This made me cry

I downloaded the complete Stern Report yesterday.

I read most of it.

The Stern Report is a complete study of all the data to date on global warming, produced by the British government. The Brits are far ahead of us on this as are other European countries. The report was dispassionate and covered all the possible scenarios in a rigorous manner.

The developers of this report are alarmed. I am too. I have been following the RSS feeds using "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" as the topics for several years now. I'm not a gloom and doom person, but my educational background and my technical bent has caused me to pay attention to this warming phenomenon.

About 25 years ago I was a professor and department head at my university. The former department head who taught a course in industrial safety and health died suddenly. The only person in the department that could take over the course on short notice was me. This necessitated quite a bit of learning on my part so I did a lot of reading outside of the text as preparation. One interesting bit of information that I shared with the class was about the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii. This observatory, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory, has been measuring carbon dioxide and other gases in the air since 1958. The charts that I showed the class showed a steady increase in CO2. The connection that I made for my students was that most of the carbon dioxide had to come from industry, where they were headed, and that they should be aware of this as a safety issue. Little did I know!

The 2006 Mauna Loa data shows not only the expected increase but a spike in CO2 level. It is actually the highest level of CO2 in 650,000 years!

I can hear the raucous laughter and comments now. "How can you possibly know what the concentration of a gas was that long ago?"

Scientists have been taking ice core samples from the arctic and antarctic ice sheets for years. The valuable information gleaned from the cores includes tiny pockets of air which when analyzed yields the percentages of the gases that made up that air. The longest core samples are from the ice layer of 650,000 years ago.

So, why is it important to know about "greenhouse" gases? First, realize that the "greenhouse effect" allows life on this planet to exist. About 30 percent of the sun's energy is reflected back to space. The other 70 percent is absorbed by the earth. If this didn't happen the planet could not support life as we know it. The reason that so much solar heat is absorbed is because the earth has an insulating layer of gases that prevents much of it from leaving. These greenhouse gases are water vapor ( ), carbon dioxide (), methane (), and nitrous oxide (). The gas that is seen as critical at this juncture is CO2, the product of burning carbon-containing fuels. Humans are burning more and more coal, gasoline, oil in the production of the increasing energy required for modern civilizations. Every electric plant, every farm tractor, every automobile contributes carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Now there are CO2 sinks that natually soak up much of the CO2 produced. All of the plant life in the world takes up CO2 and releases oxygen as part of their respiration, just the oposite of animal respiration. The oceans are another huge sink. So what's the problem? Trees are the greatest soaker-upper of CO2 on land. And trees are being cut down at a prodigious rate. One of the largest forests in the world is in the Amazon region of Brazil, South America. Those trees are being cleared at a frightening pace. The oceans absorb CO2--if they are cold. As the waters warm the amount absorbed lessens.

One of the most frightening aspects of global warming is a positive feedback mechanism involving deposits of peat in Siberia. Two years ago scientists discovered that melting permafrost was forming lakes above peat bogs allowing bubbling methane into the air. As noted above, methane is a greenhouse gas, one that is 20 times as powerful as CO2 in atmospheric warming. The positive feedback results from increased warming that allows more melting and therefore more methane release.

All of this points to a probable train wreck at about the middle of this century according to the Stern Report. The cost to the world will be huge compared to the cost of lessening the damage by restricting greenhouse emissions now.

I won't be here to witness this debacle. But my grandkids will. I don't want them to inherit that kind of world. What about you and yours?

In The Beginning

My dog is a frisky 86-pound black lab mix, 2-1/2 years old, who absolutely adores everyone he meets. I named him Keppler after the mathematician/astronomer because "Keppie" is as black as outer space. Keppie doesn't have any idea where he came from. All he knows is that he gets two regular meals a day and he has two comfortable beds and two people who care about him.

I've been reading a book lately about a controversy over the age of our planet Earth. This may not be a world shaking problem for you. I know that I haven't been pondering this question inasmuch as I accept the scientific determination of the age of Earth as well as the age of the cosmos. What piqued my curiosity was a nice mom and her son who hovered over my specimen prepping in the paleo lab where I volunteer. I was giving them a run down on the dinosaur bone, mentioning its approximate age. The lady smiled sweetly and said that her family believed that the world was created about 6000 years ago so that the bones of this animal could not possibly be 65 million years old!

Well! I had encountered a "young earth" believer. I acknowledged her belief with a great deal of respect and they moved on.

Another time I was standing in the lab explaining what the professional staff was working on when a woman approached with a bemused smile on her face. When I started my pitch she interrupted me with "I thought dinosaurs were a myth!" I calmly assured her that our specimens were extracted from deposits in the western United States and that they really are dinosaur bones. Her smile remained fixed. She did not believe me.

We have a newly discovered skull of a new species of dinosaur that warranted an exhibit of its own. There is a sign in the exhibit that estimates the age of the skull at 66 million years. As I was explaining the exhibit to a small group one man interrupted me to ask if I knew about the human footprint that was found next to a dinosaur. I had not heard of this and I stated that it must have been a hoax or a made-up story. "No, no, it's true. It was found in Texas." "Gee, I'll have to look that up" I promised. And I did.

The "evidence" has been promoted by the Institute of Creation Research in books that the Institute sells. However, the "discovery" that the person related to me has been debunked. You can read about that on Glen Kuban's web site http://paleo.cc/paluxy/paluxy.htm.

The essence of all this is that there are many people, well-meaning people, who have become convinced that the biblical story of creation is altogether true. In fact, if any portion of that story is not actually true, then the bible and its contents must be false and that cannot be the case!

Unlike Keppie, we humans are torn about our origin. We fret about it and many of us cannot tolerate the idea that the authors of the bible lived in the iron age and could not possibly know how our planet was formed and how life began and was transformed over billions of earth years. And just how do the Young Earthians come to the 6000 years of our world's age?

Two 17th century men, John Lightfoot and James Ussher independently calculated the exact date if the world's creation by analyzing the biblical geneologies from Genesis through Chronicles. They didn't agree but after each recalculated, the final date of creation was settled, on the week of October 18-24, 4004 BC.!

Then there is the fellow who conducts raft trips through the Grand Canyon, pointing out how the great flood made the canyons features.

That is the "scientific research" that supports the Young Earth position. May they go on believing, gezunter height! Myself? I love the "Old Testament." It's my holy book. But it doesn't say anything about the dinosaurs.

The great Crackup

Picture this if you can: A chunk of ice that has been connected to an island in the northern reaches of Canada snaps off and starts drifting toward sea lanes in the Atlantic. Happens all the time? Not in this case. The ice "floe" is approximately 66 square Kilometers in area (for those of you who are metric deficient, that's equivalent to over ten square miles). Look on a map of the area in which you live and lay out a ten square mile chunk and you'll begin to see the enormity of this little nightmare.

Where this has happened is at Ellesmere island and it happened about 16 months ago. It broke away from land that scientists have estimated had been a connection for over 3000 years. The ice had been a shelf, i.e. ice that was floating on the sea but also part of ice on the island. When it broke off the resulting earth tremor was picked up by seismic monitors almost 500 miles away. Pictures of the collapse were picked up by satellites.

This breakup of an ice shelf is consistent with other cracks in ice shelves in the arctic and in the antarctic. Now there's plent of ice in both places so why should we be concerned with a few square mile of it? Well, this giant ice island will be a danger to shipping, number one. Number two is that this is going to melt eventually which will add some volume to the sea. That's notgoing to raise the sea level by a measurable amount but it will be a slight dilution of the salty sea water. Add the increasingly frequent calving of glaciers fronting the world's oceans and the rapidly disappearing glaciers from the mountains of the Earth and we have an enormous problem. Or many enormous problems.

Is this a consequence of global warming?

Does the sun rise in the morning?

Remyelination

It started a few weeks ago. I had some odd pains in my legs and a tendency to walk like a drunk, falling off to one side or the other. I knew it could be something serious when I fell in the shower, almost taking the glass door down with me. The next day, after I fell against the door to our bedroom slamming the knob into the wall and leaving a gaping hole, my wife and I agreed that I had to see the doctor about this. When I described what I was experiencing, my doctor said, “Get to an emergency room, now!”

After several hours with several doctors and technicians, after MRI’s of my head, hips and legs, after some fiendish electrical shock tests of neural pathways and muscles and after having fluid drawn from my spine, the verdict came to this: Guillain-Barre’ Syndrome.

What the hell is that? I asked. The doctor then wrote out what “that” is. It is “acute demyelinating poly-neuropathy”.

Thank you doctor! So I turned to the sources I know best–on the internet.

One of the questions asked by the doctors was, “have you had any contact with a viral or bacterial infection?” Well, I certainly had. A couple of weeks before my hospitalization I had a severe stomach and diarrhea episode. One factoid from my internet search yielded this: campylobactor is a food borne pathogen that can cause mild to severe diarrhea and fever in humans. It can also cause a secondary, neurological condition known as Guillain-Barre’ Syndrome! Aha! Where does this campy-something come from? Well to put it in somewhat earthy terms, it's commonly found in animal poop.

Good grief! Now my wife is a careful food preparer and I wash my hands many times a day, so how could some I get some (excuse me) crap into my system? A mystery, believe me.

But how does an infection turn one’s body against itself? Think a minute. How do we protect ourselves from, say, flu? Well, that’s simple. We get a shot. The shot contains flu bugs that have been rendered fairly harmless. What it does is to place this foreign stuff in our bodies which alarms the immune system. In effect a flu shot sets off a counterattack by the bodies defense, by calling up the reserves. In my case the reserves were called out to battle whatever was causing my digestive upset.

Interestingly, GBS has been known to be set off by getting a flu shot. The sad fact is that the immune system, the white blood cells, having been munching on the primary cause, start to strip the myelin sheath on the peripheral nerve fibers, sort of an immune system gone wild. That's where the demyelination comes in. And that is what causes the muscles to which the nerves connect to become, well, paralyzed. And that is why I walked like a drunk and still do.

The cure? In my case I had five days where I had several hours connected to an I-V dripping immune globulins into my veins. Now I have physical therapy to keep my leg muscles in tone for the time when the nerves have remyelinated. I'm lucky that it is only my legs that are involved.
It could be worse. Much worse.

So--that is why I've started this blog. Something to do while I'm remyelinating.