Replying to LO28943 --
Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Jones <apjones@cheta.net> writes:
>I'm growing increasingly frustrated that we are doing
>so little in this country to avert global climate change.
>Thus, pasted below is a short editorial I wrote with
>support from my colleagues at Sustainability Institute
>(particularly Beth Sawin and Don Seville) that builds
>on some excellent system dynamics experimental work
>by John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney.
Greetings dear Andrew,
Thank you for the editorial. Thank you Rick for gaving the wisdom to post
it.
The comparison between a sports car and an ocean liner is good to stress
the effect which scale has.
Let me give another comparison. Here in Pretoria the highway from
Johannesburg ends in a street with a steep slope going down into our city.
I have not yet heard of the breaks of cars (tens of thousands per day)
failing when going down the slope. But the breaks of some heavy truck
(loaded to the maximum weight allowed for our roads) fail once every few
months. Then it ploughs through traffic and pedestrians down the street,
destroying dozens of cars and killing dozens of people.
The above is the mechanics. But here is the humanics. Several years ago a
compulsory stop sign for such heavy trucks had been set up at the top of
the road. Should the driver discover that the breaks are failing, a 100 m
long gravel filled pit has been provided. The immense friction of the
tyres ploughing through the gravel is enough to reduce the kinetic energy
of the truck to zero. In every incidence afterwards of a heavy truck
ploughing through the street rather than the pit, it has been found that
the driver did not stop the truck at the sign and that the break failure
was of such a kind that the driver knew the breaks were not working! Only
three weeks ago there was yet another case of such deliberate, reckless
driving.
Every "one in more than 200 years" climatic change in any region of the
world the past 10 years is like such a case of unroadworthy, heavy truck
ignoring the stop sign and subsequently ploughing down the street with
horrifying destruction. What we thus have to do, is to indentify the
loaded trucks, their owners and their drivers so as to bring them to
justice before any further such an event happens.
The loaded trucks are the industries based on fossil fuel, whether for
energy or for chemistry (entropy). The owners are anyone investing (owner,
stocks) in or getting a salary (from CEO to sweeper) from such an
industry. The drivers are anyone controlling (government, industry watch
dogs) or buying ( local, abroad) from such an industry. To bring them to
justice is to encourage them to do self-examination and reflection. Have
you tested your breaks by reducing the rate of production before going
down hill? Have you examined self the record of past destructive events in
the climate anywhere in the world?
Why are people (like truck owners and drivers) in the industrialised
countries not aware that they persistently add to climatic changes
elsewhere in the world? I think it is three mental models. The first is
that they can solve any industrial problem by adding another technologcial
support system to that industry. The second is that their own industries
are not so large as to have a noticeable effect on the climate. The third
is that nature is very resilient to the actions of humankind.
The persistence of these mental models indicate that something is very
wrong with education (formal and informal) at its very foundation. Mental
models are acquired by insufficient, skewed and frivolous learning. Only
by healing that learning can they be removed or transformed so that at
least for the immediate future they will cause no further problems.
The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle stressed already dozens of years
ago that the industrial age is not yet another higher level in the
evolution of civilised humankind. It is a steep, high, thin ridge which
has been super-imposed on a landscape which develops from one
steppe to another higher one since time immemorial. Since Hoyle's
urgent call for caution, many more poeple have become sensitive to
what humankind is really up to. The site
< www.dieoff.com >
has some frightening information from more than one contributor.
Not a day goes by without me thinking of die-off and what will cause it
first -- the dwindling supply of fossil fuels or the increasing
fluctuations in climatic conditions. A few fellow learners asked me in
private how much human population will decrease as a result of die-off.
Only one of them was not stunned because he also thinks holistically. My
answer? At least 90% the next 50 years and up to 98% the next 100 years.
In other words, the more than 8 billions at present will be reduced in the
next 50 years to about 800 million. Fifty years later it may be as low as
300 million. Numbers? No an unprecedented catastrophe in which even your
own children and grandchildren will be involved.
I have written above "increasing fluctuations in climatic conditions".
Only a hand full scientists know irreversible thermodynamics and even
fewer can apply it to massive complex systems. The inanimate part of our
globe (sea, earth and atmosphere) is the biggest such a system which we
can investigate. Most other scientists think that when one parameter in
any system gets increased steadily, at most one other parameter will
respond by increasing too, usually less. This is a bad, bad mental model
which has bewitched traditional scientists.
Irreversible thermodynamists know that by increasing merely one parameter
in a complex system, many other (rather than one) will repond by way of
the Onsager reciprocal relationships. In other words, a complex system
exhibits a "one-to-many-mapping" between cause and effect rather than a
"one-to-one-mapping". Furthermore, they know that for cyclic changes in
one parmeter as cause, the same "one-to-many-mapping" is responsible for
cyclic changes in the effects, often with different frequences in
different effects. Lastly, they know that should one parameter be changed
persistently and monotonically and a few others change cyclic as usual,
some of the cycles in the many effects get dampened seriously while others
get amplified extraordinarily.
Now think of the globe. We are steadily loading its surface and
atmosphere with thermal energy by burning fossil fuel. As a result
the ambient temperature rises steadily. But the globe are also
subjected to many cycles.Some of them are
* daily cycle (axial rotation of earth)
* monthly cycle (moon orbit around earth)
* yearly cycle (axially inclined earth orbiting sun)
* 4-5 yearly cycle (oceanic drifts -- El Nino)
*12-14 yearly cycle (sunspot activities -- cloud formation)
Each of these cycles has a "one-to-many-mapping" between cause
and effect. But the steady rise in ambient temperature dampens some
of the cyclic effects while amplifying some other cyclic effects. This
explains, for example, why the seemingly incompatable rise in ambient
temperature can be responsible for unprecedented snow falls in
recorded history. Two weeks the Eastern Cape in South Africa
suffered sucn an event.
How can I explain it easier in terms of the everyday experiences of fellow
learners? Imagine a man who behaves normally. Now think of this man taking
in liquor steadily. The man's speach become increasingly slurred. The
man's walking sway increasingly from side to side. The man's temper
becomes more violent and outbursts more frequent. I think that this is how
we have to picture the industrial age. It is causing changes in nature and
culture like the man who becomes increasingly drunk. Many of the cylic
changes in nature and culture become as disorientated like the behaviour
of the drunk man.
The industrial nations have become intoxicated and addicted to a fossil
fuel based economy. It has become urgent for them to face this and begin
with a healing program. Let us face it -- it will be an unprecedented
cold-turkey for humankind.
Dear fellow learner, are you drunk or are you sobering up?
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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