Indice dei contenuti per Issue 28 - No.2/2020 in New Philosopher

“We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.”Cicero As we kicked off 2020, we industrious humans of the Anthropocene had successfully completed a run of the five hottest years on record. And nothing was going to stop us making that ten out of ten. Despite knowing full well that our actions were responsible for increasing temperatures, we couldn't change our ways. As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy.” When COVID-19 rolled over the top of the world’s best-laid plans for the new decade, and country after country sacrificed its economy, it became clear that the couldn’t was really more like a wouldn’t.…

Academia Chilena de Ciencias, ChileAcademia das Ciencias de Lisboa, PortugalAcademia de Ciencias de la República DominicanaAcademia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales de VenezuelaAcademia de Ciencias Medicas, Fisicas y Naturales de GuatemalaAcademia Mexicana de Ciencias,MexicoAcademia Nacional de Ciencias de BoliviaAcademia Nacional de Ciencias del PeruAcadémie des Sciences et Techniques du SénégalAcadémie des Sciences, FranceAcademies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of CanadaAcademy of AthensAcademy of Science of MozambiqueAcademy of Science of South AfricaAcademy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS)Academy of Sciences MalaysiaAcademy of Sciences of MoldovaAcademy of Sciences of the Czech RepublicAcademy of Sciences of the Islamic Republic of IranAcademy of Scientific Research and Technology, EgyptAcademy of the Royal Society of New ZealandAccademia Nazionale dei Lincei, ItalyAfrica Centre for Climate and Earth Systems ScienceAfrican Academy of SciencesAlbanian Academy of SciencesAmazon…

1965: “The part that remains in the atmosphere may have a significant effect on climate; carbon dioxide is nearly transparent to visible light, but it is a strong absorber and back radiator of infrared radiation, particularly in the wave lengths from 12 to 18 microns; consequently, an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide could act, much like the glass in a greenhouse, to raise the temperature of the lower air.” Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, a report by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee 1968: “If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur, including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis. [..] Revelle makes the point that…

The 2018 Climate Change Performance Index, which ranks countries based on their efforts to prevent dangerous climate change, kept places 1 to 3 unoccupied. The organisers maintained that no country has yet done enough to prevent the impacts of climate change to warrant placing them in the top three. The average temperature of the Earth’s surface has increased by about 0.8C (1.4F) in the last 100 years. About 0.6C (1.0F) of this warming occurred in the last three decades alone. In 1751, around 11 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was produced worldwide. In 2015, some 36.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide was emitted globally. In 2016, China was the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, accounting for around 28.21% of global CO2 emissions that year. Hurricane Katrina was the costliest…

The Sun has always reigned as a god in my world. Heedless of health warnings, I long for the penetrative heat of its rays on my skin, the burnish and ripeness and Southern hemispheric tang it bestows on daily life, and the brilliant light – both literally and figuratively nourishing – that so many painters have been driven to chase, moving to Cornwall, to Arles, to Tahiti, the better to trap it on canvas. Perhaps my old soul was Aztec – or else devoted to Ra, the ancient Egyptian overlord of Heliopolis. At the cheesy end of my solar obsession, I have seen Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi thriller Sunshine many times over, never tiring of his fictional astronauts’ nail-biting mission to reignite a dying Sun – a mission that one…

A climate is, etymologically, a mixture of two fields that frequently coincided in the ancient world: geometry and astronomy. The word originates in the ancient Greek verb klinein, “to lean”, which yielded the term klima for a “slope” or “zone”. In the sixth century BC, Pythagoras’s disciple Parmenides suggested that the Earth (which he believed to be spherical) could be divided into five distinct klimata based upon its surface’s slope in relation to the sun. The two polar zones were deemed too frigid for life, and the equatorial zone too torrid, leaving a habitable temperate zone on either side of the equator. Aristotle subsequently concluded that the southern temperate zone might be inhabited, but that no Greek could ever explore it: the equator’s impassable heat was in the way. By…

A long time ago, between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago – pre-history, as they say – the world’s first great seafarers, the Austronesian peoples, began their great seaborne expansion from South East Asia into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Among the far-flung islands they landed on – as far as Madagascar in the west, and Hawaii in the east – was the Tarawa atoll, a collection of tiny islands surrounding a lagoon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Since that first settlement, the culture of the atoll has also been influenced by Polynesian culture, via Samoa and Tonga, and Melanesian culture, via Fiji. One of the stories told on the atoll is a creation myth: before time began, Nareau the Creator – the Spider Lord – walked alone through…

I like to think that I care for the environment and for the future of the planet, and I’m concerned by the potential effects of climate change and environmental destruction – bushfires, drought, rising sea levels, food shortages, etc. I try to buy local food and recycled packaging, I steer clear of anything in plastic, and rarely fly anywhere. Yet not all my actions are in the best interests of future generations: I have two vehicles (one of them diesel) that my partner and I use constantly, I heat my inefficiently-designed house using log fires, I conveniently ignore the fact that most of my clothes are shipped from the other side of the world, and I eat meat. However I don’t feel like can change any of these aspects of…

Most people are probably familiar with just one atmosphere: our own. How does Earth’s atmosphere compare to the other planets that we know about? There’s no place in our solar system today where we could land and then say: ‘Oh, this is nice. We can breathe.’ There’s no oxygen on the Moon. There’s no oxygen on Mars. There’s no oxygen on Venus, Saturn, Uranus, etc. The other planets are not suitable for aerobic respirers like us. There’s an effort that might be made to terraform Mars to get some oxygen in the atmosphere there, but that will take a long, long time, and lots of effort. For the near future, let’s say 1,000 years or so, if you’re going to live on Mars, you’re going to have to live inside…

Extraordinary quality in all respects. New Philosopher is one of the best things happening. I love how the writing reminds me that the types of issues we are grappling with today are similar to those grappled with by philosophers for centuries. I love this magazine. I no longer like reading or listening to mainstream news as it is not good for my health. Your magazine is good for me. It has real discussions that relate to life rather than reporting sensational ‘news’. Thank you. Your magazine is so helpful and is churning up the little grey cells, as Hercule Poirot says. Thank you, this world is brighter, more aware, and more meaningful with your publication in it. Great magazine. Finally one worth reading. Will recommend it to all friends. This…

In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio admonished men who wanted to “go further” than faith, because they failed to realise that faith was a task for a lifetime. These rash individuals, whom he disparagingly called “assistant professors”, didn’t understand the first thing about faith if they planned to go beyond it. Today, assistant professors and Silicon Valley techies promise that one day we’ll surpass humanity by becoming transhuman. When we merge with super-intelligent AI, we’ll finally conquer our limitations, eradicate our suffering, and vanquish death. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom even argues that when we are enhanced by AI, we’ll be better equipped to promote the existential value of life. Transhuman 2.0s will be more effective than us measly human 1.0s at spreading the ideas of…

A few years ago, the American novelist Ben Dolnick described an epiphany he underwent after he began regularly taking ice-cold showers. He wasn’t expecting to like the experience – and, sure enough, he didn’t. But a more profound alteration took place: he found himself relating differently to the very notion of liking and disliking things. “At almost every moment of the day,” Dolnick wrote in The New York Times, “I am accompanied by a pair of petulant, melodramatic children in my mind’s back seat. These children, Liking and Disliking, exert a distressing degree of control over just about everything I do.” Yet his shower experiment proved that when he ignored the screaming objections, Disliking soon piped down, and Dolnick could relax as the water hit his body: “Those urgent pleas,…

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, was rather obsessed with mammoths. Teeth and bones from the mammoth, or ‘incognitum’ as it was often known, had turned up several times in the North American fossil record. (In fact these animals were mastodons, not mammoths, but at the time both were believed to be the same species). Jefferson seized on their elephantine heft to defend against the charge, made by leading naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, that New World animals were weak and degenerate. The fearsome incognitum, with molars the size of human fist, would easily see off such European snobbery. In a 1780 list of North American animals, Jefferson listed the mammoth as the largest of all, bigger than the buffalo or polar bear. The problem for Jefferson…

In 2020, despite past pledges, the international support for the Paris Agreement starts to wane. In the years that follow, CO2 emissions are reduced at the local and national level but efforts are limited and not always successful. … Global warming of 1.5°C is reached by 2030 but no major changes in policies occur. Starting with an intense El Niño–La Niña phase in the 2030s, several catastrophic years occur while global warming starts to approach 2°C. There are major heatwaves on all continents, with deadly consequences in tropical regions and Asian megacities, especially for those ill-equipped for protecting themselves and their communities from the effects of extreme temperatures. Droughts occur in regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, central North America, the Amazon region and southern Australia, some of which are due…

noun: 1. The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period. 2. A region with particular prevailing weather conditions. 3. The prevailing trend of public opinion or of another aspect of public life. Origin:  Late Middle English from Old Frenchclimator late Latinclima,climat-, from Greekklima‘slope, zone’, from klinein ‘to slope’. The term originally denoted a zone of the Earth between two lines of latitude, then any region of the Earth, and later, a region considered with reference to its atmospheric conditions.…

Our classes were often conducted in low light, a blurry, soft-spoken figure gesticulating from the front. “Don’t just flick on a light switch,” exhorted Frank Fisher.“Think about the process involved in generating the energy for that light – all the way from the coal-fired power plant to this light switch – and ask yourself, ‘Do you really need that extra bit of light?’” His suggestion to combat the involuntary switching on of lights when entering a room: place them at knee height (although when he said this, I could always picture a cracked switchboard and scuff marks circling the knee-height light switch). Peripatetic classes, lectures in the bush, light-free tutorials: the aim of all these activities was to shift our perspective, to make us view the world from a different…

When the planetsIn evil mixture to disorder wander,What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,Divert and crack, rend and deracinateThe unity and married calm of statesQuite from their fixure? O, when degree is shaked,Which is the ladder of all high designs,The enterprise is sick. How could communities,Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,The primogenity and due of birth,Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,But by degree, stand in authentic place?Take but degree away, untune that string,And hark what discord follows. Each thing meetsIn mere oppugnancy. The bounded watersShould lift their bosoms higher than the shoresAnd make a sop of all this solid globe. From Troilus and Cressida…

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What is your demon? Trying to solve problems that are too big for me. But I will keep trying, I guess. Which thinker has had the greatest influence on your life? Yuval Harari and Byung-chul Han: one spoke to how I interpret the world today, adding new perspectives, and the other to the inner side, how I feel about it all. What do you doubt most? News. I trust some people in that field, but just a few. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? I would like us to be wiser as a species. What is happiness? It sounds silly, but not being divided, with your body here, your head or your heart anywhere else, brief moments when I am there as a…

Charley Lineweaver Charley Lineweaver is the convenor of ANU’s Planetary Science Institute and holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Research School of Earth Sciences. He obtained a PhD in astrophysics from UC Berkeley. Lineweaver has written chapters for several books, including Our Place in the Universe, and has written for Scientific American, Newton Graphic Science Magazine, and The Canberra Times on black holes, the origin of the universe, time-warps, and the Big Bang. Oliver Burkeman Oliver Burkeman is a writer based in New York. He is the winner of the Foreign Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2006. His books include HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done and The Antidote: Happiness…

“The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.”…

When friends asked me why I left my job as a reporter in Beijing to move to Sydney, I would always point upwards. “The sky,” I’d say. In a country like China where so-called unpolluted “blue sky days” are rare, clean air, as I saw it, was a luxury. Over the last six months, however, that luxury has vanished. Smoke from the worst bushfire season in recorded history has bled into the skies of Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. From my studio window overlooking Sydney Harbour, I can usually see pretty bobbing sailing boats; for days at a time this summer they have been reduced to blurred stains barely visible through a dirty hazy fog. Worse, I felt the hazardous pollution – as in Beijing – burning my eyes, my lungs…

ClientEarth is an environmental law charity that you founded 12 years ago, now with offices in London, Brussels, Warsaw, Berlin, and Beijing. On the website, it states that you “use the law to hold governments and other companies to account over climate change, nature loss, and pollution”. What prompted you to start Client Earth and how do you hold governments and companies to account? We’re set up as a group of international lawyers, formed as a charity, and in place of a traditional client we have the Earth and everyone who lives on it – so you, and all your readers are our clients, and we try to act on behalf of everyone who lives on it. I had done a lot of work in the United States in the…

If we know it’s a bad thing, why don’t we stop climate change? The trickiest part of this question is the word ‘we’. Lots of us believe that climate change is real and that’s is a bad thing (that is probably going to get worse). But not everybody thinks that way. There are still people who deny the existence or seriousness of climate change, even despite the evidence. Unfortunately, some of these people are very powerful and very wealthy. It might be nice if the world was a perfect democracy, where every person had the same ability to influence what happened. In reality, sometimes a small group of people have much more influence than they should. Some people have had much more impact than others in causing climate change, and…

The Physicist Stephen Hawking 1942 – 2018 Human demands “One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn’t any more available.” The Diplomat Kofi Annan 1938 – 2018 Your threat “Depending on where you live, your threat is much different…

Field Notes from a Catastrophe Elizabeth Kolbert Warning signs In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking; those in Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly it has been estimated that they will vanish entirely by 2030. The oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to. These are the warning signs that the Charney panel cautioned against waiting for, and while in many parts of the globe they are still subtle enough to be…