Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t avoid hearing predictions of doom and gloom. Climate change, “peak oil,” fisheries collapse, economic meltdown, ocean acidification, ocean dead zones, spreading deserts, water wars…the list seems endless. If even a fraction of the forecast catastrophes come true, it’s going to be a challenging future – especially if you are unprepared.

I have put the three things you should be doing now up top, and the justification following, because many of you are well aware of the challenges we face. Continue reading →

We have many intelligent people in the highest positions of power. Some are less intelligent, but are quite cunning fellows. You cannot achieve the highest positions without a large dollop of one or both of these attributes. What is lacking almost entirely in the people at the top is wisdom. We need to fix that.

Wisdom is the ability to recognize and accept truth. Ignoring or denying reality, clearly, makes you unwise. Most of us have had the experience of being told by another: “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” And we did it anyway. And lived to regret it. Some people don’t have the chance to regret their mistake, because it turned out to be fatal; see: Darwin Awards. Continue reading →

A lot of terms are being thrown around by people talking about climate change, and it can be confusing. Is it global warming or is it climate change? Should we be thinking of it as a crisis or emergency? And why does there seem to be so much hyperbole?

First, global warming is accurate. The Earth gets warmer or colder based on many factors, including our distance from the sun (which varies because the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse), fluctuations in the sun’s heat output, and the gases in Earth’s atmosphere. In the case of the current warming, the main cause is an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – of which we are the main cause.

Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide (NO2). CO2 is a direct result of burning fossil fuels; methane comes from various sources, but feedlot cattle are huge; and NO2 comes from various sources. All can be thought of as adding insulation to the Earth, thus trapping more of the sun’s energy and causing the Earth to warm.

If you are truly sceptical about whether global warming is happening or whether humans are the main cause, you should not be reading blogs by non-climate-scientists like me about it. You should be going back to the science. That’s what I had to do to convince myself. RealClimate is a great place to start, as it is run by real climate scientists. Otherwise, you’re going to have to read the actual scientific reports. I read enough of those to realise that RealClimate and the books mentioned in the next paragraph accurately reflect the science, but it’s heavy slogging. Continue reading →

It is a mug’s game to attempt to predict the future. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” That said, some educated guesses can be made. There are several converging trends that will change the employment picture in significant ways. Those changes will be driven by increasing oil prices and ‘environmental’ problems. Together or separately, they will of necessity produce changes in who gets to do what in developed countries like Canada and the United States.

Back to Basics

More of us will have to go back to supplying basic needs. Look at it this way: a certain number of people are required to produce the necessities of life for everyone: food, water, clothing. After that, everyone else can do whatever they can get someone else to pay for. In the United States, approximately 9% of the population is engaged in farming or farm-related activities, from actually growing food, to producing canned goods and tractors, to distributing and selling all those items. (As of 2002, but close enough. Things get muddled because some of those farmers are exporting food, and we also import food.) That means 91% of us don’t have to worry where our food comes from and can do other things like write blogs, do cosmetic surgery, screw people over by being a bankster, and so on. Continue reading →