My best wishes to all of you, my Multiply friends!  May this year come with blessings, prosperity and happiness for you and your loved ones.

Sent to me by an old classmate.  A really interesting insight into something we all take for granted.  I don't quite agree with Pascal's views on Happiness, but I can certainly relate to the rest.

As for my promised Reflections for the year-end (previous blog entry), sorry it's been delayed.... long story, sigh!  Guess it'll now have to be for the New Year instead.  Keep watching THAT space... it's coming, I promise!

Another last chance to change your life
Pascal Bruckner
Monday, January 1, 2007
PARIS

In one of his last books, Romain Gary tells how, as a lover at 59 of a
Russian woman of 20, he decided to end the relationship because of the
age difference. But, deeply in love, he hesitated. In the café where he
went to write a letter breaking off the liaison, the server asked him
what he wanted. "Je prendrai une décision," he said, I will have a
decision. As the server, philosophically, waited for him to place his proper
order, he corrected himself. "Je prendrai une infusion," I will have an
herbal tea.

The practice of making New Year's resolutions is growing rare in
France, perhaps because we spread them out from January to December, a
demonstration of a delicate balance between good will and willpower.
Descendants of the spiritual exercises of the ancients, resolutions are both
educational and therapeutic.

In declaring resolutions, if possible before witnesses, we nourish the
illusion that changing our lifestyles will change our lives: "This
year, I will read Proust." "This year, I will not invade Iraq." "This year,
I will be faithful to my wife." "This year, I will reduce unemployment
in France."

Or, more prosaically, "I will exercise three times a week, I will
finally try to stop smoking, I will cut back on sugar," etc. It's a sort of
collective drunkenness for people to make vows that nobody expects to
keep.

Westerners are athletes of introspection - we never stop analyzing
ourselves. "It is never too late or too early to care for the well-being of
the soul," Epicurus said, and so we make our lives a study of
ourselves. We need a moment in the year when we look at ourselves, weigh our
good and bad habits, evaluate our conduct as a doctor evaluates our health
during an annual examination, so we can strive for a way of life that
is wiser and more responsible.

There are two types of resolutions: those that are reasonable, and
those that are not. The day I took communion, when I was an adolescent and
still believed in God, I would decide to be good to everyone, to smile
at my family, to spread charity and goodwill. This love for my
neighbors, even the ones who annoyed me, lasted two days, and then I returned
to being an ordinary human, neither good nor bad, with my moods and my
preferences. I could not make myself someone I was not.

Similarly, to declare that in 2007 we resolve to be happy is
unreasonable.  We can't determine to be happy: it is in our power to avoid certain
evils, to stay away from conflict, to not bankrupt ourselves, to not throw
ourselves out the window or under a train, but we can't order up
happiness as we order a dish in a restaurant or command a dog to come at our
call.  Happiness eludes the rendezvous we fix, arrives when we least expect
it, disappears when we think we have it in hand.

In other words, those people who are unhappy about not being happy
forget that happiness has a knack for indirection, coming in the middle of
the most ordinary day or disappearing at the height of one's career. It
is a matter of luck, almost of grace, a visitor who enters the house
unexpectedly and vanishes on tiptoe. "I recognize happiness by the sound
it makes when it leaves," said the poet Jacques Prévert.

In contrast, let's imagine someone who sets out on Dec. 31 to ruin his
life.  It's not certain that ruin will arrive: It is no less difficult to
destroy one's life than to improve it. Catastrophe is a delicate art that
also requires chance. Hell is just as hard to get into as heaven.

If the end of the year brings a flood of resolutions to change, it is
because we are faced with an existence that is invaded by the routine,
by the rush of demands. We can't bear it. We know that another life
exists, more beautiful, more passionate, one that laziness and apathy keeps
us from attaining.

I have to break with time to overcome my obstacles, to rediscover
myself, to be myself in all innocence. I can change my life, at least in
some small way. Making resolutions demonstrates optimism, the desire to
make oneself better, a faith, naïve and beautiful, that declarations can
spontaneously become actions, that saying means doing.

Knowing that you can change your behavior, even by an iota, is
essential for holding yourself in esteem. We're often cynical about how
resolutions are never kept, but we shouldn't be. Resolutions are perhaps lies,
but they're lies of good faith, necessary illusions. As long as we can
make them, we are saved, we can control the chaos of destiny; it
doesn't matter that we break them and that others view us with skepticism.
Every resolution is good simply because it is declared. It is a comedy,
perhaps, but it keeps us sane.

A lot's been going on in my life, but most of it seems like undercurrents so far.  Been doing a lot of thinking for a while already, but really didn't get around to putting anything down on paper.  But now's that time of year when I really should be making promises to myself, resolutions, and all that stuff.

Will be out of town this weekend though, so watch this space.  I'll be penning something here before my next bout of revelry, and certainly before this year is out.

As always, please feel free to comment (constructively!) if what I write strikes a chord with you too.

A very interesting article from my nephew in San Jose, CA.  I have my own thoughts about this matter, but what do YOU say?

The Thirteenth Tipping Point
12 global disasters and 1 powerful antidote
by Julia Whitty
November/December 2006 Issue

          WE'VE BEEN DIVING SHIFTS through the night for a week, donning
clammy wet suits long after bedtime in order to hover above coral heads
and peer into the pools of light from handheld strobes. We are examining
the coral polyps, those goose bump-like swellings decorating staghorn,
elkhorn, brain, fan, lettuce-leaf, and plate corals. Virtually all of
the scleractinian, or reef-building, corals are readying themselves for
the greatest sex show on earth, preparing to unleash an orgy of
fertilization, self-fertilization, hybridization, and every other manner of
fruitful and unfruitful coupling Mother Nature can dream up.
     The pink and orange gamete bundles that look like caviar eggs but
are actually hermaphroditic clusters of eggs and sperm are migrating up
the polyps toward the oral cavities, the corals' single, multi­purpose
orifices. Each night these bundles have been growing and stretching the
polyps until they resemble nothing so much as minuscule pregnant
bellies. On this night, the fourth night after the full moon of the austral
springtime, the gametes are beginning to crown, like human heads in
their birth canals.
     I check my watch. When I glance back to the coral, the ocean is
transformed. I blink, thinking I'm seeing things. But it's really
here—the black water engulfed in a pink and orange blizzard flowing
toward the surface. Within seconds, countless billions of magenta and
tangerine gamete bundles have been birthed from their polyps and are
floating upward on the buoyancy of the fatty eggs.
     Those of us underwater at this moment are also transformed by the
bundles, which collect under the folds and angles of our wet suits,
buoyancy control devices, dive masks, and regulators. Colorful gametes
tangle in our hair. If we could breathe water, we'd be breathing them. The
rate of the blizzard amplifies until the light from the strobes blinds
us. Clicking to a lower setting, I see eruptions of milky white sperm
pulsing rhythmically from nearby sponges and sea cucumbers, polychaete
worms and giant clams.
     On this night, as many as half of the reef-building
corals—perhaps 150 species—plus a host of other invertebrates inhabiting
the 1,200 miles of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, are spawning. It's
an ancient ritual, maybe as old as the 200 million-plus years that
scleractinian corals have been alive. These corals emerged in the darkest
days after the Permian-Triassic extinction, when the planet was
impoverished nearly beyond repair by massive global climate change, and when
almost all life died in hot, dry, and iceless conditions. Since then they
have survived two subsequent mass extinctions, including the one that
killed the non-avian dinosaurs.
     Already, manta rays with six-foot wingspans are sailing into view,
mouths open, filtering the eggs from the water. At the outer range of
our strobes, reef sharks are circling, preparing to gorge on those that
have come to feast. From the cold and perpetually dark reaches of the
deep known as the mesopelagic, fish that glow in the dark, and live a
mile or more below the tidal, lunar, and seasonal influences that trigger
the mass spawning, are rising toward it now, preparing to devour the
bonanza they have perceived in ways we can't.
     No modern human knew of the mass spawning of corals on the Great
Barrier Reef before 1982, when marine biologists accidentally happened
upon it. Since then, other spawnings adhering to their own unique
schedules have been discovered on many reef systems. Somehow, spineless,
brainless, eyeless, earless, immotile marine animals that meet all our
criteria for zero intelligence manage to synchronize their activities to
ensure survival. Otherwise, all their gametes—a year's investment
in energy—would launch off into open water without ever finding
suitable partners. While an individual animal might survive such behavior
for the term of its natural life, the species could not.

12 ASTEROIDS AND EVOLVING INTO WISDOM

     IN 2004, JOHN SCHELLNHUBER, distinguished science adviser at the
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom,
identified 12 global-warming tipping points, any one of which, if triggered,
will likely initiate sudden, catastrophic changes across the planet.
Odds are you've never heard of most of these tipping points, even though
your entire genetic legacy—your children, your grandchildren, and
beyond—may survive or not depending on their status.
     Why is this? Is it likely that 12 asteroids on known collision
courses with earth would garner such meager attention? Remarkably, we
appear to be doing what even the simplest of corals does not: haphazardly
tossing our metaphorical spawn into a ruthless current and hoping for a
fertile future. We do this when we refuse to address global
environmental issues with urgency; when we resist partnering for solutions; and
when we continue with accelerating momentum, and with what amounts to
malice aforethought, to behave in ways that threaten our future.
     A 2005 study by Anthony Leiserowitz, published in Risk Analysis,
found that while most Americans are moderately concerned about global
warming, the majority—68 percent—believe the greatest threats
are to people far away or to nonhuman nature. Only 13 percent perceive
any real risk to themselves, their families, or their communities. As
Leiserowitz points out, this perception is critical, since Americans
constitute only 5 percent of the global population yet produce nearly 25
percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions. As long as this
dangerous and delusional misconception prevails, the chances of preventing
Schellnhuber's 12 points from tipping are virtually nil.
     So what will it take to trigger what we might call the 13th
tipping point: the shift in human perception from personal denial to personal
responsibility? Without a 13th tipping point, we can't hope to avoid
global mayhem. With it, we can attempt to put into action what we
profess: that we actually care about our children's and grandchildren's
futures.
     Science shows that we are born with powerful tools for overcoming
our perilous complacency. We have the genetic smarts and the cultural
smarts. We have the technological know-how. We even have the
inclination. The truth is we can change with breathtaking speed, sculpting even
"immutable" human nature. Forty years ago many people believed human
nature required blacks and whites to live in segregation; 30 years ago
human nature divided men and women into separate economies; 20 years ago
human nature prevented us from defusing a global nuclear standoff.
Nowadays we blame human nature for the insolvable hazards of global warming.
     The 18th-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus named us Homo
sapiens, from the Latin sapiens, meaning "prudent, wise." History shows we are
not born with wisdom. We evolve into it.

CLIMATE CLIQUES AND NAYSAYERS

    EISEROWITZ'S STUDY OF risk perception found that Americans fall
into "interpretive communities"—cliques, if you will, sharing
similar demographics, risk perceptions, and worldviews. On one end of this
spectrum are the naysayers: those who perceive climate change as a very
low or nonexistent danger. Leiserowitz found naysayers to be
"predominantly white, male, Republican, politically conservative, holding
pro-individualism, pro-hierarchism, and anti-egalitarian worldviews,
anti-environmental attitudes, distrustful of most institutions, highly
religious, and to rely on radio as their main source of news." This group
presented five rationales for rejecting danger: belief that global warming is
natural; belief that it's media/environmentalist hype; distrust of
science; flat denial; and conspiracy theories, including the belief that
researchers create data to ensure job security.
     We might wonder how these naysayers, who represent only 7 percent
of Americans yet control much of our government, got to be the way they
are. A study of urban American adults by Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies
of Cornell University sheds some light on environmental attitudes.
Wells and Lekies found that children who play unsupervised in the wild
before the age of 11 develop strong environmental ethics. Children exposed
only to structured hierarchical play in the wild—through, for
example, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, or by hunting or fishing alongside
supervising adults—do not. To interact humbly with nature we need
to be free and undomesticated in it. Otherwise, we succumb to hubris in
maturity. The fact that few children enjoy free rein outdoors anymore
bodes poorly for our future decision-makers.
     Another study, this one from the Earth Institute at Columbia
University, found an ominous silence when it comes to educating American
K-12 students on the relationship between our personal behavior and our
environment: that the size and inefficiency of our cars, homes, and
appliances, our profligate fuels, our love of disposables, and the effects
of buying more than we need actually undermine our prospects on earth.
Slightly more time is spent teaching kids how the environment can affect
us, overpowering humanity with floods, droughts, storms, earthquakes,
climate change. But in our overall failure to illuminate the
interdependence between Homo sapiens and earth we withhold critical knowledge from
those whose lives depend upon it most.
     Many of today's kids recreate in the unwilderness of the shopping
mall, where messages of prudence and wisdom are overwhelmed by the
consumerism that feeds global warming. We send our kids to the mall because
we fear the dangers outside. We could hardly be more wrong in our
assessment of risk.

THE ALARMISTS AND THE ACROBAT

    ON THE OTHER END of Leiserowitz's spectrum of perception regarding
global warming is an interpretive community he calls the alarmists,
generally comprised of individuals holding pro-egalitarian,
anti-individualist, and antihierarchical worldviews, who are supportive of government
policies to mitigate climate change, even so far as raising taxes.
Members of this group are likely to have taken personal action to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. Collectively, alarmists compose 11 percent of
Americans, with the remaining interpretive communities falling
considerably closer to the alarmists than the naysayers in the
spectrum—suggesting the gap might be cinched by sustained public education on the
neighborhood dangers likely to arise in a changed global climate.
     Hurricane Katrina provided a wake-up call for how bad it can get
in the neighborhood, and may prove a tipping point itself. Yet long
before its rampage, American kids were coloring pictures of the first icon
of global environmentalism, the Amazon. Its billion-plus acres of
rivers and rainforest—its trees collecting and containing excessive
greenhouse gases from the atmosphere—were our primer for the
revolutionary notion that the earth's neighborhoods are interdependent.
     Today Amazonia is the most famous of Schellnhuber's tipping
points. For a generation, kids have grown up learning that the Amazon is at
risk from massive deforestation. But even if clearcutting were to halt,
climate models forecast that a warming globe will convert the wet
Amazonia forest into savanna within this century, and the loss of trees will
render the region a net CO2 producer, further accelerating global
warming.
     Amazonia's tipping point might be fast approaching. The year 2005
saw the driest conditions in 40 years, with wildfires raging unabated,
and 2006 is looking worse, raising alarms that environmental synergism
is already in play as changes become self-sustaining and reinforce one
another. Dan Nepstadt of the Woods Hole Research Center in
Massachusetts questions whether the warming of the Atlantic (the tropical North
Atlantic rose 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1901-1970 average in 2005)
is affecting airflow over the Amazon, leading to drier and fierier
conditions there.
     Changes in the currents of the North Atlantic constitute another
tipping point. As the Atlantic warms, ice caps melt, diluting the ocean
and potentially shutting down its thermohaline circulation (THC), the
oceanic river currently delivering the thermal equivalent of 500,000
power stations' worth of warmth to Europe. A 2005 study published in
Nature found that after 50 years of monitoring, a critical component of the
THC had suddenly slowed by 30 percent.
     The fate of this circulation is closely linked to one of
Schellnhuber's more notorious tipping points, the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Encompassing 6 percent of the earth's freshwater supply, this ice, if melted,
would raise sea levels by about 23 feet worldwide—not counting ice
loss from the rest of the Arctic and the Antarctic. A study by NASA and
the University of Kansas showed the decline of Greenland's ice
unexpectedly doubled between 1996 and 2005, as glaciers surged into the sea
with unpredicted speed. More worrying, the area of melt shifted 300
nautical miles north during the last four years of the study, indicating the
warmth is spreading rapidly.
     One tipping point affects the other in a balance as delicate as
that of an acrobat's spinning plates. Greenland's increasing freshwater
flow into the North Atlantic will certainly impact the THC. Warm water
recirculating within the central Atlantic may further rearrange airflow
over the Amazon, accelerating its dry-down and tree loss, and
potentially freeing as much carbon dioxide from its enormous reservoir as the
20th century's total fossil fuel output. A sudden Amazonian release would
surely melt whatever of Greenland hadn't already melted, crashing the
THC and drastically cooling Europe—in the worst-case scenario,
freezing it solid. Although we like to compartmentalize, nature does not.
Biology and climatology are the indivisible warp and weft of earth's
living fabric.

SOCIAL FACILITATION, REWARDING PRUDENCE 

    A VARIETY OF FACTORS enable tiny coral animals to coordinate
spawning with pinpoint precision. Many synchronize to inescapable
environmental factors—maximum water temperature, for instance, fine-tuned
to moon phase and tides. Spawners also stimulate the spawning of their
fellows by the presence of their eggs in the water. Thus, among some
species, local spawning triggers a cascade of spawning down current, night
after night, as the gamete cloud passes overhead.
     Many animals coordinate their activities through what is known as
social facilitation. The howling of wolves, the twittering choruses of
African wild dogs, the cawing of crows when settling to roost, all
serve to synchronize the group, and perhaps to spur individuals to their
best performance. In human psychology, social facilitation is defined as
the tendency for individuals to perform better at simple or well-known
tasks when they know they are being observed.
     Interestingly, research out of the Max Planck Institute in Germany
found that people are more likely to take action to protect the climate
when they are seen to be doing so. Manfred Milinski and his cohorts
used a variation on game theory, a tool born from mathematics and
economics, now used across many disciplines to analyze optimal behavior
strategies when the outcome is uncertain and is dependent on the choices of
others.
     In Milinski's version of the game, players were asked to
contribute money—in some rounds anonymously, in other rounds
publicly—to a common pool used to pay for a magazine advertisement warning the
public of the dangers of global warming and listing simple means to
limit individual carbon dioxide emissions. Some rounds enabled players to
reward or not reward fellow players whose "reputations" as donors from
previous rounds were revealed. Some groups received scientific
information on the causes and consequences of climate change; others did not.
     The results showed that almost no one was willing to donate money
anonymously. Those who did had received the scientific education.
Overall the largest donors were those both tutored in the science and able
to donate publicly. In the reputation rounds, players generally only
rewarded fellow players who were known to be donors. Clearly, we are
inclined to behave as better citizens when we are educated and when our
actions are visible. Perhaps if we're vigorously informed of the
neighborhood dangers of global warming, we'll make sustainable and sensible
lifestyle choices. Abetted by knowledge, social facilitation might begin to
reward prudence. 

SOCIAL LOAFING, THE MEDIA, THE OZONE HOLE 

    EVEN WELL-INTENTIONED CITIZENS feel helpless in the face of
looming global calamities and respond by circling the wagons and focusing on
family-size problems. The end result is that most of us practice
denial, which appears in the culture at large as indifference, and which
collectively enables us to embrace the dark sister of social facilitation:
social loafing.
     Social loafing is the tendency of individuals to slack when work
is shared and individual performance is not assessed. There may be no
better example of social loafing than in the U.S. Congress, where members
cloak their lethargy regarding global climate change behind the
stultifying inactivity of their fellows. And why not? After all, who's
watching?
     Not the media. For example, on the day the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that the first half of 2006
was the hottest on record in the United States, the news vaporized in
the explosions of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict. Though the media would
never ignore another round of Middle East bloodletting by rationalizing
that we've heard all that before, this is exactly what it does with
environmental news.
     Part of the reason is that the organizations responsible for
bringing us the news fail to assess that new science stories are not the
same global warming story rehashed from last week/month/year but worrisome
new data. Combined, the growing body of scientific knowledge gains heft
and power. But the public rarely hears it, reinforcing our denial and
indifference.
     A 2005 workshop at the Tyndall Centre assessed the performance of
the media and found that its sensationalist approach simplified complex
issues, while its "balanced" coverage ignored the consensual scientific
view, awarding a few skeptics equal billing. The workshop also noted a
seminal study from Philadelphia's Drexel University, which found the
U.S. media subservient to (at least) or controlled by (at worst) the
fossil fuel industry.
     A classic example of the bad marriage between a compromised media
and a slacking public fuels another of Schellnhuber's tipping points.
We've known since 1985, when scientists first reported a "hole" above
Antarctica, that chlorofluorocarbons deplete ozone in the stratosphere.
Two years later the world mobilized to sign the first Montreal Protocol
phasing out ozone-destroying chemicals.
     All seemed well enough. Kofi Annan called the Montreal Protocol
one of the undoubted success stories of international cooperation. Yet
along with the hole over the Antarctic, and the newer ozone dimple over
the Arctic, a general thinning is under way everywhere else on earth at
the rate of about 3 percent per decade. Schellnhuber calls the ozone
hole the mother of all tipping points since it tips even as we declare
victory.
     In June 2006 researchers from NASA, NOAA, and the National Center
for Atmospheric Research announced findings that the hole will take 20
more years than previously predicted—that is, until 2018—to
begin significant healing. This is partly the result of a paradoxical
effect of global warming: It actually makes the stratosphere cooler, and
a cooler stratosphere slows ozone repair. Yet the critical new
findings, the snowballing data, go largely unreported.
     Similarly, we hear about the connection between ozone depletion,
skin cancers, and cataracts but very little about the fact that
increased ultraviolet radiation will also impair or destroy phytoplankton.
Without these tiny marine plants turning inorganic sunlight into organic
life, none of us would or will be here.
     Although they live underwater, phytoplankton mitigate atmospheric
carbon dioxide more powerfully than any other known agent. They are
critical counterweights to another tipping point: the Antarctic
Circumpolar Current (ACC), which circulates 34 billion gallons of water around
Antarctica every second, carrying nutrients from the depths to the
surface.
     A 2006 Princeton study identified this current of the Southern
Ocean as the key global player in the balance between the nutrient and
carbon cycles of our planet. Put simply, the more nutrients in Antarctic
waters, the less carbon dioxide in earth's atmosphere, because the
nutrients fuel the phytoplankton that absorb CO2. Moreover, when these
phytoplankton die, they sink, taking their CO2 load with them to the cold
bottom of the ocean and sequestering it there. But global warming is
predicted to slow the nutrient upwelling, affecting phytoplankton
populations in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans, too.
     Just as the oceans affect the atmosphere, so the land affects the
oceans. In another of Schellnhuber's tipping points, global warming is
expected to shrink the Sahara by increasing rainfall along its southern
border. A greener Sahara will emit less airborne desert dust to seed
the Atlantic and feed its phytoplankton, to suppress hurricane formation,
and to fertilize the CO2-eating trees of Amazonia. Hardly a
neighborhood on earth will look the same if Africa tips. 

THE GAME THEORY OF COCKROACH DEMOCRACY 

    Recent research out of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in
Belgium shows that cockroaches live in a democracy composed of individuals
with equal standing that consult to reach consensus on decisions
affecting the whole group. These decisions are made nonhierarchically and in
the absence of perfect knowledge. Somehow these simple creatures balance
the inevitable conflicts between cooperation and competition in ways
that benefit all.
     Some dolphins manage this social dilemma ingeniously, too. At 5.5
feet long and 150 pounds, Tahitian spinner dolphins are among the
world's smallest cetaceans, inhabiting the tropical waters of the globe,
often in close proximity to coral reefs. They live in flexible,
ever-changing groups composing what the late Ken Norris of the University of
California-Santa Cruz called "a society of remarkably cooperative friends."
      This day in French Polynesia, a group of about 25 spinner
dolphins is sleeping behind the barrier reef protecting Moorea's lagoon from
the open sea. Like all dolphins, they remain conscious during sleep,
resting only the hearing parts of their brains while relying on their
sight to identify predators. In this state, they move as stealthily as
ghosts, surfacing quietly, breathing low. But by the late afternoon the
school begins to awaken and the dolphins pick up speed, with individuals
bursting through the surface to perform the dramatic aerial leaps and
spins for which the species is named.
     Then almost as quickly as they awoke, the dolphins slow down
again. The spinners have entered the phase of their day Norris and
colleagues dubbed "zigzag swimming," with the group oscillating between sleep
and wakefulness, as some individuals wish to awaken and others wish to
lounge abed in the lagoon a while longer.
     Underwater, the split in intentions is even more obvious. When the
group is persuaded to sleep, the dolphins fall silent. When the group
is urged to awaken, the sea explodes with the whistles, clicks, quacks,
moos, baahs, barks, and squawks of their varied calls. In short order,
these sounds are accompanied by an artillery barrage of dull booms and
hissing bubble trains: the percussion of belly flops and back flops at
the surface.
     Like howling wolves and cawing crows the spinners are
consolidating their intentions, using zigzag swimming to cast and recast their
votes until consensus is reached. As the afternoon progresses, their
phonations grow louder, eventually merging into the congested cross talk that
Norris et al. jokingly called the Yugoslavian News Broadcast. This is
the buoyant clamor of true democracy. Since there is no leader or
hierarchy in this or any other aspect of spinner life, every dolphin is
awarded the same voting power. However many individuals reside here today is
the same number that must now agree on when to leave and where to go.
     It's no easy decision. At stake are their lives. By leaving the
lagoon the spinners face real danger. To catch fish they must venture
offshore and dive alone or in mother-calf pairs to depths of 1,000 feet or
more in the nighttime sea. They will be hunting alongside many larger
predators, including sharks hunting them.
     Throughout the night the school maintains auditory contact as
members share information (location of a food source) and resources (the
food), even when that sharing might diminish their own wellbeing (less
food left for them). This trade-off enables individuals to survive
conditions they could not survive alone.
     Curiously, cockroaches and spinner dolphins have learned to share
in ways both prudent and wise—despite the predictions of game
theory, which in its simplest guise posits that cheaters will beat
altruists every time. Clearly, nature knows otherwise.
     A recent study hints at the evolution of altruism. A team of Swiss
and American mathematicians and population biologists ran a variant of
game theory known as a public goods game, in which players contribute
money to a common pot that an experimenter doubles, divides evenly, and
returns to the players. In ordinary play, if all players contribute all
their money, everyone wins big. If one player cheats, everyone wins
small. If an altruist and a cheater go head-to-head, the cheater wins
consistently. This paradox is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.
     But in the new computer variant, population dynamics were
introduced into the game. Players were divided into small groups that played
among themselves. Each player eventually "reproduced" in proportion to
the payoff received from play—thereby passing her cooperator or
cheater strategy to her offspring. Mutations and dispersions were
introduced, creating a shifting population of individuals divided into groups
of changing sizes and allegiances.
     After 100,000 generations, the results were surprising. Rather
than succumbing to the cheaters, the cooperators overwhelmed them.
     This is because cooperators flourish in smaller groups where their
high investments begin to pay off, says Thomas Flatt, one of the
study's authors. They reproduce at higher rates, gain a toehold in a group,
eventually come to dominate it, then launch their offspring to spread
their altruism to other groups.
     Cockroaches have been on earth about 300 million years and
dolphins about 50 million years—what amounts to millions of rounds of
play. During those eons they have evolved what ethologists call "obligate
cooperation": an evolutionarily stable strategy that reflects the
individual's inescapable dependence on the group.
     Somewhere along the way, these two very different life-forms found
the tipping point and slipped from selfishness toward altruism,
transforming what we perceive as the Tragedy of the Commons into something
more like a triumph.

SEQUESTERED KNOWLEDGE AND SNOW MIRRORS

     KNOWLEDGE CAN BE VIEWED as a commons. At the moment, science knows
far more than it "tells" to the larger world, in effect hoarding its
resource. Not all scientists agree with this strategy, leading the
community to play out its own version of zigzag swimming.
     At a recent meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology,
members argued over whether they should simply publish their findings in
their scientific journals or advocate solutions—by forcing their
results, conclusions, and suggestions in front of lethargic policymakers
and the press. Some vigorously oppose the proactive approach as one that
sullies research. Others believe the time has come for the man behind
the curtain to step forth. A survey in the wake of the conference found
that 70 percent of the 300 members favored increased advocacy. At the
moment, however, the behavior of most researchers is still largely
non-advocatory, depriving the lay world of the right to zigzag on its own
through global warming issues.
     Sequestering scientific knowledge is the equivalent of piling lead
weights on the scales of the tipping points we hear little or nothing
about. Take another tipping point: the Tibetan Plateau, a million square
miles of steppe, mountains, and lakes. This roof of the world is home
to fewer people per square mile than any land besides Greenland and
Antarctica. Rising an average of 15,000 feet above sea level, its snowy
heights act like an enormous mirror reflecting the sun's warming rays back
to space. But global warming is forecast to melt these snows and
uncover dark soils ideal for absorbing sunlight and warming the earth in a
positive feedback loop.
     The Tibetan Plateau acts like a powerful chimney between earth and
the sky, connecting tipping points in both places. It cools the
stratosphere by drawing water vapor and chemicals upward via thunderstorms. A
cooler stratosphere rearranges the jet stream, resulting in warmer
winters in North America and Europe, and exacerbating the Greenland and
ozone-hole tipping points.
     The source of Tibet's thunderstorms is the Asian monsoon, which
drives oceanic moisture up the flanks of the Himalayas. Geoscientists
expect a warming climate to either weaken or strengthen the monsoon,
perhaps one after the other. Either effect is potentially catastrophic for
the more than half the world's population adapted to and reliant on the
monsoon as it currently exists. For this reason, the monsoon is another
of Schellnhuber's tipping points.
     The health of the monsoon is critically connected to the ocean,
notably the faraway North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. Working with
fossilized plankton and ancient iceberg debris, scientists from India
and America have concluded that periods of a cooler and less salty North
Atlantic corresponded to—or else produced—weaker monsoons.
This suggests a warming climate might strengthen the monsoon, perhaps
ruinously, then weaken it below present levels if and when the THC shuts
down.
     Other studies hint that the connective tissue between the monsoon
and the North Atlantic is none other than the Tibetan Plateau.
Normally, spring warms the air above Tibet and powers the pressure gradient
driving the monsoon. But a cooler North Atlantic might cool the plateau
lying downwind, stalling the monsoon's ignition.
     No matter how badly it manifests for us, nature evolves toward
efficiency, balancing the spinning plates at the point of minimum effort,
rearranging them with ruthless dexterity.  

THE RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM OF VAMPIRE BATS 

    AN ASSESSMENT BY the World Health Organization concluded that the
effects of climate change since the mid-1970s likely caused more than
150,000 deaths in the year 2000. Other analyses estimate 160,000 deaths
a year since then. In contrast, terrorism caused 56 American deaths in
2005, the same year we spent about $100 billion fighting it and its
shadow oil war—even as these investments fantastically increased the
real threats to our homeland security.
     To mitigate and survive the global changes coming our way, we need
to cooperate in unprecedented ways. Biologists have long struggled with
the notion of cooperation, which was once seen as benefiting the
"survival of the species"—until geneticists pointed out that,
evolutionarily speaking, there is no mechanism in place for species survival,
only individual survival. William Hamilton's work on colonial-living
insects advanced the radical idea that related individuals might act
altruistically because they share genes.
     Eventually, scientists surmised that individuals act
altruistically toward even unrelated others in expectation of an equivalent
reciprocal act at some time in the future. A now-classic example was found
among vampire bats. Gerald Wilkinson of the University of Maryland
discovered that on any given night, 7 percent of adult vampire bats and 33
percent of juveniles fail to find a blood meal. They rarely go hungry,
however, since well-fed bats regurgitate blood to them upon return to the
roosting colony.
     Wilkinson's experiments showed that bats are more likely to share
blood with a bat that has previously fed them. Without these
reciprocated favors, he wrote, "annual mortality should exceed 80 percent, but
female vampire bats are known to survive more than 20 years in the wild."
In other words, because they share a little every day, vampire bats
increase their longevity over a lifetime. Those that don't share die
young.
     The notion of reciprocal altruism is tested in game theory through
the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which two players pitted against each other
choose to cooperate or not cooperate (cheat). Cheaters always
win—except when the same players engage in repeated rounds together.
Iterated play eventually produces a tit-for-tat response, until the players
learn to cooperate, lest they both lose. In this way, punishment for
cheating leads to cooperation.
     A Prisoner's Dilemma variant run by Stuart West of the University
of Edinburgh found that small groups of people are more likely to come
together and cooperate (share resources) when engaged in repeated
interactions, and when the competition for resources occurs on a more global
than local scale. His study took place over two years, engaging
undergraduate classes of 12 or 15 students broken into groups of 3. West's
results suggest that manipulating how the players perceive competition
alters the level of cooperation. He suggests this insight could be used to
encourage altruism. One way would be to reward local cooperation.
Another would be to create a common enemy who must be competed against
globally.
     Since we already have our common enemy, global warming, perhaps we
can bring it to life. Picture a fiery monster consuming our
neighborhoods. It's big and scary yet vulnerable to the Lilliputian arrows each of
us wields with personal lifestyle choices. However, the hybrid car is
not enough. Wielding the big stick of consumer choice, we can batter the
fiery monster more convincingly if we persuade the corporate world that
we are serious and, collectively, powerful. We can buy or not buy. We
can invest or not invest. Business can survive by becoming green and
sustainable.
     How might we get these messages across? Imagine a lottery funding
advertising about the fiery monster, the Lilliputian arrows, the
neighborhood dangers. Ideally these advertisements would be big and splashy
and persistent enough to awaken us from our slumber in the televised
lagoon.
     Instead of a ticket, we'd buy a web listing displaying our
commitment to the battle as well as our marksmanship rating: a number
reflecting how much money we'd donated, the efficiency of our car, home,
appliances. The highest-rated players would earn high-visibility web pages.
Low-rated players could improve their ratings by following a list of
lifestyle amendments. The higher our rating, the greater our chances in
the lottery. Every week someone would win.
     Would we play? 

THE CLATHRATE GUN HYPOTHESIS

    HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS when we don't. Left to governments alone, the
troubles breed and fester. For example, the Kyoto Protocol, ratified by
165 nations (but not the United States), requires its signatories to
report their greenhouse gas emissions. A 2004 study by the European
Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy found this voluntary reporting to
be grossly inaccurate. The United Kingdom, for instance, which
advertises itself as a leader in the global warming fight, actually emits up to
92 percent more methane than reported. Other enormous discrepancies
were found in Germany, China, and France.
     Methane is one of the three greenhouse gases reported under Kyoto
(along with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide). Twenty times as powerful
a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, methane has more than doubled in
the atmosphere in the last 150 years until today it totals about half the
greenhouse effect caused by carbon.
     Worse, methane emissions increase rapidly in a warming climate. So
even as methane alters climate, it is also affected by
climate—another dangerous positive feedback loop. Methane garners its own tipping
point in the form of methane clathrates, the 1- to 2.5-trillion-ton
reservoir of frozen methane underlying the ocean floor and the Arctic
permafrost.
     Some scientists believe that the sudden melting of clathrates in
the past released massive "burps" into the atmosphere, catastrophically
amplifying global warming. The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis posits that a
big burp of methane triggered the Permian-Triassic extinction 250
million years ago. Schellnhuber and others fear this could happen again as
ocean temperatures warm, and as the permafrost melts. A recent study in
Nature reported that the Siberian and Alaskan permafrosts are rapidly
melting, releasing five times more methane than expected.
     Exacerbating those problems, a study by Russian and American
researchers in Science published in June announced, is a heretofore unknown
global carbon source in a deep layer of permafrost known as loess,
which contains an estimated 500 gigatons of carbon. The loess has never
been accounted for in climate warming models.
     Warming oceans may also trigger the tipping point known as
salinity valves—the chemical plugs enabling oceanic bodies to maintain
strikingly different ecosystems and biodiversity. These include the
Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Caribbean, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of
Mexico, the Black Sea, the Baltic, and the Java Sea. Warming waters may
unbalance the El Niño tipping point, too, which NOAA researchers report
could create a persistent El Niño with biblical droughts and floods
afflicting half the globe all year, every year.
     Finally, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Long believed too cold to
melt anytime soon, this icy world now confounds the soothsayers. New
data from the British Antarctic Survey hint that the slumbering giant is
awakening, its 7 million cubic miles of ice thinning dangerously. If
melted, the ice sheet will raise sea levels between 16 and 50 feet
worldwide.
     This recent melt may be caused in part by the Antarctic
Oscillation—a kind of on/off switch affecting pressure gradients in the
Southern Hemisphere. At its current setting, the Antarctic Oscillation is
warming Antarctica, increasing the melt, and accelerating the flow of
the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (our earlier tipping point). As we've
heard, changes in this current affect plankton populations, which
affect atmospheric CO2. Changes in the ACC also affect the global
thermohaline circulation, which controls everything from Europe's thermostat to
the monsoon.
     In the end, all the spinning plates spin or fall together, and the
Antarctic Oscillation appears to be triggered by none other than the
ozone hole, the wound that refuses to heal. The cooler stratosphere
caused by (and causing) the ozone hole produces the weather changes at
ground level now threatening to turn Antarctica's icescape into a
continent-swallowing seascape.
     In less than 200 years, armed with fossil fuels, we've wrested
hold of the spinning plates, donned the acrobat's tights, and initiated
our own wobbly circus. Nature, impassive and plenipotent, waits to reward
or punish us. 

LET THEM EAT CO2 

    THE NATURE OF TIPPING POINTS is that they happen dizzyingly fast.
The good news is that history proves we are capable of keeping up.
Social scientists once believed it would take decades of government
pressure and education for Americans to choose smaller families, since the
desire to procreate is an absolute part of the human animal, or so they
thought. Yet population radically declined in the course of only three
years in the 1970s—one woman at a time, without an ounce of
government involvement. Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson calls the
voluntary choice of women around the globe to limit their families an
almost miraculous gift to future generations.
     We also changed with breathtaking speed in 1941 when we
recalibrated the entire economy of the United States in one short year to fight
global enemies in Germany and Japan. The effort was promoted by the
government but carried forward by individual citizens. Obviously, our
powers of transformation are magnified by visionary leaders. Mahatma
Gandhi's Salt March in 1930 ignited Indians of diverse religions, languages,
and ethnicities to unite in the common cause of independence. Gandhi, in
turn, inspired Martin Luther King Jr., Stephen Biko, Nelson Mandela,
and Aung San Suu Kyi, who catalyzed their followers to change the world
as well.
     Leaders can rouse us against them, too. Whether or not Marie
Antoinette actually said, "Let them eat cake," she inspired change that
reverberated far beyond Europe. Likewise, when George W. Bush says we can't
act on global warming until we "fully understand the nature of the
problem," we can use his callous disregard as a rallying cry.
     The truth is, we can change, and change fast, even in the absence
of perfect knowledge. Like cockroaches, our hallmark is adaptability.
Long ago, we looked out from the trees and saw the savannas. Beyond the
savannas we glimpsed other frontiers. History proves that when we
behold a better world, we move toward it, leaving behind what no longer
works. 

WE ARE THE ANTIDOTE 

    THIS MORNING, IN THE AFTERMATH of the coral spawning on
Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the surface of the sea is slick and pink with
eggs. From the air or from afar it looks like an oil spill and smells like
a fish kill, drawing in creatures from the deep and creatures from the
land, including crocodiles cruising the reefs. Underwater, the fish
that make their living picking plankton are hyperactively at
work—the day shift toiling alongside the night shift, as lobsters, cuttlefish,
and flashlightfish forgo sleep to feast. Above, the air is crowded with
seabirds plucking at the surface with pink-stained beaks.
     In the coming days the gamete cloud will travel on prevailing
currents, triggering the corals below to spawn. Seduced by moonlight,
spring, and the tides, stimulated by the chemistry of other spawners, the
tiny creatures that build their own world will build it again.
     So too with us. The difference between people and corals is that
if we build our world poorly, we can rebuild it well. We know what to
do. We know how to do it. We know the timeline. We are our own antidote. 

@2006 The Foundation for National Progress

Read the article online:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/13th_tipping_point-3.html
    
Check out the latest from Mother Jones at:  http://www.motherjones.com

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