"They're complete Neanderthals" : No, they aren't

From October 2008

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One of the things that irritates the hell out of me is reading things like “so-and-so (someone the speaker doesn’t like, obviously) are complete Neanderthals”.

All right, I may be nitpicking, but I’ve always felt people should know just what the hell it is that they are talking about. The last time I came across this, it was someone claiming the Bush gang were Neanderthals. Oh please.

I hate the Bushies as much as anyone, as everyone here knows perfectly well. But it’s ridiculous to compare them, or any other Alpha-male or Vandal-type, to Neanderthals, and for clear and definite reasons.

Now I’m sure you know something about the Neanderthals, unless you learned to read just yesterday; but some things need repeating.

First is the basic and irretrievable fact that Neanderthals are extinct. That’s right, dead, unless some person does a Jurassic Park and recreates one from DNA; of that, more anon.

The second thing is that Neanderthals were humanoid, even quasi-human; although scientists as yet aren’t decided whether they were a human subspecies (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) or a separate species (Homo neanderthalensis). Since I’m sure nobody reading this will be a creationist nitwit, you get the significance of the classification. If Neanderthals were a human subspecies, they would have been able to interbreed with modern humans; if they were a different species, they wouldn’t. And so far as we can find, unfortunately, they didn’t, and they were a separate species. (Yeah, I too wish they had, and they weren't, but we have to go by facts, however unpleasant. That’s why we believe in science.)

Since Neanderthals are extinct, and moreover, didn’t interbreed with our species, calling Bush a Neanderthal would be factually incorrect.

Of course, there’s much more to come.

Neanderthals were bipedal and looked a lot like humans. But there were many differences too; they had a more muscular body, a much larger brain size, but the shape of the skull was markedly different, suggesting that they may have had a more developed visual system and been capable of less vocalisation. And so on and so forth.

But the Neanderthals also used stone tools, hunted, performed surgery (one skeleton has an amputated arm) and religion (they buried their dead with flowers). You think about that. Proto-humans who did all that…and who vanished after coming into contact with modern humans, the Cro-Magnon, everywhere along their range.

What does this suggest? It suggests that these large-brained, muscular, tool-using, evolved hominids were wiped out, either directly or by out-hunting and out-breeding, by the Cro-Magnon, does it not?

High time we began calling stupid, destructive morons Cros.

No insult intended to Corvus splendens, though. 

(By the way, creationists love to pretend that Neanderthals were modern humans. Not so.)

Response to Global Warming Deniers

Sometimes, some lines of argument reveal more about the people making those arguments than the points they are advancing...

Let’s take two different lines of argument advanced by two different lots of the deny-global-warming brigade:

The first lot:

One frequent assertion of the people who love to pretend, for reasons I shall discuss in a moment, that there’s no such thing as global warming is this: global warming doesn’t exist. If it does exist, it isn’t due to the activities of human beings. And even if it is the activities of human beings that is causing it, it’s likely to be a good thing because the melting of all that ice will free up so many natural resources for exploitation, and so on and so forth. Now there are some governments which love to subscribe, officially at least, to this theory. Y’know, how the resources opened up will benefit the nation, and how people up north will save because they won’t have to heat their houses any more, and so on.

It requires very little intelligence to see that there is a lot wrong with this line of “argument”. Now, unless one’s one of the lot who love to imagine that the Day of Judgement is about to arrive, one expects that the planet is likely to endure till the sun turns into a  red giant about five thousand million years from now. Accordingly, the resources “freed up” by global warming will need to last at least five thousand million years or until some kind of technology is developed which needs no resources, or at least so few resources that the new resources freed up will last at least that vast majority of humanity which does not emigrate to other planets for five thousand million years. Right? Now can anyone believe that this is likely to happen, especially as these same governments spend far more money and effort in the race to secure resources than in the attempt to develop even marginally less wasteful technologies?

Then there is the little point that the planet isn’t warming up in little patches, of course; whatever the reason behind global warming, the planet is warming up as a whole. It might seem obvious to you and to me, but not to these ladies and gentlemen. If the north warms up, the south does so too. And the majority of the world’s people live in the equatorial regions, so if the Arctic and Antarctic warm up, you can probably agree with me that the equatorial region is liable to warm up a sight more.

What happens if it warms up? Well, one of the obvious (to you and me) consequences is the massive reduction of crop yields because of many factors, some of which can be briefly described as under:

First, the patterns of ocean currents will be badly disturbed by warming of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps leading to the entry of huge amounts of fresh cold water into the seas. The ocean currents are responsible for a very large portion of global rainfall. You disturb the currents, you disturb that rainfall, and you destroy crops worldwide, most of which are still dependent on rainfall for irrigation.

Second, because many of these crops exist in places with little seasonal temperature variations, a sharp rise in temperature is liable to kill them off, because crops domesticated over thousands of years lose what resistance they had in the wild to change of conditions.

Third, the melting of the ice caps will raise ocean levels and flood coastal lands all over. More people worldwide live on the coasts than do inland, and, especially in poorer and more crowded lands, there is liable to be not much space for them to move to. Coastal crop yields will vanish.

Then there are the other deleterious effects of global warming on equatorial people: not only famine due to reducing crop yields, but hunger/drought/flooding induced migration and conflict, fighting over land and water and food, rampant disease (usually a bigger killer in low-technology fighting than combat itself), and even deaths from heatstroke. All this can be safely predicted, as can be predicted that the governments eulogising global warming will do nothing to mitigate these effects or help these people. Of course, those same governments will never even mention that these things will happen. We can call this the “I got mine Jack” line of thinking. It’s short term and stupid, because the resources will run out anyway, and because of course the adverse effects of global warming won’t fail to affect them as well.

While the second lot of global warming deniers lack any official support, unlike the first lot, their line of argument is even more interesting and even more self-delusional. Although also global warming deniers, they are on the surface the enemies of the first lot. Their line of argument goes like this: global warming does not exist. It is only a scaremongering tactic thought up by a few rich nations as a way of committing genocide against the poorer nations of the world!

(That, by the way, is an argument put forward by a faction of the anti-abortion hypocrites in the US too:  that abortion is a weapon used to reduce the populations of poor non-white minorities. Therefore poor non-white minorities should avoid abortion and have more and more children, ensuring they remain poor forever.)

Anyway, to get back to the main point: these people aver that global warming is a plot to divert crops to biofuels and so on and to deny poor countries the good things of life, by restricting their ownership of cars and so on. Yesterday I read one of the shining lights of this lot of intellectuals claim that anti-global warming activists like Al Gore were “killers by starvation of Third World children” (As an aside: I didn’t see any comment by her against the much more direct killing of children by Zionazi bombs and the like, in case you’re wondering).

Superficially it’s plausible, because there’s a quite undeniable taint of racism in the line of thinking that goes “If all Indian and Chinese people buy their own cars then the world will go under, so we must stop them from buying their own cars”. But this second lot of global warming deniers don’t stop at pointing out that line of racism; they go quite a bit further. They claim, more or less, that global warming is a plot to deny those Indians and Chinese their own cars. They claim, quite correctly, that diverting grain production to produce biofuels will decrease the availability of food supply. This is something anyone with any sense can say (people with sense don’t include adherents of the first line of argument, above) – but they have never advocated that the rich nations reduce their ultra-conspicuous consumption levels. Instead, they want to protect and even increase those consumption levels, and in order to do so they argue that, in effect, such consumption levels are everyone’s birthright and that anyone who wants to reduce those consumption levels is a racist plotter against the so-called “Third World”.

So just how do they claim that global warming is a myth?

The commonest claim goes like this: “We had twenty inches (sic) of snow this time, and the temperature dropped to minus twenty degrees Farenheit (sic), so the claim that global warming exists is hogwash.” It’s a very superficial claim, because these people are incapable of non-superficial thought. Anyone with sense and a little bit of knowledge will point out that global warming isn’t calculated by a few hot or cold days in the north of the US or the extreme south of Tierra del Fuego; it’s astatistical reading of average temperatures worldwide, and on any such graph global warming isn’t just a reality, it’s advancing at a frightening rate. The indicators: disintegration of the ice sheets, desertification, dropping food yields – are undeniable unless you find a way to pretend that it all doesn’t exist either.

Another way to deny global warming is a hunt for some “scientist” (of the same variety that denied evolution, said cigarette smoking was healthy and claimed the splitting of the atom was “Jewish Science”, I suppose) who claims global warming is a myth. You can almost feel the triumph of these deniers when they encounter such a “scientist”: they hold him up as a trophy. “See, we found one who agrees with us!”

Then there is the bit about the “Third World”, a term I find highly insulting, and which thinking people would do well to avoid. But let that pass for the moment: the main point is that these people don’t seem troubled by the actual parameters by which the “Third World” remains underdeveloped. They aren’t bothered by the lack of schools or hospitals. They are – allegedly - bothered by the idea that the people of the “Third World” shouldn’t each have a car of his or her own.

I suppose it’s as good a place as any to say this – if you provide access to schools and medical care, the average “Third World” lifestyle is far more sustainable than a “First World” one. A hundred people crammed into a bus, even if it’s a polluting, smoke belching museum piece, is better than a hundred separate cars on the street. A few chickens scratching around in the dirt and providing the family with eggs and meat is better than a chemical fed, hormone-zombie of a battery hen. A social support network is superior to any number of insurance schemes and psychoanalysis that you can lay on. There is nothing shameful about recycling things as long as they can be recycled, either, instead of disposing of things after half a use. And this is the truth. But all this is of no value to these ladies and gentlemen. For them, the “Third World” is irredeemable unless it can be made a copy of the “First World” in its material consumption; or, to put it another way, they would rather carry on with their own lifestyles because interrupting them would mean that the right of the “Third World” to catch up is being denied.

I’ve said the first lot were “I’ve got mine Jack” thinkers, implicitly racist. The second lot are at least as racist, probably more. And, unlike the first lot, who are upfront about what they want, they’re hypocritical to the bone.

I don’t know if they know it themselves, though.

Tyrant King Of The Buzzards

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.

All right, that was Ray Bradbury introducing Tyrannosaurus rex in his short story (later to be made into an unendurable film), A Sound Of Thunder [1]. Yes, Tyrannosaurus rex, which, unless you only learned to read yesterday, you know as the baddest goddamned dinosaur the world has ever seen.

Uh, actually...

Actually, of course, Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t even the biggest predatory dinosaur, let alone the biggest dinosaur. The biggest predatory dinosaur we know of till date, Giganotosaurus, would’ve dwarfed any of the tyrannosaurids (there were several different types, of which the celebrated and much-hyped Tyrannosaurus was merely the largest). But this, really, isn’t about that.

What is it about, then?

Well...re-read that Bradbury intro above. Now, imagine how it would have read like this:

It came on scaled, scuttling, clawed legs, head thrust forwards, a great evil god, its feathered arms held close to its fluffy feathered chest.

Feathers? Yeah, you’ve got that right...feathers.

According to an article [2] I read recently, Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers.

So it didn’t, apparently, look like this:


It, the article says, looked like this:


Now I found the entire idea so bizarre that I had to do a little research of my own.

And, to be sure, this is what I found [3]:

There’s as yet no proof that Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers. And the scientists concerned did not say they had feathers. What they said was that there was a possibility that some of the precursor species to Tyrannosaurus may have had protofeathers, which are more like filamentous hair than feathers. It’s the equivalent of your prehuman ancestors having a gorilla-like pelt, and speculating that this means that you must have one too. No impression of T rex skin recovered to date shows feathers, mosaic scales or anything.

Also, an animal the size of T rex would have had problems with the body overheating if it had had feathers or hair, because the larger the body the less comparative surface area, and the less heat loss. Compare to large African animals, all of whom have substantially reduced or altogether eliminated body hair, like hippos, elephants or rhinoceroses.

Speculation. Nothing, really, much more than that. But speculation sells. Facts don’t. Look at the Iraq invasion for example.

But maybe, as the article continues, only cold-climate Tyrannosaurs had feathers?

Now this sounds superficially plausible, but isn’t really much more than speculation built on speculation. There’s really no reason why Tyrannosauruses would be found in cold climates at all, whatever cold climates existed in a time when the world’s temperature was rather higher than it is now. There are reasons for this.

Now, let’s assume for the time being (I’ll discuss the assumption in a moment) that the tyrannosaurids were predators. Large animals, it’s obvious to all of us except the wilfully ignorant, need large amounts of food. Now, if tyrannosaurs were homoiothermous (so-called “warm-blooded”) animals, they would need much more food than poikilothermous (so-called “cold-blooded”) creatures; a snake might get by a month on a meal, but a shrew has to eat several times its own weight every day. And a large homoithermous predator, one the size of a tyrannosaur, would need truly daunting quantities of food.

Assuming the tyrannosaurids were predators, then, they would need to kill one or two very large prey animals at relatively short intervals, or else chase down and kill large numbers of small animals. Now, very large prey animals back in Tyrannosaurus’ day would have been thin on the ground in cold climates. While small dinosaurs were almost certainly homoithermous, the really big ones would’ve probably boiled inside their skins from their own body heat if they had to maintain a constant body temperature. Also, as with any other homoiotherm, you need more food to keep yourself going. Allied with a gigantic body size, the big dinos would have had to eat really terrifying amounts of vegetation to survive in cold climates...vegetation which, typically, does not grow in cold climates. You know, like the tundra ain't no rain forest?

OK, so maybe cold-climate tyrannosaurs chased down large numbers of small prey? Chances of that happening are low to zero. Try running down a mouse sometime; hunting a small prey animal is more difficult and requires much more energy than hunting a big one, and for much less ultimate reward. Tyrannosaurus would have died of expending more energy on the hunt than it got from the food it obtained.

Uh, well, perhaps the prey creatures were big, cold-blooded dinos? Or Tyrannosaur itself was?

To take the second question first, why would a cold-blooded T rex need feathers at all? Feathers are meant to keep the body warm, as is fur. Evolution doesn’t support the creation of functionless structures. Besides, there’s a reason why there are fewer and fewer snakes and other cold-blooded animals the more you proceed from the equator towards the poles; animals whose body temperatures vary according to the outside temperature don’t do so well when said outside temperatures drop sharply. Cold-blooded dinos in the Arctic? No!

Ergo, Tyrannosaurus rex couldn’t have flourished in temperatures cold enough to require feathers to maintain body heat, and in climates where it actually would have flourished, adults, at least, would probably be naked skinned. Chicks might have, of course, been feathered. They would, lacking body fat deposits and probably having to be more active in search of food than the adults, require help to maintain their body temperature.

Yes, some dinosaurs definitely had feathers. Some of the smaller dinosaurs most certainly were more like chickens than lizards, and some of them were the size of big chickens, too. But they were small. (I need to point out that it’s almost certain that birds are surviving dinos; it’s just evolution that makes them look different). And Tyrannosaurus wasn’t a small dinosaur.

But let’s for the moment assume Tyrannosaurus had feathers. Let’s grant the animal that. Would these feathers have caused problems in hunting? Could they have possibly been as bright as the illustration suggests? Wouldn’t that kind of plumage be too visible to prey species to be realistic?

I don’t really see why not...if we take a second look at the idea that Tyrannosaurus rex was a predator.

It may come as a surprise to some, but there’s actually a strong school of thought among palaeontologists arguing that the tyrannosaurids weren’t predators at all, but rather scavengers feeding on carrion [4]. Their small eyes, large olfactory lobes, weak forelimbs and heavy hind limbs all argue for a carrion eating lifestyle, as does the fact that no fossils have been found of other dinos which show the (highly characteristic) toothmarks of tyrannosaurids which have healed. That would prove predation, since no predator kills each time it attacks prey. At least a fair proportion of the prey always gets away and at least some of these wounded animals would live to heal the wounds. But we have not found a single such fossil...yet.

So, T rex could have bright feathers because, obviously, vultures don’t really need camouflage. And it might even have been a seasonal thing, with maybe only the bulls sporting bright plumage and that only during the breeding season...like birds. Again.

Now, it’s perfectly possible that the tyrannosaurids weren’t purely scavengers. It's possible that like the African lion of today, which often steals hyaena kills, T rex used its superior strength and size to chase other smaller predatory dinosaurs off the carcasses of their prey. If so, brighter colours would not have been a disadvantage. They may even have been useful: a warning to the competitors to get away from the scene in time to spare T rex a fight. Darker colours, in contrast, would have been really useful only if T rex was an ambush predator attacking from hiding over short distances, and given its size that would probably have been difficult to achieve. If it hunted at all, it most likely chased its prey down.

I see the Tyrannosaurus rex following herds of herbivorous dinos, like hadrosaurs, on their migrations, feeding off the dead and dying, chasing other predators off their kills to steal them, and only hunting if it had to.

Having said all that, though, I rather like the idea of a Tyrannosaur looking like a giant bird. It would have been a pretty fearsome beast, too, as it chased you down.

The chicken in your run would have had an ancestor to be proud of.

Sources:

[1]http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/sound_of_thunder.htm

[2] http://www.cracked.com/article_19001_17-images-that-will-ruin-your-childhood_p2.html

[3] http://whyihatetheropods.blogspot.com/2008/09/did-tyrannosaurus-rex-have-feathers.html

[4] http://www.unmuseum.org/tyran.htm

Whirlybird

(From 2007)

Ever heard of Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi? No? He's a 24 year old physics undergraduate from Kano, Nigeria.

So what, you ask?

Mr Abdullahi is a big fan of action movies and a keen student of helicopter aerobatics in those action movies. And so what's such a big deal about that? There must be hundreds like him right here on this website.

Mr Abdullahi is not your typical 24 year old college student and action movie buff. Mr Abdullahi didn't just watch helicopters flying around on the TV screen - he went ahead and built his own. He used aluminum scrap, seats from a  Toyota, the engine of a Honda Civic, and parts cannibalised from a crashed Boeing 747. He financed it himself with money earned from repairing computers and mobile phones. It even flies.

Way to go.

Think about it - a young man collecting scrap metal, sundry spare parts, etc, etc, and knocking together a helicopter that - for all its deficiencies - at least can get off the ground each time its maker wants it to.

That isn't a joke, is it now.

Typically, for a "Third World" (that phrase again) nation, Mr Abdullahi has got no kind of recognition, no help whatsoever, for his feat. Nor will he - this sort of thing is hardly unique to Nigeria. India, for example, is chock-a-block with unsung inventors whose eco-friendly, cheap creations are either overlooked or actually punished  - like a farmer some years ago who knocked together a three wheeled, fuel-efficient, mini-tractor. He was, if I'm not mistaken, penalised for creating a non-authorised vehicle. I don't know what happened to the tractor.

No wonder all the talent flees overseas as fast as it can. The Bush regime for one would be crippled without the efforts of scientists from the same "Third World".

Now of course I am not suggesting Mr Abdullahi and his fellow amateur inventors can take over the market with their hand-built products. However, the talent is there, brimming over, and ignoring it is just going to ruin it and drive it underground. It's a classic reason why we remain underdeveloped.

I hope now that the world has finally heard of Mr Abdullahi, he gets some kind of recognition, and others like him also get their due. I hope so, but I'm not hopeful - if you get what I mean.

But then again, this bit of news came out at a most apposite time. It's the classic riposte to James Watson of DNA fame, who recently claimed that blacks were less intelligent than whites.

Watson said he was "inherently gloomy about the  prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. That's the usual excuse advanced by those Westerners who love to pass off the results of centuries of colonial exploitation and artificial borders as the inherent traits of the black African.

It's up to Africans like Mr Abdullahi to prove him wrong. 

Reincarnation

I'm just climbing out of one of my phases of acute depression (some of you are aware of my problem) and my thoughts are tending in philosophical directions for the moment. I promise you that this introspective interlude will be temporary. It damn' well had better be.

Anyway, 'twas a remark by someone else on a different post on my blog which set off this train of thought. So the blame for this post should go not to me, but to jaymal666.

That train of thought was headed for a topic some of us could take seriously, others not: reincarnation. (Obviously believers of the Abrahamic religions, with the belief system of eternal heaven or eternal hell, aren’t concerned with this.)

Now, I've always believed that if we’re to discuss something rationally, we need to have, if only in our own minds, a working definition of what we’re talking about. So what does reincarnation mean? As far as I can see, one can call it one of two things:

First, one can posit that death is only a step in a cycle, and that the consciousness, or “spirit” if it be so called, is an entity independent of the corporeal body, and is blessed (or condemned, depending on one’s point of view) to be born, live, and die only to be reborn in turn. This process can be assumed to either repeat itself endlessly, or to be escapable if one achieves the appropriate “spiritual level,” the Buddhist state of “moksha” (freedom from rebirth) being a case in point.

Or, second, one can take a rather different view, to which I’ll allude in a moment.

Now, to discuss the metaphysical notion that death is a step in a process: I, as anyone who knows me will be aware, do not have any belief in spirituality or religion. Nor do I subscribe to the idea that consciousness has any independent existence from the corporeal body, which is a mass of chemicals and electrical charges. And I believe that the available scientific evidence, as apart from that drawn from anecdotes, tends to back me up on this point.

The brain is an incredibly complex organ; but it's still only an organ, as much one as a kidney or a lung, and as prone to failure as a kidney or a lung. Recently I was privileged to watch a video where a neuroanatomist was discussing the roles the two hemispheres of the brain played, and how they were as different as though they were two completely separate brains, performing parallel functions, and how the “personality” is a function of the fusion of the processing powers of these two parallel brains. This same lady discussed in detail her own symptoms when she had a stroke that impaired the function of her left brain, and left her incapable of reading or speaking, and yet feeling sensations that she had never felt when she had full control over her faculties. The evidence is impossible to ignore: we are our brains; and by a logical extension, when our brains die, so do our ‘consciousnesses’. I will leave aside the question of whether we have a ‘spirit’ independent of our consciousnesses as not germane to the discussion.

Also, the earth itself had an origin, and will one day be baked to a cinder when the sun swells to a red giant. Life on this planet began, in forms simpler than a bacterium, and will end one day. So, unless one posits that we are to be reincarnated in the form of protobacteria or viroids in the primal sludge of some planet in the Andromeda galaxy, I submit that the notion of reincarnation in the spiritual or religious sense is not tenable.

But, if we set aside the metaphysical version of reincarnation, we’re left with something else, and far more interesting.

Once part of it’s easy: the fact that when we die, our bodies are broken down by microbes and maggots (or rather more quickly by the action of fire) and the elements returned to nature, to be reused and recycled. That’s reincarnation, even if only as part of the protoplasm of a bot-fly or vulture. But there’s a far greater kind of reincarnation than that.

As most of us know, the stars aren’t forever; they are born, grow old, and die. And when they die, the material they throw off sometimes condenses into other stars, and planets. We can even see this process happening in galactic dust clouds. The Sun is a star that was formed from the debris of other stars, and the planets were formed quite similarly. Ergo, you can’t get away from it: we are the material of stars. Once upon a time, the matter that makes up your body, and of mine, was part of a star. And, it’s more than likely that, when the earth is a cremated rock spinning round the Sun’s burned-out corpse, we will once again form part of a new star.

Can you imagine a more awesome reincarnation? 

Why we don't exist

Today was one of those days.

Everyone has once of those days sometimes; one when you suddenly have an attack of the jamais vu; those times when you suddenly feel that something familiar and well-known was completely different from what it had ever been.

In my case, I was looking at my right hand, at the veins and the little hairs on the back, when I suddenly realised something:

My hand does not exist. Not in the way I see it. My hand is, and by extension I am, basically empty space.

Imagine the shock of this realisation. Not that I didn’t, intellectually, know it already, what with my chemistry teachers’ ceaseless efforts to hammer atomic structure into my thick head all through my formative years. Yes, I knew it. But did I know it? Did I actually say, “Here I am, a collection of a few billion infinitesimally tiny elemental particles and mostly empty space, through which cosmic rays are sleeting every moment of every day”? Did I look down at my body and think of it, not as skin and connective tissue, bone and blood and nerves, but as empty space?

No.

But today, I had that kind of epiphany.

I don’t exist. You don’t exist. Nothing really exists…except quantum-level particles doing their thing. My brain, which thinks this, is empty space, thereby proving my old teacher Kevin D’Castro right. My hands, which type this statement, are empty space. This computer is empty space.



How can I prove I exist?

I can tell myself, normally, that I occupy space, and no other material object can occupy the same space at the same time. I can say this to myself, but clearly this is rubbish, since I am empty space occupying empty space, and this space isn’t in any case really empty, but full of radiations which zoom through me as though I’m not even there. Which, in a very real sense, I am not.

What exists, then? Neutron stars? Degenerate matter? Black holes? Is the only real existence when things are squeezed into conditions which the normal universe doesn’t tolerate? Then what is normal, what’s abnormal? Is everything we see abnormal, then, and “normal” means something we can never experience directly? If I stood on the surface of a neutron star, the tidal forces would rip me into an infinity of salami slices and then smoosh me into a film wrapped over the surface of the body…but then my material would probably be more “real” than what I am now. No?

You see where this thing is taking me?

The problem is I can’t unsee it now. I have stared into the abyss, and the abyss didn’t deign to stare back.

I’m too unreal for that courtesy, and so are you.

Comforting thought? Sleep well.

Vermicomposting

I’ve been keeping earthworms as a hobby for the last ten years in my own compost pit, and I think it might interest anyone who wants to know how to dispose of recyclable biodegradable rubbish in a safe hygienic way.
First: You will need a spot where your compost and earthworms can stay undisturbed. This might be a pit, or a container (with a lid). I would prefer a container because

1. It is easier to maintain and monitor than a pit
2. It is easier to keep the contents safe from the elements
3. It is infinitely easier to keep your worms from wandering away and to keep local wildlife like moles and shrews from eating your worms.
4. It takes up less space.

The best form of container for this would be an old discarded oil drum. If the bottom is not rusted away, break it or at least knock a few holes in it. Remove the top in case it’s not already gone. Dig the bottom of the drum into the soil for a short distance. What you have now is an open cylinder set into the soil.
Now, line the bottom of the drum with pebbles so you keep a draining layer between the soil and your compost. If you can find cowdung, this is a good layer to put down on top of the pebbles along with a layer of straw. Now add your compost. Compost would be anything that can decompose – vegetable and animal waste (the latter includes meat/fish scraps, pet hair, old bedding for pets), flowers, grass clippings, sacks, and cardboard soaked in water (worms love the glue). Water the whole thingthoroughly and cover with a layer of soil. You will need to leave it for at least 10 to 14 days for it to rot and cool down enough to accept worms.
Warning: Worms prefer slightly alkaline conditions, but decomposing garbage tends to become acid. So avoid putting material like onion rinds and lemon peel in the compost. You might invest in a Ph meter (available at agriculture stores) to measure Ph. If it gets very acidic add a small quantity of calcium hydroxide ("slaked lime") until you get neutrality. Too much lime and the worms will die.
After about two weeks the garbage (depending on your atmospheric temperature) should be decayed and cooled down.
Worms: The brown garden earthworms (mostly pheretimoids in this country) do not survive very well in the high organic content of a compost heap. The specialist worms are Eisenia foetida ("tiger worm" because of its red and yellow bands) andLumbricus rubellus ("red worm").
It is possible to buy them both from dealers but I don’t know any L
Alternatively, you can find them for yourself. They inhabit sludge, old piles of leaves, under old sacks left out in gardens. Wherever you find decaying organic matter, there you find these worms. I found my starter stock in an old chicken coop!
Release the worms into your compost and wait. Unfortunately, this is a slow business. You will need to wait until the worms begin breeding, so the more worms you begin with, the better.
You will soon find other animals: small black beetles, tiny orange arachnids like pill bugs, maggots. And if it gets too acidic you’ll find a small whitish nematode looking like a small segmented earthworm (but those are pseudo-segments).
Compost: Completed compost is like slightly moist, light soil, dark brown to black in colour. The bottom layers will be converted first. You will notice that as the compost forms the quantity of material in the pit/container shrinks. This is because the worms eat and excrete the material to make compost. The worms need moisture but be careful not to overwater. Almost all necessary water will come from the decaying garbage. It just needs to stay moist enough so if a handful is squeezed some drops of water come out. Too wet and the worms will migrate. If they can’t they will drown.
Compost is to be stirred up at intervals to oxygenate it and prevent packing. Always use gloves while handling it. And when you harvest it, remove the worms and add to fresh rotten garbage. The best way of doing this is to spread the compost on a sheet of cloth or paper and remove layer after layer from the top, allowing the photophobic worms to migrate to the bottom of the heap. Ultimately you have a layer of worms.
Compost is an excellent fertiliser and also the worms are saleable, so you can turn your garbage to gold!
Additional information here.
Do you like touching worms, incidentally? If you don't, this is not an activity for you.

An Exercise in Belief: The Loch Ness Monster

While I'm in no sense religious, I do understand that some minds require the presence of a deity or similar focus for their lives, if demonstrably false, because it gives them solace. Though usually weak, such minds should not be dismissed; they are, after all, what keeps the entire mythological-religious-spiritual farce going, whether it is garbage like Reiki or Feng Shui or that monster of illogic, the Catholic Church, or animal sacrifices in Hindu temples or Id.
One of the odder manifestations of this kind of illogic, and the pervasive desire to believe, against all odds, is the Loch Ness Monster. I'm sure anyone who's reading this will have already heard of this beast, so instead of going into a long and convoluted explanation I'll just do a brief recap:
There is, so the story goes, one or more gigantic monsters of an unknown species in a lake called Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands.  Ness is a long and deep lake, but so narrow that even on a cloudy day with poor visibility one can see clear across it. This is significant for purposes of observation. In any case, the monster is supposed to have been around at least since the time of St Columba in the sixth century, who is alleged to have saved (in 565 AD) a swimmer who was about to be eaten/bitten by the monster by shouting "Halt thou and think not to touch that man. Quick go back!" which promptly caused the monster, believe it or not, to submerge and disappear. After that there were a few garbled accounts of the monster emerging from the lake and smashing things up with his/her/its tail, but then only in the 1930s did the story suddenly gain prominence again with some characters claiming to have seen a monster walk across the road at night, briefly, in their car headlights. They did not stop for a closer look. (This is a recurrent feature. No one ever gets back for a closer look, and the researchers seem never to be able to get close enough for any look that would produce unambiguous evidence.) After that there was a sudden splurge of sightings, and tourist interest was already aroused (nowadays the Loch's economy is almost entirely tourism-, and hence monster-, driven, and includes stunts like this). Photographic evidence was produced, though what exactly those photos showed was wide open to interpretation...logs? Fish? Wave patterns? Otters?
The composite picture the monstereers (if I can coin a term) produced was of an animal, variously from six to twenty metres in length, resembling (though not necessarily being) a long-necked plesiosaur, but with bizarre features including
1. humps on the back, with variable numbers and forms. According to one researcher, the monster believer Tim Dinsdale, the humps could be seen to change shape and number as one watched (now I'd be inclined to believe that humps that changed numbers and shape would likely be no humps at all, but otters swimming in line, shadows on water, or logs, but then I'm a non-worshipper at this particular shrine)
2. an equine fringe at the back of the neck (I guess this was to reconcile stories of a crest with the plesiosaur hypothesis)
3. Rough, warty skin like that of a toad. I'll come back to this one later.
4. the ability to submerge vertically (to explain away abrupt disappearances of the "phenomenon" when viewers shifted position?)

OK.
In 1934 Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London physician,allegedly photographed a plesiosaur-like beast with a long neck emerging out of the murky waters.
That photo, on the left, created quite a fuss. Before the photo, Loch Ness was the stuff of legend and myth. The locals knew the ancient history of the sea serpent. But people came to the lake more to relax than to go on expeditions looking for mythical beasts. After the photo, the scientific experts were called in. First, they examined the photo itself. Could be a plesiosaur. Yes, but it could be a tree trunk, too. Or an otter. Dinsdale, in his book, The Loch Ness Monster, devotes an entire chapter to that photo, and "proves" it genuine to his own satisfaction (because wave patterns prove that there is something underwater behind that neck, which they do; but that does not necessarily prove, to any normal person, that that "something" is a monster's body). Unfortunately, the photo, shown in its entirety on the left and not in the cropped form as above, is fake, fake, fake. Christian Spurling, who died in the autumn of 1993, made a deathbed confession of his role in the prank. The fake photo was not taken by Wilson--his name was used to give the photo stature and integrity--but by Spurling's stepbrother, Ian Wetherell. Ian's father, Marmaduke Wetherell, had been hired by the London Daily Mail to find the monster. So he constructed a small model of a sea serpent made of plastic wood attached to a 35 cm toy submarine...
The little prank created such a huge fuss that the pranksters decided that the best thing for them to do would be to keep quiet. Poor Dinsdale. Unfortunately he died six years before the hoax was exposed, or else I'd have loved to have read his reaction.
And there are of course, deliberate hoaxers, like this one, not dupes like Dinsdale, who in 1960 took a grainy, indistinct, black and white 16mm film allegedly showing the monster's hump in the water. To an unprejudiced observer it resembles a small boat with a wake, but among monstereers it's an article of faith that it proves the existence of Nessie. Dinsdale himself was a true believer. Another weak mind.
Oh, for "heaven's" sake:
1. The story of Loch Ness' monster is riddled with contradictions. Sometimes it appears on land; yet it is, most of the time, a flippered creature which would have a difficult time on land. And when it appears (just occasionally) on land, it seems to be really mobile and is sometimes said to have claws.
Sometimes it has large and glittering eyes, and sometimes none.
It is shy, yet "St Columba" allegedly had to save a man from being eaten by it.
2. What is it? A mammal? Yet a mammal, being warm blooded, would have to
(a) Come up to breathe, and hence shown itself every day. Same problem with a reptile, such as the plesiosaurs probably were.
(b) Unlike reptiles, mammals need large quantities of food for temperature maintainence. The most optimistic estimates say the Loch can't support more than 30 tons of fish. So, if the monster is as huge as described, why has it not eaten the Loch empty by now? Also, taking a minimum breeding population of 10 monsters, and a maximum predator mass of 10% of prey mass, the monsters can't weigh more than 300 kg. NOT the giants of many tons.
A reptile? Besides the breathing problem I mentioned, a reptile or amphibian would not find life easy in the cold water. Most reptiles do not live that far north.
A huge invertebrate? A giant mollusc? A fish? I suggest they modify their shapes!
A plesiosaur? Plesiosaurs became extinct, as per fossil records, at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago. And Loch Ness formed just 10,000 years ago...and 15000 years ago it was buried under ice during the last ice age. And here is what Wikipedia has to say about plesiosaurs, which were not dinosaurs and this not even theoretically warm-blooded:
Contrary to many reconstructions of plesiosaurs, it would have been impossible for them to lift their head and long neck above the surface, in the 'swan-like' pose that is often shown. Even if they had been able to bend their necks upward, to that degree (they could not), gravity would have tipped their body forward and kept most of the heavy neck in the water.
3. What does it eat? if fishes are the prey, where are the numbers to support a breeding population? I assume no one says Nessie is immortal.
4. And where, for whatever's sake, are the corpses?
5. Why have serious sonar studies failed to show Nessie? If the idea is that there is a connection between Loch Ness and the sea, some tunnel through which Nessie only sometimes came to the Loch, one would need to ask how such a tunnel would be not just large enough for Nessie but also not so large as to empty the water of the lake because its outflow would be larger than inflow from the river!
Here is a site discussing hoaxes, some of which are still worshipped by the fan site here. And the famous "Flipper Photo", worked up to the skies by the "scientist" Dr Robert Rines, is taken apart here.
While I'm on this subject, here is a possible explanation for the original "Nessie" sightings, which would also tie in with the rough skin I mentioned:

Loch Ness mystery solved? SCOTLAND. The Loch Ness Monster may have been an elephant. That’s the word from paleontologist Neil Clark of the University of Glasgow, according to the UK newspaper the Sunday Mail (March 5, 2006). Clark has learned that in the 1930s, when the first reports of the monster came in, a circus had been travelling in the area and had stopped to let its elephants take a dip in the large, deep lake. Upon seeing their backs and trunks above the surface, the ringmaster apparently launched a publicity stunt by offering a reward to anyone who could deliver the “Loch Ness Monster” to the circus.

Come on. A monster   that has no evidence, no credibility, no existence outside of anecdotes, and you want to believe it? Yet people do, and insist they do. Which is why this post is called "Exercises in Belief". The Loch Ness Monster is considered just as an example in blind belief...as for the rest, fill in the blanks yourself.

The Most Important Moment in History?

"Space... the final frontier."
While the voyages of the StarshipEnterprise are still fiction, they might actually happen, in some form or other, someday. In fact, they'd bloody well better...if this pathetically inept race of creatures called Homo sapiens is to survive.
And we've just begun to take the first steps...
What is the most important event in human history? Is it the invention of the wheel? Is it the advent of modern medicine? Is it the splitting of the atom? Well, while the first of those three was an extremely important event in itself, it was not essential for the survival of the species or even of civilisation (and the Incas constructed an organised civilisation without using the wheel for anything more complex than children's' pull-along toys). As for the second, yes, it has been a revolution that has extended lifespans and given people the time and leisure to dream of a better future. But the time of medicine is inexorably heading towards a dead end; germs are becoming resistant to the latest and best antibiotics, and the gains of health are being counterbalanced by the lifestyle diseases that have emerged. Medicine is now on track to perform spectacular but essentially meaningless feats like face transplants and the search for "immortality" - not the most vital goal for the preservation of the human race.
And as for the splitting of the atom, just look at where that little feat has got us.
So, what are we left with?
For an answer, look around the world.
We face runaway global warming, species sliding into extinction, accelerating desertification and environmental degradation, melting ice caps, corporate profits being given more importance than ecology, and as though Operation Endless War and the concomitant jehadi response weren't enough, there will soon be widespread water wars. We face new and devastating diseases, and old diseases reappearing in new forms. We face the threat of an unknown asteroid smashing into the planet (an inevitable occurrence, given enough time) and sending  us to where the dinosaurs hang out these days.
Even if we manage to get out of this mess, in just a few billion years the sun is going to become a red giant and burn the earth into a cinder...
We face, in a word, extinction.
As Stephen Hawking said some time back, the only hope we have is to go out into space, move out and form colonies, set up outposts, create new forms of humans (and I'd like to say, also the other creatures whose place ion this planet is being threatened by ouractivities).
Well, we've made a sort of start.
That start was not made too long ago. In fact, it's been not even half a century.
On the morning of April 12, 1961, a primitive little spacecraft called Vostok 1 ("Vostok" means "East" in Russian) lifted off from the launchpad at Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, atop a converted heavy lift intercontinental ballistic missile called the A1 (the best use for a missile I can imagine, personally - the Russians entered it in the space race after realising that it was unnecessarily heavy lift for a weapons programme). It contained a single cosmonaut, a MiG-15 pilot called Major Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, and returned to earth after a single orbit. The entire voyage lasted 108 minutes from launch till Gagarin (who ejected from the craft at a height of 7000 metres, because Vostok landings were too hard for a human to endure without injury) and his capsule descended separately by parachute near Engels in Saratov.
The mission was long in the preparation (a detailed account is here), and achieved virtually nothing in terms of scientific knowledge beyond proving that a man could lift off from earth, orbit, eat and drink, and write in weightlessness, and return unharmed. It would have returned much more data if the mission had included just an instrument payload, because instruments don't have to be fed, given air, kept safe, or returned to earth. Yet is it such a small achievement? Think about it. If we are to set out on a journey of a thousand light years, a single step has to begin it, am I right?
Besides...
Besides, while I'm personally certain life exists elsewhere in the universe, and more than likely in primitive forms within this solar system of ours (Mars, where running water has recently been discovered, or Europa, or Jupiter's atmosphere), until we can actually findsuch life, we must proceed on the assumption that we are alone. In that case our responsibility for preserving life becomes unique in its gravity. If we go into the dark, then, there will be nothing to take over from us. There will be nothing left. Nothing. Anywhere.
And that is why I think Gagarin's flight is the single most important moment in history. As Gagarin himself said, it was an achievement for the whole of mankind, not just of the Soviet people.
Human civilisation is only 7,000 years old, and countless years lie ahead - we hope. But wherever future adventurers travel, whatever they find in the black, cold reaches of space, they will always remember the pair that preceded them—the Vostok and Major Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.

^{"To boldly go where no man has gone before..."
It doesn't sound so ridiculous any more.} 

Possible Solutions to the World's Meat Problem

This is something I've been thinking about for some time now.

As we all know rather well, meat production uses up an inordinate amount of resources. In terms of animal breeding, raising, protection from disease, the growing of grain to feed them, their housing, transport, the expense and effort involved in slaughter and the preservation of the carcasses and their processing, you just think of it...the effort is enormous. And even then, after getting rid of all the inedible parts of the animal, you lose maybe half the animal: skin, bone, hair, feathers, and viscera, none of which is anywhere near as important as a by-product as it once was. Bad.

And then think about all that goes into creating the animal. The economics of the whole thing means that the animal is fed hormones to promote growth, confined to small spaces so that it does not waste food in exercise, routinely fed antibiotics so it doesn't fall sick, and given processed feeds which contain body parts of other slaughtered animals. Even if you aren't an animal rights activist the meat of such a creature doesn't seem worth the eating.

Besides which, the amount of methane animals such as cows release into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming, is simply enormous.

So, what is to be done?

Now, it takes less effort to raise one cow or pig to slaughter weight than an equivalent number of goats or sheep. This is because grass is not an efficient source of energy and ten goats would eat more grass than one cow, even if they weighed the same, to produce the same meat. So, if we could switch the world to beef and pork away from mutton, we would make a start. But the Muslim world will not eat pork and the Hindu world won't touch pork or beef, so there's a problem. Some Hindus - non-vegetarians - won't eat chickens either. Why not? How should I know?

So, if we can't continue indefinitely as we are at this time, we have to find solutions. More meat cannot be produced for a larger population without diverting grain and resources from direct human consumption; and by no means is the world going to turn vegetarian (we are not a vegetarian species anyway. I'll save my anti-vegetarian rant for another occasion).

Anyway. So I'm thinking of solutions to the problem. Here are a couple:

In the short term: Try to promote rabbit farming. If you're not pernickety about eating an animal that swallows its own waste, rabbits are fast growing and convert grass to meat very efficiently and quickly. They're also fairly resistant to disease, much more so than poultry.

In the medium term: Switch to eating insects. We already eat shrimps and lobsters and crabs, most of which consume such delicacies as stinking rotten meat. Insects like locusts and grasshoppers have infinitely less yucky diets and are much more plentiful and can be bred easily. Much of the world's population already eats insects (the Chinese used to call grasshoppers meant to be eaten "woodland shrimp" if I am not mistaken)  - they are almost fat free and full of easily assimilable protein, so eating them shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

In the long term: Now here's where I began to let my imagination run a bit wild. Imagine a nutrient broth kept in a huge vat in sterile conditions. Imagine tissue taken from stem cells from whatever animal you want - beef, mutton, pork, whatever - and grown in this vat. Under the right conditions, it could grow forever, into a huge slab of meat tissue. All you would need was to cut slices of whatever size you wanted, perhaps by remote controlled knives. Nothing would die. There would be no waste in transport, or growing grain for the meat, or anything like that. Even vegetarians, I think, should be able to eat that without guilt.

Not that any of it will happen, of course. But it's still a thought.

On the Pioneer Plaques

Let’s take a trip through space, far, far away.

Somewhere far from here, and getting further every second, two small spacecraft called Pioneer 10 and 11 are speeding further away from us. Driving through the gulf of space, bathed in hard X rays and random stellar radio waves, these two craft are the first objects created by this species to leave the solar system.

These two spacecraft also carry two identical gold anodised aluminiumplaques, one of which you can see in the illustration, which are pretty interesting in a lot of ways.

These plaques, of course, are there for the benefit of any future alien species that may someday intercept these craft; a most unlikely event because of the immensity of space and the smallness of the craft themselves, but that’s beside the point.

Anyone here who’s read the awful 1950s-era pulp science fiction by the likes of Michael Shaara will remember those dire warnings about interstellar wars and how alien species which encountered each other’s craft would instantly annihilate each other to protect the secret of the location of their home planets. The idea of the alien as predator-oppressor-imperialist is very much alive, even now. Remember that awful movie called Independence Day?

Yet, where science and not prejudice is concerned, we have these perfectly sane scientists sending out a plaque to an alien race with detailed instructions on how to locate Earth in the cosmos. It’s either suicidal or rational, and I know which I think it is.

The other extremely interesting thing is less edifying. Take a good look at the second picture; at the close up of the figures of the naked man and woman on the plaque. What strikes you at once? Well, apart from the fact that the couple are so obviously white; but that’s not really significant because I suppose they had to make them something and the early seventies imagination probably didn’t extend to multiethnic physiognomies. What else? Well:

The man is holding up a hand in greeting, and the woman is just standing there, looking away slightly. I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of sexist. The man is the forward one; the woman, standing metaphorically in his shadow, doesn’t even look the alien in the face.

This might be a bit of an “extreme” explanation. I might be over-reacting, but I don’t think I am, because of the other thing.

Look at the genitals. The man’s are intact, completely visible; but what do we see between the woman’s legs? Nothing. Just a smooth mound tapering off to a point where her thighs meet.

Was this a simple oversight, then? Not quite.

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say over this:

the original design included a short line indicating the woman’s vulva. It was erased as condition for approval by John Naugle, former head of NASA's Office of Space Science and the agency's former chief scientist.

So, a line indicating the woman’s external genitals, meant to be seen only by hypothetical alien creatures millennia hence, was erased because some conservative idiot didn’t think it appropriate, or because he thought other conservative idiots wouldn’t think it appropriate.

How much more sexist than that can you get?

War Of The Worlds

If you keep up with advances in science, you’ll probably know all about the latest on the exploration of Mars, the plans for a manned mission there, and the worries about how to survive there without available sources of water.

You may have also heard that subterranean glaciers have been discovered on Mars, potentially solving the water problem for a long time.

Well, if that’s so, just excellent. Isn’t it?

Or is it?

Without trying to be overly moralistic, let me assume that  there are creatures of some kind extant on Mars. Let these creatures be bacteria, or plants, or fungi, or primitive animals, or something entirely different from any of these; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they exist, in numbers so small unmanned probes miss them completely; and let’s say that they are clustered round these ancient glaciers, and they melt drops of water from this ancient ice to nurture themselves. Not impossible at all; extremophile organisms on Earth do all that, and more.

Meanwhile, our gallant astronauts turn up on Mars with a complete programme costing trillions, all set to colonise the Red Planet, a programme designed specifically to utilise that glacier water. And they find that using the water will snuff out those unique alien organisms completely.

What then?

Do we, just because we can reach another planet, own that planet? What happens if there are inhabitants, even if they are only bacteria? Have they no rights over their own world? Or can we say “they are only bacteria, so there’s no point even in thinking about them?” Once we deny rights to bacteria, aren’t we on the slippery slope to denying rights to pines, armadillos, blue whales...to other humans? Suppose it were a planet round a far star, and there were primitive humans there? Where do we draw a line?

All right, so our gallant astronauts call up Earth and say they’ve found these bacteria, and what should they do about it? Do you really think NASA or whoever is in charge is going to throw away a programme costing trillions just for a few lousy bacteria? Of course not. Nor will the people of the world, when the news comes out, turn a hair. Bacteria are evil, that’s why there are antibiotics, right?

Ah. But. Suppose the creatures aren’t just bacteria or “worthless” lichens. Suppose there are tiny furry animals there, cute grey mole-like mammal-cognates, like animated cartoon characters come to life? What then? Does anyone feel different suddenly about killing them off? You bet they do.

So what happens? Will the whole mission be called off?  Are you serious? All that will happen is that they’ll go ahead and use the water and kill all those cute mole-things anyway...but the news will never be allowed to come out.

Alienocide.

Hell, it isn’t even a crime.

India, China, Global Warming, and Emission Control

It’s been said – with some justice – that the highly industrialised nations, the so-called First World (which is a term I particularly detest, but that’s something for another discussion) aren’t solely to blame for the current levels of emissions that all but the wilfully self-deluded agree are at least aiding, if not causing, global warming. It’s been said that nations like India and China need to do as much as the rich western countries to reduce emission levels.

It’s perfectly true that rapidly industrialising nations like India and China, which are burning fossil fuels as fast as they can be ripped from the ground and aren’t overly concerned with the environment, bear a great part of the responsibility for global warming. It’s also true that they make some kind of sense when they claim that the West is being hypocritical; the rich nations became rich by wantonly destructive environmental practices and exploitation of colonies, and only now, when they are rich, can they afford to talk of environmental protection. (For an illustration, one needs look no further than the modern American love affair with whales. Anyone who ever read Moby Dickknows of the US’ own history of ruthless and systematic whaling, which lasted till the 1950s and only waned when there weren’t any longer sufficient whales to hunt profitably.)

In its essence, what India and China claim is simple: first, economic growth is incompatible with environmental concern; second, that they have a duty to their citizens to grow economically far and fast enough to provide their people a reasonably high standard of living; and, third, that per capita, their emission levels are still much lower than those of the West.

Most thinking people would agree that it’s a travesty of justice to deny so-called Third World nations a chance to achieve decent human standards of living while their “betters” live as though there was literally no tomorrow. That’s understandable. It’s also perfectly true that when you think about it logically, the India-China line of argument is a load of plausible-sounding goat manure.

It’s a load of goat manure for the following reasons:

First, because the planet, as a whole, isn’t compartmentalised. India and China can’t claim that they can do whatever they wish in their own territories, because the effects of what they’re doing are felt worldwide. An analogous situation would be that of the householder who claims he has a right to burn old tyres in his own yard. He can claim that, but the stench and smoke will permeate the entire neighbourhood. Therefore, India and China can claim till the cows come home that they have a right to put economic growth above the environment, but since their actions damage the environment of the entire world, the argument fails.

Secondly, India, at least, has done absolutely nothing to provide its citizens with a standard of living commensurate with its achieved level of economic growth. China, too, has seen rising income disparities and social divisions, but nothing like that of India, where a tiny ultra-rich minority lives as though in a different universe from the rest of the population; while the poor are poorer than ever before, in both absolute numbers and in living standards. Nobel Economics laureate Amartya Sen had noted several years ago that there were now two Indias, one that lived like California while the other wallowed in such abysmal poverty that it would put sub-Saharan Africa to shame. The brand-new Asian Tiger, India, now occupies the 148th rank in the world in the Human Development Index.

Then, again, nobody, as far as I know, can satisfactorily define what an adequately high standard of living would be. I don’t know about the Chinese, but for the Great Indian Muddle Class, the standard they aspire to is that of the US. This doesn’t mean that the Muddle Class wishes to live as Americans actually live; it wishes to live as it imagines Americans actually live, an idea gleaned primarily from soap operas and Hollywood films. The reality of the wasteful American lifestyle is horrible enough as it is – it’s been estimated that if everyone lived like American citizens we’d need the resources of six more earths to get along...until they ran out, of course.

I somehow don’t think such aspirations are worthy of encouragement.

The third red herring is the notion of the low per capita emission. It’s quite true that per capita, India and China produce less carbon dioxide and other pollutants than Westerners. It’s also perfectly true that India and China put together have more people than the rest of the world combined, so – if you calculate the total amount of pollution they produce – they do more than their share of damage. Why they have so many people is something for another day’s discussion; the fact remains that they do.

The fact remains, though, that however illogical and dissimulating the Indian and Chinese position on emission control is, it’s not going away. Neither of these two nations, especially India, is going to make any significant effort to reduce pollution levels in the foreseeable future. And India, at least, seems to have chosen the worst of American practices to emulate, especially by promoting and encouraging private transport and mass car ownership instead of cheap, safe and convenient public transport. The vehicular haze that hangs over any Indian city by mid-morning has to be seen to be believed.

There are two other, and less obvious, dangers associated with the Indian and Chinese position on this subject. The first is the effect this has on other “Third World” nations. If India and China can continue chopping down their forests, belching forth factory chimney smoke, damming and polluting rivers to death, and so on, all in the name of economic progress, why should they, the erstwhile peers of these nations, continue to remain in poverty? Why shouldn’t they go the same way in ruthless economic growth at all costs? Can you imagine the consequences if every country from Angola to Papua New Guinea, from Paraguay to Haiti, began acting as far as they could like India and China?

The second danger is the fact that this position encourages climate change denial. Recently I read some British writer warning gloomily that giving in to “global warming scaremongers” meant British people would be left without power for their computers and heat for their houses while Indian and China, who “had the common sense to ignore the whole rubbish”, forged ahead. However stupid this attitude sounds, it’s true that global warming deniers are growing shriller by the day, and that in the propaganda war they’re winning. People will prefer to believe comforting lies rather than cold truths any day. It’s immensely more satisfying and happy-making to believe that scientists in the pay of unspecified evildoers are conjuring up a spectre of global warming rather than admit that one will have to make drastic changes to one’s lifestyle if one is to survive at all.

The outlook isn’t encouraging.

(Note to reader: I believe global warming is happening, and that it’s primarily to entirely caused by human activity. I also believe that we are rapidly – very rapidly – approaching a tipping point of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere beyond which the greenhouse effect will cause runaway warming that cannot, by any means currently known, be controlled, and that this will have devastating effects on life on earth in general and on human society in particular, including famine, mass drought, the flooding of coastal areas, water wars, mass forced migration, and general civil breakdown. I believe that global warming denial is now an organised industry. And I am coming round to the belief that it might be best to let said global warming go ahead and wipe out human civilisation. We’ve done enough damage to Mother Earth. Maybe it’s time to leave the stage. After we’re gone, believe it or not, the curtain won’t fall. Life will go on.)