When the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire as the Iraqis left, the prediction was that it would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got.
In the 1990's, they were predicting a global financial meltdown due to y2k and people were prepping for it -- putting away food stocks, etc. That got quietly solved and no one wakes up every day going "THANK GOD THEY SOLVED THAT AND WE AREN"T LIVING IN THE POST Y2K APOCALYPSE!!!!"
I think we can solve this. I also think if we do solve it, people will act like the fears we are expressing now about it were overblown. People are terrible about being unable to count the disasters that did not happen. When things go well, we seem to think that is "normal" even though it really is not.
I am aware we may not solve it and the world may, in fact, go to hell the way everyone is predicting. But may not and cannot are different things. But, you know, we are all dust in the wind anyway. In another million years, none of this really matters.
My experience is that if you have something positive to say, people pretty much ignore you. I am still trying to figure out how to get traction for being able to talk about things that actually work in various problem spaces. People mostly do not want to hear it. They are far more interested in being all emo about the state of the world while carrying on with their lifestyle as usual for the most part.
I fixed my fair share of Y2K bugs in COBOL in 1998-1999. I agree with you. I know from the work I did then that there would have been some pretty serious, life-disrupting issues had there not been the colossal effort to fix it all (payroll jobs in fact did fail to run, as did financial reports, report cards, etc.).
I'm generally an optimist. I think there will be fairly widespread support for environmental engineering in our state to protect and repair our natural areas. (There already is a lot of that.)
But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.
But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.
I know that you are aware that I am homeless in California and have been for about 4.5 years. Every place I camp with my two sons, we urinate on the local bushes and trees to intentionally try to grow better cover for our campsite.
Where we currently are, we are camped behind what we thought was a dead tree. Large parts of it are covered in lichen. With being peed on for months, it grew a whole new section and developed berries. Birds began nesting in it. Nearby, what was previously essentially a dead zone is alive with insects and smaller animals.
The large bird that routinely perches above us has stopped screeching constantly -- a territorial behavior intended to drive off competitors for its food -- and we recently witnessed multiple birds of the same species gather nearby in a copse of trees. We think these are all golden eagles and we think they may have paired off to mate, though we aren't sure. It was somewhere between 8 and 11 birds that we could count and it may have been more.
I am homeless and live without a car (and gave up my car a few years before I walked away from my corporate job) and everywhere I pee, the flora and fauna flourish.
My "boots" are probably on the ground a lot more than yours, and to me it looks like it isn't that hard at all to make a positive difference in this situation. Though I have no idea how to start a "please walk more and please pee on a tree" campaign. Nonetheless, everywhere I go, people begin walking more and the local environment visibly improves -- a thing I have written about some: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...
I also have a deadly medical condition that is incurable and I am getting well when doctors claim that cannot be done. So I spent over a year at death's door and have spent a lot of years coming back from that. Thus, what we are doing to our environment looks solvable to me. I have done harder things.
But I am a homeless woman that everyone dismisses as insane because, obviously, only men in white lab coats can figure out how to help deathly ill people (for scads of money, of course) not former homemakers who are dirt poor because of a) being a woman that no one will listen to and b) having an expensive debilitating medical condition.
So, to my eyes, the big challenge is figuring out how to get an audience and how to present the information in a manner that will be palatable. If I can get off the street in the near future, I imagine I will work on that -- because we all need a hobby, I guess.
Well, there are some important differences between berry-bearing trees and the larger conifers, as well as all the various different microbiomes we have around the sierra. There's chaparral, scrub, high desert, foothill, subalpine and alpine environments, and they all have different needs and react differently to environmental changes. The high desert stuff, for instance, is really good at coming back from extended dry hot periods. Chaparral, scrub, and foothill aren't likely to change drastically, I don't think (in my totally uneducated opinion).
I'm more worried about the subalpine forest, the kind of stuff you see in the western Sierra from about 3,000 to 8,000 foot elevation. That's where we're seeing the worst of the tree die-off and wildfire disasters, and it's an ecology that takes much longer to return to what we think of as "healthy". The watersheds in these areas is also a major, very important part of the state's water supply, so impacts on these ecosystems have the potential to affect communities all over the state.
I'll make an assumption here that is, the oil fires if extinguished would leave something of immense value behind for resources companies to extract? That might be why effort and money was spent on extinguishing them. Why else would the Iraqis set them on fire, so people couldn't have them?
I'm not saying the engineers did a bad job, at all. It sounds like they worked miracles, but the issue with climate change is that the global money distributers and politicians want engineers to stop people from solving this problem. they just don't seem to care. There is no consent given for the right people to fix it.
Solving the problem in this case using common sense and reasoning, just means you're stepping on self-interested, highly deluded people's toes.
The real problem that needs solving first is the baking and political systems. People problems.
Common folk seem to want the issue resolved but have taken the failed stance of being a single entity who can't make a difference, without realising they're everything, the way they vote, travel, eat and consume all are part of the solution. We're all feeding the machine.
The consumption levels in the world are just out of control, I wonder how we have gotten this far. Even today in Rome I was looking at the millions of cigarette butts on he ground, a storm was forecast and I just felt sorry for Mother Earth, she needs rain to provide for us but when it happens, she is rewarded with toxic rubbish ending up in the oceans. She has provided us with everything and that's what we give back.
By the way I think you're right, if the problem was one of pure engineering, science and reasoning, we wouldn't have a problem. In that sense there is a positive side.
Yeah, they lit oil wells -- petroleum. And after the fires were extingushed, sometimes with large amounts of water, the water- and ash-covered desert bloomed like no one could remember in at least twenty years. This did not make the news. It was a footnote in stories with more drama and human interest.
The rich people failing to do something effective about this are fools. They are like the hyenas in "The Lion King" destroying the landscape -- the very source of their wealth. Without abundance, wealth dies.
I blog about varying topics -- homelessness, managing health issues without drugs, etc -- topics to empower ordinary people to solve their problems with minimal resources. There isn't much money it and a lot of people are openly dismissive of me. But not doing it scares me more. No one seems to be effectively addressing these problems.
I would be thrilled if you would check out some of my writing and Tweet it or otherwise share it.
The two examples you gave have a significant mitigating factor -
They are not massively cross disciplinary.
Oil wells were a specific problem solved by finding a solution possible with current tech.
Same for y2k. The fear got us on the other side, and the damage was far less than expected.
But.
We have been harping on climate change forever, there are vested interests who have found it useful to cloud civic thought with FUD, there is a political movement which has evolved (implying that even the base debate was fraught), to openly mock science and research.
Working on climate change is further hampered by it being vague and imprecise, dependent on our improvements in science and tech.
It also severely curtails the options of growing economies who see it as the west robbing them blind, living like kinds and then denying them the same quality of life.
Global warming requires people around the world to feel and believe they are in the same boat, which is worth saving, with other people they share a lot in common with.
Since that is a pipe dream no one is working on, broad political solutions are out, leaving weird targets and alliances to move forward. Targets which most people don't want to meet because it means engines cost more, products become expensive, and margins thin.
So, in my mind, your objections are irrelevant. There are plenty of Americans -- the so-called 99% that rich assholes would like to treat like sheeple and give Basic Income -- whose lives are in the toilet. I in no way need to convince them they are saving the world. I just need to get solutions into their hands that make their lives work better. The solutions that work are lightweight and low cost. If you can arrange your life so that you do not need a car, your quality of life can go up dramatically even if you are some "loser" failing at having a spiffy well-paid career. And then you are doing less harm to the environment even though saving the environment was not on your agenda.
I am a big believer in enlightened self interest. Our current system does not work for most people. We have a shrinking/shrunken middle class and most people's lives are just not working, even if they are doing everything the system tells them is the right thing to do.
The gig economy is growing and Millenials are insisting more on walkable neighborhoods and many of them live without a car. To the best of my ability, I try to encourage people who are failing to get a job to stop looking for a job and embrace the gig economy.
This is not a movement I need to start. It is already happening because no car and flexible work just works better for some people. But I can toss in my two cents worth and hopefully make the transition process a little easier for some folks, basically.
> When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got.
The problem here is that the parallel to the burning oil wells are already on fire, have been on fire for years, and the collective response hasn't been one determined to address this, it's been a fight between people who are saying there's a problem and people who are saying the idea of burning oil wells is a conspiracy (and even if it's not, we didn't light the oil wells on fire).
When the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire as the Iraqis left, the prediction was that it would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got.
In the 1990's, they were predicting a global financial meltdown due to y2k and people were prepping for it -- putting away food stocks, etc. That got quietly solved and no one wakes up every day going "THANK GOD THEY SOLVED THAT AND WE AREN"T LIVING IN THE POST Y2K APOCALYPSE!!!!"
I think we can solve this. I also think if we do solve it, people will act like the fears we are expressing now about it were overblown. People are terrible about being unable to count the disasters that did not happen. When things go well, we seem to think that is "normal" even though it really is not.
I am aware we may not solve it and the world may, in fact, go to hell the way everyone is predicting. But may not and cannot are different things. But, you know, we are all dust in the wind anyway. In another million years, none of this really matters.
My experience is that if you have something positive to say, people pretty much ignore you. I am still trying to figure out how to get traction for being able to talk about things that actually work in various problem spaces. People mostly do not want to hear it. They are far more interested in being all emo about the state of the world while carrying on with their lifestyle as usual for the most part.