They say it’s a small world and getting smaller. In many ways that’s true. Thanks to the many advances in transportation and communication over the last hundred years, it’s easy to think sometimes that the world is more like a big town. Especially with the rise of social media over the last ten years, we can actually have regular conversations with people thousands of miles away. Even though TARTLE is a small company, we have team members all around the world. So yes, it’s very easy to think of the world as small and getting smaller. Yet, it’s still very physically big. When something happens on the other side of the Atlantic or even on the other side of the country, it’s very easy to think of it as not really affecting us, certainly not how it might be affecting our health.
Yet, this where we have to realize that while the world may be big enough that things don’t directly affect us, it is still small enough that we are indirectly affected by a lot of things. There are plenty of examples.
Turn the clock all the way back to 9/11/01 when terrorists flew a pair of passenger liners into the World Trade Center in New York. For weeks after, flights were grounded. That led to a measurable increase in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, sunlight that normally is blocked by contrails.
More recently are all the wildfires in the western United States in the summer of 2020. Dry weather and poor forest management caused what in the US was a worse than average wildfire season. The immediate effects were of course loss of millions of acres of forest, loss of homes for many and loss of life. So much burned that it also had a significant effect on the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. So much particulate went into the upper atmosphere that it affected the colors during sunrise and sunset at least as far away as Michigan. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the sheer amount of smoke and other particles in the air is going to have an effect on people’s respiratory health. In fact, it’s actually possible that the wildfires and the subsequent respiratory effects helped fuel the summer COVID spike that was seen in the United States.
Or recall the big storm that went through the plain states last fall, destroying millions of acres of crops. Fallout from that affects food prices which in turn affects people’s ability to get quality food, which in turn affects long term health.
One doesn’t even need to invoke climate change to make this point. If a water treatment plant is poorly maintained or its capacity is overwhelmed due to excess water usage or too many chemicals getting flushed down the drain it can cause a failure that leads to significant river contamination, which has a downstream effect on fish and other things, such as treatment plants that take water out of the river for nearby towns.
A single cigarette tossed out the window or poorly managed campfire can turn into something that affects people thousands of miles away. One mistake in quarantine procedures can lead to an invasive species such as Asian Carp taking over whole river systems, causing significant effects on the overall food supply.
How to track all of this and its long term effects on the globe? We need data, and as always, the closer we can get to the source of that data the better. This is exactly why TARTLE is set up the way it is. We provide buyers the ability to connect not just with random information, but with individuals who generate data every day and who can generate more if need be. Want to know how food prices are affected by a big storm? Go ask people how prices are going up in their area. How is health getting affected? Go directly to the hospitals and clinics around the country and find out how many are admitted to the ER and for what. Or ask people if they are getting new prescriptions, or if exercising outside is more difficult since the wildfires started. Data like this is exactly what is necessary to determine the effects of our behaviors on the world and what things we can change to make a difference.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Yet, this where we have to realize that while the world may be big enough that things don’t directly affect us, it is still small enough that we are indirectly affected by a lot of things. There are plenty of examples.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, to where humanities gets into the future, and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:25):
The reckoning of the climate is on your front doorstep, you just have not been paying attention.
Jason Rigby (00:32):
Alex, melting ice caps, warmer oceans, intense storms, heat waves, droughts, floods, and wildflowers.
Alexander McCaig (00:39):
Wildflowers?
Jason Rigby (00:40):
Yes, I love wildflowers.
Alexander McCaig (00:40):
Ooh, that sounds good to be you.
Jason Rigby (00:41):
Wildfires.
Alexander McCaig (00:43):
Was it Walt Whitman or Ralph Waldo Emerson that says, "It's not what you're looking at that matters, it's what you see?"
Jason Rigby (00:52):
Severe hurricanes.
Alexander McCaig (00:55):
Yeah. A lot of people are not affected by huge torrential flooding in the United States.
Jason Rigby (01:03):
The natural disaster happened to those other people.
Alexander McCaig (01:06):
It happened 12,000 miles away, it does not matter to me.
Jason Rigby (01:08):
Yeah, it doesn't affect me.
Alexander McCaig (01:09):
Yeah. Well, guess what? It does affect you. Let's talk about how this affects you.
Jason Rigby (01:12):
I love this.
Alexander McCaig (01:13):
New York Times pushed out an article with some data that was coming from George Mason University, and two researchers for the Institute of Climate Change, something like that, what is the institute before I just absolutely botch that?
Jason Rigby (01:25):
Climate Change Communication at the Edward W. Maibach at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
Alexander McCaig (01:32):
Yeah, there we go. Okay, so what they want to do is, they want to show the effects of climate change that may be happening somewhere else on the globe, and you'll be like, "Oh, that doesn't really affect me because it's an environmental thing," until you realize the actual effect on your health, and your mental state and the possibility of other illnesses borne of higher temperatures.
Jason Rigby (01:52):
And, this is a prime example, we had a pandemic and it's physically been horrific, and hundreds of thousands people have died, but when we look at the mental aspects, I guarantee you 80% of the population or more were effected mentally by COVID. And you talk to people and they're like, "Barely survived 2020," and then they'll go, "Mentally," wherever they're at, especially here in the United States, everybody is always... I was just talking to someone and they were saying that, "The mental stress that I had, and I had depression before, and then it was even worse. And then the isolation, no human contact, only communicating through cell phones, not being able to go to family get togethers, and holidays because you're worried about, grandma may get COVID from one of us-"
Alexander McCaig (02:43):
You wonder why productivity dropped, suicide rates increased, and now all-
Jason Rigby (02:47):
... Teenagers are taking a hit, not going to high school, not having that whole function, staying at home constantly on their phones, watching Netflix, being boring.
Alexander McCaig (02:55):
... Dealing with their parents, I know the feeling.
Jason Rigby (02:58):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (02:59):
I'm here for you.
Jason Rigby (03:01):
So it does affect us.
Alexander McCaig (03:03):
Yes, it does. And it's all of those, not direct, but indirect effects of these things that happened. So what's great about the data that they were talking about, are the indirect effects of occurrences from climate instability. So one of the ones, just for a poignant example here that is close to home, we have the California wildfires. Okay, people are like "Great, whatever, wildfire is not bothering me," but when you have the particulate that is in the air coming and affecting the lungs of young children, people with asthma, and also reducing the amount of blood oxygen that's getting up to the brain because you're essentially suffocating the lungs, is decreasing the mental state of that individual within their own mental capacity to operate in a natural biological function. And on top of that, you're arresting their lungs from doing the function they want to do best.
Alexander McCaig (03:50):
So your overconsumption of your material items, increasing the carbon footprint, doing all these other things that may have increased the temperature somewhere in Indonesia, that changed with the trade winds coming over here, and then preventing rain from dropping in California, causing a forest fire to occur, is actually affecting the asthma, and the mental states of human beings in the State of California.
Jason Rigby (04:12):
Well, this report also said, heart disease and stroke rise.
Alexander McCaig (04:15):
Well, of course, they're going to rise.
Jason Rigby (04:16):
And how many people do we know had strokes, or had died of heart disease?
Alexander McCaig (04:20):
Yeah. And thinking about it, your lungs are the things that drive you, if you can't get the right balance of gases through those lungs to then enrich your blood, you're done, you're dunzo. It's going to strain the heart, and for people that are already with a strained heart, which is probably 40% of the United States if you look at the data from American Heart Association, well, then that's going to lead to systemic effects that were indirect from the aspects of climate change. Climate change is physically killing you quicker when you didn't think it wasn't at your front doorstep.
Jason Rigby (04:51):
Yeah, they even said high levels of air pollution is an increased risk of developing dementia.
Alexander McCaig (04:56):
Yeah, because no one really knows the real true cause for dementia, but they are seeing that some of these things that are driving it, so stopping that blood-brain barrier, if there's an issue with that, they've seen that, that may be linked to dementia. And if you are inhibiting that by inhibiting the lungs because of poor air quality, because of an issue of climate instability, hello.
Jason Rigby (05:18):
Yeah. And we have a lot of unsafe air quality issues in a lot of different cities here, they're talking about young children growing up and developing with that pollution. They're talking about pregnant women having issues with fetuses, older adults, people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, and then we don't even think about this, the people with fewer resources, and outdoor workers.
Alexander McCaig (05:41):
What about guys that work tours all the time, constantly? Even if you're a window washer in a city you're literally outside just getting hit, you're up in the smog all day long, huffing this stuff. Well, here's another thing, what happens when temperatures become warmer? Nobody likes ticks.
Jason Rigby (05:59):
No.
Alexander McCaig (05:59):
I personally don't like ticks. I don't like pulling them off dogs, nothing of that nature, but there's so many issues with tick-borne illnesses, okay? There's so many issues with mosquito borne illnesses.
Jason Rigby (06:10):
Yeah, that's the number one animal that kills people is mosquitoes.
Alexander McCaig (06:12):
Yeah, so one of the highest pests, actually, it's a lack of food causing malnutrition, and then the effect of mosquito coming in and affecting a body that's malnourished. Okay, so it's actually a lack of food, lack of nutrition, so the mosquito is secondary.
Jason Rigby (06:29):
I wonder if we could take that same data, and correlate it with COVID deaths and immune systems.
Alexander McCaig (06:34):
Oh, interesting.
Jason Rigby (06:35):
You see what I'm saying?
Alexander McCaig (06:36):
Oh yeah, I didn't even consider that. But the effect here is that, as things begin to increase in temperature, in areas where it typically wasn't there, these pests, these disease carrying things are allowed to fester. They thrive in these environments.
Jason Rigby (06:49):
So you got Rocky Mountain spotted fever increase, you got the West Nile disease, the mosquito borne, so you get ticks, and mosquitoes are just going crazy.
Alexander McCaig (06:55):
Yeah, you got EEE, you got all this different stuff that's coming in. The thing is, overconsumption in China, India, the rest of the globe is also changing the climate. And all of those people that are interacting with this, causing this problem, are having a direct effect on you in the United States, and your children and your children's children.
Jason Rigby (07:14):
Yeah, they were even talking about food and water supplies, especially with organisms with heat, so during heat waves. How the food poisoning, microbial contamination of drinking water, how that happens when you raise the temperature.
Alexander McCaig (07:26):
If you have slightly stagnant water, and you give it an environment of just the right amount of sunlight, and a couple other things with oxygen, whatever, for the photosynthesis, what that does is, it allows these algae blooms to grow, poisonous deadly ones. And then all these other microbes start to thrive in that warm environment where there's more bacteria and stuff for them to feed off of, especially if you're a larger microbe, right? And so, that's going to be a bad thing. Or then, say, for instance, you have flooding in a specific area, say you're in Miami, walking through floodwater increases your, what was it, for disease 15 times?
Jason Rigby (08:02):
Bacterial blood infections?
Alexander McCaig (08:03):
Yeah, bacterial blood infections.
Jason Rigby (08:04):
Blood infections, guys, 15 fold, 15 times.
Alexander McCaig (08:08):
Your skin's a sponge, you ever sat in the bathtub? Imagine if you're walking around in dirty sewage filled hepatitis whatever floodwater all day long, and dirt's just getting soaked up through osmosis in your skin, and it's going right into your bloodstream, 15 times. So an increase in the temperature of the climate, melting ice caps, all this stuff, all the data that is screaming at you that is all under human cause, or at least a good portion of it, is having direct effects on your health, your children's health, and their future.
Jason Rigby (08:40):
Yeah. And that's why we hope we scared you because this is all true, and that's why we've made climate stability number one on our big seven. And how can, I want to close this out, Alex, but I think this is important, how can the average Joe, that person that's sitting in Bangladesh, that's on their smartphone, how can they reverse these issues? How can we get the climate stable, and how does TARTLE help with that?
Alexander McCaig (09:11):
Right. This climate instability is, the humans are the progenitor of it. Earth always wants to be an equilibrium, we've thrown it off equilibrium. So in order for us to solve the problem we created, we need to come together collectively, and analyze our traits, habits, behaviors, consumptions, everything that we're doing, and we can do that by sharing that data on TARTLE, so the people that have the resources, the people that populate that research to give those answers back to the public, now have the best body of information possible to take effective action on reversing this terrible calamity we've driven ourselves into.
Jason Rigby (09:51):
I love that. Well, everyone tartle.co, T-A-R-T-L-E.co, sign up today. You'll not only earn money.
Alexander McCaig (09:59):
But shrink the tick population.
Jason Rigby (10:02):
Yeah, I don't like ticks either.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future, and the source data defines the path. What's your data worth?
