Manolo El Lobo

Manolo said...

Hi Mike ! (Mike's bogspot is http://mike-emmel.blogspot.com/ )

I know this is troubled water, but I am just curious on what are your thoughts about the endgame here. Are some humans smarter than yeast and bring a radical solution to the conundrum ?

April 4, 2010 4:35 AM

Mike said...

I'm in India right now and I can say that its going to be really really hard no matter what happens. This lack of recognition of coming hardship will almost certainly make it worse. Beyond that its tough to really say we simply have to many people on the planet and until we solve that problem we are stuck pushing the constraints of our environment.

April 12, 2010 9:31 PM

Hi Mike, thanks for taking your time and sorry to bother you in India !

Well, the "lack of recognition" of our situation and predicament is what's bugging me. Question: Is it really so?

It might be true for the vast majority of people, those who are perception managed and socially engineered: most don’t know what sort of world they are living in.

But I am very doubtful that our "Alpha elite" is ignorant. There have been way too many studies and warnings by all sort of prestigious personalities and organisations.

And now the Pentagon has gone public with its own dire predictions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply

My guess: it's their "medium case". And for sure they have the best intel.

Now, for all I know, the IEA has a similar "internal" set of analyse.

Your modelling and research and my own "ears to the ground" info tell me we might just be around the edge to chaos...

...and in the meantime, for all we know, the Alpha elite has been bunkering in, most of the gold has vanished into secret vaults, and the seed banks are completed and sealed...

Nobody knows the future of course, but there are probabilities, trends and history to try to shape the things to come.

With my unobtainium / lead / tinfoil alloy hat firmly in place, and for entertainment and educational purposes only, let me think out loudly...

There are basically two choices on the plate:

a) The present 7 Billion individuals’ civilisation is crashed NOW, leaving about 1 out of 10 surviving but still having some resources at their disposal to rebuilt "something different"

b) The present civilisation tries to overshoot by a very long shot, ends crashing anyway with more or less 9 Billion individuals and literally nothing left to rebuilt anything.

Hmmm...a little hypothesis:

There is a window of opportunity, up to the end of 2012, to blame all the bad things going to happen, on “mythology”, "the ancients knew", or even "it's written in the Bible"...

But of course, no human can take the decision to crash humankind on such a magnitude and scale, it is completely unbearable. As George Mobus puts it nicely in “the-hardest-moral-dilemma-of-all”:

http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2010/02/the-hardest-moral-dilemma-of-all.html

But one might be able to blame it on "climate change", like the “methane trigger point”, as in "The clathrate gun hypothesis" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

...and where some are saying we are now beyond the point of no return. Case of “told you so” .Nice also, methane goes away relatively fast….and may be helped a little bit.

So Blame it on everyone.

And of course, as we just had a successful test run on a virus outbreak: you can be certain the real run will be very deadly and there will be way not enough vaccine, so this could be another addition to the deadly mix.

So Blame it on nature.

For good measure, some devastating regional wars (in preparation as we speak), a couple of nukes, as "controlled" as possible…and the prevailing winds are heading East…(in that event, you might want to move from where you are real quick, Mike !)

So Blame it on some stupid.

Add financial chaos and lack of transportation fuel and theses “ingredients” would bring down society as we know it, fast, big time.

So finally, blame it on Wall Street.

There are certainly other nasty elements to consider, ready to be activated.

A recipe for the survival of the fittest and smartest?

(Better be in the right places too..)

Sounds familiar? Impossible? All this is unfortunately almost as easy as 1,2,3, ... all the elements are in place, and, as in point a), almost unavoidable.

This sounds depressing and of course, my super alloy hat is probably malfunctioning (somebody tell me please it is!?!)…but how am I doing so far under that hat ? What am I missing?

Oh yeah ! Mother nature as been quite active lately. You sure want to stay away from active volcanoes, earthquake zone and the like. Organized help will go diminishing…

Disclosure: I like simple stories, but I don’t believe in Occam’s razor: once you know the principle, you can trick it.

You are right, Mike, lets just quote this again:

“Its going to be really really hard no matter what happens. This lack of recognition of coming hardship will almost certainly make it worse.”

I am afraid that that IS THE POINT...but then of course, I don’t have to tell You this.

PS1 : hope you enjoy India !

PS2: I really, really hope to look like a big old fool, completely ridiculous, by December 2012, looking on a world where nothing happened!

Book Review

Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr.

Reviewed by George Mobus

First I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves.

To a growing number of people it is looking more and more like mankind is about to undergo a most unpleasant transition. One might write such views off as being what kooks and apocalyptic religious fanatics hold to, and we know they are crazy. But over the last five years many deep thinking and well respected people have been sounding some alarms that are not as easily put aside. In 2004 Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal in Britain and clearly no intellectual harebrain, wrote Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning, Basic Books. In it he gives humanity about a 50/50 chance of surviving through the century. Not really good chances when you think about it.

Last year James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, wrote a sobering call for a massive revision of capitalism and an end to growth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Yale University Press. Like many authors have done, he painted a picture of what was wrong and why, but then pointed to remedies that might presumably fix the problems. That is, if only our leaders and our citizens would see the light and do what is necessary we might avoid total collapse. Most of these authors offer humanity an escape hatch, but point out that we have to be willing to sacrifice substantially, in terms of material wealth, for it to work.

The realization that mankind is damaging its planet is certainly not new. Rachel Carson (The Silent Spring, 1962) may have started the trend in increasing awareness that we are doing things, in our zeal to control nature, that were starting to backfire, threatening to leave us worse off if we didn't change our ways and attitudes. Environmentalism has largely operated on this theme for decades. We've been warned of environmental degradation, global warming, and peak oil, and how these are interlinked. We've been made immanently aware of the dangers we have ourselves created.

Now William R. Catton, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Sociology at my state's other PhD granting institution, Washington State University, brings on the sequel to his first book in this genre, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, in which he sounded an alarm being heard more frequently. Like Speth, Catton, in that earlier book, pointed out the problems as he saw them, from the viewpoint of a sociologist, and then declared that if we heed these warnings we might yet escape the worst.

In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called an population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return.

As to why we are in this state of affairs, Catton calls on several sociological theories surrounding the evolution of culture and especially the development of over-specialization or 'division of labor'. The latter was touted by Adam Smith as the reason we were so efficient in our manufactures. And Catton, like many authors who deplore modern capitalism and corporatism, recognizes that at a time this was indeed a beneficial capacity. Today, however, he says that we overdid it and that the tendency toward deep specialization has tended to dehumanize and isolate each of us from the benefit of interpersonal relations. He further argues that we have come to think of others as instruments, mere means to our own ends. This he says is the end result of taking the abstraction of money as representing wealth too far in our thinking.

This idea that once things like money and capitalism, etc. fulfilled good purposes and were good for society as a whole, but have simply been overdone in our modern technologically-driven world, is actually one of the common themes sounded by many writers. It is certainly something I have subscribed to in my evaluation of human affairs. Early in mankind's history, these inventions, these institutions, served a purpose to make man more fit as a species, to quell the negative selective forces of nature and allow humans to succeed evolutionarily. But somewhere along the line humans failed to recognize that too much of a good thing is actually bad.

The failure to recognize this is the lack of wisdom, to which I will return in a bit. But to understand how humans got so carried away it is important to recognize, as Catton and others have done, that humans, like all animals, have a biological dictate to maximize their access to energy. For humans this took the shape of learning to control fire, making clothing, building shelters, and later finding additional external energy sources to supplement their bodily abilities. This included the invention of tools and agriculture. And it essentially culminated in the discovery of fossil fuels that allow modern humans incredible power over their environment. Catton renames a subset of Homo sapiens as a 'quasi-species', Homo colossus, those being the people in developed countries who consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to motivate and control machines that do orders of magnitude more work than a human can do with muscle power alone. To achieve this we are combusting carbon to produce CO₂ and returning fossil carbon deposits to the atmosphere and oceans after sequestration for millions of years. And it is the rapidity with which this is happening which leads Catton, and others, to conclude that it is infeasible to put the brakes on for this train. That is, you can try to brake, but you won't stop in time to avoid a crash.

Unfortunately for mankind, there are now far too many of Homo colossusin the global population. And the damage is done. NASA climatologist James Hanson has claimed that the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere should not be over 350 parts per million (ppm) in order to avoid calamitous climate shifts. But we are already at 385ppm and climbing, even though the global recession has slowed the burning of fossil fuels. It just isn't enough to stop let alone reverse the growth in carbon in the air. But beyond the damage done already, and the potential damage to come due to climate changes and sea level rise, Catton sees an impending threat from the fact that we are going to run out of this magical fuel one day. Or at least we will hit a barrier where the cost of extraction exceeds the benefit of having the fuels. When that happens what becomes of Homo colossus? Indeed what happens to Homo sapiensin toto? Even though peoples in developing and underdeveloped nations don't burn the fuels directly, they still rely on the developed world for aid produced by burning those fuels.

Catton bases his analysis on the idea of carrying capacity. Fossil fuels have artificially boosted the carrying capacity of earth for human occupancy (if you ignore the damage we've done to other species). We are in overshoot, the theme of his previous book. We are like the cartoon character, Wile Coyote, who would race off a cliff in futile pursuit of the Roadrunner and would remain suspended in mid air until he realized his predicament; then it was too late and he would fall. When the fossil fuels are effectively used up, what will replace them? As things stand now, there simply is no realistic or viable alternative energy source that could scale up to the level needed by modern civilization in time to take over the job. Once again, it's the rate of change that gets us. In spite of continued pie-in-the-sky thinking by even engineers and scientist who should know better, no one has shown how real time solar energy in all of its many forms (thermal, photovoltaic, wind, even hydroelectric) will ever match the power in fossil fuels. These came from ancient photosynthesis over millions of years compressed and cooked into a convenient package over more millions of years. The scope of concentration is literally unimaginable (apparently) yet very serious people dream of capturing current solar influx and replacing fossil fuels with it. They may be serious but they are also dreamers or delusional. While in theory, the total daily influx of solar energy to the earth would provide many times over what we need to sustain our current civilization and provide development for the lesser developed nations, our systems of capture would have to cover gigantic areas of the planet. Our energy storage and distribution systems would have to be radically redesigned and rebuilt. And all of this comes just as we recognize the impacts of declining net energy from fossil fuels; those fuels being needed to subsidize the building of all that energy infrastructure.

The root cause of humanity's impending impasse, however, is not his lack of will, or cleverness, or even sufficient energy resources. The root cause is his lack of wisdom. Catton points to this on page 190, speaking about his great-grandson:

...by the time surviving members of his generation have emerged from the coming bottleneck, when he may himself have somewhere a great-grandson he will wish to visit,somehow his contemporaries will have attained the wisdom Linneus implied was characteristic of our species when he named us Homo sapiens.

(Emphasis mine)

For several years now I have been pursuing a quest to understand better why our species is not, on average, more wise. With all of the history we have experienced, with all of the science we have learned, with all the cleverness our kind has for solving local (in time and space) problems, you would think that we would have developed greater wisdom than we have in fact. What I came to realize was that the brain capacity for wisdom (which I have boiled down to: good judgment in complex social issues, strategic thinking, highly developed systems thinking, and strong moral sentiment) was a relatively new emergent capacity coupled with symbolic thinking and language and second order consciousness (conscious of being conscious) for early Homo sapiens. But it was evolved, as Catton notes, to meet the needs of the late Pleistocene existence of our species. It is not, on average, up to the task of modern complex society. One of my main conclusions is that our species is simply not sufficiently wise (or I prefer the term sapient to differentiate between a native capacity and an actualized capability) to deal with the world we have created. For a more in-depth treatment of this subject, readers are directed to my working papers at: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/seriesIndex.html.

It is this lack of inherent wisdom that will keep us, has kept us, from doing the right things to prevent the impending impasse. Catton's 'Prognosis for Humanity', page 206, is alarming.

...with great reluctance and regret, I am compelled to doubt that we can confidently hope to avoid a serious "crash" as the focal human experience of the 21st century—envisioned also as our species having to pass through an ecological "bottleneck".

This is by far the most explicit statement of what we would call doom of any author in the popular book trade. There have been many writers, especially in the blogosphere, who have expressed similar conclusions. But I have yet to see a writer of some eminence such as Catton go all out and claim that the end is near. Unfortunately, I happen to agree with him.

The question for me is: Will humanity come through this bottleneck with a gene pool competent to meet the challenges of a changed world AND have a stronger native capacity for sapience, for wisdom? Assuming some remnant of humanity does survive, that is no guarantee that our descendants will go on to evolve a better ability to make good, long-term judgments in that future world. Nor are we guaranteed that they will be able to reconstruct anything like modern technology-based society in order to re-achieve a species fitness allowing them to survive and thrive in the very long run.

My only complaint with Catton's thesis is that he didn't go far enough in suggesting what those of us who see this coming might do now to save our genus from extinction or, in the case of my concern, to increase the likelihood that our descendants will inherit genetic components leading to higher sapience. He assumes that some humans may survive and the future environment may select for greater wisdom. I'm not so sure that will be the case. His parting words simply express thankfulness that he lived during the epitome of human achievements in science and understanding as well as freedoms to travel the world. My question is: Now what do we do?

I have to applaud Catton for writing so honestly about what he has concluded. I have contemplated writing a book on the evolution of what I call eusapience, true sapience, as the future of the genus Homo. Necessarily, the species sapiens must go extinct to allow the rise of a new, wiser, species of humans. And an evolutionary bottleneck would be the most likely mechanism for this to happen. But I have hesitated, realizing this is a message no one wants to hear! Every other author of books on end-of-the-world scenarios at least offers that if we would only come to our senses... the world won't end. William Catton does not do this. Sorry for the spoiler but you should know in advance. Thus this probably isn't a book easily digested by everyone, even though I think everyone who believes themselves to be a critical thinker should read it.

The reviewer is an Associate Professor of Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is currently on sabbatical leave studying biophysical economics and energy-related issues at the State University of New York, Environmental Sciences and Forestry in Syracuse NY. His blog is Question Everything at: http://questioneverything.typepad.com

Manolo El Lobo

Saturday, April 17, 2010

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Humanity's Impending Impasse?

Book Review

Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr.

Reviewed by George Mobus