Nuclear Against Global Warming

A good debate between George Monbiot and an opponent of nuclear.
ThoughtStorms is a bit sparse on climate change issues (just found the ClimateChange page itself was empty!). Will try to rectify that.

Stone Spray

Nice! Architectural scale 3D printing with eco-material.

The Wrong Kind of Magic

The Arch-Druid on the Wrong Kind of Magic

The Physics of Collapse

Excellent systems model of how complex societies collapse.

Hat-tip : Jean-Luc Delatre

Templar of Earth

Say only

I understand and accept fully that the human race is harming the natural world by driving species to extinction, releasing long-lived pollutants, changing the climate and poisoning nature.

I understand and accept fully that the human race makes many suffer horribly and die in war, famine, injustice, poverty and oppression, and that we are failing to provide a good life for all of humanity.

I understand and fully accept that my own efforts appear unequal to the task of changing these facts.

I swear by the bones of the earth, the roots of the mountains to always treat those who understand and accept fully these Three Truths with dignity and respect, myself included.

Make a badge or banner, by any means, of this design.



You are now a templar of Earth. Display the symbol as you will.

Now this is awesome!

Solar sintering. (Desert, sand, sunlight, Fresnel lens, solar cells, 3D "printing")

Very interesting talk by Dmitry Orlov

From the funeral of Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva

Awesome robot marketing.

I'm reading some absolutely fascinating articles about neo-folk, apoliteic music and attempts to build a fascist, green, anarchist synthesis.

Very confusing and scary. Like Michael Barkun's "improvisational millennialism" without the flying saucers (yet).

Fits right in to conspiracy theories and netocracy though, doesn't it?

Further thought. Is hauntology a kind of left-wing apoliteic music? With the myths of a cosy, Reithian, paternal modernism replacing the the folk-tradition celebrated by the rightists?

Nice line from anon in Jay Rosen's comments for discussion of JAnthony's question to Julian Assange :

we'll see at COP16, international diplomacy - in the state it's in - is not going to help humanity transcend to where we need to be as an international community.

I hope it's not true. But I fear that it will be. There really is a question overhanging what good international diplomacy is doing at the moment.

Bad news from current climate negotiations. Nation states basically can't square their self-interest with any kind of global political deal at all.

So what next?

Ben Hyde:

I learned this rule from “Reading the Forested Landscape,” if you stand in the forest and all the trees are about the same size it tells you when the catastrophe happened. That works just as well for housing developments. If you take the rule seriously then one of your first questions is always: what were the catastrophes?

++ThoughtStorms

Talented Friend Watch #19 : Clemira and Vitor of the Serra Bonita nature reserve (where this photo was taken), will be participating in, and getting an award from, the National Geographic Fourth Annual Symposium this year.

Humming Birds
Originally uploaded by interstar

Oh, of course.

It doesn't matter how sane something is, you can always find someone to be against it.

George Monbiot :

Yesterday in the Guardian Peter Preston called for a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness. "We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince … We need to be taught to believe by a true believer." Would it work? No. Look at the hatred and derision the passionate and persuasive Al Gore attracts. The problem is not only that most climate scientists can speak no recognisable human language, but also the expectation that people are amenable to persuasion.

In 2008 the Washington Post summarised recent psychological research on misinformation. This shows that in some cases debunking a false story can increase the number of people who believe it. In one study, 34% of conservatives who were told about the Bush government's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were inclined to believe them. But among those who were shown that the government's claims were later comprehensively refuted by the Duelfer report, 64% ended up believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

:-(

Normblog worries that Monbiot goes "too far" in that :

That people are sometimes resistant to being persuaded of what is true (when it is indeed true) is readily observable. But a theory purporting to explain why they must be resistant to persuasion is something else. It risks opening on to suggestions of an alternative method of 'winning' them over. There is no democratically acceptable alternative method. Sometimes you can persuade people, other times not. Welcome to the real world.

But there's more to be said than that. Daily, science is going to turn out evidence of human decision making being irrational : affected by unconscious environmental cues, learned associations, chemical triggers, partisan feelings etc. Yet our belief in democracy is fundamentally, philosophically, committed to humans as rational and free decision makers. What should we do when this commitment becomes scientifically untenable?

Will this, itself, become a reason for politicians to reject science? To deny the results of psychological research in favour of an unjustifiable faith in human agency? Will someone come up with a philosophical compatibilism? (As in "don't worry, decisions are still free and rational even though we can now see their causes"? But how sustainable will this be as we also discover better ways to manipulate beliefs?)

We have always sought to persuade. Sometimes we succeed. And sometimes we don't. But what happens when it becomes clear that persuasive power is mere "engineering", available to the highest bidder?

Swift-boating the climate-scientists.

Very nice. Joel Spolsky and co. have done the logical thing and turned their awesome StackOverflow into a more general software-as-a-service offering. And started a new site for environmental tips :-)

Can't quite decide if this is a great idea or a horrible one.

There's something awefully spiritually ersatz about sub-contracting your organic gardening to someone else, to do in mass. OTOH, in reality, if it funnels more money and resources into organic horticulture, and creates more empoloyment for people who are actually good at it, why not?