Wow, it's been a year since I last posted here. A lot has happened this year, both personally and in our society (more on personal updates another time). Unfortunately, the most important thing that could have happened has not, namely major policy changes on the part of the largest nations regarding climate change. On the one hand, the media coverage and general awareness of this issue has never been stronger, with articles regularly in major news outlets and many public demonstrations by citizens in multiple countries. On the other hand, this has not led to any really meaningful changes. By meaningful I consider things such as: major new sales taxes added to gas-guzzling vehicles, and fuel per se, restrictions on air travel, restrictions on meat consumption, etc. In other words, anything that would seriously reduce carbon emissions quickly. Carbon taxes, while arguably effective, are still sufficiently far removed from the individual consumer as to have had little effect on actual behavior.

Of course, some major national governments are still actively denying there is even a problem, although at least some have acknowledged the reality. Presumably at some point events will overtake denial to the point of ludicrousness - one would think we were there already but clearly not. Still, serious change in the behavior of individuals will require some equally serious changes in society functions - there's no way to have major reductions in fuel consumption if people still have to drive most places, work, shopping, social activities. And obviously automobile companies will not stop making large inefficient SUVs or similar vehicles for family use on their own initiative, in fact Ford has essentially stopped manufacturing cars in North America, citing that they can only make money or that there is only demand for SUVs. This is the opposite of what needs to happen. Only a very large tax, either directly on fuel or indirectly on fuel-inefficient vehicles, is likely to reverse this trend. Strangely, at the same time there are more hybrid and even fully electric cars on the market than ever, at least in terms of variety if not total sales. As in other areas of our society, there seems to be a great polarization between some people doing their best at an individual level to minimize their carbon footprint, and others who basically ignore the issue completely in their personal and family lives. Presumably, both groups will be affected equally once society-threatening climate change events start to happen. Sadly, this is very discouraging to those trying to mitigate climate change. If eocological destruction is already inevitable because we have waited to long, then why even bother, why deny oneself the comforts of air conditioning, vacations overseas, steak dinners, large roomy vehicles, and so on.

To some extent this depends on the science. No one really knows today whether we have passed crucial tipping points or not, whether complete societal breakdown is already inevitable or not, or what the time line might be (decades? centuries?). In the face of this uncertainty it does seem reasonable to continue taking personal actions to reduce carbon use, and making sure one's friends and neighbors are aware of this. Certainly there are far more hybrid cars on the road than when I purchased my first Prius. Much of Montreal's taxi fleet, and many buses are now hybrids. This suggests that there has been at least some movement in the right direction, albeit slow and modest. If total destruction of our environment is not yet inevitable, if there is still time to rescue an ecosystem in which humans will be able to survive sustainably, then it's time to redouble not reduce one's personal efforts. My wife has certainly taken this to heart, even more than I have. For me switching to a low meat diet is the hardest adjustment. Luckily I live in a city with good public transit, especially a metro system, so I can go many days without touching my car, and drives around town for shopping or entertainment are so short that often I only need to refill my (small) gas tank once a month. And I have stopped eating steak and burgers, going veggie in that regard. Chicken, eggs, fish, cheese still a significant part of my diet though. Small steps!

There have been a couple of recent movies in a sci-fi or thriller genre on the theme of overpopulation (spoiler alert!). Examples are Inferno, based on the Dan Brown book, and of all things Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War. In both, the villain (hero?) has decided that overpopulation is the cause of the world's (read galaxy's) ills, and the solution is to kill off half of all living people (read intelligent life forms). In one movie, the solution is a novel bioengineered deadly virus, in the other it's a gauntlet powered by remnant energy from the Big Bang (or something like that, it's left a bit vague).

Almost needless to say, in the absence of any additional actions both of these schemes are completely pointless. Populations expanding by exponential growth will inevitably recover to their previous size in the absence of any new checks, and potentially very quickly. If one were to kill off half of all intelligent life in the universe, and the ones left just had four kids each (for species with a mere two genders), then in a generation things would be right back to where they were before. I've oversimplified the numbers a bit, not being an epidemiologist I'm not sure what the exact number of extra kids would have to be, but it's small. As a real world example, after many years of flat budgets, the NIH in the US doubled its total research funding during the 1990's, after which it once again became fairly flat. After a short period where success rates of new grants rose dramatically, that too levelled off as universities hired more researchers. Today the success rate for new research proposals at the NIH is low again, pretty much back where it was before the budget doubled. The reason is that the size of the research community also tends to grow exponentially (though with a fairly small absolute exponent). In such a situation, in order for the new grant proposal success rate to stay high, the total budget also has to grow exponenentially, forever as in every single year. That is completely unrealistic in today's economy.

The only way to prevent inevitable human overpopulation is to either 1) keep killing off a big chunk of the population every generation by war, famine, disease, etc, or 2) reduce the birth rate to replacement value or less. In fact, with scenario 2 you don't have to actively kill off anyone, since we have a natural mortality rate. By managing the total birth rate, one can achieve any desired absolute population, as quickly or slowly as you want, and do so stably and with minimal violence.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is fairly unlikely, since humans are no better at self-restricting their population growth rate than any other species. The sad part, and the way we are in fact special, is that we are capable of understanding this. No other species as far as we know consciously restricts its population, although all species' birth rates are regulated in some way according to their environment. Indeed, there are places in the world where stable human populations are the norm, or have become so. In industrialized countries such as in Japan or Europe, this actually creates a problem since our capitalist economies demand constant growth, ultimately driven by population size. A  stable population requires a completely different economic model at least to avoid widespread poverty. That too seems pretty unlikely at the moment, although there are lots of proposals of how such a truly sustainable economy could work. I can only hope that some fairly severe shocks to the system will wake enough people up that they will entertain such counter-evolutionary, yet long term necessary, alternatives.

I begin this post with a fairly lengthy science-y preamble, whose purpose will become clear by the end (but before the footnote!)

The planets of our solar system can be broadly divided into two groups, the small rocky inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) and the four gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). I omit Pluto from this discussion, as its position as a planet versus one of the largest of many large distant icy rocks of the Kuiper belt is at best ambiguous.

Here I focus on the four rocky inner planets, and in particular, what specific aspects of Earth's geology have made it hospitable for our kind of life (carbon based, using photosynthesis as the ultimate energy source, primarily oxygen-burning, made up of proteins and nucleic acids among other biomolecules, and so on). Some comparisons with the other three rocky inner planets are important, especially with regard to the ongoing and potentially catastrophic climate change.

The first and most important point to note is the relative distances of the planets from the sun. The amount of energy received by each planet relatively decreases as the square of distance, due to the inverse square law (a consequence of our universe having three dimensions, and therefore surfaces having two). Most significantly for this discussion, a square inch of Earth (93 million miles from the Sun on average) receives about half the solar energy of a square inch of Venus (67 million miles from the sun on average).

The surface temperature of a planet depends on more than just the energy it receives from the sun, it also depends on how much energy is reflected back into space immediately by the upper atmosphere (if any), also internal geological processes such as radioactive decay. But given that Venus receives about twice as much energy as Earth per square inch (at the top of the atmosphere that is), why are their surfaces so different? Venus' atmosphere is a hellish 700 degrees C or so, hot enough to melt lead. It's mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, with nitrogen and argon as on earth. No free oxygen to speak of. Incessant winds of hundreds of miles an hour. Sulfuric acid rain. Nothing like our present day Earth, low pressure atmosphere mostly nitrogen and oxygen, rest mostly argon, bit of water vapor and of course growing CO2 (now at 0.04% see my previous post).

There is not one simple answer to this question, however some geological and venerological facts offer suggestions. There is actually about the same amount of nitrogen in Venus' atmosphere as in Earth's, but because of the much greater amount of CO2, nitrogen makes up a smaller proportion of Venus'. The key difference is the amount of CO2. The fascinating thing I recently learned was that the amount of carbon in Venus' atmospheric CO2 is fairly comparable (maybe not exactly the same) as the amount of carbon believed to exist on earth, where it is mostly in living organisms or in fossil fuel and other rocky deposits beneath the surface (such as graphite and diamond). In other words, Venus is what Earth could become if a lot more of its carbon was oxidized (i.e. burned) to CO2 and released to the air. Oxygen is more complicated, as even on earth most oxygen is tied up in rocky ores. But it seems to me that the carbon balance is the most relevant.

It's accepted that Venus' atmosphere has evolved over the past billions of years, just as Earth's has. It's hard to know whether it was always so inhospitable, although some scientists have proposed possible scenarios in which long ago Venus could have had a similar atmosphere to Earth's of that time (not today). They conjecture that tremendous volcanic activity, together with the intrinsically greater amount of solar energy absorbed at Venus' distance from the sun, caused much of its carbon to be oxidized to CO2, which built up in the atmosphere to the current tremendous levels of heat and pressure. Also at an early stage the higher general temperature meant that the atmosphere could hold more water vapor than Earth's, which also contributed to a greenhouse effect.

The point of this extended discussion of solar system -ology is that things change, and not necessarily for the better as far as our form of carbon/DNA-based life is concerned. Even though Earth receives half the solar energy as Venus, there is no obvious geological obstacle to Earth's atmosphere becoming extremely, it not as, inhospitable as Venus'. We just need to burn a lot more carbon, enough to initiate a positive feedback loop including water vapor. And since burning carbon is how our society works, endless economic growth implies more burning carbon. When some politician talks about jobs, just show him some molten lead and ask if he would enjoy watching his grandchildren swimming around in it. That is where we are headed if we don't either burn less carbon, figure out how to sequester most of the CO2 released, or both.

Incidentally, we can offset as much of this as we like with sustainable energy, but all processes in the universe generate heat, so even a completely "green" industrial economy has a problem with how to radiate the excess heat generated back into space. Burning carbon speeds our problem up, a lot, but isn't the sole source of the problem. For the moment however, increased CO2 production is the most pressing problem. It'll be a while before we need to think about moving Earth further from the sun (if that is even possible, see Larry Niven's Ringworld for the idea).

The total concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is above 400 parts per million (ppm). It crossed the 400 mark a year or two ago with many expressions of concern from some and complete ignorance from most. I have come to see that part of the problem is people's poor grasp of mathematics, and the way different uses of words can result in different emotional responses. My genetic counselor friends are aware of this, and have commented that people may react quite differently if they are told that the risk of some genetic event affecting their kids is for example 5% (seems small) versus '1 in 20' which seems larger because 20 is a bigger number than 5 even though it's in the denominator. Of course 5% and 1 in 20 mean exactly the same thing mathematically.

With that in mind, 400 sounds like a big number, but a million is so much bigger that people, if they think about it at all, are likely to say it doesn't seem very dangerous. But, 410 (the number last June, a bit lower in Hawaii atop Mauna Loa today) ppm is the same as 0.041%. Even that seems small, until you search the internet and find out that it's been reported that exposure to 2% CO2 can cause headaches, nausea, and cognitive problems (quoted from http://www.aragonvalley.com/en/effects-of-co2-in-humans/ , which says original source is Scripps Oceanographic Institute, I haven't verified yet). So how bad is 0.04% versus 2%? It's 50 times lower, which means if we keep burning fossil fuels at the same rate as today or higher, in a few decades unless CO2 is removed more rapidly than currently occurs, OUR AIR WILL BE UNBREATHABLE.

Seems pretty trivial to talk about sea levels rising a few feet, or heat waves, or climate change in general, compared to WE WILL ASPHYXIATE.

So my mission is to get everyone to stop talking about CO2 in parts per million, and start talking about percent. Maybe that will scare more people, which it should because it scares me plenty.

In general I think Canadians are appalled but not necessarily surprised by the unrolling of events south of the border. U.S. foreign policy has always had very ideological and coercive aspects that  other countries don't think very highly of. For example, the U.S. government actively managed the illegal and violent overthrow of the legally elected government of Iran in the 1950s. Is it surprising that they distrust American promises and policies forever since (religious issues and Israeli politics aside)?

The U.S. also has a recurrent domestic history of bigotry and racism, plus a propensity to violence out of proportion with its stated belief in law and order. In the current situation I see threads going back to right-wing mistrust both of FDR and the New Deal, and of LBJ's courting of minorities following on the various civil rights acts. I also blame the Democrats (the party, not the political philosophy) for kowtowing to its own oligarchs and giving a real third party candidate (which Trump effectively was, although he also co-opted the right wing of the GOP) its best chance since Ross Perot.

All of that said, the weakness of the social contract is a real part of American society, and not just on the right (read Morris Berman for example). Although the rebellions of the 1960's were at least partly driven by real unfairness to minorities and women in issues social, legal and economic, they also tied in to the traditional individualism of America's self-image. The success of the me generation was a little too easy to be put down to just a few "hippies".

In retrospect, the most telling moment for me was not when Obama was elected, but when the Dems took such a large loss in his first mid-term elections. Obama had just saved the economy and enacted some semblance of universal health care (as much as was possible at that time and place). Although there were bailouts of some big companies, they came with very strong financial oversight and indeed do seem to have helped not hurt the economy. The rejection of these policies was too overwhelming to be due just to extreme right wing fringes of the Republicans, or some poor messaging (after all, Obama won the election through his strength in messaging and his sophistication). It seems that most american voters, and not just Republicans, do not really want anything looking like socialism, and would rather be unnecessarily poor or even die themselves of untreated medical problems than give up their ideological belief in the autonomy of the individual in a complex techno-industrial society (which seriously limits that autonomy), or that the individual can somehow "triumph" against adversity in all situations.

In terms of the rejection of globalism, of course the people being hit hardest in the US are probably the same ones who were rapid anti-communist/socialist. When a billion chinese suddenly became capitalists willing to work for much lower wages than americans for the same jobs, what did they think would happen? The rest of the world basically accepted neoliberal capitalism, which meant the US no longer had the specific advantages that system offers, but still had to deal with the disadvantages.

One has to acknowledge that Trump was much clearer about stating some of these things than the other candidates of both parties. Demagogues arise so frequently in such situations that the surprising aspect is only the amount of resistance he's facing in his own country. His solutions of course are non-sensical and will either not work at all or will eventually lead to some real wars - and the destruction caused by wars is one of the sure-fire ways to restart moribund economies unfortunately. Trump may actually know this, at least intuitively, and be working towards it. Needless to say there's a lot of suffering and violence that goes with that approach to economics, versus actual fair wealth redistribution.

I haven't written anything here in many months. In some ways not much has happened in the world, in other ways a lot. The problems of unsustainable economic and ecological systems increasingly occupy my mind. In the face of a corrupt oligarchical political system, the only way to prevent mass revolt by the starving masses is to increase total growth. As long as most people have an acceptable minimum income (whatever that level is), they seem willing to tolerate gross total inequality of distribution. "Growth" is presented as a panacea, and every piece of evidence of it is taken up by mainstream media as a positive message.

The problem is, as a biologist I see unrestrained growth as an evil. Our bodies grow when we are young, but once we reach maturity, continuing growth of any subunit of the body basically means cancer, which is ultimately fatal. The entire body can't grow indefinitely, for one thing we aren't built that way, for another we would obviously reach physical limits. For example, several hundred million years ago, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere was substantially greater than it is currently (it's now about 21%). One consequence was that insects could be larger. As a group, insects lack a dedicated circulatory system, so the only way the interiours of their bodies can get oxygen is by diffusion (ok there are systems of air ducts in at least some insects, but not an active circulatory network). If their bodies get too large, the cells in the center can't get enough oxygen to support their energy needs, which limits potential growth. If the overall oxygen pressure of the air is higher, then enough oxygen can diffuse to support larger bodies. There are fossils of things like dragonflies with wing spans of feet versus inches. In the case of humans, we have all kinds of physical limits that are not usually considered by economists. We can't live in air of 10% oxygen, I'm not sure where the lower limit is but it must be somewhere between 10 and the current 21% I imagine. We can't tolerate extreme heat and humidity, if we can't sweat then we die of internal overheating. We need a regular daily dose of pure water or salt concentrations and pH become unbalanced which is fatal (probably to our brains first).

Economists tend to assume human technologies can overcome all such physical limits. Indeed this may be the case at least enough to support some people, but not all. Technological solutions have to work not just for a few, but for all 7+ billion of us, else we end up with dystopias as described by many science fiction writers and movies.

The point is that economic growth requires energy consumption. For now that mostly means fossil fuels, with the result of increasing greenhouse gases. If we keep this up too long, we'll end up like Venus (atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide and water, super high pressure and temperature that of molten lead). I imagine a handful of elite could survive this underground, but imagine bunkers for 7 billion - not likely.

Even if we manage to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, energy consumption still means heat, as there is no beating the second law of thermodynamics (when it comes to energy, you can't win, and you can't even tie). If the heat can't escape the earth, then temperature rises. Things like melting the permafrost and releasing trapped methane, could cause a Venus-like future even if we were fully "green" in terms of energy production.

No one can predict the future. Extremists like Guy Macpherson aver that it is already too late and the earth will become void of all large plants and animals inevitably in the next century if not decades. I agree this could happen, although from what I read of climate science, even given very alarming evidence of accelerating ice cap melting etc, it still doesn't seem a foregone conclusion. But even if not, it's a likely outcome, in centuries if not sooner. What rational species would continue on the same path given this information? None of course, which just goes to show that mankind is not as rational as it tends to claim it is. From the basic theory of evolution, I presume that all species have a drive to grow and expand in numbers, and that any limits are imposed only by the external environment not by any evolvable behavior. That bodes poorly for mankind. The tragedy is that the same evolutionary forces have given us minds that are capable of imagining such a future. If only those minds were strong enough to allow us to modify our actions to contradict the deeper biological drive to expand, grow, reproduce. But I fear not, ever or anytime soon at least. The question is whether we can survive as a species until we mature sufficiently to attain such mastery over basic evolutionary impulses.

 Capitalism has a number of dangerous inherent flaws. It has no way to deal with externalities, leading to unstoppable depletion of natural resources and accumulation of waste (including things like carbon dioxide and even heat). It has no intrinsic mechanism for determining a "fair" division of surplus wealth (i.e. profits) between workers, management and owners, leading to incessant and often violent negotations over wealth sharing. It tends to create monopolies which are at odds with the basic concept of a free market. The actual way in which it functions is highly dependent on the societal and legal framework in which it operates. It probably isn't even possible at all without strong central governments, whereas it rejects the idea of external regulation and claims to be autonomously sufficient. These are not problems that can be resolved by "tweaking" the pure economics of capitalism, they are inherrent. Clearly only a modified form of regulated capitalism has any chance to function effectively in the long term (if that). This is basically the system that came out of world war II, and it worked fairly well until several things happened that may perhaps be linked. First and foremost, right wing ultraconservatives established a long term explicit plan to roll back as much as possible of the New Deal and post-war evolution, including things like high marginal tax rates, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, Social Security, minimum wages, and so on. This is clearly a case of pure class warfare. It is obviously not sustainable in the long term, as an impoverished population can't afford to purchase the products, thus reducing demand and ultimately making the capitalist system itself dysfunctional. Second, there is the component of pure costs of production, which must be presumed to have risen significantly with the end of cheap US oil in the mid 1970s. I remember myself when gasoline was less than 30 cents at the pump, and each penny increase was a newsworth. Nowadays prices in the US are at least 3-4 times that, and are even higher in Europe. Whether as a source material for chemical industry (as in plastics) or as a source of energy, a several fold increase in price must reduce profits if the price index does not rise equivalently. To me it is highly suspicious that the beginning of the triumph of the right wing neocon agenda began shortly after the mid-1970s. It could be coincidental, but could also be that the increase in oil prices and lack of control of those prices translated into greater energy put into subverting our political process. Further support for this idea comes from the relatively recent recovery of the US economy (in terms of GDP if not wages), also coincident with the use of new technologies to increase national oil production thereby reducing dependence on middle -eastern oil (reducing but not eliminating).