Bernstein on Science and Scientists

     Jeremy Bernstein. Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos (1991) Bernstein wrote for The New Yorker and other magazines for many years. I liked his pieces then, and I like this compilation now. He’s a bit prissy, expressing doubt that “the merely personal” should be remarked in biographies of Schroeder, for example. Schroeder was a notorious womaniser. Bernstein’s modest about his insights into matters he doesn’t get, but very good at explaining what he knows. He’s a working physicist, and as such is careful to keep within his limits.
     He began his scientific career before the vastness of the Universe in space and time was understood. Cosmology was almost a fringe science, burdened with ignorance and poor data. It was the accidental discovery of the cosmic background radiation that shifted scientific opinion. This led to radio astronomy, and now the whole electromagnetic spectrum is exploited to make sense of what’s out there. Cosmology is a nice example of how better instruments lead to better data, and so not only lead to  confident insights, but also to answerable questions.
     His essays on the great physicists of the late 19th and early 20th century reminds one that quantum theory was accepted before there were good data to support it. It began with Planck’s quantised model of light. Now, its insights have become engineering principles.
     In one of his last pieces, Bernstein mentions global warming, and, touchingly, infers that we will change our way of life to avoid the worst effects. I think he would be appalled at the concentrated efforts to deny and distract from the threat.
     The compilation amounts to a history of science in the 20th century. Worth reading. ***

Canadian Politics in the 80s: cartoons by Wicks

Ben Wicks. The Second Ben Wicks Treasury (1987) Wicks invented Mavis and Bill, an Ottawa couple with political connections and insight, with a more or less cynical take on current Canadian political events. For example:

Mavis: How does Chretien feel about taking Turner’s job, bill?
Bill: Keen.
Mavis: How do you mean?
Bill: He’s not saying anything.
Mavis: Wow! He wants it as bad as that.
Bill: In the worst way.

At it best as good as Yes Minister, and a good primary record for a grad student aspiring to write the definitive history of Canadian politics in the 1980s. I enjoyed it, but I won’t keep it. **½

Offloading the Risk III: ARAMCO IPO fails to reach target

The New Yok Times reports that the ARAMCO IPO fell short of Saudi expectations.

"Investors balked..."

It seems that my assessment of the viability of the oil industry is more widely shared than I thought.

Am I a cynic? Sure. Ambrose Bierce's definition: "Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."

Update 2023-03-03: Putin's War against Ukraine has upset earlier calculations about the fate of fossil fuels. In the long run, the war will delay the final collapse of that industry. Whether that collapse will take the form of a phasing out or just another part of a  general collapse of our civilization remains to be seen.

Offloading the risk II: Oil is cheaper than ever

 The Guardian published a report today on possible further cuts to OPEC oil production.

The 2019 oil prices varied from $55 to $75. (1) The 1950 oil prices were about $28. In 2019 dollars, that’s $300. So the 2019 prices are between 1/6 and 1/4 of the 1950 prices.

Verily, “oil is sloshing around” the world (See Offloading the Risk). No wonder ARAMCO is going public. At such low prices their profits must be tanking.

And with such cheap oil, the incentive to convert to renewables is reduced. That’s not good.

(1) See this page on Macrotrends.  Since the latest prices is shown in current dollars, the chart is not adjusted for inflation. The highest price shown is $164.64 in June 2008, or $18 in 1950 dollars, about 65% of the 1950 price.

The cost of externals: An accumulating debt

Steel, concrete, and climate change: the cost of zero-priced externals

New Scientist (November 16-22, 2019) has published an article showing the high carbon cost of making steel and cement, the two raw materials that make our techno-civilisation possible.

The article reports several projects to reduce the carbon cost. One is to use hydrogen instead of coal in blast furnaces. “If the economics work out”, that is. All these projects are priced at the actual costs of development and deployment. This makes them look expensive compared to traditional methods of making steel and cement. (1)

Steel and concrete are a prime example of how traditional economics has misstated the costs of our life style. Neo-liberal (Chicago school) economics prices externals at zero. Thus steel and cement have seemed to be cheap materials for making the things we want. In fact externals do have a price. We just haven’t bothered to work out good methods for pricing them, still less for paying them. (2)

As a species, we have evolved to use our environment as a freely available resource for making what we want, eg, spears. The cost of making these tools was the labour of making them. The cost to the ecosystems was ignored. Our ancestors didn’t notice or care that the tree they destroyed to make sticks for poking game animals to death meant that the ecosystem had to make another tree. As long as humans were a small component of the ecosystems, the long-term effects of our use of natural resources were minimal. (3)

However, the costs of externals accumulate. If we don’t pay them, they become a debt. Mother Nature always collects her debts. We either spend our resources now to mitigate and if possible reverse climate change, or we will pay with the loss of property and life.

(1) Concrete is made by using cement to bind the sand and gravel particles together. This process requires CO2, so some of the CO2 used to make cement is recovered from the air.

(2) Zero-priced externals mean that the goods are under-priced. The market works efficiently if and only if prices express costs accurately relative to each other. Mispriced goods distort the market, which leads to market failure.

(3) Human effects were actually not balanced by ecosystem recovery: archeologists have found evidence that agriculture began the climate warming cycle at least 7,000 years ago. Also, many local or regional extinctions of animals were caused by humans.

Gary Larson. The Far Side Gallery 4 (1993) Another lovely collection of Larson’s cartoons. Two samples below. ****

Creepy Cartoons by Gahan Wilson

Gahan Wilson. Playboy’s Gahan Wilson (1973) Gahan Wilson died a week or so ago: see the New York Times obit. So I took out my copy of this collection, and spent a pleasantly lugubrious hour enjoying his work. I like his mix of the macabre, satirical literalism, and insight into the dark paranoia that terrorised our childhoods. Like cartoonists in general, his work is underrated. Here’s one of the many cartoons that stuck with me. Its riff on the brain-in-a-jar hints at the terrifying truth better than most: The brain needs a body in order to generate the conscious self. The speech of this one is beginning to fracture: The doctors...say...they’ve never... seen...another case...quite...like...it. This brain will not be sane much longer.
    I think that any collection of Wilson’s work is worth more than a cursory look. ****