Blue Eyes Crying

Blue Eyes Crying

Originally uploaded by ecstaticist

I’ve been dugg again…what fun. I’m getting 20 hits per second on this photo!

16 percent agree! Bush is great…

For a country who likes rally behind their presidential father figure cum final arbiter cum war maker, I was surprised that even Shrubya scores so low on the strongly approve scale in this latest poll.

Oh, we’ll just adapt…not!

The last stand of the climate change skeptics is now “ok, so we’re causing it. So what? We’ll adapt. We always have in the past.”

Contrary to what most skeptics will tell you, this now-finished debate was never about whether climate change happens in absence of human causes. Of course, climate science, geology and a host of other sciences have long shown us that our climate is variable. Ice ages of the past covered our planet in ice caps. Heat waves caused drought and melting. This all happened before. This time, the problem is not that it is happening again, but rather the speed of change is historically unprecedented, with the exception of times of cataclysm like meteor strikes or huge volcano eruptions.

It is the speed of change that will be the gotcha for humans. Sure, we have adapted in the past. In the past, change has come over many generations, and change has been almost imperceptible. This time we are seeing change on a decade-by-decade pace, and it will soon change to year-by-year. It will be very difficult, and very expensive, to make the needed adjustments to our human infrastructure to be able to continue in a civilized manner, should we take the “we’ll adapt” approach to this problem. Here’s a mild example of possible outcomes, which happened recently in one of our most civilized countries, Britain:

Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.

About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.

Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.

Think about this over the long term, as changes become more profound, and impacts are spread to more fragile societies with even less ability to adapt. Then ask yourself what the proper approach to this issue is. I think it is clear we need to act within our capacity to mitigate the effects of excessive co2 emitted by our society, just as we acted to curb CFCs and stop damage to the Ozone layer. It is clear. We must act.

Certainly, there are other important issues facing us. General environmental degradation is one. Nuclear proliferation is another. AIDS yet another…sadly we don’t get to cherry-pick the issues we tackle. They must all be beaten.

Google Phone?

Here’s a compelling analysis of why Google wants to buy the 700mhz spectrum in the US. Keywords: free, open. Two words that are not in the cell phone industry vocabulary. Watch out wireless carriers. You better start thinking about how to change your business models.

Once the company announces the wireless broadband to the nation, it will immediately announce that Google Phone everyone has been talking about. The Google Phone will work specifically with the Google system (kind of like Skype) and will be free of charge. The only fee to the consumer is the cost of buying the phone, which can be done over the Google checkout system from online retailers or at fine brick-and-mortar retailers nationwide.