How to prolong life

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

Expect the Unexpected
 - Proverb

(5/2022) There’s some terrible things going on in countries who are ruled by one person: Wars, retraining camps, genocide, cruelty, but none of them are concerned about climate change.

That is the opposite to those other countries who are called western democracies, and not even all of them. Western Europe, the northern states of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. These are the ones who rant and rave, call conferences, invest in solutions, and plan to turn the tide.

That is both scary and ironic, because they also know that all their talk, all their conferences are rubbish. Climate change is here to stay.

There is no way out, and hasn’t been for at last twenty years. It was then that the IPCC (Intergovernmental panel on climate change) introduced the concept of tipping points, meaning that at some particular point things would change so much that they could not be reversed.

They took the idea from work done on waterway pollution, that showed that if a certain level of contaminants was passed, the waterway would never recover, irrespective of what was done, and in the case of climate, they at first predicted that the tipping point would be 5 degrees Celsius, and about ten years later altering it to between one and two degrees.

The only ‘greenhouse gas’ is carbon dioxide, and today all gasses contributing to climate change are turned into greenhouse equivalents.

Back in 1860, physicist John Tyndall suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations, while in 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Arrhenius predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases to global warming, and the Carbon Dioxide theory of climate change was formulated by Milutin Milankovic in 1956.

So where did all this CO2 come from? Initially, animals, especially humans, but that was soon overtaken by the burning of fossil fuels. In 1927, carbon emissions reached one billion tonnes per year, and in 1930 the population of the globe reached two billion.

In 1987 the population had reached five billion, and today the CO2 emissions have reached 50 billion tonnes per year, and there is 416 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is predicted to rise to 1100 ppm by 2100, when the temperature rise would be eight degrees Celsius, which is enough to cook the oceans.

Scary? Only if you think about it, which a lot of people are doing, all of them if the democracies of western Europe, North America, Oceania. This group includes the people of the drowning islands in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.

It is also the place where leaders are elected, meaning they have not only a responsibility to their citizens, but a desire to stay in office. This means they cannot tell the truth, even if they know it, but every other nation doesn’t want to know, and are never reminded of it.

How different that is in dictatorships, in countries that put growth above everything, and who simply don’t care.

Dictators, especially in China and Russia make the rules and say what they want. Others, like India, ignore it and go on adding to the gasses. Africa, South America go on burning forests, fossil fuels.

Now here’s the biggest irony that has ever occurred: In a perverse way, the dictators are right. This problem is insoluble, and there is only one rational thing to do: Put the billions of dollars that are being spent on ways of trying to remove the problem and put them towards making it possible to live in the new environment.

OK, that is not going to happen, because the system and the politicians won’t allow it, they don’t have the nous to understand, so the useless rhetoric persists.

But there is one way that has already worked, for a different problem. It is called ‘Percolation theory,’ and shows how small things, when collected together, have their own tipping point.

The illustration used is this: It rains, and some of it hits the window, forming drops. Slowly, one drop will move down under the force of gravity until it joins another drop. Somewhere else on the window the same thing happens, and soon those drops merge. Should they meet another group of four, a much bigger drop forms and it suddenly runs all the way to the bottom.

In practice, the same thing has happened in Hong Kong, where it’s always possible that the government will close down the networks. To avoid this, citizens have turned to ‘mesh’ networks that let one or two people talk to each other without any record. If another two join this group, the connectivity grows until it reaches the critical point. This effectively is under the radar, unseen and unrecorded.

The same process is being used in medical areas, weather forecasting and so on - it’s the equivalent of crowd funding. This could be pertinent in the area of forming citizen groups to force governments into finding a way to protect us from this ongoing disaster.

I haven’t heard of any better ideas, but if you ave, please let me know.

Climate change is the existential threat to end all threats, but there is another threat that is more immediate, and could well upend the whole of civilisation. This is the growth of the dictator, the alliance between China and Russia. In their own ways, they are spawning more far right governments, subverting democracy wherever they can, and I doubt Mesh groups will be effective.

Now to a different matter. In three weeks’ time, Australia has a federal election. Labor vs Liberal. Neither leader is liked – one totally distrusted, the other inaudible. It is the number of independent candidates that will turn the tide.

Let me know when you mesh.