I've been worrying about the polar ice caps a lot lately. As I drove across the Bay Bridge today to cast my ballot to keep the Terminator out of the statehouse and to keep counting Technicolor data points in a blindingly racist society, a theoretical physicist on KPFA confirmed that I am right to be worried.
See here's the deal: the ice caps are melting. That's right, the ice at the North and South Poles is rapidly (in geologic terms) melting. No seriously. Since the industrial revolution, human beings have been pumping carbon into the atmosphere at amazingly high and quickly increasing rates.
The increase in carbon in parts per billion in the last 150 years is higher than the change in the last 10,000 years. Yes, that's a problem. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and basically, adding more of it to the atmosphere heats up the world.
I'm no scientist, but fortunately for us, there are people who spend their whole lives thinking about this stuff and some of them even get Nobel Prizes for it. In fact, 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, signed a warning way back in 1992 stating that the way we're living right now, throwing shitloads of carbon (and lots of other nasty stuff) into the atmosphere, "could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand."
Union of Concerned Scientists . . .
See, it's not just about ice melting, it's about changing the pH of the oceans, and tampering with the narrow balance of acidity and base which supports life in the seas. It's about kicking a big hole in the bottom of the food chain, killing off phytoplankton and the other vital vittles that keep us perched precariously at the top of the pyramid. It's about low-lying coastal areas actually slipping into the sea. I mean, didn't an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea go under just a couple of years ago?
What's next, Bangladesh? Holland? Oakland? So anyway, I'm listening to this radio program about the ice caps and I'm thinking to myself, "Self, does it really matter if a Nazi sympathizing, ass-grabbing, Pete Wilson fronting, sound byte spitting, comic book caricature of hypermasculinity becomes the leader of the fifth largest economy in the world?"
I wasn't quite sure if the answer to that question was yes, but I'd driven all the way across the Bay, spitting carbon particles out of my tailpipe the whole way, so I went ahead and voted (No, Bustamonte, No, No, in case you're curious) and climbed back into my car and flipped on KPFA.
On the way back across the Bridge, I discovered that yes, it matters. Even though the ice caps are melting and the Gulf Stream is shifting and ecosystems are changing faster than evolutionary adaptation can respond, it matters.
By the way, ecosystems are non-linear systems prone to large discontiguous leaps as inputs shift only slightly (that means that seemingly small changes, a few degrees Celsius here and there, can lead to really big changes, like entire ecosystems that have persisted dynamically and abundantly for tens of thousands of years dying off completely in less than a decade. With little warning.) It matters.
Why, you ask? Because that annoying old lady on KPFA pointed out that Orrin Hatch, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch, personal friend of Arnold, Orrin Hatch, who has used Arnold's celebrity magnetism to raise much money, has introduced a Constitutional amendment to allow foreign-born US citizens to run for President.
I swear I'm not making this shit up...
Will it move from the Senate and be passed by 38 states to actually change the constitution?
Will the American people actually vote for him if he's on the ballot for the presidency in 2008?
Will Conan the Barbarian become Arnold the President?
Go vote dammit. Small inputs have big impacts in non-linear systems, and we're all governed by the laws of physics.
