Editor's pick – We need a unit of personal environmental impact
You call for clear-headed assessment of schemes to reduce our impact on the natural world (Leader, 18 January). We also need a new unit for a new measure of the environmental cost to the planet of a person in a year. The point would be to allow us to compare individuals: people who have acted to reduce their footprint, people with different lifestyles 鈥� jet-setters, vegans, commuters 鈥� and people in different countries.
This measure should account for use of energy, water, plastics, metals and so on. While the formula to calculate it might be subject to disagreement, at the moment we have many types of measure of impact, which confuses many and makes it hard to compare people.
The name of the unit? I propose a Thunberg. We could say that the average European is 14 Thunbergs, the average African 3, and so on.
The benefits of cooking lessons and rough grazing (1)
Thank you for reporting your experiment with going vegan (4 January, p 32). I suspect one of the main issues that puts people off trying this is that basic nutrition and cooking skills are no longer taught a lot in UK schools. This is a reason, alongside time limitations, for people falling back onto ready meals and processed food.
The ability to think sideways about how to achieve flavour, visual appeal and a balanced meal comes easier to those with varied cooking skills. Working in a health food shop, I am continually surprised, and often appalled, by people asking how to cook vegetables, or to get their children to eat them in the first place. People who haven’t grown up with one or both parents cooking from scratch will find creating vegan food much harder than those who have had to cater for themselves, in spite of the best efforts of popular television cooks.
That said, it is getting easier to create tasty, nutritious vegan food from produce available in major supermarkets and independent health food shops.
The benefits of cooking lessons and rough grazing (2)
You might think that as a livestock farmer I would resent vegans claiming that my way of life is unethical, and you would be right. You quote Michael Clark saying that eating animals fed on plants must be less efficient than people eating plants. This ignores the fact that many herbivores can, and do, get much more feed value out of plants than people. What’s more, much of the north and west of the UK and Ireland can only be farmed practically using grazing animals.
The editor writes:
Much of the world’s beef is now produced in intensive feedlots 鈥� pens without pasture. This may have a lower carbon footprint than pasture-fed beef. We suspect that most of that is done on fertile land, not rough grazing. It is even harder to find figures for other meats. We note that in the UK, upland sheep production is only marginally viable even with EU subsidies.
You will always get less than you ask for
Extinction Rebellion's demands are unrealistic, says Mike Clarke (Letters, 2 November 2019). I think they are deliberately so.
In persuasion psychology there are two common techniques called the “foot-in-the-door” and the “door-in-the-face”. The first of these involves asking for a small favour to later ask a larger one, referring to earlier deeds or promises. This is very common when asking for donations: “You are such a generous person, having bought many of our gifts in the past to support children in need. Would you now consider a monthly donation?”
The second involves asking for something large, knowing that it won't be granted, and then asking for something small, trusting that you will get a concession in return: “Mum, I want a horse.” “No way.” “Can I just have a hamster, then?”
Extinction Rebellion uses both strategies. When governments declare a climate emergency, activists use this to demand action consistent with that declaration. They will insist on carbon neutrality by 2025 in order to have more chance of it by, say, 2050.
The world dodged a bullet with the Montreal protocol
The UN Environment Programme has defined the huge scale of the task of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C, reports Adam Vaughan (30 November 2019, p 7). But things could be worse.
In recent research, Rishav Goyal and his colleagues showed that the world dodged a bullet when the , phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) (Environmental Research Letters, ). CFCs are very potent greenhouse gases, as well as ozone destroyers. Their study shows that climate change would be catastrophic rather than merely panic-inducing if they had continued to be produced.
I can't prove that there are other consciousnesses
Sam Edge suggests that the only way to rule out whether computers could have consciousness as we would experience it, is to fall back on dualism – which, he says, is a faith-based belief, not amenable to any scientific enquiry (Letters, 4 January).
A dualistic approach isn't necessarily either faith-based or unscientific. And it isn't necessarily wrong.
I have no doubt that I exist as a consciously aware being, but I can't prove that any other person or creature has awareness similar to my own. I see them as other entities, similar to myself in external characteristics and behaviour, but not having my awareness.
It is conceivable that there may only be one observer in the universe. This is dualistic, but not necessarily faith-based.
A first-class way to reduce airline carbon emissions
What can the aviation industry do to reduce emissions? One way to significantly cut carbon dioxide per passenger is to reduce the number of premium seats per plane (11 January, p 18).
On long-haul flights, each first class seat takes about five times as much cabin area as an economy seat, and a business class seat about three times. Some planes are configured with fewer than half as many seats as an all-economy configuration. If many premium passengers trade down to lower class seats, airlines will configure their planes for more economy seats. A plane's fuel use is related to distance flown and its take-off weight, the vast majority of which is the aircraft plus fuel, not passengers.
We need a better name for these artificial gizmos
Your report on artificial intelligence helping tackle one of the biggest unsolved problems in maths is the latest of an increasing number on what seem to be AI’s opaque capabilities (14 December 2019, p 16).
These have got me thinking about the name of this technology, although it is probably too late to change it. These systems are certainly artificial: but how would you characterise a natural intelligence that very often makes the correct decisions but can’t tell you why? You might find a person who claimed that annoying.
In people, we call the ability to make correct decisions without understanding why “intuition”. AI should actually stand for Artificial Intuition: a great support for human intelligence, but certainly not a replacement.
For the record 鈥� 1 February 2020
鈥� The eruption of the Taal volcano in the Philippines isn’t yet large enough to produce measurable global cooling (18 January, p 5).
鈥� Braden Tierney and colleagues looked at 13 conditions and found that a person’s microbiome was a better predictor of 12 of them than their genetics (18 January, p 6).
鈥� Silkworms will apparently eat most mulberries (11 January, p 31).