April 2020 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?

Most hopeful story:

  • Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month.

the best scholarly books of the decade

This is a late entry on the best books of the 2010s, but it included a number of interesting nonfiction books I hadn’t heard of. I don’t have time to sit down and read long non-fiction books these days (or really think in depth about anything at all) so these reviews might be as close as I get. Here are a handful I might read if I actually could.

  • “Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization.” Let’s just go ahead and legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution, tax them, tamp down the violence and move on.
  • Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Though the intelligence industry isn’t always visible, one constantly senses its presence. Its rapid growth since the 1950s also created a prosperous, high-tech region whose’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy belies its idyllic self-image.” This is the actual deep state, in its original sense of the military-industrial-intelligence complex that influences so much of our country’s laws and policies to produce wealth and power for itself.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Okay, I’ve heard of this one. Haven’t read it but think I get the idea. Wanted to be seen reading a copy while on jury duty but didn’t have the guts.
  • Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Because tolerance and understanding is good.
  • Every Twelve Seconds – this is about what really goes on in a slaughterhouse. I admit it, my “meatless Monday” aspirations have slipped during the coronavirus shutdown.
  • James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011) “did more than any single book to shake up how I thought about British imperial history.” What could this have to do with me? Well, I am American and have spent time in Singapore and Australia, among other places.

drought

Alarm bells are beginning to sound on drought risk in western North America and around the world, including some important and populous food growing regions.

Here’s an article in Science talking about “an emerging North American megadrought”:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change. We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought. The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming. Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

Science

Here’s an article in Earth’s Future (from the American Geophysical Union, which I consider prestigious) talking about some other regions with high drought risk.

The multi‐model ensemble shows robust drying in the mean state across many regions and metrics by the end of the 21st century, even following the more aggressive mitigation pathways (SSP1‐2.6 and SSP2‐4.5). Regional hotspots with strong drying include western North America, Central America, Europe and the Mediterranean, the Amazon, southern Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Compared to SSP3‐7.0 and SSP5‐8.5, however, the severity of drying in the lower warming scenarios is substantially reduced and further precipitation declines in many regions are avoided. Along with drying in the mean state, the risk of the historically most extreme drought events also increases with warming, by 200–300% in some regions.

AGU

So, our species has identified the problem and identified solutions, but is continuing to fail to actually do anything. This is a little like the coronavirus, where early action could have been cheap and effective compared to the drastic action required when the problem became really obvious to even the densest politicians. It’s unlike the coronavirus in that once the problem becomes obvious to even the densest politicians, there may be no effective measures that can be taken, even maximally disruptive ones.

The mention of the Amazon and Southeast Asia are particularly concerning to me. These are both important food growing regions and biodiversity hot spots.

why pay for office space?

I figured cheap-ass companies would try to keep people working from home to avoid paying for office space. This confirms it:

  • “A Gartner, Inc. survey of 317 CFOs and finance leaders on March 30, 2020, revealed that 74% will move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID 19.”
  • “In fact, nearly a quarter of respondents said they will move at least 20% of their on-site employees to permanent remote.”

one more covid tracker

I thought I was over covid trackers, but I just can’t help it. I know this isn’t my first “one more”, and it might not be my last. This one plots new cases over the past week on the vertical axis vs. total confirmed cases on the horizontal, the animates over time. You can add any country or U.S. state. The simulation starts whenever 10 cases were reported in that location, and you can see them grow at first exponentially and then deviate from the line when they start to get it under control. You can pick a log or arithmetic axis – log is good for the math, but it kind of lets you forget that there is a difference between 10 people dying and 10,000 people dying. Anyway, it’s nice and thanks to this person for posting it for free.

ferrets and coronavirus

Ferrets are highly susceptible to coronavirus. Apparently, ferrets are susceptible to similar respiratory diseases as humans in general and are used in research for that reason. Cats are also susceptible, but dogs and farm animals generally aren’t.

If this were a movie, humans would eradicate the virus but it would persist in a small community of feral cats somewhere, mutate into something even more horrible, and jump back to humans.

New Start expires February 2021

With the coronavirus crisis raging, it is easy to forget that nuclear weapons are still out there. One thing coronavirus should be teaching us all is that the unthinkable can happen. Trump, aka the angel of death, has already made us all less safe by withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, the nuclear deal with Iran, ratcheting up tensions with China. Now the New Start treaty, through which the U.S. and Russia have achieved further arms reductions over the past decade, is set to expire on February 5, 2021. The current administration and/or the current Congress could do the right thing just this one time and extend the treaty. Then the next President and Congress could start working on extending the gains.

Noam Chomsky on coronavirus

Here’s Noam Chomsky on coronavirus:

Describing the US president as a “sociopathic buffoon”, Chomsky said while the coronavirus was serious, “it’s worth recalling that there is a much greater horror approaching. We are racing to the edge of disaster, far worse than anything that’s happened in human history.

“Donald Trump and his minions are in the lead in racing to the abyss. In fact there are two immense threats that we’re facing – one is the growing threat of nuclear war … and the other of course is the growing threat of global warming.”

While the coronavirus can have “terrifying consequences, there will be recovery”, said Chomsky, but regarding the other threats, “there won’t be recovery, it’s finished”.

Al Jazeera

In other words, our government knew a major pandemic would eventually happen, and in fact was certain given enough time. Our experts told our government and political system what it needed to do to prepare and respond. It did next to nothing, and now we are in crisis.

Like he says, this crisis will pass, though not for those of us who don’t survive it. But the climate crisis will not pass. It is certain, and we know what to do, and we are not doing it. We are not preparing, and we will not be able to respond when the worst happens. This is the major lesson of the coronavirus – there is not some secret plan or agency that is quietly and competently preparing to meet the threat when there really is no choice.

Just to review, here’s a short list of things we need to do.

  • Secure the long term food supply.
  • Protect most of our coastal population centers, while possibly strategically and gradually abandoning some areas.
  • Ramp up innovation.
  • Do our fair share to bring down global emissions.

As for nuclear weapons, they are the acute crisis to make all other acute crises seem trivial by comparison. We need to lead by example, and also reengage with international institutions to work on the problem.

AI and rural jobs

This Wired article is written by a Microsoft executive originally from the southwest corner of Virginia, which is where I happen to be originally from. He gives a few examples of how technology can transform old jobs and create new jobs in out of the way places.

  • Running “automated” farming equipment requires some combination of mechanical fix-it ability and IT help desk ability.
  • Keeping the books at a nursing home chain requires some fairly advanced database skills.
  • Precision plastic parts can be molded locally by technicians trained at community college, rather than ordered from abroad.