Of Pteropods & Armageddon Timepieces

Our friend the pteropod

They used to have a doomsday clock, and for all I know they still do.  Every once in a while it would show up in a newspaper article, saying that the doomsday clock during such and such a crisis had edged to seven minutes to midnight, with midnight signifying Armageddon.  The worry then was atomic war, and we all worried about atomic fallout and atomic winter and other such nasty stuff.  Then the Soviet Union collapsed and we put on a happy face, revved up our economies, went on the net, turned in our guitars for electric basses and stopped worrying about Armageddon timepieces.

Well, it's time to reset the doomsday clock once again.  This time set it for 2030.  That's the year when the pteropods start dying.

I knew that would worry you.

Gretchen Hofmann, a molecular ecologist and biology professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, calls pteropods the "potato chip" of the ocean because so many species feed on them.  Fish eat pteropods, penguins eat fish:  it's the grand scheme of life.  But if the pteropods die, then there are fewer fish, then the penguins start to croak.  That's the not-so-grand scheme of death.

And of course it's not just penguins we have to worry about.  We're not really sure how many species would be endangered if the pteropods die.  Lots, most likely, since critters at the pteropod end of the food chain tend to ultimately feed species all the way up the food chain to us, me and you.
So what is it that's going to do in the pteropods?  Carbon dioxide.  Yep, the same gas that's bringing us global warming.

You see, there is direct relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the carbonate chemistry of the surface of the oceans.  The surface of the oceans, those places where surface light can still be seen, is where most ocean life is found.  You don't want to mess with it.  But unfortunately high carbon levels do mess with it, and in critical ways.

The ocean, you see, is where a lot of the carbon that our global civilization produces winds up.  Something between 33% or 40% of the surplus carbon produced in the 200 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has wound up in the ocean, an amount totalling something like 120 billion tons.  At present some 25 million tons of carbon dioxide dissolve in the ocean every day.  That's right.  Every day.

Okay, that's a good thing, because otherwise all that carbon would be in the atmosphere contributing to warming.

But it's a bad thing because all that excess carbon is also making the ocean acidic.

Toss a piece of chalk into a bottle of vinegar.  Watch it dissolve.  Now imagine that piece of chalk is a crab.  Watch the crab's shell dissolve.  Watch the crab die.  (Now please don't go tossing crabs into acid.  Take my word for it.  It's the same effect as with the chalk.)

Too much CO2 in the ocean leads to the formation of carbonic acid, and the more carbonic acid, the less carbon bicarbonate, which shellfish and pteropods use to build shells.  These shells effectively sequester carbon dioxide, meaning that it isn't going to go back into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming.  When pteropods die, their shells drift down to the ocean floor and just lie there, keeping the carbon in the shells out of circulation.  That's a good thing.

Stopping that process, that's a bad thing.

Well, lately a report has come down which more or less pinpoints when that process stops, when the atmospheric carbon is too high, and the oceans consequently become too acidic to support shellfish and pteropods.  Some scientists say that will happen when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach 450 parts per million.  According to current projections, that level will be reached in 2030.

Then forget oysters and clams, forget cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh.  The entire ecology of the ocean will probably begin to collapse.  And since the entire planet is dependent in one way or the other on the oceans, humanity won't fare too well, either.

Set your clocks for 2030.  Doomsday melting your lobster dinner.

Or maybe we really will change our ways before that happens, stop buying more and more stuff, stop driving to work, stop jetting all over the place, stop sending immense amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, stop placing the economy ahead of the planet.

And maybe we'll start caring, I mean really caring, money-where-your-mouth-is type of caring, about the future of the planet.

You know, the future, where our children and grandchildren are going to have to live.
Oh yeah, we'll change.  Soon.

Sure we will.

Addenda:  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has recently reset the Doomsday Clock to 6 minutes to midnight (from 5) in response to recent promises by world governments to fight climate change and the actions of President Obama in respect of world peace (Afghanistan notwithstanding.)  Dependent, of course, on whether any of those promises are fulfilled.
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References:

Whatever the Warming, Ocean Acidifies From Carbon-Dioxide Buildup, ScienceDaily, 27 March, 2007

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070322110240.htm

Ocean Acidification and Its Impact on Ecosystems, ScienceDaily, 29 May 2007

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080526162652.htm

Regardless of Global Warming, Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Threaten Marine Life, ScienceDaily, 11 March 2007

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070308220426.htm

Southern Ocean close to acid tipping point, ABC News, 11 November 2008

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/11/2416190.htm

The Geography of Homelessness

Geography is fundamentally the study of the relationship of human beings to the landscape.  Part of that relationship is inventory:  mountains, rivers, valleys, marshlands, metals, minerals, forests, indigenous plants, birds, wildlife, fish, topsoil, and so on.  Much of the rest of the story has to do with how human beings relate to that inventory.

That is why we can talk about the geography of homelessness.  Different classes of people relate to the landscape differently, because, among other reasons, some have more power than others, and the homeless are those with the least power of all.

A landowner will relate to a downtown hotel as an investment, a way to make money.  That same downtown hotel might also be seen as home for a couple of dozen people.  If the landowner decides that it is possible to attract a class of tenant with more money, and get a better return on his or her investment thereby, then he or she will do so.  Of course, in that case, the original tenants must move out.  And when they do, some will find substitute accommodation, and some will not, depending upon how much substitute accommodation is available.  Those who do not find substitute accommodation become homeless.

The process of attracting tenants with more money is known as gentrification.  For gentrification to happen, a formerly low rent district has to undergo changes, transform itself into an area which the prospective new tenants deem acceptable.  In transforming itself, the low rent district becomes progressively less affordable for the poorer people who originally lived there.  Gentrification, a geographic process driven by money and bourgeois values, thus becomes one of the forces encouraging homelessness.  It's people with money pushing people without it into the cold.

Once you are homeless, geography controls your life even more.  According to laws and policies put in place by the classes with power in our society, certain people have more rights over the landscape than others, and can decide what various parts of the landscape can and cannot be used for.  The benches in bus shelters, for instance, are for the use of commuters.  That is an acceptable use.  It is not acceptable that a homeless person should sleep on one, even if it is in the middle of the night and the buses are no longer running.  Therefore, they design these benches so that they can be sat on, but cannot be slept on.

Making benches so the homeless can't sleep.

Parks are another example.  These are for recreation, having a picnic, playing ball.  If you are homeless and try to set up a tent in a park, the police will come and move you on.  Playing ball is all right, but living there is not, even if you have no other place to go.

If you sit on a curb, you will be moved along.  If you camp in an abandoned building, you will be moved along.  If you try to sleep in the alley, you will be moved along.  When you are homeless, no part of the landscape is reserved for your legitimate use.  You don't belong anywhere.  You are not permitted to stand still, to lie down, to lock a door or turn off a light, and when you try to beg for a meal in front of a store, the shopkeeper will come out and threaten you.  And the police will stand by the shopkeeper's right to do so.

They chase you, and prod you, and kill your sleep.  Anywhere you stand is the wrong place to be.  Anywhere you stand, there is someone who doesn't want you there.  Finally, your only recourse is to hide where no one will find you, to find a hole where no one will see you, to stay out of the reach of the legitimate people who don't want you around.

That is homeless geography.  A rat in a hole, out of sight of the decent people.

Oh, such decent people.

There is a story about turtles which has been around for a long time in one form or other.  The story is used to illustrate the philosophic problem of infinite regression—which has also been around a long time (even longer than the story about the turtles) although not everybody has noticed that infinite regression is a problem except philosophers, scientists and other similarly persnickety people.

What problem? Ben Stein asks. There isn’t a problem.

The problem of infinite regression is a problem in bad logic, and some people hate bad logic.  And so they tell the story about the turtles.

Or the enormous elephant.

When John Locke told the story in 1690, his version involved an enormous elephant and lacked the kicky punch line of the story as related by Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, superstar scientist and raconteur.  In Hawking’s telling, which is to be found in his A Brief History of Time, a prominent scientist, possibly Bertrand Russell—after giving a lecture about the earth and the sun and the galaxy—is challenged in his cosmology by an elderly woman in the audience.

You’re wrong, insisted the woman. The world is a flat plate balanced on the back of a turtle.

If that is so, the scientist asked, what is the turtle standing on?

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” says the woman. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

Which of course naturally leads to the topic of intelligent design.

Intelligent design has been put forward as an idea which—according to its advocates—is a legitimate scientific idea—upright, clean and morally good—which should be taught in the schools along with evolution, or instead of evolution.  The premise is that there are some structures in nature too complex to be the product of evolution, that is, of random variation subject to natural selection. If evolution could not have produced such complex structures all on its own—and it really couldn’t, insist the advocates of intelligent design—an intelligent hand must have gotten directly involved.

Oh, really.

Evolution can make a tree, says the intelligent designer, but eyes can only be made by higher intelligences like me.

But what is the intelligent designer standing on?

Critics of intelligent design say that the idea is merely creationism dressed up and made to act polite; that it is not a scientific theory but merely religious doctrine with little or no actual scientific content.  

Science by its nature is about testable things.  Articles of faith such as the existence of an intelligent designer, concepts which can neither be proven or disproven, do not belong in science and that is because science has nothing to do with unprovable things.  Sorry.  That rule is written into the definition of science.

Oh no, say its advocates, crossing their fingers behind their backs, we didn’t say it was GOD who was the intelligent designer.  We never said God, no one heard us say God, you can’t prove a thing.

But it's not even a legitimate scientific theory, point out the critics of intelligent design.   Merely insisting that certain structures could not have been produced by evolution is not an argument that stands on its own.  Couldn't have happened?  On whose say-so?  Who can claim that level of understanding of nature that they can say what it is or is not capable of doing--given a planet to play with, life multitudinous, and fourteen billion years to do it in?

Have we figured out nature's every trick?  No sirree.

There are many things that seem impossible at first glance, as anyone realizes who has ever been to a good magic show. Yet an intimate knowledge of what goes on behind an illusion can transform the impossible into the clever but perfectly reasonable.  To see behind the illusion, though, you must first learn how a trick is done, see all the steps gone through by the illusionist, and learn to ignore the misdirection which steers you to illusion.

No reputable scientist discussing evolution would ever insist they knew everything there was to know about it.  Nor would they ever insist that they could not be fooled, and that therefore a trick which they could not figure out must be not be a trick at all.  It must be real magic.

But intelligent design advocates argue exactly that, that they can’t be fooled, and that therefore there must be an intelligent designer.

Anyway, postulating such an intelligent designer merely begs another question.  A perplexing question when you're not allowed to evoke religion.

Because, you see, if an eye is too complex for nature to come up with, then where did theintelligent designer come from?  (And was the designer eyeless?)

Intelligent design says that extreme complexity presupposes a designer.  Yet what could be more complex than the intelligent designer?  That being so, the question arises of who or what designed the intelligent designer? And who or what designed the being who designed the intelligent designer?  And who or what designed the being who designed the being who designed the intelligent designer?  And so on. And so on.

It’s turtles, you see.

All the way down.