Earth’s climate is changing. If you’re not wearing blinkers, and usually follow the news, this should no longer be a controversial statement to you. (Of course, climate change is a better descriptor than global warming. Earth’s temperatures will not literally rise everywhere all the time. Instead, extremes of climates will become more extreme, and the overall nature of Earth’s climate will shift dramatically.)

For example, from this great New York Times piece:

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”

The question, then, apparently shifts to: ‘Is this climate shift man-made? Or at the least, is the climate shift exacerbated by human contribution?’ People who are ‘skeptics’ on this matter hold forth on how Earth’s climate has changed many times before. On the one hand, they doubt claims made by climate scientists—that the Earth is becoming hotter—based on their research, and on the other hand cite the very same scientists’ results on how temperatures on Earth have varied over the millenia.

A crude example—in the New York Times article cited above, a commenter writes:

Hasn’t “extreme weather” raged world wide since time began.? I think the dinosaurs might have something to say about that. It is time to put your words in the proper respective in regards to how long the Earth has existed………Solve our current pressing problems, then worry about how to pay for “climate control”. If you can.

So very true. The question is—where did said climate change, so naturally occuring on Earth over millenia, leave species that existed in those times? Thriving and healthy? Or as dust covered fossils scattered around the world? About 90-99% of all species of life to have existed on Earth are now extinct. Yes, that many.

What many people don’t realize is—it doesn’t matter if the climate shift is man-made. The Earth does not need humankind; we need the Earth to maintain a certain kind of climate for us to thrive, and, indeed, survive. If the Earth’s climate changes to an extreme, and we are not able to adapt to the new conditions quickly enough, we will run a very real risk of joining those 99% of extinct species. The Earth will happily continue to exist, and a new burst of evolution will spring forth a new dominant species to rule the Earth, just like homo sapiens now, and the dinosaurs before us.

Let’s stop fighting over whether we are the reason climate change is accelerating. (Most likely, we are, but as I said, that’s besides the point.) There’s absolutely no doubt human activities at least contribute to global warming (via burning fossil fuels, for example), and there’s no doubt a drastic change in climate is not good at all for the overall health of the human species. We already know what a runaway global warming process leads to: just look at Venus! It’s currently so toxic that we have a hard time even getting our space craft to operate on its surface. We will be extinct long before Earth’s global warming reaches even a percentage point of that of Venus. Not in 10 years, not in 100, not even in 1000, but the seeds of the far future are being planted now.

So let’s do something about it! I can understand the influence exerted by industries that would suffer if we changed our energy usage, but seriously, the health of the human species should take precedence over the relatively shorter term goals and ambitions of interested parties. Let’s stop being tone deaf; let’s take our collective hands off of our ears and eyes and start believing our own data. And please, let’s not selectively trust our scientists. They are experts in their field, and know what they’re talking about.

And no, climate science is not the same as economics and statistics.

The Earth is the only home we have; let’s not burn it down. Even if we are not the primary cause of the fire, we have to make our best effort to contain it, and if possible, put it out. Our survival depends on it.

P.S.: While looking for a suitable link for global warming on Venus, I found more links disputing the comparison than affirming it. Interestingly, most of such articles, with analyses, are written by, for example, Economists, and medical doctors; articles by climate scientists seem to be curiously missing. I will address this “dispute”, since I brought up the comparison with Venus, but in a separate post—let’s only focus on Earth for now.

Species that reproduce sexually usually need two partners to reproduce, right? Right. What I didn’t know was, females of some species (that usually reproduce sexually) have apparently been observed to be able to reproduce without a mate—rarely, and when they’re in captivity and away from potential mates.

But now, virgin births have been observed in snakes–in the wild, with males present nearby!

They captured pregnant copperhead and cottonmouth female pit-vipers from the field, where males were present.

The snakes gave birth, allowing the scientists to study the physical and genetic characteristics of the litters. […]

“That’s between 2.5 and 5% of litters produced in these populations may be resulting from parthenogenesis.

“That’s quite remarkable for something that has been considered an evolutionary novelty,” he said.

No insights yet on how and why this happens, though, or what implications it may have.

But this is fascinating, nonetheless.

The latest in paleontology:

[…] “a filamentous body covering obviously represents the plesiomorphic state for dinosaurs in general,” wrote Rauhut’s team.

Plesiomorphic is another way of saying “ancestrally typical.” In short, it was feathers all the way down.

What?! All two legged dinosaurs had feathers? What were we thinking all these years? Has this been verified?

Now they’ll have to make Jurassic Park all over again.

Found this article recently, where they wanted to check how microscopic worms would do in space. Turns out, they do fine—in fact, they actually live longer in space! Additionally:

“We identified seven genes, which were down-regulated in space and whose inactivation extended lifespan under laboratory conditions,” Szewczyk said in a press release. This basically means that seven C. elegans genes usually associated with muscle aging were suppressed when the worms were exposed to a microgravity environment. Also, it appears spaceflight suppresses the accumulation of toxic proteins that normally gets stored inside aging muscle.

They’re not sure what the biological mechanisms might be behind this phenomenon.

I wonder, though—how much of it can be simple chemistry and fluid dynamics? We know that at small enough length scales (such as those of microscopic organisms) viscosity is a much stronger agent than inertia (governed by mass, and to an extent, gravity). Often, gravitational effects are ignored when doing small scale analyses. How do things change in the actual biology when gravity is really zero, not just as an approximation?

Also from the article:

“Most of us know that muscle tends to shrink in space. These latest results suggest that this is almost certainly an adaptive response rather than a pathological one. Counter-intuitively, muscle in space may age better than on Earth. It may also be that spaceflight slows the process of aging.”

I’m not sure why this seems novel. My thought has always been that muscle atrophy in space is due to lack of use, i.e. adaptation. This is why astronauts take special care to exercise their leg muscles while at the International Space Station. The legs no longer need to support the considerable weight of the human body, and the body efficiently starts optimizing its resources!

But perhaps (and most likely) my lack of knowledge allows me to simplify a phenomenon that a physiologist would find many angles to! I’d love to know those angles though—anyone reading this who can help?

One of my pet peeves with scientific journalism is the propensity to confuse correlation with causation. The idea is that just because two things are observed to happen at the same time (or before, or after, one another), does not imply that one causes the other.

In the latest example of this, the link between chocolate and good health is revisited.

The article opens with:

People who eat chocolate regularly tend to be thinner, new research suggests.

… which implies that a causation has been observed. The article goes on to make the following points:

[…] those who ate chocolate a few times a week were, on average, slimmer than those who ate it occasionally.

The link remained even when other factors, like how much exercise individuals did, were taken into account.

[…] it is how often you eat chocolate that is important, rather than how much of it you eat. The study found no link with quantity consumed.

So… I’d still lose weight if I ate a tonne of chocolate very frequently? Really?!

The most important statement, however, comes a little later:

But the findings only suggest a link - not proof that one factor causes the other.

… and,

And if you are looking to change your diet, you are likely to benefit most from eating more fresh fruits and vegetables.

Now guess what the headline of this article, which itself says that it’s only a link, and talks about maintaining an overall good diet, reads.

Chocolate ‘may help keep people slim’

Perfect, isn’t it?