The Age of Chicken Little

Just a little interim post (I'm in the air today completely missing the 10th of October.)

Before I left I was reading a book consisting of a collection of essays called Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis. He won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction, a chemical procedure that allows scientists to "see" the structures of the molecules of genes.

It's an excellent book. Excellent. Part of it is about his belief that we aren't destroying the ozone layer (it's almost economic & climatic conspiracy theory - but it actually makes utter sense) and there's a bit about what he thinks is the real reason pot became illegal. Anyways, I've excerpted a portion of the chapter on how we're not actually responsible for global warming either titled "The Age of Chicken Little." Enjoy.

People are jerked about almost monthly by new announcements by spokesmen for various government agencies and research groups sponsored by government funds. They tell us that every time we start our cars we contribute to greenhouse gasses. Every time we vent Freon from a refrigerator, air conditioner or spray can into the atmosphere we are destroying the ozone layer and contributing to the worldwide incineration of all life. It makes no sense, in the light kf the climatic history of the world, to talk about catastrophic changes in the weather being caused by human activities.

What happened in the 1980's? We have brought something down on ourselves as expensive, although not quite as brutal, as a world war. Did everybody forget that we were just big ants? Did somebody convince us that just because most of our religions had lost their appeal, we ourselves were suddenly gods? That we were now the masters of the planet and the guardians of the status quo? That the precise climatic conditions that happen to exist on the Earth today in the Holy Twentieth Century, the Climatic Century of 001, the first year of human domination of all Earth, should be here forever, in secula seculorum? All the good species are here now. None shall perish and no new ones are welcome. Biology is no longer allowed: the Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change are now in charge. Evolution is over.

I recall a cartoon. A caveman is raging in front of his cave glaring up at a flash of lightning and pointing an accusing finger toward his mate and the fire burning in the mouth of the cave, "It didn't used to do that before you started making those things."

The future of the Earth has got nothing to do with the creatures that live clustered along the shores of its great bodies of water. We are just here for the ride. And the ride is not smooth. It never has been smooth.

The world that the Vikings sailed out into a thousand years ago was warmer by far than it is today. Since then it has gotten colder. It even got colder last century. It didn't do so in response to the Viking ships or the Spanish horses dropping manure on the California poppies. It got colder all over the planet and drier on the West Coast of the United States for reasons that only the planets and the sun can be held accountable. It got colder and drier because angles and distances of Earth and our major heat source changed - things that neither the Vikings nor the Spanish could measure and surely did not affect.

We can't position our planet relative to the sun just exactly to our liking. We can't make sure that the average temperature in San Diego for the next thousand yuears will be a comfortable 68 degrees Fahrenheit. We can stop worrying about whether we can control it because we don't have anything to do with it. It just plain isn't stable. It may get colder in the coming centuries - it may get hotter.

The computer jocks who hardly go outside even on nice days write the programs for their bosses at IPCC. They predict that global warming is coming and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple.

If we had sailed into here in space ships and the physical history of the place was that the climate had always been the same, then we might reasonably think that there was an amazing delicate balance on the Earth that we should not upset, if for no other reason, just to show a little respect. Maybe we could justify hiring experts or priests to help us.

But that is not at all what happened. We eveolved here, and we evolved in the midst of some pretty serious climatic changes. They were serious enough so that millions of years and extinctions later we can still see the effects of the changes and give names like "carboniferous" and "cretaceous" and "Eemian" to the very different climatic epochs because they were different. There is no reason to think things are going to stay the same now - with or without us.

The vast majority of the world is invisible to our eyes regardless ofthe brightest of our lights, and we can't hear more than a tiny bit of the sound of it with our ears, and we can't feel the subtle textures of it with our fingers. Even with all our instruments, long tubes on mountains, and a Hubble telescope in space, we are blind to the myriad of complex energies that are whirling and vibrating and clattering all around us day and night, year after year, millennium after millenium.

The appropriate demeanor for a human is to feel lucky that he is alive and to humble himself in the face of the immensity of things and have a beer. Relax. Welcome to Earth. It's a little confusing at first. That's why you have to come back over and over again before you really learn to enjoy yourself.

The sky is not falling.