Rants – Page 35 – a sibilant intake of breath

Getting serious about climate change

The key thing that is required for dealing with climate change, and which our society does not yet possess, is seriousness. Seriousness of the kind that accompanied winning the Second World War – far more seriousness than we are displaying now in Afghanistan. We can afford to effectively lose that war, watching control pass back to the Taliban, but we cannot afford the consequences that would arise from decades of additional unmitigated emissions.

The threat certainly justifies an effort on the scale of winning a world war. The business-as-usual outcome of more than 5°C of temperature increase would cause enormous disruption. It is quite probable that it would disrupt global agriculture to such an extent that the global population would drop significantly, amid a lot of bloodshed and suffering. Preventing that requires replacing the energy inputs that run everything with carbon neutral ones: a process that will cost trillions and probably require converting areas the size of states into renewable power facilities.

Where could the necessary seriousness come from? The scientists have already given us a vivid and well-justified picture of what continuing on our present course will do. Some political parties and entities have accepted the direction in which we need to travel, though they don’t really understand how far we need to go along that road, or how quickly we need to begin. In the worst case, seriousness will come with the first concrete demonstration that climate change is a major threat to civilization. By then, however, even action on the largest scale and with the utmost urgency would probably be more of a salvage effort than a save.

Something needs to prompt us, as a global society, to take action on an environmental issue at a scale and a cost never previously borne. Rational scientific and economic analyses are already urging that, but don’t seem to have the psychological motive power to make people stop dallying. Finding something to provide the needed push into serious thinking must be a major task for the environmental movement.

Lack of vision in the Australian senate

Australia may be the rich state with the most to lose from climate change, in the near- and medium-term. Almost all of the country is already either unsuitable or marginal for agriculture. They have major problems with erosion, invasive species, drought, and salinization. They are also one of the rich countries closest to low-lying poorer states, where climate change could induce a surge of migration.

Nonetheless, the Australian Senate seems likely to defeat the Rudd government’s attempt to introduce a carbon trading scheme. The principle grounds of opposition seems to be an unwillingness to act before others do. This is in spite of the fact that the plan calls for emissions-intensive and trade-exposed industries like steel and aluminum production to be given 95% of their permits for free. Barnaby Joyce, the leader of Australia’s National Party, has expressed his desire to delay climate change regulation for as long as possible, probably in ignorance of the fact that all states behaving likewise would threaten the long-term viability of Australia as a self-sustaining society.

This suicide pact mentality is especially inappropriate coming from a state as vulnerable as Australia, which could become almost entirely agriculturally non-viable with a multi-degree increase in mean temperatures. If anybody should be willing to step out a bit ahead of the pack, it should be a highly rich and highly vulnerable state, with excellent renewable energy opportunities. The fact that even politicians in this drought-stricken state don’t have the foresight to embrace carbon pricing speaks ill of the intelligence of politicians, as well as raises doubts about whether any society is going to be able to act effectively in time to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Scrolling in XP and Mac OS X

For those with a scroll wheel on their mouse, Mac OS has one nice feature that is annoyingly absent in Windows XP. In Mac OS, if you put your mouse cursor over a window and scroll, it scrolls the contents of that window – a document, a webpage, whatever. In Windows XP, it will only scroll if it is the ‘active’ application, and will ignore scrolling when the cursor is pointed elsewhere.

The difference may have to do with some deep mechanism by which Mac and Windows applications interact with the operating system, or it could be a minor configuration choice. Either way, the Windows approach is annoying.

Of course, Apple doesn’t do everything right. My fancy wireless Mighty Mouse is over in a dresser drawer somewhere, too annoying to use. Instead, I am using an old $20 Microsoft optical wheel mouse.

The value of private cars in cities

In the midst of the discussion about the ethics of traveling to Vancouver, the issue of how cars have benefited and harmed people living in urban areas came up. It is undeniable that they have been a major transformative force, when it comes to the shape and character of cities.

To me, it seems that private cars in cities do more harm than good, for a slew of reasons:

They kill a lot of people: both drivers and pedestrians.
They take up a lot of space and alter urban design in negative ways, contributing to sprawl and vast areas of just residential or just commercial zoning.
Sprawl reduces natural and agricultural space. It also leads to people commuting, which is a major waste of their time.
They pollute and emit greenhouse gasses.
They are loud.
They cause neighbours to know one another less than they otherwise would.
They help make many states dependent on oil exports, and frequently involve them militarily in Middle Eastern conflicts.
They have made roads into hostile spaces for everything but automobiles, whereas previously they were more versatile public spaces.
The roads they require are built with public money, though they do not provide value to everyone, and contribute to serious negative externalities.
They use energy quite inefficiently, since they move faster than is sensible, and the mass of the vehicle itself far exceeds that of passengers and cargo.

If it were possible to re-design cities, I think it would be better if they excluded cars entirely within their cores and had a lot of dedicated transit and bicycle routes. Stores could be permitted to have delivery vehicles for large items, and taxis could continue to exist, but the use of private cars within city limits would ideally be eliminated.

What points would people offer to defend private cars in cities? Also, are there and indictments against them I missed?

Balancing the environment and economy

When dealing with climate change, politicians often talk about the need to ‘balance the economy and the environment.’ I think this is a misleading categorization for two reasons.

Firstly, the balance has always been tilted virtually 100% towards the economy, in Canada at least. When the government talks about the need to scale back climate mitigation programs for economic reasons, they are talking about scaling back a handful of ineffectual programs that are not proving effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The ‘balance’ dial between environment and economy is already twisted sharply towards the latter.

Secondly, even if we completely ignore the natural environment, the need to mitigate emissions remains. The Canadian economy could not survive the consequences of unrestrained emissions and climate change, with a temperature increase of 5.5°C to 7.1°C by 2100. If we care at all about the state of the economy 20, 50, and 80 years out, we need to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The economic analyses of mitigation that have been undertaken in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere have painted the same broad picture: it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly at a modest cost, provided you start early. The costs associated with inaction are much higher than those associated with this mitigation programme. To succeed, the whole economy needs to be pushed in the direction of decarbonization – a fact that remains true regardless of what balance you care to strike between economic health across the long term and environmental protection.

Endless Canadian delay on climate change mitigation

Jim Prentice, Canada’s Minister of the Environment has said that Canada might not impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions until 2016. This is simply preposterous. It makes a mockery of this government’s pledge to cut emissions to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. It is also hypocritical. This government argued that they could not meet their Kyoto Protocol targets due to the inaction of their predecessors. They argued that the short time left before the deadline would require them to simply shut down Canadian industry and services to homes (See: The Cost of Bill C-288 to Canadian Families and Business) Of course, dallying until 2016 would put whatever government was in charge then in an even tighter bind.

In order to meet this government’s 2020 target, Canadian emissions will need to fall by about 170 million tonnes over the next eleven years: a task equivalent to making the entire province of Alberta carbon neutral. Obviously, waiting until 2016 to begin dooms the project to failure. That ignores the fact that even the 20% target is insufficiently ambitious, when you consider the risks associated with different global emissions pathways and the fact that rich, developed states must lead the way on the transition to low- and zero-carbon sources of energy.

The idea that we could do nothing substantial for another seven years is an affront to ethics, good sense, Canada’s international obligations, and our reputation as good global citizens. If Canada cannot show the leadership or vision necessary to appreciate the risks of unconstrained climate change, as well as the opportunities in moving the energy basis of our society to a sustainable basis, our best hope is that we will be made into a pariah state by our most important trading partners. For Canada to maintain growing emissions for another decade would be shameful, but not a global crisis in itself. For the United States, European Union, China, and Japan to do so would quite probably doom future generations to a world very different from ours. If those states do show the fortitude required to begin the transition to carbon neutrality, they will be quite justified in imposing stiff carbon tariffs against a Canada too blind or selfish to see upon or act as must be done.

Limits of aquaculture

Seen from a simplistic and very selfish human perspective, ecosystems are devices for converting sunlight into human food. Sometimes, this happens fairly directly: sun hits soybean leaves, soybeans grow, and people eat them. In the case of the fish we eat, it is generally much less direct: sun hits phytoplankton, zooplankton eats that, they get eaten by fish that can eaten by successively larger fish, finally the largest fish get caught and eaten by us. In at least one important sense, this pyramid of energy use is quite different from the terrestrial one. In terrestrial agriculture, we manage the initial sun collection and can increase its amount in various ways. We are not, and perhaps never can be, farmers of plankton at the scale necessary to sustain the global marine food web. The effort involved in boosting the global plankton supply significantly would presumably be very large, given the immense biomass involved. Also, since energy is lost in each conversion, the amount of additional high-level species that would result from any increase would be smaller than the amount of additional plankton generated.

We are seriously overfishing the stocks that depend on the energy from existing phytoplankton stocks. If we start growing tuna and salmon in farms, feeding them fish from progressively lower in the marine ecosystem, we will eventually hit the bottom (if we keep having enough fuel for all those fishing boats). It is a fallacy to think that fish farms are like livestock farming on land. In the latter case, we are responsible for providing the inputs. In the former, we are still gathering from natural ecosystems, and doing so at an unsustainable rate.

Two partial solutions seem to exist. Firstly, we can get more fish per person by eating more plentiful species with lower trophic levels (closer to being creatures that eat plankton). That means anchovies for dinner, rather than tuna. Secondly, we could conceivably feed fish in farms using food from the land. That allows us to increase the basic solar energy being collected, and sustain a larger amount of tasty fish as a result. Of course, extending land-based agriculture entails other financial and environmental costs. Not least among these are the marine dead areas produced by pollution and fertilizer runoff.

The sensible way to run global fisheries is to avoid activities that cause disproportionate harm (dynamite fishing, catching juvenile fish) and then eat the sustainable portion of the output from different trophic levels. This means basically accepting a total level of sustainable human fish consumption for different species, then resisting political and financial pressures to exceed that limit. Of course, the record of human societies on doing this is dismal. We basically only fish sustainably when we are physically incapable of fishing more. Partly as a result of that, the general outlook for the world’s marine fisheries is dire.

Changing Images of Man

First published in 1974, and available for free online, Changing Images of Man is a kind of philosophical reflection on science and how human beings understand themselves. While it does touch on some interesting ideas, the degree to which it is fundamentally lacking in rigour or discipline means that it is also choked with nonsense, impenetrable jargon, and pointless speculation. In short, it does not have the feel of a text whose ideas have been borne out by subsequent history. Rather, it is more like a monument to a kind of faddishness that has long since become dated, though elements endure in the more superstitious aspects of contemporary culture.

Much of the book concerns environmental issues: specifically, how human civilization can cease to be such a destructive force, and how ecology is affecting science in general. Neither discussion is very satisfying. The former discussion focuses on a kind of caricatured extension of the Beatles going to India to lean yoga and discover themselves. While significant transformations in human behaviours and self-understanding may well be necessary to generate a sustainable society, the perspective on those changes offered in this work doesn’t seem either plausible or compelling to me. The latter discussion exaggerates the degree to which the study of complex dynamic systems challenges the practice of science: while they are certainly more challenging to study scientifically than systems that are more easily broken down and understood in terms of constituents, science is nonetheless proving increasingly capable of dealing with complex systems like climate and ecosystems, and is doing so without the kind of radical extension and modification endorsed by this book.

Much of the book is no more comprehensible than a random string of pompous-sounding words strung together in a grammatical way. It seems telling that the chapter on ‘feasibility’ is the least accessible and comprehensible of the lot. The report perceives a crisis in science that I don’t think existed at the time it was written, and I do not think has emerged since. Complex phenomenon are being grappled with using enhanced versions of conventional techniques, while UFOs and psychic phenomena have been effectively rejected as quackery, due to the absence of any good evidence for their existence. Basically, Changing Images of Man is an exhortation to abandon rigorous thought in favour of a kind of wooly inclusiveness, exceedingly open to ideas that are too vague to really engage with. The book has a naive counterculture tone, overly willing to reject what is old and unthinkingly embrace novel concepts that register with a 1960s/1970s mindset. While the questions it considers are generally good and important ones, the answers provided are vague, preachy, and largely useless.

Climate deniers deciding science funding in Canada

In yet another demonstration of the ongoing tensions between conservative political parties and science, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has appointed a couple of climate change deniers to federal science funding bodies. One has claimed that “the climate-change issue is somewhat sensational and definitely exaggerated.” The appointments seem likely to worsen the quality of scientific work being done in Canada, putting us further behind the rest of the developed world, when it comes to comprehending and appreciating the characteristics of the world in which we live, and in which important political choices must be made.

This is reminiscent of the appointment of a man seriously invested in the oil sands to the ‘Clean Energy Dialogue’ ongoing with the US. The Conservatives claim that they accept the science of climate change, but they cannot really take it to heart because of the degree to which it fundamentally conflicts with a laissez faire approach to economic regulation.

All we can hope for is for climate change denial to eventually become so patently ridiculous to the electorate that parties that continue to dabble in it seem to be arguing the equivalent of the Earth being flat and orbited by the sun. That may be the only time at which conservative parties have the impetus they need to reform their ideas to be compatible with what we now understand to be the state of the world.

Provincial exams are very useful

Speaking with people involved in the Ontario school system, I was surprised to learn that they do not have provincial exams for courses in the last years of high school. To me, this seems like a mistake. Provincial exams provide vital information to university application departments: specifically, they let you gauge how much grade inflation is happening at any particular school. A school where the mean class mark is 90%, but where the mean provincial mark is 60%, is clearly inflating grades. Conversely, a school where the mean class grade is 60% but where students get 90% on the provincial exam clearly has high standards.

Given that individual schools and teachers have a strong incentive to inflate the grades of their students, provincial (or federal) exams seem to be a key mechanism for keeping them honest. Otherwise, there is simply far too much opportunity to call mediocrity excellence, without anyone else being the wiser.

I very much hope B.C. retains the provincial exam system, and that it becomes universal across Canada.