Southern Bookman

A couple of shots in the arm

On Friday morning, I took the fifth: another Covid booster shot.

Our friendly neighborhood Tuxedo Pharmacy was busy with people getting the latest version of the vaccine, this one re-engineered to ward off the raging Omicron variant, or whatever it is these days.

Hedging my bets, I also received a flu shot. Guess I'm good for the winter.

I received my first covid shot on a cold January night in 2021, at the Piedmont office building in Vinings.

Like a horror film monster, Covid has kept coming back since then. '

The flu has never gone away, and covid probably won't either. I'll keep taking shots until something else sweeps me away from this mortal coil.

Driving home, listening to J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers' "Last Kiss" on satellite radio, I felt good that I'd kept covid at bay once again, until the next variant comes along.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Republicans' climate change denial threatens humanity

Not one Republican senator voted for the United States' first significant climate change legislation.

If anyone's left to write history, the GOP senators will be remembered like the good Germans who ignored Hitler and the Holocaust.

I thought at least Utah Sen. Mitt Romney would vote for the Democratic bill that seeks to reduce carbon emissions by boosting solar energy and electric vehicles. But Romney joined with Mitch McConnell's Republican goose-steppers.

While liberal pundits and progressives cheer the legislation, which is expected to pass the House this week and go to President Biden, environmentalists are criticizing the bill for concessions to the fossil-fuel industry, such as allowing the completion of a pipeline in Sen. Joe Manchin's West Virginia.

The legislation, two or three decades too late, will do too little to cut emissions and keep temperatures from soaring to unsustainable levels.

While environmentalists have long called for a carbon tax, the legislation instead calls for solar-power and electric vehicle incentives. The fossil fuel industry has reluctantly come to support a carbon tax, which wouldn't cost American families, but it remains political poison, especially to the GOP.

Once, Republicans recognized the threat of climate change. In George W Bush's administration, Lindsay Graham and John McCain were proponents of carbon offset credit swaps. But the GOP succumbed to oil industry money, and now Graham is among the senators who deny climate change.

The United States must take more immediate and extensive climate change action. The planet's future depends on the Democratic Party increasing its control over the House and Senate in the midterm elections.  A Republican Congress will sound the death knell for human civilization.

Monarch Butterfly declared an endangered species

The Monarch Butterfly's disappearance is one of the saddest stories of the "insect apocalypse."

Once a common sight in American yards and byways, the orange and black monarchs have been declining for years.

Moving closer to extinction, the monarchs were declared "endangered" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Thursday. The organization also placed the monarchs on its "red list" of threatened species, according to the Associated Press.

The Monarch Butterfly population in North America has fallen between 22 percent and 72 percent over the last decade, depending on the measurement method, the group said. The decline has been even more precipitous in recent years, according to some estimates.

Like honeybees and fireflies, the monarchs have all but vanished from our yards. The appearance of one or two brings a moment of melancholy wonder.

In North America, millions of the creatures participate in the longest migration of any insect species, from the mountains of central Mexico to Canada and back again, breeding new generations along the way.

The insects lay their eggs on milkweed, which has been devastated by American agriculture's increased use of pesticides and herbicides. Climate change has also hastened the insects’ demise.

Concerned homeowners can plant milkweed in their back yards to attract the butterfly, but a more massive campaign is required.

While the Mexican government set up a refuge for the butterflies, they won't be saved unless American agriculture makes significant changes.

So far, the insects have not been placed on the endangered species list under the American Endangered Species Act. That's a necessary next step in the campaign to preserve the beautiful flashes of color.

The monarchs are among thousands of species threatened by extinction as humans seize control of more and more of the Earth. Soon, humans will be alone, also an endangered species.

 

 

 

 

Black hole images raise awe at universe's majesty

Spooky to see those images of the Milky Way black hole on Friday the 13th.

Those extraterrestrial scientists who released photos of the black hole's spectrum must have a sense of humor.

On Friday the 13th, the black hole appears even more ominous and strange. Scientists say a black hole sucks into its endless dark chamber anything that gets too close.

And I'd thought the black hole was the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Will it ever hold public hearings?

Another black hole is the U.S. Senate, where progressive legislation goes to die.

Black hole: that would be a good name for the coal mining corporation that made Joe Manchin a millionaire.

The big cookie monster at the center of the universe is 4 million times larger than the sun. A few years ago, scientists released images of an even bigger black hole farther out toward the universe's edge.

Those cosmic images are not actually the black hole, called Sagittarius A*, like the title of a sci-fi novel. Black holes, as their name implies, can’t be seen or photographed.

The international organization of scientists captured images of the black hole's outer spectrum, the light and matter that surrounds the black hole's swirling gravitational pull. The images reveal an orange halo resembling a misshapen doughnut. Images of Sagittarius A* match Einstein's theory of relativity. 

Capturing the first images of the black hole closest to earth - a mere 27,000 light years away - is an impressive accomplishment for an international group of researchers involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project. The term event horizon refers to the point where there's no escaping the black hole's embrace.

The black hole's images illuminate another mystery of the universe.

Too bad the United States now lacks the cooperative spirit of the Event Horizon team. Terrestrial black holes proliferate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

52nd anniversary of Earth Day raises urgency of climate change action

Bursting with spring beauty, LSU celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970.

Like Vietnam Moratorium Day six months before, also held on the Ole War Skule's Parade Grounds, Earth Day changed my worldview.

A freshman carrying out a misguided passive-aggressive protest against my ROTC class and close to losing my student draft deferment, I wandered through the Earth Day exhibits, instantly turning into an environmentalist.

Millions across the globe marked the event, protesting air pollution, species extinction and the destruction of the ozone layer. Climate change was an unknown concept, outside of a few academic research offices.

The Vietnam War still raged, dividing the country. But the environmental movement received nearly universal support, even in the Republican Party. The Environmental Protection Agency was created during the Nixon Administration, and action was taken to preserve the ozone layer.

That momentum waned in succeeding years, and the fossil fuel industry criminally impeded efforts to fight climate change. The world recently has begun action to reduce carbon emissions that should have been taken years ago.

The Biden administration, ambushed by rising gas prices and the Ukrainian invasion, recently retreated from its promises to move toward solar and wind energy. The climate change-denying Republican Party's culture war appears on course to retake the Congress and presidency.

On Earth Day's 52nd anniversary, the Earth is in greater peril than ever.

 

Apocalypse arriving soon if carbon emissions not slashed, U.N. panel warns

Cassandra keeps on singing.

In its latest apocalyptic alarm, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the Earth will reach the point of no return in eight years.

As emissions soar higher and higher, the world is rapidly burning through its "carbon budget" for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius over pre-industrial temperatures, according to a Washington Post article.

The world can release just 500 more megatons of carbon to have any hope of meeting that threshold set at the Paris Climate Summit. At the present rate, the budget will be blown in less than a decade.

Failure to slash emissions will result in the earth heating to 3.2 degrees Celsius, or 5.8 degrees Farenheit, by the end of this century.

That'll make most of the world uninhabitable.

Monday's report was the third warning issued recently by the panel.  The New York Times ran a page-one article on the report, but the panel's in-depth assessments  by scientists from across the globe have yet to generate urgency among world leaders, especially developed countries.

Russia's massacre of Ukraine has led to a renewed commitment to oil and gas drilling more than a green economy. Opposition from Joe Manchin, the senator from coal, killed President Biden's climate-change plan. With gas prices rising, Biden abandoned reducing emissions by announcing  the release of oil from strategic reserves.

The Ukranian disaster is horrifying. Climate change is more so.

Amazon Rainforest headed for extinction, according to report

The news articles all agree that the Amazon Rainforest is near a "tipping point."

That's when the world's lungs will hit code red. Tipping point seems a droll term to describe the impending death of the rainforest.

The Amazon’s demise is one of the many threats to humanity caused by climate change. Some enterprising journalist should compile a summation of all of them.

A recent avalanche of doomsday climate-change alarms agree that emissions must be radically reduced if humankind has any hope of avoiding extreme devastation.

When the Amazon’s point of no return arrives in the next few decades, the rainforest's disappearance into savannah will be irreversible, according to a new study.

Instead of absorbing carbon, the changing rainforest will release tons of greenhouse gases  into the atmosphere. The grasslands replacing the forest will no longer act as a carbon "sink."

Based on monthly satellite observations from 1991 to 2016, 75 percent of the rainforest has lost the ability to recover from drought, fire, deforestation and climate change, according to the study published in Nature Climate Change. The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Technical University of Munich, according to a BBC report.

The Amazon’s loss of resilience is higher near areas of deforestation for agriculture, encouraged by the Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro.

Poet Joyce Kilmer in a much ridiculed poem said that only God can make a tree.

Only God, or nature, can make a rainforest. Once it's gone, it's lost forever. And the world will shuffle closer to doom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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New York Times' Jane Brody says farewell to readers

Jane Brody's Personal Health column in The New York Times was like a weekly letter from a wise Mom.

The 81-year-old Brody said farewell to her readers Tuesday, leaving a huge void in the newspaper's Science Times section.

After joining the Times in 1965, she began writing the Personal Health column in 1976, giving reliable information on diet, exercise, prescription drugs and medical procedures.

Like other top food and science journalists, she gave clarity to difficult information.

Jargon-free and conversational, her work undoubtedly improved and added years to people's lives. She often gave personal testimony to the benefits of her prescriptions.

In her farewell column, she notes the changes in medicine that she has documented, such as shifting dietary rules on which fats are harmful. Now the Mediterranean diet and olive oil appear best, but that could change, she points out, calling for someone else takes up her mission. 

Brody issues a mea culpa for an early column that touted conversion therapy to cure homosexuality. She also recalls a column about masturbation delayed for years until the Times editors got over their squeamishness. 

Covering an open field of topics with wit and style, she made her patch of space at the back of the Science section a garden of nutrition, medicine and science writing.

Tuesday mornings won't feel the same without Jane's greetings.

 

 

Golf fans at TPC Scottsdale cheer and toss beer as Soutwest bakes in worst drought in 1,500 years

The American Southwest's worst drought in 1,500 years made me wonder about those lush fairways at the TPC Stadium course in Scottsdale, Ariz., the site of last weekend's Waste Management Phoenix Open.

Global warming is worsening the Southwest's 20-year drought, according to a recent study, as reported by the Guardian. The extended dry conditions are the worst since 800 A.D, according to The New York Times.

Watching the WM Open, I wondered how much water the course uses to stay so green. The TPC does make an effort to conserve water, and recycles "gray water" to flush porta-potty toilets for the beer-guzzling spectators during the tournament, according to reports. Opened in 1986, the course sits on land reclaimed from a garbage landfill and features several presumably man-made lakes.

But hundreds of gallons of water are needed to keep the grass from turning back into the desert that surrounds it. The TPC does make an effort to use environmentally sustainable techniques, according to its web site, but its water consumption appears out of bounds as the drought worsens.

The tournament is famous for its par 3 stadium hole, enclosed by stands filled with drunken spectators who cheer good shots and boo those off target.

When golfer Sam Ryder made a hole in one Saturday, the crowd tossed a deluge of beer cups onto the green. The spray of beer was the most moisture seen in years.

Those cheers won't continue too long if the drought persists. It'll seem like 800 A.D. again.

Space telescope reaches destination 930,000 miles from earth

Putin's troops threaten Ukraine, inflation soars, political turmoil rages. But the James Webb Space Telescope has reached its perch on the other side of the sun.

With a last thrust of booster rockets, the $10 billion telescope with its 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors entered its orbit at Lagrange 2, a spot where the sun and earth's gravitational fields blend into equilibrium.

From its "halo orbit," the telescope will gather data from the universe's earliest moments and peer at distant stars. Jubilant NASA scientists said that the telescope will operate for 20 years or more.

The earth and sun's orbits result in five Lagrange points, numbered L1 through L5, according to the Washington Post.

 "Placing the telescope at L2 — in line with the earth and sun, where the telescope’s large shield can protect it from their glare and heat — will allow it to look farther, while also keeping its sensitive instruments at the super-cold temperatures they need to operate," the newspaper reported.

Surprisingly, the 18th century Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange discovered the places where gravity and centrifugal force counterbalance each other.

Now, NASA scientists will align the telescope's mirrors and instruments, with the first images not appearing until June or July, if all goes well. The telescope's mirrors will gaze at the first stars that rose following the big bang 13 billion years ago.

As we muddle along on earth, the great eye in the sky will be searching for clues to the origin of the universe, and whether life exists somewhere else.

Perhaps someday we’ll find our own harmonious Lagrange point right here at home.