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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #31, 2019

Posted on 6 August 2019 by Doug Bostrom

56 articles this week.

What articles are open access?

When Ari was running this page open access articles were flagged as such. That feature is now restored. Note that identification of open access articles is largely mechanized under the new regime and so it's possible there will be omissions. Performance should improve over time.

Open access article titles are appended with "(open access)" in our list.

What's "open access?" This denotes a scientific article free to read by any member of the public, without them needing to pay money or be affiliated to library privileges at an institution. Open access is closer approximation to ideal means for propagation and transfer of scientific information, refinement made possible by fundamental changes in the mechanics and logistics of scientific publishing. The open access publisher PLOS articulately explains the philosophical underpinnings. of open access.

The drive to open access in the verb sense has been profound and swift. 67% of this week's collection of publications are published as free to read. This begs a question: is the inability of a researcher or research team to pay fees for open access to their work a feature of a true meritocracy?

The Earth as systems engineering task

The International Space Station (ISS) functions as required— as a semi-closed system— because it's the subject of fanatical measurement and analysis. Everything that can possibly be accounted for, is. Rational planning coupled with regulation makes the operation of the ISS feasible. In a similar vein, today's largest cruise ships can support total human occupancy of nearly 9,000 persons for a few days at a time thanks to accounting, planning and boundaries on behavior. Passengers and crew of space stations and ships are not expected to figure out how they'll eat and breath without any plan or engineering support, and they're not free to behave exactly as they choose at all times.

With the Earth increasingly filling the role of a cruise ship packed to the gunnels with passengers and crew (7.5 billion souls on board, growing) and traveling an endless circular course around the Sun, it seems as though more "systems thinking" along the lines of what we freely admit is necessary for successful operation of smaller artifacts would be good practice to adopt. In this week's roundup of climate research pertaining to human affairs we find an explicit reference to that philosophy, The Earth System Governance Project as a network organization: a critical assessment after ten years. Many articles in the human affairs related section of research news are reflective of systems thinking of a kind we've not previously had to adopt but which is now increasingly obviously missing in our habits, to our detriment. Star-shaped cities alleviate trade-off between climate change mitigation and adaptation integrates various findings to produce a more systematic approach to urban design, an attempt at engineering cities that will function better than a random assemblage:

One strand of literature demonstrates that compact cities of sufficient density result in lower GHG emissions in the transport and the buildings sectors compared to sprawled cities. Another strand of literature, however, reveals that compactness hinders climate adaptation by amplifying the urban heat island (UHI) effect. As a result, mitigation and adaptation objectives of cities appear to contradict each other. Here, we develop a geometrical optimization framework and model of a three-dimensional city that minimizes this conflict. It makes use of the observation that low-carbon efficient transport can be realized via linear public transport axes, and that GHG emissions and UHI effects scale differently with varying geometric properties, thus enabling design that reflects both the economics and the climate of cities. We find that star-shaped cities, in contrast to radially symmetric cities, are well suited to alleviate the problematic trade-off. ... The results are of particular importance for city planners of rapidly urbanizing cities in Asia and Africa who still have the potential to shape urban layout.

What's the probability of this work being realized in a pure implementation? Probably low, but formally exploring engineered cultural systems allows us to assess our real world results against the realm of the possible, and to have tools readily available when we find improvement is mandatory.

More broadly, it's hard to say if our human culture systems thinking will evolve and its results be implemented with sufficient rapidity. So far our adjustments are lagging. But we can certainly bear in mind lessons from operation of our smaller engineered artifacts. It's safe to say that a cigar shop and cigar smokers on the ISS would require an engineering response to handle effluvia or a "no, you can't do that." Similarly, here on Earth it seems incumbent on promoters of coal mines to either provide a successfully engineered outcome for the side-effects or their trade, or be told that coal sales are not permitted as combustion of coal has proven incompatible with successful operation of Earth.

Engineering implies regulation. Regulation of behaviors isn't a radical concept— regulation of usage is part of successful engineering outcomes. A bridge is engineered to handle a certain amount of weight and this is not a matter of controversy. As it is performing the same effective role of the ISS at a much larger scale but without possibility of supply missions to make up for inefficiencies, Earth is also an engineering topic and conclusions necessarily arise from that fact.

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