Category: climate change

The Un-statesman Like Hallway Bully

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have never before seen an American president behave in such an un-statesman like manner. My opinion of the USA has gone downhill. It might be argued that this does not matter because they have the power. A president who has lost his own battle with power is likely to be ever more punitive to people he sees as enemies, adversaries and ever more willing to listen to sycophants. He will not hold back his vengeance. He will listen only to those whose opinion he wants to hear.

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In the course of few short weeks, he has sided with Russia against Ukraine and to an extent NATO and Europe. He is paranoid that everyone is out to screw him. He sees his own twisted image in the mirror.

This is what he does will alliances and agreements signed by the prior law abiding heads of state. I am not sure of the constitutional vagaries. A deal with him is not worth the paper it is written on.

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So, we awake to a new reality.

Article 5

In 1949, the primary aim of the North Atlantic Treaty – NATO’s founding treaty – was to create a pact of mutual assistance to counter the risk that the Soviet Union would seek to extend its control of Eastern Europe to other parts of the continent.

Every participating country agreed that this form of solidarity was at the heart of the Treaty, effectively making Article 5 on collective defence a key component of the Alliance.

Article 5 provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.

Article 5

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.”

This corner stone, this foundation stone, has been called into question by the “stable genius”. I don’t know how many shares in Gazprom might result.

It is pretty clear that much of what is wrong with the world, as it currently stands, has some causal origination in the USA. Well, they now have the president they deserve and we all have to live with the knock on consequences.

This morning, I had the idea that maybe the Chinese should invade Taiwan. The US economy is way more dependent on the semiconductor chips made there than anyone else. TSMC makes most of these. USA would then be fighting a country of similar size and power rather than a small state of ~ 30 million {now} people who are getting the shit kicked out of them by a powerful aggressor. But no, the USA wants to put its boot in too!! Take that you bastard Ukrainians!!

Thanks to one man’s gargantuan but fragile ego.

Trump may have the cards but Taiwan has the chips.

Bullies rarely pick on people their own size.

I am far from optimistic as to where things go from here. Viewed from one angle if there has to be a mass dis-incarnation in order to save the planet, then maybe that is what is needed. Nuclear winter could solve anthropogenic climate heating.

Isolationist, elitist, we know best thinking, can often preclude a massive downfall. It takes a while.

With “friends” like Trump who needs enemies?

I am struggling to believe what my own eyes have seen and the question is, “is this simply the starter for ten” so to speak. How much further down the shitter will humanity be dragged in this massive psycho-drama?

I have been told that this is my very last incarnation here…

The Problem of Both And

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

This “problem” can be found on all sides. It stems from the desire to have both one thing and another. It has a root in idealism but also in an unwillingness to choose or decide.

At the moment relatively wealthy humanity is accustomed to having multiple up to date electronic devices, frequent new cars, foreign holidays involving air travel and conspicuous consumption which is sometimes diarised for show in social media. Yet in the back of the mind there is the spectre of anthropogenic climate change. There is a weak desire to slow this down. People want both their current way of life and to limit the ravages of global warming. Most approaches to planetary heating back “solutions” which do not significantly impinge on current lifestyle.

This is an obvious fallacy.

But it is one that is not addressed because in affect it is taboo and politically very unpopular. In wanting both and decisive action is delayed and put off. The advocates of striving to limit climate change themselves travel by air. People cross their fingers and hope we can limit climate change without changing our behaviours. The fairy godmother of technology will wave its magical AI wand and ta-da we have a solution for global warming. In the meantime, business green washes to keep the greenbacks rolling.

There is an awful lot of kidding and people are willing to be kidded because their conscience is assuaged by flashy on tone public relations. Look the oil manufacturers and producers are transitioning to green alternatives…😉

“Phew, I can have my holiday in the Maldives after all…”

Elsewhere I have predicted that the impact of climate change needs to get catastrophic before humanity wakes up. By which time it will be very late, perhaps too late.

We saw it coming, we did fuck all.

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“Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospect; it has to be shattered before ascertained.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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Humanity has a monkey with its hand in the cookie jar mentality. Inside the cookie jar are lovely cookies. We put our hand in it to extract the cookie but we cannot pull it out with the whole cookie in hand. The villagers are coming with sticks. We are so tempted by the cookies; we do not want a beating by the villagers. What to do?

This is a catch 22 which stems from greed and desire. In the absence of desire, there is no dilemma. Drop the cookie and get the hell out of Dodge. But it is a lovely cookie with banana and chocolate chips….

I cannot have both the cookie and avoid a beating.

No desire, no greed, no problem. Let go. Do a runner.

Most catch 22s stem from wanting something, some desire or some ambition. They are based on preferred outcome. In the absence of these the dilemma dissolves; it is a figment of mind and emotion.

Humans have a face in a jar problem. Inside the jar is their face, their social self-image, which they are clinging on to. They may want to resolve a relationship or ameliorate it but they are burdened by their face which they hold clenched in their fist. They are unable to shake hands whilst their fist is clenched tight around the mask of face. So, for most of their lives they walk around with their face clenched bare knuckled in fist and never know the freedom of an open palm free of social encumbrance. They may want to save both their face and a relationship. However, this is impossible, humans are stubborn and before long, it is too late.

You can see this human folly all around you.

Life is not a quantum superstition state. Sooner or later the both-and must be measured and collapse into either-or. The coherence of the both-and is finite. Decision is not something people are fond of.

Sometimes nature, the universe, or a planet will make the decision for us…

Wanting both-and is greedy.

LIFE is way bigger than petty human want and desire…

I’m a Lumberjack and a Fire Salamander.

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

We have been under the influence of Tempête Eowyn for the last 18 hours or so. This means we keep an eye on the vide sanitaire. Because with persistent rainfall it can start to flood. The pump is in and the mains supply extension in the veranda. We have a lull before the next high winds and heavy rainfall due Sunday.

Yesterday afternoon while checking the vide, the space under the house, we saw a Fire Salamander.

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{not my image}

We had one previously outside which drowned in the water bowls for the stray cats.

This one had come out to play in the darkness of the vide because of the rain. We closed the door and let it go about its business.

“Despite its wide distribution and abundance, it is classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List due to its susceptibility to infection by the introduced fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, which has caused severe declines in fire salamanders in parts of its range.”

We are quite lucky here we get slow worms, grass snakes and couleuvre vipérine (Natrix maura). To see them swimming in the pond is quite a treat.

During the night the winds were high and doing the rounds this morning I noted one of the poplars has cracked at its base and is being held up by the marsh willow in the “swamp”.

The coypu have not disturbed the witness sticks overnight.

The weather radar suggests a slight break in the rain around mid-day. The poplar needs moved before the next wind. The plan is to attach a rope to the base of the poplar and pull. It should fall step wise. I’ll don my lumberjack shirt and get the chainsaw ready. It looks like it will make good firewood. The difficulty being that thanks to Ciaran all the covered wood store is full.

Maybe I’ll store it in the relative dry under the pines…

Insuring Against Apocalypse

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“Climate-related extreme weather events will become both more frequent and more violent, resulting in ever-scarcer insurance and ever-higher premiums,” a US Senate report on the insurance market warned just last month. “Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem. It is a looming economic threat.”

The big insurers – State Farm, AllState and Farmers, among others – insist they have no choice but to raise rates because of factors including sky-high construction costs and what they call “catastrophe exposure”, especially in California where they face regulatory hurdles unmatched in other states. The industry points to State Farm, whose credit rating was downgraded last year, as a casualty of these pressures.

The Guardian

“Driven by a desire to maximize profits, property casualty insurance companies … have engaged in a troubling trend of dropping California homeowners’ insurance policies like flies,” said the complaint, filed in San Diego County Superior Court. A spokesperson for Liberty Mutual declined to comment on the litigation.

The inability to get coverage is reflected in the number of policies picked up by California’s FAIR Plan, which as of September had about 452,000 policies, up from a little over 203,000 four years ago. FAIR Plan’s website says its claims exposure is nearly $6 billion in Pacific Palisades alone.

“The situation has been a train wreck coming down the track for a while,” said Rick Dinger, president of Crescenta Valley Insurance, an independent brokerage in Glendale.

Los Angeles Times

“There’s been a mass exodus of big players from the market in these parts of California,” Ben Keys, a real estate and finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told a conference Friday.

“We’ve seen enormous non-renewals recently,” he said.

On Wednesday, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, announced that homeowners in areas affected by and around the fires would be protected for a year against non-renewal and cancellation of coverage.

This type of measure protected more than a million contracts in 2024.

In 1968, the coastal state set up a public insurance scheme, called FAIR, for homeowners who could no longer find a private insurer.

This “band-aid” was supposed to be temporary while people moved from one insurance policy to another, but has now expanded well beyond its intended use, lamented Keys, pointing out that its exposure had risen from $50 billion in 2018 to more than $450 billion today.

To bring companies back on board, Commissioner Lara has also initiated a reform process authorizing them to increase premiums on condition that they do not apply any geographical exclusions.

France 24

My hypothesis is that climate change will render larger and larger areas non-insurable or exorbitant. As a rule of thumb people lending mortgages require insurance for the collateral upon which the mortgage is based.  

The press I have read today suggest that many US insurers are being more argumentative already about settling claims in full. Premiums have sky rocketed and others are not offering renewals, they are dropping customers with force majeure risk.

I wonder what percentage of LA home owners have gone bareback with no insurance.

Who is going to fund the rebuild?

Perhaps many will have to sell a still smoking plot of land.

Trendy neighbourhoods may lose their trendy status if houses burn down.

Tempest Ciaran caused us around 3500 euros of damage here. The insurers were helpful and reimbursed 80%. But they made a slightly threatening sound that we should make sure that all our trees are safe and tended by experts. That this was our responsibility. We have ~100 trees. The French government allowed the insurers, by decree, to increase their premiums.

The insurance policies will get “funky” said one article. Implying complex wording and perhaps multiple small print exclusions.

There is a non-virtuous cycle, no insurance, no mortgage, no house build.

Places with the street names like Water Lane hint at flooding.

We had to, as a prophylactic, pump out our vide sanitaire, a kind of basement over the weekend. When we went to the local hardware store, the shelf which once contained water pumps was de-stocked.

Water Wind and Fire, water and wind, wind and fire.

I’ll predict that during 2025 there will be even more quasi-apocalyptic events, which will have an ever increasing impact on economies. People will be unhappy that although they live in a risk prone region, the risk materialises.

They will be upset that increasingly they cannot insure against apocalypse.

Preparing for the Annual Toad Migration

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Earlier this year, in February, I put up a three strand electric fence to try to deter the Coypu coming onto the property and eating all the lotuses on the pond. It worked.

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This year we had a magnificent display of flowers and no Coypu turds. The availability of fresh shoots in the wild has dropped as we come further into winter. They managed to find a way in by the bridge in October. Here are four of the blighters I blocked this off with wire mesh at end of October.

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The family of Coypu coming up from the river…

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So, we have had no Coypu sign until about a week ago. I found some chewed iris shoots. I set up the trail camera and got one returning to the river hesitantly through the electric fence. I did not see it get shocked but I heard the audible click as 0.25 J earthed at kilo Volts through the Coypu. The animal seemed to be coming from another direction. I set up witness sticks on the river bank and by a hole in the fence. The little bugger was coming through the fence. I blocked it last night with one big and one medium sized pine fire logs. He shifted the smaller log last night. I saw some Coypu sign, damaged iris shoots. There are two fairly hefty fire logs there now.

Yesterday evening when checking the fence I came upon an electrocuted toad. For an animal ~50-100g I guess 0.25 J is too much. I am surprised that it was on the move. We have had an inordinately mild time of it. In general, we get up to 60 toads and frogs at any one time in the pond for mating. I wondered if the annual migration is beginning early.

Today I have put a few more posts up near the old ingress route for the Coypu and lifted the bottom wire so that at no point is it less than 6cm from the ground. That should be enough room for the amphibians but not enough for the Coypu…

We shall soon see if the toad migration proper is beginning early.

Another harbinger of anthropogenic planetary warming?

2024 Numerology – Written December 2023

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In December each year I take a look at the numerology of the upcoming year.

2024 is 2 + 2 + 0 + 4 = 8.

24 is 2 + 4 = 6

8 is the jewel of awareness, harmony through conflict.

The feeling I get is that conflict will be more evident than harmony. Any harmony will arrive towards the end of the year. 8 may manifest as minus 8 lack of harmony.

4 is the jewel stability which in negative manifestation is inertia.

6 is the jewel choosing between the old and the new, between the apron strings and a new wife. Lack of decision or choice means stuck in the old, not enough courage to choose the new. 24 is the dark jewel fear. Fear can dominate.

I note that all three jewels 4, 6 and 8 pertain to the direction North according to the rule of the four pronged nagal. They are about earth and matter and action. They can also if negative manifest as lack of action.

There are two 2s. 2 is the jewel humility and understanding usually expressed as need for and can sometimes hint at destiny.

The initial feeling is that we will not get the positive manifestations.

There are two brutal conflicts in the current attention of the West, though there are others such as Sudan. One in Gaza has high level civilian death, the Ukraine seems from what we hear, stuck.

The world is caught in inertia, it does not seem to be going anywhere. Which ever geniuses thought that putting a CEO of an Arab oil company in charge of COP28 have a hand in this. The climate agenda is stuttering.

There is material uncertainty because of the dire state of US politics. It is possible that we have a groundhog Trump presidency. It is bizarre that a nation of such inventiveness is so polarised and so very stuck in its ways. That they are even considering choosing between two very old men looks stupid everywhere other than America.  

I see conflict, inertia and being stuck in the old ways as the smorgasbord for next year.

The conflict in the middle east may spread. People shocked at the collusion of the USA and the UK may get so fed up that they take matters into their own hands.

I don’t see much evidence of humility. I see dogmatic adherence to polarised camp forming. I see in the UK government drifting further from populace. It is possible that we have a Labour or in others words a Tory wet government in the UK.

I am not getting a good feeling about next year.

2024 the minus eight year. Written 20th Jan 2024

It is fairly clear to see that war is environmentally hostile. There is a real likelihood that a climate change denier will become president of the USA again. Johnson is brown nosing. He is after something, perhaps.

The abuse of power in Gaza is dragging on. Way back when the initial invasion started, I predicted that up to 1% of the population would be killed. That figure has been surpassed and with 3% of the population injured. 85% of the population have been displaced. It is a brutal vengeance. The myth of a two state solution looks very unlikely.

And the Western governments sit on their hands and watch.

All those deadly munitions take energy to make and release greenhouse gas on detonation. There is an ammunition alliance trying to get artillery shells to Ukraine. Earlier on in the blog I predicted that Russian industry would be directed towards munition fabrication. This a lesson learned by Stalin when the comrades swung into tank production for war against the Nazis. He also diverted his armour, which was facing Japan, towards the West. Production capacity is always a key factor in war.

Two blitzkrieg style invasions have ground on into protracted war and death.

In the UK the navy is facing recruitment problems.

It is pretty clear that Israel did not think things through regarding a “what next”. Waving the flag of destruction of Hamas and total victory, they steamed in angry. They are going to have a lot of Palestinians in camps, refugees imprisoned in their own country.

There will be no harmony. The conflict will continue, harmony is probably now impossible, especially with current rhetoric. The world has gotten drawn into a weird kind of Omertà.

It is like Basil Fawlty with German guests, “don’t mention the war”. The coverage in the UK media is very limited and toes the line. It is quite shocking to see how parochial the UK has become, a nation of shopkeepers.

Mass murder is OK so long as they are Muslim “terrorists”. That seems to be the justification.

Already “whack-a-mole” eruptions of fighting are evident. Will there be a wider conflagration? Maybe.

That sixth ray idealism and blind devotion is having a deep polarizing influence. We and them, friend or foe myopia is setting in. 

If I have one global prediction for this year it is dis-harmony. 2024 the minus eight year.

I am not getting a good feeling about where this year is going.

Climate Change and the Atlantis Metaphor

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Humans not only create Gods in their own image but Aliens too. Gods and Aliens can also be extrapolations of other known terrestrial lifeforms, animals. We project our ideas onto other putative forms. We imagine life will comply with the biochemical norms of that extant currently on our planet. We look in an astro-biological sense for water, Carbon, Nitrogen, Hydrogen and Oxygen. These are said to be the building blocks of life. Higher living things are a bag of water with some form of skeleton which reproduces sexually via internal womb like development or by means of eggs. We look for life perhaps in the so called goldilocks zone on a planet near a star. Life we imagine must be corporeal and Carbon based, we are prejudiced against Silicon. We cannot imagine a lifeform in absence of a body yet we may “believe” in God.

We do not know if this is the first and only universe or if we are in universe 2.0. We do not understand why there is so much matter and not antimatter. We do not know what dark matter and dark energy are. These are fundamental gaps in knowledge. There are things beyond our ken. We can be very arrogant and adamant.

We assert that there has never been an Atlantis despite the prevalence of deluge and inundation myths in most cultures. Nobody has ever found an Atlantean skeleton. We know less about the depths of the ocean than we do the moon.

In esoterica the kingdom of Atlantis was very highly advanced. The golden days were under the guidance of the Toltec adepts. The Atlanteans started increasingly to engage in depravity and no longer followed the “good law”. This caused its demise and disappearance below the sea. Sorcery, perverse sexual activities and evil power over practices were widespread and brought about downfall. Atlantis called forth its own submersion and destruction.

If I was emigrating from a sinking Atlantis, I would seek high ground. I might head for the Tibetan plateau.

If you look on the internet it is not a big extrapolation to say that sexual gluttony and perversions have become normalised. My generation is perhaps among the last to have grown up without smartphones and access to on line pornography in all its shades. Modern mores would seem depraved to my parents even though they had the swinging sixties. Things have taken a dark turn. The gender “debate” is not about biology. It is not filled with light and luminosity.

One could speculate that we need a cleansing flood and a reset for humanity. Perhaps we are due a mass extinction / dis-incarnation event. We could argue that by trying to fight climate change we are resisting a fully natural phenomenon in that humanity brings about its own downfall and disaster. The planet needs rid of us human-locusts and a chance to recover from us and heal itself. We are only trying to put off the inevitable…

The solution to global warming is a widespread nuclear winter. This is perhaps more likely than inundation.

Some of the floods around the world recently have been truly biblical. Things will probably ramp up even further. People moan that the government doesn’t help enough yet forget that our behaviours and lifestyle is causal of global warming.

The United Nations formed out of the brutal forge of the 1914-1945 war is losing its relevance and significance. The days of “enlightened” internationalism are splintering into nationalist popularism. The cult of the personality is again on the rise and right wing politics resurgent. Force is preferred over diplomacy.

The metaphor of Atlantis sinking under the weight of its own karma grows ever more apt….

Are we doing Groundhog Day on a planetary scale?

Beyond Your/our Ken?

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When Israel launched its revenge attack on Gaza last year, I predicted that maybe 2% of the Gazan population would be killed and this figure has already been surpassed. There have been more that 5% injured. Apparently, this kind of slaughter is “allowable” without much adverse comment to the contrary by western leaders. 7% of the population killed or injured does not meet the criterion of genocide, according to some.

If not, what does?

If you would have asked me five years ago if this kind of slaughter could happen in our times, I would have said no because it was beyond my ken that a highly armed power would be allowed to kick the living shit out of an impoverished and nearly defenceless neighbour. The giant kills the minnow, the bully beats up the unpopular geek who dared to answer back.

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It looks like Putin is winning the war of attrition in Ukraine. They are running out of men to draft. The Russians know attrition better than any – Stalingrad.

As the year draws to a close, I am not optimistic for 2025.

The paradigm of governmental borrowing to finance public expenditure is looking ever shakier. Living on tick is not a great idea. Several countries like Zambia, Argentina, Bhutan, Japan, Greece, Sudan, USA and UK have national debt in excess of GDP. {IMF sourced} France too.

The populations in Europe and parts of Asia age and the demographic time bomb of too few children per woman is ticking ominously. There simply is not enough money to sustain our current ways of life.

People want popular policies to get into power, but there ain’t the dosh. Harsh decisions are avoided and put off. It seems humanity is very blinkered.

Orange-boi is mooting a trade war, his credit rating is probably worse than China’s. He has caused several of his own businesses to fail, six bankruptcies. I am not sure that these wars are a good idea and I do not trust his judgement. I understand that he may like chaos.

USA GDP is ~30,000 billion, current account balance is about 1000 billion in the red. There could be a cash flow problem for them. It is paying around 3% of GDP in interest close to 1000 billion dollars. Government revenue is ~ 10,000 billion dollars per year, government expenditure ~ 11,000 billion dollars. That is a 1000 billion overspend.

UK GDP is about 3500 billion dollars and current account balance is overdrawn by ~ 100 billion dollars.

These figures are beyond my ken. 100 billion in aid to Ukraine from USA does not seem to much but it is ~1% of revenue.

I am not sure that loan financing for vanity projects is a good idea.

Cash flow problems are difficult to solve and markets are very jittery.

When things move too far from equilibrium anharmonic behaviour sets in and some non-linearities come into effect. What these may be is beyond our ken. A downgrade in credit rating means more expensive borrowing which if funded by more borrowing is not a virtuous circle.

A number of key figures are exhibiting flakiness Yoon Sook Yeol and Macron with his unneeded elections. There are a lot of instabilities. Where is Merkel when you need her?

My pet theory is that because of increased climate change induced “disasters” household and auto insurance will increase substantially and may become prohibitively expensive. Ours has gone up by governmental decree! Because of insurance costs, places will become inhabitable which will raise house prices elsewhere. People have already mooted that the French might move North to places with a milder oceanic climate like Brittany.

Governments already straining financially will increasingly struggle to mitigate and clean up. The blame game will be played when everyone is not ready to take responsibility and make the necessary adjustments to their life “style”. It might impede their Instagram story.

My gut feeling is that the shit must really hit the fan before people will even begin to countenance radical change.

The scale of what may lie ahead is beyond our ken. What people are doing is crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. There are climate change deniers who like the sound of their own voice.

The rule of thumb is that when you are in a hole it is best to stop digging. Hoping for the fairy godmother whilst buying some more semi-automatic assault rifles will not stop tornadoes or floods.

My guess is that humanity is heading for a really profound wake up call which will be beyond our current ken.