Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.
This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and from the regional collapse of civilization.
People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.
But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.
All sensible species avoid living on the edge. But as the world’s temperature goes up a few degrees in the course of the present century, many will be pushed over.
We humans, if I am to judge from the thermostat settings, prefer room temperatures up in the mid-70s [24°C]. All species have an environmental temperature that they prefer–but it is always less than the optimal temperature for making a living and raising offspring. Why is “cool it” so important?
I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling.
The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute.
The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.
But standing in the electricity half of the power plant, you cannot tell what the heat source is. All you see are the big steam pipes coming in at the far end of the giant hall from an adjacent building. Looking out the big open doors, however, two giant cooling towers are immediately visible. (more…)
Thanks to upsetting our climate with a series of low-tech practices such as cutting down forests, tilling the soil, and—worst of all—burning fossil fuels, we are now facing a use-it-or-lose-it intelligence test.
The outlook is for a higher fever, with droughts that just won’t quit. Extreme weather will keep trashing the place. Tipping points may lead to demolition derbies, as when the Amazon rain forest burns or major cities are inundated.
Absent effective treatment of climate disease, the students of today will face an unpleasant, chaotic future—not merely hotter summers. Unless we get our act together very quickly—the next ten years—and on a global scale, our legacy could be genocidal downsizing.
Yet all we hear about is a low-carbon energy diet over the long haul: conserve energy, emphasize renewable energy, fill the car’s tank less often, and substitute clean solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal for the fossil fuels.
Are such measures quick enough? No. Reliable enough? No. Can they head off the developing world from repeating our mistakes? No. (more…)
My father ran a medium-sized insurance company in Kansas City in my youth and, when we were driving around town, he would point out accidents waiting to happen—say, leaving one’s bicycle sprawled across a path for someone to trip over in the dark. A more subtle form of foresight is playing the percentages—and some improving percentages lead to my suggestion, “Don’t Sleep Alone!”
Young adults mostly die, or become permanently disabled, from accidents. Later in life, heart attacks, cancer, and stroke become more common than accidents. Cancers are insidious but the three others strike without warning. They often require fast treatment to prevent permanent disability or death. How fast is fast? (more…)
David Houle at EvolutionShift.com: In this fourth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview William H. Calvin, PhD.< I had the good fortune to meet Bill at the Future of Energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future several months ago. I have also had the pleasure to read excerpts of his upcoming book “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”, a book that could well become a classic as it frames the conversation and offers up a strategy and vision to effectively deal with Climate Change. He is the author of a dozen books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution. The latest is A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond .
1. Evolutionshift.com: Bill, thank you for sending me a chapter of your new book: “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”. When will it be published?
I’ll put that comparing-solutions chapter up on the web at Global-Fever.org. The book itself will be out in February by the University of Chicago Press. They did my other climate book (A Brain for All Seasons) which won several book awards.. What prompted you to write this book?The urgency of the situation. I figured that, as a newly emeritus medical school professor who has been following climate science since 1984, I could afford taking the three years to write it. Better that than taking a real climate scientist away from research and teaching time. And I felt that I had the right skill set. A Ph.D. in biophysics makes it easy for me to dig into both the physics and the biology involved. And thanks to talking shop with the neurosurgeons every day for twenty years, I do know something about when you can afford to wait and when decisive action is needed.