Coping with climate change drove innovation

When and how innovation occurs sometimes seems random and the corporate world has long pursued the creation of “environments” in which innovation can flourish. And while the very definition of what counts as innovation can be debated, it seems to me that it is a changing environment rather than a static environment which is a key ingredient. And it could well be that the greater the change to be handled then the very necessity of coping with that change could be the “mother of all innovation”.

I suspect that some of the most fundamental innovations have been driven by the need not just to survive but also to thrive in “rapidly” changing and threatening environments. And climate change where “rapid” would mean several hundred if not thousands of years would also have been a powerful driver. One advantage in the stone age would have been that humans would have focused on coping with the change as it unfolded and not wasted too much effort in trying to control the climate.

A new paper addresses how climate change could have driven innovation in the stone age centered around the discovery and establishment of new refuges.

Ziegler, M. et al. Development of Middle Stone Age innovation linked to rapid climate change, Nature Communications 4, Article number: 1905.

Abstract: The development of modernity in early human populations has been linked to pulsed phases of technological and behavioural innovation within the Middle Stone Age of South Africa. However, the trigger for these intermittent pulses of technological innovation is an enigma. Here we show that, contrary to some previous studies, the occurrence of innovation was tightly linked to abrupt climate change. Major innovational pulses occurred at times when South African climate changed rapidly towards more humid conditions, while northern sub-Saharan Africa experienced widespread droughts, as the Northern Hemisphere entered phases of extreme cooling. These millennial-scale teleconnections resulted from the bipolar seesaw behaviour of the Atlantic Ocean related to changes in the ocean circulation. These conditions led to humid pulses in South Africa and potentially to the creation of favourable environmental conditions. This strongly implies that innovational pulses of early modern human behaviour were climatically influenced and linked to the adoption of refugia.

PhysOrg reviews the paper:

According to a study by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the University of Cardiff and the Natural History Museum in London, technological innovation during the Stone Age occurred in fits and starts and was climate-driven. Abrupt changes in rainfall in South Africa 40,000 to 80,000 years ago triggered the development of technologies for finding refuge and the behaviour of modern humans. This study was recently published in Nature Communications.

Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that modern humans (the modern form of Homo sapiens, our species) originated in Africa during the Stone Age, between 30,000 and 280,000 years ago. The latest archaeological excavations in southern Africa have shown that technological innovation, linked to the emergence of culture and modern behaviour, took place abruptly: the beginnings of symbolic expression, the making of tools from stone and bone, jewellery or the first agricultural settlements.

An international team of researchers has linked these pulses of innovation to the climate that prevailed in sub-Saharan Africa in that period.

Over the last million years the global climate has varied between glacial periods (with great masses of ice covering the continents in the northern hemisphere) and interglacial periods, with changes approximately every 100,000 years. But within these long periods there have been abrupt climate changes, sometimes happening in the space of just a few decades, with variations of up to 10ºC in the average temperature in the polar regions caused by changes in the Atlantic ocean circulation. These changes affected rainfall in southern Africa.

The researchers have pieced together how rainfall patterns varied in southern Africa over the last 100,000 years, by analysing river delta deposits at the edge of the continent, where every millimetre of sediment core corresponds to 25 years of sedimentation. The ratio of iron (dissolved from the rocks by the water during the rains) to potassium (present in arid soils) in each of the millimetre layers is a record of the sediment carried by rivers and therefore of the rainfall throughout the whole period.

The reconstruction of the rainfall over 100,000 years shows a series of spikes that occurred between 40,000 and 80,000 years ago. These spikes show rainfall levels rising sharply over just a few decades, and falling off again soon afterwards, in a matter of centuries. This research has shown that the climate changes coincided with increases in population, activity and production of technology on the part of our ancestors, as seen in the archaeological records. In turn, the end of certain stone tool industries of the period coincides with the onset of a new, drier climate.

The findings confirm one of the principal models of Palaeolithic cultural evolution, which correlates technological innovation with the adoption of new refuges and with a resulting increase in population and social networks. For these researchers, the bursts of demographic expansion caused by climate change in southern Africa were probably key factors in the origin of modern humans’ behaviour in Africa, and in the dispersal of Homo sapiens from his ancestral home.

 

Reviews confirm that Medtronic’s spinal treatment “Infuse” provided little benefit

In 2011 The Spine Journal took on the morass of hyped scientific papers, multi-million dollar payments to researchers and adverse effects surrounding Medtronic’s Infuse product. As I posted in August 2011

Medtronic is the world’s largest medical device company and Minnesota’s seventh-largest public company based on revenue, which totaled $15.93 billion for the fiscal year that ended April 29. Medtronic’s Infuse product is a bioengineered bone-growth protein that has been used in spinal fusion procedures for the past nine years and is used in about half of the 80,000 anterior lumbar fusion procedures performed every year in the United States.

Now the NY Times reports that 

The controversy reached a climax in 2011, when a medical publication, The Spine Journal, devoted an issue to reports that repudiated the Medtronic-sponsored research, calling it misleading and biased. The journal’s move was significant because it is published by the nation’s biggest group of spine surgeons, the North American Spine Society.

Experts involved in research, like Dr. Zdeblick and Dr. Burkus, defended their work and insisted that their ties to Medtronic had not influenced them. But facing a firestorm, Medtronic agreed in 2011 to provide $2.5 million to Yale University to oversee an independent review of study data.

The resulting examinations, published Monday, involved reviews by two separate teams.

One of the teams, headed by scientists at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, reported that Infuse appeared to have no advantages over a bone graft and might pose patient risks, including possibly a small added risk of cancer.

The other team, led by researchers at the University of York in England, found that Infuse fused spinal vertebrae more quickly than a bone graft but that the added speed appeared to lack clinical relevance.

Both the British and Oregon teams found no significant difference between Infuse and a bone graft in measures critical to patients, like reducing pain or improving physical function.

…… 

A professor at Yale who oversaw the review, Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, said that while the two teams had slightly different findings, they pointed in the same direction.

“The general, overall picture is that they failed to find a big benefit,” for Infuse, Dr. Krumholz said. “And they found there might be some harms.”

Doctors and patients, he said, could use the review’s information to decide which treatment was best for them.

Some reviewers also concluded that the Medtronic-financed research had — unwittingly or not — presented a misleading picture.

“Selective reporting or underreporting of outcomes in journal publications may have misrepresented the benefits and harms,” of Infuse, the Oregon group wrote.

The selective reporting or under-reporting or non-reporting of scientific research to suit the commercial interests of the pharmaceutical and medical industries is not likely to disappear anytime soon. And Infuse is still in use and still generates significant revenues for Medtronic.

The review’s results, however, are likely to lead to further drops in Infuse sales. Annual sales of the product, which stood at about $900 million before The Spine Journal’s issue devoted to it, were $528 million in the company’s most recent fiscal year.”

Indian monsoon starts early and vigorously

An almost spectacular start to the Indian monsoon and Delhi has received heavy rains almost two weeks earlier than expected. Two weeks of the official 4 month monsoon period (about 15%) are over and the welcome rains have covered the entire country around one month ahead of schedule. Over 30% of the total expected rainfall for a “normal” monsoon has already been received. So much so that the new airport in Delhi was flooded yesterday, not so much because of problems at the airport but because the drainage in the surrounding areas could not cope with the flow draining out of the airport and caused a back-flow!

Temperatures have dropped to a “pleasant” 31°C and it augurs well for my trip to Delhi in a couple of weeks.

Expectations for a “good” monsoon and a subsequently high level of agricultural growth are high.

ToI:The monsoon hit Delhi and its neighbourhood on Sunday, two weeks before time — and in a record sweep, swiftly covered all of northwest India. 

Besides reaching the capital well before the initially predicted date of June 29, a record occurrence unfolded in a span of 24 hours with the rain bearing system reaching the ends ofnorthwest India a full month before the usual July 15 date. The progress of rains to cover all of India as rapidly as happened over Saturday and Sunday last occurred in 1961. 

Delhi recorded 6.1 mm rain till 8.30 am and 45 mm in the next 12 hours. Palam recorded a day’s highest rainfall in the city in two years with 117.8 mm between 8.30 am and 5.30 pm. The showers have been so plentiful that Delhi will see the Yamuna cross the warning level and maybe even touch the danger mark by June 18. 

The city’s maximum temperature sharply fell to 31.5 degrees Celsius, eight degrees below normal while the minimum was 23.7 degrees.

From IMD:

monsoon 16 June 2013

Global cooling in the cretaceous shifted the global carbon cycle

A new paper in Nature Geoscience showing that global cooling is as significant as global warming.

‘Atlantic cooling associated with a marine biotic crisis during the mid-Cretaceous period’. A McAnena, S Flogel, P Hofmann, JO Herrle, A Griesand, J Pross, HM Talbot, J Rethemeyer, K Wallmann and T Wagner.  Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1850, published on: 16th June 2013

From Newcastle Univeristy’s press release:

Global cooling as significant as global warming

A “cold snap” 116 million years ago triggered a similar marine ecosystem crisis to the ones witnessed in the past as a result of global warming, according to research published in Nature Geoscience.

The international study involving experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK, Cologne, Frankfurt and GEOMAR-Kiel, confirms the link between global cooling and a crash in the marine ecosystem during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse period.

It also quantifies for the first time the amplitude and duration of the temperature change.  Analysing the geochemistry and micropaleontology of a marine sediment core taken from the North Atlantic Ocean, the team show that a global temperature drop of up to 5oC resulted in a major shift in the global carbon cycle over a period of 2.5 million years.

Occurring during a time of high tectonic activity that drove the breaking up of the super-continent Pangaea, the research explains how the opening and widening of new ocean basins around Africa, South America and Europe created additional space where large amounts of atmospheric CO2 was fixed by photosynthetic organisms like marine algae. The dead organisms were then buried in the sediments on the sea bed, producing organic, carbon rich shale in these new basins, locking away the carbon that was previously in the atmosphere.

The result of this massive carbon fixing mechanism was a drop in the levels of atmospheric CO2, reducing the greenhouse effect and lowering global temperature.

This period of global cooling came to an end after about 2 million years following the onset of a period of intense local volcanic activity in the Indian Ocean.  Producing huge volumes of volcanic gas, carbon that had been removed from the atmosphere when it was locked away in the shale was replaced with CO2 from the Earth’s interior, re-instating a greenhouse effect which led to warmer climate and an end to the “cold snap”.

The research team highlight in this study how global climate is intrinsically linked to processes taking place in the earth’s interior at million year time scales. These processes can modify ecospace for marine life, driving evolution.

Current research efforts tend to concentrate on global warming and the impact that a rise of a few degrees might have on past and present day ecosystems.  This study shows that if global temperatures swing the other way by a similar amount, the result can be just as severe, at least for marine life.

 

Another GIGO report: Climate change overseas will threaten UK food supplies

A good GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) report is one which can generate a whole family of garbage reports with the results from one being used as the input for the next and so on ad infinitum. An excellent GIGO report is one which earns a small fortune for its author while keeping the stench concealed.

This time the GIGO report is by PWC. It is based on a string of  questionable assumptions:

1. that global warming (euphemistically “climate change”) will happen,
2. that extreme weather will happen in some vulnerable food producing countries
3. that it will lead to increased food prices
4. which will lead to export “protectionism” by those countries,

leading – surprise, surprise –  to food exports to the UK being threatened.

Given the assumptions it does not take much intelligence to reach the desired conclusion. No doubt PWC produced some very pretty images and graphs. This rubbish is considered “research” by Roger Harrabin of the BBC. I have never known PWC do anything for free and this particular report was apparently commissioned by Defra (UK, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). The usual profit margin on such a report would be at least 150% and with gullible civil servants as the clients could be closer to 1000%). I have no doubt that Defra had briefed PWC on the conclusions to be reached.  (PWC like their other “big 4″ brothers are blind to fraud when committed by their clients and expert at producing – and justifying – whatever conclusion is desired by them).

Climate change abroad will have a more immediate effect on the UK than climate change at home, a report says.

Research by consultants PWC for Defra says the UK is likely to be hit by increasingly volatile prices of many commodities as the climate is disrupted.

It warns that global production of some foodstuffs is concentrated in a few countries.

These are likely to suffer increasing episodes of extreme weather.

The report says there will be opportunities for the UK from climate change but these are likely to be far outweighed by problems. The opportunities include the ability to export British know-how and reduced shipping costs if the Arctic becomes ice-free. The Arctic looks likely to be a big business opportunity; research estimates suggest that it is likely to attract more than £64bn of investments over the next decade.

What is particularly irritating is that conclusions from one GIGO report are then used as input again and again producing a chain reaction of further garbage reports.

The report warns that as the climate changes, there will be pressure for the UK to increase its aid budgets (already under threat from back-bench Conservatives).

The report is a follow-up to the recent UK Government Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) which assessed domestic threats and opportunities and the Foresight study into international climate change.

It is based on the UN’s “medium CO2 emissions scenario” which is broadly aligned with the 2C maximum temperature increase – a target that is unlikely to be met. That means the study is on the optimistic side, it says.

The paper draws on research from Chatham House describing climate change as a multiplier of other threats.

Oh Dear!

Spot the error π = 3

I like this one:

π = 3

 

 

For the error in this one and some other similar math errors go HERE.

Better to build a roof than to try and stop the rain (or the sun)

Climate change is happening.

Of course it is. When was it ever not so?

It will be cooling at times and warming at others but for around 85% of all the time humans have been around we have lived in glacial conditions. Interglacials are the exceptions and not the rule. Yet humans have thrived. Not just by surviving the glacial times but by continuing to develop even during the glacials, Wasting time and energy and vast sums of money on trying to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide has been a blight on development for the last 3 decades. Just in Europe it has come at the expense of around 15 million jobs.

It essentially panders to the political and religious idea that “human development is inherently bad”. In that sense the “Green Movement” and the subsequent growth of enviro-fascism have taken the place of Marxist ideology. They have filled the vacuum left behind as the fall of Communism has spread. They didn’t begin that way. As local movements to clean up air and water and our immediate environments they performed a timely, neccessary and very useful function. But then they became ambitious. Local movements were hijacked by the marxists without a home. Former marxists in non-Communist countries needed a cause. They remained disaffected and had to find a new home. They now had to go Global. Local causes which were the strength of environmentalism were replaced by Global causes.  Global causes were manufactured by inventing impending global catastrophes. All the disaster scenarios had to have growth and development (and by inference – capitalism) as the culprit. Not in Russia or China or other former Communist countries where they were too busy becoming entrepreneurs. And so the carbon dioxide myth took hold and and fossil fuels became the whipping boy.

This interglacial will end.

Fossil fuels and their continued and increased use (and there is enough gas for at least 1000 years) will be critical for human development as and when the next glacial comes along. It is only by adapting to whatever climate change occurs  - not by trying to stop climate change – that the human condition will continue to improve.

It is better to build a roof than to try and stop the rain or the sunshine. But the global warming hierarchy will continue their posturing and their futile dances to try and control the climate.

Montreal Gazette:

Adapting to – not just fighting – climate change is taking the heat out of global warming talk

Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.

The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It’s becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet’s wild weather.

It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New York City’s rising seas with flood gates, levees and more that brought this transition into full focus.

After years of losing the fight against rising global emissions of heat-trapping gases, governments around the world are emphasizing what a U.N. Foundation scientific report calls “managing the unavoidable.”

It’s called adaptation and it’s about as sexy but as necessary as insurance, experts say.

It’s also a message that once was taboo among climate activists such as former Vice-President Al Gore. …… 

…. Now officials are merging efforts by emergency managers to prepare for natural disasters with those of officials focused on climate change. That greatly lessens the political debate about human-caused global warming, said University of Colorado science and disaster policy professor Roger Pielke Jr.

It also makes the issue more local than national or international.

“If you keep the discussion focused on impacts … I think it’s pretty easy to get people from all political persuasions,” said Pielke, who often has clashed with environmentalists over global warming. “It’s insurance. The good news is that we know insurance is going to pay off again.” ….. 

And even from New Zealand comes a commentary that when “even the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is no longer beating the drum. That’s when you know the cause is dead”.

National Business Review:

Global warming ends with a whimper

It’s a good news column today: the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand has seriously down-rated the worry about global warming. That’s one less thing that need make us miserable.

The down rating is huge. Green co-leader Russel Norman in his speech to this month’s annual conference never once mentioned global warming. He busied himself instead taking potshots at John Key and the late Sir Robert Muldoon.

The Green Party did have a climate change conference the following week but Mr Norman’s keynote speech lacked any of the usual end-of-world prophecy and knee-jerk call to de-industrialise. His concern was the pedestrian one that New Zealand is failing to meet its international obligations.

There was no hellfire and no brimstone.

When Jeanette Fitzsimons was co-leader global warming was the greatest-ever threat to the planet. It dwarfed all other environmental worries. It was the granddaddy of them all. Global warming threatened to destroy the biosphere and Ms Fitzsimons was forever calling an urgent and radical reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. …… 

….. But the shift on global warming with the Greens is significant. We are safe in concluding that they no longer regard global warming as the greatest threat to the planet. It would, I think, merit a mention in a leader’s annual speech to the Greens if it were. A fast-approaching environmental armageddon would be top of mind, not the constitutionality of parliamentary legislation, and not Peter Dunne’s emails.

So, hallelujah. The polar bears can continue to float about on their ice floes, millions of environmental refugees won’t wash up on our shores, malaria won’t be making an unwanted appearance in New Zealand any time soon, our beachfront properties are safe and there is no need to feel guilty driving past that bus stop.

It was always going to end with a whimper, not a bang. The scare was so big, so dominating, so accepted, that it could not be sustained. Unless, of course, it was true. It’s now not possible to maintain the huff and puff that the media and politics need to keep the headlines running. …..

……. They have been the first to shut up about it. The argument is no longer that global warming has “paused” for 17 years but rather that even the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is no longer beating the drum. That’s when you know the cause is dead.

After all, Mr Norman was still backing Marxism-Leninism long after Mikhail Gorbachev had given up on it. 

 

Chapter downloads and book marketing

My book “Essence of a Manager”  is about the behaviour of managers. It was published by Springer in April 2011 and I now begin to understand why my editor strongly suggested that I make my Chapters “self-sufficient and free-standing”.

Springer just informed me that:

The chapter downloads on SpringerLink means your book was one of the top 50% most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2012. To further widen the distribution of your book, it has also been made available as an Amazon Kindle eBook version.  As you can see, in addition to the print book, the electronic version reaches a broad readership and provides increased visibility for your work. This is especially noticeable in the long run: statistical data shows that the usage of electronic publications remains stable for years after publication, so this is what you can expect for your book for the years to come.

The book has its own homepage and those interested can  request a free online review copy of the book from here. Each individual Chapter can also be separately downloaded. The Table of Contents is here: EOAM ToC

Why averaging climate models is meaningless

This comment/ essay by rgbatduke on WUWT is well worth reading and digesting.

“this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!”

A professional taking amateurs to task!

(Note! See also his follow-up comments here and here.  rgbatduke would seem to be Professor R G Brown of Duke University?)

rgbatduke says:

June 13, 2013 at 7:20 am

Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!

This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.

Note the implicit swindle in this graph — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.

Say what?

This is such a horrendous abuse of statistics that it is difficult to know how to begin to address it. One simply wishes to bitch-slap whoever it was that assembled the graph and ensure that they never work or publish in the field of science or statistics ever again. One cannot generate an ensemble of independent and identically distributed models that have different code. One might, possibly, generate a single model that generates an ensemble of predictions by using uniform deviates (random numbers) to seed
“noise” (representing uncertainty) in the inputs.

What I’m trying to say is that the variance and mean of the “ensemble” of models is completely meaningless, statistically because the inputs do not possess the most basic properties required for a meaningful interpretation. They are not independent, their differences are not based on a random distribution of errors, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the errors or differences are unbiased (given that the only way humans can generate unbiased anything is through the use of e.g. dice or other objectively random instruments).

UK Met Office to hold summit to redefine all weather events as climate (change)!

From the ever reliable Guardian (Leo Hickman) comes this story. All weather events will now be taken as evidence of global climate change!

Met Office brainstorms UK bad weather

Washout summers. Flash floods. Freezing winters. Snow in May. Droughts. There is a growing sense that something is happening to our weather. But is it simply down to natural variability, or is climate change to blame?

To try to answer the question the Met Office is hosting an unprecedented meeting of climate scientists and meteorologists next week to debate the possible causes of the UK’s “disappointing” weather over recent years, the Guardian has learned.

Tuesday’s meeting at the forecaster’s HQ in Exeter is being convened in response to this year’s cool spring, which, according to official records, was the coldest in 50 years.

The one-day gathering will be led by Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre and professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, and will include up to 20 experts from the UK’s leading climate research institutions.

The “roundtable workshop” will attempt to outline the “dynamical drivers of the cold spring of 2013″, but attendees are expected also to debate the “disappointing summers of the last seven years”. 

Official records show that above-average temperatures in summer last occurred in 2006, a season that had above-average sunshine hours, and below-average rainfall. The only summer since then to give us average conditions nationally was in 2010.

The meeting will also discuss the washout summer of 2012 and the freezing winter of 2010-11.

The Met Office said it had never held a formal meeting in this way to discuss possible causes behind the UK’s unusual weather of recent years. … 

But rather than admit that climate models have become a fiasco, it would seem that the “establishment” is now “circling the wagons” and rationalising to be able to connect all weather events to “man-made climate change” – defined as being anything over and above “natural variability”. Why would the “natural variability” of just the last 150 years be the benchmark. Why would the Little Ice Age or the Roman Warm Period or the Medieval Warm Period not be part of the “natural variability” to be used as the reference? If the flood levels in Germany this spring reached the same level in Passau 500 years ago, why wouldn’t the weather/climate of 500 years ago also be part of “natural variability”?

If the UK spring this year was the coldest since the 1890′s then it surely proves that weather events today are much the same as 130 years ago.  Even the great 2011 Tohoku quake and  tsunami were events that were a repeat of something that happens every 1000 years or so. It  was not “unnatural” just because it had not happened for 1000 years. Anytime a weather event today is merely a repeat of an event which has taken place in the past, then the preponderance of probability is that it is a part of natural variability.

Everything not within a discernible “natural” pattern is not due to anthropogenic effects. It may well be in the realm of what we don’t know that we don’t know.

The Guardian goes on:

…. One attendee at the meeting, Doug Parker, professor of meteorology at the University of Leeds, said: “We are universally finding that the links between the weather and climate communities are increasing and overlapping. Most climate issues reduce down to questions about what weather events are like, and the representation of short-term weather events is a key challenge in climate modelling. People are increasingly conscious that there is a change [to our weather]. There have been informal discussions in our communities about this for a while now. The key question is whether this is down to natural variability alone, or whether climate change is now projecting on to, and adding to, natural variability. I am going to the meeting with my eyes and ears open.”

But – it seems to me – with a closed mind!

A Met Office spokesman said: “We have seen a run of unusual seasons in the UK and northern Europe, such as the cold winter of 2010, last year’s wet weather and the cold spring this year. This may be nothing more than a run of natural variability, but there may be other factors impacting our weather there is emerging research which suggests there is a link between declining Arctic sea ice and European climate – but exactly how this process might work and how important it may be among a host of other factors remains unclear.”