I have finally got round to reading Steve Jones’ 2007 book Coral. I was attracted to it long ago because I’ve always had a vague hankering to know more about coral reefs (likewise I am always meaning to read Darwin’s pioneering book on the subject but have yet to do so). If I‘d known that the book was about far more than coral I would have dived in long ago.

Coral is subtitled  A Pessimist in Paradise and Jones is the Prince of Pessimism. The book is in fact a memento mori  for the planet and humankind as well as coral: the bleached bones of dead coral serving as the contemplated skull under Jones’s gaze.

Steve Jones is a genius who can spin seamless moralities and lugubrious commentaries on human vanity, greed and ugliness whilst all the while informing us of the life of our planet in the clearest terms. Under his gaze, the fornications of Captain Cook’s crew in Tahiti, the absurdities of economic bubbles (coral has been one such, like diamonds and tulips), Eternal Reefs Incorporated of Decatur, who will “arrange for human ashes to be cast into concrete balls and used as the foundations for new coral reefs”,  are all as one.

Jones is an effortless aphorist, turning what in other hands would be dry facts concerning economics, ecology and  ageing into literature: “money is the memory of past bargains”;”Gods, in general, gain immortality through celibacy rather than starvation”.

Corals are symbiotic organisms and Jones generalizes his discussion of self-interest  and mutualism in nature and human economics until a whole pattern of sex and death and ageing has been woven from the forces of decay – whether of genes or reef-building animals – and the strategies that oppose them. Jones is a master essayist of an almost 17th century kind but his message is wholly of our time, which he believes to be apocalyptically geological rather than merely historical.

As extreme weather events escalate across the world it is surely time to set out the challenge in the strongest terms.

Those who accept that anthropogenic global warming is occurring have a logical plan: CO2 reduction. Those who deny the anthropogenic cause but accept that climate change is happening (how can anyone now deny that?) have no plan beyond: “go with the flow” (tell that to the Somerset Levels); business as usual; adapt.

OK. What would adapting mean? Many parts of the world that are presently pleasant to live in and can sustain large populations will find that their food production and water supply will become totally inadequate. Meanwhile, deeply inhospitable parts of the world will open up. Northern Siberia and Canada will no longer be mostly permafrost and elks. The Arctic trade route will create vast growth in Siberia, and agriculture, industry and cities will follow.

So Mr Putin will surely welcome us to Siberia: the 21st century’ California. But a vast exodus of billions of people from now ruined countries to these new, promised lands is hardly likely to be carried through peacefully, even if the prospect of Siberian ranching appeals.

Further down the track, we’ll lose most of the world’s major cities to the sea. New York will be one of the first, which ought to concentrate minds – but then minds should have been concentrated long ago by what has already happened.

Just as the Cornish Riviera doesn’t look so swish when it’s been battered by the sea and the railway track left hanging in the air, the Mediterranean won’t be as charming when it starts to mimic the African desert across the water.

And  “Business as Usual and Adjust to Climate Change” doesn’t end there.  With no amelioration, warming would become a runaway positive-feedback process. We know that the world has at remote times in the past been very much hotter than now: the Cretaceous, for instance, when for part of the period there may have been no ice at the poles.  But there were no people around then and people could not survive en masse in such Cretaceous heat-bath conditions. Clever as we are, a rump would probably survive in the hot equivalent of Antarctic research stations, a handful of scientists living under great great domes with climate control to allow food to be grown.

The only rational course is carbon dioxide mitigation which would preserve a world recognisably like our own.

On Tuesday, January 28th, The Independent reported that: “The amount of money the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has allocated to maintain England’s rivers fell from £108m in 2010-11 to about £92m in 2012-13, the year in which Mr Paterson took office. The cuts have accelerated under Mr Paterson. The allocation fell to about £70m this year and is scheduled to tumble again, to £60m next year, bringing the total drop in funding under the Coalition to 45 per cent.”

The government’s (at least the Tory part of it) believes that public spending is bad and that the country needs more and more private enterprise. But you  can’t deal with a country drowning under repeated flooding by means of the UK government’s nostrum: “more competition and privatisation”. It is obvious to all that being flooded for weeks, or even months, on end is akin to a war-time situation. What did we do in the last War? – We socialised most of the economy.  It must be deeply troubling to the government that a situation has arisen – and is going to get far worse –- in which collective, public action is the only possible way out of an unprecedented crisis. How mean of the climate to ruin their little boomlet! I imagine they must want us to try feel good in our heads  even as our knees are in water.

Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes (OUP)

Once a Cinderella, earth sciences are now the most exciting and vital studies on the planet. Waking the Giant is a major contribution. In the first part, it details the salient aspects of the earth’s climatic history to establish the current state of global warming. But the crucial aspect of the book is the thesis that climate change and volcanic activity are linked.

At first surprising and unlikely, this idea becomes blindingly obvious when you understand the movement of the earth’s crust under the weight of almost 2 miles of ice and then its partial removal.  Some facts about this are well known. When the polar ice sheet contracted at the end of the last Ice Age, Scandinavia began a rise of perhaps 1000 ft. This process is still going on, one consequence of which is that Britain is being flipped about its axis, Scotland rising and southeast England sinking at the rate of about 1 mm per year.

The quest to understand the links between the air, the oceans, and the rocks has produced some remarkable correlations. GPS techniques have shown that the movement of water and ice around the world through the seasons causes the earth to bulge slightly on an annual cycle. In the Northern Hemisphere winter it contracts by 3 mm whilst the Southern Hemisphere expands and vice versa in the summer.

McGuire looks at many possible triggers for the incidence of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The most important one is that rebound after ice has melted. Volcanoes and faultlines are in a precarious state of equilibrium. A shift caused by rebound after ice is just the kind of mechanism to tip them into activity. The geological record shows that there was an increase in volcanic activity during the most intensive period of deglaciation from 12,000 to 5000 years ago.

Waking the Giant describes some of the major episodes and their consequences for human life, the most terrifying in recent history being the 1783 and 1815 eruptions of the Grímsvötn volcano in Iceland and the Tambora volcano on Java, respectively which blighted harvests in Europe for several years after. But these pale into insignificance compared to the giant Sumatran Toba volcano of 74,000 years ago. It was so large its signature in terms of ash deposited  in the geological  record is unmissable. It is thought to have come close to wiping out the human race. Even worse was the geologic catastrophe of 252 million years ago that destroyed 95% of living species – the greatest extinction on record.  This is now thought to have been caused by a massive eruption of magma plates in Siberia: the Siberian Traps.

The geological processes that caused the Siberian Traps and the Toba eruption are still active. In particular, the possibility that global warming will release the vast store of frozen methane hydrates could produce mayhem on a major scale.

We have been lulled into complacency by the fact that human civilisation developed against the only possible backdrop – an extended period of benign climate. It’s the only world we have known. But it’s not the only world we are going to get.

At end of year the papers publish their lists of Books of the Year and highlights from the forthcoming year’s catalogues. There is a wood-for-the trees problem here. A single year often contains no truly great books. But the last few years have seen some truly mind-expanding popular science books. Our knowledge of life on earth is growing so rapidly and the picture that is emerging is so at odds with our lazy received viewpoints, it’s not going too far to claim that these books are essential reading if there is to be a future not entirely horrific.  This is the raw list. Over the next few weeks I’ll post commentaries on each book.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (Penguin)

Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (Profile)

Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Quercus)

Philip Ball, Shapes (OUP)

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire (Profile)

Steven Mithen, After the Ice, Phoenix

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, the 10,000 Year Explosion (Basic Books)

Guy Deutscher, the Unfolding of Language (Arrow)

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (Vintage

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail (Profile)

Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (Profile)

Wolfgang Behringer, a Cultural History of Climate (Polity Press)

Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes (OUP)

The aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan is still the urgent task of rescue; then for the Filipinos will come years of rebuilding. And for the world there is, yet again, the question: are these extreme weather events become more common and/or more extreme and are we the cause?

Whenever something like this happens the public level of debate runs along lowest common denominator lines. The question is asked: did our carbon emissions cause this? Like the Scottish Referendum it’s a yes/no question. But it isn’t a yes/no issue. It can’t be answered in that form.

All public debate where science is involved founders on the fact that those who have not received a scientific education regard common sense as the ultimate touchstone. We evolved  to cope in a world perceptible to our limited senses and common sense has generally been a good guide to our survival. But as Lewis Wolpert pointed out most forcefully in his book, The Unnnatural Nature of Science, science flouts  common sense: it is counter intuitive. But it’s true.

Common sense would never have have predicted that a small portion of matter could explode a city; that a tiny particle no one will ever see can decimate human populations, that our inheritance is based on a 4 letter code strung out in a 3 billion letter chemical molecule, that voice and moving picture data can be transmitted and reconstituted across the globe, either broadcast or targeted on a single individual thousands so miles away holding a plastic rectangle. And so on.

How common sense misleads: a rightwing US climate denier spluttered that by adding a bit of carbon dioxide to the air we couldn’t possible affect the mighty processes of the earth. But the mighty processes work in mysterious ways. When ice forms or melts over land it depresses or raises it. Scandinavia is still rising from its depressed position in the last Ice Age, which ended around 12,000 years ago. This heave is a matter of 1000 feet or more. And this massive release can cause earthquakes. We know that a small change in atmospheric carbon dioxide can melt ice: it’s happening very fast in the Arctic now. So small changes in airy gas real can move the mighty processes of the earth. And on top of superstorms, drought, forest fires, floods, rising sea levels, we are probably going to see an increased incidence of earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic action: an omniwhammy.

But the man around the family barbecue will not be won over.  To go beyond common sense to understand how science came to the conclusions it has requires following a patient trail of evidence and reasoning.  The man around the family barbecue, who appears en masse in opinion polls won’t do this.  As Darwin wrote: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. “ 

One of the pleasures of nature watching in your own garden is the yearly weather induced variation and the chance arrivals. Once the season is set it’s often dominated by a particular phenomenon. There was the year blackbirds raised a brood in our hedge – the only time in 25 years this has happened. Two winters ago it was a great horde of greenfinches regularly fighting over the bird feeder. Last year many mint moths suddenly appeared on the wild marjoram.

This year it has been the gatekeeper butterfly.  The hot July gave a boost to butterflies but in North London it seems very few species were left able to take advantage of it. It’s about 5 years since we saw a peacock in the garden. This year, apart the usual early orange tip and a single speckled wood, until July there were a few visits by a comma, a regular in recent years and that was it.

There were plenty of whites around in July as predicted but the gatekeepers have been a constant presence, swelling to a maximum of 5 at the same time on the last very hot day of July. Gatekeepers are not urban butterflies and it seems they were never found in London during the years of industrial pollution. They returned to Hampstead Heath in 1991 and seem to be thriving. They’ve certainly been regulars in our garden for the last few years but never on this scale. So good for the gatekeepers but where are the red admirals that used to swarm over a large buddleia bush in the street two doors away? Where are the peacocks? 

Since its summer we can be permitted a little idle entomologising. Last summer I was delighted to find for the first time mint moths (Pyrausta aurata) in my garden. These are small, beautifully patterned in various shades of ochre, indigo and brown, day-flying moths. They live on mint or pretty well any labiate flowers. The reason for their appearance was the clumps of marjoram that have thrived in our small North London garden for over 25 years.

Two weeks ago a different moth appeared. It had  wavy cream patterns on a bluish-black, backround, with yellow on the head and barred on the body. I should have  guessed that it’s a relative but only just worked it out when I found two of them this morning. This is the Wavy-barred Sable (Pyrausta nigrata). It is a native of chalk downland so it’s wonderful to find it in North London, blown in from the Chilterns or North Downs.

I have always loved the fauna and flora of chalk down land so to find that it is coming to me rather than me having to go to Box Hill is very gratifying. Summer days are here at last.

As a recent convert to Geological obsession I have  been entranced by Iain Stewart’s BBC2 series Rise of the Continents. So many questions I’d never even asked are answered. Why, for instance, is Antarctica a waste of ice and snow but Australia tropical desert?  Until 200 million years ago they were joined as part of the single earth landmass Pangaea, and covered in lush Glossopteris forest.  When they sundered, the Antarctic island, surrounded by ocean, began to chill. Wind currents stirred ocean currents to circulate around the continent rather than trade with the warmer waters coming from the tropics. I haven’t worked out yet quite why Australia became tropical desert. Obviously it was always moving north, getting warmer and, drying out, so desertification presumably became unstoppable.  Australia, in any case, is still moving and will eventually crash into Asia, unleashing a new mountain range and becoming tropically lush again

Speaking of mountain ranges, I didn’t know that New York sits on the eroded base of a mountain range once of Himalayan dimensions, produced when South America collided with North. A good base on which to build skyscrapers.

For those who can access BBC iPlayer, I can’t recommend this series too highly.

This Facility Contains Chemicals...

Besides much that is admirable and glorious California also has its mad bureaucratic streak. A notice that appears in hotels and other public places startles: “This Facility Contains Chemicals Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer, And Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm. A Brochure With More Information Is Available At The Registration Desk”. To which the obvious retort is: why isn’t the State of California doing something about it then rather then frightening people needlessly.  The answer of course is California’s direct voter legislation. This is Proposition 65, passed in 1986. It has a laudable aim of reducing known carcinogens in the environment but the blanket use of this warring; often unattached to any actual assessment of any chemical risk is counterproductive. Wikipedia comments: “Because of the overuse of the vague warning, the ubiquitous signs ultimately communicate very little information to the end user... Most of the Proposition 65 complaints are filed on behalf of straw man plaintiffs by private attorneys, some of whose businesses are built entirely on filing Proposition 65 lawsuits”. Hmmm.