Public Brainstorm: Environment
We are going to promote and discuss ideas, statements, observations and solutions for five areas that are considered key challenges by Schloer Consulting Group. The main characteristics are exponential changes - the primary cause for critical societal and economic crisis. You find an overview of the Public Brainstorm here.
You are invited to contribute here to our public brainstorming session: Public Brainstorm: Environment
posted by Felix Bopp at 11:52 AM
5 Comments:
The discussion of climate specialists - the real people who are still unbought by big oil, or haven't been bullied in to a silence by the big corporations yet, are coming to accept the reality that "two degrees warming in the coming century" is pretty much ancient history. We are well underway discussing six degrees to fifteen degrees global temperature rise, and it is mostly acknowledged that by four degrees we face antarctic and greenland iceland melt where by the end of the century the global sea levels have risen by well over six meters.
In other words, the scientific world is pretty much in agreement that somewhere later this century most of the Netherlands is a tiny strip of land along the coast of Germany.
And that is already the case if we stopped consuming CO2 generating hydrocarbons.
Sadly, this is a scenario far worse than regular people can deal with. It was the same with people being ferried in trains to Auschwitz - at some level of severity the reality you face as a human being the human mind just shuts down and goes in to fullblown denial mode.
That is where we are now. All the Cassandras in the known universe can rant all they want - it won't get them invited to conferences, it won't make them any money, it won't get them published, and it will ruin their social lives.
However those people who are still smart and courageous should not shut up. In fourty years from now anyone who knows the facts should ask themselves "why did I do? Where did I stay quiet, and when did I take my chance to speak?"
Hardy F. Schloer: “The world will be tested between 2012 and 2025 by more challenges, than it has possibly in its entire existence of human development.
Clearly, I am not discounting here the challenges of the past centuries, as for example the outbreak of the black pest in the dark ages, where there was no medicine or sufficient understanding in how to deal with such far reaching epidemic; or perhaps the two world wars of the last century, that caused more then 80 million death by senseless violence. Neither should one discount the emergence of nuclear technologies or weapons, which posed for the first time in history real and omnipresent danger of destroying the entire planet in a timeframe of only few minutes.
Nevertheless, many real dangerous and catastrophic events are less violent and much less visible. For example, the human discovery of cereals or potatoes enabled human population to grow in exponential pace, and in only the past two centuries of exponential growth to overpopulate the planet in such way, that it is now near impossible to keep vital dynamics of this planet in a sustainable balance. The real problem is ‘us’.
The fact however is, that we do not experience separately a crisis of overpopulation. With it came the systemic faults of money and its creation, which lead to economic breakdown. Exponential overpopulation also caused vastly emerging food, water and farmland shortages, and a predatory and now often violent battle to use the resulting energy shortage in the most profitable ways. Then there is the exponential environmental decay, which poses also accelerating effects on the food, water and farmland problems. Accelerating global warming and its effects come here to mind.
The fact is, that we experience all these climactic disasters concurrently, coming together in one dynamic model, like the proverbial ‘perfect storm’. We are living in the next 20 years in the ‘Age of Final Exponential Change’ where relatively flat growth curves have all begun concurrently to transform into fast and vertical growth that is unsustainable and also complimentary to produce disastrous magnifications to all other here identified problem domains.
To manage this ‘perfect storm’ of complimentary disasters, we must begin to analyze our problems in much more complex and more inclusive models. Unless we begin to think in inclusive and interdisciplinary models, we will not even begin to understand; much less solve these problems.
Understanding is the first step, and it is vitally important. The world, and mostly its politicians and economic leaders are in deep denial about these problems. Misinformation, driven mostly by self-serving dogma, or greed for profit, cement this denial as necessity, to defend specific and selfish goals. However, just as we must look at all our challenges in the context of all concurrent problem domains, we also need the entire human population to come together, and participate in the understanding of this complex situation and also in the definition of solutions.
Ultimately, we will need to do two separate things to solve these problems. First we need to analyze data in an all-inclusive way, using modern supercomputers and cloud computing infrastructures to analyze all available global data and so manage the scientific understanding of the ‘interrelated problem fabric’. Secondly, we must decide on a global level, how we furthermore instruct intelligent supercomputers to search for possible solutions to these problems.
We do not have time anymore, for politicians to ‘play the omni-intelligent rulers’ of our world. We must hurry to find globally acceptable solutions to this perfect storm of apocalyptic problems, because it is the fear in society, that we don’t know where we are going next, that causes global fear, aggression and finally global conflict. To prevent this we must come together, and solve our pretext of sustainability. This will be the first step to begin living together as one human race, in peace, freedom and sustainability.”
Hardy F. Schloer: "I did read all your comments. Interesting! Those of you, that think, that these problems are all just go away, if we do nothing, because 50% of them are not true (not scientific) and the other 50% will solve themselves before they become too critical. Well, all of you, that believe this may be in for a very big surprise… and soon.
I don't know how to put this any simpler, or any more polite….
The problem is not the 100s of predictions prophesying the end of the world, coming from all kinds of crazy paranoia groups, or pseudo scientists that could not even understand the plunder they wrote themselves. The problem is also not churches that tell us, that the Revelations in the Bible are about to tell us from the end the world. We know, what to think about them.
The Problem is: EXPONETIAL CHANGE!!
The real danger of exponential change is, where a timeline/data correlation is located in the near vertical curve segment of the observed exponential change.
We are living in a world, where more then 74% of our vital indexes (SCG Analysis 2011) have crossed over into the dangerous exponential acceleration point of the curve, as opposed to only about 8% in the 1950s. In only 10 more years we will see likely over 90% of our vital indexes operate in a near vertical rise or decline, depending on what you observe, or what the focal point of your research is.
If this this was just all to complicated for you, then here is a very simple exercise I ask you to do:
Please watch the following lesson by Prof. Dr. Albert A. Bartlett from the University of Colorado:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ&feature=related
Watch all of it. Watch it twice, if you have to! Then we can open the discussions again about what exponential changes we want to observe, how they influence each other, and what the mathematical outcome they MUST produce!
Do your homework. Start, what we have started decades ago. So far the predictive analysis of our group has been exactly on target for these decades. We use holistic models, and we strip all the soft data, and assumptive elements (and other nonsense) as much as possible, and only use, what is left: very hard data; hard change-over-time observations (Stochastic Time-Series Data); and continuous error corrective optimization methods and offsetting factors, as new data and facts becomes available. We need such error correction method, since we live in a dynamic world after all, and new information becomes available continuously.
After you done all of this, and use a very complex and inclusive investigation model of the planet (as inclusive as modern supercomputers and cloud computing infrastructures allow you to be) and include as a minimum global and regional models and data of Population, Energy, Environment, Economy, Finance, Logistic, Food and Water into the overall model. Furthermore, lay over all this a sociological probability model of expected human behavior. Now you begin to do useful science!
When you begin to trace all the exponential changes and compile the potential effect corridors in the data, then you will be confronted with a most uncomforting reality: 2012 to 2025 will be very hard to manage, unless we start looking NOW at the real facts and expected futures, and not wishful thinking, or masking such facts by the needs of special interest groups. There is no more time for minority rule of the planet. We need to arrive at consensus of the global community NOW, to prevent a meltdown.
Our politicians are not equipped to deal with these problems. Al they know is, how to get elected. We need to begin to vote for problem-solving strategies, rather then presidents, because this is all that matters from now on."
Hardy F. Schloer, President and CEO, Schloer Consulting Group - SCG
Environment is more than just climate change. It is also more than just the living things, it is also the rocks and the clouds. Maybe if you follow Lovelock's Gaia then it is one giant living biodsphere of all these.
Climate change is not a sure thing, the sun may put out less energy and we might get cooling. It is not impossible to get another little ice age.
But lets assume that we are warmed, what is the result? Is it as dystopian as in A Friend of the Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Friend_of_the_Earth
I fear so. So what to do? Take on a survivalist mentatality? Be a Cassandra? Or engage in eco-motivated-defensive violent action?
Well to some extent all these are happening, as a personal strategy I look at things that can mitigate climatic effects on me and us as I think it's too big for most people to understand and do something about. Although there are others that are doing things:
http://www.onehundredmonths.org/
And that strategy has to be tried as well.
Bill Liao: "Holistic solutions are required that also make economic sense.
www.weforest.org endeavors to achieve this thorough the selling of virtual tress that result int he planting of permanent sustainable real forests."
Bill Liao, European Venture Partner, Founder WeForest.org and Co-Founder XING AG
Post a Comment
<< Home