HinesSight

Live longer by slowing time down

Time keeps marching on. When I wrote my previous blog post, "How to make time slow down," I was 59. Now, I'm 61.

Obviously I haven't been able to stop chronological time. Every year, on my birthday, my age meter advances a click. But we all know how time seems to fly sometimes, and drag at other times.

None of us wants life to be a drag.

However, the older I get, the more I want time to slow down. Perceived time, that is, because I know I can't do anything about those damn birthdays coming around every 365 days.

Previously I quoted Steve Taylor, who argues persuasively that mindfulness is one of the best ways to slow time down. 

A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be 'mindful' of our experience… Poets and artists often have this kind of 'child-like' vision – in fact it's this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions.

An article in the October 24-30, 2009 issue of New Scientist, "The Time Machine Inside Your Head," provides some explanations for why mindfulness succeeds in slowing down time for us.

Researchers wondered why we feel that some experiences (such as a frightening one) last longer than others. People who survive a serious car accident, for example, often say "I felt like everything was happening in slow motion." According to the article:

[David] Eagleman now attributes the apparent slowing of time to a trick of memory. An intense experience, with heightened fear or excitement, rivets our attention and evokes the firing of many neurons across the brain, he says, causing us to soak up more sensory details.

Richer memories seem to last longer, he says, because you assume you would have needed more time to record so many details.

...That could explain many other temporal illusions too, such as the "oddball effect." When people see the same thing over and over (a picture of a dog flashed on a computer screen, say) and then suddenly see something different (Margaret Thatcher), the new thing seems to last longer, even if all the pictures are actually shown for the same duration.

So if we see familiar things as if for the first time, this should slow down time for us. The years we have left to live will seem like they take longer to pass.

As Steve Taylor says:

Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the 'there and then' of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.

In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn't have to speed up as [we] get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it's also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

Craziness of creationists shown by 47-million-year-old fossil

Oh, Ida, it's so nice to meet a relative -- albeit a distant one. Really distant. As in 47 million years ago.

Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, primates and humans.

Scientists say the fossil, dubbed "Ida," is a transitional species, living around the time the primate lineage split into two groups: A line that would eventually produce humans, primates and monkeys, and another that would give rise to lemurs and other primates.

I love the idea, better termed "reality," that my ancestors include all sorts of other creatures. Which, of course, isn't a strange idea at all, since humans obviously are animals. And animalistic.

There is, however, some controversy about whether Ida is part of the Homo sapiens family tree. Some scientists say the fossil is like an aunt from several generations ago. Others, that it is more like a third cousin twice removed.

Whatever. Ida still is a relative, and I'm glad she came to visit after so long. Forty-seven million years! Time for some inter-species togetherness.

Reality is so much better than fantasy, by and large.

Science is dedicated to learning how things really are. Religion casts its lot with imagining how things might be. Eternal life. A god who created the universe just for us. Heavenly delights offered in exchange for blind faith.

None of that makes sense.

So Christian religious fundamentalists fear reason, evidence, facts. Evolution threatens their irrational world view, where God created everything all at once -- or at least managed the design of creation with his divine will.

Over on one of my favorite blogs, Pharyngula, biologist PZ Myers has been punching holes in a creationist's arguments. I like the title of yesterdays' post: "I'll be condescending when condescension is deserved." 

Who should be intellectually condescending here? I think the side that presents the evidence, actually seeks out new knowledge to test their conclusions, and actually demonstrates some knowledge and scholarship deserves to be a little uppity and arrogant. It's the people like Peter Heck, who are utterly ignorant of the science, mangle what little they know, and actively mislead people about the evidence who might deserve a little condescension. My only reservation about that is that I tend to favor treating ignorant, lying twerps with open contempt instead.

Nicely said.

Today Myers ripped into Heck again, demolishing his ridiculous claim that there is no evidence for macroevolution (the emergence of new species) -- only microevolution (such as when a virus evolves into a new form, like swine flu).

When creationists argue that they believe in microevolution, but that macroevolution is dubious, they've got it backwards. Large scale historical change was confirmed and thoroughly documented in the 19th century! Darwin was a bridge, who explained how small scale, natural processes could produce the known variation between species, and the triumph of 20th century biology was to confirm and expand upon our understanding of how those changes occurred. Neither macro nor micro evolution are speculative. Neither one is lacking in evidence.

For sure.

Ida, who could well be my distant ancestor (yours too) is more proof of evolution. Now, we can only hope that believers in creationism and intelligent design will evolve into human beings who aren't stuck in the Dark Ages of anti-scientific fundamentalist beliefs.

Dancing cockatoo shows that birds can boogie

Browsing through some news web sites this morning, it was nice to come across a story that made me smile rather than frown (as swine flu and economic headlines do).

For the first time, apparently, scientists have proven that an animal can dance to music. Snowball, a cockatoo, performs to various tunes. This video of him grooving to the Backstreet Boys was the first one I watched.

Loved it!

I wish our dog could do half (heck, a tenth) as well. And that I could put a video of her on You Tube that would get over 2,150,000 views.

Unfortunately for our family pet's fame, researchers analyzed more than 5,000 You Tube videos of "dancing" animals.

In the end, only 33 videos really seemed to show creatures moving with a beat. There were 14 different species of parrots and one elephant species.

It seems that only species capable of imitating sound can keep a beat. Dolphins are going to be studied to see if they can aqua-dance, since they're capable of learning vocalizations.

I don't think they'd be as engaging as Snowball, though. Here's another video of him dancing, this time to Huey Lewis. I love how he throws his head around.

Non-shock: men see bikini-clad women as objects

Sometimes science reveals the obvious.

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.

...Although consistent with conventional wisdom, the way that men may depersonalize sexual images of women is not entirely something they control. In fact, it's a byproduct of human evolution, experts say. The first male humans had an incentive to seek fertile women as the means of spreading their genes.

Guys, we can't fight evolution. So, embrace it.

Caution: universe may be much vaster than it appears

It's good to keep things in perspective. Sure, the economic times are tough. Most of us feel like we're being painfully squeezed by circumstances not of our own making.

We do our best to keep balanced, hoping to maintain the equilibrium of the little corner of the cosmos that each of us calls "me."

Well, there's truth in the conception that the world can be found in a grain of sand. Or, a single psyche.

But it's also wise to keep in mind how small each of us is when compared to the unimaginable vastness of the universe.

Which, according to a recent New Scientist article ("Another universe comes calling") may be much vaster than suspected.
Download Another universe comes calling

Clusters of galaxies have been clocked at 1000 kilometers a second, racing toward a certain patch of sky at a unexplainably high speed. Here's an image from the article that explains what may be going on. (click to enlarge)
Note the relatively small circle in the middle of the cosmic landscape. That's the observable universe, with a radius, I believe, of some 13.7 billion light years (the age of the universe).

Much further out is the cosmic horizon, 45 billion light years from an observer. This is how far away the most distant object we could see today is. It's well over 13.7 billion light years because the universe has been expanding much faster than light since the big bang.

So (I think I've got this right)...by the time light from a hugely distant galaxy reaches us, the galaxy has zoomed much further away. It seems considerably closer than it really is.

On the other hand -- and this is the mind-blowing part of the article for me -- there may be vast expanses of the universe beyond the cosmic horizon that are having an effect of what lies within the horizon.

These expanses are indicated by the "mountain" range of dense space-time shown on the right side of the image. Some scientists suspect that an entity outside of the observable universe is pulling on the galaxy clusters, causing them to flow in that direction.

Such is far from being proven.

Still, I love the notion that so much of the cosmos is over the cosmic horizon, forever beyond our knowledge (unless we could travel faster than light) yet impacting our corner of the universe nonetheless.

Back when I was working in the health policy arena, I gave a talk to medical school students on death with dignity issues. As an icebreaker (somehow I managed to fit this into my presentation) I started off by asking them, "Who knows about how many galaxies there are in the universe?"

Nobody even hazarded a guess. And these were science students, in medical school! How much less, I'm sure, do regular people know about our place in the cosmos.

Answer: likely at least 125 billion galaxies; probably many more. And an average galaxy has around 100 million stars.

So we're very, very small in the big scheme of things. And that scheme is much bigger than we'll ever know if the New Scientist article is correct -- as it likely is to some degree.

I don't know if this knowledge helps when our car won't start, or our back aches.

But I enjoy pondering how insignificant my worries are in light of the ever-expanding and ultimately unknowable cosmos.

Lars Larson thinks global warming is an Oregon joke. That isn’t funny.

Oh, Lars, you're so funny. But only in your own right-wing mind. Today I heard Oregon's contribution to uninformed talk radio (Lars Larson has both a national and local show) praising global warming and today's record breaking heat wave.

"Oh, sure, global warming is going to turn southern California into a dust bowl," I recall Lars saying. "But it's going to be great for Oregon. Just look at the terrific weather we're having. Global warming, bring it on."

First of all, Lars, my daughter and her family live in Hollywood. Real people live down there, like they do elsewhere in the southwest. And all the other parts of the world that are facing long-term drought largely because of global warming.

Lars, you live in the city. You turn on a tap and water comes out. Spend some time in the country. People like us rely on a well for our water. Drought is no joke to country folk. And farmers. There's plenty of both in Oregon, Lars. You need to get out more.

Then there's Victoria Taft on Portland's KPAM, another conservative talk show host who is spectacularly ignorant about global warming. And the status of Oregon State's weird and wacky weather guy, George Taylor. It's a fact: he isn't the official state climatologist.

But recently I heard Victoria say that he was, before Gov. Kulongoski stripped him of his position. Wrong. He never had it, because no such beast as "Oregon state climatologist" exists.

She also believes that humans have nothing to do with global warming, a spectacularly wrong conception that Taylor shares. Along with extremely few reputable scientists.

Taft and Taylor are prone to spouting climate myths. I doubt that they're open-minded enough to expose themselves to the facts about these myths, but they're readily available on the New Scientist web site.

I just read one of those articles, "The 7 biggest myths about climate change." See, I'm a subscriber to several science magazines. I've got this strange (to Lars and Victoria) notion that truth is better than falsehood, and facing reality is preferable to blind faith in political or religious dogma.

Truth. Reality. Some paragraphs from New Scientist:

Our planet's climate is anything but simple. It depends on the interplay of many factors, from massive events in the sun to microscopic creatures in the oceans.

Yet a clear picture has emerged, supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence: the world is warming, this warming is due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases caused by human activity, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with ever more serious consequences.

True, there are big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both ways: the response of clouds might slow warming or could speed it up instead, for instance.

With so much at stake, the last thing we need is for the real issues to be obscured by discredited arguments and wild theories. We must act now to avoid the worse effects. So for those who are not sure what to believe, here's our guide to climate myths and misconceptions.

Decide for yourself.

Lars and Victoria, you're being spoken to. Could you stop talking and start listening? The truth is out there. It just takes opening your mind's eye and removing those right-wing blinders.

Global warming doubters deserve to be scorned

Al Gore did a lot for me last night when "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar for best documentary. We'd just finished watching the movie on DVD. He'd already inspired me to do more to fight global warming.

But my passion was still on simmer. Hearing Gore repeat nine words from the movie raised the heat of my activism:

"It's not a political issue. It's a moral issue."

Driving home from the Academy Awards party where I won the trophy for picking the most winners (including documentary feature and original song, thanks to "An Inconvenient Truth"), I turned on the radio and heard Matt Drudge opining on the Oscars and global warming.

A caller suggested that he should pay more attention to the science of global climate change, rather than base his skeptical view solely on his conservative political beliefs. Drudge replied:

I trust my common sense and conscience rather than the science.

Gore has changed my attitude to ridiculous statements like that. I used to think, "that's so wrong." Now my reaction is, "that's absolute bullshit."

In short, I've become scornful of anyone who refuses to look at the scientific facts. Today's Prickly City comic tells it like I am.

Like I said in my letter to the editor about George Taylor, O.S.U.'s global warming head-in-the-sand climatologist, there's a big difference between skepticism and ignorance.

Skepticism is an integral aspect of the scientific method. Ignorance isn't. If Taylor, or anyone else, doubts the consensus of the world's leading climate researchers that (1) global warming is occurring and (2) humans are largely responsible for it, they need to show why the science is wrong.

If they can't, then they should shut up. What we need is more light on the subject of global climate change, not more people saying, "Put on blinders! Don't look at the facts!"

The science of global warming is akin to the science of evolution. There isn't any significant scientific debate about the basic facts in either area. Yet uninformed doubters love to scream, "Teach the controversy!"

Problem is, there's no controversy. So, nothing to teach.

Greg Hoke has put up a transcript of "An Inconvenient Truth." (a terrific resource; thanks, Greg) For me, one of the most memorable segments in the movie was Gore's bursting of three misconception bubbles. The first is that there's disagreement among scientists about whether the problem of global warming is real or not.

There isn't. Not a bit. Gore says:

Isn't there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer reviewed article written on global warming in the last ten years.

They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero.

The misconception that there is disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small number of people. One of their internal memos leaked and here is what it said according to the press. Their objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact. This has happened before. after the Surgeon General's report [on smoking and lung cancer].

One of their memos leaked 4 years ago. They said, "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public's mind."

But have they succeeded? You'll remember that there were 928 peer reviewed articles. Zero percent disagreed with the consensus. There was another study of all the articles in the popular press. Over the last fourteen years they listed a sample of 636. More than half of them said, "Well, we are not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem." So no wonder people are confused.

Well, I'm determined not to let this blog contribute to the confusion. Regularly I get comments on my George Taylor and global warming posts from people who mouth the right-wing party line: "The science isn't certain."

Open-minded blogger that I am, I typically respond to their uninformed views with a fact-based comment of my own. And I'll probably continue to do that.

But from now on I'm going to do something else. If the global warming skeptic hasn't referenced a peer-reviewed scientific article that supports his or her position, that comment is going to be branded with a reader warning:

Caution: no peer-reviewed scientific evidence is cited here. So be highly doubtful that what is said is anything more than a personal opinion.

There's a lot of room for subjective opinion in the blogosphere. However, when it comes to global climate change, the world can't afford to be distracted by political posturing that masquerades as serious skepticism.

If you believe there's another side to the consensus scientific view of global warming, show it to me. Cite the peer-reviewed journal in which the alternative conclusion appears. Then we can have an informed discussion.

If you can't do that, then you have a choice: either keep your personal opinion to yourself, or accept that your comment on my blog is going to be accompanied with a Caution statement.

You've got a right to express your unscientific beliefs. And I've got a right to be scornful of them.

(Global warming skeptics: a good place to start your re-education is this Scientific American piece, "Are You a Global Warming Skeptic? Part IV." It'll probably tax your brain to read facts rather than politically-inspired blather, but consider this an exercise for your grey matter).

George Taylor is a loser, not a winner

I couldn't agree more with a beautifully written and thoughtfully argued letter in today's Salem Statesman Journal, "Climate theory not a winner."

The fact that I wrote it just adds self-centered luster to this shining rebuttal of the newspaper's ill-considered awarding of a Weekly Winner prize to an OSU climatologist, George Taylor.

In my first three sentences, I establish the foundation for demolishing this editorial travesty:

On Friday, Feb. 9, George Taylor was a Statesman Journal "winner" for challenging the conventional science about global warming. I assume the editorial board will next applaud those who still believe the Earth is flat. There's a big difference between skepticism and ignorance.

In my next three, the wrecking ball smashes:

Taylor, who uses the title of state climatologist (even though this position doesn't officially exist anymore), says that it is unsure whether carbon dioxide causes atmospheric warming. When I heard him say this on a right-wing radio talk show, I e-mailed a respected scientist at Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. Professor Jim Coakley told me, "George's assertion that we can't prove whether CO2 causes warming or cooling, is, of course, nonsense."

Finally, Taylor's credibility crumbles in a logical coup de grâce

The scientific evidence is clear: Human-caused global warming is occurring due to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Taylor doesn't contribute to genuine scientific debate in this area. He doesn't publish in peer-reviewed journals. He simply uses his soapbox of head of the Oregon Climate Service to echo the party line of global-warming deniers: "The science isn't in."

But it is. George Taylor is misinformed, not a skeptic. That makes him a loser, not a winner.

Climate models undermine global warming skeptics

Along with the usual blather I hear on right-wing talk shows, there's a fresh falsity being spread over the airwaves: computer climate models are unsophisticated attempts to mirror changes in the Earth's weather and shouldn't be trusted.

This isn't true. So don't believe global warming skeptics like George Taylor, who isn't Oregon's state climatologist but likes to pretend that he is.

I heard Taylor spout his uninformed criticisms of climate models on KPAM's Victoria Taft show. Since those models show both that global climate change is going to be an increasingly serious problem, and that humans are responsible for a large share of the rise in carbon dioxide that is helping to drive global warming, ExxonMobil supported pseudo-scientists like Taylor try to discredit the models.

Recently Taft echoed the unscientific party line, claiming that the models don't include basic factors that affect the climate. Such as, Taft said, "the sun." I suspect she meant to say sunspots, or some other subtlety of solar radiation, but that wasn't what came over my car radio. I remember hearing: "Gosh, those models don't even include the sun. How crazy is that?"

Well, not crazy at all. Because Taft and Taylor don't know what they're talking about. Here's the graphical bottom line that proves them wrong, courtesy of the Woods Hole Research Center, along with a couple of paragraphs of Woods Hole commentary.

Look, read, and believe in the models. (As noted in the commentary, "forcing" means an influence on global temperature; "anthropogenic" means human-caused.)

For example, recorded global temperature change can be compared with computer models that predict temperature change under different "forcing" scenarios, (with "forcings" signifying external influences on the solar radiative budget of the planet - greenhouse gases, aerosols, increased solar radiation, and other agents). Fig. 2 above compares observed temperature anomalies from the historic mean (red line) with the results of computer models that attempt to predict temperature based on the interactions of other environmental influences (gray line).

The top two charts in the figure illustrate that models using natural and anthropogenic influences alone [(a) Natural Forcing Only & (b) Anthropogenic Forcing Only] fail to match the observed record of temperature anomalies since 1866. But the combination of natural and anthropogenic models [(c) Natural + Anthropogenic Forcing] produces a close match to the measured data. This is seen as a clear "thumbprint" of human impacts on climate change.

These graphs also are in Alan J. Thorpe's informative (and readable) paper, "Climate Change Prediction: A challenging scientific problem." Thorpe starts out by saying:

Predictions of future climate change, based on numerical global climate models, are the critical outputs of climate science. Whilst much has been written about the details of the predictions themselves, skepticism about the prediction models is rife and this is why this paper is devoted to de-mystifying the prediction methodology…There is little doubt that a lack of knowledge about how climate change is predicted and the associated uncertainties are amongst the main reasons for ill-informed comment on climate change.

And he concludes with:

So why do commentators imagine that top scientists are deluded about anthropogenic climate change? The stakes are high and rarely are scientists under such scrutiny. Scientists are appalled that they could be suspected of distorting the evidence to enhance their reputations or funding opportunities. Of course scientific hypotheses and analysis can be refuted by later discoveries but this is not the same as complicity. The fact that everyone experiences weather and climate may explain why nonscientists feel confident in attempting to refute the scientific evidence.

The complexity of the climate system and its many interacting and compensating physical processes means that simple arguments that gloss over this complexity have to be approached with a significant degree of scepticism. A common method of arguing starts by identifying a single cause or physical process that either has not been included or has been included in an imperfect way, into climate models. But the climate changes because of a multiplicity of interacting processes and any one process alone cannot be the whole story.

The search for the one and only cause of climate change is doomed to failure. Climate modellers attempt to include in the models all the processes that are even remotely likely to have a detectable effect – any newly discovered process will quickly find itself incorporated into the models!

So be highly skeptical of global climate change skeptics. Thorpe says that the models they dismiss with off-hand comments ("doesn't even include the sun!") have about three-quarters of a million lines of computer code.

Compare that with the miniscule iota of sense made by global warming deniers such as George Taylor and Victoria Taft. Believe the models, not them.

 

Relax, right-wingers: George Taylor isn’t being fired

When the person who calls himself the Oregon state climatologist is compared to Galileo, it’s obvious that right-wing paranoia has gone over the edge.

The headline of today’s Oregonian story (“To governor, Oregon has no ‘climatologist’”) might lead conservative conspiracy theorists to believe that Gov. Kulongoski has ordered George Taylor to disappear into the dungeon where he keeps state employees who disagree with his policy on global warming.

Actually, the truth is much milder. Kulongoski wants Taylor to stop using the title of “state climatologist” because there is no such position in state government. That’s a fact.

George Taylor isn’t going to be fired from his job as head of the Oregon Climate Service. If the governor gets his way, Taylor just won’t be able to claim (or strongly imply) that he speaks for state government on climate matters.

Today state Senator Brad Avakian phoned me after I’d emailed him some questions about the Oregonian story. Avakian has been working on legislation that would allow the governor to appoint an official state climatologist. He said that the bill probably won’t be introduced now, since the governor and Oregon State University seem to have reached an understanding about Taylor’s role.

However, I told Sen. Avakian that the story said OSU officials weren’t rushing to correct Taylor’s title, which is disturbing. I don’t understand why, now that it’s been pointed out to them that Taylor is claiming to occupy a non-existent position, OSU doesn’t stop spreading the falsity that he is the state climatologist.

Ideally, Taylor would keep doing what he seemingly does well: maintain and analyze Oregon weather data. But his training is in meteorology, not climatology. He isn’t competent to be speaking for anyone other than himself on climate change issues. Amazingly, Taylor doesn’t even know that carbon dioxide causes atmospheric warming.

Hopefully money will be found to establish the Oregon Climate Center that Kulongoski wants. A genuine climate expert can be recruited to run the Center and serve as the state climatologist.

Global climate change is going to affect Oregon in many ways. It’s important to have someone on board in state government who understands both why the world’s weather is changing because of human influences and what can be done about it. George Taylor clearly isn’t that person.

Recently I heard from Peter Bock. He shared with me a message that he’d sent to the president of Oregon State University and the dean of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, where Taylor works. Bock shows why Taylor’s unscientific position on global climate change is more than wrong; it’s dangerous.

To those, like Mr. George Taylor, who doubt the urgency of addressing the problem of global warming and the need to reduce atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, I ask the question... Suppose you are right. What does proactive action cost us?

It costs us an investment in renewable energy technology such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, etc... an investment that reduces our dependence on foreign petroleum... an investment that reduces our need to station our troops around the world to defend that petroleum and the despotic regimes that sell it to us... an investment that reduces our risk of asthma, cancer, stroke, heart disease, emphysema and other diseases caused by breathing auto exhaust and petroleum and coal pollutants.

But... suppose Mr. Taylor is wrong? What is the cost then? What will the Earth that we leave to our grandchildren look like? Is it an earth with ocean levels forty feet higher, with no polar ice caps, with no Amazon rain forests, with most coastal cities under water, with a desert in the American Midwest, with permanent global El Nino conditions?

Is it an Earth with a population of 2 billion rather than 6 billion? And thirty years from now, if we are wrong, are we prepared to look into the faces of our grandchildren and answer their question... "Why didn't you take action when you still had the chance?"

Facts about George Taylor and the “state climatologist”

Here, finally, are some solid facts about the Oregon state climatologist position that supposedly is occupied by George Taylor, who minimizes both global warming and the impact humans are having on global climate change.

For well over a week I’ve been waiting for answers from the Oregon State University (OSU) News and Communication Office to my questions about Taylor and the “state climatologist” title that he holds.

Patience pays off. I just got a couple of emails from Mark Floyd. At the end of this post you’ll find, verbatim, the first message he sent me. After I read it, I wrote back to Mark, asking him to correct me if I was wrong about any of five assumptions. His reply concerning each is shown in italics.

(1) There is no position called “state climatologist” authorized by the State of Oregon.
As far as I know, you are correct on No. 1.

(2) The title of “state climatologist” has been given to the head of the Oregon Climate Service by OSU.
No. 2 also is correct, though it is stated simply, which ignores the context of history.

(3) Within Oregon state government, there is no description of what the job of state climatologist entails, nor a list of duties, because the person who has this title doesn’t occupy an actual position with that name.
No. 3: OSU is, in fact, a state agency of sorts. If your intent is to ask if there is a governor-appointed state climatologist, I assume the answer is no, though that is a question for the governor.

(4) Because Taylor does something similar to what the person who truly was the state climatologist did previously, he’s called the “state climatologist,” even though this position doesn’t exist.
No. 4: That sounds right. You should know that the origin, funding, duties, and history of state climatologists vary from state to state.

(5) The American Association of State Climatologists recognizes Taylor as the state climatologist because OSU has given him this title, even though the position doesn’t exist in state statute.
No. 5: I can’t assume the reasons the AASC recognizes Taylor as state climatologist. It may or may not be because of his OSU-given title. There may be several reasons. I can’t speak for the group.

Well, this vindicates what I’ve been saying here and here, along with Kari Chisholm, the governor, state Sen. Brad Avakian, and others who recognize (even without the OSU News and Communication Office clarification) that Taylor isn’t really the state climatologist, because the title he wears so proudly has no actual position attached to it.

Hopefully this will stop such right-wing claptrap as “Tucker Carlson’s Hot Air on Kulongoski and Climate Change.” And World Net Daily’s putting George Taylor in the same censored scientist category as Galileo. Give me a break.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of conservative hot air expended on Taylor and the state climatologist position. Now that it’s been confirmed that such a position doesn’t exist, so there’s no way he can be fired from it, maybe they’ll turn their attention to a real problem: global warming.

Here’s Mark Floyd’s message:

The history of the climate service and state climatologist go back to 1978, when OSU and NOAA signed a memorandum of understanding to establish the Office of the State Climatologist at Oregon State University. The first person to serve in that position, I believe, was Allan Murphy. In 1982, Kelly Redmond joined the OSU Department of Atmospheric Sciences and served as assistant state climatologist in the Center for Climatic Research. He took over as state climatologist in 1984, funded by a combination of state funds and external grants.

The Office of the State Climatologist was eliminated in 1989 because of budget cuts and Redmond left the university. George Taylor was hired on a part-time basis in 1989 in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences as a meteorologist. Two years later (1991), Oregon Senate Bill 661 passed, establishing the Oregon Climate Service at OSU. Taylor was hired on a full-time basis, and the department head in atmospheric science at that time requested to OSU that Taylor’s title be changed from meteorologist to state climatologist because his role was so similar to that which Redmond held.

By the way, George Taylor is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and the Oregon Climate Service is a recognized state climate office, as certified by that association…

Mark Floyd
OSU News and Communication

Oregon’s state climatologist flunks Climate Change 101

You’d think that someone called the “state climatologist” would understand basic facts about climate. But George Taylor isn’t big on facts.

He doesn’t believe that humans are having a significant effect on global climate change, which puts him at odds with the world’s experts who just said otherwise. Of course, I’m sure there are a few biologists here and there who don’t believe in evolution.

Hopefully none of them have the title of “state biologist.” If any do, I’m embarrassed for that state. Just as I’m embarrassed that George Taylor has the title of state climatologist in Oregon.

Taylor has irritated me for several years. Now I find him more laughable than irritating, since the science of climate change has left him so far behind, it’s amusing to observe him trying to defend his “What, me worry about global warming?” attitude.

Willamette Week’s headline back in August 2005 captured Taylor perfectly: “Hot or Not. Oregon’s official weatherman has some good news about global warming—it doesn’t exist.” The story was good too. It showed how little Taylor knows about what a climatologist should know a lot about.

Climate.

Wednesday evening I was driving around, doing errands, listening to talk radio. Victoria Taft (KPAM) had George Taylor as a guest. I didn’t hear all of the interview but caught this gem from Taylor as I was pulling into our carport:

“We can’t prove that CO2 [carbon dioxide] causes or doesn’t cause warming.”

Are you kidding me? was my instant reaction. A story in today’s Washington Post says:

With at least 90 percent certainty, the IPCC's "Summary For Policymakers" concludes human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half century. Hundreds of scientists from 113 countries prepared the report, which represents the most comprehensive overview of scientific climate research since 2001.

I also asked a distinguished faculty member at O.S.U.’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, where Taylor works, to comment on Taylor’s notion that it isn’t known whether carbon dioxide causes warming of the atmosphere. Jim Coakley’s email reply said, in part:

George's assertion that we can't prove whether CO2 causes warming or cooling, is, of course, nonsense. But then, no one tries to pin George down on what he means by "we can't prove..." First, one should ask what proof is needed? Would seeing the 3-5 C rise in temperature that we're predicting for this century serve as proof? Can you imagine the dilemma waiting to see such a rise would pose? We can't wait. Waiting is stupid.

Interestingly, Taylor himself agrees we shouldn’t listen to him on global warming. Which is exactly what all of us should do. Taylor is having a good time playing his “state climatologist” role, which he may or may not be (Kari Chisholm, the governor, and me all have our doubts).

Just don’t take him seriously. There’s no reason to trust a climatologist who flunks Climate Change 101.

So-called “climatologist” George Taylor has to go

George Taylor is a embarrassment to Oregon. He passes himself off as the official state climatologist even though Oregon doesn’t have such a position. Today an article in the Oregonian (“Experts square off over climate change”) quoted Governor Kulongoski:

"He's not the state climatologist," the governor said. "I never appointed him. I think I would know.”

Apparently Oregon State University’s College of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences gave Taylor this title, because the Oregonian story says that the position of state climatologist was dissolved by the legislature in 1989.

Regardless, Taylor loves to spout off about how humans really aren’t a big factor in causing global warming, an unscientific position that makes him a darling of big oil and conservative organizations like the Heartland Institute, which recently trotted Taylor out as among the serious scientists who are debunking scaremongering about climate change.

Yeah, right. You’d be hard pressed to find a truly serious scientist who doesn’t accept that human caused climate change is happening. Heck, Taylor’s own college admits this on its web site:

Climate change is happening globally and in the Pacific Northwest. Humans are contributing to global warming and climate change in a measurable way.

Willamette Week ran an expose on Taylor in August 2005. I’d been ranting about the absurdity of Oregon’s climatologist being a global warming denier for several months previous. It’s even more absurd now that we know he isn’t the climatologist.

But Taylor is still up to his old tricks. Just a few days ago (January 26) right-wing talk show host Lars Larson had Taylor as a guest. He introduced Taylor as the “official state climatologist.”

Taylor then proceeded to mangle facts and science. He said that the 1930s was the warmest decade in Oregon, which isn’t true: the 1990s was. He also claimed that 1917-42 saw the most melting of Oregon glaciers. Also not true, according to this Oregonian story.

"It's almost universal that all glaciers are retreating," said Peter Clark, a professor at Oregon State University and an international authority on glaciers. "The signs of retreat are dramatic and accelerating."

If Taylor simply went around speaking as an uninformed individual with views about global warming that aren’t shared by reputable scientists, that wouldn’t be so bad.

However, when he writes a letter to the editor as the state climatologist, passing along the untruth that the 1930s was the warmest decade on record in Oregon, that’s unconscionable.

Email the dean of George Taylor’s college at OSU, Mark Abbott. Tell him that Taylor needs to stop being called the state climatologist. And that Oregon deserves to have someone competent heading up the Oregon Climate Service.

Lars Larson asked Taylor whether, if we change our human activities enough, we can have an effect on human caused global warming. Taylor’s answer: “I don’t believe that’s true.”

Willamette Week said that Taylor’s critics call him one of the most dangerous men in Oregon. Could be an overstatement. But human caused global warming is real and deadly serious.

To have someone saying otherwise, who is passing himself off as Oregon’s climatologist, that is dangerous.

[Update: Advance reports of what will be in the soon to be released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change feature headlines such as "World's scientists say climate change is much worse than they thought." But George Taylor feels that he knows more than the world's experts on climate change, because he continues to claim that humans are having a minimal effect on global warming.

The report supposedly will say: "It is virtually certain that human activity has played the dominant role in causing the increase of greenhouse gases over the past 250 years." But don't worry. George Taylor says it isn't so. And so long as Oregon State University continues to bestow upon him the title of "state climatologist," unfortunately some people are going to believe him.]

Happiness is a new mountain bike. Maybe.

My birthday has begun. Actually, it started five days ago. It’ll culminate on October 7, which used to be known as my “birthday.” I’ve decided to celebrate it like Ramadan—a full month of honoring what I reverence most: me.

This makes perfect sense, because the older I get (have started to become 58), the fewer birthdays I have left to celebrate. Therefore the celebration should get longer as I age, to make up for fewer future celebratory opportunities. If I live to 100, I suppose I’ll be celebrating continuously.

Anyway, here’s my first major gift to myself. A black 2007 Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike. My old Raleigh was cream colored. I like my new Ninja look. I also like how my riding happiness has increased since Sunday, when I picked up the bike at Eurosports in Sisters.

Just as I expected. Otherwise, why would I want a new bike? On the same day I bought myself this present, I received a few other gifts from myself after a visit to my other favorite Sisters store, Paulina Springs Books.

I saw “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert on the new non-fiction table. At first I figured that the book would tell me how to do just that. But as I thumbed through it I realized that Gilbert had a more tasty fish to fry. He’s out to explain why what we think will make us happy usually doesn’t. At least not in the way we thought it would.

A small still voice in the back of my mind said, “Brian, you just bought yourself a $500 mountain bike that you expect will bring you great joy. Isn’t it dangerous to now plunk down $24.95 on a book that promises to burst your happiness expectation bubble?”

I paused to ponder my small still voice. Then I told it to shut up. After all, I’d just read a blurb on the front cover from Steven Levitt that said, “This absolutely fantastic book will shatter your most deeply held convictions about how the mind works.” So why should I trust what my mind was telling me?

Screw it. I’ll buy the book. And the bike. And whatever else I want and can afford for the next 28 days. It’s my goddamn birthday month! I deserve it all!

Good decision. I’ve been enjoying “Stumbling on Happiness” just as much as my bike, even though it’s got a mostly white cover and doesn’t meld very well with my new Ninja nature. Gilbert is one of those authors who makes me think, “Dear devil, I’ll gladly sell my soul in exchange for being able to write as well as this guy.”

He had me hooked by the time I finished the first paragraph of his Acknowledgements.

This is the part of the book in which the author typically claims that nobody writes a book by himself and then names all the people who presumably wrote the book for him. It must be nice to have friends like that. Alas, all the people who wrote this book are me, so let me instead thank those who by their gifts enabled me to write a book without them.

Terrific. Then the hook was set, hard, by the first few pages of Gilbert’s Foreword. After that, I couldn’t put the book down.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of our hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps.

Great stuff. I was happy that I’d indulged me right now, instead of the future him that I so often sacrifice myself for. But then I read on. And began to see the Dark Side.

In fact, just about any time we want something—a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger—we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forebearance.

Yeah, yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless….How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year—or at least later this afternoon?

Seems like it. But Laurel already has listened to Gilbert’s book on CD, and she tells me that research shows we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy. (Well, I’ll believe it when I read it. The day my body listens to a book will be the day they pry my yellow fluorescent highlighter from my cold dead hands.)

So maybe, maybe, my new mountain bike isn’t going to bring me as much joy as I’m expecting it will. Yet I’m different. I’m special. I’m like no one else in the world. Other poor fools may not know what makes them happy, but I do.

Such is my fervent hope. And, likely, my fervent delusion, based on peeking ahead to the last line of the final chapter.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities—minds unlike any others—and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

Well, stay tuned. It could be that every single person who gets a new mountain bike from Eurosports, including me, is happy for the rest of their days. I’ll let you know if that’s true. (If it is, you'll be eager for this information.)

Secrets of the sexes, revealed!

After investing three hours of watching “Secrets of the Sexes” on Oregon Public Broadcasting, I figured that I should share what I learned about how men and women are different. Aside from the obvious, I mean.

Note: this is serious research-based stuff, not cocktail party surmising.

In the first episode I watched various Britons (this was a BBC production) riding in a cab and being treated to some personal cabbie chatter. When asked to recall the particulars of the conversation and cab ride, women were more tuned in to the emotional situation while men were more thing-oriented. Not a big surprise.

So this suggests that women like relationships and men like facts. True perhaps, except when the provider of the facts is wearing a low-cut dress. Men watched two newscasts: one read by a man, the other by a woman in a revealing outfit. They could recall lots of facts conveyed by the man. Typical comment about the female newscaster: “She had nice breasts.”

The conclusion: “We found that men are indeed interested in facts, but one thing they’re more interested in is sex.” Not a big surprise either.

Nor was the result of an experiment in which a young girl sat forlornly on a sidewalk, back up against a wall, decidedly abandoned-looking. This was a measure of empathy. Will passers-by check on her? During the time of filming 41 women stopped to help. Only two men did, one of them accompanied by a woman. 22% of the women stopped; just 1% of the men.

At this point in the program, we were told:

Things aren’t looking very good for men. Object-centered, partially deaf, unempathic, sex-obsessed fantasist, is not how most of them would like to be remembered. Men are supposed to be go-getting, thrusting, successful. So we’re giving them a chance to shine. After all, men love competition and they’re great at driving. Aren’t they?

Cut to a go-cart track. Tests of testosterone levels were taken throughout the racing. It was revealed that men and women have a different biological response to competition. There was a big testosterone fluctuation in men, almost zero in women. This makes men more likely to take risks. Conclusion: “There’s no doubt that women can be competitive, but they don’t have the edge that testosterone can give men.”

Here’s another unsurprising fact: if you’re looking for a skilled heavy equipment operator, you’re much more likely to end up with a man. I heard, “In our survey of half a million people, the biggest difference between men and women was in visual-spatial tasks. On average, men scored 40% higher than women. But some women did exceptionally well.”

This also may be due to testosterone. Men and women were given instructions in how to operate a Caterpillar digger, then they had to carry out various tasks: pick up a bucket of water with the fork, nudge eggs into a container, make an air horn sound. Women did much worse than the men, aside from a woman who had an unusually high testosterone level.

The program moved to a familiar question: What do men find physically attractive? Computer software allowed men in the study to manipulate (virtual) female bodies anyway they wanted. Each man got to create his ideal woman. What would they focus on: Breasts, legs, bottom?

Supposedly this was the first research of its kind. Which found, shock!, that men like relatively large breasts, a C or D cup. The most striking finding, though, was men’s preference for an hourglass figure, the equivalent of 36 inch hips and a 23 inch waist. Probable reason: “The hip to waist ratio is one of the best ways of seeing if a woman is fertile.” In other words, evolution has attuned men to like hourglass women.

Then came speed dating. Men and women dialed in a “first impression” rating to researchers. A three minute conversation ensued, after which each person re-rated the potential date with whom they’d been talking. Result:

The immediate chemical attraction is of priority for most people….Analyzers showed that men and women who decided to date had made up their minds within seconds. With few exceptions, the three minute conversations made no difference at all. Clearly looks are all important, yet it’s not the face but the body that counts.

In terms of physical attractiveness, two factors made all the difference. They were different for men and women. For men, the factor that blew all the others out of the water was the waist to hip ratio. With speed dating, women whose figures came closest to the ideal got the most offers of dates.

So how much did male physique matter to the women? They also were given the opportunity to fashion an ideal male figure on a computer. But unlike the men, at the speed date there was no relationship between this figure and the bodies of the most popular men.

For women, height was the most important factor. Which I find entirely appropriate, given that I’m over six feet tall. A researcher advised guys, “Don’t bother about going to the gym. Don’t bother about putting on new flashy clothes. Be tall.”

Moving to the more sublime side of male-female relationships, I learned that there are important evolutionary reasons why love activates reward systems in brain: “Love is a mechanism that has been built into our brains so that we stay together with a particular person; in the case of mothers and fathers, that they stay with their child and help in raising it.”

Unfortunately, the researchers said, studies have found that the initial powerful bonding effects of romantic love only last for two to three years. So what about after the chemicals wear off? Howard Markman has studied what makes marriage thrive and what makes it fail.

There are four research-based danger signs:

(1) Withdrawal (usually by the man). Women often pursue in the face of withdrawal, which can make the man withdraw further. (2) Escalation. Interactions become increasingly negative. (3) Sweeping negative interpretations add fuel to the fire of negativity. “You’ve never loved me.” You’re just like your father.” (4) Invalidation. The other person is attacked verbally, and sometimes physically.

If a couple is able to get through the rough times that plague every long-term relationship, they can look forward to smoother sailing into old age. The last hour of this three part series featured a charming gray-haired pair who appeared to be in their seventies.

I enjoyed their repartee:

He: “Do we argue?”
She: “All the time. Never a day goes by.”
He: “Always. If she says, ‘that happened,’ I always say, ‘no.’ Automatically we argue about it.”
She: “I’ll say to him, ‘I’d like to do so and so. He’ll say, ‘not bloody likely,’ excuse my language, ‘not bloody likely.’”
He: “And then we’ll end up doing it.”

That’s the main secret of the sexes I’ve learned after thirty-fours of marriage: go along with your woman, and you won’t go wrong.

Progressives are battling for reality

It’s worth fighting for: reality. Indeed, the only thing really worth fighting for. My version of scripture says, “And what profiteth a man, if he wins all the world, and loses reality?”

Right-wingers are out to overturn a vision of the world that has served us exceedingly well since the Enlightenment: there is an objective reality that, broadly speaking, is the domain of “science,” and there is a subjective reality that, broadly speaking, is the domain of “art.”

Thus we have the sciences and the arts. We have physics and we have mystics. We have demonstrable facts and we have improvable beliefs. We have the predictable orbits of planets and we have the wild improvisations of lovers.

This is the way the world is. But it isn’t the way the Bush administration, conservative talk radio, and the Christian right want it to be. They seek to turn reality upside down, making the objective world subjective and the subjective world objective.

Crazy.

Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq either were there or not there. The objective fact is that no substantive evidence of them was discovered. Yet 72% of those who voted for Bush in 2004 believed otherwise. They were wrong. Kerry voters were much more likely to be right.

This shows that you can fool a lot of people some of the time. But reality wins out in the end. It’s too powerful to be kept down for long. The Dark Ages didn’t last forever. And the American people will get their wits about them again. Soon, I’m confident.

We’re seeing evidence of this in Bush’s continued low approval ratings, notwithstanding his tired attempts to resurrect the “we’ve got to fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here” lie. Also in the courtroom and ballot box defeats of intelligent design, another example of subjective belief attempting to masquerade as objective reality.

Most people understand the difference between truth and illusion. They know that truth manifests in various guises, some outward and some inward. Not all of reality can be known by science, not by a long shot.

Poetry, music, painting, emotions, religiosity, philosophy, imagination, dreams—these are as much a part of being human as mathematics, logic, research, statistics, reason, observation, experimentation, deduction.

However, the social fabric is threatened when attempts are made to elevate the subjective above the objective in public policy, when truthiness is valued over truth in making decisions that affect society as a whole.

Recently Republican Rep. Katherine Harris of Florida, who is running for the U.S. Senate, said that if Christians are not elected to political office, politicians will “legislate sin” and that God does not intend this country to be “a nation of secular laws.”

Harris is entitled to her own beliefs, as unfounded as they may be. However, neither she nor anyone else is entitled to substitute their subjective view of the cosmos for how things really are.

Human-caused global warming is real. So is evolution, the promise of stem cell research, the dangers of massive budget deficits, looming Medicare shortfalls, and systemic problems in Iraq that show no sign of abating.

Come November I’m betting that most voters will cast their ballots for reality. After six years of neo-con efforts to pull the wool over our eyes, this nation deserves to see clearly again.

Bad week for creationists and intelligent designers

Evolution was on the march last week, crushing the creationist crazies and intelligent design dogmatists. Will they now give up their anti-science jihad? Not likely.

Unfounded religious beliefs are addictive, like other drugs. They relieve the anxiety that comes from living in a complex, mysterious, uncertain world. When the unknown can be banished with the wave of a faith-filled hand, that’s damn appealing.

It's wrong. But still appealing.

Myself, I prefer reality. And that’s what evolution is: real. More evidence of this has arrived via two breakthroughs: a transitional fossil that shows how fish evolved into land animals has been discovered, and molecular biologists demonstrated that so-called “irreducible complexity” actually can be the result of small genetic changes caused by random mutations.

Life happens. On its own. For the life of me, I can’t understand what’s so metaphysically frightening about this. Nature is natural. The Taoists have been telling us this for thousands of years, as have many other naturalistic belief systems.

Why do so many people feel lost without a belief in a personal and paternalistic God-the-Father who directs every aspect of the cosmos? Grow up. We don’t remain children forever. At some point every human should learn to stand on his or her own feet, physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Sadly, though, many young people are being held back by religion from achieving this sort of maturity. In “Testing Darwin’s Teachers” the LA Times reports that biology teachers are challenged by students who unthinkingly spout the Christian creationist party line.

And we wonder why the United States is sinking lower and lower in cross-national rankings of scientific literacy. Nations who are high in religiosity have lower science scores. Blind faith and critical thinking are like oil and water: they don’t mix.

Global warming is real. Debate over.

If you have any doubts that global warming is real, read the April 3 TIME magazine cover story and “Be Worried, Be Very Worried.” The evidence is in. The debate is over. Global warming is happening. Humans are the major cause of it. And we’re heading for disaster.

Yes, there are still global warming deniers like Oregon climatologist George Taylor. But he’s been outed by Willamette Week and I haven’t heard any “global warming is a myth” craziness from George lately. Maybe he’s turned to arguing that creationism and intelligent design are fact, while evolution is fiction. Or that the Earth is flat.

It’s a free country. People can believe weird things. But they don’t have the right to destroy our planet. This is why there’s a big difference between evolution-denying crazies and global warming-denying crazies: the latter are a lot more dangerous.

TIME speaks the truth: “Polar ice caps are melting faster than ever…More and more land is being devastated by drought…Rising waters are drowning low-lying communities…By any measure, Earth is at the tipping point…The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame.”

It may be too late to do anything about it. Once past a tipping point, it’s devilishly difficult to turn things around. But the cover story ends with:

Curbing global warming my be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.

The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we’re finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we’ve been monkeying with those margins. It’s long past time we set them right.

James Hansen, a NASA scientist the Bush administration has been trying to shut up, is one of the scolds who's been warning about the dangers of global warming. His Scientific American article, “Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb” is both solid and scary. “Small forces,” he says, “maintained long enough, can cause large climate change.”

Humans are pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Nonetheless, compared to Nature as a whole humanity’s impact on the climate is puny. The problem is, as Hansen pointed out, that relatively small anthropogenic (human-caused) forces can have big effects.

Arctic ice is melting. That’s a fact. As it melts dark water increases and light ice decreases. Dark water absorbs heat while light ice reflects it. So that causes more melting, which makes more dark water, and so it goes. The system feeds back upon itself.

TIME says that the effects of global warming are upon us much more quickly than was anticipated.

What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives rise to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough carbon dioxide in the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam.

Amazingly, conservative apologists like George Will are still saying that global warming is up for debate. It’s strange. In the old days, conservatives believed in conserving. I know this because I was raised by a woman who was both deeply Republican and deeply conservative in the best sense of the word: frugal, non-wasteful, protective of limited resources both monetary and natural.

George Will writes:

Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Middle West -- must be bad?

Gee, George, what a great question. Let’s ask the people of Nebraska if they’d rather run the risk of having the United States’ economic growth slowed slightly or be buried under a sheet of ice.

Alternatively, if the answer to that question seems obvious we can instead apply ourselves to combating global warming. Hansen says, “The emphasis should be on mitigating the [climate] changes rather than just adapting to them.”

My wife and I own two cars, a Toyota Prius and a Toyota Highlander. Both are hybrids. Automotively, we’re doing our part.

Our hot water heater needs replacing. Today we ordered a new one. The energy efficient model is going to cost us an extra hundred dollars (though we’ll get some of that money back via a tax credit). Water heaterly, we’re doing our part.

Unfortunately, neither of us is the President of the United States, who isn’t doing his part. Recently I heard George Bush say that he is opposed to the Kyoto Treaty because it would harm the American economy.

As if having the mid-West covered by a sheet of ice wouldn’t. What an idiot.
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Next day P.S.: it might seem paradoxical that global warming could lead to either a mini or maxi ice age, but the Scientific American article about "Abrupt Climate Change" explains how this might happen:

As global warming continues to heat up the planet, many scientists fear that large pulses of freshwater melting off the Greenland ice sheet and other frozen northern landscapes could obstruct the so-called North American conveyor, the system of ocean currents that brings warmth to Europe and strongly influences climate elsewhere in the world.

A conveyor shutdown--or even a significant slowdown--could cool the North Atlantic region even as global temperatures continue to rise. Other challenging and abrupt climate changes would almost certainly result...As the conveyor grows quiet winters become harsher in much of Europe and North America, and agriculture suffers.

...Uncertainties abound, and although a new ice age is not thought credible, the resulting changes could be notably larger than they were during the Little Ice Age, when the Thames in London froze and glaciers rumbled down the Alps.

Transitional fossils do exist, you creationist crazies

Thank God for science, which came up with Prozac. I’m going to need a prescription soon if anti-science zealots keep getting me so anxious about where this country is heading. Three disturbing news items bit into my brain in the past 24 hours:

(1) Last night “60 Minutes” had a segment on the FDA’s religiously-based decision to reject an application to let Plan B, the morning after pill, be dispensed without a prescription. Scientific experts overwhelmingly voted to make Plan B over-the-counter. The religious right objected. Guess who won?

(2) On CNN this morning I read “Priests urge stem cell opposition.” Missouri Catholic dioceses are sermonizing against stem cell research that promises to find cures for spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other life-threatening diseases. And these supposedly are advocates for a “culture of life”?

(3) Then I saw several anti-evolution letters to the editor in our local newspaper that pushed my crankiness quotient into the Needs Medication danger zone. It’s one thing to express your personal opinion on the Opinion page. It’s another thing to make factually false statements that many readers will take as the gospel truth.

To wit, Salem resident Arthur Birkby’s absurd contention that “Even Darwin's former advocates admit that there is no evidence of even a single transitional life form from one to another.”

Arthur, I wish that before you’d written your ill-informed letter to the editor, you’d gotten on a computer and done a Google search on “evolution transitional forms.” It took me just a minute or two to find a Transitional Forms page on the University of California Museum of Paleontology Understanding Evolution web site.

That page has photos of three related creatures: a land mammal with nostrils near the front of its skull, a beluga whale (alive today) that has its nostrils at the top of its skull, and the transitional Aetiocetus that had its nostrils at the middle of its skull.

That demolishes Mr. Birby’s “no evidence” line. Of course, this is just the University of California’s fossil experts speaking. Believers in creationism probably consider that the devil is using the Museum of Paleontology as his mouthpiece and the Christian Discovery Institute deserves to be trusted instead.

It’s amazing that creationist crazies can suspend their rational faculties to such a degree that they can say things like this statement I found on a Creation Science site:

There are no transitional links and intermediate forms in either the fossil record or the modern world. Therefore, there is no actual evidence that evolution has occurred either in the past or the present.

Aaaaaaggghhhhh! Just look at this guy’s references that he’s using to support blather like that. The pro-theory of evolution references come from publishers like the Smithsonian Institution, Time-Life Books, Simon and Schuster. The anti-theory of evolution references come from places like the Institute for Creation Research, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., and such.

Who you gonna believe? I know what my answer is.

People like zoologist Kathleen Hunt who wrote a seriously researched Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ that crushes the “there aren’t any transitional fossils” statement that, she says, keeps popping up in creationist propaganda.

In a “conclusions” section she summarizes her main point:

Creationists often state categorically that "there are no transitional fossils". As this FAQ shows, this is simply not true. That is the main point of this FAQ. There are abundant transitional fossils of both the "chain of genera" type and the "species-to-species transition" type. There are documented speciations that cross genus lines and family lines.

The interpretation of that fact I leave up to you. I have outlined five possible models above, and have explained why I think some of them are better than others. You might disagree with my conclusions, and you can choose the one you think is best, (or even develop another one). But you cannot simply say that there are no transitional fossils, because there are.

No, you can’t say that, Mr. Birkby. But you did. And you won’t be the last to speak the untruth. The truth will win out in the end, though.

Intelligent designers are out to Christianize America

Advocates of intelligent design aren’t really scientists. They’re theologians. And they’re determined to root every last vestige of non-Christianity out of American culture.

That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after reading the first three chapters of a book that has been sitting on my “to read” bookshelf for three years. I picked up “Signs of Intelligence” a few days ago, wanting to learn from intelligent design proponents—not critics—what this movement is all about.

An editor of this collection of essays is William A. Dembski, one of the few real scientists who believes in intelligent design. He’s a professor of Science and Theology at Southern Seminary in Louisville. Not exactly Harvard or Stanford. (Dembski has a weblog that is worth checking out to gain some insights into his philosophy of life and science).

The other editor of “Signs of Intelligence” is James M. Kushiner, publisher of Touchstone magazine, a Christian journal that bills itself as providing a place “where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.”

Gee, that reassures me that Kushiner is exactly the sort of objective, unbiased scientific truth-seeker who should be at the forefront of a movement that is trying to tell schools what to teach about the origins of life on earth. Scanning a list of his Touchstone articles, you get the clear impression that he loves Jesus, dislikes homosexuality, and is committed to science only insofar as it supports his faith.

People who accept the gospel of intelligent design try to claim that their movement isn’t religiously motivated. I don’t believe them, especially after reading Nancy Pearcey’s essay “Design and the Discriminating Public.”

Ms. Pearcey’s academic credential is a M.A. from Covenant Theological Seminary. That qualified her to contribute to the book “Of Pandas and People,” a supplemental biology text advocating intelligent design. Apparently she didn’t get the memo from ID Central about toning down the religiosity of this supposedly purely scientific alternative to the theory of evolution. For she writes:

On both sides of the issue most people sense instinctively that there is much more at stake here than a scientific theory—that a link exists between the material order and the moral order…Our view of origins shapes our understanding of ethics, law, education—and yes, even sexuality.

If life on earth is a product of blind, purposeless natural causes, then our own lives are cosmic accidents. There’s no source of transcendent moral guidelines, no unique dignity for human life. On the other hand, if life is the product of foresight and design, then you and I were meant to be here. In God’s revelation we have a solid basis for morality, purpose, and dignity.

…At stake in this controversy is which worldview will permeate and shape our culture. Design is not an esoteric question relevant only to scientists. Design, especially as it relates to God creating the world, lies at the heart of all that Christians believe.

I find this attempt to Christianize science extremely troubling. More bluntly, it’s disgusting. I love science. I spent two years completing all the course requirements for a Ph.D. in Systems Science. For ten years I worked in health services research, trying to distinguish fact from fiction in the complex world of health planning. And I’ve written a book about how mysticism relates to the new physics.

Given my interest in what I like to call “spiritual science,” you’d think that I’d have warmer feelings about the intelligent design movement. A few weeks ago a conservative friend expressed surprise when I trash-talked intelligent design theory. “But you believe in it!” he said.

No, I don’t. Not the way it’s being pushed by Dembski, Behe, and the Discovery Institute zealots. I’m very much open to the idea that intelligence pervades the cosmos. This notion lies at the heart of classic Greek thought, including Platonism and Neoplatonism. I’ve also written a book, “Return to the One,” about the teachings of Plotinus, a 3rd century Greek mystic philosopher.

Plotinus, like Plato, considered that nous (variously translated as “intellect,” “intellectual principle,” and “spirit”) is the immaterial foundation of this physical world. This is akin to how most mathematicians believe that mathematics isn’t a human invention, but somehow exists independently on a higher plane of reality.

So if the intelligent design folks wanted to focus on the “intelligent” aspect of their philosophy and minimize the “design” aspect, I’d look upon their movement more favorably.

The older I’ve gotten, the more Taoist my spiritual beliefs have become. Taoism, like Neoplatonism, finds order at the root of reality, but it isn’t a personal, theistic, designing order. It is impersonal. Just the way things are. In her book “Taoist Mystical Philosophy,” Livia Kohn says:

The Tao is the one power underlying the universe; it makes things be what they are; it causes the world to come into being and decay again. It is the foundation of all, the source of life and being, from which we all come and to which we all return. The Tao is organic in that it is not willful, it is not a conscious active creator, and it is not personal. The Tao is nature, yet it is more than mere nature, it is the essence of nature, the inner quality that makes things what they are.

If any religious philosophy deserves to be associated with a scientific conception of how intelligence pervades the cosmos, Taoism and Neoplatonism have a much better claim than Christianity. This is part of what makes the intelligent design movement in this country so galling to me: the ID advocates are trying to convert science into a cultural force for promoting Christian dogma.

Currently science unites all of humanity. There is no Christian science, Muslim science, Jewish science, Hindu science, or Buddhist science. There is just science. The intelligent design zealots don’t like this. They want a Christian science. Or, at least, a theistic science where Christians, Jews, and Muslims can argue over whose personal God is doing the intelligent designing.

Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Neoplatonists—they and anyone else who believes in a universal impersonal intelligent power can’t play in the intelligent design clubhouse. Neither can atheists, agnostics, pantheists, or other deniers of a personal God who willfully caused the creation and everything in it to come into existence.

Another essayist in the “Signs of Intelligence” book, Jay Wesley Richards, reveals that the ultimate goal of the intelligent design movement is to change the way all science is practiced. Naturalistic science is to become theistic Christian science.

Here’s what Richards has to say about the grand design of intelligent design:

So how is ID relevant to Christian apologetics? ID can be extended. We may envision its extension as a set of concentric circles, encompassing ever-larger swathes of nature within its explanatory domain…If intelligent design theory exposes the inadequacy of materialistic explanations in the natural sciences, it will deflate this assertion [that scientific progress has made Christian belief obsolete], and could contribute to a renewal of Christian belief in the twenty-first century.

These intelligent design guys are scary. Their words may sound fairly moderate, but that’s because they’re trying to disguise (thinly, admittedly) their real goal: to make the United States, and the science practiced in this country, overtly Christian.

They must be fought in every courtroom, every classroom, every public forum. The divine Tao deserves to be defended.

Estrogen, it's what men lust for

Science has confirmed the obvious: “Men just want someone young and pretty.”

So says evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave about research which found that women with higher levels of estrogen were rated as more attractive, healthy, and feminine-looking than those with lower levels.

A feminine face is rounder with gentle features, big eyes, small nose and big lips. It’s an indicator of reproductive fitness, according to the researchers. Evolutionarily speaking, beauty helps men identify women who will bear them large numbers of children.

Not that this is Bill Maher’s conscious motivation. But his inner caveman is wordlessly screaming, “Reproduce! Pretty and young!” Bill clearly is listening.

Listen to the Big Bang

Thanks to astronomer Mark Whittle, you can listen to the Big Bang’s first million years of primordial sound, compressed into ten seconds and shifted up 50 octaves into the human range of hearing. Click on this page’s first sound file.

Even on my tinny laptop speakers, I got a chill up my spine hearing this reproduction of what Whittle calls the universe’s primal scream (this link is a fine non-technical description of his scientific work).

The universe was born in silence and soon grew into an awesome roar. Whittle says:

Have you ever wondered what the "Big Bang" actually sounded like? Surely, you may be thinking, this is a trick question -- didn't it just sound like, well, a really big BANG! Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is "no, not really". As is often the case with Nature, things are not so simple, and a more accurate description would be something like this: a moment of silence followed by a rapidly descending scream which builds to a deep roar and ends in a deafening hiss.

Fundamentalists like to say that science strikes at the heart of religion. That’s hogwash. Exactly the opposite is true: scientific understanding produces a sense of wonder that is the essence of genuine spirituality.

Reading Whittle’s description of how the Big Bang formed the seeds of our present universe is to gain a glimpse into the cosmos’s blueprint of creation, the “mind of God” if you want to use a religious term. He notes that the cosmic microwave radiation that can be sensed by sophisticated scientific instruments depicts the universe’s “genome."

Now, 12 hours after conception, a human is tiny and formless, and all that is present is its DNA. Yet within that DNA, hidden and encoded, is information which determines much of what the developing child and adult will become. So too with the microwave background.

It depicts a compact Universe which is virtually formless, and yet hidden within its delicate patchiness is encoded a huge amount of information, much of which determines how the Universe will subsequently evolve and grow. In a sense, then, studying the microwave background is to astronomy what the human genome project is to the life sciences.

From formlessness came form. From silence came sound. From nothing came something.

Modern science gives us a view of creation that is orders of magnitude more compelling (and, clearly, convincing) than the Genesis mythology and other purely human religious imaginings.

Listen to the Big Bang. You’ll hear more truth in those sounds than in any sermon.

Listen to the Dalai Lama, science-fearing Christians

This is my fantasy: that fundamentalist Christians will read the Dalai Lama’s new book, “The Universe in a Single Atom,” and be converted to his enlightened attitude toward science and spirituality.

James Dobson, just say the word and I’ll be happy to mail you a copy.

I bought this book to give to myself on my birthday, which was last Friday. I’ve just started reading it, but by page three I already was cheering the Dalai Lama’s words:

My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.

That is so refreshing, coming from one of the leaders of a major world religion. Can you imagine the Pope saying the same thing, substituting “Christianity” for “Buddhism”? I can’t, though nothing prevents Christians from similarly accepting that science searches for the truth about physical reality and religion searches for the truth about spiritual reality.

Thus science and religion don’t overlap. They don’t compete. You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can embrace both, as the Dalai Lama does. Most people in industrialized countries are able to do just that.

Unfortunately, the United States is the most religious industrialized nation. And, not coincidentally, the most scientifically illiterate. Fundamentalist Christianity has dumbed down the critical reasoning faculty of Americans to such an extent that our citizens casually accept President Bush’s call for creationism/intelligent design to be taught along with evolution in science classrooms.

Yet evolution is an accepted scientific theory that is strongly supported by fact and creationism is simply subjective religious dogma without a shred of solid evidence behind it. Christian theologians should be busily adapting their articles of faith to be compatible with evolution rather than wasting their time defending creationism and intelligent design,.

Peeking ahead to a chapter about evolution, I did note, however, that the Dalai Lama believes that evolutionary theory lacks an understanding of how consciousness is at the root of reality. Such may sound like an endorsement of intelligent design and Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace has felt the need to defend the Dalai Lama’s position as being compatible with modern science.

What is really indefensible, though, is the United States’ scientific stupidity. As noted in this “America #1?” piece, 20% of Americans think the sun orbits the earth while 17% believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (this bit of information also is quoted in the November issue of Playboy, so clearly it must be true).

Christian leaders of America, after a bit of editing you should insert this advice from the Dalai Lama into your sermons and speeches. I know that you won’t, but you should.

I wish to emphasize to the millions of my fellow Buddhists worldwide the need to take science seriously and to accept its fundamental discoveries within their worldview…Certainly some specific aspects of Buddhist thought—such as its old cosmological theories and its rudimentary physics—will have to be modified in the light of new scientific insights.

Animal instinct

Yesterday some neighbors were treated, if that’s the right word, to a display of our dog’s kinky sexual behavior. Well, probably “kinky” isn’t the right word either. It was just instinctual sexual behavior.

Heck, leave out “sexual” too, because it seems that female dogs who hump other dogs (male or female) are motivated by a desire for dominance, not sex.

Regardless, it still was disconcerting to be talking to a man and his pre-teen daughter while our dog and their yellow Lab calmly sniffed each other at first, then to look down and see that Serena had mounted Ginger and was pumping away with a sailor-on-shore-leave exuberance.

I muttered, “Ha, ha, got a little dominance thing going on here, I guess” and yanked Serena off of the considerably smaller and younger Ginger. Then I did the exact same thing three more times, feeling increasingly embarrassed as the neighbor girl watched our Shepherd/Lab mix climb on top of her sweet little pet.

Ginger eventually snapped, literally. That led to some growling and “Oh yeah! Let’s see who’s Top Dog!” posturing from Serena, which spurred me to head on down the trail toward home. Somewhat strangely, Ginger ran after us, tail wagging, seemingly now ready to play after having asserted herself.

The whole Serena-Ginger episode was largely a play of animal instinctual behavior. Serena is a spayed female. So far as I know, she has never seen a male dog mate with a female (unless she has some doggie porn stashed under her pad that she looks at after we’ve gone to sleep).

How does she know what to do? Serena has the sex act down pretty well, as you can see from this photo I took of a previous neighborhood escapade. Also, Serena was raised in Portland for the first year of her life. Yet she is expert at stalking field mice like a coyote, doing the “Gotcha!” leap from above just like I remember seeing on “Living Desert” Walt Disney shows.

Instinct. It’s a mystery. I thought I’d get some good answers from Google this morning, but I was surprised to find that solid scientific explanations were lacking about how animals act out complex instinctual behaviors. To say that these are genetic doesn’t explain much.

How the heck does DNA enable an arctic tern to make its way from near the north pole to near the south pole, and then back again? Some fledgling migrating birds leave before their parents do, yet somehow they get to the same place.

The mystery of bird migration has been somewhat unraveled by science, but to my mind learning some of the secrets of how birds navigate doesn’t begin to explain how that “how” is implanted in their instinctual repertoire. Yes, birds apparently use the sun, stars, moon, magnetic fields, and such to keep on track. Yet, how do genes make that happen?

I can understand how DNA produces a physical bird body. How, though, does DNA lead that body to perform amazingly complex instinctual behavior? Not to take away anything from dogs, but dog humping is nothing compared to bird navigating (still, it’s fascinating that Labrador Retrievers who haven’t had anything to do with hunting will spontaneously point completely on their own).

Some people get all mystical when they marvel at bird migration and other “How do they do that?!” animal behaviors. A woman finds Allah behind it all, while genetic memory that could explain past life regression also has been hypothesized. Me, I don’t know. As Isaac Armour says, every answer concerning the nature of life leads to more questions that take you all the way back to the beginning of time.

Go figure. When you get down to it, that’s my basic response.

This afternoon a heron paid our little pond a visit, the first time this has happened. We have a metal sculpture of a heron stuck in the ground. The real heron stood for quite a while looking at it. I hope it wasn’t falling in love. Eventually it flew away, perhaps to puzzle out the meaning of a two-dimensional member of his species who bore just a passing resemblance to the herons he’s used to.

Crazy animals. Instinct makes them do such bizarre things. I was expressing these sentiments to someone once, complaining about a robin who was pecking on our bedroom window every morning, believing that the bird he saw reflected in the glass was the real thing.

The guy listened to my rant, then said, “How is that different from Playboy magazine?” That shut me up. Hit too close to home.

People are animals too. We just are able to make up explanations for our animal instincts. Those explanations could be instinctual too, of course.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this weblog post was written by an animal who was driven by instinct to write about instinct. And you’ve been driven to read about it.

Kansas is to evolution as Oregon is to global warming

I’ve been proudly wearing my “Kansas Museum of Science” T-shirt that ridicules the Kansas School Board’s attempts to put creationism on an equal footing with evolution.

But in the area of global warming, Oregon also is a poster child for faith-based science. I can envision a mocking “OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences” T-shirt showing an ostrich with its head in the sand saying, “What global warming? I don’t see any global warming!”

For the Oregon Climate Service is based at Oregon State University. It is headed by the state climatologist, George Taylor, who—as I’ve written about before—is a Pollyanna on global warming.

Actually, “Pollyanna” is too gentle a word, for it connotes a person who is foolishly or blindly optimistic. I don’t think Taylor is blind to the fact of global warming. He willfully chooses to ignore the facts.

There’s a scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is for real. There’s no more controversy about the basic facts of global warming than there is over the basic facts of evolution.

The national science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States of America have issued a statement: “Global Response to Climate Change” (this is a PDF file). It says, “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring” and “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.”

But Oregon’s state climatologist apparently thinks he knows more than the National Academy of Sciences. George Taylor is a tireless spokesman for global-warming deniers, who have as many facts on their side as do evolution-deniers. Namely, virtually none.

It’s embarrassing that an environmentally-aware state like Oregon is being represented by a state climatologist who doesn’t believe that the Arctic is undergoing remarkable and catastrophic climate change.

Taylor and his ten comrades who signed the above-linked letter to Sen. John McCain are precisely the sorts of people the highly reputable RealClimate commentary site on climate science warns about. Noting in December 2004 that the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment has come under attack, these climate scientists said:

“Sadly, in recent years we have become accustomed to a ritual in which the publication of each new result on anthropogenic climate change is greeted by a flurry of activity from industry-funded lobby groups, think tanks and PR professionals, who try to discredit the science and confuse the public about global warming.”

Which is just what George Taylor is doing, using his pulpit as state climatologist to preach that human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming isn’t occurring. However, it is. RealClimate presents the scientific consensus:

(1) The earth is getting warmer
(2) People are causing this
(3) If greenhouse gas emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate

Pretty simple. Can’t you understand those 21 words, Mr. Taylor?

Me and the Milky Way

I’m trying to put my problems into perspective. New Scientist magazine is helping me out. The current issue has a great article on the Milky Way galaxy. This is where I live. You too.

When I consider the big picture, really big, of what surrounds us, earthly aggravations look a lot less immense. In my saner moments, I’m able to juxtapose what gripes me with the galactic point of view. Then I see how miniscule are the mole hills that I’ve been regarding as mountains. [All quotes are from the New Scientist article.]

I’m going to be fifty-seven this year. I’m ancient!
“The galaxy’s oldest stars are roughly 13 billion years old, suggesting they formed less than a billion years after the universe began life in a giant explosion 13.7 billion years ago.”

The earth is overpopulated. I feel cramped.
“The Milky Way is a dense disc of stars, gas and dust some 100,000 light years wide.”

If my book doesn’t sell well, I’m a failure, a nothing!
“In total, the Milky Way contains at least 250 billion stars, possibly as many as a trillion.”

It’s crazy that people disagree with how I view the cosmos, since I know so much and I’m so obviously right.
“Compress the whole of human history into just one year, and you will find that it is only in the last four hours that we gleaned the faintest inkling of the geography of the galaxy we inhabit. It was in the 1920s that astronomers realized that our sun and the stars surrounding it form a cosmic island, just one of countless similar islands dotted across the universe.”

I’m afraid my bald spot is getting larger.
“At the heart of the Milky Way lies a monster…a supermassive black hole—a colossal nugget 3 million times as massive as the sun. It is so immense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, escaping from inside a radius of about 7.7 million kilometers, or about twice the distance from Earth to the moon.”

If the Senate eliminates the filibuster rule this week, the United States is doomed.
“The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are racing towards each other at a relative speed of 500,000 kilometers every hour, and in 3 billion years’ time, the two giants will run into each other in a catastrophic encounter that will change them both beyond recognition.”

Damn! I’ve gained two pounds.
“Ponder this one next time you make a cup of coffee. If you swapped your teaspoon of sugar for a teaspoon of neutron star innards, it would weigh about a million tonnes.”

We’re wrecking our planet; it’s the only one we have.
“In the Milky Way galaxy as a whole there must be an enormous number of planets…There are billions of planets in our galaxy.”

Sometimes I’m bored with my life. Everything I do seems so familiar.
“Most of the Milky Way is invisible, which has made it all the more difficult to figure out its structure. The motions of stars appear to be influenced by the gravity of vast amounts of mysterious ‘dark matter’ in a giant ball enclosing the galactic disk and bulge.”

My fellow humans, the indisputable fact is that we are small. Very small. And the universe is large. Very large.

If you need more convincing, remember that the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years wide.

Now, let’s further broaden our horizons. Here’s a look at our neighborhood within a billion light years. THis is still just a small part of the entire universe, however. Those clumps aren’t galaxies, or even clusters of galaxies, but clusters of clusters of galaxies—superclusters. It’s estimated there are 3 million large galaxies like the Milky Way within a billion light years.

I feel even smaller.

But attaining a realization of complete cosmic insignificance requires Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex.

Be warned, though. As Adams says, “if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.”

“What the #$*! Do We Know?!”

Great question. Great movie. Short answer: not much. Made in Portland, and starring the wonderfully expressive actress Marlee Matlin (an Oscar winner for “Children of a Lesser God”), “What the #$*! Do We Know?!” mixes together a fictional storyline with non-fictional expositions of quantum physics, neuroscience, and other findings from the cutting edge of science.

Having written a book about the relation of the new physics and old mystics (“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” which I’ve revised and am working to get back-in-print), this was a movie that I couldn’t miss. Unfortunately, lots of other people will. I only found two reviews through the Movie Review Query Engine, and the Salem Cinema seats were mostly empty last Friday night. That’s too bad. This film isn’t perfect—what movie is?—but it has much more entertainment and thought-provocation value than most flicks.

I got to see and hear some scientists whose books I’ve enjoyed: Amit Goswami from the University of Oregon, and Fred Alan Wolf. I agreed with most of what they and others talked about, but the “quantum physics says we create our own reality” theme is a stretch that goes over the edge of even cutting-edge science. Goswami himself says in his first book, “The Self-Aware Universe,” that a universal rather than individual consciousness has to bring reality into manifestation.

If this weren’t the case, the laws of nature wouldn’t bear much resemblance to the utterly dependable laws we are familiar with. In his book Goswami likens the situation to people coming to a four-way intersection and choosing what color the light should turn: red or green. Chaos would result, cars crashing into each other. Obviously, this isn’t the way the universe works. Regularity and order prevail on the macro level where we live and breathe. Only on the subatomic level is quantum unpredictability and uncertainty clearly evident.

In my book I quote Roger Penrose as saying that early on people hoped to find evidence for human free will in the randomness of quantum events. But, says Penrose, randomness is a pretty shaky foundation for free will, which should permit us to do just what we want to do, not take a chance on a roulette wheel of possibilities.

That quibble aside, my main problem with the movie, Laurel and I thoroughly enjoyed the examination of another theme: how our thoughts and emotions form a prism through which we see the world only darkly. Often not how it is, but how we have been conditioned to see it. Breaking that conditioning is what psychotherapy and meditation are all about. Science too, since regular paradigm shifts are necessary to boost scientific understanding out of well-worn ruts and into new paths.

It was Fred Alan Wolf, I believe, who said in the movie that our planet’s religions are out of sync with a modern scientific world view, and that one day they will seem as out-moded as so many other discredited perspectives—such as that the Sun revolves around the Earth. I couldn’t agree more. Mystery, Wolf said, should be embraced, rather than feebly explained away through the superstitions offered up by traditional Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the like (Buddhism seems more in tune with reality to me, but not by much).

Consider: physicists believe that only 4% of the physical universe is made of ordinary matter, with some 21% being composed of dark (unseen) matter and 75% of dark energy (I think I have these percentages right). So how can anyone consider that we know much about the cosmos when we don’t even know what 96% of it is made of, much less how the universe came to be and what the meaning of all this is? Mysteries surround us. Mysteries are us. I’d much rather embrace the reality of mystery than the illusion of religious “answers.”

Putting things in perspective

A few nights ago, when I was just about at the peak of my feeling-sorry-for-myself bell curve, since we’ve had to put up with snow/ice/power outages for a couple of weeks now, I picked up two science magazines that helped me put things in perspective. In the November 22 issue of New Scientist (a great weekly science magazine published in Great Britain, so you get a continental, meaning liberal/anti-Bush, perspective in the editorials) I read the cheerily titled piece, “Doomsday Scenario.”

Here I learned that all of humanity’s advances during the last 10,000 years have occurred during wonderfully temperate, and quite rare, climatic conditions. Which, of course, goes a long way toward explaining why humanity advanced so much in this period. Thus we have an inherent, and understandable, lackadaisical attitude toward the Earth’s climate. All that we have known is, basically, good times weather-wise, taking the planet as a whole. So we think, “this will continue,” just as we expect that the sun will rise tomorrow, because it has every day of our life.

Well, almost certainly the sun indeed will rise. But in an amazingly few number of days it could start rising to start a damn cold day—right here in Oregon, in the middle of summer. The article says that “the Earth’s climate during the era of ice ages had two ‘stable states.’ There was no smooth transition between them. The planet simply jumped periodically from one state to the other.” Great. If ten days of ice and snow bum me out, ten years would put me completely over the edge. Which, apparently, is what humanity may be doing to the Earth’s climate: producing relatively small changes that, nonetheless, push conditions over the edge into some huge global effects—just as slipping a few inches on some pebbles when you’re walking along the edge of a high cliff can cause you to fall hundreds of feet in an instant.

That article was sobering enough. But then I picked up the December issue of Scientific American and read the even scarier, “The Day the World Burned.” That was some 65 million years ago, when an asteroid or comet crashed into what now is the Yucatan area in Mexico, producing an explosion equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT. Much of the Earth was heated hundreds of degrees, which, not surprisingly, had some pretty nasty environmental effects—even worse than what all the people driving SUV’s have produced. In fact, the article says that the forest fires produced by the impact, which resulted from all the flaming chunks falling back into the atmosphere, produced carbon equal to 3,000 years of modern fossil-fuel burning. Hence, mucho greenhouse warming took place, and the dinosaurs took a powder, to be replaced by mammals, like us. So 100 trillion tons of TNT can lead to some nice effects, if you’re willing to wait 65 million years.

My point, if I have one, might be this: we have no idea what sort of unbelievable catastrophes await us, “us” being all of humanity. The past 10,000 years and, more broadly, the past 65 million years, have lulled us into believing that tomorrow will be like today. But, one day it won’t. And, what then? That’s when we’ll see what humanity is made of. Catastrophes, large or small, test our spirit, and our mettle. They also can bring us together. We talked to some neighbors during the snow/ice storm that we hadn’t spoken with in a long time. That was nice. It’s good to be reminded that as much as we might find our fellow humans difficult to deal with, ice ages and asteroids are much less companionable. Last point: enjoy today to the fullest, for tomorrow could be much colder, or much hotter.

Still time to be part of the Elegant Universe

If you didn’t catch the first two hours of PBS’ “The Elegant Universe” with string theorist Brian Greene, the final third hour is coming up from 8-9 pm on Tuesday, November 4. We haven’t finishing watching the initial episode, but what we’ve seen has been great. I’ve read most of Greene’s book by the same name, and am passingly familiar with string theory. Still, there’s no substitute for special effects, and having complex physics/cosmology explained by an expert with a gift for communicating. Greene can write; he can talk; he’s likable and expressive; and he’s also a top-notch scientist—a rare combination of talents.

Superstring theory was prominently featured in the final chapter of my first book, God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder. It’s hard not to get excited about a theory that purports to explain everything in the universe, the long-sought Theory of Everything. Supposedly the foundation of the cosmos actually is ten or eleven dimensions, not the three of space and the one of time with which we are familiar. Whether these extra unseen dimensions are compactified, or folded up, in an extremely small fashion, or whether they truly exist as really real realms of reality is still conjecture—as is all of string theory.

Yet it’s the current best bet for a Theory of Everything, one which posits that a cosmic symphony of vibrations produced by a single simple source results in all the complex matter/energy in the universe. A beautiful idea, entirely compatible with the deepest tenets of mystical spirituality. Watch “The Elegant Universe.”

Serena renaming not in the works

At least, the past few days have convinced us that the family pet definitely shouldn’t be renamed Thor, a.k.a. the Viking thunder god. Notwithstanding Serena’s proud half German-Shepherd bloodline (the other half being Labrador, though her Lab DNA must be missing all retriever instincts, given how much time and energy I spend retrieving tennis balls), we’ve learned that she is a total dog-wuss in the presence of thunder and lightning.

Here in the Camp Sherman environs of central Oregon, we’ve had some impressive thunderstorms the past few days. (A few trees reportedly caught fire on Black Butte last night, but were quickly put out by smokejumpers.)

Serena has spent several hours curled up, and trembling, in whatever areas of the cabin most look like a lair to her at any given thundering moment. First, she headed for her portable kennel, but that apparently was too close to some windows. Then, we found her lying on my meditation pillows, in a bedroom closet that I’ve appropriated for my deep spiritual practice, which some might casually dismiss as sleeping while sitting cross-legged if they weren’t aware of the subtle transformative mystic energies being contacted in my seemingly somnolent state.

Perhaps this is why Serena felt so safe perched on my pillows and Indian shawl, which we quickly replaced with her faux sheepskin dog pad. I shut the closet door halfway, to enhance the cavelike feel, and Serena made it through the thunderstorm in fairly good dog-spirits. This afternoon, more rain and thunder drove Serena under the small desk on which my laptop computer sits, to nestle, trembling again, against my legs as I tried to write some emails.

Dogs are good for lots of things, including licking up spills on the floor that you otherwise would have to take a sponge to, and also reminding us of the Magical Side of Nature. If we didn’t know what thunder and lightning was (and I barely do, I have to admit), we humans too would either be curled up in some womblike place of shelter, or rendering sacrifices to Thor. Sometimes it seems that knowing too much leads to knowing too little. Maybe Serena’s reaction is the proper one—fear and trembling in the face of natural powers we can’t control, and barely understand.

Laurel and I went for a mountain bike ride yesterday afternoon, just as the storm was gathering strength. We rode along the beautiful single-track trail behind Metolius Meadows while thunder boomed and nickel-sized raindrops fell on us. We felt very small. Two little people in a great big quasi-wilderness, watching the wildness of a thunderstorm flash and crash overhead. It was great. It was real. It wasn’t bullshit make-believe like so much of human life is. It reminded us that whatever we think we humans are, we aren’t much, compared to the Forces of Nature than could wipe out each and every Homo sapiens in a heartbeat. Serena instinctively knows this. In this way, our dog is smarter than we are, and we have much to learn from her.

[Note: I do not have any inside information from the Forces of Nature that they are preparing to wipe out each and every Homo sapiens in a heartbeat. However, general justification for this statement is contained in this paragraph from a book I’m reading, “The Universe Story,” by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry:

When we examine the nature of the universe we find galaxies with a violence so intense that we cannot account for it scientifically: great spikes of energy blasting across hundreds of millions of miles from the center of our galaxy out through its member systems. Speculation points to black holes of monstrous dimensions generating such extremes of energy from the center of our galaxy. Our own Milky Way galaxy might be capable of generating such a death spike. If such an energy blast does erupt, we will not learn of it much before it reaches us. Even now, a wall of plasma could be rifling towards us at millions of miles a minute; with such stupendous power it would not even notice the Sun and Earth as it scattered us into elementary particles in its inexorable flight of destruction through the stellar systems.

Chimps join we “Homo’s”

If you haven’t read the news about chimpanzees being even more closely related to humans than was previously thought, here’s a link to an article in the online version of Discovery magazine. Serious thought is being given to adding a species to the Homo genus, of which Homo sapiens currently is the only member. I love the idea of having chimpanzees join us in the Homo club. We humans need reminding that we are animals, and should be treating our kin with more respect. Like, by not eating them. Or hunting them. Or mistreating them in zoos and circuses.

Reading about the new chimp research, which found that humans actually share more than 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, reminded me of a few paragraphs I wrote in my book, Life is Fair, some years back. Here’s the excerpt:

Though many details remain to be explained by Darwin’s theory of how life on earth has evolved through supposedly random genetic mutations and natural selection of the most viable mutations, there is general agreement that modern humans are links of an ancestral chain that extends far, far back into prehistoric times.

Chimpanzees share at least 98% of the DNA possessed by people. So from a genetic perspective, only about 1 part in 50 of human beings differs from a life-form that most would regard as decidedly “sub-human.” This means that there is a rather strange dichotomy between scientific fact and social custom.

Though people basically are highly evolved animals (spend a few hours in any singles bar to confirm this), we still act as if there were a great divide between ourselves and other species—even the primates, with whom we share the greatest kinship. Otherwise, why would we find it so acceptable to keep chimpanzees confined in public viewing areas (zoos) for our amusement, when no civilized society would condone this being done to people?

Near-death experience and nothingness

Recently an acquaintance forwarded me an email message about a particularly amazing near-death experience. All near-death experiences are amazing, of course, because death is such: amazing, the mother of all mysteries. I've always been interesed in NDE's since I have a bit of a personal interest, as do we all, in what happens after we take our last breath. Death has a way of capturing your attention, thats for sure. But most NDE's bear a distressingly close resemblance to the nature of the person having the experience. Christians tend to see Jesus, New Agers a soul guide, and so on. Also, I've never heard of a NDE where the almost-dead person came back with truly convincing information that could only have come from the Other Side.

This NDE in question shares some of these same skepticism-inducing characteristics. I get the impression that the author of the tale experienced things that he had thought a lot about before his NDE. I also am sorry that when he was given the chance to ask questions of the being on the Other Side, he didn't ask some presently unanswered scientific question, such as whether superstring theory is true, that could have been tested to assess its validity. Still, its quite a story, and I offer it for your entertainment and consideration. Having just finished a rewrite of my first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," I was particularly interested in his comments about the nothingness that preceded the Big Bang. Here's a few pages from my book about the mysteries of the quantum vacuum that covers some of the same ground as the author of the NDE does in his description of higher realities.

Soulful science

For an interesting, if dense, scientific consideration of soul, consciousness, and Platonic truth, read "Morality at the Planck Scale," a chat with Stuart Hameroff. Reading this Metanexus posting, I recalled that Hameroff is the anesthesiologist whose work Roger Penrose cites in his equally dense (and much longer, being a book) "Shadows of the Mind." The basic notion of these brilliant guys is that teeny-tiny microtubules in the brain's nerve cells are small enough to involve quantum effects at the teeniest-tiniest level of physical reality, which is the Planck scale.

This means that there is a connection between us, our brain, and the cosmos, the undivided whole of the quantum world. The great mystery to consciousness researchers is how something physical, the brain, seems to produce something nonphysical, consciousness. But Hameroff says that he calls himself a panprotopsychist (yeah! I'd join that church), which entails "the notion that whatever gives rise to consciousness is implicit and exists inherently everywhere in the universe." Including the quantum realm, which connects with our consciousness, or soul if you like, through those microtubules. Hameroff suggests that "the soul could be a particular distributed pattern in fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale." Well, maybe the Church of Panprotopsychism isn't going to attract many members, if this is the Creed: "We believe in soul, a particular distributed..." The Lord's Prayer has more of a ring to it.

New sexual anxiety: length matters

Length of the index and ring fingers, that is. I learned this last night, watching a Discovery Channel program about the differences between men and women (I know, I know...you'd think, at the age of 54, I wouldn't need such education). One experiment with boys and girls was highly encouraging: they dumped a bunch of $100 bills from a balcony and filmed a group of young boys and a group of young girls separately trying to catch the bills before they hit the ground.

The boys caught six bills, and the girls caught zero, nada, zilch, which goes a long way (or, at least, some way) toward explaining the income differential between men and women. Men catch more money falling from high places. The girls basically ran around in circles with their hands up, having a great time and giggling like crazy but doing a terrible job at getting ahold of the bills. Of course, now that I think about it, the girls may have realized that the experimenters weren't using real money, while the stupid boys actually thought they were going to get $100 for taking part in a PBS special.

Regardless, the program went downhill for me when they started talking about the importance of the length of a male body part that has been found to be closely linked to sexuality, the ring finger. For more info, consult this TigerBunny article (don't ask me what TigerBunny is; I just go where Google sends me). Generally, men have a ring finger that is longer than their index finger, while in women the ring and index finger tend to be the same length. The average ratio for men is .96 (index finger length divided by ring finger length). Laurel and I ran to the ruler as soon as the show was over. Laurel was a perfect 1.00. As for me, I found that you can fudge the results if the line at the bottom of your finger is ill-defined (as is the case with me), but I tried to be as honest as possible.

On both hands, I got a ratio of .975, which puts me only .025 away from the female norm of 1.00, instead of the male average differential norm of .04 (1.00 minus .96). God, I feel like such a wimp! Where are those email ads for ring finger lengthening, now that I know I need this to be a real man, and, I assume, to please women (oops, I mean a woman) as a real man does.

However, when I looked more closely at the TigerBunny page, I saw that men whose ring finger is longer than the index finger are: (1) more fertile, (2) have higher lifetime reproductive success, (3) are more aggressive and assertive, and, wait a minute!, (4) have a greater proclivity toward homosexuality/bisexuality. Guess I'll hold off on that index finger lengthening plastic surgery. Anyway, I'd be interested in learning your own ratio, if any HinesSight reader is man or woman enough to share this vital statistic. For purposes of scientific research, a brief summary of your sexual inclinations, along with the finger ratio data, would be most appreciated.