extreme climate pessimists

On the opposite end of the spectrum from climate deniers are voices predicting that abrupt and irreversible climate change will cause collapse or even human extinction in the relatively near future:

First, James Lovelock, who is best known for the Gaia Hypothesis:

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem – the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100.

Second, former University of Arizona ecology professor Guy McPherson. This is part of a long, rambling article that cites a lot of evidence, although most of it is newspaper and magazine articles, lecture notes and videos, rather than published peer reviewed articles:

On a planet 4 C hotter than baseline, all we can prepare for is human extinction (from Oliver Tickell’s 2008 synthesis in the Guardian). Tickell is taking a conservative approach, considering humans have not been present at 3.5 C above baseline (i.e., the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, commonly accepted as 1750). I cannot imagine a scenario involving a rapid rise in global-average temperature and also habitat for humans. Neither can Australian climate scientist Clive Hamilton, based on his 17 June 2014 response to Andrew Revkin’s fantasy-based hopium. According to the World Bank’s 2012 report, “Turn down the heat: why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided” and an informed assessment of “BP Energy Outlook 2030” put together by Barry Saxifrage for the Vancouver Observer, our path leads directly to the 4 C mark. The conservative International Energy Agency throws in the towel on avoiding 4 C in this video from June 2014 (check the 25-minute mark). The 19th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 19), held in November 2013 in Warsaw, Poland, was warned by professor of climatology Mark Maslin: “We are already planning for a 4°C world because that is where we are heading. I do not know of any scientists who do not believe that.” Among well-regarded climate scientists who think a 4 C world is unavoidable, based solely on atmospheric carbon dioxide, is Cambridge University’s Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics, Dr. Peter Wadhams (check the 51-second mark in this 8 August 2014 video), who says: “…the carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere, which now exceeded 400 parts per million, is sufficient, if you don’t add any more, to actually raise global temperatures in the end by about four degrees.” Adding to planetary misery is a paper in the 16 December 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluding that 4 C terminates the ability of Earth’s vegetation to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.

I’m not sure what it means to plan for 4 C (aka extinction). I’m not impressed that civilized scientists claim to be planning for it, either. But I know we’re human animals, and I know animals require habitat to survive. When there is no ability to grow food or secure water, humans will exit the planetary stage.

genetic sequencing: what’s it good for?

Do you find genetic sequencing interesting, but you’ve been struggling to find a practical application? Look no further:

According to Hutchinson, Sweet Peach will provide women with kits allowing them to swab their vaginas at home, then mail the swab into a lab which will sequence the genomes of their vaginal bacteria. Sweet Peach will then create a personalized probiotic — targeting UTIs and yeast infections — based on each woman’s swab. Women will be able to purchase a monthly regimen or a longer “subscription” based on their needs. More information will be available when the company launches their crowdfunding campaign this coming week.

“It’s nothing about scent,” Hutchinson told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. “A vagina should smell like a vagina, and anyone who doesn’t think that doesn’t deserve to be near one.”

Okay, touche, nothing about scent… but I can think of plenty of applications above the waist that do involve scent. Bad breath and armpit odor are caused mainly by sulfate reducing bacteria, I think, so introduce another harmless organism that can out-compete them, and problem solved – in fact, showering too often might tend to disrupt your perfectly balanced armpit ecosystem. How about some genetically customized pro-biotic mouthwash and deodorant? You could come back from your next camping trip smelling better than when you left! Or on a more serious note, how about healthy teeth and gums without brushing?

not so fast, says Paul Krugman

Not so fast with the backslapping on the U.S. economy, says Paul Krugman:

On Dec. 16, 2008, the Fed set its interest target between 0 and 0.25 percent, where it remains to this day.

The fact that we’ve spent six years at the so-called zero lower bound is amazing and depressing…

It’s true that with the U.S. unemployment rate dropping, most analysts expect the Fed to raise interest rates sometime next year. But inflation is low, wages are weak, and the Fed seems to realize that raising rates too soon would be disastrous. Meanwhile, Europe looks further than ever from economic liftoff, while Japan is still struggling to escape from deflation. Oh, and China, which is starting to remind some of us of Japan in the late 1980s, could join the rock-bottom club sooner than you think.

In other inflation news, the price of Thanksgiving was up slightly this year:

– The American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual price survey found the average cost of this year’s Thanksgiving meal for 10 is $49.41, a 37-cent increase from last year.

– Don’t blame the turkey for the slight uptick. The AFBF says the typical 16-pound turkey will cost $21.65. That’s an 11-cent decrease from last year.

– In fact, cranberries, stuffing and pie shells are down in price. The slight rise in total meal cost can be blamed on higher prices for sweet potatoes, milk and whipping cream.

online productivity and creativity apps

This article from Civicly lists useful online apps for planners – actually, I think they are useful for anybody whose job involves trying to solve problems with a little creative latitude. I especially like the free tools for infographics – it looks like you can pick a template and customize it for your data.

transportation news

Transportation is today’s topic.

First, a fantastic set of facts and figures on just how much space cars actually take up in cities.

According to the FHWA’s Highway Statistics report, large U.S. cities average 4.7 road-miles per 1,000 residents, or 25 road-feet per capita. Assuming 50-foot average road width, this is 1,240 square feet of road area per capita, or about 1,500 per motor vehicle. In addition, there are typically 2-6 off-street parking spaces per vehicle. These parking spaces, including their driveways, require, on average, about 300 square feet, or 600 to 2,400 square feet total…

As a result, in automobile-dependent communities with road and parking supply sufficient to keep traffic congestion to the level typical in U.S. cities, plus parking spaces at most destinations, a city must devote between 2,000 and 4,000 square feet (200-400 square meters) of land to roads and off-street parking per automobile. This exceeds the amount of land devoted to housing per capita for moderate to high development densities (i.e., more than 10 residents per acre, which means less than about 4,000 square feet per capita), and is far more land than most urban neighborhoods devote to public parks. This illustrates the problems that growing cities face if they try to develop automobile-oriented transport systems where most residents own a private car: they will need to devote more land to roads and parking than to housing.

Second, an interview with a Swede:

If we can create a system where people are safe, why shouldn’t we? Why should we put the whole responsibility on the individual road user, when we know they will talk on their phones, they will do lots of things that we might not be happy about? So let’s try to build a more human-friendly system instead. And we have the knowledge to do that.

But to do that we need to have those who build this to actually accept this philosophy. Even in our country context, it still has been a struggle to get our road engineers to understand that they are responsible, it starts with them. Then the individual road user also has a responsibility. But if something goes wrong it goes back to the designer of the system.

There’s a little bit of engineer-bashing there. We engineers are great at solving the problems that are put in front of us. We aren’t always great at framing the problem in new and better ways – for example, an objective of safe streets for all users and not just maximum flow rate of cars. But if you frame the problem in that new and better way and give it to the engineers, we will solve it for you.

Speaking of engineer bashing:

“If there was honest predicting, some percentage of them would under-predict traffic,” he said. “There would be a bell curve. Instead… what we have is these projections that are always immensely above what the actual traffic is.”

There is ample incentive for these firms to inflate numbers. Firms that predict high levels of traffic attract investment dollars and regulatory approvals, which lead to construction projects, and the same firms often end up directly cashing in.

The article is about some anecdotal cases where future traffic was overestimated, toll road companies went bankrupt, and taxpayers were left paying at least part of the bill. This is unfortunate, but it is a pretty serious charge to accuse an engineer of purposely enriching private parties at the expense of the public. (Full disclosure: I have professional ties to organizations mentioned in this article, although I don’t have direct involvement or knowledge of any projects mentioned.) I think the correct conclusion here is that it is time for some of the tools and assumptions and methods used in transportation engineering and planning in the United States to be seriously reexamined and brought up to date.

 

China is now the world’s biggest economy

From Jeffrey Sachs:

According to the IMF, China’s GDP will be $17.6 trillion in 2014, outstripping US output of $17.4 trillion. Of course, because China’s population is more than four times larger, its per capita GDP, at $12,900, is still less than a quarter of the $54,700 recorded in the US, which highlights America’s much higher living standards.
In other U.S. – China news, the NSA is worried that China has the ability to crash the U.S. electrical grid with a cyber attack:
China and “one or two others” can shut down the U.S. electric grids and other critical infrastructure and is performing electronic reconnaissance on a regular basis, said NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers, testifying Thursday (Nov. 20) at a House Select Intelligence Committee hearing on U.S. efforts to combat cybersecurity.

habitat loss and animal welfare

Brian Czech makes the point that habitat loss causes a lot of animal suffering. I think this is almost certainly true, and sad. He mostly blames urbanization. I want to argue with that, because a compact, well-designed city should have a relatively small ecological footprint per person living in it, compared to people spread out over a more rural landscape. For example, the Amish way of farming actually is a big contributor to the water pollution destroying the Chesapeake Bay. If there are going to be 7 billion of us, or 10 billion, we can’t all live like the Amish or it would be an ecological disaster. Of course, it is true that the relatively low-impact lifestyle in the city is supported by an enormous rural base of agriculture, forestry, fishing, resource extraction, mining, and manufacturing that has a huge and growing ecological footprint. It’s possible to envision a world where we eventually turn the corner and manage to grow in quality without growing our physical footprint. But we are far from that, and natural ecosystems are certainly the big losers whether or not we are actually on the verge of destroying ourselves.

the fox guarding the financial hen house

On Huffington Post, Elizabeth Warren says we have a new fox guarding the hen house when it comes to financial regulation. Now, I have political opinions and will discuss them if asked, but that is not really the point of this blog. Here I am most interested in whether the financial reforms instituted after the 2007/8 meltdown are actually working, or whether the system is headed for an even more catastrophic meltdown. It’s not encouraging to think that the banks may be practically writing their own regulations:

Soon after they crashed the economy and got tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, the biggest Wall Street banks started lobbying Congress to head off any serious financial regulation. Public Citizen and the Center for Responsive Politics found that in 2009 alone, the financial services sector employed 1,447 former federal employees to carry out their lobbying efforts, swarming all over Congress. And who were their top lobbyists? Members of Congress — in fact, 73 former Members of Congress.

According to a report by the Institute for America’s Future, by the following year, the six biggest banks employed 243 lobbyists who once worked in the federal government, including 33 who had worked as chiefs of staff for members of Congress and 54 who had worked as staffers for the banking oversight committees in the Senate or the House.

commodities fraud

The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is investigating too-big-to-fail banks for fraud in manipulating commodities markets:

One focus for the subcommittee is the management of Detroit-area metal warehouses run by Metro Trade Services International, the largest U.S. warehouse company certified to store aluminum warranted by the London Metal Exchange for use in settling trades. Since Goldman bought Metro in 2010, Metro warehouses have accumulated up to 85 percent of the U.S. LME aluminum storage market.

Since Goldman took over the warehouses, the wait to withdraw LME-warranted metal has increased from about 40 days to more than 600 days, reducing aluminum availability and tripling the regional premium for storage and delivery costs.

The investigation revealed a number of previously unknown details about these deals: that Goldman’s warehouse company paid metal owners to engage in “merry-go-round” deals that shuttled metal from building to building without actually shipping aluminum out of Metro’s system; that the deals were approved by Metro’s board, which consisted entirely of Goldman employees; and that a Metro executive raised concerns internally about the appropriateness of such “queue management.”

Goldman didn’t just store aluminum; it was involved in massive trades of aluminum at the same time its warehouse operations were affecting aluminum availability, storage costs, and prices.

Even more fun than this, if you dig into the long report you can learn that Goldman Sachs is operating a “physical uranium business”, possibly without people qualified to do this:

Goldman’s involvement with physical uranium began with a 2008 proposal by GS Commodities to get into the business of trading physical and financial uranium products and processing rights.688 In 2009, Goldman purchased Nufcor, and expanded its business over the next five years, resulting in Goldman’s buying millions of pounds of uranium, controlling inventories of physical uranium at storage facilities in the United States and Europe, and becoming a long term supplier of physical uranium to nine utilities with nuclear power plants. Because no employees who conducted Nufcor’s business joined Goldman after the sale, Goldman employees ran the business.

This is great Bond villain material. Except Bond would probably be on the banks’ side, as long as they were just trying the rip the world off financially on behalf of the empire, rather than actually blow anything up.