In February 2022, our planet was 1.19°C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature of 13.7°C calculated from the collected global records in the 1880s. The Industrial Revolution technically began about 100 years earlier, but no extensive measurements exist to verify the combined surface temperature of both land and water during those years. Between 1920 and 1940, the global temperature rose 0.1°C per decade, 0.2°C during the 1980s, and 0.61°C per decade since 2000. This ascending trajectory corresponds to a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, and ends the 10,000 years of relative climate stability that has allowed human civilization to flourish.
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The Quadra Project: the Social Game
In the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens has existed as a distinctive species, we have done very well. During this time we have outlived at least five other hominids, including Homo neanderthalensis, which became extinct a mere 40,000 years ago—depending on ancestry, we actually carry traces of Neanderthal genes as a result of interbreeding. We have also managed to populate the entire planet, an accomplishment that has puzzled those who have tried to explain our unprecedented success. Luck was obviously a factor. But an another is now emerging from the genomic analysis of a rare disorder known as Williams Syndrome. (see “The Last Human” by Kate Ravilious, NewScientist, 29 Nov. 2021.)
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The Quadra Project: Passenger or Crew
The famous Canadian media guru, Marshall McLuhan, when commenting on Buckminster Fuller’s seminal 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, said, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.” Like so many of his insightful comments, McLuhan managed to encapsulate a complex and comprehensive understanding in a few simple words.
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The Quadra Project: Eco-Morality
The global environmental crisis is creating a paradigm shift in human consciousness that will change the moral tenor of everything we think and do for the foreseeable future—not just for decades, but for centuries as we become the de facto regulators of our planet’s climate. As the media guru Marshall McLuhan noted, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.”
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The Quadra Project: losing our minds
Just when we need our entire minds, we seem to be losing them. This is the considered opinion of Johann Hari, a British-Swiss writer and journalist, writing in a Guardian Weekly feature, “Focus (If You Still Can)” (Jan. 7, 2022).
It’s not that we’re losing all our minds, just about 20%, according to studies. This is a critical amount considering that we’re confronting some of the most serious threats to our survival in the history of human civilization, and the capabilities we need to make crucially important decisions are precisely the ones being compromised.
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