6th August 2021. Climate change | Newton
Making communities more resilient; understanding more about Newton
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
Apologies for missing yesterday’s edition. I ran out of time.
#1: Making communities more resilient
My former colleague Ben Wood, now at Good Business was part of the team that has just produced the Building Future Communities report (pdf) for the insurance company Aviva.
Of course, it is pretty obvious why insurance companies are concerned about climate change, even just from a narrow business point of view. It does terrible things for their business model.
I recall Axa saying—when it signed a climate pledge a couple of years ago—that a four degree world was “uninsurable”. But going by some of the material in the Aviva report, even our current world is heading that way.
And it’s good to see Aviva not sitting on the fence here: the headline on the Introduction is, “We are in the midst of a climate emergency”.
The top ten warmest years on record in the UK have all happened since 2002 and it is predicted that, by 2050, average summers will be hotter than the record-equalling heat of summer 2018. At the same time, February 2020 was England’s wettest ever, with some regions being hit by more than 400% of their normal rainfall.... last February, we received almost a year’s worth of storm claims in one month whilst in 2018 the lack of rainfall exposed properties to a higher incidence of subsidence claims, highlighting the vulnerability of many communities.
The report comes with seven “urgent steps” that should improve community resilience in the face of climate change.
Three of these are about increasing resilience at the design stage:
- Greater use of innovative nature-based solutions that are adapted to the UK landscape
- Strengthen planning regulation to protect UK properties
- More collaboration and research across all stages of the building process to combine sustainability with safety.
The first one s about designing in greater resilience to the landscape and built environment, and the second one, put simply, is about simple things like not letting people build on floodplains. The third is about the kind of innovation that could lead to new materials and methods being adopted in building.
A second set are about helping people when catastrophe happens:
- Improve access to home insurance and narrow the insurance gap to protect those most at risk
- Encourage and incentivise property resilience to aid recovery
- Collaboration across recovery organisations to strengthen crisis response and resilience at community level.
The first one notes that renters are more likely to be exposed to insurance risk, which is an interesting insight. The second one is about helping home-owners improve their homes to be more resilient to disaster; the last one is about helping communities respond better.
The final one is “Ensure small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are sufficiently protected against extreme weather.” (It’s hard to see how it’s different from encouraging “property resilience.”) I’ve written some of these reports in the past, and this looks to me like something that the Marketing Director slipped in to support some business target.
The report itself has short case studies supporting each of the seven.
There’s also a data point that jumps out from the report. More than a third of UK householders think they’ll be directly affected by climate change in the next year, and half think this will happen in the next five years.
(Source: Aviva)
#2: Understanding more about Newton
I finally got round to reading James Gleick’s biography of Isaac Newton, which I seem to have bought 18 years ago marked down to half price in a bookshop chain that no longer exists.
I thought I knew plenty about Newton; the laws of motion, the calculus, the fascination with alchemy, the years at the Royal Mint. But I didn’t really understand that much.
So here are some of the other things I learned from the book.
Long before he got round to the problem of gravity, or of the planets, he’d already solved (in his early 20s) the problem of why light appears to be white, which was taxing the best brains of his time. (This also led to a falling out with Robert Hooke, the first President of the Royal Society).
Solving the problem of light wasn’t a trivial undertaking, since 17th century optics weren’t really up to the task, so he made his own. (There’s a quote about this in the epigraph of the book).
I don’t really want to jump over the rest of his vast contribution to science, but the importance of measurement jumps out. This isn’t just theoretical work, and again, the challenge of this shouldn’t be underestimated, given the limits of measurement at the time.
The apparent paradox of inventing so much of modern science and being fascinated by alchemy led Keynes in a short article to call him ‘the last of the magicians’. Keynes had bought some of Newton’s papers when they were auctioned by Sotheby’s in the mid-30s, and then spent time collecting more of them. (Strikingly, given how much Newton’s papers would sell for now, the auction didn’t create much excitement or raise much money).
But this is quite a modernist view, even Whig view of history. A better explanation is that at a time when previous models of how the world worked were losing their explanatory power, alchemy and modern science were both candidates to offer better explanations. Allegations of ‘witchcraft’ also peak just as the new science emerges.
As it happened, his knowledge of alchemy both helped Newton with his study of light, and also served him well when as Master of the Royal Mint he needed to re-issue the nation’s currency.
Three more notes. The first is that he rescued the Royal Society from likely closure when he became President after Robert Hooke died. Partly, this was because he bailed out its shaky finances with his own money. But he also put its research on a proper footing, appointing a Curator of Experiments to do actual experimental work—and later two more of them.
The second is that although he’s known for his modest claim that he was “standing on the shoulders of giants”, he didn’t mean it. The phrase is in a lecture to the Royal Society, as a young scientist to older and better known scientists. It was a rhetorical device designed to deflect criticism—and envy. Newton knew well enough how much he’d invented.
The third is that Newton himself is responsible for the apple myth. He seems to have planted the story with listeners, late in his life, at a point where he was clearly cultivating his reputation.
I’m not making any special claims for the Gleick book. I just read it because it happened to be on my shelves, and because I’d listened to an intriguing podcast in which Patricia Fara had talked to Tyler Cowen about Newton. It’s well written, as are all of Gleick’s books, and it covers the ground, and most of the main controversies (his religious views, the feud with Leibniz over the invention of calculaus. I see it doesn’t make the Five Books interview with William Newman about Newton. I might start there if you want to know more, or with an interesting short article at the National Endowment for the Humantities.
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