Good to see Nettime ricocheting into life again, despite occasional acrimony. But it was always so. Personally in the current Age of Manifest Disinformation I can't see how calling attention to the questionable credentials of a centrally quoted (& evidently quack) expelled former academic equates to Stasism, but maybe that's just me. This is a forum where people point things out. And sometimes they're called out.
In any case to go back to Brian's original set of meteorological questions and observations from Sunday, we're definitely heading at full speed into very dark times. Here in Ottawa, to cite a small but telling detail, for the first time since it opened in 1970 the Rideau Canal Skateway, AKA "the world's longest naturally frozen skating rink," hasn't opened and will not open. It has simply been too warm to produce safe ice. And we're north of Toronto. There's absolutely no doubt that even if 'we' figure out how to eventually reduce carbon in the atmosphere, the climate crisis will inevitably get far worse before it gets better—producing growing waves of refugees, which in turn will trigger ever larger populist backlashes in wealthy countries. (Why 'we' in quotes? Who're we, anyway? Will 'we' soon encompass AI capable of solving and not just exacerbating global problems? I used to have a techno utopian streak, but lately it's gone AWOL.) Something we've certainly already seen of course, and in fact the climatological backdrop to the Syrian civil war hasn't been sufficiently appreciated, but rather was largely understood as a manifestation of the Arab Spring. And this is worrisome, as I know I'm the first to point out, because it gives grounds for the Marine Le Pens of the world to claw their way to power and the Viktor Orbans and Gioria Melonis to retain it. Which in turn further undermines international efforts to try to tackle the problem. And this is to say nothing of the desperate plight of the people actually fleeing drought and starvation—people whose misfortune was simply to be born in the wrong place. Casting a black shadow over all this of course, is Putin's criminal invasion of Ukraine (whoops, I guess I'm a 'useful idiot' for NATO), which has distracted attention away from the most existentially important question of all, namely how to try to turn the temperature down, literally. Add to this Xi Jinping's evident determination to rule for life, something that never works out well (see Putin, Vladimir, above); his fixation on annexing democratic Taiwan in his lifetime (ditto), and the genocide of Xinjang's 12 million Uyghur Muslims, 1 million of whom are still being forcibly "reeducated" in concentration camps, to little apparent lasting international attention—despite eight decades of "never again" rhetoric. I mention China in part because what we really need in my view is a kind of Manhattan Project on steroids in which the financial and scientific resources of the three biggest economic blocs, the EU, the US, and the PRC, are pooled, with some extremely major funding and talent thrown at this problem. But how likely is that in the current political climate? I mean, if ever there was an 'all hands on deck moment,' this is it. But instead of taking that cliche seriously we as a species are doing what we've always done so ridiculously well: fighting amongst ourselves. Rearranging deck chairs. As Brian alluded to, electric cars and solar panels aren't going to cut it, though of course solar and wind are definitely elements of the solution. But what we really need in my view are 'dark satanic mills' capable of reversing some of the damage done by the first ones and their successors, by scrubbing CO2 _out_ of the atmosphere. Instead we're spending 2 trillion dollars annually on armaments, with the US of course leading the way at 732 billion annually. That shoots down a lot of balloons. Apologies if some or all of the above seems obvious. Best wishes anyway, Michael -- Michael Benson *Kinetikon Pictures * michael-benson.net kinpix2...@gmail.com
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