9UNP0537SD_James_Pawley_WordPress  James Pawley A New Theory of Everything  - 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.    l 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 meridional 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 a while, 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 logarithmically 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.  Stefan Boltzmannn 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 Boltzmann's constant?   - That's Boltzmann'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 a while 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 basins in America, but particularly in India, in Gujarat-- 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.    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 Patz 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 a while 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)