Arctic action
I need to explain further my call for geoengineering in the Arctic by 2013 (newscientist.com/article/dn21275), and why it is not premature, as some suggest.
In October, I organised a workshop to tackle the Arctic methane issue, inviting leading experts on various subjects. The majority became convinced that we had a global emergency on our hands, and geoengineering had to be part of the solution. Thus was formed the , which I chair.
Even if geoengineering is implemented, it may be impossible to cool the region. Once the Arctic Ocean is nearly free of sea ice at the end of summer, all ice that forms in the winter will be young ice and will easily melt again.
We must try our hardest not to get to this point, after which the Arctic will warm faster than ever from the absorption of sunlight in open water. This is liable to thaw the subsea permafrost that holds vast stores of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the continental shelf regions studied by Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov ().
Releasing a small percentage of this methane into the atmosphere could cause sufficient warming to trigger further release and runaway warming, akin to what is thought to have happened in the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum extinction event 55 million years ago.
Logistics mean the earliest feasible start for geoengineering would be spring 2013, which is why I am urging governments to back an emergency plan with that target date. It is common sense to do our utmost to avoid reaching the point of no return.
Stormy times
Perhaps one day we will have the tools to forecast how the economy will behave, just as we forecast the weather today, as Andy Haldane suggests (10 December, p 28). But however good such a technology may become, there is a fundamental difference between forecasting the weather and forecasting the economy.
Knowing what the weather will be has no effect on the weather we actually get. An “economy forecast”, on the other hand, would change the behaviour of the public, businesses and government, which might render the forecast invalid or make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Giving a credible warning that a particular bank should be avoided because it might soon go bust, for example, would likely make it go bust.
Cyber gaps
Regarding Paul Marks’s look at cybersecurity at infrastructure sites such as power plants and water companies (3 December, p 25), if every computer uses the same operating system and instruction set then there is little chance of them being secure. This is like everyone having the same door key and trying to be secure by hiding the keyhole.
If organisations such as the armed forces and multinational companies want computer security then all they have to do is write their own operating systems. Such a system would only have to support the features that they require and not supply the vast gaps through which hackers gain access.
They could even go a little further and write their own micro code, producing their own instruction set. Then if anyone were able to break into such a system they would not know how to do anything. It would appear that this computer security problem is really one of the victims’ own making.
Grammar paradox
David Robson’s article suggests English is an easy language to learn because it has so few rules (10 December, p 34). In fact, non-native speakers have enormous problems learning to speak English correctly – because we cannot teach our language using rules.
English is a language that has adopted not just words from other tongues, we have absorbed many different grammatical forms. Such differences are so difficult to define that we don’t develop rules as such, we just hope our children and the rest of the world learn by example.
The editor writes:
• The research concerned the morphology of a language’s words – whether the endings of verbs, for example, change with different tenses. There is no doubt that English has a less complicated morphology than most other Germanic languages (and, in fact, most of the world’s other languages). But it does contain other complexities that challenge those learning it as a second language.
Hand it to you
I was surprised that length of the lifeline in the palm of your hand was not mentioned in your look at predicting longevity (10 December, p 46). In , P. G. Newrick, E. Affie and R. J. Corrall of the Department of Medicine, Bristol Royal Infirmary, established “a highly significant association between the two” after controlling for hand size in a study carried out at autopsy.
The editor writes:
• We understand this paper was for an edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The data on which the study was based were from real measurements of cadavers, but it is perhaps best interpreted as a demonstration of how apparent associations seen in data can lead to spurious conclusions.
Hedy stuff
So Hedy Lamarr invented spread spectrum frequency-hopping radio systems (3 December, p 54). Perhaps you could try to find out if any latter-day screen sirens are working on cutting-edge inventions. Would Scarlett Johansson be trying to work out how neutrinos travel faster than photons, or is Angelina Jolie working on the hard problem of consciousness? It is in the public interest that we be told.
Coral chaos
Charles Sheppard’s letter on erosion and flooding in the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean (10 December, p 33) highlights the need for good science in these low-lying, remote coral atolls. Hopefully the paper I co-authored in , which sparked the story is a contribution to that goal.
The work is not solely about satellite sea level. It examines sea level from tide gauges and satellites, vertical land movement, ocean modelling, storms, wind and waves, tsunamis, and the occurrence of extreme events in order to evaluate the dangers faced. We conclude that over the past few decades the Chagos Islands have been a relatively stable physical environment, with no evidence of any increases in those factors which might contribute to erosion and flooding.
Low-lying coral atolls are highly dynamic environments. They are largely the product of the very forces that erode and reform them – storms and extreme high tides. Indeed, zoologist Gilbert Bourne described these processes on Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos archipelago, over 130 years ago.
There is an urgent need for an expanded science programme to investigate the issues across a wide range of disciplines, including factors such as these, rather than relying on anecdotal reports. Ironically, the modest amount of UK government funding that had been available in the past from the Overseas Territories Environment Programme has now evaporated, despite the fact that the Chagos is a Marine Protected Area of great importance to the Indian Ocean.
Lucky me
Thank you for the excellent article “The many faces of the multiverse” (26 November, p 42). It helped me to identify what lies behind my previous reluctance to subscribe to the multiverse hypothesis. I hadn’t realised, but it is a feeling of guilt for having survived several incidents on the roads, and other potentially harmful situations. Because, of course, admitting to the existence of the multiverse implicitly condemns to death huge numbers of parallel versions of me. Your illustration on page 46 only serves to bring this home. Each of us, in effect, is a Schrödinger’s cat.
Mutual benefit
McGregor Cambell’s interesting article on citizen banking exposed some horrors of the US banking system and pitfalls of P2P lending (10 December, p 38). I was puzzled that he did not mention mutualised building societies, which have existed in the UK for more than a century.
They provide relative security and exist for the benefit of just savers and borrowers, not shareholders. Is this something else, along with the National Health Service, that Americans could do well to copy from us?
Salt sensitivity
The relationship between cardiovascular disease and a salty diet is well known to the medical profession (3 December, p 46), but, as you briefly mention, it is equally well known, at least in regard to blood pressure, that some people are salt sensitive and some are not. It is not surprising therefore that many of the studies quoted produced equivocal results. Large investigations of random groups will not necessarily produce worthwhile findings if several factors are present.
Although applauding cardiologist Francesco Cappuccio’s approach of looking at those with evidence of disease, I think there are fascinating opportunities to study groups who have apparent risk factors but do not show signs of the illness normally associated with them.
Pound of flesh
The referenced in Mario Herrero’s letter on livestock and greenhouse gases (3 December, p 39), show that foods sourced from animals in their entirety, including fish, only supply 17 per cent of global food calories, with meat providing less than 8 per cent.
So it is worth repeating that livestock is responsible for the lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture while providing the minnow’s share of the food. Cattle meat in particular is responsible for a large part of all enteric-fermentation methane, but it provides just 1.4 per cent of global food calories. Again, a large part of this meat goes to those countries that have the most obesity problems.