I’m pleased to announce that Passage of Discovery: An Ecologist’s Guide to the Missouri River of Lewis and Clark will be published in multiple e-book formats by INscribe Digital Book in September 2011. Watch this space for additional announcements and purchasing information.
In 2001, I was asked to give the Keynote address to the annual meeting of the Henry David Thoreau Society. The talk, based on my book, No Man’s Garden, was published in The Concord Saunterer, the publication of the Thoreau Society. Here is an except from it.
Ironies of the Information Age
During the time that I have been an ecological scientist and involved with environmental issues, I have found several ironies of our modern technological and scientific information age. The first irony is that often we do not measure what we need to know. I have been involved in a lot of major environmental issues, from the conservation of bowhead and sperm whales to the possible effects of global warming on forests. In each case I find that there are key pieces of information missing that nobody has bothered to find out.
The second irony of the information age thing is that, if we do measure something useful, we usually don’t bother to use it. This is true among scientists as well as among public agencies and non-profit interest groups. We just archive information and forget it.
The third irony that, although we have the ability to gather many kinds of scientific information, we tend to solve environmental problems from ancient myths, plausibilities, false inferences, and ideologies. This means we often start with an answer that we wish were true and squeeze whatever scientific information we use into a mold that conforms to this wish. And we get very upset if people do not believe us.
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In 1968, I began scientific research on the possible ecological effects of global warming, and published my first scientific paper about this subject in 1973. During the same period, I developed a computer model of forest growth. Called JABOWA, it became one of the major methods in the 1980s and 1990s to forecast possible effects of global warming on forests and some endangered forest species. When I first became concerned about global warming, there was a relatively small group of scientists – ecologists, climatologists, and meteorologists mostly – who were thinking about it. In the years since, I have continued to do research and publish articles, both scientific and for lay people, about global warming. I devoted a chapter and more to this subject in my first major trade book, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, New York: 1990).
In all of this work, my goal was to do an objective scientific analysis and new research, following traditional scientific principles of disprovability. This research includes observations (empirical studies) and theory. Wherever possible, theoretical models have been tested and validated.
Now that global warming has become a major public issue, a great many people are speaking and writing about global warming , regardless of their knowledge, experience, research, and study of the subject. As a result, people have been asking me a variety of questions about the scientific basis of what we are being told.
A recent Sunday New York Times article features an interview with Nobel Laureate physicist Freeman Dyson, who expresses concerns about global warming and mentions tipping points. This makes a good companion piece to my post, Tipping Points, Global Warming and the Balance of Nature.
Tipping points are in the news these days because some of the well-known scientists who are concerned about global warming keep telling us that the Earth — the Earth’s global environment, that is — is nearing a tipping point. The idea is that the environment may undergo changes from which there will be no return; the Earth’s environment will figuratively fall off a cliff.
Underlying this belief that our environment has tipping points and we might be nearing one is a deeper belief: that the Earth’s environment is stable, that undisturbed by human influences it would be constant, or close to it. Allied with this is the belief that our own actions are pushing the Earth toward the edge of a tipping point in ways that have never happened before.
The idea that our environment — nature, as it used to be called — is pretty much unchanging except for what we do is an ancient belief. It goes back to the Greek and Roman philosophers, who expressed it as the great Balance of Nature: that nature undisturbed achieves a permanence of form and structure, and that even when disturbed by us, if we then leave it alone, it will return to its harmonious constancy.
That idea has followed Western civilization down the ages, and in the 20th century was a fundamental belief even among ecologists — scientists who study the relationship between living things and their environment. But as I’ve shown in my book Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century, nature has always changed. All the climate reconstructions show that change is its only constant property. To be more technical about this, modern science tells us that natural ecological systems and their environment are non-steady-state systems. The old idea about nature being constant and able to return to its constant state after disturbance is based on a classical idea of stability — the stability of a machine, like the pendulum of an antique grandfather clock. Once set in motion, the pendulum goes back and forth, but gradually friction slows it down and it comes to rest exactly where it started.
One of the things that makes it hard to accept the view of environment and ecosystems as out-of-steady-state and part of non-steady-state systems is that we haven’t had ways to think about how such systems change over time. To make that possible, years ago I and my colleague Matthew Sobel — an applied mathematician, economist, and William E. Umstattd Professor at Operations Research at Case Western Reserve University — wrote a paper called “Stability in Time-Varying Ecosystems.” (The paper was originally published as Botkin, D.B. and M.J. Sobel, 1975, “Stability in time-varying ecosystems” in American Naturalist 109: 625 – 646.)
Briefly, we coined and defined two new terms for ecological systems that insist on changing all the time: persistence and recurrence. Instead of expecting an ecosystem, say of tundra near Barrow Alaska, or a population, say of polar bears, to remain constant, we expect instead that their numbers will vary, but within a certain range. This means the bear population will persist within certain limits, an upper and a lower number. We call this persistence within bounds. If we take actions that we think might harm the polar bear populations, we can check if there is an effect by comparing its past persistence with current ranges of variation. (That is, of course, if we have the data to do this. If we don’t, we’re out of luck as scientists and our management of polar bears lacks an important scientific base, but that’s another story.)
Recurrence is similar. If an ecosystem or population is recurrent, then the condition it is in now will occur again in the future. If a population is declining and on its way to extinction, its current population size is nonrecurrent. Here’s another example. In 1938 there were only 18 whooping cranes, and there was concern that this species would go extinct, and steps were taken to protect their habitat — their wintering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Texas and their summering grounds at Ramsar Wetlands in northern Canada. This helped their population to increase greatly, and by 2007 scientists counted 237 at Aransas. We who admire these cranes hope a population low of 18 never recurs — the population never gets that low again, but that 400 or even more could.
Tipping points don’t work for non-steady-state ecological systems, because they are always changing, kind of sloshing around from one condition to another, and they don’t really have cliffs to fall off of. Life has persisted on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, during which it has evolved, changed, and adapted to changes many times. Indeed, many of the changes life has adapted to were brought about by life itself, which has altered the environment locally and globally, adding to that sloshing among system states. Living things and their ecological systems do change a lot. We can talk about changes that we like and those we don’t like, changes we consider natural or unnatural, but speaking of these as tipping points gets us off the track, away from how these things really work, and interferes with understanding what we could do, want to do, and even should do.
These are the general ideas. If you want to get into the details, please read Matt Sobel’s and my paper. Meanwhile, realize that tipping points only happen to steady-state systems, and our environment and ecosystems are not that kind. There are many helpful ways to consider and discuss the possible effects of global warming. Tipping points is not one of them.
Originally published in the International Herald Tribune, October 17, 2008.
Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2008.
John McCain has called for building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030 and 100 eventually. Barack Obama’s Web site says, “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table.”
But to what extent can nuclear power really help achieve energy independence?
There’s a problem about nuclear energy that gets little attention. At present, fossil fuels provide 87 percent of the world’s total energy while nuclear power plants provide just 4.8 percent. (All nuclear power plants currently generate electricity, accounting for about 15 percent of world electricity generation, while fossil fuels produce almost 67 percent of the electricity.)
The best estimates put the amount of uranium that can be mined economically (what geologists call the reserves) at about 5.5 million metric tons, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, today’s nuclear power plants use 70,000 metric tons a year of uranium. At this rate of use, the uranium that could be mined economically would last about 80 years.
Suppose it were possible to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear power. Suppose that we could use nuclear energy to make liquid and gas fuels to power vehicles, and could do this quickly using conventional nuclear power plants.
We would have to build enough plants to increase energy production by 17.4 times, which means using 1.2 million tons of uranium ore each year. At that rate of use, the reserves of uranium would be used up in less than five years.
Geologists also estimate that there are about 35 million tons of uranium out there regardless of the cost of mining it (geologists call this identified resources). With nuclear power replacing all fossil fuels, even these would be used up in 29 years.
Thus, if the goal is to counter global warming by replacing all fossil fuels with nuclear power, this goal cannot be met.
Advocates of nuclear power point out that it doesn’t have to replace all other sources of energy. Let’s consider that approach.
At a recent meeting, the Group of Eight major industrial countries agreed to reduce carbon emissions 50 percent by 2050. Suppose nuclear energy increased just enough each year to enable fossil-fuel use to decline at a constant annual rate, to 50 percent by 2050, while nuclear power therefore increased to provide 50 percent of the world’s energy.
At this rate of use, uranium reserves would run out by 2019, and the estimated maximum of 35 million metric tons of uranium in identified resources would run out by year 2038, gaining us less than two decades.
There are some important caveats. Exploring for minerals is done on an as-needed basis, and large areas of the world may have been little explored for uranium. Every mining geologist and mine corporation executive will tell you that estimates of total reserves of a mineral are just that – estimates – and that the reserves of many minerals always increase over time.
This approach may be all right for the planning time of mining companies, but it won’t work for a long-term global energy strategy based on adequate supplies of uranium.
Considering the enormous costs of building the large number of nuclear power plants that are contemplated to replace fossil fuels, the United States would be courting disaster if it chose this route with nothing but blind faith that there may be a lot more uranium out there if we only look for it.
We need to know a lot more about available uranium resources and where they are. If they are in unfriendly countries, they might not be available at all.
Nuclear power advocates also argue that it is possible to recover significant amounts of uranium from spent fuel. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “In 2004, two-thirds of the uranium used was newly mined; the rest came from civil and military stockpiles, spent fuel reprocessing and re-enrichment of depleted uranium.”
But the amount from spent fuels is not specified, and a reprocessing program to deal with 1.2 million tons of used uranium would be a major undertaking, perhaps not technologically feasible in the near future.
Others suggest that breeder reactors, which produce more nuclear fuel than they use, will solve the problem.
The United States experimented with a few breeder reactors from 1964 to 1994, but they were shut down or work on them halted in the 1990s.
Other nations have tried building them, and some are considering or developing them. But to my knowledge perhaps only one or two breeder reactors are in use and providing electrical energy anywhere in the world, and these are probably not “breeding.”
There are reasons for this: The technology is not there yet, and the reactors are dangerous in themselves, even without considering their potential use in making atomic weapons. They are the kind of nuclear reactors that everybody fears Iran or North Korea might build and use to make atomic bombs.
In sum, the breeder-reactor route, if it is practical at all, is a long way in the future as a major contributor to the world’s energy, and certainly not a way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels now or in the near future.
The bottom line: From what is known about resources of uranium and the present and future state of nuclear power plants, there is no way that nuclear power can play a dominant role in the world’s energy supply.
This is not to say that it could play no role in a mixed strategy involving many kinds of energy, only that those who continue to press for a greater role for nuclear power must first show that there will be enough uranium to assure that thousands of nuclear power plants built at enormous cost would not soon stand idle – and leave our economy standing idle too.
by Daniel B. Botkin, Henrik Saxe, Miguel B. Araújo, Richard Betts, Richard H. W. Bradshaw, Tomas Cedhagen, Peter Chesson, Terry P. Dawson, Julie R. Etterson, Daniel P. Faith, Simon Ferrier, Antoine Guisan, Anja Skjoldborg Hansen, David W. Hilbert, Craig Loehle, Chris Margules, Mark New, Matthew J. Sobel, And David R. B. Stockwell. Published in BioScience 57(3): 227-236.
In 2004 a group of scientists, including myself, met and discussed what needed to be done to improve the ability to forecast the possible effects of global warming on biodiversity. The result was a paper published in BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS).
In that paper, we proposed a “Quarternary Conundrum” — we found that the fossil record gave results about climate change and biodiversity that did not agree with modern forecasts. Here is what we wrote about that idea. (If you are interested in more from this paper, let me know and I will post more of it, or you can obtain it from AIBS.)
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Current forecasting methods suggest that global warming will cause many extinctions, but the fossil record indicates that, in most regions, surprisingly few species went extinct during the Quaternary (from approximately 2.5 million years BCE to the present)—in North America, for example, only one tree species is known to have gone extinct (Bush and Hooghiemstra 2005). Large extinctions were reported mainly for tree species in northern Europe (68% loss of tree genera; Svenning and Skov 2004) and for large mammals (> 44 kg) in the Northern Hemisphere (MacPhee 1999).We refer to this contrast between the implications of modern forecasts and the observed fossil record as the “Quaternary conundrum.” The resolution of this conundrum is key to improving forecasts of climate-change effects on biodiversity. Among the possible explanations are that climate change during the Quaternary was greatly different from climate change forecasted for the future; that genetic and ecological mechanisms, not accounted for in formal forecasting methods, allow the persistence of many species even under rapid climate change; and that factors in addition to climate change could decrease rates of extinction.
Some recent ecological genetics research further deepens the puzzle. For example, the risk of extinction for a species in response to climate change depends on the demography and evolution of genetically differentiated populations across their geographic ranges. If populations are locally adapted, climate change will cause conditions to deteriorate across the species’ range, rather than just at the margins of the range. Modern reciprocal transplant experiments, in which spatial gradients in climate serve as proxies for temporal climate change in the future, show that these fitness losses can be large (Rehfeldt et al. 1999, Etterson 2004). For example, a reciprocal transplant experiment on lodgepole pine in Canada indicated that global warming would slow tree growth and increase mortality, resulting in a 20% loss of productivity (Rehfeldt et al. 1999). Likewise, a study of a prairie annual in the Great Plains of the United States showed a 30% reduction in seed production in climates similar to those predicted for future decades. Ecological genetic data, in each of these cases, predicted different rates of adaptive evolution in different parts of the species’ range (e.g., rear and leading edge; Hampe and Petit 2005) but generally suggested that evolutionary rates would be slower than the anticipated rate of climate change (Etterson and Shaw 2001, Rehfeldt et al. 2002).
Until recently, it was thought that past temperature changes were no more rapid than 1 degree Celsius (oC) per millennium, but recent information from both Greenland and Antarctica, which goes back approximately 400,000 years,indicates that there have been many intervals of very rapid temperature change, as judged by shifts in oxygen isotope ratios. Some of the most dramatic changes (e.g., 7oC to 12oC within approximately 50 years; Macdougall 2006) are actually of greater amplitude than anything projected for the immediate future. Although these changes were probably not equally severe everywhere on the globe, a well-documented rapid warming did occur around the shores of the North Atlantic at the end of the last glaciation, when melting of the ice cover on the ocean suddenly allowed the Gulf Stream to reach the shores of northern Europe. There, temperatures rose rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as anticipated today for the next several decades (Huntley et al. 1997).
What could explain the Quaternary conundrum? One possibility is that migrations were faster than has been thought possible. A large literature examines late-Quaternary range shifts deduced from the pollen record, and recent papers consider models and seed-dispersal mechanisms that may account both for migration across geographic barriers and for rapid invasion of new territory. Sparse populations of several tree species are now known (from genetic and macrofossil evidence, supplemented by detailed analysis of mapped pollen data) to have persisted during the last glacial maximum in regions where very few, if any, pollen grains have been observed—regions that for this reason would be judged well outside the climate envelope for these species (Tomaru et al. 1998, Brubaker et al. 2005, McLachlan et al. 2005, Magri et al. 2006). These populations serve as advance colonists, allowing rapid population growth in newly available habitat.
A second explanation is that low extinction rates during Quaternary climate change may be partially attributable to ongoing adaptive evolution. Theoretical models suggest that adaptive evolution can enhance the persistence of populations in a changing environment even when migration is possible (Bürger and Lynch 1995). And rapid genetic adaptation to climate has already been documented for a few wild organisms for which long-term studies of field populations have been conducted (reviewed in Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2006). Invasive species have also evolved since their arrival in a new habitat in the 20th century, at surprisingly rapid rates of evolution (e.g., Huey et al. 2000).
A long-standing controversy regarding the role of people in Quaternary extinctions of large mammals speaks to the difficulty of quantifying impacts of multiple factors on species loss. The high extinction rate of large mammals has been widely recognized since the 19th century, and extinctions of large mammals and island birds over the past 100,000 years have been the subject of much conjecture. Paul Martin has made the now well-known case that the timing of extinctions followed human dispersal from Afro-Asia to other parts of the globe and that these extinctions resulted from human “blitzkrieg” overkill (Martin and Steadman 1999). But careful analysis of well-documented extinctions in Beringia suggests that human hunting was superimposed on a preexisting trend of diminishing animal population density (Shapiro et al. 2004, Guthrie 2006). These data suggest that the interaction of environmental change and human resource use can have a larger negative impact on biodiversity than either factor alone.
Copyright © American Institute of Biological Sciences, posted with permission.
The answer is: ideally the best designed house would be as close to as sphere as possible. A Buckminster Fuller geodesic Dome is a pretty good approximation.
Dan Botkin
Published originally in the International Herald Tribune
December 28, 2007
by Daniel B. Botkin
NEW YORK:
Now that the Bali conference is over and climate scientists have warned us again about the dire predictions of their climate models, a question remains: Will their forecasts come true? Given the current international focus on global warming, you would think that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, many people will want to know whether today’s predictions proved accurate.
But, in fact, people rarely look back to see if their old forecasts were on the mark. Foretelling the future has always been difficult and almost always wrong. Charles Mackay, in his wonderful 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” observes that the so-called necromancers of earlier centuries who purported to divine the future were grouped with the worst alchemists. Today, however, computers seem to have undermined our natural skepticism. Many of us put our faith in complex software that most of us cannot understand. (more…)