physics of happening

 O2 post: Mauro,

That’s an excellent question.   What you want is the ‘accumulative’ total effect, of the ‘choice’ being made, if what you want is to give people ways to decide what choices are better than others.    The way you’re starting is just the right way,  thinking it through far enough to begin to see the real complications.     For me that leads to seeing the need for ways to simplify.   What you want is to get the whole picture right, not just use up your energy fully detailing the first part of it you start with.

I don’t know of any effectively permanent carbon sinks other than the natural accumulation of carbon on the sea bed.   The 2-300 year residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is so much longer than active most biomass sinks that I wouldn’t really count them at all.    That greatly simplifies the calculation!    Greatly simplifying the calculation also corrects for the strong tendency people have of spending time looking for offsets to excuse increasing their basic carbon production.    That time and creative effort is better applied elsewhere I think, like to trying to understand why everyone is saving energy but energy consumption still multiplies…      

The biomass issue that really caught me by surprise last year was figuring out that even the long term biomass carbon sinks consume land in a non-renewable way!     That is a hidden but very major impact.     Using forests to accumulate biomass does work, but only as land is set aside for new forests in perpetuity, and the resource for that is quite limited.    To get a sense of scale, sequestering carbon with trees at the rate that normal spending produces CO2 you’d need to set aside new forest land at a rate (very roughly) of an acre for every $200k of GDP.   For a small business with ten employees, that might mean obtaining and planting 10 acres a year, forever.    The kick back, of course, is that this sort of thing is exactly where the world food crisis came from.    There are all kinds of ways in which development permanently consumes food production resources, and we really need them.

No matter what the price is, food demand is going up and resources for food production are going down.    That’s what really let the speculators in to run up the price.     I think the take home message is that all these big reactions coming at once indicates nature is simply gagging on our proposed new relationship with her as a whole.    In any new relationship being overly immature and aggressive in your approach brings on severe rejections, and observing sever rejections is a ‘sign’ of having missed all the earlier signs.    We could learn about that as the natural way. 

maurocordella@virgilio.it
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 5:58 AM
To: o2mailinglist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: co2eq lifespan

I was discussing about biomass carbon sink “ability” but I have a doubt in my mind I propose you.- consider any supply chain which is time
and space oriented (i.e. the life cycle of any process evolving in
space and time)
- several stages of the process are likely to
contribute to GHG emissions.
- a period of time of years, decades or
centuries may occur between the earliest and the latest stages.
- in order to quantify the kgCOeq2 emitted during the life cycle of the
process, should people take into account that GHGs have different life time in atmosphere (so that an emission occurring in the latest stages could “replace” an “older” emission)? or we have to consider all the GHGs emission regardless their actual release time (simply adding all the emission occurring in the earliest and latsest stages)?

Brian,

Yea, most people think it’s a problem of attitude, but there are great examples of where that’s clearly not the case. The environmental movement, for example, makes the same mistake time after time of treating niche opportunities as unlimited resources. The important part is not to say they have a ‘bad attitude’. The error is not one of attitude. The important thing to note it that it’s the exact same error they are trying to correct. It’s error that the business and finance interests are making in massively misjudging the limits of the earth’s easy resources. The greens like the developers tend to think that every resource we have not yet exhausted is unlimited, like wind and solar and all that. That insight is the useful and helpful lesson of ethanol, that it was a good niche opportunity thought of as an unlimited resource up until it triggered the world food crisis. What we’re dealing with is a major conceptual misunderstanding of the problem.

If you don’t want to “plan for failure” as you say, then you should pull yourself up short and figure out why nearly everyone with that attitude actually is planning for failure. Almost no one thinks things through. Almost all planning is done to just push the problem a little ways ahead, hoping it will go away. That worked when we had not hit the limits of the earth. Now just pushing the problem ahead a bit just pushes it to where it will be worse when we get to it again. In order to think things through we need to understand them from beginning to end, ¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸ , and that’ll teach you how nature starts everything with explosions of creativity to see if they will learn how to stabilize, or lets them collapse of their own feeble accord if they don’t.

The real solutions to our two main uncontrolled growth problems, population and wealth, are both stubbornly in conflict with our self-images of what ‘good’ means, the stuff we cling to in our minds. Those ‘functional fixations’ throw us into deep conflict with a changing world. To me the real solution to both is *not* getting the right ideas into our minds. It’s to learn a way to see *through* our ideas so we can watch the real world, see them in overlay. Otherwise we only look *at* our ideas and let them hide the world from us. If we see both we don’t have to give up the things that are precious to us, including our attitudes, and can successfully navigate a place that we’ve mostly lost contact with too.

Does that make any sense?

Best,

Phil Henshaw

“it’s not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say”

———-

Hi Phil,

What differentiates humans from animals is our capacity to conceptualise in abstract terms and to plan for the future, and then to act on those plans with a view to realising them. To me the problem is one of “attitude”. My personal experience is that our plans are self fulfilling. Winners plan to succeed, and losers plan to fail. I am personally not predisposed to plan for failure. To me that is not a constructive use of my time and energy. My personal predisposition is to want to co-operate with my fellow humans with the objective of furthering our mutual interests. To me there is no purpose to be served in contemplating the end of the world. That is not the attitude of a healthy mind.

Kind Regards,

Brian Bloom

From 5/29/08

Jack,

I think there are so many disconnects between what formulas describe and what they’re used for, once you see it, you’ll wonder why we have not noticed the defect in thinking of ‘everything’ in terms of formulas right from the start.  How we’ve made use of formulas has never been to actually follow them.  Their best use is always as learning tools.  That’s how we test them too, but then seem to ignore how critically important the learning process is to making them work. 

Take the problem of sitting at dinner and picking up a glass of water to drink.  We have a ‘formula’ for where the glass should be, at the upper right of the place.  We have to look at the actual environment, though, in which we are attempting to use the formula, to not make a complete mess of the operation as a rule.  The formula does not give you a useful location for the glass, but a useful start to reaching out for it.   Similarly you could ask how it would work to shake someone’s hand if all you had was a statistical representation of where the other person’s hand sould be.  You’d simply never get a good firm handshake out of it even if waving your hand around in the ’statistical phase space’ of your model eventually resulted in your hand bumping into the other person’s hand.

That very traditional relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (i.e. science and engineering) has been traditionally ignored by the theorists it seems…    The theory guys like to think that they were the ‘priests’ of knowledge or something, with invented abstractions being somehow superior to direct learning experience…   The truth seems to be that theory comes from, and is only useful as an extension of, the learning methods of practice, and has no inherent value at all.

The tricky places are where there’s no theory, where nature is inventing whole new ways of behaving that only learning experience will expose at all.  It’s those, along with a practical way of organizing historical data, I’m mostly talking about with my ‘bump on a curve’ model for questions to ask about what’s ‘happening’ in developmental change… (¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸)   I describe one example as a metaphor for others in the first 3 paragraphs of my main web page.

Does that help?

Best,

Phil Henshaw