Matt Ridley's Blog, page 17

The mysterious cycles of ice ages

An expanded version of my recent Times column on ice ages:

Record cold in America has brought temperatures as low as minus 44C in North Dakota, frozen sharks in Massachusetts and iguanas falling from trees in Florida. Al Gore blames global warming, citing one scientist to the effect that this is “exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis”. Others beg to differ: Kevin Trenberth, of America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research, insists that “winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change”.

Forty-five years ago a run of cold winters caused a “global cooling” scare. “A global deterioration of the climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilised mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon,” read a letter to President Nixon in 1972 from two scientists reporting the views of 42 “top” colleagues. “The cooling has natural causes and falls within the rank of the processes which caused the last ice age.” The administration replied that it was “seized of the matter”.

In the years that followed, newspapers, magazines and television documentaries rushed to sensationalise the coming ice age. The CIA reported a “growing consensus among leading climatologists that the world is undergoing a cooling trend”. The broadcaster Magnus Magnusson pronounced on a BBC Horizon episode that “unless we learn otherwise, it will be prudent to suppose that the next ice age could begin to bite at any time”.

Newsweek ran a cover story that read, in part: “The central fact is that, after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

This alarm about global cooling has largely been forgotten in the age of global warming, but it has not entirely gone away. Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University has suggested that a quiescent sun presages another Little Ice Age like that of 1300-1850. I’m not persuaded. Yet the argument that the world is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age after 10,000 years of balmy warmth is in essence true. Most interglacial periods, or times without large ice sheets, last about that long, and ice cores from Greenland show that each of the past three millennia was cooler than the one before.

However, those ice cores, and others from Antarctica, can now put our minds to rest. They reveal that interglacials start abruptly with sudden and rapid warming but end gradually with many thousands of years of slow and erratic cooling. They have also begun to clarify the cause. It is a story that reminds us how vulnerable our civilisation is. If we aspire to keep the show on the road for another 10,000 years, we will have to understand ice ages.The oldest explanation for the coming and going of ice was based on carbon dioxide. In 1895 the Swede Svante Arrhenius, one of the scientists who first championed the greenhouse theory, suggested that the ice retreated because carbon dioxide levels rose, and advanced because they fell. If this were true, he thought, then industrial emissions could head off the next ice age.

Burning coal, Arrhenius said, was therefore a good thing: “By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates.”

There is indeed a correlation in the ice cores between temperature and carbon dioxide. There is less CO2 in the air when the world is colder and more when it is warmer. An ice core from Vostok in Antarctica found in the late 1990s that CO2 is in lock-step with temperature -- more CO2, warmer; less CO2, colder. As Al Gore put it sarcastically in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, looking at the Vostok graphs: “Did they ever fit together? Most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” So Arrhenius was right? Is CO2 level the driver of ice ages?

Well, not so fast. Inconveniently, the correlation implies causation the wrong way round: at the end of an interglacial, such as the Eemian period, over 100,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels remain high for many thousands of years while temperature fell steadily. Eventually CO2 followed temperature downward. Here is a chart showing that. If carbon dioxide was a powerful cause, it would not show such a pattern. The world could not cool down while CO2 remained high.

In any case, what causes the carbon dioxide levels to rise and fall? In 1990 the oceanographer John Martin came up with an ingenious explanation. During ice ages, there is lots of dust blowing around the world, because the continents are dry and glaciers are grinding rocks. Some of that dust falls in the ocean, where its iron-rich composition fertilizes plankton blooms, whose increased photosynthesis draws down the carbon dioxide from the air. When the dust stops falling, the plankton blooms fail and the carbon dioxide levels rise, warming the planet again.

Neat. But almost certainly too simplistic. We now know, from Antarctic ice cores, that in each interglacial, rapid warming began when CO2 levels were very low. Temperature and carbon dioxide rise together, and there is no evidence for a pulse of CO2 before any warming starts, if anything the reverse. Well, all right, said scientists, but carbon dioxide is a feedback factor – an amplifier. Something else starts the warming, but carbon dioxide reinforces it. Yet the ice cores show that in each interglacial cooling returned when CO2 levels were very high and they remained high for tens of thousands of years as the cooling continued. Even as a feedback, carbon dioxide looks feeble.

Here is an essay by Willis Eschenbach discussing this issue. He comes to five conclusions as to why CO2 cannot be the main driver and why the feedback effect is probably small:

The correspondence with log(CO2) is slightly worse than that with CO2. The CO2 change is about what we’d expect from oceanic degassing. CO2 lags temperature in the record. Temperature Granger-causes CO2, not the other way round. And (proof by contradiction) IF the CO2 were controlling temperature the climate sensitivity would be seven degrees per doubling, for which there is no evidence.

Now, the standard response from AGW supporters is that the CO2, when it comes along, is some kind of positive feedback that makes the temperature rise more than it would be otherwise. Is this possible? I would say sure, it’s possible … but that we have no evidence that that is the case. In fact, the changes in CO2 at the end of the last ice age argue that there is no such feedback. You can see in Figure 1 that the temperatures rise and then stabilize, while the CO2 keeps on rising. The same is shown in more detail in the Greenland ice core data, where it is clear that the temperature fell slightly while the CO2 continued to rise.

As I said, this does not negate the possibility that CO2 played a small part. Further inquiry into that angle is not encouraging, however. If we assume that the CO2 is giving 3° per doubling of warming per the IPCC hypothesis, then the problem is that raises the rate of thermal outgassing up to 17 ppmv per degree of warming instead of 15 ppmv. This is in the wrong direction, given that the cited value in the literature is lower at 12.5 ppmv

So what does cause ice ages to come and go?

A Serbian scientist named Milutin Milankovich, writing in 1941, published a lengthy book  called “Canon of Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the Ice Ages”. He argued that ice ages and interglacials were caused by changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun. These changes, known as eccentricity, obliquity and precession, sometimes combined to increase the relative warmth of northern hemisphere summers, melting ice caps in North America and Eurasia and spreading warmth worldwide. This, said Milankovich, was “the hitherto missing link between celestial mechanics and geology”.The northern hemisphere matters because no matter how warm the southern summer gets, Antarctica, being at much higher latitude, stays cold and (reflective) white.

In 1976 Nicholas Shackleton, a Cambridge physicist, and his colleagues published a paper called “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit – Pacemaker of the Ice Ages” with evidence from deep-sea cores of cycles in the warming and cooling of the Earth over the past half million years which fitted Milankovich’s orbital wobbles.

In a brilliant insight, Shackleton had realised that sediments taken from the ocean floor and analysed for different isotopes of oxygen could serve as a proxy for climate. The lighter isotopes of oxygen evaporated more readily from the sea, and therefore were more likely to fall as snow and get stuck on ice caps in cold periods, returning to the sea when the ice melted. So the relative concentration of the lighter isotopes in sea-floor sediments were a sort of thermometer.

Precession, which decides whether the Earth is closer to the sun in July or in January, is on a 23,000-year cycle; obliquity, which decides how tilted the axis of the Earth is and therefore how warm the summer is, is on a 41,000-year cycle; and eccentricity, which decides how rounded or elongated the Earth’s orbit is and therefore how close to the sun the planet gets, is on a 100,000-year cycle. When these combine to make a “great summer” in the north, the ice caps shrink.

Game, set and match to Milankovich? Not quite. The Antarctic ice cores, going back 800,000 years, then revealed that there were some great summers when the Milankovich wobbles should have produced an interglacial warming, but did not. To explain these “missing interglacials”, a recent paper in Geoscience Frontiers by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer argues we need carbon dioxide back on the stage, not as a greenhouse gas but as plant food.

The argument goes like this. Colder oceans evaporate less moisture and rainfall decreases. At the depth of the last ice age, Africa suffered long mega-droughts; only small pockets of rainforest remained. Crucially, the longer an ice age lasts, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the cold oceans. When the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drops below 200 parts per million (0.02 per cent), plants struggle to grow at all, especially at high altitudes. Deserts expand. Dust storms grow more frequent and larger. In the Antarctic ice cores, dust increased markedly whenever carbon dioxide levels got below 200 ppm. The dust would have begun to accumulate on the ice caps, especially those of Eurasia and North America, which were close to deserts. Next time a Milankovich great summer came along, and the ice caps began to melt, the ice would have grown dirtier and dirtier, years of deposited dust coming together as the ice shrank. The darker ice would have absorbed more heat from the sun and a runaway process of collapsing ice caps would have begun.

Here is an extract from the paper:

A more logical explanation for the inverse correlation between dust and CO2can be seen through the effect that CO2 concentrations have on plant life.  also shows that CO2 levels during each ice-age came all the way down to 190–180 ppm, and that is approaching dangerously low levels for C3 photosynthesis-pathway plant life. CO2 is a vital component of the atmosphere because it is an essential plant food, and without CO2 all plants die. In her comprehensive analysis of plant responses to reduced CO2 concentrations, Gerhart says of this fundamental issue:

It is clear that modern C3 plant genotypes grown at low CO2 (180–200 ppm) exhibit severe reductions in photosynthesis, survival, growth, and reproduction … Such findings beg the question of how glacial plants survived during low CO2 periods … Studies have shown that the average biomass production of modern C3 plants is reduced by approximately 50% when grown at low (180–220 ppm) CO2, when other conditions are optimal … (The abortion of all flower buds) suggested that 150 ppm CO2 may be near the threshold for successful completion of the life cycle in some C3 species ( Section II).

It is clear that a number of plant species would have been under considerable stress when world CO2 concentrations reduced to 200 or 190 ppm during the glacial maximum, especially if moisture levels in those regions were low (). And palaeontological discoveries at the La Brea tar pits in southern California have confirmed this, where oxygen and carbon isotopic analysis of preserved juniperus wood dating from 50 kyr ago through to the Holocene interglacial has shown that: ‘glacial trees were undergoing carbon starvation’ (). And yet these stresses and biomass reductions do not appear to become lethal until CO2 concentrations reach 150 ppm, which the glacial maximums did not achieve - unless we add altitude and reducing CO2 partial pressures into the equation.

All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants. Agriculture was probably impossible before then, and without its hugely expanded energy supply, none of the subsequent flowering of human culture would have happened.

That interglacial will end. Today the northern summer sunshine is again slightly weaker than the southern. In a few tens of thousands of years, our descendants will probably be struggling with volatile weather, dust storms and air that cannot support many crops. But that is a very long way off, and by then technology should be more advanced, unless we prevent it developing. The key will be energy. With plentiful and cheap energy our successors could thrive even in a future ice age, growing crops, watering deserts, maintaining rainforests and even melting ice caps.

Artificial intelligence will be a symbiosis, not a replacement

My Times column on AI and jobs:

 

In the early 1960s, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there was a disagreement about what computers would achieve. One faction, led by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, championed “artificial intelligence”, believing that computers would gradually replace human beings. The other, led by Norbert Wiener and JCR Licklider, the man who oversaw the creation of the internet’s precursor, championed “human-computer symbiosis”, believing that computers would augment human beings.

“Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in co-operative interaction between men and electronic computers,” wrote Licklider in a crucial essay published in 1960. “It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership.” In his arresting analogy, computers would be to us as fig wasps are to fig trees: symbiotic partners.

Looking around us, Licklider was right. Augmentation rather than replacement triumphed, says the historian Walter Isaacson in his 2014 book The Innovators, especially after it was taken up by the hackers, hobbyists and hippies of the west coast. By 1968, at what came to be known as the “Mother of All Demos”, the visionaries Stewart Brand and Douglas Engelbart were demonstrating to an audience in San Francisco such symbiotic concepts as the cursor and the mouse.

We are in the middle of a hype cycle about AI and I think Licklider will be right this time too. The AIs we use, though we do not call them that, are augmenting, not replacing, people. My smartphone recognises the faces of my family, adds to maps the names of restaurants or theatres it spots in my diary, re-routes me around traffic congestion: it is my symbiont, not my nemesis. Note that AI is assisting the lives of consumers even more than those of producers.

The same symbiosis is true of the AIs coming in the near future. At a Microsoft lab I have watched experimental systems do in seconds that which takes a radiologist hours: delineate an organ on a series of scans, preparatory to cancer treatment. At Google’s Deepmind in London, algorithms are preparing to save the search engine company a fortune in energy bills by rethinking its electricity distribution system.

What about driverless cars? The more I have looked into this (and I sat on a select committee that produced a comprehensive report), the more convinced I am that in the foreseeable future we will gain huge amounts of symbiotic driver assistance and very little driver replacement, except in niches such as trams, tractors and trains. On congested urban streets and narrow rural lanes, driverless cars are a distant if not impossible dream.

Even on motorways, the transition from a driver at the wheel, heavily assisted by adaptive cruise control, automatic braking, lane discipline and so on, to a computer chauffeur is massively problematic. Imagine: you have not driven a car for months, you are inside one doing 70mph on the M6, dozing gently, when a snowstorm blinds the sensors and an electronic voice says: “I’m handing back control to you.” That is roughly what happened to two inexperienced Air France pilots with many hours of flying but most of it with the automatic pilot on, over the Atlantic in 2009. They crashed.

Even where automation has replaced human beings, it has increased employment through spillover effects: more productive workers can afford to buy more goods and services, which supplies more jobs to those providing them. The economist William Baumol identified that employment actually rises in low-skill occupations when high-skill ones are automated.

In a report published last month the Institute for Public Policy Research agrees that this has happened: “The evidence suggests that consumers have used their higher incomes to purchase relatively more services . . . low-skill service occupations (typically also low-tech) such as food service workers, cleaners, or recreational workers, have grown rapidly in recent decades.”

The IPPR thinks that this will continue with the next wave of AI: “There is likely to be tremendous potential for the productivity dividends of technological change to be redirected to the consumption of social goods and infrastructure, and expanding employment in the provision of these services . . . it is possible that technological change will also negatively impact on employment in services. But it is unlikely.” We have heard warnings of mass unemployment with every wave of automation since the threshing machine. In 1964 a US presidential committee of inquiry set up by Lyndon Johnson foresaw huge job losses because of “potentially unlimited output by systems of machines which will require little co-operation from human beings”.

However, the IPPR raises the prospect that AI will create more inequality, as the lowest-skill jobs and the highest-skill ones increase, while the middle-skill jobs decline: more managers being driven by more Uber drivers, but fewer taxi drivers and secretaries. Such job polarisation does show up in the statistics over the past two decades.

Yet it is the lawyers, professors and accountants whose jobs are under threat. Even if the jobs of carers and cleaners can be partly automated, I suspect that will increase the demand for their services. If, say, robots could do some of the work of looking after old people more cheaply, then people would be able to afford more carers to supply the rest of the need. The IPPR says that “the risk is therefore less mass joblessness and more the ‘paradox of plenty’. Technological change would make society richer in aggregate. However, capital-biased economic change would create a problem of distribution: those who can provide labour but do not own capital might have inadequate means of making a reasonable living.”

Here too history teaches a reassuring lesson. Automation has already shifted vast amounts of income from labour to capital, and how has society responded? By sharing the labour more equally. Consider, for example, the fact that Britain has very low unemployment right now. Yet because of shorter working hours, longer holidays, longer periods in education and longer retirement, the proportion of life that the average Briton will actually spend at work, as opposed to sleeping, consuming, learning, on holiday or in retirement, has shrunk dramatically, from about 25 per cent a century ago to about 10 per cent today. That is evidence of fairly sharing the benefits of automation. If the percentage falls to 7 per cent or 5 per cent thanks to further symbiosis between computers and people, then everybody can gain.

Why selecting intelligent babies won't happen

My Spectator article in the Christmas edition:

Christmas Day marks the birthday of one of the most gifted human beings ever born. His brilliance was of a supernoval intensity, but he was, by all accounts, very far from pleasant company. I refer to Isaac Newton.

Would you like your next child to have the intelligence of a Newton? It may not be long before this is a consumer choice, according to an ambitious new company founded in America a few months ago. Genomic Prediction initially plans to offer people who use in-vitro fertilisation the chance to identify and avoid embryos that would be likely to develop diabetes, late-life osteoporosis, schizophrenia and dwarfism. The key is the application of smart software to gigantic databases of genomic information from the population at large so as to spot dangerous combinations of gene variants. The founders also talk of being able to predict intelligence from genes, at least to some degree.

It is of course already common practice to screen embryos for terrible diseases, but only those simply caused by single genes: cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and so forth. The new idea is to extend this capability to disorders caused by the interaction of many genes, each of small effect: and that is most of them.

This is welcome and potentially ethical, but is it also, after many false starts, the beginning of the slippery slope to designer babies? No, it is not. If anything, the new knowledge will cause such a threat to dissolve.

It is true that intelligence is one of the most strongly heritable human traits, like height. In childhood, among people who get sufficient food and a reasonable education, genes account for about 40 per cent of the variation in IQ. Later in life this rises to more like 80 per cent. If this sounds puzzling, consider this friend of mine: left a bad school at 15, worked as a lorry driver for a big company, which spotted his intelligence and paid for him to attend a top university, where he got a first, rejoined the company and is now a global senior executive: his achievement at 45 better reflects his innate intelligence than his achievement at 15. As a child we don’t get to choose our environments, so clever kids often don’t get to read as many books or do as many mind-bending maths puzzles as they would like, while stupid children read more books and get more maths tutoring than they would if left to their own devices. By adulthood, we are choosing and modifying the life that suits us.

Hence it has always been possible selectively to breed for intelligence. Francis Galton in 1869 pointed out that just as it was easy to ‘obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations’.

However, human beings proved surprisingly unwilling to do this, and most governments eventually gave up trying to coerce them to do it, often with horrific eugenic policies. Then along came artificial insemination and test-tube babies, and surely now we would see a rush to have bright babies, by using sperm banks of Nobel Prize winners? But we did not. People used these technologies to have their own children, not those of Newton-like sperm donors. It is curious
how wrong most experts were about where the demand for IVF would come from: mainly from infertile couples wanting their own children, not fertile people wanting other people’s.

Strange as it may seem to academics, not everybody thinks intelligence matters all that much. They would rather have good- looking or athletic or happy or kind children than super-bright ones. And healthy comes first for almost everybody, so if there is any risk of poor health as a result of selecting an embryo for intelligence, people will, and for all we know very wisely, avoid it.

That is the first reason we will not see designer-intelligence any time soon: there will be little demand, especially if the procedure carries risks. For 50 years we have fretted about designer babies every time there is a new reproductive technology: mitochondrial donation and cloning were the most recent reason for dusting off the old canard.

The second reason is that the genes involved are too numerous and too feeble to be of any practical use. For a long time there was a puzzling gap between what studies of twins and adopted children said about the heritability of intelligence (that it was high), and what genetic surveys found (next to nothing). The first genome-wide association studies — or GWAS — came up empty when looking for gene variants associated with high IQ.

That has changed, thanks to much bigger sample sizes, such as the UK Biobank, which has looked inside the genomes of half a million people of a certain age. Thus, a recent study of nearly 80,000 people, published in May, found 40 new gene variants associated with intelligence. Another study  published in Nature of 1,238 extremely gifted intellectuals turned up more gene variants, including three in a gene called ADAM12.

But the more we find, the more ridiculous the idea of selecting for intelligence looks. Each variant seems to have a small effect, so you would need to fiddle with scores of genes to make a child bright, and fiddling with them might have unforeseen consequences for the health of the child. ADAM12, for example, is hard at work in every organ of the body.

As for the concern that genomic selection for intelligence, if it comes, will be available to the rich but not the poor — well, the same is true for good education. Opportunities to buy the best genes for your children will be dwarfed for decades to come by the ability of the rich to buy the best education for their children. If you must do something, do something about that instead: and preferably do so by making all education as good as the best, rather than as bad as the worst.

Finally, staring us in the face is a more obvious reason why intelligent designer babies will not happen soon and if they do, will not matter much. Individual intelligence is overrated. This is partly the well-worn argument that lots of other characteristics determine success, especially energy and diligence. We know people who are too bright to be decisive; or conversely achieve much in spite of their apparent disadvantages.

However, I mean something more than this. I mean that human achievements are always and everywhere collective. Every object and service you use is the product of different minds working together to invent or manage something that is way beyond the capacity of any individual mind. This is why central planning does not work. Ten million people eat lunch in London most days; how the heck they get what they want and when and where, given that a lot of them decide at the last minute, is baffling. Were there a London lunch commissioner to organise it, he would fail badly. Individual decisions integrated by price signals work, and work very well indeed.

And here is the key insight from evolution. Our brains grew big long, long before we achieved civilisation. We’ve had 1,200cc of intelligence for half a million years: even Neanderthals had huge brains. For 99 per cent of that time we were just another hard-pressed species, as bottle-nosed dolphins are today, and around 75,000 years ago we teeter-ed on the brink of extinction.

What changed was not some bright spark of a new gene being turned on, but that we began to exchange and specialise, to create collective intelligence, rather than rely on individual braininess. To put it another way, dozens of stupid people in a room who talk to each other will achieve far more than an equal number of clever people who don’t. The internet only underlines this point. Human intelligence is a distributed, collaborative phenomenon.

Vaping's triumph in peril

My Times column on Britain's successful use of electronic cigarettes (vaping) to cut smoking rates:

 

Imagine if Britain led the world in a new electronic industry, both in production and consumption, if independent British manufacturers had a worldwide reputation for innovation and quality, were based mainly in the north and were exporting to Asia. And that this innovation was saving lives on a huge scale while saving consumers over £100 billion so far.

All of this is true of electronic cigarettes. Britain leads the world at vaping. We have taken to it more enthusiastically than any other nation, consuming more than twice as many e-cigarettes as the average European country. There is a thriving manufacturing industry here, even exporting from Blackburn to China. It is probably the fastest-growing industry in the country. Few innovations have happened faster or seen Britain lead the way so much.

The result has been a steep fall in smoking. In 2016 only 15.8 per cent of adults smoked, the second lowest number in Europe, compared with 19.6 per cent in 2012. With the shameful exception of the World Health Organisation, virtually all bodies involved in public health — Public Health England, the Department of Health, Cancer Research UK, Action on Smoking and Health, the Royal College of Physicians, the British Psychological Society, even at last the British Medical Association — now agree that vaping is an effective way of quitting smoking, is much safer than smoking and attracts almost no one except smokers: only 1-3 per cent of vapers have never smoked.

This success is not the result of deliberate government policy. Four years ago, when I started writing about this, the government was lobbying Brussels to get e-cigarettes banned except on prescription, which would have killed the revolution. The only thing the British government has done differently is not get in the way of consumers driving the change. Australia still bans the sale of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes altogether.

The industry is dominated by independent small businesses with no links to the tobacco industry: there are more than 1,100 vape businesses in Britain. The Independent British Vape Trade Association says in evidence to a parliamentary inquiry: “Unlike traditional cessation methods, vaping is empowering. It represents a market-based, user driven, public health insurgency. That is why it is so successful. No taxpayers’ money has been spent.”

Now, following a positive view of e-cigarettes in its Tobacco Control Plan, the government’s “Stoptober” campaign for the first time advocated that people use e-cigarettes to help quit smoking. Yet just as the government joins the vaping bandwagon, progress is faltering, mainly because of irresponsible and wholly untrue headlines in tabloid newspapers claiming that vaping is as “bad as fags” for you. Just as the clinical and toxicological evidence has come in overwhelmingly in favour of the far greater safety of vaping, public opinion has begun swinging the other way: 26 per cent of people now erroneously believe vaping to be “at least as harmful as smoking”, up from 7 per cent in 2013.

New rules from Europe are not helping. The introduction of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) this year demolished what was until then a sensible set of rules on e-cigarette advertising. Now, whereas manufacturers of (prescribed) nicotine gums and patches can advertise their products, the manufacturers of e-cigarettes cannot advertise at all through television, radio, newspapers, commercial email or companies’ own websites.

Nor can they make health claims, even though e-cigarettes are far more effective quit aids than patches or gums. The Advertising Standards Authority is consulting on whether to remove this prohibition, and the government is to partner with the industry to promote vaping. Yet the companies themselves are forbidden from telling the world about their products through these channels till we leave the EU. Madness.

The EU regulations also ban large e-liquid containers and strong e-liquids, both vital to the heaviest smokers when they start to quit, so a black market is developing. Ironically, the EU directive has given some European states, including Belgium, an excuse to ban cross-border trade in vape products. So much for the single market.

Meanwhile, businesses are forcing vapers to mix with smokers in specially designated smoking areas. This reinforces the false message that vaping is as dangerous as smoking. If you have to go out in the cold every few hours to vape alongside people puffing carcinogenic toxins at you, then why bother to switch?

One of the beauties of e-cigarettes is that whereas smokers tend to finish each cigarette once they have started, vapers can have single puffs at more regular intervals so their nicotine levels stay moderate rather than spiking up and down. This is one reason vapers find it easier to reduce their nicotine use over time. But if the smoking/vaping area is a long walk from your desk, your employer is not going to want you popping out more often than a smoker. You could even argue that an employer is breaking the law by forcing a non-smoker (vaper) to share a space with a smoker.

The New Nicotine Alliance has launched a campaign to challenge properties to drop their policies of treating vapers like smokers. After all, vapers do not emit smoke; their vapour does not even smell unless flavoured; there are no known harms to bystanders from second-hand vapour. Vaping can be done discreetly. I’ve watched someone vape stealthily even on an aircraft. (I neither vape nor smoke myself, by the way, and have no financial skin in this game to disclose.)

Public Health England specifically recommends “that e-cigarette use is not covered by smoke-free legislation and should not routinely be included in the requirements of an organisation’s smoke-free policy”. A recent report from the Freedom Association found that local councils were ignoring this recommendation and treating vapers as if they were smokers. Wetherspoon pubs ban vaping in all the areas where smoking is banned, even outdoors.

Vaping should be like mobile phone use: something that you do with consideration for others and covered by rules of etiquette, not prohibitions. And, as Professor Peter Hajek of Queen Mary University of London puts it, “Public health would benefit if the [vaping] section of the TPD is scrapped as soon as possible and if, in the meantime, it is ignored as much as is legally possible.”

Right on plastics and PCBs, wrong on acidification

My Times column on the BBC's Blue Planet II:

 

Nothing that Hollywood sci-fi screenwriters dream up for outer space begins to rival the beauty and ingenuity of life under water right here. Blue Planet II captured behaviour that was new to science as well as surprising: giant trevally fish eating sooty terns on the wing; Galapagos sea lions herding yellowfin tuna ashore; an octopus wrapping itself in shells to confuse sharks.

The series also preached. Every episode had a dose of bad news about the ocean and a rebuke to humanity, while the entire last episode was devoted to the environmental cause, featuring overfishing, pollution, climate change and ocean acidification. The team behind the incomparable Sir David Attenborough has acceded to demands that it should push more environmentalism.

Bottlenose dolphins in South Africa on the BBC’s Blue Planet IIPA

Mostly, these sermons were spot on. It is a scandal that eight million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean every year, though 95 per cent of it comes from just ten rivers, all in Asia and Africa, so that’s where the main effort is needed. Plastic kills albatross chicks and even whales.

The series has been accused of cheating in the sequence in which a pilot whale is shown carrying its decomposing calf. The commentary implied, without actually saying, that the calf might have died from ingesting plastic, or from pollutants in its mother’s milk. Yet there was no evidence of how it died. I think that’s unfair on the BBC. The commentary was careful and raised a valid worry.

Why are there still so few killer whales, bottlenose dolphins and great white sharks in European waters, now that seal numbers have hugely increased? There is only one resident pod of killer whales in British waters, and it is dwindling, with no calves born for years.

The answer came when one of those killer whales died recently, a female called Lulu. Her blubber had one of the highest concentrations of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) ever recorded: over 900mg per kg, 100 times what is considered safe. A study of stranded killer whales and bottlenose dolphins in European waters found “PCB levels that markedly exceeded all known marine mammal PCB toxicity thresholds”:

In conclusion, this pan-European meta-analysis of stranded or biopsied cetaceans demonstrates that several European cetacean species, specifically BNDs, SDs, and KWs, currently have markedly elevated blubber PCB concentrations. Particular “PCB hotspots” included the western (SDs and BNDs) and central (BNDs) Mediterranean Sea and SW Iberia, the Gulf of Cadiz (BNDs) and the Strait of Gibraltar (BNDs and KWs). Despite an EU ban on the use and manufacture of PCBs in the mid-1980s, blubber PCB concentrations are still very high, possibly having reached a “steady state” between environmental input and degradation, meaning that high PCB exposures are set to continue for the long-term in cetacean top predators in Europe. These high and stable PCB exposures are associated with small populations, long-term population declines or contraction of range in several dolphin species in Europe (NE Atlantic and Mediterranean Seas) that were not adequately explained by other factors (e.g. bycatch or other anthropogenic causes of mortality). Bycatch is common in the most abundant cetacean species in Europe, but is comparatively rare in BNDs and virtually unrecorded in recent years for KWs, suggesting that the ongoing population declines in these two species are predominantly driven by other processes, with bioaccumulation of PCBs through marine food chains being the predominant factor. A lack of recruitment in monitored KW and BND populations is also consistent with PCB toxicity as the likeliest cause of their declines. In the Mediterranean Sea, the SD has suffered recurrent CeMV mortalities, which may have been exacerbated by the high and immunotoxic level of PCB exposure. Without significant mitigation, PCBs will continue to drive population declines or suppress population recovery in Europe for many decades to come. Measures to significantly reduce inputs of PCBs into the marine environment from terrestrial and other sources are urgently needed. Further studies are also needed to better assess PCB exposure and quantify toxic effects in marine apex predator populations in Europe. Finally, the potential impact of PCB bioaccumulation in marine ecosystems may extend beyond European waters, particularly in globally distributed marine apex predators such as KWs, false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) and great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias).

Being at the top of the food chain, these mammals concentrate PCBs in their fat and it renders them sterile (killer whales that eat fish, rather than seals, are doing better). PCBs were used mainly in electrical equipment until they were banned in the 1980s. Off America, this problem is fading: PCB levels have fallen and animals have “offloaded” the pollutants in milk, such that after several births they can bear and feed healthy calves. PCB levels in European waters fell but have now stabilised, implying that they are still getting into the sea somehow.

I was glad to see these issues given more attention, at last, than global warming, having long argued that the obsession with climate change (increasingly recognised as gradual) is diverting attention and money from more urgent environmental issues such as overfishing, pollution and invasive species.

It was good, too, to hear Attenborough’s recognition, rare on the BBC, that we are living through an unexpectedly bountiful renaissance in some marine ecosystems. Too often we are told only the bad news. The last episode featured the recovery of turtles, as well as the resurgent herring, killer whales and humpback whales of Norway, and the vast concentrations of sperm whales now being seen for the first time since the era of Moby Dick. Many populations of sperm, right, grey, bowhead, fin, blue and humpback whales are now high again, and rising at 5 to 10 per cent a year, something I never dreamt would happen in my lifetime.

The series could have made the same point about the penguins, fur seals and elephant seals of South Georgia, an island denuded of almost all wildlife about 75 years ago, but now once again teeming. Or about walruses, an Arctic species that has rebounded after centuries of exploitation. When I first visited Spitsbergen in the 1970s there were about 100 walruses there. Today there are about 4,000 and the population is still increasing rapidly.

Walruses were brought to the brink of extinction in Svalbard (Norway) during 350 years of unregulated harvesting. They became protected in 1952, when few remained. During the first 30 years of protection, approximately 100 animals became established within the archipelago, most of which likely came from Franz Josef Land, to the east. A marked recovery has taken place since then. This study reports the results of a photographic aerial survey flown in summer 2012, covering all current and historical haul-out sites for walruses in Svalbard. It provides updates regarding the increasing numbers of: (1) landbased haul-out sites (from 78 in 2006 to 91 in 2012); (2) occupied sites (from 17 in 2006 to 24 in the 2012 survey); (3) sites with mother-calf pairs (which increased from a single site with a single small calf in 2006 to 10 sites with a total of 57 small calves in 2012) and (4) a 48% increase in abundance in the six-year period between the two surveys to 3886 (confidence interval 3553-4262) animals, including animals in the water at the time of the survey. Future environmental change might reduce benthic production in the Arctic, reducing the prey-base for walruses, and also impact walruses directly via declines in their sea-ice breeding habitat. But, currently the Svalbard walrus population is growing at a rate that matches the theoretical maximum rate of growth that has been calculated for recovering walrus populations under favourable environmental conditions with no food limitations.
Walruses recovering after 60+ years of protection in Svalbard, Norway (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266713764_Walruses_recovering_after_60_years_of_protection_in_Svalbard_Norway [accessed Dec 12 2017].

So it was naughty of Blue Planet II, in showing a sequence in which a mother and calf walrus desperately try to find a bit of ice big enough to bear their weight but not already occupied by other walruses, to imply that this was evidence of climate change threatening a species with extinction. Most of the ice in the Arctic Ocean disappears each summer and reappears each winter. Walruses have hauled out on shore, or on what’s left of the ice at that season, forever. The main thing that has changed is that there are now more walruses, and more polar bears feasting on them, throughout the Arctic.

So the climate change obsession is still sometimes getting in the way of telling the truth. The most dishonest sequence in the series was when Attenborough watched shells dissolving in a tank of acid, to a soundtrack of fizzing noises, and was told by Professor Chris Langdon that although this was “more dramatic than what’s happening in the oceans”, nonetheless “the shells and the reefs are really truly dissolving”.

This is highly misleading in several different ways. Was it carbonic acid, or another acid? The reduction in alkalinity will get nowhere near neutral, let alone actual acidity, even by the end of the 22nd century, so “dissolving” is false, let alone happening now. The changes in ocean pH expected even by the end of this century are minuscule compared with what was shown in that tank, and by comparison with the daily and seasonal changes that an average reef experiences. (Coral bleaching, a different issue, is more serious, but more temporary.)

A 2010 analysis of 372 studies of 44 different marine species found that the world’s marine fauna is “more resistant to ocean acidification than suggested by pessimistic predictions” and that it “may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century”:

Ocean acidification has been proposed to pose a major threat for marine organisms, particularly shell-forming and calcifying organisms. Here we show, on the basis of meta-analysis of available experimental assessments, differences in organism responses to elevated pCO2 and propose that marine biota may be more resistant to ocean acidification than expected. Calcification is most sensitive to ocean acidification while it is questionable if marine functional diversity is impacted significantly along the ranges of acidification predicted for the 21st century. Active biological processes and small-scale temporal and spatial variability in ocean pH may render marine biota far more resistant to ocean acidification than hitherto believed.

And recent work has established that corals’ ability to make skeletons is “largely independent of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and hence ocean acidification...the relevance of their commonly reported finding of reduced coral calcification with reduced seawater pH must now be questioned”. Indeed, one study found that calcifying plankton “respond positively to acidification with CO2enrichment”,

As a result, cell growth and cellular calcification of E. huxleyi were strongly damaged by acidification by HCl, but not by acidification by CO2 enrichment...The present study clearly showed that the coccolithophore, E. huxleyi, has an ability to respond positively to acidification with CO2 enrichment, but not just acidification.

another that the growth rate of corals also increases with higher carbon dioxide up to 600 parts per mllion and concluded:

Furthermore, the warming projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the end of the twenty-first century caused a fivefold decrease in the rate of coral calcification, while the acidification projected for the same interval had no statistically significant impact on the calcification rate—suggesting that ocean warming poses a more immediate threat than acidification for this important coral species.

The producers of Blue Planet II claim every word of the commentary was based on solid scientific evidence. Not in this case. In a magnificent series, they got that one wrong.

Minimising the need for trusted third parties

My recent (4 December 2017) Times column on bitcoin, block chain and distributed ledgers:

 

The price of a Bitcoin has risen tenfold in ten months. Yet whether and when the bubble will burst is beside the point, which is that Bitcoin works. What I mean by this is that Bitcoin has proved that the blockchains technology behind cryptocurrencies is capable of doing what it was claimed it could: create an asset of limited supply and high security, like digital gold.

“Running non-stop for eight years, with almost no financial loss on the chain itself, [Bitcoin] is now in important ways the most reliable and secure financial network in the world,” writes the legal scholar and computer scientist Nick Szabo. This is likely to be a more enduring legacy than any burst bubbles or scandals over the use of cryptocurrencies by drug dealers. Blockchains may change more than money.

Cryptocurrencies are worth north of $300 billion, about half of that being Bitcoin. With 16.7 million Bitcoins in circulation, it is little wonder that there are now Bitcoin billionaires, such as the Winklevoss twins. The biggest such Bitcoin plutocrat is probably its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, who is thought to have about a million Bitcoins, worth roughly $10 billion, making him (perhaps briefly) about the 130th richest person in the world. Yet his identity remains a secret, hidden behind a Japanese name, a German IP address, east-coast American hours and British spelling (he also once quoted The Times).

To understand Satoshi’s thinking, it pays to study the writings of Szabo, especially an essay a few months ago called Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability. As one of the “cypherpunks” who assembled in Santa Cruz in 1992 to discuss how to use computer science to secure property and privacy in cyberspace, Szabo was the inventor of Bit Gold, on which Bitcoin built. Many people think Szabo is Satoshi, since he dropped somewhat out of sight around the time Satoshi popped up, and has a similar writing style. He denies it. (Governments generally prosecute the founders of alternative currencies, usually on dubious pretexts.)

Szabo’s argument is that institutions such as government, markets and money are designed to create “scalability”, to enable us to behave towards numerous strangers with almost as much confidence as we do with a few family and friends. He sees blockchains as an online version of such an institution and argues that human society has not yet evolved to take full advantage of online technology. Uber, Facebook and eBay still have to be actual companies with offices, for example.

Taking his lead from Adam Smith and a remark by Richard Dawkins (“money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism”), Szabo became fascinated by the evolution of money: how humans apparently began around 100,000 years ago to use sea shells as bridewealth, compensation for injury, or inheritance. Later they started using wearable gold, then gold and silver coins, then gold-backed paper IOUs and then fiat currencies as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Szabo dreamed of creating something that was lent value by its scarcity and incorruptibility, but cost nothing to transport: a digital version of gold.

The solution is a network of thousands of computers rewarded for updating a chain of blocks of code, which gradually seal the story of any transaction deeper and deeper inside an increasingly hard-to-crack shell — like a fly in amber, to use Szabo’s analogy. As he writes: “Blockchains don’t guarantee truth; they just preserve truth and lies from later alteration, allowing one to later securely analyse them.”

The goal, says Szabo, is “trust minimisation”. If this sounds paradoxical — surely we want more trust? — then bear with me. Right now you have to trust the Bank of England that a tenner is worth £10, or an accountant that a company is worth what it says, or a lawyer that somebody owns a house she is selling, or a government that somebody is a citizen of the country whose passport they hold. We still rely on human beings, outside cyberspace, to verify what happens within. That should change. Blockchains promise decentralised and trustworthy computing: programs checking up on each other’s work.

Blockchains, writes Szabo, “allow one to seamlessly and securely work across human trust boundaries (eg national borders), in contrast to ‘call-the-cop’ architectures like PayPal and Visa that continually depend on expensive, error-prone and sometimes corruptible bureaucracies to function with a reasonable amount of integrity”. Admittedly, Bitcoin cannot rival PayPal or Visa, because its emphasis on security ensures that it works slowly and uses a lot of electricity. Satoshi made “radical tradeoffs in favour of security and against performance”, as Szabo puts it.

One phrase that Szabo coined early on was “smart contracts”. This has since been taken up by many blockchains start-ups, especially the darling of the market, Ethereum. It is here that the technology shows most long-term promise. As Lord Holmes of Richmond argued in a paper published last week, the British government should be actively studying how to revolutionise its work through distributed-ledger technologies, such as blockchains.

Lord Holmes has tried to breathe new life into the recommendations last year by the government’s chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, that “distributed-ledger technologies have the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, assure the supply chain of goods and generally ensure the integrity of government records and services”.

The Holmes report suggests that border control could work more seamlessly using a distributed ledger, shared and updated by the agencies that have an interest in the operation of the border. In the private sector there is a rash of new startups offering blockchains breakthroughs. For example, Cambridge Blockchain promises to tackle the costly and time-consuming know-your-customer regulations that entangle banks and customers in absurd and repetitive questionnaires about who they are.

How many of these ideas prove practical remains to be seen, but some probably will. If you think of blockchains as the decentralisation of the solution to the trust problem in cyberspace, you can see how far this could go. Blockchains may represent a far greater threat to the jobs of middle men — lawyers, accountants, Facebook employees, civil servants — than artificial intelligence does. And a far greater opportunity to go global even than Brexit.

Britain should give the EU £20 billion extra as an act of charity

My Times column on Britain's "financial settlement" with the European Union:

Theresa May reportedly plans to offer about £40 billion of our money in order to bring the European Union to the table to discuss whether it wishes to trade freely with Britain after we leave in 2019. I listened to a German MEP last week describe these negotiations as “a French commissioner insulting an entire nation”, and heard a British MP call the EU’s obsession with money “disreputable”. The result is not humiliating for us, but for them. If I were Mrs May, this (tongue-in-cheek) is the letter I would write to accompany the offer.

 

Dear Angela, Emmanuel and others (cc Donald, Jean-Claude, Michel),

I enclose a cheque for £40 billion as agreed. However, you will notice that it is post-dated March 30, 2019, and that it will bounce without a free-trade agreement between us, as I mentioned on the telephone. We are delighted to be in a position to be so unilaterally generous, and sorry that you find yourselves in such dire need of our help.

As you will recall, under the Lisbon Treaty, the European Union is a legal “person” responsible for its own financial commitments, so we legally owe you not a penny after the current budget ends in 2020, a fact confirmed by a House of Lords committee. You may remember that your opening request for approximately €100 billion was taken apart line-by-line in a three-hour presentation at one of the bilateral meetings by one of our better civil servants.

As an EU source told a newspaper at the time, “everyone was completely flabbergasted that this young man from Whitehall was saying that the EU’s preparation on the financial settlement was ‘inadequate’. It did not go down well.” But the young man was right wasn’t he? We have since given him a bonus.

Nevertheless, as I say, we are prepared to go beyond the letter of the law and make a charitable donation, doubling the £20 billion we actually owe until the end of 2020. We cannot help feeling that a little more financial discipline on your part might have avoided the need for such a large sum. Perhaps you were misled by people such as Tony Blair and Nick Clegg into thinking that the result of our referendum could be reversed?

For instance, we notice that all Eurocrats can draw generous final-salary pensions when they get to the end of their lucrative careers, throughout which they will have had handsome allowances and expenses and have paid specially low income tax at a flat rate. In Britain we regard this as regressive, or “unfair”, and are unhappy that hard-pressed British workers in, say, Sunderland should now be asked to guarantee the pensions of such wealthy people, when they have no such guarantee themselves. (£20 billion is the equivalent of a 4p one-off surcharge on income tax, by the way.)

We realise you cannot agree among yourselves whether to cut the budget or increase the national contributions once the second largest net contributor leaves the European Union, so you are desperate for us to help you out. That we have filled your coffers for 40 years in this way, always giving more than we received, might in some circles have elicited a measure of gratitude. However, we are surprised on looking back through the files to find no such letters of thanks, but rather quite a few reprimands, insults and aspersions.

We note that this has continued during the course of the negotiations, where David Davis has been the soul of cheerful politeness, repeatedly saying that he hopes the European Union thrives after we leave. By contrast, I don’t recall your side saying the same about us, but there have been many leaks and briefings to the effect that we are fools and idiots. Twice there have been silly insults passed to the press after dinners attended by me, which hardened the British people’s resolve to leave.

It is true that much of our media, especially the BBC, has been unhelpful in this respect, treating Michel Barnier’s opening positions as if they were final offers, relaying every European annoyance but mocking any British one, and implying that Mr Barnier is an infallible offspring of Albert Einstein and Mother Theresa, while Jean-Claude Juncker is the reincarnation of the Angel Gabriel himself.

Moreover, your reaction to my Florence speech in September, in which I promised that no country in the European Union would be worse off as a result of our leaving, was really unhelpful to your own cause. You could have said “that is a magnificent gesture and we thank you”, which would have built trust. Instead you said, in essence: “This offer is pocketed but nothing is given in return; you must do more.” I know you like to think of us as a province in a Napoleonic “continental system”, but I have to say that it took an almighty effort on the part of Mr Davis and myself not to tell you to get stuffed at that point.

This episode is, of course, the reason we insist on moving in lockstep this time. You will also notice that the cheque is drawn from our foreign aid budget (given the political chaos in Germany, Italy and Spain, this seems appropriate) and counts towards our 0.7 per cent of gross national income spend on aid. This means you will have to fill out forms certifying that the money was not wasted. These must be returned to the Department for International Development punctually, and failure to comply may result in fines. I am sure you will understand that this is necessary given that the money would otherwise have gone to help starving and sick people in Africa.

Dear friends, we were surprised that you chose to try to squeeze money out of us before even talking about our future relationship, in breach of the spirit of Article 50 (which requires you to “take account of the framework for [the] future relationship with the Union in the arrangements for withdrawal”), as this seemed to elevate bureaucratic priorities over the economic welfare of ordinary citizens. We have done the sums on no trade deal and find they make little difference to the gains we make from free trade with the rest of the world. So you should realise that we are offering this cheque and a trade deal out of goodwill as friendly neighbours.

Tons of love,

Theresa

Beware the fall armyworm

My Times column on the urgent need for biotechnology in African agriculture:

An even more dangerous foe than Robert Mugabe is stalking Africa. Early last year, a moth caterpillar called the fall armyworm, a native of the Americas, turned up in Nigeria. It has quickly spread across most of Africa. This is fairly terrifying news, threatening to undo some of the unprecedented improvements in African living standards of the past two decades. Many Africans depend on maize for food, and maize is the fall armyworm’s favourite diet.

Many Africans rely on maize but it is threatened by a rapidly spreading pestWAYNE HUTCHINSON/GETTY IMAGES

Fortunately, there is a defence to hand. Bt maize, grown throughout the Americas for many years, is resistant to insects. The initials stand for a bacterium that produces a protein toxic to insects but not to people. Organic farmers have been using the bacterium as a pesticide for more than five decades, but it is expensive. Bt maize has the protein inside the plant, thanks to genetic engineers, who took a gene from the bacterium and put it in the plant. 
Bt maize has largely saved Brazil’s maize crop from fall armyworms.

However, influenced by European environmentalists, most African countries forbid the growing of genetically modified crops. This is a pity, because unless they change their attitude fast, they will face the prospect of using far more pesticides, which small-scale farmers cannot afford, and which come with environmental and safety risks, or suffering famine, relieved by expensive imports of food.

Fortunately, inch by inch Africa is changing its mind on biotech crops, though only South Africa has approved Bt maize. Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya are slowly changing their legislation. But bureaucrats with empires to build keep putting roadblocks in the way of change, and environmental pressure groups are campaigning to undermine the efforts.

Some years ago I spoke to the leaders of a large charity working with African farmers and asked them why they did not come out in support of biotechnology. They replied that they dared not do so for fear of retribution from the big environmental pressure groups, such as Greenpeace, for which opposition to biotechnology is a totemic issue when fundraising in Europe.

Money came before humanity, in other words. Greenpeace’s former director, Stephen Tindale, changed his mind about biotechnology and said two years ago, before his death: “I worry for Greenpeace and the other green groups because they could, by taking such a hard line . . . be seen to be putting ideology before the need for humanitarian action.”

Last year 129 winners of the Nobel prize signed a letter, saying: “We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology.” Yet Greenpeace remains opposed to biotech crops. The European Parliament also voted to accept a Green Party report arguing against involvement in a new international agricultural technology initiative in Africa because of the involvement of biotech firms. A Kenyan farmer, Gilbert Arap Bor, wrote: “They want us to remain agricultural primitives, stuck with technologies that were antiquated even before we entered the 21st century.”

More than half of the two billion people who will be added to the world’s population by 2050 will be Africans. Yet feeding the continent’s growing population, largely from African farms, is possible. And, like Asia before it, Africa can initially prosper through agriculture more than any other industry, but only if there is a green revolution of farming modernisation comparable to what happened in Asia in the Sixties.

The average yield of an African maize crop is less than a quarter of that of a North American crop, even before the effect of the fall armyworm. This is largely down to a lack of fertilisers, pesticides, hybrid seeds and biotechnology, and frequent drought. Hybrid seeds alone, produced by conventional breeding, can deliver improvements in yield of 20 to 30 per cent, I’m told. Drought-resistant varieties, also conventionally produced, can double the yield. But neither helps against the fall armyworm.

The African Agricultural Technology Foundation is co-ordinating a public-private partnership called Water Efficient Maize for Africa (Wema). Its aim is to develop drought-tolerant and insect-protected maize using both biotechnology and modern techniques of conventional breeding. Its first product, a drought-tolerant, white maize hybrid seed, was delivered to farmers in Kenya four years ago. It resulted in a harvest of 4.5 tons per hectare, compared with 1.8 tons normally. The Wema project has the support of industry to make the varieties available royalty-free to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa through African seed companies. Monsanto, for example, is giving away its intellectual property in the region.

Ah, say its critics, but Monsanto is hoping that Africans will use its hybrids and thus become rich enough to buy more seeds from it one day. Yes, and what is wrong with that? Suppose Wema does result in many African smallholders earning enough money to buy a tractor, put a child through school and go into the market in search of the best seeds, as well as sufficient fertiliser? Where’s the problem? All right, say the critics, but resistance to the Bt toxin is already developing in fall armyworms in Brazil. True, but so is resistance to insecticides. Agriculture is an arms race against the other species, and newer techniques should keep us easily one step ahead, so long as we do not prevent them.

The next technology to help farming will be gene-editing, different from the transgenic technique that produced Bt maize, and involving the introduction of no foreign DNA, the thing that critics say they most object to. A tweak to the genes of maize can make it resistant to maize lethal necrosis, a viral disease hurting yields in parts of Africa. There is an opportunity for Britain here. Freed from Europe’s deadly precautionary principle, British plant scientists could be well placed to support their colleagues in Africa.

Those who think poverty a price worth paying for nostalgia say we should go back to traditional agriculture, in better harmony with the land. Not if we want wildlife. Globally, if we had the yields of 1960 we would need more than twice as much land to feed today’s population. In which case, you could kiss goodbye to all rainforests, nature reserves and national parks.

Boots, not suits

My Times column on environmental policy:

 

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, is right to promise higher, not lower, environmental standards once we leave the European Union. Britain has always been a pioneer of environmental policy, and indeed many of our protections pre-date our joining the EU. Besides, thanks to the productivity of our farmers, we can spare land for nature in increasing amounts, and thanks to new science and technology, we can afford ever more effective interventions on behalf of wildlife. Improvement, not just protection, is the aim.

But if Mr Gove thinks that the way to achieve this is to set up a new statutory body, “independent of government” with “clear authority” whose job is to “uphold environmental standards”, then he has clearly been spending far too much time with north London greens rather than real conservationists. This is their agenda, not wildlife’s. Too many urban activists in the environmental movement simply see policy as a cash cow to be milked to support paper-pushers enforcing rules while doing precious little on the ground to help the environment.

The first problem with Mr Gove’s proposal is that such a body already exists. Or rather three of them already exist. If you wish to do anything to or with a species of plant, animal or fungus in the British countryside, the chances are that you will need permission from Natural England (or its Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish equivalents) or the Environment Agency, or the Forestry Commission. Or if you are in a national park, add in the national park authority. And then there are the conservation officers of local authorities. Oh, and the Committee on Climate Change will probably sermonise too.

In short, the last thing the natterjack toads and sphagnum mosses of the British Isles need is another vast bureaucracy. They need people in boots, not people in suits. On land, Natural England is almost all the things Mr Gove promises: an arm’s-length, independent, science-based body with “real authority”; in the water, ditto the Environment Agency; in woodland, ditto the Forestry Commission.

So what’s going on? Mr Gove is too canny a politician to set up another quango for the sake of it, and he is familiar enough with the tenets of public-choice theory to know that “regulatory capture” is a very real problem. That is to say, the vested interests in the environmental lobby groups would soon dominate such a body, directly or indirectly.

To understand what lies behind this initiative, apart from an ambitious but bruised politician deciding that his future lies in embracing a blob, rather than enraging it for a change, consider a live issue: the burning of heather moorland. This practice is vital to preventing wildfires as well as maintaining a mosaic of long and short heather that is ideal for rare curlews, golden plover, black grouse and commercially important red grouse throughout the Pennines.

But the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has long made clear its opposition to grouse shooting practices, despite their economic and ecological benefits, and has asked the European Commission to find Natural England in breach of the Habitats Directive by not doing enough to ban such burning. Brussels is a sort of appeal court for green pressure groups when they don’t like what British government agencies do. That is essentially what spooks environmentalists about Brexit: the loss of a power of last resort to overrule the government and its arm’s-length agencies.

To which I say, and Mr Gove should say: welcome to democracy. Natural England is answerable to parliament, as are the politicians who appoint its board. If it goes rogue and does something that is arguably bad for its mission, then complain through parliament. There is still judicial review as well.

The arrangement by which unelected organisations such as the RSPB get unelected commissioners in Brussels to decide what should happen in say, Wensleydale, whatever British politicians or civil servants decide, is exactly the problem Brexit is there to address. If an organisation wants to alter policy, let it take on the interests it opposes in parliament rather than behind the notoriously closed doors of Brussels: it can get its view heard in questions to ministers, select committee hearings, meetings of all-party groups in two Houses — all on the record. That’s democracy.

We can’t afford to be complacent about environmental standards. They need to be improved and strengthened. Our agencies and civil servants do far too little about invasive species at the moment, for example. The EU has been futile in the battle to save the red squirrel from the grey. I want to prevent the extinction of the curlew, which is a real danger throughout all of England except on Pennine grouse moors, where heather burning is vital to its continuing survival.

Yes, Natural England and the Environment Agency are frustratingly obtuse at times. I have battled the former over its (until recently) idiotic policies on great crested newts, where fences to keep them off development sites make far less sense than agreements that developers should create habitat for them. I have battled the latter over its not allowing us to eat the invasive American crayfish infesting certain rivers in the north of England, thus preventing us improving, perhaps saving, the ecology of an entire river.

But what is wrong here is the policy and its execution, not the administrative structure. Talk to anybody in the countryside involved in conservation and you will find them brimming with ideas about how to help wildlife. For example, we currently incentivise some farmers to cultivate seedy plants to encourage birds in winter, but most of these run out of seed by February and the birds starve then. It is an easy fix to require plants with longer-lasting seeds; it does not require a super-powerful new body. Countryside policy is disfigured by the triumph of intentions over outcomes.

The last thing the environment needs is further nationalisation. It needs a free schools-type revolution. Ofgreen, as Mr Gove’s new body should be called, would be an undemocratic, interest-group-captured, top-down hindrance to the exciting task of steadily improving our environment with ingenious science, imaginative policy and local decision-making.

Supporting wind and solar energy at the expense of the environment

My Reaction article on the disputes within the green movement:

 

You can always tell when there is a United Nations Climate Conference of the Parties (COP) coming up, because there are any number of carefully timed press releases about how hot it has been or is going to get in the future. The media has been snowed under with such things for a while now, and sure enough, this week sees the gathering in Bonn of the usual circus of thousands of diplomats, bureaucrats, quangocrats, envirocrats and twittercrats.

Sceptics and lukewarmers are not welcome, despite the falling poll numbers for alarmism: in Britain public “concern” over climate change has dropped steadily from 82% in 2005 to 60% today – which is in line with the scientific evidence that warming is proving slower and less harmful than the models predicted. As Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University said in September “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.” It’s nice to have that confirmed authoritatively, but of course the public has known the truth for some time.

Meanwhile, NASA says the globe has 14% more green vegetation than 33 years ago, largely because of extra carbon dioxide in the air, which makes plants grow faster and use less water doing so, in all ecosystems from the arctic to the tropics.

Germany is an inappropriate, even embarrassing, place for the climate circus to meet. Its “Energiewende” is probably the most expensive, ambitious and comprehensive carbon-reduction policy in the world, for the size of the country. But it has been a pretty big disaster, in its own terms (emissions remain stubbornly high), as well as economically and ecologically. It is the main sticking point in the talks between political parties to form a new “Jamaica” coalition, with the Green party trying to take the “coal” out of coalition and the Free Democrats trying to keep it in.

The German countryside is now pockmarked with 28,000 wind turbines, rashes of solar farms and lashings of anaerobic digesters making gas out of maize crops. Renewables are now providing more than a third of Germany’s electricity, which sounds like a green triumph. But the cost is enormous. The cost of subsidising all this so far is about €190 billion, and is heading for 500 billion euros in total by 2025

In spite of that, the impact on emissions has been small, even if you count biogas as low-carbon (which it is not). This is because to back up and balance the renewables, while killing off nuclear (to appease greens scared by Fukushima), the country is unable to reduce and has actually had had to expand its coal-burning sector. It has built 10 gigawatts of coal-burning power stations in the past five years. Last year Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions actually rose.

Meanwhile, the renewables are causing an environmental disaster as well as an economic one. The wind farms kill thousands of rare birds of prey every year, the biogas plants cause run-off and soil erosion, while the solar farms industrialise and denature the land. Many soi-disant ‘environmentalists’ are shamefully silent. “If dead eagles and kites were found next to chemicals plants or nuclear power stations, the public reaction would be fierce and furious,” says Michael Miersch of the German Wildlife Foundation.

As this quotation illustrates, the green movement is fracturing. Half of it is becoming ever more shrill in favour of the renewable-energy industry, a crony-capitalist business that takes money disproportionately from the poor (through poorly controlled levies on consumers) and gives it disproportionately to the rich through rents and dividends. (To declare an interest, my family business does receive money for one wind turbine, which we give away, but has turned down many more offers; we also get money from unsubsidised coal mining.)

Thus adverts have been appearing all over London recently boasting, unconvincingly, about the halving cost of wind power, though not offering to give up the subsidy addiction. They bear the logos of wind companies and big green multinationals like Greenpeace and WWF. Big Green is increasingly behaving like the PR arm of Big Wind.

Other greens and climate scientists, however, have lost faith in renewables, arguing that they have diverted funds from more worthwhile projects and have effectively killed nuclear power in some parts of the world – because nuclear cannot economically be turned on and off to match the intermittent nature of wind output. Globally, wind power produced just 0.7% of total energy use (including transport and heat) last year, showing how minuscule its contribution to decarbonisation is, even after decades of subsidy.

These two tribes – the ones who argue that only nuclear can deliver carbon-free energy on a sufficient scale to make a difference versus the ones who are wedded to a renewable future, whatever the cost – have now fallen out badly inside the scientific establishment. A paper by Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson and colleagues published in December 2015 argued that the continental United States could meet virtually 100% of its energy needs using wind, water and solar power alone by 2050.

A rebuttal paper, published in the same journal (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) in June this year by Christopher Clack and 20 colleagues from various universities and companies argued that Jacobson had made absurd assumptions to reach his conclusion. For instance America would have to increase its hydro-electric capacity by an implausible amount to back up intermittent wind and solar. This would be unfeasible physically, let alone environmentally – dams are not good for wildlife.

Dr Clack’s paper argues that Dr Jacobson’s paper “contains modeling errors; incorrect, implausible, and/or inadequately supported assumptions; and the application of methods inappropriate to the task. In short, the analysis performed in [it] does not support the claim that such a system would perform at reasonable cost and provide reliable power.”

To the astonishment of the entire world of science, Dr Jacobson has responded by suing the journal and Dr Clack and his colleagues for defamation, demanding $10 million in damages. Jacobson argues that the Clack paper contains “materially misleading errors” and the decision to publish it “has had grave ramifications” for his reputation and career.

The history of science is full of feuds, often bitter ones, going back to Isaac Newton’s vendetta against Gottfried Leibniz and beyond. But that is how science works – through disagreement followed by discussion. Not by taking your enemy to court. “Using court to resolve sci issues? Generally a bad idea” tweeted Gavin Schmidt of NASA – who has none the less defended a similar law suit by the climate scientist Michael Mann against the journalist Mark Steyn. “Enormously chilling for academic discourse. Would I ever write a paper challenging Jacobson’s analyses, even if they’re wrong? No way” tweeted Professor Roger Pielke of Colorado University in Boulder.

Reality is slowly dawning on at least some of the climatocrats meeting in Bonn, that their success in scaring the world as to future global warming has enabled an eruption of profitable capitalism to occur under the disguise of saving the planet. The economist Bruce Yandle has a phrase for this phenomenon, whereby pious preaching goes along with pure profiteering: “Bootleggers and Baptists”. During Prohibition in the 1920s, an unholy alliance developed between Baptist preachers and the lucrative bootlegging industry, both of which favoured a ban on alcohol, one through misguided principle, the other because they cynically saw a way of increasing the price of their product and gouging the consumer. After little more than a decade Prohibition collapsed under the weight of its own hypocritical contradictions. Will Green Prohibition go the same way? It certainly deserves to.