Interesting column in the Wall Street Journal asserting that string theory is just an intellectual entropy increasing exercise, perhaps a dead end. Time for some thinker to connect with the truth. Surely somewhere on earth, amongst the billions of us here today, there is a glimmer of the new science?

When I think about the miricle of life, of being here with so many other beings "other than human", it's almost unbearable to contemplate the great dying that is comming if the predictions of global warming are conservative. While life itself will no doubt go on, the loss of so many species is a sin ( where a sin is something that comes between a person and god )of the most tragic sort.

The recent publications in the journals Science and Nature discussing the huge amounts of CO2 that will be released when the tundra warms a few degrees more makes the release of the methane clathrates ( methane in ice) from the huge deposites in artic also more likely.

We are learning that there may be thermal runaway thresholds that trigger unstoppable pertabations in earth's climate that may change our planet for thousands or tens of thousands of years underway now. These changes may become extreme in decades, and we may be able to know within a few years that it's going to be a very rough ride.

Looking at the BBC population map showing the growth of urban population since 1955, it's shocking to see Asia exploding, and bodes ill for global warming. How can we feed 6 or 8 billion folks if we deplete the oceans, convert our breadbaskets to deserts?

We need to get started learning how to reclaim deserts for good, how to conserve our fresh water, how to live without producing so much greenhouse gases and how to help species, ecosystems and environmental niches to transplant themselves to the new places where they can live out the change. Resistence to political change will delay effective response, indeed those forces have effectively confused and delayed any concerted attempts to create the new world and it's new technologies.

We need to work on the engineering of flywheel energy storage, energy conversion, sound refrigeration, tissue culture, ecosystem restoration, genetics and molecular biology and agraculture, we need to work on our social values so that we teach our children how to live with the earth. Indeed the time has come to reconnect with the american native peoples relationship with the spiritual, with the rest of life on the planet.

Time to go water the bamboo then bike to work (I wish).