Author Archives: Mr. Lynn

Oppenheimer was Wrong: Not With a Bang but a Whimper

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Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, about the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who is widely known as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” has partnered with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, about the doll that began as a blonde bombshell, to create a block-busting Hollywood double feature the likes of which have not been seen since pre-pandemic times. Let’s start by stipulating that Oppenheimer is a magnificent film, as historically and scientifically accurate as it needs to be, with outstanding performances across the board. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., are mortal locks to be nominated for Oscars in leading and supporting roles, and the performances of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are also Academy Awards worthy. Nolan will certainly be nominated for Best Director and I can’t imagine any other film winning Best Picture – unless maybe Barbie because money talks and Ryan Gosling singing “I’m just Ken” is irresistible.

While the explosion of the first atomic bomb – code name “Trinity” – was the highlight of Oppenheimer, the thrust of the film is the conflict within Oppenheimer over his leadership role in the bomb’s development. The Manhattan Project was a massive collaboration involving thousands of individuals, and contrary to conventional wisdom, Oppenheimer was never in charge of the Project, he was the director of the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Trinity, as well as the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs dropped on Japan, were assembled. Nonetheless, his name is forever linked to the atom bomb and few would argue that his genius and personal charisma were key to the Manhattan Project’s success. Oppenheimer himself assumed personal responsibility for the bomb and he took great pride for its role in ending World War II. At the same time, however, he was tormented with enormous guilt. In one scene, Oppenheimer has a nightmarish vision of the fission technology he helped unleash: atomic bombs exploding over every continent, igniting the atmosphere and setting off a planetary firestorm that spells doom for civilization as we know it.

Oppenheimer was without question a brilliant man. Surrounded by a circle of scientific leviathans – Ernest Lawrence, Isador Isaac Rabi, Luis Alvarez, Niels Bohr, Hans Bethe, Robert Serber, to name but a few – Oppie stood out. Even in the presence of Albert Einstein, he more than held his own. But it doesn’t take a genius, only someone smart enough to know fear, to appreciate the visceral terror Oppie and every other eye witness felt upon seeing the Trinity explosion – the blinding flash of light followed by the titanic boom, flames mushrooming to the heavens and the onrushing shockwave flattening everything in its path. No, even the simplest mind can grasp the threat to human existence posed by nuclear bombs, but nevertheless, for all his brilliance, Oppenheimer was wrong. He was wrong to foresee nuclear fission as the greatest technological threat to humankind. In the years since Trinity, it has become increasingly clear that fossil not fissile technology presents a more grave danger: fossil as in the burning of fossil fuels.   

This past summer we’ve seen wildfires burn out of control in North and South America, Europe and Asia. We saw virtually the entire town of Lahaina on Maui wiped out as effectively as if it had been nuked. We also saw many regions in the world bake under severe triple digit heatwaves of never-before-seen durations. In the meantime, while some areas withered under unprecedented droughts other areas drowned under unprecedented flooding. Disease and death accompanied these climate disasters along with wrecked economies, crippled food-chains, and rescue and relief resources stressed to the breaking points.

No reputable scientist denies that climate change is real and that the combustion of fossil fuels is the principle driver behind this change. You do not have to be an Oppenheimer, a climate scientist, or even someone who paid attention in middle school science classes to understand the problem. Combustion of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. Molecules of carbon dioxide, by virtue of their architecture and electronic bonds, are prodigious trappers of infrared radiation, aka heat. The more carbon dioxide we vent into the atmosphere above and beyond natural emissions, the hotter the atmosphere becomes as solar energy reflected off Earth’s surface is trapped, much as what happens to sunlight in a greenhouse.

New Orleans’ French Quarter in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (photo from CNBC)

Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of coal and oil has vented more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with nearly half of that having been added this century. During this time, the global annual temperature has increased in total by about two degrees Fahrenheit, with the annual rate of increase having doubled over the past 40 years. Since 2015, every year has succeeded its predecessor as the hottest year on record. Unless there is a major paradigm shift, temperatures in 2023 may seem “cool” by the standards of 2053. What’s worse is that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can remain there trapping infrared radiation for up to a thousand years. In other words, we’ve gone and enveloped our planet in a gaseous greenhouse that’s not going away anytime soon.

The obvious thing we must first do as a civilization is significantly reduce our combustion of fossil fuels. Scientists have been screaming about this since the 1960s, but their warnings have until recently been widely ignored by governments throughout the world. Again, you don’t have to be a Robert Oppenheimer to see why this is so. The atomic bomb and the far more powerful hydrogen bomb have not been the doomsday devices Oppenheimer feared because these horrific technologies scared governments into taking action to curtail their production and use. Governments were able to succeed – at least so far – because there is not much money to be made off the production and use of weapons that will vaporize producers and consumers alike.

On the other hand, there has and continues to be an abundance of money to be made from the production and use of fossil fuels. An abundance of money, like an abundance of carbon dioxide, seldom serves the common good. I have no idea as to what blather is being fed to the citizens of China, India and Russia, to name three of the nations in addition to the United States currently most responsible for spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, I am fully aware of the falsehoods citizens in our country are being told. While money from fossil fuel producers and industries that rely on fossil fuel combustion knows no political party (looking at you Senator Manchin) only Republican politicians are aggressively pushing an agenda of climate change denial.

It is one thing for a Marjorie Taylor Greene to deny the reality of climate change – the woman has gone on record attributing wildfires to Jewish space lasers. It is quite another thing entirely for pharma-bro turned Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswami to repeatedly declare climate change a hoax. There is no question that Ramaswami knows his statement is false. The question is why would he be so outspoken about something he knows is untrue? He must think there is a big swath of voters who will reward him for his lie. Sadly, when it comes to the Republican presidential primaries he is probably right.

The most recent study from the Pew Research Center reports that overall 54-percent of adults in the U.S. view climate change as a major threat. I’m surprised the percentage is that low. What with heat domes popping up like teenage acne this summer, and once-in-a-lifetime droughts and floods, and 100-year superstorms becoming annual events, I would think most sentient adults would see that something is sorely amiss. Unfortunately what is not surprising is the enormous schism between voters who identify as Democrats versus those who identify as Republicans. Nearly 80-percent of Democrats describe climate change as a major threat to the country’s well-being, up from about 60-percent a decade ago. By contrast, only about 25-percent of Republicans consider climate change a major threat, about the same percentage as 10 years ago. About 60-percent of the Democrats polled by Pew called climate change a top priority in stark contrast to 13-percent of the Republican respondents. Ramaswami is a cynical fraud, but he did graduate from Harvard thanks to George Soros, so the man knows how to read polls.

The vast gap between Democrat and Republican perceptions of climate change is “not surprising” because supporters of the two parties are being fed two vastly different “realities.” Studies show most Democrats get news from mainstream media outlets including newspapers, magazines and broadcast news, as well as from cable news outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, all of which address and discuss the threats posed by climate change and acknowledge the role of fossil fuels. Most Republicans get their news first and foremost from Fox, where climate change denial continues to reign supreme. No surprise then that in a study out of Yale University entitled Climate Change in the Minds of U.S. News Audiences, Fox viewers scored at the bottom of every category of climate change awareness. Don’t expect enlightenment any time soon. Florida and Oklahoma have become the first states to accept into their public school curriculums the agitprop drivel produced by PragerU under the guise of “conservative education.” With regards to climate change, PraegerU holds that if the polar caps are melting and sea levels are rising it is God’s will. All humans can do about it is learn to tread water. If you’ve been following the narrative arc of this blog post you won’t be surprised to learn that the leading funders of PragerU are brothers Farris and Dan Wilks who became billionaires through fossil fuel fracking.

In one respect, capitalism and the market place may force many climate change deniers to face facts despite what the talking heads on Fox tell them. An increasing number of insurance companies have decided that the risk of covering businesses and homes in areas most likely to suffer from climate change is too high and are abandoning those markets. Attention residents of California, Florida and New York, the insurance industry is looking at you. But don’t you other states worry, your time is coming.

What insurance companies get that so many Republicans don’t is that nature doesn’t care about your personal opinion. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a citizen of the U.S., China, India, Russia or wherever, so long as humankind continues its greenhouse gas assault on the atmosphere, the atmosphere is going to continue to heat up and the consequences will be dire.  Oppenheimer feared human civilization would be erased in a bang of nuclear explosions but his fears were misplaced. Unless we take dramatic and immediate action, our civilization will end not in a bang but in the whimper of a global climate that can no longer sustain us.

Life on Other Worlds: Will We Know It If We See It and What Will It Mean?

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(Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech)


This month NASA is scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, far and away the largest, most complex and powerful space telescope ever built. With a primary mirror measuring more than 21 feet across and boasting a light collecting area nearly 60 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb telescope will be expand human vision to the furthest reaches of the known universe, some 13.5 billion light years away, a time when the first stars and galaxies were formed. This incredible instrument is the product of an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency, involving thousands of scientists and engineers whose collective ingenuity shows what human minds can achieve if tasked with something other than posting a comment on social media.

Unlike the Hubble telescope, which orbits Earth, the Webb telescope will take up an orbit around the Sun some one million miles away at the second Lagrange Point that will keep it in line with Earth 24/7. The Webb’s giant primary mirror is a multi-segmented complex of 18 gold-plated hexagons, protected by a five-layer thick sunshield the size of a professional tennis court. Also unlike the Hubble, which was optimized for collecting visible and ultraviolet light, Webb is optimized for collecting infrared light, which enables it to study stars whose light has “redshifted” in wavelength while traveling across vast distances to reach Earth. The Webb will be especially adept at identifying exoplanets – planets outside the Solar System – and analyzing their atmospheres. This should be an enormous boost to answering one of the most persistent and vexing questions in all of science: Are we alone? Is Earth the only home for life in the vast expanse of star-spangled black we call the universe?

Artist’s illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope with its massive sunshield fully deployed. (Image credit: Northrop Grumman)

If you’re an odds-maker in Las Vegas and you’re taking bets that Earth is it as far as life goes, consider the following. Our own Milky Way galaxy harbors some 100 billion stars with an estimated 10 trillion planets orbiting those stars. The Milky Way is but one of some 200 billion galaxies we’ve observed – and not a particularly large galaxy either. This means there could be thousands upon thousands of times more planets in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the deserts and beaches on Earth. If it is truly the case that our “pale blue dot” is the only home for life in the universe, there is only one word to describe the odds: “Miraculous!”

Since scientists aren’t given to accept miracles without empirical evidence, they’ve been searching for signs of life on other worlds since the invention of the telescope and the realization that Earth is but one planet in a system of planets orbiting our Sun. This search has long excited the general public as well as the scientific community, though the search has also sometimes engendered caution and even fear. For example, in 1877, astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, using a telescope to study Mars, observed features on the surface he called “canali,” the Italian word for “channels.” The English press mistranslated the word into “canals,” which gave rise to the idea that Mars was home to an intelligent civilization. Popular speculation about the canals of Mars and the Martians who built these canals led to the publication in 1898 of H. G Wells’ The War of the Worlds, a novel about a Martian invasion of Earth. This novel would go on to be the inspiration for an infamous radio broadcast by Orson Welles in 1938 that sparked panic in the streets.

We now know that Mars is home to neither canals nor LGM, the “Little Green Men” acronym that astronomers somewhat mockingly attached to the SETI effort – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The term “little green men” may have come from the John Carter on Mars series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began around 1912, though the Tharks – the green men in those books – weren’t little.

The LGM moniker reflects how non-seriously the serious scientific community took the SETI effort until a conference in 1961 organized by radio-astronomer Frank Drake and held at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. Among those attending the three day affair was a post-doc student named Carl Sagan. At the conference, Drake unveiled an equation for estimating the number of planets that could potentially host intelligent life in the Milky Way galaxy. The Drake equation initially calculated that the Milky Way could host as many as 100,000,000 civilized planets. These were planets that would be similar to Earth in size, composition and atmosphere, with plenty of liquid water and orbiting a yellow sun in the so-called “Goldilocks zone,” meaning the planets were not too hot and not too cold but just right for sustaining life as we know it.

Drake was focused on detecting radio transmissions from technologically advanced beings on planets similar to ours, but Sagan did not believe the search for extraterrestrial life should be constrained to hearing from LGM on replicas of Earth. As a professor at Cornell, he devised experiments to simulate a wide range of atmospheric and surface chemistry conditions that revealed numerous alternative pathways by which the complex organic molecules of life as we know it can form. With this experimental evidence, along with his telegenic charisma and gift for public outreach, Sagan helped launch the field of astrobiology, in which scientists from across multiple disciplines seek to identify “biosignatures” – chemical markers created by living organisms.

Up until the 1990s, the worlds we could explore for signs of life were limited to our Solar System neighbors. Then through a combination of telescopes, satellites and probes, we began finding exoplanets. As of today we’ve identified thousands of them, most of which orbit stars – mainly red dwarfs not yellow stars like the Sun – but some of which are rogue, meaning they just spin through the Milky Way like nomads on a perpetual road-trip. We only see artist conceptions of what exoplanets look like because most are discovered by indirect methods such as  “transit,” in which a star’s light is observed to dim as a planet passes between it and the telescope; and “wobble,” in which the gravitational effects of a planet orbiting a star cause a detectable change in the star’s light spectrum. The few exoplanets that have been directly observed appear only as tiny dots of not-so-bright light.

In addition to expanding the number of worlds that might harbor life, we’ve also expanded the definition of “life as we know it.” During the past decades, scientists here on Earth have discovered colonies of microorganisms thriving in environments that would be considered too hot, too cold or too dark under the Drake equation: super-hot vents at the bottom of the ocean; super-cold lakes far beneath the Antarctic ice; hairline cracks in bedrock miles below our planet’s surface. These microbes, collectively classified as “extremophiles,” have adapted to levels of acidity, alkalinity, toxicity or radiation that would spell certain death for life as defined in the Drake equation.

So what are the biosignatures for which astrobiologists are searching these days? The most obvious target is oxygen. Life needs oxygen right? It powers the metabolic processes that sustain living cells and enable them to thrive and replicate. Then there’s carbon of course. Carbon atoms sprout four chemical bonds that readily link up with other atoms to form chains of complex molecules such as DNA and RNA. Also, carbon is one of the five most abundant elements in our galaxy along with hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen. Speaking of hydrogen and oxygen, scientific consensus holds that liquid water is essential to any form of life as it is a powerful solvent that can dissolve and transport nutrients throughout the body of an organism.

As logical as that all sounds, what it really means is we only know the biosignatures of life that is based on carbon; in other words, life as we know it. But there are other fluids that could serve the same nutrient dispersal purposes as water, and there are proposed scenarios under which sulfur could replace carbon as a biological building block. For this reason, some astrobiologists have suggested that in addition to biosignatures, we also look for evidence of motion with the idea that all living organism move in response to their environment. But supersensitive motion detectors created by LGM on a distant planet and aimed at Earth wouldn’t detect snottites.

Microbial colonies of snottites form mucus-like films in toxic caves during metabolism.

First discovered in a cave in Mexico filled with poisonous hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide gases, and through which runs a creek of sulfuric acid water, snottites are chemotrophs that oxidize hydrogen sulfide as their metabolic energy source. During metabolism, they form films on cavern walls that look like the blobs of mucus you spray when you sneeze from a cold or flu. Snottites are among several different types of extremophiles called “bioverms” because their colonies form patterns of lines known as vermiculations. It is easy to imagine snottites and other bioverms or extremophiles living in Martian caverns, or beneath the global wide ice cap that is the Jupiter moon Europa, or even in the methane seas of the Saturn moon Titan, just waiting for us to discover them. (See my novel Chromeleon Part One: A Greater Good)

So what does it mean if and when we do discover life on another world? Pubic polls in this country consistently show a general feeling of “positivity,” as some would say. This reflects the enthusiasm with which the public reacted in 1967 when Jocelyn Bell, a 24-year-old Cambridge University student doing research for her PhD, detected radio signals emanating from deep space that pulsed on and off every 1.3 seconds. The signal continued to pulse for about an hour then stopped. Approximately 23 hours 56 minutes later – the time it takes for Earth to rotate on its axis – the 1.3 second pulses resumed and once again stopped after an hour. Given the possibility that the signal was being transmitted by an alien civilization, Bell and her supervising professor Antony Hewish initially and tongue-in-cheek dubbed their discovery “Little Green Men-1.”

After extensive follow-up studies, Bell and Hewish determined that the actual source of the signals was in many ways as strange as if it had been LGM. Bell and Hewish had discovered a neutron star, a star that is only a tiny fraction the size of the Sun but much more massive. As the name implies, neutron stars are comprised almost entirely of neutrons (the subatomic particles that along with protons are found in atomic nuclei) jam-packed into a ball so dense that a spoonful of neutron star material would weigh several hundred million tons. Neutron stars that spin so rapidly they cast out radio signals, such as the one discovered by Bell and Hewish, are called “pulsars.”

The discovery of pulsars generated heavy media coverage around the world. Even though the signals turned out to be a false-alarm with regards to alien civilizations, the public attention garnered by the discovery of pulsars indicates that humans are at least intrigued by the idea of making contact with alien civilizations. There are of course exceptions. Some have warned that courting the attention of an advanced alien civilization could be dangerous, either remembering War of the Worlds or perhaps remembering happened to Native Americans when their existence became known to Europeans.

(From the film Mars Attacks)

Given current sociopolitical conditions in this country, I can easily guess what would happen if Little Green Men – or Little Green Them as in gender-neutral non-binary beings – filled the sky with their ships and began incinerating major population centers with their death rays. Republicans would call the attack “Fake news!” and either deny it or declare “It’s not our problem!” even as they were being vaporized. Democrats would either form a committee and dozens of subcommittees to debate what should be done, or defer any action until Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema made their intentions known. Both sides would blame the other.

The scenario of an alien invasion I believe is highly unlikely as any civilization sophisticated enough to monitor what we humans are doing to our planet would no doubt conclude there’s no intelligent life here. If and when we do discover evidence of life on another world, it will most likely be in the form of microbes or fossils of microbes. And that discovery will be profoundly significant – perhaps the most important discovery in history even if it has no effect on the price of gasoline. The importance of such a discovery was beautifully expressed in Richard Powers new novel Bewilderment. When the narrator, an astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, is asked why it matters whether life occurs only on Earth, he answers: “Once is an accident. Twice is inevitable.”

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Climate Change – Code Red For Humanity

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Mark Twain famously quipped that “Everybody talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it.” Twain’s joke has never been more true nor less funny. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its first major scientific assessment since 2014, a 4,000 page meticulously detailed and rigorously reviewed STFU to every politician, pundit, fake “scientist,” industrial mouthpiece, eschatologist, or TikTok charlatan who continues to deny the reality of climate change and the role of human enterprise. To say the evidence of climate change and human impact is “overwhelming” is an understatement of apocalyptic proportions. In the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the conclusions of this report represent “a code red for humanity.”

The Sixth Assessment Report from the IPCC’s Working Group One was prepared by an international collective of 234 scientists based on the findings of some 14,000 individual peer-reviewed studies. It was signed off on by the governments of 195 countries. The report is not reader friendly. The executive summary for policy makers alone is 42 pages and even Al Gore would have a hard time plowing through it. But you don’t have to read a single sentence of the report nor any of the great many fine summations provided by a great many fine science writers to know our planet is in dire straits. As X-file agents Mulder and Scully would tell you, the inconvenient truth is out there and it’s out there for even the most willfully blind to see.

From raging fires incinerating the West, to monsoon rains washing away parts of the Northeast and Midwest, to hurricanes and superstorms threatening to drown the Gulf coast, to heat domes that span the entire North American continent, we are suffering from the effects of weather on steroids, grotesquely pumped up by a carbon dioxide heated atmosphere. And it’s not just us. As I write, Greece is on fire while the rest of Europe is flooded; China’s rains are too much even for its always thirsty rice crop; and the ice in Greenland and the permafrost in Siberia are melting. The IPCC report shows this past decade was hotter than any period in the past 125,000 years, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is at a two million-year peak.

The IPCC report also shows conclusively that the greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels have raised the global average temperature by about 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the late 19th century average. Furthermore, this warming pathway has already been set for the next few decades, meaning we’re in the third stage of triage now. For those seeking to blame the sun for this warming, fuhgeddabudit. The IPCC report says the contribution of natural phenomena to atmospheric warming is essentially zero.

IPCC reports shows that the atmospheric warming since the industrial revolution across the planet is unprecedented in its pace and scale, and would be almost impossible without human intervention. (Credit: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report)

As previously noted, summaries, highlights and analyses of the IPCC’s new report are widely available – just Google IPCC and take your pick. I want to address two points that aren’t so widely discussed. The first point is the economy, not in terms of the tremendous economic losses we might see when urban  coastlines are redrawn by rising sea levels, or agrarian lands are rendered unsuitable for the production of food, but in terms of jobs. The Maginot Line of the fossil fuel industry and all of its myriad defenders has been that transitioning to clean energy sources such as solar, wind, hydro or geothermal, will inflict unbearable economic pain through the loss of jobs. Once upon a time that might have been true, but this argument has been rendered as anachronistic today as the Maginot Line was at the start of World War II. Studies – again by collectives of international researchers – show that transitioning to clean energy sources will result in a net gain of millions of jobs. One, sponsored by the European Institute on Economics and the Environment, looked at 50 countries, including the United States, and projected that energy jobs are likely to jump 50-percent, from an estimated 18 million people today to more than 26 million by 2050 if the world transitions from fossil fuels to green energy sources. Here at home, a study from the Bookings Institute shows that many of the current fossil fuel hubs, including Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Alaska, are ideal sites for renewable energy production. These jobs would be higher paying and far more reliable than for example coal mining, and wouldn’t include black lung disease as a benefit.

The second point is the projections as to what will happen if global average temperature increases another two to four degrees. The aforementioned deniers dismiss these projections as speculation and cite previous scientific projections about the effects of climate change on weather that have been wrong. It is true that at the beginning of this century, scientists were unable to definitively link climate change to specific extreme weather events. This is no longer the case. World Weather Attribution, another international collective of scientists, has employed state-of-the-art technology to perform real-time analyses to such extraordinary events as the big freeze this past winter in Texas, the on-going drought in California, and the recent catastrophic floods in Tennessee. The verdict left no room for argument: these events are the direct result of climate change.

The thing of it is, we don’t have to guess what happens when Earth’s atmosphere is choking on carbon dioxide and its land masses are submerged by the seas: our planet has been there and done that. By studying isotopes of oxygen, silicon and other key elements in marine and surface rocks, scientists have determined that some 3.5 billion years ago, what is known as the Archean Eon, Earth was one ginormous hot tub, a water world with an atmosphere that was almost nothing but greenhouse gases. No fossil remains have been detected on what little surface area there was, but the oceans do appear to have hosted life. That life was microbial, mostly cyanobacteria. When Matthew in the Bible declared that the meek shall inherit the Earth, it is safe to presume he was not referring to microbes.

Under the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels, the East Coast of the United States could look a lot different by the year 2100. (Image courtesy of NASA)

We’re nowhere near to being there yet and such a future for our planet can most certainly be avoided if we muster up the fortitude to do what is necessary. Code red does not mean code dead, but it does mean the need to take action is immediate. While riding a stationary bike at the local Y, I saw an ad for the American Petroleum Industry. The visuals looked like something produced for the Sierra Club with blue skies, green foliage and rushing white waters. A soft, reassuring female voice – the kind of voice that explains why wearing an adult diaper or swallowing a pill to correct EDS is nothing to be ashamed about –  delivered a soothing message about how the API supports responsible production and use of fossil fuels. The latest IPCC report makes it abundantly clear that the time for responsible production and use of fossil fuels is long past. The time to transition to green energy is now. Otherwise code red for climate change will mean code dead for humanity.

Release the Methane

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Creek Fire in the Sierra National Forest (photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)

Creek Fire in the Sierra National Forest (photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)

For most of 2020, science reporting has been overwhelmingly focused on SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic that has infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands in our country alone – and is nowhere near under control. However, the massive wildfires now raging throughout the West Coast, especially in California where millions of acres have burned with the traditional fire season just underway, are a dramatic reminder that climate change is still very much a concern. And still nowhere near under control.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee calls the West Coast infernos “climate fires” rather than wildfires because their unparalleled magnitude and intensity are largely the result of dramatic climate changes brought on by human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels. He’s right. Most of California’s fires were started when nearly 12,000 lightning strikes bombarded the northern part of the state, which was sweltering under record-breaking triple digit temperatures. This unprecedented lightning barrage was accompanied by maybe 12 drops of rain, the first moisture to “wet” the region since January. The combination of heat and drought made for extremely parched vegetation, which in turn created a vast tinderbox primed for ignition.

There is a well-established link between these historic climate fires and sustained periods of excessively hot, dry air that have gravely impacted regional ecosystems. Earth’s average air temperature increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century and reputable models point to a further increase that could reach 10 degrees before the end of this century if current greenhouse gas emissions are not abated. Scientific consensus is that an increase between 3 and 4 degrees F is the threshold beyond which our planet and the biospheres that sustain us will suffer permanent damage.

Don’t let political hacks or fossil fuel flacks fool you, greenhouse gas emissions are the primary drivers behind climate change (See this). Unless we literally want to set the world on fire, drown our coastal cities under rising sea levels, and dislocate hundreds of millions of people, immediate steps must be taken to curb these emissions. At this critical juncture in human history, what does the Trump administration do? It releases the Kraken of climate change.

Methane is a carbon hydride greenhouse gas that doesn’t receive the publicity of carbon dioxide because of its much smaller presence in the atmosphere, as in 200 times scarcer. But what it lacks in presence, methane makes up for in potency. Over a 20-year period, methane will absorb 86 times more heat than the same amount of carbon dioxide. It has been estimated that as much as 25-percent of the atmospheric warming recorded over the past 100 years is due to methane, which is also a prodigious contributor to smog.

Certain politicians love to crack jokes about methane and cow farts. It’s true that cattle flatulence and agricultural waste send a significant amount of methane into the atmosphere, as do wetlands, rivers and lakes. However, only so much can be done to reduce these emissions – the argument that we simply eliminate beef from our diet is far from simple and deserves a blog of its own to explain the nuances. On the other hand, much can and has been done to reduce the equally significant amount of methane released into the atmosphere by the production of natural gas and petroleum, especially through fracking. In 2016, the Obama administration, under the Clean Air Act, enacted rules to reduce these methane emissions; rules supported by all the major oil companies because even their leadership realized that profits are useless on a dead planet.

In August of this year, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, despite the opposition of the major oil companies, announced a rollback of the Obama administration rules, replacing them with new rules that ignore climate considerations and make future restrictions difficult if not impossible to implement.

Abrupt thawing of permafrost releases carbon in the form of methane, the Kraken of greenhouse gases (photo from Bureau of Land Management)

Abrupt thawing of permafrost releases carbon in the form of methane, the Kraken of greenhouse gases (photo from Bureau of Land Management)

Setting aside the highly questionable politics, economics and ethics behind the rollback – this is a science blog after all – independent studies indicate the new methane emission rules will have the same impact on climate change as adding 100 coal-fired power plants every year. This could trigger a phenomenon known as “abrupt thaw” in Earth’s permafrost – the roughly seven million square miles of soil that are pretty much frozen year-round. Consisting of dirt, gravel and sand bound together by ice, permafrost is rich with the decomposed organics of plants and animals accumulated over tens of thousands of years. In other words it is a massive repository for carbon. How massive? It is estimated that Earth’s permafrost harbors some 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon, which is double the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere.

Some thawing of the permafrost during the summer season is a natural occurrence. During this gradual thawing, carbon is released as carbon dioxide; undesirable but adaptable. Under an abrupt thaw, however, in which pockets of permafrost melt all at once, the carbon is released as methane; potentially catastrophic. The same hot dry air that fuels apocalyptic climate fires also causes abrupt thawing of permafrost. Curbing the methane emitted as a result of human activity to the greatest extent we can is critical to slowing atmospheric warming, which in turn is critical to preventing large-scale abrupt thawing of the permafrost. The potential consequences of abrupt thawing of the permafrost are so dire as to make us all wish it had been the Kraken rather than methane that was released.

A Seinfeld Universe

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What’s the deal with the universe? That’s a question comedian Jerry Seinfeld might well posit in one of his stand-up performances. It came from nothing, it goes back to nothing and in between the coming and going there’s a whole lot of nothing. Seinfeld became immortalized by the eponymous sitcom that famously billed itself as “a show about nothing.” Of course, from that show about nothing sprang a cornucopia of expressions that have become part of the lingua franca – re-gifter, sideler, close-talker, man-hands, master-of-my-own-domain, yada, yada yada. And out of the nothingness from which the universe sprang we got – well – the universe! From the infinite-to-the-infinitesimal, when it comes to actual material stuff, the universe truly is much ado about nothing.

From a good observational point on a clear starry night take a look up into the sky and consider all those billions and billions of stars that so entranced Carl Sagan. Then consider the following. Collectively, all those billions and billions of stars account for about five-percent of the composition of the universe. Through observation of gravitational effects, we know there’s another 25-percent of the universe made up of material stuff we are not yet able to “see” or detect and we have dubbed this invisible stuff as “dark matter.” As for the rest of outer space, that great black cosmos, when it comes to stuff, the universe has got nothing.

But it gets worse. If you paid any attention at all in your high school science classes – and I do mean any attention – you know that all us and the world we live are made up of atoms, the smallest bits of matter that have chemical properties. And if you paid slightly more attention then you know that atoms consist of a central nucleus made up of one or more positively-charged protons and possibly one or more charge-less neutrons, and that this nucleus is orbited by negatively charged electrons. Even if you did not know that before, now you do. What high school science classes seldom make clear is how much nothing there is inside of atoms. Let’s take a look at the simplest and smallest type of atom – hydrogen. Its nucleus consists of a single proton that is orbited by a single electron. If you were to create a scale-model of a hydrogen atom, and you personally represented the proton in the nucleus of that hydrogen atom, then your electron would be represented by a pea and it would be located approximately 13 miles away from you. In between you and your electron would be nothing.

Think about a time you met someone and came away thinking to yourself what an empty person that was. You were spot-on! But be careful about throwing bricks from your glass house. The physicist Brian Greene once calculated that if all the empty space in the atoms that make up a human body were removed – that is the space between the nucleus and the electrons of those atoms – every human being on the planet today could fit inside a teacup with room to spare. I think we can all agree that’s a lot of nothing. And don’t even get me started on all the nothing  inside protons and neutrons, which are essentially hollow bags consisting of three quarks and (more than half) empty space.

So much empty space begs the question as to why we aren’t like ghosts, spectral beings able to pass through the so-called solid objects in what is itself essentially a phantom world? To answer that question we must turn to quantum mechanics, but don’t worry, there’s no math involved and there won’t be a quiz. First, the picture of the universe inside the atom that most high school science classes present is one in which a small moon-like electron orbits a larger planet-like nucleus. This simplistic picture is shown to avoid quantum mechanics for reasons that will soon become obvious.

The universe inside the atom is not at like the macroscopic universe that we and our planet move through. An electron is a fermion, a particle of matter that also acts as if it were a wave. When we talk about an electron’s orbit, we’re talking about a discrete region of space away from the nucleus that is occupied by that wave. Because of the negative electrical charge carried in that wave, no other electron can occupy that same orbit at the same time. The rule is called the Pauli Exclusion Principle after Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian physicist who discovered it in 1925. This discrete region of space occupied by an electron wave is defined by its energy (which can have an upper and lower limit) and by the attraction between the negative electrical charge of the electron and the positive charge of the nucleus.

Rather than one or more moons orbiting a planet, the picture inside an atom is more akin to a nucleus with a staircase made up of energy steps, each which may be occupied by a single electron. Under the rules of quantum mechanics, for any given energy step, an electron can physically be anywhere and everywhere on that step at once. Even if that doesn’t make sense from the macroscopic world our senses are engineered to perceive, the important thing to know is that no other electron can be on that step except for that one electron. Hence that energy step for that electron in that atom and every energy step for every electron in every atom in the universe is as “solid” as the earth beneath your feet.

This brings us back to the original question: What’s the deal with the universe? Is it really about nothing? Of course not. There’s something there alright and it’s HUGE. Before talking about that huge something I would like to refer you back to an earlier blog in which I discussed the meaning of the word “theory” and how scientists and the general public use the word in two very different senses. When most of us talk about “empty” space we mean that it is void of matter, which is defined as anything that has mass and takes up physical space. In science, however, thanks to Albert Einstein, we know that mass and energy are interchangeable, two sides of the same coin. So when we say that matter, both the matter we can see and dark matter comprise about 30-percent of the space in the universe, the rest of it is not actually empty but filled with energy.

Some of this energy, such as the energy produced from the thermonuclear burning of the sun and other stars, is intertwined with matter, but the energy that makes up the remaining 70-percent of the universe is a mystery that has been dubbed “dark energy.” This so-called dark energy acts as a sort of anti-gravitational force that accelerates the rate at which the space of our universe is expanding. The discovery of dark energy was announced at the start of 1998 by two teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project head by Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (my day-time employer) and High-z Supernova Search Team led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. The three men shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. No one knows what dark energy is but an awful lot of scientists are doing their best to figure it out because the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. But that’s another story.

 

It’s Just a Theory – Not!

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During any given week, someone on a television show will be asked about the perpetration of a crime or some other mysterious act and in response will utter words to the effect of “I’ve got a theory about that.” What the person will mean is that he or she has a suspicion, a hunch, a guess based on little if any physical evidence. When scientists talk about a theory, they are talking about something entirely different.

I have a suspicion/hunch/guess that so many in the general public are so easily mislead on issues concerning climate change and evolution because they do not understand what the term “theory” means in science. My guess is that their understanding of the term “theory” comes from watching TV crime shows because most of them also seem to give far more weight to the term “law.” They don’t question the “law of gravity” as they do the “theory of evolution.” By this measure, since Newton’s ideas about gravity are expressed as a “law” and Einstein’s ideas are expressed as the “theory” of general relativity, Newton’s ideas must have been proven to be superior. But that’s not how it works in science, where for all intents and purposes, theories trump laws!

I think one of the major failings of science over the centuries has been its conscription of terms that are very much a part of the common vernacular but are put to use by scientists in completely different context. When scientists use the term “theory,” they are talking about an explanation of observed physical phenomena, facts, an explanation that fits all physical evidence and has been vetted over and over again. Most importantly, it is an explanation that has been successfully used to predict new observations and evidence. Contrast this to a “law,” which is a description of a well-observed phenomenon, and a “hypothesis,” which is probably the term that most closely approximates a guess, but a guess that is highly educated and based on observations and evidence. Some in the scientific community would dispute my equating a hypothesis with an educated guess and would argue that it, like a theory, is an explanation of a narrowly defined phenomenon.

This is not to say that scientific theories are set in stone. In the face of new and verified observations and evidence, theories can be refined or in some cases even discarded altogether. However, the longer a theory stands the test of time and repeated challenges, and the greater the number of new observations and evidence it has successfully predicted or explained, then the stronger that theory becomes. Let us take, as a prime example, the theory of evolution. This has become the favored punching bag of politicians who are either scornfully ignorant or shamelessly cynical. With a general public that was better informed, these politicians would be exposed and dismissed as the charlatans they are.

Since Charles Darwin set sail in 1831 on the HMS Beagle, and published in 1859 On the Origin of Species, scientists have made discoveries and advances in genetics and molecular biology that this extremely modest and unassuming English naturalist could not possibly have imagined. Darwin based his explanation of evolution most famously on his observations of finches in the Galapagos Islands, focusing primarily on how different species had adapted differently shaped beaks in response to different environmental pressures. Today, scientists can compare the DNA that comprises the human genome to the DNA that makes up the genomes of chimpanzees, mice and numerous other vertebrates. Through such comparisons, they can determine with remarkable precision when two different species last shared a common ancestor. For example, based on the number and location of conserved DNA sequences, mice and humans last shared a common ancestor about 75 million years ago. Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor as recently as six million years ago. No surprise then that the human and chimpanzee genomes are 98-percent identical (the dramatic differences arise from how and when the genes are turned on/off and the combinations in which two or more genes act together).

Yet, despite the rigorous challenges that modern science has brought to bear on Darwin’s theory, the old naturalist’s original explanation of evolution has held up surprisingly well and is universally accepted by the entire scientific community. The slogan often bandied about by those ignorant and/or cynical politicians I mentioned a moment ago reads: “Teach the controversy!” There is no controversy. The notion that there exists an ongoing scientific controversy regarding the theory of evolution is a fiction fabricated and deployed to exploit the uninformed. Why would anyone foster such a fraud? For the same two reasons most frauds are fostered – political or monetary gain.

This leads me to a few words about “creationism,” but only a few as this blog is about science. Creationism is neither a theory, a hypothesis nor a law. It does not offer an explanation of observed phenomenon or physical evidence, nor does it describe any observations or evidence. It cannot be used to predict new observations or the discovery of new evidence. Creationism, and its twin-by-another-name, “intelligent design,” attributes the world in which we live to the actions of a supernatural being. End of story. There is no way to test the validity of this idea nor is there any need to conduct such test for no further understanding is necessary. The supernatural being did what the supernatural being did and that is all you or anyone else needs to know. Forget this trying to understand stuff and go do something useful – like mow the lawn or clean your house.

Let’s be honest. If you remove the religious element from creationism, what you have is magic. The idea of a supernatural being creating the universe and Earth within the past 10,000 years is as whimsical as the idea of a rabbit that once a year hides color-dyed chicken eggs for children to find, or an overweight elderly white man in a red suit delivering presents to those same children a few months later.

I have stones in my backyard that are more than 10,000 years old (radiometric dating of terrestrial and lunar rocks puts the age of Earth at approximately 4.5 billion years) but hey, it’s magic right? And when it comes to magic there are no rules and logic takes a holiday. I can see the appeal of magic because it is easy – all you have to do is believe. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted that to a society of primitives, advanced technology will seem like magic. Apparently in a society of advanced technology, there will always be those members who prefer to stick with magic and remain primitives.

Global Climate Change and Barry Bonds

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Any politician who tells you that global climate change is a hoax is either willfully ignorant or deliberately lying. Politicians have staff and one of the tasks for any politician’s staff is to get the facts on issues of importance to that politician. How the politician chooses to deal with those facts – accept, ignore or hide them – is another matter. Any Congressional staffer doing even the most rudimentary – bare bones – investigation into the science behind global climate change will learn the following.

Fact: Carbon atoms are the fourth most abundant element in the universe and the basis of life as we know it. As atoms go, carbon is also somewhat of a slut, an electron donor with four electrons available to form strong chemical bonds with any receptor atom that will  have it.

Fact: A carbon atom is happy to engage with multiple partners, most notoriously with two atoms of oxygen to form a molecule of carbon dioxide.

Fact: The carbon dioxide molecule by virtue of the energy and architecture of its electronic bonds is a voracious heat-trap. When infrared photons (heat) strike a carbon dioxide molecule, more of those photons will be absorbed than will pass through.

Fact: Carbon dioxide is a molecule with impressive staying power. About 20-percent of all the carbon dioxide molecules emitted into the atmosphere this year will still be there 800 years from now.

Fact: While carbon dioxide is a natural part of Earth’s atmosphere, it is naturally only a tiny part of the atmosphere. There’s just enough natural carbon dioxide to keep the atmosphere – like the porridge that Goldilocks ate – not too hot and not too cold. At the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, carbon dioxide made up about 0.028-percent of the atmosphere.

Fact: Today carbon dioxide makes up .039-percent of the atmosphere – a 28-percent increase since the Industrial Revolution launched an aerial carbon dioxide assault.

Fact: Human activity since the Industrial Revolution has released nearly one trillion tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels.

Fact: Half of this amount was added in the last 30 years.

Fact: Earth’s average global temperature has risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since the start of the 20th Century.

Fact: Most of this increase took place since 1980.

Fact: The difference between the average global temperature today and the last Ice Age is about 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius)

Put all the facts together and do the math. It does not require a super-computer to determine the following: When you release a huge volume of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the atmosphere will heat up. It’s not politics, it’s chemistry.

What happens when the atmosphere rises to unnaturally high temperatures – the track we are currently on? Weather patterns change. You can think of it as weather on steroids or the Barry Bonds analogy. For those who do not follow sports, Barry Bonds was a professional baseball player, one of the best of his generation. Early in his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, his physique was sinewy and lean, like a panther. He hit 34 homeruns at the age of 28 in his best season at Pittsburgh. By 2001, he was playing for the San Francisco Giants and he was 36 years old, an age at which most professional athletes are well into decline. He had the physique of a grizzly bear and his head was the size of a watermelon. Just about everyone, including his ex-wife, believed he was taking steroids. That year he crushed 73 homeruns, the most ever by anyone in a single season and more than twice as many as when he was in his athletic prime. Did Barry Bonds hit homeruns before he allegedly took steroids? Yes. But after he allegedly took steroids, the homeruns became a much more frequent occurrence and many of them were titanic – “tape-measure” shots. That’s what happens to weather as the atmosphere continues to heat up. Storms of the century appear two or three times a decade, 40-year floods become annual events, the freakish becomes the norm.

What all of this means is that if we do nothing to dramatically slow down the rate at which our activities are spewing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, our grandchildren might very well be seeing Christmas cards showing Santa at the North Pole sunning himself in a canoe. My former boss, the Nobel laureate Steve Chu, who at the writing of this post is the Secretary of Energy, used to draw the analogy between global climate change and the electrical wiring of a house. “If experts told you that over the next ten years, there’s a 50-50 chance your electrical wiring will catch fire and burn down your house,” Chu used to ask, “would you change the wiring or take your chances?”

Experts are telling us that over the next few decades, and maybe sooner, our carbon dioxide emissions will reach a tipping point and the Earth is going to become a different planet. What are we going to do about it? When my daughters were growing up, I told them that people change their ways for one of two reasons: They want to, or they have to. Politicians know what you want to hear and that’s what most of them will tell you. Scientists don’t care what you want to hear, they’ll present you with the best available data and the best available data on global climate change and the burning of fossil fuels says this: We have to change our ways.

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Scientists and the Shoulders of Giants

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All discussions about science must at some point include some mention of those who are doing the science. We call these individuals “scientists.” There have been times during my career when I’ve felt like an anthropologist who has been set down in some remote location to observe a strange and most exotic tribe of humans. While this tribe shares many of the same phenotypical characteristics displayed by the rest of us, there are some characteristics that seem to be genetically hardwired into those who choose science as a career path. It is this special “scientist DNA” that drives some scientists into becoming diabolical lunatics hell-bent on world domination, and others to unleash some unspeakable creation that will force the rest of us to bow down in acknowledgement of their magnificence. It is this same unique DNA that causes scientists to go “BWAHAHAHA!” when they laugh.

Really?

For those of us who actually interact with scientists the notion that any of them would dream of being master of the world is absurd. The best scientists are so focused on their research they’re scarcely aware of the world outside of that work. True story: I once interviewed one the world’s foremost experts on fusion energy and when I dropped a casual reference to Star Trek, he asked: “What’s Star Trek?”

As for unleashing monsters that destroy the world as we know it, scientists live in the same world, if everybody’s gone who will provide for them? Scientists are notoriously poor hunters and gatherers and not so much at constructing shelters either. Has a scientist ever been featured on any of the Survivor television shows? Trust me, scientists are smart enough to know that in a world reduced to a primal state of existence, mesomorphs rule!

Also, contrary to what some in the political and theological arenas might have you believe, scientists are not self-congratulatory know-it-alls conspiring to wreck the socio-economic and moral fiber of human civilization. For one thing conspiracies require secrecy and scientists are notoriously bad at keeping secrets. Also conspiracies are usually spawned by cabals and scientists are notoriously non-cabalistic. They’re so absorbed in their work they’d forget to attend cabal meetings or pay their dues.

Finally, in 40 years of interviewing scientists, I have never heard a single “BWAHAHAHA!”

What I can tell you from personal experience is that scientists come in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. Some are deeply political (liberal and conservative), some are deeply religious, and some not so much on either of those topics. There are affable and empathetic individuals who seek human contact and interpersonal relationships, like the Leonard Hofstadter character on the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and there are those like the Sheldon Cooper character in that series, who would not know what a TV sitcom is and could care less that you  exist. As in all walks of life, the majority fall somewhere in between.

Some characteristics, however, are common to all the best scientists. They are obsessive and compulsive about their work and unflinchingly honest about the results they report because they have to be. Scientists seek to understand the rules of nature by asking questions and acquiring answers. They are like detectives only they don’t stop at who done it, they want to know why and how it was done and could it be done again only better. They propose answers based on a rigorous investigative method involving testing and analysis. These proposed answers are then made public for others to study and either refute or build-upon. This takes courage.

No one is tougher on a scientist than other scientists. Scientists do not want opinions, they want knowledge and personal feelings are seldom if ever spared in that quest. In that respect, science is a blood sport. When you publish research results that might represent years – maybe even a lifetime – of work to the intense scrutiny of your peers, the data will stand or fall on its own merits, but your interpretation of that data will be subject to challenges that may never go away. Every new question brings answers that not only raise new questions but sometimes resurrect old questions thought to have been settled. King Sisyphus and his boulder had nothing on science.

Finally, while those in the sciences are always loath to speak in absolutes, I can unequivocally tell you there are no dummy scientists. There are certainly naïve scientists and even more certainly there are arrogant and unjustifiably vain scientists, but dumb-bells need not apply. Science does not allow for frauds and poseurs, all such individuals are inevitably exposed and discarded into the bin of irrelevancy.

This is not true in the political and theological arenas from where the strongest critics of science and scientists seem to hail. I acknowledge that there are smart – even brilliant – politicians and theologians on the scene today, but there are also a great many individuals in both of these arenas that have proven themselves to be dumber than a bag of nails. Unfortunately, these individuals seem to draw the most attention from members of the media, an arena in which many of its members make those nails in a bag look smart (see Fox News).

Few scientists ever get rich. Even fewer get famous. But  every scientist who does get rich and famous owes some measure of their fortune and fame to the knowledge accumulated by many other scientists who came before them. As Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists in history, once wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

(Photo of JBEI scientists by Roy Kaltschmidt)