Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Health and climate change

I was surprised just now to see that I don’t think I have a general thread on climate change and human health.

I’d say there are at least two big relevant dimensions to it.

First, because fossil fuel use causes so many bad health impacts, phasing out fossil fuels brings major co-benefits in terms of avoiding disease.

Second — whereas people seem to find environmental problems generally abstract and of low salience — people seem to have a much more consistent willingness to prioritize health related items. Thus, emphasizing the health impacts of climate change may help to motivate those presently unmoved or hostile to climate action.

There are certainly other important links, including how climate change will alter the distribution of mosquito-borne and other diseases and of course the intersectional ways in which health connects with public policy, economic justice, race, and global equity.

I did for a while host a Canadian government report on human health and climate change, which the Harper government decided to make available to the public only through the mail on a CD.

Health was also an important part of the case we made for divestment at U of T (PDF page 50 / printed page 44-7).

Related:

CBC on the war against the fossil fuel industry

The CBC has two new podcast episodes related to my research. Front Burner has an episode on the movement to divest from the bitumen sands, which tracks the movement’s progression from church groups to universities to major banks and insurers. It notes that only half as many insurers are willing to cover the industry as before the divestment movement began in 2011/12. The second describes Supran and Oreskes’ new analysis of how ExxonMobil has worked to delay climate action and mislead the public, notably by emphasizing consumer responsibility (like the idea of carbon footprints) to try to avoid regulation.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) on the carbon bubble

The International Energy Agency has released a report on what would be necessary to achieve a ‘net zero‘ global economy by 2050: Net Zero by 2050 A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector.

Unsurprisingly, it replicates the carbon bubble / stranded assets argument: “The global pathway to net‐zero emissions by 2050 detailed in this report requires all governments to significantly strengthen and then successfully implement their energy and climate policies. Commitments made to date fall far short of what is required by that pathway.”

It also asserts the basic concept of a contraction and convergence framework for global equity in emission reductions: “advanced economies have to reach net zero before emerging markets and developing economies, and assist others in getting there.”

Most encouragingly, it avoids the assumption that massive carbon removal technologies will be deployed, meaning a net zero pledge based around effective fossil fuel abolition:

Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four‐fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one‐fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low‐emissions technology options are scarce.

This is naturally an enormous challenge to the companies and governments choosing to pretend that there will be an easy technological fix which reconciles controlling climate change with continued fossil fuel use.

Unsurprisingly, the CBC describes Canadian reactions to the report as “mixed”.

Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)

One of the case studies in my M.Phil thesis was persistent organic pollutants (POPs) — a class of mostly pesticides which have been restricted under international law because they harm humans and other species, persist in the environment for long periods, and bioaccumulate in food chains, rising to higher concentrations in each level of predators.

One of the reasons states were motivated to act was because of the strong moral case made by arctic Indigenous peoples, especially the Inuit. Data on the accumulation of POPs in breast milk was especially salient, as discussed in the excellent book edited by David Downie and Terry Fenge: Northern Lights against POPs: Combatting Toxic Threats in the Arctic.

Similar attention is now being directed toward polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are also persistent or “forever chemicals” and which have also now been found accumulating in human breast milk.

China emitting over 14 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent

In a development that illustrates the global dynamics of climate change China’s emissions now exceed those of the entire developed world put together.

Since at least the 1990s the basic nature of a global deal to control climate change has been clear. States like Canada with the highest historical and per capita emissions need to cut their fossil fuel use dramatically. At the same time, rapidly developing countries need to choose a lower carbon development path than the states that preceded them.

Canada is massively reneging on this deal. We have never hit our climate targets and our leaders continue to act as though continued fossil fuel development can somehow be compatible with climatic stability. We also treat the emissions from the fossil fuels we produce as someone else’s problem, just as we treat the emissions that go into our imports (some of those Chinese emissions are making stuff for the benefit of Canadians, and people in all rich countries).

Persisting with the status quo is a suicide pact, yet states and citizens have not yet displayed the wisdom of recognizing and acting upon that. With so little time left to change course and avert the worst impacts of climate change we cannot keep accepting governments that abstractly promise that emissions will fall in the far future while working in practice largely to protect business as usual.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)

One element of a science fiction future which I expect to see in my lifetime is the ability to directly connect human brains with computers and share instructions back and forth.

That seems especially plausible now that Neuralink has demonstrated a high bandwidth BCI with two tetraplegic people.

This evokes the idea of a Ghost in the Shell future where people can use their disembodied minds to control computer systems, robots, and prosthetics. Even just being able to control a computer with the rapidity of thought is essentially a superpower, since it would allow people to perform calculations and other tasks which their unaided brains could not manage. Beyond that, a transhuman future beckons.

Related:

The rational mind as storyteller not decider

There is an intriguing hypothesis about the rational mind: while we think of it as a weigher of evidence that contributes to the decisions we make when faced with a choice, it’s possible that its real role is to construct a story after the fact about why we made the choice we did for instinctive or emotional reasons.

Chris Voss alludes to this in his book about negotiations:

In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should do in logical terms, but they found it impossible to make even the simplest choice.

In other words, while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.

Voss, Chris. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Penguin Random House, 2016. p. 122 (emphasis in original)

It has occurred to me that while the fundamental units of the physical universe may be the particles of the standard model or superstrings or something similar, the fundamental units of the psychological universe may be stories. We make decisions — perhaps — by analogy and imagination, using the stories we know as templates for projecting what could happen from one or another course of behaviour. This is compatible with the idea that generals are always fighting the last war, or that decision makers find an analogy as a schema for assessing the options before them in the present case (famously, the notion that states blundered into the first world war arguably motivated the appeasement policy toward Hitler which was later judged to have contributed to the second, while the lesson learned about the dangers of appeasement fed the undue combativeness of the cold war).

The idea that rationalization is after-the-fact storytelling risks feeding in to a nihilistic perspective that our decisions are just uncontrollable emergent phenomenon, coming out of a black box which we cannot control or influence, but that does not follow if we accept that we can influence the conditions that influence our emotions and train ourselves in how we respond emotionally. Voss’ book elaborates on this view with numerous practical details and examples, not taking for granted that people are emotional so they just do as they do, but highlighting how often-subtle mechanisms for influencing how people feel can powerfully influence how things turn out.

Related:

The psychological significance of groups

Even in the most basic definition of a group, [social psychologist Henri] Tajfel and his colleagues found evidence of ingroup bias: a preference for or privileging of the ingroup over the outgroup. In every conceivable iteration of this experiment, people privileged the group to which they had been randomly assigned. Ingroup bias emerged even when Billig and Tajfel in 1973 explicitly told respondents that they had been randomly assigned to two groups, because it was “easier this way.” The ingroup bias still appeared, simply because the experimenters distinguished the two groups. These respondents were not fighting for tangible self-interest, the money they allocated went to other people, not themselves. They simply felt psychologically motivated to privilege members of their own imaginary and ephemeral group—a group of people they had never met and would never meet, and whose existence they had only learned of minutes earlier. People react powerfully when they worry about losing group status, even when the group is “minimal.”

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 11

COVID’s second spring

My winter thread is now behind the times, so this will be a new place to track COVID stories of interest and importance.

One I saw today is not encouraging: More young Canadians getting severe COVID-19, being hospitalized: experts

According to new modelling from the Public Health Agency of Canada, Canada is on track to see a “strong resurgence” of COVID-19 cases across the country if these variants continue to spread and become more commonplace, and if public health measures remain at current levels.

The new long-range projections, released on Friday, show that the highest incidences of COVID-19 are currently being experienced in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario, while the overall incidence rates are highest among young adults aged 20 to 39 and have declined among older Canadians.

Let’s all do what we can to combat complacency and sustain the public determination to keep acting protectively toward one another.