As environmental concerns grow—rapid deforestation, increasing carbon-dioxide emissions, habitat destruction, threats to critical areas of biodiversity—insights from affective science will become more and more important. The time has come for social scientists to join the ranks of engineers, natural scientists, and policymakers seeking to preserve and enhance environmental well-being.
Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
Milford H. Wolpoff
Paleoanthropologist; professor of anthropology, adjunct associate research scientist, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan; author, Race and Human Evolution
The human species has successfully dealt with twenty or more distinct episodes of global warming, but in circumstances that no longer exist.
There is no real difficulty in identifying the most important news of 2015. Global warming is the news that will remain news for the foreseeable future, because our world will continue to warm at a rate never before seen, without (at least at the moment) a foreseeable end. Paleoanthropology is a comparative science, and comparing most past episodes of global warming to the global warming in today’s news leads me to question whether (and how) we may survive this one. And my doubts are not solely because of a point the news also recognizes: The rate of temperature change is much faster than humans have ever experienced.
Prior episodes of significant global warming within the Pleistocene (more-or-less the last 2 million years) have invariably followed cooling periods with glacial advances. During the Pleistocene, the human lineage successfully adapted to changing environments (including climate) and evolved to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the changes, even as Homo populations reacted to the constraints those changes created, evolving diverse adaptations to the different climates and ecological circumstances they encountered. Improvements in communication skills and planning depth, retention of deep history with tales, poems, and song, and other aspects of cultural behavior dispersed throughout humanity.
At any particular time, the Pleistocene world population was quite small: an estimated 1 to 2 million during all but the most recent episodes of cooling and warming cycles, half or more living in Africa. Scarce on the ground, with little ecological impact, and with vast habitable areas unoccupied by human groups, the human reactions to periods of global warming often were simply population migration. These had important consequences for human evolution, because our particular brand of evolutionary change—the unique human evolutionary pattern—began with the initial and ongoing geographic dispersals of human populations. In many mammalian species, significant range expansion such as the human one resulted in geographic isolation for many groups and the formation of subspecies and ultimately of species. In humans, these processes were mitigated by continuing population interconnections created by gene flow, in some cases the result of population movements and in others because expanding human populations grew to encounter each other. The unique human evolutionary pattern was created as adaptive genes and behaviors, under selection, spread throughout the human range. Genetic changes adaptive for the entire human species were able to disperse throughout it, no matter how varied individual populations may have become, because population contacts allowed it and natural selection promoted it.
But this long-lasting pattern has been disrupted as humans gained control of their food resources and began the accelerated increase in numbers so evident today. This is recent—so recent that a rapidly growing humanity has yet to encounter significant climate change, until now. Today’s headlines make it clear that the change we are encountering is global warming. It is not at all evident that the adaptive successes of the past will guarantee a successful reaction to the changes coming upon us today. The world is quite different. Adaptive strategies that once underlay a successful strategy for the human species may no longer be possible; a vastly larger number of humans probably precludes similar success from the same strategies, even absent the rapid rate of climate change we are encountering.
The fact is that the present is not a simple extension of the past. Conditions are radically different, and the strategies that promoted a successful balance of population variation within the human species and a successful adaptation for all populations throughout the Pleistocene may, today, create competition between human populations at a level that could make the lives of the survivors quite unpleasant.
Of course, nothing like this is inevitable, or even necessarily probable, but its possibility looms large enough to be taken seriously. We need to learn from the past without trying to repeat it.
Blue Marble 2.0
Giulio Boccaletti
Physicist, atmospheric and oceanic scientist; global managing director for water, The Nature Conservancy
The Blue Marble was the first full photograph of the Earth from space. The Apollo 17 mission took it on December 7, 1972. It was not the first photograph of the planet; by then, the first image of Earth as seen from the Moon had been widely circulated. In 1969, the lunar-landing astronauts took the famous shot of “Earthrise,” capturing the solitary fragility of our planet as it rises from darkness. But the Blue Marble was a photograph of a different sort—comprehensive in scope yet detailed in nature, giving it an unusually high density of information and a powerful evocative quality. It symbolized the beginning of the Anthropocene: During the 1970s, humankind began recognizing its role in the planetary ecosystem and wrestling with the question of its impact on a finite and vulnerable planet.
The Blue Marble shows the planet from the Mediterranean to Antarctica, with the African continent and the Arabian Peninsula in the foreground and the Indian subcontinent and the Southern Ocean as frames. It provides an integrated single view of the planet’s atmosphere in its spellbinding complexity: the intertropical convergence zone, where moist air flowing equatorward from north and south rises in a narrow band of convective plumes that give the characteristic thunderous rainy weather to the tropics; the Sahara and Kalahari deserts some 30° north and south of the equator, where that same air subsides from its poleward flow, drying out any remaining moisture as it completes the cycle of the Hadley cell, the atmospheric overturning circulation spanning the tropics. A tropical cyclone fed by the warm surface waters of the Arabian Sea is visible in the top right quadrant. There are the mid-latitude weather systems of the roaring forties over the Southern Ocean, marked by visible fronts, altocumulus, and cirrocumulus clouds. The contour of Antarctica is revealed in full view of the Sun. It is a compendium of Earth’s climate in a single shot.
Iconic geographic images can reframe how we conceive of our place on the planet. They are a recurring cultural phenomenon and a moment of synthesis revealing the preoccupations of those who produced them. While we cannot know how widespread its adoption was, the first known map of the world, the 6th-century b.c.e. “Imago Mundi” from Mesopotamia, shows the city of Babylon as it relates to the surrounding cities, the Euphrates, and the Persian Gulf, synthesizing in one image the primary elements of threat and survival of an entire civilization. The Peutinger Map, almost ten centuries later, revealed the extent of the Roman Empire in one image, providing a map organized around the great land routes that represented the strength of Roman logistics and connected the empire.
A different type of picture made headlines around the world in 2015—one that is equally representative of our preoccupation with our sustainability, and evocative of the challenges ahead.
“Tom and Jerry” went up in space on March 17, 2002. Two identical satellites formed the basis for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment—GRACE, for short. The satellites orbit the Earth sixteen times a day at an altitude of more than 500 km, sending back a map of the distribution of mass on the planet due to the variation in distribution of rocks and water. They produce this data by measuring distortions in the gravitational field caused by slight differences in the distribution. As the two satellites pass over these differences, the first is slightly accelerated or decelerated with regard
to the second. By measuring their relative distance to an astonishing level of accuracy—the satellites can detect a micron difference over 200 km—they provide an integrated, point-wise measurement of the gravitational field of the planet, a planetary CT scan of sorts. It is one of the great successes of modern geodesy that the resulting measurement can be inverted, filtered, and analyzed to reveal the complex three-dimensional structure of the Earth.
One of the crucial applications of this technology has been to diagnose groundwater storage in the great aquifers of the world. Water is of course different in density from the surrounding rock, thus leading to slight effects on the gravitational field, which GRACE can detect. Global hydrological assessments have always been hampered by the complex and local nature of the resource, making syntheses of the state of the world difficult to construct and of limited utility. When they do exist, they tend to be encyclopedic in nature, often published in ponderous volumes, listing individual rivers and nations as chapters, and based on single numbers, painstakingly inferred, compiled, or estimated from sparse measurements and models—hardly an evocative synthesis to stimulate a humanist debate on our place on the planet.
But in the almost decade and half since its launch, the long data sets offered by GRACE have provided the first integrated image of the state of groundwater use. It is an image global in scope yet local in nature—a detailed, realtime diagnostic of the planet. And GRACE has shed light on the most obscure part of the water cycle—that hidden underneath the Earth’s surface—and this is the picture that has made the news. It shows that one in three large aquifers in the world appear to be stressed, depleted by people drawing water for human use. California’s Central Valley, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indus basin share a common fate, uniting vastly different economies and societies in a planetary challenge: our persistent inability to manage finite resources.
While scientific practice will be integrated rather than dramatically changed by GRACE’s data—remote sensing still requires significant processing and integration with land-based measurements to be operationally useful—the resulting images have already started to change the narrative on sustainability. So these data will continue to be news for the coming years. Like the ancient maps and the Blue Marble, they provide a powerful explanatory visual framework for an existential concern of our time: that another finiteness of our planet consists of the water resources we all share. GRACE has shown us that, indeed, we live on a fragile blue marble—one that is drying at an alarming rate.
High-Tech Stone Age
Tor Nørretranders
Science writer; author, The Generous Man: How Helping Others Is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do
The real news is old news: We belong here on this planet; we are natives. The recent news is that we are finding ways to behave as natives by using new technologies to live in an old way, a High-Tech Stone Age. Basically, it is about returning to our old niche of energy, matter, and information by using brand new technologies. Illustrative examples are food, light, and relationships.
Food:We used to live as hunter-gatherers, foraging for a rich variety of wild plants and animals. Now, through agriculture, we have become dependent on a select few domesticated plants and animals (more than half the calories we eat come from four crops). The machinery and fossil-fuel use involved in running nature according to our will is rising steeply, soils are eroding, and monoculture allows for pests.
Returning to a foraging lifestyle will be difficult with 7 billion people on the planet. But a wide variety of technologies, from the simple to the complicated, offers new possibilities: Leading chefs rediscover forgotten resources in the wild—for instance, edible insects and little-known marine animals. Information technology makes foraging easier. Urban agriculture is on the rise. Many people turn away from the kinds of food that arose with agriculture (the starch in bread, pasta, rice, corn, and potatoes). Thus the old niche of wild foods and perennial plants is becoming relevant again, through the crafts of chefs and scientifically based techniques like fermentation. In the long run, unregulated growth of biomass (as opposed to the highly structured monocultures) may provide a higher yield of edible biomass. The Stone Age strategy is to let nature grow as it will. The high-tech hack is to post-process the available biomass into edibility for humans (select, cook, ferment, break down with enzymes, etc.).
Light:Natural light from the Sun, bonfires, and candles is thermal radiation, exhibiting a continuous spectrum. Look at it through a prism and you see a rainbow. The incandescent lightbulb is the same, since it is also thermal. But energy-saving lightbulbs and other fluorescent lights do not provide light with a continuous spectrum; they give a line spectrum, with only some of the colors of a rainbow. Thus there has been a loss of light quality and color-rendering ability in modern lighting. The incandescent bulbs have been phased out, but the replacement (energy-saving lightbulbs) gives bad light.
LEDs have the potential to solve the problem by producing light with almost continuous spectra and with a low energy use. However, present LED light for home and office use is not yet of a high enough quality in terms of color rendering. Our perception has adapted to seeing objects in the light from sources giving out a full rainbow, but LEDs are not there yet. They will get there, and the next wave of lighting technology will be better at producing a continuous spectrum. The use of quantum dots—artificial atoms—will allow the production of light that looks thermal but without the same energy waste as thermal sources. Solid-state lighting, like LED and quantum dots, can re-create the kind of light we have adapted to as hunter-gatherers, but with a small use of artificial energy.
Relationships:The flat, peer-to-peer-based network of relationships found in hunter-gatherer cultures is ideal for regulating hunting and gathering. But the advent of agriculture meant centralization, with cities, depots, kings, and control. Thus, social structure lost the dependence on bottom-up self-organization and became reliant on top-down, rule-based societies. They are good at many things, but not for keeping civil society vibrant and alive. Also, regulating common resources is sometimes difficult for the anonymous state and market. A growing emphasis on communities that govern commons—sometimes called commonities—is a result of the climate challenge. Headquarters have been disappointing in their ability to take real action, but windmills, city gardens, and the sharing economy are no longer just naïve and vain attempts; they are changing social structure. With the advent of decentralized production (3D printers, fermentation hubs, Web-based culture), the traditional globalization trend will yield to a localization trend.
Information technology will allow humans to return to a niche of decentralized, self-organized production adjusted to the local environment. To close the loop of matter flows, local regulation is essential. The real news is that new technologies and new social strategies allow us to return to a very old resource base: the decentralized solar energy and the local flow of matter and information.
It is good news.
The Dematerialization of Consumption
Rory Sutherland
Executive creative director, OgilvyOne, London; vice-chairman, Ogilvy Group, U.K.; columnist, The Spectator
Sometime early in this century, it seems, the U.K. may have reached “peak stuff.” It is a complex calculation, of course, but it seems that although the world’s oldest industrialized economy had grown throughout most of that period, its consumption of raw materials and fossil fuels had not grown in lockstep, as before, but had (save for one markedly cold winter when fuel consumption spiked) consistently declined.
Chris Goodall and a number of other commentators have documented this decoupling extensively: U.K. government data also show a reduction in material use from about 12 tons a year per person to around 9 tons from 2000 to 2013. Japan shows a similar pattern.
Some people have contested these findings, of course. (Other people believe they are true but wish that they weren’t widely known.) But there is enough evidence worldwide to show that patterns of
consumption and status-seeking do change, and that intangible goods are replacing physical ones in many domains. Not only are there the obvious, comparatively trivial examples—music and film downloads, say, have replaced CDs and DVDs—but car mileage seems to have peaked, as have car purchases. Astoundingly to anyone who has seen American Graffiti, half of U.S. eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.
There seem to be multiple forces at work, all aligned toward a lower emphasis on material consumption. One of them may be simple satiety—it is difficult to see the benefits of not owning a car until you have owned one for a few years; it is only by traveling long-haul a few times that you may discover that your favorite place to spend your free time is a lake sixty miles from home. Now that jet travel is affordable for most people, it is perfectly acceptable (in fact rather an ornament) in wealthy British circles to take your main holiday in Britain.
Hipsterization of various categories (beer, gin, coffee, etc.) is also evidence of a complementary trend—people seeking value and status in increasingly hair-splitting distinctions between basic goods rather than spending discretionary income on greater quantities of such goods, or on non-essential purchases.
The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has ingeniously attributed this change in behavior to the creation of online social media, which change the whole nature of status-signaling—to one in which sharing experiences may have gained signaling power at the expense of possessions.
More and more economic value is being divorced from the physical attributes of a thing and resides instead in intangibles. London’s most expensive street consists of terraces of houses which most wealthy Victorians would have found laughably small. It is the fashionable address that gives them their value, and living in the center of a city is now deemed more fashionable than living in suburbia.
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