We all need to make better reflective paints to reflect more light back into space and prevent our planet from warming too much. The key to these paints is that they reflect IR and UV, and that they have very fine pigment so they cover the entire surface, not part of it with high granularity. Making these paints is thus a matter of getting to a mix that is optimal to catch and reflect the most radiation.
The temperatures are high in many parts of the world. Not for a day but for weeks on end. This is exhausting, its ruining crops, it makes nuclear reactors useless because there’s no cooling water. It is the frightening predicted result of unabated economism, banks telling us to maximize GDP and profits, even as it is killing us.
But there’s another aspect about it that I have not seen mentioned. Male ballz (as I will call them to keep it tastefull) are picky about temperature. They like to be a bit cooler than the body itself. They like 93 Degrees Farenheit or 34 Degrees Celsius. Not the 100 and 37 of the rest of our body. Maybe because the process of DNA splitting has to be done in a ‘less noisy’ chemical environment to go right.
Each 1°C increase in the ballz temperature leads to a 14% decrease in sperm production
Oops! So in over 100 Farenheit or 37 Celsius weather you are already producing 42% less sperm. What about places where its 50 Celsius? No Jizz at all! A study mentioned in the Jeruzalem post even states just 100,4 Farenheit or 38 Celsius can lead to infertility. This does not bode well for anyone already worried about population collapse. Under the heat dome most men are not producing any sperm! This should become visible in the birth rate data, which lags the heatwaves by an obvious 9 months.
Just wanted to put this out there..
Climate activists are struggling with demonstrating they do not personally cause a lot of CO2 emissions. It is not easy to live in a modern city, using the internet, not having your own land to grow stuff, working in a job that hardly pays attention to its climate effect, to be ‘neutral’. The reality is though that it doesn’t even make sense to require it. Does a baker eat all the bread he tries to sell, does a doctor take all the medicine he prescribes, does a surgeon operate on himself? You don’t always have to follow the rules you advocate yourself.
To me it looks like people miss an important aspect of climate change, which is its duality. There are two timescales at which things happen, and both need to be addressed, but you can ignore your personal emissions as long as you do. This is because the CO2 has to spread out through the atmosphere and then stays there for a long time. The best way to imagine that is to think of dropping ink in a swimming pool. Throwing it in is easy, getting it out once diluted is impossible.
The CO2 that was put into the atmosphere in the past will spread out and become more effective in absorbing IR radiation and causing a warmer climate over time. If we would stop emitting today temperatures would keep going up for decades. Then there’s also feedback effects (most prominently visible forrest fires). So you can say that climate action is useless. That is if you hope to see CO2 stall or drop any time soon. Of course it is NOT useless, the result just takes more time to materialize.
The duality is that although we won’t see much effect, we still have to rigorously cut emissions as fast as we can. The tiny amount added by people who make this happen is irrelevant.
The average temperature on Earth is directly linked to the CO2 concentration so to get it back to livable levels (where life can thrive), we need to recapture CO2. This can take thousands of years because the CO2 is diluted and it takes energy to separate it out and energy to convert it in to something that does not cause a greenhouse effect.
The process of CO2 capture is a problem if it could work in our economy, because it would effectively be an energy source the economy is very capable of putting to use. Banks would want to trade it. It would also compete with fossil and nuclear and renewables, so it would not be really welcome and it would not be permanent. This is why I suggest CO2 capture and conversion to fuels or plastics or some permanent form has to happen outside our economy (extraeconomically).
The question is : Will we survive the time average temperatures will keep going up, will people be able to focus on the capture of CO2 or will chaos and famines engulf the world to the point where nobody has any idea its even possible to fix things. Nature is not going to. We have to.
Categories
Recession and Deglobalization
The world is deglobalizing. There are several reasons for this, one is that the power is becoming more distributed, with the BRICS and Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and China all trying to cut up a pieces and dominate it. Another is that climate change will lead to tensions which will divide the world. Another is that reducing emissions means less shipping and flying, if not today then soon.
From the US perpective the FED has been raising interest rates to reduce lending and spending. This was in response to a reduced energy supply, less spending means you need less energy to make stuff. This lead to a slump in the stock market. Now people are wondering what will happen as the FED keeps raising interest rates. My guess is the rates will not rise a lot anymore and the economy will grow.
The simple reasoning behind it is that deglobalization means local producers get an advantage. It also means renewable powered producers and those involved in the ‘Roboeconomy’ (renewable powered AI driven) will be recieving the most (private/retail) investment. Even as people may be replaced by AI, many will be employed in the returning manufacturing industry and renewable energy/storage sector. This means economic growth.
Strangely not all that growth will become visible, because some of it does not generate increased cashflow. Renewable energy can be used (as a basic example) to make pizza’s locally without ever being converted to cash. A stamping machine can be solar steam powered and work all day long, not generating any revenue for an energy company.
It is the banks who are fighting to keep the renewable energy economy at bay, to keep installations expensive, to make sure no renewbale energy installation can be realized without significant debt. But they will lose this fight. The economy will rev up on renewables, on new manufacturing, on new ways to locally do stuff using AI, on better recycling of waste, and on the fight for survival of humanity, which will become more of a positive experience as soon as banks stop telling us its no use, its never no use to fight for a better world.
You can find my booklet on the Roboeconomy on Roboeconomy.com
The world is vast, and now it seens to be warming rapidly. Three “Heat domes” cover the US, the Atlantic and part of Europe. Asia is also struggling with 52 Celsius heat. This is a disaster for food production. Luckily not everywhere in the world at the same time, but that could happen.
How to do anything about this? A heat dome is a body of hot air that traps the air underneath. It circulates but near the surface the air remains hot. On land this is inescapable. The heat makes the air rise, and it will cool as it rises (against space which is very cold) for that the atmosphere has to be thinner so the CO2 blanket doesn’t get in the way. Then the air is cold and wants to sink, but it sinks around the hot dome, not through it.
Hail does something different, it is formed when water evaporates and rises, then reaches a height where it can also cool against space, then it forms into ice (if there are nucleation points), and it starts to fall down.
Hail can turn into rain when it falls through hot air, then it can reevaporate and people on the ground never notice anything. This is even more likely with rain. Hail will however fall right into a heat dome, not slide off at the sides like the cold air. If it reaches the ground the ice cools the surface. I call this ‘gravity cooling’ and I think it deserves such a name because it really is one of the few ways to cool the ground in spite of the hot air that may be around.
When we consider our options regarding the heat domes, only those at sea can be reduced if we mobilize hail to do it. This could then help cool the air that blows towards land. This is the way to do it :
You disturb the surface water under the atlantic heat dome enough to encourage evaporation. This is how tropical storms are formed. Normally the air above the water is so saturated with water, so humid, no more water can evaporate. This means the water is under a humid blanket and warms up more and more. By disturbing this humid layer the water can evaporate and start to rise upwards. This causes a wind at the surface which then pulls out more heat from the ocean into the convection column.
If that convection colum contains enough water it will form clouds, rain will fall, and if it rises high enough even hail. I am not expert but I would like weather modellers to see what is needed to achieve this effect. We have a vast Atlantic, but maybe we can trigger the evaporation artificially, thus causing cooling convection of air to the higher atmosphere. This can then mean that the ocean remains cooler, land remains cooler, more clouds also reflect sunlight.
Artificial hail may be triggerable from the clouds that form, and this will really mean a cooling of the ocean below.
If you are a climate modeller, what do you think?
Categories
You Can’t Pay for Quality
“Of course you can!” will be the common response, if you want you can get great food, watches, cars, hotels, all of great quality because you pay more. Another crazy way to approach it is to say that high cost is a quality in itself : “This is a two thousand dollar watch, this is a one million dollar condo”, but even then you can’t pay for the quality, you can’t pay for high cost, that makes no sense.
To clarify what I mean we should exclude for a moment machines that deliver specific quality, even though they usually need to be operated/maintained by skilled people to do so. Of course some manchines can churn out near perfect copies of the same product all day every day. But what about the quality of people, their dedication to what they do. How is that achieved?
One way to achieve it is to select the right person for the job. So a host for a party should be someone that likes people that knows what makes them happy, that can communicate well etc. These are talents you are born with that you can develop or get handed by your parents. If the job is in engineering you look for a person that wants to know how things work, that can analyse well, that can apply the knowledge base and methods that others have developed that work, but that can also invent new ways to do things. Again a person like this is selected, maybe self selected, then graded as of [pronoun] quality in an education system.
So above we have two examples of how the quality of a person for the job is not because of pay, because it is the result of life experience and their own motivation long before they get payed.
The way industry mostly achieves ‘quality’ is three pronged, one, it teaches people to want low quality. This is done by presenting low quality as the best life choice, something celebrities do.
Second it tries to avoid the need for quality, so automation and mechanization and procedures to achieve it (fast food franchies).
Third it makes people desperate through economic pressure so they want to deliver quality. So immigrant labour in Dubai builds highrises, very primitively, with lots of errors, but these people try their best at it. Part of creating desperation can be the creation of a myth about what you achieve. This can be a business in itself, like dance contests for a money prize or fame and recognition.
The irony is that the latter method encourages low wages, because only when the wages are low will the person try to do the best job. The pay however has little to do with the quality of the work, nor does it encourage it most of the time.
It is very interesting then how to actually evoke people to deliver quality. Most of the examples will be in environments of excellence. You see high quality people operating in environments that are excellent, in design, organization, cleanliness, social contact, communication. But then you may be on to something : it has to be inspired. It has to be switched on in people by their environment. How do you do that? Whoever knows can make a lot of money 😉
Even when you try to make everyone deliver quality you will discover many people do not have that ambition at all. Industry that thinks from a system’s perspective about people does not need their personell to be high quality, just sufficient and safe. Also if a person is in a job that is hard to populate, the employer might want to degrade that person’s quality as much as possible so that job mobility is minimized. Some people are selected for the quality of being able to limit and degrade the quality of others!
To achieve better quality in everything we just need to think of what that means. This puts us in a better mindset as well
It seems the bottom line is that we should not believe that money is the driver towards an optimal society, because as argued above it evokes forces that degrade quality of what society produces. It is much better to recognize quality where it exists, and make sure people can experience a life that makes them capable of recognizing it.
Holland has made it illegal to openly deny the Holocaust. It is deemed anti-semitic. The death of millions of jews during WO II is a moral atrocity that still weighs on many people’s minds, even as the last survivors are passing away. For some it seems a logical thought to outlaw denial of this tragedy, but to me it is not.
There are some clear rules in the public sphere in the western world today : 1. Don’t deny the Holocaust 2. Don’t attack Israel. In both cases you are deemed an anti-semite. Rule nr. 3 is ‘Don’t be an anti-semite’. In my personal life I have no reason to be an anti-semite, I am not anti much in life, my main anti feelings are against economism and priests of any religion.
But the rules above are truely enforced. If you write something that is vaguely anti-semitic you get beat down immediately. This is bad. There have been many killings in history, the Holocaust is one of them. Nobody is perfect, people who happen to be jew are no exception. You have to be able to point out mistakes Israel makes, after all this is what members of the opposition of Israeli parliament do as a full time job.
To make a law so that a person gets punished for claiming the holocaust did not happen is extreme. It is the start of more prohibitions, rules on what books you can own, etc. It is also very primitive. Does anyone think that true anti-semitics don’t have private telegram or other communication means to be angry at jews?
Another and way more important aspect of it is that it doesn’t help at all. If I where an anti-semite I would not deny the Holocaust. It is one of the biggest succes stories of jew haters in jew hating history. Other instances of the killing of jews have occurred in history, but this is true for nearly every priest run religion. Christians where persecuted harshly in roman times, Protestants where prosecuted, entire cities exterminated in Holland by the Spanish inquisition. Religions and their priests have driven people crazy for as long as they existed.
So talking about the Holocaust can be an act of anti-semitism. Therefore not talking about it can be an act of pro-semitism. It thus makes no sense and it is no use to ban denial of it. It is however a dangerous prescedent when it comes to freedom of speech.
This law was pushed by Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius who has announced her ambition to become the prime minister if her party the VVD has a majority in parliament at the next elections. We all get told her life story, because these days you are supposed to elect a politician because you like him or her [or whatever], not based on [pronoun] ideas. It seems she is for censorship, and that is not a good sign.
Climate change is likely going to be the worst case scenario we can think of right now, meaning 10 Celsius, with unlivable heat, storms, devastating hail and barely much agriculture being possible. Most current ‘systems’ are futile exercises done for profit and to delay real emissions reduction. The UNFCCC is the authority, it will look for your carbon capturing or emission reduction method and issue credits, so the emissions can still be done elsewhere. It is all about financing low emissions technology while not undercutting bank cashflow, that is what the scheme is designed for.
If our goal is not to keep the banks happy, but for humanity to survive (longer) we need to do different things, unprofitable things, things that may not be easy to account. We still need to do it because it buys us (and other life on Earth) time. One such thing is reflect more light back into space. Reflecting IR, visible light and UV back into space has the advantage that it cools Earth. It mimics the effect of cloud cover or less sunshine. If you reflect 90% of the light back, it is like the sun only shines for 10%. This was the case at the poles, and it created stabile ocean and atmospheric currents. This is all thrown out of wack now.
To finance such ideas we should adopt a new kind of credit, a Climate Protection Credit. The question is what does this credit grant you to do? Even though you can calculate the slight effect on atmospheric temperatures of say one square kilometer of highly reflective material, how can you reward it. Besides that question is how to enforce the system. At the moment banks still have everyone fooled and behave like some alien force that has us all in its grip. Nobody can mess with it, even though it happens quite often that banks lose grip (for example during the 2008 sub prime crisis). Those moments pass in silence, and we once again are told to work hard and bring food to the table in an economic system that hopes to kill us at the end of our (economically) usefull lifes.
It seems we have to organize and make a promise to weed out all the pro fossil and pro banking influences out of politics, and reward the people that have done a thing to protect our climate when we have reached stabile power. This can be pretty soon. Until then it will be a struggle, but for those that thought about our existence, it is always rewarding to know you have done your best.
The world has many religions in our world, each with their curious habits and props and stories. There are also philosophies that are very much like religions but don’t have a god or holy sites. It is often said the supernatural should be part of what a religion is, holy sites, reverence by the followers etc. To an atheist it always looks the same : People behaving crazy, responding to things you can’t see, honouring schedules and calenders that seem to have no or just practical purpose.
Where do you draw the line between religion and non religion? That it has priests, or prayers? I guess the best one is to look at the behavior and how it is triggered. Somewhere in the chain of cause and effect something happens that does not make any sense.
We underestimate how hard we need triggers to allow our behaviour. This is mainly because we are in sensible environments and have our thoughts to trigger behavior. But our lives would be total chaos if we unconsiously and spontaneously would start to do things we can do, it would become super dangerous. Its not due to a conscious effort that we restrict our movements etc. to what the context allows, the body doesn’t want to die as much as our mind. We are inhibited into our tried and tested routines most of the time.
It is also one of our basic functions to see if other people are normal or safe to be with. You could even say our automatic empathy and immitation of behavior is primarily to sense what other persons are up to. If they are cold and motionless and their eyes don’t seem to be freely attracted to whatever happens we quickly start to worry.
Religions have clear triggers and this seems to make sense, until you realize these triggers where made up. So to pray in front of Mary for fertility makes sense, but who made the first statue of her? Priests no doubt. If you take the behavior versus speech it also becomes quite confusing. It is most likely humans discovered the power words on minds not used to much words, minds who where not allowed to think outside the immediate practically usefull language (for fear of being accused of lying or being crazy). To me priesthoods, which descended from the village doctors and shamans, where always simply those that had more time to learn more language and meet more people, becoming able to predict and control others with words.
How would we describe a priest? Someone that knows behaviors that mesmerize people and trigger specific behaviors that ultimately serve them. A priest is like an evil psychologist. Its all self serving. The old testament is basically a how to priest manual. The main currency is fear and desperation, although it can also be love. Any emotion. Once you allow some dude or woman to tell you what the state of your world is, you live in their world.
Priests then form religions, I think that’s how it goes. Any remembered myth or habit is integrated into the religion, any new notable event is given a place in the religious bubble created. This bubble can be inclusive, exclusive etc.
We had a Apple/Microsoft religious battle in the 90’s. Now still a Microsoft/Linux battle. Both sides sort the positive and negative aspects according to the rules of their bubble, they listen to different priests. The discrimination can be totally justified objectively but then at other times not. Why the hell wear an Apple watch?
But to come back to the definition of religions, I think we should redefine it so it becomes “Any culture managed by priests”, culture being a collection of customs, habits, preferences, food choices etc. Priests being the people that weave a story from the past to the future, decide how we feel about what. You will always find the priests are doing great!
“Orthodox members are exempt from military draft and given a stipend by law”
Question then becomes with anyone you see in a visible leading role : “Is [pronoun] a priest?”. Soon you find that there are many many priests, from political leaders to celebrities. Every time they start to suggest you behave in a certain way, one that ultimately strenghtens your submission or the wallet of the priest. Kanye is a priest, Martin Luther King was a real one. Economists are priests. The reason is that in all cases there are things you can/could see, and things that you had to believe and you became different from other people. You marched to a different tune. This then can become a source of conflict, unless your priests tells you to be peacefull.
To an atheist the chaos created by priests is enough to ban all but the most basic priesthoods. Do sport, enjoy nature, share communal meals. Have feast for spring and other annual rituals. The problem is that many lives these days are more or less abstract, in the sense that people never really care for their own survival. The economy and cities makes it so people are removed from what sustains them. Its no accident. The further people are removed from what sustains them, the harder they are willing to work for money, the lifeblood of cities. The high priests of economism (a theory that is crazy because it never worries about replacing resources and only strives to increase numerical values), will tell you you have to be in cities, use every means to lock you in them, to then tell you you have to be usefull to the banks (pay a lot for your mortgage) or get thown out. You can see people in New York paying $4000 per month for an appartment and be proud of it. The city itself is the holy place sold by the real estate priests.
We love our food to be blessed by someone who cares for us. This makes 100% sense, because what if the person making the food hates you? You could be very sick. The more a person cares for your food the more important you feel. This is almost a need for many people because people who serve the economic priests well are taught to look down on people who don’t (see the pattern?). So your life sucks, your friends hate you because you are poor, then you’d love to feel a bit more important by getting special treatment. There the food priests can help you, and you want to pay for it. In the end you are squeezed or squeezing. That is what the banks want “you fight, we take a piece of the spoils. ”
To maximize wealth, which is our purpose on this Earth, where wealth does not include money, but means to realize our dreams and live a comofortable life, we need to reduce the nr. of distractions and fixations that really do not serve to increase our wealth. No religious uniformity but religious freedom and irrelevance. No territorial completeness but territorial utility. Of course wealth itself helps people get along. It is very ironic money is invested in poor countries to supply them with weapons, while the same money could possibly reduce the sources of conflict.
To come back to the definition of religion, it is a distraction in itself. The first thing the priest will do is point away from [pronoun] self, so no thought energy goes into analysing the advantages and inequalities evoked. To demystify all priests, to ask them to show real world wealth gain, not profit, as a justification of revering their truths, makes a lot of sense. Historically this has gone wrong in a system we call communism, simply because whatever system you introduce it will develop priests, and if it tries to disown everyone, some of them won’t want to, or will just work to own in other ways. Once you have a totalitarian power structure, using it to serve your own desires is the easiest thing to do. You know what you want best.
So imho the best strategy is to have local centers of authority, and a constant process of trying to make sense of decision in the context of real world resources, desires, needs. To celebrate good fortune and know the people you ‘work’ for. To have no bank religion, no state religion, no ancient text recited or dress codes. To just keep to principles without some dangerous imaginary god or far out promise or desire to conform to ancient orders. All that is is insanity.
To boil it down for you : Oceans are warming because they can no longer shed heat through our atmosphere like before. They can be 5 degrees Celsius warmer than before and in places you will die of heat exhaustion if you swim in it too long. Today.
The economic respons is to retreat, to forget about it, go elsewhere, harvest, sell, destroy something else. Humanity does not have that luxury. Hot oceans are deadly to its ocean life, they are causing more sever storms and are also making land temperatures much higher, up to 12 degrees in the Horn of Africa. Today.
The Economy is Paralysing Action
Oil companies knew this was coming, we are here now. We have to find a way to deal with it. The problem we see with this is that every activity of nearly anyone in our world is immediately captured in a business model for profit if we show we really want to do them. This makes everything worth doing maximally expensive. It also makes it so we don’t do what is not profitable, and I have observed financial institutions hide, disappear, patent and own ideas that where impossible to make expensive or profitable for them. Carbon capture is a victime, Carbon trading is a victim of that. Carbon sequestration the same thing. It is not a problem to supress these things for the parties involved, because they don’t care about anything but money and control.
We need solutions that are ‘extraeconomic’ or ‘roboeconomic’. Ones that use initial resources but then only renewables or their own organic growth, maybe use waste or some plentifull resource, but not anything that has to be shipped across the globe, made in factories. At the same time the product will likely be valuable in today’s economy. Be it plastic, some kind of oil (to capture Carbon) or pure carbon (soot like or graphite). The economy and banks will come for it, to sell it and consume it.