The total concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is above 400 parts per million (ppm). It crossed the 400 mark a year or two ago with many expressions of concern from some and complete ignorance from most. I have come to see that part of the problem is people's poor grasp of mathematics, and the way different uses of words can result in different emotional responses. My genetic counselor friends are aware of this, and have commented that people may react quite differently if they are told that the risk of some genetic event affecting their kids is for example 5% (seems small) versus '1 in 20' which seems larger because 20 is a bigger number than 5 even though it's in the denominator. Of course 5% and 1 in 20 mean exactly the same thing mathematically.

With that in mind, 400 sounds like a big number, but a million is so much bigger that people, if they think about it at all, are likely to say it doesn't seem very dangerous. But, 410 (the number last June, a bit lower in Hawaii atop Mauna Loa today) ppm is the same as 0.041%. Even that seems small, until you search the internet and find out that it's been reported that exposure to 2% CO2 can cause headaches, nausea, and cognitive problems (quoted from http://www.aragonvalley.com/en/effects-of-co2-in-humans/ , which says original source is Scripps Oceanographic Institute, I haven't verified yet). So how bad is 0.04% versus 2%? It's 50 times lower, which means if we keep burning fossil fuels at the same rate as today or higher, in a few decades unless CO2 is removed more rapidly than currently occurs, OUR AIR WILL BE UNBREATHABLE.

Seems pretty trivial to talk about sea levels rising a few feet, or heat waves, or climate change in general, compared to WE WILL ASPHYXIATE.

So my mission is to get everyone to stop talking about CO2 in parts per million, and start talking about percent. Maybe that will scare more people, which it should because it scares me plenty.

In general I think Canadians are appalled but not necessarily surprised by the unrolling of events south of the border. U.S. foreign policy has always had very ideological and coercive aspects that  other countries don't think very highly of. For example, the U.S. government actively managed the illegal and violent overthrow of the legally elected government of Iran in the 1950s. Is it surprising that they distrust American promises and policies forever since (religious issues and Israeli politics aside)?

The U.S. also has a recurrent domestic history of bigotry and racism, plus a propensity to violence out of proportion with its stated belief in law and order. In the current situation I see threads going back to right-wing mistrust both of FDR and the New Deal, and of LBJ's courting of minorities following on the various civil rights acts. I also blame the Democrats (the party, not the political philosophy) for kowtowing to its own oligarchs and giving a real third party candidate (which Trump effectively was, although he also co-opted the right wing of the GOP) its best chance since Ross Perot.

All of that said, the weakness of the social contract is a real part of American society, and not just on the right (read Morris Berman for example). Although the rebellions of the 1960's were at least partly driven by real unfairness to minorities and women in issues social, legal and economic, they also tied in to the traditional individualism of America's self-image. The success of the me generation was a little too easy to be put down to just a few "hippies".

In retrospect, the most telling moment for me was not when Obama was elected, but when the Dems took such a large loss in his first mid-term elections. Obama had just saved the economy and enacted some semblance of universal health care (as much as was possible at that time and place). Although there were bailouts of some big companies, they came with very strong financial oversight and indeed do seem to have helped not hurt the economy. The rejection of these policies was too overwhelming to be due just to extreme right wing fringes of the Republicans, or some poor messaging (after all, Obama won the election through his strength in messaging and his sophistication). It seems that most american voters, and not just Republicans, do not really want anything looking like socialism, and would rather be unnecessarily poor or even die themselves of untreated medical problems than give up their ideological belief in the autonomy of the individual in a complex techno-industrial society (which seriously limits that autonomy), or that the individual can somehow "triumph" against adversity in all situations.

In terms of the rejection of globalism, of course the people being hit hardest in the US are probably the same ones who were rapid anti-communist/socialist. When a billion chinese suddenly became capitalists willing to work for much lower wages than americans for the same jobs, what did they think would happen? The rest of the world basically accepted neoliberal capitalism, which meant the US no longer had the specific advantages that system offers, but still had to deal with the disadvantages.

One has to acknowledge that Trump was much clearer about stating some of these things than the other candidates of both parties. Demagogues arise so frequently in such situations that the surprising aspect is only the amount of resistance he's facing in his own country. His solutions of course are non-sensical and will either not work at all or will eventually lead to some real wars - and the destruction caused by wars is one of the sure-fire ways to restart moribund economies unfortunately. Trump may actually know this, at least intuitively, and be working towards it. Needless to say there's a lot of suffering and violence that goes with that approach to economics, versus actual fair wealth redistribution.

I haven't written anything here in many months. In some ways not much has happened in the world, in other ways a lot. The problems of unsustainable economic and ecological systems increasingly occupy my mind. In the face of a corrupt oligarchical political system, the only way to prevent mass revolt by the starving masses is to increase total growth. As long as most people have an acceptable minimum income (whatever that level is), they seem willing to tolerate gross total inequality of distribution. "Growth" is presented as a panacea, and every piece of evidence of it is taken up by mainstream media as a positive message.

The problem is, as a biologist I see unrestrained growth as an evil. Our bodies grow when we are young, but once we reach maturity, continuing growth of any subunit of the body basically means cancer, which is ultimately fatal. The entire body can't grow indefinitely, for one thing we aren't built that way, for another we would obviously reach physical limits. For example, several hundred million years ago, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere was substantially greater than it is currently (it's now about 21%). One consequence was that insects could be larger. As a group, insects lack a dedicated circulatory system, so the only way the interiours of their bodies can get oxygen is by diffusion (ok there are systems of air ducts in at least some insects, but not an active circulatory network). If their bodies get too large, the cells in the center can't get enough oxygen to support their energy needs, which limits potential growth. If the overall oxygen pressure of the air is higher, then enough oxygen can diffuse to support larger bodies. There are fossils of things like dragonflies with wing spans of feet versus inches. In the case of humans, we have all kinds of physical limits that are not usually considered by economists. We can't live in air of 10% oxygen, I'm not sure where the lower limit is but it must be somewhere between 10 and the current 21% I imagine. We can't tolerate extreme heat and humidity, if we can't sweat then we die of internal overheating. We need a regular daily dose of pure water or salt concentrations and pH become unbalanced which is fatal (probably to our brains first).

Economists tend to assume human technologies can overcome all such physical limits. Indeed this may be the case at least enough to support some people, but not all. Technological solutions have to work not just for a few, but for all 7+ billion of us, else we end up with dystopias as described by many science fiction writers and movies.

The point is that economic growth requires energy consumption. For now that mostly means fossil fuels, with the result of increasing greenhouse gases. If we keep this up too long, we'll end up like Venus (atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide and water, super high pressure and temperature that of molten lead). I imagine a handful of elite could survive this underground, but imagine bunkers for 7 billion - not likely.

Even if we manage to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, energy consumption still means heat, as there is no beating the second law of thermodynamics (when it comes to energy, you can't win, and you can't even tie). If the heat can't escape the earth, then temperature rises. Things like melting the permafrost and releasing trapped methane, could cause a Venus-like future even if we were fully "green" in terms of energy production.

No one can predict the future. Extremists like Guy Macpherson aver that it is already too late and the earth will become void of all large plants and animals inevitably in the next century if not decades. I agree this could happen, although from what I read of climate science, even given very alarming evidence of accelerating ice cap melting etc, it still doesn't seem a foregone conclusion. But even if not, it's a likely outcome, in centuries if not sooner. What rational species would continue on the same path given this information? None of course, which just goes to show that mankind is not as rational as it tends to claim it is. From the basic theory of evolution, I presume that all species have a drive to grow and expand in numbers, and that any limits are imposed only by the external environment not by any evolvable behavior. That bodes poorly for mankind. The tragedy is that the same evolutionary forces have given us minds that are capable of imagining such a future. If only those minds were strong enough to allow us to modify our actions to contradict the deeper biological drive to expand, grow, reproduce. But I fear not, ever or anytime soon at least. The question is whether we can survive as a species until we mature sufficiently to attain such mastery over basic evolutionary impulses.

 Capitalism has a number of dangerous inherent flaws. It has no way to deal with externalities, leading to unstoppable depletion of natural resources and accumulation of waste (including things like carbon dioxide and even heat). It has no intrinsic mechanism for determining a "fair" division of surplus wealth (i.e. profits) between workers, management and owners, leading to incessant and often violent negotations over wealth sharing. It tends to create monopolies which are at odds with the basic concept of a free market. The actual way in which it functions is highly dependent on the societal and legal framework in which it operates. It probably isn't even possible at all without strong central governments, whereas it rejects the idea of external regulation and claims to be autonomously sufficient. These are not problems that can be resolved by "tweaking" the pure economics of capitalism, they are inherrent. Clearly only a modified form of regulated capitalism has any chance to function effectively in the long term (if that). This is basically the system that came out of world war II, and it worked fairly well until several things happened that may perhaps be linked. First and foremost, right wing ultraconservatives established a long term explicit plan to roll back as much as possible of the New Deal and post-war evolution, including things like high marginal tax rates, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, Social Security, minimum wages, and so on. This is clearly a case of pure class warfare. It is obviously not sustainable in the long term, as an impoverished population can't afford to purchase the products, thus reducing demand and ultimately making the capitalist system itself dysfunctional. Second, there is the component of pure costs of production, which must be presumed to have risen significantly with the end of cheap US oil in the mid 1970s. I remember myself when gasoline was less than 30 cents at the pump, and each penny increase was a newsworth. Nowadays prices in the US are at least 3-4 times that, and are even higher in Europe. Whether as a source material for chemical industry (as in plastics) or as a source of energy, a several fold increase in price must reduce profits if the price index does not rise equivalently. To me it is highly suspicious that the beginning of the triumph of the right wing neocon agenda began shortly after the mid-1970s. It could be coincidental, but could also be that the increase in oil prices and lack of control of those prices translated into greater energy put into subverting our political process. Further support for this idea comes from the relatively recent recovery of the US economy (in terms of GDP if not wages), also coincident with the use of new technologies to increase national oil production thereby reducing dependence on middle -eastern oil (reducing but not eliminating).

Story coming out of New Jersey, due to problems with budget negotiations many state services are shut down over this Fourth of July weekend. That includes various state parks and beaches. OK, except that the governor (C.C.) apparently took his family to one of those parks and there were various pix posted on the internet of them sunning on an otherwise empty expanse of sand. The sheer arrogance seems beyond belief, except that it's only too believable. We know well that some people lack all empathy, however we prefer that such people not be elected to manage our affairs. In this case, the governor is probably a lame duck, after a seriously failed presidential run plus being spurned by the administration. He may simply be thumbing his metaphoric nose at everyone. But he is still running the state, in theory. And yet, he probably does feel a sense of empowerment, given that America has been giving positive signals to politicians to behave with increasing meanness and haughtiness. In addition to the message that poor people and minorities should not share equal opportunity or even basic civil rights, this is being extended to practically everyone who is not wealthy. How self-avowed populists can reconcile such behavior with the basic idea of populism is difficult to understand. But clearly the republican party, for all its supposed patriotism, has actually little interest in understanding or functioning under the true values by which the US was founded. The founders espoused the values of the Enlightenment, which have nothing to do with the actions (as opposed to the rhetoric) of the conservatives these days.

There is a lot of media attention these days to a supposed crisis in the replication of scientific studies. However, I don't agree that there is such a replication "crisis". Biological experimentation involves a very high degree of complexity, with many variables that are extremely difficult to control. For example, even the same inbred mouse strains, or tissue culture cell lines, can actually be quite divergent between different laboratories. It is very difficult for one lab to assess the number of statistical degrees of freedom in its own work. Thus it is to be expected that some, many even many, results which are reported reliably on experiments performed in good conscience, will fail to replicate among labs. That is part of the cost of doing truly novel research. Just based on an anecdotal sense of the kinds of work being described as "non-replicable", much of it is either in the social sciences, where controlling variables is even harder, or in clinical trials on human cohorts where again it is challenging to control for environmental factors. In contrast, in my own field of human medical genetics, results tend to be highly replicable, as we are usually looking at the effects of severe high penetrance mutations. Different mutations in the same gene typically generate very similar, though not identical phenotypes even in very different populations. A quick survey of the Human Gene Mutation Database corroborates this observation.

That said, it is true that scientists are under way too much pressure to generate positive results, especially for very expensive programs like clinical trials or large scale population genetic studies. Moreover, the hypercompetitive state of grant funding these days encourages hype and excessive optimism over sober analysis. This is not the fault of the NIH, this is the result of decades of government underfunding of science measured as a proportion of national GDP.

What comes after

I woke this morning from a very interesting and (for me) atypical dream. Most dreams are of a private nature and publishing them nothing but an exercise in vanity, but this is perhaps one of those rare exceptions.

In the dream I was in the afterlife. No idea how I got there, that was irrelevant. It was not clearly depicted, but there many of "us", again not very clearly visualized. I seemed to be seated (?) at a console like a microfilm or microfiche machine, and images went speeding by as when one fast forwards through that type of film. The images were in color.

An authority, again not visualized, more like a voice (perhaps I was drawing on Tolkien's short story Leaf by Niggle), was explaining how things worked. Essentially all possible information was available, in other words everything that had ever happened (on earth? in the entire universe?), but it was up to each of us to focus our minds to narrow in on any information of interest to us. As a preliminary exercise, the voice suggested we solve a simple math puzzle, the answer to which was a number. I don't recall the number, but as I focused on it, the images I was seeing slowed, came into focus, and eventually settled on the correct number. As that was happening, I was also seeing images of children. The voice, now close to me, noted that before I arrived here (wherever here was), I had asked to see my grandchildren. They were among the children whose images had gone by, thus I had come near, but not perfectly, at obtaining my desired information. As it happens, earlier in the day (the real day, not the dream) I was leafing through Steichen's classic photoessay, Family of Man; perhaps the images of children in my dream were stimulated by that real-life activity. I am not aware of feeling strongly about grandchildren (none so far), perhaps it's more important to me than I realized.

Anyway, the voice continued that I had wanted to know something else, namely whether quantum mechanics and general relativity could ever be reconciled as a coherent theory of everything in physics. This is indeed something I've love to have solved by physicists (not me of course), and have often joked that that would be my first question on arriving in Heaven (or the other place, hopefully they both know!) The voice said that the answer was that the two theories could not be reconciled. I asked whether that meant both were incomplete approximations of a true mathematically consistent theory, which the voice confirmed.

Then I woke up. If only I had slept a few more moments, I might have had the answer to all physics! Probably not though, probably I woke up because that was as far as I could go. But I awoke with a sense of perfect peace, because the universe was about not struggle, but about knowledge and correct understanding, from which action and consequence flow naturally. This now seems rather buddhist to me, though most of the time I tend much more to activity, spontaneity and trial and error, versus deep thought. My wife must be changing me, or else I am changing myself in response to her wisdom.