ONWARDS AND UPWARDS?

Faithful readers know of my fascination with CHANGE and my relatively newfound interest in global warming. The two came together yesterday with my discovery of a new book “Forgiving Humanity – how the most innovative species became the most dangerous” by Peter Russell (2023) who has gone so far as to give us a video discussion between himself and his AI clone (!!) about the book. Because its so new, I'm not yet able to download it (which I can do for more than half the books which interest me). 

Instead I've put a link in the title which accesses an article which appears as a 

chapter in the book which is one of the best analyses of CHANGE I've ever 

come across – so good that I've just added it to the latest version of my (short)

 Annotated Bibliography of Change which offers notes on some 100 books on the 

subject. It's based on the concept of exponential change/growth which the 

“Blindspot” article explains 

Although we are all well aware of the accelerating pace of change in our own lives, we find it difficult to think in exponential terms. You may have heard the story of the king who was asked for one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the second, four on the third, doubling each time till the 64th square would have how many grains? A mind-boggling 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, about 45 trillion tons, a heap as high as Mount Everest—far more than most people intuitively expect

If the whole of Earth's history were collapsed into one year, then human beings appeared in the last fifteen minutes, civilization thirty seconds ago, and the Information Revolution in the last half second.

A crisis of acceleration

The crisis we are facing is, in essence, a crisis of acceleration. Clearly the human population explosion is the result of exponential-like growth. Thankfully, it is beginning to tail off, nevertheless the implications for food, water, housing, geo-politics, and other issues are major and growing. Oil reserves are running out because we are now consuming it a million times faster than it was created. Similarly with many other resources whose supply is becoming critical—platinum, copper, zinc, nickel, and phosphorus, all of which are crucial for contemporary technology—will have run out, or be very limited, within a few decades. Yet our demand for them continues to grow, especially with the rapidly growing needs of developing countries. On the other side of the equation, rapid growth in industrialization has led to an accelerating growth in the release of pollutants into the air, soil and sea. And they are being released thousands, or in some cases millions, of times faster than the planet can break them down and absorb them. Climate change, for instance stems from our accelerating consumption of fossil fuels and the accompanying increased emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Normally the CO2 is absorbed by plants and the oceans, but we are now producing it hundreds of times faster than the these systems can handle.

We known about all this for some 40 years - ”Limits to Growth” of course came in 1972 but people needed some time to get their head around the message of that book but the definitive warning was contained in Overshoot – the ecological basis of revolutionary change by William Catton in 1982 which cropped up in this useful recent video discussion

UPDATE; Still on global warming, this is an interesting discussion on the excellent site "Plant Critical" which interviews thinkers about the issue