Earth System Proxies

For a large project that I am working on, I have been thinking about examples of things that hold a lot of information about the state of the Earth System.  And of course I have been doing that in the context of the the diagram presented here (and whose original files are no longer available to me due to the evolution of computer software and related technologies).  The bit of the diagram that is important is the middle bit with the 3 lobes.  I gave an introduction to this diagram many years ago, and some changes have occurred, not the least is that it now shows the natural / artificial system boundary that separates bits of the Earth system that are related to human intentionality from all of the other bits (and whose continued usefulness I now wonder about).

Examples of things that might represent the state of the Earth system include things like the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the state of the ENSO system.  ENSO is a great example, because it has teleconnections that influence climate variability across vast swaths of the entire planet AND we can predict it to a certain extent.  This means that in a rational / logical world we should be able to use our understanding of the physics of the ocean and atmosphere to make decisions that improve the quality of human life on Earth.  Unfortunately it is not that simple, as we discovered in the mid-1990s at Columbia.

Each member of a set of such proxies would have the following qualities:

1. It would be easy to measure.
2. It would contain a great deal of information about the current state of some portion of the Earth System; and perhaps tell us something about what is likely to happen in the near future.
3. It would be more or less independent of the other members of the set (in geek speak, the members of the set would be more or less orthogonal).
4. Changes in this measure would tell us something about whether life on Earth was getting better or worse.

In the next few posts I am going to play around with some ideas for proxies in the "Life" lobe.

On the demise of the Mean

Perhaps I should call this On the demise of the Normal.  More and more these days I encounter distributions where the median is a much better descriptor than the mean.  Of course if things are distributed normally then the median and the mean (and the mode) are all the same number.  But if things are abnormal then those definitions start to point to different parts of the distribution.

My first encounter with non-normal distributions came in graduate school as I was thinking about the distribution of elevations in topographic profiles.  Turns out that those things have a lot in common with power-law distributions.  So does the distribution of sizes of earthquakes.  And all sorts of other things in nature as well.  Then of course there were arguments about the differences between log-normal distributions and power-law distributions and how you might be able to tell in which was which by measuring things.  In the context here, it doesn't matter; neither one in normal.

I have been pondering this lately because I have been trying to write about proxies for the state of the human system part of the Earth system and central tendency indictors and variability around those have come up with considerable strength.  And now I am wondering if that most archetypal of all normal distributions - heights of humans - will stand up as normal over all of Earth.  Or does that example really only work in a suburban middle class classroom in the mid-1970s.

Which in turn makes one wonder whether in fact it is the normal distribution that is abnormal...

(ain't I clever!)

We can't rely on Magic

A defense of pragmatism in the modern world.

Between my mother’s illness and eventual death and the Vietnam War, my idealism was pretty much gone by the time I left high school. Over the years some of it has returned, but with it has come a healthy sense of pragmatism. I know the world I would like, and I am painfully aware of the world that I have. Most days I muddle along in the company of Simon and Lindblom. I know that to get to the world I want I have to start in the world I have and change it bit by bit. Every once in a while a crisis occurs that allows us to make more singular change, but that even those changes have their roots in history. And the people who live through such changes certainly carry the experiences from before the change with them.

Hence I am a pragmatic idealist. I carry with me always a vision of a world that is better than the one I was born and live in. I strive to expand my view of what is possible. I also am keenly aware that what is possible includes very real tradeoffs across politics, economics, environment and culture. I take victories where I can, rarely concede defeat, and fight to a draw most days.

When she was younger, my daughter asked me if I believed in magic. My response, as pragmatic as ever, was that I was certain that if you didn’t believe in it then it didn’t exist. Since that time, I have become increasingly open to the possibility of magic on the scale of little kids and their spirits. But I don’t think we should be betting on it to address climate change or poverty in Africa. Those challenges require that we confront the brutal facts, formulate big hairy audacious goals, and take the steps we can in those contexts. We must keep our eye on the ball, but always with an eye to keeping our options open just in case...

Another Son of Wisconsin

Warning: this post contains a bit of diatribe - not sure where that came from.

Perhaps he is a black sheep, and he did move early on with his family to Minnesota. But Thorstein Veblen is a clearly of the cloth.

I am reading Theory of the Leisure Class and have just finished his chapter entitled (yes) Conspicuous Consumption. He is clearly skirting around some of my thinking wrt Q and he is definitely stimulating my thinking about small and high quality in the developed world.

How do we change our notions of prestige? This is along the tree hugging line of living simply but it more nuanced than birkenstocks and vegan diets. We need to work toward a more responsible footprint that acknowledges the real lives of much of America. (and no I didn't forget them) We need to think about the depths of Q as we move the several billion in poverty upward

What I mean by "realism"

When I refer to realism, I am usually referring to a point of view that asserts that there is a unique and knowable world beyond the observer. In many cases this is real.

I am strongly influenced here by the literary critical frame. In particular when I think about realism, I often have something like the descriptions that Terry Eagleton (Literary Theory: an introduction, 1983, Univ. Minnesota Press) gives of the roots of the American New Critical School. In particular practical criticism and close reading. In these frames the text stands independent of its culture, of the author and of the reader:

It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. (p. 44) ... The poem meant what it meant, regardless of the poet's intention or the subjective feelings the reader derived from it. Meaning was public and objective, inscribed in the very language of the literary text, not a question of some putative ghostly impulse in a long-dead author's head or the arbitrary priviate significances a reader might attach to his words. (p. 48).

In referring to realism, I am alluding to a frame that includes a unique and objective external world. I am also asserting that things about that world can be known and that we can know with great confidence whether or not the things we know are True. There is an element of empiricism in my idea; we find out things about the world by observing them. There is also an element of linearity in my idea; we can know about things in isolation and when we put them back together again, they still make sense.