Been dealing this past week with recurring technical issues affecting my other website, all solved aside from a large amount of attempts to crack the administrator password. The techies tell me it’s normal; bot attacks. I take that as being the same as in South Park, The North American Man Bot Love Association.
Whatever.
Other than that, dug out an old text book, dating back to my masters, on the subject of security, remembering it had a chapter on ‘environmental security’. Interesting in that whilst mention was made of ‘climate change’, the book was published near twenty years ago, the possibility of conflict caused by environmental factors was at the time considered low. I would imagine this has changed based on a research paper released by the United States military which predicts a high likelihood that climate change could be a major cause of future conflicts.
Also on climate, I recently watched a presentation made by a Professor Tao, Harvard Uni, in which he outlined a few ways by which he believes we could solve our climate problem, but I feel are a bit unrealistic. Huge areas of mirrors to reflect sunlight back out into space, oyster shells as the base ingredient for some concoction that would capture CO2, who knows? Maybe we will need to get desperate at some point. Where I did agree is in how he drew attention to the fact our current approach to the climate problem is overly anthropocentric. We analyse the situation in terms of how humans will be affected, but omitting that humans are part of a greater whole he and the security text book say should be viewed as an ‘Earth System’. A what temperature can food crops no longer be grown? A what temperature do essential insects drop dead? We know the environmental limits to human survival, but could other species, plants, etc essential to human survival start to disappear before those environmental limits to human survival are reached? Last year I was listening to an interview of a woman who lives near Broken Hill, a mining town in the far west of the state of New South Wales, and who said soil temperatures on her property had reached 70 degrees Celsius. I’m not a farmer but would imagine nothing much edible could be grown in those conditions, but I suppose it would save you the cost of a slow cooker; just wrap the leg of kangaroo in foil, bury in the morning and by evening, bon appétit, a perfect slow-cooked supper.