” I SEE NO WAY OUT FROM THIS MESS. but it won’t hit the fan until 200, 400 more years…. until then, maybe until 2100 at least, we will muddle along….and the climate tsunami, when it hits, it won’t hit all at once, like in Thailand, it will hit the beach here slowly, over a period of maybe 10 to 100 years… “
Dan,
Hi, I hate to be the one to tell you, but the point of vanishing returns for multiplying our use of the earth has been crossed. I think we’ll be very lucky to stabilize for decades. There seem to be several environmental collapses underway, as majestically developmental but irreversible as they are.
Our bets on what we could accomplish have completely fallen apart. The ’snag’ the economies ran into does not seem to be some mysterious malfunction brought about by everyone doing their expert jobs suddenly screwing up all at once, or even greed…!!
The whole purpose of the system both when it does and doesn’t work is greed. So that’s not the event now occurring.
I’m very interested in your Evo-Devo Universe project. I also found some interesting examples of development, that operates by multi-level selection. Below is a bit of a very nice clear example, a case of punctuated equilibrium occurring by a series of rapid evolutionary progressions (spurts), for a plankton species, G. tumida. It goes from being small and smooth to big and bumpy, in a half million years. What’s unique about the succession is the strong evidence of repeated rapid evolutionary progress.
The math I use is a little different, diagnostic math not deterministic math. The theory is a little different, too, about how to look beyond representational theory. One identifies natural systems as complex organizational developments, working as a whole. But your “big idea” that the universe is doing what life is doing, fits very well. Continue reading Multilevel selection in evolution – Devo-evo?→
Re: Letters to Science in response to the paper by Tim Searchinger of Princeton and R. A. Houghton of Woods Hole et. all. in February. It surprised the scientific world by documenting the oversights in calculating the environmental impacts of bio-fuels.
Biofuel production consumes food resources and produce added CO2. It happens by causing the conversion of productive ecologies into farms. These letters clarify some of the issues that were left unclear in their paper, but still leave big things out]
Letter to Science,
The 10/17/08 letters in Science by Vinod Khosla and reply by Tim Searchinger and R. A. Houghton do clarify some to the complicated measurement problems regarding the environmental impacts of bio-fuels on food production. Both seem to miss the largest of the growing strains on the food production resources of the earth. The real culprits are urbanization and economic growth, of course. Continue reading Biofuel impacts on food→
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!
Re: Lester Brown’s “THE FLAWED ECONOMICS OF NUCLEAR POWER” Circulated by Charlie Hall to his “peak oil’ list for comment. Lester has been among the most farsighted observers of the collision between man and earth.
Charlie,
Lester does his usual great job, and makes everyone’s usual great error.
He expertly addresses a part of the puzzle without mentioning the whole puzzle that all the alternates look as bad.
I think the lack of solar and wind development at scale is fairly obvious, and the same as the reason he points to for the lack of new nuclear power plants. It’s not really economic. The same has been true during the whole 40 year vigorous search for alternative fuels. Continue reading Responses to Brown’s nuclear piece→
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….→
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→
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 theBill 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→
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→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
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!