Evolutionary Team Effectiveness
There are major floods happening around our planet almost every day now. In this video I explain why this is happening.
I present a “Climate Moment” talk at our month Provisors Palo Alto 1 meeting. Many thanks to Keley Petersen and Stephen Dobrow for sponsoring this series.
Here is a link to previous Climate Moment editions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCt7LPRITZv7rF_1vMzOCDGZbqTE6g-I5
#climatechange #climate #climatemoment #flooding
For the Climate Moment talk in August, I introduced the concept of “Degrowth” as and organizing principle for human society and shared a link to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2024/06/in-defense-of-degrowth
Here is a link to previous Climate Moment editions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCt7LPRITZv7rF_1vMzOCDGZbqTE6g-I5
#climatechange #climate #climatemoment #degrowth
For our climate moment. This month, I am going to introduce the concept of Degrowth. Now you’re all familiar with the growth economic model. So what is a Degrowth economic model? Well, let’s first look at the metrics. The main metric for growth is GDP–how fast the economy is growing. For Degrowth, the main metrics are human well-being and living within planetary boundaries, so we balance human well-being with those how we’re doing on living within planetary boundaries.
Well, how are we doing right now living within planetary boundaries with our growth model? The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has developed a dashboard and identified nine distinct planetary boundaries and measures and reports them. Right now, of those nine, we are exceeding planetary boundaries on six of them.
The “growth” model has us exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth. And the Degrowth economic model would have us start to live within the carrying capacity of the Earth and not exceed those boundaries.
Recently, I was at a sustainability and climate conference, and there was a VC speaking, and I asked him what he thought of that Degrowth economic model. He looked at me and said, “Good luck with that.” So, some people are quite dismissive of that, especially in Silicon Valley, which is grow, grow, grow. But meanwhile, in other places, like, say, that tree-hugging institute, Harvard, there is a recognition that we do need to start to live within the planetary boundaries. Just last June There was an article in Harvard Business Review called In Defense of Degrowth. I will put this link into the chat for you and you can review that and learn more about Degrowth.
That’s the Climate Moment for the month. Thanks.
Since we’ve been experiencing record breaking heat this summer, I dedicated this July 2024 edition of the Climate Moment to heat and how it affects our weather. I presented this Climate Moment talk to my Provisors Palo Alto 1 group on Friday, July 12, 2024.
#climatechange #climate #climatemoment #heatwave
Since we’ve been hearing a lot about heat in the news lately, this month’s Climate Moment is the heat edition. This chart here shows the average monthly temperature of the atmosphere [surface air measured at 2m.] And you can see over the last 12 months that the red line on the top has been over 1.5 degrees C every single month. On average, it was 1.64 degrees C. Now, you might know that 1.5 degrees C is the Paris Limit. So already for the past year, we have been over the Paris Limit.
But that’s not the whole story. The bigger story is the oceans, because most of the energy that’s being trapped in the earth is going into the oceans. And now you can see here, this is a chart of the northern hemisphere oceans. And you can see how much heat is being trapped there. And that is still going up.
Now, you ask yourself, how do we turn that around? Well, the way to know that is by something called Earth’s Energy Imbalance. And this is the amount of energy coming in from the sun and then being radiated back out into space. And that yellow line shows the amount coming in. The red line is the line going out.
And ideally, you want them to be the same or zero imbalance. But you can see now that over this last 20 years, it started a little under a half a Watt imbalance, and now it’s up at 1.4 Watts imbalance. So, it’s getting bigger and it’s going to continue to get bigger as long as we continue burning fossil fuels, emitting CO2, and then trapping the heat in the system.
And until we stop burning fossil fuels, the weather forecast is… more extreme heat and bigger and bigger ocean storms. That is my climate moment for the month.
There are a number of psychological hurdles we must overcome to engage with a problem. Our brains are designed to conserve our body’s energy resources, and it has a number of tricks it plays on us to keep us from expending energy, even in the face a problem that must be solved. Our continued burning of fossils and the subsequent climate and biodiversity-loss crises pose the biggest threat to humankind we have yet faced. How we humans are responding to these crises expose many of the tools the brain deploys to keep us from taking action and expending energy. These tools are called unconscious biases. In this video I share four unconscious biases that we humans are using to avoid taking action to address the existential crises of our time.
Thanks to Matthew Cahill of The Precipio Company (https://percipiocompany.com/) for his input on this talk.
I’m giving a brief talk about unconscious biases and how they affect our action or inaction to address the climate crisis. And I’m giving this talk to my ProVisors Networking group, and I thought I would share it with you. So let’s get started.
Unconscious biases serve as an energy saving technique for our brain. If we can avoid expending the energy of making decisions, then that saves energy for the brain to do other things. Unconscious biases serve as one of those tools. These are mostly beneficial, but sometimes they can be harmful when the brain inaccurately assesses risk. And, by not taking action, you will end up preserving a status quo when maybe that’s not the most appropriate thing to do. Media know about our unconscious biases, and people who advocate for inaction and preserving the status quo use our unconscious biases to their benefit to keep us from not taking action. The unconscious biases that I’ll go over today are Normalcy Bias, Bystander Effect, Survivors Bias, and Backfire Effect.
The first is Normalcy Bias. What this one does is trick our brain into thinking that everything is fine, even when it’s not. And, it’s particularly easy to trick the brain when the threat is invisible, like say a deadly virus, or an invisible greenhouse gas. Everything looks fine, so the brain tricks us into thinking everything’s fine.
All right, the next one is the Bystander Effect. Even when our brain does see that there’s some kind of urgent emergency happening, we’ll trick ourselves into thinking that somebody else will take care of it. And therefore, we can avoid expend the energy of making the decision to do something, and the energy of taking action on actually doing something.
And then the third one is Survivors Bias. “I made it this far, so I’m going to be okay.” It’s particularly easy for our brain to trick ourselves when we live in more resilient communities than in less resilient communities, “Oh yeah. So they may have a problem, but we’ll be fine here.” And another thing is, if you live in a place where the climate is particularly mild, like we do here in California, then we can trick ourselves into thinking, “Oh yeah, everything’s fine, there’s no problem here,” while maybe the rest of the nation or the globe is having extreme weather events.
All right. And then the last one I’ll go over is the Backfire Effect. When our brain is confronted with some information that it doesn’t want to hear, then we go into, “la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,” and we just ignore it and deny it. And that allows us to preserve whatever beliefs or thoughts that we had, without having to expend energy to change the way we think, and perhaps have to take action to address some emerging issue.
So these are just four of the things our brain does to trick us and keep us from addressing the climate crisis because if our brain does accept it, then that next step is you start to feel guilt for not taking action. And so, these biases will have the effect of saving energy, avoiding taking action, and avoiding any feelings of guilt by tricking our brains into thinking that there isn’t an emergency.
All right, thanks so much for listening.
I am grateful to Keley Peterson, group leader of ProVisors Palo Alto 1, for permitting me to inform our group about the latest state of the climate crisis with tips for what our members can do to address the crisis.
Do you think we are already at 1.5C heating?
Scientists projected we would hit 1.5C average heating by 2030.
This July, Aug and Sept have been the hottest in the last 100,000 years. And Oct is already shaping up to be one of the hottest ever, too. Scientists predict that this year will be our first year of 1.5C heating and are already hypothesizing we may be at a staggering 1.8C heating by the end of the decade.
What can I do? People have been asking this. Everyone should be thinking to do two things now: Mitigate and Adapt.
Mitigation is what you could and should be doing now to slow down the crisis, both individually and systemically.
Adaptation is what you will be compelled to do as mother nature imposes the crisis on you.
Mitigation is proactive. Adaptation is reactive but can be proactive if you start building resiliency now.
Who will mitigate and who will adapt?
All of us will have to adapt.
Mitigation is another matter. Not all will, but the more of us who do, the better things will be in the long term.
Mitigation on an individual basis is simple.
Number 1: Don’t burn fossil fuels. Replace all your fossil fuel appliances and vehicles with electric ones. Want to do more? Don’t eat beef and pork—the two food industries with the most carbon emissions. Just those two things and you’ve done great!
See – I told you—easy peasy.
Look, there are plenty of people who prefer denial. But I bet just as many want the truth, painful as it is. We deserve a shot at rising to the occasion.
Next month I would like to review some of the tax benefits available to you in the inflation reduction act to electrify your home and transportation. In fact, if there’s a CPA you know who already has a handle on that, then please let me know.
And, Remember, most of us live in California, with the fifth largest economy and with a platform the world turns to for leadership. We have the resources, the knowledge and more political will than most places. We must demonstrate that decarbonization can be done, and then the rest of the world will follow us.
Thanks.
