The Fog Of Misinformation

Back when I used to do a lot of stuff in the peace movement, during the first Gulf War in fact, this guy came up to us and said that Saddam Hussein burning oil fields should convince us that he was a madman and that the war was therefore a good thing. This struck me as totally weird because at that very moment I was thinking that that very incident was a big reason why the war was so wrong. It’s astonishing, sometimes, how the very same “evidence” can seem to convince two people to draw exactly opposite conclusions.

My understanding of rhetoric is extremely primitive and outdated, but I’m aware of the classic division into three factors: pathos, ethos and logos. I didn’t know this division at the time, but did think in this way. Logos is the use of rational arguments, ethos the reputation of the speaker and pathos the evocation of emotion. It’s actually slightly different from that if I remember correctly, such as eliciting sympathy in the audience. Ethos sounds similar to the argument from authority and ad hominem fallacies, but this is not so much about rational argument as how people are persuaded. Because rhetoric has been used so much for negative ends, this sounds like a nefarious approach, but it need not be so. For instance, it could be used to address someone’s anxieties or downheartedness and it needn’t be deceptive.

I think we all know this stuff is out there even if we don’t identify it, and we use it all the time, but naming things helps us notice and think about them. I was at this point, in 1991, naïve of them, but it occurred to me that arguments for the retention of nuclear weapons, the justification for the Gulf War and so forth at least aspired to be rational, and I didn’t want to play their game, because it seemed to me that this way of portraying things was an important part of patriarchal discourse, so I decided it would be more effective to argue emotionally. By that, I don’t at all mean crying, screaming and shouting. I did enough of that, mainly in the privacy of my own bedroom, but not in conversations with the general public or acquaintances. I should point out here that the 1991 Gulf War constituted a pivotal moment in my adult life, moving me in a direction I’m still pursuing now in 2023. Although I am talking about pathos here, Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperative were also important in my strategy.

Our children got really sick of hearing the Categorical Imperative from me, but I’ll repeat it here:

Act on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law of nature.

– Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten

(„Der kategorische Imperativ ist also nur ein einziger, und zwar dieser: handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.“).

This has several formulations in his work, and although I often quoted it, I don’t actually agree with it because it varies according to how an act is described. For instance, someone steals a loaf of bread from a bakery (24601?). Is that person depriving someone of a means of earning a living or are they trying to save their loved ones’ lives by preventing them from starving to death? Which universalisation is more appropriate. It can also be used disturbingly effectively as an argument against abortion: one cannot will that one’s life as a foetus be terminated, since one wouldn’t exist to do the willing. Since I view the ethics of abortion as the single central issue from which all ethics is derived, there must be a flaw in this argument and therefore probably in the Categorical Imperative itself. Nonetheless, it works well as a rhetorical device and appeal to the emotions.

One example of the kind of thing I used to say was, “if your mother was in Baghdad right now, would you feel okay about the city being bombed?”. This is a naked appeal to the emotions, but seeing as each person has infinite value (should be treated as an end rather than a means, as Kant would put it), it’s a fair one. I’m not saying this is an effective way of arguing. It’s particularly questionable if the person one’s talking to has a particularly bad relationship with their mother or is an orphan, and it feels kind of sneaky. I’m currently less persuaded that it’s the right approach, but maybe someone could come up with an emotive argument which will help me convince myself that it is.

Another area in which Kant comes into how I think about ego defences. Kant believed that the blizzard of sense impressions with which we are constantly assaulted is structured into a world as we understand it through things called categories. These include the likes of existence, non-existence, negation and plurality, to choose a few arbitrary examples. I noted at the time that the ego defences, such as rationalisation, projection, transference and so forth, were remarkably similar to categories, and drew from this the conclusion that we actually don’t use reason at all, or rather, we do, but it has an emotional “mould” to it. It isn’t a case of reason being one thing and emotion another, but reason at all times being dictated to and dependent upon emotion. This is because, to use a stereotype, we’re human. We’re not calculators or computers.

This is of course very consequential. For instance, it means that NVC is fundamentally misconceived and involves being in denial about the ineradicably emotional element of all thought. This is more significant to me than most people though. Another aspect of this is that we only ever fancifully imagine that we believe the things we do merely because of cold reasoning, because there is no such thing. What may happen, much of the time, is that we have an opinion and proceed to rationalise it by finding a reason to believe it. It’s only ever what we want to believe, not something we’ve concluded through logic. Another example: people who eat meat are highly motivated to reject veganism as an ethical position, meaning that they may want to believe that the species they eat are incapable of suffering, not conscious, unable to feel pain or perhaps feel less acutely than humans. They may then find reasons for this which skew their world view in other ways. For instance, Christine Battersby once argued to me that a non-language user was incapable of consciousness. This is highly convenient as such beings are almost literally voiceless, so it’s tantamount to saying that if you can’t speak, not only are you not entitled to an opinion but that you can’t even have one and don’t have interests to consider. You may understand why I feel rather strongly about this.

I may have moderated my position on this somewhat, because it’s potentially problematic. There seems to be such a thing as reality “out there” somewhere and emotional arguments seem to be persuasive in the face of evidence and to have major political consequences, and therefore consequences which affect people. It’s also very much the position of a privileged person. It’s substantially an attempt to compensate for one’s unconscious bias, as it might be put today, and the problem with that is that if it’s adopted by a member of a marginalised group it may cause further marginalisation, and possibly even get murdered or something as a result.

Therefore, we do unfortunately probably need good and apparently rational, evidence-based arguments, probably in all political and social arguments, or at least most. The use of emotive arguments seems to have led us to a position where people feel entitled to their own facts, and hence a lack of dialogue or mutual understanding. Another problem is that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and while we pursue emotional means of persuasion, we’re doing that if we succeed, and if we later turn out to be wrong, what are we supposed to do? Are we then supposed to use emotive arguments again? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Actually, I wanted to talk about climate change myths in this post, so that’s what I’ll do. Well, not so much myths as statements which are often made about the situation we find ourselves in. Partly to help myself, I’m going to make some bullet points:

• Cold weather refutes climate change
• Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is
• The current change is due to fluctuations which would’ve occurred anyway
• Some glaciers are growing
• Climate change is good for the environment
• Renewable power generation is bad
• Renewable power generation is too expensive
• The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is from volcanoes, not human sources
• Sunlike stars fluctuate like the Sun

It is true that the phrase “global warming” was swapped out for “(anthropogenic) climate change” a while back. This is because the latter describes what’s happening more precisely, and such changes are part of how science works. All conclusions in science are provisional and the model has shifted from a straightforward idea of trapped heat warming the whole surface of the planet indiscriminatedly to the idea of more energy from the Sun staying near Earth’s surface. Before I state that more clearly, I want to describe what happens.

This is what I went running and did Yoga in yesterday. Some of the yellow bits are notably washed out in the photo because they are giving off more light than the visible light falling on them from the Sun. This is fluorescence: some substances absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it in the visible range, at a different wavelength. Greenhouse gases do something similar. They absorb shorter wavelengths of light and re-emit them as infrared, including the wavelengths which constitute radiant heat. This causes more energy to stay in the lower part of the atmosphere than would otherwise happen. This is actually essential to life as we know it. Without greenhouse gases, the equator would be below freezing. Incidentally, I read this piece of information in ‘Everybody’s Book Of Facts’, published in 1939. That’s how long this has been known about, at least. The chief greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are water vapour and carbon dioxide, the former being much more powerful than the latter.

Trapping solar heat in the troposphere, the turbulent layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, is trapping solar energy. This increases the turbulence after which this layer is named, changing the fluctuation of the jet stream, boosting hurricanes and other storms. Although mean global temperature is rising because of this, it can mean colder weather in some places because of effects like evaporation increasing and making air more humid, thereby increasing rainful which takes heat out of the atmosphere, and causing masses of air to expand as they warm, pushing colder masses of air into other parts of the world which don’t usually have them. It supercharges climate rather than simply warming it.

As I’ve said, water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Venus used to have an ocean. This evaporated gradually, making its atmosphere very humid, and that trapped solar energy close to the surface. That heat then baked the carbon dioxide out of the rocks, ultimately leading to today’s scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead. This fact is sometimes used to suggest that the relatively small amount of carbon dioxide released in industrial processes is insignificant next to the much larger amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. This is wrong, because released carbon dioxide increases water evaporation which exacerbates the greenhouse effect.

Climate fluctuates constantly over geological time scales. It’s sometimes stated that global temperatures today are higher than at any time since the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. This is completely false. The highest temperatures since then were 41 million years ago during the Eocene. It’s hard to believe this because the axial tilt was the same as today, meaning that the lands of the midnight Sun were subtropical even during months of darkness. Nonetheless this was so. It is true that it’s the hottest it’s been since humans evolved, and that’s more significant because we’re used to living on a cooler planet than we currently have. The rate of change is also important.

The current cycle of ice ages and warmer intervals is due to Milankovitch cycles. When I Googled that, “Milankovitch cycles GCSE” popped up, so I’m not going to bother to talk about them specifically because I presume it’s part of a general secondary education, but I will say that we’re supposed to be due for another ice age and the fact that it’s hotter on average than it has been for many centuries merely means the ice age we would’ve had otherwise is actually mitigating climate change, and this is far from the usual cycle.

Some glaciers are growing. This is pointed to by a few climate change deniers as evidence against global warming. However, the glaciers which are growing are unusual. This illustration shows Sermeq Kujalleq, the Jakobshavn Glacier in Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland), which is fed by a cyclical cold water current which varies, so it grows and shrinks over several years. This current has been altered by climate change, which as I’ve said involves the capture of more energy from the Sun in our global systems rather than simple temperature increase. The question to be answered here is how to ensure that something like this doesn’t look like an excuse or cherry-picking to an outsider, and unfortunately the answer is probably that people need to know, for their own sake and the sake of making political decisions, how science ideally works. It may not be enough to know why one particular glacier is growing. There are others, but the overall trend is shrinkage.

How do we know that the source of the increasing mean global temperature is not from the Sun? This one is quite straightforward: the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere cooling. The turbulent portion of Earth’s atmosphere, where most of what we would generally think of as weather is happening, ends where it stops getting colder with height, at the tropopause. Above this, air currents move horizontally, hence the name “stratosphere”. This layer shows a cooling trend, and is, like the rest of the atmosphere, exposed to the Sun. This is happening because greenhouse gases trap heat lower down, preventing light and heat which would otherwise reflect off the surface from warming the stratosphere. If global warming were due to the Sun warming the planet as part of some kind of cycle or warming trend, the stratosphere would be warming, but it’s cooling, so the simplest explanation, i.e. the most scientific one, is that climate change is not due to fluctuations in solar activity.

The influence of solar radiation on a body is referred to as “radiative forcing”, which is the rate of change of energy through a surface caused by climate change factors, measured in watts per square metre. Due to the peculiar nature of the troposphere, with its turbulent winds, cloud cover and precipitation, it only makes sense to measure this outside that layer of atmosphere, at the tropopause and the top of the stratosphere. This does vary, due to Earth having an elliptical orbit around the Sun and therefore receiving less radiation from it in the northern summer than the northern winter. This seems to many people to be the wrong way round, incidentally. It also varies because the Sun has a sunspot cycle as mentioned on my post on that star. This lasts eleven years, and involves a build-up of sunspots, which are cooler and therefore emit less light than the general photosphere of the Sun, which then wanes again, making the Sun slightly variable. These fluctuations are not reflected in the trend towards global warming, and therefore changes in solar activity are not responsible for the current change in climate.

One response to the arguments against anthropogenic climate change being lost is to say that climate change is a good thing. This can be made in several ways. In recent decades, a vineyard has been established in my birth village in Kent, and it produces very nice white wine. This has been made possible by climate change, and it presumably benefits the economy of the South of England. Norwegian wine now exists too. Wildlife moves away from the Equator. There are little egrets in the local bourne here in the East Midlands who have only arrived in the last few years. Because plants need carbon dioxide, the increase in the atmosphere is said to promote their growth, making arable farming more productive. However, this increased productivity is not accompanied by any increase in soil minerals or vitamins in the crops, so the result is a watered-down version of these crops, and other food plants, with more carbs without more vitamins and minerals. Some of the species moving away from the Equator bring infectious diseases with them, for instance ticks. Summer 2023 has brought an increase in insect bites in Britain. Moreover, the species which can move, which can be to higher altitudes or in the sea greater depths as well as towards the poles, can do so, but some can’t. This increases the risk of further pandemics. Beavers moving north have caused problems for the Inuit, that is, competition between humans and beavers. To some extent, humans are intellectually resourceful and adaptable, but competition with other species is not necessarily going to benefit any of them. Invasive species are more difficult to manage if they originated from warmer climates. Also, in the very hottest parts of the planet’s surface, the climate can become completely uninhabitable for some species, as can be seen with the deaths of Australian fruit bats. This translates, as usual, into problems for the poorest communities in the world, as they tend to live in its hottest regions.

Michael Moore is known for producing critically-acclaimed documentaries which oppose establishment views. Sadly though, this did not apply to his ‘Planet Of The Humans’, for which he’s executive producer, which focusses on the environmental damage caused by renewable power sources. There is a lot to be said about this film, but if I said it all it would turn this post into a debunking of the film as opposed to a survey of climate change denial arguments, so I’m going to provide a short summary. Clips from the early part of the documentary showed a solar-powered festival from the 1990s before renewable technology had improved to the point where the issues shown, where the electricity ended up having to come from the grid, are no longer important. Likewise the clip about the electric car which is recharged using mainly coal-fired power stations dates from 2010 and the situation has improved a lot since then. Comparisons are made between the open cast mining of coal which removes entire mountain tops with the siting of wind turbines on mountains when in fact this is far less destructive and the shots of the deforestation ignored the fact that whereas an open cast coal mine is pretty permanent damage, the trees would grow back in a few years for the wind turbine site. There were then some contentious comments about ethanol and hydrogen power, which are probably true but also accepted by environmentalists, who don’t recommend their use. I’m going to have to find out more about the hydrogen power issue as it seems to have changed recently, but my possibly obsolete understanding is that hydrogen works as a way of storing power rather than being a specific fuel in itself. That is, although it’s a fuel, it’s generated by electrolysis and the source of electricity for that is what matters. Solar panels are now very efficient. They bring in twenty times the cost of manufacture in power over their working lives, and their decline in efficiency is gradual, so it isn’t like they suddenly stop working after that period. Hence even if they are manufactured using only fossil fuels, this is because those fuels were what happened to provide that energy and not because that’s the only way that energy could ever be provided. The documentary also ignores the possibility of roof-based solar power rather than power plants taking up a lot of unoccupied land elsewhere. The intermittent nature of solar and wind power can now be addressed using the more efficient batteries which are now on the market, as found for example in power walls. The investment of one unit of fossil fuel generated energy into producing solar panels and installing them is likely to produce twenty times that in clean energy. Wind power, it’s twice as efficient as that. The film also blames the problem on overpopulation, but the issue here is that the communities whose population is growing fastest are those using the least energy. Moreover, consumption is growing twice as fast as the population. This is basically about blaming Black people, as it’s White Westerners who are the biggest part of the problem.

There are two issues related to this which I want to look into but can’t comment upon yet as I’m mainly doing this off the top of my head. One is the source of materials for batteries and the other is environmental damage caused by wind turbines. However, I will say this: I have long advocated for orbital solar power as the solution, which would involve materials taken from lunar sources rather than terrestrial ones and completely circumvent any problems arising from ground-based solar and wind power while allowing microwave receiving stations to be sited in areas which are less economically developed, making those countries wealthier.

Getting back to a more general point, increases in carbon dioxide are often blamed on the gas coming out of volcanoes. However, this is relatively constant, barring mass extinction events and various uncommon calamities, and it’s the extra emissions which are important. The planet and its biosphere is used to the vast amounts of CO₂ which maintain its surface temperatures at habitable levels. It’s the extra which constitutes the problem, which is many times as much annually as volcanic carbon dioxide emissions. And this extra is sometimes said not to be from fossil fuels. In fact, the excess CO₂ can be traced definitively to fossil fuels because the isotope profile in that gas is the same as in fossil fuels and not at all the same as in volcanic emissions. This also means that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be firmly laid at the door of human activity.

I’m just going to explain how this works. Each chemical element has the same number of protons in its nuclei, but the number of neutrons varies. For instance, carbon always has six protons but may have six, seven or eight neutrons. Elements exposed to certain forms of radiation can also become other elements or different isotopes of the same elements. It’s probably too obvious to state, but this is the basis of carbon dating because when carbon dioxide is exposed to the atmosphere, cosmic rays change a certain fraction of its carbon from carbon 12 to carbon 14 or convert nitrogen and oxygen to carbon at a known rate, leading to a known proportion in a living organism which changes when it dies at a known rate, allowing its age to be estimated. It has many other uses. For instance, oxygen 16 and 18 are used to measure water temperatures in ice core samples and calcium isotopes can be used as evidence for the source of food being marine or terrestrial when human bones are recovered from ancient sites.

Living matter very much prefers carbon 12 to carbon 13, and this was so for the organisms who became coal and oil. This is not so for volcanic emissions, which just emit what the expected profile of carbon isotopes would be in the form expected from sources without biological involvement. This can also be used to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is not simply incorporated in a larger biomasse. Hence even if carbon emissions fluctuate from year to year due to volcanic eruptions, it’s still possible to separate the volcanic and industrial sources, and the emissions cannot therefore be blamed on volcanoes.

I realise that I’ve stirred up quite a few questions as well as answering some, so I plan to address those too. These include the ethics of battery manufacture and supply chains, the “U”K government’s approach to energy policy, the issue of hydrogen and various other things. However, that’ll do for now. Please do correct me if I’m wrong and let me know what you think.

My Orphanhood And Science

I’ve been very quiet on here lately due to pressure of organising things related to my mother’s death and my father’s probate, so I’m coming back to report here on a particularly affecting thought about my mother which I think illustrates something about science as it relates to feelings. But first things first.

My father died last June. One of the last things he said was a series of names of more or less binary compounds such as ammonium sulphide. I’ve never heard of this kind of thing happening before, but this is similar to something which happened with the mother of a friend recently too, whose details I don’t remember. My father had, among other things, been an industrial chemist, and we won’t know until we get there I suppose, but it seems to me that this was a sign of how firmly ingrained his scientific knowledge was in his memory that this happened. I also found it notable that this particular compound, which is used in stink bombs, has the formula (NH₄)₂S. It may mean nothing, but it does have the same initials as National Health Service. Then again, maybe he could just smell something, or was perhaps hallucinating its odour. I really don’t know.

At the end of March this year, my mother also died. They were long since divorced, so there’s probably no direct connection between these two events happening in the space of a year. It isn’t like my mother missed her husband, for example, and the differences between their ages probably doesn’t mean that anything about their lifestyle when they were together would have resulted in their deaths being close together. I could imagine that my mother still held some deep, residual affection for my father of course, but I really don’t think she did. Going down this route would probably involve imagining patterns where there are none, and this brings me once again to science, which is in a way an attempt to find out which patterns are based in reality and which ones aren’t. Given this, my late father’s recitation of chemical formulae isn’t scientific but just part of the vocabulary of science. If he’d been at all musical, maybe he would’ve hummed a tune or something similar. It is true, of course, that centuries of understanding and investigation got humanity from atomic theory in the time of Democritus and the four elements of Empedocles to a point where we understood that there were around a hundred different main types of atom which joined together through the operation of electrical forces in certain numbers to form molecules and other compounds, which are expressed through such names as “ammonium sulphide”, but the actual name of the compound is more the culture of science than science itself. It’s almost like poetry. These things can be conjoured up in technobabble by using two surnames with a hyphen between them followed by a technical sounding word, so for example the Banks-Tortora Effect, Auerbach-Gould Analysis or the Brock-Pearson Principle. These are just surnames I read off nearby books, but don’t they sound clever and technical?

All that said, real scientific findings can have real emotional impact, and my recent bereavement is no exception.

My mother was a remarkably kind and selfless person, and a non-scientific but nonetheless true way of looking at her life would be to say she didn’t deserve the misfortunes which afflicted her. A few years ago, I was casting about for a neutral way to describe what pro-lifers call an “unborn child” and what pro-choicers tend to call a “fetus”, and thought about using the term “the products of conception”. This, however, was firmly rejected by mothers I knew who had had miscarriages, and the question is still open. The words we use to describe scientific phenomena matter when they are used by people who are directly emotionally affected by them. A notorious example is the tendency for genes to be referred to by whimsical names such as “sonic hedgehog”. This is a gene found in most species of multicellular animals. Now known as the SHH gene, this encodes a signalling protein responsible for regulating the formation of organs, the central nervous system and limbs in humans, and has similarly important roles in other animals, including fruit flies. If it malfunctions in fruit flies, it produces a spiny embryo, hence the name. However, as genetics became more advanced and applied to human medicine, the gene’s name began to crop up in conversations about a lethal fetal condition known as holoprosencephaly, where the brain doesn’t separate into two hemispheres in utero, which as well as being fatal can lead to horrific facial features which I’m not going to go into. Therefore, the practice of using these playful names came to an end. When scientific findings come up against personal life, things can get distressing and upsetting.

Well, I am going to go there, mainly to show that science is not just this abstract thing which is “out there” and has no influence on how we feel about stuff.

I am my mother’s eldest child and have a younger brother. Between us, my mother gave birth to three children who were all premature but also potentially viable. In other circumstances, for instance paediatrics being a decade more advanced at the time, they would probably have survived, although each one was probably only conceived because the last one hadn’t been. This is the kind of sadness I almost feel shouldn’t be mentioned in public, and do feel shouldn’t be profited from. So I’ll state this as a cold, ruthless fact: my mother lost three babies between me and my brother. Not fetuses. Not that scientific term, and also not fetuses because of taking a position on the pro-choice/pro-life issue, but because they actually were babies. I don’t want to take away from anyone who has had a miscarriage either by denying that they too have lost a child, but I also want to assert that these were babies, born at the same stage of development as my brother, currently running marathons and living in the south of Spain with his partner, and in other circumstances it would be one of them who was doing something similarly “real person”-y today, although in that case it would be they who was my younger sibling rather than my brother. All of these are lives not lived, which ended perhaps a century earlier than they would, and which would’ve touched and resulted in other lives. But we’ll never find out because their remains are currently interred in a cemetery in Kent, and have been for over half a century. Perhaps my mother will have a memorial near them one day.

Okay, so a process of scientific enquiry led fairly recently to a surprising finding among people who had born children: some of those who had had boys were found to have XY diploid cells in their bodies, in a situation called “microchimerism”. It was found both that people whose cell lines had no Y chromosomes who had never been pregnant had no Y chromosomes in their bodies, which is hardly surprising, but that those who had had children with Y chromosomes did. This is not about sex or gender though. What this means is that cells from the fetus cross over into the maternal body and take up residence in their bodies, even in their brains, as stem cells and later develop into the appropriate cell, so for example they alter the microscopic anatomy of the brain and even participate in what is going on in that brain. It happens with female fetuses too: the only significance of the Y chromosomes here is that they happen to have indicated that something remarkable was happening with fetal cells and the maternal body. The interpretation of the fetal cells healing brain damage could go either way. It could be seen as the child controlling the parent’s mind or as a way the child is healing the parent.

The fetal cells don’t just occupy the brain. They have also been found in the pancreas, bone marrow, skin and liver. I may practically have been directly looking at my siblings when I looked at my mother. They also persist for decades, perhaps life-long. Hence it’s possible, and I choose to believe, unscientifically but still perhaps correctly, that part of my siblings was physically still with my mother until the day she died. Hence in that sense it’s possible that all of them lived into their fifties.

There’s something else though.

Another recent finding in human biology, and actually zoology in general, is what happens after an animal dies. A sketchy definition of death for vertebrates such as ourselves might be the point at which the respiratory centres of the brain irreversibly cease to respond to an increase in carbon dioxide levels in the blood. Now there are three sets of respiratory centres in the brain: in the pons, which is responsible for rhythm of breathing, the ventral centres in the medulla oblongata and the dorsal group in the nucleus tractus solitarius. It clearly isn’t a strict definition of death because artificial ventilation might keep the rest of the body functioning at this point, and clearly the rest of the brain might hypothetically continue to function even if they’ve been permanently damaged, and I don’t know if things ever happen this way round. Probably a better way to understand death would be irreversible cessation of brain stem function more generally. Note also that I’m saying “irreversible” rather than “permanent”, because permanent cessation of function may be irreversible without anything ever happening to reverse it, as with someone who doesn’t receive CPR or a defibrillator shock but might have, and therefore would’ve survived. Here again, the coldness of the scientific understanding is mixed with feelings of desperation and poignancy about someone who could’ve survived but didn’t because of the circumstances they found themselves in.

There’s a fragmentary memory here I have that individual cells from a human brain have been induced to function and divide, so presumably not neurones which can’t divide except in certain very localised regions, even twelve hours after death. This might hypothetically mean that a clinically dead body could have the injury repaired long after death as we understand it today, particularly in circumstances where metabolism and decomposition have been slowed or halted by such things as hypothermia. Maybe a body lying at the bottom of a frozen lake in winter or in a mortuary freezer, for example. But this all smacks of the bargaining stage of grief of course. The fact is that none of that now applies to my mother, who died in a hospital bed and whose corpse was still there several hours later before, presumably, being removed by the undertakers or going to the morgue.

However, there is more. Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was discovered that – well, I’m going to need to set out how genes work to maximise the chances of this making sense. DNA unravels and one of the strands is copied using transfer RNA, which then moves to the ribosomes of the cell and is turned into proteins. Like most processes in the cell, this requires energy, which is usually liberated from glucose and linked to the metabolic processes in the cell via adenosine triphosphate, hence my blog post ‘Sodding Phosphorus!’ a few entries back. Most of the energy liberated is helped by oxygen, which is why we need it, and of course free oxygen is not available to most of the body after someone has stopped breathing. This seems to have taken us quite a long way from the emotional side of what I’m talking about, although as I write this description I’m acutely aware than my mother did stop breathing forever a few weeks ago, so there is that. Anyway, due to the fact that most of this process benefits dramatically from the availability of oxygen, it might be concluded that it stops when someone dies. But, as I was saying, around the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was discovered that some genes continue to be expressed after death. This is known as the “thanatotranscriptome”, from the Greek “θανατος”, meaning “death”, and “transcriptome” by analogy with “genome”: all of the RNA transcriptions which occur in the internal organs of the body after death. Some of these are simply ongoing processes, but some are long since inactivated which spring back into action. This goes on for up to forty-eight hours after death. In “cold-blooded” animals it can be even longer.

Clearly cells are really complicated, and quickly break down as the carbon dioxide builds up, makes their internals more acidic and the temperature changes, usually by falling, but given that there are so many cells in the human body, not all of them just conk out immediately after death and some of those which do will have bits of their machinery still active. Significantly, one set of genes that does stop working is the suppressor genes, which are there to prevent other genes from expressing themselves and causing cancer, i.e. the oncogenes. Other genes which have stopped working seemingly permanently are the ones involved in fetal development and in the ovum. These two briefly come back into action after someone dies. Mammals, being “warm-blooded”, don’t express quite as many of these genes as, for example, fish, presumably because our bodies don’t just need oxygen but also higher temperatures than in most corpses to function, but even in us, more than five hundred genes will still be “working” out of the total genome of around twenty-odd thousand, so that’s actually more than two percent of them, which seems like a lot to me considering they’re in a dead person. Some of the genes are involved in inflammation and the immune system, which is not surprising as death is a very serious injury with the decomposition presumably being interpreted as infection. Here again I feel a sense of urgency and futility, and a kind of mixed feeling of despair that my mother’s dead body made some last-ditch attempt to defend itself against its decomposition and cried for help, as it were, which could never come. That’s grim.

This, though, was a body which had been pregnant several times, and which may, and this is not certain but I have a hunch that it did, have contained minute parts of the bodies of my dead siblings, lying almost dormant since the start of the 1970s, in the form of isolated fetal cells. In particular, considering that it is fetal genes that specifically ramp up after death, these cells would briefly, for maybe a couple of days, in a sense, and a very broken manner, resume the development which was interrupted by their untimely deaths all that time ago, and for a short period of time my mother’s other babies would in a sense be in a kind of half-living state during which they would vainly attempt to continue the development which would’ve enabled them to survive if they had been born later. In fact, considering that each time one of them was born, their chances of survival may have been higher than their elder siblings, just maybe these fatally injured cells would have in some ways reached the stage when they would have survived if they had been born. For instance, maybe there were lung cells secreting the surfactant which enables a baby’s lungs to expand properly at birth which actually had genes reach that stage and begin to manufacture that life-saving substance, only fifty-two years too late.

And then it was to no avail, because my mother’s body ended up at the undertakers, in the mortuary, in a casket, and now of course cremated, and all this in any case in an 89-year old body which had failed to stay alive.

I find this thought most disturbing. There might be things it’s better not to dwell on, but maybe if someone dwells on this for long enough in the right way, it will save lives. Even if not, it serves as an illustration of how apparently abstract and obscure scientific findings do not necessarily leave one cold if one can bring them sufficiently into focus in everyday or real life (or real death) terms. When I studied pathology, I was left with the impression that it’s primarily about the body’s desperate attempts to keep healthy from an initially very tiny imbalance that just ends up snowballing. This has a similar kind of feel to it, in that it made me sad to think of my mother’s body’s, and her children’s bodies’ including mine and my brother’s, efforts to do what they were “supposed” to do against impossible odds.

And that last bit, the realisation that some of my own cells died with my mother, means that part of me literally died with her sometime between her clinical death on 29th March and my father’s first missed birthday on 2nd April 2023.