The big picture, AI, chemophobia, rocket mass heaters

Green Gatherings #1

Welcome to the first Green Gatherings. This is a collection of links and reflections on “Emergence,” the sphere that covers technology, climate, philosophy, and science.

Let’s dive in.

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Public health, science, and medicine

Chemophobia — the fear of chemicals — is a public health crisis

Nearly all science and health misinformation capitalizes on chemophobia… Public fears around chemicals and chemistry can hinder progress and even worsen the state of affairs. That’s why chemophobia is a global health crisis. We need everyone in society to take an active role in combating this on every level in order to ensure our health and safety and the future of our planet.

The scientist in you: citizen science

I truly believe that we are all bona fide scientists. The “scientific method” is simply observing the world, generating an understanding about how the world works, testing your new inference, and determining if you were correct… At some point, an artificial line arose between the science done in the lab and the science done in the community. Lab science became privileged and gatekept by specialized training programs administered by higher education. Yet, the boundary is flimsy, and today we are knocking it down.

Does this stuff even work? Yeah, looks like it does.

Four years ago, we looked to plants to protect us from pathogens because vaccines and treatments weren't coming anytime soon. The minute those vaccines and antivirals came out, the public forgot all about plants. They reverted to their old assumptions that herbs were for hippies… Well, here we are again.

The metabolic impact of Long Covid

From chronic fatigue to brain fog, it’s clear that Long COVID has zapped the energy of millions of people. Some recover in a few months, some are still battling the symptoms years later. Here, the possible role of mitochondrial dysfunction in Long COVID is reviewed. I start by providing an overview of mitochondrial function followed by a reference list demonstrating how SARS-CoV-2 impacts mitochondrial function, and finally with a summary re: possible future treatments.

AI — what it can and can’t do

Why A.I. isn’t going to make art

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated… Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new…. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The role of AI in ocean conservation

AI is divisive. Particularly generative AI – those designed to craft text, data or images. Its capacity to generate misinformation and disinformation at scale runs the risk of distorting public opinion and thus encouraging us to retaliate to ‘fake news’ - as we’ve seen far too many times in recent months and years.

It has been accused of killing creativity, threatening job security and people's privacy. And yet, while the debate rages on about AI's impact on society, one area where its potential for good is becoming increasingly clear is: environmental conservation. Coral reef conservation, specifically.

Renewable energy and sustainable living

The most sustainable home is not what you think

A video essay on sustainability and housing, exploring the lines between greenwashing and real ecological living.

Silent solar: some really really good news you haven’t heard

Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world. Without waiting for what are often moribund utilities to do the job, business and home owners are getting on with electrifying their lives, and doing it cleanly.

Why we should burn wood for heat — the rocket mass heater

The reality is that burning biomass is the only truly sustainable and regenerative form of on-demand heating. The problem is that the current supply chain and the most widespread combustion technologies are both bad. It's not that burning wood is bad, it's that we're doing it all wrong. Here's how to do it right.

The Big Big Big Big Big Picture

This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years…

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over the next week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.

We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.

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