In like a Leyen: the European Commission’s new president

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Weather forecasting got its start as a public good based on shared data across international borders, but that may be changing. We look into the remarkable, vast, computationally intensive global collaboration that is predicting the weather and where it's heading. And do you like getting close to wildlife? Maybe it's time to plan a trip to Japan. As many people move from rural areas to the cities and those left behind stop hunting and farming. The animals are moving in. Just make sure you wear a bearbell. First up, though, The applause was loud, but not as loud as it might have been. Last night, Ursula von der Leyen became the first woman to be appointed president of the European Commission after a secret ballot by members of Europe's parliament. But she only squeaked by with 383 votes, just nine more than the minimum. As Commission President, Mrs. Von der Leyen will be at the heart of a legislature that represents half a billion people.

The trust you placed in me is confidence you placed in Europe ahead of the vote.

She laid out her vision to the European Parliament, speaking about trade, gender equality, climate change, migration and defence. Mrs. Von der Leyen was a latecomer to the presidential race and there are questions about what kind of leader she will be.

Ursula von der Leyen was never the frontrunner to be the next president of the European Commission.

Jeremy Cliff writes Charlemagne, our column about European politics.

She was a compromise candidate reached after about 30 hours of negotiations at the start of July, where divisions in the European Council between national leaders and divisions in the European Parliament itself pushed them to find a compromise candidate and they reached for Germany's defence minister. But I think the fact that she only got through with nine votes yesterday shows that even as a compromise candidate, she's going to have her work cut out forging majorities as Commission president.

So why was the vote so split?

The vote was split yesterday because there are a number of new dividing lines in the European Parliament and between the European Parliament and national governments. And so you had the traditional centrist coalition, which would ordinarily have pushed someone like Mrs. Von der Leyen over the line, fairly easily divided. You had, for example, Social Democrats, including from her own native Germany, refusing to vote for her because they didn't like the way that her candidacy had been, as they saw it, imposed on the Parliament. But then you had other parties from outside the mainstream, so some right wing populist parties, for example, voting for her out of opportunistic strategic reasons. And so there's a real patchwork of interests and outlooks at play. And the result was not the resounding victory that she might have hoped for.

So what do we know about Mrs. Von der Leyen as a person?

In many ways, she's a somewhat paradoxical politician. On the one hand, she is absolutely a product of the old political establishment. Her father was a major figure in the centre right Christian Democrats. She is trained as a doctor, she's a bastion of the sort of moderate wing of that party and has been very close to Angela Merkel over her career. And she has a sort of smooth, conciliatory style in the way she presents herself. She's multilingual, she speaks fluent English and French as well as German. And on the other hand, she is also willing to pick some fights. She, as Families Minister under Angela Merkel's first government, she took on the old sort of patriarchal worldview of those on the right of her own party by bringing in progressive reforms on things like parental leave. And most recently as Defence Minister, she's been taking on issues like equipment shortages and problems in the top brass of Germany's armed forces, which has won her some praise, a lot of criticism, certainly a difficult relationship with many in the armed forces themselves. So you have, on the one hand, this very smooth established figure, but also someone who can take on those who stand in her way. And it will be interesting to see, as Commission president, how that balance plays out.

The. But what specific policies is she aiming to enact here?

Well, she didn't have very long to pull together a programme. She was nominated unexpectedly only 13 days before yesterday's vote. And in her speech yesterday, ahead of that vote, she laid out a series of policies that seemed to be designed to appeal to the various different parts of the broadly centrist or even centre left coalition that she was hoping to construct. So you had, for liberals, you had things like a strategy on artificial intelligence and A commitment to complete the European Capital Markets Union. To Socialists, she addressed a commitment to a European wide unemployment reinsurance scheme and to harmonisation of minimum wages in Europe. To Greens, she promised a sort of Green New Deal for the European economy and sort of faster progress towards emission tests.

I want Europe to become the first climate neutral continent in the world by 2050.

And actually it was a perfectly credible array of policies. There was nothing terribly surprising. But these are mostly things that had been in the ether for a while that pick up from where Jean Claude Juncker, who will be her predecessor, who gives up the job at the end of October where he left off. The one shift I think we might see under her is a slightly greater focus on foreign policy. She talked a lot about Europe in the world. She's even suggested ending the requirement for unanimity on foreign policy decisions in some areas, which would be a big step if she can implement it, which I think will be difficult.

But what you're describing is an agenda that is kind of all things to all people. Do you think that she'll be able to push all that through, given the fragmentation and the fact that she is appealing to quite a broad political spectrum?

Yes. She comes into office at a time of immense pressures on the European Union, economic pressures, security pressures, the sense that Europe is having to fight for its relevance in a world increasingly dominated by the US and China. And her pitch yesterday addressed that reality, but it was pitched to various different parts of the political spectrum and I think she'll only get it through. Firstly, if she can do case by case deals with individual parties to build coalitions around certain subjects, she won't be able to rely on a single stable majority. And secondly, if she can cut deals that actually cross between different themes, so, for example, bringing the Conservatives on board for environmental legislation by promising them tougher action on border controls and so forth. So I think it will really test her skills as a deal broker.

One of the first things that Mrs. Von der Leyen said in her speech yesterday referred to her position as first female president of the Commission. How significant do you think that is?

Of course, it's very significant. Europe hasn't done a great job in the past of achieving a gender balance in its top roles. It's got there. We have now the first female president of the European Commission. And as part of that package of jobs that was agreed by leaders a few weeks ago, the first female president of the European Central bank in Christine Lagarde. And Mrs. Von de Leyen's made it clear that that's going to mark her commission. She said that she wants a gender equal commission.

We represent half of our population. We want our fair share.

And I think, you know, this follows from her career in Berlin where as family's minister she pursued a lot of policies that advance the cause of gender equality in Germany. And I think she's a feminist, but she's also quite a sort of pragmatic sort. And I think she sees this as simply part of a modern, civilized, liberal society. So I think that will mark her time as a commissioned president and will be perhaps a greater priority than has been accorded to it in the past.

Jeremy, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Just over a week before Hurricane Sandy struck the northeastern coast of the United States, most residents were blissfully unaware of what was building. But a small group of people realized that something big was about to happen.

It was in the fall of 2012, in October. I live in New York City and my son was an infant. And I was spending a lot of time sitting in a chair with him in one hand and my phone looking at Twitter in the other. And it was a Sunday afternoon then when all the meteorologists kind of all at once went a little crazy with the outputs of these weather models.

That's Andrew Blum, author of the Weather Machine, a book he wrote in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, exploring the mechanics of the modern weather forecast.

What they showed was that in about eight days a storm would come, a storm that didn't even exist. And what amazed me was that it was clearly beyond their human comprehension. It entirely depended on the outputs of these supercomputers. And it really indicated to me that we had developed a system that far exceeded the scale that I given it credit for.

The good news is, is that the governors and local officials, I think, have had a few days preparation. So we're confident that the assets are pre positioned for an effective response in the aftermath of the storm.

Those first indications to the models came on a Sunday. But it really wasn't until that Thursday or Friday that the media really caught on to what was going to happen.

Millions of Americans are bracing for a potential superstorm. Hurricane Sandy is serious. And so that forecast, it was right.

As the week went on, everyone's confidence rose. By Thursday or Friday, they were ready to make major decisions. But knowing that it was coming really changed the ability and the willingness to begin to evacuate people, to begin to close the subways, to do all the things you can do to prepare for a storm. When Sandy came that following Monday night, it was really A wake up call for how vulnerable New York City was to, to these new kinds of storms, storms of sort of unprecedented strength, but also as a bit of a silver lining, this new capability of the forecast.

So these supercomputers were used to predict Hurricane Sandy and we rely on them now just to give us our daily forecasts. How does a prediction actually get made eight days in advance? Take me right down inside it.

Well, the most important piece to recognize is that you can't know what the weather will be unless you know what the weather is. So you need observations of the weather first. And while the kind of anchor of the system is still the surface, weather stations, often at airports, particularly in the US and you know, sort of scientific observatories that still launch helium balloons with sensors attached that send back their readings, really the bulk of the information that goes into the weather models comes from the satellites. And not only just weather satellites in general, but the polar orbiting satellites that are primarily focused on collecting numerical data.

Once you have all of the current conditions and then the satellite data, how does that get turned into what my weatherman's telling me?

It would seem to be as straightforward as a sort of computer program that takes the present and turns it into the future. But in fact the weather models are actually a kind of ongoing concern. They are continuous simulations of the atmosphere that have the special ability, of course, to be run forward faster than time. So what happens is with each run of the model, as they say, every six or 12 hours, those best forecasts, the sort of soonest forecast, the 6 or 12 hour forecast, is compared to the then latest set of observations and then corrected slightly so that the model better matches reality. But it's not as if they are using past weather to predict future weather. It's entirely about the equations of physics and thermodynamics and this actual ongoing simulation of the atmosphere.

Why hasn't that converged to the perfect forecast?

Kind of has, depending on what you count as perfect. One of the things that's really made the weather forecasts work as well as they have is this ability to not only have this daily science experiment of a forecast that can be sort of tweaked and corrected and run again the next day with a slightly different equation. But in fact, if you change your model, you can then go back 50 years and run it against all of the weather data you have and tweak it even further. The meteorologists say their models are getting better by a day, a decade, which is to say a five day forecast today is as good as a four day forecast 10 years ago and on back for 40 years. All of that really comes from this ability to tweak the models and test them and refine them and know each day whether or not they're verified. I think one of the key things that the meteorologists hold onto is that the forecast is only as good as the decisions you can make from it. There are harder places in the world to predict the weather than others, but at a larger scale. Where we have ended up today is quite remarkable. Right?

And so this led you to want to look into how such amazing forecasts can be made. But let's wind back a little bit. Where did the very idea of forecasting begin?

It was not until the invention of the telegraph that you have operators at first in an ad hoc way, sending observations and temperatures and saying, you know, there's a storm over here to the west and you can expect it coming towards you later in the afternoon. And it wasn't until the 1870s that meteorologists really began to turn these more ad hoc observations into an organized system and began to sort of say, okay, these are the times of day when we should be taking our observations. These are the ways in which we'll characterize the sky. So we're all on the same page and can begin to assemble a real map of the atmosphere, connecting many places with simultaneous observations. It was something that governments did. It was really meant as a public good. And from the very beginning, there was this real diplomatic exchange between the weather services of different nations, recognizing that they may have their own political borders, but the atmosphere was borderless, and they would all help each other out by exchanging data as much as possible.

So you've described all of this as an inherently international effort, paid for and run by governments and happily shared across cross borders. Do you see that continuing?

I think it's definitely at risk. I think that there's a real change in the economics of the entire system, in part thanks to climate change and new weather extremes. It used to be that it was really only governments who would spend 20 or 30 million dollars on a supercomputer to forecast the weather. But now that the forecast is getting better, there's ostensibly more money to be made on a forecast with an edge on private systems that can outperform public ones. And so what we're seeing is a bit of a kind of early boom of private weather forecasters, not in the way that they've worked over the last generation or so of taking the government forecasts and tweaking them, but going deeper into the system, in some cases flying their own satellites or developing their own weather models. There is an interest from the Trump administration towards encouraging these new private weather companies, and the question is if that will be to the detriment of the international exchange, or if it can improve everybody's forecast, rather than ending up with one set of forecasts for the haves and one set for the have nots.

You mentioned climate change. How does that figure into weather forecasting?

Climate change plays into this in two really interesting ways. The first is that when we relied on humans to forecast the weather, they were, of course, as we humans always are, kind of bound by past experience. And so in this new era of weather extremes, the weather models are particularly adept at forecasting unusual storms because they're not based on past weather, they're based sort of more deeply in the physics of the atmosphere. So we're very well served by them in that case. The other really interesting moment is to consider how the weather models help improve or diverge from the climate models. And while the kind of basics of them are the same, the process of verification that we've had for 30, 40 years of weather models, where this daily experiment that we can test it each day and refine it, we don't have that with climate models. We essentially have almost basically one cycle of verification with climate models where we're seeing, looking back, were the models from the 1980s correct in the forecast for 30 and 40 years out? And we're seeing that they were correct. In fact, they sort of understated the changes in the climate. But without that kind of daily feedback mechanism of improvement that we get with the weather, you don't have the same surety with the climate models.

Andrew, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

In Japan, there's a familiar ring, that of a bear bell. Hikers have long carried them to ward off wildlife. But as bears leave the woods for more populated areas, the bells are starting to become a feature of life in the country's villages.

So in Japan, you see bear bells everywhere.

Sarah Burke is the Economist's Tokyo bureau chief.

People have them attached to their backpacks. They use them when they go walking. They're little bells that basically make a ring when you walk along. And big hiking paths have bigger ones that you can ring when you're about to go through a bit of wood. And the idea is that they're used to scare off mainly bears, but lots of other animals. But now they're not being just used on mountains and in rural areas, but lots of Japanese are using them even in sort of more inhabited regions.

And that's because the bears are coming to town.

Indeed, there are lots more monkeys and boars and bears numbers have been rising. I mean, it's quite striking when you look at the statistics which, yes, the government collects, looking at the number of bear sightings per year, and that's been going up since the 2000s. None really knows the estimate of sort of how many bears there actually are, but there was close to 13,000 sightings last year.

And why, why is that number going up?

I mean, people argue about this, but one of the main reasons that people who study this agree is that it's a demography thing. So Japan is shrinking, the population is shrinking, and that's especially acute in rural areas, not only because people are moving to urban centers, but lots of rural areas are inhabited by old people who are dying off. And this emboldens the animals. You know, when something looks less inhabited, they're less inhibited about wandering around. So, for example, we see that the biggest jumps in sightings are in those areas where the population is falling fastest.

Well, this is a bit of a reverse of the normal story. What you normally hear is that as people sort of expand, as populations rise, that's when the interactions with animals go up.

Yeah, true. I guess you can say that the wild is pushing into the people instead of the people pushing into the wild as more and more of these areas, villages, et cetera, sort of die out. I mean, another reason is that hunting is on the decline mainly. Again, hunting is something that older people do. So again, the government reckons that the average hunter is now 68 years old. Farmers and foresters, they're also declining. Put all these reasons together and you can see why maybe bears are having a party at the moment.

So it would be a good time to be a bear bell salesman, I suppose. But what else does it mean for the people of Japan?

I mean, that's true and you know, it's a great thing that there's lots more wildlife around, especially after years of worrying about these animals dying out. But, you know, it's not all roses. These bears injure scores of people per year, and often they kill a handful of them too. Deer cause damage to farmland, or they spur erosion by eating too much grass. So people say that actually Japan is kind of at the forefront of having researched what you can do to deter these animals. And there are simple things you can do. You can build a fence, for example, around a village, or you can change the layout around it. How many trees there are, but that doesn't seem to be happening too much. Instead, what happens is there are a lot of bears are actually captured and kill. And the government now says that it wants to halve the number of certain types of deer, certain types of boars and certain types of Monkeys in the 10 years from 2013. So by 2023, Japan is sort of leading the way in lots of things to do with shrinking demography. And this is obviously one of them.

Sarah, thank you very much for bringing your reporting to bear.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow. Sam.