Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Why keep trying?

The other day, I was looking back over the photos I took at the Fill The Hill climate change event in Ottawa, back in October of 2009. At the time, the event made me optimistic. Here were all these young people concerned about climate change and ready to take personal action in response to it.

When I look at the photos now, the Hill seems a bit thinly populated. Contrast how many people turned out to express their concern about climate change with how many people get excited about a meaningless hockey game or concert and it seems like humanity has cause to worry.

The most important reason to deal with climate change is the ethical obligation we owe to future generations – the obligation to leave them a planet that can support their welfare. When it comes to how people decide on their priorities, however, it seems like such ethical obligations are very low on the list, way below personal financial welfare or convenience.

When I think about how the Amazon rainforest may be doomed because of human greenhouse gas pollution, along with the Great Barrier Reef and countless species, I feel overwhelmed with revulsion about how casually destructive our species is, and how little regard we show for the world which we inhabit and ultimately depend upon completely. We do not have the technical means to build a self-sustaining spacecraft and so the continued life of every human being on the planet depends on the continued operation of all the physical and biological processes that make the Earth habitable. Now – largely because we are fond of cheap energy – we are willfully assaulting those processes as though they are indestructible.

In the face of that, I wonder whether any personal efforts of mine are meaningful. If humanity as a whole is determined to commit suicide, why should I spend my life trying to stop it? The forces pressing for a sane and sustainable strategy seem to be far weaker than the forces that promise instant gratification today, with little consideration for whatever consequences follow.

Normally, this is where I would try to write an uplifting closing about how doing the right thing is appropriate, even when the odds are hopeless and when other people will actually resent you for making the effort. The noble course combines self-sacrifice (reducing your personal impact) with determined political action to try to produce a better outcome. While I still think that is true, and know my conviction will eventually return, it is feeling thoroughly sapped at the moment, partly by the way voters everywhere continue to make their political choices largely on the basis of their own short-term economic self-interest.

Humanity is very clever in a micro sense – when it comes to solving small problems in ways that benefit the solvers quickly and materially. When it comes to macro issues, it seems to be dumb luck and the sheer durability of nature that explain why we haven’t wiped ourselves out already. That isn’t much comfort though. There are limits to how much abuse nature can tolerate, and we have been beating it pretty harshly with a wrench lately (with still-worse abuse promised for the future). Perhaps humanity has no future, and perhaps the thing to do as individuals is choose whatever life seems most tolerable with that possibility acknowledged.

Extinction logic

Living things are frequently presented with choices that involve a time trade-off. There is an immediate effect, and then there is a delayed effect. For example, you can quit your job today because you hate it, but may need to deal with delayed effects in a few weeks when your rent comes due, along with cell phone bills and all the rest. Sometimes, the delayed effect involves a different creature entirely from the immediate effect. For instance, a person assembling an automobile can do a shoddy job of assembling the steering or braking system, leaving some hapless future driver to deal with the consequences.

When the space of time between the two effects is long, there is more of an incentive to ignore the delayed effect. You might not be around (or even alive) to experience it. The same is true when the delayed effect is uncertain. Presented with the choice between something 100% likely to pay off right now, but only 50% likely to have a cost in the future, there is an incentive to take what you can get right now.

The biggest incentive exists when the creature that will suffer the consequences is totally unrelated to you. This situation is omnipresent in politics. Politicians are judged on the effect they seem to be having right now. Little consideration is given to consequences down the road and, by the time any such consequences have arisen, the politician and the people who voted for them are likely to be long gone, or at least no longer associated with the situation in the minds of the public. Also, because decisions impact one another, responsibility for outcomes usually gets hopelessly muddled. What actually occurs on the long-term is the cumulative consequence of choices made by different individuals, firms, and governments along with a large dose of random chance. A particular outcome – like a firm going bankrupt – cannot usually be attributed to a single cause. Rather, it must be said that various policies at different levels of government had an effect, along with managerial choices and technological change, not to mention relevant developments in other countries, etc.

All this seems to pose the risk of creating dangerous ratchet effects, where movement in one direction is possible but movement in the other is impossible or unlikely. While there may be situations in which the temptation to make some easy money in exchange for causing long-term problems will be rejected, those opportunities are going to keep arising and the people calling for a conscientious approach will not always win out. Indeed, they are likely to fail quite often, given that the people chasing the quick buck will quickly end up with goodies for themselves and for their supporters. A community might be able to resist the temptation to blow up a local mountain to access the coal inside on a series of successive occasions, but the choice not to do so is always temporary. By contrast, the one time when they decide to go with the dynamite approach closes off any possibility of restoring things to how they once were.

Whereas we have a strong personal interest in looting the future for our own immediate benefit, there is only really our sense of moral and aesthetics that holds those urges in check. Those senses often turn out to be very weak. Furthermore, the world will tend to select against people who take the long view. In the near-term, they seem like spoilers who forced everyone else to pass up a good opportunity. In the long term, the causes of outcomes are all muddled together, so the people who urged restraint probably won’t get any credit for what they protected. They also may not be around to benefit from any credit, if it is provided.

None of the ideas here are new, but the cruel logic I am trying to express seems to be extremely powerful and one of the strongest things working against humanity in the long term. If we are going to survive another 10,000 years, we are going to need to learn to discipline ourselves, and to support those who impose discipline upon us. We cannot just keep looking out for our personal short-term interests and hoping things in general turn out for the best.

Preventing accidental nuclear war

One of my biggest fears is that a nuclear war could start by accident, or as the result of a miscalculation. Some national leader could push a threat too far, an exercise could be misinterpreted, things during a conventional war could get out of control, and cities could suddenly get incinerated.

It seems quite likely that Canada’s major cities are the targets of ex-Soviet missiles spread around Russian subs and silos. We may be the targets of Chinese bombs, as well.

Two important policy objectives seem to be (a) keeping additional countries from developing nuclear weapons (b) reducing the stockpile of weapons possessed by existing nuclear weapon states and (c) building systems that reduce the chances of accidents, including permissive action links to prevent unauthorized use of bombs and delays in hair-trigger systems.

Test for a sentient species: can you run a planet?

In the very long term, the survival of the human species depends upon developing the capability to colonize other planets. Earth is always vulnerable to major asteroid and meteor impacts, and there will come points billions of years in the future when the carbon cycle ends and when the sun becomes a red giant.

As of today, however, humanity has more pressing problems. Indeed, it is not at all clear that humanity will be able to survive the next few centuries. We continue to abuse the planet – exhausting non-renewable resources and accumulating dangerous wastes. At the same time, the world is still wired up for a Dr. Strangelove-style nuclear war, with thousands of cities incinerated with thermonuclear bombs, followed by nuclear winter.

In a way, perhaps overcoming those challenges and any others that arise in the next few centuries will be an important test for humanity. If we were to spread through the galaxy now, we would arguably be spreading as a malignancy: a species that cannot manage itself, and which brings the risk of ruin to any place it visits. If we can spend the next few centuries producing a global society that is safe and sustainable, perhaps we will have gained the maturity to carry something valuable outwards – something that better represents the potential of humanity, when compared with the messes we have produced for ourselves at this stage in history.

10 billion humans in 2100

The population division of the United Nations now estimates that the global human population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.

While it is challenging to comment accurately and appropriately on the consequences of global population growth, it does seem fair to say that the difficulty associated with providing any particular global standard of living increases as the total global population does. In particular, providing energy for ten billion people to live decent lives – without wrecking the climate – seems like it will be a major undertaking.

Bum me out, and I’ll ignore you

My friend Lauren sent me a link to an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger entitled: The Long Death of Environmentalism.

It contains much that is of interest, but one passage stood out for me:

John Jost, a leading political psychologist at New York University, recently demonstrated that much of the partisan divide on global warming can be explained through the psychological concept of system justification. It turns out that many Americans have a strong psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order. When Gore said “we are going to have to change the way we live our lives” he could not have uttered a statement better tailored to trigger system justification among a substantial number of Americans.

‘A strong psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order’ probably contributes to the Lindzen Fallacy.

Possible doctoral topic: can renewables power the world?

It may seem like an unusual topic for a PhD thesis in International Relations / Politics, but it seems to me like it could actually be a useful and interesting one.

The questions would be:

  1. What kind of standard of living could be supported for the world population using only renewable forms of energy?
  2. How quickly could that be deployed, given all the technical and political hurdles?

Ultimately, it is a very political question. The geopolitics of energy have already been front-and-centre for decades, since at least the 1973 oil price shocks. There is also the large and growing dependence of the European Union on Russia for gas, as well as increasing American dependence on exceptionally dirty oil from Canada.

The research could include investigation of places that have already deployed various renewables widely (hydro in Quebec, geothermal in Iceland, wind in Denmark, etc), as well as consideration of what is happening in rapidly developing states like China.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Dinosaur demise historiography

At the Ottawa Museum of Nature the other day, I saw their video presentation on the demise of dinosaurs. It was interesting to compare it with videos I saw as a child on the same topic. The ones I remember were claymation productions, put out by the National Film Board of Canada. This one was computer animated, and used multimedia effects like fans to simulate the shockwave from the Yucatan asteroid collision.

More than in videos I can recall, this one stressed that both birds and mammals already existed when the extinction of dinosaurs took place. It also included a couple of references to the paleoclimate, describing some of the ways in which the Cretaceous Earth differed from the modern form. The film was also forthright in describing some enduring scientific uncertainties, such as how long it took after the impact for the dinosaurs to actually die.

The Museum of Nature is a pretty great place, even though they removed the live frog exhibit which was my favourite part. They have a rather excellent gift shop that sells – among other things – hand puppets shaped like crabs and very affordable large actual fossils.

Understanding complex dynamic systems

Complex dynamic systems are the most difficult things in the universe to understand because they are bundles of relationships that interact in complex ways. It’s easiest to explain what they are through an example. Think of the Earth’s climate. It has discrete elements like incoming sunlight and the physical properties of water. The elements interact in complex ways that vary with time. Water forms clouds and icesheets which affect the reflection of light. The amount of ice on Earth has an effect on the totality of life on Earth, which then interacts in complex ways with other elements of the climate system: the erosion of rock, the composition of the atmosphere, etc, etc, etc.

Understanding a complex dynamic system at all is challenging. For instance, there is the task of understanding all the interactions that are ongoing when something is in a steady state. The level of complexity jumps when you consider the totality of steady and unsteady states, and all the ways by which they can turn into one another.

It seems arguable that the main task of thinking entities in the universe is to better understand complex dynamic systems. That understanding is always partial – akin to the French concept of connaitre rather than the concept of savoir. You can write down the totality of a person’s phone number on a piece of paper, but you can only express a partial view of what ‘Paris’ or ‘German’ or ‘physics’ is. In addition, it seems that complex dynamic systems are nested and that if we want to be able to behave intelligently in the world, we need to have some kind of understanding of all of them:

  • The rules of the universe: gravitation, electromagnetism, the nature of matter, etc
  • The physical Earth: the composition of the planet, and the way physical elements interact
  • The totality of life on Earth: genetics, behaviour, the history of life, etc
  • The human body: cells, organs, genes, the endocrine system, the physical brain, etc
  • The human mind: cognition, politics, economics, creativity, etc

At some point in history, it may be necessary and useful to consider the physical and/or mental characteristics of life from places other than the Earth.

The better a particular being understands each of these complex dynamic systems, the more capable they are of acting effectively in the world (a concept that presumes the existence of intentions, which ties back to each of the dynamic systems under consideration). Understanding them all better is thus a strategy capable of advancing the achievement of any conceivable goal, with the possible exception of intentional laziness or the avoidance of mentally taxing work.