Advice for emigrating to Germany

Due to recent events, I'd like to write some basic advice for any of my American readers who might be considering moving to Germany. After all, the USA took in a lot of Germans when Germany went through dark and troubled times, so it's only fair if Germany returns the favor.

Here are the major options I am aware of.

Via citizenship in an EU country

If you have citizenship in an EU member nation - or Norway, Iceland, or Liechtenstein - you are in luck. You can visit Germany whenever you want for up to three months and then can stay if you have found a job or some means of supporting yourself - and being within Germany makes finding a job a lot easier.

Note that the UK still counts as an "EU member nation" for this purpose - Article 50, which is a prerequisite for the Brexit, has not been triggered yet, and even afterwards there will be a two year transition period where the UK will still be a member. What happens afterwards is less clear, but if you have established yourself in Germany until then there will likely be options for staying.

You might have heard that there are possibilities of gaining German citizenship if you have German ancestors. This option exists, but only in a very few specific cases - one of your ancestors must have been deprived of German citizenship during the Third Reich for "Political, Racial, or Religious reasons". If your ancestors emigrated before the 30th of January 1933 and the 9th of May 1945, you are out of luck.

As a student

This is one of the easier ways of getting in, and actually a great opportunity. For starters, no public German university currently charges any tuition fees - even to foreigners. Furthermore, many German universities actually offer English-language degrees and courses these days, so you don't even need to speak the language upon arrival - although I still strongly recommend learning it as quickly as possible once you get here, since it will make your life a lot easier.

As you are presumably not an EU citizen (otherwise you would have chosen the option above), you do need to demonstrate that you have adequate funds for your first year of studies on a locked bank account - currently, that amount is 8,640 Euros. You don't actually have to spend it all (though living expenses, especially rent, should not be underestimated), but you do need to demonstrate that you have it. Furthermore, as a non-EU student you are somewhat limited in your ability to work on the side - there is a maximum of "120 full or 240 half days per year" that you are allowed to work. Exceptions exists for student assistants working at universities, and if you have skills that are in particular demand you might also get an exception for other types of work, but you shouldn't count on it.

Your first stop for information relating to studying in Germany is the website of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service. Particular requirements applying to American students can be found here.

By finding a job in Germany

This is more tricky. While you can stay in Germany for up to three months on a tourist visa and look for a job, you need to leave after that and then apply for a job visa while back in the United States. Which requires that you have a job offer from an employer in Germany and that employer must vouch that they couldn't find an EU citizen who is as well qualified for the job as you are. This is a mere formality in some fields, but a lot trickier in others. As a general rule, people with skills that are highly sought after in the USA that are applicable elsewhere will have a much easier time. If you are a good software developer or a first-grade engineer there might be opportunities for you, but if you are an expert in American case law you are going to have problems. Look around on job boards like Monster or Stepstone for jobs with English-language job titles and do take note of the language proficiency requirements.

Universities and other research institutes might be some of the best opportunities, since they are used to having international employees and how to deal with their needs. And departments always need new PhD students - these are paid poorly, but at least in the STEM fields it's usually enough for one person to live on (as I know from personal experience). Just make sure that you get out of the universities in time, as long-term career perspectives there are dismal and staying there too long will make it more difficult to get an industry job (as I also know from personal experience).

Beyond that, if you are already working for a multinational corporation you might be able to get a transferral to Germany - it will certainly be easier than applying with a German company that doesn't know you.

By applying for asylum

Sorry, but no. Things would have to deteriorate a lot in the USA for any German authority to even consider granting an American citizen asylum, and this would also require German-American political relations to sour so badly that German authorities no longer care about the political fallout from such a decision. Put this option out of your mind and concentrate on one of the more realistic options outlined above.

Useful Links

• Toytown Germany: An English-language site for expatriates in Germany, with fairly large and active forums.
• Expatica: Another website for expatriate with its own Germany section.
• Expats in Germany Blog Directory: Read how other expatriates deal with life in Germany so that you know what you are getting into. Heck, even read these blogs even if you aren't considering moving to Germany - they are frequently enormously entertaining in their own right.

Any Questions or Comments?

Obviously, moving to another country is a huge topic, and this post is intended to give only the barest outline and a starting point for further discussions. Have any additional questions? Ask them in the comments, and I will try to answer them in future posts. Do you have your own experience with being an expatriate and/or living in Germany? Share your insights here as well.

The Brexit Project - Index and Overview

As I pointed out in my previous post, I had to do a "thesis" of sorts for my IPMA certification ("Transfernachweis" in German) - an examination of a real or fictional project from the point of view of all the major aspects of project management.

The certification organization demanded a certain outline for this thesis, and I think this outline is useful enough that I will reuse it for the Brexit Project. The outline is listed below, and as I finish new posts for this project I will add them to this page. This does not necessarily represent a chronological list - as in my thesis, I expect to go back and forth between different subjects a lot - but it serves as a useful starting point.

0. Miscellaneous posts

• The Brexit Project according to IPMA - a Project Management Case Study

1. Project Description

What is the background of the project? Who initiated the project? Who are the "customers"? What are the project goals?

2. Project Environment and Stakeholders

What is the overall context of the project? Which people, organizations, factions have a stake in its outcome, and how should they be managed?

3. Risk Analysis

What risks threaten the success of the project? What measures can be taken to counteract the risks?

4. Project Organization

How should the project be organized? What role do the individual participants in the project play, and what are their responsibilities? How should the project members communicate with each other?

5. Phase Planning

What are the main phases of the project? What are the important milestones?

6. Project Structure Plan

What are the individual work packages? How do the organize the work packages into an effective system?

7. Task Scheduling and Planning

What tasks must be accomplished in which order? Which delays in individual tasks will cause delays for the entire project?

8. Resource/Cost Planning

What funds, expertise, and other resources are required for the project? At which times are these resources needed, and how can we make sure the resources are available at these times?

9. Behavioral Competence

How do we approach negotiations effectively? How do the stay focused on achieving the desired results? How do we deal with conflicts and crises? And how can we foster creativity in finding solutions?

10. Miscellaneous Topics

What is our approach to Quality Management, Configuration Management, and Change Management? How do we approach the project start and the project end?



Can you think of any important project management-related aspects that are missing from this list? If so, leave a comment below. And if you know of any company in need of a certified project manager - especially one with strong expertise in the field of renewable energy/energy management - I am still available, and here is my CV!

The Brexit Project according to IPMA - a Project Management Case Study

First, some personal background: I've worked as a project manager in a department developing new energy management/demand response applications (basically, matching energy consumption with the highly variable energy production of renewable energy sources) for four years. Getting involved in project management was actually a semi-accident - I had applied for a different job at the same organization, but the head of the Energy Management department got hold of my CV, liked what he saw, and offered me a job in his department when I came in for the interview.

In the beginning there was still some discussion whether my work should focus on pure project management or involve software development as well. After a while, I decided to focus on the former - my reasoning was that my development skills were not as good and up-to-date as those of the full-time developers, and if I split my attention between development and management I'd never catch up with them anyway. So the most efficient approach would be to focus on all the administrative, bureaucratic, and frankly political aspects of the projects, take care of the overall planning and keeping an eye on the big picture - and thus ensure that the developers could carry on with the jobs they were trained and paid to do instead of being distracted by all sorts of other stuff that had nothing to do with software.

All in all, this approach worked quite well - the developers appreciated it that I had their backs and let them do their work, and to my surprise I quite enjoyed being the ringleader of the Circus. Sadly, it was only a temporary position, and while I did get a two-year contract extension a third one was not possible for internal reasons.

Since then I've been on a job hunt, and earlier this year I decided to take the opportunity to get some additional training in the field of project management - while four years of project management experience is not insignificant, most of it was "on-the-job training" and "learning-by-doing", and I had realized during several job interviews that the interviewers were fishing for specific project management terms and phrases that I simply hadn't been familiar with until this point. I mean, of course we did "Stakeholder Management" at my old department, we just never called it that - it was just - "keeping our partners and customers informed and doing damage control whenever they were worried about a particular issue".

When deciding which project management certification course to take, I learned that there were three main types of project management certification:

• PMI (originating in the United States)
• PRINCE2 (originating in the UK)
• IPMA (originating in Europe)

While there are certification courses available in Germany for all three, I decided on getting an IPMA Level D certificate. One reason was that various people I had consulted claimed that the former two focused almost exclusively on project management processes, while IPMA (while not neglecting processes by any means) also had a large focus on the human element, such as team building and leadership. Another reason is that to get an IPMA Level D certification you need not only regurgitate key facts during written and verbal exams, but actually put them into practice - by writing a 50+ page document examining a real or fictional project according to the project management standards and practices established by IPMA (I am told that these days only the German branch of IPMA requires this thesis). And from my long experience in academia on both sides of the lecture room I know the difference between "memorizing stuff" and "actually putting it into practice".

I received my certification in July, but I think it's a good idea to refresh my knowledge from time to time. My work on the fictional project was very useful to get a grasp on all the assorted aspects of project management, and thus I want to tackle a new project as a case study. And now I have decided on a case study:

The Brexit.

You might interject: "Isn't it a bit presumptive of someone who has only an IPMA Level D certification and only four years of project management experience to tackle one of the single biggest projects out there?" But frankly, it's hard to see how I could do worse. Immediately after the Brexit vote it became clear that no one in the UK political establishment (with the possible exception of Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party) had planned for this outcome, and much of the time since has been spent flailing around and making mutually contradictory statements about what the Brexit means and how to proceed. Even after Theresa May got rid of her competitors for the office of Prime Minister with almost Merkelian efficiency the outlook remains exceedingly murky.

Thus, it's time someone approached the Brexit as a project management case study and examine its various aspects from the perspective of established project management standards. What are the actual goals of this project - in terms of results, costs, time schedules or social effects? Who are the assorted stakeholders, and what are their goals - and how do their goals and views affect the project? What are the associated risks, and how can they be managed? How should the project be organized? What are the project phases and milestones? How should the individual work packages be planned?

And so forth - there have been lots of statements what the Brexit ought to mean, or not to mean, but there has been little debate on how to put it into practice. If nothing else, maybe this series of posts will help encourage some people to start thinking in the right directions. And, along the way, I will try to explain what project management is actually about - useful for anyone considering shifting their career into that direction, as well as those who have experienced project management from the perspective of being managed.

Some further notes:

• I strongly welcome feedback from those with greater expertise than mine in the fields of UK politics, European politics, and project management. I do not expect to know everything I need to know going into this series - indeed, I expect I will do a lot of revising as I learn more. But this is the way of projects - they always get more complicated as you go in.
• I am basing my elaborations on project management mostly on my IPMA course material - which is in German. I will try to use the closest English-language terms, but I might pick the wrong phrase from time to time. If you note any discrepancies, please correct me!

The IPMA course material

An index of all Brexit Project-related posts can be found here. And if you know of any company in need of a certified project manager - especially one with strong expertise in the field of renewable energy/energy management - I am still available, and here is my CV!

The Brexit Fallout

I wrote this to an American pen-pal, and decided to republish it here as a short primer on the Brexit and its consequences.

---

Hello!

It's been a while since I heard from you. I must say that your current electoral cycle is absolutely riveting and has me glued to the news - "my favorite soap opera", indeed! However, now that we've had our own riveting events here in Europe (and I don't mean the European Soccer Cup, which I personally couldn't care less about) I thought I should write you my thoughts on it.

Europe of course had the same problems as the rest of the developed world - stagnating median incomes and increasing job insecurity. The financial crisis of 2008 exacerbated this, as did the handling of the Euro crisis and how European leaders handled it. Unfortunately, European leaders settled on "austerity" as the solution, which meant that the economic fallout dragged on, usually to the detriment of the poor and middle classes. While the UK was not subject to the austerity mandates of the European Central Bank - not being a member of the Eurozone in the first place - its current government nevertheless committed to austerity, slashing down public services and generally making life worse for everyone but the rich.

But of course, whenever things go badly, the main thing for political leaders is to find someone to blame other than themselves. And a very old standby is to blame the Evil Foreigners - I am sure you recognize the style. In the UK (and to a lesser degree, in the rest of Europe), "Blame Bruessels" is a popular variant - easy to do, since the workings of the EU bureaucracy are arcane and the EU does have a fair number of screw-ups.

To appease the EU haters within the ranks of his own party, Cameron promised a referendum on leaving the EU (the "Brexit") should he get elected, and he made good on his promise, even though he wanted the referendum to fail. However, other members of the Tories who wanted to replace Cameron seized on the referendum as a way of weakening him, publicly taking pro-Brexit stances. The idea was that if there was only a narrow victory for Remain, then Cameron would be so weakened that he would be forced to abdicate sooner or later, since he had staked his credibility on Remain.

Yesterday the British voters have spoken, and there was a slim but definite majority in favor of Leave.

Now the interesting part is what happens next. There is a formal process for leaving the EU - Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which you can read here.

Not a very lengthy formal process, mind you. But if the UK government is serious about this, they need to invoke this article, and then - if all further negotiations fail - the UK leaves two years after it was invoked.

Cameron has already announced that he plans to step down as Prime Minister in October. It is unlikely that he will invoke Article 50 while he is still in office - he will probably prefer it if all the consequences and blame fall on his successor.

Meanwhile, the Leave faction is in a disarray - many of their prominent supporters didn't really expect that they will win this, and thus have no actual plan for the process of leaving the EU. (Their promises during the campaign went on the lines of: "We will make new treaties, the best treaties, and have the EU pay for them!")

The European Council, in the meantime, is pushing for the UK government to invoke Article 50 as quickly as possible:

"We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible, however painful that process may be. Any delay would unnecessarily prolong uncertainty. We have rules to deal with this in an orderly way. Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union sets out the procedure to be followed if a Member State decides to leave the European Union. We stand ready to launch negotiations swiftly with the United Kingdom regarding the terms and conditions of its withdrawal from the European Union."

They are correct in this, of course - any uncertainty will be detrimental to the economy of both the UK and the rest of Europe, since businesses hate uncertainty - as today's drops in the stock and currency markets show. And European leaders have certainly reasons for wanting to get members off the voting tables if these members will soon leave and thus no longer have to live with the consequences of their votes.

But this is also a fairly standard pressure tactic. The hand that the UK government is negotiating with is already fairly weak, and as soon as they invoke Article 50 it will get even weaker - if they don't get any replacement agreements until the end of the two-year period, they will get nothing at all.

The Brexit leaders are beginning to realize this. Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent Brexit leaders and likely successor to Cameron, has already made a statement today. And in it, he said that "there is no need for haste" and "there is no need to invoke Article 50".

So we will be in the odd position that the Brexit leaders - those with any economic sense left, that is - want to delay the Brexit, and the rest of the EU wants the UK out as quickly as possible. Heck, every time the UK government waffles and delays, they can say: "Why do you disrespect the will of your people like this? Hurry up!" And Johnson, if he gets the PM slot, will already be in a bad spot, because the British economy will take a massive hit from this - which will fall back on him.

It would be hilarious if it didn't affect so many people.


Best regards,

- Jürgen

What North Korea gets out of the Sony Hack

The Hack of Sony has been getting a lot of airtime as of late, and rightfully so. I will leave it to others to fully explain the sheer amount of damage it did to the company. However, a primary suspect for the hack that has emerged is North Korea, and that warrants some further attention.

Many reacted in disbelief over this accusation - after all, why go that far over a mere movie even if that plot was likely to upset the North Korean leadership (considering that involved an assassination plot against the Supreme Reader)? But what those people are missing is that stopping was not the point of the whole exercise (assuming for the moment that North Korea really was behind it) - it was just an excuse.

Keep in mind that North Korea has very few sources of revenue - and it is, in fact, dependent on humanitarian aid to prevent wide-spread starvation. If the nation opened up more, it might get more aid - but it will also weaken the regime, possibly causing it to collapse.

And they can't have that. Instead, North Korea has always used a different approach - acting as if they are a crazy loon who must be appeased before they hurt anyone. All those military threats, all those artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, even the nuclear weapons tests... all those are North Korea saying: "Negotiate with us and make us concessions, before something happens you will regret!"

So far, it has worked for them. But, well, sooner or later such threats get stale. If you haven't shelled Seoul for a few decades, then nobody is going to believe you are planning to do it soon. And the nuclear weapons held the attention of the world for a while, but now they too no longer move many headlines. And the thing about military attacks is that they would represent regime suicide if they are actually used - sure, you can hurt (some) enemy nations, but after that they will flatten you. Which is why the North Korean regime - which is very interested in its own survival - won't use them.

But this hack? It works out brilliantly for North Korea. It was no military attack, which means that it will be hard to justify military strikes in return. But they hurt one of the biggest companies in the world very, very badly - and considering the attack was against a media company, and involved a potential blockbuster, the attack and its consequences are now very public. Suddenly, North Korea is discussed by everyone again, and everyone fears them again. How many other companies are vulnerable to attacks like these? Far too many - and as a result, many others will tell their respective governments to tread more softly with North Korea and perhaps give them more concessions - just so that they won't strike again.


Mission accomplished.

My thoughts about Ferguson

The aftermath of the Ferguson shooting as well as the recent Grand Jury verdict on the case have made it as far as the German news media, and this compelled me to write down my own thoughts on this issue.

A Nation in Fear

The United States, a very high percentage of armed people. Anyone around you might be armed, and thus anyone around you might be a threat to your life.

And "I was afraid for my own life" is a legitimate reason for lethal self-defence. And since, in the United States, there is almost always a reason to feel threatened like that by a stranger, it becomes disturbingly easy to justify shooting shooting said stranger in a manner that will satisfy the average jury. This, of course, includes the police - who are far more likely to shoot for kill in the USA than elsewhere in the developed world. In all of 2013, German police officers shot 42 bullets at other people, killing eight. In the USA - a country with only four times the people of Germany - police officers killed 45 people in January 2013 alone.

So shooting others is easy to justify. And it becomes especially easy if said stranger is a member of an ethnic group which is portrayed as especially "violent" and "prone to crime" by the prevailing media narratives.

Echoes of Trayvon Martin

If the shooting of Martin Brown had been an isolated incident - if it had been a single aberration - there wouldn't have been so many protests. But there are ample precedents.

It may be instructive to go back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The "mistake" of Trayvon Martin was walking around a neighborhood where a local thought he didn't belong. That was enough to cause his death.

His second mistake may have been that he didn't carry a gun of his own. After all, he was provably stalked by an armed stranger - and that, according to the logic established above, would have been enough to make him fear for his life and establish a legitimate case for lethal self-defense. It wouldn't even matter if - as George Zimmerman claims - that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch during their altercation. As long as he had sufficient reason to be afraid of his life - and who wouldn't, if stalked by an armed stranger? - he would have been amply justified in using any force necessary to stop Zimmerman from posing a threat to him.

Though it remains an open question if the jury would have seen it the same way, or indeed the police wouldn't have simply shot him at the scene. But he didn't have a gun while Zimmerman did, so Zimmerman shot him, survived, and got free.

And immediately afterwards a campaign began to vilify Trayvon Martin - painting him as a "violent thug" instead of a normal teenager who had every reason to be afraid of his life - while Zimmerman was lauded as a "hero" by too many people - standing up for the right to shoot black teenagers who look "suspicious".

Young black people apparently can't win. As long as the narrative portraying them as "violent" and "dangerous" persists, they remain targets that can be shot nearly at will. If they try to look as unthreatening as possible - playing out "respectability politics" - they need to constantly watch their steps and live under constant fear about "stepping out of line", to a far greater degree than white people do. And the other alternative - arming themselves so that they can better defend themselves - looks rather dubious, since that would only play into the "blacks as violent thugs" narrative and is thus far more likely to get them killed. In fact, considering recent cases where carrying toy guns was enough for black men to be shot, carrying actual weapons looks like an invitation to suicide-by-cop.

Police - The Face of Oppression

Which brings us to the next point - law enforcement. I've seen people claim that if Michael Brown and other young black people in similar situations had acted just like the police wanted them to, nothing would have happened to them.

I find that dubious. Maybe they wouldn't have been killed, but it is still very possible that something bad could have happened to them with no fault on their part. It needs to be remembered that the police in Ferguson - and too many other places like it - does not act as the "friendly neighborhood cop", always willing to assist ordinary citizens. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they were simply the biggest extortion racket around, preying upon the community's poorest members because those had the least access to legal counsel.

How long would you be willing to remain quiet in the face of oppression? Ask that yourself, before you condemn the protesters of Ferguson.

And while Ferguson might be an extreme case, it is hardly the only one. Systematic abuse of, for example, forfeiture laws is disturbingly common. Not all police departments in the United States are rotten, but in many the rot sits deeply. They are the oppressors in many cases, and it is the poorest who have noticed it first - and that includes much of black America.

And as long as it remains easy to justify shooting others, and as long as black people continue to be portrayed as a threat to others, the killings will continue.

What is to be done?

Frankly, I do not know if it is even possible to fix this. Guns are too prolific and too much a part of American life to eliminate the constant fear of violence, and harsher gun control laws probably wouldn't change anything - just like with Prohibition, it would only drive the guns underground instead of removing them.

And the narrative of black Americans as dangerous will continue as long as poverty affects black Americans disproportionally - after all, it is always useful for the upper classes when the middle classes have a lower class to look down to, and fear.

So this narrative will only end if there is a long-term, concentrated movement to lift black America out of poverty - but that will require fixing housing discrimination, unequal school funding, job discrimination and so many other forms of structural discrimination that even stricter gun control seems less of a long shot in comparison.

So no, I don't have any ideas for how to fix this, except to keep on talking about it. What are your thoughts?

[Global Warming] No, the Earth is NOT "doomed". But it will be bad enough.

There is plenty of hyperbole surrounding climate change, so let's get this out of the way first. No, the Earth is not going to be destroyed because of global warming. The Earth is far more resilient than that. Even humanity will almost certainly survive, unless the resulting resource wars somehow manage to trigger global thermonuclear war.

But just because the worst things we can imagine won't happen it doesn't mean that more realistic scenarios aren't horrible enough.

Let's start with sea level rise. In the latest IPCC report, possible sea level rises until the year 2100 range from 26 cm for the most optimistic scenario to 98 cm for the most pessimistic, depending on how CO2 concentrations will develop in the coming decades - and, as the report notes, sea level rise is likely to continue after 2100.

Now, for obvious historical reasons, much of Earth's most valuable real estate is within a short distance of the coast. Many of the world's greatest cities are ports - New York City, Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, and many, many others. What would happen if sea levels were to rise half a meter? Remember, that's only the average sea level - storm surges will also reach higher.

Either they will have to surround the cities with Dutch-style dikes - which is enormously expensive - , or they will have to abandon the areas closest to the coast and rebuild everything deeper inland, including the entire infrastructure - which is also enormously expensive. And, of course, smaller towns or poorer countries will not be able to shoulder such expensive, which means that they will have to go for the second option.

Then there will be all those climatic shifts. "Global Warming" will not be a uniform process. Some places will get a lot warmer, while others barely so. Some places will get much more precipitation, and some much less.

And all our local agriculture and infrastructure is optimized for our current local climate. The rich nations of the world will be able to cope... probably. We can adjust our farming techniques and update our infrastructure so that we can still produce crop yields - and if that fails, we will probably still have enough money to buy our food from elsewhere. But the poorer nations won't have the means to adapt and change, which means that their inhabitants will attempt to leave en masse. And we will notice a few hundreds of millions of refugees on our doorsteps.

Beyond agriculture, there is the shift of ecosystems. Numerous species suddenly can't live in their usual habitats any more, because the temperature and the precipitation changed. The oceans are getting more and more acidic thanks to all the dissolved carbon dioxide, with unknown effects on the most fundamental components of the oceans' ecosystems. We do not yet know how that will affect our food sources, but it would be foolish to assume it doesn't. And beyond that, this mass extinction represents a truly epic loss of genetic diversity - of information. What might we have learned about biology, genetics, and numerous other subjects by studying these species? What inventions might have been inspired by this information?

We will never know.

And worse, much of this is probably inevitable. Already, the permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, releasing massive amounts of methane which will likely continue the warming process even if humanity were to somehow stop emitting CO2 tomorrow. It's a very slow process, taking place over decades and even centuries - but it is quite likely unstoppable.

"So what's the use?" you might ask. "If all this is inevitable, shouldn't we just give up on reigning our CO2 emissions in?"

Well, we might not be able to stop global warming any more, but we can still affect the rate at which it occurs. Reducing our emissions will slow it down, which buys us time. Time to adapt, for both us and the species that live around us. Time to figure out new technological solutions to combat both the warming and its effects.

Even beyond the likely loss of human lives, global warming represents a huge economic drain on the world's funds. And worse it gets, and the faster it arrives, the bigger this drain will be. By causing this change, we are forcing our descendants to spend much of their resources on mitigating its effects, rather than improving themselves and their lives - or even just enjoying their lives. And, of course, if current life extension research works out, we will be damaging our own prosperity as well.

We can argue all day how we are supposed to reduce our CO2 emissions - but that is a topic for future blog posts. However, in my mind there is no doubt about the need to reduce them.