If you read news reports or environmental studies about global warming and the current environmental issues we’re dealing with, you have, no doubt, often heard solutions provided that are very simple and straightforward: use less gas, watch your carbon footprint, support ‘green’ companies, and so on. But the solutions to undoing the damage we have done to the earth are not so simple. Scientists can’t even agree on what the basic outlook is for the earth, much less the details.
How many of you have a computer? (Dumb question, I know… the answer is just about everyone in the western world). And how many of you have ever dealt with a sluggish computer. Here’s the important question: how many of you have been given a simple and straightforward suggestion about how to make your computer perform well again, and did that suggestion work?
You’ve certainly used a computer somewhere that took forever to do the simple task you were trying to perform. Maybe you clicked on a link to a website, and all the sudden the computer slows to a crawl for three or four (or 10!) minutes and doesn’t do anything at all. Are you familiar with this scenario?
What’s going on is that the computer has limited resources, and for whatever reason, one or more of those resources is being exhausted.
Maybe you need more RAM or more level 2 cache. Maybe the hard disk is failing. Maybe you have too many programs currently running for the speed of the processor that you are using. Maybe the operating system is trying to do something else in the background, performing some task that you don’t even know is turned on, like indexing and cataloging all the files on your computer. It’s possible that adding more RAM or buying a faster processor will solve the problem.
More likely, the problem is an intricate combination of several factors, and fixing any one piece of the system won’t really address the performance issue you are experiencing. You probably will need to add more RAM and buy a faster processor and tune your operating system to turn off some unnecessary features and get a bigger or faster hard disk.
You see, a computer is an extremely complicated system. Even though it can handle a large drain on the resources it has, when one or more of those resources becomes strained, performance issues show up in many places simultaneously. A particular issue, like taking too long to load a web page, could actually be caused by one of dozens (or even hundreds) of possible factors. The cost in time and money to track down the interrelated issues leading to the problem are usually much greater than the cost to simply buy a new computer in the first place. That’s why many professionals will suggest that outright when your computer starts to have issues keeping up with modern software and tasks.
Likewise, the earth is an extremely complicated system. Fixing a computer problem is nothing compared to reversing o-zone depletion, because there are so many different things that affect the problem and that complicate the solutions. But we can’t just buy a new earth.
Something as simple as predicting the weather a week in advance is currently beyond our ability, because of the enormous number of seemingly insignificant or difficult-to-accurately-measure factors affecting the weather all the time. Do you really think we can accurately predict the global weather (temperatures, storm trends, oxygen levels, o-zone depletion, ocean levels) months, years, or decades in advance? Do you really think we can fix the damage we’ve done (which, it so happens, we’re not even really sure of or able to agree on) by changing one or two things about how we as a community do things?
The reality is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can make educated guesses, but they could be (probably all are) completely wrong. We can suggest ideas to counteract the damage, but we have no idea whether any of them will actually work. And even if we guess most of them accurately, we might be missing one small factor that keeps everything else from falling into place properly.
Still, there is hope.
We, as individuals, can make the changes in our daily life that are most likely to change our impact on the system. We can learn and teach others. We can make a tiny change towards the balance that we know has worked in the past.
We, as a global community, are becoming aware of the issues. We are starting to care. And if humankind has shown one thing again and again, it’s that once we put our collective minds to solving a problem, we eventually succeed. These particular problems may be very complex, and we may take a while to find agreement in many places to work together to solve them, but I believe we will find solutions to them.
Life may be drastically different in generations to come, just like life now is drastically different than it was 200 years ago. But life will go on.
Other news
- Looks like you need a do-over: Warning over blood-taking method
- I didn’t know there was such a thing as the ‘Breast Biomechanics Team’: ‘Wrong bras’ can damage breasts
- But they’re the only good ones: Americans Urged To Avoid Mexican Jalapenos
Quote for the week
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. - Henry Brooks Adams
From the editor
They say the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day of purchase and the day of sale. I can vouch for the former, but the latter is not a happy day. I’m sad to see my boat go.
Since I’ve been traveling so much, I’m just never around my boat. In the last two years I’d taken her out only once, and that was to move her to a less expensive marina facility. Rather than having her grow old and neglected, it was time to transfer her to someone else. I’ll miss her!
But now I can start thinking about my next one!
Healthy thoughts,
Jeff
