All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Ecological Economics, Regime Shifts

Partha Dasgupta on Lomborg’s muddled concreteness

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Environmental economist Partha Dasgupt a reviews Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, by Bjorn Lomborg in Nature

Unfortunately, Lomborg’s thesis is built on a deep misconception of Earth’s system and of economics when applied to that system. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now 380 p.p.m., a figure that ice cores in Antarctica have revealed to be in excess of the maximum reached during the past 600,000 years. If there is one truth about Earth we all should know, it’s that the system is driven by interlocking, nonlinear processes running at different speeds. The transition to Lomborg’s recommended concentration of 560 p.p.m. would involve crossing an unknown number of tipping points (or separatrices) in the global climate system. We have no data on the consequences if Earth were to cross those tipping points. They could be good, or they could be disastrous. Even if we did have data, they would probably be of little value because nature’s processes are irreversible. One implication of the Earth system’s deep nonlinearities is that estimates of climatic parameters based on observations from the recent past are unreliable for making forecasts about the state of the world at CO2 concentrations of 560 p.p.m. or higher. Moreover, the nonlinearities mean that doing more of a bad deal (Kyoto) may well be very good.

These truths seem to escape Lomborg. His cost–benefit analysis involves only point estimates of variables (interpreted variously as ‘most likely’, ‘expected’, and so forth), implying that he believes we shouldn’t buy insurance against potentially enormous losses resulting from climate change. His concerns over the prevalence of malaria, undernutrition and HIV in today’s world show that he is an egalitarian. There is, then, an internal contradiction in his value system, because if you are averse to inequality you should also be averse to uncertainty.

The integrated assessment models of Earth’s system on which Lomborg builds his case are arbitrarily bounded on either side of his point estimates. It can be shown that if those bounds are removed (as they ought to be), even a small amount of uncertainty — when allied to only a moderate aversion to uncertainty — would imply that humanity should spend substantial amounts on insurance, even more than the 1–2% of world output that has been advocated. If the uncertainties are not small, standard cost–benefit analysis as applied to the economics of climate change becomes incoherent, even if those uncertainties are judged to be thin-tailed (gaussian, for example); this is because the analysis would say that no matter how much humanity chooses to invest in protecting Earth from passing through those later tipping points, we should invest still more.

Economics helps us to realize what we are able to say about matters that will reveal themselves only in the distant future. Simultaneously, it helps us to realize the limits of what we are able to say. That, too, is worth knowing, for limits on what we are able to say are not a reason for inaction. Lomborg’s seemingly persuasive economic calculations are a case of muddled concreteness.

Australian ecologist Tim Flannery makes some similar points in his review and concludes with the much stronger statement that:

By empathizing with those who are concerned about climate change and poverty, and trying to persuade them to divert their energies, Cool It is a stealth attack on humanity’s future.

Visualization

Mapping economic activity from night lights

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USA estimated Economic Activity

spatial distirbution of EU econ activity

Maps are estimates of economic activity within 5×5 kn grid cells, based on satellite observation of night lights.

Images are from the paper Mapping regional economic activity from night-time light satellite imagery (Doll, Muller and Morley, Ecol Econ 2006, doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.007).
From the abstract:

Night-time light remote sensing data has been shown to correlate with national-level figures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Night-time radiance data is analysed here along with regional economic productivity data for 11 European Union countries along with the United States at a number of sub-national levels. Night-time light imagery was found to correlate with Gross Regional Product (GRP) across a range of spatial scales.

Maps of economic activity at 5 km resolution were produced based on the derived relationships. To produce these maps, certain areas had to be excluded due to their anomalously high levels of economic activity for the amount of total radiance present. These areas were treated separately from other areas in the map. These results provide the first detailed examination of night-time light characteristics with respect to local economic activity and highlight issues, which should be considered when undertaking such analysis.

Cities, Scenarios, Visualization

Imagining Future Cites

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Black Hawk DownAre there any movies, video games, tv shows, etc that have a positive visions of urban futures?

There are plenty of negative ones. Mike Davis thinks Black Hawk Down represents a new icon of the urban future to replace Blade Runner as the city of the future. From BLDGBLOG: Interview with Mike Davis: Part 1:

BLDGBLOG: What kind of imaginative role do you see slums playing today? On the one hand, there’s a kind of CIA-inspired vision of irrational anti-Americanism, mere breeding grounds for terrorism; on the other, you find books like The Constant Gardener, in which the Third World poor are portrayed as innocent, naive, and totally unthreatening, patiently awaiting their liberal salvation. Whose imaginination is it in which these fantasies play out?

Davis: I think, actually, that if Blade Runner was once the imaginative icon of our urban future, then the Blade Runner of this generation is Black Hawk Down – a movie I must admit I’m drawn to to see again and again. Just the choreography of it – the staging of it – is stunning. But I think that film really is the cinematic icon for this new frontier of civilization: the “white man’s burden” of the urban slum and its videogame-like menacing armies, with their RPGs in hand, battling heroic techno-warriors and Delta Force Army Rangers. It’s a profound military fantasy. I don’t think any movie since The Sands of Iwo Jima has enlisted more kids in the Marines than Black Hawk Down. In a moral sense, of course, it’s a terrifying film, because it’s an arcade game – and who could possibly count all the Somalis that are killed?

And, does anyone know of any pieces of popular art that represent a positive vision of an urban future?

Visualization

Geography in the Anthropocene

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Aral Sea

Andrew Revkin has a brief article Art of Mapping on the Run about mapping human caused environmental change in the Sept 9, NY Times.

Now, though, the accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the planet, requiring ever more frequent redrawing not only of political boundaries, but of the shape of Earth’s features themselves.

For more on the Aral Sea disaster:

Ecosystem services

Moving ecosystem services from idea to practice: an interview

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As part of a series on ecosystem services on WorldChanging, Hassan Masum, David Zaks, and Chad Monfreda, interview people in the People & Ecosystems program at WRI (Karen Bennett, Charles Iceland, Evan Branosky, and Stephen Adam) working on the application of ecosystem services ideas. The People & Ecosystems program recently published a report Restoring Nature’s Capital: An Action Agenda to Sustain Ecosystem Services based on the finding of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

In the interview – Moving Ecosystems Services from Theory to Reality – the WRI people describe some of their recent projects to establish markets for ecosystem services and the challenge of ecosystem service tradeoffs.

Continue reading →

Regime Shifts, Visualization

Arctic sea ice at record low

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In 2005 on Resilience Science, Line Gordon, wrote about recent research that we may have already passed tipping points in the Arctic.

NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice News Fall 2007 is providing weekly updates on the state of Arctic sea ice, which has reached record low coverage this year (the previous record low was in 2005).

Arctic Sea Ice

The figure shows daily ice extent for 2007, 2005 and to the 1979 to 2000 average.

Adaptation

Losing agricultural diversity

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avian breeds from FAO reportThe drive for agricultural efficiency is driving the loss of the capacity for agriculture to cope with shocks and adapt to future change. This pattern fits that general pattern of the pathology of natural resource management that Buzz Holling has described previously.

The FAO, in collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other groups, surveyed farm animals in 169 countries, to produce a report of global livestock diversity “The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources.” This report shows that many local varieties of livestock are declining due to the promotion of common varieties.

Nature News has an article on the FAO report Local livestock breeds are dying out as commercial breeds sweep the world.

Many of the world’s indigenous livestock breeds are in danger of dying out as commercial breeds take over, according to a worldwide inventory of animal diversity. Their extinction would mean the loss of genetic resources that help animals overcome disease and drought, particularly in the developing world, say livestock experts.

…The survey reports that 11% of the investigated breeds are now extinct (some having disappeared many decades ago), 16% are currently at risk, 38% are unthreatened, and the security of the remaining 35% is unknown.

…

Local breeds, nearly 70% of which are found in the developing world, are often better suited to their environments than commercially marketed animals bred for their high yields and short-term profitability, Seré argues. Red Maasai sheep, for example, are naturally resistant to intestinal parasites, and Uganda’s indigenous Ankole cattle are particularly drought-hardy.

Until recently, natural selection allowed animals to adapt, but now a lot of this is falling through the cracks.

…

But the dominance of big breeding companies, mostly based in industrialized countries, means that these populations are being supplanted by the most common commercial breeds. Holstein-Friesian cattle, the stereotypical black-and-white dairy cow, are now found in more than 120 countries throughout the world.

The spread of such animals means that many farmers are now working with livestock that are poorly adapted to their environment, Seré says. “Until recently, natural selection allowed animals to adapt, but now a lot of this is falling through the cracks,” he says.

The pursuit of high-yielding animals means that genetic diversity is in crisis even in the established commercial breeds, says Shirley Ellis of the Institute for Animal Health in Compton, UK. She estimates that the roughly one billion Holstein-Friesians in the world were sired by the same few dozen bulls in North America. The advent of cloning for the most prized males will make the inbreeding problem worse still, she says.

Exporting strains such as Holstein-Friesians to the developing world is short-sighted, experts point out. “They don’t cope very well with local climate and diseases,” Ellis says.

Adaptation, Vulnerability

Catastrophe Bonds: Markets, Learning and Volatility

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“Wall Street is a machine for turning information nobody cares about into information people can get rich from.” Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, Aug 26 NYTimes in his article about catatrophe bonds – which are used to share disaster lossses – Nature’s Casino:

From Miami to San Francisco, the nation’s priciest real estate now faced beaches and straddled fault lines; its most vibrant cities occupied its most hazardous land. If, after World War II, you had set out to redistribute wealth to maximize the sums that might be lost to nature, you couldn’t have done much better than Americans had done. And virtually no one — not even the weather bookies — fully understood the true odds.

But there was an exception: an American so improbably prepared for the havoc Tropical Depression 12 was about to wreak that he might as well have planned it. His name was John Seo, he was 39 years old and he ran a hedge fund in Westport, Conn., whose chief purpose was to persuade investors to think about catastrophe in the same peculiar way that he did. He had invested nearly a billion dollars of other people’s money in buying what are known as “cat bonds.” The buyer of a catastrophe bond is effectively selling catastrophe insurance. He puts down his money and will lose it all if some specified bad thing happens within a predetermined number of years: a big hurricane hitting Miami, say, or some insurance company losing more than $1 billion on any single natural disaster. In exchange, the cat-bond seller — an insurance company looking to insure itself against extreme losses — pays the buyer a high rate of interest.

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everywhere he goes, he has been drawn to a similar thorny problem: the right price to charge to insure against potential losses from extremely unlikely financial events. “Tail risk,” as it is known to quantitative traders, for where it falls in a bell-shaped probability curve. Tail risk, broadly speaking, is whatever financial cataclysm is believed by markets to have a 1 percent chance or less of happening. In the foreign-exchange market, the tail event might be the dollar falling by one-third in a year; in the bond market, it might be interest rates moving 3 percent in six months; in the stock market, it might be a 30 percent crash. “If there’s been a theme to John’s life,” says his brother Nelson, “it’s pricing tail.”

… Continue reading →

Ideas

Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction

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HirschmanOn the Ecological Economics weblog Dave Iverson reminds us of the great American economist Albert Hirschman‘s book The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.

Iverson writes on Hirschman’s thoughts on dialogue and democracy:

As I read it, I wondered, once again, “How many economic arguments are simply the stuff of reactionary rhetoric?” Too many, I fear.

In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman gives us three theses to ponder:

  • The Perversity Thesis: reform efforts will backfire, tending toward effects opposite those desired
  • The Futility Thesis: reform efforts are doomed to fail from the get-go
  • The Jeopardy Thesis: reform efforts will unravel earlier (better) reforms, or they will unravel the entirety of whatever system is in play…

Hirschman explains how easily both conservatives and progressives get drawn into the rhetorical standoffs, impasses really: “… To the dangers of action it is always possible to oppose the dangers of inaction. …” Here is how Hirschman frames a hypothetical point/counterpoint:

Reactionary: The contemplated action will bring disastrous consequences.

Progressive: Not to take the contemplated action will ring disastrous consequences.

Reactionary: The new reform will jeopardize the older one.

Progressive: The new and the old reforms will mutually reinforce each others.

Reactionary: The contemplated action attempts to change permanent structural characteristics ([natural] “laws”) of the social order; it is therefore bound to be wholly ineffective, futile.

Progressive; The contemplated action is backed up by powerful historical forces that are already “on the march”; opposing them would be utterly futile.

Hirschman concludes with:

Recent reflection on democracy have yielded two valuable insights …. Modern pluralistic regimes have typically come into being not because of some preexisting wide consensus on “basic values,” bur rather because various groups that had been at each others’ throats for a prolonged period had to recognize their mutual inability to achieve dominance. Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups.

This historical point of departure of democracy does not bode particularly well for the stability of these regimes. The point is immediately obvious, but it becomes even more so when it is brought into contact with the theoretical claim that a democratic regime achieves legitimacy to the extent that its decisions result from full and open deliberation among its principal groups, bodies, and representatives. Deliberation is here conceived, as an opinion-forming process: the participants should not have fully or definitively formed opinions at the outset; they are expected to engage in meaningful discussion, which means that they should be ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of arguments of other participants and also as a result of new information which becomes available in the course of the debate. …

If this is what it takes for the democratic process to become self-sustaining and to acquire long-run stability and legitimacy, then the gulf that separates such a state from democratic-pluralistic regimes as they emerge historically from strife and civil war is uncomfortably and perilously wide. A people that only yesterday was engaged in fratricidal struggles is not likely to settle down overnight to those constructive give-and-take deliberations. Far more likely , there will initially be agreement to disagree, but without any attempt at melding the opposing points of view—that is indeed the nature of religious tolerance. Or, if there is discussion, it will be a typical “dialogue of the deaf”—a dialogue that will in fact long function as a prolongation of, and a substitute for, civil war. Even in the most “advanced” democracies, many debates are, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a “continuation of civil war with other means.” Such debates, with each part on the lookout for arguments that kill, are only too familiar from democratic politics as usual.

There remains then a long and difficult road to be traveled from the traditional internecine, intransigent discourse to a more “democracy-friendly” kind of dialogue. …

One question lingers with me: How far have we, particularly here in the US, backpedaled in our quest for pluralistic reasoning?

When “values” of various stripes are trotted out before us on a daily basis, asking us to pledge allegiance to ‘values’ framed as ‘moral absolutes’ in-ever-more-strident urgings, why are we not in the streets screaming, Stop! We are losing the very platform on which democracy can flourish!

Or maybe I’m just being reactionary?

Inequality

Visualizing Global Inequality

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A graph of global inequality from:

Branko Milanovic, Global Income Inequality: What it Is and why it Matters? World Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1, January-March 2006.

Inequality within and amoung countries

The figure compares the income distribution within France, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Rural Indonesia. The graph shows that the poorest 5% of France are richer than the top 5% rural Indonesians. The poorest 5% rural Indonesian are richer than the poorest 5% of Brzil, but the richest 5% of Brazil are as rich as the top 5% of France.

Branko Milanovic, a world bank economist, is one of the world’s top experts on inequality. His 2005 book Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality is an excellent clear introduction to the problems of understanding global inequality.

via Tim Holland.