CONTEXT - “The Earth is indivisible.”We have been reliant on reductionist science for some 400 years. The change it has made to the complexity of our civilization is breathtaking. The devastation to our life support system, the Biosphere, is equally breathtaking. We are either headed toward extinction or toward wisdom, but the thirty years that we have known about climate change and done very little to mobilize ourselves to address this man-made threat makes a convincing argument for extinction. James Lovelock has stated that we passed the point-of-no-return some time ago and the inputs to positive feedback continue to be stoked. Contextual science, seeing nature as a system or as a system of systems is the path to allowing the Earth support us. But we may have arrived at this awareness too late.

We humans tend to think of this as “THE END OF THE WORLD”, but it’s not. It is the end of us, Homo sapiens, and, thanks to us, it is also the end of redwood trees, grizzly bears, honey bees, vast herds of wildebeest, snow leopards, whales, rain forests, bats and hectares of oil palms and tens of thousands of acres of BT corn. Most likely it is the end of all the mega fauna, mega flora, art, architecture, literature, technology, biotech, gods and goddesses, money and sports. It will be the end of circuitry and the silence of the iPhones.

As incredible as it sounds, the vast majority of life on Earth (or Planet Water as Lynn Margulis would have renamed it) will hardly notice our disappearance. Extinction happens. Chemolithoautotrophs will go on munching crust 10 kilometers below the surface. Fungi will “make do” weaving their fabric of mycellium through the rotting remains of the extinguished. Cyanobacteria will go from heterotrophy to photosynthesis with each dawn as they have for thousands of milllions of years. Some things rarely change, but change they do. Once again, it will be a time of renewal, experimentation and radiation. The world-wide bacterial sensorium, adopting a quaint Dawkinsian slang, may muse on what new “vehicles” to produce. As Ian McHarg predicted, the algae will laugh, “Next time, no brains!”

Our “science” strata in the rock record will be very thin. Lynn thought that the various incarnations of the aluminum pop-top might be the index fossils for the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

BRILLIANT TELEVISION--THE NEWSROOM Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing”, gave us three seasons of “The Newsroom” about ACN, a fictional cable network trying to give its viewers real news (read Edward R. Morrow) instead of what my veteran news cameraman friend calls “infotainment based loosely on reality” that keeps us distracted when there’s no sports to watch. Season 3, Episode 3, “ Main Justice”, aired on 11/23/14. It featured a segment where one of ACN’s field producers has scooped an interview with the

Deputy Director of the EPA on a new, unreleased climate change study. You can download and watch the segment at this link: EPA interview

The interview is dark and deadpan, but notice the scene that follows the interview. It is even more wickedly brilliant, though I may not have provided enough context. Context is all important.

WE DESPERATELY WANT TO BE SPECIAL--EVEN IF IT MEANS BREAKING BADIt is interesting what happens when people discover that humans really don’t reside somewhere between Angels and big fuzzy critters. We aren’t the whole point of the evolution of the Universe or even the evolution of Planet Water. We are Johnny-come-latelies as a species. We aren’t “more evolved”. We don’t seem to be good for the Biosphere. In fact, we seem to fit the definition of a “plague species” according to Reg Morrison in his book, “The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature.”

It seems like we immediately go to the Dark Side. If we can’t Save the Planet (Lynn pointed out that we cannot because it is the Earth that sustains us) then, by God, we want to nuke, frak, drill, spill, despoil, ruin, sterilize, drain, wipe out, foul, bleach, hole, tar, contaminate, fell, burn, bleach, meltdown, dump, heat and basically go all Ozymandias on the only home we’ve ever known. Surely in the history of the world, we must be the TOP BAD ASS . But are we?

“The Anthropocene is named after us and we’ve squandered most fossil fuels in only 100 years! We’ve spilled, leaked and befouled to the max! We got FaceBook. Us..we‘ve spoiled everything and every place. CO2 in the atmosphere is at its highest level in 15 million years and its going up like a sky rocket! We’ve heated the globe en route to storms that will flatten whole cities. We’re raising sea levels! We got the makings of a long nuclear winter any day now! We got North Korea!”

Are humans especially BAD ASS?

So, how do we stack up against other extinction events? Let’s take a dumb chunk of primordial matter, the Chicxulub asteroid, that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan Pennisula about 66 million years ago.

The Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud seen from 160 km. The cloud is 56 km

high. Can we get some respect?

Chicxulub blasted a crater 180 km wide and 20 km deep. It is “the asteriod that ended the dinosaurs” (non-avian).

HOW DO HUMANS STACK UP AGAINST CHICXULUB? First let’s compare the energy output Us versus Chicxulub in exajoules. One EJ = one quintillion (1018) joules. All of the munitions used in all human history: tests, target practice, pyrotechnics, hunting and wars including our existing nuclear arsenal amount to 32 exajoules of energy.

Add to this the total world energy consumption which I have calculated by averaging each decade of this chart. I also calculated an estimate for the decades prior to 1820 back 60,000 years when our species is thought to have originated in Southern Africa. It is a ballpark estimate with the margin of error on the side of overstatement.

Human Total Energy Output including munitions = 13,457 exajoules.

http://ourfiniteworld.com/

Chicxulub impact

EXTINCTIONS

The Total Energy Output of Chicxulub = 420,000 exajoules.

It may be helpful to grasp the magnitude of Chicxulub by considering the La Garita Caldera, the largest known explosive eruption in Earth history. It is estimated to have moved 5,000 km3 of material-- enough to cover the state of California 39 feet deep. The Chicxulub impact was 416 times more powerful than the La Garita eruption. Chicxulub caused a global firestorm, giant tsunamis, vaporized so much carbonate rock that CO2 levels soared to an estimated 2300 ppm. Dust, debris and aerosols blocked out the sun for at least a decade. Chicxulub was a Bang. We are a whimper.

IT MAY NOT BE THE SIZE OF THE FIRST PEBBLE TO ROLL THAT DETERMINES THE SIZE OF THE AVALANCHEMartin Brasier cautioned us that the severity of an extinction event might not be determined by the size of the perturbation to the Earth. What Martin Brasier demonstrated with his work on symbiotic forams was that when organisms specialize and become increasingly complex to optimize themselves for an environment with its predictable variations, they also become increasingly fragile and dependent on the environment remaining relatively stable. We can apply this lesson to our global human civilization and readily see that climate disruption will easily do us in--no large bolide impact required.

John Fellows sent along this obituary for Martin Brasier. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11306605/Professor-Martin-Brasier-obituary.html. It focuses on Brasier’s “confrontation” with Bill Schopf, a palaeobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles over some putative Apex chert fossils. The obit says that Brasier “launched an attack”, but I think the truth is closer to “there’s an argument slightly against that”. When I talked to Martin about this he seemed to be a bit surprised that as an expert in foraminifera, he had become well-known for this incident where he was pointing out that in science it was important not to ask what something looked like, but what was it?

State of Colorado. Red mark volcanic caulderas. Area in yellow is the La Grarita cauldera. http://skywalker.cochise.edu

JURY STILL OUT ON “NATURAL SELECTION” DEFENSEBruce Scofield sent along this link about the devastation being wrought by natural selection. http://www.theonion.com/articles/natural-selection-kills-38-quadrillion-organisms-i,37873/. Isn’t it time we humans woke up and put a stop to this carnage?

THE SHOWDOWN AT THE P.N.A.S. CORRALSusan Mazur writes that her new book contains the story of Lynn Margulis’ challenge to the editor of the PNAS over witholding publication of papers retitled: " 'Marvelous' Lynn Margulis". Her book is entitled The Origin Of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza. “The book's largely about the politics of origin of life and synthesizing of life, but I do have a section called Rethinking the Circus.  In it, I include my interviews with Carl Woese, Nigel Goldenfeld, Denis Noble and James Shapiro re evolution, an interview with Pier Luigi Luisi and also Piet Hut.”

You can find out more about the book at http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/bookmachine/origin-life-circus-how-make-life-extravaganza

NASA MAPS OLD, OLDER AND OLDEST ICE ON GREENLANDJulie Brigham-Grette, Head of Geosciences at UMass-Amherst sent this out to everyone on the geolist for the Department. Luckily, I still manage to get some communication from my old department and this is cool. She said, “I just discovered  this remarkable NASA animation — put up Jan 23, its already had 96,943 views! It is worth 3.5 mins of your time.  thanks.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VbPE0TOtQ

ICE IS A ROCK, THE EARTH ISN’TJames E. Lovelock was fond of using the metaphor of the Earth as a single organism. When asked why, he said it was so people would stop treating the Earth like “a pile of rocks”. What Lovelock was describing with his metaphor was the Earth system, Gaia. His principle collaborator on this idea was Lynn Margulis. Gaia theory explains the anomalous nature of the Earth through a deep time understanding of Earth’s unique feature in the Solar System, a Biosphere--abundant life for at least 3800 million years. This work by Lovelock and Margulis is celebrated by NASA.Here is a clip of the show “Real Time with Bill Maher”. Bill had a 50/50 chance to choose the informed side of the “climate debate”. He got that right, but it doesn’t mean that he understands anything about science or context. RealTimeScience.

Going back to the beginning of this newsletter to the idea of context. We have been living as if this was an infinite world. We’ve been tiny cogs in wheels that do something--grind up other people--add some bit of data or an error to the growing databases being mined. We have been living in the “context of no context” (as illustrated by the TV game show Family Feud where the right answer isn’t necessarily the answer sought, rather the most popular answer of a survey given to 100 random people.) The February 7 issue of Science News has the article, “Awash In Numbers: In the Flood of Big Data, the Truth is Hard to See”. Unfortunately, if you are not a subscriber, you will have to wait a bit to be able to read it online.

BACTERIA IS THE NEW BLACK - WEAR IT EVERYDAYBetsy Dyer thought that I should have made my personal experiment with AO+ Refreshing Cosmetic Mist the top story of the December 2014 EnvEvo newsletter. It is kind of strange spraying the “germs” on instead attempting to wipe them out. For background read the article in the NYTimes. I am very satisfied with the results. No need for deodorant. I actually use a drop or two of Argan (Morrocan) oil on my long hair to make it manageable. Before I started using AO+, I had rosacea on my nose, cheeks and forehead. The problem started in the Fall of 2014. I had spent lots of time outdoors sans sun block that Summer, which may have contributed to the outbreak and it seemed to get worse until this month. It seems to be a bit better. I have used AO+ on my face since November and I just ordered another 3-month supply. I would say that results thus far, as a treatment for my rosacea, remain

indeterminate, but the experiment continues.