I reported on the Indonesian fires recently, noting that burning peatlands are releasing lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. What I didn't think about was how those fires were affecting endangered species on the island of Borneo. Specifically, I didn't think about how those human-caused fires were further endangering endangered orangutan populations (SciDev, October 26, 2015).
An orangutan is placed inside a cage on a bed of leaves for transport to a safe zone away from the fire
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and not much writing. That will continue for a while.
In the meantime, in the video below, Jeremy Rifkin, who envisions a Third Industrial Revolution, lays out his plan for wiring up the whole world to make human economies much more efficient. And, by the way, we're going to have to replace all our current energy systems with renewables too. No problem!
You know, the usual techno-optimismist, another visionary. And isn't that just what the world needs right now?
Here's what I see when I watch this video: I see a self-absorbed know-it-all spouting fiction to an earnest, attentive audience of people who couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality if their lives depended on it. (And, ultimately, their lives will depend on it of course.)
I can not even imagine me standing up in front of an audience and telling them I've got all the answers. The chutzpah! So full of himself! Who is the greater fool? Rifkin? Or those buying what he's selling?
I don't know, but somebody said "there's a sucker born every minute." That was in the old days. Here in the 21st century there are 4.3 suckers born every second.
I have resisted characterizing humans as "stupid" on this blog because it's a catch-all term that doesn't tell us anything profound about our favorite subject (Homo sapiens). But now, Balazs Aczel, a professor at the Institute of Psychology at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, has teased out what people generally mean when they call human behavior "stupid".
And it turns out that humans generally are indeed stupid in the most common meanings of the term. My source is How to act less stupid, according to psychologists (Washington Post Wonkblog, October 19. 2015).
What are those meanings? It boils down to three things:
1. "confident ignorance" — when a person's self-perceived ability to do something far outweighs that person's actually ability to do it, and it's associated with the highest level of stupidity.
This is a no-brainer. Think of all the things humans believe they can do that they can't do. Humans want to believe they can run an efficient and ultimately equitable economy, but experience tells us they can do neither. Humans think they can make democracy work, but experience tells us otherwise. Others think human ingenuity, expressed as technological cleverness, will solve any environmental problems which may turn up. There's little evidence to support that dubious proposition. These examples can be enumerated ad nauseam. Delusional optimism! Confident ignorance!
2. "can't help himself" — when someone does something because they have, on some level, lost their ability to do otherwise. Aczel calls this "lack of control" and characterizes it as the result of "obsessive, compulsive, or addictive behavior."
Another no-brainer. Perpetual growth in populations and economies is a case in point. And don't try to tell these humans that endless growth isn't a good idea, because they're not listening. And why? Can't help themselves! Lack of control! Again, I could enumerate examples ad nauseam. No Free Will!
3. "absentmindedness — lack of practicality" — an either/or scenario, in which someone does something that's clearly irrational, but for a reason that could be one of two things: they either weren't paying attention or simply weren't aware of something.
Humans? Not paying attention? Unaware? Like with global warming? The sixth extinction? The general destruction of terrestrial and marine ecosystems? Their own deep behavoural flaws? I've called this existential threat filtering, although I think the intended meaning here is all-purpose cluelessness.
We get lots of happy talk about the seemingly limitless virtues of wind mills and solar panels, but nobody talks much about the virtues of wood pellets. Until recently, that is. Climate Central has a three-part series called Pulp Fiction. Here's the opening text from part I.
As the world tries to shift away from fossil fuels, the energy industry is turning to what seems to be an endless supply of renewable energy: wood. In England and across Europe, wood has become the renewable of choice, with forests — many of them in the U.S. — being razed to help feed surging demand. But as this five-month Climate Central investigation reveals, renewable energy doesn’t necessarily mean clean energy. Burning trees as fuel in power plants is heating the atmosphere more quickly than coal.
... Oregon officials say burning waste wood and forest thinnings from its large logging industry and forestlands would protect the climate, while improving the natural environment. But their ambitions go beyond that. The governor’s office wants to know whether the last coal plant in the state could be converted to run on wood — a substantially riskier proposition for the atmosphere.
Oregon's governor wants to replace coal with wood. I will return to this subject.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to make critical decisions about this kind of energy as it cracks down on power plant pollution. Its decisions will affect how a fuel known as biomass — wood and other organic material burned for energy — can be used by the states to meet new pollution rules.
In doing so, the agency will walk a fine line between promoting the use of wood energy that could accelerate deforestation and global warming, and defining the limited sources of wood fuel that could help ease those problems.
The European Union makes no such distinction.
Through a loophole in its clean energy regulations, all wood energy is treated as if it releases no carbon dioxide.
That accounting trick is allowing European national governments and their energy sectors to pump tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year — without accounting for it. That helps them keep that pollution off their books, but not out of the atmosphere.
There's a Flatland term — loophole. Surely EU regulators did not simply overlook the fact that cutting down trees releases carbon dioxide.
I have commented lately on the mainstream media and the political process in a series of posts (here, here, and here). An interesting post by Fredrik deBoer, a young professor in the humanities at Purdue University, bears directly on those observations. I will re-print deBoer's post here, with a few comments.
You may remember a book called This Town [aka., Suck-Up City] that came out a couple years ago. Written by Mark Leibovich, it’s one of those DC-insider dealies that skewers Washington culture and yet was beloved by the people who make up that culture.
One of the sturdier aspects of DC journalism is that nobody is more cynical about it than DC journalists, at least in the abstract. So when the book came out, you saw very frank discussion by people who know that the entire edifice of American political media is impossibly corrupt.
But now it’s election season, and so this kind of self-knowledge is nowhere to be found. Whenever election coverage ramp up, the self-same insiders who will throw up their hands and say “this town! so corrupt!” suddenly lose that insight and become very invested in the integrity of the process.
This is where they make their hay, and they can’t let the ambient understanding that DC journalism is a sewer get in the way.
With each passing year it becomes more and more clear that the scientific consensus on climate change has underestimated future risks. Penn State's Michael Mann has been particularly forthright about this trend (and see the video at the end).
What are we to make of this? It is clear that understating risks is due in part to uncertainty and ignorance. We can model how various Earth systems will respond to greenhouse gas forcing, but those models may be wrong. The models are then subject to revision as events unfold.
On the other hand, this rational view of human risk assessment can not explain the general tendency to underestimate climate risk. To explain that, I came up with my Flatland model of human cognition, which says that understating climate risks falls under existential threat filtering, which itself is rooted in instinctual optimism bias.
Humans filter threats in a variety of ways, with seemingly endless subtle variations, all of which are ultimately inconsequential. One common way to filter threats is to push them off into the far future, and keep doing so as time goes on. Thus the threat in question never actually arrives
A new meta-analysis of the research literature introduces a new way of thinking about the future ocean — we will get "simplification" of marine ecosystems if human "stressors" on ocean life continue unchecked (carbon dioxide emissions, overfishing, nutrient run-off, etc.).
I can't access the study itself without paying money, but I can quote the "significance" of the research.
Significance
People are not only concerned about climate change and its effects on plant and animal diversity but also about how humans are fundamentally changing the globe’s largest ecosystem that sustains economic revenue and food for many countries. We show that many species communities and ocean habitats will change from their current states. Ocean acidification and warming increase the potential for an overall simplification of ecosystem structure and function with reduced energy flow among trophic levels and little scope for species to acclimate.
The future simplification of our oceans has profound consequences for our current way of life, particularly for coastal populations and those that rely on oceans for food and trade.
Simplification of human societies and economies would be a welcome development. Unfortunately, this is not also true of marine ecosystems
Profound consequences for our current way of life — yeah, you can kiss the biosphere goodbye.
docile — ready to accept control or instruction; submissive; yielding to supervision, direction, or management; tractable.
These off-the-cuff remarks were prompted by coverage of last night's Democratic debate. I'll get to that in a moment.
We are told, and it is true, that human societies and our global civilization itself would not be possible without human cooperation on a grand scale. And while it's true that humans form themselves into disparate social groups which may be in conflict—this is called politics—it is also true that human cooperation, both within groups and within societies, overwhelms conflict. After all, if that were not true, human societies could not exist.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that there's about a 90% chance that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. None of those Republican clowns can win. Bernie can't win and won't be nominated. Biden probably won't run. That leaves us with Hillary.
The last time I voted was in 2008, when I voted for Hope & Change. My decision never to vote again became set in stone when Hopey-Changey installed Tim Geithner at Treasury about one month later. Not only would America's financial system (the "FIRE" economy) not be reformed, it would also be defended every step of the way. And it was.
Here we are seven years later, and this time it will be Hillary Clinton's job to protect the status quo. All this will be obvious to most of you, but I wanted to get this post out of the way so I never have to write it again. It's a good time to do it because Hillary has finally come out with her economic and financial "reform" plans.
The global economy is teetering on the brink of recession, or maybe it's already in recession.
A few people are talking about it—I'll get to them in moment—but nobody seems to care, at least in the United States. Let's start with those puzzled optimists at the IMF.
The International Monetary Fund is worried. That’s not just because it has shaved its growth forecast for 2015 for the second time in six months. It is not even that the world economy is expected this year to post its weakest performance since it completely stalled in 2009.
Rather, it is because the global economy continues to under-perform. Every year, economists at the fund predict that recovery is about to move up a gear, and every year they are disappointed. The IMF has over-estimated global growth by one percentage point a year on average for the past four years.
That’s a chunky forecasting error, especially in the light of all the factors that should have been boosting activity – interest rates at all-but zero, oodles of money creation through quantitative easing programs and, more recently, tumbling oil prices.
As a result, the fund is now doing some head-scratching in order to determine whether this persistently weaker than predicted performance is a temporary phenomenon caused by a particularly deep recession or something more permanent.
The $73.5 trillion global economy is expected to grow 3.1 percent in 2015 and 3.6 percent in 2016, according to the latest International Monetary Fund projections.
Those numbers, though, are heading lower and could be revised even more before all is said and done...
The IMF did it again! Next year is always better than this year. It's not easy for humans to climb aboard the clue train.
