Researchers are exploring whether building massive berms or unfurling underwater curtains could hold back the warm waters degrading ice sheets.
January 14, 2022
James Temple
In December, researchers reported that huge and growing cracks have formed in the eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-size mass of ice that stretches 75 miles across western Antarctica.
They warned that the floating tongue of the glacier—which acts as a brace to prop up the Thwaites—could snap off into the ocean in as little as five years. That could trigger a chain reaction as more and more towering cliffs of ice are exposed and then fracture and collapse.
A complete loss of the so-called doomsday glacier could raise ocean levels by two feet—or as much as 10 feet if the collapse drags down surrounding glaciers with it, according to scientists with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Either way, it would flood coastal cities around the world, threatening tens of millions of people.
All of which raises an urgent question: Is there anything we could do to stop it?
Even if the world immediately halted the greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change and warming the waters beneath the ice shelf, that wouldn’t do anything to thicken and restabilize the Thwaites’s critical buttress, says John Moore, a glaciologist and professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland.
“So the only way of preventing the collapse … is to physically stabilize the ice sheets,” he says.
That will require what is variously described as active conservation, radical adaptation, or glacier geoengineering.
Moore and others have laid out several ways that people could intervene to preserve key glaciers. Some of the schemes involve building artificial braces through polar megaprojects, or installing other structures that would nudge nature to restore existing ones. The basic idea is that a handful of engineering efforts at the source of the problem could significantly reduce the property damage and flooding dangers that basically every coastal city and low-lying island nation will face, as well as the costs of the adaptation projects required to minimize them.
If it works, it could potentially preserve crucial ice sheets for a few more centuries, buying time to cut emissions and stabilize the climate, the researchers say.
But there would be massive logistical, engineering, legal, and financial challenges. And it’s not yet clear how effective the interventions would be, or whether they could be done before some of the largest glaciers are lost.
Redirecting warming waters
In articles and papers published in 2018, Moore, Michael Wolovick of Princeton, and others laid out the possibility of preserving critical glaciers, including the Thwaites, through massive earth-moving projects. These would involve shipping in or dredging up large amounts of material to build up berms or artificial islands around or beneath key glaciers. The structures would support glaciers and ice shelves, block the warm, dense water layers at the bottom of the ocean that are melting them from below, or both.
More recently, they and researchers affiliated with the University of British Columbia have explored a more technical concept: constructing what they’ve dubbed “seabed anchored curtains.” These would be buoyant flexible sheets, made from geotextile material, that could hold back and redirect warm water.
The hope is that this proposal would be cheaper than the earlier ones, and that these curtains would stand up to iceberg collisions and could be removed if there were negative side effects. The researchers have modeled the use of these structures around three glaciers in Greenland, as well as the Thwaites and nearby Pine Island glaciers.
If the curtains redirected enough warm water, the eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites could begin to thicken again and firmly reattach itself to the underwater formations that have supported it for millennia, Moore says.
“The idea is to return the system to its state around the early 20th century, when we know that warm water could not access the ice shelf as much as today,” he wrote in an email.
They’ve explored the costs and effects of strategically placing these structures in key channels where most of the warm water flows in, and of establishing a wider curtain farther out in the bay. The latter approach would cost on the order of $50 billion. That’s a big number, but it’s not even half what one proposed seawall around New York City would cost.
Researchers have floated other potential approaches as well, including placing reflective or insulating material over portions of glaciers; building fencing to retain snow that would otherwise blow into the ocean; and applying various techniques to dry up the bed beneath glaciers, eliminating water that acts as lubricant and thus slowing the glaciers’ movement.
Will it work?
Some scientists have criticized these ideas. Seven researchers submitted a response in Nature to Moore’s 2018 proposals, arguing that the concepts would be partial solutions at best, could in some cases inadvertently accelerate ice loss, and could pull attention and resources from efforts to eliminate the root of the problem: greenhouse-gas emissions.
The lead author, Twila Moon, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says the efforts would be akin to plugging a couple of holes in a garden hose riddled with them.
And that’s if they worked at all. She argues that the field doesn’t understand ice dynamics and other relevant factors well enough to be confident that these things will work, and the logistical challenges strike her as extreme given the difficulty of getting a single research vessel to Antarctica.
“Addressing the source of the problem means turning off that hose, and that is something that we understand,” she says. “We understand climate change; we understand the sources, and we understand how to reduce emissions.”
There would also be significant governance and legal obstacles, as Charles Corbett and Edward Parson, legal scholars at University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, noted in a forthcoming essay in Ecology Law Quarterly.
Notably, Antarctica is governed by a consortium of nations under the Antarctic Treaty System, and any one of the 29 voting members could veto such proposals. In addition, the Madrid Protocol strictly limits certain activities on and around Antarctica, including projects that would have major physical or environmental impacts.
Corbett and Parson stress that the obstacles aren’t insurmountable and that the issue could inspire needed updates to how these regions are governed amid the rising threat of climate change. But they also note: “It all raises the question of whether a country or coalition could drive the project forward with sufficient determination.”
Getting started
Moore and others have noted in earlier work that a “handful of ice streams and large glaciers” are expected to produce nearly all the sea-level rise over the next few centuries, so a few successful interventions could have a significant impact.
But Moore readily acknowledges that such efforts will face vast challenges. Much more work needs to be done to closely evaluate how the flow of warm water will be affected, how well the curtains will hold up over time, what sorts of environmental side effects could occur, and how the public will respond. And installing the curtains under the frigid, turbulent conditions near Antarctica would likely require high-powered icebreakers and the sorts of submersible equipment used for deep-sea oil and gas platforms.
As a next step, Moore hopes to begin conversations with communities in Greenland to seek their input on such ideas well ahead of any field research proposals. But the basic idea would be to start with small-scale tests in regions where it will be relatively easy to work, like Greenland or Alaska. The hope is the lessons and experience gained there would make it possible to move on to harder projects in harsher areas.
The Thwaites would be at the top rung of this “ladder of difficulty.” And the researchers have been operating on the assumption that it could take three decades to build the public support, raise the needed financing, sort out the governance challenges, and build up the skills necessary to undertake such a project there.
There’s a clear problem with that timeline, however: the latest research suggests that the critical eastern buttress may not even be there by the end of this decade.
Source: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Summary: Economic growth goes down when the number of wet days and days with extreme rainfall go up, a team of scientists finds. The data analysis of more than 1,500 regions over the past 40 years shows a clear connection and suggests that intensified daily rainfall driven by climate-change from burning oil and coal will harm the global economy.
Economic growth goes down when the number of wet days and days with extreme rainfall go up, a team of Potsdam scientists finds. Rich countries are most severely affected and herein the manufacturing and service sectors, according to their study now published as cover story in the journal Nature. The data analysis of more than 1,500 regions over the past 40 years shows a clear connection and suggests that intensified daily rainfall driven by climate-change from burning oil and coal will harm the global economy.
“This is about prosperity, and ultimately about people’s jobs. Economies across the world are slowed down by more wet days and extreme daily rainfall — an important insight that adds to our growing understanding of the true costs of climate change,” says Leonie Wenz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) who led the study.
“Macro-economic assessments of climate impacts have so far focused mostly on temperature and considered — if at all — changes in rainfall only across longer time scales such as years or months, thus missing the complete picture,” explains Wenz. “While more annual rainfall is generally good for economies, especially agriculturally dependent ones, the question is also how the rain is distributed across the days of the year. Intensified daily rainfall turns out to be bad, especially for wealthy, industrialized countries like the US, Japan, or Germany.”
A first-of-its-kind global analysis of subnational rainfall effects
“We identify a number of distinct effects on economic production, yet the most important one really is from extreme daily rainfall,” says Maximilian Kotz, first author of the study and also at the Potsdam Institute. “This is because rainfall extremes are where we can already see the influence of climate change most clearly, and because they are intensifying almost everywhere across the world.”
The analysis statistically evaluates data of sub-national economic output for 1554 regions worldwide in the period 1979-2019, collected and made publicly available by MCC and PIK. The scientists combine these with high resolution rainfall data. The combination of ever increasing detail in climatic and economic data is of particular importance in the context of rain, a highly local phenomenon, and revealed the new insights.
“It’s the daily rainfall that poses the threat“
By loading the Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases from fossil power plants and cars, humanity is heating the planet. Warming air can hold more water vapour that eventually becomes rain. Although atmospheric dynamics make regional changes in annual averages more complicated, daily rainfall extremes are increasing globally due to this water vapour effect.
“Our study reveals that it’s precisely the fingerprint of global warming in daily rainfall which have hefty economic effects that have not yet been accounted for but are highly relevant,” says co-author Anders Levermann, Head of the Potsdam Institute’s Complexity Science domain, professor at Potsdam University and researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, New York. “Taking a closer look at short time scales instead of annual averages helps to understand what is going on: it’s the daily rainfall which poses the threat. It’s rather the climate shocks from weather extremes that threaten our way of life than the gradual changes. By destabilizing our climate we harm our economies. We have to make sure that our burning of fossil fuels does not destabilize our societies, too.”
Journal Reference:
Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann, Leonie Wenz. The effect of rainfall changes on economic production. Nature, 2022; 601 (7892): 223 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04283-8
Stories may be the most overlooked climate solution of all. By
December 23, 2021
Devi Lockwood
There is a lot of shouting about climate change, especially in North America and Europe. This makes it easy for the rest of the world to fall into a kind of silence—for Westerners to assume that they have nothing to add and should let the so-called “experts” speak. But we all need to be talking about climate change and amplifying the voices of those suffering the most.
Climate science is crucial, but by contextualizing that science with the stories of people actively experiencing climate change, we can begin to think more creatively about technological solutions.
This needs to happen not only at major international gatherings like COP26, but also in an everyday way. In any powerful rooms where decisions are made, there should be people who can speak firsthand about the climate crisis. Storytelling is an intervention into climate silence, an invitation to use the ancient human technology of connecting through language and narrative to counteract inaction. It is a way to get often powerless voices into powerful rooms.
That’s what I attempted to do by documenting stories of people already experiencing the effects of a climate in crisis.
In 2013, I was living in Boston during the marathon bombing. The city was put on lockdown, and when it lifted, all I wanted was to go outside: to walk and breathe and hear the sounds of other people. I needed to connect, to remind myself that not everyone is murderous. In a fit of inspiration, I cut open a broccoli box and wrote “Open call for stories” in Sharpie.
I wore the cardboard sign around my neck. People mostly stared. But some approached me. Once I started listening to strangers, I didn’t want to stop.
That summer, I rode my bicycle down the Mississippi River on a mission to listen to any stories that people had to share. I brought the sign with me. One story was so sticky that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months, and it ultimately set me off on a trip around the world.
“We fight for the protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”
I met 57-year-old Franny Connetti 80 miles south of New Orleans, when I stopped in front of her office to check the air in my tires; she invited me in to get out of the afternoon sun. Franny shared her lunch of fried shrimp with me. Between bites she told me how Hurricane Isaac had washed away her home and her neighborhood in 2012.
Despite that tragedy, she and her husband moved back to their plot of land, in a mobile home, just a few months after the storm.
“We fight for the protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane,” she told me. “I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Twenty miles ahead, I could see where the ocean lapped over the road at high tide. “Water on Road,” an orange sign read. Locals jokingly refer to the endpoint of Louisiana State Highway 23 as “The End of the World.” Imagining the road I had been biking underwater was chilling.
The author at Monasavu Dam in Fiji in 2014.
Here was one front line of climate change, one story. What would it mean, I wondered, to put this in dialogue with stories from other parts of the world—from other front lines with localized impacts that were experienced through water? My goal became to listen to and amplify those stories.
Water is how most of the world will experience climate change. It’s not a human construct, like a degree Celsius. It’s something we acutely see and feel. When there’s not enough water, crops die, fires rage, and people thirst. When there’s too much, water becomes a destructive force, washing away homes and businesses and lives. It’s almost always easier to talk about water than to talk about climate change. But the two are deeply intertwined.
I also set out to address another problem: the language we use to discuss climate change is often abstract and inaccessible. We hear about feet of sea-level rise or parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what does this really mean for people’s everyday lives? I thought storytelling might bridge this divide.
One of the first stops on my journey was Tuvalu, a low-lying coral atoll nation in the South Pacific, 585 miles south of the equator. Home to around 10,000 people, Tuvalu is on track to become uninhabitable in my lifetime.
In 2014 Tauala Katea, a meteorologist, opened his computer to show me an image of a recent flood on one island. Seawater had bubbled up under the ground near where we were sitting. “This is what climate change looks like,” he said.
“In 2000, Tuvaluans living in the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he said. “The root crops seemed rotten, and the size was getting smaller and smaller.” Taro and pulaka, two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine, are grown in pits dug underground.
Tauala and his team traveled to the outer islands to take soil samples. The culprit was saltwater intrusion linked to sea-level rise. The seas have been rising four millimeters per year since measurements began in the early 1990s. While that might sound like a small amount, this change has a dramatic impact on Tuvaluans’ access to drinking water. The highest point is only 13 feet above sea level.
A lot has changed in Tuvalu as a result. The freshwater lens, a layer of groundwater that floats above denser seawater, has become salty and contaminated. Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are now a thing of the past. Each home now has a water tank attached to a corrugated-iron roof by a gutter. All the water for washing, cooking, and drinking now comes from the rain. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and used to wash clothes and dishes, as well as for bathing. The wells have been repurposed as trash heaps.
At times, families have to make tough decisions about how to allocate water. Angelina, a mother of three, told me that during a drought a few years ago, her middle daughter, Siulai, was only a few months old. She, her husband, and their oldest daughter could swim in the sea to wash themselves and their clothes. “We only saved water to drink and cook,” she said. But her newborn’s skin was too delicate to bathe in the ocean. The salt water would give her a horrible rash. That meant Angelina had to decide between having water to drink and to bathe her child.
The stories I heard about water and climate change in Tuvalu reflected a sharp division along generational lines. Tuvaluans my age—like Angelina—don’t see their future on the islands and are applying for visas to live in New Zealand. Older Tuvaluans see climate change as an act of God and told me they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else; they didn’t want to leave the bones of their ancestors, which were buried in their front yards. Some things just cannot be moved.
Organizations like the United Nations Development Programme are working to address climate change in Tuvalu by building seawalls and community water tanks. Ultimately these adaptations seem to be prolonging the inevitable. It is likely that within my lifetime, many Tuvaluans will be forced to call somewhere else home.
Tuvalu shows how climate change exacerbates both food and water insecurity—and how that insecurity drives migration. I saw this in many other places. Mess with the amount of water available in one location, and people will move.
In Thailand I met a modern dancer named Sun who moved to Bangkok from the rural north. He relocated to the city in part to practice his art, but also to take refuge from unpredictable rain patterns. Farming in Thailand is governed by the seasonal monsoons, which dump rain, fill river basins, and irrigate crops from roughly May to September. Or at least they used to. When we spoke in late May 2016, it was dry in Thailand. The rains were delayed. Water levels in the country’s biggest dams plummeted to less than 10% of their capacity—the worst drought in two decades.
“Right now it’s supposed to be the beginning of the rainy season, but there is no rain,” Sun told me. “How can I say it? I think the balance of the weather is changing. Some parts have a lot of rain, but some parts have none.” He leaned back in his chair, moving his hands like a fulcrum scale to express the imbalance. “That is the problem. The people who used to be farmers have to come to Bangkok because they want money and they want work,” he said. “There is no more work because of the weather.”
A family celebrates Nunavut Day near the waterfront in Igloolik, Nunavut, in 2018.
Migration to the city, in other words, is hastened by the rain. Any tech-driven climate solutions that fail to address climate migration—so central to the personal experience of Sun and many others in his generation around the world—will be at best incomplete, and at worst potentially dangerous. Solutions that address only one region, for example, could exacerbate migration pressures in another.
I heard stories about climate-driven food and water insecurity in the Arctic, too. Igloolik, Nunavut, 1,400 miles south of the North Pole, is a community of 1,700 people. Marie Airut, a 71-year-old elder, lives by the water. We spoke in her living room over cups of black tea.
“My husband died recently,” she told me. But when he was alive, they went hunting together in every season; it was their main source of food. “I’m not going to tell you what I don’t know. I’m going to tell you only the things that I have seen,” she said. In the 1970s and ’80s, the seal holes would open in late June, an ideal time for hunting baby seals. “But now if I try to go out hunting at the end of June, the holes are very big and the ice is really thin,” Marie told me. “The ice is melting too fast. It doesn’t melt from the top; it melts from the bottom.”
When the water is warmer, animals change their movement. Igloolik has always been known for its walrus hunting. But in recent years, hunters have had trouble reaching the animals. “I don’t think I can reach them anymore, unless you have 70 gallons of gas. They are that far now, because the ice is melting so fast,” Marie said. “It used to take us half a day to find walrus in the summer, but now if I go out with my boys, it would probably take us two days to get some walrus meat for the winter.”
Marie and her family used to make fermented walrus every year, “but this year I told my sons we’re not going walrus hunting,” she said. “They are too far.”
Para especialista, fenômeno precisa ser visto com cautela para que medo não se transforme em negacionismo
Enquanto conversava com a reportagem por telefone, o advogado Leandro Luz, 29, confessa que está nervoso. A angústia em sua fala se refere ao tema da conversa que envolve um de seus maiores medos: a crise climática.
Ler, ouvir e falar sobre aumento da temperatura na Terra, queimadas na Amazônia, derretimento de geleiras e desastres ambientais cada vez mais frequentes deixam Luz nervoso. Quando se depara com o tema, ele sente taquicardia e suor frio nas palmas das mãos e costas.
Até pouco tempo, ele não entendia bem o que sentia, até que descobriu sofrer da chamada eco-ansiedade. O termo, que aparece em um relatório divulgado pela Associação Americana de Psicologia em 2017 e foi incluído no dicionário Oxford no final de outubro de 2021, é descrito como um medo crônico sobre a destruição ambiental acompanhado do sentimento de culpa por contribuições individuais e o impacto disso nas gerações futuras.
A primeira vez que Luz prestou atenção às questões climática foi após o tsunami em Fukushima, no Japão, quando ondas gigantes mataram 18 mil pessoas. Hoje, ele vive em Salvador, mas conta que pensa em se mudar para o interior. “Converso com a minha namorada de morar longe da costa, mas sei que esses locais também serão afetados”, diz ele que relata viver em um grande dilema.
“Não sei como me comportar nos próximos 30 anos, procuro evitar o consumo desenfreado e evito produzir muito lixo plástico, mas sei que são atitudes muito pontuais que, a grosso modo, não vão mudar a realidade”.
O advogado, porém, também critica o governo sobre sua postura diante da crise climática. Para ele, por exemplo, a prioridade de autoridades deveria estar na mudança da matriz energética brasileira. “Mas, estamos no caminho oposto, voltamos a discutir a implementação de usinas de carvão para produção de energia no Brasil, algo que é totalmente rudimentar”.
Assim como Leandro Luz, a aluna do ensino médio Mariana dos Santos, 16, se recorda de chorar copiosamente quando criança após assistir a reportagens sobre mudança climática. Hoje, ela diz que apesar de não desabar mais diante das notícias, a ansiedade vira e mexe ainda a abala.
Ela costuma temer, por exemplo, o aumento do nível da água dos oceanos. “Penso nas cidades que podem desaparecer e as consequências que isso pode acarretar. Isso se torna uma bola de neve. Sei que não dá para fazer muito e é isso que desencadeia o desespero”, diz.
A estudante de gestão ambiental Maria Antônia Luna, 20, também descobriu recentemente que o aperto no peito, sensação de falta de ar ao ler notícias sobre o incêndio que atingiu o Pantanal em 2020 se referem à eco-ansiedade.
“A sensação é de uma angústia de que nada vai melhorar”, define ela que agora busca uma terapia que a ajude a enfrentar aflições relacionadas às crises climáticas, tópico frequente em sua graduação.
Marina, Maria e Leandro não são casos isolados. Um estudo publicado no The Lancet Planetary Health, no início de setembro, analisou a ansiedade climática entre jovens de dez países, como Brasil, Estados Unidos, Índia, Filipinas, Finlândia e França.
O artigo, em preprint (não revisado por pares), ouviu 10 mil jovens de 16 a 25 anos e apontou que a maioria sente com medo, raiva, tristeza, desespero, culpa e vergonha diante de problemas ecológicos.
Ao todo, 58% consideram que seus governos traíram os jovens e as gerações futuras. Apenas franceses e finlandeses não concordam majoritariamente com a afirmação. Quando os números são destrinchados por países, a sensação de traição tanto por parte dos adultos quanto dos governantes é mais latente entre os brasileiros (77%), seguido por indianos (66%).
Para Alexandre Araújo Costa, físico e pesquisador de crises climáticas há 20 anos, a pesquisa aponta também para um olhar otimista, ou seja, o potencial de conscientização maior entre os mais jovens.
“Eles sentem que o Brasil não faz nada para evitar a atual situação e isso pode ser bom para mobilizar”, diz Costa. Segundo ele, não é possível hoje evitar que o assunto seja debatido. “A consequência relacionada à saúde mental é preocupante, mas não podemos manter nossas crianças e jovens em uma redoma dizendo que está tudo bem, quando corremos o risco de perder a Amazônia”, afirma.
O professor ainda analisa que a situação não deve ser vista apenas como um sofrimento individual, já que todos vão acabar impactados de uma forma com a crise ambiental. “É preciso que a gente troque esse governo que dá de ombros para o problema ou que é sequestrado por interesses econômicos que só visam lucro de curto prazo”, diz.
A bióloga Beatriz Ramos segue a linha de Costa. Para ela, o perigo da eco-ansiedade é a vontade de não saber o que está acontecendo. “Ao nos afastarmos dos fatos, podemos entrar em um processo de negação.’”
“É preciso falar o que vai acontecer, como podemos prevenir, quais são as possíveis soluções e explicar que vai acontecer um aumento de eventos extremos, mas existem formas de nos adaptarmos e ainda temos tempo de mitigar isso. Não dá para agir só com otimismo ou só com a sensação apocalíptica”, diz.
“Eu respiro fumaça de incêndio. É triste, mas é uma forma que encontrei de não me esconder. A sensação de impotência diminui, sinto que não estou parada assistindo à destruição”, diz ela que relata que nos piores momentos do ano passado presenciou cenas desesperadoras de animais agonizando vivos.
A angústia diante às crises climáticas parece cada vez mais latente e atinge, principalmente, os mais jovens. Em Portugal, de acordo com uma reportagem publicada pela Agência Lusa, o termo traz um novo desafio aos psicólogos. Já no Brasil, o uso do termo ainda é emergente, apontam especialistas.
O antropólogo Rodrigo Toniol, por exemplo, não acredita que esse diagnóstico vá emplacar. “Não acho que a gente vai chegar num consultório e será um diagnóstico à mão de todos os psiquiatras, mas eu acho que esse é um sintoma relevante que aponta para problemas ligados à falta de um pacto social”, diz ele.
Para o psicanalista e professor do Instituto de Psicologia da USP Christian Dunker diz que os efeitos da ansiedade causada pelo clima são colaterais. Dunker reflete que, na verdade, nota no consultório o crescente sentimento de injustiça quanto às situações que demandariam ações que não são sendo tomadas, como desigualdade social, racismo, homofobia e desigualdade de gênero.
“No bojo desta modificação da nossa indignação aparece a situação em que passamos a enxergar o planeta como alguém e não como algo”, analisa.
It is one of the most important developments in human history, affecting everything from engineering to international trade to political systems.
On the facade of the Ministry of Justice in Paris, just below a ground-floor window, is a marble shelf engraved with a horizontal line and the word ‘MÈTRE’. It is hardly noticeable in the grand Place Vendôme: in fact, out of all the tourists in the square, I was the only person to stop and consider it. But this shelf is one of the last remaining ‘mètre étalons’ (standard metre bars) that were placed all over the city more than 200 years ago in an attempt to introduce a new, universal system of measurement. And it is just one of many sites in Paris that point to the long and fascinating history of the metric system.
“Measurement is one of the most banal and ordinary things, but it’s actually the things we take for granted that are the most interesting and have such contentious histories,” said Dr Ken Alder, history professor at Northwestern University and author of The Measure of All Things, a book about the creation of the metre.
One of the last remaining ‘mètre étalons’, or standard metre bars, can be found below a ground-floor window on the Ministry of Justice in Paris (Credit: PjrTravel/Alamy)
We don’t generally notice measurement because it’s pretty much the same everywhere we go. Today, the metric system, which was created in France, is the official system of measurement for every country in the world except three: the United States, Liberia and Myanmar, also known as Burma. And even then, the metric system is still used for purposes such as global trade. But imagine a world where every time you travelled you had to use different conversions for measurements, as we do for currency. This was the case before the French Revolution in the late 18th Century, where weights and measures varied not only from nation to nation, but also within nations. In France alone, it was estimated at that time that at least 250,000 different units of weights and measures were in use during the Ancien Régime.
The French Revolution changed all that. During the volatile years between 1789 and 1799, the revolutionaries sought not only to overturn politics by taking power away from the monarchy and the church, but also to fundamentally alter society by overthrowing old traditions and habits. To this end, they introduced, among other things, the Republican Calendar in 1793, which consisted of 10-hour days, with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. Aside from removing religious influence from the calendar, making it difficult for Catholics to keep track of Sundays and saints’ days, this fit with the new government’s aim of introducing decimalisation to France. But while decimal time did not stick, the new decimal system of measurement, which is the basis of the metre and the kilogram, remains with us today.
Prior to the French Revolution, at least 250,000 different units of measurement were used throughout France (Credit: Madhvi Ramani)
The task of coming up with a new system of measurement was given to the nation’s preeminent scientific thinkers of the Enlightenment. These scientists were keen to create a new, uniform set based on reason rather than local authorities and traditions. Therefore, it was determined that the metre was to be based purely on nature. It was to be one 10-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.
The line of longitude running from the pole to the equator that would be used to determine the length of the new standard was the Paris meridian. This line bisects the centre of the Paris Observatory building in the 14th arrondissement, and is marked by a brass strip laid into the white marble floor of its high-ceilinged Meridian Room, or Cassini Room.
Although the Paris Observatory is not currently open to the public, you can trace the meridian line through the city by looking out for small bronze disks on the ground with the word ARAGO on them, installed by Dutch artist Jan Dibbets in 1994 as a memorial to the French astronomer François Arago. This is the line that two astronomers set out from Paris to measure in 1792. Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre travelled north to Dunkirk while Pierre Méchain travelled south to Barcelona.
Using the latest equipment and the mathematical process of triangulation to measure the meridian arc between these two sea-level locations, and then extrapolating the distance between the North Pole and the equator by extending the arc to an ellipse, the two astronomers aimed to meet back in Paris to come up with the new, universal standard of measurement within one year. It ended up taking seven.
The line of longitude used to determine the length of the metre runs through the centre of the Paris Observatory (Credit: Madhvi Ramani)
As Dr Alder details in his book, measuring this meridian arc during a time of great political and social upheaval proved to be an epic undertaking. The two astronomers were frequently met with suspicion and animosity; they fell in and out of favour with the state; and were even injured on the job, which involved climbing to high points such as the tops of churches.
The Pantheon, which was originally commissioned by Louis XV to be a church, became the central geodetic station in Paris from whose dome Delambre triangulated all the points around the city. Today, it serves as a mausoleum to heroes of the Republic, such as Voltaire, René Descartes and Victor Hugo. But during Delambre’s time, it served as another kind of mausoleum – a warehouse for all the old weights and measures that had been sent in by towns from all over France in anticipation of the new system.
But despite all the technical mastery and labour that had gone into defining the new measurement, nobody wanted to use it. People were reluctant to give up the old ways of measuring since these were inextricably bound with local rituals, customs and economies. For example, an ell, a measure of cloth, generally equalled the width of local looms, while arable land was often measured in days, referencing the amount of land that a peasant could work during this time.
Paris’ Pantheon once stored different weights and measures sent from all across France in anticipation of the new standardised system (Credit: pocholo/Alamy)
The Paris authorities were so exasperated at the public’s refusal to give up their old measure that they even sent police inspectors to marketplaces to enforce the new system. Eventually, in 1812, Napoleon abandoned the metric system; although it was still taught in school, he largely let people use whichever measures they liked until it was reinstated in 1840. According to Dr Alder, “It took a span of roughly 100 years before almost all French people started using it.”
This was not just due to perseverance on the part of the state. France was quickly advancing into the industrial revolution; mapping required more accuracy for military purposes; and, in 1851, the first of the great World’s Fairs took place, where nations would showcase and compare industrial and scientific knowledge. Of course, it was tricky to do this unless you had clear, standard measures, such as the metre and the kilogram. For example, the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, and at 324m, was at that time the world’s tallest man-made structure.
The metric system was necessary to compare industrial and scientific knowledge – such as the height of the Eiffel Tower – at the World’s Fairs (Credit: robertharding/Alamy)
All of this came together to produce one of the world’s oldest international institutions: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). Located in the quiet Paris suburb of Sèvres, the BIPM is surrounded by landscaped gardens and a park. Its lack of ostentatiousness reminded me again of the mètre étalon in the Place Vendôme; it might be tucked away, but it is fundamental to the world we live in today.
Originally established to preserve international standards, the BIPM promotes the uniformity of seven international units of measurement: the metre, the kilogram, the second, the ampere, the kelvin, the mole and the candela. It is the home of the master platinum standard metre bar that was used to carefully calibrate copies, which were then sent out to various other national capitals. In the 1960s, the BIPM redefined the metre in terms of light, making it more precise than ever. And now, defined by universal laws of physics, it was finally a measure truly based on nature.
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) was established to promote the uniformity of international units of measurement (Credit: Chronicle/Alamy)
The building in Sèvres is also home to the original kilogram, which sits under three bell jars in an underground vault and can only be accessed using three different keys, held by three different individuals. The small, cylindrical weight cast in platinum-iridium alloy is also, like the metre, due to be redefined in terms of nature – specifically the quantum-mechanical quantity known as the Planck constant – by the BIPM this November.
“Establishing a new basis for a new definition of the kilogram is a very big technological challenge. [It] was described at one point as the second most difficult experiment in the whole world, the first being discovering the Higgs Boson,” said Dr Martin Milton, director of the BIPM, who showed me the lab where the research is being conducted.
As he explained the principle of the Kibble balance and the way in which a mass is weighed against the force of a coil in a magnetic field, I marvelled at the latest scientific engineering before me, the precision and personal effort of all the people who have been working on the kilogram project since it began in 2005 and are now very close to achieving their goal.
The BIPM houses the original standard metre and the original standard kilogram (Credit: Madhvi Ramani)
As with the 18th-Century meridian project, defining measurement continues to be one of our most important and difficult challenges. As I walked further up the hill of the public park that surrounds the BIPM and looked out at the view of Paris, I thought about the structure of measurement underlying the whole city. The machinery used for construction; the trade and commerce happening in the city; the exact quantities of drugs, or radiation for cancer therapy, being delivered in the hospitals.
What started with the metre formed the basis of our modern economy and led to globalisation. It enabled high-precision engineering and continues to be essential for science and research, progressing our understanding of the universe.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the placement of the meridian line in the Paris Observatory. We regret the error and have updated the text accordingly.
Can you imagine turning on the Weather Channel to get an update on Storm 34B-SQ59? While major storms aren’t sentient beings, it’s become standard to give them human names to make it easier to communicate about them, especially during critical news updates. From Hurricane Elsa to Tropical Storm Cristobal, there’s an intriguing legacy behind naming storms.
The History of Naming Storms
A few hundred years ago, storms were named after the Catholic saint’s day that lined up with the storm. For example, Hurricane Santa Ana landed in Puerto Rico on July 26, 1825. But if storms hit on the same day in different years, names doubled up. Hurricane San Felipe I struck Puerto Rico on September 13, 1876 and then San Felipe II hit in 1928.
In the late 19th century, Australian meteorologist Clement Wragge began using women’s names for tropical storms. The practice was adopted by the U.S. Navy and Air Force during World War II when latitude and longitude identifications proved to be too cumbersome.
Outside of the military, early 20th century storms were named and tracked by the year and order, with names such as “1940 Hurricane Two” and “1932 Tropical Storm Six.” This created some confusion when multiple storms were happening during the same time, especially during news broadcasts. To reduce confusion, United States weather services also began using female names for storms in 1953, and later added male names to the list in 1978. This began the modern version of how we name storms.
Who Is in Charge of Storm Names?
Although NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) National Hurricane Center is the premier source for news about storms, this organization does not name them. Instead, the World Meteorological Organization does. The WMO is a specialized agency of the United Nations, headquartered in Switzerland, that focuses on weather, climate, and water resources. Each year, the WMO creates a list of potential names for the upcoming storm season.
Where Do the Names Come From?
There is a bit of an art to naming modern-day storms. The WMO compiles six lists of names for each of the three basins under its jurisdiction: Atlantic, Eastern North Pacific, and Central North Pacific. Countries outside of this jurisdiction have their own naming conventions. For areas within the WMO, such as the United States, storm names are cycled through every six years. That means that the list of names for the 2021 season will be used again in 2027.
Each list contains 21 names that begin with a different letter of the alphabet (minus Q, U, X, Y, Z because of the limited number of names). For the Atlantic basin, names are typically chosen from English, French, and Spanish, because the countries impacted primarily speak one of those three languages. While the names are supposedly random, there are some pop culture-related coincidences, such as 2021’s Hurricane Elsa.
When Is a Storm Named?
A tropical storm can be named once it meets two criteria: a circular rotation and wind speeds more than 39 MPH. Once a storm reaches 74 MPH, it becomes a hurricane but keeps the same name it was first given as a tropical storm, such as when Tropical Storm Larry turned into Hurricane Larry in September 2021.
Hurricane names can also be retired, and this is often done when a hurricane is especially destructive. As of the 2020 season, there are 93 names on the retired Atlantic hurricane list, including 2004’s Katrina, 2012’s Sandy, and 2016’s Matthew. When a name is retired, it is replaced with a new name.
New Rules in 2021
Before the 2021 season, if the full list of storm names was used before the end of the season, any additional storms that reached the necessary criteria for naming would use the Greek alphabet — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. There were 30 named storms in 2020, only the second time the full list of names had been used.
As of 2021, the WMO will use a supplementary list of names, similar to the original list (starting with Adria and ending with Will). The WMO felt that the Greek names were too distracting. From a technical perspective, the Greek names could also not be replaced in a way that made sense if they were retired (such as Eta and Iota in 2020).
Edward O. Wilson, who passed away at the age of 92 on December 26, 2021, is widely recognized as a giant of the Arts and Sciences. I include the Arts because Wilson regarded the creative dimension of science as an artistic endeavor, worked toward unifying the Arts and Sciences, and wrote beautifully for the general public, resulting in two Pulitzer prizes for nonfiction and one novel.
Wilson’s stature is so great, and reflections on his legacy upon his death are so numerous, that another reflection might seem unnecessary. The purpose of my reflection, however, is to make a novel point: Wilson left at least six legacies, which need to be combined to fully realize his vision. Combining the legacies of Edward O. Wilson requires first identifying them separately and then integrating them with each other.
The six legacies are:
1) His contributions to evolutionary biology.
2) His contributions to the conservation of biodiversity.
3) His contributions to a sociobiology that includes humans.
4) His contributions to the unification of knowledge.
5) His encouraging stance toward young scientists and other learners.
6) The new frontier that he was working on at the time of his death was ecosystems.
My relationship with Edward O. Wilson
Before turning to these legacies and their integration, I will briefly recount my own relationship with Ed. I am 20 years younger so that he was already famous as a Harvard professor when I entered graduate school at Michigan State University in 1971. I first met him during the summer of that year. I was a student in an ecology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was sitting in on the student project reports. After I reported my experiments on food size selection in zooplankton, Ed remarked “That’s new, isn’t it?” I was so proud to have impressed the great E.O. Wilson and contributed to the vast storehouse of scientific knowledge that I have remembered his comment ever since!
My graduate education was shaped in part by Ed’s influence on evolutionary biology, as I will elaborate below. My next personal interaction came near the end of my graduate career. I had constructed a mathematical model that provided support for the theory of group selection, which had been almost universally rejected by evolutionary biologists, as I will also elaborate below. Convinced of its importance, I wrote Ed asking if he would consider sponsoring it for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ed invited me to visit him at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. As with my first encounter, I have a vivid memory of the visit, which began with a tour of his ant laboratory. Then he stood me in front of a blackboard, sat down in a chair, and said “you have 30 minutes until my next appointment.”
I talked like an auctioneer, filling the board with my equations. Ed was sufficiently intrigued to sponsor my article for PNAS after sending it out for review by two experts in theoretical biology. The article became my Ph.D. thesis, which is probably the shortest in the history of evolutionary science (four pages).
In the years that followed, I became one of the main advocates of group selection without directly crossing paths with Ed. I also took part in most of the other initiatives associated with Ed’s legacies without directly interacting with him. We were both involved in the formation of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) and I hosted its third annual conference in 1993. On the theme of consilience, I started the first campus-wide program for teaching evolution across the curriculum and wrote one of the first book-length accounts of religion from an evolutionary perspective. It might seem strange that Ed and I shared so many interests without directly interacting, but just about everything associated with Ed’s legacies are in fact broad developments in the history of science involving many protagonists, a point to which I will return.
My next and by far most substantive interaction with Ed began at the 2006 annual conference of HBES. Ed was a plenary speaker and I was in the audience. Even though HBES members were in the avant-garde of studying human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, most of them were doctrinaire in their rejection of group selection. On his own, Ed had embraced group selection, converging on my own advocacy, and chose to break the news to the unsuspecting audience in his plenary. You could have heard a pin drop. Afterward, we found a corner of the lobby to talk alone.
“Did you like the grenade that I tossed in their midst?” Ed asked with a conspiratorial smile. On the spot, I suggested that we write a major article together, which became “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology”, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology in 2007. To reach a larger audience, we also wrote “Evolution for the Good of the Group”, which was published in the American Scientist in 2008. These were written by trading drafts and discussing them by email and phone. I still remember his voicemails, which sometimes went on for several minutes and were spoken in flawless extemporaneous prose.
At the end of our “Rethinking” article, we summarized our argument for group selection as the theoretical foundation of sociobiology by stealing from Rabbi Hillel, who was reputedly asked to explain the meaning of the Torah while standing on one foot and replied “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Everything else is commentary.” Our one-foot version of sociobiology was: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” This meme has become widely known and Ed repeated it all the way up to his final publications and interviews.
After this intense collaboration, Ed and I went our separate ways to continue pursuing our largely overlapping interests. The last time I saw him was at a conference at MIT, which was close enough to his home that he could attend without arduous travel. In the few minutes that we spoke together, he told me excitedly about ecosystems as the next big topic that he planned to synthesize. He retained his youthful spirit of exploration right up to the end.
I have one more story about Ed to tell before turning to his six legacies. In 2014, the evolutionary psychologist Barry X. Kuhle recorded a series of interviews with pioneers of HBES, including both Ed and myself. Ed must have relished the opportunity to talk at a professional level with someone as well informed as Barry because his interview lasted two hours. I was president of the newly founded Evolution Institute and Editor in Chief of its online magazine This View of Life(TVOL), which was named after the final passage of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (“There is grandeur in this view of life…”). I was eager to feature a print version of Barry’s interview with Ed on TVOL, so I offered to transcribe it myself. There is something about transcribing a recording, word by word, that burns it into your memory more than merely listening to the recording or reading the transcription. This experience adds to my knowledge of Ed and his legacies, along with his published work and my personal relationship with him.
The Six Legacies
History—including the history of science–is a complex systemic process involving many actors and environmental (including cultural) contingencies. Attention often becomes focused on a few key people, such Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and B.F. Skinner, which under-represents the contributions of many dozens of others. Iconic status is thrust upon a person as much as actively sought by the person. There seems to be a need to personify ideas as a form of simplification, among the general public and even, to a degree, among the experts.
A few evolutionary biologists such as Ed Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and the late Stephen Jay Gould have achieved this iconic status. Yes, they made outsized contributions as individuals, but they also represent something larger than themselves. I think that Ed would agree. In his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, for example, he was relying upon the work of many hundreds of scientists to support his claim that there can be a single theory of social behavior informed by evolution.
The world “catalyst” also bears examination. In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without being used up in the process. The way a catalytic molecule works is by holding other molecules in an orientation that binds them to each other and releases the catalytic molecule to repeat the operation. A person can play a catalytic role in cultural change in much the same way. As we will see, Ed was a catalyst par excellence. He made things happen that otherwise would have occurred much more slowly or not at all.
Against this background, calling Ed an “icon” and a “catalyst” honors the individual while also going beyond the individual to examine systemic trends in the history of science. It is in this spirit that I will review his six legacies.
1) His contributions to evolutionary biology.
Here is how Ed described his contribution to evolutionary biology in his interview with Barry Khule:
We have to go back to the 1950’s. In the 1950’s, the molecular revolution had begun. It was clear that the golden age of modern biology was going to be molecular and would endure a long time. In fact, it did occupy the second half of the 20th century and beyond. We felt here at Harvard immediately the pressure to start giving up positions to molecular biology. The Dean of the faculty and the President at that time were entirely in accord. We found—I say we, the organismic and evolutionary biologists here, comparative anatomists, comparative zoologists and so on–realized that we would not to be given much additional space anymore, that we probably would not get many if any new positions for a long time. They would be reserved to build up Harvard’s strength in molecular and cellular biology. What this did was have a tremendous impact on me personally because I realized…that those of us, my generation of what we came to call evolutionary biologists and organismic biologists, were not going to get anywhere by complaining by any means but we were going to have to—and we should be tremendously excited to plan this—develop an equivalent to molecular biology on our own.
Ed then set about trying to modernize the biology of whole organisms, as part of a younger generation following the architects of the Modern Synthesis, which included names such as Ernst Mayr, Julian Huxley, and George Gaylord Simpson. This required finding and collaborating with people who had complementary expertise—especially the ability to build mathematical models of ecological and evolutionary processes. Names that Ed mentions as part of this younger generation include Robert MacArthur, Larry Slobodkin, and Richard Lewontin. These were some of the rock stars whose work I avidly read as a graduate student in the 1970s.
One of Ed’s most productive collaborations was with Robert MacArthur, an ecologist with mathematical training, leading to their landmark book The Theory of Island Biogeography, published by Princeton University Press in 1967 with Ed as the second author. What made the book so important was a theoretical framework that made sense of the great mass of natural history information on the distribution and abundance of species on islands—some of it collected by Ed for ant species around the world. The theory applied not only to actual islands but to all habitats that are island-like, such as mountains separated by valleys or patches of forest separated by deforested areas.
While Ed played a prominent role in modernizing whole organism biology, he was by no means alone. Also during my time as a graduate student, a Nobel prize was awarded to Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Carl von Frisch for pioneering the study of animal behavior and the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky titled an article for biology teachers “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Evolutionary theory was proving its explanatory scope and many people were taking part in the effort. What this meant to me as a graduate student was that I could choose any topic, begin asking intelligent questions based on evolutionary theory (often with the help of mathematical models), and then test my hypotheses on any appropriate organism. I didn’t need to become a taxonomic specialist and I could change topics at will. In short, I could become a polymath, based not on my personal attributes but on a theory that anyone can learn. This is the legacy of evolutionary biology, to which Ed made an outsized contribution.
2) His contributions to the conservation of biodiversity
As first and foremost a naturalist and ant taxonomic expert, Ed was passionate about the conservation of biological diversity and made room for it alongside his scientific career. His book Biophilia argued that we are genetically adapted to be surrounded by nature, with mental and physical health consequences if we are not. This bold conjecture has been largely supported by research. For example, hospital patients recover faster if their room has a window or is decorated with foliage and flowers.
Ed collaborated with Thomas Lovejoy, who coincidentally passed away just a day earlier at the age of 80, to preserve the biodiversity of the Amazon. According to a remembrance in the New Yorker magazine, it was they who coined the term biological diversity, which became shortened to biodiversity. They even drew upon the theory of Island Biogeography by studying the effect of the size of forest reserves on species loss.
With his gift for marketing whole disciplines and initiatives, Ed coined the term “Half Earth” for the goal of preserving half of the earth for nature and the other half for humankind—not in separation, but in a way that is interdigitated, so that humans can live within nature and nature can flow along corridors. Anyone who values nature should want to continue this legacy but doing so requires changing the minds and hearts of people, along with their cultural practices, in the real world.
3) His contributions to a sociobiology that includes humans
Ed’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, was in the same mold as Darwin’s “there is grandeur in his view of life” and Dobzhansky’s “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Ed’s claim was that evolutionary theory provides a single conceptual toolkit for studying the social behaviors of all creatures great and small. Thanks to Ed’s gift for identifying whole fields of inquiry and writing for non-specialists, Sociobiology combined the authority of an academic tome with the look and feel of a coffee table book, complete with over 200 illustrations by the artist Sarah Landry. Thanks to his stature and gift for promotion, its publication was noted on the front page of the New York Times.
It was the last chapter on human social behavior that landed Ed in trouble and a systemic view of the history of science is needed to understand why. For all its explanatory scope, the study of evolution was restricted to genetic evolution for most of the 20th century, as if the only way that offspring can resemble their parents is by sharing the same genes. This is patently false when stated directly since it ignores the cultural transmission of traits entirely, but it essentially describes what became known as the modern synthesis and was consolidated by the molecular biology revolution described by Ed in his interview with Barry Kuhle.
What became of the study of cultural evolution? It was ceded to other disciplines in the human social sciences and humanities. Each discipline developed into a sophisticated body of knowledge, but not in reference and sometimes in perceived opposition to evolutionary theory. And all of those disciplines did not remotely become integrated with each other. Instead, they became an archipelago of knowledge with little communication among the islands. The lack of consilience for human-related knowledge stands in stark contrast with the consilience of biological knowledge, at least when it comes to genetic evolution.
Darwin’s theory is often said to have earned a bad reputation for itself in the human-related disciplines by providing a moral justification for inequality (Social Darwinism). The real history of Darwinism in relation to human affairs is more complex and interesting. Socialists such as Peter Kropotkin and progressive thinkers such as William James and John Dewey were inspired by Darwin along with “nature red and truth in claw” types. The bottom line is that any powerful tool can also be used as a weapon and Darwin’s theory is no different than any other theory in this regard.1
Returning to the reception to Sociobiology, when critics accused Ed of genetic determinism, they were absolutely right. The entire field of evolutionary biology was gene-centric and Ed was no exception. Yet, critics from the human social sciences and humanities had no synthesis of their own.
Only after the publication of Sociobiology did evolutionary thinkers begin to take cultural evolution seriously. Ed was among them with books such as On Human Nature, Genes, Mind, and Culture (with Charles J. Lumsden), Promethean Fire (also with Lumsden), and The Social Conquest of Earth. Other major thinkers included Richard Dawkins and his concept of memes, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (Cultural Transmission and Evolution), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Not By Genes Alone). The importance of symbolic thought began to occupy center stage with books such as The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon and Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb.
Today, Darwinian evolution is widely defined as any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication, no matter what the mechanism of replication. This definition is true to Darwin’s thought (since he knew nothing about genes) and can accommodate a plurality of inheritance mechanisms such as epigenetics (based on changes in gene expression rather than gene frequency), forms of social learning found in many species, and forms of symbolic thought that are distinctively human. While human cultural inheritance mechanisms evolved by genetic evolution, that doesn’t make them subordinate, as if genes hold cultures on a leash (one of Ed’s metaphors). On the contrary, as the faster evolutionary process, cultural evolution often takes the lead in adapting humans to their environments, with genetic evolution playing a following role (gene-culture co-evolution).
Part of the maturation of human cultural evolutionary theory is the recognition of group selection as an exceptionally strong force in human evolution—something else that Ed got right. According to Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Richard Wrangham in his book The Goodness Paradox, naked aggression is over 100 times more frequent in a chimpanzee community than in small-scale human communities. This is due largely to social control mechanisms in human communities that suppress bullying and other forms of disruptive self-serving behaviors so that cooperation becomes the primary social strategy (this is called a major evolutionary transition). Nearly everything distinctive about our species is a form of cooperation, including our ability to maintain an inventory of symbols with shared meaning that is transmitted across generations. Our capacity for symbolic thought became a full-blown inheritance system that operates alongside genetic inheritance (dual inheritance theory). Cultural evolution is a multilevel process, no less than genetic evolution, and the increasing scale of cooperation over the course of human history can be seen as a process of multilevel cultural evolution.
While the critique of genetic determinism was accurate for Sociobiology and evolutionary biology as a whole in 1975, this is no longer the case for the modern study of humans from an evolutionary perspective—which brings us to Ed’s next legacy.
4) His contributions to the unification of knowledge.
Something that can be said about Ed’s books is that they are all visionary—imagining whole new fields of inquiry—but vary in the degree to which Ed has made progress carrying out the vision. He made the most progress for ants and other social insects, of course, and Sociobiology reflected a thorough reading of the literature on animal social behaviors. A book such as Consilience, however, is long on vision and short on execution.
I do not intend this observation as a criticism. Ed had only 24 hours in a day, like the rest of us, and his visionary gaze is worthwhile even if the execution is left to others. In Consilience, the vision is “a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws (p4)”. While this vision stretches back to antiquity and includes knowledge of the physical world in addition to the living world, there is something about evolutionary theory that fulfills the vision for the living world in an extraordinary way. Here is how Ed describes his first encounter with evolutionary theory in the opening pages of Consilience. He’s an 18-year old kid newly arrived at the University of Alabama, with a passion for identifying plants and animals using field guides.
Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly—that is not too strong a word—I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr’s 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.
The thin volume in the plain blue cover was one of the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and modern genetics. By giving a theoretical structure to natural history, it vastly expanded the Linnaean enterprise. A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled, couldn’t stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. And for philosophy. And for just about everything. Static pattern slid into fluid process…A new enthusiasm surged through me. The animals and plants I loved so dearly reentered the stage as lead players in a grand drama. Natural history was validated as real science.
Coincidentally, Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution was one of the first evolution books that I read as an undergraduate student. While it was not thin (811 pp!), I was similarly enthralled. Compare Ed’s epiphany with passages from Charles Darwin, such as “I can remember the very spot on the road…” and “he who understands the baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke”, which was scribbled in his notebook in 1838. There is something about the simplicity and generality of evolutionary theory that starts working at the very beginning, for Darwin as the originator and Ed Wilson as an unschooled kid. Now recall what I said about being a graduate student in the 1970s—that I could become a polymath, based not on my personal attributes but on a theory that anyone can learn. What this means is that by the 1970s, what Darwin and Ed glimpsed from the start was now proving itself for the length and breadth of the biological sciences. Every time an evolutionary biologist decides to switch to a new topic and/or organism–which happens all the time—consilience is being demonstrated in action.
The prospect that human-related knowledge can become unified in this way is both old and new. It was how Darwin thought and he originated group selection theory as much to explain human morality as “for the good of the group” traits in nonhuman species. But you can’t make sense of humanity without acknowledging its groupish nature and the importance of culturally transmitted symbolic meaning systems. As Emile Durkheim wisely put it: “Social life, then, in every aspect and throughout its history, is only possible thanks to a vast body of symbolism.” Only now are we in a position to synthesize human-related knowledge in the same way as biological knowledge, thanks to an expanded definition of Darwinism as any variation/selection/replication process. Ed’s vision in Consilience is right on and its fulfillment is now in progress.
5) His encouraging stance toward young scientists and other learners.
No remembrance of Ed would be complete without noting the way that he encouraged people to become scientists, to follow their hearts, and to cultivate a reverence for nature. Visit #eowilson on Twitter and you’ll find quotes such as these offered by those whose lives he touched.
“Adults . . . are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering.” — The late great Edward O. Wilson
“Nature first, then theory. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and with good fortunes discoveries will follow.”
“You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.”
“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
“There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.”
“The evolutionary epic is the best myth we will ever have.”
“You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.”
“Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.”
Passages such as these spell the difference between science and a science-based worldview. By itself, science merely tells us what is. A worldview provides a sense of values and motivates action. A science-based worldview does this based on reverence of the natural world rather than a supernatural agency. Ed is remembered at least as much for the science-based worldview that he offered as his scientific discoveries.
6) Ecosystems as Ed’s final frontier
Ed’s next book was to be titled “Ecosystems and the Harmony of Nature”. I don’t know if it will be published posthumously but we can get a glimpse of what he had in mind from its title, a brief article on the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation website,2 and a short lecture on YouTube.3
In the article, Ed is quoted as saying: “We know that ecosystems, which are really what we are trying to protect–not just single species but ensembles of species that have come together and have reached the ability—sometimes over thousands or even in some places millions of years—have formed ecosystems that equilibrate. And we don’t really know how equilibration comes about.” Ed also encourages young people to join “the coming development of a new biological science, one of the next big things, which is ecosystem studies.”
I must confess that I am puzzled by these statements since the study of whole ecosystems dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and has become increasingly integrated with evolutionary ecology over the last 50 years. It turns out that multilevel selection theory is essential for understanding the nature of ecosystems, no less than single species societies. I will be fascinated to know if Ed has converged upon this conclusion.
To explain what I mean, a critical distinction needs to be made between two meanings of the term “complex adaptive system (CAS)”: A complex system that is adaptive as a system (CAS1), and a complex system composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies (CAS2). A human society in the grip of civil war is an example of CAS2. It can be understood in terms of the conflicting interests of the warring factions, but it does not function well at the level of the whole society (CAS1) and no one would expect it to.
Many single-species societies in nature are like my human civil war example. Members of social groups are largely in conflict with each other and at most cooperate in specific contexts. We need look no further than chimpanzee communities for an example, where naked aggression is over 100 times more frequent than in small-scale human communities and the main context for community-wide cooperation is aggression against neighboring communities. Social strife in chimpanzee communities is stable—there is no reason to expect it to change, given the selection pressures that are operating—but that doesn’t make them harmonious or desirable from a human perspective.
Many multispecies ecosystems are also like this. For example, if you want to understand the nature of beaver ecosystems, ask the question “what’s in it for the beavers?” They are modifying the environment for their own benefit, flooding it to protect themselves from predators and eating the most palatable plants. Consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling are collateral effects of beavers pursuing their interests. There is no reason to expect the whole ecosystem to be functionally organized and harmonious, any more than a chimpanzee community or a human society in the grip of civil war.
This is a hard lesson to learn about nature. We want it to be harmonious. Religious cosmologies often portray nature as harmonious (e.g., the Garden of Eden) except when disturbed by humans. The early study of ecosystems often treated them axiomatically as harmonious. But Darwin’s theory of evolution tells a different story. It tells us that functional organization for any given system, at any given scale, requires a process of selection at that scale. That is the only way to achieve the status of CAS1 rather than merely CAS2, where functionally organized agents impose suffering on each other in the course of pursuing their respective adaptive strategies. That statement goes for human society, single-species animal societies, and multispecies ecosystems.
Are there examples of whole ecosystems that have evolved into superorganisms? Yes! Microbiomes are an example. Every multicellular organism is not only a collection of mostly identical genes but also an ecosystem composed of trillions of microbes comprising thousands of species. When the host organisms differentially survive and reproduce, this is due in part to variation in their microbiomes along with variation in their genes. Thanks to selection at this level, microbiomes have evolved to be largely mutualistic with their hosts. There is also potential for selection among microbes within each host, however, leading to the evolution of pathogenic strains. It all depends on the level of selection.
Nowadays, whole forests are being imagined as mutualistic networks, with trees connected into a network by mycorrhizal fungi. Is such a thing possible? Yes, but only if selection has operated at the scale of whole forests with sufficient strength to counteract selection at lower scales. Otherwise, forests become merely CAS2 systems, composed of species that interact at cross purposes, rather than CAS1 systems.
Above all, it is important to avoid confusing “harmony” with “equilibrium”. Ecologists have started to use the word “regime” to describe stable assemblages of species. This is a well-chosen word because it evokes what we already know about human political regimes. All political regimes have a degree of stability, or we wouldn’t call them regimes, but they span the range from despotic (benefitting a few elites at the expense of everyone else) to inclusive (sharing their benefits with all citizens). Some of the worst regimes are also depressingly the most stable. Using the language of complex systems theory, there are multiple local stable equilibria and positive change requires escaping the gravitational pull of one local equilibrium to enter another local equilibrium. This requires active management and will not necessarily happen by itself. The management of ecosystems must itself be a human cultural evolutionary process informed by multilevel selection theory.
Combining the legacies
In this remembrance of Ed Wilson, I have tried to honor the person while also placing him in the context of broad trends in the history of science. Without mentioning Ed, we can say that Darwin’s theory of evolution has an amazing explanatory scope, that this scope was largely restricted to the study of genetic evolution for most of the 20th century, but now is rapidly expanding to include all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life. As I put it in my own book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, Dobzhansky’s statement “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” can be extended to include everything associated with the words “human”, “culture”, and “policy”.
Without mentioning Ed, we can also say that evolutionary theory is capable of functioning as a worldview in addition to a body of scientific knowledge. Science only tells us what is, whereas a worldview inspires us psychologically and moves us to action. Creating a worldview informed entirely by science, as opposed to supernatural belief, is part of the enlightenment project that led to humanism as a philosophical worldview and social movement. While humanists accept Darwin’s theory as a matter of course, the recent developments that I have recounted have not been incorporated into the humanist movement for the most part. Thus, humanism and what it stands for is due for a renaissance, along with a renaissance of basic scientific knowledge.
Some simple calculations will help to put Ed’s career into historical perspective. Starting from when he received his Ph.D. in 1955 to his death in 2021, his career lasted for 66 years. If we mark the beginning of evolutionary science with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, then Ed was present for 40% of the history of evolutionary thought. If we mark the beginning of the scientific revolution with the publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, then Ed was present for 14% of the scientific revolution. As 20 years Ed’s junior, my numbers work out to 28% and 10% respectively.
These numbers remind us that evolutionary science and the scientific revolution are still works in progress. If science in general and evolutionary science, in particular, have revolutionized the way we see and therefore act upon the world, then we can look forward to further improvements in the near future. This leads to a form of hope and optimism, even in the darkest of times, that is part of Ed’s legacy.
For me, the next frontier is not just ecosystems but becoming wise stewards of evolution in all its forms. Variation/selection/replication processes are taking place all around us at different time scales, including genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and intra-generational personal evolution. Without wise stewardship, these evolutionary processes result merely in CAS2—complex systems composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies, often inflicting harm on each other and on the entire system over the long term. Work is required to transform CAS2 into CAS1—systems that are adaptive as whole systems. This work will be required for all forms of positive change—individual, cultural, and ecosystemic. The ability to see this clearly and to act upon it has only become available during the last few decades and is currently shared by only a tiny fraction of those who need to know about it. Catalysis is needed, so that positive evolution can take place in a matter of years rather than decades or not at all. The best way to honor Ed’s combined legacies is to join in this catalysis.
Research shows that a positive attitude to ageing can lead to a longer, healthier life, while negative beliefs can have hugely detrimental effects
For more than a decade, Paddy Jones has been wowing audiences across the world with her salsa dancing. She came to fame on the Spanish talent show Tú Sí Que Vales (You’re Worth It) in 2009 and has since found success in the UK, through Britain’s Got Talent; in Germany, on Das Supertalent; in Argentina, on the dancing show Bailando; and in Italy, where she performed at the Sanremo music festival in 2018 alongside the band Lo Stato Sociale.
Jones also happens to be in her mid-80s, making her the world’s oldest acrobatic salsa dancer, according to Guinness World Records. Growing up in the UK, Jones had been a keen dancer and had performed professionally before she married her husband, David, at 22 and had four children. It was only in retirement that she began dancing again – to widespread acclaim. “I don’t plead my age because I don’t feel 80 or act it,” Jones told an interviewer in 2014.
According to a wealth of research that now spans five decades, we would all do well to embrace the same attitude – since it can act as a potent elixir of life. People who see the ageing process as a potential for personal growth tend to enjoy much better health into their 70s, 80s and 90s than people who associate ageing with helplessness and decline, differences that are reflected in their cells’ biological ageing and their overall life span.
Salsa dancer Paddy Jones, centre. Photograph: Alberto Teren
Of all the claims I have investigated for my new book on the mind-body connection, the idea that our thoughts could shape our ageing and longevity was by far the most surprising. The science, however, turns out to be incredibly robust. “There’s just such a solid base of literature now,” says Prof Allyson Brothers at Colorado State University. “There are different labs in different countries using different measurements and different statistical approaches and yet the answer is always the same.”
If I could turn back time
The first hints that our thoughts and expectations could either accelerate or decelerate the ageing process came from a remarkable experiment by the psychologist Ellen Langer at Harvard University.
In 1979, she asked a group of 70- and 80-year-olds to complete various cognitive and physical tests, before taking them to a week-long retreat at a nearby monastery that had been redecorated in the style of the late 1950s. Everything at the location, from the magazines in the living room to the music playing on the radio and the films available to watch, was carefully chosen for historical accuracy.
The researchers asked the participants to live as if it were 1959. They had to write a biography of themselves for that era in the present tense and they were told to act as independently as possible. (They were discouraged from asking for help to carry their belongings to their room, for example.) The researchers also organised twice-daily discussions in which the participants had to talk about the political and sporting events of 1959 as if they were currently in progress – without talking about events since that point. The aim was to evoke their younger selves through all these associations.
To create a comparison, the researchers ran a second retreat a week later with a new set of participants. While factors such as the decor, diet and social contact remained the same, these participants were asked to reminisce about the past, without overtly acting as if they were reliving that period.
Most of the participants showed some improvements from the baseline tests to the after-retreat ones, but it was those in the first group, who had more fully immersed themselves in the world of 1959, who saw the greatest benefits. Sixty-three per cent made a significant gain on the cognitive tests, for example, compared to just 44% in the control condition. Their vision became sharper, their joints more flexible and their hands more dextrous, as some of the inflammation from their arthritis receded.
As enticing as these findings might seem, Langer’s was based on a very small sample size. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and the idea that our mindset could somehow influence our physical ageing is about as extraordinary as scientific theories come.
Becca Levy, at the Yale School of Public Health, has been leading the way to provide that proof. In one of her earliest – and most eye-catching – papers, she examined data from the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement that examined more than 1,000 participants since 1975.
The participants’ average age at the start of the survey was 63 years old and soon after joining they were asked to give their views on ageing. For example, they were asked to rate their agreement with the statement: “As you get older, you are less useful”. Quite astonishingly, Levy found the average person with a more positive attitude lived on for 22.6 years after the study commenced, while the average person with poorer interpretations of ageing survived for just 15 years. That link remained even after Levy had controlled for their actual health status at the start of the survey, as well as other known risk factors, such as socioeconomic status or feelings of loneliness, which could influence longevity.
The implications of the finding are as remarkable today as they were in 2002, when the study was first published. “If a previously unidentified virus was found to diminish life expectancy by over seven years, considerable effort would probably be devoted to identifying the cause and implementing a remedy,” Levy and her colleagues wrote. “In the present case, one of the likely causes is known: societally sanctioned denigration of the aged.”
Later studies have since reinforced the link between people’s expectations and their physical ageing, while dismissing some of the more obvious – and less interesting – explanations. You might expect that people’s attitudes would reflect their decline rather than contribute to the degeneration, for example. Yet many people will endorse certain ageist beliefs, such as the idea that “old people are helpless”, long before they should have started experiencing age-related disability themselves. And Levy has found that those kinds of views, expressed in people’s mid-30s, can predict their subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease up to 38 years later.
The most recent findings suggest that age beliefs may play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Tracking 4,765 participants over four years, the researchers found that positive expectations of ageing halved the risk of developing the disease, compared to those who saw old age as an inevitable period of decline. Astonishingly, this was even true of people who carried a harmful variant of the APOE gene, which is known to render people more susceptible to the disease. The positive mindset can counteract an inherited misfortune, protecting against the build-up of the toxic plaques and neuronal loss that characterise the disease.
How could this be?
Behaviour is undoubtedly important. If you associate age with frailty and disability, you may be less likely to exercise as you get older and that lack of activity is certainly going to increase your predisposition to many illnesses, including heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
Importantly, however, our age beliefs can also have a direct effect on our physiology. Elderly people who have been primed with negative age stereotypes tend to have higher systolic blood pressure in response to challenges, while those who have seen positive stereotypes demonstrate a more muted reaction. This makes sense: if you believe that you are frail and helpless, small difficulties will start to feel more threatening. Over the long term, this heightened stress response increases levels of the hormone cortisol and bodily inflammation, which could both raise the risk of ill health.
The consequences can even be seen within the nuclei of the individual cells, where our genetic blueprint is stored. Our genes are wrapped tightly in each cell’s chromosomes, which have tiny protective caps, called telomeres, which keep the DNA stable and stop it from becoming frayed and damaged. Telomeres tend to shorten as we age and this reduces their protective abilities and can cause the cell to malfunction. In people with negative age beliefs, that process seems to be accelerated – their cells look biologically older. In those with the positive attitudes, it is much slower – their cells look younger.
For many scientists, the link between age beliefs and long-term health and longevity is practically beyond doubt. “It’s now very well established,” says Dr David Weiss, who studies the psychology of ageing at Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. And it has critical implications for people of all generations.
Birthday cards sent to Captain Tom Moore for his 100th birthday – many cards for older people have a less respectful tone. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Our culture is saturated with messages that reinforce the damaging age beliefs. Just consider greetings cards, which commonly play on of images depicting confused and forgetful older people. “The other day, I went to buy a happy 70th birthday card for a friend and I couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t a joke,” says Martha Boudreau, the chief communications officer of AARP, a special interest group (formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons) that focuses on the issues of over-50s.
She would like to see greater awareness – and intolerance – of age stereotypes, in much the same way that people now show greater sensitivity to sexism and racism. “Celebrities, thought leaders and influencers need to step forward,” says Boudreau.
In the meantime, we can try to rethink our perceptions of our own ageing. Various studies show that our mindsets are malleable. By learning to reject fatalistic beliefs and appreciate some of the positive changes that come with age, we may avoid the amplified stress responses that arise from exposure to negative stereotypes and we may be more motivated to exercise our bodies and minds and to embrace new challenges.
We could all, in other words, learn to live like Paddy Jones.
When I interviewed Jones, she was careful to emphasise the potential role of luck in her good health. But she agrees that many people have needlessly pessimistic views of their capabilities, over what could be their golden years, and encourages them to question the supposed limits. “If you feel there’s something you want to do, and it inspires you, try it!” she told me. “And if you find you can’t do it, then look for something else you can achieve.”
Whatever our current age, that’s surely a winning attitude that will set us up for greater health and happiness for decades to come.
This is an edited extract fromThe Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life by David Robson, published by Canongate on 6 January (£18.99).
Edison Veiga – De Bled (Eslovênia) para a BBC News Brasil
31 dezembro 2021
Legenda da foto, Zélio, em foto publicada pelo jornal A Gazeta de São Gonçalo, extinto em 1937
Se a tentativa era criar uma espécie de mito da religião nacional por excelência, elementos simbólicos não faltam na história de como o médium fluminense Zélio Fernandino de Moraes (1891-1975) teria criado a umbanda.
A começar pela data: 15 de novembro de 1908. Sim, um 15 de novembro, aniversário da Proclamação da República, data portanto da criação do Brasil contemporâneo.
E também pela história: no transe vivido por Zélio, ele teria dialogado com espíritos de negros e indígenas e, por fim, incorporado um padre jesuíta italiano que havia pregado no Brasil colonial — e acusado de bruxaria.
Mais simbólico do sincretismo cultural, étnico e religioso do Brasil, impossível.
Por outro lado, e é esse o ponto que vem sendo revisto e muito criticado por pesquisadores contemporâneos da umbanda, considerar Zélio o precursor dessa religião é também resultado de um processo de embranquecimento — é negar que a umbanda já vinha sendo praticada por negros oriundos da África e seus descendentes em solo brasileiro, é entregar a primazia da religião afrobrasileira a um homem branco.
“Não é um assunto novo: a história de Zélio como fundador da umbanda vem sendo questionada. Eu não o considero fundador da umbanda porque a umbanda é muito anterior a isso”, crava o sociólogo Lucas de Lucena Fiorotti, autor da página Abrindo a Gira, no Instagram.
“Ele se tornou uma figura importante em função do embranquecimento [da umbanda]. Ele é importante para um tipo de umbanda, que no passado queriam chamar de ‘espiritismo de umbanda’. Quem o celebra como fundador da umbanda não tem culpa. A culpa é do projeto de país”, acrescenta Fiorotti.
Para o historiador Guilherme Watanabe, pai de santo do terreiro Urubatão da Guia, em São Paulo e membro fundador do Coletivo Navalha, Zélio é “a representação de uma grande construção histórica”, do “mito de fundação que, a partir dos anos 1960, começa a se fazer no Rio”. “Uma grande mentira”, sentencia.
O que teria acontecido em 1908
Filho de uma família tradicional de São Gonçalo, na região metropolitana do Rio, Zélio estava se preparando para seguir carreira militar na Marinha quando foi acometido por uma paralisia. Ele tinha 17 anos. Acamado por alguns dias, teria declarado que “amanhã estarei curado” e, de fato, no dia seguinte levantou-se como se nada houvesse acontecido.
Diante da surpresa dos médicos, os familiares decidiram recorrer a padres católicos — que também não souberam explicar o que havia sucedido ao jovem.
Para a família, Zélio sofria de distúrbios espirituais. Então, por indicação de um amigo, levaram-no até a Federação Espírita do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, então sediada em Niterói.
O médium presidente da entidade teria organizado uma sessão espírita, com Zélio à mesa. Na ocasião, conforme relatos da época, houve a manifestação de espíritos de ancestrais africanos, os chamados “pretos-velhos”, e indígenas, os “caboclos”.
O dirigente da sessão, então, teria classificado tais espíritos como atrasados e solicitado que eles se retirassem. Foi quando Zélio acabaria incorporando uma entidade, o chamado “Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas”, em defesa dos pretos-velhos e dos caboclos. E disse que se ali não houvesse espaço para que negros e indígenas “cumprissem sua missão”, ele, o tal caboclo, fundaria no dia seguinte um novo culto — na casa de Zélio.
Seria então 15 de novembro de 1908. E, para muitos, se trata do marco fundador da umbanda, como uma nova religião do Brasil.
A partir do episódio, Zélio e o Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas seriam identidades indissociáveis. De acordo com o médium, a entidade seria a manifestação do padre jesuíta italiano Gabriel Malagrida (1689-1761), um missionário que chegou a andar pelo Brasil catequizando indígenas e, mais tarde, acusado de bruxaria e heresia, foi morto pela fogueira da Inquisição em Lisboa.
“Ele é caboclo mas, dentro do mito, também é um padre jesuíta. O que cria uma disforia total, uma loucura promovida pelo processo de embranquecimento [da umbanda]”, diz Fiorotti.
Crédito: Domínio Público. Ilustração antiga e recortada do padre Gabriel Malagrida, morto pela Inquisição em Lisboa
Segundo a narrativa de Zélio, na “última existência física”, Deus teria concedido a Malagrida “o privilégio de nascer como caboclo brasileiro”.
Com esse caldo cultural multiétnico, estava criado o mito da fundação da umbanda.
‘Embranquecimento’
Conforme explica o sacerdote de umbanda David Dias, pesquisador em ciência da religião na Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), a história de Zélio pode ser vista sob duas óticas.
“A primeira traz sua vida contada por meio dos manuais de umbanda e mantida pela sua família, a qual assegura sua memória até os dias de hoje. Já a segunda é contada por meio de um mito de criação onde cada um que conta aumenta uma ponta, deixando na história contada uma lenda de existência questionável”, pondera ele.
Dias lembra que um dos relatos atesta que, entre a consulta médica, o conselho dos padres e a famosa sessão espírita, Zélio teria sido levado a uma benzedeira do Rio. E fora ela, incorporando um preto-velho, que dera a sentença: àquele jovem seria reservada uma grande missão pela frente.
O pesquisador ressalta que há ainda um fato importante que só reforça a ideia de que muitos detalhes não tenham passado de ficção para azeitar uma mitologia da fundação.
“Na ata de 15 de novembro de 1908 da citada federação [espírita] não há registros destes fatos, o nome do dirigente da suposta sessão não confere com a história, nem mesmo o nome de Zélio se faz presente”, afirma Dias.
Por fim, ele lembra ainda que a figura do Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas também apresenta “incongruências”.
Segundo especialistas, a história de Zélio como fundador da umbanda foi uma construção que passou a tomar forma nos anos 1960, quando o médium já era idoso.
Em 1961, a jornalista e umbandista Lilia Ribeiro publicou pela primeira vez essa versão no jornal informativo Macaia, ligado à Tenda de Umbanda Luz, Esperança e Caridade, da qual ela era dirigente.
Após a morte de Zélio, essa narrativa se consolidou. Em dezembro de 1978, por exemplo, a Revista Planeta, publicação da Editora Três que hoje não circula mais, trouxe uma grande reportagem intitulada Como surgiu a umbanda em nosso país: 70o. aniversário de uma religião brasileira, na qual todos os elementos dessa mitologia fundadora estavam presentes.
Fiorotti acredita que então Zélio se torna “uma figura importante para a umbanda hegemônica”.
Mas que tudo seria um esforço sistêmico para apagar as raízes realmente africanas — e anteriores ao século 20.
“Há indícios de que já havia práticas de umbanda muito semelhantes tanto em ritualística quanto em estética ao que acontece hoje muito antes de 1908”, diz ele.
“Essa umbanda que tem Zélio como fundador é uma umbanda muito associada ao espiritismo em si. Mas há diversos autores que se sentem contemplados por essa narrativa e eles são pessoas fortemente associadas ao espiritismo e a algumas ideias esotéricas, místicas. Fogem da vivência do terreiro de fato. A estrutura umbandista já existia no século 19.”
Crédito: Reprodução/Correios. Selo em homenagem a Zélio de Moraes
Watanabe lembra que a própria palavra umbanda vem das línguas quimbundo e umbundu da África Central e “significa algo como arte ou maneira de curar”.
“É uma palavra que existe há muito tempo e, como sendo arte ou maneira de curar, se trata de uma prática medicinal e espiritual feita por um médico feiticeiro”, contextualiza.
“Algo que já era praticado por centro-africanos desde muito tempo atrás e, a partir da diáspora, do tráfico de escravizados, acaba sendo trazido ao Brasil. Por isso, no Rio de Janeiro do século 19 já havia diversas casas de feiticeiros africanos.”
Para Fiorotti, a mitologia de Zélio é, na verdade, a tentativa do “embranquecimento da umbanda, dentro da ideia da democracia racial, de que não há racismo no Brasil, de que as relações raciais são simétricas”.
“Essa umbanda do Zélio está na esteira desse país que começa a se pensar como mestiço para disfarçar os problemas das relações sociais”, aponta.
Assim, Zélio teria sido “usado” como “uma história privilegiada para encarnar a umbanda da democracia racial”, enfatiza o pesquisador.
E a consolidação desse estilo deixou como legado uma série de “descaracterização das divindades, dos orixás, dos espíritos”.
“Por exemplo, ao dizer que um caboclo, que é indígena, pode ser um branco. Ou dizendo que um preto-velho pode ser uma pessoa branca. São absurdos. Mas a partir dessa umbanda [de Zélio], isso passou a ser possível”, exemplifica.
“Zélio é a história de um homem branco classe média que se apropria da cultura dos centro-africanos e seus descendentes”, resume o historiador Watanabe. “Além disso, apaga e invisibiliza a cultura dos centro-africanos ao se dizer fundador de algo que, na verdade, já existia.”
E de onde vêm as sete encruzilhadas? A resposta está na própria ideia umbandista do que é uma encruzilhada.
“É um conceito: estar na encruzilhada, ao contrário do que as pessoas costumam pensar, é desejável. Porque tudo é feito de caminhos. Um caminho reto, sem possibilidades, não é desejável. O desejável é estarmos na encruzilhada, onde não há caminho fechado”, explica o sociólogo Fiorotti.
“Sete encruzilhadas, assim, é o infinito de possibilidades”, conclui ele.
The climate crisis resembles a huge planetary lockdown, trapping humanity within an ever-deteriorating environment
‘The shallow layer of earth in which we live … has been transformed into a habitable milieu by the aeons-long labour of evolution.’ Photograph: Jon Helgason/Alamy
Fri 24 Dec 2021 14.00 GMT
There is a moment when a never-ending crisis turns into a way of life. This seems to be the case with the pandemic. If so, it’s wise to explore the permanent condition in which it has left us. One obvious lesson is that societies have to learn once again to live with pathogens, just as they learned to when microbes were first made visible by the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.
These discoveries were concerned with only one aspect of microbial life. When you also consider the various sciences of the earth system, another aspect of viruses and bacteria comes to the fore. During the long geochemical history of the earth, microbes, together with fungi and plants, have been essential, and are still essential, to the very composition of the environment in which we humans live. The pandemic has shown us that we will never escape the invasive presence of these living beings, entangled as we are with them. They react to our actions; if they mutate, we have to mutate as well.
This is why the many national lockdowns, imposed on citizens to help them survive the virus, are a powerful analogy for the situation in which humanity finds itself detained for good. Lockdown was painful enough, and yet many ways have been found, thanks in part to vaccination, to allow people to resume a semblance of normal life. But there is no possibility of such a resumption if you consider that all living forms are locked down for good inside the limits of the earth. And by “earth” I don’t mean the planet as it can be seen from space, but its very superficial pellicle, the shallow layer of earth in which we live, and which has been transformed into a habitable milieu by the aeons-long labour of evolution.
This thin matrix is what geochemists call the “critical zone”, the only layer of earth where terrestrial life can flourish. It’s in this finite space where everything we care for and everything we have ever encountered exists.There is no way of escaping our earth-bound existence; as young climate activists shout: “There is no planet B.” Here is the connection between the Covid lockdowns we have experienced in the past two years, and the much larger but definitive state of lockdown that we find ourselves in: we are trapped in an environment that we have already altered irreversibly.
If we have been made aware of the agency of viruses in shaping our social relations, we must now reckon with the fact that they will also be moulded for ever by the climate crisis and the quick reactions of ecosystems to our actions. The feeling that we live in a new space appears again at the local as well as the global level. Why would all nations convene in Glasgow to keep global temperature rises below some agreed upon limit, if they did not have the sensation that a huge lid had been put over their territory? When you look up at the blue sky, are you not aware that you are now under some sort of dome inside which you are locked?
Gone is the infinite space; now you are responsible for the safety of this overbearing dome as much as you are for your own health and wealth. It weighs on you, body and soul. To survive under these new conditions we have to undergo a sort of metamorphosis.
This is where politics enters. It is very difficult for most people used to the industrialised way of life, with its dream of infinite space and its insistence on emancipation and relentless growth and development, to suddenly sense that it is instead enveloped, confined, tucked inside a closed space where their concerns have to be shared with new entities: other people of course, but also viruses, soils, coal, oil, water, and, worst of all, this damned, constantly shifting climate.
This disorienting shift is unprecedented, even cosmological, and it is already a source of deep political divisions. Although the sentence “you and I don’t live on the same planet” used to be a joking expression of dissent, it has become true of our present reality. We do live on different planets, with rich people employing private fire fighters and scouting for climate bunkers, while their poorer counterparts are forced to migrate, suffer and die amid the worst consequences of the crisis.
This is why it is important not to misconstrue the political conundrum of our present age. It is of the same magnitude as when, from the 17th century onward, westerners had to shift from the closed cosmos of the past to the infinite space of the modern period. As the cosmos seemed to open, political institutions had to be invented to work through the new and utopian possibilities offered by the Enlightenment. Now, in reverse, the same task falls to present generations: what new political institutions could they invent to cope with people so divided that they belong to different planets?
It would be a mistake to believe that the pandemic is a crisis that will end, instead of the perfect warning for what is coming, what I call the new climatic regime. It appears that all the resources of science, humanities and the arts will have to be mobilised once again to shift attention to our shared terrestrial condition.
Bruno Latour is a philosopher and anthropologist, the author of After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis and the winner of the 2013 Holberg prize
Cold era, lasting from early 15th to mid-19th centuries, triggered by unusually warm conditions
Date: December 15, 2021
Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Summary: New research provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.
New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.
The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in around 600 years ago, was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death for millions. To date, the mechanisms that led to this harsh climate state have remained inconclusive. However, a new paper published recently in Science Advances gives an up-to-date picture of the events that brought about the Little Ice Age. Surprisingly, the cooling appears to have been triggered by an unusually warm episode.
When lead author Francois Lapointe, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in geosciences at UMass Amherst and Raymond Bradley, distinguished professor in geosciences at UMass Amherst began carefully examining their 3,000-year reconstruction of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, they noticed something surprising: a sudden change from very warm conditions in the late 1300s to unprecedented cold conditions in the early 1400s, only 20 years later.
Using many detailed marine records, Lapointe and Bradley discovered that there was an abnormally strong northward transfer of warm water in the late 1300s which peaked around 1380. As a result, the waters south of Greenland and the Nordic Seas became much warmer than usual. “No one has recognized this before,” notes Lapointe.
Normally, there is always a transfer of warm water from the tropics to the Arctic. It’s a well-known process called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is like a planetary conveyor belt. Typically, warm water from the tropics flows north along the coast of Northern Europe, and when it reaches higher latitudes and meets colder Arctic waters, it loses heat and becomes denser, causing the water to sink at the bottom of the ocean. This deep-water formation then flows south along the coast of North America and continues on to circulate around the world.
But in the late 1300s, AMOC strengthened significantly, which meant that far more warm water than usual was moving north, which in turn cause rapid Arctic ice loss. Over the course of a few decades in the late 1300s and 1400s, vast amounts of ice were flushed out into the North Atlantic, which not only cooled the North Atlantic waters, but also diluted their saltiness, ultimately causing AMOC to collapse. It is this collapse that then triggered a substantial cooling.
Fast-forward to our own time: between the 1960s and 1980s, we have also seen a rapid strengthening of AMOC, which has been linked with persistently high pressure in the atmosphere over Greenland. Lapointe and Bradley think the same atmospheric situation occurred just prior to the Little Ice Age — but what could have set off that persistent high-pressure event in the 1380s?
The answer, Lapointe discovered, is to be found in trees. Once the researchers compared their findings to a new record of solar activity revealed by radiocarbon isotopes preserved in tree rings, they discovered that unusually high solar activity was recorded in the late 1300s. Such solar activity tends to lead to high atmospheric pressure over Greenland.
At the same time, fewer volcanic eruptions were happening on earth, which means that there was less ash in the air. A “cleaner” atmosphere meant that the planet was more responsive to changes in solar output. “Hence the effect of high solar activity on the atmospheric circulation in the North-Atlantic was particularly strong,” said Lapointe.
Lapointe and Bradley have been wondering whether such an abrupt cooling event could happen again in our age of global climate change. They note that there is now much less Arctic sea ice due to global warming, so an event like that in the early 1400s, involving sea ice transport, is unlikely. “However, we do have to keep an eye on the build-up of freshwater in the Beaufort Sea (north of Alaska) which has increased by 40% in the past two decades. Its export to the subpolar North Atlantic could have a strong impact on oceanic circulation,” said Lapointe. “Also, persistent periods of high pressure over Greenland in summer have been much more frequent over the past decade and are linked with record-breaking ice melt. Climate models do not capture these events reliably and so we may be underestimating future ice loss from the ice sheet, with more freshwater entering the North Atlantic, potentially leading to a weakening or collapse of the AMOC.” The authors conclude that there is an urgent need to address these uncertainties.
This research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
Journal Reference:
Francois Lapointe, Raymond S. Bradley. Little Ice Age abruptly triggered by intrusion of Atlantic waters into the Nordic Seas. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (51) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi8230
IS IT NEARLY over? In 2021 people have been yearning for something like stability. Even those who accepted that they would never get their old lives back hoped for a new normal. Yet as 2022 draws near, it is time to face the world’s predictable unpredictability. The pattern for the rest of the 2020s is not the familiar routine of the pre-covid years, but the turmoil and bewilderment of the pandemic era. The new normal is already here.
Remember how the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 began to transform air travel in waves. In the years that followed each fresh plot exposed an unforeseen weakness that required a new rule. First came locked cockpit doors, more armed air marshals and bans on sharp objects. Later, suspicion fell on bottles of liquid, shoes and laptops. Flying did not return to normal, nor did it establish a new routine. Instead, everything was permanently up for revision.
The world is similarly unpredictable today and the pandemic is part of the reason. For almost two years people have lived with shifting regimes of mask-wearing, tests, lockdowns, travel bans, vaccination certificates and other paperwork. As outbreaks of new cases and variants ebb and flow, so these regimes can also be expected to come and go. That is the price of living with a disease that has not yet settled into its endemic state.
And covid-19 may not be the only such infection. Although a century elapsed between the ravages of Spanish flu and the coronavirus, the next planet-conquering pathogen could strike much sooner. Germs thrive in an age of global travel and crowded cities. The proximity of people and animals will lead to the incubation of new human diseases. Such zoonoses, which tend to emerge every few years, used to be a minority interest. For the next decade, at least, you can expect each new outbreak to trigger paroxysms of precaution.
Covid has also helped bring about today’s unpredictable world indirectly, by accelerating change that was incipient. The pandemic has shown how industries can be suddenly upended by technological shifts. Remote shopping, working from home and the Zoom boom were once the future. In the time of covid they rapidly became as much of a chore as picking up the groceries or the daily commute.
Big technological shifts are nothing new. But instead of taking centuries or decades to spread around the world, as did the printing press and telegraph, new technologies become routine in a matter of years. Just 15 years ago, modern smartphones did not exist. Today more than half of the people on the planet carry one. Any boss who thinks their industry is immune to such wild dynamism is unlikely to last long.
The pandemic may also have ended the era of low global inflation that began in the 1990s and was ingrained by economic weakness after the financial crisis of 2007-09. Having failed to achieve a quick recovery then, governments spent nearly $11trn trying to ensure that the harm caused by the virus was transient.
They broadly succeeded, but fiscal stimulus and bunged-up supply chains have raised global inflation above 5%. The apparent potency of deficit spending will change how recessions are fought. As they raise interest rates to deal with inflation, central banks may find themselves in conflict with indebted governments. Amid a burst of innovation around cryptocoins, central-bank digital currencies and fintech, many outcomes are possible. A return to the comfortable macroeconomic orthodoxies of the 1990s is one of the least likely.
The pandemic has also soured relations between the world’s two great powers. America blames China’s secretive Communist Party for failing to contain the virus that emerged from Wuhan at the end of 2019. Some claim that it came from a Chinese laboratory there—an idea China has allowed to fester through its self-defeating resistance to open investigations. For its part, China, which has recorded fewer than 6,000 deaths, no longer bothers to hide its disdain for America, with its huge death toll. In mid-December this officially passed 800,000 (The Economist estimates the full total to be almost 1m). The contempt China and America feel for each other will heighten tensions over Taiwan, the South China Sea, human rights in Xinjiang and the control of strategic technologies.
In the case of climate change, the pandemic has served as an emblem of interdependence. Despite the best efforts to contain them, virus particles cross frontiers almost as easily as molecules of methane and carbon dioxide. Scientists from around the world showed how vaccines and medicines can save hundreds of millions of lives. However, hesitancy and the failure to share doses frustrated their plans. Likewise, in a world that is grappling with global warming, countries that have everything to gain from working together continually fall short. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, the accumulation of long-lasting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means that extreme and unprecedented weather of the kind seen during 2021 is here to stay.
The desire to return to a more stable, predictable world may help explain a 1990s revival. You can understand the appeal of going back to a decade in which superpower competition had abruptly ended, liberal democracy was triumphant, suits were oversized, work ended when people left the office, and the internet was not yet disrupting cosy, established industries or stoking the outrage machine that has supplanted public discourse.
Events, dear boy, events
That desire is too nostalgic. It is worth notching up some of the benefits that come with today’s predictable unpredictability. Many people like to work from home. Remote services can be cheaper and more accessible. The rapid dissemination of technology could bring unimagined advances in medicine and the mitigation of global warming.
Even so, beneath it lies the unsettling idea that once a system has crossed some threshold, every nudge tends to shift it further from the old equilibrium. Many of the institutions and attitudes that brought stability in the old world look ill-suited to the new. The pandemic is like a doorway. Once you pass through, there is no going back. ■
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “The new normal”
As alarm about climate change and calls for action intensify, solar geoengineering (SG) is seeing increased attention and controversy. Views on whether it should or will ever be used diverge, but the evidentiary basis for these views is thin. On such a high-stakes, knowledge-limited issue, one might expect strong support for research, but even research has met opposition. Opponents’ objections are grounded in valid concerns but impossible to fully address, as they are framed in ways that make rejecting research an axiom, not a conclusion based on evidence.
Supporters of SG research argue that it can inform future decisions and prepare for likely future calls for deployment. A US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report earlier this year lent thoughtful support to this view. Opponents raise well-known concerns about SG such as its imperfect climate correction, its time-scale mismatch with greenhouse gases (GHGs), and the potential to over-rely on it or use it recklessly or unjustly. They oppose research based on the same concerns, arguing that usage can never be acceptable so research is superfluous; or that sociopolitical lock-in will drive research toward deployment even if unwarranted. Both support and opposition are often implicit, embedded in debates over additional governance of SG research beyond peer review, program management, and regulatory compliance.
At present, potential SG methods and claimed benefits and harms are hypothetical, not demonstrated. The strongest objections to research invoke potential consequences that are indirect, mediated by imprudent or unjust policy decisions. Because the paths from research to these bad outcomes involve political behavior, claims that these “could” happen cannot be fully refuted. Understanding and limiting these risks require the same research and governance-building activities that opponents reject as causing the risks.
To reject an activity based on harms that might follow is to apply extreme precaution. This can be warranted when there is risk of serious, unmitigable harm and the alternative is known to be acceptable. That is not the case here. Rejecting SG research means taking the alternative trajectory of uncertain but potentially severe climate impacts, reduced by whatever emissions cuts, GHG removals, and adaptation are achieved. But these other responses needed to meet prudent climate targets carry their own risks: of falling short and suffering more severe climate change, and of collateral environmental and socioeconomic harms from deployment at the required transformative, even revolutionary, scale.
Suppressing research on SG might reduce risks from its future use, but this is not assured: Rather than preventing use in some future crisis, blocking research might make such use less informed, cruder, and more dangerous. Even if these risks are reduced, this would shift increased risks onto climate change and crash pursuit of other responses. Total climate-related risk may well increase—and be more unjustly distributed, because the largest benefits of SG appear likely to flow to the most vulnerable people and communities.
Yet the concerns that motivate opposition to research are compelling. SG use would be an unprecedented step, affecting climate response, international governance, sustainability, and global justice. Major concerns—about reckless or rivalrous use, or over-reliance weakening emissions cuts—are essential to address, even if they cannot be avoided with certainty. A few directions show promise for doing so. Research should be in public programs, in jurisdictions with cultures of public benefit and research accountability. The NASEM call for a US federal program is sound. Other national programs should be established. Research governance should be somewhat stronger than for less controversial research, including scale limits on field experiments and periodic program reassessments. Exploration of governance needs for larger-scale interventions should begin well before these are considered. Research and governance should seek broad international cooperation—promptly, but not as a precondition to national programs. Broad citizen consultations are needed on overall climate response and the role of SG. These should link to national research and governance programs but not have veto power over specific activities.
Precaution is appropriate, even necessary. But precaution cannot selectively target risks from one climate response while ignoring its linkages to other responses and risks. Suppressing SG research is likely to make the harms and injustices that opponents fear more likely, not less.
In Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores how technological developments around data are amplifying and automating discrimination and prejudice. Through conceptual innovation and historical details, this book offers engaging and revealing insights into how data exacerbates discrimination in powerful ways, writes David Beer.
Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (mathematical illustrations by Alex Barnett). MIT Press. 2021.
Going back a couple of decades, there was a fair amount of discussion of ‘the digital divide’. Uneven access to networked computers meant that a line was drawn between those who were able to switch-on and those who were not. At the time there was a pressing concern about the disadvantages of a lack of access. With the massive escalation of connectivity since, the notion of a digital divide still has some relevance, but it has become a fairly blunt tool for understanding today’s extensively mediated social constellations. The divides now are not so much a product of access; they are instead a consequence of what happens to the data produced through that access.
With the escalation of data and the establishment of all sorts of analytic and algorithmic processes, the problem of uneven, unjust and harmful treatment is now the focal point for an animated and urgent debate. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s vibrant new book Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognitionmakes a telling intervention. At its centre is the idea that these technological developments around data ‘are amplifying and automating – rather than acknowledging and repairing – the mistakes of a discriminatory past’ (2). Essentially this is the codification and automation of prejudice. Any ideas about the liberating aspects of technology are deflated. Rooted in a longer history of statistics and biometrics, existing ruptures are being torn open by the differential targeting that big data brings.
This is not just about bits of data. Chun suggests that ‘we need […] to understand how machine learning and other algorithms have been embedded with human prejudice and discrimination, not simply at the level of data, but also at the levels of procedure, prediction, and logic’ (16). It is not, then, just about prejudice being in the data itself; it is also how segregation and discrimination are embedded in the way this data is used. Given the scale of these issues, Chun narrows things down further by focusing on four ‘foundational concepts’, with correlation, homophily, authenticity and recognition providing the focal points for interrogating the discriminations of data.
It is the concept of correlation that does much of the gluing work within the study. The centrality of correlation is a subtext in Chun’s own overview of the book, which suggests that ‘Discriminating Data reveals how correlation and eugenic understandings of nature seek to close off the future by operationalizing probabilities; how homophily naturalizes segregation; and how authenticity and recognition foster deviation in order to create agitated clusters of comforting rage’ (27). As well as developing these lines of argument, the use of the concept of correlation also allows Chun to think in deeply historical terms about the trajectory and politics of association and patterning.
For Chun the role of correlation is both complex and performative. It is argued, for instance, that correlations ‘do not simply predict certain actions; they also form them’. This is an established position in the field of critical data studies, with data prescribing and producing the outcomes they are used to anticipate. However, Chun manages to reanimate this position through an exploration of how correlation fits into a wider set of discriminatory data practices. The other performative issue here is the way that people are made-up and grouped through the use of data. Correlations, Chun writes, ‘that lump people into categories based on their being “like” one another amplify the effects of historical inequalities’ (58). Inequalities are reinforced as categories become more obdurate, with data lending them a sense of apparent stability and a veneer of objectivity. Hence the pointed claim that ‘correlation contains within it the seeds of manipulation, segregation and misrepresentation’ (59).
Given this use of data to categorise, it is easy to see why Discriminating Data makes a conceptual link between correlation and homophily – with homophily, as Chun puts it, being the ‘principle that similarity breeds connection’ and can therefore lead to swarming and clustering. The acts of grouping within these data structures mean, for Chun, that ‘homophily not only eases conflict; it also naturalizes discrimination’ (103). Using data correlations to group informs a type of homophily that not only misrepresents and segregates; it also makes these divides seem natural and therefore fixed.
Chun anticipates that there may be some remaining remnants of faith in the seeming democratic properties of these platforms, arguing that ‘homophily reveals and creates boundaries within theoretically flat and diffuse social networks; it distinguishes and discriminates between supposedly equal nodes; it is a tool for discovering bias and inequality and for perpetuating them in the name of “comfort,” predictability, and common sense’ (85). As individuals are moved into categories or groups assumed to be like them, based upon the correlations within their data, so discrimination can readily occur. One of the key observations made by Chun is that data homophily can feel comfortable, especially when encased in predictions, yet this can distract from the actual damages of the underpinning discriminations they contain. Instead, these data ‘proxies can serve to buttress – and justify – discrimination’ (121). For Chun there is a ‘proxy politics’ unfolding in which data not only exacerbates but can also be used to lend legitimacy to discriminatory acts.
As with correlation and homophily, Chun, in a particularly novel twist, also explores how authenticity is itself becoming automated within these data structures. In stark terms, it is argued that ‘authenticity has become so central to our times because it has become algorithmic’ (144). Chun is able to show how a wider cultural push towards notions of the authentic, embodied in things like reality TV, becomes a part of data systems. A broader cultural trend is translated into something renderable in data. Chun explains that the ‘term “algorithmic authenticity” reveals the ways in which users are validated and authenticated by network algorithms’ (144). A system of validation occurs in these spaces, where actions and practices are algorithmically judged and authenticated. Algorithmic authenticity ‘trains them to be transparent’ (241). It pushes a form of openness upon us in which an ‘operationalized authenticity’ develops, especially within social media.
This emphasis upon the authentic draws people into certain types of interaction with these systems. It shows, Chun compellingly puts it, ‘how users have become characters in a drama called “big data”’ (145). The notion of a drama is, of course, not to diminish what is happening but to try to get at its vibrant and role-based nature. It also adds a strong sense of how performance plays out in relation to the broader ideas of data judgment that the book is exploring.
These roles are not something that Chun wants us to accept, arguing instead that ‘if we think through our roles as performers and characters in the drama called “big data,” we do not have to accept the current terms of our deployment’ (170). Examining the artifice of the drama is a means of transformation and challenge. Exposing the drama is to expose the roles and scripts that are in place, enabling them to be questioned and possibly undone. This is not fatalistic or absent of agency; rather, Chun’s point is that ‘we are characters, rather than marionettes’ (248).
There are some powerful cross-currents working through the discussions of the book’s four foundational concepts. The suggestion that big data brings a reversal of hegemony is a particularly telling argument. Chun explains that: ‘Power can now operate through reverse hegemony: if hegemony once meant the creation of a majority by various minorities accepting a dominant worldview […], now hegemonic majorities can emerge when angry minorities, clustered around a shared stigma, are strung together through their mutual opposition to so-called mainstream culture’ (34). This line of argument is echoed in similar terms in the book’s conclusion, clarifying further that ‘this is hegemony in reverse: if hegemony once entailed creating a majority by various minorities accepting – and identifying with – a dominant worldview, majorities now emerge by consolidating angry minorities – each attached to a particular stigma – through their opposition to “mainstream” culture’ (243). In this formulation it would seem that big data may not only be disciplinary but may also somehow gain power by upending any semblance of a dominant ideology. Data doesn’t lead to shared ideas but to the splitting of the sharing of ideas into group-based networks. It does seem plausible that the practices of targeting and patterning through data are unlikely to facilitate hegemony. Yet, it is not just that data affords power beyond hegemony but that it actually seeks to reverse it.
The reader may be caught slightly off-guard by this position. Chun generally seems to picture power as emerging and solidifying through a genealogy of the technologies that have formed into contemporary data infrastructures. In this account power seems to be associated with established structures and operates through correlations, calls for authenticity and the means of recognition. These positions on power – with infrastructures on one side and reverse hegemony on the other – are not necessarily incompatible, yet the discussion of reverse hegemony perhaps stands a little outside of that other vision of power. I was left wondering if this reverse hegemony is a consequence of these more processional operations of power or, maybe, it is a kind of facilitator of them.
Chun’s book looks to bring out the deep divisions that data-informed discrimination has already created and will continue to create. The conceptual innovation and the historical details, particularly on statistics and eugenics, lend the book a deep sense of context that feeds into a range of genuinely engaging and revealing insights and ideas. Through its careful examination of the way that data exacerbates discrimination in very powerful ways, this is perhaps the most telling book yet on the topic. The digital divide may no longer be a particularly useful term but, as Chun’s book makes clear, the role data performs in animating discrimination means that the technological facilitation of divisions has never been more pertinent.
A relação entre o conhecimento genuíno e as doutrinas marginais é mais próxima do muitos querem aceitar, diz historiador especialista em história da ciência
Para as instituições científicas, essas práticas e movimentos enquadram-se na categoria das “pseudociências”. Ou seja, doutrinas baseadas em fundamentos que seus adeptos consideram científicas e, a partir daí, criam uma corrente que se afasta do que é normalmente aceito pelo mundo acadêmico.
Mas como distinguir o que é ciência daquilo que se faz passar por ciência?
Essa tarefa é muito mais complicada do que parece, segundo Michael Gordin, professor da Universidade Princeton, nos Estados Unidos, e especialista em história da ciência. Gordin é autor do livro On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (“Na Fronteira: Onde a Ciência Encontra a Pseudociência”, em tradução livre).
Seu livro detalha como operam as pseudociências e como, do seu ponto de vista, são uma consequência inevitável do progresso científico.
Em entrevista à BBC News Mundo (o serviço em espanhol da BBC), Gordin detalha a complexa relação entre o que se considera ciência verdadeira e o que ele chama de doutrinas marginais.
Michael Gordin, autor do livro “Na Fronteira: Onde a Ciência Encontra a Pseudociência” (em tradução livre do inglês)
BBC News Mundo – O senhor afirma que não existe uma linha definida separando a ciência da pseudociência, mas a ciência tem um método claro e comprovável. Esta não seria uma diferença clara com relação à pseudociência?
Michael Gordin – Acredita-se normalmente que a ciência tem um único método, mas isso não é verdade. A ciência tem muitos métodos. Os geólogos fazem seu trabalho de forma muito diferente dos físicos teóricos, e os biólogos moleculares, dos neurocientistas. Alguns cientistas trabalham no campo, observando o que acontece. Outros trabalham em laboratório, sob condições controladas. Outros fazem simulações. Ou seja, a ciência tem muitos métodos, que são heterogêneos. A ciência é dinâmica, e esse dinamismo dificulta a definição dessa linha. Podemos tomar um exemplo concreto e dizer que se trata de ciência ou de pseudociência. É fácil com um exemplo concreto.
O problema é que essa linha não é consistente e, quando você observa uma maior quantidade de casos, haverá coisas que antes eram consideradas ciência e agora são consideradas pseudociências, como a astrologia. Existem temas como a deriva dos continentes, que inicialmente era considerada uma teoria marginal e agora é uma teoria básica da geofísica.
Quase tudo o que hoje se considera pseudociência já foi ciência no passado, que foi refutada com o passar do tempo e os que continuam a apoiá-la são considerados lunáticos ou charlatães. Ou seja, a definição do que é ciência ou pseudociência é dinâmica ao longo do tempo. Esta é uma das razões da dificuldade desse julgamento.
Considerada ciência no passado, a astrologia encontra-se hoje no rol das pseudociências – ou doutrinas marginais, segundo Michael Gordin
BBC News Mundo – Mas existem coisas que não se alteram ao longo do tempo. Por exemplo, 2+2 sempre foi igual a 4. Isso quer dizer que a ciência trabalha com base em princípios que não permitem interpretações…
Gordin – Bem, isso não é necessariamente certo. Dois óvnis mais dois óvnis são quatro óvnis.
É interessante que você tenha escolhido a matemática que, de fato, não é uma ciência empírica, pois ela não se refere ao mundo exterior. É uma série de regras que usamos para determinar certas coisas.
Uma das razões pelas quais é muito complicado fazer a distinção é o fato de que as doutrinas marginais observam o que é considerado ciência estabelecida e adaptam a elas seus argumentos e suas técnicas.
Um exemplo é o “criacionismo científico”, que defende que o mundo foi criado em sete dias, 6.000 anos atrás. Existem publicações de criacionismo científico que incluem gráficos matemáticos sobre as razões de decomposição de vários isótopos, para tentar comprovar que a Terra tem apenas 6.000 anos.
Seria genial afirmar que usar a matemática e apresentar gráficos é ciência, mas a realidade é que quase todas as doutrinas marginais usam a matemática de alguma forma.
Os cientistas discordam sobre o tipo de matemática utilizada, mas existem, por exemplo, pessoas que defendem que a matemática avançada utilizada na teoria das cordas já não é científica, porque perdeu a verificação empírica. Trata-se de matemática de alto nível, feita por doutores das melhores universidades, mas existe um debate interno na ciência, entre os físicos, que discutem se ela deve ou não ser considerada ciência.
Não estou dizendo que todos devem ser criacionistas, mas, quando a mecânica quântica foi proposta pela primeira vez, algumas pessoas diziam: “isso parece muito estranho”, “ela não se atém às medições da forma em que acreditamos que funcionem” ou “isso realmente é ciência?”
Nos últimos anos, popularizou-se entre alguns grupos a ideia de que a Terra é plana
BBC News Mundo – Então o sr. afirma que as pseudociências ou doutrinas marginais têm algum valor?
Gordin – A questão é que muitas coisas que consideramos inovadoras provêm dos limites do conhecimento ortodoxo.
O que quero dizer são basicamente três pontos: primeiro, que não existe uma linha divisória clara; segundo, que compreender o que fica de cada lado da linha exige a compreensão do contexto; e, terceiro, que o processo normal da ciência produz doutrinas marginais.
Não podemos descartar essas doutrinas, pois elas são inevitáveis. Elas são um produto derivado da forma como as ciências funcionam.
BBC News Mundo – Isso significa que deveríamos ser mais tolerantes com as pseudociências?
Gordin – Os cientistas, como qualquer outra pessoa, têm tempo e energia limitados e não podem pesquisar tudo.
Por isso, qualquer tempo que for dedicado a refutar ou negar a legitimidade de uma doutrina marginal é tempo que deixa de ser usado para fazer ciência — e talvez nem surta resultados.
As pessoas vêm refutando o criacionismo científico há décadas. Elas trataram de desmascarar a telepatia por ainda mais tempo e ela segue rondando à nossa volta. Existem diversos tipos de ideias marginais. Algumas são muito politizadas e chegam a ser nocivas para a saúde pública ou o meio ambiente. É a estas, a meu ver, que precisamos dedicar atenção e recursos para sua eliminação ou pelo menos explicar por que elas estão erradas.
Mas não acho que outras ideias, como acreditar em óvnis, sejam especificamente perigosas. Acredito que nem mesmo o criacionismo seja tão perigoso como ser antivacinas, ou acreditar que as mudanças climáticas são uma farsa.
Devemos observar as pseudociências como algo inevitável e abordá-las de forma pragmática. Temos uma quantidade de recursos limitada e precisamos escolher quais doutrinas podem causar danos e como enfrentá-las.
Devemos simplesmente tratar de reduzir os danos que elas podem causar? Esse é o caso da vacinação obrigatória, cujo objetivo é evitar os danos, mas sem necessariamente convencer os opositores que eles estão equivocados. Devemos persuadi-los de que estão equivocados? Isso precisa ser examinado caso a caso.
Existem em várias partes do mundo grupos que se opõem às vacinas contra a covid-19
BBC News Mundo – Como então devemos lidar com as pseudociências?
Gordin – Uma possibilidade é reconhecer que são pessoas interessadas na ciência.
Um terraplanista, por exemplo, é uma pessoa interessada na configuração da Terra. Significa que é alguém que teve interesse em pesquisar a natureza e, por alguma razão, seguiu a direção incorreta.
Pode-se então perguntar por que isso aconteceu. Pode-se abordar a pessoa, dizendo: “se você não acredita nesta evidência, em qual tipo de evidência você acreditaria?” ou “mostre-me suas evidências e vamos conversar”.
É algo que poderíamos fazer, mas vale a pena fazê-lo? É uma doutrina que não considero perigosa. Seria um problema se todos os governos do mundo pensassem que a Terra é plana, mas não vejo esse risco.
A versão contemporânea do terraplanismo surgiu há cerca de 15 anos. Acredito que os acadêmicos ainda não compreendem muito bem como aconteceu, nem por que aconteceu tão rápido.
Outra coisa que podemos fazer é não necessariamente persuadi-los de que estão equivocados, porque talvez eles não aceitem, mas tentar entender como esse movimento surgiu e se expandiu. Isso pode nos orientar sobre como enfrentar ameaças mais sérias.
As pessoas que acreditam nas doutrinas marginais muitas vezes tomam elementos da ciência estabelecida para traçar suas conclusões
BBC News Mundo – Ameaças mais sérias como os antivacinas…
Gordin – As vacinas foram inventadas no século 18, sempre houve pessoas que se opusessem a elas, em parte porque todas as vacinas apresentam risco, embora seja muito baixo.
Ao longo do tempo, a forma como se lidou com a questão foi a instituição de um sistema de seguro que basicamente diz o seguinte: você precisa receber a vacina, mas se você receber e tiver maus resultados, nós compensaremos você por esses danos.
Tenho certeza de que isso ocorrerá com a vacina contra a covid, mas ainda não conhecemos todo o espectro, nem a seriedade dos danos que ela poderá causar. Mas os danos e a probabilidade de sua ocorrência parecem ser muito baixos.
Com relação aos antivacinas que acreditam, por exemplo, que a vacina contra a covid contém um chip, a única ação que pode ser tomada para o bem da saúde pública é torná-la obrigatória. Foi dessa forma que se conseguiu erradicar a pólio na maior parte do mundo, mesmo com a existência dos opositores à vacina.
BBC News Mundo – Mas torná-la obrigatória pode fazer com que alguém diga que a ciência está sendo usada com propósitos políticos ou ideológicos…
Gordin – Tenho certeza de que, se o Estado impuser uma vacina obrigatória, alguém dirá isso. Mas não se trata de ideologia. O Estado já obriga tantas coisas e já existem vacinas que são obrigatórias.
E o Estado faz todo tipo de afirmações científicas. Não é permitido o ensino do criacionismo nas escolas, por exemplo, nem a pesquisa de clonagem de seres humanos. Ou seja, o Estado já interveio muitas vezes em disputas científicas e procura fazer isso segundo o consenso científico.
BBC News Mundo – As pessoas que adotam as pseudociências o fazem com base no ceticismo, que é exatamente um dos valores fundamentais da ciência. É um paradoxo, não?
Gordin – Este é um dos motivos por que acredito que não haja uma linha divisória clara entre a ciência e a pseudociência. O ceticismo é uma ferramenta que todos nós utilizamos. A questão é sobre qual tipo de assuntos você é cético e o que pode convencê-lo de um fato específico.
No século 19, havia um grande debate se os átomos realmente existiam ou não. Hoje, praticamente nenhum cientista duvida da sua existência. É assim que a ciência funciona. O foco do ceticismo se move de um lado para outro com o passar do tempo. Quando esse ceticismo se dirige a assuntos que já foram aceitos, às vezes ocorrem problemas, mas há ocasiões em que isso é necessário.
A essência da teoria da relatividade de Einstein é que o éter — a substância através da qual as ondas de luz supostamente viajavam — não existe. Para isso, Einstein concentrou seu ceticismo em um postulado fundamental, mas o fez dizendo que poderiam ser preservados muitos outros conhecimentos que já eram considerados estabelecidos.
Portanto, o ceticismo deve ter um propósito. Se você for cético pelo simples fato de sê-lo, este é um processo que não produz avanços.
O ceticismo é um dos princípios básicos da ciência
BBC News Mundo – É possível que, no futuro, o que hoje consideramos ciência seja descartado como pseudociência?
Gordin – No futuro, haverá muitas doutrinas que serão consideradas pseudociências, simplesmente porque existem muitas coisas que ainda não entendemos.
Existem muitas coisas que não entendemos sobre o cérebro ou o meio ambiente. No futuro, as pessoas olharão para muitas teorias e dirão que estão erradas.
Não é suficiente que uma teoria seja incorreta para que seja considerada pseudociência. É necessário que existam pessoas que acreditem que ela é correta, mesmo que o consenso afirme que se trata de um equívoco e que as instituições científicas considerem que, por alguma razão, ela é perigosa.
The decision to appoint a board of advisors is welcome — and urgent, given the twin challenges of COVID and climate change.
EDITORIAL – 08 December 2021
UN secretary-general António Guterres announced plans for a new science board in September, but is yet to release further details.Credit: Juancho Torres/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Scientists helped to create the United Nations system. Today, people look to UN agencies — such as the UN Environment Programme or the World Health Organization — for reliable data and evidence on, say, climate change or the pandemic. And yet, shockingly, the UN leader’s office has not had a department for science advice for most of its 76-year history. That is about to change.
UN secretary-general António Guterres is planning to appoint a board of scientific advisers, reporting to his office. The decision was announced in September in Our Common Agenda (see go.nature.com/3y1g3hp), which lays out the organization’s vision for the next 25 years, but few other details have been released.
Representatives of the scientific community are excited about the potential for science to have a position at the centre of the UN, but are rightly anxious for rapid action, given the twin challenges of COVID-19 and climate change, which should be urgent priorities for the board. The International Science Council (ISC), the Paris-based non-governmental body representing many of the world’s scientists, recommended such a board in its own report on science and the intergovernmental system, published last week (see go.nature.com/3rjdjos). Council president Peter Gluckman, former chief science adviser to New Zealand’s prime minister, has written to Guterres to say the ISC is ready to help.
But it’s been more than two months since the announcement, and the UN has not yet revealed the names of the board members. Nature spoke to a number of serving and former UN science advisers who said they know little about the UN chief’s plans. So far, there are no terms of reference and there is no timeline.
Nature understands that the idea is still being developed, and that Guterres is leaning towards creating a board that would draw on UN agencies’ existing science networks. Guterres is also aware of the need to take into account that both the UN and the world have changed since the last such board was put in place. All the same, the UN chief needs to end the suspense and set out his plans. Time is of the essence.
Guterres’s predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, had a science advisory board between 2014 and 2016. Its members were tasked with providing advice to the secretary-general on science, technology and innovation for sustainable development. But COVID-19 and climate change have pushed science much higher up the international agenda. Moreover, global challenges are worsening — the pandemic has put back progress towards the UN’s flagship Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a plan to end poverty and achieve sustainability by 2030. There is now widespread recognition that science has an important part to play in addressing these and other challenges.
Research underpins almost everything we know about the nature of the virus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes. All countries have access to similar sets of findings, but many are coming to different decisions on how to act on those data — for example, when to mandate mask-wearing or introduce travel restrictions. The UN’s central office needs advice that takes this socio-cultural-political dimension of science into account. It needs advice from experts who study how science is applied and perceived by different constituencies and in different regions.
Science advice from the heart of the UN system could also help with another problem highlighted by the pandemic — how to reinvigorate the idea that it is essential for countries to cooperate on solving global problems.
Climate change is one example. Advice given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is being read and applied in most countries, albeit to varying degrees. But climate is also an area in which states are at odds. Despite Guterres’s calls for solidarity, there were times during last month’s climate conference in Glasgow when the atmosphere was combative. Science advisers could help the secretary-general’s office to find innovative ways to encourage cooperation between countries in efforts to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
The SDGs are also, to some extent, impeded by competition within the UN system. To tackle climate change, manage land and forests, and protect biodiversity, researchers and policymakers need to work collegially. But the UN’s scientific bodies, such as the IPCC, are set up along disciplinary lines with their own objectives, work programmes and rules, all guided by their own institutional histories. The IPCC and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), for example, have only begun to collaborate in the past few years .
Independence will be key for an advisory role to be credible. Guterres needs to consider an organizational architecture through which UN agencies are represented, and funding could come from outside the UN. But all of those involved would have to accept that their contributions were for common goals — not to promote their own organization’s interests.
Leadership matters, as do communication and support. Guterres should ensure that his scientific advisers are chosen carefully to represent individuals from diverse disciplines and across career stages, and to ensure good representation from low-income countries. The board needs to be well staffed and have a direct line to his office. And it will need a decent budget. Guterres should quickly publish the terms of reference so that the research community has time to provide input and critique.
At its most ambitious, a scientific advisory board to the secretary-general could help to break the culture of individualism that beleaguers efforts to reach collective, global goals, and bring some coherence to the current marketplace of disciplines, ideas and outcomes. This will be a monumental task, requiring significant resources and the will to change. But if the advisers succeed, there will also be valuable lessons for the practice of science, which, as we know all too well, still largely rewards individual effort.
O que o surgimento da internet, os ataques de 11 de setembro de 2001 e a crise econômica de 2008 têm em comum?
Foram eventos extremamente raros e surpreendentes que tiveram um forte impacto na história.
Acontecimentos deste tipo costumam ser chamados de “cisnes negros”.
Alguns argumentam que a recente pandemia de covid-19 também pode ser considerada um deles, mas nem todo mundo concorda.
A “teoria do cisne negro” foi desenvolvida pelo professor, escritor e ex-operador da bolsa libanês-americano Nassim Taleb em 2007.
E possui três componentes, como o próprio Taleb explicou em um artigo no jornal americano The New York Times no mesmo ano:
– Em primeiro lugar, é algo atípico, já que está fora do âmbito das expectativas habituais, porque nada no passado pode apontar de forma convincente para sua possibilidade.
– Em segundo lugar, tem um impacto extremo.
– Em terceiro lugar, apesar de seu status atípico, a natureza humana nos faz inventar explicações para sua ocorrência após o fato em si, tornando-o explicável e previsível.
A tese de Taleb está geralmente associada à economia, mas se aplica a qualquer área.
E uma vez que as consequências costumam ser catastróficas, é importante aceitar que a ocorrência de um evento”cisne negro” é possível — e por isso é necessário ter um plano para lidar com o mesmo.
Em suma, o “cisne negro” representa uma metáfora para algo imprevisível e muito estranho, mas não impossível.
Por que são chamados assim?
No fim do século 17, navios europeus embarcaram na aventura de explorar a Austrália.
Em 1697, enquanto navegava nas águas de um rio desconhecido no sudoeste da Austrália Ocidental, o capitão holandês Willem de Vlamingh avistou vários cisnes negros, sendo possivelmente o primeiro europeu a observá-los.
Como consequência, Vlamingh deu ao rio o nome de Zwaanenrivier (Rio dos Cisnes, em holandês) por causa do grande número de cisnes negros que havia ali.
Tratava-se de um acontecimento inesperado e novo. Até aquele momento, a ciência só havia registrado cisnes brancos.
A primeira referência conhecida ao termo “cisne negro” associado ao significado de raridade vem de uma frase do poeta romano Décimo Júnio Juvenal (60-128).
Desesperado para encontrar uma esposa com todas as “qualidades certas” da época, ele escreveu em latim que esta mulher era rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno (“uma ave rara nestas terras, como um cisne negro”), detalha o dicionário de Oxford.
Porque naquela época e até cerca de 1,6 mil anos depois, para os europeus, não existiam cisnes negros.
Prevendo os ‘cisnes negros’
Um grupo de cientistas da Universidade de Stanford, nos Estados Unidos, está trabalhando para prever o imprevisível.
Ou seja, para se antecipar aos “cisnes negros” — não às aves, mas aos estranhos eventos que acontecem na história.
Embora sua análise primária tenha sido baseada em três ambientes diferentes na natureza, o método computacional que eles criaram pode ser aplicado a qualquer área, incluindo economia e política.
“Ao analisar dados de longo prazo de três ecossistemas, pudemos demonstrar que as flutuações que ocorrem em diferentes espécies biológicas são estatisticamente iguais em diferentes ecossistemas”, afirmou Samuel Bray, assistente de pesquisa no laboratório de Bo Wang, professor de bioengenharia na Universidade de Stanford.
“Isso sugere que existem certos processos universais que podemos utilizar para prever esse tipo de comportamento extremo”, acrescentou Bray, conforme publicado no site da universidade.
Para desenvolver o método de previsão, os pesquisadores procuraram sistemas biológicos que vivenciaram eventos “cisne negro” e como foram os contextos em que ocorreram.
Eles se basearam então em ecossistemas monitorados de perto por muitos anos.
Os exemplos incluíram: um estudo de oito anos do plâncton do Mar Báltico com níveis de espécies medidos duas vezes por semana; medições de carbono de um bosque da Universidade de Harvard, nos EUA, que foram coletadas a cada 30 minutos desde 1991; e medições de cracas (mariscos), algas e mexilhões na costa da Nova Zelândia, feitas mensalmente por mais de 20 anos, detalha o estudo publicado na revista científica Plos Computational Biology.
Os pesquisadores aplicaram a estas bases de dados a teoria física por trás de avalanches e terremotos que, assim como os “cisnes negros”, mostram um comportamento extremo, repentino e de curto prazo.
A partir desta análise, os especialistas desenvolveram um método para prever eventos “cisne negro” que fosse flexível entre espécies e períodos de tempo e também capaz de trabalhar com dados muito menos detalhados e mais complexos.
Posteriormente, conseguiram prever com precisão eventos extremos que ocorreram nesses sistemas.
Até agora, “os métodos se baseavam no que vimos para prever o que pode acontecer no futuro, e é por isso que não costumam identificar os eventos ‘cisne negro'”, diz Wang.
Mas este novo mecanismo é diferente, segundo o professor de Stanford, “porque parte do pressuposto de que estamos vendo apenas parte do mundo”.
“Extrapola um pouco do que falta e ajuda enormemente em termos de previsão”, acrescenta.
Então, os “cisnes negros” poderiam ser detectados em outras áreas, como finanças ou economia?
“Aplicamos nosso método às flutuações do mercado de ações e funcionou muito bem”, disse Wang à BBC News Mundo, serviço de notícias em espanhol da BBC, por e-mail.
Os pesquisadores analisaram os índices Nasdaq, Dow Jones Industrial Average e S&P 500.
“Embora a principal tendência do mercado seja o crescimento exponencial de longo prazo, as flutuações em torno dessa tendência seguem as mesmas trajetórias e escalas médias que vimos nos sistemas ecológicos”, explica.
Mas “embora as semelhanças entre as variações na bolsa e ecológicas sejam interessantes, nosso método de previsão é mais útil nos casos em que os dados são escassos e as flutuações geralmente vão além dos registros históricos (o que não é o caso do mercado de ações)”, adverte Wang.
Por isso, temos que continuar atentos para saber se o próximo “cisne negro” vai nos pegar de surpresa… ou talvez não.
The Port of Savannah in Georgia is the third-largest container port in the United States.
‘It’s Not Sustainable’: What America’s Port Crisis Looks Like Up Close
An enduring traffic jam at the Port of Savannah reveals why the chaos in global shipping is likely to persist.
Published Oct. 10, 2021; Updated Oct. 14, 2021
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Like toy blocks hurled from the heavens, nearly 80,000 shipping containers are stacked in various configurations at the Port of Savannah — 50 percent more than usual.
The steel boxes are waiting for ships to carry them to their final destination, or for trucks to haul them to warehouses that are themselves stuffed to the rafters. Some 700 containers have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for a month or more.
“They’re not coming to get their freight,” complained Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority. “We’ve never had the yard as full as this.”
As he speaks, another vessel glides silently toward an open berth — the 1,207-foot-long Yang Ming Witness, its decks jammed with containers full of clothing, shoes, electronics and other stuff made in factories in Asia. Towering cranes soon pluck the thousands of boxes off the ship — more cargo that must be stashed somewhere.
“Certainly,” Mr. Lynch said, “the stress level has never been higher.”
It has come to this in the Great Supply Chain Disruption: They are running out of places to put things at one of the largest ports in the United States. As major ports contend with a staggering pileup of cargo, what once seemed like a temporary phenomenon — a traffic jam that would eventually dissipate — is increasingly viewed as a new reality that could require a substantial refashioning of the world’s shipping infrastructure.
As the Savannah port works through the backlog, Mr. Lynch has reluctantly forced ships to wait at sea for more than nine days. On a recent afternoon, more than 20 ships were stuck in the queue, anchored up to 17 miles off the coast in the Atlantic.
Such lines have become common around the globe, from the more than 50 ships marooned last week in the Pacific near Los Angeles to smaller numbers bobbing off terminals in the New York area, to hundreds waylaid off ports in China.
The turmoil in the shipping industry and the broader crisis in supply chains is showing no signs of relenting. It stands as a gnawing source of worry throughout the global economy, challenging once-hopeful assumptions of a vigorous return to growth as vaccines limit the spread of the pandemic.
The disruption helps explain why Germany’s industrial fortunes are sagging, why inflation has become a cause for concern among central bankers, and why American manufacturers are now waiting a record 92 days on average to assemble the parts and raw materials they need to make their goods, according to the Institute of Supply Management.
On the surface, the upheaval appears to be a series of intertwined product shortages. Because shipping containers are in short supply in China, factories that depend on Chinese-made parts and chemicals in the rest of the world have had to limit production.
But the situation at the port of Savannah attests to a more complicated and insidious series of overlapping problems. It is not merely that goods are scarce. It is that products are stuck in the wrong places, and separated from where they are supposed to be by stubborn and constantly shifting barriers.
The shortage of finished goods at retailers represents the flip side of the containers stacked on ships marooned at sea and massed on the riverbanks. The pileup in warehouses is itself a reflection of shortages of truck drivers needed to carry goods to their next destinations.
For Mr. Lynch, the man in charge in Savannah, frustrations are enhanced by a sense of powerlessness in the face of circumstances beyond his control. Whatever he does to manage his docks alongside the murky Savannah River, he cannot tame the bedlam playing out on the highways, at the warehouses, at ports across the ocean and in factory towns around the world.
“The supply chain is overwhelmed and inundated,” Mr. Lynch said. “It’s not sustainable at this point. Everything is out of whack.”
Born and raised in Queens with the no-nonsense demeanor to prove it, Mr. Lynch, 55, has spent his professional life tending to the logistical complexities of sea cargo. (“I actually wanted to be a tugboat captain,” he said. “There was only one problem. I get seasick.”)
Now, he is contending with a storm whose intensity and contours are unparalleled, a tempest that has effectively extended the breadth of oceans and added risk to sea journeys.
Last month, his yard held 4,500 containers that had been stuck on the docks for at least three weeks. “That’s bordering on ridiculous,” he said.
That these tensions are playing out even in Savannah attests to the magnitude of the disarray. The third-largest container port in the United States after Los Angeles-Long Beach and New York-New Jersey, Savannah boasts nine berths for container ships and abundant land for expansion.
To relieve the congestion, Mr. Lynch is overseeing a $600 million expansion. He is swapping out one berth for a bigger one to accommodate the largest container ships. He is extending the storage yard across another 80 acres, adding room for 6,000 more containers. He is enlarging his rail yard to 18 tracks from five to allow more trains to pull in, building out an alternative to trucking.
But even as Mr. Lynch sees development as imperative, he knows that expanded facilities alone will not solve his problems.
“If there’s no space out here,” he said, looking out at the stacks of containers, “it doesn’t matter if I have 50 berths.”
Many of the containers are piled five high, making it harder for cranes to sort through the towers to lift the needed boxes when trucks arrive to take them away.
On this afternoon, under a merciless sun, the port is on track to break its record for activity in a single day — more than 15,000 trucks coming and going. Still, the pressure builds. A tugboat escorts another ship to the dock — the MSC AGADIR, fresh from the Panama Canal — bearing more cargo that must be parked somewhere.
In recent weeks, the shutdown of a giant container terminal off the Chinese city of Ningbo has added to delays. Vietnam, a hub for the apparel industry, was locked down for several months in the face of a harrowing outbreak of Covid. Diminished cargo leaving Asia should provide respite to clogged ports in the United States, but Mr. Lynch dismisses that line.
“Six or seven weeks later, the ships come in all at once,” Mr. Lynch said. “That doesn’t help.”
Early this year, as shipping prices spiked and containers became scarce, the trouble was widely viewed as the momentary result of pandemic lockdowns. With schools and offices shut, Americans were stocking up on home office gear and equipment for basement gyms, drawing heavily on factories in Asia. Once life reopened, global shipping was supposed to return to normal.
But half a year later, the congestion is worse, with nearly 13 percent of the world’s cargo shipping capacity tied up by delays, according to data compiled by Sea-Intelligence, an industry research firm in Denmark.
Many businesses now assume that the pandemic has fundamentally altered commercial life in permanent ways. Those who might never have shopped for groceries or clothing online — especially older people — have gotten a taste of the convenience, forced to adjust to a lethal virus. Many are likely to retain the habit, maintaining pressure on the supply chain.
“Before the pandemic, could we have imagined mom and dad pointing and clicking to buy a piece of furniture?” said Ruel Joyner, owner of 24E Design Co., a boutique furniture outlet that occupies a brick storefront in Savannah’s graceful historic district. His online sales have tripled over the past year.
Mr. Joyner, 46, designs his furniture in Savannah while relying on factories from China and India to manufacture many of his wares. The upheaval on the seas has slowed deliveries, limiting his sales.
He pointed to a brown leather recliner made for him in Dallas. The factory is struggling to secure the reclining mechanism from its supplier in China.
“Where we were getting stuff in 30 days, they are now telling us six months,” Mr. Joyner said. Customers are calling to complain.
His experience also underscores how the shortages and delays have become a source of concern about fair competition. Giant retailers like Target and Home Depot have responded by stockpiling goods in warehouses and, in some cases, chartering their own ships. These options are not available to the average small business.
Bottlenecks have a way of causing more bottlenecks. As many companies have ordered extra and earlier, especially as they prepare for the all-consuming holiday season, warehouses have become jammed. So containers have piled up at the Port of Savannah.
Mr. Lynch’s team — normally focused on its own facilities — has devoted time to scouring unused warehouse spaces inland, seeking to provide customers with alternative channels for their cargo.
Recently, a major retailer completely filled its 3 million square feet of local warehouse space. With its containers piling up in the yard, port staff worked to ship the cargo by rail to Charlotte, N.C., where the retailer had more space.
Such creativity may provide a modicum of relief, but the demands on the port are only intensifying.
On a muggy afternoon in late September, Christmas suddenly felt close at hand. The containers stacked on the riverbanks were surely full of holiday decorations, baking sheets, gifts and other material for the greatest wave of consumption on earth.
Will they get to stores in time?
“That’s the question everyone is asking,” Mr. Lynch said. “I think that’s a very tough question.”
Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.
But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical.
More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.
As I argue in a new paper, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world.
Honeybees and hexagons
Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why?
According to the “honeycomb conjecture” in mathematics, hexagons are the most efficient shape for tiling the plane. If you want to fully cover a surface using tiles of a uniform shape and size, while keeping the total length of the perimeter to a minimum, hexagons are the shape to use.
The hexagonal pattern of honeycomb is the most efficient way to cover a space in identical tiles. Sam Baron, Author provided
Charles Darwin reasoned that bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax.
The honeycomb conjecture was first proposed in ancient times, but was only proved in 1999 by mathematician Thomas Hales.
Cicadas and prime numbers
Here’s another example. There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks.
Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18?
One explanation appeals to the fact that 13 and 17 are prime numbers.
Some cicadas have evolved to emerge from the ground at intervals of a prime number of years, possibly to avoid predators with life cycles of different lengths. Michael Kropiewnicki / Pixels
Imagine the cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant.
Suppose there are predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 years. What is the best way to avoid them all?
Well, compare a 13-year life cycle and a 12-year life cycle. When a cicada with a 12-year life cycle comes out of the ground, the 2-year, 3-year and 4-year predators will also be out of the ground, because 2, 3 and 4 all divide evenly into 12.
When a cicada with a 13-year life cycle comes out of the ground, none of its predators will be out of the ground, because none of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 divides evenly into 13. The same is true for 17.
P1–P9 represent cycling predators. The number-line represents years. The highlighted gaps show how 13 and 17-year cicadas manage to avoid their predators. Sam Baron, Author provided
Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere.
If mathematics explains so many things we see around us, then it is unlikely that mathematics is something we’ve created. The alternative is that mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines and planets.
What did Plato think?
But if we are discovering something, what is it?
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had an answer. He thought mathematics describes objects that really exist.
For Plato, these objects included numbers and geometric shapes. Today, we might add more complicated mathematical objects such as groups, categories, functions, fields and rings to the list.
For Plato, numbers existed in a realm separate from the physical world. Geralt / Pixabay
Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.
Explanation involves showing how one thing in the world depends on another. If mathematical objects exist in a realm apart from the world we live in, they don’t seem capable of relating to anything physical.
Enter Pythagoreanism
The ancient Pythagoreans agreed with Plato that mathematics describes a world of objects. But, unlike Plato, they didn’t think mathematical objects exist beyond space and time.
Instead, they believed physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms.
If reality is made of mathematical objects, it’s easy to see how mathematics might play a role in explaining the world around us.
Pythagorean pie: the world is made of mathematics plus matter. Sam Baron, Author provided
In the past decade, two physicists have mounted significant defences of the Pythagorean position: Swedish-US cosmologist Max Tegmark and Australian physicist-philosopher Jane McDonnell.
Tegmark argues reality just is one big mathematical object. If that seems weird, think about the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object.
McDonnell’s view is more radical. She thinks reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the Universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself.
I defend a different view: the world has two parts, mathematics and matter. Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance.
Mathematical objects provide a structural framework for the physical world.
The future of mathematics
It makes sense that Pythagoreanism is being rediscovered in physics.
In the past century physics has become more and more mathematical, turning to seemingly abstract fields of inquiry such as group theory and differential geometry in an effort to explain the physical world.
As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical.
But it is strange that Pythagoreanism has been neglected by philosophers for so long.
I believe that is about to change. The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.
Is mathematics real? A viral TikTok video raises a legitimate question with exciting answers (The Conversation)
Daniel Mansfield – August 31, 2020 1.41am EDT
While filming herself getting ready for work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question:
How could someone come up with a concept like algebra?
She also asked what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras might have used mathematics for, and other questions that revolve around the age-old conundrum of whether mathematics is “real” or something humans just made up.
Many responded negatively to the post, but others — including mathematicians like me — found the questions quite insightful.
Is mathematics real?
Philosophers and mathematicians have been arguing over this for centuries. Some believe mathematics is universal; others consider it only as real as anything else humans have invented.
Thanks to @gracie.ham, Twitter users have now vigorously joined the debate.
For me, part of the answer lies in history.
From one perspective, mathematics is a universal language used to describe the world around us. For instance, two apples plus three apples is always five apples, regardless of your point of view.
But mathematics is also a language used by humans, so it is not independent of culture. History shows us that different cultures had their own understanding of mathematics.
Unfortunately, most of this ancient understanding is now lost. In just about every ancient culture, a few scattered texts are all that remain of their scientific knowledge.
However, there is one ancient culture that left behind an absolute abundance of texts.
Babylonian algebra
Buried in the deserts of modern Iraq, clay tablets from ancient Babylon have survived intact for about 4,000 years.
These tablets are slowly being translated and what we have learned so far is that the Babylonians were practical people who were highly numerate and knew how to solve sophisticated problems with numbers.
Their arithmetic was different from ours, though. They didn’t use zero or negative numbers. They even mapped out the motion of the planets without using calculus as we do.
Of particular importance for @gracie.ham’s question about the origins of algebra is that they knew that the numbers 3, 4 and 5 correspond to the lengths of the sides and diagonal of a rectangle. They also knew these numbers satisfied the fundamental relation 3² + 4² = 5² that ensures the sides are perpendicular.
No theorems were harmed (or used) in the construction of this rectangle.
The Babylonians did all this without modern algebraic concepts. We would express a more general version of the same idea using Pythagoras’ theorem: any right-angled triangle with sides of length a and b and hypotenuse c satisfies a² + b² = c².
The Babylonian perspective omits algebraic variables, theorems, axioms and proofs not because they were ignorant but because these ideas had not yet developed. In short, these social constructs began more than 1,000 years later, in ancient Greece. The Babylonians happily and productively did mathematics and solved problems without any of these relatively modern notions.
What was it all for?
@gracie.ham also asks how Pythagoras came up with his theorem. The short answer is: he didn’t.
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-495 BC) probably heard about the idea we now associate with his name while he was in Egypt. He may have been the person to introduce it to Greece, but we don’t really know.
Pythagoras didn’t use his theorem for anything practical. He was primarily interested in numerology and the mysticism of numbers, rather than the applications of mathematics.
Without modern tools, how do you make right angles just right? Ancient Hindu religious texts give instructions for making a rectangular fire altar using the 3-4-5 configuration with sides of length 3 and 4, and diagonal length 5. These measurements ensure that the altar has right angles in each corner.
In the 19th century, the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker said “God made the integers, all else is the work of man”. I agree with that sentiment, at least for the positive integers — the whole numbers we count with — because the Babylonians didn’t believe in zero or negative numbers.
Mathematics has been happening for a very, very long time. Long before ancient Greece and Pythagoras.
Is it real? Most cultures agree about some basics, like the positive integers and the 3-4-5 right triangle. Just about everything else in mathematics is determined by the society in which you live.
[Solar radiation management is listed first. Calling it “controversial” is bad journalism. It is extremely dangerous and there is not a lot of controversy about this aspect of the thing.]
Nov 8th 2021
The astonishingly rapid development and rollout of coronavirus vaccines has been a reminder of the power of science and technology to change the world. Although vaccines based on new mRNA technology seemed to have been created almost instantly, they actually drew upon decades of research going back to the 1970s. As the saying goes in the technology industry, it takes years to create an overnight success. So what else might be about to burst into prominence? Here are 22 emerging technologies worth watching in 2022
Solar geoengineering
It sounds childishly simple. If the world is getting too hot, why not offer it some shade? The dust and ash released into the upper atmosphere by volcanoes is known to have a cooling effect: Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991 cooled the Earth by as much as 0.5°C for four years. Solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management, would do the same thing deliberately.
This is hugely controversial. Would it work? How would rainfall and weather patterns be affected? And wouldn’t it undermine efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions? Efforts to test the idea face fierce opposition from politicians and activists. In 2022, however, a group at Harvard University hopes to conduct a much-delayed experiment called SCoPEX. It involves launching a balloon into the stratosphere, with the aim of releasing 2kg of material (probably calcium carbonate), and then measuring how it dissipates, reacts and scatters solar energy.
Proponents argue that it is important to understand the technique, in case it is needed to buy the world more time to cut emissions. The Harvard group has established an independent advisory panel to consider the moral and political ramifications. Whether the test goes ahead or not, expect controversy.
Heat pumps
Keeping buildings warm in winter accounts for about a quarter of global energy consumption. Most heating relies on burning coal, gas or oil. If the world is to meet its climate-change targets, that will have to change. The most promising alternative is to use heat pumps—essentially, refrigerators that run in reverse.
Instead of pumping heat out of a space to cool it down, a heat pump forces heat in from the outside, warming it up. Because they merely move existing heat around, they can be highly efficient: for every kilowatt of electricity consumed, heat pumps can deliver 3kW of heat, making them cheaper to run than electric radiators. And running a heat pump backwards cools a home rather than heating it.
Gradient, based in San Francisco, is one of several companies offering a heat pump that can provide both heating and cooling. Its low-profile, saddle-bag shaped products can be mounted in windows, like existing air conditioners, and will go on sale in 2022.
Hydrogen-powered planes
Electrifying road transport is one thing. Aircraft are another matter. Batteries can only power small aircraft for short flights. But might electricity from hydrogen fuel cells, which excrete only water, do the trick? Passenger planes due to be test-flown with hydrogen fuel cells in 2022 include a two-seater being built at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. ZeroAvia, based in California, plans to complete trials of a 20-seat aircraft, and aims to have its hydrogen-propulsion system ready for certification by the end of the year. Universal Hydrogen, also of California, hopes its 40-seat plane will take off in September 2022.
Direct air capture
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes global warming. So why not suck it out using machines? Several startups are pursuing direct air capture (DAC), a technology that does just that. In 2022 Carbon Engineering, a Canadian firm, will start building the world’s biggest DAC facility in Texas, capable of capturing 1m tonnes of CO2 per year. ClimeWorks, a Swiss firm, opened a DAC plant in Iceland in 2021, which buries captured CO2 in mineral form at a rate of 4,000 tonnes a year. Global Thermostat, an American firm, has two pilot plants. DAC could be vital in the fight against climate change. The race is on to get costs down and scale the technology up.
Vertical farming
A new type of agriculture is growing. Vertical farms grow plants on trays stacked in a closed, controlled environment. Efficient LED lighting has made the process cheaper, though energy costs remain a burden. Vertical farms can be located close to customers, reducing transport costs and emissions. Water use is minimised and bugs are kept out, so no pesticides are needed.
In Britain, the Jones Food Company will open the world’s largest vertical farm, covering 13,750 square metres, in 2022. AeroFarms, an American firm, will open its largest vertical farm, in Daneville, Virginia. Other firms will be expanding, too. Nordic Harvest will enlarge its facility just outside Copenhagen and construct a new one in Stockholm. Plenty, based in California, will open a new indoor farm near Los Angeles. Vertical farms mostly grow high-value leafy greens and herbs, but some are venturing into tomatoes, peppers and berries. The challenge now is to make the economics stack up, too.
Container ships with sails
Ships produce 3% of greenhouse-gas emissions. Burning maritime bunker fuel, a dirty diesel sludge, also contributes to acid rain. None of this was a problem in the age of sail—which is why sails are making a comeback, in high-tech form, to cut costs and emissions.
In 2022 Michelin of France will equip a freighter with an inflatable sail that is expected to reduce fuel consumption by 20%. MOL, a Japanese shipping firm, plans to put a telescoping rigid sail on a ship in August 2022. Naos Design of Italy expects to equip eight ships with its pivoting and foldable hard “wing sails”. Other approaches include kites, “suction wings” that house fans, and giant, spinning cylinders called Flettner rotors. By the end of 2022 the number of big cargo ships with sails of some kind will have quadrupled to 40, according to the International Windship Association. If the European Union brings shipping into its carbon-trading scheme in 2022, as planned, that will give these unusual technologies a further push.
VR workouts
Most people do not do enough exercise. Many would like to, but lack motivation. Virtual reality (VR) headsets let people play games and burn calories in the process, as they punch or slice oncoming shapes, or squat and shimmy to dodge obstacles. VR workouts became more popular during the pandemic as lockdowns closed gyms and a powerful, low-cost headset, the Oculus Quest 2, was released. An improved model and new fitness features are coming in 2022. And Supernatural, a highly regarded VR workout app available only in North America, may be released in Europe. Could the killer app for virtual reality be physical fitness?
Vaccines for HIV and malaria
The impressive success of coronavirus vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) heralds a golden era of vaccine development. Moderna is developing an HIV vaccine based on the same mRNA technology used in its highly effective coronavirus vaccine. It entered early-stage clinical trials in 2021 and preliminary results are expected in 2022. BioNTech, joint-developer of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, is working on an mRNA vaccine for malaria, with clinical trials expected to start in 2022. Non-mRNA vaccines for HIV and malaria, developed at the University of Oxford, are also showing promise.
3D-printed bone implants
For years, researchers have been developing techniques to create artificial organs using 3D printing of biological materials. The ultimate goal is to take a few cells from a patient and create fully functional organs for transplantation, thus doing away with long waiting-lists, testing for matches and the risk of rejection.
That goal is still some way off for fleshy organs. But bones are less tricky. Two startups, Particle3D and ADAM, hope to have 3D-printed bones available for human implantation in 2022. Both firms use calcium-based minerals to print their bones, which are made to measure based on patients’ CT scans. Particle3D’s trials in pigs and mice found that bone marrow and blood vessels grew into its implants within eight weeks. ADAM says its 3D-printed implants stimulate natural bone growth and gradually biodegrade, eventually being replaced by the patient’s bone tissue. If all goes well, researchers say 3D-printed blood vessels and heart valves are next.
Flying electric taxis
Long seen as something of a fantasy, flying taxis, or electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, as the fledgling industry calls them, are getting serious. Several firms around the world will step up test flights in 2022 with the aim of getting their aircraft certified for commercial use in the following year or two. Joby Aviation, based in California, plans to build more than a dozen of its five-seater vehicles, which have a 150-mile range. Volocopter of Germany aims to provide an air-taxi service at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Other contenders include eHang, Lilium and Vertical Aerospace. Keep an eye on the skies.
Space tourism
After a stand-out year for space tourism in 2021, as a succession of billionaire-backed efforts shot civilians into the skies, hopes are high for 2022. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic just beat Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to the edge of space in July, with both billionaires riding in their own spacecraft on suborbital trips. In September Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, sent four passengers on a multi-day orbital cruise around the Earth.
All three firms hope to fly more tourists in 2022, which promises to be the first year in which more people go to space as paying passengers than as government employees. But Virgin Galactic is modifying its vehicle to make it stronger and safer, and it is not expected to fly again until the second half of 2022, with commercial service starting in the fourth quarter. Blue Origin plans more flights but has not said when or how many. For its part, SpaceX has done a deal to send tourists to the International Space Station. Next up? The Moon.
Delivery drones
They are taking longer than expected to get off the ground. But new rules, which came into effect in 2021, will help drone deliveries gain altitude in 2022. Manna, an Irish startup which has been delivering books, meals and medicine in County Galway, plans to expand its service in Ireland and into Britain. Wing, a sister company of Google, has been doing test deliveries in America, Australia and Finland and will expand its mall-to-home delivery service, launched in late 2021. Dronamics, a Bulgarian startup, will start using winged drones to shuttle cargo between 39 European airports. The question is: will the pace of drone deliveries pick up—or drop off?
Quieter supersonic aircraft
For half a century, scientists have wondered whether changes to the shape of a supersonic aircraft could reduce the intensity of its sonic boom. Only recently have computers become powerful enough to run the simulations needed to turn those noise-reduction theories into practice.
In 2022 NASA’s X-59 QueSST (short for “Quiet Supersonic Technology”) will make its first test flight. Crucially, that test will take place over land—specifically, Edwards Air Force Base in California. Concorde, the world’s first and only commercial supersonic airliner, was not allowed to travel faster than sound when flying over land. The X-59’s sonic boom is expected to be just one-eighth as loud as Concorde’s. At 75 perceived decibels, it will be equivalent to a distant thunderstorm—more of a sonic “thump”. If it works, NASA hopes that regulators could lift the ban on supersonic flights over land, ushering in a new era for commercial flight.
3D-printed houses
Architects often use 3D printing to create scale models of buildings. But the technology can be scaled up and used to build the real thing. Materials are squirted out of a nozzle as a foam that then hardens. Layer by layer, a house is printed—either on site, or as several pieces in a factory that are transported and assembled.
In 2022 Mighty Buildings, based in California, will complete a development of 15 eco-friendly 3D-printed homes at Rancho Mirage. And ICON, based in Texas, plans to start building a community of 100 3D-printed homes near Austin, which would be the largest development of its kind.
Sleep tech
It’s become a craze in Silicon Valley. Not content with maximising their productivity and performance during their waking hours, geeks are now optimising their sleep, too, using an array of technologies. These include rings and headbands that record and track sleep quality, soothing sound machines, devices to heat and cool mattresses, and smart alarm clocks to wake you at the perfect moment. Google launched a sleep-tracking nightstand tablet in 2021, and Amazon is expected to follow suit in 2022. It sounds crazy. But poor sleep is linked with maladies from heart disease to obesity. And what Silicon Valley does today, everyone else often ends up doing tomorrow.
Personalised nutrition
Diets don’t work. Evidence is growing that each person’s metabolism is unique, and food choices should be, too. Enter personalised nutrition: apps that tell you what to eat and when, using machine-learning algorithms, tests of your blood and gut microbiome, data on lifestyle factors such as exercise, and real-time tracking of blood-sugar levels using coin-sized devices attached to the skin. After successful launches in America, personalised-nutrition firms are eyeing other markets in 2022. Some will also seek regulatory approval as treatments for conditions such as diabetes and migraine.
Wearable health trackers
Remote medical consultations have become commonplace. That could transform the prospects for wearable health trackers such as the Fitbit or Apple Watch. They are currently used primarily as fitness trackers, measuring steps taken, running and swimming speeds, heart rates during workouts, and so forth. But the line between consumer and medical uses of such devices is now blurring, say analysts at Gartner, a consultancy.
Smart watches can already measure blood oxygenation, perform ECGs and detect atrial fibrillation. The next version of the Apple Watch, expected in 2022, may include new sensors capable of measuring levels of glucose and alcohol in the blood, along with blood pressure and body temperature. Rockley Photonics, the company supplying the sensor technology, calls its system a “clinic on the wrist”. Regulatory approval for such functions may take a while, but in the meantime doctors, not just users, will be paying more attention to data from wearables.
The metaverse
Coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in his novel “Snow Crash”, the word “metaverse” referred to a persistent virtual world, accessible via special goggles, where people could meet, flirt, play games, buy and sell things, and much more besides. In 2022 it refers to the fusion of video games, social networking and entertainment to create new, immersive experiences, like swimming inside your favourite song at an online concert. Games such as Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite are all stepping-stones to an emerging new medium. Facebook has renamed itself Meta to capitalise on the opportunity—and distract from its other woes.
Quantum computing
An idea that existed only on blackboards in the 1990s has grown into a multi-billion dollar contest between governments, tech giants and startups: harnessing the counter-intuitive properties of quantum physics to build a new kind of computer. For some kinds of mathematics a quantum computer could outperform any non-quantum machine that could ever be built, making quick work of calculations used in cryptography, chemistry and finance.
But when will such machines arrive? One measure of a quantum computer’s capability is its number of qubits. A Chinese team has built a computer with 66 qubits. IBM, an American firm, hopes to hit 433 qubits in 2022 and 1,000 by 2023. But existing machines have a fatal flaw: the delicate quantum states on which they depend last for just a fraction of a second. Fixing that will take years. But if existing machines can be made useful in the meantime, quantum computing could become a commercial reality much sooner than expected.
Virtual influencers
Unlike a human influencer, a virtual influencer will never be late to a photoshoot, get drunk at a party or get old. That is because virtual influencers are computer-generated characters who plug products on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
The best known is Miquela Sousa, or “Lil Miquela”, a fictitious Brazilian-American 19-year-old with 3m Instagram followers. With $15bn expected to be spent on influencer marketing in 2022, virtual influencers are proliferating. Aya Stellar—an interstellar traveller crafted by Cosmiq Universe, a marketing agency—will land on Earth in February. She has already released a song on YouTube.
Brain interfaces
In April 2021 the irrepressible entrepreneur Elon Musk excitedly tweeted that a macaque monkey was “literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip”. His company, Neuralink, had implanted two tiny sets of electrodes into the monkey’s brain. Signals from these electrodes, transmitted wirelessly and then decoded by a nearby computer, enabled the monkey to move the on-screen paddle in a game of Pong using thought alone.
In 2022 Neuralink hopes to test its device in humans, to enable people who are paralysed to operate a computer. Another firm, Synchron, has already received approval from American regulators to begin human trials of a similar device. Its “minimally invasive” neural prosthetic is inserted into the brain via blood vessels in the neck. As well as helping paralysed people, Synchron is also looking at other uses, such as diagnosing and treating nervous-system conditions including epilepsy, depression and hypertension.
Artificial meat and fish
Winston Churchill once mused about “the absurdity of growing a whole chicken to eat the breast or wing”. Nearly a century later, around 70 companies are “cultivating” meats in bioreactors. Cells taken from animals, without harming them, are nourished in soups rich in proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins and minerals. In 2020 Eat Just, an artificial-meat startup based in San Francisco, became the first company certified to sell its products, in Singapore.
It is expected to be joined by a handful of other firms in 2022. In the coming year an Israeli startup, SuperMeat, expects to win approval for commercial sales of cultivated chicken burgers, grown for $10 a pop—down from $2,500 in 2018, the company says. Finless Foods, based in California, hopes for approval to sell cultivated bluefin tuna, grown for $440 a kilogram—down from $660,000 in 2017. Bacon, turkey and other cultivated meats are in the pipeline. Eco-conscious meat-lovers will soon be able to have their steak—and eat it.
By the Science and technology correspondents of The Economist■
This article appeared in the What next? section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2022 under the headline “What next?”
Legenda da foto, Luiz Carlos Molion, professor aposentado da Universidade Federal de Alagoas, disse em uma de suas palestras que aquecimento global “é uma farsa”
Uma sala repleta de estudantes de agronomia assiste a uma palestra sobre mudanças climáticas no Brasil. Estão em uma faculdade no Estado do Mato Grosso, maior produtor de soja do país, ouvindo falar um professor da Universidade de São Paulo. Mas o que escutam é o contrário do que acredita a esmagadora maioria da comunidade científica do mundo. Ali, a mensagem transmitida é de que não existe aquecimento global causado pelo homem.
“Os objetivos [de quem fala em mudanças climáticas] são congelar os países em desenvolvimento. O Brasil é o principal foco dessas operações que envolvem meio ambiente e clima. A ideia da mudança climática e dessas questões ambientais são para segurar o nosso desenvolvimento”, afirmou o palestrante, o meteorologista Ricardo Felicio, sem respaldo científico, em uma entrevista concedida após o evento que aconteceu em 2019.
Na realidade, segundo o último relatório do Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC), de agosto deste ano, o papel da influência humana no aquecimento do planeta é “inequívoco”. É para limitar as mudanças climáticas por meio da redução na emissão de gases de efeito estufa que líderes se reuniram nas últimas duas semanas na COP26 em Glasgow, no Reino Unido.
No Brasil, a maior causa de emissões de dióxido de carbono é o desmatamento feito para expansão da agricultura e da pecuária.
Mas, na contramão do que diz a ciência, associações do agronegócio — de fazendeiros de soja, passando por cafeicultores, sindicatos rurais, faculdades ligadas a agronomia e até uma empresa de fertilizantes — estão bancando palestras dos chamados “negacionistas climáticos”, pessoas que não acreditam que existam mudanças climáticas causadas pelo homem e que apresentam esse fato como uma fraude. As apresentações são direcionadas a outros fazendeiros, produtores rurais ou estudantes de agronomia.
A reportagem contou ao menos 20 palestras do tipo nesses ambientes nos últimos três anos feitas por Felicio e por outro professor. A citada no início desta reportagem aconteceu em 2019, e fez parte de um circuito universitário de um total de 11 palestras com o nome “Aquecimento global, mito ou realidade?” em nove faculdades e dois sindicatos no Mato Grosso. Todas elas foram bancadas pela Aprosoja Mato Grosso, a associação de produtores de soja e milho do Estado, maior produtor de soja do Brasil.
Ao mesmo tempo em que negam o aquecimento global antropogênico, as palestras pagas e vistas por ruralistas os absolvem de reconhecer seu papel nas mudanças climáticas. Elas seriam, de acordo com o conteúdo contrário ao consenso científico apresentado pelos professores, somente fruto de variações naturais, sem interferência alguma do homem.
Ao contrário desse setor “negacionista” do agronegócio, o presidente do conselho diretor da Associação Brasileira do Agronegócio, Marcello Brito, diz que a associação se pauta “pela melhor ciência” e que “jogar fora a ciência porque ela não nos traz só vantagens, mas também deveres, é no mínimo contraproducente, jogando contra a melhoria contínua”.
Palestras
Felicio, o professor do departamento de Geografia da USP contratado pela Aprosoja Mato Grosso em 2019, é conhecido por suas posições controversas — ultimamente, em relação à pandemia de covid-19. Em um vídeo publicado em agosto deste ano em seu canal do YouTube, chamou a pandemia de “fraudemia” e disse, sem base científica, que vacinas causam danos maiores que a covid-19. Em outro, afirmou que máscaras não são efetivas contra a covid-19. É também um notório negacionista das mudanças climáticas causadas pelo homem. Ficou conhecido em 2012, quando foi convidado ao Programa do Jô, da Globo, e, sem provas, negou o efeito estufa.
Ricardo Felicio (no canto esquerdo) e Luiz Carlos Molion (no canto direito) dão palestras pelo Brasil; na foto, eles participam de audiência pública no Senado. Crédito, Geraldo Magela/Agência Senado
Durante três semanas, a reportagem tentou falar com Felicio por telefonemas, mensagens de texto e e-mails, mas não obteve resposta. O vice-presidente da Aprosoja Mato Grosso, Lucas Beber, justificou o convite em entrevista à BBC News Brasil.
“A gente trouxe o Ricardo Felicio para fazer um contraponto com aquilo que é replicado na mídia hoje, que parece uma verdade absoluta. A gente não queria impor aquilo como uma verdade, mas sim trazer a um debate”, afirma. Para ele, as mudanças climáticas causadas pelo homem ainda são uma “incerteza” — embora já haja consenso científico em torno delas. Beber também disse não se lembrar quanto custou o ciclo de 11 palestras feitas por Felicio naquele ano.
Vice-presidente da Aprosoja Mato Grosso diz que convite a professor considerado negacionista se deu para promover ‘contraponto com o que é replicado na mídia’. Crédito, Getty Images
No ano passado, o meteorologista também foi convidado para falar no Tecno Safra Nortão 2020, uma feira para produtores rurais, lideranças, técnicos, pesquisadores e estudantes organizada pelo sindicato rural de Matupá, município no norte de Mato Grosso.
Segundo o vice-presidente do sindicato, Fernando Bertolin, ao menos cem pessoas, entre pequenos e grandes agricultores, pecuaristas e outras pessoas da cidade assistiram à palestra. Ele defende o convite, dizendo que, à época, Felicio estava “bem forte na mídia” e que sua palestra “foi um pedido dos produtores”. “A gente ouve todo mundo. Ele tem o embasamento teórico dele e a gente queria saber por que ele dizia aquilo.”
Bertolin diz não se recordar do valor da palestra de Felicio de cabeça, mas afirma que nenhuma das contratadas pela feira custou mais de R$ 15 mil.
Em 2018, Felicio concorreu, sem sucesso, ao cargo de deputado federal pelo PSL, antigo partido do presidente Jair Bolsonaro.
Um ano antes, o presidente tuitou um vídeo de uma entrevista em que Felicio nega a existência de mudanças climáticas causadas pelo homem. Bolsonaro escreveu: “Vale a pena conferir”. Consultada pela BBC News Brasil sobre esta recomendação feita por Bolsonaro, a assessoria da Presidência não respondeu.
O professor não foi aclamado apenas pelo presidente. Em 2019, Felicio foi convidado para dar uma palestra no Senado ao lado de outro acadêmico que não acredita no aquecimento global causado pelo homem, o professor aposentado da Universidade Federal de Alagoas (Ufal), meteorologista Luiz Carlos Molion.
O convite para que os professores falassem em uma audiência pública conjunta das comissões de Relações Exteriores e de Meio Ambiente do Senado sobre as mudanças climáticas partiu do senador do Acre Marcio Bittar (hoje PSL, mas, na época, do MDB), um ex-pecuarista que faz parte da bancada ruralista.
Ao lado de Felicio, Molion é considerado um dos principais representantes do negacionismo climático no Brasil e autor das outras palestras contabilizadas pela reportagem.
Nos últimos três anos, Molion fez diversas palestras promovidas por entidades como a Cooperativa Agrícola de Unaí, em Minas Gerais, a Associação Avícola de Pernambuco, a Associação de Engenheiros e Arquitetos de Itanhaém, com o patrocínio oficial do Conselho Regional de Engenharia e Agronomia de São Paulo, a Central Campo, uma empresa especializada na venda de insumos agrícolas, a Feira Agrotecnológica do Tocantins, do governo do Tocantins, a feira de Agronegócios da Cooabriel, uma cooperativa de café com atuação no Espírito Santo e na Bahia, e o sindicato rural de Canarana, no Mato Grosso.
Molion também foi convidado para falar em universidades: o Instituto de Ciências Agrárias da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) e a Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB). A BBC News Brasil procurou todas essas instituições para comentar sobre os convites que fizeram a Molion — leia as respostas abaixo e no fim desta reportagem.
A maior parte dessas palestras tem como tema as perspectivas climáticas para o ano seguinte e as “tendências para os próximos 10 anos”. Nas palestras — a maioria disponível no YouTube e vistas pela BBC News Brasil —, Molion de fato faz previsões para o ano seguinte, útil para que os produtores rurais se planejem para as próximas safras, mas reserva a última parte da palestra para falar sobre como o “aquecimento global é uma fraude” — novamente, uma afirmação sem embasamento científico.
Ele mostra um slide na parte final em sua apresentação de Powerpoint, com suas palavras finais. O texto da apresentação diz que o clima “varia por causas naturais”, e que “eventos extremos sempre ocorreram”. Afirma, também: “Aquecimento global é mito. CO2 não controla o clima, não é vilão (…) Redução de emissões: inútil!”
Segundo o último relatório do Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC), de agosto deste ano, o papel da influência humana no aquecimento do planeta é “inequívoco”; no Brasil, a maior causa de emissões de gases do efeito estufa é o desmatamento. Crédito, AFP
Na palestra promovida pela Secretaria de Agricultura, Pecuária e Aquicultura do governo do Tocantins em maio de 2020, por exemplo, Molion afirmou, contrariando a ciência, que o “aquecimento global é uma farsa, é um mito”. “Reduzir emissões como quer esse Acordo de Paris de 2015 é inútil, o Brasil tinha que pular fora porque reduzir emissões não vai causar nenhum benefício para o planeta, para o clima, porque o CO2 não controla o clima”, disse, indo contra a esmagadora maioria da produção científica dos últimos anos e aos esforço global de selar acordos para diminuir as emissões dos gases de efeito estufa.
A secretaria disse que o convidou, ao lado de outros palestrantes, para “alinhar o setor agropecuário quanto às diversas correntes existentes e auxiliá-los no seu planejamento e tomadas de decisão mais assertivas para seu empreendimento rural”.
Depois, em outubro de 2020, em um seminário virtual promovido pela Central Campo, uma empresa mineira especializada na venda de insumos agrícolas, Molion fez as mesmas afirmações sobre o CO2 e o Acordo de Paris.
O diretor da empresa, Artur Barros, disse por e-mail à BBC News Brasil que a empresa “sempre soube do posicionamento do professor Molion, que é muito pragmático quanto às questões climáticas” e “o profissional que tem maior assertividade nas previsões”. “A Central Campo, assim como grande parte dos produtores atendidos pela empresa, está muito alinhada ao posicionamento do professor Molion”.
À BBC News Brasil, Molion afirmou: “Procuro usar minhas palestras para o agronegócio, que não são poucas, para no terceiro bloco falar sobre as mudanças climáticas e a farsa do CO2 como controlador do clima global. Faço um diagnóstico local, previsão para safra e depois falo sobre a tendência do clima dos próximos dez, 15 anos, que é de resfriamento.”
Segundo Molion, ele dá 50 palestras por ano, “a grande maioria, 80%, 85% para o agronegócio”, cobrando R$ 4 mil por cada uma. Barros, da Central Campo, afirmou que foi este o valor que pagou pela palestra do professor.
O meteorologista diz que não se incomoda de ser chamado de “negacionista”, embora, ressalte, nunca tenha negado que houve aquecimento no planeta em um período específico no passado. “Eu levo o que acho que está correto, pode ser que daqui a alguns anos me provem que estou errado e vou reconhecer isto. Não sou paraquedista. Eu tenho visão muito crítica do clima local e global graças ao meu treinamento.”
Um dos seminários mais recentes de que participou teve também a presença de membros do governo Bolsonaro: o vice-presidente Hamilton Mourão e o ministro de Infraestrutura, Tarcisio Freitas. Foi um seminário virtual sobre a Amazônia em agosto deste ano organizado pelo Instituto General Villas Bôas, ONG do ex-comandante do Exército.
Contrariando o consenso da comunidade científica sobre as mudanças climáticas, Molion defendeu que o clima global varia naturalmente, sem influência da ação humana, e apresentou um slide em que dizia que o efeito-estufa, “como descrito pelo IPCC, é questionável”. Antes de passar a palavra para o ministro Freitas, afirmou: “CO2 não é vilão, quanto mais CO2 tiver na atmosfera, melhor”.
Vice-presidente Hamilton Mourão participou de seminário sobre a Amazônia que teve a participação do professor Luiz Carlos Molion; sua assessoria disse que ele se baseia em ‘dados científicos para emissão de suas ideias e opiniões’. Crédito, Adnilton Farias/Palácio do Planalto
A BBC News Brasil procurou a vice-presidência questionando por que Mourão aceitou participar de um seminário ao lado de um professor que nega que a ação do homem esteja contribuindo para o aquecimento global. Sua assessoria disse apenas que Mourão participou do evento a convite do Instituto General Villas Bôas e que “baseia-se em dados científicos para emissão de suas ideias e opiniões”.
A assessoria do ministro da Infraestrutura, Tarcísio Freitas, afirmou que ele participou do seminário após convite feito pelo próprio general Villas Boas. A ministra da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento, Tereza Cristina, foi inicialmente anunciada como um dos nomes de ministros que participariam do seminário, mas sua assessoria informou que ela não participaria do evento, sem responder por que desistiu.
Negacionismo climático no Brasil
A genealogia do negacionismo climático no Brasil começa nos anos 2000, quando a imprensa “dava pesos iguais para argumentos com pesos totalmente diferentes”, avalia o sociólogo Jean Miguel, pesquisador associado da Unifesp que estuda o tema. O debate sobre o assunto no Brasil se deu principalmente a partir do documentário americano Uma Verdade Inconveniente (2006), sobre a campanha do ex-vice-presidente americano Al Gore a respeito do aquecimento global.
Enquanto isso, um grupo pequeno de negacionistas na academia brasileira, incluindo Felicio e Molion, se pronunciavam publicamente sobre o tema. Para Miguel, eles são “verdadeiros mercadores da dúvida, trabalhando para destacar lacunas que toda ciência possui e amplificar incertezas”.
“[E quem os ouviu no Brasil] foi parte do agronegócio interessado na desregulamentação florestal”, responde Miguel.
Hoje, “as palestras fazem massagem no ego do produtor rural e criam a mentalidade de que esses grupos de agronegócio estão sendo injustiçados enquanto estão contribuindo para o PIB nacional”, diz o pesquisador.
Não significa que todos os produtores rurais sejam negacionistas. “A briga hoje é entre dois lados: o setor de agroexportação, que está mais em contato com compradores internacionais, portanto mais pressionado pela questão reputacional, e que faz investimentos a longo prazo, pensando na questão produtiva na próxima década, não na próxima safra”, diz Raoni Rajão, professor de gestão ambiental na Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG).
“Outro lado do setor são os produtores, mais politizados e fortes apoiadores de Bolsonaro e toda sua agenda. Eles de certa forma compram esse discurso que toda a narrativa de mudança climática é algo para poder impedir o desenvolvimento do Brasil.”
Apesar de não começar no governo Bolsonaro, o negacionismo “encontra terreno fértil para proliferar” em sua gestão, avalia Miguel, citando algumas ações do governo atual, como o fechamento da secretaria responsável por elaborar políticas públicas sobre as mudanças climáticas, no início da gestão Bolsonaro (ela foi reaberta em meio a críticas no ano seguinte) e a desistência em sediara COP-25 que ocorreria no Brasil em novembro de 2019. Em sua campanha, em 2018, Bolsonaro também prometeu acabar com o que chamava de “indústria das multas” ambientais.
O ex-ministro das Relações Exteriores Ernesto Araújo, que ficou no cargo do começo do governo Bolsonaro até março de 2021, chegou a colocar em dúvida que as mudanças climáticas seriam causadas pela ação humana, na contramão do consenso científico.
ara sociólogo, negacionismo climático no Brasil não começou no governo Bolsonaro, mas encontrou ‘terreno fértil para proliferar’ em sua gestão. Crédito, EPA/Joedson Alves
“Eles estão altamente informados pelo negacionismo climático. Mesmo que não digam que é uma fraude, de uma maneira interna vão criando as possibilidade de sabotar a ciência e as políticas climáticas nacionais, com formas práticas de negacionismo climático”, afirma Miguel.
Desmatamento
Mas ações práticas terão de ser adotadas para que o Brasil cumpra as metas anunciadas pelo governo durante a COP-26: zerar o desmatamento ilegal no país até 2028, reduzir as emissões de gases do efeito estufa em 50% até 2030 e atingir a neutralidade de carbono até 2050.
O desmatamento, causado pela expansão da agricultura e da pecuária, é responsável pela maior emissão de CO2 no Brasil.
Só entre agosto de 2019 e julho de 2020, uma área de 10.851 km2 — mais ou menos metade da área do Estado de Sergipe — foi desmatada na Amazônia Legal, segundo dados do sistema Prodes, do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE). O valor representou um aumento de 7,13% em relação ao ano anterior.
Esse crescimento teve um claro reflexo nas emissões de gases poluentes pelo Brasil em 2020. Houve um aumento de 9,5%, segundo dados do Sistema de Estimativas de Emissões de Gases de Efeito Estufa (SEEG), do Observatório do Clima, principalmente por mudanças no uso da terra e floresta, que inclui o desmatamento, e a agropecuária. O aumento aconteceu na contramão do mundo que, parado por conta da pandemia de covid-19, diminuiu as emissões em 7%.
Só entre agosto de 2019 e julho de 2020, uma área de 10.851 km2 – mais ou menos metade da área do Estado de Sergipe – foi desmatada na Amazônia Legal. Crédito, Adriano Machado/Reuters
Para Tasso Azevedo, coordenador do SEEG, a boa notícia é que, se o Brasil conseguir controlar o desmatamento, “as emissões cairão muito rapidamente”. “Se controlarmos o desmatamento, não há país no mundo que vai ter emissões menores proporcionalmente do que temos no Brasil, então acho que é uma oportunidade. Teremos um resultado incrível para o Brasil e para o planeta.”
Apesar de pertencer ao setor responsável pela maior parte de emissões de gases do efeito estufa no Brasil, parte dos ruralistas diz acreditar ser injustamente acusada por ambientalistas.
As palestras do meteorologista Felicio no Mato Grosso, em 2019, “foram bem numa época em que era moda dizer que o agricultor era quem estava acabando com o mundo”, diz o produtor rural Artemio Antonini, presidente do sindicato rural de Nova Xavantina, no Mato Grosso. Também cético em relação às mudanças climáticas, Antonini ajudou a organizar a palestra de Felicio na região.
Na opinião de Rajão, da UFMG, “o agro como um todo toma as dores e se sente ofendido quando se fala de desmatamento”. “A reação é negar o desmatamento e a existência das mudanças climáticas.”
“Tomar as dores” porque, de fato, quem desmata primariamente não é produtor rural. Uma área desmatada começa com uma onda de especuladores – quem demarca a terra e serra dali a vegetação depois quem tenta regularizar a área -, em seguida vem o pecuarista e depois vem o agricultor, explica Rajão. “Por isso que quando dizem que não estão envolvidos com o desmatamento, é verdade, boa parte deles não está. Mas se beneficiam de um fornecimento de terra barata, que vem de todo o processo de desmatamento ilegal que às vezes aconteceu 10 anos antes.”
A ilegalidade é bastante concentrada. O estudo “As maçãs podres do agronegócio brasileiro”, de Rajão e outros pesquisadores, mostrou que mais de 90% dos produtores na Amazônia e no Cerrado não praticaram desmatamento ilegal após 2008. Além disso, apenas 2% das propriedades nessas regiões eram responsáveis por 62% de todo desmatamento potencialmente ilegal. O trabalho foi publicado na revista Science no ano passado.
‘Agrosuicídio’
O agricultor de soja Ilson Redivo também esteve na plateia em uma das palestras que o professor Ricardo Felicio deu em 2019, no município de Sinop, norte do Mato Grosso.
Redivo migrou do Paraná para Sinop em 1988, inicialmente trabalhando, como a maioria dos migrantes, no setor madeireiro. “Era um grande polo madeireiro, e era o que dava retorno na época”, diz. Hoje, ele possui uma fazenda de 4200 hectares de milho e soja na região, e é presidente do Sindicato Rural da cidade.
Ele diz ter gostado da palestra de Felicio. Como ele, o produtor rural também rejeita a ciência estabelecida sobre o aquecimento global. Ele diz que é uma “narrativa econômica”, não ambiental, criada para conter o desenvolvimento do Brasil.
“Eu estou há trinta anos aqui, foi desmatado um monte e o clima continua da mesma forma, tá certo? Não houve alteração climática”, diz Redivo à BBC News Brasil.
Ecoando argumentos já usados por Bolsonaro, o agricultor diz que o Brasil é “um exemplo para o mundo em preservação ambiental”. “O produtor brasileiro é o cara que mais preserva.”
O argumento é repetido por outros produtores rurais. “Ninguém fala que o agricultor está deixando 80% e só usando 20% da área para produzir”, reclama o produtor rural Antonini.
Durante a COP-26, em Glasgow, Brasil prometeu zerar o desmatamento ilegal no país até 2028. Crédito, Reuters
Eles se referem à Reserva Legal, um dispositivo criado no Código Florestal Brasileiro que obriga os proprietários de terras na Amazônia a preservar 80% da floresta nativa (no Cerrado, o valor é de 35%; em outros biomas, 20%), algo que beneficia o próprio agronegócio, por meio dos serviços ambientais prestados pela floresta. Muitos agricultores acham isso injusto. Mas, na prática, nem todos respeitam essa exigência.
A pesquisadora do Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia (Imazon) Ritaumaria Pereira conduziu entrevistas com 131 criadores de gado no Pará em 2013 e 2014 e descobriu que mais de 95% deles declararam preservar menos do que a quantidade exigida. Segundo ela, argumentam que, quando chegaram, a terra já estava nua, ou que no passado tinham o estímulo para desmatar, ou que não tinham recursos para regenerar 80%.
Para Pereira, da Imazon, para que o Brasil consiga cumprir as metas anunciadas durante a COP-26, será preciso investir em fiscalização na Amazônia, fortalecendo órgãos como o Ibama e o ICMBio.
Também será preciso combater o discurso do negacionismo climático. A mensagem transmitida a produtores rurais, diz ela, legitima o desmatamento, e “traz mais pessoas para esse pensamento, para que, num futuro próximo, validem assim tudo o que já desmataram”.
Para Rajão, da UFMG, é uma narrativa “que no curto prazo é confortante, mas no longo prazo contribui para o chamado ‘agrosuicídio'”.
Posicionamentos de empresas que convidaram professores para palestras
Cooperativa Agrícola de Unaí (Coagril)
A Cooperativa Agrícola de Unaí Ltda (Coagril) diz “ter contratado o professor Molion no intuito de obter informações acerca do regime de chuvas para a região de sua atuação, visando ao planejamento estratégico dos seus negócios e de seus cooperado”.
Associação Avícola de Pernambuco
“A AVIPE reforça seu caráter plural onde preza pela diversidade de ideias onde o debate de todos os pontos de vista precisa ser exaurido constantemente com o intuito da busca eterna de uma conclusão contingente sobre quaisquer assuntos. (…) Como associação, não nos cabe acreditar ou não se os fatos humanos causam mudanças climáticas, pois nosso papel não é de credo, mas sim de apoiar o debate científico por aqueles que se dedicam toda uma vida em pesquisa. Não condiz com nossos princípios, condutas e valores, selecionar uma parcela de opiniões do mundo científico para apoiar determinada conclusão com fins casuísticos ou individuais. Aspectos financeiros são reservados apenas aos nossos associados.”
Associação de Engenheiros e Arquitetos de Itanhaém, com o patrocínio oficial do Conselho Regional de Engenharia e Agronomia de São Paulo
A Associação de Engenheiros e Arquitetos de Itanhaém recebeu o pedido da BBC News Brasil por e-mail e WhatsApp, mas não respondeu.
O Crea-SP respondeu que “tem como missão legal o aperfeiçoamento técnico e cultural dos profissionais da área tecnológica, conforme a Lei 5.194”.
“Os eventos com essa finalidade, realizados pelas associações, são de responsabilidade de seus idealizadores e não necessariamente representam a posição do Crea-SP.
O Conselho reforça ainda que acredita em mudanças climáticas causadas pelas ações humanas e, como forma de apoiar medidas para combatê-las, é signatário dos 17 Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável da ONU.”
Cooperativa de café Cooabriel
Recebeu o pedido da BBC News Brasil por e-mail, mas não respondeu.
Sindicato rural de Canarana
O presidente do sindicato, Alex Wisch, respondeu, por mensagem via WhatsApp: “Propomos que vocês indiquem um cientista de mesmo nível acadêmico do Prof. Molion para que todos possam ter conhecimento da verdade científica sobre esse tema. Podemos colaborar financeiramente com esse evento e inclusive sediar o evento.”
Instituto de Ciências Agrárias da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Por telefone, o vice-diretor do Instituto de Ciências Agrárias da UFMG, Helder Augusto, afirmou: “Na universidade, há diversidade de ideias e contrapontos. Não é um posicionamento da UFMG. É um ponto de vista dele, é uma fala relativa. A pessoa veio, fez palestra e pode falar o que bem entender porque é um ambiente público. A universidade não paga palestra para ninguém.”
Universidade Federal da Paraíba
“O evento foi realizado no auditório do Centro de Tecnologia da UFPB, organizado no âmbito do Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica, que aproveitou que o palestrante já estava em João Pessoa (PB) e o convidou para ministrar palestra na UFPB, portanto, neste caso em particular, sem ônus para a UFPB.
A iniciativa de convidar o pesquisador para ministrar palestra sobre seus estudos não se confunde com a visão, missão e valores da UFPB, entre os quais destaca-se o caráter público e autônomo da Universidade.
A UFPB defende o papel da academia e apoia a ciência e a pesquisa, o conhecimento gerado a partir de métodos científicos, no intuito de encontrar soluções para desafios em todas as áreas e geração de benefícios para a sociedade. Por meio da ciência, as teorias são constantemente testadas, visando sua comprovação ou substituição por outra teoria que resista à checagem. Não compete à Universidade aplicar censura prévia à ciência.”
Some ‘high-level’ scientific pronouncements have assumed stewardship of climate geoengineering in the absence of other agents. This is dangerous, as effects on the Indian monsoons will show.
Prakash Kashwan – 28/Dec/2018
Multilateral climate negotiations led by the UN have ended on disappointing notes of late. This has prompted climate scientists to weigh the pros and cons of climate geoengineering. Indian scientists, policymakers, and the public must also engage in these debates, especially given the potentially major implications of geoengineering for the monsoons in South Asia and Africa.
Since 2016, an academic working group (AWG) of 14 global governance experts (including the author) has deliberated on the wisdom and merits of geoengineering. In a report, we argue that we ought to develop ‘anticipatory governance mechanisms’.
While people often equate governance with top-down regulations, the AWG’s vision emphasises a combination of regulatory and voluntary strategies adopted by diverse state and non-state actors.
In the same vein, it’s also important to unpack the umbrella terminology of ‘geoengineering’. It comprises two sets of technologies with different governance implications: carbon geoengineering and solar geoengineering.
Carbon geoengineering, or carbon-dioxide removal, seeks to remove large quantities of the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. The suite of options it presents include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This would require planting bioenergy crops over an area up to five times the size of India by 2100. Obviously such large-scale and rapid land-use change will strain the already precarious global food security and violate the land, forest and water rights of hundreds of millions.
The second cluster of geoengineering technologies, solar geoengineering, a.k.a. solar radiation management (SRM), seeks to cool the planet by reflecting a fraction of sunlight back into space. While this could help avoid some of the more severe effects of climate change, SRM doesn’t help reduce the stock of carbon already present in the atmosphere. Scientists also caution that geoengineering may distract us from investing in emissions reduction. But we know from experience that policymakers could ignore such cautions in the policymaking process.
This means problems like air pollution and ocean acidification will continue unabated in the absence of profound climate mitigation actions. On the other hand, by altering atmospheric temperature, SRM could significantly disrupt the hydrological cycle and affect the monsoons.
Just being interested in minimising disruptions to the monsoons should encourage India to help develop international geoengineering governance.
But before we can get into into the nitty-gritty, there’s a question that must be answered. Why should the global community think about governing climate engineering at this stage when all that exists of SRM are computer simulations of its pros and cons?
Some reasons follow:
First, the suggestion that geoengineering technologies merely fill a void left open by a “lack of political will” doesn’t capture the full array of possibilities. The IPCC Special Report on the effects on a world warming by 1.5°C includes a scenario in which the Paris Agreement’s goals are secured by 2050. This pathway banks on social, business and technological innovations, and doesn’t require resorting to radical climate responses or sacrificing improvements in basic living standards in the developing world.
On the other hand, $8 trillion’s worth of investments have already been redirected away from fossil fuel operations. These successes owe thanks to a global divestment movement led by environmental activists and student groups. (Such an outcome was thought to be politically infeasible only a few years ago.)
Second, recent research has shown that some geoengineering technologies, such as BECCS, could compete against the pursuits of more “ ecologically sound, economical, and scalable” methods (source) for enhancing natural climate sinks.
Third, despite a lot of progress in recent years, we don’t know enough to support a full assessment of the intended and unintended effects of geoengineering.
Decisions about which unresolved questions of geoengineering deserve public investment can’t be left only to the scientists and policymakers. The community of climate engineering scientists tends to frame geoengineering in certain ways over other equally valid alternatives.
This includes considering the global average surface temperature as the central climate impact indicator and ignoring vested interests linked to capital-intensive geoengineering infrastructure. This could bias future R&D trajectories in this area.
And these priorities, together with the assessments produced by eminent scientific bodies, have contributed to the rise of a de facto form of governance. In other words, some ‘high-level’ scientific pronouncements have assumed stewardship of climate geoengineering in the absence of other agents.
Such technocratic modes of governance don’t enjoy broad-based social or political legitimacy.
Individual research groups (e.g. Harvard University’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program) have opened themselves up to public scrutiny. They don’t support commercial work on solar geoengineering and have decided not to patent technologies being developed in their labs. While this is commendable, none of this can substitute more politically legitimate arrangements.
The case of the Indian monsoons illustrates these challenges well. Various models of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project have shown that SRM in use will likely cause the net summer monsoon precipitation to decline from 6.4% to 12.7%. (These predictions are based on average changes in atmospheric temperature, which means bigger or smaller variations could occur over different parts of India.)
So politically legitimate international governance is important to ensure global responses to climate change account for these and other domestic consequences.
As a first step, the AWG report recommends the UN secretary-general establish a high-level representative body to engage in international dialogue on various questions of governing SRM R&D, supported by a General Assembly resolution. Among other things, the mandate of this ‘World Commission’ could include debating whether, and to what end, SRM should be researched and developed and how it could fit within broader climate response strategies.
Then again, debates over solar geoengineering can’t be limited to global bodies and commissions. So the AWG also recommends the UN create a global forum for stakeholder dialogue to facilitate discussions on solar geoengineering. Such a forum could engage a variety of stakeholders, including local governments, communities, indigenous peoples and other climate-vulnerable groups, youth organisations and women’s groups. Only such a process is likely to effectively represent Indian peasants and farmers at the receiving end of a longstanding agrarian crisis.
These proposals for geoengineering governance build on various precedents. For example, from the 1990s, the World Commission on Dams demonstrated the feasibility and value of an extensive multi-level governance arrangement.
In 2018, policy experts have finally recognised that global climate governance can’t ignore the general public’s concerns. It would be best to avoid rediscovering this wheel in the international governance domain of climate geoengineering.
Prakash Kashwan is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and was a member of the AWG. The South Asia edition of his book Democracy in the Woods (2017) is due out later this month.
Summary: Human behavior drives the evolution of biological organisms in ways that can profoundly adversely impact human welfare. Understanding people’s incentives when they do so is essential to identify policies and other strategies to improve evolutionary outcomes. In a new study, researchers bring the tools of economics and game theory to evolution management.
Human behavior drives the evolution of biological organisms in ways that can profoundly adversely impact human welfare. Understanding people’s incentives when they do so is essential to identify policies and other strategies to improve evolutionary outcomes. In a new study publishing November 16thin the open access journal, PLOS Biology, researchers led by Troy Day at Queens University and David McAdams at Duke University bring the tools of economics and game theory to evolution management.
From antibiotic-resistant bacteria that endanger our health to control-resistant crop pests that threaten to undermine global food production, we are now facing the harmful consequences of our failure to efficiently manage the evolution of the biological world. As Day explains, “By modelling the joint economic and evolutionary consequences of people’s actions we can determine how best to incentivize behavior that is evolutionarily desirable.”
The centerpiece of the new analysis is a simple mathematical formula that determines when physicians, farmers, and other “evolution managers” will have sufficient incentive to steward the biological resources that are under their control, trading off the short-term costs of stewardship against the long-term benefits of delaying adverse evolution.
For instance, when a patient arrives in an urgent-care facility, screening them to determine if they are colonized by a dangerous superbug is costly, but protects future patients by allowing superbug carriers to be isolated from others. Whether the facility itself gains from screening patients depends on how it weighs these costs and benefits.
The researchers take the mathematical model further by implementing game theory, which analyzes how individuals’ decisions are interconnected and can impact each other — such as physicians in the same facility whose patients can infect each other or corn farmers with neighboring fields. Their game-theoretic analysis identifies conditions under which outcomes can be improved through policies that change incentives or facilitate coordination.
“In the example of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, hospitals could go above and beyond to control the spread of superbugs through methods like community contact tracing,” McAdams says. “This would entail additional costs and, alone, a hospital would likely not have an incentive to do so. But if every hospital took this additional step, they might all collectively benefit from slowing the spread of these bacteria. Game theory gives you a systematic way to think through those possibilities and maximize overall welfare.”
“Evolutionary change in response to human interventions, such as the evolution of resistance in response to drug treatment or evolutionary change in response to harvesting, can have significant economic repercussions,” Day adds. “We determine the conditions under which it is economically beneficial to employ costly strategies that limit evolution and thereby preserve the value of biological resources for longer.”
Journal Reference:
Troy Day, David A. Kennedy, Andrew F. Read, David McAdams. The economics of managing evolution. PLOS Biology, 2021; 19 (11): e3001409 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001409
New antibody and antiviral treatments, and better vaccines, are on the way
The Economist – Nov 8th 2021
IN THE WELL-VACCINATED wealthier countries of the world, year three of the pandemic will be better than year two, and covid-19 will have much less impact on health and everyday activities. Vaccines have weakened the link between cases and deaths in countries such as Britain and Israel (see chart). But in countries that are poorer, less well vaccinated or both, the deleterious effects of the virus will linger. A disparity of outcomes between rich and poor countries will emerge. The Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charities, predicts that average incomes will return to their pre-pandemic levels in 90% of advanced economies, compared with only a third of low- and middle-income economies.
Although the supply of vaccines surged in the last quarter of 2021, many countries will remain under-vaccinated for much of 2022, as a result of distribution difficulties and vaccine hesitancy. This will lead to higher rates of death and illness and weaker economic recoveries. The “last mile” problem of vaccine delivery will become painfully apparent as health workers carry vaccines into the planet’s poorest and most remote places. But complaints about unequal distribution will start to abate during 2022 as access to patients’ arms becomes a larger limiting factor than access to jabs. Indeed, if manufacturers do not scale back vaccine production there will be a glut by the second half of the year, predicts Airfinity, a provider of life-sciences data.
Booster jabs will be more widely used in 2022 as countries develop an understanding of when they are needed. New variants will also drive uptake, says Stanley Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania, inventor of the rubella vaccine. Dr Plotkin says current vaccines and tweaked versions will be used as boosters, enhancing protection against variants.
The vaccination of children will also expand, in some countries to those as young as six months. Where vaccine hesitancy makes it hard for governments to reach their targets they will be inclined to make life difficult for the unvaccinated—by requiring vaccine passports to attend certain venues, and making vaccination compulsory for groups such as health-care workers.
Immunity and treatments may be widespread enough by mid-2022 to drive down case numbers and reduce the risk of new variants. At this point, the virus will become endemic in many countries. But although existing vaccines may be able to suppress the virus, new ones are needed to cut transmission.
Stephane Bancel, the boss of Moderna, a maker of vaccines based on mRNA technology, says his firm is working on a “multivalent” vaccine that will protect against more than one variant of covid-19. Beyond that he is looking at a “pan-respiratory” vaccine combining protection against multiple coronaviruses, respiratory viruses and strains of influenza.
Other innovations in covid-19 vaccines will include freeze-dried formulations of mRNA jabs, and vaccines that are given via skin patches or inhalation. Freeze-dried mRNA vaccines are easy to transport. As the supply of vaccines grows in 2022, those based on mRNA will be increasingly preferred, because they offer higher levels of protection. That will crimp the global market for less effective vaccines, such as the Chinese ones.
In rich countries there will also be greater focus on antibody treatments for people infected with covid-19. America, Britain and other countries will rely more on cocktails such as those from Regeneron or AstraZeneca.
Most promising of all are new antiviral drugs. Pfizer is already manufacturing “significant quantities” of its protease inhibitor. In America, the government has agreed to buy 1.2bn courses of an antiviral drug being developed by Merck, known as molnupiravir. This has shown its efficacy in trials, and the company has licensed it for widespread, affordable production.
There are many other antivirals in the pipeline. Antiviral drugs that can be taken in pill form, after diagnosis, are likely to become blockbusters in 2022, helping make covid-19 an ever more treatable disease. That will lead, in turn, to new concerns about unequal access and of misuse fostering resistant strains.
The greatest risk to this more optimistic outlook is the emergence of a new variant capable of evading the protection provided by existing vaccines. The coronavirus remains a formidable foe.
Natasha Loder: Health-policy editor, The Economist■
This article appeared in the Science and Technology section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2022 under the headline “From pandemic to endemic”
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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