the Thwaites glacier

The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is roughly the size of Florida, according to USA Today. It is held back by a Game of Thrones style ice wall (seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if pictures of this or similar structures inspired the visuals in the show, if not the original concept. I always thought George R.R. Martin’s original concept might have been inspired by Hadrian’s wall, although I think a sprightly child could jump or climb over that.) Over the next few years to decades it could slide off the continent, float away, melt, and raise average sea levels by a foot. Or “up to 10 feet, if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it.”

I have in the back of my mind that we are looking at “a meter of sea level rise over a century”. This is bad, but it leaves a few decades for me to take my children on beach vacations not too different from the ones my parents took me on in my own childhood, wrap up raising said children to adulthood in my home not too far from the Atlantic coast, eventually sell my coastal real estate empire (consisting of the family home and a small condo I have hung on to for an older relative) at a reasonable market price, and advise the adult children not to buy property anywhere near the coast. I myself would not live to see the worst effects, and as much as I care about my children and their hypothetical children on down the line, it is just human nature that I don’t sit around worrying too much about risks that far into the future.

There are some numbers in this article that suggest I might not have decades to accomplish this long-term plan. The numbers are a bit confusing and conflicting, however.

  • The ice shelf (official name for the Game of Thrones wall) could collapse in the next 3-5 years. This would be the “beginning of the end” of the glacier, which would then begin sliding into the sea.
  • Then there will be a “dramatic change in the front of the glacier probably within a decade”.

The article refers to “rapid” sea level rise, but it doesn’t quantify that, so I don’t have any really new or good insights on whether my 1 meter in 100 years idea is too rosy. I still don’t think coastal property is a great investment anywhere in the world. A few rich, small, low-lying, technocratic countries like the Netherlands and Singapore will probably do whatever it takes to physically alter their coastlines and raise their urban areas, but many other countries will just sit on their hands.

December 2021 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful story: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Project Censored Top 25 Stories of 2021

Let’s see what Project Censored has come up with as their top 25 “censored” stories of 2021. “Censored” has a broad definition here which includes “under-reported”. News stories are under-reported when there is no market for them in our mostly profit-driven media. Anyway, here are a handful that caught my eye:

  • “Coastal darkening” – I hadn’t heard this term, but it encompasses organic matter in the water (from farms and urban runoff and wastewater), algal blooms, and sediment stirred up by human activity. These are all forms of water pollution scientists and engineers have been familiar with for a long time. Solutions are known, but the scale of the problem and cost of dealing with it is difficult. Our industrialized, urbanized, heavily populated civilization creates these forms of pollution. We should appreciate that a lot of money and hard work go on behind the scenes to make these problems much, much less bad than they would be if nothing was done – wastewater treatment, etc. But still, the scale of the problem is daunting to solve completely and we prefer to pay in environmental damage which affects everybody a little bit rather than divert the money and effort it would require to solve them completely. Under the basic economic principle of scarcity, something else would have to give if we did this, at least in the near- to medium-term. In the long term, there is a virtuous cycle where once we get started, technology tends to improve and we learn by doing. But cynical politicians elected on 2-4 year cycles are not going to pitch these ideas to the public, even if they understand them.
  • The pollutants mentioned above (organic matter, nutrients, etc.) are yucky but at least biodegradable. Another article is about microplastics and PFAS in the ocean. They are going to be there until the end of time now, but we could start working on trying not to add more of them.
  • “tens of thousands of satellites” – driven by civilian communications but inevitably useful for military applications. Companies like SpaceX are getting billions of dollars of military-industrial-complex money.
  • factory farming creates a risk for future pandemics – the article is about “U.S. factory farming”, but even if we invented it, it is being done all over the world, and the scale of what is done in Asia dwarfs anything the U.S. or Europe does at this point
  • things are not good for Amazon (the rain forest)
  • You could think of the social cost of past carbon emissions by industrial economies as a kind of debt owed to countries that are less industrialized or have industrialized more recently. That would mean that they have taken up much more than their fair share of the atmosphere’s and ocean’s ability to absorb emissions over time. The US, UK and Europe would probably prefer to focus on their share of current annual emissions rather than their share of cumulative emissions since they got the first lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings and burned them a couple centuries ago.
  • The sky is up, the Earth is down, and US drug prices are still insane. The article estimates the human toll of this in terms of premature deaths.

Longreads Best of 2021

(Too)Long(didn’t)reads.com picks a best article every week, and once a year they list all of them from the past year. I probably won’t have time to really dig into many of these, but there are certainly interesting topics here and they provide a look back on the year.

  • a look back at the January 6 attack on the US Congress by a fascist mob, just a few days after it happened
  • the story of the Covid vaccine development, and on a much less happy note, the Covid carnage in US prisons, and the crisis in India as it was happening
  • “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State” – I think I may have actually read this. What is happening there meets the UN definition of genocide and must stop. A wrinkle is that its genesis came shortly after the 9/11 attacks and U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Almost anything could be justified as part of the Global War on Terror at the time. Xinjiang is next door to Afghanistan, and is home to a Muslim ethnic group, and within that ethnic group a resistance/terrorist group formed which perpetrated attacks on the imperial capital. The parallels are surprising when you think about it. The Chinese approach is not acceptable, but did that make the American approach in Afghanistan any more acceptable?
  • Anti-Asian-American violence. I continue to be a bit puzzled by this. I am not questioning its reality, it just doesn’t seem to be happening in the places or to the Asian-Americans I cross paths with. I wonder if it is really new or something like shark attacks that happens periodically and the media suddenly picked up on and made a big deal of for awhile. People could also be reporting it more often now that they feel someone is listening and something might be done about it.
  • Salem, Massachusetts witch tourism

Time person of the year Elon Musk

Hugo Drax…I mean…Elon Musk is Time’s man…I mean…person of the year for 2021. I guess I’m okay with it, since I am interested in electric cars, self-driving cars, and space travel.

He sees his mission as solving the globe’s most intractable challenges, along the way disrupting multiple industries across two decades. These include what was once the core American creation, combustion-engine automobiles, and what was once the core American aspiration, spaceflight, as well as a litany of other manifestations of our present and future: infrastructure construction, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and increasingly money itself through his dalliances with cryptocurrencies.

TIme

Project Syndicate Predictions for 2022

Wow, a dozen or more famous people asked to weigh in and it is almost 100% doom and gloom. To grossly summarize:

  • Carbon emissions will just keep getting worse, and not much will be done. About the most positive thing anyone can say is that pressure for change will increase and the “corporate and financial sectors” will get more serious about it. We are the corporate and financial sectors, and we are here to help!
  • Political dysfunction and polarization in the US and EU. Republicans will retake the US Congress (and both sides will say they knew it all along).
  • US vs. Russia, China vs. US, Iran vs. the US and/or Israel. Several commentators predict one more attempt to revive the Obama nuclear deal, which will fail, which will be followed by more uranium enrichment, which will be followed by a military strike by the US and/or Israel.
  • Bees will continue to decline. Does this seem less important than the other things? Bees pollinate around a third of crops, and even if we find other ways to pollinate crops or grow crops that don’t need pollination, we can look forward to:

Given that heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events prevent people from engaging in agricultural work, and that bees and other pollinators affect 35% of the world’s agricultural land and support the production of 87 of the leading food crops, we will see an increase of global insecurity, even in developed economies. Unable to sustain the production of the food they need, many of the world’s poor will be pushed into extreme poverty, suffer malnutrition, and migrate.

Agnes Binagwaho, Project Syndicate
  • Several point to mass migration as a big issue for 2022. Not a long term issue, but an issue that will come to a head in the next year.
  • On the Covid front, most people think it will just become another disease that kills us some times but we will get used to that.
  • Many commentators think inflation will tone down, and that the bigger risk is governments overreacting to it. Some predict a sharp decline in the US dollar (is this bad for the average Joe? hard to say), and there is already a real estate crash happening in China.
  • A few are optimistic that social safety nets may improve here and there.
  • On the technology front? “One hopes for more demonstrations of the power of recent biomedical and genetic research, amply validated by the rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. There also may be new leaps in additive manufacturing and machine learning.” (Diane Coyle) There may be some progress on “green hydrogen and an overhaul of mobility and transportation systems”.

I’m not known for unbridled optimism, but let me think of a few positive things that could happen in 2022. Electric vehicles could finally emerge in the public consciousness in the US. We will all be surprised if that happens, and then one day later we will all have known it all along. The US could make some progress on the childcare crisis that is holding our country back (see this Fresh Air interview if you don’t believe me). Covid will be annoying and disruptive, but I am predicting it will be less annoying and disruptive on December 31, 2022 than on January 1.

In a way, a good year at this point will be one in which nothing really catastrophic happens and we have some breathing room to chip away at the many challenges already on our plates. We have to hope there will not be a major war, nuclear detonation, epic new plague, major food crisis, catastrophic meltdown of the internet or financial system. Hoping is about all us average citizens can do about the latter list, but if you are one of the movers and shakers out there with the power to help manage these risks, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???

I tried to talk myself into being optimistic just now, and failed, oh well.

my holiday offering

According to The Onion, you should not attend your office holiday party. But if you choose to ignore that advice, you should under no circumstances give a six-hour lecture on how “Christmas” evolved from pagan winter solstice celebrations. Because “No way you can cover all the relevant material in less than eight. And remember to build in time for questions!”

I say make it a double header and add at least two hours on the pagan origins of Halloween (spoiler: it involves fairies). I can see how this can be annoying, but it is still more interesting than whatever it is that “normal” people jabber on about. Perhaps what we introverts fail to understand is that the jabbering itself is the point, and the content mostly irrelevant.

Happy holidays!

November 2021 in Review

Here I am writing in late December, and it seems I forgot to do a November in review. In current events, the “Omicron” coronavirus tidal wave is breaking over the Northeast U.S. as we speak. But plenty of people have plenty to say about that, and I do not have much to say, and even if I did it would be outdated by the time I said it. One thing that is slightly amusing is that we just stopped naming hurricanes after Greek letters because most of the public lacks the “benefits of a classical education”. Months later, we are naming mutant viruses after Greek letters. Anyway, here goes the November review:

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them a a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.

Most hopeful story: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.

NYT best books of 2021

And continuing the “best books” theme, this year’s New York Times list is out. The only one that really catches my eye is When we Cease to Understand the World. This appears to be historical fiction somehow knitting together the 20th century’s great scientists and their ideas.

Other books mostly cover a variety of racial and multicultural topics that are interesting and good to know about, but I do not have time to learn about them in book form. There’s a new autobiography of Sylvia Plath, and I like and am saddened by Sylvia Plath, but I think I would rather spend time reading her original work rather than an autobiography about her. Just a random note since I was briefly talking about Margaret Attwood yesterday – when I think of The Handmaid’s Tale I often think of Sylvia Plath, and also Anne Frank, and also Frederick Douglas and other first-person slave narratives. All depressing, and all things everyone should read. The Handmaid’s Tale is at least a work of fiction although it seems quite real when you are in the middle of it, at least for me, and especially the audiobook version.

Planetizen top 10 books of 2021

Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
  • Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.