Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

@eff the “yes and…” approach is readily ignored by sociopaths

Thing 1, thing 2,
and induced demand.

If you build thing 1 so that it enables more of thing 2 to happen, then it should not come as a surprise when more of thing 2 happens.

Now, if thing 2 *already* has a low* carbon and material footprint – like cycling – the induced demand is of low (not no) impact.

But if thing 2 is not low carbon, you’ve made cumulative overshoot *worse*

- - -

*relative to its alternatives

…a culture that understood climate science as existential would manage demand *first* while it explored potential technical fixes.

We’re exploring technical fixes while pouring petrol on the fire

@aral damn. Swift recovery to you

@onepict

…Tom is all about our context: the wide view we need to take in to understand where we are – assuming we *want* understanding, as opposed to living in delusion.

He’s a physicist. He begins with our cosmology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjNAzwU3lKg

And an analogy with a chickpea and a human hair…

…Here’s how Tom frames the series:

“The name ‘Metastatic Modernity’ conjures a grave cancer diagnosis—terminal, in fact. This intentional association captures my sense that modernity is fated to self-terminate, like any cancer.

But…

because modernity is just one of many possible ways for humans to arrange their lives, a failure of modernity does *not* translate to a failure of humanity.”

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/07/metastatic-modernity-launch/

#climateDiary

TIL that in July, Tom Murphy began posting a series of 18 videos, with the 18th posted about a month ago.

The series is called Metastatic Modernity and the videos range in length from 6 to 15 minutes long.

The entire series is presented and embedded on his blog page: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/metastatic-modernity-video-series/

Being familiar with Tom’s work and having heard him talk about why he’s done it, I strongly recommend listening to it in sequence as I am now doing. Don’t be tempted to jump ahead!

…If you’ve watched Tom on cosmology (link above), you’ll understand that we are orbiting an unexceptional star in an unexceptional galaxy in an unexceptional region of the known universe, which may perhaps also be an unexceptional universe.

The universe is *not about us*.

Tom’s next video walks us through early life on Earth. He places major landmarks in the evolution of life on a 12-hour clock and shows humans arriving just before midnight.

And the important takeaway is…

…and now, a bit more challenging…

Take a second chickpea, leave your first chickpea and the human hair and the grain of sand where you placed them, get on a train, travel 300km – e.g. London to Sheffield – and now your second chickpea is proportionately as far away from your first chickpea as the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

But remember, there’s mostly nothing in between

…Take a chickpea and a human hair, the latter on a piece of tape for ease of holding onto.

Hold the tape about a metre away from the chickpea and you have a rough scale model of:

– the diameter of the sun (the ~1cm chickpea)
- the proportional diameter of the Earth (the thickness of the hair)
- the distance between the two.

In the same model, Jupiter is a ~1mm grain of sand 5 metres away from the chickpea.

And the outer solar system are microscopic particles of dust a football field away…

…“We’ve basically forgotten who we are and where we come from. We pay no heed to our most ancient ancestors, without whom we are *nothing*”, and Tom invites us to have awe, respect, humility and admiration for the genius of what life figured out in the first 3.5 billion years.

By way of example, he points out that we share about a third of our genome with that of amoeba, explaining that that’s because of all that they figured out, without which we don’t exist…

The biosphere is really big.
But finite.

It’s a multi-billion year inheritance – https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113266291886504412 – that’s 10,000 times longer in the making than Homo Sapiens has been around. And about 40,000,000 times longer than each of us, give or take.

Turns out that 1 billion or so people swindled into squandering it can spend enough of it in about 300 years that it could take longer than our species has ever existed to build it back up again.

Homo Retusus
#ClimateDiary

We’re probably in this weird space for the rest of our lives where what’s good for the economy is bad for the biosphere and therefore, slightly longer term, bad for the economy and people.

Conversely, what’s bad for the economy is often bad for people but usually less bad for the biosphere and therefore paradoxically less bad for people too.

And as we fk up the biosphere more and more the lag between short and longer term outcomes will converge

https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/113548662240865649

…Following this post is a lightly edited transcription of what Indy Johar said over the course of 9 minutes in an interview with Sarah Wilson at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/indy-johar-the-starkest-collapse-prognosis-ive-heard/id1548626341?i=1000677521024

Here’s a one sentence summary:

“We’ve all collectively been living a lie where all the goods that we’ve got are effectively creating greater harm than the value.”

…but we’re so indoctrinated with bullshit economics that has been entirely blind to this predicament, that perhaps the only way we can shake that off is to have the polycrisis rub our faces in shit.

But, let’s at least try to be better in the way that Indy Johar has clarified…

@rgarner prescience is a thankless gift

@aral

This might be the stupidest sentence I read today, but it’s not 9am yet.

It’s by Keir Starmer:

“Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which include news media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/28/keir-starmer-journalism-lifeblood-british-democracy-labour

As Valencia prepares itself for more rain https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113417885855937114

the rest of us would do well to understand that we are *daily* pushing ourselves outside what Johan Rockström calls “the corridor of life”, especially the geological ribbon of the Holocene in which human civilisation has been possible.

The graphic shows the 14°C average that climate scientists use as the ‘zero’ baseline of the last 3 million years. The Holocene has been within +/- 0.5°C of that.

Until now, when we are +1.45°C

@aral I do that consciously. It’s become a habit. I’m not sure why. It makes me feel like I said ‘fuck’ without actually saying it

Got some offshore capital stuffed in a *British* tax haven to invest, but only on terms that fk over UK people some more?

Get Rubber Stamp Boy to give it the green light.

Got a deranged right wing ethnic cleanser that needs carte blanche to bomb 5 other countries in the last year and counting?

Get Rubber Stamp Boy to parrot whatever armourer Uncle Sam says