7 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Budget 2024-25 is now in early planning stages. Wish lists have gone out to Department heads. Panic sets in when departments realise that they are not spending their allocations quickly enough to reach zero sum on June 30th. Then there are the secret senior cabinet discussions. Economics has little to do with these discussions. The political courage melts away as the opinion polls turn sharply against a PM. Then there is the hanging rock of the stage three tax cuts. So the budget pondering in January swings around wild scenarios. Tax reform gets a run and is then run out deliberately by slow thinking politicians. Budget cuts go the same way. Departments send in theirvminister to defend for dear life the existing department budget allocation. Then it gets down to the negotiation ability of the ministers. Some departments will face adjustments, some will face savage cuts and a few will get an increase. But in January all that is ahead of the game. Ministers have their confidence boosted by their department heads. Then they go in to bat against the demon bowlers from the Treasury and Finance. Treasury will always want cuts. Finance will want to know how previous allocations were spent. The technique of every department spending programs will be examined sharply. Deals will be done, partnerships will be formed. Everyone will know that some departments must miss out, if only to give political claims of budget restraint credibility. This is the fiscal game that is played in Canberra. The motto “Who dares wins” is pushed by department heads. The reality is a lot harsher. Politics is not a pretty girl going to a ball. It is an ugly child with an axe to grind. Budget planning is subservient to political necessity.

2. The effects of AI on jobs and incomes. Those who retain jobs after AI innovations will have their productivity increased and can expect better salaries. But AI will also eliminate jobs. On balance the IMF believe the net effect will be negative: the young and skilled will gain advantage while older workers will lose out. Overall economic inequality will increase.

   The returns to being young and educated will increase.

   https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67977967

3. CDR <i>suite et fin< /i>

   Argument one for taking CDR seriously was here: https://johnquiggin.com/2024/01/09/monday-message-board-628/#comment-264537 . It narrowed my dispute with our host on the matter to a matter of weighting, so this follow-up is not strictly necessary. I did promise it, so here it is, briefly.

   Argument Two is a plea for equal treatment of carbon removal with adaptation, as responses to the climate crisis.

   Remember Bjorn Lomborg and Stephen Milloy, prominent for a decade as public faces of scientific denialism? One of their main talking points was that adaptation was cheaper than mitigation. This may have been arguable in 2000, but by 2015 they were no longer taken seriously, as the cost of mitigation kept falling and of adaptation rising. The mitigationists won. But they did not say that adaptation was tainted irrevocably by association with sleazy denialists, high-profile and covert. Instead, a non-denialist version of adaptation was folded into the consensus. The Paris Protocol is mitigation-and-adaptation all the way; partly no doubt to secure the support of developing countries, facing higher adaptation costs from climate change with less resources to meet them. The adaptationist principle of compensation for loss and damage was accepted by rich countries, but the haggling is still going on over the amount.

   Cynics could say that while adaptationists lost the argument, they won the policy. How else can we interpret the last decade than as inadequate mitigation efforts leading to ever higher adaptation costs? Out of Hurricane Harvey’s total damage of $127 bn, just over half – $67 bn – has been attributed to climate change.

   Carbon removal shares with climate adaptation an early association with worthless and dishonest lobbyists. I suggest that mitigationists like us follow the same strategy as with adaptation: not outright rejection but a Nelsonian split-the-enemy tactic. Highlight the CCS scams, and insist on a thorough, fair, technology-neutral and science-driven development of a broader range of CDR technology.

   The first two arguments appeal to fair treatment of different policy schemes as we would give competing scientific hypotheses. Argument Three addresses a quite different fear of distraction from the main task, cutting emissions. To achieve a decisive victory, Clausewitz advised concentrating your forces – though Sun Tzu was less categorical. In any case you cannot generalise military models straightforwardly into other domains like politics.

   A better model is that governments, and their three components of executive, legislature and judiciary, are by design high-bandwidth social organisations capable of handling hundreds of different tasks at once. The same holds for political parties, hospitals, universities and armies. In a way they are shoggoths: large, unintelligent, driven by simple appetites, but capable of responding rapidly to new challenges and threats by growing new eyes, mouths, and tentacles for tearing enemies apart. As individuals, our bandwidth is indeed very limited, and the skill sets that determine our comparative advantages only change slowly. A young scientist may well have to choose between mitigation and carbon removal as career paths. A government or think tank can perfectly well cover both, and should.

   A historical case in point. The belligerents entered WWI by accident, and few had coherent war aims. “Winning” is not a war aim, but a common precondition for one. Leaders were promptly captured by the apparently insoluble military problems, and spent little time thinking about the future after the war. The striking exception was Woodrow Wilson and his 14 points. I suppose that when the USA entered the war in 1917, it was impossible to conceal from the American public the brutal nature of the conflict the country was getting into, and the likely scale of casualties. So Wilson had to dream up a grandiose peace plan in short order – which Britain and France then rejected. The Treaty of Versailles they eventually cobbled together was as much an accident as Sarajevo, and did not last 20 years.

   The story was quite different in WW2. The failure of the Versailles settlement to secure lasting peace was in everybody’s mind on both sides. Even in the middle of a titanic and desperate struggle with enemies far nastier than the Central Powers in WW1, the Allies put a considerable amount of effort into planning for a durable peace after victory.

   A few tentacles in the timeline:

   Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, before Pearl Harbor.

   Work had started even earlier on the administration of occupied territories, and by 1945 the US Army had trained thousands of civil affairs officers to do just that. They were not clones of George Patton.

   Seven governments-in-exile proposed war crimes trials of German leaders in 1942, which led to the Nuremberg trials.

   From 1943, the plan for the creation of a new international organisation to replace the failed League of Nations took shape at a series of Allied conferences, and the details were essentially complete by the end of the war.

   The postwar economic order was redefined at Bretton Woods in 1944.

   George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow, kicking off the Cold War policy of containment of the Soviet Union, was sent in February 1946, after the end of hostilities, but the thinking behind it was done in wartime.

   You don’t have to admire all these decisions, but they clearly represented a different level of commitment to postwar reconstruction compared to the miserable record of WW1. With all its faults, the system they set up has outlasted the League of Nations by almost four times, in spite of nuclear weapons. Is there any evidence that the additional decision-making burden this work imposed on Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin made them less effective as war-fighting leaders? Roosevelt was ailing anyway and forced to delegate to his very capable underlings. If anything, the main failing of Churchill and Stalin as war leaders was a tendency to micromanage military campaigns, a vice which political distractions probably constrained a little.

   My inference is that the bandwidth problem is not very significant for competent and determined governments. They can and should develop policy for the three branches of the response to the climate crisis: mitigation, adaptation, and removal. Mitigation is the first priority, as success there reduces the need for the other two, just as failure – where we are now – enhances it.

4. https://badnewsletter.substack.com/p/all-the-garbage-i-found-on-substack

5. My re-registration to this blog seems to be awaiting moderation or reactivation. Assuming that goes through, I will simply make a few Monday Message comments and avoid links.

   COVID-19 remains a major health problem for Australia and the world. See “The COVID-safe strategies Australian scientists are using to protect themselves from the virus” on the ABC News website. This article also contains links and information about how infection rates, mortality and morbidity are still all unacceptably high.

   Climate change remains unaddressed by Australia and the whole world in any meaningful way whatsoever. We continue the onrush to disaster on this front also.

   All I can do is strongly encourage people to continue to use multi-layered protections against C-19 (vaccinate, mask, distance, isolate if ill).

   In the current weather, be aware of heatstroke dangers. Avoid outdoor work and outdoor exercise if possible. Swimming may be okay if sun-protected. Look at BOM Thermal Comfort Observations.

   “A wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C, or around 95 °F, is pretty much the absolute limit of human tolerance… Above that, your body won’t be able to lose heat to the environment efficiently enough to maintain its core temperature. That doesn’t mean the heat will kill you right away, but if you can’t cool down quickly, brain and organ damage will start.” – MIT Technology Review.

   This refers to heatstroke of course. Use the Wet Bulb Globe temp for outdoors in direct sun. Regard WB or WBG 35 °C as the absolute limit for young adult, slim, fit, healthy, acclimatised persons. Reduce this with a cautious bias allowing for your real age, health and fitness levels.

   Why do I write this? We can’t save the world but we can save a few, maybe, for a while, if we are sensible. It’s come down to this. Obviously cut your GHG emissions as much as possible, You never know, by some fluke we might save a reasonable number of humans and some other macro and meso species. [1] Even if it’s a 1 in a 1,000 hope we need to hang on to it.

   Regards, Ikonoclast.

   Note 1 – Don’t worry about the viruses and microbes. They will survive practically anything except total planetary destruction.

6. Ikonoclast: – “This refers to heatstroke of course. Use the Wet Bulb Globe temp for outdoors in direct sun. Regard WB or WBG 35 °C as the absolute limit for young adult, slim, fit, healthy, acclimatised persons. Reduce this with a cautious bias allowing for your real age, health and fitness levels.”

   A wet bulb temperature of 35 °C (in the shade, with low air flow) is generally fatal well within 6 hours of exposure time (and if substantially biologically compromised, in as little as 15 minutes). Per the Supporting Information for the PNAS paper An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress, published 3 May 2010, included these statements:

   <blockquote>Heat Storage. Humans can endure negative cooling (heat storage) for brief periods by temporarily raising their core body temperature. In principle this allows survival of 35 °C wet bulb temperatures, but in practice this appears doubtful for any extended interval.

   With 100 W of heat generation (a typical resting value), body mass of 75 kg, and specific heat of 3.5 J g⁻¹ K⁻¹, body temperature would increase by about one degree every 45 minutes. It would thus increase from a normal value of 37 °C to 42 °C—a value that begins to cause permanent tissue damage—in roughly four hours, leading to the tolerance times given in the main text.</blockquote>

   Evidence/data indicates biologically compromised people are likely to die at lower wet bulb temperature thresholds.

   Recent empirical data indicates a lower moist heat threshold for where heat stress compensability ceases to exist, taken from laboratory-based measurements in young, healthy adults doing work associated with the minimal activities of daily living.

   As heatwaves become more frequent, intense, and longer-lasting due to climate change, the question of breaching thermal limits, not just for us humans, but also for plants and animals we depend upon for food, becomes more pressing.

   See the PNAS paper published 9 Oct 2023, by Daniel J. Vecellio et al. titled Greatly enhanced risk to humans as a consequence of empirically determined lower moist heat stress tolerance.

   Published in Nature communications on 29 Nov 2023, by Jennifer Vanos et al. titled A physiological approach for assessing human survivability and liveability to heat in a changing climate, included the Abstract:

   <blockquote>Most studies projecting human survivability limits to extreme heat with climate change use a 35 °C wet-bulb temperature (Tw) threshold without integrating variations in human physiology. This study applies physiological and biophysical principles for young and older adults, in sun or shade, to improve current estimates of survivability and introduce liveability (maximum safe, sustained activity) under current and future climates. Our physiology-based survival limits show a vast underestimation of risks by the 35 °C Tw model in hot-dry conditions. Updated survivability limits correspond to Tw~25.8–34.1 °C (young) and ~21.9–33.7 °C (old)—0.9–13.1 °C lower than Tw = 35 °C. For older female adults, estimates are ~7.2–13.1 °C lower than 35 °C in dry conditions. Liveability declines with sun exposure and humidity, yet most dramatically with age (2.5–3.0 METs lower for older adults). Reductions in safe activity for younger and older adults between the present and future indicate a stronger impact from aging than warming.</blockquote>

7. Geoff,

   Thanks for the update. Yes, the real position is considerably worse than I quoted. The papers you refer to give a much more concerning picture, especially for older people. I am 69.6 years, about. I worked outdoors for two hours Saturday from 8 am to 10 am. I worked outdoors Sunday for one hour from 8 am to 9 am. Part of a tree had fallen across our driveway. My chainsaw could not be run (bad fuel) so I used blunt pruning saws and a blunt axe. [1] Those work times were all I could handle. The tree is off the driveway but not dealt with further. I worked 0 hours outdoors Monday for the obvious reasons.

   Someone I know, fit and in his forties, worked a few days ago in his gardening business (before the full peak of this heat/humidity wave). He subsequently advised his customers he had heatstroke and medical advice to rest for 3 days. He apologized that he could not mow their overgrown grass etc. A lot of outdoor work has to wait in these conditions and it puts people behind. This might seem a trivial individual case in a society-wide sense but extrapolate to the big picture and lots of outdoor work has to wait in a warming world. This can and will become critical, I assert, in a society having to repair ever more frequent extreme-event infrastructure damage. I mean IF our government does not take mitigation, amelioration, recovery and restoration seriously. And clearly our government is not taking these issues seriously at all.

   Note 1: Sounds like slackness and maybe it is. At the same time, I have been as busy as the proverbial blue-****ed fly for the last 6 months (within my age-imposed activity limits). There are still so many jobs I haven’t got to. I am going backwards (though we are lucky enough to have the financial reserves to ultimately bail me out of my work backlog if need be). Extrapolating again, how many people are going backwards in our society for age, health, financial and other reasons? I assert it is more than 50% of the population. As a nation we are in big trouble and most of the rest of the world is in an even worse position. It’s a long collapse but still a collapse. The governments and corporations are in cahoots and blind to what they are doing to the majority of the people and the environment. They just don’t care. They have to be made to care, but how?