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to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. >> Tom ZI'm Tom Zinnen.everyone
I work here at the Biotechnology
I also work for UW Extension, Cooperative Extension, and
on behalf of our partners, the
PLATO, and Wisconsin Public Television, welcome to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab.
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.
interface between biological His research includes the
instrumentation, and that includes microscopes and
especially 3D microscopes.
talk about something a little Tobit broader than that in hiso
interests in chaos and in global
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]
See we've got a brand new year >> James Pawley: Thank you, Tom.
everything, right? so we can do a new theory of
resolution. I think we're going to turn down
some lights.
Kaley? Am I supposed to do that?
the TV won't work. >> No, because otherwise
Well, we'll see what we can do, but the thing is that projector
isn't very bright and we may not
The first thing you need to know be able to see everything.
talks that you hear, is not a italk about my research in somee
particular small area of the
In fact, I'm kind of a funny guy world.
my first degree was Electrical in the Zoology Department;
And ended up talking not about Engineering.
Engineering but my courses were mabout global warming because I
suddenly discovered that was an overarching problem that you
needed tremendous breadth to
that really the purpose of this electure is to say just that,d
that whatever you've heard about
do I want to say worse? Well, yeah, probably, but what I
mean is more pervasive because
and it has to do with energy and it's not just the only problem
economy. energy has to do with the entire
the time we're through. IFirst, however, I'm going toy
have a diversion off to the side
know, watching the television over Christmas and there was a
lot of news about rotten weather
in particular, in Europe, that's in, well, a lot of places, but
have that kind of snow in England, andEngland.n't usually
I wanted you to know that it was
See that little, this is the not cold everywhere.
different the temperature was in temperature anomaly how
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
that's, no, more or less twice degrees colder in centigrade, so
The bad news is that these areas that in Fahrenheit.
bigger than the cold areas were about ten degrees centigrade
warmer. So anybody who has somehow
played this story of the weather
global warming's all over," should look at this graph
and I hope that many will.
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
Low, can you see this thing, with these mic--
I'm going back to the laser.
They say use the laser. Okay, we're going to use the
laser.
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
because of the Coriolis Force, from the high to the low but
a lot of air from the more or iless warm Atlantic to Europes
which is all over there.
Now, what happened this time, is quite different.
I really need to take the mic,
We can't see these. itI can't see them.t.
and I don't think you can.
Is that better? LeGood, okay.t.
I think I'm going to have to
slides. tOkay, now this here, so here's
America down here and here's
Europe. Now we have two different lows
and highs.
a high sort of in northern We've got a low over Norway and
The result is that we have winds western Canada, very different.
away from the pole. That wind coming away from the
pole carries a lot of cold air
Is this unusual? and that's what happened.
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.
meridianal pattern; winds blow This results in an extremely
Bering Strait and north to south south to north going into the
of the world. cWhat's interesting is severale
studies have been published over
concluded that the mechanism for the past few years that
of this Arctic dipole was triggered by low sea ice extentn
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
there over the Arctic ice cap. pictures of the ice that isn't
every year. Of 2007 it was the lowest.down
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
winters in Europe. is, at least for awhile, cold
say about climate and measuring Thatemperatures and so on. to
I'm going to assume that you
you a few references to go to know aboalong the way.ll give
If it turns out that you do-- Oh, god, that's gotten awfully
bright. Is that it?
Dim, okay.
So I want to start by making clear what I mean by a.
couple of concepts such as
These matters are at the heart positive feedback and chaos.
How do we make sense of the of the gworld?crisis.
Now how do we interpret information out there in our
brain and sort of figure out
When analyzing how a number of what is going to happen next.
default assumption is often that factors relate to a topic, our
linear manner. these factors interact in a
Newtonian mechanics or everyday Folife, shall we say, two of
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
Two similar houses probably need sugar.
one house to heat them. twiLots of things are linear. as
What does it look like? Well, it looks linear.
That's the whole idea.
that, and the output is It'proportional to the input.ke
So we've got the output over
side. herOne of the great featuresher
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.
It's very intuitive, and it's Thwhere we live.p.
It's our normal way of living.
up is that there's a lot of Nothings about climate changehis
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.
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 input, but it's no longer Tsimply proportional and youto
don't really know what shape
it. yoIt's a lot harder to see thee
future, it's less intuitive and so we've got lots of things that
get examples from pretty about
are non-linear. Okay, but things could be worse.
What do we mean by a chaotic
Something that is chaotic? function?
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
sensitive to some specific input the input, but it's extremely
that went into driving your values andequation.ssumptions
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 harder to see the future. It's counter-intuitive.
impossible, although you can see In fact, in a way, it's almost
We've all heard about how chaotic phenomenon maybe have to
do with the butterfly flapping
causing a tornado or some other thing and people think, oh yeah,
that's kind of unlikely.
just moving that little bit of Well, the idea is, you see, by
even dew drop formed or didn't air may be one raindrop or one
humidity in a certain amount of fair, enough so that you got aof
storm somewhere.
just one that changed the Npattern 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
PBS, and there's lots of see on television, if you watch
flap their wings, they don't butterflies on PBS, when they
(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.
We can measure some things. WWe measure what goes in, wet.
measure what goes out and we
black box from what we measure have to guess what's inside the
We measure it and in this case going in and out.
water in and then all of the time goes on and we put more
in and a whole bunch comes out. suddenHow can this occur?oo much
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.
kind of a crooked vase, well What's inside the black box is
( laughter ) alright, maybe it's a vase
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
One side, oh sorry, went too balanced any more.
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
You've got a tremendous increase floor.
Now how does this happen? What makes this a chaotic
system? Well first of all because we
can't really understand it until
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.
unrecognized constraints. The reservoir is asymmetric and
it's balanced on the edge of a
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
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
was going on. shoThese constraints producehat
something called sensitivity to initial conditions.
Doesn't that sound a bit like,
They talk about collateral well, listening to the news?
been blown to smithereens. damage and they mean somebody's
conditions. IWhat is positive feedback?
As the vase tips or starts to tip, the water sloshes to the
right, making it tip faster.
small change in the output has In general any system in which a
change bigger is said to have the effpositive feedback. small
All such systems are likely to
Now I want to have something be chaotic.
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
today" is considered to be bad, especially in Wisconsin wherel
we're all very polite.
when we're talking about systems But that's not the way it is
Why is that? that we're trying to understand.
brings chaotic instability Well, because positive feedback
things don't run away, why most wheof you are sitting in yourwhy
chairs; you're not floating away
gravitational force. because there's a very strong
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
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
the magnitude got smaller. logarithmically less of them as
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
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
The difference between here and here is two trillion.
It's hard to graph this.
graph it's still not linear. Even if you have a logarithmic
situation, one that we should This iskeep in mind. chaotic
There are a lot of good movies
chaotic systems which I wanted that you can see about
there's so little time, I don't to show yohave them.t because
The original one that made
was, people thought they people begin to think about it
and the moon and they figured they should be able to make a
computer program that would work
and they find out it was really out the posithard.f all of those
In fact, little tiny changes at the beginning would end up
producing terrible errors.
measurements and we have all So now we make very accurate
do know where the earth, the sun sorts of corrections now, so we
easy, even though we know all anthe equations that we thinkot
effect these three bodies, but
with each other. unfortunately they all interact
the feedback include the stock Other systems that we cause
that, the spring on a mouse trap, falling in love, right?
You normally have, it's when
of interested in you and you're sort of interested in them thatt
the trouble starts. Putting a microphone too near
a loudspeaker, that's the normal
"Oh, I just got feedback." one right?
CO2 in the atmosphere and surface temperature.
The good news, the outlook--
only until some other limit is does not increase forever;
On the example I have, when it reached.
No more water. falls over, it's empty.
the wire hits the wood. Of course there's no mouse
there.
You meet the in-laws. This i( laughter )friendly talk.
The amplifier can't put out any more power.
That's why if you really leave
place, it goes up to some level, the microphone in the wrong
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.
of mine. Stephan Boltzman is a relative
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
the thing it's radiating to betweenthe fourth power.ing, and
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
Falling off a cliff. things with positive feedback?
and closer, all right. >> Yeah, so you get closer
Yeah, I mean because it doesn't rise or maybe
because it catches fire?
and then it burns. >> It catches fire
We all went to Physics and >> Right, okay.
some of us went later as well and we got the idea that we know
what's going on, but actually,
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
Usually it doesn't cause an earthquake, I mean an avalanche,
but sometimes it does and if you
versus their size, you get that gsame curve that you get fores
earthquakes.
Because of the factors that determine, many of the factors
that determine climate seem to
Ditto for the economy. have positive feedback.
vapor. Warmer ocean causes more water
so the planet gets warmer. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas,
all heard this, I'm sure, ice and snow is brighter than water.
Everybody in Madison knows that.
so obviously, if the planet is We can all look out at the lake
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
the continent right now being Channel covered in snow.half of
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
So if you have less snow, you reflect less and that means you
absorb more and then you have to
Methane from permafrost is a get rid of it somehow.
the permafrost warms up and the methane comes out, we have more
heating, more permafrost, around
Less coal power, which we are going to have to have will mean
less sulphates in the air,
world that don't scrub the especially from the parts of the
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
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.
lots, anybody been to British It kills lColumbia?ees and by
Nobody has been to British
You should all go there and try and make sure you make some
friends.
( laughter ) You may need to move north soon.
you'll find that large areas of British Columbia is nothing but
trees.
Oregon, California and half of It's the size of Washington,
of it is covered with trees and maybe a half of those have dieds
in the last five years from mountain pine beetle.
And you know what happens to a
Well it sits there for awhile and eventually it falls over and
some animals or some bugs eat it
is not a good thing, but it's aworth keeping in mind becausech
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 be able to waste We ought to get credit for that.
I don't see them lining up to say, well, actually we just lost
a lot of those trees and
That's the problem with offsets, therefore we ought to use less.
More CO2 in the ocean lowers the do not consider them.
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
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
you, represent about 98 percent mayof vertebrate biomass. of
I want to put that in ordinary
I mean our cows and pigs and words.
dogs and cats, I guess if you really want to count, and us, of
course weigh about fifty times
that look kind of like us; that mois to say, ones that can runs
around, the vertebrates.
we're just talking about We're not talking about fish,
That's unusual, huh? terrestrial animals.
size during this period. The planet stayed about the same
are gone from the oceans. NNow I don't mean that they areh
extinct, I mean the fish aren't there.
There aren't as many big
anything. We didn't know it was so bad
until a few years ago.
measured or got some reports of Somwhat it used to be like ally
hundred years ago when you went out fishing for these critters.
The whales, of course, are gone.
without whales, we don't need whales in Wisconsin, anyway.
Even the Welsh don't think
But, of course, they have a lot to say about the rest of the
ocean ecosystem.
The krill eat the plankton and They eat the krill.
lot to say about how the rest of it turns out that they do have a
particular what color it is. the system works and in
Well, that's the albedo, Why is that important?
Ocean absorption of CO2 seems to remember?
of years. be downWe don't know why.couple
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
worse than that. world by humans, might even be
money we just don't have in the But that'bank anymore.ing, some
Every year we have to pay.
It's not just a few It'szebra mussels out thereebt.
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
especially if you have a dog. The dogs chase the cane toads
and they're poisonous and they
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
Texas and throughout the major being exhausted, not just in
but particularly in India, water basies in America,
and in China, to a less extent, well just as important, but--
By fossil, do you mean
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.
thought of but which fits in Another one that we hadn't
website that keeps track of all wthe wars that are going on soa
that you don't miss one.
right now. There's thirty six of them going
eighty years. SoWell, why is that important?or
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
The economic system has just at you.
I know somebody is going to say, collapsed.
The Dow Jones is back up to oh,whatever it is, 11200.d.
That's another talk.
factor in all of these. One way that we haven't talked
about is sort of a psychological
Here's by the way, in case way.
going on up here; this is the you'relast straw, right?is is
That is definitely a chaotic
Science is, or at least was, phenomenon.
source of accurate seen to be the most reliable
Now it's Glenn Beck. and reliable knowledge.
What was less stressed by the scientists and I fault the
scientists for this was that
incomplete and we didn't talk enough about chaotic phenomenon.
We gave the impression that we
didn't. knewAnd we knew we didn't.n we
By emphasizing those aspects of our knowledge that were likely
to produce short term profits,
built a society that is much and ignoring the rest, we've
we dared admit because these closer to chaotic collapse than
because they didn't make any things that we've been ignoring
important. money are getting more and more
ignoring this fact is that any The practical reason for
destroy the confidence thought realistic analysis is likely to
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
I think the best recent example itwas AIDS.y?
I was in California when the
soon as they said it attacks the first four cases came up and as
even to me, who is not a doctor but knew some biology, that anys
infection that destroys the policeman of the body was going
to be big trouble.
it at the beginning because the Bpeople who knew about it weret
sort of left wing.
And we did not want to be seen I thought myself that way.
( inaudible ) Well, now, what, 25 million
people, or 35 million people
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
for those of you who don't eat only now it's worldwide, except
I mean anything. anything.
don't rock the boat syndrome. It seems like a perfect chaos
conundrum.
aspects of this problem. Let's talk about some of these
economics has produced not only economic collapse, but also ad
populist ignorant of
face and distrustful of the enlarger structures in societywe
needed to orchestrate any meaningful response in the case
of carbon, of global warming, we
What do I mean by massive? need a massive carbon tax.
energy in a barrel of oil, it's the same as a person working for
three years day and night.
working for three years for day How much doand night?or a person
Even four thousand dollars a
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.
interacting problems we face The complexity and chaos of the
answers impossible. People have been taught that the
only things that they should
are accurate and precise. The caution and narrowness that
must constrain science is poorly
change. We've been pushing the idea of
growth, but we have a problem, a
Modern civilization is the child contradiction.
If we burn, I'm sorry that's a of cheap energy.
carbon, climate will crash and typo there, if we burn much more
produce starvation, wars, and that will drastically effect the
whole planet. I know that sounds inflammatory.
I would like to stand by those
to talk about it as we go. and defend them if anybody wants
must decline. Applied psychology has improved
political advertising to the
longer acts as a stabilizing point that western politics no
You can't have people analyze the real world that is facing
them either because they don't
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
factors are likely to have than they seem but as many
likely to be chaotic and so the situation may not only be worse
than is estimated, it may be
How bad is it? possibly much worse.
star on campus until he was Wstolen away to Minneapolis,r
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
be important about our future: factors that are understood to
down here, atmospheric aerosols, biodiversity laws you can see
but it turns out it's very, very you might not worry about that
you've all pretty much heard of ithat, 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
scientific journal, probably the by the way, this is a serious
I'll let you read that by myourselves..
As seeing that we're getting
have to move along. These models do not include theo
stuff he's working with, even though he's come up with this
bad news, do not include the
processes that further warm the climate such as the decreases in
the surface area of the ice or
vegetation. So even then, he had a problem.
I should have pointed out that
keep the red arrows inside the the green area here, if we can
Some of them are in, some of green, then we're alright.
One of the ones over here that's them are way out.
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
lightning or the old ways of not made by bacteria or
was made in a chemical factory making nitrogen for plants, but
fossil fuels. If you think that these are
exaggerations, I encourage you
It's been interviewed; this guy's been interviewed several
times on NPR, particularly
His name is Guindar. Wisconsin Public Radio.
Long Time Ago." HeHe's a military historian.a
It's all based on stuff from the
wacko, pinko, left-wing group who fly off the handle witha
outrageous suggestions all the
So, what are these tipping time.
Well, you can see the ones that we're most worried about right
now: climate change, rate of
It's a long article; I won't try biodiversity loss and nitrogen.
There's also a moral question. and go over the whole thing.
comfortably, probably had a good We're all sitting here very
ago. Christmas dinner a little while
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
this topic on campus here. have one of the great experts on
gather he's already talked to His name iyou earlier.atts and I
You can see that the damage is
causing the trouble, but this is where, these people aren't
the results. where the people are suffering
pictures. We've Who's responsible?ts of
This is the annual emissions and
and again it's the same thing. this is the cumulative emissions
If we work it out per capita, it The U.S.A. is very high.
Of course Africa doesn't show up is pretty much the same story.
The Canadians and the Americans are worse in tons per carbon per
year but over a cumulative
Kingdom comes along because, of course, they started burning
coal earlier. We started doing something about
smoking, not because it killed
other people. peWhen are we going to startd
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
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
I'll read this to those who can't read it,
because it's too far back.
experiment that if you drop a Thfrog in boiling water,s
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
Beats me. Scientists, go figure.
Probably the same ones studying global warming.
How did we get into this mess?
imaginable. It covers, I should think, three
quarters of the departments on
It's also new and there's many this campus.
understand, and so we need things about it we don't yet
unbiased research to find out what is important and where we
stand, but these young
appointed on the basis of having university types are often
about a specific topic. demoThe need for expertise,rtise
especially when you're young, encourages people to be narrow
and not to see the bigger picture.
How do we get these experts to
confidence to confront massive reach out of their boxes of
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
worried about this Keylor plot, that was that plot that showed
the CO2 was going up in spite of
believed for eighty years that the fact that everybody had
sorry, sixty years, that that thatwould not happen., no,
Nobody bothered to measure it because it's really hard to
measure CO2 unless you happen to
which very few scientists were be on the top of Mauna Loa,
There's very few places where it's not disturbed by cars going
by or trees sucking CO2 out or
"It's not my department," said the reverse.
Some of you are old enough to appreciate Tom Lehrer.
Vague grant applications don't
And if you don't get funded, you get funded.
that apart from being appointed, don't get tenure and we realized
order, you can come up here and youtalk about broad things. in
But at meetings, they found others that were getting strange
results.
only ones getting strange Each had thresults.ey were the
After awhile they noticed it was
If you want to look at the all the same.
for "Discovery of Global history of global warming, look
Institute of Physics, another left-wing group, just full of
physicists. You know how crazy they are.
It is a book, basically.
referenced. Somebody's name comes along, you
can find out who he is, what he did.
Any topic technique used for
can find out. mIt will take you a couple ofu
days to read it all.
It has a few, it's not a lot of It igraphs, it's text.ite.
I think all these people here know how to read, so that's a
good step forward.
details, but they can miss the Experts understand some of the
what we've done. big picture, and that is kind of
interact? The climatologist says business
as usual will cause 4.3 degrees warming by 2100.
The ecologist says, 4.3 will
where. change what plants can thrive
plants that live on the planet In other words, all of the
temperature and of course the are cruciarainfall.dent on the
The agronomists, human food comes from plants, that's
important.
substitutes. The economist, find some
Lower the taxes, that's the general solution.
Sociologists; starting societies
The general says instability are unstable.
military spending. must be quelled, increase
spending, less for mitigation, Bean counter says more military
turbines. Publicists, can't we just fake
it until I retire?
Feedbacks: dead plants give up Fire those ecologists.
Feeding back to the CO2, chanbeginning.edo, etc.
In fact almost all of these feed
All of these fields are chaotic. back to the beginning.
thought dust would be so The climatologist, who'd of
Nobody until a little while ago. important?
ten years, okay? By a little while, I mean about
work with, turns out to be No measurements, very hard to
clouds. crVery, very, very important. no
Ecologists, well, I meant 4.3 but with the same rainfall.
But maybe you don't get the same
Make people pay for the water. rainfall.
We went from Canes to Hayek. We often change our theories.
in fact, I hope we go to We may be going back to Canes or
Birth rates can change. someBig surprise there, etc.nt.
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.
election. We must talk about that.
So, we've talked about
and sun and temperature. eco-system services like rain
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
Because if we don't reduce the energy.
350 parts per million soon, and by the way, it's way past
that now, it's around 390,
the economy will survive. All the important variables are
chaotic.
question. Because economics is chaotic and
has positive feedbacks in it, it
measurements of any of the is impossible to make useful
by strong feedback, either important parameters constrained
cause has become confused with positive or negative because the
You can't tell one from the other, which is why economics
Nobel Prizes are given for
years. opposite theories on alternate
not really Nobel Prizes, they're Of course, you know that they're
the bank of Sweden. actuaConsequently, accurateup by
predictions are impossible and
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
It was just chance most of the understand it, but we don't.
until it crashes and then we try time and we followed this again
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
going in one direction, you can make a lot of money off them.
What is it? It's how we apportion scarce
resources.
system varies the sources and the sinks of these resources.
Where we get things from and
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
system irrelevant. unfortunately, it makes the
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
food feeding people or horses. was recent solar energy, usually
food, made some muscle power, we The sun came down, made the
ended up with some stuff. The industrial society changed
all this. Most important change is that
food muscle power now represents
energy utilized to make modern less than one percent of the
Virtually everything you buy society functional.
of energy were used to make it. eLet's see how that might work.s
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
And down at the bottom is long energy.want.
They usually give that about
great mistake because there's eiinputs to those inputs. a
Somewhere there's some mineral
and you concentrate it and you in the ground and you dig it out
transport it and you sell it to fthis raw materials in thed
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;
but what do you use the wages all the wagesfor?quite a lot,
You use the wages to buy
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
energy. thWe need new economics.th
The present system has lead us
Something completely new is to theneeded.'re in.
The externalities are no longer external.
Regarding climate, we know three
There's an overarching things for sure.
stay less than two degrees and requirement that climate change
one point two. we're already committed to about
even a simple cigarette lighter Thplus a dry forest is now ase
weapon of mass destruction. Massive inequalities in income
distribution are no longer, can no longer be sustained.
Everyone now has a veto,
got a, can start a fire which will mess up the whole system.
There's a new metric for
processes and it must be the economic activities and
Even if this means that human hands have to do more.
A sewing machine is a great idea.
Any idea how much a sewing
energy? machinNo, not zero. way of
You don't plug it in, it doesn't
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
fifty watts, actually, because But some of you are more like
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.
One of those big sewing machines, maybe three hundred
watts; the ones that go bzzt, bzzt.
It's not random that steam was
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
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,
one; okay there's one in ten, ten, ten, seven.
The economy must defer to the thirteenscience.e still.
When people starve, they go to
kill each other. war, when they go to war, they
failed states where that's And right now we have some
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
I'm not against Ireland. bail out Ireland.
current well being has something We've got the idea that our
western economics, but actually it has to do with the fact that
since the time of Adam Smith
amounts of almost free energy. we've been able to access vast
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
kilowatts of power being of twelve point four five
economy all of the time. utilized somewhere else in the
five kilowatts. SoSo that is approximatelynt
fifty times, well these two is
other and so that means that almost a hundred times each
somewhere on the planet, you somewhere in the economy,
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
energy embodied in all the because it ignores all the
that was spent in Japan to make all those nice cars we use, or
in China for all the Christmas
We need to reboot, the period of presents.
end. cheap energy is coming to an
out of supplies apart from One way or another we're running
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
fact it is dangerous. irSo to the economists in the in
audience, stop. Just stop.
FDR closed the banks down for three days to sort things out.
Take three days.
school, learn about energy, it's Close down the shop, go back to
You can't cheat on the easier than business.
You never get more out than you accouget in.right?
It's really easy to check that. You always make some heat.
Learn enough about climate and
system must be changed massively ecology to be convinced that the
Then develop new rules, impose and rapidly.
something like fifty to a hundred dollars of ton of carbon
or three times that per ton of
Remember the CO2 has got a lot CO2.
It weighs almost four times as of oxygen in it.
carbon. And if you're going to have any
offsets, if you're going to have
only offset should be for CO2 sothat is captured and storedthe
directly by the person doing the
Not paying for somebody not to offsetting.
because some mountain pine cut down some trees somewhere
them down for them and then beetles you're stuck. and cut
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
some science. doReligion is about certainty,ng
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.
things: the planet's surface is getting warmer, mostly because
of changes caused by humans,
rather will be a major change. even two percent; two degrees
Alternative energy sources and More will be a catastrophe.
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 )
the kind of insulation You'd have to go back there with
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 that this campus did a war going, different war.
unfortunately has done nothing something to stop and
New factors arise. to stop these most recent ones.
everything certainly and the They will, because we don't know
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.
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
"conservation," I might have put was "uncertainty," I think I put
and google found it first time. "A lot of people look at this.e"
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
wanted to pay the mortgages on collapse, but the guys who
incentive to go fishing than the their fish boats had more
going to crash had to do people who knew that it was
Anyway, they suggest something about it.
Decision making in the presence of uncertainty; be cautious,
include human motivation in analysis.
Consider the source is another
Act before complete scientific way of considering that.
Yeah, I'm a scientist saying consensus.
complete scientific consensus. that because we never have
consensus as we have about We never have had as complete a
It hasn't had the slightest globeffect.ing.
Not to this country anyway. Individuals have, individual
cities have, even states have,
not. but the county generally has
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.
sustainability. Some of them will be more true
than others.
Confront uncertainty. UsConsider many alternatives.ue.
Choose actions that are robust
that even if the numbers are a to uncertainty, in other words,
work out. little It'll still help.ll still
You know one of the best of those, put some more insulation
in your attic.
that means that you need less energy will mean when energy is
very expensive, you will still
something which will be very need less energy and that is
Update assessments. In other words, keep watching.
Modify the policy.
monitor the results. Favor actions producing data and
reversible. Nothing very surprising.
This is just what ordinary
right? people do in their houses,
which college Johnny ought to go We'd never know everything about
AP Physics or band, you know. tMaybe he's going to be a jazze
great.
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
maybe ninety nine or even nine economy, but ninety eight or
fraction. Essentially all terrestrial
energy flows and stores represent solar energy in one
form or another.
Revolution, we lived on solar income, now we live energy out
of the bank.
been the atmosphere and it's now The sink for these flows has
Will the economy collapse? full.
it already has for one thing. WI mean, we can pretend that it
hasn't, but there is, no, that's
So I won't go into that. another whole talk.
not what it was. Manufacturing in Wisconsin is
Leaving aside the matter of I whether it already hast.
collapsed, if we don't reduce CO2, we're going to have a
collapse that will be permanent,
because there won't be the that we'll never come back from
won't be able to live on most of energy to do it and then we
Good news; only seven percent of the planet's surface.
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
of that sort of stuff. medicine and basic fire and all
percent, not fifteen plus seven. That's a total of fifteen
could get along without. Eighty five percent of things we
closely because I might be in Now don'that part.here too
The U.S.
World War II, none. Three million the year before, a
hundred and thirty nine I think,
the next three years. or a The country survived.ee for
Up above a minimum, energy is not coupled to well being.
The U.S.
percent, sorry, I've already reduced its energy use by eighty
We still waste an awful lot of given you that number.
improved things a lot since energy ev1969.ough we've
It's too cheap. Here is the curves of how happy
people are, how satisfied they
different countries around the are with their lives in
You can't read them, I'm sorry world.
And here's how much money they to say.
Once you get here, you're in the make.
You don't need massive amounts scatter.
life and in fact, American of spending to be happy with
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
was it fifteen percent of that? in jEight percent of that?ve,
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
hydrocarbon slaves. Do we really need forty nine
slaves to live a comfortable and
Would maybe ten due? productive life?
Thomas Jefferson or I meGeneral Washington had. than
Oh, you say, oh no, he
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
you could carry 500 pounds on a buck board at ten miles an hour,
you try and do
But now we want 500 horse power. that on your back.
Maybe even five would be enough. You don't need 500 horsepower.
and make the best use of these. Let's groThank you all.plaining
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)