Category Archives: global warming

I Made A committment To Publish all of the Candidates Stand on Energy

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Lions Tigers and Bears or is that Nixon, Reagan and Bush? What a Bone headed idea! Publishing all of the Candidates pretty much in a row when there is incredible breaking news… I shall soldier on. Yes I know Gore won the Nobel Prize. There is a huge National Geographic Magazine article on Global Warming and an Associated Press article on Cities and Towns in Europe that are eliminating emissions! I promise I will get to that…after 3 or 5 more candidates

Since Interstellar Space Travel Is Impossible What Would Have Been the Impact Had Science Fiction Not Lied.

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Why was Asimov so mad?

 

The thing that always impressed me about the essay that I can’t find (see previous blogs) was its tone. I have read many Asimov works (which I am assuming was a condensation of a longer essay in the book, The Relativity of Wrong, see previous blog) and he never ever appeared angry. In this essay he was angry, accusatory and attackive! How did he go from a 1984 essay discussed earlier where he blithely dismissed both time travel and faster than light interstellar travel (as impossible) as mere conventions to seeing those same concepts as dangerous?

 

Was it because he was ill with AIDS and knew he would soon die? That would explain animus in anyone I suppose. Asimov had discussed death before though and he seemed comfortable with it.

 

I think it was more than that. I think he thought space travel would die and that he was in part responsible for that death. Paraphrase begins {: He concludes the essay by saying that he fears that when NASA fails to come up with even routine planetary travel in the next 30 or 40 years that NASA which is expensive will be abandoned.:} paraphrase ends. But I think it was bit more emotional for him then that because he probably asked himself some tough questions and saw what the real answers were for both his craft (science fiction writing), human space exploration, and maybe even how we treat the planet.

 

What would Science Fiction have looked like without interstellar space travel? One of his firm beliefs was that early science fiction always stuck pretty much to the possible. The writers were keen on new technology and knew what was possible. THAT was the magic of it really? Artie Clark would write about satellites and BOOM 10 or 20 years later they were circling the globe. Many writers talked about travel to the moon and 60 or 70 years after the first story we were there. At some point that became too restrictive to the writers of the 60’s. They yearned to do more. They wanted to make science fiction “real” literature. To bring grand stories to the silver screen.

 

 

So you say, “So What”? Well imagine what the cultural world would be like if every science fiction work had begun with the disclaimer (imagine the Star Wars intro screen “rolling out” this way) The story you are about to see is IMPOSSIBLE. Humans will never be able to travel between the Stars and even planetary travel will be really really expensive and dangerous. Planetary travel may not even be routinely possible 400 years from now! Then IN A GLAXAY A LONG WAYS FROM HERE IN THE DISTANT FUTURE THERE WAS A BAND WARRIORS FIGHTING AGAINST TYRANNY. Or whatever the Star Wars intro was. I think that that might have slowed down our mindless rush into space. But lets take it a step farther. Lets say to be a science fiction writer you had to take a Pledge. “I Doug Nicodemus promised to write science fiction that uses technology available to humans only in the next 60 or 70 years” And what if you were thrown out of science fiction writing if you violated that pledge! No publisher would publish you.

 

Well first off the idea of Aliens would be radically altered. Not disappearing mind you because you could posit “foreign worlds” as long as you gave star coordinates for it. They could have all kinds of weird characteristics and they could even be zipping around their very different solar system. But no more than that.

 

Second there would be no aliens visiting the earth. There would be no UFO’s and every science fiction writer would laugh at people who claimed to have seen them as the lunatics that they probably are. Aliens can’t get here…end of story.

 

Some people have even told me that Science Fiction would have simply died out. I don’t think so. It most certainly would have had to get a lot cleverer. And might have made science a bit cleverer as well. Just as an example I could imagine a story in which we could use things that go the speed of light like really bright lights or radio wave to try to communicate with other planets. Just AIM and Fire. I mean really, SETI is nice and all but it doesn’t make much sense for us to just sit around and listen to broad frequencies for some “sound”. Under a premise like that you could weave an Evangeline like story where this guy and this gal establish contact fall in love but they will never be able to touch each other. There are tons of stories that could have been written about conquering Mars and the other planets. Which would have led to more and open discussions about different technologies that could have got us there. What our living quarters would look like and why we were there in the first place. Gold? Platinum? Fuels? I am no science fiction writer, buts it the people in the story that any good writing is about.

 

 Neil deGrasse Tyson has a thought or two on the matter. When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/18magazines_cosmic.php

What has the impact of this “impossible dream” of interstellar space travel been on Environmentalism? Well if we are going to get a NEW planet then we don’t have to take care of this one. If we really are inhabitants of this little tiny cosmic island, isolated from the universe, except for what we can observe of it, as Tyson has said. And that had been rammed home over and over again, then maybe we would treat our ONLY planet EVER a whole lot better. Did Asimov realize that? I doubt it but it is a burden that we who are opposed to burning will have to over come. And soon.

 

ON the other hand maybe there was a reason GOD set the speed limit for those with so little understanding at 186,000 miles a second. So we cannot do to the universe what we have done to the Earth and may do to the solar system.

What Would Happen If All The Oil Workers Went On Strike?

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Like in the previous entry what if all of the Oil Workers followed the Coal Miners and stopped Work. What if they demanded to be retrained as Solar Workers instead. They could make solar panels, or other products that would supply energy but not harm the globe. What would happen then? I ask you to imagine such a world not because I think it is likely to happen, but because it is the economic leap that we shall have to make sooner or later.

Smithsonian Magazine Agrees

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Their May 2007 heralds compact flourescent lightbulbs (CFLs) as the lightbulb of the future. But you can not find the article online! Is this a conspiracy like in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow – which they site in the article? Who knows?  I doubt that Byron the Bulb and the Phoebus Surveillance Room had anything to do with it. It is a tribute to their writing style that they even remember the book. But my favorite line from the article is, “There’s always something poignant when a pear-bodied vestige of our past gives way to a younger and sexier rival”. You can see that issue without the article here.

Interestingly enough their current BLOG has this to say about global warming. Could we be about to evolve again?

September 5, 2007

Climate Change Forced Humans to Evolve

A study of African sediment cores suggests that ancient climate change stimulated the expansion, migration and, ultimately, evolution of early humans.

Writing in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers say that 75,000 to 135,000 years ago, a series of “megadroughts” dried up many of Africa’s lakes and other water sources. But just 5,000 years after those droughts, the climate swung wildly, becoming much wetter.

That change to a wetter world (which, with global warming, we may again be entering) was more favorable to early humans. It fostered their migration to various parts of Africa and eventually to other parts of the world.

The theory that a changing climate helped human development is supported by a 2005 report that periods of great, rapid climate change were accompanied by increases in human brain size and complexity. Scientists theorize that the stress of adapting to a rapidly changing climate, with its altered food and water sources, forced humans to become more adaptable and find new ways to reap benefits from whatever resources were immediately available.

Posted By: Jen Phillips — News, Environment, Biology, Paleontology | Link | Comments (0)

Energy Tough Love (climate change)

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Energy Tough Love (climate change)
Current mood: chipper

I call this blog Energy Tough Love because I think that burning things up is a primitive behavior that we are BEYOND as a species. With the Political and Economic leadership we could quit this digging and burning behavior, leave resources in place for future generations that will need them and improve our lifestyle as a result. Let me be clear, all this digging and burning is interfering with what we all want, Life’s Necessities, Love, Family, Friends, Travel and Enterprise in no particular order. If we could Travel, for instance, without burning things up we would do more of it and have more fun at it. So this is a blog about thinking about and changing burning things up as a behavior.

 

This is not the answer you normally get, especially from an environmentalist. The answer you get is we have TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING to save the Earth!! While I am sometimes sarcastic about such “the sky is falling” mentality, I actually agree that global warming is a huge problem that will ultimately thin out the human herd. There is a remote possibility that it could lead to our extinction as a species. But when you really get “into” so called global warming you loose the big picture, which is what the oil conglomerates, the utility companies and fossil fuel mining companies WANT you to do. They want everyone to be dragged down into useless arguments about CO or CO2 or NOX or carbon particulates or actual world temperatures or worse yet world water temperatures or world sea levels. We can talk about that but it misses the big picture!

 

Is there global warming? Actually no there isn’t. What there is actually, is Global Weather Destabilization and Negative Local Sharp Variances. What a mouthful. 30 years ago a lot of “senior” environmentalists didn’t like that PHRASE because nobody would understand it (they thought) and it wasn’t sexy enough. So they chose to look at one short term phase, the very first one, and adopted Global Warming as the “only use phrase” to capture what will be a pretty horrendous experience for the humans going through it. Yes indeed the planet will warm up, but that is just the pleasant part of it. Earth only has so many mechanisms to establish equilibrium so once most of the ice melts, then the Earth is going to get real wet real fast…

 

So here we are 30 years later and the people who really like us to burn as much of everything as we can so they can make money, are saying “OK there is some warming, but it is not caused by Human Activity). So play this little thought game with me.

There are only five heat sources for the Earth. The Sun, Jupiter, The Earth’s core. The Moon, and hmmmmmm oh Man. There are other POTENTIAL sources like cosmic radiation, and long wave sources of energy but they are easy to measure. In addition if there were a noticeable change in those indices we would all fry before we could do much but print a few headlines and kiss our loved ones goodbye.

The Sun is in a cooling phase. Which makes what is going on locally even more frightening. Ironically it was the discussion of this cooling phase and its nonmanifestation that the BURNERS have latched onto to say no one know what’s going on – thus voile’ there is no global warming. So let me repeat, every Sun scientist agrees that the sun is in a cooling phase. The Moon only reflects light so since the Sun is cooling, the Moon’s impact is cooling too. Jupiter only minimally supplies energy to Earth, but as the second biggest entity in the Galaxy it contributes some. Is Jupiter heating up? Probably not but I usually interject the “alien” presence here for those who like the X Files or firmly believe in alien abduction. Maybe there are aliens out by Jupiter pointing a ray gun at us and heating up the planet. Then there is the Earth’s core. There is no evidence that the Earth core is getting hotter. In fact volcanic activity is in a historic period of decline that is often associated with a reversal of the magnetic field.  So who does that leave to be the “culprit” as it were, why us burners.  OOPS, there is nobody plausibly left and I did not have to mention one gas, no temperatures except the obvious that things ARE getting warmer and it looks pretty much like Humans are the cause. Just as a simple example for you gardening fans out there when I was born Illinois was a hard definite zone 5 on the back of all the seed packets. The saying for corn was “knee high by the 4rth of July”. Now we are considered a very temperate 6. The corn has tassels by the 4rth of July and is 8 ft. tall.

Nuff said