Some patterns of thought are like family. A few words out of their mouths and you know where they’re going.
Summary so far: to keep average global temperatures within 2°C by 2100, we’ll need to be a lot more energy efficient, reproduce less (not exceeding 9 billion by century’s end), and get really good at increasing agricultural productivity so that lots of land can revert back to the wilds. Scenarios associated with RCP2.6 show how this might be possible.
The Ideological Square:
1. Exaggerate Our Good Things: Our vision is good and true
2. Exaggerate Their Bad Things: Their vision is evil and false
3. Minimize Our Bad Things: Our vision has no serious downside
4. Minimize Their Good Things: Their vision has no merit
RCP2.6 is one of the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a few years ago. A scenario consistent with RCP2 is a global population of 9 billion in 2100, fairly robust global GDP growth, middling reforestation and wild habitat restoration, relatively less oil (and more natural gas) consumption than the other RCPs, and decent advances in carbon capture technologies van Vuuren et al (2011a).
Problem-solving when we’re in a good mood tends to be quick, flexible, creative, and intuitive. Problem-solving when we’re in a bad mood tends to be information-based, detail-oriented, systematic, and cautious. Then there’s problem-solving when we’re on the rebound from feeling bad to feeling good ...
“Rather than talking about the 1% and the 99% as if they were forever fixed, it would make much more sense to talk about the fact that Americans are likely to be exposed to both prosperity and poverty during their lives & to shape our policies accordingly.” - Mark R. Rank, “From Rags to Riches to Rags” New York Times, April 18, 2014
Relative affluence or poverty is less a matter of fixed groups than of lifespan. The young are poor, the middle-aged are gaining traction, the near-retired have peaked, and old age is a long decline - in wealth and income as well as health. When we're young, we're getting educated and sampling jobs - a process that can extend into our 30s.
Inequality is correlated with all sorts of bad things (at least if you look at subsets of the international data, which often includes different countries and time periods and doesn't control for outliers, mediators, moderators, and confounding variables). But we all know correlation is not causation...
The phrase “wandering thoughts” is interesting. Why not call the movement of thoughts “exploring thoughts”? From the outside, exploration may look like wandering. From the outside, you can’t see direction; you can’t see what is being sought. It’s all helter-skelter.
I just don’t see mild –sometimes very mild - stress as “suffering”. Occasional feelings of irritation, guilt, anger, shame, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, chagrin, boredom, and all the rest of the less-than-positive spectrum of emotion are not a cause for alarm. These are not “toxic” emotions, unless you define them as such.
…the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general principles." There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. (Dewey 2010, p 1)
What to do about climate change? Initiate the Process. The first few steps being: define the Problem, then specify what you want to accomplish (the goal) and what you want to avoid.
Behavior is motivated by desire to do or have something, either for pleasure or the relief of discomfort. Conflict is the perception that there’s a reason not to act on the desire. Temptations are desires that conflict with one or more of our goals. We resist temptations through exercising self-control.
Mozart, when asked, in effect, "how do you do it?!", responded: "I don't: it just happens - I have nothing to do with it."
Will and self-discipline matter, of course - but they don't generate, they prepare the field for generation. And they know when to get out of the way and when to rein in.
Although “wandering” conveys an impression of thoughts adrift, unanchored and chaotic, it may be more accurate to view such thoughts as triggered by a sense of concern and seeking some resolution. The Wandering Mind is theExploring Mind: exploring the problem space, a few moves at a time.
The basic message of the last few posts: climate change projections require assumptions about human behavior and these assumptions may be questionable. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has presented a “business-as-usual” trajectory of green house gas concentrations that would result in a mean global temperature rise of 3.7°C (2.6 to 4.8°C range) by 2100, meaning that such concentrations are plausible if present trends continue.
I've often suspected that one of the appeals of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is the idea that in the ideal society, people would only do what they feel like doing and that people shouldn't feel compelled to do something they didn't feel like doing (a teenage boy utopia). Some think this ideal is about to be realized because work is going the way of the dinosaurs, thanks to robots.
I work in scientific research and have seen its dirty underbelly. Diving in headlong, full of idealism about the scientific method and its inherent humility.
“Coal is the slowest-growing energy source in the IEO2016 Reference case, with 0.6%/year average increases in total world coal consumption from 2012 to 2040, considerably slower than the 2.2%/year average over the past 30 years. The EIA forecasts declines from 40% of total generation in 2012 to 29% in 2040.” (IEA)
According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2011, gross median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose from $59,400 to $75,200, or 26.5%. However, once adjusted for household size and looking at taxes from an after-tax perspective, real median household income grew 46%.