A “negative-negative” relationship between religion and animal cooperation?

Over the past few months, I have absorbed a study by Carlos Botero of belief in “moralising high gods” – largely because of my interest in why atheism and consequent demographic decline and big government have become so persistent in the urban Enriched World, leading to the region’s likely economic obsolescence as it becomes unaffordable to live in due to crippling taxes and regulations.

For many years, the main arguments for the urban Enriched World’s atheism have been somewhat contradictory:

1. the scarcity of natural resources and land in the Enriched World making family formation unaffordable (e.g. Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God)
2. extreme abundance of water, nutrients and protein producing natural egalitarianism and atheism in the Enriched World, hinted strongly at (if not explicitly) by a variety of authors such as:
1. Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters
2. John Snarey in ‘The Natural Environment’s Impact upon Religious Ethics: A Cross-Cultural Study.’
3. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel
4. Gordon Orians and Antoni Milewski in ‘Ecology of Australia: the Effects of Nutrient-Poor Soils and Intense Fires’

It was for this reason that I was strongly attracted to Russell Gray and Carlos Botero’s ‘The Ecology of Religious Beliefs’ when it was published last November. I had hoped to find explanations for the cultural differences observed in the so-called developed world between conservative Australia and Red America and liberal Europe, East Asia, Blue America, Canada and New Zealand (the Republican West is quite morally liberal though extremely individualist and free-market).

As it turns out, whilst there are some explanations given for the atheism of today’s Enriched and Tropical Worlds, which fits very well with theory 2) about abundance of resources tending to discourage cooperation between individuals, Botero’s study has serious problems.

Societies with moralising high Gods in blue (top; from ‘The Ecology of Religious Beliefs’) versus percentage of avian cooperative breeders (middle; broadly defined from Dustin Rubinstein’s ‘Environmental Uncertainty and the Global Biogeography of Cooperative Breeding in Birds’) versus coefficient of variation of annual runoff (bottom; from Thomas Aquinas McMahon’s ‘Global Hydrology Part 3: Country and Climate Studies’)

The most crucial problem, of course, is that European societies with moralising high gods inherited the Christian God from Southwest Asia – a region which ecologically, as suggested by:

1. Dustin Rubinstein’s study of cooperative breeding plus Holger Kreft and Walter Jetz in ‘A Framework for Delineating Biogeographical Regions based on Species Distributions’
   • (Southwest Asia is probably part of Afrotropical rather than Palearctic)
2. Thomas Aquinas McMahon in Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges
   • (Southwest Asia in part at least may share high runoff variability of Australia and Southern Africa)

is certainly closer to Australia and Africa than Europe. For an idea of the impact of European environmental conditions, it would be essential to study pre-Christian European societies, which Botero admits possible via written records.

A second point is that, since 1900 when the study was done, Indigenous Australians have become Christian to an extent greater than the European population, whereas indigenous Americans and Siberians have not accepted Christianity significantly despite longer efforts at evangelisation. Although one might sensibly argue conversions of indigenous Australians are analogous to those of Europeans and do not demonstrate suitability of Australia for moralising high gods, this does suggest that a map of moralizing high gods should focus upon indigenous populations and religion indigenous to a region much more than it is.

From the map, one sees that not all areas with frequent cooperative breeding (e.g. equatorial Africa) or high runoff variability (e.g. the Norte Chico in Chile) possess the other feature. It is, however, striking that several regions possess a distinct lack of all three traits monitored within the above charts:

1. temperate South America
2. Andean South America
3. the Amazon Basin
4. the Arctic Ocean drainage area
5. the North Pacific Rim
6. extratropical East Asia

In contrast, if we are careful about indigenous conversions brought about externally, only the Middle East seems to strongly possess all three traits, and does not do so to the most extreme extent with any single one. This implies that the three traits we have been studying may be much more linked by absence rather than by presence.

In my opinion, if absence of moralising high gods, absence of cooperative breeding in birds, and very low runoff variability are more closely linked than their opposites, it is likely that these three traits evolved in the Arctic and Pacific Rims in very recent geological times. Mountain uplift (which provides steep terrain that increases runoff ratios) and extreme oceanic enrichment (which provides animal protein in quantities unknown in previous geological eras) select very firmly against cooperation, especially in humid coastal lowlands adjacent to the mountains. Even when these regions have evolved agriculture and stratified societies, the underlying radical individualism has expressed itself – for example in emperor-worship and samurai culture where the law allowed the samurai to kill almost anyone he wanted to. It is seen even more clearly, as Rod Dreher notes, today.

A strange sight!

Today, as I removed my scarred but still good metal drink bottle (I prefer metal to plastic as it wears better even without the paint and at university always chose to use a metal ruler even for paper) to try to find a drink in the heated room, I observed a rude shock.

The bottle did not open when I twisted it! I was initially worried that something was really awry and that I would have to replace the bottle, but past experience quickly dawned upon me that the lower part of the fridge was a frost hollow where dense, cold air generated by the fridge sank and chilled the bottle to the point that it froze. In the past I have seen frozen milk in the fridge in the event of spills – although I hope that at thirty-eight I am better than I was about allowing bottles of milk to spill when there’s not the space to store them upright.

This is my largely frozen drink bottle from when I finally managed to unscrew the (faintly visible) cap

A few hours later, despite my mother using a heater – I feel that even in winter Melbourne is too warm for heating and that three layers will be plenty on a typical 6˚C morning – the bottle is still only partially thawed and I could not drink from it as I wished:

This is my partly thawed drink bottle a few hours later

The shock of an unexpected freeze was as bad to me as much more costly freezes to farmers around the world! It left me a little thirsty too!

25 Most Influential Marriages of All Time

Today Time has published a list of the “25 Most Influential Marriages of All Time”. The list comprises:

• Adam and Eve
• Abigail and John Adams
• Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
• Beyoncé and Jay Z
• Archie and Edith Bunker
• Bill and Hillary Clinton
• Marie and Pierre Curie
• Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
• Bill and Melinda Gates
• Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine
• Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn
• Pat and Bill Loud
• John and Jackie Kennedy
• John Lennon and Yoko Ono
• Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
• Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing
• Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson
• Michael McConnell and Jack Baker
• Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio
• Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
• Juan Domingo and Evita Peron
• Romeo and Juliet
• Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt
• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
• Marge and Homer Simpson

The list, which is the first I have noticed for a long time, seems to make reasonable sense,as I cannot see any obvious omissions, despite admitting to being no expert in this field.

Comparing temperature and rainfall data – with an example

In my previous post, I noted that rainfall extremes and changes are a much more reliable guide than temperature extremes and changes to global warming – because the latter can be distorted from circulation changes produced by the enhanced greenhouse effect:

1. cooling temperatures via enhanced cloud cover in a super-monsoon 
2. cooling temperatures via increased outgoing radiation in dry weather under the expanded Hadley circulation
3. cooling temperatures via enhanced equatorward flow is also potentially possible

The main theme of my previous posts was to show how inverse relationships exist between temperatures for most places at the same latitude. Unlike with rainfall where it is possible for models to show which regions will become drier and which wetter with enhanced greenhouse gases, temperature changes do not show any “preference” so cases of temperature change locally cannot easily detect global warming. The following diagram comparing mean daily temperatures in January for the contiguous US and Alaska North Slope is illustrative:

If you look carefully, you will see that the large anomalies in the Alaska North Slope co-occur with large anomalies of opposite sign averaged over the contiguous US:

• Spearman’s ρ = -0.49
• Pearson’s r = -0.56

In contrast, we can see this graph of rainfall over major cities in southwestern Australia and Central Chile. In the previous case we would except co-occurring warmth but never observe it, but here we see synchronous drying, especially in the southern part of Chile between Curico and Valdivia:

The decline here is obvious, although the wet years observed in the “virgin period” are not coherent, the dry years from global warming are much more critically so.

Correlations between winter maximum temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere – and lessons

In recent weeks as I have read the North American Monthly Weather Review, it has often occurred to me that harsh winters in certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere correlate with mild winters in another part – although I have not noticed a consistent basis by which this occurs.

Analysing Monthly Weather Review issues from the 1970s when hysteria occurred over another ice age after three extreme winters in the eastern United States, I noticed how often higher-than-average temperatures in Alaska seemed to occur alongside extreme cold in the contiguous US (e.g. Januaries 1937, 1963, 1977, 1979). Owing to the cold temperatures and extremely low population densities of Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, little attention was paid to this by Americans faced with extreme cold and shortages of heating oil in January 1977.

Today, I did a table of January temperatures over the contiguous US (apart from the southern States westward to New Mexico) by NWS region and for three representative districts of Alaska, and then did both Spearman rank correlation and Pearson product-moment correlations for them.

To minimise the effect of man-made global warming, I limited my data to the period from 1925 (when Alaska climate data begin) to 1980.

As you can see, the January temperatures between 1925 and 1980 show a definite negative correlation for all but adjacent districts. Only four Januaries (1928, 1931, 1944 and 1967) were warmer than median across all six divisions, and only 1966 and 1969 were colder than median across all six. In fact, only January 1967 comes close to having been warmer-than-normal across all five NWS regions (the four contiguous including the Southern, plus Alaska as an NWS region, where it was marginally below normal).

Stardardised maximum temperature anomalies for the only four Januaries above median for all six regions. It’s notable that 1967 marks the beginning of the ongoing rainfall declines in southwestern Australia and central Chile, and the major increases in northwestern Australia, eastern Western Australia and central-eastern South America (but see below).

Standardised mean maximum temperatures for the only two Januaries below normal for all six regions. These two cases are both interesting because they suggest critical Australian and South American rainfall changes – although now drive 100 percent by global warming – were initiated by a warming of the Southern Hemisphere relative to the Northern.

These generally negative correlations are noteworthy because it shows that one cannot simply rely on a cold winter in one region of residence as proof the climate is changing: a global warming implies warming in all regions.

These results constitute a critical contrast with precipitation changes: precipitation changes in a single region are much easier to compare with expected observed changes in circulation from warming of the troposphere – especially the poleward spread of the subtropical arid belts along the west coasts of Australia and South America, as noted by Dian Seidel in ‘Widening of the Tropical Belt in a Changing Climate’ back in 2007 (since when these trends have intensified) – and can also be correlated with inverse precipitation trends in other regions (e.g. eastern WA affected by increased flow of tropical air from monsoons and cyclones) to much more consistent effect.