What is pure consciousness? In simplistic terms, it seems to be awareness of awareness. That is, it is not an awareness of the content of awareness such as being conscious of fish or trees or ideas, but an awareness of the awareness itself. As such, it would seem to be a distancing from the content of awareness—of the things that we think about—to the awareness itself. This detached awareness from experiences and ideas would give us the perspective to assess the substance of our thinking, to give us special insights into how we think, and perhaps more appropriately, to allow us to assess how we behave.
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The Quadra Project: Hot Food Prices
Regardless of all other factors, higher global temperatures alone will cause an increase in the price of food in the range of 0.9% to 3.2% per year, a price that will add between 0.3% and 1.2% per annum to inflation, according to a study by Maximilian Kotz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, done in collaboration with the European Central Bank (“Food Is Costing More Due to Climate Change—Prices Will Keep Rising”, New Scientist, March 30, 2024).
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The Quadra Project: The PFAS Folly
All too often our ingenuity seems to outwit our wisdom. A case in point is the discovery and production of PFAS chemicals. Its first iteration was created in 1938 by Roy J. Plunkett, the accidental result of some scientific tinkering while searching for a better refrigerant gas. He had inadvertently discovered an artificial compound that was “impervious to heat and chemical degradation and also extremely slippery”, as well as being water and oil repellent (Graham Lawton in New Scientist “Everyday Toxins”, May 11, 2024). We know this substance as the commercial product called Teflon, now produced at more than 200,000 tonnes per year.
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Old Habits – The Quadra Project
Some old habits are difficult to break. Since the global pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, 30 years of half-hearted trying has not stopped them from going up rather than down. The result is exactly as scientific modelling has predicted—global temperatures are rising. The year 2023 was the hottest in about 125,000 years after temperature records were recorded for consecutive months from June to December of 2023, and then for January and February of 2024. The final calculations for 2023 indicate that we have reached 1.32°C above the pre-industrial temperature, exceeding the 2019 record by 0.4°C. Yes, it’s a warmer El Niño year, but that only accounts for 0.2°C of the 1.32°C. New 2024 calculations indicate we have reached 1.48°C above historical levels.
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The Quadra Project: Polycrisis
A new word, “polycrisis”, has entered the vocabulary of ecologists, particularly those scientists who are monitoring the health of the entire planet. Some of these scientists are uncomfortable with the word, arguing that it is an alarmist term. They believe that we have various crises, in the plural, but they are not indicative of the widespread description that is implicit in such a cataclysmic term as polycrisis. Some historians say that what we are experiencing “is just history happening.”
Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the relationship between ecology and human behaviour, argues that such a term as polycrisis is an apt description of what is actually happening on our planet, and it is the result of multiple factors. The word, he says, was first coined in the 1990s at the World Economic Forum to describe the “tangled mess of problems” that seemed to be occurring—“pandemic, war, climate extremes, energy shortages, inflation, rising authoritarianism, and the like.” The term, however, proved useful.
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