Friday, July 31, 2020

THE SLEEP OF REASON

The artist and Chinese political dissident, Ai Weiwei's recent warning that "Abandonment of rational thinking leads to a collapse in which fear and joy, ignorance and reason, all blow in the wind" is a terrifyingly accurately depiction of this moment in time with America's President and his followers denying reality and furiously tweeting in the dark.

The Sleep of Reason by Francisco Goya
Credit: Brooklyn Museum


Years of attacks on scientific knowledge, rationality and expertise of all kinds, particularly relating to critical health, environmental and climate-related issues have, tragically, set the stage for just such a destabilized and destructive state of mind. As a consequence, today, with a dangerous pandemic sweeping across the land, and one hundred and fifty thousand Americans already dead, even the most minimally-invasive and 'reasonable' steps to mitigate the disaster such as mask-wearing and social-distancing continue to be met with powerful surges of irrational fantasies and fears, leaving the rest of us, in Ai Weiwei's imagery, and Bob Dylan's prophetic words from the 1960's, "blowing in the wind."

So deep is this 'sleep' of un-reason that violations and distortions of ordinary rules of law and governance, institutional standards, decorum and even measurable facts seemingly pass unnoticed and un-opposed in the night. Swirling in a maelstrom of Orwellian double-speak, "alternative facts," cries of "fake news," conspiracy theories and a continuing flood of blatant lies and denials, the reasoned process of discourse essential to the functioning of democracy becomes muddied and impossible to sustain.

While the President's 'gut feelings' about untested cures and virus prevention are given equal weight against demonstrable scientific evidence, leading scientists and epidemiologists are demeaned and their voices silenced. Widespread national protests in favor of Black Lives and against police violence become distorted into exaggerated and menacing projections of 'anarchism' in the streets. At the point where the most fundamental democratic acts of census taking, voting and delivering the mail provoke radically fearful and polarized reactions, the narcotic has fully taken hold.

Reason seems to have been fully detached from the requirements of fact. Propaganda, passion and sheer misinformation are free to activate the latent fears and anxieties in the mind of a paralyzed and destabilized public. Faith in the electoral process erodes, and in an American first, a sitting President openly proclaims that he might not accept the results of an election that goes against him! 

In just such a moment, some threshold is crossed. It could be the point when the unprecedented intrusion of federal paramilitary units into American cities against the wishes of state and local officials in the name of preserving 'law and order' becomes more than just one more fleeting outrage in the news cycle. Perhaps it will be the moment when the fever breaks.

For there is a point when sleepers do awaken. At times they are shaken into consciousness by the very intensity of the fearful specters unleashed in their own minds; at others by encounters with the rough and unforgiving edge of external reality against which even their fantasies are powerless.

"El sueño de la razon prodúce monstros" (The sleep of reason produces monsters), the Spanish painter Francisco Goya inscribed in his famous etching more than two centuries ago during a similar collapse of rationality in the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution. Yet the lesson of history is that, inevitably, the darkly demonic forms, wildly exaggerated images, fears and nightmares will fade in the bright light of day: reason reasserted. In a partial reframe of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous words: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward reason."

lka

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

TURNING THE CLIMATE CLOCK BACK 3.3 MILLION YEARS

"BY 2025, CO2 LEVELS WILL BE HIGHER THAN THEY'VE BEEN FOR THE LAST 3.3 MILLION YEARS" [Nature Scientific Reports July 10, 2020]



Let's see. What was going on 3.3 million years ago?

--Humans like us were just a gleam in evolution's eye. The most promising potential ancestor around then was Australopithecus, an apelike creature living in southern Africa who may have been the first to use shaped stones to smash open bones for their marrow. 


--Earth wouldn't enter the current geologic epoch, the Holocene, for another 3,288,000 years. It was then in the middle Pliocene

--North and South America hadn't yet collided and connected. 

--North America sported two elephant-like species, hyenas, small, three-toed ancestors of modern horses, bone-crushing dogs, giant bears and three species of huge, saber-toothed cats


Smilodon populator--one of North America's
Pliocene saber-toothed cats
Credit: Charles Knight/American Museum of Natural History

--Humans wouldn't set foot on the continent for another 3.27 million years.

--Crucially, from our point of view, atmospheric CO2 levels were comparable to today's (somewhere between 381 and 427 parts per million), yet global temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees C (3.6 to 5.4 degrees F) higher than they are now, and sea levels were 25 meters (82 feet) higher. 

Equally crucially, because of those nearly equal CO2 levels, the period tells us what our world may look like all too soon.  "We studied this particular interval in unprecedented detail because it provides great contextual information for our current climate state," says Elwyn de la Vega, researcher at the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, in the UK, and lead author of the Nature Scientific Reports study.

The Southampton research team was able to pin down those ancient CO2 levels by studying the fossilized shells of foraminifera--millimeter-sized sea creatures protected by carbon-rich shells. The ratios of boron isotopes in the shells correlate with atmospheric CO2 levels at the time the shells formed.

Clearly, we're not going to see a return of saber-toothed cats or giant bears. But we, or our children or grandchildren, may well have to deal with a Pliocene climate--much hotter, lacking most of the Northern Hemisphere's ice cover, and with rapidly rising sea levels.

Why aren't we already living in mid-Pliocene conditions? Simply because there hasn't been time for the full impact of the greenhouse gases we've already pumped into the atmosphere to warm the oceans and melt most of Earth's ice. Geochemist Gavin Foster, also at the University of Southampton explains:

... it takes a while for Earth’s climate to fully equilibrate (catch up) to higher CO2 levels and, because of human emissions, CO2 levels are still climbing. Our results give us an idea of what is likely in store once the system has reached equilibrium.

To get a sense of what things will be like when Earth has reached that Pliocene-like equilibrium, picture your favorite coastal city under 80 feet of water. According to recent research, coastal flooding could displace hundreds of millions of people and cost the global economy trillions of dollars by the end of this century if we don't get a grip on climate change now.


Keeling curve--atmospheric CO2 1960-2020
Credit: Scripps Research Insitute

Right now we're at 413 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and rising, and the curve is getting steeper. We're running as fast as we can towards a very inhospitable past.

--REA









Saturday, July 11, 2020

COUNTDOWN TIMER--HOW LONG UNTIL WE CAN VOTE TRUMP OUT?

HERE'S THE EXACT TIME 
TO ELECTION DAY, 2020






Timer credit: timeanddate.com

CHECK YOUR REGISTRATION.

IF YOU'RE NOT REGISTERED, DO IT NOW.

AND PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE VOTE!