Tipping Points

For today's post, let's consider tipping points. It's a pretty controversial subject, particularly when applied to global warming or climate change, which we obviously read a lot about today. But there are lots of other tipping points as well. It's a complex issue defined as below:

“the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.”  - Merriam Webster Dictionary

There are more pragmatic colloquial definitions which people are much more familiar with and more succinct and self-explanatory. There's really no reason to be so pretentious. Such as: 

“The horse is already out of the barn. The cat is out of the bag. The train has left the station. A broken egg can't be mended.”

Wouldn't it be great to see an interview about climate change with a famous meteorologist who gets asked about the inexorable progression and they responded, “Well, the train has left the station.” That would be very refreshing. A little honesty.

People have multiple tipping points within their lives. Losing your virginity, the first drag on a cigarette, either tobacco or ganja, fighting as a soldier in a war and the like. Once these points are passed, for many people, their lives are unalterably changed. They simply have tipped over, both figuratively and literally. You simply can't go back. For some people, losing their virginity results in an unstoppable surge of hormones that can lead to a lifetime of nymphomaniacal obsession or perhaps registering as a normal physiologic evolutionary act (in the missionary position), conspicuously common among most mammals to avoid extinction. Or just plain fun. But clearly a tipping point to some extent.

Boy, was that a digression. Back to climate change. I don't have to read a lot of articles in Nature and Science magazines to know about climate change. It was succinctly and obviously explained to me by my unbelievably talented handyman, Mark, several summers ago. He was up on my roof doing a repair in August under a blazing sun. He came down his ladder and looked at me, red-faced and no longer sweating due to dehydration, and said, “I think I'm going to come back and do this in a couple of months. I've never seen it so fucking hot up there. I'm dying.” This was a lifelong resident of Southern Arizona fully adapted to the heat. ‘Nough said. He did not need any meteorologic sensors or other equipment to know that global warming was occurring. 

Apparently there are a lot of climate tipping points. I read about 1.5° C temperature increase over time, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, weakening of the Gulf stream, and such. But those are just really signs and symptoms of the issue. The real issue of course is that there are too many human beings on Earth to be sustained by Earth's resources. Humans have come up with various innovative schemes to sustain completely irrational species growth including animal domestication, agricultural crop cultivation, diversion of water resources, etc. But they never deal with the actual problem of too many people. And of course they can't. Because who's going to volunteer to leave, given the current lack of inexpensive interplanetary mass transit. As well as the lack of desirable destinations.

So if one really wants to look at the tipping points from a truly historical and accurate perspective, you have to go way, way back, well before our fixation on modern technologies such as cars and power plants. And I'm not talking Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or the Industrial Revolution.

Because the people who are really responsible for climate change and creating the basis for modern tipping points are not getting their just blame or accountability.

Around 12,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, it is likely that a brilliant guy named Ignatu noticed that olive trees appeared to grow out of olives that fell on the ground. That's a pretty profound discovery when you think about it. So he went up to the chief of his hunter-gatherer group and put this in the suggestion box: “Why don't we collect a bunch of olives, and throw them out on an open meadow? And I'm pretty sure we'll end up with a whole bunch of new olive trees.” His social group probably cracked up and laughed at him, and then to discourage any further efforts on his part to improve their lot, assigned him the task of collecting edible insects during the hottest part of the day.  

Accordingly, it is lost to history, whoever exactly figured out the concept of agriculture. But agriculture sure has screwed up a lot of things by allowing us to have 8 billion humans on Earth heading towards 12 billion.

To my mind, it was probably the same Ignatu, who while collecting insects, had a lot of time for free thinking and noticed a group of rabbits (not a fluffle!) during his sojourns. He probably thought it might be a good idea to collect them inside a fence of some sort, so they didn't have to go around chasing them all the time and could just go inside the fence and pluck one out for a meal. And then made the unbelievable imaginative leap to provide food and water for them. Fearing further retribution for progressive ideas, he likely told his sister, Ofrena, about this who passed it on to the chieftain of the hunter-gatherer group. Who likely again laughed at her as well and decided that these crazy ideas simply ran in the family. Probably the first recognition of familial genetic predispositions. Intelligence, once again misinterpreted as stupidity. So she probably ended up collecting insects along with Ignatu. 

But eventually after a couple of hundred or a few thousand more years and a few other smart people, animal husbandry and domestication developed. Which of course led to massive domesticated animal belching and farting and subsequent atmospheric methane release, racing us towards oblivion today. Why hadn't they thought this through properly? That's what I say.

But to my mind, the most notorious historical figure contributing to climate change was the guy/gal who figured out how to control and use fire, about 300,000 to 400,000 years ago in Qesem Cave or thereabouts. Likely named Levi, based on my reading of the cave wall art signature, it may have been very impressive that he figured out that fire could keep them all warm in that cave, but when some meat fell in the fire, some hungry fool stuck their hand in and grabbed it and after a few bites said, “Holy shit! You gotta taste this. It tastes SOOO much better than the raw meat!” So don't go blaming oil and gas barons and fossil fuel driving humans for our current dilemma. If those cave dwellers hadn't figured out how to capture energy in the form of fire, we wouldn't be in this whole mess, and the world's population would still be around a few hundred thousand people. 

Perhaps not enough to populate a healthy social media forum (a contradiction in terms), but a positive outcome of diminution of our species’ population.

Imagine. Everybody could have beachfront property! Well, I'm not sure when property rights developed, but likely it occurred when a pretentious and selfish ass declared that a grove of coconut trees were his and that if anyone touched them, he would chop their hands off. He was also the guy who invented ‘no trespassing - private beach’ signs.

I tell you, those Fertile Crescent folks, both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, really screwed things up for us.

To summarize: Stephen Hawking predicted that humans would be extinct by the year 2600. I think he was wildly optimistic.