Good news: The planet can cope!

An update really to the previous post that mentioned the satellite data that shows that planet earth is undergoing reforestation rather than deforestation! Just to show that you can get anecdotal evidence for the greening of the planet when you actually look for it, the New York Times had ran this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/science/earth/30forest.html

Containing the happy quotes:


"By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster."

“Biologists were ignoring these huge population trends and acting as if only original forest has conservation value, and that’s just wrong,” said Joe Wright, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute here, who set off a firestorm two years ago by suggesting that the new forests could substantially compensate for rain forest destruction."

"Globally, one-fifth of the world’s carbon emissions come from the destruction of rain forests, scientists say. It is unknown how much of that is being canceled out by forest that is in the process of regrowth. It is a crucial but scientifically controversial question, the answer to which may depend on where and when the forests are growing."

They sure don't act like that de/reforestation is unknown do they? But hey I've an idea....why not just look at the available satellite data? Then it won't be so "unknown" any more. Too easy? Or just no juicy research money in that approach? We know - good news doesn't seem to sell papers - not unless it's "causing a firestorm".

And as if that wasn't enough good news, there's a reality check for the Malthusians (population worriers) too:

"In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population." 

Alas we had the predictable negative responses from those scientists whose income depends on alarmism. After all what's a professional earth science pessimist to do when nature seems to know how to sort things out on it's own? Well, how about becoming an entrepreneur and being a net giver to society rather than a net taker! Too scared to leave academia and face making your own living? Yes we know - that's why you stayed on for the PhD in the first place. The rest of us didn't fancy the trade-off of working 3 years for nothing for the shiny kudos of  someone calling you doctor. Sadly, too many find that their new PhD allows them to be easily rejected as "overqualified" in the real world. We need a PhD vocational re-education program. The first two items I'd put in the curriculum would be:

a) Look at all the data, not just the bits that fit your hypothesis.

b) Stop being so darn pessimistic. eg think seal cubs might be saved rather than polar bears might be lost!


And for all you people who say well it can't hurt making sure we stop deforestation then you clearly haven't seen this PBS documentary: I urge you to do so!  
http://www.pbs.org.news-channel.org/frontlineworld/stories/carbonwatch/moneytree/


That comment from anonymous below the film clip was from me. Ignored completely of course by the self-righteous - in complete line with the Stiglitz think tank who I'd alerted about reality not being quite the same as the models, before they went and made an arse of themselves at Copenhagen. Seems like they've dropped off the radar anyway - still using up public cash though and producing flawed reports that nobody seems to read. Oddly though they'd asked for comments on their reports and supplied an email to do so which is why I bothered. I'd even harboured a notion that they might at least acknowledge me (they didn't) though I'd known beforehand that  they wouldn't say "thanks we'll think about this". And of course when the Sunday Times gets around to investigating the deforestation fiasco then they'll say that nobody informed them. Frankly it's not up to me either - it's up to Dr Steve Running who did the fine satellite work. Funny that he hasn't received funding for it since 2003 when he reported the good news isn't it? Almost like they didn't really want to know that deforestation wasn't a problem! 


Stiglitz of course is one of the few economists who predicted the current financial fiasco - a Keynesian, he was predisposed to be skeptical of the Washington Consensus version of free-market strategies, and has written fine words in condemnation of the world Bank and IMF policies in Latin America. He really should know what it's like to be against the crowd but correct and he should realize the vital value of using real data to validate hypotheses because he was that man; resigning his position at the World Bank when they failed to listen to him.


So we have the tyranny of good intentions, the herdlike nature of humans to believe exactly what they want to believe, the failure to appreciate unintended consequences and plain old follow-the-money. Sure the planet can obviously take it but it's the poorest humans that suffer. Can't we at least learn to listen to them this time around?

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"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

I've discussed the first part of Einstein's famous phrase above in "Simple is Efficient" but the second part is just as important. If the recent meltdown of the financial markets is a guide to anything it's about how we search for ways to over-simplify something we truly don't understand, in order to make predictions that have no solid foundation. I'll use the dismal science as an example. I could have used engineering but that's too obvious: When a bridge falls down you are forced to do things better next time, but with economics they can just swap out one failed or untested theory with another.

The current economic dogmata owes much to the opposing Chicago School and Keynesian schools of thought. The Chicago school, of whom Milton Friedman is the most famous were a bunch of revisionists who reverted to a free market concept which they ascribed to the "invisible hand" metaphor of Adam Smith. Likely they hadn't even read Smith or they'd have known better. In truth Smith wasn't lecturing anyone, he was trying to understand the market and in several places he honestly admitted when he just didn't get it. The simplification made was that people are rational, markets work perfectly by themselves via the "invisible hand" and government regulation is therefore automatically bad. Of course the absurdity of the assumptions ridicule the conclusion - but only to a rational thinker. There's the rub; they thought they were rational people (rather than ivory-towered, hubristic chumps who couldn't run even a toffee shop) so their assumptions must perforce be correct.

Well the simple theory-confounding reality is that a truly free market is also free for the criminals. The only real test of the Chicago School theory was in Yeltsin's Russia, where all the economists straight from college suddenly became government advisors. Yeltsin naively assumed that what was being taught in US Universities was how America became rich. In truth America became rich thanks to staying out of the World War for long enough to sell vast amounts of arms and materiel to the combatants. No real secret there; but crucially the huge booms felt in the fifties in the West owed abolutely nothing to free market ideas either. It was Keynesianism apparently. But Keynes pretty much changed his mind all the time, so you might say it wasn't really his doctrine - it was his own savvy. Keynes of course knew how to run a business that made money and that is done by learning from mistakes, ie being adaptable, rather than sticking to ideas that have manifestly failed. Russia paid a heavy price for believing US academics by having a huge slump and being dominated by criminals. They only recovered when statism returned under Putin.

In the 70's Keynesianism, or rather the simplistic version of it invented by Samuelson, was blamed for the lack of growth and Friedman became the new guru. Thatcher then experimented with these Friedmanite free market ideas - basically changing taxation from income to consumption and removing state subsidies and regulations. Initially this lead to a massive recession in the UK but eventually - thanks to deregulation of the markets (and North Sea oil) the UK began to look lean and fit. It had certainly been shorn of much of it's manufacturing capability. But while the poorer 60% became poorer, the richer 40% became richer so it was all deemed a big success by the right-dominated newspapers. Everyone was in fact happy that the overly-powerful unions had been quietened, it was just a shame it took massive unemployment engendered* by a ruthless, bloody-minded, destructive and immoral harridan to achieve that end.

Reaganomics didn't really come from Reagan as he he didn't really bother himself much with government at all - or indeed with anything that required any thinking, or even with turning up for work. His puppeteers copied Thacherism, which in truth wasn't really like anything Friedman had advised (Thatcher had already abandoned monetarism as a proven failure) and renamed it the Washington Consensus. This doctrine was applied by the World Bank and IMF in a one-size-fits-all manner: Privatise everything, cut government spending, remove subsidies. The result - as reported by the economist Joseph Stiglitz and others - was a complete disaster for any country who asked for IMF or World Bank help. In effect these organisations who were supposed to be helping poor nations become less dependent on aid, had turned into tyrannical loan sharks, destroying economies for the profit of their friends on Wall street and various other corporate criminals based offshore.

Now Samuelson's Keynesianism is back but not in the manner Keynes would have liked. Keynes decried the idea of casino capitalism and that's almost exactly what is being tried now. There is no actual plan behind the massive spending except the vague idea that it worked before. But previously there had been the realization that to make money you have to add value to raw materials and sell the finished product at a profit. Somehow now, we have a strange mix of massive spending from that psuedo-Keynesianism combined with the sunny Chicago School optimism that markets, if left alone, will absorb this cash injection and magically produce economic growth. A double-whammy of stupidity! Only in the 3rd strand of economics; the Austrian school of Von Mises and Hayek, is there the realization that if too much debt caused the problem then more debt will make it worse. Of course the Austrian School followers have somewhat oversimplified beliefs too (stemming from Ayn Rand) but at least they were the ones who predicted this depression coming. Strangely this wasn't enough qualification to allow them to be employed by governments to fix the mess. Likely their fix - let the banks fail - was a bit too much for the revolving door mentality of politicos. After all that's their next job they'd be making disappear. Even Nouriel Roubini's softer ideas of mark-to-market mortgage reassessments were rejected. At any cost the huge mistakes made by the bankers seemingly had to be rewarded by the taxpayer. What are the chances then of this lot fixing anything? After all they are the same ones who broke it.

The point is that all strands of the original economic thought, have been over-simplified by others, removing all the important caveats and uncertainties of the originators, to the point where they do more harm than good. This is only one illustration of the process. One could mention the oversimplification of CO2 as the major climate driver, or of psychotherapists eager to blame parents for every misdeed done by their children, or indeed of  any number of other social sciences that ignore the wondrously unpredictably chaotic nature of life on Earth. Good grief they've even over-simplified natural chaos into a chaos theory. Isn't that an oxymoron? If you ever need an illustration of the real, natural chaos that confounds us then you'll see it the next time you pick up a cable that seems to have tied itself in knots all by itself after you had neatly stacked it away. Now that's an allegory worth remembering!

*It was the late Paul Foot's theory that Sir Keith Joseph and Maggie had deliberately conspired to increase unemployment so as to reduce inflation. The swingometer of high unemployment=low inflation was a trendy concept at that time so it's possible. Conservatives truthfully didn't give a rats arse about anyone who had to dirty his hands to work so it's plausible too. After all how can you not realize that if Asia and Europe subsidize their industries and you remove your subsidies then you will lose your industries. It's not a difficult concept! So it's either gross stupidity, which is also plausible, or downright evil or the blinding dogma of the free-marketeers (which to be fair also goes in the stupidity box).

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The science is worse than we thought!

There was a link from a recent article in the Independent (about the met offices abysmal prediction record) that showed some of the arithmetic trickiness employed by the IPCC to present the case that climate change is worse than we thought.
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ipcc

Now i'd noticed before the inability of the IPCC to properly add up error bounds, ie it is impossible for individual components to a total to have a larger error bound than the total. And I'd noticed the IPCC got the 20% deforestation number totally ass-backwards because the planet has actually been officially greening according to the peer-reviewed NASA satellite data http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalGarden/. It might very well be 20% REforestation. If that was included int he carbon sink summation then there is less missing sink to search for. The missing sink argument is that we stick roughly 7 Gt (Gigatonnes)) in the air, 1.5 Gt is added by deforestation, 3 Gt stays in the atmosphere and 2 Gt is removed by land and sea.The remainder is unaccounted for. Of course the error bars on these numbers are quite high. The numbers also vary according to who does the calculation.

Ref: IPCC + http://www.greencollar.org/employer/the-missing-carbon-sink-ads-7868.html
Values in gigatonnes:

Existing idea: 7 (fossil fuels) + 1.5 (deforestation) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) = 3.5 Gt missing sink.

More plausible idea?: 7 (fossil fuels) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) =  2 (reforestation).

Of course the whole sink/source argument is inexact science to say the least, as this report shows:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070621140805.htm

They really don't in fact have a clue as to what is a sink and what is a source in nature. In fact the sea should be a net source too by Henry's law, since it is warming up. The reason it is treated as a sink is because then either the sea contributes to the total that we observe in the atmosphere which is politically incorrect (in my opinion) or there is an even greater missing sink, meaning our scientists are even more clueless about the carbon cycle. There isn't really a scientific justification for a warming sea being a net sink - there are some hand-waving arguments and iffy models but no real evidential numbers so it's mostly a politically convenient decision.

And I'd of course  noticed that the 90% certainty figures in the summary was presented as scientific, ie based on evidence when in fact it was no more than a show of hands, ie 100% unscientific and misleading.

But it's even worse than I thought. Things are added after the reviews are complete. This is brought to light becuase the review comments were eventually - after much pressure - released in this "open process". And they reveal that Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones clearly thought the case wasn't strong enough so they just made things up and added them later - unreviewed.

The IPCC is always used as the yardstick to judge alarmism, eg by the UK judge who lorded it over the courtcase that identified 9 serious innaccuracies in "An inconvenient truth" and ordered schools to mention these when the film is shown. However, we no longer have that yardstick because the IPCC report was shaped by these two lead authors after everyone else had gone home. I'm reminded that several of the authors; Paul Reiter (malaria), Richard Lindzen (feedbacks), Chris Landsea (hurricanes), Roger Pielke Snr (land-changes) had of course resigned because of this post-review chicanery and had been summarily ignored by the press. In addition just about everyone has criticised the millenial reconstructions of temperature including Briffa the actual lead author of the report, who according to the "climategate" emails firmly believes that there was a medieval warm period as warm or warmer than today. Crazy! Science will recover because people have short memories but we really have to redefine peer-review procedures now that we have the chance.

Now some might think that it's all for the greater good. Wrong! Being honest is for the greater good! If you are dishonest in your summary of the science then you are more than likely dishonest in all of your science and you dishonour your profession. In engineering this type of chicanery would quite literally cost lives.

Update : some more links from a skeptic sight which you are free to peruse. The carbon cycle never really gets the discussion it deserves anywhere in the mainstream press or journals.

My argument beaten by 10 years and much more technically obtained - we get the same 30% fraction. Impressively this was 4 years before the satellite data confirmed the greening of the planet:

http://www.john-daly.com/bulletin/bull-111/bul111.htm

An alternative statistical conclusion to the IPCC:

http://www.john-daly.com/ahlbeck/ahlbeck.htm

http://www.john-daly.com/co2-conc/reviews.htm


An alternative bathtub model:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm

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