Global Warming – Berkeley presentations.

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disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Greenhouse Gas Sources and Trends and California’s Response

I attended a lecture in the continuing lecture series on Climate Change, in Tolman Hall at UC Berkeley. The lecture was presented by Dan Kammen, Co-Director, Berkeley Institute for the Environment, UCB.

This was another general lecture on greenhouse gas emissions that was very well presented by an articulate and highly informed person to a university level audience. Thus it was very good, and it was similar in basic content to Michael Mastrandrea’s at Haas School of Business, and Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. But once again, as with all of these other lectures which I have attended on this subject, there was essentially no mention of the root cause. Which is too many people. The overabundance of people causes the atmospheric pollution, and exhaustion of resources. If there was a small enough total population of people behaving, in aggregate, just as middle class Americans presently do, there would be no problem. The overpopulation problems are aggravated by nuclear proliferation, and economic confusion, and the overarching possibility of nuclear war. All of these basic factors must be considered together while discussing any one of them or a completely distorted concentration on a specific one will create unstable problems for the others. None of the lecturers embedded the CO2 pollution sub-problem in this larger complex matrix of problems.

Perhaps my overpopulation concerns are considered off topic from what these researchers are considering at this time. But, I would contend that if their topic is too narrowly defined then their results will be anemic, and will not be solving the problem but only propping up a single aspect of a failing complex system of problems. When those props reach their limits, become overstressed, and fail the entire system will come crashing down in a more catastrophic way that will be even more disastrous than if they had done nothing. What they are doing, with the best of intentions, will eventually bring humanity to an end position from which it will be unable to recover.

There is another fundamental problem with all of the “scientific presentations” which I have attended here at Berkeley, and that is that the very air of this city is redolent with bias. A true scientist must look at the facts which come from his carefully done objective research, and present these findings as clearly and objectively as is humanly possible. The reason that he as a scientist must be perfectly objective in his research, and in his findings is that once a scientist takes a political position he, being human, starts unconsciously fudging his data to fit his position. This becomes magnified when he is immersed in a community of like minded researchers, such as here in Berkeley, who because they are human will start to spin their findings to fit the community norm. This is a cascading process, and soon the data become so degraded as to become worthless or even worse than worthless, as that data becomes the seemingly reliable foundation for erroneous conclusions and improper actions.

If the public and the policy researchers and political decision makers are to make the best possible decisions they must have accurate information. Information which is biased at its source by the researchers themselves is compromised, and counter productive. It makes their findings suspect and the decision makers will ignore them, and their reports. Even the people hostile to some particular political action will wish to base their position on valid data. If they base their arguments on false or unreliable data they set themselves up for being made fools of, and failing in their quest. Therefore scientists must provide the most accurate information possible, and remain objective.

A Behind the Scenes Look at Climate Science

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Al Gore, disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Today at the Haas School of Business, here on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, there was a lecture about Climate Science by Michael Mastrandrea, a PhD and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was a very well presented, fast moving and informative lecture covering much the of same information presented in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth“. It did cover some of the technical data more deeply than the movie but still it was directed primarily at a general audience, in this case to about twenty sophisticated Berkeley graduate school business students. It was being video recorded so in a couple of weeks there may be a link here.

After the formal lecture there was a question period. All of the questions were very good, and on topic, and very rapid. I don’t know if it is my low body temperature slowing down my brain, or old age or what, but it seems students are speaking much faster than they did twenty years ago. However, the rapid speech wasn’t accompanied by a more sophisticated, and precise vocabulary so I don’t know if there is actually any more information being transmitted per minute, perhaps less. The quality of the dialogue was definitely better than yesterday at the I-School question period which was diffuse, sometimes to the point of being word salad.

I didn’t ask any questions at the class because after all this was a class, and I was an interloper-auditor. However, after the lecture and two students had finished talking to Dr. Mastrandrea I did chat with him for about five minutes where I brought up the questionable quality of the various projections being made on his charts for the next 100 years, and futility of the solutions being presented in the face of the ongoing population explosion. I said, that if the population kept growing at the current rate there would certainly be a catastrophic collapse long before the end of the hundred year projections he showed on screen. I suspect that he agreed. At least he didn’t call me crazy for saying such a thing. He said that talking about population control was a difficult subject because of the ethical implications, and the impossibility of saying who would be allowed to have children, and who would be prevented. Who would live, and who would die? He told me that there were some people who were trying to come up with workable solutions, but apparently they were not being successful because there hasn’t been a squeak of any of these things being presented publicly. And I have been listening.

I asked about alternate solutions such as sequestering atmospheric carbon, as opposed to not creating it, but it seemed that most of the work along that line was rich carbon offenders buying off carbon credits from poor rain-forest countries. Functionally that is little more than paying off rich politicians of poor tropical countries to oppress the poor people of the forest. If these things go the way they usually do the suffering little guy on the bottom gets very little for what was his ancestral land, and in the end dies in situ or moves to the city, and becomes the new bottom dwelling member of the urban poor.

I suggested a few ideas, which might be crazy or maybe not – but he had never heard of them. Such as how much of the black heat absorbing arctic land could be painted over with titanium oxide white for a few billion dollars, and thus made more reflective of solar energy input, and thus cooler? Or how might ocean currents be deflected to improve human use requirements, or wind flow patterns of hot air going to arctic regions. He called this geo-engineering, but didn’t seem very enthusiastic about its chances for funding. Quite frankly, although he was an optimistic kind of person, and was optimistic about “solutions being found”, and was as informed as anybody I have encountered so far, he didn’t seem to have a workable answer. Not even close, and what’s worse, although he wanted it to be true there didn’t seem to be any large scale thing which was truly positive on the horizon. This is the same unsubstantiated kind of hope that Ambassador Kroner seemed to imbued with. It is a faith based hope and as such it makes living day to day easier and more pleasant but in the long run it courts disaster and eventually marries her.

Okay, so this week I have directly encountered three people in the center of this looming crisis, Ambassador Kroner on global warming and flooding, some speakers at the Berkeley Conference on global warming and now Dr. Mastrandrea of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and in addition I watched Al Gore’s movie on global warming. Everyone of these sources was intelligent, sane, informed, optimistic and apparently well paid for their role in solving this problem. And yet, I am sorry to say, they didn’t offer a single realistic clue as to how to actually cope with this crisis and worse yet none of them seemed to be thinking outside of their self imposed box. Changing your light-bulbs to compact-fluorescents isn’t going to solve the global warming problem.

All of these sources presented the nice sawtooth graph of CO2 starting in 1956 and going up to the present with accurate measurements, and not the slightest deviation from an arrow straight line to disaster. At least I offer some suggestions, but I am an outsider, and always will be, and as soon as I start talking in public about the real solutions I am branded as crazy, and the methods unworkable. The alternative, of course, is to let natural processes take their course. Mother nature will win out in the end no matter what we do, but we won’t enjoy her methods. She will eventually kill us off as a species, but if we behave correctly that could be a long long time in the distant future and not tomorrow evening at dinner between desert and coffee.

Al Gore – “An Inconvenient Truth” ignored the real problems.

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Al Gore, disaster, Environment, future, global warming, greenhouse gases, Health, pollution, population, solutions

Last night I watched Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming. In it he claims global warming is caused by human created greenhouse gases. But then the movie shows him flying all over the planet looking out the window of his private jet at the problems below, such as melting glaciers, forests being harvested, deserts etc.. It never seems to cross his mind that all of his unnecessary flying about is setting a really bad example for the public. His behavior is promoting tourism which is probably the most optional of all of the major sources of pollution.

There isn’t any real complaint with his facts about global warming or the science behind his facts, but there is a very real complaint at the solutions which he proposes at the end of the movie. The movie was presented well enough with innumerable whiny complaints about the very real problems, but the solutions at the end were all lame patches couched in a truly weird crossword puzzle game. These “solutions” were stirred into the usual fast moving credits scrolls typically seen at the end of movies, but they were all but impossible to read let alone think about. Why did he choose to do the solutions in such a stupid way? Because, the solutions are stupid, and they won’t solve the problem – and he knows it. And everyone else knows it.

The real problem which I mentioned a couple of days ago is simply that there are far too many human beings on planet Earth. But, that simple truth is about as unpleasant and unpopular a statement as can be made – I agree, I agree wholeheartedly, but it is still true.

There are quite a few ways to look at humans, and their place on this earth and a variety of these are sketched out on the Probaway – Happiness chart. Number twelve of the fourteen presented is Utilitarian; which is defined as – the maximum happiness for the maximum number of people for the maximum amount of time based on utilizing all available resources to maximize humanity’s survival and population vigor. That’s a bit long but it is useful definition because you can measure each of the various factors and come up with numbers which can be compared in various ways. This numerical method must always be considered as a hypothetical guide as it is only a way of looking at problems for purposes of relative comparison.

As individuals we all want to maximize the attainment of our goals and minimize our struggles getting to these goals. But when looking at all humanity’s needs and its health we must abstract ourselves from our personal considerations and look at the problems globally. Is it better for the human species to have 6.8 billion people for one year or 6.8 million people for a thousand years or 6.8 thousand people for a million years? Most species of our approximate physical size have been closer to the six thousand population size and have existed roughly in the million year range. Natural selection seems to like a population size of about that number, because it is large enough to be stable, but small enough to adapt to its environment with adequate quickness to maintain itself for a long time. Humans of course are a special case, a very special case, but all the same, even with our species special abilities there is some sort of balance between our population numbers, and our overall sustainability. Obviously, if our numbers grow to such huge size that in a few generations we pollute our environment so badly that it cannot sustain our presence, then there will be a catastrophic event and our population will collapse. When other species have had these uncontrolled population explosions they tend to have very precipitous collapses and sometimes go all the way to zero. This is of course a condition from which they never recover, and we humans appear to be on this path to self induced oblivion. Humans are presently said to be destroying species at a rate of a thousand per year, and humans would be only one more species, so what’s the problem? It’s us – that’s the problem!

The question becomes – is there a type of human society where the population can be sustained permanently in a living condition which they could accept. Is that number six thousand wild people living a similar existence to apes, or six million people living on a high tech but sparsely populated planet or six billion living briefly until any of innumerable problems finally triggers a catastrophic collapse into oblivion.

Population is the real problem and until it is brought to a sustainable number and some method is found for maintaining that population at that much smaller but sustainable level then, because there are no natural constraints on humans, there will be population explosions and collapses. We have a choice, but the choice is to limit our population to a vastly smaller number than what the Earth is presently enduring on a temporary basis.

—- A Sonnet —-

All panting desperation man would be,
If with but modest courage he was filled;
For then into the future he would see,
With clear, unshifting eye and will.

But courage was bred out so long ago
That now we have but vestige of that trait.
The bounty of fore-sight we now forego;
And blindly stumbling forward is our fate.

Perhaps we should not look beyond our nose,
For then despair would overwhelm our soul.
For what’s to see but loss of all we know
And love. We know clear vision takes its toll.

God’s plan for man is plain enough to see.
It’s simply death for all eternity.
—-

Global Warming – Solutions for America.

Tags

CO2, conference, Environment, golbal warming, population, proliferation, resources, war

Today I attended the Focus the Nation – UC Berkeley: Global Warming Solutions for America conference here in Berkeley, California at the International House. It it was held in the auditorium with about 500 folding chairs most of which were filled with intelligent well educated and well intentioned people. I was hoping for some profound lectures because after all this is Berkeley and there is a tradition of great things coming out this Athens of the West, and out of this very room. But to my profound chagrin there was nothing but blah blah. If you click this “Focus the Nation” report you will get ninety percent of what was said. The other ten percent is just as lame it just doesn’t happen to be in this fancy boiler plate blurb. The solutions presented could be found in any small town publication any where on planet Earth but in this particular case with some ya ya buzz words added to make it seem more Bezerkeley profound. Take the first sentence of this blat as an example, “We stand at a critical moment in history: climate change is upon us and it is the social, economic and moral challenge of this generation.” Any hack politician in the last ten thousand years could have stared his sermon with those “momentous” words, oh yes, they would subtract the word climate and insert just about anything more relevant to their particular situation. Here is a fun challenge, print out that document and underline or cross out the buzz words and see what you have left. Nothing! At least nothing suggestive of useful solutions to the real problems, – just lets all get together, get high, sing songs, get out in the streets, and protest and the world will be just fine. It was stated that that worked in the 60s so that is what will work now. Nonsense – it was people who escaped from that 60s silliness like Andy Grove, a Berkeley graduate of the time, who co-founded Intel, who was effective in making the best part of modern world while the druggie street culture mostly ended up with rotting brains and bodies.

Everything that was presented at this conference was palliative band-aids, plastering over the real problems, and there was not a breath or mention let alone confrontation of the real issues which lie behind the problems and confound the global warming problem and make it unsolvable by those leaders on the podium. In fact they make the problem worse every day by distracting people and energy away from exploring the real fundamental issues. There could have been mention of or better yet a list of the exact places where people with new methods for coping with these problems might go for financial and personal help.

The underlying problems and their solutions are unpleasant and therefore unpopular and therefore these nice successful social type people are unwilling to discuss them – these are all nice people but the solutions to these grave problems are going to remain un-nice and unpopular. Unpopular, unpleasant things are not discussed by nice people. The underlying problems include:

1. Too many people – there is a continuing population explosion and reducing each persons carbon footprint means little, if at the end of some projected time period to reduce CO2 by say thirty percent there are twice as many people. The total increase in number of people per year is now 3.6 times what it was in 1900 and that was considered on ongoing population explosion.

2. Exhaustion of resources – water, land, oil, are the things which produce our food and with the wholesale mining and with the destruction of these resources eventually there will ensue a famine and a population collapse. The population decline will probably be precipitous when it happens because we are mining resources down to a level where it takes a complex high technology to exploit them and if and when that technology falters a massive population collapse must immediately ensue. Currently, we have approximately fifteen days of food supplies stored in the channel from farm to mouth.

3. Nuclear proliferation and major war – I am fearful that these nice people will bring their types into major political office. None of the speakers even came close to mentioning what the influence of what they are proposing would be on those unpleasantly profound dangers. These nice people make heroes of leaders such as hansom charismatic Presidents who repeatedly brought us to the brink of annihilation and tend to vilify those farsighted people who pulled us away from catastrophe.

4. Economic confusion – The flow of money is subject to strange fluxes and distortions. It is probable that no one really knows what is happening well enough to prevent sharp, unpleasant events. Or if they do has enough clout to do anything effective. Most of these fluctuations can be endured by a healthy society but societies are not always healthy, and the fluctuations are not always small and when the problems I have been abstracting upon collide they may be synergistic and create short term devastation vastly beyond gradual global warming and a 3mm per year sea level rise.

There may have been a single constructive event at the meeting and that was that Bryan Martel, the Managing Director of Environmental Capital Group was introduced. He was sitting in the audience a few rows behind me. During the break I sought him out, we talked briefly and he gave me his card. This could be the beginning of something big because I have workable solutions for many of the problems I have been whining about in this blog.