Category: Culture

In memory of Neil.

There will only ever be one Neil Armstrong.

Like millions of others on this planet, I was held spellbound by the historic and epic moment of man placing his mark on another heavenly body, the Moon.  I had been so wrapped up in NASA’s space missions that I took a holiday from work (I was working at the time for ICIANZ in Sydney, Australia) for the week of July 16th, 1969.

It was, of course, July 16th when the Apollo 11 Mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center culminating at precisely 20:17:39 UTC on July 20, 1969, the moment when the Lunar Module made lunar contact.

But in terms of me writing my own obituary for Neil, what could I offer?

Then a couple of items changed my mind.

Neil Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)

The first was reading the obituary printed in The Economist.  I have long admired the many, many beautiful obituaries that have been published by this newspaper and this one was no exception.  Take this extract from the Neil Armstrong obituary,

He had an engineer’s reserve, mixed with a natural shyness. Even among the other astronauts, not renowned for their excitability, he was known as the “Ice Commander”. Mike Collins, one of his crew-mates on the moon mission, mused that “Neil never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly.” He once lost control of an unwieldy contraption nicknamed the Flying Bedstead that was designed to help astronauts train for the lunar landing. Ejecting only seconds before his craft hit the ground and exploded, he dusted himself off and coolly went back to his office for the rest of the day. There was work to be done.

Then the beautiful words that bring the obituary to a close,

Earth’s beauty

Over half a century, the man who never admitted surprise was surprised to observe the fading of America’s space programme. The Apollo project was one of the mightiest achievements of the potent combination of big government and big science, but such enterprises came to seem alien as well as unaffordable. Mr Armstrong, who after his flight imagined bases all over the moon, sadly supposed that the public had lost interest when there was no more cold-war competition.

Yet the flights had one huge unintended consequence: they transformed attitudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet, “quite beautiful”, remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds. His reserve, after all, was not limitless. One photograph showed him in the module after he and Buzz Aldrin had completed their moon-walk, kicking and jumping their way across the vast, sandy, silver surface towards the strangely close horizon. He is dressed in his spacesuit, sports a three-day beard, and is clearly exhausted. On his face is a grin of purest exhilaration.

” … they transformed attitudes towards Earth itself. He too had been astonished to see his own planet, “quite beautiful”, remote and very blue, covered with a white lace of clouds.”   For that reason alone, we need to celebrate the achievement of the Apollo 11 mission for putting our own planet into perspective within the enormity of the universe.

The second item that persuaded me to write this was a wonderful historic insight into how a potential catastrophy on the surface of the Moon would have been handled by President Nixon.  This historic item was published on Carl Milner’s blog the other day, the specific item being  What if the Moon Landing Failed?  Republished with the very kind permission of Carl.

What if the Moon Landing Failed?

Posted on September 1, 2012 by 

When Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, they had a speech ready for him to deliver to the world just in case the 1969 moon landing had ended in disaster. In fact many experts believed there was a big chance that Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin could have really gotten stuck on the moon. It’s something we don’t really think about now because we all know it was such a success. American Archives have unearthed the speech that would have been delivered if the late great Armstrong and Aldrin had never made it back to earth. This is such a great piece of history that I thought I might never see.

Give it a read, It’s such a moving and well prepared speech, and such a good thing that President Nixon never had to delivered it.

So, as with millions of others, I am delighted that this speech remained unspoken and instead we experienced: “At 5:35 p.m. (US EDT), Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:50 p.m. on July 24.”

Neil Armstrong’s legacy is not only being part of the wonderful team that allowed man to make the first footprint on the Moon but also bringing into our human consciousness that this blue, wonderful planet we all live on is the only home we have.

First Full-View Photo of Earth
Photograph courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center
This famous “Blue Marble” shot represents the first photograph in which Earth is in full view. The picture was taken on December 7, 1972, as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth’s orbit for the moon. With the sun at their backs, the crew had a perfectly lit view of the blue planet.

Strikes me that celebrating July 20th each year as Blue Planet Day might not be a bad idea!  Any takers?  Now that would be a legacy for Neil!

Slightly late on duty!

A stirring set of pictures from the Queen’s Jubilee

At the end of June, pilot friend Bob Derham sent me an email which contained all of what follows.  I ‘filed’ it away and then forgot I had received it!  My apologies.  But as Europe was the subject of yesterday’s post, then maybe this can be seen as remaining on theme.  Enjoy.

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One last look back at those amazing Jubilee celebrations . . . as seen by the ‘Tail-end Charlie’ in Britain’s last airworthy Lancaster

Incredible footage has been released showing the bird’s eye view enjoyed by the crew aboard a Lancaster bomber flying over London for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

The aeroplane, which is part of the RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight (BBMF), flew in formation with aircraft including a Spitfire, Hurricane and Dakota transport aircraft down The Mall, followed by the Red Arrows aerobatic team – to the delight of crowds and the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace below.

As well as preserving a fleet of priceless aircraft and keeping them in tip-top flying condition, the BBMF reminds the nation of the sacrifices made during World War Two.

Spectacular: The tail gunner’s view from the Lancaster bomber, as it completed the Diamond Jubilee flypast. Buckingham Palace Gardens can be seen behind the tail of a Hurricane fighter, also of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, which flew in formation with the Lancaster
Final approach: Having lined up on The Mall, the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster flies towards Buckingham Palace with St James’ Park on the left and Birdcage Walk beyond.
The nose of the Lancaster passes over the Memorial to Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace.

The BBMF is based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire with many of its personnel, including pilots, acting as volunteers; the flight costs about £3m a year to run.

Squadron Leader Ian Smith, who is in charge of the BBMF, is the only permanent member, with all of the remaining pilots, navigators, air engineers and other crew coming from different airbases and ordinarily flying several different types of aircraft; from Typhoon fighters to the huge Hercules transport plane.

Cramped: The footage shows just how tight a fit it can be aboard a vintage aircraft and what a tight squeeze it is for the crew aboard the Lancaster bomber.

The aircrew give up three out of every four weekends from May to the end of September in order to fly and display the historic aircraft.

The footage, released by the Ministry of Defence, shows just how tight a fit it can be aboard a vintage aircraft, with the crew – clearly eager to catch a glimpse of the Queen – taking up most of the available space.

The historic flight includes the Lancaster, which first saw service in 1942. The ‘Lanc’ was the most famous of the Second World War bombers and gained renown for its starring role in the momentous ‘Dambuster’ raid on Germany’s Ruhr Valley in 1943.

Carrying a payload of 22,000lb and with a 1,500-mile range, the RAF bomber wreaked havoc on Germany. Some 3,500 were lost in action during the war.

The view of Buckingham Palace and The Mall beyond from the Lancaster bomber.
In formation: Incredible footage has been released showing the view enjoyed by crew aboard a Lancaster bomber flying over London for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Hurricane single-seater fighters played a crucial role in the Battle of Britain. Heavier and slower than the Spitfire, it was considered the RAF’s ‘workhorse’ against the Luftwaffe.

A remarkable total of 14,533 Hurricanes were built and served operationally on every day and in every theatre during the war. Only 12 are still airworthy worldwide.

The Spitfire is the iconic fighter that won legendary status against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. It possessed a top speed of 378mph, an altitude of 35,000ft and armed with two 20mm cannons, four Browning machine guns and two 250lb bombs.

One of the four that flew yesterday was P7350 – the oldest airworthy Spitfire in the world and the only one which actually fought in the Battle of Britain. It was shot up by a Messerschmitt 109 during combat in October 1940 but its wounded Polish pilot Ludwik Martel managed to crash-land it, wheels up, near Hastings.

The pride of Britain: The vintage planes – all powered by classic World War Two Merlin engines – roar across the London sky.
Flypast: The Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince of Wales, the Queen, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry watch the aerial action.
Aerobatic aces: The Red Arrows display team fly in formation over Buckingham Palace.
Stirring image: The Lancaster, centre, was accompanied by two Spitfires on both flanks and tailed by a Hurricane.

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A wonderful and incredibly nostalgic set of photographs.  Finally, let me close with a short piece of video of that Lancaster Bomber in flight.

YOU are responsible

An intriguing guest post from Schalk Cloete.

Introduction

Schalk is the author of the Blog One in a Billion which describes itself as ‘A DIY guide to saving our world while building a happy, healthy and wealthy life.‘  The Billion in the title refers to ‘the billion wealthiest world citizens, are creating serious global problems through our unsustainable consumption habits.’

As the Blog’s About page explains,

My name is Schalk Cloete, a South African research scientist currently living and working in Norway. Officially, my research is centered around the mathematical modelling of fluidized bed reactors; something which makes nice pictures, but which is not exactly the most brilliant blog material. I will therefore not bore you with further details about the kinetic theory of granular flows.

Nope, the material I write about here; building a happy, healthy, wealthy and sustainable life within our affluent modern society, should be much more interesting. I use the word “building” quite a lot because that is exactly what needs to be done. One literally needs to build the environment within which one functions from day to day with the same level of diligence and attention to detail one would use to build a house.

Anyway, with no further ado, let me go to Schalk’s guest post.

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YOU are responsible

Not so long ago, Paul left a very thought-provoking comment on my blog: the One in a Billion project, and suggested that my response to that comment was worth publishing as a guest post on Learning from Dogs. Needless to say, I gratefully accepted this generous offer!  Before we go any further though, I’d just like briefly to describe my blog so that the comment can be seen in perspective.

The principle objective of my blog is to advocate personal lifestyle change as a lasting solution to the pressing sustainability problems we are facing today.

The rationale behind this overall theme is threefold:

  1. Our current systems are fundamentally guaranteed to collapse (more about this here)
  2. A personal lifestyle change is the one and only sustainable solution to this impending crisis (further detail can be found here)
  3. Such personal lifestyle changes towards sustainable living are the one and only road to lasting health, wealth and happiness.

So, on that backdrop, here was Paul’s comment:

Any successful attempt at reversing and correcting the perilous journey humanity is on has to focus on the nature of change, how humans change, why the change required in this case is psychologically complex, and how the reward feedback process has to work. In my opinion these are the core issues to be tackled.

And my response:

Change is driven by a complex set of internal and external triggers that influence our consciousness every second of every day. If these triggers collectively indicate to a person (based on his or her unique subjective interpretations and subconscious filters) that some alternative is more attractive or that the current reality is unacceptable, motivation for change is granted. The exact nature of the change that this project requests is a change in day-to-day lifestyle choices which stems from shaping a person’s interpretation and filtering of the various internal and external triggers to accurately represent the reality that a lifestyle aimed at sustainable happiness is infinitely more attractive than one focused on consumerism.

This project tries to motivate people to take action by strongly emphasizing on the immediate personal benefits of making these lifestyle changes, the ease with which these changes can be made (and made permanent), the short and long term hazards of not making these changes and the moral obligation we have to the poor and to future generations to make these changes.

The change is psychologically complex because the entire environment we live in today just begs us to consume at ever increasing rates. This is the reason why this project repeatedly emphasizes on the construction of micro-environments to protect against this toxic macro-environment and make the correct actions natural and automatic. On a higher level, change is psychologically complex because we now have to abandon a system that has raised our standard of living tremendously while we still had abundant cheap fossil fuels and a limitless planet. Our most powerful weapon has turned into our greatest threat and it should come as no surprise that we seem totally unable to handle that.

The reward-feedback process in the One in a Billion initiative is actually quite interesting. As stated before, a lot of emphasis is placed on the immediate rewards of making certain lifestyle choices, but the thing that makes it really interesting is the holistic and complementary nature of this plan. Because it covers such a broad spectrum of areas, one quickly finds that gains in one area start to enhance gains in other areas. From personal experience, this truly is an extremely exciting journey and even becomes addictive, thereby all but guaranteeing further lifestyle changes. As soon as this spiral is started, the mind becomes a lot more open to the wealth of information on sustainability out there and this understanding then stimulates further action. In the end, you end up with a completely self-sustaining upwards spiral towards happy, healthy, wealthy and sustainable living.

In closing, the change that is needed within the developed world today can basically be summarized as follows: hundreds of millions of people must be reconditioned away from a debilitating and self-destructive culture of consumerism and entitlement towards a healthy and fulfilling culture of contribution and personal responsibility. It is my sincere hope that the One in a Billion project can contribute to this change and help overcome the great challenges discussed above.

This really is a dream of mine which I have recently described in more detail under my Dream heading for anyone who might be interested. Please spend a minute or two to think about this philosophy and whether you might consider developing a similar dream of your own.

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Trust me, Schalk’s blog is full of very interesting propositions.  Yet another sign that opinions are changing across this great interconnected world.

Future of the car?

The mistake we all make is to look behind us and think the future will be the same.

Let me start with something that is not really news.  Not news in the sense that it has been very widely reported.  I’m speaking of the probability, the high probability, that this year’s summer ice area in the Arctic will be a record low, with all the implications that this carries.  Let me refer to a recent BBC news item that included a stunningly powerful chart.

Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center said data showed that the sea ice extent was tracking below the previous record low, set in 2007.

Latest figures show that on 13 August ice extent was 483,000 sq km (186,000 sq miles) below the previous record low for the same date five years ago.

The ice is expected to continue melting until mid- to late September.

“A new daily record… would be likely by the end of August,” the centre’s lead scientist, Ted Scambos, told Reuters.

“Chances are it will cross the previous record while we are still in ice retreat.”

The US National Snow and Ice Data Center may be found here.

So to the piece that generated the title of this post, the future of the car.

On the 17th August, I wrote an article highlighting the fact that the U.S. leads the world in cutting CO2 emissions.  That was endorsed by an item published on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) website, that said,

U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from energy use during the first quarter of 2012 were the lowest in two decades for any January-March period. Normally, CO2 emissions during the year are highest in the first quarter because of strong demand for heat produced by fossil fuels. However, CO2 emissions during January-March 2012 were low due to a combination of three factors:

  • A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use
  • A decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices
  • Reduced gasoline demand

It was the last item that caught my eye.  Because it resonated with an article on Chris Martensen’s Peak Prosperity blog just over a week ago.  That article, written by Gregor Macdonald, was called The Demise of the Car.

About a third of the way into the article, Gregor writes,

But it’s not just India that has incorrectly invested in automobile transport. The other giant of Asia, China, has also placed large resources into auto-highway infrastructure.

It appears that at least a decade ago, the developing world made the same assumption about future oil prices as was made in Western countries. The now infamous 1999 Economist cover, Drowning in Oil, reflected the pervasive, status-quo view that the global adoption of the car could continue indefinitely. A decade later, however, we find that after oil’s extraordinary price revolution, the global automobile industry is now starved for growth.

Then a little further down in this interesting article there is this,

More broadly, however, global governments are captured by sunk-cost decision making as the past 60-70 years of highway infrastructure investment is now a legacy just too painful to leave behind. Interestingly, whether citizens and governments want to face this reality or not, features of the oil economy are already going away as infrastructure is increasingly stranded. Moreover, there are cultural shifts now coming into play as young people are no longer buying cars – in the first instance because they can’t afford them, and in the second instance because it’s increasingly no longer necessary to own a car to be part of one’s group. See this piece from Atlantic Cities:

Young People Aren’t Buying Cars Because They’re Buying Smart Phones Instead

Youth culture was once car culture. Teens cruised their Thunderbirds to the local drive-in, Springsteen fantasized about racing down Thunder Road, and Ferris Bueller staged a jailbreak from the ‘burbs in a red Ferrari. Cars were Friday night. Cars were Hollywood. Yet these days, they can’t even compete with an iPhone – or so car makers, and the people who analyze them for a living, seem to fear. As Bloomberg reported this morning, many in the auto industry “are concerned that financially pressed young people who connect online instead of in person could hold down peak demand by 2 million units each year.” In other words, Generation Y may be happy to give up their wheels as long as they have the web. And in the long term, that could mean Americans will buy just 15 million cars and trucks each year, instead of around 17 million.

If future car sales in the US will be limited by the loss of 2 million purchases just from young people alone, then the US can hardly expect to return to even 15 million car and truck sales per year. US sales have only recovered to 14 million. (And that looks very much like the peak for the reflationary 2009-2012 period)

Indeed, the migration from suburbs back to the cities, the resurrection of rail, and the fact that oil will never be cheap again puts economies – and culture – on a newly defined path to other forms of transport and other ways of working.

It’s a long and interesting article that demonstrates an old truth, no better put than in this quotation reputed to have been said by John F. Kennedy,

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

Back to fasting!

A closer look at the excellent work undertaken by Dr. Krista Varady.

Back on the 16th I wrote a post that was a follow-up to the previous day’s post about living a long life.  My follow-up was called, hardly surprisingly, Postscript to Long Life post.

In that follow-up post, I wrote this,

Over on the Healthy Fellow blogsite, there’s an interview with Dr. Varady.  The web link of that interview is here and crossing over and reading the full interview is much recommended.  Here’s a taste, pardon the pun, of that interview:

JP: Can you help explain the distinctions between alternate day fasting and caloric restriction?

Dr. Varady: Caloric restriction is basically daily calorie restriction where an individual would restrict themselves by about 15% to 40% of their energy needs daily. So basically every single day you’re undergoing the same amount of restriction, whereas alternate day fasting involves a fast day wherein the individual would only eat 25% of their energy needs. So about 500 calories or so and that’s alternated with something called a “feed day” where the individual would eat ad libitum – so as much as they want. However in our studies we show that people end up losing weight because they can’t fully make up for the lack of food on the fast day on the feed day.

I’ve been in touch with JP wondering if I might have permission to republish the full interview.  Unfortunately that wasn’t possible.  However JP did say that republishing a couple of paragraphs would be fine and I’m going to be cheeky in adding a couple to the one I already published above!

Anyway, before inserting those paragraphs, let me set the scene.  A very quick web search comes across the fact that Dr. Varady is an Assistant Professor at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences.  Her research work is described thus,

Research Interests

Dr. Varady, PhD

My research investigates the ability of novel dietary restriction strategies to facilitate weight loss and decrease cardiovascular risk in obese subjects. The most common dietary restriction protocol implemented is daily calorie restriction (CR), which involves reducing energy intake by 15 to 40% of needs daily. Another dietary restriction regimen employed, although far less commonly, is alternate day fasting (ADF). ADF regimens include a “feed day” where food is consumed ad-libitum over 24-h, alternated with a “fast day”, where food intake is partially or completely reduced for 24-h. ADF regimens were created to increase adherence to dietary restriction protocols since these regimens only require energy restriction every other day, rather than every day, as with CR. Recent findings from our lab demonstrate that ADF is an effective means of facilitating weight loss and improving several indicators of cardiovascular disease risk in overweight and obese subjects. Our findings also show that changes in adipose tissue physiology during weight loss may mediate these improvements in vascular health.

Current research activities

Developing novel diet and exercise regimens to facilitate weight loss and decrease cardiovascular disease risk in humans; Examining the intermediate role of adipose tissue in mediating the cardio-protective effects of diet and exercise; Investigating the behavioral factors that influence adherence to dietary restriction strategies.

So this is one lady that ought to understand the effects of what we shovel down our mouths.  OK, on to that interview.  From Part One, I selected this exchange,

JP: How long does it generally take for people to adapt to this new way of eating?

Dr. Varady: A lot of the subjects were saying that for the first two weeks it was pretty tough to basically change from a 3 meal a day eating pattern to just eating 1 meal a day and then 3 slightly bigger meals the next day. But they said that about after two weeks they totally got used to it and weren’t that hungry on the fast day anymore. They could undergo these really long periods of fasting without really feeling deprived. The other interesting thing that they were telling us was with regard to the feed day. The people didn’t binge. They only ate about 100% to 110% of their calorie needs.

Then from the second part of the interview, JP underlines an important point, “The truth of the matter is that research into ADF is still in its infancy and Dr. Varady is the first person to admit it. ”  I then went on to select this exchange between JP and Dr. Varady,

JP: It seems as though ADF provides a very broad array of health benefits. Do you have a theory about why this is possible?

Dr. Varady: In the human data the main thing you see is weight loss. Even if it’s done in normal weight people. The minute you start losing weight you all of a sudden see an improvement in the majority of these factors. A lot of the effects of alternate day fasting are mediated through weight loss. Losing weight is so tightly correlated with your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels and heart rate, etc.

Fasting May Reduce Age-Related Disease Risk Factors

Source: J Appl Physiol 103: 547-551, 2007 (link)

So this is not something of trivial interest, it’s serious research that could have a remarkable effect on the huge problems of obesity and poor diet that affect millions.  Do yourself a favour and read the interview now.  Part One and Part Two.

Finally, in that post on the 16th, I owned up to having got my weight down to 161.6 lbs (73.30 kgs).  Now here we are having completed my third week of 5:2 fasting and last Saturday morning my weight was 159.0 lbs (72.12 kgs).  The routine is very comfortable and as Dr. Varady mentioned, there is no sense of wanting to binge after the two days of fasting.

Too hot to handle!

A stark reminder that more of the same will hurt us.

On the 14th August I published a post with the title of From feeling to doing.  The post was a 15-minute video presented by David Roberts of Grist showing, in essence, how fundamentally simple was the issue of climate change and how profound the implications if we didn’t halt the rise in the temperature of Planet Earth.

I’m not going to insert that video in this post because you can click on the link above and do that yourself.  What I will do is to draw your attention to the accompanying article on Grist under the title of Climate change is simple: We do something or we’re screwed. That article includes the slides that were in the video, such as this one:

So with that in mind, here’s what the BBC published on their news website yesterday morning,

Science advisor warns climate target ‘out the window’

Pallab GhoshBy Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News

One of the Government’s most senior scientific advisors has said that efforts to stop a sharp rise in global temperatures were now unrealistic.

Professor Sir Robert Watson said that the hope of restricting the average temperature rise to 2C was “out the window”.

He said that the rise could be as high as 5C – with dire conseqences.

Professor Watson added the Chancellor, George Osborne, should back efforts to cut the UK’s CO2 emissions.

He said: “I have to look back (on the outcome of sucessive climate change summits) Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban and say that I can’t be overly optimistic.

“To be quite candid the idea of a 2C target is largely out of the window.”

As the BBC points out Professor Watson is a highly respected and world renown scientist on climate change policy and is currently Chief Scientist at the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and a former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Professor Watson was also with the World Bank and an advisor to former Vice President Al Gore.  The BBC item goes on,

Professor Watson, who is due to step down from his role at Defra next month, suggested that the Chancellor, George Osborne, reconsider his opposition to tough measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Mr Osborne has said that the UK’s ambitious targets for CO2 should be relaxed so as not to drive businesses to countries which have set themselves much lower targets.

“I would say to George Osborne, ‘work with the public sector. Work with the public on behavior change. Let’s demonstrate to the rest of the world that we can make significant progress here” Professor Watson argues that the UK and Germany should continue to take the lead in driving efforts to reach an effective international treaty.

Hurt Poorest

“If we carry on the way we are there is a 50-50 chance that we will get to a 3 degree rise,” he said.

“I wouldn’t rule out a 5 degree world and that would be quite serious for the people of the world especially the poorest. We need more political will than we currently have”.

The IPCC 2007 assessment summarised the probable impact of various temperature rise sceanrios.

It shows that the impact on human health, the availability of food and water, the loss of coastlines becomes progressively worse as the average temperature of the planet rises.

The 2C target was agreed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in 2010.

The majority of countries though prefer a lower target of 1.5C.

A number of analyses have also concluded that the 2C would be missed. The most recent was by the International Energy Agency earlier this year.

Professor Watson added that deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.

“This doesn’t take a revolution in energy technology, an evolution would get us there.”

What I would add to this report that has been widely circulated is that while it’s natural to assume, ‘We need more political will than we currently have‘, that political will flows from the will of the people.

Take the effect of a 4C rise, as David Roberts explains,

Which is described in the Grist article as,

Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

So come on people, get real!  Make sure that the democratic systems work and that our leaders know the sort of change that has to take place.  As the wise Professor highlighted, ‘… deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.’  Sort of makes sense to me.  How about you?

Avoiding the catastrophe of indifference.

Doing nothing is not an option.

Introduction

So back to non-doggy stuff although I hope the themes of truth and integrity continue to rein supreme though this blog!

In the last couple of weeks, I have devoted a number of posts to the subject of change, as in how do we humans change.  The first post was Changing the person: Me where I started examining the process of change; by process I mean the models of change commonly understood in, say, management change.

The next post was You have to feel it! which drew heavily on research from Ezra M. Markowitz & Azim F. Shariff regarding the psychological aspects posed by climate change to the human moral judgement system.

The final post was From feeling to doing.  In this post, David Roberts of Grist showed that one could put aside all the ‘head stuff’ about change and in just 15 minutes cover all that one would ever want to know about the biggest issue of all facing this planet.

So rather a long introduction to two guest posts that today and tomorrow set out the case for what we all have to consider; doing nothing is just not a viable option.  The first is from Martin Lack of the popular and hard-hitting blog Lack of Environment.

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Avoiding the catastrophe of indifference.

by Martin Lack.

Paul has very kindly invited me to follow-up his recent post regarding David Roberts’ item on the Grist blog entitled ‘Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could’ followed by a second post in which was embedded David Roberts’ excellent video ‘Climate change is simple – we do something or we’re screwed’.

So my guest post is an expansion of a comment I submitted in response to the first of those two posts, You have to feel it.  However it would be wrong not to first add my voice to all those that have applauded David Roberts for all his excellent work.

Clive Charles Hamilton

In 2010, the Australian social anthropologist Clive Hamilton published Requiem for a Species: Why we Resist the Truth About Climate Change – one of the scariest but most important books I think I have ever read.

Reading Hamilton’s book was one of the reasons I decided, as part of my MA in Environmental Politics, to base my dissertation on climate change scepticism in the UK.

In the process, I read much but Hamilton’s book was one of very few that I actually read from cover to cover – I simply did not have time to read fully all the books for my research. However, because I have a background in geology and hydrogeology, my greatest challenge was learning to think like a social scientist.

I was all for taking these climate change sceptics head on and demolishing their pseudo-scientific arguments or taking them to task for the ideological prejudices that drive them to reject what scientists tell us. Thus, it fell to my dissertation supervisor to mention politely but firmly that I needed to disengage with the issues and analyse patterns of behaviour and frequency of arguments favoured by different groups of people.  In short, I needed to stop trying to prove the scientific consensus correct and start understanding the views held by those that dispute that consensus.

Having said how I read Professor Hamilton’s book in full, I must admit to learning about a load of other equally-scary sounding books since subscribing to Learning from Dogs;  Lester Brown’s World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse being just one that comes to mind!

David Roberts

Then of course there is what David Roberts himself says, which is just as scary. I think we have good reason to be scared. However, as Hamilton points out, we must move beyond being scared, which is simply debilitating, and channel our frustration into positive action.

Because if we do not, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that civilisation may well fail. If that means engaging in acts of civil disobedience, as it has done for James Hansen and many others, well, so be it. I suspect that nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without someone breaking the law in order to draw attention to injustice – the abolition of slavery and child labour, the extension for all of the right to vote including women, come to mind.

That is the conclusion of Hamilton’s book; that civil disobedience is almost inevitable (p.225). Just as turkeys won’t vote for Christmas, our politicians are not going to vote for climate change mitigation unless we demand that they do so.

So it was the steer from my dissertation supervisor that lead me to read David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History, and much more about psychology. All of which guided the Introductory section of my dissertation, which summarised the philosophical roots of scepticism, the political misuse of scepticism, and the psychology of denial; see a recent post on my blog Lack of Environment.   In terms of what I want to say here, it is an elaboration of the last of those topics, the psychology of denial.  Indeed, it formed the preamble to the findings of my research.

To help me research this unfamiliar subject, my dissertation supervisor sent me a PDF copy of a paper written by Janis L. Dickinson in 2009 and published in Ecology and Society.  It was called ‘The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change’ and dealt with a challenging, almost taboo subject, namely our own mortality.

Despite my initial reluctance to learn about psychology, the more I read the more I realised just how central psychology was to explaining why we humans have failed to address the problem of climate change.

I ended up summarising the work of Dickinson, together with other sources of material, in the following manner.

In considering reasons for the collective human failure to act to prevent anthropogenic global warming (AGW), a number of authors appear to have been influenced by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). For example, Aaronovitch proposed that we try to avoid the “catastrophe of indifference” that a world devoid of meaning or purpose represents (p. 340).  Hamilton suggested that climate disruption “has the smell of death about it” (p. 215).

Janis Dickinson elaborates a little more, exploring what she describes as “…one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner”, then referring to what psychologists call terror management theory (TMT) – Dickinson also categorises denial of climate change; denial of human responsibility and immediacy of the problem as proximal responses (Dickinson 2009).

Furthermore, as referenced here, both Dickinson and Hamilton suggest that other distal TMT responses, such as focussing on maintaining self-esteem or enhancing self-gratification, can be counter-intuitive and counter-productive. Dickinson summarises the recent work of Tim Dyson by saying “[b]ehavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes” (ibid).

Based on the evidence of the most frequently used arguments for dismissing the scientific consensus regarding climate change, I collated the findings of my research and which might be summarised as follows:

Having analysed the output of such UK-based Conservative think-tanks (CTTs), along with that of scientists, economists, journalists, politicians and others, it would appear that the majority of CTTs dispute the existence of a legitimate consensus, whereas the majority of sceptical journalists focus on conspiracy theories; the majority of scientists and economists equate environmentalism with a new religion; and politicians and others analysed appear equally likely to cite denialist or economic arguments for inaction.

As I find myself saying quite frequently, the most persistent arguments against taking action to mitigate climate change are the economic ones.

However, as all the authors mentioned have suggested, or at least inferred, I think it is undoubtedly true that the most potent obstacle to people facing up to the truth of climate change is our psychological reluctance to accept responsibility for something that is obviously deteriorating – namely our environment!

Nevertheless, all is not yet lost.  We do not all need to go back to living in the Dark Ages to prevent societal and environmental collapse but we do need to accept a couple of fundamental realities:

  1. Burning fossilised carbon is trashing the planet. Therefore, fossil fuel use must be substituted in every possible process as rapidly as possible. Unfortunately, it is not substitutable in the most damaging process of all; aviation.  That merely increases the urgency of substituting where we can (i.e. power, lighting and temperature control).
  2. Poor people in developing countries have a legitimate right to aspire to having a more comfortable life but the planet definitely cannot cope with 7 to 10 billion people living like we do in the “developed” countries.

Once we accept these realities, we will learn to use less fossil fuels and, if we can become self-sufficient using renewable energy sources, we can have a flat-screen TV in every room and leave them on standby and the A/C on full power 24/7 and still have a clear conscience. However, we must get off fossil fuels ASAP.

oooOOOooo

I am indebted to Martin for writing such an insightful analysis of how we all have to change.  Tomorrow, another guest post further exploring the options that face us all as we work towards a sustainable future.  As I opened this post, doing nothing is not an option!

Two lost souls

Remaining with the theme of love, love lost and new love.

John Hurlburt sent me the following last week and it is so perfect as a sequel to the writings of the last two days.  That was John’s poetry last Saturday on Learning from Dogs, by the way.

oooOOOooo

Two lost souls

After losing his parents, this three year old orangutan was so depressed he wouldn’t eat and didn’t respond to any medical treatments. The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness.

The zoo keepers found an old sick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog to the animal treatment center. The dog arrived at the same time the orangutan was there being treated.

The two lost souls met and have been inseparable ever since.  The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend.  They are together 24 hours a day in all their activities.

They live in Northern California where swimming is their favorite past-time, although Roscoe (the orangutan) is a little afraid of the water and needs his friend’s help to swim.

Together they have discovered the joy and laughter in life and the value of friendship.

They have found more than a friendly shoulder to lean on.

Long Live Friendship!

I don’t know, but some say life is too short, others say it is too long, but I know that nothing that we do makes sense if we don’t touch the hearts of others.  While it lasts!

May you always have love to share, health to spare, and friends who care…..even if they are a little hairy at times.

oooOOOooo

I must say that the generosity of so many of my readers in sending me these beautiful examples of what is really important in this world of ours touches me deeply.  Thank you, John.  Thank you, one and all.

What is love?

How the relationship that we have with domesticated animals taught us the meaning of love.

This exploration into the most fundamental emotion of all, love, was stimulated by me just finishing Pat Shipman’s book The Animal Connection.  Sturdy followers of Learning from Dogs (what a hardy lot you are!) will recall that about 5 weeks ago I wrote a post entitled The Woof at the Door which included an essay from Pat, republished with her permission, that set out how “Dogs may have been man’s best friend for thousands of years longer than we realized“.

The following day, I wrote a further piece introducing the book and then commenced reading it myself.  Please go there and read about the praise that the book has received.

What I want to do is to take a personal journey through love.  I should add immediately that I have no specialist or professional background with regard to ‘love’ just, like millions of others, a collection of experiences that have tapped me on the shoulder these last 67 years.

I would imagine that there are almost as many ideas about the meaning of love as there are people on this planet.  Dictionary.com produces this in answer to the search on the word ‘love’.

love

[luhv]  noun, verb, loved, lov·ing.
noun

  1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
  2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
  3. sexual passion or desire.
  4. a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person;sweetheart.
  5. (used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection,or the like): Would you like to see a movie, love?

But, I don’t know about you, those definitions leave something missing for me.  Here’s my take on what love is, and it’s only by having so many dogs in my life that I have found this clarity of thought.

Love is trust, love is pure openness, love is knowing that you offer yourself without any barriers.  Think how you dream of giving yourself outwardly in the total surrender of love.  Reflect on that surrender that you experience when deeply connecting, nay loving, with your dog.

Here’s how Pat Shipman expressed it in her book:

Clearly, part of the basis of our intimacy with tame or domesticated animals involves physical contact.  People who work with animals touch them.  It doesn’t matter if you are a horse breeder, a farmer raising pigs, a pet owner, a zoo keeper, or a veterinarian, we touch them, stroke them, hug them.  Many of us kiss our animals and many allow them to sleep with us.  We touch animals because this is a crucial aspect of the nonverbal communication that we have evolved over millennia.  We touch animals because it raises our oxytocin levels – and the animal’s oxytocin levels.  We touch animals because we and they enjoy it. (p.274)

Pat soon after writes,

From the first stone tool to the origin of language and the most recent living tools, our involvement with animals has directed our course.

Thus it is not beyond reason to presume that tens of thousands of years of physical and emotional closeness between humans and their animals have developed the emotion of love in us humans, so eloquently expressed in art and life.

There’s another aspect of what we may have learned from dogs.  In Alexandra Horowitz’s book Inside of a Dog, she writes of the way that dogs look at us,

Having been folded into the world of humans, dogs no longer needed some of the skills that they would to survive on their own.  As we’ll see, what dogs lack in physical skills, they make up for in people skills.

AND THEN OUR EYES MET ….

There is one final, seemingly minor difference between the two species.  This one small behavioral variation between wolves and dogs has remarkable consequences.  The difference is this: dogs look at our eyes.

Dogs make eye contact and look to us for information – about the location of food, about our emotions, about what is happening.  Wolves avoid eye contact.  In both species, eye contact can be a threat: to stare is to assert authority.  So too is it with humans.  In one of my undergraduate psychology classes, I have my students do a simple field experiment wherein they try to make and hold eye contact with everyone they pass on campus.  Both they and those on the receiving end of their stares behave remarkably consistently: everyone can’t wait to break eye contact.  It’s stressful for the students, a great number of whom suddenly claim to be shy: they report their hearts begin to race and they start sweating when simply holding someone’s gaze for a few seconds.  They concoct elaborate stories on the spot to explain why someone looked away, or held their gaze for a half second longer.  For the most part, their staring is met with deflected gazes from those they eyeball.

Then a few sentences later, Alexandra continues to write,

Dogs look, too.  Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.  Not only is this pleasing to us – there is a certain satisfaction in gazing deep into a dog’s eyes gazing back at you – it is also perfectly suited to getting along with humans. (pps 45-46)

No apologies for now inserting the photograph of Pharaoh that adorns the Welcome page of Learning from Dogs.  Underlines what Alexandra wrote above in spades.

Now that is a gaze!

OK, time to start bringing this to a close.

The Toronto Star ran a great review of Pat Shipman’s book from which I will just take this snippet,

“But understanding animals and empathizing with them also triggered other changes in humanity’s evolution, Shipman said.

All those things allow people to live with people. Once people have domesticated animals, they start to live in stable groups. They have fields, crops and more permanent dwellings.”

In other words, we can see that living with animals took us from nomadic hunter-gatherers to living with other people in stable groups; the birth of farming.  It is my contention that the evolution of communities and the resulting more stable relationships elevated love leading to love becoming a higher order emotion than just associated with the ‘grunt’ of reproduction.

I started by saying that it was Pat Shipman’s book that stimulated me to wander through my own consciousness and realise that when I bury my face in the side of one of the dogs, say on the bed, it resonates with the most ancient memories in my human consciousness.  Indeed, I am of no doubt that my openness and emotional surrender to that dog enables me to be a better, as in more loving, person for Jean.

So let me close this essay by asking you to return here and read the guest post tomorrow from author Eleanore MacDonald, where Eleanore writes of the loss of their dog Djuna.  You will read the most precious and heart-rending words about love.  Thank you.

Postscript to Long Life post

More information about fasting, not about being female!

In yesterday’s post on Learning from Dogs, I wrote that there are two important aspects of living a longer life.  The first one was be a female and the second one was about fasting.  I propose to expand a little on that second aspect because of the number of people who found the topic so interesting.

Valter D. Longo and students.

In yesterday’s post there was reference to the work that Professor Valter D. Longo of the University of Southern California (USC) has been undertaking.  As the USC web reference explains, Valter Longo is the Director of the Longevity Institute, a Professor of Gerontology and Biological Sciences and the Edna Jones Chair of Biogerontology, so if anyone understands how humans tick, it’s likely to be this man!  As his research overview states,

He is interested in understanding the mechanisms of aging in organisms ranging from yeast to humans. The focus is on the conserved nutrient signaling pathways that can be modulated to protect against age-dependent oxidative damage and delay or prevent diseases of aging including cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.

(Any questions, ask Prof. Longo not me!)

BBC Presenter Michael Mosley with Dr Krista Varady

The other learned person referred to in yesterday’s post was Dr. Krista Varady.  This is what was written,

Dr Krista Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago carried out an eight-week trial comparing two groups of overweight patients on ADF. (ADF = Alternative Day Fasting)

Over on the Healthy Fellow blogsite, there’s an interview with Dr. Varady.  The web link of that interview is here and crossing over and reading the full interview is much recommended.  Here’s a taste, pardon the pun, of that interview:

JP: Can you help explain the distinctions between alternate day fasting and caloric restriction?

Dr. Varady: Caloric restriction is basically daily calorie restriction where an individual would restrict themselves by about 15% to 40% of their energy needs daily. So basically every single day you’re undergoing the same amount of restriction, whereas alternate day fasting involves a fast day wherein the individual would only eat 25% of their energy needs. So about 500 calories or so and that’s alternated with something called a “feed day” where the individual would eat ad libitum – so as much as they want. However in our studies we show that people end up losing weight because they can’t fully make up for the lack of food on the fast day on the feed day.

Let me add a personal perspective on this.  On the morning of the first day after our two-day fast, my weight was 162.5 lbs (73.71 kg), on the morning of the second day after our fasting days my weight was 161.8 lbs (73.39 kgs) and on the morning of the third day after our fasting, my weight was 161.6 lbs (73.30 kgs).  Ergo even though we were back to eating normally for three days after our two days of fasting, I continued to lose 0.9 lbs (0.4 kgs).

So if you have any concerns over cardiovascular health or want to explore a realistic way of losing excess weight, then do read the interview.  Part One of that interview is here and Part two here.

As is said, we are what we eat and I shall close this postscript with a link to an article on the Mother Nature Network website that was published a little over a year ago: 18 foods that fight common ailments – Try healthy eats that help fight diabetes, heart disease, migraines and more.

So may we all live forever!