The Benefits: Morality, Equality, Mobility, Culture, and the Environment

Author(s):  
Arthur M. Diamond

The wealth received by some innovative entrepreneurs is fair because of the large benefits of their innovations. Widespread flourishing under innovative dynamism encourages tolerance of diversity, respect for the rights of others, more effective sympathy, and cultural diversity. The equality that matters most is that everyone has roughly an equal chance to improve their lives. The quantity of resources expands, because inventors and entrepreneurs create new uses for old materials. For example, process innovations in agriculture, such as the Haber-Bosch process for creating fertilizer from nitrogen in the air, mean that an abundance of food can be grown with less land, encouraging the greening of the planet. Innovations can allow us to adapt to modest and slow global warming. If global warming becomes greater and faster, other innovations can produce energy with less carbon, can increase the sequestration of carbon, and can counter the increase in temperature through geoengineering.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehud Keinan

Most global challenges, including global warming, food for everybody, the race for sustainable energy, water quality, dwindling raw materials, and health problems, are chemical problems by nature. Therefore, Humankind cannot meet these challenges without the chemical sciences and will not solve any of these problems without global cooperation. Chemists have always been doing much better than politicians in meeting these challenges, working together across borders through unique collaboration and friendship. Despite fundamentally different political systems and cultural diversity, chemists go beyond borders, find each other, share their findings, and solve problems together.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Millington ◽  
Peter M. Cox ◽  
Jonathan R. Moore ◽  
Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).


1984 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Irving ◽  
Harold Perl ◽  
Edison J. Trickett ◽  
Rod Watts
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