Research shows not only the fittest survive

Contact: Daniel Williams
d.d.williams@exeter.ac.uk
44-013-927-22062
University of Exeter

Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into question by new research published today (27 March 2011) in Nature.
A collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Bath in the UK, with a group from San Diego State University in the US, challenges our current understanding of evolution by showing that biodiversity may evolve where previously thought impossible.
The work represents a new approach to studying evolution that may eventually lead to a better understanding of the diversity of bacteria that cause human diseases.
Conventional wisdom has it that for any given niche there should be a best species, the fittest, that will eventually dominate to exclude all others.
This is the principle of survival of the fittest. Ecologists often call this idea the `competitive exclusion principle' and it predicts that complex environments are needed to support complex, diverse populations.
Professor Robert Beardmore, from the University of Exeter, said: "Microbiologists have tested this principle by constructing very simple environments in the lab to see what happens after hundreds of generations of bacterial evolution, about 3,000 years in human terms. It had been believed that the genome of only the fittest bacteria would be left, but that wasn't their finding. The experiments generated lots of unexpected genetic diversity."
This test tube biodiversity proved controversial when first observed and had been explained away with claims that insufficient time had been allowed to pass for a clear winner to emerge.
The new research shows the experiments were not anomalies.
Professor Laurence Hurst, of the University of Bath, said: "Key to the new understanding is the realisation that the amount of energy organisms squeeze out of their food depends on how much food they have. Give them abundant food and they use it inefficiently. When we combine this with the notion that organisms with different food-utilising strategies are also affected in different ways by genetic mutations, then we discover a new principle, one in which both the fit and the unfit coexist indefinitely."
Dr Ivana Gudelj, also from the University of Exeter, said: "The fit use food well but they aren't resilient to mutations, whereas the less efficient, unfit consumers are maintained by their resilience to mutation. If there's a low mutation rate, survival of the fittest rules, but if not, lots of diversity can be maintained.
"Rather nicely, the numbers needed for the principle to work accord with those enigmatic experiments on bacteria. Their mutation rate seems to be high enough for both fit and unfit to be maintained."
Dr. David Lipson of San Diego State University, concluded: "Earlier work showed that opposing food utilisation strategies could coexist in complex environments, but this is the first explanation of how trade-offs, like the one we studied between growth rate and efficiency, can lead to stable diversity in the simplest possible of environments."

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COMMENT: Liberals, motivated by the desire to promote the IDEA of "diversity" (with all its implications for gov policies) PRETENDING to do science.


There are many people on this planet right now who CANNOT understand the Scientific Method, but they just PRETEND they are scientists anyway. In science, you have to be willing to discover what the truth is NO MATTER WHAT it turns out to be. Liberals - like Conservatives - LOVE science whenever it supports what they WANT to be true... or seems to. When it violates their desires, the Liberals say "that's racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever smear is applicable." (The Conservatives say it's "elitist", or lately, "lib-tard".)


Charles Darwin's proposed explanation for the mechanism of evolution - which he called "natural selection", meaning the local environment naturally selects those inherited characteristics which best fit that environment - has been proven correct over and over, etc. You are not free to believe whether it's true or not.

However, Darwinian evolution supports SOME of what the Conservatives have been saying all along about different races and sexes, so the Liberals are utterly DESPERATE to "prove" Darwin wrong. 

The Truth is Good, The Lie is Evil. Choose.
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Book review: ‘Moral Landscape’ examines science behind human values

Saturday, March 19, 2011 10:48 PM CDT

The goal of this book is to begin a conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science. There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident and many are deeply counterintuitive.”

So writes Sam Harris in his latest best-seller, “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.” Harris is co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation that advocates for science and secular values; he has degrees in philosophy and neuroscience from Stanford University and UCLA. His previous books include “The End of Faith,” which won the PEN Award for Nonfiction in 2005, and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

At the heart of “The Moral Landscape” is the notion that all human values have their genesis in the natural order and, as such, we do not need “God” or anything else to define concepts of right and wrong or to otherwise make judgments about the inherent efficacy of different behaviors. To illustrate this point, he examines a number of values that tend to be common to people in most societies. For instance, acting in one’s own self-interest has often been characterized as being beneficial from an evolutionary perspective. Conversely, most religions tend to articulate, in one way or another, that cooperation and empathy for others are higher-order aspirations that allow us to transcend our more primal tendencies.

“Many people imagine that the theory of evolution entails selfishness as a biological imperative,” Harris observes. “This popular misconception has been very harmful to the reputation of science.” He then proceeds to provide several examples of how selfishness has been counterproductive to the evolution of some species, while cooperation has led to a competitive advantage for others.

“We have good reason to believe that much of what we do in the name of ‘morality’ - decrying sexual infidelity, punishing cheaters, valuing cooperation, etc. - is borne of unconscious processes that were shaped by natural selection,” Harris adds.

Harris thinks that scientists should not shy away from passionately extolling the virtues of their particular medium for pursuing new insights into reality that bring us closer to defining the perpetually elusive “absolute truth.” Specifically, he would like to see his colleagues become a lot more vocal in their critique and criticism of the proponents of religion. “The scientific community’s reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at a price,” Harris notes. “It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important questions of human life.”

When you dig a little deeper into his thesis, however, it becomes increasingly obvious that Harris has embedded his own self-serving agenda in “The Moral Landscape.” As is the case with so much of what is done in the name of motives that are alleged to be altruistic and pure, the allocation of financial resources - i.e., money - seems to be a driving force behind this book. “Many of our secular critics worry that if we oblige people to choose between reason and faith, they will choose faith and cease to support scientific research,” Harris contends. “Currently, federal funding is only allowed for work on stem cells that have been derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics.”

The author also seems to understand that the scientific community can sometimes be its own worst enemy. “There is no question that scientists have occasionally demonstrated sexist and racist biases,” Harris concedes. At the same time, he seems in denial when he argues that science is somehow impervious to these deleterious attitudes. After providing several examples of where less than admirable human qualities have arguably distracted from the quest to advance knowledge, he comes to the rather dubious conclusion that “none of these facts, alone or in combination, remotely suggests that our notions of scientific objectivity are vitiated by racism or sexism.”

To his credit, very few books are as extensively researched and referenced as “The Moral Landscape.” There are 43 pages of notes in the back, together with 40 pages of citations. Harris is intimately familiar with both the current and the historical literature that forms the nucleus of his work. When discussing the debate concerning whether creationism should be included in curriculum, he does a reasonably balanced job of providing both sides of the issue, although his personal bias does tend to shine through in various passages.

A primary problem with Harris’ argument is that he assumes the scientific method is the only valid method of inquiry; i.e., the only mechanism through which legitimate knowledge can be satisfactorily derived. Ultimately his belief in science comes down to a matter of faith, and this is the glaring contradiction at the core of “The Moral Landscape.” The scientific method is admittedly very useful for dealing with the empirical world, but it does exhibit rather severe limitations when it veers outside that realm.

“The Moral Landscape” is not a bad book. It is a fairly interesting read that tends to stimulate critical thought and reflection in an area of life that touches us all, although the author’s intolerance and contempt for opposing perspectives is definitely a distraction. It’s one thing to passionately advocate for your position - it’s quite another to claim that your position is the only viable way of understanding and interpreting the world.

— Reviewed by Aaron W. Hughey, Department of Counseling and Student Affairs, Western Kentucky University.

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COMMENT: Sam Harris said


"At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria.. "


and


"In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah."
http://www.rationalresponders.com/head_in_the_sand_liberals_by_sam_harris

thereby identifying himself as PRETENDING to be rational.

P.S.
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are all evil.
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White House wants new copyright law crackdown

March 15, 2011 10:51 AM PDT

by Declan McCullagh

The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making "illegal streaming" of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.
In a 20-page white paper (PDF), the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix "deficiencies that could hinder enforcement" of intellectual property laws.

The report was prepared by Victoria Espinel, the first Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator who received Senate confirmation in December 2009, and represents a broad tightening of many forms of intellectual property law including ones that deal with counterfeit pharmaceuticals and overseas royalties for copyright holders. (See CNET's report last month previewing today's white paper.)

Some of the highlights:

• The White House is concerned that "illegal streaming of content" may not be covered by criminal law, saying "questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works." To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to "clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances."

• Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that move "would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses."

• Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's generally illegal to distribute hardware or software--such as the DVD-decoding software Handbrake available from a server in France--that can "circumvent" copy protection technology. The administration is proposing that if Homeland Security seizes circumvention devices, it be permitted to "inform rightholders," "provide samples of such devices," and assist "them in bringing civil actions."

The term "fair use" does not appear anywhere in the report. But it does mention Web sites like The Pirate Bay, which is hosted in Sweden, when warning that "foreign-based and foreign-controlled Web sites and Web services raise particular concerns for U.S. enforcement efforts." (See previous coverage of a congressional hearing on overseas sites.)

The usual copyright hawks, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded the paper, which grew out of a so-called joint strategic plan that Vice President Biden and Espinel announced in June 2010.
Rob Calia, a senior director at the Chamber's Global Intellectual Property Center, said we "strongly support the white paper's call for Congress to clarify that criminal copyright infringement through unauthorized streaming, is a felony. We know both the House and Senate are looking at this issue and encourage them to work closely with the administration and other stakeholders to combat this growing threat."

In October 2008, President Bush signed into law the so-called Pro IP ACT, which created Espinel's position and increased penalties for infringement, after expressing its opposition to an earlier version.
Unless legislative proposals--like one nearly a decade ago implanting strict copy controls in digital devices--go too far, digital copyright tends not to be a particularly partisan topic. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, near-universally disliked by programmers and engineers for its anti-circumvention section, was approved unanimously in the U.S. Senate.

At the same time, Democratic politicians tend to be a bit more enthusiastic about the topic. Biden was a close Senate ally of copyright holders, and President Obama picked top copyright industry lawyers for Justice Department posts. Last year, Biden warned that "piracy is theft."

No less than 78 percent of political contributions from Hollywood went to Democrats in 2008, which is broadly consistent with the trend for the last two decades, according to OpenSecrets.org.

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COMMENT: Once again, Obama proves himself evil by carrying on the policies of the Bush 43 admin.

If I steal your car, you don't have your car anymore. If you put a song, movie, book or whatever on the web, and I - and millions of other people - download it, you STILL HAVE it, and now millions of others do too. They are NOT the same thing. The term "intellectual property" is psychological warfare.

AND, by linking this to the Patriot Act, will people be classified as terrorists just for violating copyright?

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What Kind of Sick Culture Blames an 11-Year-Old for Being Gang-Raped? 

By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet
Posted on March 11, 2011, Printed on March 13, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150199/

The memories have faded, but still they float to the surface at times: being 12, 13, 14 years old in an insular West Texas town where you could walk from one end of town to the other in half an hour. Most walks home from the store or school were uneventful, but a handful of times, young men in their late teens or early 20s would slow their cars down and lean out the window while you walked. “Hey, why are you walking? Don’t you want a ride?” Faces full of concern they never seemed to have when dealing with young girls in any other setting.
I always said no. I was too young to have any inkling of what could happen if I accepted, but I figured it was not likely to be good.
But one 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas, a rural town in the eastern part of the state, did say yes to the ride. And what allegedly was done to her is the sort of thing that begs for an explanation. She was taken to one house and then to an abandoned trailer. She was threatened with violence if she didn’t comply. She was sexually assaulted by multiple men in their teens and 20s, some of whom recorded the event and posted it online. How could these young men allegedly do this?
The answer to that question lies in large part in attitudes unearthed in recent coverage that quotes accusations that the victim is to blame, and were reported, without comment, context and certainly no criticism, in the New York Times and in the Houston Chronicle.
When the photos and videos of the alleged rape were discovered, the girl---not the accused, some of whom are the golden boys of the community---became such an object of hate and gossip that the authorities removed her from her home to a safe house, and are encouraging her family to relocate permanently. It seems that for many, the person who bears the blame for this alleged gang-rape is a girl still at the age when many are playing with Barbies.
What could an 11-year-old girl do that would be so terrible she somehow deserved to be raped by at least 17 but as many as 28 men? Did she ax-murder a family? Burn down a city? Orchestrate a genocide?
According to some members of the Cleveland, Texas community quoted in the New York Times and Houston Chronicle, she courted gang-rape by being on the verge of adolescence and striving to seem older than she was, a common enough behavior for girls that age. In both papers, much is made of the reputation of the alleged victim wearing makeup, dressing older than her age and currying favor from teenage boys. The Houston Chronicle dwelled extensively on the girl’s bragging about drinking, smoking and sex on her Facebook page, and also takes note of the alleged victim’s defensiveness in the face of so much community disapproval. 
Of course, when I was a 12-year-old girl and a man followed me as I was walking home from school, muttering dirty things under his breath and boring holes in me with his eyes, I was wearing my usual uniform of jeans and a sweatshirt, with sneakers and certainly no makeup. I didn’t even shave my legs. I escaped him by ducking into True Value and pretending to buy some tapes. The only “crime” a child who falls into the hands of a rapist has committed is to be unlucky, with no True Value nearby to escape to.
Girls suffer from harassment, violence and rape all the time, but they rarely tell. And the reason is that while girls may not know much about sex or men or the world, they pick up on what this alleged victim is suffering now. They instinctively know that to tell is to invite judgment, to have people ask not, “What kind of man would assault a child?” but “What did she do to invite this abuse?”
Finding angry criticism of the victim for dressing or acting in ways the community deems inappropriate to a girl her age was easy for reporters. Same with finding people willing to blame the mother for allowing her child to roam unsupervised in a small Texas town. But, as someone who grew up in a small Texas town, I can assure you that letting even small children roam free is hardly an unusual choice, in fact, it's quite normal. The reasoning, ironically, is that small towns are safe for children.
Some residents were happy to lay the blame squarely on any man who thinks it’s appropriate to join in a gang-rape, and a couple tried to split the difference, blaming both victim and victimizers. But the New York Times also quoted, without comment, supportive comments for the alleged rapists, with one woman saying, “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.” No one was quoted discussing the lifelong impact of being the victim of a gang rape.
One question is on the lips of reasonable people everywhere when they hear that the only reason these arrests are occurring is that the alleged rapists taped and photographed the event, and then shared it widely online. But young men who would do such a thing live in the same world we all do. They notice that it’s the victim and not the rapists who are assailed by the community and the media when a rape is reported. They notice that people blame the victim for what she was wearing or who she had sex with before. They notice that it’s the victim who has to move away, not the alleged perpetrators. 
Anyone who took all this in should be forgiven for assuming that when a rape occurs, the crime was being raped, not being a rapist. And we shouldn’t be surprised when some would-be rapists take all these social signals shifting blame from rapists to victims, and decide that if they raped they probably will get away with it. All too often, they do.
Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150199/

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COMMENT: Hey, Amanda, you lying stupid crazy feminist bitch, how about mentioning that the GIRL was a non-black Hispanic, and that the MEN and teen BOYS were all Black? Maybe that's why the NYT coverage is VERY different for this story than for the WHITE Duke Lacrossse players who were FALSELY accused by a Black woman?

The Truth is like air to The Good; without The Truth, The Good dies. No more secrets, no more lies.

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3 men who discovered bomb say they later lost jobs

– Fri Mar 11, 5:01 pm ET

SPOKANE, Wash. – Three cleanup workers who were hailed as heroes after finding a live bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade said they later lost their temporary jobs after supervisors questioned their handling of the situation.
The men were employed by Labor Ready and doing temporary work for the Spokane Public Facilities District when they found a backpack containing the bomb about an hour before the scheduled start of the Jan. 17 parade.
They alerted police, who were able to defuse the device.
"For the first two days, basically all we did was get chewed out," worker Mark Steiner told Spokane television station KHQ. "We did this wrong. We did that wrong. I don't know what you consider calling 911 wrong after two minutes after we found it."
Steiner, Brandon Klaus and Sherman Welpton had been hired to perform cleanup work during the parade and noticed the backpack on an outdoor bench.
Stacey Burke, a spokeswoman for Labor Ready, said the men were performing contract work for the facilities district and remain eligible to get more work through the temporary employment service when they ask.
"They can still find employment through us," Burke said, adding they had done some work since the bomb was found.
This was the first time that Labor Ready workers had to deal with a live bomb in Spokane, Burke said.
Kevin Twohig, head of the public facilities district, told The Spokesman-Review that the three men "we're messing around with the bomb."
"I think they put themselves at more risk than they needed," Twohig said.
Burke said the men should not have picked up the backpack.
"I would not wish for them to pick up a backpack that has a bomb in it," she said. "I'm sure they didn't know what it was."
The identities of the men were withheld until a suspect, Kevin William Harpham, 36, was arrested Wednesday near Addy.
Steiner told KHQ the three men were not trained to deal with suspicious packages.
"We'd go out, and we'd clean up parking lots," he said. "Who knows what happens when you see a backpack sitting there? The first reaction is to pick it up and that's what we did, and we opened it, saw wires sticking out of it and called police."
Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and Spokane Mayor Mary Verner have praised the three workers in speeches for being vigilant.

Information from: KHQ-TV, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3082888/
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COMMENT: Sounds like someone in the gov is PISSED that these three normal humans inadvertently foiled the latest FAKE TERRORISM op.

ALSO, this story came out just hours after the earthquake/tsunami news from Japan. Maybe hoping it would get "lost in the shuffle"?
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Cave murals in Spain 'show man may have used magic mushrooms 6,000 years ago'

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:37 AM on 9th March 2011

For all those who thought hallucinogenic drugs took off in the 1960s, think again: scientists believe they have found evidence of magic mushroom use 6,000 years ago.
Cave murals found in Spain appear to depict them in religious rituals - which would be the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.
The Selva Pascuala cave mural near the town of Villar del Humo has a bull in the centre, but researchers from America and Mexico are focussing on a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects.

Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico say they believe the objects are Psilocybe hispanica, a local funghi with hallucinogenic properties.

 

The mushroom has a bell-shaped cap with a dome and lacks a ring around the stalk, just like the objects in the 6,000 year-old mural, they say.
It also has stalks which vary from straight to sinuous - the same as those drawn thousands of years ago, they add in the latest issue of New Scientist.
But, even though it is several millennia old, it is not thought to be the oldest painting showing hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Messages from another world: The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave signs and paintings cover 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago

A mural in Algeria that may show Psilocybe mairei is 7,000 to 9,000 years old, according to NewScientist.com.
Just last month, it was revealed the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France is to be the subject of a 3D documentary by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, as it is thought to be where man made his first attempts to write.
Since its (re)discovery in 1994, the cave in southern France has offered scientists a veritable treasure trove of perfectly preserved paintings.
Alongside these are evidence of attempts at communication 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

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COMMENT: The artists painted the pictures on the walls; then the shaman gave everyone mushrooms (or marijuana, or whatev), led them into the cave, and the flickering flame combined with the "trip" to make the images move on the wall in the perceptions of the audience, as the shaman guided their trip with story-telling. It was a combination church/movie theater for them.


These days, use of hallucinogenic plants has been completely separated from spirituality, so spirituality has been lost - replaced with religion - and drug use is now "recreational" - "ooh, look at the pretty colors."
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Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?

by Bill McKibben

For two decades now we've been ignoring the impassioned pleas of scientists that our burning of fossil fuels was a bad idea. And now we're paying a heavy price. 

February 2, 2011 

If you were in the space shuttle looking down yesterday, you would have seen a pair of truly awesome, even fearful, sights.

Much of North America was obscured by a 2,000-mile storm dumping vast quantities of snow from Texas to Maine--between the wind and snow, forecasters described it as "probably the worst snowstorm ever to affect" Chicago, and said waves as high as 25 feet were rocking buoys on Lake Michigan.
Meanwhile, along the shore of Queensland in Australia, the vast cyclone Yasi was sweeping ashore; though the storm hit at low tide, the country's weather service warned that "the impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations," especially since its torrential rains are now falling on ground already flooded from earlier storms. Here's how Queensland premier Anna Bligh addressed her people before the storm hit: "We know that the long hours ahead of you are going to be the hardest that you face. We will be thinking of you every minute of every hour between now and daylight and we hope that you can feel our thoughts, that you will take strength from the fact that we are keeping you close and in our hearts."

Welcome to our planet, circa 2011--a planet that, like some unruly adolescent, has decided to test the boundaries. For two centuries now we've been burning coal and oil and gas and thus pouring carbon into the atmosphere; for two decades now we've been ignoring the increasingly impassioned pleas of scientists that this is a Bad Idea. And now we're getting pinched.

Oh, there have been snowstorms before, and cyclones--our planet has always produced extreme events. But by definition extreme events are supposed to be rare, and all of a sudden they're not. In 2010 nineteen nations set new all-time temperature records (itself a record!) and when the mercury hit 128 in early June along the Indus, the entire continent of Asia set a new all-time temperature mark. Russia caught on fire; Pakistan drowned. Munich Re, the biggest insurance company on earth, summed up the annus horribilis last month with this clinical phrase: "the high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change."

You don't need a PhD to understand what's happening. That carbon we've poured into the air traps more of the sun's heat near the planet. And that extra energy expresses itself in a thousand ways, from melting ice to powering storms. Since warm air can hold more water vapor than cold, it's not surprising that the atmosphere is 4% moister than it was 40 years ago. That "4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms," said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the government's National Center for Atmospheric Research. It loads the dice for record rain and snow. Yesterday the Midwest and Queensland crapped out.

The point I'm trying to make is: chemistry and physics work. We don't just live in a suburb, or in a free-market democracy; we live on an earth that has certain rules. Physics and chemistry don't care what John Boehner thinks, they're unmoved by what will make Barack Obama's re-election easier. More carbon means more heat means more trouble--and the trouble has barely begun. So far we've raised the temperature of the planet about a degree, which has been enough to melt the Arctic. The consensus prediction for the century is that without dramatic action to stem the use of fossil fuel--far more quickly than is politically or economically convenient--we'll see temperatures climb five degrees this century. Given that one degree melts the Arctic, just how lucky are we feeling?

So far, of course, we haven't taken that dramatic action--just the opposite. The president didn't even mention global warming in his State of the Union address. He did promise some research into new technologies, which will help down the line--but we'll only be in a position to make use of it if we get started right now with the technology we've already got. And that requires, above all, putting a serious price on carbon. We use fossil fuel because it's cheap, and it's cheap because Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal get to use the atmosphere as open sewer to dump their waste for free. And today you can see the results of that particular business model from outer space.
Overcoming that will require a movement--a movement that is slowly beginning to build. In 2008 a few of us started from scratch to build a campaign with an unlikely moniker: we called in 350.org, because a month earlier this particular planet's foremost climatologist, James Hansen, had declared that we now knew how much carbon in the atmosphere was too much. Any value higher than 350 parts per million, he said, was "not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." That's troubling news, because right now the atmosphere above Chicago and Cairns and wherever you happen to be is about 390 ppm co2. In other words, too much.
At the time, some of our environmentalist friends said that science was too complicated for most people to get--that the only way to talk about these issues was to simplify them. But we thought people could understand, just as we understand when a doctor tells us our cholesterol is too high. We may not know everything about the lipid system, but we know what 'too high' means--it means we better change our diet, take our pill, lace up our sneakers. And indeed 350.org has now coordinated almost 15,000 demonstrations in 188 countries, what Foreign Policy magazine called 'the largest ever coordinated global rally" about any issue.
That's just a start, of course, and so far not enough to counter the power of the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise humans have ever engaged in. So we'll keep building, and hoping others will join us. But the good news is simple: more and more of this planet's inhabitants are remembering that they actually live on a planet.
We've been able to forget that fact for the last ten thousand years, the period of remarkable climatic stability that underwrote the rise of civilization. But we won't be able to forget it much longer. Days like yesterday will keep slapping us upside the head, until we take it in. The third rock from the sun is a very different place than it used to be.

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, and author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149774/

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THE EPIDEMIC OF STUPID PEOPLE PRETENDING TO BE SMRT: Umm... there's no such thing as a "greenhouse gas."

P.S. "Using the truth to lie" is one of the hallmarks of the "psychopathic personality."

P.P.S. Total cholesterol is an utterly meaningless number.

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