The Everyone Dies Event Class

Lytton burns

The climate, globally, is warming. Everyone acknowledges that. It’s not warming equally, or consistently, or evenly; I think everyone acknowledges that as well. Rather, the atmosphere is a heat engine: as you put more energy into it in the form of heat, you get more work out of it, in the form of turbulence. Winds get stronger, precipitation more intense, and heat waves hotter.

Human beings function in a fairly constrained temperature band. The healthy body temperature is 37° Celsius, plus or minus about one degree. The human body cools itself by evaporation. If water can’t evaporate from your skin, you can no longer cool yourself. Rather, you take on heat from the environment. Body temperature above 40° Celsius is a life threatening emergency, and above 42.3° denaturing of proteins, especially in the brain, may occur rapidly. This is not survivable.

But the operation of the human body generates heat continually. The beating of the heart generates heat. The movement of the chest cavity in breathing generates heat. Even brain activity – thinking – generates heat.

So in order to survive we need to be able to dump a small amount of heat into our environment continually. If the air is humid enough that sweat can’t evaporate, we need a small heat gradient to make that possible. So we need it to be actually cooler than 37°, and the survivable number generally quoted is a “wet bulb temperature” of 35°.

What does ‘wet bulb temperature’ mean? It’s the temperature at which water (and sweat) evaporates, and that’s a function of the absolute temperature of the air, and of the humidity: the saturation of water vapour in the air. As the air becomes increasingly humid, so the wet bulb temperature falls. In very dry atmospheric conditions, you can easily survive air temperatures well above 35° Celsius, provided you can drink enough fluids to enable you to sweat.

So: there is a temperature and humidity at which everyone exposed to the air just dies, and just dies pretty quickly. How close are we to hitting those temperature and humidity conditions?

The answer, of course, is that there are places on Earth which regularly exceeded those limits even before the days of significant anthropogenic warming, but that people don’t live in those places. Examples include Death Valley in California, parts of the Arabian Peninsula and of the Sahara, and Pakistan’s northern Sindh province, in which a Victorian British Brigadeer had the bright idea of building a city. What’s interesting is that these are not generally humid places; on the contrary, they’re exceptionally dry.

But the consequence of anthropogenic heating is that we’re seeing both higher average temperatures and higher variations in temperature. Which means we’ve been seeing a lot more exceptional heat events than we’ve been used to.

Over the past decade, ten places on Earth have recorded wet bulb temperatures at or above the theoretical ‘everybody dies’ limit. So far, we haven’t had an event in which very large proportions of the population have died suddenly of heat stroke, despite the fact that three of the places which have seen the highest wet-bulb temperatures, Ras Al Khaimah, Jacobabad and Mecca have significant populations.

But we cannot be very far away from an ‘everybody dies’ event, and the first probably won’t be somewhere that’s accustomed to very high temperatures.

Lytton, in British Columbia, Canada, wasn’t, until this year, accustomed to exceptionally high temperatures. Yes, it had frequently been the hottest place in Canada, but Canada is not on the whole a very hot place. The extreme heat event that hit Lytton in June 2021 – 49.6° Celsius – was fully 5° Celsius warmer than had ever been recorded there before. This is, as I’ve said before, because having more heat in the atmosphere makes it more turbulent and thus more heterogenous.

Lytton is 50°13’52" North. For comparison, that’s about eleven miles south of Plymouth in Devon, England, or about six miles north of Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Lytton didn’t quite exceed the ‘everybody dies’ limit, although it came very close. But it did exceed the ‘everything burns’ limit, which is what it isn’t there any more. And what Lytton proves is that, in an era of increasingly unstable weather, extreme heat events do not only happen in the tropics.

So:

1. We’re currently on 1.19° Celsius of anthropogenic warming over pre-industrial levels;
2. At 1.19°, we’re seeing local temperature records being exceeded by 5° not only in the tropics but even in temperate zones;
3. At 1.19°, our margin of safety for ‘everyone dies’ events in previously habitable zones appears to be completely exhausted;
4. If capitalism continues (SSP4), we’re heading for 3.2° Celsius of warming; even on the much more optimistic SSP2 track, we’re now heading for 2.7°.

So: if at 1.19° average warming, we’re seeing local records broken by 5°, by what amount will we see them broken at 3.2° average? This isn’t going to be a simple linear curve; it seems to me that it must be at least to some degree exponential, because there are clearly accelerating effects and feedback loops in there.

But let’s assume that it’s simply linear. Then we would be looking at current local records being exceeded by fifteen degrees, more or less anywhere in tropical or temperate zones. Indeed, given what we saw in Siberia in 2020, we could easily see ‘everyone dies’ events happening as far north as the Arctic Circle. Obviously, they will be more common in the tropics. But no currently populous place on Earth will be immune.

So, just sit for a moment, and imagine. It’s 2035. It’s June. You’ve seen ‘everyone dies’ events, covering thousands of square kilometres, happening in other parts of the world already. Now the weather forecast tells you that there’s a 30% probability of an ‘everyone dies’ event in the area where you live in the next ten days.

What do you do?

That weather forecast is going to trigger everyone who can move, to move. It will cause gridlock on every means of transport. It will cause mass civil unrest. A fortnight later we’ll see news reports of ‘rescue’ workers – probably troops – going into the places people have gathered in their last desperate attempts to survive, have died in heaps. Those places may be subway stations, or underground vaults; they may be public buildings where there had been some hope the air conditioning system would not fail.

And each such event will leave a dead zone behind it to which – although we’ll know that these events will happen more or less randomly, like lightning strikes – few people will want to return.

Let’s be clear about this. 3.2° of warming isn’t ‘survivable’. 2.7° of warming isn’t survivable. We’re on the very edge of seeing ‘everyone dies’ events, covering areas the size of small European countries, now, at 1.19°. We cannot afford any more warming.

Yet already we’re hitting cascade effects. As the Arctic warms, so methane frozen in permafrost or beneath the sea thaws and is released into the atmosphere, ratcheting up warming. As ice melts, new, darker sea and land surfaces are exposed, ratcheting up warming. As ocean circulation systems are disrupted, their moderating effects break down, ratcheting up warming. Even if we all stop burning fossil fuels today, the temperature will still rise to about 1.6° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

We are already in the disaster zone. Every barrel of oil we pump makes it worse. We have to just stop.

Where's the steel?

A blast furnace in operation

From the discovery of iron working techniques, about 3,200 years ago, up until the widespread exploitation of fossil fuels, about 250 years ago, iron and steel were rare, precious materials. The average person, across the whole world, almost certainly had less than 500 grammes of it. A knife, probably; some tool of their trade, possibly. Even members of the elite -- warriors who fought in full armour, for example -- probably owned no more than 30kg of iron and steel.

The use of fossil fuel changed all that, of course. There's about one car for every two people in the UK, and the average car now weighs 1857Kg, so that's almost a ton per person in cars alone, not to mention all the steel we now have in buildings and infrastructure. But it's fossil fuels that have made that possible. In future, we can't use them. So how much steel will we have?

Steel costs about 4MWh/ton to make. Current production of steel is about 1.8 billion tonnes per annum.That's about 7.2 billion MWh, or 7.2 million GWh, or 7,200 terawatt hours per annum -- which is 23% of total world industrial energy consumption.

Total world electricity production is around 27,000 terawatt hours So making all our steel electrically would take one third of our total electricity generation capacity. But only 28%, or 7560 TWh, of this is renewable. In other words, if we converted all our current steel making capacity ro electric arc, it would use virtually all of the world's production of renewable energy.

About 260GW of new renewable generating capacity is being added annually, but that figure is a bit misleading, since renewable plant cannot operate at full capacity all the time. Solar panels only operate during hours of daylight, and at full capacity only when the sky is cloudless and the sun significantly above the horizon. Wind turbines operate at full capacity only in a fairly narrow band of wind speeds. So 260GW of capacity does not translate into 2 277 TWh of electricity actually produced per year, but much less. How much less? I don't know, but about a third, or 0.7 TWh, seems a reasonable guess.

However, only a proportion of steel is made using electric arc furnaces; the rest is made using fossil fuels, largely coal. The exact proportion is hard to establish, since especially in the West new electric arc capacity is being built quickly. But the best figure I can get is around 29%. That means, of course, that of that 29% of steel that is made electrically, only 28% – or 8% of total steel making – is carbon neutral.

It also means that, disregarding the proportion of existing electric arc furnaces which are using fossil-fuel generated electricity, it would take seven years of our total new renewable energy capacity to replace existing fossil fuel steel making capacity with renewable. And that's before a single joule of electricity becomes available to power any of the new electric cars, electric trucks, electric trains, etc, that we want to build with that steel.

Except we couldn't build the new capacity that quickly, because it takes (a lot of) steel to build both new steelmaking plant and new renewable electricity generating capacity. We are going to have to shut down the approximately 70% of steelmaking capacity that is fossil fuel powered, and we're going to have to shut it down soon. And in a world which is critically short of a strategic material as critical as steel, making the right choices about how to allocate that steel is going to be hard and contentious.

So no. We're not all going to have electric cars. We're going to have a lot less steel

Rape, grouse, and the pathology of power

Red Grouse (source)

I got into a foolish Twitter dispute last night, and ended up saying something I fundamentally think to be true. People will say, and with good reason, 'oh, Simon's gone off on one again. He's mad, you know'. And, of course, it's true. I am insane. A really frustrating consequence of that is that sometimes my judgement is seriously wonky. But it also means I can say thing that other people are too sensible to say. Let's explore this idea.

Firstly, to roll back a little, I do not believe that anyone is irredeemable. 'Evil' is not a word that should be applied to people. And, I believe, usually, people who do evil things do so because evil has been done to them.

So this is an essay about the pathologies of power.

I want to examine a number of things:

1. The Bulingdon Club, and Alpha Epsilon Pi
2. Grouse moors
3. Jeffrey Epstein, and child sex abuse

I will argue that these are on the same spectrum.

To demonstrate huge wealth is not difficult. One merely has to drive a gold plated Lamborghini. To have power, one has to be able to use it. One has to be able to do things which other people, people with less power, cannot do. And one has to be able to do these things with impunity. To show to others that one has power, one has to actually do things which other people cannot do: one has to use power performatively. And, indeed, this is the only way one can answer the question, 'how much power do I have?'

The Bullingdon Club is a club for very rich young men at Oxford University, it has been in existence for more than two hundred years, and with very much its present reputation for at least one hundred years. The reputation of the club is for extremely bad behaviour, with records of extreme destruction of other people's property from as early as 1894 to as recently as 2010.

Apart from wrecking country houses and restaurants, notorious Bullingdon practices include

1. Forcibly removing the trousers of members of the public;
2. Burning £50 notes in front of homeless people;
3. Bestial necrophilia.

Alpha Epsilon Pi is not quite as elite as the Bullingdon Club. It is a 'fraternity' of university students at a number of universities, originally in the US, but including, specifically, St Andrews in Scotland. The chapter at St Andrews in particular has been associated with a startling number of allegations of rape. (Dani Garavelli wrote a very good piece which refers to the Alpha Epsilon Pi allegations in Scotland on Sunday this week)

All just young men's high spirits, don't you know? Or a systematic way for rich young men to explore just exactly how much bad behaviour they can get away with?

Very well. Let us move on to child sexual abuse and the sexual exploitation of very young women; and the very large number of allegations around it which centre on rich and powerful men.

Not all allegations of child sexual abuse are associated with powerful people, of course; that's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that the pathology of power draws people to explore what they can get away with. Child sexual abuse is the crime which in our modern society is most reviled and most stigmatised (and with reason). If you want to demonstrate that you can get away with anything, this is the Everest, the pinnacle.

What I'm arguing here is that the attraction of child sexual abuse to very powerful people is not (at least mainly) an erotic attraction to very young bodies, just as the alleged sexual act between a former prime minister of the United Kingdom and a dead pig was not primarily about the erotic attraction of pork. On the contrary, both are, at least in part, a pathological need to explore the limits of power.

Corpses of grouse, pheasants and geese
left to rot (source)

Which brings us on to grouse moors. Grouse moors represent the environmental destruction of large areas of countryside in order to provide an opportunity for a very few people to slaughter a large number of birds - birds which are not particularly good eating and which are in fact largely dumped and left to rot for this very reason.

The grouse, like the child sexual abuse victims and the dead pigs, are not being shot for their intrinsic value; they're being shot for their trophy value: to prove that the shooters can get away with it.

So what is it they're 'getting away with'? Shooting a few wild birds does not seem so shocking, surely? Well, no. But in order to create the environment in which birds can be shot in such numbers, hundreds of people must be driven out of their homes and off their ancestral lands.

Enclosing commons was how the powerful of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrated their power. They had the power to drive the common people out of their homes and off their land, and they did. Having enclosed the commons, of course, they could then farm the most productive parts more intensively (or at least, rent them out to farmers, who would do so, at high rents) and make profits.

But a large part of the lands from which they had driven the subsistence farmers could not be farmed profitably in any other way, so what to do with it? The answer was to create vast deserts on which to slaughter small birds.

Just as, as feminists keep saying, rape is not (mainly) about sex, so enclosing the uplands is not mainly about improving agriculture - the new 'improved' agriculture could make no use of such marginal land. What had been, from April to September, the summer shieling of tens or hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers, became an arena, for a few days in August, to display the power of the few.

Solitudinem faciunt, bona appellant.

Birds of prey - especially large birds of prey - are the most visible of the iconic species of our wildlife. Wildlife is not the 'property' of anyone: rather it is a commons for us all. Birds of prey eat meat. Not huge amounts of it, but it is what they eat. I find the idea that eagles or red kites significantly predate on red grouse improbable. Hen harriers, of course, will do so, where grouse are abundant.

There is a certain bitter rationality to gamekeepers slaughtering hen harriers, wild cats, foxes and stoats on grouse moors: the gamekeepers are paid to provide plentiful easy targets for their employers to take aim at. Predators which predate on ground nesting birds will necessarily reduce that plenty. This is how ecosystems work, after all.

Mountain hares killed on a single day on
a single estate in the Angus glens (source)

But the fact that eagles, kites, pine martens and mountain hares are also slaughtered indiscriminately on grouse moors is evidence that this isn't about bitter rationality, or any rationality at all.

The fact that ordinary people - people who are not powerful - take pleasure in seeing eagles, kites, hen harriers, ravens, wild cats, foxes, stoats and mountain hares - mountain hares! - is the only reason to exterminate them. It's a naked demonstration of power over the commons. Power to steal, to desecrate, to destroy, and to do so with impunity. Wanton and blatant destruction of common goods. Bad behaviour performed solely for the purpose of showing that you can get away with bad behaviour. And this, I claim, is evil.

Wherever you find rich and powerful people wishing to demonstrate their wealth and power, you'll find others who make their living by enabling it. The Oort cloud of lawyers and estate agents who orbit Londongrad are an example.

So Ghislaine Maxwell was, in effect, Epstein's grouse moor manager. She organised the provision of plentiful easy targets for him and his friends to take aim at, and managed the arenas in which they bagged their trophies.

What I'm arguing here is not that grouse moors are 'as bad as' child sexual abuse - clearly, in terms of direct harm to specific individual people, they are not.

But I am arguing they are on the same spectrum, driven by the same pathology.

And the reason that this matters - the reason that I believe we should look on the owners of grouse moors with the same eyes as we look on those people in the other categories I've discussed - is that it people have a propensity for performatively extremely bad behaviour in one aspect of their lives, it is highly probable that they are exhibiting equally unacceptable behaviour in others.

World enough, and Time

Orrery of the Long Now clock

Last night I listened to an episode of the Politics Galore podcast which utterly depressed me: not because the content was depressing (although it was), but because the analysis was so shallow. It analysed Scotland's current dilemma solely in terms of the Westminster political game played by Westminster's first past the post rules. It suggested that the next independence referendum could be, and tactically should be, delayed until the late 2020s, as though nothing in the world would change in the meantime.

Human beings are programmed to believe that nothing much in the world, on a macro scale, will change very much from one year to the next. We call this inductive reasoning, and over the past million years it's served us pretty well. On the whole, tomorrow has been more or less like yesterday; on the whole, next year has been more or less like last. And for most of that time, what lay over the horizon was literally unknowable: oncoming crises, no matter how inevitable, could not be predicted or prepared for.

This is no longer the case. Multiple interlocking crises — the changing climate, the mass extinction of species, the concentration of wealth and power — are changing the world rapidly. We can now see over the horizon; we do now have the tools.

Consequently, you can't now discuss Scotland's politics in isolation from our geopolitical context. I'd identify several key factors:

1. There is a strong risk that the UK will diverge sharply from EU over the few months after December 2020;
2. There is a strong risk that climate change is running substantially faster than IPCC have allowed for, and that action to mitigate is lagging far behind;
3. The new digital propaganda tools by which well-funded actors can manipulate elections are rapidly maturing; and consequently
4. There is a strong risk that the English-speaking world is sliding towards something resembling real fascism or at least oligarchy.

Both Scotland and the UK are bit-players in all this; we don't move the tides of history, we have to ride them. The attack by Russia on electoral processes in the UK is not primarily aimed at the UK so much as at creating chaos and turmoil across the West. In that sense the UK's only geopolitical significance is as a keystone in the defences of the European area of stable peace against chaos, and it's a keystone which no longer has any structural integrity.

For clarity, in saying 'the attack by Russia' I'm not saying that the attack is made solely by Russia, nor that the attack is in the long term interests of the Russian people or state. Rather, it's an attack by an emerging oligarchy, which currently controls Russia. Nor is this oligarchy monolithic; rather, it's made up of a class of ultra-rich individuals who very largely do not see themselves as a collectivity and who very largely do not coordinate their actions, but nevertheless each act 'rationally' to protect and enhance their accummulated wealth and influence.

They include, but are not limited to, those who profited from the ill-managed privatisations in the collapse of the Soviet Union; absolute rulers of oil states in the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere; the hereditary aristocracy of Great Britain, including the House of Windsor; 'tech entrepreneurs' including Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page; the financial services elite; and the controllers of major organised crime cartels. These groups, of course, socialise, intermarry, interpenetrate, overlap; that is the nature of a collectivity.

Surrounding the oligarchs themselves — who may or may not be consciously malign — there's a penumbra or Oort cloud of actors who clearly are malign: people like Murdoch, Bannon, Yiannopoulos, Rees Mogg. They are, in a sense, the intellectuals or ideologues of the oligarchy, forging an ideology which allows the oligarchs themselves to 'rationally protect and enhance their wealth and influence', by undermining and destroying the democratic institutions which would otherwise allow mass action to erode those accummulations. But they're not oligarchs themselves, although they may aspire to be; they're hangers on.

One very worrying thought made powerfully by Umair Haque, when he says "climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish", is that the oligarchs (or their ideologues), rather than putting their shoulders to the wheel to resist climate change, may consciously be seeking to accelerate it.

To say 'but we can't resist these forces' is probably true, but that way leads simply to despair. If human life on earth is to continue, people (including Scotland as a bit-player) must resist these forces, now. It isn't sufficient to go on playing the Westminster game, and, in particular, there isn't time to think about the long game. As John Maynard Keynes said, but with particular force now, in the long run we're all dead.

Pulling focus back to Scotland, what worries me is that the SNP's analysis is as shallow as Politics Galore's. Like the podcast, they believe that the future will be much like the past; like the podcast, they ignore the turbulent geopolitical forces which mean it won't be.

Salmond was a risk-taker; Sturgeon is not. She will play it safe. As the tides of history tear our society and our economy apart, she will wait irresolute for a 'perfect moment' which will never come. The merit of Angus MacNeil's 'Plan B' was not primarily that it actually was a strategy (Sturgeon's wistful hope that she can somehow extract a Section 30 order from a triumphant English Tory government is not), but that it gave us a fresh bite at the cherry with each successive Westminster election.

But there (probably) isn't time. Measurements in Greenland and the Antarctic show that the Climate Emergency is moving much faster than predicted, and meantime the oligarchy and its ideologues are honing its anti-democratic toolkit.

Scotland alone cannot swing the UK back to a path of sanity. We're structurally weak, and, as Johnson gerrymanders the electoral system to lock in Tory majorities, we'll remain structurally weak. Our escape route is to bind ourselves to the European bloc (EFTA or EU), and then to work to strengthen — and radicalise — that bloc; but we cannot do that without independence.

We don't have, for reasons I've given above, much time. You would not have been wise, in 1935, to make any political plan for three electoral cycles hence: the tides of history would have washed it away. 2020 will be 1935 on steroids.

I still believe — and believe strongly — that an independent Scotland could be a positive actor on the world stage, both in seeking to build peace, justice and stability, and in seeking to resist climate change and slow the rate of extinctions. But time is short; the crises are urgent and rapidly becoming more so. If we cannot achieve independence within a very short time frame, it will be time to abandon indulgences like constitutional tinkering and seek to build alliances to defend our planet. Indeed, it may well be that time already.

An independent Scotland on a dead planet would be a very hollow victory.