Another rant.

Thanks to the reader who misunderstood my comments about the Environment.  I rather take it as given that our species needs to stop pumping Carbon Dioxide and other ‘green house gasses’ into the atmosphere.  There is no question that surface of our little planet is heating up, and that we should not keep radically changing our atmosphere.  What I read as a knee-jerk reaction to someone who is not holding the ‘party line’ is understandable considering the extreme polarisation on this issue, and the way that calm and rational analysis and behaviour modification is replaced by a simplistic, single-issue focus, that is accepted as an act of faith by everyone on ‘our’ side of the issue.  

New Whig is amused that anyone would suggest we are anything less than enthusiastic about a shift in Energy Production to Renewables.  However, we do not go along with people who demand that the only way we are permitted to think about the situation is to envisage a world with zero emissions, and that we must devote all our thoughts and energy towards that goal.  This narrow focus means that all other considerations are ignored, including living in the actual world as it exists now because only the pure ideal can be contemplated.

We cannot help drawing an analogy with the silly, ideological calls for Australia to become a Socialist Republic, instead of remaining a Democratic Monarchy.  For the sake of the single issue of ending one family’s hereditary role, all other considerations are ignored, even though there is no flow-on effect that prevents our otherwise egalitarian principle of equal opportunity for all, despite any accident of birth, and also because in this single, unique case of the one person at the very pinnacle of the International Social Hierarchy and the custodian of the Reserve Powers, it is because they inherit the job that puts them above all political and social influence, and hence the perfect template for local Heads of State.  It is not the powers the Monarch exercises, but those that are kept from all potential tyrants who think they have achieved total control till they are overwhelmed by hubris. 

The point I was trying to make was that there is more to Global Warming that rabid opposition.  The world IS warming, so we need to accept that, even if we stop it happening faster, or even stop it happening at all. The amount of warming already cannot be reversed.  We need to mitigate against the worst of the consequences and recognise any benefits, for indeed there are benefits.  Plants prefer the higher Carbon Dioxide levels which is good news for Agriculture that is working out how to feed a growing world demand for food.  While the surface of our planet is warming, the planet as a whole is slowly cooling, so keeping the surface warm could be a good, long-term project.

Most people do not understand that the Global Warming does not simply mean higher temperatures.  The extra ‘warmth’ is taken up as various forms of Energy within the Weather Systems.  Energy goes into more and more intense Tornados and Cyclones, for example.  Energy also goes into the ‘water cycle’ meaning that there is more evaporation in some places, due to increased air movement as well as increased temperature, and consequently more precipitation in other places as rain and snow.  It is very possible that this warming also effects Ecosystem and also the behaviour of social species such as ourselves, and the apparently greater social strife in many places could be extra Energy entering our various Social Systems leading to more interpersonal and international aggression.

The biggest problem with Global Warming is that it has become a politicised issue, so that on one side people become irrationally short-sighted about it and on the other side there is total denial.  It is impossible to debate the issue and change opinions because it is an act of faith on both sides of the divide.  Of course the ‘left’ believe that the ‘Middle Class’ and their Free Enterprise Economics are doomed by History to very soon vanish from the world (rathe like the imminent appearance or return of the Messiah or Mahdi) and when the Revolution finally happens the Environment will be saved; but till that time, if ever, the problems of anthropogenic Global Warming will not be solved when approximately half the population deny the problem because that view is part of their raft of beliefs that they accept as acts of faith and are often inculcated at an early age, reinforced by social pressure, and never questioned or examined.  Until the Left gives up ownership of this issue, it will not be rectified.

The Rio Olympics included a magnificent argument about saving the planet that must have been seen and understood by a lot of otherwise sceptical people.  And yet, this is not the only issue where a small, extreme cabal or ultra-extremists hold the rest of the population hostage to their demands.  For example, the opposition to Marriage Equality and the recognition of Gender Diversity.  Another example are the so called Conservative Lawyers who are opposing Constitutional Recognition of Australia’s First Peoples and Treaties with them, on the ostensible purpose of Constitutional stability, but really a way of being racist without appearing to deny Aboriginal rights.

The recently publicised atrocities against young people in Northern Territory detention is another example of the rank hypocrisy that underpins to many powerful opinions. As long as we keep insisting that the main purpose of the Criminal Justice System is to impose punishment on behalf of the wronged, as a modern form of ‘an eye for an eye’, and stop seeing the miscreants as people who are not bad people, just people who have done bad things, and helping them, we will continue to have the atrocities that were actually know about for a year at least before the authorities claimed ignorance and shock.  The Criminal Justice System is based on ancient, out-dated morality.  We need to rehabilitate, not punish people. 

The Rio Olympics

The Rio Olympics opened to spectacular fashion.  How wonderful to see all the nations of the world marching together in harmony and equality.  The fashions of what the athletes were wearing was the most interesting, with some teams dressing women and men identically, while others had balanced versions of gender specific equality.  While some countries had women in scarves, other countries that might have done so make a point of having their men with head covering but the women bare-headed in a statement of secularity.  The most spectacular clothes were once again worn by the Africans with a great diversity of re-imagined tradition.  The opening pageant displaying a clash of cultures finally merging into the multi-racial society that is modern Brazil and also the 

World was a wonderful introduction to this Century, in a way previous Olympics have not been.  Then followed a stunning audio-visual exposition of Global Warming and its consequences for many coastal cities including Brazil itself.  The warning is clear: stop Green-House Gasses and prevent the sea-level rising.

In Australia, we had a commentary from well-known Sports experts, but the Closed Captions left a lot to be desired.  See attached photograph of the screen with an unusual transcription of the thanks to the volunteers.  Some of the later solecisms appeared wrongly at first and were then corrected.

Optimism.

There is a look of gloom and pessimism, but really, we should be optimistic.  Even things we think are impossible or very bad could turn out to be good things.  Take Global Warming; perhaps we are staving off the onset of the next Ice Age.  For the last half-a-billion years, the usual state has been for the glove of our Earth to be mostly iced over, with only a narrow band between the tropics that was temperate and habitable.  Every hundred-thousand years or so, the world would warm up, but only for ten thousand years or so, a fraction of the time since the last ‘inter-glacial’.  We are coming to the end of our warm period and the world is due to revert to its icy climate.  Our species has succeeded in developing methods to warm the planet and prevent the next Ice Age.

Roads everywhere are clogged by private vehicles.  The dream is for universal mass-transport, but everyone likes their own vehicle too much and derives too much identity from it for such transport to fade into history.  We are on the verge of the robot, driver-less car, and also at the start of the era when flying vehicles are more common that land-restricted ones.  Soon our roads will have flying cars above them.  It will be much safer than present roads, as they will be robot controlled and sense each other and avoid collisions.  Probably speed will increase with height, so people will not overtake others next to them, as on our present roads, but above them.  The extra dimension will provide a huge amount of safety.

It is a mystery to me why our trains and other vehicles do not incorporate aerofoils so that forward motion provides lift.  If nothing more, it means free of friction.  Why have magnetically hovering trains, when they could be suspended from wings that hold them above the rails as long as they are moving.  While I am at it, why don’t they have momentum breaking.  Flywheels that are co-axial with the wheels that have a break-like mechanism to transfer rotational energy, will eventually slow the vehicle and transfer the energy to the flywheel (which could be a dense liquid)  and the vehicle would stop.  Then the process is reversed to transfer the energy back to the vehicle.  It need not be wheels, either, the energy could be transferred to a jet rotor to provide the forward thrust to life the vehicle off its track so it would glide with the stored power.  I don’t know why this does not exist.  Are there Science Fiction stories that use this method of powering vehicles?

The Royal Commission into Juvenile Justice is doomed as long as we retain the idea that people must be punished to fulfill society expectations of revenge.  It is the primitive ‘eye for an eye’ type of justice that should by now have faded from human practices, but it has been institutionalised so that revenge is meted out by the State on behalf of the ‘victims’.  How often do we hear the cry for harsher penalties to ‘punish’ the wrong-doer?  The true ‘evil’ here is the lack of compassion for the ‘sinner’ not the self-righteous indignation of the ‘sinned against’.

As no one will ever read this Blog Entry, I can be safe in posting whatever outrageous ideas come into my head.  I used to regret that I won’t live far enough into this century to see my ideas of Universal Harmony come into fruition, but now I see it will be well into the millennium before such a ‘Synthesis of the Duality’ as I used to call it will ever start to happen.  This Century will end much as it began, after various groupings of human disputation.  My Utopian predictions are out by a factor of ten, at least: five hundred years, not fifty.  If I live another five years I shall see as much as if I lived for fifty more, or indeed five hundred more years.  

And yet, the optimism.