Concerning Catastrophes and Cooperation

Concerning Catastrophes and Cooperation

By Emily Spence

Until fairly recently, anthropologists and geologists were greatly puzzled by an unusual finding. Their perplexity concerned the almost total disappearance of humankind many years ago. Finally, they were able to put together the various factors related to this happening and came up with the following scenario.

Over much of the Earth, crude stone tools have been found at the geological layer roughly corresponding to 74,000 years ago. Based on the various rock types used, their rate of wear and the number of implements uncovered in each setting, the population could be estimated for many regions of the globe. In addition, migration patterns could be charted based on similarities in tool designs combined with their varying quantities in assorted locales. As the seasons changed and the animal location shifted -- so did the hunter-gatherers. The related movement could be mapped for several clans.

Then suddenly, signs of all tools, abruptly and completely, vanished across nearly the entire globe. The disappearance was almost completely universal except, for the most part, in one small region of Eastern Africa. At the same time, there existed, instead of the tools elsewhere, layer upon layer of volcanic ash corresponding to a time period many years in duration.

Based upon the amount of powder found in each locality, its composition and other characteristics, the epicenter of the "event" was, eventually, determined to be the place now called Lake Toba. Lake Toba is a large, serene and pastoral body of water roughly 100 km long and 30 km wide (sixty miles by eighteen) in Sumatra, Indonesia. It wasn't always peaceful [1].

Because the region lies close to the Sumatra Fracture Zone (SFZ), it is a seething hotbed of subterranean geological activity. This is because the subduction of the Indian Ocean plate under the Eurasian plate is occurring at the rate of 6.7 cm per year and is a part of the basin dubbed "The Ring of Fire" [2], a horseshoe shaped expanse extending across the Pacific rim, while, at the same time, being prone to numerous earthquakes and volcanic activity. For example, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami can be attributed to the instability of these shifting tectonic plates and the seismically activity situated in this, generally, unstable zone.

Furthermore, one (of several) volcanic eruption from Toba caldera was so gigantic (with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8, termed "mega-colossal") that it spewed an estimated volume of 2,800 cubic kilometers ((670 cubic miles) of materials upward and outward. ( 1.609 km equals one mile.) A good basis of comparison is provided by Mount St. Helene, which emitted 1.2 cubic km of matter during its most recent flare-up.

In other words, the sheer magnitude of these two volcanic disturbances were vastly different. Moreover, this largest Toba blast (named the Toba Tuff) was of such a magnitude that at least 20,000 square kilometers were enveloped in pyroclastic flows while the original breaching material was 600 meters (1,800 feet) thick near the point of origin.

As such, ash quickly covered a territory approximately half the size of the US and it has been retrieved as far away as the bay of Bengal and India, where it exists 15 cm (6 in) thick in deposition over the entire Indian subcontinent This is around 3100 km (1,900 miles) from Lake Toba. In short, this eruption was likely the biggest one in the past twenty-five million years.

Moreover, it has been calculated that the upsurging plume column was between 50 to 80 km (30 to 50 miles) in height so as to be capable of spreading gases and debris, via upper atmospheric winds, over an ever increasing and extensive portion of terrain for quite an interval of time. In addition, 10¹⁰ (ten to the tenth power) metric tons of sulphuric acid exploded into the air while causing an extremely toxic fallout of acid rain to, likewise, blanket a large area of the globe.

With all of these factors combined in impact, massive weather change ensued. Resultant temperatures varied downward 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius for a number of years (with evidence collected as far away as Greenland through ice core samples), sunlight sufficient for photosynthesis was blocked in many regions due to light ash dust and other atmospheric impediments trailing the eruption. Furthermore, an enormous number of plants would have died off even if sufficient light were to have been present. This is because vegetation was inundated by ash, acid rain and other noxious byproducts -- a phenomenon that has been studied, via the use of duplicative conditions, in botany laboratories at several university sites.

So, in the end, there was a massive die-off engulfing the planet. Indeed, an ice age developed on account of the eruption and lasted approximately a millennium.

At the same time, there is evidence, drawn from mitochondrial DNA and the aforementioned diminishment of tools, that humankind, in all likelihood, experienced a genetic bottleneck [3] due to Toba Tuff. According to information collected by some genetic researchers, the human population probably shrunk to only two to ten thousand of members.

All or most of these lived within around 200 miles of the Rift Valley in Kenya. The advantages by doing so were clear...

Because of the reduced plant and animal life, there was not a large margin of error in terms of acquiring food. If a single animal, for example, were found, it had to be killed on the first try as there were not many more extant from which to select. As such, tools had to be very light, sharp, easily shaped and highly effective. Indeed, they could reflect all of these features in this location as obsidian, an ideal rock for the task (and, ironically, formed by volcanic activity), was in plentiful supply in the Rift Valley.

However, tribes gathering this material could not all live near its source as there was an insufficient food supply in the area. In addition, they had to share (at least the obsidian) and cooperate while

communicating with others (strangers from other families) in that they could not expend inordinate energy and time in battle in lieu of primarily focusing on obtainment of enough food and clean water.

In other words, those tribes that chose to fight, for the most part, died off and their genetic legacy did so, too. Meanwhile, it has been speculated that the other groups -- the ones that made it to the obsidian deposit without battling -- traded, shared and aided each other while there, as well as (later) bartered obsidian with clans too far from the rock bed to make the trek, themselves.

As a result, our ancestors, all of them for everyone on Earth, likely came from these small bands of people and we all inherited a genetic foundation imbued with a propensity towards accommodation, sharing and cooperation!

Now, flash forwarding into the near-present, and there is another, smaller and more personal calamity being addressed. In shock, I am standing in the shell of a house on Water Island, near St Thomas. It is my mother's home and was built to stand close to 200 miles an hour of hurricane force. It was build by my father and a work crew to withstand, approximately, twenty-five miles an hour above any maximum storm thrust.

In order to be so, it was built with a venting roof to handle changes in air pressure and wind, as well as had three 3" thick rebars running one yard down into the earth while, also, embedded in each of the building's 2' X 2' X 12' concrete support columns. In addition, the structure contained other well thought out, protective features. All the same, I am cleaning up the mess left from Hurricane Marilyn (1995) -- the second time for such a going-over on account of Hurricane Hugo (1989) having created similar, although less thorough, ruin.

Unfortunately, not much was left of the home this succeeding time. Most of the columns are lying on their sides split in pieces like a chopped stick of butter. My mother's dresser drawers and clothes were found strew more than a mile away. Our refrigerator held its place, but our neighbor's refrigerator flew through a foot thick concrete wall so as to leave a gaping new window the exact size and shape of its outline (due to winds clocking in at 220 mph in the near vicinity). At the same time, the inner walls held in our home, but the roof, windows and most household items lay spread out everywhere. Even some broken plumbing pipes, ripped from the interior of walls, lay scattered here and there, along with everything else.

Meanwhile, my mother's grief over this trouble was only superceded by the torment created by the deaths of her husband, firstborn child and parents. At the same time, we wondered that the hurricanes could be so much more powerful than the US Weather Service set as the standard for maximum force.

How ever tragic such individual losses are from hurricanes, floods, wild fires and other causes indirectly related to global warming, nothing will likely approach the gargantuan magnitude of demise caused by such events as Toba Tuff. Nothing will, also, match the humongous enormity of further devastation that is likely advancing towards us due to the greenhouse effect and other kinds of environmental damage. Not even regional wars, unless they were to be full-scale nuclear in nature, can come close. Here are the reasons...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was conducted by 1,300 researchers from ninety-five nations over a four year period. it comprises of the most comprehensive analysis of current planetary conditions ever undertaken and resulted in a detailed report compiled by World Resource Institute (WRI) and approximately thirty partners.

Their ultimate conclusion is that human actions endanger the Earth's capacity to maintain future generations. Meanwhile our current circumstances include these factors:

As human demand for resources grows exponentially, most ecosystems across the globe have been seriously impaired due to exploitation and the natural processes that support life on Earth are falling apart. Indeed of twenty-four environments that have been assessed, fifteen are seriously damaged. Furthermore, it is only within the past fifty years that this severe destructive change has taken place in which sixty percent of worldwide ecosystem benefits (such as clean air, fish, fiber, timber, etc.) have significantly deteriorated. In addition, human water usage have doubled over the past forty years and, currently, forty to fifty percent is being used. However this will change as drought areas spread in addition to glacial runoff and snow packs disappearing due to global warming. Moreover, fish stock is depleting at an extraordinarily rapid pace, coral reefs are dying, large oceanic dead zones are spreading, whole forests are vanishing, pollution of watersheds (in large measure due to agrochemicals) has led to eutrophication of waters and species extinction rates are now 100-1,000 times above their normal speed of occurrence. In addition, further extreme problems are arising due to the devastation produced by carbon loading.

If this isn't sufficiently gloomy by itself, the 2007 study by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers further grave information. It is that greenhouse gases, with a ninety percent certainty to be caused by our too great reliance on fossil fuels, are driving cataclysmic level of climate change. These, in turn, will introduce other grim perils of which many are already irreversible.

Some of the worst include that there will be increasingly severe water shortages in many regions, dramatic increase in virulent diseases, decreased food supply, greater extremes in weather causing habitat loss (such as the indigenous life forms and my family faced on Water Island), rising oceans, unbearable levels of heat in some spots so that some life (including many humans) will perish from it, vastly expanding desert regions and other dreadful upshots.

For example, the melting of the permafrost will release further CO2 into the atmosphere and, thereby, accelerate the melting. Along with no longer cooling the earth by a sort of refrigeration effect, the lack of much frost, white snow and ice reflecting light back up into the atmosphere will increase the heat trap on earth.

All considered, James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia model (in which the planet is viewed as an interdependent, integrated super-organism), postulates that billions of humans (far more than was killed by the Toba Tuff) will, ultimately, die off due to global warming. As such, he recommends that all communities and countries try to postpone this inevitable outcome (along with delimiting the numbers to be killed) by taking EVERY measure possible to cut back the greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, many others share his bleak outlook while, also, expanding upon it [4].

Despite that we do not know the Earth's ultimate carrying capacity for people, we do know that it is definitely finite. We, likewise, know that we are running out of critical commodities (most notably fossil fuels, certain ores, some minerals, as well as the plants and animals that our species will, both directly and indirectly, cause to become extinct). In the same vein, we know that there will be massive loss of human life due to various effects of global warming, including ones related to shrinking food production.

All considered, we are faced with a looming cataclysm that perhaps begins to move towards the scale of the Toba Tuff. While our travails are not entirely of human making, they, largely, ARE due to human behavior. This is because they are caused by our collective greed for ever more products, our reproductive patterns doubling the population nearly every thirty years, and the fact that certain resources (such as fossil fuels) have rigidly preset limits while others (such as marine life and trees) are being reduced too rapidly to sufficiently replenish themselves.

In the end, it matters not that, as a species, we are not programmed to react to danger unless it is immediate (rather than slowly evolving), dramatic and concrete (such as is a flood or fire), and in close proximity. It matters not that we deny the existence of global warming and would prefer to think about pleasant topics rather than those that cause discomfort and dismay. This is because, like it or not, the changes that humankind have created for the planet are happening, anyway, due to most people wanting ever more affluence and grander lifestyles, ever more prgeny, and ever more personal wealth largely obtained from turning other species into wares. As such, Toba Tuff and other catastrophes give us a little glimpse (and warning) about just how bad life can get when climates radically alter.

This in mind, whoever is left a hundred or so years from now will wonder about the reason that our generation amused themselves with such questions as, "Should I buy Gucci or Prada shoes?" They, certainly, won't be trying to select between taking an overseas vacation in Madrid or Tokyo. They might not even know what a jet or cruise liner is unless they go to a museum (that is, if there is any museum left and a way to get to it).

They, also, will likely see the ironic, contradictory folly of jetting in droves to the Great Barrier Reef to study the best way to save it from destruction caused by our large carbon footprint. Likewise, they will probably wonder as to the reason that we didn't willingly cut back on population growth rather than let "nature" handle the problem for us through tragic and painful means. Similarly, they will almost certainly be, to some degree, angry at us as our need for constant self-pampering and ever more babies led into the state of affairs that they will have inherited from us. At the same time, perhaps they will be the offspring of sets of individuals who, like the East African tribes of 74,000 years ago, were the most prone to cooperate, share and render mutual assistance rather than war over the last remaining resources in such predatory fashion as is now taking place in the Middle East.

In any case, let us hope that they will learn better methods for conservation than our feeble attempts, feel more greatly protective of the natural world, and look at the wilderness as a necessity rather than as, primarily, a site to plunder. If not, they will have to learn all over the understandings that we are just now starting to know and it certainly will NOT be easier for them given the voluminous amount of the Earth that we, right here and now, are utterly destroying so as to turn it broken over to them as our legacy.

In the end, we, all of us, have to ask ourselves whether we wish to have more of everything (manufactured goods, vacation homes, holidays in far away locations and so on) in the short term or do we want to stretch out our use of resources to give the Earth a break to heal and to try to help ensure that future generations can more easily survive. Do we want a little inconvenience now or the formation of a whole lot of it down the road? (Surely if our forebears on the African plains could learn to live within their daunting limits, we can manage a little personal discomfort or irritation so as to generally improve life on Earth for all.) Do we have a sufficient supply of self-control and compassion toward our unknown descendants to curb our boundless desire for ever more merchandise, petrol, electricity and offspring? Can we find some modicum of happiness within deliberately self-proscribed limits?

If not, it is almost inevitable that we will, eventually, wind up with far less people, inadequate energy sources and minimized per person consumption due to the mounting harm to our globe that we are now producing... Our forebears had no choice but to deal with the effects of Toba Tuff. We, though, DO have a choice and it is a clear one with high stakes. Thus, can we start changing immediately out of our growing recognition that it is absolutely essential that we do so? In the least, we owe it to the future generations to make a determined effort to cooperate together to create better methods to reduce our ecological damage! Literally, their lives depend on it!

[1] Excellent portrayals of the Toba Tuff can be found at: March Resources @ National Geographic Magazine (magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0503/resources_), as well as the related films listed at Supervolcano - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano) and (http://natgeochannel.co.uk/explore/earthshocks/index.aspx).

[2] To learn more on this topic, please refer to: Pacific Ring of Fire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire).

[3] This is defined at: Population bottleneck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck).

[4] A replete and striking overview of this stance is provided by Juan Santos at: The Fourth World: Apocalypse No! part 3: The Law of Life and... (http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/2007/01/part-3-of-apocalypse-no-law-of-life-and.html).

The Ants of Gaia

It’s only the end of the world, so quit bitching

by Joe Bageant / July 7th, 2007

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

– Thomas Manthus, 1798

As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I’d guess that it was the lack of water that finally got ‘em.

But the most interesting thing in retrospect — if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting — is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper’s grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death.

Now you’d think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to any non-intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it, “Done drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off.” Never mind that Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was a best seller and remains a classic. Never mind that James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking Englishman who 99% of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever because it amounts to self-cannibalism.

Lovelock also convincingly argued that, due the side effects of this species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20% of humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North and South Poles.

As to be expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said of Lovelock: “This guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types,” both of which number among my favorite kinds of people.

Those pagans who allowed themselves to feel and not just intellectualize about the earth’s condition, and those scientists who did not require computer modeling to do simple subtraction, recognized that these are the most challenging of times in human history, “challenging” being a polite term for the fact that that humanity is gonna die off big time, if not sooner, then later. Call it the secular version of The End Times.

But not much later, in light of the brief span Homo sapiens hath shat, frolicked, killed and exceeded their MasterCard limits upon the earth, which is less than a second in geological time. Already we are on the way out because we did not have the common sense of lizards, which lasted tens of millions of years longer without so much as a calculator, much less computerized eco models.

A bunch of DNA molecules gave us this aberrant evolution of brain and consciousness that enabled us to dominate everything else and get into the totally fucked situation in which we now find ourselves. The monkey got so smart he took over everything, ate most of it, drove over the rest, then stuck the roadkill on its own dick as a nuclear warhead, and after having threatened what was left around him, set out to destroy even that small remaining scrap of his ruined earthly turf. Is this God’s cruelest joke?

Global Warming as Mange Medicine

If mankind were discovered on a dog’s hide the owner would give the dog a mange dip. Or if the earth were a Petri dish, we would be called pathology. Problem is though, mama earth tends to shed pathogens off her skin, which for us pathogens, is the ultimate catastrophe.

When forced to look at catastrophe on this order of magnitude, we either go numb in shock or look in delusion to something bigger, or at least something with more grandeur than Mother Nature flushing humanity down the toilet. Otherwise, one must accept the both ugly and the weirdly beautiful prospect of oblivion. Meanwhile, we begin too late to “make better choices.” Grim choices that do nothing but postpone the inevitable, which are called better ones and sold to us to make ourselves feel better about our toxicity. Burn corn in your gas tank. Go green, with the help of Monsanto. But not many can be concerned even with the matter of better choices. Few can truly grasp the fullness of the danger because there is no way they can get their minds around it, no way to see the world in its entirety. The tadpole cannot conceive of the banks of the pond, much less the wooded watershed that feeds it. But old frogs glimpse of it.

Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice — the moral one. Accept the truth and act upon it. Take direct action to eliminate human suffering, and likewise to eliminate our own comfort. We can say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to drive at all and refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can quit being so addicted to rationality and embrace the spirit. Rationality simply turns back on itself like a mobius strip. Too much thinking, too much cleverness on the monkey’s part leads it to believe it can come up with rational solutions for what ration itself hath wrought.

All the green energy sources and eating right and voting right cannot fix what has been irretrievably ruined, but only make life amid the ruination slightly more bearable. Species gluttony is nearly over and we’ve eaten the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature (though a case might be made for stupidity) but because the existence of consciousness necessarily implies each of us as its individual center, the individual point of all experience and thus all knowing. The accumulated personal and collective wounds fester and become fatal because there is no way to inform the world that we must surrender our assumptions, even if we wanted to. Which we do not because assumptions are the unseen cultural glue, the DNA of civilization. If we did so, the crash would be immediate.

So we postpone transformation through truth, and stick with what has always worked — empire and consumption. And we twiddle our lives away thorough insignificant fretting about mortgages and health care and political parties and pretend the whole of American life is not a disconnect. Hell, all of Western culture has become a disconnect. Somebody needs to tell the Europeans too; progressive Americans give them entirely too much credit for the small positive variation in their cultures and ours. We both get away with it only so long as the oil and the entertainment last.

The front page of today’s newspaper tells me that 41 million motorists will gas up and hit the road today, July 3rd. Another five million will sip drinks and read magazines while zipping through the stratosphere in 747s that burn the day’s oxygen production of a 44,000 acre rainforest in the first five minutes of flight just getting off the ground and gaining altitude, adding to the more than 110 million annual tons of atmosphere-altering chemtrail gasses, some of which will remain to hold heat in the upper atmosphere for almost 100 years.

Below it all are the spreading pox like blotches of economic and ecological ruins of dead North American towns and city cores, such as downtown Gary Indiana, Camden, Newark, Detroit . . . all those places we secretly accept as being hellish because, well, that’s just what happens when “blacks take over,” isn’t it? Has anyone seen downtown Detroit lately? Of course not. No one goes there any more. Miles of cracked pavement, weeds and abandoned buildings that look like de Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. Hell, for all practical purposes it is uninhabited, though a scattering of drug addicts, alcoholics and homeless insane people wander in the shadows of vacant rotting skyscrapers where water drips and vines crawl through the lobbies, including the Ford Motor Company’s stainless steel former headquarters. (See the works of Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara.) It is the first glimpse of a very near future, right here and now for all to see.

The hearts of even our most avowedly thriving cities are just dead, reduced to nothing more than designated spending zones, collections of bars and banks and overpriced eateries lodged at the center of a massive tangle of overpasses and freeways designed for a nation of soft people hurtling themselves through the suburbs in petroleum powered exoskeletons in search of fried chicken, or into the city for the lonely monetized experience called urban nightlife. Which is no life at all, but rather posturing in lifelike poses amid simple drunkenness and engorgement.

We allow ourselves to imagine the worst is somewhere in yet another future so we can continue without owning decision. Love of comfort being the death of courage, we continue the familiar commoditized life, the only one we have known. Is it not true that our entire understanding of courage as we know it is about braving some unknown? About making the socially unaccepted and dangerous choice? Stepping forward in the face of the wars and evil mechanics of our own particular time?

Empire and its inevitable permanent state of warfare flourishes not because evil men are at the helm, but because the men at the helm are even weaker and more in denial than we are. (Look at Dick Cheney. The guy is a nervous wreck wrapped in arrogance and denial.) And so their uninformed and crude confidence is assuring to both them and us. We elect the worst among ourselves in increasing avoidance of ourselves and they are validated by our endorsement. Evil men seeking empire did not make us or the world this way. We made their existence possible through our denial, love of ease and non accountability.

The most dangerous question in the world

Yet, I dare say that comfort is not the most important thing in most American lives. It is just the only thing we are offered in exchange for our toil and the pain of ordinary existence in such an age. Consequently, it is all we know. Meaningless work, then meaningless comfort and distraction in the too-few hours between sleep and labor. But we settled for that and continue to do so. The day will never come when we stand around the office water cooler and ask one another: “Why in the hell are we even here today?” It’s the most dangerous question in America and the Western world.

Some few of us are in a hellish limbo, simply waiting for total collapse because it is easier to rebuild from nothing than to change billions of minds not even remotely concerned with the looming catastrophe. A minority of the world, the six percent called America, suffers the mass self-delusion of endless plentitude. A much larger portion is less concerned with the moral aspects of consumption because they are brutally engaged in trying to find enough to eat and a drink of clean water. So plentitude on any terms looks damned good. Escape to America because those fuckers over there don’t seem to be suffering at all.

Manifesto of the Damned

I thank the stars for younger men, writers such as Derrick Jensen and Charles Eisenstein. They say what we cannot yet say to ourselves and what the media will never say because media survives by the corporate numbers game. Consequently, the iron rules of being allowed to communicate with significant numbers of people within our empire tend to call for glibness, fake optimism, and the wide net of inclusion of even the silliest sorts of people. Fuck only knows I’ve participated in the sham over the years. But the truth is never politically or socially correct.

What’s left of my own aging hippie optimism dies hard. And as an older guy who has seen both interior and external horror in this life, I often assure those who will deal with this world after I am worm chow that “to have seen a specter is not everything.” I’ve often repeated this theme because it is important to know that many more specters lie ahead of the next generation, the survivors of which will be the new “brave happy few,” links in the chain of reason tempered with art. No one yet knows with absolute certainty the outcome of our terrible common plunge toward truth. But even in the worst of times, there is glory in the sheer electricity of life, the expression of its juiciness, those moments when the eternal fecundity of the flesh struts by in a tight skirt, or perhaps sporting the perfect unshaven jaw, offering everything and nothing. Life is never completely joyless.

Younger men and women will live to rule or rule the day. So seize it for god sake! And listen to the cellular wisdom of the flesh. I did and do and am damned glad of it. Despite what a police court Jehovah, Yahweh or Allah may have told us, the only holy thing existent is this the flesh in which we now walk. It leads us toward both good and evil, but it leads, and most probably will bleed if we are on the right path. Yet, what could be better than a meaningful life during meaningless times? Which is everything, whether we be artistic, queer, altruistic, an unheralded ox in the fields of labor . . . or one of the invisible ones out there with a stone cold determination to kill the supposedly deathless machinery in which we are expected to supplicate daily and call that a life.

I am not a wise man, but I dare say that’s about all you can hope for. A splash of small glory, or perhaps even a canteen filled with meaningfulness in the desert. It is no small thing.

So here we are. You and me. Let us hang all our laundry out to dry in this tiny corner of cyberspace. I think it is entirely possible that we can be honest cybernetic bards in an unpromising age, possibly even noble amid the ruins.

'Sun not behind global warming'

• Leigh Dayton, Science writer
• July 10, 2007

THE key plank of a controversial British documentary has been discredited by new research showing that the sun is not causing global warming.

The findings are in stark contrast to claims made in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is to be shown on ABC television on Thursday.

The program dismisses the widely held conclusion that greenhouse gases from human activity are driving global warming, instead claiming that changes in solar activity have triggered recent warming.

"Manmade global warming is unmitigated nonsense," the program's writer and director, Martin Durkin, wrote in last Saturday's The Weekend Australian.

But solar physicists at Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Southampton, along with colleague Claus Froehlich of the World Radiation Centre in Dorf, Switzerland, have found that while solar activity may have played a role in climate change in the first half of the last century, it is not driving the recent rapid warming.

Their conclusion was based on a study of all the available solar data for the past 100 years.

They found no correlation between total solar radiation, the number of sun spots or cosmic ray intensity and global warming since 1985.

"Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability," they will report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

University of Melbourne climate scientist David Karoly commented: "These findings completely refute the allegations made by some pseudo-scientists that all recent global warming is due to solar effects."

Professor Karoly has just returned to Australia as a Federation Fellow from the University of Oklahoma, where he took part as a lead author in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment released last April.

As reported by The Australian at the time, Professor Karoly was highly critical of efforts by panel delegates from China, Saudi Arabia and Russia to water down the scientific findings.

Professor Karoly will appear on an expert panel after the documentary is broadcast, along with climate change sceptic Bob Carter of James Cook University.

Mike Lockwood, a professor at the Rutherford laboratory, told the journal Nature that he and Dr Froehlich were "galvanised" to conduct a new and comprehensive study of solar data following allegedly misleading media reports about global warming, including those made in Mr Durkin's documentary, which screened in Britain in March.

Despite their findings, Israeli scientist Nir Shaviv, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, continued to support the solar theory. He told Nature the new findings may not reflect a "lag" between solar activity and warming.

Along with Urs Neu, of the climate and global change forum of the Swiss Academy of Sciences in Berne, Professor Karoly dismissed Dr Shaviv's suggestion.

"We have much evidence (from different types of research) that most of the observed warming over the last 20 to 30 years is not due to solar influences," Professor Karoly said.

Canadian Arctic temperatures rising at double global rate: UN

Nasa, the Associated Press

Image shows interannual observations of sea ice over the Arctic detecting recent reductions in the extent of perennial ice between 2004, left and 2005.

http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1181364150008
By Stephen Thorne The Canadian Press OTTAWA (Jun 9, 2007)

A United Nations panel says temperatures in the Canadian Arctic have been rising at almost double the global rate, mainly because of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Coming on the eve of a G8 meeting looking for ways to reduce heat-trapping emissions from industry and automobiles, the UN's "Global Outlook for Ice and Snow" says Canada's Arctic, along with north-central Siberia and the Antarctic Peninsula, has registered the largest temperature increases of any place on Earth.

"Ice and snow are important components of the Earth's climate system and are particularly sensitive to global warming," says the report, citing "substantial," documented decreases in ice and snow over the last few decades.

"Changes in volumes and extents of ice and snow have both global and local impacts on climate, ecosystems and human well-being."

Arctic temperatures will continue to rise through the 21st century, melting glaciers that will raise sea levels by up to a metre, affecting millions of people worldwide, says the report by more than 70 experts. And with critics calling PM Stephen Harper's emissions-reduction plan at best ineffectual and at worst counter-productive, the UN report urges decisive measures to tackle the problem before it snowballs.

"To avoid further and accelerated global warming with major negative consequences, greenhouse gases must stop increasing and start decreasing no later than 15 to 25 years from now," says the document released earlier in the week.

"Economic assessments indicate this is achievable without significant welfare losses."

Harper has dismissed fixed caps on Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions, saying they will devastate the economy. He's in Europe this week touting a plan to link emissions to industrial production by establishing so-called "intensity targets."

Critics such as Green Party Leader Elizabeth May have called the plan a recipe for disaster.

The UN says Arctic sea ice has disappeared at a rate of 8.9 per cent a decade over the last 30 years, and it predicts a "mainly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer by 2100 or earlier."

The declines in ice and snow will only compound the warming effects of greenhouse-gas emissions because snowless land masses and iceless oceans will absorb rather than reflect more of the sun's warmth, says the report.

While there has not yet been widespread thawing of permafrost, the report warns that climate change is expected to cause a thaw across the subarctic by century's end.

Such a melt would further compound global warming because permafrost, especially its upper layers, stores "a lot of carbon," the report says.

"Permafrost thawing results in the release of this carbon in the form of greenhouse gases which will have a (detrimental) effect to global warming."

The report warns some sea-ice dependent organisms from bacteria to polar bears are already at risk because of melting ice and declining habitat.

Ironically, it notes that the increasing extent of open water in the polar regions will allow easier access to exploration for oil and gas, energy sources responsible for much of the planet's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Bush rejects G8 greenhouse gas initiative

ROSTOCK, GERMANY — As leaders of wealthy nations converged Wednesday on a Baltic Sea resort for their annual meeting, the White House effectively derailed a climate change initiative backed by one of President Bush's strongest European allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The White House said it would hold firm against concrete long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a major priority for Merkel, the host of the Group of 8 meeting.

The real work of the meeting will get under way today, when Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia are to meet. Bush tried to stop the slide in relations with Putin on Wednesday by saying Russia is not a menace to Europe despite a threat to aim missiles at the West.

"Russia is not going to attack Europe," the president said, brushing off Putin's warning that he would reposition Russian rockets in retaliation for an American-devised missile shield to be based in Poland and the Czech Republic.

"Russia is not an enemy," Bush emphasized. "There needs to be no military response because we're not at war with Russia."

The theme of the meeting is "growth and responsibility in the global economy," but by Wednesday, it was apparent that the biggest rift will revolve around global warming.

After lunch with Bush, Merkel seemed to concede — without explicitly saying so — that her plan was off the table.

"There are a few areas here and there we will continue to work on," she said, standing side by side with the president outside an elegant white castle on the grounds of the Kempinski Grand Hotel. When Bush turned to her and said he has "a strong desire to work with you" on the issue, the chancellor pursed her lips.

Specifically, Merkel is pressing the G8 to adopt a plan to cut emissions in half by 2050 and to limit the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius — terms the president's chief environmental adviser, James L. Connaughton, said Wednesday the United States was not prepared to accept at this time.

Instead, he said, the final communique approved by the G8 nations — the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan — would probably reflect a merging of Merkel's plan with a proposal by Bush. In a major speech on global warming last week, the president said he intended to convene major polluting nations, including China and India, in a series of meetings aimed at setting long-term goals by the end of 2008.

Merkel, a physicist who has made global warming her signature issue, has staked her reputation on making real and significant progress on the problem.

"She does not want to make this a public spat," said Julianne Smith, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "But she was elected in part because she's a scientist, she has a very strong position on this, and Germans are huge fans of any effort to cope with climate change. So for her own public, she has to show that she's being a bit forceful with the United States and she's putting her foot down."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Feels Like I'm Dying...From that Old Used-to-Be

Feels Like I'm Dying...From that Old Used-to-Be
Sharon Astyk

"I got the blues...Won't you save me?

I got the blues...as far as I can see.

I got the blues...Won't you save me?

Seems like I'm dying, from that old, used-to-be."

-Lyle Lovett

I tend to be an optimist, at least by the standards of peak oil activists (which isn't very hard). By that I mean that I believe in individual action and I believe that we could overturn the system that we live within and make better choices. But I also think this is less likely than that we'll do the wrong thing, and part of it is that our brains are trying to kill us (or at least our kids). That is, we've gotten into habits of thought so destructive and so automatic that we don't even recognize their basic failures. And if we don't recognize the failures in our own heads and overturn them, we're in big trouble. One of those problems is that we can't stop looking for a quick fix. I liked this essay by James Kunstler quite a bit, and I recommend it to you, because he has a useful grasp of essentials, " It only made me more nervous, because this longing for "solutions," strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth's ecosystems (and human civilization with it).

And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem -- certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things. ("We Want Solutions" http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/05/we_want_solutio.html) I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees." I, like Kunstler, think that the phrasing of the call for "solutions" as "ways to keep things mostly the way they are" is completely mistaken. Trying to keep the cars going and growth capitalism up and running is a. futile and b. destructive. Not only will we be doing the wrong thing, but we don't seem to grasp that none of these represents a real solution in any meaningful sense. Ethanol, biodiesel, solar panels - all of these are tremendously fossil fuel intensive.

We can't make a solar panel without using a whole lot of silicone and metals that are mined, smelted, crafted, assembled, sold and transported using...fossil fuels. The day that we can create a solar panel made from cradle to grave with renewable energies, I'll buy the notion that we're all going to be running around in electric cars fed by solar panels. Now when I say that, people start arguing that it is hypothetically possible that someday we'll use bioplastics and mine metals using electrically powered machinery.

And again, I point out, show me a case of having done it, having made even 5 solar panels that way, and I'll buy it. Heck, I'll write a free ad. Because most people don't grasp that solar panels, or wind generators or ethanol aren't a magic bullet unless they represent a self-perpetuating system. Oil was nicely self perpetuating, at least for a good long time - you used oil based equipment to get oil out of the ground in a nice ration of energy returned over energy invested (EROEI) of 100-1. But we don't have the infrastructure, or the grid system, or the renewables, or the tools, or in some cases the technology to make things like solar panels or wind generators entirely out of renewables. They take fossil fuels at 20-50 different spots along the ride. When you add up all the fossil fuels involved, the EROEI of most renewables is somewhere between 1 to 1 and 20-1, probably on the low side for most of them. That means that even to match our current energy needs, we'd need 5 times as much power generated from wind as coal and 50 times as much generated from solar as natural gas. Do you begin to grasp the scale of the problem? And these alternative energies aren't a permanent solution - it is true that a solar panel might last 20-30 years. [George Monbiot in Heat, p6. 130 - 130: "Here are two facts you seldom see on the same page: Solar photovoltaic cells pay for themselves after 25 to 35 years. Solar photovoltaic cells have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years." WB]

It is also true that they might not, and that the batteries certainly won't. That grid intertie that keeps you from having batteries - that uses lots of fossil fuels quite regularly and needs quite a lot of regular maintenance and other energy inputs. And even if your windmill lasts you two decades, unless we can make them again with renewables, that means that we're just sticking the problem on our kids. That is, let's say we do a massive build out of windmills and solar panels, enough to keep our whole society going (never mind that we could never fund it or engineer it). We use up a huge amount of our remaining fossil reserves to keep everyone comfy and in their cars, and we go into massive debt to do it. Well, five years from now, all the solar panels need new batteries. But we don't have any manufacturing plants that make batteries from solar panels. So we need to do it again, with fossil fuels, plus fix the solar panels that got broken and replace a few parts on the windmill. And all the metal, and the chemicals and the little pieces need to be made, mined, manufactured. ..with fossil fuels.

And then five years later we have to do it again, and then a decade after that we have to do it on an even bigger scale - to replace all the worn out windmills and solar panels. And as we go along, supply constraints are increasing, and prices of fossil energies are rising. Capital costs go up, investment costs go up, and remember, since energy costs are way up, there may not be as much money around to invest. Where is the energy and the money for all these fossil inputs going to come from in our nice, "renewable" society? In order to keep things going on renewables, we'd have to vastly *expand* our existing infrastructure - not only would we have to make enough windmills to keep the grid going, but also to run the electric cars, to power the mining equipment, to make bioplastics, and smelt aluminum, to manufacture titanium parts - all things that were done comparatively efficiently with oil and gas (because they are heat intensive) now must be done much less efficiently by electricity. So we'd have to build enough windmills not just to power things as they are, but to produce 3 times as much electricity - and rebuild the grid.

This would costs trillions of dollars, tons of oil and natural gas...and in a few years, we'd have to do again. Whenever I bring this up from people looking for techno solutions, they all tell me that eventually we'll be able to make things from renewables, of course. Hmmm...of course. That is, we're betting our kids lives on the hope that at some point renewables will become self-perpetuating, even though we have no idea how that will happen, that would require major, multiple large scale technical breakthroughs in many cases that might or might not happen, AND, we're not willing to do it now, when we have energy to burn, lots of money and no crisis - instead, we're going to bet the farm (and lives) on the fact that we'll be able to do this 20 or 30 years into a depletion crisis with much less money, much less oil, much less availability in a society that we simply don't know the shape of.

That is, we're going to stick the next generation with the problem, and hope it isn't too serious. But if we can't do it now, when we have lots of energy and lots of money and all the time in the world, the chances are excellent we won't be able to do it. "Hey kids, when you are poorer, more indebted, and energy costs are up at 250 bucks a barrel, guess what? The techno people want to offer you the chance to keep the society going. And if you can't afford it, or get the energy to do it, well...tough. You can adapt then, even though every infrastructure adaptation will cost you more and require more scarce resources. What, you wanted to use your precious legacy of remaining fossil fuels for cancer treatment drugs? Tough - we used it to build batteries so we could have windmills. Oh, but you can't have windmills or cancer drugs. But feel free to scavenge in our debris."

So what we're offering our kids is for them to take on the real burden. We, we are told need "transitional" solutions - ones that would enable poor rich us to be able to get comfy with a more sustainable life. We need our electric cars because we can't be expected to change hard - that will be much, much easier for our children. Does anyone else see a problem here? Like the wacko, immoral reversal of what parents and grandparents are supposed to do for children - we're supposed to be willing to work our behinds off and make sacrifices for the wellbeing of future generations. And what we're really saying is fuck them, I don't want it to be too hard for me. How did we get here? How did we turn into this? Well that's been the strategy for the last 50 years, right? Let's stick the next generation with the problem and not worry our pretty little heads about whether it is sustainable. In the 1970s, when we became widely aware that the oil was going to run out, the people who were able to vote (not me, I was 5) decided to elect Ronald Reagan and go for denial, instead of starting to build renewable energy systems. So now it is my problem. And their parents, after World War II, decided to destroy the nation's agricultural system, which meant that the chemicals and the pesticides became my parent's problem, and my problem, and my kids' problems.

Wow, so that's what an inheritance is! I would suggest that the "find a short term solution solution" even if it were feasible (probably not) is morally bankrupt, ugly, inelegant and in part responsible that each generation's children seem to want less to do with their parents than the last one. The notion that there's a techno solution out there is probably wrong, but even if we could find one, Kunstler's right, would we want it? Would we want to be people who said, "Let's just put it off a little longer so that someone else has to deal?" Would we want to be the opposite of the generations who made huge personal sacrifices so their kids wouldn't have to? The thing is, there is a solution, and like most good solutions is really, really simple, and equally elegant. Stop being rich. Seriously, that's all there is to it. Stop living like rich people. Right now you probably have a servant to wash your dishes, another to do your laundry, another to transport you to your destination. These aren't people servants (somehow we're convinced that paying other people is wrong), they are electrical or oil based. But you live like a lord in a castle. Your castle is probably huge by world standards. You probably have a whole bunch of servants. You take a lot of wealth from poorer people (ie, you buy cheap things manufactured by virtual slaves that are cheap because of that), also like lords in castles.

The answer is really simple. Get off your ass, and dump the castle, or at least move a few more people into it. Get rid of most of the servants. Start doing for yourself without using power. Stop buying anything you want and eating like a king. Live like a peasant. Wear peasant clothes. Do peasant work. Eat peasant food. Get comfortable with it. The thing is, peasantry isn't really that bad. Peasant clothes are sturdy and comfortable - peasants don't have to wear pantyhose, get botox shots or wear a necktie much. Peasant work isn't that bad - the fact is that 11th century serfs managed to feed themselves working just over half the year - the rest of the time was spent drinking beer. Ladakhis work hard 4 months a year, and spend the rest partying. The !Kung people can meet their needs in 3 hours a day. Once you get good peasantry, it really isn't that hard. Peasant food is great - fancy restaurants in cities serve peasant food and call it "Trattoria" or "Bistro" fare. The craving for a solution that will mean things don't *REALLY* have to change in any deep way is not just a sign that we're missing the point. Because even when confronted by the obvious and simple truth, we choose denial or simply not to give a flying fuck. I'm not always sure which one it is. I suppose if I have to choose one, I'd rather we were stupid than evil, but, as my husband once said, "no dichotomy where dualism will do!" But I still want to believe that we can count without our fingers, figure out when things don't make sense, take our heads out of collective asses, and stop killing our children with our old-used-to- be. It might even be true.

Sharon

Ignorance on global warming

By Derrick Z. Jackson | June 2, 2007

IF RACHEL CARSON were alive and writing 45 years after "Silent Spring," her new book would be "Stagnant Summer."

Among her subjects would be NASA administrator Michael Griffin. His own top climate scientists reaffirmed in a study last month that "global temperature is nearing the level of dangerous climate effects." The study concluded that "little time remains to achieve the international cooperation needed to avoid widespread undesirable consequences."

This week, National Public Radio asked Griffin whether climate change was a problem mankind should "wrestle with."

Griffin responded as if one of NASA's deep-space probes had dropped him off on Pluto. "I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists," he said. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."

Digging his toes deeper into his mouth, Griffin said, "I guess I would ask which human beings -- where and when -- are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position to take. . . . Nowhere in NASA's authorization . . . is there anything at all telling us that we should take actions to affect climate change. . . . NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, 'Battle climate change.' "

Berrien Moore, director of the Institute for the Study of Earths, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire, said Griffin's comments were "bizarre," "baffling," and "mind-boggling."

"It is such a strong statement based on such a high level of ignorance," Berrien said yesterday in a phone interview. He has been a lead author in past reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It indicates he doesn't have any knowledge on the topic he's talking about. Even a cursory reading [of the research] would not support what he said."

Griffin came off as the newest bad cop to remind people where the Bush administration stands on global warming. Griffin said this on the same day that President Bush, with his popularity among Americans dropping to its depths among Europeans, said he wants to commune with the planet on climate change. But in advance of next week's G-8 summit, Bush has already rejected the call by Germany, Britain, and Japan to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a modern version of what Carson, who would have been 100 years old this week, wrote about in 1962 when she woke up the world to the dangers of pesticides. "We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effect and to ignore all else," she wrote. "Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard."

The day before Griffin denied the existence of hazard, I spent 90 minutes observing two mallard families at Mount Auburn Cemetery. One mother had four chicks. The other had 10. We take mallards for granted as our most common duck, with 7.3 million of them in the United States and Canada, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. But they did plummet from about 11 million birds to about 5 million between 1958 and 1965. The total number of ducks, 36 million today, was down to 25 million when Carson wrote "Silent Spring."

In noting the pesticide residues building up in some wildlife refuges, she wrote, "such poisoning of waters set aside for conservation purposes could have consequences felt by every western duck hunter and by everyone to whom the sight and sound of drifting ribbons of waterfowl across an evening sky are precious."

She would have warned us that climate change is the new poison. In his stagnation, Griffin last year oversaw the deletion of the words "to understand and protect our home planet" from NASA's mission statement. Now he is asking which human beings should accord themselves the privilege of fighting climate change. Carson would have asked right back from "Silent Spring":

"Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? . . . Who has decided -- who has the right to decide -- for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?"

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

U.S. set to reject targets on climate change

U.S. set to reject targets on climate change: report

By Myra P. Saefong, MarketWatch

Last Update: 2:27 PM ET May 26, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. is set to reject new targets on climate change at next month's Group of Eight summit, the Associated Press reported Saturday, citing a document released by environmentalists.

That would ruin Germany's and Britain's expectations for a new global agreement on carbon emissions, the report said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants the meeting to agree on targets for greenhouse gas production cuts and a timetable for an agreement on emissions reduction that would succeed the Kyoto Protocol, AP said. The Kyoto Protocol, which runs through 2012, is an agreement between developed nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But unattributed comments on a draft summit communiqué suggest the White House has serious reservations, the AP news report said. Greenpeace attributed the comments to U.S. officials and said they were given to the group by an undisclosed third party, AP said.

"The U.S. still has serious fundamental concerns about this draft statement," the notes said, according to AP. "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' tin terms of what we simply cannot agree to."

The document claims that the White House is 'fundamentally opposed' to many of the European objectives.

The 27 European Union members have agreed on a 20% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The cut would rise to 30% if a broader international pact can be made, the AP said. See MarketWatch's special report on global warming.

At the June 6-8 Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm, on Germany's Baltic Sea coast, Germany's Merkel wants to win agreements for a global cut in emissions of 50% below 1990 levels by 2050, as well as commitments to energy-efficient strategies, the news agency said.

Myra P. Saefong is a reporter for MarketWatch in San Francisco.