For better server stability I’ve moved Resilience Science from my lab’s webserver at McGill to the Resilience Alliance’s server. Thanks go out to Paul Morrill for help with the move. The old site will remain, but will not be updated.
Readers should update their bookmarks to the new web address (rs.resalliance.org), and let me know about any problems.
Anatol Rappaport died Jan 20th in Toronto. Born in czarist Russia, he lived and worked in the USA and Canada. He was a transdisciplinary innovator who made substantial contributors to the study of commons dilemnas, systems, and peace. He was a co-founder of Society for General Systems Reseach. Perhaps most famously he was the inventor of the tit-for-tat strategy for the itterated prisoner’s dilemna. The Toronto Globe and Mail has an obtituary:
For Anatol Rapoport, rationality wasn’t all that rational. It was slippery and deceptive and tended to default to the selfish interests of the individual, only to hurt collective interests. Examples abounded: If every farmer kept as many cows as possible, soon there would be no grass to graze on, and all cows would die. If everyone ran for the exit of a burning building at once, no one would get out. If every fisherman took the maximum catch, the fishery would soon be depleted.
He believed war was no different: Belligerent factions actually work toward the same goal — to kill — in what appears (to them) as rational behaviour. The result is that all humanity is needlessly threatened by war and conflict.
Among the most versatile minds of the 20th century, Dr. Rapoport applied his protean talents in mathematics, psychology and game theory to peace and conflict resolution. The first professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, he is known as one of the world’s leading lights in the application of mathematical models to the social sciences.
“This is a great loss for the program, the centre, Canada, and, indeed, all of humanity,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the program’s successor, the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at U of T. “He was a man of staggering intellectual scope.”
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He authored more than 300 papers and about two dozen books on decision theory, psychological conflict, semantics and human behaviour. His better-known volumes included Two-Person Game Theory, about zero-sum games, and its sequel, N-Person Game Theory, which analyzed contests in which there are more than two sets of conflicting interests, such as in wide-scale warfare, or poker. His work also led him, most prominently, to peace research (The Origins of Violence, 1989; and Peace, An Idea Whose Time Has Come, 1993).
via 3 Quarks
A new report provides a College Sustainability Report Card that ranks 100 “leading universities” in North America on their campus environment and how they invest their endowments.
Schools are graded (from “A” to “F”) in seven categories. Four of the categories are on campus operations (administration, green building, food and recycling, and climate change and energy policies) and three endowment related categories (endowment transparency, shareholder engagement, and investment priorities). The report shows that while many universities are improving their operations, most schools do not have clear policies on how they invest their money.
McGill, Univ. of Toronto, and UBC were the only Canadian universites ranked. On campus policies UBC was by far the best (achieving all A’s on the on campus part of its evaluation), and was one of the top universities in North America. In Canada, UT was 2nd (receiving an A in administration and B’s in the other 3 categories. McGill was 3rd (last) with B’s in administration and food and recycling, and C’s in climate & energy and green building.
None of the Canadian universities do well in their endowment policies. However, McGill does better under these criteria (with no failing grades), while UT failed in endowment transparency and UBC failed in both in shareholder engagement and endowment transparency. Combining both these scores, UT and UBC tie, and McGill comes last – with overall grades of B-, B-, and C+.
Compared to all North American schools evaluated, UBC placed at the top, and UT and McGill in the lower middle.
Hopefully future issues of the Macleans Canadian university rankings will include evaluations of all Canadian universitiy sustainability practices and polices.
The full 120-page Report Card can be downloaded as can invidual school report cards.
A January 26, 2007 Scientific American article Open Access to Science Under Attack:
The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central–a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding–and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the “pit bull” of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature.The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, head of Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm that specializes in “high stakes communications and marketplace defense,” to address some of its members this past summer and potentially craft a media strategy. …
Specifically, according to Dezenhall’s suggestions in a memo, the publishers should “develop simple messages (e.g., Public access equals government censorship; Scientific journals preserve the quality/pedigree of science; government seeking to nationalize science and be a publisher) for use by Coalition members.” In addition, Dezenhall suggests “bypassing mass ‘consumer’ audiences in favor of reaching a more elite group of decision makers,” including journalists and regulators. This tack is necessary, he writes, because: “it’s hard to fight an adversary that manages to be both elusive and in possession of a better message: Free information.” Finally, Dezenhall suggests joining forces with think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and National Consumers League in an attempt to persuade key players of the potential risks of unfiltered access. “Paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles,” he adds.
Of course, open access does not mean no peer review. While the NIH is not in the business of peer review, according to Dr. Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, the entirety of PLoS journals are peer-reviewed. “Open access journals are peer-reviewed to the same standards,” notes Mark Patterson, PLoS’s director of publishing. “We wanted to provide an open access alternative to the best journals to allow the very best work to be made publicly available.”
On Direction not Destination, James Millington describes a 2006 William Cronon talk about narratives of climate change:
I made a point of going to see Bill Cronon at the Thursday morning plenary “Narrative of climate change” at the RGS conference. He suggested that narratives of climate change have been used as both prediction AND (secular) prophecy. This idea of a secular prophecy comes from recent intonations of Nature as a secular proxy for God. Prophecies are often told as stories of retribution that will be incurred if God’s laws were broken. If Nature is a proxy for God then Climate Change is portrayed as a retribution for humans breaking the laws of Nature.Cronon suggests that Global Narratives are abstract, virtual, systemic, remote, vast, have a diffuse sense of agency, posses no individual characters (i.e. no heros/villains), and are repetitive (so boring). These characteristics make it difficult to emphasise and justify calls for human action to mitigate against the anthropic influence on the climate. Cronon suggests these types of prophetic narrative are ‘unsustainable’ because they do not offer the possibility of individual or group action to reverse or address global climate problems, and therefore are no use politically or socially.
Coronon went on to discuss the micro-cosms (micro narratives) Elizabeth Kolbert uses in her book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” to illustrate the impacts of global change in a localised manner. She uses individual stories that are picked because they are not expected, they are non-abstract and the antithesis of the unsustainable global narratives. He concluded that we need narratives that offer hope, and not those tied to social and political models based on anarchic thought that do not address the systemic issues driving the change itself. This is the political challenge he suggests – to create narratives that not only make us think “I contributed to this” when we see evidence of glacier retreat, but that offer us hope of finding ways to reduce our future impact upon the environment.
From Doonesbury :
The Christian Science Monitor has an article – Sustainability gains status on US campuses – about Arizona State University’s new School of Sustainability. It is the USA’s first, and it includes quite a few researchers (including archaeologists, anthropologists, economists, and ecologists.) from the Resilience Alliance.
Any new building erected at ASU – a school adding facilities quickly – must be built to exacting environmental standards. Some professors in the university’s labs are concentrating on understanding nature and then using the knowledge to solve problems. For example, a team of professors is growing a strain of bacteria that feast on carbon dioxide. The bacteria could then be used to convert emissions from a power plant into bio-fuels.
By the fall, the university hopes to integrate its work so that students in other schools, such as the law school, can minor in sustainability. Some students will come from China as part of an agreement in August to launch a Joint Center on Urban Sustainability.
In October, ASU hosted 650 academics, administrators, and students from AASHE who took part in a conference on the role of higher education in creating a sustainable world. The university is attracting donors and business people, including heiress Julie Ann Wrigley and Rob Walton, chairman of Wal-Mart, who last month agreed to chair the board of ASU’s Institute of Sustainability.
Behind the university’s efforts is its president, Michael Crow, who arrived at ASU in 2002 after 11 years at Columbia University, where he played a lead role in founding the Earth Institute. (Read an interview with Mr. Crow).
Like many environmentalists, he counts reading Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” as a landmark in his life. However, he says it wasn’t until he matured that he realized “all of these 70,000 chemicals and synthetics that we have put in the atmosphere and water were all derived mostly by universities with no thought given to what the other impacts may be to what they are doing.”
At ASU, Dr. Crow reorganized the life-science departments, and began hiring experts in sustainability. A central goal, he says, “is that we work in concert with the natural systems as opposed to in conflict with the natural systems.”
And Crow goes a step further: He believes that nature, through 4 billion years of genetic change, provides “the pathway to everything we need. Nature has adapted to all kinds of problems: hot climate, cold climate, high carbon dioxide, low carbon dioxide.”
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Students seem excited to be part of the university’s effort. One is Thad Miller of Malverne, N.Y., who has been accepted to work on a doctorate at the new School of Sustainability. “What is appealing to me is that these problems of climate change, the urban heat island, urban planning, require a real interdisciplinary way of looking at the world, and they do this more so here than any other school,” says Mr. Miller, who is leaning toward working for a nonprofit or advising decision- makers when he graduates. “It’s fun to be a part of it.”
The USA’s National Abor Day Foundation has updated it tree hardiness maps (which are used to suggest what species of trees will grow in a particular region) based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States. The site includes an animation of changes between the 1990 and 2006 maps, which shows how the tree hardiness zones have moved north over the past 15 years.
The new map reflects that many areas have become warmer since 1990 when the last USDA hardiness zone map was published. Significant portions of many states have shifted at least one full hardiness zone. Much of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, for example, have shifted from Zone 5 to a warmer Zone 6. Some areas around the country have even warmed two full zones.
… Hardiness zones are based on average annual low temperatures using 10 degree increments. For example, the average low temperature in zone 3 is -40 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit, while the average low temperature in zone 10 is +30 to +40 degrees Fahrenheit.
On RealClimate, Michael Mann has a good explanation of what is going on with North America’s unusual winter weather. He discusses what parts of the weather may be due to ENSO fluctuations and what part could be a signal of climate change.
The pattern so far this winter (admittedly after only 1 month) looks … like a stronger version of what was observed last winter … . This poses the first obvious conundrum for the pure “El Nino” attribution of the current warmth: since we were actually in a (weak) La Nina (i.e., the opposite of ‘El Nino’) last winter, how is it that we can explain away the anomalous winter U.S. warmth so far this winter by ‘El Nino’ when anomalous winter warmth last year occured in its absence?
The second conundrum with this explanation is that, while El Nino typically does perturb the winter Northern Hemisphere jet stream in a way that favors anomalous warmth over much of the northern half of the U.S., the typical amplitude of the warming (see Figure below right) is about 1C (i.e., about 2F). The current anomaly is roughly five times as large as this. One therefore cannot sensibly argue that the current U.S. winter temperature anomalies are attributed entirely to the current moderate El Nino event.
Indeed, though the current pattern of winter U.S. warmth looks much more like the pattern predicted by climate models as a response to anthropogenic forcing (see Figure below left) than the typical ‘El Nino’ pattern, neither can one attribute this warmth to anthropogenic forcing. As we are fond of reminding our readers, one cannot attribute a specific meteorological event, an anomalous season, or even (as seems may be the case here, depending on the next 2 months) two anomalous seasons in a row, to climate change. Moreover, not even the most extreme scenario for the next century predicts temperature changes over North America as large as the anomalies witnessed this past month. But one can argue that the pattern of anomalous winter warmth seen last year, and so far this year, is in the direction of what the models predict.
In reality, the individual roles of deterministic factors such as El Nino, anthropogenic climate change, and of purely random factors (i.e. “weather”) in the pattern observed thusfar this winter cannot even in principle be ascertained. What we do know, however, is that both anthropogenic climate change and El Nino favor, in a statistical sense, warmer winters over large parts of the U.S. When these factors act constructively, as is the case this winter, warmer temperatures are certainly more likely. Both factors also favor warmer global mean surface temperatures (the warming is one or two tenths of a degree C for a moderate to strong El Nino). It is precisely for this reason that some scientists are already concluding, with some justification, that 2007 stands a good chance of being the warmest year on record for the globe.
Inspiring words from Muhammad Yunus, in his acceptance speech for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize:
I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.
Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity, by designing concepts, which are too narrow (such as concept of business, credit- worthiness, entrepreneurship, employment) or developing institutions, which remain half-done (such as financial institutions, where poor are left out). Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people.
I firmly believe that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it. In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums. When school children take a tour of the poverty museums, they would be horrified to see the misery and indignity that some human beings had to go through. They would blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition, which existed for so long, for so many people. A human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also to contribute to enlarging the well being of the world as a whole. Some get the chance to explore their potential to some degree, but many others never get any opportunity, during their lifetime, to unwrap the wonderful gift they were born with. They die unexplored and the world remains deprived of their creativity, and their contribution.
Grameen has given me an unshakeable faith in the creativity of human beings. This has led me to believe that human beings are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty.
To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.
Let us join hands to give every human being a fair chance to unleash their energy and creativity.
