Atwood’s Post-apocalyptic climate scenario

September 30, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

To support the launch of the 10:10 Climate campaign in the UK, the Guardian asked authors to write new work in response to the climate crisis.

Margaret Atwood wrote Time capsule found on the dead planet:

1. In the first age, we created gods. We carved them out of wood; there was still such a thing as wood, then. We forged them from shining metals and painted them on temple walls. They were gods of many kinds, and goddesses as well. Sometimes they were cruel and drank our blood, but also they gave us rain and sunshine, favourable winds, good harvests, fertile animals, many children. A million birds flew over us then, a million fish swam in our seas.

Our gods had horns on their heads, or moons, or sealy fins, or the beaks of eagles. We called them All-Knowing, we called them Shining One. We knew we were not orphans. We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins.

2. In the second age we created money. This money was also made of shining metals. It had two faces: on one side was a severed head, that of a king or some other noteworthy person, on the other face was something else, something that would give us comfort: a bird, a fish, a fur-bearing animal. This was all that remained of our former gods. The money was small in size, and each of us would carry some of it with him every day, as close to the skin as possible. We could not eat this money, wear it or burn it for warmth; but as if by magic it could be changed into such things. The money was mysterious, and we were in awe of it. If you had enough of it, it was said, you would be able to fly.

3. In the third age, money became a god. It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk. It began to create on its own. It created feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations. It created greed and hunger, which were its two faces. Towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands and the lives of children. It ate armies, ships and cities. No one could stop it. To have it was a sign of grace.

4. In the fourth age we created deserts. …

General

Krugman on Keynes and Uncertainty

September 29, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Paul Krugman reviews Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky in the Observer. He writes:

…there’s an alternative interpretation of what Keynes was all about, one offered by Keynes himself in an article published in 1937, a year after The General Theory. Here, Keynes suggested that the core of his insight lay in the acknowledgement that there is uncertainty in the world – uncertainty that cannot be reduced to statistical probabilities, what the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “unknown unknowns”. This irreducible uncertainty, he argued, lies behind panics and bouts of exuberance and primarily accounts for the instability of market economies.

In this book, Skidelsky puts himself in the camp of those who argue, in effect, that Keynes 1937, not Keynes 1936, is the man to listen to – that Keynesianism is, or should be, essentially about uncertainty and how it leads to economic instability. And from this he draws some radical conclusions.

Most strikingly, Skidelsky declares that the traditional division between microeconomics and macroeconomics, which is based on whether one focuses on individual markets or on the overall economy, is all wrong; macroeconomics should be defined as the field that studies those areas of economic life in which irreducible uncertainty, uncertainty that cannot be tamed with statistics, dominates. He goes so far as to call for a complete division of postgraduate studies: departments of macroeconomics should not even teach microeconomics, or vice versa, because macroeconomists must be protected “from the encroachment of the methods and habits of mind of microeconomics”.

How far should we be willing to follow Skidelsky in this? I think we must trust the biographer in his assessment of Keynes himself; Skidelsky argues persuasively that Keynes spent much of his life deeply focused upon, even obsessed with, the question of how one acts in the face of uncertainty, which is why Keynes 1937 comes closer to the essence of the great man’s own thinking.

That’s not the same thing, however, as saying that Keynes was right – even about his own contribution. Surely it’s possible to make the case for a less profound reconstruction of economics than Skidelsky advocates. I’d point out that behavioural economists, who drop the assumption of perfect rationality but don’t seem much concerned by the essential unknowability of the future, have done relatively well at making sense of this crisis; I’d also point out that current disputes over economic policy, above all about the usefulness of government spending to promote employment, seem to be primarily about Say’s Law – that is, Keynes 1936.

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management

Uncertainty and climate change

September 27, 2009 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Australian Economist, John Quiggin points out that uncertainty should increase intensity of climate change action. He writes

…it’s a straightforward implication of standard economic analysis that the more uncertainty is the rate of climate change the stronger is the optimal policy response. That’s because, in the economic jargon, the damage function is convex. To explain this, think about the central IPCC projection of a 3.5 degrees increase in global mean temperature, which would imply significant but moderate economic damage (maybe a long-run loss of 5-10 per cent of GDP, depending on how you value ecosystem effects). In the most optimistic case, that might be totally wrong – there might be no warming and no damage. But precisely because this is a central projection it implies an equal probability that the warming will be 7 degrees, which would be utterly catastrophic. So, a calculation that takes account of uncertainty implies greater expected losses from inaction and therefore a stronger case for action. This is partly offset by the fact that we will learn more over time, so an optimal plan may involve an initial period where the reduction in emissions is slower, but there is an investment in capacity to reduce emissions quickly if the news is bad. This is why its important to get an emissions trading scheme in place, with details that can be adjusted later, rather than to argue too much about getting the short term parts of the policy exactly right.

…

Anyway, back to my main point. The huge scientific uncertainty about the cost of inaction has obscured a surprisingly strong economic consensus about the economic cost of stabilising global CO2 concentrations at the levels currently being debated by national governments, that is, in the range 450-550 ppm. The typical estimate of costs is 2 per cent of global income, plus or minus 2 per cent. There are no credible estimates above 5 per cent, and I don’t think any serious economist believes in a value below zero (that is, a claim that we could eliminate most CO2 emissions using only ‘no regrets’ policies).

For anyone who, like me, is confident that the expected costs of doing nothing about emissions, relative to stabilisation, are well above 5 per cent of global income that makes the basic choice an easy one.

Reorganization

Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis

September 25, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Historian Stephen Mihm writes in the Boston Review on Hyman Minsky‘s work on the unstable dynamics of capitalism in Why capitalism fails:

Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers – what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment – what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” – would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.

It sounds very similar to Holling’s adaptive cycle and the pathology of natural resource management.

Big Back Loop, Regime Shifts, Reorganization

Planetary Boundaries

September 24, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

A number of resilience researchers, and many others, have proposed the concept of planetary boundaries in a new paper A safe operating space for humanity in Nature (doi:10.1038/461472a).

Johan Rockstrom and others propose nine planetary boundaries, beyond which the functioning of the earth system will fundamentally change. They argue that we have crossed the climate, nitrogen and extinction boundaries, and need to change the course of our civilization to move back into conditions which provide a safety for human civilization.

Nature has a special feature on Planetary Boundaries. It has also published seven independent essays by experts who reflect upon each of the defined boundary (two of the nine were not defined due to a lack of information), and their blog Climate Feedback is also hosting a discussion of the article.

Science journalist, Carl Zimmer has written a good article about the paper and concept on Yale’s Environment 360.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre provides links to the full paper, and supporting information, as well as a number of videos explaining the concept.

Ecological Management, General

Bureau of Reclamation adaptive management job

September 22, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

I was sent this job ad:

The Bureau of Reclamation has an opening for a GS-13 Supervisory General
Biologist in Salt Lake City, Utah. The selectee will serve as an
understudy to the current Adaptive Management Group Chief for approximately 6 months, and will then assume the responsibilities of the Adaptive Management Group Chief. Responsibilities include serving in a key
technical and managerial role in the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCDAMP). For more information on the GCDAMP visit:

http://www.usbr.gov/uc/rm/amp/index.html

This position is open to both government employees and to the public.
Apply at USA Jobs: http://www.usajobs.gov/.

In USA Jobs, search using one of the following vacancy numbers: BR-UC-2009-37 (public) or BR-UC-2009-61 (for government employees [note: government employees must also click the “status” button on the left side of the USA Jobs page to see the BR-UC-2009-61 announcement]). The vacancy closes on October 17, 2009.

Ecological Economics

New measures of national well-being are moving towards mainstream

September 19, 2009 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Alternative measures of national well-being are moving further towards the mainstream.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in the Financial Times about a report, commissoned by the President of France he lead. President Sarkozy, established the International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which produced a report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. Stiglitz writes about the report in the Financial Times article – Towards a better measure of well-being.

National income statistics such as GDP and gross national product were originally intended as a measure of market economic activity, including the public sector. But they have increasingly been thought of as measures of societal well-being, which they are not. Of course, good statisticians have warned against this error. Much economic activity occurs within the home – and this can contribute to individual well-being as much as, or more than, market production.

There are concerns, too, that a focus on the material aspects of GDP may be especially inappropriate as the world faces the crisis of global warming. Should we “punish” a country – in terms of our measure of performance – if it decides to take some of the fruits of the increase in productivity from the advancement of knowledge in the form of leisure, rather than just consuming more and more goods?

What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things. In the quest to increase GDP, we may end up with a society in which most citizens have become worse off. We care, moreover, not just for how well off we are today but how well off we will be in the future. If we are borrowing unsustainably from this future, we should want to know.

Flawed statistics may also lead us to make incorrect inferences. In the years preceding the crisis, many in Europe, focusing on America’s higher rates of GDP growth, were drawn to the US model. Had they focused on metrics such as median income – providing a better picture of what is happening to most Americans – or made corrections for the increased indebtedness of households and the country as a whole, their enthusiasm might have been more muted.

… Advances in research across a number of disciplines enable us now to develop broader, more encompassing measures of well-being. Such measures recognise that unemployment has an effect that goes well beyond the loss of income to which it gives rise. Health, education, security and social connectedness all are important to quality of life – but are not adequately reflected in GDP.

Newsweek reports:

The report recommends shifting economic emphasis from simply the production of goods to a broader measure of overall well-being, which would include the benefits of things like health, education, and security. It calls for greater focus on the effects on income inequality, as well as new ways to measure the economic impact of sustainability (climate change specialists like Nicolas Stern are members), and recommended ways to include the value of wealth to be passed on to the next generation into today’s economic conversation. What it didn’t do is come up with a quick and easy new way to tabulate a new measure of wellbeing. Some of the necessary yardsticks already exist; others still need to be invented.

Still, Sarkozy said he plans to shop the report all over the world. “France will open the debate on this report’s conclusions everywhere. It will put it on the agenda of every international conference, every meeting, every discussion where building a new economic, social, and ecological order is the objective,” he told the Sorbonne crowd. “France will fight for every international organization to modify their statistical systems by following the commission’s recommendations. It will propose to its European partners that Europe set the example by putting them into action. [France] will adapt its own statistical machinery in consequence,” he promised. Even the commission’s rapporteur admitted he wasn’t expecting Sarkozy’s strong reaction.

Visualization

Photos of Oil’s dominion

September 18, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Foreign Policy magazine’s September issue is focused on oil. The issue, Oil: the long goodbye, includes an article Scenes from the Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass along with an accompanying photo essay.

Children play in the halo of a natural gas flare in Ebocha. The name means "Place of Light," after the flare at an Agip petroleum refinery that has burned there, night and day, since the 1970s. Photo by MICHAEL KAMBER from Foreign Policy

Greenlash

Methane in the Arctic

September 13, 2009 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Charles Hanley writes about current methane research in the Arctic for associated press in Climate trouble may be bubbling up in far north

Pure methane, gas bubbling up from underwater vents, escaping into northern skies, adds to the global-warming gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And pure methane escaping in the massive amounts known to be locked in the Arctic permafrost and seabed would spell a climate catastrophe.

Is such an unlocking under way?

Researchers say air temperatures here in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 2.5 C (4.5 F) since 1970 — much faster than the global average. The summer thaw is reaching deeper into frozen soil, at a rate of 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) a year, and a further 7 C (13 F) temperature rise is possible this century, says the authoritative, U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 2007, air monitors detected a rise in methane concentrations in the atmosphere, apparently from far northern sources. Russian researchers in Siberia expressed alarm, warning of a potential surge in the powerful greenhouse gas, additional warming of several degrees, and unpredictable consequences for Earth’s climate.

Others say massive seeps of methane might take centuries. But the Russian scenario is disturbing enough to have led six U.S. national laboratories last year to launch a joint investigation of rapid methane release. And IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri in July asked his scientific network to focus on “abrupt, irreversible climate change” from thawing permafrost.

Resilience Science