ASM056 Repentance, Climate Change, and Living in a Fish

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repentance climate change and living in a fish all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike a weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life huge stuff happening on the events front not only is lost and found coming in the near future to phoenix and to los angeles but i'm actually going on tour with gunger go to ask sciencemic.com click on the events button to learn more i'll talk about it at the end of the show but for now let's get it started [Music] hi science mike my name is kate and i live in tallahassee uh we've actually met once but it was right after your concussion so i think you may not remember me but that's okay i have a question about global warming and co2 emissions and greenhouse gases specifically as it pertains to cattle ranching or cattle raising in the livestock industry i recently watched the documentary on netflix um called cowspiracy and the information in it was really shocking to me and sort of knew i had never heard of it before that instead of co2 emissions from like cars and transportation this documentary claimed that the biggest contributor to global warming and greenhouse gas emissions was the livestock industry now this documentary really sort of rocked my world and i pretty much immediately decided that i would begin the process of going vegan and my girlfriend got on board and we're really excited about that but my parents reminded me that i have a tendency to kind of see things in black and white and to be very quick to jump on board with something like this and just to believe things like this so i wanted to get your opinion to ask whether or not you had seen the documentary or if you knew about anything pertaining to this whether or not livestock and cattle raising and things like that are actually contributing to climate change in the way that this documentary claimed and also um contributing to deforestation of the rainforest um among other things so yeah i was just wondering if you had any knowledge of that or what your opinion was on um i don't know the science behind cows and and animal livestock and how that might be affecting um climate change so anyways thank you so much uh for everything that you do i hope to see you again sometime soon and thanks for answering my question bye well i haven't seen cowspiracy i have trouble even saying the name of that uh documentary but i am very familiar with the role livestock and other agriculture plays in global climate change specifically man-made climate change changes in the climate that are caused not by purely natural environmental phenomenon but are driven by the activities of our species and the news isn't great here [Laughter] i first want to say that modern agriculture is in many ways miraculous we've made methodologies and processes and systems for extracting incredible amounts of nutritional value from soil without modern agriculture the world would starve backyard agriculture simply won't scale to the level of population we have on the earth today and some form of large-scale agriculture is necessary to maintain the human population so i want to start by saying i'm not demonizing agriculture and i think most of the great ills that large-scale agriculture are causing to the planet were driven out of a genuine motive to feed people now of course there's a whole other thing we can get in here into factory farming and the role of capitalism and profit motives tied to food production i'm gonna dodge that for this this question uh just because you know that'd be a three hour podcast maybe it's something we'll talk about on the liturgists at some point but let's kind of talk about uh the role specifically livestock place livestock is not the only driver of global climate change but it is absolutely a significant one and that's for a few reasons number one livestock especially especially cows produce methane as part of their digestive process now methane is actually a really intense greenhouse gas per volume it drives more warming of the earth than co2 so if you have the same amount of methane versus the same amount of co2 methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas but it's not that simple methane also breaks down more readily in the atmosphere it's not stable exposure to the sun's radiation ultraviolet light will cause methane to break down into components that aren't greenhouse gases or are less intense greenhouse gases and so unlike co2 that once it's out there it's relatively difficult to pull out of the atmosphere if you lower methane emissions methane levels in the atmosphere drop pretty quickly okay so that's actually a hopeful thing if you produce less methane if we reduce our meat consumption methane levels can drop pretty fast now but it's not just methane even though methane is a huge problem and it's it's actually remarkable how much methane a single cow can produce they've actually done experiments where they've attached big drums directly to cal stomachs and they can fill up these 55 gallon drums with methane gas in relatively short periods of time i don't have the data in front of me my memory is that it's some somewhere south of a 24-hour period but please don't quote me on that it should be easy to find on google but livestock also directly creates co2 emissions number one the energy required to ship cows slaughter cows and other animals is a lot but it's also cows have to eat pigs have to eat chickens have to eat and they eat many of the same foods that we do so there's a lot of acreage devoted to feeding livestock and that grains those vegetables are farmed with tractors and machines burning co2 gas and they're shipped in trucks and freight that is burning fossil fuels and so that does contribute to fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere significantly and not only that uh the ever-growing demand for meat not only in the united states but across the world actually demand in the united states is going down a bit but globally means that we're driving up incredible population levels of livestock animals on the planet right now totally a historic numbers really phenomenal stuff and as you mentioned your question there's the whole deforestation thing so we cut down forests to create grazing land for the animals and to create more agricultural land to raise grains to feed animals and then it hits you with a double whammy not only does that process produce greenhouse gases because you're burning a lot of fossil fuels to do it but you're also taking the trees of the equation and trees are really helpful they're natural atmosphere scrubbers trees love to pull out carbon from the air that's how photosynthesis works and the less trees we have the the less scrubbers we have running so we're not only producing more greenhouse gases we're cutting the ecosystem's ability to absorb carbon now depending on who you ask agriculture meat based agriculture is said to be responsible from anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions now 20 would be when you talk to the food lobby 50 would be when you talk to the most um intense i might even say radical people who are really concerned about climate change and they both bring their biases and they they kind of pull the figure but i mean that means you could probably safely say 35 percent i mean i think most climate scientists would probably agree with that and that means eating less meat is an easy way to drive environmental changes to reduce climate change that's something people what can i do when you talk about something as big as global climate change well guess what changing your diet can really materially affect the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere because this stuff is driven by demand so every time you eat a hamburger you eat a steak you know you're eating red meat you're not only doing something that's not great for your health very little red meat is needed by your diet i mean you get by with none but a healthy amount of red meat is very limited um but you're also driving these these carbon emissions now to give you some idea to produce one kilogram of meat that's beef produces 34.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions if you do if you eat lamb instead you're cutting it for the same one kilogram of meat down to 17.4 kilograms of co2 pork is even lower 6.35 kilograms of cot for every one kilogram of meat and chicken is all the way down below five for 4.57 kilograms of co2 per kilogram of meat here's the thing we've known for a long time less meat is better for you not only for the reasons of animal suffering but climate change i'm heavily drawn towards veganism or vegetarianism i can't do it i start to get kind of a twitch if i don't eat any meat at all so what i've done is i've tried to gradually reduce the amount of meat that i eat and i've done that successfully i eat a lot and i mean a lot less meat than i used to and what i'm trying to do instead of making some line in the sand where i'm a i'm a vegetarian now i'm kind of trying to just gradually become a vegetarian human brains tend to do a little bit better with gradual change than sudden change and i'm trying to trick my brain into not rebelling and just going along with the flow i've also been diagnosed pre-diabetic earlier this year so i've got to lose some weight and lowering my meat consumption is a huge part of pulling that off and uh it's working i've lost 10 pounds so far and i've cut my contribution to carbon emissions so a lot of those documentaries you watch them they're really scary they take the most extreme positions among client climate scientists and present them as consensus i saw another documentary called racing extinction that does that everything they said is science but they they presented it in the most severe light but it doesn't matter to some degree because whether we're talking about hitting climate tipping points caused by you know permafrost melt and releasing even more methane in the atmosphere in 30 years or 150 years what we're doing to the atmosphere and therefore to the planet is unprecedented and represents a real threat to the way we live you know we could be looking at in my lifetime having to abandon the city of miami and let's say that that's too soon that that the process will take longer than that it's still in my my kid's lifetime or my grandkids lifetime where in just two or three generations climate change is going to drive dramatic changes in sea levels and how rapidly deserts expand and we're at the point where drastic changes are needed and when governments come together it's difficult to get a consensus view it's difficult everybody tries to look out for their interests but we members of society we can drive changes today because the only person you have to convince is yourself so don't panic but making changes today and how you live matter the more people that do it the lower carbon emissions are and one of the best things one of the most powerful things you can do to combat climate change is in fact reducing or eliminating meat in your diet [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads high science mike if humans had time travel and we ignore any paradoxes that would arise from using it how far into the past could we go before genetic shift would make it impossible to reproduce with ancient humans thanks hannah i want to start the question by saying we have time travel technology if you get on an airplane you're traveling slightly slower through time than you're on the surface of the earth and being a little clever we're always traveling through time forward and using relativity you can change the speed with which you travel forward through time we see no plausible way in physics today to go back in times you have to worry about paradox because the laws of physics i've seen a couple of proposals that uh are out of my league but but i think it's a consensus in physics today that backwards time travel is impossible but the the core question here how far back are we us is is what we're looking at and this really cuts to the heart of some of the most common misconceptions about uh darwinian evolution namely that you know you hear people ask about transitional fossils a lot and you hear people talking about the emergence of species i want to go and let you know here that's an incredibly gradual process and let's look at our nearest genetic relatives as an example chimpanzees and bonobos they're separated by rivers these two populations they have been for a long time they don't naturally interbreed but they can't and they're considered two different species in captivity specifically in circuses uh chimpanzees and bonobos have interbred and produced successful offspring even though they are two separate species and this is a an important point there's not like this arbitrary line at which two species are different this is a process we study it's it's to some degree arbitrary uh the line between a subspecies and a species that requires expert review and debate to determine that two species are separate but chimps and bonobos can successfully interbreed and what you're looking at is how similar is your dna that's the core idea in a species because as you've alluded to in the question the more drift there is the less likely that you can produce successful offspring so even with the same species there's some chance that your offspring won't be successful reproduction is hard trigger warning here i'm going to talk a little bit about lost pregnancies but it's very common even in our species when two healthy homo sapiens mate that the uh zygote isn't viable the neural tube doesn't form correctly and the pregnancy spontaneously ends and the more drift you have the more likely it is that this offspring is going to be in some way not viable so the first sign you sort of see is in species that have drifted enough that they can still mate still conceive the offspring is viable but can't reproduce so it's it's sterile in some way you see that in agriculture breeding different horses mules donkeys that stuff so now if we think about chimpanzees bonobos their offspring often can reproduce in fact frequently can reproduce because those species are very similar so when we look at other hominids you have different human subspecies so they call us homo sapiens sapiens to denote current humans are subspecies of human we're the only subspecies of human alive but if you go back into the fossil record you find other species of homo sapiens and this is a critical there's a disagreement over different lineages of hominins whether they're subspecies of human or not there's an ongoing controversy about neanderthals are neanderthals a separate species or subspecies of homo sapiens there is not a scientific consensus on that point but when we introduce genetic testing into the equation we've discovered that all non-african homo sapiens have some percentage between one and five percent of their dna is neanderthal dna so as homo sapiens left africa and entered the european continent we interbred with homo sapiens so much that every person who has non-african lineage is part neanderthal so you can go back 150 000 years that interbreeding we think happened 38 000 years but if you go back even further 150 200 000 even further back in time to anatomically modern humans still homo sapiens probably a different subspecies you find that we also interbred with other hominid species like homo erectus and homo habilis homo erectus is the the upright human homo abilis means the tool using human those are arguably not subspecies of humans but different species now we don't have dna evidence for that direct dna evidence because we don't have preserved dna for those species like we do for neanderthal but we've effectively done that with computer modeling and wound back the dna and seen evidence that all humans have some degree of homo erectus and homo habilis dna in their genetic code so pretty far a couple hundred thousand years and interbreeding is still possible you may even go even further back and have some genetically viable offspring now what's interesting here is we know that not only did couplings between homo sapiens and neanderthals happen successfully but those offspring were able to reproduce and be successful enough in society to be accepted that's why we all have neanderthal dna so in the tree of life uh humans and this really runs counter to a lot of the way especially christians think about this or theists we're presented as being unique and made in the image of god and that's language i use a language i agree with our creative capacity our ability to move with intent with awareness with ethical implications but i don't know that that gift is unique to our species and as we see in evolution that line of species is is much more blurry much fuzzier than most people think about so i can't give you a definitive answer here because we don't have dna records for these more ancient species but i think it's a relatively safe assumption that you can wind back the clock 200 000 to 250 maybe even 300 000 years and find other groups of hominids that homo sapiens can interbreed with pretty wild stuff undermines a lot of our assumptions here and i know this probably won't be the most popular answer for my more conservative listeners but as always i'm committed to give you the best and most honest answer i can come up with so thank you our next question also came in via email and it reads hi science mike great podcast you do a wonderful job of being thoughtful and honest in your discussion and help create a safe environment for people to feel comfortable discussing some very sensitive topics i can't tell you how much clarity it has given me in my own life keep it up i'll get right to it can you describe neurologically neurobiologically psychologically why repentance is so beneficial for human beings the more i read the bible the more i understand its underlying theme to be about the conscious admission of falling short of a standard and that the understanding that whatever being created us that being has ultimately chosen not to hold our transgressions against us for a long time i avoided scripture because i felt in order to embrace the forgiveness of spouse in the bible i also had to accept some of the values i would describe as archaic for example homosexuality being a sin it wasn't until i began to experience firsthand the power of forgiveness and redemption in my own life that i became more comfortable spending time in the bible i now try to spend time reading it every day repentance really isn't an idea that is talked about in the secular sphere and it definitely isn't a word that is tossed around at all it is arguably the most powerful avenue for deep genuine lasting change i feel if people understood biologically why the doctrine of repentance has such value that they would be more inclined to embrace the concept and less likely to shun scripture because they don't see eye to eye on some of the other social issues so what do you think mike what does science have to say about the value of repentance i kind of knew i wanted to go with this answer immediately and it was relatively difficult to come up specifically finding any science where people have studied repentance so there is a language gap here certainly between judeo-christian religions and the terminology science uses to describe brain function i actually wasn't able to find one study and i looked where you know for example a neuroscientist studied people in a state of repentance couldn't do it let's talk a little bit about what repentance means a common definition would be remorse or contrition for one's past actions or sins or an act or the process of being repentant see also penitence and then i also looked up something in a bible dictionary and it basically said there were several greek verbs used for repentance and from those greek words as well as the hebrew word and uh the original old testament that they identified four components of repentance one is a true sense of one's own guilt and sinfulness two is an apprehension of god's mercy in christ three is an actual hatred of sin for a persistent endeavor after a holy life in walking with god in the way of his commandments okay that's some heavy stuff um and for example hating sin uh now this is that's not direct biblical language although they provide some scriptural justification for it um hating sin is not going to be something that science is going to back up is neurologically beneficial however to really answer this question i wanted to focus on one thing and that that's the difference between guilt and shame and how that relates to the christian idea of repentance shame is basically whenever you have negative feelings about something involving your identity who you are and shame is toxic it's harmful to people and it's related to our neurocognitive mechanisms for social cohesion we want to feel like we belong to a group and when you have shame you have something you're afraid to reveal about yourself because you believe it endangers your ability to be connected with others it endangers your ability to have position and social standing shame is bad as much as possible in my work i try to destroy shame everywhere i find it shame keeps people in bondage shame makes people afraid of who they are guilt is very similar but neurologically distinct and it's not over who you are but over something you've done and guilt can be a healthy emotion when it compels behavioral change too much guilt can actually produce shame if you just focus on guilt but if you allow guilt to modify your behavior to work toward restitution then it is effective and so i would say there that thing of feeling guilty over something you've done if it's if it's if you if you're genuinely hurting people if you're violating someone's consent if you're producing suffering guilt's an appropriate response and in repentance this idea of having this guilt this moment of conviction and then turning away from that behavior is beneficial in the secular world they would call that restorative justice instead of punitive justice where the focus is punishment restorative justice the focus is on righting wrongs and most social scientists and certainly neuroscientists would say that that is a better kind of justice and and seems to be linked with this idea of repentance we can have a debate over the merit of the idea of sin some people think that the idea that humanity is fundamentally broken is more damaging than helpful but certainly a commonly held critique in atheist circles i still use the term sin and i'm comfortable with it because human beings do show a remarkable capacity to operate in self-serving ways even when they know doing so harms other people i think institutional racism is a sin as much as i think overt intentional racism is a sin i think shaming lesbian gay bisexual trans and queer people is sin it is a falling into a giving end to what in genesis is described as the whisper of a serpent a desire to have what is yours to the exclusion of others and i think a call to repentance to turn away from these sins is good and beneficial i am daily trying to repent of racism in my life i am daily repenting of the ways i yes i have contributed to a society that marginalizes and oppresses not just people of color not just people of different sexual orientations and gender identities but people in poverty the least of these if repentance is oppressive if repentance is associated with damnation i think it's harmful but if repentance invites us into the most compassionate empathetic behaviors human beings are capable of then i think you can make a great scientific argument that guilt combined with a change in behavior that leads to restorative justice is good for the species and also good for the individual who repents hey mike this is scott from la have a chance to hear you in chicago at storyline couple weeks ago and your talks were intriguing and thought provoking so thank you here's my question scientifically do you think that a human can survive for any significant amount of time within the stomach of a fish i'd love to hear your thoughts on the story of jonah this program has a remarkably diverse audience it astounds me every week when i read the questions when i look at your tweets when i read your emails and facebook posts this is a program that has a significant listenership of self-described atheists or agnostics non-religious affiliated people liberal christians progressive christians conservative christians evangelical christians there appear to be a small number of muslims who listen to the program it's it's wild so when i venture into these territories i always worry about how my answer will affect people and so i'm going to answer this question from a few different perspectives and let you decide which perspective best fits you okay so let's start purely scientifically naturalistically let's remove either an assumption that god exists as a being who intervenes in reality or that god exists at all and from that pure naturalistic perspective the story of jonah is completely non-plausible so a whale shark would be an example of a fish large enough to fit a human in its mouth however its esophagus is tiny because it's a filter feeder it's not meant to eat animals this size whale sharks spit out things that enter their mouth that aren't their food source of plankton and very small microscopic organisms and would readily spit a human out even if they didn't there is no oxygen none in a whale shark's mouth and if you look at other fish sharks that could swallow whom being whole they don't have lungs they're not inhaling oxygen and if there were any gases in their digestive system it would not be what we call breathable air or atmospheric air but instead digestive gases uh methane these sorts of things totally unbreathable not to mention the purpose of these animals stomachs is to break down organic matter and in the case of fish that could swallow us like a great white shark animal tissue you would be digested in that stomach no chance for survival now if we think about whales again filter feeding whales esophagus we're not going to make it down there even if we did get into their stomachs it's meant to break down tissue there's no oxygen now sperm whales could certainly swallow a human being and we could fit through their esophagus uh but sperm whales are predators and there's a couple of accounts of people being cut out of the stomachs of sperm whales they they're not plausible they're old accounts they're unsourced they appear to be early urban legends scientifically speaking i'm comfortable making the ascertation forget three days you're not going to last an hour in the digestive tract of a fish or a whale it's just not going to happen now when you introduce a god actor into the story god could literally do anything [Music] right god could create a one-off fish whose only job is to swallow jonah and have an oxygen-rich environment for him to breathe for three days before vomiting him up somewhere okay it's plausible but only because literally anything is plausible when you introduce an all-powerful actor so if you're going to take the story of jonah as a literal account i think it requires an assumption of an interventionist maybe not all-powerful but very powerful deity driving that story forward what do i think about the story of jonah i think the story of jonah is primarily mythic that it's a story about a reluctance to follow god's calling towards justice for a people group you despise it's about fear it's about hatred so in the story of jonah jonah is told to go to nineveh which are people that are hated and despised and are military adversaries of his people and he doesn't want to and he ends up you know as we know being swallowed by a fish vomited on the shore and then he does what he was supposed to do and when the people hear jonah's words the people of nineveh they actually repent they turn away and god redeems their city and then jonah gets angry about it i think that's a great story that teaches us absolutely teaches us how many americans today think of iran as nineveh a lot it's a it's a good story now one criticism i've seen from conservative christians about people like me who dismiss jonah historical basis and and take it merely as myth or allegory is that you know jesus himself spoke of jonah and so then you're calling jesus a liar or mistaken i don't think that it undermines jesus to have jesus speaking in the language and cultural expectations of his day i have no doubt that significant maybe the vast majority maybe all first century jews thought of the story of jonah as a historical account it doesn't matter the point of that story is to invoke a response in us not to relay historical claims so it doesn't bother me a bit to have the idea that jesus could have spoke about jonah in that manner i think this kind of tension this these fights come down to us projecting a particular set of modernist assumptions not only onto jesus but unto god my view is that god is drawing humanity drawing humanity towards healing towards redemption that's salvation that's the work of christ and using a story about a man who was reluctant or reticent to deliver a message of hope and redemption to a people group he despised was not only timely in those days i think it might be more timely now i think this story has not aged poorly it's aged incredibly well and we clearly still have not learned its lesson because the modern geopolitical landscape the modern american political landscape is so ready to name someone as the other to name someone as unworthy of the grace and redemption that we ourselves speak so i don't care if jonah was actually swallowed by a fish because i know exactly what it's like to not want to talk with the people of nineveh [Music] [Applause] well that's another episode of ask science mike in the books and i have got more events in the next couple of months than i've ever had you there's more opportunities to come hang out and meet in person than there has ever been i'm so excited about it first of all february 26th i'll be in phoenix arizona february 27th i'll be in los angeles both of those events are with the liturgists doing an event called lost and found it's a beautiful event a night where we tell the stories of losing faith and then encountering god in little vignettes it's interspersed with really incredible music by gunger and the brilliance with guided meditations and will come together at the table and do the eucharist you don't want to miss that if you're in phoenix or los angeles there's actually two events in a row in los angeles don't miss it and then starting march 10th i'm actually going on gunger's one wild life tour we're kicking it off in denver from there we'll go to albuquerque phoenix again san diego tucson santa cruz california los angeles santa barbara california san francisco california will also hit dallas texas san antonio texas waco texas and houston in the course of that tour so it'll be a rock show gunger will play their music i may open with a little bit of a science mic weirdness and then we'll finish the evening with a liturgist podcast style discussion and q a i'd love to see you in any of those cities april the 8th i'll be in ventura california pete ends and i are doing a multi-day event called issues of faith science and the bible it's going to be great if you know pete ends work you know he's one of the main voices in how i approach scripture a lot of people have asked for us to do an event together and and we're doing it it's happening in ventura california and then april 23rd i'll be in portland oregon at cascade church portland and may 14th i'll be at hope fellowship in frisco texas both of those are just science mike events so that's a lot you can go to ask sciencemike.com and there's an events tab right at the top of the screen almost in the top right where you can get information about all those venues times dates i'd love to see you my absolute favorite thing is going on the road and meeting you face to face it's cool to tweet with you it's cool to get your questions to the show but my i stand there for an hour and a half at least after every event to meet every person who wants to meet before i head back to the hotel or move on to the next city so i'd love to see you at any of these events in february march april or may i do want to thank all of you patrons who are keeping the show alive on patreon this show is listener supported you can be a part of that if you go to ask sciencemike.com and click the patreon button if you send a dollar a month that's great five dollars a month is phenomenal that little bit is what keeps the show viable and on the air and helps cover the cost of production and uh i really appreciate all my patrons who do that also for the show to go we always new dude questions so if you go to asksciencemike.com you can submit questions by either typing them or by recording your voice you can also tweet me using the hashtag asksciencemike and that'll put your question in for consideration for the program and huge thanks this some of the funniest itunes reviews we've ever had have been the last few weeks i read those the hilarious ones oh man i love them if you're wondering i love it when people rate the show but it's worth going to just read the reviews some of them are side-stitchingly funny so thanks to all you folks who have reviewed the show it helps people find out about it on itunes finally i want to thank andrew gallucki who's been doing our pre-production lately the show has gotten so much better with andrew's hand on the rudder here picking the questions i tend to dodge certain questions for a long time because i think they'll be too controversial or too hard to research and andrew doesn't let me so he's been picking the patreon poll questions and also helping me out in weeks like this where the time frame is so tight that there's no time for a poll he's still picking the questions doing a phenomenal job of course the show sounds amazing because of greg nordin and his work as the show's producer and our theme song is by jed botiford and people sing it to me all the time it's super catchy so i hope to see you uh in the next couple of months now oh what if you don't live in texas or portland or the southwest piece of cake if you go to ask sciencemike.com there's a book mic button in the upper right hand corner if you tap that button and fill out the form there's a lot of ways to get me there uh if you're in a market where i've got great downloads we can do ask science mike live and if you can help me get a venue and some volunteers and some airfare we can sell tickets and then there's no fee to get me in your city now that's got to be in a city where i've got enough downloads to make that viable but even if that's not the case i'm my speaking fees are pretty reasonable so i'd love to come to your part of the country all you've got to do is find an organization who wants to host some authentic conversation about science and faith and i'm there i can go to ask sciencemike.com and tap book mic obviously as you hear 2016 is booking really fast so if you're thinking about seeing me this year don't wait too long to start that process of talking with jim chafee and the folks at the chafing management group anyway thanks for listening everybody and i can't wait to see you next week