cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome everyone
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the Biotechnology Center at UW Madison.
I also work for UW Extension, Cooperative Extension, and
on behalf of our partners, the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
PLATO, and Wisconsin Public Television, welcome to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight I'm delighted to be able
to introduce to you Professor James Pawley of the Department
of Zoology here at UW Madison. His research includes the
interface between biological specimens and physical
instrumentation, and that includes microscopes and
especially 3D microscopes. Tonight, however, he's going to
talk about something a little bit broader than that in his
interests in chaos and in global warming.
He'll be talking about climate, energy and the economy.
"A New Theory of Everything." Please join me in welcoming
Professor Pawley to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE] >> James Pawley: Thank you, Tom.
See we've got a brand new year so we can do a new theory of
everything, right? It's kind of like a New Year's
resolution. I think we're going to turn down
some lights. Am I supposed to do that?
Kaley? >> No, because otherwise
the TV won't work. >> Okay.
Well, we'll see what we can do, but the thing is that projector
isn't very bright and we may not be able to see everything.
The first thing you need to know is that this, unlike many of the
talks that you hear, is not a talk about my research in some
particular small area of the world.
In fact, I'm kind of a funny guy in the Zoology Department;
my first degree was Electrical Engineering.
And ended up talking not about microscopes or about Electrical
Engineering but my courses were about global warming because I
suddenly discovered that was an overarching problem that you
needed tremendous breadth to even think about seriously and
that really the purpose of this lecture is to say just that,
that whatever you've heard about global warming, it's much,
do I want to say worse? Well, yeah, probably, but what I
mean is more pervasive because it's not just the only problem
and it has to do with energy and energy has to do with the entire
economy. I'll try and make that case by
the time we're through. First, however, I'm going to
have a diversion off to the side because a lot of you were, you
know, watching the television over Christmas and there was a
lot of news about rotten weather in, well, a lot of places, but
in particular, in Europe, that's England, and they don't usually
have that kind of snow in England.
I wanted you to know that it was not cold everywhere.
See that little, this is the temperature anomaly how
different the temperature was in November compared to 1951 to
2000. I'm supposed to try and use my,
okay, I'll try and do that. What you see is, yes up here it
was about what, two, maybe three degrees colder in centigrade, so
that's, no, more or less twice that in Fahrenheit.
The bad news is that these areas here, these huge areas, much
bigger than the cold areas were about ten degrees centigrade
warmer. So anybody who has somehow
played this story of the weather in Europe as, "Oh well,
global warming's all over," should look at this graph
and I hope that many will. So, what happened?
Well, normally we have what's called the North Atlantic
Oscillation and in the winter time there is--
oh, dear, okay, I've got a do it with these mic--
Low, can you see this thing, because if you can't,
I'm going back to the laser.
They say use the laser. Okay, we're going to use the
laser. So if you look closely there,
that's Iceland and around there we have a lot of low and if you
look closely down here, you see Spain and you have a high there.
Of course the wind tries to go from the high to the low but
because of the Coriolis Force, it goes this way and it brings
a lot of air from the more or less warm Atlantic to Europe
which is all over there.
Now, what happened this time, is quite different.
I really need to take the mic, it down a little bit.
We can't see these. I can't see them.
and I don't think you can. Let's try that.
Is that better? Good, okay.
I think I'm going to have to turn it up again after the dark
slides. Okay, now this here, so here's
America down here and here's Africa over there and a bit of
Europe. Now we have two different lows
and highs. We've got a low over Norway and
a high sort of in northern western Canada, very different.
The result is that we have winds that go towards the pole and
away from the pole. That wind coming away from the
pole carries a lot of cold air and that's what happened.
Is this unusual? Well, yes, it is unusual.
The Arctic dipole has got a new name, I mean that's what we,
we had to come up with it as opposed to the northern
oscillation. This results in an extremely
meridianal pattern; winds blow south to north going into the
Bering Strait and north to south coming out on the opposite side
of the world. What's interesting is several
studies have been published over the past few years that
concluded that the mechanism for its formation, for the formation
of this Arctic dipole was triggered by low sea ice extent
in the first place. Have you heard about low sea ice
extent? Well, I hope so, because that's
the poster child. It doesn't matter what any
computers say, we've got these pictures of the ice that isn't
there over the Arctic ice cap. Of course it's been going down
every year. 2007 it was the lowest.
It went up a bit, 2008 and it's been up and down a little bit.
It has not recovered. It's thirty percent lower than
we expected it to be. This lack of ice has not got
another effect and that effect is, at least for awhile, cold
winters in Europe. That's about all I'm going to
say about climate and measuring temperatures and so on.
I'm going to assume that you know about that and I'll give
you a few references to go to along the way.
If it turns out that you do-- Oh, god, that's gotten awfully
bright. Is that it?
Dim, okay. Right, well we'll keep trying.
So I want to start by making clear what I mean by a
couple of concepts such as positive feedback and chaos.
These matters are at the heart of the global crisis.
How do we make sense of the world?
Now how do we interpret information out there in our
brain and sort of figure out what is going to happen next.
When analyzing how a number of factors relate to a topic, our
default assumption is often that these factors interact in a
linear manner. For example, in the world of
Newtonian mechanics or everyday life, shall we say, two
kilograms of sugar weighs twice as much as one, you know, it's
linear. You've got twice as big a
number; you've got twice as much sugar.
Two similar houses probably need twice as much energy per year as
one house to heat them. Lots of things are linear.
What does it look like? Well, it looks linear.
That's the whole idea. It's a straight line, just like
that, and the output is proportional to the input.
So we've got the output over here and the input on the other
side. One of the great features
of linear phenomena is that you can extrapolate.
You already know something, you double it, it'll probably be
twice as big. May not always be, but it'll
probably be something like that. That's a big help.
It's very intuitive, and it's where we live.
It's our normal way of living. Now the reason I'm bringing this
up is that there's a lot of things about climate change
which are not linear. What about non-linear?
Well, you have lots of things that aren't lines, right?
You've got some sort of a graph between the input and the output
that is not a straight line and there are lots of non-linear
possibilities there. An example might be that the
ecological damage caused by a two degree temperature rise is
much more than 2x greater than that caused by a one degree
Centigrade rise and so it might be a curve like this that goes
up faster than linear. The output is still related to
the input, but it's no longer simply proportional and you
don't really know what shape your curve is until you measure
it. It's a lot harder to see the
future, it's less intuitive and so we've got lots of things that
get examples from pretty about everything you can think of that
are non-linear. Okay, but things could be worse.
What do we mean by a chaotic function?
Something that is chaotic? Do we mean it's just random?
No. No, we don't mean it's random,
we mean that it goes along more or less normally and then
something suddenly happens. Chaotic does not mean random.
The output is still related to the input, but it's extremely
sensitive to some specific input values and or the assumptions
that went into driving your equation.
In other words, your equation could be nice linear, but what
actually happens when you measure it is not linear because
you had the wrong assumptions. It's counter-intuitive.
It's harder to see the future. In fact, in a way, it's almost
impossible, although you can see broad outlines of the future.
We've all heard about how chaotic phenomenon maybe have to
do with the butterfly flapping his wings in the Amazon and this
causing a tornado or some other thing and people think, oh yeah,
that's kind of unlikely. Well, the idea is, you see, by
just moving that little bit of air may be one raindrop or one
even dew drop formed or didn't form just changing the amount of
humidity in a certain amount of air, enough so that you got a
storm somewhere. Not a big storm, not a tornado,
just one that changed the pattern of the weather of the
world a little bit because we know lots of times we see big
thunderstorms, you don't have tornados, right?
We don't know what actually makes you have a tornado.
There's a lot of possibilities. But it's important to remember
that most of the butterflies you see on television, if you watch
PBS, and there's lots of butterflies on PBS, when they
flap their wings, they don't cause tornadoes.
(chuckling from audience) That's the hopeful part
of my talk right there. Sudden changes are always
possible. Let's consider this black box.
A black box is something we don't know what's inside it.
The climate's a bit like that. Wall Street's a bit like that.
We can measure some things. We measure what goes in, we
measure what goes out and we have to guess what's inside the
black box from what we measure going in and out.
We measure it and in this case time goes on and we put more
water in and then all of the sudden we pour a little too much
in and a whole bunch comes out. How can this occur?
It seems very unfair. It looks like a perfectly
ordinary black box, but the thing is, we don't know what's
in that black box. What's inside the black box is
kind of a crooked vase, well alright, maybe it's a vase
( laughter ) It's less than $5, right?
And we're pouring water in it and this is not only crooked but
it's sitting on the edge. Sitting on the dock of the bay.
No, no. On the edge of a table.
And as the water goes in, initially, there's more water in
this side than that side so there's no problem but as time
goes on, the water fills up and it's still balanced but then it
gets to the point where it's not balanced any more.
One side, oh sorry, went too fast there, there we go.
Because the side that is tall and crooked fills up, whereas
this side isn't filling up. Eventually it will fall over and
water will come all over the floor.
You've got a tremendous increase in the output.
Now how does this happen? What makes this a chaotic
system? Well first of all because we
can't really understand it until it goes bananas and then we can
imagine what is inside it and try and figure out what made it
chaotic and then it becomes linear again, except maybe needs
a couple of different equations to discuss the different parts
of its behavior. The back box contains
unrecognized constraints. The reservoir is asymmetric and
it's balanced on the edge of a table.
Beyond the threshold level, the system has positive feedback and
becomes unstable. I'll come back to this positive
feedback in a minute. We don't know initially where
the threshold is. And the time needed to reach
this threshold depends on the flow rate.
In other words, if we were doing the same experiment but we
weren't pouring so fast then we might never get to the point
where it tips over. And we might think, oh, it's
just fine, we know what's going on in there, because nothing
ever blew up on our face and showed that we didn't know what
was going on. These constraints produce
something called sensitivity to initial conditions.
Doesn't that sound a bit like, well, listening to the news?
They talk about collateral damage and they mean somebody's
been blown to smithereens. It's sensitivity to initial
conditions. What is positive feedback?
As the vase tips or starts to tip, the water sloshes to the
right, making it tip faster. In general any system in which a
small change in the output has the effect of making this small
change bigger is said to have positive feedback.
All such systems are likely to be chaotic.
Now I want to have something quite clear here because we get
psychologists down here and other people interested in other
things. In interpersonal relationships,
positive feedback, "Oh, my God, that's a nice shirt you've got,"
is considered to be good whereas, "Golly you look awful
today" is considered to be bad, especially in Wisconsin where
we're all very polite. But that's not the way it is
when we're talking about systems that we're trying to understand.
Why is that? Well, because positive feedback
brings chaotic instability whereas negative feedback is why
things don't run away, why most of you are sitting in your
chairs; you're not floating away because there's a very strong
gravitational force. Even if you try to jump up, you
wouldn't get more than six or eight feet off the ground before
you fell back down. So most things have negative
feedback and so that makes them stable.
How is chaotic different than random?
A chaotic system, large changes are logarithmatically less
likely to occur than smaller ones.
The normal example of this is earthquake magnitude.
This is all the earthquakes, or at least the top five thousand
earthquakes in 2000 in America, there was one up here almost at
eight and there were logarithmically less of them as
the magnitude got smaller. That is a perfect example of a
chaotic phenomenon. I'll give you another example:
anybody have any idea what this might be heading for?
Here we have the end of World War I and the value of the
German mark went down a little bit and it went down a little
more, that is to say you needed more of them to buy an ounce of
gold. And then things were getting
kind of serious, and then it ran away.
The difference between here and here is two trillion.
It's hard to graph this. Even if you have a logarithmic
graph it's still not linear. This is an extremely chaotic
situation, one that we should keep in mind.
There are a lot of good movies that you can see about
chaotic systems which I wanted to show you here, but because
there's so little time, I don't have them.
The original one that made people begin to think about it
was, people thought they understood the earth, the sun
and the moon and they figured they should be able to make a
computer program that would work out the position of all of those
and they find out it was really hard.
In fact, little tiny changes at the beginning would end up
producing terrible errors. So now we make very accurate
measurements and we have all sorts of corrections now, so we
do know where the earth, the sun and the moon are but it was not
easy, even though we know all the equations that we think
effect these three bodies, but unfortunately they all interact
with each other. Other systems that we cause
the feedback include the stock market, I already mentioned
that, the spring on a mouse trap, falling in love, right?
You normally have, it's when somebody looks like they're sort
of interested in you and you're sort of interested in them that
the trouble starts. Putting a microphone too near
a loudspeaker, that's the normal one right?
"Oh, I just got feedback." Okay.
CO2 in the atmosphere and surface temperature.
The good news, the outlook-- does not increase forever;
only until some other limit is reached.
On the example I have, when it falls over, it's empty.
No more water. People run out of money,
the wire hits the wood. Of course there's no mouse
there. This is an animal friendly talk.
You meet the in-laws. ( laughter )
The amplifier can't put out any more power.
That's why if you really leave the microphone in the wrong
place, it goes up to some level, it's ear shattering, but it
doesn't get any louder. Sometimes the microphone breaks
or sometimes the loudspeakers break, but the limit is how much
power can the amplifier put out. Stephan Boltzman is a relative
of mine. No, it's not true at all.
He's a very famous guy that developed an equation that said
the flow of radiant energy, right here, is proportional
to the difference in temperature between the thing radiating, and
the thing it's radiating to the fourth power.
So you don't have to increase the temperature of the planet
earth all that much for massively more energy to
escape from it. >> Is that Boltzman's constant?
That's Boltzman's constant, yeah.
Can you think of any other things with positive feedback?
Falling off a cliff. >> Yeah, so you get closer
and closer, all right. >> Baking a cake?
Yeah, I mean because it doesn't rise or maybe
because it catches fire? >> It catches fire
and then it burns. >> Right, okay.
We all went to Physics and Chemistry in high school and
some of us went later as well and we got the idea that we know
what's going on, but actually, almost everything is chaotic.
Almost nothing follows a couple of simple equations that we all
understand; very few. That's the reason that old
Newton could work out the gravitational constant just from
knowing the moon going around the earth, was there's no
friction. That's unusual.
Most of the cases there is friction.
What about stars sweeping over?
That's right. The mass of the star is just
a little bit too big, it goes supernova; a little bit smaller,
it doesn't. Very good.
Okay. That's another example.
You can roll a snowball down a hill.
Usually it doesn't cause an earthquake, I mean an avalanche,
but sometimes it does and if you graph the number of avalanches
versus their size, you get that same curve that you get for
earthquakes. Why go into this?
Because of the factors that determine, many of the factors
that determine climate seem to have positive feedback.
Ditto for the economy. Warmer ocean causes more water
vapor. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas,
so the planet gets warmer. The Ice-Albedo effect, you've
all heard this, I'm sure, ice and snow is brighter than water.
Everybody in Madison knows that. We can all look out at the lake
so obviously, if the planet is covered with snow it reflects a
lot more light. It doesn't have to emit it at a
longer wave length because it emits it at a shorter wave
length. We've all seen satellite
photographs on the Weather Channel of the northern half of
the continent right now being covered in snow.
Well, the reason it looks white is that that light is reflecting
up not just to the little bit that hits the camera for the
weather camera, but to space generally.
So if you have less snow, you reflect less and that means you
absorb more and then you have to get rid of it somehow.
Methane from permafrost is a greenhouse gas and therefore as
the permafrost warms up and the methane comes out, we have more
heating, more permafrost, around in circles.
Less coal power, which we are going to have to have will mean
less sulphates in the air, especially from the parts of the
world that don't scrub the sulfates right now.
We've started to do that and we will get less cooling from that.
Less cooling you say? You mean coal powered power
plants were good for something? Well no, they weren't good for
something but they have been hiding much of the heat, the
heating of the earth that has been going on for the last sixty
years by putting a lot of sulfate aerosols into the air,
very white aerosols which reflect a lot of light and have
cooled the earth. Warm winters caused the mountain
pine beetle to grow real fast. It kills lots of trees and by
lots, anybody been to British Columbia?
Nobody has been to British Columbia?
You should all go there and try and make sure you make some
friends. You may need to move north soon.
( laughter ) But when you go there
you'll find that large areas of British Columbia is nothing but
trees. It's the size of Washington,
Oregon, California and half of Idaho and I would say two-thirds
of it is covered with trees and maybe a half of those have died
in the last five years from mountain pine beetle.
And you know what happens to a dead tree?
Well it sits there for awhile and eventually it falls over and
some animals or some bugs eat it and they turn it into CO2, which
is not a good thing, but it's worth keeping in mind because
the Canadians, of which, by the way I must confess I'm one, were
asking for special treatment on Kyoto.
They said we've got all these trees, their sucking CO2 out of
the air. We ought to get credit for that.
We ought to be able to waste more hydrocarbons.
I don't see them lining up to say, well, actually we just lost
a lot of those trees and therefore we ought to use less.
That's the problem with offsets, do not consider them.
More CO2 in the ocean lowers the pH just like Coca Cola, means
that less calcium carbonate is deposited in coral and then
by dinoflagellates and -- This is a major problem,
one which we only thought about about eight years ago.
This makes the climate chaotic and the details unpredictable.
Meanwhile between 1950 and now, or like 2000 actually, sort of
distant past, I guess, before China really got going, human
population doubled, world economy grew seven times,
agricultural output tripled and now utilizes forty percent of
earth's land surface. Water use has tripled.
In the U.S. it exceeds rainfall.
CO2 production has gone up by 500 percent.
Humans and their animals, this may be a surprise to some of
you, represent about 98 percent of vertebrate biomass.
I want to put that in ordinary words.
I mean our cows and pigs and chickens, less important, and
dogs and cats, I guess if you really want to count, and us, of
course weigh about fifty times more than all the other animals
that look kind of like us; that is to say, ones that can run
around, the vertebrates. We're not talking about fish,
we're just talking about terrestrial animals.
That's unusual, huh? The planet stayed about the same
size during this period. Ninety percent of the large fish
are gone from the oceans. Now I don't mean that they are
extinct, I mean the fish aren't there.
There aren't as many big swordfish, big tuna, big
anything. We didn't know it was so bad
until a few years ago. Somebody went back and actually
measured or got some reports of what it used to be like a
hundred years ago when you went out fishing for these critters.
The whales, of course, are gone. You may say, well, we can do
without whales, we don't need whales in Wisconsin, anyway.
Even the Welsh don't think that you need whales.
But, of course, they have a lot to say about the rest of the
ocean ecosystem. They eat the krill.
The krill eat the plankton and it turns out that they do have a
lot to say about how the rest of the system works and in
particular what color it is. Why is that important?
Well, that's the albedo, remember?
Ocean absorption of CO2 seems to be down, that's the last couple
of years. We don't know why.
We hope it's just because the krill, the krill crashed in the
southern ocean. The U.N. estimates that
invasive species now cost five percent of the world's GDP.
Five percent. I think if you counted as
invasive species all of the diseases that are communicable
and have been carried around the world by humans, might even be
worse than that. But that's just something, some
money we just don't have in the bank anymore.
Every year we have to pay. It's like interest on the debt.
It's not just a few zebra mussels out there
or the -- Well, we don't have them here,
yet, but it's getting warmer, right?
Okay we'll leave cane toads out of it for a minute, but cane
toads are a big problem in Australia, that's for sure,
especially if you have a dog. The dogs chase the cane toads
and they're poisonous and they die.
The dogs die. Fifty percent of the forest
that remains is being cut and a lot of it is dying
like I mentioned with the mountain pine beetle.
Fossil, fresh water supplies are being exhausted, not just in
Texas and throughout the major water basies in America,
but particularly in India, in Gucharat--
and in China, to a less extent, well just as important, but--
By fossil, do you mean aquifer?
Deep aquifer, water that's been there a long time.
Forty percent of the land's surface is already used for
crops; I already mentioned that. Another one that we hadn't
thought of but which fits in with the whole thing, there's a
website that keeps track of all the wars that are going on so
that you don't miss one. There's thirty six of them going
right now. Some of them have been going for
eighty years. Well, why is that important?
Well, because the problems we face are global programs and
it's an awful lot harder to get people to agree to do sensible
things if they're not shooting at you.
The economic system has just collapsed.
I know somebody is going to say, oh, no, it's not collapsed.
The Dow Jones is back up to whatever it is, 11200.
That's another talk. Chaos seems to be an important
factor in all of these. One way that we haven't talked
about is sort of a psychological way.
Here's by the way, in case you're wondering what this is
going on up here; this is the last straw, right?
That is definitely a chaotic phenomenon.
Science is, or at least was, seen to be the most reliable
source of accurate and reliable knowledge.
Now it's Glenn Beck. ( laughter )
What was less stressed by the scientists and I fault the
scientists for this was that such knowledge is always
incomplete and we didn't talk enough about chaotic phenomenon.
We gave the impression that we knew what was going on when we
didn't. And we knew we didn't.
By emphasizing those aspects of our knowledge that were likely
to produce short term profits, and ignoring the rest, we've
built a society that is much closer to chaotic collapse than
we dared admit because these things that we've been ignoring
because they didn't make any money are getting more and more
important. The practical reason for
ignoring this fact is that any realistic analysis is likely to
destroy the confidence thought necessary to maintain what
relative stability we do enjoy. How do we get out of that?
If we're so frightened that people are going to panic that
we don't tell them that we've got something really serious to
deal with, how do we ever take it seriously?
I think the best recent example was AIDS.
I was in California when the first four cases came up and as
soon as they said it attacks the white blood cell, it was obvious
even to me, who is not a doctor but knew some biology, that any
infection that destroys the policeman of the body was going
to be big trouble. But we didn't get anxious about
it at the beginning because the people who knew about it were
sort of left wing. I thought myself that way.
And we did not want to be seen as anti-gay.
( inaudible ) Well, now, what, 25 million
people, or 35 million people is it, have AIDS and
20 million of them have died. Maybe we should have been
willing to put up with a little incomfort.
We've got the same problem now only now it's worldwide, except
for those of you who don't eat anything.
I mean anything. So, we've got this
don't rock the boat syndrome. It seems like a perfect chaos
conundrum. Let's talk about some of these
aspects of this problem. Thirty years of oversimplified
economics has produced not only economic collapse, but also a
populist ignorant of environmental challenges that we
face and distrustful of the larger structures in society
needed to orchestrate any meaningful response in the case
of carbon, of global warming, we need a massive carbon tax.
What do I mean by massive? If you look at the amount of
energy in a barrel of oil, it's the same as a person working for
three years day and night. How much do you pay for a person
working for three years for day and night?
Even four thousand dollars a barrel would be cheap.
So if we just wait till the price goes up so we'll stop
using it, that's not going to work.
Applied psychology in the service of narrow interests has
actively abetted this ignorance and distrust and you know who
I'm talking about. The complexity and chaos of the
interacting problems we face make accurate and precise
answers impossible. People have been taught that the
only things that they should ever respond to are things that
are accurate and precise. The caution and narrowness that
must constrain science is poorly suited to motivating social
change. We've been pushing the idea of
growth, but we have a problem, a contradiction.
Modern civilization is the child of cheap energy.
If we burn, I'm sorry that's a typo there, if we burn much more
carbon, climate will crash and the resulting lack of food will
produce starvation, wars, and that will drastically effect the
whole planet. I know that sounds inflammatory.
I would like to stand by those and defend them if anybody wants
to talk about it as we go. Ergo, carbon based energy use
must decline. Applied psychology has improved
political advertising to the point that western politics no
longer acts as a stabilizing negative feedback.
You can't have people analyze the real world that is facing
them either because they don't seem to know how to do it or
they listen to people who do it for them in a very biased way
and that's too bad. If proof cannot be the solution,
what can? So far, the necessary
uncertainty of science, because science is never precise, it's
just getting better and better, was used to imply that these
problems might be less serious than they seem but as many
factors are likely to have positive feedbacks, they're
likely to be chaotic and so the situation may not only be worse
than is estimated, it may be possibly much worse.
How bad is it? Well, John Foley, who was our
star on campus until he was stolen away to Minneapolis,
wrote a paper with some other people, in fact a large number
of other people, called "Planetary Boundaries" where we
find a number of different factors that are understood to
be important about our future: biodiversity laws you can see
down here, atmospheric aerosols, you might not worry about that
but it turns out it's very, very important, chemical pollution,
you've all pretty much heard of that, you know about climate
change. In other words, there's a whole
stack of these things here, not just one.
He's got some sober talk in here.
This is from "Nature" magazine by the way, this is a serious
scientific journal, probably the most serious.
I'll let you read that by yourselves.
As seeing that we're getting short of time here, I'm going to
have to move along. These models do not include the
stuff he's working with, even though he's come up with this
bad news, do not include the long term reinforcing feedback
processes that further warm the climate such as the decreases in
the surface area of the ice or changes in the distribution of
vegetation. So even then, he had a problem.
I should have pointed out that the green area here, if we can
keep the red arrows inside the green, then we're alright.
Some of them are in, some of them are way out.
One of the ones over here that's way out, by the way, is nitrogen
production. I don't mean gaseous nitrogen, I
mean fixed nitrogen; nitrogen fertilizer.
Of the nitrogen that makes up all of the people in front of me
probably, two thirds of it was not made by bacteria or
lightning or the old ways of making nitrogen for plants, but
was made in a chemical factory using energy probably from
fossil fuels. If you think that these are
exaggerations, I encourage you to read this book.
It's been interviewed; this guy's been interviewed several
times on NPR, particularly Wisconsin Public Radio.
His name is Guindar. He had a series called "War a
Long Time Ago." He's a military historian.
It's all based on stuff from the Pentagon, which we know is a
wacko, pinko, left-wing group who fly off the handle with
outrageous suggestions all the time.
So, what are these tipping points?
Well, you can see the ones that we're most worried about right
now: climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and nitrogen.
It's a long article; I won't try and go over the whole thing.
There's also a moral question. We're all sitting here very
comfortably, probably had a good Christmas dinner a little while
ago. If we look at the average CO2
per capita and we make a map of the world, see America comes out
pretty well here. I gotta tell you, the Canadians
are pretty bad per capita, too. If you see where the damage
goes, this is estimated 160,000 deaths per year right now.
That was in 2004. It's much worse now.
I could tell you why, but we have one of the great experts on
this topic on campus here. His name is Jonathan Patts and I
gather he's already talked to you earlier.
You can see that the damage is where, these people aren't
causing the trouble, but this is where the people are suffering
the results. We've all seen these sorts of
pictures. Who's responsible?
This is the annual emissions and this is the cumulative emissions
and again it's the same thing. The U.S.A. is very high.
If we work it out per capita, it is pretty much the same story.
Of course Africa doesn't show up at all.
The Canadians and the Americans are worse in tons per carbon per
year but over a cumulative period of time, the United
Kingdom comes along because, of course, they started burning
coal earlier. We started doing something about
smoking, not because it killed people, but because it killed
other people. When are we going to start
thinking about global warming that way?
If things are so bad, why do they look so average?
As you well know, we have a well known optimist.
He always thinks he can catch this little blue guy.
He's always going a little more enthusiastically than he should,
but in the long run, gravity wins.
I'll read this to those who can't read it,
because it's too far back. These scientists did this
experiment that if you drop a frog in boiling water,
it jumps out. We don't do those experiments
any more. But it you put him in warm water
and heat it slowly, he just swims around until he's cooked.
What's the point of that experiment?
Beats me. Scientists, go figure.
Probably the same ones studying global warming.
How did we get into this mess? It's the broadest topic
imaginable. It covers, I should think, three
quarters of the departments on this campus.
It's also new and there's many things about it we don't yet
understand, and so we need university types to do the
unbiased research to find out what is important and where we
stand, but these young university types are often
appointed on the basis of having demonstrated exemplary expertise
about a specific topic. The need for expertise,
especially when you're young, encourages people to be narrow
and not to see the bigger picture.
How do we get these experts to reach out of their boxes of
confidence to confront massive interacting problems?
There's one of them up here now and I hope that there's some
more in the audience that they'll come up here too.
The biggest problem is climate, okay.
In the beginning there were some weather guys, they seemed
worried about this Keylor plot, that was that plot that showed
the CO2 was going up in spite of the fact that everybody had
believed for eighty years that that would not happen, no,
sorry, sixty years, that that would not happen.
Nobody bothered to measure it because it's really hard to
measure CO2 unless you happen to be on the top of Mauna Loa,
which very few scientists were at that time.
There's very few places where it's not disturbed by cars going
by or trees sucking CO2 out or the reverse.
"It's not my department," said Werner Von Braun.
Some of you are old enough to appreciate Tom Lehrer.
Vague grant applications don't get funded.
And if you don't get funded, you don't get tenure and we realized
that apart from being appointed, you also have to be tenured in
order, you can come up here and talk about broad things.
But at meetings, they found others that were getting strange
results. Each had thought they were the
only ones getting strange results.
After awhile they noticed it was all the same.
If you want to look at the history of global warming, look
for "Discovery of Global Warming" on the American
Institute of Physics, another left-wing group, just full of
physicists. You know how crazy they are.
It is a book, basically. It's beautifully cross
referenced. Somebody's name comes along, you
can find out who he is, what he did.
Any topic technique used for measuring you click on it, you
can find out. It will take you a couple of
days to read it all. It is not an easy website.
It has a few, it's not a lot of graphs, it's text.
I think all these people here know how to read, so that's a
good step forward. Experts understand some of the
details, but they can miss the big picture, and that is kind of
what we've done. Worse yet, what if the details
interact? The climatologist says business
as usual will cause 4.3 degrees warming by 2100.
The ecologist says, 4.3 will change what plants can thrive
where. In other words, all of the
plants that live on the planet are crucially dependent on the
temperature and of course the rainfall.
The agronomists, human food comes from plants, that's
important. The economist, find some
substitutes. For food?
Lower the taxes, that's the general solution.
Sociologists; starting societies are unstable.
The general says instability must be quelled, increase
military spending. Bean counter says more military
spending, less for mitigation, less for solar cells and wind
turbines. Publicists, can't we just fake
it until I retire? Fire those ecologists.
Feedbacks: dead plants give up CO2, change the albedo, etc.
Feeding back to the beginning.
In fact almost all of these feed back to the beginning.
All of these fields are chaotic. The climatologist, who'd of
thought dust would be so important?
Nobody until a little while ago. By a little while, I mean about
ten years, okay? No measurements, very hard to
work with, turns out to be crucially important: no dust, no
clouds. Very, very, very important.
Ecologists, well, I meant 4.3 but with the same rainfall.
But maybe you don't get the same rainfall.
Make people pay for the water. We often change our theories.
We went from Canes to Hayek. We may be going back to Canes or
in fact, I hope we go to something completely different.
Birth rates can change. Big surprise there, etc.
But we could turn some of these things backwards.
We've not walked into this, we've run into it.
And we've run into it pushed by these people and these people
very often. They can push us out of it if
they want to. It is a mess.
How to proceed? The economy is what everybody
thinks is important. We saw that in the last
election. We must talk about that.
So, we've talked about eco-system services like rain
and sun and temperature. Sustainability does not equal
growth. That is to say, you can't have
growth and sustainability because growth requires more
energy and not less and we must use less.
We must remember that the economy is really inside
the ecology and it's really not about money.
It's really about how we use energy.
Because if we don't reduce the CO2 to something like
350 parts per million soon, and by the way, it's way past
that now, it's around 390, little of what we call
the economy will survive. All the important variables are
chaotic. We need to realize it's a huge
question. Because economics is chaotic and
has positive feedbacks in it, it is impossible to make useful
measurements of any of the important parameters constrained
by strong feedback, either positive or negative because the
cause has become confused with the effects.
You can't tell one from the other, which is why economics
Nobel Prizes are given for opposite theories on alternate
years. Of course, you know that they're
not really Nobel Prizes, they're actually something dreamed up by
the bank of Sweden. Consequently, accurate
predictions are impossible and we should start remembering
that. Scientists are never entirely
right, but we are often quite a lot right and we get better over
time. There's no chance to do that
with economics, I'm afraid. The apparent success is
as likely to be caused by, so here we have, at any time
there's a variety of analyses and predictions and if you wait
awhile, something will happen and you look backward and say,
oh yeah, he said that was going to happen.
And you all feel that we now understand it, but we don't.
It was just chance most of the time and we followed this again
until it crashes and then we try something else.
It's more religion than a science the way it works,
largely because people get rich believing it will work.
If you get the herd going in one direction, you see the herd
going in one direction, you can make a lot of money off them.
What is it? It's how we apportion scarce
resources. The problem is, the present
system varies the sources and the sinks of these resources.
Where we get things from and where we put them is zero.
Unfortunately there is called externalities and we don't talk
about them, they're not part of the system, and makes the
talking and the math easier, but unfortunately, it makes the
system irrelevant. Now the sink for our favorite
energy source is full and, this is particularly serious because
energy cannot be recycled and there is no substitute.
No energy, nothing happens. Here's what I mean; for most
of history, the energy we used was recent solar energy, usually
food feeding people or horses. The sun came down, made the
food, made some muscle power, we did something with that and
ended up with some stuff. The industrial society changed
all this. Most important change is that
food muscle power now represents less than one percent of the
energy utilized to make modern society functional.
Virtually everything you buy exists only because vast amounts
of energy were used to make it. Let's see how that might work.
How do we make a product? There's the product, we have
some inputs: raw materials, factory, labor, management,
finance, specs, you make this as long as you want.
And down at the bottom is energy.
They usually give that about eight percent, but that's a
great mistake because there's inputs to those inputs.
Somewhere there's some mineral in the ground and you dig it out
and you concentrate it and you fabricate something out and
transport it and you sell it to this raw materials in the
beginning, okay, and the same can be true for most of the
other ones. But this doesn't happen by
itself. You've got to have a whole bunch
of machines for that and you've got to have some people.
You've got to have some wages; all the wages is quite a lot,
but what do you use the wages for?
You use the wages to buy machines and to buy stuff.
And what is that stuff? That stuff is the stuff that
comes out at the end here and you need energy to make all of
those things. So basically wages are just
tokens that allow you to buy things that were made with
energy. We need new economics.
The present system has lead us to the pit we're in.
Something completely new is needed.
The externalities are no longer external.
Regarding climate, we know three things for sure.
There's an overarching requirement that climate change
stay less than two degrees and we're already committed to about
one point two. That's pretty serious, because
even a simple cigarette lighter plus a dry forest is now a
weapon of mass destruction. Massive inequalities in income
distribution are no longer, can no longer be sustained.
Everyone now has a veto, everybody because everybody's
got a, can start a fire which will mess up the whole system.
There's a new metric for economic activities and
processes and it must be the utility for energy.
Even if this means that human hands have to do more.
A sewing machine is a great idea.
Any idea how much a sewing machine uses in the way of
energy? No, not zero.
You don't plug it in, it doesn't work.
I can tell you that for sure. So you all require about seventy
watts when you're sitting here. If you're thinking real hard,
maybe a hundred watts. And when you're walking home
maybe a hundred watts. But some of you are more like
fifty watts, actually, because you're just not that big.
Us fat guys, a little more. A sewing machine is about the
same, but a sewing machine will let you sew what, ten times
faster? >> It depends how much high
tech it has. >> That's right.
One of those big sewing machines, maybe three hundred
watts; the ones that go bzzt, bzzt.
It's not random that steam was first used to make clothes, to
make cloth, to spin yarn. Even two degrees centigrade will
affect the ecology. More will be a catastrophe, and
by that I mean if the positive feedbacks run away, serious
scientists suggest that the population of the planet at the
end of the century will be five hundred million.
So, let me see, you're dead, ten, ten, ten, seven.
one; okay there's one in thirteen is alive still.
The economy must defer to the science.
When people starve, they go to war, when they go to war, they
kill each other. And right now we have some
failed states where that's happened but there's other
people to send--, and so on to bail them out.
How many failed states can we have?
If China is a failed state or India is failed state; we're
worrying whether we can even bail out Ireland.
I'm not against Ireland. We've got the idea that our
current well being has something to do with the perfection of
western economics, but actually it has to do with the fact that
since the time of Adam Smith we've been able to access vast
amounts of almost free energy. Now here's the numbers that I
just told you, so that's when you're working, right, not just
when you're asleep. You can output about two hundred
watts over a fairly long period of time.
This absolutely constrains what he or she can accomplish without
assistance. The average American is the
beneficiary, on the other hand of twelve point four five
kilowatts of power being utilized somewhere else in the
economy all of the time. Somewhere else, twelve point
five kilowatts. So that is approximately
fifty times, well these two is almost a hundred times each
other and so that means that somewhere in the economy,
somewhere on the planet, you have hydrocarbon slaves working
day and night with no food, lodging or fabrication costs and
all the energy comes from burning fossil fuels.
That's our energy use for the last little while, since about
1975. It hasn't gone up much but
actually it's a bit misleading because it ignores all the
energy embodied in all the imported goods, all the energy
that was spent in Japan to make all those nice cars we use, or
in China for all the Christmas presents.
We need to reboot, the period of cheap energy is coming to an
end. One way or another we're running
out of supplies apart from everything else but much more
important is the sink for the waste products is overflowing.
We need to do a totally new system; an economic framework
not based on energy is irrelevant or even dangerous, in
fact it is dangerous. So to the economists in the
audience, stop. Just stop.
FDR closed the banks down for three days to sort things out.
Take three days. Close down the shop, go back to
school, learn about energy, it's easier than business.
You can't cheat on the accounting, right?
You never get more out than you get in.
It's really easy to check that. You always make some heat.
Learn enough about climate and ecology to be convinced that the
system must be changed massively and rapidly.
Then develop new rules, impose substantial carbon tax of
something like fifty to a hundred dollars of ton of carbon
or three times that per ton of CO2.
Remember the CO2 has got a lot of oxygen in it.
It weighs almost four times as much as the same amount of
carbon. And if you're going to have any
offsets, if you're going to have some of these cap and trade, the
only offset should be for CO2 that is captured and stored
directly by the person doing the offsetting.
Not paying for somebody not to cut down some trees somewhere
because some mountain pine beetles may come down and cut
them down for them and then you're stuck.
Trade with no country lacking such a tax, use your
advertising moxie to sell the necessity of the above, fund
massive worldwide education starting with this room and
proceeding to our political and commercial leaders.
The scientists need to change some stuff, too.
Science is not about certainty, it's about doubt.
It was when we started saying we don't know that we started doing
some science. Religion is about certainty,
that's fine, but it's not science.
While not perfect, science is the best way we have and we need
to start admitting our limits. Science is very sure of four
things: the planet's surface is getting warmer, mostly because
of changes caused by humans, even two percent; two degrees
rather will be a major change. More will be a catastrophe.
Alternative energy sources and massive conservation is
possible. If we reduced our use, per
capita use in America by eighty percent it would only take us
back to 1969, you know, when we lived in caves.
( laughter ) You'd have to go back there with
the kind of insulation we have now, not the kind
of insulation we had in 1969 because that was before the
oil crisis. But we could live at the same
level and that was, we still had a war going, different war.
A war that this campus did something to stop and
unfortunately has done nothing to stop these most recent ones.
New factors arise. They will, because we don't know
everything certainly and the prescription for the most
effective response will change. In other words, I know the
scientist; the politicians want you to say, well, we want to
know exactly what to do. We don't know exactly what to
know. We know some things will work
better than others. If you want to follow this up,
there's a great paper you can get online and I know it's a
great paper because all I put in was "uncertainty," I think I put
"conservation," I might have put "fish" in and "science magazine"
and google found it first time. A lot of people look at this.
It's a history book, I mean a history lesson in a science
magazine. Well, that's a good idea, good
idea. And what it basically says is
during all the various fish collapses which they count,
people knew they were going to collapse, but the guys who
wanted to pay the mortgages on their fish boats had more
incentive to go fishing than the people who knew that it was
going to crash had to do something about it.
Anyway, they suggest a number of things.
Decision making in the presence of uncertainty; be cautious,
include human motivation in analysis.
Consider the source is another way of considering that.
Act before complete scientific consensus.
Yeah, I'm a scientist saying that because we never have
complete scientific consensus. We never have had as complete a
consensus as we have about global warming.
It hasn't had the slightest effect.
Not to this country anyway. Individuals have, individual
cities have, even states have, but the county generally has
not. Hedge, that means were not
only going to do this but I'm going to imagine that maybe it
won't work and I'm going to try and save, no, I'm not going to
go over the cliff once I notice that we're going in the wrong
direction. Distrust all claims of
sustainability. Some of them will be more true
than others. Use the ones that are more true.
Confront uncertainty. Consider many alternatives.
Choose actions that are robust to uncertainty, in other words,
that even if the numbers are a little bit wrong this will still
work out. It'll still help.
You know one of the best of those, put some more insulation
in your attic. Replace your windows; anything
that means that you need less energy will mean when energy is
very expensive, you will still need less energy and that is
something which will be very valuable.
Update assessments. In other words, keep watching.
Modify the policy. Favor actions producing data and
monitor the results. Favor actions that are
reversible. Nothing very surprising.
This is just what ordinary people do in their houses,
right? We'd never know everything about
which college Johnny ought to go to or whether you ought to take
AP Physics or band, you know. Maybe he's going to be a jazz
great. Who can tell?
But we still have to make these decision and we've been putting
off the decisions because we've been thinking, oh well, we'll
soon know more. Well, we know enough.
We know enough. We're really deep in the soup.
Any change requires the consumption of energy and the
production of heat. That's thermodynamics.
Any change, any change. Thinking about it, blinking your
eyes; any change. Fossil fuel energy represents
not eight percent of the economy, but ninety eight or
maybe ninety nine or even nine nine point nine, but a huge
fraction. Essentially all terrestrial
energy flows and stores represent solar energy in one
form or another. Before the Industrial
Revolution, we lived on solar income, now we live energy out
of the bank. The sink for these flows has
been the atmosphere and it's now full.
Will the economy collapse? Well, yeah, to some extent, but
it already has for one thing. I mean, we can pretend that it
hasn't, but there is, no, that's another whole talk.
So I won't go into that. Manufacturing in Wisconsin is
not what it was. I think you all know that.
Leaving aside the matter of whether it already has
collapsed, if we don't reduce CO2, we're going to have a
collapse that will be permanent, that we'll never come back from
because there won't be the energy to do it and then we
won't be able to live on most of the planet's surface.
Good news; only seven percent of the economy is needed for
clothing, shelter, in other words the things you really
need. And by the way, a lot of those
things come from Wisconsin, particularly the food.
Fifteen percent, if you include all the basic services,
including government and medicine and basic fire and all
of that sort of stuff. That's a total of fifteen
percent, not fifteen plus seven. Eighty five percent of things we
could get along without. Now don't look up here too
closely because I might be in that part.
The U.S. produced no automobiles during
World War II, none. Three million the year before, a
hundred and thirty nine I think, or a hundred and forty three for
the next three years. The country survived.
Up above a minimum, energy is not coupled to well being.
The U.S. reduced its energy use by eighty
percent, sorry, I've already given you that number.
We still waste an awful lot of energy even though we've
improved things a lot since 1969.
It's too cheap. Here is the curves of how happy
people are, how satisfied they are with their lives in
different countries around the world.
You can't read them, I'm sorry to say.
And here's how much money they make.
Once you get here, you're in the scatter.
You don't need massive amounts of spending to be happy with
life and in fact, American happiness index has gone down
since about 1970, whereas the amount of money we've spent has
gone up and up. How does it benefit us to have
two point three million people in jail when we used to have,
was it fifteen percent of that? Eight percent of that?
It's a tiny fraction. It depends whether you count all
the jails or just penitentiaries.
Suppose that ninety eight percent of the energy needed to
make things comes from fossil fuels and that two percent from
the food we eat, it means that we each have forty nine
hydrocarbon slaves. Do we really need forty nine
slaves to live a comfortable and productive life?
Would maybe ten due? I mean that's not much more than
Thomas Jefferson or General Washington had.
Oh, you say, oh no, he had 400 hundred slaves.
Yeah, but he had a big family and they were all, everybody
lived on that plantation. They were all supported by those
400 slaves. So ten is really a pretty good
number. That's a lot.
One horse power is a lot. If you had a horse a hundred
years ago, you were way ahead of someone who didn't have a horse
you could carry 500 pounds on a buck board at ten miles an hour,
you try and do that on your back.
But now we want 500 horse power. You don't need 500 horsepower.
Maybe even five would be enough. Let's grow up, stop complaining
and make the best use of these. Thank you all.
( applause )