Monthly Archives: September 2008
Taking the Earth’s Temperature
How do we measure our planet's global mean temperature, and compare it to a record dating back hundreds of thousands of years, a comparison central to discussions about climate change? Jordan R. Raney's description of the ingenious but impaired proxy measures from tree rings to coral reefs are meant to encourage skepticism for some of the more extreme claims that have been made. Unfortunately, we still need to make decisions about climate change, however incomplete, uncertain the data we have is. In fact, that is the challenge.
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Why is laughter almost non-existent in ancient Greek sculpture?
Electrical Engineering professor Yannis Tsividis innocently asks, why is it that we very rarely see laughter depicted in ancient Greek sculpture? From the range of scholarly answers, you get the peculiar sense that we "moderns" are not in a position to give an answer.
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No Heaven on Earth
Why are so many of us so skeptical when confronted with the overwhelming evidence for environmental consequences of destroying everything we come in contact with? In her review of American Earth, an anthology of American environmentalist views, Verlyn Klinkenborg has this reaction to the barrage of evidence and entreaties to reconnect with nature:
After a day or two, I found myself reading this anthology as if it were a series of reports from a distant planet in a distant time—as an appendix, perhaps, to Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos novels. Reading American Earth in that light helped make several things clear. First, each document in the volume is a minority report—sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments in nearly every one of these pieces, no matter when they were written, are contradicted by the way the vast majority of Americans live and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle. Second, the fundamental environmentalist arguments—the fundamental perceptions—are unchanging over time; only the details vary. We are still catching up to Thoreau, still coming to terms with the outrage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his worries about "climatic excess" and our "restless love of change." Third, writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers—for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.Her conclusion is also worth noting. She reaches for Kafka (
There is infinite hope, but not for us.) and writes regretfully:
I would say something different if I could. I have every faith in nature's recuperative powers....What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.
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