Two quick stories: 1) California is banning those little shampoo bottles hotels provide guests—with a substantial fine for violations; 2) A resurgence of wolves in Washington (state) has put officials in a quandary—to re-cull or not. In those two little stories lies a common human dilemma that permeates almost all our actions.
 
First California: It’s true that the little shampoo bottles end up in some environment, mostly landfills, but their quantity pales by comparison to the plastics of all kinds that end up in the homes of California’s politicians: Knobs on toasters, light switches on walls, polyvinyl chloride coverings on furniture and in cars, computer monitors and keyboards, razors’ holders, recharging plugs, and, well, seven commonly used plastics, including those found in traffic cones, packing materials, kitchenware, countertops, toys, chairs, garbage cans, buckets, phone covers, combs, and bottles. It’s also true that travelers could remember to take along their own shampoo—hopefully in reusable containers and in quantities less than three ounces for flights—or either refrain from shampooing while on a trip or buy at the local Rite Aid or CVS near the hotel a large shampoo bottle that they subsequently throw away in the same environment that the little discarded shampoo bottle might have occupied; they could also stop using plastic combs and brushes since their hair might just as well be unkempt as it will be unclean.
 
Those little bottles are a big concern for California legislators. They’re sure that in taking steps to eliminate unnecessary plastics, they will save the environment—even though most ocean plastic pollution comes from Asia. Little bottles and plastic straws have become targets in a state that has to shut off electricity to a million residents during forest fires because of old electrical systems. And what covering insulates wires? Yeah. Can’t wait for all that plastic to be discarded when the new wires go up.
 
Second Washington (state): Wolves are not cute dog cousins. They are dangerous predators. And over the last ten years, their Washington population has grown by an estimated 28% (keep your Corgi named Stanley and your cat named Fluffy inside). Wolf sightings from Olympia to Spokane indicate that wolves range throughout the state, and not just as lone wolves, but as in packs, true packs. So, the dilemma their presence generates is real: Cull the packs, let them reproduce and kill livestock and other animals, or find some method that allows humans and their animals to coexist with wolves, such as fencing that stretches for mi--ever. Enter the government. It was a government decision to reintroduce wolves (first in Yellowstone) to the landscapes of northwestern and southwestern states. Bad idea? Not really. Their absence caused by hunters, trappers, and airplane-riding government poisoners over a couple of centuries changed the food chain and the ecologies and habits of wolves’ natural prey. The result was a “trophic cascade,” a change in the way and in the places where herbivores chose to graze. *   
 
Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, recognizing a problem, formed the Wolf Advisory Group composed of environmentalists, ranchers, and hunters. The group did little by argue until they found a way to communicate with outside help.** That doesn’t mean they’ve solved their wolf issue, but it does mean that the groups involved talk to one another. Has the state resolved the problem of having free-ranging wolves in the mix with livestock? Not yet. But Washingtonians (state) are working on the issue that Washingtonians (Federal) created.  
 
It seems that whatever we do has some cascading effect. Remove little plastic bottles from California’s environment? Put bigger bottles into the environment in their place. Remove wolves from the American West? Get grazing animals to change the ecologies as elk chomp and stomp aspen saplings to the ground, changing the nature of forests and affecting other animals' habitats, altering soils by continuous compression beneath hooves, and changing the plant species that grow where forests once grew when wolves roamed the region.
 
Wolves and plastic: We both want them and fear the ramifications of having them. Most human actions are like introducing either plastics or wolves into the environment. Almost everything we do has a cascading effect, and that includes, of course, how we interact not just with the natural environment but also with one another. Every time we believe we can exert control over a complex world, we discover those often experienced "unintended consequences" of our decisions and actions. 
 
*Mark, Jason. Can Wolves Bring Back Wilderness? Scientific American excerpt. 9 Oct 2015. Online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-wolves-bring-back-wilderness-excerpt/
Accessed October 15, 2019.
 
*Calfas, Jennifer. Wolf Resurgence in Washington State Tests Limits of Civility. The Wall Street Journal, 12, October 2019. Online at  https://www.wsj.com/articles/wolf-resurgence-in-washington-state-tests-limits-of-civility-11570885202   Accessed October 13, 2019. 

Overheard in a restaurant:
 
“You gonna finish your shirt?”
 
“Yeah. I’m just takin’ a break. I’m getting stuffed. Who ‘da thought I couldn’t finish my T-shirt and T-bone? Must be slowin’ down. I used to go through a whole buffet of clothes.”
 
“But think of how lucky you are to have so much food. You know, there are people out there who are starvin’ when they could be runnin’ around full but naked.”
 
Not much longer, it seems. That is, not much longer will people go hungry. Here’s the headline from Reuters: “U.S. regulators allow genetically modified cotton as human food source.” * Guess it will be T-bones AND T-shirts on the menu at swanky roadside eating establishments with flashing names like “Restaurant,” “Stop-n-Gobble,” and “Breads and Threads.” Apparently, researchers from Texas A&M AgriLife Research were able to remove gossypol from cottonseed while still leaving it in the growing plants to ward off insects.
 
But there’s always the unintended side effect, isn’t there? Gossypol (C30H30O8) is a yellow phenolic aldehyde that the Chinese have used as a male oral contraceptive. Start eating cottonseeds free from gossypol, and men get more fertile, so there’ll be more mouths to feed. And there’s always the interesting fact: We’ve been raising and using cotton for over four millennia and only now have we figured out a way for humans to eat it. Sure, we’ve been feeding it to our animals in supposedly small amounts, but other than its uses as medicines for birth control and ovarian cancer, the cotton’s gossypol has limited our consumption of cotton mostly to wearing it. ** Obviously, during those four thousand years of using cotton, we didn’t have until modern times the ability to genetically alter cotton beyond hit-and-miss hybridization. But with our newfound ability to rapidly alter individual genes in plants, I wonder what other commonly used plant material might have food value. We use forests, don’t we? Why limit trees as a source of food via nuts or fruits?
 
Back to our restaurant conversation:
 
“Gotta hand it to them scientists. Now we can go food shopping and clothes shopping in one place. Oh! I forgot about Walmart superstores; I guess I can do that now. But, I don’t mean havin’ a grocery store section next to sections for TVs, toiletries, and toys. I mean, I can shop for an edible pair of jeans.”
 
“You gonna finish that shirt? If not, I’ll take it rather than gettin’ up for another trip to the buffet. Maybe them scientists will make other stuff edible. I’m thinkin’ trees. That way, we could really get all them newspaper journalists with tabloid mentalities and political agendas to eat their words.”
 
*Dunham, Will. Reuters Environment. 11 Oct. 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-cottonseed/u-s-regulators-allow-genetically-modified-cotton-as-human-food-source-idUSKBN1WQ2J1   Accessed October 12, 2019.
 
**Gadelha, Ivana Cristina N., et al. Gossypol Toxicity from Cottonseed Products. The Scientific World Journal, Volume 2014, Article ID 231635, http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/231635  and https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2014/231635/   Accessed October 12, 2019.

Mother Earth. She has so much to teach old school, unlike so many human and compassionate mothers. Children of the latter can wear them down. Such kids sometimes comply, sometimes listen, and sometimes learn, but they often exhibit willfulness, self-importance, or sophomoric pride, all shown in emotional outbursts. And grownup, they sometimes continue their tantrums, not even lessening their intensity into old age. Children of Mother Earth get no helicoptering protection and enabling. She gives her lessons the hard way. When her children get complacent and haughty, she hands them a forest fire, landslide, sinkhole, eruption, flood, or earthquake. She knows how to keep her children humble and on their toes, especially when they go back to their old ways after discipline. After any of her “punishments” or wakeup calls, we wonder, “Is there more, or can we slink off to our computer games in the refuge of our bedrooms, that is, can we resume life as it was before the disciplinary action?”
 
You offer, “Did you read the recent research by Gulia and Wiemer on earthquakes? * They looked at 58 earthquakes and their aftershocks to determine whether a major earthquake might be followed by another major earthquake or by a series of tremors with decreasing power. They think they’ve identified a system based on a ‘b-value’ to predict whether or not Mother Earth is done with us after the big shock. When the b-value drops, all her ensuing outbursts will gradually fade. When it rises, look out; you’re in for more trouble. You know you can handle subsiding intensity, but another major seismic event is scary.”
 
“That makes me wonder,” I say, “whether it’s possible to predict any emotional outburst, not just one from a mom angry about clothes strewn over the bedroom floor or incomplete chores. Wouldn’t that be great? I mean, having a b-value system that enables us to predict if not when the big outburst occurs, then at least when it will stop or turn into some lesser form. If only we could determine the b-values for all her disciplinary outbursts, we would know what to expect from her. Maybe we could also use the b-values for others, not just for angry moms. Then we could forecast when someone was driven to shake the surrounding landscape with high emotions. What if we had a robot companion to warn us about the intensity and repeatability of emotional outbursts, you know, something like that self-driven floor vacuum iRobot Roomba 675 that has free range over the entire house so that it could follow around to observe and detect?”
 
“Yeah,” you add. “But you would have to have an intricate monitoring system. Even those seismologists admit that predicting aftershock intensity requires numerous seismometers for the data necessary to determine a b-value. I just can’t imagine all the emotionmometers we would need on every person who lacks emotional control. And even if we were to strap such monitors on individuals or have individuals followed by carpet sweepers, what would we do with the alerts? I can imagine the system acting like the robot from the TV series Lost in Space, shouting, ‘Danger! Will Robinson, danger!’ **  Would we have enough time to respond? Could we act to stop the additional major outburst? And if the b-value showed a high probability of fading and lower intensity outbursts, would the b-value have any real value? Wouldn’t we just be inclined to think, ‘Whew! The big one is over; I can handle the ever-weaker aftershocks.’”
 
*Gulia, Laura and Stefan Wiemer. Real-time discrimination of earthquake foreshocks and aftershocks. Nature. 574, 193-199. 9 October  2019. Reviewed by Marti, Michèle. ETH Zurich, Distinguishing earthquake foreshocks and aftershocks. Phys.org. October 10, 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-10-distinguishing-earthquake-foreshocks-aftershocks.html   Accessed October 10, 2019.
 
**https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps&hspart=pty&p=the+warning+from+the+robot+in+lost+in+space#id=4&vid=f8fa838eb73a74b52c2455652ad394b7&action=click  at 24 seconds into the video clip. 

Remember, Friend, that what you hear
Goes quickly in and out your ear.
The physics also will apply
To all that enters through your eye.
So, when you see discordant tweets
Aimed to anger those in streets,
Think, don’t act, and use your brain;
It is, for peace, there to restrain.
 
And don’t allow both sight and sound
To stay within and rattle round
To build an anger that will seethe
That will persist while you can breathe.
You have advantage and a flaw
In holding what you heard and saw.
Remember good and not the bad,
Especially what will make you mad.
 
In troubled times you should forget
Lest you act and then regret. 

Now we know, because we have video evidence, that a pig can use a tool. We can add pigs to birds and chimps as fellow tool-users. Makes me think that when Homo habilis made a tool and left it on the ground so that we could find it some 1.5 to 2.1 million years later, he (or she, of course), might have simply been imitating other organisms, critters that we’ve decided are less intelligent than we. What if we got our inventiveness from imitating? Homo habilis sees chimp use tool; Homo habilis uses tool. Archaeologist claims Homo habilis is first tool-user.
 
Maybe I’m not inventive enough, and maybe in the Great Chain of Being I’m not “a little lower than the angels, but much higher than animals.” Instead, I might be just a pinch higher than a pig. I certainly haven’t put together an infomercial on my latest gizmo that makes life easier for millions—available now at Walmart. So, I feel a little dumb, realizing that I hold no patents and that I made nothing that advances modern technology. I use readymade tools, however, so I’m at least on the level of Pigcasso, the painting pig; I can be taught to use tools.
 
A pig in an online YouTube video can be seen to use a stick to dig.* It appears to be an uncoached pig. That makes it, in my eyes at least, an inventor of sorts, though not one who will advertise using a digging stick on late night TV. For want of a shovel at times, I, too have used a stick to dig a small hole. Sticks make good holes when one wants to plant seeds in a flowerpot as I have discovered on my own (Am I the first?). And obviously, sticks are just as useful in digging up seeds, or tubers, or mushrooms, or even places for piglets to rest.
 
Maybe you are an inventor, one of those who sees a physical process, recognizes a way to enhance that process, and invents the gizmo that makes the process easier. That’s great. Technology can be wonderful. We couldn’t support modern civilization without it.
 
Unfortunately, civilization’s problems aren’t all physical processes. We have a mix of emotional, philosophical, social, and political problems, generally all of our own making. We excel at making problems, don’t we? Over the course of 200 to 300 thousand years of our existence as members of the animal kingdom, we seem to have generated problems at a rate faster than we have generated tools to solve them.
 
So, here’s a task to try your skills as an inventor. I want to see your late-night infomercial that sells your solution to those particularly human problems. I want to be so sold on your solution to life’s problems that I’ll order not one, but two—I am willing to pay the extra “handling charge” for your BOGO offer. No doubt, I’ll be pleased with my purchase, which, I believe, will, like some super flashlight cast brilliant light on my life, or, like some super sunglasses, allow me to see through life’s obfuscating glare. I hope you soon get a patent on your solution to life’s problems. I’m getting out the credit card right now.
 
*https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/pigs-caught-video-using-tools-first-time  and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHfCkc8VCuI
See also my posting called “Pigcasso” (9/26/19).

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always heard complaints about “The Rich,” and I’ve wondered whether those who complain would complain if they were rich. In America’s extended political season (Are we ever not in one?), those left of center politically carry the message about the “evil” rich, and those who are members of the “evil” rich become conflicted about their own left leanings and economic status.
 
By chance, I stumbled upon two reviews of Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman, an anthology of thoughts from wealthy people the sociologist-author interviewed. * In their reviews (I did not read Sherman’s book), both Amir Goldberg and Drake Bennett report a couple of her findings: 1) That the wealthy she interviewed “distinguish themselves from the undeserving, ‘lazy’ rich by portraying their lifestyles as productive,” 2) That the wealthy often seem uncomfortable with their wealth in an age of wealth disparity (What age isn’t?), and 3) That they consider the very process of deciding to spend or not—to consume ostentatiously—to be a moral justification for spending on private schools and expensive dwellings with expensive furnishings.
 
Apparently, some of the rich are self-conflicted by their economic status. In what appears to be an admission of what I call “self-reconciliation,” one of the interviewees says to Sherman, “I was gonna be a revolutionary, and then I had that first massage.” The inner conflict really gives way to an eventual capitulation and justification: “I worked to get what I have.”  
 
So, what about you? Are you guilty about your wealth? Rather proud of it? What? You don’t consider yourself to be wealthy? But isn’t wealth a relative thing? “Not for Bill Gates,” you say. “That’s absolute wealth. Same with that other Warren guy, the one with the last name like a smorgasboard. Those guys, the Amazon guy, and some others have wealth even Midas would envy.”
 
But wealth is relative, even though there are economists who distinguish among the poor, the lower, middle, and upper middle classes, the lower wealthy, middle wealthy, and more-money-than-most-countries-have wealthy. Those demarcations of economic divisions change all the time, don’t they? You’ve seen the economically challenged wearing $150 running shoes as they stand in line to buy an $800 IPhone at the Apple Store.
 
So, when you look around at what you have, do you need to consume more?
 
Take electronics, for example. Can you name all the electronic devices you have plus all the batteries and wires and chargers and holders and covers and contracts and warranties, and stuff? Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t see a television until I was about 8 or 9 years old or that there are people in Third World countries who have never seen one, let alone own one? Out of curiosity, I want you to count the number of radios you own—alarm clock radio, kitchen radio, IHeart radio, SiriusXM radio, car radio, shower radio, old transistor radio, antique radio, table radio. And don’t get me started on the computer stuff. I know what’s on your desk, lying unused in your closet or drawer, or even in the basement.
 
Anyway, the point is that to someone who doesn’t have what you have, you are rich. But you won’t take that as a consolation for your perceived poverty, will you? After all, there are all those “rich people” living lives of luxury you can only imagine: People eating caviar on private planes headed to exotic lands and five-star resorts; people who don’t live from check-to-check or who have to buy a Chevy instead of a Lamborghini.
 
Now, I’m beginning to feel both sorry and guilty. Sorry for what I don’t have and guilty about what I do have. What’s wrong with me? And if I were to become inordinately wealthy, would I pretend dissatisfaction with my status? Would I downplay my newfound wealth? Would I disdain ostentatiousness of any kind, reluctantly travel first class, and stay in an ordinary suite instead of the Presidential Suite? Order the house wine? Shop at Walmart? Cut my own grass?
 
Are you one of those who complain about “rich people”? Look around. There are those that might think that you, relative to them, are “one of those people.”
 
In his review of Sherman’s book, Amir Goldberg writes, “…Sherman’s interviewees depict their consumption choices as prudent, frugal, and reasonable…[and] their choice not to publicize their economic means is what makes them morally worthy of having them” (312). That makes me think of an interview I once saw in which Warren Buffett said he still drove himself around Omaha in an aging car (Buick, I think) and lived in the same house he always occupied. I have a feeling that many people “of means” fear they might be perceived of as another Great Gatsby.
 
Just remember that when you hear people say that the wealthy should give away some of their wealth, you can ask them whether or not they will be willing to give away some of their wealth to those who are less fortunate. You already know the response you’ll get, but elicit a response anyway.
 
I’ll leave you with a short anecdote. As I drove from Guatemala City to Antigua Guatemala and the volcanic hills beyond, I passed a woman carrying firewood on her head. I also passed tin-roofed huts made of branches stuck in the ground, huts with dirt floors and spaces between the sticks making up the walls, huts without running water or electricity. Back in the United States after that experience, I was a bit embarrassed by what I had accumulated. And then I turned on the flat screen TV to watch a football game and forgot about Guatemala for a while.  
 
*Goldberg, Amir. Book Review. American Journal of Sociology, Volume 125, Number 1, July 2019.
Bennett, Drake. Poor Little Rich Folks. Bloomberg, September 21, 2017.
Sherman, Rachel. (2017) Uneasy Street: the Anxieties of Affluence. Princeton University Press.  

If you know who Greta Thunberg is and are moved by her cry for help, you might call the following more “heartless denial.” I do understand, however, how a young girl can become emotional over what she perceives to be an end-of-world scenario. I’ve seen and written about similarly panicked people and their motivations. Remember Heaven’s Gate? Remember Y2K? The Aztec Calendar? Howard Camping? In those historical examples of failed predictions and in probably hundreds or even thousands of similar examples, there are those who predicted and those who followed, the latter acting not as much with their frontal cortexes as with their limbic systems. And Greta? Who can blame her for her panic? But those who influenced her? Hmnnn… Who tells a child she has no future?  
 
For those who influence others to panic over climate change—an environmental change which I acknowledge is a real possibility because it is the way of the planet—I have a two-part question for which I have as yet to hear definitive and irrefutable answers. I am particularly vexed by the lack of a definitive answer to the second part of my question.
 
If the count is correct, our atmosphere has topped the 400 parts per million by volume (ppmv) mark for carbon dioxide, and that amounts to an increase of more than 150 ppmv since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now, as we all know, CO2 is an insulating atmospheric blanket, along with the more abundant and therefore more significant H2O vapor, the more efficient insulator CH4, and some other greenhouse gases. With extra CO2 the world should, one would think, get warmer. But to what extent and to what effect? Therein lie both my dual question and a point of controversy.
 
Regardless of the predicted dangers to life bandied about in the media and in the halls of government, one has to consider that it was a very warm period under which the mammals took over the planet after the demise of the dinosaurs, and later on, it might have been during another warm period that our pre-human ancestors developed bipedalism, a physical characteristic that freed hands to make ever more sophisticated tools and gourmet meals. Think Lucy. Our Australopithecus afarensis ancestor walked around in an atmosphere with about 400 ppmv CO2.*   
 
Of course, we always have to consider the data and the time required for Earth to “correct” itself. We should, many say, consider today’s temperature data and trend as undeniable because they are direct; that is, the data come from actual measurements, and we have records that go back a couple of centuries. After all, a thermometer has no agenda and doesn’t lie though it can be mis-calibrated, placed inappropriately near an asphalt parking lot or in a city heat island or downwind of it, on a roof, or near a large mall’s parking lot. But the validity of the data? Well, when I think about them, I guess they can be misinterpreted, smoothed by selective generalizing that uses averages, or outrightly falsified to fit preconceived notions and narratives, or to support further research and the need for conferences that require scientists to travel abroad.** And then there’s the problem of areal coverage on the planet’s surface and the altitude data for various layers of the atmosphere. Similar restrictions on irrefutable temperature readings and trends apply to satellite instruments which up to now have predominantly measured mid-infrared wavelengths, ignoring one important reality: More than half of Earth’s outgoing heat leaves the planet in far-infrared wavelengths (those from 15 microns to 100 microns).***
 
Assuming the accuracy of today’s data, you and I could take current temperature readings and compare them to yesterday’s, going back, but mostly localized, for more than a century—again, assuming that past data collectors were people of integrity and meticulous accuracy and that the paucity of their records for nineteenth-century lands and seas is an irrelevant fact.
 
The history of temperature before anyone kept “accurate” weather records is a bit sketchy. For the long period before the rise of weather record-keeping, we have only “proxy data,” temperatures we infer from the products of chemical, biological, and physical processes, such as the incorporation of Oxygen-18 in the tests of foraminifera (chemical), the growth of ancient trees and even fossil-leaf paleoaltimetry (biological), and the position, shapes of, and extent of continents and oceans (paleogeography), plus old maps of mountain glaciers (paleocartography). We could also consider what Milankovitch argued, that the planet’s orbit and tilt of its axis to the plane of its orbit probably play a role in cycles that play out over periods ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 years. And don’t forget the role sunspot activity plays over shorter cycles in controlling Earth’s temperature budget. These are all legitimate proxies, but their use is in providing temperature ranges and good estimates rather than in giving us precise temperatures of Earth’s deep past. Most such temperatures always appear with a +# or -#, as, for example, in ±0.2 degrees C.
 
You might say, “Well, if ranges of temperatures are good enough for the scientists, they’re good enough for me.” Okay, but when the scientists’ numerous media and political proxies and little Greta say that just a two-degree Celsius rise will be “devastating,” how meaningful is a range with a “plus and minus” notation? Would you consider “It’s about one degree Celsius warmer on average today, give or take a quarter of a degree” to be an accurate and useful designation for climate sensitivity? And would you think that a change of about one degree Celsius, give or take quarter or half degree over a couple of centuries is, in fact, an indicator of instability or stability? Would, for example, the Romans during their experience with a “Roman Warm Period” or the Vikings during their “Medieval Warm Period” recognize Earth as radically different from your experience with today’s “about one degree Celsius” higher temperature? Were those rises in temperature not also tipping points, not forerunners of calamitous climate change? Had they had mass communication, would Romans and Vikings have worried about a warmer future? But, no, you say, they didn’t have to worry because carbon dioxide levels weren’t rapidly rising. Their warm periods were caused by… Hmnnn?
 
It seems to those who have convinced Greta to be worried, that the temperatures of the deep past are largely irrelevant. For example, the proxy temperatures for the warmth just before and just after the demise of the dinosaurs occurred on a somewhat different planet: Some continents lay in latitudes radically different from their current position. Fifty-five million years ago, for example, India wasn’t connected to Asia. And of course, with India far from Asia, there were no Himalayas to alter weather patterns. During the Eocene, which began about 56 million years ago, the oceans had different shapes: There was only a surmised small connection between North Atlantic and Arctic oceans on the east side of Greenland, but a seemingly well-established connection between Pacific and Atlantic allowed circulation between the two oceans where the blocking isthmus of Central America now lies. So, circulation of warm and cold surface waters was different then, an important consideration given the relatively high specific heat of water compared to air. The Appalachians were also somewhat higher, and the Rockies, in places, somewhat lower or even nonexistent during the Eocene. 
 
At the time of that “hottest” period of the past 65 million years, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, even with an accounted for error, appears to have as much as 900 ppm (by volume) or maybe even as much as 1,670 ppmv (2 to 4 times current levels). **** The proxy temperatures, even with the “plus and minus” values, indicate that this was a rather toasty world back then, maybe 6 to 9 degrees C warmer. Was that a bad thing? Yes and no. There appears to have been sufficient and persistent drought in eastern Africa, where forests collapsed. Apparently, the very warm early Eocene and the cooler middle and late Eocene saw the rise of many different kinds of mammals, including some predecessors to our primate ancestors. Certainly, the rise of mammals wasn’t quick as an individual human life is quick, so when we speak of the effects of a warmer Earth, we have to consider that we are looking back on periods of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, large swaths of time that are irrelevant to our short lives. And we might also consider that the descendants of mammals that arose in the Paleocene endured many climate changes.*****
 
Now the reason I mentioned a “point of controversy” above is that climate models have a tough time with proxy data and the effect of CO2. “The inability of climate models to match the warm conditions inferred from proxy evidence has been attributed to missing model components and physical processes, climate forcings, or misinterpretations and uncertainties in proxy reconstructions” (Zhu, et al.). So, in their simulation of the “extreme” warmth of the Eocene, researchers Zhu, Poulsen, and Tierney incorporate micro-cloud processes and components. I’ll bet that when you rose this morning, panicked over your impending doom by climate change, you forgot to consider micro-cloud processes.
 
Look up. See that cloud? It’s playing a role in Earth’s heat budget. The top of the cloud reflects light, processes within the cloud both store and release energy, and cloud extent plays a separate role. And if the micro-processes within clouds play a key role in the retaining or releasing of heat energy and if numerous climate models fail to take those processes into account, then what reliability do the models have at the level of our atmosphere’s sensitivity to change? In short, we’re still a long way off from making precise predictions about our own climate future if the models have difficulty determining historical warming and cooling events as we have identified them through proxy data.
 
Then there are the related side effects of the temperature variations. Warmer oceans might mean large die-offs of corals—or migrations of corals to higher latitudes—and warmer latitudes might mean insects and diseases common in tropical zones will invade formerly temperate zones—think Zika, Dengue, malaria. And higher temperatures in higher latitudes would change agriculture. The corn and wheat belts might move northward, but so might the tropical fruit zone. Maybe we’ll be eating more oranges and bananas and less bread where grains once prevailed. And more CO2 dissolved in the oceans means acidification, making more difficult the building of calcium carbonate and aragonite bio-structures, though some organisms seem to do better than others under more acidic conditions.
 
So, we’re back to the second of my two questions: Assuming that we can determine the extent of warming, what will the effect of a warmer Earth be? Greta thinks it will be an Earth without a “future,” or, at least, without “her future.” She’s not alone in thinking thus. During the recent wave of children’s “climate” protests, the theme of a doomed planet was the motivation: “Basically our earth is dying and if we don’t do something about it, we die,” said A.J. Conermann, a 15-year old sophomore. “I want to grow up. I want to have a future.”******
 
And in all of the ruckus over climate's and temperature's effect on environment, one environmental issue seems to be overlooked in favor of the temperature argument: The destruction of habitats by what we do and how we live. Temperature trends and climate changes aren't likely the reason that the megafauna of the past three million years are no longer roaming the planet. Wooly mammoths, for example, were wooly: Their shaggy coat was evidence of adaptation to climate. No, it's likely your ancestors are to blame. Yes. YOURS. You know what they say, "Give a guy a spear and a nearby herbivore...." But don't put the blame exclusively on Paleolithic hunters. Personally, you also bear some responsibility for continuing the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species that, by the way, at least for deforested landscapes, affects climate by affecting albedo, evapotranspiration, and runoff. 
 
You don’t live in a tree; possibly, where a tree once stood, you now occupy a building made of trees. You drive on roads that cut through long-gone ecologies. You use iron and aluminum, whose miners altered the landscapes where they extracted the metals. You consume fish, or beef, or bird, and if you are a vegetarian (or vegan—I can never remember the difference), you eat organically grown plants that are cultivated in the place where other plants once grew randomly. Greta’s at fault, too. She might in her short life so far have been given vitamins that she flushed into the environment, maybe even estrogens enhanced by soy products. And she, like you, wears clothes made from both artificial and natural fibers. Were cotton fields always cotton fields? Were fertilizers widespread? Did all the trappings of her society arrive at her disposal by fiat? Did the sailboat on which she is pictured come from purple clouds in an imagined sky filled with unicorns or from ferrocements, polyester resins, adhesive composites, vinylester resins, epoxy moldings, aramid fiber reinforcing, carbon fiber masts, aluminum, and steel cables? Were all those products locally sourced or transported to a shipyard for building? And didn’t I hear that her sailboat returned to Europe after a crew flew over to pick it up?
 
Okay, the planet seems destined to become warmer, but we’ve altered or destroyed ecologies more efficiently by meeting the demands for civilized and urbanized life than we have by raising temperatures. It’s our nature as civilization-builders. But maybe it’s Nature’s nature to alter. Long before primates began altering their environments, other animals altered the environment, and plants have always been opportunistic (how else explain the spread of forests or grasslands?).
 
Again, to what extent and effect?
 
Gosh this is wearing me down, and I suppose it’s wearing you down, too. “Donald, you’re belaboring.” But I have to mention more about effect. We have “chosen” to build most of our great cities on coasts. Their position is a natural consequence of maritime trade in an age before airplanes, trains, and cars and a necessity in transporting goods to millions via large ships. But all coasts are ephemeral features. Look, for example at underwater archaeology finds in the Mediterranean, Black, and North seas. Sea level rises; sea level falls. It’s been both much lower and much higher during the reign of humans. If Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets melt, sea level will be higher again, varying locally as it always has.******* So, yes, a warmer Earth means higher seas that will inundate current coasts. Keep in mind, however, that when the first people inhabited the eastern seaboard of the United States, Chesapeake Bay was a river valley, and the coast was many miles eastward of its current location.
 
I have as yet to hear definitive answers to my two questions. I don’t believe, however, that Greta and A.J. Conermann will have “no future” unless they choose to have no future. I do think that their futures will be too brief to see the “destruction” they’ve been told to envision. I can’t imagine that our ancient ancestors, in running around killing off mammoths and other large mammals, were worried about a world without big game. And I don’t think YOU or any of your contemporaries, including me, will be willing to stop exploiting soils and changing ecologies on a scale that will mitigate our natural tendency to use whatever is available. Prove me wrong. Move out of your home, and do what you can to restore the land to some pre-human condition.
 
Think of the effect you have had just by living where you live. Think of the extent of your personal assaults on ecologies by your use of ANYTHING. But what’s your alternative? You probably don’t aim to destroy, but you certainly aim to live, and that living means changing some locality. And the way you live now means changing some other localities, simply because you eat fruits, vegetables, and grains in seasons and in places where they don’t naturally grow; you use minerals from elsewhere; you use metals from elsewhere; you probably even use wood from elsewhere (Own a guitar? Piano? Coffee table? Headboard?).
 
To what extent and effect?
 
Yes, I’ve turned this discussion of temperature and carbon dioxide into a discussion about Greta, you, and me, into a discussion about researchers presenting their findings in person at conferences in lands far from their homes, into a discussion about organisms enduring and adapting to changing environments and temperatures. And I confess that I can’t even answer my two-part question. But, maybe having asked it, I have motivated you to find the answers or to question the answers that have led millions to panic in the belief that they have no future.
 
*Grant, G. R., et al. The amplitude and origin of sea-level variability during the Pliocene epoch. Nature. 2 October 2019. 
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1619-z   Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1619-z  Accessed October 4, 2019.
The 400 ppmv estimate for carbon dioxide is for the mid-Pliocene warm period and is derived from the work of Masson-Delmotte, V., et al. that was a contribution to the IPCC’s 2013 report entitled Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.
 
**There is, as most people know, abundant grant money available for data acquisition and interpretation, and also for travel to “exotic lands” for academic conferences. As a point of disclosure, I here reveal that I received several grants to 1) make the official PA inventory of greenhouse gas emissions that the EPA said it would use as a model for the other states to follow, 2) write a policy for the Commonwealth on mitigating GHG emissions, and 3) identify green technologies PA could develop. I did that research in the 1990s; I can’t imagine in the time since I wrote those reports the amount of grant money spent on similar research or on sending people around the world to conferences in an age of SKYPE and other online meeting venues. There is in the back of my mind the faint memory that during the 2000s some reporter asked a climate scientist why he needed to travel to an exotic venue for a meeting, to which he replied, “That is where the action is.” Ah! The good life of the climate scientist! Life as a jetsetter on a researcher’s salary.

***The European Space Agency has a satellite in the works that will sense the far-infrared wavelengths. FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) will be launched in 2025 or 2026. See Amos, Johnathan. Satellite will gain hi-res view of greenhouse effect. BBC Science, 24 Sept 2019. But doesn’t this seem silly in a way. After all, if the “science” is set that we’re near the “point of no return” on warming, what good will come from finding out what we already know? Why bother with the expense of a satellite? ​https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760   
hey, our ancestors had to eat.

****Jiang Zhu, Christopher J. Poulsen, and Jessica E. Tierney. Simulation of Eocene extreme warmth and high climate sensitivity through cloud feedbacks. Science Advances 18 Sept. 2019, Vol. 5, no. 9, eaax1874. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax1874

*****The horse-like Litopterns and the chubby Notoungulates persisted for tens of millions of years; obviously, therefore, they endured many climate changes. It was at the beginning of the “ice age” that these two orders saw their decline and demise. So, cold, not warmth, appears to have done them in—probably with the help of human hunters. At least eleven other orders of mammals evolved during the Paleocene-Eocene periods. And a mass extinction of certain large mammals appears to have been human-driven in Plio-Pleistocene times—hey, our ancestors had to eat.

******Q13Fox. Associated Press.  https://q13fox.com/2019/09/20/young-protesters-around-globe-demand-climate-change-action/    Accessed October 2, 2019.  Arnold Schwarzenegger supposedly offered to lend Greta an electric SUV for her proselytizing campaign. Noble, right? Like some movie caveat that “no animals or people were abused in any way during the making of this picture,” Arnold’s SUV probably has a caveat that “nothing in the ‘natural world’ was affected by the building or operating of this machine.” Inertia is the principle. Once the climates begin to change, they will begin to change. Once 7 billion people begin to exploit the planet on which they live, they will continue to exploit, even if they do so in ignorance.
 
*******If one removes weighty glaciers from the continents, the continents rebound from their depressed positions while more water in the oceans depresses the sea floor. 

Postscript: I can't leave this without referring you to a picture of the beach at Dakar's Hann Bay. See  https://phys.org/news/2019-10-divers-senegal-plastic-tide.html . Accessed October 5, 2016.

Honestly, I’m just as easily fooled as anyone. I see movies that morph faces, that use younger faces on older actors, and that distort shapes according to some dream-like realities. Am I looking at the real or the surreal? And now, with AI advancing rapidly, I have to ask whether or not I will become more befuddled by “What Is.”
 
Knowing what scenes in manmade images, moving or still, are manipulated is a problem when we need to separate the real from the unreal or surreal as a matter of survival, economic health, or effective behavior. And in a world of multiple news sources and wannabe news-breakers seeking attention either for personal aggrandizement or agenda-driven policies, alternative realities can shape the future of both individuals and the societies they compose.
 
So, what are we to do with the realities imposed on us by an elite group in control of the news, or at least, in control of the mass dissemination of knowledge that might not be “true.” Take, for example, a New York Times’ article by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The headline reads “Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds.” * Reading that headline is about as much as the average reader will read. Who among the laity cares for the details? 
 
But according to an examination of the “scientific report” on which the article is based, conducted by Nicholas Lewis, “The paper does not directly claim that ocean warming is accelerating faster than thought; that is the headline of the New York Times article about the paper [by Cheng et al (2019)].” **
 
In a back-and-forth discussion between Lewis and the team of researchers, the authors of the original paper fail to refute Lewis’s criticisms “concerning factual errors and misleading statements.” But anyone who read the New York Times would see a report on “settled” science. Once proclaimed in headline form, forever in the minds of readers. That’s one way that alternate realities become part of our psyche, both individual and societal.
 
How many of us are Nicholas Lewises? How many of us would take the time to re-examine a “reality” to see whether or not it had substance? Right! Not many of us. First, we’re too busy to re-examine all we see or hear; second, we’re ill-equipped intellectually to do the re-examining because we lack the special kinds of skills and knowledge behind scientific research. So, one reporter, possibly with an agenda of “the-world-is-about-to-end-because-of-climate-change” and one editor can headline a scary conclusion not supported by the very journal article from which they derived the headline.
 
From movies to newspapers, we live in a world of alternate realities as difficult to escape as the mythical labyrinth designed by Daedalus for King Minos. Our reality is now alternate reality.
 
* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-climate-change.html     Accessed October 1, 2019.
 
**Cheng, Lijing, John Abraham, Zeke Hausfather, and Kevin E. Trenberth. How fast are the oceans warming? Science 11 Jan 2019, Vol. 363, Issue 6423, pp. 128-129. DOI: 10.1126/science aay7619.
 
*** https://www.nicholaslewis.org/is-ocean-warming-accelerating-faster-than-thought/
Accessed October 1, 2019.