Scientists think Earth doomed: I disagree

We're 44 percent doomed and it's our own fault.

That's not me saying it. It's science!

According to a paper published in the journal Science last week and written about on the blog site Science 2.0 (it has to be real science! Otherwise, they couldn't write about it in Science and on Science 2.0!), the Earth has crossed four of nine "planetary boundaries" that keep it functioning well.

According to the paper, the four "boundaries" that are already beyond that point of no return (Incidentally, there was a 1977 album by Kansas called "Point of Know Return." It included "Dust in the Wind.") are climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff. Of the four, I kind of understand climate change.

The paper says that for approximately the past 12,000 years, our planet was stable. Starting about 100 years ago, human occupation began to wear on Earth like a relative who stays too long and starts helping himself to food from the refrigerator. Now four of the nine significant indicators are fouled up.

The report focused particularly on the biochemical cycles. While attempting to understand, I drifted off and starting thinking of other cycles – the triple is the hardest part of baseball's "hitting for the cycle," unicycles seem impossible to ride, the song "Circle of Life" should be "Cycle of Life."

Then it hit me: I suspect the scientists are focused on the wrong things, because everybody knows that if you lose something, you can always replace it. There are always other fish in the sea. There's more than one way to skin a cat. I'm sure there are other PETA-unfriendly sayings, too.

So what if we've screwed up things in the past 100 years? Think of all the great things we've added – things that make life better.

A century ago, many homes didn't have indoor plumbing. They lacked Internet access. Not only was there no "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," there was no TV! Major League Baseball was limited to 16 teams in the East.

More?

How about microwave popcorn? Starbucks? Cellphones? The zipper (I think it was invented earlier, but go with me here)? Nyquil?

I'll take what we have now for what we had in 1915, even with the loss of the stuff I don't understand.

Are you going to tell me that the invention of the automobile, the eradication of polio, the institution of the eight-hour workday and discovery of antibiotics don't offset the "loss of biosphere integrity"?

Balderdash.

I'm not buying that we're doomed – or even 44 percent doomed. The scientists say that conditions during the past 12,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch (like how the 1990s were known as the Tupac epoch), we lived in a world that was perfectly suited for us.

Then World War I kicked off, movie theaters opened and John Garamendi began running for office. That's when things started going downhill, according to the guys in white coats, who insist that we're nearly halfway to blowing it all.

"It might be possible for human civilization to live outside Holocene conditions, but it's never been tried before," co-author Steve Carpenter says.

I'll just say this. Steve Carpenter is a fine name for an athlete or an auto mechanic or someone who attended high school with you. But a scientist? Nah.

You can have science and all its "smarts." I remember this: Science brought us New Coke, Bruce Jenner's new face(s) and the steroids era in baseball. If science tells me we've blown 44 percent of our important "boundaries," I say this: We've still got a 56 percent chance. Oh, and I just looked it up and saw that the term "zipper" started being used in 1923.

Trust me, we'll be fine.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Diabetes will be the death of me – soon

My day, as usual, was going along pretty well. I walked around whistling the theme from "The Andy Griffith Show" while waving at people and thinking, "There's no such thing as strangers, just friends I haven't met."

Then I saw the article and everything turned gloomy.

The headline said, "Type 1 Diabetes Linked To Lower Life Expectancy."

Oh no.

I'm doomed.

The article was on the website WebMD, where you go to find out if your illness could be fatal. It's a great place to terrorize yourself.

This terrorized me.

According to a recent Scottish study, men who have Type 1 diabetes (which I have) "lose about 11 years of life expectancy compared to men without the disease." Women lose 13 years.

What? Whaaaa? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa?

I read on, learning that the big danger is to our hearts and that men with my condition have an average life expectancy of 66 years, compared to 77 for those without it. For women, the numbers are 68 and 81.

Here's a secret: I'm within 20 (OK, 15) years of that expected life span.

This is not good news. Let's face it, if my life were a book, I'm closer to the appendix than the table of contents. I thought there were still plenty of chapters left. But now?

They're telling me it's almost over (and I haven't even completed two of my bucket-list items: Golfing with Wayne Newton and watching every episode of "Gilligan's Island").

Here's what makes me mad: When I became a diabetic at age 14 – back when we just had three TV networks and "Google" was an outdated reference to a comic-strip character named "Barney Google" – my doctor sat me down and gave me the low-down on what the disease meant. He said that it would likely take 10 years off my life.

Big deal! I was 14! I was more concerned that I couldn't drink chocolate milk!

Fast-forward several decades. After the invention of accurate blood-testing strips, insulin pumps, the invention of NutraSweet, cholesterol-control medicine and more, they say it will reduce my life span by . . . 11 years.

It's worse now?

Diabetes already let me down once (when I campaigned to have my disease renamed "Brad Stanhope Syndrome," much like Lou Gehrig, Alois Alzheimer and Cy Nusinfection), but this is worse.

This is the 1994 baseball season, which ended in August. This is watching a two-hour TV program only to find that your DVR stopped recording after 90 minutes. This is finding out that the food you've been hiding was eaten by someone else. This isn't fair!

I tell myself that the numbers won't apply to me, since I consider myself bulletproof. I remind myself that people who have strict control of the disease do better. I acknowledge that modern technology has allowed us to track and adjust blood-sugar levels. I consider that the explosion of Type 2 diabetes (really a different disease) has led to many breakthroughs in treatment.

One doctor in the article pointed out that it wasn't until the 1980s that the medical community figured out how to best use insulin to control blood sugar levels (What? I was a diabetic before that and they acted like they knew what they were doing!). He reminded his interviewer that people in the 1920s with Type 1 diabetes had a life expectancy of less than a year. He said we don't know what will happen next.

So maybe things aren't as gloomy as the report indicated. Maybe all those people dying at 66 got hit by trucks, struck by lightning or killed by Wayne Newton on a golf course.

Or maybe they read WebMD articles that said statistics they believed all their lives were wrong. Maybe they found out that their childhood doctor was making things up.

I can always hope. And eliminate the Wayne Newton thing off my bucket list, just in case.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

When my car disappeared at a BART station

A 12-year-old Chinese boy received a certain amount of notoriety recently when he was lost for six days in an IKEA store.

The kid actually spent nearly a week inside the store (and it was a real week, not the "it feels like a week" experience that many of us have in big-box stores). It started when he got into a fight with his mom over homework (so much for thinking that was strictly an American problem) and left the house. Days later, police found him, "very weak with hunger" and rushed him to a local hospital.

It seems silly, but it happens to all of us.

Because you don't have to be in a huge store to lose your way.

It can happen even in public places. Even when it seems impossible to get lost. Even when places are labeled and parking spots are marked.

Such as a Bay Area Rapid Transit station.

Seriously.

Several years ago, I was covering the postseason for the San Francisco Giants and took BART to San Francisco from the North Concord station. After a game, I returned home, arrived at my station and got off the train, thinking about my drive home.

Things were going well. The game ended early and now I could be in bed at a reasonable time. I walked to the parking lot and looked.

And looked.

I couldn't find my car.

I was pretty sure I'd parked it near the station's entrance, but it wasn't there. I obviously remembered it incorrectly, so I decided to be practical and systematic. I'd walk each line of cars until I found my Saturn. (Mrs. Brad likely doesn't believe this. Her view is that I go nuts when I get confused and act more like Professor Irwin Corey than James Bond. But trust me, I was like Agent 007 on this occasion.)

I strolled up one row and down another. Up and down. I started losing my cool because my car wasn't there. It had obviously been stolen.

Stolen!

From a BART parking lot. I was stuck – should I call the police? If so, which department – Concord or BART? Should I call Mrs. Brad? Should I start shouting and hope the car thief returned?

My car was stolen from a BART parking lot! I was lost in North Concord!

This was going to be a disaster. I didn't have a car and I was stuck, 30 miles from home, late at night.

I walked back into the station, looking for a pay phone. And as I walked, I looked up . . . and saw a sign.

I was at the Pittsburgh-Bay Point BART station, one stop beyond North Concord. I wasn't lost. My car wasn't stolen. (Well, maybe I was lost, but my car wasn't stolen.)

I slinked back into the station, realized I had to pay extra since I'd ridden BART past my stop (it was then that I remembered that I'd jumped the BART turnstile when the stupid thing told me my ticket wasn't enough upon arrival) and got back on the train heading west.

It was a combination of relief that my car wasn't stolen and embarrassment that I missed my spot and went all Irwin Corey in the parking lot.

So maybe that Chinese kid wasn't lost. Maybe he just thought he was in a Home Depot or Costco.

Hey, it happens to the best of us.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Become a better writer in 2 simple steps

The young reporter walked into the office where his boss waited, like you wait when it takes a long time to be served at a restaurant.

"Sit down," the boss grumbled, pointing to a chair with his right index finger.

The reporter swallowed hard. The kind of swallow that hurts your Adam's apple. He sat down.

"You're probably wondering why you're here," the boss declared.

"I have no idea," the reporter stammered.

The editor sat back in his cheap, leather chair and raised his feet onto his chair, putting his legs at about a 12 percent angle to his hips, which is pretty steep. Maybe 9 percent would be more accurate.

"I wouldn't bring you in if it wasn't something important," the editor groused. "This isn't about things that can get you fired, it's just a few things that you need to know. They will make you a better writer."

The reporter felt relief, like when you get a letter from the Internal Revenue Service, but it's a contest entry, not an audit. Although the IRS doesn't run contests.

"That's good news," he whispered. "Really good."

The room got quiet. As quiet as a room gets when no one is speaking and you hear that weird noise that sounds like air moving around inside your head.

"It's about a writing style. You need to make some changes," the editor pronounced. "You do a good job on most thing, but you have two huge problems."

The reporter was concerned.

Libel? Spelling? Sloppiness? A tendency to end five consecutive sentences with a question mark? Something else?

"I don't want to be guilty of making the same mistakes over and over," the reporter disclosed. "What's wrong?"

The editor looked over his glasses at the reporter, which was tough because he had his glasses on his forehead. He had to slam his chin into his chest so hard that it bruised both.

"Your first problem is word choice," he growled. "There's nothing wrong with finding a good word and using it over and over and over."

The reporter sighed. Then he nodded his head, which is always confusing because when an author writes that someone nods their head, some readers aren't sure if that means side to side or up and down. But "nod" means up and down, while "shake" means side to side, despite the fact that it's possible to shake up and down.

"So what's wrong with my word choice?" he queried.

"It's mostly when you do interviews. You have a tendency to–"

"Interrupt people?" the reporter articulated.

"No. It's not that, it's that you often–"

"Don't let people finish their thoughts?" the reporter announced.

"No. Stop interrupting. The problem is more basic than that," the editor shouted.

In the newsroom, people stopped working. Like a strike, but without the passion.

"I think the kid reporter is getting set straight," a veteran reporter harrumped to his co-workers.

"I hope not," squeaked a sensitive reporter, who squinted her eyes because she was sensitive to light, too. Even though the light was as weak as wet tissue paper.

"Here's the problems," the editor explained. "You never use the word 'said.' You go out of your way to use other words, but you never use 'said.' You should always use 'said.' "

"I understand that," quipped the reporter, in a way that reminded everyone of springtime in Paris, although they didn't know why. "What's the other problem?"

"You over-describe things that readers don't care about, sometimes using ridiculous similes."

"I understand," agreed the reporter, nodding his head up and down, like a man watching a yo-yo competition. "I'll work on it."

Everyone asserted that those were good ideas.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.