For many pressing social problems, there are no scientific solutions - let's put that out there first. Religious conflicts, for example, cannot be scientifically settled, and neither can most court cases, with the exceptions being one where very narrow questions are being asked - and note, "settled" here includes the role of the judge and jury in assigning the sentence.
If we want to apply science to economics, we have to begin with ecology, more specifically the ecology of human civilizations. It turns out that in preventing many forms of societal collapse, science can play a very important role - in combating disease, in helping out with agricultural and industrial production and waste management, in collecting information about the physical (or 'natural') world, and (for our purposes) in differentiating between scientific claims on energy technologies and global warming trajectories.
The kind of 'societal collapse' I'm talking about is the kind that is often preceded by food and fuel riots, and which sometimes leads to genocidal conflict. This is the basic concern about global warming and resource exhaustion - that it will lead to a hundred or more new Rwandan-type events, which could easily become larger-scale nuclear conflicts. Societal collapse plus nuclear and/or biological weapons is a bad combination, best avoided if at all possible. In order to avoid such outcomes, people of all persuasions must base their decisions on accurate information.
That's one evolutionary argument behind big brains, is that they allow their possessors to more comprehensively and efficiently process information about the world around them (as well as retain that information) thereby creating a survival advantage for both themselves and their social group.
The other side of that coin is that big brains may easily be deluded by false information into truly disastrous but quite complicated behaviors, involving stratagems that little brains (like those of lizards, say) would find impossible to carry out (or even remember). In this cheerless worldview, humans are just too smart for their own good, and sooner or later, that will result in evolutionary termination.
A truly bleak perspective, isn't it? However, we still are here, even though we've apparently wiped out many of our planetary co-inhabitant species, all within the geological blink of an eye. I'm still betting that the generalized benefits of larger brains will win out - but it all depends on the ability to discriminate between accurate and bogus information.
In our society, the employees of academic and media institutions are the ones charged with supplying the rest of the social sphere with accurate information - don't laugh, now, that really is the job description, no matter how distorted the whole thing has become. The same job description was posted in the Cold War nation of East Germany, as well as under Lysenko and Beria in the Soviet Union, and of course we have the example of Germany, 1933-1945. No one ever calls their own media and academic institutions "part of a propaganda machine" - it is always sold as the truth, regardless of circumstances.
How then, is the observer to distinguish between accurate and misleading information? It is a fundamental problem, and not just for humans - consider the camouflaged insect, whether predator or prey, as just one of many examples of misinformation in nature. Even in nature, we can see that misinformation also confers a survival advantage on the deceiver - proof, if any was needed, that evolution is no guide for moral behavior, much to the dismay of Social Darwinists everywhere. "Perhaps", says the true believer, "we need to redefine 'morality' to bring it in line with our more natural and evolutionarily determined impulses?" That, by the way, is what gets a lot of religious philosophers annoyed at Darwin and Dawkins - and they have a pretty good point, which is that the Nazis based their Holocaust on just such arguments of 'scientific morality'. The curious thing there is that eugenics was all built on flawed assumptions about how genetic inheritance really worked (not that a modern knowledge of genetics forms any moral basis for slaughtering people, either).
So: accurate information matters. Differentiating accurate from inaccurate information - that's the problem. If we can't do that, we are lost.
Back to the issue at hand:
When it comes to climate and energy issues (among others), the world has been faced with an epic snow job, misinformation on a grand scale - and the easiest and most reliable way to track such misinformation to its real source is to look at how the funding works.
In the case of the U.S. energy supply, the agency of interest is the Department of Energy, a section of the executive branch of government, headed by a chief who is appointed by the elected President and who also must be confirmed by Congress. If we want to know what their agenda is, we should first ignore everything but their budget:
So, rather than go through all that again, I'll just repost something I put up on the NYT Web Site a while ago:
Dec 11th 2008: The Department of Energy
December 11th, 2008
7:03 am
Fundamental changes at the DOE will be needed to really develop more renewable energy technology. This isn't just a technological problem, since a pool of trained scientists and engineers is needed to work in industry. That means that many programs will be needed, not just one isolated one.
At the very least, they'd have to set up something like the National Institute of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically for funding and developing renewable energy technology research.
As it is, there is is almost no money at DOE for renewable energy research today. There are several public-private partnerships like FutureGen, now in private hands, and the privately managed National Renewable Energy Lab, managed by a joint consortium between Battelle and Bechtel. Battelle is also the primary backer of FutureGen, and the owner of the secret proprietary coal carbon-capture technology involved - which doesn't work. Basic arguments show it can't work, certainly not at a scale needed to go on burning coal at current rates, but that didn't stop the project from going forward.
It's hard to imagine the DOE and the National Laboratories dropping their mostly military-related research and focusing instead on clean energy. The DOE budget would have to be radically transformed, for one thing.
The most recent DOE budget request had the following numbers:
Nuclear Security: $9.385 billion
Environmental Responsibility: $6.344 billion
Scientific Discovery: $4.398 billion
Energy Security: $3.123 billion
Management Excellence: $0.629 billion
This is fairly vague, but it's almost all devoted to nuclear weapons research and cleaning up the waste from nuclear weapons production.
Here is the entire DOE budget for the real renewables, under Energy Security, subsection "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy":
Biomass and biorefinery systems R&D... $0.179 billion
Solar energy...$0.148 billion
Wind energy... $0.040 billion
I think that works out to about 1.5% of the DOE budget. The National Science Foundation doesn't fund applied energy research, so that's about it. Even that money is tightly controlled by "industry partners" - so there is almost nothing for fundamental research.
By comparison, the National Insitute of Health has a $28 billion budget, delivered to medical research institutions and universities all across the country.
That's why every single research school in the U.S. has some kind of pharmaceutical / medical device research program, while you won't find a single large-scale renewable energy research program at any university - just a handful of projects at a few of the DOE-based National Laboratories - which are all now government-owned, contractor-operated institutions.
Will we see a radically transformed DOE budget? Will the DOE budget be fundamentally altered? The only way to do that would be to abandon all new nuclear weapon development programs, and instead devote those billions to a wide-ranging renewable energy development program, involving massive federal investment. $10 billion a year would be a reasonable amount - our nukes work fine.
It's been done before - after the Manhattan Project, there was a huge expansion of nuclear weapons production, involving dozens of giant facilities scattered all over the country, all within a few years.
If the government and business actually WANTED to halt the use of fossil fuels and build a renewable-based energy system, it could be done - but please note, those are separate tasks. Either approach will infuriate everyone who is invested in coal-fired electricity generation and gasoline and diesel-based transportation, meaning well over 50% of what remains of Wall Street, a lot of sovereign wealth funds, the entire memberships of the American Petroleum Institue and the Coal-fired, I mean Edison, Electric Institute. Not to mention the railroads, who still rely heavily on shipping coal from mine to power plant for their profits.
However, it would also create a huge new job base, and would mean that the concept of "energy independence" at the national, state, local and even personal level would be a real possibility. That notion makes the electricity and fuel cartels very nervous indeed, but they shouldn't worry - the vast majority of people will still want to pay someone else to deal with it for them.
P.S. There is an old mantra about nuclear fusion solving all energy problems for the future. This is true, but we already have the fusion reactor - the Sun. There's no need to attempt to build one here on Earth - any such reactor would need tritium, which must be produced in a normal nuclear reactor, with all the problems that entails.
Recommended by 13 Readers
Did we see any kind of radical restructuring at the DOE? No, instead we saw an very large increase in funding for coal-based energy projects, as well as continuing support for tar sand development and other "unconventional fossil fuels". The carbon-capture plan is almost entirely mythical - essentially, FutureGen is a coal-to-gasoline plant posing as a zero-carbon power plant, and the effort to portray CO2-injection-based oil well recovery enhancement as "carbon burial" is equally dishonest.
What this really means is that the DOE is not a reliable source of information on energy technology, even though they are given an annual budget of $25 billion plus to do just that. For example, one result of this massive information failure is that the United States now has among the worst energy policies of any nation on Earth - policies that are a recipe for economic as well as ecological disaster. For example, the 2010 DOE Budget includes a massive increase in public-private government partnerships along the lines of the FutureGen Alliance, a coal industry front group run by private 'non-profit' DOE contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, who also is the owner of the 'proprietary FutureGen technology', which has yet to be seen by the public.
This is the wrong way to run a science program, and there is no escaping the conclusion that the Department of Energy is under disastrous leadership and is headed in the wrong direction - away from scientifically informed decision-making.
Adam Smith would have agreed about the fundamental role that good information plays in good economic decision-making, by the way.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Does the inability of models to predict El Nino invalidate long-term climate projections?
If you've been following the global predictions of La Nina and El Nino, you may have noticed some interesting shifts recently. It is still unclear what will happen over the next year with ENSO, but the indicators now point towards El Nino:
Forecasters say El Nino may be developing June 8, 2009
Compare that estimate to predictions from Jan 2009:
La Niña Returns, NASA Watches Sea Surface Indicators
01.26.09
The inability of models to forecast EL Nino variability does not, in fact, invalidate long-term climate predictions based on the atmospheric accumulation of long-lived greenhouse gases, namely CO2, CH4 and N2O. Why not? For the same reason that climate models don't predict hurricanes. El Nino is an example of ocean weather, much as hurricanes are a case of atmospheric weather. That means chaotic instability and sensitive dependence on initial conditions play large roles in the development of the phenomenon, just as in weather forecasting.
However, predictions of more extreme weather events as warming proceeds are viewed as robust, even though climate models don't specifically forecast such events. What is going on here? Are these predictions that the models are missing, and why?
For an interesting take, see this:
Response of ENSO to global warming: A perspective from the global heat balance, Sun, D
Here the notion is that external forcing that increases surface-subsurface differences (for example, warming of surface waters by increased GHGs) is counteracted by ENSO activity, which mixes in that extra warmth. Thus, El Nino seems like conversion of oceanic potential energy into global kinetic energy - or, an equatorial belch that affects global climate.
The large 1997-98 El Nino may have been an example of that. By increasing temperature differentials (vertically or horizontally) in the short term, you spawn more intense weather systems. Over the long term, an entirely new, stable climate regime will set in - one radically different from what the Earth has seen in 3 million plus years. Full-blown global warming is thus the equilibration stage, when the atmosphere is no longer acting to increase ocean temperature. It's highly unlikely that anyone now alive will live to see a new stable climate, however, as the response time to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 by 2050 is at least hundreds of years, possibly exacerbated by a permafrost methane pulse.
Once CO2 levels stabilize, how long does it take the oceans and atmosphere to reach a new thermal equilibrium? Around a thousand years? with the rate of ocean mixing being the main variable. At that point, the earth would again be in radiative equilibrium.
Study: CO2 impacts could last centuries - Rising levels could lock in droughts, sea level increases, January 27, 2009
What this emphasizes is that the oceans are going to play the dominant role as global warming progresses - and a major factor is going to be the how the deep ocean interacts with the surface layer. It's far harder to measure oceanic temperature profiles than atmospheric ones, so this is a data-limited area of research in many respects.
The effects of fossil CO2 pollution are not as irreversible as species extinction, but they are certainly not reversible under short time periods, despite recent claims by Yale researchers. It is a nice idea - the 'resiliency of nature' - but it really means very little. Easter Island was also 'resilient' - the grass didn't stop growing, did it? What if the climate had also radically changed, however?
If people and nations can't even sustainably manage resources under conditions of climatic stability, they will face certain disaster as global warming and instability progresses. Nations incapable of providing their own populations with basic resources like food and fuel will likely face violent collapse under such scenarios - it's been seen before, even without drastic climate change. The nations most at risk are those that rely heavily on trade for their provisions of basic commodities, and those with highly vulnerable water supplies. In all cases, reform of agriculture away from the fossil fuel-intensive "Green Model" is particularly important.
Google News search exercise: "fuel riots" OR "food riots" time period 2000-present
See any trends?
Here's another question for thought: what role are climatic factors and resource extraction factors playing in the current global economic downturn? Are Marxist and neoclassical economists capable of taking such factors into account in their 'econometric models'?
Forecasters say El Nino may be developing June 8, 2009
Computer models that forecast climate differ, the agency noted, with some predicting arrival of El Nino while others expect continued neutral conditions.
Compare that estimate to predictions from Jan 2009:
La Niña Returns, NASA Watches Sea Surface Indicators
01.26.09
La Niña conditions are likely to continue in the Northern Hemisphere during the spring of 2009. That's the forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center, National Center for Environmental Prediction and National Weather Service in their official statement on January 8, 2009
The inability of models to forecast EL Nino variability does not, in fact, invalidate long-term climate predictions based on the atmospheric accumulation of long-lived greenhouse gases, namely CO2, CH4 and N2O. Why not? For the same reason that climate models don't predict hurricanes. El Nino is an example of ocean weather, much as hurricanes are a case of atmospheric weather. That means chaotic instability and sensitive dependence on initial conditions play large roles in the development of the phenomenon, just as in weather forecasting.
However, predictions of more extreme weather events as warming proceeds are viewed as robust, even though climate models don't specifically forecast such events. What is going on here? Are these predictions that the models are missing, and why?
For an interesting take, see this:
Response of ENSO to global warming: A perspective from the global heat balance, Sun, D
I will review progress that has been made in understanding the role of ENSO in the global heat balance. In particular, I will highlight the research leading to the view that averaged over the decadal or longer time- scales, ENSO acts as a basin-scale heat mixer in the tropical Pacific.
Here the notion is that external forcing that increases surface-subsurface differences (for example, warming of surface waters by increased GHGs) is counteracted by ENSO activity, which mixes in that extra warmth. Thus, El Nino seems like conversion of oceanic potential energy into global kinetic energy - or, an equatorial belch that affects global climate.
In this view, the level of ENSO activity is controlled not only by tropical heating, but also by extra-tropical cooling. It suggests that we shall see an elevated level of ENSO activity in the initial stages of global warming, but a reduced level of ENSO activity (or even a permanent El Nino state) when global warming is full-blown.
The large 1997-98 El Nino may have been an example of that. By increasing temperature differentials (vertically or horizontally) in the short term, you spawn more intense weather systems. Over the long term, an entirely new, stable climate regime will set in - one radically different from what the Earth has seen in 3 million plus years. Full-blown global warming is thus the equilibration stage, when the atmosphere is no longer acting to increase ocean temperature. It's highly unlikely that anyone now alive will live to see a new stable climate, however, as the response time to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 by 2050 is at least hundreds of years, possibly exacerbated by a permafrost methane pulse.
Once CO2 levels stabilize, how long does it take the oceans and atmosphere to reach a new thermal equilibrium? Around a thousand years? with the rate of ocean mixing being the main variable. At that point, the earth would again be in radiative equilibrium.
Study: CO2 impacts could last centuries - Rising levels could lock in droughts, sea level increases, January 27, 2009
What this emphasizes is that the oceans are going to play the dominant role as global warming progresses - and a major factor is going to be the how the deep ocean interacts with the surface layer. It's far harder to measure oceanic temperature profiles than atmospheric ones, so this is a data-limited area of research in many respects.
The effects of fossil CO2 pollution are not as irreversible as species extinction, but they are certainly not reversible under short time periods, despite recent claims by Yale researchers. It is a nice idea - the 'resiliency of nature' - but it really means very little. Easter Island was also 'resilient' - the grass didn't stop growing, did it? What if the climate had also radically changed, however?
If people and nations can't even sustainably manage resources under conditions of climatic stability, they will face certain disaster as global warming and instability progresses. Nations incapable of providing their own populations with basic resources like food and fuel will likely face violent collapse under such scenarios - it's been seen before, even without drastic climate change. The nations most at risk are those that rely heavily on trade for their provisions of basic commodities, and those with highly vulnerable water supplies. In all cases, reform of agriculture away from the fossil fuel-intensive "Green Model" is particularly important.
Google News search exercise: "fuel riots" OR "food riots" time period 2000-present
See any trends?
Here's another question for thought: what role are climatic factors and resource extraction factors playing in the current global economic downturn? Are Marxist and neoclassical economists capable of taking such factors into account in their 'econometric models'?
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A Lesson in Unsustainable Practices
The Wealth of Planets
Once upon a time there was a society of people who came from a long and noble lineage, whose roots were buried in the mists of time. For thousands of years they had been born, had lived rich lives, and had been buried with their wealth in ornate tombs that stretched in orderly processions over the hills. Life was a slower, more careful affair in those days, and while a rich life was possible, it was never easy. Nevertheless, the people prospered, for a while.
Eventually a time came when the people came upon great difficulties: a drought, a famine or an epidemic of disease. The people vanished, scattered to the four directions, and only their tombs remained amidst the ruins of their great cities.
Many years later, a village grew up near the site of one of these abandoned cities. The villagers scratched out an existence by farming and raising livestock, using the surrounding forests for hunting and gathering purposes. Then one day they discovered the graveyards and tombs of the ancient city. Each tomb they found held a wealth of gold.
They begin to break into and loot more and more tombs, beginning with the most recently constructed. Over time, this became integrated into the social and economic fabric of the people. Every year a few tombs were exhumed, and a priesthood blessed the entire business, thanking the ancestors for their gifts to the living.
They celebrated their newfound wealth, and began to trade with their poorer neighbors, exchanging buried treasure for food, clothing, and all manner of luxuries. Eventually, the trade in the ancient wealth became the most lucrative in the whole area, and other neighboring tribes travelled long distances to barter with them.
As they grew and expanded, they excavated tomb after tomb, hauling the plenty away. More children were born and the village grew to be a small city. Every day, lines of men would go to dig in the ancient graveyards, returning with all the wealth they could ever need. The villagers now built lavish homes and temples, some of them dedicated to the people of the ancient city who had stored up such wealth. People viewed the ancient artifacts with awe and coveted them, for they did not have the skills required to produce such things themselves.
As the easily discovered graveyards were plundered faster and faster, men moved farther out in the search for new graves. However, these older, poorer graves had less gold in them, and were also difficult to find. Conflict broke out between neighboring tribes over the last of the tombs, sparked by secret raids on each other’s graveyards. As their economy collapsed, the citizens of the new city, now swollen in numbers, found that they had nothing to trade with other villages for food.
Waves of bloody warfare over control of the last of the buried treasures soon led to the destruction and degradation of the people. One day, the last grave was dug up, and the last sack of gold was carried off. Faced with starvation, the people took to fighting with one another for what wealth remained, and to raiding their neighboring tribes for food and slaves. Few could remember the skills of their great-grandparents, who had known how to coax crops from the land and how to raise livestock, and their society soon descended into chaos and warfare.
All of their neighbors feared them, calling them 'the damned'. Finally, upset by the taking of slaves and the murderous raids, the neighboring villages joined together and wiped the gravediggers out in a bloody invasion. They burned the city down to the ground and left, saying the place was cursed by the dead.
It is in this way that people learned to leave the graves of the dead alone.
Once upon a time there was a society of people who came from a long and noble lineage, whose roots were buried in the mists of time. For thousands of years they had been born, had lived rich lives, and had been buried with their wealth in ornate tombs that stretched in orderly processions over the hills. Life was a slower, more careful affair in those days, and while a rich life was possible, it was never easy. Nevertheless, the people prospered, for a while.
Eventually a time came when the people came upon great difficulties: a drought, a famine or an epidemic of disease. The people vanished, scattered to the four directions, and only their tombs remained amidst the ruins of their great cities.
Many years later, a village grew up near the site of one of these abandoned cities. The villagers scratched out an existence by farming and raising livestock, using the surrounding forests for hunting and gathering purposes. Then one day they discovered the graveyards and tombs of the ancient city. Each tomb they found held a wealth of gold.
They begin to break into and loot more and more tombs, beginning with the most recently constructed. Over time, this became integrated into the social and economic fabric of the people. Every year a few tombs were exhumed, and a priesthood blessed the entire business, thanking the ancestors for their gifts to the living.
They celebrated their newfound wealth, and began to trade with their poorer neighbors, exchanging buried treasure for food, clothing, and all manner of luxuries. Eventually, the trade in the ancient wealth became the most lucrative in the whole area, and other neighboring tribes travelled long distances to barter with them.
As they grew and expanded, they excavated tomb after tomb, hauling the plenty away. More children were born and the village grew to be a small city. Every day, lines of men would go to dig in the ancient graveyards, returning with all the wealth they could ever need. The villagers now built lavish homes and temples, some of them dedicated to the people of the ancient city who had stored up such wealth. People viewed the ancient artifacts with awe and coveted them, for they did not have the skills required to produce such things themselves.
As the easily discovered graveyards were plundered faster and faster, men moved farther out in the search for new graves. However, these older, poorer graves had less gold in them, and were also difficult to find. Conflict broke out between neighboring tribes over the last of the tombs, sparked by secret raids on each other’s graveyards. As their economy collapsed, the citizens of the new city, now swollen in numbers, found that they had nothing to trade with other villages for food.
Waves of bloody warfare over control of the last of the buried treasures soon led to the destruction and degradation of the people. One day, the last grave was dug up, and the last sack of gold was carried off. Faced with starvation, the people took to fighting with one another for what wealth remained, and to raiding their neighboring tribes for food and slaves. Few could remember the skills of their great-grandparents, who had known how to coax crops from the land and how to raise livestock, and their society soon descended into chaos and warfare.
All of their neighbors feared them, calling them 'the damned'. Finally, upset by the taking of slaves and the murderous raids, the neighboring villages joined together and wiped the gravediggers out in a bloody invasion. They burned the city down to the ground and left, saying the place was cursed by the dead.
It is in this way that people learned to leave the graves of the dead alone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
