Weather is not a pest

A few months ago, I attended a conference called Writing Home, Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Place, which had a nice byline written by Gary Geddes. It read:

"Philosophy," Novalis said, "is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere." The home-place assumes many different guises. A physicist or mathematician may sometimes feel at home amongst, and speak of the beauty or elegance of, ideas, concepts, formulas, even shapes such as the ellipse. Writers, too, have always struggled with the problem of place and its literary evocation, even after Oscar Wilde declared that "One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of art." But what of the biologist or ecologist who rarely if ever betrays such preoccupations in his or her writing about the natural world? Is there an aesthetic dimension in science? How are sites chosen? Do pristine environments influence what is sought and found in nature? Does the failure to recognize or acknowledge an aesthetic dimension make science any less robust or compelling to the wider public?

Anyway, I was asked to do a presentation (as a scientist type), and the intro of my talk always appealed to me as a Lawrence Weschler kind of thing.

With summer here, I note that the flies and other assorted citizens of bugdom are appearing at my house again. Some are silent like models of mathematical motion, and some buzz loudly, almost as if you can see their pursed lips - air forced through their invertebrate skeletons. All seem pervasive, as if to target my children endlessly whilst they play. Naturally, my paternal instinct kicks in, and I decide I must do something about these flies. Nasty flies.

In my efforts to learn more, I come across images of my enemy. Images like this one below:

And looking closely, even as a scientist a follower of the empirical, I can marvel at the inherent beauty of such structures, drawn as if guided by fluid lines, swaths of colours for effect. But when I step back and glance distractingly upon the picture, it is then that it hits me that I've seen this fly before - looking a little cleaner, simplified, but no less the same.

This, by the way, is a picture of carbon dioxide (CO2 for short) in standard chemical modeling nomenclature (black is carbon, red is oxygen).

Currently, it is estimated that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hovers just below 400 parts per million. In comparison, the numbers of flies sharing that same air space is decidedly less so. Both represent scourges of some manner that inhabit the sky. What's interesting to me, apart from the obvious visual similarities, is how the two are perceived in public light.

Of course, people's opinions (my own included) on flies are generally not good. As alluded to earlier, the distain often crosses into the need to remove them altogether. And folks have been ingenuous indeed with the use of traps that use ultraviolet light, phermones, toxic baits, sprays, surface applications, electric zapping, and (ironically) carbon dioxide. Really, it seems that there is little mercy in this regard. In contrast, the reaction against carbon dioxide, though apparent, appears otherwise muted and at times in conflict with itself. How else do you explain the wincing over the Kyoto Protocol or love affairs with SUVs?

The point, I suppose, is that this is not good. Those 400 parts per million should actually be scaring the shit out of people. And even if you do disagree with things of the global warming nature, there is the reality that one still shouldn't take the chance. Weather is not a pest.