Posts by Peter Ashby
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I suppose it all depends on how much you also spend on palliative care then because people in pain and their relatives tend to shout very loudly and get political attention whereas toddlers in Porirua and their parents, not so much. So when someone's Nana needs a hip replacement and has been waiting for 2 years in increasing pain and disability it is hard to ignore that or be sanguine and philosophical about it.
It also depends on what people do with those extra healthy years, if they keep the weight off, eat right and exercise then they will reduce their ill health burden, on average in later life. There is truth in the old adage of use it or lose it, joints wear when the muscles around them are not strong enough to hold them in ideal positions. This comes from being constantly and well active. So primary care and early intervention is only one plank. The hard one will be to encourage people to ditch the computer, the tv, the games console etc and exercise, which will mean more than a brisk walk around the block too.
For the record I'm 44 and I run 55-65km per week and eat a pretty healthy diet, I obviously don't smoke and drink very moderately (unpleasant running on a hangover).
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I should also point out that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing only because the rate at which we burn fossil carbon sources and chop down and burn forests is so great that the oceans and the rest of the biosphere cannot absorb it all. They have absorbed about half of what we produce.
So Lucy's faith that the planet and life will save is has been hollow since about 1850 when we began to seriously outstrip their ability to absorb what we were producing.
For the source of this look here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/Note that absorbing all that CO2 is acidifying the oceans which may reduce its ability to sequester carbon. This is because it sequesters the carbon when plankton that makes carbonate shells dies and sinks to the seafloor there to eventually form limestone. If the ocean becomes too acidic they will no longer be able to make carbonate shells, the chemical equations get pulled too far away energetically from carbonate formation. We don't know at which point of acidity this will happen (and it may well vary by species). But this is one of the tipping points, when it happens the ability of the oceans to absorb our emissions will fall markedly. If we have not lowered our carbon outputs significantly by then atmospheric CO2 levels will rocket.
Since we don't know when that point will be reached, it seems prudent to curb our output as soon and as much as possible. Don't you think?
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I am sorry that pointing out using past examples of how badly the climate and the environment can get fucked up looks like a disaster movie to people. But time to wake up and smell the end of the Holocene I'm afraid.
Lucy's breezy confidence that various aspects of the planet will save us from ourselves was so wrong it needed to be countered.
NZ is actually well placed to survive. Being so mountainous we don't lose much land from sea level rise, though we do lose flat agricultural land. We can always do a miniature of what the rest of the world will do. Everyone decamps for the South Island (including Ozzies who don't fancy Tasmania*) and fill the NI with geothermal, Wind, Tidal and solar thermal installations then pipe the power the other way across Cook strait. By then robotics mean we can service it all largely remotely.
*And of course our cousins from the Pacific whose islands have been inundated or desertified by the heat.
By 'we' I mean our descendants. This is not going to happen even this century, but the way we are going it is becoming ever more likely. Don't fancy it? fine, just stop sticking your head in the sand and thinking we don't have to do a great deal right now to lower those odds to manageable levels.
If the past teaches us anything it is that the climate can be stable at everything from a snowball world encased in ice to one where dinosaurs roamed the poles, which were heavily forested with lower latitudes baking in über tropical heat. Plenty of plate tectonics, lots of ocean, plenty of life and barely a whiff of burning fossil fuels to boot. It is all possible.
Which do you fancy? You don't get to choose the status quo.
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Oh BTW the Brazillians have discovered and are beginning to exploit a vast new oil field 150miles off their coast in the South Atlantic. It's deep water but doable and as the oil price rises more and more of the deep water deposits like this are becoming exploitable.
Did I mention its likely to be almost as big as Saudi Arabia's? Much of Western Europe's coal is still in the ground, as the price goes up and up and China's appetite grows and grows the old pit towns could ring again. Plenty of black gold still to be dug out and burnt.
And all that is after the fact that if we burn just those fossil fuel deposits we knew about at the last climate meeting we get 5C average rises easy. All the new discoveries just push that up and up and up.
We, or rather our children and grandchildren are going to go to a very real hell in a climate handcart.
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1) Plate tectonics.
There is data that weather affects the movement of plate boundaries.
2) Life.
Gaia isn't real you know. The more complex and ecosystem is the more carbon it stores. We humans have been exploiting a great number of them, especially the oceans, that we are simplifying the ecosystems (like shark fishing taking out the top predators) so their carrying capacities are reduced. I wouldn't be so sanguine about the rest of life coming to our rescue. We have also seen in past mass extinctions that the simplified surviving ecosystems take a long time to recover biodiversity.
3) Finite sources of human-usable carbon.
Being pumped into a finite atmospheric system. This also ignores tipping points, like the Amazon drying so much it burns, like it has in past warmings or the great methane stores: marine hydrates and the permafrost let go. If you drill through the ice above a Siberian pond and light a match over it you get a column of fire that sustains itself so much methane is leaking from the permafrost.
There is evidence that in the great Permian extinction when 90% of all marine life died (bye, bye trilobites) that initial volcanic activity (formation of the Siberian traps) triggered enough warming to hit the tipping points which caused more warming and more tipping points, including ocean circulation shutting down. That is why so many marine species died, with the currents of there was minimal mixing and the oceans stratified with all but the top few metres completely anoxic. A non mixing ocean can store less heat, will be way less productive so will absorb far less carbon.
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And I didn't even include the nigh impossible task of keeping our planet's climate 'stable'.
There are good reasons to think that we have managed to dodge a predicted and expected Ice Age. We seem to have done this by the simple expedient of millions of us clearing forest, ploughing soils and planting crops along with putting lots of grazers on the cleared land at high density.
Once we started using wood to make charcoal for smelting metals then the deforestation began to pick up pace. As it coincided with lots of things like ship building we got onto a real roll. Remember why the virgin kauri forests were felled? since they go straight up with no branches and a nice taper they were ideal for ship's masts.
Near here in Scotland, off the coast of SW Fife in the 17thC they sunk a mine under the Firth of Forth and built a vent for air that stuck up out of the water. They did this because they had a very real energy crisis as there were not enough trees. Thus we began to seriously, industrially exploit fossil carbon sources, for over 300years at an ever increasing rate.
The earth is finite.
Venus is solidly in the goldilocks zone, it is a furnace of a hellhole they think because for whatever reason it doesn't have plate tectonics, nothing to bury all those carbonate rocks. There is no physical reason why the earth cannot go the same way if we push enough CO2 into the atmosphere. The debate over whether or not we have reached Peak Oil shows we have the industrial capacity and the desire to burn our way into climate hell.
We learn from some lake cores that the last time the Gulf Stream shut off the big freeze took mere weeks to happen and hundreds of years to turn around.
We have inadvertently engineered a more stable climate than we might otherwise have experienced so your comment is more than a little naive. We truly do not want to know what a non stable climate might be like. Therefore we need to do something about it, urgently before we inadvertently make a very big mistake.
BTW where do you think our 'cousins' over the Tasman will want to move when life on the 2nd driest continent becomes untenable?
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@Craig
Keir has it absolutely right. The one thing you can say about the Tories' policy on PR is that it is principled. They have not let the still dire situation for them in Scotland where they are clear beneficiaries of PR change their principles. So if they suddenly changed and came out for PR it would be a huge shock and without a very credible reason why a conclusion that they had abandoned their principles would have to be drawn.
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@Craig
And Thatcher had thumping majorities based on a majority of the vote did she? The election Major won was a wonder of thwarted democracy. So you can't throw the broken voting system for Westminster elections at the door of the Labour party just because they are current beneficiaries. You see I remember my history.
Labour at least has toyed with the idea of constitutional reform and brought in PR for devolved assembly and local elections. The Tories are and always have been dead set against any and all PR so the fact they are on the wrong end of FPTP is just funny. That they are simultaneously beneficiaries of PR in the devolved legislatures (they won no constituency seats at Holyrood) makes it even more delicious.
As I said before my heart fails to bleed for them.
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@Phil Lyth
the Baroness is still alive.
Have you seen her recently? There are reasons why in his IF series Steve Bell draws her as a zombie.
BTW Craig your analysis of the UK election scene is deeply funny. The reasons the stellar Tory poll lead is failing is because they keep doing things to remind the electorate that contrary to Cameron's assertions they are still the same old nasty party. The alliance in Europe with far right anti semites is showing Cameron up as a major blunderer. His assertion that he will effect negotiation with a Europe who do not want to know and will play extremely hard ball for being forced to know means his term will be mired in pointless Euro feuding, which bores most people to tears. The Tories kicked their ultra Eurosceptic wing into UKIP a decade ago so why he feels the need to out sceptic them is unclear. But the big one is that his Shadow Chancellor has announced in effect that ordinary people will have to pay with their jobs and much poorer services for the sins of the rich bankers. There is incandescent anger on the streets here over this prospect.
Add in that Labour are as a result looking like a party of sanity and the economy is showing faint signs of life (which the Tory policies would strangle) and a hung parliament looks like a real prospect.
Note that Labour has won two recent bye elections here in Scotland on the trot. They have done it by campaigning as the opposition party, which here in Scotland they are as the SNP are in power in Edinburgh. In most of Scotland the fight is between Labour and SNP, the Tories are nowhere. The Tory vote in the North of England and the big urban conglomerates has not recovered much either.
So you are right in that the electoral distribution still favours Labour, but only because the Tories' have hugely safe seats in the shires which put up their share of the vote without giving them a majority of seats. But since the Tory party has been by far the biggest sceptics against PR in UK or indeed any elections it is hard to feel sorry for them.
Note that the Scottish Tories are still against PR despite them not only having any MSP's or many local councillors because of it. Turkeys voting for xmas come to mind.
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What a wonderful video. My Beaker is sitting by the computer and seemed to enjoy it too. Well every scientist needs a lab tech.