Category: Politics

The Same Language, but …

We are so close yet in some ways so separate!

George Bernard Shaw once quoted that: “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

It seems a most apt way of introducing an article published by The Conversation.

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UK and US elections: 2 very different systems united by a common political language

Long, drawn-out campaigns just aren’t Rishi Sunak’s cup of tea. Chris J Ratcliffe/WPA Pool/Getty Images.

Garret Martin, American University School of International Service

Voters in the United Kingdom on May 22 learned the date they would be joining the many, many people casting ballots around the world in 2024.

In a surprise move, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a snap election to be held on July 4 – six months earlier than many had expected. An early election is certainly a major gamble for the prime minister but one he felt was worth taking. With the ruling Conservative Party more than 20 percentage points behind opposition Labour in the latest polls, Sunak faces an uphill battle to stay in office.

The Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, is heavily favored to return to power for the first time since 2010.

To a U.S. audience, many of the top issues in the election campaign will sound familiar: the economy, immigration, health care, Ukraine and Gaza. The choice of date, too, may ring a bell – and political soothsayers are already trying to read into what it means for the U.K. election to fall on Independence Day.

A person with a trash bin head gestures with his thumbs down to a person with a bucket as a head.
U.K. elections can be an odd affair in which mainstream politicians can rub shoulders with the likes of rival candidates Count Binface and Lord Buckethead. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

But as to the campaign itself – well, they do things a bit different on the other side of the pond. While Americans may be used to set terms and lengthy campaigns filled with endless advertising, in the U.K. such things are, to use a Britishism, “just not cricket.” Here are three main ways in which the British conduct their elections.

1. Election timeline

U.S. elections follow a predictable schedule. In 1845, Congress passed a law establishing a single day for federal elections to take place on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” Further, presidents are elected for a fixed four-year term, making the dates for upcoming votes knowable for the foreseeable future.

That isn’t the case in the United Kingdom. By convention, elections have been held on a Thursday since 1935. But the month of the vote has varied considerably. For the most part, they take place in late spring or early summer – but fall and winter elections are not unheard of.

The U.K. Parliament does have a fixed term of five years, with elections automatically scheduled once that time has lapsed. In practice, however, parliaments have rarely gone the full five years.

Indeed, prime ministers in the United Kingdom have the authority to request the dissolution of Parliament at any time. They can do so without the approval of the cabinet, and so prime ministers have taken liberal advantage of their ability to control the timing of the election to try and gain an advantage.

Many thought that Sunak may have been eyeing an election later in the year, but a number of factors, including economic forecasts and not wanting the distraction of a U.S. election, may have factored in to him calling an earlier-than-expected vote.

2. Campaign rules

Besides the shifting timing, the nature and rules of the campaign are also very different in the United Kingdom. This starts with the sheer brevity of the campaign. Once Parliament is dissolved, the election must take place 25 working days later. This means the parties have a mere six weeks to make their case to the public.

And unlike in a presidential system, voters in the United Kingdom do not cast a ballot for the person they want to see lead the country. Instead, the U.K. is divided into 650 distinct constituencies; voters pick their preferred candidate to represent their local constituency in Parliament. The party with the most seats typically wins the election, and the leader of that party has the opportunity to become prime minister and govern as a single-party government or as part of a coalition.

U.K. election campaigns are also subject to strict rules to maintain neutrality. Once the campaign starts, the period of “purdah” kicks in, which imposes certain restrictions on government activities. This involves, for instance, strict prohibitions on government ministers announcing new initiatives to affect the election or using public funds for political purposes.

In the same manner, civil servants – employees of the crown who work for the government but are not political appointees – are required to maintain strict impartiality and not become involved in partisan debates.

Moreover, the Office of Communications, the United Kingdom’s independent media regulatory authority, also enforces strict rules for broadcast media, including television and radio. The 2003 Communications Act requires that all broadcast media must cover the elections in an impartial manner, providing coverage of all parties, even if they do not assign equal time.

A man in a white shirt chats to a man in a blazer. Bith hold cups.
Opposition leader Keir Starmer, left, poses on the campaign trail with what the photographer says is a cup of coffee … but which I strongly suspect is actually tea. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Broadcast media is also not allowed, on polling day, to suggest the outcome of the vote before polls are closed.

In a huge departure from the U.S., U.K. political parties are banned from buying television ads, but this rule does not apply to streaming television.

3. The role of money

The limited role of money is another distinct feature in U.K. elections. Even factoring in the different population sizes, U.K. elections are significantly cheaper than their counterparts in the United States.

Indeed, total campaign spending in the 2020 U.S. elections, covering presidential and congressional races, hit more than US$14 billion. That scale completely dwarfs how much parties and candidates will be able to spend in the 2024 United Kingdom election.

Through regulations established by the Electoral Commission, an independent government agency, a British party that competes in all constituencies in the United Kingdom will be allowed to spend just over £34 million (around $43 million) in total to support all candidates.

That figure in itself marks an 80% increase from the allowance at the last election in 2019, so to factor for inflation since limits were set in 2000.

Individual candidates can spend funds to support their campaign. But the amount, defined partly by the size of the constituency, is low and in the scale of tens of thousands of pounds. This is again a far cry from some of the more expensive congressional races in the United States, where even primary elections could attract close to $30 million in spending.

Challenging times ahead

As a result, both Sunak and Starmer will have only a short time – and limited funds – to make their case to voters. Whoever wins will face a very challenging situation at home and abroad, with little to no respite. According to the think tank Institute for Fiscal Studies, the state of public finances is “a dark cloud that hangs over the election.” And then there is the delicate matter of maintaining a special relationship with the U.S. – a country that may itself have a very different political landscape after it goes to the polls later in the year.

Garret Martin, Senior Professorial Lecturer, Co-Director Transatlantic Policy Center, American University School of International Service

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As I have frequently said, I feel English and love the fact that I speak with an English accent. Yet I adore, along with Jean, where we live just outside Merlin in Southern Oregon. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

Politically we are in very strange times, as was said right at the end of this article.

More on our existence.

The Einstein-Freud Letters

I was born in London in November, 1944. Exactly six months before the Second World War ended in April, 1945.

Thus it was of great interest to me that yesterday Jean and I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme about the letters that were exchanged between two great Jewish men: Einstein and Freud, in 1932. The programme was called Why War? The Einstein-Freud Letters.

The programme ends with offering the listener a fundamental choice, which I won’t spoil for you now. But to me it is an extension of my post (or Patrice’s post) that I published recently on March 19th.

I believe, and hope, you can listen to it by clicking on this link. Here also is the text that is at that link:

In 1932 the world-famous physicist Albert Einstein wrote a public letter to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Einstein, a keen advocate of the League of Nations and peace campaigner, asked Freud if he thought war and aggression was forever tied to human psychology and the course of international relations: could we ever secure a lasting world peace? 

Einstein’s letter is deeply prescient, as is Freud’s extraordinary response. The exchange was titled ‘Why War?’. The two thinkers explore the nature of war and peace in politics and in all human life; they think about human nature, the history of warfare and human aggression and the hope represented by the foundation of the League of Nations (precursor to the UN) and its promise of global security and a new architecture of international law. 

At the time of their exchange, Freud is in the last great phase of his career and has already introduced psychoanalysis into the field of politics and society. Einstein, the younger of the two, is using his huge international profile as a physicist for political and pacifist intervention.

For Einstein, future world security means a shared moral understanding across the global order – that humankind rise above the ‘state of nature’ never to devolve into total war again. He wrote to Freud, as ‘a citizen of the world…immune to nationalist bias…I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth. You have shown how the aggressive and destructive instincts are bound up in the human psyche with those of love and the lust for life. At the same time, you make manifest your devotion to the goal of liberation from the evils of war…’ Is it possible, Einstein asks Freud, to make us ‘proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?’. Freud’s answer is fascinating and quite unexpected. 

The exchange of letters was sponsored by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an organisation promoting global security by using prominent thinkers, drawing on multiple fields of knowledge (from science to psychology, politics and law) to achieve a new language for international peace, following the lessons learned from the Great War of 1914-18. 

But even as Einstein wrote to Freud in the summer of 1932, the Nazi party became the largest political party in the German Reichstag. Both men felt a sense of apprehension about what was coming; both were pacifist, both Jewish, both would be driven into exile (both Einsteinian physics and Freudian psychoanalysis were denounced by the new regime). The letters were finally published in 1933 when Hitler came to power, suppressed in Germany, and as a result never achieved the circulation intended for them. 

Featuring readings from the Einstein–Freud letters and contributions from historians of warfare and psychoanalysis, war journalism and global security, this feature showcases the little-known exchange between two of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, ‘Why War?’ – a question just as relevant in today’s world.

Contributors include historian of war and peace Margaret MacMillan, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, defence and security expert Mark Galeotti, historian of international relations Patrick O Cohrs, author Lisa Appignanesi, who has written on Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, and Faisal Devji, historian of conflict and political violence in India and the Middle East. 

Readings are by Elliot Levey (Einstein) and Henry Goodman (Freud) 

Produced by Simon Hollis

A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4

Albert Einstein

Portrait by Ferdinand Schmutzer, 1921

Sigmund Freud

Freud, 1921

Two very great men.

Our human existence!

We are a very strange bunch.

Jean and I live in an ideal part of America: Merlin in Southern Oregon. We did not plan to come here but in 2012 we wanted to move from Payson, Az. and fortune brought us here. However, I started this blog in 2009 when I had seen the integrity and happiness of dogs and wanted to write about them.

However the wider world is far, far from just the integrity and happiness of dogs.

On March 17th Patrice Ayme posted yet another post on his blog about war and I felt that it was important to be read by as many followers of Learning from Dogs as is possible. (The few small typographical changes are mine.)

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Want No War? A Symptom That Nazism Perdures

Do not whine that war is bad. Ask instead what it is for.

Friend of a friend Manfred Krieger: Will mankind ever learn that wars do no good to anyone?

Patrice Ayme: All over the world, the vermin helping Putin claim that war does not do any good. Similarly the Nazis, after claiming for years that they were the party of peace and minorities, accused big bad France of having launched WW2. France did, indeed, but that was after the Nazis had invaded a few countries, including two democracies, and officially killed a few hundred thousands of alleged mental retards and genetically defective (including a relative of Hitler).

Vermin helping Putin vermin has been crawling around the French and German leadership for a quarter of a century. That Putin was a war criminal was obvious as early as 1999. 

The Putinists claim that war never helped anyone. So the war to stop Hitler did not do good to anyone? Only an obdurate Nazi would hold that opinion.

My family was hunted by the Gestapo: I am delighted that more than five million Nazis got exterminated like the vicious vermin they were. It would have been better if the French Republic had declared war on the Nazi gangrene earlier. Destroying the vermin when it was weaker would have saved the lives of in excess of 50 million thoroughly innocent people who got killed as a result of having let the Axis fly from victory to victory, gathering alliances with nearly as equally repulsive tyrannies in the process.

This may well be happening now: the Chinese dictatorship is sitting on a fence, not trying to help the Kremlin tyrant too much. The fascist Iranian theocracy retreated a bit when threatened recently by the West after attacks in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Syria. 

This hesitancy on the part of fascists also happened in World War Two; for a long time Mussolini did not dare to join Hitler, but then they militarily cooperated attacking Spain and three years later, attacking France. But ultimately, except for Franco who looked degenerate, but was smarter, fellow dictators, even Stalin, sided with the Axis. 

In final analysis, WW2, and also WW1, happened because, primarily, not enough Germans fought the forces of fascist imperialistic plutocracy inside Germany.

So it is a lack of war, not an excess of it, which brought disaster.

That happened because not enough Morally Correct Germans realized in a timely manner that it would do some good to destroy the fascist imperialistic plutocratic mentality. 

None of this deplorable meta-mentality is obsolete; France and Germany encouraged and empowered the Kremlin vermin in the last quarter of a century, by building its economy and financing it with advantageous trade. Now the Kremlin vermin is potentially the greatest threat against humanity and civilization, ever. And what does the German government do? Claim that one should not fight the Kremlin gangrene too much, to not aggravate matters too much.

But that appeasement in face of the unacceptable only encourages the latter. Germans still have to understand the biggest lessons of history.

‘An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile quality food, hoping

that the ferocious creature will die of indigestion.’

Patrice Ayme

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Water, water, everywhere, but …

A dramatic article from George Monbiot about water!

I read the latest from George Monbiot yesterday morning and was startled. Startled because I hadn’t thought of it before. Startled because here in Merlin, Southern Oregon we have had so much rain since the beginning of November, 2023 that our acres are swimming in the wet. Startled since that time also our Bummer Creek, which flows across our land, has been at record depths.

But this report is incredibly important and I wanted to share it with you, as I have Geo. Monbiot’s permission for so doing.

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Dry Run

Posted on11th March 2024

The mega-droughts in Spain and the US are a portent of a gathering global water crisis.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th March 2024

There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.

Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.

A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out.

In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.

Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.

That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.

Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline.

Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.

There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it.

You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work.

Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.

Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.

This is not to give all plant products a free pass: horticulture can make massive demands on water supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, we should be switching from some grains, vegetables and fruit to others. Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of stronger rules and informative labelling.

Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the EU’s agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger than in the food and farming sector.

I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have to try to counter the endless bias against relevance in politics and most of the media. This is yet another of those massive neglected issues, any one of which could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, we need to recover our focus.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Oh dear, oh dear!

One hates to be alarmist and yet Monbiot is a very smart reporter and this is truly important.

Oh dear, oh dear!

Listening to ancient folk

Returning to climate change.

We think that climate change is a relatively recent phenomenon. Wrong! And I am not going to say any more because this post from The Conversation covers it beautifully.

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What ancient farmers can really teach us about adapting to climate change – and how political power influences success or failure

A farmer paddles to his fields on an artificial island among canals, part of an ancient Aztec system known as chinampas, in 2021. AP Photo /Marco Ugarte

Chelsea Fisher, University of South Carolina

Published February, 26th, 2024

In dozens of archaeological discoveries around the world, from the once-successful reservoirs and canals of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the deserted Viking colonies of Greenland, new evidence paints pictures of civilizations struggling with unforeseen climate changes and the reality that their farming practices had become unsustainable.

Among these discoveries are also success stories, where ancient farming practices helped civilizations survive the hard times.

Zuni farmers in the southwestern United States made it through long stretches of extremely low rainfall between A.D. 1200 and 1400 by embracing small-scale, decentralized irrigation systems. Farmers in Ghana coped with severe droughts from 1450 to 1650 by planting indigenous African grains, like drought-tolerant pearl millet.

Ancient practices like these are gaining new interest today. As countries face unprecedented heat waves, storms and melting glaciers, some farmers and international development organizations are reaching deep into the agricultural archives to revive these ancient solutions.

A canal running through a mountain side with snowy peaks in the background.
An ancient irrigation method used by the Moors involving water channels is being revisited in Spain. Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Drought-stricken farmers in Spain have reclaimed medieval Moorish irrigation technology. International companies hungry for carbon offsets have paid big money for biochar made using pre-Columbian Amazonian production techniques. Texas ranchers have turned to ancient cover cropping methods to buffer against unpredictable weather patterns.

But grasping for ancient technologies and techniques without paying attention to historical context misses one of the most important lessons ancient farmers can reveal: Agricultural sustainability is as much about power and sovereignty as it is about soil, water and crops.

I’m an archaeologist who studies agricultural sustainability in the past. Discoveries in recent years have shown how the human past is full of people who dealt with climate change in both sustainable and unsustainable ways. Archaeologists are finding that ancient sustainability was tethered closely to politics. However, these dynamics are often forgotten in discussions of sustainability today.

Maya milpa farming: Forest access is essential

In the tropical lowlands of Mexico and Central America, Indigenous Maya farmers have been practicing milpa agriculture for thousands of years. Milpa farmers adapted to drought by gently steering forest ecology through controlled burns and careful woodland conservation.

The knowledge of milpa farming empowered many rural farmers to navigate climate changes during the notorious Maya Collapse – two centuries of political disintegration and urban depopulation between A.D. 800 to 1000. Importantly, later Maya political leaders worked with farmers to keep this flexibility. Their light-handed approach is still legible in the artifacts and settlement patterns of post-Collapse farming communities and preserved in the flexible tribute schedules for Maya farmers documented by 16th century Spanish monks.

Maya farmers and researchers explain milpa farming.

In my book, “Rooting in a Useless Land: Ancient Farmers, Celebrity Chefs, and Environmental Justice in Yucatán,” I trace the deep history of the Maya milpa. Using archaeology, I show how ancient farmers adapted milpa agriculture in response to centuries of drought and political upheaval.

Modern Maya milpa practices began drawing public attention a few years ago as international development organizations partnered with celebrity chefs, like Noma’s René Redzepi, and embraced the concept.

However, these groups condemned the traditional milpa practice of burning new areas of forest as unsustainable. They instead promoted a “no-burn” version to grow certified organic maize for high-end restaurants. Their no-burn version of milpa relies on fertilizers to grow maize in a fixed location, rather than using controlled fire ecology to manage soil fertility across vast forests.

The result restricted the traditional practices Maya farmers have used for centuries. It also fed into a modern political threat to traditional Maya milpa farming: land grabs.

Traditional milpa agriculture requires a lot of forested land, since farmers need to relocate their fields every couple of years. But that need for forest is at odds with hotel companies, industrial cattle ranches and green energy developers who want cheap land and see Maya milpa forest management practices as inefficient. No-burn milpa eases this conflict by locking maize agriculture into one small space indefinitely, instead of spreading it out through the forest over generations. But it also changes tradition.

Maya milpa farmers are now fighting to practice their ancient agricultural techniques, not because they’ve forgotten or lost those techniques, but because neocolonial land privatization policies actively undermine farmers’ ability to manage woodlands as their ancestors did.

Milpa farmers are increasingly left to either adopt a rebranded version of their heritage or quit farming all together – as many have done.

Mexico’s fragile artificial islands: Threats from development

When I look to the work of other archaeologists investigating ancient agricultural practices, I see these same entanglements of power and sustainability.

In central Mexico, chinampas are ancient systems of artificial islands and canals. They have enabled farmers to cultivate food in wetlands for centuries.

The continuing existence of chinampas is a legacy of deep ecological knowledge and a resource enabling communities to feed themselves.

Chinampa techniques use canals and artificial islands. This photo shows one in 1912. Karl Weule, Leitfaden der Voelkerkunde via Wikimedia
A well-maintained farming island among canals near Mexico City.
The chinampas of Xochimilco are a UNESCO world heritage site today, but development expanding from Mexico City has put their survival in danger. Sergei Saint via Flickr, CC BY-ND

But archaeology has revealed that generations of sustainable chinampa management could be overturned almost overnight. That happened when the expansionist Aztec Empire decided to re-engineer Lake Xaltocan for salt production in the 14th century and rendered its chinampas unusable.

Today, the future of chinampa agriculture hinges on a pocket of protected fields stewarded by local farmers in the marshy outskirts of Mexico City. These fields are now at risk as demand for housing drives informal settlements into the chinampa zone.

Andean raised fields: A story of labor exploitation

Traditional Andean agriculture in South America incorporates a diverse range of ancient cultivation techniques. One in particular has a complicated history of attracting revival efforts.

In the 1980s, government agencies, archaeologists and development organizations spent a fortune trying to persuade Andean farmers to revive raised field farming. Ancient raised fields had been found around Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia. These groups became convinced that this relic technology could curb hunger in the Andes by enabling back-to-back potato harvests with no need for fallowing.

But Andean farmers had no connection to the labor-intensive raised fields. The practice had been abandoned even before the rise of Inca civilization in the 13th century. The effort to revive ancient raised field agriculture collapsed.

A view from a plane shows the outlines where fields were raised.
An aerial photograph shows pre-Colombian raised fields in Bolivia. Umberto Lombardo, University of Bern, Switzerland, CC BY-NC

Since then, more archaeological discoveries around Lake Titicaca have suggested that ancient farmers were forced to work the raised fields by the expansionist Tiwanaku empire during its peak between AD 500 and 1100. Far from the politically neutral narrative promoted by development organizations, the raised fields were not there to help farmers feed themselves. They were a technology for exploiting labor and extracting surplus crops from ancient Andean farmers.

Respecting ancient practices’ histories

Reclaiming ancestral farming techniques can be a step toward sustainable food systems, especially when descendant communities lead their reclamation. The world can, and I think should, reach back to recover agricultural practices from our collective past.

But we can’t pretend that those practices are apolitical.

The Maya milpa farmers who continue to practice controlled burns in defiance of land privatizers understand the value of ancient techniques and the threat posed by political power. So do the Mexican chinampa farmers working to restore local food to disenfranchised urban communities. And so do the Andean farmers refusing to participate in once-exploitive raised field rehabilitation projects.

Depending on how they are used, ancient agricultural practices can either reinforce social inequalities or create more equitable food systems. Ancient practices aren’t inherently good – it takes a deeper commitment to just and equitable food systems to make them sustainable.

Chelsea Fisher, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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We like to think that the changing climate is a modern phenomenon but this article shows it is not. That sentence by Chelsea Fisher offers a route out of the present situation: “The world can, and I think should, reach back to recover agricultural practices from our collective past.”

The imminent climate change crisis

But a positive TED Talk on the situation.

There have been so many disastrous activities on climate change, and I am not belittling them, but it was amazing to come across a TED Talk last Saturday that I watched. But first the speaker, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, who was born in Asmara, Eritrea. Her bio (in part):

From WikiPedia:

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Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil biogeochemist and political ecologist who is the current Director of the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. She was previously the Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences; University of California, Merced.[1] Her research group worked to understand how soil helps regulate the Earth’s climate.

Advocacy and global impact work

Berhe’s work at the intersection of soil, climate change, and political ecology lends itself well to a number of global issues. During her graduate career, she was a member of the working group that produced the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was called for by the United Nations Secretary Kofi Annan to assess the impact of humans on the environment. She was one of the lead authors on the 2005 report’s chapter on “Drivers of Change in Ecosystem Condition and Services.”[19] The Assessment received the Zayed International Prize for the Environment in 2005.[20]

In 2018, Berhe was selected as part of the inaugural National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine New Voices in Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine cohort, as an early career leader working to advance the conversation around key emerging global issues and communicate the evidence base around those challenges.[21]

An advocate for women in science, Berhe is currently a co-Principal Investigator of ADVANCEGeo, which is working to transform the workplace climate of the geosciences to increase retention of women in the field and develop a sustainable model that can be transferred to other scientific domains. Currently, the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN), the Association for Women Geoscientists, and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) have partnered to address the issue of sexual harassment in the earth, space and environmental sciences.[22] The program led by Erika Marín-Spiotta and is run with support from a four-year $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.[23]

She currently serves as an advisory board member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organization working to make science open, inclusive, and accessible, and is on the leadership board of the Earth Science Women’s Network.

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Now from the TED Talk, firstly the description:

Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode What Lies Beneath.

Earth’s soil can store vast amounts of carbon. Biogeochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe says soil could be a powerful tool for fighting climate change – if only we stopped treating it like dirt.

About Asmeret Asefaw Berhe

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil biogeochemist and President Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Energy Office of Science. She is a professor of soil biogeochemistry at University of California, Merced. Her research group works to understand how soil helps regulate the earth’s climate.

Berhe’s work exists at the intersection of soil, climate change, and political ecology. During her graduate career, she was a member of the working group that produced the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was called for by the United Nations to assess the impact of humans on the environment.

Berhe received a B.Sc. in Soil and Water Conservation at the University of Asmara in Eritrea. She has an M.Sc. in Political Ecology from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in Biogeochemistry from University of California, Berkeley.

This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Matthew Cloutier and Sylvie Douglis and edited by Rachel Faulkner and Katie Simon. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.

Now that positive TED Talk:

We wish Asmeret the very best of fortune in bringing about these changes.

Hollywood movie to reality?

Where is the global climate going?

The challenge with writing posts, albeit not so often, about the global environment, especially when I am a non-scientist, is that one relies entirely on the words of others. In the case of a recent article, published by The Conversation, the authors are claimed to be specialists, and I do not doubt their credentials.

The three authors are René van Westen who is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Physics, at Utrecht University, Henk A. Dijkstra who is a Professor of Physics, also at Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, a Climate Model Specialist, again at Utrecht University.

So, here is their article:

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Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows

Too much fresh water from Greenland’s ice sheet can slow the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Paul Souders/Stone via Getty Images

René van Westen, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Utrecht University

Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.

While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?

Twenty years after the movie’s release, we know a lot more about the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.

In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.

The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.

We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.

The ocean’s conveyor belt

Ocean currents are driven by winds, tides and water density differences.

In the Atlantic Ocean circulation, the relatively warm and salty surface water near the equator flows toward Greenland. During its journey it crosses the Caribbean Sea, loops up into the Gulf of Mexico, and then flows along the U.S. East Coast before crossing the Atlantic.

Two illustrations show how the AMOC looks today and its weaker state in the future
How the Atlantic Ocean circulation changes as it slows. IPCC 6th Assessment Report

This current, also known as the Gulf Stream, brings heat to Europe. As it flows northward and cools, the water mass becomes heavier. By the time it reaches Greenland, it starts to sink and flow southward. The sinking of water near Greenland pulls water from elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and the cycle repeats, like a conveyor belt.

Too much fresh water from melting glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet can dilute the saltiness of the water, preventing it from sinking, and weaken this ocean conveyor belt. A weaker conveyor belt transports less heat northward and also enables less heavy water to reach Greenland, which further weakens the conveyor belt’s strength. Once it reaches the tipping point, it shuts down quickly.

What happens to the climate at the tipping point?

The existence of a tipping point was first noticed in an overly simplified model of the Atlantic Ocean circulation in the early 1960s. Today’s more detailed climate models indicate a continued slowing of the conveyor belt’s strength under climate change. However, an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation appeared to be absent in these climate models. https://www.youtube.com/embed/p4pWafuvdrY?wmode=transparent&start=0 How the ocean conveyor belt works.

This is where our study comes in. We performed an experiment with a detailed climate model to find the tipping point for an abrupt shutdown by slowly increasing the input of fresh water.

We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years. The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.

The result: Dangerous cold in the North

Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.

The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36 F (20 C). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.

Two maps show US and Europe both cooling by several degrees if the AMOC stops.
The annual mean temperature changes after the conveyor belt stops reflect an extreme temperature drop in northern Europe in particular. René M. van Westen

These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.

The conveyor belt shutting down would also affect sea level and precipitation patterns, which can push other ecosystems closer to their tipping points. For example, the Amazon rainforest is vulnerable to declining precipitation. If its forest ecosystem turned to grassland, the transition would release carbon to the atmosphere and result in the loss of a valuable carbon sink, further accelerating climate change.

The Atlantic circulation has slowed significantly in the distant past. During glacial periods when ice sheets that covered large parts of the planet were melting, the influx of fresh water slowed the Atlantic circulation, triggering huge climate fluctuations.

So, when will we see this tipping point?

The big question – when will the Atlantic circulation reach a tipping point – remains unanswered. Observations don’t go back far enough to provide a clear result. While a recent study suggested that the conveyor belt is rapidly approaching its tipping point, possibly within a few years, these statistical analyses made several assumptions that give rise to uncertainty.

Instead, we were able to develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal involving the salinity transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic Ocean. Once a threshold is reached, the tipping point is likely to follow in one to four decades.

A line chart of circulation strength shows a quick drop-off after the amount of freshwater in the ocean hits a tipping point.
A climate model experiment shows how quickly the AMOC slows once it reaches a tipping point with a threshold of fresh water entering the ocean. How soon that will happen remains an open question. René M. van Westen

The climate impacts from our study underline the severity of such an abrupt conveyor belt collapse. The temperature, sea level and precipitation changes will severely affect society, and the climate shifts are unstoppable on human time scales.

It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that’s the risk ahead.

This article was updated to Feb. 11, 2024, to fix a typo: The experiment found temperatures in parts of Europe changed by more than 5 F per decade.

René van Westen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Physics, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Professor of Physics, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Climate Model Specialist, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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I am 79! I like to think that whatever is coming down the wires, so to speak, will be after my death. But that is a cop out for a) I have a son and a daughter who are in their early fifties, b) I have a grandson, my daughter and son-in-law’s young man, who is a teenager, with his birthday next month, and c) I could possibly live for another twenty years.

The challenge is how to bring this imminent catastrophic global change in temperature to the fore. We need a global solution now enforced by a globally respected group of scientists and leaders, and, frankly, I do not see that happening.

All one can do is to hope. Hope that the global community will eschew the present-day extremes of warring behaviour and see the need for change. That is NOW!

So that the Hollywood movie, The Day After Tomorrow, remains a fictional story. And for those that have forgotten the film or who have never seen it, here is a small slice of a Wikipedia report:

The Day After Tomorrow is a 2004 American science fiction disaster film conceived, co-written, directed, co-produced by Roland Emmerich, based on the 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, and starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Emmy Rossum, and Ian Holm. The film depicts catastrophic climatic effects following the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, in which a series of extreme weather events usher in climate change and lead to a new ice age.

Wikipedia

And here is a YouTube video:

There we go, folks!

This year’s Reith Lecture

“The Future of Democracy” is, for me, incredibly interesting.

I haven’t a clue as to how long I have been listening to the annual Reith Lecture on BBC Radio 4. It has been many years.

As Wikipedia explains:

The Reith Lectures is a series of annual BBC radio lectures given by leading figures of the day. They are commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service. The lectures were inaugurated in 1948 to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Lord Reith, the corporation’s first director-general.

Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service that aimed to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver the lectures. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about issues of contemporary interest.

Wikipedia
From the BBC’s History of the BBC.

As the BBC explains on the BBC Sounds website:

Released On: 29 Nov 2023

Available for over a year

This year’s BBC Reith Lecturer is Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, Oxford University.

He will deliver four lectures called “Our Democratic Future,” asking how we can build a politics that works for all of us with systems which are robust to the challenges of the twenty first century, from climate change to artificial intelligence. In this first lecture, recorded at New Broadcasting House in London in front of an audience, Professor Ansell asks whether we are in a ‘democratic recession’, where longstanding democracies are at risk of breakdown and authoritarianism is resurgent. And he examines how resilient democracies are to the challenges of artificial intelligence, social media and if they can effectively address core challenges from climate change to inequality.

The Reith Lectures are presented by Anita Anand and produced by Jim Frank. The Editor is China Collins. Reith Co-ordinator is Brenda Brown. The series is mixed by Rod Farquhar and Neil Churchill.

Here is the link to that first lecture: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001sty4

Ben Ansell’s website is here, from which I have taken this:

Welcome to my website. I am Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. My work focuses on a variety of issues in political economy, including both comparative politics and international relations.

I am also co-editor (with David Samuels) of Comparative Political Studies.

My 2010 book, From the Ballot to the Blackboard, published by Cambridge University Press, is available here. My 2014 book (with David Samuels), Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, published by Cambridge University Press, is available here.

This site contains a variety of working papers, syllabi, my biography, and other information about my academic work. My CV is available here.

There is so much more to our dogs than we realise!

A fascinating post on Treehugger.

It is Wednesday morning in Southern Oregon and already I am having to think about the post for tomorrow. Not that this is a problem it is just one more thing that I want to do. Plus we are in the middle of a local heat wave with temperatures expected to be well above 100 degrees F and possibly 109 deg F (42.8 deg C.).

So I am turning to Treehugger for a dog post and hoping that I shall be able to share it with you all.

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Dogs Could Revolutionize the Sustainability of Future Pandemic Testing

Scent dogs are quicker, more effective, and create less healthcare waste than conventional COVID tests.

By Melissa Breyer

Senior Editorial Director

  • Hunter College
  • F.I.T., State University of New York
  • Cornell University

Published July 17, 2023 

Joe McDonald / Getty Images

One of the more frustrating roadblocks in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic was the difficulty in getting quick, accurate test results. Sometimes, results for PCR tests took up to two weeks, rendering their diagnosis useless for planning isolation scenarios. Meanwhile, rapid tests still oftentimes provide a false negative if taken too soon after infection. When I had COVID, I was four days into symptoms before I got a positive at-home test—I’ve heard many people recount similar stories.

The testing we have is certainly better than nothing, but it leaves a lot to be desired. If only there were a better way, say, using something with remarkable innate sensitivity. Like, dogs. Far-fetched? Not at all.

A review of recent research concluded that scent dogs may represent a cheaper, faster, and more effective way to detect COVID-19 and could be a key tool in future pandemics. This could be a game-changer for sustainability as well, eliminating the enormous amount of waste that comes with billions of testing kits.

The review, published in De Gruyter’s Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, found that scent dogs are as effective, or even more effective, than conventional COVID-19 tests such as PCR tests.

Most of us know that dogs have a remarkable sense of smell; they sniff out drugs and explosives and have even successfully identified patients with certain cancers, Parkinson’s, and diabetes. They have up to 300 million olfactory cells, compared to 5 or 6 million in humans. And they use one-third of their brains to process scent information—humans just use 5%.

Professor Tommy Dickey of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Heather Junqueira of BioScent Detection Dogs analyzed 29 different studies in which dogs detected COVID-19. “The studies were performed using over 31,000 samples by over 400 scientists from more than 30 countries using 19 different dog breeds. In some studies, the scent dogs sniffed people directly, sometimes in public places as a health screening. In others, the dogs sniffed patient samples such as sweat, saliva, or urine samples,” explains a press statement from De Gruyter.

Dogs’ Incredible Accuracy 

The dogs ranged from Labrador retrievers and Belgian malinois to beagles and English springer spaniels. In most of the studies, the dogs demonstrated similar or better sensitivity and specificity than the current gold-standard PCR tests or antigen tests.

“In one study, four of the dogs could detect the equivalent of less than 2.6 x 10−12 copies of viral RNA per milliliter. This is equivalent to detecting one drop of any odorous substance dissolved in ten and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools and is three orders of magnitude better than modern scientific instruments,” notes De Gruyter.

Remarkably, they not only detected COVID-19 in symptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and asymptomatic patients, but they could also sniff out COVID variants and even long COVID.

Considering the Safety of the Dogs 

One thing we certainly don’t want is for dogs to become collateral damage in the pursuit of better testing. The study authors acknowledge this, writing that the “safety of scent dogs, their handlers, and those who are inspected by the dogs is critical for the acceptance and implementation of the scent dog screening and testing approach.”

“This is consistent with the One Health paradigm,” they add, “which defines health as more than the absence of disease and recognizes the interrelationships among humans, animals, and environmental welfare.”

The authors evaluated whether medical detection dogs could contract and become ill with the COVID-19 virus and if dogs pass on the COVID-19 virus to humans. From a number of studies, they concluded that dogs are in the low-risk category. “To our knowledge, there have been no deaths of dogs that can be unequivocally attributed to COVID-19,” the authors explain. “Importantly, the studies described above suggest that it is safe for healthy individual handlers to utilize scent dogs to directly screen and test individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus.”

Speedy Test Results 

A major benefit of using the dogs is their speed. In one study, researchers were able to do a lineup with 40 samples, including sample collection, lineup loading, and unloading, within just 3  minutes.

“The time between RT-PCR sampling and the return of results can be up to days, whereas the RAG test results are obtained within about 15 min.,” write the study authors. “Again, if scent dogs directly sniff individuals, results are learned in seconds, or a few minutes if samples are taken and sniffed soon after by the dogs.”

“The criticality of the speed of the return of test results cannot be overemphasized,” the authors add.

Elimination of Plastic Waste 

That dogs could provide a result in seconds to minutes is crucial. But additionally, and importantly, scent tests by dogs don’t require expensive lab equipment or create mountains of plastic waste, unlike conventional diagnostic approaches.

As of December 22, 2022, the United States alone had performed around 1.15 billion tests for COVID-19. Thinking of all the material for the testing kits and all the resources used for testing labs and sending samples around, etc., the reduction in ecological footprint is potentially tremendous.

Not to mention the cost. Some of the research in the review was, in fact, motivated by the need for inexpensive testing in developing nations, the authors note.

“Although many people have heard about the exceptional abilities of dogs to help humans, their value to the medical field has been considered fascinating, but not ready for real-world medical use,” says Dickey. “Having conducted this review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during pandemics, potentially as part of rapid health screenings in public spaces. We are confident that scent dogs will be useful in detecting a wide variety of diseases in the future.”

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In the interests of expanding the argument, here is a copy of a comment left to that original post:

Here we go again, using animals for testing. I believe that dogs can’t smell covid and detected it 100%, but we humans NEVER treat animals with the respect and equality they deserve, so I am very concern for the safety and health of testing “smell Covid” dogs… I know a person that have esophageal cancer and for almost 5 years before it was diagnosed, his dog (an adorable mutt) insisted on crawling over her owner chest every single time that he laid down, in an attempt to “cure” the inflammation in that spot. After the cancer was eliminated with chemo and surgery the dog stopped doing it… 
I which we humans were more connected and attentive with animal wisdom, to learn from them, respecting and became better people.

I think that second sentence should read can smell covid but have left it how it was printed.

Anyway, I will leave readers to cover the main article which speaks very highly of man’s best friend.

These Heat Waves?

What is the truth?

Today, August 14th, here in Southern Oregon we are expecting 111 degrees Fahrenheit or 43.8 degrees C. That is really hot! (And at home it reached 108 deg. F. at 3pm.)

So it seems pertinent to republish a post from The Conversation that was published on July 21st, 2023.

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Is it really hotter now than any time in 100,000 years?

By Darrell Kaufman

Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Northern Arizona University

As scorching heat grips large swaths of the Earth, a lot of people are trying to put the extreme temperatures into context and asking: When was it ever this hot before?

Globally, 2023 has seen some of the hottest days in modern measurements, but what about farther back, before weather stations and satellites?

Some news outlets have reported that daily temperatures hit a 100,000-year high. 

As a paleoclimate scientist who studies temperatures of the past, I see where this claim comes from, but I cringe at the inexact headlines. While this claim may well be correct, there are no detailed temperature records extending back 100,000 years, so we don’t know for sure.

Here’s what we can confidently say about when Earth was last this hot.

This is a new climate state

Scientists concluded a few years ago that Earth had entered a new climate state not seen in more than 100,000 years. As fellow climate scientist Nick McKay and I recently discussed in a scientific journal article, that conclusion was part of a climate assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021.

Earth was already more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times, and the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were high enough to assure temperatures would stay elevated for a long time.

Earth’s average temperature has exceeded 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) above the preindustrial baseline. This new climate state will very likely persist for centuries as the warmest period in more than 100,000 years. The chart shows different reconstructions of temperature over time, with measured temperatures since 1850 and a projection to 2300 based on an intermediate emissions scenario. D.S. Kaufman and N.P. McKay, 2022, and published datasets, Author provided

Even under the most optimistic scenarios of the future – in which humans stop burning fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions – average global temperature will very likely remain at least 1 C above preindustrial temperatures, and possibly much higher, for multiple centuries.

This new climate state, characterized by a multi-century global warming level of 1 C and higher, can be reliably compared with temperature reconstructions from the very distant past.

How we estimate past temperature

To reconstruct temperatures from times before thermometers, paleoclimate scientists rely on information stored in a variety of natural archives.

The most widespread archive going back many thousands of years is at the bottom of lakes and oceans, where an assortment of biological, chemical and physical evidence offers clues to the past. These materials build up continuously over time and can be analyzed by extracting a sediment core from the lake bed or ocean floor.

University of Arizona scientist Ellie Broadman holds a sediment core from the bottom of a lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Emily Stone

These sediment-based records are rich sources of information that have enabled paleoclimate scientists to reconstruct past global temperatures, but they have important limitations.

For one, bottom currents and burrowing organisms can mix the sediment, blurring any short-term temperature spikes. For another, the timeline for each record is not known precisely, so when multiple records are averaged together to estimate past global temperature, fine-scale fluctuations can be canceled out.

Because of this, paleoclimate scientists are reluctant to compare the long-term record of past temperature with short-term extremes.

Looking back tens of thousands of years

Earth’s average global temperature has fluctuated between glacial and interglacial conditions in cycles lasting around 100,000 years, driven largely by slow and predictable changes in Earth’s orbit with attendant changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. We are currently in an interglacial period that began around 12,000 years ago as ice sheets retreated and greenhouse gases rose.

Looking at that 12,000-year interglacial period, global temperature averaged over multiple centuries might have peaked roughly around 6,000 years ago, but probably did not exceed the 1 C global warming level at that point, according to the IPCC report. Another study found that global average temperatures continued to increase across the interglacial period. This is a topic of active research.

That means we have to look farther back to find a time that might have been as warm as today.

The last glacial episode lasted nearly 100,000 years. There is no evidence that long-term global temperatures reached the preindustrial baseline anytime during that period.

If we look even farther back, to the previous interglacial period, which peaked around 125,000 years ago, we do find evidence of warmer temperatures. The evidence suggests the long-term average temperature was probably no more than 1.5 C (2.7 F) above preindustrial levels – not much more than the current global warming level.

Now what?

Without rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth is currently on course to reach temperatures of roughly 3 C (5.4 F) above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, and possibly quite a bit higher.

At that point, we would need to look back millions of years to find a climate state with temperatures as hot. That would take us back to the previous geologic epoch, the Pliocene, when the Earth’s climate was a distant relative of the one that sustained the rise of agriculture and civilization.

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It is difficult to know what to say other than one hopes that Governments and country leaders recognise the situation and DO SOMETHING!

As Dr. Michael Mann put it in the last issue of The Humanist: “The only obstacles aren’t the laws of physics, but the flaws in our politics.“

I have a son and a daughter in their early 50’s and a grandson who is 12. They, along with millions of other younger people, need action now.

Please!