Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels, to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires.
There are some that feel like human activity is the cause for carbon emissions, and because of that, we need to revert to where we were in the 1870s for carbon emissions. I just choose to disagree with that.
Food, like sex, is one of the principal kinds of human activity that engage people when they wonder about how to account for different kinds of human behaviour.
There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There's not much to do about them.
Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.
Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.
When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.
It made me think about a whole area of human activity that was not really a concern to me before that, because I was involved in reading Chinese history, or languages, or whatever.
I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.
Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It's hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards those who accept its risks, usually with new resources.
