Climate change scientists have asked policy makers to think again about their approach to climate change.

Instead of “carbon reduction targets” they say it is global temperature targets that need to be considered as reducing CO2 output will not stop the inexorable rise in temperature, and that is the problem.

It is not until we replace coal as our main source of energy that we reduce the inevitable chaos that climate change and global warming would cause. Denial will not change simple physics. Natural processes buried masses of carbon over millions of years. Ice ages freeze methane in Siberia. These events are not within human control. If we undo them, we can not restore them.

We live in a balanced environment. Why tip it over?

President Obama has stated that it is time for American leadership to step up and he has picked the one time when the Right certainly have no right to complain about putting America to work solving its dependence on foreign oil economic imbalance in three years.

All it takes is the political will to spend on the economy while saving the banking system. The best and perhaps only way for a modern large economy to work is not so much trickle down as a sort of reverse trickle – or more correctly by “assimulative growth” – growth that absorbs and supports its own as well as taking on new ground. It is the point of winning a war, to be able to improve a worsening situation.

And this is an economic war of sorts, the banking system is poised like a blocked drain may cause part of a city to flood whilst leaving others dry battling against the forces. Only by expanding upward does it become obvious that our resources are limited by our number.

Only by rewarding the creativity and workmanship of his citizens to act as a force, to meet the demands of citizenship and help the wheel of wealth turn the right way again – for a time – can the Government is better not to simply dish out cash. But to use the oil to make productivity of Americans create their own wealth again by reducing the need to trade for oil. If Barack Obama has the community building skills to achieve this, then the Republicans should support it or lose any credibility they think they have.

It is the best news for the World at large, for years.

See also: Al Gore’s Blog

My grandmother told me they were dangerous. She was a doctor and she said that taking them create long term health issues. Her conventional practice eventually became homeopathy. She was extremely good at diagnosis and she had a following of dedicated patients.

She was warning me that antibiotics could cause eventual breakdown in immunity, and it appears she was right. Antibiotics are life saving. But when used for things that the body is able to cure, they quite often also kill the bacteria that protect us. Our bodies are not “clean” – we are highly efficient factories that break down food and provide cell building blocks. We manufacture cells based on the raw materials of what we eat. The chemical soup we maintain to digest consists of many life forms. We call these “good bacteria”. We can provide “good bacteria” by eating yogurt, but it takes time to establish a goodly number of them.

Now, people find that they can fall victim to diseases that are rare purely because our good bacteria have evolved to protect us from them.

If we lose our good bacteria by using antibiotics, our evolutionary lesson is being ignored. We risk a break down of our system of defenses.

Naturally, we would then evolve a new type of survival pattern, i.e specialist immunity to the disease we did not need to have. But Antibiotics may interrupt that evolution also.

Article: NY Times

Article in the Guardian provides a scale of harm from climate change.

And it is always interesting to read what George Monbiot has to offer and here he compares the UK Government’s readiness for a terribly unlikely smallpox outbreak with the planning for the passing of “peak oil” – which is a certainty but for which the UK government has no contingency planning in place.

In the end, if political landscape changing disaster strikes, the actions of existing governments can only really be what they have thought about in advance.

Governments may be “poor” at running business enterprises, but predicting the future appears outside their brief.

Hence they do not plan for the actual future, just one that their predecessors felt was important.

The Oil Companies continue to invest in oil exploration and recovery is barely news and their reticence to invest in new sources of energy is their own fate.

When hydrogen powered electric cars are the norm, they will be the ones paying more for a scarer resource. If they fail to invest in renewable clean energy, they will die. Oil companies do not matter so much if they do not invest in what we have to do.

Have a read of NY Times writer, Brooks article about morale philosophy.

Likening proactive morale behaviour (for example, charity) to aesthetics seems an attractive proposition. The human is being defined increasingly loudly by “science” as “non-spiritual”. The Brain controls our new age emotions, in a logical, physical, provable manner. Predictability is often the first sign of a new thinking, and here it is.

The idea that spirituality exists regardless of form, function or practical explanations has to be undermined due to evidence of evolutionary psychology?

The physics of huge objects may be the same as that of small objects but it has become a very hard thing to align with facts. Defining a moral compass for everyone is also a distinctly impossible task.

You walk past a drunk lying in the street, seems asleep. Do you do anything. What if you did – would society’s inbuilt moral compass do anything to reward you or are you more likely to be judged as some kind of idiot.

If a person makes 64 billion and then declares that it is all given to charity, do we say he is an admiration seeking fool? Certainly not.

Can we celebrate the geninue humanity evident every day in every way by people who hug each other. Not as some kind of native survival urge leading us by the nose. But as an act of the human will. That is something that evolutionary psychology possibly sees as successful behaviour being rewarded in the soup of evolution – but plainly is something more immediately under our control and that is the will. It has overriden much that nature evolved over time. Without a moral compass, we leave our survival up to chance. Which it is anyway. But the will makes us feel responsibility. We can feel in control of our selves with a sense of morality to help us feel bad when we hurt other people.

If we did not feel bad when we hurt other people, we are indeed a different kind of human than those I encounter every day. The need to be suspicious of each other is an instinct and it takes an act of will over get past that – and learn trust.

The hypothesis that moral judgment is solely based on our instinctive responses sounds more like Right Wing propaganda than science. Moral judgment is not solely based on imperatives. Certainly they play a part, but we are not only shopping for what is pleasing or we would hurt others in the process. From being careless. That is our real value. We can feel pain, so care about things that we should not. This creates new reasons to make moral decisions. The experience of pain in our lives makes us want to try and help those we beget not to make the same mistakes.

Whether we are effective or not, this is moral judgment from the will. Evolution is the brutal side of nature. Sudden cessations in the constant changing morass of life and accidents aside, it drives life into more successful forms. But some see that as the sole imperative and that allows their moral compass to the yes box on genetic engineering of foods.

It is the very disrespect for the natural process of selection that they ignore to the peril of ecology. There is a morale philosophy. It does not even require a God. It just requires awareness that we do what we want.

Our will is the mutation that made humans so successful and intelligent. Altruism, patriotism and dependence are things that develop and run like the tides. The idea that once they have occurred to you they are in any way fixed, that idea is corrupt.

We are what we think we are. That is the moral fibre underlying civilisation.

“Sustainable Development” used to mean the kind of financial growth that Bernie Madoff practiced. In a childs game of impressing people with graphs of his snake oil financial empire he gloated in his now repossessed houses and yachts about his ability to make capitalism work for him personally in very special ways.

Sustainable development eventually became, in the 1970s a mantra for civilizing the world. A hundred years ago this civilizing allowed the demise of colonialism. The fruits of which resulted in an extended upper class that ruled things from the ‘ouse of Lords or perhaps it was the cricket umpires, after all.

The inanity of passing along with wealth political power into dynastic arrangements have historically proven to be one way of doing things. We took thousands of years to realize that instead of being ruled by an inbred clan of monarchs we could choose our finest and give them seats in a decision making body that matched our courts in finding the truth, fairly and for all. Celebrating the monarchy is one way of providing civilian purpose in a God-less world.

The Taleban have their inane rules to govern human desire but in doing this they make important the unimportant. The trails of hair that grow from a man’s chin are not going to feed families or erect great monuments that inspire. The Taleban will always appear stupid to the rest of the world for demolishing history. Their cultural rules and habits are not really our business, and in the same breath, they must allow for the presence of other cultural springs in their community, or be damned. Mainly by logic.

In the same way, the communique to rescue the world from financial crisis through the World Bank and IMF aims to prevent years of decline by watering down the entire system, but there is a danger the old traditions will start to occur in a new “environment”. With regulation, the worst atrocities can be avoided.

It will work. Sort of. George Monbiot writes in the Guardian that it ignores the environment. He does have a point as the ice caps inexorably melt. It is like we are more concerned about saving the silverware than preventing the boat from sinking. At least we are worried about the silverware, but do not seem to mind that we through our babies into the surging seas to do so.

The alternative, letting the bankruptcies change our world into a right wing desert of survival of the very fittest or a generational decline, just seems like torture. Why go through the massive degree of pain, when it can simply not occur. There is a left wing cabal at work – as China’s influence rises – the West has gone socialist. President Hu has asked what the OECD is, although China is about to become a member – it is China who is defending their tax havens while the Western governments are hell bent on shutting them down.

Liberty and Equality for all to be greedy – is what Monbiot is afraid will come of all this. He is partially right. But the long term is the only way to measure the effects of Globalisation. Incorporation of Green transformational goals into global change and development is the way forward.

Globalisation is seem as a terrible thing by the protesters at the G20. They see it as exploitation. Unfairness. Their tune can now be “environmental” but is it actually just anti-progress. Anti-wealth?

It does not really matter what extremes of political opinion are provided that humanity takes stock of itself and reduces our numbers in the long term (no, not by genocide or economic force), by modernization of our morale codes.

It is not acceptable to destroy the future. It is unacceptable to hide profits from common taxation. The war against tax havens and avoidance will prevent dynasties erupting from wealth hidden from this bubble – dynastic insanity such as that of Osama Bin Laden is the result of too much money in too few hands.

‘There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.
‘Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth’s “limits of sustainability”.’

BBC article