Archive for the ‘climate change’ Category
Just a few thoughts on climate change and the obstacles…
There are people in the world, in their millions or billions, who know, with as much certainty they can have about anything, that their god or gods exist. Yet, since they don’t all believe in the same gods, they cannot, as a matter of logic, all be correct, and there’s a strong possibility that none of them are. That’s my belief, but is it just a belief?
But my intention here is not to go on about religion, I’m thinking more about knowledge or what people claim as knowledge. For example, and this is my real topic here, some people claim that climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, is a myth, a mistaken belief, or a plot of some sort – a plot developed by certain people who somehow stand to gain by pedalling misinformation. And some people claim this without really believing it, while others presumably believe in it to the point of refusing to examine the science, which they strongly suspect is just indecipherable gobbledygook.
This seems to be the case for many people on ‘the extreme right’, but what exactly is the extreme right?
I tend to consider extremists as people who believe without thinking. Certainly without trying to think carefully or deeply. Another term often used is ideologue. An ideologue is someone who is, in a sense ‘previously convinced’ and ‘thinks’ from that previously convinced perspective, which is generally drawn from strong family and/or cultural influences. I don’t believe however, that they’re hopeless cases, or I don’t want to believe it.
An ideology is often something you will adhere to especially if you are treated well within and feel you’ve benefitted from that family and cultural background. For example, if your parents are both devout Christians and have treated you with kindness and devotion, and you feel strongly that you’ve benefitted from their parenting, you’re likely to feel a strong urge to continue in their tradition and to see the world through that lens.
Climate change ‘skepticism’, however is a non-belief, and it’s often, but not always, connected to a general skepticism of science (I’ve heard tell of Nobel Prize winning scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming). There are many people who are very ‘turned-off’ by science – not so much clueless as totally uninterested in looking for clues. Science just doesn’t matter to them, again due to background influences. And a lot of such people are in high-level political positions, especially in the USA. Again this is often because they are preoccupied with other things, such as power, wealth or fame – the phenomenon known as ‘getting ahead’, or ‘getting on top’. It would be interesting to ask Donald Trump, or say Nigel Farage, or Australia’s Jacinta Price, to expatiate on their favourite science. Or perhaps not.
These are three people who, I suspect, have never given any thought to finding out about climate change. I mean, doing some very basic research on the subject. And this is largely incomprehensible to people who, when they don’t know much, or enough for their sense of self-pride, about a subject, make some effort at learning more about it – like how the adaptive immune system works, or how we discovered exoplanets, or what’s this thing about birds being dinosaurs. They’ve been encouraged, perhaps even without realising it, to wonder about such things.
One of the problems of our political systems, whether democratic or otherwise, is that we generally find ourselves being led politically, not by people who want to know or learn stuff, but by people who want to control stuff. People who are ambitious for themselves. Examples of such people are too numerous and obvious to mention. And of course the opposite is generally also true – people who want to ‘find things out’ aren’t so much driven by the lure of wealth, power and control.
In the case of climate change, which is much about what we are doing with our wealth, politics and science often clash. It is a fact that our planet is warming faster than at any point in human history, and this is clearly due to greenhouse gas emissions. China is the largest emitter overall, and the USA, second in overall terms, is the largest emitter on a per capita basis, of the world’s highly populated nations (per capita emissions in some Middle Eastern countries, and in Palau, are quite a bit higher). However, China’s total emissions are between twice and three times that of the USA. Its government accepts the facts about global warming and is apparently committed to ‘achieve carbon neutrality by 2060’, though this will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly, given its plans for economic growth. As to the USA, its target will no doubt vary depending on which monarch is on the throne. And please believe me, that isn’t a joke.
We need, of course, to look to the big emitters overall – China, USA, India and Russia, in that order – because we in Australia are minnows in comparison – interestingly, we’re 16th in both overall and per capita emissions. Still, it would be great if we could set an example.
According to the Worldometer website, which I hope is reliable, and which unfortunately only has data to 2022, CO2 emissions are still rising worldwide, though in some major emitting countries, such as China and Russia, they’re reducing slightly, while in other mostly developing countries, such as Indonesia, they’re rising fast.
There are other sources which give more recent data, but the overall picture is complex. Many regions are quickly developing alternatives to fossil fuels to supply their energy needs, but global consensus on the problem, and especially from major emitters, is essential for success – success being measured by keeping global average temperatures to, if possible, 1.5 degrees, or at most 2 degrees, above a baseline (the average between 1861 and 1890). Many have given up on the 1.5 target, and a 2024 poll found that only 12% of US ‘Republicans and Republican leaners’ considered climate change to be a major government priority. This is serious considering that Republicans will probably be in power there for the next 50 years or so, given current trends.
Interesting times….
References
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
solutions ok – methane-eating microbes
this gives a general idea..
So here’s a relatively short one. I have/had another blog called ‘solutions ok’ which I haven’t touched in ages, I’d rather have a one-size-fits-all blog – one failure’s better than two, as they don’t say. Anyhow, here’s a little solution I read about in New Scientist – methane-eating bacteria. Not that this idea is particularly new, you’ll find videos promoting it from more than five years ago, but apparently it will soon be put into practice – at least in practice:
Later this year, researchers in the US will deploy a bioreactor filled with a specially bred strain of methane-eating bacteria at a landfill site in Washington. They hope that the field test will prove that these bacteria, known as methanotrophs, can be deployed in bioreactors such as this to harvest methane from the air, even when it is at relatively low concentrations.
So what’s a bioreactor, I ask myself. Well, it’s what it sounds like, a bound system, as with a nuclear reactor, in which controlled reactions, this time biological, can take place. If the system is made to work effectively, it presumably could be replicated globally. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, though not as prevalent, nor as long-lasting in the atmosphere. However, emissions of methane are rising. The main sources are agriculture, fossil fuels and waste material in landfills. These bioreactors will ultimately target all three, or so it is hoped.
The particular methanotroph to be tested is a strain, specially bred for purpose, called Methylomicrobium buryatense 5GB1C (you will be tested). They’re still working on its methane-harvesting ability, so as to deal with the relatively low levels measured at landfill sites. The idea is to suck the methane-laden air into the bioreactor, where, by means of these methanotrophs, the methane will be converted into useful proteins, plus carbon dioxide (hmmm). The net effect, in any case, will be ‘a reduction in the warming capacity of the air’.
So this isn’t the only pilot project in the works. Other projects, using methanotrophs ‘encased in hydrogels’ are planned for absorbing and converting methane from wetlands. Apparently these microbes have ‘evolved the enzymatic capacity to bind methane and oxidise it to carbon dioxide and also assimilate it to biomass’, which is a very meritorious thing, from a human perspective. All is not yet lost, apparently.
I’ll keep an eye out for other such solutions in future.
Reference
New scientist, April 19 2025, p13, ‘methane-eating bacteria ready to tackle emissions’.
the curbing emissions front 2- problems both environmental and political
Young people, indeed, all people, need to understand that they cannot solve the energy and climate problem without addressing the special interest problem in Washington.
James Hanson, climate scientist
There are wet and dry heat waves. The wet ones are also known as wet bulb events. Dry heat waves are generally driven by large high pressure systems. From Wikipedia,
High-pressure systems are frequently associated with light winds at the surface and subsidence through the lower portion of the troposphere. In general, subsidence will dry out an air mass by adiabatic or compressional heating. Thus, high pressure typically brings clear skies.
The wet bulb events are of most immediate concern. For example, Karachi in Pakistan experienced one in July 2015, with heat stroke killing some 1200 people in a 10-day ‘pressure cooker’. The wet bulb idea refers to the fact that in a humid environment our sweat has less chance of evaporating and cooling us down. It’s defined much more specifically, though – the wet-bulb temperature is ‘the lowest temperature that can be reached under current ambient conditions by the evaporation of water only.’ No, I don’t know what this means either. Apparently there’s such a thing as a wet-bulb thermometer, but that doesn’t help. What is adiabatic cooling? That’s when air is cooled by expansion without any heat exchange with the surrounding environment. Why do I even mention this? I do understand, I think, that when air, or anything, expands, it likely cools, just as when it’s compressed, it heats up. But this surely involves heat exchange. Or the heat ‘dissipates’, is less ‘concentrated’ as it spreads. I don’t know if this is heat exchange or not. I wish I’d never heard of wet bulb events, but I think I can understand that humid heat would be more harmful to humans than dry heat.
Changing the subject, ice is melting at the poles and sea levels are rising, and don’t forget ocean acidification. And the USA, perhaps the biggest national contributor to the problem, which under Trump is happy to exacerbate things (pity about a politico-social system more or less designed for dictators and their mega-wealthy enablers), is likely to do a lot of the irreparable over the next few years. But on sea level rise, many of our largest cities are essentially ports, including the USA’s oil ports, Houston and Galveston. Other threatened ports are in Saudi Arabia, China, South Korea and Russia. Singapore is also in the firing, or drowning line. And of course all of Australia’s major cities are by the sea.
Rising ocean levels are of course long-term (and likely permanent) stuff. In the short-term, that’s to say right this minute, England and western Europe is experiencing a heat wave, and Alaska has recently received a heat advisory for the first time in its history. And we’re not long into summer, and if I’m not mistaken there will be another summer next year, and so forth. Meanwhile the Joke Bogans and their supporters, the one-winged neoliberal ‘think tanks’ with their deep pockets and narrow self-serving concerns, are spruiking denialism and disinformation at every opportunity. Unsurprisingly, much of this disinformation is manufactured and consumed in the USA, as Wikipedia reports:
A 2022 study found that the public in many countries substantially underestimates the degree of scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. Studies from 2019–2021 found scientific consensus to range from 98.7–100%. Research found that 80–90% of Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. While 66–80% Americans support these policies, Americans estimate the prevalence to be 37–43%. Researchers have called this misperception a false social reality, a form of pluralistic ignorance.
This, I feel, is due to the noise made by vested interests, which many wrongly believe to be about genuine climate change scepticism rather than business-as-usual cynicism. A major perpetrator of this cynicism here is Sky News Australia, and the oligarchs who fund it, and of course there are plenty of others. Gina Rinehart, Campbell Newman, Colin Boyce and Hugh Morgan are some of the culprits, but there are many others. Some even try to claim that we’ll be saved by ‘the next ice age’. They can’t effectively deny the current record-breaking temperatures so they try the ‘scientific’ line that it’s part of a natural cycle, somewhat like the Milankovich cycles I’ve written about previously, or the solar magnetic cycle, an 11 year cycle in which the magnetic poles of the sun reverse. This cycle does affect the amount of solar radiation we receive, but only slightly. But we know that temperatures are currently rising even when the energy received from the sun is reduced – the greenhouse effect, in effect. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have in the deep past been effective in ‘releasing’ the planet from ice-bound states.
The Keeling Curve, which has been measuring CO2 in the atmosphere for decades, has it currently at 429.03 ppm, from 315 ppm at its first measurement in 1958, and the increase is accelerating. It’s currently at the highest level for the last million years or so. We know this from measuring bubbles in Antarctic ice cores. Scientists can also distinguish atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, as it has a different chemical signature from naturally occurring CO2. This is rather amazing, and I’m not sure how they know this, but if it identifies the culprit, that’s all to the good. Maybe I’ll write about this in the future, if the chemistry isn’t too complicated.
So I think that’s enough for now….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
The Keeling Curve
Charles Darwin, coral reefs, bleaching and all that
a stony coral polyp
I’ve read a lot of stuff about, and by, Charles Darwin over the years – not only in various passing depictions and interpretations by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Jay Gould, but whole books, such as James Moore and Adrian Desmond’s big biography, Darwin (1992), David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s egg (2007) and Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the barnacle (2003) – a real favourite. And I finished his Voyage of the Beagle only a few days ago, trying to get my head around the last sections, in fact the penultimate chapter of the book, in which he deals with ‘coral formations’. I seem to remember from one or more of those biographical books that he expanded his brief but dense – I mean complex – account in his Voyage, into what we might nowadays call a separate scientific paper [‘On the structure and distribution of coral reefs‘], and that his understanding of these formations was mostly correct, and ground-breaking. So for my sins I’m going to try to fathom these mostly undersea marvels, with the help of Darwin and others.
But before that, just one more thing about Darwin biographies. I’ve recently returned from a very pleasant holiday on Kangaroo Island, where we stayed at an ‘air b & b’ on the coast just outside of Kingscote, very comfy-cosy, and with a very varied lounge-room library. One book caught my eye – another Darwin biography, Charles Darwin: voyaging (1996) by Janet Browne. I read the first few pages and was – well, smitten might be the word. The comparison between Darwin’s social world and that of Jane Austen, one of my favourite authors, was brilliant and completely engrossing. Of course I didn’t have time to read much more, what with my own reading and all our excursions round the island, but I’m looking out to get myself a copy asap.
So Darwin starts out with the kind of basic but fresh wonderment that even I got in observing the rounded, rust-coloured boulders heaped up on the shore at Cape Willoughby, the eastern tip of Kangaroo Island. What were the processes….?
But Darwin, of course, went much further. Of reefs, he starts… ‘such formations surely rank high amongst the wonderful objects of this world’, and goes on:
We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.
So Darwin reflected on the ‘three great classes’ of coral reefs – atolls, barrier and fringing reefs.
Atolls, as he teaches me, are ‘ring’ islands, or sets of islands, encircling a central lagoon, and I have to quote, as Darwin does, a French adventurer’s exclamation from 1605:
C’est une merveille de voir chacun de ces atollons, environné d’un grand banc de pierre tout autour, n’y ayant point d’artifice humain.
I suppose they could also be called ‘reef islands’, and the ‘land’ or reef rings can extend to a diameter of many kilometres. I won’t be using Darwin’s descriptions for the following, as his antiquated language is headache-inducing, but atolls are apparently the ‘third and final stage of Darwin’s subsidence theory’, so I should put them in order.
With the first stage, the fringing reef, volcanic activity forms an island, rising up from the ocean, and corals, which I’ll attempt to describe later, begin to form, and they build up as the land formed by the volcano begins to subside. This is because the coral needs sunlight as a source of energy. The corals form a more or less circular fringe around the subsiding land.
In the second stage, with more subsidence, a kind of barrier – think of it perhaps as a kind of natural ‘moat’ – forms between the reef and the now almost submerged land in the centre.
In the case of an atoll, the land is wholly submerged. And yet, the coral seems to form islands around this central lagoon? Anyway, here’s how one presumably reliable source puts it:
The Deep Sea Drilling Project sought evidence of volcanic cores beneath coral reefs and found it. First, in 1952 at the Einwetok Atoll in the Marshall islands, and again, in 1960 at the Midway Atoll, teams found volcanic rock strongly supporting Darwin’s theory that coral reefs form around submerging islands. Today, Darwin’s theory is universally accepted as a means of explaining these reef formations.
However, as this source, linked below, puts it, not all reefs fit this pattern (and I’m thinking that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef surely doesn’t). Other reefs known as patch reefs and bank reefs are found in the Caribbean region.
But I want to get down to the real basics. Coral reefs are built by coral, or corals, or what? Micro-organisms? What is coral? I’ll start, and probably finish, with Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and reliable encyclopedia ever devised, but there are many other reliable sites, linked below.
Corals are tiny invertebrate animals, in the phylum Cnidaria (of which there are more than 11,000 species, including jellyfish and sea anemones). Generally they form colonies of individual polyps, long thin little creatures with tentacles. They can reproduce asexually to form colonies, and sexually by spawning – releasing a mix of eggs and sperm into the water, as most marine creatures do. For most of their lives they’re sessile (immobile), and these colonies of genetically identical individuals can number in the millions. Stony coral polyps produce a skeleton of calcium carbonate, essentially composed of calcium, carbon and oxygen (CaCO3). The stony coral we’re familiar with, Scleractinia to the cognoscenti, have been around for about 250 million years, from the Middle Triassic, but we can trace coral ancestry back much further, to the Cambrian, 535 million years ago. They were quite rare, though, until the Ordovician, 100 years later, and they were of a very different type from ‘modern’ corals. It seems that different coral types came and went, with a particularly massive disappearance due to the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which killed off 75% of all marine species.
So, a little more about their anatomy, before I go on to to coral bleaching, and current threats. I’ve mentioned the calcium carbonate skeleton, deposited by the polyps and also by the coenosarc, a layer of tissue that connects these polyps by secreting coenosteum, a stony material made of calcium carbonate in the form of aragonite (a more spongy and porous form). There’s also an extracellular matrix called mesogloea – it’s complicated!
Aragonite is also the material from which corallites are made. These are cup-shaped depressions into which the polyp can retract. The individual polyps and their housings can grow to form enormous colonies of very variable shapes and sizes:
Colonies of stony coral are markedly variable in appearance; a single species may adopt an encrusting, plate-like, bushy, columnar or massive solid structure, the various forms often being linked to different types of habitat, with variations in light level and water movement being significant.
It would be frankly ridiculous of me to go into much more detail, there’s way too much ground, or stone, or ocean, to cover. Better to focus on coral’s apparently self-imposed bleaching behaviour. When corals are stressed, usually due to the over-heating of reef waters, they expel a particular form of algae, known as zooxanthellae, from their tissues. Why they do this seems unclear, as the zooxanthellae provide food and photosynthetic energy essential for their growth and reproduction. It has to do with oxidative stress, apparently, and I’m sure they know what they’re doing. And perhaps ‘bleaching’ should be dumped as a term, because it surely gives the wrong impression. The pale skeletons that remain are not in any sense bleached, but….
Anyway, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef has suffered several mass bleaching events in the last few years, the most recent being earlier this year (2024), following the hottest year, globally, on record. Corals do recover from such events, gradually, but the strain on them is accumulating.
References
http://coraldigest.org/index.php/DarwinsTheory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral
https://www.barrierreef.org/the-reef/threats/coral-bleaching
Antarctica, global warming and our endless complacency
The most recent New Scientist podcast has reported from a big meetup re global warming, melting ice, disappearing islands and such, and I feel that’s something I need to know much more about. The Australian Antarctic Research Conference was just held in Hobart in late November, attended by some 500 researchers.
So here’s the grim. According to an interviewee who attended the conference, ‘there was a precipitous drop-off in the extent of the winter sea-ice around Antarctica in 2023 and again in 2024, 2024 being nearly as bad as 2023’. The 2023 data for winter sea-ice was the lowest with regard to expectations since data has been recorded. Seven standard deviations off the mean, apparently. Whateva, that doesn’t sound good. So the decrease in Antarctic sea-ice over this past decade is equivalent to that in the whole Northern Hemisphere in the past 45 years. And if those magnitudes continue, the Antarctic could be free of summer sea-ice even before the Arctic, which is expected to experience that scenario by around 2050.
So this will certainly lead to changes in ocean currents, and other mostly unpredictable knock-on effects, supposing the changes being measured down south represent something permanent. The fall in sea-ice became measurable from 2016, but has become more dramatic recently. Ice reflects sunlight back into space, so its reduction will lead to oceanic warming, which in turn will lead to a more rapid reduction of ice. One of the key areas of concern is the Denman Glacier and the surrounding Shackleton Ice Shelf, which is melting quite quickly. The complete melting of that particular system is calculated to lead to some 1.5 metres of global sea level rise (which seems hard to believe, I must say).
So what is to be done, and how are those most responsible for the global warming that’s causing all this, responding? Well, it doesn’t seem to be getting much airplay on the internet at present, and apart from New Scientist, there hasn’t been much reporting on the above-mentioned conference and its findings, so I’m having to dig deeper.
I’ve picked up a new term: the cryosphere. That’s the Earth’s icey stuff, in all its forms and habitats. And of course most of it exists at or near the Poles. The IPCC released a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) in September 2019, all available online, and chapter 4, ‘Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities’, is obviously of particular interest. It found that the dominant cause of the rise in global mean sea level (GMSL), at least since 1970, is ‘anthropogenic forcing’, which presumably means something like ‘humanity’s typically forceful influence’. It also found the GMSL rise is accelerating. The situation was worse in the past, though. Way back in the last interglacial, some 120,000 years ago, and also on other occasions millions of years ago, but there were a few H sapiens and other hominins around at the time of the last interglacial, and they obviously survived, so why worry?
Seriously the effects of sea level rise (SLR) on coastal communities are enormously complex and multifaceted, with human-induced habitat degradation muddying the waters of coastal ecosystems, so to speak. There are obvious reasons why humanity tends to congregate around coastal regions – and it’s particularly obvious why it happens here in Australia – and where humanity congregates in large numbers, there’s bound to be a cost, in particular to other species, with rebound effects. Here’s how the IPCC puts it:
Coastal ecosystems, including saltmarshes, mangroves, vegetated dunes and sandy beaches, can build vertically and expand laterally in response to SLR, though this capacity varies across sites … These ecosystems provide important services that include coastal protection and habitat for diverse biota. However, as a consequence of human actions that fragment wetland habitats and restrict landward migration, coastal ecosystems progressively lose their ability to adapt to climate-induced changes and provide ecosystem services, including acting as protective barriers….
Again, this doesn’t sound like deadly serious stuff, to selfish humans like us, but global SLR, estimated by the IPCC to be around 3.3 mm annually (and likely set to increase), will clearly affect islands and coastal regions worldwide. It’s also important to note that global warming isn’t occurring uniformly – Africa’s Central Sahel region, effectively the Sahara Desert, is warming at 1.5 times the global rate. War-torn regions such as Syria and the DRC are also more vulnerable to climate change. Afghanistan is now experiencing its worst drought in decades, while paradoxically there is severe flood damage in some areas. Lack of foreign aid due to the Taliban takeover has created an economic and humanitarian crisis there.
Finally, to focus more on Australia, our future scenario depends muchly on global greenhouse gas emissions, and we, globally, have done little, in spite of all the fuss, to reduce these emissions. The levels reached a new high in 2023, with CO2 ‘accumulating in the atmosphere faster than any time experienced during human existence, rising by more than 10% in just two decades’, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Sea level rise is more of a factor here than in most regions – 85% of our population now lives within 50 km of the coast. This will of course affect coastal infrastructure and our celebrated beaches, but the real issue, for Australia and elsewhere, is that the fact that previous records are ‘falling like dominoes’, according to one expert, is still not being taken seriously enough by the major contributors to the problem, both on a corporate and national level. Australia’s native islander peoples, in the Torres Strait and elsewhere, are facing threats to their very way of life due to sea level rise, but most Australians don’t feel much affected, and many are in denial about the issue, like frogs in the proverbial warming pot.
So, what more to say? It’s hard to keep watching this all happening…
References
https://www.newscientist.com/podcasts/
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/greenhouse-gas-concentrations-surge-again-new-record-2023
https://www.rescue.org/article/10-countries-risk-climate-disaster
More musings on bonobos, families and the riddle of humanity
ring-tailed lemurs are female dominant and beautiful – just saying
So, returning to bonobos and how they’ve managed to become female dominant, and how they might teach humans by example. In an article from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, from just over a decade ago, it was explained in these terms, at least when it comes to conflict:
It is not female alliances that help females win conflicts. The context of the conflict does not seem to be relevant for its outcome either. Instead, the attractiveness of females plays an important role. If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
So that’s it, our next female aspirant to political leadership needs to be good-looking, with plenty of sexual swellings. Such swellings would need to be on display at political rallies (which, happily or sadly, don’t really exist in Australia).
But unfortunately, human society isn’t quite that simple – and nor is bonobo society, methinks, though the influence of sexual swellings among naked apes would surely be greater than among clothed ones. And we human males tend not to be attracted to females primarily because of signs of their fecundity, though it can be argued that physical attractiveness and being within a certain age bracket are common factors, with fecundity hiding slyly behind them.
It’s interesting to consider sexual differences between bonobos and humans. Bonobos are definitely not monogamous, and neither are their close cousins the chimps. We humans like to think we’re ‘naturally’ monogamous, but are we? Were Neanderthals? Australopithecines? And how does monogamy relate to male dominance, if at all? It’s worth noting that we’re by no means certain of how humans lived even in the recent past, in evolutionary terms – say, a mere 10,000 years ago. The term ‘hunter-gatherer’, which to many has suggested a clear delineation, with males as the hunters, has been very much in dispute in recent times (see references), and one might reasonably suspect that participation in either activity would depend on the food available in the region, just as is the case with bonobos, whose diet is mostly vegetarian with the addition of small game animals, easily hunted by either gender, and this has been cited as a contributing factor to bonobo female dominance.
In her book The Patriarchs, Angela Saini considers a number of historical examples, some clear-cut, others more murky, of female empowerment in the past. And much of this has to do with class and heritage:
The low status of some women has never stopped others in the same society from having enormous wealth or power in their own right. There have been queens, empresses, female pharaohs, and powerful women warriors for as long as humans have kept records. In the last two centuries, women have reigned as monarchs over Britain for longer than men have. Women have kept slaves and servants, and still do. There are cultures that prioritise mothers, in which children aren’t even seen to belong to the same households as their fathers.
However, there is no female equivalent to the sexual enslavement, or concubinage, practised in the past by alpha males in a number of human societies. This is highlighted in Joseph Henrich’s landmark work, The Weirdest People in the World, especially in chapter 8, ‘ WEIRD monogamy’, which begins with a quote from a 16th century Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, describing Aztec society:
For three or four years the Sacrament of Matrimony was not administered, except to those who were educated in the house of God. All other Indians lived with as many women as they cared to have. Some had 200 women and others less, each one as many as suited him. Since the lords and chiefs stole all the women for themselves, an ordinary Indian could scarcely find a woman when he wished to marry. The Franciscans sought to uproot this evil; but they had no way of doing so because the lords had most of the women and refused to give them up. Neither petitions nor threats nor arguments, nor any other means which the Friars resorted to were sufficient to induce the Indians to relinquish their women, and, after doing so, enter marriage with only one, as the law of the church demands… This state of affairs continued until, after 5 or 6 years, it pleased the Lord that some Indians of their own accord began to abandon polygamy and content themselves with only one woman, marrying her as the church required… The Friars did not find it easy to have the Indians renounce polygamy. This was very hard to achieve because it was hard for the Indians to quit the ancient carnal custom that so greatly flattered sensuality.
It’s interesting to note here the assumption that monogamy is a less ‘sensual’ or ‘carnal’ practice than polygamy. Bonobos are generally regarded as sensual, even sex-obsessed, but their relations can’t be easily described in a ‘mono’ or ‘poly’ sort of way, because there’s no clear sense of ‘ownership’ of others, though there is plenty of bonding, mediated by sexual-sensual activity, and there is also a degree of hierarchy. We too, will aways have that, as particular individuals emerge as ‘leadership material’, but this can be as much a problem as a benefit. The political meme, ‘strong and wrong beats weak and right’, is so often only fully understood in hindsight.
When I think of a bonobo-style human society, this notion of non-ownership, even as regards children, comes prominently to mind. The compartmentalisation of modern WEIRD society into nuclear family units seems particularly problematic for me, and personal, as I was a five-year-old child of immigrant parents, taken from Britain to Australia on the other side of the world, with no further contact with broader family relations, and neighbours who were barely seen or heard. It’s often claimed that this separation into individual family units, physically separated in a built environment, began with agriculture, with the separation between those units growing with further developments – industrialisation, migration, the Church edicts forbidding marriage between cousins to the nth degree (as Henrich describes in his book). The real story, though, is doubtless even more complex.
I suspect we’re just at the beginning of ‘the great unravelling’ of the nuclear family, with an increasing number of single mothers, and fathers, and a host of ‘different’ family or group organisations, some of which are barely discernible on the horizon. I firmly believe that humans will survive the crises we create for ourselves (and indeed the whole biosphere), though not without great damage to the most vulnerable. It will require greater internationalism, and greater understanding and sympathy for all the species we’re connected to – that’s to say all species. There are plenty of horrific ‘hotspots’ of violence, warfare and inhumanity, as well as callous indifference to the suffering that our everyday actions – our food consumption, our mining and undermining operations, our general rapacity – are causing to the most vulnerable of our own species and many others. Our dominance should teach us to care more. With great power comes great responsibility. So many great powers in the past have not cared enough about the damage they’ve done, for it isn’t immediate damage to them.
Enough, I’m waxing melancholic. Bonobos are, it seems, happy with what they are, which they might continue to be if humans don’t wipe them out. Humans want to know more, grow more, be more than what they are. The ‘beginning of infinity’ indeed. I too am caught up in that quest, as I’m only human. Is it an upward spiral or a downward one? That is the question.
References
Still more critique of the PLOS article on women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: the origins of inequality, 2023
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, 2021
aspects of climate change – Milankovic cycles
from Wikipedia
I’m currently reading A brief history of the Earth’s climate, by Steven Earle, a Canadian geologist, who provides summaries of the various internal and external forces affecting our planetary atmosphere’s composition and temperature over its history. It’s all very sciencey, which is of course good, but not so good for dumb-funks like me, who have to put it into their own words to get a proper handle on it. So that’s why this piece is on Milankovic cycles, about which I know next to nothing.
In 1941 Milutin Milankovic completed a book entitled Canon of insolation and the ice-age problem, in which, according to Earle,
he argues how the natural variations in the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and in the tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis played a critical role in the timing of glaciations over the past two million years.
A brief history of the Earth’s climate, p63
Insolation is defined as ‘the strength of sunlight shining on the various surfaces of the Earth’, bearing in mind that dark surfaces, such as the oceans and densely vegetated regions, absorb sunlight while ice and snow reflect it. Milankovic’ work went largely unrecognised in his lifetime but he was the first to ‘calculate the effects of insolation and to accurately determine the periods during which those changes would be most likely to contribute to the growth [or shrinkage] of glaciers’.
These periods have everything to do with the Earth’s eccentric (but not too eccentric) orbit, and its wobbling tilt, vis-à-vis its orbital plane. That orbit is elliptical, and the Sun is not at the centre, so the Earth’s distance from the Sun varies seasonally. Most people know this, I hope, but they may not know that the shape of Earth’s orbit varies over time, from slightly elliptical to even more slightly elliptical. But we’re talking about very long periods of time, many thousands of years, between the most and least elliptical orbits. When the orbit is most elliptical, the difference between the Sun at its closest and its farthest from Earth is, of course, greatest. It should be obvious, from what we know of the Sun as essentially our only heat source, that these differences will have a climatic impact.
Now to the wobbling tilt, or the Earth’s obliquity, relative to the plane of its orbit. This tilt is presently 23.5 degrees from vertical, and the degrees vary from 22.1 to 24.5 over a period of about 41,000 years. It basically defines our seasons, as the Northern Hemisphere tilts towards the Sun when the Southern Hemisphere tilts away from it, and vice versa. And the variation in that tilt, the wobble, creates greater or lesser variation between summer and winter seasons.
And now back to Milankovic. He, along with a few colleagues including Alfred Wegener of continental drift fame, made observations about the formation and growth of glaciers:
glaciers grow best at temperate latitudes – in fact at around 65 degrees north or south – and can start growing only on land.
There is in fact relatively little land at 65 degrees in the Southern Hemisphere, but plenty in the north, so that was where Milankovic focussed. He also focussed on the summer insolation, as cooler summers are more a factor in glacier growth than cold winters. As Earle explains, when the summers are cooler, there’s less melting of snow and ice, and when winters are colder, they’re also drier, and less snow falls.
So Milankovic based his cycles on three variables – eccentricity, tilt angle and tilt direction.
Eccentricity, which varies on a 100,000-year cycle, determines the distance between Sun and Earth. A high eccentricity (a greater distance), in conjunction with tilt direction, ‘provides a greater opportunity for the Earth to be pushed from a non-glacial state to a glacial state or vice versa’ (Earle).
Tilt angle, which has a 41,000-year cycle, affects seasonal differences. ‘A lesser tilt angle leads to cooler summers and warmer winters, and that favours the growth of glaciers’.
Tilt direction, which has a 23,000-year cycle, determines which hemisphere, north or south, points to the Sun when the Earth is farthest away from it. ‘Glaciation is favoured when the Earth-Sun distance is greatest during the northern hemisphere summer, leading to cool summers with less melting’.
When Milankovic died in 1958 his insolation theories were far from being accepted by mainstream science. This was largely because, though it was known that glaciers enlarged and reduced over millennia, the timing of these ebbs and flows was much of a mystery. Better measurement techniques were required to verify the Milankovic hypotheses. These came in the sixties and seventies with sea-floor and later ice core samples, as well as measurement of isotopic variations in the history of marine mammals, and their relation to temperature, culminating in a key paper published in 1976, at the end of which the authors wrote:
It is concluded that changes in the Earth’s orbital geometry are the fundamental cause of the succession of Quarternary ice ages.
It’s important to note that these orbital changes were not the cause of the ice ages, it simply explained their timing. The cause was a period of atmospheric cooling over 50 million years until recently, geologically speaking. That atmospheric cooling I’ll (try to!) explain in a follow-up post.
From the 70s onwards, ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica have been able to be correlated with variations in surface temperatures over 250,000 years, based on measurements of the ratios of hydrogen isotopes in the water molecules from the ice at those sites. To quote Earle:
The correlation between the temperature record and the July insolation levels is reasonably clear. The third-last interglacial, extending from 245,000 to 235,000 years ago, corresponds with a period of high insolation. The following very low insolation initiated the beginning of the second-last glacial period. That was followed by a very high insolation period (at around 220,000 years ago, which led to significant warming but wasn’t enough to break the glacial cycle. Glacial conditions then intensified over the next 90,000 years.
Another period of very high insolation, culminating at around 120,000 years ago, was able to break the cycle, leading to the second interglacial, which lasted from about 127 to 90 thousand years ago. That was followed by a similar cycle of increasingly cold climates and strong glaciation until around 20,000 years ago, when the glacial cycle was again broken by a period of strong insolation.
As Earle further points out, methane levels from the same ice cores are even more closely correlated with the insolation pattern. And there are other positive feedback processes that ‘amplify Milankovic forcing’, as Earle puts it, including carbon dioxide levels and the albedo effect of accumulated ice and snow during cooling periods.
Our recent greater understanding of Milankovic cycles allows us to predict their effect on the future climate. We’re entering a period of low ellipticity in the Earth’s orbit, meaning that insolation levels won’t vary much for the next 50,000 years. This means we will have an ‘interglacial’ climate for a long long time to come. So, no cyclical glaciation will arrive any time soon to rescue us from anthropogenic global warming. Add that to the forlorn hopes about other processes touted by climate change skeptics/deniers, such as sunspots and a sudden upsurge of vulcanism….
References
Steven Earle, A brief history of the Earth’s climate: Everyone’s guide to the science of climate change, 2021
global warming or climate change? Does it matter? More importantly, how are we going in dealing with it?
…climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called global warming)….
Vaclav Smil, How the world really works, pp 168-9
Man-0-man-o-man-o-man-o-man-o-man….
I was a bit miffed by this slight put-down, because for some time I’ve been insisting (as if anybody noticed) on using the term ‘global warming’ in the face of what I’ve considered a move towards the ‘climate change’ term. In other words my subjective impression has been that ‘global warming’ is being replaced by ‘climate change’, a less urgent term to my way of thinking. I suspect this impression has come from my listening to expert podcasts and videos from New Scientist and other scientific sources, and it seems to me that some agreed-upon descriptor has come down from the Scientists on High, which of course stirs my anti-authoritarian blood.
My semi-informed view is that, yes, the climate is changing due to ‘greenhouse’ gases, by-products of our industries, particularly carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour, accumulating in the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect which is essentially a warming effect. And heat is energy, creating volatility and unpredictability. And the water vapour in particular, evaporating from the oceans, is broadening the tropical belt, causing storms, floods, lightning and fire. Of course there are countervailing factors – ice melt from the poles cools the oceans, adding to the volatility.
So I’ll go online to explore this rather minuscule issue, in my minuscule way. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has this to say:
Although people tend to use these terms interchangeably, global warming is just one aspect of climate change. “Global warming” refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “Climate change” refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time – including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns.
That tells me it’s all much of a muchness, and the climate change we’re concerned about today is a product of greenhouse gas concentrations and the warming this is creating. So I’ll continue to use the global warming term, which isn’t at all inaccurate, because for me at least, it’s clear that the climate changes we’re experiencing stem from this warming, which is why experts like to connect our planetary future to 1.5 degrees, or 2, or 3 degrees, etc. Having said that, I’m more than impressed by Vaclav Smil’s analytical approach to the Big Issues of our modern world, and by his work ethic, which of course puts me to shame (he has written 36 books on energy, food, technology and other key aspects of human civilisation). He can be pedantic, but in a useful way, for example in pointing out that the ‘greenhouse effect’ isn’t really about how greenhouses work:
Labelling this natural phenomenon as the ‘greenhouse effect’ is a misleading analogy, because the heat inside a greenhouse is there not only because the glass enclosure prevents the escape of some infrared radiation but also because it cuts off air circulation. In contrast, the natural ‘greenhouse effect’ is caused solely by the interception of a small share of outgoing infrared radiation by trace gases [water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide].
V Smil, How the world really works, p178
Yeah, we kind of knew that, Vaclav, but thanks for the detail. What’s more interesting in his book is the detail of the challenges we face, and how we’re actually facing them. And one of the critiques he makes, what with all these COP meet-ups and IPCC projections, is the lack of detail and realism in dealing with these enormously complex issues faced by diverse states at varying levels of development, with competing needs, resources, issues and challenges. Our environmental footprint is embiggening, though its embiggening rate is reducing, in much the same way as our global population is, and our continued reliance on the Big Four, cement, steel, plastics and ammonia, to maintain our civilisations, means that fossil fuel emissions and global temperatures will continue to rise in coming decades. Moreover, as Smil points out, predictions about the growth in EV sales haven’t panned out in the last decade or so, and many other prognostications, especially about the future, have fallen flat, such as global supersonic flight, the population bomb, peak oil (I once read a book on that one), nuclear energy (for air travel and for uncovering natural gas fields, and some even nuttier schemes, such as creating ‘instant harbours’!), synthetic life forms (good-looking, hopefully), the 2000 tech-meltdown, and so on.
We seem often to underestimate our genius for surviving – and to overestimate our tendency to fuck things up. Which isn’t to say that we always get things right, or foresee the results of our manipulations of the so-called natural world. Smil is undoubtedly a good skeptic in this area, although I do find him something of an aloof overseer, unlike, for example, Gaia Vince, an intrepid traveller, moving from coal-front to coal-front, befriending and interviewing movers and shakers in the field, from the Sahel to the Columbian mines and the disappearing Himalayan glaciers. Both individual types help us to view the world richly, from individual and global perspectives (and it’s interesting, and unsurprising, that the overseer is male, and the engager is female).
Another problem preventing us from facing the real issues is the petty but mass-murderous ambition of the Putins and Xi Jinpings of the world and their horrific concepts of nationalism and power. The WEIRD world needs to reach out to the suffering peoples of these countries – especially the Chinese, a smart, industrious, ambitious and forward-thinking people who would thrive under a democratic regime (the Russians, by contrast, seem more cowed by their centuries of horror). This raises the question of how we deal with a country like China. My approach would be to maintain relations as much as possible while promoting better, more inclusive forms of government. Raise again and again the lack of women in government. Ask why this is so. What is the justification for an all-male politburo? How can they (the tiny governing minority) pretend that women in power is ‘Western’ and anti-Chinese? Isn’t the generally more collaborative approach of women a boon at a time when we face global crises needing global, collaborative solutions? Doesn’t the drumbeat of war, in these times, sound jarring and out of tune?
A greater internationalism is upon us, and more of it will be forced upon us as we face a global warming issue that will worsen in coming decades, without any doubt. Nationalism tends to get in the way of responses to international crises, as happened with the recent global pandemic. We tend to live in the moment, an eternal present, and we don’t realise, most of us, that if we were born a couple of centuries ago, we could travel throughout much of the world without crossing a border, without having to produce a passport or a visa, and without having to prove our ‘legality’. And we certainly can’t predict what systems will pertain in a couple of centuries from now, but they’re surely more likely to promote communication, co-ordination and exchange rather than isolation. I can only thank the writers and communicators that I’m able to plug into for helping me to focus on the future – my own and beyond – with as much realism and positivity as can reasonably be mustered.
References
How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, by Vaclav Smil, 2022
Adventures in the Anthropocene; Transcendence; Nomad Century, by Gaia Vince, 2018 – 2021
a shallow dive into economics, and the discovery of a (possible) heroine
Shemara Wikramanayake, speaking at the G20 International Conference on Climate
Don’t know much about economics, to put it mildly, being constitutionally work-shy and generally impoverished in a rich country, so it seems absurd for me to occasionally buy and try to make sense of Britain’s internationally focussed mag, The Economist. To be fair to myself, it does have many interesting articles on international politics, reminding me that the bizarreries of the USA and our domestic difficulties re housing and mortgages (in Australia) are far from the most-life threatening issues on the planet. But when it comes to bond markets, IPOs, floaters, monetary policy and the like, I defer to the cognoscenti while suffering a touch of FOMO.
So, with all that, I’m going to present here an almost incomprehensible (to me) letter to the editor from the August 26 2023 issue, entitled ‘Do we need banks?’
I’m not sure what part of David Apgar’s piece on narrow banking was the most entertaining (‘By Invitation’, August 12). The idea that the ‘Chicago Plan’ was conceived with ‘the Depression fresh in mind’ must be viewed as quite original. However, almost equally amusing was Mr Apgar’s suggestion that bank lending ‘fuels credit to enterprising businesses’, when he realises that the problem with Silicon Valley Bank was that it had invested an awful lot of money in notes issued by the Federal Reserve, supposedly also to fuel commerce (and thus revealing the mockery underlying quantitative easing).
None of this has anything to do with supporting ‘enterprising businesses’ that increase prosperity. Banking is doing something else. Banks should go out and make money from the people who deposit money, assuming that they will keep it safe. Instead they are admonished to multiply paying services offered to those who trust them, and still go bankrupt. Do we need the banks or do the banks need us? And if the latter, then why do we need the banks?
I can’t really make sense of much of this, but the writer’s final ‘killer punch’ is surely ridiculous. We needed and used banks in the past because it was unsafe to keep our money ‘under the bed’ or stuffed in oversized wallets. Nowadays WEIRD society is pretty well cashless and we pay with cards or phones electronically connected to our bank accounts. How would we manage without this? And banks need us to pay for their staff, their buildings etc. Think mutual providence(?).
Of course, as someone who has never taken out a loan in my life, I was clueless about how banks make profits. And the fact is, some banks make eye-watering profits. The CEO of the ‘Macquarie Group’ (whatever that means, but I presume it includes the Macquarie Bank which I think is an investment bank, meaning it has nothing to do with me), one Shemara Wikramanayake, earned just under $24 million in the 2022 financial year, presumably due to the profitability of the ‘Group’ she heads. This is an obscene amount of money, and I find it hard to believe she lives on the same planet as myself. Her Wikipedia profile presents her and her ‘Group’ as a heavy hitter in the financing of low carbon emissions technologies, which is great, but I just don’t understand such super-massive wealth disparities…
Having said all that, my hope in starting this piece was to try and understand the concept of quantitative easing, without the apparent cynicism of the letter quoted above (its author tells us that banking ‘is doing something else’ other than supporting enterprising businesses, inferring of course that ‘banking’ is out to make money for itself, which of course is necessarily true, otherwise it wouldn’t have the funds to continue supporting other enterprising businesses). Here’s how Forbes puts it:
Quantitative easing—QE for short—is a monetary policy strategy used by central banks like the Federal Reserve. With QE, a central bank purchases securities in an attempt to reduce interest rates, increase the supply of money and drive more lending to consumers and businesses. The goal is to stimulate economic activity during a financial crisis and keep credit flowing.
Which leads me to further questions – what’s a ‘central bank’, what are ‘securities’, and what is monetary policy’? I’m sure I’ve heard somewhen that it’s the opposite of fiscal policy but that don’t help much.
I’m guessing that the ‘Federal Reserve’ is the USA’s equivalent of our RBA (the Reserve Bank of Australia):
‘We conduct monetary policy, determine payments system policy, work to maintain a stable financial system, issue the nation’s banknotes, operate the core of the payments system and provide banking services to the government’.
Looks like it’ll take me a while to get to QE, but safly safly catchee monkey. Here’s the RBA again:
In Australia, monetary policy involves influencing interest rates to affect aggregate demand, employment and inflation in the economy. It is one of the main economic policies used to stabilise business cycles.
Of course, I’ve heard of the RBA raising/lowering interest rates, and this affects both savings and loans, obviously. But why does this have to be fixed nationally, why can’t banks fix their own rates and let the customer decide which bank to go with? And is it necessary for private banks to follow the RBA’s decisions? (From what I’ve gleaned they don’t have to but generally keep close to the RBA’s settings). And how do interest rates affect ‘aggregate demand’ (defined as ‘the total demand for goods and services within a particular market’)? Does anybody really understand all this – apart from the magnificently named Shemara Wikramanayake?
I must admit to having only a modicum of interest (careful with that word) in the minutiae of economics, but at least my teeny research has brought to mind Ms Wikramanayake as a rare female in the world of financial movers and shakers. She’s Australia’s highest paid CEO due to the profitability of the Group she heads. Obviously I can’t speak to the economics of that, or any attached ethical issues relating to such massive profits, but these profits appear to be related largely to industries and start-ups in the field of renewable, clean energy. In a world of too many macho anti-feminist thugs like Putin, Xi and those who govern Iran, Burma and too many other countries, we need more positive, future-facing, can-do types like her.
I might actually return to trying to understand QE, corporate bonds and the like, in later posts, but maybe not.
References
The Economist, 26/8 – 1/9/2023
global warming worries
Gaia Vince strikes me as a positive type, as opposed to an optimist. An optimist, as I see it, is someone who just feels that the future will be better than the past – that ‘something will turn up’ – while a positivist (not of the logical type) explores and promotes solutions, generally with the requisite realism – nary a solution that doesn’t entail its own problems.
Nomad Century is a remarkable book, which tries to pack as many possible solutions to the global warming situation as possible in a couple of hundred pages, while recognising that the situation is already serious enough to warrant collaborative international action to support the most vulnerable, who are also largely the most innocent in terms of creating the crisis. In this post I’ll try to summarise these ideas and solutions, principally for my own referential purposes.
- Migration
Our history is all about migration. I’m a migrant. Nations, borders, passports and visas are ultra-modern phenomena. Migration has brought helpful genetic input to receiving populations. Clearly we will not bring global warming to less than 1.5c before 2050, probably not even close. We have a responsibility to help those who will increasingly suffer from drought, flooding and fire in coming decades. And while migration is generally a benefit to all, in spite of xenophobic attitudes, planned migration will be much more successful. The United Nations, and other international organisations that have some heft in the world, need to step up as the situation worsens. We need to recall that global society is entirely reliant on movement – of goods. Australia was once a hub of manufacturing. I know, it provided me with employment for much of my youth. Now those goods, including motor vehicles, are pretty much entirely imported, while we rely on exports, mostly of iron ore, coal and gas, to China, Japan and other Asian countries. International trade has expanded muchly in recent decades, creating levels of interdependence never before seen, and yet we tend to be obsessed with guarding our borders. To quote Vince:
As humanity faces its greatest environmental challenge – a population of 10 billion people, resource limitations, and a demographic crisis – we should not be handicapping ourselves by limiting our most important survival tool. We will only meet our global challenges through planned and extensive human movement and redistribution…. we need lawful, safe, planned and facilitated migration.
2. Population
I recall as a kid reading, probably in an out-of-date textbook, that our human population was around 3 billion. In fact we got to one billion early in the 19th century, after some 300,000 years of existence. The World Population Clock now has it at a little over 8 billion, and it will certainly be over 9 billion by mid-century. However, in most WEIRD nations the growth is slow or negative, while nations such as Niger and South Sudan have much higher birth rates. This raises issues around ageing populations, which could be balanced by immigration.
In 2008 the world population became officially more urban than rural, and internal migration to cities continues apace. Cities and their governance and future planning are thus becoming an increasingly vital factor in climate change mitigation. With effective collaboration within and between urban centres, solutions to urban problems re pollution and carbon emissions can be multiplied and shared. The greening of cities is often seen as a benefit in itself, which citizens of differing ideologies can get behind. Environmentalist writer Ihni Jon quotes city planners in Darwin:
We’re trying to create a more pleasant environment in the city for people to roam around and hang out more, which could help the economy of our city. ‘Creating a pleasant condition’, or ‘creating a destination’, has become the motivator for planners to be engaged more with nature and the environment in general.
Then again, the question needs to be asked – how bearable will the environment be in a city like Darwin in the second half of this century? Today is the first official day of spring in Australia, and it has just been announced that the winter just completed was the warmest since records have been kept. And so it goes.
3. Decarbonisation
Everybody is talking about this, but fossil fuel emissions continue to increase. As Vaclav Smil tells us clearly in How the world really works, we’re far from finding ‘replacement’ energy for air travel, shipping and agriculture. Our agriculture industry has been revolutionised since the early 1900s by the mass-production of ammonia (NH3), As the Climate Portal puts it:
…ammonia has to be made at a high pressure under high temperatures—meaning it takes a lot of energy to manufacture. Most of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and methane gas, which give off the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change.
CO2 emissions from ammonia production make up between 1% and 2% of the whole. Emissions from agriculture in general make up around 12%, while a little over 14% comes from transportation. Arguably the sector that can most ‘easily’ be transformed is the ‘general energy’ sector – households and businesses using fossil fuel-based electricity, and gas, for heating, cooling and multitudinous appliances. But we’re a long way from making inroads even in this sector, and we’ve only just managed, more or less, to convince the general population that global warming is a real thing with serious consequences for the biosphere.
With the human population very much on the rise, and the ongoing quest to raise living standards for all, the pressure is on to find solutions. Nuclear fission is an option, and it’s disappointing to note the degree of misinformation around this technology. Australia would be a better location than most, but there seems little public appetite here, perhaps because our climate and open spaces are so well suited to solar. Much has been reported about small modular reactors (SMRs):
The term SMR refers to the size, capacity and modular construction only, not to the reactor type and the nuclear process which is applied. Designs range from scaled down versions of existing designs to generation IV designs. Both thermal-neutron reactors and fast-neutron reactors have been proposed, along with molten salt and gas cooled reactor models.
Again, the appetite just doesn’t seem to be there, and nuclear fusion, which I’ve recently written about, looks to be far into the future still.
Lifestyle change, in terms of what we eat, how we build or refit our homes, and how we recycle our waste, will help, but not enough. A sense of urgency is rising among the cognoscenti, but with the world so divided in other areas (Russia, China, Iran, the USA, etc), it may take a real kick up the biospheric arse (a devastating El Niño?) to wake us up to truly collective action. Meanwhile, we may need to loosen our cherished borders a bit to help those already affected by global warming.
There are some interesting techno-solutions I’ve half-learned about through reading Nomad Century, and I’ll try to learn more about them via a future post.
References
Gaia Vince, Nomad century, 2022
Ihni Jon, Cities in the Anthropocene, 2021
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-change
Vaclav Smil, How the world really works, 2022