Yesterday Eric Rimmer, on the sustainability slide show discussion, had replied to my comment about the problem with using I=PAT for the “chicken and egg” problems of overshoot relating the problem of population vs. wealth. He said:
Thank you. Phil. Interesting thoughts, though I can’t detect what you suggest we should DO?
Eric,
Well, I’ve been thinking about that too… Because the way natural systems steer their development is by using their operating surplus to redirect their development. We should get Barack to realize his mistake of saying it’s OK to spend all our effort and surpluses to get back to using up the earth’s resources ever faster again. Continue reading Real steering for the chicken and egg→
Thanks much again. The PNAS paper on tipping elements, though as good as I’ve seen from established scientists, is still a bit flimsy relative to what you could say. You could consider the evolving physical systems of the earth as developmental processes, with organization of their own that can be destabilized themselves, rather than as mathematical models.
No contest about the balance at present...
Models just don’t have many of the behaviors that natural systems do. They use controlled variable theory to represent distributed uncontrolled systems with independently changing and reacting parts… Continue reading Now real steering at the tipping points…!→
Regarding Russ Hopfenberg’s article on population carrying capacity Lawrence Espy and Bill Reese similarly replied to Steve Solmony that the model of population growth limited by the natural carrying capacity of the earth was too general.
Lawrence had pointed out ‘carrying capacity’ has many diverse natural system and artificial system parts, that evolve very differently and those differences need to be considered but were not. Bill similarly pointed out that many ecologists do not see “carrying capacity” as a particularly useful term as the ecosystem (the species’ environment) is constantly changing its ‘productivity’ and is never a fixed target.
All agree with the basic premise that civilization’s whole shaky house of cards will come tumbling down if we are unable to maintain the constant throughput of resources necessary. I offered the following:
Tuesday 6/2/09
Lawrence & Bill,
I think the way to tie the two kinds of potentials, the natural and artificial “carrying capacity” limits of the earth is using the experience curves that indicate our own ability to leverage more and more of those potentials.
That ability to find and invent more cheaper stuff increased for centuries, but is now decreasing, so there was a peak somewhere.
There’s been a real “soul searching” discussion within Harvard Business School about it’s responsibility in having trained many of the people whose business practices got the world into our present still worsening economic crisis. It was reported today on NPR.
It seems they have discovered they should teach business leaders to take some responsibility, not just make as much money as humanly possible and push the risks on others… That’s great if you believe it. I wonder it is even possible for people making money not to want to push their risks on others, to not “optimize” the making of money? That is not being asked yet as far as I can tell.
Another thing not being asked yet seems even more telling. Still clearly missing from the public eye, and the professional soul searching all around, is the question of why our economic system produces catastrophic systemic risk at all.
missing from the professional “soul searching” is asking why making money has always so regularly created systemic risk
On a ClimateConcernGroup thread, “Can 350.org save the world?
In response to Maria Guzman’s:
Admirable efforts, but of dubious efficacy. Nothing is likely to make a real difference until everyone in the industrial societies personally feels the impact of a disaster in the making. How long this will take is hard to predict.
http://tinyurl.com/pobspv Maria Guzman
Maria,
Yes, that seems more and more likely, if even then. I think what will make people personally feel the problem is feeling that we have all been entirely misled on the limits of our current path. We’ve been misled about the real limits of growth. We can now it’s for all parts of the system to come into conflict with each other.
We’ve been misled about the real limits of economic growth,
all the parts of the system coming into conflict with each other.
Almost anyone who logically thinks about a system of independently growing things in a confined space can see and make sense of that. It’s more the scientists who can’t (1). Continue reading Everyone feels it in the making!→
“Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human
mind because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is
out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of
the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the
describing activities of human beings – cannot.”
From MAKING TRUTH: METAPHOR IN SCIENCE, by TL Brown (2003).
is interestingly “garbled” in the usual way self-consistent language has problems referring to inconsistent things.
I’m not talking about the difficulty of even narrowing down what “truth” means. I’m talking about a suspicious distortion that his thinking seems to add in the process.
It’s that in emphasizing how the meanings in our minds are distinctly our own, and different from the organization of the “world out there”, he ends up seeming to say that the outer world has no language of its own. What would make more sense is that the rich world of natural languages that systems evidently develop on their own, seem incompatible with what we are able to fit in our minds.
—
You have to laugh about the long range predictions for the environment, though. The planners show ocean levels continuing to rise for 1000+ years, even if CO2 increases are halted immediately. The curves all have a different slope depending on how soon.
That well founded idea has been in all the literature, even from the economists, for a decade or more. see: http://www.synapse9.com/issues/ClimateLags.pdf
Anselmo,
Right, it’s not only that things get more expensive, but more profitable to make more expensive too. On the downslope as shortages develop faster than expectations are broken the prices of things are driven up. Then people who control resources profit from accelerating their depletion which vastly worsens the problem.
I think that’s a good general explanation for why the last tree on the Easter Islands was cut down. It was the one with the highest profit to the owner. That that also effectively terminated what was probably a kind of “tree worship” civilization is the curiosity…
Thinking 100 years into the future with assumptions from 100 years in the past… is a problem. It’s tragic to hear of Barak’s crystal clear statement about global warming.
We know that preventing global warming requires physically lowering our total resource footprint on the earth so we can live sustainably. That directly conflicts with all his other policies for continually swelling our footprint by restoring continual economic growth.
