Bill McKibben, one of the earliest to write about climate change and the founder of [350.org][http://350.org], has a article on the state of play in the New York Review of Books. In it he looks back on what scientists got right with their early modelling…

These climate models got their first real chance to shine in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, injecting known amounts of various chemicals into the atmosphere, and the models passed with flying colors, accurately predicting the short-term cooling those chemicals produced.

…recalls that the oil companies were well aware of the problem even while they did their best to ensure no meaningful action was taken…

Exxon, for instance, got the problem right: one of the graphs their researchers produced predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration would be in 2019. That this knowledge did not stop the industry from its all-out decades-long war to prevent change is a fact to which we will return.

…and goes on to point out that we need to do way more than we’ve been doing.

To meet the Paris goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to cut its emissions by 7.6 percent annually for the next decade. Stop and read that number again—it’s almost incomprehensibly large. No individual country, not to mention the planet, has ever cut emissions at that rate for a single year, much less a continuous decade. And yet that’s the inexorable mathematics of climate change. Had we started cutting when scientists set off the alarm, in the mid-1990s, the necessary cuts would have been a percent or two each year. A modest tax on carbon might well have sufficed to achieve that kind of reduction. But—thanks in no small part to the obstruction of the fossil fuel industry, which, as we have seen above, knew exactly what havoc it was courting—we didn’t start correcting the course of the supertanker that is our global economy. Instead, we went dead ahead: humans have released more carbon dioxide since Hansen’s congressional testimony than in all of history before.

The whole article is worth a read to get an idea of where we are currently and the potential for change, from increasing use of renewables to divestments and campaigns to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

January in Australia, for a club cyclist at least, means a pilgrimage to Adelaide for the Tour Down Under. I hadn’t been for the last two years, so I was overdue a visit this year and when Stu said he was going down for a half-week, I was in too.

The usual protocol is for our club to ride around 100km per day, stopping at the occasional bakery to refuel and intersecting with the race route to watch the pros in action. Depending on numbers, we usually have more than one bunch, with the fast bunch doing a few more kms (up to 130) and the slower bunch doing 80 or so. Everyone rides the climbs at their own pace - whether that’s all-out to see how fast you can go, or a comfortable effort - and we re-group at the top.

Usually I flit between the two groups, riding at the front of the slow group, or hanging on to the fast group, but this year it became apparent from the first climb that I was the tail-end Charlie on all the climbs, even in the slow bunch! Not enough hard training in the last few months, or really any training at all.

Sure, I’d been riding a few times a week, but not really following anything structured that you could call a training plan, and now my lack of fitness was revealed 😁 Unfortunately there was only one bunch this year as numbers were down, but I managed to find one or two others each day who were around my pace and happy to do a few less kilometers and it all worked out in the end. I’ve ridden those roads enough times to know my way around, so my preference is to let the main bunch do their own thing, rather than me holding them up. Sounds altruistic, but it’s actually me being selfish and not wanting the pressure of trying to keep up! The Adelaide hills are still a great place to ride, even if most of your club-mates are on a different route.

A few days before Christmas, a bushfire broke out in Cudlee Creek, an area we habitually visit, and riding through there this year was eye-opening. The scent of smoke was still in the air, more than three weeks later, as we rode down roads surrounded by burnt trees and slopes, marvelling at how houses had been saved despite being surrounded by burnt-out land and then being reminded of the toll these fires take by the occasional ruin of a house that couldn’t be saved. One thing is certain - the Country Fire Service did a really good job under pretty testing circumstances.

The New Republic has an article on the gig economy, titled ‘The Silicon Valley Economy Is Here. And It’s a Nightmare’ looking at the effects of companies like Instacart and Uber classifying their workers as independent contractors to get around labour laws.

Rideshare gig drivers have reported earning so little that they resort to sleeping in their cars during off-peak times so that they don’t have to waste time commuting to higher-earning areas when they start driving the next day. Most gig companies don’t offer reimbursements for expenses like gas, parking, or tickets. Nor do they provide adequate insurance to cover wear and tear on personal vehicles, or hikes in data-usage plans for workers’ smartphones.

All the risks and expenses are shifted to the worker, with the compensation for the job being driven lower and lower.

These broad structural conditions of inequality have accelerated thanks to Big Tech’s penchant for skirting labor laws, such as the minimum wage, through classifying its employees as contract workers. When Cotten first started as an Instacart shopper, she did well, earning up to $22 per “batch.” However, Instacart soon flooded her region with new shoppers, which drove down her wages to as little as $3 an order. The added competition meant that if she couldn’t work, someone else was there to pick up the slack.

Sounds like globalisation in miniature. Instead of your job going to China or India, it just goes to anyone in your area who’s willing to work for a lower percentage of minimum wage than you are.

Interesting article on how extraction of water to drain peatland over many years is slowly sinking the Netherlands.

In 1953, the Netherlands experienced a flood that killed more than 1,800 people. That disaster led to the development of the Delta Works, a hugely successful series of national construction projects that created the world’s largest storm barrier.

“The problem is that we’ve been very good at adaptation to land subsidence,” says Erkens. “But all we’ve done is adaptation. We haven’t done any mitigation of land subsidence.”

Floods are catastrophic events that make the evening news and require government inquiries, but the slow drop of the ground level doesn’t draw the same attention. As a result, few people have been aware of the growing crisis, including Niezen, who didn’t give the subsidence problem much thought until she became an alderman.

But now more people are noticing. “Climate change was a game changer,” says van den Born.

Particularly pertinent now that Australia has experienced months of bushfires and our climate-change-denying Government is suddenly all talk about ‘adaptation’ and less enthusiastic about ‘mitigation.’

A detailed look at how Swedes, and now many other nationalities, got caught up in the pseudo-scientific Colour Theory of personality analysis put forward in Thomas Eriksen’s Surrounded by Idiots.

Despite the use of colours, it turned out that the “Surrounded by …” books were not based on Myers-Brigg. Instead, they built on another personality theory, the so-called DiSC model. The most noteworthy outcome of a search through the academic literature on this model was that, despite the fact that the test had been around for fifty years, there was in principle no research on whether or not it worked.

Despite Eriksen having no qualifications, and the theory itself having lain dormant since the 50s, with no supporting research, the book has gone on to sell more than two million copies world-wide, simply because no-one bothered to factcheck when it first came out.

In the age when anyone can publish their views online, the very institutions which we are meant to trust — -publishers, broadcasters and newspaper editors — -have to fight harder than ever to maintain their own trustworthiness. If they lose that trust then the very existence of democracy and the open society is at risk.

Pretty cool.

Here’s a copy of the first paper linking CO2 to increased atmospheric temperature, published by Mrs. Eunice Foote, read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856!

That was three years BEFORE Darwin published On the Origin of Species!!!

The receiver containing the gas [CO2] became itself much heated - very sensibly more so than the other - and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling.

An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as increased weight must have necessarily resulted.

On comparing the sun’s heat in different gases, I found it to be in hyrdrogen gas, 104°; in common air, 106°; in oxygen gas, 108° and in carbonic acid gas [CO2], 125°

MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on a new type of GPS spoofing going on in Shanghai which has the experts puzzled.

Nobody knows who is behind this spoofing, or what its ultimate purpose might be. These ships could be unwilling test subjects for a sophisticated electronic warfare system, or collateral damage in a conflict between environmental criminals and the Chinese state that has already claimed dozens of ships and lives. But one thing is for certain: there is an invisible electronic war over the future of navigation in Shanghai, and GPS is losing.

Strava data makes an appearance as a way of figuring out whether only shipping is affected.

Perhaps bugs or malware in the ships’ AIS or GPS systems were causing the effect? To rule that out, they sought data from another form of transportation completely: cycling.

China has about as many bicycles as the rest of the world combined, with nearly 10 million in Shanghai alone. Some of the city’s cyclists use smartphone fitness apps to track their rides. One in particular, Strava, shares a global heat map of anonymized activities from the previous two years.

A really interesting article on the encryption debate from Jim Baker, who was the FBI’s general counsel when it tried to get Apple to decrypt the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters in 2016.

Baker argues that despite law enforcement facing the prospect of losing access to plain text messages from various sources, and the extra difficulties involved investigating certain cases, widespread encryption should be encouraged by all public officials to counter the much graver threat posed to national security from insecure networks and communications.

Today, digital technology is pervasive and society relies on a range of devices, networks and services to conduct its most important affairs. The political, economic and military power of the United States, as well as the health, safety and welfare of Americans, depend heavily on the secure and reliable operation of a complex digital ecosystem. We have connected our most vital international, national, regional and local systems to an inherently vulnerable network of networks. Glenn Gerstell, the general counsel of the National Security Agency, recently wrote a compelling piece about the complexities of the global digital network and the many challenges it presents to the United States.

It is, therefore, essential that we safeguard the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data on those networks. But we have not done so. The failures are systemic and involve poor design, poor implementation and poor risk management. The cybersecurity problems of the United States and its allies are profound.

With China, in particular, aggressively hacking everything from universities, to companies and Governments, Baker points out that the ongoing threat from that activity far outweighs the loss of access to some criminals’ messages.

Refreshing to see this argument put forward when we’re so often only presented with the simplistic “do this or criminals/terrorists/paedophiles will escape justice.” The fact is that our entire society now relies on strong encryption and weakening it will have far-reaching unintended consequences.

Governments all over the world are terrified of losing access to what the public is talking about, warning that all sorts of doomsday scenarios will happen if they can’t snoop on our every word. This despite the fact that they have never had access to this information until arguably the widespread adoption of email from the mid-90s, and particularly since the advent of social media in the mid-00s.

Prior to that they could get a warrant and tap your phone, or perhaps try to steam open your letters, but they, with the possible exception of the NSA, couldn’t do it to all people, all the time.

The internet has provided the biggest boon to the surveillance community, with Snowden revealing the NSA’s now-relistic goal to record all the information, store it and have it searchable forever.

Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society have a good article looking at the latest attempts to get the tech platforms to minimise their use of end-to-end encryption, or to provide some other way for Governments to snoop on message contents.

But we do not live in a world where that system always stays tightly confined to CSAM [child sexual abuse material], or malware scanning, and doesn’t end up enabling censorship of individuals’ private personal conversations with other people over content that is not illegal or harmful. That already happens in China (which is increasingly an object of envy by U.S. law enforcement). China uses its online censorship capabilities to keep its citizens from using WeChat to talk about Winnie the Pooh or “Tiananmen Square”. An end-to-end encrypted messaging system that would do client-side scanning of content against a blacklist before it’s encrypted and report the positive hits? China would rush to fund that work, and likely already has.

The whole article is worth a read, but it’s important to recognise the end-goal.

The rationale may change — national security and terrorism one day, and if that doesn’t work, child abuse the next — but the goal is the same: for governments to have the ability to eavesdrop on your every conversation, the legal power to require that all your conversations be recorded, and the authority to make private-sector providers do their bidding in the process. To have total control. And, if they really succeed, they will reach the ultimate goal: to not even need to exert that control to restrict what you say and do and hear and think — because you’ll do that yourself. You will save them, and Facebook, a lot of time.

An article that’s been sitting in my unread tabs for a while now, but is pretty cool. We’ve known for ages that spiders can fly, but we’ve only just figured out how they do it.

Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. And spiders can increase those forces by climbing onto twigs, leaves, or blades of grass. Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.

File under ‘Nature Is Cool.’