Climatron: Personal Blog of Kyle Vandercamp

So on Wednesday I was contacted by someone called Lun3terr3 (pron. Lune-terr). She said she was interested in helping me decode the intranet files. What she didn’t say was what a weird genius she seems to be. Very contradictory. She’s asked me to post this clip… Well I’m happy to do that.

Bb_int

I sat with her in a dark monitor-strewn room for 14 hours. We speak completely different languages in computer terms, but lo and behold, we made real progress, which we’re verging on ready to share. For now though, in her own cryptic way, introducing Lun3terr3. More soon! K

Juanita Monte's interview with Harrison Wyld

One of the emails I sent as I was heading to Aus was to Juanita Monte, an independent documentary film maker living in Sydney.

A friend sent me the address to her online doco. on philanthrocapitalism when they spotted Harrison Wyld’s name in the trailer for ep2… I was already completely distracted by my suspicions at work, but Juanita’s work finally pushed me to do something… it’s the way of things – that last push is what it takes.

So you could easily say I knew I was going to torpedo Now I Can Change the World. Not so much an unexpected consequence, more a kill switch.

I’m so sorry Juanita! When you look at it, there were other ways, but not other outcomes. Bluebird is completely context-changing. I hope in some way we can make something out of all of this.

It’s good to be back in Aus. The irony, the reality, is refreshing. But the terms of returning here are, as you may have guessed, somewhat strained.

Whistleblowing was a huge decision. If you’ve spent any time on Climatron, you’ll know a bit about my concerns. I’m overly cautious by nature, and that tips into skepticism on occasion. How, then, did I end up working for a billionaire, researching geoengineering – good point…

Part of the reason is simply because I was asked. Fresh out of graduate studies, only really half way through a theory I think could have massive potential, and along comes an email, followed by a meeting with a real, live billionaire, promising relatively unlimited servers and a state-of-the-art lab. Well, yes, Faust comes to mind for me too, now.

That’s not to say my former boss was the devil! Harrison’s an impressive man, when you see what he’s already achieved, what he’s capable of achieving.

Such opportunities come rarely, if at all, and maybe now I understand that some things can be too good to be true.

Now the truth needs uncovering. I didn’t come back to Aus to be wistful, we need to get to the heart of the matter. I left convinced that Bluebird was about to launch, may have already launched – do you think you could tell? Let’s find out.

The end of my first proper job

Well this is the post I’ll never forget. The one in which I tear away from the world I was just getting used to and follow my instinct, which lets face it doesn’t always work out.

This is me leaving!

I’ll keep it as brief as possible – watch the video below. It’s me blowing the whistle on something that’s got to be stopped. Please take the time to get across it.

I know I know, big assertions. But the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Like I say, stay tuned and in the meantime:
http://www.stopbluebird.com/
To access the files I mention, copy and paste ftp://otakudaddy.net/ into a browser. Your browser’s proxies may redirect you, if that happens, set them to auto-detect and try again. Then when you see the dialog box, enter on request:
username: kv_bb@otakudaddy.net
password: TrVr6284
Here is an index of links to the subject matter. Like I say, it’s far from science fiction:
http://delicious.com/kylevanc

Thanks for your time… more soon. K.

Still from Ron Fricke's film Baraka

Yes, Vorsorgeprinzip. Never heard of it right? It’s the originating German for Precautionary Principle, which you may well have heard of.

The Precautionary Principle spans science, economics, politics, all things really. But like anything, it only works if you use it. And that’s not as stupid as it sounds.

Primum non nocere, “First, do no harm” is a precept of medical ethics, also eloquently known as Nonmaleficence. It’s pretty obvious what it means and the Precautionary Principal is an articulation of that same meaning. Humans have gradually developed a cautious streak since way back, back on the plains and savannas and the cold starry nights of our ancestors.

What I think modern humans struggle with is enacting that meaning on a conceptual level – we’re cautious in and attentive of our own lives but beyond our immediate environments, nearly unconscious of causality. Perhaps that’s why precaution is so apparent in the physician’s world, where it’s all about the immediate.

And my point is, any practical application of big science should be filtered this way too… Without precaution, some aspects of science are so powerful that irreversibilities are possible. This will make more sense soon.

Having a blog can be like having one long OpEd column. So if I sound a bit preachy, I don’t mean to, but I’ll say this – the world is incredibly complicated, we should move through it with a precautionary principle, now more than ever…

“Climate change” is such a loaded term now. If I say “home” each and every one of us has a unique meaning for it. But climate change is becoming an homogeneous soup-of-a-term, fashioned out of doom, gloom and disputes about the significance of events.

Let all that go for a minute and return to the original notion of Global Warming. Within the extremely modest measure of our records, the NOAA announced March to be the warmest since records began. 0.77 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean.

NOAA State of the Climate Global Analysis March 2010

Detail from a picture by Olivier Vandeginste

You may have already seen this page.

A professor said to me once that the problem with watching footage of a nuclear bomb exploding was how distractingly beautiful it all was. Can’t say I share the sentiment exactly, but I get that there’s a grand aesthetic happening in real time, unrepeatable and thus unique.

So it is with volcanoes – they’re so beautiful! and they even come with amazing lighting conditions for photography. Hence these beautiful shots of Eyjafjallajokull, Aviation’s menace of the north!

Cancelled due to Volcanic Ash

Over a significant spread of the northern hemisphere, there’s not a big bird in the sky, so to speak. For the first time since September 12 2001, the skies are the domain of the fowl again. Back then, a US Study headed by David Travis found that the temperature in the three days following 9/11 increased and the skies appeared unusually clear:

We found that the change in temperature range during those three days was just over one degree centigrade. And you have to realize that from a layman’s perspective that doesn’t sound like much, but from a climate perspective that is huge.

Indeed.

Warning Will Robinson! Warning!

I’ve been researching geoengineering since before it was cool. You can search the chatter and surface the subject so frequently now and I find that mostly alarming… mostly. So thank you Martin Rees for stating caution so succinctly.

Micro Plankton Illustration

When the US Military admit to serious concerns of oil shortages by 2015 whether you’re left, right, or middle of the road – we’re all listening, no?

“”By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day… While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India… One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest.”

Grim tidings that we’ve heard raised before. But even the end of oil has a bright side, we’ll be forced to find other ways to power our lives, carbon free. Fundamental change is driven by necessity, and we seem to be racing toward one here.