Tag Archives: hagen
Shipping giants look lustily at the warming Arctic
When a blue-hulled cargo ship named Venta Maersk became the first container vessel to navigate a major Arctic sea route this month, it offered a glimpse of what the warming region might become: a maritime highway, with vessels lumbering between Asia and Europe through once-frozen seas.
Years of melting ice have made it easier for ships to ply these frigid waters. That’s a boon for the shipping industry but a threat to the fragile Arctic ecosystem. Nearly all ships run on fossil fuels, and many use heavy fuel oil, which spews black soot when burned and turns seas into a toxic goopy mess when spilled. Few international rules are in place to protect the Arctic’s environment from these ships, though a proposal to ban heavy fuel oil from the region is gaining support.
“For a long time, we weren’t looking at the Arctic as a viable option for a shortcut for Asia-to-Europe, or Asia-to-North America traffic, but that’s really changed, even over the last couple of years,” says Bryan Comer, a senior researcher with the International Council on Clean Transportation’s marine program. “It’s just increasingly concerning.”
Dear reader, like what you see here?
Keep Grist’s green journalism humming along by supporting us with a donation today. All donations made between now and September 29 will be matched dollar-for-dollar.
Venta Maersk departed from South Korea in late August packed with frozen fish, chilled produce, and electronics. Days later, it sailed through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, before cruising along Russia’s north coast. At one point, a nuclear icebreaker escorted Venta Maersk through a frozen Russian strait, then the container vessel continued to the Norwegian Sea. It’s expected to arrive in Germany and St. Petersburg later this month.
The trial voyage wouldn’t have been possible until recently. The Arctic region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with sea ice, snow cover, glaciers, and permafrost all diminishing dramatically over recent decades. In the past, only powerful nuclear-powered icebreakers could forge through Arctic seas; these days, even commercial ships can navigate the region from roughly July to October—albeit sometimes with the help of skilled pilots and icebreaker escorts.
Russian tankers already carry liquefied natural gas to Western Europe and Asia. General cargo vessels move Chinese wind turbine parts and Canadian coal. Cruise liners take tourists to see surreal ice formations and polar bears in the Arctic summer. Around 2,100 cargo ships operated in Arctic waters in 2015, according to Comer’s group.
“Because of climate change, because of the melting of sea ice, these ships can operate for longer periods of time in the Arctic,” says Scott Stephenson, an assistant geography professor at the University of Connecticut, “and the shipping season is already longer than it used to be.” A study he co-authored found that, by 2060, ships with reinforced hulls could operate in the Arctic for nine months in the year.
Stephenson says that the Venta Maersk’s voyage doesn’t mean that an onrush of container ships will soon be clogging the Arctic seas, given the remaining risks and costs needed to operate in the region. “It’s a new, proof-of-concept test case,” he says.
Maersk, based in Copenhagen, says the goal is to collect data and “gain operational experience in a new area and to test vessel systems,” representatives from the company wrote in an email. The ship didn’t burn standard heavy fuel oil, but a type of high-grade, ultra-low-sulfur fuel. “We are taking all measures to ensure that this trial is done with the highest considerations for the sensitive environment in the region.”
Sian Prior, lead advisor to the HFO-Free Arctic Campaign, says that the best way to avoid fouling the Arctic is to ditch fossil fuels entirely and install electric systems with, say, battery storage or hydrogen fuel cells. Since those technologies aren’t yet commercially viable for ocean-going ships, the next option is to run ships on liquefied natural gas. The easiest alternative, however, is to switch to a lighter “marine distillate oil,” which Maersk says is “on par with” the fuel it’s using.
But many ships still run on cheaper heavy fuel oil, made from the residues of petroleum refining. In 2015, the sludgy fuel accounted for 57 percent of total fuel consumption in the Arctic, and was responsible for 68 percent of ships’ black carbon emissions, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation.
Black carbon wreaks havoc on the climate, even though it usually makes up a small share of total emissions. The small dark particles absorb the sun’s heat and directly warm the atmosphere. Within a few days, the particles fall back down to earth, darkening the snow and hindering the snow’s ability to reflect the sun’s radiation—resulting in more warming.
When spilled, heavy fuel oil emulsifies on the water’s surface or sinks to the seafloor, unlike lighter fuels which disperse and evaporate. Clean-up can take decades in remote waters, as was the case when the Exxon Valdez crude oil tanker slammed into an Alaskan reef in 1989.
“It’s dirtier when you burn it, the options to clean it up are limited, and the length it’s likely to persist in the environment is longer,” Prior says.
In April, the International Maritime Organization, the U.N. body that regulates the shipping industry, began laying the groundwork to ban ships from using or carrying heavy fuel oil in the Arctic. Given the lengthy rulemaking process, any policy won’t likely take effect before 2021, Prior says.
One of the biggest hurdles will be securing Russia’s approval. Most ships operating in the Arctic fly Russian flags, and the country’s leaders plan to invest tens of billions of dollars in coming years to beef up polar shipping activity along the Northern Sea Route. China also wants to build a “Polar Silk Road” and redirect its cargo ships along the Russian route.
Such ambitions hinge on a melting Arctic and rising global temperatures. If the warming Arctic eventually does offer a cheaper highway for moving goods around the world, Comer says, “then we need to start making sure that policies are in place.”
Visit site –
America’s best friends ready to take on climate … without Trump
At the G7 summit in Canada this past weekend, nearly all the leaders of the world’s richest and most powerful countries were united behind a bold proclamation: There can be no global economic progress without climate action. Take it or leave it.
And then Trump left.
It now looks like that move could help usher the United States out of the world’s premier economic alliance. The remaining six countries, call them the “G6,” have put climate action ahead of maintaining normal relations with the United States — an unthinkable development not very long ago. That’s huge.
This is something greens have been demanding for years: climate change at the core of global geopolitics. Now it’s here.
While there are plenty of disagreements between Trump and the rest of the world — some summaries of the meeting didn’t even get around to mentioning climate change — it’s impossible to view what happened over the weekend without considering other countries’ desire to reduce emissions.
Long-simmering tensions between the U.S. and the other countries simply boiled over. It all started when Donald Trump decided to bail on the Paris climate agreement this time last year — a shock to the global community still coming to terms with the prospect of a United States not playing by the rules as a matter of principle. In the run-up to this weekend’s meeting, Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister and the meeting’s host set the agenda, with climate change scheduled for the last day. The timing of Trump’s departure — skipping out just ahead of time — seems curiously timed to avoid the issue.
Emerging from the the wreckage of the summit is a global community that appears surprisingly OK with moving on from an increasingly childish and untrustworthy leader of the United States. A quick survey of initial reactions from observers around the world are nearly unanimous in assessing how events played out over the weekend. In the U.K., the Guardian called it a “watershed moment.” In Germany, Deutsche Welle said: “It’s probably better this way.”
An instantly iconic image of Trump sitting with his arms folded and what looks like a pout on his face, while Germany’s Angela Merkel and leaders of other countries plead their case, seems a perfect encapsulation of where we are now. The adults in the room are fed up.
That a would-be authoritarian American leader has taken a “wrecking ball” approach to diplomacy has implications that will last for years. And when it comes to climate change, we simply don’t have that time to spare.
What the G6 decided to say on climate this weekend was relatively tame compared to what needs to happen. Yet Trump refused to sign on. Instead, the U.S. attempted to insert language into the meeting’s official summary document that encouraged the use of fossil fuels.
Appeasing the U.S. right wing on climate hasn’t worked out well for the world in the past. In the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, delegates decided to water down the draft proposal to try to woo the Republican-led U.S. Senate into signing on. The entire agreement ultimately collapsed as a result — paving the way for a relatively weaker agreement in Paris six years later.
Europe has continued efforts to fight climate change with the U.S. as an inconsistent ally. The European Union, which now makes up the bulk of the G6, is in the process of assembling a new long-term climate strategy that has the potential to usher in a new era of European climate action, aiming to ditch incremental action for transformational change. Before the summit, France’s President Emmanuel Macron had already hinted that an EU-U.S. trade war on climate grounds may be necessary should Trump remain obstinate.
Going forward, neither Trump’s “America First” vision of a G1 world, or the associated fears of a collapse of Western civilization as we know it — a G0 world — seem likely. What seems bound to happen is the elevation of marginally important groups, like the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a NATO-like security organization which now claims half of humanity as members after the high-profile addition of India over the weekend. No single country — the United States, for instance — is likely to dictate the terms of global climate politics.
In an era that demands urgent, radical action, it’s good to see world leaders making climate change a priority. It might sound like hyperbole, but what happened this weekend could signal a major turning point in world history — as well as a hopeful development for the climate.
Link:
America’s best friends ready to take on climate … without Trump
Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (Great Discoveries) – Michio Kaku
READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS
Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (Great Discoveries)
Michio Kaku
Genre: Physics
Price: $1.99
Publish Date: May 17, 2005
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Seller: W. W. Norton
“A fresh and highly visual tour through Einstein’s astonishing legacy.” —Brian Greene There’s no better short book that explains just what Einstein did than Einstein’s Cosmos. Keying Einstein’s crucial discoveries to the simple mental images that inspired them, Michio Kaku finds a revealing new way to discuss his ideas, and delivers an appealing and always accessible introduction to Einstein’s work.
Original source:
Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, W. W. Norton & Company
Tagged alo, anchor, company, cosmos, great, hagen, iphone, michio-kaku, Ona, space, transformed
Comments Off on Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (Great Discoveries) – Michio Kaku
Apparently, all it takes to fix strained relations in Washington is beer.
That’s the conclusion of a study led by Helen Harwatt, an environmental nutrition researcher at Loma Linda University.
You may feel paralyzed and powerless to save the human race from climate doom in the face of Trump’s exit from the Paris Agreement. As our favorite doctor-turned-journalist James Hamblin writes in The Atlantic: “The remedy … is knowing what can be done to mitigate environmental degradation, from within in a country singularly committed to it.”
This switch is a relatively easy suggestion!
Okay, one caveat before you start feeling too good. Making the transition from beef to beans could reduce carbon-equivalent emissions by 334 million metric tons — but the United States releases over 6 billion metric tons each year. It gets us closer to the goal Obama set at the 2009 Copenhagen talks, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
Still, it’s worth noting that the trend line on that big ugly graph is moving in the right direction and getting closer to the Copenhagen goal. Much of that can be attributed to (potentially threatened) EPA regulations and a switch from coal to natural gas, but small lifestyle changes on a large scale can nudge it further.
Excerpt from –
Apparently, all it takes to fix strained relations in Washington is beer.
Haze fills the air and ash rains from the sky: Just another day in Siberia.
This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).
Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.
But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.
But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.
Originally posted here:
Haze fills the air and ash rains from the sky: Just another day in Siberia.
Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, FF, GE, Hagen, LAI, ONA, Ringer, Uncategorized
Tagged anchor, apocalypse, hagen, jakarta, limit-vehicles, mexico, science, siberia, world-car-
Comments Off on Haze fills the air and ash rains from the sky: Just another day in Siberia.
The Wall Street Journal Cons Its Readers Yet Again
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Every once in a while I get suckered into reading a Wall Street Journal op-ed. I’m not sure why. They’re all the same, after all. Today the clickbait (or is it hatebait?) was “History of a Climate Con” from Holman Jenkins:
A little history is in order to appreciate the cynical nadir of climate politics in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it from media coverage, but the closest the U.S. Congress came to passing a serious (if still ineffectual) cap-and-trade program was during the George W. Bush administration in early 2007. Then, within days of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Al Gore announced a revelation: the “climate crisis” no longer required such unpleasant, de facto energy taxes. The problem could be solved with painless handouts to green entrepreneurs.
Hooray! Everybody loves a handout. The activist duo Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus noted that the shift in Mr. Gore’s thinking was “highly significant.” “He knows that cap-and-trade, and most any new regulation, would raise energy prices—a political nonstarter during a recession.”
A proposed oil tax swiftly disappeared from the Obama transition website. With control of all three branches of government in hand, the imminent climate threat to humanity suddenly appeared not so urgent after all—passing a “signature” health-care law did. Democrats, it turned out, were in favor of climate root canal only when Republicans were in charge.
George Bush! Who knew he was such a climate change advocate?
He wasn’t, of course. The 2007 bill was introduced by Joe Lieberman and opposed by George Bush. It eventually failed to overcome a Republican filibuster and went down 48-36. There were a grand total of 7 Republicans who voted to proceed and 4 Democrats against. In other words, it failed because nearly the entire Republican Party opposed it and a handful of Democrats joined them.
Fast forward to 2010. A cap-and-trade bill supported by President Obama passes the House with strong Democratic support and nearly unanimous Republican opposition. This is the most serious cap-and-trade effort of the past decade. But in the Senate, after considerable debate, Harry Reid eventually pulls the plug because he can’t find 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. As in 2007, a cap-and-trade bill fails because nearly the entire Republican Party opposes it and a handful of Democrats join them. Neither the urgency of climate change nor Democratic control of the Senate had anything to do with it.
Nor did Al Gore change his mind on anything after the 2008 election. In the context of a massive recession and the promise of a stimulus bill from the Obama administration, it’s true that he favored spending lots of money on incentives to fund clean energy initiatives. Why wouldn’t he? However, in the same breath he maintained that “the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty.”
I continually wonder why Wall Street Journal readers enjoy paying good money to get lied to so routinely. There’s almost literally nothing true about that passage above. And yet, apparently this is what the Journal’s audience craves. Why?
Link –
This Chart Shows Which Countries Are the Most Screwed by Climate Change
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Verisk Maplecroft
One of the cruel ironies of climate change is that its impacts tend to fall hardest on the countries least equipped to manage them.
When drought or sea level rise strike the United States, communities at least have access to federal aid, top scientific expertise, public investment in expensive climate-ready infrastructure, and the like. But some of the most extreme effects of global warming are headed for developing countries—drought wiping out crops in East Africa, or catastrophic hurricanes pounding Southeast Asia—that don’t have access to those resources.
New research from Maplecroft, a UK-based risk consultancy, paints a pictures of where vulnerability to climate change is most pressing. Their analysis drew on three criteria: exposure to extreme events, based on the latest meteorological science; sensitivity to impacts (i.e., does a country have other sources of income and food supply if agriculture takes a hit?); and adaptive capacity—are the country’s government and social institutions prepared to work under adverse climate conditions and help citizens adapt to them?
Unsurprisingly, Africa and Southeast Asia ranked the lowest, while Scandinavian countries ranked the highest. (While definitely at risk from sea level rise, countries such as Norway and Sweden have rich, highly functional governments to manage adaptation.) The major global climate talks in Paris are coming up in just a couple weeks; the chart above makes it clear why it’s so important for big players like the US and China to work closely with delegations from developing countries on solutions that will provide immediate support and relief.
Excerpt from:
This Chart Shows Which Countries Are the Most Screwed by Climate Change
This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
On Monday afternoon, Indonesian President Joko Widodo cut short a visit to the United States and headed home to oversee efforts to extinguish a rash of epic wildfires that have engulfed his country.
Joko was in Washington, DC, for a photo op with President Barack Obama, to talk about climate change, and to promote Indonesia as a choice venue for foreign investors. His trip was also supposed to include a stopover in San Francisco for meetings with tech industry executives. But Joko’s decision to return to Indonesia early underscores the challenges his country faces in stopping the worst deforestation on Earth—deforestation that is playing a critical role in global climate change.
There’s more to global warming than pollution from cars and power plants. In the United States, coal-fired power plants are the No. 1 source of carbon dioxide emissions, followed by tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. That’s why the Obama administration has focused its climate policies on those sources; Obama’s signature plan aims to reduce power-sector emissions by one-third by 2030. Those policies get some natural help from the ecosystem, as trees and soil soak up carbon out of the atmosphere. In the United States, thanks to forest conservation and climate-friendly farming practices, land use (a term climate wonks use to describe emissions that come from the land rather than from man-made infrastructure and vehicles) actually offsets about 13 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the rest of the economy.
But on a global scale, land use is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink. The biggest culprit is deforestation: Living trees store carbon; dead trees release it back into the atmosphere as they decompose. Emissions from crop soil, fertilizer, and livestock also play a major role. Overall, land use accounts for about one-quarter of the world’s total greenhouse gas footprint.
In Indonesia, the situation is even more dire. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), land use represents 61 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That means deforestation causes far more climate pollution than all of the country’s cars and power plants combined.
In fact, Indonesia has the world’s highest rate of deforestation, even higher than Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon rainforest. From 2000 to 2012, according to research published in Nature, Indonesia lost more than 23,000 square miles of forest to logging, agriculture, and other uses. That’s roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2010, the government attempted to put the brakes on deforestation by exchanging a two-year moratorium on new logging permits for $1 billion in aid from Norway and the United States. But according to Susan Minnemeyer, a forest analyst at the WRI, that policy appears to have had the “perverse impact of accelerating deforestation, because those with permits felt that they had to take action quickly or they would no longer be able to.”
This all adds up to global-scale pollution: Indonesia is the world’s fifth-ranking greenhouse gas emitter, coming in just behind Russia and India. In other words, we can’t stop climate change without saving Indonesia’s rainforests.
Indonesia is in the middle of a public health crisis from forest fire haze. The problem isn’t just deforestation, but how that deforestation is happening. In Indonesia, forests are often cleared out with fire. This can be done legally with a permit, but it’s often carried out illegally as well. This year, forest fires are also being fueled by El Niño-related weather patterns. The combination of El Niño and intentional deforestation has proven incredibly dangerous: The country has experienced nearly 100,000 fires so far this year, the worst since the last major El Niño in 1997. Fire activity typically ramps up in September and October, the end of the dry season, and over the last couple of weeks the conflagrations have grown to crisis proportions—hence Joko’s hasty return. The fires are so big they can be seen from space.
The greenhouse impact from those fires is staggering: On several days over the last month, emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the US economy:
World Resources Institute
To make matters worse, more than half of those fires occur on land made of peat, the thick, soil-like material made from decomposed plant matter. Peat is packed with carbon, and fires that occur on peatland can have a global warming impact 200 times greater than fires on normal soil, according to the WRI. Last week, Joko said the government would stop issuing new permits for commercial development on peatland, but that won’t stop the fires that are already burning.
Climate pollution is just part of the problem. Firefighting costs are pushing $50 million per week. The impact of this fire season on Indonesia’s economy could reach $14 billion. And the thick blanket of haze that is stretching from the country across Southeast Asia has caused at least 10 deaths from haze-related illness and 500,000 cases of acute respiratory illness.
Your snacks and makeup are part of the problem. Of course, Indonesians aren’t just chopping and burning down trees for fun. Besides logging, one of the main uses for cleared land is to plant African oil palm, the fruits of which are used to produce palm oil. Palm oil is the world’s most popular form of vegetable oil, and half of it comes from Indonesia. It’s also found in about half the processed food you encounter in a grocery store (as well as many cosmetics).
Palm oil has some advantages over other oils: It’s cheap to produce and doesn’t contain trans fats, and the trees yield far more oil in the same land area—using fewer chemical fertilizers—than soybeans or sunflowers. According to the World Bank, the increase in global demand for cooking oil by 2020 could be met with palm oil using one-seventh the land area that would be required to fill that demand using soybeans. For that reason, it could actually have many environmental advantages over other types of oil.
Unfortunately, much palm oil production now happens in highly vulnerable ecosystems, often in the former habitats of endangered animals such as tigers and orangutans. Pressure is growing on Indonesia’s palm oil producers to stop deforestation and stay out of sensitive areas. A handful of major US food processors, including Nestlé and PepsiCo, have adopted commitments to rid their supply chains of palm oil linked to deforestation, according to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. But that report also that found many fast-food chains are lagging behind. Last year, an Indonesian court ordered the first-ever major fine—$30 million—for a palm oil company found to have cleared forest in protected orangutan habitat.
Indonesia’s climate test. For the international climate negotiations coming up soon in Paris, Indonesia has pledged to increase its emissions over the next 25 years by 29 percent less than it would have under a “business as usual” scenario. That won’t be possible without curbing forest fires and deforestation. So for Indonesia, getting a grip on palm oil producers will be even more important than going after power plants, as Obama is doing. Joko has been moving in the right direction, Minnemeyer said, but it’s unclear how his promises will hold up.
“Across the board, there has been very weak enforcement of Indonesia’s environmental laws,” she said. If they’re going to meet their climate target, “the fires are going to be a key part.”
More:
This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now
Posted in Anchor, FF, food processor, G & F, GE, global climate change, Hagen, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage
Tagged amazon, firefighting, francisco, global climate change, hagen, nature, Ona, states, united, virginia, washington, world
Comments Off on This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now
A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really
A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really
By Clayton Aldernon 9 Sep 2015commentsShare
Hold on to your tinfoil hats, folks: Robots are taking over the world after climate change forces global mass extinction. Or, rather, with enough conjecture, coincidence, and frivolous shoehorning, you too could wring that argument out of a new paper by researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen and the University of Texas–Austin. If that’s what you wanted to do with your afternoon.
But you don’t need to — that’s what The Washington Post is for:
We’ve already heard of all the nasty consequences that could occur if the pace of global climate change doesn’t abate by the year 2050 — we could see wars over water, massive food scarcity, and the extinction of once populous species. Now add to the mix a potentially new wrinkle on the abrupt and irreversible changes – superintelligent robots would be just about ready to take over from humanity in the event of any mass extinction event impacting the planet.
In fact, according to a mind-blowing research paper published in mid-August by computer science researchers Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen, robots would quickly evolve in the event of any mass extinction (defined as the loss of at least 75 percent of the species on the planet), something that’s already happened five times before in the past.
In a survival of the fittest contest in which humans and robots start at zero (which is what we’re really talking about with a mass extinction event), robots would win every time. That’s because humans evolve linearly, while superintelligent robots would evolve exponentially. Simple math.
Woahhh, boy. Easy. Have a sugar cube.
Climate change is bad, bad, bad news bears. But it’s probably not going to wipe out all the people. Don’t get me wrong: Rising sea levels, security threat multipliers, Peabody is the devil, keep it in the ground, carbon fee and dividend, etc., etc. But implying mass human extinction due to a warming climate is counter-productive in a country in which half the political populace suggests the threat is overblown.
Side note: Even if we did “start at zero,” presumably that would imply actually starting at zero. As in, no humans and no robots. In which case you can exponentiate zero until the robocows come home, and you’ll still be left with an arithmetic donut. Mother Earth wins every time — the deserts, the oceans, the bacteria — not the ‘bots. End side note.
There’s a lot going on in Lehman and Miikkulainen’s paper, but none of it is about climate change. (Dominic Basulto, the author of the WaPo piece, acknowledges as much.) The study itself is a relatively straightforward piece of computer science: Dump some biologically inspired learning algorithms into a population of simulated robots, tack on an evolution-mimicking step, kill off a bunch of digital bots (that’s the mass extinction), and see what happens. The researchers demonstrate that after unplugging a good chunk of the robots, “evolvability” accelerates; that is, the extent to which and the rate at which the digibots are able to fill abandoned niches increase. It’s an interesting result, and one that warrants discussion in the context of biological evolution.
But back to climate change, mass extinction, and the coming robopocalypse. Let’s assume “start at zero” means “start at roughly equal numbers of robots and humans, who are at roughly equal levels of intelligence, and who are more or less randomly geographically distributed, and then inexplicably normalize this undoubtedly high-dimensional description of the scenario to ‘zero’.” (Forget the difficulties of meaningfully quantifying intelligence and consciousness.) There are a handful of robots and a handful of humans. It’s basically Burning Man out there. Then, the argument goes, the robots really take off:
Think about it — robots don’t need water and they don’t need food — all they need is a power source and a way to constantly refine the algorithms they use to make sense of the world around them. If they figure out how to stay powered up after severe and irreversible climate change impacts – perhaps by powering up with solar power as they did in the Hollywood film “Transcendence” — robots could quickly prove to be “fitter” than humans in responding to any mass extinction event.
They also might just sit around and rust in the sun. What’s motivating them to survive? Part of the problem here is that we also don’t really know what “evolvability” is. A 2008 review in Nature Reviews Genetics by Massimo Pigliucci states that, traditionally, “the term has been used to refer to different, if partly overlapping, phenomena.” It’s also unclear whether or not an organism can actually evolve evolvability.
Setting those difficulties aside, in assessing the Robo-Climate Wars scenario, we’re still left poking at the unparalleled uncertainty that hovers around the Singularity — the term used to describe the moment at which runaway artificial intelligence surpasses that of mankind. Some researchers argue the moment could come within the next ten years. Others say it won’t be less than a hundred (if ever). Basulto’s argument in The Washington Post rests on the temporal convergence of a climate-change-induced mass extinction and the dawn of superintelligence. Which seems a tad unlikely. And even if you buy, say, 2050 as an extinction date and as the hockey stick uptick for the Singularity, we’re still left with the assumption that human evolution and robot evolution will somehow be qualitatively and quantitatively different from one another. Which should give us pause.
While Basulto writes that “humans evolve linearly,” that idea is not at all settled in the evolutionary biology community. (Nor is “linear evolution” particularly well-defined in the first place. Linear? By what metric?) Some futurists argue — and it’s mostly futurists having these conversations — that as soon as we’ve developed robots capable of superintelligence (which ostensibly implies nonlinear evolution) we’ll have cracked the code of our own brains. In which case the same argument that applies to the robots in Lehman and Miikkulainen’s paper will apply to us, too, and we should spend more time worrying about climate change and less time worrying about the rise of our robot overlords.
Besides, by 2045, we’re supposed to be able to upload our brains to achieve immortality. As long as we’re cherry-picking futurist tidbits, we might as well cling to that one.
Source:
Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution
, PLOS One.
The strange link between global climate change and the rise of the robots
, The Washington Post.
How mass extinctions can accelerate robot evolution
, Kurzweil AI.
Find this article interesting?
Donate now to support our work.
Please
to view the comments.
Get Grist in your inbox
Link:
Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, global climate change, Hagen, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized
Tagged earth, hagen, hollywood, king, mother, reviews, robots, texas, university, world
Comments Off on A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really
