Climate sacrifices must be made by all, equally
Debora MacKenzie draws attention to the gilets jaunes protests in France as an indicator of the ordinary person's reluctance to pay higher fuel duty prices (25 May, p 23). The real reason that the rises caused so much furore was president Emmanuel Macron's incompetent and arbitrary imposition of taxes to fight a nebulous concept like climate change, while he also allowed polluters and people at the top to carry on as before. This created justifiable anger.
To counter climate change successfully, painful adjustments must be made across the board – equal misery for all. This is why politicians need to be decoupled from the decision-making process and why Citizen Councils, as advocated by the Extinction Rebellion movement, of which I am a member, are the way forward. Ordinary people are in the best position to judge what is acceptable to them. They generally have a greater sense of fairness and less entitlement than politicians, decision-makers and top academics.
Tackling climate change should result in the overwhelming majority of people being in a better place than they are now. The goal is better houses and transport and a cleaner environment, not business as usual with a bit of climate change mitigation mixed in.
Don't get left high and dry talking about rising seas
In your article about the Greenland ice sheet melting, you mention how “bad news begins to wash over you” (4 May, p 23). I spend time in parts of the US that have a lot of climate change sceptics. Discussing evidence and reasoning is often met with suspicion, or even outright derision, but I have found one thing that consistently gives them pause for thought: visualisations of the forecast sea level rise over the next 100 years.
Those that show the rise that is “locked in” due to current temperature rises and which focus on low-lying areas in Florida, Louisiana and Texas are particularly effective. I would encourage others who have similar “discussions” to use them as a tool to help.
Schools, genes and peers affect your development (1)
Robert Plomin’s observation that genes are more important than parenting in a child’s development is hardly new (25 May, p 39). Judith Rich Harris showed precisely this 20 years ago in her landmark book The Nurture Assumption.
She made a convincing case that a child’s peer group contributes much more to socialisation than the home environment. This implies that the greatest impact parents have on their children is in helping to determine their peer group.
Schools, genes and peers affect your development (2)
Plomin’s interview brought to mind a counterpoint from a documentary, The Mystery of Murder: A Horizon guide, by Michael Mosley. The programme offered persuasive evidence that high stimulation in the brain’s amygdala and genes for low levels of the chemical serotonin are associated with violent behaviour, except when good parenting intervened to provide a happy childhood environment for people with these genes.
Both genes and environment are important in the production of the next generation of non-violent individuals.
Schools, genes and peers affect your development (3)
Your article implied that selective schools get better exam results because they admit students who did well in earlier tests. I think Plomin has ignored a key variable: that children are bound to do best in a cohort of similar ability. If you are fascinated by calculus and the rest of the class is struggling with fractions, where do you go? Equally, if you can’t keep up with the other pupils, you would be better off in a school that meets your needs.
I had a very chequered school career, eventually ending up in one of England’s top performing schools. A recent review suggests that my old school challenges pupils, and if they can’t take that, it isn’t the right place for them. I second that. Here in Australia, the selective public school system doesn’t offer any better teaching than non-selective schools, but it offers a far better education, simply because the pupils are all keen to learn. Sadly, able students who fail to make it to a selective school often drop out because there is nothing to challenge them.
Data is key to preventing a tech monopoly
The tech giants' huge revenues are now comparable to those of some nations (4 May, p 18). But, as Douglas Heaven points out, breaking them up isn't a good solution to their dominance, as new giants will spring up in their place.
If tech giants grew without limits, a single corporation could soon control your social media, your transport and your ability to earn money or pay for goods. Eventually, you would have to choose between being a citizen of a nation state or a customer of a corporation.
But the tech giants aren't (yet) intent on world domination, they just want to make money, so they don't want to force this choice on you.
“The Data Transfer Project” and Mark Zuckerberg's call for more regulation aren't examples of altruism in action, they just show that companies want to avoid this kind of crisis.
To prevent such concentration of power, the online world needs to be divided into two layers – one that holds all the data and is owned by the consumers, and another that is owned by the tech corporations and provides services but doesn't store data long-term. The division between these two layers isn't a natural choice, from a software point of view: it can only be defined and enforced by regulation.
That said, this division isn't impossible – software is malleable. The clue is in the name.
Methane emissions should be a priority
Your point that methane has less impact as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide overall may be true over a timescale of centuries, but given that humanity has only a couple of decades to get its act in order, I would have thought that we need to pay much more attention to the significantly greater short-term effects of the gas than the original article implied (27 April, p 20).
When user testing is the only testing
Paul Bowden asks if every vital software update is an admission of poor design (Letters, 1 June). Far more often, software errors are a result of inadequate testing.
In the early days of software, testing typically took up 50 per cent of a project's budget. Now, a lot of testing is left to users. Everything is effectively in beta. Testing picks up not only design flaws, but also programming errors, data errors and specification errors. Any one of these problems can require an update.
DNA could unmask monsters in murky waters
After reading your article about detecting species fromfree-floating DNA in river and lake ecosystems, it seems to me that the waters of Loch Ness should be tested for unfamiliar DNA, reptilian or otherwise (18 May, p 8). But I am sure that there are people who would object.
For the record 鈥� 15 June 2019
鈥� Asimina Arvanitaki is the first woman to hold a named research chair at the Perimeter Institute (1 June, p 46).
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