Nina Munteanu

This is the first in a new series I’ll be posting that deals directly with climate change, a topic of great controversy among scientists still and one meriting discussion among us here. Okay, I lie: I posted several articles already that touch on this subject. I touched upon the chaotic nature and interrelatedness of climate and weather in my post on chaos theory. In two blog posts, “Climate Change & the Nobel Peace Prize” and “Blog Action Day—Truth”, I devote lengthy discussion to the dedicated work of Al Gore, his film, “the Inconvenient Truth” and generate lively discussion on the topic (check out the comments pages!). In “Tornadoes Connected to Global Waming?” I described my own personal experience with the historic unseasonal tornadoes in the US earlier this year and how some believe this is related to climate change and is a sign of more to come. In “Polar Cities” I describe Dan Bloom’s concept for surviving the aftermath of global warming and explore the need for paradigm changes. Then in “The Complexity of Nature” I discuss how perspective plays a role in our perception of both our future and that of our planet.

I left off with a discussion—actually a series of questions—related to “scale” and whether or not we should intervene, when everything that we are and do is PART of the global network already. Is it simply that we are being hubristic once again by seeing things from a strictly anthropomorphic view? Perhaps, it isn’t our place to succeed, but rather to secede to something more suited to what is yet to come… I’d like to think that it may be neither, rather that these global events will hasten our own evolution into a higher form. But I’m getting way ahead of my own series. Because today’s post is entirely from a human’s viewpoint and concerned with our own well being. Much of the information here is from an article written by the medical community in Nova Scotia, Canada. I start with some very interesting statistics. For instance, did you know that:

• Close to 8% of all non-accidental deaths in Canada are caused by air pollution resulting from by-products of burning fossil fuels.
• Following smog days, hospital admissions for respiratory problems increase by 6%, admissions of infants with respiratory problems increase by 15%.
• Forecasts show that without reductions in fossil fuel consumption, in 20 years there will be a 60% increase in particulate emissions with a corresponding increase in respiratory illnesses, hospitalization and health care costs.

A report by the US National Academies’ National Research Council, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises, warns that people can expect “climate surprises” in the form of “large, abrupt and unwelcome regional or global climatic events,” including drought, floods, extreme heat, hurricanes, (how about unseasonal tornadoes?…) and rising sea levels. Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, says the report indicates that “we’ve underestimated the rate of this change, we’ve underestimated the sensitivity of biological systems, we’ve underestimated the cost of global warming.”

Epstein and other authors published a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal where they suggested that the direct effects of climate change to humanity include: illness and deaths from heat waves, drought, floods, storms and the breakdown of systems in the aftermath of weather disasters. Indirect effects would include decreased crop productivity owing to pests and climate change, changing water availability, lower air quality, rising sea levels and animal-based diseases appearing in regions in which they had previously been unheard of.

I dedicate this Friday Feature page to the stellar websites and blogs devoted to educating us, challenging us and guiding us on climate change, some of which appear below. Please check them out and let me know of any sites you think should be included that I’ve neglected to include.

The David Suzuki Foundation on Climate Change
Environment Canada’s page on Climate Change
The International Institute for Sustainable Development on Climate Change and Energy
Climate of Our Future
Climate Ark
Real Climate
Climate Feedback
Climate Change Action
Talk Climate Change
Global Climate Change
Grenedia
GlobalWarming.org
Global Warming: early warning signs
Global Warming Blog
Climate 411
Climate Crisis
Global Warming Futurist

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond
them into the impossible—Arthur C. Clarke

When I was in my early twenties (some time ago) I read Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. He’d written it a year before I was born. I remember being moved by the story’s grandness and scope about the transformation of humanity. On the slightly garish cover of the Ballantine science fiction classic book jacket Gilbert Highet’s endorsement said, “…a real staggerer by a man who is both a poetic dreamer and a competent scientist.” This remains an apt assessment of this self-professed “mildly cheerful” British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, perhaps best known for the novel 2001: a Space Odyssey (also about the transformation of humankind).

On March 19 of this year, Arthur C. Clarke died at age ninety in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he’d made his home since 1956. He left behind a legacy of incredibly imaginative works, valuable scientific inventions and concepts and profoundly thoughtful discussions of the future.

During the time Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor and technician (from 1941 to 1946) he proposed satellite communication systems, which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal (in 1963) and a nomination in 1994 for a Nobel Prize. What you might not have known about him is that he was an avid scuba diver and helped fight for the preservation of lowland gorillas, which won him the UNESCO-Kalinga Prize in 1962. Clarke was also fascinated with the paranormal and admitted that it was part of the inspiration for his novel Childhood’s End. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986. And in 2000, he was knighted. Yes, he is Sir Arthur Charles Clarke. He served as the first Chancellor of the International Space University from 1989 to 2004, has an asteroid named in his honour and a species of ceratopsian dinosaur (Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei), discovered in Inverloch in Australia.

Born in Minehead, Somerset, England, Clarke enjoyed stargazing and reading old American science fiction pulp magazines when he was a boy. His first professional sales (e.g., Loophole and Rescue Party)appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946 at age 29. In 1948, Clarke wrote The Sentinel for a BBC competition; although it was rejected it represented a turning point in Clarke’s writing, which introduced a more mystical and cosmic element to his work (the Sentinel was the basis for his best known work, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Many of his subsequent works (including Childhood’s End) features the theme of a technologically advanced but prejudiced humankind being confronted by a superior alien intelligence—the encounter of which produces a conceptual breakthrough that accelerates humanity into the next stage of its evolution.

Among Clarke’s visionary science (fiction) and inventions, some of his most notable include the following:

• Geostationary satellites as telecommunications relays (described in a paper in Wireless World, October 1945 entitled, Extra-Terrestrial Relays—Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?) The geostationary orbit 36,000 km above the equator is officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union as a “Clarke Orbit”;
• Space elevators (first described in The Fountains of Paradise, 1979); and,
• A “global library” (in Profiles of the Future, 1962).

We get a good sense of Clarke’s beliefs and philosophy in his works. In his introduction of Mysterious World: Strange Skies, Clarke said, “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.” At the end of the episode, of the Star of Bethlehem (of which his favorite theory was that it was a pulsar) he added, “How romantic, if even now we can hear the dying voice of a star which heralded the Christian Era.”

In the 1973 revision of his 1962 book, Profiles of the Future, Clarke added two laws to create his famous three laws of prediction, aptly termed Clarke’s Three Laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Fiction is more than non-fiction in some ways…you can stretch people’s minds, alerting them to the possibilities of the future, which is very important in an age where things are changing rapidly—Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke’s most notable works include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood’s End, The Fountains of Paradise.