Not seeing the forest or the trees, for the leaves.

Apparently the International Energy Agency has warned that if we don't change things, in 5 years we will have irreversible climate change. Personally I'm scared, once the climate change is irreversible how will we ever go back to the jurassic climate required to support cloned Dinosaurs?

The biggest Climate myth is Climate Stasis. Everyone who believes in Dinosaurs and ice ages, believes in Climate change. Even when it seems like the climate is static, it's not, because the length of time in that climate pattern is increasing. The climate is the sum of it's inputs and states, all climate change is irreversible. Every instant of every day for the whole history of the earth irreversible climate change has been going on. 

I wish people would suck it up and admit how little we actually know about the climate. Everything is a player in the climate and maybe now that we've got a decent collection of earth watching satellites we can finally get a grasp of all the inputs, but a system that has cycles that last decades, centuries or maybe even millennia, is not all of a sudden going to be cracked by us, especially cause there's not really a lab to experiment with these things.

The biggest sign that we don't know what we're talking about is that, we are concerned about our impact on the climate, and we want to stop impacting it as much so we want to stop getting energy in ways that impact the composition and instead we want to syphon energy right out of the weather systems. Have you heard of the conservation of energy? Wind energy isn't free, wind energy takes energy from the air currents that move atmospheric water around. But it's not like with the rise of wind energy we've seen an increase in weather systems stalling and causing flooding and draughts? Oh wait, we have.

It's unbelievably frustrating to see the public debate be between people who are willfully ignorant and people that are willfully arrogant. It would be really nice for some people to say, hey we don't really have the best grasp on the big picture, but if thing keep going the way they have been, then whatever the cause it's going to cause problems for us, and maybe we can or can not stop it, but instead of betting the farm on our ability to stop the trend, let's look at things that improve our survivability and maybe will buck the trend.

It seems to me that one area that could really benefit the world are micro-grids and ways to recycle small scale waste into them. That is to say that there is a lot of waste energy that we don't bother collecting because storage and transmission make it cost ineffective. One of the challenges with solar houses is rigging the houses grid to take/store the excess so that you have energy when solar is unproductive, but if you look a little wider you'll see that in addition to excess solar energy there are lots of other sources of waste energy that could be tapped and stored, if that doesn't have to go to far. And if we design home scale electrical systems to take these small inputs, then there will be an incentive to design in energy capturing technologies, into the bigger "waste" producers to reduce the cost of operations. 

Another area is refrigeration and cooling. Yes we could probably design much more efficient refrigerators by understanding that if your refrigerator isn't densely packed then every time you open the door and lose all the cold air you're making it do a lot of work. why we haven't made it to a 3 sections design, with the bottom third being a drawer and greater control on the temperature of each section, with ice disposer in the door, is beyond me. But if we got the base cooling that much more efficient all the better, and if we could better move heat around a house or building then we could do without a lot of the production of cooler or hotter air. 


And my last rant on this whole general area, is that many of the people that I have known that have been very pro, let's do the environment right, have also been very supportive of "historical" districts and building preservation. Historical districts don't often make sense because they freeze in place buildings that had been seeing major renovation every 20 years. If the history of a building is to change, then you're not preserving it but not letting that continue. Beyond that however is the fact that may of these buildings are vastly inefficient and keeping them around and making people use them is contrary to the goals of lessening our impact on the world. 


So in summary, we need to stop being so arrogant and ignorant about where we stand with climate science, and should not ignore basic laws of physics when looking for ways to fix things. While we aren't masters of climate science that should be ok, we're finally in a position to start learning, but it will take a while. It's okay to come up with hypotheses as long as you are open to competing ones and established ones having to be altered or thrown out. Climate science is important. But beyond grand declarations there are problems that can be addressed and solved. Those smaller problems should have as much of our focus as the larger ones.

The fall of Official Identity

I think it's funny, I keep hearing about new measures for ID cards, when the system that supports them is dying. There are three things in motion right now that are undermining or system of official identities and that could cause major upheaval if we don't proactively seek to address them. 

To understand the first big threat, it helps to have ever had to establish yourself independently with a state ID authority (normally the DMV or MVA). In addition to providing documentation establishing who you are, you have to establish where you live. They normally have people do this by bringing official mail, bills, bank statements, etc. The problem with this is that most people have started to interact with the people who generate that mail online, and most of them want to help you "Go Green" (and save them money), by stopping to send you such mail. No longer receiving that official mail. Good luck proving that you live where you do, especially if you're living with a friend or somewhere where you don't have a lease. Oops!

The second threat is tied to the first. That's the impending collapse of the US Postal Service. Not only will it accelerate the first problem, just as the first problem accelerates it, but it prevents new interesting problems for the future. The USPS are generally the one of the main agents for officially recognizing addressing change. If you're still getting bills Fed-Ex'ed to you, what happen when you move to a new community or building that Fed-Ex doesn't understand yet, cause the database of valid addresses isn't being updated anymore? As long as your identity is established with mail, you need the USPS.

The third threat, and this is the big one, is what happens when people become long term nomads? Let me explain because this one is a little more complicated. Why do we maintain private residences? To hold our stuff, For recreations that require infrastructure, for a place to sleep, a place to be a family, and as a place with a Bathroom. So let's take a time to look at these motivations and see what's on the horizon.  

As my posts on media have probably let on, I'm a bit of a major consumer. But over the last few years, less and less of my spending results in the physical accumulation of more stuff. Most of the media I buy is bought digitally and with new cloud initiatives, I'm less likely to have to house infrastructure to make sure that I don't lose it. When my stuff other then furniture is just my clothes and the devices that I carry around all the time anyway there's a lot less of a motivation to invest in a location. And the seeming universal migration that everyone makes to college is going to have the younger generations realizing this sooner.  

The idea of having a hobby room or a media room appeals to a lot of people, but often this is what loses the space wars. In addition to that preferences in media consumption tend to make people want to be where they can consume the media they want. Well as the media goes digital and cable services start letting you view your content anywhere. You can view your media anywhere especially as technology to take what you've got in your pocket and put it on a big screen improve. Just like fitness rooms and laundry rooms, I could easily see dorms and apartment buildings of the future containing reservable media rooms, that are posh enough that they make up for the lack of space, which in addition to the media rooms, let them fit more people in that space. And eventually Hobby retailers will figure it out too. Someone will eventually setup a place as a perpetual con. They will have a store where you can by hobby paraphernalia setting where you can partake in your hobby, better then you could in your cramped  home, and even some storage space that you can rent to store your stuff. Plus while you're their they'll also sell you things for peripheral needs like food and/or for the late sessions a place to crash. And the best part is that these places help you connect with people with similar interests to you. 

As for the biological needs of sleeping and the bathroom. As people's use of their home becomes more and more dorm like, because they don't need space for stuff or hobby supplies, then there's not reason for there not to be a shift. Some people like Google already have fitness rooms and nap rooms at some of their locations, how long before employees that are at a remote site for a night or a month just crash there, even if the employees doesn't think of and provision for it first. So now you have people moving from college Dorms to corporate Dorms. When will these people ever change their permanent address to be anything other then their Parent's home?

Which finally brings us to having a family. So you've people who still list their home as their parents home, who have all the stuff they own that won't fit in a duffel bag and messenger bag at their parents home, and who will probably need help when it comes to day care anyway. Where are they going to go? If it's close enough they will probably just go to their Parents home. Which isn't so far fetched a thing, for a lot of our history there have been familial homes. And if we're spending most of our adult lives as vagabonds, why not? The only problem is that some familial homes will be inconvenient. And the answer to that is new ones being established. Or maybe your aunt, uncle, or childless older friend will invite you in as family. 

And the problem with being a long term nomad who spends decades of their life are marginally tied to any one residence isn't establishing official identity, it's with what happens when your official identity doesn't match your actual one. What happens when you're a "resident" of New York, spending all your professional time in California? Who get's to tax you? Who do you get to vote for?  and how is a jurisdiction supposed to afford the infrastructure it's residents need if none of them officially live there?

So we are heading towards a world where it is getting hard to establish official identity and one in which it easier to maintain one that isn't an actual reflection of reality. We're approaching a world in which it's easier for people to be transient, but in which our funding of infrastructure, governmental representation, and maintaining official identity is based on not being inherently transient. And what happens when a person finds themselves untethered, with a place to sleep and job, but no real home and no way to establish an identity? A lot of the assumptions that have built modern America were reflective of the time but not really the past, or perhaps the future. So do we work to preserve those assumptions or try to fin a better set?

And the most important question, as is the question with all inevitable change is will we act now when we can be thoughtful and have time to innovate, or will we wait until we are at the moment of crisis?