compassion, collaboration & cooperation iN transistion
YOU are IMPERFECT ...
and STILL ...
learning to learn
to nurture the natural way
of the TAO
that which heaven has granted
as the LAW of NATURE
as the NATURE of LOVE
NO RESPECT for your environment - NO RESPECT for YOURSELF
We assume that algae affect climate primarily through their emission of dimethyl sulphide (which may influence cloud albedo), and that land plants do so by fixation of atmospheric CO2 (refs 9–12). When we consider how the planetary area occupied by these two ecosystems varies with temperature, we find that a simple model based on these ideas exhibits three feedback regimes. In glacial conditions, both marine and terrestrial ecosystems provide a negative feedback. As the temperature rises to present-day values, algae lose their strong climate influence, but terrestrial ecosystems continue to regulate the climate. But if global mean temperatures rise above about 20 °C, both terrestrial and marine ecosystems are in positive feedback, amplifying any further increase of temperature. As the latter conditions have existed in the past, we propose that other climate-regulating mechanisms must operate in this warm regime.
Access: Public“In the doomsday scenarios we are so often invited to contemplate,
the ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a
manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself, as
humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity.”
Dr Rowan Williams
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Comment by Michael Grove on July 16, 2013 at 12:29
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What’s especially remarkable - the close parallels between ant
colonies’ networks and human-engineered ones. One example is
“Anternet”, where we, a group of researchers at Stanford, found that
the algorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the Traffic
Control Protocol (TCP) [updated with correct spelling] used to regulate
data traffic on the internet. Both ant and human networks use
positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the
transmission of the next data packet, or from food-laden returning
foragers that trigger the exit of another outgoing forager. This research
led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to invent systems
familiar to us: wow, ants have been using internet algorithms for millions of years!
( WIRED, too, flirted with the concept of “anternet” in its Jargon Watch column last year.)
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The emergence of an efficiency led full circle evolution IS NOW on the horizon.
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AS I have previously posted elsewhere...
"we're obviously already embedded in a complex web of
relationships, both with our own kind and with many entities very
different from us. How then is it that we don’t notice them, don’t
honour our relationships with the plants and animals and all
the other elemental presences (soils, rainclouds, rivers...) who
support and nourish us? It can only be because somehow we're
oblivious to that direct, unmediated layer of carnal exchange which
is always already going on - because we're oblivious to the bodily
level of our existence. It is my body that steadily drinks of the
oxygen breathed out by all the green and growing plants, and
my body that breathes out the carbon dioxide these plants
steadily draw upon in order to photosynthesise and flourish.
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James Lovelock, however, defines life as a self-preserving, self-similar system
of feedback loops like Humberto Maturana's • autopoiesis; as a self-similar system.
LIFE could be a cell as well as an organ embedded into a larger organism as well as an individual in a larger inter-dependent social context.
The biggest context of interacting inter-dependent living entities is the Earth. The problematic empirical definition is getting “fuzzy on the edges”: Why are highly specialized bacteria like E. coli that are unable to thrive outside their habitat considered “life”, while mitochondria, which have evolved independently from the rest of the cell, are not?
In other words Lovelock dealt with them holistically, naming this self-regulating living system [which we refer to as nature] after the Greek goddess GAIA.