Zapped

The official message is to stabilise CO2 emissions "at a safe level to avoid not only dangerous climate change but also dangerous ocean acidification".

The likely reality, according to James C. Orr, is that "the chemistry is so fundamental and changes so rapid and severe that impacts on organisms appear unavoidable. The questions are now how bad will it be and how soon will it happen."

I'm still trying to take on board what Orr told me in 2006: "Our children will no longer be able to see the amazingly beautiful things that we can. I tell my son, go to see the corals now because soon it will be too late."



P.S. 2 Feb: a post from Simon Donner on coral reefs, a high CO2 world and deep time

P.P.S 11 Feb: Tom Goreau writes:

tropical surface waters will be the LAST part of the oceans where limestone becomes under-saturated. ...Alarm about acidification effects on coral reefs is based on fundamental misunderstanding of the CO2 cycle in tropical surface waters. This is not to say that it is not an important long-term problem, but only that it is trivial compared to bleaching as a source of coral mortality and growth decline.

Hrönir

Conscious Entities puzzles towards a state of complete confusion:

...[Let us concede for a moment that] yes, OK, all that dust does have mental experience. But surely it only has the most tenuous and ethereal kind. To take another ridiculous example, suppose we were talking about an axe. Normally we require all the parts of an axe to be well co-ordinated in space and time, but we could have a dust-axe which was made up of different parts from different places and centuries. If we make the right selection of parts, we can have a series of axe-slices which even constitute its swinging and cutting wood. But it’s not really a very good axe; its existence relies completely on the support of our imagination, even though it consists entirely of unobjectionable physical items. Its existence is thin and dependent; it’s like the hrönir in the Borges story Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius, objects that exist only because someone thought they did. The experiences of the dust mind are almost as insubstantial as the experiences of fictional characters, or it seems as if it ought to be so.

But somehow I find myself reluctant to say even that much...

-- continued at Fear in a handful of dust?

Perhaps Borges's Thermal Beings -- 'entities composed solely of heat, from an earlier stage of the world's creation' -- would be closer to the mark.

Oldest animal

I didn't know this:

the oldest [known] animal in the oceans is a 4000-year-old cold-water coral.

-- the redoubtable J. Murray Roberts.

Earthworms 'save' planet

earthworm-produced calcite could lock up 564kg of carbon per hectare of soil per year. Put into context, typical soil-based carbon sequestration techniques such as using cover crops, organic composts and manures, and converting degraded soils into forests could sequester 300 to 800 kg of carbon per hectare per year.

-- Mark Hodson on Darwin's humble earthworm and its 'impossible' poo.

Common descent

Rather than being morally subversive, as his Christian critics claim, Darwin's achievement was morally grounded. Rather than being a dispassionate practice, his science had a humanitarian drive. It made brothers and sisters not only of all human races, but of all life.

-- from Darwin the abolitionist by Adrian Desmond. [1]


(images: Selk'nam U Onas: 1, 2)

P.S. 9.45am: an article has just gone up on the BBC web site

Footnote:

1. David Remnick writes:

[John] Lewis read his Bible and on Sundays tuned in to WRMA, the gospel station out of Montgomery, to hear the Soul Stirrers and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Lewis was a soulful, intelligent, and eccentric child. When religious feeling washed over him, he began visiting the henhouse out back to preach to the Dominiques and the Rhode Island Reds. The chickens composed his ministry: Lewis baptized new chicks; he raised and fed them; he buried the dead under a mound of wildflowers. As Lewis wrote many years later in his autobiography, “Walking with the Wind,” he was a lonely searcher learning compassion for God’s creatures.

'Evolution: the next 200 years'

Some fascinating provocations from Richard Dawkins, Kenneth Miller, Frans de Waal and thirteen others. But what thinking ahead is needed now as Man increasingly understands the selective pressures of [his] actions on ecosystems and other species and in some cases takes charge of evolutionary processes?

P.S. 29 Jan: According to Overcoming bias:

Any Future not shaped by a goal system with detailed reliable inheritance from human morals and metamorals, will contain almost nothing of worth.

Elsewhere, contemplating "the adjacent possible of the biosphere", Stuart Kauffman has written:

As organismic diversity increases, and the "features" per organism increase, there are more ways for selection to select for mutualisms that become the conditions of joint existence in the universe. The humming bird, sticking her beak in the flower for nectar, rubs pollen off the flower, flies to a next flower for nectar, and pollen rubs off on the stamen of the next flower, pollinating the flower. But these mutualistic features are the very conditions of one another's existence in the open universe. The biosphere is rife with mutualisms. In biologist Scott Gilbert's fine phrase, these are codependent origination—an ancient Buddhist phrase. In this open universe, beyond entailment by fundamental physics, we have partial lawlessness, ceaseless creativity, and forever co-dependent origination that changes the Actual and the ever new Adjacent Possible we ceaselessly self-consistently co-construct. More, the way this unfolds is neither fully lawful, nor is it random. We need to re-envision ourselves and the universe.

In his novel Raw Youth (note Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in On Kindness), Dostoyevsky:

describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe. Acknowledging their human vulnerability, they respond to it positively...When God is dead, kindness is all that people have.

Making lunch

Man may be the only animal that cooks, but some dolphins, it seems, know how to butcher (Bottlenose dolphin shows off her butchering skills).

682

...is the estimated number of mountain gorillas still living in the wild. Of these, about 302 are thought to be in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and 380 in Virunga National Park (Mountain gorillas in dire straits, DNA reveals).

P.S. 30 Jan: 'ten babies' born in Virunga.

'Writings about Friendly AI'

Joshua Fox has sought out references on the risks and moral issues associated with recursively self-improving intelligence.

One in the eye

They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.

-- David Attenborough on the hate mail he receives from Christianists.

P.S. 28 Jan: I was puzzled as to which organism Attenborough might be referring, and asked a medical friend. He wrote:

Onchocerciasis or river blindness does fit the bill although it's West African and not East. Plus it’s a systemic disorder as you say [i.e. the worm can travel through almost any part of the body]. Humans are the intended host. There is an East African entity known as Dicofilaria conjunctiva- it’s a parasitic worm of the Filaridae family, which usually lives in dogs intestines and accidentally infects humans.

It looks as if Attenborough is overstating the case when he says the worm "cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs". But his point that much is ugly and horrible in nature stands.

My medical friend (who is not a specialist in tropical parasites so concedes he could have missed something) sent a link to photos of Thelazia, the oriental eye worm.

Smother fish

Fish could vanish from huge stretches of the ocean for tens of thousands of years unless we drastically reduce our carbon emissions.

-- New Scientist reports a study Gary Shaffer of the University of Copenhagen:

Under the worst-case scenario, average ocean oxygen levels will fall by up to 40%, and there will be a 20-fold expansion in the area of "dead zones", like those already discovered in the eastern Pacific and northern Indian Ocean, where there is too little oxygen for fish to survive. Even in the mid-range scenario, dead zones would expand by a factor of 3 or 4. Cold, deep waters will also be affected if warming stifles the currents that deliver oxygen to greater depths.

Dogs and children

A second post with a dog connection today. I've just been at Desert Blues: readings by Patience Agbabi, Melanie Challenger and David Constantine, and music by the Adriano Adewale Group. Constantine read, among other things[1], from his translation of Brecht's Children's Crusade:

In Poland that January [1940]
A dog was caught, it had
A cardboard round its soggy neck
With writing on it that said

"Please help us, we are lost.
We can’t find the way anymore
We are fifty-five. This dog will lead
You to where we are

And if you can’t come, drive him away
Don’t shoot at him, he is
The only living creature
Who knows the way to us."

The writing was a child’s
Peasants read it aloud.
That was a year a half ago
The dog hungered and died.

Footnote

1. One of the other poems Constantine read from Nine Fathom Deep was Pity. He introduced it saying "I had the notion that if there were more monsters and hybrids left we might have a better idea of what we were doing". See Montaigne, On a monster-child (Essays, book 2)

Dog days

Alexander Fiske-Harrison wishes The Philosopher and the Wolf had included a section on what it is like to be a wolf. Perhaps Temple Grandin is helpful. Consider, for example, this from an essay on consciousness in animals and people with autism:

Chimpanzees have self awareness. When they look at themselves in a mirror, they do not react to the image as if it was another animal, and if paint is applied to the chimps face, it will try to wipe it off. Because dogs are not able to do this, one should not jump to the conclusion that dogs are not self aware. Dogs may not be visually self aware, but are possibly smell self aware. A dog marking its territory is able to discriminate between its own urine and a strange dog's urine.

I am not a 'dog person' but I think I can understand what it is like to be one from observation, and from Pablo Neruda's A Dog Died (linked on right hand side of this page)

Hybrids, chimeras, trees and webs

Hybridisation may be a significant force in animal evolution:

The conventional explanation for metamorphosis is that it evolved gradually, with the juvenile form becoming specialised for feeding and the adult for mating, until they barely resembled each other. [Donald Williamson, formerly of the University of Liverpool] thinks otherwise. He points out that marine larvae have five basic forms and can be organised into a family tree based on shared characteristics. Yet this tree bears no relationship to the family tree of adults: near-identical larvae often give rise to adults from different lineages, while some closely related adults have utterly unrelated larvae...


...His star witness is the starfish Luidia sarsi, which starts life as a small larva with a tiny starfish inside. As the larva grows, the starfish migrates to the outside and when the larva settles on the seabed, they separate. This is perfectly normal for starfish, but in Luidia something remarkable then happens. Instead of degenerating, the larva swims off and lives for several months as an independent animal.

-- from Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life [1]

footnote:

[1] (added 23 Jan): Larry Moran suggests a better headline for the article would be: "More evidence that Charles Darwin didn't know everything there is to be known about evolution when he published his book in 1859." (Added 9 Feb) Carl Zimmer on Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life.

The extinction of animals, undertaken by the colourist Walton Ford

According to the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, "a tale of conquest and colonization and accumulated injuries against nature...is at the heart of Walton Ford’s allegories". For Bill Bufford, Walton Ford is Bruegel by way of Borges.


Tur (an Aurochs), purchased by the Smithsonian.


Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros

In Man and Beast Calvin Tomkins reports:

At first glance, the long procession of great auks in "Funk Island" winds, lemming-like over a rocky landscape, toward the distant fires and cauldrons that signal their extinction as a species. Clear enough, but what is going on in that huge cloud of smoke from the fires? Close examination reveals dozens of naked men and women in erotic combinations. Ford's research had disclosed that the flightless auks were clubbed to death, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so that their plumage could be used in feather beds and pillows. "This was the global economy in action, right?", he said. "It was like goddam Auschwitz for birds, so the Marquis de Sade and Casanova could do their fucking on feather beds!"...

[A new painting of] mountain lions was nearly done when I visited his studio in mid November. Lately, he explained, there had been numerous sightings of these big cats in the Berkshires, "although not one sighting is documented, and there's no evidence -- no scat, no tree scratchings, not attacks on pets or joggers. Mountain lions have been extinct in New England for decades." Ford's painting is set in a local cemetery, where several pairs of mountain lions are copulating among gravestones. "they're making more ghost cats for people to see", he said. His are life-size, and very lifelike.

I'd like to suggest an animal for inclusion in a future painting: the Northern elephant seal. Perhaps Ford has already done this or considered it only to reject it, and if so the more fool me. Still, in support of my case here's an anecdote which I may have imagined but think I heard at Año Nuevo SNR:

The elephant seal was hunted to the brink of extinction in the nineteenth century. As we now know, a few survived, but by the late nineteenth century it was believed the species was actually extinct.  Then a research party (from the Smithsonian, no less) stumbled on small group of survivors [on Guadalupe Island off Baja?]. They slaughtered them all for study, stuffing and mounting even though for all they knew these might be the last ones in the world. 

That's how I remember the story, but I am happy to be corrected. With or without the anecdote, elephant seals are the tops.


An archive of press articles about Walton Ford is here.

P.S. More striking pictures, this time of Southern elephant seals, here (hat tip Hypnogogic Zoo).

Thin ice

It's reported that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of collapse and a paper in Nature [1] offers clear evidence that Antactica is warming in step with the rest of the world (BBC, NYT) [2].

Wally Broecker's climate "monster" may be stirring [3].

Barry Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams before present rapid changes in the Polar climates were well understood. [4] But Lopez was haunted by unease at the role of industrial man, alluding to the Eskimo terms ilira, fear that accompanies awe, and kappia, fear in the face of unpredictable violence.

As late as the early industrial period (the early nineteenth century), creatures such as the Greenland right or Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) still resonated with something of the monstrous that had fascinated and appalled earlier Europeans.

A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the [British whaler] Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right [whale], a 57 foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work. [5]

But, Lopez shows, when you pay attention to the remarkable nature of this animal it is men's actions towards them that now seem monstrous:

The skin of [the Greenland right whale] is slightly furrowed to the touch, like coarse-laid paper, and is a velvet black color softened by gray. Under the chin and on the belly the skin turns white. Its dark brown eyes, the size of an ox's, are nearly lost in the huge head. Its blowhole rises prominently, with the shape of a volcano, allowing the whale to surface in narrow cracks in the sea ice to breathe. It is so sensitive to touch that at a bird's footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined. (In 1856, a harpooner on the Truelove reported a whale that dived so furiously it took out 1200 yards of line in three and a half minutes before crashing into the ocean floor, breaking is neck and burying its head eight feet deep in the blue black mud.) [6]

Today our "monsters" lurk elsewhere. Ilira kappia stabs us not from behind but from within our own shadows.

Footnotes

1. Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 by Eric Steig et al (doi:10.1038/nature07669). In State of Antarctica: red or blue? at Realclimate, two of the authors try to pre-empt misinterpretation.

2. (Added 27 Jan) Melting ice could push Emperor penguins to extinction

3. See also Attribution of polar warming to human influence by Nathan P. Gillett et al (doi:10.1038/ngeo338).

4. The discovery in 1985 of the "ozone hole" above Antarctica shocked many people into increased awareness of the potential of human activity to substantially affect whole earth systems on a short time scale. It helped pave the way for greater acceptance of the case for anthropogenic global warming. (See Breaking into politics 1980-88 in The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart). Arctic Dreams was published in 1986. I have recently gone back to if for the first time in many years thanks, in part, to a prompt by JML.

5. From the prologue of Arctic Dreams. In Waiting for Salmon (2006), Lopez writes of the fury of many of his compatriots at the idea that nature is anything but a warehouse to be emptied prior to a rapturous departure:

To speak of large-scale changes in the natural world that might be traced to human activity is anathema to people still furious at Darwin for suggesting that 'nature' included man...[In] America, mainstream politics is uninformed by, event hostile to, biology.

6. Lopez quotes the Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross as 'cautiously' suggesting that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. 'A sound estimate of the size of the population today [1986] is 200.' 90% of the indigenous human population may also have died as a result of European incursion and infectious diseases.

A glass-walled slaughterhouse

[Temple] Grandin is in favor of almost total openness — she’s among the writers who believe that slaughterhouses should have glass walls. “No animal should spend its last conscious moments in a state of terror,” she writes, and any visitor should be able to observe that they do not.

-- from Dwight Garner's review of Animals make us human.

'Eating tourism' boom

Spawning of reef fish in [the Coral Trangle] has declined 79 percent over the past 5 to 20 years, depending on location.

-- NYT reports work by Yvonne Sadovy et al.

Our ultimate success in preserving and restoring the oceans depends on a more inclusive ethic for the seas.

-- from Developing an Ocean Ethic by Peter J Auster et al

('Big fish', we have been reminded, 'save reefs')

Wet dream

Grrlscientist is enthusiastic about the promo for Wild Oceans out of South Africa.

Colour me unreasonably sceptical, but to me this looks too much like an ad man's fantasy and too little like reality.

Heck, maybe the marine reserve is actually well managed. Still, recall the cruelty at the heart of it.

Drone world

A massive change has...occurred in the airspace above wars. Only a handful of drones were used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with just one supporting all of V Corps, the primary U.S. Army combat force. Today there are more than 5,300 drones in the U.S. military’s total inventory, and not a mission happens without them. One Air Force lieutenant general forecasts that “given the growth trends, it is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands.”

-- from Robots at War by P.W. Singer.


The U.S. military may be proud of their new toys. The child corpses in the photograph are from Gaza, where drones have taken out kids playing on rooftops, but they could as well be from Pakistan or Afghanistan where, as William Dalrymple notes, multiple killings of civilians by drones are contributing mightily to radicalization.

P.S. A longer version of P.W. Singer's thesis appears in The New Atlantis.