Once more with feeling: Climate Change (longish read)

A comment based on my current understanding of the science

     Climate is a chaotic system. It consists of a web of interconnected feedback loops. For example, cloud cover cools the ground below, which reduces evaporation, which reduces the amount of water in the air, which reduces the odds that there will be rain. However, water doesn’t cool as rapidly as the ground, so evaporation from large lakes continues, which increases the amount of water vapour in the air, which increases the odds that there will be rain. Which is why cloud cover over the Great Lakes usually signals rain, while cloud cover over the Prairies does not.

     These links between feedback loops makes it difficult to precisely model the weather and hence the climate. Some feedback loops cancel the effects of other loops, and some feedback loops enhance the effects of other loops, and all of them are entangled with one or more other feedback loops. Such systems are characterised by non-linear relations between causes and effects. Small (sometimes very small) changes in some factor can become magnified into huge effects. Hence the sometimes rapid development of afternoon thunder storms after a bright, cloudless morning.

     A chaotic system cycles through a series of states ("the seasons") that vary within some range but average out over time (average annual seasonal temperatures, etc.) This average is called the attractor. "Regression to the mean" is a common effect: Think of a baseball pitcher's performance over time. Pitching is the influenced by many factors, most of which affect each other. The pitcher's performance is a chaotic system: sometimes he's hot, sometimes he's not, most of the time he performs near his average level.

     Chaotic systems can change radically. If some factor or factors exceed some limit (too much or too little), the whole system will shift into a new series of states, some or all of which are radically different from the previous ones. Hence climate change, or global warming.

     There is no question that burning fossil fuels has increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, now (about 400 parts per million) coming closer to double the concentration of pre-Industrial Revolution levels (about 280 parts per million). (See this graph) This is having an effect on climate, the  annual weather cycles. The important questions IMO are:
a) How fast is this happening?
b) Is it happening faster in some climate zones than others?
c) How far will it go?

     Answer to a) Unknown, but climate models so far have understated the expected changes. This is shown in:
     Answer to b) Yes. For example, the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the temperate zone. Predictions of the extent of summer sea ice have repeatedly underestimated the numbers. The general trend is melt beginning earlier and proceeding more quickly than predicted by the models available at the time. Thus, there is less sea ice, and it’s thinner. The last ten years or so have seen record ice loss almost every year.
     Answer to c) Nobody knows for sure how far climate change will go. Models are continually updated and tested with new data, both current and historical (from Greenland ice cores, for example). As these models get better, they imply what I think are several important conclusions:

1) Climate can change very rapidly from one normal limit to the other. For example, the Little Ice Age, a fairly sudden cooling of the northern winter, which among other things destroyed the Viking settlements in Greenland.

2) Seasonal weather patterns can change in opposite directions, for example, rainfall shifting from winter and summer, hence wetter springs and falls, and dryer summers and winters. This means flash flooding and drought when neither was common in the past.

3) Weather patterns can change from historic averages within two or three years, for example the now five-year drought on the West Coast of the USA.

4) There's a lag between the warming effects of CO2 and climate change because of heat-sinks, chief of which is the ocean: Over half of the recent rise in ocean levels is caused by the expansion of water as the oceans warmed up.

It's true that climate models aren't good enough to satisfy the non-scientist's yearning for certainty. But I think the certainty is higher than required in a civil law case ("balance of probabilities"), and close to that required in a criminal case ("beyond reasonable doubt”, emphasis on "reasonable").

(Revised 2020 09 21)

Offloading the Risk III: ARAMCO IPO fails to reach target

The New Yok Times reports that the ARAMCO IPO fell short of Saudi expectations.

"Investors balked..."

It seems that my assessment of the viability of the oil industry is more widely shared than I thought.

Am I a cynic? Sure. Ambrose Bierce's definition: "Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."

Update 2023-03-03: Putin's War against Ukraine has upset earlier calculations about the fate of fossil fuels. In the long run, the war will delay the final collapse of that industry. Whether that collapse will take the form of a phasing out or just another part of a  general collapse of our civilization remains to be seen.

Offloading the risk II: Oil is cheaper than ever

 The Guardian published a report today on possible further cuts to OPEC oil production.

The 2019 oil prices varied from $55 to $75. (1) The 1950 oil prices were about $28. In 2019 dollars, that’s $300. So the 2019 prices are between 1/6 and 1/4 of the 1950 prices.

Verily, “oil is sloshing around” the world (See Offloading the Risk). No wonder ARAMCO is going public. At such low prices their profits must be tanking.

And with such cheap oil, the incentive to convert to renewables is reduced. That’s not good.

(1) See this page on Macrotrends.  Since the latest prices is shown in current dollars, the chart is not adjusted for inflation. The highest price shown is $164.64 in June 2008, or $18 in 1950 dollars, about 65% of the 1950 price.

R. Cobb. Raw Sewage: Unprocessed Cartoons (1970) No longer in print, but worth searching for, this collection reminds us of several things: The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The increasing damage caused by our overproduction of material goods. The tight grip that unexamined ideas have on us. The morphing of political principles into religious dogmas. And so on. And while some details of Cobb’s cartoons  fail to foresee the future, the theses are as valid today as they were fifty years ago. Our consumerist capitalism will destroy us. A bleak vision, but a necessary one. ****

Cobb died recently. New York Time obituary here.

The Improbability Pirnciple: Why we don't notice the improbability of eveyday life (re-read)

 

David Hand. The Improbability Principle (2014) Suppose you’re playing bridge. You get a hand of all 13 hearts. How unusual! In fact, this deal is one of  635 013 559 600 possible hands. “Ordinary” hands are much more likely, right? Well, yes and no. The fact is that any combination of 13 cards is equally likely. The all-hearts hand is unusual only in that you notice it. A hand with a mix of values and suits looks normal, and it is, in the sense that there are only four all-suit hands, and 635 013 559 596 mixed-suit hands. But each one is unique. So each one is as unlikely to be dealt as any other. All bridge hands are equally improbable. 

     The same goes for lottery number picks.  

And when you have absorbed that fact, you are on the way to understanding Hand’s book. He explores odds and chance, our perceptions of odds and chance, and the tools available for estimating odds and chance more accurately. The exploration shows that “Coincidences, miracles, and rare events [will] happen every day”. He demonstrates several laws of probability that combine to make the improbable happen.

                                                  Ian Fleming was wrong.

    Hand’s book will help the reader realise how improbable every event is. It’s a good introduction to probability and statistics, with many real-life examples as well the standard text-book ones. It will help the reader see the world in which they live with more understanding, and I hope more curiosity. Hand writes well, his tone is conversational, he allows himself the occasional dry joke.
     Recommended. ****
     

Here’s my take on his work. It builds on his book, and other books I have read.
     Improbable events must happen, for there are long and convoluted chains of cause and effect leading up to every event. Call them event-chains. Looking forward from here and now, an enormous number of possible event-chains stretches into the future. They intersect and criss-cross in unpredictable ways. The future is a network of possible events. Any one event lies on a node, where several possible paths through the network meet. Which paths through this network could lead to events involving you, tomorrow morning, while you are having breakfast? An enormous number. You can list some of the most likely events (the cat will want to go out just before you set the breakfast table, you will fetch the cereal from the pantry, etc).

Jung didn't understand probability. Nor did he notice that "meaningful coincidence" is meaningless. What's meaningful for one person is a mere oddity to someone else, and triviality to a third.

      But there are other ones, trillions of them in fact (a meteor will crash into the garden, a storm will strip the leaves from the oak tree, two cars will collide in front of your house, the water heater will spring a leak, etc). The odds that any one of them will happen is small (the microwave will stop functioning). For most of them, the odds are very small (one of the people in the collision is a schoolmate whom you haven’t seen in twenty years). Some are extremely small (on the back seat of the blue car there’s a paperback that you donated to the Goodwill in another town seven years ago).
     One of these unlikely events will happen. True, some event-chains are more likely than others, but in general, there are far more unlikely possible events than likely ones. There are so many that unlikely events are more likely to happen than likely ones. The likely ones just happen more often.

      As with the all-hearts hand, most events are equally unlikely. Or equally unlikely enough that it makes no difference. We pay attention to the ones that we feel are strange in some way. (That's why Jung was wrong about "synchronicity".)

     Think about it this way:
     You go to buy a box of ball-point pens. Consider the event-chain leading up to your purchase. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people were involved in producing the raw materials, shaping them into parts, assembling them into pens, packaging them, distributing the pens to the store. Then there’s the event-chain leading up to your decision to buy the pens. Today, not yesterday. This store, and not another. And so on. What are the odds that you would buy this particular box of pens, today?
     Exactly.
     So why don’t you think of it as improbable?
     We don’t usually notice the improbability of any given event. That’s why we’re flummoxed when we do notice one.

 Another review of this book:  https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-odds-that-odd-things-will-happen.html

 

Societies and their Environments: Collapse, by Jared Diamond

 

    Jared Diamond. Collapse. (2005) Or How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
     Diamond begins his survey of failed societies with an elegiac account of Montana, which is over-crowded and over-exploited, and will suffer some kind of ecological collapse unless the individualist values that make Montana attractive to the incomers radically change. And that’s the over-arching thesis: that the values that enable societies to thrive will, sooner or later, clash with ecological (and therefore economic) reality. Then the choice is stark: adapt or die. For all societies depend on the natural systems they exploit.
     These systems may change naturally (very small shifts in temperature or rainfall can make the difference between a garden and a desert). More often, they are over-exploited: the prime example of this is Easter Island. He ends his survey with a rather depressing look at the ways in which our misallocation of resources damages the ecosystems that sustain us. His prime example is mining, which we practice as if there were no long-term costs. He does see some hope here and there, in the shift towards pollution reduction in China, for example, but overall, we are still making choices based on values that made sense when resources were scarce, surplus wealth was difficult or impossible to accumulate, and ecological damage was localised and its effects on people and other life forms was limited.
     Diamond’s work shows that the choice is never between “the economy” and “the environment”, but between values, attitudes, and desires. The fundamental issue is that humans, like any other creatures, depend on the environment. We humans have changed the Earth more thoroughly than any other organism. That has made us very successful, if you measure success by our numbers and the variety of habitats that we occupy.
     But that success contains within it the seeds of our own destruction. We operate on the same imperative as all other life forms: be fruitful and multiply. If we continue to operate on the values of economic growth and profit, if we fail to understand that the standard of living is not about money, we will destroy our civilisation. If we do, will the humans who survive the inevitable population crash learn from our mistakes? The history of societies that destroyed themselves suggests that’s unlikely.
     Recommended. ****

Footnote 2023-03-156: Recent research indicates that the rain forests help create the rain that sustains them. The implication is that once a  the rain forest is logged out, the savanna that replaces it will be drier than the forest, which in turn suggests that it will eventually devolve into desert.

Food matters

     Seeds of Time (2013) Documentary that follows Cary Fowler as he travels round the world  as part of a world-wide seed-saving project. He was one of the instigators of the Svalbard Seed Vault. His message is simple: industrialised agriculture has brought about a sharp decline in crop diversity just when climate change has raised the need for genetic diversity so that crops can be adapted to changing conditions. Besides Svalbard, a project to preserve potato diversity in Peru gets central billing. There are also scenes of conferences, graphics illustrating the loss of seed banks, and so on. This is one of those slow-moving crises that people will ignore until it’s too late.
      Besides the Peruvian potato saving project, the film includes examples of seed saving by gardeners and other projects designed to preserve and increase diversity. Some of the repetitive bits could have been cut to provide more room for gardening, which in pure energy terms is the most efficient method of growing food.
     Unlike industrialised agriculture, a garden multiplies energy. The efficiency of agribusiness is an illusion limited to money. In terms of resources, it’s highly inefficient, because the externals aren’t priced. Gardening is labour intensive, but we get more food energy out of a garden than we put into it. Good thing too, or our ancestors, couldn’t have survived without preserving garden produce for the long cold winter. We subsidise agri-business by underpricing oil, which means we exchange the future of the planet for the present freedom from labour.
     A film both depressing and hopeful, relentlessly earnest, but necessary. Watch ity, and grow beans in your backyard. ***

Sand Wars (2015)

     Sand Wars (2015) Our civilisation is built on sand. We have used so much of it that it has become a scarce commodity, worth stealing and smuggling. Almost all land-based sources have been used up. Australia exports huge quantities of it. I don’t know if Canada does, but I wouldn’t be surprised. This documentary shows that removing  sand from beaches and the sea floor is causing unexpected and dangerous consequences. You can find the doc here:
     http://tvo.org/video/documentaries/sand-wars
     Watch it. Sand is an example of how our taking the environment for granted prevents us from seeing what we are doing. “Selective inattention” is the psychological term for this phenomenon. ***