Weird weather

A friend asked me the other day what I think about the “weird weather” we’ve been having.

The world has certainly been seeing a lot of the weird recently – unprecedented floods in Pakistan, Australia and Latin America, earthquakes in Japan, volcanic eruptions in Iceland and Chile, droughts in part of the U.S. and Africa, record-breaking temperatures for cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  What are we to make of it?

For decades, scientists have predicted that global warming would lead to more frequent extreme weather events like these.  So is our current weather a foretaste of weather patterns we’d better get used to as the climate gets warmer?  Or is this simply a bad run?

Unfortunately, we can’t know for sure yet.  The problem is that if we wait until we do know for sure, the climate will already be too warm for us to take any remedial action.

And let’s be honest.  Climate change is an extraordinarily complex process, and even now scientists can make only informed guesses.  Personally, I think one would be a fool to put ones money on the odds that the climate is not getting warmer.  I think the risks of waiting until we are sure are far too great to meddle with.

If global warming does occur – say the predicted increase of 4 degrees celsius – there will be some quite desirable outcomes.  But the negative outcomes will far outweigh the positive ones.  Sea levels will rise, coastal lands will disappear, great cities like New York and London and swathes of entire countries like Bangladesh may be threatened.  Food supplies and water supplies will be at a premium, leading to increases of disease, starvation, and war.           

I know this sounds like something out of the Apocalypse.  And I don’t think spreading fear is a particularly effective way to mobilize people to act.  Too often we respond with a case of ostrich-itis and put our heads in the sand.  But sometimes the challenge is to look at a problem head on.  Saying everything is fine when the tests suggest that there might be something seriously wrong does not return us to robust health.  And global warming won’t go away just because we don’t like what the scientists are saying.

Environmental degradation and global warming are huge and complex problems, and I’m not sure whether the human species will meet the challenge.  I think we are smart enough.  But I’m not sure we have learned how to cooperate well enough to solve these problems.

So what do I think of this weird weather?

I think it’s worth noticing.

Going batty

Movies haven’t always given them a good press, and many people think of bats as nothing more than a nuisance – rather like having flying rats to contend with.

But bats, like bees which are also threatened, are essential to the survival of the human species.  Among other things, bats keep the insect population in balance and without them, the eco-system could go badly array.

Unfortunately, perhaps as many as 50% of the world’s bat populations are under threat.  Like the threat to bees, this is one of those extinctions that the human species simply cannot afford.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that we can do something about it.  It doesn’t cost a lot and comes with considerable built-in reward.  That’s because bats are marvellous natural pest controllers.  A single bat can eat up to one thousand mosquitoes in one hour and they don’t even require batteries and electricity to keep running.

The environmentally friendly way for many of us to contribution to the solution of the threatened bat is to  get a bat house.

Bat houses are available on-line, on both Amazon and e-bay, and they are often sold in local home centers.   Like bird houses, bat abodes can make both an interesting and attractive addition to the garden.  .  For the really environmentally friendly and handy types, there are free bat-house plans also on the web.

So for your next barbecue, don’t buy a mosquito zapper or spray repellent.   Get a bat house.

Image from TheBetterBackYard.com

 

Could it happen to us?

We call her Mother Earth.  But sometimes she is Medea, murdering her children in cold fury.

One of the things that is so shocking about the earthquake and tsunamis that hit Japan last weekend is that Japan was prepared.  Japan is not littered with sub-standard buildings and slums clinging to mountain sides.  It is a modern society that has taken the risks of earthquakes and tsunamis seriously.  Its buildings are constructed to withstand earthquakes.  It has sea-walls built along the entire coast to defend against tsunamis.

And yet tens of thousands– and possibly even a hundred thousand – people are dead.  Entire villages have been swept away by the raging waters,  entire trains are gone, boats have disappeared in the whirlpools, millions are living in shelters, many of whom will never be able to return to homes that are no longer there.

Now it is snowing, many roads are impassable, and there are shortages of food, water, and medical supplies beginning to be felt in the shelters.

Four nuclear reactors along the coast are threatening to spew forth deadly radiation and workers are risking their  lives in – so far – futile attempts to cool the reactors down.  The terrifying thing is that not only could it have been worse.   It could still get worse with after-shocks that are powerful enough to trigger more tsunamis and collapse more buildings.  The potential risks from the nuclear reactors alone are catastrophic.  Electricity is in short supply, and the economy currently crippled.

Could something this destructive happen some place else in the developed world?  Germany is closing its nuclear plans to examine this very question.  China has just made a similar announcement.  Could it happen in the United States?  Yes.  The west coast is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis, but there are the fault lines of tectonic plates on both the east and west coasts.

There are times when Mother Earth makes the destructiveness of her human children look like mere play.

Us and the collapse of civilizations

Jared Diamond asked the question in The Third Chimpanzee:  The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal some years ago.  The question of just how often climate change has contributed to the collapse of civilizations continues to matter.

It isn’t an easy a question to answer, mostly because it often isn’t climate change that leads to the collapse of civilizations but its accumulated effects.  Civilizations that are not destroyed by volcanic eruptions or earth quakes most often have collapsed as a result of  disease and tribal warfare arising from insufficient supplies of water and food, which may be exacerbated or even caused by climate change, but also have other causes.

There is, however, a frequent pattern of civilization collapse appearing as far as 7,000 years ago.  Civilizations prosper, populations increase dramatically, cities emerge with highly sophisticated systems of trade and specialized roles.   And then the climate changes.  Most often the most debilitating changes seem to have been extreme drought.  Mayan cities were abandoned  in the 9th century after 200 years of drought.  So did the Mesopotamian civilization three and a half thousand years ago, and Egypt collapsed following severe drought in 2300 BC.

But flooding and extreme cold also result from climate change.  The story about Noah’s and his arc is about flooding.  An ice age ended the Viking dominance in Greenland in 13-1400 AD.

The list goes on.

The question for the human population today is just how devastating the climate change we are currently facing might be.  In this last year flooding has displaced millions of people and destroyed crops from Pakistan,  Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Australia.  Drought has possibly destroyed so much of China’s grain this season that it may be driven to importing it for the first time, and the encroaching desert underlies many of Africa’s wars.

The human population has doubled in less than fifty years, and continues to grow, though at a slower pace.  Last month, scientists with the United Nations warned that in less than 20 years the world would have insufficient food and water unless we begin to take action now.  It’s impossible to imagine this won’t lead to increased war, disease, starvation, displacements, and immense suffering.

Will we survive?  Will we destroy Earth’s ability to sustain us?  Will we simply starve?

The pessimistic answer always somehow sounds like the braver, wiser response.  Optimism so often seems to spring from ignorance or simply naive fear of facing the awful impending reality.

But personally, I think we will survive.  Along with the greed and selfishness and arrogant stupidity that plagues our species, I see also incredible ingenuity, bravery, and creativity.  I see love and determination.  I think we have a willingness to cooperate and share on a global scale.

It is a challenge.  It is a great challenge.  In fact, it is a very very great challenge, and we won’t achieve it easily.  The cost, in the best scenario, will be great.

But I am hopeful that Homo sapiens, will find the depths of spirit to face this challenge.  Perhaps stumbling and not always with glory.

But yes:  I think we can.

 

 

Bread and Freedom

Following the successful overthrow of governments in Tunisia and Egypt the western media continue to report demonstrations and unrest throughout much of the Middle East.  The commentators and politicians often suggest that the primary demand is for freedom and democracy, but my own hunch is that these demonstrations are also being driven for something just as essential – food.

In country after country, the ruling elite have amassed fortunes, while the quality of life for millions has not improved.  Now they are dangerously at the edge.  Food prices and unemployment are ballooning for not only the poorest but for the educated middle classes.

I’m not sure that the internet and social networks alone can bring about a revolution.  I’m not sure revolutions cannot still be stopped if the military is determined to attack its own people.  And I’m not sure that a desire for freedom alone will sustain a revolution for long enough and among large enough numbers to succeed.

None of us, after all, have absolute freedom.  It’s not just the constraints of physical existence that limit us.  It is often the laws and customs and constraints of society.  Only we don’t most of the time tend to think of these constraints as impinging on our basic freedoms as human beings.  We agree with many of these customs and constraints and are outraged when criminals and psychopaths violate them.  And if we get angry enough, we can toss out one government after several years, and if we don’t like the next one, we can vote it out too.  But mostly we have enough to eat.

The fight for freedom that is going on in the streets and squares of the Middle East today is real and significant.  And I agree that we don’t live by bread alone.

But we don’t live without bread either.  As the American revolutionaries knew during the War of Independence against the British, even taxing tea so that the common man cannot afford it is more than the human spirit will bear.

Which is why I think today’s demonstrations are motivated by the need for both food and freedom.

It may also point to a reason why the global environmental change we are experiencing might be more destructive than most people expect.  About which more on the next post.

Is science worth bothering with?

The Decline Effect reveals a source of uncertainty, a reason why scientific facts might be wrong.  So is science so riddled with potential error that we should give it up?  Is it too biased to bother with?

Only people who have not understood the nature of science have ever thought that science was infallible.  What the Decline Effect has done is open up a source of doubt that might be more gaping than we had previously suspected.  We don’t really know how small or big the problem might be. We just know it’s there.

So is science worth all its trouble?  should we go back to relying on common sense and intuition and to believing what our elders tell us?  Isn’t that just as good?  Or maybe even better?

No, I don’t think we should discard the scientific pursuit.

First of all, look at what science – faulty as it may be – has done for us that no other approach has come near.  Science has put us on the moon and will probably get us to Mars.  It has eliminated small pox from the face of the Earth, and through vaccinations has saved millions of people from the devastations of polio, whooping-cough, and measles.  It has parked cars in our garages, put computers on our desks, mobile phones into our pockets, televisions into our homes.  In the last 150 years, it has increased human life expectancy in the world by more than 25 years.

Has science ever gotten things wrong?  Absolutely!  But it is invariably scientists themselves who have noticed that it was wrong and often righted it.  The Decline Effect itself was first noticed by a scientist and it is scientists who are going to find ways to reduce its distorting effects.

In that sense, the Decline Effect hasn’t changed anything.  An attitude of questioning has always been the most scientifically intelligent approach.

Maybe we just don’t always appreciate just how intelligent.

 

What is causing the Decline Effect?

The Decline Effect, which seems to have appeared in almost every area of science, is a phenomenon scientists have noticed only recently in which the results which seemed initially to be very strong get weaker and weaker as studies replicate the original research.

Since nobody seems to be gaining from it, undue carelessness in carrying out the original research or even deliberate fraud do not seem to explain why the decline effect is happening.  .  The effect was initially even identified by someone trying to replicate his own research.

There might still, however, be a weakness in the way the scientific method is being implemented by the scientific community.  The problem might be that we have inadvertently made it less and less worthwhile to publish research that does not show that whatever we are studying has some positive relationship to some apparent effect or result.  For example, suppose an article studying Vitamin B12 supplements concludes that it can make a difference in reducing memory loss in old age.  That’s good news.  We can do something about some of that distressing memory loss.  But if, on the other hand, the research finds no discernible differences, there is always the possibility that different research might still turn up something.  Different doses, different combinations of vitamins, different populations, different measurements of cognitive functioning – all of them might turn up some result.  In the meantime, the message is that there’s no new advice for dealing with our forgetfulness.  Not nearly as many people are going to be interested in this headline information.

To put it in technical terms, it is difficult to get research published in professional journals that does not demonstrate what are called “statistically significant” results.

The essence of statistical analysis is deciding whether some event probably happened by chance or not.  Although analyses have become extraordinarily sophisticated with the increasing computer power in the modern world, the principle remains the same.

For instance, walking down the street, there is one chance in 365 that the next person I see will have been born on the same day of the year as I was.  There is one chance in two that if I flip a penny, it will come up heads.  Science uses statistical analysis to decide if the effect connected to some variable happened by chance or is what is called “statistically significant.”

Did this group of people, for instance, who took an aspirin every day for the last ten years have lower levels of cancer than a similar group of people who didn’t regularly take aspirin?  And if the first group did have lower levels of cancer, was that merely a chance difference or were the differences so great that the probability that it was chance are miniscule?

What the decline effect is suggesting is that results that at first look as if could almost certainly not have happened by chance gradually seem to look more and more like chance with repeated replication.

The problem is that if science is tending more and more to publish only those results that are statistically significant, then research which suggests that some variable does not have any effect does not tend to get known by the scientific community at large.  If research showing that eating less red meat is associated with lower levels of cancer gets published, but if research showing that red meat consumption does not seem to be related to incidence of cancer does not, then there is going to be a bias in the publicly accessible research.  So the fact that in reality the association between red meat and cancer might be either very small or not exist at all is going to take much longer to become evident.

The almost universally accepted level of probability that results are not caused by chance is 5%.  In other words, to be statistically significant, there has to be less than 5 chances out of a 100 that it was a fluke outcome caused by chance.  But that means that at least 5% of all research reporting a positive result is probably a result of chance and not a real effect at all.

Traditionally, the way to catch these errors has been through replication of research studies by a variety of different researchers.  But if studies that are not statistically significant are difficult to get published, then these chance errors are not going to be found in the natural course of study.

Imagine you are a young, ambitious scientist eager to make a mark.  Are you going to deliberately put your professional time and energy into doing research that is going to refute research which has already been published and is quite possibly lauded by the professional community?  Is it the wisest thing to begin by pitting your findings against received wisdom?  Wouldn’t it be better to strike out and find out something new and positive and statistically significant?

My strong suspicion is that the Decline Effect is the result of a widespread but indeliberate failure to adequately replicate initial research that reports some supposedly significant finding.   And so it is taking us longer to sort out the wheat from the chaff, to identify those findings that are robust, and those that were based merely on chance.

The one thing science cannot afford to do is to let go of real, robust replication – including studies that report that they have been unable to find anything significant at all.

The problem of the Decline Effect

Most scientists understand today that scientific fact is never absolutely certain.  One reason is that a new theory might always displace an earlier theory, which then puts everything we thought we “knew” into a different perspective.  And indeed this has happened more than once in the last four centuries.

Many non-scientists are unaware of just how fragile the “facts” of science often are, how often they change, and why.  An article published last month in the New Yorker magazine explores one of the factors creating this uncertainty that until now most of us scientists have not fully appreciated.

The article is about what is called the “Decline Effect.”  Fundamentally, this is a phenomenon in which scientific findings get progressively weaker as they are repeated over time in new studies of the same phenomenon.  The effects of a new generation of anti-psychotic drugs, for instance, which twenty years ago seemed to reduce psychotic symptoms dramatically, have, bit by bit, begun to dribble away.

The Decline Effect, though, has not just appeared in relation to research into the effectiveness of new drugs and medicines.  It has shown up in psychology, in biology, in physics, in fact in almost every area of science.

What is going on?  Probably several different things are causing this disturbing phenomenon.  I will examine four of them in my following posts here.  And then, in light of its inescapable uncertainties, address the questions of science itself:  is it a valid source of information?  is it any better than intuition?  or even just a good guess?

Global warming might make winters colder

Right now, Great Britain is facing weather that is literally breaking records for cold – quite possibly the lowest temperatures ever recorded in modern Britain.  Thankfully they do not extend to the ice age 15,000 years ago.  They don’t even extend to the 17th century mini-ice age when people crossed the River Thames in London on foot and in New York walked from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Yet modern records are bad enough.  During the winter of 1962 , it did not get over 5 degrees anywhere in Britain before mid-March.  This winter could be worse.

What has happened about all these warnings about global morning?  This morning a meteorologist reminded me of something I have tried to forget.  Instead of global warming making Britain a warmer, if wetter, place, it could shift the Gulf Stream south.  In which case weather in Britain and  some in the U.S. warmed by the Gulf Stream will resemble that of Siberia or Alaska.

This winter the Gulf Stream has shifted south, and is highly unlikely to shift north again this year.

We will survive a cold winter or two.  But what if the Gulf Stream has shifted permanently and never returns?

The scientific evidence is not comforting.  It is not just various global temperatures that suggest the effects of global warming are real.  The measure of salinity in the seas has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, indicating that the flow of air and water reflecting the Gulf Stream’s path is no longer taking the course we are accustomed to.

Global warming has already begun to make deserts out of what vast tracts of farmland, threatening food supplies for as many as a billion people – one out of every six people on the planet.  We might discover that, paradoxically, global warming is making winters much colder for millions of us too.

 

What happened before the Big Bang?

Roger Penrose, a distinguished cosmologist at Oxford University, is publishing a new book, Cycles of Time, in which he argues that our universe did not begin  with the Big Bang.

He thinks we can see in otherwise inexplicable patterns of low variation around various galaxies the evidence of what he calls earlier “aeons” before the Big Bang.  He thinks it suggests that Big Bangs have happened more than once in the past and will continue to happen in the future.  This is different from other, now  discarded, theories hypothesizing that the universe may one day deflate back into the singularity – the incredibly dense dot of energy out of which scientists hypothesize the universe originally emerged – and then inflate again in another Big Bang.

Penrose’ theory explains why there are clearly visibly variations in the rings surrounding some galaxies.

Penrose thinks Big Bangs may occur when galaxies run into each other, and that these events are cyclical.

In a BBC interview Penrose was asked what he thought were the implications for a creator God.  Penrose says that although he himself is not a believer, sources in the Vatican have told him that from their point of view, his theory neither confirms or eliminates the possibility of an initiating creator.