Humans have moles in their lineage.

Tags

evolution, Human ancestory, human evolution, Humans and moles

Remember back sixty-five million years ago when the 10-kilometer bolide struck the Yucatan Peninsula, at Chicxulub in Mexico? Sure you do, it’s like yesterday, it’s when the dinosaurs went extinct. There was worldwide devastation which is marked worldwide in the soil by the iridium rich K-T boundary layer. It is the cloud of dust that settled out after the impact and it can be seen in many places where erosion has exposed it. Many species were wiped out by the cloud of finer particles which remained in the atmosphere and prevented sunlight from reaching the ground. The plants didn’t grow without sunlight and without the plants growing for a year or more the animals which eat plants died, and soon the animals which eat plant-eating animals died too. But why did our ancestors survive and reproduce when so many others failed to survive or thrive? Obviously our progenitors survived or we wouldn’t be here, but why ours and not theirs? My post Why the human lineage survived the last extinction event, covers the reasons for our survival in some detail, but in brief it was because, while all animals living in the tropical and temperate regions were wiped out by lack of sunlight, those living in the polar regions were pre-adapted to long dark winters. Those living under the soil, like moles, were especially likely to survive very long winter conditions, because part of their food source was underground. That is why I speculated that moles were in our lineage and not temperate or tropical squirrels.

Today in the news there was an article reported in Yahoo, Earliest mammals sniffed their way to smarts; it was based on an article in AAAS Science, Evolving Large and Complex Brains by R. Glenn Northcutt. What is interesting in this article, relative to the arctic period of our postulated past, is that the small mouse-like animals reported upon in the article had brain regions suggesting good smell abilities, and good surface touch sensors linked to hairs. Other analysis showed these animals were eating insects, worms and grubs. Their abilities were honed to improved sensitivity to things touching their body hair, which helped these creatures sense their environment when they were scurrying under leaves. for example.

The exact creatures being studied may not have been moles as we know them, but these animals already adapted to living on the ground under leaves and hiding from predators by being very close to and even under the ground would need very little adaptation to become mole-like creatures living primarily underground. It was these animals, some of whom found themselves living in and adapted to the arctic regions, who would have been most likely to survive the K-T extinction event. After the ecological slate was wiped clean in the tropics, there would have been myriads of opportunities for these survivors from the arctic to find new niches. And it is known that some of our early ancestors were quick to ascend into the trees. This can happen very quickly, as has been observed in Israel where there were no squirrels in a remote area when some trees were brought in and in a few years the local rats took over the habitats in the trees that are normally limited to squirrels. These animals are still rats, but if they were isolated for a very long time they would behave even more like squirrels.

Evolution can proceed quickly when there are ample rewards to be found with a little learned adaptation, and when the creature can survive with that learned adaptation any physical and genetic improvements can then enhance the learned skills with natural genetically enhanced abilities and speciation will eventually occur.

Here is a reason for me to appreciate the mole hill in my back yard.

The 6th most important issue facing humanity is poisoned habits.

Tags

famine, Human hubris, human nature, Malthus, Mother Nature

Human behavior is controlled by habits. These are short routines with which we automatically direct our inner thoughts and outer actions. We learn these habits as part of growing up; they are very resistant to change and generally are best controlled by controlling the environments we place ourselves within. This of course is a habit also, but there are occasional moments of consciousness of what we are doing when we can voluntarily change our future behavior. However, these moments are rare and are usually associated with a complete change of circumstance, and pain if we continue what we were previously doing.

Whole societies, and humanity itself, are a vast collection of habitual responses to perceived inputs. Generally, this all works out for the maintenance of people and their institutions, but in the modern world we approaching some inescapable limits to which we will be forced to respond. For example, we have clearly exceeded the permanent carrying capacity of the Earth, by consuming quantities of one-time-use materials for which there is no substitute. It took natural processes millions of years to create the coal, oil and gas that we have consumed half of in the last one hundred years. Our food supply is largely dependent upon these mineral energy sources for their creation, and when they are gone most of the food supply they provide will also be gone. When the food supply drops to ten percent of the present supply the population will also drop to ten percent of its present size. If we cultivate the land as done back in 1600, our population would drop from seven billion to one billion. Fortunately we have better equipment and more productive crops but, unfortunately, the land itself has been mined of nutrients, so its natural productivity would be much less. Also, much soil has been washed away into the sea by erosion, so there is less land to cultivate than there used to be. People will not know what the food carrying capacity of the Earth actually is until all these factors are in play, but in about two hundred years these will be known and adaptations will have been made. That seems like a very long time, certainly much longer than we will live, but it is a very short time when measured by historical standards.

The time of population collapse will occur before that date, because when food starts running out there will be social turmoil such as we have never witnessed, and so we have no conception how our social institutions will hold up. But it seems unlikely that population reduction will be an orderly process controlled by human laws. I am not recommending population restrictions at the present time, because it is obvious that we have already overshot Earth’s carrying capacity and with a life expectancy of seventy plus years people already alive will witness the end of abundance and the days not just of scarcity but years of near absence of necessities. Even if there was not a single new child born for ten years this collapse will be upon us because the people already alive will eat up all of the consumables. It is a grim picture, and I hope I am wrong, but with the population already existing able to consume what remains, the hope of an orderly solution seems forlorn, and with the population still doubling in forty years and refusing to even consider it as a problem, let alone confront the issue, there seems little reason to expect anything but nature to intervene and solve the problem of human success and excess.

The basic problem is that individuals have been seeing humanity’s problems as a ramped-up example of personal problems. They have poisoned their habits of thinking into a mind set where there will be solutions found to these problems, because their experience has shown that, in a well ordered society, problems always have a fix. Up until 1800, when Malthus was developing his famous population theory, humans had been living in a dynamic balance where periodic famines weakened the population and then the people succumbed to diseases which were usually accommodated to by a healthy body. Then with diseased people around to form a reservoir for the various diseases to sustain themselves, there would be a great die off from the period of exhaustion and loss of spiritual vigor. Then as things got better the survivors would repopulate the land as quickly as possible, before some other group of people came in and took over.

Periodic famine is a natural condition, but it’s one which Americans haven’t even come close to since 1816, the year without a summer. The world in 2011 has such good food distribution systems that the only famines have been essentially war caused, a way of killing opponents, and the victims might be considered battle causalities. But in a large self-contained literate culture there are written records of numerous famines. One emperor was quoted as saying, “The worst thing about being Emperor is that during a famine, I must decide which large group of good people among my subjects are to get food and which must be left to starve.”

The poison in modern thinking is that everyone has the absolute right to have as many children as they want, and everyone has the absolute right to all the food they want. If that were up to a vote I would be for it, but Mother Nature says no. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s famous consultation with his cabinet, where they all voted against some proposal. “Twelve Nays one Yea, the Yeas have it.” In this case with Mother Nature standing in for Lincoln, it would be

“Seven billion Yeas and one Nay, the nays have it.”

Homeplanet Security – Update of major risks.

Tags

CO2, farming, Sruvival, transportation, war

Disaster Scale of human calamities. (Click to enlarge.)

[Disaster Scale – DISS — Disaster, defined, measured and charted]

The 15 Homeland Security Disasters?

This is based on my post of May 1, 2008 by probaway with updates on April 14, 2010 | Edit

Homeland Security – The Scenarios List – July 2004

1: Nuclear Detonation – 10-Kiloton DISS~4
2: Biological Attack – Aerosol Anthrax DISS~4
3: Biological Disease – Pandemic Influenza DISS~5
4: Biological Attack – Plague DISS~4
5: Chemical Attack – Blister Agent DISS~2
6: Chemical Attack – Toxic Industrial Chemicals DISS~2
7: Chemical Attack – Nerve Agent DISS~4
8: Chemical Attack – Chlorine Tank Explosion DISS~4
9: Natural Disaster – Major Earthquake DISS~3
10: Natural Disaster – Major Hurricane DISS~3
11: Radiological Attack – Dispersal Devices DISS~2
12: Explosives Attack – Bombing Using IED DISS~2
13: Biological Attack – Food Contamination DISS~3
14: Biological Attack – Foreign Animal Disease DISS~0
15: Cyber Attack – Financial Infrastructure DISS~0

After the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center the United States got more serious about what came to be referred to as Homeland Security. It has been much publicized and perhaps they do a lot of preparation and training for the level of disasters listed above. However, the Lifehaven project isn’t concerned with any of these disasters because none of them have but the remotest possibility of annihilating humanity or agricultural life on Earth. It is possible that if it were believed that any of these things were precipitated by willful terrorist or national malice that it could precipitate a DISS~10 or worse response. But, the 15 scenarios on the list by themselves are not a profound danger to the survival of humanity. All of these estimates are arbitrary and intended only to give working approximations but a simple addition of the numbers published within the list above gives a total of “only” 294,000 fatalities. That number is probably too small for a coordinated attack. Usually a terrorist attack is intended to gain political leverage and an attack of the type using the weapons listed would probably prove counter productive for the terrorists of the sought for world opinion. That is a lot of people being killed but considering that since WW II there has only been one attack on US homeland, 9-11-01 The World Trade Center towers we should divide that number by at least 60 years to get a yearly threat rate. That calculation gives us 49 people per year death rate and it has only happened one time, which is a poor data base upon which to base a rate. However, by that measure the terrorists are way behind the Homeland Security worries. In fact the unrealized published terrorist rate is only one tenth of the automobile fatalities rate which is realized every year for a total death from automobiles in the US as about a quarter million people. So, I say again, these things are terrible but they are not humanity threatening and therefore are not of much concern for the Lifehaven Project. Unfortunately for us, there are things which are an exitential danger and are capable of annihilating humanity but none of the items in the scenario list above are among them.

The Real Threats to Human Survival

1. A Total Thermonuclear War in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres – DISS~15 Everyone is gone.
   

   Earth’s population by latitued is a proxi of where H-bombs will fall.

2. Total Thermonuclear War mostly Northern Hemisphere – DISS~12-14 Only Lifehaven inhabitants survive.
3. Major Thermonuclear War Northern Hemisphere – DISS~10-11 Moderately prepared Southern Hemisphere people will survive.
4. Limited Thermonuclear War – DISS~9 All targets of 50,000 and more people are destroyed and nuclear winter covers the Northern Hemisphere for a year.
5. Limited Thermonuclear War – DISS~8 A high percentage of combatant nations people killed and food crops ruined for a year by dislocations and haze.
6. A separate issue: Advanced bioweapons unleashed – DISS~1-15 It is impossible to know what can happen with carefully designed biological weapons but probably it would be self limiting by killing off its host victims before it was transmitted to everyone. Or if it wasn’t quite so contagious or virulent it probably wouldn’t kill off everyone and would be self-contained and adapted to by the host bodies. A few generations of exposure would limit the future severity of a bio weapon. We have been fighting off biological invaders for a billion years and have gotten pretty good at it or we wouldn’t be here now. If the disese didn’t kill everyone within a year humanity would probably recover its health.
7. Natural disasters of the magnitude necessary to annihilate humanity probably are even rarer than the 65 million year old event at Chicxulub. We humans have more methods of coping with that type of disaster than alligators, birds and rodents and yet they survived. So, it is unlikely that any natural event of any type experienced in the last half billion years is likely to kill every human.
8. There are extra solar events which could sterilize our Earth of all living things but they are so rare and so distant that would strike Earth only once in a thousand Earth lives. And they can’t be predicted or avoided or coped with so why worry.

The stress factors which bring on the war.

The human population explosion is continuing right on past the carrying capacity of the planet. By my calculation the ability of Earth to digest CO2 was passed in about 1850 and its current ability is to sustain only 10-100 million modern high tech people. The argument is rather like Thomas Malthus’s, which is still basically correct, we just haven’t reached the limit he proposed but it has only been ten generations and we are now very close to his limits in terms of generation time. Probably one more doubling of population will bring on the collapse and that is roughly a maximum of fifty years. Those figures are based on running out of food or some existential mineral like water or copper and don’t take into account the ongoing destruction of the carrying capacity of the Earth which will bring it on even sooner.

A major crop failure of even one of the basic cereal foods: rice, wheat, or corn would bring on an immediate world wide famine. At first it might be spotty but it would quickly increase the price stress on food for everyone. This recently happened when American farmers shifted a portion of their crop yield to the manufacture of ethanol for transportation usages. This brought about an instant mini-famine in Mexico among the poor people who eat a lot of corn based tortillas. But if this disruption in corn supply is brought about by uncontrollable disease or even by some unexpected economic disruptions or some military or terrorist conflict which prevented the easy shipping there would be real famine somewhere and quickly.

Continuing climate change towards hotter and more variable weather and with that a change in what will grow in previous farming locations or which is planted but is somehow killed off before it can be harvested by the unpredictable weather.

Water failure both from floods and droughts will increase stress.

Land erosion decreases land availability for crops.

Destruction of the productivity of the irrigated land by the toxic mineral salts precipitated out by evaporation of the rain water percolated through soil in the mountains and then brought onto the farms.

Oil price rise from various lacks cause crop failure from lack of the ability of farmers to pay for the price of the creation of fertilizer or pay for the fuel to operate machinery necessary for cultivation.

What predictive indicators should we be watching for?

Large numbers of people with rising expectations of what they deserve and a willingness to take it by force. For example the capturing ships on the high seas.

When large groups of people start demanding and then taking food from other groups of people by force it is a sure sign that serious trouble about to crash in upon the entire system. The instability these actions will create will force the price of everything to increase rapidly because all of the near infinite lines of supply will have to be protected. When this moves from difficult to impossible to do then a collapse will ensue fairly quickly.

It is impossible to predict or possibly even post-dict the real causes of any specific war because it will be a complex mix of many things and ultimately it doesn’t matter much because it could be any of them or some unusual combination of them or just a miscalculation by a politician or even just random chance. However, chance and risk can be observed to some degree and preparations can be made for their various possibilities based on their likelihood. Or perhaps take the Black Swan approach and develop ones robustness to cope with the unexpected. So ultimately preparing for a Chicxulub like event doesn’t make sense but preparing for the possibility of rain on a cloudy day does make sense and preparing for transportation disruption may prove to be the most critical one which can be helped and implemented.

Nearly all people are forced by their life situation to make the best of it where they find themselves but also nearly everyone is immersed in a social situation which may become extremely volatile and near impossible to survive within. If anyone survives those difficult times it will most likely be those who laid up enough of what ever it takes to survive better than the people around them. It is like the joke of the two guys hiking in a forest where there are man-eating tigers. One hiker has on heavy walking boots and the other has on running shoes. The booted hiker says, “It’s worthless to wear running shoes because you can’t out run a tiger.” To which the guy in the running shoes replies, “You are right I can’t out run a tiger, but I can out run you.”

Humanities survival my ultimately depend on some good running shoes.

The water table must be raised world wide.

Tags

Aquifer preservation, Restoring water tables, Water conversation, Water creation, water saving, Water sustainability

People here in California talk about drought, when we have one, but they don’t talk much about the water table dropping even during a drought. I suspect this is the general attitude world wide and people don’t worry about water until the well runs dry. Unfortunately, it is running dry! Farmers in our central valley have been pumping water out from deep under their soil for many years even during rainy years when there is surface water to use but when there is a drought they pump much more. Needless to say this can’t go on forever, especially when the California central valley is so near sea level already. The State Capitol building in Sacramento, which is in the center of the valley, is only 3 meters above sea level, so a further subsidence as great as that pictured below would put that building deep into the sea.

Water table in California

At present our governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared California to be in an official condition of drought and the public has had restrictions placed on water consumption.

California Drought Monitor from NDMC

The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) has charts of Drought Monitoring: Current Conditions for the United States. The NDMC considers, at least in this site, only surface water but that will be essential for current use and for replenishing subsurface waters. The surface waters are important for the yearly cycle and a few years but the subsurface waters are important on a decade long and century long basis. When the subsurface aquifers are gone, the shorter term droughts will become instantly devastating because their effects will be felt much more quickly and there will be no recourse but to suffer.

US soil moisture Jan 11, 2009

Water is one of the basic necessities of life and without water there is no life, at least not human life. When there is no water falling from the sky and no water coming in from rivers or aqueducts we can sometimes turn to well water. However, much of this type of water tends to be a one time use and once it is used it is gone forever. There is only one way to get more water out of the ground in the next hundred years and that is to put a lot more water back into the ground than is presently being taken out. We could wait for nature to take its course to refill the deep aquifers but that would take thousands of years and probably it would never happen. Perhaps there are ways to re-water the drained out sandstone aquifers by putting water in at some place where it can then find its way to where it is being pumped out. Some experiments are already being done along this line with pumping CO2 gas deep into the places in the earth where there is porous sandstone but that is intended to sequester the CO2 permanently. Perhaps some of these porous sandstone layers could be filled with water instead of CO2. The exact same wells that are presently drawing water could be the ones where water is pumped back in when it is available.

Unfortunately, if we wait too long after the ground water has been taken out the porous ground compresses and material above it subsides into the space as seen in the photo above. When that happens it would be necessary to literally jack up the land above the aquifer which would be near impossible. Probably only still porous sandstone can be re-aquified. The alternative to this obviously expensive plan is to watch the best land of California slowly sink into the sea, well not so very slowly if the picture above is accurate.

A similar problem on a more local and personal level is when erosion of a stream cuts into the land so the near surface water table descends toward a new water level nearer that of the lowered stream. This lower level means all of the vegetation near that stream must seek lower to find its water and sometimes this is impossible and the vegetation dies. This is the beginning of desertification. This kind of water table drop can be reversed by installing small dams frequently along the stream which raises the water level of the stream and soon that of the surrounding land. After a while sedimentation raises the stream bed to this new height and another dam can be constructed to raise the stream a little higher. This procedure makes possible the survival of much greener and more water demanding vegetation which can be more productive for human use.

When I think long term I like to aim for 12,000 years as that is the lifetime of modern human activity and when one thinks of these problems in that way it becomes obvious that humans must be much more active in the controlling of water in a sustainable way.

Use no more water than you can obtain sustainably.

Note – Perhaps I should make a drought chart similar to the Disaster Scale for measuring the seriousness of the water condition. Going all the way from total flood to absolute absence of water. It would include the typical causes for each level of the water problem.

What are the chances of stressors colliding with reality?

Tags

Deforestation, Desertification, Drinking water, global warming, Human disease, Nuclear wastes, Oceanic pollution, Overgrazing, Plant disease, Topsoil

Estimating the interaction between the various Earth’s stressors as listed in yesterday’s post leaves me with the impression that there are various time scales upon which the various stressors operate. Three decades of projection is probably longer than makes sense for some of the things listed but not for others.

1. The loss of topsoil is inexorable but it probably takes 30 more years to lose half of it, which of course will cause a population collapse even if everything else were still functioning as well as it is today, which, of course, it wouldn’t be.

2. Desertification is about the same time scale but it seems that it may recover itself at least partially because of natural climate oscillations.

3. Deforestation is about the same 30-year time scale also for catastrophic problems to develop and there are great efforts to try and save the forests which might work and just perhaps in 30 years there will be as many trees as there are now although they will probably be smaller and younger .

4. Poisoning of drinking water can probably be controlled for city water and most people seem to be moving into the cities but uncontrolled water will probably get very bad and local methods will have to be created which really work well.

5. Oceanic pollution will probably continue and the center of the gyres will probably become gigantic cesspools but as it is so very far from what people can personally experience it will be a difficult thing to correct but of itself it shouldn’t cause catastrophe.

6. Shrinking wetlands will impoverish the planet and kill off many species but by itself it will not bring humanity to collapse.

7. Overgrazing will continue and probably reach really bad conditions when population overruns demand the absolute last calorie of food that can be wrung from the soil and grasslands will probably be producing half of what they do today.

8. Loss of wilderness areas will probably not bother people much because they simply will not be used to much wilderness and the transportation needs to access it will seem overly expensive for the rewards.

9. Species loss is a more difficult one to make any decade projections about because species means every other (non-human for this discussion) species, including all of those which interact to keep the planet in ecological balance.  Some unanticipated species collapse might have totally devastating consequences.

10. Shortage of firewood will continue to be disastrous for those people who depend upon it for cooking and probably other, possibly solar collectors, will have to be devised to take up the energy for cooking. If that can’t be done those people who depend upon that source of energy will perish.

11. Exhaustion of oil reserves probably won’t be absolute but the price of petroleum will rise and their uses will become more limited and that form of transportation will become more limited. There will then be more emphasis on something similar to what is now considered public transportation.

12. Exhaustion of mineral resources is rather like loss of species because it is impossible to know the things which we take for granted that would without some resource suddenly become very expensive and then unavailable. But our present hi-tech society is probably dependent on literally hundreds of things which nature provides in seeming abundance which could suddenly vanish. Some of these might turn out to irreplaceable but not catastrophic, like the color green on your TV monitor.

13. Siltation in rivers and reservoirs will probably have a major impact on the amount of food which is created because when the dams are silted up there is no storage capacity and thus nothing to water the croplands which are now being watered by those dams. There is a similar problem with silted rivers preventing the smooth flow of bulk goods.

14. Encroaching habitat on arable land has been happening from time immemorial when human populations were smaller but with the now huge population the people themselves are physically occupying the once abundant land with their bodies, homes and highways. This land is reclaimable after a population crash but with great difficulty.

15. Dropping water tables is in the same general category as other mineral resources and as the various aquifers run dry there will be local collapse of food creation and a corresponding decrease of world population.

16. Erosion of the ozone layer is a problem which has been brought under human control, at least during times of relative peace, but if there is real turmoil it may prove of short term benefit to do something which destroys the ozone but this is probably not as big a threat as the other problems.

17. CO2 accumulation is continuing to rise at alarming rates and there isn’t going to be any remedy because it costs so much to sequester CO2 and only half of it could be sequestered even if there was a major effort. Therefore it will continue to accumulate and start becoming disastrous after about 30 years.

18. Global warming is the usual thing worried about with the CO2 level rising but there may be other events like the dying off of high metabolism creatures like hummingbirds followed by the dying off of the whole food chain their pollination supports.

19. Rising sea levels worries a lot of sea front people but of itself shouldn’t cause a problem because people can adjust their behavior in that time scale.

20. Nuclear wastes will probably catch up to us in the form of atomic bombs being created out of uncontrolled waste. The occasional bomb itself will not destroy humanity but the havoc which the terror wreaks and the confusion as to how to cope with these problems may disrupt society so badly that it ceases to function as we know it.

21. Acid rain will probably get worse but as most of that seems to be created in localized power plants and other industrial settings it can probably be controlled to a livable level.

22. Plant disease is a real joker card because a serious disease striking one of the basic foods such as rice, wheat, corn etc. would cause havoc and mass starvation because it would strike suddenly in a period of a few months.

23. Human disease is a instant catastrophe if it is ideally suited to human transmission. For it to be contained would require the instant shutting down of the transportation industry and if that didn’t happen quickly enough the disease would be worldwide in less than a month.

24. Human energy consumption is continuing to expand and humans have an endless need and demand for more energy because it satisfies so many wants. If energy supplies collapsed many people would suffer and because ultimately food is stored energy if that supply was cut off people would starve.

Tomorrow’s blog will be about some interactions among these stressful factors.

Estimating the interaction between Earth’s stressors.

Tags

Deforestation, Desertification, Earth's stressors, Firewood shortage, Mineral resource failure, Ocean pollution, Oild depleation, Overgrazing, Species loss, Topsoil, Toxic drinking water

Estimates of the rate of deterioration caused by human stresses placed on the Earth. Some of these accelerate in their deterioration as the supply becomes limited because greater demands are being placed upon a smaller and dwindling supply. It is difficult to get quick answers general estimates but below are some numbered links to web sites that explore the issues

1. Loss of topsoil 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
2. Desertification 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
3. Deforestation 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
4. Toxic poisoning of drinking water 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
5. Oceanic pollution 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
6. Shrinking wetlands 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
7. Overgrazing 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
8. Loss of wilderness areas 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
9. Species loss 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
10. Shortage of firewood 1 -2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
11. Exhaustion of oil reserves 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
12. Exhaustion of mineral resources 1 -2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
13. Siltation in rivers and estuaries 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
14. Encroaching habitat on arable land 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
15. Dropping water tables 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
16. Erosion of the ozone layer 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
17. CO2 accumulation 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
18. Global warming 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
19. Rising sea levels 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
20. Nuclear wastes 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
21. Acid rain 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
22. Plant disease 1 –2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
23. Human disease 1 -2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –
24. Human energy consumption 1 -2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 –

This list is based in part upon, Paul Demeny Population and Development Review 1190 Vol. 16 p. 416.

This blog isn’t finished. The intent is to create links to each of the basic items, so you can check into the source materials; then there will be an estimate as to how serious this risk factor is and how likely it is to interact in a synergistic way with the other factors. Mineral exhaustion and pollution blowback appear likely to be the real terminators of our present good times. They will impact our society long before the inevitable global sea level rise will become an unavoidable problem.

Predicting the unknown unknowns of Doomsday

The former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld made a famous statement about “things”:

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know
we don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Doomsday will probably come from some concatenation of unknowns from the collision of two or more predictable knowns but in some unanticipated and unknown way. The most likely type of problems of this type will be shortfalls of some previously known necessity. That is there will be something which is absolutely needed and which is realized is coming into short supply but where there is a hoped for replacement but when those replacements are requested they are found to be insufficient. When an effort is made to use some other resource for a fall back substitute it will too be found to be insufficient and thus a cascade of failures precipitates a progressive collapse. When this cascade of failure progresses and a realization of the impending collapse of alternatives becomes well appreciated it will cause desperate actions to be taken by some parties and then a general panic will overtake all parties. When this condition strikes the people in charge of some major weapons system the full blown effects of Doomsday will soon be upon us.

There are many things which could compound in this way to make this hideous mess and trigger the collapse but in the end it may be something even more trivial than the more obvious ones in the following list:

1. Loss of topsoil
2. Desertification
3. Deforestation
4. Toxic poisoning of drinking water
5. Oceanic pollution
6. Shrinking wetlands
7. Overgrazing
8. Loss of wilderness areas
9. Species loss
10. Shortage of firewood
11. Exhaustion of oil reserves
12. Exhaustion of mineral resources
13. Siltation in rivers and estuaries
14. Encroachment of human habitat on arable land
15. Dropping water tables
16. Erosion of the ozone layer
17. CO2 accumulation
18. Global warming
19. Rising sea levels
20. Nuclear wastes
21. Acid rain
22. Human and plant disease

This list is based in part upon, Paul Demeny Population and Development Review 1190 Vol. 16 p. 416.

All of these environmental problems are already upon us to some degree and all of them are aggravated by more human population. They are long term, multi-decade, problems and they are resistant to quick fixes. They must be healed by Earth’s natural processes. Each of them has a deleterious effect upon each of the others and there are probably unforseen interactions between them which will prove worse than any one taken seperately. The political interactions will also affect everyone and be interactive and when these are compounded with economic complications which affect the world economy there may be chaos which is unrelated to the items on the list but which aggravates something and generates a general progressive collapse. The unknown unknowns are in the interactions between these known problems but when they occur together they will create very real effects.

Lifehaven – How bad are the 15 Homeland Security Disasters?

Tags

CO2, farming, Lifehaven, survival, transportation, war

Homeland Security – The Scenarios List – July 2004

— — — [DISS — Disaster, defined, measured and charted]
1: Nuclear Detonation – 10-Kiloton DISS~4
2: Biological Attack – Aerosol Anthrax DISS~4
3: Biological Disease – Pandemic Influenza DISS~5
4: Biological Attack – Plague DISS~4
5: Chemical Attack – Blister Agent DISS~2
6: Chemical Attack – Toxic Industrial Chemicals DISS~2
7: Chemical Attack – Nerve Agent DISS~4
8: Chemical Attack – Chlorine Tank Explosion DISS~4
9: Natural Disaster – Major Earthquake DISS~3
10: Natural Disaster – Major Hurricane DISS~3
11: Radiological Attack – Dispersal Devices DISS~2
12: Explosives Attack – Bombing Using IED DISS~2
13: Biological Attack – Food Contamination DISS~3
14: Biological Attack – Foreign Animal Disease DISS~0
15: Cyber Attack – Financial Infrastructure DISS~0

After the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center the United States got more serious about what came to be referred to as Homeland Security. It has been much publicized, and perhaps they do a lot of preparation, and training for the level of disasters listed above. However, the Lifehaven project isn’t concerned with any of these disasters because none of them have but the remotest possibility of annihilating humanity or agricultural life on Earth. It is possible that if it were believed that any of these things were precipitated by willful terrorist or national malice that it could precipitate a DISS~10 or worse response. But, the 15 scenarios on the list by themselves are not a profound danger to the survival of humanity. All of these estimates are very arbitrary, and intended only to give a working approximation, but a simple addition of the numbers published in the list above gives a total of “only” 294,000 fatalities. That number is every one of the terrorist attack methods being deployed one time which is unlikely. That is a lot of people being killed, but considering that since WW II there has only been one attack on US homeland, 9-11-01 Trade Towers we should divide by at least 60 to get a yearly threat rate. That calculation gives us 4,900 per rate per year which has only happened one time. By that measure the terrorists are way behind the Homeland Security rate. In fact the unrealized published terrorist rate is only one tenth of the automobile fatalities rate which is realized every year, year after year. So, I say again, these things are terrible, but they are not humanity threatening, and therefore are not of much concern for the Lifehaven Project. There are things which are an annihilating danger, but none of the items in the scenario list above are among them.

The Real Threats to Human Survival

Total Thermonuclear War North, and South Hemispheres – DISS~15 Everyone is gone.

Total Thermonuclear War mostly Northern Hemisphere – DISS~12-14 Only well prepared Southern Hemisphere, and Lifehaven inhabitants survive.

Major Thermonuclear War Northern Hemisphere – DISS~10-11 Moderately prepared Southern Hemisphere people survive.

Limited Thermonuclear War – DISS~9 All targets of 50,000 and more people are destroyed, and nuclear winter covers the Northern Hemisphere for a year.

Limited Thermonuclear War – DISS~8 A high percentage of combatant nations people killed, and food crops ruined for a year by dislocations, and haze.

A separate issue: Advanced bioweapons unleashed – DISS~1-15 It is impossible to know what can happen with carefully designed biology, but probably it would be self limiting by killing off its hosts before it was transmitted to everyone. Or, if it wasn’t quite so contagious, or virulent it probably wouldn’t kill off everyone, and would be self-contained, and adapted to by the host bodies. We have been fighting off biological invaders for a billion years, and have gotten pretty good at it, or we wouldn’t be here now.

Natural disasters of the magnitude necessary to annihilate humanity probably are even rarer than the 65 million year old event at Chicxulub. We humans have more methods of coping with that type of disaster than alligators or rodents, and they survived. So, it is unlikely that any natural event of any type experienced in the last half billion years is likely to kill all humans.

The stress factors which bring on the war.

The human population explosion is continuing right on past the carrying capacity of the planet. By my calculation the ability of Earth to easily digest CO2 was passed in about 1850, and its current ability is to sustain only 10-100 million modern high tech people’s pollution. The argument is rather like Thomas Malthus’s, which is still basically correct, we just haven’t reached the limit he proposed, but it has only been ten generations and we are now very close to his limits in terms of generation time. Probably one more doubling of population will bring on the collapse, and that is roughly a maximum of fifty years. Those figures are based on running out of food, and don’t take into account the ongoing destruction of the carrying capacity of the Earth which will bring it on even sooner.

A major crop failure of even one of the basic cereal foods. rice, wheat, or corn would bring on an immediate world wide famine. At first it might be spotty, but it would increase the price stress on everyone. This was recently shown when American farmers shifted a portion of their crop yield to the manufacture of ethanol for transportation usages. This brought about an instant mini-famine in Mexico among the poor people who eat a lot of corn based tortillas. But, if this disruption in corn supply is brought about by uncontrollable disease, or even by some unexpected economic disruptions, or some military, or terrorist conflict which prevented the easy shipping, there would be real famine somewhere and quickly.

Continuing climate change towards hotter, and more variable weather, and with that a change in what will grow in previous farming locations or which is planted, but is somehow killed off before it can be harvested by the unpredictable weather.

Water failure both from floods, and droughts will increase stress.

Land erosion decreases land availability for crops.

Destruction of the productivity of the irrigated land by the toxic mineral salts precipitated out by evaporation of the rain water percolated through mineral rich, and salty soil in the mountains, and then brought onto the farms where it evaporates. This process according to The Atlas Of World Population, has brought down several civilizations.

Oil price rise from various lacks will cause crop failures from lack of the ability of farmers to pay for the price of the creation of fertilizer or pay for the fuel to operate machinery necessary for cultivation.

What forecast indicators should we watch for?

Rising expectations of what is deserved, and a willingness to take it by force, is an indicator of world wide problems of supply.

When large groups of people start demanding, and then taking food from other groups of people by force it is a sure sign of serious trouble is about to crash in upon the entire system. The instability these actions will create will run the price of everything up rapidly, because all of the near infinite lines of supply will have to be protected. When this moves from difficult to impossible to accomplish then a collapse will ensue fairly quickly.

It is impossible to predict or possibly even post-dict the real causes of any specific war, because it will be a complex mix of many things, and ultimately it doesn’t matter much, because it could be any of them or some unusual combination of them or even just chance finally tipping something over some unseen edge into catastrophe. However, chance, and risk can be observed to some degree, and preparations can be made for their various possibilities based on their likelihood. Or, perhaps take the Black Swan approach, and develop ones robustness to cope with the unexpected. So ultimately preparing for a Chicxulub like event doesn’t make sense, but preparing for the possibility of rain on a cloudy day does make sense and preparing for transportation disruption may prove to be the most critical one which can be helped with planning.