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Sean Carroll on free will – a sort of compatibilist
this comment, from a site called ‘physics of free will’, seems to miss the point completely
There are a few positions on the free will issue, and probably three principal ones. They are, compatibilism (the most common position, particularly among philosophers), incompatibilism and libertarianism. I’m not interested in discussing libertarianism, which is just too weird. Compatibilism, argued for by Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, amongst many others I’ve read, including Steven Pinker, and most of the contributors to Free will & determinism, a mid-twentieth century collection edited by Bernard Berofsky, claims basically that though our macro world is deterministic, otherwise science would never have gotten off the ground, we as complex, thinking and deciding individuals, make life choices all the time, in large matters and small, choices which we claim as our own, with all the praise and opprobrium that comes with our decisions.
Those that argue for incompatibilism, or hard determinism as it’s sometimes called, question, among other things, this notion of the self-determining self. Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University, has written a comprehensive defence of the incompatibilist position in Determined, which together with his earlier book Behave, and Sam Harris’ book Free Will, and reflections on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (a 50-year-old longitudinal study of, inter alia, personality types and how they change, or not, over time), has shifted my own stance on the issue from a wobbly compatibilism to a much more firm incompatibilism.
So to Sean Carroll, eminent physicist and science communicator and author of a 2016 book which I bought the other day, The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself – obviously inspired by my own writings. He devotes six pages of his 441-page book to the free will question, so it’s probably not a big issue for him. And indeed, it’s pretty inevitable that successful and highly respected individuals, who have contributed positively to science and human understanding, as Carroll undoubtedly has, would wish to be given credit for their achievements, and to believe that their own decisions and their own hard work have brought them to the position of respected public intellectual that the likes of Carroll enjoys today.
However.
I’m not going to research Carroll’s background, any more than I’ll research the backgrounds of other compatibilists such as Dennett and Pinker, but I think I can safely assume that none of these individuals were born into dire poverty, or a toxic family situation, or a war zone, or a strongly kinship-oriented, non-English-speaking culture. When I think of free will, or the lack thereof, it’s these Big Factors that come to mind, not whether I chose to have muesli or shredded wheat for breakfast. It’s typical, for example, that Carroll uses this example in demonstrating our ability to choose:
Imagine you’re a high school student who wants to go to college, and you’ve been accepted into several universities. You look at their web pages, visit campuses, talk to students and faculty at each place. Then you say yes to one of them, no to the others. What is the best way to describe what just happened, the most useful vocabulary for talking about our human-scale world? It will inevitably involve some statements along the lines of ‘you made a choice’.
Clearly Carroll knows his readership – educated citizens of the ‘Western’ or WEIRD world – so I can hardly blame him for his choice of example. However, he doesn’t really question the essential word ‘you’ here, and seems to think it’s all about a confused use of language and categories:
… the mistake made by free-will skeptics is to carelessly switch between incompatible vocabularies.
Describing the choices we make about what to wear in the morning, he writes:
That’s a decision that you [my emphasis] have to make; you can’t just say, ‘I’ll do whatever the atoms in my body were going to deterministically do anyway’. The atoms are going to do whatever they were going to do, but you don’t know what that is, and it’s irrelevant to the question of which decision you should make. Once you frame the question in terms of you and your clear choice, you can’t also start talking about your atoms and the laws of physics. Either vocabulary is perfectly legitimate, but mixing them leads to nonsense.
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, p 379
This is, unfortunately, a classic straw woman argument. No careful-thinking incompatibilist is going to bring up atoms or even neurons to explain this particular everyday choice. Amongst the determining factors will be: what clothes are available to the subject; the weather; what job, activities or tasks she expects to engage in; her mood; her age and gender; her culture; her taste, developed over a lifetime and influenced by family, peer group, class etc. The ‘you’, the self, is constructed of many of these elements and more, including daily effects (the weather) and lifelong ones (culture, genetics) operating very much down to the neuronal and hormonal level – but there would rarely be a need to reach down that far to explain the person’s choices.
While I recognise that Carroll has barely skated over the topic in six pages, I find it bizarre that he doesn’t touch on the Big Issues here – culture, upbringing, genetics and our arbitrary ‘thrown-ness’ into the world – and their massive determining effects. He does end on a note of compromise and uncertainty however, while still, I think, largely missing the point:
Most people do maintain a certain degree of volition and autonomy, not to mention a complexity of cognitive functioning that makes predicting their future actions infeasible in practice. There are grey areas – drug addiction is an obvious case where volition can be undermined, even before we go all the way to considering tumours and explicit brain damage. This is a subject in which the basics are far from settled, and much of the important science has yet to be established. What seems clear is that we should base our ideas about personal responsibility on the best possible understanding of how the brain works that we can possibly achieve, and be willing to update those ideas whenever the data call for it.
Ibid, p 384
To me, this feeling of volition and autonomy is simply a product of complexity, and a sense of that complexity being inside us. We feel it, especially when faced with tough choices, or regretting the road not travelled. But what is the difference here between me and my pet dog? Does she feel anger, shame, regret? The general human response would be – maybe, but not like us. And what about bonobos? Cetaceans? We recognise, with all these mammals, that they are ‘individuals’. All dogs I’ve owned, or known, had their own personalities, I recognised that they ‘thought’, and so reacted, differently from each other. There may be similarities in breeds, just as we recognise cultural similarities in humans, but there are individual differences due to being ‘the runt of the litter’, being over- or under-fed by their owner, being brought up with other dogs or not, being pampered or neglected, and so on. But do we grant them free will? Surely not. And only humans, it seems, have the power to grant beings such power! Which is why we grant it so readily to ourselves. It’s just another example of human exceptionalism, as defined by humans. Remember how we were the only tool-makers, the only language-users, the only mourners of the dead….?
In my next piece on this topic I’ll look at what Steven Pinker had to say about free will in his 2002 book The blank slate. I wonder if he’s changed his mind since….
References
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: on the origin of life, meaning and the universe itself, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2017
Daniel Dennett, Elbow room: the varieties of free will worth wanting, 1984
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky ed, Free will and determinism, 1963
Dummies on dark matter 3: all these neutrinos…
wateva
Canto: So, look up neutrinos and dark matter together on any bona fide sciency website, such as Astronomy magazine, or Nature, and you’ll get apparently contradictory claims – ‘neutrinos cannot constitute dark matter’ and ‘neutrinos may solve the mystery of dark matter’, so what’s a dummy to think?
Jacinta: It’s ongoing, and exciting, we must suppose. Dark matter is often given another adjective – cold dark matter – and neutrinos are too ‘hot’, which is to say they travel close to light speed. The clumpy nature dark matter is believed to have – remember they’re believed to clump around the outskirts of galaxies, explaining the observed higher velocity of outer galaxy stars – that clumpy nature isn’t consistent with zippy neutrinos.
Canto: Yes – neutrinos are kind of slight and speedy whereas dark matter is fat and lumpy?
Jacinta: Well that’s one way of putting it, but if it was fat it’d be visible, but it appears to be ‘transparent’ as Hossenfelder describes it.
Canto: That’s funny, a lot of fat people would prefer to be invisible, maybe dark matter has worked out a way… But if this matter is transparent or invisible, how can they detect it, or know that it’s clumpy? It seems to be just a placeholder to explain the gravitational behaviour of galaxies – doesn’t it?
Jacinta: Obviously I can’t answer that. Mathematics, however, may find a way…
Canto: I was hoping you wouldn’t mention that word.
Jacinta: Well it’s a return to neutrinos – sterile neutrinos. They only interact via gravity, but they are heavy, as needs to be the case. It’s all about missing mass after all.
Canto: Sounds like a similar profile to WIMPs but I think WIMPs, which are just postulates, I think, only interact through the weak nuclear force, an interaction that brings about nuclear radioactive decay. But I don’t think gravitational interactions have been ruled out for them.
Jacinta: WIMPs have gone off the boil recently, I think. It’s all such groping in the dark stuff at the moment, and if you have virtually no mathematics, it’s deadly. I’ve just been reading a dialogue between a physicist and a mathematician on neutrinos and dark matter, which after various increasingly heated exchanges of equations and talk of Minkowski spacetime, Lagrangians, anti-commuting spinor-valued fields, Weyl spinors and the like, it got to the point of pistols at dawn and aim for the heart. But the equations did look impressive.
Canto: Time to get back to basics. Remember we know about three types of neutrinos, also called flavours – tau, muon and electron. And remember they’re called leptons because they’re elementary particles and not very interactive….
Jacinta: That doesn’t explain why they’re called leptons, though, does it? Actually, when I try googling that very question, all I get is what leptons are, or what physicists thank they are.
Canto: You didn’t frame the question well enough:
Lepton was first used by physicist Léon Rosenfeld in 1948: ‘Following a suggestion of Prof. C. Møller, I adopt—as a pendant to “nucleon”—the denomination “lepton” (from λεπτός, small, thin, delicate) to denote a particle of small mass’.
Jacinta: Okay, all Greek to me. And by the way there are six lepton types, let’s get this clear – the three neutrinos and the particles they’re connected with, the electrons, muons and tauons. But I don’t know how or why they’re connected.
Canto: It seems that the three neutrino types are electrically neutral versions of, or sisters of, the negatively charged electrons, the also negatively charged muons – which have a half-spin, apparently – and the tauon or tau particle, which is also negatively charged with a half-spin. How can they tell them apart you ask? Well, according to the US Department of Energy, ‘Muons are similar to electrons but weigh more than 207 times as much’. Which is a bit like saying I’m similar to my neighbour but she weighs more than 15,000 kgs.
Jacinta: Ah yes, I’ve met her. A gentle giant, but a bit negative.
Canto: Well, multiply my neighbour’s mass – I mean a muon – by 17 and you have the mass of a tau particle. You’d think they’d be unmissable, but the first lepton to be discovered was by far the smallest, the electron. That was in 1897, and the rest are 20th century discoveries. And there are anti-leptons, of course.
Jacinta: Of course. So for completeness’ sake, and for our education, there are leptons, mesons and hadrons. Oh, and fermions. I’m just throwing those names out there. And gluons, and quarks, and bosons… and that might be it.
Canto: Well considering that we can account for only 4 or 5 percent of universal mass-energy – unless something’s very wrong with our accounting – we might be adding a few more possibly speculative particles in future. Is it really exciting or is it just a mess?
Jacinta: You want me to answer that?
Canto: Rhetorical, rhetorical. But it’s no wonder that respected physicists like Neil Turok is finding that we’ve complicated the field way too much. As he says, the LHC, the most touted experimental device in physics in the last 40 years, has discovered nothing but the Higgs boson, which of course was a really important discovery, but…
Jacinta: He says the dark matter is probably a right-handed neutrino, which, whatever it means, sounds simple enough. And that the universe is a kind of flat space, with nice and simple geometry…
Canto: Okay, a right-handed neutrino, let’s follow that up. The first thing I would think would be – it’d have to be heavy, and non-interactive, which means very difficult/impossible to detect. And then – if there are right-handed neutrinos there must surely be left-handed ones. These terms relate to spin, and the Standard Model, I think, gives neutrinos a left-handed spin, with a ‘helicity’ of -1, and these are paired with right-handed anti-neutrinos, with a helicity of +1.
Jacinta: So Turok is out on a limb here?
Canto: How would I know? It starts to get into mathematics and if-then speculations very quickly, and I get lost. But Turok feels that there must be more simple solutions to the big dark matter-dark energy conundrums without positing all these new particles. I know he seems to be positing one himself, but it’s just a variant of the neutrinos that’ve been proven to exist.
Jacinta: Helicity, by the way, is ‘the projection of the spin onto the direction of momentum’. Just another head-scratcher for dummies. Helicity, at any rate, is conserved. It doesn’t change over time. And here for, what it’s worth to the likes of me, is what one commentator says about Turok’s hypothesis:
For a heavy neutrino to serve as dark matter, it needs to be quite stable. Apparently this is tough if it interacts with the Higgs—how true is that, exactly? But a neutrino that’s its own antiparticle can have a mass without interacting with the Higgs: a so-called ‘Majorana mass’.
In Turok’s theory all the neutrinos have Majorana masses, described by a mass matrix. To make the heaviest right-handed neutrino stable, a bunch of matrix entries must vanish—and this makes the lightest left-handed neutrino massless!
Canto: Yeah, ain’t mathematics magical.
Jacinta: Hmmm, I’m wondering if we should leave all this dark stuff behind us for a while. Leave it to the Dark Lords to work out.
Canto: Haha, not very female supremacist of you…
References
https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-022-00024-6
https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2022/12/neutrino_dark_matter.html
we are family? bonobo care, monogamy or not, the magniloquence of humanity, etc
a single mother, benefits assured
So in this post I want to look at how monogamy is doing in the WEIRD world, inter alia. As Henrich and others point out, marriage became thoroughly regularised (and economically exploited) by the Church in the millennium or more during which it held sway in Western Europe. Its marriage and family programme (MFP) ‘legitimised’ children (at least among the upper classes, where legitimacy mattered), reduced kinship ties (which helped to weaken dynastic forces that might challenge the Church’s power) and, perhaps inadvertently, encouraged marital ties based on elective affinities or that fuzzily pleasant concept or sensation known as love.
So in the modern WEIRD world we may marry whomever we like as soon as achieving legal adulthood, and then repent at leisure and divorce without fault, or we can reproduce without marrying and receive much the same supports for our offspring as married couples do. And during the past few decades in particular, couplings and combinations, short-term or long-term, and regardless of gender, have been experiencing less censure and opposition. There is no sense, pace some ultra-conservative circles, that our society is falling apart due to these changes. Capital enterprises continue to flourish, per capita GDP continues to rise (as does the temperature), and the WEIRD world continues to work and party hard, while occasionally fretting about its collective future.
With the rise of WEIRD feminism, there can be excesses, both in the positive and negative direction, and combined with the religious hangover (‘your body is a temple’), even sexual dialogue – the first level of sexual intercourse – has become fraught. Even so, the situation is an improvement on that of previous generations, when coercive intercourse, date rape and such were part of a history that women have only recently been able to talk about. So the WEIRD situation re sexual power, politics, language and intercourse (in the general sense) is very much in flux, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
How that flux will affect the monogamy we currently still accept as the norm is hard to predict. The most common argument in its favour has long been about the raising of children. The conservative view that a child needs both a father and a mother isn’t ridiculous, in spite of the fact that many modern children have thrived on less (and sometimes more), but it seems to me that the most successful upbringing for a child would involve what we call ‘support networks’, a rather bloodless, bureaucratic term for a combo of loving and caring elders and peers. You might guess from this the bonoboesque direction in which I’m heading.
Given what I’ve learned about bonobos over the years, I’m hardly surprised that childcare by bonobo non-parents is a normal part of bonobo life. An online article, linked below, describing research from the University of Oregon, bears this out. Here are some quotes:
“After studying bonobos for several years, I noticed that juveniles and adolescents were obsessed with the babies,” said Klaree Boose, an instructor in the UO Department of Anthropology. “They played with the babies and carried them around. It appeared to be more than just play behavior.”
“It is common in the wild to see infant bonobos be a focus of enormous interest to others, especially to adolescent bonobos,” White said. “It is often noticeable how bonobo mothers are willing to let others get close and interact with their infants, as compared to chimpanzees who are more restrictive.”
Initially, Boose observed that all juvenile bonobos, ages 3-7, were obsessed with handling the infants, all under age 3. As they entered adolescence, however, females continued to approach the mothers and help care for the infants, while males turned away in favour of other behaviours.
“Handling behaviour picked up among the female adolescents, and it was really intense,” Boose said. “They would approach the mothers, groom them briefly and then carry the babies away. They’d move across the enclosure, where they would engage in nurturing and other maternal behaviours with the infants, such as grooming and cradling them, putting them on their belly and carrying them on their back. These were very deliberate caretaking behaviors.”
Boose also found a hormonal link to her observations. Elevated levels of oxytocin — associated with complex social behaviors and social cognition, including maternal and caregiving activities — were common in urine samples collected after infant-handling activities. As young females interact with the infants, Boose said, increased oxytocin may reflect how the body reinforces caregiving activity or social bonding with mothers or infants.
Note that this is described as a very female thing. It isn’t clear from the article as to whether any adolescent carers of these infants were male, but I wishfully think they might have been. And I might draw from my own experience here. My mother gave birth to the last child of the family, extraordinarily enough, on my eighth birthday. This odd factoid had a seemingly profound maternal effect on me. I was fascinated by this baby, and more than happy to be his principal baby sitter, lullaby singer and rocker of the cradle. During the first year or so of his life, I doted on him, much to the relief and evident pleasure of my mother.
Whether or not bonobo males play much of a role in the raising of children, human males are doing a bit more of it in the WEIRD world, doubtless to the detriment of their testosterone levels. Here’s an interesting quote from ten years ago:
A record 8% of households with minor children in the United States are headed by a single father, up from just over 1% in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Decennial Census and American Community Survey data.
Of course the number of single mother households would be much higher and also rising. But it takes a village to raise a child – or, in the WEIRD world, a community, compleat with childcare services, kindergartens, Play School, Sesame Street and the like (the impact of disembodied social media on our culture – which we’re only just beginning to come to terms with – has been profound, and clearly not entirely beneficial). The ‘village’ that WEIRD children are currently exposed to seems in many ways to be a blooming, buzzing confusion, and yet they’re navigating it, for better or worse. The worry, at present, is that real physical contact is in danger of being replaced by gaming, texting and other forms of interaction that lack the throb and breath of that animal nature we seem at pains to deny. The term ‘remote learning’ is indicative, and of course there is more – online trading, virtual care services, artificial intelligence, the cloud, all of these developments seem to have swamped our reality in just a decade or so. In that sense, a bonobo humanity seems to be receding beyond the horizon.
And yet, it’s complicated. Bonobos are noted for sharing, and for closeness (to put it euphemistically). Humans are, I think, getting better at the sharing part, but not so much the closeness. The internet, for example, is a massive shared resource, with the potential to educate, entertain and enrich us beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations, without our ever having to rub our skin against another human for the best (or worst) part of a lifetime.
And speaking of skin, it’s something we’ve evolved to keep covered – for protection, for decoration, for privacy. Sometimes just for conformity. We’re the clothed ape, and few of us want to be thought of as less than that. All of this has more or less impelled us to develop a noli me tangere sensibility that has fuelled and been fuelled by religion – our bodies as temples must never be desecrated, and we alone can determine whether worship or desecration has occurred. And so, unlike bonobos with their close comforts, we’ve become more or less severe guardians of these decorated temples, proudly isolated, opened only to the most select of select of select few.
Perhaps this is all to the good? One of the first intellectuals I was exposed to as a youth was Sigmund Freud, with his concepts of polymorphous perversity and sublimation, and as a randy adolescent I took this to mean that we’re more filled with sexual thoughts and easily sexually stimulated in our youth, but as we mature our sexual impulses are harnessed and channelled into creative arty-sciencey endeavours. And was left to wonder whether I really wanted to grow up. Anyway, maybe we needed all this sublimation to uncover the secrets of the universe, to create marvels of engineering, wondrous art forms and financial empires (not to mention WMDs, mass slavery and the Cambodian and Congolese killing fields). What does love, or a bout of the touchy-feelies, have to do with it?
It’s a conundrum, and yet, I just can’t get those bonobo exemplars out of my mind…
References
https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-bonobos-finds-day-care-pays-babysitters
we’re running out of gas on this topic
Jacinta: So we need to look at why high domestic energy costs come as a shock to Chinese arrivals here in Australia. It seems the essay we analysed last time took the view that we should be capitalising on high gas prices, getting top dollar for our gas exports, and exporting even more of the stuff, including increasing production as much as possible, and not capping the domestic price but somehow offsetting the cost to local consumers through the tax system. But it seems that Chinese consumers are getting it cheap.
Canto: Yes, it’s hard to make sense of it – how is it that gas producers/retailers are making windfall profits by selling LNG to China when the consumers there are paying much less for it than we are? Is it just the sheer quantity they’re sending offshore?
Jacinta: Well, we’re not economists, far from it, so it’s a battle for us to understand it all. But I’m reading an Aussie article from a little over a year ago that puts it bluntly:
Australia [has] gas. Loads and loads of it. Far more than we could ever possibly need. It comes out of the ground at $1GJ all across QLD and SA. But then what happens to it is beyond all hope and reason. Three-quarters of it is shipped to China as LNG at $31GJ, $4GJ cheaper than it is sold locally.
That doesn’t seem to me to be that much cheaper, but the author, David Llewellyn-Smith, seems to be claiming that the cost of bringing the gas out of the ground is $1 per gigajoule, but it’s sold, presumably after much processing, as LNG at $31 per gigajoule in China. And sold here at $35 per gigajoule. Or was. And that may not mean the cost to the household consumer. I’ve been trying to find out current domestic prices, but the economic gobbledegook is beyond me.
Canto: I’ve located our last gas bill – $344.64 for 91 days usage (i.e quarterly). The usage is measured in megajoules, and a gigajoule is 1000 megajoules. Our average daily usage for the period May through July was 52.24 MJ. That’s about 4754 MJ or, say 4.75GJ used in the period. That means we’re paying around $72.50 per gigajoule. Something very wrong here, I give up. The average quarterly gas bill in South Australia is currently $218, so we’re way over. I presume that’s per domestic household. Average daily usage over winter in SA was 21.64MJ, and we’re way over that. We have only gas hot water, and we rarely ever use the gas stove. I cook on a small electric oven we bought – not induction, sadly.
Jacinta: They may be adding other costs on to the basic usage costs, but our high usage is extremely surprising, and it won’t necessarily be less in the warmer months, because we’re only using the gas for showering and washing dishes, not for heating. That means we’re likely spending nearly $1400 annually for gas. Can we change the subject now?
Canto: Well, no, we need to change our usage, not the subject. That’s assuming this usage number is reliable, and I have to be sceptical of that. Anyway, I think we can dispense with gas usage totally, at least I can. For example, washing dishes via electricity (boiling the electric kettle), and body-washing also via electricity (same system) and doing without showering. That would reduce my gas usage to zero.
Jacinta: Okay, good luck with that. We still haven’t really worked out why the Chinese are paying less for gas, or maybe for energy in general, than we are.
Canto: Well, economics bores me witless, but here we go. In 2021 China became the world’s largest gas importer, surpassing Japan. What this means for the cost to the domestic consumer I’m not sure. There has been a decline in commodity prices, including gas, in recent months apparently, but I suspect that low prices to the consumer have little to do with that. I suspect it has to do with the deviancies of the Chinese Testosterone Party – which I blame for everything in that country.
Jacinta: Haha, but is blame the word? How have they managed to shield their people from the costs we suffer under?
Canto: Anyway, our way out is to get our electric dishwasher fixed, stop using the gas hot water system, and switch off the gas tap.
Jacinta: Yes, and then we can get back to talking about bonobos and such…. Please!
References
What is the average (MJ) cost of gas in Australia?
How are the Maldives faring under global warming?
Lily Beach Spa and Resort, Maldives. Book Now!
Jacinta: So we’re reading Adventures in the Anthropocene, by science writer and intrepid traveller Gaia Vince, which we picked up at Adelaide Writers’ Week earlier this year. She was a speaker, probably from a remote location, but I didn’t hear her talk….
Canto: Yes, but we’re certainly interested in the topic – global warming, problems, possible solutions, and the female and male heroes trying to effect those solutions. We bought two of Vince’s books – Adventures in the Anthropocene, published in 2014, and Transcendence, in 2019. And at last we’ve gotten round to reading them, in order of publication. We’re about halfway through the first book, which is divided into sections of concern and interest. The first section, “Atmosphere”, deals with the cause of the problem, human changes to our atmosphere, increasing CO2, methane, chlorofluorocarbons and such. The next sections, “Mountains”, “Rivers”, “Farmlands” and “Oceans” treat of glacial melting, dammed, over-fished and polluted rivers, drought-affected and nutrient-depleted soils, and rising sea levels, among other things…
Jacinta: Which brings us to the Maldives, a group of numerous tiny-teeny low-lying tropical islands in the north Indian Ocean, between the Arabian Peninsula and India, regarded as ‘canaries in the coalmine’ for global warming. The smallest and most geographically dispersed nation in Asia, it’s apparently been a getaway place for the super-rich, but most of the local population are dirt poor, and heroin addiction is rife, or at least was ten years ago. Vince met with the island nation’s then President, Mohammed Nasheed, a climate activist who’d taken over from some more or less corrupt characters, and was soon to be ousted by same. My further reading tells me that he’s still active in Maldivian politics, in spite of its brutal nature – corruption in the country has drawn criticism from human rights organisations, and caused its withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Nations in 2016. It has since been reinstated…
Canto: Yes, the Maldives is surely the oddest nation on earth. It has about half a million inhabitants (tiny for an Asian country – if that’s what it is), spread over a territory of 90,000 square kilometres, of which only 300 square kilometres is land! It features a vast mountain range, entirely under water, and overall it’s the world’s most low-lying nation. Apparently the tiny islands are separated by large distances, but navigation between them is near-impossible due to all the coral reefs surrounding them. The marine ecosystems there are among the richest and most diverse on the planet.
Jacinta: Politically it’s been very up and down. It’s a Moslem nation, and to be honest, there haven’t been too many Moslem nations with great democratic, open-society credentials. Wikipedia relates plenty of cloak-and-dagger stuff, with timely, or untimely, depending on perspective, intervention from India.
Canto: It was part of the British Empire/Commonwealth for a period, after colonising efforts from the Dutch and the Portuguese. Their National Day relates to the extirpation of the Portuguese, who’d tried to impose Christianity on the islands. The Brits agreed to a protectorate system which allowed for Home Rule, apparently.
Jacinta: In 1953 one Mohamed Amin Didi became the Maldivian President. He was a progressive, who promoted the education of women, and tried to deal with addiction issues on the islands. He was more or less beaten to death for his efforts.
Canto: Yes, the history of the region is a sorry saga, but let’s focus more on the present. There are various predictions as to when the islands will disappear completely under rising seawater, and this will of course depend on the rate of warming, as well as mitigation processes on the islands themselves.
Jacinta: Yes, it seems that Maldivians are at the mercy of the rest of the world’s emitters. But here’s an interesting quote from Wikipedia:
In 2020, a three-year study at the University of Plymouth which looked at the Maldives and the Marshall Islands, found that tides move sediment to create a higher elevation, a morphological response that the researchers suggested could help low lying islands adjust to sea level rise and keep the islands habitable. The research also reported that sea walls were compromising islands’ ability to adjust to rising sea levels and that island drowning is an inevitable outcome for islands with coastal structures like sea walls.
Canto: Hmm, I can visualise that idea of tides moving sediments to build up the land – more than receding tides might remove sediments – but I can’t imagine it making a big difference. But what would I know?
Jacinta: Yes, and as to sea walls, they’re of course an artificial solution – which isn’t necessarily all bad, but they’re generally seen as short-term solutions, designed or financed by the rich to keep their coastal properties intact. I believe the most recent IPCC report, every word of which seems to be scrutinised and questioned by various governments, refers to some proposed solutions as ‘maladaptations’ without being too specific. In any case, natural solutions such as mangroves don’t work everywhere…
Canto: And rising sea levels cause other problems, such as contamination of underground aquifers in low-lying islands and coastal areas.
Jacinta: Representatives from these regions – the Maldives and the Marshall Islands for example – are arguing that, for the foreseeable, there’s no alternatives to sea walls, and they should be paid for largely by the world’s principal emitters, which sounds reasonable to me.
Canto: There’s another issue – the concrete generally used to build these walls also contributes to global warming. So here’s an apparent solution, or at least a partial one. Cement, the essential binding ingredient of concrete, is made from clinker, ‘a residue produced by firing limestone and clay in a furnace heated to 1,450°C’, a temperature achieved by burning fossil fuels. Cement-making causes about 7% of annual CO2 emissions. According to the PreventionWeb site, there’s a solution:
One of the biggest challenges facing the construction sector is reducing concrete’s carbon footprint while keeping the benefits of a cheap and durable building material. One way to achieve this is by replacing cement with recycled industrial waste, such as granulated slag from steelworks and pulverised ash from coal power plants (essentially, the residue that can be scraped out of the bottom of furnaces).
Our newly designed low-carbon concrete mixes use both of these recycled materials. In fact, it was possible to use up to 60% steel furnace waste in the mixes without the concrete losing its compressive strength, which is crucial for ensuring the structure holds up. The resulting mixes had a 40% smaller carbon footprint than traditional concrete.
Jacinta: Not bad. And I suppose engineering solutions, if that’s what this is, are important for mitigation while we tackle the actual emissions problem.
Canto: Well this is tackling the emissions problem too, kind of. Anyway lots of piecemeal solutions do add up.
Jacinta: Hmmm. And apparently they’ve been building new islands in the Maldives and elsewhere. Not floating islands, that would rise with the tides, which some enterprising individuals have created, but massive things upon which to build new tourist resorts and high-rise buildings. Lots and lots of sand apparently. It’s already happening. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
References
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014
Gaia Vince, Transcendence, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maldives
Scientists warn seawalls can make rising waters worse in the long run
Maldives’ man-made islands offer answer to sea-level rise
a bit about writing and reading origins
We’ll perhaps never know – but I should never say never. We’re still a long way from knowing when we first developed language. After all, what exactly is language? How do we define it? Chimps and bonobos, and other apes and monkeys, not to mention cetaceans and perhaps other species, perhaps in the class of cephalopods, have more or less sophisticated ways of communicating which at least partially resemble language…
But that’s not what I wanted to focus on in this essay. I want to focus on the origin of writing, and its corollary, reading. I’m reading Maryanne Wolf’s 2010 book Proust and the squid for the second time, this time perhaps a little more carefully, while thinking on what constitutes a writing system and how writing and reading changed the human world. Terms such as logogram, syllabary, cuneiform, abecedary and hieroglyph, as well as peoples – the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians and the Ugaritic people of the northern Levant – these are all floating around in my head like so much flotsam and jetsam at present, and I’m hoping that some writing of my own might make sense of it all.
There are questions, of course, about the first writing system. For example, when we find impressions on clay, or daubs on walls which appear to have some structure that we can’t decode, how can we know if it is writing? There appears to be some agreement – though it’s contested by some Egyptologists – that the first writing was Sumerian, from the lower Mesopotamian, which evolved into something called cuneiform about 5400 years ago. But it’s also generally agreed that writing was invented independently as many as four times. And there may yet be more early forms to discover. And there should be no reason to believe that these independently-created writing systems would resemble each other.
So let’s have a look at some of them. First, cuneiform, shown above:
The word ‘cuneiform derives from the Latin word cuneus, ‘nail’, which refers to the script’s wedge-like appearance. Using a pointed reed stylus on soft clay, our ancestors created a script that looks, to the untutored eye, a lot like bird tracks.
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the squid, p32
Around 5000 of these clay tablets have been found, in temples and palaces but also in ancient warehouses, used mostly for accounting. What’s most important to note with these figures is that a sufficient number of people would need to know how to interpret – ‘read’ – them to make the process worthwhile. And that this writing-reading system would require new neurological connections, or the adaptation of existing ones. This would require time, a gradualism from a more painstaking pictorial representation to more abstract, easily constructed and comprehended forms. It’s been argued that many written languages retain the vestiges of pictorial forms, though clearly some more than others. Wolf makes this observation:
Soon after it originated, Sumerian cuneiform, mysteriously and rather astonishingly, became sophisticated. Symbols rapidly became less pictographic and more logographic and abstract. A logographic writing system directly conveys the concepts in the oral language, rather than the sounds in the words. Over time many of the Sumerian characters also began to represent some of the syllables in oral Sumerian. This double function in a writing system is classified by linguists as a logosyllabary, and it makes a great many more demands on the brain.
Ibid, pp33-34
It’s a difficult passage, for me at least. How do we know today the ‘syllables in oral Sumerian’, a language nobody has spoken for millennia? I understand that a logographic writing system, like Chinese, is conceptual, but a concept can also be pictorial in some sense. A website called WikiDiff puts it this way:
Strictly speaking, a “pictogram” represents by illustration, an ”ideogram” represents an idea, and a ”logogram” represents a word: Chinese characters are all logograms, but few are pictograms or ideograms. Casually, ”pictogram” is used to represent all of these: it is a picture representing some concept.
So, to put it, mildly, it’s complex. I’m not sure if there’s anything ‘strict’ about it – a piece of writing, in the alphabet I’m now using, is read as sounds, images and/or ideas, or none of these (if we don’t know the word). Do we think of ‘the’ and ‘and’ as sounds when we read them (as opposed to hearing them)? Perhaps, but so fleetingly… The word ‘and’ surely conveys an idea of continuation or plurality depending on context, and ‘the’ conveys the concept of definiteness as opposed to ‘a’ or ‘any’. But all of these are composed of sounds, or ‘sound representations’, of course, barely noticed due to their familiarity.
My own brain, and the brains of virtually all my acquaintance, is wired for the alphabet, derived from Ancient Greek. A Chinese reading brain is apparently quite different. Quoting Wolf again:
Unlike other writing systems (such as alphabets), Sumerian and Chinese show considerable involvement of the right hemisphere areas, known to contribute to the many spatial analysis requirements in logographic symbols and also to more global types of processing. The numerous, visually demanding logographic characters require much of both visual areas, as well as an important occipital-temporal region called area 37, which is involved in object recognition and which [the French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislaus Dehaene] hypothesises is the major seat of ‘neuronal recycling’ in literacy.
Ibid, pp35-36
I have no memory whatever of leaning to read. It’s as if I could always do so, and grammar and spelling came very easily to me. I was never read to as far as I can recall, though our home, in one of Australia’s most working-class neighbourhoods, was always full of books. The Sumerians, of course, didn’t have books in our sense, and their writing systems, and those of today’s Chinese, took years to learn. The Sumerians – those of the upper class – learned their symbols off clay tablets, which they would copy on the reverse side. It took years of self-discipline, and harsh discipline from above, to learn long lists of words and how to convey them, phonetically and conceptually, in symbols.
I’m trying to understand this, to get it under my skin. What the Sumerians were doing wasn’t just learning a handed-down alphabetical, phonemic system, they were creating such a system – not alphabetic in our sense, but based on phonemic and morphological symbols that needed to be agreed upon and bedded down. Morphemes being those essential additives that indicate plurality or tense. And this, according to Wolf and many others, was a decisive breakthrough in our intellectual history:
For the first Sumerian teachers this resulted in a long-lasting set of linguistic principles that facilitated teaching and learning and also accelerated the development of cognitive and linguistic skills in literate Sumerians. Thus, with the Sumerians’ contribution to teaching our species to read and write, the story began of how the reading brain changed the way we all think. All of us…
Ibid, p39
But Sumerian died out, as languages do. By 1600 BCE no-one was left to speak it. By that time the Akkadian language was in the ascendant in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian writing system and teaching methods, though, had been incorporated in various forms by the early Persian and Hittite civilisations, among others, and the Akkadians continued the tradition, helping to preserve something of that system over the next millennium.
Akkadian script, however, became increasingly syllabic, retaining only a few significant logographic (pictorial) elements. We have managed to uncover a lot of Akkadian texts, including the first great adventure story in literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which seems to have refined and greatly elaborated upon earlier Sumerian and Old Babylonian tales. It’s likely that it had a stylistic influence on the later Homeric tales – looking forward to reading it.
As to how different reading and writing systems affect the brain, and associated thought processes, I recall when I obtained my first computer in the 1990s. I’d been writing regularly, in diaries, since the late 70s, crabbed non-cursive writing in foolscap books, about 14 in all. Changing to a computer slowed things down as I’d never learned to type and I still can’t touch-type. It’s hard to say how this change affected the content and style of my writing, but I know it did. Editing, of course, became much easier, though I sometimes felt guilty, or a cheat, for so easily erasing my first thoughts for more ‘improved’ ones.
But that’s another story. How did the alphabet we use today come about? One of the first alphabetic or proto-alphabetic systems was the north Semitic alphabet from the region of what is now northern Syria. The term ‘Semitic’, often these days associated with Jewishness, actually refers more accurately to a language group widespread throughout Western Asia and Northern Africa. The north Semitic alphabet is the first known alphabetic writing system, ancestral to the Phoenician and later Greek alphabets. The term ‘north Semitic’ now seems questionable, as the oldest inscriptions in the language were recently found at Wadi el-Hol, a site near the Nile in Egypt. The topic of early or earliest alphabetical scripts anyhow seems very tangled and contested, and no doubt mixed up with national and regional pride as well as scholarly reputation. Still, I might have a go at at in a future post…
References
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the squid, 2010
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sumerian-language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
humans and neanderthals and chimps and bonobos
We now know for sure that humans and neanderthals interbred. How much, we don’t know, nor do we know the nature of the interbreeding. The spectrum presumably goes from love and flowers to warfare slaughter and rape, and I recently heard one pundit arguing for the latter option, and I tend to agree, especially given what information ancient DNA is providing about human populations over the last 50,000 years or so – that’s to say, it appears that it was much less a case of cultures and practises spreading from one place to another than populations replacing earlier populations. And it may well be that we’ll get a more gory-detail picture of human-neanderthal intimacies in the foreseeable.
We’ve also learned that chimps and bonobos bonked after their separation due to the creation of the Congo River between one and two million years ago. I wish I’d been there to see it. My guess is that would’ve been far less traumatic, though perhaps not too lovey-dovey either.
So if we accept that violence was involved – who were the perps and who the victims? My feeling is that humans were the rapists, for the simple reason that we’re still here. Neanderthals disappeared some 40,000 years ago, though a remnant population appears to have survived in the Iberian Peninsula for another few thousand years. With chimps and bonobos it was probably more fifty-fifty, though I’m prepared to accept that nothing is ever that simple.
The fact that many of us – I don’t know about me – have some neanderthal DNA is probably a mixed blessing (some genes for absorbing sunlight may have predisposed us to skin cancer, others may have affected our ability to process carbs), but it hasn’t prevented us from quadrupling our population in the last century. And since we’ve produced the first whole-genome sequence of the neanderthal genome, they’ll soon be back with us, so no worries. Unfortunately, their memories of what we did to them will have been wiped, but we’re working on it.
Seriously, humans most likely were one of many contributors to neanderthal extinction. The two species shared similar European territories for the last few millennia before their disappearance, with human numbers apparently growing as neanderthals dwindled. Maybe they were out-competed in hunting big game, and small, as their diets would’ve been more or less identical to ours. Studies of neanderthal teeth from different environments (north-west and south-west Europe) indicate that they were opportunistic dieters, eating more meat in some regions, less in others, not all-out carnivores as previously thought, so this brings them even closer in line with humans, and in competition with them when habitats overlapped. And if anything, ancient DNA is telling us that our human ancestry was even more violent than previously thought – and we’ve long known how bad it was.
We don’t have any direct evidence that modern humans killed neanderthals, and we may never have such evidence. Professor Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum argues that, as we now know that both species inhabited Western Europe for about 10,000 years before neanderthals died out, there was more likely a kind of awkward balance between the two species for much of that time. So, maybe killing but not outright extermination. Of course the same can be said for the large mammals that humans hunted. There was never any intention to exterminate them, but the pressure they were put under did for them in the end.
With chimps and bonobos, that seems to me even more of a mystery. What does a chimp look like to a bonobo, and vice versa? Most of us wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other, but that’s because we’re humans. In the past, Europeans used to say that all Chinese looked the same. Back in Darwin’s day and before, the people of Africa, Australia and Indonesia were collectively termed ‘savages’ by ‘white’ people. It’s taken a while for us dumb humans to become more discriminating. So it’s hardly surprising that bonobos weren’t recognised as a separate species from chimps until well into the twentieth century. Speciation itself is a rather more complicated and questionable affair than it was thought to be in the time of Linnaeus – and it wasn’t particularly simple then. Here’s an interesting quote from a Science article on chimp-bonobo interbreeding:
These findings come on the heels of other genome analyses—such as between coyotes, dogs, and wolves—showing such gene flow between species. “The more we look at genomes, the more it seems to be found,” [Professor Jim Mallet] says. “It’s going to be pretty common,” he predicts.
An article in earth.com, a popular science site, linked below, provides a summary of the physical and social differences between bonobos and chimps, though I can’t vouch for its accuracy – for example it claims that bonobo males and females are ‘much closer in size’ than chimp males and females. I’d always thought that the sexual dimorphism difference was slight, now I’m not so sure. Another interesting difference, that I’d not noticed before in my reading, is that bonobos have dark faces from birth, whereas chimps’ faces are lighter, and darken with age. I can well believe though that there are individual differences, in this as in robustness and gracility, bonobos being in general more gracile. Of course, chimp males are more dominant, so I can well imagine chimp-bonobo interbreeding to be a violent affair. And with bonobo females tending to stick together it would’ve been difficult to pick off an isolated female. Perhaps we should build a few Pan-friendly bridges across the Congo River and see what happens….
References
https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/science-culture/neanderthals-in-prime-time
https://www.science.org/content/article/chimps-and-bonobos-had-flings-and-swapped-genes-past
https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/chimpanzees-vs-bonobos-whats-the-difference/
understanding genomics 2: socio-sexual inequities and bonobos!
1 in 200 Men are Direct Descendants of Genghis Khan – Answers in Genomics!
Jacinta: So this blog piece is a bit of a change of pace from the science we’re obviously having trouble with – and I should mention that we’ve started watching the 11-part ‘Introduction to genomics’ videos online to help us with the basics – but what we’ve read in Who we are and how we got here and other texts is providing further evidence of a violent past that reflects an ancestry more associated with chimp-like behaviour, much exacerbated by the deadly weapons we developed along the way, than the bonobo togetherness that my endless optimism sees signs of in that part of the world that is increasingly empowering the female sex.
Canto: Yes, that in itself is a long story of gradual release from the masculinist Catholic hegemony of the medieval world, with its witch-hunts and its general suppression of female power and influence…
Jacinta: Going much further back in fact to the ancient Greeks and, for example, Homer’s Odyssey, and the treatment of women therein, as explored on this site years ago (referenced below).
Canto: Yes, this general improvement in the treatment of women, and of each other – the end of witch-hunts (I mean real ones) and public executions and torturings and so on – at least in English-speaking and Western European nations, has been highlighted in Pinker’s The better angels of our nature and other analyses. But we still have the Chinese Testosterone Party, the masculinist horrors of Iran and Afghanistan, and the macho thuggery of little Mr Pudding and his acolytes, to name but a few. The humano-bonobo world is still a long way off.
Jacinta: Yes the Ukrainian horror, getting all the airplay here that Mr Putin’s incursions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia didn’t, reminds us that the horrors of two major European wars and Japan’s macho offensives in the first half of the 20th century haven’t been enough to reform our world – from a human one to a humano-bonobo one. But I doubt that genetic tinkering would do the trick.
Canto: Vegetarianism perhaps? But then, Hitler…
Jacinta: No easy solutions I’m afraid. But there are some who are interested in using genomics to highlight just how un-bonobo-like our past has been. Or rather, it’s not so much an interest, it’s more like telling the gruesome story that genomic data is revealing to them. In Neil Oliver’s History of Scotland, for example, he recounts how genomic data reveals that the Pictish men of the Orkneys and the northern tip of Scotland were almost completely replaced by men from Northern Europe, the Vikings, in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, while the female line remained largely Pictish. Slaughter, combined with probable rape, being the best explanation. Reading this reminded me of the chimpanzee war of the seventies in Tanzania, which admittedly was more of a civil war, and apparently less one-sided than the Viking invasion of the Orkneys, or the European invasion of the Americas, or the British invasion of Australia, but in some ways it was similar – an attempt, if not entirely conscious, to replace one population with another, and to the victor, the spoils.
Canto: Well, Reich is fairly circumspect in his book, but he does have a small section towards the end, ‘The genomics of inequality’, from which we may draw pretty clear inferences:
Any attempt to paint a vivid picture of what a human culture was like before the period of written texts needs to be viewed with caution. Nevertheless, ancient DNA have provided evidence that the Yamnaya [a relatively advanced steppe culture that emerged about 5000 years ago] were indeed a society in which power was concentrated among a small number of elite males. The Y chromosomes that the Yamnaya carried were nearly all of a few types, which shows that a limited number of males must have been extraordinarily successful in spreading their genes. In contrast, in their mitochondrial DNA, the Yamnaya had more diverse sequences.
and
This Yamnaya expansion also cannot have been entirely friendly, as is clear from the fact that the proportion of Y chromosomes of steppe origin in both western Europe and in India today is much larger than the proportion of steppe ancestry in the rest of the genome.
This is a roundabout or academic way of saying, or ‘suggesting’ (oh dear, I’m becoming an academic) that the Yamnaya forcibly replaced many of the males of earlier populations in those regions and interbred, in one way or another, with the females.
Jacinta: Yes, again very chimp-like, mutatis mutandis. The good thing is that we’re more and more coming to terms with our violent past – and I would love to be able to trace it further back, beyond Homo sapiens, or at least to the earliest H sapiens 100,000 years ago or so.
Canto: Well, I’m thinking that the CHLCA (chimp human last common ancestor) would be a good place to start, but we’ll probably never know what that population was like – was it more chimp-like or bonobo-like in its social (and sexual) behaviour? But there’s a huge difference between that CHLCA and us – just consider brain size.
Jacinta: But that’s a tricky measure – look at H naledi and H floresiensis. Chimps average around 400cc, gorillas 500cc, H naledi has been estimated at anything from 450 to 600cc, and H floresiensis, from the only extant skull, came in at 426cc. And those two hominins are considered relatively modern. Our brain size is about 1300cc. It’s over the place. But forget all these caveats for a moment, I’ve heard that we got our bigger brains courtesy of hunting big game and cooking meat – and the hunting at least strikes me as a macho activity, leading to a hierarchy of the big and strong, and so, alpha males and all the shite that follows…
Canto: Yes, and bonobos have evolved in a more physically restricted but resource-rich environment, and have somehow become less hierarchy-obsessed, though still hierarchical – the sons of the most powerful females apparently have a higher status in the male hierarchy.
Jacinta: Yes all this is important as we strive to establish a humano-bonobo world. In our incredibly diverse human world we have people dying of over-eating in some parts, and of starvation and malnutrition in others. But in the world of relative abundance that you and I live in, mechanisation and other technologies have reduced the need for physical strength, and testosterone levels in males have dropped rapidly in just the last few decades. We’re eating meat more than ever, but in our cities, nobody can hear the victims’ screams. And we don’t have to do the hunting and killing ourselves, so if we want to toughen up we have to do it via gymnasiums and sports, which are no longer gender-exclusive.
Canto: All this has little to do with genomics, but it seems to me that the macho-chimp orientation of early humans since the CHLCA has much to do with increased proliferation, diversity and inter-group competition for resources, especially over the last 20,000 years, or less. The domestication of horses and the invention of the wheel, and sophisticated sea-going vessels would have helped. Different groups advanced at different rates, with some developing better weapons – for hunting and then for warfare, and naturally they hankered for more territory to expand into, to ‘lord over’. Those more advanced groups became more hierarchical, and gaining more territory and ‘winning’ over more people became an end in itself – think of early versions of Genghis Khan and little Mr Pudding.
Jacinta: That’s why, like the female bonobos who gang up on uppity males before they can do too much damage, we need to stick it the Mr Puddings of the world – hit em hard, before they know what hit em.
References
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here, 2018
an interminable conversation 12: more on hydrogen, and wondering about local power costs
filched from an anti-global warming dinosaur – all’s fair….
Jacinta: So we’ve learned a lot about the problems with hydrogen as a potential fuel, and its problems as a chemical, in the production of fertiliser, in the petrochemical industry, and the need to clean up such usage, for example the contribution of ‘fugitive methane’ to carbon emissions. We also learned that carbon capture and storage, mooted for decades, seems to be going nowhere, largely due to its unprofitability re the private sector…
Canto: So now we’re going to listen to Rosie Barnes, of “Engineering with Rosie”, at a Hydrogen Online Conference, one of many interactive conferences apparently being planned. I’ve heard Rosie before, expressing some skepticism about hydrogen in general, so I’m surprised that she’s prepared to enter the ‘lion’s den’ of what I naturally presume to be hydrogen advocacy.
Jacinta: Yes I’m not sure I want to listen to the post-talk interactive session of this video, as I’m a bit squeamish about confrontation. Why can’t everybody just be nice and agree about everything?!
Canto: Yeah well Rosie begins with the question – which hydrogen projects should we prioritise? And she also mentions the hydrogen energy supply chain, which is apparently a liquid hydrogen transport project between Australia and Japan, about which I know nothing.
Jacinta: Though actually we did write about this before, in a piece that now seems haplessly naive (linked below, FWIW). Anyway, the ScienceDirect website has this ‘headline’ in its overview of liquid hydrogen:
Production of liquid hydrogen or liquefaction is an energy-intensive process, typically requiring amounts of energy equal to about one-third of the energy in liquefied hydrogen.
which don’t sound promising.
Canto: But Rosie seems to think the hydrogen future is a bit more rosy these days. Another focus of her talk will be ‘giga projects’, presumably meaning ginormous projects, such as the ‘Asian renewable energy hub’ and the ‘western green energy hub’, about which more research is needed – by us.
Jacinta: So she was hearing a lot of hype, mainly from politicians, a couple of years ago, about all sorts of hydrogen ‘applications’, but mainly about ‘power system balancing’, which hopefully we’ll hear more about – maybe to do with balancing for the variability of wind and solar – and for vehicular transport. And clearly she didn’t get it, especially in respect of other applications, no doubt, such as home heating. I mean, why hydrogen?
Canto: Indeed. She identified four red flags at the outset – and we need to dig deeper into these. First, ‘will developers keep building wind and solar if prices are negative?’ I don’t know what that means…
Jacinta: Economics is definitely not our strong suit. Actually we don’t have a strong suit. So here’s Wikipedia:
In economics, negative pricing can occur when demand for a product drops or supply increases to an extent that owners or suppliers are prepared to pay others to accept it, in effect setting the price to a negative number. This can happen because it costs money to transport, store, and dispose of a product even when there is little demand to buy it.
Canto: So it’s not immediately clear what that has to do with hydrogen, but let’s mention the other 3 red flags: 2 – will negative electricity prices persist? 3 – round trip efficiency, and 4 – the head start for and rapid improvement of other renewable technologies. Just putting those out there for now.
Jacinta: The questionable nature of the first one is – if electricity production becomes virtually free (negative pricing) then hydrogen production will be virtually free too, using renewables. I think. So the first two red flags are clearly connected. Businesses need to be profitable, so they won’t build (wind or solar) if there’s no market or if the market is saturated. With green hydrogen anyway, the production costs are, or have been quite extreme and those costs would have to come down by a factor of three to be equivalent to ‘dirty’ hydrogen production, to say nothing of cheaper electricity competing for the grid. To wait for the energy to be ‘negatively priced’ and only then use it for electrolysis seemed risky and possibly unworkable. A lot of equipment, etc, for little return.
Canto: Much of this was looking back at 2020 – not so long ago – and looking to Germany as an example of a highly renewable grid, but now she considers our Australian state – South Australia, which produces a lot of wind, first, and solar, second. Over the past 12 months, 65% or so of our grid electricity has been from renewables. Largely wind and solar, rather than base-load renewables (meaning nuclear perhaps, in the case of Germany?)
Jacinta: Yes, presumably nuclear, also hydro could be base load, as presumably it is in Tasmania. Rosie mentioned that we don’t have a lot of geothermal, and that rather shocked me, as I thought there wasn’t much geothermal anywhere, that it was one of those eternally future technologies….
Canto: The USA’s EIA (Energy Information Administration) tells us more:
The most active geothermal resources are usually found along major tectonic plate boundaries where most volcanoes are located. One of the most active geothermal areas in the world is called the Ring of Fire, which encircles the Pacific Ocean.
Most of the geothermal power plants in the United States are in western states and Hawaii, where geothermal energy resources are close to the earth’s surface. California generates the most electricity from geothermal energy. The Geysers dry steam reservoir in Northern California is the largest known dry steam field in the world and has been producing electricity since 1960.
Jacinta: Well, thanks for that. Something new every day…
Canto: So Rosie tells us we have had persistent negative electricity prices in SA – which is interesting considering that our household bills are painfully high. She presents a couple of graphics that I don’t fully understand… I certainly can’t understand negative pricing. Clearly not talking about consumers…
Jacinta: I’d like to know why our electricity costs are so high. Right now please. We can get back to Rosie later.
Canto: Well it’s a worthwhile detour to pursue, but it’ll require a bit of research. So maybe next time. So having watched Rosie’s not-so-rosey presentation, without watching the Q & A, because I tend to be a bit squeamish about that format, I find myself wondering…. there was little mention of Prof Cebon’s concerns about the questionable future of blue hydrogen and CCS, or of the problem of fugitive methane in the production of hydrogen from natural gas, or of the obvious failure in the take-up of hydrogen for passenger transport, or of the cost and difficult logistics of hydrogen compression and transport. And as to its possible use in storage, the battery solution seems more likely, surely?
Jacinta: She did point out, either in this talk or her earlier one, that hydrogen often looks like a solution looking for a problem, and this seems surely to be the case for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. It seems that EVs have won that race, and the improvements continue to be rapid. Well, we might pursue the hydrogen issue, and why so many people are hooked on hydrogen, and the details of hydrogen production, and many other issues relating to renewables, for a while yet, but let’s have a look at the cost of energy here in South Australia, where rooftop solar is very popular, and wind farms are kicking up a storm, but our electricity bills are still painfully high….
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/liquid-hydrogen
an interminable conversation 11: Hydrogen?
yeah, hang on a minute
Jacinta: So green hydrogen – what is it, is it real? Does it really have a future? Where, if anywhere, does it fit in that future? It keeps getting put down, it keeps getting talked about, and it seems most experts say, yeah, it’s in the mix, but at a fairly low concentration.
Canto: Good topic – this will allow us to look back at some videos we’ve viewed which have left me scratching my head. So first, on the inestimable Fully Charged podcast, Robert Llewellyn interviewed a clearly Australian Prof, David Cebon…
Jacinta: And this interview received really rave reviews in the comments, I noticed, which surely says something.
Canto: Yes, so let’s try and get our heads around it… and wow, having watched that interview, I feel a bit dumb for having vaguely hyped green hydrogen’s promise, and for being overly skeptical of Elon Musk’s dismissal of hydrogen a few years go – especially in light of the difficulty of compressing and moving the stuff.
Jacinta: So let’s start at the beginning. Prof Cebon is with the Hydrogen Science Coalition (https://h2sciencecoalition.com), and is a professor of mechanical engineering at Cambridge University. He’s the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, and he’s co-authored over a hundred papers etc etc, so he’s super-knowledgeable about this stuff, especially when it comes to vehicular transport.
Canto: So Robert started by talking positively about hydrogen fuel cell cars as clean and green – no toxic fumes. But, nowhere to refuel them – and refuelling is one of many issues.
Jacinta: And then it was onto the colours of hydrogen, which I didn’t know about. So you ‘make’ hydrogen in two ways – electrolysing water, that is separating into hydrogen and oxygen by means of an electric current, which is energy-intensive. Pulling the H2O molecules apart isn’t easy. If the electricity you use for this is renewable, that makes ‘green hydrogen’. If that energy isn’t renewable it’s called ‘yellow hydrogen’. Of course, energy out of the grid may be a mix – here in South Australia it’s largely gas and renewables, whereas in the eastern states a lot of it is coal – nasty brown coal in Victoria. And so on.
Canto: And as Prof Cebon points out, using green energy to produce hydrogen, rather than to grid it directly into houses and businesses, might seem a bit odd. He calls it an opportunity cost.
Jacinta: The next main ‘colour’ of hydrogen comes from fossil fuel, particularly gas (mostly methane, CH4). By treating gas with super-hot steam, you can break it down into hydrogen and CO2. That carbon dioxide normally goes into the atmosphere. Some 2% of the world’s carbon emissions comes from producing this sort of ‘grey’ hydrogen, which is used to make ammonia (NH3) for fertiliser, and in the petrochemical industry. That percentage is about as much as aviation uses (though fertiliser is pretty essential). However, if you can ‘carbon capture and storage’ that CO2, then the hydrogen involved becomes lovely blue hydrogen.
Canto: Yes but as the Prof points out, once you’ve stripped the carbon from the methane, the remaining hydrogen isn’t very energy intensive, so you need a lot of methane to make a useful amount of hydrogen. Better to use the methane directly via the grid!
Jacinta: As Prof Cebon says, you need more methane to fuel your economy via hydrogen (around 40% more) than if you just used natural gas directly. All very attractive to the natural gas industry!
Canto: Right – what with the ‘electrify everything’ trend, the gas industry will be worried about its market, so here’s an opportunity – pump up hydrogen. Beware of the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying! And it’s blue hydrogen they’re really after, for financial reasons.
Jacinta: So back to electrolysis, green hydrogen, and efficiency. The electrolysis process is about 75% efficient, but importantly the energy has changed form. Think of energy as either work or heat, and forget kWhs for the moment. It’s work that’s important. You want the energy to produce more work and less heat (as with LED versus incandescent light globes). The combination of the two is the total energy output according to the first law of thermodynamics, or the law of energy conservation. Electricity from your battery produces work (eg in an EV) with very high efficiency. Diesel, petrol and other chemical fuels, including hydrogen, produce a lot of heat. According to the prof, the efficiency of an infernal combustion engine, which is essentially its work to heat ratio, is around 30%. Diesel may get up to maybe 45% but that’s the limit. Electricity can reach 90 to 95% efficiency. Chemical energy apparently runs up against the second law of thermodynamics, which limits the conversion of heat back to work. There’s always going to be a loss.
Canto: Right again. So 25% of the energy used in electrolysis is lost as heat. You have to convert the heat back to electricity via a fuel cell, which also has limited efficiency. And this efficiency reduction is before the energy required for compression, transportation, etc. So it’s all very problematic, though hydrogen has been touted as a miracle energy source since the early days of the nuclear industry.
Jacinta: Yes, and there are plenty of other problems with hydrogen – first, it’s colourless and odourless, and it’s very hard to contain without leaks, being of course the most molecularly tiny element in existence, so to use it as a home fuel would require a massive infrastructural upgrade, and of course it’s highly explosive and generates high NOx emissions when burned in the home – more so than methane. It’s also very inefficient compared to electrified heat pumps, which the prof calculates as about six times more efficient. So why would you use renewable energy in this inefficient way? The industry, according to the prof, is trying to hide this impracticability from the public.
Canto: Professor Cebon is involved with, or maybe heads up, the Hydrogen Science Coalition, which highlights five principles. First, the only acceptable form, in terms of fuel, is green hydrogen, using electrolysis via green energy. Blue hydrogen isn’t clean – being gotten from ‘dirty’ methane, and what Cebon calls fugitive methane, emissions from flaring and venting and leaking, amounts to the total annual carbon emissions of Europe – it’s a huge problem, due partially to the unregulated nature of the gas industry in Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Carbon capture and storage, which has been mooted for decades, has gotten nowhere, because – where are the profits in it? No private enterprise would touch it.
Jacinta: The second principle, or project, is to clean up the chemical use of hydrogen in ammonia fertilisers and in the steel and petrochemical industries by preventing the escape of so much of the C02 byproduct from escaping into the atmosphere. Not so much via CCS as by more efficient processing. The third project is to speed up electrification – let’s not pretend that hydrogen is an option for heating homes, for example, or that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can be competitive with EVs. That battle has already been won.
Canto: Fourth is to rid ourselves of the idea that blending hydrogen into gas for any energy purposes is going to be useful. Hydrogen is a low energy replacement for methane, so you would need much more of the stuff, with all the attendant problems. And fifth and last is that hydrogen can only be used locally – that’s to say, at source. Transporting hydrogen safely is hugely expensive – being very light, many vehicles would be required to transport a sufficient energy load – 16 to 1 compared to diesel, according to our Prof. Not at all practicable.
Jacinta: And apparently hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are much more expensive to run than EVs, requiring replacement parts and so forth. So why are people still touting hydrogen. We’ll look more into that in a future piece.
Canto: Yes, Australia’s ‘Engineering with Rosie’ vodcaster has participated in a webinar for Mission Hydrogen, which sounds ominous, but I’ve heard her being skeptical about the green hydrogen movement, so we’ll see what she has to say.
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