Analysis

Climate explained: how growth in population and consumption drives planetary change

-Michael Petterson, Auckland University of Technology The growth of the human population over the last 70 years has exploded from 2 billion to nearly 8 billion, with a compounding net growth of over 30,000 per day. We all breathe out carbon dioxide with every breath. That equates to about 140 billion CO₂ breaths every minute. Isn’t it logical that atmospheric carbon will continue to increase with the birth rate regardless of what we do about fossil fuel reduction? This question touches on the core of our impact on planetary change. It highlights the exponential growth in the human population, but also homes in on the potential direct input of carbon dioxide from humans, through respiration. As I explain in more detail below, our breathing does not contribute to the net accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But population growth, combined with an increase in consumption, is now seen as the main driver of change in the Earth system. Humans: a moment in geological time Earth has been around for 4.56 billion years. The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilised mats of cyanobacteria that are about 3.7 billion years old. From around 700 million years ago, and certainly from 540 million years ago, life exploded into its present myriad forms, from molluscs to lung fish, reptiles, insects, plants, fishes and mammals – culminating in hominids and finally Homo sapiens. Genetic studies suggest hominids evolved from primates around 6 million years ago, with the oldest hominid fossil dating from 4.4 million years ago in East Africa. Our species appeared around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, a blink of an eye in geological terms. From Africa, Homo sapiens migrated through Europe and Asia and spread across the world, at lightning speeds. Part of the question is about a putative link between human biological functions and climate. Homo […]

Why the most successful students have no passion for school

Jihyun Lee is associate professor in the School of Education at University of New South Wales in Australia. Her main research area is developing methodology to increase psychometric properties and usability of survey instruments. She publishes regularly in educational psychology journals. In order to be successful, many people believe, one must be passionate. Passion makes challenges enjoyable. It bestows the stamina necessary to excel. However, there are telling counterexamples where passion doesn’t seem to be a necessary ingredient for success. One such case is academic success. You might think that successful students should be passionate about their schooling, and that this passion for school would account, at least partly, for why some students succeed and why some don’t. But this isn’t right. My research has found that there is in fact no relationship between how well students do academically and what their attitude toward schooling actually is. A student doesn’t need to be passionate about school to be academically successful. My research findings derive from the analysis of a large-scale international database called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes the dataset available every three years. It’s a treasure trove that gives researchers like myself an unparalleled view into what students across the world think about their education. In the most recent 2015 PISA assessment, 72 countries and economies contributed. Reading, mathematics and science tests, along with a questionnaire about attitudes, beliefs, learning habits and the like, are administered to nationally representative samples of 15-years-olds around the world. In previous surveys, four simple options were used to measure students’ attitude toward school: (a) school has done little to prepare me for adult life when I leave school(b) school has been a waste of time(c) school helped give me confidence to make decisions(d) school has taught me things that could […]

“Harbinger households”

In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households’ purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail — that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these “harbinger households.” In the new paper, the researchers consider very large data-sets on consumer goods and fashion purchasing, house-buying, and political donations, to examine whether being a “harbinger household” correlates to other predictors of failure, and find that these households are also likely to buy real-estate that makes lower profits (or generates larger losses) than nearby properties; they are likely to buy fashion and consumer goods that get discontinued due to lackluster sales; and they are more likely to donate to losing politicians’ campaigns than winners. The researchers also claim that harbinger households voluntarily cluster: that when a harbinger household moves, it is likely that it will move to another habringer ZIP code (and nonhabringers move to nonhabringer households). Moreover, harbingers don’t appear to learn their preferences from one another — a nonhabringer household that locates in a harbinger ZIP code doesn’t alter its purchasing and political contributions to “loser” products and candidates. Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents. They tend to make above-average use of coupons, and the coupons they use have above-average values. The researchers don’t claim a causal relationship between these different factors — donating to losing political candidates doesn’t make you prefer Crystal Pepsi, for example — but rather speculate that there is an “unobserved intervening variable” that explains both factors. Using data from multiple sources, we have shown that the phenomenon of harbingers is surprisingly widespread. […]

Why today's protests are not revolutionary TM website

Why aren’t today’s protests leading to revolutions?

-Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, University of Melbourne We live in a world of violent challenges to the status quo, from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, Catalonia and the Extinction Rebellion. These protests are usually presented in the media simply as expressions of rage at “the system” and are eminently suitable for TV news coverage, where they flash across our screens in 15-second splashes of colour, smoke and sometimes blood. These are huge rebellions. In Chile, for example, an estimated one million people demonstrated last month. By the next day, 19 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured and more than 2,800 arrested. How might we make sense of these upheavals? Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger? And are they doomed to fail? Key characteristics of a revolution As an historian of the French Revolution of 1789-99, I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world – the English Revolution (1649), American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Russian Revolution (1917) and Chinese Revolution (1949). A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary. A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories. The key characteristics are: long-term causes and the popularity of a socio-political ideology at odds with the regime in power short-term triggers of widespread protest moments of violent confrontation the power-holders are unable to contain as sections of the armed forces defect to rebels the consolidation of a broad and victorious alliance against the existing regime a subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary alliance as competing factions vie for power the re-establishment of a new order when a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating power. Why today’s protests are not revolutionary […]

Here’s how a circular economy could change the world by 2030

Recycling and reusing natural resources – such as water – will become the norm, not just an ideal. Predictions for 2030: What if we get things right? Let me share my vision of 2030. By then, we are living in a global circular economy that has become ‘intentionally transparent’. This open mindset has released a surge in trust throughout the world’s supply chains that encourages higher visibility and greater control over responsible sourcing. We now have ethical and sustainable circular supply chains in which the rewards are shared equitably, right from local communities through to the primary consumer and beyond. Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and nanotechnology have helped to facilitate the tracking of critical metals and minerals from mine to consumer. This transparency has heralded a ‘new normal’ in which the raw materials we use for manufacturing and construction can be traced from the moment they are extracted through to first use, re-manufacture and eventual deconstruction and reuse. In 2030, nobody talks about the circular economy; it’s just the economy. The hard yards in increasing societal prosperity, while reducing dependence on primary materials and energy, have already been done. We wince at the grim days of the 2010s, when billions of tonnes of materials were extracted every year to meet the functional needs of society – but only a fraction was ever recycled back into our economies. Change of era People in 2030 will celebrate the initiatives that were launched to drive action towards net-zero carbon emissions from heavy industry and the heavy-duty transport sector. Improvements in sustainable battery supply chains enabled the transport and power industries to reduce emissions by 30%, putting economies back on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Looking back, few categories benefited more from the vision of our […]

Davos 2020: What mattered

McKinsey global managing partner Kevin Sneader during the 2020 WEF Annual Meeting panel: Leading a 21st Century Corporation, held January 22, 2020. By Kevin Sneader January 27, 2020 Unseasonably and somewhat unnervingly mild temperatures provided a fitting backdrop for what emerged as the top issue at the 2020 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: climate change and its risks. But that was far from the only topic. At the end of this year’s Annual Meeting, I sat down with Rik Kirkland, our director of publishing, to share my reflections. Climate risk is firmly established as a C-suite issue. Research published in reports like the McKinsey Global Institute’s “Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts” has clearly convinced more and more global policy makers and business leaders that the problem of climate change has moved from a far-off priority to a here-and-now risk that demands action. Personal experiences, whether from watching the wildfires in Australia or California or numerous other small examples, have also brought home the reality that this is a topic that requires leadership from the top. While there wasn’t much debate about the science, executives and investors were concerned about the lack of reliable data on the efforts companies and society are making, not to mention their impact. Greater clarity is required in order to speed development of new standards to help markets act more efficiently and reward progress. Beyond metrics, the leaders I spoke with are thinking about the problem in new and creative ways. They are taking a clear-eyed look at what is driving their carbon footprints, beginning to quantify the cost of inaction, and asking how they can accelerate positive change in a way that fits within their core business agenda. That’s a huge shift in tone from even a year ago. The short-term economic outlook is […]

If you can read this headline, you can read a novel.

Judith SeaboyerSenior Lecturer, The University of Queensland Public anxiety about the capacity of digital-age children and young adults to read anything longer than a screen grab has come to feel like moral panic. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest we must take such unease seriously. In 2016, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported the proportion of American adults who read at least one novel in 2015 had dropped to 43.1% from 56.9% in 1982. In 2018, a US academic reported that in 1980, 60% of 18-year-old school students read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school. By 2016, the number had plummeted to 16%. Those same 12th graders reported spending “six hours a day texting, on social media and online”. American literacy expert and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes the threat screen reading poses to our capacity for “the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading”. She asks: Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves? But rather than taking up defensive positions on either side of the digital-analogue reading divide, Wolf encourages us to embrace both. As parents and teachers we can help our children develop a bi-literate reading brain. There are several ways we can do this. Reading pathways Reading is a learned skill that requires the development of particular neural networks. And different reading platforms encourage the development of different aspects of those networks. Screen-reading children, immersed from toddlerhood in the pleasures and instant gratification of skimming, clicking and linking, develop cognitive skills that make them adept power browsers, good at the useful ability to scan […]

Iran vows revenge for Soleimani’s killing

Shahram AkbarzadehProfessor of Middle East & Central Asian Politics, Deputy Director (International), Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University US President Donald Trump has not held back on threatening Iran after the targeted killing of General Qassem Soleimani, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and a key player in expanding Iran’s links with armed groups across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In addition to extreme sanctions, Trump’s latest threat includes hitting 52 military and cultural targets in Iran. As might be expected, the Iranian leadership has doubled down on its anti-US rhetoric and promises of retribution. Soleimani was too important to the regime to let this slide. As the commander of the Quds Force in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Soleimani was in direct contact with Hezbollah in Lebanon. He mobilised the militant group to defend Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad against US-backed rebels and armed Islamist groups. Soleimani also visited Moscow in 2016 to make a case for, and coordinate, Russia’s military involvement in Syria. Soleimani made frequent trips to Iraq to bolster the Kurdish and later the Shia militia push-backs against the Islamic State. The recapture of Mosul from the Islamic State in 2016 by the US-backed Iraqi army and the Shia Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) was greeted in Iran with joy. Soleimani was celebrated as a national hero. The Iranian regime praised him for serving the national security doctrine of offensive defence: defeating ISIS beyond Iran’s borders. Direct military confrontation is unlikely It makes sense, then, that the Iranian regime feels compelled to respond to Soleimani’s assassination. Iran cannot afford to let its national hero be slain without retribution. When Soleimani’s daughter asked President Hassan Rouhani, “Who will avenge my father’s blood?”, his response was swift: “We will all take revenge”. But what can Iran do? The […]

This is how climate science went mainstream

Environmentalism has become mainstream. Recycling is now a $200 billion global industry. Sustainability has become a significant focus for global corporations. And governments have been introducing major programmes to cut carbon emissions. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s, worrying about our impact on the Earth was perceived as a niche pursuit. So how did we get to where we are today? Here’s a timeline of some key developments. 1962 – Silent Spring The book that is widely seen as having launched the modern environmental movement was written by an American ecologist, Rachel Carson. Silent Spring took aim at the use of pesticides and the damage they were causing to biodiversity. Carson called for environmental stewardship and a more considered approach to human intervention in the natural world. 1971 – Greenpeace Inspired by Rachel Carson, a group of activists from Vancouver, Canada set sail for Amchitka – an island off the coast of Alaska that was home to bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and 3,000 endangered sea otters – in an old fishing boat called The Greenpeace to try to stop an American nuclear weapons test. The activists feared the underground explosion would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. The ship was forced to turn back, but the mission captured the public imagination. Greenpeace is now an international organization with offices in 40 countries and its own research laboratories. It is still involved in direct action, but also lobbies governments for policy changes and conducts investigations into “environmental crimes”. 1989 – Margaret Thatcher Known as “The Iron Lady” for the certainty she had about her political views, the former UK Prime Minister also raised awareness about climate change in a series of domestic and international speeches. In November 1989, she told the UN General Assembly: “The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country […]

The countries where it’s best to be a woman

Norway and Switzerland are the best countries to be a woman and Yemen and Afghanistan the worst, said research on Tuesday which found the state of women’s rights is not “all doom and gloom” around the world. While life for women has improved in some 60 countries, it has deteriorated in Yemen and other war-torn nations, research organizations Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Peace Research Institute Oslo concluded. The researchers looked at 167 countries since 2017 when the first Women, Peace and Security Index was compiled, weighing variables such as access to bank accounts, jobs and security. Rounding out the top of the list were Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Sweden and Netherlands tied for ninth place, followed by Canada. At the bottom were Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mali and Libya. “There are important areas of progress. It’s not all doom and gloom,” said Jeni Klugman, managing director of the Georgetown Institute and lead author of the index. Gains were strongest in women’s access to financial accounts, either mobile or at conventional banks, in fewer discriminatory laws and through increasing legislative representation. “A national election can bring about big changes, both positive and negative,” Klugman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We have a number of countries which boosted the share of women in their national legislatures. We also had several countries which went the other way,” she added. Iceland lost its top spot from 2017 after elections brought a drop in the number of women in parliament. The United States inched up to No. 19 from No. 22 two years ago, in part due to 2018 elections when a record number of women were elected to Congress. But Klugman said the United States […]

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