SBrunning talks

The meticulous and endlessly diligent folks at Mauna Loa have released their latest figures: CO2 is now at 387 ppm. Here’s the link:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

This is the highest figure for the last 650 thousand years. A more important figure is the “carbon dioxide equivalent” (CDE), which adds nitrous oxide, methane, and other non-CO2 greenhouse gasses. This figure is around 420 ppm. NASA’s James Hanson believes the “tipping point” for irreversible and non-linear changes is around 350 ppm. He’s the first to admit, though, that nobody really knows.

On the up side, life in Antarctica is so far pretty much unaffected by global warming. Cynthia Rosenzweig and her team at NASA Goddard examined 28,800 datasets on climate change impact on plants and animals. Antarctica. No problem (at least in the central plateau). It’s cool.

Everywhere else, though, between 90% and 95% of the observed change is consistent with global warming predictions. The early arrival of spring is having a major effect; more northern forest fires is another effect that itself has a cascade of effects; and of course, for land species, changes in water distribution and availability change everything.

Water and food. it’s about water and food.

Kindness is culturally dismissed as a lesser skill, a less-subtle, less difficult, less important character trait. Call up a mental image of “kindness”–what did you find? When was the last time a eulogy featured the subtly and skill of kindness over, say, courage, or brilliant intelligence, or artistic sensitivity?

Kindness may have a foundation in instinct, but in lived life, it’s a difficult skill. To do it well requires looking persistently both into the past and into the future. You encounter: a child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket; awareness a friend is cheating on a spouse; or you’re responsible for evaluating and communicating the quality of someone’s work. What’s kind? A short-term kindness may be a long-term cruelty. What’s the kind thing to do? Where are they coming from, and how did they get to be ‘here’? How much of one’s own perception can be trusted about where someone else’s ‘here’ really is? Where do they seem to want to go? How important is it to them now, or will it be in the future? How will an action look in the “10-10-10″ lens (ten minutes, ten hours, ten years)? How much of one’s own pain or awkwardness or desire is being projected, and to what degree is it highlighting or obscuring what’s actually there for the other? What words or actions will truly be kind, over what time frame? How do you balance an act of kindness to another that can be unkind to yourself?

All of these threads are particularly acute in how we bind our children to ourselves–chiefly, it’s our capacity for love, but we make countless behavioral choices that either bind, or force them to independence, or I suppose sometimes both. The world is cold and it’s a false kindness to hide that from one’s children; but forcing the coldness on them in a righteous ‘training’ is no more kind. Wanting your kids to have happy lives and wanting them to have rich lives–not the same–attending to and interacting with what they want–none of us can see all of the hidden paths we’d wish, nor choose wisely as much as we’d like.

Seeing in three dimensions–seeing, as contrasted with the pragmatic monitoring and tracking we have to do-is amazing. We live and move in–well, it’s breathtaking sometimes.

A couple of months ago, Woods Hole researchers saw a three-kilometer lake on Greenland drain through the ice sheet in 90 minutes. That’s a more rapid flow than Niagara Falls. The concern is that this draining, with the concommitant lubrication of the interface between the bottom of the ice sheet and the underlying stone, could both accelerate glacial movement in to the sea, and worse, could break the ice sheet up and set huge chunks of it adrift. If that happens, the ice melts far more rapidly than if it stays above water. This year, a chunk of Antarctica the size of Connecticutt broke off.

Climate scientist James Hanson–who warned Congress of global warming in 1988–has a paper coming in Science looking at the last 50 million years. He points out that the Antarctic ice sheet formed when CO2 dropped to 425 ppm; the current ‘CO2-equivalent’ (with also includes methane and particulate) is around 420 ppm.

More cheerfully, people’s voice’s ’speak’ in multiple ways. Gordon Gallup and Nathan Piptone at SUNY Albany recorded women counting from one to ten at four different places in their menstrual cycles. They then had both male and female students rate the attractiveness of the person associated with the voice. Men and women alike selected the recordings made during peak fertility, rating as less attractive the women whose recordings were during non-fertile periods. I love voices–and now I suspect I love voices from some times of the month more than from others. (At least if they’re women’s voices. And in this particular aspect, pre-menopausal.)

Would be interesting to look at how men’s voices change with circumstances.

I don’t know why our minds are so bad at knowing they’re physical. Nick Humphreys thinks it’s an evolved characteristic–that the reason it’s so hard to figure out what consciousness is is becuase it’s advantageous for our minds to believe wholeheartedly in our minds. (Apologies for the pun.)

Despite learning the effects of sleep deprivation over and over, I still get tangled. The thoughts and feelings  seem so real from the inside. It even seems real when there’s the parallel track that knows.  (Like when you’re dreaming and it feels real, even with the voice-over saying it’s a dream.)

Sarah (Sam’s long-time girlfriend) advised me a couple of years ago to just stay in bed for eight hours, regardless of whether I sleep or not. I can’t — Ellen had me try for 7:15, something more achievable. I haven’t been doing that, either. I did it for a while. Then forgot. When I get enough sleep I forget I’ve been getting enough sleep and start acting like I don’t need it.

Dumb. Everything’s better with enough sleep. Sleep seems self-indulgent, somehow. I, who counsel others that the road to freedom runs through the release of hope, driven to get up and do because sleeping is… I don’t know. Wasteful.

My wily, elusive mind.

Hurricane evidence is equivocal, since one possible consequence of the accelerated warming at the poles–they’re warming around four times faster than the equator–is lower differential between the poles and the more temperate latitudes. That may reduce the heat transfer, equator to poles, which would in turn reduce the movement of hurricanes.

I need to post something more cheerful.

Running today, I was brought up short by my running partner’s comment about her young son’s worry about global warming. “He’s very concerned”–in a tone reporting yet another drift of his mind, alongside the dog’s haircut.

I didn’t know what to say. I made a bland comment about it being serious. In twenty years–if our luck is bad, ten, if our luck is worse, five–it’s will be known to be the greatest and most pervasive human catastrophe in the last 100 thousand years. It’s only a run, only a conversation that will quickly move on. Life before I began reading about this, before I began seeing the edges of what it’s emerging to be, that life seems a dream. What do I say?

Fossil evidence recently analyzed suggests that in the late-Cretaceous–about 65 million years ago–central Siberia had weather and vegetation like what you’d find in Florida now. Current climate models had predicted average temperatures of around 0C.

“Predicting” the past is a key test for the climate models used to warn us of likely effects of global warming. Models are run backward and checked for the degree to which they match measured temperatures. When there is a big difference between the model’s output and an historical or paleontological value, something is wrong.

Sometimes, it’s a measurement or analysis error–the “real” data isn’t really what happened. In this case, modeler Paul Valdes (U. Bristol) acknowledges the possibility of an analysis error (it wasn’t really that hot); but he suspects the problem is with the models. The specific culprit he fingers is hurricanes. Hurricanes move heat from lower to higher latitudes, but they’re too transient and fast-moving to show up in current climate models.

If Valdes is right in his surmise, two things follow. Climate models will need to be updated to include this effect. And, says Valdes, “…Climate models are underestimating the magnitude of future temperature change, which could turn out to be larger than currently predicted.”

[ Based on reporting by Fred Pearce in New Scientist 8 March 2008 ]

Reading Atul Gawande’s book on the practice of medicine, Better. His discussion of the extraordinary efforts and performance of the hugely-overstretched medical teams with the US military in Iraq raises a disturbing question. The systemization of medical delivery has resulted in lives being saved that in any previous war would have been lost. A consequence is, soldiers with horrendous injuries survive–to live a life with no legs, a missing hand, disfigured faces, and so much permanent internal trauma that they can’t lift themselves. When I imagine myself 22 and with such injuries–would I thank the doctors and the medical technology that saved me? 

Yesterday afternoon, 4:09, Violet Kornell made her brisk entry into the world. Congrats to mom Renee, dad Nate, and big sister Juliet.