Blogging for Peace on Earth

Monday, 25 June 2012

Arctic warming: not all bad news

A survey in the Economist (16 June 2012) makes it startlingly clear that the Arctic is changing fast – much faster than climate science models predicted. Which is in itself an indication that there is a lot we don’t understand. The Antarctic is a less immediate problem, although on balance that too is slowly warming.

The main points as I understand them are listed below.

Over the last 60 years the Arctic has been warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. The average temperature there has increased by 1.5 deg C since 1951, compared to a global average of 0.7 deg C.

Two billion tonnes of ice from the Greenland glaciers are melting each year – four times the rate of a decade ago. This means huge amounts of fresh water running into the sea and changing the ecosystem, the ocean currents and the local, possibly global, climate. Major Gulf Stream alterations are still thought to be possible but probably over hundreds or thousands of years, which is fortunate since the effects would be enormous.

The long term threat is sea level rise. If all the Greenland glaciers, i.e. land-bound ice, melted the global sea level would rise by 7.2 m, more than enough to drown most cities in the world but this would take centuries. More imminently, a metre rise could happen in 50 years and this would still cause serious flooding. (NB: the melting of sea ice makes no difference to sea level.)

Stocks of cod and other edible fish are increasing as the sea temperature rises but some forms (mainly?) of microscopic life are declining. This could be particularly useful as demand for protein grows globally. Hopefully a new balance to suit the higher temperatures will establish it itself.

Polar bears, and probably much other life, are not in danger since they appear to have survived periods in the remote past when the Arctic was totally free of ice.

Arctic sea ice is contracting in area relentlessly and much faster than predicted. The minimum extent of ice is always in September and it has decreased from 8 million square km in 1950 to about 5 million last year. It was predicted only to fall to 7 million.

New energy and mineral resources are now becoming available as the ice retreats. According to the report the likelihood of conflict is minimal since there is more than enough for everyone and none of the nations involved want war.

Russia, Canada, USA and the Scandinavian countries are planning to exploit these resources and to use the sea routes which are now beginning to open up. These are the North-West Passage (off Canada) and the Northern Sea Route (off Russia).

There is a danger of runaway global warming driven by methane released from permafrost melting and the accelerating reduction in albedo (% of solar energy reflected back by the surface) as soil rather than ice is exposed to sunlight and as industrial soot darkens the remaining ice.

The Economist report is excellent and well balanced. As you can see, there may actually be some benefits but given the immense complexity of the biosphere we must tread carefully. Life is the most unpredictable ingredient because of its creative nature and we have to remember that the Earth’s atmosphere of today was generated by life over billions of years. The original atmosphere was an obnoxious mixture of carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. It was evolving living plants and creatures that made it what it is today – mainly nitrogen and oxygen, totally benign to human beings when not polluted by us.

Sunday, 24 June 2012

Reforming the world economy

Individual countries throughout the world have got themselves into enormous debt – either government spending debt, as in Greece, or personal debt, as in the Anglo-American economies (including Ireland and Spain), or a mixture of both.

EUROPE

Debt levels of the 4 largest economies in Europe

as % of GDP (2009 figures) + GDP growth rate

Country	Total debt	Financial Institutions	Household debt	Commercial debt	Government debt	GDP growth rate 2010 % p.a.
UK	466	194	103	110	59	1.25
France	323	84	44	114	80	1.50
Italy	315	82	41	41	109	1.3
Germany	285	80	64	69	73	3.5

Currently the centre of attention is the eurozone but this is a world problem. The European Union has a turnover of around 15 trillion dollars p.a, slightly more than the USA, so what happens here affects everywhere, especially highly indebted countries like the USA, UK and Japan.

USA, JAPAN and CHINA

Debt levels as % of GDP (2009 figures) + GDP growth rate

Country	Total debt	Financial Institutions debt	Household debt	Commercial debt	Government debt	GDP growth rate 2010 % p.a.
USA	296	53	97	79	67	3.0
Japan	471	110	69	95	197	4.0
China	159	18	12	96	32	10.4

If European banks start failing and governments default on their debt it will have a large global impact, especially on the USA and the UK, which are where unsound financial practices began and where the total debt burden is highest (private and government debt as % of GDP). It seems to me highly unlikely that the eurozone will be allowed to break up, except possibly to eject Greece in an orderly, internationally coordinated way. All economic power blocs of the world recognise that the entire global trade and wealth generating system would be severely disrupted, probably for decades, if the eurozone broke up.

The eurozone is a victim of the following, most of which originated outside the eurozone and from a worldview out of kilter with reality:

government over- spending by nations , largely made unsustainable by the need to rescue banks (especially in Spain and Ireland)

reckless individual borrowing to buy houses or finance consumption, together with the easy lending which exploited the naivety or vulnerability or greed of the borrowers.

gambling with shares, loans and derivatives by finance workers.

ignorance of the debt owed to the biosphere (clean air and water, plus an ecosystem that supports growth of food).

It is difficult to know whether to call these practices sinful or stupid, but they certainly are not good in any sense. This is a global problem and it has to be solved if more poverty, war, revolution, starvation and economic stagnation are to be avoided.

To correct this situation most would agree to the following, all highly interconnected and requiring a lot of international cooperation:

1. The governments need to become more financially efficient

Honest presentation of government statistics with no hiding of debts or distortion of spending for party political gain. This will allow them to run the social, health, security and military services in a realistic way.

2. The debts need to be paid back or written off

All governments and banks need to repay what they owe over a sufficiently long but rigorously enforced period to avoid too much economic disruption. Some creditors of international investment banks will have to accept losses rather than expect tax payers to bear them. Overall the debt levels are so high that they will have to be partially passed on to the next generation.

3. Finance needs to be tightly regulated

Buying and selling of shares cannot continue on a short term basis: entrepreneurs wishing to build up a wealth-generating enterprise must be given a reasonable period, typically 5 years. Large corporations must pay the social costs of transferring their activities to the region of cheapest labour. City traders cannot be permitted to ride the real economy by buying and selling on short timescales (e.g. a fraction of a second), thereby creating a fantasy economy comparable in turnover to the real one which at some point has to be called in to rescue it.

4. The world economy needs to grow qualitatively rather than quantitatively

To bring those burdened with poverty or starvation or disease to a reasonable living standard with enough leisure to make them fully human as well as to provide a qualitatively better life for all, where knowledge, skill and creativity are the drivers rather than consumption, the world economy needs to grow in some way, a very different way from the way it has in the past. This is probably the biggest challenge of all. One possibility is exploration of our universe and the celebration of God as revealed in the natural world.

5. Accounting needs to become realistic

There are many ways of presenting the annual balance sheets, profit-and-loss statements and cash flows of companies, charities and public corporations. These are meant to reflect the real financial state and outlook of an organisation but in reality accountants tend to slant them towards vested interests, albeit within the letter of whatever convention they have adopted. Also, accountants have to work towards quantifying the cost of taking from the earth’s resources.

These are technical problems but also, more importantly, ethical ones and have to be tackled on a world scale, in a spirit of humility and desperation, yet without attempting to turn our culturally rich and diverse world into a bleak monoculture run by demagogues. As a Christian I would say that to get it right we have to get into a right relationship with God but I am also aware that this will not be easy given the greed of humans and the pride of those who do not even acknowledge the existence of their maker.

Hopefully, time will not run out on us.

John

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Sunday, 17 June 2012

Life, enzymes and big numbers

It is commonly stated that living organisms are made of 20 amino acids, often referred to as the ‘building blocks of life’, as though just a bit of juggling and a few hundred million years of natural selection would have led to the creation by chance of the first living organisms of which we are aware (i.e. bacteria). See also Natural technology: the bacterium. It is like looking at the bricks in New York city and saying that this ‘explains’ the formation and functioning of this great metropolis, with its transportation technology; cyber networks; telephone, water and power systems; gardens, theatres, cinemas, museums, vibrant streets and communities. All that was needed were various kinds of brick and the rest would follow by natural selection and chance.

Just how irrational is such an approach (not to mention literally soul destroying) was calculated in Cosmic Life Force by Sir Fred Hoyle, FRS, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, first published in 1988.

The simplest living systems of which we are aware, and which appeared a few hundred million years after the creation of the planet, consist of these 20 amino acids arranged into about 2000 enzymes, comparable in complexity to the one below. These enzymes perform a complex spectrum of functions and behave in what can only be described as a purposeful way to edit, repair and modify long chains of DNA via messenger RNA as well as perform a host of other functions we are only beginning to understand. Moreover, amino acids have to be put together in special ways to produce other vital components of life such as histones (which have recently proved crucial in epigenetics, because they help govern a gene's expression of protein) and cytochrome-c (used to transport electrons around the cell). Again, each arrangement is exceedingly improbable. If the positions of the amino acids in the enzymes, histones or cytochrome-c are wrong the system becomes non-viable. (The building block analogy breaks down: normally the brick of a building can be in any position, while the particular amino acid has to be in a specific life-conferring position within the enzyme.)

Using their mathematical prowess they calculate that the probability of the amino acids forming the enzymes alone is one chance in 10 to-the-power-of-40,000 (i.e. 1 with 40,000 zeros – taking up several chapters of a book). To express the probability of the whole cell forming by chance would take volumes of books to write out the zeros involved. There are ‘only’ about 10-to-the-power-of-80 elementary particles in the entire observable universe, which is many, many orders of magnitude less.

The authors compare the probability to that of over 10,000 spectators arriving at a match in a particular pre-specified and significant order (not any old order). It would take 10-to-the-power-of-40,000 games for this to happen by chance (assuming it would happen at all). If the games were held weekly, say, it would take immeasurably longer than the age of the universe (13.3 billion years). This leaves out consideration of the other components of a living cell, all of them essential. For this degree of organisation to arise by chance is not credible. It would have to be guided in some way. The claim of evolution by random processes is described by the authors as ‘an uneasy combination of wishful thinking and dogma’. (These calculations have not to my knowledge been improved upon since the book was published. Please correct me if you know otherwise.)

Since 1988 attempts have been made to simulate simpler self replicators, which conceivably could evolve into more complex ones, via software; but they all require human intelligence: the operating system and hardware to run the simulation has to be designed in the first place and the simplest self-replicating software models have to be carefully designed. How such systems could organise themselves by natural selection into the observed fossilised living organisms of over 3.5 billions years ago is a question for a magician, not a scientist. All systems in nature consist not of simpler viable, self-standing systems put together: each component system is useless without the rest. It is all or nothing.

The authors of Cosmic Life Force were far from religious (in fact my understanding was that Hoyle was an agnostic or atheist) but their book concludes with these words:

'The general belief that is common to all religions is that the universe, particularly the world of life, was created by a being of incomprehensibly magnified human-type intelligence....the overwhelming majority of humans would have instinctively adopted this point of view in some form, totally and without reservation. In view of the thesis of this book, it would seem to be almost in the nature of our genes to be able to evolve a consciousness of precisely this kind, almost as if we are creatures destined to perceive the truth relating to our origins in an instinctive way.'

Hoyle thought the universe was infinite and eternal, so he could ‘explain’ how life came about somewhere somehow in the universe by chance then got transported here by chance. Then came the Big Bang theory, which overturned his view of the cosmos: it is far from infinite and eternal and in my view such concepts are philosophically and mathematically untenable, being meaningful only in poetic terms (see links below). Therefore the big question stands. From where did life and the cosmos come?