A thought experiment on the future

Let us imagine for a moment that the 3 largest sovereign CO2 emitters on Earth are not really all that serious about mitigating their impacts on the planetary climate system.  Leave aside the reasons; simply consider the possibility.

Now, taking that as a starting point, what are the things we would want to know in the world that will result?  And how should we determine the priority of finding these things out?

Remember we know many of the first order effects of increase atmospheric CO2 already:

• We know that sea level will rise.
• We know that the surface ocean will become more acidic.
• We know that the average temperature of Earth's atmosphere will rise (and with it over a very long time the heat structure of the oceans will change).
• We know that climate variability will increase.

It is tempting to say that what we need to know is more detail on the above; it is tempting because it is what we know how to do.  We have a very sophisticated climate science infrastructure that can run models and dig deeper and deeper into the natural science minutia.  It is safe and it is a little bit like looking for our keys under the streetlight because the light is better.

But will doing more of the climate science we have been doing for a couple of decades really help us evolve more robust and resilient societal structures?  Will it help us design storm water systems or point to entrepreneurial opportunities?  Will it help natural resource planners design forests and fisheries for the middle of the coming century?  Will it help us design healthly cities for the 3 billion residents we will add to our planet in the coming decades?  Remember we already know the things in the list above, but we have very little sense of what societies will do in the face of those changes.  And we have done very little thinking about how we would adapt to those changes on any scale.

I think that it is time to focus more on the human side of the equation.  Off the top of my head, some of my own answers to the questions I posed in the opening are the following:

• What is the variance in human decision making processes?; and the corollary, What do human decision making processes have in common?
• How do societal adaptive strategies vary with culture and geography?
• How can economies evolve to be more robust in the face of increasingly rapid change in both the natural and human landscape?
• How do human perceptions and sensitivity to risk vary over Earth?  What is the relationship between that geography and our expectations regarding global weirding?

Apologies to those who already work on these questions; my naiveté merely exposes the distance these questions currently stand from our discussions about how to cope with a changing climate.  I don't think that we should completely abandon climate modeling, but I do think we should be investing many more resources into thinking how humans will react to the coming changes.  And I think we should *carefully* think about how we spend our climate modeling resources.  And finally note that, beyond implying they should have higher priority than they do now, I have not prioritized my list of questions...

Science can only do so much...

In his column in Nature this month, Dan Sarewitz gives a very clear assessment of the current foundering of climate scientists.  He points out that in the case of climate, we have asked Science to carry out a task that is best left to Politics.

Climate science has made it clear that Earth's atmosphere is warming due to increasing accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.  It is becoming increasingly clear that that same CO2 is changing the pH of the surface waters of the global ocean in ways that will make it harder for the bottom of the ocean's food chain to function.  A number of consequences of the increasing heat content of our planet's atmosphere are also beginning to become evident, in particular increases in the variability of weather and climate.  Climate science has also established with reasonable certainty that humans have a discernible influence on the atmospheric changes that are currently underway.

Climate science does NOT tell us that these things are bad.  The scariness of glacial retreat, sea level rise and other effects in the climate litany is a human response to those things.  There is no external reference frame that we can call on that will impose mitigating or adapting actions on the part of humans.  We must CHOOSE to do those things ourselves.

Choosing what to do next has at least two components.  The first, and most argued about, is the resource component.  Should we reallocate resources currently allocated to X over to Y?  The second element has to do with norms and values.  Is switching from X to Y the right thing to do independent of the associated risks and benefits.  Science can help us place boundaries on some of the benefits and risks of switching from X to Y; but it cannot tell us which choice is better.

The choice of better is political and, as we have seen over recent decades, it has time and space varying components.  I will reiterate - there is no external framework that can unambiguously impose a choice on how we should re/allocate our resources in the face of human impacts on our planet.

Humans can, and I would say very likely will (albeit through passive rather than active means) , choose to continue to use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for CO2.  This choice makes me quite sad, and I think it will prove to be a costly folly with respect to human well being.

But the sooner that we start talking about this choice in the context of political tradeoffs rather than scientific uncertainty and foibles, the better off we will be and the better the decisions we actively make are likely to be.

Environmentalists as Tea Partiers

Yesterday Frank Rich painted a very sobering picture of the current political populism in the US.  He called attention to what I will call the growing instability of a growing segment of our population, a segment which is pretty thoroughly disaffected right now.  (Even more sobering was Dave's (who has a lot more patience with idiots that I do) comment that it is going to get worse before it gets better.)  Central to the Tea Party movement is a distrust of any government and the idea that all government should be eliminated.  In particular Rich calls attention to the invection of violence that can be heard in the rhetoric of people like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin.

The really scary bit of the Tea Party is the following:  The very angry people who identify with the Tea Party do not seem to be for anything.  But they are very much against many (most?) things.  Anger works best against rather than for.  Most of the things this populist movement is against are quite complex and I suspect only distantly connected to the real disaffection of the Tea Partiers.

Building the fear for me is the corollary of not being for something.  That is, the Tea Party does not have ideas for replacing the Fed or the IRS.  They want the government to go away, but there is no discussion of what would replace it.  (and note my rhetoric here assumes there is a thing called the Tea Party which of course is not the case).  And if Beck and Palin are successful in stirring this angry mob to violence or other sorts of destruction, what will we have left?  And will those people's lives actually improve?

It is the absence of being for something that leads me to link environmentalists with the tea partiers.  My recent post on the reading of the litany bemoaned the absence of vision regarding a positive environmental (or otherwise) future.  We need to replace the nihilism of being against everything and seeing only the bleak aspects of humanity with a positive vision of the future.

Life System Proxies: Top Predator Health

All ecosystems include food webs, and many of those webs contain a predator this is a dominant member.  Early conceptualizations of predator / prey relations characterized the system as a chain with bigger things eating smaller things in a more or less linear relationship.  We now know that the image of a chain is too simple as many species are prey in multiple food relationships and similarly those same species may eat across several of what we formerly referred to as chains.

But I digress.  The point is that in these eat and be eaten systems, be they chains or webs, there are a species that pretty much only eat.  These are things like bears, wolves, and sharks that for all intents and purposes are not normally food for other species, but do eat a lot themselves.  This species is called the top predator.

As we have learned more about how food webs work, we have learned that the presence or absence of a top predator can have a big effect on the functioning of the food system and the related ecosystem as a whole.  Sever over-fishing of northwest Atlantic cod and related predators has left huge swaths of the northwest atlantic habitat without a top predator.  As a result the food web in those areas has shifted to a very different configuration and it is not clear that the system that supported the cod will be able to re-emerge simply with simply the reduction of the fishing pressure.

So presence, absence, or change in the top predator in a food web can tell us things about how that food web and its associate ecosystem are functioning or may be changing.  Following on this a strategy that monitors the health and resilience of top predators might serve as a proxy for the health and resilience of the larger systems that those beings are part of.

Life System Proxies: Forest cover

A few posts ago I noted that I would follow with some specific examples of Earth System proxies.  I got distracted, but here is a first one...

A clear indicator of the state of the Life subsystems of the Earth system is the amount of Earth's land surface that is covered by forests.  There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that forested land is archetypal in western cultural images of "natural".  Forests house ecosystems that are more or less independent from humans; they provide homes to many of our cherished charismatic megafauna and they provide a whole host of ecosystem services ranging from materials to spiritual solace.  A couple of less obvious of these include gas exchange with the atmosphere that removes CO2 and releases O2 as through photosynthesis and moderating the hydrologic cycle - the rain forests of Brazil are sometimes referred to as the lungs of our planet.

So changes in the percentage and distribution of forest cover on Earth's land surface will change in very fundamental ways how the Earth system functions.  Prior to the Industrial Revolution (say 1776), the distribution of forest cover on Earth changed slowly in concert with other elements of the Earth system (e.g. during glacial cycles).  Following the industrial revolution and the attendant increased consumption of energy and expansion of human population that came with it, humans began to have a significant impact on where and how much forest there was on Earth.  For instance, much of what is now forest in New England, was cleared for farmland in the 18th century.  Those forests began to return as transportation corridors opened up to the west and allowed the much more fertile and easy to work lands of the midwest to take up some of the demand for food on along the East coast.

On a much larger scale (the economy is now global and removal rates are higher), similar economic pressures are driving the removal of rain forests in Brazil, Indonesia and parts of Africa in current times.  Rain forest soils and ecosystems are very different from the deciduous forests of New England and it is clear that re-growth of the rain forests will take much longer than those of New England.

If we monitor forests, where they are, how they are changing, we will be monitoring a part of Earth's Life system.  The challenge of course is to know what those variables tell us: Are those changes good or bad? and What futures do they signal or eliminate?