WARMING TO A THEME

Dick Pountain/15 February 2007/10:03/Idealog 151

This column is supposed to be about ideas (hopefully ones that relate somehow to computing), so in the interests of credibility I can no longer avoid making comment on the biggest idea of this century, Global Warming. I'm not a Global Warming Denier - on the contrary, as a keen amateur naturalist I've noticed something wrong with the seasons for a decade or  more, and I do keep up with the climate science quite keenly. There's no doubting now that digging up and burning fossil hydrocarbon deposits, combined with chopping down too many trees, is altering the energy balance of the planet and causing it to heat up. What there is plenty of doubt about is how far and how fast the process will go. I have a nagging fear it may prove to be highly non-linear and will surprise us (not in a good way) rather sooner than expected.

The massive increase in fossil fuel burning is a direct consequence of the energy demands created by the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions which lead to the internal combustion engine and mass transport, a larger world population thanks to mechanised agriculture, better hygiene and medicine, and the generation of electricity as a medium for distributing energy. So the other, er, burning question is to what extent can technology correct the problem that it's helped to create? Computers are a very late addition to this list of culprits, and not major consumers of electricity when compared to lighting, heating and transport (though their manufacture of course adds quite a lot to the load). On balance I think it likely that computer technology, properly applied, could save more carbon emissions than it creates, though whether it *will* be properly applied is a whole other can of worms. 

Technologists of many kinds are studying the problem hard, and have come up with many tricks both to generate energy from renewable (ie. non-fossil) sources and to prevent its waste: Scientific American September 2006 contains a very good summary of the state of the art. We can now build houses that require zero energy inputs to heat them and vehicles that use a fraction of the fuel of current models. The problem that remains is, of course, inertia - physical, commercial and political. The world is already full of things and you can't just snap your fingers and replace them all with new, more energy-efficient things. And even if you could, who will pay for them? And you still have to persuade everyone that it's all necessary.

Computers come into this story at many different levels. They're needed as control systems in energy-efficient hybrid cars and direct injection bio-diesel engines. They're needed as design tools to create more efficient, low-drag devices of all kinds from aeroplanes and lorries to wind turbine blades. The climate models that proved that global warming is taking place would be inconceivable without computers, and they continue to monitor and refine these models. But there's a far greater potential role that computers could play.

You see, my gut feeling is that all these advances in energy conservation, generation and utilisation - even if we ever find the political will to apply them, which remains in doubt - won't prove to be enough in the long term. Climate change involves heating such huge amounts of matter that the process is very slow and exhibits huge inertia (that word again), so it's likely that it's already gone way further than current models tell us and that reversing it will be like trying to do a hand-brake turn in an oil-tanker. I'm not predicting that Earth is going to turn into Venus and wipe us all out in a deluge of sulphuric rain, merely that the weather will become rough enough to severely disrupt the economy and obstruct the efforts needed to cure it.

Should this turn out true, people will eventually have to rethink the entire basis of modern life, namely that both matter and information need to travel faster and faster. What if they decide that information should travel ever faster but matter actually needs to travel slower, less far and less often? There's already a backlash against supermarkets who fly English apples across the world to polish them and back again to sell them, and a counter movement toward growing and selling food locally. This principle might be extended everywhere. Paper publishing would be abolished in favour of online communication of various kinds, saving millions of hectares of trees. Telecommuting would be the preferred way to work where possible, and living close to work wherever not. And - I can't believe I'm actually saying this - Second Life may turn out to be the model for much future social interaction. Instead of travelling to the Seychelles they'll stay home and holiday in a hyper-realistic virtual Seychelles, and shop in virtual Sainsbury's. You may regard such a life as not worth living, and I might well agree, but in any case we'll be long dead before this becomes feasible/necessary. Anyway cheer up, it might never happen - car culture has such a powerful grip on the human imagination (West and East) that they'll probably choose to drive back to the Stone Age at 150mph with the air-con and stereo full on...