And Hopefully Not More Publication Delays Here …

Life has its challenges. The medical types have discovered several spots on my lungs in CT scans, and one under my armpit, so I may be a bit distracted with medical procedures at times in the near future. That may or may not impede my continued study and writing here. I hope not, but thought I’d mention it. I have another never-read blog at http://timprosserblog.wordpress.com, my old “scratch space” blog, where I have begun journaling the experience. I am staying positive and will continue to think creatively, study, and do my best to inspire myself and others to think and plan ahead in ways that will move the planet toward a sustainable situation with as little human misery as possible.

Thanks for reading, and thinking, and working for a better future for the planet. – Tim

Added July 30, 2008
I feel lucky, though I am not out of the woods completely.  The pulmonologist I saw this morning said the spots on my lungs do not look serious, and many people have them.  He is having me get another CT scan at the end of September and see if anything changes (if not … great … scan again in the future).  He is also sending me to a surgeon for a biopsy of a lump under my arm, so I am knocking on wood that it is just a fatty deposit or something, and not something worse.

Meanwhile, I will keep searching for a job in project management, documentation, quality management, or maybe something with a startup or small company that needs an experienced head with lots of skills to contribute and enough small company experience to have no compunctions about sweeping the floor, if that’s what is needed.  My University of Michigan MBA focused on small organization growth should be a strength, too.

Best regards to all – Tim

Temporary Publication Delays Likely on This Blog

July 17th, 2008, a man came to my desk (at my day job) and took away my desk phone. I asked him if this was management trying to tell me something, and he looked sheepish. He said that he had been given a list of phones to pick up, and didn’t know why. Having been through corporate downsizings a number of times in my multiple careers, I started packing. I was fortunate to be able to make a professional exit, transitioning my work to my supervisor and even saying goodbye to a few colleagues and constituents before the end of the day, when one of my coworkers informed me that he had spoken with my contract employer’s headquarters staff, and they had informally confirmed that I was “on the list”.

Will Overpopulation Exceed the Capacity of Our Global Infrastructure?

Perhaps the question is, more appropriately, when will population exceed the capacity of our global infrastructure? I am amazed that enough food and other goods can be produced and delivered today to sustain cities like Karachi, Pakistan (12-18 million) and Mexico City (19-35 million), especially since the average family income in these cities is relatively low compared with that in the more developed countries. I wonder how long such cities can continue to grow, and why the infrastructure to sustain them doesn’t appear to be increasingly fragile and at risk from human and naturally-caused problems. What are the signs that tell us that we are pushing our infrastructure to the point where risk of problematic or disastrous collapses is significantly increased?

Lop-sided Focus on Climate Change Ignores Other Problems; Obscures the Root Problem: Overpopulation

Many feel the climate change risk is overstated and unsupported by evidence. Among websites that question whether global warming is supported by evidence, Anthony Watt’s Watt’s Up With That website is, in my opinion, probably the most credible, and its popularity continues to grow. His more than half million hits per month include enough commenters expressing significant weather knowledge and reasonable positions (among the Gore haters and anti-government types) to make it worth reading, in my opinion. It is clear that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and a lot of press, some of the highest profile releases coming from James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, has stirred a lot of concern worldwide. Personally, I am more concerned with the many problems, climate change possibly included, caused by the huge increase in the global human population over the last century.

Could Nanotechnology Someday Replace Toilet Paper?

The “throne room” is a great place for coming up with new ideas.  Sitting on the throne (toilet) recently, I was moved to consider that most basic commodity of civilization, toilet paper.  Surely, like deodorants and hot showers, this is one of the key enablers of our civilized lifestyle.  As time progresses, however, this might change.  Might we someday find that the manufacture of toilet paper uses more resources and energy than can be economically justified?  What will we do then?  Can nanotechnology provide an answer?

1972 Rockefeller Commission Report on Population Was Surprisingly Insightful

President Nixon initiated a study of population that holds many insights of lasting value.  In the late 1960’s President Richard Nixon was very aware of a growing population and the problems it could cause (see my earlier entry “Who Would Have Thought Richard Nixon a Visionary“).  As a response, he set up the Rockefeller Commission under John D. Rockefeller III.  The Rockefeller Commission Report is a diverse, well-researched, and well-written report, a real eye opener, and it is clear now that it did not get the attention it deserved.   I will be writing more entries around some of the key revelations in this report, as there are just too many striking insights, still applicable today, to cover them in a single entry.  Here are a few highlights, however.

Biofuels Which Use Existing Energy Infrastructure May Be Implemented First

Biofuels (link) appear to be among the best alternative energy sources under development.  Production yields per acre for advanced biofuel sources such as algae, for example, significantly exceed those of both food and non-food crops, and it is possible that both gaseous and liquid fuels can be produced in quantities that could make a meaningful dent in the demand for fossil fuels within a decade or two.  As for any energy source, though, while innovators tend to focus on power generation technologies, delivery and storage systems may be even more important in making them economically useful. 

It’s Not Carbon Footprint That Matters Most, but Energy Footprint

The global climate never stops changing. Everything changes, even the global climate. Is it getting warmer? Or colder? That’s for the scientists to answer, and it appears that they will take a very long time to come to anything remotely approaching a consensus, which means that all the polarized rhetoric, Gore-bashing, etc. is just so much hot air (not enough to warm the globe, fortunately, though sometimes I wonder).

Is humanity affecting the climate? We’ve affected many other things as our numbers have increased by a factor of 6 in less than two centuries – a blink of an eye in natural time. If our numbers keep increasing as they have, and our energy use keeps increasing as it is, we will affect the global climate at some point, if we aren’t already. That is another point for scientists to study, and about which there will also probably never be complete agreement. Generally, though, if we are affecting the climate, it is as much tied to our energy use as anything.