The Age of Humans

As an antidote to all of the Republican presidential candidates who have been pretending that global climate change doesn't exist, The Economist this week has a lengthy story on the "Anthropocene"--the modern era in which humans shape the planet, rather than the other way around. Today's New York Times puts the dot on that "i" with a story about the detection from space of human-induced groundwater depletion:

Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.

They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry.

Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling here, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.

From Brain Drain to Brain Gain

It has been a seemingly universal law of migration that outmigration is a bad thing for the sending community, because the migrants tend to be younger and among the more ambitious. When they leave, things are worse than they were before--the brain drain is a bad thing. In a new book (Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define our Future, by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan), which is reviewed and extensively commented on in this week's Economist, the authors show that the world is different than it used to be--the brain drain has become a brain gain. It is not that migrants are any different than they used to be; rather the world is a very different place than it used to be. There are two very important pieces to the puzzle--the ease with which migrants can stay in touch with and potentially return to their country of origin, and the ease with which remittances can be sent back home. The transfer back home of new skills and knowledge, along with the money, are important components of lifting the sending countries out of poverty.

As the Economist's own analysis suggests:

Women Drivers (or Not) in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is working very hard, according to the New York Times, to keep Arab monarchies in power and to tamp down revolution wherever it possibly can. The goal seems to be to maintain the power and credibility of its fundamentalist form of Islam, Wahhabi, which allows an authoritarian leader such as a monarch, whereas the more mainstream form of Sunni Islam practiced in most of the rest of the world does not condone that form of government. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia is trying to protect the region from the influence of Shia Islam as practiced in Iran, especially, but also in Iraq, as well (Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan are the only Shia-majority countries in the world).

From a purely demographic perspective, Saudi Arabia has the kind of young population that could spark a revolution, if pushed by circumstances. Nearly 1 in 2 Saudis is under the age of 25, although that percentage is declining as fertility slowly comes down in the kingdom. Still, its population of 27 million is twice what is was only 25 years ago, and UN projections suggest that the population will very nearly double again by the middle of this century. Thus far, one of the more noticeable signs of discontent has come from a woman pushing for the ability of women to drive cars in Saudi Arabia.