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Living within a living, loving planet
Science
Lord give us this night our daily certainty
Mar 31st
“Give us God in whatever form She, He, It, or They consents to assume, so long as that transcendent something supplies us with an answer we can curl up around close enough to breathe ourselves to peace, or anyway to sleep. Lord give us this night our daily certainty.”
“The first step toward creating some way out of our dilemma may involve allowing our sense of certainty itself to unravel.”
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-religious-value-of-the-unknown/
George Prochnik
Our modern technology has given us a strong sense of certainty by its “swap the board” or “replace the unit” fix. Unfortunately, main stream science uses a mechanistic model as a basis for “fixing” climate change. Even the measurement devices are designed for machines instead of a living Earth; a living being. Homo Sapiens have never encountered the present level of CO2 and some other green-house gasses. CO2 is now building up in the troposphere at an increasing level and the rate of increase is increasing. Further the rate of increase is variable and unpredictable.
There is no certainty and no meaningful computer models to assist in predictability.
Of course, this is green fodder for those paid to spread fear and doubt thus discrediting 97% of climate scientists who know that humans are accountable for this runaway increase in CO2, warming of the oceans and melting of polar icecaps to name a few climate variables. We accept uncertainty when our physician prescribes a remedy and then tells us that if it doesn’t work we are to return for an alternative. However, there is no loss of profits in that situation whereas keeping fossil fuel in the ground might throw a few people off the billionaire list! Sky 31 March, 2019
First Fern Genome Shows Unique Bacterial Partnership
Aug 21st
Discover magazine
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/07/02/first-fern-genomes/#.W3vFpc5KiM_
First Fern Genome Shows Unique Bacterial Partnership
This article and research further supports James Lovelock and the Daisyworld hypothesis. Question? What probable action that we know of will lower the CO2 such that we won’t skip another ice age? If we don’t have another ice age, then what property or force that we know of will curtail the non-linear increase in CO2.
My previous post about the CO2 and methane being produced under and around thawing permafrost lakes will increase CO2 and with rising oceans, there will be more swamp and more vegetation under water which will increase CO2 and methane from rotting plants. Why should we not be very, very afraid on behalf of Gaia?
“Though it’s little, the tiny fern Azolla may have changed the world 50 million years ago. Fossil records from the Arctic suggest that these fast-growing, carbon-sequestering ferns removed enough carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere to cool the then-greenhouse globe and allow today’s polar ice caps to form.
In more recent Earth history, rice farmers in Asia have been using Azolla as a natural fertilizer for over 1,000 years. Nostoc azollae, a cyanobacterium species that lives inside Azolla leaves, captures nitrogen from the air and converts it into a form that the ferns — and rice plants — can use.
Many plants have symbiotic relationships with the bacteria living inside them, but Azolla’s partnership with Nostoc is unique because the bacterium lives inside the fern for its whole life and transfers from parent to child when Azolla reproduces. It’s a microbial inheritance that most plants don’t get — they must start fresh with bacteria from the environment.
Evidence hinted that the Azolla fern and its cyanobacterium partner might share a long evolutionary past together. Unraveling the details of their evolutionary history was one reason Li and his team wanted to sequence the Azolla genome.”
“Ferns may have been overlooked partly because they have a reputation for massive genomes that would be expensive to sequence — the average fern has about four times the genetic information of a human — and because the benefits of sequencing fern genomes is not immediately obvious compared to sequencing the genomes of other plants, like agricultural crops.”
“Comparing the new Azolla genome with the previously-sequenced Nostoc genome confirms that the fern and the cyanobacterium have been partners for as long as 100 million years, evolving and branching into new species together. From experiments with the fern’s genome, Li’s team found that the cyanobacterium’s ability to capture nitrogen from air keeps the fern nourished when other nitrogen sources aren’t available.”
“Li’s team studied the fern genomes to track down the origin of the natural pesticides and found evidence that in Salvinia, the pesticide protein might have come from bacteria rather than from plant ancestors. Transferring genes between species is fairly common among bacteria (this is what makes bacteria so good at resisting antibiotics) but rare in more complex life, like plants.”
NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
May 1st
NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Posted on 29 April 2017 by dana1981
https://www.skepticalscience.com/nyt-hired-hippie-puncher.html
I like the analogy below. I also like my analogy in regards to uncertainty. When we go our GP or specialist they are often not certain of the cause of our ailment and thus whether the medicine they prescribe will cure it. They often say, something like, take this and come back in X days if you are not better. We all understand that the body is an incredibly complex organism and most of us accept our physician’s efforts to help us. Well, the Earth systems are complex also and our scientists are limited in their predictive efforts mainly, in my not so humble opinion, because their instruments have been designed to register the outcomes of a machine-like object. Unfortunately, recent scientific research is revealing that Earth “behaves” as if it was a living organism. Earth is a “self-regulating” organism and thus inherently unpredictable. We are caught in the grips of vast greediness supported by our cultural beliefs, economic global order whilst being buried by our mechanistic, capitalistic, materialistic worldview.
“Stephens needs a lesson in risk management
Smoking provides an apt analogy. Each time we smoke, we increase the odds of developing cancer a little bit more. The future outcome is uncertain – we don’t know exactly if or when the disaster of cancer will hit – but we know we’re making it more likely every time we smoke, and the smart move is to mitigate that risk by cutting down on the cigarettes as quickly as possible. With climate change, each time we add more carbon pollution to the atmosphere, we increase the odds of a climate catastrophe a little bit more. The smart move is to mitigate that risk by cutting down on our burning of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Stephens’ piece is akin to criticizing doctors and anti-smoking groups for being too mean to the tobacco industry, and for not focusing on the uncertainty about exactly when the chain-smoking patient will develop cancer.”
Technology
Jul 15th
Technology
Many more people and far fewer jobs. What does that add up to?
“…there’s little doubt that the main thrust of the research is accurate: lots of non-routine, cognitive, white-collar as well as blue-collar jobs are going to be eliminated in the next two decades and we need to be planning for that contingency now.”
“Combinatorial innovation is a different kettle of fish, because it feeds on itself and grows exponentially. Given that we’re bound to lose this race against the machine, isn’t it time we began thinking of how we might harness it to improve the quality of our lives, rather than merely enrich the corporations that own it?”
Science and Spirituality
May 7th
“For centuries, science has led our progress; spirituality, as indicated through participation in orthodox religion has been in steady decline. But the unorganized, personal aspect of spirituality is the subjective pursuit of value, reality, and understanding through individual experience or consciousness. This aspect of spirituality has not declined. Instead, the drive to find external solutions to global problems that have value to our interior world is more powerful than ever. The scale of our planet’s problems is too great to be solved without an integrated approach of science and spirituality.” Deepak Chopra
Promissory Materialism
Dec 14th
Promissory Materialism
http://www.integralworld.net/sheldrake.html
“chains of parallel and successive operations that build complexity” will eventually explain the diversity of forms (Carroll, S.B. 2005. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Quercus Books, London, p. 105)
Just what are chains of operations that build complexity? I can detect the vague promise and recognise the materiality context; the kind of materiality that describes what happens with the presumed hope that this mysteriously satisfies our desire to “know” something substantial about the phenomenon. I am not kind and considerate like Rupert. This is just the same old blabber materialists have been dishing out since they began pulling stuff to pieces in order to gain useful knowledge.
For years, I taught field engineers how to isolate problems with first main frames, then minicomputers and finally micros. I assure you that the only useful knowledge that pulling any of the above to pieces in order to find out how it works will give you is just the number of pieces on the bench. You will never, ever find out “how it works” this way.
A Fascinating Story
Jul 4th
A Fascinating Story
A comment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/scientists-and-scholars-i_b_3543037.html
“The semantic and sociological issues in this discussion remind me of the frailties of peer review and what is considered to be a “mainstream” idea. A classic study on peer review, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1982, did the following. The authors took “12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices. With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as ‘serious methodological flaws.'”
This simultaneously sad and funny outcome has not improved much three decades later, as this 2006 article indicates in an article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. It concludes that “Peer review is a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative, and scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”
Or, perhaps it’s not so odd after all, given that everything we know is ultimately rooted in one belief or another.”
Best wishes,
Dean Radin
Senior Scientist
Institute of Noetic Science