On my last long weekend run I covered 11k and felt OK at the end of it. My plan for the coming week is to push it out by a further kilometre and thereafter to gradually increase the distance and the time spent running continuously. Looking at progress so far, I’m confident that I’ll manage the Edinburgh half-marathon next May and have entered it. My aim is to be at half-marathon fitness well before it, allowing for inevitable setbacks and for winter.
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Back in 2017, a visit to Audiology confirmed that I was losing some high-frequency hearing. I went back to Audiology this week for another test that they could match against my records. The loss has indeed spread further down the frequency range and the audiologist asked if I wanted to try hearing aids calibrated to boost the frequencies where I’m having difficulties. I agreed to a trial and I expect the hearing aids to be delivered at some point in the next few weeks.
It is a trial because it isn’t clear whether they will be effective in the situations where I have difficulties. All of this is free at the point of use, of course: NHS.
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I’ve written here off and on over the years about climate change and how it is the only game in town. This has been known for years. I’ve also written that I expect no mitigating actions to be taken until it is too late – arguably it is already too late. As I write, the impacts in the northern hemisphere are obvious and will only get worse. And it is linked to the other major issues of our time – biodiversity loss and pollution – as well as driving problems with food supply and population movements.
In my collection Coyote in the Corner I had the problem of reducing emissions solved by vampires largely wiping out humans. I’m writing sequel stories now, and one of my problems is that every time I calibrate a story for the latest analyses of climate change, I have to revise it six months later as more analysis comes in of the changes already locked into place – usually to make things worse.
In my teens, stories built around various apocalypses used to be either the very British novels of John Wyndham or set in the far future. It seems odd to watch it happening on the news and encounter so many people, not all of whom are American, still denying what is happening. It has been a feature of the past few years, despite no lesser person that Margaret Thatcher warning of what was coming, that governments have found all sorts of ways to ignore what the science was saying and to water down reports and predictions.
All the time, various optimists have been saying that there was still time to mitigate at least some of the impacts we can expect. All of those optimists ignored the inertia in the system and tacitly put more faith in governments and their willingness to cooperate towards necessary changes than justified. My view has been for a decade or more that the necessary changes will not happen at scale, at pace or in time. Nothing I see now changes my mind on that, and there are no magic hearing aids to distribute to politicians who default to expedient deafness.
What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.
…
[T}he environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.
*Answer at the end
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A core notion in writing fiction, especially SFF genre fiction, is ‘world building.’ A lot is said about it, but the aim is to create a consistent context for the action, because readers will usually suspend disbelief if everything hangs together, no matter how ‘out there’ the story goes. The same idea crops up in all sorts of contexts, and it swims in the same pond as notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts in the sense articulated by Thomas Khun.
Paradigms and associated fictions have been on display this week in the strange Tory ‘leadership’ debate here in the UK, a debate which is marked by an utter lack of anything resembling leadership from candidates who have ‘succeeded’ so far by craven pusillanimity, patronage and pretence.
That debate is positioned according to a world view that has been with us for several decades, the one that tests everything against a social and economic paradigm. Within that paradigm, economic analyses dominate and climate is discussed, if at all, by reference to the ‘affordability’ of a pledge of ‘Net Zero by 2050.’ This is the language and conceptual structure of Oxford PPEs who seem to be incapable of grasping that Net Zero is nonsense and 2050 will be far, far too late. They do not get that all of their favoured policy concepts and arguments are contingent in the face of an existential threat that is impacting us now, and they have not the first idea of how to react to what is to come.
One of the more obvious perpetrators of this nonsense in that debate was Kemi Badenoch whose (failed) campaign was masterminded by Michael Gove, whose opinion on listening to experts is a matter of public record. She was not alone in her nonsense, just the most visible. Notably, discussion by Liz Truss of ‘economic growth’ and the forthcoming recession lacks any understanding at all of international factors degrading the already weakened UK economy and how global catastrophe will deliver the coup de grace.
At least during Covid some initial lip service was paid to ‘following the science.’ Not so now.
There is some intelligent discussion on issues ignored by political discourse led by Rory Stewart here from around 2’23” :
I should add that I haven’t heard much on the realities of this from Labour either. Their position is built entirely around responses to the talking points of British politics so far as I can see.
Perhaps here in the UK the debate will at last have reached a turning point with the shock of fires in London and elsewhere after just 1 day of 40° (104°F) heat. I’m not optimistic, but I do get the sense that public opinion is shifting ahead of political action. When lockdown first happened in March 2020, there wasn’t a lot of resistance because we’d all seen what was happening in Italy and expected it. Will the same be true for the much more stringent measures necessary to mitigate imminent disaster? I’d like to think so, but I’m pessimistic.
I’m writing a novel just now which posits that after human depopulation emissions stop completely (it is in the same world as Coyote in the Corner). I had to come up with a plausible scenario for the world as it would be circa 2050. To do this, I used consensus scientific opinion but looked at the edge cases and uncertainties to ramp up the world building. Over the time I’ve been writing it, I have twice had to go back and recalibrate for more severe climate impacts. As the edge cases and worse-case scenarios develop and as the UK and Europe reach those worse cases decades ahead of forecast, I’m going to have to go back again.
*It was said by Margaret Thatcher at the UN General Assembly, 8 November 1989. There are a lot of things to be said about Margaret Thatcher, and the rest of the speech has makes questionable assertions, but she was a chemist and understood the threat of Global Warming in ways that her political descendants do not.
Regular readers will know that throughout my Covid Diary I would occasionally say that the pandemic was bad but the real problem is global heating. Last November (Last Orders Please) I wrote:
I may be wrong – I hope I am – and the technical material that will flow from the conference may have actual operational value, but I can’t see the COP26 making the slightest difference once the speeches have been made and the caravans have moved on to the next venue and the next photo-op and next worthy words; all the sound and fury signifying nothing.
There is an old science-fiction short-story – I think Brian Aldiss’s Last Orders – that has it’s protagonist calling in for a final pint before the starships evacuating the Earth leave for a new home. The protagonist gets chatting and having ‘just one more’ before he has to go, and is still drinking and chatting and ordering another drink as the last starship leaves. That’s where we are right now: drink up, ladies and gentlemen – time to go home.
I haven’t written much about it here since then because there’s a risk of sounding like a stuck record, and I’m not sure what else to say, but even the densest of our politicians and corporate cheerleaders must recognise that shit has got real now, and has done well before the supposed 1.5° warming limit – a target that will not now be met due to concerted and deliberate political and industry inaction over decades. You do wonder if people who have invested so much in denying physics will have the wit to do anything now that the UK has had it’s hottest day on record and fires were burning from London to Yorkshire (and yes, that’s a Brit-centric perspective – I’ll broaden it out in a future post).
I was at a family funeral in Yorkshire on Monday, and got caught up in some of the chaos on the way home as overhead cables on the East Coast mainline failed. LNER got me home, and worked hard in difficult circumstances to do that, but it was an acute reminder that an infrastructure designed for a temperate Atlantic climate will fail when that climate changes. And it isn’t just trains, wildfires and melting roads and airport runways: there were significant failures of the digital infrastructure too when datacentres in the London area failed in the heat, bringing down cloud services. And that’s before issues of food and water security and population movements.
But the fires and infrastructure failures are symptoms only: the issues are systemic, structural and global. I’ll have more to write, but for now I’ll just leave here something I put on Twitter yesterday:
Interesting from The @guardian but also, I think wrong in the long run – Net Zero has become a political construct; the policy and strategies should focus on achieving *Actual* Zero, or we’ll keep going round in political and definitional spirals.https://t.co/rYKK9jipFH
Today featured two triumphs – or at least they seemed that way to me. The first was that, after several years of wearing XL sized shirts, I picked a shirt out of the wardrobe this morning sized L and it fitted me with room to spare. That pleased me a lot. Since my last diabetes update two days ago, I’ve lost a further half kilo (1.3 lb to North Americans.)
The second triumph was fixing a problem with a typewriter that’s been bugging me for a week – an AEG Olympia Traveller Deluxe S, made sometime in the 1980s I think. Everything worked fine except the letter ‘a’ which wasn’t striking cleanly. It is now. That means that I now have three working typewriters and one more that needs some work. Of course, with four typewriters in the shed, I absolutely am not keeping my eyes open in charity shops and online for more. Nor would I like it to be generally known that I am interested in typewriters so that people might find them and give them to me (especially ultra-portables in reasonable condition*.) Oh no. That would be silly.
We value “naturalness” so highly that in some places we are even willing to hurt and kill animals to protect it. When non-native animals are killed simply because they “don’t belong” and not because they are clearly causing some measurable harm, we have decided that erasing the taint of the human is more important than the lives of animals – who, lest we forget, have no conception that they are in the “wrong” place.
To make good environmental decisions, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence, on turning back time or freezing the non-human world in amber. We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory. Given that we actively use at least half of Earth’s land for our own ends and actively manage many of our protected areas, a gardening metaphor seems right. But our global garden is, and should be, rambunctious because we must always leave room for the autonomy of non-humans. We shouldn’t seek to carefully control every plant and animal on the planet. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.
Rejecting the human/nature dichotomy doesn’t mean condoning all human actions because, as animals, everything we do is “natural”. Using “natural” as a substitute for “good” is the problem here, not the solution. Many human actions have been bad for us, bad for other species, bad all around. As a collective, we humans have clearly taken more than our fair share of space, water and other resources. But we don’t fix that by exiling ourselves from the rest of Earth’s species and building a wall between us. We fix that through repairing the systems by which we make our living, by learning – or re-learning – better, positive relationships with the species with which we share Earth.
I agree with that. She also argues that:
Our concepts of nature and wilderness sadly limit the solutions that we can imagine. Perhaps because of the bluntly extractive tendencies of their ancestors, it remains very difficult for many people with primarily European ancestry to wrap their minds around even the idea of a positive, mutually beneficial relationship with other species. Thus they can see only two conceptual options: destruction of nature by humans or separation of humans from nature. To save nature, we must exile ourselves from it – like latter-day Adams and Eves leaving Eden in shame after despoiling it.
I think there’s a straw man lurking there, but agree with her basic point.
I watched Marvel’s The Eternals which I wanted to enjoy, but instead stuck with to the end in a state of appalled fascination. The talented cast were wasted on a wooden script – a script as wooden as a log cabin in a redwood forest: so wooden that I had to check I wasn’t watching a DC film.
I also watched the final episode of The Expanse, which wrapped the programme up nicely and left me wanting more. I continue to enjoy Blade Runner : Black Lotus.
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*Ultra-portable models include:
Hermes Baby/ Hermes Baby Rocket
Empire Aristocrat
Adler Tippa/Gossen Tippa
Remington Travel Riter
Groma Kalibri
Princess 300
Smith-Corona Skyriter
Smith-Corona Zephyr
Antares Parva
Olympia SF
If anyone in the UK spots one of these going cheap … (the clue is in the name, they are usually surprisingly small and specifically designed for travelling rather than sitting on desks.) Generally speaking, these are all overpriced online, priced up for a collectors market that doesn’t really exist in the UK. Asking a premium price for a fully-refurbished machine is one thing, but for an eBay/charity shop special is something else.
I was chatting with a neighbour earlier, and he asked an interesting question that is harder to answer than you might think. He asked me what I understood by ‘rewilding.’ The answer that I came up with distinguished rewilding from mere abandonment. I said that, to me, rewilding means a form of land management with a particular end in mind – essentially recreating an ecological balance with a focus on native species.
I was happy enough with that as an off-the-cuff answer, but then I went for a 10K/6m walk and thought about it some more.
Linguistically, I’m accustomed to hearing ‘rewilding’ used as an active verb – as something that is consciously done to or in an environment. I suppose it could also be used reflexively – the land is in the process of rewilding itself, for example – but I tend to think of that via a process/metaphor of reclamation. That might just be because of my age: it’s the kind of approach used in 1975 by Richard Mabey in The Unofficial Countryside. I don’t think this is semantic hair splitting. My neighbour talked about the period following the retreat of the ice at the end of the last ice age as a form of rewilding, and that is obviously correct on one level. But if we were simply to abandon parts of Scotland for nature to reclaim, for example, the Highlands would be left with a legacy of commercial forestry and invasive species (such as the ubiquitous rhododendron.) It would certainly get wild, but not, I think, in the usual sense of ‘rewilding.’ Of course, there are definitional issues with ‘invasive species’ – some of them have been here a very long time – but the general principle is clear enough, I think.
For me, a rewilded Scotland would not just be about the headline reintroduction of the wolf, the lynx and the beaver, but also about encouraging the growth of Scots Pine, Alder, Aspen, Birch and the Mountain Ash (Rowan), which in turn would attract insects and birds and thus food for apex predators (bird diversity in Scotland is at catastrophically low levels.) In short, I’d be looking to trigger a trophic cascade in the same way that the reappearance of a family of wolves triggered in Yellowstone.
By the way, for those of you who have read Coyote in the Corner, the idea for the Gaia Cascade came from the trophic cascade in Yellowstone. If you haven’t yet read Coyote in the Corner, it is easily available on Amazon and I’ve helpfully provided a link in the immediately preceding sentence.
However.
All of that is in the realm of fantasy if other issues aren’t addressed. Chief amongst those is our relationship with the planet and the horrible things that humans do to a landscape. Dumping of raw sewage into watercourses by profiteering water companies is a recent example here, but it’s only one example amongst many. Go to any beauty spot in Scotland and you will find cars and campervans spilling out of the carpark and SUVs ripping up verges with their tyres. There will be sandwich packets and chocolate wrappers and drinks cans (and face masks) all over the ground. Take a standard path up any Munro within easy distance of the central belt and you’re likely to be walking up an eroded trench formed by the passage of thousands of vibram-soled boots. Our oceans are filling with plastics and emptying of fish. The world’s highest mountains are littered with abandoned tents and equipment and the abandoned bodies of unfortunate climbers.
Sorry: I’m going off on one 🙂
The point I’m getting to is that ‘rewilding’ takes us into all sorts of areas of ethics and public policy that ought to be coherent but aren’t. Restoring ecological balance and triggering a trophic cascade is about more than a few beavers and red kites, it’s about how we approach everything.’ And yes, there’s a link to climate change through the restoration of peat bogs, and reversal of deforestion caused first by man and then by unpredated herbivores. This isn’t about chasing a myth of Eden, it’s fundamental to long-term survival as a species.
As I said, an interesting question that’s harder to answer than you might immediately imagine.
Here’s a 20-minute TED talk by Alan Watson that covers some of the basics in a Scottish context. I note he talks mainly about restoration rather than rewilding.
I seem to be emerging from a really bad few days – a combination of the sudden switch to a low-carb diet, the Covid booster, and a UTI that really took it out of me. I’m feeling more human today, but not yet at anything like ‘normal’. I haven’t had confirmation yet, but I suspect that changes in sugar levels caused by my kidneys adjusting to a low-carb diet provided a perfect growth medium for the UTI, and the consequence has been two days of shivering, wrapping myself up, dozing a lot, sleeping badly and generally feeling crappy. I thought I might get some reading done, but I keep getting through only half-a-dozen paragraphs before dozing off. Plus, my enjoyment of The Mask of Dimitrios has been spoiled by the protagonist suddenly acting like a dick for no obvious reason and inconsistently with his character up to that point.
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Reflecting on COP26, the optimism from politicians seems to be based on a series of nudges towards doing the right thing. Meantime, the figures are skewed by inherent problems. For whatever reason, countries are under-reporting their emissions (we know this from satellite data), and even if the data were scrupulously precise, my understanding is that marine and military emissions figures are omitted anyway.
Just over a year ago, I wrote here that I’m not generally given to catastrophism, but it’s hard not to harken to its siren call. It isn’t just looking at what’s happening in the Pacific North West right now, it’s looking at the numbers and reading what the scientists closest to the ground are saying. And I’m not interested in political reassurances based on incomplete, skewed data, especially if the climate sensitivity modelling turns out to be way understated and tipping points into permanent, large-scale transitions have been overestimated. I’m 62 now, and the only question is just how bad it’s going to get in my lifetime, let alone my children’s lifetimes, even if we took all the steps necessary now to cut emissions..
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