Science – Page 37 – a sibilant intake of breath

Smoking and climate change

Tristan keeps telling me that ozone depletion and acid rain are poor comparisons for climate change. Yes, they were major environmental problems that were identified scientifically, and then dealt with legislatively. But addressing them only really involved a small number of organizations, and processes that could be fairly readily replaced. Addressing the issues didn’t require much social or political change.

That’s fair enough, but perhaps there is an alternative comparison that is useful: smoking. Watching Mad Men constantly reminds me of how much of a transformation there has been in the public attitude toward smoking in the past few decades. While part of that was certainly driven by personal fear (smoking will kill you personally, climate change will not), the transition also involved moral arguments about the effects of secondhand smoke on unconsenting others. And it involved government imposing increasingly harsh regulations on an industry that was highly profitable, powerful, and fundamentally opposed to having its products restrained by law.

Perhaps growing awareness of the harms fossil fuels impose on others – including those in future generations – could help to drive a similar cultural shift. We have promising alternatives to fossil fuels, but our political system is still unwilling to take on the industries that want to keep us reliant on them. Perhaps smoking suggests that could change.

Psychology and delayed gratification

Back in 2009, The New Yorker published an interesting article on psychology and self-control. It describes an experiment in which children were challenged to delay gratification, and then considers what implication their success or failure at such tasks has for their lives. It also describes some of the mechanisms through which people are able to defer an immediate pleasure in favour of a larger one later:

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

Perhaps the most useful thing about psychology is the way in which is allows us to learn about the limitations of our own minds. Once we recognize the many flaws in human reasoning, it becomes easier to avoid falling prey to them and being able to manage well in the world.

Reasons to be hopeful

Climate change is a daunting problem, about which humanity is doing far too little. While all the characteristics that make climate change a massively difficult thing to deal with are daunting, there are also numerous reasons to be hopeful about humanity’s future. Those who are alive now are likely to live to see the question of how much the climate changes decided, either in favour of unconstrained burning of fossil fuels accompanied by unconstrained warming, or shifted decisively toward zero-carbon forms of energy and a sustainable future.

That potential shift represents a major opportunity for humanity. For tens of thousands of years, human societies functioned using renewable forms of energy: primarily sunlight embedded in crops and biomass. Since about 1750, humanity has benefited from the massive burst of embedded energy accessible in fossil fuels. The evidence of that energy is everywhere: from highways to high rises. Now, we are obliged by pragmatism and ethics to swap out the unsustainable core of all our society’s undertakings and replace it with one that is compatible with the potentially unending string of human generations which could follow this one. If the generations alive now, and those that will be born soon, manage to achieve that transition, they will have effected one of the most importance changes in the history of humanity: a great shift from a global society built on the weak and threatening foundation of fossil fuels to one that can be relied upon indefinitely.

The rate of change in human societies is easy to underestimate, and yet the world has been transformed to an enormous extent in each of the past few centuries. Those transformations have largely been uncoordinated – arising from disparate actors making choices in response to the local incentives they face, as well as their worldviews and ideologies. Functional worldviews now must be exactly that: perspectives that are capable of taking seriously the bounded, finite, and interconnected nature of the world in which we live. If we are capable of driving the emergence of such worldviews, it seems as though the benefits could be numerous. Dealing with climate change requires that we act selflessly in anticipation of problems that science has uncovered, lurking out in future decades. If we can learn to respond intelligently to that threat – and press the emergence of a political and economic system that has that capability – it seems that humanity will be knit together in a newly intentional way. A way that includes the recognition of mutual interconnection and vulnerability, which appreciates how changes that unfold across long timescales can nonetheless require present and enthusiastic action, and which may be capable of addressing the many other problems which threaten humanity, albeit not as profoundly as climate change seems to.

In a way, the fossil fuel industry itself demonstrates the kind of human capabilities that are now required. Whereas extracting oil was once a comparatively simple matter, the global network of systems that extracts, processes, and uses fossil fuels is the product of a massive investment of resources and ingenuity across decades. Capabilities like deepwater drilling and the upgrading of heavy oils demonstrate what the combination of capital and human intellect can produce. Until now, most renewable forms of energy have been bit players from a societal perspective. As it becomes increasingly clear that the future of our energy system lies in the use of such technologies, it is fair to hope that some of those resources and intellectual capabilities will be turned to the project of their deployment and improvement.

The challenge facing us is an enormous one: one that requires a new level of global coordination across all continents and across the decades and centuries ahead. It is reasonable to see it as a test of humanity – whether we can behave collectively in an intelligent way, responding to a problem that is anticipated rather than immediately obvious, or whether we really are just a swarm which cannot be coordinated. While my reasons for hope may not be wholly rational, pressing ahead with the possibility of success in mind is surely preferable to despairing at the difficulty of the problem.

DDT and evolution

Naomi Oreskes’ book about climate change deniers makes some interesting points about the pesticide DDT. Apparently, there has been a kind of campaign recently to challenge the history of the substance and its ban, with some anti-regulation groups claiming the regulation of DDT was unneccessary and caused many human deaths. They argue that if DDT use had not been regulated, malaria could have been eradicated.

Oreskes seems to rebut this argument convincingly. Critically, she points out how DDT had been stripped of its effectiveness through over-use, particularly in agriculture. She makes the point that the consequences of different sorts of DDT use for the genetics of the mosquito population can be very different. Spraying indoors exposes only a small minority of mosquitoes to the chemical, leaving most of the population isolated from it. As a consequence, there is only a small advantage for those mosquitoes that are more resistant to the poison. By contrast, widescale agricultural spraying exposes whole populations of mosquitoes to the toxin. Those who are a bit resistant to it have a huge advantage, and soon come to dominate the population. Over time, the indiscriminate use of DDT breeds mosquitoes who are troubled less and less by the toxin.

Oreskes documents how the banning of DDT took place only after its effectiveness was lost, as well as how the environmental and human health effects of the substance were sufficiently worrisome to justify the ban. She argues that the recent attempt to change the historical narrative is not about DDT itself – which nobody is seeking to reintroduce. Rather, it is intended to foster and enlarge a general sense that taking precautions to protect human health and the environment is unjustified, and that science that supports the regulation of industry and individual behaviour is ‘junk’.

A related situation that I have written about before is the abuse of antibiotics in the livestock industry. Just as the agricultural use of DDT provided ideal circumstances for insects to evolve resistance, today’s factory farms may as well have been custom designed to render our antibiotics ineffective. Crowding huge numbers of unhealthy animals close together, flooding them with chemicals to make them grow as quickly as possible, feeding them unnatural diets, and then using antibiotics to try and keep them from dying too early, is a string of compounding errors. Not only does it demonstrate considerable disregard for the welfare of the animals in question, but it demonstrates a lack of foresight when it comes to maintaining the effectiveness of our drugs and the relative manageability of the bacteria out there.

Of course, the political system tends to favour the small group of farmers that benefits from the status quo and which would suffer significantly from a change in policy, rather than the great majority of people who are incrementally harmed by the emergence of ever-more-dangerous superbugs, and the dilution of the effectiveness of the relatively small class of chemicals capable of safely killing bacteria inside human beings, without causing undue harm to the person.

Northern lights webcam

The Canadian Space Agency has set up a website that allows the live viewing of the northern lights from Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. You can watch live during the appropriate hours, as well as watch the previous night’s video in time lapse and selected videos from especially active nights.

The videos are pretty small and not super high resolution. The ‘AuroraMAX’ site would probably benefit from the addition of some large still photos. The sun’s 11-year cycle of activity is expected to peak in 2013, and the site has a mandate to carry on until then. The site doesn’t say what kind of equipment is being used, but it seems to be a fisheye lens on either a video camera or dSLR.

But if Not

In 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech about civil disobedience, entitled “But if Not“. One passage from the speech – which was delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – seems quite relevant to climate change today, particularly when it comes to people who have a high degree of knowledge about the subject:

I say to you this morning that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it then you aren’t fit to live. You may be thirty eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you’re afraid you will lose your job; or you’re afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity; or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, shoot at you, or bomb your house and so you refuse to take a stand. Well you may go on and live until you’re ninety, but you’re just as dead at thirty eight as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

The point about integrity relates to one made by the physicist Richard Feynman, who argued that experts lose their integrity when they allow their conclusions to be publicized – when they are useful to those in power – and allow them to be buried when they are not.

[Update: 19 January 2015] I noticed that the YouTube link in the original post is dead, so here is an audio version.

Two kinds of adaptation

When people talk about ‘adaptation‘ in the area of climate change, they usually mean all the activities by which human beings can reduce how vulnerable they are to the expected and unexpected consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. This includes everything from developing drought-resistant crops to designing infrastructure to be able to tolerate sea level rise.

In his essay “Ethics and Global Climate Change” University of Washington professor Stephen Gardiner highlights how human adaptation in response to climate change can take two forms: we can adapt to the unpredictable physical consequences that arise from humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, and we can set up regulatory structures that restrict greenhouse gas emissions, requiring firms and individuals to adapt their lifestyles and business practices to be appropriate in a carbon-constrained world.

As he points out, the latter type of adaptation is preferable to the former in many ways:

On the one hand, suppose we allow global warming to continue unchecked. What will we be adapting to? Chances are, we will experience both a range of general gradual climatic changes and an increase in severe weather and climate events. On the other hand, if we go for abatement, we will also be adapting but this time to increases in tax rates on (or decreases in permits for) carbon emissions. But there is a world of difference between these kinds of adaptation: in the first case, we would be dealing with sudden, unpredictable, large-scale impacts descending at random on particular individuals, communities, regions, and industries and visiting them with pure, unrecoverable costs, whereas in the second, we would be addressing gradual, predictable, incremental impacts, phased in so as to make adaptation easier. Surely, adaptation in the second kind of case is, other things being equal, preferable to that in the first.

Gardiner, Stephen. “Ethics and Global Climate Change” in Gardiner, Stephen et al. Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. p.12 (paperback)

That strikes me as an elegant way of presenting the situation in which humanity finds itself. Governments can either take the lead and drive a preferable kind of adaptation, or they can ignore the problem until unfolding natural events force a more painful sort.

The ethics of eggs

I have long been of the view that vegetarianism is smart for three major reasons: because of the hygienic problems with how almost all meat is produced, because of the animal suffering associated, and because of the unsustainable character of modern agriculture, especially meat production. That being said, I do think that meat can be ethical to eat, when it is produced in ways that do not have these problems. Indeed, choosing to eat ethical meat may be morally preferable to eating no meat at all, because doing so could encourage the emergence of a better food system.

One problem with the hygiene/suffering/ecology justification is that it applies to things other than meat, including dairy products and leather. As The Economist points out, egg production may be an especially egregious violator of all three sets of ethical norms:

Over the past few decades every sector of American agriculture has undergone dramatic consolidation. The egg industry is no exception. In 1987, 95% of the country’s output came from 2,500 producers; today, that figure is a mere 192. Though the salmonella problem appeared to affect two dozen brands, those were all traced back to just two firms in Iowa, the top egg-producing state. Critics suggest that this shrivelling of the supply chain leaves consumers vulnerable to bad luck or bad behaviour. Inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported this week that a recent visit to Wright County Egg, one of the Iowan firms responsible for the recall, found rats, maggots and manure piled several metres high at or near the egg-producing facilities. Robert Reich, a former labour secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration calls these “corporate crimes” and argues that “government doesn’t have nearly enough inspectors or lawyers to bring every rotten egg to trial.”

That points to the other culprit: poor regulation. Shockingly, state officials do not inspect eggs in Iowa, and federal authority is fractured among several supervisory agencies. This bureaucratic tangle is a well-known problem. Bill Clinton promised stronger regulations for eggs in the 1990s. Broader reform is needed, advocates have long insisted, as more Americans eat food that is imported, prepared in restaurants and produced at huge plants. In March 2009 Barack Obama created a “food safety working group” to study the existing maze of regulations and suggest improvements. But reform has been too slow. Officials at the FDA argue that stricter regulations that came into force on July 9th would, had they been implemented earlier, have probably prevented the egg crisis. An “unfortunate irony”, declares Margaret Hamburg, the FDA’s boss.

To me, the appropriate response to all of this seems to be threfold:

When possible, avoid purchasing or consuming animal products that are produced in problematic ways
Consider buying such products when they are produced according to high ethical standards, in order to encourage the emergence of producers who use such approaches
Encourage the emergence of laws, regulations, and policies that curb the most problematic practices

Given the way in which most of the world’s meat, eggs, milk, etc come from very problematic sources – and given the degree to which there are animal products in everything – every person who is trying to be conscientious needs to choose a balance point, with convenience and the risk of offending friends and family on one side and ethical ideals on the other. Exactly where that should lie is a personal choice, though information like that in the quoted article certainly provides a stronger factual basis for favouring one side over the other.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize winning 800-page account of the history of the atomic bomb is a comprehensive and highly important book. He covers the science, from the earliest theorizing about the structure of the atom through to the early stages of the development of thermonuclear weapons. He also covers the political and military history associated with the Manhattan Project, and touches upon attempts to develop nuclear weapons in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Rhodes also goes beyond straight history to examine the scientific and military ethics associated with the development and use of the bomb, while also raising questions about what the existence of nuclear weapons means for global politics in the long term. The book goes beyond being a detailed historical account, by also engaging in serious ethical questioning about the implications of this dreadful technology. The book is also quite philosophical in places, such as when contemplating the nature of science.

One overwhelming message from Rhodes’ book is the horror of modern war – from ingenious combination poison gas attacks during WWI through to strategic bombing of civilians in WWII and the ongoing threat of thermonuclear annihilation. While nuclear weapons have certainly increased both the actual and potential horror of war, Rhodes uses appalling examples to show how they are not at all necessary for people to treat one another atrociously. That in turn affects the ethical status of using atomic weapons: was doing so preferable to invading Japan with conventional forces? Were any other alternatives available? Regardless of how you answer such questions for yourself, Rhodes’ account of warfare is one that cannot fail to produce revulsion in whoever reads it. His extensive use of primary documents and quotations – particularly when describing the destruction wrought by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs – is effective both at conveying the history and providing some understanding of how people were thinking at the time. Colourful anecdotes also give a human quality to the account, such as when Rhodes describes personality clashes between military officers, or the existence of a women’s dorm at Los Alamos that was “doing a flourishing business of requiting the basic needs of [the] young men, and at a price.”

In addition to providing the broad strokes of history, Rhodes provides fairly detailed accounts of the lives and personalities of the key scientists, military figures, and politicians. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about the book is how it draws together timelines that would normally be treated separately: scientific discoveries alongside social and geopolitical developments. Seeing them described in parallel gives the reader a strong sense of context, and hints at some of the linkages between scientific advancement and other aspects of history.

I have some minor quibbles with The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It doesn’t always define terms at first usage, which could make some passages difficult to understand for those who don’t have a pre-existing familiarity with the subject matter. He also provides extremely little information on the spies within the American nuclear weapons program who provided so much critical information to the Soviet Union, greatly speeding the development of their nuclear and eventually thermonuclear weapons. He also only hints at how a permanent nuclear institution emerged in the United States. While many at Los Alamos scattered at the end of the war, there were those who realized as soon as the theoretical possibility of nuclear weapons arose that they would profoundly alter the security of states and the relationships between them.

Ultimately, Rhodes shares the conviction of the physicist Niels Bohr that nuclear weapons have fundamentally changed world politics. He argues that they have “destroy[ed] the nation-state paradoxically by rendering it defenseless” and calls upon states to accept the necessity of “dismantl[ing] the death machine”. Specifically, he argues that nuclear weapons make the settling of disputes between states by armed conflict impossible, creating the need for some form of world government. Rhodes stresses the risk of accidental or unauthorized war – a risk that can only grow in severity as more and more states acquire nuclear weapons of their own. Unfortunately, it is hard to share his conviction that such a transformation is really possible. For people of his generation, the fact that most of humanity could be wiped out in less than an hour in a major nuclear exchange is a novel and terrifying feature of life. For those who were both during and after the Cold War, it is a reality that most have been aware of since childhood. Still, there is every reason to continue to try to reduce the risks associated with nuclear weapons. Doing so includes working to prevent the proliferation of such weapons to new states, as well as working to reduce the danger of accidents and the sheer number of weapons deployed.

Rhodes continues the history of nuclear weapons with a successor volume on thermonuclear bombs: Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. In the course of reading Rhodes’ book, I was also compelled to write posts on cancer and the neutron, anti-Semitism, the nature of human rights, Pearl Harbor, and the distinction between nuclear ‘devices’ and deployable weapons. Rhodes also has a third book on nuclear weapons – The Twilight of the Bombs – which I certainly aim to get around to reading eventually.

The melt rate in Greenland and Antarctica

The latest issue of Nature Geoscience features an article by David Bromwich and Julien Nicolas, in which they produce an estimate of the rate at which the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting in response to climate change. Their estimate is based on satellite gravimetry using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission (mentioned before). They concluded that previous estimates hadn’t properly taken into account the phenomenon of isostatic rebound and that, as a consequence, the rate of ice loss is about half what was estimated before:

With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

On the basis of this, they concluded that icesheet loss accounts for about 30% of observed sea level rise, rather than the 50% estimated before. The remainder is the result of the oceans expanding as they warm up.

Inevitably, the reduced ice melt estimates will be jumped upon by climate change delayers and deniers. This once again re-enforces the asymmetry in the debate between scientists and those who argue for inaction on climate. The latter never admit their mistakes but jump on any correction, error, or update from scientists as proof that climate science is deeply uncertain, and that no action should be taken now.