How soon could the brimstone part of fire and brimstone actually come?

A Congressman recently said: "We shouldn't worry about global warming leading to sea level rise. After all, the Bible says God promised he will not destroy the world by flooding any more..."
But in that same passage in Bible, he is said to say "Next time it will be by fire and brimstone."
There are lots of serious "fire" hazards we all know about (form nuclear fire to tradiation from new 'ozone holes'), but what about brimstone? Could the stench of brimstone (the poison H2S) be closer at hand than we imagine?
Possibly so.... to the best of my meager knowledge.... not representing the folks I work for...

I recently posted some new details to a couple of lists:
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Good morning, folks!

On again, off again, I have been asking myself and others: what would
be the objective indicators that could tell us how far we are from the
"green sky" scenario of mass extinction
(including extinction of humans) which Peter Ward warns about in his book?

Since it is not my job (or anyone else's?) to answer these kinds of
questions, it's been very much a part time thing, though I have
certainly tried to get input from domain experts
(and will continue to do so).

For the moment, it is looking a whole lot scarier to me than it was a
year ago, when I had less information.

In essence, there are two steps to extinction:
(1) "stratified ocean";
(2) "the trigger," which seems to be mainly a matter of low oxygen levels in the
lower layer of the stratified ocean.

Ward and Kump have different views about what the trigger has been and can be.
Ward suggests acidity due to rapid CO2 buildup (such as what we are seeing now).
Kump hints at other mechanisms for anoxia. Agricultural runoff at
today's levels may well be all we need for the trigger. The trigger
warrants further study, but if we get to stratified ocean, chances are
pretty serious that our fate is sealed. More precisely, that H2S and
radiation will rise inexorably to levels that kill us.

So for months I have been looking for hard information on the cutoffs
which would lead to stratified ocean in the northern hemisphere. (If
it's just the Northern hemisphere, that would
still be enough to kill us, e.g. as per the eocene discontinuity
discussed by Ward.)

There is a huge NEAR TERM literature on "overturning meridional
currents," some of it
replicating the obvious biases of political appointees to EPA during
the Bush administration and such. Digging deeper into the physical
realities, I now pay most attention to two sources:

http://www.vub.ac.be/ANCH/educ/Marine Physico Chemistry Pdf version
Chs 1 to 7/Chapter 2 Salt Temperature and Density.pdf

http://science.yourdictionary.com/articles/ocean-greatest-salt-content.html

=====

Complex as the overturning ocean currents are, they basically depend
on an input of energy from convection, just as an electrical device
depends on a source of voltage. Cut the voltage, and they go off.

For currents of wind in the atmosphere, the primary source of
"voltage" is pretty simple. The sun heats up the land and the air AT
THE BOTTOM of the atmosphere. The heated air becomes less dense,
because of heating, and wants to rise. When stuff at the bottom wants
to be at the top, that generates all kinds of convection currents.

For "normal" ocean, at room temperature, it is quite different. The
sun heats the water at the TOP of the ocean; it becomes less dense,
but it does not want to rise, since it is already at the top. Thus
there is no overturning or convection current. That's why we had
stratified ocean for most of the history of the earth - and why we
were at the knife edge of extinction, with twelve actual break outs
(events of mass death) when the "trigger" appeared.

Our current benign period (the past 2 to 25 million years, I haven't
tracked down)
is due to a very special circumstance at both poles. When fresh water
is colder than 4 degrees centigrade, it has a rather unusual physical
property. Heat it, and it becomes DENSER. As a result, when it is
warmed, it SINKS. That is the primary source of energy for
the currents which have kept the deep oceans clean and oxygenated for
millions of years, and have also created the warming currents on the
surface  which keep UK and France
warmer than the corresponding latitudes in Siberia. Ice in the Arctic
also has a big effect
on currents there.

So what is the cutoff?

Logic suggests that the cutoff is the temperature where water has
maximum density.
Once it gets that warm, further warming reduces density, and the
currents die (as do we).
Is it 4 degrees C?

The curve in the first URL above suggests that the cutoff is less than
4 degrees C, because
of salinity. On first looking at the curve (actually, two straight
lines in the graph), I thought
it would be close to 4 degrees C, because I read the horizontal axis
as percentage salt. But the example makes it clear that that is not
the units on that axis. The second URL suggests that the prevailing
salinity in north Atlantic is high enough to imply a cutoff less than
zero degrees C.

As the ice melts in the Arctic, lots of changes are coming. If we end
up with a normal level
of mixing, making it like the North Atlantic, it suggests that the
time when all the ice has melted in the Arctic may already be the time
when stratified ocean begins. You can find ideological tracts saying
that the ice of the Arctic cannot possibly melt within the next four
centuries, but empirical reports of what's happening in the Arctic are
quite different.

And so -- it's not my job, and I know that triggers have some role too
here, but on balance,
I wonder how much time we have left.

Some in the lifeboat foundation have said at times "Of course organic
humans are
virtually dead already. BUt can we build intelligent machines?" We
just had good discussion of that in an IEEE conference in Singapore.
At the rate we are going with real design (as opposed to the writing
of visions and traditional overpromising), if we really accelerate
things, we might be able to produce
a mouse-brain level of intelligence in about a century. (Of course, we
already have the required hardware density, according to common
assumptions about complexity of neurons,
but the systems level issues are far more difficult). Not soon enough,
and not high enough
intelligence to give any kind of "singularity."

Where does that leave us?

Best of luck,

   Paul

============
From a res;pondent: 
> Other GEE'd are less predictable.

http://www.countercurrents.org/cc130413.htm

Some say the cutoff will come as soon as 2020 (see above).

Your sources deal with SOME aspects of the problem, not those which I
raised, based on the simple physics of it. I really doubt other
serious sources would plot different curves for the maximum density or
freezing point as a functon of salinity!
No need to debate details of huge models when there is simple physics at work.

Best of luck,

     Paul

vast scandal in the economics of austerity

Luda just showed me a rather interesting story about an economics grad student named Thomas Herndon at UMass Amherst who has just had a huge abrupt impact on the world
of economic policy:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-who-shook-global-austerity-movement.html?test=true

I tried to post a comment, but the site is one of those with creeping demands, so I just post my reactions here:

The story is quite   interesting  for  additional reasons beyond the  obvious.    Of    course it was essential to  science and the progression of knowledge that the truth should come out. Yet   Carmen should not have a strong incentive to withhold data; there is severe moral hazard  in  punishing her on that. As  information is not a private good, we face huge dilemmas of this flavor, seriously inhibiting our ability to learn more about reality in many fields of science. (NIH's  open access policy is one good step to deal with some aspects, but perhaps journals should support efforts to require data to be open.)
       Also... it seems that this particular world of policy making relies on stuff like mass clinical trials, versus the underlying "physiology" of the world economy. I have wondered for some time why all but a few people involved in austerity decisions seem to be unable to understand obvious basic concepts like Pareto optimality and how it plays out concretely here. The problem with the clinical trial approach (done right or done sloppily) is that the reality is very multivariate, and we need to understand nonlinear relations whose projection into simple linear statistics is essentially random. If people could think more analytically (or for that matter if they had used rational algorithms to assess mortgage packages), we wouldn't be having the problems right now. Just my personal opinion...

challenge for folks who think they know some math/physics

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzYEn42Vg7DKY3JLNWpack5wSGc/edit

(Be sure to download  -- the equations don't appear right in google docs "view" mode!)

OOps: 3/14/21023: in the 3D version, which is what really counts,
I can easily prove that the system is always unstable. Yes, even with
a definite topological charge for all physically realistic states, and with distinct subsets of the set of states for different topological charges ... there is never a state of minimum energy within the set!

Given that those conditions are the main arguments used in the paper of Erick Weinberg
to suggest that the solitons in the usual Georgi-Glashow-Thooft-Polyakov system are stable..
it is quite a shocker to realize this. Topology is not the guarantee it has been made out to be.
The question of stability of topological solitons, with topology based on a Higgs term, is
more serious than I thought....

children's guide to intelligent life on earth

Even small children learn very early that we humans are not the only life here on earth.
But the biology books we had, when I was growing up, didn't have such a clear story on
who the other folks are. There are a lot of basic things that nobody knew about until
just a few years ago... and a lot of things I didn't know about until this week!
I don't have time to try to become a real biologist, but I have tried to understand
what makes us smart -- and that means trying to see who ELSE is smart on this planet.

When I was small, adults would explain -- "there are two kingdoms of life,
the animals and the plants." Sophisticated people would even say: "You can see a lot of animals by going to a zoo. We call it a 'zoo" because it's a place for animals; 'zoa' is just another name for animals."

But then people began to think more about those wiggly single-celled creatures you
can see in a microscope -- the microbes. At first, they asked: "OK, we only have plants and animals. So which of these wiggly little things is a plant, and which is an animal?" Some of them are green and get their energy from light, just like trees. Others, like the amoeba, live their lives like hunters, gobbling up other microbes. But gradually, biologists decided that it would make more sense
to create a whole new category for the microbes, and put us big animals with lots of cells
into a different category. They also decided that fungi (from foot fungus to yeast to mushrooms and more) belong in a different category. That gives four kingdoms of life -- microbes, us big types of animals ("animalia"), big plants, and fungi.

What happens when you live your life with this nice simple four-fold picture, and then suddenly a strange and alien kind of life from outer space shows up and takes over more than half of your planet? Or rather, what if it already took over half your planet, and you didn't even know about it?
That's sort of happened about 10-15 years ago, and a lot of adults still don't know about it.

More precisely -- a famous new guy called Woese showed up, and made us aware of an important form of life called "archaea" (NOT archaebacteria now!). Archaea are really fascinating, and very important to the cycle of life on earth. I am tempted to say a whole lot more about them. But so far as we know, they are all just another kind of microbe -- even though half the weight of life
in the ocean is archaea, and even more deeper under the earth. So far as we know, they aren't smart -- they don't have any intelligence. (But some folks wonder at times what kind of intelligence might be hidden in the connection between the microbes of earth.)

So now -- people mostly say the life on earth is in three DOMAINS -- archaea, bacteria,
and out kind of life, the "eukaryotes." We eukaryotes are made up of the textbook kind of cell --
a cell with an outer wall (a membrane), a nucleus in the middle (containing all or almost all
the DNA), and a bunch of other stuff called "cytoplasm." When I went to elementary school,
everyone "knew" that the cytoplasm was like a ball of water or jelly; now we know that it
is much more interesting, because of all the little tubes and compartments it has inside it,
almost like the inside of a crab. But the bacteria and the archaea don't have a nucleus! They are totally different. In GOOD elementary schools, they now teach "ABE" -- the three domains of life,
archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. In good high schools, they pay serious attention to all three,
because all three are important to the ecology and environment of earth.

Is there other stuff we should know about, beyond even ABE? What about viruses? Souls? Alien life forms that might exist on other planets? Those are important too, but this little blog will not go beyond ABE. In  fact, it will stick to us eukaryotes. That's where all the intelligence is that we know about in biology.

And now -- WITHIN the domain of eukaryotes, we still have the four kingdoms,
the eukaryote microbes ("protists"), the animals like us with more than one cell
("animalia"), the fungi, and the plants with more than one cell. Little hunters like the amoeba
(which can act pretty smart in its own way when it stalks its prey) are still called "protozoa" -- protist animals, but that's all informal. They aren't part of "animalia," our group.
They are animals and they are zoa, but they aren't "animalia."

So what about us animalia? Who is smart in our group?

Us, of course -- at least by comparison with the other guys we can see on earth.
Humans are ONE of the pinnacles of intelligence on earth. 

But who are the others?

Of course, we all know about our cousins -- the mice, the rats, the cats, the dogs, the elephants, the dolphins, the whales, the tigers, the orca, the ferrets, and other mammals. The human brain does have at least one special new feature, really basic in nature, beyond what the mouse has... but we're all basically in the same family.

Years ago, I read a very fascinating and important story of evolution, of story of the rising levels of intelligence from the fish to the amphibian to the reptile to the birds and the mammals. It was written by a psychologist called M.E. Bitterman, for Scientific American. Later, in a book edited by
Francis Schmitt, I read a similar story of how the wiring of the brains changed from fish to
reptiles to birds and mammals, showing how brains evolved at the same time intelligence evolved.
Of course, this was all the history of VERTEBRATES -- the big group of animalia which we are part of. And yes, folks, we are the smartest of all of them, and we have a great chain of ancestors
which can help us understand how we got there. I have spent a whole lot
of my life trying to understand that chain.

But is there anyone who is smart who is not a vertebrate?

Many years ago, I actually looked up that guy, M.E. Bitterman, and called him on the telephone.
"have you learned anything more about this great story?" Yes, he had some new papers in Science magazine. Most of it was just proving what he already knew. But there was one startling new development. He took those psychology tests he used, which showed how mammals are smarter than reptiles, and he tried them out on bees. A hive of bees, it seems, is as smart as a mammal, by some crucial tests.

Other folks I met have studied the octopus in their lab - and the legends of its uncanny intelligence really seem to be true.

So last week I thought -- "We have three top smart guys on earth: the human,
the octopus and the ant or the bee. What do I know about where the octopus fits in the story of evolution?" I felt pretty guilty that I never bothered to learn or remember where the octopus fit in
in evolution.

Then when I checked -- I didn't feel guilty. Only in 2011 did the guy win the prize for figuring out the basic story.

We animalia basically come in five kinds: (1) sponges and the like, which are our common ancestor;
(2) eccentric types, the "radialia,' which never got very far;  (3) our type, vertebrates plus,
called "deuterostomia" (defined by the way our first mouth turns into an anus, the real key to what we are?); (4) the octupus's type,  molluscs plus, called something like "lopotrophia"; (5) the type
which ants and bees belong to, arthropods plus plus, called something like eczema...

So it seems that we actually have three great lineages or chains of intelligence we could study,
eventually... the vertebrate chain, the mollusc chain, and the arthropod chain.
The "plus" and "plus plus" mainly just add earlier stages to the chain, along with a few "never got very far" oddballs. For us vertebrates, there are earlier little wormy guys, " semiverebrates" or "hemichordata", which could help us figure out the pathway to something as advanced as an eel, on the way to the fish. For the arthropods, it seems there are nematode worms. For molluscs... I'm not sure what the relation is to their relatives, the annelid worms, but everyone agrees that the molluscs and annelids evolved from simpler creatures, like "bryzoa," which would just sit there in the water
feeding from floating food crossing the special hairs they use for eating.

The three great chains of intelligence... within three of the Big Five of animalia.

Nice to have the big picture...

but of course, I still don't know what the chain leading to the octopus is like in detail.
 I'll still be paying more attention to vertebrates -- except when we keep the artropods
from invading our kitchen, or when we make better use of molluscs in that same place.

sequestration and fiscal crisis: the real hidden story

It's not exactly hidden why things fell apart. Anyone with open eyes could see it. But it takes a lot of energy to keep one's eye's open... unless one makes a habit of it.

It's not just the sequestration which hit today, but the larger context which it is part of.

A couple of months ago, I posted my analysis, predicting why the sequestration talks then underway
were doomed to failure - unless some new elements were introduced. So many people assumed that of course that could not be so... of course the experienced folks on the Hill would once more barely escape disaster. But that kind of past experience failed. Logic did not.

However - in his State of the Union speech, Obama clearly had some insight into what was going on.
In amidst all the expected partisan stuff, were two vey concrete suggestions for how to
avoid sequestration (or at least better balance jobs and debt) which should be bipartisan:
(1) reductions in medical costs, especially medicare, based on a combination of efficiency and things Republicans have been clamoring for; (2) a restructuring of taxes, especially corporate taxes, to result in less loopholes, lower overall rates, and net revenue -- something which prominent Republicans had been clamoring for just a few weeks before!!

Why no follow-up on these two rather crucial offers?

It's pretty clear from the press. Honest Republicans and sincere Tea Party people and people who wanted to stimulate small business might have wanted to accept what they had already promised and asked for. But there are internal deep divisions in the Republican party. The folks on the take form special interests who want their loopholes wouldn't unite. And, under the corporate culture which declares they must have a united front... the honest folks felt morally compelled to
give up their principles and give up the US economy. Perhaps a straight outreach from Obama to key Tea Party folks, bypassing the other guys... might have gotten some distance... or perhaps not.

So we will see...

fire and brimstone II: a better fix on the Green Sky threat

Quick summary -- no one knows yet, but the best evidence I can find
suggests that Peter Ward was basically right, that global warming is pushing us closer than
we would think to "fire and brimstone" -- a rerun of the mass extinctions of the past, where H2S poisoning ("brimstone") and radiation from "ozone holes" ("fire") were high enough to kill
every human on earth.


Background

Peter Ward's important classic, Under a Green Sky, presents us with
some important questions: how close are we to the time when emanations
of H2S to the atmosphere
("brimstone") or radiation induced by a new ozone hole ("fire") start
growing to the point where all higher mammals on earth, including
humans, would be killed?  Ward's book (and the paper by Kump which he
cites) proves that these problems have caused mass extinctions many
times in the past, but he doesn't unravel the mechanisms of HOW this
happens well enough to give us any kind of decent early warning. He
argues that a new kind of crossdisciplinary cooperation would be
needed, between people who study the long history of earth and people
who study the relevant types of ocean currents -- "thermohaline
currents" (THC), in order to understand just how bad the problem is
for us today. He does suggest that we are in fact on a road to a new
mass extinction, sooner than we think.

New stuff

I have done a lot of google scholar search and such, to see whether
anyone on earth has made the right connections to analyze this
situation. Failing that -- I have groped to try to make the
connections myself. Just yesterday, I had a chance to study a paper by
Iris Grossman, of the Carnegie Mellon climate change group, which
explains the relevant THC more clearly than any other paper I have
found as yet. The picture is complicated, but here are..

MY CRUDE INITIAL IMPRESSIONS OF THE BOTTOM LINE

1. There is a very tight coupling between the warming northern Gulf
Stream ("GS") currents and the deep currents ("NDWA"?) which protect
us from a Green Sky event.

2. For the moment, the melting of ice on Greenland reduces the
saltiness (salinity) of water in the North Atlantic, which weakens the
warming current (adding some cold and snow and such to places like
England, France and New England) and the NDWA. However, the AMOUNT of
weakness of these currents is proportional to the RATE of melting of
the Greenland ice; if it keeps melting at the same rate, the cold
storms would not get worse,
and the ocean will not become more stagnant than it is today. It may
even be that this problem peaked at around 1970, when there was a
"Great Saline Anomaly" (low salinity
and a weakening for a few years of the warming GS).

3. Midterm, the situation seems even less threatening. The NDWA seems
to depend on the salinity of the cold North Atlantic and North Pacific
water more than anything else. For now, melting of Greenland ice is a
major factor, but when that is totally gone (just as the Arctic ice is
on path to disappear), this effect goes away. Then we fall back to the
long-term drivers of salinity: rain and evaporation. Thanks to
melting, we know to expect less rain in places like the Himalayas (due
to the "albedo effect"); warming and low albedo should also increase
evaporation. That all should increase saltiness.

4. HOWEVER: this nice NDWA of ours is new. In most of earth's history,
we did not have it at all. In most of earth's history, agricultural
runoff like what we had today, combined with
stagnant flows in the deep ocean, would be enough to cause a "green
sky" effect --
and many times did, killing everyone. What was different about the THC
back then?
The obvious answer: the THC now is very sensitive to effects of
salinity when water is in the very special and unique regime between 0
degrees C and 4 degrees C. (Notice how
little the salinity and temperature at the equator seems to change
this story!) Back then, the poles were warmer. Bottom line: there
probably exists a "tipping point" when temperatures at
the North Pole would get high enough to turn off the NDWA, both in
north Atlantic and north Pacific, quite enough to get us all killed.

BOTTOM LINE: It looks as if the Green Sky problem is current reducing;
however, when things get warm enough in the water in the North Pole
area, that will reverse. We do not yet know the critical temperature
which kills us all, but on the whole, the bottom line feels a lot like
Ward's position, even though the logic behind it is quite different.

================
===================

Needless to say, this cries out for scientific analysis, and
quantitative analysis, far beyond
anything I have done here.

It doesn't help us that the South Pole is in a different regime.

I find myself thinking back to the old movies, AI and Wall-E.
Thoughts about robots and archaea. But the bottom line here really
cries out for more direct follow-ups.


I also remember the line in the Bible about "next tme wikll be fire and brimstone."



And I think about the friendly NASA xenobiologist who guided me a few years ago, when
I was first exploring these questions... and other issues related to archaea.

Of course, none of this represents anyone else. It's all tentative even for me. Just groping
as best I can to understand stuff. (Am sorry how I once thought temperature gradient
would be more important here. Maybe they will be more important in future to THC,
but not quite yet.)

Best of luck... we all need it...

protecting yourself from hackers, criminals and big brother

The recent Chinese hacking scandal is a real wakeup call... but how do we wake up?

Some folks would want to bark a lot, like a chihuahua dog, and then go back to sleep.
Or prepare for some kind of war with China.

Some of the Chinese army folks have really been trying to get our goat, that's for sure. "If you guys can use cyberwarfare to try to shut down Khamanei's plan to nuc Israel, why can't we use it to shut down the US economy, here and now?" (I wonder what Xi Jinping thinks about efforts to
shut down one of their biggest markets right now in the middle of a global recession? But the Bo Xlai
guys would love to get rid of Xi Jinping, in a flood of uncontained testosterone. Good old fashioned
warlord types.) What's more... I remember a talk on cybersecurity at the National Defense University in 2009, when they stressed that "it's not just software; folks can use this to kill hardware." In dark moments, I wonder what connections might or might not exist between the crash of my great
Imac at work in November, versus the new flood of viruses and the incessant, stepped-up attacks on ordinary folks at NSF which has become ever more visible over the past few weeks.

 A wake up call. The 1974 oil embargo should have been a wake up call.. and not just about
the price of gasoline then and there. This is not just about the Chinese army, though their willingness to attack right now without holding anything back is part of what we can deal with.

"Waking up" may include remembering an old idea on the back burner: should we seriously consider shifting BOTH from PCs and from Macs to machines with a properly installed SE-Linux kernel
or even Mimix? Should the US consider responding to the Chinese army AND TO THE MANY
OTHER such threats, by pushing hard for all government offices and critical infratsructure companies
to do the same? When my Mac died, should I have immediately shifted to something more secure immediately?

People once said "the Unix-like operating system of the Mac OS X makes it impossible for malware
to cause the same level of problem on a Mac as on a PC." Some grossly uninformed people have even said "Oh, all operating systems are created equal, it's a matter of principle." (So it doesn't matter whether the coder was implementing theorems, or just happened to be drunk and type in random code? Re the latter, I have had friends who got to see the "inner spaghetti" of some systems the world relies on.) But in fact... there is an interesting history of "macontrol" and "flashflake"
this past year. I haven't dared to visit websites like rootkit.com, now that I know
how easily the best macs with the most modern virus protection can be creamed just by clicking on the wrong thing. But it seems that even under Steve Jobs, Mac must have put in "back doors"
(not "phone home" stuff, but real back doors from the manufacturer, to let selected people
get back in), which the hackers found out about. The new Lion version does close one
of the most egregious back doors, but the  vibes out there suggest that the new generation is even more eager to please the folks who want big back doors.

Yes, there are folks who want all computers to have big back doors -- so that selected people
can keep an eye on you, and pursue legitimate goals such as protecting us from terrorists and mafias.
However, some of those folks have a very serious insider problem of their own, in part what I think of as "code name Trajan." Not Trojan, Trajan. And if the cost of backdoors is the ability of more serious folks to just shut us all down completely, are they really worth it? Are they sustainable,
in light of the problems now facing us?

By the way, I can think of technical means to make much safer backdoors, and other ways to
crack what people think cannot be cracked. But I don't see how that kind of technology "fix" would really change things. Technologies like solar power could be a big fix in their area, but in this area, even full-fledged superhuman machine intelligence would just add more players to the game.

Best of luck....