All posts by Tim De Chant

A map of where climate change will make nights uncomfortably hot

If there’s one thing you should get used to with climate change—apart from the heat waves, droughts, and intense storms—it’s hot, uncomfortable nights. Worldwide, there will be somewhere around two weeks of higher nighttime low temperatures. In some places, winter nights may be unseasonable warm, or in others summer nights could grow more sweltering and sleepless.

But it’s not just our comfort that’s at stake. Plants are uniquely sensitive to nighttime low temperatures. If they’re too high, plant respiration rates tend to increase. (Yes, plants respire just like us. Unlike us, they’re able to grow without eating because, during a typical day, the rate of photosynthesis greatly outpaces the rate of respiration, meaning they’re making more food than they are consuming.) When respiration rates rise in plants, they consume more of the carbohydrates they made through photosynthesis during the day. With less energy available, they might grow more slowly or put less energy into producing seeds. It happens that many staple crops, like rice and corn, are seeds, so warm nights are one way climate change could slash crop harvests.

Not only will more people be going to bed sweating, they’ll be doing so on empty stomachs.

Source:

Historical climate: Climate Research Unit (Mitchell et al, 2003). Projected changes: Climate Systems Analysis Group, University of Cape Town 2009, calculated from Meehl et al, 2007. Available from the World Bank.

Related posts:

Where children go hungry in the world

Spare or share? Farm practices and the future of biodiversity

Farming, circa 2050

warm-nights

Jobs added after the recession are most at risk from automation

Nikhil Sonnad put together a nice interactive based on a working paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from the University of Oxford. Overall, there’s a decreasing relationship between median wage and likelihood of the position being automated. In other words, the people who can least afford to be unemployed are the most at risk.

More troubling, though, are some of the job categories threatened by automation: food preparation and servers, waiters, retail salespeople, and cashiers. Those same categories are the ones where the economy is adding the most jobs, according to Annie Lowry, reporting for the New York Times:

The National Employment Law Project study found especially strong growth in restaurants and food services, administrative and waste services and retail trades. Those industries — which often pay wages at the federal minimum — accounted for about 40 percent of the increase in private sector employment over the past four years.

That’s not good news. Back in September 2013, when Frey and Osborne wrote their working paper, they said 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being automated. Given the tenor of the recovery, I can’t see that decreasing. Which means that, in the next decade or two, we could be facing another employment crisis.

We’re Not Ready to Deal with Oil Spills in the Arctic

Yours truly, writing at NOVA Next:

Despite the amount of effort sunk into exploration, little has been done to prepare for oil spills, according to a new report by the National Research Council. Much of what we know about oil spills comes from dealing with the disasters in warmer oceans, like the Gulf of Mexico. These regions not only have different thermodynamic properties from the Arctic—which helps disperse thick oil—but they also are surrounded by more infrastructure—the ports, ships, and supplies required to clean up the mess.

Google reinforces geopolitical bubbles

Brian Ries, writing at Mashable:

Russian users of Google Maps, who use the service through Google.ru, will see that Crimea is wholly a territory of Mother Russia. That black line is a border — the same style that marks all 1,426.07 miles from the Black Sea in the south to Belarus in the north.

Americans who visit the region on Google Maps through Google.com will see the disputed border — where it seems the two countries are still working things out.

But what for Ukrainians, who lost Crimea following Russia’s annexation last month? Nothing to see here. Users on Google.ua will hardly notice a nearly invisible grey dotted line that etches its way between Crimea and mainland Ukraine.

Seinfeld, His Show, and Inequality

Anand Giridharadas, writing at the New York Times, notes how much the U.S. has changed in just 16 years:

The country has changed since “Seinfeld” signed off in May 1998, and Jerry has changed. His popular new online show, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” dispenses with the observational examination of regular life that defined the old “Seinfeld.” In its place is a show, well suited to an era dominated by talk of inequality and its effects, in which the über-successful hang out together, and our inability to relate becomes the point.

(Via Seth Fletcher.)

Architect Philip Johnson's dark side

Matt Novak:

American architect Philip Johnson designed some of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century. Johnson, who died in 2005, has long been hailed as one of the greats. But there’s one fact about the man that many people in the architecture community don’t like to talk about: Johnson was a fascist who openly supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for nearly a decade.

New York's type foundry district

Tobias Frere-Jones:

I re-read Maurice Annenberg’s “Type Foundries of America and their Catalogs”, tracked down business directories of the period, and spent too much time in Google Earth. But I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Album covers in street view

Halley Docherty puts classic album covers like “Physical Graffiti” by Led Zepplin and the Beatles “Abbey Road” in context. 

Redrawing North America, 1980s edition

Matt Novak:

In the early 1980s, Washington Post editor Joel Garreau outlined the nine different Americas he and his fellow journalists saw when they looked at a map of North America.

High-speed rail in Texas

A Texas network is often included in maps of potential high-speed rail corridors, but given the freeway-friendly politics of the state, you’d be forgiven in thinking its a long shot. Apparently, some businessmen in Texas disagree, and they have plans to open a 90-minute link between Dallas and Houston by 2021 using Shinkansen technology.

The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary

This interactive from the Guardian takes a bit to get into (click “scroll down” a few times), but it’s worth it. I spent six days on the reef in 2002 after setting out from Gladstone, and it’s an experience I’ll never forget. I told myself I’d get back one day, now I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it in time.

Give the people what they want, sort of

Architect Mitchell Joachim, being interviewed by Diana Budds for Dwell:

Green technology has to be more affordable. We have to find systems that will leapfrog previous ones and are actually cheaper at the point of purchase. Moreover, we have to accept that we can’t change the American value system. Everyone wants to own property and have a sovereign or autonomous lifestyle. We have to react by innovating.

San Francisco's variable parking rates reduce circling for parking

Stephen J. Smith, writing for Next City:

SFpark, the city’s variable-rate parking program, is perhaps the most complete implementation of Shoup’s ideas to date. Started three years ago, the program gradually adjusts rates on electronic parking meters in the most congested parts of the city. (All are near downtown.) Rates can differ by time of day and day of the week, and are adjusted every month or so. Even then, they can only rise or fall by 25 cents after each adjustment period and are capped at $6 per hour, which costs less than nearby garages, where hourly rates can reach into the double digits.

According to a study published last month in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, the program has worked. San Francisco’s occupancy goals have been met, and “cruising” for parking — driving around and clogging up streets after you’ve already reached your destination — is down by 50 percent.

Why China’s cities need to get denser, not bigger

Lily Kuo, writing for Quartz:

If higher density makes so much sense, why haven’t Chinese cities embraced it already? One major reason is that local governments are highly dependent on selling undeveloped land to developers. Redeveloping existing cities to make them more dense wouldn’t result in any local government revenue.

Origin of the Blue Marble images

NASA’s Blue Marble series was inspired by the whole-Earth image taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, but aside from that, I haven’t heard much about why it was revived as a series in 2002. Well, Quartz has the backstory:

[Robert] Simmon and his colleague at NASA at the time, Reto Stöckli, created the iconic image that ended up on the iPhone in part to undercut what he saw as undeserving operators profiting in the marketplace for space imagery, he told Quartz. At the time, he recalled, similar falsely colored images rendered from older black-and-white NASA data were selling for up to $10,000. Simmon and Stöckli’s image, as a work created by US government employees, was in the public domain—free for anyone to use, for any purpose, without restriction. Simmon posted it on the NASA website and didn’t think much more of it.

Months after Comcast payment, Netflix shows its hand

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix:

[O]n other big ISPs, due to a lack of sufficient interconnectivity, Netflix performance has been constrained, subjecting consumers who pay a lot of money for high-speed Internet to high buffering rates, long wait times and poor video quality. A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicled this degradation using our public data. 

Once Netflix agrees to pay the ISP interconnection fees, however, sufficient capacity is made available and high quality service for consumers is restored. If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future. Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience.

Without strong net neutrality, big ISPs can demand potentially escalating fees for the interconnection required to deliver high quality service. The big ISPs can make these demands — driving up costs and prices for everyone else — because of their market position.

Yours truly, writing on February 24:

Many people have predicted (and feared) that the day would come when a content provider would pay an internet provider for priority access to broadband subscribers. Now that it’s here, I can’t help but wonder why it happened now and with Comcast, especially when you consider that Netflix and Verizon have also been duking it out over the same issue (arguably in a more public way).

The answer, I think, is that Netflix is using Comcast’s bid to buy Time Warner to its advantage. As a part of the buyout approval process, both the FCC and the Department of Justice will be scrutinizing Comcast’s moves and market power in the coming months. Having made this payment, Netflix can make the case to either the FCC or the DoJ that pre-Time Warner Comcast has used its dominance in broadband—about 27 percent of the market—to extract payments from content providers like itself. Netflix could argue that if the Time Warner deal goes through, Comcast will have nearly 50 percent of the market, and its bargaining power to demand such payments will further increase.

One rail yard, four city blocks, five skyscrapers

Nick Stockton, writing for Wired Map Lab:

Hudson Yards is the largest private development project in U.S. history, and it’s being built without footings or foundations. Instead, the project is going to sit atop 300 concrete-sleeved, steel caissons jammed deep into the underlying bedrock. Work on the platform broke ground last week, and will take roughly two and a half years to complete. In that time, there’s a lot of engineering to do.

In 40 years, will self-driving cars send us packing for the suburbs?

desert-suburb

At the end of 2013, the journal Cityscape put the following statement to contributors and asked their opinion of it: “In 40 years, the average person will live closer to her neighbors and farther from the ground than she does today.” This is a critique of one response. More to come…

Most urbanists will tell you that we’ll be living at higher densities sooner than you think. Nathaniel Baum-Snow, an economist at Brown University, is one of them. He cites a handful of reasons why he thinks we’ll all be living closer to our neighbors 40 years from now, including commute times, declining fertility rates, and stalled highway construction. Baum-Snow makes valid points, but many of his assumptions presume that the world 40 years from now, at least technologically, will look similar to today. Given the last 40 years, I’ll be surprised if that happens.

Self-driving cars are one of the biggest threats to the future of cities, and widespread adoption could single-handedly undermine one of Baum-Snow’s most compelling arguments—commute times, which he says will be a driving force behind increasing urban densities. As incomes have risen for many city dwellers—those in the top 50 percent, at least—the value of their commute time has also risen. Given Marchetti’s constant, which says that commute times tend to hover around 30 minutes each way, snarled traffic will force the wealthy out of the suburbs and back to cities. In a sense, we’ve already started to see that.

But self-driving cars could reverse that trend. As people’s commutes are freed up for other tasks, including work, they’ll stretch their daily trips, once again allowing them to live where they want. And as we’ve seen, people want to live where they have more space.¹ Compounding the problem is the fact that most early adopters are likely to be wealthy, the same people Baum-Snow says will be looking to drive less.

Working in cities’ favor, Baum-Snow adds, are declining fertility rates. Between 1967 and today, birth rates have fallen from 0.122 births per woman of childbearing age to 0.065, nearly a 50 percent drop. With people having half as many children, the need for space should decline. But as we’ve seen, that’s not necessarily the case. Between 1973 and 2012, median home sizes have grown from 1,525 square feet to 2,306 square feet, the same time that fertility was declining. In that same time period, median household income has risen almost $10,000 when adjusted for inflation, a nearly 25 percent increase.²

Then there’s the siren song of the suburbs—school quality. Suburban and small town school districts frequently outperform their urban counterparts. Baum-Snow notes that the quality of public schools in big cities has stabilized, at least, but that isn’t quite the same as improving. Plus, even if they do improve, urban schools will have to overcome the stereotype wrought by decades of poor performance.

(There is a simple fix, of course—invest in public education at all levels. Early childhood programs have shown great promise at preparing children of all backgrounds for full-time school, and education is the best chance many of children have to break free of poverty.)

Given these realities, I don’t think the future points to downtown, as Baum-Snow does. It’s true that city centers are the hot place to be, but density numbers don’t reflect the newfound enthusiasm. And trends in technology could shatter the many cities’ recoveries.

Despite that, I think many of us—at least, those of us not in the top few percent—will be living closer together. Not downtown, but in the sprawling inner suburbs that will be indistinguishable from the rest of the city, slogging through long commutes between home—which was convenient to the old job we got laid off from—and our new jobs on the wrong side of town.


  1. Home sizes briefly halted their inflation during the recession, but they’ve started to rise again.
  2. On top of that, interest rates are lower today than in the 1970s. That could change 40 years from now, of course.

Photo by Michael Colburn.

Source:

Baum-Snow, Nathaniel. 2013. “Changes in Urban Population Densities Over the Next 40 Years.” Cityscape 15(3).

Related posts:

In 40 years, will we live in cities in the sky?

Marchetti’s constant, or why the 30 minute commute is here to stay

Population density fostered literacy, the Industrial Revolution