WARMING AND OTHER WOES
“Hot and bothered” (January 27) illuminates well the effects of global warming, but I suggest we need to avoid focusing too much on temperature. Basic thermodynamics might be kept in mind, particularly what is sometimes called the “anomalous” behaviour of water.
If a kettle of water is heated, once it reaches boiling point, the temperature will remain at 100°C while it boils dry. The heat is carried away by the water as vapour, which also happens at lower temperatures with evaporation. It’s also how sweat cools us. This heat is known to physics as latent heat, because it’s effectively hidden by unchanging temperature. You can see from the time it takes for the kettle to boil dry, compared with the short time taken to come to boiling point, that the latent heat absorbed is enormous.
Melting of ice also absorbs heat without a temperature rise but doesn’t consume so much. Additionally, water has a high heat capacity – it takes more heat to raise water through 1°C than to heat the same mass of rock. This causes the sea and land breezes well known to sailors and also allows the planet to absorb heat with smaller temperature rises than if the surface were all solid.
These phenomena obscure a basic fact: the planet is warming if it’s receiving more heat than it’s losing, but that may not be fully reflected by rising temperatures.
It would be good to include in discussions of this issue at least a simple picture of the thermodynamics at work, especially the role of water. If we don’t, we risk leaving space for global-warming deniers and fossil-fuel companies. They use temperature rises as their definition of global warming, then look for alternative ways of “explaining” them without reference to thermodynamic principles. David Wright (Hataitai, Wellington)
The excellent global-warming story, with its practical suggestions, left me more optimistic than Johan Norberg’s microeconomic view of progress (“The view from the bright side”, January 27). Concentrating on proportional statistics, he largely ignored totals and the simple fact that improving the human lot exacerbates the biggest problem: we are too many. Gavin Maclean (Cullerlie, Gisborne)
I felt as if I was watching a happy-go-lucky movie while sitting in a missionary pot of hotter and hotter water as I read Johan Norberg’s Pollyannaish views, which made no mention of income distribution.
Studies such as Alberto
Alesina and Roberto Perotti’s 1996 “Income Distribution, Political Instability and Investment” show that growing skews in income distribution lead to economic, social and political chaos.
The world economy today mirrors the decade before the Great Depression. The literature says this milieu leads to the ascendancy of political kooks and, ultimately, fascists.
From 1950-80, the share of New Zealand national disposable income going to the labour force was 65%. Now it’s 50%. At today’s national income, this would be an additional $14,000 a year for each worker.
Unions should adopt a goal of redressing income distribution to return it to 1980s levels. They must also gain membership, importantly by attracting contract labour. And they must adopt a single-minded focus on compensation issues. No more Luddite attacks on automation. No more pursuit of social issues.
They may have to break with the Labour Party so that they can adopt techniques used by business to influence politicians from all parties. Redistribution of income is a messy, uneasy process, but it’s better than the sort of economic, political and social chaos that followed the Great Depression. Robert Myers (Auckland)