At Random: Tonga and the Gaia Hypothesis

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Listening to a BBC radio newscast about Tonga this morning, it occurred to me that maybe there is something to the Gaia Hypothesis after all, and its forces might be in play.
    While the rest of the world has been plagued by the pandemic for more than two years, Tonga has so far had only one Covid case. Isolation obviously has its advantages. Tonga’s luck ran out on another front, however. A massive volcanic eruption [“2022 Hunga Tonga eruption and tsunami”], described as a blast larger than an atomic bomb, spawned a tsunami that created great destruction. The extent of the damage is not yet fully known because of a damaged undersea cable, but relief efforts were launched.

Motomynd: Global warming: How concerned are you...really?

[In the article that follows, Motomynd puts the heat on Moristotle as well as on Moristotle's readers. But to show he's a good sport, Moristotle confessed yesterday that he turf turds his lawn.

Recently your blog was abuzz about global warming. From the responses [see comments on the post "In awe of Nature's four billion years on Earth"], the consensus seemed to be that not only was the earth warming, but people were causing it. So here is a quiz designed to find out if your readers are concerned enough about global warming to actually be doing their part to combat it—or if all is just rhetoric. Answer the following questions to establish your GWAR—Global Warming Action Rating:

1. The stereotypical great American lawn is a green desert that, from an environmental perspective, ranks only a couple of notches above a parking lot. In our quest for tidy expanses of green grass we kill the earth beneath it with chemicals, spew pollutants while mowing and trimming, and waste water and energy. What does your lawn say about your GWAR?
    A) I have a yard that requires no mowing, watering or fertilizing. It takes care of itself and I pay the necessary attorney fees to keep my neighbors and the zoning commission at bay. Perfect score! 10 points! You don't just talk the talk, you walk the walk!
    B) Most of my yard is natural. I never seed, feed, or water. I do essential trimming with hand tools, or with a battery powered trimmer—and I recharge the batteries with solar panels or a windmill. Great score! 7 points! You talk, you walk, and you compromise on your terms.
    C) Part of my yard is natural. The rest I feed, seed, and water and I take care of, or hire someone to take care of, with a traditional gas-powered mower. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) To keep peace with the neighbors I have a yard that requires mowing, watering, and seeding. And aerating and plugging, whatever that is. No score! Zero points! You talk, but you don't walk—you barely crawl.

2. American business commuters create an immense carbon footprint. When traveling back and forth to work, what do you do to help with the problem?
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I carpool, commute alone in an electric vehicle, or use a gas-powered vehicle that gets at least 60 miles per gallon. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and can’t be bothered thinking about it.  Zero points! But you knew that already, right?

3. American casual travelers also create an immense carbon footprint. How do you travel for fun?
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I carpool, commute alone in an electric vehicle, or use a gas-powered vehicle that gets at least 60 miles per gallon. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and can’t be bothered thinking about it.  Zero points! But you already knew that again, right?

4. Since this is America and we can’t get away from travel, let’s talk about how we go on vacation. Yes, there is a recurring theme here.
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I fly, or travel with three others in a vehicle that gets at least 30 miles per gallon, or drive with at least one other person in an electric vehicle. 4 points. At least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and still don’t want to be bothered thinking about it. Zero points! But you already knew that again, right?

5. The typical American meat-based diet is another huge waste of resources that creates an oversize carbon footprint. So how do you rate?
    A) I’m a vegan. I use no animal products at all. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I’m an ova-lacto vegetarian. I eat a grain and vegetable-based diet supplemented only with eggs and milk. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I am working on becoming a vegetarian. Eating mostly fish and chicken, and just the occasional burger, counts for something doesn’t it? 4 points. Again, at least you are trying.
    D) This is America, of course I eat a lot of meat. Zero points! Yes, I already knew that.

6. How and where we eat can impact global warming almost as much as what we eat.
    A) I never cook. Really. I eat everything raw. Perfect score! 10 points! (But how on earth do you do it? We really want to know!)
    B) I cook once or twice a week. The rest of the time I warm leftovers in a solar oven or microwave. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I cook when I want and eat out when I wish. But at least I favor dimly lit restaurants that serve mostly vegetarian fare. 4 points, keep trying.
    D) I drive a gas guzzler, sit 10 minutes in a drive-thru with the motor running, and cook outside on a grill that uses more fuel per meal than a hybrid car does in a week. Yeah, I know, zero points.

7. Enough about food—how about shelter?
    A) I live in a tent (or tepee or yurt) and I travel as the season changes like Native Americans and Mongols, so I never use heat or air. And by Mongols I mean descendants of Genghis Khan, not the motorcycle gang. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I live in an environmentally friendly multi-family housing complex, or a single-family home completely powered by solar or wind. Great score! 7 points!
    C) My single-family home is powered by the grid, but at least I updated the windows and insulation and use insulated blinds, drapes, and curtains. 4 points. Keep it up.
    D) I’m pretty sure we added storm windows on the north side of the house, but gas, oil, and electricity aren’t really all the expensive, so I use what I need. Yep, zero points.

8. And how about minimizing the environmental impact of that shelter?
    A) I carry my tent on my back and walk from winter home to summer hangout. What more can I do? Hard to argue with that. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) We use a state-of-the art thermostat to maximize the benefit of our environmentally friendly heating system, water the garden with rain water, and compost all we can. Great score! 7 points!
    C) We use one of those fancy computer-controlled thermostats, wear more clothes indoors in winter so we can set the heat lower, and we threw out a bunch of stuff and downsized to a smaller home. 4 points. You are getting there!
    D) If it is cold we turn up the thermostat and if it is hot we turn it down. So what? Zero points, at least you are consistent.

9. How does your recycling affect your GWAR?
    A) We buy items only in environmentally friendly packaging and recycle and compost everything. We never have trash. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) We recycle all our cardboard and paper products, and all the plastic bottles and jugs, but keeping track of all those different numbers on plastic is just a little too much. Great score! 7 points! That is a lot more than most people do.
    C) Cereal should be in a box, not a bag, so that’s the way we buy it. But we do recycle the boxes and a few other things. Four points, about average.
    D) We have four trash cans. Do you really expect us to find room for a recycling bin? Need we even say zero points?

10. Here is a chance to earn some bonus points.
    A) I never buy water in plastic bottles. Great! Add 10 points to your score!
    B) I maintain recommended tire pressure and check it weekly. Good! Add 7 points!
    C) I turn the thermostat down to 60 in winter and wear a sweater made from recycled plastic bottles. Nice touch, add 5 points.
    D) I always recycle all batteries and old electronics. That counts. Add 3 points.

So what does your GWAR say about you?
    100 or more points: You are a global warming action hero! They may make a movie and market a line of toys based on your exploits.
    80-100 points: You not only talk the talk, you walk the walk.
    60-80 points: Not awful, but you need more walk and less talk.
    40-60 points: Probably about average, sadly.
    20-40 points: Barely below average, even more sadly.
    0-20 points: Do you just not care? Or are you among those people who believe the world is going to end in a few months, so why bother?

The boot room

In Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is invited to the North Pole.

The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change...There were no lecturing duties—Beard's presence would be sufficient—and the foundation would bear all his expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.
    ...
    It turned out that Beard was the only scientist among a committed band of artists. The entire world and all its follies, one of which was to warm up the planet, was to their south, which seemed to be in every direction....
    ...
    From the second day, the disorder in the boot room was noticeable, even to Beard. [pp. 46, 47, 62, 75]

This boot room, which McEwan introduces so innocently, so unremarkably, attracts more of a Nobel Prize winner's attention than we might expect:

    He suspected that he never wore the same boots on consecutive days. Even though he wrapped his goggles...in his inner balaclava on the third day, they were gone by the fourth, and the balaclava was on the floor, soaking up water...He was not a communally spirited person, but there were certain decencies he took for granted—in himself, and therefore in others. He always put his stuff on and below the same peg, number seventeen, and was disappointed to note that others had trouble observing such simple procedures. Gloves were a particular problem, for it was impossible to go outside without them. As a precaution, he stuffed his inside his boots, along with the glove liners. The next day the boots were gone. [p. 75]

    And the week long Beard observes the artists' idealistic

demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances...fashioned to deflect the course of catastrophe.
  Such was the music and magic of ship-bound climate-change talk. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall we had learned to call a bulkhead, the boot room continued to deteriorate. By midweek four helmets were missing, along with three of the heavy snowmobile suits and many smaller items. It was no longer possible for more than two thirds of the company to be outside at the same time...Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs.

Then McEwan reveals his hand, why the boot room has been such a focus, to serve as a symbol:

Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. Even harder to impose order once the room was strewn with backpacks and stuff bags and supermarket plastic bags half filled with extra gloves and scarves and chocolate bars. No one, he thought, admiring his own generosity, had behaved badly; everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in "discovering" his or her missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the earth—assuming it needed saving, which he doubted—when it was so much larger than the boot room? [emphasis mine, pp. 79, 80]

Half a world population ago

In 1968, a couple of years after Lunar Orbiter I made the first images of Earth—back when the planet's human population was half what it is today—I gave a talk recommending zero population growth at a meeting of a chapter of the American Association of University Women.

Many of those present had already heard the term zero population growth, and some may have read Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich's bestseller of that year, The Population Bomb, which was among my primary sources of information. The basic idea was that if humans, on average and as a personal commitment, produced just enough offspring to replace themselves (two per couple), then population could remain approximately constant. Zero population growth. Or, as an entry in Wikipedia puts it, "In the long term, zero population growth can be achieved when the birth rate of a population equals the death rate...."

Ehrlich's predictions of worldwide famines between 1970 and 1985 because of overpopulation may have failed in their details, but few informed people today doubt that overpopulation has driven and continues to drive global warming, including unmistakable changes in weather patterns, shrinking polar icecaps, and the rising acidity of oceans (some of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere going into the formation of carbolic acid)—all of which have stark consequences for life on earth.

For along with rising numbers of humans come their rising expectations, which can be summarized briefly as expecting to live like an American. You know, drive an SUV and produce, by Third World standards, an astounding amount of garbage.

I don't know how accurate Erhlich's 1968 prediction was for when the Earth's population would double (I'd have to read his book again to check), but he did expect it to double. He knew how difficult it would be to achieve ZPG, because, to quote Wikipedia again, "a country's population growth is often determined by economic factors, incidence of poverty, natural disasters, disease, etc."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, here are the Earth's population figures for 1966 and 2008: 3,416,212,203 and 6,677,602,292 (doubling in those 42 years). Its prediction for the next 42 years (2050) is 9,392,797,012. While that would be a growth of less than half the preceding period, remember that the extra people will be hustling to realize their growing expectations...so long as conditions don't worsen to the point where such expectations are impossible to maintain and many will give up hustling in favor of desperately hoping and waiting for an afterlife.

A moral imperative

I watched Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," last night. I knew what was in it, but I hadn't expected to be moved the way I was by actually watching it. I was moved by Gore's conclusion that it's a moral imperative to do something to try to avert the environmental cataclysm threatening Planet Earth. This means, among other things, that it's a matter of conscience that I go back to commuting to work by way of the local transit system. I'd commuted by bus for some months before my vacation in California in October, but I haven't ridden the bus since.

I'm going to start again on Tuesday. (I'm off for MLK's birthday.)

And, if I intend to continue to blog politically occasionally, it is more important to talk about this issue than about Iraq. Alas, Bush will still be part of the discussion, since the Busheviks have been largely successful at misleading people through their comprehensive campaign to hide the truth—such as a White House official's distorting government climate reports:

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training. [The New York Times, June 8, 2005]