Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)

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Herman, Edwin; Strang, Gilbert; etal. (2017). Calculus. Vol.1. Houston, Texas: OpenStax. pp.454–459. ISBN 978-1-938168-02-4. OCLC 1022848630. Archived from the original on 23 September 2022 . Retrieved 26 July 2022. The thing that made the biggest impression on me is that in the rush to achieve Net Zero, it’s almost inevitable that enormous costs are going to be placed on those least able to bear it. If you give over a lot more land to tree planting and rewilding rather than agricultural production, food prices are going to go up. Relying exclusively on renewables, given the cost of storage and the intermittency problem, will push up energy costs even further. Running an electric car is going to be a lot more expensive than a petrol car. Heat pumps will be more expensive than gas boilers. The list goes on. It dawned on me that there is a real a risk that the push to achieve Net Zero creates a two-tier society where the wealthy can still afford to fly, drive and not shiver, but the poor increasingly cannot. Rules governing the use of zero appeared in Brahmagupta's Brahmasputha Siddhanta (7th century), which states the sum of zero with itself as zero, and incorrectly describes division by zero in the following way: [46] [47]

The Arabic-language inheritance of science was largely Greek, [52] followed by Hindu influences. [53] In 773, at Al-Mansur's behest, translations were made of many ancient treatises including Greek, Roman, Indian, and others. In 1988 I was the only voice at the Changing Atmosphere conference who stood in a plenary to ask that the conference statement that delegates were hammering out be changed to recognize the possibility that the changes to the composition of Earth’s atmosphere that everyone there was concerned about, could be reversed.Mercier, Raymond. "Consideration of the Greek symbol 'zero' " (PDF). Home of Kairos. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 November 2020 . Retrieved 28 March 2020.

The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. China This is a depiction of zero expressed in Chinese counting rods, based on the example provided by A History of Mathematics. An empty space is used to represent zero. [27]The term 'net zero' arises from the likelihood that whatever action we take, there will be some residual emissions which we need to deal with by removing carbon from the atmosphere. The safest and most reliable way to do this is by protecting forests and other natural 'carbon sinks'. However, their capacity is extremely limited – we still need to reduce our emissions to almost zero. Pingala ( c. 3rd/2nd century BC [34]), a Sanskrit prosody scholar, [35] used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables), a notation similar to Morse code. [36] Pingala used the Sanskrit word śūnya explicitly to refer to zero. [34] Even if this were to work – which is highly uncertain – the large-scale deployment of BECCS would risk pushing us beyond other planetary boundaries including freshwater use and soil health. Estimates of the amount of land required are as high as 3000 million hectares – twice the total amount of land currently under cultivation globally. You can find out more in this briefing from Friends of the Earth International (PDF). a b Hodgkin, Luke (2005). A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity: From Mesopotamia to Modernity. Oxford University Press. p. 85. ISBN 978-0-19-152383-0. Kardar, Mehran (2007). Statistical Physics of Particles. Cambridge University Press. pp.4–5, 103–104. ISBN 978-0-521-87342-0.

Rex, Andrew; Finn, C. B. P. (2017). Finn's Thermal Physics (3rded.). CRC Press. pp.8–16. ISBN 978-1-4987-1887-5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/greenhouse-gas-emissions-pledges-data/ William L. Hosch, ed. (15 August 2010). The Britannica Guide to Numbers and Measurement (Math Explained). The Rosen Publishing Group. pp.97–98. ISBN 978-1-61530-108-9. Archived from the original on 4 August 2016 . Retrieved 26 September 2016. The number 0 is the smallest nonnegative integer. The natural number following 0 is 1 and no natural number precedes 0. The number 0 may or may not be considered a natural number, [59] [60] but it is an integer, and hence a rational number and a real number. [61] All rational numbers are algebraic numbers, including 0. When the real numbers are extended to form the complex numbers, 0 becomes the origin of the complex plane.I think that, in most people’s minds, it was as simple as: climate change is bad, something needs to be done about it, Net Zero is something, let’s do that. My thoughts on it had amounted to little more than that, to be honest. The Lokavibhāga, a Jain text on cosmology surviving in a medieval Sanskrit translation of the Prakrit original, which is internally dated to AD 458 ( Saka era 380), uses a decimal place-value system, including a zero. In this text, śūnya ("void, empty") is also used to refer to zero. [42]