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What have we done? I mean WHAT HAVE WE DONE!!! I have become a climate change vandal without ever knowing it. As a businessman making my wealth from technology I have to begin to admit MEA CULPA. I am guilty. I was thinking about Climate Change simply because of the arguments which are polarizing scientists and common folk around the world.
I have to admit that I don’t know how much human beings contribute to climate change, but logically I can’t subscribe to the view that some people have, that human beings don’t contribute to climate change and it is merely a cycle over millions of years.
I’m looking at it this way. The earth is a closed system. That is, we have an atmosphere and everything within it is enclosed and never actually “leaks out”. For example, all the water that has ever been on this planet is still here. There is no more or less than there has ever been. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s clean, or that it can be used. I wonder, in Australia about the Great Artesian Basin, that huge ocean under our feet. Once, millions of years ago that ocean under our feet was on the surface. We can see that in the millions of fish fossils we find in dry desertified places in our country. Actually I have a theory. It is a theory that flies in the face of most other thinking and most probably would be just too scary for governments to ever do anything about testing.
In recent years we have been encouraged, even coerced to save water. We have been led to believe that water is the most precious commodity, (and it most likely is). BUT, and there is always a BUT in this argument, how does ‘locking up’ water really affect us.
ARGUMENT: Within our enclosed atmosphere there is said to be an eternal cycle. Water evaporates, forms clouds, winds blow the clouds over the land and sea, and atmospheric conditions release that water as rain, which then falls to the earth and is once again set to repeat the cycle.
As populations increase, we have built dams to provide water for agriculture, for consumption in cities and towns. We have altered the flow of rivers, and diverted water for the purposes of growing water greedy consumables like cotton, wheat, rice etc, to feed and clothe the 8 plus billion souls on the planet.
We have locked up water in reservoirs and dams, and stopped it’s natural flow from the mountains, to the lowlands, in rivers and streams to the sea. In real terms we have changed our climate in a very real way by slowing down, and in some cases even stopping entirely the natural evaporation and ‘recycling’ of water. When water evaporates into the clouds, and falls as rain, it is to a certain extent ‘cleaned’ (though maybe not entirely) but certainly more than when it has to go through expensive processes to make it drinkable.
Now, we have the example of dried up or slow flowing rivers, such as the Murray here in Australia, the Yangtze in China and, well, most of the mighty rivers of the world. Their flow is stopped by huge dams, which divert the water to places of high population, or to the millions and millions of hectares of land growing grain and cotton. We further compound the situation in the production of meat. Cattle, sheep etc consume vast amounts of water. In the state of Wisconsin USA alone there are approximately 10,354,979 cows. In New Zealand, with a human population of around 3 million, there are over 30 million sheep. An average cow weighs something like 1500lbs, and will eat about 100lb of feed every day and drink a bathtub full of water. 70% of the bulk of a cow, or about 350kg is water. Multiply that number by the number of cows and we suddenly realize just how much of our worlds water is ‘locked’ up in a single beast domestically grown for consumption by human beings. Let’s just make the situation even worse. What percentage of a human being is water? Without going into the minutiae, a newborn baby is about 78% and a grown adult is about 55-60% roughly. However, in MY lifetime the population has exploded. In 1959 we had a population of around 3 billion people. By 1999 that number had doubled to 6 billion. By 2042 the population in human terms, discounting major catastrophe will be 9 billion people. That is 9 billion walking columns of water. One way or another we are LOCKING UP water which should be cycling, evaporating, flowing, creating clouds, and depositing rain. Damming rivers, diverting rivers and LOCKING UP water is a recipe for disaster. I would argue that we must, one way or another UNLOCK the water we are so greedily storing. We have become so afraid that we are causing climate change by not accepting the natural cycle of the planet. We are creating deserts through our own fear. Should we not be boring down into the Great Artesian basin and letting this underground ocean burst to the surface, evaporate, and begin to nurture the land once more. Clouds will do their own work of desalination, and the winds will blow the clouds to let this vast and precious commodity fall back to earth and create fertile lands, forests, and in doing so we will begin to reduce our personal carbon footprint.
Talking about carbon footprints, I shocked myself. I live a relatively frugal life by western standards. Here is the result of my visit to www.myfootprint.org. My country Australia nationally has a carbon footprint of 29.8. I was pleased to know that mine is 13.5. National food footprint is 26.9, mine is 26.2. Housing national footprint is 10.2, mine is 5.8. National goods and services are 23.9. Mine is 16.5. As you can see I should be pleased as punch with these figures. In one case my carbon footprint is half the national average and the others are significantly smaller than the average. HOWEVER, here is the shock. If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle we would require 3.85 Earths to sustain us. Even living as frugally as I do my carbon footprint is completely unsustainable. We only have one earth!
Have I changed any minds yet about whether human beings are significant in changing our climate? I hope so!
Let me go one scary step further. I remember a lecture I went to by David Suzuki some 20 years ago. I was skeptical; in fact, much of what David Suzuki says is cynical and questionable. Recently he called for the imprisonment of those who deny climate change is significantly caused by human beings. Personally I think his tongue was in his cheek, but some took his comments very seriously. Whether the comment was serious or not we do have a sort of precedent in Australia where one can be imprisoned for denying the holocaust. Why not the same for those who totally deny climate change? If they are wrong, then they are criminal in their behavior and we are screwed! But that’s an aside. I was present at a lecture where David Suzuki spoke about “carrying capacity”. Imagine a paddock where 100 cattle can graze and grow healthily and quickly. Increase that number by one and the carrying capacity of the paddock has been compromised. Very quickly the cattle become more emaciated, disease breaks out, and the entire herd has problems.
The carrying capacity of the earth is said to be around 8 billion people. By 2042 there will be 9 billion. Currently there is a child born every .05 of one second, and we are carrying more than 6.9 billion people. We are bordering on catastrophe.
We can hold off a little while by each one of us reducing our carbon footprint, and consuming less, changing our lifestyle and becoming more frugal. It’s only a ‘hold out’ because even if we each reduce our carbon footprint by half the end result will be the same. We are changing the climate of the earth and those who argue differently must have rocks in their head with the evidence available. There are still those who declare that the earth is flat, but at least they do little damage in their foolish beliefs.
It’s radical I know to say UNLOCK the water. Destroy the dams, let the water flow, and let the atmosphere take care of the distribution. It’s a gamble too because we have become so afraid of not having any water to use that we are creating a self fulfilling prophecy. We WILL run out of useable water very soon, and water is the one thing that sustains all life on this planet.
In my next blog I intend to talk about “e waste”. Waste produced by our digital lifestyle, and how we can think that we are so proud of recycling that waste by sending used computers and mobile phones to China, but how we are creating a disaster in the manner by which we recycle. Use of acids and corrosives to reclaim materials and polluting water supplies with toxic materials from our recycling will be major part of the argument in support of climate change.

We are human, and we live on the earth within a closed system. No matter what we say, we change the earth, we change everything. We are entering an age of catastrophic disasters if we don’t begin to change NOW. I look forward to your comment. Take care, clean your registry every day, update your antivirus and MAKE SURE YOU TURN YOUR COMPUTER OFF OR PUT IT TO SLEEP WHEN YOU ARE NOT USING IT!
www.blogactionday.org

I'm going to China next week, 15th October, and will be back on 26th. I'll be blogging from Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou and places in-between. So looking forward to seeing my Chinese daughter (Guo Ya Na)and discussing philosophy of Buddhism with my priest in Xiamen. This year I want to retire from business and become more footloose. I

I dropped a little poem I wrote when I was another person onto Minenow’s blog. She wondered perhaps what inspired me to do that. What reason? Sometimes we don’t think of reasons, only connections. A long time ago, after a lifetime of untreated manic depression, with 24 years of unadulterated love and marriage, I found myself stripped of all I had ever had, or had ever been. I lived in a beat up old VW camper named Charlotte, often spending months in the bush alone. ‘Hermically sealed’ I wrote my books and studied. One night I made my camp by the sea, and wandered in search of rock oysters and bush food. I made my fire on the sand, and gazed up at the full moon spreading over the water, and making eerie shadows of the palm trees. I still walked with a stick, without funds for pain medication or access to mood changing drugs. Daily life was like a dream, neither real nor ethereal. I would wake believing I was awake, and then wake again knowing that I had only dreamed being awake, and sometimes I would wake again, not knowing if the first waking or the second had been a dream, or if I would wake yet again.
They say the mind compensates and maybe it did. Maybe this too was a dream, for out of nowhere an old “bushie” appeared, and invited himself to my campfire. I had driven across a desert, to the far northern reaches of the continent where there is little or no habitation. The last signs of human habitation I had come across had been weeks ago, and surely there could be no one but me here. Considering now, I still do not know if the old man was a dream.
I told the old bloke that I had reached the end, and I would put on my best clothes, tape up Charlottes windows, and take my leave.
“You need a reason” The old fellow said, his bearded face dancing in the firelight, so that his eyes seemed to further light the space around him.
“A reason for what” I said. It was not a question, but a statement.
“Everyone needs a reason.” He said, “perhaps just to get up in the morning”. And for the rest of the evening we both fell silent.
I woke in the morning, stretched in the tropical sun, the ashes of the fire surrounded by a heap of oyster shells. There was no trace of anyone else having been there. No footsteps leading to or away from my campfire.
I was washing in the crystal clear waterhole in the rainforest, when what I can only describe as a ‘creature’ wandered down to the waters’ edge to drink. He was thin, and ugly, with floppy ears, a cross between a retriever and perhaps a German shepherd. That night he strolled onto my camp and lay down by the fire huffing and panting, his tongue louching from the side of his mouth.
I called him REASON. And from that day on I had a reason to wake up and be responsible for another creature in my life. He died only a year or two ago, peacefully by the side of my bed. I wrote that poem in memory of my reason. So I gave it to Minenow, because whatever connection was made in her blog, she wanted a reason.
Take care, clean your cache, update your antivirus, and always make sure you have a reason.

Whilst I did not get into round two of the internship competition, mainly through deliberate lack of promotion and getting out on the hustings, I want to say massive thanks to all those who participated and got into the second round. I let my blog sit there unattended and perhaps should have done some promotion, but “them’s the breaks”. To Greg and eddy in particular I want to say well done guys. You played the game fair and square and went into it with obvious gusto and you did well. To some others I might say that the ability to cut and paste the work of other people was a tad sneaky and unworthy, but that’s purely a personal opinion. Regardless, I’m going to put MY list of 10 things that might entertain the Opera Community.
1)When Opera opens play the opening bars of Edvard Hagerup Griegs Hall of the Mountain King.
2)When Opera is closed, give the user the choice of closing with a FART BUTTON.
3)Provide a list of “funny” videos that will auto send to your ten best friends that you can choose before you log off.
4)Auto clean your registry when you log out of, myopera.
5)When you open or close opera ask if “you would like fries with that?”
6)Add a radio button for most used widgets in your blog space
7)Add interactive “games” you can play with your “friends”
8)Auto send birthday or celebration cards to your friends from your browser
9)Add a download button to all emails sent from your mail client.
10)Provide Private Browsing and Parental controls as a pop up when you open Opera.
Well guys and girls. I wish you all the very best in your quest to see Oslo and maybe begin a new era in your chosen careers. Meanwhile I will spend my time launching my latest 47” and 55” massive flatscreen tv’s with pc’s inside them so that Opera looks BIG AND BEAUTIFUL when you want to surf the net in your loungeroom. Take care, always upgrade your antivirus, clean your cache and please add me as your friends. In return I will try to entertain with my blogs, and will continue to write my books, my textbooks, and my poetry books. Good luck to you all. Prof.

We speak of the planets most precious commodity, water, as though it were, like oil, running out. Of course it is not. It is merely devalued and polluted. Because we have an atmosphere, there is no more or less water on and in the earth than ever there was at the beginning of time. It is our only perpetual motion machine. We lock it up, we dam the rivers, we block its passage, we store it, and curtail evaporation as though evaporation were an evil. In doing so we deprive ourselves of the very substance of life. By allowing the free flow of water, we permit evaporation, which forms clouds, and the clouds purify and return it to the earth cleansed and pure again. Under the skin of the earth here in our most dry continent on earth we have the biggest underground ocean, the Great Artesian Basin. In the western deserts, fish fossils millions of years old litter the surface, while beneath our feet a mighty ocean rests. I wonder, if ever we conquered our fear, and brought that ocean to the surface, to evaporate and be cleansed into rain, whether the great deserts would once again bloom to become the great tropical forests and lakes this continent once thrived on. In Australia we use more water to grow cotton and rice than all the other sustainable trees and plants combined. We divert the water from farming communities to grow the cotton, harvest it, and allow the earth to dry out and for salt, making the land useless for more sustainable forests. Trees take in carbon dioxide and water, their leaves transpire, and send water into the atmosphere to form clouds, and return to earth to sustain the whole.
My Buddhist teacher in China asked me to pour myself a glass of water. To lift it to the light and see the specks of solids, drifting in the sunlight. “This,” he said is life as old as time itself. “Lift the glass to your lips and drink”. I did so, and he sat back, hands clasped together and smiled. Then he spoke again. “Inside that single glass of water are the remains of all the life that has ever existed on the earth. Plants, insects, trees, all of humanity and every creature has become a part of you. You ARE the sum of all that has been before by taking in this water.”
“How many people exist on earth?” He asked. “About 8 billion”. “And each human being, and each cow, and fox, and rabbit and the tiniest of lichens? How much in total” ‘Uncountable “ I replied. “You,” he said are a walking fountain of water. How much of your body is only water?” I knew my science roughly and answered about 75%. “Can you say that death is final, the end?” He asked. I thought for a moment. I cease to be, my body breaks down, my chemicals return to the earth, my fluids return to the water, and sustains life again. “I cannot cease to be.” I said. “Because all that is me returns to the earth, and my thoughts return to the river of thought for eternity.” He looked pleased. “Ah” he said, “You have considered that other river, that of thought. The river of memories, discoveries, philosophy, an energy that cannot disappear, forever to run in that other river across universes”. He leaned forward and poured green tea, which had been prepared with great reverence, almost by ritual. “So can there be reincarnation?” My teacher never answers questions, he questions answers. “Perhaps,” I said, the moment of BEING is the moment when we take our first breath, and our brains take up a little of that river of thought. Energy that has once been used by others, memories of some other self. Would this not be reincarnation, to absorb the memories in some infinitesimal way of some other person or being?” “Would it?” He asked. “Perhaps.” I answered. When I came back to Australia I had made a change without ever having tried. Now I know why I can only live by the sea. I know that water, more precious than the most precious metal should not be stored, locked up, CONSERVED. It should be set free to cleanse and replenish the rivers, to flow down the mountains to the sea. Yet fear causes us to dam the rivers, lock up the water, refuse to allow the perfection that is the whole. Let water be free to run where it will, to evaporate, to form clouds, to drop back to earth. To sustain us all.