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.

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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.

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…)

• Global warming and threats of extinction of species are two different issues. They may be connected, but let’s not confuse them.
• There is ample justification for moving away from fossil fuels. This is important to do not only because of the potential threats of global warming, but also because petroleum is going to become harder to get and more expensive, because our need for it poses threats to national security, and because petroleum causes pollution of various kinds in additional to production of greenhouse gases.
• Contrary to many popular assertions in the media, we already have the technology to obtain more than ample energy from solar and wind, and, subsidies aside, the technology is economically viable.
• Biological diversity is of clear importance and we should do whatever we can to conserve endangered species.
• Experts on the fossil record and causes of past extinctions have long argued about likely causes of extinctions. As the famous anthropologist Paul S. Martin has written, “The popular answer, ‘the climate did it,’ is unsatisfactory” for extinctions of large animals during the past 2.5 million years. Martin argues that hunting by people during the past 10,000 years caused extinctions of some of the biggest, fiercest, and most famous land mammals — the hairy mammoth, the saber-toothed cat, among others. Other experts suggest that new diseases may have done it.
• Whatever the causes, the percentages of animal and plant species that are known to have gone extinct during the past 2 ½ million years — a period that saw the evolutionary origin of Homo sapiens and some of our humanoid ancestors — are much smaller than what is forecast by the new report of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change and the new “Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists” (published December 6, 2007), as well as recent assertions by others.
• Today, human actions that pose major threats to endangered species include
  • destruction of habitats of these species, as a result of deforestation and human settlement;
  • overharvesting, including poaching and international trade in endangered species;
  • introductions of exotic species, including parasites and microbial diseases
    of endangered species.
  • Climate scientists appear to be calling primarily for large reductions in the release of greenhouse gases from human activities as a way to prevent extinctions. For example, a group of more than 200 leading climate scientists met in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007 and concluded that the world must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 50% by 2050; otherwise, many animal and plant species will be “in serious danger of extinction.”
• Meanwhile, biological conservationists point to the need for better-protected areas, focusing on specific species that appear to be in danger of extinction, and whose habitats are threatened and are in areas where habitat conservation seems possible, so that actions could have desired results.
• For example, a recent scientific paper with Taylor Ricketts as the primary author identifies 794 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and conifers that are endangered but open to conservation. They write that “only one-third of the sites are legally protected, and most are surrounded by intense human development. These sites represent clear opportunities for urgent conservation action to prevent species loss.”
• The question is: Which way should we devote our resources, our time, money,
  and effort?
• Pointing to global warming as the primary problem for endangered species, and fearing a catastrophic die-off of species in the future, should we make biological conservation one of the justifications for actions needed to reduce greenhouse gas production?
• Or should we deal directly with species known now to be threatened, and work to preserve and improve habitats, prevent overharvesting and poaching, and reduce
  introductions of exotic species?
• Can we do both?
• In any case, there are ample reasons other than biological diversity to move away from the use of fossil fuels. Those other reasons should be the primary focus of policies and actions to reduce greenhouse gases.
• Finally, for those who are interested, here are some important scientific references:
  • Botkin, D. B., Henrik Saxe, Miguel B. Araújo, Richard Betts, Richard H.W. Bradshaw, Tomas Cedhagen, Peter Chesson, Margaret B. Davis, Terry P. Dawson, Julie 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. (2007). “Forecasting Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity.” BioScience 57(3): 227-236.
  • England, M., Richard Somerville, Andrew Pitman, Diana Liverman, Michael Molitor (2007). 2007 Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists.
  • Lovejoy, T. E., Lee Hannah, editors. (2005). Climate Change and Biodiversity. New Haven, Yale University Press.
  • MacPhee, R. D. E., editor. (1999), Extinctions in Near Time: Causes, Contexts, and Consequences. New York, KluwerAcademic/Plenum Pub. In particular, see
  • Martin, P. S., D. W. Steadman (1999). Prehistoric Extinctions Chapter 2. Extinctions in Near Time: Causes, Contexts, and Consequences. R. D. E. editor. MacPhee. New York, KluwerAcademic/Plenum Pub.: 17-56.
  • Martin, P. (1963). The last 10,000 Years. Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press.
  • Ricketts Taylor H. Ricketts, E. D., Tim Boucher, Thomas M. Brooks, Stuart H. M. Butchart, Michael Hoffmann, and J. M. John F. Lamoreux, Mike Parr, John D. Pilgrim, Ana S. L. Rodrigues, Wes Sechrest, George E. Wallace, Ken Berlin, Jon Bielby, Neil D. Burgess, Don R. Church, Neil Cox, David Knox, Colby Loucks, Gary W. Luck, Lawrence L. Master, Robin Moore, Robin Naidoo, Robert Ridgely, George E. Schatz, Gavin Shire, Holly Strand, Wes Wettengel, and Eric Wikramanayak (2005). “Pinpointing and preventing imminent extinctions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102(51): 18497-18501.

In his classic book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (originally published in 1941), Charles Mackay discusses how difficult it is to forecast the future, yet how fascinated and focused on this people become. Just how difficult, I came to realize today.

In researching recent literature on global warming, I came across the following quote, made in 1990: “Our projections on global warming suggest that by the year 2000, we will begin to see rapid changes over vast areas. In parts of the North, we expect to see stately old trees beginning to die back. The warmer temperature will make many trees vulnerable to insect attacks and different blights. Hikers will increasingly find themselves among dead trees. Loggers will have to choose between harvesting the dead timber and glutting the lumber and paper industries. And the diebacks will affect water supply and erosion rates. It’s really overwhelming.”

I wondered what idiot made this forecast — and discovered that it was me, in Harper‘s magazine. The complete reference is: Pollan, M., Daniel B. Botkin, Dave Foreman, James Lovelock, Frederick Turner, Robert D. Yaro. (1990). “Only Man’s Presence Can Save Nature.” Harper’s magazine (April issue) pp. 37-48.

Daniel B. Botkin
Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2007

Fifty years ago, a group of scholars and scientists — some of America’s greatest humanitarians — published a landmark book titled Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. It was one of the twentieth century’s major statements about how people and their civilizations had changed the environment. Not only did it paint the picture of what people had done that had harmed the environment, it suggested what people might do to improve the environment and at the same time improve the lot of humanity.

Nowadays we hear daily from the media and through the media about the threat of global warming and its potentially dire effects on people and the diversity of life on Earth. The general tenor of these pronouncements is negative for people. You get the sense that people, especially modern technological people, have done wrong by Mother Nature. Having thus sinned against nature, we are warned that we will suffer the consequences. There will be massive flooding and terrible storms, destroying our homes and ways of life; millions if not billions of people displaced, homeless, wandering. Fresh water will be hard to find; we will thirst and our crops will fail. Pestilences and plagues confined to tropical climates will spread, and many of us will die.

A dark picture of the future emerges that sounds like the Medieval explanation of the great plagues as mankind’s punishment for its sins. The obvious implication is that we environmental sinners must pay by becoming material and energy minimalists and misers.

But if a warmer world is inevitable, is it not worth asking what is the role of human beings in that world and how could we make that world livable? Can we more than mitigate the worst effects, perhaps create a globally warmed world where there is music, art, literature, swimming, boating, hiking, picnics, trips to wilderness, views of magnificent forests, wildlife, and ocean shores.

Some biological conservationists are using formal computer models to forecast where habitats for endangered species might be in the future. Sometimes this is cast only negatively, to assure us that our present parks and preserves are doomed. But sometimes there is a glimmer of hope, that perhaps our modern scientific tools and our technology could help us help other creatures and build a world of the future that has biodiversity, life’s wonderful variety, and might even be enjoyed by us.

Perhaps it is time to expand this constructive approach, to look back at the ways of thinking of scholars and scientists of the mid-twentieth century, who saw not only our dark side but also our bright side, and sought to move us and our civilizations to be better.

There are precedents for such positive approaches to dire environmental change. In the 1930s, in response in part to the Dust Bowl and in part to the Great Depression, the federal government, apparently from a conviction that writers, artists, and musicians, that human culture and creativity, were worthwhile and deserved support, set up the Works Project Administration including the Federal Writers Project, and provided things for creative people to do that would benefit them, as well as benefit creativity and society. Today, in a time when large federal agencies and projects are seen often as having serious drawbacks, there could be other paths to this goal: individual creativity, local initiatives, regional responses, actions from the private sector.

Those who don’t believe in global warming will probably say that this kind of activity would be a waste of money. Those who do think global warming is happening may think that this is the worst admission of our failure to avoid it. Those who believe that a democratic society only acts in panic faced with doom and gloom will oppose this as another way to assure that the worst will happen to the environment. But those who love the best of civilization and the best of human cultures and creativity should applaud this suggestion and begin thinking of the best ways to make the globally warmed future liveable and more. Those scientists and scholars who are convinced that global warming is our most likely future have a moral obligation to take constructive actions of the kind I am suggesting. Who will stand up to the challenge?

I will be putting up a list of things you can do, both to help reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and to improve our lives in a global warming world.

Daniel B. Botkin
Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2007

As someone who has done research since 1968 on global warming and its possible effects on living things, I am impressed and surprised by the great amount of attention that the media, Congress, international bodies, and people in general are paying to this issue, which seemed to be ignored for so long. 

Over the years, people have often asked me whether global warming is happening or not, and whether the terrible possible effects are definitely going to happen or not.  I reply that this isn’t the right question, that we should think about global warming and its possible effects more like the way we think about buying insurance against other natural hazards and catastrophes.

I was on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara for many years, and when I  moved there I became acquainted with earthquakes and wildfires.  I bought  a house there and asked one of my colleagues in the geology department who was an expert on earthquakes and asked if I should buy earthquake insurance.  “I don’t have it,” he said,  “and here’s why.  It’s expensive.  The deductible is $10,000.  If an earthquake strikes this part of California and does an average of $10,000 damage per house, this will bankrupt the insurance companies and the Feds will have to come in and bail them out and cover our costs anyway.  And it’s very unlikely that that bad an earthquake will happen in my lifetime anyway.  So I don’t have it.”  He was right — the damage of the next big earthquake did exceed the ability of the insurance companies to pay, and the Feds did have to come in and bail people out.

What he was evaluating was, first, the cost of the premium; second, the likelihood of the event; third, the effects (in dollar terms) of that event; and fourth, whether the insurance would likely pay off anyway.

People did the same kind of analysis for wildfires and came to the opposite conclusion. Everybody had that kind of insurance.  The premium was relatively cheap, wildfires were common and likely in one’s lifetime, the deductible was low; and the potential personal costs without insurance were disastrous.

What’s the equivalent of buying global-warming insurance?  Actions to lessen the rate of warming or offset potential effects of global warming.  The intriguing thing is that most of the actions we would take to “insure” ourselves would benefit us even setting aside the issue of global warming.  We would plant trees to take up carbon dioxide; and we would burn less coal, which, aside from its greenhouse gas contributions, is highly polluting both to mine and to burn (and especially hazardous for the miners). We would generate electricity from solar and wind energy, abundant in many places that do not have petroleum reserves; this would reduce international strife over access to oil and gas. We would increase plantings even in our cities, making urban life more pleasant.  We would lower our energy costs (when you take into account all the costs of fossil fuel energy including the oil depletion allowance and wars fought over petroleum resources. We would help save endangered and threatened species. Viewed this way, it would make sense to do the equivalent of buying global-warming insurance. 

Forget about empty debates as to whether or not global warming is going to bring catastrophe and whether it is our fault. Take action that is carefully chosen to both combat global warming and benefit living things with or without global warming. And be particularly careful not to act in such panic as to do things that are dangerous and  damaging to life on Earth.  In short, think about it the way my geologist colleague thought about buying earthquake and wildfire insurance in California.

The underlying reason that we are having trouble dealing with global warming is that we are not used to dealing with environmental change. This is true both in the history of beliefs and ideas in Western Civilization and in modern environmental sciences, which are formulated primarily in terms of steady-state conditions and theory. In Western Civilization the idea is known as the Great Balance of Nature   that nature undisturbed by people achieves a permancy of form and structure which is best of itself, for us, and for all life. (I discuss this in my book, Discordant Harmonies, and pursue its many implications in another book, No Man’s Garden.)

Case in point: In 1991, I and several colleagues published a forecast about how global warming would effect the Kirtland’s warbler, an endangered species that nests only in Michigan. The state of Michigan had set aside 38,000 acres of jack pine forest, the only kind of forest in which this bird nested, and managed these for the warbler. 

The warbler nests only in young jack pine woodlands, and jack pine only comes in after a fire. It can’t grow in the shade of taller trees, so if there are no fires, jack pine disappears. Periodic fires set intentionally in the Kirtland’s warbler’s forest were benefiting the bird. This raised the question: if the climate warms and jack pine can no longer grow in the part of Michigan where the warbler nests, what will happen to the bird’s habitat? (For reasons not completely understood, the warbler only nests in a specific kind of sandy soil found only in southern Michigan, so the bird is unlikely to migrate north.)

The computer model of forest growth that I developed with colleagues at IBM Thomas J. Watson Laboratory (available to download at  www.naturestudy.org) forecast that by 2015 jack pine would decline significantly and the warbler would begin to get into trouble.
Oddly, although there is so much written and said about global warming, and although this 1991 prediction got the attention of newspapers around the world, no one has tried to see if the forecast is turning out ot be valid. Here’s an opportunity to test at least one global warming forecast. Why is nobody taking advantage of this test? (Stay tuned.)

Forecast Jack pine forest under present climate and 40 years in the future

These forecasts are based on the use of the JABOWA forest model (see www.naturestudy.org) and a standard climate model.

Copyright © 2007 Daniel B. Botkin