State deals on climate will need support of the people
The UN climate summit, COP26, may be a historic chance to secure the future, but a question looms even if new agreements are struck at the state level: will individual behaviour change?
Even before lockdowns end, millions are booking flights (Leader, 24 April). For just one G7 meeting in June in the UK, the . Are the super-rich giving up their luxury lifestyles for a flat and one holiday a year? Will heads of state lead the way, exchanging their palaces for a small house?
Replacing fossil fuels with batteries is a solution. But with ocean mining for the necessary mineral resources likely, David Attenborough’s next TV series will be Mucky Brown Planet III.
Maybe attendees to COP26 should party like it’s 1999, as it doesn’t look to me like there will be a 2099 worth celebrating.
Transition to green living is looking very tricky (1)
Many people will be deterred from thinking that they can do anything to help reduce greenhouse gases because many proposals seem impractical (24 April, p 34).
For example, the idea that many millions of people can switch to electric vehicles may fall foul of circumstances that arise a fair bit. For instance, imagine terraced houses with no front gardens and narrow pavements. Where are the charging points going to go?
Similarly, not everyone will be able to switch from gas-fired boilers to heat pumps as many homes have no land for a ground heat pump system and air pumps will struggle to provide sufficient reliable heat and hot water for an average family. We must keep the likes of waste-to-heat-and-power generators or small nuclear reactors on the table.
And while we should reduce our intake of animal products, do it by not importing from countries such as Brazil where the forests are being destroyed. Similarly, outlaw palm oil in food and work to restore South-East Asian forests.
Transition to green living is looking very tricky (2)
We need a better tool to allow us to calculate our carbon footprint to help us change lifestyles. The unit of this carbon footprint should be the Thunberg, after Greta.
Get fit without even leaving your armchair
As you report, there is a long history of attempts to design drugs that mimic the effects of exercise (24 April, p 46). But why use drugs?
I was at a conference about 15 years ago where a presenter claimed he had been able to train for a marathon while sitting at home watching television, with his legs jerking (quite violently in his video) in response to electrical stimulation. .
A virtual answer to the dark matter mystery?
Your story “Muons point to new physics” brought to mind an issue that has nagged me for a while (17 April, p 14).
If pairs of particles/antiparticles “pop into existence” and then vanish “moments” later, they would, nonetheless, be part of our physical universe for very short periods of time. They also have mass, which is (presumably) the same for both partners in the pair.
I am curious as to whether proposals for dark matter to account for the missing mass that astronomers say is needed to explain the universe take into account the aggregate masses of all the possible virtual particles.
Icy era could have led to retreat into woodlands
Erle Ellis and his colleagues argue that as far back as 12,000 years ago, 95 per cent of temperate woodland was shaped by human societies (24 April, p 16).
Earth was then in the grip of the Younger Dryas, a glacial period that caused large areas of the northern hemisphere to be covered with ice and tundra, so the area of woodland would have been much lower.
There might have been a reduction in untouched woodland at this time because people living in northern regions were forced south, increasing the population density in the surviving temperate forests.
We may have to revise the view on Planet Nine
The idea that a tiny black hole may lurk in the far reaches of our solar system, rather than a ninth planet, is based on its position, which doesn’t fit with current theories of planetary evolution (3 April, p 34).
This reminds me that, until very recently, our theories also precluded gas giants close to their stars. The discovery of many “hot Jupiter” exoplanets resulted in some hasty revisions to that idea.
Spiders seem to love a bit of Beethoven
Ian Morse’s story on spiders and interpreting their web vibrations as music leads me to conclude that tunes played near webs cause spider activity (17 April, p 12).
I have three social distancing spiders in my conservatory. When I play Radio 3, they shoot out and run about, especially to percussive or piano pieces. It must be vibrating certain web strands. When they find no struggling insects, they retreat.
Forget town twinning, try toilet twinning instead
Priti Parikh is right to draw attention to the importance of good sanitation and clean water supply in tackling childhood undernutrition (17 April, p 21). While governments should be addressing this, it is possible for anyone to make a contribution.
The charity Tearfund has a system of “toilet twinning”. For a donation, you can twin your own toilet with one the charity will fund in a low-income country. Mine is twinned with one in Sierra Leone. There are nearly 30 million households in the UK. If every one of them twinned a toilet, it would make a significant dent in the problem that Parikh highlights.
For the record 鈥� {05 May 2021}
Our story on Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall volcano (24 April, p 28) meant to refer to the Reykjanes peninsula.
Francis Crick coined the term central dogma, which describes the flow of genetic information (3 April, p 52).