Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away”*…
As Christine Ro explains, this timeless wisdom may be about to invert: Revisiting typography…
A typical paperback book accounts for around 1kg of carbon dioxide, according to sustainability expert Mike Berners-Lee.
Perhaps that does not sound like much. But in the US alone, where 767 million paperback books were sold in 2023, this is equivalent to the electricity use of more than 150,000 homes for a year.
Forest loss, paper production and printing, and transport of books are generally the largest contributors to the carbon emissions of printed books.
So, using less wood fibre, and shipping lighter loads, are important ways to reduce the emissions of print books (as well as the costs of producing them).
One simple method is reducing the thickness of the paper. Some publishers are turning to subtly thinner paper. There are limits to this: the most lightweight paper may be less durable. And for certain types of books, including art books, there’s a preference for heavier paper.
Yet between these extremes, most readers are unlikely to notice the difference.
Nor would most readers notice the design tweaks that allow more text to fit onto each page – as long as designers ensure that the text remains easy to read.
The publisher HarperCollins has experimented with compact typefaces that require less ink and paper. This has resulted in savings of hundreds of millions of pages.
A leader in this field is Sustainable Typesetting, a project of the design and typesetting company 2K/DENMARK. One of the company’s focus areas is complex typesetting for long texts, including Bibles.
Andreas Stobberup, project lead at 2K/DENMARK, says that Sustainable Typesetting can achieve page count reductions of up to 50%, although he recommends less dramatic changes for novels.
While it’s common to simply increase the point size to make text easier to read, Mr Stobberup says that readability is actually determined by x-height. The x-height is the height of most lowercase letters in the Latin alphabet, and makes up nearly all of the printed marks on a page.
The x-height can be increased without enlarging all of the text. For many designers, increasing the x-height is key to increasing legibility…
Reducing point size is not always the optimal way to reduce the physical size of a book, Mr Stobberup emphasises.
Perhaps some lessons can be drawn from large print books, which are aimed at older readers or those with visual impairments.
They feature larger point sizes, which can lead to bigger books.
But other design features of large print books include more blocked letters and, if images are involved, more attention to the contrast between the foreground and the background.
“It’s a totally different typeface,” says Greg Stilson, head of global technology innovation for the American Printing House for the Blind.
Mr Stobberup concedes that incorporating such design in regular books “will not look as aesthetic”.
But he believes that most readers will not care about the typeface used for the bulk of the book. Meanwhile, more artistic fonts could be used on places like book covers.
And the savings might well justify the change – according to Mr Stobberup, a 20% reduction in pages would be equivalent to a roughly 20% reduction in carbon emissions.
However, the saving depends on many factors, including the size of the print run, the type of energy used for printing, the transport distances, and even the ink used.
Then there’s the word count: a textbook or Bible can achieve more drastic reductions in weight than a book of poetry.
Mr Stobberup is keenly aware of the financial pressures affecting the publishing industry.
“We need to make sustainability cheaper,” he says. “We simply need to show that we don’t think it’s a compromise. We think it’s a better product.”
David Miller is the president and publisher of Island Press, a small non-profit publisher of environment-themed nonfiction.
Printing costs have soared in the last few years, he says. The Covid-19 pandemic led to supply chain issues.
Meanwhile, paper manufacturers have been switching over to making cardboard due to the boom in the delivery businesses.
This has driven up the expense of producing books. In some cases Island Press has simply had to absorb the extra costs itself rather than passing them onto consumers, according to Mr Miller.
Initially he wasn’t sure about Sustainable Typesetting. But after seeing that a 19% reduction in pages could lead to at least a 10% cost savings, while readability actually improved, Mr Miller has become a fan.
Sustainable Typesetting has been applied to two Island Press books published so far. And he’s interested in going even further than a 19% trimming.
Mr Miller calls this a technology that is “only starting to poke its nose out behind the door” within different segments of the publishing industry.
“It’s a sort of revolution in thinking about what typography can be and how it can be put to use in a very productive way.”…
Using design to address climate change, one page at a time: “Publishers try skinnier books to save money and emissions,” from @BBC.
* Tom Waits
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As we conserve, we might note that today is the annual celebration of a set of books that are strong candidates for this sort of type redesign: it is Hobbit Day, a reference to its being the birthday of the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, two characters in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s popular set of books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the books’ lore, Bilbo was born in the year of 2890 and Frodo in the year of 2968 in the Third Age (in Shire-Reckoning). Tolkien Week is the week containing Hobbit Day.
“We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it”*…
… So what we do and how we do it matters. Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain warn that one of the most popular current approaches is unfair and could be a dead end…
Carbon offsetting injects market logic into thin air. It demands that certain activities become measured and standardized, reduced to the single dimension of the carbon dioxide molecule. The goal is fungibility—to assert equivalence between activities by people or environments so that emissions created over here can be traded and (theoretically) compensated for by actions removing or reducing carbon over there. The means is, of course, commodification. Offsets privatize planetary metabolism.
Offsetting is the logic behind “net zero.” “Think about it like a bath,” suggests National Grid. “The amount of water in the bath depends on both the input from the taps and the output via the plughole. To keep the amount of water in the bath at the same level, you need to make sure that the input and output are balanced.” Or, as McKinsey & Company puts it: “Net zero is an ideal state where the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the earth’s atmosphere is balanced by the amount of greenhouse gasses removed.”
Policymakers and corporations around the world have embraced the concept of net zero as a pathway to address the climate crisis. Nation states, corporations, public institutions, and even art exhibitions purchase offsets as financial assets (called carbon credits) in an attempt to compensate for their emissions and reach a state of carbon neutrality. Traded as financial commodities on carbon markets, offsets are supposed to represent either carbon dioxide reductions—via avoided emissions that would have otherwise happened in a business-as-usual scenario—or carbon dioxide removals—where some of the carbon already hanging about in the atmosphere is drawn down. Offsetting projects range from tree planting and conservation to changes in energy infrastructures, jet engine cleaning schemes, and programs for reducing methane emissions from cows. The carbon fluxes produced by offsetting projects are measured, quantified, priced, abstracted, and finally sold via carbon registries to emitters looking to claim a lower carbon footprint. What is counted as an offsetting project, however, and what is not, is left to the discretion of these registries.
The assumption underpinning offsets is that paying to compensate for emissions creates a powerful economic incentive for emissions reductions. In practice, however, it risks doing exactly the opposite. The logic of offsetting suggests that carbon intensive activities can continue as long as someone else, somewhere else, cleans up the mess…
Lavigne and Brain recount the history of the offset and explore it in practice, exposing its failings; they then turn to possible remediation…
… To foster an appreciation for some of these oversights—what current carbon markets are not counting—we have built a more inclusive carbon registry. We have developed new methodologies for how political actions that contribute to a program of carbon savings and radical change can be counted, measured, and transformed into offsets. What if we were to take the proposal of net zero seriously and apply carbon accounting to a wider range of human activities?
Our first carbon offsetting methodology, titled “Industrial Sabotage as Temporary Carbon Storage,” enables actions by groups like Blockade Australia, Water Protectors, and the Tyre Extinguishers to be analyzed with a carbon counting technique that was originally developed by the forestry industry. Called “temporary carbon storage,” this method provides a way of calculating the carbon benefit of delaying the release of emissions, like the harvest of a plantation forest. Although this approach has never before been used to calculate the benefits of production delays caused by activists who block fossil fuel infrastructures from producing emissions, we have rigorously undertaken this work, holding ourselves to the same standards as the offsetting industry. A marketplace for the resultant carbon credits is under development, where all proceeds will be donated back to support the groups responsible for these actions.
A second methodology further explores the carbon savings of sabotage and efforts to slow productivity. “Time Theft as Avoided Emissions” quantifies the carbon savings of immobilizing corporate executives working in the energy and extraction industries We applied this approach in a new offsetting project titled Cold Call, in which participants are invited to work in a call center and make calls to distract the oil and gas executives from their jobs for as long as possible.
To return to the words of [Australian activist] Max Curmi, sabotage reveals a system functioning exactly as it is meant to:
[The system] is actually not broken. It’s performing exactly the way it was set up … For the climate movement to actually start to engage with this in an effective way we have to acknowledge the situation that we are currently facing. It’s not a couple of bad politicians or a couple of bad corporations, it’s an entire economic and legal framework that prevents change from happening and that locks in an extraction-based economy that is fundamentally about exploiting people and the environment for as much profit as possible for the rich…
Eminently worth reading in full: “All that is Air Melts into Air,” from @sam_lavigne and @tegabrain.
Pair with: “Words Versus Words, Fire with Fire” on climate change denial (and deflection) propaganda and how to counter it.
* Barack Obama
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As we ruminate on remediation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that the term “global warming” appeared for the first time in print, with the publication of Wallace Smith Broecker’s paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in the journal Science.
Five years earlier, in 1970, Broecker, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, published a study of ocean sediment cores that revealed the Ice Age had seen rapid transitions in its Broecker argued that there was an increasingly likely scenario for this to happen: the ongoing rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide content created by fossil fuel emissions would soon begin to warm the planet, in turn warming surface waters in the ocean and melting ice into fresh water. This would reduce the waters’ density, thereby preventing cold water from sinking, altering ocean currents and effectively shutting off the conveyor belt. If that were to happen, he postulated, Europe would grow cooler as it did during the Ice Age. The more disruptive effect would come from unpredictable “on-and-off flickers” in global temperature. As Broecker put it in 1998, “the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”
Broecker built on this discovery in his 1975 paper, which hypothesized that the Ice Age’s rapid fluctuations had been caused by changes in “thermohaline circulation”: the ocean currents and wind systems that move heat from the equator up north towards the poles and transport cold water toward the equator. Broecker later named this the “Great Ocean Conveyor.” He believed that rapid changes in climate were once again possible if this conveyor belt were changed or “turned off.”…
“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”*…
… in the age in which we live: two dispatches…
First, from the realm of real estate:
Nantucket, MA, has long served as a sandy summer paradise for jet setters such as Joe Biden, Ben Stiller, Kourtney Kardashian, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others.
Take, for instance, one six-bedroom house on Red Barn Road that was listed as far back as October 2020 for $2,995,000. Four years and four price cuts later, the 3.8-acre property is now listed at $1.7 million. Even so, it is still sitting on the market after seven months.
The listing agent, John Arena of Raveis, says he has received plenty of calls about the house, which is now in foreclosure.
“People are lined up to buy it,” he insists, adding that the foreclosure has prevented him from properly showing the house.
Shelly Lockwood of the real estate advisory firm Advisors Living has a different theory on why it hasn’t sold: The very beach the house sits on is slowly eroding away.
As a result, she says, “It’s falling in the ocean.”…
“Buying in ‘Billionaires Isle’ Nantucket Is Now a Bargain: Homes Are ‘Falling Into the Ocean’“
Next, from the arena of aristocratic accessories:
Two Italian luxury giants pay just a small amount to produce handbags that retail for thousands of dollars, according to documents in a sweeping investigation of subcontractors.
Italian prosecutors in Milan investigated the LVMH subsidiary Dior’s use of third-party suppliers in recent months. Prosecutors said these companies exploited workers to pump out bags for a small fraction of their store price.
Citing documents examined by authorities, Reuters reported last month that Dior paid a supplier $57 to produce bags that retailed for about $2,780…
The relevant unit of Dior didn’t adopt “appropriate measures to check the actual working conditions or the technical capabilities of the contracting companies,” a prosecution document said, according to Reuters.
In probes through March and April, investigators found evidence that workers were sleeping in the facility so bags could be produced around the clock, Reuters reported. They also tracked electricity-consumption data, which showed work was being carried out during nights and holidays, the report said.
The subcontractors were Chinese-owned firms, prosecutors said. They said most of the workers were from China, with two living in the country illegally and another seven working without required documentation.
The probe also said safety devices on gluing and brushing machines were removed so workers could operate them faster…
The probe also extended to Giorgio Armani contractors, and the luxury company was accused of not properly overseeing its suppliers.
Armani paid contractors $99 per bag for products that sold for more than $1,900 in stores, according to documents seen by Reuters…
As Kevin Kwan observes, too often the allure of luxury is simply an escape from reality…
* Long-running television series
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As we head back to basics, we might recall that it was on this date in 2002 that a modernization of the classic Cinderella folklore, A Cinderella Story, premiered. Panned by critics, the film was a box office success, grossing $70.1 million against its $19 million budget, and inspired multiple straight-to-video films. Indeed, over the years, it has developed into a cult classic.
“Men argue. Nature acts.”*…
Further to yesterday’s post, an elegant (albeit frightening) tool from our friends at The Pudding…
Climate scientists say that we’re headed for more than a two degree rise in earth’s temperatures. But for most of us, that’s not really helpful in providing a tangible vision of our future.
Perhaps that’s because we’re more familiar with weather: the daily, short-term forecasts that make you pack an extra sweater or wear your rain boots. Climate, on the other hand, describes average weather systems over long periods of time.
150 years ago, German scientist Wladimir Köppen attempted to bridge the gap between climate and weather by using vegetation growth, average temperature, and precipitation levels to classify the world into five distinct climate zones: Arid Tropical, Temperate, Cold, and Polar…
To distinguish the differences within these categories, the five climate zones are divided into subcategories.
For example, here you can see these European temperate climates broken up into four subcategories: Temperate – Dry summer, hot summer, Temperate – Dry summer, warm summer, Temperate – No dry season, warm summer, Temperate – No dry season, hot summer.
Overall, there are 30 unique subclassifications, and together they make up the Köppen Climate Classification (KCC). The KCC helps us not only differentiate between weather systems of neighboring countries, but also brings insights into cities oceans apart that on average will have similar weather throughout the year…
A 2018 study, led by climatologist Hylke Beck, used projected data from climate models along with the current Köppen Climate Classification to give a glimpse at what our world may look and feel like in 2070.
At a zoomed out level, some of these changes are hard to notice: Temperate climates shifting north Tropical and Arid climates growing Cold climates disappearing.
But what if we were to zoom into the city level to see how these changes affect the way each city feels?
This project looks at 70 global cities, and tracks their classification from present day to 2070.
And with climate change, your city isn’t just getting hotter: it will resemble the distinctive climate of completely different places…
Here we see our 70 global cities listed in their current climate classification. [With this tool], we can transport any city into its future classification…
Bracing: “Climate Zones- how will your city feel in the future?” from @puddingviz.
See also: “Conservation Imperatives: securing the last unprotected terrestrial sites harboring irreplaceable biodiversity,” a paper from two dozen climate scientists with a plan to protect Earth’s remain biodiversity by conserving a tiny percentage of the planet’s surface: “Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years. This represents less than 0.2% of the United States’ GDP, less than 9% of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”
* Voltaire
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As we reconsider our customs, we might note that on this date last year, the Earth set a record for the hottest day every recorded… a record that lasted until the next day, Tuesday, July 4th. July 6, 2023 currently holds the record– but it is deemed likely to “fall” this summer…
“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.”*…
… and it’s likely, climate scientists Matthew Barlow and Jeffrey Basara suggest, to get more uncomfortable still…
… Although heat waves are a natural part of the climate, the severity and extent of the heat waves so far this year are not “just summer.”
A scientific assessment of the U.S. heat wave estimates that heat this severe and long-lasting was two to four times more likely to occur today because of human-caused climate change than it would have been without it. This conclusion is consistent with the rapid increase over the past several decades in the number of U.S. heat waves and their occurrence outside the peak of summer…
… Although heat waves are a natural part of the climate, the severity and extent of the heat waves so far this year are not “just summer.”
A scientific assessment of the U.S. heat wave estimates that heat this severe and long-lasting was two to four times more likely to occur today because of human-caused climate change than it would have been without it. This conclusion is consistent with the rapid increase over the past several decades in the number of U.S. heat waves and their occurrence outside the peak of summer…
At the peak of the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, when the Northeast U.S. was under thousands of feet of ice, the globally averaged temperature was only 10.8 F (6 C) cooler than now. So, it is not surprising that 2.2 F (1.2 C) of warming so far is already rapidly changing the climate.
Countries promised in 2015 as part of the Paris Agreement to keep warming well under 2 C, but current government policies around the world won’t meet those goals. Temperatures are on pace to continue rising, with the increase likely to more than double again by the end of the century.
While this summer is likely be one of the hottest on record, it is important to realize that it may also be one of the coldest summers of the future…
Read on for more on: “How climate change is heating up the weather, and what we can do about it,” from @MathewABarlow and @OUWXDoc in @ConversationUS.
See also: “The rise of the truly cruel summer,” (gift article) from @TheEconomist.
* Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister dated 18th September, 1796
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As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922, the day before his 19th birthday, that Ralph Samuelson invented water skiing. Samuelson had already mastered aquaplaning (riding on a sheet of wood while being pulled by a powerboat) but wanted a summer equivalent of snow skiing. He had unsuccessfully tried barrel staves and snow skis before succeeding with 8 foot long pine boards, the front tip of which he bent up (by boiling them in his mother’s kettle). His first successful outing, on a wide portion of the Mississippi River near Lake City, Minnesota, involved starting on an aquaplane, then stepping off onto the skis.
Samuelson didn’t patent his invention, nor was his work sufficiently publicized at the time to prevent U.S. Patent 1,559,390 for water skis from being subsequently issued, on October 27, 1925, to prolific inventor Fred Waller, who marketed his product as “Dolphin Akwa-Skees.” (Waller also invented Cinerama, which he used to publicize his skis…) Still, Samuelson, who became a turkey farmer, was a guest of honor at a water skiing 50th anniversary in 1972, and was inducted into the Water Ski Hall of Fame in 1977. His slightly-modified second pair (the first pair broke) still exists, and are on display at the Lake City Chamber of Commerce.
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