Author: joel@waterfallhouse.net

It is high time we all pulled back from our frenetic raping of the planet to consider the broader questions of whether we should do something in the first place.  My blogs have been emphasizing that we need to redefine lifestyle expectations for our home and work environments, possibly redesigning our communities to eliminate anything but mass transit.  We should be walking to work and other venues outside our home.

But, once we define our home sustainably, we should be asking whether and how we heat and cool them for comfort and safety.  Europe is locked into that debate now and listening to both sides will be helpful.  Should we even use air conditioning?

It is a simple fact that summer heat waves kill people.  A large power outage decades ago in France proved that killing over 1,000 senior citizens caught in their homes while their children partied in the Mediterranean.  A similar event occurred about two decades ago on the Gulf Coast of this country with the same dire outcomes.

Air conditioning helped develop the South, but nobody was asking the question whether we should be doing that.  I grew up in New York where heat waves occurred every summer, but lasted only 5-10 days.  I worked in the city, and the heat there was unbearable due to heat island effects … the sun baked all those buildings, streets, and sidewalks, and the heat they absorbed during the day, they reradiated all night, making it oppressive.

Even so, I grew up in New York City without air conditioning.  Yes, there were nights I slept under a thin sheet and sweated all night, but that was just how it was.  Nobody asked whether we should air condition, but we did when my parents could afford it.

There is no reason to avoid these questions, but we should be aware of the politics that dominate how they are solved these days.  Someone is always going to suggest that comfort is an inalienable right and therefore the government should provide it at little to no cost.  After all, this is no different than other public safety concerns.

When put to a vote, those who are already paying almost nothing into the system will of course vote to get one more freebie.  Why not?  Let the rich pay for it!

Therefore, as we ask and answer these existential questions, we should be asking the more underlying key questions about how society can best afford these essential services.

Personally, I believe we must go back to densely built communities with centralized heating and cooling systems. Thermal storage then makes perfect sense.  The idea of putting these in each dwelling unit makes no sense.  Then, we decide how much each person-dwelling there pays.  And, while we are doing all this, we build these communities using DC technology … not AC as we do now.  After all, solar panels generate DC, lights are best done with DC, and power reliability for the dwelling units becomes trivial.

Once we return to essential questions, such as how we heat and cool our homes, we should consider more innovative redefinitions of comfort and safety.

On an easier topic, eat more food produced locally vs. transporting it from the other side of the world.  Purchase food products made in your community vs. made abroad and brought here on ships and planes.  Walk or share a ride to the store vs. driving your own 3,000+-pound vehicle. These are small steps we can all take that, and when combined, make a difference on our planet. 

I was reading my church’s Sunday bulletin and noticed the announcement of a support group for parents with neurodivergent children or relatives.  I wasn’t sure what that meant, so of course I looked it up and found this on the Cleveland Clinic’s website: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23154-neurodivergent

“Neurodivergent is a non-medical term describing people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason. This means the person has different strengths and struggles from people whose brains develop or work more typically. While some people who are neurodivergent have medical conditions, it also happens to people where a medical condition or diagnosis hasn’t been identified.”

Some of the conditions that are most common among those who describe themselves as neurodivergent include:

• Autism spectrum disorder (once called Asperger’s syndrome).
• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
• DiGeorge syndrome.
• Down syndrome.
• Dyscalculia (difficulty with math).
• Dysgraphia (difficulty with writing).
• Dyslexia (difficulty with reading).
• Dyspraxia (difficulty with coordination).
• Intellectual disabilities.
• Mental health conditions like bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and more.
• Prader-Willi syndrome.
• Sensory processing disorders.
• Social anxiety (a specific type of anxiety disorder).
• Tourette syndrome.
• Williams syndrome

Well, now I understand how to describe the idiots in today’s world claiming to solve the world’s problems.  They are simply neurodivergent.  We used to call these disabilities or personality disorders.  Please think carefully about that.  We are implying there is no personal accountability.

Now, don’t get me wrong … I am fully aware that we should avoid the term idiot since it sounds so judgmental but give me a break.  When somebody says that biological boys who “identify” as girls can participate in their sports, I draw a line.  Having raised four daughters, the idea that a biological boy is in a girl’s locker room makes my skin crawl.

Sure … medical conditions such as autism, down syndrome, and even cases of obsessive-compulsive behavior can have virtually no personal accountability.  They are not choices in life, nor are they the result of inadequate education or upbringing.  We must learn to welcome and support individuals with these attributes.  I am also painfully aware how we used to wrongly poke fun at them.  Fair enough … guilty as charged, but let’s move on.

It is also interesting to note that some of the most famous brilliant people suffered from these conditions including Temple Grandin, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Simone Biles, and Greta Thunberg.  The list also includes Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Van Gogh, Nikola Tesla, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  So, who am I to judge how history books will define some, or even me?

Given our modern proclivity to come up with labels for these conditions, and following the pattern of difficulties with math, reading, and writing to make these less critical of the obvious failings in our education system, I would like to add these neurodivergent classes:

• Dyslogia (difficult with critical thinking) – oooops … already taken!
• Dysensia (difficulty with common sense).
• Dyshistoria (difficulty with learning anything from history).

Please note that these three were possibly classified with the label “intellectual disabilities” in the prior list.  Yes, we must learn to love one another … but simply using labels to excuse society’s failure to educate, apprentice and mentor people to be productive members of society is just one more example of our modern temptation to simply define situations rather than correct them.  Then, when we do, we either resort to medications or promise a cure politically … how silly.

Oh, I could have used the “ism”, “ist” and “phobia” suffixes as lists of the same tendencies.   How about logiphobia, sensiphobia, and hostoriphobia?  We are now being told by labelists that everything we deem wrong in society is just another point of view … there are no rights and wrongs.  These are simply western society’s bias toward dualistic perspectives.  We need the eastern mystical worldview.

Want to understand the recent fuss over pronouns?  Can you now see these are simply labels to legitimize personal obsession with non-normative identities.  The worst case in my opinion are “furies” who have been known to insist classrooms have litter boxes.  No, I am not making this up!

My wife is right … nobody gets the complete package.  We are all simply puzzles with missing pieces.  The book Chop Wood Carry Water says: comparison is the thief of joy.  The goal of comparison is only to point out realistic areas for improvement. 

Unfortunately, as my prior blogs have proven, you just can’t fix dystupidia.  There … I didn’t use the word stupid.

 

The phrase “figures don’t lie, but liars figure” has been attributed to Mark Twain and others.  That doesn’t quite keep up with our modern data world where, as the precision and time-based data-tracking awareness improves, we can now say we infer things that are simply not true reflections of our history.

Climate alarmists love to quote the “fact” that storms have gotten more severe recently and that the damage they cause has catastrophically increased damage costs.  A careful review of all the hurricane data has repeatedly shown that this fact is not true … storms have not gotten any more severe.  Damages have risen of course. That is due to the fact that we now have a lot more people in harm’s way and have built enormously more expensive dwellings along our coasts.

As we summered here in Old Saybrook, we finally took in the museum honoring the famous actress Kathryn Hepburn who up here, made it her home, retired and died here. Pictures and movies of her first home that washed out to sea, along with the devastation of the hurricane of 1938 are in it.  I remember our shack in East Hampton was on stilts because the first one was taken out to sea by that hurricane, along with just about every other dwelling along the coast here.

According to Wikipedia: “It made landfall on Eastern Long Island as a Category 3 hurricane on September 21, 1938, and it is estimated to have killed 682 people and damaged or destroyed more than 57,000 homes. It remains the most powerful and deadliest hurricane to ever strike New York and New England in history, perhaps eclipsed in landfall intensity only by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.”

It just so happens that our recent guest whose lineage came through Old Saybrook asked us to join he and his wife as we met with staff from the historical society here.  They produced several books (one 660 pages long) on his family history.  Other books we found included some first hand accounts of that hurricane in 1635 which completely flooded the coastal point in Old Saybrook.  It took every house in that area out to sea.

What made that storm so devastating of course was that there was no warning. There is a lot to be said about our modern technologies to warn us about things like this.  We can now alert people to evacuate, seek higher ground, etc.  Our modern mathematics offers “cones of uncertainty” for the path that communicates better than one liners in the newspapers or on the radio of that day.  The devastation would have been the same in 1635 but lives would have been saved for sure.

But, before I discuss the graphic at the beginning of this blog, please carefully read that Wikipedia segment below.  Have there been prior hurricanes that were worse?  Why don’t we know just how bad the Hurricane of 1635 was?  Isn’t it perfectly clear that we simply did not have the measurement techniques back then.  In fact, this area was not inhabited by many Europeans before then and the Native Americans did not take measurements or keep records.

Read the full Wikipedia article: “The storm developed into a tropical depression on September 9 off the coast of West Africa, but the United States Weather Bureau was unaware that a tropical cyclone existed until September 16 when ships reported strong winds and rough seas 350 miles northeast of San Juan; by then, it was already a well-developed hurricane and had tracked westward toward the southeastern Bahamas.”  I rest my case.

Now, back to that graphic. If you read anything about Hurricane Erin, it will be that it was a Category 5 storm.  Really?  Just because it briefly intensified to that level?  We never defined storms that way in the past … since we didn’t know.  How many storms have there been in our data records that also hit this level on their paths long before they made landfall? 

You all probably remember Al Gore’s insistence that hurricanes had increased in number and intensity.  He just took a 20-year period where that appeared to be true, but that was not reflective of the full dataset, which shows no such increase in number nor intensity.

However, we now have a new type of data, made possible by satellite measurements, which was unavailable before the 1960s.

The conclusion is that we are better off with all this modern data accuracy and timeliness, but it brings with it a lot of questions we can’t answer about trends back where we thought we knew what we saw and measured.

Finally, if you are still clinging to that global warming mirage offered by Al Gore and his cronies, read Konin’s book “Unsettled,” which debunks much of the hurricane nonsense. 

Prophets of doom are more often than not profiting from fear.  That we know for sure. But if you need proof, watch toward the end of the documentary Planet of the Humans where Al Gore and Richard Branson are being interviewed about their work promoting their green agenda.  They are asked, “Do you consider yourselves prophets?” One of them cleverly responded, “That depends on how you spell profits!”  And they laughed hysterically. 

I know this blog is very long but given the reaction to my last two on plastics in our environment, and how serious this is to our wellbeing, I must ask you to indulge me with this comprehensive but alarming article by Hiroko Tabuchi from the New York Times on the worldwide negotiations to solve this problem.

It speaks volumes about how governments and companies abandon the moral high ground in favor of fattening their bottom line. I have included most of the text from Ms. Hiroko because it illustrates how bad things are on the world stage as we attempt to solve existential health and sustainability questions. This should be a wakeup call to everyone that we are doomed if this persists. Please carefully consider Ms. Tabuchi’s summary:

Negotiations over the first-ever global treaty on plastic pollution, launched with great hope in 2022, were supposed to set the world on a path to tackle the explosive growth in plastic waste. Instead, they have become the latest example of the United Nations’ painstakingly slow and deadlock-prone negotiation-by-consensus.

After 10 days of what was scheduled to be the final round of talks, countries had not agreed on a single article in the larger treaty, including one that would seek to curb plastic production, an approach opposed by nations that produce plastic and its petrochemical building blocks.

But most nations at the talks have supported curbs on plastic production, saying the plastic waste problem needs to be addressed at the source.  They have pointed to eye-popping statistics: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that, without global action to curb plastic pollution, plastic production between 2020 and 2040 will grow by 70 percent to 736 million tons.

Overall, less than 10 percent of global plastic waste was estimated to have been recycled in 2020, the rest disposed of in landfills, incinerated, or released into the environment.

During the talks, disagreements weren’t limited to questions of production. Negotiators riddled the entire draft treaty text with “brackets,” or parenthesis placed around text that has not yet been agreed upon.  At one point, there were nearly 1,500 brackets, according to a tally by GSCC, a network of communications professionals focused on climate change.

Despite the disagreements, the delegates have battled on. “We are ready to negotiate, and negotiation means we could make some hard compromises,” said Magnus Heunicke, Denmark’s environment minister.  Then came the latest draft text, released Wednesday by the secretariat. Gone were any references to limiting plastic production. Also missing were any measures to address harmful chemicals in plastic, another issue pushed by a group of “high ambition” nations at the talks.

In fact, there was little left in the treaty, delegates grumbled, that would compel nations to do much of anything in any legally binding way.  The draft was widely panned, in particular by some developing nations, which have spearheaded efforts to adopt an ambitious treaty.

“This is simply repulsive,” Juan Carlos Monterray Gomez, a negotiator for Panama, declared at the plenary assembly. “We will not sell out our future generations for a text as weak as this.”  The treaty had “lost its very objective,” said Deborah Barasa, the Kenyan negotiator. “There are no global binding obligations on anything.”

Haendel Rodriguez Gonzalez of Colombia said, “We cannot continue like this.”  The European Union also stated that the proposed text was not acceptable.  This impasse came despite momentum, or at least a sense of urgency, around the need to address plastic pollution not just to protect the environment, but to safeguard human health.

In a stark warning published in The Lancet ahead of the talks, leading health researchers and doctors called plastic pollution a “grave, growing and underrecognized danger” to public health that was costing the world at least $1.5 trillion a year.

“Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age,” the researchers wrote, pointing to links between exposures to plastics and plastic chemicals to reduced human fertility, increased risks of miscarriages and birth defects, as well as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

And at the treaty talks, more than 80 countries had signed onto a proposal led by Switzerland and Mexico to include controls on toxic chemicals in plastic products.

“We’re making a strong call to make sure that we are including chemicals within the agreement, that this plastic treaty can also help us protect human health,” Camila Zepeda, Mexico’s negotiator at the talks, said.  The latest draft treaty does not address chemicals.

On Thursday, delegates continued to demand a new draft, even as they contemplated various outcomes: a weak treaty, a continuation of talks or no treaty at all. Getting all of the world’s nations to agree using U.N.-sanctioned consensus-based negotiations seems increasingly out of reach. Other unsettled issues include a financing mechanism that would channel much needed funds to poorer countries to tackle plastic pollution.

The opposition

A league of petrochemical-producing nations, along with industry groups, have staunchly opposed any controls on production, however.  “I think if we’re going to make this work going forward, we need to once and for all respect our red lines,” said Abdelrahman bin Mohammed Algwaiz, negotiator for Saudi Arabia. “And there have been many red lines crossed for the Arab group, and they’ve been clear for years.”

The Trump administration, meanwhile, also opposed production caps, proposing early in the talks to delete from the treaty a reference to addressing “the full life cycle of plastics.” And on Wednesday, John E. Thompson, a senior State Department official, told the conference plenary that the text still “crosses many of our red lines.”

Industry groups have been active at the talks, triggering concerns over corporate influence over the treaty negotiations.  “The fossil fuel and petrochemicals industry lobbyists aren’t just pulling strings behind the scenes — we saw them boldly take the floor, speak in plenary and push their agenda in plain sight,” said Rachel Radvany, an environmental health campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law, a legal advocacy and research organization.

So, what does this say the root cause is behind our world situation?  What does this imply about how leadership cares about existential issues?  Why isn’t there more of an outcry from the media about truly important questions?

The media is focused on Trump Derangement Syndrome and the Epstein files.  Is that going to redeem our situation on any important agendas?  Benjamin Franklin’s words are stunningly appropriate:  “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

There you go … this speaks volumes about where we are on truly important issue resolution.  We can talk of “the greater good” but that died recently …

Finally, there is something to be learned from the history of the tobacco companies as the evidence of harm mounted.  The tactics of those who can see the handwriting on the wall are well documented as shown below:

Big Tobacco’s Dirty Tricks: A Casebook

 

This blog follows upon on last week’s as proof that companies would capitalize on the fear of microplastics with absurd ideas and dupe the world into investing in absolute nonsense.  See for yourself: https://www.timeplast.com/

“With microplastic pollution on the rise, our water-soluble plastic technology is designed to dissolve after a set period. Already partnered with Nestle and Hello Bello, we’re targeting a massive $1.3 trillion addressable market*, with segments like single-use plastics and sustainable packaging. Invest as we prepare for a pioneering, cleaner, and sustainable future. Let’s make water plastic’s worst enemy.”

Are you already sensing how stupid this is?  Number 1, it does nothing to solve the problem we already have with garbage everywhere and the microplastics in our water supply.  Number 2, it would add to the plastic dose in our water supplies by the dissolution step itself.  What other health problems will we have if we ingest more dissolved plastics plus the micro- and nano-plastics already in them?   Why didn’t the article even pose this as a risk?

You must watch the movie Idiocracy, the 2006 satirical movie that captured viewers’ imaginations with its exaggerated portrayal of a future where society has devolved into intellectual and cultural decay.  It emphasizes that you can’t fix stupid.  Folks … we are there!

Rather than face our problems holistically, we seem hell bent to chase shiny pennies that are mirages … they clearly don’t address the root problems, yet we seem prone to endorse this nonsense.  Perhaps it is because we don’t want to face our bad habits … single-use containers that are not reusable, hence the name. 

Can’t we see by the prevalence of cancer and premature deaths that there is something terribly wrong in our existing food supply chain, and that we are poisoning the planet with our trash and bad supply-chain choices.  When are we going to stop chasing cheaper alternatives and chase better ones for a sustainable future?

My blog from last week suggesting we bring back glass and paper is the right answer, but we still need answers for the microplastics everywhere …

As Sigourney Weaver expressed in the opening scene of Aliens after 50-years of being in a sleep state and an encounter with just one of those critters. She was being interrogated by the review team questioning her actions that lost lives and the ship, and she responds, “Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?” That says it all. 

Wake up friends.  We are not addressing the root cause of the problem.  Do we really need to bottle water when we can filter it at home if we want better than the locally provided water supplies that the FDA closely monitors? And that water never touches plastic.  Do we need to import it in plastic bottles from Fiji?  I hope you can see the errors in our way.

Finally, it is interesting that even rags like the New York Times are now echoing my perspective: The article is called You Are Polluted.

And, just in case you are still a zealot for climate change, please consider this:  Turns Out Major Climate Study Peddled By Media Relied On Bunk Data | The Daily Caller