Don’t be boring even if you have nothing to say.

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Boring, Health, How not to be boring, How to be boring, Interesting

Too many people are just plain boring! It is not that the world around them has nothing interesting to report upon. And possibly it is not that they haven’t a thought in their head, although that is a more likely possibility. It because they have developed some bad habits and habits can be changed.

The reason most people are boring is because they are not responding to the ongoing conversation and the primary reason for that failing is because they are not paying attention to the conversation. Thus whenever they do say something it isn’t relevant to what other people are presently interested in. They don’t seem to realize that just talking, during a pause, isn’t participating if what they say is irrelevant. It might appear that these interupters are caught up in their own inner dialogue and that is why they blurt out a non sequitur but the problem goes much deeper. The external behavior betrays an inner conflict. They are, almost certainly, engaged with a similar babel of dialogue of non sequiturs within their own mind. Thus as time passes with these type of conversations going on they become ever more confused and boring even to their own selves. They begin to the feel pain of being disconnected from other human beings and from themselves.

You might ask, How do I know these things? It is simply because I have those problems myself and that’s why I can speak with expertise born of personal experience. I am a boring person sometimes and people get annoyed with me and complain at my interruptions quite often. I like to think I interrupt because I hate to miss riffing a good joke and that is often dependent upon a bit of quick but interjective repartee. My riff may give others a moment of derisive laughter but the joke is disruptive and that is the characteristic of a boring person. Furthermore, those lame attempts at idle humor clearly mean that some major portion of my brain is engaged in thoughts other than the topic of discussion.

The way not to be a bore is to pay attention to what others are saying when they are talking; and when they are not talking or you are alone pay close attention to what you are thinking and saying to your self. If you have nothing to say remain silent.  

The way to be interesting is to be interested in what’s happening.

NEJM – Shattuck Lecture – Health of the Nation

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babies, genetic disorder, Health, NEJM, New England Journal of Medicine, Shattuck Lecture

The New England Journal of Medicine publishes an overview medical article every year entitled the Shattuck Lecture. This year they featured a seminar discussion with 13 panelists from a variety of policy level positions, including medicine, academic, business, insurance and politics. This seminar will have a major impact on US governmental policy because it comes from the most prestigious medical journal in the country. The magazine article was unfortunately too short to give any of the various participants enough time and space to develop their positions properly, and the published article becomes little more than a collection of paragraph long outlines of complex problems with little offered in the way of workable solutions. After several pages of these very brief presentations the concluding page was a simple off-loading the problem onto the presidential candidates. However, after dumping the problem onto the candidates their published conclusion about the candidates stated plans were, “Part of it is fantasy based on a lack of understanding about how things really work now. We will have to wait till after the election—see how things settle out. And then engage in a realistic discussion about how to pick this up together.” The United States government turns to these “experts” for their expert advice, and what they got from them was not well presented suggestions, but this kind of worthless buck passing. Bah humbug.

This panel was supposed to make recommendations on “The Health Of The Nation”, and because they were dealing with that enormous abstract issue one would expect them to cope with it from a grand, and abstract point of view—from the long term health of the people. But, they didn’t do that. Instead they were trying to cope with a nation of 300 million people with a life (a political life of 232 years since its birth) on a personal short term basis of doctors being paid. It was on a four year election cycle basis at most. This panel may have been filled with experts in their various fields, but they certainly didn’t approach their stated goal properly because the health of the nation is not a four year issue it is much grander issue.

There is a fundamental problem underlying these peoples approach, and it is a problem which compounds the practice of morality with the practice of democracy. This problem has been recognized since the beginnings of the idea of democracy, by the early Greek philosophers, and that is that it tends to be very short sighted. Democracy is founded upon an ideal of giving the people the right to determine their destiny which is an excellent idea, but what happens in practice is that the ideas which dominate the public’s attention are presented to the controlling majority of the people in the moment of decision as the short term moral thing to do. Thus a democratic country becomes very susceptible to complex problems being reduced to eloquent catch phrases, slogans, and pretty faces presenting moral sounding platitudes. What leadership is forced to do if it wants to stay in power, and be successful is to present ideas which sound beautiful now, and which permit a behavior which can be defended with beautiful rhetoric at the next election in the same momentarily beautiful way. This Shattuck Lecture had the stated intent of trying to take a more objective, and longer point of view on the health of the whole nation, but it avoided this by its shifting the long term thinking and responsibility onto the totally overbooked candidates, who have many other responsibilities. These policy researchers and presenters did our country a great disservice by not delving deeper into the issue.

Because the Shattuck Lecture was so very shallow in its time perception it didn’t even remotely come close to the fundamental long term health care problem of our 232 year old country. The problem about to be broached here never enters public discussion, because it has no visible effect in four years, but in 232 years more it will have a vast and perhaps overwhelming impact. It may have impacts greater than all other health disasters combined that occur in that long period of time. The problem is that the very success of our current medical establishment has a negative impact upon our nations genetic health.

In a natural situation in which all wild species live, and in which all humans lived up until the advent of modern medicine, about one hundred years ago, most births did not result in individuals which themselves reproduced. Today because of high quality medical care virtually all births result in individuals that reach sexual maturity, and are capable of reproduction. That is wonderful in the short run, but in the long run it is not so good because of the introduction of health destroying genetic disorders. The long run is only one hundred years and certainly far less than 232 year life of our country. That number of years is chosen to give some time perspective to this problem. Assuming a generation to be twenty years there would be eleven generations in that time period. Our country has lived that long, and we should do what we can to see that it lives in good health that much longer.

Here is the problem: approximately six percent of babies born in the US have visible birth defects, and the number of invisible defects makes the total number of defects greater. Some of this disorder is heritable, and is passed on to these individuals’ children, who in twenty years pass it on to their children, and so on for eleven generations in this example. After that period the number of people affected with the disorder would be enormous. A simple multiple by 2 with each generation reaches  2048 by the end of that time. That is sad enough, but that genetic problem is derived from a single individual. The medical disaster being currently created by our medical establishment is far worse than a simple compound interest type of problem because of the other babies being born into this current six percent with other heritable problems. These will compound at a similar rate, and they will interbreed with all of the others with problems, and thus there will soon be babies born with multiple defects which in their turn will be passed to their children. In a natural situation these are cleared out of the gene pool by natural selection.

Because modern medicine has been so very successful there has been no way to remove these unfortunate genes from the group’s gene pool, and so it grows. In a single generation the problem is invisible; even in two or three it doesn’t become visible because who remembers how things were sixty years ago at a time when they were twenty years old, and just might have become aware of birth defects. Sixty years ago infectious disease, and communicable disease and war were far more visible health problems. This gene defect is an abstract problem, and is not visible without a very long time sense, but in time periods of one hundred years or so it becomes visible and in two hundred years it will become devastating to the whole country. There is the hope that genetic engineering can eliminate genetic disorders although dealing with 6.7 billion individuals on a high tech genetic basis seems unlikely when at present it is difficult to find enough money to put up mosquito netting in bedrooms of malaria infected countries, and even that is being paid for with outside foreign charity.

NEJM – Genomic Medicine cover

The Shattuck Lecture probably wouldn’t have admitted onto their panel a person who discussed long term genetic health even though it fitted in perfectly with the stated goal of “Health of the Nation” because it would be seen as admitting to the value of eugenics, and that has been an anathema subject for seventy years. Ultimately the panels short sighted, even microscopic sighted policy making will bring disaster to humanity unless the likes of Craig Venter, and his genetic engineers can find a solution. He and his co-researchers should be supported in every way possible in their quest for a better world. However, his struggle has been a terrible one against the powers that be in Washington on the Human Genome project, and so far not much better on the other projects he has for saving humanity. Cleaning up the gene pool of heritable disease should be at the top of the agenda on National Health. The ancient pre-human women who set humanity upon the healthy path to intelligence and morality a hundred thousand years ago were far more sensible than the high minded, highly credentialed and highly paid people of the Shattuck Lecture.

iRobot – The new creepy crawlies are not science fiction.

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d: Caterpillar, happiness, Health, Helen Greiner, IRBT, iRobot, PackBot, personal needs, robots, Roomba, Scooba, tractors

Today was another wonderful day for me because I went to a really fun, informative and worthwhile lecture. It was presented by the cofounder and chairman of iRobot Corporation, Helen Greiner. — IRBT — She, and her team have created lots of robots with lots of different functionalities over the last fifteen years. The Roomba is commonly available for helping you with your housework, and there are others which are deployed in Iraq to do things which are too dangerous for soldiers to do, like find and defuse bombs.

Helen Greiner while being introduced by by Robert J. Full, CiBER Director at the University of California, Berkeley, Bechtel Engineering Center on May 5, 2008.

This is a little home companion which keeps you connected to your friends with a video camera and mic hookup to a wireless network so you can cruise with your friends remotely.

The iRobot Roomba comes out at night or whenever you program it to and cleans up your dirt and then returns to its hidden charging station, out of sight and supposedly out of mind.

This little fellow can go lots of places you can’t go, and wouldn’t want to go and with the front traction tracks it can climb stairs, and over stuff. This one is mounted with what appears to be a stereo camera, but the US Army has put a lot of more interesting stuff on their models.

Helen Greiner talked about these things, showed us several movies of them in action, and lots more. This is all such cool stuff, and I dreamed of doing that kind of thing as a kid, but somehow got distracted by softball, golf and the Lone Ranger. I had a little windup caterpillar tractor that could crawl slowly along for a little while at age 7, and about age 9 I had a real Caterpillar tractor to drive about for my grandfather because all of my uncles were off to WW II.

He put blocks on the pedals, and a box behind my back so I could reach the pedals, and steering bars, while he manned the equipment at the back. That was sort of fun for a while, but soon became very boring for a kid. I went on to flying airplanes, and then jets for the USAF, but now this looks a lot more interesting. I need to develop a relationship with these people to help do the remote control setup on my power generating kites.

After the lecture I left, being hesitant to go to the reception, but came back to it, and talked to Helen, and the others for a while. She is a fascinating person, and reminds me of Michael Marks of Flextronics whom I talked to last week, because of her enthusiasm for what she is doing, which is rather similar to what he is doing — making really neat stuff that really works wonders. She hasn’t made the inordinate amounts of money that Marks has, but she said she likes to talk about her company as worth a quarter billion dollars because she said, she likes the sound of billion dollars attached to what she has created. I suspect she would like to own a quarter of Tesla Motors and be its CEO like Michael, and do some really neat things with it.

In a few years I think she, and her company may make a lot more money than a mere 65 billion dollars, because when they hit the right product this company will explode with profits. I said to her that what iRobot was doing was fabulous, but that it was so limited relative to what she might develop, and spend her time working on. I spend a minute or two a day on cleaning up the floor, and no time at all looking for unexploded bombs, and asked her what she was doing that would impact my life, as an ordinary person, in terms of time and usefulness. We didn’t get very far with that although I think she thought it was a valid question. The reception ended, and I left still thinking about that, and while outside walking away she, and Bob Full were also walking away. I re-approached them, and said I thought I had an answer to my question — that I spent eight hours a day sleeping and I was wondering if a robot could help me sleep better — that would occupy one third of my time. She enthused over that idea for a bit about things being attached to a sleeping person’s head which helped them wake up at the best possible time for them to get rested properly. That’s great I said, but I was thinking more in a mechanical sense, because that is what her robots were doing. I said I would like a robot to lift the covers a bit when it perceived that I was about to roll over so I wouldn’t get tangled up in them, and have to wake up a bit to straighten them out. Or, that a robot would realize I had been seeping in some position for a certain period of time and needed to get into some other position. I want a robot to pamper me, to cater to my every whim, even my unconscious whims and I suspect that is what everyone else wants too. I had some other ideas along that line but felt that I was imposing on their group which appeared to be heading out to dinner. So I departed and we all happily went our separate ways.

Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona

Tags

diet, fat, Health, obesity, smoking, Surgeon General, tobacco

The United States 17th Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona spoke here at University of California, Berkeley about his experiences in life and the position of being Surgeon General. He served in that post for four years from 2002-2006, and because of the characteristics of the office he was able to represent the American people, and not just a particular political constituency. This he said creates a unique, but real problem because he can speak the scientific truth as no politician can, and because of that all politicians consider him an enemy. He said the conventional wisdom in Washington, “If you want a friend in Washington … bring a dog. But it is worse than that if you are the Surgeon General, he said, so it’s a good idea to bring two dogs, because one of them may die or turn on you.” He spoke at some length about his early life growing up in New York city which ultimately was saddened because his mother, and grandmother didn’t live to see him graduate from high school – their fondest hopes. But, absolutely beyond their wildest dreams was the possibility that he would become a doctor, and the person responsible for the health of everyone in America. In this station he succeed in increasing the life expectancy of us all. Among other things, he is the one who brought secondhand tobacco smoke to the world’s attention, and thereby helped curb the sale, and distribution of that noxious weed, and thus to limit its life destroying effects. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish because many people have become wealthy selling this horribly addictive drug, and don’t want to give up their money, and power. They support the tobacco lobby, and have put billions of dollars into the pockets of politicians to write laws to maintain their legal right to distribute their product—the end result of which is to kill a half a million Americans every year. This is five hundred times what the terrorists did only once in the history of the US, and these business people have been doing it every year and are still doing it with the blessing of the American Congress. Dr. Carmona as the Surgeon General had real enemies in Washington, and not just the usual word-smith news hounds looking for a sensational news story.

At the end of his lecture I asked him if the American food industry isn’t culpable of all of the same vices which the tobacco industry has been shown to be guilty of—that they are forcing products upon Americans which they don’t need, and which are in fact destroying their health, and killing them. I tried to make the point that it isn’t the food itself that is unhealthy—as is the case with tobacco—there is plenty of healthy food available, it’s that the industry is tricking the public into eating entirely too much of the wrong kinds of food. I said the real problem is how to get Americans to be more physically active, and how to get them to stop eating every meal sooner. We batted this back, and forth a bit, but I don’t think that I got through to him the essence of the idea that we need to learn how to stop overeating by stopping eating sooner. I mentioned the evil practice of supermarkets placing real food as far from the front door as possible so that the shopper must walk through mountains of flashy, poor quality food to get to the real food. Is it possible to pass a law that a reasonably short list of basic healthy foods must be placed near the entrance? But the real problem is to stop eating sooner and walk more. If we could figure out a way do accomplish that then we could bring to an end the worst of the obesity epidemic.

Type 2 Diabetes – Causes and cures.

Tags

carbohydrate, diabetes, exercise, fat, Health, Krebs

Gerald I. Shulman from HHMI at Yale University School of Medicine spoke to a distinguished audience here at UC Berkeley. The subject was:
Cellular Mechanisms of Insulin Resistance: Implications for Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes and the Metabolic Syndrome

This was a very technical lecture, and most of it was beyond my background, but even so there was a great deal that was understandable, and useful to the ultimate consumer—those of us possessing a human body. My take home message from the lecture was get plenty of exercise from your youth to your old age every single day especially if your parents were even a little bit diabetic. Your exercise controls the transfer of insulin in the muscles, and this is the easiest place in the whole metabolic cycle for you to have a meaningful control of the process. Also, controlling total food input may be difficult to effect, but it is very important as it is the total caloric intake verses the caloric output over the months, and years that controls the body’s total weight. Total body fat when excessive adversely impacts the insulin cycle, and tends to make a positive feedback loop, and make the insulin problems become chronic. But, even overweight people can benefit greatly by exercise.
My derivative spin on this lecture, and he didn’t say these things directly—as this was an experimental fact based lecture—was that one should not take on carbohydrates unless they are going to be exercising large muscles from one to three hours after their intake. That means eat carbohydrates in the morning, and perhaps at lunch, but avoid them at supper, and especially in the evening. Get plenty of exercise every single day from birth to death. That generally means a minimum of ten thousand steps per day every day on a pedometer.
After the lecture I asked him about my admittedly weird concept of dissolving plaque and fat out of the body by raising the body temperature four degrees coupled with a little alcohol as a solvent. He seemed a bit taken aback by the question, but said he didn’t think there was a connection. There was a professor standing beside him who had asked a question about macrophages so I asked him if he thought macrophages were activated by raising the body temperature. He said there was a great deal of literature saying that that was probably true. I mentioned this as a possible cure for the common cold, and other diseases. He reacted a bit like I was reaching too far but politely said that many things are left to be discovered.

Ecological groupthink is destroying the Earth.

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disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, groupthink, Health, pollution, population, solutions, sustainability

All of the ecology pundits are saying the same thing. — Is it GROUPTHINK ? They are all saying that global warming is being caused by greenhouse gases and these are being created by us industrialized humans. This last month I have attended numerous lectures, read several books, watched a small batch of movies on those general subjects. There has been the opportunity to talk personally with several of the most informed high level people in this general field, and I came away saddened. I am feeling sad because they were all hopeful. They were feeling hopeful because they believed they were doing a good job, and that real workable solutions were just over the horizon. They all acknowledged that CO2 was causing global warming, and that CO2 concentrations were climbing rapidly, and at a steady rate, and that many new causes of increased CO2 production were coming into being as major countries are becoming industrialized. They acknowledge that changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescent isn’t going to save the world, that becoming a vegetarian, or at least not eating beef, will be as beneficial as driving a semi-electric Prius instead of a gas destroying Hummer, but those things, although helpful, won’t stop the problem. In fact if every one of the suggested patches were implemented it wouldn’t stop the problem. And it is impossible for even most of these solutions to be even half way implemented.

What I think is — that unless the CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is quickly reversed, and brought back to 1800 levels or even lower there will be a total meltdown of the ice packs over the next couple of hundred years. Every graph presented was catastrophic if it went to the year 2100. That really isn’t such a long time if you are thinking geologically – and this is a geological problem.

No one, well not many, wants go live like the one billion people lived in 1800, because by our standards their lives were nasty, brutish and short. They didn’t have any of the necessities of life like High Def TV, weekend vacations in Paris, Wikipedia or even a fast internet. They didn’t even have cures for any diseases, reliable food without rot, sewers to carry away disease, or even police you could call when you needed help. But, these people in 1800 did have one advantage, they were living in a sustainable balance with nature.  – How many people can the Earth sustain permanently

—–Irving Janis devised eight symptoms that are indicative of groupthink (1977). Quote from The free dictionary.

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

—–

Disaster – compare the magnitude of worldwide human disasters.

Tags

disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Human disaster is talked about a lot — global warming, CO2, famine, local wars, genocide — but there hasn’t been a general measure for disasters, like a Richter Scale for earthquakes, or a Fujida Scale for tornadoes, until now. Now there is the Probaway – Disaster Scale by Charles Scamahorn.

This is too small to read so click here for a nice printable PDF.

The Disaster scale begins at DISS-0 which is a single person’s death and maxes out at DISS -14 with a single person surviving. It goes up by multiples of ten to DISS-9, which is a billion people being killed. Then there is a break when going to DISS-10 because 10 billion would be more people dead than are presently alive. The scale shifts from number killed to number surviving, going from DISS-10 to DISS-14 by multiples (actually divisions) of one hundred, based on the number of survivors. This change of scale works much better than trying to do some weird decimal between 9 and 10 and conveys the magnitude and meaning of the disaster better.

This disaster scale is important, because it gives people a better intuitive feel for different magnitudes of disasters, and hopefully will give them, and their decision makers more flexibility in avoiding such disasters. The news media seems to make today’s top story into the greatest tragedy imaginable no matter what the scale. For example, a child trapped in a well will create more media interest than the report of a historical fact like the population of China having 150 million people missing in a population gap. See page 141 of Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Rhodes. This is a tragedy of previously inconceivable proportions, though even those directly involved, and right in the middle of the worst of it would be unaware of the magnitude. They can only see what is before them, and no one has an appropriate overview. In our daily lives we have no sense of proportion for really large scale world events, and we tend to see them in the same way we see our daily lives.

Hopefully — this Disaster Scale will help people see more clearly and find their way to a better understanding of world events.

Global Warming – Berkeley presentations.

Tags

disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Greenhouse Gas Sources and Trends and California’s Response

I attended a lecture in the continuing lecture series on Climate Change, in Tolman Hall at UC Berkeley. The lecture was presented by Dan Kammen, Co-Director, Berkeley Institute for the Environment, UCB.

This was another general lecture on greenhouse gas emissions that was very well presented by an articulate and highly informed person to a university level audience. Thus it was very good, and it was similar in basic content to Michael Mastrandrea’s at Haas School of Business, and Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. But once again, as with all of these other lectures which I have attended on this subject, there was essentially no mention of the root cause. Which is too many people. The overabundance of people causes the atmospheric pollution, and exhaustion of resources. If there was a small enough total population of people behaving, in aggregate, just as middle class Americans presently do, there would be no problem. The overpopulation problems are aggravated by nuclear proliferation, and economic confusion, and the overarching possibility of nuclear war. All of these basic factors must be considered together while discussing any one of them or a completely distorted concentration on a specific one will create unstable problems for the others. None of the lecturers embedded the CO2 pollution sub-problem in this larger complex matrix of problems.

Perhaps my overpopulation concerns are considered off topic from what these researchers are considering at this time. But, I would contend that if their topic is too narrowly defined then their results will be anemic, and will not be solving the problem but only propping up a single aspect of a failing complex system of problems. When those props reach their limits, become overstressed, and fail the entire system will come crashing down in a more catastrophic way that will be even more disastrous than if they had done nothing. What they are doing, with the best of intentions, will eventually bring humanity to an end position from which it will be unable to recover.

There is another fundamental problem with all of the “scientific presentations” which I have attended here at Berkeley, and that is that the very air of this city is redolent with bias. A true scientist must look at the facts which come from his carefully done objective research, and present these findings as clearly and objectively as is humanly possible. The reason that he as a scientist must be perfectly objective in his research, and in his findings is that once a scientist takes a political position he, being human, starts unconsciously fudging his data to fit his position. This becomes magnified when he is immersed in a community of like minded researchers, such as here in Berkeley, who because they are human will start to spin their findings to fit the community norm. This is a cascading process, and soon the data become so degraded as to become worthless or even worse than worthless, as that data becomes the seemingly reliable foundation for erroneous conclusions and improper actions.

If the public and the policy researchers and political decision makers are to make the best possible decisions they must have accurate information. Information which is biased at its source by the researchers themselves is compromised, and counter productive. It makes their findings suspect and the decision makers will ignore them, and their reports. Even the people hostile to some particular political action will wish to base their position on valid data. If they base their arguments on false or unreliable data they set themselves up for being made fools of, and failing in their quest. Therefore scientists must provide the most accurate information possible, and remain objective.

A Behind the Scenes Look at Climate Science

Tags

Al Gore, disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Today at the Haas School of Business, here on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, there was a lecture about Climate Science by Michael Mastrandrea, a PhD and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was a very well presented, fast moving and informative lecture covering much the of same information presented in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth“. It did cover some of the technical data more deeply than the movie but still it was directed primarily at a general audience, in this case to about twenty sophisticated Berkeley graduate school business students. It was being video recorded so in a couple of weeks there may be a link here.

After the formal lecture there was a question period. All of the questions were very good, and on topic, and very rapid. I don’t know if it is my low body temperature slowing down my brain, or old age or what, but it seems students are speaking much faster than they did twenty years ago. However, the rapid speech wasn’t accompanied by a more sophisticated, and precise vocabulary so I don’t know if there is actually any more information being transmitted per minute, perhaps less. The quality of the dialogue was definitely better than yesterday at the I-School question period which was diffuse, sometimes to the point of being word salad.

I didn’t ask any questions at the class because after all this was a class, and I was an interloper-auditor. However, after the lecture and two students had finished talking to Dr. Mastrandrea I did chat with him for about five minutes where I brought up the questionable quality of the various projections being made on his charts for the next 100 years, and futility of the solutions being presented in the face of the ongoing population explosion. I said, that if the population kept growing at the current rate there would certainly be a catastrophic collapse long before the end of the hundred year projections he showed on screen. I suspect that he agreed. At least he didn’t call me crazy for saying such a thing. He said that talking about population control was a difficult subject because of the ethical implications, and the impossibility of saying who would be allowed to have children, and who would be prevented. Who would live, and who would die? He told me that there were some people who were trying to come up with workable solutions, but apparently they were not being successful because there hasn’t been a squeak of any of these things being presented publicly. And I have been listening.

I asked about alternate solutions such as sequestering atmospheric carbon, as opposed to not creating it, but it seemed that most of the work along that line was rich carbon offenders buying off carbon credits from poor rain-forest countries. Functionally that is little more than paying off rich politicians of poor tropical countries to oppress the poor people of the forest. If these things go the way they usually do the suffering little guy on the bottom gets very little for what was his ancestral land, and in the end dies in situ or moves to the city, and becomes the new bottom dwelling member of the urban poor.

I suggested a few ideas, which might be crazy or maybe not – but he had never heard of them. Such as how much of the black heat absorbing arctic land could be painted over with titanium oxide white for a few billion dollars, and thus made more reflective of solar energy input, and thus cooler? Or how might ocean currents be deflected to improve human use requirements, or wind flow patterns of hot air going to arctic regions. He called this geo-engineering, but didn’t seem very enthusiastic about its chances for funding. Quite frankly, although he was an optimistic kind of person, and was optimistic about “solutions being found”, and was as informed as anybody I have encountered so far, he didn’t seem to have a workable answer. Not even close, and what’s worse, although he wanted it to be true there didn’t seem to be any large scale thing which was truly positive on the horizon. This is the same unsubstantiated kind of hope that Ambassador Kroner seemed to imbued with. It is a faith based hope and as such it makes living day to day easier and more pleasant but in the long run it courts disaster and eventually marries her.

Okay, so this week I have directly encountered three people in the center of this looming crisis, Ambassador Kroner on global warming and flooding, some speakers at the Berkeley Conference on global warming and now Dr. Mastrandrea of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and in addition I watched Al Gore’s movie on global warming. Everyone of these sources was intelligent, sane, informed, optimistic and apparently well paid for their role in solving this problem. And yet, I am sorry to say, they didn’t offer a single realistic clue as to how to actually cope with this crisis and worse yet none of them seemed to be thinking outside of their self imposed box. Changing your light-bulbs to compact-fluorescents isn’t going to solve the global warming problem.

All of these sources presented the nice sawtooth graph of CO2 starting in 1956 and going up to the present with accurate measurements, and not the slightest deviation from an arrow straight line to disaster. At least I offer some suggestions, but I am an outsider, and always will be, and as soon as I start talking in public about the real solutions I am branded as crazy, and the methods unworkable. The alternative, of course, is to let natural processes take their course. Mother nature will win out in the end no matter what we do, but we won’t enjoy her methods. She will eventually kill us off as a species, but if we behave correctly that could be a long long time in the distant future and not tomorrow evening at dinner between desert and coffee.

Al Gore – “An Inconvenient Truth” ignored the real problems.

Tags

Al Gore, disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Last night I watched Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming. In it he claims global warming is caused by human created greenhouse gases. But then the movie shows him flying all over the planet looking out the window of his private jet at the problems below, such as melting glaciers, forests being harvested, deserts etc.. It never seems to cross his mind that all of his unnecessary flying about is setting a really bad example for the public. His behavior is promoting tourism which is probably the most optional of all of the major sources of pollution.

There isn’t any real complaint with his facts about global warming or the science behind his facts, but there is a very real complaint at the solutions which he proposes at the end of the movie. The movie was presented well enough with innumerable whiny complaints about the very real problems, but the solutions at the end were all lame patches couched in a truly weird crossword puzzle game. These “solutions” were stirred into the usual fast moving credits scrolls typically seen at the end of movies, but they were all but impossible to read let alone think about. Why did he choose to do the solutions in such a stupid way? Because, the solutions are stupid, and they won’t solve the problem – and he knows it. And everyone else knows it.

The real problem which I mentioned a couple of days ago is simply that there are far too many human beings on planet Earth. But, that simple truth is about as unpleasant and unpopular a statement as can be made – I agree, I agree wholeheartedly, but it is still true.

There are quite a few ways to look at humans, and their place on this earth and a variety of these are sketched out on the Probaway – Happiness chart. Number twelve of the fourteen presented is Utilitarian; which is defined as – the maximum happiness for the maximum number of people for the maximum amount of time based on utilizing all available resources to maximize humanity’s survival and population vigor. That’s a bit long but it is useful definition because you can measure each of the various factors and come up with numbers which can be compared in various ways. This numerical method must always be considered as a hypothetical guide as it is only a way of looking at problems for purposes of relative comparison.

As individuals we all want to maximize the attainment of our goals and minimize our struggles getting to these goals. But when looking at all humanity’s needs and its health we must abstract ourselves from our personal considerations and look at the problems globally. Is it better for the human species to have 6.8 billion people for one year or 6.8 million people for a thousand years or 6.8 thousand people for a million years? Most species of our approximate physical size have been closer to the six thousand population size and have existed roughly in the million year range. Natural selection seems to like a population size of about that number, because it is large enough to be stable, but small enough to adapt to its environment with adequate quickness to maintain itself for a long time. Humans of course are a special case, a very special case, but all the same, even with our species special abilities there is some sort of balance between our population numbers, and our overall sustainability. Obviously, if our numbers grow to such huge size that in a few generations we pollute our environment so badly that it cannot sustain our presence, then there will be a catastrophic event and our population will collapse. When other species have had these uncontrolled population explosions they tend to have very precipitous collapses and sometimes go all the way to zero. This is of course a condition from which they never recover, and we humans appear to be on this path to self induced oblivion. Humans are presently said to be destroying species at a rate of a thousand per year, and humans would be only one more species, so what’s the problem? It’s us – that’s the problem!

The question becomes – is there a type of human society where the population can be sustained permanently in a living condition which they could accept. Is that number six thousand wild people living a similar existence to apes, or six million people living on a high tech but sparsely populated planet or six billion living briefly until any of innumerable problems finally triggers a catastrophic collapse into oblivion.

Population is the real problem and until it is brought to a sustainable number and some method is found for maintaining that population at that much smaller but sustainable level then, because there are no natural constraints on humans, there will be population explosions and collapses. We have a choice, but the choice is to limit our population to a vastly smaller number than what the Earth is presently enduring on a temporary basis.

—- A Sonnet —-

All panting desperation man would be,
If with but modest courage he was filled;
For then into the future he would see,
With clear, unshifting eye and will.

But courage was bred out so long ago
That now we have but vestige of that trait.
The bounty of fore-sight we now forego;
And blindly stumbling forward is our fate.

Perhaps we should not look beyond our nose,
For then despair would overwhelm our soul.
For what’s to see but loss of all we know
And love. We know clear vision takes its toll.

God’s plan for man is plain enough to see.
It’s simply death for all eternity.
—-