Nature: "Current models of climate economics assume that lives in the future are less important... [View all]

[NNadir]

than lives today, a value judgement that is rarely scrutinized and difficult to defend..."

This language comes from a news feature "focus" article from Nature featured on this issues cover: Nature, Vol. 539 Iss. 7591 pg 397 (2016)

The issue, at least in its news and viewpoint sections, is devoted to reflections on scientists' need to reflect on how their work will impact future generations.

One "news" article asks the question, "Should parents edit their children's genes." Nature 530, 402–405 (25 February 2016) It now seems perfectly technologically feasible to do so, owing to the invention of CRISPR-Cas, a technique using complementary genetic material to carry a protein which is a nuclease, designed to clip sections of DNA enabling the insertion of other genes.

This has very high potential to edit the genome in a very facile and efficient way, not only humans, but practically every other high species on the planet. Ultimately it is a technology by which humanity could, were it so inclined, design its own ecosystem and all of the creatures in it?

Were this technology fully developed when the embryo that ultimately became me, my parents might have considered snipping and replacing the gene for type II diabetes, which I apparently carry. Would I be me? Would I know that I wasn't me? Would I care?

My son, who just was admitted to a fairly prestigious art school, is dyslexic, generally associated with chromosome 18. Would I have been wide or foolish to edit it?

Of course, the implications go way beyond any particular individual, myself included. These are not easy questions to answer.

(One of two independent discoverers of CRISPR-Cas, Jennifer Doudna, wrote a wonderful rumination a few issues back, also in Nature on how ill equipped she was to deal with the ethical implications of her work, the emergence of which surprised her and got her to thinking in new ways: Genome-editing revolution: My whirlwind year with CRISPR (Nature 528, 469–471 (24 December 2015))

One of the articles in the current issue also features a rumination on the Environmental issue before us, climate change. An economist, Nicolas Stern, authored an article titled Current climate models are grossly misleading. The point here is that climate models talking about a 2^oC increase is a global average, but the economic effects locally can hardly be expected to the same everywhere. The author writes:

Current economic models tend to underestimate seriously both the potential impacts of dangerous climate change and the wider benefits of a transition to low-carbon growth. There is an urgent need for a new generation of models that give a more accurate picture.

Dark impacts

...The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2013 and 2014, provided a comprehensive overview of the literature on the costs of action and inaction. But the assessment understated the limitations of the research done so far. Essentially, it reported on a body of literature that had systematically and grossly underestimated the risks of unmanaged climate change. Furthermore, that literature had failed to capture the learning processes and economies of scale involved in radical structural and technical change, and the benefits of reducing fossil-fuel pollution, protecting biodiversity and forests, and so on...

An article with a larger physical science focus was published a few weeks ago:

Allowable CO2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets (Nature 529, 477–483 (28 January 2016))

The authors show that a 2^oC "average" temperature increase in the climate is dominated by the relatively mild changes over the oceans; elsewhere the impacts will most extreme.

The following graphic demonstrates this:



Here's another plot from their paper:



The authors write:

This figure is compelling because it shows a clear linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and a measure of the global climate response. The obvious consequences are (1) that every tonne of CO2 contributes about the same amount of global warming no matter when it is emitted, (2) that any target for the stabilization of ΔTglob implies a finite CO2 budget or quota that can be emitted, and (3) that global net emissions at some point need to be zero2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

"Every tonne contributes the same amount of global warming no matter when its emitted."

This includes tons emitted when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. We may think we're doing something by mouthing mindless platitudes about how great wind and solar and other forms of so called "renewable energy" are, but we are lying to ourselves.

What we are doing isn't working; it isn't working at all.

2016 has been an unprecedented year, with the weekly data as compared to the same week the year before routinely being over 3 ppm higher. February 21, 2016, 3.33 ppm higher than the weekly average of 2015

I don't think we'll find the wherewithal to stop at 2C. It's going to be much worse.

Have a nice week.