Matt Ridley's Blog, page 39

GM crops are good for the environment

My Times column on GM crops:

The news that Britain could soon grow genetically
modified crops commercially is a victory for common sense over
irrational opportunism, and also for the environment over
pollution.

Under pressure from the European Union’s health and consumer
commissioner, Tonio Borg, and Britain’s environment secretary, Owen
Paterson, the EU is on the brink of ceding control of the issue to
national governments. That suits countries such as France and
Austria, who are implacably opposed to GM crops, and Britain, which
is not.

It is now clear that the opposition to GM crops has been
counter-productive for the environment as well as harmful to the
economy and the consumer. It has left us more reliant on pesticides
than other parts of the world. For instance, potatoes currently
require spraying with fungicides up to 15 times a season. Each
spraying costs money, burns diesel, compacts soil and kills
innocent fungal bystanders. Breeding blight-resistant potatoes the
old fashioned way has proved difficult. By the time it is achieved,
the blight is already immune to the resistance.

However, doing it the GM way proved straightforward for the Sainsbury
Laboratory in Norwich, and promises stronger and longer resistance,
because it is possible to introduce a cassette of several
resistance genes. These come from wild plants in the same genus as
the potato, which disposes of one source of opposition — that it’s
an unnatural cross. The new GM variety probably could have been
developed years earlier if the eco-vandals had not driven much of
that kind of ground-breaking research abroad.

Incidentally, the very phrase “genetic modification” is getting
harder to define. It used to mean bringing genes in from other
species, but what about when genes are brought in from a species in
the same genus (as in the potato example)? Or, as will increasingly
be the case, when existing genes within the crop species are edited
rather than replaced? And why do the complex regulations about GM
not apply to plants whose genes have been deliberately but randomly
modified by gamma rays, as has happened to many common “non-GM” and
even organic varieties?

Remember, organic bean sprouts killed 51 people in one E coli outbreak in
Germany in 2011. GM food has killed nobody. There’s now simply no
way to argue with a straight face, after billions of GM meals have
been eaten all round the world, that the technology is a threat to
our health. The reverse is actually the case.

Purple tomatoes, rich in anti-cancer agents, have been created in Norwich, but they will be grown and
sold in Canada, because we in this country are still denied such
health benefits thanks to green campaigners.

The need for genetic modification is ever more urgent. The EU,
in thrall to the mad precautionary principle — which argues for
weighing the risks but not the benefits of innovation — is
gradually outlawing many effective agro-chemicals used
against weeds such as black grass, insects such as aphids and fungi
such as yellow rust, all of which threaten the yields of British
wheat crops on a huge scale. Farmers are facing a galloping
yellow-rust crisis as resistance spreads and the armoury of allowed
treatments shrinks. GM rust-resistant varieties of wheat are still
five years away, because that’s how long it takes to get regulatory
approval.

Elsewhere in the world, where GM crops can be grown that are
resistant to pests, the butterflies, bees and birds are back in the
fields in bigger numbers. When the pest resistance is inside the
plant, only pests encounter it. (Incidentally, the same applies to
neonicotinoid insecticides, the banning of which, after a year of
increasing bee numbers, makes no sense: the alternatives are the
more damaging, externally applied pyrethroids.)

So this is a technology that is safe for human health, better
for the environment, more effective than the alternative and
economically beneficial to consumers and farmers. Let the French
ban it if they want to.

The opposition to GM crops was never really much about safety or
environmental protection. It was always chiefly motivated by
dislike of corporate “control” of seeds, a bogeyman that suited the
environmental movement as a rallying cry with which to raise funds.
It was a meaningless slogan, since companies also supply non-GM
seeds, not to mention tractors and wellington boots. But the beauty
of the campaign, as far as the likes of Greenpeace was concerned,
was that it led directly to heavy-handed and expensive compliance
regimes, that meant that only large corporations could afford to
apply for approval for GM crops, which then appeared to prove the
point. Rarely has an argument been more circular.

Incidentally, any doubt that money is the principal concern of
Greenpeace evaporated this month with the news that a rogue trader
in its currency trading division had lost $5.2 million betting
against the euro. Good grief! This, remember, is the organisation
that has done the most to block GM crops — including a disgraceful
campaign against the non-profit, humanitarian project in support of
vitamin-A-rich “golden” rice. This rice could prevent the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of children each year from vitamin-A
deficiency diseases. And it’s gambling with charitable donations!
It makes Goldman Sachs look like the Angel Gabriel.

In America, the GM debate might superficially appear to be
slipping slightly backwards. Two counties in Oregon have just
banned GM crops, requiring all trace of them to be removed within a
year. Once again, the reason turns out to be money. Those with an
ear close to the ground say the big green philanthropic bodies in
the USA are showing “donor fatigue” on the issue of climate change.
Quick as ever to pick up on such signs, “Big Green” has begun
changing its message to push other buttons in its search for more
funds. The perennial concern of right-on people that “they are
doing things to our food” is one of those buttons.

In short, the new campaign is based on no new science suggesting
environmental or health risks. It’s simply a sign of a movement
addicted to scaremongering and in need of new funds. Fortunately it
will not gain much traction. With 17 million farmers growing GM
crops in 28 countries, on 12 per cent of the world’s arable land,
this gene genie won’t go back in the bottle.

Fat and fattening: exploding the myths

My Times column on low-fat diets and the evdience
behind them:

The diet police are on the prowl: if you hear a
knock on the door, hide the sugar bowl, the butter dish and the
salt. A draft report from the scientific advisory committee on
nutrition said last week that we should halve our intake of sugar.
The campaign group Action on Sugar wants “a total ban on advertising of
ultra-processed foods that are high in saturated fats, sugar and
salt, and sweetened soft drinks, to protect children”.

I have been curious about this new demonisation of sugar. I now
realise that it conceals a grudging admission that fat is not bad
for you after all, but the experts cannot bring themselves to say
so. There is a strong possibility that the “diabesity” epidemic has
been caused largely by the diet police themselves.

So argues a devastating new book: The Big Fat Surprise by Nina
Teicholz, an experienced journalist who spent eight years tracking
down all the evidence for and against the advice to eat low-fat
diets. She finds that it was based on flimsy evidence, supported by
an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests and amplified by
a docile press. And it made us fatter.

In the 1950s heart disease had come from nowhere to be a big
killer in America, especially of men in middle age. Although we now
know that cigarettes were a huge cause — and the sharp recent
decline of deaths from heart disease is mainly due to people
smoking less, plus better treatments — scientists quickly decided
that eating fat was the cause. Cholesterol clogs arteries, so
eating high-saturated-fat food such as meat, eggs and dairy
products must cause high cholesterol in the blood. Plus, eating fat
makes you fat. Obviously, no?

The chief source of the anti-saturated-fat message was a
politically astute scientist named Ancel Keys. In 1961 he persuaded
the American Heart Association to issue guidelines on saturated fat
intake. The main evidence came from his study of heart disease in
six countries in Europe plus Japan, from which he concluded that
low-fat diets led to less heart disease.

Yet the data in the study were awful, Teicholz says. Keys left
out countries that he knew produced inconvenient results, most of
his low-fat countries were ones still recovering from wartime
starvation, his dietary evidence came from a tiny subset of the men
in his clinical sample, and his lowest-fat diet was from Crete
during Lent, when meat-eating all but ceased. He published results
in obscure German journals. Teicholz told me these were huge
methodological problems, which should have called the entire study
into question.

Even so, the fat effect was weak: an order of magnitude less
than the effect of cigarettes on cancer, for example. Yet it was on
this feeble and dodgy dossier that an entire edifice of advice was
built. Sceptics kept pointing out inconvenient facts, but were
ignored. How come native Americans, Inuit and Masai ate mostly meat
and fat but had almost no heart disease or obesity, while they
immediately got both when they started eating bread and potatoes?
How come controlled trials of veterans and prisoners found that
substituting vegetable oils for animal fats caused no change of
overall mortality rates?

Anyway, we now know it just is not true that eating fat is what
makes you fat. The body does not shunt butter directly to your
thighs; it processes all food and adds to or draws down from fat
reserves based on hormonal signals. Fat has more calories per unit
of weight, but it’s also more satiating. All the best evidence now
suggests that it’s easier to gain weight on a high-carb than a
high-fat diet because the latter is more filling.

The sceptics were silenced by Keys and his allies and howled
down by obedient journalists, a profession in love with
conventional wisdom. Teicholz documents how the fat folk reviewed
each other’s papers, funded each other’s projects and kept the
doubters out, so that they gradually left the field. (Reminiscent
of modern debates on climate change?)

The American Heart Association, built up into a major force with
funding from the vegetable-oil industry, relentlessly pushed the
message that animal fat was bad. The US government issued
guidelines in 1978. We in Europe followed suit, as we tend to do.
And the message was driven home in the culture. Low-fat became a
craze. It still is: look at supermarket shelves.

In the past ten years, study after rigorous study has found that
animal fat per se is not harmful, does not cause obesity, does not
raise the kinds of cholesterol that predict heart attacks, does not
increase death rate and is healthier than carbohydrates. For
instance, one two-year trial in Israel found that a fat-and-meat
“Atkins” diet lowered weight more than either a low-fat or a
Mediterranean diet. As Teicholz puts it in her book: “Every plank
in the case against saturated fat has, upon rigorous examination,
crumbled away.”

Such findings remain too heretical for most diet experts. Those
who make them struggle for years to get published and have to couch
their findings in cautious language. Those such as Teicholz and
Gary Taubes who write books pointing out that this fat emperor had
no clothes are treated as pariahs. If anything, the official
committees of the diet police are doubling down, demanding that we
eat ever less saturated fat.

However, they are also now shifting the emphasis of their
disapproval to sugar. In fact, while the evidence against
carbohydrates in general as the cause of obesity and diabetes is
good, the evidence against refined sugar being peculiarly evil is
not. And there’s a real problem developing. If we are to condemn
carbs and sugar (and therefore fruit), and still condemn fat and
red meat (as Action on Sugar does), then there’s not much left to
eat except sea bass and spinach. Which is not practical.

The message is all stick and no carrot, which is no way to win
people round. So here’s a suggestion for the diet police: put out a
poster saying “We now think you should eat less sugar and bread,
but that you should feel free to eat more eggs, meat and cheese
again (but we might be wrong)”.

The subtitle of Teicholz’s book is: “Why butter, meat and cheese
belong in a healthy diet.” Yesterday I cooked bacon and eggs for my
breakfast. And by the way, I don’t have a vested interest: my farm
has a dairy herd, but then it also grows wheat and vegetable
oil.

More growth, less warming

Here's a version of the article I published in the Financial Post this
week with added links:

 

The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the
way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are
possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is
inevitable. In fact there is room for lots of intermediate
positions, including the view I hold, which is that man-made
climate change is real but not likely to do much harm, let alone
prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind this century.

After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on this topic
for various media organizations, and having started out alarmed,
that’s where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this
view. I share it with a very large international organization,
sponsored by the United Nations and supported by virtually all the
world’s governments: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) itself.

The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen
to the world economy, society and technology in the
21st century and what each would mean for the climate,
given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to
carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild
warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees
Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out
just 0.8 degrees warmer.

Now two degrees [above pre-indistrial levels] is the threshold
at which warming starts to turn dangerous, according to the
scientific consensus. That is to say, in three of the four
scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my children’s
children are elderly, the earth will still not have experienced any
harmful warming, let alone catastrophe.

But what about the fourth scenario? This is known as RCP8.5, and
it produces 3.5 degrees of warming in 2081-2100 [or 4.3 degrees
above pre-industrial levels]. Curious to know what assumptions lay
behind this model, I decided to look up the original paper describing the creation of this
scenario. Frankly, I was gobsmacked. It is a world that is
very, very implausible.

For a start, this is a world of “continuously increasing global
population” so that there are 12 billion on the planet. This is
more than a billion more than the United Nations expects, and flies
in the face of the fact that the world population growth rate has
been falling for 50 years and is on course to reach zero – i.e.,
stable population – in around 2070. More people mean more
emissions.

Second, the world is assumed in the RCP8.5 scenario to be
burning an astonishing 10 times as much coal as today, producing
50% of its primary energy from coal, compared with about 30% today.
Indeed, because oil is assumed to have become scarce, a lot of
liquid fuel would then be derived from coal. Nuclear and renewable
technologies contribute little, because of a “slow pace of
innovation” and hence “fossil fuel technologies continue to
dominate the primary energy portfolio over the entire time horizon
of the RCP8.5 scenario.” Energy efficiency has improved very
little.

These are highly unlikely assumptions. With abundant natural gas
displacing coal on a huge scale in the United States today, with
the price of solar power plummeting, with nuclear power
experiencing a revival, with gigantic methane-hydrate gas resources
being discovered on the seabed, with energy efficiency rocketing
upwards, and with population growth rates continuing to fall fast
in virtually every country in the world, the one thing we can say
about RCP8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.

Notice, however, that even so, it is not a world of catastrophic
pain. The per capita income of the average human being in 2100 is
three times what it is now. Poverty would be history. So it’s
hardly Armageddon.

But there’s an even more startling fact. We now have many
different studies of climate sensitivity based on observational
data and they all converge on the conclusion that it is much lower
than assumed by the IPCC in these models. It has to be, otherwise
global temperatures would have risen much faster than they have
over the past 50 years.  As Ross McKitrick noted on this page
earlier this week, temperatures have not risen at all now for more
than 17 years. With these much more realistic estimates of
sensitivity (known as “transient climate response”), even RCP8.5
cannot produce dangerous warming. It manages just 2.1C of warming
by 2081-2100 [see table 3 in the report by Lewis and Crok here]

That is to say, even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy
assumption till you have an edifice of vanishingly small
probability, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause
minor damage in the time of our grandchildren, let alone
catastrophe. That’s not me saying this – it’s the IPCC itself.

But what strikes me as truly fascinating about these scenarios
is that they tell us that globalization, innovation and economic
growth are unambiguously good for the environment. At the other end
of the scale from RCP8.5 is a much more cheerful scenario called
RCP2.6. In this happy world, climate change is not a problem at all
in 2100, because carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted thanks to
the rapid development of cheap nuclear and solar, plus a surge in
energy efficiency.

The RCP2.6 world is much, much richer. The average person has an
income about 16 times today’s in real terms, so that most people
are far richer than Americans are today. And it achieves this by
free trade, massive globalization, and lots of investment in new
technology. All the things the green movement keeps saying it
opposes because they will wreck the planet.

The answer to climate change is, and always has been,
innovation. To worry now in 2014 about a very small, highly
implausible set of circumstances in 2100 that just might, if
climate sensitivity is much higher than the evidence suggests,
produce a marginal damage to the world economy, makes no sense.
Think of all the innovation that happened between 1914 and 2000. Do
we really think there will be less in this century?

As for how to deal with that small risk, well there are several
possible options. You could encourage innovation and trade. You
could put a modest but growing tax on carbon to nudge innovators in
the right direction. You could offer prizes for low-carbon
technologies. All of these might make a little sense. But the one
thing you should not do is pour public subsidy into supporting
old-fashioned existing technologies that produce more carbon
dioxide per unit of energy even than coal (bio-energy), or into
ones that produce expensive energy (existing solar), or that have
very low energy density and so require huge areas of land
(wind).

The IPCC produced two reports last year. One said that the cost
of climate change is likely to be less than 2% of GDP by the end of
this century. The other said that the cost of decarbonizing the
world economy with renewable energy is likely to be 4% of GDP. [See
fro example, this summary.] Why do something that you know
will do more harm than good?

Property rights underground

My Times column was on when property rights
are too strong; though in other cases they are too weak.

 

The government is consulting on whether to amend
the law so that you cannot stop a gas or geothermal company from
drilling a horizontal well a mile beneath your house, though you
can get paid for it. Lord Jenkin of Roding last week pointed out
that, under the common law, ownership of your plot reaches “up to
Heaven and down to Hades”. Is the government justified in weakening
this aspect of your property rights below a depth of 300
metres?

Yes. When air travel began in the 1920s the United States passed
a “uniform aeronautics law” to prevent planes being charged with
trespass for flying over private property. In this country judges
made case law that overflight was not trespass. This is a similar
case — shale gas extraction would not work if trespass was held to
happen deep beneath your feet.

It would be absurd to act as if you owned a diminishing
cross-section of the earth’s crust, mantle and core down to where
it met the vanishingly small tip of an Australian householder’s
plot at the centre of the earth. The world is bedevilled by
problems caused by lack of private property rights, but it is also
bedevilled by problems caused by too much property ownership.

In the first camp, a new book by two American economists, Terry
Anderson and Gary Libecap, called Environmental Markets: a Property Rights
Approach, documents just how many environmental problems
could be solved by granting stronger property rights to tackle
“tragedies of the commons”, in which open access results in a
destructive free-for-all. In Montana, an irrigation channel was
held by judges to be a river channel and therefore free for all to
fish in; the local farmers, unable to keep trespassers out,
responded by allowing it to dry up when it was not needed.

New Zealand has led the way in solving marine overfishing by
creating individual, transferable quotas in particular fisheries,
so that fishermen have an incentive to maximise the value of the
fishery they partly own, rather than grab what they can before
somebody else does. In many such cases we should be strengthening
property rights.

But in just as many cases we should be weakening them. In his
book The Gridlock Economy, the Columbia
University law professor Michael Heller coined the term
“anticommons” for cases where too many owners try to charge tolls
for crossing their property. His paradigmatic case was transport on
the Rhine in medieval times, when the gradual fragmentation of the
river’s ownership into hundreds of greedy, toll-raising fiefs led
to a withering of trade.

The same happens today with patents on drugs and genes, so that
researchers have to fight their way through costly thickets of
patents for “access” to certain aspects of bodily biochemistry.

Many successful songs end up in court for having trespassed on a
copyrighted tune. George Harrison’s My Sweet
Lord, though based on an out-of-copyright hymn, was found to
have “subconsciously plagiarised” a 1963 hit written by Ronnie Mack
and sung by the female group the Chiffons.

Having had to pay three separate fees just to quote some short
lyrics from the song What a Wonderful World in my
last book, I think there is too much of this virtual rent-seeking
around (even though I am an author myself).

The analogy with real property is poor anyway. The whole point
of a song or a book is that you share it, which is not true of a
house. In fighting against Google Books, which wants to digitise
and publish extracts from books, organisations that represent
authors are putting supposed property rights above sharing
opportunities.

It was to prevent just such ownership gridlock that the
government long ago established that individual landowners could
not stop canals, railways, roads, sewers, water pipes or even coal
mines going through, over or under their properties, so long as
they were compensated for any harm done.

The proposals for shale gas are no different. If somebody is
going to take the expensive trouble to drill through miles of rock,
and have no discernible effect on your garden above, then you
should no more have the right to prosecute him for trespass than
you do to prosecute an airliner flying thousands of feet above your
garden or a car driving past on a motorway a mile away. The law
needs clarifying because the anti-gas greens were planning to buy
minuscule parcels of land over shale-gas drilling sites and
refusing permission to the drillers.

In the United States, where a property owner owns the gas
itself, they solved this issue in an ingenious way. When oil and
gas drilling first began, it became clear that you could suck
somebody else’s oil out of the rock before he got to it if you
pumped hard enough close to the boundary fence. This led to an
inefficient arms race of competitive pumping, a bit like
overfishing. The Texas Railroad Commission (incredibly, this is
still the name of the oil and gas regulator in Texas) started to
rule that adjoining owners must “pool” their oil ownership and be
rewarded pro rata.

Some states required a threshold majority of land owners within
a certain acreage to consent to the drilling, but most now have a
“forced pooling” system, whereby, once the driller has reached a
deal with a landowner to site its drilling pad on the surface, no
adjoining landowner within that “section” can prevent the drilling
going under his property.

Chris Wright, whose Liberty Resources is one of the leading
shale-oil producers in North Dakota, told me how this works there.
North Dakota has a standard 1,280-acre drilling spacing unit. “If
you own 1.28 acres in one of my units, I send you my drilling plans
and the estimated cost of the well and you can agree. . . to
participate, and pay 0.1 per cent of the well costs to own 0.1per
cent of the production from my well.” Alternatively, you can
“non-consent”, pay nothing and own none of the oil and gas coming
out until some threshold has passed. At that point — when revenues
exceed 300 per cent of costs — you can apparently reconsider your
refusal to participate, which is nice.

Green landowners should no more be allowed to hold up shale gas
or geothermal energy projects in the deep earth than they should be
allowed to prevent the overflying of aeroplanes.

Income inequality is falling, globally

My Times column on inequality:

There was a row last week between the “rock star
economist” Thomas Piketty and Chris Giles of theFinancial
Times over statistics on inequalities in wealth — in this
country in particular. When the dust settled, the upshot seemed to
be that in Britain wealth inequality probably did inch up between
1980 and 2010, but not by as much as Piketty had claimed, though it
depends on which data sets you trust.

Well, knock me down with a feather. You mean to say that during
three decades when the government encouraged asset bubbles in house
prices; gave tax breaks to pensions; lightly taxed wealthy
non-doms; poured money into farm subsidies; and severely restricted
the supply of land for housing, pushing up the premium earned by
planning permission for development, the wealthy owners of capital
saw their relative wealth increase slightly? Well, I’ll be
damned.

My point is that a good part of any increase in wealth
concentration since 1980 has been driven by government policy,
which has systematically redirected earning opportunities to the
rich rather than the poor. Look at our energy policy: thanks to the
allegedly left-wing energy secretaries Ed Miliband and Ed Davey, we
pay double or treble the going rate for land-hungry projects such
as wind, wood and solar energy, all of which results in rewards
going to the owners of property. Try getting through a dinner party
in the shires these days without somebody waxing lyrical about the
subsidised “payback” on wood-chip boilers or solar panels. The
upper class has a welfare dependency problem as well as the
underclass.

Yet even Piketty’s figures show that British wealth inequality
is only back to where it was in the mid-1960s, when the top 10 per
cent of people held about 70 per cent of the wealth. The figure
dipped to about 60 per cent in 1980, having peaked at 90 per cent
in 1910. So it is not true that we are back to Edwardian levels of
wealth inequality. One reason for this modest change is that
government has at the same time systematically redistributed money
from the rich to the poor by taxing the rich at higher rates and by
handing benefits to the poor.

And in doing so it has reduced income inequality. Yes, the
widespread assumption that income inequality has also been shooting
upwards is plain wrong: in this country, in terms of disposable
income, the gap between the well paid and the poorly paid has been
going down. Top salaries have certainly rocketed, but so has the
turnover of people getting them — as has the turnover of people in
the lowest income bracket. And once you take into account tax and
benefits, the Office for National Statistics confirms
that the Gini coefficient (an income distribution index) of
inequality in this country is actually lower now than it was 25
years ago (though it’s higher than it was 35 years ago in the
confiscatory tax regime of the 1970s).

I was startled when I learnt this fact, which seems to be
missing from the entire debate, the assumption of which is that
income inequality is getting worse right now. It is not. In chapter
and verse, the recent ONS bulletin entitled The Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household
Income, 2011/12 finds that the highest-earning 20 per
cent of British households earned 14 times as much as the lowest
earning 20 per cent before tax and benefits — but just four times
as much after tax and benefits. These measures cut the average
income of the top 20 per cent from £78,300 to £57,300, while they
raise the average income of the bottom 20 per cent from £5,400 to
£15,800. Thus, even though government may enact policies that help
the wealthy to increase their wealth, it does at least redress the
balance through the tax system. As it should.

Remember too that global inequality is not going up: it is
plunging downwards. Nobody knows quite how fast — there’s a similar
row about the numbers of the Spanish economist Xavier
Sala-i-Martín on this question — but every economist I speak to
agrees that global income inequality is falling, even before you
take into account tax and benefits.

It has to be. For a quarter of a century people in poor
countries have been getting rich faster than people in rich
countries have been getting richer. In the past five years that
discrepancy has exploded, thanks to recession in rich countries and
continuing rapid growth in poor ones. Mozambique’s economy is 60
per cent larger than it was in 2007; Italy’s is 6 per cent smaller.
Isn’t this redistribution of growth from the rich world to the poor
world the big story about inequality? In countries such as
Mozambique, inequality means some people going without adequate
food, shelter, running water or medicine.

It is worth remembering that nowhere in the world, with the
possible exception of North Korea and Somalia, are the poor getting
poorer. The percentage of the world’s population living on $2 a day
(corrected for inflation) has halved since 1990 — a truly
unprecedented change (see here).
Any increase in wealth inequality or pre-tax income inequality in
Britain or America is caused by the rich getting disproportionately
richer, not by the poor getting poorer. This is the point made forcefully by the economist-philosopher
Deirdre McCloskey in Saturday’s Times, and in her
trilogy of books on the bourgeois virtues. The gaps that are
opening up in the West are mostly in luxuries, not in
necessities.

Yet I have to admit that arguments such as these fall mostly on
deaf ears. People genuinely seem to mind about the unfairness of
unequal income as much as or more than they mind about poverty.
They think in terms of relative wealth, not absolute, which is why
inequality reduction is an end in itself. As Margaret Thatcher said in response to Simon Hughes in one of her
last appearances as prime minister: “He would rather that the poor
were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich.”

Neither Britain nor the world is especially unequal right now
compared with most of the past two centuries. If you want to reduce
wealth inequality in Britain, then the quickest way is to
liberalise the planning laws to bring down house prices. If you
want to make poor people less poor, then raise the growth rate of
the economy and keep on redistributing.

Sometimes it is right to wipe out a species

My Times column is on the eradication of diseases
and the resurrection fo extinct species. Both interferences with
nature would be a good thing.

The World Health Organisation’s annual assembly
decided on Saturday evening not to set a date to destroy the last
two remaining samples of smallpox virus kept in secure laboratories
in Atlanta and Novosibirsk. Smallpox, being a virus, does not
really count as a living species. But the prospect of the
deliberate extinction of some harmful species is getting closer. Be
in no doubt — it would be an unambiguously good thing.

Smallpox was eradicated outside laboratories in 1977, when Ali
Maow Maalin recovered from the disease in Merca, Somalia (he died
last year of malaria). Until now researchers have wanted to keep
the virus alive in the laboratory just in case they need to study
it further. Pretty well everybody now agrees that the risk of
keeping the virus is greater than the risk of not keeping it.
Remember that the last case of smallpox was the death of Janet
Parker, a medical photographer, in Birmingham in 1978, who caught
it from a laboratory.

Last year the WHO convened a group of independent experts who concluded that “there is no need, from a global
public health perspective, to retain live Variola
virus [its scientific name] for any further research”. They also
pointed out that 600 million doses of smallpox vaccine remain
available in the highly unlikely event that — say — a live virus
emerges from a buried corpse in the frozen tundra.

If you had predicted in 1978 that 36 years later we would have
extinguished no more diseases (apart from rinderpest, a cattle
disease), you would have been thought a dire pessimist. Yet
smallpox turned out to be uniquely vulnerable to eradication
because its short incubation period, lack of an animal reservoir
and its obvious symptoms allowed rapid vaccination responses to
contain outbreaks. Polio was expected to follow it to the viral
grave soon afterwards, but that dream has been repeatedly
postponed.

Indeed, this year polio is resurgent, with 82 cases so far, compared
with 34 by this date last year. Most of them are in Pakistan, a
country where polio vaccinators are sometimes murdered by the
Taliban on the suspicion that they are US or Israeli agents
spreading Aids or sterilising girls.

Disastrously the CIA helped to give credence to such rumours by
using a local doctor to run a hepatitis
vaccination project as cover for trying to get blood samples from
the children living at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, in
order to identify who was living there. The doctor is now in
jail.

There is even a brief glimpse in the film Zero Dark
Thirty of a fake vaccinator, wearing a jacket with “Polio”
written on the back, trying to get access to the house — a factual
mistake by the film makers that can only have
exacerbated the risk to real polio vaccinators. Last week the Obama
administration promised the deans of 12 public health schools
that it would never use fake vaccinators again, but that promise
comes too late for those paralysed by polio in Pakistan in the past
few years.

The imminent eradication of the guinea worm in Africa has also
suffered a setback this year. Last month there were just three new cases, down from 25 in
April last year and 80 in April 2012. But one of them was in Chad,
where a handful of recent cases have occurred in people and dogs
near the Chari river, an area previously thought to be free of the
problem. The others are in South Sudan, where, despite the war, the
parasite does seem to be coming under control.

Is such deliberate extinction of creatures that cause suffering
a good idea? As long as the effect on ecosystems is small, then the
answer is clearly yes. Take mosquitoes, for example. There are
2,500 species of mosquito in the world and only one of them
— Aedes aegypti — is responsible for carrying
dengue fever, a disease that currently afflicts nearly 400 million
people and rising. If you were to wave a magic wand and get rid
of A aegypti, then there would be plenty of other
mosquitoes to take its place in ponds and puddles.

And waving such a magic wand is no longer completely
implausible. Last month the Brazilian government gave an Oxford-based company called Oxitec a
licence to release into the wild genetically engineered
male A aegypti mosquitoes. They carry two extra
genes that render their offspring incapable of breeding. Release
enough of them in an area and the species all but dies out locally.
The beauty of this scheme is that the rarer the species gets, the
better the chance that the genetically engineered males you release
will mate with any available females, so the technique becomes more
effective, not less, as local extinction approaches.

Global eradication of even this one species of mosquito is
likely to remain practically impossible, but local extinction might
well be feasible. And, although it is not the insect’s fault that
it carries the dengue virus, good riddance. The ecological impact
of reducing the diversity of mosquito fauna by one species will be
undetectable.

As the prospect of eradicating species we dislike gets closer,
so the prospect of resurrecting extinct species we like gets closer
too. Exactly a century ago this September the last living specimen
of the passenger pigeon, a female called Martha, died in Cincinnati
zoo. The DNA sequence of the passenger pigeon has now been read,
and a researcher named Ben Novak is beginning to put together a
plan for how to edit the chromosomes of a closely related species,
the band-tailed pigeon, until they match the passenger pigeon’s.
After that, a cell with the edited genome could be turned into an
embryo and grown in an egg. (Full disclosure: I am an adviser to
the project.)

Some nattering nabobs of negativism are worried that this is a
bad idea. It might risk upsetting today’s ecologies or make us
complacent about extinction. Worse, argues one critic, it is “a refusal to accept
our moral and technological limits in nature”. Yup. That refusal is
something I am eternally grateful for, as a person who was
vaccinated against smallpox.

Imagine, 50 years from now, that we have resurrected five
species — the passenger pigeon, mammoth, dodo, thylacine and great
auk — but eradicated five others: the guinea worm, dengue mosquito,
leprosy bacillus, malaria parasite and river-blindness worm. Would
that be a better world? Yes.

Oh for politicians who value social AND economic freedom

My Times column on the politics of liberty:

As the Ukip campaign ploughs steadily farther off
the rails into the anti-immigrant bushes, in search presumably of
former British National Party voters, it becomes ever easier for
small-government, classical liberals — like me — to resist its
allure. Nigel Farage once advocated flat taxes, drug
decriminalisation and spending cuts. Now his party has dropped the
flat tax, opposes zero-hours contracts, is hostile to gay marriage
and talks about subsidising farmers and growing the defence
budget.

Meanwhile, the Conservative party has probably never been so
socially tolerant, or the Labour party so socially reactionary, as
they are today. Is a great realignment possible, with the old
Gladstonian coalition of economic free-marketers and social
liberals gradually re-emerging, with Labour, Ukip, the Greens and
the Lib Dems left appealing to those who fear change?

For most of the 20th century, if you wanted the state to stay
out of economics you had to vote for a Conservative party that
paradoxically believed in a strong authoritarian state when it came
to defence, law and order and public morality: telling people what
to do in the bedroom but not the boardroom. Likewise if you wanted
the state to plan the economy, you had to vote for a Labour party
that wanted to be permissive, socially and morally.

Odd, that. Surely, wanting government to stay out of the economy
should go with wanting government to stay out of society too. They
went together in the 19th century, after all. Radical liberals who
campaigned against war, colonialism, slavery, political patronage
and the established church were usually furiously free-market
libertarians on economics: people such as Richard Cobden, Harriet
Martineau, Herbert Spencer or WE Gladstone.

Cobden, said one of his biographers, “believed in individual
liberty and enterprise, in free markets, freedom of opinion and
freedom of trade”. But he also was an implacable pacifist and
refused a baronetcy from a monarch he disapproved of. Nobody would
have dreamt of calling him a rightwinger.

Liberals were trying to lift the dead hand of the corrupt and
tyrannical state from the market economy as well as from the
private life of the citizen. Who remembers now that the
demonstration attacked at Peterloo was in favour of free trade as
well as political reform, or that the Chartists were founder
members of the Anti-Corn Law League?

The rise of Marxism changed all that. Suddenly the apparatus of
the state, far from being seen as the weapon of an oppressive
elite, began to be seen as the servant of the proletariat. The last
of the Gladstonian liberals died out in the first decades of the
20th century — people such as John Morley, who resigned from
Asquith’s cabinet over the declaration of war in 1914 but firmly
opposed social welfare legislation too. A final hurrah was the
lonely career of Sir Ernest Benn, Tony’s uncle, who was a
left-wing, free-market libertarian and managed to get identity
cards scrapped after the Second World War.

By then the “Liberal” party, as well as the Labour party, wanted
to plan the economy, even as the state withdrew from religious,
social and moral finger-wagging. The Tories wanted the opposite:
hanging, flogging, church and army, but free enterprise. Tony Blair
dragged the Labour party towards more authoritarian policies on
crime, defence and welfare, and away from them on economic
planning. Ed Miliband has reversed that economic liberalisation,
with his plethora of planned interventions in commercial markets,
but he has not moderated the social authoritarianism. Thus the
Labour party, representing public sector unions and public sector
institutions, looks more than ever like the 19th-century Tory
party: the NHS is the Labour party at prayer.

Under David Cameron, however, and even more under the influence
of the 2010 intake of Tory MPs, the Conservatives have been wetter
than Labour on some social policies — gay marriage, press
regulation, even warfare — and have remained pretty dry on economic
policies. Only in areas such as energy (a Lib Dem fief) is the
top-down, nanny-knows-best approach to commerce still tolerated in
this government — and the tolerance is wearing thin.

The realignment still has a long way to go but if it continues,
the Tory party after the next election will look a lot more like
the party of Cobden and Gladstone than the one of Salisbury or even
Thatcher. After all, Daniel Hannan MEP and Douglas Carswell go
round singing the praises of the Levellers who mutinied against
Oliver Cromwell in 1649: these were not proto-socialists but
proto-libertarians who demanded free trade, low taxes, limited
government and freedom of the individual. So maybe I will live to
see a party that wants free trade and free speech; free enterprise
and free movement of people; free markets and free thinking. A
couple of years ago that party might have been Ukip; not now.

I may be guilty of wishful thinking. On immigration, almost
nobody — apart from Boris Johnson — is making liberal noises now.
The landslide victory of Narendra Modi’s BJP in India is a reminder
that the old Reagan-Thatcher strategy of putting together a
coalition of social authoritarians and economic liberals can still
work well. Tony Abbott in Australia and Stephen Harper in Canada
pulled off the same trick.

In America, that coalition has fractured. Ronald Reagan governed
mostly as a libertarian after being elected mostly as a social
conservative. His Republican successors are sharply divided between
the ever more libertarian Ron and Rand Paul and Gary Johnson — who
oppose military intervention — and the ever more reactionary
Christian conservatives such as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum,
who desire big government to combat the rise of drugs, terrorists,
gays and immigration.

In today’s Britain, the free-market/permissive coalition could
work. Surveys show that people coming out of university are
strikingly liberal in both respects. They want to be free to make
money in any way they want, but they also want to be free to make
love in any way they want. Much more than their elders, they
dislike deficits, welfare spending and trade unions, but they have
little affection for the armed forces. They also have no time for
homophobia, xenophobia or sexism. They echo the great 19th-century
French economist Frédéric Bastiat, who when asked for his “plan”,
replied: “Liberty within and peace without: this is the entire
plan.”

The coerced consensus

My Thunderer column in the Times on the bullying
of a distinguished climate scientist for having the temerity to
advise those who doubt the speed of climate change:

[update: links repaired below]

Lennart Bengtsson is about as distinguished as
climate scientists get. His decision two weeks ago to join the
academic advisory board (on which I also sit, unremunerated) of
Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation was greeted with
fury by many fellow climate scientists. Now in a McCarthyite move —
his analogy — they have bullied him into resigning by refusing to
collaborate with him unless he leaves.

The GWPF aims to ensure that the climate-change debate is more
balanced. Its members are not “deniers”, yet as Lord Lawson said in
a recent speech: “I have never in my life experienced the extremes
of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification that I, along
with other dissenters, of course, have received for my views on
global warming and global-warming policies.”

Professor Bengtsson’s resignation shows that the alleged
“consensus” on dangerous global warming involves suppressing
dissent by academic bullying. He emphasises that there is no
consensus about how fast and how far greenhouse warming will go,
let alone what can be done in response.

Evidence of such bullying emerged in the “Climategate” scandal of 2009, where some
climate scientists’ emails revealed them to be ready to threaten
and blackball colleagues, reporters and editors who expressed
sceptical views. I talk frequently to scientists who are
unconvinced that climate change is even close to being the world’s
most pressing environmental problem, but who will not put their
heads above the parapet for fear of what it would do to their
careers.

What is going on in academia when demonising and silencing your
opponents has become so acceptable? It’s not just climate change.
The nature-nurture debate is also policed by zealots, although less
so than in the 1970s when any mention of genes and behaviour led to
accusations of fascism.

Or consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who suffered genital
mutilation, attempted forced marriage, attempted assassination and
double exile for her views. The offer of an honorary degree from
Brandeis University on the anniversary of the Boston marathon
bombings (committed by Islamists) was withdrawn after pressure from
its women’s studies department (more on Aayan Hirsi Ali here).

Professor Bengtsson’s persecution shows precisely why
independent think-tanks such as the Global Warming Policy
Foundation are essential. Truly, the old joke is becoming ever more
true: what’s the opposite of diversity? University.

 

More on this story here:

http://climateaudit.org/2014/05/16/io...

 

Appendix:

Examples of the threatening and blackballing
of scientists, reporters and editors in the Climategate emails:

Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic
Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F
Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there
now SB-C has retired.( 1256765544)

Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has
published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with
the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)

Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why
another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical
article.( 1255352257)

Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic
papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages
the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher
that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that
whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get
editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch
too. ( 
1051190249)

Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very
tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. ( 1255100876)

Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in
UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is
covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding
behind them”.( 1106338806)

Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he
expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says
that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the
scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the
VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says
he needs to word things diplomatically.( 1140554230)

Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his
reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp
sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against
something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated
verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.( 1024334440)

Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals
if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has
complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather
[why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged
GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about
the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia
[does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a
sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him
ousted.(1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was
subsequently ousted]

Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.( 1132094873)

Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating
themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information
Commissioner [!]( 1219239172)

Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.( 1254259645)

Jones says in a HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL email that he and Kevin
will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.( 1089318616)

Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to
refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of
instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been
a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and
IPCC.( 1255553034)

Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic
paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies
with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about
the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says
that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it
( 1054756929)

Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not
entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.( 1233249393)

And here is what a climate scientist, Michael Schlesinger, wrote
to Andy Revkin of the New York Times shortly afterwards:

Andy:



Copenhagen prostitutes?



Climate prostitutes?



Shame on you for this gutter reportage. This is the second
time this week I have written you thereon, the first about giving
space in your blog to the Pielkes.



The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that
your reportage is very worrisome to most climate
scientists. Of course, your blog is your
blog. But, I sense that you are about to experience the
'Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust
you, me included. 



Copenhagen prostitutes? 

Unbelievable and unacceptable. 



What are you doing and why? 



Michael

Race, genes and recent evolution

My Times column on the implications of genetic
evolution since races diverged:

Is it necessary to believe that racial differences
are small and skin-deep in order not to be a racist? For the first
half of the last century, science generally exaggerated stereotypes
of racial difference in behaviour and assumed that they were innate
and immutable. For the second half, science generally asserted that
there were no differences — save the obvious, visible ones — and
used this argument to combat prejudice.

Yet that second premise is becoming increasingly untenable in
the genomic era as more details emerge of human genetic diversity.
We will have to justify equal treatment using something other than
identity of nature. Fortunately, it’s easily done.

Human evolution did not cease thousands of years ago; it has
been “recent, copious and regional”, in the words of Nicholas Wade,
a veteran New York Times science writer and the
author of A Troublesome Inheritance, an eloquent but disturbing book on genes, race and
human history, which was published last week.

In the past 30,000 years — after humanity split into different
races — all sorts of genetic change has happened through natural
selection: lactose tolerance developed in response to dairy farming
in Europe and parts of Africa; physiological adaptations for high
altitude emerged in Tibetans; malaria resistance spread throughout
Africa and the Mediterranean; a gene for sweat glands, ear wax and
hair changed in China.

One estimate is that about 14 per cent of the human genome — 722
regions containing 2,465 genes — has been affected by so-called
“selective sweeps” (whereby a gene mutation brings an advantage and
replaces other versions in the population) in one race or another.
The frequencies of gene variants have shown rapid change in these
places. In many places, the affected genes are active mostly in the
brain. As Wade puts it: “These findings establish the obvious truth
that brain genes do not lie in some special category exempt from
natural selection.”

Perhaps people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent have high average IQs
because for centuries their ancestors worked almost exclusively in
professions such as money-lending, where exceptional literacy and
numeracy were rewarded with greater fecundity. Or perhaps Chinese
people show greater conformity because for centuries those who
could stomach Confucian rote-learning and obedience got to have
more surviving children. These are no more far-fetched arguments
than to suppose that ancestral Inuit with genetic adaptations for
coping with the cold had more offspring.

Nor is it implausible that over millennia of settled,
agricultural and urban living, with the execution or ostracism of
“skull-cracker” misfits, selection took place for tameness in the
natives of Europe or India compared with say, New Guinea or the
Amazon. Thanks to “soft sweeps” — where multiple existing gene
variants change in frequency — evolution can work a lot faster than
we used to think. Starting in the 1960s, a Russian fur farmer
transformed silver foxes from fearsome, fierce, wild animals into
affectionate, floppy-eared, piebald pets in only 35 generations
simply by breeding from those that were least fearsome.

So Wade is absolutely right that the old assumption that human
behaviour did not evolve much after the divergence of human races
at the end of the old Stone Age has to be wrong. The comforting
message that biologists sent to social scientists in the 1960s —
that they were sure there was no biological basis for race, which
could instead be regarded as a social construct — is bunk.

True, the boundaries of races are blurred, and the differences
between individuals dwarf those between average members of
different races, but differences there are, and not just in skin
pigment. The more we look, the more genetic variation we will find
between races, as well as between individuals, so we had better get
ready to deal with such discoveries, if only for medical reasons.
Some diseases afflict certain races more; some drugs work
differently in different races.

However, I part company with the next step in Wade’s argument.
He tries to explain too much of human history by gene changes. The
industrial revolution started in Europe and not China, he suggests,
partly because Europe had been preconditioned by genetic evolution
for the sort of economic openness that sparked accelerating
innovation.

This is based on the work of the historian Gregory Clark (like
Wade, an expatriate Briton in America who has written a fascinating
new book about social mobility called The Son Also
Rises). The evidence from the history of surnames, Clark
says, “confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for
the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of
the poor and criminal”. Clark finds that, more than in China, for
centuries literate, entrepreneurial Europeans had been out-breeding
poorer ones, their genes cascading down into the working class
through downward mobility.

So yes, there would have been genetic change in European society
as certain types of personality had more offspring. But surely this
was not anywhere near fast or large enough to spark the industrial
revolution, let alone as important as factors such as the
harnessing of fossil fuels or the invention of inclusive
institutions and opening up to trade. Just look at how quickly
attitudes to homosexuality, say, have changed within a lifetime,
with no time for gene changes.

It may be harder to build and run a modern consumer society from
scratch using only people whose ancestors were hunter-gathering for
most of the past 30,000 years (native Australians, say) than by
using only people whose ancestors experienced farming, cities,
diseases, alcohol and literacy. But it would be far from impossible
with the right institutions.

There is a big reason that racial differences in mental capacity
will not matter a jot, however many we find. Human achievement is
not, despite what professors like to think, the work of brilliant
individuals. It is a collective phenomenon. Every technology, every
idea, every institution is a combination of many people’s
contributions. There is no single human being on the planet, as
Leonard Read famously pointed out, who knows how to make a pencil,
let alone the internet, the economy or the government.

The average IQ of a group, a team or a race matters little, if
at all. What counts is how well they communicate, collaborate and
exchange ideas. Give me a hundred thickos who talk to each other,
rather than a hundred clever-clogs who don’t. This collaboration is
surely the true secret of human achievement and the true reason
that race does not count, not because we are all identical inside
our skulls.

Very well, alone

My Times column on the Lucky Planet theory:

We may be unique and alone in the Universe, not
because we are special but because we are lucky. By “we”, I mean
not just the human race, but intelligent life itself. A fascinating
book published last week has changed my mind about this mighty
question, and I would like to change yours. The key argument
concerns the Moon, which makes it an appropriate topic for a bank
holiday Moonday.

David Waltham, of Royal Holloway, University of London, is the
author of the very readable Lucky Planet, which argues that the Earth
is probably rare, perhaps even unique, as planets go. He is also a
self-confessed “moon bore” who has made important discoveries about
how the Moon formed.

Ever since Copernicus, the “mediocrity principle” has been
scientific orthodoxy: that our planet is not the centre of the
Universe; it’s just one of (as we now estimate) a thousand billion
billion spherical objects of similar size orbiting fiery suns just
like ours.

But in that case, as the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi famously
asked, where is everybody? Why no faint radio messages from our
distant neighbours in space? There should be enormous numbers of
planets that have been around for longer than us, long enough
surely to get to the point of transmitting some interstellar Muzak.
Yet not a peep.

Dr Waltham points out that planets where life fails to survive
cannot give rise to sentient life forms, so we are bound to find
ourselves on one that has managed to be just right. Precisely
because we are afflicted with this severe case of observational
bias, the mediocrity principle need not follow. We can be misled by
what we can see around us into thinking our case is typical, when
actually it might be almost impossibly rare. We might be neither
special nor commonplace, just lucky.

And indeed, there does seem to be a long string of coincidences
behind our existence. The pressure of anti-gravity in our universe
happens to be very, very small — not quite big enough to blow the
Universe apart before stars could form. Phew. The relative strength
of nuclear and electrical forces is just right to allow carbon to
be one of the commonest elements, and carbon’s capacity to form
lots of bonds is crucial to life. Cheers. The strength of molecular
bonds is just right to allow chemistry to happen at our distance
from the Sun. Hooray.

Then there’s the climate. Although there were probably at least
four times when the Earth came close to freezing altogether or
overheating irreversibly, it somehow recovered each time, unlike on
Venus or Mars, and for the last half billion years the weather has
been astonishingly benign. Periodic catastrophes, caused by
volcanoes or meteorites, have set the evolution of life back, but
not often enough to prevent intelligence emerging eventually:
another stroke of luck.

Spookily, the slow waxing of our Sun’s strength over four
billion years should have produced a ten-degree rise in average
temperature, but it has not because it has been almost precisely
matched by a slow decline in our greenhouse effect as carbon
dioxide became progressively scarcer. This has kept the temperature
in a small range for a very long time — long enough once again to
allow the emergence of intelligent life. (The recent uptick in
carbon dioxide levels as a result of fossil fuel burning is still
small in comparison.)

Waltham posits three possible explanations for these great
strokes of good fortune: God, Gaia and Goldilocks. God does not
show His workings; Gaia says living things themselves somehow
unwittingly control the thermostat; and Goldilocks says it’s just
an almighty fluke that we’ve managed to keep things neither too hot
nor too cold, but just right.

This is where the Moon comes in and delivers the verdict
decisively to Goldilocks. It is most unusual for a small planet to
have such a huge moon — almost a double planet. It probably came
about after a collision between two planets, a chunk of the larger
one being ejected into space, where it first formed rings like
Saturn’s, but these then coalesced into a big satellite.

At that point the Moon was only about 20,000 miles away, or one
tenth the distance it is now. Our day was five hours long. The
ocean’s tides, caused by attraction of the Moon, themselves slowed
down the Earth’s rotation and caused the Moon to move steadily
outwards.

All this was a stroke of luck because the Moon stabilised the
rate and angle of our spinning such that we got a fairly long day
and regular seasons to keep warming the poles and preventing the
irreversible growth of ice. What Waltham has discovered, however,
is that this was an even bigger lucky strike than we used to
think.

Had the Earth’s day been a few minutes longer just after the
collision, or the Moon’s diameter a few miles greater, then the
Earth would have had an unstable spin and life would have been
repeatedly wiped out by chaotic climate change. If the day had been
shorter or the Moon smaller, then we would have had more and longer
ice ages, because too little heat would have reached the poles
through air currents.

Very few planets indeed could have collided with an object the
right size to produce such a moon and even fewer of them would have
ended up with a Goldilocks moon that was just the right size. Since
life cannot control the Moon’s orbit, Gaia cannot explain this
piece of luck. The Moon therefore shows decisively just how hard it
will be to find another planet of sufficiently stable climate to
spawn life that could last long enough to develop intelligence.

Waltham has persuaded me that we are “perhaps the luckiest
planet in the visible universe”, the only one among billions of
billions to have thrown six after six whenever the dice were
rolled. Whichever planet achieved this would have thinking beings
on it who would think they were special, whereas really they were
just lucky. And they would be alone, or very nearly so.

The moral? Remember the famous David Low cartoon from after the fall of
France in 1940, showing a defiant Tommy on a sea-lashed rock, with
the message: “Very well, alone.”