Gentle Decline 1/28: Technology & Tenaciousness

Hello. It's been a while since the last issue; I had an attack of research in various medieval and medieval-ish fields, some of which has since surfaced in Commonplace, and some of which will surface much later on other venues entirely. This issue, composed over some weeks (and also through a bit of heat-haze; my brain doesn't handle summer well), deals with new technology which will either help cut down on climate crisis-inducing effects, help mitigate the effects, or help us cope with the outcomes. As you'll no doubt recall, I am not a believer in a technological solution to climate issues, but I do think it can do things to help us cope. I'm also going to look in on some stuff with which technology can't help much - namely, the concept of the narrowing ecological niche for humans.

Actually, let's do that first. The concept of an ecological niche is kind of fuzzy, and there are a lot of different ways to view it. My working definition is something like "the spaces in place and time where humans have the necessities of existence". That stretches from sea-level to quite a ways up into mountains, varying a little by season, and covers pretty much every bit of land on the planet. Once you take into account some of the ways in which we can extend our niche using technology, it currently covers every part of the planet, including deep hot deserts like the interior of Australia, Antarctica, underwater, and even in orbit.

However, niche extension using technology has limits. First, we need to be getting some benefit from where we are. In the case of Antarctica, deep sea, and space, we have a lot of research and information-gathering going on. In desert areas, there's occasionally resource extraction - oil in Saudi Arabia and Texas, for instance, and mining in parts of Africa. But it's not usually a thing we can usefully do just to enable people to be there - even the most ardent man-over-nature right-winger comprehends that.

There were a few occasions last year where temperatures in parts of Australia climbed above human tolerance. This means that in those places if you were outdoors for more than about 20 minutes, you would die. The exact measurement for this is called a "wet-bulb temperature", which is a combination of heat an humidity, and the threshold for humans is 35 degrees Celsius (which you'd exceed at 43C of 'actual' temperature at 60% humidity, say). There are not many people in the Australian interior, so while it's terrifying, it's not dangerous in this instance. The drying-out effects in surrounding areas allowing the wildfires there in January and February of this year, of course, were a knock-on effect.

The affected areas of Australia will be bigger, on average, every summer from now on. And it doesn't have to last for long - one or two days a year when the ambient conditions will kill you is plenty to render a region uninhabitable, not least because it's going to kill everything else in there that isn't a mineral resource. We're also going to see those conditions, with temperatures above human tolerance levels, in other parts of the world - the Arabian Peninsula, where the humidity is high enough, Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and parts of South America.

India is the area of particular concern, because there are so many people there. Wet-bulb temperatures are extremely hard to predict, because humidity depends on factors like wind direction, local bodies of water, and so forth. But as temperatures rise, the chances of hitting that distinctly un-magical number increase, and temperatures are definitely rising. The best current predictions for average temperature rise by the end of the century are between 2.5C and 4.5C. If the average rise stayed at 2.5C, it looks like India might just skate under the 35 degree wet-bulb threshold, most of the time. If the average rise is 4.5C, something in the region of four million people will almost certainly be in areas that cross it regularly. And here's the thing: it only has to happen once in a while for a region to be uninhabitable, so even the optimistic 2.5C rise could be enough to effectively take these areas out of the human ecological niche. They could still be winter grazing, say, or maybe suitable for some crops in the not-so-hot-seasons, but people can't live there. So that's four million people who will have to move elsewhere, and these are already some of the poorest parts of India (which is saying something).

There really isn't a technological solution for this. In theory, buildings with solar-powered cooling mechanisms could be put in place across the affected regions, in which people could take shelter during the worst conditions. In practice, this would be hideously expensive, and even if the Indian government were inclined to spend money on its poorest people - which it isn't - it's doubtful it could pay for it at all.

The actual numbers of people that will have to move will be pretty high. One study reckons that 3.5 billion people will be affected by 2070. Climate refugees are going to be one of the biggest issues of the late 21st century, and with the level of racism already happening in the global north, I don't think that's going to be easily solved.

Anyway. Let's move on to looking at some technology that might be see and be of use. A bunch of these came from Alex - thank you!

First up, induction forges. Induction forges work in the same way as an induction hob in a kitchen (it has recently become clear that the word "hob" is not known in the US; Americans please read "stovetop" or something) - using electromagnetic fields to induce heat. The video Alex sent shows a blade being heated to red hot in a few seconds, by someone holding it in their bare hand at the tang end. Induction is much faster than conduction, so it's safe to do that for a bit. Obviously, induction forges are much more efficient for metalwork, don't use fossil fuels directly, are cleaner, and have a raft of other advantages. Equally obviously, they only work on magnetic metals, so just as aluminium saucepans won't work on the induction hob, you can't shape aluminium this way. But almost all pre-modern tools were iron or steel, so these forges will allow a lot of work without needing fossil fuels. They do consume a lot of electricity; re-shaping metal is going to do that. The next most environmentally sound fuel is charcoal, and it's difficult to get it to the necessary temperature, so being able to do so using electricity is a pretty neat trick.

Next up, agricultural robots. The examples I'm looking at here - also from Alex - are from the Small Robot Company. My initial reaction to this is mixed - on the one hand, they're agricultural machinery which doesn't use fossil fuels to run, so that's a good start. On the other, they're really specialised, almost-single-purpose devices, and I can't see them being in any way cheap or low-energy to make. On closer examination, though, the company isn't looking to sell the robots, but sell a subscription to them, "farming as a service". Other "X as a service" things are very useful, so that puts them in the good books by a few marks more. I'm interested in the language they're using around them, too - they have names, and the monitoring robot that stays more-or-less permanently on the farm ("Tom") "lives" in a "kennel". They're a friendly bright yellow, not the threatening black-and-grey of the Boston Dynamics dog-bots. I cannot for the life of me locate the subscription price - I suspect it hasn't been settled yet, as they're still developing the robots. I also suspect it's one of those numbers that would look very high to non-farmers.

(This also raises the question of whether robots could farm in areas humans sometimes can't go into, as above. I don't know what those conditions would be like for machines.)

These are not the first agricultural robots, by a long shot. Dairy farmers already use milking robots, which because they're an interaction between machine and animal without human intervention, seem really weird to me. An interesting quote, though, from a guide:

"It is better then not to think of a robot milker replacing staff members, but rather reallocating them from the traditional daily milking routine into a more flexible work pattern."

Dairy robots are bought, not rented, and they're pretty expensive to set up, usually requiring a dedicated new building, and a variety of modifications and maintenance requirements for surrounding fields and animal traffic areas. A robot that can handle about 55 cattle would cost around £15,000 per year (depreciation, maintenance, electricity), and as noted above, is not going to reduce the necessary staff. Since the machines run 24/7, it also changes the work from something with one of the most traditionally predictable routines in history to something for which you can be called on at any time if there's a problem. These systems are in use on farms already, so they must do something useful, but I confess I'm struggling to see the advantage.

However, while I still have these misgivings about agricultural robots, the Small Robot Company ones have been heavily invested in by actual farmers. This probably means they've something useful going on.

A small note on battery stuff: in what seems to be fairly advanced biotech, there are indications that crustacean shells (currently a waste product of seafood, essentially) can be used to produce stuff that converts other energy - motion and pressure, in particular - into electricity. This has next to no effect on big battery-requiring devices, but it makes a definite difference to small ones - in things like medical monitors, for example. If only they could find a use for jellyfish.

Biotech has also developed an enzyme that can break down 90% of a PET plastic bottle, whereas current processes can get about 30%. That's good for easing the transition off plastic dependence in the longer term.

I've been hunting around for signs of improvements in battery technology, for transport, but I'm not seeing much evidence that anything is happening. Of course, the first half of this year is essentially a write-off as far as new developments are concerned, since few enough people working in R&D labs are going to be deemed essential workers, but working from home on new tech isn't all that practical either, unless you're Tony Stark.

The technological stuff above is good, in all cases. But all of it is either incremental advances, or new ways to do things we already know how to do. I'm not saying that these are all the new things out there, because there are going to be hundreds, maybe thousands of things under development that I haven't heard of. But none of these are breakthroughs that will change the trajectory of the climate at the moment, or allow for wide-ranging transport in declining oil, or otherwise change the overall direction of my thinking over the last twenty-some issues. And I'm not making daft statements that there will be no new developments in technology in the next thirty years; given the last century, that seems like it would be a poor prediction.

But the fact remains that fossil fuels were a body of stored energy built up over millions of years, millions of years ago, and we've blown that windfall inside a hundred years, and in doing, released a lot of that energy directly into the atmosphere. I don't think that the technology is going to exist - without time travel, like - that will reduce the effects of that, so we're realistically down to mitigation of the effects, where we can, and coping with the effects, where we can't.

This issue brought to you by the discovery of a summer meadow a few hundred metres from my house, meals eaten outside, an online food conference, and some in-depth writing about how to do research. In the next issue I'll move on to technological aids, both old and new, for individual aid in environmental and declining oil situations. If you have stuff in that line that you know of, fire it this way.

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