Greenhouse Mending

Climate Jui-Jitsu The Jui-Jitsu school of martial arts has many techniques; however, Jui-Jitsu is most noted for its throws and trips achieved by yielding. When an opponent pushes forward, the Jui-Jitsu fighter yields to the direction of the attack and then turns the resulting momentum with a trip or a throw. The stronger the thrust of the opponent, the harder the fall for that opponent. A similar philosophy might be applied even more so to an attack of excessive (at least to us) global warming. Seriously hotter temperatures would open new physical ways to respond, and clearly visible major changes would cause people to more readily support radical countermeasures. In the last century and a half, the world has only seen increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about a third (0.03 to 0.04 of one-percent) and slight warming of about 1 degree Celsius. These two changes have actually increased crop yields. More carbon dioxide increases the photosynthetic efficiency of ...

A week ago, I had just finished my first day of Craig Duswalt’s Rock Your Life Conference in Frisco, Texas. (You can just call it Dallas if you’re not local.) Besides being a conference for entrepreneurs, the event had a strong motivational bent.  One of the first speakers was actor Glenn Morshower from 24, Transformers, Ozark, and other productions. But that day, he had his philosopher’s hat on. He gave us a new word, pronoia. Pronoia is a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good. Morshower declared that, indeed, the Universe does conspire to give us good and give it abundantly. He cautioned that we consider carefully what we ask for because the Universe is most likely going to give it to us.  That’s all true. A species small than the apex predators — “Lions and tigers and...