It’s a Cat’s Life

I’ve been on holidays for a couple of weeks, and Blogging is about the last thing I’ve thought of; the weather has been phenomenal, and I’ve been enjoying the outdoors like never before.

I live in a suburb of Vancouver, which, at times, can be quite a rainy city. July and August are usually quite nice, but this July has been completely without precedence;  Vancouver set a record today, the thirty-fourth day in a row without even a trace of precipitation (the previous record was recorded in 1953). It looks like there will be zero precipitation for the entire month.

Any time I’ve spent inside has been spent either reading, watching a short movie with my daughter, or rearranging/cleaning our home. Yesterday, I spent the entire day shifting around bookshelves in our bedroom, and one of my daughter’s cats spent the day sleeping on the only corner of the bed not covered with books and/or other extraneous materials; I continuously piled and removed material from around him, but he managed to sleep through the entire event.  As I was grunting , he was snoring (‘purring’), and as I was heaving, his paws were twitching as if he was dreaming of chasing his favorite prey. I suddenly realized that somewhere in the scheme of things I’d gone down the wrong path: the life of my daughter’s cat was the one that was (surely) meant for me.

Since then, I have been treating my daughter’s cat with the reverence that he obviously deserves from his build-up of positive karma.

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The Anthropocene: the New Man Epoch

economist.com

A new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (the New Man Epoch), may have begun; which, according to predictions, will include the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history.

A paper has been written (The New World of the Anthropocene) in which the authors claim “…that recent human activity, including stunning population growth, sprawling megacities, and increased use of fossil fuels, have changed the planet to such an extent that we are entering a new geological era. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time era, and changing the course of the planet’s geological evolution for millions of years.” The authors of the paper are Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his study of atmospheric ozone).

Currently, fertilizer factories are account for the fixation of more nitrogen (the conversion of more nitrogen to a biologically useable form) than all land-based plants and microbes. The runoff from fertilized lands triggers oxygen-depleting algal-blooms in river deltas around the world.

Poor forest husbandry practices have caused devastating erosion and an alarming increase in sedimentation (and giant dam projects cause the opposite, holding back sediment that would naturally be washed out to the seas of the world). The loss of forest habitat is predicted to cause mass extinctions, which are already occurring over a hundred times quicker than at any time during the previous half-billion years; and, if trends persist, the rate of extinctions may rise by a factor of thousands.

But the largest geological effect is the change in the atmospheric composition; namely, an increase in carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) as a result of the use of fossil fuels, which are causing a warming effect that could raise temperatures to levels not felt on our planet for millions of years. There is evidence that plants and animals are already migrating toward the Earth’s poles. Many species will not survive. It is predicted that sea levels will rise six meters (twenty feet), or more. Carbon dioxide will eventually acidify the oceans to the point that corals will not be able to build reefs (there is evidence that this process is already occurring, and by the middle of this century it may cause devastation to corral reefs). Reef gaps are a consequence of the previous five major mass extinctions; the most recent mass extinction was approximately sixty million years ago, possibly due to the impact of an asteroid. To the geologists of the far future (assuming homo sapiens survive), our footprint will look eerily similar to the devastatingly sudden consequences of an asteroid striking the planet. I wonder how we will be viewed by our distant descendants, but I imagine it will not be with approval.

There is still debate that the increased carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is a naturally occurring phenomena (although the gasses are increasing at an unprecidented rate of over ten times the speed of previous epochs, mainly driven by human activity); however, these arguments, to me, seem moot: does it really matter? Is it morally acceptable to continue to belch and leach poisons into the atmosphere and waterways? I think we’ve become inured to the problem; apathy reigns, and I admit that I, alike millions upon millions, am caught in the lethargy of our society. This is what scares me: the ennui of apathy.

Paul Crutzen, who coined the term Anthropocene, has said that his “…hope is that the term Anthropocene will be a warning to the world.”

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of cow belches, whale poo, and the environment

A colleague of mine enjoys challenging my views with humorous jabs; recently, when I was decrying the fact that our society (myself included) is apathetic in regards to the pollution effects of fossil fuels, he suggested that the world’s one-and-a-half billion cows are to blame for the greenhouse gas problems.

[Image found at Science Hax]

“A cow,” he informed me, “farts out as much pollution as a car.”

I looked it up; he was almost correct, but it is cow burps (scientific types, and other straight-laced characters, prefer the term eructation), not flatulence, that releases the bulk of the methane — a significant greenhouse gas component — from cows into the atmosphere.

In fact, ruminant animals (cows, sheep and water buffalo in particular) account for almost thirty percent of the methane in the environment. It is a big enough problem that there are even plans to add antibiotics to cattle feed to impede the production of methane. Personally, I’d prefer that we decrease our consumption of beef, which would reduce the population of cows required on the planet, thereby lowering the eructation of ruminant-methane. Our planet maintains a natural balance, but humanity has a nasty tendency to push past the level that the environment can correct for.

When I reported my findings back to the colleague who had prompted my research, he nodded; I was thus encouraged, and went on to explain that the real problem was our diet: apparently, in Canada and the United States, animal consumption accounts for about seventy percent of our dietary intake, and we could reverse the methane-eructation problem if we  reduced our livestock herds by modifying our eating habits. The carbon footprint of vegetables, beans and grains is a fraction of that created by animal husbandry. And, if our society reduced its consumption of animals, we would receive the added bonus of a healthier population.

“Okay,” my esteemed colleague said; “but what about the whales?”

“Huh?” I replied.

And then he began to (humorously) malign whales for their colossal contribution to global warming due to their excessive exhalation of carbon dioxide (CO2), a familiar greenhouse gas pollutant. “There have been estimates,” my colleague informed me, “that whales contribute the equivalent of forty-thousand CO2-belching automobiles.”

So I did some more research…

And he was correct, as far as he went; however, he hadn’t looked at the big picture.

Australian researchers, while studying baleen (krill eating) whales, have discovered that although whales exhale huge quantities of CO2, their feces are responsible for the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Whales move their bowels at the surface and, because their feces are rich in iron, this acts as a fertilizer for phytoplankton, the wonderful marine plant that uses CO2 from the atmosphere to drive photosynthesis. In fact, it turns out that the reduction of CO2 by phytoplankton, as powered by the iron from whale feces, is twice the amount exhaled by the whales; therefore, the net contribution of whales is beneficial in the battle against greenhouse gasses and global warming.  This is an example of how nature — if we take humans out of the equation — performs its own checks and balances.

So, when I was back at work again, I reported the findings to my colleague.

He nodded, accepting my research, and said, “Okay, but what about…”

But I didn’t hear the rest because I’d stuck a finger in each ear and walked away, humming loudly…

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