Cane toads and climate change

My dear Skeptophiles,

Skeptophilia is rapidly approaching ONE MILLION HITS, and we are sponsoring a 50/50 contest that you can win by guessing exactly when the millionth hit will occur!

As of Friday, 3/28, at 2:00 PM, the pageviews ticker was about 980,828, and at that point we took the counter down.  We've been averaging about a thousand hits a day, with a range of about 700 to about 1,400 on average days.  The highest number of hits in one day was a little over 70,000 -- but as great as that would be, it's not at all the norm, nor is it expected again soon!

It's $10 to enter the pool, and the winner (whoever guesses the closest) will get half, the other half going to support Skeptophilia.  To enter the pool, send $10 either by mail (contact info at CBGB-Arts) or use PayPal to jaggy227@fltg.net with your name, contact information, and best guess as to when the millionth hit will occur (date and time - specify AM or PM).  Closest guess wins and will be announced on April 19 (assuming it's occurred by then)!

The pool will be split in case of a tie.

Have fun and here's to a million hits!

cheers,

Gordon


********************************

Humans, sad to say, have a fairly lousy track record for fixing problems that they've created through their own negligence and/or stupidity.

Take, for example, the case of the gray-backed cane beetle, a native Australian insect that is a pest on sugar cane.  Back in the 1930s, sugar cane growers were having a devil of a time with the beetle, because not only do the larvae feed on the roots, the adults feed on the leaves, creating a double whammy that was playing hell with the crop yields.  So someone thought it'd be a smart idea to introduce the cane toad, a South American species with a voracious appetite, as a way of controlling the beetle.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem was that the individual who introduced them seemed to be unaware that beetles can fly and the majority of toads cannot.  Also, the toads are venomous, get huge, eat damn near everything in sight up to and including small mammals, and reproduce like mad.  The result: northeastern Australia still has cane beetles, and now it also has to contend with the cane toad, which seems to be spreading slowly south and west.

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for expressing some doubt when I hear someone saying about an ecological problem, "Hey, this will fix it!"  Which is why, when my buddy and fellow writer Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math) sent me an article proposing to use geoengineering to solve climate change, my immediate response was, "This may be the dumbest fucking idea I've heard in years."

The idea is not new, but it has a new champion; David Keith, professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard.  And in the article I linked above, Chris Wodskou (writing for CBC News) tells us that what Keith is thinking about is not on a small scale:

Geoengineering is an attempt to arrest the course of climate change through a number of different schemes, such as seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles.  Or putting gigantic mirrors in orbit around the Earth to reflect sunlight back to space.  Or fertilizing the ocean with iron to stimulate the growth of carbon-absorbing plankton...  [Keith] is
particularly interested in solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management, which would involve putting tiny sulphur particles into the stratosphere, where they would reflect solar energy back to space.

Keith acknowledges the controversial nature of what he is proposing; in fact, he calls it a "brutally ugly technological fix" that does not get at the root of the problem.  But nevertheless, he says, we should be giving it serious consideration:

Carbon dioxide is like filling a bathtub.  The climate risk comes from the historical sum of all emissions.  The only way to stop adding to that risk is to stop putting more carbon dioxide in.  But let’s say you’re going to stop carbon dioxide emissions over 100 years.  If you do this solar geoengineering, you could spread out the climate change over 200 years, slowing down the amount of climate change, and I would say most climate risks have to do with the rate of change.

Well, okay, I agree with that, but there's a big "if" -- and that is "if we understand completely what the results of the geoengineering will be."  It took us 150 years just to notice the global result of all of the additional carbon dioxide we were adding to the atmosphere (counting the start date as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, give or take).  It's taken us another sixty to come to a reasonable scientific consensus, but due to special interests, the media, and sheer human pigheadedness, we are still yet to get up off our asses and do something about it.

And compare the results of climate change with the predictions.  Some of the predictions haven't come true, or at least not yet (e.g. the slowing of the Atlantic Conveyor).  Others have (e.g. loss of Arctic pack ice and the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves).  Some results have been entirely unexpected, such as this year's unhinged winter, with the northeastern United States being socked with temperatures that were more than once colder on the same day than Fairbanks, Alaska and Irkutsk, Siberia.

Honestly, though, this is more or less what the climate scientists expected.  You can't perturb a complex system like global climate and expect it to behave like a clockwork.

So why in the hell do we think we can perturb it even more and that this will somehow push it back into equilibrium?  Isn't it far more likely that the further perturbation will only serve to destabilize the climate more, and in far more unpredictable ways?

Listen, I'm no conspiracy theorist, as regular readers of this blog will know well enough.  My doubt about this plan isn't because I'm afraid of some Big Bad Government Plot To Destroy Us All (undoubtedly using HAARP and chemtrails and so forth).  It's more that we have shown, over and over, that we simply don't know enough to try some kind of brute force approach with this problem, simply because the one real solution -- cutting back on fossil fuels -- is too bitter a pill to swallow.

For cryin' in the sink, if we can't get something as simple as the cane toad right, what makes us think that we can manhandle climate change into submission?

Sorry, you get an "F"

Tomorrow is the start of a new school year for me, and that probably explains why I had the reaction I did to a flyer that some friends of mine picked up.

They were in their car in downtown Ithaca, and a very earnest-looking woman came up and shoved a piece of glossy paper through their open window.  Nearby were several people with picket signs.  Resisting the impulse to roll the window up, my friend's daughter took the piece of paper, which was apparently a joint effort of two groups called GeoEngineering Watch and Global Skywatch.

A brief glance at the flyer was enough to elicit some hearty guffaws from my friends, and the daughter, riding in the passenger seat, read the contents to her dad as he drove.  Several times, he reported afterwards, he almost had to pull over because he was laughing so hard.  And the consensus was, "Oh, we have to keep this and give it to Gordon," with the probable reasoning being that my blood pressure is far too low.

So anyhow, over dinner a few days later, I was presented with the flyer.  I won't quote the whole thing, because the back is covered with fine print and it would be as tedious for me to type it out as it would be for you to read it, so I will simply present you with the high points, along with some parenthetical comments that I would have scribbled in, in red pen, if this had been a paper that one of my Environmental Science students had submitted to me.

Illegal government-controlled chemical weather modification programs are taking place over our heads right now day after day!  [Source?  This is clearly an overgeneralization.]

It's called, [misplaced comma] GeoEngineering [but you need a comma here] AKA Chemtrails, Stratospheric Aerosols or Solar Radiation Management.  [Geoengineering and stratospheric aerosols aren't the same thing, and chemtrails and "solar radiation management" appear to be made up.]  We are being sprayed with tiny particles of Aluminum, Barium, Strontium, and other highly toxic chemicals that go right into our red blood cells.  [No, we aren't, and no, they don't.]

These chemicals spread across the sky and block out the sun.  [Yesterday was nice and sunny, but thanks for asking.]  The lack of sunlight and the nano size particles are poisoning everything and making us sick.  [Strangely enough, I feel fine.]  Respiratory and brain disorders have risen off the charts.  [Source?]  The aluminum is poisoning our farms so only Monsanto's aluminum resistant GMO seeds will grow.  [Odd that my vegetable garden is doing so well this year, isn't it?]

See through the lies!  Do your own research!  [Oh, I do.]

Save the planet!  [Doing my best.  The first thing I'd choose to save it from is "stupidity," but at the moment I'm thinking this is a losing battle.]

Governments and corporations are deliberately manipulating and altering Earth's climate, endangering the lives of people all over the world.  [Source?]  Two of the most extreme cases of geo-engineering are chemtrails -- the release of toxic chemicals into the air that are poisoning people and the planet [please review the definition of "geoengineering"] -- and HAARP -- an electromagnetic antenna array in Alaska that can send radio frequency radiation over large geographical areas [so do television station transmitters] and manipulate weather patterns causing earthquakes, tsunamis, and more.  [Earthquakes and tsunamis are not "weather patterns"]  These projects represent some of the worst crimes in history, yet most people are unaware of them.  [Perhaps because you're making this up as you go along?]

For over ten years, observers have been noticing white aerosol trails being dispersed in the skies that don't behave like usual condensing jet exhaust.  When seeking explanation, investigators are told by the government that these are just the normal "contrails" that we see coming from commercial jets and that they are perfectly safe.  [Seems right to me.]  However, they don't dissipate the way regular condensation trails do.  [Yes, they do.  The evaporation time of a contrail is dependent on the weather conditions in the upper atmosphere -- temperature, windspeed, and humidity -- but they all eventually evaporate.  Water does that, you know.]  They linger for hours, spreading across the sky, and are often laid out in cross hatch patterns.  [Check out maps of common air traffic flight paths in your area for an explanation of this.]  The government has refused to test samples collected underneath the trails.  [Better things to do, I would imagine.]  Now a TV news report from Germany has confirmed that their military is in fact doing aerial spraying of chemtrails.  [Oh!  A TV news report from Germany!  Well, then!  All the proof I need!]

An article from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, confirms that not only are chemtrails real, [Bull.  Shit.]  but they are suspected to be responsible for a variety of neurotoxic conditions including MS, Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, and Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS).  [All of these conditions are caused by different things.  Have you ever passed a biology class in your life?]

Intense spraying of dangerous chemicals from planes has been reported in, at least, the US, Canada, Germany, England, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and Croatia.  [Source?]  A nasty mixture of parasites, pathogens, toxic heavy metals, and nano-engineered particles have been found falling to earth from the trails of certain planes.  [Living parasites and pathogens somehow survive the combustion process in the jet engine?  Really?  Do you have even the vaguest understanding of how jet engines work?]  Aluminum, barium, bacillus spores, radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, dessicated blood, mold spores, yellow mycototoxins, ethylene dibromide and synthetic nano-fibers are among the ingredients found in collected samples.  [Wasn't this the recipe for a magic spell by the witches in Macbeth?  Oh, and I think you mean "mycotoxin."  Are the yellow ones really bad?]  As these fill the atmosphere and lodge in our lungs and blood streams through the air we breathe and the food we eat, it represents the most unavoidable toxic pollution in history!  [Odd, then, that you aren't wearing a filter mask right now.  Why is that, I wonder?]

And so forth and so on.

So, yes, the chemtrail people have come to very close to my home town, and they are pissed.  Which they should be, because I would definitely give them an "F" for this report.  I might even call home and talk to their parents, perhaps recommending that they drop my class and sign up for some remedial-level science courses. 

Because it sure as hell sounds like they need them.