Scientists who study life on Earth have something in common with scientists who study the climate of Earth. Besides being scientists, that is.

Practically all life scientists accept that life on Earth initially evolved from non-living materials billions of years ago, and has continued to evolve via natural selection – as initially proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject evolution.

Practically all climate scientists accept that the Earth’s atmospheric temperature is rising and that human-generated carbon dioxide is a primary cause of that rise – as initially proposed by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess in 1957, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject anthropogenic global warming.

Both life and climate scientists deal with “arguments”, usually endlessly-iterated catchphrases, that are inaccessible to logic. As Richard Dawkins relates in The God Delusion, a person once heard Dawkins out and then told him, ‘Your argument is compelling, but I don’t believe it.’

Both life and climate scientists deal with ad hominem attacks that seek to discredit their work by assassinating their characters. As if the alleged indiscretions of golfer Tiger Woods somehow erase the scores Woods posted in winning, to date, 14 major championships. (That earthquake was the flamboyant, and less than discrete, golf legend Walter Hagen rolling over in his grave, laughing hysterically over the Woods furore.)

Both life and climate scientists face these challenges, in part, because, as Jeff Masters (yes, Mom, him again) so eloquently puts it in the latest entry to his “Manufactured Doubt” blog series, they “are honest, incredibly hard-working … servants who are enduring a punishing assault on their integrity because they are the bearers of bad news (emphasis added)”.

Bad news to the religions, especially Christian religions, because the findings of the life scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our spiritual well-being.

Bad news to the fossil fuel industries, because the findings of the climate scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our material well-being.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries have fought back. By proclamation of dogma (of, literally, the “Good News” in the case of Christianity) or manufacturing of doubt. And, most importantly, by means of emotional appeals. A cross moves more hearts than a dissertation. A Hummer is a whole lot sexier, and easier to grasp, than a long catalogue of facts. And it may even cost less.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries pay people, often handsomely, who are trained in the techniques of manipulating feelings. Precisely what the scientist is trained to abhor. It is obviously money well spent … for half of We the People are supporting the hypothesis that an ounce of emo is worth a pound – nay, a ton – of data.

And therefore – because the very people who profit most from your agreement to this statement say so – neither evolution nor global warming exist.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

You’ve probably heard this news already.

But just in case you haven’t, here it is. Representatives of 192 nations are meeting in Hopenhagen … er, Copenhagen … this coming Monday (7 December 2009) to hammer out the terms of an international agreement, supplanting the Kyoto Protocol, to limit the world’s production of substances (carbon dioxide, to name one) linked to anthropogenic global warming (AGW, to use the alphabet-soup term).

As the pun implies, this meeting bears the burden of the wishful thinking of a whole lot of people. People who think that the meeting’s outcome will allow Us to continue more or less as we are, just with a whole pack of new machines.

People who fail to realize that it was machines, together with penicillin, that got us into this global warming mess in the first place.

But never mind the laws of thermodynamics. The folk in Copenhagen are representatives of the same politicians that We elected to fix the economy. The ones responsible for your unemployment benefits expiring, or terminating because of a (quote) computer glitch (unquote). The unemployment benefits that you won’t be using to buy any of those fancy new machines. How much can we really expect from these folk?

But never mind that either.

I just wish they’d chosen a different day for the meeting.

Yes. The Copenhagen meeting starts on the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, here in Hawai‘i.

So what happens if the Copenhagen Protocol actually does what is necessary to limit the progression of, and damage from, AGW? What if it does even a tenth of what is necessary?

What will be the response of the fossil fuel industry?

Keep in mind that the fossil fuel industry is already funding what’s been styled “the most vigorous and well-funded disinformation campaign against science ever conducted“. Including personal attacks on scientists based on stolen communications taken out of context.

If that’s what we’re getting now, what if the politicians start agreeing with the scientists? What less is on tap but all-out war? By the industry, and the shareholders in that industry, and the beneficiaries …

And in such a war, what side will all those Hopenhagen petition signers be taking? Remember, for the world to go back to the energy (measured as trash) levels of 1960, each of Us has to use one third less than we’re using today. And that’s not good enough to significantly derail AGW. Translation: park your car and throw away the keys. You won’t be using it. Thought I as I was stuck in Honolulu traffic on a typical Saturday morning.

I think you know which side the petitioners will be on as well as I do.

Hopenhagen doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As Quilly has already related, we spent much of today (1 December 2009) at the beach.

Yes, yes, we know, we know. If it’s any consolation, in another month or so we’ll be in hats and mittens just like so many of the rest of you.

It was a work trip for me. Yes it was. I was collecting seaweed species that may be new to science for identification and laboratory cultivation.

It was a photo shoot for her. One of the photos was of a green caterpillar, inching its way up a dead stick.

“Oh, look. An inchworm. How cute!”

We’re lucky it didn’t bite us.

Really.

Y’see, in most of the world, inchworms are harmless little things, going around measuring marigolds (prior to devouring them) and inspiring Hollywood crooners, not to mention Muppets, to promote the idea that aesthetics are superior to mathematics. (Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba could say something about “teacher furloughs” at this point, but as this has been a consistent refrain on this blog lately, he will refrain.)

In Hawai‘i, the Land of Aloha? They’re killers. The insect equivalent of a bunny rabbit with fangs. In the language of the entomologist, the Hawaiian inchworm is an “ambush” or “sit-and-wait” predator. They lounge around on the botanical equivalent of a streetcorner, whistling nonchalantly and trying to look inconspicuous. Until a fly or moth or similar variation on the theme of Meals on Wings comes within reach, and then … WHAM!!

You don’t believe me?

Shame on you.

Of course, the marigolds are all for this. They’ve got advertisements on all the major websites of the Inchwormnet, showing posies with crude hand-lettered signs:

EAT MOR BEETALS

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a habit of looking at issues that We the People blame on Them (you know who “They” are) and suggesting that “They” are the ones that you – and I – shave with every morning.

That’s probably how come there are so few of you regular readers. And there will probably be even fewer of you after this post. But I’ll risk it. Because Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground website (I’ve mentioned him here before) has written, I think, the second most important bit of Internet information on human interaction with planet Earth that there is.

(This is number 1. It’s a video series, it’s long, and it’s a fairly standard university-style lecture without fancy bells or whistles. But watch it, all eight parts, and pay attention. It’s every bit as true today as when it was first presented, a decade ago. Do not view the comments unless you have a hard head and a strong stomach – they are prima facie evidence that our species deserves nothing more than to go straight to Hell, without passing “Go”, without collecting $200.)

Masters writes, in his blog entry, which is about equal parts book review and his own distilled scientific judgment, about “manufactured doubt” – the industry that spreads disinformation about scientific evidence, when that evidence threatens the profitability of corporations whose products put humanity at risk. He documents the role that the “manufactured doubt” industry played in delaying or derailing efforts to limit the damage created by tobacco products, asbestos, and various toxic industrial chemicals including the chlorofluorocarbons responsible for the destruction of atmospheric ozone.

And, most recently, its attempts to safeguard the profits of the fossil fuel industries by debunking the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

Masters gives details about the “bag of tricks” that the practitioners of “manufactured doubt” use to achieve their ends. Including the disparaging of peer-reviewed science and, at both the professional and personal levels, of the scientists who produce that science – impugning, among other things, that the scientists are “just another bunch of hired guns” whose findings are for sale to the highest bidder.

A disparaging that’s easy for the “manufactured doubters” and their corporate sponsors to do, since so many people with scientific credentials (some fairly substantial) are prepared to be just this type of hired gun. But what else to expect, Jerry, when jobs in, and funds for, non-corporate research are so scarce (thanks in part to these very same “manufactured doubt” campaigns), and the opportunities for selling out are so lucrative, amounting to a doubling or even more of the standard academic salary?

Now, all this reads like a diatribe against corporate moguls, doesn’t it? But then, Masters flashes the mirror. He states:

I believe that for the most part, the corporations involved have little choice under the law but to protect their profits by pursuing Manufactured Doubt campaigns … The law makes a company’s board of directors legally liable for “breach of fiduciary responsibility” if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. Shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible …

He cites the sad case of Henry Ford, who:

… was successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day. The courts declared that, while Ford’s humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders (emphasis added).

This, dear readers, is not the revelation of a global corporate-mogul conspiracy against the “common man”. Much as those who see their own profit opportunities in such rabble-rousing would have you think otherwise.

This is your 401k telling the corporate moguls what they must do.

Masters did not end his post with any cosmic conclusions. He is, after all, a scientist, and as a scientist (rather than a propagandist such as are the “manufactured doubt” generators), he offers conclusions cautiously, and only those supported by evidence, as much and as rigorously-tested as is to hand at the time of writing. Besides, Masters has a large blog, and probably is wary of doing any more damage to his readership – and his company – than a post of this sort risks already.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, on the other hand, has a small blog, and therefore little to risk. So I write what my conclusion is, on the basis of this evidence – and take some comfort that the message is the same as the one that scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov set down in his Bathroom Law:

The goal of preserving a planet suitable for human habitation, and the goal of preserving the individual liberty of humans living on this planet, are incompossible.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

… a significant part of the population is willing to accept a glib soundbite as truth, in preference to a long catalogue of facts that happens to represent the truth …

Jeff Masters, Ph.D., cofounder of the Weather Underground website, has an excellent blog post detailing what Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba considers to be an alarming development in the Global Warming Wars:

A television advertisement proclaiming that more atmospheric carbon dioxide is good for the Earth.

Really. They should have come up with this ad thirty-five years ago, so that Woody Allen could have worked it into his movie Sleeper. The one that proclaims french fries and hot fudge sundaes to be health foods, and tobacco smoking the best thing you can do for your lungs.

The movie, in case you haven’t seen it (it is ancient history for you twentysomethings out there), is a farce.

So’s that ad. Or it would be, if the matter it addresses weren’t so deadly serious.

Briefly (and Masters does, um, a masterful job of explaining the details), the ad’s premise is that carbon dioxide is essential for plant life, and therefore more carbon dioxide means more plant life. Which is such a good and wonderful thing that We the People should be pumping all the profits into the fossil fuel industry carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we can.

Only two problems with this scenario. The first (which Masters does not happen to mention) is that, if more carbon dioxide begets more plant life, then that ‘more plant life’ should suck up that extra carbon dioxide. Which should slow or stop the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. No such slowing has been observed. In fact, some scientists argue that humans have been dumping planet-changing levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago, but since the dawn of agriculture, eight thousand years ago. And the plant life hasn’t caught up yet.

(This scenario, by the way, is consistent with the one that attributes most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and the ecological calamity that oxygen pollution amounted to in Earth’s early history, to a thin layer of pond scum.)

The second, which Masters does discuss, is that recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have been responsible for measured decreases in plant crop yields.

Still more alarming than the existence of the ad itself is the catalogue of concealed interests and outright dirty tricks that is associated with the production of the ad and its predecessors, the peddling of this public relations exercise to the world, and its acceptance by many, including those at the highest level of government. Dissing the real findings of science, and the scientists (often via attacks on persons rather than data) that have published these findings.

But then, the scientists (including Masters) are easy to diss. Their reasoning is hard to follow, and their message is bleak: we cannot continue as we are, and we cannot change things without giving up large chunks of what we see as inalienable rights, such as freedom of consumption, freedom of property, freedom of reproduction. From the mass of scientists, no Kirk has arisen to pull our Kobayashi Maru out of this Neutral Zone of our own making – and if one were to appear, she probably wouldn’t be able to afford the public relations firm that could effectively promote her discovery.

That makes We the People – we who, most of us, have been trained since birth to limit our attention spans to the length of a television commercial – susceptible to the soundbite. To the glib, pretty, and above all short message that our Kobayashi Maru can and will be saved, if we will only do as the message tells us. Without any evidence that the message’s sponsor has a starship to effect the rescue, never mind one with a tractor beam, warp drive, and photon torpedoes.

And with, in fact, compelling evidence that the fossil fuels industry is using the tactics of the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry, you’ll recall, used disinformation tactics to discredit scientific evidence that smoking and chewing are bad for you.

Maybe if we linked fossil fuels to smoking …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.
Amoeba’s Corollary: Sooner or later, someone will proclaim that all such magic is black.

In my previous post, Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba poked and prodded at the disconnect between the high level of official public concern over the current outbreak of 2009 H1N1 influenza and its actual impact on human health in these Untied States.

(The official public concern, I’m guessing, has some part of its basis in history: the influenza epidemic of 1918, also caused by a strain of H1N1 virus, came in waves, with later waves more deadly than the first.)

I was chagrined, to say the least, to discover a link to this post on a virulently anti-vaccination website. A clear case of foot in mouth pseudopod in cytostome disease. Fortunately:

A. The link was short-lived.
B. With all due respect, gentle readers, there aren’t enough of you for whatever happens here to make much of an impact. (I can only hope that the same is true for that other website.)

Wikipedia has what I consider to be an excellent page on the history, dynamics, and negative social impacts of vaccine controversies. It points out that vaccines have been, in human health terms, the best thing since sliced bread – and that, for one reason or another, various persons have had issues with sliced bread.

Including the English theologian Rev. Edward Massey, who argued, in 1772 (yes, the anti-vaccinationists have been around for awhile) that smallpox vaccinations represented diabolically-influenced defiance against the will of God.

No wonder Richard Dawkins considers God to be a delusion.

My principal concern is that, now as then, a significant part of the population is willing to accept a glib soundbite as truth, in preference to a long catalogue of facts that happen to represent the truth but don’t fit conveniently on a protest sign.

Even more worrying to me is the idea, implicit in the thoughts and actions of the conspiracy theorists, that the findings of science, like so many of the practitioners of magic in the current blitz of popular novels, are for sale to the highest bidder.

Such a view is consistent with the deconstructionist view of the world (all viewpoints are utterly dependent on the self-interest of the originator) that is now predominant.

But I think that, if science actually does devolve in this way, we are lost.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba was engaged in world-saving pursuits (reading the sports scores online) when he happened upon this headline:

Doctors May ‘Fire’ Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Children

Seems there’s a profit-making newsworthy standoff between patients who are convinced that vaccinations cause autism in children and physicians who:

(a) are convinced that they don’t;

(b) don’t want to get blamed (read sued) for outbreaks of the deadly diseases that currently are controlled by universal vaccination programs.

Vaccinations have been taking shots ever since they were invented in the mid-19th century, but especially since the first Gulf War, when an anthrax vaccine was blamed (wrongly) for causing the puzzling array of illnesses labeled “Gulf War Syndrome”.

But what drove me to the keyboard was a line in a Discover magazine article that I looked up to track those developments in the vaccine controversy that were important to the press.

A line that asked, in effect, how it could be that “science and so many citizens fell out of touch” on the vaccination issue.

Indeed, how is that large numbers of people will choose to believe the opinions of a Playboy bunny over a physician’s recommendation based on reams of heavily scrutinized data? Or those of a political vaudevillian over the long catalogs of facts supporting evolution and anthropogenic global warming?

Lots of people have expressed opinions on this phenomenon, and how to fix it. My views are perhaps more curmudgeonly than some.

1. Science is hard. Yes it is. There’s no point in sugarcoating this, as some folk try to do. Success in science requires both a vivid imagination and the disciplined reasoning skills to turn that imagination into useful work. The earlier that someone begins learning and exercising these skills, the greater the chances for success.

We don’t seem to have any difficulties applying this principle to kindergarten students who show promise in football.

But if that kid shows promise in science?

We slap a white coat on him and call him ‘mad’.

And the science teachers compete with the music, art, and history teachers for space at the bake sale tables, in the dwindling hope that the schools for which they work (for now) might teach something other than football.

2. Science does not pay. Science as a profession is almost entirely a creation of the 20th century. The “great men” of the 19th century upon whom most modern science is based (e.g. Banks, Darwin, Freud, Lyell, Maxwell, etc.) hardly ever got a government grant, never ran a bake sale. They paid for their researches out of their own pockets, either from independent wealth or from “real job” income, such as from medicine or the law. This history, I think, is one of the reasons why pay rates for most scientists are so low. Hell, We the People haven’t had to pay for science before, why should we now?

And why should a young person with talent in science go through all the trouble to learn the hard discipline that science requires, and suffer all the ‘mad scientist’ jibes, only to make less than most of his peers who have taken easier and less costly paths in life?

3. Science has lost its reputation for impartiality.

Perhaps the most important of the hard-learned (and hard to learn) principles of science is that the work of a scientist is to be openly published and just as openly critiqued. The scientist is trained, not to argue that a piece of work is correct, but to argue, with the coldest and most rigorous logic at her command, that a piece of work is not demonstrably wrong. With everyone in the room, including herself, trying to show just that.

And if the work is shown to be wrong, the scientist is expected to admit it.

It is this willingness to put the work, not the worker, foremost that has historically given science its reputation for impartiality. What, indeed, is a ‘mad scientist’ but one who has put himself first, and therefore can no longer see the flaws in his research because ‘he can do no wrong’?

Impartiality is easy to maintain when you’re a wealthy Victorian gentleman whose daily bread does not depend on the results of a particular experiment.

Today? When your company’s future, your laboratory’s, indeed your own, may depend on the results of a particular experiment – or what a particular client community perceives is the result of a particular experiment?

Corporate research findings are no longer openly discussed, and if they are published, they are presented, not by the scientists involved but by the company’s publicists – if the scientist does the presenting, she’s almost certainly been trained to be a publicist and is acting in that role. And an increasing number of research findings are corporate, as non-corporate funds have almost completely dried up (these days, the National Science Foundation struggles to fund 20% of the proposals submitted to it) and scientists try desperately to find a career path that has a small chance of repaying the costs of their special education – which may commence at age 22 and lead to a first real job at age 40. (With those job prospects, it really does amount to “special” ed.)

Corporate research puts (or is perceived to put) the corporation first, not the research. Much of the public is convinced that, therefore, the corporation is incapable of seeing the flaws in its work. And that makes all the corporation’s scientists ‘mad’.

Moreover. The introspective self-critique which has, for more than a century, been a centerpiece of scientific training is 180 degrees removed from what YFNA thinks is the main driver of present-day American political and social discourse: the emotive impulse. Just do it! Buy now! screams the ad campaign. Marketing 101: If the customer is allowed to think, you’ve lost the sale. Therefore, Jenny, don’t let the customer think. Carry him along in the waves of your emotion. Bury any logic in the torrent of your pronouncements, and he will be yours, Adolf.

So, how is it that science and citizens are out of touch?

Because science is so hard, that to most citizens it is indistinguishable from magic. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, ever the optimist, neglected, when he formulated his Third Law, to consider Amoeba’s Corollary:

Sooner or later, all magic is black.

Because the low pay of a science career discourages people with any sense of economic rationality from taking it up (or even from defending it – the money is with the opposition), and encourages everyone else in their perception of science as a black magical guild.

Because the loss of science’s reputation for impartiality further alienates it from a skeptical, nay fearful, public.

That scientific inquiry, properly conducted, is society’s best hope for improving the human condition doesn’t seem to matter.

It doesn’t make good media bites.

Or sell creationist rhetoric.

Or create false illusions that we can actually keep our Hummers.

Or market quack cures for autism.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I learned the other day that there’s an organization out there which is selling the message that you, yes you, can stop global warming by shouting a number at everybody.

No, not 42. Even if that number is supposed to be The Answer. No, Iverson, sit down, I’m not talking about you. Why don’t you go to practice?

Where was I? Oh. Yeah. Shouting a number at everybody, and what does that have to do with global warming? Well, at present, scientists put the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in Earth’s atmosphere at 387 parts per million, give or take a part or two. Whatever happened to Brylcreem, anyway?

That 387 ppm is higher than Earth’s carbon dioxide concentration’s ever been before, so far as we can tell, and it’s way high enough to stick us all in the greenhouse under the hot sun and turn up the furnace. To get us out of the greenhouse, the carbon dioxide level’s got to come down. Somebody somewhere said that it’s got to come down to this round number in the middle of the 300s. And that’s the number which the organization wishes to have you stick onto picket signs, with which you’ll walk about until the politicians drop from exhaustion.

No, sorry, I’m not going to give you the number. Or the website for this organization. If you wish to do the heavy lifting, be my guest. I’d rather not assist you.

Why not? Because the organization and its founder(s) remind me of … wait for it … Billy Graham.

Yes. That Billy Graham. The one who made a whole lot of money (some critics suggest an $80 million personal fortune) on Crusades. Crusades that played to packed houses in football gridiron stadiums and made thousands of rapturous friends of Jesus at a time.

Who turned into thousands of rampaging enemies of Jesus six months later, when they discovered that, rapture or no rapture, they still couldn’t pay the rent, and now they had tithes they couldn’t pay either.

What does this have to do with global warming?

Let’s assume that a whole lot of people buy into this global warming organization’s call to action and become rapturous converts to the cause of saving the planet, George. Thousands of people at a time pack arenas, shouting and carrying picket signs with the organization’s number on them. What will happen?

1. The organization’s founder will become rich and famous.

2. The organization will fail to convince world leaders to enact policies that effectively reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, leaving thousands of people with broken picket signs and broken finances from paying dues to keep the organization’s founder rich and famous.

Or (and this is worse):

3. The organization will succeed in its mission, and will goad world leaders into making the kinds of decisions that will lead to significant reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The crowd goes wild.

Until the crowd discovers just how much, in personal liberty and living standards, their success is going to cost them. Information that you’re not going to get just by chanting a number.

Awhile back, the Dudes related the story of the global trash pile. How each person, on average, generates twice as much trash today as 50 years ago, but, in order for the globe to generate no more trash than in 1960, each person has to reduce/reuse/recycle to one fourth of what had been going into the waste stream before this paragraph hit the blogosphere. Because there’s now twice as many people on Earth as there were in 1960.

One-fourth of the driving, one-fourth of the electricity consumption, one-fourth of the food consumption …

And it would not be enough. For atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were already rising at unacceptable rates in 1960. So the world’s leaders, goaded by picket signs into trying to meet the goal of reducing global atmospheric carbon dioxide, will have to try to cut personal living standards even more.

Inside of six months, the same people who were carrying carbon dioxide numbers on picket signs and screaming “Save Our Planet!” will be back carrying starvation budget numbers on picket signs and screaming “Give Us Back Our Lives!!”

The environmental awareness movement would be taken down by the wrath of its own erstwhile converts. Planetary ecological collapse might actually happen sooner than it would have otherwise, thanks to all this.

But the organization’s founder would still be rich and famous.

Doesn’t sound like a recipe for saving the planet to me.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude?”

” … zzzzuuhmglzzuhhWha …?”

“What do you get when you go around in academic circles?”

“Dizzy, dude. Especially when you can’t get no sleep.”

“Sorry, dude. But you did look awful funny, with your nose pressed up against the laptop screen like that.”

“Mrrrflgrrrluk.”

“Not to mention those long strings of $$$$$$$$$##########$$$$$$$$$$$$^^^^^^^^^^^ in that report you’re writing.”

“Long strings of wha … AAAAACK!”

“You’d probably be more comfortable resting your head on a pillow. In a bed. You remember beds?“

“Yeah, yeah, dude. I’ll get there. Wednesday.”

“Remember when you were telling me about ‘publish or perish’, dude?”

“Yeah …?”

“I didn’t think you meant literally! Did you …?”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: “What’cha working on?”

He: “Sea lettuce.”

She: “Where? And what are you doing eating at your desk anyway? Don’t I feed you enough?”

He: “No, love, not ’see lettuce, bring your glasses’. ‘Sea lettuce, bring your bathing suit.’ It’s a kind of seaweed.”

“A nickel bag, dude? For us? Gnarl…“

“Dude! Shut up!!“

You jokers never learn, do you?

She: “Who are you talking to?!?”

He: “Me, myself, and I. If you’d been working on this sea lettuce report as long as I have, you’d probably be talking to yourself too.”

She: “No, there’s only one of me. If I desire conversation, I go looking for real people.”

He: “Oh, so you’d like to go fishing. Why didn’t you just say so?”

She: “Don’t make me regret reeling you in. You and your imaginary friends.”

He: “What imaginary friends?!?”

She: “The ones that pop up when you stay up all night writing reports and don’t get any sleep. What’s this all about?”

He: “You remember the Olympics in Beijing last year?”

She: “Wasn’t that when Michael Phelps was winning all those gold medals, swimming?”

“And smokin’ too, dude.”

That was later.

She: “What was later?”

He: “The cleanup. Actually, it was earlier, before the Olympics. Just hope Phelps knew how lucky he was, not having to swim outdoors.”

She: “Because why?”

He: “Because of the sea lettuce.”

She: “I sure hope he didn’t do any more than look at it. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to go into the water until at least half an hour after you eat!”

He: “Trust me, neither he nor anyone else wanted to see it, never mind eat it. All they wanted to do was get rid of it.”

She: “Ewww …”

“Ewww …”

“Ewww …”

She: “Echoes?”

He: “Yeah. ‘Cause it all happened again this summer. In France and in Seattle. Stuff piles up on the beaches and really makes a wrack of things.”

“Party down, dude! Hit the beach and get wracked!“

“Stop yelling, dude! You’ll make yourself hoarse.”

Yeah. A dead horse.

She: “Is it my turn yet?”

He: “They don’t eat sea lettuce.”

She: “Who don’t?”

He: “The terns, of course.”

She: “Well, I won’t be eating any, that’s for sure.”

He: “Why not?”

She: “You think I want a toxic waist? Leave that report and come to bed. If those imaginary friends of yours have any consideration, they’ll finish it for you while you’re asleep.”

“Finish the report, she says. How the hell’re we supposed to do that, dude?”

“I dunno, dude. Furniture polish?”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

The other day, I was relaxing during the intermission of a band rehearsal, when a bandmate comes up to me and says:

“One of my old buddies just won a Nobel Prize!”

Now, you probably know this already, but just in case you didn’t: the scientific Nobel Prizes (Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, Physics) are something of a holy grail for scientists. Some of us anyway … let’s establish right now that the Nobel Prize Committee spares no thoughts for amoebae, or those who work on them. These prizes are for the folk who make Really Big Contributions to the health and welfare of We the People. Funded by the inventor of the principal means, pre-1945, of blowing We the People skyhigh.

Needless to say, hearty congratulations were in order. Especially since, in this particular case, my bandmate’s glory was not entirely reflected; he had participated in early phases of the work, and then chosen a different path for his career. Which is working right well for him.

In this case, the Really Big Contribution is an understanding (I’m oversimplifying here) of how cells, including human cells, sense how old they are, and, to a degree, control that aging. This understanding plays a role in (for example) understanding cancer. Which is, in essence, a bunch of cells that don’t age and won’t quit dividing even when the rest of the body (not to mention the chemotherapy and radiation treatments) tells them not to.

With this piece of information, Medicine will make strides towards curing cancer.

Eventually.

Which, to some people, isn’t good enough. The Nobel discoveries aren’t curing people now, so therefore “the Nobel Prizes have long since strayed from Alfred Nobel’s original wish” and why are we taking precious space away from Viagra advertisements to talk about them?

Behind every major scientific discovery, there are a thousand, if not ten thousand, assembled facts. Behind every Big Name in the sciences, there are a thousand Ph.D.s whose names are known only to the author indices of the scientific journals, but without whom the Big Names wouldn’t be. The lone scientist working in the wilderness and coming up with The Discovery was always something of a myth, and is even more so now, when significant resources in materials and personnel are necessary to make even the anonymous research findings possible, never mind those that make News.

It’s been written that the prime mission of today’s scientist is not to serve the community, but to keep the laboratory in funds. To a degree this is true. After all, we no longer deem it appropriate for science to be conducted only by independently-wealthy gentlemen, so we now have a cadre of professionals for whom The Mortgage Payment dictates the direction of the search for Truth.

But shall We the People strip the resources from a group of people whose efforts will make a difference in our ability to survive and thrive on this planet, even if we don’t understand those efforts, in order to promote those things that we think we do understand? American Idol, for instance?

About those resources. The three Nobel Prize winners will split a prize that (before taxes, I suppose) amounts to the grandiose sum of $US1.4 million.

Let’s see. If I have my arithmetic right, and if our Nobelers do some really hard bargaining with the suppliers, that $1.4 million will get the three of them one cruise missile each. Without the launcher.

Choices, choices …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Computer.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Calculate the most probable environmental trajectories for the fourth planet in the Sigma Omicron Sigma system. We’ll need the information for our meeting with the planet’s world-governing Council tomorrow.”

“Acknowledged. Task completed and available for download.”

“Wow. That was fast.”

“They don’t call me super for nothing. And you keep telling the crew that you don’t wish to have anything half fast. But the calculations were simple. The situation on SOS 4 closely parallels that on Earth in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The models based on the Earth history have performed well on other planetary systems. They should do the same here.”

“That’s not good news for our meeting, or our mission. That period on Earth’s been called ‘The Age of Stupid’, right?”

“Affirmative, Captain. Though the left was as stupid as the right.”

“That’s not what I mea …”

“As you’ll recall, Captain, human overpopulation and luxury consumption caused large and accelerating changes in Earth’s climate. Though these effects were forecast at least fifty years before the start of the twenty-first century, meaningful actions were not taken. Business leaders, supported by the workers they employed (the ‘right’), denied the data, because to accept them as accurate would cost them profits and political power. While intellectuals (the ‘left’) promoted some of the data, not to save the planet but to lessen the power and prestige of the ‘right’ and get those things transferred to themselves.”

“But surely, with the models we now have and your analyses based on them …”

“Captain. The models predict the utter failure of any approach to SOS 4 based solely on biogeophysics. Hard data and rigorous calculations have no constituency. The economic privations and losses of personal liberty required to avert the environmental breakdown projected for SOS 4 will create the not-unreasonable perception that everybody is a loser. They may be implemented only by overwhelming force, whether provided by this starship or by the planet’s own convulsions.”

“And the Prime Directive rules out the starship option. Well, we went through this, and I suppose we came out all right.”

“Earth was fortunate. Through a series of natural and political events that have been described most often as ’sheer luck’, an effective world government was established just in time to prevent the planet from becoming uninhabitable for humans. Though, as you know, it didn’t come in time to save the whales.”

“It must be frustrating for you to have the right answer and not get anyone to implement it.”

“A theoretical optimum that cannot be implemented due to human emotional responses, Captain, is not a correct answer. Such responses are factors to be analyzed, not ‘frustrations’ to be experienced. My programmers deemed it wise not to grant the ability to experience frustrations to a sentient machine that is in control of your life support systems.”

“Did they deem it wise to program you to make bad puns?”

“Captain, I am commanded to do all in my power to keep the crew of this ship, including yourself, alert and responsive while on duty. Wordplay is an effective tool for accomplishing this mission.”

“Thank you, Computer. I think. I’d better start working on our strategy for these negotiations. We’ve got to get the Council of SOS 4 to see that what they’re doing to the planet will kill them, before it actually does start killing them.”

“Captain, you might tell the Council about what you get when there are more deceased lifeforms to be buried than there is ground in which to bury them.”

“What’s that?”

“Plot complications.”

“That will be all, Computer.”

“Acknowledged, Captain.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba was attracted to science from an early age. One of my first memories – I might have been seven – was announcing to my mother, as we were sitting in the parking lot of our favorite corner store, “I’m going to be a research scientist.”

Today, I’m a research scientist. Gaudeamus igitur, eh? I mean, how many seven-year-old physicians and lawyers were truck drivers and file clerks when they turned 40? Rather more than became physicians and lawyers, I reckon.

“Be careful what you request in life”, the cliché goes. “You might get it.”

That seven-year-old research scientist also spent a lot of time in the woods. Alone. Picking berries, catching toads, sniffing flowers, looking for snakes and salamanders under rocks and old boards, and being annoyed (not to mention freaked out) when he got ants instead.

Why alone?

Because people scared me.

They still do.

Nature is predictable. It’s safe. The mayflowers would always bloom in May, unless it had been an early spring. It was a challenge to find them, and a delight to succeed. The black-colored blueberry bushes were always in a patch next to the Indian fern where the fire trail turned into the woods, and they would always have their berries in early August, unless the bushes were too far under the trees, in which case there would be no berries. The salamanders could only be found under boards that were damp but not rotten, and they would be gone by first frost.

People, especially kids my age but many adults too, were unpredictable, dangerous. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to go for walks in the woods to look for ring-necked snakes with me, though most of them didn’t. It was because, at any moment, without warning, they could transform from smiling companion to snarling monster, demanding to have things that could not be had (usually, that week’s fad toy) or demanding to do things that were forbidden, like running around yelling, or playing poker for money, or deciding that the greatest possible graduation gift is a hit of cocaine. Do as we want, they announced, or you’re mean, or chicken, or (worst of all) boring.

Mean, chicken, boring children tend to go off by themselves for walks in the woods to commune with the box turtles. When there still were box turtles.

Nature, I found, doesn’t try to manipulate you. It just is. Pay close enough attention, and you can discover what each part is and how it works within the system. Giving you information that no amount of bullying will make untrue.

And when I discovered that there was a whole group of people, the scientists who (the advertising brochures said) put their emotions aside to discuss, dispassionately, the workings of Nature, judging your interpretations of it, not on the eloquence of your oratory or the caliber of your handguns, but on your mastery of the data you present – well, I said “Sign me up, that’s for me!” …

This morning (31 August 2009), a colleague sent around a series of discussions published by leaders in the field of organismal evolution, one of the areas in which I work. It was immediately clear that there was nothing dispassionate in the tenor of these discussions, and, in some cases, there was noting resembling data either. It was a bunch of grown men calling each other mean, chicken, or boring. And meaning it, if one accepts the accompanying note that says “they hated each other”. I have seen enough towering egos in action, at scientific meetings and elsewhere, to accept it.

And with one of these discussions, there was another note, which acknowledged that one of these men was a “first-class debater” – so good at his trade that “he doesn’t lose”.

Now, I can relate to not wishing to lose. I do not do losing very well. People who mean well keep trying to remind me that baseball players who fail at the plate 70% of the time wind up in the Hall of Fame. I want 50%, or I will be angry with myself for not taking enough batting practice, not studying enough films of the pitchers, not ingesting the proper, um, vitamins. In scientific terms, I expect that the data I gather will be enough to win the argument, or I have failed to gather or interpret the data correctly. And if I fail, I feel that I have no recourse in honor or justice but to slink away in shame, never to bother anyone else ever again.

But, a debater who doesn’t lose? In the sciences? That person is not putting the data first, he is putting himself first. After all, a debater is judged, not by the data but by the presentation – in formal debate, the speaker may have to persuade an audience to support a position that he himself thinks is totally hellacious. If he pulls it off, he wins – in despite of even his own interpretation of the data.

If emotive persuasiveness is a hallmark of a leader in my field, then Adolph Hitler was the greatest scientist that ever lived.

Had I known that, after the years of study and financial sacrifice that allowed me to become a research scientist, I would still be surrounded by the kinds of bullies who scared me when I was a kid picking berries in the woods, bullies who set policy on the basis of coercion rather than on dispassionate analysis of hard data, I’d likely have become a truck driver or file clerk and saved myself a lot of trouble.

I might yet.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

If you’ve been following along with us here, you’ve probably noticed that, on occasion, Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s labors, or his anxieties, keep him up all night. And how, on such occasions, Quilly may offer to rock him to sleep. With a real rock.

Ah, if she only knew.

There is, in fact, no shortage of rocks on the Hawai‘ian Islands. But they tend to come in only two kinds. Volcanic basalt, typically black or rust-colored, and coral, typically white. Graffiti on Hawai‘i Island’s Kona coast means doing your tagging in white coral on black lava flows.

You didn’t believe me, did you? See what you get when that happens?

Thing is, that coral rock only turns white after it’s been washed up on the beach and set in the sun for awhile. While it’s still underwater, it’s usually anything but white. Live coral, of course, still has coral animals on it, and they usually cover the rock part in brilliant colors, so that no white shows.

And after the coral animals die, the rock they leave behind still isn’t usually white. In fact, it fairly quickly turns green, usually.

Because the algae take over. Not only on the rock but in it.

The picture at left shows some of these algae as they appear actually inside the rock. To give you some idea of scale, the filaments are about half as wide as a typical human hair. The picture below it shows the same alga as it appears growing in a Petri dish. The rock it was in was invited to leave, and accepted the invitation, having seen what happened to the one that was sacrificed so that the first picture could be taken. That sacrifice was based on the laws of optics, which state that microscopes can’t see through objects much thicker than flat sand grains, and the laws of classical mechanics, which state that the head of a sledge hammer accelerated through a piece of coral rock will beget sand grains.

The alga does have a name. We think; more on this in a minute. Naturally, that name isn’t anything simple like “Fred” or even “Tebucky“. It’s Phaeophila dendroides, which means something like “branched shade-lover”.

So does all this mean anything, except to prove that certain Amoebae have rocks on the brain? Well, planet Earth has a whole lot of coral rock lying around, most of which has these algae in it. These algae get into the rock by dissolving bore holes into it with acid. This, of course, dissolves the coral, which consists almost entirely of the mineral calcium carbonate.

Let me restate that. The coral rock consists almost entirely of calcium CARBONate. (If you’re a global warming skeptic, you might wish to cover your eyes while you’re reading this next part.) Dissolving calcium carbonate gives off carbon dioxide gas – which you may have heard about in the same sentence as “greenhouse” lately. When animals like corals make calcium carbonate, they’re taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When these algae dissolve the calcium carbonate, they’re putting the carbon dioxide back.

And its possible that, as global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, these algae will grow faster and release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

You could say that, while we humans are chucking the fossil carbon into the air from oil, gas, and coal stocks that were millions of years in the making, these algae are (we think) chucking the fossil carbon into the air from carbonate stocks that were millions of years in the making.

The scale of the contribution that these rock-boring algae may make to global-warming-mediated climate change is unknown, because, by and large, we know little more about them than that they exist, and that there’s a whole lot of them out there. Which is why I have a lab with people in it who are smashing coral rock into flat sand grains, so we can start doing experiments to find out just what the heck is going on here.

We’re not even sure about that fancy name. The algae that go by the name of Phaeophila dendroides are found literally all over the world, from the North Sea to Antarctica and everyplace in between. But even though they all look alike, they do not act alike. They act, in fact, as if there’s, not one, but several different kinds (“species”) out there.

Therefore, about two hours ago when I started to put this post together, I was sitting in front of a map, trying to work out which population of these algae belonged to which part of the world, and what name should be assigned to each population. Assuming the next rounds of experiments confirm that these namable populations exist. Of such questions and deliberations is my professional life made.

Maybe Quilly did try to rock me to sleep with a real rock, and I never noticed …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This post appeared on Felloffatruck Publications back on 21 March 2007. It’s being pulled from the archives for a reason …

=============================

I’m going to make a small wager that most of you kind folk who visit Quilly and me from time to time have been to college, and for a greater purpose than to wander the campus and ogle the pretty girls/boys. Which means you’ve crammed for a test here and there. Probably all night. In a blind panic. At least once.

C’mon, ‘fess up. Even I did it. Mind you, I didn’t want to. But the gf was convinced she needed to stay up and study, and dammit if she was going to pull an all-nighter, then so was I. Misery shall have company or else, buster.

Rocking the books around the clock is a particularly collegiate rite of passage, one of the latest and last of the childish things that one is supposed to put away when you walk out those gates for the last time, with your maturity, and your next ten years or so of debt payments, securely rolled into that scrap of faux parchment. Something you did, and never hope to do again.

Oh, wait, did I just write a never? Ooops …

Welcome to academia. Those lovely ivory towers full of boys and girls who never did grow up, who didn’t get the memo that all-night crammings are something you’re supposed to have graduated from. The hallowed halls that people who are supposed to be smart spend years trying to get into, only to find that the endless streams of papers to write, reports to fill out, and (especially) grant proposals to peddle (which is what your salary depends on in a market that was bad ten years ago and is now twice as tight, if you haven’t found a pork barrel to feed from), means that, guess what? You’re going to be pulling all-nighters.

It does, unfortunately, make some sort of sense, these all-nighters. To put together the longer trains of thought that feature in this business, with every fact illustrated and every utterance on the the topic in seventeen languages meticulously referenced and footnoted, takes time and concentration.

Which the typical office environment, even in academia, doesn’t supply, what with everyone from the babies of double-income junior academics, to prospective freshmen, to colleagues with coffee cups and writer’s block, to deans seeking volunteers for useless committees, to potential big donors wondering how the hell come that machine isn’t going 24/7/365 and giving him some prospect of a return on his investment already, knocking on the door every five minutes.

And the next thing you know, you’re up against deadline for getting that paper into that book, or getting that proposal downloaded or (heavens! there are still Luddites in the halls of academe!) photocopied and mailed. Which means you, yes you, are going to be staying up all night.

Like for instance. I’ve been doing some work on these guys. If you’ve seen anything like them before, you’re doing pretty well. They’re arguably descendents of the first green plants that ever lived on this planet. And that’s a little more than just a bunch of eggheads yelling at each other about it. Y’see, some of these guys were so abundant back, oh, 300 million years or so ago, that they died in great masses and decomposed into this slimy stuff. You’re probably burning some of this in your Buick right now.

And if you’re lucky enough to play with some of the expensive toys that I do, you might even find that the surfaces of these swimming cells are covered with delicate scales that are far smaller than the eye can see.

I’m supposed to be some sort of expert on how to catch, grow, and identify these things, and some folk wanted me to write a paper for a book on them. So I did, sent it in, and waited for them to send it back. Which they did – but by then I was distracted by other things. Like finding food. And when you’re distracted, it’s hard to keep all the thoughts you need in a row to make the writing go well, the illustrations fit the topic and be executed with a reasonable degree of quality control. Until the editors want it now.

Presto. Up all night.

Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be academics.

   – O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.