Writing – Page 45 – a sibilant intake of breath

The future of newspapers

In a recent post, Taylor Owen argues that the death of newspapers (if it is happening) is not anti-democratic, because they will likely be replaced by less hierarchical structures. Personally, I think the value of newspapers derives precisely from the resources they have that most websites lack, such as access to powerful figures and the resources required for independent research. While some blogs do have very capable writers and sophisticated analysis, I do think the mainstream media is a very important current flowing into online discussions.

One way or another, I am sure newspapers will survive. They serve too many valuable purposes to be rendered pointless by the internet, and the best of them will eventually develop revenue streams that allow them to keep functioning despite it.

Dark Sun

The whole technical and chilling history of atomic weapons is reviewed in Richard Rhodes’ Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Released in 1995, it is based substantially on documents that became available after the end of the Cold War, documenting the development of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in the United States and Soviet Union, as well as delving into issues of international politics, espionage, and delivery systems.

Most people are likely to find some aspects of the book tedious, while others are fascinating. For instance, I noted all the descriptions of design details of nuclear and thermonuclear issues with interest, but found a lot of the minute descriptions of espionage activities tedious (especially descriptions of nearly every meeting between the atomic spies and their contacts). That said, the book will certainly offer good rewards to anyone with an interest in some aspect of nuclear weapons or the Cold War.

The last few pages really ought to be read by everyone. They document the shocking behaviour of Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the period prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as during it. At the time, LeMay and some of his commanders could use nuclear weapons without presidential authority; they were also obsessed with striking first, and generally convinced that war with Russia was inevitable. Perhaps the most shocking actions detailed are LeMay’s strategy of flying nuclear-capable bombers over targets like Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union. They were running drills and taking photos, but it looked to the Russians exactly like an atomic attack. I don’t think Rhodes is wrong to suggest that, had the Soviets done something similar in America, the SAC would have launched an all-out attack against them. Rhodes marshals compelling evidence that LeMay did, at times, seek to provoke a nuclear war through initiatives like these flights and the provocative American ballistic missile test undertaken during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The book’s closing also laments the enormous amounts of sacrifice made to build up these massive, threatening stocks of weapons. The Oak Ridge and Hanford complexes, producing fissile materials, used more energy than the Tennessee Valley Authority, Hoover, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville dams could produce together. One year of expanding the facilities required 11% of US nickel production and 34% of the output of stainless steel. All told, Rhodes estimates that the arms race cost America over $4 trillion, which could have otherwise been put to productive uses. On the Soviet side, the story is far more appalling: with thousands of slaves being terrorized and irradiated in the drive to match the American weapons complex. The irony is that, while generals and arms manufacturers clamoured for ever-more warheads, politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain had already come to understand that the weapons could never be used. Indeed, Rhodes’ account provides a nice counter-argument to the view that all politicians are short-sighted and lacking in wisdom.

All told, Rhodes’ account is an excellent one: historically rigorous, but alive to the human issues raised inevitably by the subject matter. It’s a book that is deeply relevant in a world where US-Russian tensions are growing, weapons are proliferating, and a terrifying number of bombs are still deployed on 15-minute hair-trigger alerts.

Call for papers on climate change

The St. Antony’s International Review has issued a call for papers (PDF) for their upcoming issue: “Climate Change: Preparations for a Low-Carbon Future.” Normally, it is something I would definitely make a submission to. As it stands, their last issue included a paper of mine on nuclear power, so I will probably sit this one out.

That being said, readers of this blog who have something interesting and scholarly to say about climate change should consider sending something. In particular, they are looking for work that addresses one or more of these topics:

Framing the Issue
Rethinking Existing Policy
Actors and Sites of Governance
Societal Attitudes towards Consumption

They also want reviews of books consistent with the theme. Abstracts are due by April 30th. Final papers are due August 31st.

Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet

Oliver Morton’s exploration of the nature and consequences of photosynthesis makes for a remarkable and informative book. It is divided into three sections: one covering the span of a human life and covering the scientific investigation of photosynthesis; one on a planetary timescale, describing the evolution of the climate, atmosphere, and life; and one on the timescale of a tree’s life, covering the changes humanity has induced in the carbon cycle, and the ways through which the climate change crisis can be overcome. The book is strongest when it comes to putting scientific information into a poignant and comprehensible form that is almost poetic. Arguably, it is weakest in terms of its analysis of what needs to be done in response to climate change.

Eating the Sun contains many sections that are highly technical: descriptions of the biochemistry of photosynthesis, the geological and climatological processes that have taken place over billions of years, the scientific methods through which both have been explored, and more. It can also be quirky, philosophical, and personal. For instance, there are asides in which the author explains his aesthetic preference for one or another scientific theory, such as how photosystems I and II in plants came to be integrated. The combination is not unlike that found in Michael Pollan’s work, where an educated non-expert with a talent for writing adopts the task of explaining technical issues and making their significance clearly felt.

The book features a great deal of discussion of the Earth as an integrated chemical and energy system, including consideration for many different forms of ‘Gaia hypotheses’ – most of them far less teleological than James Lovelock’s earliest work, which (probably wrongly) attributed a kind of agency to the planet as a whole. Of particular interest, among the non-telelogical variants, is combination of the anthropic principle with the idea of systems that self-regulate. It may well be that there are planets where physical and chemical processes do not remain constrained between life-compatible bounds over the long term. Of course, there are no living and intelligent observers on these planets to make note of them.

On climate change, Morton fails to appreciate the rapidity with which mitigation must occur. He contemplates what would be necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, whereas we will actually need to make great strides towards stabilizing concentrations by then. Rather than the seven Pacala-Socolow wedges required to produce a flat emissions profile, many more will be needed to begin the decline towards zero net emissions. His calm descriptions of global concentrations of carbon dioxide passing 500 parts per million (ppm), with associated temperature increases of up to four degrees Celsius, fails to portray what a catastrophic outcome this would be. These days, those committed to avoiding change of more than two degrees are advocating concentration targets around 350 ppm.

Morton’s discussion of mitigation technologies also offers scope for criticism; in particular, his discussion of nuclear fusion, fission, and hydrogen fuel cells is fairly superficial and fails to take into consideration some of the major limitations associated with each technology. In particular, he fails to consider the practical and economic issues associated with hydrogen as a fuel. That being said, he strongly makes the point that, in the long run, it will be necessary to move from an economy powered by the built-up solar reserves in fossil fuels to one largely powered by the current energy available in sunlight: whether that energy is directed towards the production of electricity, biomass, or fuels.

At times, the level of detail in Eating the Sun can be overwhelming. In particular, I found that some of the passages about biosphere-atmosphere interaction or long-term geological trends required close and repeated reading to be understood. For the non-practitioners at whom this book is aimed, such knowledge is not likely to be long-lasting. At the same time, by providing such clear and vivid detail, Morton grants a worthwhile understanding of the history and nature of the scientific processes through which we have uncovered so much about the world. As with the very best scientific writing, this book makes you feel both awed about the complexity and power of the world and impressed with the ingenuity that has gone into better understanding it. The book is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the history of the planet, the nature of the carbon cycle, or science generally.

Morton on the end of the carbon cycle

Among many other things, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun discusses the carbon cycle across extremely long timespans. It highlights the existence of positive and negative feedbacks, which have historically constrained atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to a particular range: with a high point established though increased emissions from volcanoes, and a low point established through the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the weathering of rocks.

The book predicts that, on the basis of astronomical and geological factors, this see-saw will eventually come to rest about a billion years from now: with the victory of erosion, and the permanent elimination of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a consequence, photosynthesis will cease – for lack of building material – and the energy system that supports all complex life will collapse. Morton dubs this ‘the end of plants’ and the explanation of why it is to occur is difficult to compress into a blog post. It’s one of many reasons for which the book is worthwhile reading.

It’s a sobering perspective: akin to the knowledge that our sun will eventually fail, or that the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a universe expanding without end would combine to produce ‘heat death’ and an end to all chemical reactions everywhere.

That being said, it is essentially impossible for our minds to appreciate the meaning of a billion years, or anticipate how life (and humanity) would change across that span. Long, long before this final descent in the carbon cycle could be approached, we would have ceased to resemble our present forms; indeed, our current forms and future forms might not even be able to comprehend one another. After all, the Cambrian explosion, in which complex life forms like molluscs and crustaceans emerged, happened ‘only’ 530 million years ago.

Of course, even starting to approach that post-human future requires surviving the all-too-human threats we have created for ourselves, with climate change foremost among them. The billion-year carbon bust offers no prospect of avoiding the warming we are creating at the level of years and centuries. What Morton’s long-term perspective does offer, however, is a fairly strong assurance that life can adapt to most any set of climatic circumstances we might be able to create. Of course, ‘life’ writ large is far more adaptable and resilient than our present form of civilization, which may be quite impossible to propagate in a world where temperatures are more than 5˚C higher, on average, glaciers and icecaps are gone, the oceans are acid, and precipitation patterns have changed dramatically.

It is both startling and entirely possible that human civilization, for all its accomplishments, will prove less adept at responding to large-scale changes in climate than ancient sharks or turtles have done.

The Man Who Loved China

Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China is a competent and sometimes compelling biography of the scientist and sinologist Joseph Needham: a man who started off as a Cambridge biochemist and later devoted his life to documenting the scientific history of China. While it contains a lot of interesting narrative and information, it does sometimes feel more like a catalogue of achievements, written by an admirer, than a substantive examination of either Chinese scientific history or Needham’s own work.

The book is essentially divided into two phases: one describing Needham’s life and explorations within China, in the period of the Second World War, and a second describing the process of writing his masterwork: Science and Civilization in China. More accurately, it must be said that he began his masterwork, as he was only able to produce the overall plan and the first few volumes before dying as an elderly man. During the first section, Needham is serving as a kind of official scientific liaison between the British government and the Chinese nationalist government during the period of Japanese occupation. During the second, he is principally installed in Cambridge as an academic, though he did return to China to lead an easily-duped team of weapons inspectors, investigating claims that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War.

The book is a somewhat odd one to read at this point in history. Needham’s work was published long enough ago to have become the mainstream understanding: namely, that a great many critical inventions and discoveries happened earlier in China than elsewhere. Most members of the public are probably able to identify gunpowder and the compass as Chinese inventions. Those with knowledge in other fields – from engineering to nautics – are probably similarly familiar with early Chinese contributions. By not providing much evidence about the prevailing view beforehand, the book makes it a bit awkward to assess Needham’s own contribution, aside from the indirect evidence provided by all of his subsequent academic recognition.

The book does a fairly comprehensive job of expressing Needham’s curious personal characteristics: his polyamory (spending most of his life within reach of both wife and mistress, both well aware of one another), his socialism, his love of trains and boats, and his overwhelming dedication to China. The strength of the latter is revealed through his inability to appreciate the problems with Mao’s revolution, at least, nor until the man himself had been dead for some time. Needham is portrayed as quite a dashing figure: scientist, activist, diplomat, and adventurer. In terms of the sheer number and variety of experiences, his life is one that must be envied by anyone who is curious about the world.

The so-called ‘Needham question’ of why scientific innovation in China stalled, prior to exploding in the West, gets surprisingly brief and superficial treatment in this volume – just a few pages in the epilogue. This is a curious way for a biographer to treat the central subject of his subject’s fascination. It would have been interesting to see various hypotheses discussed more thoroughly, with a focus on the evidence supporting and challenging them that arose from Needham’s investigations and subsequent scholarship.

For me, this book didn’t manage to be as compelling as Winchester’s history of the Oxford English Dictionary. Nonetheless, it would probably be of interest to those who enjoy reading about people who lived notable and unusual lives. It certainly tends towards inspiring a person to wonder what more exotic and worthwhile things they might be doing themselves.

On blog post timing

My current system is to produce two posts a day (sometimes one on weekends or when I am very busy). The first post includes a photo, and is generally the more substantive of the two. One post comes out at a random time between 7:00am and 8:00am Ottawa time. The other, at a random time between 6:00pm and 7:00pm.

Given that almost all the posts are written in advance, these time conventions are arbitrary. Would readers prefer for them to come out at different times? For instance, the first could be released earlier in the morning, for the benefit of those who habitually rise long before me.

Time zones are also a consideration. During the past year, there have been 22,253 visitors from across Canada, 19,789 from the USA, 5,597 from the UK, 1,314 from India, 1,297 from Australia, 642 from Germany, and less than 500 from 165 other states. The times at which posts are released matter most to regular readers, who tend to be in England (GMT), the Toronto-Ottawa area (GMT-5), and the Vancouver area (GMT-8). That means posts come out in Vancouver between 4:00am and 5:00am, as well as between 3:00pm and 4:00pm. In London and Oxford, they come out between noon and 1:00pm, as well as between 11:00pm and midnight.

Also, is the semi-random system preferable to one where they come out at the exact same moment, or would the alternative be better?

The Kindle and electronic books

In a recent article about Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, The Economist declared that:

It seems likely that, eventually, only books that have value as souvenirs, gifts or artefacts will remain bound in paper.

Despite being a big fan of electronic content delivery systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with this assessment. There are considerable advantages to having a personal library of physical books, and there are big disadvantages to taking your books in electronic format.

Physical books possess the many advantages of immediacy. One can display them and quickly glance through the whole collection. One can take notes in them, mark pages, stack them, pass them to others, and so forth. Collections of books are also physical representations of the reading a person has done. I often find that, when I first find myself in someone’s house, flat, or bedroom, their collection of books is the first thing I scrutinize. There is a reason why the personal libraries of intellectuals and political leaders are objects of interest, and I don’t think they would retain the same importance if they consisted of a bunch of PDF or text files.

Electronic books have the same disadvantages as other electronic media: you can’t be confident that they will be intact and accessible decades from now. Furthermore, they are often hobbled with digital rights management (DRM), which means you can never be sure that you can use them on future devices, or in various ways you might wish to. A library stored on a small device may be easier to transport, but it is a lot less trustworthy, durable, and reliable than one that you need to cart around in a heavy collection of boxes.

Electronic books can certainly complement physical ones. It would, for instance, be very valuable to be able to search electronic copies of books you own. A custom search engine, containing all the books in one’s library and that one has borrowed, would be excellent for tracking down particular passages or conducting general research. Partly for these synergistic reasons, and partly for the reasons listed above, I don’t think physical books are ever likely to become rare.

I do see much more promise for electronic periodicals. Hardly anybody wants to keep physical copies of their newspaper or magazine subscriptions on hand: especially when they are available in an easily searchable form online. If I got a Kindle, it would be for the wireless newspaper and Wikipedia access, not for the $10 book downloads.

Nuclear paper published

The February issue of the St. Antony’s International Review contains my article: “Climate Change, Energy Security, and Nuclear Power.” The article is meant to be an introduction to some of the important issues surrounding nuclear power, energy security, and climate change. It remains an issue that I am agnostic about. It may be that nuclear fission is an important transition technology, useful to smooth the transition to a low-carbon global economy. It may also be that it is a subsidized, dangerous boondoggle and a distraction from superior options.

The full text is available here (PDF). Comments would be appreciated.

Cool Tools on The Deniers

I was disappointed by a recent entry in the Cool Tools blog – a place that normally highlights useful stuff like little tripods. Their post on the 16th, which got re-posted on Boing Boing, was about Lawrence Solomon’s book: The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud – And those who are too fearful to do so. The post argued that since science is advanced by those who question current beliefs, we should encourage those who question the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

It is regrettable that the mistaken impression endures that the key tenets of climatic science are still disputed by the scientific community as a whole. Greenhouse gasses unambiguously cause warming, and humanity is unambiguously releasing those gasses. While we certainly need critical thinking to advance climatic science (there is much left to learn about feedbacks and the internal dynamics of the climate system) the kind of people who deny the existence or seriousness of climate change are not engaged usefully with the scientific discussion. In most cases, they tell stories that contradict one another (it’s not happening, it’s not caused by greenhouse gasses, it is likely to be beneficial, it is all China’s fault, etc). In most cases, I also don’t think they are genuine in their approach: they are united by the desire to avoid government regulation of greenhouse gasses, not by a substantive disagreement about what is happening in the world.

Given the strength of entrenched interests opposed to climate change regulation, people willing to add confusion to the debate will always be able to find financial support. That is, at least, until society as a whole finally appreciates that their arguments are self-serving and wrong.