A Is for Armageddon

With all the doom and gloom of the past couple years, you can't blame Richard Horne (author of 101 Things To Do Before You Die) for taking the piss out of the doomsday message with A Is for Armageddon: A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It.

As they put it over at BrainPickings,

From religious warfare to grey goo to deforestation, Horne combines science, superstition and sociology in a beautifully illustrated, delightfully dystopian guide to the apocalypse. Underlying the wickedly entertaining tone, however, is a grounded, non-preachy crusade for awareness that exudes the call of urgency none of us want to hear but all of us must.

Opening with a Table of Contents that riffs on the periodic table of the elements, this is a book that make you laugh while it educates. Lots of photos follow. Click on them to get to the full size versions where you can read the text. If you haven't had enough, be sure to check out Slavoj Žižek’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in One Minute (the Elvis of Cultural Theory only comes up with four impending catastrophes!) and, for an antidote, An Optimist's Tour of the Future.

IF you ever wondered what the war in Afghanistan was really about . . .

at least since 2004, and especially for Canada, whose Cdn companies control 60% of the mining projects in the world:

Report: US Discovers $1 Trillion in Afghan Mineral Deposits

The New York Times is reporting the United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including huge amounts of copper, cobalt, gold and lithium. US officials say the find could alter the Afghan war and make Afghanistan one of the most important mining centers in the world. An internal Pentagon memo states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and cell phones. The value of mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing economy. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion. American geologists have been studying the potential for mining since at least 2004. The timing of the New York Times article has been questioned by some because it is being published at a time when the Obama administration has little good news to report on Afghanistan."

(from Democracy Now, 14-06-10)

Ecosystem Modeling | Energy Bulletin

Ecosystem Modeling | Energy Bulletin

Energy Bulletin has posted an article by Albert Bates on Ecosystem Modeling. This segment looks at carrying capacity and responses to energy declines. The five types of ecosystem modeling featured are:

1. no discontinuity: the population and carrying capacity increase together; temporary shortages are quickly resolved by resource substitution;

2. sigmoid response: the ecosystem has a clear signal that a limit has been reached, curbs its consumption of resources, and population growth goes down;

3. oscillating overshoot: signals are unclear or confused; the population continues to grow and over-consume, overshooting multiple limits over a relatively short period; each period of overshoot leads to a crash, then a resumption of growth and overshoot;

4. hard crash (for lack of a better term): there are no clear signals of limits, the population continues to overshoot until a crash happens and there is no avenue for recovery;

5. catabolic collapse: This is John Michael Greer's scenario of a long period of decline, a stepwise descent into a lower-energy system. The authors confirm that this is a very likely scenario and has been predicted by other energy experts:

After reading John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, we added a fifth type to the CAT scenarios — catabolic collapse. Once more, the signals are not recognized because the reality of the problem challenges the core beliefs of the dependent organization, such as a classical economics that admits of no limit in supply as long as there is demand. Greer postulates that overshoot may not follow a straight linear decline but rather may vacillate between plunges and temporary states of repose, using up “banked” resources that are retasked and recycled. The descent curve resembles a stair-step, arguably the experience of the global economy since peak production of liquid fossil fuels and their substitutes was reached in the 2006 to 2008 period.

Social and Natural Systems in the Decline of North America's Megafauna

One of the most striking characteristics of humans is that we are adaptive generalists. Unlike most species, which are adapted to specific ecological niches, humans have radiated out to populate virtually every land-based ecosystem on the planet. We can do this because we build shelters, transport food and otherwise make arrangements for the necessities of life in those parts of the globe that would otherwise be inhospitable.

It is this capacity, the ability to transform situations to meet our needs, that lies at the root of the interconnection between social and natural systems. The most obvious example of this interconnection is climate change, where humans are pumping the carbon stored in the ground as fossil fuels into the atmosphere and, hence, fundamentally altering both atmospheric chemistry and the global climate.

But what lies at the root of this human capacity? The standard answer is technology. Through technology we transcend the limitations and constraints placed on other species. But a recent article by Christopher Johnson in Science (Science 20 November 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5956, pp. 1072 - 1073) detailing the process of magafaunal decline in North America casts doubt on this account. Here is the story in brief:

Twenty thousand years ago, North America had a more impressive array of big mammals than Africa does today; by 10,000 years ago, 34 genera of these mammals were gone, including the 10 species that weighed more than a ton. Many other drastic changes occurred in this interval, all of which have been advocated as possible causes of megafaunal extinction. The climate flipped from cold to warm, then back to cold in a 1000-year chill (the Younger Dryas), before rapidly rewarming. There were more, larger fires, and the structure and species composition of vegetation changed drastically. People arrived, and the Clovis culture—with a characteristic style of beautifully crafted stone spear points—flourished for less than 1000 years. Some scientists have argued that an extraterrestrial object struck Earth ~13,000 years ago, triggering the Younger Dryas, starting fires, killing the megafauna, and putting an end to the Clovis culture. ....

What about people? It has long been argued that Clovis artifacts signal the first arrival of people in North America south of the boreal ice sheets and that the Clovis people were specialized big-mammal hunters who caused a crash of megafaunal populations from prehuman abundance to extinction within a few hundred years. This “blitzkrieg” scenario is supported by the fact that terminal dates on megafaunal fossils range from 13,300 to 12,900 years ago, which coincides almost exactly with the Clovis period. But the new data show that the megafaunal decline had begun more than a thousand years earlier. If people were responsible for that decline, they must have been pre-Clovis settlers. The existence of such people has been controversial, but archaeological evidence is slowly coming to light and is consistent with their arrival around the beginning of the megafaunal decline. It is beginning to look as if the greater part of that decline was driven by hunters who were neither numerous nor highly specialized for big-game hunting. Clovis technology may have been a feature of the endgame, possibly reflecting an intensified hunting strategy that developed once megafauna had become rare, possibly wary, and harder to hunt. ...

Before 14,800 years ago, the environment around the site studied by Gill et al. was an open savanna or parkland, probably with scattered spruce and rare broad-leaved trees growing over a short grass-dominated pasture, and almost no fi re. As the megafauna declined, woody biomass increased, mainly by growth of broad-leaved trees that had presumably been suppressed by the large herbivores. The result was a transitory spruce/broadleaf woodland, the like of which does not exist today. Big fires broke out ~14,000 years ago, and for the next few thousand years, major fires returned every few centuries. These changes were widespread: Fire increased throughout North America ~14,000 years ago, and the transitory “no-analog” woodland extended over a vast area.

In short, we begin with an ecosystem dominated by open savanna and numerous species of megafauna. Humans arrive, and apparently without the aid of significant technology, kill off the majority of the megafauna thus setting loose a cascade of ecological changes that ultimately result in the replacement of the savanna by a "no-analog" woodland. Thus we have a clear, early example of the interconnection of social and natural systems, but one that seems not to implicate technology as the fundamental driver.

Whistleblower Says IEA Inflated Oil Estimates

An unnamed whistleblower at the International Energy Agency claims that the IEA's previous and current "World Energy Outlook" ('08 and '09) inflated the estimated amount of oil reserves in the world. The Guardian UK has the story, which includes a 3-minute audio segment by journalist Terry Macalister, a nice quick summary of the situation. The whistleblower inside the IEA says that the United States pressured the agency to make oil reserves look better than they really are to avoid panic in the markets and worsening of the financial crisis.

The current WEO states that world oil supplies can reach 105 mbd by 2030.

The whistleblower told The Guardian, "Many inside the organization believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90 million to 95 million barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further.”

Currently, the world output is 83 mbd.

"A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added." (Guardian UK)

An October report by the UK Energy Research Council says that world oil production will go into permanent decline before 2020, in less than ten years. UKERC is a consortium of academic partners from 15 different UK institutions. Its headquarters are based at Imperial College Londonand at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

The World Energy Outlook '09 was just released today.

Biophysical Economics

The second conference of Biophysical Economics was held in Syracuse, NY at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

"Real economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs," said Charles Hall, professor of systems ecology at SUNY-ESF and organizer of both gatherings in Syracuse. "Neoclassical economics is inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics."

"The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today's dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?

A small but growing group of academics believe the latter is true, and they are out to prove it. These thinkers say that the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world's diminishing supply of energy at humanity's peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on investment. They hope that a set of theories they call "biophysical economics" will improve upon neoclassical theory, or even replace it altogether."

What interests me as a sociologist is the idea that "biophysical" concepts are being encoded into many different branches of knowledge. Does this signal a major paradigm shift, or in biophysical terms, a non-linear phase transition of the system into a new state? Are we entering a new phase of human civilization?

Resilience, Vulnerability and Criticality

In my search for appropriate definitions of resilience, I have come across the work of Neil Adger, Prof. of Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Neil is a fellow at the Resilience Alliance, at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change, and one of the co-recipients of the Nobel prize awarded to scientists of the IPCC.

I am attempting to get several of his papers, some of which are not published, but one that is available online is "Social and ecological resilience: are they related?", a chapter from Progress in Human Geography, 24,3 (2000) pp. 347-364. This paper examines various definitions of 'resilience', 'vulnerability' and 'criticality'. The last term, 'criticality', is not one I had heard before:

"The concept of criticality is distinct from vulnerability. Environmental criticality ‘refers to situations in which the extent or rate of environmental degradation precludes the continuation of current use systems or levels of human well being, given feasible adaptations and societal capabilities to respond.'" (Kasperson et al., 1995: 25) (Adger 2000).

Resilience is sometimes defined as the capacity to cope with stress, at other times as the opposite of "reisistence."

"Resilience can be defined in many ways. It is the buffer capacity or the ability of a system to absorb perturbations, or the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before a system changes its structure by changing the variables and processes that control behaviour (Holling et al., 1995). By contrast other definitions of resilience emphasize the speed of recovery from a disturbance, highlighting the difference between resilience and resistance, where the latter is the extent to which disturbance is actually translated into impact (see Figure 1). It is important to note that these definitions, shown for a population in the graphical representations in Figure 1, are most relevant at the ecosystem scale. (Adger 2000)

On social resilience:

"Social resilience has economic, spatial and social dimensions and hence its observation and appraisal require interdisciplinary understanding and analysis at various scales. But it is important to note that, because of its institutional context, social resilience is defined at the community level rather than being a phenomenon pertaining to individuals. Hence it is related to the social capital of societies and communities." (Adger 2000)

The empirical portion of this study focuses on the resilience of coastal communities related to changed in coastal resources, e.g. mangrove ecology in coastal Viet Nam.