November 22, 2006

late check in

i flew back to lost angels last night, since i’m taking today off to pre-emptively avoid the thanksgiving travel madness. for this thanksgiving, i give thanks that i’m not travelling on wednesday or sunday. unfortunately, i somehow thought i could slide into the airport with less margin than possible, and between this and bart being delayed and the airbart shuttle bus being filled with conventioneers from the society of slow movers, i ended up checking my bag a scant 26 minutes before the flight.

note: apparently the real cutoff for baggage check in at the counter for southwest flights is 30 minutes. which is dangerous to know, because hmc has been flirting with 40 minutes before already for a few weeks now. also, when you don’t make the 30 minute cutoff time, a BIG SIREN GOES OFF. no kidding. i’m not sure if it’s just to chastise you or to bring attention to everyone else that you should be sneered at and rocks should be thrown your way. then someone comes over and makes it clear to you that your luggage tag should be up to date, because you may never, never, never see this piece of luggage again.

i did consider just taking it on the plane, but i neglected to bring a zip lock baggie for all the LIQUIDS(!!) and didn’t want to fight the TSA or have to throw them out. peering out the window at the tarmac, i kept trying to see if a last-minute trolley would come to throw my bag onto the plane. finally, up came one, and a baggage handler ran up with… what? two panasonic boxes? what the hell?

on the flight i read the last week’s issue of the new yorker. elizabeth kolbert’s article, “the darkening sea” is a frightening, sobering read: it’s basically the underwater corollary to al gore’s message: the CO² that we’re releasing into the air is actually absorbed into the oceans as part of the natural exchange between the atmosphere and the oceans. what this results in is a acidification of the oceans with possible horrifying ramifications to underwater ecosystems:

Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned enough coal, oil, and natural gas to produce some two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of carbon. The result, as is well known, has been a transformation of the earth’s atmosphere. The concentration of CO² in the air today is higher than it has been at any point in the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer.
…
When CO² dissolves, it produces carbonic acid, which has the chemical formula H²CO³. As acids go, H²CO³ is relatively innocuous—we drink it all the time in Coke and other carbonated beverages—but in sufficient quantities it can change the water’s pH. Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans—some hundred and twenty billion tons—to produce a .1 decline in surface pH. Since pH, like the Richter scale, is a logorithmic measure, a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty percent. The process is generally known as “ocean acidification.” This year alone, the seas will asborb an additional two bilion tons of carbon. Every day, every American, in effect, adds forty pounds of carbon dioxide to the oceans.
Because of the slow pace of deep-ocean circulation and the long life of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, it is impossible to reverse the acidification that has already taken place. Nor is it possible to prevent still more from occurring. Even if there were some way to halt the emission of CO² tomorrow, the oceans would continue to take up carbon until they reached a new equilibrium with the air. As Britain’s Royal Society noted in a recent report, it wil take “tens of thousands of years for ocean chemistry to return to a condition similar to that occurring at pre-industrial times.”

to be honest, it gets even more grim after that. it details some of the possible changes in the ecosystem, and what that means to the species that we’re familiar with and what may survive such a change (i hope you like jellyfish! who knew that that’s the grey goo everyone was talking about).

after finishing the article, i look out over the landscape of northeastern la county as we circle to land in ontario. endless development as far as the eye can see. industrialization and rows and rows of warehouses with hundreds of tractor trailers suckling up under iodine lights. i remember looking upon such sights in the past with awe but right now it’s revolting and shocking to me. i wonder if we really can move back down here in good conscience. but then again, where is actually better? living in a shack in the middle of the woods? buying a home where you think the new coastline will be in 50 years and spending the time learning to speak jellyfish, waiting for our new masters?

after all that, my luggage shows up in ontario, popping out on the carousel. once again my folly has been rewarded. perhaps i have learned nothing.

Posted at November 22, 2006 4:14 PM
Comments

I think we were in synch as far as our plane habits. I took the trip to Earl’s wedding to read that same issue of the New Yorker from cover to cover. It was yet another article in a long line of articles that should be waking us up, but instead has conserative pundits writing articles with titles like “Global wamring, is there anything it can’t do?” *sigh*

Posted by: ohbejuan at November 23, 2006 6:01 PM

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