Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Climate-Be Humbler before the Facts

The short-term climatic future is relatively easy to predict. If warming continues on its present trajectory, growing seasons in Europe will lengthen, vineyards will again be established in central England, and farms will be cleared closer to the Arctic Circle. Northern Europe and much of North America may prosper from the warmth, but southern Europe, much of tropical Africa, and Central and South America will suffer more frequent water shortages and greater heat, as well as diminished agricultural capacity. Confrontations over water rights will flare in countries like Egypt, which depend on river flow from across national borders. People will adapt as they always have, but drier tropical regions with at least 400 million people subsisting in overpopulated marginal environments will make that adaptation difficult.

 

 

What of the longer term, if global warming accelerates? Sufficient reserves of fossil fuel exist to cause a continued growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels well into the twenty-second century. If this growth continues unchecked, the climate changes on earth will probably be very large indeed and extremely unpredictable. But many scientific uncertainties remain. Recently, James Hansen and a group of his colleagues have argued that the rapid warming of recent decades has in fact been driven mainly by non-CO, gases such as chlorofluorocarbons. Fossil fuel burning C02 and aerosols have both positive and negative climatic forcing effects, which tend to cancel each other out. Hansen and his team point out that the growth rate of non-CO, gases has declined over the past decade and could be reduced even further. This, combined with a slowing of black carbon and C0, emissions, could lead to a decline in the rate of global warming. 18 Much more research is needed to confirm this hypothesis,

 

 

Optimists assume that we will adapt comfortably. We humans do have a striking ability to adapt to changing environmental circumstances at the local level. Witness the agricultural revolution in Flanders, the Low Countries, then Britain during the climatically unpredictable sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

 

 

Yet optimism fades in the face of demographic reality. Six billion of us now inhabit earth, with hundreds of millions still subsisting from harvest to harvest, from rainy season to rainy season, just as many European peasants once did. For Europe and North America, with their industrial-scale agriculture and elaborate infrastructures for moving food over long distances, famine is remote. But subsistence farmers on other continents still live with the constant threat of hunger. As I write this, more than 2 million cattle herders in northeast Africa face starvation because of severe drought. Such numbers are hard for us to comprehend in the prosperous West. They will become still harder to comprehend if global temperatures rise far above present levels, when rising seas inundate densely populated coastal plains and force millions of people to resettle inland, or far more severe droughts settle over the Sahel and the less well watered parts of the world? I have avoided discussing wars in this book-it would be simplistic to say that wars or other complex political events were caused by climatic changebut it's implausible to suppose that famines and massive dislocations of poor populations will be unaccompanied by civil unrest and disobedience. We can only imagine the potential death toll in an era when climatic swings may be faster, more extreme, and completely unpredictable because of human interference with the atmosphere. The French Revolution or the Irish potato famine pale into insignificance.

 

 

Even if the present warming is entirely of natural origin, greenhouse warming in the future could be accentuated by fossil fuels. We would be rash to ignore even theoretical scenarios, for we and our descendants are navigating uncharted climatic waters. In that respect we are no different from medieval farmers or eighteenth-century peasants, who took the weather as it came. Today we can forecast the weather and model climatic change, but globally we are still as vulnerable to climate as were those who endured the famine of 1315 or the great storms of the Spanish Armada, simply because there are so many of us and we are so closely linked, environmentally, economically, and politically. Fortunately, we now have, or will shortly have, the scientific data that document the full extent of the danger. We also know what has to be done, and have many of the tools to make significant changes. But to implement countermeasures to reduce geenhouse gasses and minimize the impact of climatic extremes on an increasingly crowded world community will require a new altruism, and a desire to work for the global rather than the national good, for the welfare of our grandchildren and geat-grandchildren rather than to satisfy short-term, often petty, goals. Political bickering, selfish national interests and the intense lobbying of international business have so far militated against broad agreement as to the path ahead.

 

 

Over a century ago, Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley urged us to be "humble before the facts." The facts stare us in the face, yet we do not display sufficient humility. As British diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell recently remarked: "Mostly we know what to do but we lack the will to do it." The vicissitudes of the Little Ice Age remind us of our vulnerability  again and again. In a new climatic era, we would be wise to learn from the climatic lessons of history.

 

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Rich Get Richer

I read an article by a man from Finland.  He wrote they had rich people in Finland, but there is a level at which they would become embarrassed.

 

In the United States CEOs of large corporations make over 260 times more than the average American worker. In many other countries everybody wants to be rich, but there is a limit. You cannot become a billionaire stepping over children sleeping in the street. That is not what this country is supposed to be about. Enough should be enough.

 

In 2007, the top 1 percent earned 23.5 percent of all income. During the 1970s it was about 8 percent and in the 1990s it was around 16 percent. The people at the top are getting a bigger and bigger chunk of all income. We hear about the top 1 percent. The top one-tenth of 1 percent took in 11 percent of total income in 2007.

 

The last time that type of income disparity took place was in 1928. Remember 1929.

 

If working people, the vast majority of the people, do not have the income to spend money to buy products and goods and services, jobs will not be created. If all the of the money or a big chunk of the money ends up with a few people on top, there is a limit to how many limousines you can have. When so few have so much, it is not only a moral issue, it is also an economic issue.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

Benghazi

These shootings cannot be prevented because we do not understand what security requires. Much like the locks on the doors of our houses our security only stops people willing to be stopped and annoys those who feel compelled to go along with it.

Security requires electric fences topped razor wire surrounding the entire facility and multiple armed guards inside and outside as well as on the roof of all buildings positioned far enough apart so they cannot be neutralized as a group with weapons ready as well as attack dogs free within the fence. Security requires the protected live in a prison. No matter we are not ready to do that. We live in a free society and citizens have the right to own and carry weapons.

In the 70s our company had NCR computers. On occasion I would go to the NCR manufacturing location. I was given a security card similar to a hotel room card that I scanned to go through a door. The card controlled which door I could pass through, which direction I was allowed to go, in or out and how many people, if any, could go with me and if I could take anything electronic or metal with me. That was security.

Imagine if the location of this recent shooting was located in a combat zone? Mass shooting on a military reservation shows these people need to be on a ship in the middle of an ocean somewhere. They might be safe there except from each other. On the other hand this may put some light on Benghazi.


Creation of the Middle Class

Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line. In 1912 it took Ford 1,260 man-hours to produce a Model T.  When the company adopted the electrified assembly light it brought a big leap in industrial productivity. In 1914 it took 617 man-hours. As the line's operation was fine tuned by 1925 it took 228 man-hours.  

Ford also led the way to boosting blue collar wages. One day Ford announced he would double workers' pay---to five dollars a day---across the board. He saw the higher wages were necessary to convince large numbers of men to take factory jobs that had become numbingly tedious---to discourage them from quitting those jobs. Workers would train, become bored and quit. Continual training was expensive to the company. In response to the increase 15,000 workers applied for 3,000 open slots. Other factory owners, with no options also raised wages.

As factory jobs came to require less skill, they began to pay higher wages. And that helped set in motion one of the most important social developments of the century: the creation of a vast, prosperous American middle class.

 

Lords of Finance

In the book "Lords of  Finance", following WWI while Germany was negotiating the reparation demands its economy floundered. There was a series of weak governments which collectively proved unable to control the country's finances that causes of which were for the most part self –inflicted. To make the reparation payments Germany resorted to printing money. Know any other countries that do that?

In 1914 the mark stood at 4.2 to the dollar worth a little under 24 cents. By the beginning of 1920 after the full effects of the war finance had worked its way through the system there were 65 marks per dollar worth around 1.5 cents and prices were nine times as much as they were in 1914. Over the next eighteen months the mark stabilized. Foreign private speculators, betting the mark had fallen too far moved some $2 billion into the country.  Germany was viewed, before the war, as the epitome of discipline, orderliness, and organization. It was inconceivable it would give up on restoring order.

A series of events in 1921 resulted in the public losing confidence that Germany's problems were soluble and abandoned the mark. Foreign speculators bailed, losing most of the $2 billion they had pumped into the economy. 

On June 24, 1922 the man recognized as architect of the economy was murdered, panic set in. Prices rose fortyfold during 1922 pushing the mark from 190 per dollar to 7,600 per dollar.

Early in 1923 Germany defaulted on some reparation payments and the budget deficit almost doubled to around $1.5 billion. To finance the shortfall Germany printed ever-increasing amounts of worthless paper marks. In 1922 around 1 trillion marks of additional currency were distributed, In the first six months of 1923, 17 trillion marks were printed.

It took 133 printing works with 1,783 machines and 30 paper mills. Over the next few months Germany's economy destructed. By August 1923, a dollar was worth 620,000 marks and by early November 1923, 630 billion.

A kilo of butter cost 250 billion marks, a kilo of bacon 180 billion, a ride on a street car, which before the war cost 1 mark now cost 15 billion.  Currency was available in denominations of up to 100 billion marks and were carried around in bags, in wheelbarrows, in laundry baskets and hampers and in baby carriages.

In the last three weeks in October prices doubled every couple of days and rose ten thousandfold. In the time it took to drink a cup of coffee in a cafĂ© the price might have doubled.  Money received at the beginning of the week lost nine-tenths of its buying power by the end of the week. 

Workers who were once paid weekly were paid daily and given a half-hour to go and buy something. They bought what they thought they would be able to barter.

On July 31, 2008 the Zimbabwean dollar reached 500 billion to the U.S. dollar. It can happen to us.