Name Change

I change the name of my blog today from Planetary Management to Earth Systems Management. The change reflects a couple of things. First I did a Google search on "planetary management" and got a lot of stuff that was oriented to imaginary planets rather than to the very real one we currently (and for the foreseeable future) live on. I want to steer clear of fictional enterprises because I believe that we really are making management decisions (through action or inaction) at the scale of Earth and I do not want my ideas to be confused with fiction (despite that fact that I have on occaision been known to make things up).

The second reason that I changed the name is that I wanted to get a plural noun into the title. The expansion of the number of disciplines studying Earth's functioning clearly indicates that there is more than one system at work on our planet. The disciplinary focus has taught us much about those systems. It is now time to work on understanding the interaction of those systems.

In particular our management decisions are likely to reflect the mode of our inquiry. For example fisheries managment decisions in the mid-20th Century focused only on the lifecycle of individual species primarily because that is what fishery biologists were interested in. We now know that environmental factors such as El Nino variations and inter-species interactions such as trophic structures are also important in fish stock dynamics and our management strategies are beginning to reflect this.

Begin Aside
Imagine a surface of constant but very low nitrogen concentration. If that concentration is low enough, most of Earth's atmosphere would be inside of it. For all intents and purposes, that surface would define a closed system with respect to mass (that is all of Earth's stuff would be inside of that surface (this ignores some gasses going up and some rocks coming down). Energy would cross that boundary and in the long run the balance of the energy fluxes that cross that surface are is all that we have to go on.
End Aside

I mentioned that I wanted to get a plural noun into the title to call attention to the fact that there are multiple systems to be considered. But as I have also alluded to, at some large scale there is a single Earth System. How we parse that singular system is crucial to how we will understand it and how we will make decisions that affect the evolution of the singular and plural systems.

Outlaws

I referred to the "outlaws of Guangzhou" a few nights ago (SARS entry) and would like to return to that briefly. In Kingdom of Fear Hunter S. Thompson quotes Pablo Escobar, "the difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that an outlaw has a following." Thompson goes on to note that perhaps Escobar's only real crime "was that the the product his business produced was seen as a dangerous menace by the ruling Police & Military establisments of the U.S. and a few other countries that were known to be slaves and toadie of U.S. economic interests."

Begin Aside

I think that Hunter S. Thompson is one of our unsung brilliant writers. He can be over the top, but his writing is often brilliant and his political anaysis is very good.

End Aside

The reason I bring this up is that the image I have of the activites of Guangzhou is of lawlessness not in a gangster sense, but in an operating-outside-of-the-norms sense. That was what I was going for in juxtaposing Guangzhong and Zhongnanhai.

In a recent Wired magazine article Arthur Kroeber characterizes the Guangzhou region as follows: "An untamed technology boom is sweeping through China's Pearl River Delta, where cheap labor, mass production, police thugs, and get-rich-quick dreams rule. It's a terrible, horrible, lawless frontier. And it works." The image is one of raw capitalism in the shadows of communist China and within commuting distance of Taiwan. In this teeming economic cauldron new products, ranging from inexpensive computers to hybrid viruses, are being exported to all parts of the globe with little or no overarching framework.

So the point tonight is that strong systems can emerge in the absence of guiding frames, but there are costs associated with such unfettered, large scale activites. (I can see that I am going to have to return this yet again, but enough for tonight.)

Finiteness of Earth

One of the major changes that has occurred in the relationship between humans and our planet is the realization that Earth is finite. I placed a scale on Earth’s size a few days ago – the radius of a sphere of equal volume. With a radius of about 6000km, that sphere has finite volume. Now that volume is large and for most of human history it was so large as to be essentially infinite. Resources could be extracted and wastes disposed of at no apparent cost to the present or future. This was true because the rates of extraction and disposal were small compared to the overall size of our planet.

As our numbers and capacities have increased, the fluxes of material through our societies have increased to the point that we can now “feel the edges” of Earth’s capacity. Assumptions of infinite sources and sinks must now be replaced with boundary conditions on capacity.

If we assume that there are 5 billion (5e9) people (I know there are more than 6 billion, but 5 is such a nicer number to work with) and that Earth has 1e14 square meters of ice-free land, then everyone gets about 2e4 square meters of land (about 4 American football fields) to produce and absorb all of the inputs and outputs that they need to survive.

Water is another resource that is limiting for humans (actually all life on Earth). Earth has a lot of water, but 97% of it is in the oceans. Of the remaining 3%, 70% is tied up in glaciers and permanent snow. This leaves about 1% of the total water on Earth for all of human needs. Indeed a significant proportion of Earth’s inhabitants do not have access to adequate water resources.

Nitrogen provides an example of human capacity to rival that of natural systems. I don’t have the exact numbers at hand at the moment, but very roughly, human activities are responsible for a doubling of the magnitude of the nitrogen cycle. In the case of nitrogen, humans have overwhelmed the natural system and we do not yet know what the effects of this impact will be.

Finally consider food. I sometimes start a discussion of environmental policy with our cheery friend Malthus. He certainly was concerned about issues of finiteness and rooted his policy recommendations in the assumption that our ability to reproduce would soon outstrip our ability to produce food. The doom and gloom that he expected has, for the most part, not developed because he did not consider the impact of technological innovation on the productivity of farmers. Ignoring infrastructural issues related to the distribution of food, we have the capacity to produce enough food for Earth’s current population.

This leads to the question of whether there is a largest number of humans Earth can support. Certainly there is an upper limit related to the physical space that each person must occupy, but well before that limit, is there a limit based on the ability of Earth systems. Joel Cohen addressed this topic in his book How Many People can the Earth Support? His answer is that it depends on how well you want those people to live. Thus while there are certainly physical limits, there will be cases there our values and desires establish the upper limits of our activities.

The case of Malthus brings up and interesting counter argument to what I have written so far. There are those who will argue that Earth is in fact not finite. There argument is rooted in the idea that technological will always advance faster that resources are depleted and provide substitutions etc. I find these arguments to be hopeful by ultimately not helpful. It is true that the Malthusian disaster has been steady pushed into the future by technological innovation, I think it is overly optimistic to believe that we have nothing to worry about because technologists will always save the day.

SARS and 6 Degrees

We probably dodged the bullet on this one but it provides a vivid illustration of the level of our interconnection and the vulnerability that might present. The SARS story broke right around the time that the US invaded Iraq and as riveting as the embedded reporting was, I was playing close attention to the scroll at the bottom of the screen and wondering about the priorities of the news media (but that is a different rant).

SARS seems to have had it origin in Guangzhou. It is likely to be a coronavirus and it is possible that close contact between humans and animals in Guangzhou allowed the virus to jump from animals to humans.

What is fascinating and scary about SARS is how fast and widely it spread. The speed of spreading is due to the biology of humans and the virus. The virus could survive for fairly long periods outside of the human body and is spread in droplets related to the coughing and other symptoms of the disease. In addition it seems that some people are extremely efficient at spreading the disease.

The geography of the spreading is primarily related to the extent that humans move around the globe. It has been observed many times that replacing sea voyages with air travel allows people to get from point A to point B much more rapidly than the incubation period of the disease. This allows the pathogen to mix well around the globe.

The reason I am writing about this today is an article in the New York Times. It seems that a case of SARS has been identified in the very exclusive enclave that houses the senior leadership of the Communist party in China. To me this highlights the interconnection elements of the epidemic.

Think of SARS as a tracer. There is a path from any new case to an old case. Thus there is a path from the elite of Zhongnanhai to the outlaws of Guangzhou. More impressive is that there are fairly short paths from China to all of the developed economies in the northern hemisphere and many of the better developed economies in the southern hemisphere. All of this illustrates the importance of the ideas around 6 degrees of separation.

It is especially sobering to imagine the what it would like if instead of about 6% mortality, SARS had 25% mortality and rather than superspreaders being rare, they were the norm. If this were the case we would probably recognize the problem faster than we did this time round, but given our experience in Toronto, it is not hard to imagine falling behind the curve and not being able to recover.

Enter Democracy

I ended last night with a thought experiment to meant to twist your brain regarding the kinds of policies we will need to develop if we are going to move toward something like sustainability (which is another idea we will need to come back to). Implicit in whatever sustainability is the notion/objective that all of Earth’s (human?) inhabitants have an improving quality of life (what ever that means). I proposed that we imagine the kinds of infrastructure and processes we will need to manage Earth systems that have century time scales.

The best example, that I am aware of anyway, of a policy document that has the requisite time scale to manage things like the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the Constitution of the United States. Roughly that document sets out a set of over arching objectives (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and an infrastructure and procedural frame to facilitate moving toward those objectives. It leaves tremendous flexibility regarding exactly how those objectives will be reached. That flexibility allows us to learn-by-doing.

While there is flexibility in the details of implementation, the framework laid out by the Constitution is difficulty to modify. Thus in the language of time scales, the framework of the Constitution has a longer time scale than the processes it guides.

So what is the point with respect to the title of this entry? The point is that if we are going to move toward some set of objectives, we not only have to figure out how to move, but we also have to figure out where we hope to end up and how to know if we are moving in the right direction. Democracy is related to identifying where we want to end up.

Our early framers had a bit of an advantage over our current situation. They could reasonably focus on fairly restricted geographic locale. They could reasonably assume unlimited natural resources. And perhaps most importantly, while their ideas about who exactly was "created equal" were pretty expansive for the time, it was still a pretty homogeneous set. These things made it fairly straight forward for them to agree on a set of "self-evident" postulates and a set of related objectives for their new society.

Shear numbers ensure that no such homogeneous, representative decision making body can be assembled today over the space and time scales I am talking about. Thus one of the great challenges we face as we move forward is how to deal with heterogeneity in our populations and in our geography.

Let me be clear, I am not calling for a single Planetary Constitution that is a simple metaphor to the US version. I am (at least for the moment) arguing that we need to invent or identify some set of processes that will provide a framework to guide democratic processes on scales larger than the nation state. This infrastructure will need to rooted in some evolved form of democratic principles and have time scales that are long compared to many of the natural and social processes we are trying to protect.

Time Scales


Yesterday I wrote a short introduction to spatial scales. Today I will write briefly about time scales.

Some timescales of interest:

Decision making - minutes to months

Attention span - about 15 minutes

Seasons - 3-6 months depending on latitute and other geographic factors

Career span - 40 years

Lifetime of Carbon in the atmosphere - hard to say, but a century or two is a useful approximation

Age of the United States and the time since oxygen was discovered - 250 years

Time since end of the last glacial period and the invention of agriculture - 10,000 years

Age of humans - 1million (1e6) years

Age of Earth - 4.5e9 years

15 minutes is about 3e-5 years; thus if we just take the times outlined above and restrict our attention to human time scales, the time scales of interest span somewhere between 9 and 11 orders of magnitude. This is a huge range. Even if we decide not to worry about times longer than the age of the United States, we still have management time scales that range over 6-7 orders of magnitude.

Let me give a concrete example. There is much concern about about the rapidly increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. It is pretty clear that most of this increase is due to the burning of fossil fuels due to rapid industrialization over the last couple of centuries. Carbon that was put into the atmosphere at the beginning of the industrial revolution has only recently cycled out of the system. Carbon that we are emitting now from our energy production and transporation systems will continue to influence the heat budget of our climate for about 2 centuries. Thus actions that we take to mitigate the impact of CO2 emissions will not have their strongest impacts for at least several decades.

One more point on time. Think about the amont of learning and technological advance we have seen since oxygen was discovered sometime in the late 18th century. Think about what we will learn and how things will change over a comperable time into the future. Now try to imagine what kinds of policies and practices we will need in order to accomplish long-term human well being.

On Scale (first words)

Understanding scale and scaling is crucial to the task of managing our interactions with Earth systems. There are two kinds of scale that must be considered - space and time. I will consider space first and time in a future installment.

"Think Global, Act Local" recognizes two important scales. At the large end is the scale of the planet. Assuming that the radius of Earth is 6000 kilometers, we can put a number on this planetary scale that is on the order of Earth's circumference - 2*pi*radius or about 40,000km. Note that considering the atmosphere does nothing to change this number as 99% of the atmosphere's mass is contained in the first 40km of altitude (my rounding does not see this). (More on the structure of the atmosphere)

Begin Aside As a physical scientist, I am going to work in the metric system. A useful conversion from km to mi is 2/3 (my rough value for Earth's radius is equivalent to 4000 miles, which yields a planetary scale of 25,000mi). Note also that as a I am trying to make points I am likely to be rough with numbers, but I will try to keep track of rounding to keep things close). So pi might become simply 3, pi squared will definitely be 10 (with a nod to Ms. King). The radius of a sphere of equal volume to Earth is 6371km. 6000 is close enough for me (do the math and round to a nice number). End Aside

At the small end is the local. This is not quite so clean in terms of a number. In the context of the bumper sticker I interpret it to imply the level of a community which I would scale at about 1 km. But local can also refer to one's own behavior which in its most intimate sense has a scale of about 0.001km (about 1m).

Thus in terms of space we have scales that range from about 1e-3 to about 1e4 (if you don't recognize this notation, see next aside), or about 7 orders of magnitude. I will have plenty to say about the scales in between the global and the local in future posts.

Begin Aside I am going to use the "e" format for scientific notation. Thus 1e4 is 1 times 10 raised to the 4th power or 10,000. When the number following the "e" is negative, the decimal point moves to the left; thus 1e-3 becomes 0.001. End Aside

It is perhaps trite in this day and age to observe that human numbers and technological capacity have become significant factors in the functioning of Earth systems. In particular Herbert Simon's artificial now rivals the natural in determining the evolution of our planet's future.

I saw a book today by the founder of Greenpeace. The book is called Thermageddon and, based on the jacket blurbs it argues that Earth is on the verge of an irreversible transition due to the ongoing increase in CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. The possiblility of such transition is real and we should do everything we can to avoid them, but in recognizing their possibliltity, we should also consider how we might manage the risk. Planetary Management is the effort to develop and implement managment structures that recognize the spatial and temporatl scales of human activities in relation to the functioningn of our planet.