From the Shifting baseline’s project a strong video on the emptying of the ocean of fish:
via Dot Earth
See also World’s Fair on the Great Pacific Trash Vortex.
Category Archives: Tools
Wine and climate change in the UK
Richard Selley an Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London has written a book The Winelands of Britain: past, present and prospective, that describes how climate, geology, and culture have shaped wine growing in the UK.
He projects that climate change will destroy the wine producing potential of current wine producing areas of the UK, such as the Thames Valley, and the Severn valley. From an Imperial college press release:
…if the climate changes in line with predictions by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, by 2080 vast areas of the UK including Yorkshire and Lancashire will be able to grow vines for wines like Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon which are currently only cultivated in warmer climates like the south of France and Chile.
Different grape varieties flourish in different temperatures, and are grouped into cool, intermediate, warm and hot grape groups. For the last 100 years ‘cool’ Germanic grape varieties have been planted in British vineyards to produce wines like Reisling. In the last 20 years some ‘intermediate’ French grape varieties have been successfully planted in southeast England, producing internationally prize-winning sparkling white wines made from Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay.
Combining temperature predictions from the IPCC and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre with his own research on UK vineyards throughout history, Professor Selley predicts that these cool and intermediate grape varieties will be confined to the far north of England, Scotland and Wales by 2080, with ‘warm’ and ‘hot’ varieties seen throughout the midlands and south of England.
Explaining the significance of his new study, Emeritus Professor Selley from Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “My previous research has shown how the northernmost limit of UK wine-production has advanced and retreated up and down the country in direct relation to climatic changes since Roman times.
“Now, with models suggesting the average annual summer temperature in the south of England could increase by up to five degrees centigrade by 2080, I have been able to map how British viticulture could change beyond recognition in the coming years. Grapes that currently thrive in the south east of England could become limited to the cooler slopes of Snowdonia and the Peak District.”
Ecological architecture
Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences Blooms and Grows, Balancing Man and Nature
Mr. Piano’s vision avoids arrogance. The ethereality of the academy’s structure suggests a form of reparations for the great harm humans have done to the natural world. It is best to tread lightly in moving forward, he seems to say. This is not a way of avoiding hard truths; he means to shake us out of our indolence.
See a slide show of the Academy and from Flickr photos.
Also, from Pruned:
The New York Times visits Alan Berger and gets a tour of his reclamation project in the Pontine Marshes. Says Berger, “The solution has to be as artificial as the place. We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape.” Much earlier, The New York Times tagged along with the landscape architect and his class to a severely polluted mining area in Colorado.
Visualizing collapse: a year of heavy losses
The New York Times presents an interactive visualization of US financial institution losses (about $1 trillion dollars over the past year).
Financial resilience – Taleb and Mandelbrot reflect on crisis
Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb writes on Edge about an unwillingness or consider and remember extreme events leads to financial disaster in The Fourth Quadrant: A map of the limits of statistics.
Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).
The current subprime crisis has been doing wonders for the reception of any ideas about probability-driven claims in science, particularly in social science, economics, and “econometrics” (quantitative economics). Clearly, with current International Monetary Fund estimates of the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis, the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks. But it was easy to see from the past that the pilot did not have the qualifications to fly the plane and was using the wrong navigation tools: The same happened in 1983 with money center banks losing cumulatively every penny ever made, and in 1991-1992 when the Savings and Loans industry became history.
It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law’s checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand. I want this to stop, and stop now— the current patching by the banking establishment worldwide is akin to using the same doctor to cure the patient when the doctor has a track record of systematically killing them. And this is not limited to banking—I generalize to an entire class of random variables that do not have the structure we thing they have, in which we can be suckers.
And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, we are riding in a bus driven a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence, which to me is a pathological problem with academia. After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited. Yet the Fed helped their bailout and exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks’ swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).
Are we using models of uncertainty to produce certainties?
…So the good news is that we can identify where the danger zone is located, which I call “the fourth quadrant”, and show it on a map with more or less clear boundaries. A map is a useful thing because you know where you are safe and where your knowledge is questionable. So I drew for the Edge readers a tableau showing the boundaries where statistics works well and where it is questionable or unreliable. Now once you identify where the danger zone is, where your knowledge is no longer valid, you can easily make some policy rules: how to conduct yourself in that fourth quadrant; what to avoid.
…
Now it lets see where the traps are:
First Quadrant: Simple binary decisions, in Mediocristan: Statistics does wonders. These situations are, unfortunately, more common in academia, laboratories, and games than real life—what I call the “ludic fallacy”. In other words, these are the situations in casinos, games, dice, and we tend to study them because we are successful in modeling them.
Second Quadrant: Simple decisions, in Extremistan: some well known problem studied in the literature. Except of course that there are not many simple decisions in Extremistan.
Third Quadrant: Complex decisions in Mediocristan: Statistical methods work surprisingly well.
Fourth Quadrant: Complex decisions in Extremistan: Welcome to the Black Swan domain. Here is where your limits are. Do not base your decisions on statistically based claims. Or, alternatively, try to move your exposure type to make it third-quadrant style (“clipping tails”).
Below I’ve redrawn Taleb’s figure. His article provides a fuller picture.
Similarly, Scientific American reprints Benoit Mandelbrot’s 1999 How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street:
Individual investors and professional stock and currency traders know better than ever that prices quoted in any financial market often change with heart-stopping swiftness. Fortunes are made and lost in sudden bursts of activity when the market seems to speed up and the volatility soars. Last September, for instance, the stock for Alcatel, a French telecommunications equipment manufacturer, dropped about 40 percent one day and fell another 6 percent over the next few days. In a reversal, the stock shot up 10 percent on the fourth day.
The classical financial models used for most of this century predict that such precipitous events should never happen. A cornerstone of finance is modern portfolio theory, which tries to maximize returns for a given level of risk. The mathematics underlying portfolio theory handles extreme situations with benign neglect: it regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter or as impossible to take into account. It is true that portfolio theory may account for what occurs 95 percent of the time in the market. But the picture it presents does not reflect reality, if one agrees that major events are part of the remaining 5 percent. An inescapable analogy is that of a sailor at sea. If the weather is moderate 95 percent of the time, can the mariner afford to ignore the possibility of a typhoon?
A climate change and development slide show
The 2007/2008 UN Human Development Report Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world focuses on the inequalities of climate change, as well as providing its usual indicators of human development.
According to the report, in 2007 the most developed countries are Iceland, Norway, Australia, Canada, and Ireland while the least developed (of the countries ranked) are Mali, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, and Sierra Leone).
The high developed countries are responsible most of the accumulation of greenhouse gases driving climate change, while the low development countries are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (see also previous post on climate inequalities).
Now the report has inspired an exhibit at the UN – One planet, one chance. Magnum photos produced a video for the exhibit, which uses gripping photos to describes the basic inequalities of climate change. The video is below the break.
Shipping containers and world trade
The BBC is planning to follow and report on the progress of a container around the world for a year. They have painted a container and bolted a GPS transmitter to allow is readers to follow its progress around the world on their map (as I write this the container full of whiskey in Scotland).
The BBC named their project The Box after The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger an interesting book on the history of containerization and its effect on globalization by Marc Levinson (here is a book review from Ethan Zuckerman and an essay by Witold Rybczynski).
I read the book earlier this year and enjoyed it. I would have liked more economic history and statistics in the book, but its main problem was that people mocked me when I told them I was reading a book about containers. However, containers have become an essential part of global trade and of its rapid growth.
Trends in world trade of total merchandise, intermediate goods and other commercial services, from 1988-2006 (100=1988). From the WTO’s World Trade Report 2008.
Below are some maps of parts of global trade. They give a bit of an idea of where such a container is likely to move between.
Structure of world trade of between 28 OECD countries in 1992. The size of the nodes gives the volume of flows in dollars (imports and exports) for each country . The size of the links stands for the volume of trade between any two countries. Colors give the regional respectively memberships in different trade organisations: EC countries (yellow), EFTA countries (green), USA and Canada (blue), Japan (red), East Asian Countries (pink), Oceania (Australia , New Zealand) (black). From Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
World trade imbalance web for the years 1960 and 2000. Directed network of merchandise trade imbalances between world countries. Each country appears as a node and the direction of the arrow follows that of the net flow of money. (Serrano et al 2007).
The book – The Box – includes lots of interesting history of the container system, and how as a system it lead to innovations, efficiencies, and had many unintendend consequences. One example, is that it made many old ports obsolete which reshaping many city centres (over decades), but also the creation of new ports and the changes in container ships they triggered – caused ongoing shifts in global trade patterns.
One key cycle of change was a postive feedback between ship size and port attributes. Because the fuel consumption of a ship does not increase proportionately to the number of containers a ship can carry – containers ships have become bigger and bigger – which has had the effect of focusing trade into ports that can handle the large ships and the trade volume. These big ports then lead to the construction of more bigger ships. Wikipedia lists the world’s busiest container ports – the top are Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong , Shenzen, and Busan. This concentration of big ships in big ports has had the effect of making world trade unexpectedly (for economic theory) “lumpy.” Paul Krugmann explains:
[Economic theory suggests] a country like China should export a wider range of products to a small country, like Ecuador, than it does to a big country, like the US. Why? Because Ecuador, being small, probably has fewer industries that are cost-competitive with Chinese exports. In fact, however, China seems to export a wider range of stuff to bigger economies.
A possible explanation is the lumpiness of transport costs: there are more container ships heading from China to US ports than to Ecuadorian ports, so that it’s worth sending over a bigger range of stuff. It’s like the reason there are fewer food choices in supermarkets on St. Croix (where we spent our last vacation) than in New Jersey — there’s just one boat with groceries coming over every once in a while, so you can’t keep, um, arugula in stock.
Reading the Box also makes it clear that while higher fuel prices will reshape trade patterns and probably boat designs, neither global trade patterns nor transportation costs will return to those of the 1960s or 1970s. This is due to huge improvements in logistics that have radically dropped the labour cost for shipping goods long distances, and this has also decreased fuel costs.
The rapid expansion of skills in logistics is a hidden environmental efficiency of the moden world economy – in that it allows things to be moved around for less cost than earlier in history. However as occurs with most increases in efficiency, modern society undoes the environmental advantages of efficiency by using the cost saving to simply move more stuff for the same amount of money.
Logistics makes at least parts of the world “flatter.” And the ease of making these connections appears to make it easier to spread tools and ideas as well as goods. The World Bank claims that countries with the most predictable, efficient, and best-run transportation routes and trade procedures are also the most likely to take advantage of technological advances, economic liberalization, and access to international markets. While countries with higher logistics costs are more likely to miss the opportunities of globalization. The World Bank ranks countries using a logistics performance index which measures the ease with which the country connects to the global economy. Singapore, Netherlands, and Germany are at the top as the most accessible; while Rwanada, East Timor, and Afghanistan are at the bottom of the rankings.
Of course, novel solutions also produce novel problems. Discarded containers litter landscapes worldwide (finding uses for them has become a standard architecture project), container ports are centres of environmental and biotic pollution, and the ease of using containers is also useful for smuggling.
And at least my impression from reading The Box, was that containerization has not finished trasnforming the world economy.
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P.S. Ethan Zuckerman also has a long post Mapping a connected world discussing containers and world trade.
A transforming Arctic
From EO Newsroom
This image shows Arctic sea ice concentration on September 8, 2008, as observed by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer–Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The observations are collected on a pixel by pixel basis over the Arctic. The percentage of a 12.5-square-kilometer pixel covered by ice is shown in shades of dark blue (no ice) to white (100 percent ice). The gray line around the Arctic basin shows the median minimum extent of sea ice from 1979-2000. (The median of a data set is the middle value if you arrange the numbers in order from smallest to largest.)
The southern portions of the Northwest Passage through the Arctic (the western route from Europe to Asia through the islands of northern Canada) opened in early August. Then in early September, ice scientists confirmed that the waters around the Russian coastline—the Northern Sea Route— were navigable, but still treacherous, with shifting floes of thick, multi-year ice, that could coalesce rapidly. The image shows that the widest avenue through the Northwest Passage, Parry Channel, still harbored some ice, but the more circuitous, southern waterways were clear. On the other side of the Arctic Ocean, the passage around Russia’s Taymyr Peninsula, normally locked in by ice, was similarly open. According to a press release from the U.S. National Ice Center, “This is the first recorded occurrence of the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route both being open at the same time.”
The summer opening of the Arctic means that new uses of the Arctic are likely to emerge. International legal experts believe that “existing laws governing everything from fish stocks to bio-prospecting by pharmaceutical companies” are inadequate.
To date, the eight Arctic nations (the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Finland) have limited discussions to existing agreements, such as the law of the sea. Environmental groups would like new laws, but others have suggested a more feasible, and adaptive response may be to strengthen the role of the existing Arctic Council to better govern a changing Arctic in a more adaptive way.
UK energy flow chart 2007
From the UK’s Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
It is based on statistics taken from the Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics 2008, Table 1.1 – Energy Balance 2007. The flow chart is a simplification of these figures, illustrating the flow of primary fuels from the point at which they become available from home production or imports (on the left) to their eventual final uses (on the right). They are shown in their original state and after being converted into different kinds of energy by the secondary fuel producers. The flows are measured in million tonnes of oil equivalent, with the widths of the bands approximately proportional to the size of the flow they represent.
More detailed flow charts are available by fuel on the BERR website.
I previously posted WRI’s world greenhouse gas emissions flowchart.
Geography and Genes
From the New York Times reporting on an article by Oscar Lao and others in Current Biology:
The map shows, at right, the location in Europe where each of the sampled populations live and, at left, the genetic relationship between these 23 populations. The map was constructed by Dr. Kayser, Dr. Oscar Lao and others, and appears in an article in Current Biology published on line on August 7.
The genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.
…
Data for the map were generated by gene chips programmed to test and analyze 500,000 sites of common variation on the human genome, although only the 300,000 most reliable sites were used for the map. Dr. Kayser’s team tested almost 2,500 people and analyzed the data by correlating the genetic variations in all the subjects. The genetic map is based on the two strongest of these sets of correlations [the principal components used to plot the data above – these explained 31.6% and 17.3%, of the total variation. The potential geographic basis of these two PCs was supported by a positive correlation (r2 = 0.6) between the genetic and geographic distances among the samples.].
The gene chips require large amounts of DNA, more than is available in most forensic samples. Dr. Kayser hopes to identify the sites on the human genome which are most diagnostic for European origin. These sites, if reasonably few in number, could be tested for in hair and blood samples, Dr. Kayser said.
Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago. Most people switch off the lactose digesting gene after weaning, but the cattle herders evidently gained a great survival advantage by keeping the gene switched on through adulthood.