These are my notes from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory talk last night (prone to errors of interpretation):

The latest intergovernmental climate report will be coming out in January 2014.

2012 was the hottest year on record.

CO2 emissions were steady at 270 ppm before the steam engine. Now they are over 350ppm, haven’t been that high since 3 million years ago. We are on track for 750ppm, haven’t seen that for 34 million years, when Antarctica was created.

Clear link between atmospheric CO2 and temperature rise.

Emissions are 56% higher today than in 1991. Rio Earth Summit held in 1992. Kyoto Protocol in 1997. 2013 was the 18th meeting of parties to discuss climate change. Action is not being taken.

Historical emissions have committed us to warming consequences 25 years out. Effects from changes made now will be seen after year 2035.

California has pleged to not raise its emissions through 2020 as of legislation in effect January 2013, and an order by Schwarzenegger would reduce emissions by 80% in CA by 2020.

Warming planet raises deadly storm frequency and severity, increases both floods and droughts, increase fire danger risk, insect and pathogen outbreaks. As planet warms, permafrost thaw releases even more carbon as organic decomposition takes off. This is not accounted for in climate models, and raises carbon by as much as 20 percent.

Deadly weather, costing dozens of thousands of deaths, has been seen in Europe 2003, Russia 2010, Texas 2011.

50% carbon stays in atmosphere, 25% absorbed by forests, and 25% absorbed by oceans. Oceans are becoming more acidic, which destroys shells of sea creatures and coral reef habitats. Trees are keeping up with their share of absorption, but at what cost?

320 million trees killed in Katrina storm, equal to the net gain in US forests annually.

Climate ecnomist suggests taxing use of carbon minimum $20/ton (some suggest $100/ton) to encourage consumers to leave carbon in the ground and develop smarter alternatives. Get top 20 countries to agree to tax carbon for its real cost.

The top two emitters of CO2 are US and China. China’s coal alone is equal to our total emissions (we export some coal to China).

Geoengineering to cool the planet is like applying a 3,000 year bandaid. Need to leave the carbon in the ground.

There is 4 times more carbon in oil/coal reserves than our trees can soak up. More trees is not the answer.

The risks to our food supply are serious. Crops are growing in ideal conditions. Temp rise as little as 2 degrees can impact yields. Temp is projected to rise as much as 15 degrees with no action taken against carbon.

“If we don’t do something, the major export from some of these hungry countries will be violence.”

For more information, check out Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or UCTV, where you may find links to a video of the talk with climate scientists.

I’ve been wondering, how do you create/foster community when we are on the move so much? When we are so busy? This has been a real challenge for me. I have a few ideas now:

*make people feel safe and welcome in your presence

*hold people accountable, but resist judgements

*take time regularly to let people know that you love them. Love is a feeling of connection.

*Hug them, feed them, tell them what you’re thinking regularly

*let people know you’re there for them

*send notes, gifts

*make time for intimacy, share your fears

*with less time, we feel rushed to do activities with our time together, but we must take time to connect at the start, check-in

*create traditions, even if that’s nicknames, handshake, weekly call/meal

*stop activity if someone is feeling unloved. Not worth it. Check in. Keep trust accounts and transparency high.

Those who know me know my shortcomings in this area. Please help me put these into practice. Thank you!!

I awoke this morning at 6am to the sound of a loudspeaker Muslim prayer call in the distance layered over a wild rooster crowing and other tropical birds chirping. The birds are the most active in the early morning, when it is cool enough to be active. It reminded me of my time in the Dubai airport on the way here. The airport prides itself on minimizing announcements over the loudspeaker to keep the airport experience pleasant. But out of nowhere around 6 am, a woman started singing/chanting a very beautiful song/prayer over the loudspeaker. It must have gone on for 5 minutes. I actually love the public chanting/singing, it is calming and unifying in some way.

The last couple days have been very relaxing, as I’ve mostly stayed at the home while the city is consumed with protests over the recent sectarian suicide bombing of Shia Hazaras in Quetta. Sit-ins have been staged all over the country in protest to the violence. Most businesses and schools were closed in Karachi as people did not feel safe to leave their homes and travel through the protests during the day. We have, however, gone out each night for dinner quite safely. The newspaper said the protesters are mostly Shias, who want the government to step-up and help stop the genocide killings of their people.

In talking with one of the relatives, they have encouraged their children not to get involved in the political protests. They expressed uncertainty about the future of their country, and fear for their children’s safety should they try to make a stand. It seemed somewhat defeatist, like the country’s problems are bigger than they feel they can affect. They are in survival mode. We have it so nice in the US, we might get tear-gassed during a protest gone badly, but rarely do we fear for our lives. I can understand a parent’s concern, while it concerns me that they are releasing their control of their country’s future in exchange.

Gas stations have been overwhelmed because cars and commercial trucks did not fill up for a couple days then needed to all at once. There have been a couple small bomb blasts in Karachi, but thankfully with no injuries. The paper said they are probably meant to frighten the protesters. According to the paper, the Shias in Quetta are refusing to bury the dead. The coffins line the streets, 89 so far with more to come. The paper showed one woman holding up a homemade sign: “If being Hazara is a crime, I feel great to be criminal!”

Because of the vast class differences, there is no more safety/security in everyday life. The US should take note of this, as they are headed toward greater class disparities. For example, here in Karachi, those with any money have their homes built like a mini-compound. There is an armed guard, very cheap, uneducated servants and drivers, multiple locks on the gates and doors (interior and exterior), and even the bedrooms in the house are locked when you leave so that the servants are not tempted to steal anything. If you are carrying any kind of valuables on you, you make sure your driver drives very fast to your destination so that you are not followed/hijacked. In general, it is safer not to stop your car, especially in more remote parts of the city.

At the last wedding party we attended, most of the guests had left and our smaller wedding party was eating catered food and having a lovely time chatting. We were kind of lost in discussion, when one of the men noticed that the laborers and caterers were starting to fill up the wedding tent toward us, staring and lingering for no good reason. He advised us to leave in a hurry, together, making sure not to leave a single car behind the group. And we sped home.

The upper class loves living here, because you can live like kings and queens, having 5-star dinners at country clubs, servants to take care of all the daily chores, leaving you free to have a very easy life. But that luxury comes at a steep price. Pray for the Pakistanis that they might realize a state of greater equality, freedom, and safety. And pray for the US that they might see where class inequality could lead them.

Just as the painting is an enriched product of a living relationship between the painter and the object, so enriched becomes the product purchased through the interaction between buyer and shopkeeper in Pakistan. When I first visited the country years ago, I was irritated by the custom of bargaining for the price of ordinary objects in the markets. I wanted/craved the more familiar, quicker, sterile process of paying a set purchase price. But this time around, I noticed just how much buyer and seller got to learn about each other through these interactions. I observed that the depth of the exchange is often deeper than many people will attempt to communicate in familiar business or personal relationships in my country. Both parties walk away from the 10-15 minute bargaining with a deeper understanding of their buyers/sellers, of the quality of their products, the state of the local economy, and of the buyer/seller wants and needs. It is not as unsophisticated as I first imagined, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s real. It’s not the point and click photo-taking, it’s a dance between two souls, and it is a wonder to behold.

I had a great discussion on Facebook today with a friend who had a totally different viewpoint than I did on an issue. I live in Berkeley, CA, but I come from Montana and the Dakotas, and I have a lot of friends from around the country and world with very different viewpoints. And I love it. Hopefully the convo below will show you why…look what we came up with!

It was sparked by the controversy of Korean entertainer, Psy, being invited to sing in the US after having made Anti-American/Anti-War statements (Story Here).

Just got forwarded this video by my mother, apparently it went online in 2007. http://www.youtube.com/embed/42E2fAWM6rA

Memes: Time with family vs. time with work; money vs. happiness (Themes very common around Christmas time!)

This video inspired me today with its brilliance because it encapsulates the human condition and patterns of adaptation. We have certainly reached a tipping point in our culture where institutions we have created are failing, but is the answer really to go into reverse? Let’s examine the institutional (human idea) “failures” and their dynamics. I think you’ll see that in most cases, going forward will not mean exactly going backward (as romantic as this would be)!:

1. Nuclear Families: Divorces, More single-parent homes (due in part to racist drug wars), more acceptance of Non-Traditional Families. Children moving farther away, scattering across the globe AND/OR moving back in with parents due to an inability to survive in a more expensive and/or chaotic world. Adults waiting longer to have children. Having fewer children later. More women in college than men, role reversals. Egg and sperm donations.

-The notion of nuclear families seems to be a throwback from two generations ago (our grandparents). Since we tend to want to do the opposite of what our parents did (because of course they are blamed for our unhappiness as children) we probably tend to escape what didn’t work from our parent’s generation by going back to the grandparent’s generation for answers. However, we are finding now that what worked for our grandparents won’t work for us in today’s more mobile and uncertain world, and it is frustrating. We are no longer settling down on farms in the west with our large families, hunting and fishing. We are jumping at the national and international opportunities as they flash in front of us, and relating more electronically.There is less actual physical connection between loved ones, and our biology hasn’t caught up to that yet. It may be manifesting in sex addictions and violence, sadness from expectations of a marriage and family not matching up to the reality of today’s cultural/resource demands.

2. Banks: Our bankers over-leveraged themselves by creating illusion/mystery products they could not explain/understand/justify, causing the mortgage/housing/lending industry to collapse. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The world’s major banks dominate international currency exchange, therefore we must maintain relationships with them unless we want to usurp their power to create a national public bank. Mortgage holders got the short end of this stick because we do not have the resources or willpower for a large-scale failure and national bank takeover. We are simply unprepared to takeover should the banks fail us, much like Egyptians were unprepared with a new leader after toppling the old. People must adapt to this new economy by better understanding their protections when entering contracts with banks. This may drive more self-reliance temporarily, but eventually large funds will have to be borrowed for large projects from either a lower-interest large-scale public collaboration (credit unions are on the rise) or will again fall to the easier route of the banks, who arguably have a monopoly collectively until lending power among the people rises to those levels.

3. Investments: Investment managers overleveraged their bets and used resources they didn’t have to produce short-term gains; costing many people their retirement savings and sending themselves into jail/suicide. Investing is complex. People need to beware of smoke and mirrors. The competitive nature of investing makes transparency difficult. People then need to accept that the lower the transparency, the greater the risk, and assign only risk-tolerant assets to non-transparent investments that promise great return.

4. Environment: We collectively have made a lot of hasty environmental assumptions before putting thousands of new chemically-engineered products onto the market to grow crops, make food last longer, sanitize, and to enhance our appearance, get to work faster, work harder, sleep less, and then to suffer less with our illness(es). As a result, our planet’s air, water, and fatty tissues of humans and animals contain toxic chemicals whose inflammation effects in our very own internal ecosystems (the human body’s microbiome) are just starting to be understood. The more chemicals we consume, the more oblivious and avoidant we seem to become to tackling impending catastrophic climate change. And as a side-note, the fatter we become, the more propensity we have toward being untruthful (biochemically). Fat gives off estrogen, and men given doses of testosterone in a recent study were less likely to lie – i.e., more likely to admit to the reality of a situation. I wouldn’t listen to climate/environment advice from anyone who is seriously overweight. Prejudice or science? hmmm….

5. Money: We had a floodgate of money open up to us in the 90s with easy access to credit cards. We were all able to make short-term impulse buys without having to plan for long-term consequences, and this financially ruined many many families. We did not trust our own ability to pull money toward ourselves so we borrowed it from those we thought had the money, giving our power over to them. When one late payment was made, the once affordable debt became totally unaffordable.

“A discussion of consumer debt must acknowledge, however, that consumers ultimately make the decision about whether to apply for credit and how much to borrow.”

This is a fascinating statement from the Federal Reserve, basically putting all the responsibility on citizens for their financial choices. It makes you wonder how much choice people really do have, however, when minimum wage hasn’t risen in 40 years, but I digress.

Likely due to the rapid evolution of technology and information dissemination, there is more uncertainty in what products and services people need. This leads to unstable job markets. We are no longer living in an era where dad goes to work from 9-5 at the same manufacturing plant for 25 years. We are definitely not living in our grandparent’s world where we worked on the farm from 5am to 9pm, but we want to act like it. Our working hours are long, and are usually piece-meal from several part-time jobs, or we experience longer periods of unemployment/job-seeking between jobs. The point is, there is more chaos and uncertainty. It makes sense that people would want to stabilize this by buffering the instability with credit card use. Perhaps we ought to legislate around this so as to give our citizens a bit more buffer/mental relief while coping with a new volatile economy which shows no signs of stabilizing.

6. College: We allowed ourselves to think that the ivy league universities only accepted the best and the brightest, and they charged lots of money which encouraged that myth in a feedback loop. Now the bottom is dropping out of the universities – we are at a tipping point where the government keeps pulling money out, leaving the burden to families, so only the wealthy or those willing to take on the enormous debt burden of college for the illusion of connections and job security (which they won’t get because they are too busy working 3 jobs during college to keep the loans at bay to make the connections necessary to get a good job). And meanwhile, education is becoming free on the internet to anyone that wants it. Colleges as institutions are slow to change and will be extinct before long should tuition costs continue on trend. Trends are toward mentorship, emphasizing relationships/social connections, entrepreneurship and job creation. Those people able to quickly mobilize money and people around new information & technologies will win in the new rat race.

7. Goods and Services: Products are designed for one-time use. The throwaway products can generate the most money the quickest. New technologies are always in demand. The trick to this game is not to run out of resources or create too many toxic by-products along the way. Critical-resource conservation and life-cycle legislation should be priorities.

8. Get Rick Quick Schemes: Many MLM companies shot up from the 1980’s to the early 2000’s.  An MLM creates an illusion of wealth which draws people in then steals their wealth leaving them more bankrupt. Similar refinancing cons affected people in the housing market who were over-leveraged but somehow managed to own very expensive/valuable properties. They used their homes as leverage for riches that were just out of reach. In a more chaotic world, people are more apt to throw their hands up in the air to try to snag anything that looks like a golden ring. And why not? They have time since they do not have steady work, and most buy-ins are affordable. But these can be giant wastes of time, so business opportunities need to be evaluated on actual value provided to society. If an idea doesn’t totally light your fire like it’s the best thing you’ve heard lately, you probably shouldn’t pursue it just for the promised golden ring.

“OUR CULTURE HAS NOT PREPARED US FOR THE RATE OF CHANGE WE WOULD SEE IN OUR LIFETIME.” My roommate the other day.

We are living in an information age. Hearing too many other perspectives and trying to assimilate them all throws off your sense of balance, sense of judgement, and ability to make decisions. For example, if you have a desire to do something, and now have 500 different opinions on Google for how to do it, you are simply not equipped with the time to analyze 500 different options. You must trust an expert, or you must make an emotional decision and have faith that your decision was the best you could do at the time. And you are more likely to fail. Failure is really hard on the human psyche. Those that can get up and dust themselves off and try again eventually win. Those whose failures put them into a bind they can’t find a way out of are the most pitied.

It’s kind of like speculating in the stock or futures markets. They say any market with more than about 30% speculators will become chaotic and subject to short-term rather than long-term thinking: emotion/mob-mentality vs. stability/logically-calculated changes. Volatility/price swings will then become the norm.

When you are overloaded with “information” i.e., “perspectives”, as the stock market is (unpredictable), your brain becomes overloaded. Brains are only capable of binary logic. Distilling down multiple perspectives into the right binary question then becomes a valuable skill.

I find it interesting that this parallels what is happening with climate change. We are turning up the heat in the atmosphere, and climate starts swinging between extremes.

The earth goes through cycles of stability and volatility. It may just be the nature of life itself. It is not the stable planet, stable home-base we like to think of it as. The core itself is always cooling, burping and releasing its lava/heat/CO2 into our atmosphere. The plates are always shifting a bit, groaning under the weight of the oceans/tides and the molten crust’s liquid rhythms.

As below, so above. The sun against the tilt of the earth’s axis, warms only the continents and oceans it reaches, which are themselves drifting and changing levels and densities. The moon’s orbit causes disturbances. The sun itself experiences flareups, bursts, etc. of an extremely volatile nature–thankfully its distance from us mutes some of these disturbances.

Even our solar system is subject to the disturbing interactive forces of the entire milky way galaxy as we make our relatively slow revolution around its center.

Our use of technology has allowed us to connect to one another and experience one another’s perspectives. It is confusing, it is brilliant, it is beautiful, it is paralyzing, it is chaotic, it is enlightening. And it is the world we must adapt to, together.

This is an essay about institutional/group hazing and bullying. I am privy to these cultural discussions having been an athlete all my life and now a university varsity sport coach for the past 6 years.

Hazing/bullying is finally being addressed in high schools, and now in universities. The final frontiers? Gangs, the military, and medical residency.

This story from Chicago was pretty egregious: underwear being ripped off and a kid being sodomized by his athletic team – in high school (http://northbrook.patch.com/articles/poll-are-schools-doing-enough-to-stop-hazing-bullyiing)

I still remember to this day the pain and embarrassment on L.M.’s face at my high school, when his underwear got ripped off by the wrestling team, thrown down amidst the varsity girl’s volleyball team where we were practicing, and he ran crying down the stairs toward the boy’s restroom. I remember the most popular girl in high school being upset about it, knowing exactly who had done this act to him. “That’s not cool!” she yelled up at him, while he returned an evil laugh.

Recently, a soccer team in our league (California’s CCAA) got a one-year suspension for forced alcohol consumption and humiliating hazing toward freshmen. Surprising in a town known for growing great marijuana, but I suppose that’s besides the point. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/sports/soccer-team-suspended-for-hazing.html?_r=0)

At a recent staff meeting at the university where I coach, we were recently given a list of hazing offenses. It was actually a list that came from fraternity/sorority anti-hazing guidelines, so a couple of things on the list made us coaches laugh, like “subjecting someone to feats of physical stamina.” What exactly are we supposed to do at our practices then? :-)

But it’s all for the best. It’s an indication that our society is “growing up,” I think, to start a national discussion on what constitutes physical and mental abuse for the sake of joining an institution.

But all this discussion begs the questions: What about the demeaning practices of our own government’s military? What about the demeaning hierarchical practices of our nation’s medical residency institutions? Both use sleep deprivation and power plays to initiate new inductees into the institution. Survivors/codependents get to stay, rebels get booted.

I suppose it is only a matter of time before someone in these organizations refuses to put up with the hazing there too and calls them out on their abuse. Although I like to think people join such organizations in part because they have a lot of energy and they’d like to see someone else direct that energy for a while. They’ d like to be exposed to someone else’s discipline. It gives them a sense of structure and meaning that they otherwise have a hard time cultivating. It doesn’t make it right, though.