Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
“I’d rather fight 100 structure fires than a wildfire. With a structure fire you know where your flames are, but in the woods it can move anywhere; it can come right up behind you.”*…
The devastation in the Los Angeles area is just the latest reminder that wildfires are a massive problem that continues to grow. Caleb X. Cunningham, Grant J. Williamson, and David M. J. S. Bowman put the threat into alarming perspective…
Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters…
An unlocked article from Nature Ecology & Evolution: “Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on earth.”
Looking forward: “Five Climate Realism Insights on California’s Wildfires.”
Apposite: “Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance,” from the Congressional Budget Office.
And very practically: “Wildfire Prep.”
* Tom Watson
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As we contemplate conflagration, we might recall that on this date in 1949, after two days in which a few flakes fell, Los Angeles “enjoyed” a real snow fall (the first that anyone can recall).
“Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: ‘progress’ unguided by humanism is not progress”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: from Stewart Hicks, a story of unintended consequences…
How did a humble piece of metal quietly reshape the American suburbs—and with them, our expectations for modern homes? This video explores the history and impact of the gang-nail plate, a simple yet revolutionary invention that transformed residential construction and accelerated suburban growth.
Originally devised to combat hurricane damage in places like mid-century Miami, the gang-nail plate allowed builders to quickly and securely connect multiple pieces of lumber at virtually any angle. By enabling the mass production of roof trusses in off-site factories, it led to stronger, cheaper, and more efficient construction. This efficiency opened the door to spacious open floor plans, complex rooflines, cathedral ceilings, and the sprawling McMansion aesthetic, all of which have come to define much of American suburban architecture.
Yet, the influence of this unassuming invention isn’t entirely positive. While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another…
Via Jason Kottke, who observes…
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago?…
“The Invention That Accidentally Made McMansions”
* Steven Pinker
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As we practice restraint, we might spare a thought for Canvass White; he died on this date in 1834. An engineer and inventor, he worked as head assistant to chief engineer Benjamin Wright in the construction of the Erie Canal. Needy of a hydraulic cement to serve as mortar between the stones used to create the Canal’s locks, and unable to afford to import it from England, White developed and patented a locally-sourced waterproof cement– Rosendale cement— which was used to build the Erie Canal then host of major works in the US including the Delaware and Hudson Canal and Brooklyn Bridge. As Bill Bryson wrote (in At Home) “the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly, he helped make America.”
“The last act is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason”*…
Climate change is wreaking an increasing amount of havoc in the U.S. and around the world. Many are worried that the political turn to right in so much of the world will aggravate the situation. But Nathan Gardels suggests that, while the current political temper is out of sync with the planetary imperative, it may still present a path forward.
He begins by recounting his Berggruen Institute colleague Nils Gilman‘s call for a planetary response, then …
… [In sum] What is needed, says Gilman, “is a radical rethink of the very architecture of planetary governance in light of this condition of planetarity.” Or, as I put it… what is now called for is not the old “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nation-states against each other but a “Gaiapolitik” that aims at securing a livable biosphere for all.As logically compelling as this case may be, the paradigm shift underway is going in the opposite direction. Instead of the global interconnectivity forged in recent decades maturing into a planetary perspective, it is breaking up into a renewed nationalism more emphatic than before the advent of globalization.
In short… the present political temper across the world is out of sync with the planetary imperative.
All of this makes the politics of what can be called “planetary realism” a vexing endeavor. It entails both a recognition of the interdependence of the planetary condition as well as a realistic grasp of what it will take to navigate through what remains a world of nation-states.
This is where such alternative notions as decision-division allocated among appropriate scales of governance, sub-national as well as non-state networks of the willing, and a “partnership of rivals” come in.
For example, when President-elect Donald Trump formally pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord during his last administration, then-California Governor Jerry Brown intensified the state’s cooperation with China’s provinces on de-carbonization strategies, including efforts, among others, to align the metrics of their carbon-trading markets so they could one day be integrated with each other. The present governor, Gavin Newsom, also visited China last year to meet President Xi Jinping to enhance and deepen that collaboration even as U.S.-China relations worsened at the national level.
Acting as a new breed of subnational statesmen, both Brown and Newsom have understood that while the U.S. and China may well survive the decoupling of their economies from each other, the world will not survive the decoupling of climate cooperation between the two largest carbon emitters on the planet. “Divorce is not an option,” Newsom declared in Beijing last year.
Despite all other tensions between these two incommensurate political systems, what Newsom calls the “fundamental and foundational” climate summons must bind the two together in partnership despite rivalry in other realms. This climate cooperation embodies the idea of “a partnership of rivals.”
California is just one case among many where trans-localism can circumnavigate geopolitics. We don’t have to wait for the nation-state as the cumulative causation of local, regional and non-state actors can move the needle. One saving grace of the climate challenge is that, as a distributed reality, it can be addressed in a distributed way.
While climate action does not have to wait for the nation-state, the capacity of nation-states to mobilize domestic populations and resources to shape outcomes remains decisive for crossing the threshold of effective mitigation.
Here, something new is emerging — “green nationalism” — that, in essence, does the right thing for other reasons. Or, to put it another way, it paradoxically advances the planetary agenda on nationalist grounds.
Industrial policies designed to make the green energy transition across America, Europe and China are all competing to protect and promote national self-interest vis-a-vis each other rather than collaborating as a species facing a common threat. Subsidies here are put in place to counter subsidies there. Tariffs or outright bans are blocking the spread of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and critical supply-chain minerals across borders. All these policies are aimed at building homegrown industries of the future.
Recently, Italy’s right-leaning prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, put a new twist on the issue. She argues that her country must implement serious climate policies as a key way to keep migrants from the Global South trekking north as climate refugees.
At the COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan, Viktor Orbán, declared Hungary was positioning itself to become “a significant player in electric vehicle development and electricity storage” as a basis for bolstering and sustaining national strength in the fiercely competitive times ahead. Unlike other Western nations, the pugnacious autocrat intends to do so through collaboration with his Chinese friends to leverage their prowess in green-tech development.
It is entirely conceivable that Elon Musk can sell the climate-denier-in-chief on the need for a robust EV industry and infrastructure in the U.S. as the best way to stay ahead of China and, for the same reason, Big Tech can sell him on a revival of non-fossil fuel nuclear energy to power its data centers as part and parcel of national security.
On the face of it, all this may seem a fatal fragmentation. But there may be another way we are compelled to look at it. We have the legitimacy framework we have — the nation-state — not the one we wish we had.
The hard truth seems to be that competitive green nationalism in the realpolitik mold possesses the kind of political legitimacy required for effective action that would take Gaiapolitik generations to achieve at the planetary level.
As the climate clock is ticking, green nationalism is beginning to appear as the most politically organic way to move forward as fast as possible at this historic juncture. In tandem with subnational and non-state networks, it in some ways manifests the very kind of distributed action that decision-division according to scale envisions. Though each may be going it alone, all are going in the same direction.
That is not an endorsement, but simply a recognition of the best we can probably hope for in the intermediate term.
Making lemonade from the lemons we have: “Green Nationalism,” from @noemamag.com @nilsgilman.bsky.social.
* T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
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As we search for silver linings, we might recall that it was on this date in 2021 that a rare and record-breaking derecho and tornado outbreak caused widespread damage that was focused across Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. There were many reports of hurricane-force thunderstorm wind gusts and more than 50 tornadoes causing widespread damage to homes, vehicles, businesses and infrastructure (totaling roughly $2 Billion). This was the first December derecho on record to occur within the United States. This event also produced the first December tornado on record in Minnesota since 1950, with 17 tornadoes reported across southeast Minnesota.
(Your correspondent will note that yesterday, December 14, San Francisco experienced its first tornado warning in recorded history.)
“It’s peculiar. It’s special. There’s very little of it, but it has this pivotal role in the universe.”*…
One of the oldest, scarcest elements in the universe has given us treatments for mental illness, ovenproof casserole dishes, and electric cars. Increasingly, our response to climate change seems to depend on it. But how much do we really know about lithium? Jacob Baynham explains…
The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously. Elementary particles like quarks, photons and electrons were smashing into each other with such violence that no other matter could exist. The primordial cosmos was a white-hot smoothie in a blender.
One second after the Big Bang, the expanding universe was 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Quarks and gluons had congealed to make the first protons and neutrons, which collided over the course of a few minutes and stuck in different configurations, forming the nuclei of the first three elements: two gases and one light metal. For the next 100 million years or so, these would be the only elements in the vast, unblemished fabric of space before the first stars ignited like furnaces in the dark to forge all other matter.
Almost 14 billion years later, on the third rocky planet orbiting a young star in a distal arm of a spiral galaxy, intelligent lifeforms would give names to those first three elements. The two gases: hydrogen and helium. The metal: lithium.
This is the story of that metal, a powerful, promising and somehow still mysterious element on which those intelligent lifeforms — still alone in the universe, as far as they know — have pinned their hopes for survival on a planet warmed by their excesses…
[Baynham tells the story of this remarkable element, the development of it many uses (in psychopharmacology, in materials science, and of course in electronics– especially batteries), the rigors of extracting it for those purposes, and the challenges that its scarcity– and its potency– present…]
… Long before cell phones and climate anxiety and the Tesla Model Y, long before dinosaurs and the first creatures that climbed out of the ocean to walk on land, long before the Earth formed from swirling masses of cosmic matter heavy enough to coalesce, back, way back, to the infant universe, to the dawn of matter itself, there were just three types of atoms — three elements in the blank canvas of space. One of them was lithium. It was light, fragile and extremely reactive, its one outer electron tenuously held in place.
Everything we have done with lithium, all its wondrous applications in energy, industry and psychiatry, somehow hinges on this basic structure, a sort of magic around which we’re increasingly engineering our future. Lightness is usually associated with abundance on the periodic table — almost 99% of the mass of the universe is just the lightest two elements. Lithium, however, is the third lightest element and still mysteriously scarce…
That most elemental of elements: “The Secret, Magical Life of Lithium,” from @JacobBaynham in @noemamag.com.
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As we muse on materials, we might send densely-packed birthday greetings to Philip W. Anderson; he was born on this date in 1923. A theoretical physicist, he shared (with John H. Van Vleck and Sir Nevill F. Mott) the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on semiconductors, superconductivity, and magnetism. Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking including a paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. He was a pioneer in the field that he named: condensed matter physics, which has found applications in semiconductor and laserr technology, magnetic storage, liquid crystals, optical fibers, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and biomedicine.
“Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides”*…
Regular readers will have deduced that I am something of a techno-optimist. While I worry that human misapplication (exploitation) of new technologies could create new dangers and/or further concentrate wealth and power in too few hands, I believe that emerging tech could– should– help humanity deal with many of its gravest challenges, certainly including climate change. At the same time, I am disposed to thinking about large issues/problems systemically.
Rianne Riemens shares neither of my enthusiasms; she sounds a critical note on techno-optimism, systems thinking– and more specifically, on the application of the latter to the former…
Today, American tech actors express optimistic ideas about how to fix the Earth and halt climate change. Such “green” initiatives have in common that they capture the world in systems and propose large systemic, and mostly technological, solutions. Because of their reliance on techno-fixes, representatives of Silicon Valley express an ideology of ecomodernism, which believes that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline. In this article, I show how “whole-systems thinking” has become a key discursive element in today’s ecomodernist discourses. This discourse has developed from the 1960s onwards – inspired by cybernetic, ecological and computational theories – within the tech culture of California. This paper discusses three key periods in this development, highlighting key publications: the Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the cyberspace manifestoes of the mid 1990s. These periods are key to understand how techno-fixes became a popular answer to the climate crisis, eventually leading to a vision of the world as an ecosystem that can be easily controlled and manipulated, and of technological innovation as harmless and beneficial. I argue that “whole-systems” thinking offers a naive and misleading narrative about the development of the climate crisis, that offers a hopeful yet unrealistic perspective for a future threatened by climate change, built on a misconception of Earth as a datafied planet.
In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Citation2023) venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argues why we should all be techno-optimists, especially if we are worried about the future impact of the climate crisis. According to Andreessen, promoting unlimited technological progress is the only option: “there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment”. If we generate unlimited clean energy, we can improve the natural environment, whereas a “technologically stagnant society ruins it” (Andreessen, Citation2023). This is possible, he writes, because technologies enable processes of dematerialization and will eventually lead to material abundance. And, “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system” (Andreessen, Citation2023). The manifesto thus conceptualizes technology as immaterial and the capitalist economy as an evolutionary system: it presents techno-fixes as a harmless form of environmental action, and economic growth as an inevitable process that political powers should not interfere with.
The “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is an example of a form of techno-optimism that places full trust in the potential of capitalist tech companies to help humanity “innovate” its way out of a climate crisis. Andreessen (Citation2023) cites historical figures including Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, Douglas Engelbart and Kevin Kelly as the inspiration for his manifesto, showing that the work of these figures and their communities is being remixed and reappropriated into the future visions of contemporary techno-optimists. In this article, I analyse how the belief in the environmental potential of techno-fixes is engrained in the ideology and history of “Silicon Valley” and is discursively constructed through a language of “whole-systems thinking”. I use the concept of whole-systems thinking as a lens to study how simplified notions taken from whole-systems theory and cybernetics played and still play a key role in techno-environmental discourse in the post-war era in the United States. I zoom in on three key events that help explain the origins and evolution of popular whole-systems thinking: the Whole Earth Catalog community led by Stewart Brand in the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome in the 1970s and the cyberlibertarian community in the 1990s. I will show how a new language emerged that used simplified notions of systems-thinking to promote the idea that technology would help understand, manage and save a planet in peril.
Through a discourse analysis of primary sources and literature review I present a critical reading of these events in the light of today’s techno-optimistic environmental discourse. My corpus exists of a number of primary sources, including the aforementioned “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023), Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., Citation1972), editions of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996), texts by Kevin Kelly (Citation1998) and Stewart Brand (Citation2009) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., Citation2015). I have discursively analysed these sources for their discussion of systems thinking as well as environmental concerns. By analysing how whole-systems thinking became a popular way of addressing environmental issues, I aim to provide a “post-war genealogy” (Pedwell Citation2022) of the term and critique today’s promises about how tech can save the climate. As Johnston (Citation2020) has argued, tracing the development of a cultural perception of trust in techno-fixes reveals a complex and multi-sided history. I claim that the environmental dimension of techno-optimistic discourses requires a critical reconsideration of the ideological underpinnings of Silicon Valley, described as the “Californian Ideology” by Barbrook and Cameron (Citation1996). I will demonstrate how ecomodernism, including its belief that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline, allows us to better understand, and critique, the environmental ideology of Silicon Valley.
I will first expand on contemporary ecomodernism and present my thesis that “decoupling” nature from culture has come to underlie whole-systems thinking in contemporary techno-optimistic discourse. In the following three sections, I highlight a few historical moments to demonstrate the development of the cultural perception of techno-fixes, specifically as a means of managing the environment. I show how whole-systems thinking became popularized by the Whole Earth community, got incorporated in environmental debates through the Limits to Growth report and is reflected in cyberutopian dreams about immaterial societies. Building on my necessarily brief history, I argue that techno-fixes can be strategically presented as ideal solutions if the world and environment are imagined as simple systems and technology as immaterial and harmless. Finally, I return to contemporary US tech culture and argue that it is shaped by, and co-shapes, the ideology of ecomodernism in which nature and culture are decoupled. I conclude that this worldview expresses itself today in corporate visions, resulting in a false hope about how to innovate our way out of the climate crisis…
Eminently worth reading in full (if in the end, as for me, less as a wholesale rejection of techno-optimism and systems thinking than as a cautionary counterweight): “Fixing the earth: whole-systems thinking in Silicon Valley’s environmental ideology,” from @WeAreTandF.
(image above: source)
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As we tangle with tech, we might pause to remember a man who bridged our understanding of the systems of the world from one paradigm to another: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS; he died in this date in 1944. An astrophysicist, mathematician, and philosopher of science known for his work on the motion, distribution, evolution and structure of stars, Eddington is probably best remembered for his relationship to Einstein: he was, via a series of widely-published articles, the primary “explainer” of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the English-speaking world; and he was, in 1919, the leader of the experimental team that used observations of a solar eclipse to confirm the theory.
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