Information flow: Samples of rock and ice reveal how much CO2 there was in the atmosphere.
Head in the sand, prof – science be damned
Perhaps ivory tower syndrome (ITS) should be a recognised dysfunction, an example of which is clearly demonstrated by Philip Lloyd (“Climate be damned, we need energy”).
Ignore for now that the best scientists are at an almost 100% agreement that human-made emissions are changing our climate, or that the fetish of “economic growth” leads to greater inequality, or that it has been possible to measure ancient global temperatures by means of deep core samples in ice-locked land …
India has about 25 times the number of people compared with South Africa, so emitting four times as much is hardly a comparison – measured by per capita per gross domestic product shows that we emit up to 20 times more than even the United States.
“Huge tracts of land” are used to feed livestock, not people – about 50% of both crops grown and fish caught are fed to livestock. One would swear that Lloyd does not read what other scientists in our country have written, confirming that some 50% of our populace (and a billion more globally) are food insecure – hardly “no longer a threat for most people”.
Electricity is not “stuttering because of a lack of fossil fuels” but from poor maintenance. It is also often forgotten that Gro Harlem Bruntland’s famous quote is still misquoted – what she said was “sustainable development is the notion of discipline, within which …”. One company using nearly 10% of all our electricity to create 2 000 jobs, when more than 50 million of us use about 18% – hardly disciplined.
Lloyd forgets the promises of the nuclear industry – “too cheap to meter” (really? New nuclear electricity generation is costing some R1.50 per Kilowatt-hour, compared to wind at 75c currently) or that “the problem of nuclear waste will be solved by the time there is a high level waste to handle” – not a single suitable sustainable solution exists other than storage. What price storage for 100 000 years?
Renewable energy can and does provide industrial baseload power, creates the largest number of jobs especially given the existing skill sets in South Africa and has delivered on time, to spec, on budget – not so with nuclear or coal.
It is time for sanity to prevail in the world of energy. – Muna Lakhani, Wynberg
• Reading Lloyd’s letter, I was shocked that a member of an energy institute could be so unaware of the basic laws of physics and chemistry.
There is a blanket around the Earth that is made up mainly of carbon dioxide. When light energy emitted by the sun hits the Earth’s surface, it is reflected upwards as infrared energy. The nature of visible light is such that it can pass through layers of CO2 without much difficulty. This is not true of infrared energy.
Thus, visible light can pass through the CO2 blanket around the Earth but the reflected infrared energy cannot and is trapped as heat energy inside the atmosphere. This process is vital to ensuring the Earth is warm enough to sustain human life, but it is fragile. It depends on there being a very specific amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Too little and not enough heat is trapped. Too much and the Earth gets too hot.
The equilibrium has been disturbed in the past, when volcanic eruptions sent massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. The resulting increase in temperature melted the polar icecaps. Icecaps are white and white substances are the most reflective of light and heat; black is the most absorbent.
The white ice that used to reflect a lot of light and heat energy, thus keeping the Earth relatively cool, was turned into dark ocean water that absorbed massive amounts of heat, warming the Earth exponentially.
The result was mass extinction. Millions of animals of different species died and it took hundreds of years for the system to right itself. How do we know? We can tell exactly how much CO2 there was in the atmosphere at any given time because samples are preserved in rock and ice. There was a period when CO2 levels rose exponentially and this corresponds to what palaeontologists call the Permian extinction.
The bottom line is that geology, physics, chemistry, biology, palaeontology and climatology all agree that too much CO2 is very, very bad for life. CO2 levels have risen dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. The main product of burning fossil fuels is CO2. The temperature is rising, CO2 levels are increasing, the ice caps are melting again.
We are heading towards a catastrophe that will wipe out Lloyd’s precious economy, along with most of human civilisation. Unlike “traditional prophecies of doom”, there is something we can do about it. But if Professor Llyod wants to stick his head in the sand, who am I to question him? – Jarah Fluxman
Fifty Shades glamourises rape
Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the worst pornographic glamourisations of sexual violence ever released on the big screen (“Fifty shades of criticism for erotic flick”).
Christian Grey, the main male character, uses manipulation, jealousy, intimidation and violence to control the naive Anastasia Steele. Her given age is 21 but her emotional age is much younger: Fifty Shades thus subtly promotes paedophilia.
The movie markets rape as romance. It’s just a sensationalised lie: telling women they can and should fix violent, controlling men by being obedient and devoted.
Fifty Shades reflects a culture saturated in violent pornography. This porn has groomed, and continues to groom, the next generation of men to believe that they are entitled to violent sexual behaviour – and that women should enjoy it.
The popularity of Fifty Shades among women also sends a message to men – that unrestrained domination is what women want.
While millions of women fantasise about the controlling and abusive Christian Grey of fiction, there are many other women dealing with the horrors of living with males like him. Women like Anastasia end up in a shelter for the abused.
I urge everyone to not waste R50 to see this rape porn. Donate it to a shelter for abused women. – Taryn Hodgson, Cape Town
UCT values the humanities above profits
In his comment piece “What is the price of education?”, Dr Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi is absolutely right to warn of the dangers of neoliberal agendas in shaping education policy and practice. We have seen these emerge through government policy (the National Qualifications Framework is a case in point – see Stephanie Allais’s excellent recent book on the subject) and through various institutional practices.
We need to be vigilant about the institutional and personal effects of performance management and of institutional auditing procedures, as well as the commodification and marketing of qualifications in attempts to raise revenue, the slashing of “unprofitable” courses and the eroding of collegial governance structures in favour of authoritarian executive leadership.
Yet in his article Dr Ramoupi does not make the case that such an agenda has penetrated the University of Cape Town (UCT). He establishes that UCT vice-chancellor Max Price was at Davos in January, where “delegates talk about business and making profits”. He then cites Martha Nussbaum and others who extol the value of a humanities education, especially for creating citizens with “the critical literacies necessary to keep democracies alive and become complete citizens”. He also mentions fellow Davos attendee Dr Iqbal Survé’s allegations about UCT’s failure to transform and ends with a warning that universities should not be run as corporations.
Stitching together these four claims presents an underlying argument that Price frequents Davos because he is into the business of running a university for profit, that this will inevitably entail an assault on the humanities and that Survé was right about UCT’s failure to transform. Isn’t that a bit of a stretch?
As I recall, UCT vice-chancellors were first invited to Davos about 10 years ago – Professor Njabulo Ndebele was the first to go – not to discuss the business of making profits but to meet with the heads of universities from other parts of the world. Neither during Ndebele’s tenure nor that of Price have I been aware of ongoing attempts to run UCT as a profit-making enterprise encapsulating corporate values.
All higher education institutions in our country face challenging financial constraints and often very hard choices have to be made about which projects to run with and which to drop, in order to balance the budget. Although the faculty of humanities at UCT (the university’s largest in terms of student numbers) is not able to mount all the programmes it would probably like to (especially in the area of African languages), it has not, since the early 2000s, had to cut back significantly on curriculum offerings.
In fact, university budget allocations to the humanities increased substantially during Price’s term of office, made possible by rising enrolments. Price has also been a very active supporter and fundraiser for the humanities at UCT. Areas such as the creative and performing arts, languages, philosophy and religious studies, often among the first victims of university financial cutbacks, are doing very well indeed at UCT.
UCT governance structures are, in any case, highly devolved – it isn’t the vice-chancellor’s decision which courses are offered or dropped. This is the business of faculty boards and the senate.
There are universities in South Africa and elsewhere where vice-chancellors have powers similar to those of a company chief executive, and executive deans have considerable decision-making authority. At UCT, the authority of the vice-chancellor, the deputy vice-chancellors and the deans is circumscribed and new initiatives are implemented, and existing practices stood down, usually after argument and persuasion across many committees.
The issue of transformation at UCT is of course critical, and a matter of public interest and concern. I personally would have found it helpful if Survé had made clear what initiatives he had proposed in his various capacities at UCT, and how these had been either supported or thwarted.
Generalised attacks on UCT are easy to make, but not very helpful. Noting the presence of Price at Davos tells us absolutely nothing about how these challenges are, or are not, being addressed. – Paula Ensor, professor of education and former dean of humanities, UCT