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‘To create is to recombine’ said the molecular biologist François Jacob.
Healthcare and education are among the few things that cost more in terms of hours worked now than they did in the 1950s.
Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.
Fire and cooking in turn then released the brain to grow bigger still by making food more digestible with an even smaller gut – once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy. As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size.
people have become oxytocin-junkies far more than many other animals.
Thia pean to oxytocin overlooks the effects it has on ingroup / outgroup relations that increases violent responses.
Politically, as Brink Lindsey has diagnosed, the coincidence of wealth with toleration has led to the bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its social consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they come. ‘One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.’
‘Rich countries,’ concluded the Bank, ‘are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity.’
The archaeologist Steven LeBlanc says that the evidence of constant violence in the ancient past has been systematically overlooked by Rousseauesque wishful thinking among academics. He
more precisely, to replace all the industrial nitrogen fertiliser now applied would mean an extra seven billion cattle grazing an extra thirty billion acres of pasture. (You will often hear organic champions extol the virtues of both manure and vegetarianism: notice the contradiction.)
synthetic fertiliser, it exhausts the mineral nutrients in the soil – especially phosphorus and potassium, but eventually also sulphur, calcium and manganese. It gets round this problem by adding crushed rock or squashed fish to the soil. These have to be mined or netted. Its main problem, though, is nitrogen deficiency, which it can reverse by growing legumes (clover, alfalfa or beans), which fix nitrogen from the air, and either ploughing them into the soil or feeding them to cattle whose manure is then ploughed into the soil. With such help a particular organic plot can match non-organic
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Or that Golden Promise, a variety of barley especially popular with organic brewers, was first created in an atomic reactor in Britain in the 1950s by massive mutation of its genes followed by selection?
When Arab piracy and papal plunder paused under the influence of the first Otto,
So government is good for something after all and trade doesn't magically cure all ills.
‘Many of my contemporaries in the developed world,’ writes Stewart Brand, ‘regard subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.’
As far as the planet is concerned, this is good news because city dwellers take up less space, use less energy and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers.
The space might be correct but it neglects the fact cities also expand outwards. I'd like to see the numbers on enery and impact statements.
The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.’
Make a zoo for us to live in
Just one wind farm at Altamont in California kills twenty-four golden eagles every year: if an oil firm did that it would be in court. Hundreds of orang-utans are killed a year because they get in the way of oil-palm biofuel plantations. ‘Let’s stop sanctifying false and minor gods,’ says the energy expert Jesse Ausubel, ‘and heretically chant “Renewables are not green”.’
But is their environmental cost lower?
But is this just a math anomoly because GDP and energy usage both increased?
foresee pebble-bed, passive-safe, modular nuclear reactors everywhere.
Once you work out security
Ebola outbreaks – which wreaked horrible disintegration upon their victims and wiped out whole villages in the Congo a handful of times in the 1990s before fading away each time – proved to be very local, easily controlled and partly man-made. That
Needs to update this part
The epidemic is far from over, and much more could be done, but the news is getting slowly better, not worse.
Because dire claims sparked action and research
without any unusual genetic changes at all in the rodents that have been studied.)
Doesn't mean the area is safe or the animals healthy
It took just months in 2009 to generate large doses of vaccines for swine flu.
Based on decades of research and experience
No wonder nearly five million Egyptians have decided to build illegal dwellings instead. Typically, a Cairo house owner will build up to three illegal storeys on top of his house and rent them out to relatives.
That's really safe I'm sure
People move happily from London to Hong Kong or Boston to Miami and do not die from heat, so why should they die if their home city gradually warms by a few degrees? (It already has, because
overlooks medically vulnerable but I take his point
the cause is human migration and habitat change, not climate change.
And climate change could trigger both
before worrying about the possibility that global warming might increase that number by 30,000 – at the very most?
and where does this # come from?
Wheat, for example, grows 15–40 per cent faster in 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide than it does in 295 ppm. (Glasshouses
plants grow faster but I've seen articles that say the growth is focused in srems and leaves not the bits we eat
But bleaching depends more on rate of change than absolute temperature. This
and it's happening
It is now clear that corals rebound quickly from bleaching episodes, repopulating dead reefs in just a few years, which is presumably how they survived the warming lurches at the end of the last ice age. It is also apparent from recent research that corals become more resilient the more they experience sudden warmings.
I guess it's ok then
‘It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair,’ said H.G. Wells.
The collapse of Detroit’s big car makers in 2009 leaves a flock of entrepreneurial startups in charge of the next generation of cars and engines.
no it didn't
