Global Warming – Page 12 – Auxiliary Memory

Electric Cars and Wikipedia

I’m going to kill two birds with one stone in this post. I started out researching electric cars and quickly discovered one of the best sources of information on them is Wikipedia. Since this came just after seeing a major attack on Wikipedia the contrast of the two stories is too hard to ignore. If you have time, look at this video “The Truth According to Wikipedia.”

These people think Wikipedia is evil but my experience is just the opposite, I think Wikipedia is very positive and creative, and represents a new paradigm in thinking and transmitting knowledge. I wanted to find out about electric cars and Wikipedia provided a very comprehensive survey of what’s going on with that technology, and had links to more information and related articles. I jumped over to the Encyclopedia Britannica and found zip – well that’s due to the fact that it’s a sales site and doesn’t offer a way research electric cars without paying. I bought the deluxe DVD of the EB over a year ago and it included one year’s access to the online version of EB.

For awhile whenever I looked up something I’d check EB first and then Wikipedia and in all cases I preferred the information I got from Wikipedia, so I stopped using EB. I could check my DVD copy of EB for what it says about electric cars, but I didn’t reinstall it on my new machine and I don’t feel like hunting down the DVD right now. And it will be out of date. In other words, if Andrew Keen and company want an authoritative encyclopedia to compete with Wikipedia it needs to be on the web and free. I can understand EB wanting to make money but can’t it make money like all the other commercial Internet sites through advertising?

Even if you aren’t interested in electric cars, look at the Wikipedia entry for electric car and plug-in hybrid. I found the stub for electric cars at EB and it promises 227 words if you buy the online subscription. Wikipedia is offering thousands of words of info for free. Sure there’s a chance that some of Wikipedia’s facts might be wrong, but I think the group effort looks extremely good. I learned all I needed and wanted to know and more.

The major criticism for Wikipedia is it’s written by amateurs – but the results look very professional to me. I was quickly able to learn about the different types of electric cars, their histories, and the planned models on the drawing boards. For the plug-in hybrid, the technology I’m most interested in, Wikipedia gives continuously updated listing of press reports. Other than finding insider blogs from fanatics about electric cars, I can’t imagine needing more information than what Wikipedia is presenting.

I learned quickly from Wikipedia what kind of electric cars are for sale. The ones I can afford, I don’t want, and the ones I want, I can’t afford or they aren’t in production yet. I also learned that certain types of electric cars have restrictions to driving on roads with 35mph or less speed limits, which is another reason why I don’t want the affordable electric cars. The information was so good at Wikipedia that I don’t even feel the need to search further. Wikipedia is even supplanting the Internet.

My conclusion is I need to wait for the automobile industry to come up with a good solution. Not only that, it looks like it will be a long time before Detroit or Japan offers a $20-25k plug-in hybrid that will be practical for the average driver. It appears for the next few years the best electric cars will compete in price with the more expensive models of Mercedes.

This brings me to the second bird I wanted to kill with this stone. If global warming is the crisis that scientists are saying it is, why hasn’t our government and others around the world jumped in a created a crash program to manufacture low cost plug-in hybrid electric cars? If what scientists are saying about global warming is true it’s far more terrifying than anything Osama bin Laden plans to do, or more threatening than Iraq five years ago. Why is Muslim terrorists more scary than a threat that promises to grind civilization down world-wide?

Politicians who avoid the issue of global warming do so because they fear fighting it will hurt the economy. I would think one major solution to keep the economy stable and fight global warming at the same time would be the development of an ecological car. Plug-in hybrids appears to be the next intermediate solution – they still use gas, but much less, so they will work with the existing infrastructure of gasoline supplied energy stations. Plug-in hybrids will also benefit from people who install solar energy panels on their houses. If you create a Marshal Plan like effort to promote both technologies we could lower our oil consumption and lower our use of coal in electrical production and thus find two major ways to lower our carbon footprint.

I think our leaders are still in the authoritative mindset of people who are attacking Wikipedia, but the world’s population acts more like the human dynamics that create Wikipedia. Car makers still want to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica editions. What we need are leaders who can promote solutions to global warming in the same way Wikipedia succeeds.

Jim

Faith in Science

Unless you are a scientist working on a very specific area of research and actually understand a particular phenomenon in detail, you take everything else stated as true by science on faith. When I argue with my friends we need to change society to slow down global warming I’m really preaching on faith – my faith in a particular idea. I can’t personally prove its true. I’m testifying for the global warming gospel. I am not a scientist. I read a lot of popular science books and magazines, and that isn’t science either, nor does it make me a scientist or even scientific in my thinking. Popular science books are the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels of the world of science. The real enlightenment is through understanding experiments.

Last night I attended the Memphis Astronomical Association meeting and heard a lecture about how the speed of light was figured out over the centuries. We are told the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second in a vacuum. I can’t prove that. The lecture last night covered several methods that scientists used since the 17th century to calculate the speed of light. If I wanted to I could recreate those experiments myself and have a better understanding – one that is not based on faith.

For our culture to be based on scientific experience rather than faith we need to train kids to practice science. Even though measuring the speed of light is a difficult problem, there are probably many many ways to get the job done. One creative approach I found was by melting marshmallows in a microwave. I have no idea if this experiment is real or not. Right now it’s in the faith realm. There are other stories like it on the net but using cheese instead of marshmallows. My point is people can come up with creative ways to solve the problem. Teachers need to find more of these experiments to help raise kids to understand how things actually work. If the marshmallow experiment is bogus, then they need to learn why?

I’m reading Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and in one chapter he explains how much astronomy can be achieve by an ordinary person with a stick. I don’t need to duplicate these stick experiments because Tyson explains them so well that I’m willing to accept them as true. However, I think our schools would be better if we actually let kids do these stick experiments. Knowledge is more than words. Our society is failing because people live too much in fiction and not enough in fact.

When I argue with my friends about global warming I need to understand the science behind the concept and I need to do some experiments on my own to have experience, or at least read about specific experiments and understand them. So I’m wondering what are a basic list of experiments that can prove that people are impacting the global weather? These can be thought experiments too – Einstein discovered a lot about reality with some good thought experiments.

From my reading, most scientists now support the idea that humans are impacting the global environment, but many people do not believe that or refuse to believe that. Global warming is a vital issue with many people but it ranks very low among all vital issues the public is considering in the current presidential campaign. If the impact of global warming will be as dire as some scientists predict it should be rated #1. Why isn’t it then?

There are very few climatological scientists in the world, and few people want to take up the discipline as a hobby. Most of the talk about global warming deals with CO². Normal people have to take on faith that extra carbon in the atmosphere is bad and that people are at fault by adding it to the air in their daily lives. I meet lots of people who flat out say they don’t believe this. How can I counter this belief without whipping out a series of scientific proofs to change their mind?

Our society and all the other societies around the globe need to be more scientific in their thinking. Faith in science doesn’t cut it. We need an educational system where more real experiments are practiced by school kids. After that, they need to study of historical experiments until their logic is a sixth sense in which they view the world. We need to develop a mind set where we can understand scientific ideas and not just argue the ideas on faith, like ancient religious scholars discussing how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

Now all I have to do is go out and find those proofs – any help will be welcomed.

Jim

Going Paperless

When my Time magazine renewal came in recently I decided not to renew. I had been paying about $29 a year and now it was $49, and I thought that too much. Then on Saturday I saw the new issue at my favorite bookstore and wanted to read it, but I passed on it thinking I’d need to learn to do without. Later that evening I had a V-8 moment where I imagined hitting my head. Hell, I have a Kindle and I can get Time from the Kindle store, I thought. It turns out subscribing to the Kindle version of Time is only $1.49 a month or about $18 a year.

Flipping on my Kindle I zoomed over to their store and subscribed and instantly saw a download completed message. A couple clicks later I was reading the article I saw at the bookstore about George Clooney being the last Hollywood star.

Then it occurred to me that I should check Time’s web site, and I’ll be damn if the whole article wasn’t there for free. Not only was the read for free it also included a video segment of George Clooney going into the writer’s crawl space looking for source of an alarm that had gone off unexpectedly. Seeing the video of a fancy movie star at the writer’s modest house for dinner doing ordinary things really did accent the piece. I could have had all of this for free.

The trouble is reading Time online isn’t exactly pleasurable, and reading the Kindle is, so I’m happy to pay for my Kindle copy. However, this experience reminded me of an article in the latest issue of Wired (hard copy $12 a year) called “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” – which I now link so you can read for free. Once again I wished I had this article on my Kindle. The Kindle is actually as near perfect for my eyes as I can imagine anything formatted for reading. Among all the little buttons at the bottom of online reading material I now wish there was a “Send to Kindle” button. It would be worth the dime Amazon charges for receiving such stuff.

We are really very close to having a paperless society that pundits have talked about every since I can remember. People always exclaim they hate reading off the computer screen even though they spend hours a day doing so. Now the Kindle offers a better way to read, even better than paper, and that starts to suggest going paperless is possible.

By the way, I kid you not when I say I prefer to read the Kindle over paper. If my paper material was formatted like the Kindle, paper would be fine, but modern layout artists format magazines for people with 20-15 vision. The typeface on the Kindle is sharp, large and the scan line is just a few inches across – very easy on the eyes.

I subscribe to a lot of magazines, most of which I only read a tiny fraction of each issue. All those trees cut down and processed with tons of water, power and dangerous chemicals so I can just flip through and read a few tidbits here and there. Now that’s wasteful. I’ve been feeling guilty for years, but with global warming I really feel terrible about such waste. I’ve decided it’s time to go paperless. Besides that I’m tired of carrying so much paper out to the curb for recycling.

I canceled the paper over the protest of my wife – we finally compromised and get just the Sunday edition, but I’m aiming to eliminate that too eventually. I hate to see newspapers lose business and carriers lose jobs, but we recycle pounds of newspaper after only reading ounces of pages. That’s just too wasteful. Now I’m on to finding new ways to read my magazines.

Most magazines do not have Kindle editions, but they usually have a web edition. However, many of those do not have full text online. I got the latest Scientific American today and checking online I find two articles available as full-text, including the cover story “The End of Cosmology,” the one I wanted to read the most. The others articles are available for money online and SciAm also offers a digital subscription for $39.95 a year that includes 12 new issues and access to 180 old issues. That seems steep because my paper copies cost just $24.95, and that includes shipping and the slaughter of the pulp trees. Seems like bits of electrons would cost less.

What I’d really like is a service like Netflix that for a single fee provided me with full access to a range of magazines and their back issues. I still don’t believe Wired hippie pie in the sky about everything being free. And if everything free is going to be plastered with ads like a race car then I don’t want free.

Going paperless will be tough. I don’t think the online Popular Photography will be as nice to read online as flipping through the paper version. They do a pretty good job and sometimes the photos look better online. And it’s much easier to maintain back issue information online. It would be great if they truly showcased every photo with a 1920 x 1200 pixel version. Now that would be worth subscribing too. This would be especially great if I could add them to my Desktop Art Gallery.

I currently subscribe to two paper editions of science fiction magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Recently I bought an issue of Analog which had the #2 part of a serial so I zipped over the Fictionwise and bought the past issue and as it turned out the third issue was already on sale too. Fictionwise then sends me my magazines to my Kindle for reading. So I read a Kindle issue, then read a paper issue and then finished up with a Kindle issue. That really convinced me I preferred reading SF by Kindle.

The SF mags are slowly losing subscribers so I’m wondering if e-book subscribers are helping or hurting their business. It costs the same to sub with either edition and once again I feel like I’m getting more for my money with paper but I actually read more stories when I get the Kindle edition.

It will take a year or two for all my paper subscriptions to lapse. During the time maybe more magazines will come out on Kindle, or I’ll just start reading them online. I hope the Kindle does become a success and the “Send to Kindle” button starts appearing on web pages.

Going paperless is a lot like going CD-less. I assume DVDs will be next. Can magazines and newspapers survive and thrive off of online and e-book editions? That’s the real question. If Wired is right then they can, but I don’t know. So far the tide is against online subscriptions – people expect everything on the web for free and I don’t know if that’s possible in a paperless world. Right now publishers make the bulk of their income off of paper editions. Can they even survive in a paperless world without charging? I don’t know. I do know I gave up reading my local paper years ago when I discovered I could read the NY Times for free online.

Maybe they could combine free web versions but have a fee based button for sending to the Kindle. I’d gladly pay 10-25 cents an article for such a fee.

With global warming, oil and water shortages, paper is an expensive luxury if you have a digital world.

Going Paperless 2

Jim

Science Fiction and Global Warming

I’ve yet to read any science fiction extrapolating stories about the effects of global warming. The Road by Cormac McCarthy could be about global warming but it could also be about anything that brings on the collapse of civilization. So I jumped over to Google and searched on [“science fiction” “global warming“] and discovered there are a few books to read, and it appears Kim Stanley Robinson is out in the forefront with Forty Signs of Rain, the first in a trilogy. And damn, wouldn’t you know it, I already own it in hardback. I often buy books and then forget about them since I have hundreds waiting to be read.

I shall move this volume up my waiting list but sadly it hasn’t gotten good reviews. Science Fiction Book Reviews at SciFi.com only gave it a C+. There are sixty reader reviews over at Amazon.com but only 22 are five and four stars. It appears to be more cerebral than action packed. But that’s a depressing fact about the topic of global warming anyway. It would be hard to make the subject into a techno thriller. The apparent way to make the subject exciting is to assume the ice caps go down the drain and we all become barbarians like in Waterwold.

Still you’d think global warming would be a big topic for science fiction. This crisis will determine just how intelligent of a species we are. Global warming could be our dinosaur killer asteroid. Most people ignore the topic writing it off as some old Al Gore issue that’s just plain boring. But in reality it’s a hot scientific topic that has rocketed forward so its no longer just a minor political issue. Most people think Inconvenient Truth, whereas new data is flooding in all the time. The new researchers never talk about Al Gore anymore.

Try and catch Dimming the Sun on PBS’s Nova. Scientists now think pollution has been significantly dimming the sun and masking the effects of global warming for years. Things are much worse than anything Al Gore discussed in his dog and pony show. Now that whole legions of scientists are studying the subject the topic seems to have fallen out of favor with the public. Public interest peaked much too soon.

Science fiction writers have a unique opportunity to bridge real science with speculation. Unfortunately science fiction has never been good at subtle drama and the impact of global warming is more suited for quiet literary fiction. Whether humanity succeeds or fails at facing this issue will not be due to a few heroes who save the world but how we all choose to act in our personal lives. Think about the relocation of the victims of Katrina on a massive scale. Global warming isn’t about adjusting to heat and rising shorelines but in our lifetimes its about living with drought and mass relocations. Nature is about to get downright Biblical on us.

Over at Grist, a blog for Environmental News & Commentary they have interview with Paolo Bacigalupi about science fiction and environmentalism called “Stranger than Fiction.” He mentions one of his stories, “The Tamarisk Hunter” about drought and a bounty hunter who kills tamarisk trees, a rather unique bit of speculation predicting the need for water is so great that the government will pay to kill off parasitic trees that take too much. It’s another grim future, positive only in that it says people will survive one way or another. A telling paragraph:

When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple of towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how “hot” it was. It didn’t really matter how “hot” it was. The problem wasn’t lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn’t touch it.

I think in the United States most people for the next few decades will face global warming over issues about water and drought and not anything as dramatic as rising oceans stealing land from the coasts. Look at Georgia, the state is trying to redraw the Tennessee state line so they can have access to the Tennessee River. “The Tamarisk Hunter” shows one personal story of our possible future. I’d think there would be millions of stories to tell.

One vital purpose of science fiction is to warn us away from futures we don’t want to find ourselves living in. If you caught Six Degrees Could Change the World then you know millions of people are already living in stories like “The Tamarisk Hunter.” It’s no longer science fiction to them.

Science fiction can be escapist fiction that thrills us while we try to ignore our real lives, or it can influence us to change our lives, inspiring us to alter our future. At work I’ve become a boring nag about global warming. Most people want to brush the topic aside as soon as they hear it. Others bristle and want to attack Al Gore. Scientists have played Chicken Little too many times and cried the sky is falling so often that people just don’t believe them anymore. Science fiction writers have an opportunity to paint realistic views of the future that may convince more people to return to this topic.

Read “The Tamarisk Hunter” and see what you think. Don’t you think Paolo Bacigalupi has set up complex image of the future in very few words? Would you have preferred escaping into a military SF story that’s a cross between Starship Troopers and Halo? I’m asking for a bit of naval gazing here, a bit of self-analysis. This little Rorschach test tells whether you seek deeper understanding of reality, or whether you prefer to escape it.

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Update 2/28/8: Jason Sanford reviews Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi new book and says its the best speculative fiction collection since Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life. That’s very high praise indeed. Another a review focusing on its econological aspects can be found at Locus Magazine. This book includes “The Tamarisk Hunter” that I discuss above plus ten other stories.

Jim

Back to the Future

I’ve enjoyed a lot of embedded film clips on the blogs I read so I thought I’d experiment and try to embed a clip here, unfortunately I learned through trial and error and the FAQ page at WordPress that Flash videos are a no-no. That’s too bad. If you want to watch the film I’m about to discuss go here:

Watch The Video

The clip is from Hula.com a new video site I’m checking out and the show is 30 Days from FX, one I’ve never heard of before. But I was attracted to the episode entitled “Off the Grid,” where the show producers took two city slickers from the Bronx down to Missouri to live on a Eco-Green Commune. Talk about back to the future because I’ve stayed at a couple communes and remember the Mother Earth News hippie subculture of trying to live self-sufficient on five acres.

This show has a lot of good information in it, but it also gives a totally wrong impression. To change our lives to fight global warming we don’t all need to move to the country and crap in a bucket. This show was very positive, but I worry about the subtle implications. Modern people hate the hippie lifestyle and culture. Back in 1972 when I had hair, and it was long and I looked and acted the hippie part, I hated my visit to the country commune like the one in this show.

The people were great and sincere but I just couldn’t stomach working so hard to live the simple lifestyle. Before the real experience I loved reading Mother Earth News and contemplating how to be self-sufficient off the grid. This isn’t a new idea because these memories of mine are over forty years old. But we also know such movements have always come and gone. Just think about Henry David Thoreau living in the woods and inspiring generations, and he was far from the first man to think up the idea. The urge to return to nature is as old as cities.

Like I said, this show has a lot of useful information in it. At the beginning the visitors to the commune where told we’d need over twelve Earths to sustain everyone living on the planet at their current consumption levels. At the end of the show, they were told we’d need just 1.3 Earths if everyone lived like the people at the commune. That’s an amazing bit of data because it means billions live on this planet in living conditions worse than those hippies and that’s pretty damn scary.

To successfully combat global warming we will need to alter our lifestyles but not so drastically. I think this may be why so many people do not want to face up to the global warming problem – they’re afraid they’ll have to live like the hippies in this show. I think we can transform society and still live in the suburbs and drive to work. Does it matter if the power in your outlets come from fossil fuels or renewable energy sources?

Imagine if we could build enough solar energy plants and other sources of clean energy, and if we switched to driving electric cars or other vehicles with clean fuel, would our lives be that much different? We’ll also need to waste a whole lot less, but is that a real big deal either? I think the most drastic change might be the end of the beef industry, which is incredibly energy wasteful. But like this show shows, there are ways to raise cattle naturally too.

We all want to get back to the future where living is science fictional and far out. There are probably damn few people who want to live like humans did in the past, close to nature, working as hard as animals, living without convenience. However, that’s exactly how we will live if civilization collapses. If you’re afraid of living like a hippie, change and modernize for a clean energy future.

By the way, this was a fun show and I liked how the couple changed and adapted. They didn’t wimp out. I was impressed, especially with the girl.

Jim