“Why a Four Degree Celsius Warmer World Must Be Avoided” Infographic

The World Bank (not known for its bleeding-heart environmental activism) has issued a new report on global warming entitled “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4 Degree C Warmer World Must Be Avoided.”

Why should we avoid it? Because it would be verging on apocalyptic. Coral reefs dead, rainforests dead, sections of the tropics becoming uninhabitable due to heat, spreading deserts, ice sheets collapsing, rising sea levels inundating cities and entire countries… The infographic below tries to be optimistic, but it is best to know the truth: we are currently a ship of fools sailing for planetary-scale disaster. So much for tending God’s garden (this will be the second time we’ve lost that job!).

Politically there is no will  (at least in the USA and other major CO2 emitters) to fix the problem. As I have said before, I think we are being forced into the geoengineering option, because the technical solution, no matter how crazy it is, is not as difficult as the moral-political solution.

In any case, enjoy the graphic, and check out the others at the Visual.ly environment section.

A 4 Degree Warmer World – We can and must avoid it infographic by worldbank.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: A Philosophical and Ethical Book Review

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is a spectacular novel. It is a tour-de-force through six stories, each story with its own genre, creating a multigenre whole unlike any work I’ve read before. (There may be other works out there like this, but I don’t know them – I’m an ethicist, not a lit guy – so if you have suggested readings, let me know!)

I picked up this book because I saw the trailer for the movie version by the Wachowskis (of “The Matrix” fame) that is coming out today. I could tell that the story was going to be fascinatingly intricate, and that a movie could not do it justice, so I wanted to read the novel first before seeing the movie. I won’t include the trailer here because it may affect your reading of the story; it did for me (while reading I kept thinking “I wonder who is going to play this character?”). I will review the movie in a few days and include the trailer then.

In this review I am going to try to avoid specific spoilers, however, the generalities of the work will come up and especially what I see as the moral and philosophical core of the work. If you read this review it may spoil the novel for you on that level, so if that concerns you, just go read the book instead, then come back.

But if you want to know anyway, come along. Here’s how we will go: 1) The story itself, its style and composition, 2) Its major themes, 3) Its similarities and differences with a few other works, and a few allusions I picked up, 4) Its movie potential.

What Kind of a World for Our Children?

Earth as the “Blue Marble” of Apollo 11, from NASA (via Wikipedia).

My father is a quiet man. Very smart, but not exactly philosophical. I once asked him if he had any wisdom to share with me after his long life and he said (in sum) “no.”

Which is why something he said to me many years before strikes me as all the more important. He said “I don’t think we’re leaving you a world as good as the one we were given.”

When you are a little kid that doesn’t really make sense. The world changes? The world gets better and worse? Why is it worse now? What happened to make it worse?

Now that I’m an adult it unfortunately makes perfect sense.

Brian’s Links 18 May 2012: Medicine, Crime, Climate Change, and Creatures

A cute little jumping robot.

This US wind map is really cool.

Conservation in the Age of Man – its not about protecting the wild anymore – its more like gardening… and using nature to protect people. An interesting shift in philosophy from the Nature Conservancy.

Mind over matter: paralyzed patients moving robotic arms with only their minds.  In the video, a locked-in patient uses her mind via the robotic arm to reach for her coffee and drink it for the first time in 15 years.

First it’s shocking and horrible (UC Davis) and then it’s normal, barely even news. From last month. Didn’t get enough coverage.

How to deal with psychopaths, using Girardian theory.  I especially like the “gray rock” strategy.

Brain injuries are very bad things. In this new study deceased US military veterans were autopsied and found to have similar brain damage to athletes such as football players.

This story is grotesquely unjust. An elderly man accidentally sets off his medic alarm. Cops come to man’s home.  He informs them it was an accident. Cops shoot man dead. Can you guess the victim’s skin color?

The dollar is being slowly, intentionally, steadily devalued, as anyone who has watched gas or gold (or any) prices might suspect. No conspiracy, just economics – its the best the Fed thinks they can do to keep the monetary system stable.

Yes, your dog does need plastic surgery. No, the starving children don’t need food.

Three fun climate-change-related links.  One on Washington D.C.’s warmest winter ever (I was there in late December, and it was quite pleasant), another on the record-breakingly warm March, and the last imagining San Francisco as an island after the sea level has risen. The time frame on SF Island is totally unrealistic (IPCC estimate is less than 3 feet in the next century, not 3 feet per year – see Wikipedia), but people like to imagine disasters.Interesting linked info too.

And one for any skeptics: the US military thinks climate change is real.

What bacteria can survive 1000 times more radiation than a human? Also known as Conan the Bacterium? Well Deinococcus radiodurans, of course. Luckily, its also friendly.

The RoboBonobo. Not only does it look freaky, it really just is. It’s basically an ape-controlled drone (well, humans are apes too… so it’s a non-human-ape-controlled drone…) armed with a squirt gun. Yeah, next we’ll have them invading and bombing foreign countries! Well, maybe we could just keep this one for fun, for now, at least.

Some very alien places on Earth. Very interesting pictures.

An enormously giant bunny. The world’s biggest. Bigger than small children. About four and a half feet and 50 pounds of bunny.

Lastly, happy bouncing cows.

Brian’s Links 12 May 2012: Science, Space, Cardinals, and Ennui

Robotic support brings freedom to paraplegics – Tek RMD. More really cool technology.

A Stanford scientist conducts an experiment on himself, producing “an integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) [that] combines cutting-edge scientific fields such as genomics (study of one’s DNA), metabolomics (study of metabolism), and proteomics (study of proteins).” And he discovers a link between viral infections and type-2 diabetes, among other things.

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Paypal, Solar City, Tesla Motors, and Space X, wants to save the world. He wants to get humans off-planet, on Mars, to “back up the biosphere.” Sounds like a good idea to me. Here’s a fascinating interview from CBS’s 60 Minutes.

A “seed vault for culture.” From the folks at The Long Now Foundation.

Yes, there are even invasive plant species in Antarctica.

George Monbiot tells us what he really thinks about Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Hint: it includes the word “psychopath.”

According to these guys women can be Catholic Cardinals. How interesting.

Panera restaurants make paying for food voluntary. And it works! At CatholicMoralTheology.com and USA Today.

The South Korean scientists who faked his human-cloning data is off to redeem his reputation. By trying to clone a Woolly Mammoth.

So the Galactic Empire in Star Wars has leadership troubles. The Sith really need to work on their “people skills.” Here’s how you can learn from their failures.

Grass fed cows! They still exist? Yes! And they can be environmentally friendly? Well, yes. Moo.

The NSA is watching you. And You. And you, and you, and you, and…

Okay, near the end of the links I try to be funny. Here’s research about sexually rejected fruit flies turning to alcohol to cheer themselves up. No joke! Gives a new meaning to “bar flies.”

Lastly, Henri, Cat of Ennui.

Morality and Technology

Some kinds of problems can be solved in two ways: a moral solution and/or a technological solution.

Take global warming.  If we wanted to reduce global warming we could either change our technology – which is very carbon intensive – or change our behavior – which is very carbon intensive.

For example, cars only burn gasoline and make CO2 if we drive them. Our light bulbs only use coal-fed power if we turn them on. Rainforests only release their stored CO2 if we burn them down.

Those are all behaviors which we could control if we wanted to.  But self-control is hard. So the much easier solution is the technological one.

Hydropower dams! Wind farms!  Solar cells, geothermal, fusion power! Electric cars, electric buses, electric trains. And on and on. All good technologies, and we need them to replace the older carbon-intensive techs that we need to retire.

But in this quest to save the world from climate change, technology is only one component of the solution. If we continue to solve all our problems via technology, what will happen to our behavior? We will grow weak-willed. We will think that whenever there is a problem we could solve it if only we had an engineer to come and save us. Thus we forget the fact that we also have a say in this as individuals, in how we act. What about ourselves?

One of the greatest challenges posed when I taught an ethics of engineering course last year was from a student who said we should all just get off the grid. We had been talking about cooperation in evil and he took the teaching to heart – he wanted no part of cooperating in climate change. We could end CO2 production now if people all just stopped using CO2 intensive power sources. And of course he was right – but that is a really hard thing to do. Our social institutional structures are not set up to let us out of the grip of CO2. To name just one, the entire interstate highway system is against us. And he was only one voice in a class of 3o.

But the challenge is real. To many problems, there are moral or technical solutions (bioethics seems particularly full of them). The technical solutions are often easier and so we run to them to save us so that we don’t have to actually change our behavior or make hard moral choices.

The philosopher Hans Jonas warned of going down this route where technological power saves us instead of morality. He warned that as we grow in power, we can begin to lose a sense of how it ought to be used. As our power grows, our ethics diminish. And soon we have nuclear weapons, a massive extinction of species , and global warming and we wonder what to do – because we’ve forgotten how we are supposed to act and who we are supposed to be.

So while the technical solutions are tempting, we must not succumb to letting only them save us.  We need our self-control too. We need to know why we are living and what we are here for, and how to act based on who we are.  And in contemporary culture, those are hard questions to ask, much less answer.

(H/T to my engineering and social justice class at SCU and to Thomas at God and the Machine for making me think about this stuff)

Brian’s Links 20 March 2012: Invisibility and Environmentalism

The invisible car.  Really its a zero-emissions vehicle, the LED invisibility is just an analogy. Two technological feats for one car!

And while we are on the subject of invisibility, check out artist Liu Bolin hiding in plain sight in New York City and other places around the world.

Yes, court-ordered forced abortions are still illegal in the United States, though this case had to go to the appeals court…

For Catholics in the Occupy movement, a new gathering point on the web. More info here at the ever-informative catholicmoraltheology.com.

This looks like a really great new wind power technology. They’re “windstalks.” Just swaying in the breeze.

Here is a great story about how people are getting to the bottom of where their meat comes from and how it is raised.  One of the farms mentioned, Soul Food Farm in Vacaville, CA, is a splendid little place with tasty free-range eggs. My family and I are lucky to have access to farms like this. Free-range is a great way to go.

Will there be moral machines?

Portland’s public toilets are metal shacks with almost no privacy.  They are cold and uninviting. And they are proving to be the best public toilets ever invented.

And finally, a man trying to save his island nation from rising sea-levels. President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives (who was unfortunately recently ousted). Turns out that environmentally “invisible” car above can’t come too soon – it and everything else we need to set our ourselves right.

Brian’s Links 15 March 2012: Money, Meat, and Marvelous Animals

I think this crow is having fun.

Guess what? Ugandans really hate the Kony 2012 campaign. “Towards the end of the film, the mood turned more to anger at what many people saw as a foreign, inaccurate account that belittled and commercialised their suffering, as the film promotes Kony bracelets and other fundraising merchandise, with the aim of making Kony infamous. One woman I spoke to made the comparison of selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11.” Here’s a good resource for further investigations

The “avoid ghetto” button for your new map directions might also provide a “divert path to nearest advertiser” feature.

Is Distributism a Form of Capitalism? Depends what you mean by “capitalism.”

So, our congress folk are not exactly like the rest of us: “Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500.”

Addressing the issue of whether science and religion are at war, and additionally, whether your story’s characters are unrealistic due to your lack of interest in people you do not like. Written by science fiction author Mike Flynn.

It’s great that this new material can soak CO2 out of the air, but the idea of artificial trees I think is a little too C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength.

Should we raise the human IQ?

Greek parents abandoning their kids in the streets.

Ever wonder if you should terraform that planet over there? Well, Wikipedia can tell you whether it’s okay or not.

Why are Americans eating less meat? A 12% reduction in 5 years is a pretty big drop. Maybe it’s because of the foaming exploding pig poop problem?

Vegetarians, you are hereby morally obligated to eat laboratory grown meat.

Tuberculosis with no cure, at all. Completely drug resistant.

Honeybee colony collapse disorder may have a culprit: a tiny parasitic fly laying its maggots in live honeybees. San Francisco State University professor cracks the case! Here’s the free paper! (I love free papers.)

A story about getting your email account hacked and losing everything.

It’s like news from The Onion, but it’s The Onion Dome.

From the real Onion: Iran expresses concern that US may be building its 8500^th nuclear weapon.

And lastly, “A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.” Don’t mess with lions fighting crime, seriously. Awesome.

"We'll take it from here."

The 10,000 Year Clock: Long-Term Thinking Is Good

What is the relationship of time to ethics?

Well, for one thing if we promise to do something on Friday we ought to do it. And for another, if we did something bad last Friday, we probably ought to try to make amends for it. And for another, if what we do to achieve something good now is going to result in something bad in 10 years or 100 or 1000 years, maybe we ought to think about our action very carefully.

To focus our thoughts on this last scenario is precisely the purpose of the 10,000 year clock, being constructed in Texas, by the Long Now Foundation, located, conveniently enough and as so many good things are, in San Francisco. Here is an excellent article in Wired discussing the project, and its funder Jeff Bezos.

The founders of Long Now thought that people ought to think a bit more about the long term effects of their actions. This is a very good idea. Selling the future for the present only becomes a tradition among the doomed.

In other words, it is never tradition for long.

The USA has been doing this for a long time with its national debt, and the whole world is doing it with global warming, pollution, and environmental degradation. Long Now is trying to get people to think beyond the short term.

In some ways the construction of this clock is a religious endeavor. It has faith in humanity, not only that we can build such a thing, but that there will be anyone around to read it some day. The second involves more faith (but less hubris) than the first, I think. The builders also hope it will become something like a pilgrimage site (link to Long Now’s Clock Introduction). It is also a religious endeavor in that some religions tend to think long term (or if not long term, at least very slowly…).

Interestingly, at 10000yearclock.net the front web page quotes are both about humans becoming gods.

We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.

We are as gods and we HAVE to get good at it.

-Stewart Brand 1968 and 2009, respectively

These are odd quotes when discussing a clock, but I think I can see the point if the perspective is broadened. It is an expression not of triumph, but of worry. Gods with terrible powers and without feelings or plans of responsibility for the future are not gods. They are something vastly inferior. This dangerous future is to be strenuously avoided. And if a clock can help do that, then it should be done.

I wonder if they have any theologians in their group, because if humans are going to become gods, it would be good to know a little bit about what gods are and do.

In any case, I think Long Now and their clock are doing a good thing, as long as they can really get people thinking longer term  and acting with the future in mind.  For too long we have traded the future for the present. It’s about time we do something better.

Should Christians Care about Space Exploration?

Heavens, yes!

God doesn’t call us to sit on our butts. However, there are a million ways to not sit on one’s butt. Why should space exploration be one of them?

Two reasons: for the greater glory of God, and the development of our own virtue.

First, God’s glory. This almost goes without saying: the universe is amazing. God’s creation is utterly mind-boggling and humbling. Christians have historically been on the forefront of explorations both geographic and scientific, and there is good reason for this: we are called to learn more about God, and God’s creation provides a handy starting point.

For the last 2000 years Christians journeyed as missionaries to distant places and collected knowledge at home; knowledge from their journeys, from past scholars, and from current experiments and theories (I have already posted on Christian contributions to scientific method here). From Bede the Venerable and Albert the Great to Gregor Mendel and Georges Lemaitre, and even more recently to the Jesuits of the Vatican Observatory, the faithful have been devoted scientists and researchers.

But what of explorers? From St. Patrick in Ireland to Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci in Asia, Jacques Marquette in North America, and countless others across the world, Christians have sought out new places, not only for the sake of evangelism and helping others but also for the sake of learning more about the world.

When we learn about God’s creation we are struck by its wondrousness. For the Christian, this glorifies God, and when we share those ideas we share God’s glory with the world.

Furthermore, to get Franciscan for a moment, St. Francis had a beautiful way of referring to all things in creation as his brothers and sisters, as in “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” The above explorations have all been on earth, but I think we ought to get to know some of our more distant family a little bit better. They will have stories to tell us about God. Stories written in their rocks, and perhaps even stories of life. Just last month astronomers announced the discovery of a good candidate for an earth-like world, Kepler 22b – right size, right temperature. It would take centuries or millennia to get there, but until then we can certainly keep looking for more to add to our planet catalogue. Exploration is not only about physically going there (though I think that should be the ultimate goal), but also about mentally going there, through telescopes like Hubble and Kepler, probes like the Voyagers and Pioneers, and various planetary orbiters, rovers, and landers.

Second… why are we called to learn more about God? For our own benefit, both intellectual and moral. God doesn’t get anything from our glorification, God has no needs; this is something to help us become better people.

Explorations are always dangerous. And so we grow in courage to face the unknown, both physical and mental. Not only are lives on the line, but thoughts as well. What if a discovery overturns previous knowledge? We would have to humble ourselves before reality. Science is a religious activity and furthermore a very Christian activity because it requires not only hard work, which makes us better, more disciplined people, but also humility before creation. Humans are not smart. Individually we know next to nothing and collectively we still know very little. And yet it is miraculous that we can know anything at all. God deigns to give us brains capable of glimpsing the infinite, and he does this out of pure love.