Fire and Knowledge

Greenland has a new island, which has been named “Warming Island.” Here’s an excerpt from the news article:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland’s enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland’s remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea….

As the satellite pictures and the main photo which we publish today make clear, Warming Island has been created by a quite undeniable, rapid and enormous physical transformation and is likely to be seen around the world as a potent symbol of the coming effects of climate change.

But it is only one more example of the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that scientists have begun to realise, only very recently, is proceeding far more rapidly than anyone thought.

Whether humans are the “main cause” or not, would it really hurt for us to stop being wasteful and polluting our beautiful home?

It is a curious paradox of science that its empirical knowledge of the material world gives rise to abstractions such as statistical averages which have no materiality and exist only as ideas. There is, empirically speaking, no average and no type. Between the species and the specimen the creature itself, the individual creature, is lost. Having been classified, dissected, and explained, the creature has disappeared into its class, anatomy, and explanation.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 39

Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today – that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each – will only be about fifty bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 283-4

Of the 3 percent of Earth’s water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount – 0.036 percent – is found in lakes, rivers and reservoirs, and an even smaller part – just 0.001 percent – exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planet’s ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland. Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on over 2 miles of ice, at the North Pole just 15 feet of it. Antarctica alone has 6 million cubic miles of ice – enough to raise the oceans by a height of 200 feet if it all melted. But if all the water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only a couple of centimeters.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 240-241

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 153

For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever “model” we use) is enviably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 7

Global warming: the final verdict

Excerpt:

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms – like the ones that battered Britain last week – will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

I belong to a small, unconventional school that believes that no rat poison is the correct amount to spread in the kitchen where children and puppies can get at it. I believe that no chemical waste is the correct amount to discharge into the fresh rivers of the world, and I believe that if there is a way to trap the fumes from factory chimneys, it should be against the law to set these deadly fumes adrift where they can mingle with fog…

–E. B. White, “Sootfall and Fallout” (1956) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 93