Last week, Robert M. Thorsen of the Hartford Courant wrote an article about how the Earth’s temperature this year, 2010, is one of the hottest on record, and it’s currently competing with the year 1998 for the title. He compared the temperature of the Earth to a human fever, something we can all identify with in Cosimo’s book Earth Fever: Living Consciously with Climate Change. Thorsen says:

Thus far, according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, this year’s average is 58.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 1.21 degrees higher than the 20th century average.

This year’s elevated temperature is already 2.068 percent above normal. In human terms, this is like running a fever of 101.2 degrees. Though we’re not in the danger zone yet, we must not forget that the fever is still rising, albeit erratically.

Here’s what the Earth Fever authors have to say:

With respect to global warming we could use another metaphor: The Earth has a fever. As we all know, fever is a symptom of illness. Fever can heal, but it can also be deadly. We, the authors, don’t believe that the Earth itself will succumb to this relatively light fever, but we do believe that humankind and large parts of nature are in serious danger.

Thorsen’s article goes on to explain how the higher temperatures effect real communities, and what (scientificially) is causing the rise.

Another article, written by Beth Kapusta for The Huffington Post, discusses a recent arctic expedition and how climate change is affecting the polar areas of the world, especially the ice caps. She says:

Ice conditions affect our captain’s daily navigation decisions (particularly the fear of becoming trapped by it), and provides a palpable physical reminder of the climate change that is affecting the High Arctic with accelerated force–the global rise in temperature is about .8 degrees Celsius; here it is considerably higher. Today, we have almost been trapped by the melting ice cap as it fragments into pieces (some of them the size of a football field), and is swept south by the wind and east by the rotation of the earth.

Finally, an article by the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Jeffery Sachs, emphasizes the importance of addressing climate change now in his final article for the Sustainable Developments column at Scientific American. The whole column is available in the September issue, but I’d like to highlight a key point he makes here.

According to Obama’s 2008 election campaign, this was to be the first year of a new climate and energy policy for the U.S., too, and the second year of a “green recovery.” We’ve had neither. The recovery has sputtered: Obama bet on “stimulating” exhausted consumers rather than on a long-term program of public investments in sustainable infrastructure. The Senate, true to form, sustained its 18th year of inaction on global warming since ratifying the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. […]

We are losing not just time but the margin of planetary safety, as the world approaches or trespasses on various thresholds of environmental risk. With the human population continuing to rise by 75 million or more per year and with torrid economic growth in much of the developing world, the burdens of deforestation, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction, ocean acidification and other massive threats intensify.

All these articles bring to light how climate change is actively affecting our communities, and if not our livelihoods, then the livelihoods of those around us. Earth Fever also makes this important distinction, and offers insight to help us find new ways of living. Ways that will affect the Earth in a positive manner, that will enable us to continue to sustain life and growth without wreaking havoc on the world around us.

Learn more and buy the book at earthfeverbook.com

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A group of financial experts convened earlier this month in Florida at a meeting on Transforming Finance, hosted by Hazel Henderson, President of Ethical Markets Media, Global Futurist and Cosimo author. They released the following press release announcing the importance of truly reforming finance globally in order to serve human societies:

FOR RELEASE, MONDAY

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010, 12 NOON EDT

ST. AUGUSTINE, FL, USA

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL

GREENWICH, CT , USA

Financial experts, warning of future crises, call for re-affirming finance as a global commons, first recognized at Bretton Woods in 1945.

Co-conveners, John Fullerton, President, Level3Capital Advisors, LLC, and The Capital Institute, former Managing Director of JPMorgan, and global futurist and author of nine books, Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, said, “Our TRANSFORMING FINANCE group, as beneficiaries and active participants in global capital markets, affirms our responsibility to reform finance consistent with this reality.” They added, “Today, 24-hour global capital markets are dependent on satellites, internet and other technologies largely financed by taxpayers as public infrastructure investments.”

The full TRANSFORMING FINANCE Statement, now circulating in their private networks, adds “Financial markets are founded on trust – now eroded by the irresponsible and unethical behavior of many players, including many of our leading financial institutions.” The signers, from the European Union, China, India, Australia, Brazil, Canada and the USA agree that “unbridled greed-driven speculation, the improper use of public infrastructure technology for activities such as high-frequency trading, together with a misguided self-regulatory ideology, damaged the financial commons and the trust on which we all depend.”

The TRANSFORMING FINANCE group outlined necessary principles and conditions to operate the shared global financial architecture consistent with 21st century realities. Their Statement cites many agreements and institutions, global norms and rules that have evolved since Bretton Woods. It shows how markets for public goods can be expanded by pricing carbon and other emissions and external costs and accounting for un-priced assets, including: ecological productivity, biodiversity and other global commons, as well as social and human capital.

The group pledged to continue their own efforts to modernize capital markets to serve human societies as one of the tools to manage the global commons, using the new accounting standards and national accounting beyond “efficient market” and “rational actor” models, now outdated by findings in brain and neurosciences.

Prominent signers include: Graciela Chichilnisky (USA and Argentina); Zhouying Jin (China); Robert A.G. Monks (USA); Karl Kleissner (Austria, USA); Tessa Tennant (Scotland, Hong Kong); Ashok Khosla (India); Lawrence Bloom (UK); Christina Carvalho Pinto (Brazil); Woody Tasch (USA); Orio Giarini (Switzerland); Ladislau Dowbor(Brazil); Richard Spencer (UK); Rinaldo Brutoco (USA); Robert Shaw (USA); Susan Davis(USA and Ecuador); Eva Willmann de Donlea (Australia); Ross Jackson (Denmark); Ellen Hodgson Brown (USA); Steve Waddell (Canada); Terry Mollner (USA); Allen White (USA) and many others.
CONTACTS:

Hazel Henderson: President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society for Arts and member of the Club of Rome; www.EthicalMarkets.com, hazel.henderson@ethicalmarkets.com, Ph. 904-829-3140

John Fullerton: President, Capital Institute, Greenwich, CT, and Level3Capital Advisors, LLC; www.capitalinstitute.org, john@level3cap.com, jfullerton@capitalinstitute.org, Ph. 203-769-1191

Christina Carvalho Pinto, President – Full Jazz Communication Group and Mercado Ético (Ethical Markets Brazil) Multimedia Platform; christina.cp@fulljazz.com.br, Ph. (5511) 5507-5870

Graciela Chichilnisky: Managing Director, Global Thermostat, LLC; Professor and Director, Columbia Consortium for Risk Management, Columbia University; author of the carbon market of the UN Kyoto Protocol; chichilnisky1@gmail.com, Ph. 212-678-1148

Ashok Khosla, President, Development Alternatives, Delhi, India; President, IUCN; Co-President, Club of Rome; akhosla@gmail.com

Stuart Valentine, President, IOWA Progressive Asset Management, Fairfield, Iowa; svalentine@fwg.com, 1-800-509-9096

Rosalinda Sanquiche, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media; www.ethicalmarkets.com, office@ethicalmarkets.com; to arrange interviews phone at 904-826-1381

They also released a Transforming Finance Statement, explaining in further detail their vision of a world in which the financial system serves a flourishing and sustainable human, ecological, and spiritual future, and inviting all others who share and work toward these goals to co-sign this declaration.

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Cosimo’s Darwin Gillett, author of NOBLE ENTERPRISE: The Commonsense Guide to Uplifting People and Profits is offering the first chapter of the book for free on his website.

You can learn more about Gillett and NOBLE ENTERPRISE on his website at www.noblebusinesssolutions.com.

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Yesterday the New York Times posted an article about the death of (yet) another bookstore: The Barnes and Noble on 66th and Broadway near the Lincoln Center in New York City. It’s an enormous building, stuffed to the brim with books, and it’s all going the way of the record player. The article interviews independent-street-side-used-book-seller Charles Mysak, who laments the death of books in general, a phenomenon he has noticed in the last ten years as Apple Products and Kindles become more pervasive. The article spends a lot of time genuflecting on the loss of readers, and print books, and how sad it is that people are getting more stupid. And by people we must mean kids, because the younger generations are the majority of the gadget-buyers and the target audience for the New York Times is older and will understand the John Donne literary references from the columnist.

At the end of the article, Mysak comments:

It is apparent that we have a real serious issue, that the life of the mind has been in decline for some time now. [. . .] Ignorance and indolence is the primary problem. If you take care of the mind, everything else follows.

You can and should go read the article for yourselves. There are a lot of interesting comments on the article, most following in the usual vein: “It’s true, the loss of the print book is sad and terrifying, these fools and their gadgets don’t notice anything around them or know how to think for themselves.”; “OH, THE SMELL OF PRINT BOOKS! IT’S THE BEST SMELL IN THE WORLD! DON’T LET THEM DIE!”; “People are just reading on those gadgets, get over it, technology is here to stay!”; “Literary types are just as absorbed as the tech-types, no one has room to talk.”

Our publisher also offered his comments on the article, which are pretty interesting and insightful:

This is a fascinating article as it describes a reality - not based on statistics or corporate financial newsflashes - but based on a personal and very vivid experience which for many of us is becoming clearer and clearer every day: people are too busy with digital gadgets to focus on our surroundings, they are too focused on quick soundbites rather than longterm absorption of (reading)knowledge.

The question is if this is fundamentally different from moving from horse & buggy to cars -which most people would agree was inevitable and positive for mankind’s mobility and development - or are we moving to a world resembling sci-fi movies such as Idiocray and Minority Report, where people no longer care about the fundamentals of life & civilisation, and are pre-occupied by technologically driven entertainment.

Who knows for sure, but an important question also for the NYT to pursue further in their reporting.

I agree to an extent. But the real-life experiences reflected in the Times are from those who are uninterested in what technology and these admittedly distracting gadgets can do. Perhaps children are losing their attention spans and college students refuse to read anything that doesn’t come in the form of a text message. But I’m young enough that I was a partial product of the technology era, and I read in both print and digital formats, and while I can find myself distracted by Twitter and Facebook and blogs, here I am also disseminating information to a slew of people by those very same means.

It goes both ways; which I think all the dissenters know well enough. Technology is a tool, and how we choose to use it is what’s important. People lament the loss of print books and their smell and texture and the feelings they invoke. Well, I propose this. If it’s the physical book that’s making you feel all warm and fuzzy inside then you have no business reading and claiming to be a great lover of books. It should not be the physical product that warms you; it should be the content of the book. That’s what’s important, that’s what changes people, NOT a cover with some musty used pages.

There are upsides and downsides to reading in print and digitally. Print doesn’t die from a used battery or become unusable because of a smashed screen. But you can’t carry an entire library of print books with you on vacation, either. The fact that the loss of one bookstore or the inattention of some people who wouldn’t be reading anyway is not a reason to think that people are stupid or books are dead. Books are more alive than ever in more formats than ever. Publishers, readers, gadget-users need to broaden the definitions of the terms they use and realize that the tools they have can be valuable in multiple ways.

I know that this is going to be an on-going conversation and that others have expressed the same feelings more poignantly, but I think it’s a conversation that still needs to be had. I don’t think there’s going to be a reversal of technology or that people will go back to the old ways. But we can influence how technology is used and whether we’re going to become more knowledgeable and cultured because of it, or let reading and books and everything they stand for fall to the wayside.

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A German military think tank study has analyzed how “peak oil” could change the global economy. The internal draft document shows for the first time how serious the German government takes a potential energy crisis.

Read for a better understanding of the global oil situation “CRUDE OIL: A Strategy for a Declining Oil Supply” - a US goverment report released by Cosimo.

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Tom Croft, author of Up From Wall Street, recently wrote an article about renewing (in both the monetary and green sense) our economy for the fall issue of the socially-responsible investment magazine, Green Money Journal.

This article can be found online right here. As always, Cosimo Books are available in our online store and at Amazon.com.

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