O Ceallaigh: Science Belief and Society

As regular readers of this blog have noticed, no doubt, there hasn’t been much posted here lately. It’s not like I haven’t been writing. But it’s been stuff that has a chance of paying the bills. Google AdSenseLess doesn’t qualify. Good thing I never believed in it. I blog here ‘cause I choose to, not ‘cause I expect it to pay the rent. And I chose not to write any blow-by-[hair-torn-out-in-frustration]-blow accounts of my struggles to complete the latest scientific grant proposal.

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Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth left no stone unturned, no receding glacier unphotographed, no graph unanimated, to point its moral: carbon dioxide generated by humans begets global warming.

Except one.

The human population curve.

Yes, he showed one. But while he was absolutely eager to show how Africa and South America fit together, how graphs of carbon dioxide levels and temperatures fit together, how graphs of temperatures and sea levels fit together, he did not do anything with the population curve. Two seconds and it was gone. But to anyone paying attention, anyone still awake after listening to Al Gore for an hour and a half, the perfect fit of the population curve with all the rest ought to have been a knock-you-off-your-seat.

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A little less than a month ago as I write this, I let it be known that I had not yet seen Al Gore’s global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Since I figured that, as a researcher in the field, I already knew what the message would be.

Well, now I have seen it. My church arranged for a free screening, and I agreed to moderate the discussion afterward. I saw pretty much what I expected to see in the movie. But the event provided an opportunity for some random reflections. Which, since I need to get something onto this blog this week, I thought I’d share.

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Science shows up in all kinds of places you might not expect. Yay! Yes, I’m a scientist. Regular readers of this blog are used to hearing about just about everything but science in this space, so the surprise and dismay at my self-identification can, and will be, forgiven. Even if it has been displayed on the sidebar since I started this blogging thing back in January. This entry, shock horror, is a science blog. It even touches on some of the things I do for a living. Really. Though I don’t do the cop thing. At least, not yet.

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No, I haven’t seen the movie An Inconvenient Truth. The one about global warming starring Al Gore, in case you’ve been spending all your time lately reading “Flavor Flav and Hoopz Don’t Last". Why haven’t I seen it? ‘Cause I’m a marine biologist, working in an oceanography laboratory. Check the sidebar. We do this for a living. Greenhouse Gas Effects R Us. We could have told you all this years ago. Lord knows we tried. Hell, I even tried here, on this blog. That entry got fewer hits in nine months than Flavor Flav gets in a day. The NOAA guys have tried. They got muzzled for it. Remember?

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In case you missed it – and where have you been these past six years? – America is a Christian nation. We are (it says here) worthy descendants of the Puritans who landed on these shores in the 17th century, seeking the freedom to establish a community that worshiped God as its people saw him. Or else. We are told that the path to prosperity, in this world and the next, is blazed with Rules such as Thou Shalt Not Drink. Through which you can be sound, in body and in mind, and be presentable to both your Maker and your Broker.

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If April is the cruelest month, thought the scientist as he got ready for his morning jog, then September is the saddest. In Maine, anyway. For, if April’s cruelty comes from the foreknowledge that its pastel promise will end ere long in stark brown blight and white frost, September’s sadness comes from the announcement: “Sorry, mate. This year is the same as any other."

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A colleague just sent me this press release from an organization called PEER - Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The press release gives PEER's take on the FY 2007 Library Plan for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA (PDF file obtainable at http://www.peer.org/docs/epa/06_21_8_library_plan.pdf), which the Bush Administration is (so says the release) implementing in advance of Congressional action on the FY 2007 budget.

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Yesterday (28 August 2006), while the gang over at Doug’s place were riffing on the theme of how denial is not a river in Egypt, somehow the topic of the Danube River came up. Something about how the view of de Nile would give you de blues. Like the Blue Danube, Herr Strauss. Except – the Danube is not blue.

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As you may know, back on Wednesday of this week (19 July 2006), US President George W. Bush vetoed legislation calling for increased Federal funding for stem cell research. Or perhaps you don’t know. It’s been tough for anything to get attention these last few days that isn’t the howl of a rocket. Or of a jet with a Star of David painted on it. Or of a blogger who is still surprised that Google AdSense hasn’t yet made the payments on the family yacht. Anyway, BigBadJohnny found himself in agreement with the veto, siding with those who consider research on embryonic stem cells “an insult to God�, and he asked me what I thought about it. Here’s my answer.

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I don't happen to know how many Ph.D.s are actually living and working in the United States at the moment. But I read that American universities have turned out no fewer than 30,000 per year since the 1960s; in 2003, the latest year for which official statistics are available, there were 46,024 newly-minted eggheads.

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On several occasions (for example, here, here, and here) since I started this blog on New Year’s Day 2006, I’ve commented on the extent to which our modern mores and attitudes are dependent on technology. It’s my thought, and one shared by not a few other scientists, that many of the customs that we now defend or assault on moral, ethical, or legal grounds originally arose as pragmatic human responses to health or disease issues.

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Once upon a time - in this particular case it was twenty years ago, plus or minus a few - a bright young fellow, we’ll call him Piet, set out to get his Ph.D. in phycology. More precisely, he took up the study of how algal cells divide, and what the differences that we find among the different algal species tells us of how all cells divide (information needed for, among other things, cancer research), as well as about the history of life on earth.

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I was playing around with pictures this evening. Normally, I don't mess with pictures in my blogs because, frankly, I'm too lazy. But this night, for some reason, I decided I was tired of looking at the large expanses of plain green that made up the stock template at my Blogspot site. So I thought I'd fix that. And then I noticed that the images I was playing with were showing up on Bloggerparty's Popular Content sidebar. With my nonsense tag names and no explanations. I could understand if some of my blogging buddies clicked on these names and went, well, "What the ..."? So, here's the "What the ..." Which just happens to be my opportunity to tell you a little bit about what I actually do for a living. When I'm not writing about war, and peace, and purloined bicycles, and geriatric cats, that is.

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I don't know how many of you outside the San Francisco Bay area are familiar with the political/social cartoon Bad Reporter by Don Asmussen, which has been running (currently, twice weekly) in the San Francisco Chronicle since 2003. I think it's a howl and well worth a wider distribution. Of course, some of you (you know who you are) would probably color it pink. Or maybe red, green, and black. Today's explosive offering describes the Special Forces takeout of the anti-development terror leader, Dar al-Hannah. A major victory for the War on Environmentalists, but al-Gore is still out there.

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