China's bold action on climate change

In the Pliocene Epoch (2.3-5.6 million years ago)  average temperatures were 2-3 degrees C above the present, corresponding to a sea level some 25 metres higher than today.

There is an emerging world consensus that even if the rich countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions to zero over the next 20 years the average world temperature will rise to 1.25 deg C above the present average. Since pre-industrial (late 19^th century) times the global average has already risen 0.75 deg C and the rate of increase is itself increasing, so that, assuming there is a significant connection between temperature rise and sea level increase, these Pliocene sea levels could be reached this century. Since most cities are near rivers and on coasts this would be disastrous.

 

So the pressure is on the developing world to drastically cut its emissions while growing economically even if the developed world stops all its greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade or so.

 

The world’s two biggest economies are the USA and China. The latest figures from the Factbook on my iPhone:

 

• USA:   GDP per person  =  $48,300 (2011)

• China: GDP per person  =  $8,400 (2011)

 

But China’s population (1.34 billion) is about 4x the USA’s so there is scope for the economic activity to grow enormously should it succeed in reforming its economic structure and liberating the spirit of creativity. Its overall  economic output could reach 20-30 times  the present level. Even setting aside the output of the rest of the world, this amount of activity without green measures could cause potentially catastrophic global warming as the temperature rise accelerated. It would also be a huge drain on planetary resources:  food, water, fossil fuels, metals and minerals.

 

So it is fortunate for all of us that the 2011 Five Year plan included strict environmental measures. The March 2013 edition of Prospect has an article by Sam Knight, called The thin green line which gives the bold targets which China has set itself:

 

• Reduce emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45 % by 2020

• Increase the proportion of renewable energy to 20% of the total energy produced by 2020

• Spend $800 billion on green investment by 2016

• Set up pilot schemes for carbon trading in 5 cities

• Cap coal production in 2015 (1 in 3 new coal-fired plants are now on hold)

 

Already China has the largest wind turbine and solar energy industries in the world and is putting a lot of R&D into these areas.

These targets are partly a response to visible intense city pollution and industrial health problems, which, together with the aging population and absence of a welfare state, are risking social instability. Also, greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 150% since 2002, the north of China is experiencing rapid glacial melting and desertification while flooding is a big problem in the south. See http://globalwarming.markey.house.gov/impactzones/china.html
 

Nevertheless they make environmental moves by the USA look timid indeed, relying largely on conversion from oil to natural gas extraction, moves towards renewable energy and control of automobile emissions.

 

China being a command economy makes drastic action easier. E.g. hundreds of polluting factories have been closed, with resultant job losses, and some cities are suffering blackouts as power is cut off by local officials to meet emission targets. The irony is that leaders are faced with a choice between two kinds of human suffering: loss of livelihood and break up of community on one side, catastrophic climate change, pollution and starvation on the other. The west's leaders do not have a command option. Only changes in human behaviour can avoid the problems of global warming coming to a head.

 

Other developing nations are also taking the global warming problem more seriously. In Bangladesh the plan is to reduce emissions by one third by 2030 as well as to deal with the problems already created by global warming, such as producing thousands of cyclone shelters and disaster-proof latrines. South Korea has been spending $23 billion per year on green growth measures since 2008.

Where all this is leading no one can know. The whole picture could change through discovery of some unexpected mechanism in the atmosphere or the oceans, or through the development of controlled fusion or even migration of manufacturing into space should really cheap surface-to-orbit transport be developed.

 John
author 2077 AD
reach me at cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Morality and empathy

Philosophical materialists are in effect claiming that free will does not exist and that  all thought is illusory, including presumably all the findings of science from evolution by natural selection to cosmology. Philosophical materialism is the belief that reality consists exclusively of matter and energy.

If you do not regularly read popular science magazines you may find this incredible but only today I came across an old New Scientist cover story with the headline ‘THE GRAND DELUSION: everything you think is an illusion’. (This statement is meaningless unless there is a reality somewhere, since the very word illusion means a departure from reality.)

The latest illusion to emerge from materialists is that empathy, evolving out of the natural world, is the source of morality.  This is indeed an illusion.

Empathy is defined in the web dictionary as ‘understanding and entering into another’s feelings’.  It could be broadened to include seeing the world from another’s perspective, a capacity of particular value in business negotiations, for instance. Morality, however, is defined as ‘concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct’. If a person is moved to do good, say by helping someone being bullied, then empathy can be a powerful tool in deciding the needs of the person being helped. If empathy is absent it makes it more difficult to gauge a person’s feelings and so act to build up or sooth that person. However, it says nothing about the moral worth of an action.

Empathy can be an instrument of the most extreme evil, such as deriving pleasure from the gratuitous infliction of mental or physical suffering on another person. An example of a lesser evil where empathy would be useful to the perpetrator would be in personally and deliberately deceiving a victim into losing money in a confidence trick.  

It is true, fortunately, that empathy is mostly employed in the cause of goodness because acts of charity are more likely to take place when we identify with a suffering person and it also helps in the practicalities of help, e.g. in enlisting the cooperation of others, since it is easier to judge who will donate their time or money if you can empathise with them and if they in turn empathise with you they will more likely recognise your sincerity and feel impelled to offer assistance.

Yet it is also common for those having low empathy to do good simply because they recognise right from wrong and do not want people to suffer. As believers they want to serve God by serving the children of God. If they are non-believers they think they are doing it from their own sense of right and wrong, which I maintain still derives from our Creator which the non-believer is too proud to acknowledge, believing himself to be the authority for righteousness, or misled into accepting the precepts of some self-appointed authority, say Marx.

I have often wondered how much empathy was around during the Holocaust. If empathy is a purely naturalistic phenomenon one would have expected it to be as common among the thousands of perpetrators as among the population at large. It cannot be denied that some kind of evil was at work, both during the mass executions and in the 1920s and 1930s when German nationalism was coming to a climax. Perhaps the source of evil, which many call Satan or the Devil, is able to eclipse or magnify empathy in the cause of evil.

This may sound unscientific, but not as unscientific as the statements emanating from some scientists – hopefully a minority, otherwise science is doomed to ridicule, withdrawal of funding and oblivion. See also the 5-fold threat to science.

Peace on earth rests on facing the truth in a spirit of humility before our Creator. Pride is perhaps the greatest sin because it gets in the way of truth and eventually, relentlessly, divorces individuals and whole nations from God and sanity and plunges them into hell on earth.

 John

reach me at cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Fighting bacteria

http://textbookofbacteriology.net/themicrobialworld/bactresanti.html

The media in the UK at least has recently been full of concern verging on hysteria about the possibility of bacteria gaining resistance to all known antibiotics. The mechanisms by which germs infect the body and overcome antibiotics is phenomenally complex and anything but random. Often one hears about how bacteria mutate into new forms, almost as though they just randomly and magically transformed themselves from one microscopic bullet into another, so that eventually a form would emerge which could beat the antibodies which protect against them.

One look at even an instructional website for laymen like me shows the daunting complexity of the biomolecular processes at work in what looks like a fight of good against evil in a science fiction movie. See, e.g. see a previous post on the engineering miracle of a bacterium.  In particular it needs to be born in mind that when healthy or hostile bacteria (germs) mutate they do not do so at random but in a way which is structured in both time and space. The mutation process responds to the situation, such as a threat, and occurs only in selected parts of the genome – i.e. parts of the bacterial genome which are involved in essential functions like reproduction do not mutate.  See, e.g., this research from the Francis Crick Institute in Cambridge.

 

The germs also only attack when they reach a critical number. They know when this number is reached by communicating via signalling molecules called autoinducers, and this process is known as quorum sensing. If potentially harmful bacteria get wrong data they don’t attack at the right time.  So if the signalling between germs could be confused or disrupted this would render them harmless and this strategy is being explored.

 

Knowing little about biology I am nevertheless puzzled by the apparent absence of antibiotic research based on the recent discovery of bacteria totally isolated for millions of years in an underground cave. It suggests the possibility that there are bacteria in nature already resistant to all antibiotics we are likely to develop in future.

 In a way this does not seems surprising. The medicines used against harmful bacteria are all from a natural world that has been around for many millions of years. Could it be that the research on combating germs should widen its scope to consider not just systematic mutations by bacteria but the possibility that resistant strains might well be propagating around the world through winds, ocean currents, animal movements and human travel, and that whenever a new antibiotic is launched into the environment it will eventually encounter such a germ, and this germ would then be at an advantage over those still being killed by the antibiotic.  

Recently I learned that it is very likely that bacteria permeate not only the biosphere but the Earth's crust, down to several miles. Could this be another means by which bacteria spread around the planet? There is also evidence of soil bacteria being resistant to penicillin. Some scientists suspect that bacteria are embedded in extra-terrestrial debris, such as comets and meteors, along with viruses, but this does not seem to have become mainstream science since the idea was pioneered by Fred Hoyle et al in the 1970s.

 

Whatever direction is taken by antibiotic research it is now recognised that the way it is funded, developed for use and dispensed to the public needs to be radically revised. There are several promising antibiotics that are now at a dead end because no pharmaceutical company is prepared to take on the huge expense and risk of testing them and getting them though the regulatory hurdles erected by governments in response to demands from the general population and the medical profession, amplified by the media, for ever higher safety standards. Perhaps the research could be done by universities and non-profit philanthropic organisations, with the government issuing prizes to the groups which come up with the best solutions. The bringing to market of the medicines could be done separately on a contract basis with funding by governments and international charities.

 

Returning to the actual front line battle against germs one solution that has been gaining ground slowly over the decades is the use of bacteriophages. These are viruses which eat germs and were pioneered in the USSR before the Soviet break-up. Success has been achieved in curing certain minor infections but this approach could conceivably lead to big breakthroughs.

 

Hopefully, the dark memory of a world before penicillin and other antibiotics will be enough to shock us into doing what it takes to get new drugs into use and more prudent ways of dispensing them.

 John

Author 2077 AD
Reach me at cosmik.jo@gmail.com