Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
As promised, last night I curled up with James Lovelock’s The Revenge Of Gaia instead of watching Live Earth. I’m pretty sure it was a much better use of my time.
Lovelock wrote the book when he was in his mid-eighties, and it’s a powerful mixture of passion, knowledge, experience and elegiac reflection. The book discusses the threat and evidence of global warming, and ways in which its effects could be ameliorated.
What I hadn’t realised until last night was that he has parted ways with many of his fellow environmentalists by stating that nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels. He makes a good case in the book for saying that nuclear energy has been unfairly demonised, and it has certainly got me thinking about it. He has gone on record as offering:
…to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land; it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and fit safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home. It would be a waste not to use it. More important, it would be no danger to me, my family or the wildlife.
He examines the evidence of how and why the nuclear energy industry has become demonised over the years. As an example, he quotes a report issued in 2000 by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). Interestingly, I see from the report that the average yearly natural background radiation is 2.4 millisieverts per caput (person), and "ranges from 1-10 mSv, depending on circumstances at particular locations, with sizeable population also at 10-20 mSv". Diagnostic medical examinations turn out to be 0.4 mSv per caput per year. Against these figures, the equivalent amount caused by the Chernobyl accident (0.002 mSv) or nuclear power production (0.0002 mSv) seem comfortably low. Lovelock puts these conclusions in a form that makes it even clearer:
From the conclusions we could reasonably expect that the consequences of exposing the entire population of Europe to ten millisieverts of radiation, about as much as would come from 100 chest X-rays, would be 400,000 deaths.
Put like this it seems a terrible risk, but it is an amazingly naive way of presenting the facts. What matters is not whether we die but when we die. If the 400,000 were to die the week after the irradiation it would indeed be terrible, but what if instead they lived out their normal lifespans but died a week earlier than expected? The facts of radiation biology are that ten millisieverts of radiation reduces human lifespan by about four days, a much less emotive conclusion. Using the same calculations, the exposure of all those living in Northern Europe to Chernobyl’s radiation on average reduces their lifespan by one to three hours. For comparison, a life-long smoker will lose seven years of life.
No wonder the media and the anti-nuclear activists prefer to talk of the risk of cancer death. It makes a better story than the loss of a few hours of life expectation. If a lie is defined as a statement that purposefully intends to deceive, the persistent repetition of the huge Chernobyl death toll is a powerful lie.
It’s true that the media have stated high figures as the eventual death toll from Chernobyl (e.g. this BBC story that claims 200,000), but the World Health Organisation has found, in examining the health of those in the area polluted by the plume from Chernobyl fourteen and nineteen years after the accident, evidence of only forty-five and seventy-five people, respectively, who had died as a result. And the Chernobyl Forum has found that while 600,000 people received high levels of exposure as a result of the accident, the eventual death toll directly attributable to Chernobyl is likely to be only "several thousand".
As I say, much to think about. One can play a "what if" game here. The goal of producing power by nuclear energy is to do so by the process of nuclear fusion, rather than nuclear fission. The former is much more efficient, and hence produces less waste. But fusion is also much more difficult to achieve. All operational power plants today use the more wasteful process of nuclear fission. While experimental nuclear fusion reactors exist (e.g. the Tokomak), they are at least 20 years, and possibly a century away, from being put into production. The "what if" comes in wondering where we might have been in our struggle to reduce carbon dioxide emissions if the whole nuclear energy industry had not been so consistently demonised for so many years.
Lovelock closes his book with an elegiac chapter: Beyond The Terminus. He states that he is not a pessimist, but is increasingly seeing the doom-laden predictions of the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, in his book Our Final Century as being prescient:
…for now the evidence coming in from the watchers around the world brings news of an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive. We have made this appalling mess of the planet and mostly with rampant liberal good intentions. Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these feeble offerings would be accepted by Gaia as an appropriate and affordable sacrifice. We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think that an apology is enough. We are part of the Gaian family, and valued as such, but until we stop acting as if human welfare was all that mattered, and was the excuse for our bad behaviour, all talk of further development of any kind is unacceptable.
Let me be quite clear, Lovelock does not think that the planet is doomed – Gaia is resilient, and that includes the life that is part of the system. What he is clearly worried about is the very real possibility that while human breeding pairs will survive, human civilisation is doomed. He sees a new Dark Age approaching, and proposes a means to lessen its impact:
One thing we can do to lessen the consequences of catastrophe is to write a guidebook for our survivors to help them rebuild civilisation without repeating too many of our mistakes. I have long thought that a proper gift for our children and grandchildren is an accurate record of all that we know about the present and past environment.
…
No such book exists. For most of us, what we know of the Earth comes from books and television programmes that present either the single-minded view of a specialist or persuasion from a talented lobbyist. We live in adversarial, not thoughtful, times and tend to hear only the arguments of each of the special-interest groups.
…
Scan the shelves of a bookshop or a public library for a book that clearly explains the present condition and how it happened. You will not find it. The books that are there are about the evanescent things of today. Well-written, entertaining, or informative they may be but almost all of them are in the current context. They take so much for granted and forget how hard won was the scientific knowledge that gave us the comfortable and safe life we enjoy. We are so ignorant of those individual acts of genius that established civilization that we now give equal place on our bookshelves to the extravagance of astrology, creationism and homeopathy. Books on these subjects at first entertained us or titillated our hypochondria. We now take them seriously and treat them as if they were reporting facts.
Imagine the survivors of a failed civilization. Imagine them trying to cope with a cholera epidemic using knowledge gathered from a tattered book on alternative medicine. Yet in the debris such a book would be more likely to have survived and be readable than a medical text.
What Lovelock calls for is, in effect, the creation of a Bible of science – printed on durable paper with long-lasting print – for any kind of medium that requires a computer and electricity to read it would be useless.
What we need is a book of knowledge written so well as to constitute literature in its own right. Something for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and of us – a manual for living well and for survival.The quality of its writing must be such that it would serve for pleasure, for devotional reading, as a source of facts and even as a primary school text. It would range from simple things such as how to light a fire, to our place in the solar system and the universe. It would be a primer of philosophy and science – it would provide a top-down look at the Earth and us. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of medicine, including the circulation of the blood, the role of the organs. The discovery that bacteria and viruses caused infection diseases is relatively recent; imagine the consequences if such knowledge was lost. In its time the Bible set the constraints for behaviour and for health. We need a new book like the Bible that would serve in the same way but acknowledge science. It would explain properties like temperature, the meaning of their scales of measurement and how to measure them. It would list the periodic table of the elements. It would give an account of the air, the rocks, and the oceans. It would give the schoolchildren of today a proper understanding of our civilization and of the planet it occupies. It would inform them at an age when their minds were most receptive and give them facts they would remember for a lifetime. It would also be the survival manual for our successors. It would help bring science part as part of our culture and be an inheritance Whatever else may be wrong with science, it still provides the best explanation we have of the material world.
Like Lovelock, I would love to see such a book. Parts of it do exist, scattered over thousands of other works, but I fear, like Lovelock, that in the aftermath, their small voices will be drowned out by the roar of the detritus of pseudoscience and celebrity culture.
Speaking of celebrity culture, I see that the BBC News web page reporting on Live Earth has one of those instant Vote questions. The question sums up for me the feeling that we are well and truly fucked because of the breathtakingly inane way it’s phrased. If that’s indicative of of our capability to save civilisation, then we might as well kiss our arses goodbye.
Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal.
A little while back, I mentioned that the topic of how the mind and consciousness comes about fascinates me. I’ve just read three books on this in quick succession, and I highly recommend all of them.
First up is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. As I said then, it’s an absolute joy of a book. He examines, with a not inconsiderable wit, how people react to their lives. The opening sentence reads: "Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet and split infinitives". He goes on to explain the little-known fact that psychologists (he is one) also take a vow, and that is to publish, at some point in their professional lives, a book that contains the sentence: "The human being is the only animal that…".
Stumbling On Happiness is Gilbert’s stab at completing the psychologists’ sentence, and he does it with: "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future". As he says:
"Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer holiday, or turns down a toffee apple because it already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.
He goes on to illustrate the evidence for his thesis with both experimental data and illuminating vignettes on how we perceive, and attempt to create, the state of happiness.
Next up is Richard Wiseman’s Quirkology, subtitled "the curious science of everyday lives". Again, lots of entertaining references to actual research that has thrown up surprising facts about the ways in which people behave. He closes the book with a neat piece of metaresearch: he asked people to rate factoids derived from the studies described in the book to identify those factoids that were most likely to provoke good conversation at dinner parties. He lists the resulting "top ten". My two favourites are:
As you see, the book lives up to its title, but in with all the bizarre research are some fascinating findings about the way we behave. One negative – there is no index, which means that you will be frustrated trying to track down that precise reference to the Thirteen Club. You’ll have to trawl through the footnotes instead.
Lastly, Chris Frith’s Making Up The Mind, subtitled "how the brain creates our mental world". Frith is a professor in neuropsychology. Like Gilbert and Wisemen, he is an entertaining writer, with the knack of explaining things well. He uses the device of having an imaginary professor of English comment on what he states, and the resulting dialogue is often wry and ironic. He makes the point that his book is not actually a theory of consciousness, instead:
…rather than writing about consciousness, I have emphasized how much my brain knows and does without my being aware of it. My brain makes me afraid of things that I am not aware of seeing and can control complex limb movements without my knowing what I am doing. There seems very little left for consciousness to do. So, rather than asking how subjective experience can arise for activity in neurons, I ask the question, "What is consciousness for?" Or more particularly, "Why does my brain make me experience myself as a free agent?" My assumption is that we get some advantage from experiencing ourselves as free agents. So the question is: "What is this advantage?" My answer is, for the moment, pure speculation.
As I say, all three books are well worth reading. Sometimes you come across the same data being analysed by more than one of the authors, and that either illuminates a slightly different facet, or reinforces the same conclusions that can be drawn. All three books have extensive footnotes and references to the original research material.
As a bonus, Gilbert’s book comes with a P.S. section which has further entertainment value in a Q & A with Professor Gilbert, a short biography, "why I write", and his top ten favourite electric guitarists. The Q&A is a particular joy. My favourites:
Would you like to live in the eternal now? No. I enjoy remembering the past and imagining the future. My ability to do these things is among nature’s greatest gifts to me, so why would I want to get rid of it? Anyone who wants to live in the moment should have been born a mosquito.
Do you think that we have lost some primal ignorance that would have kept us happy? No, no, no. Did I mention no? Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past.Dead wrong. Things are better today than at any time in human history. Our primal ignorance is what keeps us whacking each other over the head with sticks, and not what allows us to paint a Mona Lisa or to design a space shuttle. The ‘primal ignorance that keeps us happy’ gives rise to obesity and global warming, not antibiotics or the Magna Carta. If human kind flourishes rather than flounders over the next thousand years, it will be because we fully embraced learning and reason, and not because we surrendered to some fantasy about returning to a world that never really was.
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