Starting Gaia Watch Blog...

Hello World

I am starting a new blog where I will report and discuss observations, developments, and new understandings of what is happening to our planet Earth. My interest in the world started, like everyone, at my birth. As a child, I had great curiosity and interest in everything. Being raised in a conservative Catholic school, I learned that the Earth was created around 4,000 BC, on a Tuesday. I recal being told it happened at 2 PM, although I never understood how that could be calculated from the bible.

Fortunately, I lived in Chicago, and the Field Museum of Natural History was there. In those days, it and all the main museums in Chicago were free. In the summer, I woud get some loose change, take the bus, and spend the afternoon just walking its halls. The Field Museum had the greatest collection of stuffed animals. It seemed all the animals of the world were there, organized in great halls. A hall for cats. A hall for birds. A hall for reptiles, and one for insects, etc. Several halls were dedicated to mankind, organized by location and culture.

Gorgosaurus standing triumphantly
over the slain carcass of a Lambeosaurus
sometime in the Late Cretaceous

I saw the vastness of life, and the diversity of man. I marveled at how people could live in so many different ways. Being an irish boy living in an immigrant Polish neighborhood, I was already aware that people could be very different. My first first freinds were Polish boys, whose parents spoke only polish. So the ways of South Sea Islanders, or of American Indians, or exotic Tibet, were merely extensions of what I already knew.

Several of the halls was dedicated to prehistoric life. As a young boy, the most captivating was the dinosaurs. In the main hall, a skeleton of a Gorgosaurus was displayed in a carnivore’s victory pose over its, supposedly, recently vanquished prey – a Lambeosaurus. I wondered how these creatures lived, and why. I read books by Edwin H. Colbert, who was the existing expert on dinosaurs. His “Dinosaur Book”, was my favorite. However, even at a young age, I was a skeptic by nature. When Colbert claimed that the Dinosaurs were cold blooded, I did not accept that. In fact, I did not accept them as Reptiles. I felt that they were whole other classification — not mammal, not bird, and not reptile. To me, they were Dinosaurs, unique and amazing.

Close by the hall of the dinosaurs, was a hall about geology. It was my least favorite hall. Rocks, being inert, hold very little interest to a child. There was one exhibit in that hall that caught my eye. It showed a 1/4″ rod, coiled round and round, and had the various ages of the earth and what was happening on ther earth at those times. It showed the cambrian, and the age of fishes, the Ordovician, the Silurian, the Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and all the ages. This coil went round and round many times, a dozen or more at least. At the very end of it, about an eighth of an inch finally came the age of man. A fine tiny sliver was the historic era going back to the ancient Egyptians.

I began to see, at that young age, how tiny and insignificant all mankind was. If mankind ceased to exist, our bodily remains would be so few as to hardly leave a trace after a few million years. As opposed to the remains of sea creatures that built Florida, and laid down the huge beds of limestone that we quarry, our existence is as nothing. Yet, being in Chicago, I saw some of the greatest buildings ever built. The skyscraper started in Chicago, and modern architecure was defined and refined there. Still, these creations would eventually turn to dust, given the enormity of Time.

In time, I grew up, and left behind such childish musings. I got a degree, and then a Masters Degree in Business from Northwestern University Kellogg School. I made a living consulting and helping companies operate better and make more money. Outside of the occassional visit to a museum, thoughts of life and the planet did not occur to me much.

I had a daughter. I took her to the Field Museum, wanting to introduce her to the place that was my mind’s incubator. But, it had changed. It charged money now, and the fee was not cheap. More importantly, though, it had changed on the inside. The great halls of stuffed animals were destroyed, and the information gone. I took my daughter into a recently “renovated” bird diorama that you walked through. I guess it was done to give a viewer a “feel” for the birds environment. I guess they think we don’t have imaginations. What is worse, though, is that the stuffed animals cannot be put out in the open like that. So, all the really good ones, the rare ones, were no longer displayed. The absolute worst, though, was the destruction of information.

In the diorama, a red-winged blackbird was displayed. Pretty. But, no information, other than its common name was given. No latin name. No map showing habitat range. No display of young or female birds, whiich I knew looked different. No display of diet, or beavior, anything else. If that is all I needed, I could show my daughter red-winged blackbirds on the side of the highway. It was horrible. To me, it was as if barbarians had invaded the temple to knowledge, and destroyed it. Marauding Vikings with war hammers and axes could not have done a more devastating act of vandalism.

It was obvious that the hordes of religious fanatics, screaming creationism had descended. The dioramas of Neanderthal man were removed. In the main lobby, a glass case once stood, showing the erect skeletons of the five main apes – Gibbon, Chimpanzee, Orangutan, Gorilla, and Homo Sapiens. As a child, I saw how closely we were related to the other apes. Just take a gorilla’s body, and change the dimensions of it bones, and you would get the Chimpanzee, or the Gibbon, or a Man. The same could be done with all of them. That was an important lesson I wanted to teach my daughter. But, it was removed. When I complained about it, and wondering if it was destroyed. I was shown that it still existed, but hidden away where it could not be seen. This, for a display that was once considered so important that it was displayed in the main hall. I guess science had lost its appeal at the Field Museum. All the displays have been ravaged now, and depleted of information. Whatever is shown now is devoid of context, and without context, facts are meaningless. Fortunately, the American Museum of Natural History is still world class.

But I digress. In 2001, my interest in the planet Earth was awakened by a magazine article. I forget where I read it, but it said that naval observations had shown that the average Arctic summer ice thickness had gone from 17 ft thick in 1980 to 9 feet thick by 1998. I was shocked. A simple computation told me that the Arctic will have a summer ice thickness of zero by 2017. What surprised me at the tiime was that climatologists and their models were predicting 2100 as the time for a summer ice free Arctic. I could not square the naval ice thickness data with the climatologist’s predictions.

It was my effort to understand the naval data and the climatologists that got me thinking again about this Earth, and what is happening to it. The Arctic has rekindled my interest, but many other things are happening that need to be understood. Much of what is reported is often without context, or even wrong. The scientists are not always the best at making things understandable. In fact, their wording is often ambiguous. For instance, an article might read “The Arctic has seen its lowest ice extent since 1979″. To the normal reader, that would mean — The Arctichas seen its lowest extent since 1979 WHEN IT WAS LAST AT THIS LEVEL. When, what the scientist really means is — WHEN RECORDS STARTED BEING KEPT. So, no implication of prior extent being that low – EVER. I will do my best to explain things I come across in clear unambiguous terms. Science is not that difficult, when things are presented clearly.

And so, now, I start my blog. If you like it and find it occassionally interesting, please leave your comments, I want to hear them. I will respond as best I can.