A while ago I linked to a Der Spiegel article on surveillance and internment camps in certain provinces in China. This article in Breitbart is the first coverage I have seen of this story in any U.S. press outlet, and all the sources they link to are sources outside the U.S. The only good news is that the Der Spiegel reporters couldn’t seem to find anyone who has returned from the camps, whereas Breitbart actually has. I’m not sure exactly what Breitbart’s motive is for covering the story, but I’ll give them some credit.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
the new IPCC report
Here’s the new IPCC report, Global Warming of 1.5 °C. I guess the idea is to show that this amount of warming, which most nations of the world have tentatively agreed to target, is still pretty bad. And the world is not even remotely on the path toward limiting warming to this level.
The report estimates the world has already warmed by about 1.0 degree C on average due to emissions that have already happened. If we stopped emissions today, the world would continue to warm, but warming would peak somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5 degrees C. I think this is an important concept to grasp – the effects that are beginning to be felt now are not the result of emissions happening now, but of past emissions including emissions decades ago. They would continue and get worse even if we stopped emitting today, and not only are we not lowering emissions, we are continuing and even accelerating them. So the problem is potentially one of runaway, exponentially growing consequences and we are only at the very beginning of the curve.
I find the report difficult to distill into key messages. Here are a couple paragraphs on impacts (starting on p. 1-29 if you are following along at home):
Impacts of climate change are due to multiple environmental drivers besides rising temperatures, such as rising atmospheric CO2, shifting rainfall patterns, rising sea levels, increasing ocean acidification, and extreme events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves (IPCC, 2014e). For example, changes in rainfall affect the hydrological cycle and water availability (Schewe et al., 2014). Several impacts depend on atmospheric composition, for example, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels leading to changes in plant productivity (Forkel et al., 2016), but also to ocean acidification (Hoegh Guldberg et al., 2007). Other impacts are driven by changes in ocean heat content, for example, the destabilization of coastal ice-sheets and sea-level rise (Bindoff et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2017), whereas impacts due to heat waves depend directly on ambient air or ocean temperature (Matthews et al., 2017). Impacts can be direct, for example, coral bleaching due to ocean warming, and indirect, for example, reduced tourism due to coral bleaching. Indirect impacts can also arise from mitigation efforts such as changed agricultural management (Section 3.6.2) or remedial measures such as solar radiation modification (Section 4.3.8, Cross-Chapter Box 10 in Chapter 4).
Impacts may also be triggered by combinations of factors, including ‘impact cascades’ (Cramer et al., 2014) through secondary consequences of changed systems. Changes in agricultural water availability caused by upstream changes in glacier volume are a typical example. Recent studies also identify compound events (e.g., droughts and heat waves), that is, when impacts are induced by the combination of several climate events (AghaKouchak et al., 2014; Leonard et al., 2014; Martius et al., 2016; Zscheischler and Seneviratne, 2017).
The rest of the report goes into various scenarios and pathways for achieving the 1.5 degrees C limit.
The Summary for Policy Makers has some attempts to convey these concepts in a more graphical way.
another robot doing stuff
because it’s fun to watch robots doing stuff
detecting submarines with satellite lasers
The latest idea in detecting submarines involves using powerful lasers mounted on satellites to penetrate to much greater depths than previously thought possible. As far as I can tell, the lasers don’t actually zap the submarines, they just tell you where they are. This could still be a big deal because undetectable submarines with nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent. A first strike on an opponent’s land- and air-based nuclear forces can never succeed in wiping out the ability to retaliate, as long as the subs are out there. There is even a solid argument that a few submarine-based weapons are all the nuclear weapons a country really needs strategically. So if someone gets ahead in the sub-detection game, a first strike could become more thinkable.
more reasons to worry about the global financial system
William White, formerly with the Bank of Canada among other jobs, has another cheery list of reasons to worry about a new financial crisis.
- large increases in dollar-denominated debt in the private sectors of emerging market economies,
- high property prices in many countries,
- asset-management and private equity firms acting as lenders in place in traditional banks, with less regulation and fewer limits on risk taking,
- disparities in interest rates between countries leading to capital movement
- flash crashes,
- algorithmic trading,
- passive investing, and
- the possibility of slower growth, higher inflation, and political meddling in monetary policy in the U.S. caused in part by Trump’s misguided policies.
nitrogen fixing bacteria as an alternative to fertilizer
The invention of nitrogen fertilizer is a key reason the Earth is able to support so many humans, but it has also taken a huge toll on our natural water bodies and climate. Grist has an interesting article on the possibility of using nitrogen-fixing bacteria, either naturally occurring or genetically engineered, on a much wider range of crops and on a much larger scale to help solve this problem.
A pack of startups is racing to market with a means of fixing nitrogen without polluting the Earth. One of them, Pivot Bio, just garnered a $70 million vote of confidence in a funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the coalition of big-name billionaires — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson — hoping to power climate change-beating innovation…
Next year, Pivot plans to start getting farmers nitrogen-fixing bacteria — which efficiently delivers fertilizer to crops, no fossil fuels required. Farmers will spritz seeds with a liquid probiotic as they bury them in the ground. Another startup, Azotic Technologies based in England, is racing to bring a different bacterium to market around the same time. Intrinsyx Bio — a spin-off from a company that supplies NASA with bacteria and other critters for experiments — plans to put yet another bacterium on the market in 2020. And at least one other, the Bayer-backed Joyn Bio, is just ramping up. If any of them is able to provide a viable alternative to the international fertilizer industry, it could be the most significant environmental breakthrough since Haber figured out a way to synthetically release nitrogen from its natural bonds.
So this could be a big deal. Of course, I can’t help thinking of Donella Meadows talking about “layers of limits”. Remove one layer and continue to grow and expand, and you will eventually bump up against the next one.
fair vs. unfair inequality
This interesting article in Vox talks about academic ideas on how to distinguish and measure a difference between fair and unfair inequality. The premise is that there is no moral justification for leaving anyone below the poverty line, even if they are there due to bad choices of their own making. But once out of poverty, there is a need for incentives for people to make effort, make good choices and take the kind of good risks that sometimes pay off for society. There is also a difference between people who are less well off because of bad luck (often the luck of who their parents are) and people who are less well off because they have made less effort or bad choices. Of course, people who are better off because of luck or breeding will tend to rationalize their success relative to others as being due to superior effort and good choices, when in fact they may not be the case. So having an objective way to measure this is an interesting idea. It suggests you could have policies that kick in automatically when some measure of “unfair inequality” gets to a certain level. I don’t quite understand the measure itself, but this is a blog post referring to an academic paper, and I didn’t dig into the academic paper itself.
Modern Monetary Theory
The Intercept has a long article on Modern Monetary Theory.
In a nutshell: MMT proponents believe that the government can safely spend far more money than it currently does, and increasing the federal deficit is not a bad thing in and of itself — a public deficit is also a private-sector surplus, after all.
While typically we hear rhetoric that our political leaders must first “find” money through new taxes or budget cuts in order to pay for new programs, MMT proponents say that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works. In so-called fiat currency systems (meaning societies in which money isn’t backed by physically valuable commodities like gold or silver) governments literally create the money and tax it later to control for inflation and keep it in demand.
Inflation is still a risk, MMT advocates say, but it’s a much more remote risk than mainstream economists let on, and it’s one that can be addressed down the line if it arises, without so much pre-emptive austerity.
They also talk about the idea of a federal jobs guarantee.
I just had a few college economics courses, but the idea seems risky. By expanding the money supply so drastically, I thought you risked hyper-inflation and a devaluing of your currency relative to others. Of course the U.S. can push it further than other countries, but there still must be a breaking point. But the idea of some kind of counter-cyclical automatic investment in infrastructure, education, training, and research is appealing to me. This could kick in if unemployment hits a certain level, growth falls below a certain level, or some combination of the two. Then during stronger economic times, the government steps back and lets the private sector take the lead. I think it would have to be some kind of formula or else the politicians will ruin it.
Project Censored’s Top 25
Project Censored has released its top 25 censored stories for 2017-2018 (2019 is available for sale as a book). Among the interesting ones:
The Florida Parkland High School shooter was a member of the school’s Junior Reserve Office Training Corps and was taught to shoot surplus military weapons by something called the Junior Marksmanship Program.
“Solutions journalism” is a relatively simple idea to offer solutions along with coverage of problems to avoid “negative news overload”.
Natural systems such as rivers are being given legal rights and even personhood in some places.
Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and vegetation on a large scale.
Cell phones might be causing miscarriages.
Also, Russia may be up to no good but at the same time the exhaustive coverage of it may be distracting us from other important issues. Opioid drugs continue to kill a lot of people. And the rich are getting richer. But I don’t think these really qualify as “breaking news” for those who have been paying attention.
Trump and the next pandemic
Add to the stupidity of the Trump administration slashing funding to prepare for and respond to the next deadly pandemic outbreak. These are the unwanted border crossings we should actually be worried about, and by helping people in countries where diseases are breaking out we could also be protecting ourselves.
The investments made after the 2014 Ebola crisis have been slashed in recent proposed federal budgets from the Centers for Disease Control, the agency that works to stop deadly diseases in their tracks, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which responds to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak. Moreover, Timothy Ziemer, the top White House official in charge of pandemic preparedness, has left his job, and the biosecurity office he ran was summarily disbanded…
Perhaps most terrifying, difficult to treat and highly fatal strains of H7N9 avian influenza are spreading throughout China.
This strain of bird flu causes rapid respiratory illness with associated multiorgan dysfunction that’s easily spread by a small droplet. That’s why it’s so difficult to control and why recurrent epidemics continue to crop up: There have been five epidemics of H7N9 since 2013 in China alone, the most recent between the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017. Across these epidemics, among the 1,565 confirmed cases, about 40 percent of infected individuals died.