AMOC is of course the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, and a new study summarized by Guardian suggests we are on a path to its tipping point.
Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.
The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.
Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.
I admit that when I am sort of lazily thinking about this, I don’t distinguish in my mind between the tipping point and the collapse. But they are different, as this article illustrates. The tipping point is the point of no return, but because there is a time lag between the tipping point and the consequences, the tipping point is going to be called in hindsight rather than in real time. And this is very bad for our increasingly short-attention-span species and civilization.
Well, Musk himself has not volunteered for invasive brain surgery as far as we know. But some people do in fact have small electrodes implanted in their brains. I learned from Startalk that this has legitimate medical uses. If a person has brain cancer and would die without brain surgery to remove a portion of the brain, surgeons will implant these electrodes and monitor the brain’s signals for a period of time to understand exactly which part of the brain needs to be removed, and to do that as safely as possible. The ethics of this are pretty clear. Technologically, the next step after this invasive form of brain monitoring is to advance non-invasive brain monitoring technologies, which exist but are currently not as good. And after that, still in the realm of science fiction for now, would come the injectable nanobots that can connect your brain to the internet. According to Ray Kurzweil, that fabulous science fiction future is scheduled to arrive in 2029.
Now back to Musk and Neuralink. A person who had the technology installed about 18 months ago has chosen to speak publicly. The person was paralyzed after an accident, and this has given him the ability to do many things he would otherwise not be able to do.
a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI, or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body…
When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and a dozen companies in the U.S. and China have been conducting limited human trials since 1998.
But becoming the first patient to get a Neuralink implant, in particular, is its own right of passage. For one, Neuralink’s device has threads with more than 1,000 electrodes, giving the device a much higher connectivity rate than most of the BCIs currently being studied in humans in the market. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Neuralink’s device is also wireless, versus competitors like Blackrock Neurotech that require a wired connection from the implant through the skull to an external receiver for signal capture and decoding (Blackrock Neurotech sells a wireless processor that has been used for research).
So there you have it. This brain control (as in brain controlling something other than a human body part) technology is farther along than us laymen not paying attention might have thought.
It’s sad – Philadelphia’s public transportation, which was already creaky and unreliable due to decades of deferred maintenance and capital investment, is being financially starved due to dysfunctional politics at the state level. At the heart of the political game is a willful misunderstanding of a fundamental truth – most economic activity occurs where the most people are. Is this really not so obvious that we need to debate it? And this means that most taxes in a state like Pennsylvania are paid in its metropolitan areas. It makes sense to spend some of that money disproportionately in rural areas which by definition can’t generate the net economic activity to support themselves. But people and politicians in these rural areas not only do not appreciate this, they believe the exact opposite thing to be true – that they are subsidizing metropolitan areas. Which is logically, financially, and physically impossible. But mirroring the larger country, these irrational rural politicians have disproportionate political power relative to the number of people they represent. I have no political answers to this political problem, and I am getting closer to considering leaving the state. Delaware and New Jersey have their own problems but are much more rationally governed.
Anyway, having said all that, Philadelphia’s public transportation is not exactly cutting edge or visionary. It’s dirty, old, slow, and communication is poor. And it’s not cheap – one person riding a bus can save money relative to Uber, assuming they don’t place a high value on time. But several people traveling together will not save money. Tourists and business travelers have no hope of understanding it, if they were willing to brave the urine and feces and garbage and rats in the stations and bus stops and on the vehicles themselves. A system like this is at risk of losing out to more innovative competition, even if that innovative competition is bad for the environment and dangerous for people. So let’s look at some of the alternatives mentioned in this ABC article.
ride sharing databases – The local one is run by our metropolitan planning organization. Basically just a message board for people to find each other who want to carpool. Makes sense, just seems low tech and clunky. Enterprising individuals could probably build a business around this, which may or may not be against the rules.
Rideshare (Uber, etc.) – Sure they’ve been around for awhile, but they have some new ideas. With “Group Rides”, you can invite specific friends to share your ride. “The company’s latest option, Route Share, is designed to function like a commuter shuttle running every 20 minutes during peak times from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.. with designated pick-up and drop-off points.” … “For even more significant savings, try Uber Transit, which provides a public transit route, sometimes combined with an Uber ride.”
van pools run by rental car companies – “The rental car company teams up with companies to match employees who live near each other, then provides them with vehicles to use… Each ride consists of 4-15 riders who live near each other or along a route, and share rides to and from work. Enterprise takes care of maintenance and vehicle liability insurance.”
New Jersey and Delaware also have “Transportation Management Associations” which seem vague to me but again have something to do with organizing carpools and vanpools.
A couple thoughts. First, we see tech solutions like Uber adapting to public transportation, and starting to cover the gap between whatever public transportation can provide and what people actually need to get from Point A to Point B. This is basically good, although if public transportation can’t compete on cost it may eventually disappear. Governments might do the math and decide to subsidize the more flexible private options instead. Self-driving and self-parking wheeled vehicles may change the dynamics of how all this works, and relatively soon. All of this is likely to exacerbating sprawling land uses rather than the more compact urban areas we know are best for economic growth, innovation, human health, and the environment. But that has been the trend for a century at least.
I have some hope that self-parking vehicles may enable less waste of the most economically valuable land for parking. Because the point of parking is to make transportation easily accessible where you are working/shopping/recreating, and a self-driving vehicle can park efficiently farther away but still show up when and where you need it. Instead of a store having to have a parking lot that is bigger than the store, you can now have two stores next to each other and a large parking lot/garage out of sight on the edge of town. And that garage or lot won’t have to be as big because the self-parking cars will be able to maneuver more efficiently not to mention infinitely patiently compared to human drivers.
This might seem esoteric, but it is somewhat germane to some points I made recently. One part of a big-picture solution to housing supply challenges lies in, well, housing. But another angle (at least from an economic growth perspective) lies in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure allowing people to live in one place and work in others with less friction (i.e., travel time and cost.)
Under conditions of spatial mismatch between labor supply and demand, intercity non-local employment, including intercity-commuting-based employment and remote work, has become increasingly common worldwide. However, research examining intercity non-local employment from an industry perspective remains limited. Using census data from 2011, 2016, and 2021 for Australia’s significant urban areas, this study adopts an industry lens to examine patterns of intercity non-local employment and their associations with industry diversity, industry disparity, and the location quotients of different industries. The findings reveal that: (1) Intercity non-local employment in Australia intensified during 2011–2021, with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth serving as key network nodes; (2) Although industry diversity is not significantly associated with non-local employment, work-residence connections are more likely to form between industrially diverse cities over longer distances; (3) Industry disparity between work and residential cities reduces the likelihood of non-local employment, reflecting a tendency toward employment self-containment; (4) Cities with higher location quotients in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing exhibit a stronger capacity to attract non-local workers. This study supports developing regional industrial diversity centers as hubs for labor mobility and interaction. Furthermore, it highlights the rationality of industry complementarity, particularly between capital and non-capital cities, as a strategy to balance labor supply and demand, and calls for further evaluation of the long-term impacts of non-local employment on cities reliant on specific workforce sectors. Overall, this research advances the understanding of Australia’s urban structure and offers valuable insights for targeted industrial development strategies aimed at fostering balanced and sustainable urban systems.
I did work and travel in Australia a bit about 10-15 years ago, and one thing that struck this American is that their cities are just really far apart, and there is not much in between. So I got the impression that a lot of their white collar business travel is by plane. What is blue collar business travel you ask – there I am thinking of long haul trucking. And no, if I am thinking about long haul trucking in Australia I can’t get Mad Max out of my head. One really hopes this is not our future.
While there is a propaganda shield between news coverage of the global climate emergency and those of us absorbing news here in the US, the American Meteorological Society bravely continues to publish their annual State of the Climate report. I think “absorbing” is the right word because, while accurate news sources are not actually censored and are out there to be sought out, if you are just getting your news from headlines and sound bites and passing a monitor in an airport, you’re getting the impression that the ongoing collapse of our world’s biophysical life support system is not a front and center concern.
Anyway, I think of this report as sort of the interim annual report between whenever the IPCC gets around to their major releases. Here are some quick highlights:
Atmospheric CO2 stands at 423 ppm. This is the highest ever, it is growing each year and it is growing at the fastest rate recorded since the 1960s. So the world is not only turning the corner, it is not decelerating toward turning the corner. It is accelerating.
Record heat. Record drought. Record ocean heat. Record polar heat, ocean ice and glacier loss.
Record sea level. Well, this is not surprising because the trend is up, and this one I wouldn’t expect to fluctuate so much year to year. The summary in the article I linked to doesn’t say whether there is evidence of unexpected acceleration. But with all that ice melt, there is a mass balance situation here…
So it’s bad bad bad, dad. I don’t know how else you can spin this other than to say it’s important to put one year in the context of longer-term trends. But the long-term trends are all bad. And if we are hitting unexpected records, that suggests that the projections (which are bad) may not be bad enough. Increasingly it looks like the world may be at that tipping point – it will be called in retrospect rather than definitively in the moment, but it might be now. 2025 will be a nice round year to put in the history books.
This is a short Wikipedia article about defining and mapping the historical or potential natural vegetation of areas that have been developed or otherwise altered by humans. Sure, there is plenty of scientific debate about the concept but it seems to me like it could be adapted for practical purposes. Even in the U.S., we have ordinances in most places requiring maintenance or restoration of something approaching natural hydrology on development sites (I’m not saying implementation of this concept is remotely perfect either, just that it is widespread and more or less accepted). But we don’t have anything approaching that for ecology, and you can restore hydrology without restoring an ecosystem (for example, with a storage and infiltration tank under a parking lot). So if you have a model of what the original or potential natural vegetation of a place is, you should be able to quantify what percentage of that is being destroyed, preserved, or restored by a given project.
This is just some natural(ish) vegetation. I’m just trying to make the site more visually interesting, okay? Thank you Indiana Jo for posting on Wikimedia.
This (paywalled) Financial Times article has eye-popping pictures of French towns built in the 1200s and 1300s. Many of these still exist and are going strong today, and people love them. They were small (around a thousand people) and densely populated. They were generally built around a public square with a weekly market. At the time, the article says, feudal lords created the towns as a way of concentrating, controlling, and taxing people, in exchange for greater safety and quality of life. The feudal lord generally owned the commercial and industrial real estate, of course, but the article says this can be a model for development corporations today, with master planning and long-term ownership of business districts. Housing developers in theory can do their short-term thing but pay into these development corporations which are then set up in perpetuity to operate and maintain the commons. Sounds good in theory. Clearly the private markets don’t create the kind of green spaces, schools, etc. that people say they want but then vote against with their actual dollars and housing and transportation choices.
This paper identifies a number of “positive tipping points” on climate change that can help counteract the risk of reaching negative tipping points such as glacier melting and methane release. They identify the shift to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, and heat pumps for heating and cooling buildings. These seem very market- and consumer-driven to me. So these are feedback loops that have been gathering some steam, and maybe governments can do relatively small things to reinforce them in the hopes of getting them to a takeoff point where they are self-sustaining and able to counteract the negative feedback loops that are out there. It is somewhat heartening to realize that the renewable energy and electric vehicle revolutions are farther along outside the US than inside, and we are not getting this impression I believe because of effective oil and gas industry propaganda here. Because those companies and their lobbyists understand these positive feedback loops too, and they are evil or at least amoral in the pursuit of short term profit at the long term expense of human civilization on Earth.
From what I understand (outside this article), adoption of heat pumps and building electrification is farther along in the U.S. than elsewhere. This is interesting – how did we manage to move away from heating buildings with coal, oil, and gas directly decades ago if this decreased the profits of the all-powerful fossil fuel industry? Were they just asleep at the switch, or were the economic incentives just that strong? Is it because we made the choice to fund electric infrastructure through a decentralized, regulated electric utility industry? And once we built that infrastructure, the economic incentives became too strong to resist. Whereas we have not built the infrastructure to support the electric vehicle transition, and the fossil fuel/automobile/highway construction industry is successfully fighting that tooth and nail through propaganda and (legalized, by our corrupt Supreme Court) political corruption. (Remember that currently, highway construction has dedicated funding from gas taxes. And auto dealerships make more money from servicing and repairing fossil fuel powered vehicles than they do from selling them.)
Note the oil and gas industry could have been decentralized and regulated too, that is just not the path we went down a century or so ago. It’s too late for this, but economic incentives are going to push in the direction of building the charging infrastructure, because it is just a better, cleaner, and cheaper way to get around overall. So by pushing for this policy, however strongly and effectively the forces of darkness have been pushing against it lately, we are working to reinforce a positive feedback loop that can eventually tip and become irreversible.
I know, a lot of electricity is still generated with fossil fuels at this point. It is still more efficient from what I understand. And slowly but surely, renewables are chipping away. Add modernized nuclear technology to this mix, like the small modular reactors, and keep pushing toward that longer-term dream of fusion power.
We kind of knew this would happen. IVF has been around and is getting more common, although it’s still expensive. We’re told DNA sequencing means people using IVF can select embryos to reduce the probability of genetic diseases. So far so good. Basic research exists tying genes to traits other than susceptibility to disease, like intelligence and eye color. So it was inevitable that companies would arise offering to let people select embryos tied to these traits, right? And that has now happened. Here is a long rundown of where the state of this industry stands.
The biggest concern, which I share, is that rich people will be able to afford this and nobody else will, so rich people will have even more advantages and the gap between rich and poor will grow. But I do like this quote from the article:
One might object that at least they’re in good company: other products which help rich kids get healthier/smarter/taller/prettier than poor kids include private tutors, gyms, hair salons, health insurance, clothing, books, and food.
Next the article presents the argument that rich people adopting a technology early helps to move it along the path to economies of scale and eventually a cost everyone can afford. This makes a certain amount of sense. But it would make even more sense for governments that care about their people to be the early adopters.
Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this; it could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future health care expenses. In countries with public health care, this comes directly out of the government treasury; even in the US, it’s covered by Medicare after age 65. The government should be begging people to select embryos.
The most persistent cost barrier is likely to be in vitro fertilization itself, a necessary precursor. In the US, 2-3% of babies are born through IVF. For those kids, this is a no-brainer – even if the cost never comes down, the cheaper products are only a fraction of total IVF expense. What about the other 98%? If those parents feel like they have to get embryo selection (and therefore IVF) to keep up, this could be a significant burden. IVF isn’t fun – it requires pumping a woman full of mind-altering hormones for weeks, extracting eggs in a minor surgery, and then implanting embryos in another minor surgery, all with a decent chance that some step will fail and you’ll have to do it all again. It also costs $15,000 in the US (less in poorer countries), and unlike the genetics, the cost has barely gone down in the past twenty-five years.
Israel is cited as a country that is offering universal free IVF to its citizens. And here in the U.S., policies that have favorable long-term benefit-cost ratios just implement themselves, right?
All this is without any form of genetic engineering, remember. You are just selecting within the variation in naturally-occurring embryos. One can imagine accelerating this even more if generations of embryos can be spliced and diced by AIs and robots in a short amount of time. And even more if the actual genes are manipulated. (Ethical issues TBD, but if it can be done, someone somewhere will do it eventually.)
Incidentally, Brave New World is supposed to enter the public domain in the U.S. in 2028. But here is a copy you can buy for only $6000!
Nate Silver has put together a spreadsheet with a comprehensive answer to this question, based on records from 800 flights he personally has taken. You have to be a paid subscriber to his site to get the spreadsheet, but there are plenty of clues in the narrative. It is not crystal clear which factors are additive rather than overlapping.
First, the “base case” is a solo English-speaking American business traveler. Families and people who don’t speak perfect English are inconveniences that can be treated in a stochastic manner. More specifically, this base case is a solo domestic (U.S.) traveler, with TSA PreCheck or CLEAR, and not checking bags. For this base case, the rule is “60 minutes from walking through the airport door to departure.”
For a car commute, round up whatever Uber/Lyft says the trip will take by 30%. [For public transportation, my rule is to take the vehicle before the last vehicle that would get me there just barely on time.]
If parking or returning a rental car, add 15-30 minutes.
Add 15 minutes for a really big, busy airport (like JFK, O’Hare). 5-10 if you use that airport a lot and know it inside and out.
Add 5-10 minutes if you have a connection make. His reasoning: “This might seem silly since it doesn’t affect the departure time at the originating airport. But it raises the stakes for missing your flight. Also, if you arrive at the very last moment, you’ll likely be asked to gate-check your bag, which can get you off to a slower start when making that tight connection.”
Add 20 minutes if you do not have PreCheck/CLEAR, +5 for really big busy airports and -5 for small ones
Add another 20 minutes in bad weather.
For international, add 20-40 minutes if you don’t need to check in at the counter and another 15 (business class) to 30 (economy class) if you do.
Add 20 minutes if you just enjoy relaxing at the airport with a beverage before flying.
Special case: If you’re going somewhere (like Canada) that you need to clear immigration before getting on the plane, you need to allow an extra 30 minutes. Presumably it will save you the same amount at the other end (although in my personal experience, U.S. immigration is about as bad as it gets anywhere I have been.)
Okay, let’s try adding this up for my most common travel cases.
Case 1: A domestic business trip, let’s say I’m attending a 2-3 day conference. I have one bag that fits in the overhead compartment or can be gate-checked. I check in online. Weather is reasonable. I’m going to allow 60 minutes at the airport, +10 because my home airport of Philadelphia is pretty big and pretty busy but I know it well, +25 because I don’t have Precheck and security can be a real cluster-, +20 because I enjoy sitting down and having a beer before flying. That’s 1 hour 55 minutes, so the “2 hour rule” was just about right. I could do PreCheck if I really travel enough to make it worthwhile, and obviously I don’t need the beer, I just want it.
Case 2: An international trip with the family. I am past the stroller/car seat/diaper phase which would add exponential complication – not part of Nate Silver’s computational framework. Let’s say I am traveling in reasonable weather from the nightmare hell (but relatively easy to get to) hub of Newark. 60 minutes + 15 because it’s a nightmare hell hub + 10 minutes because there’s a connection + 20 minutes for security + 60 for counter check in (! – but yes, it can be this bad). I’ll skip that beer because I don’t want to get even more dehydrated on a long haul flight. I get 2 hours 40 minutes, so the “3 hour rule” is not far off.
So in conclusion, for me the 2 hour rule can maybe be shaved to 1.5 and the 3 hour rule to 2.5 if I want to live adventurously. I try to get to the airport by public transportation when I can though, so that adds another layer of likely delays. My rule there is to take the vehicle before the vehicle that would get me there just in time. Sometimes you just have to try to relax and make the most of wherever you happen to be, and not worry so much about the time. If I spent another half hour at home or the office before I left for the airport, what would I really do – either interact with other people or do something on a screen. Traveling is stressful, and it can be good to take a moment between the mad dash to the airport and security line, and the various inconveniences and indignities of actually flying. At the airport, I am more likely to read a book, have a beverage, or unwind a bit before flying if things aren’t too crazy.
