It’s not just the Democrats. It’s the climate changed obsessed Green movement in general, it’s all politicians and high profile world leaders who are increasingly, either unwittingly, or knowingly, being sucked into this dangerous cult, who are advocating and in many cases implementing its insane policy prescriptions for averting an imaginary climate catastrophe.

The quote is from Oppenheimer of course, somewhat liberally translated from the original Sanskrit verse of the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna reveals his terrifying, magnificent, wondrous true form to his disciple Arjuna.

But it is terrifyingly apt. The Green movement is, literally, becoming death and the potential destroyer of this world of plenty. In supposedly trying to save the environment, it is degrading and destroying the environment; ‘our house is on fire’ says Greta and, quite literally, Greens are making sure it burns to the ground by implementing crazy environmental policies and opposing sane, practical measures which reduce the risk of devastating wildfires. Also, as Tony Heller notes, if we stop using fossil fuels, completely eliminate them from modern life, then we will die. It’s as simple as that.

The catastrophic Australian wildfires are the latest, terrifying example of what happens when Green ideologues are let loose, first to dictate what is ‘best’ for the environment, then to scream madly that climate change is destroying the very environment which they negligently failed to protect from a dangerous combination of foreseeable very dry, hot weather and an army of copycat psychopathic firebugs. Then they screech even more dementedly from the windows of their unassailable ivory towers in the media, in NGOs and in academia that it’s all the fault of the anti-climate big fossil fuel companies and their paid shills in government.

We’ve probably never had it so good as we have in the last decade, notes Matt Ridley:

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Efficiencies in agriculture mean the world is now approaching ‘peak farmland’ — despite the growing number of people and their demand for more and better food, the productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking amount of land. In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 per cent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow.

Land-sparing is the reason that forests are expanding, especially in rich countries. In 2006 Ausubel worked out that no reasonably wealthy country had a falling stock of forest, in terms of both tree density and acreage. Large animals are returning in abundance in rich countries; populations of wolves, deer, beavers, lynx, seals, sea eagles and bald eagles are all increasing; and now even tiger numbers are slowly climbing.

Greens and the climate crisis doomers don’t see it like this. They see a world on fire, ravaged by storms, heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas, which will only get worse. In every bad weather event, they see confirmation of their pessimistic world view and the opportunity to ascribe blame to the capitalist, fossil fuel polluters who are ravaging the world with their selfish excesses. Not only are they exploiting these natural weather events and their impacts for political gain, but they are actively making their impacts worse with their ludicrous ‘environmental’ policies:

I don’t fully buy into Matt’s optimism because many iconic species are on the brink of extinction due to hunting, exploitation and habitat destruction, there are still millions living in poverty and facing starvation, death and disease because of political corruption, poor management and greed, but it is undeniable that today’s fossil-fueled, technologically advanced world is generally a vast improvement on even the world that existed 50 years ago. But undeniably, some things have got worse. Undeniably, climate change has not made things worse; it has very likely contributed in no small measure to making things better.

Climate crisis fanatics are cashing in big time on the real human misery and environmental catstrophe of the Australian bushfires. It’s quite a sickening spectacle, especially as it is Green policies which have contributed to this avoidable catastrophe.

Karen Stenner is a “political psychologist and behavioural economist” – putting her dubious talents to good use I see. Ali Milani is a “UK Labour Councillor and activist” – enough said. What these people are doing is propagating extremely damaging political propaganda and very possibly encouraging acts of environmental terrorism by arsonists and by mad Greens dictating insanely destructive Green policies. Because there is little doubt that Green policies are to blame for the severity of these wildfires and there is no doubt whatsoever that arsonists are responsible for lighting many of them. Bolsonaro even went so far as to accuse NGOs of deliberately lighting the Amazon fires earlier in the year, which climate activists also capitalised upon. Perhaps that was stretching it a bit, as no hard evidence seems t have been forthcoming, but it would not surprise me in the least if at least some of the psychopathic firebugs who have devastated the Australian landscape and its wildlife and burned peoples’ homes to the ground, even killed people, might have been tempted to do so to ‘prove a point’ about climate change. Look at XR. Some of those people are seriously unhinged, convinced that billions will die soon. So what’s a few lives now, a few million hectares burned to the ground when weighed against the loss of billions of lives and the incineration of the entire planet in a few years time?

Reposted from the Fabius Maximus website.

Posted by Larry Kummer, Editor

Summary: Amidst the gloom that blankets America, there is evidence that a discontinuity in history approaches – a technological singularity. It could blow away many of today’s problems. Let this help dispel our fears and give us cause to celebrate. In the New Year, we can begin to prepare for what is coming.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
— Attributed to Charles H. Duell, Director of US Patent Office 1898-1901. The quote is as false as the idea it expresses.

ID 159868760 © 9194202 | Dreamstime.

Wonders might await us that we cannot even imagine, just as the people of 1850 could not imagine the world of 1950. The rate of economic growth will accelerate, bringing more security and prosperity to the world. Pollution as we know it will be almost gone by 2100. The world will become a garden again as the population crashes. In the 22nd century we can repair the damage done in the 21st as the world’s population grew to 10 or 12 billion. Our next big challenge will be managing the political and social disruptions created by the coming new technologies.

Humanity rose by creating singularities

History, from the Serengeti Plains to the Apollo moon landings, is a series of singularities. Fire gave us power over the environment. Agriculture gave us control over our food supply. Writing allowed better accumulation of knowledge across generations. The industrial revolutionn broke us free from the Malthusian limits on our population and wealth.

Each singularity took us into an unknowable future. For a fun illustration of this see “Early Holocene Sci-fi” by Pat Mathews.

Shaman:  I have foreseen a time when everybody can have all the meat, fat, and sweet stuff they can eat, and they all get fat.

Chief:        You have had a vision of the Happy Hunting Grounds.

Shaman:  It is considered a great and horrible problem! People go out of their way to eat leaves and grass and grains, and work very hard to look lean and brown.

Chief:        You’ve been eating too many of those strange mushrooms, and are seeing everything backward.

The singularity that just ended

“The Singularity has happened. We call it ‘the industrial revolution’ or ‘the long nineteenth century.’ It was over by the close of 1918. Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses). Check. Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check. Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.”

— “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi (Assoc. Prof of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon).

Industrial revolutions do not just solve problems. They make them irrelevant – to be replaced by the problems of a more stable and prosperous world. Each is a leap forward followed by a period of consolidation.

An industrial revolution began in 1700 (to pick an arbitrary date) and ended with WWII. Its momentum boosted per capita GDP in the developed nations through the 1960s. Few noticed it ending. Even in the 1960’s people expected a future of rapid technological progress. But all we got was the manned space program (an expensive trip to nowhere) and the supersonic transport (a premature technology), and radical but narrow changes in communication and computers.

Few predicted this slowdown. One who did was the great physicist Albert Abraham Michelson in Lights waves and their uses (1902). People laughed, but time has shown it as more right than wrong.

“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. …Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that ‘our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.’”

Now the slowing is obvious. The productivity of research – the engine of progress – is slowing as ever more resources are devoted to it (see this NBER paper). See this dismal graph from “Are ideas getting harder to find?“, a 2017 NBER paper by Nicholas Bloom et al. More evidence: growth in total factor productivity peaked in the 1940s, despite the skyrocketing number of researchers. We press the gas pedal ever harder, but the car does not accelerate. Click to enlarge the graph.

Looking at the bottom line, US economic growth has been slowing since the 1970s, as has that of the other developed nations. Many books describe this, such as these.

A new singularity looms ahead

Available at Amazon.

Each year gives more evidence that a singularity lies in our near future, a discontinuity in history that ends our current tech stagnation. We can only guess at what it might bring.

Space travel can bring a vast increase in resources. In the distant future, planetary engineering might make us independent of Earth’s vicissitudes.

Genetic engineering can liberate humanity from random evolution, bringing the freedom to shape ourselves.

New energy sources, such as fusion can provide ample clean power for a growing world. It has reached a new milestone, as private capital moves in.

New industrial methods are coming. Such as learning the mysteries of catalytic chemistry. Our bodies do near-miraculous chemical processes at room temperature. This will also transform agriculture into a more eco-friendly cornucopia.

Semi-intelligent computers (aka “artificial Intelligence”) can supplement our minds, just as machines supplemented brawn – boosting productivity and hence economic growth. In the more distant future, perhaps they will end our solitude and free us from limitations of biological intelligence.

A longer vital lifespan can change humanity in ways we cannot imagine. In George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, longer vital lifespans are the key to a better society (people of the future see the past as a wreck because everything was run by “children”). Vital life is key, to avoid becoming Struldbruggs – the senile, decrepit immortals in Gulliver’s Travels.

These are only plausible innovations. Who knows what we might achieve in the future?

What is a singularity?

There are many different concepts of a singularity, some contradictory. A key aspect is that we cannot see through a singularity in the physical universe (e.g., a black hole). Its first mention was by the great John von Neumann (1903-57), paraphrased by Stanislaw Ulam (BAMS, 1958).

“One conversation centered on the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

The public learned about it from Vernor Vinge’s 1986 book Marooned in Realtime, which described a wondrous future in which the rate of technological progress accelerates – eventually going vertical – after which the humanity leaves for a higher plane of existence. He gave a more detailed explanation in his 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”

There are several kinds of technological singularity, described in this excerpt from “Three Major Singularity Schools” by AI researcher Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.

“Singularity discussions seem to be splitting up into three major schools of thought: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion. The thing about these three logically distinct schools of Singularity thought is that while all three core claims support each other, all three strong claims tend to contradict each other.

Accelerating Change.

“Core claim: Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly as much change as has occurred in the past over our own lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000 years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how much change we should expect in the future.

“Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves, typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they will cross key thresholds, like the creation of Artificial Intelligence.

“Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler (?), John Smart.

Event Horizon.

“Core claim: For the last hundred thousand years, humans have been the smartest intelligences on the planet. All our social and technological progress was produced by human brains. Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on human intelligence (brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence). This will create a future that is weirder by far than most science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets.

“Strong claim: To know what a superhuman intelligence would do, you would have to be at least that smart yourself. To know where Deep Blue would play in a chess game, you must play at Deep Blue’s level. Thus the future after the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is absolutely unpredictable.

“Advocates: Vernor Vinge.

Intelligence Explosion.

“Core claim: Intelligence has always been the source of technology. If technology can significantly improve on human intelligence – create minds smarter than the smartest existing humans – then this closes the loop and creates a positive feedback cycle. What would humans with brain-computer interfaces do with their augmented intelligence? One good bet is that they’d design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces. Intelligence enhancement is a classic tipping point; the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.

“Strong claim: This positive feedback cycle goes FOOM, like a chain of nuclear fissions gone critical – each intelligence improvement triggering an average of>1.000 further improvements of similar magnitude – though not necessarily on a smooth exponential pathway. Technological progress drops into the characteristic timescale of transistors (or super-transistors) rather than human neurons. The ascent rapidly surges upward and creates superintelligence (minds orders of magnitude more powerful than human) before it hits physical limits.

“Advocates: I. J. Good, Eliezer Yudkowsky.”

Prepare for the future

Why are so many so gloomy about our future? We have survived ice ages, pandemics, natural disasters (e.g., the eruption of Toba, which exterminated most of humanity), and our own mistakes. Our history gives us good reason to look to the future with anticipation, not fear. Remember that as our elites attempt to lead us by arousing fears. Do not fear the future. Have faith in America.

For More Information

Ideas! For ideas how to spend your holiday cash, see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see a story about our future: Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.

To learn more about the coming singularity.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about forecasts, about the new industrial revolution, about good news for America, and especially these…

1. The coming big inequality. Was Marx just early?
2. Do we face secular stagnation or a new industrial revolution?
3. Economists show the perils and potential of the coming robot revolution.
4. Potentially horrific effects of drugs and machines making people smarter & stronger.
5. The coming Great Extinction – of jobs.
6. Comparing our stable lives to the previous period of rapid disruption.
7. The fast rise and fall of two industries show the coming singularity. Let’s prepare now.
8. A Timeline for the Extinction of Jobs by Machines.

Visions of our future

Our future might see accelerating growth leading to the unimaginable. These two books sketch out what might lie ahead.

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. One of my favorite science fiction novels. Brilliant and fun.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. Also, see his website.

Available at Amazon.

Available at Amazon.