What happened to global warming?

In the Boston area where I live we are getting pounded with snow leading to record accumulations and the inevitable quips ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’  I have been pondering my response to this for the last days when this morning my acquaintance Carolyn Johnson, science editor of the Boston Globe, has an excellent piece in the paper giving a detailed answer entitled ‘How warming can worsen snowfalls’. 

First, it is more helpful to use the term Climate Change rather than Global Warming, even though it is true that the basic thing that is happening to our planet is a warming due to substantially higher levels of CO2. As a result, the entire planet has warmed up 0.74*C ( 1.33 F) between 1906 – 2005. That doesn’t sound much. Tell most people and they just shrug and say ‘Huh, I’ll just wear a lighter shirt in summer and turn on the A/C more often.'

But think about that for a moment; 93% of that extra heat has been absorbed by the oceans. Think of the amount of extra energy it has taken to heat up the entire Atlantic and Pacific etc oceans. That energy is going to be expressed in various ways: stronger hurricanes and more energy in the jet stream, as well stirring a more aggressive arctic vortex in the winter. 

I first ran into this when researching the paper that I co-authored in 2012 with my colleagues Walter Kittredge, Elizabeth Wright and Donald Lubin entitled Changes in the vascular flora of the Middlesex Fells Reservation, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from 1895 to 2011. Rhodora, Vol. 114, No. 959.  In our study of the plants of this forest reservation, four miles in from the sea, we did find that some cold-loving plants had disappeared and a few other species had come in from the south. But we found a more marked change in those that liked things wetter; for example a 10% increase in wetland species. When I studied weather reports for Boston I found that there had been an 8% increase in precipitation in the last hundred years, most of that increase in the last thirty years. ‘Precipitation’ includes both rain and snow, the latter being measured in special receptacles that melt the snow and then record the water content. If it’s fluffy snow, ten inches equals just one inch of rain. 

In the warmer months Rhode Island, Eastern Massachusetts and SE Maine get more rain because the prevailing winds from the south and south west are carrying more moisture.  An Atlantic ocean current comes south down the coast of New England carrying an increased quantity of cold water (along with damp cool air) because of the melting arctic ice cap. And these air masses tend to collide around the coast of Massachusetts. In the winter a more energetic jet stream also drags more arctic air our way.  All this adds up to heavier snow storms in the winter and more rain the rest of the year. But, because of global warming our winters (though intense) are going to get shorter. The local records being beaten this week in Boston are for amounts of snow in a limited period – a week or two weeks; but even this winter is unlikely to beat the winter-long record set back in the winter of 1995-96 when Boston got 107.6 inches (2.73 meters) of snow. 

So, I guess I’ll have to go and do some shoveling. But I’m encouraged by the belief that Spring is not that far away. 

And while we Bostonians complain about all the snow, climate change is having, and will have, far more serious consequences in other parts of the world such as Southern California, the Philippines, East Africa and certain Pacific island nations.

Mitochondria

In my last blog I talked a bit about mitochondria, and now they’re really in the news with the vote in the British House of Commons (equal to the US House of Representatives) to allow the use of another woman’s mitochondria when the intended mother’s mitochondria are in some way compromised leading to fatal disease in any child.

Of course we can expect to hear religious conservatives prattling on about meddling with God’s work. But even the press are using the term ‘a baby from three parents’.  Nonsense!

Dr Lynn Margulis, who until her death in 2011 was a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was the pioneer of our understanding that in the early evolution of more complex forms of life certain bacteria got swallowed up into larger cells in what is now known and accepted as an extreme case of symbiosis: mitochondria as our energy ‘batteries’; and in plants chloroplasts for photosynthesis. These are microscopic organelles that have no say about me being a human as opposed to being a frog. And If you inject some chloroplasts from an oak tree into a rose bush it’s not then going to grow 80 feet tall and produce acorns! This British baby will be the child of its two parents’ gametes, just as I am.

Thanks to TV crime shows everyone has heard of DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid, a long thread like molecule that carries in the arrangement of it’s components the ability to make proteins. In the case of mitochondria there are a handful of genes specifically for making sugar metabolizing enzymes. With chloroplasts the little bit of DNA there controls the fabulous process of photosynthesis. But my mitochondria have had no say in making me a human being.  That happened when the nuclear DNA in the sperm from my father united with the nucleus in my mother’s egg cell. There’s no room for any mitochondria in the head of a sperm and so we get all our mitochondria from our mothers.

In 2002, Dr. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University published The Seven Daughters of Eve about the seven maternal lines of mitochondria amongst Europeans. Just seven. So in this British case, it will be pretty easy to find a donor with the exact same mitochondria as the mother.

We’re all happy to accept someone else’s blood when needed, provided it’s the same blood type of course. Same with mitochondria.  No genetic change, no ‘third parent’.  

Red blood cells carry oxygen to our cells. Once there the mitochondria use that oxygen to burn glucose to make energy - two organelles working in close cooperation. Let’s focus on the miracle of a new healthy baby made possible by these advances in medical science.

Death and Sex 

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not talking about death from a case of over-exertion. I’m writing about biology. If we’re honest, most of us humans are pretty pissed that one day we’ll have to die. It’s been somewhat of a preoccupation of humans for thousands of years. Most anthropologists would explain the early origin of religions as a way by which humans have tried to deal with this, with promises of a next stage.

Just in case anyone is in the way of thinking that death is a curse put upon us following some sin in the Garden of Eden, let me explain that sex was a great advance in evolution that makes it possible for us to exist at all. If you were really hoping to live eternally you should have been born a germ. All the bacteria and other single-celled organisms, such as amoebas, alive today represent a continuity of living protoplasm over the last three plus billion years. They have just kept growing and dividing in half when they got a bit big. Of course not every individual is still alive otherwise we’d be drowning in bugs. But there has to have been a continuity of their protoplasm. More on that later.

A long time ago, some of these single cells stayed stuck together and the ‘idea’ of multicellular organisms began. Now the planet is populated by millions of species of multicellular plants and animals all with finite lifespans. Some insects live just a matter of days, some trees live a few thousand years, but we all, because of our multicellular nature, have to die. Our human bodies are made up of approximately 300 billion cells. You can’t just make a duplicate copy of that bag of complexity. All we complex creatures can do is produce some microscopic special cells that will grow into a whole new billion-cell life form. We die and they take our place. 

OK, so then why don’t we all just produce some genetic copies of ourselves in single-cell form, sort of ‘virgin birth’? Why sex? We’re told that evolution works through survival of the fittest, or more precisely survival of the one that has most kids. But if I could just bud off a copy of myself, in a year or two I’d have two offspring; whereas with sexual reproduction it takes two people to produce one offspring; so the math doesn’t add up. Here’s the point. Most of us have heard of mutations – little changes in the DNA that occur from time to time and are often not a good thing (can lead to cancer), but just sometimes by sheer luck produce an improvement. Since the beginning of time that little bit of luck has been what evolution has worked on to develop/evolve slightly improved models. But if it was that alone we’d still be looking like slugs. 

What sex loses in numbers of offspring per individual it makes up for in recombination. This is the reshuffling of our DNA as our gametes are produced.  It’s called meiosis. This is why no matter how many children a couple has, unless they’re identical twins they’ll all be fascinatingly different. Over the last billion years or so evolution has played on this great variety produced by sexual reproduction and the result is not only the wonderful variety of plants and animals in our world, but also ourselves. If sex hadn’t been ‘invented’ we wouldn’t be here. But, to return to my opener, the pay-off is that our individual bodies do wear out and die. 

But remember those ancient bacteria that began it all? They’re closer than you think. When early multicellular organisms started to develop, one challenge was to deliver energy locally in the larger more complex cells. Either by kidnapping or a friendly deal – “I’ll protect you if you’ll work for me.” – some small aerobic bacteria got swallowed up into the cells of the multicellular organism. They’re still there today in every cell of our bodies – called mitochondria, the ‘powercells’ where glucose is ‘burnt’ to produce energy, still with their own separate thread of DNA handed down from all those billion years ago. 

A man’s sperm is simply a tiny packet of half his genetic material. You got your mitochondria from your mother and so on back down the female line. Incredibly, only about 33 different lines of mitochondria have been found amongst all human beings! I’ve had mine tested and so I know that my mother’s mother’s mother’s people had been in northwest Europe for approximately 30,000 years. 

A human egg cell is quite large as cells go, containing many thousand mitochondria embedded in protoplasm representing a continuity of living tissue since the beginning of life on this planet. So ladies, you are part of an ‘eternal life’, and, because of sex, we guys can at least hand on a few molecules of DNA. 

Enjoy ! 

It’s a Dog’s Life

When I was young my family had a dog called Tina. We loved her dearly. Eventually she grew old and was clearly in a lot of pain limping around and whimpering. The vet could do nothing to help, and so after we all hugged Tina and cried a lot, my Dad took her to the vet who ‘put her to sleep’ as we did not want Tina to suffer anymore. My question is: Why don’t we humans have the same rights as dogs?

This question was brought to the fore in America last November when 29 year old Brittany Maynard, suffering incurable brain cancer, died peacefully using a prescription medicine, with the full support of her husband and mother. However, this is only possible in very few states in the USA. In Brittany’s case she and her husband had to relocate from California to Oregon where they have a Death with Dignity law. 

Right now I have no intention of dying just yet – I’m having too much fun. Nevertheless, the principle of the right to die with dignity, and the suffering of others, came to my attention through the review of a new book which I read recently. The book is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014) by Dr. Atul Gawande; and the review I read in the New York Review of Books was by Marcia Angell. Dr. Gawande reports that on average every American spends the last year or more of their lives disabled and in a nursing home, often in much discomfort either physically or mentally or both. “These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception.” Gawande writes.

 In less developed parts of the world the situation is doubtlessly worse. What concerns me is that in the 21^st century, in a country which is supposed to have ‘separation of church and state’, there is so much resistance to a person being able to say: “You know what? It’s time for me go”, and then legally to be able to get the help to achieve that.

The reviewer, Marcia Angell, has her own story to tell. Her husband died from cancer just last June here in my state of Massachusetts. We had a referendum here a couple of years ago on death with dignity. The Catholic Church weighed in with a lot of expensive ads on TV and the measure was defeated. As a result Marcia’s husband’s end was as she puts it “unspeakably difficult” and drawn out. 

Look, if you want to lie there in pain believing that only God has the right to call you up to heaven, and that he’ll do it when he’s ready – “I’m busy right now, wait your turn.” – fine, but don’t impose your silliness on me. Sadly, only three states in the USA have provisions for death with dignity. Here in the northeast I’d have to move to Vermont. Then in the northwest there is Oregon and Washington with such legal provisions.

Even if you believe in the healing power of prayer, you surely accept that we all have to go sometime. It would be nice to think that the more evil your life has been the more you would suffer at the end, and vice versa. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Julie Selsberg is campaigning to change the law in Colorado after she watched her father Charles suffer terribly in his last days. The bill that some legislators are bringing for consideration in that state stresses death with dignity, not physician-assisted suicide. Suicide means you want to die. People who are prematurely stricken with cancer, such as Brittany Maynard, don’t want to die, they just want to go with dignity. In the other 47 states where there is no such provision, then desperate people do take the law into their own hands and it can get problematic which naysayers love to pounce on. It’s time we moved into the 21^st century folks.

When my time comes, I’d rather not suffer for a long time thank you very much, just to satisfy someone else’s childish beliefs. It could also save a lot of money in hospital costs.

As I wrote in my last, also controversial, blog (I’m getting old and crotchety), it’s time for us to grow up, leave hopes in miracles behind, and embrace the factual truths that science has painstakingly revealed to us over the last few centuries;  and in this case reduce unnecessary suffering at the close of life. Je suis Tina.

Je suis Charlie. It’s time we all grew up.

A few days ago twelve Parisians were gunned down for expressing an opinion. They were executed in the name of Allah, the Arabic word for God. These Al Kaida and ISIS characters have given themselves the right to kill anyone who doesn’t worship their god the way they like. Just a few years ago Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in Northern Ireland because they didn’t like each other’s version of their religion. 

In America where religion abounds no one can hope to advance politically without constantly saying “God bless America”. I wonder what Native Americans think of that. The Christian Europeans didn’t bring them much blessing. Each religionist believes passionately that his religion is the truest expression of God’s reality and will. And so Muslims kill Jews, Jews kill Muslims, Christians kill Jews, and Muslims kill Christians, and so on and so on and so on. Isn’t it time we gave religion a rest? I’m serious. It’s done enough harm. I know, atheism didn’t work out too well in the USSR. And yes, we still have this nut-case running an atheist prison camp called North Korea. But there’s got to be some better way for the future folks. 

I’ve just read Edward O. Wilson’s latest book The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). Wilson is a famous biologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University. In this book he makes a convincing case that because of the way our brains have evolved we have an built-in conflict in our natures tied up with strong tribalism producing strong group loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for one’s own people; but also a tendency to mistrust the other, the foreigner, the other race, the other tribe, the other religion.

Because of this fierce loyalty to one’s tribal religion, and because of our basic fear of death and all the unanswered questions, otherwise well-educated people still believe in the most absurd stories and claims handed down to them in their religion. In 1950, centuries after it was proven that we live on a ball hurtling through space, Pope Pius XII announced ex cathedra i.e. infallibly, that Jesus’ mother Mary had in fact ascended into heaven about 1900 years earlier, (not that Pius had been there to witness it of course). Perhaps Jesus, who incidentally had performed the same trick a few years earlier, had swept into orbit in his private spaceship and picked her up. At the time of Pius’ announcement, one prominent biologist commented that at about 30,000 feet poor Mary would have passed out. At this point if you’re not overly religious you might be having a chuckle. But others will be offended at me making light about these revered religious people and stories. And that in the end is why several of the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine were gunned down in Paris. It’s time we all grew up. We’re on our own on a lonely planet, facing some serious challenges concerning climate, population, water, food etc. We need to leave our tribalism behind and work together across the world. And yes, it starts with me.