tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66077957823046129902024-03-13T09:50:42.506+01:00Peak ResourcesPeak Resources is a independent blog that focuses on questions and reflections regarding natural resource limitations in connection to economics, ecology and politics.
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.comBlogger144125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-27522153335908822282018-11-22T13:47:00.000+01:002018-11-22T13:47:45.080+01:00 Climate hazards too much for the current governance paradigm to handle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Life on Earth is under enormous stress from a rapidly changing environment and climate. A recent <a href="http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/Publications/Mora%20066.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">study</span></a> in Nature show how human societies are already impacted by a changing climate in at least <a href="http://impactsofclimatechange.info/"><span style="color: purple;">467 different ways</span></a>. For example, increased water evaporation and increased air capacity to hold moisture, due to warming, have lead to <b>extreme drought</b> in places that are commonly dry (<a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/california-drought-worst-least-1200-years">California</a>, <a href="https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00692.1">Middle East and Southwest Asia</a>) that have lead to higher risk of <b>heatwaves</b> and <b>wildfires</b>. Warmer ocean waters enhances evaporation and wind speeds thus intensifying <b>downpours</b> and the strength of <b>storms and risk of flooding</b> from storm surges aggravated by sea-level rise. </div>
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The <b>cumulative changes</b> from a disrupted climate are so <b>massive</b> and the speed at which they are occuring so <b>rapid</b>, only comparable to when a meteorite killed the dinosaurs som 65 million years ago, that many species will have a hard time adapting. Species must either <a href="https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.se/&httpsredir=1&article=5654&context=smhpapers"><span style="color: purple;">tolerate the change, move, adapt, or face extinction</span></a>. We know that species on land are moving polewards by 17 km per decade and marine species 72 km per decade. And just like terrestrial mountainside species are moving upslope to escape warming lowlands some fish species are driven deeper as the sea surface warms. This in turn impacts human well-being and is already <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/climate-change-and-disasters.html"><span style="color: purple;">forcing people to migrate</span></a>.</div>
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The current socio-economic paradigm has not changed in accordance with occuring biophysical changes and will not be able to handle the mounting pressure unless it adapts or transforms into something new. <b>A rapidly changing world cannot be navigated by concentrated, rigid, hierarchical, short-term social systems that resist change</b> and tries to maintain status quo. We know this to be true of all living systems, including human societies. Civilisations fail to adapt to changing environmental conditions because they try to maintain high levels of sociopolitical complexity (large armies, bureaucracies, social stratification, occupational specialisations) and focus on expansion instead of <b>dissolving into decentralized, smaller, more flexible and innovative units</b> that are able to respond to change more effectively. That's why corporations, with global scope, are doing better than nation states. And why local communities and municipalities are responding more effectively to changes than governments. </div>
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However, the limiting conditions, <b>resource availability</b>, under <b>climate change</b> make adaptation in place difficult since entire regions are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. Thus forcing people to migrate, just like other species do. This in turn puts extra pressure on national governments as social tensions increase over remaining resources. <b>States that fail to provide essential services for their citizens eventually foster uprisings</b> and risk internal conflict and collapse. We already see this occuring in the Middle East (Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Isreal/Palestine, Egypt). </div>
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Unless governments take seriously the <b>need for fundamental change of the sociopolitical system </b>they will be unable to handle to shift to a post-carbon society able to cope with climate change. Trying to expand and pile on further sociopolitical complexity to the system will not work.<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Climate Hazards</td></tr>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-1125276457278801502018-11-14T02:38:00.000+01:002018-11-14T02:38:26.823+01:00When greed and growth kills<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZyRDDBEYbU" width="560"></iframe>
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The capitalistic system only has two modes of operation, either expanding or collapsing. That's why people are so obsessed with growth, because it stabilises the system. Capitalism is premised on the logic of never ending growth: debts are made on the basis that they can be repaid with future income, and profits are invested to gain future profits. It's the only super-exponentially expansionary socioeconomic system in the history of humanity. And its only made possible by consuming and depleting finite fossil fuels. But it's now coming to an end. </div>
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The <b>absolutely religious idea that a nation must grow</b> its economy by 2-3% and population each year only emerged over the last 100 years. The idea of social progress only came about because people attacked peoples spirituality and wanted to replace it with materialistic values and short-termism, viewing the world as a machine, nature to be dominated, and people of as slaves to the system. Taking away everything of real value to people meant it had to be replaced by something else, and that became economic structures, <b>commodification of life</b>. Instead of people's well being and survival focus shifted to financial flows. </div>
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Now we pray to the measure called GDP because we have <b>no higher purpose than to be debt slaves</b> until we die. A tragic fate that people strangely cling onto no matter what the costs. We don't even blink when 70% of insects gets annihilated, I mean we all have to make money so whatever….right? No, not if you want to be able to eat in the future. Fishing out the oceans, filling them with plastics, and eroding half of the Biospheres topsoil and people say we should not question material growth!?</div>
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The idea of perpetual expansion has taken over our language and infiltrated our subconscious, talking about “green growth”, “personal growth”, “smarter growth” etc. These oxymorons shows <b>how desperate we are to continue lying to ourselves</b> that “everything is fine” and we “only have to make small adjustments” to our way of life. </div>
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Under crude capitalism, <b>stagnation leads to exploding debt, followed by a crisis and austerity for the people</b> while the rich escape safely. And thats what will happen again and again as the world economy gradually contracts until it breaks abruptly and people really start to suffer. And then when you are dirt poor and could have really used a healthy piece of land with access to freshwater to grow food on and insects to pollinate those crops there are none, because you already destroyed them, and so you have to fight for the last remaining resources left to survive. </div>
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That's whats happening in Yemen right now, where<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-war-peace-talks-ceasefire-saudi-arabia-houthi-rebels-uk-hodeidah-famine-a8631861.html"> millions of people are starving</a>, because they are being bombed to pieces, there is no access to energy or water and people cant afford food. Of Yemen's population of 30 million, 17 million are in desperate need of food aid, and <b>seven million Yemenis are at risk of famine</b>, many children already starving, which <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-45857729/yemen-could-be-worst-famine-in-100-years">the UN has warned</a> would be the <b>worst the world has seen for 100 years</b>.</div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-75272953327958219712018-11-11T22:27:00.000+01:002018-11-11T22:29:54.869+01:00Inequality and economic crisis leaves democracies open to totalitarianism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The central assumption of the neoliberal economic model that material consumption and industrial expansion can continue without devastating political and environmental consequences is known to be false. Yet, every politician on Earth is pushing for further material growth which in a time of resource scarcity only leads to rapidly increasing income inequality. This in turn undermines the stability of society. And <b>vulnerable societies that suffer major economic downturns are known to elect dangerous people and do some crazy stuff</b>.</div>
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Overexploiting and degrading both ecological and social capital to gain ephemeral financial capital is the <a href="http://jayhanson.us/_Biology/OvershootCollapse.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">pathway to collapse of a society</span></a>. Anthropological and agent-based modelling studies have shown that any society that undermines its ecological base runs into <b>declining marginal returns</b> from further material growth. When a threshold is passed, and <b>net energy starts to fall</b>, society can no longer afford to maintain its social organisation and infrastructure and starts to decay. If the ruling elite refuses to give up on trying to push the economy to grow the remaining resources will simply be swallowed up by the resource sector and benefit only a small minority of rich elites while the <b>majority grows poorer over time</b>. This will of course cause <b>political turmoil</b> as even the middle class starts to voice their dissatisfaction. And the entire process makes any democracy open to totalitarianism, a form of government in which the state has <a href="https://fs.blog/2018/03/hannah-arendt-totalitarianism/">no limits in authority</a> and does whatever it wants.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Full collapse from over-depletion and high levels of inequality. Source: <a href="http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/096/050/ecp14096050.pdf">Castro et al. 2014</a></td></tr>
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<i>“Democracy is first and foremost about equality: equality of power and equality of sharing in the benefits and values made possible by social cooperation</i>” (Sheldon Wolin, 2010, p. 61).</div>
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Most societies have no mechanisms for sharing power and the benefits of cooperation in a <a href="http://peakresources.blogspot.com/2018/11/involuntary-degrowth-and-its.html"><span style="color: purple;">time of involuntary degrowth</span></a>, which we are currently in. Every government policy since the 1970s have only worsened the issue by promoting the enrichment of the capital owning class over the worker class through financialisation. <b>Giving out cheap credit has masked the systemic issues </b>and kept the middle class happy for a while, as they get to continue consuming resources in the moment, but its a giant ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually. Meanwhile, the working class has only suffered since the 70s, with falling living standards and increasing poverty, and thus started to heavily mistrust the ruling elite.</div>
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Furthemore,<b> wealth equalizing institutions</b>, such as <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/50/13154"><span style="color: purple;">income taxation, <b>has become ineffective</b></span></a> in a globalised world. Big corporations and rich individuals can escape national laws and continue to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else and nature. The world's <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2018-01-22/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year"><span style="color: purple;">richest 1 percent now owns as 82% of global wealth</span></a>, while the poorest 3.7 billion people saw no increase in their wealth in 2018.</div>
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<b>When people are desperate for change, ideology becomes a powerful weapon</b>. If people have no way to influence the political system, no equality in control of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Dahl"><span style="color: purple;">instruments of persuasion</span></a>, other than voting every four years it cannot be called a true democracy. Private control over the media and higher education are examples of public loss of instruments of persuasion.</div>
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<b>Rising inequality opens up a power vacuum that is easily filled by leaders of business or populistic parties </b>in order to extract what they want from the system. The rich business elites usually claim the “trickle down” doctrine or that “government is the problem” to justify deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. While populistic parties (left and right) exploit the working class hate of elites and fuels polarisation and division in society while arguing for a centralised strong government. We see this type of development all over Europe and in the US.</div>
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The only way to combat this negative development, as I see it, is to promote decentralization of power and strengthening local economies with circular resource flows that stay within certain boundaries through for example a local currency. And promoting self-sufficiency. Also trying to even the playing field by offering alternative stories through online platforms when the mainstream media is failing. I know that many instead are calling for global governance to reign in multinational corporations but that won't be possible in a resource constrained world and it's certainly not what people are going to vote for. </div>
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<b>If no credible options are put forward as the old story breaks apart there is a high chance that people will turn to “strongman” governance</b> in their desperation for change. With potentially catastrophic consequences for peace and security. It's now 100 years since the end of World War I and we are again living in very dangerous times. Europe is so fragile that it feels like any shock could trigger something major, especially if we have a major financial collapse. Unfortunately, such a financial crisis looks increasingly likely as <a href="http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-global-financial-system-is.html"><span style="color: purple;"><b>the global debt bubble has started to unravel</b></span></a>. I hope there is still some sanity left among people to resist another major war.</div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-28549331908064049282018-11-09T12:36:00.000+01:002018-11-09T12:36:29.902+01:00The Middle East on Fire<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW1LgwCtSjynlQN3RX-Ek25y0aSwpOu7tBQv6iLOzYSPuLtbQWGbnCyAtLgIhBtwdcrYl_UUHKttWNHQdBldkFGI-_o8RmTfVZHe-NYBLalvbjC_R668pkdISr0dbkb9wItsVGlBRv2MY/s1600/149-Water-security-1-graphic.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="553" data-original-width="847" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW1LgwCtSjynlQN3RX-Ek25y0aSwpOu7tBQv6iLOzYSPuLtbQWGbnCyAtLgIhBtwdcrYl_UUHKttWNHQdBldkFGI-_o8RmTfVZHe-NYBLalvbjC_R668pkdISr0dbkb9wItsVGlBRv2MY/s640/149-Water-security-1-graphic.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: FAO Aquastat, Oxford Analytica</td></tr>
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When people from the West and its mainstream media try to analyse what's happening in the Middle East all they talk about is armed conflict and war. But never do they mention the deep fundamental drivers of <i>energy, water scarcity </i>and<i> climate change</i>. </div>
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<b>Many countries in the Middle East are extremely vulnerable and on the verge of break down</b> because they cannot deal with mounting economic/energy and environmental costs. Only a little disturbance is needed to make these states fall apart and then all hell can break loose. It has nothing to do with what type of people they are, its simply a matter of survival that brings out the worst in people. When water resources dry up, agriculture collapse, there's no way to make and income and food becomes unaffordable people tend to riot no matter which country. Thats what happened during the French revolution, after 1 million died from famine and peasants turned on the ruling elite.</div>
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Displaying a complete lack of understanding of the situation, and utter lack of morality, the imperial powers decided to try and grab the regions oil resources by getting rid of Saddam Hussein but instead created a power vacuum that was filled by al-Qaeda extremists who rapidly transformed into the Islamic State. Then followed by a proxy war over resources and power between many different actors in the region. Never ending fighting with no real benefits for anyone involved. The US "divide and rule" strategy is an utter failure. </div>
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Intensifying the fight against extremists doesn't deal with the fundamental drivers of why they exist in the first place. Instead its producing more extremists as the conditions that laid the groundwork for the rise of IS are worsening. <b>The long-term ecological crisis </b>of especially <b>water stress</b> is worsening in the region. <b>Severe drought conditions </b>intensified by water mismanagement and climate change have led to failed crops and lack of clean drinking water. Leading to increasing food import reliance and pushing people to move into the cities where there are no job opportunities, creating tensions. Then government subsidies for food and fuel get slashed as state revenues from falling oil exports decline. This at a time when oil and food prices have steadily risen and have had major spikes on the international market. That's <b>the perfect storm</b>. </div>
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<b>Absolutely nothing have been done to build local capacity to cope with extreme weather or manage ecosystems more sustainably</b>. The conditions of deepening water scarcity are projected to intensify in coming years and decades. Meanwhile population keeps growing. And that's why the future in the region looks bleak. The US idea of turning Iraq into a booming oil economy is simply nonsense. Even if there is still more oil left in Iraq, compared to Syria, Yemen or Egypt, they too will face peak oil within a decade or so. <b>Hedging your entire future on oil is utterly idiotic</b> and as we witness <b>very destructive</b>.</div>
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Yemen reached a production peak in oil in 2001 and has now practically collapsed. Acute water scarcity and lack of food is <b>reaching levels of mass famine</b>. Nationwide fuel shortages are routine and economic activities have come to a halt. Livelihoods are destroyed, people starve and live in misery, and <b>yet the US and UK support Saudi Arabia's bombing</b> campaign of the country. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/IXDezFJJZhgqE_z8GudopOdfCMhApoTHpTgxzPynqBaESYbIu823hmdUFfjf7QIUBUyNeLtXsoEJXwgg8R3nR6c6MLl4FNRx2j8HCYuKFO8sXMSEb38C4yajKFnvsIE8REauHSAr" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/IXDezFJJZhgqE_z8GudopOdfCMhApoTHpTgxzPynqBaESYbIu823hmdUFfjf7QIUBUyNeLtXsoEJXwgg8R3nR6c6MLl4FNRx2j8HCYuKFO8sXMSEb38C4yajKFnvsIE8REauHSAr" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Conflict Shoreline by <a href="http://clivethompson.net/2016/05/31/the-conflict-shoreline-a-map-that-correlates-climate-change-to-drone-strikes/">Eyal Weizman</a>. Shows the aridity line, areas of about 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation, and western drone strikes in red dots</span></td></tr>
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Egypt has become a net importer of oil and food and is struggling to pay its bills for a growing population. Poor water management (irrigation, pollution, dumping of waste) and growing demand has led to water scarcity in the country. Cairo residents don't have access to water for large portions of the day. The <a href="http://www.unwater.org/publication_categories/world-water-development-report/">U.N. World Water Development report for 2018</a> warns that Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty and dramatically heading towards absolute water scarcity (500 m3 per capita).</div>
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Even if we are able to limit global warming to 2 degrees the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will become unbearably hot and many parts unlivable in the coming future. Prolonged heat waves and dust storms will plague the already arid region. Destroying much of the region's agricultural potential. <a href="https://www.mpg.de/10481936/climate-change-middle-east-north-africa">Researcher</a> are expecting a <b>climate exodus from the region</b>. Of which we have seen only the beginning. </div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-78866122653826777852018-11-05T21:12:00.000+01:002018-11-05T21:14:39.969+01:00Earth System Sensitivity<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdOX33p7fBSKEjmG9gpQ7hIQmk8eIoMjevo7dvXbTcJWNqvNz9qPKS4YVewPzu0wMcMdDfBiT8i41L_abiposhO-KTK9JmZ0m8YNNakSMZNjI8uDRHvpzK7ISen6oXic9XAm6KHxjzWAY/s1600/temp+col.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdOX33p7fBSKEjmG9gpQ7hIQmk8eIoMjevo7dvXbTcJWNqvNz9qPKS4YVewPzu0wMcMdDfBiT8i41L_abiposhO-KTK9JmZ0m8YNNakSMZNjI8uDRHvpzK7ISen6oXic9XAm6KHxjzWAY/s640/temp+col.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption">Annual global temperatures from 1850-2017. The colour scale represents the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C. Credit: <a href="https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2018/warming-stripes/#more-5516">Climate Lab Book, 2018</a></td></tr>
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<h1 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 20pt;">
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<h2>
The Earth System</h2>
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Earth is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_systems_theory"><span style="color: purple;">complex dynamic system</span></a>. Earth system dynamics can be understood in terms of trajectories between alternate states separated by thresholds that are controlled by nonlinear processes, interactions, and feedbacks. For example, over the past 1.2 million years Earth has remained in a state of glacial and interglacial cycles. The current temperature change at <a href="https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2017/defining-pre-industrial/"><span style="color: purple;">1,2°C above a preindustrial </span>baseline</a> has already pushed Earth out of the next glaciation cycle.</div>
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Furthermore, Earth is a water planet and incredibly inert. The time lag between cause and effect, between the heating and the final change in temperature, is large. The full warming effect of a large emission pulse <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001"><span style="color: purple;">may not be felt for several decades or centuries</span></a>. As a result, the currently observed change in temperature represents only a part of the eventual expected increase in temperature resulting from already released greenhouse gas emissions.</div>
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Exactly where a potential planetary threshold, between a livable state and a hothouse state, might be is uncertain. <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/33/8252.full.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">Steffen et al. (2018)</span></a> suggests 2°C as the critical limit, stating that passing two degrees could trigger tipping elements in the Earth System that could cascade, triggering further tipping elements, causing rapid warming beyond human control. </div>
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Thus, actions taken over the next decade could <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/33/8252.full.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">significantly influence the trajectory of the Earth System</span></a> for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and potentially lead to conditions that would be inhospitable to humans and to many other species.</div>
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<b><i>Main point: Earth is tracking a hothouse pathway </i></b><br />
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<h2>
Earth System Sensitivity</h2>
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How the climate system will respond to increasing CO2 levels depends on time-scale and which feedbacks we consider. Taking into account fast feedbacks such as clouds, water vapour, snow cover change, and aerosols we get a climate sensitivity of about 2-4.5°C to a doubling of CO2. But this does not include slow longer-term feedbacks such as ice sheet disintegration, changes in carbon cycle (e.g. permafrost thaw), vegetation cover changes, or changes in oceans ability to store carbon. If we include all feedbacks, both fast and slow, we get a Earth System Sensitivity of 3-6°C. </div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><img height="347" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/2R-cLlu9U3-qzfYFVkqT_m2b2uvTBWKBM5AcXwB37XgCVRajHP5JE1OkW28P9727cHO334tvFoO4oIKwyBq56TKmoZqXTEfeFWIry6dSSRlml4O_piJRaU4OJNKbehR7kS28Gvnw" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="602" /></span></div>
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Estimated temperature changes from fast and slow feedbacks. Source: <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/09/why-correlations-of-co2-and-temperature-over-ice-age-cycles-dont-define-climate-sensitivity/">Schmidt, 2016</a></div>
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Studies of past climates in Earth's history show that long-term feedbacks play an important role in Earth's overall climate. For example, during the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo724"><span style="color: purple;">mid-Pliocene</span></a> some 3-4 million years ago, when global mean temperatures were about 3-4°C warmer than preindustrial and sea levels 10-25 meter higher than today, CO2 levels <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/what-pliocene-epoch-can-teach-us-about-future-warming-earth"><span style="color: purple;">peaked at 450 ppm</span></a>. Our current concentration levels stand at 410 ppm CO2, but temperatures have only risen about + 1,2°C, so Earth is likely to warm up at least to similar levels eventually. And we would over millenia have sea-level rise of up to at least 10 m.</div>
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The reason why most people don't talk about ESS is due to the fact that its presumed to take centuries or millennia for these slow feedbacks to kick in. But the issue now is that the rate of change is many times faster than any natural rate in Earth's history. <span style="color: purple;"><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2018/07/31/1810141115.DCSupplemental/pnas.1810141115.sapp.pdf">Only comparable with catastrophic rare events</a> </span>such as the meteorite strike that took out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. This means that longer-term “slow” feedbacks such as melting of ice sheets and changes in permafrost carbon stores are starting to occur now, much quicker than expected, and will likely impact humanity during this century.</div>
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Which means that on top of some more warming from rapid feedbacks that has yet to be realised due to thermal inertia we also face the consequences of slow feedbacks already coming into play. These biogeophysical forces are incredibly strong and could become dominant in driving the system. Thus limiting the range of <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/barents-sea-seems-to-have-crossed-a-climate-tipping-point/"><span style="color: purple;">potential future trajectories</span></a>.</div>
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<i><i><b>Main point: Earth's climate is more sensitive to forcings than standard scenarios of future warming assumes</b></i></i></div>
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Biogeophysical Feedbacks</h2>
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Some of the key negative (dampening) feedbacks such as carbon uptake by land and oceans and reflectivity by ice and snow that have maintained the Earth system in favourable conditions are weakening. We are now witnessing ever more systems close to or passing a threshold, tipping point, causing abrupt change. The challenge with tipping points is that they're often easiest to identify in retrospect.</div>
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<img height="448" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/hNoavkRm2hDq9jqxp-lpz_iu6kLnXmkbAYJsgvo80156rjwvMQ3IJiTu4ILQYwtaY46ZguK8vag8uIa2pJSBLh5F4h70dlsgd42LbYaQgpIUuNkKqQzFRgvpGEyeS0iDyAEf5WKs" width="640" /></div>
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For example, Arctic sea ice crossed a <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.5445"><span style="color: purple;">tipping point in 2007</span></a> and is now in terminal decline and could be gone during the summer <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-arctic-could-be-ice-free-by-2040/"><span style="color: purple;">by 2040 or earlier</span></a>. Due to the loss of reflective ice the dark oceans are now absorbing more energy, in turn accelerating regional warming, further melting ice and snow. It also influences jet stream patterns causing more extreme weather events in northern latitudes. The loss of Arctic sea ice has also <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/barents-sea-seems-to-have-crossed-a-climate-tipping-point/"><span style="color: purple;">flipped the Barents Sea</span></a> from acting as a buffer between the warmer Atlantic and colder Arctic ocean to now being essentially an extension of the Atlantic.</div>
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A warmer Arctic also leads to thawing of permafrost in the region. Before believed to be a rather gradual process, new studies show <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180816143035.htm"><span style="color: purple;">abrupt (decades) thaw in Alaska and Siberia</span></a> due to the formation of thermokarst lakes. Releasing CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere and accelerating warming. </div>
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The Greenland ice sheet is now melting rapidly, the <a href="http://www.nessc.nl/greenlands-ice-caps-crossed-tipping-point/"><span style="color: purple;">ice caps melting irreversibly</span></a>. Accelerated surface melt has <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/great-greenland-meltdown"><span style="color: purple;">doubled Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise</span></a> to 0.74 mm per year since 1992–2011. The interior ice sheet could cross a tipping point slightly under 2C warming. Global sea level rise has <a href="https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Spotlight_on_sea-level_rise"><span style="color: purple;">accelerated to 4.8 mm/yr</span></a>. </div>
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The Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has already crossed a tipping point and is melting irreversibly. This will likely trigger a <a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/148cb0_a06ec671eed14a6f8f37e2145175f63f.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet</span></a> on decadal time scales. Leading to at least 1 meter sea level rise this century. Partial deglaciation of the East Antarctic ice sheet is likely for the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, contributing to about 5 metres of sea level rise in the first 200 years.</div>
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Melting freshwater pouring into the Atlantic has<a href="https://www.pik-potsdam.de/services/infodesk/tipping-elements/kippelemente"> <span style="color: purple;">slowed down</span></a> the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that transports heat from the Gulf of Mexico to Northern Europe. Slightly cooling northwest Europe and piling up heat along the southeast waters of the US. This in turn increases temperature differentials between tropical and sub-polar waters that can drive stronger storms. </div>
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<i><i><b>Main point: Abrupt changes are already occurring in the climate system, passing 2°C would likely prove catastrophic</b></i></i></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e414561f-7fff-b6ea-ac44-bc23cc3a25ce"><br /></span>
<h2>
Human feedbacks on the system</h2>
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As I have explained above, <i><b>the climate system is much more sensitive to even small perturbations than most people think</b></i>. Another way of showing this fact is to look at human impacts on the climate before industrialisation. </div>
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Since the rise of agriculture, human activities on Earth have played a role in shaping ecological and climatic conditions. There is good evidence to suggest that the rise of agriculture actually had a positive (amplifying) feedback on early climate, hindering a new ice age to occur. </div>
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Atmospheric CO2 and CH4 increases during the last few millennia are anomalous compared to preceding interglacial periods. The same time period when agriculture spread across the continents and emitted greenhouse gases by clearing forests for crops and pastures, domesticating livestock and burning crop residues. Suggesting that <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2015RG000503"><span style="color: purple;">emissions were large enough to warm climate</span></a> and prolong the natural interglacial warmth.</div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="310" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/s0KOrTd_CKPYE5ZMfPd6RakJ88zoPd8nX7pftezNESxW12MRaQTtfS5Y9zxabbsnQJSBsO2lnhBsfwjqXtBQSRlcoTHguFlS4jMqNPPqiLpzW7TExiRKIARV5ydKmZuL_gUWRkZB" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="479" /></span></i></div>
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<a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2015RG000503"><span style="color: purple;">Ruddiman et al. (2016)</span></a> show evidence for what seems to be a trend brake in naturally falling CO2 and CH4 concentrations some 6000-5000 years ago, towards increasing concentrations most likely driven by anthropogenic forcing<i>.</i></div>
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We know that agriculture spread across the world during this time period. Agrarian civilisations started to flourish along the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow River some 7000-5000 years ago. Cultivation was dependent on flow and ebb cycles that in turn relied on seasonal rains and melting snows packs in the mountains. These formed the conditions for production of surplus food (energy) which allowed societies to expand and grow more complex.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="316" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/wXMxgHEBDeRIMi3xcPGIvK9-TutKSuhAjl0pqEAeG7CtjX4ML1hz-PKUcUxl7jSBnjR1olBrFhdZHUOEOIWjB-QW2b8iuvMLAeaZsiYujnoPo6oW9h0F3iTPit-BQ3BaGk46qqPT" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="602" /></span></div>
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Ruddiman and colleagues show how the development of irrigated rice paddies in Asia and widespread livestock domestication some 5000 years ago coincides with increases in methane emissions. Just like today, forests were cut down, vegetation slashed and burned to make way for agriculture all across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas. This generated CO2 emissions which in turn impacted climate. </div>
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Archeological data records a shift from forest cover to more open vegetation in northern and central Europe that began som 6000-5000 years ago and was complete by the start of the industrial era. Similarly, early deforestation was likely caused around the Mediterranean by extensive land use by Greek and Roman civilisations. In Britain and France, forests had already been reduced to near-modern levels by 2500-2200 years ago.</div>
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East central China had widespread forest cover until 8000 years ago, followed by a persistent decrease especially after 6000 years ago. Archaeological sites, proxy for population density, in central China increased thirtyfold between 8000–7000 and 5000–4000 years ago. By 4000 years ago, coal had come into use as a fuel source in the Yellow River Valley because of lack of wood. Deforestation of southern China during the spread of rice agriculture after 5000 years ago added to the ongoing CO2 increase.</div>
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In India, sedentary farming and clearance emerged between 5000 and 3500 years ago, with especially rapid settlement expansion on the Deccan Plateau and in the Ganges plains. </div>
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All this evidence provides support for the idea that large-scale deforestation led to a rise in CO2 during the middle and late Holocene. Many models have missed this because they assume low population numbers and small forest clearance per person and thus show low emissions. But this doesn't fit with historical evidence of larger per capita forest clearing 2500-1000 years ago than during industrial times. Probably because land use was inefficient and required large amounts of land but became more intensive over time as agricultural methods changed.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="439" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/GmKJ6YbNBCWoxmqLKU0Di1HWX1vEGM9O4rgzd1_1ecVX7VEbRfCA6gResyu_Ij7nFZekN1rzh84_odstCKBOe4uSiNjCDdPoJ2hn7h63YP4JU_g-RXmoqBkSPAaF1b-HVekAMNnE" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="602" /></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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The simulation above indicates much greater deforestation during the millenia preceding the industrial era in agreement with pollen evidence. In contrast, standard reconstructions that assume small constant per capita clearance during preindustrial times show 40-80% of forest cover still persisting in Europe by the year 1800. Meaning massive deforestation must have taken place within the last 200 years to explain current low forest cover. But this doesn't fit with historical evidence of pervasive reforestation in western and central Europe since 1800, not deforestation. </div>
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<i><b>Main point: The Holocene climate was partly a consequence of human feedbacks on the climate system</b></i><br />
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<h2 style="text-align: justify;">
Climate Change Adaptation</h2>
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Changes in temperature and precipitation have always impacted people by affecting what they could and couldn't grow to harvest food (energy) for survival. </div>
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The climate stabilised about 7,000-5,000 years ago coinciding with the flourishing of agrarian civilisations along the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow River. Cultivation was dependent on flow and ebb cycles that in turn relied on seasonal rains and melting snows packs in the mountains. These formed the conditions for production of surplus food (energy) which allowed societies to grow more complex.</div>
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But <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-civilizations-a-lesson-from-the-past-51907"><span style="color: purple;">agrarian societies have always been vulnerable to climatic changes</span></a>. Sudden cooling events or extended droughts caused widespread famines and sometimes collapsed entire communities. Especially vulnerable were those who relied on single crops or undermined the ecological base for survival for example through intense deforestation. </div>
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For example, a sudden cooling that happened around 3,700 to 3,000 years ago <a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaar4491"><span style="color: purple;">greatly influenced populations in Asia</span></a>. The most dramatic changes were seen in high latitude and high-altitude areas in Mongolia and the Tibetan Plateau. Crops started to fail and widespread famine took hold. This forced people to migrate, shift to more cold resistant crops, or turn to pastoralism. Cooling temperatures also affected Northern China between AD 291-360, a time when the Chinese capital was relocated from Xian to what is now Nanjing, in the south. Again, people would have had to adapt by migrating, changing crops, herding cattle or trading. It was not an easy process and lots of conflicts arose.</div>
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The difference now is of course that the rate of change is much more rapid and that its becoming hotter, not colder, which humans have had less of an experience adapting to. Furthermore, there are no virgin lands left to move to when one region becomes uninhabitable, the world is full and most ecosystems severely degraded. Using migration as a tool for adaptation doesn't work that well anymore. We have also become heavily reliant on just a few crops and undermined diversity by eradicating species. This makes our current civilisation very vulnerable to a changing climate.</div>
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<i><b>Main point: Humans can adapt to a changing climate but this time the rate of change is much more rapid and migration is not a good option</b></i></div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-37672050635598950462018-11-04T12:36:00.000+01:002018-11-05T18:46:40.432+01:00Involuntary degrowth and its consequences<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3HusBCLws0Q" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<b>We are in a double bind</b>. Growing the economy will cause catastrophic climate change and massive biological extinction. But not growing the economy will lead to lots of suffering under the current neoclassical economic structure. Of course, we could chose to change our entire economic system so that its in line with the biophysical reality we live in, i.e. we would have to give up on growing materially and lower our consumption radically but do so in a more orderly and just fashion. But no, we have made no such decision, instead every government on Earth is trying to push its economy to grow further while dabbling in some <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Greenwashing"><span style="color: purple;">greenwashing</span></a> on the side. </div>
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Because we, especially the ruling elites, don't like the alternatives we have to choose from in this dilemma we have tried to maintained <b><i>status quo</i> at any cost</b>. With the consequence of <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2018-01-22/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year"><span style="color: purple;">rapidly rising inequalities</span></a>, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/asce-gives-us-infrastructure-a-d-2017-3?r=US&IR=T&IR=T"><span style="color: purple;">failing infrastructures</span></a>, <a href="http://copa.acguanacaste.ac.cr:8080/bitstream/handle/11606/234/Sobrepesca-pdf.pdf?sequence=1"><span style="color: purple;">collapsing ecosystems</span></a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/05/why-the-next-four-months-are-crucial-for-future-of-planet-climate-change"><span style="color: purple;">climate disruption</span></a> and <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319478142"><span style="color: purple;">failing states</span></a>. But now <b>this strategy has reached its end game</b>. The global economy which has been stagnating and on life-support by central bankers stimulus for over a decade is starting to fall apart. All the while people around the world are electing unsavory authoritarian leaders “strong men”, that promote heavy extractive practices, due to <b>increasing mistrust of the ruling elite</b>. The <a href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-02/the-price-of-failed-promises-in-brazil/"><span style="color: purple;">latest example being Brazil</span></a>.</div>
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And nowhere in the mainstream media or from elected politicians do we hear about the underlying issues of our current predicament. About how <b>net energy decline restricts growth</b> and forces the economy to contract. The fact that trying to push for further material growth now costs more than it benefits society. Or that it's simply not possible to fuel our current overconsumptive, overpopulated and <a href="https://www.academia.edu/22664620/Can_renewable_energy_power_the_future?auto=download"><span style="color: purple;">destructive techno-industrial society with renewable energy</span></a>. Not to mention the fact that it's not desirable since it would destroy the ecosystems upon which our very survival depends. </div>
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Using total factor productivity as an indicator of returns on innovation, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652617304225?via%3Dihub"><span style="color: purple;">Bonaiuti (2018)</span></a> has shown how industrial nations have gone through three industrial revolutions of which the latest is now coming to an end. After the peak in the 1930s, when <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915303815"><span style="color: purple;">global oil and gas EROI hit a peak</span></a>, productivity decreased until it reached only 0.34% in the period 1973-95. When <a href="https://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">US oil production peaked</span></a> and massive privatization and debt accumulation took off to fund further consumption. The third industrial revolution, known as ICT, has not been powerful enough to compensate for the declining returns of the second industrial revolution. This is <b>evidence that advanced capitalist societies such as the US, Europe and Japan have entered a phase of declining marginal returns</b> or involuntary degrowth with detrimental impacts on societies capacity to maintain its institutional framework. </div>
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Total Factor Productivity % of the Private Non-Farm Business Sector (1750-2014). Source: <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/378522933/Are-we-entering-the-age-of-involuntary-degrowth-Promethean-technologies-and-declining-returns-of-innovation-Bonaiuti-2017">Bonaiuti (2018)</a></div>
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Historical estimate of the global EROI of oil. Source: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915303815">Court and Fizaine (2017)</a></div>
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In other words, <b>fundamental resources are becoming scarce and expensive</b> and <b>we are becoming poorer</b> and cannot afford to maintain or grow our current society so it starts to crumble. This shows up in the economy in terms of increasingly expensive basic resources like food, rising levels of debt, rising income inequality, underinvestment in infrastructure (e.g. health care, education, railways), and higher unemployment etc.</div>
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<b>People are experiencing their living standards falling </b>while politicians are telling them everything is just fine as is, or that the issue can be solved by tweaking the system. But this is no longer enough, <b>people are fed up with false promises and incompetent governments</b>. And rightly so, but the thing people don't realise is the fundamental drivers of our current situation and the fact that no matter how much more they exploit and destroy nature will it improve their lives. Actually, the opposite is true, it only undermines their own wellbeing in the long run. <b>Only investments into low-energy infrastructure and restructuring of the entire economy, focusing on increasing social and ecological capital, can lessen people's suffering</b>. Yet people around the world are voting for violent idiots that promises economic growth by aggressive exploitation of the remaining ecosystems that sustain all biological life.</div>
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For example, <b>if the new president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has his way the Amazon rainforest will be decimated</b> to give way for unsustainable soy plantations. The biodiverse rich region and home to traditional peoples will be destroyed and the ecosystems capacity to oxygenate the planet and store carbon will be greatly impacted. Bolsonaro also has plans to legalise the use of weapons on a wider scale which will probably lead to further indiscriminate killings of people trying to safeguard the Amazon and promote wide scale illegal logging. This of course will only undermine Brazilians wellbeing but the majority believe the opposite to be true. </div>
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<b>Economic decline led by net energy decline doesn't have to result in despotism</b>, although it can. <a href="https://www.postcarbon.org/energy-and-authoritarianism/"><span style="color: purple;">A number of other factors are likely influencing</span></a> how politics in resource scarce times turns out. Weak institutions, dysfunctional media, high levels of inequality, high population growth, high levels of private debt, a powerful military, and high vulnerability to changes in environment are other generic factors likely playing a role. Other factors tied directly to energy include: high dependency on food imports, government budgets tied to fossil fuel exports, high per capita energy use, and high dependency on energy imports. </div>
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<b>There are several measures governments and organisations can take to reduce the risk of a society falling into the hands of a dictator</b>. For example by promoting independent media, investing in low-energy infrastructure, reducing political polarization, strengthening democratic institutions, discouraging inequality, building local food production capacity, decentralising the economic and political system, limiting population growth, and reducing financial instability. In other words, the opposite of what many governments are trying to do currently. So people need to wake up to the realities of our situation and demand change, but such <b>change needs to be guided by the understanding of biophysical realities. Otherwise it is doomed to fail, </b>will only promote further violence and destruction.</div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-31553997152862511692018-11-01T15:41:00.001+01:002018-11-01T15:41:46.880+01:00Getting rid of lawns - Planting Meadows<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There are many ways in which we as <b>individuals can impact biodiversity and ecosystem health</b>. One simple positive change would be for households to change their monoculture grass lawns into biodiverse meadows. </div>
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In Sweden, 52% of the urban green areas are lawns and in the United States lawns cover about 2% of the land area. <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6411/148"><span style="color: purple;">Lawns may cover as much as 1.4% of the global grassland area</span></a> and lawn grass is the largest irrigated nonfood crop. This is a extremely wasteful use of resources simply to maintain lawnscapes that does not promote biodiversity or food production.</div>
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Gardens could have many positive impacts, for example: <i>providing habitats, storing carbon, air purification, nutrient cycling, water filtration</i>, that are ruined by destructive management practices such as power lawn-mower, irrigation, pesticide use and chemical fertilizers. Lawns usually have very little biodiversity because they are monocultures. </div>
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Lots of studies show that <b>allowing gardens to become more wild</b>, i.e. more diverse like natural ecosystem, by for example planting meadows or <a href="https://permaculturenews.org/2011/10/21/why-food-forests/">food forests</a> would help promote<b> biodiversity </b>while providing us with vital <b>ecosystem services</b> such as fruits, healthy soils, pollination, cleaner air etc. Biodiverse healthy garden ecosystems also provide tremendous <b>aesthetic and cultural values</b> that are achievable without lots of money. Not only that it gives us<b> joy and mental reprieve </b>in a time of enormous social stress.</div>
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In many industrial societies, gardens have an <b>enormous potential to provide habitat for many species </b>on the verge of extinction due to the loss of traditional landscapes. Meadows and food forests require very little intervention, are beautiful and provide habitat for a number of threatened species. In a temperate climate like Sweden, <b>meadows that bloom from spring to autumn</b> are a suitable replacement for lawns and would provide relief for many species that once were common in the days of open pastures and small scale non-mechanical farming.</div>
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There is now a <b>practical handbook </b>in how to cultivate a meadow in your own garden from the Swedish University of Agriculture that can be found <a href="https://www.slu.se/en/departments/urban-rural-development/research/landscape-architecture/finished-projects/lawn/"><span style="color: purple;">here</span></a>.</div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-63911935962643441722018-10-31T17:29:00.003+01:002018-10-31T17:29:57.082+01:00Ecocide - Give Nature Rights<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u9ErjSd8xu0" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<b>By giving nature legal rights could we halt the ongoing onslaught on vital ecosystems that sustain us? </b>There is currently an <a href="http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/rightsOfNature/"><span style="color: purple;">upswing in proposals of giving legal rights to ecosystems</span></a> all around the world as a response to the ongoing onslaught on the natural world.</div>
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<a href="http://eradicatingecocide.com/"><span style="color: purple;">Ecocide</span></a> is the loss or damage to, or destruction of ecosystems of a given territory, such that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants has been or will be severely diminished.</div>
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The power of laws to prevent ecocide is that it creates <b>a legal duty of care that holds peoples responsible to account for the wellbeing of ecosystems</b>. Its an evolving legal approach that wants to change the traditional legal systems description of nature as property to only be used for human benefit. And its based in the recognition that humankind and Nature have co-evolved and co-exist on the planet. It's basically an attempt to create better stewardship of ecosystems by using the legal system. Also known as <a href="http://therightsofnature.org/principles-of-earth-jurisprudence/"><span style="color: purple;">Earth jurisprudence</span></a>. </div>
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The basic assumptions are that all living beings have fundamental “rights”, including the <b>right to exist, to have a habitat and to participate in the evolution</b> of life on Earth. These so called rights are limited by the rights of other beings to the extent necessary to maintain the integrity, balance and health of the communities where they exist. </div>
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I have discussed in a <a href="https://peakresources.blogspot.com/2018/10/is-there-such-thing-as-natural-rights.html"><span style="color: purple;">previous post</span></a> about how there are no metaphysical, god given, rights only applicable to humans as believed in the 17th century. Rights are a human construct. So we have to use moral philosophy, ethics, to derive moral values that can guide our conceptions of rights and duties. Most people in the western world today acknowledges that every human has the same fundamental rights independent of sex, ethnicity, sexuality etc. Many countries also have animal rights and environmental protection but to a very limited extent. This reflects how our <b>values have changed over time</b>, yet they are still entirely human centered. A western legacy that is different from native peoples perception of nature.</div>
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The idea that a river is a living being is a strange concept to most westerners but it's nothing new to indigenous and traditional peoples. Thats because indigenous philosophical systems tend to see humans as a part of nature not as separate or dominant over nature as the western system does. </div>
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There are several examples of countries that have applied the indigenous idea of “Rights of Nature” to ecosystems. In <a href="http://therightsofnature.org/ecuador-rights/"><span style="color: purple;">2008 Ecuador</span> </a>wrote in Nature rights into the constitution, acknowledging that all life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles. And Bolivia adopted its Law under the <a href="http://therightsofnature.org/timeline/"><span style="color: purple;">Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well in 2012</span></a>. In 2017, New Zealand passed the <a href="http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/new-zealand-bill-establishing-river-as-having-own-legal-personality-passed/"><span style="color: purple;">Te Awa Tupua Bill</span></a> which granted the Whanganui River the rights of legal personhood. And in India the holy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/21/ganges-and-yamuna-rivers-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-beings"><span style="color: purple;">Ganges and Yamuna Rivers</span></a> where also granted legal personhood status. In practice this means that if the rivers are threatened by human activity there can be a legal case in court on behalf of the rivers. The fact that such rights could become a reality depend to a large extent on indigenous peoples strong connection to the ecosystem. They have a spiritual connection to the river, see it as sacred, and have a wish to protect it from human destruction. </div>
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There is a shift in values all around the world, driven by non-western traditions and peoples, that will influence legal systems around the planet. Because western ideas and philosophy has failed to halt the ongoing destruction of the natural world people have turned to other sources of inspiration. </div>
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The main goal for many proponents is to achieve an <b>international law against ecocide</b>, habitat destruction, that could safeguard current and future humans and Natures wellbeing. A proposal to amend the Rome Statute, Article 5 - crimes against peace, to include an international crime of Ecocide into the UN legal framework was put forward in 2010. <b>If achieved the crime of Ecocide would be included in Article 5</b> along with the crimes of <i>genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crime of aggression</i>. The idea is actually not new, but has been downplayed and dismissed since the 1970s.</div>
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<i>”The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large scale use of bulldozers and pesticides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention. It is shocking that only preliminary discussions of this matter have been possible so far in the United Nations and at the conferences of the International Committee of the Red Cross, where it has been taken up by my country and others. We fear that the active use of these methods is coupled by a passive resistance to discuss them”</i>.- Olof Palme Swedish prime minister 1972Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-56004730837606650062018-10-30T17:21:00.001+01:002018-10-30T17:24:33.059+01:00Rapid loss of life on Earth<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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Humanity's population explosion and massive overconsumption of natural resources is killing off wildlife at an unprecedented rate. In the <a href="https://c402277.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/publications/1187/files/original/LPR2018_Full_Report_Spreads.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">2018 Living Planet Report</span></a> by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) we come to understand that there has been a<b> 60% decline in species population sizes since 1970</b>. Especially hard hit are the tropics in South and Central America, which have seen a 89% loss compared to 1970. And freshwater ecosystems, like rivers and lakes, have experienced the largest decline of 83%. We have killed off 83% of all mammals and 50% of all plants since the dawn of civilisation, and its irreversible on human timescales. It is truly a <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089"><span style="color: purple;"><b>biological annihilation</b></span></a> as coined in a scientific study published by Ceballos et al. in PNAS last year.</div>
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In 2017 the world lost an amount of forest area equivalent to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals"><span style="color: purple;">size of Italy</span></a>, destroying habitats, causing biodiversity loss and polluting the environment. There is a growing number of scientists that are now calling for a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2018/jun/28/scientists-call-for-a-paris-style-agreement-to-save-life-on-earth"><span style="color: purple;"><b>global deal for nature</b></span></a>, creating vast nature reserves to prevent biological armageddon.</div>
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The loss of biodiversity is a tragedy in itself but it also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds?CMP=share_btn_tw"><span style="color: purple;">threatens the survival of civilisation</span></a> says experts to the Guardian. People don't understand that biodiversity underpins ecosystem health and thus human health. We already see a <b>dramatic rise in chronic diseases</b> caused by unhealthy diets and pollution. Around 93% of the world's children under the age of 15 years, 1.8 billion children, breathe air so polluted it puts their health at risk and tragically about <a href="http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/29-10-2018-more-than-90-of-the-world%E2%80%99s-children-breathe-toxic-air-every-day"><span style="color: purple;">600,000 children die</span></a> from acute lower respiratory infections every year. Studies have also shown that it's not just seabirds that have plastic in their stomachs but we <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/your-poop-is-probably-full-of-plastic/"><span style="color: purple;">humans have it too</span></a>. </div>
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Can we turn this development around? We only have until the year 2020 to get our act together according to the WWF-report or it will be too late. <b>Governments need to increase investments several fold into safeguarding biodiversity on land and in the oceans</b>. Protected areas should be expanded to cover at least 20 percent of natural habitats on land and 30 percent of habitats in the ocean. But I'm having a hard time seeing that happening in a world of depleting resources and growing population. <b>Do we have foresight enough to safeguard life on Earth for our own survival?</b> It remains an open question I guess...</div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-40861304315148504092018-10-30T13:01:00.001+01:002018-10-30T13:01:32.065+01:00Eating fossil fuels - Failing food security<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8x7JbAOsg_DXzjkf3H9b4N_RoaB_lgS33POwBxJMykIZe6vnYz9MbsXsTrBqmjKokFA0LwRYxQXWcp8ZJ9QEifM_o4TB_tNbAYcSa_vvtK18IEKiLM1BMol7vKVIOmmXi-tXEUiO8r-A/s1600/agri.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8x7JbAOsg_DXzjkf3H9b4N_RoaB_lgS33POwBxJMykIZe6vnYz9MbsXsTrBqmjKokFA0LwRYxQXWcp8ZJ9QEifM_o4TB_tNbAYcSa_vvtK18IEKiLM1BMol7vKVIOmmXi-tXEUiO8r-A/s640/agri.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption">Silage windrows in a field in Brastad, Lysekil Municipality, Sweden. Credit: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Sweden#/media/File:Silage_windrows_and_two_tractors_2.jpg">W.Carter (CC0 1.0)</a></td></tr>
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Multiple stressors are converging to make the current industrial food system increasingly unsustainable and vulnerable to perturbations. Of course, the food system is in and of itself a leading cause to what is now threatening its future survival. <i>Climate disruption, freshwater depletion, biodiversity loss, soil erosion</i> and <i>falling EROI on fossil fuels</i> all point to the <b>demise of industrial agriculture</b>. This is well understood by biophysical economists and systems ecologists but often neglected in public or political discussions about <b>food security</b>. Most agricultural policies worsen the problem by making small-scale local agroecological farming unprofitable. Thus dooming large swathes of the population to become reliant on a dying system that <b>costs more than it provides in terms of surplus energy</b>.</div>
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There is a big misconception in the world about how modern technology has made us more efficient in agriculture. We think that big machines and lots of fertilizers are a better use of resources than employing more people. While large scale farming may seem efficient at first glance our perceptions are opposite of reality. How efficient the production of food is depends on the amount of energy expended on its development. The <b>EROI, <i>Energy Return on Investment</i>,</b> shows us the true nature of our efficiency in producing and consuming food. </div>
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In hunter-gatherer societies, the relevant EROI metric is the caloric value of the food captured or gathered, versus the caloric expenditure of the hunt or gathering expedition. Studies of <b>hunter-gatherers show an EROI of 10:1 to as high as 50:1</b> (<a href="https://digitalcommons.esf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.se/&httpsredir=1&article=1076&context=honors">Glaub 2015</a>, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10745-017-9908-3">Glaub & Hall 2017</a>) depending on effort and final consumption. Large prey eaten directly by the hunting party only would yield a large energy profit while meat provided to support the hunters families would yield lower EROI ranging between <a href="https://digitalcommons.esf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.se/&httpsredir=1&article=1076&context=honors">16:1 to 6:1</a>. Nevertheless, this relatively large energy profit ratio probably allowed for the leisure time often associated with gathering societies. But limited capacity for food storage and settlement hinders development of a larger society. </div>
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High population and overexploitation of resources was likely a driver of early domestication. In pre-industrial agriculture, dependent on <b>peasant farmers, the EROI was 5:1</b> or less (<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-018-0035-6">Day et al. 2018</a>) as it required intense efforts over long periods with often variable results. Much time was spent on production of food, fodder and fuelwood. But farming had the benefit of food storage which led to established settlements and concentrated labour. Fuelling population growth and specializations. </div>
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Early industrialized societies benefited from high EROI from fossil fuels and large energy surpluses. Capital and energy substituted for labour. Food, fodder and fuel could be provided with fewer workers, permitting an expansion of non-primary sectors. The range of goods and services expanded. In the United Kingdom, energy and food expenditures fell to 20% as a proportion of GDP in 1830 from 50-80% prior to the industrial revolution (<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-018-0035-6">Day et al. 2018</a>). But EROI of global oil reached its maximum value of 50:1 in the 1930s and has fallen since then to about 10-15:1 today (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915303815">Court & Fizaine 2017</a>). <b>Modern industrial high-tech agriculture</b> <b>now consumes a staggering 10 calories of energy for every calorie of energy (food) delivered</b> to the market, i.e. <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the-energy-we-spend-on-food/">EROI of 1:10</a>. Rending much of agriculture a net energy loss and completely unviable without fossil fuels.</div>
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<a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lhgIypuw-AhKHGk3xxcaEOKMxEEEbIK2lqHbQCJ4iaHs1g5z4KMJED8YvbMe8eAhwTe_qh1GiHmLuPKLece0QZy34AhNNmR_r7_fpBYdMby0TtjsVHwmEIoUvbcMHH00MuNFkRoS" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="333" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lhgIypuw-AhKHGk3xxcaEOKMxEEEbIK2lqHbQCJ4iaHs1g5z4KMJED8YvbMe8eAhwTe_qh1GiHmLuPKLece0QZy34AhNNmR_r7_fpBYdMby0TtjsVHwmEIoUvbcMHH00MuNFkRoS" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" title="Chart" width="539" /></a></div>
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As EROI of fossil fuels continues to fall an increasing amount of energy will be needed simply to provide energy and food to society. Leaving less energy over for other sectors of the economy such as education, health care etc. The only way to get out of this trap is to switch to renewable energy sources and promote small-scale, local, agroecological food production that can generate high yields but in a more diffused manner. Just like renewable energy technologies. Thus there needs to be a transition from centralised to decentralised energy and food production. Very few believe we can replace all fossil fuels with biofuels or electricity, especially in the agricultural industry that is very reliant on diesel as transport fuel. Furthermore, even if some farms could make such a shift in fuel use they would still be unsustainable if they continue to erode soils, eradicate biodiversity, deplete freshwater sources and pollute the environment. Even FAO recognizes this dilemma and now promotes <a href="http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4009e.pdf">agricultural practices in line with ecosystem-based management</a>. </div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-48273414925303961832018-10-25T16:34:00.000+02:002018-10-25T16:34:04.261+02:00Is there such a thing as natural rights?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcWv4ET-sKBuCZSXSgjf4TQ8ahzBTV-3fut0QS-nu6gsFQd8IaCnULcbkjvUuph6ESccd91k__nnJx8QilCbn4MszG4lcJbw6w5wgE8ZrDBx9coKGOrjCx86vE-HvfJEbeVnXMKDaA-vQ/s1600/gardenofgods.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="609" height="408" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcWv4ET-sKBuCZSXSgjf4TQ8ahzBTV-3fut0QS-nu6gsFQd8IaCnULcbkjvUuph6ESccd91k__nnJx8QilCbn4MszG4lcJbw6w5wgE8ZrDBx9coKGOrjCx86vE-HvfJEbeVnXMKDaA-vQ/s640/gardenofgods.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Garden of Gods. Credit. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/snowpeak/6174065038/">John Fowler CC-BY 2.0</a></td></tr>
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Europeans have for the last 30 years lived in their own little bubble of financial scams protected by American hegemony, but that is now imploding by debt deflation and utter disgust with the ruling elite. And while criticising the current neoliberal economic paradigm is one step in the right direction there still seems to be an unwillingness to reflect upon our deeper values, about rights and freedoms, that ultimately led us here. <br /><br />We live on a finite planet that is now full of people but running low on resources. Our social contracts and economic frameworks developed during a time when the world was less crowded and had plenty of resources. Disregarding biophysical realities is not an option anymore. Therefore one must ask, are those social constructs of ours still valid? <br /><br />Well, we know that our economic framework certainly is not. There's <a href="https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781441993984">plenty of evidence</a> to prove that. But how about our ideas about so called “natural” rights? <br /><br /><br /><h3>
Social contract theory </h3>
<br />The political ideology called liberalism, that we now take for granted, arose from 17th century European ideas about natural rights and social contract theory. <br /><br />The idea and theory of a social contract gained prominence in Europe when it became one of the leading ways of explaining and delimiting peoples duty of obedience to their government and of their right to resist and overthrow government when it became oppressive. It was an attempt to explore the best form of government and its justifications. What should laws require? When do people have a duty to obey decent government? And when may they justly exercise their right to resist oppressive government? <br /><br />According to the early formulations of social contract theory citizens may justly exercise their right to resist governments that flagrantly and systematically fails to perform its basic tasks or preserve fundamental rights. And laws are only legitimate when they are generated by the institutions and procedures that are part of the terms of the social contract. <br /><br />Until the end of the 17th century the social contract was understood in communitarian terms. It was not understood in individualistic terms. The government received its legitimate power in a grant from the community as a whole, not from the the individuals comprising that community. And governments only have legitimate authority when that community consents, through its rightful representatives, to transfer its power to the government. Therefore, the right to resist an oppressive government was only justified by the community as a whole, not individual persons. <br /><br />But then Thomas Hobbes came along and dropped a bombshell in his famous book Leviathan. He rejected the communitarian aspect of the social contract tradition and claimed that rights belonged to individual persons but that they are at constant war with each other, due to human nature being fundamentally egoistic, and therefore needed to grant power to a strong state that in turn would ensure protection. He believed such a social contract therefore needed to be non-liberal and absolutist-authoritarian. <br /><br />During the early 19th century the idea of metaphysical natural rights came under attack. Utilitarianist like Bentham rejected the idea that any objective, universal and moral rights possessed by humans in virtue of a common human nature existed. More people agreed with Rousseau's ideas that human nature changed through history. Hume claimed that very few people had actually ever consented to be governed and that it was hard to see how such consent could ever be fairly proved. Furthermore, they argued, that society is much more like an organism which develops without conscious control by its parts than it is like an artificial machine controlled by some outside force. The claim of god given natural rights were believed to have led to bloody wars and revolutions that reigned terror upon Europe and so metaphysical rights and social contract theory were both out of fashion by 1815. <br /><br />In the Americas, thinkers were slower to reject natural rights and social contract theory than in post-1815 Europe. But by 1861 the idea of natural rights came under scrutiny as it was suspected that the theory had contributed to the South's attempt to secede from the Union and its commitment to states founded on racial slavery. But the doctrine of natural rights continued to be widely popular throughout the period. Many anti-slavery arguments appealed to natural rights. And many pro-slavery arguments did the same, arguing that which legal rights anyone had depended on their natural rights, but slaves were not genuinely human, and so did not have the natural right not to be enslaved!<br /><br />In Latin America, the idea of natural rights were seen as a obstacle in trying to create a stable government by the 1870s. They rejected the idea in favour for the liberal principles of J.S Mill and Herbert Spencer, as well as those of Auguste Comte´s authoritarian socialism. <br /><br />The massive and seemingly pointless slaughter of the first world war came to be blamed on the <a href="http://www.preservearticles.com/201106238453/the-organic-theory-of-the-state-with-special-reference-to-herbert-spencer.html">organic theory</a> of the state and society. That blame, along with modernisms distaste for evolutionist models, dethroning Darwin and makine Einstein king of scientific thought, eventually overthrew the organic theory. But utilitarianism continued to predominate in secular moral theory and political thinking, especially after the Great Crash of 1929 when people were sympathetic to socialist and collectivist premises. <br /><br />But by the 1960s, utilitarianism were overthrown and in the 1970s collectivism was abandoned and replaced by individualism. Natural rights and social contract theory returned to the stage. This was much due to the US unjust war in vietnam killing hundreds of thousands of innocents. People blamed it on deranged utilitarian thought. Unfairly utilitarianism itself was blamed for the US morally corrupt reasoning. And so people turned to Rawls, Nozick and Dworkin's ideas of individual rights trumping collective-utilitarian policies and the Kantian view that governments main duty is to give equal respect to all its citizens. <br /><h3>
<br />Modern critique</h3>
Given what we know today one must reject the old fashioned ideas of natural rights and social contract that originated from the 17th century and came back to force during the 1960s. <br /><br />First of all, these ideas came into being in a world that still had plenty of resources and healthy ecosystems to support the population. It was a world were only white men were allowed to take part in discussions, where slavery was rampant, and humans believed themselves to rule over nature. <br /><br />Our understanding of the world is much better today. We now know that we live in a world that is completely beholden to physical laws such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics">thermodynamics</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass">conservation of mass</a>, <a href="https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution">evolution</a>, and <a href="https://export.arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1810/1810.07056.pdf">diminishing returns of complexity</a>. <br /><br />We know that there are no such things as objective god given or natural rights, we made them up. We know that people in the past used the claim of natural rights to justify slavery because they didn't want to give up the “free” energy that generated their wealth. Similarly, they didn't recognize that all humans come from a common ancestor and that we are part of the larger animal community. Or that females often chooses the male, not the other way around. Neither did they consider the fact that without healthy ecosystems humans wouldn't survive.<br /><br />We have to move away from the old reductionist thinking that treats humans and other organisms as isolated parts in a big machinery. We know that the world doesn't work that way. We are part of a whole that interact and feedback on each other. Outcomes are an emergent phenomenon that cannot be derived from studying parts in isolation. Depending on guiding principles, incentive structures, we get different outcomes. Our current incentives tells us to destroy ecosystem for profit so that we can consume even more resources until they run out and we starve. That's simply suicidal.<br /><br />Moreover, we know that human nature is not just based on selfishness. Humans are capable of both egoistic and altruistic actions but incentives guide them to behave in one way more than the other. It is true in a strict biological sense that humans try to maximize their own and kins net energy in order to survive and thrive but we also know that reciprocity and cooperation has had an evolutionary advantage. By hunting or farming in groups, bigger prey or larger fields can be used to gain a larger energy surplus. Thus being an advantage also to the individual. But a society is much larger than any tribe (say 250 people) and so eventually one cannot rely on personal trust and reciprocity to maintain order. Therefore people invented social constructs like culture and religion to guide human behaviour. Later one, as societies grew ever larger they instituted authorities to oversee that these incentive structures were being followed. <br /><br />In a full world, there is no room for individual rights over collective outcomes if we wish to avoid mass suffering of both humans and nature. Of course, people will react to this and say “look at all the dictatorships” bla bla etc. But they forget that they will eventually have to kiss their so called “individual rights” goodbye anyway if we continue on the current track. Fossil fuels and other resources are depleting, making us poorer, more unequal and more at risk of death from climate change. Resource limitations often lead to competition, conflict and war. Something we have already started seeing. The neoliberal capitalist ideals born out of the 1960s return to 17th century ideas about natural rights have been an utter failure. <br /><br />And if we want to talk about rights we must admit that they are made up by humans and can be changed. From an objective perspective, a human has as much right to live as a hedgehog or an oak tree. Either that, or none of us has any rights at all and matters of mass killings or mass extinctions are simply a tragic fate of natural laws. <br />Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-54833525964280400602018-10-24T23:15:00.000+02:002018-10-24T23:15:31.822+02:00Abrupt thaw of permafrost lakes in the Arctic<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/awNnw_e9KL8" width="560"></iframe><br />
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There's an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding the threshold value, tipping point, for frozen grounds in the Arctic, permafrost, to start thawing irreversibly. And whether released methane from the permafrost will occur <a href="http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2054/20140423?ijkey=e440c81a539e8d03fbc775994a9602a3daf05d24&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha"><span style="color: purple;">gradually over time</span></a> or <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180816143035.htm"><span style="color: purple;">more abruptly</span></a>. There is more stored carbon in frozens soils than we currently have in the atmosphere.</div>
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There are basically two camps, some believe the permafrost to be stable with a <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115"><span style="color: purple;">threshold value around <3°C</span></a> while <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/21/temperature-rise-permafrost-melt"><span style="color: purple;">others claim 1,5°C is enough</span></a> to start thawing large parts of the frozen grounds and lakes in the Arctic. </div>
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For a lay person this is quite confusing, but it simply means that there isn't enough data to know for sure and so some scientists are more or less conservative in their estimates. Then there is the question of using climate models to try and predict potential threshold values or doing actual fieldwork and extrapolating conclusions from that. To my knowledge, climate models have a pretty bad track record of capturing highly non-linear dynamics in the climate system. For example,<a href="http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~anders/articles/NewScientistFeb2013.pdf"> <span style="color: purple;">Arctic sea ice passed a tipping point in 2007</span></a> and is now in a death spiral but models had predicted sea ice to remain until the end of this century. Pretty high margin of error if you ask me. Also, we are learning that there seems to be differences in how permafrost soils and lakes thaw. </div>
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According to a <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180816143035.htm"><span style="color: purple;">recent field research study funded by NASA</span></a> of thermokarst lakes, formed by thaw of permafrost below the soil, in Alaska and Siberia the potential for abrupt thaw (decades) is now <a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future-boost-of-methane-possible-from-arctic-permafrost/"><span style="color: purple;">likely and irreversible</span></a>. As the Arctic warms more of these lakes are appearing and growing in size which expands the thaw below. It has been estimated that they now <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13043"><span style="color: purple;">cover about 20% of northern permafrost regions</span></a>. This could double the release from terrestrial landscapes by the 2050s. A carbon cycle feedback that is not yet included into climate models.</div>
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<i>"Within decades you can get very deep thaw-holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw"</i></div>
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This is bad news for climate change mitigation efforts. This feedback is significant because methane is about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas. And the lakes are expected to thaw even under the lowest IPCC emissions scenario, adding further warming. Since we most likely are <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962079/"><span style="color: purple;">already committed, warming yet to come from current emissions, to 1,5-2°C</span></a> this extra warming from the permafrost reinforcing feedback could take us above the 2C threshold for <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115"><span style="color: purple;">potentially catastrophic warming</span></a>. Unless we rapidly decarbonize our economy and try to take out carbon from the atmosphere by for example large-scale reforestation efforts. Time is not on our side. We need a climate emergency plan.</div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-68480387335107340062018-10-24T03:16:00.000+02:002018-10-24T03:16:04.338+02:00Converging crises - Synchronizing failure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9-fRmprRycbLtT6kQ9ezQPn0qFKc9NCHOrr2dHj1FH9tp3KXRRWGxMJgojhb9CD2aTRjj7LDcYAttIoob_ePdumV1GW1QeNvL71EnZNRFZd0RrY-TlMl3fsdkFeheM6_HQDnGK-98VV0/s1600/clock.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="124" data-original-width="359" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9-fRmprRycbLtT6kQ9ezQPn0qFKc9NCHOrr2dHj1FH9tp3KXRRWGxMJgojhb9CD2aTRjj7LDcYAttIoob_ePdumV1GW1QeNvL71EnZNRFZd0RrY-TlMl3fsdkFeheM6_HQDnGK-98VV0/s640/clock.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Climate mayhem, falling net energy and debt deflation</h3>
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We are in for another <a href="https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/brace-for-the-financial-crash-of-2018-b2f81f85686b"><span style="color: purple;">global oil supply crunch from 2018 onwards</span></a> that many experts say will trigger another severe economic recession if not depression. A fragile global economy, with a massive debt overhang, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309402988_The_energy-population_conundrum_and_its_possible_solution"><span style="color: purple;">cannot handle too high oil prices</span></a>. A large portion of most countries budgets, and individuals budgets as well, are spent on fossil fuel energy. That's why rapid price increases (over $60 per barrel) crushes demand and flips the economy over into a recession. In turn, leading to the bankruptcy of non-profitable unconventional energy ventures like tar sands and fracking. Thus further reducing supply over the long term.</div>
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Since the early 1970s global energy costs have steadily increased. Even if oil prices have oscillated with recurring spikes and drops, as the economy tries to adjust, the overall trend is a steady increase. This is due to the fact that extraction has become increasingly difficult and costly, yielding ever lower return on investment. The problem of course is that we built our economies based on cheap energy that yielded relatively high net energy to society. But that is a thing of the past and now we are struggling to afford our current lifestyles. Thats basically why we started this <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-10/global-debt-jumped-to-record-237-trillion-last-year"><span style="color: purple;">massive global debt bubble</span></a>, pulling forward future consumption with cheap credit. But costs will eventually have to be paid.</div>
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We have now reached a point when all the energy and resources available to society are required just to maintain our <a href="http://energyskeptic.com/2016/why-the-demise-of-civilization-is-inevitable/"><span style="color: purple;">existing level of complexity</span></a>. A phenomenon puzzling many commentators, calling it <a href="https://timjackson.org.uk/secular-stagnation-meets-the-gdp-fetish/"><span style="color: purple;">secular stagnation</span></a>. All these factors have made the global economy so fragile that even small perturbations from climate change, wars or falling credit could tip the system over into a deflationary spiral. With economic inequalities already increasing, increasing<span style="color: purple;"> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615">social instability</a></span>, this is a recipe for disaster. </div>
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No economy will be able to recover unless it transitions to non-fossil fuel energy sources and writes down its debts. And even then net energy will likely be much lower, meaning that society still has to lower its overall consumption of energy and resources. Implying a voluntary measure to reduce organizational complexity in society. Something few previous civilisations managed, perhaps the British did when they dismantled their empire. </div>
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Implication for food security</h3>
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Global food prices have increased steadily since 2005, about the time of global peak oil, now at 1970s highs or above. Further exacerbating the problem is booming populations, freshwater scarcity and climate change. </div>
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Today’s population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. Especially vulnerable to rising food prices are people with low purchasing power and without subsistence farming to fall back on. We know that food price increases that reach 200 on the FAO index have led <a href="http://necsi.edu/research/social/food_crises.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">to riots and unrest</span></a>.</div>
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Many countries in the Middle East are especially vulnerable due to convergence of several different crises. State revenue losses from falling oil exports, due to depleting resources and higher domestic consumption, with a need to cut food and fuel subsidies usually make people very upset. Especially when, as is the case in the region, people have no way of making a living coupled with overexploited water reservoirs and eroded soils. As if that wasn't enough, scorching heat and significant risk of recurrent droughts makes the entire region utterly unsustainable. Without energy they have nothing. The chances for further conflict and wars in the region are high. Massive, continuing, migration flows towards Europe is to be expected. </div>
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The infamous ‘Doomsday Clock’ is again at <a href="https://thebulletin.org/timeline"><span style="color: purple;">two and a half minutes to midnight</span></a> - the closest since 1953</div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-64171477865905075242018-10-20T02:03:00.003+02:002018-10-21T21:07:02.221+02:00Faster than forecast - Melting Arctic<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hx0C6VV6szI" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Half a truth is often a great lie</i>. - Benjamin Franklin</span><br />
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Abrupt climate change in the Arctic</h3>
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Ice covers 10 percent of Earth's surface and helps moderate the planet's temperature. Glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets around the world are <b>melting at an</b> <b>alarming rate</b>. Much faster than climate models had predicted, like what Peter Wadhams, expert on ocean and ice physics, discusses in the video clip above. Climate models fail to interpret the real climate system because they ignore nonlinear dynamics, like key carbon cycle feedbacks and tipping points, crucial to the real system.</div>
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The Arctic (North of 60° N) is a key strategic region of global importance. Changes in the Arctic impact Earths energy balance, cloud formations, global wind patterns and ocean currents, release of methane, sea level rise, phytoplankton blooms and much more. As seen in the image below.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi01OavsY-RRP8BOWlbdXmyMft69H6mUHPbSvLburri82LBPjU-j8SGa3hH6bKnQ3VH6N-3plex3L1fci_UR0XEJV5miNDSqHkrvgTA0OlA_vUOLEWglf1EN0slL9VXFow7dNRj0Sji3Pg/s1600/arctic.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="763" height="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi01OavsY-RRP8BOWlbdXmyMft69H6mUHPbSvLburri82LBPjU-j8SGa3hH6bKnQ3VH6N-3plex3L1fci_UR0XEJV5miNDSqHkrvgTA0OlA_vUOLEWglf1EN0slL9VXFow7dNRj0Sji3Pg/s640/arctic.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption">Component state variables and dynamic processes operating in the Arctic. There are strong couplings, feedbacks and nonlinear behaviors arising from their interactions, which together define the Arctic system. Source: <a href="https://www.arcus.org/arctic-info/archive/28466">Arctic System Synthesis, 2018</a></td></tr>
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A <a href="https://phys.org/news/2018-10-thick-ice-arctic-sea-slowly.html">recent study published by NASA</a> shows how, since 1958, Arctic sea ice cover has lost about 66% of its thickness, averaged across the region at the end of summer. Old ice has shrunk more than 2 million square kilometres and today <b>70% of the ice cover consist of ice that forms and melts within a single year</b>. Thinner, weaker seasonal ice is much more vulnerable to weather than thick ice and can easily be broken apart by storms. </div>
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That's very bad news for our planet as darker ocean waters absorb more sunlight and triggers further warming. <b>Melting sea ice</b> has already contributed to about 25% of current warming but could add double that amount when the Arctic ocean starts becomes ice free in summer. That's a <b>very strong reinforcing feedback process that accelerates warming</b> which in turn accelerates further ice loss and so on. While in theory, with some sort of risky geoengineering, it would be possible to reverse this trend I really doubt we can do much to stop it. We can't even stop our greenhouse gas emissions from growing every year. No, its too late for Arctic sea ice, what we see now is a<b> death spiral. </b></div>
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Warming in the Arctic occurs much faster than at lower latitudes, a process known as Arctic Amplification. Arctic temperatures have increased at least 3 times the rate of mid-latitude temperatures relative to the late 20th century, due to multiple reinforcing feedbacks. Even if global temperature increases are contained to +2° C by 2040, Arctic monthly <b>mean temperatures in fall will increase by +5° C</b>. The Arctic is very likely to be sea <a href="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFMGC11G1095O"><span style="color: purple;"><b>ice free during summer before 2040</b></span></a>, and probably much sooner than that. Not like the IPCC report says, once in every hundred years.</div>
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This will impact mid-latitude, like Europe, weather events by<b> causing the jet stream to slow down and become more meandering</b> which causes more persistent weather patterns as high or low pressure weather systems to get stuck in one place for an extended duration. Like what we saw this summer in Scandinavia with persistent heat wave, drought and forest fires i Sweden.</div>
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We have also <b>detected a slowing down of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation </b>(AMOC) <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0007-4#ref-CR1"><span style="color: purple;">during the past 150 years</span></a> since the little ice age, and that enhanced freshwater fluxes from the Arctic and Nordic seas weakened Labrador Sea convection and thus the AMOC. Its been suggested that the lack of a subsequent recovery may have resulted from hysteresis (i.e., instability of thermohaline circulation) or from 21st century melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.</div>
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<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0006-5"><span style="color: purple;">Another recent Nature article </span></a> improved a sea surface temperature proxy for AMOC strength. Their proxy AMOC fingerprint consists of a cooling in the subpolar gyre region due to reduced heat transport, and a warming in the Gulf Stream region due to a northward shift of the Gulf Stream, indicating that <b>AMOC has been steadily weakening since around 1950</b>, strengthened shortly during the 1990s and 2000s, then weakened again. In the short term this could cause a small cooling effect in western Europe while warming the ocean waters in the gulf of Mexico, southeast Americas. Not mentioned in the latest IPCC report. </div>
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Last time Earth went through an interglacial period, and global temperatures were less than 1C warmer than today, <a href="https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/">sea level rose to +6-9 meters and extreme storms were common</a>. <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2022"><span style="color: purple;"><b>Sea level rise has accelerated</b></span></a> as ice sheet loss on Greenland and West Antarctica has accelerated. Also not accounted for in the latest IPCC report.</div>
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<b>Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost are slumping and disintegrating</b>, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. Permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles in Canada—an expanse the size of Alabama. According to researchers with the <a href="http://www.nwtgeoscience.ca/"><span style="color: purple;">Northwest Territories Geological Survey</span></a>, the <b>permafrost collapse is intensifying</b>. Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in <b>Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia</b>, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal<a href="http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2017/02/06/G38626.1.abstract?sid=3caa2535-8d09-4d60-9872-89ea658cd63b"> <span style="color: purple;">Geology</span></a>. Arctic permafrost caps vast amounts of old, geologic methane (CH4) in subsurface reservoirs. <b>Thawing permafrost opens pathways for this CH4 to migrate to the surface</b>. The concentration of methane in the atmosphere has <span style="color: purple;"><a href="https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/">risen sharply</a> - </span>by about 25 teragrams per year since 2006. <b><a href="https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/global-change-debates/Sources/Methane-Clathrate-gun-hypothesis/1-Clathrate%20gun%20hypothesis-Wikipedia.pdf">Sub sea methane clathrates could also be seeping out</a></b>. None of these feedbacks are included in IPCC climate models. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCYrajwuCxvi-e87fHfuSkyeif9SF4diGBCCV28XWcMkG2uuDjw8r5moh0TSJ_ke73ecWaYafuM2YmMH_WCgdbbqQPirGTKIGRveQ7dpELOny4hcWUt74o61cjxEHOyDnXM43Tp5gAyzI/s1600/melting+permafrost.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="924" height="454" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCYrajwuCxvi-e87fHfuSkyeif9SF4diGBCCV28XWcMkG2uuDjw8r5moh0TSJ_ke73ecWaYafuM2YmMH_WCgdbbqQPirGTKIGRveQ7dpELOny4hcWUt74o61cjxEHOyDnXM43Tp5gAyzI/s640/melting+permafrost.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption">Melting permafrost is altering the landscape in northern Canada on a grand scale. Credit: Wikimedia</td></tr>
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In conclusion, <b>putting too much trust in IPCCs climate models and scenarios is NOT recommended</b>. One should not forget that the IPCC is a political institution and subject to political leaders meddling in the science. I have per email questioned the Swedish meteorological institute that use those models and scenarios as a reference for climate change in Sweden. When I questioned the use of IPCC material due to the fact that they don't include nonlinear dynamics I got a very angry response back that I was dead wrong. Really? So its just me and lots of other international climate experts that are worried that <b>IPCC understates risks and uses incomplete information to draw ridiculous conclusions</b>? Like the fact the we are <b>already committed to 1,5C</b> and most people think its impossible to stay below even 2C. Or the fact that <b>all the low carbon scenarios are based on assumptions of carbon sucking technologies</b> that we haven't tested yet. I'm I really the only one that worries about this? No, of course not. Just read the recent report by David Spratt <span style="color: purple;">"<a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/09/what-lies-beneath-scientific.html"><span style="color: purple;">What lies beneath - The scientific understatement of climate risks</span></a></span>" or take a look at the video clips and you will understand why people are worried.</div>
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<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I7-4wOs2AmI" width="560"></iframe>Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-46574994481080497042018-10-15T19:12:00.002+02:002018-10-15T19:12:10.406+02:00The struggle to survive a collapsing society<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
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Mohamed Ataya, a 31-year-old Syrian tends to his plants on the rooftop of his damaged building in the Syrian rebel-held town of Arbin, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus last week. Ataya, who used to be a professional football player before the war, cultivates seeds for sale. Reddit <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanGardening/comments/6vlutq/mohamed_ataya_a_31yearold_syrian_man_known_as_abu/">March, 2017.</a></div>
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The crisis of civilisation</h3>
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People seem confused, deluded by mainstream media into to wishful thinking, about the current state of affairs in the world. But there is that uneasy feeling that all the alarming reports about <i>peak oil, climate change, desertification, species mass extinction, freshwater scarcity, dying coral reefs, melting of polar ice caps and toxification of our environment</i> are piling up. In fact, we are currently living in a time of a collapsing civilisation, the end to wasteful resource use and reliance on fossil fuels. Everything is becoming increasingly expensive leading to falling standards of living and a majority of the world's population who can barely afford food, shelter or gas for transport anymore. <a href="https://www.cgdev.org/doc/events/WD%20Food%20Riots%20Submission.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">When food becomes too expensive people riot</span></a> and revolt against the ruling elite. Conflict arises and sometimes it breaks out into wars. Syria being the prime example. <b>For Syrians who are still within the country's borders a total and rapid collapse has long since been underway and is continuing to this day</b>. Look at the man watering his seeds in a city of concrete ruins. Its utterly sad and beautiful at the same time. That is reality. And <b>we will be seeing more of it as entropy starts moving in from the periphery of the global economy towards the centre</b>.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://necsi.edu/research/social/foodcrises.html">Lagi et al. (2011)</a></div>
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Since it's clear now, almost fifty years after The Limits to Growth (1972) was published, that humans will not take preemptive action to avoid a collapse of the system, <b>the global economy will have to shrink.</b> And the process has been underway for some time now, especially since 2008, it's just that some regions will feel it much harder and sooner than others. <b>Nobody is safe from its crushing effects</b>, that's why building resilience is important for every community on Earth.</div>
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<a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/G3aNUUq9Lnyn70scX53G0ZSgzP0vpm4-uIsa7zcfAkdWnliyuBrGvFTpNQ39oPBCu-yshSYQpJghtoZejPJXfSZbyA42lrdInJSYQilAIKCVZ5Xkd3iLcUiCM80xMNENUZFM87Tt" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="484" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/G3aNUUq9Lnyn70scX53G0ZSgzP0vpm4-uIsa7zcfAkdWnliyuBrGvFTpNQ39oPBCu-yshSYQpJghtoZejPJXfSZbyA42lrdInJSYQilAIKCVZ5Xkd3iLcUiCM80xMNENUZFM87Tt" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="602" /></a></div>
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People who are well aware of the seriousness of our current situation are suggesting radical ideas because they know there will be mayhem as hundreds of millions of people will be displaced due to a rapidly degrading biosphere and unstable climate.</div>
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“<i>Why not create a climate passport, actually, give it to all those people who cannot live anymore in their original homes, which gives them access to all the countries who destroyed their home, like the United States” </i>- H.J Schellnhuber (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY5IDDs1QDg">Climate Change: A Last Call for the Planet, 2018</a>)</div>
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Well, sure... that probably wont happen but it shows the <b>inequality</b> of the issue and where, to the centre of the global economy, people with the possibility to do so will be fleeing as their own areas are devastated. The <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2015-12-02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-carbon-emissions-while-poorest-35"><span style="color: purple;">world's richest 10% account for half the carbon emissions</span></a> while the poorest 3.5 billion account for just a tenth. </div>
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Now, climate is not the only issue here, it's just one of the symptoms of a full world. Syria suffered lost state revenue from declining oil exports due to a peak in production, massive population growth, reduced food and fuel subsidies, at the same time as they had the worst drought in 900 years. It's a combination of <b>converging crises that crushes nations that lack resilience</b>. This is only one way that collapse manifests. But it will impact every nation, either direct or indirect, and cause <b>instability and hardship for ordinary people</b> while a small percentage of the rich continue to overexploit remaining resources.</div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-82116525646475619182018-10-13T21:03:00.002+02:002018-10-13T21:05:03.280+02:00From growth to inequality and collapse<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
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Economic growth as people know it, in terms of <b>GDP, has stagnated and started to turn negative</b>. Most reactions to the absence of growth have consisted in trying to get it back again as fast as possible, whatever the cost, further <b>degrading the biosphere at an accelerated rate</b>. We have seen low interest rates, debt expansion, bank bailouts, government stimulus, land-grabs, tax havens, fiscal austerity, and stock buybacks etc. Most of these things did nothing to increase the wellbeing of ordinary people but greatly <b>profited the richest in society</b>. The <b>massive debt overhang</b> from such policies have now become a burden on the real economy. All it did was to divert people's attention from the inconvenient truth that <b>there will be less material goods and energy flows in the future</b>, not more.</div>
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This <b>massive wastefulness of resources comes</b> at a time when we could have used those means to invest in benefitting projects like affordable housing, a basic income, low carbon infrastructure, ecologically sound agriculture, adaptation to climate change etc. Instead we have chosen to let the oceans contain more plastic than fish and species go extinct a thousand times faster than any time in the last 65 million years. <b>The central bank and governments desperate policies after the 2008 financial crisis is the biggest failure in our time</b>. When the next crisis hits, which could be very soon, there will be neither fiscal nor monetary room for manoeuvre.</div>
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In his latest <a href="https://www.cusp.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP-12-The-Post-Growth-Challenge-1.2MB.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">paper</span></a> Tim Jackson show how declining growth in the real economy caused by resource limitations has led to increasing economic inequality. A factor that greatly increases the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615"><b>instability of a society</b></a>. The rising inequality that has haunted advanced economies over the last decade is a direct consequence of policy decisions trying to promote growth in a dying capitalistic society that cannot be supported by underlying fundamentals. <b>All it has done is to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top</b>. The growth fetish has hindered ecological investments, reinforced inequality and exacerbated financial instability. The social and ecological prosperity that once was is being undone by this allegiance to growth at all costs. </div>
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As shown in the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615"><span style="color: purple;">HANDY-model (2014)</span></a>, <b>overexploitation of both nature and labour leads to a fast total collapse of society.</b> Economic stratification is a symptom often found in many past collapsed societies and is an <b>outcome of elite overconsumption in a society overshooting its ecological carrying capacity</b>. Such a collapse often lead to inequality-induced <b>famine</b>, due to <b>widespread poverty,</b> that causes the loss of workers rather than a collapse of the ecological base itself. Elites consumption keeps growing until the society collapses.</div>
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This is a very ugly possibility. And it shows just how important issues of ecological degradation and inequality are for social stability. The fact that we see widespread resource/economic inequality indicate that we, some societies more than other but talking globally, are far gone in the process towards collapse.</div>
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However, in <a href="https://www.cusp.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP11-Confronting-inequality-in-a-post-growth-world.pdf"><span style="color: purple;">another paper by Jackson</span></a>, there are post-growth scenarios that dont necessarily lead to increasing inequality. Jackson claims that it depends on three structural features of the economy: elasticity of substitution between labour and capital, the dynamics of the capital-to output ratio, and the behaviour of the savings rate. Under conditions more favourable to wage labour (than capital) measures like a tax on capital and a universal basic income can decrease inequality even as growth decline. However, these measures are insufficient to reduce inequality when institutions aggressively favour capital over labour. </div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-44126928140379578552018-10-13T11:52:00.000+02:002018-10-13T12:05:55.809+02:00Complacent adults and brave childrenThe Roman government kept the populace happy by distributing free food and staging huge spectacles to divert attention from a empire in decline, i.e. to prevent people from revolting. And that's basically the same short-term policies current governments employ to appease the public and distract them from collapse. The public may still voice their grievances but according to history they won't revolt until the bread and circuses stops. A surprisingly effective strategy it seems, even today.<br />
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Marx once said that "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic"><i><span style="color: purple;">religion... is the opiate of the masses</span></i></a>", meaning that it reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on. Nowadays, such plesasant illusions are not only provided by religion but also by the entertainment industry, media and medical science in form of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic"><span style="color: purple;">legal narcotics</span></a>.<br />
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People were more worried about <i>peak oil</i> and accepted the science of <i>climate change </i>some years ago but then <b>denial</b> increased and they got <b>meme fatigue</b>, tired of reading about it. Looking at google trends on the search word peak oil we can see how interest was high from 2004-2009 but then dropped off significantly.<br />
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In the case of climate change the interest is more stable over time but when we look at related topics like global warming we see the same tendency of meme fatigue and denial increasing over time. And similar queries with the biggest increase in search frequency, not top search words, relate directly to climate denial and ignorance on the topic. Especially coming from North <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=climate%20change,global%20warming">Americans</a>, which is a reflection of how indoctrinated they are.</div>
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However, while many westerners seem in denial or complacent about climate change the topic seem to be of growing interest in nations like Kenya, Bangladesh, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, India and Malaysia. Countries that are already hit hard by a changing climate, for example, 40% of Indias population suffer from acute water scarcity. </div>
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So, my theory is that the “comfy” delusional westerners won't revolt until the bread and circuses stop. Not until costs rise even further, in form of direct taxes or indirect by inflation/deflation, and food subsidies stop coming will people rise up and demand change. Despite the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/22/inequality-gap-widens-as-42-people-hold-same-wealth-as-37bn-poorest"><span style="color: purple;">gross inequality</span></a> in modern societies and falling living standards people stay passive like sacrificial lambs . They are simply too comfortable in the current system. But there is yet hope. The younger generation, that have nothing to lose, may yet drive some change. Lets end with "<a href="https://medium.com/wedonthavetime/greta-thunberg-our-lives-are-in-your-hands-b5a7b1e24a97"><span style="color: purple;">Gretas cry for help</span></a>"</div>
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<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SWiFwIiFLL0" width="560"></iframe>Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-48600916477035800032018-10-11T17:00:00.000+02:002018-10-11T17:01:20.958+02:00Fragile systems under abrupt climate change<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4IL-TeV-cqY?start=1" width="560"></iframe><br />
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We know from our, humanity's, ancient history on this planet that rapid climatic changes ruin agrarian societies. Especially vulnerable are societies that mismanage their resource base and/or live on the margins, for example, in extremely arid regions that are wholly dependent on predictable precipitation patterns. But even societies that manage to survive periods of, say, extreme drought may suffer as they become increasingly fragile to any perturbations to the system. <br />
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A changing climate is not bound by any borders and often occur within whole regions or on a global scale. When highly populated areas undergo climatic fluctuations it often cause people to migrate in search of better lands. Which can collapse other, already fragile, societies as the extra pressure from the inflow of people pushes the system over the edge. <br />
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This is demonstrated in the German documentary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IL-TeV-cqY">How Climate Made History</a> (2017), above. I highly recommend it and other videos about climate on the youtube channel Hazards and catastrophes. More informative than American or British counterparts.<br />
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<b>What can we learn from history?</b> </h4>
Well, first of, Homo Sapiens hunter-gatherers, a <i>generalist species</i>, could adapt easier to extreme environmental conditions than neanderthals which were restricted to specific food sources, methods of hunting, or climates. This ability may have been the result of humans cooperative nature. It had nothing to do with brain size or intelligence. <br />
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Second, a relatively stable mild climate and fertile land, with ample and <b>reliable sources of freshwater</b>, plant and animal life, where instrumental to rise of agriculture. People settled and surpluses (food energy) from agriculture could be stored, freeing up time from simply collecting food, and giving rise to specialist occupations. It also gave rise to hierarchies, inequality, as some had more of a surplus than others. Humans also started worshipping the sun (source of energy).<br />
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Third, thriving <b>agricultural civilisations were more vulnerable to changes in climatic conditions</b> than nomadic peoples. When the climate changed rapidly and rainfall became unpredictable or rivers dried out people were <b>forced to move</b> in search of new lands to survive. Especially if they managed their lands unsustainably, degraded the land, and were more vulnerable to shocks. <br />
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Fourth, in highly populated regions such drastic changes in climatic conditions impacted civilisations both directly and indirectly. High pressure on the land from a <b>large population made societies more susceptible to shocks</b>. As people migrated from poorer lands into other richer areas they tended to destabilise societies that could have survived longer if not for the extra pressure. It also led to unrest and conflict over remaining resources.<br />
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Fifth, when civilisations collapsed people spread out to look for resources and <b>knowledge was lost</b>. What we call a dark age occurred.<br />
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Implications for modern society</h4>
Climate change is occurring rapidly and it is uncertain to what degree we will manage to adapt. We still live in agrarian type societies and are dependent on predictable rainfall, some regions more than others of course. Desertification and water scarcity is a major problem in many parts of the world already. Many societies are extremely fragile to shocks due to overexploitation and land degradation. Crop yields are falling. Seas are rising. Taking for granted that fossil fuels will save us is not a good idea for several reasons. Some societies may succeed better than others in managing their resources but will be vulnerable in other ways, e.g. to climatic changes, financial shocks, trade shocks and/or migration flows. Today there are no new/empty regions to populate once other areas fail. Resources are limited on a global scale. Tensions over scarcity are rising. Some societies, like Syria, have already collapsed. While others, where most of the remaining resources are located, are having issues with immigration. It will be a very difficult journey for humankind. But as history shows, even if civilisations collapse, humanity survives. We are a tenacious species.Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-68603838922011152822018-10-09T22:56:00.002+02:002018-10-10T19:40:27.149+02:00The big meltdown - 2020?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_dld6ic-imKVWoLq8Gf_VHmiaUzNnLM5fnqNvbxHwQMMMzhbJ53TXcRkb92pdHhgCrmKqrCjk3IIV3vOwkAvUsZhTyHlbbTaD1B20rtDidzXs8xIU3EazX-KcWrIVx1kgJefGxPitNkY/s1600/eruption.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_dld6ic-imKVWoLq8Gf_VHmiaUzNnLM5fnqNvbxHwQMMMzhbJ53TXcRkb92pdHhgCrmKqrCjk3IIV3vOwkAvUsZhTyHlbbTaD1B20rtDidzXs8xIU3EazX-KcWrIVx1kgJefGxPitNkY/s640/eruption.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles-Blomfield-Mount-Tarawera-in-eruption-June-10-1886.jpg">Charles Blomfield's painting</a> of the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera based on eyewitness accounts</td></tr>
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<b>Are we headed for the next succession of financial destruction?</b> It’s been ten years since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 that almost ruined western industrial civilisation. And while rich people in the west, at least mainstream media, seem to have the impression that we now are “back to business” lots of people around the globe are suffering from the reality of limits to growth that struck at the heart of the global economy in 08. Even if more fortunate people, like Swedes, can go on deluding themselves (for a little while) that there’s no problem with our current perverse growth paradigm there are people who don't have that luxury. Just take a look at most of the countries in the Middle East and you will quickly understand how <i><b>peak oil, water scarcity, food crises, overpopulation and climate change</b></i> can trigger endless misery and suffering (read Nafeez Ahmeds excellent <a href="https://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319478142"><span style="color: orange;">book</span></a> on this).<br />
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Contrary to the dominant narrative of “progress” I see <b>major systemic crises converging towards the year</b> <b>2020, or sooner! </b>Are we reaching a major tipping point or simply another wave of entropy entering the system?<br />
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The symptoms of this can be found in the global economy itself with the <b>rate of global growth stagnating</b> (i.e. energy and debt limits) and tensions between countries competing for limited resources increasing. We also see it in the political sphere where <b>maniacs with empathy deficit disorder get into power</b> as a response to people's frustrations and start talking about all kinds of warfare: cultural, economic and military. We already see social unrest, conflict and trade wars but also talk about military wars connected to resources, mainly oil. <b>Most societies are already very vulnerable</b>, lack resilience to withstand further shocks, so a global financial meltdown could escalate fairly rapidly into chaos and destruction. When people lose everything, and they don't know why, they tend to get angry and violent. How will the US act? Will they unwind the empire, all military bases etc., or spend every bit of their last resources to plunder the planet? The place is more like an oligarchy so the über rich might decide they want the last of the oil, not for the people but for themselves. Europe is a basket case and is likely to break down, every nation on their own eventually. If a economic collapse doesn't do it, the flood of climate refugees will.<br />
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As for Sweden, we will see our <b>massive housing bubble pop</b> and a deep recession meanwhile people fleeing from the middle east will want to immigrate here. With the nationalist and xenophobic party, the Sweden Democrats, now being the third largest party things could turn out to their advantage as people become poorer and are likely to blame immigration issues. Similar to what we see in the rest of Europe. There is, however, a fairly strong left still in play in Sweden and to my surprise they got 10% of the votes in this year's election. So perhaps there is still some balance left in the political system, but without any major blocs the grownups in the government has yet to come to an agreement about how to rule, so maybe not. While they argue about who get what seat the world is on fire, and so it goes with large bureaucratic structures that become incompetent. And so the likelihood of social unrest increases.<br />
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As for the UN climate targets last chance of bending the emissions curve, I'm pretty pessimistic. A global financial meltdown will put all those hopes on hold and even if action did occur its likely too late to stop the climate from going above the 2C target. Moreover, what we need is not “green growth” but actual <b>downsizing</b> which would happen when the economy contracts. If we won't voluntarily give up consumption, mother nature will do it for us. But of course, it won't be what most people hoped for, <b>it likely won't be a civilised and peaceful decent</b>. <br />
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Will there be a global financial meltdown soon? Somewhere between 2018-2020? Well, I don’t know, but what's certain is that something has to give since <b>we live on a finite planet</b> where endless growth is impossible. There's no negotiating with nature.Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-7296583534142303702018-10-01T23:58:00.002+02:002018-10-02T10:35:49.031+02:00Blowing past 2°C, headed for 4-5°C?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo1BjVM8S6V9VEK5pxPBmsQxX2HFNT6MYpOgQ8sgemnhVdCfsZ7pFZ_HmgJQMAevDy9V4cNR8CzSJaApqYt6smFmd4f2QngPne2bHG27TMYyys948One1VS5VnDyw02PQO0kifyf_B3do/s1600/Impact_event.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="517" height="444" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo1BjVM8S6V9VEK5pxPBmsQxX2HFNT6MYpOgQ8sgemnhVdCfsZ7pFZ_HmgJQMAevDy9V4cNR8CzSJaApqYt6smFmd4f2QngPne2bHG27TMYyys948One1VS5VnDyw02PQO0kifyf_B3do/s640/Impact_event.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Wishful thinking is today so prevalent that it even has infected the brain of people who are trained not to be biased, scientists. I mean sure, economists have always been blissfully ignorant and wrong in their predictions but what I’m talking about is more widespread. It's a <b>deep denial</b> among the people researching our most critical issues: climate change and energy limitations. </div>
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You see it in the media when scientists discuss oxymorons like “green growth”, or proclaim that we can “decarbonize our entire economy within 20 years”, or that “agriculture will save biodiversity”, or that “lab grown meat will solve our food problems” and so on. It's nothings but <b>grasping at straws in a world that is on fire</b>. Such delusional statements are more about belief systems and identities reflecting values than science. It's also because climate scientists have been told by behavioural psychologists not to scare people as it may hamper action. But isn't it odd that the profession that claims to be devoted to curiosity and truth seeking wants to<b> restrict exploration of future possibilities</b> and censor people due to how it might come across to others?</div>
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<b>Our climate reality is harsh</b>. Most scientists tend to underestimate our predicament because they are too conservative, not the other way around. But now it's becoming clear, predictions made by oversimplified climate <b>models have underestimated the changes we're already witnessing due to climate change</b>. Earth, the biosphere, ecosystems and human systems such as the economy are dynamic complex systems and their behaviour is nonlinear. A model that does not include critical feedbacks in the system will not be able to accurately predict results in the real world. This has now become obvious as real world observations about the sad state of our climate is pouring in. <b>Climate change is accelerating</b>.</div>
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<b>Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at an alarming rate</b> and looks to be completely gone summertime some time in the coming years (2022?), accelerating global warming further. Ice and snow reflect about 80 percent of the Sun’s energy back into space while the darker ocean and land will absorb 90 percent of that heat. The albedo effect due to vanishing sea ice is already responsible for about 25 percent of global warming (<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3322"><span style="color: orange;">Pistone et al. 2014</span></a>). <b>Greenland shed about 280 gigatons of ice per year </b>between 2002-2016 and the island’s lower-elevation and coastal areas experienced up to 4 meters of ice mass loss (expressed in equivalent-water-height) over a 14-year period (<a href="https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/30/greenland-ice-loss-2002-2016/"><span style="color: orange;">NASA, 2018</span></a>). Accelerating rates of ice loss also implies <b>accelerated rates of sea level rise</b>. Certain cities will have to be abandoned. In ten years prior to 2016<b> the Atlantic Ocean soaked up 50 percent more carbon dioxide than it did the previous decade</b>, speeding up the acidification of the ocean (<a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2015GB005248"><span style="color: orange;">Woosley et al. 2016</span></a>). And the list goes on and on with increasingly worrisome observations.</div>
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With an increase of carbon emissions of 2% in 2017 (<a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-set-to-rise-2-percent-in-2017-following-three-year-plateau"><span style="color: orange;">Carbon Brief, 2017</span></a>), the so called “decoupling” of economic activity from emissions is not yet making a net dent in global emissions. Even if we start reducing emissions now it's not going to be enough to prevent dangerous climate change since there is about a decade <b>lag between emissions and resulting warming</b> (<a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/12/124002"><span style="color: orange;">Ricke & Caldeira, 2014</span></a>). <b>We have already (95% probability) gone past the 2°C warming point/UN target </b>(<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3352"><span style="color: orange;">Raftery et al. 2017</span></a>), and are <b>likely headed towards 4-5°C</b> (<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252"><span style="color: orange;">Steffen et al. 2018</span></a>). That's because the Earth system is dynamic and is more likely to continue warming until it stabilises at another point, which in the Earth's past occurred at about 4-5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. By the way, it is generally accepted that a 5 degree rise in temperature is not compatible with human civilisation as we know it. At the same time, perhaps a complete collapse of civilisation could prevent the worst climate change outcomes (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.0428.pdf"><span style="color: orange;">Garrett, 2012</span></a>). But no one is going to promote or talk about that in public. Even if diminishing returns on resources, especially oil, likely will shrink our civilisation in the near future, whether we like it or not (<a href="https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2763500/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf"><span style="color: orange;">Turner, 2014</span></a>). </div>
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<b>No one likes either outcomes of this predicament</b> and that's why most experts are basically just arguing over different options of removing carbon from the atmosphere through geoengineering. Using machines to suck out carbon, however, is not feasible both in terms of cost and scale and could cause more harm than good. Current technology would have to be scaled by a factor of 2 million times within 2 years. That's just not going to happen. Biological approaches to carbon capture such as planting trees, restoring soils, holistic grazing, and growing seagrass and kelp appear far more promising. </div>
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Anyway, the real issue for ordinary people is <b><i>how to adapt to a world that is increasingly hostile while using less energy</i>?</b> Not wasting time listening to myths about "green tech" or believing in fantasies like "colonising Mars" or "geoengineering the entire planet"</div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-79636584687964284822018-09-27T12:28:00.000+02:002018-09-27T14:42:04.103+02:00Albatross - A sad love story<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/218502282" width="640"></iframe><br />
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"<i>Until my gastly tale is told, this hearth within me burns</i>" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge<br />
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Midway atoll, located at the middle of the remote North Pacific Ocean, is the farthest you can get from any continent on Earth. There, tens of thousands of Laysan albatross chicks lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic. Chris Jordan, artist and filmmaker, started visiting this remote place in 2009 and returned again and again over eight years to document the cycles of life and death of these magnificent seabirds.<br />
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Its a movie that moves you to tears of sadness and joy over the way the Albatross fights to survive in a world degraded by humans. Most of all, its a beautiful piece of art. Its hard, emotionally, to watch but we cannot turn our eyes away from reality. Can we let ourselves be moved deeply, to take action to transform our socities for a better future, not just for us but also for the sake of other living beings on this planet? I hope so, I sure do.<br />
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You can watch the entire movie for free at <b><span style="color: orange;">www.albatrossthefilm.com/watch-albatross</span></b>Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-52241359305712154062018-09-22T12:42:00.004+02:002018-09-22T12:42:40.967+02:00Democracy enough to handle ecological crisis? <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgox2jTrFXVkKAp8u9y-V-xrkJcE-xt7649Uc8jL17s8ShoSV2Z_Wdp0xg8zj_avPYx4tCPLXWPU9d15bL5VbCrM4n8g_KGPrVyq6COZtrONqAZNNoIkickmajT8o0BFqZ-MVrMnvbG9_k/s1600/pagoda+Japan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="960" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgox2jTrFXVkKAp8u9y-V-xrkJcE-xt7649Uc8jL17s8ShoSV2Z_Wdp0xg8zj_avPYx4tCPLXWPU9d15bL5VbCrM4n8g_KGPrVyq6COZtrONqAZNNoIkickmajT8o0BFqZ-MVrMnvbG9_k/s640/pagoda+Japan.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption">Pagoda Japan. Source: <a href="https://pixabay.com/sv/users/WaSZI-6086964/">WaSZI</a> CCO Creative Commons</td></tr>
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How to handle a crisis of overexploitation</h2>
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Throughout history, agricultural societies have had to struggle with the balance between population growth and maintaining sufficient resources to support themselves. Some failed to manage their resource base sustainably which lead to collapse or disbanding while others took measures to ensure more sustainable use of their lands and persisted. </div>
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In modern times we all assume that democracy is a better option than authoritarian forms of government. Of course no one likes the idea of abuse of power and state violence that usually comes along with such forms of government. But are democracies inherently superior to authoritarian regimes in dealing with crises such as resource depletion? </div>
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To adapt to/or manage scarcity governments may have to do some unpopular things like restricting consumption, manage usage rights of natural resources and punish offenders. Can leaders find support for such policies through elections? Its very much an open question. Small communities have been known to manage pasture lands in a democratic manner more sustainably. But today's societies are huge in comparison. </div>
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Let's look at a historical case in which the Japanese, that had relatively large cities in terms of number even back during feudal times, managed to establish more sustainable forest management through both top-down and bottom-up practices.</div>
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<br /> Forest Management in Feudal Japan</h2>
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Ecological crisis</h3>
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Japan had a serious deforestation problem 300 years ago as a consequence of a growing population and unsustainable forest use. Forests were overexploited by logging mainly for timber and fuelwood. By 1570 Japan's population had reached 10 million people and needs for forest products had increased correspondingly. With the advent of the Tokugawa shogunate and peace, followed by rapid growth of cities and construction of castles, temples and shrines, logging increased during the 1600s to a scale never before experienced in Japan. Conflict between villagers and rulers over the use of forest lands became intense. By 1670 the population had increased to nearly 30 million and all the old growth forest had been completely logged, except for in Hokkaido. The supply of timber and other forest products was running out. Soil erosion, floods, landslides and barren lands were becoming common. Japan was headed for ecological disaster. </div>
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<br />Feudal lords take action</h3>
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There were three principal types of forest land tenure during the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). Feudal lords tenure, communal tenure and individual tenure. Individual tenure failed to develop because individual land ownership was prohibited in principle by the Tokugawa Shogunate. Therefore, almost all Japanese forest land tenure was either the feudal lords tenure or communal. </div>
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Access to the forest owned by feudal lords was strictly limited and those who logged illegally were severely punished. A typical example of forest owned and managed by a feudal lord was the Kiso area that was owned and managed by a relative of the Shogun.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBQChfpQXO7xw5HI4IpeMCASOK1OJR0G0sgoEHLbDphZhB0jYtfPmEQIRDgyoShLZ3h5zzZg3xcs3Ov76VVxLcvmP0l2frvnvVWYCniK2NLcgYQxUBntuQa-QJm3FSs_BZWlxu_nSwhnI/s1600/japan+map.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="461" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBQChfpQXO7xw5HI4IpeMCASOK1OJR0G0sgoEHLbDphZhB0jYtfPmEQIRDgyoShLZ3h5zzZg3xcs3Ov76VVxLcvmP0l2frvnvVWYCniK2NLcgYQxUBntuQa-QJm3FSs_BZWlxu_nSwhnI/s640/japan+map.JPG" width="608" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The two major cities Edo and Osaka and forest management places like Kiso. Source: <a href="http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/IWAFOR.html">Iwamoto (2002)</a></td></tr>
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Before the Tokugawa period, Kiso was covered with thick forest but by the late 17th century iso forest resource had deteriorated greatly. The feudal lord therefore carried out the first reform in 1665, instituting seedling protection, strengthening of patrols and selective cutting. The reform reduced timber production by half and cut the feudal lords income severely. Only a few years later the lord ordered an increase in timber production for financial reasons. Even though the reform first failed the second reform was planned in 1724. In this reform, timber production was reduced by more than 60% and this time it succeeded, carrying on for 30 years and thus allowing the forest to recover. </div>
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Common lands </h3>
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During the Tokugawa period most Japanese people made their living by agriculture, managing uncultivated mountainous common lands surrounding their villages. Common forest lands provided a wide variety of ecosystem services such as timber, fuelwood, fertilizer, feed, clean water, erosion control etc. In the late 17th century, intensive forestry with artificial planting was begun by members (farmers) of the commons in response to increasing demand for wood. People planted valuable conifers such as sugi and hinoki and developing new techniques for planting, thinning and pruning plantations necessary for high-quality timber. Wandering scholars wrote silviculture manuals and traveled around the country spreading the new technology from village to village. Forest management stimulated new social institutions for the ruling elite and villagers to cooperate on timber production in a way that provided villagers incentives to produce timber: <i>yamawari </i>(dividing use rights of common lands among families), <i>nenkiyama</i> (long term leases of forest lands to villagers by the rulers), and <i>buwakibayashi </i>(villagers producing timber on rulers land and sharing the harvest with the elites). Slowly but surely reforesting took place. </div>
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Lessons from history</h3>
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First of, action on the part of the ruling elite and villagers did not happen until forest resources were severely degraded and conflict arose between the two. New management practices were forced upon the population and breaking the rules meant severe punishment. Reforms sometimes failed due to financial interests and needs. Relying heavily on one sector for the majority of income was a bad strategy. A more diversified income probably helped later reforms to succeed. New forest management practices lead to the development of new social institutions that were more cooperative and respectful of usage rights. During hard times forests may have been overexploited but reforestation efforts during easier times helped prevent the worst of outcomes. The feudal lords were probably not very lenient towards villagers and ordinary people must have, at first, disliked the decision to cut back on timber production and being punished for logging in certain areas. However, they adapted to this new reality and started planting trees to meet the demand. Its a case of non-democratic rule that actually had a positive outcome in terms of more sustainable use of Japan's forests. Now, it should be mentioned that forests were again overexploitation during the second world war. And perhaps the previous reforms only succeeded due to times of peace. It also should be mentioned that after the war forests, both from common and lords lands, where taken up into public lands managed by the state. But it's still an interesting example to ponder. Perhaps a mix of both top-down and bottom-up rules is needed but to achieve successful management but its hard to imagine it happening without some amount of unpopular decision-making if the society is large.</div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-68865548371635777462018-09-21T12:00:00.001+02:002018-09-21T12:00:08.556+02:00Chronic illness major cause of premature deaths<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2zIXVjdLCT-ZxVX6r8UkSl6PmFque7c-jbWDsasVKswWgVDInGv3VXW9Ld_6oTbTJNfH7L2TBqSYBe1fC85zuC_AhWaDBNYwcoxMRf5I47OENGL_JwjkFjzdErhyphenhyphen3ipXPAWDqCMbkEfc/s1600/kroniska+sjukdomar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="503" data-original-width="1045" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2zIXVjdLCT-ZxVX6r8UkSl6PmFque7c-jbWDsasVKswWgVDInGv3VXW9Ld_6oTbTJNfH7L2TBqSYBe1fC85zuC_AhWaDBNYwcoxMRf5I47OENGL_JwjkFjzdErhyphenhyphen3ipXPAWDqCMbkEfc/s640/kroniska+sjukdomar.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The probability of dying from chronic illness between 30 and 70 years of age. Credit: NCD Countdown 2030</td></tr>
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If you live in the US, China or UK you have a higher risk of dying early from chronic illnesses like cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes than people in Australia, Japan, Spain or Sweden. These are some of the findings in a detailed global analysis of deaths related to non-communicable diseases (NCD). <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31992-5/fulltext"><span style="color: orange;">The study</span></a> is a collaboration between the Imperial College London, World Health Organisation and NCD alliance.</div>
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Chronic illnesses are the main cause of premature death for most countries and a larger danger to human health than traditional foes such as bacteria or viruses. Non-communicable diseases kill nearly 41 million people every year, about seven out of ten deaths globally, of which 17 million of these deaths are classed as premature (i.e. before the age of 70). </div>
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Overall, women in Spain, South Korea, Japan and Switzerland were least likely to die prematurely from chronic illness while the lowest risk for men were Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. </div>
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According to the analysis, the situation is stagnating or deteriorating in 15 countries for women and 24 for men. A multitude of factors such as alcohol and tobacco use, pollution, stress and lack of sleep, diets and exercise, early treatment etc could be contributing to increases in chronic illnesses. </div>
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In Europe, women in Moldova (17%) and Ukraine (16%) have the highest chance of dying from key NCD and the lowest chance in Spain (6%) and Switzerland (7%). For men i Europe, the highest chance is seen in Russia (37%) and Belarus (35%) and the lowest chance in Iceland (10%) and Switzerland (11%).</div>
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The chances for men and women in the US to die prematurely of NCD is worse than in Vietnam, Turkey, Panama, Liberia, Mexico and Angola. In other words, the highest risk among all high-income nations.</div>
Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-82579784040236829552018-09-20T12:03:00.003+02:002018-09-20T12:05:06.917+02:00Tipping points in social animals<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLbmy8680oCdcKFUtKuo1GKBSJY8m4ho3r1Am21PPxx3XcC6zlXjo7fMkmPCIVJopvHVmmbUSGldmC9I2cmhyphenhyphenf_e8MJ81QGOPMxrfN4iqyxKT71imqlrxRbJcjcOcYaY6fOaNH5JwaDNE/s1600/socialanimal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1513" data-original-width="1600" height="604" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLbmy8680oCdcKFUtKuo1GKBSJY8m4ho3r1Am21PPxx3XcC6zlXjo7fMkmPCIVJopvHVmmbUSGldmC9I2cmhyphenhyphenf_e8MJ81QGOPMxrfN4iqyxKT71imqlrxRbJcjcOcYaY6fOaNH5JwaDNE/s640/socialanimal.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A hysteresis window between an environmental condition (heat) and group behavior (degree of infighting) in social spiders as they respond to heat stress. Groups that have been in an agitated state (red) tend to remain agitated, whereas calm groups (blue) tend to remain calm over a common temperature range. Credit: Mesa Schumacher</td></tr>
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<br />Complex adaptive systems</h3>
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We know that there are tipping points in many different complex systems. Although they may be hard to study and exactly define. For example in large systems such as the global economy or climate system. A recent study shows beautifully, in simpler ways, how social animals that lives in communities also have tipping points, before the function of the system changes fundamentally.</div>
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In this case the research focused on the communal spider which lay their eggs, spin webs and share their prey in cooperatives colonies, from Massachusetts to Argentina, in relatively cool temperatures. However, only until 31 degrees C, after which they start to attack each other. Suggesting a tipping point where some small perturbation can cause an abrupt and dramatic shift in the behavior of the system.<br />
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Reversal is difficult</h3>
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As ecologists familiar with complex systems all know, once the system crosses the tipping point it will be difficult or perhaps even impossible to return to its previous state even if environmental conditions are reversed. This phenomenon, called <i>hysteresis</i>, implies that a system can have two very different stable states and which state the system is in depends on environmental conditions and its historical dynamics.</div>
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Its common that conservation efforts claim that returning to previous environmental conditions in a ecosystem will lead to a recover. However, this is not necessarily true if the system has already crossed a tipping point, in which case you may have to rewind the system to a much earlier set of environmental conditions to drive its recovery. As demonstrated in the studied heat-stressed spiders, turning temperatures down just below 30 degrees C did not alter the behavior of fighting. Not until temperatures dropped down to 28 C degrees did the communal spiders stop fighting again.</div>
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Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6607795782304612990.post-75090202613201849452018-08-30T13:10:00.000+02:002018-08-30T13:10:02.576+02:00Swedish Election 2018<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ1YtcAdk6r4jC02WLFCU3VumeBhxymcT5zRhiO7QzP735tSQ5xXy30c4yOrlevxvf8UTIduczx5J4oFH6-rOOLH0_R86-sHpgPk76NCmiDb4mWLEFjO4sjQgjpJh5kkP9hPiXca4wWLI/s1600/opinion+aug+18.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="1226" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ1YtcAdk6r4jC02WLFCU3VumeBhxymcT5zRhiO7QzP735tSQ5xXy30c4yOrlevxvf8UTIduczx5J4oFH6-rOOLH0_R86-sHpgPk76NCmiDb4mWLEFjO4sjQgjpJh5kkP9hPiXca4wWLI/s640/opinion+aug+18.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Opinion poll for August 2018. Social Democrats (S), Left party (V), Green party (MP), Moderate party (M), Liberals (L), Centre party (C), Christian party (KD), Sweden democrats (SD), Feministic party (FI), Other (Ö). Source: <a href="https://val.digital/">val.digital</a></td></tr>
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The five most important issues to voters in the 2018 election are: health care (44%), education (26%), immigration (25%), law and order (24%), and environment (23%) according to a poll in the newspaper Daily News (<a href="https://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/valjarnas-viktigaste-fragor-och-problemen-de-vill-ha-losta/">DN, 2018</a>).<br />
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That environment/climate change is now one of the five top issues for voters this election is due to the extreme heat, droughts and massive wildfires this summer. The extreme weather this summer hit farmers really hard and exposed the governments lack of quick and effective response to natural catastophies. The heat dome over Scandinavia from May to June this summer has strong connections to climate change and a broken, stuck jet stream.<br />
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Such extreme weather (heatwaves, droughts, floods) is now part of the new norm. Something many people thought was years away or naively believed wouldnt happen here in the far north. It has shocked both scientists and ordinary people and made it an important issue for the election.<br />
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Some of the better proposals for green investments come from the Green party and the Centre party, tax-switching from labor to polluting/consumption and investing in public transportation. However, adaptation efforts are way behind in Sweden and no party has proposed any solutions for that. Its basically up to each municipality to implement solutions and enhance preparedness. As such, some regions may be better prepared to handle extreme weather than others.<br />
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As for how the election turns out we still have to wait and se until 9th of September. An educated guess is that the Sweden democrats will climb to become the second largest party instead of the Moderate party. Similar to what has happened in the rest of Europe, the once maginal extremist nationalistic party becomes popular due to increased dissatisfaction and lack of real change. This is very unfortunate in many ways. Not only because their policies are non-scientific and mostly rubbish but it will also hinder further investments into climate change mitigation and adaptation.<br />
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Despite this summers extreme weather bringing the issue of climate change and managing our resources better to the top of the election it may turn out that not much will change or even become worse with a new government where the Sweden democrats have more power. <br />
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<br />Fenixorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04649629372701208365noreply@blogger.com0