

Thursday, September 26, 2013

The law of conservation of legends

The classic urban legend of alligators living in New York's sewers. An example of the incredible staying power of legends (image from Wikipedia)

You know, I was trained in "hard" sciences; physics and chemistry. I learned that some physical laws are deeply entwined with the fabric of the universe. That you can't win against the relentless growth of entropy, that mass and energy are equivalent and conserved, that gravity always pulls matter together, and so on.

Now that I am learning a little more about the so called "soft sciences", such as communication, I am surprised to discover that there are some hard laws there too. Something that never ceases to amaze me is the incredible persisting power of legends. Really, it seems that it is more of a hard law than the second law of thermodynamics which, after all, is statistics in nature. The law of persisting legends has no statistical justification: it just exists.

Let me tell you about something that happened to me just half a hour ago. I am presently writing a paper on the effect of depletion on mineral extraction and for doing that I have to consult a number of rather ponderous tomes. So, I opened up a paper written in 2010 by.... well.... let me not write the name of the author here. Let me just tell you that it is written by a German geologist and it is dedicated to the classification of mineral resources. It is nothing like your average "publish or perish" paper; quickly assembled to improve one's h-index on the fly. No, it is a carefully written, extensive, encyclopedic tome of 420 pages!

So, I donwload this massive paper, start reading it and, at page 7, at the very start of the text, I find:

The widely known report "Limits of Growth" by the “Club of Rome" predicted in 1972 that by the year 2000 many deposits will be exhausted and many metals will no longer be available even at a high price level. The pessimistic and very constricted view of this group of persons has proved to be wrong....

All right; I told myself: don't forget that you have only one liver. I counted up to ten; then I counted up to ten again, then I regained a certain level of relaxation and consciousness. It was no small feat for someone - yours truly - who wrote an entire book dedicated to debunking the many legends that still surround the 1972 report to the Club of Rome; the study prepared by a group of scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (not "by the Club of Rome", i.e "this group of persons" ).

I have seen all sorts of accusations against the Club of Rome, often written by people whose intelligence compares to that of invertebrates (with some advantage for invertebrates), assorted conspiracy theorists, politically motivated fanatics, and more. But here, come on, this is not a comment on a blog. It is a true micro-encyclopedia packed with data and diagrams. And it is a 2010 paper; it is recent. I mean, nowadays there is a debate on these matters - it is not any more the time when "Limits-bashing" was fashionable. Apart from my book, which was not out yet in 2010, there were plenty of scientific studies and Internet documents debunking the legend of the "errors of the Club of Rome". Already in 2008 I had written in "The Oil Drum" that the legend that the Limits study had predicted to total exhaustion of some resources by the year 2000 (or some other year) was just that: a legend that had originated from a paper written by Ronald Bailey on "Forbes" in 1989. There were no such statements in the Limits book.

But no way. And think that this specific paper is written by a single person and it must mark a milestone in that person's career. Think of the amount of work that must have gone into that. How can it be that the author didn't use a minimum of care to check that one of the first sentences of his masterpiece paper has no relation with reality?

It is the awesome power of legends. (really, at this point I think it is a law of physics)

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Paving the planet: did someone say "anthropocene"?

This graph is taken from an article by Krausmann et al., (see below). It is not unexpected to see that the growth of all mineral commodities has been increasing during the past century. But what's impressive is the growth of "construction minerals" which stands for sand, rock, cement and the like. Incredibly fast: in terms of mass it is the largest produced mineral commodity over the planet. And even in more recent years, it shows no sign to be abating.

Think about that: 25 billion tons per year corresponds to more than three tons per person. Think of a ten kg cube of rock and cement delivered to you and deposited in front of your door every morning, every day of the year.

What drives this gigantic process? We seem to be engaged with incredible enthusiasm in the task of paving the planet. So far, it seems that we have been able to pave just a few percent of the planet's surface but, given the beauty of exponential growth, the day when we will have transformed the Earth into a shiny ball of concrete can't be too far away.

Did anyone say "anthropocene?"

Growth in global materials use, GDP and population during the 20th centuryFridolin Krausmann, Simone Gingrich, Nina Eisenmenger, Karl-Heinz Erb, Helmut Haberl, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Ecological Economics Volume 68, Issue 10, 15 August 2009, Pages 2696–2705

Sunday, September 22, 2013


This is a written version of a comment that I made during the discussion at the last reunion of the Club of Rome in Ottawa.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me comment on a point of this interesting discussion. We have been told, correctly, that the production of shale gas in North America is booming and also that prices are now very low; around 2 dollars per million cubic feet. It is, actually, somewhat more than that but it is still a low price in comparison to what it was some years ago; before the shale gas "revolution"

On the other hand, producing shale gas is expensive. "Fracking" is a technology that was developed long ago, but it was never used on a large scale because it was too expensive in comparison to conventional gas production. And that's reasonable: for fracking you need sophisticated equipment, chemicals, and more. In addition, a shale gas well is rapidly exhausted, so that you must go on drilling in order to keep producing. Indeed, mining technology has this characteristic: it can be used to mobilize more resources, but it can rarely make them cheap.

So, there is a contradiction here: we are using a more expensive technology to produce a commodity whose prices, however, went down considerably. What's happening?

I think the explanation, here, lies in financial factors. What we are seeing, indeed, is mainly a financial bubble in which investors are led to pour money into a market with the hope to make a lot of money. That's a hope, obviously, for the future because, right now, I am sure that nobody can make a lot of money with such low gas prices - actually I think a lot of people are losing money. But this is the magic of the financial market: if everyone believes that a certain commodity will have a large value in the future, then they invest in it, and the result is overproduction.

So, we are talking of a financial bubble and we can compare the gas bubble with the housing bubble, the one that exploded in 2008. There is a difference, though: as the respective bubbles grew, home prices went up while gas prices went down. Well, there is a logic: we have very limited capability of storing the overproduction of gas - so we must burn it. In a way, we are burning gas in order to keep the gas market alive. That's not the case with overproduction of homes: you don't need to burn your home in order to save it; at least not so far (although sometimes rather drastic measures are needed) (*).

So, all that overproduced gas had to be sold on the market and that led to prices going down. It is what we are seeing. Now, the point is for how long the market will be willing to finance the production of something that is generating such small returns (if it is at all). Consider also that in the process we are also destroying water sources and polluting vast areas; to say nothing of the methane leaks resulting from drilling. All these are costs, too - someone will have to pay for them, sooner or later. So, I think we'll see prices going up - it is unavoidable. But that may cut the demand and may cause also production to go down. We seem to be seeing both effects ongoing, right now: lower production and higher prices. It is still too early to see a robust trend, here; but I think this is unavoidable - the shale gas revolution may be already over.

See also this article on shale gas by Ugo Bardi


(*) An apartment building in Italy, near Ugo Bardi's home. Here, the owners couldn't rent the apartments at a price that they judged good enough, so they preferred to keep them vacant. To make sure that squatters won't come inside, they even walled up all doors and windows. They are waiting for the market to miraculously return to the high prices of once. Good luck!

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Decoupling: where's the cake?

This is an expanded version of a short talk that I gave on Sep 21 2013 at the meeting of the Club of Rome in Ottawa. I added some figures and links, as well as the citation from Herman Daly.

If we want a bigger cake, the cook simply stirs faster in a bigger bowl and cooks the empty bowl into a larger oven that, somehow, heats itself - Herman Daly

Ladies and gentlemen, we are discussing now the question of "decoupling. So, first of all, what do we mean with this term? Well, decoupling is a concept based on the definition of "energy intensity" or "efficiency;" the ratio of the total energy consumption of a country to its gross domestic product, GDP.  It has often been observed that this ratio tends to go down for many countries. In this case, more GDP is generated for a unit of energy consumed and this is supposed to mean that people are learning to be smarter and more efficient in doing their jobs. In other words, it appears that we can "decouple "our ability of producing wealth from the need of consuming energy.

This idea reminds me a lot of something that Herman Daly, the economist, said some time ago. He compared the economy to making a cake. Your efficiency as a cook is how much flour (the energy) you need to make the cake divided by the size of the cake (the GDP). Some economists, Daly said, seem to think that you can make a cake without flour, just by stirring faster - that's "decoupling". Without needing to arrive to this rather extreme interpretation, the idea of "energy intensity" is that you are a good cook if you can keep making bigger and bigger cakes without the need of a proportional increase in the amount of flour.

It might work that way, although I have some doubts about this definition of efficiency. But let me tell you some data about Italy that may help you understand how these concepts may be applied to a practical case. Here are the latest data for energy intensity for Italy (from knoema):

So, it seems that Italy has shown a trend of improving efficiency; we could say it has been "decoupling". The trend seems to be slowing down, but it is still there today. So, this should be a good thing, but there is a problem. Let me show you Italy's GDP (again from Knoema)

And you see that Italy's GDP never recovered from the crisis of 2008. I could show you data for energy consumption in Italy but let me skip that: let me just say that it peaked in 2004 and it has been going down ever since. So, the energy intensity has been decreasing not because the GDP was growing, but because energy consumption was declining faster.

So, you see, maybe in Italy we should be happy because we are becoming more efficient but, as you surely understand, living in a country with a declining GDP is nothing to be happy about. Industries are closing, people are losing their jobs, there is no more money for things that once were taken for granted: social security, public health, public transportation and all that.

I was mentioning yesterday that the problem with Italy's economy is linked to the increasing costs of mineral commodities. I can cite from memory that in 2012 Italy imported 66 billion euros of fossil fuels and the net balance of imports or mineral commodities was negative for around 110 billion euros. That's surely not negligible in comparison to Italy's GDP which is around 1500 billion euros, especially if we consider that, not many years ago, the cost for imports was much smaller. We have today an additional burden on the economy that I estimate as around 70 billion euros in comparison with 10 years ago. It is money that must come from somewhere and it can only come from the pockets of Italian citizens. We are simply becoming poorer.

There is no evidence that the increasing prices of energy have caused the Italian economy to become more efficient. I can tell you that from my personal experience. You see, as university researchers, we are supposed to help companies to become more efficient, and we try to do our best. There are many ways of doing that: renewable energy, leaner manufacturing methods, better technologies, and more. I have been working on that for a long time; at least 20 years.

The problem is that, nowadays, when I tell to the managers of a company that they should be more efficient, they ask when they'll recover their investment. In the best cases, I can tell them that it could be  - say - in 3-4 years. Then they answer me that they can't say for sure if they'll still be open and producing next month; so they can't even dream of asking money to a bank (and paying a stiff interest on it) for becoming more efficient. They won't do anything unless the government pays, but the government doesn't have any more that kind of money.

So, you see, this is the situation in Italy - but I think it is a very general problem for many countries that have stopped growing. We are not becoming more efficient, we are not "decoupling." To do that, we would need resources - energy and minerals - but those resources are becoming more and more expensive. So, investing in efficiency is becoming expensive and we can't afford it.

In the end, we are back to Herman Daly's metaphor of the cake.  If you are a good cook you can make a big cake even with small amounts of flour. The problem is when the lack of flour forces you to make a smaller and smaller cake. Then, it is little consolation to note that you are an efficient cook; the problem is that people are asking "where's my cake?" and they are not happy at not having it. But there is no way out: in order to make a cake you need flour and in order to keep an economy functioning you need energy. In my view,  renewable energy is a prerequisite for decoupling - if we have clean energy, we can truly decouple and we'll even be forced to do it because not even cheap energy can re-create the minerals ores that we have destroyed. But, without energy, there will be just less and less cake for everybody.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Plundering the planet: an update

This is a written version of a talk I gave at the meeting of the club of Rome, in Ottawa, on Sep 19 2013.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this short talk I'll see to give to you an update of the status of the "Plundering the Planet" book,  which, as you know, is a report for the Club of Rome. And, as many of you know, the German version of the book was published in June of this year, so that I am in the interesting situation of having published a book that I can't read! But we are working at the English version, which should come out early next year.

Now, let me summarize for you the situation that "Plundering the Planet" describes. You surely have noticed that the title doesn't say "developing the planet" or "improving the planet". No, it says "plundering", which means exactly that: We are extracting mineral resources as if we were pirates plundering the coffers of a just stormed galleon.

So, where do we stand with mining? Well, it is a long story. I can tell you that the United States Geological Survey, the USGS, lists 88 mineral commodities and that's already a very respectable number. But it doesn't include, for instance, fossil fuels in their several varieties (gas, coal, oil, tar sands, shales, and the like). Then, every commodity has different sources, different areas of exploitation, different grades of products; as I said it is not easy to extricate oneself out of the mass of data available.

Anyway, I can tell you that we are in what looks like a situation of stability in the sense that the production of some commodities is growing, while for others is declining but, on the average, we don't see dramatic changes. I can tell you that right now the largest volumes produced is for construction materials: sand, cement, rock and the like. That's also the fastest growing mineral commodity in terms of production. It is growing exponentially, showing no signs of decline. It escapes me why we are working so hard to transform this planet into a sort of spherical highway, but this is the way things stand. Among metals, let me give you a couple of examples: copper production is growing, while that of gold is declining - in general we don't see dramatic changes for this category. If, then, we look at fossil fuels, the production of liquids (oil and other fuels), gaseous and solid (coal) fuels is weakly increasing on the average. But, of course, I have no intention to go through all the 88 commodities one by one. Let's say, as I was noting before, that we seem to be in a relatively stable situation - no decline on the average, but no rapid growth either.

The sensation, however, is also that we stand on the edge of a cliff and there are several factors that provide you with that sensation. The first one is prices. You see, there was a trend of price reduction that had been going on for at least a decade and everyone had noticed that: prices are going down, therefore there is no depletion problem. And then, starting with 2004: bang! We hit a vertical wall; prices have gone up and show no sign of going down. On the average, the price of such commodities as metals, has increased of a factor of three and that's not a negligible amount. Depletion does play a role in this, because it forces us to extract from lower grade resources.

If we then look at fossil fuels, you know the trend for the most important one: oil. Prices have increased of a factor of 5 in comparison to what we had about ten years ago. We are now consistently floating over 100 dollars per barrel. If you had said ten years ago that we would arrive to these levels, they you would have been considered a total madman (I remember that I said something like that at that time, but let me not go into the details.)

High prices are not the only problem with fossil fuels. There is the problem that we are succeeding in keeping production constant or increasing by means of the addition of liquids, such as biofuels, that contain less energy per unit volume than conventional oil. So, what we call "a barrel of oil" in 2013 contains less energy, on the average, than it used to contain ten years ago. And then there is the problem of net energy: depletion is forcing us to use more and more difficult resources and we need to use more energy to produce the same amount of energy. So, we are left with less energy that we can use for other purposes. And, finally, we have the fact that the economies of producing countries are growing and they tend to consume more for their internal market and export less. So, there is less oil available for non producing countries, which includes many Western countries.

So, you see, the situation can be described as very difficult. It is true that we can fight depletion and we have been doing that successfully, up to now. But it is a battle that we have won at a very high price (and only for a limited period of time). Apparently, however, we are willing to pay any price for oil, even at the cost of renouncing to a number of things that, once, were taken for granted, such as public health care, social security, public transportation, and the like.

It is a choice that we made and that we may well regret in the near future because we are not only beggaring ourselves but creating a much worse problem: a true climatic disaster. As depletion is forcing us to consume more energy in order to produce energy, the final result is that emissions are growing and they show no sign of abating.

Up to a few years ago there was a debate on whether peak oil would have saved us from ourselves. That is, if the "natural" decline of the production of fossil fuels could have caused a reduction in emissions and that would have solved the climate change problem. That debate is by now over: peak oil is not going to save us. It is arriving, but too late to stop catastrophic climate change.

In the end, the world's economy has been following quite closely the basic scenario that "The Limits to Growth" had outlined already in 1972. In a way, it is a triumph for the Club of Rome which had sponsored a study able to predict the future with such an accuracy. And, in the same sense, it is a monumental failure because we haven't been able to do anything to avoid the dire future we ourselves had been predicting. You know, it is like one of those nightmares where you are chased by a monster. You see the monster, you want to run away, but you can't. 

Yet, the first step to solving a problem is to understand it and the "Limits" study gave us the tools we need. And not just that: it gives us the tools needed to actually solve the problem. You see, what are trying to influence is a complex system: the world's economy. Complex systems have ways to oppose changes: it is the result of internal feedbacks that tend to stunt attempts from outside to budge the system from its stable condition (intended in a dynamic sense). So, attempts to change the system by brute force either don't work or they succeed in wrecking the system, which of course we don't want.

The way to steer complex systems is to identify their "leverage points" or "critical points": intervening on these levers it is possible to change things, it is a concept that arrives to us from Jay Forrester and Donella Meadows, respectively the originator and one of the authors of the "Limits" study. If we examine our present situation, it is clear that the leverage point, the critical point, is one: it is fossil fuels. We need fossil fuels, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to keep alive seven billion people on this planet, but unfortunately it is also true that we are wrecking the planet by burning fossil fuels. So we need to burn fossil fuels but we cannot burn them: it would seem to be a classic "no-win" situation.

The point is, however, that we don't need fossil fuels. What we need is something that fossil fuels provide: it is energy. And energy doesn't necessarily need to be produced using fossil fuels. So, the way of pushing the lever in the right direction is clear: if we can't stop and at the same time we can't continue, we need to use fossil fuels to replace fossil fuels,

That is, we need to use fossil fuels to produce the renewable plants that will replace fossil fuels (it may also be said about nuclear energy, although of course there are big problems with that). If we decide to do that, then there is a chance to solve the problem before it is too late. With a sufficient amount of clean energy we can keep our infrastructures functioning, keep alive seven billion people, and we can also keep mining; at reduced rates, of course, because depletion remains a problem. And we can't hope to continue our wasteful habits as we have been accustomed to, up to now; We'll need big changes in the way we do things: we'll have to be more efficient and way smarter. But with clean energy we can still supply the industrial system with minerals for many years and gradually adapt to a future less commodity-hungry industrial system. But we must do that fast and decisively: otherwise it will be too late.

So, this is the way I see the situation and I'd like to close this short presentation with a quote from William Stanley Jevons, who can well be said to have been the precursor of "The Limits to Growth" study. Already in his times, mid 19th century, and even before computers, he had very clear in his mind the dynamic factors of the problem and the crucial need for energy. So, here it is - he was actually speaking about coal, but I replaced the term "coal" with energy - Jevons would surely understand if he were with us today. For the problems we are facing, there are no miracles, no tricks, and no shortcuts: what we need is clean and abundant energy.

(from "The Coal Question", by William Stanley Jevons 1866)

Energy in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other  commodities. It is the material energy of the country — the universal aid — the factor in everything we do. With energy almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Mineral resources and the limits to growth.

This is a shortened version of a talk I gave in Dresden on September 5, 2013. Thanks to Professor Antonio Hurtado for organizing the interesting conference there.






















































The Club of Rome team

Daphne Davies
Ian Johnson
Linda Schenk
Alexander Stefes
Joséphine von Mitschke-Collande
Karl Wagner

And the coauthors of the book "Plundering the Planet"

Philippe Bihouix
Colin Campbell
Stefano Caporali
Partick Dery
Luis De Souza
Michael Dittmar
Ian Dunlop
Toufic El Asmar
Rolf Jakobi
Jutta Gutberlet
Rui Rosa
Iorg Schindler
Emilia Suomalainen
Marco Pagani
Karl Wagner
Werner Zittel

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The next ten billion years: vidcast

Discussing the next ten billion years at the "Doomstead Diner". A follow up of my previous posts on the subject (first one and second one).

Saturday, September 14, 2013

The next ten billion years revisited

Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return. (Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations")

You can't understand a man's actions if you don't take into account that what he does on a specific day is the result of events that took place during his whole lifetime and that will result in more events in the future. It is the same for a whole planet, although the lifespan of the Earth is much longer than that of a single human being. If we want to understand what's happening today on our planet, we must try to understand how it has changed over the eons to become what it his now and what it may become in the future.

That of looking at the whole span of the history of a whole planet or even of the whole universe has a special flavor; even though none of us will ever witness the ultimate end of our biosphere, still the idea that we can imagine it is a source of great fascination. And it is not something new: it is a whole field of human thought that we can call "eschatology", from the Greek world "eskhatos", meaning "the last".

In the history of people musing on the ultimate end of everything, we can see two lines of thought that we might dub, purely for convenience, the "Western" and the "Eastern" views. The Western view sees the universe, humans and everything, as having a finite and limited lifespan, the Eastern view sees the same concepts as an infinite series of cycles. The single cycle view is typical of thinkers steeped in the Greek-Latin tradition and of the monotheistic religions that arose around the Mediterranean area. In its basic form, the idea is that God created the world and that the world will have an end (apocalypse, from a Greek world meaning "revelation"). Human beings are supposed to live a one-time trial. You succeed or you don't, but God doesn't give you another chance. East-Asian thought seems to have been based on a different viewpoint: Buddhism sees the soul as forever reincarnating in new bodies. There is no end and no beginning to this endless cyucle that the wise may, however, be able to interrupt.

It is hard to say what factors created these two different schools of thought. One thing we know, however, is that today Western science can be seen as continuing the ancient tradition, that of the single cycle. For what we know, the universe appeared in a specific event called the "Big Bang" and it is destined to end, according to the most recent data, as a cold and dreary place made out of matter scattered over an immensely large volume. Back in  1956, Isaac Asimov was reasoning within this tradition when he wrote a story titled "The Last Question", where he imagined humankind engaged in a forever quest for how to reverse the cycle and rejuvenate the universe. But Asimov was also thinking outside the Western box when he proposed at the end that the question could be answered, although not by humans themselves but by the computer they had created. As there is nobody to tell the answer to, the computer proceeds to carry on the answer in practice by creating light and restarting the universe.

I must have read this old story by Isaac Asimov when I was, maybe, 15 years old and it inspired a post that I wrote on "Cassandra's Legacy" with the title "The Next Ten Billion Years" for which I borrowed from Asimov the same finale. This post of mine had a certain success and, recently, John Michael Greer ("The Archdruid") commented on it and produced his own version of the next ten billion years as he sees them. It is by all means a fascinating piece but different from mine in a deep philosophical sense. True to his role of druid, Greer explicitly rejects the Christian "one-cycle" tradition and leans on the multiple cycle view of the universe, for instance saying that, ten million years from now,


and then he goes on to describe several non-human civilizations arising and disappearing in the span of several hundred million years, including one derived from raccoons, one from ravens, and one from freshwater clams. There is no evidence in Greer's vision of the entropy caused winding down of the universe. The atoms that once formed the Earth and its inhabitants are flung away in space by the last convulsion of the Sun and end up forming another star and a number of planets. The cycle restarts.

As I said, we are discussing philosophical matters and we'll never find an agreement on what the Earth will look like - say - ten million years from now. So, I'll just comment here on how science gives us very strong evidence for a "one-cycle" Earth. With that, I don't mean just an apocalyptic end of our planet when it will be finally consumed by an expanding Sun. No, the Earth has changed all the time over its four billion years of existence, it keeps changing, and the changes are profound and irreversible.

What we call the "biosphere" has been part of this great, long lasting cycle. As all things that are born and are destined to die, the biosphere must peak and decline. Actually, it has peaked and it is declining. The biosphere productivity over the past 3.5 billion years looks a little like a gigantic Hubbert peak according to a paper by Franck, Bounama and Von Bloh,

In a previous post, I wrote about this graph that:

As you see, the Earth's biosphere, Gaia, peaked with the start of the Phanerozoic age, about 500 million years ago. Afterwards, it declined. Of course, there is plenty of uncertainty in this kind of studies, but they are based on known facts about planetary homeostasis. We know that the sun's irradiation keeps increasing with time at a rate of around 1% every 100 million years. That should have resulted in the planet warming up, gradually, but the homeostatic mechanisms of the ecosphere have maintained approximately constant temperatures by gradually lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, there is a limit: the CO2 concentration cannot go below the minimum level that makes photosynthesis possible; otherwise Gaia "dies".

So, at some moment in the future, planetary homeostasis will cease to be able to stabilize temperatures. When we reach that point, temperatures will start rising and, eventually, the earth will be sterilized. According to Franck et al., in about 600 million years from now the earth will have become too hot for multicellular creatures to exist.

Of course, the extinction of the biosphere is not for tomorrow or, at least, the calculations say so. But it is like estimating one's lifespan from statistical data. Theoretically, the homeostatic mechanisms that operate your body could keep you alive until reach a respectable age; sure, but homoeostasis is never perfect. For instance, there are mechanisms in your body designed to reverse the effects of traumas. You may expect these mechanisms to work well if you are young but, if you are hit by a truck at full speed, well, you end up on the wrong side of the life expectancy statistics.

Similar considerations apply to Gaia. Theoretically, the planetary homeostatic mechanisms should keep Gaia alive for hundreds of millions of years, but what about major perturbations, some planetary equivalent of being hit by a truck? Would Gaia be able to recover from a human caused runaway greenhouse catastrophe?

We cannot say for sure. What we can say is that we are living in a period called the "sixth extinction," similar to other major past extinctions. In most cases, these extinctions appear to have been caused by an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The sixth extinction, too, is taking place in correspondence to a rise of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that may never have happened so fast in the history of the planet. This rapid rise is also taking place under a solar irradiation that has never been so high as it is today. We can't rule out that the sixth extinction will be the last one.

So, as I said at the beginning, the present and the future of a single person can be understood from his or her past, and it is the same for the Earth (aka, "Gaia"). Science is telling us very, very strongly that the present moment is unique in the history of the planet: the future will not be like the past. It is true that, if we fail to survive as a civilization, there will be probably space for more human civilizations. And, if we go extinct, there may be space for the evolution of new sentient species. But all that will happen in different conditions and along a downward slope.

New human civilizations developing within the next few hundred thousand years will not have the coal and the fossil hydrocarbons that we have consumed today. In a few hundred million years from now, new sentient species might find oil that has reformed in shallow anoxic seas - but they won't have coal, the result of very special conditions occurring only once (for what we know) on this planet. And they will live in a planet with a much reduced biological productivity in comparison to ours. That doesn't mean that they won't be able to develop spaceflight, as Greer proposes - the future is full of opportunities, but it is never like the past.

In the end, these considerations give us just a hint of the sheer immensity of the future and of how difficult is the human attempt to conceive it. For what we know, we are a small ripple on the top of a gigantic tsunami wave that's crashing on some remote shore. As a ripple disappears, new ones appear, but the wave keeps rolling onward to its inevitable end. And yet, we know so little: there may be other shores, other waves, the universal sea may never stop to roll, and light and darkness may exchange places in a never ending dance. So, just as Asimov concluded his story, someday, the words "Let there be light" may be said again. And there will be light again.  

ever moving.
So it can act as the mother
of all things.
Not knowing its real name
we only call it the Way

If it must be named, 
let its name be Great.
Greatness means going on,
going on means going far,
and going far means turning back

(Tao Te King, as reported by Ursula K. Le Guin)

Wednesday, September 11, 2013




by Marco Raugei







Broadly speaking, we therefore have two options:









Friday, September 6, 2013

Art and the Global Financial Crisis

Guest Post by Mike Haywood

Question..... What is the link between the famous hymn “Amazing Grace” and the Global Financial crisis? Answer.... Debt slavery and 3 paintings that hang in an English church.

John Newton (1725 -1807) wrote the words to “Amazing Grace”, one of the most beloved hymns of all time. Few people know that Newton was the captain of a slave ship for many years. He had a dramatic religious conversion on board a storm tossed ship in the middle of the Atlantic.  The words of the hymn refer to that moment on the ship.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

Newton went on to become a leading influence on the abolition of slavery in Britain.

Mike Haywood painted a triptych in 2007, entitled "Amazing Grace”,which portrays John Newton's dramatic religious conversion. But it is also an allegory for global debt slavery, and was painted before the 2008 financial crash.

The triptych is over 10 feet wide. 

·         The left hand canvas shows the depths of Newton's despair during the storm.
·         The central canvas depicts Newton's ship in the violent storm.
·         The right hand canvas depicts his moment of redemption.

The paintings are an allegory of the current state of the World. For instance, canvas 1, the empty hourglass that Newton is holding is inscribed with the words "Homo sapiens" the Main canvas the ship's name of "Greyhound" has been obscured slightly so that the word "Gaia" is visible

.... the chained World in the 3rd canvas is upside-down and Newton is trying to break the chains of debt

“Debt is the slavery of the free”…. Publilius Syrus, Roman author, 1st century B.C.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Dresden conference: communicating science

The Dresden conference on materials, energy, and public acceptance is over - I am sorry that my report about it can only be partial because of my limited knowledge of German. However, I have been impressed by the attempt of the organizers to put together a truly interdisciplinary meeting, something that involves not just science and technology but also how to communicate science and technology.

In science, "interdisciplinarity" is one of those mythical beasts that some people report having heard of from a one-eyed sailor who had a brief glimpse of it while sailing through the Roaring Forties. But, occasionally, you can see the beast alive and kicking. This seems to be the case for the interdisciplinary program in science communication of the University of Dresden that puts together professor  Wolfgang Donsbach, specialist in communication science, and professor Antonio Hurtado, specialist in energy technologies; who has organized the conference.

The results of interdisciplinary work are always interesting although not always successful. Here, I think we can see the start of something surely interesting and that has potential for becoming successful. Here is, for instance, a picture of the poster shown by Adriane Schmidt at the conference. The group is doing a lot of good work, clearly in going in the right direction.

Apart from the communication work, the conference was all rotating around the concept of "Energiewende", the "energy transition". But we cannot have any transition if we don't manage public acceptance for the concept. In Germany, the energiewende idea seems to have gained some momentum; the very fact that it is recognized with a specific name and that is being discussed means that it is recognized as a definite possibility - even though, of course, it also generates plenty of opposition. This is a success for the communication of scientific ideas.

What we are seeing in Germany is a first step in the right direction; a promising start. In the end, we must recognize that doing good science is not enough any more. We need to become good at communicating science.

