LifeItself

I needed to update my model through April 20. I have not changed the model parameters for two weeks, and I only had slight changes before. Thus, the model is stable and predictive, given the faulty, incomplete data at hand. The model points out that the reported number of deaths around the world is lagging. For the world, my cautious estimate is 30,000 missing COVID-19 deaths in late March and April, see Figures 1 and 2 . My simple model points out clearly that the more complex models may not be predictive, while fitting the erratic data better. My friend ecologist, Professor Bill Rees, just reminded me that his mentor, Crawford "Buzz" Holling, insisted on repeating to his teams whenever they got bogged down in disputes over accuracy vs precision: "It is better to be approximately correct than very precisely wrong." Figure 1. My Gaussian model for the worldwide COVID-19 deaths as of April 20, 2020.  The difference between the magenta extrapolation of what th...

Yesterday, late afternoon, we visited our neighbors some 600 m from our house.  My wife and I made our first contact with other humans in 8 days. We kept social distance, sitting outside and listening to the birds twirling around in spring love and to the crescendos of insects, and watching two wild turkeys silently pecking their way through the lush green grass right behind us.  Other than our four voices, the silence was deafening, no cars, no planes, and no human voices afar.  When we returned home, walking up our wooded hill in complete darkness, the bright stars were not dimmed by the usual halo of Austin lights a few miles away.  The Silent Earth was trying to tell us something. Again. This time around, the nature's silence is caused by the little virus that is undoing the global civilization so many take for granted.  Why did a tiny creature less that one-thousandth the width of a human hair bring the mighty, seemingly invincible human steam roller to a h...

When shown the images of two real donkeys, who used to be our adopted children, my little two year old grandson immediately pointed to his book, to a picture of a donkey with a sombrero and guitar.  He then carried on with the animals he knows, the mythical unicorns and other creatures, each endowed with different human traits.  He quickly lost interest in the real donkeys. Sunshine and Sundance (in the back) in their new family place, not far from where we live in Texas. Even after five years of separation, they still clearly recognize and follow us, and demand brushing and petting. These two inseparable donkeys are the smartest and nicest animals I have ever had the privilege of knowing. If something were to happen to one of them, the other would die quickly of sorrow.   "Our children already live in a world where there are thousands of times more toy animals than there are animal animals. Animals are no longer objects of firsthand knowledge and acquaintance.... ...

Our anthropocene world is rapidly becoming a post-industrial wasteland, where most people are impoverished, left behind, and may not know how to live with dignity. These desperate individuals need a framework to counteract the bad things that are happening in their lives, and they need basic means of survival: a functioning family, home, medical care and decent education for their children. In too many countries, including the US and UK, poverty and desperation lead to voting decisions that are suicidal. Similarly, so many of the educated and affluent people are disoriented and running scared, because they too do not understand the deep and complex connections between the human economy and nature. A beach in Beirut 12/03/2019.  Source: The New York Times. Over the last twelve years, my small-scale solution to this overwhelming problem has been to teach a class that brings many of the elements of human-nature interactions together and roots them in science, mostly in thermo...

The Amazon forest is burning. If you look at the satellite map in Figure 1, you will see that Brazil's tropical forest is being methodically plundered and destroyed by people who mean business. That Brazilian   "friend" of our own destroyer of the world is doing his best to encourage the burning and empower his criminal supporters. But on the multiple aerial photos of the forest, I also see drought. Parts of the rain forest are dry and ready to be burned. Global climate change is likely a contributing factor. In summary,  a brutal liquidation of the priceless rain forest by the criminal farmers and ranchers running amok + climate change and drying of the forest = a global-scale calamity. From Mike Haywood's collection of course. And so that you have a clearer concept of what is happening here, president Trump is directly and personally implicated in the big Amazon burn. By blocking the Midwestern farmers from selling soybeans to China and US ranchers from sellin...

Greenland's ice is melting 5-6 times faster than recently thought and Siberia's permafrost is belching giant quantities of methane into the atmosphere, see Figure 1. Perhaps then, it is time to consider seriously how we can alleviate the crushing impacts of the uncontrollable geologic forces we have unleashed by sheer greed and lack of imagination. For fun, please read my Paris OECD dinner speech I gave twelve years ago to the distinguished EU ministers of environment and transportation. This speech was (a) ignored despite presenting the most popular paper of the conference, and (b) got me blacklisted by OECD ever since. Myopia is our middle name. From Mike Haywood, 08/21/2019. Figure 1 . The Yamal crater after belching lots of methane from melting permafrost.  It is difficult to say, but you may think of this crater as of one million cows farting methane 24/7 for one year. Oops! This aerial photo was taken by the people at the Engineering and Technical Center of ...