Cassandra's legacy

The tin miners

2012-02-25T03:56:00.001-08:00

Tin Miners in England. A 1939 painting by Harold Harvey (1874-1941). Image from Bonhams art auctions.

There are very few paintings of miners at work. The dark and cramped world of mines was not accessible to painters and probably it wasn't even interesting for them. There are just a few exceptions; one is the painting above, made by Harold Harwey, a painter from Cornwall who was interested in the local life and the local characters.

The two miners in the painting have names: Sidney Angrove (left) and Nicholas Grenfell (right) (as reported by Bohhams). The painter shows the miners in a moment of relax; while one of the two smokes a pipe. There is no hint of the hard work in the tunnels, below, but the image is nevertheless permeated of a certain melancholy. It was a world that was already in decline when the painting was made, in 1939.

It is in Southern England that we can find the earliest mines in the world. 10,000 years ago there were already mines where ancient miners laboriously broke the fine limestone that we call chalk with deer antlers to seek for ochre and flint. Today, the ancient tunnels dug at that time still exist, we can still see the smoke left by the miners' oil lamps and find the tools left by them. In some tunnels, we can find human skeletons; perhaps miners surprised by a collapse or, maybe, sacrifices to the divinities of the depth.

Mining tin in Cornwall is somewhat more recent, but it still goes back to about 2000 BCE. It continued for millennia, throughout the 20th century. The last tin mine in Cornwall (also the last working tin mine in Europe), was closed in 1998. There is an old Cornish ballad, reported in wikipedia that goes "Cornish lads are fishermen and Cornish lads are miners too. / But when the fish and tin are gone, what are the Cornish boys to do?"

Slowly, we are emptying the Earth of its mineral treasures. Then, what will we do?

h/t to my wife Grazia for the image of the tin miners

Peak? What peak? King coal is coming back!

2012-02-21T14:51:00.000-08:00

King Coal may be coming back to save us from peak oil, but condemning us to a worse fate in terms of global warming (image from the National Media Museum)

Recently, Rembrandt Koppelaar has published on the Oil Drum a summary of the world's trends in energy production. The report tells us that the oil industry is struggling to maintain the present levels of production. It may not have peaked yet, but clearly it can't resume the past trends of increase. That's not surprising, it had been foreseen already in 1998 by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere (link). What's striking, instead, is the leap forward of coal. The world's total energy production is not peaking and that's because of the rapid growth of coal, as you can see here, from Koppelaar's report:

Coal seemed to have peaked in 1990, but it was an illusion. The growth of coal production during the first decade of the 21st century has been impressive; never seen before in history. So, King Coal is coming back and he may soon reclaim the title of ruler of the energy world that it had lost to crude oil in the 1960s.

We are not seeing anything like a tendency to peak for coal and that, unfortunately, is not good for climate. We can see that from the "other side" of the chemical reaction that sees fossil fuels transformed into carbon dioxide, CO2, whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing faster in recent times. (the figure below is from "think progress," see also this previous post).

We cannot say that the burst of carbon dioxide that we are seeing is due to coal alone, but it corresponds well to the spike in coal production and it is surely related to it. The global climate situation seems to be rapidly going out of control and this rapid increase in CO2 concentrations doesn't bode well for the future. Bowing down our heads again to King Coal may turn out to be the worst choice we ever made in history.

Defending good science: Michael Mann speaks out

2012-02-18T01:47:00.000-08:00

Michael Mann is the author of the "hockey stick" reconstruction that shows how the past decades have been anomalously hot as the result of global warming. In this video, he tells us of his experience, of the ordeal he has gone through, and that he is still experiencing, attacked by professionals of public relations who have unleashed a full propaganda campaign against him. Mann has been harassed and denigrated in all possible ways, including death threats to him and to his family. We need to resist against the forces who are trying to destroy climate science and science in general. Michael Mann, defined "Battle Hardened" in this clip, is doing that, and he is succeeding, but he needs all the help and support we can give to him. We all need to speak out against the forces of anti-science!

(See also a previous post of mine: "long live the hockey stick!").

"Peak Research:" Italian researchers do it doggy style, in a tunnel

2012-02-16T04:07:00.000-08:00

Copy of an announcement in "Nature Jobs," as it appeared yesterday, for a research project managed by the University of Florence. This page has been subsequently removed, but the stain on the reputation of Italian research remains.

This story is doing the rounds in the Italian web. Our Ministry of research (MIUR) had published on their site the translation of the title of a European Research project dedicated to cheese. The cheese they study is called "pecorino" (literally "sheep-cheese") which has a certain assonance with the term used in Italian ("pecorina") for what in English is called "doggy style". Now, some idiot translated it exactly that way: "doggy style"! For a while, that translation was featured also on the "Nature" web site. Later on, it was removed from both pages, but you can still read it for your amusement in the picture above (see also below and here)

All that is on a par with the story of the "neutrino tunnel", also from our ministry of research where, among other idiocies, it was said that neutrinos generated in Switzerland would travel in a tunnel all the way to Italy. You can read about this story here.

This epic fail of MIUR may be a little off topic for the "Cassandra" blog, but perhaps not so much. If nothing else, it shows how rapidly a university system can decay when it is left with no attention and no money. Maybe Italy is on the forefront in the world in terms of decadence, but I am sure that all countries have the same problem: how to sustain their research and university teaching systems with declining resources. It is, in the end, another symptom of the effects of having overexploited our resources. We passed the peak in many areas, we should not be surprised to be seeing also "Peak Research"

Here is also, conserved for posterity, the announcement as it appeared on the Italian ministry of research (MIUR) web site

And also here on the site of the European Commission

The seekers effect: why we keep seeking growth at all costs

2012-02-15T03:59:00.000-08:00

Already in 1972, the classic study "The Limits to Growth" had shown that economic growth could not last forever (above: the "base case" scenario from the study). Even without complex calculations, it should be clear from simple physics that infinite growth is not possible in a finite world. Yet, politicians, leaders, economists, decision makers and the like are all pushing for growth, growth, and more growth. In an earlier post, I tried to find rational reasons for this attitude, but I tend to think that it can be better explained in terms of the "Seekers effect." The term comes from the name of an esoteric sect, the "Seekers" active in the 1950s who believed to have been alerted by aliens of the incoming end of the world.

If you are trained in science or engineering, you probably think that your views should be based on the available data and that, if better data become available, then you should change your views. You may think that this is the obvious way to behave, but think twice. Most likely, you are part of a minority; possibly a tiny minority. By far, most people seem to act on a different set of principles. They will normally stick to their opinion no matter what the data say. And if new data contradict a previous held opinion, the hell with the new data. It is something that we could call the "Seekers effect."

The Seekers were an esoteric sect active in the 1950s. A summary of their story is told by Chris Money in an article titled "The science of why we don't believe in science." In short, the Seekers had gathered around a lady named Dorothy Martin who was claiming to be receiving telepathic messages from aliens. She had been told that a major cataclysmic event would take place on a specific date: December 21, 1954. Most of humankind would be destroyed; but the Seekers themselves would be taken to safety on an alien spaceship landing on that day.

The special element that makes the Seekers a paradigm in human behavior is that they had been infiltrated by a group of social psychologists, led by Leon Festinger, who watched them until and after the fated date when, obviously, no catastrophe occurred. In Festinger's 1956 book "When Prophecy Fails" we can read how the seekers reacted to the failure of their leader's prophecy. Their first reaction, of course, was of dismay. But that didn't last long. In a few days, the Seekers had closed ranks and restructured their beliefs: their prophet, ms. Martin had not been wrong at all; the aliens had decided to spare humankind as the result of the faith of the Seekers! The most interesting twist in this story is that not only the seekers didn't accept that their prophecies were wrong; they stepped up efforts to recruit new followers and to convince everyone of their ideas. Eventually, the were ridiculed so much that they disappeared, but that took a few years.

The story of the Seekers is one of the best studied of what is called "motivated reasoning"; that is the tendency of twisting facts and logic in order keep one's beloved worldview. Money says that:

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about... we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.

Motivated reasoning is very common. Today, you don't need to infiltrate any esoteric sect to see it at work: you can see dramas similar to the one of the Seekers unfolding on discussion sites and on Facebook. A recent case in point is that of the "E-Cat", the fabulous nuclear device that should have brought us eternal prosperity. Give a look to some of the sites of the believers and you'll see that, despite the accumulation of proof that the E-Cat is nothing but a glorified teapot, the believers are unmoved in their stance. Not just that, but are also doubling up their efforts to convince everyone that their teapot is, really, a nuclear reactor.

Most of the discussions that take place on the Web, say, on climate, energy, peak oil and the like, are not based on data or logic; have you ever seen anyone changing his/her opinion in one of these discussions? Maybe it happens, sometimes, but it is almost a miraculous event.

The same motivated reasoning seems to be at work on economic growth. It takes place mostly on the media, rather than on the web, but the psychological factors at play seem to be the same. So, it is growth, growth and more growth; it is always the same concept, repeated over and over in the media. Yet, there is no rational reason (even though I tried to find one) for choosing growth over every other possible strategy. It is our tendency to stick to our previous beliefs. In the past, we put so much effort in the belief that growth can cure all ills, that now we cannot back up without losing face. It is the Seekers effect.

Long live the hockey stick! Climate science fights back.

2012-02-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

The new book by Michael Mann tells the story of the reconstruction of past temperatures called "the hockey stick" because of its characteristic shape. Despite the propaganda campaign against climate science, climate scientists are standing their ground and fighting back.

Repeat something a sufficient number of times and, eventually, people will believe it, no matter whether it is true or not. It is one of the most effective tricks of propaganda and it has been used more than once against science, for instance in the demonization of the "Limits to Growth" study. During the past few years, it has been applied repeatedly, even obsessively, against the "hockey stick," the reconstruction of past temperatures on which Michael Mann and coworkers had been working from the 1990s.

It is rare in the history of science that a single piece of experimental evidence has been the object of so many attempts of demolition. Yet, all the serious reviews of the original data have basically confirmed the initial results. Being unsuccessful in demolishing the science, the attacks have moved against the scientist, Michael Mann himself, who has been subjected to an unbelievable denigration campaign, defamed, insulted, and even physically threatened. Recently, the campaign against Mann has targeted his new book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars", with a large number of negative reviews and derogatory remarks which appeared in the reviews of the book on the Amazon site. Most of these seem to be the work of web identities created expressly for this purpose, i.e. "sock puppets".

What is amazing in this story is how people are fighting back! If you look at the comments on the Amazon site, you see how the derogatory comments have been overwhelmed by favorable comments written by real people who signed with their names. Climate science is still under heavy attack but, clearly, there is a core of concerned people who care about the future. Science is standing its ground and refuses to be overwhelmed by propaganda. It is a difficult battle but we need to fight it for everybody's future.

At this point, it seems appropriate to me to publish on this blog the interview that Michael Mann had granted to Italian version of the "Cassandra" blog in 2010. Here it is, in English.

From "Effetto Cassandra", Sep 05, 2010

1. First of all, can you tell us something of your scientific career? How did you arrive to study tree rings and paleoclimate?

It was a long and circuitous route. I started out as a physicist and had passed my exams and was ready to go on and do Ph.D. research in theoretical physics. But my heart was elsewhere. I wanted to work on something that had more obvious world-world implications. I saw that there were other faculty at the university I was studying at (Yale University) who worked on applications of physics to the geosciences. In particular, there was a professor (Barry Saltzman) who was working on the problem of modeling Earth's climate. that sounded fascinating to me. I went and talked with him, and he agreed to take my on as a student for the summer. That worked out well, and I ended up doing my Ph.D. with him, in the department of geology & geophysics. My Ph.D. involved studying the natural variability of the climate system (i.e. the natural long-term oscillations of the climate) using theoretical climate models and analysis of available observations. The historical record wasn't long enough to study possible century-scale oscillations. That's what originally led me to turn to climate proxy data, such as tree-rings, corals, ice cores, etc. they could provide a longer-term, if more uncertain, perspective on the evolution of Earth's climate over the centuries. Ironically, my original foray into climate proxy data had nothing to do with climate change per se!

2. At some point, you must have realized that the discussion about the validity of the paleoclimate studies had turned from a scientific one to a political one. Can you tell us how and when you discovered that the dispute had stepped outside the limits of the scientific debate?

Well, after our temperature reconstruction (the so-called "Hockey Stick") was featured in the very prominent IPCC summary for policy makers in 2001, we suspected we would be subject to attack by climate change deniers. And they haven't disappointed. Their strategy has always been to attack the messenger, discredit the science and scientists, and fool the public. We've seen this for decades. Its the same playbook that for example the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, and the pharmaceutical industry have all used to try to discredit science demonstrating potential adverse effects from the use of their product. The fossil fuel industry has taken it to a whole other level however. We literally have the most powerful industry that ever existed on earth using much of their resources to smear the science and confuse the public about the adverse effects to our world of fossil fuel burning. History will look back most unkindly on industry-funded individuals and groups who sought to intentionally mislead the public about the reality and threat of human-caused climate change.

3. With the great noise about the "hockey stick" and about "Climategate", many people became convinced - in many cases, I think, in good faith - that you are a liar, a criminal and worse. How does that affect your everyday life? For instance, how about your students?

Well, I like to think that individuals engaged in good faith would think no such thing, as even a cursory examination of the facts demonstrates otherwise. But I do think that there has been such a concerted, well-funded smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists by industry front groups and the far right, that even some reasonable people may be rather confused now about the facts. That of course is the intent of the industry-funded disinformation campaign. Fortunately, I have had much support from my students and colleagues at the University, and scientists around the world, who recognize the smear campaign against me and other climate scientists, for what it is. Of course, there are some ill-informed individuals out there who have engaged in some rather nasty activities, including hateful note and emails, and the like. Unfortunately, its now a fact of life if you're a prominent climate change researcher that you will be subject to these tactics.

4. I think that we - as scientists - must have made some serious mistakes in our communication strategy if deniers have been so successful in attacking climate science. Of course, one of the reasons is that they are led by professional PR people, very good at this kind of campaigns. Yet, I think that the scientific community has neglected communication - would you agree with me on this point? And what do you think we should do in the future to improve our strategy of communication and avoid seeing again such things as Climategate?

Well, I do agree that the scientific community at times has been slow to recognize the concerted, well-funded smear campaign against us and to do something to fight back. In the wake of the manufactured 'climategate' campaign and the attacks against the IPCC, many of my colleagues have now awakened to what we're up against. So perhaps that is the silver lining in all of this. I think in the future you will see far more resources devoted to outreach and communication, including a rapid response strategy to concerted efforts to smear our science and scientists.

5. Scientists often tend to seek public anonymity. They seem to believe that "facts should speak for themselves". Instead, deniers promote themselves as public figures. They may not be nice people, but they know that the message and the messenger cannot be separated and this tactic has been successful. Personally, I believe that this is one of the (very few) things we should learn from them. Do you agree with me? Do you think we should all acquire a better personal visibility?

I do agree. I think we need to humanize the image of the scientist to the public. Too often, scientists are viewed as cold, disconnected, antisocial beings. There are always a few bad apples. But in the vast majority of cases, nothing could be further from the truth. The professional climate change denial campaign has recruited and trained a cadre of charismatic individuals who, though thorough charlatans, are versed in presenting a public face of affability and are quite skilled rhetorically. Scientists are often out-matched when going up against them in debates and other public forums, even though we have objective reality and truthfulness on our side. This problem is now well recognized, and there are many individuals and groups that are trying to deal with it. So I expect much serious efforts to address this problem in the months ahead.

6. Paleoclimatology is a fascinating subject, too bad that it has been so clouded by silly controversies about the "hockey stick". Apart from that; paleoclimatology goes to explore a fundamental point: the relation of human beings with their environment. So, climate change affects humans but also humans change climate. We have plenty of examples in which the collapse of a civilization has been linked to climate change; from the Maya to the Romans, but we still are not able to establish a relation of cause and effect. According to Ruddiman, humans have been affecting climate from the starting of agriculture, but it is also possible that external factors have been at play as well, for instance small changes in the solar output. Of course, this is a field that is still in its infancy, but you are at the forefront of these studies and you could tell us - perhaps - your opinion: do we find a relation between human activity and climate change in the past? Are civilizations brought down by climate change, or do civilizations create the change that destroys them?

Great questions, and I wish I had all of the answers. I think Jared Diamond has perhaps addressed best some of the larger questions here in his book "Collapse". There are many examples we can look to in the past where human's had the ability to exploit and degrade their environment to the point of unsustainability. The destruction of Easter Island through uncontrolled deforestation is one of the great cautionary tales to humanity in this regard. Bill Ruddiman has made a compelling argument that human activity (e.g. rice cultivation and deforestation) might have begun to influence the concentrations of greenhouse gases to the point of having some climate impact several thousand years back. The claim remains rather controversial. What is not controversial is that only within the past century to we have the means at our disposal to change global climate in a dramatic fashion over such a short timescale. It is really the rate at which humans are influencing the climate which poses the greatest threat. Humans and natural ecosystems can adapt to slow change in climate. There is no analog we know of in the past where global climate has been altered as rapidly as we are changing it today. So we are in unchartered waters, engaged in an uncontrolled experiment with the future of civilization and the environment potentially hanging in the balance.

The fate of new truths: peak oil appears on "Nature"

2012-02-09T04:09:00.000-08:00

"It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions" (Thomas Henry Huxley, 1880) Above: a figure from the article by James Murray and David King published on Nature, 26 Jan 2012, vol 481, p. 435

With the publication of a prominent article on "Nature" in January 2012, the concept of "Peak Oil" has made another step forward in the debate on resource depletion. This article has made me rethink of the past ten years of work that I did as a member of ASPO, the association for the study of peak oil. Were we right with our prediction of impending peak oil? In a sense, yes, but the crystal ball is always foggy and it cannot be otherwise. The ASPO predictions were basically right but, as all predictions, they were approximate.

Working with a simplified model based on Hubbert's early work of the 1950s, the founders of ASPO, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, proposed in 1998 that the future of oil production would have followed a curve that was to peak at some moment between 2005 and 2010, to decline afterwards. Embedded within the Hubbert model was the concept that the gradually increasing costs of extraction would reduce the profits of the industry and force it to reduce investments.

As a "first order" model, the Hubbert one is not bad and the ASPO models caught very well the problems that the oil industry was going to face. From 2004 onward, prices have shot up a levels that have changed forever the oil market. But oil production, intended as "all liquids" (that is, including oil from tar sands, biofuels, etc) didn't show a well defined peak, nor the decline that the Hubbert model predicted. Stubbornly, production has refused to decline and it may even be showing a modest increase in recent times. That doesn't make the model wrong: as all models, it is an approximation of reality.

The "peak oil" concept has been often criticized on the basis of a classic idea in economic science: that prices mediate between demand and offer. Hence, oil prices should define what should be counted as "reserves", intended as something that can, and will be, extracted. High prices should lead to more reserves and we would never run out of anything. It turns out that this criticism was not wrong, although not right, either, and its consequences were perhaps unexpected even for those who proposed it. When scarcity started to be felt in the oil market, the price correction mechanism kicked in. Prices rose and, according to the standard economic theory, that should have stimulated production. It did, in part, but with crude oil the mechanism has become a rat race. The more high prices made production profitable, the more production costs rose. That's where we hit the ceiling.

This mechanism is very nicely caught by Murray and King in their article in Nature. The figure reported at the beginning of this post shows it very clearly. Over a certain price, production doesn't respond any more. It becomes "inelastic". The graph has to be read taking into account the temporal evolution of both prices and production: very high prices are a recent phenomenon and what we see is what I called the rat race. Even with increasing oil prices, the best that the industry can do is to keep constant the production of combustible liquids.

So, we are seeing that the price mechanism may slow down the expected production decline, but at the price of causing all sorts of problems. With high prices, the world's economy must allocate more and more resources to oil extraction and these resources must come from somewhere. Since the economy doesn't grow any more, keeping oil production constant means that some sectors must shrink and that is not without pain. Much of the present political turmoil in poor countries, for instance, is due to the high prices of food, in turn related to the high cost of oil. And, with prices so high, we see the perverse effect that producers can afford to consume more but, as a result, less oil is left for importers. In a sense, many importing countries have already passed their peak oil.

As Thomas Huxley said long ago, it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. Peak oil surely began as a superstition and it is still considered as such in some circles. But, with the events of the past few years, it is also attaining the status of truth, as shown by the article by Murray and King, who have clearly understood what lies at the basis of the idea. In some sense, however, peak oil is also taking some elements of a superstition, since it fails to take into account the price mechanism. In the end, reality might be better described by something like the "Seneca model" which takes into account second order effects and that predicts a production plateau followed by a sharp decline. Also this model may be a heresy, right now, but one day may become truth and later on a superstition. As always, the future is never what it used to be.

References

The paper by Murray and King on Nature is here (behind a paywall)

A summary can be found on Scientific American here

A comment on the New York Times is here

A criticism by Michael Levi can be found here

And a defense by Mason Inman, here

________________________________________________________

Note 1. I completely agree with the approach of Murray and King regarding the relation of peak oil and climate change. It is true that the two problems are strictly related and that they should be tackled together. However, I also think that the authors should have been more careful in the way they presented this issue. At the start of the article, they say, "....continuing debates about the quality of climate-change science and doubts about the scale of negative environmental impacts have held back political action against rising greenhouse gas emissions. But there is a potentially more persuasive argument for lowering global emissions: the impact of dwindling oil supplies on the economy." Consider the number of conspiracy theorists around, this paragraph will surely be seen it as "proof" that peak oil is a hoax created by the evil oil companies in order to force customers to pay higher prices for gasoline. Besides, it makes no sense in my opinion to say that scarcity is a good argument to convince people to consume less. It would be, if people behaved rationally, but most people don't. It reminds me of an experience I had some time ago, when I presented the peak oil case to a rich financial tycoon. He answered to me with something like, "I think you are right. So, I guess I should buy myself a new Ferrari and consume as much as I can, while I can."

Note 2. Italian readers of this blog may be interested in this paragraph from Murray and King's paper. It think it is right on target. "Another powerful example of the effect of increasing oil prices can be seen in Italy. In 1999, when Italy adopted the euro, the country’s annual trade surplus was $22 billion. Since then, Italy’s trade balance has altered dramatically and the country now has a deficit of $36 billion. Although this shift has many causes, including the rise of imports from China, the increase in oil price was the most important. Despite a decrease in imports of 388,000 barrels per day compared with 1999, Italy now spends about $55 billion a year on imported oil, up from $12 billion in 1999. That difference is close to the current annual trade deficit. The price of oil is likely to have been a large contributor to the euro crisis in southern Europe, where countries are completely dependent on foreign oil."

Note 3. David King is an old acquaintance of mine and for many years we have been working in parallel in surface science studies. I am not sure if there are deep reasons that make people engaged in surface science to move to peak oil studies but, at least, there are at least two cases!

Methane hydrates: the next communication bomb in the climate change debate

2012-02-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Methane released from ice is a spectacular and dangerous phenomenon. It is not so just because methane can catch fire, but because, on a large scale, the release it could generate a rapid and devastating global warming. We cannot say much about the time scale of such an event and not even if it could take place at all, but the perception of the possible danger ahead could be a true communication bomb in the climate debate. (the video shows Katey Walter from University of Alaska at Fairbanks experimenting with this methane trapped in ice)

As greenhouse gas, methane is more powerful than carbon dioxide, but there is a much more important difference between these two gases. Carbon dioxide emissions are something that we create and that we can control, at least in principle. If we stop burning fossil fuels, then we stop generating CO2. But, with methane, it is another matter. We have no direct control on the huge amounts of methane buried in ice in the permafrost and at the bottom of oceans in the form of "hydrates" or "clathrates."

Methane hydrates are a true climate bomb that could go off by itself as the result of a relatively small trigger in the form of a global warming. Sufficient warming would cause the decomposition of some hydrates to release methane to the atmosphere. This methane would create more warming and that would generate more decomposition of the hydrates. The process would go on by itself at increasing rates until the reservoirs run out of methane. That means pumping in the atmosphere truly a lot of methane. There are different estimates of the amount stored in hydrates, but it is surely large - most likely larger than the total amount of carbon present today in the atmosphere as CO2. The effects of the rapid release of so much methane would be devastating: an abrupt climate change that could bring a true planetary catastrophe. It is a scenario aptly called the "clathrate gun" and the target is us.

Now, there are plenty of uncertainties about this scenario, and we cannot say much about its timescale or even whether it would happen at all. But uncertainty is something that may make the scenario even more worrisome. People are scared of things they don't completely understand and that they know they can't control. That's surely the case of methane hydrates. We don't know how likely the worst scenarios are, we only know that methane is being released from hydrates right now and that the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is going up. We can't say if that's the start of the clathrate gun going off, but it is enough to be scared. I don't know about you, but I can tell you that I am scared.

The timescale of the clathrate gun may be long enough that we don't have to be worried in the short term. But another explosion seems to be going off much faster, this one in the media. The trend has started with scientific papers. Before 1999, there was not a single paper on the subject in the "sciencedirect" database. In 2011, 49 papers were published and the trend may be exponential. On the Web, Google Trends still doesn't generate a significant increase in the number of searches for terms such as "hydrate" or "clathrate". But we find about 40,000 pages dealing with the combination "climate change", "methane release" and hydrates. Even the mainstream press is starting to report about the subject. So far, the problem of methane hydrates has been largely absent from the debate on climate change. But that may be rapidly changing.

The methane release scenario has all the characteristics needed to catch the public's attention. It is spectacular, gigantic, biblical, and also rapid. It even has an evil sounding name: the "clathrate gun." It is nothing like the tame scenarios of the IPCC that plod on, slowly, up to the end of the 21st century. The IPCC scenario are not meant to be scary: nobody cares about slowly boiling frogs. But do you remember the 2004 movie "The day after tomorrow"? What scares us, mostly, are sudden catastrophic events. Now, think of a blockbuster movie from Hollywood about the clathrate gun. We would see giant hurricanes, biblical droughts, deadly heat waves, devastating floods..... No matter how the story is told, it is a true communication bomb.

Before continuing, let me hasten with a disclaimer. Let me state that I am NOT saying that we (scientists, activists, journalists or whoever) should exaggerate the dangers ahead in order to scare people with the methane story. Absolutely NOT - on the contrary, my point is that a scared public is NOT a good thing for reasons that I will explain in a moment. Let me also state that this post is NOT meant to claim that the clathrate gun is going off, it is meant to discuss how the public would react to the perception that it may be going off. This said, let me go on.

So, let's assume that the clathrate story becomes widely known, how's the public going to react? According to James Schlesinger, "People have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic". The clathrate communication bomb may well lead to a paradigm shift about climate and push the public opinion all of a sudden to the other side of the Goldilock dilemma: from complacency to panic.

Some people could see that as a welcome event: we would finally see an effort to do something to avoid climate change. But it is not obvious at all that this outcome would be positive. Things done in haste are not necessarily done well. Likely, we would see a frantic effort to "do something," no matter what, no matter how. If the past experience with the energy crisis is a guide, the chances to pick up the best solutions are small (see, for instance, the hype on biofuels). It is probable that we would seek for miracle solutions in large scale geoengineering. Carbon sequestration, sulphate particles in the upper atmosphere, mirrors in space, painting roofs white, what you have.

Would those actions work? Perhaps yes, but we would be moving into a totally uncharted territory. We don't know which could be the best solutions and we can't be sure of the side effects of most of them. Then, wouldn't the energy needed for geoengineering lead to more fossil fuels being consumed and, consequently, more greenhouse gases produced? And, then, suppose that geoengineering works in cooling the planet, wouldn't people revert to complacency and declare that the clathrate gun was a hoax from the beginning? As we move into the future, the problems we have created seem to become bigger just as it becomes evident that we, as a species, are just not equipped with the tools needed to solve them.

Things would have been much simpler if we had been able to find an agreement to tackle the climate problem at its roots, reducing greenhouse emissions. That would have provided a clear target to achieve and little room for wild swings in public perception. But it may well be too late for a strategy based on gradual changes. Things keep changing, and the only sure thing is that we can't stay idle in front of changes. So, get ready for the next big change: the clathrate communication bomb going off!

____________________________________

Some recent articles and posts about methane release from hydrates. This list is not meant to be complete or representative, it is here just to give some idea of how the debate is heating up (a very appropriate metaphor, in this case)

Much ado about methane - David Archer on RealClimate

An online model of methane in the atmosphere, by David Archer, RealClimate

Dave Archer wrong to dismiss concern about potential methane runaway in Arctic, by Gary Houser on "Climate change, the next generation"

How much time is there left to act? By Sam Carana on Geoengineering

Methane: a worse worst-case scenario, by "The Tracker", theidiottracker

Wetting the stratosphere, boiling the oceans, Eli Rabett, RabettRun

What is a Smart Species Like Us Doing in a Predicament Like This?

2012-02-04T06:06:00.000-08:00

This post by George Mobus, published on "Question Everything", goes to the heart of the problem; correctly defined as "predicament". We are simply not equipped to cope with the complexity we have created. Now, it seems that we can do little but watch the banquet of consequences.

Too Smart for Our Own Good by Craig Dilworth

Reviewed by George Mobus

A Paradox

Many years ago I believed, as do most people today, that intelligence was the key to solving all of mankind's problems (read: innovation, assumed by technocornucopians to overcome all problems). I spent no small amount of my life pursuing understanding of what intelligence is, and how the brain produces the abilities to solve complex problems. My childhood was spent watching the unfolding explosion in science and technology that culminated in, for example, the landing of humans on the moon. I grew up knowing there were these wondrous electronic brains called computers. Later at a still impressionable age, once the size and prices of computers came down, I got my chance to play with them. I fell instantly in love with a machine that I could program to rapidly solve problems that would have taken me days to accomplish. And I came across the works of Alan Turing regarding the idea that a computing device might be able to emulate human intelligence, dubbed “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). The “Turing Test” posited that we should accord intelligence to machines if in a blind conversation with a real human, the latter could not detect that s/he was talking to a machine. I set out to see how such a wonder might be accomplished.

Many years later I managed to earn a PhD in computer science by programming a computer to emulate not human intelligence, but the intelligence of a neuron with its adaptive synaptic connections. These, I assembled into a computational model of a snail brain, an admittedly moronic one, and showed how such a brain could control behavior and, more importantly, emulate animal-like (biomimic) learning through Pavlovian-style conditioning. Putting this brain into a computer controlling a small Braitenberg robot, I could show how the brain learned features of its experienced environment and adjusted its behavior to conform to the stimuli of that environment (run from pain-causing stimuli and approach rewarding stimuli). That academic exercise started me digging deeper into how biological neural networks in real brains work. I read every book I could get ahold of and many journal articles on various aspects of neuroscience trying to understand how it worked. The obvious goal of AI was to produce human-like intelligence in a machine. The strong version of this program even contemplated producing a conscious machine (e.g. HAL 9000 in A Space Odyssey). The field of AI has evolved from the earliest days and it has produced some useful computational products. And even though Deep Blue (IBM) beat world chess master Garry Kasporov and Watson (also IBM) beat the all-time Jeopardy champs at that game, the fact is that computers still only simulate some aspects of intelligence, and then only in limited expertise domains.

Throughout the evolution of the field, the idea of a machine intelligence spawned considerable interest among psychologists, neurobiologists, and philosophers. Debates about just what intelligence was in the first place were generated each time AI seemed to make progress. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of the field was to show just how different real brains were from the way computers process data. And with each new accomplishment of computers, trying to master tasks that had previously been thought to require intelligence, it became clearer that the human kind of intelligence was far more complex and nuanced than our earlier models accounted for. My own claim that my robot emulated a “moronic” snail might have been valid for a very low level of intelligence, but it only served to underscore how far our computational approaches were from the real thing as far as human-level intelligence.

In any case my initial forays into AI via trying to simulate learning phenomena in neuron-like structures got me hooked on the notion of understanding the real deal. Both psychology and neurobiology had made such important strides toward grasping the nature of human intelligence and consciousness that I essentially ceased worrying about AI and turned my attentions more fully to the pursuit of real human intelligence as an object of study.

As much as has been elucidated, especially over the last few decades, about human intelligence, most of the world still holds that intelligence is our greatest mental achievement. Coupled with its twin mental capacity for creativity, intelligence is seen as the epitome of cognition; a genius is one who has ample portions of both compared with ordinary humans. The human brain is held to provide cleverness in solving complex problems. We often equate intelligence with rational thinking (e.g. deductive logic) and hold accomplishments in mathematics or science as evidence that we are an incredibly smart species. The mere fact of the existence of our technological prowes proves that we are smarter than any mere ape.

But there is a fly in the ointment of this palliative thought. If you try to objectively account for the state of the world today as the result of our being so smart you have to ask a very important question: If we are so smart, why do we humans find ourselves in such a terrible predicament today? Our species is facing a constellation of extraordinary and complex problems for which no one can suggest feasible solutions (see below). The irony is that these problems exist because our cleverness, our being so smart, created them. Our activities, clever as we have thought them to be, are the causes of the problems, which, collectively, threaten the very existence of humanity! This seems a paradox. We were smart enough to create the problems, but we're not smart enough to fix them. My own conclusion was that maybe smartness wasn't enough. Maybe something even more important to cognition had been missing that allowed this predicament to develop. That has been the thought that has been motivating my own search for an answer.

Craig Dilworth, Reader in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University in Sweden, has asked this same question from a slightly different perspective, but comes to a similar conclusion regarding the role of intelligence in creating the predicament. In Too Smart for Our Own Good Dilworth masterfully pieces together the story of how humans, being so clever, but still motivated by our animal instincts and drives, have made a real mess of things. Put simply, he concludes that the evolutionary experiment called Homo sapiens is intrinsically unsustainable. He builds the evidence carefully and skillfully, though I have a few concerns regarding some possibly nitpicking details (to be discussed later). His arguments are both complete and consistent with observed reality. And he pulls no punches.

The Predicament and Proximal Causes

A good deal of Dilworth's book deals with the evolution of the current human species and, in particular, the residual components of human behavior inherited from our animal predecessors. In short, he elucidates the various instinctive drives that underlay all human activities and that demonstrate just how much of a biological creature humans really are. He carefully derives a set of principles from physics, chemistry, and biology that explain the evolutionary trajectory that leads quite naturally to clever apes. And then he claims that a threshold was passed. Along the line of genera Australopithecus and Homo cleverness produced behaviors that no previous animals had been able to perform, at least to the extent these clever apes were able to. In particular early humans (the term covering several species) learned to control fire, to become more efficient hunters and gatherers with tools that they manufactured, to protect themselves from the climate vagaries with manufactured shelters and clothing. That capability to invent and construct put them in a new biological relation with the rest of the biophysical world. It set them going on what Dilworth describes as the “vicious circle.” Humans can extract resources, both non-renewable and renewable, from the environment at a growing rate, both per capita and as the population grows, in absolute terms. We also consume these resources after turning them into usable forms, like clothing. Our consumption, plus the ravages of entropy, means that we are producing waste products at increasing rates in the same dynamical framework as the extraction rates. And we can't help ourselves. We are driven by biological mandates to consume as individuals and to procreate.

The part about us not being able to help ourselves is really the distal, root cause of all of our misdeeds and subsequent problems. More proximal to our current conundrum is a set of immediate causes and their consequences.

The global-scale threats are legion. Here is just a partial list of some of the more threatening problems, the human role in causing them, and their possible consequences. Any one of these could be incredibly troubling for mankind, but taken together, because they are all interrelated and feeding upon one another, I am convinced, as are a growing number of scientists, they spell certain disaster.

Population Overshoot

In all but a handful of cultures, and those are generally hunter-gatherer societies, and certainly among the so-called civilizations throughout history, the general sentiment of: “Be fruitful and multiply,” seems to have prevailed. Humans, like many animals, have a few, albeit weak, built-in mechanisms for checking the size of populations relative to the carrying capacity of the local environment. Many cultures have practiced various forms of population control and some still do today with varying degrees of success. These practices may be generally seen as part of the culture and have only more recently been seen as coming from some underlying biological drives. Some of these practices are considered barbaric and immoral to civilized sentiments. But, when they work they seem to work well.

Dilworth argues, however, that these internal checks are easily subverted by the more expansive driving biological instincts when the population perceives that 1) the environment can support more bodies, and 2) more bodies are needed to do the work needed to facilitate the extraction of resources. The turning point in human prehistory was probably the invention of agriculture. The latter, ironically, doesn't actually substantially increase the net energy per capita gain as compared with hunting and gathering, at least where the latter is done in environs that provide renewable abundance in game and food plants. Rather, it tends to decrease the uncertainty of food resource availability, which we humans seem to appreciate. Also ironically, agriculture takes more work per unit time to achieve reliable results, hence an actual reduction in net energy gain per unit of time spent in food production, per capita.

In other words, Dilworth appears to be arguing that the population increases that have been attributed to agriculture came not from an increased availability of food, per se, but from a diminishing of the strength of signals that would have triggered internal natural checks on population expansion enabled by the use of food production technologies. The working classes were allowed to just barely subsist and procreate sufficiently to assure a continuing or even expanding working class to support the higher classes. And, the taller the class hierarchy, the broader the base working class needed. But such expansion also included bringing more land into cultivation in order to support the growing population and still provide a steady flow of goods up to the higher reaches of the hierarchy. Growth of population and “economic” activity — originally farming — thus became a necessity and not just a consequence.

Diminishing Net Energy Per Capita

Of course, the problem is that there is just so much land that can be cultivated. We live on a finite world. Resources, including land, are finite. As growth consumes more and more of the area around the centers of the civilization hierarchies it eventually comes up against either competing hierarchies or marginal land that eventually cannot sustain a production quantity needed. There is an additional interesting phenomenon that occurs as expansion continues, even when the land might be productive. Under the conditions of travel by animal-drawn carts, it turns out that there is a natural distance from the center beyond which the net energy returns begin to diminish geometrically with linear (arithmetic) increase in distance. Horses and oxen need to be fed and can only carry so much weight. The strategy of growth as a way to keep the enterprise going may have seemed like a good idea to the overseers, but in fact there came a time when each unit of growth produced diminishing, and eventually negative benefits. This is related to the idea first advanced by Joseph Tainter regarding the collapse of civilizations due to increased complexity^[1].

The phenomenon of a population exceeding its environment's carrying capacity, defined as the capacity of the environment to replenish levels of required resources at a rate that can sustain an average number of individuals (or more correctly the amount of biomass represented in a given species) and to absorb the waste products of that population without toxic overload, has been documented many times in ecological studies. The world works primarily on a steady but limited flow of energy from the sun. In the end, that flow of energy determines the rate of biological resource replenishment (all other factors being equal). All other animals are restricted to a relatively fixed carrying capacity, at least over normal life cycle times. But humans, in their ability to harness exosomatic (outside their own bodies) sources of energy, and their capacity for invention, found a workaround to this basic limit. They developed ways to appropriate more resources for themselves, leaving the sub-human species less for their needs. Agriculture, after all, requires taking over large tracts of land for the purpose of growing just a few crops of interest to humans, generally in mono culture. Too often this results in loss of habitat for many other species.

Once humans discovered and started dipping into the bank account of fossil sunlight known as fossil fuels, the explosion of population was inevitable. For the last several centuries, thanks to the high energy content of hydrocarbon fuels, the net energy per capita used to extract other natural resources and support greater consumption has been increasing. The energy return on energy invested in extracting fossil fuels started out so high that human ingenuity for finding ways to consume more were seemingly released from any natural constraints. The modern technological society emerged as a result.

Unfortunately, fossil fuels are exactly the kind of finite non-renewable resource that constitutes an upper bound on the extent of the population. No, actually it is worse than that. Because we have reached a point in which those fuels are diminishing in toto, and what we are extracting now takes more energy to do it, we have the equivalent of what earlier civilizations faced when they reached the geographical limits for net energy gain. We are approaching the point of zero gains (if we haven't already passed it) and from here on out every human being on the planet will be facing a decline in net energy available to stay alive. Income inequities make the variances cause increasing starvation at the low ends while the higher classes keep trying to appropriate wealth for themselves.

The human species, like other species under similar conditions, has gone into overshoot. The very typical outcome of such a condition, primarily because the dynamics are nonlinear, is a crash, a wipe out of the majority of the population^[2]. Dilworth, in his conclusion, is in agreement with a growing number of researchers that this is the most likely outcome for humanity. We are animals after all.

Derivative Problems

Overpopulation, i.e., overshoot, and diminishing net energy per capita lead to a large number of secondary problems that will also play a role in an unsustainable future for humanity. We are running out of potable water in many regions. This is in part because of overshoot but also in part due to climate changes that, in turn, are aggravated, if not directly caused by, the burning of fossil fuels adding carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere and oceans at unprecedented rates. The globe is warming and this leads to the climate chaos we are starting to witness. It also leads to ocean level rises that will inundate many inhabited regions of the globe in the not-too-distant future.

From the time of early agriculture and the reorganization of societies, humans needed some convenient method for abstractly representing wealth. At first they needed some way to account for stored grains and other commodities that would be traded. Later they needed a convenient way to carry around representations of the wealth they controlled and trade those representations rather than carry around the wealth itself. Money was invented to accomplish this task. Not long thereafter a form of lending was invented to act as investment in new enterprises. Derived most likely from the dispensing of saved grains as seed to be used by new young farmers to get started, the idea of lending wealth to generate more wealth in the future took hold. Today we have debt financing of everything from homes to bets (Wall Street). This idea of using debt-based money to invest in a future increase in wealth production was workable, even when abused as has become clear in recent years. As long as the supply of net energy was increasing there was always an expectation that the economy would expand and that would allow the pay down of debt. This was the case for the industrial revolution and well into the 1950s the expansion of oil and other fossil fuel supplies was supporting the capacity to do more physical work in the future. That meant there could be more wealth produced in the future, enough to pay back both principal and interest (the rental cost of the money for the risk taken) as well as make a profit. But now that the net energy supply is starting to diminish the strategy of growth and debt-based financing (as opposed to savings-based, as was the case in lending excess grain to a farmer for seed) is failing. And because society went so far into a debt buildup in expectation that growth would just go on forever, the resulting bubble burst that has ensued (and is still in progress) has had devastating effects on global economies. And it will only get worse.

We humans have been incredibly smart in devising machines, methodologies, and abstractions that have exploited the availability of natural resources and especially exosomatic energy sources. Too smart.

But not, it seems, smart enough to think ahead about the consequences of consumption of finite resources. We were and are extremely clever. But we are not wise.

What Does It Mean to Be Smart?

All of the above problems might have solutions if we can just invent the right technologies and apply them in time to avoid pain and suffering. We should be able to do this because we are smart apes, right?

This is precisely where the argument turns. We are smart. Smart enough to create technologies like agriculture and machinery that seem to solve certain immediate problems. We seek more certainty in our food supply so we plant and tend crops. We have to settle down in one place to do this but that, at first, seems a side benefit. We want to get places fast, and do harder work faster so we invent machine-based tools that require external sources of energy to run. We solve a problem, the problem of increasing demand for the products, by making those products more rapidly. At every turn, the smart ape has solved a problem of immediacy and done so with extraordinary results.
What this ape has also done is ignore a meta-problem. Every problem solution carries with it the seeds of another problem of greater scope. Dilworth sees the pattern clearly. It turns out that the entropy version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics explains this situation^[3].

In the process of humans inventing ways to do what is to them useful work (and solve problems) they are effectively decreasing the local entropy in their vicinity. That is, they are increasing the order (e.g. building functional structures and equipment) for themselves. But the Second Law tells us that every gain in order in a system can come only at the expense of an even greater increase in disorder (entropy) of the larger, embedding system — the environment. So even as humans increased the “value” of their human-built world, they did so at the greater expense of the environment. Order and organization on the Earth have decreased overall (think, for example, about biodiversity - a measure of organization/complexity), as the Second Law demands, but at a rate accelerated by the activities of humanity. The Earth system had been operating close to a dynamic equilibrium (Dilworth's first chapter provides insights into the meaning of this) prior to the evolution of humans. This is because the solar influx of energy had stabilized and even though the Earth was experiencing cycles (e.g. the ice ages) of ups and downs, on the whole, the biosphere was adaptively able to maintain its activities precisely because the rate of fluctuation was matched by the rate of evolutionary change in species. After humans got started, that dynamic state was forever disrupted, with greater energy dissipation and rejiggering of many of the large scale, long time geochemical cycles such as the carbon and hydrological cycles. All of this is now witnessed at a global scale. And it is very much the proximal cause of all of our other problems.

So here is the crux of the matter. We are smart enough to have created this situation by virtue of our capacity to increase the rate of entropy increase for the whole Earth system. But we are not smart enough to fix it. That is because of a simple fact. Smartness is for invention and solving local problems. Intelligence and creativity are great for finding new ways to increase entropy. In a perverse twist, this is exactly what biological evolution was all about! And we smart humans were simply fulfilling our biological mandates. Unfortunately, from my own perspective, that also means the greatest natural check of all, a negative feedback control, whereby humans destroy the very life support systems they need to exist, will correct the situation. Any time any system gets out of control it breaks apart. Why should the human-built system be any different?

The Vicious Circle Principle

Thus we come to Dilworth's vicious circle principle (VCP). Man gets smart enough to become inventive. He invents things that allow him to survive and through increased fitness produce more offspring. But as often as not he creates something like a surplus and nature abhors both vacuums and concentrations, so man begets more men to work off the surplus. Or he invents some variation on a need fulfilling tool that produces something men might want, even though it isn't strictly speaking in support of survival. After a while, those wants being fulfilled, man gets used to having whatever it is and it effectively becomes a new need. But then population overshoot reduces the availability of the whatever and a new problem exists. So back to the drawing board, invent something else that will fulfill the new need. And around we go again. I have not done justice to Dilworth's explication here. I only wanted to give the reader a sense of the direction the author is taking. Of course you should read his work to fill in the details. And there are many more details that he covers superbly.

This VCP, according to Dilworth's thesis, is the penultimate root cause of all problems that we are experiencing. It is the process where intervention would be needed to stop and reverse the predicament. But therein lay the greatest problem of all. The VCP exists because of our human nature and nothing short of changing that is going to allow an intervention that could halt the vicious circle dynamic.

I think that Dilworth has truly put his finger on the central problem for human kind. We are caught on a circle of activity that is ‘vicious’ in terms of creating and worsening all of the problems we face. But I have reservations about this way of putting it.

‘Vicious’ is a value laden term. This circle, which increases the Earth's overall entropy, appears vicious precisely because we are the victims, and we cannot help having an anthropocentric perspective. But looked at from the perspective of evolution there is nothing vicious about it at all. In fact the term vicious has no meaning at all in evolution. Would we have thought of the comet that ploughed into Earth 65 million years ago and appears to have been instrumental in killing off the dinosaurs as vicious? Were the climate changes associated with ancient ice ages that appear to have been instrumental in the evolution of the genus Homo vicious because they also created the conditions that made other species of primitive humans go extinct?

I have preferred to think of the phenomenon of man's cleverness as the emergence of a new phenomenon in exactly the same way we now think of the emergence of life from pre biological chemistry. Of course, taking this perspective means that the destruction of civilization and the potential bottleneck event for humanity^[4] are fundamentally necessary. And that is the hard part to swallow. As a human no one could ‘want’ the demise of our species, certainly. On the other hand, if we are really so smart as to understand the full implications of evolution itself, perhaps we could come to accept the inevitability of this outcome.

Conclusion

Overall, I think Dilworth's book has added an important perspective to understanding humanity's predicament. That is to say, once one has acknowledged that humans are facing a predicament that may not have any resolution but one of collapse and demise, then at least Dilworth provides an explanation for how it came about.

I have just one technical issue with the work, and one philosophical difference. The technical issue has to do with the author's heavy reliance on the concept of karyotypology to explain speciation. He uses the karyotype as if equating it to the singular marker of speciation, i.e., two different species within a single genus would have differing karyotypes. The evolutionists and geneticists I've spoken to about this express puzzlement at this usage. Karyotypes refer to the structural forms of chromosomes, especially as they appear in metaphase of mitotic cell division. It is the case that different species within a given genera may have different numbers and shapes of chromosomes that are thought to interfere with hybridization (at least viable) but this isn't always the case. Species differentiation is most generally thought to be genetic based. Some genetic differences could, of course, be the cause of differences in karyotypes, but that is a side effect of speciation, not the cause. Even with this possible misinterpretation of cause and effect in speciation, Dilworth's overall narrative of evolution is functionally correct, so the heavy reliance on karyotypology doesn't materially detract from the story.

I am with the author insofar as the pathway by which we reached this crossroads point. I agree we are too smart for our own good. But, my own take is that this is not an indictment of intelligence and creativity so much as a recognition of an inadequacy, to date, for the evolution of a mentality that might be more fit to manage its own smartness. We are smart, but not adequately wise. And we are not adequately wise because our brain structures that handle higher-order judgment have not yet evolved sufficiently to manage our smartness. You have heard the old saw: “Just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do that thing.” Just because we figured out how to split the atom to generate unimagined energies didn't necessarily mean that we should build atom bombs or nuclear reactors. We did it because we could and there was no higher-order judgment providing intuitions about the dangers of progressing down that road.

The brain basis for higher-order judgment and intuitive, unbiased guidance for decision making is what I have called sapience. It is the newest brain capacity in evolutionary terms and is deeply related to the capacity of humans to form abstract representations, especially language. It co-evolved with intelligence but started ‘later’ in evolutionary history, so is out of phase with the former. It has to catch up. My story ends a bit differently from Dilworth's. I see the impending impasse as the evolutionary opportunity for this to occur. In other words, rather than just writing off the genus Homo as failed because it was too smart, I prefer to imagine that the bottleneck is an opportunity for sapience to expand and come to provide an adequate management mental capacity for our cleverness. I have developed a scenario for the further evolution of the brain structures involved in sapience that require surprisingly little additional brain matter — more an issue of slight reorganization and wiring. Of course this is highly speculative. But it is based on known neuroscience and evolution theory. It is not idle speculation.

Whether Dilworth is right, that the end is upon us due to being too smart for our own good, or I am right that this is just a stepping stone toward an improved sentience on Earth, is something none of us will ever know. Where we deeply agree is what the near consequences for Homo sapiens sapiens will be. And the value in attending to the consequences is in anything we can conjure to lessen the pain and suffering — to be forewarned is to be prepared. The real value of Dilworth's work is to at least find some intellectually satisfying (even if disturbing) explanation for why we are where we are.

Footnotes

[1] Tainter, J. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press.
[2] Catton, William (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press.
[3] See: Schneider, E. D. & Sagan, D. (2006). Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, University of Chicago Press.
[4] See: Catton, William (2009). Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris.

Also see my review of this book: Question Everything: Humanity's Impending Impasse.

Open access science

2012-01-31T13:44:00.000-08:00

Far from being an ivory tower, nowadays science looks more like a battered citadel besieged by an army of Orcs. It doesn't help that scientists don't seem to understand that the public has a right to have access to the results of the research work performed with their tax money. We need to make science more open if we want to be ablet to act on the knowledge that science is producing (image credit "crossbow and catapults")

In the 1990s, when the Internet was young, I had the idea of an "open access journal" in what was my scientific field at the time: surface science. The idea was that scientific research is paid by the public and that, therefore, the results of scientific research have to be freely accessible to the public. So, together with a few colleagues, we started an Internet site called "The Surface Science Forum" which made research papers in surface science freely available on the Web.

It was not a success. The "Surface science forum" survived for a few years, but it never had a real impact. In 2000, I was moving to a different field and I decided to close the forum. If you are curious, you can still find it here.

But the problems with scientific publishing that the Surface Science Forum had tried to address are still there and, with time, are becoming more and more serious. Not long ago, George Monbiot gave a good description of these problems in an article on "The Guardian" He says:

Distrust [in science] has been multiplied by the publishers of scientific journals, whose monopolistic practices make the supermarkets look like angels, and which are long overdue for a referral to the Competition Commission. They pay nothing for most of the material they publish, yet, unless you are attached to an academic institute, they'll charge you £20 or more for access to a single article. In some cases they charge libraries tens of thousands for an annual subscription. If scientists want people at least to try to understand their work, they should raise a full-scale revolt against the journals that publish them. It is no longer acceptable for the guardians of knowledge to behave like 19th-century gamekeepers, chasing the proles out of the grand estates.

What Monbiot says is true: in giving the results of their work to publishers for free, scientists are exploited as if they were seasonal fruit pickers. Of course, there would be nothing wrong in this practice if the money paid for accessing scientific papers were to go to finance research or to pay for services useful for research. But that's not the case. Commercial publishers don't finance research and they face very modest costs for their activity. Peer reviewing, for instance, is performed by scientists for free (again!).

Scientists are not supposed to be dumb and, normally, they aren't. This behavior of theirs is the result of a specific factor: the fact that scientific papers are a sort of "currency" in the world of science. Money, as well known, is nothing but credit and, for scientists, each paper is a form of credit that can be later redeemed in terms of career advancement, grants, academic positions and the like. It is "money", in short.

Scientific publishers have managed to act as "banks" for this scientific currency. As banks, they guarantee the value of the currency they manage; actually they create it in the form of published papers that they stamp with their seal of quality, just as Roman Emperors stamped their denarius coins with their face.

So, it is understandable that scientists don't want to see their currency debased. For them, publishing outside the system is the equivalent of printing counterfeited money. It is not only valueless, it may actually have a negative value, damaging the scientist's reputation. for instance, in some quarters, keeping a blog is considered as a blot on a scientist's reputation. That was the attitude that had doomed the "Surface Science Forum" and which is still the prevalent one in science.

But times are rapidly changing. Once, science might have been seen as an ivory tower, able to keep its own currency. Now, it looks more and more like a battered citadel besieged by an army of orcs with catapults. The situation is especially bad with climate science, object of political spin campaigns designed to destroy the reputation of individual scientists as well as of the whole field. The public tends to ask science for miracle solutions to our problems and people are disappointed when told that there is none. Disappointed people tend to become aggressive, as you can see, as an example, in some comments on the recent case of the E-Cat scam. In this situation, the traditional methods of scientific publishing are not going to enhance the prestige of science.

Fortunately, scientists seem to be discovering that they can't stick to the old ways any longer. After all, the quality of a paper doesn't reside on the seal of a commercial editor, it is guaranteed by the peer reviewing process. And scientists are doing peer reviewing, not editors. So, scientists tend to publish more and more in "open access journals", which just didn't exist up to not long ago. There is now an "open science movement", and a movement to boycott Elsevier, singled out among the many scientific editors as an especially bad one.

Is all that enough? Surely, these are positive developments, but we must do more. Science is not an ivory tower and not even a besieged citadel. It is an enterprise designed to produce knowledge and we badly need this knowledge in this difficult moment. It is not enough to make this knowledge available to those who paid for it, we must also strive to make it understandable to those who can act on it. How to do it? Well, there are many ways. For a start, if you are a scientist, why don't you keep a blog?

On the question of open access, see also this article on the New York Times (h/t Bart Anderson)

Blue ice: beautiful and dangerous

2012-01-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

Blue ice: it is beautiful, but when it appears in the Antarctic sea it is also a symptom of dangerous global warming. Image from a post by Antonio Turiel titled coming to terms with nature" (in Spanish).

In a previous post titled "Blue ice" I reported some observations by Antonio Turiel on the color of Antarctic ice. In a post in his blog, "The Oil Crash", titled, "Coming to terms with nature" (in Spanish) Turiel tells of a colleague of his coming back from an Antarctic expedition. What made him worried about global warming, was not so much the increase in temperatures, but the color of the icebergs in the Antarctic sea. The icebergs had turned blue. Turiel reports the words of his colleague.

"You know, the worst is not that each year there is more free sea. 20 years ago, the icebergs were white. Now they are blue." I said, "yes," and we both remained silent.

I received several comments on this post over the mail and Turiel himself answered to some of them. With his permission, I am now reproducing an edited version of Turiel's mails in order to explain why old icebergs are blue and why this is relevant for climate. So, here is Turiel commenting on his post:

Something that I (deliberately) omitted in my story about blue ice is that my colleague is Russian, a former researcher in the Shirsov Institute (a well known oceanographic institution in the former Soviet Union). Soviet Russians had a wide knowledge about polar seas and they studied in great detail the physics of water formation in those areas, to the point that their studies on abyssal waters are still a reference in the field. Mikhail's voyage with a Spanish research vessel was, to some extent, a nostalgic travel as our ship was intended to meet at a given date his former ship and his former companions. To tell you the truth on Mikhail's return to my lab, when I was talking with him, I was unsure about the exact meaning of blue ice, but it seems that Russians know this very well...

<..>

..... surface melting creates crevasses which lead to water accumulate in the base of glaciers, lubricating and accelerating the ice tongue and that makes ice move faster towards the sea. This extra ice flux can cause an increase of the ice covered area of the seas nearby, especially in winter. But don't get confused about that: in such a case the sea is covered by a much thinner layer, but at the same time the ice cap has grown thinner. If you consider the total amount of ice in the ice caps you observe a net ice loss, as it is the case in Antarctica and everywhere.

Unfortunately we lost Cryosat-1 at launch, and Cryosat-2 has just started giving us data about ice thickness. Thus, we don't have a complete historical record and, in addition, we will need to calibrate these new remote sensing data during for many years to come. I'm personally involved in the calibration-validation of another ESA mission, SMOS, and I can confirm you that getting sensible data from new satellites is a lot of work that takes several years. So, we cannot rely on comfortable, large-scale measures of ice thickness to know what is exactly going on. Our only possible reliable evidence about ice thickness comes from repeated in situ measurements at selected locations, and all them indicate an increasing ice loss; but there is always of course a certain degree of uncertainty with these measurements.

Nevertheless, satellite gravimetry can give us good hints. Satellite missions such as Grace or GOCE allow us to measure small differences in the gravitational field of Earth. These measurements can be used to improve our knowledge of Earth's geoid or the average sea level, but also can be used to estimate very slow displacements of land masses and even of land ice (areas of active sea ice change too fast for those techniques to be of application). These measurements have been combined with new GNSS-R reflectometry techniques to evaluate discharge rates by glaciers; to my knowledge this has been done mostly for Greenland, with twenty of so large glaciers being monitored. I guess it is because it is the most accessible area of this kind from Europe and the United States. Pedro Elosegui is a known specialist who was for several decades in the US and now works at my lab. Quite recently Pedro gave us a presentation, compiling the state-of-the-art in the field, and the conclusion is that glacier discharge in Greenland seems to be accelerating, at least during the last decade.

Now, some comments from me. First of all, there is a persistent legend that says that Antarctic ice is "growing" and that this fact, somehow, disproves the whole concept of global warming. This is just a legend. Temperatures are increasing in Antarctica, as everywhere else on Earth. At most, it can be said that the area of the floating ice around Antarctica is constant or slightly growing. But the volume of the Antarctic ice shows a net loss, just as the volume of Arctic ice is decreasing, and Greenland's too. In other words, all the major ice sheets are losing mass because of global warming. Details on this point can be read here:

Allison, I., Alley, R., Fricker, H., Thomas, R., Warner, R. (2009). Ice sheet mass balance and sea level. Antarctic Science. 21(5), 413-426 (full text). In this paper, it is estimated that Anctartica loses something of the order of 100-200 Gigatons of ice every year. Some other estimates (http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm) report a loss of 300 Gigatons/year.

If Antarctica is losing ice, then the flow of icebergs from the ice sheet must increase. That means, in turn, that these icebergs must be older. Then, why the color blue? Well, Antarctic ice is compacted snow. Snow contains a lot of air in the form of small bubbles. As it is compacted under the pressure of an overlying ice mass, it loses more and more of these bubbles. The older the ice, the smaller the density of bubbles. Now, small bubbles scatter light just like the frosted glass of a shower panel. So new ice scatters light and it appears white. On the contrary, old ice is transparent and it takes the color blue because blue light penetrates to a higher depth than red light. In the end, older icebergs show up as blue icebergs. That is a confirmation of the fact that Antarctica is losing continental ice faster than it did 20 years ago.

So, as usual, the question of climate change is shrouded in legends of all kinds; the one about "Antarctica not warming" is just one of the many. But if you look at the science, there is no doubt that global warming is occurring faster than ever.

Antonio Turiel is a physicist working at the Institute of Marine Physics in Barcelona, Spain. In his blog, "the oil crash" (in Spanish) he discusses a wide variety of subjects, all related to Energy; from peak oil to climate change. A recent post of him on the "E-Cat" hoax is available in English on the EnergyBulletin.

h/t Euan Mearns for having started the discussion on blue ice.

Why Cassandra's task is hopeless

2012-01-25T07:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you stumble into something that needs no comments; except to note that Cassandra's task, really, is hopeless.

In Mackerel's Plunder, Hints of Epic Fish Collapse

By MORT ROSENBLUM and MAR CABRA

25 January 2012

TALCAHUANO, Chile – Eric Pineda, a dock agent in this old port south of Santiago, peered deep into the Achernar’s hold at a measly 10 tons of jack mackerel — the catch after four days in waters once so rich they filled the 17-meter fishing boat in a few hours.

Mr. Pineda, like everyone here, grew up with the bony, bronze-hued fish they call jurel, which roams in schools in the southern Pacific.

“It’s going fast,” he said as he looked at the 57-foot boat. “We’ve got to fish harder before it’s all gone.” Asked what he would leave his son, he shrugged: “He’ll have to find something else.”

From the New York Times - h/t The Oil Drum

Centennial of Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory: the start of Earth systems science

2012-01-24T04:29:00.000-08:00

Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) during a scientific expedition in Greenland, in 1912. His theory of "continental drift," presented for the first time in January of that year, started a scientific revolution in geology that deeply affected the way we understand how Earth systems work.

One century ago, in January 1912, Alfred Wegener presented for the first time his theory of "continental drift" at a meeting held in Frankfurt, in Germany (*). Wegener had collected geological and paleontological data that gave weight to an old observation: that the margin of continents on the opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to correspond; as in a gigantic puzzle. Accordingly, Wegener proposed that the present continents were once joined together but had slowly drifted away from each other over hundreds of millions of years. (image source: J. Floor Anthony)

The story of the theory of continental drift spans several decades. Initially rejected by a majority of geologists, it gradually gained acceptance, until it became standard in the 1950s. Later on, it became part of what we call today "plate tectonics" which is a pillar of everything that we know in Earth systems science.

Occasionally, the troubled story of Alfred Wegener's theory has been perversely appropriated by climate deniers to claim that they are discriminated by the scientific establishment. But that only shows that climate deniers don't understand how science works. All new scientific theories are subjected to close scrutiny and Wegener's one was no exception. Its acceptance took time for various reasons, including the start of the First World War, shortly after it had been presented. Mainly, however, it was because at the time of Wegener there was no evidence that continents could actually move and no proof that they actually did. When satisfactory experimental evidence on these points became available, the theory was universally accepted. It is true that the debate on continental drift was harsher than usual, but it was not different than any scientific debate, as you can read in detail at this link. Wegener himself would be appalled today if he could see his name associated to junk science, as sometimes it is (see here, for instance).

The relevance of Wegener's idea of continental drift (and of its underlying mechanism: plate tectonics) is not just related to an old scientific debate. It is the basis of the modern science of Earth's systems, which includes climate science. Continental drift is a manifestation of the dynamic forces existing inside the Earth, in the region that we call "mantle". It is because of the flow of matter from the crust to the mantle and back that the system maintains a concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sufficient to maintain plant photosynthesis. Without plate tectonics, there could be no life on Earth. Indeed, Venus and Mars have no active plate tectonics and - as far as we know - no organic life.

But plate tectonics does not just maintain some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It also regulates its concentration and, with it, the surface temperature of Earth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas acting as the Earth's "thermostat knob." The mechanisms of plate tectonics have slowly reduced its concentration in order to maintain an average constant temperature, despite the gradual increase of solar irradiation over geological times (some 10% each billion years). This regulation is far from being perfect: during the past Aeons, the Earth saw ice ages and very hot periods but, on the average, temperatures remained within the bounds necessary for life to exist. Unfortunately, this regulation mechanism is too slow to remedy to the perturbation we are causing today to climate by our carbon dioxide emissions. Still, what we know about the mechanism of plate tectonics and its consequences on the past history of our planet should make us more careful about what we are doing now to the ecosystems. This knowledge goes back, ultimately, to the work of Alfred Wegener: scientist and pioneer of Earth systems science.

You can read how modern Wegener's view of Earth systems science was from this excerpt from UCMP (University of California Museum of Technology)

"Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence. . . It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw."

* Wegener, Alfred (1912). "Die Herausbildung der Grossformen der Erdrinde (Kontinente und Ozeane), auf geophysikalischer Grundlage" (in German). Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 63: 185–195, 253–256, 305–309. Presented at the annual meeting of the German Geological Society, Frankfurt am Main (January 6, 1912).

Breaking the walls of Diaspar: the revolution of planetary science

2012-01-19T23:51:00.000-08:00

The title of this post derives from the 1956 novel by Arthur C. Clarke "The City and the Stars" which starts with the description of the ancient city of Diaspar - one billion years in our future. Just as the protagonist of the novel breaks one barrier after the other in his quest for truth, so we are breaking one scientific barrier after another in a series of scientific revolutions. A recent one has started with the discovery of a large number of extra-solar planets coupled with the new understanding we have of the mechanisms that keeps our Earth "alive".

If I go back to my teenage years, I can identify some of the reasons that led me to follow a scientific career. One is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke: "The City and the Stars," published in 1956 and that I read when I was, maybe, 15 years old. The name of the city of the novel "Diaspar" has remained riveted in my mind ever since.

"The city and the stars" is "hard" science fiction; it deals with planets, stars and spaceships. You can read it as an adventure novel, but also as an allegory of the human search for truth and enlightenment. It starts with the protagonist locked inside the walls of Diaspar. A jewel of a city of a billion years in our future, but also a small world from which the protagonist tries to escape. And he succeeds; breaking one wall after another, exploring what is left of the ancient planet Earth, and then moving to space to find all sorts of wonders. The novel leaves you breathless with its width and depth. It is pure magic: the magic of scientific discovery.

It is said that science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I can confirm from my experience that it is true. Of course, science fiction makes things easier: it removes the 99% of perspiration. But even in real science, the 1% of inspiration is well worth the 99% of hard work. Good science brings to you the same sensation of wonder that good science fiction produces - the sensation of breaking down one knowledge barrier after another, with the advantage that it is for real!

So, during the past few years, we have had so much good science that it has been almost overwhelming to keep track of it. Every morning, I give a look to the web to see what is new in science and, almost every morning, I am struck by something new and unexpected to be read and understood. It is hard to absorb so much, but I try and it is always fascinating.

The latest scientific revolution is in planetary science. It seems almost unbelievable that just some decades ago people were still debating on whether extrasolar planets actually existed. Today, we are discovering so many of them that it is now believed that almost every star in the galaxy has planets. It all reminds us of the times of Galileo Galilei. Think about that: before Galileo, planets were just specks of light fixed to crystal spheres. Then, after Galileo looked at the night sky with his telescope, - bang! - planet became big balls floating in space. And and not just that: there were small planets orbiting big planets; miniature solar systems. A sudden expansion of the horizon - the breakdown of a knowledge barrier. From Galileo to us, it has been breaking one wall after another: science is enlarging our horizons at a breathless pace. The universe keeps becoming bigger. Now, everytime you raise your eyes to look at the Milky Way, you know that you are looking at a galaxy full of planets. (image below from ESO, showing a comparison of the planets of the Solar System and those of Gliese 581, a star located at about 20 light years away from the Sun. )

But the thrill of new discoveries doesn't just come from knowing that extrasolar planets exist. It comes also from what we know about these planets. A revolution in planetary sciences has been going on at a breathless pace. It is a synthesis that puts together geology, biology, astronomy and physics to give us a picture of the life and the evolution of planets. Life on an Earth-like planet is not just a question of being at the right distance from a star. It is a delicate balance of factors that involve plate tectonics, the core temperature, the carbon cycle, solar irradiation; all interacting with each other to keep a planet "alive". The right combination of these factors can make a planet suitable for organic life and, probably, for the development of intelligent life. So, looking at the sky at night, we what we are seeing is not just a galaxy full planets, but also full of life and - probably - of intelligent life.

At the same time, the new science of planetary systems gives us a pretty clear view of how we can destroy our civilization by upsetting the delicate balance of the factors that keep our planet alive and friendly to us. We can do it in more than one way, but the most effective one is to continue to emit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So, once you have looked at the stars, come back to Earth and start doing something because we are all in trouble. If we manage to destroy ourselves it will little consolation to know that others in the Galaxy may do better than us.

_______________________________________________

About extrasolar planets, you may look at "Centauri Dreams" for updates.

A good synthesis of the interlocking factors that keep planets alive can be found in an article by Milan Cerkovic.

A previous post of mine on galactic civilizations is "The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi paradox"

Why biofuels are not a good idea

2012-01-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

If you have always been thinking that biofuels are not a good idea, this book by Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi will tell you exactly why.

Last year, I was engaged in a public debate on energy with a high level senior official of the Italian government - a "technocrat" if you like to use this term. When I expressed strong doubts about biofuels as a source of energy, his reaction was aggressive. He attacked me personally, hinting that I was on the payroll of the oil industry, since it is obvious that they don't like biofuels. He added that this fact was proven by the statements against biofuels issued by the Saudi ministry of petroleum. Besides, he said, speaking against biofuels is a way to prevent the poor of Brazil from reaping the goods that globalization will bring to them as soon as the biofuel world market of ethanol will be liberalized.(*)

Debates are always a learning experience, this one was no exception. One of the things I learned is that technocrats are just politicians who don't have to worry too much about their constituency. As politicians, their instinct in the debate is to go immediately for the personal attack; it is a strategy honed to perfection through thousands of years of political debate. My opponent applied it without worrying too much about the contradiction implied in accusing me of being on the payroll of the oil industry - think that I have spent the past ten years preaching the arrival of peak oil!

Another thing that I learned from that debate is how, by now, the biofuel industry has become so big that it is already politically incorrect to speak in public against biofuels. If you do that, you are bound to take plenty of flak; which is what happened to me. If you want to survive this kind of attacks, you must be very well prepared on the subject. For this purpose, you may find a lot of help in the recent book "The Biofuel Delusion" by Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi. If you are unsure about why exactly biofuels are the disaster that they are, this book will explain to you that on the basis of a rigorous analysis and plenty of data. It is unfortunate (actually, it is a scandal) that it is so expensive; almost 70 dollars for a copy. But if you are engaged in the energy debate, it is a good investment.

Biofuels are a complex matter and Giampietro and Mayumi use almost 300 pages to eviscerate it in all its aspects. The main point of their analysis is based on fundamental physics: the efficiency of photosynthesis is low and the result is that the areas needed for cultivation are large. If we are thinking of amounts of biofuels comparable to the present needs for transportation, the task is simply unthinkable: there would be no space left for food production. As the authors flatly state at page 128 of the book, "Full substitution of fossil energy with agro-biofuels is impossible."

The large area needed is only one of the problems with biofuels. More in general, agriculture is a good technology for producing food, but it is terribly expensive in terms of the resources it requires. It needs land, water, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical work; all supplies that normally come from fossil fuels. Taking all that into account, the EROEI (energy return for energy invested) of biofuels is generally low; unless the invested energy is supplied by low cost human labor, as it is the case for Brazilian sugar cane. Apart from Brazil, the need of an energy subsidy in the form of fossil fuels makes biofuels unable to deliver their promise of being a "sustainable" technology. They can't help us in reducing our dependency on fossil fuels nor in reducing the emission of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Of course, the biofuel story is more complex than that and Giampietro and Mayumi examine the whole spectrum of possibilities in their book. Are there better biofuels? Or, perhaps, ways of using the present form of biofuels in a more effective way? Yes, of course; there is the promise of "second generation" fuels (cellulosic ethanol) and the possibility of cultivating marginal areas, unsuitable for food production. But the physical factors of the problem don't change much and, right now, biofuels and conventional agriculture are already competing for land and resources. One of consequences may be the increase increase in food prices that we have been seen during the past few years.

In the end, what do we want to do, exactly, with biofuels? Do we really think that the way to solve our energy problems is to use an inefficient technology to support an already inefficient transportation system? The only explanation I can think of for so much emphasis on biofuels is that, once a bad idea is implemented, it starts to gain momentum and then it becomes nearly impossible to stop.

At this point, you may wonder how the debate with my technocratic opponent ended. Well, I was tempted to use his own tactics and accuse him to be on the payroll of the biofuel lobby. But I am not a politician and I didn't do that; also because I saw that it was not necessary. If you have some experience in speaking in public, you soon develop a sixth sense about what your audience thinks. In this case, it was clear to me: the audience was with me, not with my technocratic opponent. They just didn't buy the idea that biofuels can solve the world's fuel problem without starving anybody - to say nothing about the idea that globalization will make the Brazilian peasants rich. Did he sense that, too? I can't say. A few months later, he got an even higher level position in the new "technocratic" Monti government in Italy.

* By the way, the recent abolition of the government subsidies on corn ethanol in the US is probably a good thing, but it does not at all end the government support on biofuels, as you can read in this interesting article by Mike Sheldon on "The Oil Drum." Note, in particular, that the abolition of subsidies comes together with the abolition of the tariff on ethanol imports from Brazil and that could make ethanol cheaper than it was with subsidies! And it remains to be seen how that will affect the Brazilian peasants.

See also: The Earthscan's page on "The Biofuel Delusion"
Mario Giampietro's page at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

The return of "The Limits to Growth"

2012-01-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

The main results of the "base case" scenario of "The Limits to Growth" study, from a recent article on the New Scientist by Debora McKenzie (available upon registration)

The return of interest in "The Limits to Growth" continues. After decades of ridicule and insults, the value of the 1972 study and of its sequels is more and more recognized. The latest item in the series of revisitations is the article published by Debora McKenzie in the New Scientist on Jan 10, 2012 and titled "Boom and Doom, revisiting prophecies of collapse" (can be read on the New Scientist site after registration)

On the whole, the article by McKenzie is very well done and it summarizes all the main points of the story: how Limits never made the mistakes it was accused to have made, how the study was demonized, and how its scenarios are still relevant to our situation today. The article has been extensively researched and it cites the opinion of most of the researchers who have been working on the reappraisal of the study and of its methods, including my book, "The Limits to Growth Revisited".

A point that is less than satisfactory in the New Scientist's article is about the relation of the Limits scenarios with the present findings of climate science. It says that Limits "was too optimistic about the future impact of pollution," but I think this is not the case. The study did contain at least one scenario in which economic collapse took place because of the rapid rise in pollution. But the main point is that Limits was perhaps the first study able to identify the interaction of pollution and the industrial system that produces it. What the authors of Limits called "persistent pollution" in 1972 could later be identified with the forcing effect of greenhouse gases. It is not possible, today, to say whether the economy will collapse because of resource depletion or because of global warming; but that the terms of the dilemma were already clarified in 1972 must be considered as a remarkable intuition!

The other point that connects "The Limits to Growth" to climate science is the demonization treatment that the study received after its publication. This point is well covered in McKenzie's article. The smear campaign set up against Limits and its authors is surprising similar to the one unleashed in our times against climate science and against climate scientists. The only difference is that the methods used nowadays against science are much more aggressive. The authors of "The Limits to Growth" were often ridiculed and insulted; occasionally they also received death threats, but the level of abuse that climate scientists have been receiving in recent times is much higher. That is, perhaps, because the consequences of global warming on our society could be much more radical and fearsome than anything that Limits had foreseen decades ago.

This said, it is clear that we can learn a lot from the story of the Limits and its demonization. Unfortunately, one of the things we learn from history is that we almost never learn from history.

Blue ice

2012-01-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

Coming to terms with Nature,
by Antonio Turiel

A colleague of mine is occasionally engaged in oceanographic campaigns in Antarctica. A couple of years ago he found himself revisiting an area that he had seen for the first time some 20 years earlier. Coming back, he told me many stories about his travel; of how he had seen his old oceanographic ship, his colleagues on board..... After that, he became pensive and he told me, "You know, the worst is not that each year there is more free sea. 20 years ago, the icebergs were white. Now they are blue." I said, "yes," and we both remained silent.

The color of the ice is related the amount of air which remains trapped inside. As the ice is trapped in higher depths and is more compressed, the air escapes and the ices becomes more and more blue. Those icebergs seen by my colleague hadn't seen the light of the sun for a long time; perhaps centuries......

Continue reading the complete post in Spanish, or in Italian.

Old ladies of the Appennini mountains

2012-01-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Fidalma, resident in the village "Ca' di Franca" (Arezzo) in the Appennini Mountains, Italy. She has nicely agreed to have her picture taken and shown here. Photo taken by the author on Jan 5, 2012.

Some areas of Italy have maintained the lifestyle of a hundred years ago; especially in the mountains. In small villages, people still rely on wood for heating their houses and for cooking, as their ancestors have been doing for thousands of years, before fossil fuels appeared. Old ladies in these places still dress the way they were dressing 50 years ago, as Mrs Fidalma does in the photo above. Below, another picture, this time showing Mrs. Iliana of the village of Trecciano, in the same area of the Appennini Mountains. It gives a good idea of the nice atmosphere of a house all made in stone, heated by a fireplace.

Maybe it is a world that will disappear in a few more years, or maybe it is a world that is going to return with the gradual disappearance of fossil fuels. But, what was I doing in the mountains, in a cold day of January? Well, there are some interesting windy places, there.....

Peak everything: return to segregation in Italian trains?

2012-01-04T03:39:00.000-08:00

This post is a bit off topic, but I thought to publish a little note on this subject because it seems to me that it illustrates how so many things are changing in this world that looks more and more "post-peak". One thing that is clearly changing is the increasing unbalance in the distribution of wealth, worldwide. An effect of this change seems to appear in some recent choices made by the Italian national railways ("Trenitalia"). The company has recently introduced a new, low-cost "fourth class" in their trains. In this class, passengers are segregated; they can't access the other three classes, where the bar and the restaurant are.

That's already nasty in itself; but what the managers of Trenitalia seemed to have in mind came up from something they published on their site. There were pictures of the passengers in all the four classes; those of the first three classes were all white, whereas those in fourth class were - imagine that - black (see above). Of course, there were protests and the image has been hastily removed from the trenitalia site after the scandal erupted. You can read the whole story (in Italian) here, and here. Trenitalia has not apologized, so far.

Things are indeed changing in this post-peak world.

Losing the war against the planet

2012-01-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

We knew we had picked up a fight we couldn't win when we tackled a whole planet, but perhaps we didn't expect that the planet would fight back so viciously and so effectively. 2011 has been a year of environmental disasters in numbers and intensity never seen before. And we ain't seen nothing yet!

Give a look of the photos of the rout of humankind at thinkprogress and also at Desdemona Despair.

(for the Desdemona link - H.T. Cristiano Bottone)

Happy new year from Cassandra

2012-01-01T01:27:00.000-08:00

Despite all her magic spells, sometimes even Cassandra has troubles in predicting the future.

(image: painting by John Waterhouse)

Every year, during the past few years, I have been publishing a post with my predictions for the new year on my Italian blog. I think I have been rather successful in this role of mine as Cassandra, the prophetess. Sometimes, I have been surprised myself of how accurate some of my statements have been. For instance, at the beginning of 2008 I said something about a coming financial crisis and how I expected oil prices to crash (I stated that also in English, here and here). And, at the beginning of 2011, I said that I expected big troubles for the European Union (see here, in Italian). You see? I think I should be scared of what I have been doing. But, in reality, it was nothing more than common sense, good data, and the general attitude that things never stay the same.

So, how about the coming year? I was planning to write something about what 2012 could bring but, this time, it is beyond my possibilities; I am overwhelmed. The situation is so complex, so unstable, so desperately out of control that, really, anything can happen. And most of the things that can happen are bad. War in Middle East, the breakdown of the European Union, financial collapses, the bursting up of Arctic methane, epidemics, famines, major environmental disasters..... Anything can happen, even that 2012 could be, miraculously, a quiet year.

So, all what I can say is "happy new year" to everybody and hope, just hope, that Cassandra's predicting power could make this wish true.

Chemistry of an Empire: the Last Roman Empress

2011-12-22T05:57:00.000-08:00

A 5th century medallion showing what is perhaps the only image we have of Galla Placidia (388-450 c.e.), the last (and the only) Western Roman Empress. The inscription says "Domina Nostra, Galla Placidia, Pia, Felix, Augusta," that is "Our Lady, Galla Placidia, Pious, Blessed and Venerable." A contemporary of such figures as Saint Augustine, Saint Patrick, Attila the Hun, and – perhaps – King Arthur, Placidia had the rare chance to be able to do something that past Roman Emperors never could do; take the Empire to its next stage which was to be, unavoidably, its demise.

As I was preparing this essay on Empress Galla Placidia, I found myself giving an impromptu talk on the subject to my students in chemistry on the last lesson before Christmas. Later on, I thought that I could write my essay in the form of that talk. So, here it is. It is much expanded in comparison to what I said to my students on that occasion, but still it maintains the essence of it. I have added headings and some figures.

Introduction: chemistry of an empire

I think there won't be a lecture in chemistry, today. We are close to Christmas, there are just a few of you, and so it is better to skip a long and boring lecture; we'll have it after the pause for the holidays. So, we could simply leave for a coffee but, maybe, we could use this time we have in a different way. You know, there is a subject that I work on when I have some free time: Roman history. So, I was thinking that, instead of giving you a lecture in chemistry, I could speak to you about that. How would you like to hear the story of a Roman princess who married a barbarian king and then became Empress of Rome?

Now, I see from your faces that - yes - you would like to be told this story! But note that perhaps it is a subject that is not so far from chemistry as you might think. You see, civilizations can be seen as huge chemical reactions and you know that chemical reactions tend to flare up and then subside; it is what we call "chemical kinetics," you have studied that. The same happens for empires; they tend to flare up and then disappear; that's what happened to the Roman Empire, as you know. So, civilizations and chemical reactions can be studied using similar methods; it is a field of science that goes under the name of "system dynamics". In a sense, there are forces pushing people to do things just like there are forces pushing molecules to react. In chemistry we call those forces “chemical potentials”, about people we might use the term “destiny” or "karma" or something like that. But perhaps the difference is not so great.

But don't worry about equations. I said that today I was going to tell you a story, and I am going to do it. It is the story of Galla Placidia; born a Roman princess, then Queen of the Goths, and, in the end, Empress of Rome. It is a great story of love, sex, and war. So, let's start!

The fall of Rome.

Now, I am asking you to close your eyes and forget for a moment where you are. Forget that you are in a classroom, forget that you are students of chemistry, forget that you live in the 21st century. Try to imagine something that existed way back in time: ancient Rome in the first years of the 5th century of our era, fifteen hundred years ago.

Yes, Rome, the eternal city, the center of the world, the cradle of civilization, the place all the roads lead to. At the beginning of the 5th century, Rome is still the largest city of Europe; the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Think of the city as stretched over its seven hills; surrounded by the massive Aurelian walls, full of marble palaces, markets, amphitheaters, gardens, and fountains. The Roman Senate still holds sessions in the Curia and gladiators still fight in the arenas, as they have been doing for centuries.

But, with the 5th century, things have changed a lot for the Empire. The victorious armies of old are gone; the Emperor himself doesn't even live in Rome any longer. He stays in the small town of Ravenna, protected by the marshes that surround it. And, in 410 A.D., Rome is under siege.

Imagine that: outside the walls of Rome there is a whole nation: men, women, children, horses and cattle. Tens of thousands of people who have marched there all the way from the North: the Visigoths. They are led by their king, Alaric, and now they are besieging Rome. While the Emperor, Honorius, is hiding in Ravenna, the only barrier that keeps the Barbarians out of the city is the circle of the ancient Aurelian walls. But that cannot last forever. Without an army to defend the walls, the outcome of the siege could be only one. In August of 410, the Barbarians broke in and they sacked Rome. That date was to be remembered in history: the most powerful city in the world, the “eternal” city, had fallen. The shock for the event reverberated for centuries. Among other things, it inspired Augustine's "The City of God," still well known today.

Now, how was that the largest city in the world, the eternal city, had ended up taken and sacked by a band of Barbarians? It was just the final point of a decline that had been going on for centuries. You know that the peak of the Roman Empire had been at some moment in the second century A.D. After that period, it had been all downhill: civil wars, Barbarian invasions, epidemics, famines and all that. Not a smooth process, of course. There had been very difficult periods and periods when the Empire seemed to be able to recover. On the whole, the Western Empire had managed to remain all in one piece up to the end of the 4th century. But, with the 5th century, things were to change and, this time, the Empire would never really recover.

Edward Gibbon gives us an especially poignant report of these events in his “Decline and fall of the Roman Empire”. In the year 405 (perhaps), Europe saw a very cold winter – so cold that it froze the waters of the Rhine river. That river had been the Eastern border of the Empire for centuries. It had been chosen after that the Romans had been defeated by the Germans at Teutoburg, long before. But when it froze, a great number of Barbarians crossed over. That was the end of the border fortifications; the Romans simply couldn't defend them any more. The walls were abandoned and left to crumble to dust for ever and ever. It was an epochal change; from then on, the Barbarians were inside the Empire and they would stay there.

In the great turmoil of those years, a large band of Barbarians marched directly towards Rome. In 406 AD, they were met at the foot of the Appennini Mountains, at the city of Faesulae, by what Gibbon calls "the last army of the Republic". The Romans had gathered there all the forces they could muster and they succeeded in stopping the Barbarians. Trapped in a narrow valley, the Barbarians were nearly all killed or taken prisoners and sold as slaves. Their King, Radagaisus, was captured and beheaded. These events are still remembered as legends in the area where the battle was fought.

It was a great victory for Rome and in particular for the general who had been leading the Roman army: Flavius Stilicho, magister militum, commander in chief of all the Imperial Forces. But there was a problem: successful generals are never liked by suspicious emperors. Besides, Stilicho was a Barbarian himself, a Vandal, and that didn't make him popular with the Romans. So, soon after the battle, Emperor Honorius had Stilicho executed for treason. That was a big mistake, a very big one; you might say that Honorius had shot himself in the foot with his crossbow. By then, the Roman Army was composed mainly of Barbarians and, with their chief, Stilicho, betrayed and killed, most of them deserted. The army melted away and many of those who had deserted joined the army of King Alaric. Now, you can understand how it was that Rome was left undefended and it ended up falling to the Barbarians.

Galla Placidia: Roman Princess

What I have been telling to you is the history of the fall of Rome as we can read it in the texts of the chroniclers. Actually, very little is left of those events in terms of contemporary sources; most of what we have was written decades, if not centuries, after the events. So, we need to put together all the sources we have to try to understand what was exactly happening. And there is a human side to the events that goes beyond the fact that Rome was in decline and that it eventually fell. We can just barely imagine what was the atmosphere in Rome during the two years of the siege, what people thought and how they saw an event that - by all means - they must have found incredible; actually impossible. Rome had not been besieged for a thousand years, it was the greatest city in the known world. That it would fall to a petty Barbarian lord, that was.... come on. It just couldn't be!

The problem is that when people face something that doesn't fit with the way they think the world should be, they tend to ignore it. If they can't, they may go crazy. And the Romans went crazy. They tried whatever they could think of. They raised a new Emperor, someone named Priscus Attalus, with all the pomp involved. But the Barbarian King was unimpressed. Then, they sent to him a delegation of Senators, and they told the King how numerous the Romans were. To that, Alaric answered, solemnly (I figure) “The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed” Now, tell me if this is not the stuff legends are made of!

At this point, the Romans really went crazy. Yes, they went nuts, bananas, watermelons, whatever you like to call that condition. They started looking for a culprit, a scapegoat, someone to blame. Now, you remember that Emperor Honorius had accused his general Flavius Stilicho of treason; that is, of being colluded with the Barbarians. That was already an effect of rampaging paranoia. But, in the besieged Rome, paranoia went up of a few notches. Someone noticed that Stilicho's widow, Serena, was in Rome. If her husband had been a traitor, well, she had to be a traitoress. Serena was the cousin of Emperor Honorius, a noblewoman of high rank. But when paranoia becomes the rule, it generates pure evil. Serena was accused of treason, sentenced to death by the Senate, and executed by strangling.

It is at this point that we have the first appearance of Galla Placidia in history as an adult, she was around 20 years old at that time. We are told by the chronicler Zosimus that the execution of Serena was done "with Galla Placidia's consent."

We have a little story to tell, here. Let's go back of a few years, when Placidia's father, Theodosius 1st, "The Great" was the last Roman Emperor to rule over both the Eastern and the Western part of the Empire. He had two male children, Arcadius and Honorius, to whom he left the Empire. Arcadius took the East and Honorius the West. But Theodosius had also a younger daughter, Galla Placidia, who got nothing. Then as now, being female is not an asset when it is question of inheriting an Empire. But Theodosius may have understood that his two male children would not make good emperors (they didn't) and so he kept Placidia in reserve, sort of; something that turned out to have been a smart move. Theodosius left Placidia in care of his best general, Flavius Stilicho, who raised her in his household, with his wife Serena who was also Theodosius' niece.

So, in the years of the siege, Placidia was in Rome, probably staying with her foster mother, Serena. Now, we can barely imagine a situation in which the Senate decides to sentence to death the cousin of the Emperor, as Serena was. But Placidia was of even higher rank in terms of nobility. She had the title of "puella nobilissima." I think you know enough Latin to translate this as "most noble girl," which is, of course, the equivalent of what we call "princess" today. So, in a sense, the Senators got cold feet with their idea of killing Serena and they asked to the highest rank noble in Rome, Placidia, to take the responsibility of what was, in effect, a legalized murder. And they were asking her to agree on the murder of someone who was both her foster mother and a close relative.

We can't say, of course, what passed in Placidia's mind at that time. We can't even be sure that she actually approved anything. We know about this story only from a line written by Zosimus, a Greek who wrote more than a century after the events. But, if it did happen, it was the first political decision taken by Placidia in her life; something that may give us some idea of her way of thinking. Possibly, she simply cracked under the stress of the moment. But she may also have reasoned that opposing the Senate would have made no difference. They had already decided on that crazy idea of killing Serena, what was to stop them if they were to get even more crazy and decide to kill also Placidia? After all, she was Stilicho's foster daughter; she could have been a traitoress, too. So, maybe Placidia just didn't try to fight a battle she couldn't win. It was her style: don't fight the unavoidable. We'll see that it will resurface more than once, later on. Placidia could be flexible, adapt and thrive even in very difficult situations.

With the execution of Serena, the supposed traitoress, we may imagine that the Romans expected that the Visigoths would vanish in a puff of smoke. But, of course, that didn't happen. In 410 a.d. the Visigoths broke in, they sacked Rome, and not just that: they took a very big prize: Galla Placidia herself; puella nobilissima, half sister of the ruling emperor. The chroniclers don't mention anything like Placidia being dragged away from her palace, kicking and screaming – actually they are totally silent on this point. Probably, that means something. We don't have to think that Placidia was happy to join the Barbarians but, again, she didn't try to avoid the unavoidable. We can't even exclude that she may have felt safer with the Barbarians than with the treacherous Roman Senators. At least, as far as we know, the Visigoths treated Galla Placidia with all the honors due to a puella nobilissima, a Roman Princess.

The Visigoths stayed in Rome for just three days. As sackings go, theirs was rather mild. They burned and sacked a few buildings but, mainly, they ransacked what gold and silver they could find and then they left, heading South, with the idea of reaching Africa and of settling there. They were taking Galla Placidia with them. After a long and slow trip, they arrived to the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula, but they couldn't cross to Africa because a storm destroyed the ships they had assembled on the coast. Then, King Alaric died and legend has that he was buried under the riverbed of the Busento river, together with his share of the gold sacked in Rome. Another event that rings of legend. People are still looking for that treasure, today!

At this point, stranded in Southern Italy and short of food, the Visigoths had no choice but to go back, slowly retracing their road. They were led by their new king, Athaulf, half brother of Alaric. The travel to Southern Italy had weakened them considerably and, when they arrived close to Rome, they couldn't even dream to sack the city again. They kept moving on and, eventually, they stopped in Southern France, by then largely abandoned by the Roman Empire. And, on the way, Placidia married Athaulf, perhaps in Italy, or perhaps in Narbonne, in France. That was in 414, four years after the fall of Rome. Placidia was around 25 at that time.

The Royal Marriage

So, we have arrived to the royal marriage; it is something that most of us seem to be very interested in! I think you are all visualizing the Galla Placidia and Athaulf getting married and, indeed, it must have been something special. It was celebrated with great pomp and high Roman festivities. We even have a description of the magnificent gifts that were given to Placidia from the booty that the Goths had captured in Rome. The wedding speech was given by a Roman Senator, Priscus Attalus, who had been claiming the title of Emperor from the time of the siege of Rome. Attalus even sang a song at the wedding; you know, that was something: think of having an Emperor singing at your wedding!

Galla Placida, the Roman Princess, now gladly took for herself the title of “Queen of the Goths”. I say “gladly” because she never reneged that title later in life, no matter what happened to her – and we'll see that a lot of things happened. But why that? I mean, she already had the title of Roman Princess, she had good possibilities to marry a would-be emperor and become Empress herself. Why would she want to become Queen of a Barbarian nation? In addition, think that Athaulf was the brother of Alaric, the king who had sacked Rome. If you can imagine the daughter of an American president marrying the brother of Osama Bin Laden, well, then you can get some idea of what kind of decision Placidia took.

Of course, 1500 years after the event, we can't say what passed in Galla Placidia's mind and we can't exclude that there was a romantic element in her decision. That brings up the question of whether Athaulf was a handsome man, but we have no portraits of him. We don't even know how old he was at the time of this marriage. We know that he had been married before, he had four children from his first wife, but we have no idea of what happened to her. So, we can only say that, probably, he was older than Placidia, but that's about it. We know much more about Placida, but we don't have a portrait that we can attribute to her, either. Nevertheless, if we want to understand this story, we have to figure out in our minds the faces of these characters. I am sure that you have been “seeing” in your minds both Placidia and Athaulf – our minds are made in this way; we can't avoid that. Think of when you speak over the phone with someone you never met – you can't avoid to build up a portrait of him or her in your mind.

So, what could Athaulf and Placidia have looked like? About Athaulf, the fact that he was a Barbarian King doesn't mean that you should imagine him as Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie “Conan the Barbarian.” Not at all, of course! Athaulf surely didn't go around in a bear skin and with a horned helmet on his head. The best we can do to visualize him is to think of the one contemporary portrait of a high rank Barbarian we have: Flavius Stilicho; the Vandal general who was Placidia's foster father. We have an ivory diptych of him and of his wife, Serena, and their son, Eucherius. In this image, Stilicho is shown as tall and handsome; a bit solemn while wearing Roman clothes. Athaulf could have looked much like him: tall, handsome, and bearded.

And how about Placidia? Well, as I said we don't have a portrait of her. We might try to get some idea of what she looked like from the portrait of Serena, her cousin. She is shown almost as tall as her husband, Stilicho, and as a handsome and imposing lady – she must have been in her forties when that portrait was made. She wears a heavy necklace that looks like being made of pearls. You know, there is a legend that says that Serena was cursed when she took a necklace from a statue of the goddess Rhea Sylvia – maybe it is just that necklace. Actually, the whole household of Stilicho seems to have been cursed; he and his wife both died of violent death, including their son, Eucherius. But that's another story; let's just say that the portrait of Serena tells us, at least, how Placidia would dress in formal occasions; an elaborate garment that was called a “Palla”.

But we do know something about Placidia's face. We can see it in some coins minted during her later reign as Empress. The problem is that these portraits are anything but realistic. It is the same problem we have with Cleopatra, the Egyptian Queen. We tend to think of Cleopatra as a very beautiful woman, but we don't have a portrait that we can attribute to her for sure. So, looking at her face on coins, well, she looks frankly ugly. But, of course, those portraits on coins were not supposed to be anything realistic and we can happily continue imagining Cleopatra with the face of Elizabeth Taylor, who interpreted her in an old Hollywood movie.

Now, about Placidia, it is the same problem we have for Cleopatra. If Placidia looked the way she is shown on some coins, well, ahem...... we might pity poor Athaulf who had to marry her. But, as for Cleopatra, these coins are not supposed to be realistic. Actually, different coins show different faces for Placidia; so we can reasonably be sure that, in most cases, whoever made the portrait didn't have a chance to see the Empress in the face. In the end, the closest thing we have to a portrait of Placidia is a gold medallion; one of a couple, the other showing her half brother, Honorius. I think we can say that it gives us at least some idea of what Placidia looked like. Looking at it, we see that she had fine features and a slender neck under her elaborate hairdo. Surely, we have good reasons to imagine her as a beautiful woman; after all, her mother, Galla, had been said to be the “fairest woman in the Roman Empire.” In the end, if you like to imagine her as Audrey Hepburn playing the role of the princess in that old movie, "Roman Holiday," I'd say, why not?

So, let's go back to the imperial marriage. We have two handsome people getting married: Athaulf and Placidia, but, of course, that can't be the whole story. What we can say is that people do things for many reasons: sometimes because of logic, sometimes they act on impulse. But don't forget that real life is not a fairy tale. You know that love is a chemical reaction and that chemical reactions have a way to go on by themselves if there is a chemical potential driving them. And, as we said before, this potential is something that we may call “destiny” if we like. And I think that in this case there was a very strong potential that was leading Athaulf and Placidia to react with each other, to marry.

Now, I would like to ask you a question. Can you think of another figure who was trying to do something similar to what Placidia was doing, just in that period; that is, a Roman marrying a Barbarian? It takes a small jump of imagination to connect Galla Placidia to this figure. Can you make it? Think about that for a moment and the name will come to your mind. That name you know very, very, well: it is King Arthur!

Yes, King Arthur, the legendary hero. We can't say for sure if he actually existed. At least, historians say that there is no proof that he ever existed. But that doesn't mean that he didn't exist and if he existed there is a reasonable chance that he was a contemporary of Galla Placidia, during the 5th century. At that time, Britain had ceased to be part of the Roman Empire and it is likely that Placidia never came to know the name of a petty Barbarian King – Arthur – who ruled part of a remote northern island. Arthur, on his part, surely knew little of the events that took place in the far away Roman Empire. But, curiously, Arthur and Placidia – contemporary or not – may have followed similar paths in their lives.

You know that the core of the Arthurian cycle is the love of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. The way we often interpret the story is that Arthur was Roman and Guinevere was British (actually, Welsh). You may have seen the recent movie “King Arthur,” the one that was released in 2004. It ends with the scene of the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere. It is a stunningly beautiful scene and it symbolizes the whole theme of the film. It is the marriage not of just a man and a woman, but of two civilizations. So, their marriage implies the fusion of the Roman and the British culture. That was happening in Britain earlier than in the rest of Europe because, there, the Roman Empire had ceased to exist already during the 4th century AD.

I am mentioning this movie to you just to show how we can still “feel” quite a lot about an age as remote as the 5th century. The Arthurian cycle pervades our culture still today even though, as I said, we can't even be sure that a king named Arthur ever existed. But the fifth century was a great generator of legends. Think of the Nibelungenlied, the saga of the Nibelungs. You know that story; you know the names of the characters: Siegfried, Hagen, Kriemhild. It comes from the same period, the 5th century AD and it echoes of events of that age, including the presence in the story of historical personages, such as Attila the Hun, who also was a contemporary of Galla Placidia.

It is curious that of those characters, the one for which we do have the most historical data, Galla Placidia, is the one who didn't generate epic poems. I feel a bit sorry for Placidia because of this, but so it goes. I think it is because civilization stymies creativity. Placidia's foster-father, Stilicho, was rich enough that he could keep a house poet, Claudian, who was a "panegyrist;" someone whose job was to sing the deeds of his masters. And Claudian did that; he wrote poems praising Stilicho and the members of his family, but almost nobody remembers those poems today. As I was studying the story of Placidia, I made a honest effort to read Claudian. I found that he is refined, clever, cultured and unbelievably banal. That is, when I say “banal” I mean real silly. You know, Claudian looks to me as something not unlike our TV advertising: it is clever and often visually stunning but, in the end, it is just about eating hamburgers. As a note, Claudian mentions Placidia once, as a child, all clad in gold, at the imperial coronation of her half brothers. A glimpse we have of that time, so remote that even a small detail is to be treasured as much as possible.

Queen of the Goths

In marrying Athaulf, Placidia may simply have ceded to the unavoidable; as it was her typical style. But in following her destiny, Placidia may also have had a specific plan; surely she had a way to seize an opportunity when she saw one. You see, she was a Roman princess and she had this potential of becoming Empress. She couldn't do that as long as her half brother, Honorius, was alive, but Honorius was childless. So, Placidia must have had something in mind when she named her son "Theodosius", the same name of his grand-father, Theodosius “The Great.” From what the chroniclers tell us, it seems clear that Placidia's idea was nothing less than taking over the throne from her half-brother, Honorius, and starting a Gothic-Roman dynasty that would have ruled the Empire. A bold plan, if ever there was one.

But there was much more in Placidia's plans than simply ruling an Empire. You see, the fifth century looks like our times for many reasons; one was the great migrations. It was a time when people marched on and on, searching for a place to settle, and that brought many contrasts, battles and wars. For the Romans, the people who had entered their empire were invaders or, in some case, immigrants; that was what the term "Barbarian" meant: simply "foreigner". Legal or illegal as they could be, immigrants they were looked with suspicion – just like today we look at our immigrants. At that time, just like today, there were people who wanted to send the immigrants back home, or just get rid of them one way or another. But that wasn't easy and, as we saw, the immigrants had become numerous and powerful enough that they had been able to sack Rome. So, the Romans would have had to learn how to live with their Barbarian immigrants; but at the time of Placidia many Romans just couldn't resign to the idea they had to do that. As I said, there are remarkable similarities with our times!

In a way, what was happening was a big chemical reaction: the two “reactants”, Barbarians and Romans, had come together on that fated winter of 405, when the border fortifications of the Empire had collapsed. Now, there was nothing that anyone could do – the reactants were mixed together, the reaction was going on. It could not be stopped and Placidia's idea was to favor it. Again, we see her style: don't fight the unavoidable, let it happen. In this case, the unavoidable meant anticipating something that in actual history would take several centuries to happen: the merging of the Roman and German peoples in Europe. Placidia was taking this merging on herself by marrying a Barbarian and bearing a child to him. According to the chroniclers, it was she who convinced her husband, Athaulf, of this idea. Athaulf is reported to have said that initially he had planned to destroy Rome and the Romans, but after that he had met Placidia, he wanted to live in peace with them. Maybe it is a fancy story, but it gives us some idea of what was passing in the minds of the characters of this story.

It would be nice, at this point, to say that Athaulf and Placida lived happily ever after and that their son, Theodosius, became Emperor of the Romans and, at the same time, King of the Goths. But things didn't go that way, of course. It was a beautiful dream, but also an impossible one.

The military situation was changing. The Romans had managed to re-organize and rebuild an army under the leadership of a new commander in chief: Constantius. He seems to have been a very competent general; he never fought big battles but almost always he obtained what he wanted. The Visigoths started feeling the pressure and they had to leave Southern France and move to Spain. Their retreat must have been rather hasty, since they had to abandon Attalus, the usurper who had sung at Placidia's marriage. He was captured by Costantius and sent to Ravenna, where he suffered the humiliation of having a hand cut off before being sent to exile.

In Spain, the Visigoths settled in Barcelona, which a that time was a fortified stronghold. There, everything went wrong. Little Theodosius died before being one year old. Then, Athaulf was killed in a conspiracy. Maybe it was the result of the loss of prestige that he had suffered with the retreat from Southern France. Surely, there were Visigoths much more aggressive than Athaulf in the way they thought they should deal with the Romans; there may well have been something like a “war party”. The new king was one of them. He was named Sigeric and, just to give some idea of what he had in mind, let me tell you that he forced Placidia to march for miles on foot, while following her, riding his horse. Fortunately, as I said, she was strong and in good health.

But Sigeric ruled for just one week; I think that the Goths were afraid of what he was planning to do – and correctly so; as I said, the Romans were now much stronger than they had been at the time of the siege of Rome. So, someone got rid of Sigeric and a new, more diplomatic king was installed - someone named Wallia. The new king started negotiations with Costantius and, eventually, he sent Placidia back to Ravenna in exchange for food and a peace treaty. That was the end of Placidia's time with the Goths. For all her life, she maintained the title of “Queen of the Goths”, but she would never be with them again.

Galla Placidia: the Empress

The story of Galla Placidia seems to have been conceived from the beginning as the plot of an adventure movie. It is full of events and it swings up an down as a rollercoaster. So, we saw that Placidia started as a princess, then she was prisoner of the Goths, then she became their Queen, then she was again their prisoner. A series of oscillations that was to go on for quite some time.

With Placidia back to Ravenna, things changed again. It seems that Constantius had something in mind about her; actually he may have been an early suitor of hers. Anyway, the two got married soon after arriving in Ravenna. We can't say whether Placidia was happy about that but, as usual, she didn't fight the unavoidable and she followed opportunities when she saw one. The couple had two children and, later on, Constantius, as the husband of a member of the Imperial family, managed to be raised to the title of “co-emperor” of the Western Empire. At this point, Placidia obtained the title of "Augusta." It was not exactly the same title as “Imperator” which means “commander” and has to do with leading armies. But, for all practical purposes, she was Empress of Rome. You see? A big swing upward of the rollercoaster.

Now, there is a lot to say about Placidia's life as Empress and the rollercoaster was to go through a few more swings up and down. But let me go quickly with the story because, as you perhaps have heard, “the art of boredom consists in telling everything.” So, Constantius died a few months after having been raised to the Imperial Purple and the situation in Ravenna evolved into a squabble where Honorius and Placidia, Emperor and Empress, started behaving as the characters of old western movies; you know, when they say, "this town ain't big enough for both of us."

There are many curious details about the fight of Honorius and Placidia. One is that Placidia was accused of incest with her half brother; that may have been just bad press against her but, who knows, maybe she was using all the means she had to try to control him. That's a curious facet of Placidia's personality, considering that she was a devout Catholic and she was always said to be an exemplary spouse and a chaste widow. But she had enemies who would surely spread rumors about her. Was this one true or false? We'll never know. Then, there is mention of Placidia's Gothic bodyguards. They had accompanied her since the time when she was Queen of the Goths (which she still was – she never wanted to abandon that title!). So, the fight got ugly in the streets of Ravenna and, no matter how brave Placidia's bodyguards were, her brother Honorius managed to get the upper hand.

And here we have another swing down of the rollercoaster. Placidia, thrown out of Ravenna, could only take refuge in Costantinople; the capital of the Eastern Empire. There, her nephew had become Emperor with the name of Theodosius II. Placidia arrived in front of him with little more than the clothes she had on. But the rollercoaster swung up again: while Placidia was there, Honorius died and an usurper took his place. At this point Theodosius II thought that he couldn't lose the Western Empire to the dynasty; so he gave to Placidia a whole army to go back to Italy and reconquer Ravenna. The usurper didn't have a chance, poor guy. He was defeated, captured, had one hand cut off, then he was paraded around on a donkey, and finally beheaded. We don't know if Placidia ordered that herself, but those were hard times and if you wanted to be an emperor (or an empress) you had to take the risks involved. No one ever said that Placidia was Ms. Nice Girl, anyway.

Then, in 425 AD, Placidia took the title of Augusta for herself alone, although theoretically on behalf of her son, Valentinian. That was the end of her rollercoaster ride in life – no more swings up and down from now on. She was to rule as Empress for 12 years and she maintained a strong influence at court as Empress Mother for 13 more years; until her death, in 450 AD, when she was 62 years old.

Ruling an empire.

Now, let's play a little game, a game that I think all of us have played inside our minds. If you were the absolute ruler of the world, the Emperor of Earth, what would you do to solve the world's problems? I am sure you have plenty of ideas that you would put into practice; you know, how eliminate hunger, reduce pollution, stop global warming, make everyone happy - all that. Of course, that is only a dream for us, but there have been people in the past who really had tremendous power in their hands. Not on the whole world, of course, no single person has ever ruled it. But there existed people who ruled sizable parts of the world and their power was absolute and subjected to no rules. The Roman Emperors of the last period of the Empire were of that kind. They were called porphirogenites, “born in the purple,” they were semi-divine rulers. You know, if you were emperor at that time, you couldn't turn your head left or right when you walked; your subjects could speak to you only if you addressed them first, you had to wear heavy clothes all the time, and God knows what else the imperial protocol would impose on you. There is a curious detail about Constantius, Placidia's second husband, who said that becoming Emperor had been a terrible experience for him: too much protocol! That was the price of absolute power.

Actually, “absolute power” is an exaggeration. Galla Placidia, as any emperor before and after her,; had limits to what she could do. One of these limits was that she couldn't lead armies herself. She had to rely on generals and that was big problem: as it always happens in history, successful generals tend to take all the power for themselves and, of course, unsuccessful generals are totally useless. So, during her career as Empress, Placidia's main problem was to control her generals by balancing one against the other. One of these generals was named Aetius, you may have heard the name. He was quite a character, he was a Roman but he had been raised with the Huns, so they were his allies and they would fight for him when he needed (of course he had to pay them!). But Aetius was also the general who led the Roman army that stopped Attila the Hun from invading Europe at the famous Battle of Chalons, in 452 AD.

Anyway, the story of Placidia as Empress would take an entire book but, as I said, the secret of boredom is to tell everything, so let's just say that Placidia managed to keep the Empire more or less together as long as she was Empress. One of her achievements was securing the supply of grain to Rome from Africa. That was despite the fact that North Africa had been taken by the Vandals; yes, but they kept shipping grains to Rome as long as Placidia was Empress. After the death of Placidia, they stopped sending grain and not just that; they took Rome and sacked it. I think it means that Placidia made a difference as long as she was in Ravenna; she was not just a doll wearing expensive clothes.

But, from our viewpoint, we know that the Western Empire was doomed and that it would disappear a few decades after Placidia. The question that we may ask ourselves is whether she understood that the Empire was going to fall. If she did, what did she do to avoid that? Think of being in her shoes: if you were Placidia, what would you do to save the Empire?

So, let's see if we can understand in what kind of troubles, exactly, was the Western Roman Empire at the time of Placidia. We said before that empires are like chemical reactions and chemical reactions subside when they run out of reactants. In the 5th century, the Roman Empire had been running out of reactants. It had been growing on the profits made from military campaigns but, at some point around the 2nd century, it had reached its limits. With no more easy conquests in sight, the Empire had to live on its own resources and it never really learned how to do that. The empire, simply, could not tax its subjects high enough to support the troops it kept. Over and over, the Empire continued to spend more than it could afford for defense. It is typical of empires all over history: empires destroy themselves by spending too much for their military apparatus.

Managing any large structure is difficult and we tend to do it badly; a whole empire may be an especially difficult case. To do it well, we would need to use a method that I mentioned before: system dynamics; which is a way to describe systems and the relation of the various elements that compose them. But it is rare that people can understand systems in this way. What happens instead is that, in most cases, we understand what are the critical points ("levers") that are causing troubles, but we tend to act on them in the wrong way. It is something that we learned in our times from Donella Meadows (like Placidia, a strong woman, although not an Empress) who has taught us a lot about system dynamics. It is a very general trend: almost always we pull the levers in the wrong direction and we worsen the problems that we are trying to solve. That is even too clear for the case of the Roman Empire, at least from our viewpoint. During the decline phase, Roman Emperors struggled to keep the Empire safe from Barbarian invasions and they understood that their problem was that they didn't have enough resources to do that. But their answer was always the wrong one: they kept trying to raise as many troops as they could. That was a self-defeating idea: every time that the Romans fought the Barbarians, they could win or lose, but each battle made the Empire a little poorer and a little weaker. The empire was using resources that could not be replaced; non renewable resources, as we would say today.

So, wasn't there a solution for the troubles of the Roman Empire? Well, there was one if you think in terms of system dynamics. It is a question of pulling the levers in the right direction. By raising troops and fighting battles, the Roman Emperors were pulling the levers in the wrong direction. They had to invert the direction: the solution was not more troops but less troops. It was not more imperial bureaucracy but less, not more of a tax burden but less. In the end, the solution was right there and it was simple: it was Middle Ages.

Middle Ages meant getting rid of the suffocating imperial bureaucracy; transforming the expensive legions into local militias; having people paying taxes locally, in short transforming the centralized empire into a decentralized constellation of small states. Without the terrible expenses of the Imperial court and of the Imperial bureaucracy, these small states had a chance to rebuild their economy and start a new phase of prosperity, as indeed it happened during the Middle Ages. The Empire was going there; it was unavoidable and one could as well favor that road. Of course, when the Empire was still strong and powerful, no emperor had the power of disbanding the legions, nor the imperial bureaucracy. But that was happening anyway during the 5th century and what an emperor (or empress) could have done was to give to the events just a little push in the right direction. Don't fight the change, ease it. It is the way of pushing the levers in the right direction. Could Placidia have done just that? Incredibly, perhaps she did.

What Placidia could do as an Empress was, mainly, to enact laws. The Empire still had a functioning bureaucracy and so the edicts from Ravenna were not ignored, at least in the regions that the Empire could still control. So, law was the playground of Placidia and she did enact a number of laws, many of which are still existing in the “Codex Theodosianus,” a collection of laws compiled on behalf of Placidia's nephew, the Emperor of the East, Theodosius the 2nd. The Codex Theodosianus is an unbelievable mass of data; there are some 2500 laws in it. Well worth giving a look, because it is full of hints and glimpses of what was life in the Roman Empire at that time. But it is impossible to go into any depth in it unless you are a specialist in this matter – it is just too much. So, I learned about Placidia's laws mainly from the report written by Stewart Oost, who wrote her biography in 1966.

Now, as I said, it is a complex matter and very often we cannot say who was exactly the mind behind a certain law. But there seems to be some logic in what the Imperial Court in Ravenna was doing. That logic looked a bit like the policy of Mikhail Gorbachev for the Soviet Union – let's call it “Soviet Empire.” Gorbachev consistently refused to use force to keep together an empire that was disintegrating – although he could have done that. The court of Ravenna, it seems, took the same approach during the first half of the 5th century. The Roman Empire still had an army, they could have used to try to destroy the Barbarian nations that had settled within the Empire's borders. But that would have meant only squandering away those few resources that the Empire still had. It would only have greatly hastened collapse.

It seems that Placidia was acting according to her style; ease the unavoidable, don't fight it. Not that she knew system dynamics but, after all, system dynamics is just formalized common sense and it seems that Placidia had plenty of it. So, consistently, we see the tendency of reducing the power of the Imperial court. You see it in some details, such as when she gave back to the Senate, in Rome, the gift of gold that was customary for the senators to present to the Emperor every year. But she did much more than that. Placidia forbade the coloni, the peasants bound to the land, to enlist in the army. That deprived the army of one of its sources of manpower and we may imagine that it greatly weakened it. Another law enacted by Placidia, allowed the great landowners to tax their subjects themselves. This deprived the Imperial Court of its main source of revenues. All that meant just one thing: Middle Ages.

If the purpose of Placidia really was to take the Empire to the Middle Ages, we can say that she was successful. After that she was gone, the Empire melted away. Her son, Valentinian managed to get killed a few years after the death of her mother. Then, Rome was sacked by the Vandals and that was a deadly blow. For a few decades, there were still individuals in Ravenna who claimed the title of Western Emperor, but we don't care much about their names just as, probably their contemporaries did not. We only remember the name of the last Emperor, Romolus Augustulus, who was deposed in 476, and that is just because he was the last. After that, it was officially Middle Ages – the destination where the Western Empire was going in any case.

This is just a possible interpretation of what Placidia did and I am the first to say that it is just speculation. These laws may have been enacted simply because the Imperial Court was forced to, or it had no other choices. And, of course, we will never know what passed in Placidia's mind. She left us only some letters that miraculously survived in the Vatican's archives, but nothing that we could use to penetrate her inner thoughts. We can only say that staying with the Goths, although for just a few years, could have opened her mind enough that she could have a vision that no Emperor, before or after her, could have. And so she did something that no emperor, before or after her, could do. Push the empire towards its destiny, fulfilling its chemical potential, if you like. In a way, Placidia was the catalyser that made it happen.

Galla Placidia's legacy

Now, I'll ask you another little feat of imagination. Close your eyes again for a moment and imagine something that took place a long, long time ago; 15 centuries before our time. Imagine a young princess. Imagine that she has lived all of her life inside beautiful palaces; that she has been wearing splendid dresses and expensive jewels, that she has been walking inside closed gardens, rich of statuary and fountains; always protected, always secluded, as it is the usual lot of princesses. And then imagine her in a completely different situation: she is somewhere in the mountains; around her, the slow, winding column of the wagons has stopped and the nation of the Goths has stopped for the night. It is a cold night of an early winter and the women have lit campfires while the warriors are sitting around, singing their songs. These tall warriors are Christian, but of a different version – they are Arians, while the Princess is Catholic, and that already makes a lot of difference. Then, there is more. It is likely that in one of those wagons they still carry the wooden statues of their pagan gods: perhaps Hertha the goddess of earth, and perhaps other gods of fire and thunder. Maybe, the prayers being recited for these ancient divinities can be heard as a distant whispering in the night. Placidia listens to these distant songs and then she looks at the stars as she has never seen them. These are the same stars that we can see today; dimly, because we have dirtied our sky with our waste. But Placidia sees those stars in a sky of a clarity that today we can’t even imagine; the sky of a world that was shrinking to nearly nothing, its cities depopulated, its roads abandoned, its farmland left to transform into forest. Just during those years, Rutilius Namatianus gave us an unforgettable image of the lights of Rome in the night, lights that he saw for the last time as he was abandoning the city, to seek refuge in Gallia. But, around Placidia, there was no human light, except the fires lighted by the Visigoths, and so she could see that fantastic sky.

Now, of course this is just fantasy, but I am mentioning to you stars for a reason. You see, I said that Placidia left us almost nothing in terms of written worlds. At least nothing that we can use to understand what she thought. But she left us a message that is perhaps even clearer than a written diary. It is the mausoleum that takes her name in Ravenna; and it is there that you can find a triumph of stars in the mosaics of the ceiling. Big, bright, fantastic stars that remind to us a little those that Vincent van Gogh painted in that famous painting of his.

You know, those stars in Placidia's mausoleum always reminded to me of "Christmas", in the sense of the way we celebrate it today. Not, of course, the commercial holiday that it has become nowadays, but the atmosphere of the "nativity scene" that is still commonplace in Southern Europe and South America. Of course, in the mausoleum you won't find the baby Jesus and not even the Virgin Mary. These figures would became commonplace much later. At the time of Galla Placidia, Christianity was something different than it is for us. But there is no doubt that Placidia was a convinced Christian; she was a believer and she always saw Christianity as an important part of her life. The mausoleum is just part of this attitude of hers.

No one can say, of course, that these stars in the mausoleum in Ravenna are there as a memory of Placidia's travels with the Visigoths, but I think we can take this small creative license and see those stars as such. It is, as I said, a way to get a feeling on the matter we are discussing. We need it; you see, I could mention something that Marguerite Yourcenar says in her “Memoirs of Hadrian”. She says that she got a tremendous feeling of kinship with the long gone Emperor when she could hold in her hands a jewel that, most likely, Hadrian had held in his hands, once. We don't have a jewel that Placidia may have held or worn, but we have that building, her mausoleum.

Actually, the building in Ravenna is not a "mausoleum" in the sense of something built over one's tomb. It is reasonably certain that Placidia was never buried in there; she probably died in Rome and her tomb has been lost long ago. We can't even be sure that Placidia had a role in the design of that building; it is just a later tradition. Yet, if the tradition exists, it has to be for some reason and I think it does. In my opinion, that building was built under her influence. There are many details in it that are absolutely clear to me. So, if you walk inside the mausoleum, you know that you are walking in a place where Galla Placidia has walked. And there is more: what I can tell you is that the mausoleum is a message.

By now, Placidia is almost a creature of the mythical universe of Gods and Heroes, just like Cassandra and Helen of Troy. Yet, she has not yet vanished from memory. Her voice is faint but, if we listen carefully we can hear it. And you can still hear it if you go to see that small building in Ravenna, her last message to us. It is simple and unprepossessing in the exterior, but it is a triumph of colors inside. That’s already a message in itself that comes from an age when whatever there was that was beautiful had to be kept hidden to be saved from destruction. But it was there and it could be enjoyed by those who had the key to it. But it is not just that. That building has a decided “feminine” aspect, and it will show you more of itself if you make the effort to deserve it. It is like a woman who may show you something intimate of herself, but only if you deserve it. That building has a meaning; it is in the figures and the images in it: it is her story, Placidia's story – that building will tell it to you, but only if you deserve it.

You know that the art of being boring consists in telling everything, so I won't tell you the details of the decoration of the building and how each detail fits so well with Placidia’s story. I'll let you just imagine that and, if one day you'll have a chance to go there and visit that mausoleum; do it in silence and listen. It is a faint, faint voice, but you can hear it if you pay attention. After all, as a Latin poet who lived centuries before said, Terence, "nothing human is alien to us." Placidia was one of us.

In her 62 years of life, Placidia was princess, queen and empress. She did reasonably well in these roles and, during her reign as Empress, the Western Empire remained relatively safe and the Romans had the food they needed. She had defects; for sure. She failed to save her foster mother from death when, perhaps, she had a chance to do that. She was ruthless with her enemies and her way of being Christian may have veered on the verge of bigotry. But she played her role as well as she could in those difficult times and she may have played a fundamental role in closing an era in which the very concept of “Roman Empire” had become anachronistic. A judgment by a later chronicler, Cassiodorus, may say it all about her rule, "too much peace," even though it was intended as a criticism. In the end, she was a human being like all of us and she followed her destiny, her chemical potential, if you like.

And, if Placidia's destiny was to be empress, yours, boys and girls, seems to be to study chemistry. Then, my destiny – my chemical potential, if you like - is to teach chemistry to you. That's what we'll do next time we meet in this classroom. Now, thanks for having listened to me and we can leave and have that coffee!

History of humankind in six frames

2011-12-20T02:01:00.000-08:00

Image by Roman Pfeffer.

Peak E-Cat

2011-12-18T03:21:00.000-08:00

Number of searches of the term "E-Cat" according to Google Trends

The interest in the "E-Cat", the supposed "cold fusion reactor" invented by Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi, is waning. You can perceive that clearly from the activity of the various sites dealing with it; while "Google Trends" confirms that the trend is indeed down. After a flare of curiosity that peaked in november 2011, people found that there was nothing to see about the E-Cat except some purported "demonstrations" that didn't really demonstrate anything. So, they lost interest.

What remains of the E-Cat is a core of diehard supporters - especially in Italy. - who will likely keep the myth alive for a long time. It is typical and well known: "free energy" theories never die. Today, people are still discussing the supposed free energy devices attributed to Nikola Tesla and that go back to almost a century ago - poor Tesla is probably still rolling over in his grave. And, in the meantime, plenty more cranky theories have been proposed. In this field, the E-Cat will remain remarkable for the amount of noise it generated when compared to what little evidence (actually, none) was presented.

About the E-Cat, you may be interested in two well thought and in depth articles that demolish Rossi's claims at their basis.

No miracles in science: the story of the E-Cat. By Antonio Turiel

The Physics of why the e-Cat's Cold Fusion Claims Collapse, by Ethan Siegel

The invisible toothpaste: overselling science

2011-12-16T03:37:00.000-08:00

Justin Hall-Tipping CEO of "Nanoholdings" gives a presentation titled "The Future of Nano-Electric Power Generation". I was not impressed by the scientific content of the talk, but it think it can give us interesting insight on how communication works and how the public sees science and scientists.

The science of advertising is based on a number of fundamental laws; the most important one can be stated as, "don't just sell them a toothpaste, sell them a whole new way of life". You can see this law applied every day in TV. If you brush your teeth with a specific brand of toothpaste, you don't just get beautiful white teeth, but you'll become sexy and athletic. And you'll have a happy and smiling family, too!

Almost every one who works in advertising knows and applies the law, but if you want to see real mastery, do give a look to the video above. This guy is not just selling a toothpaste; he is selling a promise of a toothpaste to come; an invisible toothpaste. He is a true adept of the Art, a master. Look at the posture, the tone, the sense of the talk, the mix of scientific wonder and moral duty. Look at the faces of the people listening to the talk - totally enthralled. Look at the final stroke of genius, when he sorts out of his pocket the photo of a little girl from Sudan, dying of thirst. That borders on the sublime.

But what is exactly that this guy is selling? Well, my impression while watching the show was to be exposed to the output of a giant hair dryer. Of course, nanotubes are real and they have interesting properties. They do have promising future applications. But, in this talk we have no quantitative information anywhere, except for one point and, there, the given datum is wrong! (I leave it to readers to discover it as an exercise). I also went to the site of the company and there I found plenty of claims, but no details, no quantitative data, no products on sale. So, there is no way to say whether their products are real or something coming out of that giant hair drier I was mentioning before.

Apart from that, what is hugely interesting in this talk, it is the way scientists are described. Notice when he says (8:15), ".. these incredibly brilliant and kind scientists .. they have a magic look of the world .. their discoveries are coming out of the lab, and into the world.... "

A truly brilliant choice of words: I think we have here a nice summary of the problem with the public perception of scientists. They are "brilliant and kind" as long as "their discoveries are coming out of the lab and into the world" in the form of assorted gadgetry. When it works, it is "magic." But, when scientists are not bringing gadgetry for free; when they warn us of inconvenient truths such as climate change or resource depletion, well, the magic is gone. They are not any more brilliant and kind; they are enemies of the people to be insulted and threatened.

With this attitude of the public, it is impossible to think that solutions based on voluntary restraints could ever work. But can we really solve our problems with nifty little gadgets? Surely not with windows that change color or glasses that let you find your car keys in the dark. Maybe nanotubes could give us a breakthrough in solar cells, just maybe; but don't forget that even if we could have cells at zero cost, a solar plant would still cost money because of all the rest that is needed, from supports to the electronics. So, there are no miracles in science and we are going to be badly disappointed if we expect science to solve all our problems by "magic." It is like expecting to whiten our teeth with an invisible toothpaste.

H-T: Neven

It gets boring running around being a Cassandra

2011-12-14T03:44:00.000-08:00

Being a Cassandra is often boring in the sense that it is so predictable. You know from the start that whatever you say will be ignored and, when it is not ignored, it will generate all sorts of insults as a response. On the other hand, some of us seem to have taken this role and, just as the Cassandra of the Iliad, we keep trying to alert everyone of what is going on with climate change and resource depletion. Who knows, maybe not all Cassandras will always be ignored - after all, she was right! Here are some thoughts on climate change from Bruce Sterling's talk at the 2011 Art and Environment conference. The wolf is in the living room, he says. A true Cassandra; and perfectly right.

Bruce Sterling:

Climate change has lost all its sci-fi tinge in my lifetime and is now a melancholy and tiresome reality

There hasn’t been a year when I haven’t written about climate change. It’s one of the most obvious things to predict.

It’s just kind of a blunt reality that the fossil-fuel enterprise has done a regulatory capture of the entire planet, and we’re involved in a war for oil, and it’s the curse of oil, and it’s a war for a curse that’s endless and happening. You know, it gets boring running around being a Cassandra. Starting Earth Day in 1970 was a pretty late start considering the multicentury scope of this problem.

I will pass the rest of my lifetime in the shadow of climate change. It’s not about warning people in 2011, or trying to avert or defuse a misfortune. The wolf is beyond the door. The wolf is in the living room. This is the anthropocenic condition. This is how we live. This is force majeure. It’s here. It’s very obvious.

There are no national forests. You cannot protect a forest with a nation. There are forests that protect nations.

The global climate crisis is the climate crisis and it’s global because the globe is an externality. “Don’t pollute you, don’t pollute me, pollute that fellow behind me.” Just throw that into the atmosphere because the atmosphere is somebody else’s problem."

The thing that encourages me or sort of offers daylight is there’s no pro-climate crisis party. There’s no government that actually likes the idea of wrecking the climate. It doesn’t really benefit anybody. It really is an externality. It’s just something that’s entropic.

h/t Big Gav

Durban: good science always wins

2011-12-11T03:09:00.000-08:00

It will take some time before we can digest and understand the actual significance of the agreements of Durban. As usual, some people will see the glass half full, others half empty. But there is an element that gives us hope: the effort to stop climate change continues.

The effort continues despite the opposition of the fossil fuel lobbies, despite the propaganda action of "Climategate 2.0", despite the continuous attacks against science in the media, despite the fact that in the US the whole spectrum of Republican candidates has taken an anti-science position on climate. There was a whole alliance of powerful forces that were trying as hard as they could to sabotage the Durban Conference. They didn't succeed, and not for lack of trying: Christopher Monckton, the arch-enemy of climate science, was so desperate to get attention that he resorted to parachuting himself to Durban. He was ignored, anyway.

Given the coalition that had gathered against science, we can see as an almost incredible success that the conference ended up with a structured agreement that keeps the negotiations ongoing. Evidently, the gravity of the situation is becoming more and more clear: people are getting the message. As I said, climate science is good science and good science always wins in the end.

Climategate 2.0: fool me once.....

2011-12-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

Number of searches of the term "Climategate" according to Google Trends. The second release of stolen e-mails, last month ("Climategate-2.0") didn't generate anything like the spike of interest of the first release ("Climategate"), in 2009.

The so-called "Climategate" case of 2009 will remain in history as an example of a highly successful "spin campaign". It had a strong negative effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists and it played an important role in the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks. However, the public has reacted with a big yawn to the second batch of email messages released last month ("Climategate 2.0"). We can see that using "Google Trends" as shown above and also below. The modest spike that correspond to frantic attempts to ignite the interest of the public in Climategate 2.0 is nothing even remotely comparable to the giant spike of the first Climategate.

Apparently in these things there holds the old say, "fool me once...." That is, it is very difficult to fool people twice with the same trick and, indeed, "Climategate 2.0" is turning out to be a big flop.

The most recent polls indicate that concerns about global warming are climbing up again with the public and that's more evidence that you can't fool people forever. So, we still have a chance to win this battle. We need to keep fighting it.

Recognizing good science when you see it: climate change seen by depletion scientists

2011-12-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

The panel of discussants at the first session of ASPO-9 in Brussels. From left to right, Pierre Mauriaud (Total); Jean-Pascal van Ypersele (IPCC); Kjell Aleklett (ASPO); Colin Campbell (ASPO); Paul Hohnen (Greenpeace). During the discussion, Colin Campbell, founder and honorary chairman of ASPO, said "I am convinced," referring to the talk on climate change by Van Ypersele. A good scientist can always recognize good science when he sees it. Unfortunately, it seems that many people involved with peak oil studies don't often interact with serious climate science and their view of it remains linked to the distorsions presented in the mainstream media

One of the most interesting talks at the recent meeting on Energy organized by the Club of Rome in Basel, was the one given by Ian Dunlop, of ASPO Australia (photo on the right). It was not so much on energy, but on the interconnection of energy and climate change. It was up to date and saying the things that needed to be said. That is, Ian Dunlop didn't shy away from saying that climate change is threatening the very existence of our civilization and that we must do something quick about it. It was an excellent talk; give a look to the slides if you have a moment, here is the link.

What I found surprising were the several comments that I heard later on from people attending the meeting. Some of those who didn't have a specific background in climate science seemed to be shocked. They didn't know, it seems, that the climate situation is so bad and that it is so urgent to act - but they now recognized the problem. This experience of mine in Basel parallels well the one I had in Brussels for the ASPO-9 conference, when climate scientist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele gave a good talk on climate change. Also there, the reaction of some of the people attending the conference was of surprise; they never had a chance, apparently, to hear a comprehensive report on the climate situation.

Of course, I have no statistics about the average competence in climate science of the people who work with peak oil and similar subjects (let's call them "depletion scientists"). But my experience with this issue has been often disheartening: many depletion scientists are badly outdated in what they know about climate science. A few (just a few, fortunately!) make a banner of their ignorance and they fall for the most obvious propaganda tricks diffused by denialists or scoff at the whole idea with the simplistic statement "not enough oil for climate change". Alas, things are much more complex than that!

That doesn't mean that depletion scientists are not smart people; by all means they are. And it doesn't mean that there doesn't exist a parallel bias on the part of climate scientists who, often, appear to be totally oblivious of the situation in terms of resource depletion. The point is that we all suffer of narrow vision. The Internet is vast and we tend to go in depth only in the areas that we know well; the rest of our information often comes by a haphazard mix of what we read in the media. In this, we all suffer of "confirmation bias." (see below)

So, what you get from the media about climate change is that it is all a question of small details: did we see a warming during the past 10 years? What is the meaning of "hide the decline"? Didn't scientists fear "global cooling" in the 1970s? And so on. Even people who are on the side of climate science often seem to engage in the debate worrying about minor details. How many tons of CO2 can we save if we install double paned glasses in public buildings? Should we use public transportation instead of a private car for commuting? So, the general impression that you can get is that climate change is a minor issue affected by great uncertainties.

That the results of more than half a century of work in climate science have been reduced to such narrow terms in the media is a victory for denial: it is a way to keep people in the dark about what is really happening. But climate change is not something that can be stopped by double paned windows. It is a major upheaval of the whole earth ecosystem and it has the potential to do to us immense damage. The problem must be faced for what it is, in its complexity, and with the risks that come with it. Uncertainty is not an excuse for doing nothing: what we don't know is what is most dangerous for us.

So, it is very good to see that a good scientist can always recognize good science when he sees it. It has been the case of Colin Campbell (left), founder and honorary chairman of ASPO, who stated to the audience "I am convinced" after having heard the talk by Van Ypersele at the ASPO-9 Brussels conference. It was the same for several colleagues at the Basel meeting after the heard the talk by Ian Dunlop. I also noticed in other occasions that climate scientists can understand the depletion message when they hear it presented for what it is. They are good scientists, too.

So, it is time to recognize good science when we see it. And it is time to tell everyone how things stand, just as Ian Dunlop did in Basel.

____________________________________________________________

About confirmation bias:
From the Washington Post, by Ramesh Srinivasan

We’ve long heard that the Internet was supposed to unite people of different cultural and political persuasions. Yet, despite the explosion of online voices, social-media users rarely access opinions that differ from their own, and many social-media sites — with their bifurcated like/dislike, join/don’t join ethos — only perpetuate the sound-bite culture of older media.

Not only are our Facebook friends similar to us (we usually connect through mutual friends and shared interests), but researcher Ethan Zuckerman has shown that the sites we visit reaffirm our political and cultural preconceptions. This homogenization reaches the very machinery of social media — its algorithms — which tailor search results or Facebook feeds according to what the systems “think” users will find most interesting.

Bridging disparate cultural and political backgrounds remains a challenge for social media. To learn from differing viewpoints, the technologies and cultures of social media must evolve so that they bring people together rather than keeping us in digital silos.

Waiting for the big wave

2011-11-30T09:11:00.000-08:00

Guest post by Antonio Turiel

Cassandra's legacy publishes this post by Antonio Turiel that appeared first on Nov 18, 2011 on "The Oil Crash" blog (in Spanish). Here, Turiel examines the Spanish situation, seen a few days before the recent elections that saw the victory of the right wing "Partido Popular". In this lucid analysis, Turiel compares the present situation of Spain - and of the other states in trouble in Europe - to the apparent calm that arrives just before the great tsunami hits. (translation from Spanish by Ugo Bardi)

By Antonio Turiel, 18 Nov, 2011

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither". Benjamín Franklin.

Dear readers

among the most interesting phenomena that are part of the fields of oceanography and geology, there are tsunamis. A sudden vertical displacement of a fault at the bottom of the sea, by the enormous energy it releases, can displace all the mass of water above it for a not too big height, maybe 50 centimeters, maybe one meter. The problem is that the displacement affects the whole water column, which may be four or more kilometers of height. The wave generated simply by gravity propagates at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per hour; in some cases - if the earthquake takes place in very deep waters - it may arrive to supersonic speeds. When the wave gets close to the coast, the slope of the sea floor creates an effect known as shoaling.

The solitonic wave breaks up and decomposes in several packets which propagate at much lower speeds (some km/h) but, because of the accumulation of water, their height grows and grows. Because of this, it is much safer to wait for the tsunami at sea, where the wave, of some centimeters, will pass without generating major damage; but its height on the coast will arrive to several meters; in some case as much as 15 (there are documented historical cases of monster tsunamis of almost 50 meters of height) and able to penetrate inland for several kilometers, razing to the ground everything with their enormous power and pressure. Just before the first wave of a tsunami arrives to the coast, the sea retires rapidly of several kilometers; revealing a rocky seafloor of unreal aspect. Some people are fascinated by the phenomenon and find themselves looking at it, captivated, without understanding that, if in that moment they had started running inland, perhaps they will be able to get far enough, or reach a ground sufficiently high, to survive. It is a question of a few crucial minutes; those few vital minutes before the arrival of the first wave. Another fact that people often ignore is that the first wave is almost never the largest one; and sometimes it happens, as in the case of the tsunami in Hawaii of April 1st 1946 (day of the innocents), that people go to the beach to see what had happened during the half hour that separates the first and the second wave, horribly increasing human losses when the second wave, usually is larger, unleashes all of its violence over the unfortunates.

Yesterday, the spread of the Spanish treasure bonds with respect to the German ones arrived, according to what we are told, to about 500 basic points. That means that the yield given to these debt issues is about 5% larger than that of equivalent German titles. As the information given by the media is always brutally incomplete and antiquated, I never know for sure to what it is referred to: whether we are speaking of one year bonds, or five or ten, or all together. I understand, anyway, that this spread with respect to German titles is being observed in the secondary market - that means, the individuals who possess Spanish debt are selling it to other individuals with a certain discount (because, obviously, they couldn't renegotiate the conditions expressed on the bond issue). That, if you think about it a little, is even more serious than if it were Spain to sell its debt with a larger kind of interest (which happens, because the debt issue usually follows the secondary market: Spain cannot obtain cheaper money than what the market perceives). It is more serious because, in summary, those people who keep Spanish money and are selling it are accepting a certain percentage of loss (perhaps no real losses, but surely on their expectations of gain) and that means in the end that the credibility of Spain as a trustworthy debtor state is falling.

But, in the end, this is not a blog dedicated to the economy and there is no need to spend time on these questions. The interesting part of what we observe is that the Spanish debt is arriving to levels that have motivated the "rescue" of Greece and which forced a "change of government" in Italy, last week. Here in Spain, we are just two days before the general elections which all polls indicate will be won by the conservative Partido Popular with a large majority. The party's leader, Mariano Rajoy, has already anticipated that they will take appropriate measures to try to heal the Spanish accounts, hinting that we'll see more reduction in the social services and salaries than anything that was seen in the past year. In addition we could say, as a matter of coherency, that for being an amateur in applying these measures, the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was shot down by the entity that the media sometimes call the "European Troika."

We are facing, then, general elections which will radically change the orientation of the governing party, from socialist to conservative, in a country were the perception is that the right is a better manager and that, as a consequence, will be able to ride out better the difficult economic situation. In reality, the result will be the same, because after having seen what has happened to the fatuously democratic European union during the past few week, with Greece and Italy, it is clear that decisions are not taken in single countries and much less reside with the people: our new leaders will do what they are told to do - full stop. This situation will lead to a growing disillusion of the Spanish people; a disillusion that will turn into rage when the new recession which we are starting to see will increase the jobless level from the present 21,5% to 25 o 26% in a couple of years. And, no doubt, the only thing that we are doing is to follow a known path: collapse. It is sure that, about collapse, Dimitri Orlov recently revised his model of the five phases of collapse (financial, commercial, of the state, of the community and of the family) and his conclusion can't be more disheartening; according to him, it seems that the great effort of states to stave off financial collapse - which should have occurred in its full magnitude during the past 2-3 years - will cause the real financial collapse to arrive at the same time as the commercial one and, eventually, that of the state - this latter entity being dragged in by the giant weight of the debt incurred with the financial rescue. In summary, Orlov's model was too gradual and suave when compared with the abrupt road where the BAU (Business as Usual) is dragging us. It is another piece of evidence of the fact that the descent along the right side of the Hubbert curve will be dominated by non linear effects. And the present events in Greece indicate that, indeed, the financial collapse will take place at the same moment as the commercial one. Greece had no choice but turn to Iran as its major supplier of oil (thanks to Ángel, for the reference), since the other countries don't trust the Greek solvency. The descent that us, the Spanish, are starting, following the same path of Greeks, Irish, Portuguese and Italians, will take us from our pretended "First World" condition, where arrogantly we believe to belong because of our merits, to the Second or the Third in which we are being pushed down without the rest of the planet giving a damn; and it will help us little that until a couple of years ago we considered ourselves to be with the rich and the powerful; they have their own concerns and right now we are just a hindrance for them.

These days before the elections are like the sea which retires before the first tsunami wave. There is a strange and unreal calm while a vague and ominous shade is appearing at the horizon. In reality, if we know a little of history and how economy has been practised in the 20th century, we know what it is going to pass in Spain. Starting with Monday, they'll start saying that now it is the time to keep quiet, that it is urgent to find the means to contain the damage, that it is intolerable that the Spanish deficit doesn't stay within the established bounds (fixed by the government for this year at 6%, which could reach 8%). It is possible that the socialist government, in function until January, will be forced to take already some drastic measures; measures that in any case will be adopted by the Partido Popular when it will take charge: immediately lowering the salary of public workers - once more; perhaps 10% in this occasion - cutting even more health services, education, and, ouch, public works, because Germany and France are very sensitive about those multi-million airports without passengers and other stupid infrastructures build during the golden age of concrete. There will be, possibly, an increase in the VAT and surely a generalized reduction of the subsidies and help (that is affecting me, research grants and projects). All that will bring a larger economic contraction and more unemployment, with the result of lower tax revenues and there will be a general tendency to pay more in subsidies - at some moment there will be talk of reducing the unemployment subsidy and the minimum salary. All that in a context where basic goods will see an increase in price while the non basic ones will become cheaper while stocks are being liquidated, to return to high prices, later on. In the end, we'll become poorer, much poorer....

The sun is darkening, the wave is obscuring it, it is here already. I wanted to write somewhere a number of truths in the midst of so many lies as we are being told now. What is being done to countries are not "rescues", they are liquidations; they are not "changes in government for technocratic governments", they are coups that give control of the state to our creditors; it is not austerity, it is increasing financial ruin; it is not order, but repression, it is not for the common interest, but for the private one; it is not returning to growth, but it is the road to poverty; there is no growth, but the end of growth. We are left only with the poor satisfaction that these waves will arrive, eventually, also to Berlin and to New York.

The water is arriving already.

Greetings

AMT

Postscript: This post is not about energy, indeed, but I wanted to write it.

Why is economic growth so popular?

2011-11-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

When the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Senate, a few days ago, he used 28 times the term "growth" and not even once terms such as "natural resources" or "energy". He is not alone in neglecting the physical basis of the world's economy: the chorus of economic pundits everywhere in the world is all revolving around this magic world, "growth". But why? What is that makes this single parameter so special and so beloved?

During the past few years, the financial system gave to the world a clear signal when the prices of all natural commodities spiked up to levels never seen before. If prices are high, then there is a supply problem. Since most of the commodities we use are non-renewable - crude oil, for instance - it is at least reasonable to suppose that we have a depletion problem. Yet, the reaction of leaders, decision makers, and economic pundits of all kinds was - and still is - to ignore the physical basis of the economic system and promote economic growth as the solution to all our problems; the more, the better. But, if depletion is the real problem, it should be obvious that growth can only make it worse. After all, if we grow we consume more resources and that will accelerate depletion. So, why are our leaders so fixated on growth? Can't they understand that it is a colossal mistake? Are they stupid or what?

Things are not so simple, as usual. One of the most common mistakes that we can make in life is to assume that people who don't agree with our ideas are stupid. No, there holds the rule that for everything that exists, there is a reason. So, there has to be a reason why growth is touted as the universal cure for all problems. And, if we go in depth into the matter, we may find the reason in the fact that people (leaders as well as everybody else) tend to privilege short term gains to long term ones. Let me try to explain.

Let's start with observing that the world's economy is an immense, multiple-path reaction driven by the thermodynamic potentials of the natural resources it uses. Mainly, these resources are non-renewable fossil fuels that we burn in order to power the whole system. We have good models that describe the process; the earliest ones go back to the 1970s with the first version of "The Limits to Growth" study. These models are based on the method known as "system dynamics" and consider highly aggregated stocks of resources (that is, averaged over many different kinds). Already in 1972, the models showed that the gradual depletion of high grade ores and the increase of persistent pollution would cause the economy to stop growing and then decline; most likely during the first decades of the 21st century. Later studies of the same kind generated similar results. The present crisis seems to vindicate these predictions.

So, these models tell us that depletion and pollution are at the root of the problems we have, but they tell us little about the financial turmoil that we are seeing. They don't contain a stock called "money" and they make no attempt to describe how the crisis will affect different regions of the world and different social categories. Given the nature of the problem, that is the only possible choice to make modelling manageable, but it is also a limitation. The models can't tell us, for instance, how policy makers should act in order to avoid the bankruptcy of entire states. However, the models can be understood in the context of the forces that move the system. The fact that the world's economic system is complex doesn't mean that it doesn't follow the laws of physics. On the contrary, it is by looking at these laws that we can gain insight on what's happening and how we could act on the system.

There are good reasons based in thermodynamics that cause economies to consume resources at the fastest possible rate and at the highest possible efficiency (see this paper by Arto Annila and Stanley Salthe). So, the industrial system will try to exploit first the resources which provide the largest return. For energy producing resources (such as crude oil) the return can be measured in terms of energy return for energy invested (EROEI). Actually, decisions within the system are taken not in terms of energy but in terms of monetary profit, but the two concepts can be considered to coincide as a first approximation. Now, what happens as non-renewable resources are consumed is that the EROEI of what is left dwindles and the system becomes less efficient; that is, profits go down. The economy tends to shrink while the system tries to concentrate the flow of resources where they can be processed at the highest degree of efficiency and provide the highest profits; something that usually is related to economies of scale. In practice, the contraction of the economy is not the same everywhere: peripheral sections of the system, both in geographical and social terms, cannot process resources with sufficient efficiency; they tend to be cut off from the resource flow, shrink, and eventually disappear. An economic system facing a reduction in the inflow of natural resources is like a man dying of cold: extremities are the first to freeze and die off.

Then, what's the role of the financial system - aka, simply "money"? Money is not a physical entity, it is not a natural resource. It has, however, a fundamental role in the system as a catalyst. In a chemical reaction, a catalyst doesn't change the chemical potentials that drive the reaction, but it can speed it up and change the preferred pathway of the reactants. For the economic system, money doesn't change the availability of resources or their energy yield but it can direct the flow of natural resources to the areas where they are exploited faster and most efficiently. This allocation of the flow usually generates more money and, therefore, we have a typical positive (or "enhancing") feedback. As a result, all the effects described before go faster. Depletion can be can be temporarily masked although, usually, at the expense of more pollution. Then, we may see the abrupt collapse of entire regions as it may be the case of Spain, Italy, Greece and others. This effect can spread to other regions as the depletion of non renewable resources continues and the cost of pollution increases.

We can't go against thermodynamics, but we could at least avoid some of the most unpleasant effects that come from attempting to overcome the limits to the natural resources. This point was examined already in 1972 by the authors of the first "Limits to Growth" study on the basis of their models but, eventually, it is just a question of common sense. To avoid, or at least mitigate collapse, we must stop growth; in this way non renewable resources will last longer and we can use them to develop and use renewable resources. The problem is that curbing growth does not provide profits and that, at present, renewables don't yet provide profits as large as those of the remaining fossil fuels. So, the system doesn't like to go in that direction - it tends, rather, to go towards the highest short term yields, with the financial system easing the way. That is, the system tends to keep using non renewable resources, even at the cost of destroying itself. Forcing the system to change direction could be obtained only by means of some centralized control but that, obviously, is complex, expensive, and unpopular. No wonder that our leaders don't seem to be enthusiastic about this strategy.

Let's see, instead, another possible option for leaders: that of "stimulating growth". What does that mean, exactly? In general, it seems to mean to use the taxation system to transfer financial resources to the industrial system. With more money, industries can afford higher prices for natural resources. As a consequence, the extractive industry can maintain its profits, actually increase them, and keep extracting even from expensive resources. But money, as we said, is not a physical entity; in this case it only catalyzes the transfer human and material resources to the extractive system at the expense of subsystems as social security, health care, instruction, etc. That's not painless, of course, but it may give to the public the impression that the problems are being solved. It may improve economic indicators and it may keep resource flows large enough to prevent the complete collapse of peripheral regions, at least for a while. But the real attraction of stimulating growth is that it is the easy way: it pushes the system in the direction where it wants to go. The system is geared to exploit natural resources at the fastest possible rate, this strategy gives it fresh resources to do exactly that. Our leaders may not understand exactly what they are doing, but surely they are not stupid - they are not going against the grain.

The problem is that the growth stimulating strategy only buys time (and buys it at a high price). Nothing that governments or financial traders do can change the thermodynamics of the world system - all what they can do is to shuffle resources from here to there and that doesn't change the hard reality of depletion and pollution. So, pushing economic growth is only a short term solution that worsens the problem in the long run. It can postpone collapse but at the price of making it more abrupt in the form known as the Seneca Cliff. Unfortunately, it seems that we are headed exactly that way.

This post was inspired by an excellent post on the financial situation written by Antonio Turiel with the title "Before the Wave" (in Spanish).

The empty Earth

2011-11-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

And here is my new book, just published on Nov 15th. The Italian title sounds like, "The Emptied Earth", but in English it sounds better to me as, "The empty Earth." In any case, I think you can imagine from the title what the book is about. It is the history of mining on this planet; it starts from the first flint mines dug in limestone more than 10,000 years ago, arriving the modern mining rush that is, literally, emptying the earth of its mineral treasures accumulated over billions of years of geological activity.

I am sorry that most of you won't be able to read this version, but I am working at an edition in English planned for March of next year (not the same book, it will be a version reworked for the international readership). For those of you who can read Italian, you can find a description of the book at the site of the Editor and also on my Italian blog.

Technocrats

2011-11-16T06:53:00.000-08:00

On the left, Marion King Hubbert (1903-1989), originator of the "Hubbert Model" of oil production. On the right, Mario Monti (1943-), prime minister of the Italian government. They seem to share a certain style and both of them have been defined as "technocrats".

Marion King Hubbert had foreseen many things correctly in his career, mainly about oil production. But he had also joined a group called the "technocrats" who proposed that technical experts should run governments. Maybe he was right also in this prediction, as the recent events in Italy may indicate.

Professor Mario Monti has been appointed by the President of the Republic as the new head of the Italian Government, replacing the democratically elected, but disastrous, Silvio Berlusconi. I am not sure of whether Mr. Monti likes to be defined as a "technocrat," but the term fits his present job very well. Is this the start of a new trend? It is too early to say but, who knows?

Big Gav has an interesting post on "peak Energy" about the rise of Mario Monti in Italy .

Berlusconi's downfall: "Peak Males"?

2011-11-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

To the question "what is best in life?" Conan answers, "crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentation of the women" (from "Conan the Barbarian", 1982). This kind of macho style was probably out of fashion already in Atlantean times; surely it is even more so in our times. So, the downfall of powerful "alpha males," such as Silvio Berlusconi (and, earlier this year, Dominique Strauss Kahn) may be a sign of an ongoing change: this kind of aggressive leaders may be outdated.

Modern political leaders seem to have evolved over the years with the ability of leading people into battle. Have you ever been close to a high level political leader? They beam charisma all around. They are aggressive, self assured and often display a strong sex drive - they may well be serial womanizers, like Berlusconi and Strauss Kahn. But we may not need them any more: the development of robotic warfare may spell their demise. With robots doing the fighting, controllers can sit comfortably in air conditioned rooms and drink coffee while they kill people at the push of a button. It is another kind of warfare: more like pest extermination than the kind of glorious activity that war used to be. The people engaged in this activity don't need to be macho types a la Conan and, for them, being serial womanizers is definitely a disadvantage. For Berlusconi, at least, it was the case, although not the only reason of his downfall.

So, in analogy with the concept of "peak oil" we might think of a peak followed by a decline for the presence of this kind of males at the top levels of governments. Perhaps, we can call it "Peak Males."

Peak oil narratives

2011-11-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

In examining the debate on global warming and on peak oil, I came to the conclusion that the elementary unit of communication in the public discussion is always a story - a narrative of some kind. In other words, we tend to interpret reality in narrative terms, as you can understand by just a glance to the titles of any newspaper.

I argued in a recent post that the remarkable success of the denialist position in the climate debate is due to the development of a fictional narrative that describes how a group of evil scientists manipulated the temperature data in order to persuade the public of a non-existent global warming. This narrative is so seductive for human perception that it is almost impossible to fight it using just data. There are other examples; one is the case of the "wrong predictions" that the Club of Rome is often said to have proposed with the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth". It is a stubborn narrative which turns out to be almost impossible to demolish by simply showing that the pretended "mistakes" don't exist.

So, people tend to be attracted more by pleasant fables rather than by inconvenient truths. That doesn't mean that truth needs to be unpleasant, negative, or apocalyptic. However, if we want to pass our message to the public, data alone are not enough; scientific results must be presented in ways that take into account the human side of the problems. How to succeed in this task is an open question, but Antonio Turiel, who keeps the blog "The Oil Crash", has examined it in a recent post titled "running away from reality dedicated to the "Chemtrails" legend.

As you may know, chemtrails are said to be the result of a heinous plot that involves the use of planes to spread poisons that appear as white stripes in the sky. Obviously, there exist no data that could even vaguely imply that the well known "contrails" generated by flying planes are anything more than harmless water vapor. Nevertheless, the narrative of the "chemtrails" concept is seductive in suggesting that our troubles are the result of the action of an evil group of enemies of humankind acting behind the scenes. Again, trying to contrast this fictional account by means of data results ineffective.

If you can read Spanish, the post "Running away from reality by Antonio Turiel is well worth reading. Here, I am translating a section of it, the one where he examines the narrative behind conspiracy theories and compares it with the one behind the peak oil concept.

Running away from Reality
by Antonio Turiel. Nov 5, 2011

-excerpt-

.... In the end, the proposer of the chemtrails idea sees a heroic narrative, a bold struggle against a demonic power, all-knowing and almost all powerful, which, once defeated, will originate a new order. Nothing new, then, with respect to the ancient story of Hermes who, sword in hand, cut off the head of the hundred eyed monster. From what we can see, we didn't progress so much from Hellenic times.

This narrative is completely equivalent to the one of the defenders of "free energies" (in fact, they are often the same people). We commented here the absurdity and the lack of basis of free energies (surely in English "Free Energy" is an ambiguous term which means both "free" as well as "at no cost", which in the end is the way we pretend to live; at full speed we did as up to now). What is interesting now is to see how the psychological mechanisms are the same of the case of chemtrails and this explains the fact that the believers in these two theories are the same. These two groups also coincide with the defenders of the great world conspiracy of the Illuminati and the New International Order.

I am not sure of all the details of these conspiracy theories but, essentially, the idea is that there exists an occult group of rich and powerful people who form a council that takes decision to determine the destiny of the world and who have a demonic plan to submit us to endless slavery. Actually, this idea is sufficiently absurd: it is obvious that the rich and the powerful conspire to maintain their situation of privilege and influence in an illegitimate way our representatives, subverting the meaning of democracy. But they do it in full view of everyone, without hiding and, in the end, without feeling shame because in any case they arrive to believe that it is the best, or the correct thing to do. To do it, they don't need an oak table in a dark cavern with a goat head hanging from the wall.

On the other hand, although some of these powerful entities or people may have plans for anticipating the coming chaos, I doubt that all of them have developed the same diagnosis of the problems and of the relative solutions. And, in the end, it is not obvious that they can implement their chosen plans, since there are always uncertainties in the human factor. Would their militias be always faithful? Will the political leaders keep to their assigned directives? Will the people remain submissive? History demonstrates that it is impossible to keep people submissive all the time, all of them. But, again, the heroic narrative of the fight against these great villains who stole our well deserved past prosperity, which we will recover if we defeat them, is much more attractive than the vulgar and mediocre reality.

Economists and politicians, on their part, fall in the same practice of self-deception, looking for a kind of reasoning that is more attractive than realistic. For instance, they speak of restarting growth, despite the fact that this economic crisis will never end; of accepting sacrifices now in order to obtain a future prosperity when, in reality, each adjustment is leading us to the catabolic collapse; of plans of rescue necessary to restart the economy, when in reality these are only useful to plug the holes of big banks; or of policies favoring employment which in reality are the degradation of the conditions of workers, etc. And the fact is that, again, our leaders look for a heroic narrative in which, thanks to their determination and their statesmanship, they will be able to return to the earlier situation, that is to a state of endless growth.

In contrast with this kind of description, the narrative of the Oil Crash is much more gray. It is not black as it is sometimes said. The Oil Crash is not the end of humankind; not, at least, if we don't want it to be such. The oil crash is not the narrative of an apocalypse; but it really is a narrative of humiliation. Because it consists in accepting that human beings have limits, that for once it is impossible to win. And this, for the Homo Invictus who surged from the industrial revolution, who always prospered during the past two centuries, is difficult to accept. This is the real problem with the Oil Crash: the arrogance of modern man. It is better for our ego to believe that there is a villain controlling everything than to accept that the situation is out of the control of any human being, no matter how evil. The problem with the heroic narrative is not just that it is wrong; it is that it is leading us to disaster.

Read the whole post (in Spanish)

ASPO-Italy 5: beyond peak oil

2011-11-07T04:10:00.000-08:00

Toufic El Asmar, researcher at FAO and vice-president of ASPO-Italia, speaks at the 5th meeting of the association in Florence. Climate change and agriculture featured prominently in the discussion.

Peak oil is behind us. That much seems to be clear from what was said at the 5th meeting of the Italian section of the Association for the study of peak oil (ASPO) held on Oct 28 in Florence, Italy. Already in the first talk of the meeting; the one given by Ian Johnson, secretary general of the Club of Rome, the emphasis was not on oil, but on the financial problems that the world is facing. This point was also made by Nicole Foss of the blog "theautomaticearth" who spoke of the impending total collapse of the world's financial system.

Another point that was extensively debated at the meeting is how the peak is driving the oil industry to extract and process polluting and inefficient resources, and how this is causing a worsening of the climate change problem. That was the reason that had led ASPO-Italy to organize this meeting jointly with "Climalteranti," a group of Italian climate scientists. At least half of the talks at the meeting were specifically dedicated to climate change and the climate question was present in practically all discussions. Recent data indicate a big jump in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, confirming that this trend is ongoing.

Peak oil is also affecting agriculture, as reported by the vice-president of the association, Dr. Toufic El Asmar, who is also a researcher at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. The problem is not yet on the radar of most people who deal with sustainability, but it is clear that it is enormous. Agriculture, as it is structured today, cannot survive without fossil fuels and the damage caused by climate change might be devastating,

Another point that was much discussed at ASPO-Italy 5 was the problem of communication. How to transform our models into policies? That turns out to be an extremely difficult problem. Not that we didn't work on it. Pietro Cambi, member of ASPO-Italy, estimated in his talk that about one person in three in Italy has been exposed at least once to the peak oil message during the past five years as a result of the work of ASPO and of related associations and people. It is a remarkable result considering that ASPO-Italy is an association of volunteers that operates on minuscule financial resources. Yet, the impact of our message is not appearing; not yet, at least.

For instance, the politicians of the Regional Tuscan Government did their best to steer clear of the ASPO-Italy meeting, despite the fact that it was held near the central building of the Tuscan Government and that it was a high level international meeting that saw the presence of several high level scientists. The only exception was Mr. Mauro Romanelli, Regional Councilor for the Green Party; evidently more enlightened than most. In Italy, as everywhere else, it seems that the magic word that solves all the problems remains "growth." Being seen in the company of Cassandras and catastrophists must be still considered as a good way to ruin one's political career.

In the end, it seems that peak oil has generated a strong reaction of the industrial, financial and political system. It has caused a movement to counter depletion by investing more resources in extraction, despite the increasing costs and the resulting environmental damage. Ian Johnson made this point clear in his talk. Years ago, when he was vice-president of the World Bank, they had estimated what the price of oil should be to make renewable energy competitive in the market. But, when that price level was reached, what happened was that oil companies abandoned all their programs in renewable energy to concentrate on new oil sources. No matter how dirty and expensive these resources may be, it is still possible to make a profit, provided that the industry doesn't have to pay for the costs of pollution. Which is, unfortunately, the case.

What we are seeing is a tremendous effort to maintain extraction levels at least constant, even at the cost of wrecking the world's economy and the planetary ecosystem as well. It seems to be a classic example of what I called the "Seneca Effect", that is the trading of some more years of near stability in exchange for a faster decline, later on. So, we are reacted to peak oil in the worst possible way.

The meeting was organized mainly by Luca Pardi, who is also the new president of ASPO-Italy. He replaces Ugo Bardi who has served as president for eight years. The meeting was co-organized with the Climalteranti group and sponsored by Mr. Mauro Romanelli, Tuscan Regional Councilor for the Green Party, who provided the prestigious "Sala delle feste" of "Palazzo Bastogi" in Florence, where the meeting took place.

Peak oil people

2011-11-06T03:52:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, Colin Campbell had the idea of collecting the biographies of people who had worked on Peak Oil with ASPO. The result is this book which was recently published in Ireland. It contains also the biography of yours truly; Ugo Bardi. I don't know how interesting you could find it, anyway it is there. Here is the link

Burning the skeptics: a false flag campaign against the concept of man made global warming

2011-11-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

You may have seen the disgusting "no-pressure" video of last year, where global warming skeptics were made to explode in a burst of blood. Now, there comes a new one, similar. It is "Combustible," where we see a climate skeptic catching fire, turning into ashes, and leaving only his eyeballs on the sidewalk. "Combustible" is just slightly less disgusting than "No Pressure" was and perhaps a bit more subtle. Here, the hapless skeptic burns by itself, whereas in the earlier movie we actually see environmentalists pushing the kill button. But the message of both movies is exactly the same: environmentalists are murderers who enjoy seeing people suffering. Indeed, "Combustible" was understood in this way in the comments to it at the WUWT site.

Who made this crap? Apparently, it was created by a professional advertising agency, "Realm." But there is a problem here: even if it does it "pro bono", an advertising agency acts on the basis of a request from a customer. An agency, in itself, doesn't have the competency to devise a campaign from scratch. Indeed, when Realm created an environmental ad in 2009 it was for a real and traceable environmental association, Earthshare of Georgia. But for the "Combustible" video there is no such traceable sponsor. At the end of the movie, you can read "climatechangeinitiative.com." But, at present, there doesn't exist a site with that name and the link only leads you to Bill Clinton's climate initiative, where (obviously) you find no trace of this video. WUWT suggests that the video originates from WWF, but, again, the the link provided only leads to an announcement of an open position and there no trace of this video in the whole WWF site. Another link supposed to identify the sponsors leads only to a speech of President Obama on climate change. It is a game of mirrors: there is no way to know who is behind this video.

So, how come that this video is "orphan" in the sense that it cannot be linked to any known (or even newly born) environmental organization? I think the most obvious explanation is that "Combustible" is a fake environmental movie. It is, actually, a false flag video designed to smear the environmental movement, depicting its members as murderers. Of course, if we reason in scientific terms, there is no way to prove this statement. In scientific terms, whatever cannot be proven must be considered dubious. However, there is a old rule which may not be scientific but which I think applies to the present case (and to "No Preessure" as well). It says that when you start feeling that you are being cheated, most likely you are.

In a previous post of mine, I was noting how the skeptic position on climate change is based mainly on narrative: fancy stories designed to distract people from the reality of the scientific results. I argued that the main narrative behind skepticism is that global warming does not exist; it is only a hoax created by a group of evil scientists who manipulated the data in order to keep money flowing into their fat research grants, as demonstrated by the Climategate mails. But that is not the only story told by skeptics (charitably defined in this way). Videos such as "Combustible" and "No pressure" are part of another narrative created with the purpose of painting environmentalists as a group of monsters who want to destroy most of humankind in order to create their green utopia. It is nothing new; the same lie was used against the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth" whose authors and sponsors were presented as planning to exterminate most of humankind. It is pure fiction, of course, but it is an effective weapon to undermine the credibility of the environmental movement and of climate science.

The people who conceived these videos, whoever they are, are clearly willing to use any means available for their purpose. They are obviously adept at the task and well financed, too. Against this kind of attacks, we are facing a difficult battle: it is hard to fight comfortable narratives with inconvenient truths. But it is also true that these spin campaigns can backfire. The minimum we can do is to expose these tricks when we see them appearing. Eventually, truth will win.

Narrative and science in the debate on climate change

2011-11-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

The remarkable success of the anti-science position on climate change is due in large part to the development of a successful narrative plot that casts scientists as evil schemers against the public. The attempts made by scientists to respond with scientific evidence to the attacks have not been a success. Recently, the work of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) group has provided some further insight on the mechanisms of this conflict.

In the "Aeneid", the Latin poet Virgil tells us all the details of Cassandra's unsuccessful attempt to fool Ulysses's plot of introducing a wooden horse full of Greek warriors inside Troy's walls. The Trojans were not stupid; they were fooled by a trick. On the beach in front of their town, they didn't find just a wooden horse but a distressed Greek soldier, naked and bound. The Trojans believe him when he tells them that he is a victim of Ulysses and that he was left there as a sacrifice for the Gods. He tells them that the Greeks had admitted their defeat, leaving the wooden horse on the beach as an offering for the Gods before sailing toward home. The Trojans take the wooden horse inside the city and that will be their end.

This story is, of course, a piece of fiction, but not just a fairy tale. Virgil was a genius of literature and the Aeneid is a masterpiece of all times. The story of the wooden horse shows us all the elements of the human way of preferring fiction to facts. The Greek traitor triumphs because he tells the Trojans a good story that contains what they want to be told: that they have defeated the Greeks and that the Greeks are evil. Virgilio even goes on to show us how the scientific method is not enough against a good story. He tells us of how a Trojan, Lacoon, hurls a javelin against the horse demonstrating that it is hollow from the noise that is heard. But that's useless. Stories are just too powerful to be overcome by just facts.

That we are deeply dependent on fictional elements in our perception of reality is nothing new. We see it again and again in the political debate; all based on fiction. The successful politician is the one who is able to cast reality in the form of a good story; identifying the bad guys and proposing their punishment (at present, the bad guys seem to be the scientists). It is the plot of basically all fiction: bad guys fight good guys and the good guys win; it is so simple as that. Fiction appears to be actually becoming reality in the sense that it is acted upon as if it were reality (read this if you are not convinced).

The case of the "BEST" (Berkeley earth surface temperatures) study tells us something of how the debate on global warming is cast in fictional, rather than scientific, terms. The BEST study had a considerable media resonance, especially because of previous declarations of skepticism of the lead scientist of the team, Richard Muller. The study was also sponsored by institutions that had previously supported the denial of the standard interpretation of the climate data. But when the BEST results came out, they confirmed the previous result. That is, that the Earth is warming.

Gobal warming skeptics were clearly taken by surprise by the BEST results and their reaction tells us a lot on their way to approach the question. I had expected that they would fall in good order to their second line of defense; that is to saying that, "yes, global warming exists, but it is not caused by human activity". Instead, they reacted with a vicious counterattack against the BEST study and its authors, with Richard Muller turning almost overnight from hero to traitor and being vilified in all possible ways (see, e.g., this image). Anthony Watts, of the blog "Watts up with that," had initially declared about BEST that "I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong." But when the results came out he changed his position and his site is publishing almost daily attacks against Muller and the BEST study (see, e.g. this one).

It was already clear that the debate on global warming was not a scientific debate, but it is starting to be clear now how remote from science the position of the skeptics is. Their whole interpretation of climate science pivots around a single narration. It says that a group of evil scientists manipulated the temperature data in order to show a warming that doesn't exist. They were caught red-handed when their private emails were made public in what we call the "Climategate" scandal.

You see how this story has all the elements needed to triumph over facts. It tells people what they want to hear: how the bad guys (the scientists) were defeated and that there is nothing to worry about global warming. No wonder that the denial side doesn't want to abandon this narrative. It would not be the same thing for them if they were forced to battle climate science on the question of whether warming is caused by human activity or not. That becomes a battle of facts vs. facts as there is no equivalent fancy story that tells us of how evil scientists are (actually, there is one: it tells how scientists ignored the data showing that the "medieval warm period" was warmer than the present time. But this is a far less effective story than the Climategate one).

There are so many elements that show that the Earth is warming that it is almost unbelievable that skeptics can have so much success with their denial. It is not so much because they are especially smart; it is mainly because scientists are poor communicators and have neglected the importance of the emotional content of the message. So far, scientists have been assuming that all they had to worry about was facts and their scientific interpretation - this is the way the IPCC reports are made. Someone else, then, would build a narrative on the scientists' work. We are discovering that the world doesn't work that way; not any more, at least.

Narrative is a powerful way of conveying messages. It exploits channels already open inside the human mind. It is through narrative that you can call up the good that exists in human beings; their capability of working for a good cause, of acting together, of helping those in need. Just think of the Gettysburg address and you'll see how a real leader can use a powerful narrative approach for a good purpose. We have plenty of ways to develop a narrative that is not in contrast with science. And we have the most wonderful story of all to tell; it is the story of an entire planet that spans billions of years and which we are just beginning to understand.

Note: this post was published also on "planet3.0.org"

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The BEST study may also do something more for us: it may provide us with a specific counter-narrative to be used against the "Climategate" one. If you ever were engaged in a debate on global warming, you surely were confronted - at one moment or another - with someone saying "but I heard that climate scientists had confessed that they had manipulated the data." Up to now, all you could do to counter this statement was to use facts; you could only answer, "there is no evidence that scientists manipulated the data". But that is pitting facts against fiction and, as we saw, fiction wins. With the "BEST" results, now you can say something like, "you know, the same people who said that scientists had manipulated the data commissioned a study that was supposed to prove that. And, funny, the result if that study was that the data were good! The Earth is really warming". Isn't it a good story to tell?

The Future of Energy and the Interconnected Challenges of the 21st Century

2011-10-30T01:54:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Francois Cellier

Francois Cellier is senior researcher at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. He is known for many contributions in the field of modelling and perhaps the readers of this blog know him for his work with "The Oil Drum". Cellier was present at the meeting on Energy of the Club of Rome in Basel on which I reported earlier on "Cassandra's Legacy". Here, he presents a more detailed report. As a personal comment on this post, I note that Francois may appear very pessimistic when, at the end of his post, he ask the question "Are we merely a club of old men (and a few women) crying on each other's shoulders?" I think Francois' intention is not to imply that it was a meeting of old men as, instead, there were several young people attending and giving contributions. The point is, I think, is that we must never feel too old to believe that we can make a difference!

The Future of Energy and the Interconnected Challenges of the 21^st Century

François E. Cellier
Department of Computer Science
ETH Zurich
CH-8092 Zurich
Switzerland

Email: FCellier@Inf.ETHZ.CH
URL: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/~fcellier/

The Club of Rome, in collaboration with the Dept. of Environment and Energy of the City of Basel, Switzerland, recently convened a two-day international conference entitled The Future of Energy and the Interconnected Challenges of the 21^st Century. The meeting was held October 17 and 18, 2011, at the Hôtel des Trois Rois in Basel. The conference -by invitation only- brought together a group of about 30 scientists from around the globe to discuss issues relating to resource depletion (Peak Oil) and climate change. Also present was a delegation of the Basel City government including the mayor and the minister for energy as well as several members of parliament.

This report summarizes some of the outcomes of our discussions.

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In Basel, the Club of Rome was given a warm welcome. Basel is by far the most environmentally conscious city of Switzerland. To illustrate my point: Basel reduced its per capita energy consumption between 1991 and 2010 from 5.4 kW to 4.0 kW, a reduction by a whopping 26%. This is a highly impressive figure. The average energy consumption in Switzerland is currently at 5.4 kW, down from 5.5 kW 10 years ago.

Basel has both topographic and political advantages over other cities and regions in the country. On the one hand, Basel-City is the smallest of our Cantons. It essentially consists of the city only. Thus, population density is very high, and public transportation systems are excellent.

While the average number of cars per 1000 inhabitants in the country currently lies at 514 cars, there are only 320 cars per 1000 inhabitants in Basel. Most of the houses in the inner city were built long before the advent of cars, and consequently, they rarely come with garages. There are a good number of public parking garages in the city center, but they are expensive and time-limited, and the residents usually have no parking lots anywhere close to their homes. Thus, in many cases, owning a car in Basel creates more of a problem than being of benefit. About 60% of the workforce comes to work by public transport, and only 30% come to work using private cars. The remaining 10% either walk, or ride to work by bike. Real estate is very expensive due to the limited space available, and therefore, there are few gas stations in the city. Car owners usually fill their vehicles outside the city limits, and as a result, their fuel consumption is not counted in the energy statistics of the city, which to some extent, distorts the picture.

In addition, Basel has political advantages. As in most high-income countries in the Western world, our city governments tend to be a bit more progressive, a bit more energy- and environmentally conscious than municipalities in the countryside. This is true for throughout Switzerland. In contrast to Basel, however, which is a city-state, other metropolitan areas are surrounded by a hinterland that is often more conservative and exerts considerable influence on the city and cantonal politics. The Basel-city government is able to pass any local legislation that suits them without facing opposition. The more conservative neighboring Basel-Countryside is a separate Canton and has no say on city regulations.

Yet, while these advantages may explain the lower energy consumption in Basel as compared to the Swiss average, they fail to explain the rapid decrease in energy consumption over the past 20 years. To this end, a number of different incentive schemes have been introduced step-by-step.

At present, most homes in Switzerland continue to be heated by oil, while Basel is actively promoting the connection of private homes to a centralized district heating network. Centralized district heating is much more efficient than individual oil heating, because much of the heat used by the district heating network is waste heat from the waste incineration plant and other industrial plants in the region, which essentially is available for free. Any additional heat that needs to be generated by burning fuel is produced with higher efficiency, because industrial oil burners can be operated cost-effectively at higher temperatures than single-dwelling oil burners. In Basel, the percentage of central oil heating systems in private homes has decreased significantly, and the electrical resistance heaters advocated in some areas of Switzerland no longer exist at all.
Then there was introduced an "energy levy" of some 5% that is being used for energy modernization programs and for upgrading older, less energy-efficient buildings, for subsidies of solar thermal installations, and generally for subsidies of investments in renewable energy systems of all kinds.
In addition, inhabitants of Basel pay an additional 5 Cents incentive tax per kWh of consumed electricity. This tax is reimbursed to all households and companies in the city as a lump-sum payment of CHF 75 per year and is also being used to reduce payroll taxes of companies located in the City-State.
Finally, Basel was the first city in Switzerland to introduce cost-covering feed-in tariffs for solar. These stipulate that the public electricity company must buy all electricity generated by photovoltaic systems and CHP (combined heat and power) plants at a standardized cost of production. Home owners offer their roofs to the local electricity company and to private investors, such as solar co-operatives, virtually for free. At the current time, the costs for this arrangement remain slightly above the market price for conventionally generated electricity. The electricity company is allowed to pass on the incurred costs to its customer base, leading to an increase in price of approximately 0.4 Cents per kWh. At present, Basel has already more than 3 MW of installed photovoltaic power. The Basel feed-in tariff model is expected to be adopted shortly throughout Switzerland. Similar legislation is in place in Germany and has, in past years, led to a veritable explosion in installed photovoltaic power.

The price of photovoltaic systems is dropping rapidly. One kg of silicon for a photovoltaic system cost as much as $500 on the spot market in 2008. The price has meanwhile dropped to $40 and may soon be as low as $5-10. This decrease is caused less by cheaper raw materials than by increasing efficiency in the production of crystalline silicon. Modern fluidized-bed reactors are considerably more energy-efficient than the previously used Siemens process, and as a result, the EROEI of photovoltaic systems is improving. Grid parity may be reached by 2012.

If you are interested in reading the exposé by Basel parliamentarian Rudolf Rechsteiner on these and related topics, you can find it here.

The Swiss National Parliament recently passed legislation pertaining to the fact that no additional permits for new nuclear power stations will be issued in the future, and the five currently operational nuclear power stations will need to be phased out over the coming 20 years. At this time, Switzerland generates approximately 35% of its total electricity through nuclear power. Yet, extrapolating from recent experiences in Germany and recognizing that photovoltaic systems can be deployed rapidly, Basel parliamentarians at the meeting were optimistic that the loss of nuclear power will be able to be compensated for by an increase in photovoltaic systems and other renewables in a timely manner. Additional pump storage reservoirs may be required for load balancing and other reasons, but the loss of nuclear power does not necessarily lead to electricity shortages in Switzerland.

The attendees at the meeting concurred that the supply of conventional oil will soon no longer be able to meet demand, i.e., Peak Oil, if it hasn't occurred already, is imminent. Switzerland, which consumes about 2/3 of its total energy in the form of fossil fuels, will need to reduce its energy consumption. Yet, even the gradual loss of fossil fuels must not necessarily lead to a catastrophic breakdown (at least not immediately). About half of our oil consumption is caused by central oil heating systems, and a huge potential exists for improving the energy efficiency of our buildings. Technology is already available that allows us to construct buildings that are energy neutral, i.e., that generate as much energy as they consume. Historic structures, of which there are many in Switzerland, may not lend themselves to easy upgrading; nevertheless, a lot can be accomplished to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for space heating.

Undoubtedly, in the near future, we will no longer be able to take our SUVs to the nearest gas station whenever it suits us, but Switzerland features one of the densest public transportation networks on the entire planet. While other Western countries in the 20^th century systematically dismantled their public transportation systems (under the constant and growing influence of the oil companies), Switzerland consistently modernized and enlarged its public transportation network. In the future, we may need to limit the use of our cars to shorter trips, e.g. to the nearest train station. A reduction in available gas may thus represent more of a discomfort and nuisance than a true disaster.

Unfortunately, these assumptions only hold true if we postulate that the rest of the world will be able to cope equally well with the consequences of diminishing oil reserves, which is anything but certain. Peak Oil means Peak Food. Even now Switzerland is unable to feed its population of 8 million people. We currently import about 60% of our food.

While world population will likely peak long before 2050, it is by no means a given that the Swiss population will have peaked by then as well. If Switzerland continues to outperform its neighbors economically, the already enormous pressures caused by immigration will continue to increase. A recent survey in Germany revealed that 10% of all Germans questioned expressed the opinion that they would consider moving to Switzerland – not because they like Switzerland better than Germany, but for purely economic reasons … and Germany is among the richest nations in Europe.

How will we feed additional immigrants if even now our arable land has shrunk drastically due to increased urbanization? How will we keep our own industrial base operational even with sufficient locally generated energy if the economies of the nations around us are faltering due to energy shortages? For these and other reasons, Peak Oil may still turn into a disaster for Switzerland.

In addition, concerning the issue of anthropogenic climate change, most attendees expressed a much more pessimistic outlook. Certainly the energy crisis will bite us long before climate change takes its toll. However, energy issues can be dealt with after the fact in a reactive mode, even if it is uncomfortable, while the "sins" committed today with respect to the continuing emission of greenhouse gases are expected to lead to irreparable damage fifty years from now. For this reason, anthropogenic climate change represents a challenge that needs to be dealt with pro-actively in the here and now, and there is no discernible political will to do so. Despite being cognizant of the fact that inactivity now may lead to a veritable catastrophe 50 years down the road, elected officials still opt for the coming long-term disaster over short-term inconvenience. Large segments of the population are lacking awareness of the coming disaster, and politicians are prepared to ignore it because unpopular decisions taken by them now will jeopardize their future reelection due to their constituents' poor comprehension of the issues at hand.

Some of the exposés presented were outright alarming. According to Ian Dunlop, a senior member of ASPO Australia and a member of the Club of Rome, unless we start reducing the CO₂ emissions right now at a rate of 9% per year, we will be unable to stay within the 2^oC increase in temperature considered safe by the IPCC. As this clearly will not happen, we are almost certain to end up with a rise of at least 4^oC within the 21^st century. Yet, an average increase of 4^oC worldwide translates to a rise of 6^oC in central Europe, and an increase of 8-12^oC in the Arctic.

The melting of the glaciers will dry up rivers and the disappearance of the Greenland ice will lead to a rise of the sea levels by 7 meters. Coastal areas, including a large number of major cities, which are presently home to roughly a third of the world population, will be flooded. Coastal regions will be devastated by hurricanes of unseen proportions, while regions further inland will experience increased desertification. Such change may lead to a die-off scenario where the total world population would shrink rapidly.

According to Dunlop, measures to drastically decrease CO₂ emissions would need to be taken within the next 5-6 years to prevent disaster. Thereafter it will be too late. The massive technological and social changes needed to accomplish these goals may entail a war-like setting where everyone is cooperating because there are no alternatives. Yet, as the effects of climate change will not affect us in major ways for another 30-40 years (some effects are already in evidence, as shown by the escalating number of extreme events around the world over the past decade in particular that have already claimed many lives), there is no political will whatsoever to tackle the problem, even if this should mean the end of the world as we know it.

CO₂ emissions are inextricably linked to the burning of fossil fuels. For this reason, Peak Oil and anthropogenic climate change are not two separate issues. They must be addressed together. Mankind may choose to ignore one or the other, but cannot do so without risking serious consequences.

Our Western democracies served us well for the past centuries. They offered us freedom and prosperity to a degree never seen before. They also turned out to be more robust than the alternative model embraced by Eastern Europe in the 20^th century. While countries that had implemented communist social systems were slow to change, our market economies proved to be highly adaptive to a changing environment.

However, we never before faced a situation where our decisions literally affected the survival of our civilization 50 years in the future, and it remains to be seen whether our political system is able to effectively deal with such a "stress test," or whether our political structures will force us to helplessly submit to our own destruction and that of our planet.

As it stands, the most cooperative and constructive government in terms of dealing with the brewing "perfect storm" ahead may be the Chinese government. Western governments are, at this point, run by representatives that are mostly lawyers (and in-officially by bankers and CEOs of multinational corporations). By contrast, the Chinese leadership consists primarily of engineers. They do understand models and are perfectly capable of reading and interpreting charts. They do everything in their power to help mitigate the coming disaster (and they can afford to do so, because they don't need to fear for their re-election), but their problems are formidable. The Chinese cannot reduce their per capita energy consumption now, and they will not be able to do so for a good number of years to come. The average Chinese citizen remains very poor, compared to their European or American counterpart. China needs to consume more energy to improve the desperate living conditions of a large segment of its population. China is currently burning lots of coal for electricity generation. They are fully aware that this adds significantly to the world's CO₂ emissions. According to Prof. Wenying Chen of Tsinghua University, China currently does not see a way around it, as the Chinese are unable to generate enough electricity by other means. Yet, the Chinese leadership is willing to listen and is receptive to any suggestion that will help them reduce their CO₂ emissions.

One last note: The Copenhagen meeting demonstrated once again that the top world leadership is incapable of addressing this highly urgent problem, although an immediate prescription for decisively reducing CO₂ emissions may be necessary to save our civilization. It was mentioned that it is much easier to deal with politicians at the local level. City mayors and regional governments may have both the will and the means to positively contribute to a local solution. Good examples are likely to have a signaling effect and may convince governments of neighboring areas to adopt successful strategies seen elsewhere. Basel is a good example of that. However, will such a decentralized approach be sufficiently effective to save our planet in time from destruction?

I am very grateful for having had the opportunity to participate in this meeting. It turned out to be an eye-opener in more ways than just one. Yet, after two days of intensive talks, I am asking myself, what have we accomplished? Where is the outreach? Are we merely a club of old men (and a few women) crying on each other's shoulders over spilled wine? What can we do to make a difference?

The "anti-Cassandra" effect: believing the unbelievable

2011-10-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

Nobody ever said that Cassandra was dumb, but when she said that she didn't think that the wooden horse that the Greeks had left on the beach was exactly a "gift", nobody believed her. This is something that we could call the "Cassandra Effect". Sometimes, however, there happens the opposite effect. That is, people believe in improbable stories without the smallest attempt of applying a bit of critical analysis. This is something that could be called the "Anti-Cassandra" effect. As an example, let me analyze a recent report that has appeared on newspapers all over the world. It is the story of how the window of a Ryanair plane was repaired with sticky tape and that because of that, the plane needed to return to the airport soon after take-off. Above: photo from "The Sun".

On Oct 24 2011, "The Sun" published on their web site an article titled "Passengers watch Ryanair crew mend window with tape". It describes how the passengers of a plane leaving from Stansted were horrified at the sight and how the plane had to go back to the airport after take-off because of "damage to the windscreen". The article of The Sun has been reproduced in various forms in innumerable newspapers and web sites, for instance on the "Daily Mail.

Now, let's analyze this report. Can it be true that a major airline such as Ryanair (by the way, with an excellent safety record) can think of repairing a broken plane window with what the "Daily Mail" describes as "sticky tape"? Unlikely, to say the least; just as it is unlikely that the pilot of the plane would have accepted to take off with a window pane precariously held in place with scotch tape bought at the nearest hardware store.

Looking at the story a bit more in depth, we discover that there exists something called "speed tape" commonly used in aviation to repair minor damage and to stick parts together. It is not the common kind of tape, but a metal tape specifically developed for aviation. If that is what was being used to repair the cockpit window, then there is no scandal and there was no attempt on the part Ryanair of "penny pinching" (as stated in the Daily Mail). Indeed, the Irish Aviation Authority investigated on the question and both The Sun and The Daily Mail report that nothing wrong was found in the repair procedure.

But there is more in this story that may show that it was not just a mistake, but a true hoax. Let's go even more in depth in the report. Here is the image that appears on the Daily Mail; it is somewhat different from the one that appears on "The Sun" (shown above)

It is clear that this is the original photo; it has a better resolution than the one that appears on "The Sun," which has been retouched and reframed. Note how in the image on The Sun the left lower corner has been blanked out - we'll see later on that it was done for a reason.

Now, first of all, let's think in terms of perspective. From what I know, the nose of a Boeing 737 stands almost 3 meters high from the ground. Look at this image of a 737 and note how high the nose is with respect to the people standing.

Now, to take a picture like the one shown in "The Sun" or in the "Daily Mail", the photographer must be either at some distance from the plane or at a height comparable to that of the nose. Both conditions are highly improbable in the reported circumstances. When you board a plane they don't let you wander around to take pictures. And they don't let you climb on the roof of the passenger bus, either. Taken from where, then? Maybe from the inside of the passenger terminal? But that is just as unlikely; the level of the terminal floor is normally higher than the plane.

Besides, note another detail: the "arms" of the technician who is supposed to be repairing the window. These arms have been heavily retouched. But why? Possibly, because this is a photo montage where the technicians have been added to the photo of the plane.

But that's not all. Let's now read what they say in "The Sun," the original report.

"Passengers watched in horror as ground crew put the tape around the edge of the windscreen shortly before take-off from Stansted, Essex, to Riga, Latvia. "

But from where did they watch? It is weird, because we read that,

"We were kept in the dark, and were terrified. I could see guys taping in the windscreen with what looked like duct tape or gaffer tape. "

In the dark? What do they mean with that? If they mean actual darkness, it is impossible. The picture is taken in daylight and the passenger cabin of a plane is never "in the dark" when there is light outside. Besides, if the passengers were inside the cabin, how could they see the technicians taping the cockpit window from outside? Maybe they were looking from the passenger terminal, but again the story doesn't make sense. If they were really "terrified" would they have accepted to board the plane?

These contradictions would be enough to say that this story is a hoax, but there is more. Who took that picture? We cannot say that from the version of "The Sun" but we can from the one that appears on the "Daily Mail". It is written right there, on the left lower corner - just the region blanked out in the other photo. The author is one "Lee Thompson" who placed a copyright notice near his name.

Isn't it weird that a "passenger" would put a signature and a copyright sign on a picture taken while on a trip that is described as for a "stag party" as we read in the "Daily Mail"? But there is no doubt that "Lee Thompson" is the name of the passenger - we are told that explicitly in the article on "The Sun." Not just that, we have a picture of Mr. Thompson in the article. Here it is (note the disgusted expression - is that the face you make when your plane is forced to an emergency landing?)

Image from "The Sun"

So, let's see..... we have someone named "Lee Thompson", it is quite a common name, but he must be a professional photographer (because he puts a copyright mark on his images) and he must be connected with "The Sun". A little search on the web and you find him. He is, indeed, a professional photographer and he works for The Sun. Here he is as he appears on his site.

I don't know what's your opinion, but to me he looks damn like the same Lee Thompson of the article on the Ryanair "accident". Nice coincidence, right? The same person was both a passenger of the flight and a correspondent from The Sun! That explains, by the way, why they had blanked out the name of the photographer and the copyright notice. But someone, most likely by mistake, has placed on line the original.

The curious thing is that this curious story has been reproduced everywhere in the press and on the web without any attempt of criticism on the part of those who reproduced it. So, we have here a good example of the "Anti-Cassandra" effect, that is of people believing something unbelievable without making the slightest attempt to apply a bit of critical analysis. Sometimes people refuse to believe in reality and sometimes they fall easy prey of legends. So, in this case, everyone - or almost everyone - loved the chance of a little "Ryanair-bashing" given the fame of penny pinching of the company. It is the same effect that led so many people to believe in the "Climategate" story as a chance to do a little science-bashing against those nasty scientists.

It is part of the way we reason; we believe in what we want to believe and we don't believe in what we don't want to believe. It has always been like that from the times of the prophetess Cassandra of Troy and, apparently, things haven't changed so much today.

Cassandra in the 21st century: ASPO-Italy 5 in Florence on Oct 28

2011-10-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

Luca Pardi, vice-president of ASPO-Italy, is the organizer for this year the fifth annual meeting of the organization in Florence on Oct 28. The title of the meeting is "Cassandra in the 21st century: Climate Energy and Food" and it is organized jointly with the "Climalteranti" association, a group of Italian climate scientists.

A brief period that I spent outside Italy this month has convinced me that our country, nowadays, is known for a few things; none of them very good. One, of course, is about the sexual exploits of our prime minister. Then, we have our Minister of Science and Education who thought that neutrinos travel in a tunnel from Geneva, in Switzerland to a place in central Italy. And, finally, an Italian guy who has built an electric boiler and who claims it is a nuclear reactor. Bad times, indeed.

So, maybe ASPO-Italy can try to do what is possible to uphold the honor of the country. Hence, we are doing our best to organize an interesting international meeting this year. Our vice-president, Luca Pardi, has taken this burden upon himself and he has succeeded beautifully in the task of assembling a great program. With the sponsorship of the Tuscan Regional government, we are glad to report that we'll have speakers from international institutions as:

1. Ian Johnson - Secretary General of the Club of Rome
2. Nicole M. Foss - Known as "Stoneleigh", co-editor at The Automatic Earth
3. Toufic El Asmar - Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)

And we'll have many well known speakers from Italy: Luca Mercalli, Stefano Caserini, Sergio Castellari, Sylvie Coyaud and others - we'll also have musical entertainment in the afternoon!

The first two talks are in English (translation to Italian provided), all the others will be in Italian (sorry, no translation available). The location is in Florence, at the Sala delle Feste - Palazzo Bastogi, Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, via Cavour, 18. We start at 9:00 a.m. (more or less), entrance is free and no registration is necessary.

Full program of the meeting at the ASPOITALIA site.

The BEST results: the scientific method works.

2011-10-23T02:43:00.000-07:00

Recently released results by an independent research team ("BEST") confirm something that had been obvious for a long time: the Earth is warming.

The recent results by the Berkeley team (BEST) confirm that the Earth is warming. That's no surprise; we had known that for decades. So, what's so special in these results?

One point is, of course, the evident disarray of the skeptical tribe, as they had clearly put great hopes in this study. But that is a short term phenomenon as they are rapidly closing ranks and restarting the doubt-creating machine. Rather, what is interesting in the BEST study, I think, is a further demonstration of how well the scientific method works (*).

Think about that: the BEST study had started with great fanfare as a new study performed by people who defined themselves as "skeptics". It was supposed to be the final world on whether the earth is warming or not and clear hints were sent by the performers that they had strong suspicions that decades of work by climate scientists had been badly affected by an overlooked phenomenon known as "Urban Heat Island" (UHI). Considering some previous statements by the BEST team leader, Richard Muller, and some of the financing sources of the study, it was not an auspicious start.

But, instead, the team was staffed by professionals and worked professionally; applying the scientific method. At least three different teams had worked before BEST in examining the data provided by the temperature measuring stations. They all had used the scientific method; just as the BEST team did. In the end, all four teams arrived to the same results. The "UHI" bias does not exist (or, better said, it is correctly accounted for in the treatment of the data). See? The method works.

But then, why so much discussion? What made the BEST team think that previous studies were wrong? And what made critics of the BEST effort think that it would be biased in favour of anti-science theses? Well, it is a fact that scientists are human beings and they have their personal biases.

There are two kinds of typical scientific biases: one is when an aged scientist mistrusts everything new; it is the "not measured here" syndrome. Within some limits, that is a syndrome shown by Richard Muller in several of his public statements - but, in the end, it didn't affect the work of the team.

The other kind of bias occurs when scientists turn out to be easily gullible on matters they are not experts on. This is shown, among many examples, by the recent case of the "E-Cat," the device that was claimed to be able to produce energy by nuclear fusion reactions. This kind of bias is specular to the one described before; here, a scientist may take position on the basis of incomplete data, but "measured here." Eventually, however, also this bias can be corrected by the scientific method.

So, we have a good method that we can use to understand what's happening around us and what problems we will be facing in the future. We can use the scientific method to take action in order to avoid the negative effects of climate change and resource depletion. The problem? We are not using it.

(*) But what is exactly the scientific method? It is not so easy to say as it could seem, since different fields of science require different approaches and the complete description of the method needs a rather long article in Wikipedia - to say nothing of the many books and studies that have been dedicated to the subject. But I think there is a single fundamental point in the method: experimental results always take precedence over theory. In other words, reality always trumps hopes. It is this approach that defends us from the ideological bias that is part of our way of thinking.

The Club of Rome is back

2011-10-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken at the initial session of the meeting of the Club of Rome in Basel. Switzerland, held on Oct 17-18 2011 and titled "International conference on the future of energy." From left to right, sitting at the tables, Guy Marin, mayor of Basel, Ian Johnson, secretary general of the Club of Rome and Leena Srivastava of TERI (India). On the left, a glimpse of Martin Lees, former secretary general of the Club of Rome.

Yes, the Club of Rome is back. Actually, it had never gone away, but the demonization campaign that had been unleashed against its 1972 report, "The Limits to Growth," had largely convinced the public that the Club's approach to the world's problems had been based on a "wrong" model.

Instead, it turned out that the model was not wrong. The recent turmoil, the economic recession, the worries about "peak oil", and the rapid rise in the price of all mineral commodities have brought back the interest on "The Limits to Growth". That brings the sponsor of the report, the Club of Rome, again under the spotlight.

I am just back from a meeting on energy that the Club of Rome organized in Basel. When I have some time, I'll see to report on it in detail. For the time being, I can just note that I was surprised (but not so much) in finding at the meeting the kind of atmosphere that I had always imagined the Club's reunions would have. Of course, many things have changed from the time of the foundation of the Club, almost half a century ago. It may be that, today, the Club's activity is more focalized on practical solutions to the world's problems, whereas at the beginning it was more in understanding what the future had in store for humankind. But some elements of the Club's approach remain the same: the international vision, the "system approach", the attention to the interdependency of the ecosystem and the industrial system, the focus on the social problems and on the welfare of the poor.

That the Club of Rome could maintain its vision for all those years is all the more remarkable considering that it has been always defined as a "non-organization" that explicitly chose to avoid rigid and formal rules. It may be because of the personality of the founders, Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King, and several others. Or maybe it is because there is something intrinsically good in the Club's way of facing the world's problems. In any case, the Club of Rome still has a lot to say on how to manage our future.

I believe it because it is absurd

2011-10-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Climate scientist Hans Schellnhuber is threatened with a noose while giving a lecture. (link to the video). Are scientists our new enemies, the target of a new crusade?

At the beginning of the third century A.D., Tertullianus, champion of Christianity against Paganism, gave us a startling revelation of the breakdown between the old and the new cultural vision. He wrote something that we remember today as, "Credo quia absurdum" that is, "I believe it because it is absurd." These are not exactly Tertullian's words, but this sentence nicely summarizes his thought. Tertullian was using absurdity as a weapon against the old paradigm. He was an apostate, a revolutionary, a subversive.

Rethinking about those ancient times, it is impressive to note how similar they are to the paradigm breakdown of our times which is often expressed in terms of what we call "conspiracy theories". Up to no long ago, the breakdown against the old cultural vision was expressed in complex and structured ideological forms: communism or socialism for instance. But what we are seeing now is nothing structured or complex. It is simply the denial of everything that could give the impression of being "scientifically demonstrated". From chemtrails to climategate, we see the spreading of an attitude based on the concept that "if it is science, then it is a hoax." If Tertullian were alive today, his search for the creative absurdity would be expresses, perhaps, maintaining that the planes flying above us are spreading terrible poisons over the atmosphere or that the idea of that human produced CO2 is warming the planet is an elaborate hoax designed to frighten us.

It is weird; sure. But for everything that exists, there is a reason for it to exist. That is true also for conspiracy theories, now and in old times. At the time of Tertullian, the material prosperity of Rome and of the Romans was often seen as the result of the favor of the Pagan Gods. When this prosperity disappeared, it was a shock: the old Gods didn't favor Rome any more. The result was a movement of ideas that saw the ancient gods as "evil," just as those people who kept worshiping them. We remember the story of the pagan philosopher, Hypatia, killed and dismembered by an angry mob. That happened a couple of centuries after Tertullian, when the break between the new and the old paradigm was not any more the domain of isolated subversives; it had become a wave of rage - a true tsunami.

Today, we find symptoms of exactly this kind of breakdown; of a tsunami of rage mounting in our society. Think of our prosperity: we tend to attribute it not to Pagan Gods but to our technological prowess. We worship the ability of scientists to create new and better machinery. We tell each other that any and every problem can be solved by scientists inventing a clever way out. Not enough oil? Let's drill deeper, invent better biofuels, create nuclear fusion in a bottle. Not enough food? Let's invent new fertilizers, genetically modified organisms, new pesticides. Pollution? Let's have new and better filters for car exhausts and incinerator smokestacks. Cancer? Soon we'll have the magic pill that cures it.

But now something different is happening, something unheard before. The scientists are telling us that there are no quick fixes for problems such as resource depletion and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That the more we grow, the more the problem gets serious. That we risk wiping out humankind from the planet by doing exactly the same things that we have been so proud of being able to do, so far. That we need to change our ways before it is too late.

It is the complete breakdown of the old paradigm. For most of us, it is totally disorienting to hear that we did everything wrong, and to hear it told by very people, the scientists, who had shown us how to do what we have been doing. That can only be seen as a betrayal and there is no wonder that the rage mounts against those treacherous, unfaithful, evil scientists. Such stories as the "Climategate" are signs of this rage. It is a terrible rage, something that cannot be explained except by the loss of a common frame of thought. It is a society that is losing the master-pupil relation. That is, losing wisdom, sapience, auctoritas.

When people lose wisdom, the easiest way out appears to them to find an enemy, Our new enemies seem to be the scientists. We haven't seen yet climatologists being lynched by angry mobs, as it happened to Hypatia long ago - but we seem to be getting close to something like that. The rage of those people whom we call "conspiracy theorists" is still at the formless stage of denial of everything, but it may well develop in forms that we might describe as some sort of a new crusade where, this time, the enemies are the scientists. It would not be the first time that scientists become the target of political movements, from the times of McCarthyism in the US to the "Cultural Revolution" in China. Those movements eventually subsided, but maybe we haven't seen the anti-science rage appearing in full force, yet.

The transformation of the Roman Society from paganism to Christianity took centuries and involved all sorts of violent struggles until it settled into a new paradigm and a new sapience. A thousand years after Tertullian, the world saw that flowering of thought that we call scholastic philosophy; which involved rediscovering the old sapience and merging it with the new. We are seeing today the start of a new cycle and, in time, we will have to rediscover a new sapience and a new auctoritas. What we see today obscurely, as in a mirror, then we'll see face to face.

(thanks to Ludovico Pernazza for pointing out a mistake in this text; now corrected)

The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox

2011-10-08T04:18:00.000-07:00

The "Orion" spaceship is pushed onwards by the detonation of nuclear bombs. It was a concept proposed in the 1950s as a way to reach the planets of the solar system in a few days and other stars in a few years. Such ships are theoretically possible but, with the amount of energy that we can manage today, is hard to think that we can assemble enough resources for building a fleet of interstellar spaceships. On the contrary, we may well be already sliding down the other side of the Hubbert curve and we may have to give up all dreams of space exploration. Could extraterrestrial civilizations do better than us? Perhaps not. It is possible that any industrial civilization based on non renewable resources would face the same problem, we are facing: collapse generated by depletion. We could call it the "Hubbert hurdle".

When I started reading astronomy books, in the 1960s, nobody knew if there existed planets around other stars and the common view was that they were very rare. Of course, that contrasted with the main theme of the science fiction of the time, of which I was also an avid reader. The idea that planetary systems were common in the galaxy was much more fascinating than the "official" one but, at that time, it seemed to be pure fantasy. But it turns out that science fiction was absolutely right, at least on this point. We are discovering hundreds of planets orbiting around stars and the latest news are that one sun-class star out of three may have an earth-like planet in the habitable zone. Fantastic!

The measurements that are telling us of extra-solar planets cannot tell us anything about extra-solar civilizations, another typical theme of science fiction. But, if earth-like planets are common in the galaxy, then organic, carbon based life should common as well. And if life is common, intelligent life cannot be that rare. And if intelligent life is not rare, then there must exist alien civilizations out there. With 100 billion stars in our galaxy, we may think that also on this point science fiction might have been right. Could the galaxy be populated with alien civilizations?

Here, however, we have a well known problem called the "Fermi Paradox". If all those civilizations exist, then could they develop interstellar travel? And, in this case, if there are so many of them, why aren't they here? Of course, for all we known the speed of light remains an impassable barrier. But, even at speeds slower than light, nothing physical prevents a spaceship from crossing the galaxy from end to end in a million year or even less. Since our galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, intelligent aliens would have had plenty of time to explore and colonize every star in the galaxy, jumping from one to another. But we don't see aliens around and that's the paradox. The consequence seems to be that we are alone as sentient beings in the galaxy,perhaps in the whole universe.So, we seem to be back to some old models of the solar system that told us that we are exceptional. Once, we were told that we are exceptional because planets are rare, now it may be because civilizations are rare. But why?

On this point we should look back at some assumptions that are behind the Fermi paradox. The basic one is that there exist intelligent civilizations, of course, but there is another one that says that civilizations move along a path of progressive expansion that leads them towards the control of higher and higher levels of energy. If you think about that, this is a typical result of the way of thinking of the 1950s, when the "atomic age" had just started and people saw as obvious that we would hop from one source of energy to another. We would leave fossil fuels soon to move to nuclear fission. From there, we would move to nuclear fusion and then to who knows what. This progression is crucial for the Fermi paradox to make sense: of course it takes a lot of energy to embark in a gigantic task such as interstellar exploration and civilization. An estimate for the minimum power needed is of of around 1000 terawatts (TW) as an order of magnitude. It is just a guess, but it has some logic. The whole power installed today on our planet is of the order of 15 TW and the most we could do was to explore the planets of our system, and even that rather sporadically.

So, the Fermi paradox requires that alien civilization would follow more or less the same route that was seen as laid out for us in the 1950s. They would start from fossil fuels, then move to various forms of nuclear energy. Up to a certain point, it is not a bad model. It is likely that extrasolar "earth-like" or "superearth" planets would have an active plate tectonics and, if they develop life, that would lead to the formation of fossil fuels as the result of the sedimentation and burial of organic matter. Then, we may assume that intelligent aliens would operate according to economic principles
similar to the ones that govern our behavior, that is they would tend to use the highest energy yield resources and therefore use fossil fuels as the start for their industrial civilization.

Fossil fuels, however, are an energy source too weak and too polluting to use for interstellar travel. An extrasolar planet might well be better endowed than ours, but that would not help. The limits for our aliens would be the same as they are for us: either depletion or the saturation of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases (and perhaps both). But the limit with fossil fuels is more subtle than that and it is related to the Hubbert model which says that the pattern of energy production of a non renewable resource is highly non linear and follows a "bell shaped" curve.

The model is based on the concept that energy production grows depending on the energy yield of the resource (energy return on energy invested, EROEI). The higher the EROEI the faster the resource is exploited. As the best (highest EROEI) resources are exploited first, the EROEI declines and eventually affects the ability of extracting more resource. Production reaches a peak and then declines. The result is the typical, bell shaped, Hubbert curve. If, in addition, the resource being exploited produces significant pollution, decline will be usually faster than growth, that is the curve will be asymmetric and skewed forward (this I have called the "Seneca effect"). The curve is general for all non-renewable resources, although it is most often applied to fossil fuels.

Tim O'Reilly may have been the first to note, in 2008, that the Hubbert curve may be relevant for the Fermi paradox. Because of the non linearity of the curve, no matter what resources are being used, a civilization literally "flares up" and then subsides, being able to maintain the highest level of energy production only for a very short time. This phenomenon that we might call "The Hubbert Hurdle" may be very general and make industrial civilizations in the galaxy to be very short-lived. The decline associated with depletion and with pollution may rapidly bring a civilization back to stone age, from which it will never be able to develop again a sophisticated technology. That is an especially difficult hurdle if the Seneca behavior sets in (maybe we could call it the "Seneca hurdle"). In any case, this effect strongly limits the life-span of a civilization.

Note how this model is different from the view of the 1950s. In the 1950s, we believed in a continuous expansion of energy production, "hopping" from source to source was seen as a smooth process. But the Hubbert model says hopping to a new source is, instead, a dramatic hurdle and success is by no means guaranteed. We may well have failed our attempt to hop to the "next level", seen as nuclear fission. With the decline of fossil power, it may be too late to gather sufficient resources to invest in nuclear energy. Intelligent aliens might do better than us in gathering these resources, but the Hubbert hurdle remains a major problem. One problem with nuclear energy is that it creates a particularly disastrous form of pollution: nuclear war. The possibility that alien civilizations would routinely destroy themselves as they entered their atomic age is something that Isaac Asimov proposed in his 1957 short story "The Gentle Vultures." But, suppose that it doesn't happen. Can nuclear fission provide enough energy for interstellar travel? Most likely not.

Uranium and thorium, fissile elements, are extremely rare in the universe. For what we know, they are accumulated at levels that can provide a good EROEI only on earth-like planets which have an active plate tectonics. On bodies such as the Moon and the asteroids, uranium exists in extremely tiny amounts, of the order of parts per billion and that makes extracting it an impossible task. It is unlikely that an alien rocky planet could have much more uranium than we have on ours. So, let's make a quick calculation. Today, nuclear fission is generating a power of about 0.3 TW on our planet. We said that for expanding in the galaxy we need something of the order of 1000 TW. That's a far target for us, considering that, with the limited uranium resources available, we are not even sure that we'll be able to keep active the present fleet of nuclear reactors in the coming years. We could expand these resources to non fissionable isotopes of uranium and thorium if we were able to develop "breeder" reactors. In that case, an optimistic estimate has that the uranium mineral resources could last for "30.000 years" at the present rate of consumption. Maybe, but if we were to reach 1000 TW, we would run out of uranium in 10 years. This number gives us a rough estimate of the time span that a civilization could sustain at a power large enough to permit interstellar space travel: tens or perhaps hundreds of years, but not much more. Such a civilization could, in principle, generate a large spike of energy production but then it would have to quickly decline back to zero for lack of fuel resources. It is, again, the Hubbert hurdle at work.

So we arrive now to nuclear fusion, the poster child of the Atomic Age. Fusion can use hydrogen isotopes and hydrogen is the most abundant element of the universe. The idea that was common in the 1950s is that with fusion we would have had energy "too cheap to meter", so abundant that we could have had week-ends on the moon for the whole family. Well, things turned out to be much moredifficult than they seemed to be. In more than half a century of attempts, wehave never been able to get more energy from a fusion process than wepumped into it. Even “fusion bombs” are actually fusionenhanced fission bombs. Maybe there is some trick that we can't see now to get nuclear fusion working; maybe we are just dumber than the average galactic civilization. We might also maintain, however, that there simply isn't a way for fusion to be obtained with an energy gain outside stars. Of course, we can't say, but the Fermi Paradox could be telling us, actually, "look, controlled nuclear fusion is NOT possible."

Of course, there are other possibilities for a civilization to develop powerful sources of energy. For instance, think of black holes. If you can control a small black hole, throwing anything into it will generate a lot of energy that could be used for interstellar travel. Black holes are very difficult to control and a civilization using this technology would face the ultimate pollution problem: the creation of a black hole big enough that it would gobble everything around, including the civilization that created it. In any case, even black holes are subjected to the Hubbert Hurdle, as you keep throwing matter into them, you gradually run out of it. A civilization based on black holes would flare up very rapidly and then disappear, leaving nothing except black holes.

Clearly, we are entering a realm of speculation but the point I wanted to make with this post is that the Hubbert mechanism generates a short lifespan for a civilization based on non-renewable resources. It also generates dramatic problems in switching from a resource to another. If this is a general behavior for civilizations, then it can explain the Fermi paradox. Sentient beings may be common in our Galaxy, but their existence as industrial civilizations may be extremely short. So, we shouldn't besurprised that we don't find alien spaceships cruising around. Perhaps we'll have a chance to get aradio signal from one of these civilizations, but that will be just like spottinganother ship while crossing the ocean. There are plenty of ships crossingthe ocean, but take a given moment and a specific place and it isvery unlikely that one will be visible from there.

In the end, the energy source available to a planetary civilization is limited to what can be obtained from the planet's sun. That may be a lot: on Earth the total amount arriving is about 100.000 TW; which can be further increased using space installations. With that, it would be perfectly possible to arrive to those 1000 TW that we said are necessary for interstellar travel. But we have arrived to a concept completely different from the one that is at the basis of the Fermi paradox: the idea, typical of the 1950s, that a civilization keeps always expanding. A civilization based on a fixed energy source, a star, may reason and behave in completely different terms. It might concentrate on the exploitation of the star (this is the concept of the "Dyson sphere") rather than on interstellar travel.

As we move awayfrom things we are familiar with, we find ourselves in unknown terrain.How would such a high power civilization manifest itself? What is in theuniverse that we can define as “natural” as opposite to“artificial”? The only thing we can say is that stars arewonderful engines: steady, powerful, reliable, and long lasting. Ifthey were not natural, someone should have invented them..... But, of course, they are natural......yes...... I think they are......... .

Note added after publication: I discovered that John Greer had examined this subject in similar terms in 2007, (h/t Leanan)

The renewable revolution, III - the Jevons paradox

2011-10-05T01:27:00.000-07:00

I received an interesting comment today on my first post on the renewable revolution. In answering it, I thought that the exchange was worth publishing as a post in its own, so here it is.

Karl Northsaid...
: Ugo, you are no doubt familiar with the Jevons Paradox, which says that energy efficiency gains, in a typical capitalist political economy of few policy constraints, are used in ways that lead to higher energy use at the macro level. In my view something similar is at work if the “clean” energy alternatives that you are advocating replace fossil fuels to a significant degree. The use of alternatives (again in our dominant form of political economy) will be used to chew up the same resources as fossil fuels do. Many of these resources are nonrenewable, many of them destructive of global carrying capacity in their production and use. As just one example, fossil fuels have permitted an industrialized form of agriculture that is an ecological slow-moving disaster but has temporarily doubled world population, which in turn is causing its own problems. As a systems analyst I am sure you can appreciate the positive feedbacks involved. So in general, significant production of alternative fuels would continue the disastrous process that is producing ‘peak everything’ both in terms of resource depletion and nest fouling.

Few writers on the subject of energy flow in our planetary system are considering the question: What is the level of energy use (of any sort) that is excessive, because it simply wears out the system. I liken the problem to running a car at rpms that are in the red zone of the car’s tachometer. Again, as a systems analyst I would think that you would be interested in such questions.; October 4, 2011 6:50 PM; My answer:; Karl, I am glad that my post generates such interesting questions; what you say deserves a post on its own.; Now, the Jevons "paradox" is not a paradox at all, as you know. It is not coded explicitly in the models but it is there. It is a consequence of the positive feedback relationship of consumption and production. It is a very simple assumption, it is curious that it works; but it does. Basically, people always want more, they maximize their "utility function" by satisfying their short term wants. Nate Hagens explains this in terms of dopamine production within the brain. It is the way things are, at least for our civilization. I am not sure it is so general over history, there may be social rules that control it. I am sure that in several societies these social brakes have been very effective, but in our case it is dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, and the more, the better.; Now, Jevons's idea, positive feedback if you like, is what leads to overexploitation, or overshoot as it is often termed. It is the main source of our troubles. As production grows so does consumption and if there were no negative feedbacks both would grow to infinity. These negative feedbacks, pollution and depletion, exist, but arrive with a time delay; too late. The result is that you have badly depleted your resource and you must go back not just to the sustainability level, but to a much lower level in order to allow the resource to grow back. That's what we call collapse. In the end, it is caused by a molecule called dopamine, probably the most dangerous molecule on earth, perhaps even more than CO2!

These are very general considerations that apply to non renewable or slowly renewable resources. There is a different case, though, that of renewables. The trick with solar or wind based renewables is that you can't overexploit the sun. That is true, at least, for renewables such as wind and photovoltaics. Agriculture, instead, has a big problem of soil erosion that makes it often a non renewable resource. It doesn't have to be; you can create an agriculture that doesn't overexploit the soil, but let's remain now on technologies which don't damage the soil; such as PV.

Then, if you model the growth of renewables you have some of the same mechanisms that control the growth of non renewable resources. It is generated by a positive feedback and it grows rapidly. But the point is that the negative feedbacks do not generate such disastrous consequences as they do with non-renewable resources. That is, you might find that you installed too many solar panels and that it has negatively impacted agriculture. Well, at this point you may simply go back to the sustainability level, just removing the excess panels. The soil below the panels is still as good as before (and perhaps better). You didn't affect the solar flux so you don't have to remove more than those panels which exceed the sustainability level.; In the model, you would assume that the flux from the resource stock remains unchanged. Playing with the models, what normally happens is that the system naturally stabilizes to the sustainability level. I don't know whether this would happen in the real world, but I notice that people are already loudly complaining about PV using "too much land" and clamoring for stopping installations, even though the area used up to date is minuscule. So, I think that there are built-in mechanisms that would stop PV installation much before paving the whole planet with silicon cells. That applies not only to the use of land area but also to the use of mineral resources to build the panels themselves. If recycled carefully, which can be done, these resources can last a long, long time.

So, I believe that renewables are not subjected to over-exploitation themselves, or at least that the tendency to overexploitation/overshoot can be kept under control. It is a different mechanism of growth.

Now, to go back to your comment, what you say, actually, is more complex. If renewables alone are not so damaging to the environment, you are correct in saying that the mix of fossils and renewables is a different matter. It may well be a very unhealthy in the sense that it would generate a higher consumption of fossils and other mineral resources. And I am afraid you are totally right. If we were to come up with the perfect energy source, say something with EROEI= 100 and that lasts forever, then we would have electric power for free, but people would still want SUVs and they would invest in pulling out of the ground every and anything that can be burned: Tar sands, shale oil, bitumen, anything.....

Within some limits, this is an unsolvable problem. It has to do with human nature; can we fight dopamine? I don't know - perhaps not. The only thing I can say is that if we have renewable power we have a chance to convince people that destroying the earth to burn fossil fuels is not a good idea. We can say that, because we can say that we don't need to do it. If we don't have an alternative, we have no chance - it doesn't work. If you tell people simply that they have to stop burning oil and coal and be happy with less; well, look at the debate on global warming and see what is happening. Look at the debate on shale gas. These are dopamine driven debates. What people are saying is, "we must burn X (X=coal, oil, shale gas, etc....) because we don't have alternatives." If we can't propose alternatives, they'll burn everything that can be burned and then we'll be back to Middle Ages (if we are lucky, because the alternative is the Olduvai Gorge and not even that: it could be a place as ancient fossils ourselves).

I am personally convinced that there exists a road to sustainability based on renewables; a road to a world that maintains some of our good things we did, such as that modest prosperity and freedom from the elementary wants, hunger, that we have been able to create at least in a fraction of the world and even there in a fraction of society. But it is something compared to the alternative which is - to cite Jevons - that "laborious poverty" of old times.

I am also convinced that we'll arrive there, eventually. But the road is narrow and winding, and there are good chances to make a mistake and end up as Wily Coyote, squashed at the bottom of the canyon. I think, however, that we should try to see this road and do our best to follow it.

The renewable revolution - II

2011-10-03T01:45:00.000-07:00

After that I published in "Cassandra's Legacy" a post titled "The renewable revolution" I was surprised at discovering that many of the commenters reacted negatively to it, taking for granted the fact that renewables, in the form of photovoltaics or wind, "have a low EROEI" and, as a consequence, are unable to exist without a subsidy from fossil fuels. This view has its origins in the 1990s, when it was commonplace to state that "A renewable plant cannot provide enough energy to repay the energy needed to build the plant." That is, the EROEI of renewables was supposed to be smaller than one. We can find this concept, for instance, in the 2001 book by Howard Odum titled "A prosperous way down."

Perhaps the "low EROEI" of renewables was true in the 1990s, but it is not true any longer. There are various recent estimates of the EROEIs of wind and photovoltaics; but none that I know gives values smaller than one and several give high values, for instance in the range of 30-40 for the new generation of thin film PV. With such EROEIs, renewables are perfectly able to get on without the support of fossil fuels. If fossil fuels are used to build renewable plants, then the energy invested is returned several times; making it an excellent investment for the remaining fossil resources we have.

But that doesn't seem to be common knowledge, yet, and some people reacted aggressively to my post in a classic display of refusal of accepting new data that challenge one's established world view (e.g. one Harquebus). It seems that some people have concluded long ago that we are heading back to Middle Ages (or to the Olduvai Gorge) and that nothing can (or even should) be done to avoid it.

To keep my role of Cassandra, let me say that it is perfectly possible that we are moving towards such a destiny, but that doesn't mean it is unavoidable or that we shouldn't try to do something to avoid it. Let me also say that the fact that we can have now high EROEI renewables doesn't mean that we can keep the economy growing, it doesn't mean that we can run around in SUVs, it doesn't mean we can fly to Hawai'i every year. It only means that in the declining phase of the Hubbert curve we can keep electric power in relative abundance. As a consequence, we can keep the Internet, digital computation, worldwide communications, scientific research and many other things that could make the future substantially different than a return to Middle Ages. But, if we want that, we must invest on renewables now.

This said, I thought it was appropriate to reproduce another very un-Cassandric post that I published on this subject on "The Oil Drum" about one year ago. Here it is.

Renewables out of the bottle

From "The Oil Drum," April 2010

There is an old zen koan that says that a baby goose was placed inside a glass bottle and raised inside it. When it was fully grown it could no longer pass through the neck of the bottle. How can we get the goose out of the bottle without breaking it? It is the concept of "satori," "revelation". It is something that shakes you out of your old views and takes you to a new vision. It happens when you see something apparently impossible suddenly coming true, like the goose in the bottle suddenly appearing outside, free. Renewables have been growing as inside a bottle so far; a bottle made of disbelief, red tape and not enough financing. It is time for a little satori in renewable energy. Renewables can hold on their own with new and more efficient technologies, in particular the CdTe thin film version which may have an EROEI of 40. With such EROEIs, we can start thinking of renewable energy as abundant and cheap.

A few years ago, at a meeting on energy, I met a lady who turned out to be the environment minister for one of the county governments in Italy. Talking with her, I started feeling a sort of cognitive dissonance. We were using the same words: solar, wind, and the like, but with different meanings. At some point it dawned on me: she was fully convinced that renewables don't really produce any energy; that wind towers and photovoltaic plants are nice toys to make environmentalists happy but that their main purpose is to create business and transfer money from one place to another. So, she saw that her duty as environment minister was to make sure that some of the money would find its way to the goverment of her region, in exchange for the permission they gave to build the plants.

I can't really fault this lady for the way she had understood the situation; not after I have seen expensive "cash for clunkers" programs being implemented in Italy and elsewhere. If a government is willing to pay cash for destroying perfectly good cars in the name of the environment, one wouldn't be surprised if wind turbines were to turn out to be little more than souped up lava lamps. Machines that turn and turn, but produce nothing.

This is an attitude that I have often seen in politicians and the public alike: renewables are nice toys, but little more. When it is time to get serious, you need something real. You can't produce energy without burning something. You need a smokestack, somewhere, that's why you need coal, or oil, or gas. That explains another story I was told: that of the national minister of industry who was shown an electric heater (about 1 kW) powered by a 300 kW photovoltaic plant and who refused to believe what he was seeing. "Where is the trick?" he kept asking. No smokestack, no energy, apparently. You can't power the world with little blue squares facing the sun or with propellers that turn in the wind, sometimes.

Even promoters of renewables seem to see renewable energy as at best a marginal source. Most environmentalits seem to think that the right way to go is energy saving. That's the real, untapped energy source that we need to exploit. This is a respectable opinion, but I think it doesn't take into account the real potential of renewables. And that potential is truly gigantic: think of the amount of sunlight that arrives on earth everyday - you probably have heard that it is almost 10,000 times larger than the primary energy we produce today (see here ). So, what prevents us from using it? Once you start thinking about the possibilities, you may experience a little satori , an illumination where you see renewable energy suddenly breaking free out of the bottle. Renewables can provide as much energy as we need and it doesn't have to be expensive. After all, sunlight and wind are free and there is plenty of both.

But even a Zen satori has to be based on some good physics when it is about energy. And, when talking renewables, the good physics is mostly contained in the concept of EROEI - energy returned for energy invested. It is the ratio of the energy that a plant can produce over its lifetime divided by the energy needed to build it, maintain it, and dismantle it when its useful life is over. A good energy source must have an EROEI larger than one; obviously. But that is not enough; it must have an energy much larger than one if it has to provide that surplus that we need to keep up what we call "civilization".

Now, if you look at Charles Hall's balloon graph with a list of EROEIs for various sources, you'll probably think that there is not much hope for renewables. In the graph, the EROEI of PV is given as under 10 and that of wind as under 20. The graph is dominated by the blue balloon of "Oil, domestic, 1930") which is rated as having EROEI= 100. If our economy has been built on oil and if oil's EROEI is so large (or, at least it was at that time) then we can't expect that renewables could substitute oil and fossil fuels. Renewables, it seems, are a marginal source at best and surely can't give us back the good times of old.

But things move on. Charlie Hall's graph is already outdated in some points. The EROEI of renewables is increasing, it is actually shooting up. Realizing how fast that is happening was a little satori for me, not more than a few months ago. It came when I found a 2007 paper by Raugei, Bargigli and Ulgiati that evaluated the LCA of various photovoltaic technologies (See the references at the end). Then, the same authors published another paper in 2009 and in a few years the change has been remarkable. They don't report the EROEIs directly, but these can be approximately calculated from the values of the EPBT (energy payback time). I discussed the results with one of the authors, Marco Raugei (incidentally, a former student of mine), and we arrived to the conclusion that, in favorable conditions of illumination (1700 kWh/(m2*year) and assuming a lifetime of 30 years, polycrystalline silicon has an EROEI of 15, while CdTe thin film cells have an EROEI of 40.

Now, tell me if this is not enough for a good satori. An EROEI of 40? And that with a "state of the art" system? Yes, with CdTe cells that you can buy on the market! I can almost hear the objections - that I am too optimistic, that the EROEI depends on the initial assumptions, and how about intermittency, and don't you know that we passed peak tellurium? And so on. But let me discuss these objections in a note at the end of this post. For the time being, let's take this large value of the EROEI as a working hypothesis and let's see how we got there and what are the perspectives.

First of all, this high EROEI is the result of a breakthrough in thin film cells. There are many ways of making thin film cells; the advantage is that the amount of material needed is very small and that reduces the cost. The problem is that in some cases it is the manufacturing of the cells that is expensive; requiring, for instance, vacuum processing. In other cases, making the cell may be cheap, but it is the efficiency of light conversion that is low; that's the case of many kinds of organic cells. The low efficiency of the cells increases the cost of the installation (called "BOS", "balance of system") because larger areas are needed.

So far, thin film cells have been either too expensive or too inefficient (or both). However, in the past few years, CdTe (cadmium telluride) cells have reached conversion efficiencies of the order of 11% and that has led to a commercial boom all over the world. A breakthrough, indeed, compounded by further advantages of the CdTe technology: that of being less sensitive than silicon cells to high temperatures, and that of being more efficient in capturing diffuse light. First Solar , the company that makes CdTe cells, is now the second largest producer of solar cells in the world, with a yearly production corresponding to about 1.2 GW peak power. Plans have been announced for reaching 1.8 GW by 2012.

So, we aren't yet at the EROEI = 100 of oil in the 1930s, but the progress in this area has been remarkable. And if PV based on CdTe can have an EROEI of 40, what prevents us from getting much higher values, using the same or other thin film PV technologies? And not just photovoltaic cells are susceptible of breakthroughs. Not long ago, I had another satori when I reviewed the situation with Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) and in particular the implementation called Kitegen. Here, we are talking of prototypes still under costruction, but the simulations are extremely promising - the EROEI could well be over 100 .

At these EROEI levels, well, the goose is really out of the bottle (and the bottle is not broken). Of course we can't yet claim that the energy problem is solved. We may have high EROEI renewable sources, but we still have to build up the infrastructure needed to build and deploy the plants; we need to build up a "smart grid" system that can manage power production in such a way to overcome the intermittency problem; we need also to restructure our economy in such a way that it can use electric power instead of fossil fuels for such things as transportation. It can be done, but it is not at all obvious that it can be done before running out of the resources needed for doing it, that is of fossil fuels. But it is not impossible. It is a fighting chance, but it is there.

Note: The calculation of the EROEI depends on where exactly you take the "boundaries" of the system and that we still don't have rules on this point (see this paper by Charles Hall ). But as long as we compare different technologies then we can compare the relative EROEIs and that has a meaning if the same methodologies have been applied; which is the case here. About PV in general, I know that we need to take into account the question of storage, but that is very often overstated and PV is not supposed to be the only technology used for energy production. PV would be embedded in a mix of different sources over large areas that would compensate each other. The concept of of "smart grid" would provide the necessary management of the energy produced and consumed. Then, I know that the value of EROEI=40 it is obtained under rather optimistic assumptions: that the plant is located in a well irradiated area (e.g. Southern Europe or North Africa) and that it has a lifetime of 30 years. Optimistic, perhaps, but realistic as well. You CAN place these plants in Southern Europe, North Africa or Southern US and their lifetime can exceed thirty years if they are decently maintained. So, we are not talking futuristic applications - it is reality. Then, there are other objections that one can make to CdTe technology; that it needs the rare element tellurium, that cadmium is toxic and what happens in case of fire; etc. All reasonable objections, but notice that these very problems imply that there is a tremendous stimulus to recover and recycle the materials used. Finally, if one thin film technology can be made commercial, it is reasonable to think that there are more that can reach the same level.

References

"Life cycle assessment and energy pay-back time of advanced photovoltaic modules: CdTe and CIS compared to poly-Si", by Marco Raugei, Silvia Bargiglia and Sergio Ulgiati at Energy Volume 32, Issue 8, August 2007, Pages 1310-1318

"Update of PV energy payback times and life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" V. Fthenakis, H.C. Kim, M. Held, M. Raugei and J. Krones, 24th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, 21-25 September 2009, Hamburg, Germany
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The renewable revolution

2011-09-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

Worldwide growth of Photovoltaic and Wind installed power, by Emilio Martines. Data from IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme, European Wind Energy Association and Earth Policy Institute.

For a change, here is a non-Cassandric post. Look at the data in the figure above, kindly provided by Emilio Martines, member of ASPO-Italy. The growth of photovoltaic and wind energy has been impressively fast during the past 2-3 decades. The log scale evidences the exponential growth of both technologies. There are no signs of slowdown, so far, despite recessions and the bad state of the economy. According to the graph, wind power grows of a factor 10 in less than 10 years, PV power takes little more than 5 years. At these rates, both wind and PC could reach the goal of one installed terawatt (TW) each around 2020.

Of course, the capacity factor of wind and PV is smaller than that of conventional sources, so that one TW of renewable power can produce considerably less energy than one TW of - say - a coal fired plant. Then, there is the question of storage and other issues. Nevertheless, the data are impressive, considering that the total electric power installed in the world today is around 2 TW. It is exactly the value of renewable peak power that we could reach by the end of the current decade. Are we seeing a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel?

Obviously, nothing can grow exponentially forever. But we have nevertheless generated an energy revolution: renewable power has a market and it grows. It is a revolution that can't be stopped any more. It gives us a chance to replace fossil fuels before it is too late. It is a fighting chance, but we have it.

Laughing with neutrinos

2011-09-28T05:29:00.001-07:00

Faster-than-light neutrinos and the subsequent terrible mishap of the Italian minister for science and education (Ms. Gelmini) are a bit off-topic for the Cassandra blog, except as a way to highlight the condition of terminal incompetency of the structures that should lead us out of the present crisis. Anyway, I guess we might as well get a good laugh out of this story, in particular about the minister's statement that there should exist a 730 km long tunnel from Geneva to Central Italy. So here are a few jokes translated from Italian and readapted, mainly from the blog "Spinoza". (image above from "CronacaLive")

Every day, in Geneva, a neutrino wakes up and he knows that he will have to run faster than a photon in a 730 km tunnel in order to overcome it.
Every day, in Geneva, a photon wakes up and he knows that he will have to run in a 730 km tunnel fast enough not to be overcome by a neutrino.
Whether you are a neutrino or a photon, it doesn't matter. Just be sure not to be Gelmini.

Minister Gelmini confirms: neutrinos rode unicorns while in the tunnel.

Neutrinos found to have mass; larger than that of Gelmini's neurons.

Einstein was wrong on relativity, but his theory on stupidity is confirmed.

Einstein proven wrong: God wins big in Montecarlo.

The bartender says, "we don't serve neutrinos here"
A neutrino enters in a bar.

Today Schroedinger's cat will be buried. There will follow its death, tomorrow.

CERN's press release: "light than faster are neutrinos"

Superman to Lois Lane: "and you were complaining that I was faster than a bullet!"

To scientists: if you are going to rewrite physics, could you please do it without all those equations?

Press release from the Zeno Institute of Philosophical Research: "Neutrinos may be faster than light, but they will never be able to overcome the turtle, anyay"

From Switzerland to Italy, neutrinos go faster than light. On the way back, they are stopped by the usual traffic jams.

In Italy, not even neutrinos respect the speed limit.