AUTHOR

Robin E-H. Hoard, Program Manager

H&S.CO – Climate (from GMIBS Project)

ID. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7960-9780

Why is it important to aid at-risk communities who want to stay in place in the face of climate change? Climate change is not just about sea levels rising; climate change slowly affects each and every environment and habitat on Earth. When habitats and environments change, this affects crops by altering their growing seasons and by changing the water content in the soil and irrigation. For livestock, it limits the carrying capacity of the land to support animal herds. Fisheries stock and species move to new areas to survive. This information has been known for some time.

Twenty-six years ago, James Burke warned us about the aftermath of climate change and the coming refugee crisis in the television series After the Warming (1989). Forty-four years ago, the movie Silent Running (1972) imagined a future where Earth’s plant life had all but gone extinct as a result of global warming. Although After the Warming and Silent Running were both designed as entertainment, they still pointed out the potential impact humanity could experience if we do nothing to address climate change.

When people find it hard to stay in their communities due to climate change, they are forced to flee their homes and become displaced in their own country. Displaced people first move to urban areas, then, over time, resources become tight. Conflicts develop, regions go unstable and terrorists move in, followed by foreign military forces.

Unsafe in their own country, people move on to becoming global refugees. In Syria, before the refugee crisis, ISIS, or the civil war, there was an environmental crisis of over-used and mismanaged natural resources stretched to the breaking point by climate change. Syria experience its worst drought in 900 years.

Syria isn’t the only example of massive destabilization ultimately rooted in climate change: Ethiopia in the 1980s, Somalia in the 1990s, Sudan in the 2000s, and Libya all came before it. And many more will come after if communities don’t have the information they need to prepare for the coming changes. It’s not just least developed countries on the line; developing countries can slip backwards and developed countries may find it hard to stand alone with their limited resources.

Why should I listen to this? Garrett Hardin’s article “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor” (Psychology Today, September 1974) uses the metaphor of countries as lifeboats. This way of thinking has become so ingrained in the Western psyche that we are collectively willing to let situations spiral out of control. Having ridden in a lifeboat for a summer as the only way to cross a mountain lake at the base of a volcano, I know lifeboats are big, well-made and hold more then you think. The real metaphor here is that Earth is the lifeboat.

That when one part of the Earth lifeboat founders, takes on water and slides below the waves of turmoil, the other end of the boat will surely follow in time. We are not in separate boats but in one.

As Benjamin Franklin pointed out years ago: “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost. For the want of a shoe the horse was lost. For the want of a horse the rider was lost. For the want of a rider the battle was lost. For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”

In Franklin’s metaphor, he gives you the impression that one item can set off a cascade of events. But looking at this again, you can see how other overlapping events can compound the first mishap. Human settlements are the nails that hold local societies, cultures, governments and countries together. If we give up these nails that hold us together, we will lose the battle to climate change.

Why isn’t something being done now? There are humanitarian organizations and aid programs looking at climate change and trying to understand what it all means. To most of them, it means more work doing the same thing in the same way. This is the first problem.

If these organizations were armies, the outcome would be simple: if they insist on re-fighting the last war in the current conflict, they would be defeated.

Humanitarian organizations for the most part are trying to adapt to the new demands of climate change by opening innovation labs within their programs, using a model based on the funding of high technology services and product development. But this model only rewards short-term thinking and goals as opposed to a long-term view and aims. In short, we have bureaucracies playing with a flawed capitalistic concept of rewards for success. Climate change will always be a multi-generational issue requiring both a long-term view and long-range projects.

Our view is very different. We believe that to fight global warming on the local level requires a change in thinking. We need to consider how a system can be easily deployed and used by local groups in settlements at risk of climate change. Systems to act as an intelligent aid to their decision-making process, that can aid in their understanding of environmental and climate changes and help them deal with those changes.

This would also call for the formation of local and regional groups to act as the first- and second-level of support: groups made up of academics, scientists, citizen scientists, journalists, environmental hackers, and communities from the DIY and Maker movements who what to keep their home and country intact.

Why would this be the first choice? When communities become destabilized because of climate change and environmental conditions, people become displaced in their own land and refugees around the world. This opens the door to wars and terrorists. What we are proposing is more cost-effective and humanitarian than the old ways of doing things and the endless wars that follow.

Our tools gives locals in at-risk, established communities the nails they need to stay in place, the tools to ask the three main questions that scientific software can answer: What is happening to our climate/environment? What does it mean? And what can we do?

H&S.CO – Climate as a young project, is organized along the lines of Red Hat and Canonical to give it self-sufficiency in funding through the services and products it will sell once in full operation, as well as in an open time scale for long-range projects. Our goals are:

• Develop open source tools for others to mine information about the earth.
• Open an innovation lab for Harden Human Settlements for climate change research and mitigation.
• Establish an open source software clearinghouse.
• Perform QA and testing lab on specifications, designs, platform architecture of intelligent aids.
• Provide Tier three help desk and contract support for deployed systems.

The H&S.CO – Climate  is now mapping out the general design concepts and open source specifications that should be incorporated in any system that would act as an “Intelligent Aid” to a local community in their decision-making process related to dealing with climate change in their area. These are:

• Open-Source by: specifications; design; manufacture; FOSS Software.
  • Hardware designed to be rugged, lightweight, modular, scalable, and suitable for bare-base or remote field deployment with an add-on energy sustainable power module.

• • Circular economy thinking: reuse of common commodity computers into cluster platform to mimic a server’s capabilities, maintain a small carbon footprint and reduce the cost to the end-user.
  • Deployed sensor array system should include: air (quality, weather); water (quality, contamination); soil (moisture, chemicals, contamination).
  • Low capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) costs for end users.
  • Ease of deployment and operation by local communities with a limited technical background.
  • Incorporation of scientific and risk-reduction software, able to answer three questions: What is happening to our climate/environment? What does it mean?, And what can we do?
  • Development of a Tier 1 and 2 support network by locally based groups.

As program manager on a very long-range project to address climate change in one area, we are not the sole arbiter of this effort. I welcome interest and involvement in all aspects of this endeavor.

Why would we believe that this is a viable business? To analyze the market for field-ready climate science devices is to look five years into the future.

This market is in the same stage of development that the fax machine market was in during the early 1980s, before it reached critical marketing mass. The H&S.CO – Climate, will organize a marketplace around the common use of field-ready climate science devices by:

• Dropping the size and weight of devices
• Developing a uniform open source list of technology standards
• Dropping the price of devices
• Increasing the ease of device use

There are two other factors that were key to the success of the fax machine that also need to be repeated for the field-ready climate science device market to take off: education and outreach. It’s clear how to change the product to transform the industry and create a new market: make the product should be smaller, more portable and lightweight, with a lower cost, using a common communications medium. This progression is visible in the fax machine market from the first fax invented in 1843 by Alexander Bain, to RCA’s work in 1948 on the ultra-fax, to Xerox’s manufacture of a fax machine for the news wire services in the 1960s. Prices have fallen from the 1965 cost of $8,000 to the 1980 price of $2,000 and beyond.

Why are you doing this? My name is Robin Hoard and I am the program manager for the H&S.CO – Climate. My career background—both my academic and formal training—is in working with intelligent networks. I have been solving problems where complex systems and people come together for over sixteen years. In another career area before that, I managed a non-profit research organization for ten years in the 1970s. Then later I was an early employee for a high-tech start-up in the late 1980s. The H&S.CO – Climate is the third start-up organization I have been associated with from the start.

I learned an important lesson from working from one start-up, on how they could offer products and services at different levels, and the way they moved across multiple domains at different entry points to offer a new solution to the old problem of moving information around the world. Their view of innovation led to the undoing of many developed marketplaces with well-entrenched vendors and dominant players. The H&S.CO – Climate, is not so much about moving message traffic around the world as it is to supply those who mine information about the Earth with new tools and platforms. As with that start-up, this involves both a simple view of innovation and the use of commodity computing resources to create complex computing platforms. And, most critically, it involves going after a target market that no one else sees: the people trying to mine information about the Earth to understand and mitigate climate change locally.

Why do anything at all? You can think of climate change as the first great test of the human species as a whole: can we live on a planet without destroying it, and can we be on our own with no real means of escape if things go wrong?