How does it feel to live in a crypt? Impressions after one year

to live In "The Outsider" (1926), H. P. Lovecraft tell the story of someone who lives underground and who discovers his true nature only when he comes out of his crypt and sees his own image in a mirror. That's not exactly my case, but it is true that I have been living underground for more than a year, by now. It has been a good experience

Last year, I published a post on Cassandra's Legacy describing my experience with living in an underground apartment in Florence, chosen as my new home with the specific idea of resisting to the summer heat waves, intensifying every year because of global warming. After about one year, I can confirm that it was a good idea and I can add some more details. Below, I reproduce last year's post. 

First of all, I can confirm that an underground apartment is way better than any other kind of homes in the hot summers of central Italy. This year, summer is not being so terrible as last year, but we are in the midst of heat wave that will last at least one more week, probably more. Right now, the thermometer inside my apartment marks 26.2 C, which is a nice temperature. Outside, it is hot and damp, a climate unsuitable for human beings. 

Then, of course, I also spent a winter in this apartment. It is not very small, about 140 square meters, but it was possible to heat it at a very reasonable price using the existing gas-powered system. Nothing fancy, here, but the apartment has three sides against the rock of the hill, so there was very little dispersion of heat. 

Something I was afraid of was the humidity. So much that I bought a de-humidifier. But, over about one year of use, I found that it was not very useful. The apartment maintains by itself a humidity level of about 50%-60%, occasionally gets close to 70%. It is normally less humid than outside, so that by running the dehumidifier at full power I was just trying to dehumidify the whole town! Not so practical.

At the beginning, I was afraid that this relatively high humidity was bad for health. Indeed, last year I was suffering of a bad case of chronic stiff neck (Cervical spondylosis if you like), refractory to most treatments. But, after more than a year that I have been living here, my stiff neck is practically gone. Could it be that this range of humidity is good for you? I can't say that I have a sufficiently large statistical sample (just me!). Also, some arnica gel and getting rid of my bifocal glasses may have helped. Or perhaps the human sacrifices I performed at full moon. But never mind that: let's say that I can tell you that living underground seems not to be a recipe for getting arthritis. 

Not that there are no problems with this relatively high humidity rate. A mistake that my landlord made was to mount sealed window frames that don't let air pass through. It was a bad idea, especially in the bathroom and the kitchen. When someone takes a shower or cooks spaghetti, the result may be that the walls become spotty green, not really oozing out green monsters, but still not pleasant to behold. That required a repainting job, installing air vents, and setting the de-humidifier in the kitchen, ready to go when the cooking starts. Nevertheless, a few green spots are appearing on the walls in other places -- it is mostly an aesthetic problem.

What else? The small garden of the apartment was truly a life-saving relief during the months of lockdown. Just as the internal stairs, allowing good exercise by climbing them up and down some 10 times every day. 

And so things stand. Here is a picture of a touch of class of the apartment, with a sculpture made by a student of my mother at the Art Institute of Florence.

Too bad that not everybody can live underground! And here is the article I wrote last year.

 

Why I went underground and how I am enjoying my new subterranean life

From Cassandra's Legacy, Aug 13, 2019

Here is one of the windows of my new home. No, not the big one. Look at where my wife, Grazia, is pointing. Yes, that one!

This summer in Florence we already had two vicious heat waves. As I am writing, we are in the middle of the third one, even more vicious. It has been, actually, a continuous period of very high temperatures punctuated by a few storms that brought the usual floods and disasters.

Global warming is no joke. If you don't plan for these heat waves you seriously risk your life, especially if you are not so young and you are not in perfect health. And people do die: we don't have statistical data for this year, yet, but the reports from countries like Europe, India, and Japan tell of tens, maybe hundreds, of victims and thousands hospitalized.

As usual, people here and everywhere in the world suffer from the syndrome that Daniel Pauly calls "shifting baselines." They seem to think that it is all normal because that's what they have been seeing during the past decade or so. And they don't seem to realize that they are living in houses that were designed and built in a world where heat waves were occasional and lasted just a few days, not the rule for more than one month per year.

Most homes in Florence have no air conditioning or have the kind of makeshift units that make a lot of noise but don't do much to lower temperatures. Some people insist on saying that air-conditioning is "not ecological" because it consumes energy. In other cases, the city regulations forbid people to install the external unit of a truly efficient air conditioning system. And, worst of all, very few people realize how bad it is going to be in a few years from now.

So, I have been preparing for what's coming. I told you already how we (me and my wife) decided to move from a big, American-style suburban home to a smaller apartment, downtown. It was for several reasons, but one was that our former home was so large that it was impossible to cool it in summer at reasonable costs. So, we chose an apartment that would be especially suitable to survive these terrible heat waves even without air conditioning. An underground apartment.

Actually, our home is not fully underground, It is on the slope of a hill, three sides are against solid rock but the fourth, the North side, opens on a small garden. That's the only side having large windows, but the sun never shines on them. That was part of the choice: it was to keep the house cool. Here is a picture of our living room.

And here is the garden, in the background you can see the bomb shelter that came with the apartment, it is a WWII relic. It is not supposed to be used against heat waves, but it could be useful again for its original purpose, who knows?

Here is my studio, the room that corresponds to the "slit window" shown at the beginning of this post. The picture is taken in a moment when the sun shines exactly on that window, normally the room is much darker, of course. But it is the kind of place where you can concentrate on your work.

The apartment is not very large, but more than enough for two people. It has two bedrooms, kitchen, two bathrooms, storage space, and more things, but I guess what you want to know at this point is how it performs during heat waves. And, I can tell you it performs beautifully.

As I am writing this post, the temperature outside is about 39°C  (102.2°F). Inside, the thermometer marks 26.3 °C, I never saw it going over 26.6 °C (80 °F), so far. No air conditioning, windows are tightly shut. It is a reasonably comfortable temperature although we found we needed a dehumidifier running full time to bring the humidity in the comfortable range of less than 60%. (*)

For comparison, my mother-in-law apartment is nearby. It is an old building with massive walls, but also with windows facing South. With the air conditioning off, it touches 29 °C. My daughter's apartment is on the second floor of a modern building. It arrives at 30-31 °C if the air conditioning is off. Some people tell me that their apartments downtown Florence reach 33-34 °C (91-93 F). That starts to be uncomfortably close to that upper limit of survivability marked by a "wet-bulb temperature" of 36 degrees. Not a joke: heat kills.

So, what's the idea of going underground? Why not just use air conditioning? Sure, it could be done. But there is such a thing as the possibility of a black-out, you heard what happened in England these days. Now, if that happens in Italy at the height of a heat wave perhaps you won't die, but for sure you'll suffer horribly.

But can everybody live underground? No, of course not. Some people do, even in Florence there are plenty of basements used as living quarters. But that's not a good idea: Florence is built on an alluvial plain that's periodically reclaimed by the Arno river. It happens infrequently enough that people forget about these periodic floods -- the last big one was in 1966. But they are unavoidable and if you live in a basement in Florence you have to think that, eventually, you'll have to get out of it swimming, if you can. Our apartment, instead, is built on the slope of a hill and it is safe from flooding. But you can't build the whole city on the slope of a hill.

What you can do, though, is to build houses made to withstand the heat waves that will become worse and worse as time goes by. How to do that is no secret: the house must have a large thermal mass to make it able to absorb the heat. It may be underground or partly underground, it may have massive walls, or it may have other tricks to store heat away from the living quarters. But it shouldn't count 100% on air conditioning: besides being wasteful, it may not be healthy and not even comfortable.

So, we have been spending this sizzling hot summer tucked in this basement home. An interesting experience. Looking through the window at the haze of the heat, the feeling was like we were living in a science fiction novel. We had landed in an alien planet, too hot for humans to live, and we had to stay inside our spaceship to survive. Maybe that's our destiny in any case: a planet too hot for humans to live, at least during the summer. It is a concept explored by Antonio Turiel in a science fiction story published on his blog "The Oil Crash" titled "Dystopia IX (in Spanish). Maybe we'll really need spacesuits if we want to venture outside in Summer. Who knows?

Elon Musk's spacesuit was designed for Mars, but it could be useful here, on Earth, if things keep going the way they have been going.

The Politics of the Coronavirus: A Lesson from Italy on how to Deal with Emergencies

Italy fights on against the epidemic. But it is a difficult battle

                         

While things keep changing with the Covid-19 epidemics, I thought I could jot down a few considerations on the politics of emergencies. It is about Italy, but I think there are lessons in this story valid for all Western Countries. In the picture, the current prime minister of Italy, Mr. Giuseppe Conte. He has been doing reasonably well in handling the crisis.

There was a moment, a few weeks ago, when I was scared. Truly scared. The Italian Right had started mounting a hate campaign that exploited the coronavirus threat. The gist of the campaign was that the coronavirus was a threat brought to Italy by those filthy Chinese, known for their disgusting eating habits. And the African immigrants were doing the same. Although they were not yet carrying the virus, they soon would because they, too, are filthy and are known for their disgusting eating habits. All that was not happening by chance: it was planned in order to exterminate the Italian people and replace them with immigrants from Africa. The plan involved also the Islamization of the country and the adoption of the Sharia law.

I am not kidding, this is what you could read in some newspaper titles. The one shown here is from "Libero," Feb 13th, one of the national newspapers. The title says, "Technical tests of extermination," with the subtitle "the government eases the diffusion of the virus." Make no mistake: they were accusing the government of planning to exterminate the Italian population. Then, of course, they were careful in avoiding to state that too explicitly, but that was the message vehicled to their readership.

It is well known that the Right has its political base in the least educated fraction of the population, and it seems clear that many of them were truly alarmed. The reaction on social media was virulent (an especially appropriate term, in this case). In many cases, posts were written by people unable to write in correct Italian, but that didn't prevent them from venting their anger against those Communists, Greens, do-gooders (buonisti), Islamists, Terrorists, and other enemies of the people. Just an example, here.

This one says, "Down with this government of idiots who segregated the Italians and not the Chinese. Honorable suicide or state suicide for all of them, including the president." I don't know how much of what could be read was genuine: in part, it was surely the work of paid trolls, maybe of bots. So, this Mr. "Venesian" probably doesn't really exist. But that was the tone and the substance of most comments on social media.

You can see why I was scared. I don't think that the leaders of the Right really planned to exterminate anyone, they were just asking for the resignation of the current government, maybe for new elections that they hoped to win. But these things tend to go out of hand, as Maximilien Robespierre discovered in 1794. I noted the danger in a post that I wrote on Feb 23, where I compared the situation to that of the man-hunts against the "plague-spreaders" during the great plague of Milan, during the 17th century.

But, with the progress of the epidemics, the leaders of the Right discovered that they had placed themselves in a no-win position. Their strategy had backfired on them. You don't ask the resignation of the government when you face a national emergency -- it is a no-no: you look like a subversive, to say the least. So, they abruptly changed their tune: you can see the title of the same Libero newspaper of Feb 20. "Virus, now they are exaggerating. Calm down!" (*) Most trolls disappeared from the Web, not just an impression of mine, it was confirmed by quantitative data. At the same time, the Right abandoned all the stories about the planned extermination, Islamization, and the like. Then, they asked to join the current government coalition to form a government of national unity. But, of course, they were told something like, "what? First you say we are criminals, then you want to join us? Did the coronavirus affect your brains?" In many ways, it was another personal defeat for Mr. Salvini, the leader of the Italian League, who showed once more his limits as a leader.

As the threat of the virus became clearer and more pressing, the government started to take serious action. Here, there is a rule that says that in an emergency, any leader can shine. That was true also for Mr. Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister, who managed to give a good impression of leadership, calling for national unity and joint efforts to save the country. Overall, it is a good moment: Italians are reacting well to the emergency, there are no complaints, no requests of exterminating anyone, citizens are trying to do their best by staying at home, as they are requested to do.

The situation is evolving: the government is gambling on the idea that quarantine can stop the diffusion of the virus. If it doesn't work, things may become difficult, to say the least. The Italian health care system is functioning and it is staffed with competent people, but it has been suffering from financial cuts and personnel cuts during the past decades. If it is overwhelmed and collapses, all bets are off. Anything can happen. Maybe we can make it. Just maybe.


Now, what can we learn from this story? Could we project it to other future emergencies, such as the looming climate crisis? With some caution, yes. The future is never like the past, but it rhymes with it. So, if some truly heavy climate crisis arrives, governments will be tempted to react first by blaming their opponents, as the Australian government did with the forest fires of this winter. In this case, they succeeded in passing the message that the Greens were to blame because they didn't want to cut trees - no trees, no fire. Isn't that obvious? But that was possible in Australia because the threat was limited. If towns had started burning, that strategy might have backfired, just like the attempt of blaming immigrants for the epidemic, as in Italy.

So, if Italy is an example, it may be that in case of a truly serious climate emergency, governments may finally decide to react and do something serious. At the same time, the same people who are now thundering against "climate alarmism" would fall in line and ask for national unity against the climate threat. As in the case of Italy, it will be late, probably too late, but it will be at least an attempt. Could it work? Who knows? It would be at least a fighting chance.





(*) Not everyone in Italy agreed to calm down. One Mr. Vittorio Sgarbi, member of the parliament and known as an art critic and art historian, improvised himself as an expert in epidemiology and uploaded a rant against alarmists and catastrophists, denying the existence of the epidemics and of the coronavirus, inviting everyone to go visiting the "red zone" of the epidemic, all that using a foul language (impossible to translate into English) and insulting everyone who disagrees with him. That's not so interesting in itself, but note that Mr. Sgarbi received little flak from the media for his statements. It may be that his opinions are still common with the Italian population.

The Word for World is Forest

Reposted from "Chimeras".

Every book by Ursula Le Guin is by definition the best book by Ursula Le Guin. And there is no book by Ursula Le Guin that's not the best book by Ursula Le Guin. But this one, "The Word for World is Forest" may be even better than that!

I read "The Word for World is Forest" maybe 30 years ago, but when I took it up again, every word in it was familiar to me, as I had dropped it in a drawer just one week before. Each word of it carried the rumble of thunder and the force of a hurricane, the same effect on me of a presentation by Anastassia Makarieva on the same subject, the forest.

Anastassia Makarieva is a scientist, Ursula Le Guin was a novelist. It doesn't matter. There is a thread, there is a narration, there is a story that pervades humankind's consciousness. I can't remember who said that trees are the pillars that hold the sky, but I am discovering it is true. Not single trees, the forest, it is the biotic pump, an incredible machine that works pumping water from the air above the oceans and distributes it for free to every living creature. The ultimate gift of life.

I can't understand how Ursula Le Guin could grasp these concepts by pure intuition nearly 50 years ago, but she did. Reread many years later, this book is a pure hit to the stomach. It leaves you breathless, but in a state of mind as if you wanted to be punched again and again, for the pure pleasure of the action, the movement, the sensation.

In 1972, something about this subject was already known and the destruction of the Vietnamese forests using the infamous "agent orange" reverberates all over the book. The basis of the story is the Vietnam war, retold in a science fiction setting, with the Aliens in the role of the Vietnamese and the Terrans of the Americans. The Terrans want to destroy the forest to turn it into plantations, the Aliens want to save it. In fact, it is the same story as that  of the "Avatar" movie, it is just that Cameron's debt to Ursula Le Guin is not acknowledged.

But the book is not just a political statement, it is much more than that. Read this passage ("Selver" is the alien leader of the story):

"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is.

The meaning of this passage may be evident to you, or you may need to mull it over for a while in your mind. But it is one of the deepest statements I've ever read on the predicament we find ourselves in. The beauty of it is that so much hope is embedded in these words: the world changes, ideas evolve, sometimes taking the form of Gods or god-like entities. It is in this way that the world is changed: when dreams become reality. And some dreams are truly beautiful and full of hope, like this one by Anastassia Makarieva

You see, there is a succession process for forest recovery. We first have shrub grasses after some disturbance like fire, then it takes time for that to be replaced by trees. So if we are lucky our grand grandchildren will be walking in such forest, so this dimension should also be stressed. We are working for the future we are not just securing for ourselves some two dozens years of better comfort. Rather, we send a message through centuries such that people will remember us and walking into this forest along the brookes and rivers they will remember us with gratitude for our consciousness and dedication. (Anastassia Makarieva  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ1UtHRBcG4 - min 30:05))

How We Keep Destroying the Things that Make us Live: The Biotic Pump and the Raw Power of Science

Dr. Anastassia Makarieva describes the concept of the "Biotic Pump" at the Smart Biotic Pump Summit Prague 2018

This is not an easy video to follow, but I thought to propose it to you nevertheless. Perhaps its most impressive feature is how it is not refined, it is not slick, it uses no tricks. It is just a plain talk of the kind you normally hear at scientific conferences. And yet it gave me an impression of something I would call the "raw power of science." 

It is the power science has to create new ideas, new concepts, new views of seeing the natural world. The biotic pump is not just a refinement of what we know about the Earth's climate. It is a revolutionary way to look at the way the ecosystem works. Dr. Makarieva, here, shows that science produces not only new ideas but relevant ideas. Relevant for our life and for the life of the whole biosphere.  

I know that the concept of biotic pump is controversial and it is in itself a complex concept, not easy to grasp. Not being an expert in atmospheric physics, it is not easy for me to evaluate it in depth. But, if it is true, that is, it is so massive and on such a large scale as Makarieva and Gorshkov propose, then it is mind-boggling. It means that the ecosystem controls the Earth's climate in a much deeper and stronger way than commonly believed. 

According to this view, forests are immense machines that pump water away from the oceans to the land. Forests, not just trees, not grass, not pastures, not cultivated fields. You need a fully grown forest to keep the machine running and to provide the biosphere with the water it needs. And, just for a change, humans are destroying the world's forests. As usual, we keep destroying the things that make us live.

So, if you have 26 minutes, you could do much worse than using them to listen to Dr. Makarieva speaking. But if you limit yourself to the first few minutes, just listen to what she says about professor Gorshkov, who couldn't come to the meeting. She says, "I am just a pale shadow of him." It is a very kind way to honor a man who spent his life honoring the biosphere with his scientific work. 

Victor Gorshkov died last May. Anastassia Makarieva wrote to me that "the biosphere is now orphaned." 

Above, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva

_____________________________________________________

For more data on the biotic pump,  see

https://www.bioticregulation.ru/pump/pump7.php

A recent paper by a different research group

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JD029534

The Making of Greta Thunberg: Memetic Weapons for the Meme War

If I say that this young lady, Greta Thunberg, is a meme I mean no disrespect for her -- we all are memes! Actually, I think she is a great girl. But the story of how this particular meme was pushed up into becoming an important feature of the planetary memesphere is teaching us so much of how our world works. And how fundamental is memetics as a science. Truly, read on. You'll learn of things you wouldn't have suspected existed!!

Ladies and Gentlemen, first of all, let me introduce to you the study on memetics performed by myself and these two wonderful coworkers of mine, Sara Falsini and Ilaria Perissi. Everyone loves their own brainchild and I do love mine (ours): so, allow me to say that this work may be the first (at least one of the first, I believe) that uses system dynamics for the quantitative study memetics (many have made qualitative connections). Maybe it will open up a whole new field of study, but let me tell you this story.

So, what is a meme? A meme is a meme is a meme (as Gertrud Stein never said): a wonderful concept! Think of the blind crocodiles in sewers of New York, that was a pre-internet meme. Or, for a more recent one, "Obama was not born in the US." A meme is not just an idea, but an idea that reproduces itself -- analogous to the gene in biology. It was invented by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and he probably didn't suspect what can of memes he was opening.

Later on, Daniel Dennett said, "a human being is an ape infested with memes." Now, pause a moment to think of this sentence: isn't it wonderful? One of those sentences you look at, you pause for a moment to think about, and then -- poof! -- your view of the world is changed. The beauty of the universe is that you can keep learning new things and, boy, there are so many!

The point of memes is that they can "go viral" in the memesphere -- the Web -- you know this already. But what makes memes go viral? Well, there comes the fascinating thing we discovered in our paper: in biology, there is only one way to go viral: by infection. In memetics, there are two ways. One is the properly viral mode, that is, with the virus jumping from a host to another. The other is the "fallout" mode - it is like when an atomic weapon kills people by radiations -- everyone is affected at the same time. Here is the description we give in our paper

In the present study, for the first time, we discuss and compare the birth of a meme and its dynamic propagation both on the internet and in mass media environments. To grasp this fundamental difference in the meme’s origin, we built simple and intuitive models, with the system dynamic (SD) methods. SD models are particularly useful in representing the structure of complex systems, especially the non-linear systems, in which the properties-of-the-whole system are different from the properties that characterize the system’s constituent elements so that the behaviour of the whole cannot be explained in terms of a combination of the behaviour of the single parts. The result of our study reveals that the origin of a meme can be due to two different activities: internet propagation or media bombardment.

 ... memes have characteristics that genes do not have. In particular, memes can be “planted” in the mediasphere using a top-down mechanism based on scattershot diffusion on the part of the mass media. This behaviour can be seen as parallel to that of the radioactive cloud generated by a nuclear incident. The distinction between these two mechanisms can be useful to understand whether a specific meme is the result of a “natural” interest of the public that derives from its special virtues or has been diffused as a top-down operation designed to influence the public or the consumers of a specific product.

And here we are: looking directly into the belly of the great beast that is the memesphere -- the great cauldron of human thought as it boils, it quivers, it festers in the giant ecosystem we call the World Wide Web. And we can see the birth of the little beasts we call memes. Some grow by infecting one node after the other, some by being pushed from above: by that giant beast infecting the memesphere, what we call the "media" or the "mainstream media" (MSM). And what the MSM want to grow, grows.

Let me show first at a meme that grew virally: "Gangnam Style" (you remember the Korean song, popular a few years ago). Here it is, fitted with the system dynamics model

But you don't need a quantitative model to note how the viral propagation mode shows a typical exponential growth mode at the beginning: here is the same meme, Gangnam, on a different scale. It has an induction time -- it is clear. It grew by infecting one node after another, just like biological viruses do with cells.

That's not the case for a fallout mode meme. It has no induction time: it is born instantly, pushed by the MSM. Here is an example, Bataclan, the terror attacks in Paris, in 2015.

You see? No induction time. It grows from zero to the maximum in no time.


But we were speaking about Greta Thunberg, right? What kind of meme is she? Well, let's look for her memetic essence on Google Trends, and there you go:

You see how quick is the growth of the meme? It is a fallout mode, not a grassroots mode. Not so sharp as for Bataclan others but, clearly, there was some force pushing her on the Web.

But this was obvious from the beginning. We know exactly where the Greta Thunberg meme comes from: it is a creation of a Swedish company called "We Don't Have Time." The story is told by Cory Morningstar, and also by Nicolas Casaux, I haven't checked all the details, but these descriptions make sense to me, especially in view of the curve from Google trends. In short, Greta Thunberg is a memetic weapon.

That doesn't mean we should share Cory Morningstar's criticism. After all, the relation of Greta Thunberg and the company called "We Don't Have Time" is open for everybody to see -- it is no secret. Besides, the enemies of humankind are using the same memetic weapons, but in secrecy. Look at this

Yes, Climategate, the famous "scandal" that purportedly proved that all the world's scientists had formed a conspiracy to invent a non-existing danger for their personal advantage. Look at how fast the curve grows: there is almost no induction time. Not a grassroots emergence, someone has been pushing this meme. The MSMs were immediately involved to diffuse something that, in itself, was just boring: who would have cared about the personal messages that some scientists had exchanged? But who was that "someone" pushing? We don't know -- and probably we never will. The dark side of the memesphere fights against humankind and they use memetic weapons.

So, folks, this is a memetic war that we are fighting. We are fighting for our survival and we need weapons: no war in history was ever won using just moral superiority. If Greta Thunberg is a memetic weapon, then she is a good meme, created for a good purpose. And let's go on and fight.



h/t Philippe Gauthier and Nicolas Casaux

Where is the proof that CO2 warms the Earth?

A persistent element of the climate debate is the claim that "there is no proof" that CO2 and other greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. This has generated a number of amateurish demonstrations of how the greenhouse effect works  A good example of how NOT to carry out such a demonstration is shown above. Nobody told this poor kid how to perform a scientific measurement. If he had switched his jars he would have discovered that the effects he observes are only the result of one of the two jars being closer than the other to the light source. And they didn't even explain to him how the greenhouse effect actually works: you cannot see any warming in this set-up unless you place a light adsorber (e.g. a piece of black cloth) in the jar. I  discuss this and other disasters in a post of mine (in Italian), see also here.

Imagine that someone asks you to prove that the Moon orbits around the Earth because it is pulled by the force of gravity. Your first reaction would be to say something like "huh?" But - assuming you are in a good mood - you might try to explain how Newton's law of universal gravitation works and how it can be used to describe the moon's trajectory.

"So," your opponent could say, "is it correct to say that nobody ever measured the gravity pull of the Earth at the Earth-Moon distance?"

"Aw... No. What for? It would be terribly expensive. And useless, too."

"Then, you have no proof that the Moon goes around the Earth because of gravity. So, can you prove that the Moon is not being pushed by invisible angels, instead?"

That would end the civil conversation, but there is some logic in this kind of questions. You can't reproduce the Moon's motion in a lab, here on the Earth. Instead, to prove that Newton's law is valid you create a model based on the law and then use it to describe the movement of moons, planets, and stars. The model works, hence the law behind it is correct. No need of measuring the Earth's gravity pull at the Earth-Moon distance (and no need of invisible angels pushing).

Now, let's translate all this to a question often asked in the climate debate. What proof do we have that greenhouse gases, and CO2 in particular, warm the Earth's atmosphere? As a question, it is similar to the one about the Moon orbiting the Earth, in the sense that we can't reproduce the properties of a whole planetary atmosphere in the lab.

To answer the question, we can start from laboratory experiments showing that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation - they were done already by Tyndall in the 19th century. We don't need amateurs today to remake those experiments, doing the job poorly. Then, we create models that describe the Earth's atmosphere and we use them to fine-tune the parameters of the warming effect. The models follow reasonably well the warming trends of the past so that we confirm that CO2 warms the Earth.

In addition, we even have direct experiments showing that, as the atmosphere warms, more infrared radiation is radiated to space, while at the same time less infrared radiation escapes at the wavelengths where CO2 absorbs radiation. It is what we expect a greenhouse gas should do.

Case closed, then? Not really. The Moon-Earth system is relatively simple and, unless you really want to believe in invisible angels, there is no doubt that the Moon is kept in its orbit by gravity, and by gravity only. Instead, the Earth's ecosystem system is a tangle of subsystems interacting with each other in ways that - in many cases - we have troubles in quantifying exactly. Newton could never have described the Earth's atmosphere by means of a single universal equation. So, how to disentangle the various contributions to the Earth's temperature: albedo, atmospheric particulate, vegetation cover, and more?

This is the task of models, coupled with various kinds of measurements. For what we can say nowadays, the rising CO2 concentration is the main factor in the observed warming, but that's subjected to changes and refinements as we have new data. Among other examples, a very recent paper appeared in Nature quantified the effects of the vegetation cover. This is mainly a local effect and changes little to the overall picture, but it shows how dangerous it can be to say that "the science is settled." Of course, that doesn't mean jumping to the conclusion that angels are warming the Earth with their breath. And it doesn't mean to engage in silly games of data torturing. It just means recognizing the complexity of the problem.

Then, there is an even deeper problem: complex systems such as the Earth's ecosystem are just that: complex. They may react to perturbations in a strongly non-linear way, amplifying or dampening the perturbation. In a complex system, it is always difficult to say what causes what. You can say that in a complex system there are no causes and no effects, only forcings and feedbacks. So, when people say that the increase in CO2 concentration is not a cause but an effect of global warming, are they wrong? Yes, they are basically wrong, but it is also true that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases may be both a cause and an effect of global warming. Complex systems are dominated by feedbacks. And that means they can amplify the effect of a small forcing, turning it into a disaster. This is, by the way, the origin of the "Seneca Effect"

In the end, it all means that we have to recognize that the Earth's climate could react to perturbations in ways we can't even imagine. And more than seven billion humans on the planet have been a huge perturbation, no matter how we want to see the relative importance of what we have been doing. We ignore that at our risk.

Interview with Ugo Bardi: Climate, Fossil Fuels, Resources and All That

The MEDEAS project team at a recent meeting in Barcelona. At the center, the project coordinator, Jordi Solé, Another group of well-intentioned people engaged in saving the planet. Yes, we know it is difficult: we are doing our best. 

This interview was recorded this February and is reported here from the site of the European Project MEDEAS, only minimally edited. Take into account that none of the people involved (interviewers and interviewed) are native English speakers and you can understand why the grammar and the syntax are, well, let's just say "not perfect". Then, as in all non-edited interviews, the flow of the concepts is also far from being perfect. However, I thought to reproduce it here because it contains much of what I have been trying to say, lately. Maybe you'll find it interesting (U.B.)

On 17th February 2017, during MEDEAS first General Assembly in Brno, Czech Republic, Ugo Bardi from INSTM, partner of MEDEAS Project was interviewed by Mikuláš Černík for Deník Referendum, an independent online newspaper focused on social and environmental issues. The interview discussed how science nowadays can address challenges as climate change and possible limitations of resources for the transition to a low-carbon economy. The whole interview can be found below in English, while the original version is published in the newspaper’s webpage. 

INTERVIEW WITH PROF. UGO BARDI (UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE, ITALY), IN BRNO, CZECH REPUBLIC (17.2.2017) DURING MEDEAS GENERAL ASSEMBLY.

Your main topic is resource depletion. Since the release of your book on the Limits to Growth, how has the situation changed?

The thread that runs through everything I study is resource depletion in the broadest sense. You can restrict its sense to minerals, which is to take the core meaning, but then there is also climate change. Climate change can be seen as the depletion of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases without overheating. So it’s also depletion—everything’s a question of depletion. And everything is a question of resources. People have spoken about limits to growth, which at one time was a very innovative concept, but these limits on growth derive from limits on resources, and that’s something we’re still working on.

You’re writing a blog called the Cassandra Legacy. How did you, as a scientist, decide it was necessary to write a blog?

Because many people speak about there being two cultures, humanist culture and scientific culture. And in my modest opinion, this is completely wrong. There are no two cultures, there is only one culture. And so a scientist should be within the limits as much as possible, should be a humanist as much as possible within the limits, should know something about hard science such as thermodynamics and physics, and so on. But unfortunately our world has fallen into the trap of overspecialization, which means that a lot of people study so much that eventually they know everything about nothing—which is the definition of a specialist. So we have specialists who know absolutely everything about nothing, which is a little useless in my opinion. So we need a modern view of science, and this is a concept that some of us are working on. It’s a new conceptualization that tends to deemphasize what we call “reductionist science”. To emphasize what we call “systemic science”, which looks at changes at the whole-system level. Because if you are a reductionist, you would say What is the problem? I’m slowly running out of fuel for my car. So you say, No problem, hydrogen will fix everything. If you follow a systems approach, you say well, okay, maybe hydrogen is a way to change the system, but how will the system react? I think that’s a fundamental part of the MEDEAS project we’re working on. To take a systems approach. We have a valuable collaborator in Brno as well. We’re sure we can get this done.

Do you think that, as a scientist, when you publish a scientific paper, it has any impact on a broader readership and on the general public and policymakers? How do you perceive the relationship between science and politics?

There is no difference. Scientific communication is just one of many kinds of communication. And that has to do with the fact that we communicate within a system. The world—call it the mediasphere or the cybersphere or the brainsphere—the world is a huge system in which ideas, comments, novelties, the news and everything moves and competes in a space. All these things grow, they evolve, they change and they take over spaces, and that’s the most “systemic system”, if you like. It is hugely interesting to study, and that’s what we’re doing. You might not have noticed, but my coworkers and I are developing models for dissemination, for spreading ideas in the websphere, the world wide web, in the mindspace. What we’ve discovered is that your message—you want to know the theory of messaging my coworkers and I are developing? Messages are made up of two parts—the message itself and the communicator who sends it. So the message must be simple enough that it can reproduce, but that’s not enough. The message has a signature that makes it recognized as ‘self/nonself’ and if it is not recognized as “self” it is discarded and the whole attempt to transmit it is useless. So what you do when you send the message is you send yourself. And that’s it. You don’t always hit people with facts. The relevant fact is you, because you are relevant. If you are relevant, you send a message which is understood. You need to understand who is sending the message, you need to understand what a person is. So if you don’t know what you are, you can’t send the message.

This leads me to the next question. Don’t you think that, when scientists put out messages to the public, the public may believe in their correctness and yet feel that what they say is overly pessimistic? That they’re not enough to make them change their behaviour? I’m talking about alarmism. Some people argue that when you scare people too much, as a consequence they won’t be willing to change their behaviour. Do you agree?

This is because most scientists are children when it comes to communication. They know very little, nothing in this field. I won’t use the term ignoramus, but the definition is that when you don’t know anything about something, you are an ignoramus on that topic. Scientific education doesn’t cover communication. So when you try to do work in a field you’re ignorant of, you may achieve zero. And you’re likely to make mistakes. Just think of riding a bicycle for the first time. You don’t know what a bicycle is, what pedals or brakes are, and so on. You don’t really know how a bicycle works. You fall off the bike straightaway. This is what happens when scientists try to communicate all these pessimistic things about climate science to the public. They’re using the wrong communication model. Their message—its penetration—doesn’t depend upon pessimism or optimism. This is a mistake. Think about Christianity. What is the message? It is that there will come an apocalypse. And it is spread easily. Even though it’s predicting an apocalypse. Because Christians knew much better - the old, the ancient Christians, they knew how to promulgate their message. They were able to emphasize the messenger. If you’re willing to get eaten by lions, then the message is important for you, it carries weight. But you must be ready to be eaten by lions to demonstrate the message is real and that, I think, scientists are not willing to do for Climate Science. Maybe we don’t need to arrive to that point but the essence is the same - it doesn’t matter if the message is optimistic or pessimistic. The power is not in the message, it’s in the messenger. The messenger must be believable and this is the problem with climate science. Scientists have made a lot of mistakes and they are presenting a contradictory message. Some scientists say, “don’t worry, we have the solution: you don’t have to do anything” and maybe they start babbling about hydrogen or nuclear energy or whatever. Other scientist say, “well, you have to make sacrifices” and they talk about investing in double paned glasses, using bicycles and the like. But these two messages are not compatible with each other. And if the messenger doesn’t send a coherent message, he or she is not believed.

What about the term peak oil—which was much more widely used in the recent past than it is today. Could you tell us how this term has evolved in public debate?

It’s a good example of how to spread a message. Generally because the message was simple: just two words. “Peak oil”. It has a ring to it, it was interesting, and it was simple enough to spread. And spread it did. These messages have a cycle. They peak, and then they go down. But I think the spread of this message was successful in the sense that it was not only viral, but became part of our culture. Its greatest diffusion came around ten years ago. Then it lost popularity a bit because people had difficulty understanding the term. They see that oil isn’t expensive right now and think that’s because it’s abundant. But that changes. It’s like limits to growth. It was criticised, rejected, demonised, but it was a successful concept, because it is still with us. We debate it, maybe over a long period, but still we debate it. And that’s what we can do with messages. They don’t necessarily need to take over the world, but they remain with us. They can’t be ignored.

Could you also tell us something about the project you’re currently involved in? About MEDEAS; and how it is changing the debate?

MEDEAS is an extremely important project, as a next step after Paris. Paris COP21 told us what we should do, and it was a very good meeting with a huge impact because the communication was taken care of by people who knew what they wanted to do. To have a message which will take root, it must be simple. So Paris - we had thousands of people, hundreds of models, tens of thousands of scenarios, the whole climate science with uncertainties and things like that and final result was one number: 2 °C. You condense everything into something like a piece of genetic code which will then be unpacked. You send a little virus to the mind with a very tiny chink of genetic code. It takes up residency in your brain. It reproduces and grows.

So do you really think the Paris agreement is a step forward in tackling climate change?

Absolutely. It was a remarkable success because it was well packaged. But the numbers in it are not enough, because we don’t know how to achieve them. And that’s what MEDEAS is answering. We give you another number—how much it will cost? If we can afford it and the degree of sacrifice it entails. How much are you willing to pay for your survival?

Let’s imagine that we achieve a post-carbon future. Who will be the loser and who the winner in the transition?

Some scientists in the MEDEAS group have developed a concept they call Thanatia, which refers to a world not meant to be—one in which people have survived, but the planet has died in terms of minerals. This means there is no longer any ability to mine rare minerals, and these minerals are what allowed us to build our civilization. The result is a future that is completely different. There are no more mineral resources like oil and cobalt, because these mineral resources are concentrated—you can’t just find them anywhere you want. If you need something that you lack but someone else has, you may have to fight to get it. But in the future, this will no longer be done, because we will stick to resources that are abundant, like sunlight, silicon, aluminium, magnesium, etc. Society can be built in a locally-structured way that may give rise to less competition for resources and fewer wars.

In our country, the Czech Republic, if we want to achieve what was promised in the Paris agreement, we need to cut our coal consumption, despite its abundance as a resource. How would you advocate this position with the public?

I don’t think this is such a big problem. I mean, the Czech Republic is a very small part of the world and of what’s going on in the world. And if the world starts moving in a certain direction, the Czech Republic will follow. We have coal in Germany, in Poland, in Ukraine, and these regions are burning it. It has to be phased out slowly, and I think we are moving in that direction because the cost is really increasing. Coal is not as cheap as it seems. In the future, you won’t be able to afford to burn the coal, whatever the politicians may say. Mr. Trump said “we have a thousand years of coal” and this is an alternative fact, in other words, a lie. I think we will cease to burn coal sometime over the next decade or two. And hopefully we will do so because we have agreed to stop burning coal and also because we have agreed to deploy renewable energy and replace it.

So basically what you’re saying is, the sooner we make the move, the more we gain?

Yes, that’s correct. The change is going to take place anyway. People talk about problems and that’s bad. Once you say there are problems, you begin to think of solutions. But not all problems are problems, and not all solutions are solutions. If you remember the “Jewish Problem” at the time of Adolf Hitler, well, once you start to say the Jews are a problem, you start thinking of the solution, and the solution they found was a very bad idea – as we all know. So we don’t have to think in terms of problems/solutions – that may lead us to very bad ideas. Instead, we must emphasize change. That change is ongoing, and you have a choice: either you go along with the change, or you reject it. If you reject it, the change will change you, and you will not be happy but will be swept away by the change. In other words, you can solve a problem but there is no solution for a change. There is only one way to face change: to adapt to it.

Ok, thanks very much.

You’re not going to ask me anything about Italian football...?

How to talk about climate change at a party

This is a real conversation that took place a few days ago although, of course, the words that I report here can't be exactly what we said. The protagonists are me and an acquaintance of mine, Antonella. Imagine us holding glasses at a party. 

Antonella: Ugo, did you hear what Trump is doing? He wants to destroy the climate data!

Ugo: I heard something about that.

A. But it is awful! How can they allow him to do that? Destroying the work of the climate scientists!

U. You know this joke about Trump? The one that goes, "What happens when Donald Trump takes Viagra?"

A. Ugo, you keep joking all the time. But don't you work in this field? Why don't you tell me what you are really thinking about climate change?

U (looking somber). It is a long story.

A. Seriously, I want to know what you think.

U. Really?

A. Absolutely. Tell me what's going on.

U (after having taken a deep breath). The situation is out of control. The amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are larger than any value seen in the past 10 million years and it keeps rising. The icecaps are melting, droughts are destroying agriculture in the tropical regions, extreme weather phenomena are on the rise. Temperatures are rising and the commitments to keep the increase below two degrees are insufficient. In addition, we are in the middle of a mass extinction, destroying the fertile soil, poisoning everything, running out of mineral resources, and the planet is overpopulated.

A ....................

U ...................

A. I read that we'll soon be able to colonize other planets, is that true?

U. ........

She walks away, glass in hand.