Chimps and religion?

Excerpt from Escaping the Progress Trap:

As we step through evolutionary development we can go much farther back on the timeline than Gilgamesh, to see how homo sapiens may have coped with disorientation brought on by new phenomena. One notices a trend in the growth of rituals that became accepted as religion. In Lost Gods¹ John Allegro notes Jane Goodall's description of the chimpanzees' dance of defiant affirmation on the outbreak of a thunderstorm, as an indication of early religious ritual. He quotes it in detail:

..the storm broke. The rain was torrential and the sudden clap of thunder, right overhead, made me jump. As if this were a signal, one of the big males stood upright and as he swayed and swaggered rhythmically from foot to foot I could just hear the rising crescendo of his pant-hoots above the beating of the rain. Then he charged off...two other males charged after him. One broke off a low branch from a tree as he ran and brandished it in the air before hurling it ahead of him...With a display of strength and vigor such as this, primitive man himself might have challenged the elements. ²
    (In the Shadow of Man, p. 52.)

In human history the anger of the gods would customarily be appeased by sacrificial rituals whose dual purpose was to relieve tension and solve the problem at hand, whether it was a stubborn disease or a dry spell. These evolved into the theatre of tragedy and comic relief, the simulated sacrifice in Christian churches, and later into psychiatry, counselling, and therapy. Cinema and television have taken over much of the earlier role of live theatre. The purpose of catharsis is to not only relieve tension (or purge the emotions, in Aristotle's definition) but to enable the nervous system's re-engagement of mind and senses, after which we act with a fresh outlook. We get a new perspective on life. Most of us have experienced the emotional readjustment that follows a harrowing experience. Real life drama and the enacted simulation can both have this effect. Closure is the term often used today, and reaching it requires the assistance of a professional therapist.³

1. John Allegro, Lost Gods, Joseph, London, 1977
2. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,1971, p. 52.
3. Daniel O'Leary, Escaping the progress trap, Geozone, Montreal, 2007, p29 

Most threats come from progress in science and technology ̶ Stephen Hawking

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

 - Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.5.167-8), 

The renowned physicist recently discussed his BBC* Reith Lecture¹ on black holes.² It emerged that in response to a question submitted by a schoolboy on whether the world is likely to end on account of humans, or through natural disaster, Hawking pointed to humans, their science and technology as potential culprits. According to The Telegraph's Science News³, Hawking responded  “Most of the threats we face come from the progress we’ve made in science and technology. We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognize the dangers and control them. I’m an optimist, and I believe we can.”

Hawking specifically mentioned nuclear war, global warming and genetically engineered viruses as examples of human-made threats. Colonizing planets is seen as a means of surviving, a point that Hawking also made in the 2011 documentary Surviving Progress⁴, saying this was our only chance. But now he explicitly identifies science and technology as responsible. There's your progress trap.

In saying that we won't stop progress, or reverse it, Hawking is perhaps inadvertently revealing why science and technology may be our Achilles heel. History abounds with institutions that refused reform, and criticism. Athens prior to the Peloponnesian War, the pre-Reformation Church and the Soviet empire, to name but a few. Critics were seen as heretics and worse. These days, Science and Technology present themselves in many ways as beyond reproach. Thus Hawking's admission of their inherent dangers is a landmark event, for which he deserves the highest praise.

To consider the learning process – that gave us Stephen Hawking – as something not applicable to the problem of progress traps just makes no sense.

Evolution has enabled us not only to learn how to become a very capable survivor in our world, but to create new instruments and modify our world as well as our behaviour. This process suggests there are "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of " in our science, and we should learn this lesson as soon as possible. Mars can wait.⁵

How do we have the brain power to do that? With 80 to 100 billion neurons in any given person's brain,⁶ and each neuron capable of making and receiving up to 10,000 connections, well....you do the math.

by Daniel O'Leary FRSA - 23 Jan. 2016

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1qCD6jwN3c6GSzY0SY7DYjH/professor-stephen-hawking
2. Telegraph Jan.2016.   http://www.progresstrap.org/assets/Prof-Stephen-Hawking-disaster-on-planet-Earth-is-a-near-certainty.pdf
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12107623/Prof-Stephen-Hawking-disaster-on-planet-Earth-is-a-near-certainty.html
4. http://www.wired.com/2012/04/surviving-progress
5. Goodman G, Gershwin ME, Bercovich D.   Mars can wait, facing the challenges of our civilization. Isr Med Assoc J. 2014 Dec;16(12):744-7.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25630201
   Amitai Etzioni Mars can wait, Oceans can't.  CNN  Aug.17, 2012 http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/opinion/etzioni-space-oceans/
6. http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s1/introduction.html

* The Reith Lecture with Prof. Hawking - broadcast in 2 parts on BBC Radio 4 on January 26, 2016, and on Feb. 2, 2016 both at 9 a.m.

Governments have signalled an end to the fossil fuel era, committing for the first time to a universal agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions

-  from the Guardian.com (Saturday 12 December 2015):
"Six years after the chaotic ending of the Copenhagen climate summit, the agreement now known as the Paris Agreement for the first time commits rich countries, rising economies and some of the poorest countries to work together to curb emissions.

Rich countries agreed to raise $100bn (£66bn) a year by 2020 to help poor countries transform their economies. The overall agreement is legally binding, but some elements – including the pledges to curb emissions by individual countries and the climate finance elements – are not."

read the full article:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/paris-climate-deal-200-nations-sign-finish-fossil-fuel-era

Economy of scale - small scale.

Since the beginnings of industry, economy of scale¹  meant large scale. It was natural to get as much as possible done with the fewest resources. Over time, this meant larger farms, larger houses, larger cities, larger states, transport systems, and much, much more. Then came machines, electricity and factories - which gave us economies that never slept. One disadvantage of all the bounty was that humans adapted to the machines, most of which were larger than us anyway. There was no choice.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to indentured omnipotence. Ingenuity began making the the machines smaller and smaller. And smaller. Many machines are still larger than humans, don't sleep and must be fueled non-stop. But our most beloved, frequently used machines are smaller than we are. We can turn them off. We can ignore them. We can stop feeding them. Best of all, a single one of them can do many things. Little miracles. Instead of being slaves to them, we can tell them what to do.

That includes providing music, getting mail, monitoring our heart rate and figuring out exactly where we are the morning after. We adapt these small machines to suit our purposes. They are addictive sometimes, but that's not the same as involuntary slavery to polluting mega-industries like energy production, agribusiness and big pharma. The most useful gadgets such as pacemakers may have only one purpose, but they are small.

Without revolutions, marches or barricades we are quietly liberating ourselves from enslavement to the production line.

The thing is, we can do more things on a small scale, such as individually tailored medical treatments, without sacrificing what we used only to enjoy on a large scale. Yes, Mr. E. F. Schumacher ², small is beautiful.

Eventually we may be able to dispense with behemoth states, cities and perhaps a few polluting industries. For now, I can set aside the tablet on which I wrote this, for as long as I like.

by Daniel B. O'Leary FRSA

1. Economies of scale
2. Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher

Wind of Change

 The Wind Empowerment 2014 conference (3-7 Nov.) has just ended in Athens. Their video below shows how this technically challenging resource can be harnessed on a community scale, by people who need it most and have the will to make it work.



WindEmpowerment is an association for the development of locally built small wind turbines for sustainable rural electrification.

The keynote speaker was Hugh Piggott, who has built wind turbines on Scoraig island in Scotland, a process that started in the 1970s. He is the author of A Wind Turbine Recipe Book which may be the standard work on the topic. Events included demos, technical sessions and a presentation by Michel Bauwens, (P2P Foundation) on commons-oriented infrastructures.

Participants also visited 'small' wind installations in Marathonas, the site of the battle of Marathon in 490 BC – synonymous with success in the face of overwhelming opposition.

by Daniel B. O'Leary, Montreal

What's all this about a Win-Win climate situation? (IMF and Paul Krugman)

Merely three months after The World Bank and former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson presented plans that show how we can address climate problems while prospering economically, the IMF and the  New Climate Economy project¹ have come up with very similar ideas!

The International Monetary Fund's idea is that putting a price on CO2 emissions would actually enhance economic growth. The IMF shows it has done the math in a working paper².

It gets better: the New Climate Economy report has 10 recommendations for growth -

Recommendations 1 to 6 define the necessary conditions for better, low-carbon, climate-resilient investment and growth; recommendations 7 to 10 focus on the potential for sectoral change which drives future growth and lower climate risk, specifically in urban, land use and energy systems.

There you have it. Just as world leaders gather in NYC for a crucial UNO climate meeting, and thousands plan to march, we have compelling evidence that we can not only survive but prosper as well.

As Paul Krugman snidely puts it in his New York Times piece: "if you think that an economy getting a lot of its power from wind farms and solar panels is a hippie fantasy, you’re the one out of touch with reality."

by Daniel B. O'Leary, Montreal, 20 Sept., 2014

1. Global Commission on the Economy and Climate - New Climate Economy project
2. Ian Parry, Chandara Veung and Dirk Heine, How Much Carbon Pricing is in Countries’ Own Interests? The Critical Role of Co-Benefits, IMF Fiscal Affairs Department Working Paper WP/14/174
3.  Paul Krugman, Errors and Emissions, Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free? New York Times, SEPT. 18, 2014

SHOCKER - no electronics at the Faraday Cafe!

“There was life before the Internet,” said artist Julien Thomas, adding “Smart phones mean people can cede memory to their devices. There’s no need to remember phone numbers, geography or definitions. We have given up that responsibility to remember things that are important.”

The Faraday Café in Vancouver is temporarily home to a place where folks can go to leave all their digital baggage behind, for the price of a cup of coffee. No tweets, hashtags or pokes. For Mr. Thomas and his like-minded artist clients, disconnection is vital to restoring creativity.

The e-fugitive spends the coffee break in a fine wire-mesh enclosure that can screen out air-borne electronic contaminants. The safe haven is named for Michael Faraday, the father of electronics applications and inventor of the mesh cage. The enclosure keeps external static and non-static electric fields out by directing electricity through the wire net, and is used in laboratories. Thus the cage provides an escape. If ever a situation reflected the progress trap, this is it.

But what would Faraday think, having the most sophisticated electronic applications blocked by one of his simpler inventions?

Source: Globe and Mail
By Daniel B. O'Leary, 7 July, 2014

The World Bank and Henry Paulson on Climate Change and Risky Business

We can deal with climate change AND create jobs.
June 2014.  Introducing his 'Risky Business' program, Henry Paulson recently wrote in the New York Times¹ that its goals are to:

"..develop technologies, lower the costs of clean energy and create jobs as we and other nations develop new energy products and infrastructure. This would strengthen national security by reducing the world’s dependence on governments like Russia and Iran. Climate change is the challenge of our time."

Paulson served as secretary of the U.S. Treasury from July 2006 to January 2009, and is thus well positioned to learn from the past. It was on his watch that the 2008 financial crash developed, and all leaders could emulate his candour: "We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy."

The Risky Business project (riskybusiness.org) is intended to mitigate climate change while strengthening alternative energy economies and jobs. What is risky is that it plans to act now rather than waiting for all the science to come in. It's courageous because Paulson is a conservative, as is his partner in this project former Mayor Bloomberg, and these notions are not popular in quarters where many deny climate change even exists. As Paulson puts it, "We’ll never know enough to resolve all of the uncertainties. But we know enough to recognize that we must act now."

In the same week, The World Bank issued a report³ - "Climate-Smart Development." It shows that the practical benefits from actual projects illustrate how the goal of mitigating climate change while boosting economies can be achieved. The case studies involve:

• Sustainable Transport in India
• Cleaner Coookstoves in China
• Solid Waste Management in Brazil
• Biogas digestion and solar photovoltaics in Agriculture - Mexico

These projects showed that the aggregate benefits over 20 years of the four development projects will accomplish:

• 195,000 to 261,000 new jobs
• 1million–1.5 million tons of crop loss avoided
• About 1 million lives saved
• $37 billion–$60 billion increases to GDP
• 350–520 Megaton (million metric tons) CO2 equivalents³ reduction

The World Bank is very confident that climate-smart development will "secure growth, increase jobs and competitiveness, save lives and slow the rate of climate changes."

Avoiding the progress trap
Henry Paulson could not have expressed the progress trap paradox better: "I feel as if I’m watching as we fly in slow motion on a collision course toward a giant mountain. We can see the crash coming, and yet we’re sitting on our hands rather than altering course."

by Daniel O'Leary, Montreal, 28 June 2014

See also:

What's all this about a Win-Win climate situation? (IMF and Paul Krugman)

1. Henry M. Paulson Jr. The Coming Climate Crash, New York Times,  June 21, 2014
2. World Bank Climate-Smart Development report
3. CO2, BC, methane (CH4), HFCs, and nitrous oxide (N2O).

Neil deGrasse Tyson, you wanted to know - what's our excuse?

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves" - Shakespeare

Allow me to transcribe some eloquent lines spoken by Niel deGrasse Tyson in Episode 9 of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. The topic is mass extinction of species, such as befell the dinosaurs. After extolling the human skills that gave rise to civilizations, he observes:

There is nothing like the inter-glacial period—one of those balmy intermissions in the ice age—and the great news is that this one is due to last for another fifty thousand years. What a break for our kind!

    Just one problem, we can't seem to stop burning up all those buried trees from way back in the carboniferous age in the form of coal, and the remains of ancient plankton in the form of oil and gas. If we could we'd be home free - climate wise. 

    Instead we're dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate the earth hasn't seen since the great climate catastrophes of the past - the ones that led to mass extinctions.

    We just can't seem to break our addiction to the kind of fuel that'll bring back a climate last seen by the dinosaurs - a climate that will drown our coastal cities and wreak havoc on our environment and our ability to feed ourselves.

    All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us?

    The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming - what's our excuse? ¹

A similar question has been asked by the author of Collapse, Jared Diamond:

it is clear from all the cases discussed in this book that precisely such a failure has happened repeatedly. How did so many societies make such bad mistakes? ...a baffling phenomenon: namely, failures of group decision-making..²

Diamond offers several explanations, including: absent prior experience, reasoning by false analogy,  imperceptibility, distant managers, creeping normalcy, landscape amnesia, rationalized greed, sunk-cost effect, denial and resource exhaustion. In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainer linked the loss of creativity to the growth of complexity.³

Clearly human behavior has a lot to do with it, in addition to the obvious ability of vested interests to preserve the status quo and create diversions. What is baffling is why science has not taken up the challenge of determining how as humans we often undermine our best efforts.

Ongoing research for the author's progress trap project shows that the following behavioural factors may also contribute:

• habituation
• inattentional blindness
• epigenetics (change passed down from parent to child, one generation to the next)
• impaired emotional intelligence
• addiction
• technocratic obsession
• incomplete paradigm shifts
• cognitive overload
• impaired (environmental) feedback loops
• disconnection syndromes
• phenomenal dissociation
• institutional bias

The neurological aspect has been discussed by Antonio Damasio. In Descartes Error, he criticized the pioneering philosopher-mathematician and lamented the exclusively rational tendencies of science. In a lecture on Emotion and reason in the future of human life, he applies the same thinking to the environmental context:

It is difficult to conceive of any future for human life without an abundance of collective human wisdom and such wisdom depends upon a well-tempered machinery for decision-making within which emotion and reason are interwoven.⁴

Examination of the neurological factors could make the whole issue a lot less baffling. Indeed, the unfairly maligned left-brain right-brain debate does throw light on this paradox, providing insight into 'normal' human actions that are often at odds with our own long-term interests. As Iain McGilchrist, also a critic of Descartes, wrote:

the left hemisphere may be 'inadequate for the more rapid complex syntheses achieved by the [right] hemisphere...This broader field of attention, open to whatever may be, and coupled with greater integration over time and space, is what makes possible the recognition of broad or complex patterns, the perception of the “thing as a whole,” seeing the wood for the trees... In short, the left hemisphere takes a local short-term view, where the right hemisphere sees the bigger picture.⁵

The explanations that Diamond and McGilchrist offer are surely the beginnings of serious inquiries that will answer Neil deGrasse Tyson's question.

The rest of us would also like to know.

by Daniel B. O'Leary FRSA

Notes

1. Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey  Episode 9 - The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth,  2014
2. Jared Diamond, Collapse, Viking Penguin, New York, 2005. p420
3. Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press; 1988
4. Antonio Damasio, "Emotion and Reason in the Future of Human Life," Mind, brain, and the environment, Bryan Cartledge, ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 1998, p. 57.
   
5. McGilchrist, Iain. Reciprocal organization of the cerebral hemispheres,  (2010). Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 12(4), 503–515.

  
  

What is 10,000 times greater than the rate at which humankind consumes energy?

A new study by NASA finds that the rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in "an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea."  The study suggests that sea level rise projections for this century are toward the high-end of the IPCC range, which is 1 - 3 feet (26 to 98 centimeters).

The NASA video, narrated by Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, illustrates what Mother Jones magazine has described as a "Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming" and can be seen on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/YQMtb1Pd07E

More graphics are available at the NASA website 

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/earth/antarctica-telecon20140512/#.U3l2U_ldWSo

- and the press release is at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-148

But wait - there is good news. Lots of it.
To underline how unnecessary these problems are, consider this from the IPPCC:

"Solar energy is the most abundant of all energy resources. Indeed, the rate at which solar energy is intercepted by the Earth is about 10,000 times greater than the rate at which humankind consumes energy." * 
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srren/Summary%20for%20Policymakers.pdf
http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/srren-figures-ts/srren-figure-ts.1.7

* Arvizu, D., P. Balaya, L. Cabeza, T. Hollands, A. Jäger-Waldau, M. Kondo, C. Konseibo, V. Meleshko,
W. Stein, Y. Tamaura, H. Xu, R. Zilles, 2011: Direct Solar Energy. In IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation [O. Edenhofer, R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, K. Seyboth, P. Matschoss, S. Kadner, T. Zwickel, P. Eickemeier, G. Hansen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow (eds)], Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.