A Stick With Whgich To Beat Dick.
by Ian R. Thorpe
Oct 2009
CREATIVE COMMONS: attribute, non commercial, no derivs
KEYWORDS: climate, climate change, global warming, environment, science, scientists,business, profit, nature
Billionaire self - publicist Richard Branson has offered a $25million prize for the first scientist to come up with a machine that will suck carbon dioxide out of air. Sorry to be the one to break the bad news to all the money grubbing, fame seeking scientists out there but such a machine already exists, it called a tree and a lady named Mother Nature has been growing them for millions of years.
Trees are wonderful machines but really they are only components in a far bigger machine, one which runs very slowly but is self repairing, self adapting and self managing.
The inventor of this machine never attended University, nor even had basic schooling as far as we know and yet she invented things that science has ever been unable to explain. Life, she invented life. Modern scientists claim they are on the verge of creating life in the laboratory and yet they cannot define what life is. What is that spark that gives even the most simple of creatures the urge to survive and reproduce? What intelligence tells a dying tree to flower more profusely and make more seeds in the last season before it dies. Such phenomena are well documented, the logic behind the action is easy to understand. But how does the tree or plant know, it has no brain, it cannot be taught.
What powers that urge to survive, to procreate, to continue the species? We simply do not have a clue.
But are these attempts to create life in the laboratory anything more than re inventing the wheel. Life as it exists now works perfectly well and there is no reason to believe the promised benefits from these developments will ever materialise. Scientists have a track record for promising the earth and delivering a pile of dirt.
Prof. James Lovelock, originator of Gaia theory which proposes that the Earth, the biosphere is a self regulating mechanism has recently written that attempts to reverse, halt or even slow the climate change process are too little, too late and are doomed to fail. He concurs with my own view that efforts to understand what is happening are futile as the ecosphere, the planet's surface, under the ocean and immediately above the land and water, is controlled by interactions so vast, slow and complex they cannot be observed or effectively monitored and therefore defy scientific understanding.
The scientists and their paymasters in international politics and big business are undeterred by Lovelock's views. There are vast fortunes to be made from appearing to be fighting climate change. Inventors of carbon capture gadgets that will cause more carbon emissions during manufacture and recycling than they will ever save and as yet only exist on paper can attract multi million dollar investments from governments and international agencies while people with feasible ideas for wave and marine current generators struggle to attract $1million to get from working model to operational prototype.
It is the old bike shed syndrome we used to take advantage of in the computer industry. The financial directors would haggle all day over allocating funds to paint the bikesheds but sign off millions for a new computer system so long as our pitch was up in enough technobabble and the bottom line was a big enough number.
Bike shed syndrome is the high tech equivalent of The Emperors New Clothes. Everyone understands painting the bikesheds so top managers can be seen to be doing their jobs. Challenge the Information Technology consultants though and they are walking on quicksand. There are so many traps just waiting for the unwary that the managers do not examine the proposal though all claim it makes perfect sense to them. One of the favourite maxims of the 1980s was nobody was ever sacked for buying from IBM. On hearing that any good consultant would have added, "No but a lot should have been." That is not to say IBM systems were poor, far from it. Often though they were bigger, more powerful and far more expensive than the system that would have been most appropriate.
We must not fall into bikeshed syndrome on the question of climate change. The world is already in a huge, possibly bottomless, financial crisis. Government, on behalf of taxpayers, are throwing money at banks that have gambled recklessly on financial products that deal in monopoly money. They are throwing money at failed industries. And they are prepared to throw money at climate change quackery in the deluded belief that gadgets and whizz bangs can control a process that, if it is actually man made, has three hundred years momentum behind it.
That is why Richard Branson want to get into the climate change business. Whoever controls the technology governments decide to opt for in their campaign of deception will stand to make billions of Dollars, Euros, Pounds, you name it. And all the time we have the perfect gadget for absorbing carbon and the perfect system for controlling climate change. The problem for politicians is neither is likely to be showing visible success before the next pound of elections.
Ma. N. is unlikely to be trying to claim Dick’s money however, she is an old hippy and has never had any interest in money. On the up side she will be happy to keep providing us with as many tress as we need free of charge so long as we promise to stop cutting them down to make room for more houses, offices, factories, roads and shopping malls.
So the answer is simple and the Branson prize for re inventing the wheel is just another publicity stunt.
But Mother Nature is no meanie, she tells me if we all start being nicer to her she will ask her trees to provide each of us with a stick with which to beat Branson and all the other money men and politicians for being such dicks.
