Category Archives: Ideas

Big Back Loop, Ideas, Reorganization, Scenarios

Ecology for Transformation

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David Zaks and Chad Monfreda write on Worldchanging on Steve Carpenter and Carl Folke‘s 2006 paper in Ecology for Transformation (doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2006.02.007):

Ecology has long been a descriptive science with real but limited links to the policy community. A new science of ecology, however, is emerging to forge the collaborations with social scientists and decision makers needed for a bright green future. Stephen Carpenter and Carl Folke outline a vision for the future of ecology in their recent article, Ecology for Transformation. You need a subscription to access the full article, so we’ll quote them at length:

“Scenarios with positive visions are quite different from projections of environmental disaster. Doom-and-gloom predictions are sometimes needed, and they might sell newspapers, but they do little to inspire people or to evoke proactive forward-looking steps toward a better world. Transformation requires evocative visions of better worlds to compare and evaluate the diverse alternatives available to us … Although we cannot predict the future, we have much to decide. Better decisions start from better visions, and such visions need ecological perspectives.”

Ecology for Transformation offers the perspective of resilient social-ecological systems. Simply put, it recognizes that ecosystems and human society are interdependent, and that they need the capacity to withstand and adapt to an increasingly bumpy future.

Examples of resilient social-ecological systems abound in all kinds of notoriously difficult to manage areas, like natural disaster response and rangeland management. Resilience sounds great, but how do we get there? Fortunately Carpenter and Folke offer a theoretically robust three-part transformative framework:

1. Diversity
2. Environmentally sound technology
3. Adaptive governance

Diversity constitutes the raw material we can draw from to create effective technologies and institutions. It reflects the wealth of genetic and memetic resources at our disposal, in the form of biodiversity, landscapes, cultures, ideas, and economic livelihoods. We need to foster diversity as an insurance package for hard times because…

“…crisis can create opportunities for reorganizing the relationships of society to ecosystems. At such times, barriers to action might break down, if only for a short time, and new approaches have a chance to change the direction of ecosystem management. To succeed, a particular approach or vision must be well-formed by the time the crisis arises, because the opportunity for change might be short-lived.”

Environmentally sound technology ranges from incremental advancements in energy efficiency to innovative economic tools like natural capital valuation and markets for ecosystem services. Diversity and technology should sound familiar enough to WorldChanging readers. Ecology for transformation, however, goes on, to challenge us to engage in adaptive governance that recognizes the reality of constant change. The authors define adaptive governance as:

“Institutional and political frameworks designed to adapt to changing relationships between society and ecosystems in ways that sustain ecosystem services; expands the focus from adaptive management of ecosystems to address the broader social contexts that enable ecosystem based management.”

Governance is much broader than what we normally think of as government and encompasses all of the actors who shape the way we work, live, and interact. Communication across various scales, from individuals to institutions, is vital for effective governance. Many of the management and governance structures currently in place are static, but an ‘adaptive’ approach promises more sustainable outcomes by negotiating uncertainty and change.

Steve Carpenter, WA Brock, and I addressed the issue of how scientists can encourage transformations by creating new management models in our 2003 paper Uncertainty and the management of multistate ecosystems: an apparently rational route to collapse (Ecology. 84(6) 1403-1411). We wrote:

…scientists can contribute to broadening the worldview of ecosystem management in at least three ways.

(1) Scientists can point out that uncertainty is a property of the set of models under consideration. This set of models is a mental construct (even if it depends in part on prior observation of the ecosystem). It therefore depends on attitudes and beliefs that are unrelated to putatively objective information about the ecosystem. Despite this discomforting aspect of uncertainty, it cannot be ignored.

(2) Scientists can help to imagine novel models for how the system might change in the future. There will be cases where such novel models carry non-negligible weight in decision, for example when the costs of collapse are high. The consequences of candidate policies can be examined under models with very different implications for ecosystem behavior. Such explorations of the robustness of policies can be carried out when model uncertainty is quite high or even unknown, for example in scenario analysis.

(3) Scientists can point out the value of safe, informative experiments to test models beyond the range of available data. In the model presented here, fossilization of beliefs follows from fixation on policies that do not reveal the full dynamic potential of the ecosystem, leading to the underestimation of model uncertainty. Experimentation at scales appropriate for testing alternative models for ecosystem behavior is one way out the trap. Of course, largescale experiments on ecosystems that support human well being must be approached with caution. Nevertheless, in situations where surprising and unfavorable ecosystem dynamics are possible, it may be valuable to experiment with innovative practices that could reinforce desirable ecosystem states.

I think our second point, the need for creative synthesis, is not emphasized enough in science, which tends to focus on testing existing models. Ecological governance needs new ways of thinking about nature that are useful in governance situations. The creation of novel, practical models is a vital part of connecting science to policy and action. Without practical models, people are unable to develop desirable policy or effective actions.

Ideas

Thoughts on Simple and Complex Causes of Lumps

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Reply of Buzz Holling to a message from Marten Scheffer:

I did like your models (Scheffer and van Nes) that show that lumps of species emerge naturally from competition, augmented with predation (see post on self-organization of ecosystem lumpiness). I like also that the simulated lumpy distributions you demonstrated are very evolutionarily robust. That is what has been shown in so much of the multi species community data and experimental manipulations that have been published by various authors.

But let me offer some other empirical evidence that suggest something else may ALSO be operating. Then I’ll end with some words on the philosophy of science!

First, in one of my tests in my “lumpy paper” I asked if herbivores and carnivores had different lump patterns among the mammals in each of the communities of the boreal prairies and boreal forests (Holling, C.S. 1992. Cross-scale morphology, geometry and dynamics of ecosystems. Ecological Monographs. 62(4):447-502). In my mind, this was a crude, crude test of the role of competition and predation in forming body mass lump patterns. Herbivores and carnivores turned out to have the same lump patterns, suggesting that something more than competition must be causing the similarity.

Second, I asked if mammals compared to birds in the same communities (boreal forests and boreal prairies) had different or similar lump patterns. It turned out that the patterns differed when compared by untransformed masses, but were very similar when the bird masses were expressed as Mass to the third power and mammal masses as untransformed mass. Birds, it was argued, therefore must see their world in three dimensions, and mammals in one dimension. Some behavioral data seems to conform to that conclusion. But note the data and tests only applied to two systems, and clearly more ecosystems need to be compared. Adding bats, mammals that fly, offers a set of additional tests that would be very valuable. Data, however, are tough to get. Such tests need data on masses of birds, non flying mammals and bats from the same ecosystem communities.

Third , one of my colleagues, Jan Sendzimir, asked if body mass lump patterns among birds or mammals in different ecological communities around the world were more similar if they came from the same type of community. In essence, for example, are lump patterns in boreal forest communities in Europe and North America more similar to each other than to patterns among totally different communities? The answer was that they were more similar to each other, even when comparing different continents. That suggests that patterns on landscapes over a wide range of scales is central in defining lumpy patterns.

Fourth, Craig Allen has discovered a remarkably consistent pattern that the masses of endangered and invasive species of birds and mammals, exist disproportionately on the edge of the body mass lumps. He has shown that for at least five ecosystems around the world. It is as if crisis and opportunity are shared there, where, I suppose, the resources available at those scale breaks were poor. As scales increase, points are reached where the available resources suddenly change. (Think of viewing a high resolution satellite image of a landscape at different powers of ten from meters to tens of thousands of kms). Initially you see leaves and branches , and suddenly a scale is reached where you see trees and vegetation types- and on and on. What you see, I thought, is what you can , potentially eat or , better, utilize).

Finally, I am delighted with your emphasis on self organization. I have long felt that self organization , integrated with Darwinian evolution, has huge explanatory power, and the combination answers many of the existing puzzles of evolution.

But I also felt that the self organizing patterns were ones that involved not just interactions among biological species of similar trophic relations (like your competitors) but also interactions across trophic categories , and even interactions among organisms and abiotic features. Maybe, I thought, that is why anoxid, pre Cambrian organisms evolved the ability to use the dreadful poison of oxygen to explosively release a new burst of evolution. I imagined oxygen breathing species evolving in water where diffusion of oxygen was slow enough that local concentrations could be built up by organisms with facultative oxygen metabolism. Suddenly anoxic metabolism there becomes a penalty and oxygen metabolism a huge benefit. From those local concentrations, a world with oxygen could bloom.

There are two very distinct ways to suggest and test such ideas. One is via models, where very specific causes are designed and tested as a deductive excercise. That is what your paper does, in a significant expansion of that tradition. The other comes from a larger scale of testing of whole assemblies of potentially interacting variables . The conceptual ideas might come from earlier models. That was what my lump paper attempted as a test of a set of conclusions comparing earlier simulation models of ecosystems. Each of about a dozen models /studies indicated a small number of variables (less than five) at distinctly different scales explained those systems changes in variables. Hence I suggested, real data covering broad scales should show a small number of lumpy clusters. Body mass was chosen as a test because that is the data that are available. The data indeed showed the lumpy structure.

Now what is needed is slightly expanded deductive models with up to five variables/processes, much like those that Steve Carpenter and Buz Brock have structured for economic-ecological mini systems (see papers in Ecology and Society on lakes and fishing). And much more testing is needed with large scale assemblies of variables as I attempted in my lump paper. That is what Craig Allen has been doing, with collaborators, for a number of systems- biological, ecological , economic and social,. A book is about to be published, I believe. He might have some revealing comments that we all could learn from.

C.S.Holling

Ideas, Regime Shifts, Reorganization

Punctuated Equilibrium in Environmental Policy

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Readers familiar with panarchy theory will find a rich set of relevant examples in a new book edited by Robert Repetto, Punctuated Equilibrium and the Dynamics of U.S. Environmental Policy.

In Chapter 2, Frank Baumgartner explains how U.S. environmental policy shows is static for long periods of time, reflecting stable institutional structures, shared understanding of goals, and balance of power among competing interests. Occasionally, however, there are bursts of innovation as public policies are radically restructured. These rare but crucially important bursts of innovation occur across a range of scales, from local to national. Baumgartner makes his case using statistical case histories of policy dynamics.

William Brock, in Chapter 3, explains social and economic mechanisms that cause long periods of stasis interrupted by bursts of enormous change in environmental policy. Brock uses minimal models grounded in well-established social and economic phenomena. The remainder of the book develops case studies in depth.

Some cases have undergone radical change: management of water in California, certain marine fisheries, and timber in the Pacific Northwest. Other systems seem locked in traps: greenhouse gas and climate policy, vehicular fuel economy standards, and livestock grazing on public lands. History suggests that these traps will eventually be broken.

In his introductory chapter, Repetto summarizes the positive and negative feedback mechanisms that underlie punctuated equilibrium. He writes:

Though they [the feedback mechanisms] are fully capable of explaining the observed patterns of stability and abrupt change, their workings are difficult to predict in particular policy struggles because of their complex interactions. The infrequency of policy breakthroughs suggests that most efforts to bring them about will fail. Entrenched interests and ideology will retain their dominance; challengers will be unable to gather sufficient resources, attention, and momentum. Nonetheless, such failed efforts may build a foundation for later success when conditions are more favorable by undermining the prevailing policy image, by mobilizing new interests, and by forming new coalitions. Even knowing that the odds are long, effective policymakers continue to work on their issues in order to be ready and primed when opportunities arise. Timing is crucial . . . . Across the broad range of resource and environmental policy issues, only a few, if any, are likely to have potential for significant change at any particular time. The ability to discern which ones these are is a vital strategic skill.

This pattern is well known to researchers familiar with adaptive cycles and panarchy. Surprisingly, this scholarly and well-documented volume has almost no references to research on adaptive cycles, resilience and panarchy. The lone exception is a citation to the 2002 Panarchy book edited by Gunderson and Holling. I hope that there is more exchange of ideas on punctuated policy dynamics and panarchy in the future.

Visualization, Vulnerability

Mapping global soil degradation

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UNEP global map of soil degradation

UNEP provides access to a number of global environmental datasets via the GEO data portal. For example, the Global Assessment of Human Induced Soil Degradation data base was created in 1990 by ISRIC. The database contains information on soil degradation within map units reported by a survey of soil experts from around the world. It includes the type, degree, extent, cause and rate of soil degradation.
The main causes of degradation are (in order) overgrazing, deforestation, and agricultural mismanagement. Each of these is responsible for a bit less than a third of total degraded area. Other causes of degradation make up less than 8% of the total degraded area. Deforestation dominates in Asia, while overgrazing is the main driver in Africa and Australia.
For details of assessment see:

Oldeman LR, Hakkeling RTA and Sombroek WG 1991. World Map of the Status of Human-Induced Soil Degradation: An explanatory Note (rev. ed.), UNEP and ISRIC, Wageningen pdf

Big Back Loop, Ideas

Women’s work and the global economy

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The April 12th Economist has an article on Women and the world economy

… it is misleading to talk of women’s “entry” into the workforce. Besides formal employment, women have always worked in the home, looking after children, cleaning or cooking, but because this is unpaid, it is not counted in the official statistics. To some extent, the increase in female paid employment has meant fewer hours of unpaid housework. However, the value of housework has fallen by much less than the time spent on it, because of the increased productivity afforded by dishwashers, washing machines and so forth. Paid nannies and cleaners employed by working women now also do some work that used to belong in the non-market economy.

Nevertheless, most working women are still responsible for the bulk of chores in their homes. In developed economies, women produce just under 40% of official GDP. But if the worth of housework is added (valuing the hours worked at the average wage rates of a home help or a nanny) then women probably produce slightly more than half of total output.

The increase in female employment has also accounted for a big chunk of global growth in recent decades. GDP growth can come from three sources: employing more people; using more capital per worker; or an increase in the productivity of labour and capital due to new technology, say. Since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the employment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased productivity. Carve up the world’s economic growth a different way and another surprising conclusion emerges: over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.

…

In particular, there is strong evidence that educating girls boosts prosperity. It is probably the single best investment that can be made in the developing world. Not only are better educated women more productive, but they raise healthier, better educated children. There is huge potential to raise income per head in developing countries, where fewer girls go to school than boys. More than two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women.

More Jobs More Babies - from Economist April 12 2006 It is sometimes argued that it is shortsighted to get more women into paid employment. The more women go out to work, it is said, the fewer children there will be and the lower growth will be in the long run. Yet the facts suggest otherwise. Chart 3 shows that countries with high female labour participation rates, such as Sweden, tend to have higher fertility rates than Germany, Italy and Japan, where fewer women work. Indeed, the decline in fertility has been greatest in several countries where female employment is low.

via Three Quarks

Ecological Economics, Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Hurricanes, Risk Models, and Insurance

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Roger Pielke Jr has an interesting post Are We Seeing the End of Hurricane Insurability? on the Prometheus weblog. The insurance industry uses models of expected losses to set rates for catastrophic losses – from things such as huricanes. However, the models that are properitarity and not open to public evaluation. Now consumer groups are attacking the providers of “catastrophe models” arguing that these models main purpose is to justify increases in insurance rates.

In the past consumer groups have argued:

Consumers were told that, after the big price increases in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, they would see price stability. This was because the projections were not based on short-term weather history, as they had been in the past, but on very long-term data from 10,000 to 100,000 years of projected experience. The rate requests at the time were based upon the average of these long-range projections. Decades with no hurricane activity were assessed in the projections as were decades of severe hurricane activity, as most weather experts agree we are experiencing now. Small storms predominated, but there were projections of huge, category 5 hurricanes hitting Miami or New York as well, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Consumers were assured that, although hurricane activity was cyclical, they would not see significant price decreases during periods of little or no hurricane activity, nor price increases during periods of frequent activity. That promise has now been broken.

While the catastrophe modelling firms argue:

Given a constant climatological state (or if annual variations from that state are short lived and unpredictable) the activity rate in a catastrophe model can best be represented as the average of long-term history. In this situation there is no need to characterize the period over which the activity is considered to apply because, with current knowledge, it is expected that rate will continue indefinitely. The assumption that activity remains consistent breaks down, however, where there are either multi-year fluctuations in activity or persistent trends. It then becomes necessary to characterize the time period over which the activity in the Cat model is intended to apply.

Pielke argues that the disaster modellers are implying

…that the historical climatology of hurricane activity is no longer a valid basis for estimating future risks. This means that the catastrophe models that they provide are untethered from experience. Imagine if you are playing a game of poker, and the dealer tells you that the composition of the deck has been completely changed – now you don’t know whether there are 4 aces in the deck or 20. It would make gambling based on probabilities a pretty dodgy exercise. If RMS [Risk Management Solutions – a catastrophe modelling company] is correct, then it has planted the seed that has potential to completely transform its business and the modern insurance and reinsurance industries.

What happens if history is no longer a guide to the future? One answer is that you set your expectations about the future based on factors other than experience. One such approach is to ask the relevant experts what they expect. This is what RMS did last fall, convening Kerry Emanuel, Tom Knutson, Jim Elsner, and Mark Saunders in order to conduct an “expert elicitation”.

…

… RMS conducted its elicitation October, 2005 with the intent that it will shape its risk estimates for the next 5 years. This is wholly unrealistic in such a fast moving area of science. It is unlikely that the perspectives elicited from these 4 scientists will characterize the views of the relevant community (or even their own views!) over the next five years as further research is published and hurricane seasons unfold. Because RMS has changed from a historical approach to defining risk, which changes very, very slowly, if at all over time, to an expert-focused approach, it should fully expect to see very large changes in expert views as science evolves. This is a recipe for price instability, exactly the opposite from what the consumer groups, and insurance commissioners, want.

From the perspective of the basic functioning of the insurance and reinsurance industries, the change in approach by RMS is an admission that the future is far more uncertain than has been the norm for this community. Such uncertainty may call into question the very basis of hurricane insurance and reinsurance which lies in an ability to quantify and anticipate risks. If the industry can’t anticipate risks, or simply come to a consensus on how to calculate risks (even if inaccurate), then this removes one of the key characteristics of successful insurance. Debate on this issue has only just begun.

Hedging ones bets with insurance is a good strategy to deal with risk – where known outcomes are expected to occur with some known probability. However, when confronting more uncertain situations other approaches such as building resilience to potential classes of shock, engaging in experimental management to decrease uncertainty, and accelerating learning by integrating sources of knowledge across a wider variety of domains (e.g. meterology, ecology, and urban planning) and different regions (e.g. Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and New Orleans).

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management, General, Tools

ATEAM: Modelling ecosystem services

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Worldchanging guest writers David Zaks and Chad Monfreda, from Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the U of Wisconsin, have a post ATEAM: Mr.T takes on ecosystems services on a project to model ecosystem services in Europe.

The ATEAM (Advanced Terrestrial Ecosystem Analysis and Modeling) project (also here and here) is not made up of rogue soldiers of fortune, but academics in Europe. The scientific assessment correlates changes in human well-being with future changes in climate and land-use. Researchers combined global climate models and land-use scenarios using innovative interdisciplinary methods to show how ecosystem goods and services are likely to change through the 21st century in Europe. ATEAM paints a mixed picture of the continent divided into a vulnerable south and adaptive north. The results are freely available online as a downloadable (PC only) mapping tool that displays the vulnerability of six key sectors: agriculture, forestry, carbon storage and energy, water and biodiversity.Stakeholder input helped to quantify regional adaptive capacity, while climate and land-use models estimated potential impacts. Adaptive capacity and potential impacts together define the overall vulnerability of individual ecosystem services. Even when ‘potential impacts’ are fixed, differential vulnerability across Europe indicates an opportunity to boost ‘adaptive capacity’. Emphasis on adaptation certainly doesn’t condone inaction on climate change and environmental degradation. Rather it stresses resilience in a world that must prepare for surprise threats that are increasingly the norm.

ATEAM is a wonderful example of sustainability science that lets people imagine the possible futures being shaped through decisions taken today. Integrated assessments like ATEAM and the MA (also here) have a huge potential to create a sustainable biosphere by offering solutions that are at once technical and social. Combined with many ideas that WC readers are already familiar with—planetary extension of real-time monitoring networks, open source scenario building, and pervasive citizen participation—the next generation of assessments could help tip the meaning of ‘global change’ from gloomy to bright green.

Ideas

Climate change, smoking, and gaming mental models

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The environmenal journalist Mark Hertsgaard has an article about climate change politics and journalism in Vanity Fair (May 2006) that shows how climate denial was involved many of the same people who worked to deny the health impacts of smoking.

Although scientists apply the neutral term “climate change” to all of these phenomena, “climate chaos” better conveys the abrupt, interconnected, wide-ranging consequences that lie in store. “It’s a very appropriate term for the layperson,” says Schellnhuber, a physicist who specializes in chaos theory. “I keep telling politicians that I’m not so concerned about a gradual climate change that may force farmers in Great Britain to plant different crops. I’m worried about triggering positive feedbacks that, in the worst case, could kick off some type of runaway greenhouse dynamics.”…

No one pretends that phasing out carbon-based fuels will be easy. The momentum of the climate system means that “a certain amount of pain is inevitable,” says Michael Oppenheimer. “But we still have a choice between pain and disaster.”

Unfortunately, we are getting a late start, which is something of a puzzle. The threat of global warming has been recognized at the highest levels of government for more than 25 years. Former president Jimmy Carter highlighted it in 1980, and Al Gore championed it in Congress throughout the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher, the arch-conservative prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, delivered some of the hardest-hitting speeches ever given on climate change. But progress stalled in the 1990s, even as Gore was elected vice president and the scientific case grew definitive. It turned out there were powerful pockets of resistance to tackling this problem, and they put up a hell of a fight.

In the 1970s and 1980s, R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc. funded medical research with the help of Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, to the tune of $45 million. However, the research focused on issues other than the health effects of smoking, which was the central health concern for Reynolds. Seitz admitted that they were not allowed to study the health effects of smoking. Despite this, the tobacco industry used the multi-million-dollar research program as evidence of its commitment to science, and to argue that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was inconclusive. For smoking enthusiasts, the Higher Grade Store offers a wide selection of smoking accessories to choose from.

In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science behind global warming was likewise inconclusive and certainly didn’t warrant imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. He made his case vocally, trashing the integrity of a 1995 I.P.C.C. report on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, signing a letter to the Clinton administration accusing it of misrepresenting the science, and authoring a paper which said that global warming and ozone depletion were exaggerated threats devised by environmentalists and unscrupulous scientists pushing a political agenda. In that same paper, Seitz asserted that secondhand smoke posed no real health risks, an opinion he repeats in our interview. “I just can’t believe it’s that bad,” he says.

Al Gore and others have said, but generally without offering evidence, that the people who deny the dangers of climate change are like the tobacco executives who denied the dangers of smoking. The example of Frederick Seitz, described here in full for the first time, shows that the two camps overlap in ways that are quite literal—and lucrative. Seitz earned approximately $585,000 for his consulting work for R. J. Reynolds, according to company documents unearthed by researchers for the Greenpeace Web site ExxonSecrets.org and confirmed by Seitz. Meanwhile, during the years he consulted for Reynolds, Seitz continued to draw a salary as president emeritus at Rockefeller University, an institution founded in 1901 and subsidized with profits from Standard Oil, the predecessor corporation of ExxonMobil.

Seitz was the highest-ranking scientist among a band of doubters who, beginning in the early 1990s, resolutely disputed suggestions that climate change was a real and present danger. As a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (from 1962 to 1969) and a winner of the National Medal of Science, Seitz gave such objections instant credibility. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T., was another high-profile scientist who consistently denigrated the case for global warming. But most of the public argument was carried by lesser scientists and, above all, by lobbyists and paid spokesmen for the Global Climate Coalition. Created and funded by the energy and auto industries, the Coalition spent millions of dollars spreading the message that global warming was an uncertain threat. Journalist Ross Gelbspan exposed the corporate campaign in his 1997 book, The Heat Is On, which quoted a 1991 strategy memo: the goal was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.”

“Not trivial” is how Seitz reckons the influence he and fellow skeptics have had, and their critics agree. The effect on media coverage was striking, according to Bill McKibben, who in 1989 published the first major popular book on global warming, The End of Nature. Introducing the 10th-anniversary edition, in 1999, McKibben noted that virtually every week over the past decade studies had appeared in scientific publications painting an ever more alarming picture of the global-warming threat. Most news reports, on the other hand, “seem to be coming from some other planet.”

The deniers’ arguments were frequently cited in Washington policy debates. Their most important legislative victory was the Senate’s 95-to-0 vote in 1997 to oppose U.S. participation in any international agreement—i.e., the Kyoto Protocol—that imposed mandatory greenhouse-gas reductions on the U.S.

Tim Lambert on Deltoid provides some further background on the funding of smoking and climate denialists documented in tobacco documents.

Big Back Loop, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

MA: Putting a Price Tag on the Planet

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Putting a Price Tag on the Planet is a long article by Lila Guterman on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the April 7, 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article describes the history, funding, and operation of the MA as well as its findings.

As the 20th century drew to a close, leaders in the field of ecology decided they were failing at one of their primary goals. They had presented sign after sign that people were harming the environment — killing off species, destroying rain forests, polluting the air and water — but the warnings had little effect. So, to encourage conservation, they decided to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.

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Reorganization

Self-Organization of Ecosystem Lumpiness

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niche evolutionWe have growing evidence that ecosystems are lumpy. Along an axis such as body size, for example, we find clusters of similar-sized species separated by intervals of body size in which no species are found. Multiple explanations exist for lumpy patterns, and causes are still debated. Scheffer and van Nes present a simple mathematical explanation for evolution of lumpy patterns in ecosystems. Their article appears in the Early Edition of PNAS on 3 April 2006. The abstract states

Here we show that self-organized clusters of look-a-likes may emerge spontaneously from evolution of competitors. The explanation is that there are two alternative ways to survive together: being sufficiently different or being sufficiently similar. Using a model based on classical competition theory, we demonstrate a tendency for evolutionary emergence of regularly spaced lumps of similar species along a niche axis . . . Our result suggest that these patterns may represent self-constructed niches emerging from competitive interactions.

Later, the authors comment

Finally, it is worth noting a remarkable link to Hotelling’s theory in social sciences suggesting that competition of companies or political parties will often lead to convergence rather than differentiation. In this field of research, the focus is on the problem that such convergence is not in the interest of the public. For instance, having more of the same kind of TV channels is not better. By contrast, the seeming redundancy of similar species in nature may be essential to ensure ecosystem functioning in the face of adverse impacts.

When Scheffer and van Nes’s article is published in the print version of PNAS, it will be accompanied by a commentary written by Craig Allen which places the new findings in the context of research on lumps dating to the original discovery by C.S. Holling in 1992 (Ecological Monographs 62: 447-502).