This Week in Water

As the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris approaches, I want to change the format for this week's TWIW post and interject an argument and some editorial opinion. Normally, TWIW is a news aggregator replete with interesting links to issues and news about our planet's most important resource. If you want to take a look at past posts, simply click on the "This Week in Water" link in the "Labels" below.

Sometimes there is so much news that it becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees—or the ocean for the waves as the case may be. As with the last post about the discovery of evidence of flowing water on Mars, this week brings us three VERY BIG items and, in this instance, they deserve some discussion and thought.

Item #1—Exxon Evidence. Evidence has come to light that Exxon has had specific internal knowledge about the drastic, deleterious effects of man-made global warming since the 1980s—to wit, melting glaciers and polar ice and rising sea levels. Yet, internal documents show that the company used its vast marketing and political power not only to conceal this fact from the world but has been actively lying about it to its shareholders, the public, and regulators. In the meantime, it has used this knowledge to figure out how to improve its extraction of even more damaging fossil fuels from the earth. "Genocidal Behavior" and "Sociopathic Greed" hardly begin to describe this concerted series of potentially planet-murdering actions. In a truly free market with valid 'price discovery mechanisms', these costs would/should necessarily have to be borne by the company and figured into its balance sheet; yet Exxon-Mobil (and other fossil fuel extraction-based companies and their suppliers and supporters) continues to receive billions of dollars in U.S. tax breaks and subsidies and to profit from its criminally insane behavior while ignoring the public costs of their business. Questions about the viability of possible legal and/or political remedies are, hopefully, arising globally, though the damage may be irreparable. And the fact is there may be no specific laws to punish and remediate these companies' actions.

Item #2—Extinction Event. The planet is currently facing what scientists are calling its Sixth Great Extinction Event, and some are asking whether humans can survive this catastrophe. This results partially from a collapse of the food chain originating in our ocean ecosystems due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and warming global climate.

Item #3—Extra-terrestrials? Back in 2010 I posted a piece about so-called Kardashev civilizations. [Go on, read it; it's pretty cool. It'll open in a new window. Besides, this post isn't going anywhere.] Now, astronomers have discovered an anomalous star in our galaxy some 1500 light years away that shows some signs that might be indicative of an alien civilization approaching a Type II Kardashev civilization, namely one which is able to harness the energy of a star to fuel its development. (By contrast, earth's civilization is ~0.7 on the Kardashev scale because we are barely beginning to capture solar, wind, hydro, and tidal power) One explanation for the behavior of light from this star is that there are advanced life forms constructing a Dyson Sphere around their sun. Of course, there are plenty of other hypotheses to be eliminated before anyone can claim this for certain. Still, it's potentially HUGE news—I mean, the biggest news in human history. (How does this relate to water, you might ask? If there is such a civilization, they must certainly have some form of watery world resources. Okay, it's tenuous, but it's such a huge piece of news I couldn't resist.)

One fairly straightforward conclusion to draw from these Items is that our planet's continued reliance on fossil fuels (due, mostly, to the economic and political power of the extraction industries) is killing us, and if we want to advance and perhaps even to survive as a civilization and possibly a species we need to change our behavior radically, moving to sustainable energy practices before it's too late. How this can seem even remotely controversial continues to baffle me.

Global Warming, Alien Life Forms, and Republicans

There's a U.N. Climate Change Conference going on now in Cancun, Mexico. You can follow developments here.

Early indications are that 2010 has been at least the third warmest year on record since records began in 1850 and that this has been the warmest decade.

Meanwhile, here at home, the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has disbanded the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming created by Democrates in 2007 to focus on the causes and effects of continued climate change.

NASA has just announced that it has discovered a new form of life here on planet Earth. It is an arsenic-fueled life form. It is a type of bacteria that lives in California's poisonous Mono Lake and uses arsenic as the building block of its DNA. We are, of course, carbon-based life forms. Bottom Line: We have a competitor for life space on this planet.

Now if you follow the periodic table of elements' "two-down-one-over" theory for finding the complete elemental poison (such that arsenic is the complete poison for carbon-based life) [see Evolution], then, as this blogger suggests, if the Republicans continue to deny global warming and block scientific analyses and solutions for it, we'd better stock up on polonium (the element two down and one over from arsenic) before these microorganisms start evolving which, contrary to biblical theorists, they will—especially as the environment becomes increasingly more hospitable to them.

Who else, I ask you, is continually making Star Trek allusions:


or keeps coming back to silly Monty Python skits:


Speaking of Republicans, this guy (he who must not be named) apparently fell for one of the oldest cons in the world, the so-called Nigerian Prince scam (aka the Spanish Prisoner), to the tune of $180 million.

Crimes Against Humanity

The disparagement of science—true science, objective knowledge—is, generally, a function of ignorance or stupidity. The muzzling of scientific facts is a power play. But when a group of moronic thugs hide information that is crucial to the well-being of the planet and all living things out of self-interest or the short-term financial interest of their constituents in a particular industry, that's pretty much criminal.

Apparently, the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration hid "[g]raphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic ... taken by spy satellites over the past decade, [which]confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months. The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week."

The avowed antipathy of the Bush/Cheney regime to anything smacking of environmental concern and global warming grew out of their favoritism to the entrenched interests of their constituents in the oil industry. To hide such direct evidence of the "devastating impact of global warming" is a vicious, misanthropic act. In the face of such clear and compelling evidence, to argue publicly against the "devastating impact of global warming" is nothing short of a crime, a fraud.

And why must the revelation of such misfeasance (suppressing it) and malfeasance (lying about it) on this scale be relegated to a foreign newspaper? Where is the outrage in this country? Besides trying to remediate the global problem, is there nothing that can be done about the devastation these men have wrought through their outright mendacity?