Anselmo,

How evolution seems to have alternated in majestic cycles in developing the oxygen atmosphere is indeed a wonderful thing to discover.   I expect that theory of how the banded Iron formations in Proterozoic rocks might have been caused will hold up.

To put it in the larger context, the cycles you speak of from 1.8 to 2.5 billion years ago preceded the history of complex animal life that began with the Cambrian explosion ~550 million years ago.     Below is a chart from a full professional study (in Paleobiology) of ocean biodiversity (not bio-mass) that followed.

It shows two main periods, 250 million years of irregularly steady diversity of primitive animal life, a sharp dip and then 250 million years of exploding diversity of modern animal life…  which we in our stupidity are putting a great big dent in!

Continue reading The tail is capable of wagging the dog →

Dirk & O2,

Thanks for that outline of fuel use per person for different modes of transportation. The defect of both that method and mine is the effort needed to estimate what’s being left out. What I think people need is a list of impacts something like the one you provided, but that is easyier, inclusive and comparable.

People just want a direct easy way to compare choices, not spend all their time trying to understand unexplained units of measure and wondering what is left out. For example, using the cost of shipping to calculate fuel use might leave out the subsidies for the transit system that go into it, yes, but that’s fairly easy to factor in. Continue reading Measuring energy use the easier & more accurate way…. →

Peter,

Your amazement that we don’t see belief in Gaia as a living thing and a more immediate great ‘religious’ experience to choose may make more sense than you realize. There is a big gulf of separation between people who see the integrity and mystery of whole individual systems and those who still hold the wide belief that nature is ‘lifeless’ and controlled by math, rulers or ‘spirits’.

That is the belief our culture evolved with, though. Believing that individual whole systems of any kind exist actually conflicts with that basic inherited belief in determinism, and really does depart from the endless debates over which ruler is the real one as if debating over angels on the head of a pin. Continue reading A sense of a physical religion in Gaia →

To NPR, as we watch it all collapse

It’s high time you started asking that. Lots of people have studied it. Consider it as a recurrent “tripping point”. To look at one piece at a time it helps to “assume away” ALL the “usual suspects”.

Say you assume the earth has infinite resources, people have limitless good will and make no glaring errors of personal responsibility or arithmetic…, etc. Say people are only limited by not having limitless ability to understand and adapt to increasingly complex things. Continue reading What makes our life support system so fragile…? →

The idea in the Bill Mahers video was that the government rescue of the financial system seems to pass the solution back to the people who created the problem, with just upping the ante. The government signs up for even more debt than ever before. Basically, bailing out people with inadequate income by increasing their debt is real “sorcerer’s apprentice” kind of solution, that seems to just multiply the problem.

But, *which* solution is it
that’s multiplying our problems??

Jack & O2,

When I said “The ‘silver lining’ is … how natural systems successfully stabilize within their constraints (rather than overshoot)” I’m talking about how natural systems are sometimes the active player in their relation with the environment (rather than just being pushed around by it).

If animals just used resources as fast as they could until they exhausted then environments ecologies would almost always be unstable. They’re not generally unstable though. What you observe in nature is living things using exponential growth only to get started.

When they stop their growth systems and then begin actively exploring their otherwise passive environments, being resourceful with what they find uncontested while watching out to avoid trouble. They respond to what they find, as an active learning partner in the relationship. Continue reading Funny, clever, and much truth →

Brian,

But thought matters… if the things of the world that matter to us are not machines, why would thinking of resources like a machine be of help? I think it would be better to put our pension for machine-like thinking in it’s place, drop what makes machine thinking demand total control, rather than drop our having feelings.

If everything we see is in our minds how CAN we tell that from anything else??

I mean something very practical and achievable by that. It’s that we can learn to see our thought process and the world’s processes as different, and can separate what’s in our minds from the world, as a way to clarify their connections. Maybe the parallel is how people who are born blind and then regain their sight need to learn the concept of seeing before the retinal lights and shadows have any meaning for them. Continue reading (mental) Resource availability →

for http://www.oneclimate.net

I’ve been studying the puzzles of natural systems, how they all have their own individually divergent behaviors, and individual reactions to their environments. Then I noticed that that aspect of nature entirely conflicts with the idea of ‘determinism’, that everything (except human free will) is controlled by its surroundings.

Last year I read a paper written by one of my great grandfathers, Steven A Forbes, an early ecologist, and it struck me how he tried to describe the amazing stability of predator prey relationships in fresh water ponds. He noted the prey would need to show restraint or the relationship would be naturally unstable if their behavior required them consume as much of their prey as they could.

Any advantage would then precipitate a ‘tragedy of the commons’ for themselves. He was describing the necessity of a learning process to avoid local environmental collapses that would apply to every organism in the system. That’s very odd, that that insight would have been missed by later ecologists.

It does appear when you watch organisms that their main activity is making use of what is uncontested and skillfully staying out of trouble, not destabilizing maximization. Then I found out what seems to be the reason why the need for organisms to learn as they go was lost.

It happened, it seems, when ecology adopted the model of physics.

That was in the 1920’s, treating populations as statistical pressures in an equation, rather than individuals interacting with their own behaviors. Continue reading The mystery of misunderstanding the obvious →

re: WNYC’s “Tell Me More” 9/22/08

Michel,

I don’t think you, or anyone else, is getting a good picture of what happened, why, or what effect it will have. I’m not a mystic with secret answers, but a systems scientist who has been studying this kind of collapse in natural systems for 30 years. It’s an odd sort of science, that’s unpopular with most scientists.

Most scientists like to study how things are controlled and this needs to be studied for how things go out of control. It’s a different thing. In my physics research I just happened to get interested in how every experiment always misbehaved a little.

That the things that act independently also include all of the behaviors that we see in life, that science has been unable to understand at all, became one of my main interests too. What we’re seeing in the financial world is the end of the era of “borrow and spend”, our “charge it” approach to everything.

For two hundred years the future always had unexpectedly large surpluses (growth bonuses) and everyone got used to it, and made the mistake of “banking on it”. The actual collapse we observed is mostly being described in the press in terms of the personalities that we want to abuse with stereotypes.

That doesn’t describe what happened at all. I think what happened did indeed include people taking rapidly increasing and unjustified risks, but at the end. That appears to have happened *after* the whole financial system got into a jam, following the historical example and promising earnings the future would provide, that didn’t materialize.

The jam seemed to basically be that institutions needed to keep lending themselves ever more money to keep solvent. I am fairly sure it would have happened one way or another regardless of whether it was bad home mortgages specifically that everyone now says ‘pricked the bubble’.

The system had to have lost it’s resiliency for that to have mattered at all. Where we’re headed in general terms is that everyone, government, business, the public, are going to become more self-reliant, out of necessity.

That’ll be a huge change, but I doubt anyone will quite see it for real until there are other “feet to fall” to shock us into the end of our long wasteful and unsustainable habits. The underlying problem, that only people who study how things go out of control would notice it seems, is that our financial system needs to grow faster and faster to stay solvent.

The economy did that for 200 years so we expected it would do it forever. So, when the physical economy started underperforming and leveling off about 40 years ago the ways to keep the money system growing independently started to multiply.

There were consolidations, globalizations, real-estate inflation, fancy footwork, etc. etc. The fact that looking far and wide for things for money to inflate was running out of options was not generally noticed by people.

That process of meeting natural resistance to economic growth is called “diminishing returns on investment”. When you ask the question you can find the evidence of it all over. So that’s a kind of a sweeping snap shot. Money multiplies, earth doesn’t. Now it’s time to take care of our own business again!

I’m not sure if you can talk about this on air, though someone absolutely should. It’s the hidden real story, but is going to upset a lot of people.

I think ‘magical thinking’ is apt for what brought down our financial system, but it’s a view from hindsight, not foresight, and altogether too imprecise. I wrote my first comprehensive paper on growth induced collapse 30 years to the day before the Fed called this one to a halt.

The problem now as seen from foresight then is that the difference between a ‘bubble’ and a sustainable system is that both are designed to develop by compound growth, and the bubble is designed to keep growing to end in collapse at it’s growth peak rather than stabilize. Continue reading Dept. of Magical Thinking →