Lost in virtual space
I read with interest the article detailing how senses are active not passive (29 January, p 40). Had the researchers asked their teenage sons about the problem they may have arrived at a similar conclusion a lot earlier.
Today’s shoot-em-up computer games are played in a three-dimensional world in which one has to move around with only the two-dimensional representation on the screen. When one is in control of the movement around the virtual space it is very easy to understand where you are and where you’re going. But watching someone else in control can be very confusing to follow unless you are very familiar with the game. The same effect can be seen to a lesser degree when trying to find your place on a web page when someone else is scrolling.
Debugging hospitals
Jennifer Mason should count herself lucky that she is allowed to use “efficient cleaning technologies” (12 February, p 26). Successive governments in the UK (including the present one) have forced hospitals to farm out their cleaning to cheap office cleaning contractors.
In any case, the situation is not quite as simple as it seems. MRSA travels, and mostly resides, on the skin of humans. The thought of stripping staff, patients and their visitors down to the buff and then hosing them with alkalis, acids and chlorinated water at high pressure is, to say the least, a bit daunting. The most that can be hoped for is the restoration of cleaning services to direct hospital control, and the use of alcohol gel hand cleaners as is now being implemented.
Dyslexia and denial
As the father of a son who has also succeeded despite his dyslexia, I sympathise with Jon Finney’s concern about the small sample size used to quantify a handicap associated with the condition (19 February, p 28).
What we should all condemn is his response, which is to deny the validity of the observations, and the responses of fellow letter writers John Clarke and Susan Parkinson who respectively ridicule and fudge possible conclusions from the work, or possibly they both misunderstand them.
Three out of three letters published reject the science without offering relevant alternative explanations. Denying the results of science because they are personally, politically or financially inconvenient damages us all.
A more positive response might be to applaud the generation of “hard” quantitative measurements in a notoriously “fluffy” area, check and improve on them, and use the results to understand the condition and mitigate the handicaps associated with it.
Languages with soul
While English-speaking people need not necessarily feel guilty for their predominant monolingualism, nor should they bury their heads in the sand just because they can get away with it, as Bev Pease’s letter seems to propose (5 February, p 28).
Despite the fact that English is widely learned as a language, it is also recognised that people prefer to do business in their native language and are often more receptive and open towards a partner who is accommodating and flexible in this way.
As Samuel Johnson so eloquently put it, “language is the dress for thought”. The benefits of speaking more than one language add up to much more than just better communication. Languages are like mirrors: they can bring into focus their own angle on reality and the universe surrounding us. The acquisition of a new language opens up a new canvas onto which the world can take shape, and at the same time it enhances the portrait painted with one’s mother tongue by drawing parallels and forming contrasts between the two (or more) languages.
An old Czech saying states: learn a new language and get a new soul. English speakers are not so “dead lucky” after all.
Light housekeeping
I am intrigued by John Humbach’s account of how three men managed shared housekeeping while isolated in a lighthouse for long periods of time (19 February, p 28). Are there any analogous accounts of how groups of women managed a similar situation? I just have a hunch that they might come up with a rather different kind of solution.
From Norman McCanch
I served as a light keeper for three years in the 1970s, most of the time on rock lighthouses. While it is true that each man took his own supplies, in my experience it was only on tower lighthouses that cooking was carried out on a rota, due to limitations of space. On other rock lights men cooked their own food the way they liked it, although communal tea drinking was the norm.
My overriding memory of the social hierarchy on rock lighthouses was one of institutionalised bullying, disregarded by the authority responsible. A typical rock crew would be a principal keeper, probably in his late fifties or sixties, and two assistant keepers in their twenties. The PK was a god unto himself, and regimes that included maintenance work and cleaning beyond the needs of prudence and safety, restriction of activities in free time and episodes of sullen “silence” 鈥� sometimes for days in response to innocent transgressions or imagined infringements 鈥� were widespread.
Add to that the impact of idiosyncratic habits 鈥� including whistling without realising it, drumming fingers on tables, staring blankly at a person for minutes on end, endlessly rearranging books on book shelves, inane comments, mindless catchphrases and the repetition of stories ad nauseam 鈥� and you will understand why I will not be volunteering for any extended space missions in the future.
Only rarely did lighthouse crews coexist in anything like a “harmonious relationship” and the best times on a lighthouse were when no one else was around, either middle watch or early on a morning watch before anyone else was up and about. Oh yes, and being asleep!
In my book A Lighthouse Notebook (Michael Joseph, 1985) I describe the routines of daily life, but deliberately omit the less attractive aspects of my experiences. At the time there were still manned lights around, and some of my old PKs were still alive.
Personnel on deep-space missions will need nerves of steel and plenty of time to be alone if they are to arrive at their destinations as a cohesive functional unit.
Canterbury, Kent, UK
Did the earth move?
Parkfield in California is given prominence in your article describing the project to drill into the slip zone of the San Andreas fault (5 February, p 42). The place is interesting because of the supposed regularity of quakes every 22 years. But as the article mentions, a quake in September 2004 “arrived 16 years later than expected”.
In 1992, you reported the US Geological Survey predicting a significant chance of the earthquake at Parkfield in that year. The media and scientists from around the world flocked there to witness this event (New 杏吧原创, 31 October 1992, p 5). It did not happen, giving rise to one of your best headlines ever: “Everyone came but the earth didn’t move”.
Heating Earth's crust
It might be a good thing if seismic activity were to increase in response to global warming, provided people could be moved out of harm’s way. After all, volcanic eruptions have a cooling effect. However, while I concede that I grossly underestimated the depth to which global warming penetrates, I have difficulty accepting the model supported by John King (19 February, p 28).
He suggests that, given a few centuries, global warming will heat up the whole crust. According to websites like , it certainly appears that changes in the Earth’s surface temperature are imprinted onto the geothermal gradient. However, it takes 1000 years for a change in the surface temperature to be transmitted to a depth of only 500 metres, by which time the amplitude of the change is much reduced.
Also, the surface bedrock is insulated from surface warming by snow and ice, covering 12 per cent of the Earth’s surface, and by oceans, which cover a further 65 per cent. The oceans have a high heat capacity and it takes centuries for the water to turn over, so it is unlikely that a rise in surface temperature will be faithfully reproduced on the ocean floor.
But even if all the warming penetrates significantly into the crust, I am still of the opinion that any expansion would tend to be upwards as less work is required in this direction. This is exactly what happens to railway tracks in hot weather when the gap between the tracks is insufficient to accommodate the expansion. Besides, the crust, or at least the asthenosphere beneath, is likely to plastically deform to accommodate any expansion. Furthermore, the forces associated with new crust being created at mid-ocean ridges and tectonic plates being carried by convection in the mantle would likely mask any stress introduced by sideways expansion.
Assuming that the Earth’s core is spherically symmetric, there should be a higher flux of geothermal heat towards the poles, where surface temperatures are significantly lower and the thermal gradient steeper. Being able to measure this latitudinal variation in geothermal heat flux would lend the model more credibility 鈥� something that I seem to have lost.
From Tim Lee
Jennifer Mason writes that improved cleaning would be the answer in removing the threat of MRSA. Unfortunately, this is a multivariate problem, in which simple improved hospital hygiene is but one part. Any perusal of the literature will reveal that simple measures such as hand washing are effective at reducing cross-infection, but still relatively poorly practised in an NHS workforce under pressure. Unlike a kitchen, wards cannot be closed for a period for a steam clean, and unfortunately our buildings are ubiquitously elderly with innumerable quirky corners, nooks and crannies.
MRSA has been around since the 1960s, and has had various ups and downs. The central tenet of preventing MRSA-like infections is a more sensitive use of antibiotics. Many strains are now responsive to trimethoprim, rifampicin and co-trimoxazole again. More worrying is the rise of multi-resistant organisms, with gene sharing giving some varieties immunity to all but a few antibiotics. Unfortunately, doctors driven by today’s litigious and blame-centred culture are more likely to prescribe antibiotics “just to be on the safe side”, and to use a broad-spectrum antibiotic to avoid the risk that the organism treated is not sensitive to amoxicillin. Consequently 鈥� and Darwin would applaud 鈥� our bugs select resistance as a survival trait. Some then nick others’ DNA in the form of plasmids.
Add to that the large pool of nasal MRSA carriers in elderly care homes along with a possible 5 per cent asymptomatic carrier rate amongst the elderly population (regular hospital attenders) and the problem will not go away with a splash of antiseptic and a good brush.
Feckenham, Worcestershire, UK
Methane catastrophe
A runaway global greenhouse effect is about the most dramatic and terminal imaginable outcome of human-induced climate change (12 February, p 10). However, the more immediate and localised impacts of even a limited sequence of methane burps could still be devastating on a scale inconceivable to most people outside of a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster.
One of the more dramatic side effects of hydrate outgassing is the dislocation of the marine sediments in which the frozen hydrates are locked. By no means all of these are under the deep ocean, as hydrate formations are also found beneath continental shelves. If a sufficient proportion of a methane deposit burps, then the disturbed sediments will slip off the coastal shelf and slide down the continental slope towards the abyssal plain, displacing massive amounts of water in the form of tsunamis.
Such climate-induced tsunamis, triggered by long-run-out submarine landslides in the Storegga region of the Norwegian continental shelf, have occurred in the North Sea basin three times in the last 30,000 years (twice in the last 11,000), inundating most of what is now the east coast of Britain, the Netherlands and the Baltic states.
Even if a future outgassing in the area did not result in a comparable level of destruction, there would still be extensive damage to coastal communities, shipping and fisheries. If there were, however, a mega-tsunami on the scale of the last Storegga slide, which occurred 9000 years ago, then the likely death toll would be a hundredfold greater than the recent Indian Ocean disaster.
Nor is the threat limited to northern Europe. While the funnelling effect of the North Sea coastlines would greatly magnify the force of any tsunami, the mythology of southern Asia and North America, not to mention the flood story from Genesis (methane burps would certainly qualify as “fountains of the deep”), suggest that such inundations may have occurred worldwide in the wake of the last ice age.
With 80 per cent of the human race crowded along the continental seaboards, another sequence of burps could be devastating for our civilisation and, unlike last year’s catastrophe in the Indian Ocean, there would be no one left to provide aid for the victims.
Climate feedbacks
While it is good to see some balance in the arguments about global warming (12 February, p 38), I feel that you have neglected the most obvious flaw in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections on climate change 鈥� feedbacks.
I don’t think anyone doubts that global climate is variable on the scale of decades, nor that climate has been relatively stable over thousands of years, yet this variability and stability indicate that, overall, the climate system has negative feedbacks.
If the climate system had any overall positive feedback, it could not exhibit variability and stability over large timescales, as even the most benign change would rapidly push the whole system to one extreme or the other.
Yet if I understand correctly, the vast majority of the IPCC’s projections rely on either no feedback or positive feedback. This is a major logical problem with these projections, and one that has yet to be addressed.
From Jim Hannon
The question in my mind is not whether warming is real but what we should do about it. It seems that it has been decided that the best solution is to try to stop the warming, when there are at least two other approaches: do nothing or spend our money on living with it. Until these issues are really discussed I will remain undecided.
Central City, Iowa, US
From Paul Crow
The best thing that could happen for this planet would be if the most dangerous and destructive animal on it, namely us, was removed altogether and the rest of life left to get on with it.
So why don’t we stop trying to save the planet and just get on with enjoying life, safe in the knowledge that the Earth will win out in the end anyway.
Norwich, Norfolk, UK
From Gwydion Williams
Your article left out one little politico-economic detail: insurance companies are now believers in global warming. I cannot see how they could have any vested interest in believing it to be true, unless it actually is true. More disasters cost them more money, obviously.
Peterborough, Northamptonshire, UK
From Kevin Mayfield
Global warming? What rubbish. Thirty years ago science was predicting an ice age. Accurately predict my weather next week and scientists might have more credibility.
Florissant, Colorado, US
From Hans Thomas
Fred Pearce suggests that the growing world economy can absorb the costs of reducing emissions. Pearce and many others fail to acknowledge that economic growth is a root cause of the problem. While some growth can be attributed to productivity gains, much economic growth is tied to increases in population, increases in human labour and increases in extraction of natural resources. It is these loads on global energy, food, water and air supplies that will trigger dramatic changes, both climatic and social, in the coming decades.
Economic growth will not be a force that mitigates the costs of environmental remediation. It will be a force that drives further environmental degradation, even if some portion of that wealth is devoted to mitigation. It is essential that manmade loads on the Earth be reduced. Technology may be able to play a role in reducing those loads, but I do not believe that economic growth can make any positive contribution.
Oakland, California, US
From Andrew Taylor
This article raises some interesting questions about the editorial slant of your magazine, to which I am a keen subscriber. Although the article in question makes some effort to present both sides of the argument, the slant is clearly against the sceptics and in favour of the climatologists, amply demonstrated by the crude smearing of those who are genuinely sceptical about climate science as being bankrolled by multinational oil companies. The same point could be made in reverse against climate scientists themselves, as their livelihoods and future funding rather depend on their discipline remaining in the headlines. I don’t believe that such crude characterisation helps the debate itself, so perhaps some consideration of the facts would be more appropriate.
Then, the question really becomes “What should we do about climate change?” and this is where sceptics and climate scientists fundamentally disagree 鈥� a point which your article ignores, perhaps because it is more politics than science. Bj酶rn Lomborg is often cited on the subject, although anyone with a basic empirical knowledge of economics and science would probably reach the same conclusions: that human progress reduces pollution and environmental damage 鈥� just compare smoggy 19th-century London with the city today; that we aren’t likely to be using fossil fuels in 50 years’ time anyway as alternatives steadily get cheaper; and that it is both futile and immoral to try to prevent the developing world from growing as we did.
Trading in several trillion dollars’ worth of global GDP for a six-year hiatus in global warming, based on unsound science and a pessimistic view of technological progress, just isn’t a transaction we’re prepared to make. It would make much more sense to spend that money on curing disease, getting clean water to everyone in the world, and genuine research into alternative energy sources, rather than crippling our economies in the futile pursuit of a politically motivated goal.
London, UK