information roundabout

I was dubious about Twitter (140 characters too like txt mssgng, which I can’t stand to use at all), but after 24 hrs am now convinced it’s useful…

item, some guy I’d not heard of following me (why? no matter), so check him out: oh look, he’s following Fred Spier, whose 1996 book on Big History I have here somewhere – and Spier himself tweets that a) he has another book out next year, and b) the Club of Rome had a meeting in Amsterdam in Oct. They made a declaration, too. I’d missed that, but am reading it now…

Also impressed that Fred’s books are 113 and 280 pages, respectively. Mine seems to be getting longer. I foresee cuts when it all gets to the publisher, which makes me feel inefficient, but couldn’t find an another way of getting this one done.

optimism in depth

Just discovered that this enterprising chap is writing a book about the future which I’m relieved to note won’t be out until 2011…  and blogging the while.

I would just add his notes on his journeyings for research to the blogroll, but worth highlighting here too as there is lots of interesting stuff to read along the way.

 

 

Smil in full flow

admiration for Vaclav Smil’s command of a range of disciplines, sources and statistics tends to break out here quite regularly.

I’ve just renewed it by watching this discussion from the recent Perimeter Institute Conference with the – also admirable – Andy Revkin.

you can see it all here

Be patient with the opening sponsors’ roll and you get to a compelling exposition of where we are, where we might be going and whether there is hope (a qualified yes!).

50 more years?

Cheerleaders for life extension which avoids extended decrepitude always make good copy. Here’s some. On one hand it reads as a pretty lazy example of journalism by press release (and from the BBC, too). On the other, it is representative of one line of development which is tempting to buy in to – replacement joints and home grown organs.

Read on, and the level of ambition is some way ahead of the technology. The aims are ungainsayable. More durable hip replacements and the like are an obvious goal when some folks now need a second artificial joint because they live so long that the first one wears out. Removing cell surface antigens from organically grown heart valves or skin grafts is also a plausible and desirable route to follow.

These two lines of inquiry mean, apparently, that “most of the body parts that flounder with age could be upgraded”. Aside from the odd image of a body part floundering, this is quite a big claim to make on the basis of a couple of joints and a few heart valves, but we want to believe it so no sceptics are asked for quotes. That would be too much like hard work/real journalism perhaps…

The piece does say, though, that to replace all donor tissue will take 30 to 50 years. I’ll be a centenarian myself by then but I’m not worried. The singularity is due somewhat before then, isn’t it?

Smoke, mirrors and carbon?

I have a bit of a problem with climate change. I am trying not to give too much weight to technology as an influence on possible futures. And especially when thinking about global change I am convinced that social technologies, as it were, will be as important as anything deriving from natural sciences or engineering in fashioning a response which is on the right scale. The problem is finding them harder to write about. Geo-engineering is so much more fun to think about than cap and trade. I am reasonably sure, for example, that some carefully contrived market will be needed to drive technological deployment in the right direction. But how to contrive that? Part of the problem may simply be my own economic illiteracy. But the stuff does really seem pretty mysterious.

Item: a talk in Bristol the other night from Graciela Chichilnisky, who takes credit for the carbon market built into the Kyoto Protocol. She is an extremely interesting woman, if not quite as good at explaining stuff as she seems to think. This may be deliberate – she is also obviously a wily politician, and does a good line in not quite hearing the question properly when taxed with something she has said which is arguably incorrect. But I left pleased that someone so smart, committed and optimistic is still deeply involved in the discussion in the run up to the Copenhagen meeting which will have to agree how to follow Kyoto. However, she left us with copies of her piece last week in Time magazine which explains how to break negotiating deadlock between the US and China over limiting the latter’s emissions. The crucial paragraph says:

“In the agreement — think of it as a financial trade — the U.S. would buy an option to require China to lower its emissions below a certain agreed level. At the same time, Beijing would take out what amounts to an insurance policy to establish a minimum amount that Washington would pay Beijing if or when the U.S. exercised its option. The cost of Beijing’s insurance policy and the cost to the U.S. of exercising its option on China’s emissions levels would be set at roughly the same price.”

I so don’t understand how that works. It might as well say, “smoke here”, and “mirrrors over here”. Can anyone point to a place where these things are explained intelligibly? Carbon futures for dummies: that kind of thing.

Biophilia or videophilia?

Anyone writing about the future has to try and become conscious of their prejudices when evaluating weak data. I’ve stumbled slightly over one of mine when writing about biodiversity and enjoyment of wildlife. The strongest argument that we need to relate to lots of other creatures is Ed Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis. I’ve always been suspicious of this on the grounds that a) it amounts to saying that everyone else is really, at heart, like Ed Wilson and wants to be friends with the animals – or ants in his case – and b) it seems a crude use of the argument from the environment of evolutionary adaptation, that all-purpose explainer.

So, already believing that a liking for “nature” is as much culturally learnt as instinctual, I was much taken with the findings reported by Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois in 2006 that visits to national parks in the USA have gone down by a quarter in the last two decades, and continue to decline by around one per cent a year. Two years later the trend was confirmed in a broader study which looked at other nature-based recreations in the USA, and also included data from Japan and Spain. The data suggest that the time spent visiting national parks is being taken up by playing video games, surfing the net and watching movies – videophilia is displacing biophilia, as they put it. It seemed to fit. City folks (that’s me) don’t see wildlife much except on TV, and don’t miss  what they don’t know.

My perspicacious editor queried this, pointing out that the US is not necessarily representative, nor pointing the way the rest of the world is heading. And it turns out – courtesy of a paper highlighted in a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review – that the finding isn’t actually that robust. A 2009 paper in PLOS Biology reports that a survey of 280 protected areas in 20 countries showed a decline in visits in the US and Japan, but a general increase elsewhere.

So perhaps conservationists can take heart – they still have a large constituency who crave the pleasures of a landscape with at least some flora and fauna. I think my prejudice remains more or less intact though. Even if this is true, it is not obvious how it relates to biodiversity on a global scale. Put aside the fact that, for all I know, train-spotting is as satisfying as bird watching. Even if it is not,  our biophilic needs might be met rather simply. I have been in a tropical forest and found it impressive, but I don’t feel desperate to go back. I’ve been on a boat ride which afforded a glimpse of a (rather small) whale, which was nice. But I’m pretty content with my thrice weekly run round the park, watching the insect life in my small garden, and occasional trips to the English countryside and (better) coastline. Maybe I’m an unwitting sufferer from what the US journalist Richard Louv rather fancifully, if rather wonderfully, dubbed “nature deficit disorder”. But I am an urban creature, and happy to be so.

Leave it to Gaia? No thanks…

A less than enthusiastic response to the Royal Society report on geoengineering in the Guardian this morning from Gaian guru Jim Lovelock. He reckons it is a bad idea, because understanding of earth systems is so poor and we do not know what undesired effects it might have – the standard blanket objection in other words. But being the originator of Gaia theory, which he has got back into the habit of personifying, he has an original take on what our attitude should be – that is: “use our energies to adapt and leave recovery [from global heating] to Gaia: after all, she has survived more than three billion years and has kept life going all that time.”

Hmm, that works if you can maintain his apparent lack of interest in the survival of anything except the abstract “life”. But one might note that the prescription comes from a man who, while he has had many wise things to say over the years, told readers of the Independent in 2006 that “before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”. The book he was promoting then was catchily titled Revenge of Gaia.

OK, lets personify the world beast. If that is Gaia’s idea of being helpful to life, I say: stuff her. Alternatively, shouldn’t we at least try and give her a helping hand?

(Full disclosure note: I once wrote a small book about Lovelock and his ideas, and I believe he is one of the two most interesting Englishmen of the second half of the 20th century – F.H.C. Crick being the other. OTOH I also fear he has reversed the normally assumed order of things and become less wise as he has grown older.)

engineering the future

Revising older chapters of a draft throws up a few discernible shifts in ongoing discussion. One is the detail and – as far as is possible with largely absent data – rigour of examinations of geoengineering (AKA hacking the planet) as a response to climate change.

Two recent reports – from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and, at greater length, the Royal Society – both argue that schemes to block or bounce back solar radiation or to remove atmospheric carbon need to be evaluated, not as possible get out of gaol free cards but as things we might need to do and should get better information about now in case the alternatives to deploying them are worse.

Believing both that current efforts fall far short of what will be needed to curb global warming, and are not likely to get ramped up enough to change that,  and that we need all the ideas we can get, this all seems good. Indeed, both reports, especially that from the RS, seem at first unduly apologetic about calling for a serious look at some schemes (lest we discourage people from other efforts at reduction, mitigation, adaptation or whatever – as if they were falling over themselves to do those things). Among all the reactions (surveyed by Oliver Morton at heliophage), I confess some sympathy with the blogged comment he highlights from Gaia Vince who says, simply, that current policies aren’t working: get real about geo-engineering, and get on with it before it is too late. (Wonder if she’s related to Dale Vince who we buy our power from at Ecotricity: quite a team, if so).

One doubt, though. At first look, the best of the various options looks like some kind of carbon scrubbing technology, combined with sequestration (doesn’t ignore ocean acidification, doesn’t involve astoundingly costly schemes to launch space mirrors, doesn’t require hazardous ploys like spraying acid into the upper atmosphere or seeding oceans with iron). If the chemistry and the energy costs can be made to work – and that looks possible in principle if there is some decent R&D support – it addresses the problem at its root.

It still looks best at second look, as in this plot which charts the relation between safety and effectiveness of geo-engineering options using data from the RS report. But I wonder if we really need to call this one geo-engineering? A widely dispersed, easily adjustable and manageable technology for taking out of the air some of the CO2 we put into it sounds so desirable it would be a pity if it attracted opposition because it is put under an umbrella label which makes it sound like some hubristic scheme for mad scientists to grab the controls of the planet.

Maybe too late now, but can one think of a better way of describing this one? Augmented air-conditioning? Atmospheric purification? Exhaust removal? Air-cleaning? Thinning the carbon blanket?

On the other hand, if simply trying to affect the level of CO2 in the atmosphere by direct action is geoengineering (can’t decide whether to hyphenate or not), then we are already doing it, so there is not much point in discussing the merits or otherwise of the project, just how to do it better…  No?

Near future fiction

Still revising book text solidly, but holiday reading ranged a little wider so…

One of the great things about literature is that as soon as you frame a generalisation it seems to spawn counter-examples. I’ve been tempted to buy into the assertion – which has been made by a few different people now – that there is no longer any (decent?) science fiction set in the near future. Reasons advanced include that too much of the stuff of earlier science fictions has come (sort-of) true, and loss of faith in a near future which isn’t deeply depressing. Not sure I really believe either of those, but there did seem to be a retreat into far futures, alternate realities or (oh, the tedium) outright fantasy.

Then along comes Ian MacDonald with Brasyl, another stunningly good near future novel to follow the remarkable River of Gods. Well, it appeared a couple of years ago but I only just laid eyes on it. It matches River of Gods’ near future India with a brilliant depiction of Brazil in 2032. The near future bit is enriched by the braiding of two other narratives in the (2006) present and the (18th century) past, and by some alternate universes in which the near future is different – but that only adds to the interest. I’m not going to summarise, or say what the book is “about”, but it is definitely an effective demolition of any “no near future SF any more” claims.

when the future was cool

I’ve been thinking again about retrofutures, nostalgia for what we were told it was going to be like and all that

not sure if this will go in the book, but as a some time cultural historian it fascinates even when it is almost entirely speculative

anyhow, latest and most splendid exhibit is this video of the GM Futurama exhibit at the 1964/65 World’s Fair. courtesy of retrofuture.com

a remarkable document in lots of ways

and for those, like me, who were 10 in 1965, it does seem that: yes, this is pretty much what the future was going to be like…  nuclear war permitting, of course.