Perhaps useless - but also at the same time true, which is part of the predicament itself.
I used to be a Zen student at a monastery, and I would hear something similar, that needed change has to start with inner work that can filter out into the world - our insititutions and cultural narratives. I would hear this and think, yes, but fat chance any more than a very few are going to be willing to do the inner work to begin with. I still think that’s true, and that many of the insights in Ahmed’s article are true, but in a practical sense useless. That’s the tragedy of our culture, that our world view and way of life is so mal-adaptive to human and planetary well-being that impossible solutions such as what Ahmed are the few things that make sense.
We need cultural norms, narratives, and beliefs that restrain our worst collective tendencies. Our culture has none of these, the result is what we see unfolding before us.
Great post Chris. Greetings from the UK, land of Brexit. A great frustration for me is that the political theatricals of Brexit are dominating the airwaves and political and social discourse here, and diverting everyone’s attention from much more serious problems like the ones you’ve described. Species extinction, resource depletion and climate change are going to have far more impact than Brexit in the long term but nobody is talking about them. Keep up your good work.
https://postpeakmedicine.com/
“And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” . .
And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. . .Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”
Believe it.
Rector
I actually agree with both you and the wordy doctor, though I find it hard to accept common sense when it is turned into a dissertation. But while it’s nice to be nice to the nice, what the world actually needs is for some military to start shooting the wealthiest people. That, and nothing else, is going to cure the effects of capitalist countries’ worship of mammon.
Will any military actually do this? Or are they all run by climate-change deniers? I don’t know. But I no longer have the slightest illusion that our political system is up to the task which so many seem to think it will take on. Instead, we will see good pols and bad pols rise to the top and have the public turn on them, because they have proven unable to alter a system that is built off of our animal nature greed.
If any pol ever proved a true threat to the wealthiest 0.01%, they’d be dead in a flash. That’s why what little hope I have rests on people with large armaments doing something noble, even though I think they are all probably conservative, while I would once have considered myself liberal.
Though I do have to admit your plan appeals to me on one level. You know that whole “We had to destroy the village to save it,” kind of way. Your plan does give me pause however in another way because others have tried using murder on an industrial scale to establish a better world. But they never established a better world. They only killed millions. I’ll sign on to your campaign under one condition: I’m put in charge of deciding who dies and who lives.
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: First SeriesI am definitely Mencken’s normal man. The insanity of the world is just too much to bear sometimes. However my conclusion is I’ll be one who will stand in the way of any who would try to bring a better world through the tyrannical control of those who can be controlled and death to those who can’t. Not on my watch.
…it only decides who’s left.
While it may be tempting to think that the military might do something useful in an overthrow, that’s just not going to be the case.
The military, once done with their purge, would then be subject to all of the Rules for Rulers
Hi Chris,
While I fully agree that Davos 2019 is too little, too late, there were a few talks and people who were not as totally tone deaf as the rest -
Sir Richard Attenborough (from minute 21 for the first link)
https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting/sessions/the-25th-anniversary-of-the-crystal-awards
https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting/sessions/an-insight-an-idea-with-david-attenborough
Jacinda Ardern - the Prime Minister of New Zealand
https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting/sessions/our-planet
Mark Rutte - the Prime Minister of the Netherlands
My absolute cheering favourite though is Greta Thunberg
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/our-house-is-on-fire-16-year-old-greta-thunberg-speaks-truth-to-power/ She is the person who has inspired/is inspiring kids around the world to 'School Strike for Climate' and made it to Davos via a 32 hour train trip. She does NOT mince words and says things that these Davos people need to hear. For some background - here is her TedxStockholm talk from November 2018 https://www.ted.com/talks/greta_thunberg_school_strike_for_climate_save_the_world_by_changing_the_rules?language=enUnfortunately man is on a path of self destruction where they wrote theiur own epitath:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
Man seems to think he can write his own story but his~story(history) has already been written:
Revelation 11:18 And the nations were wroth, and thy wrath came, and the time of the dead to be judged, and the time to give their reward to thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and to them that fear thy name, the small and the great; and to destroy them that destroy the earth.
The next decade will bring our Father climactic end:
https://sumofthyword.com/2016/10/04/the-rapture-of-the-church-is-after-the-tribulation/
I often agree with much of what you say. However: While you may well be right in your favorite narrative, although I am tempted to think you may be presumptuously early in an eager sort of way, I nevertheless wouldn’t be inclined to argue the issue with you. But your plot breaks down to the extent that it relies for urgency on a tall-tale, utterly unfounded in science, manufactured out of new whole-cloth for ulterior purposes, and force-fed to the public by a compliant, subservient,and very compromised media for now more than 30 years. Of course, I mean the global warming /climate change story which you seem to accept at face value. To me it’s always strange when people recognize the flaws in establishment media presentations and narratives in certain areas but then accept holus- bolus uncritically and without evidence something like the anthropogenic global warming assertion. Originally, I was inclined to believe the story as it was supposedly sourced in science, but as time went by and the mythical evidence was never presented and the stories began to take on a flavour of propaganda I became suspicious and decided to investigate. I had no dog in the fight but wanted facts.To that end, I can say that I have read over 50 books, hundreds of articles, some papers, and thousands of blog posts and discovered that there is not any real science to support the notion of man-made global warming. The extent of the so-called evidence resides solely in climate models created by activist parties and that’s all there is. That’s not scientific evidence. The activists program the models using their preferred assumptions to get the results they want. That is an invalid circular process and not science but the whole thing is based on these models. When it comes to climate dynamics there are just too many unknowns and even for the things that are known it is impossible to know how to weight them properly for any climate model to have a valid outcome. Beyond this, there are reasons why CO2 does not and cannot cause the earth’s temperature to rise which I won’t get into here, In fact, to call it a pollutant is ridiculous. It is the molecule of life as the existence of all life on earth depends on it. Plants and crops require it to grow and without plants there would be no animals or humans. In fact, plants evolved when CO2 was many times higher than now. When Co2 was below 300 parts per million we were near starvation levels for plants as for eons it was continually washing out of the atmosphere and being sequestered to the point of danger. Not only is it not harmful but more would be beneficial. As an aside, several competent experts have demonstrated that the human contribution of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is tiny and overwhelmed by natural sources during times of modest rise such as now and in the constant overturning cycle can not possibly be responsible for the rise in recent decades. The math does’t work. But this doesn’t matter anyway as more is better and not harmful.
Here’s a link for another talk she gave -
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/25/right-their-faces-16-year-old-greta-thunberg-tells-davos-elite-climate-crisis-their
“It takes deep courage to go to Davos and tell the masters-of-the-universe to their faces that they knowingly torched the planet in order to get filthy rich.”
—Naomi Klein
Well, my previous post didn’t format well as I pasted it in from notepad.
Just to make reference to your Australia heatwave example, It is nothing unusual. It was in fact hotter during a heatwave in the 1890’s. But it is an example of what the co-opted mainstream media does. I remember when a few years ago they played-up another heatwave in Australia where the temp was a couple of degrees above normal while not mentioning an area about twice the size of Australia in central Asia with severe cold 10 degrees below normal that was happenning at the same time.
In fact the whole narrative of an over-heating earth is bunkum. Our current inter-glacial period is about 11,800 years long. We have been in a stairstep slide down to the next glacial period ever since the Holocene optimum some 8,000 years ago when temps were some 3 degrees celsius warmer than now. We are currently below the peaks from 5,000 years ago as well as the Roman peiod and the medieval warm priod when Vikings farmed in Greenland.
The current minor blip up is simply a rebound from the “little ice age” which was the coldest dip in the entire current interglacial. WE are still colder than 95% of the current interglacial.
The ulterior motives for the narrative:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, 1992, Under Secretary General of the UN
Maurice Strong chose the UN specifically the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to control bureaucracies within every national government and away from legislative oversight. Those bureaucracies directed research funding to one side of the debate and appointed people to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research was limited by defining climate change as only human-caused changes, which predetermined the outcome. The political objective became enshrined through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), particularly Agenda 21, introduced at the 1992 Rio Conference organized and chaired by Strong.
Basing Agenda 21 on climate and the environment gave them the moral high ground, which they used to control and centralize power. Vaclav Klaus identified this in his book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”
And:
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
And:
Ottmar Edenhofer,
co-chair of the IPCC’s
Working Group III,
explained in
precise German:
“we are in fact
redistributing
the world’s wealth
by climate policy
… one must
free oneself
of the delusion
that climate policy
is [about]
environmental
policy.”
Or what can I do about it? Me, poor little me against such a powerful machine that seems to inexorably walk (run) toward its self-destruction. I believe the answer is partly in this very interesting piece that I just stumbled upon. It ties in very well with Chris’s ‘‘Be that change you want to see in the wolrd’’ theme. What if change in the ‘‘out there’’ did indeed start with change ‘‘in here and now’’. What if the outside was merely a reflection of the inside. It just might be so, it just might be so. And it fills me with great hope and joy. There is a way out. However, make no mistake, it might also be our biggest challenge and task yet. But it is one we can and will supercede. A must read if you ask my humble opinion. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-collective-intelligence-can-change-your-world-right-now-fcfab215251f
On the same theme of change within oneself before change outside oneself can manifest, this video.
What say you?
I’d be very interested in finding out more about your CO2 cannot possibly cause climate change which you did not expose further.
Thank you.
The “greenhouse effect” is inappropriate to begin with as a greenhouse has a solid roof that prevents heat from escaping via convection. The earth’s atmosphere is open and so heat is not “trapped” but constantly convected upwards and away. Co2 makes up only .04% of the atmosphere. So the claim that an increase of one molecule in 10,000 from 3 molecules to 4 molecules in an open convective atmosphere can trap heat and has caused the 0.6C degree rise over the last 50 years is preposterous.
When sunlight hits the earth the energy is converted to heat and radiated upwards in the longwave infrared wavelength bands. About 17% radiates out unobstructed. The rest is captured by mostly water vapour and Co2. But because of the structure of the molecules and the way they can bend or vibrate, Co2 can only capture the energy from a very narrow part of the total range of infrared wavelengths. This is the energy radiated from about -75 to -85 degrees centigrade which is not very much energy at all.
Now, there is a limited amount of energy in this bandwidth available and CO2 at current levels already absorbs most or all of it. In fact,Co2 at 50ppm already absorbs most of it nevermind the current 400ppm.
But here is the kicker! Water vapour absorbs across all of the wavelenths and overlaps the absorption band of CO2. And there is on average 50 times the amount of water vapour in the air. Water vapour alone has the capacity to absorb all of the infrared radiation. CO2 makes no difference. If you reduced it to zero, water vapour would absorb all of the radiation in the CO2 band, and whatever CO2 absorbs at whatever level in the atmosphere is simply stolen from water vapour. Cut it in half or double it, it makes no difference.
And remember, there is a finite amount of energy in the wavelength that CO2 can absorb and it is all already being absorbed. Increasing CO2 can make no difference.
How about this perspective Chris.
the ego is in a constant state of want because it is striving to achieve infinity or immortality if you like. It is terrifified of dissapearing into nothingness. Of course, striving for infinity (security of the ego) by accumulating material stuff infinitely on a finite planet is a lost cause and can only lead to collapse. Which we are apparently in the process of accomplishing. How to conquer the beast then? Well, if we inately have as human beings a longing for infinity/eternity whether because it is a flaw of the ego or better yet because it is really a longing to remember our true Selves, what we truly are, children of the whole, of the universe, of God, of infinity, take the word that best suits your beliefs, , that we are mistakenly trying to achieve through material accumulation (which we already agreed is a lost cause, the ego will never be content no matter how much you have ). Then, what if we could re-route our egos’ desire for infinity (security) and feed the beast something that costs nothing to produce (or next to nothing), that multiplies when shared (unlike material stuff) and that is infinite. And therefore feed the beast until its had its fill. What am I talking ? Well knowlegde of course. La connaissance in french. A theme well developped by frenchman and Stanford graduate Idris Aberkan. ( I don’t know if is work is available in English however, it is to be looked into).
And through knowledge’s refinement we will achieve wisdom. If one is infinite, so is the other. And from wisdom we will achieve LOVE. Yes I know, it sounds all new agy and cuddly (and thus not serious, right?) Because wisdom can only lead to LOVE. (Well yes. When you truly know, something, someone, you are so fascinated by the complexity and beauty of such something or someone that you can only admire/love it). LOVE that costs nothing to produce, has no impact on the planet, (and may indeed be the only thing capable of saving it) enriches the one who gives it and the one who receives it, etc and is indeed what the ego is hungry for. Because make no mistake, when somebody feels loved, truly loved and accepted and cherished for what he/she is for no other reason than he/she is, then that person will have no more need to accumulate stuff and in the process of so doing destroy the planet. Because the void that the most materalistic person is truly trying to fill is one of love you see. Love me, love me they are screeming with their every purchase, conquest, election won, etc. I have a billion dollars yet I feel not loved, admired, perhaps two billion will do it and on and on. And if we think about it, totally sincerely with ourselves, we will acknowledge that we are no different in that regard from the worst sociopathic billionaire out there. Perhaps in depth but not on the true nature of our quest (or our ego’s quest). We are all somewhere along the spectrum of Fear----------Love. That is how we conquer the beast. Knowledge which leads to wisdom which leads to LOVE.