We'll need to cough up more for climate finance
You quote Saleemul Huq saying that the $100 billion a year of “climate finance” meant to be pledged to support low-income countries is a “trivial” amount (23 October, p 36).
He is right. To indicate how trivial, note that the UK government has budgeted half that for its covid-19 test and trace system over two years. Globally, government subsidies and tax breaks to fossil fuel firms come to more than $800 billion annually.
Why is climate finance needed, some of which, incidentally, will be loaned not given? Most adaptation activities rely on public spending as they hold very little interest for the private sector. Adaptation by billions of people on the planet needs several orders of magnitude greater support for finance, which can only be raised by taxation. A carbon tax would be a good start.
Is the entire universe a quantum object?
Your article on quantum reality mentions a “superposition” of states, which means a particle can exist in all possible states at once before it is measured or observed (6 November, p 38).
Researchers hope to do an experiment on a crystal 100,000 times more massive than used before to demonstrate quantum behaviour to show that this principal of superposition applies to such macroscopic objects. If successful, “is there any reason it stops” there, as Jonathan Halliwell at Imperial College London says.
Maybe the whole universe could exist in a superposition of all possible states? If true, our conscious decisions might be us choosing, instant to instant, which new universe to exist in.
Could this “many worlds” interpretation also explain so-called action at a distance between two paired quantum particles? Perhaps our choice to measure one of these doesn’t cause an instantaneous, faster-than-light correlation between the particles. Instead, it instantly puts us in a new universe where these particles are already correlated.
No health-conscious vegan would live on junk food
“The vegan health illusion” doesn’t discuss vegan diets in general, only highly processed vegan “junk” food, mainly plant-based meat alternatives (30 October, p 38).
No health-conscious vegan will live on a diet of these products. Possibly the main consumers are people who have swapped meat-based junk food for vegan junk food. The simple but powerful conclusion reached by Michael Pollan in his book In Defence of Food 鈥� “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” (but ) 鈥� applies equally to omnivores and vegans.
How to solve the space debris problem
Your story on space junk notes that the untrammelled and exponential growth of the number of satellites in Earth orbit, largely for private profit, stacks up problems, known and possibly unknown, for the future (30 October, p 42).
When once useful artefacts, designed with a limited lifespan in mind, outlive their utility, they are often retired, dismantled and removed to make way for others. The principle has been considered with new buildings as well as in the UK parliament 鈥� .
If satellite owners and operators were required to remove from orbit two redundant satellites for each new satellite launched, the overcrowding of Earth orbit would soon be resolved. How long do we have to wait for a simple and obvious solution like this to be adopted, and does the global political will extend to suspending commercial satellite launches until further notice?
Wind farms should tap the power of tides as well
Your picture of offshore wind turbines shows an interesting phenomenon (16 October, p 12). At the time the image was taken, the tide must have been running from right to left, as verified by the turbulent wake at the base of each turbine. Has anyone thought of retrofitting water turbines to the base of each wind turbine? This would be cheap, since infrastructure is in place. Also, tidal power will continue to be produced even when the wind doesn’t blow.
Let's take this carbon credits idea even further
Graham Lawton suggests the time may be ripe to introduce tradeable “personal carbon allowances” to ration greenhouse gas emissions incurred by our spending (23 October, p 26). It is also ripe for broadening this concept.
Besides climate change, other global environmental onslaughts are beyond the reach of market forces alone to address: toxic chemicals entering the air, water and land, the loss of top soil to the oceans faster than soil formation, a sixth mass extinction event, the spread of waste plastic everywhere.
A composite personal environmental impact ration could address this by varying the unit cost in these annual rations forfeited for each purchase. It would allow people to choose where their activities impact the global environment while capping the community’s overall environmental damage.
I , but it would have been technically cumbersome to administer then. Current methods and technology make it much more practicable.
Consciousness is just the brain filling in the blanks
Models of consciousness that you detail don’t explain why evolution of biological information processing should create conscious subjective experience (4 September, p 44).
One possibility is that subjective experience is a mechanism for continuity of processing under a biological constraint 鈥� . This is substantially slower than the speed at which sensory inputs can change.
Perhaps, therefore, brains create a semi-stable working approximation, and modify only the portions that change. That approximation, I suggest, is our conscious subjective experience.
For the record 鈥� {17 November 2021}
The five graphs in “Who is tackling climate change best?” (30 October, p 10) should have stated emissions in millions of tonnes of CO2 equivalent.