A bit late
on my monthly blog entry eh…Well, it was Earth Day the other day. What did you
do for your planet recently?
The IPCC recently released a grim report on the state of the planet. Anthropological
climate warming is real and if you don’t believe it, you either have your head
in the sand or are just plain dumb. I may sound harsh but it is a harsh reality
that we need to confront. I actually don’t know what’s worst, the planet
warming, or the staggering widespread scientific illiteracy of its citizen.
This
science is the same science that makes the combustion engine possible for you
to go to church or drive your kid to soccer practice, or make it convenient to
pick up your groceries. It is well understood. We know what will happen when we
step on the gas, or let go, in a general sense – it’s not magic, it’s not
political, it’s the nature of how things work, in this case, our planet. There
are even school science fair experiments to show adults how it works!
I won’t
pretend to do science with Google Images but here’s a simple visual compilation
to consider nonetheless:
I admit it
is open to correlation bias criticism – if you want real science, you should
check out the IPCC report. But I’d still like to make a ‘rapid’ point with this
image. In my view, it illustrates that we are messing with entropy, at least
locally, in our nice little “closed” system we call Earth; i.e. we are changing
the organization of stored energy and diffusing it in the atmosphere to
organize information (i.e. ourselves & the World around us). Add a positive
feedback loop through radiative forcing, and it’s no surprise the entropy of
the atmosphere is increasing, making it naturally more turbulent in our case. A turbulent
flow is by its nature irregular and random, and it can thus explain the
increasing frequency of ‘severe’, unforeseen, events. It takes time for a given
energy perturbation to cascade down the system to the dissipative scales. And
we don’t let it…
So we are
poised for radical change, but living in this Universe, aren’t we always? The typical
refrain sounds a bit as such: “Either WE change or the consequences around us
will impose uncomfortable change.”
There are
two things we can do IMO: 1) As the refrain says, we can try to
discipline everyone and rein in our enthusiasm for development, or 2) Perhaps
we could use our current cowboy attitude to improvise further and steer us
madly in a spectacular paradigm shift. Niels Bohr is quoted to have said that ‘an
expert is someone who has made all the mistakes in his field’ – perhaps it will
be necessary for us to bollix-up this planet to learn how to manage one
properly? It would be unfortunate, but the path to progress is not always
pretty. Good thing we are finding new planets nowadays – too bad they are so
far. The race is on then?
A lot of
pundits will argue that we will lose money by addressing these issues; that we
will slow down the economy. I beg to differ and this seems to be supported by
the IPCC report; the economy is fueled from people accomplishing things for
other people. Legislation sets the rules of the playing field and the goals and
to reach those goals people will come out and invest accordingly, given the
rules are properly enforced. So maybe we can just develop differently?
I think
governments need to ‘grow a set of balls’ and act with leadership and direction
in order to set the best policies in the interest of citizens and especially,
and more importantly perhaps, for the future of the species. But does that even
matter?
Regardless,
I feel that the World has been mostly rudderless lately, putting out fires (proverbial and literal), and
letting the free market grow in whatever direction it wanted – like weeds. It’s
time to roll up some sleeves and make a nice garden for ourselves. For some
reason though, I have a feeling outcome #2 is more likely…
No matter
the outcome, we better get used to fighting entropy, it will be recurrent in
our evolution… ;-) Let's see how long we can last...