Preparation for the future

This blog has been mostly an elaboration of ideas and issues related to my book The Big Bang to Now.  I am now writing a follow-up – The Big Bang to Now to the Future.

I am planning on posting it here as it evolves, but I am finding there is a certain gestation phase which is too disorganized to be  coherent to anyone looking in from the outside.  It’s a little like walking into the middle of a room that is being re-decorated:  at a certain point of upheaval it looks like a hopeless havoc.

And so I am taking a blog break.  I hope to return in the fall to begin to post the book as it evolves.

In the meantime, the website All of Time on Line, will continue to function.

Yes we can! but it’s harder than we thought

I have just found what I think might be the most brilliant book on climate change on the market for people who care about the environment but might not be physicists, climatologists, or politicians.

The book is Sustainable Energy and is available in paperback or to download for free on-line.   There is also a downloadable ten-page synopsis which provides an introduction or summary for those without time to read more.

Why is it so fantastic?  Well, first of all, the author, David MacKay, is a physicist at Cambridge University in England, and he knows what he’s talking about.  But he talks in everyday English, English that non-professionals can understand.  He realizes that the huge numbers involved in so many discussions about alternative energy are so big as to be meaningless to many of us.

His second great contribution is that he is seriously trying to evaluate our options.  He didn’t make up his mind before learning the facts that a green or nuclear or change-of-lifestyle is the solution to our environmental challenge.  

He evaluates whether we can save the planet if we all do little things like turning off our tv stand bys, computer monitors and phone chargers when we’re not using them.  (No, it’s not enough.  It would be rather like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.)

He evaluates whether Britain, which has a population of 60 million, or about 1/5th of that of the US, could meet its energy need through its renewable potential wind, wave, and solar resources.   (No, not unless we are willing to cover 5-10% of the country with solar panels, and fill the sea with ten million acres of offshore wind farms.)

He evaluates in a rational comparison whether hybrid or electric cars are more environmentally friendly.  (Electric cars win hands down.)

Overall, McKay’s conclusion is that if we want to ween ourselves from our excessive use of fossil-fuels, we will have to radically reduce our energy consumption as well as find significant alternative energy sources along with ways of reducing our carbon footprints. It is possible.  But it probably won’t be easy.

What is so refreshing about MacKay’s approach is the lack of hot air and unsubstantiated claims.  It calmly makes the nature and size of our choices clear.  It makes rational decisions by all of us and by our politicians possible.

Which, in its own way, is a little terrifying.

Do read the book.

Flushing the problem away

One of the ongoing arguments around the world today is if and how we can solve the problems of global warming and pollution we have created with our profligate energy use and tonnes of garbage.  

Being fundamentally optimistic, I tend to think that if we would only bring our minds and determination to bear on the problem, we would not have to resort to some of the more draconian solutions like nuclear power plants or severe cuts in populations or a return to life before the industrial revolution.

Two intriguing possibilities came to my attention this weekend.  The first is a sink/toilet arrangement where the grey water in the sink runs automatically into the toilet tank, thus saving water.  It also saves space in the bathroom.

I also saw that one of England’s water companies is setting up a project to convert sewage sludge into pellet fuel power plants.  Apparently sewage sludge is very high in methane gas, and they are already using sewage gas to run 53 of their power generation units.

We know it works because it’s been done before.  In the 1930’s, sewage gas powered the public transport systems in several German cities, including Munich.

 

Where was the Garden of Eden?

Some time ago when I was giving a talk about my book, The Big Bang to Now, someone asked me where the Garden of Eden was.  At the time, all I could say was that we knew it was somewhere in Africa, and  most certainly not in England, Germany, America, or Iran, all of which have laid claim, at some point, to being the birthplace of humanity.  

But I said that a DNA study was currently underway that might make it clearer just where in Africa Homo sapiens had first emerged.

One such study has just been completed, and it suggests that the original Eden was in Namibia.  Its first inhabitants were quite probably Bushmen known today as the San people.  Their language of clicks may tell us something about the sounds of earliest human language.

The study also offers further evidence that race is a concept with little scientific foundation.  Africa is the most genetically diverse of all the continents in the world and modern Africans have evolved from at least 14 different ancestral populations.  

All the people who settled in other parts of the world, on the other hand, are descendants from a small band of perhaps as few as 150 people who left Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

The world’s floating garbage bins

Garbage is a big problem around the world.  Landfills are getting filled, and many are beginning to leak into household water supplies or infiltrate the air of the factories and houses which are built on them.

But the garbage is not just collecting in thousands of landfills.  Swirling in the Pacific Ocean are two giant expanses of perhaps a quarter of a trillion pieces of plastic trash and other debris from our affluent life styles, about 40 pieces of plastic for every living person on the planet.  These patches are mammoth, covering 1.4 million square kilometers of ocean surface.  One is twice as big as the state of Texas.

It’s a huge problem and getting bigger every year.

Is anybody doing anything about it?

Next month Project Kaisel begins with a flotilla of vessels setting out from San Francisco to investigate the potential of cleaning up these disastrous sea-faring garbage tips.  They hope to collect perhaps 40 tonnes of it to recycle as diesel fuel.

But this effort is a mere drop in the bucket.  Plastic bags, packaging, furniture, toys, various utensils and attachments float together.   Disbursing the garbage that’s already afloat could take centuries.

Clearly the flow of debris must also be stopped at source.  Almost 85 million plastic bottles alone are discarded every three minutes in the world. 

Do we as individuals and do our governments have the discipline and courage to prevent more plastic from being dumped into our oceans?

100 million and still surviving

In the Cambridge University Botanical Gardens stands a Giant Redwood tree call the “Dawn Redwood.”  It stands more than 70 feet tall – the height of an eight-story building.

But its height is not what makes it special.  It’s special because its ancestry can be traced back 100 million years to when the dinosaurs still reigned, and when it flourished in what is now Great Britain.  Until 1941 scientists only knew of it through fossils and thought it had been extinct for at least 5 million years.

It was rediscovered in 1941 in a village in Szechuan, China.  Its journey back to Britain was interrupted by war.  Butin 1948, a seed reached Cambridge, where it was nurtured and flourished.

The Dawn redwood can now be seen through Great Britain.  Unfortunately, it is seriously endangered in China.

Groovy

For thousands of years, humans recognized a kinship with other animals.  But this recognition of kinship disappeared throughout much of Western thought when a view of a purely mechanical world that gradually took over with the scientific revolution.  Newton’s theory of gravity, in which the entire universe was envisaged as a kind of giant machine, gave an apparently solid foundation to this view in which humans, and only humans, were capable of feeling and thoughts, and much else.

Today many people are delighted, others horrified, to discover that animals can think and feel.  They solve problems, they mourn,  they often demonstrate a sense of fair play and altruism, and sometimes deliberately deceive, manipulate and play tricks.

Now we are discovering that they can even dance! Parrots are among the most prolific groovers, and may suggest just how deep our own human capacity for rhythm and dance lies.

How bad could a flu pandemic be?

Officials in countries as far away from each other as the United States and New Zealand announced today that cases of swine flu had been identified among several residents who had recently returned from Mexico.  In Mexico itself, at least 80 people have died, and hundreds have become sick.

What is worrisome about swine flu is that it is caused by a hybrid virus taken from bird, pig, and human sources.  The last flu of this mix was the Spanish flu which began in 1918 and killed some 29 million people, about twice as many as died during World War I which had just ended.

Could Mexican swine flu be as deadly as the Spanish flu almost a century ago?

Unlike most flu strains, the Spanish flu was most deadly among young, healthy adults, and there is some evidence that the Mexican swine flu may be developing along a similar pattern.  To make matters worse, world-wide travel is much more wide spread than it was in 1920, making the potential spread of this potentially infectious disease terrifyingly rapid.

On the other hand, thus far, swine flu is not nearly as lethal as Spanish flu.  And should it develop into a killer flu, the world now has anti-viral drugs on a scale that were not available to combat the Spanish flu.

So a swine flu pandemic could be very very bad.  But maybe it won’t be.

Earth Day 2009

Today is Earth day all over the world.

There are 6.7 billion people who live here.

I suspect a lot of us have to change the way we live our everyday lives if we are all going to have enough water and food and air to live.  We don’t have to change a lot.  

Just a little multiplied by 6.7 could make a big change.

For instance, most of us using the internet could choose to do one of the following from now on:

• turn off the TV stand by when it’s not in use
• turn off the computer or put it into Hibernation when it’s not in use
• turn off the light if you’re the last one to leave the room
• keep the tires inflated to the proper pressure on our cars
• turn down the thermostat by one degree
• fix the drip on the leaking faucet or tap
• take a shower instead of a bath twice a week
• wash clothes in 30 degrees water
• hang clothes out to dry instead of using the dryer on at least one load a week
• insulate the windows, wall cavities, and/or attic
• get a bicycle;  or walk once a week where you usually drive
• add at least two more things to this list

Then choose to do one.

Then do it.

Could the sun save us from global warming?

Although it’s not often mentioned in history class, a Little Ice Age descended on the northern hemisphere between 1350 and 1850, peaking between 1645 and 1715.  It is “little” not because it confined itself to a conveniently small corner of Earth, preferably near the north pole,but because for an ice age, it was short.  But it was serious.

Agriculture was drastically affected and millions of people died as a result.  Glaciers in the Swiss Alps buried entire villages, and plummeting temperatures froze the River Thames in London and the Hudson in New York.  People walked on ice from Manhattan to Staten Island.

There are two theories about what caused this Little Ice Age.  One is that, after the plague, agriculture was drastically reduced and so was the emission of greenhouse gases.  The stronger theory, though, is that the sun itself dimmed, emitting less heat and so sending out a lot less warmth. 

Scientists today have noted that the sun is dimming once again.  Why, we don’t know.  Nor have we any idea how long it might last.  It could last for as little as a few more months.

So scientists are cautioning that it would be very risky to count on the sun to turn the heat down and so solve our global warming problems for us.