Category Archives: Web Article Review

modern high-tech Noah looks at ectogenesis

If you were going to build an ark and put two of every animal on it, in these modern times, you would have to consider ectogenesis. Basically, you would freeze embryos, which is a 100% viable existing technology, and build robots with some kind of reliable renewable power source to thaw them out and raise them after you are long dead. You could fit a lot of this on an ark, or a spaceship, and they wouldn’t eat or drink or poop as long as you kept them frozen. One conundrum, which the article does go into, is whether or not to include humans, or just see if some other species evolves intelligence. I would bet on crows/ravens personally. Dolphins have had their chance, and they are perpetually stuck at toddler level, although they seem to have fun. Whatever it is, then they could use their intelligence to develop planet-killing weapons and energy sources, along with ethical consciousness, ark building technology, and the ability to freeze embryos and build robots to hatch and raise them.

the new IPCC physical science basis for we’re fucked

I suppose I have to say something about the new IPCC science report that came out this week (I’m writing on Thursday, August 12). It’s easy to find summaries of it from actual journalists in the media, for example this one from the AP.

I’ve only read the summary for policy makers. I have the best intentions to read the full report, but then I had the best intentions to read the last 16 IPCC reports, not to mention the proliferating ecosystem and biodiversity reports. Anyway, if you don’t mind a collection of random observations, here are a handful of things that caught my eye:

  • The graphics are kind of nice. If you are trying to communicate science-y or tech-y things to general audiences, they are worth a glance.
  • If we stopped emitting carbon emissions today, the earth would continue to warm for decades, if not centuries or millennia. This means the effects we are feeling right now were caused by emissions decades ago. Emissions have not only continued for decades, but they have accelerated. Things are going to continue to get worse, and probably not linearly but exponentially. If we drastically cut emissions today, the results would be detectable in about 20 years or so. The Earth is a dynamic system with lags and feedback loops.
  • Warming of about 1.5 degrees C (I don’t know how to make a degree symbol in WordPress) would be considered a great outcome. The Earth has already warmed by about 1.0 degrees as of right now (2019 actually).
  • Human activity is the overwhelming cause of warming. Come on, don’t be stupid. Natural factors exist but they are small compared to the human activity.
  • One thing that did surprise me is that scientists are pretty sure that human-caused air pollution has had a significant retarding (using this word in the scientific/musical sense of slowing something down) effect on global warming. But again, more than overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of burning, burning, burning with reckless abandon for centuries now.
  • Scientists are very sure human activity is driving massive ice loss in the Arctic. They are only kind of medium sure it is the main driver in the Antarctic.
  • So what is a good place to live? Well, central and eastern North America are some of the only regions are Earth that are not unequivocally hotter already, meaning scientists disagree on whether they are or not. They are more at risk of flooding though, along with most of Asia. Drought is biting harder in western North America, parts of Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and southern Australia than elsewhere.
  • There are five scenarios in this report. They are called SSP1-1.9, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5.

Compared to 1850–1900, global surface temperature averaged over 2081–2100 is very likely to be higher by 1.0°C to 1.8°C under the very low GHG emissions scenario considered (SSP1-1.9), by 2.1°C to 3.5°C in the intermediate scenario (SSP2-4.5) and by 3.3°C to 5.7°C under the very high GHG emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5)24. The last time global surface temperature was sustained at or above 2.5°C higher than 1850–1900 was over 3 million years ago (medium confidence).

IPCC
  • Coastal property may not be a good investment.
  • Scientists are divided on the tipping point theories involving the global meridional circulation. They agree it is going to weaken though. The tipping point collapse scenarios “can’t be ruled out and are part of risk assessment”. Ha – risk assessment language might say something like “unknown but non-zero probability, existential threat”.
  • The report provides a remaining carbon budget that could be used for policy making, depending on the end point the world would like to target.

what to do about the U.S. electric grid

Actually, it’s pretty simple. To deal with climate change, we need to electrify everything, bring lots and lots of renewable energy sources online, and have a grid that can handle them. Renewables are intermittent and unreliable locally, the cynics tell us, but in a big country they are always online somewhere. Our 50-year-old duct-taped together grid isn’t up to the task of getting enough electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed. Permitting, NIMBYism, and our antiquated system of semi-sovereign states are all part of the problem. But also, we just need to throw tons of money at this. The current administration and dysfunctional legislature are maybe considering a small “downpayment” that is the most they consider politically possible. Meanwhile, Asia is running rings around us, not that it is a competition.

Blah blah blah the statistics continue to tell a clear story of U.S. decline. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up – the problem is diagnosed, solutions exist and it is time to take action.

Other countries are zipping ahead in this area. China has emerged as the world’s clear leader in high-voltage transmission, building tens of thousands of miles of these lines to connect its power plants with cities across the vast nation. But while China developed 260 gigawatts of transmission capacity between 2014 and 2021, all of North America added just seven, according to a survey conducted by Iowa State University.

MIT Technology Review

This seems slightly unfair – we had a significant head start on China I would assume, so we might not need to build as much new infrastructure as they do. But this head starter is a driver of our complacency – we have been coasting on past investments for a long time, and we are running out of gas…er, juice. (This reminds me of a Chinese friend asking me once why Americans refer to electricity as “juice”, and I didn’t and still don’t have a good answer.)

the U.S. health care system is not just below average, it is the worst

This is getting tiresome. Do we need any more evidence that the U.S. has slipped below average and is now bringing up the rear in many categories among developed countries? This is the 2021 Mirror, Mirror report from The Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit generally considered to be competent and non-partisan.

The U.S. ranks last out of the 11 countries included. But the ranking understates the case, because the other countries are somewhat clustered in terms of cost and outcomes, and then the U.S. is a point far away from the cloud with much higher cost and much worse outcomes. It’s not an Anglo-American failure, because the UK, Australia, and New Zealand all do well. Canada is ranked second worst, but again it is on the lower right edge of the cloud and the U.S. is way out on its own.

I do think they picked a group of very high performing countries here. There have to be other developed countries, particularly in Asia, that could have been included. But somehow, I doubt including Japan, Taiwan, etc. would make the U.S. look any better.

I wonder though what would happen if they tried to compare just the over-65 U.S. population served by Medicare to the over-65 population in the other countries. If Medicare does much better than the U.S. health care “system” (i.e., cluster-you-know-what) as a whole, it would be an even stronger argument for Medicare for All. Should the U.S. maybe try to establish a health care system before the next pandemic arrives?

mushrooms in space

I learned a few things from this Scientific American article. First, fungi can be very useful in space because they break down hydrocarbons, which are abundant but not hospitable to life, and turn them into sugars, which are not abundant in space and do support life. Second, they create hard carbonaceous materials which can provide protection, insulation, and even conduct electricity. Third, at least some scientists think fungi will be discovered in space. Fourth, the character Paul Stamets on Star Trek Discovery is named after a real scientist named Paul Stamets, who wrote the book Mycelium Running, which I have heard of an haven’t read. And finally, something I knew but for the record have no personal experience with to date, psychoactive mushrooms can treat depression, loneliness, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are going to occur anywhere in our universe humans choose to go.

Limits to Growth Re-revisited

Someone revisits Limits to Growth every now and then. This author says the world is tracking the most pessimistic scenarios examined in the original model, and that stagnation or collapse in the next decade is a real possibility. The attempt at a silver lining – there is a chance that it might not be too late to do something.

but we’re ready to fight a war, right?

Yesterday I concluded the U.S. is not ready for a significant disaster. But one thing we commit plenty of resources to and are good at is fighting wars, right? In fact, we are so good nobody will even mess with us, right? Not so fast. There is buzz at the moment over a war game that supposedly showed the U.S. catastrophically losing a conflict over Taiwan. Communications were disrupted immediately by missiles, drones, and attacks on infrastructure like undersea cables, and without communications the U.S. forces couldn’t fight effectively.

I’m a little skeptical. Why would the U.S. military intentionally publicize something like this? I suppose scaring a domestic audience into committing even more resources is always one reason. A cold war with China is a good reason for our military-industrial complex to keep sucking up 5% or so of our economy, and Taiwan is the most obvious flashpoint that could go from cold to hot. If brinksmanship or bluffing to sustain military funding is the game here, the risks are too great to play the game. Seriously, let’s not let this happen.

U.S. not prepared for megadisasters

The description for this 2006 book Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do is eerily prophetic. Then again, I can’t rule out the possibility that it was updated in the last year or so to appear eerily prophetic in hindsight.

Five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully clear that the government’s emergency response capacity is plagued by incompetence and a paralyzing bureaucracy. Irwin Redlener, who founded and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, brings his years of experience with disasters and health care crises, national and international, to an incisive analysis of why our health care system, our infrastructure, and our overall approach to disaster readiness have left the nation vulnerable, virtually unable to respond effectively to catastrophic events…

As a doctor, Redlener is especially concerned about America’s increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health care system, incapable of handling a large-scale public health emergency, such as pandemic flu or widespread bioterrorism. And he also looks at the serious problem of a disengaged, uninformed citizenry—one of the most important obstacles to assuring optimal readiness for any major crisis.

Amazon

I thought we responded okay to 9/11 in terms of the actual local area where it happened. Obviously we didn’t prevent it or prepare for it, and starting two wars with countries that were mostly uninvolved can’t really be considered a response at all. Katrina is another story. When I look back, that failure on a regional scale was a harbinger of our coronavirus failure on a national scale. And coronavirus, awful as it has been, is marginal in terms of what a megadisaster could really unleash – think a disease that kills 99% instead or 1% of people infected, even a limited nuclear war, an earthquake or volcano large enough to devastate an entire densely populated region, sudden ice sheet collapse, or a catastrophic collapse of the food and/or energy systems.

It seems to me that surviving the medium-term future as a nation and civilization requires us to address both the slow and steady long-term trends like global warming, and to be prepared for the sudden catastrophic events we are going to have to deal with. The two are clearly related – dealing with the long term trends can lessen the frequency and severity of some of the short-term events, but not eliminate them.

the Nordic welfare model

This article explains that the Nordic welfare model succeeds by targeting the middle class, not just the poor. They provide services of high enough quality (child care, health care, education, unemployment, disability, retirement) that the private sector can’t compete. Then the middle class voters support the politicians who support the policies, and are willing to pay the taxes necessary to receive the benefits.

Seems simple, but it’s easy for anti-tax corporate and wealthy interests in the United States to prevent this feedback loop from getting established. They just spew propaganda and buy off politicians who are anti-tax and anti-deficit spending, so the government only has resources for limited programs targeting the poor, the middle class resents paying taxes and receiving little in return while having to pay for sub-par private benefits at the same time, and they continue to vote against policies to expand benefits. Breaking this loop would require a gamble on massive deficit spending (kinda sorta being tried now, legitimately during a crisis in my view) and/or constitutional changes/reinterpretation that stop the legalized propaganda and bribery (which would have to be enacted by the politicians who are being bribed, unless judges were to take the lead which seems unlikely).