Category: Capitalism

William Rees on disconnection

William Rees discussing the disconnect between economics and ecology.

Yesterday, I wrote about Paul Gilding’s book The Great Disruption. In a sense today’s article continues the theme; the idea that the future is going to be very different to the past, indeed has to be if mankind is to have a viable future.

Dr. William Rees is Professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. More details of Dr. Rees here.

Here’s a 17-minute video interview of Dr. Rees with Thomas Bernes, Executive Director, CIGI.

That interview is carried on the website of the Institute of New Economic Thinking from where one can read the introduction, thus,

The world economy is depleting the earth’s natural resources, and economists cling to models that make no reference whatsoever to the biophysical basis that underpins the economy. That’s why ecological economics is needed, says William Rees in this INET interview.

Standard economics portrays the economy as a circular flow: households pay money to firms in exchange for goods and services, and firms pay wages to households in exchange for labor. Textbooks describe this circular flow as self-perpetuating, capable of infinite expansion. William Rees argues that the textbooks get it wrong; he says the production of our goods and services depends on the extraction of material from ecosystems, causing resource depletion on the one hand, and excess pollution on the other.

William Rees, best known in ecological economics as the originator and co-developer of ‘ecological footprint analysis’, says the United States is using four or five times its fair share of the world’s total bio-capacity. In order to bring just the present world population up to the material standards enjoyed by North Americans, we would need the biophysical equivalent of about three additional planet earths.

There has been no time in history where income growth hasn’t been accompanied by increased material and energy consumption, Rees cautions. He says technologies exist that would enable us to enjoy our current lifestyles with perhaps as little as 20 percent of our current energy and material consumption, but we do not have the incentives in place to force that decoupling to take place.

Rees is as pessimistic on current culture and politics as he is optimistic on the technology. The global culture remains in denial, and people with vested interests in the status quo wield enormous power.

Want more from Dr. Rees? Over at the website West Coast Climate Equity is an eight-part series where Dr. Rees sets out the proposition that humanity’s survival depends on an 80% reduction in energy use.

Finally, on the Post Carbon Institute website there’s a link to an audio speech given by Dr. Rees summarised as follows.

Bill Rees speech to Vancouver World Federalist meeting on Radio Ecoshock Show
This is a speech by Dr. Bill Rees delivered April 15th at the World Federalist meeting in Vancouver. It goes a long way to explaining why we fail to act, even as the facts become clear and indisputable. He covers the three brain theory, the limits of evolution, memes, Peak Oil, and cultural myths, plus some thoughts on solutions – mostly contraction and convergence. Rees is one of the few academics more or less calling for a planned economic collapse.

The 53 minute speech is featured in this week’s Radio Ecoshock show, broadcast by 20 college and community radio stations in the U.S. and Canada, plus Green 960 AM in San Francisco.

The URL includes a link to download a transcript.

What is it you don’t understand?

Stating the obvious.

I am about a third into Paul Gilding’s book The Great Disruption. It’s proving to be a very-thought provoking read that I will review in more detail over the coming weeks.

However, I just wanted to quote from the start of Chapter 5, Addicted to Growth,

Indeed, as argued by economist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Very little that can be argued about that statement. It rather puts into context a couple of items read recently. Both from the blogsite New Economic Perspectives. The first on June 10th by Stephanie Kelton,

Earlier this week, President Obama talked about the weakening state of the economy, telling us that he’s not worried about a double-dip recession and that the nation should “not panic.” It’s hard to imagine a more alarming assessment at this juncture.

The recovery is faltering. Our economy is growing at annual rate of just 1.8 percent. Manufacturing just grew at its slowest pace in 20 months. More than 44 million Americans – one in seven – rely on food stamps. Employers hired only 54,000 new workers in May, the lowest number in eight months. Jobless claims increased to 427,000 in the week ended June 4. The unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent. Nearly half of all unemployed Americans have been without work for more than 6 months. About 25% of all teenagers who are looking for work are unemployed. Eight-and-a-half million Americans are underemployed – i.e. working part-time because their hours have been cut or because they can’t find full-time work. There are, on average, 4.6 unemployed people for every 1 job opening. And even if all the open positions were filled, there would still be 10.7 million people looking for work.

The second on July 8th by Marshall Auerback,

Today’s unemployment data suggests that we are experiencing something far worse than a mere “bump in the road”, as our President described it last month. In fact, if last month was the time to panic, as Stephanie Kelton argued here, then today’s data should create real palpitations in the White House. This isn’t just a “bump,” but a fully-fledged New York City style pot hole.

First the headline number everyone looks at: non-farm payrolls. Up 18,000 in June, the increase was 100,000 less than expectations. In addition the prior two month payroll increases were revised down by -44,000 overall. That’s weak – but not terrible.

Dig a bit deeper into the data and it looks absolutely awful: The household measure of employment fell by -445,000. Okay, it’s a noisy number. But, as Frank Veneroso has pointed out to me in an email correspondence, this measure of employment which is never revised now shows no employment growth over the last five months and very negative employment growth over the last three.

But it gets worse: The work week was down one tenth. Overtime was down one tenth. The labor participation rate at 64.1% was the lowest since 1984. The broad U6 unemployment rate rose from 15.8% to 16.2%. In other words, as Frank suggested to me this morning, “many other employment indicators in this report confirm the deep disappointment in the payroll series and the much more negative message of the household series.”

Now here’s the latest item published by Paul Gilding in his Blog, The Cockatoo Chronicles. (I have republished it in full, hopefully without upsetting Mr. Gilding – couldn’t see advice on reproduction – but copyright remains, of course, fully with Paul Gilding.)

Like a Grenade in a Glasshouse

June 29, 2011

It’s going to hit hard and it’s going to hurt – made worse because most aren’t expecting it. They think the world is slowly returning to our modern “normal” – steadily increasing growth, with occasional annoying but manageable interruptions. After all, the global recession wasn’t so bad was it? Sure there was pain and things got shaky but Governments responded, bailed out companies, stimulated economies, got things back on track. While it’s still a bit bumpy, Greek wobbles, US debt, extreme weather, high oil and food prices etc, it’ll work out. It always does….

If only it were so. In fact we are blindly walking towards the next in a series of inevitable system shaking and confidence sapping crises, deluded in the belief that the worst is behind us.

Each crisis will be a little worse than the last. Each one will shake our denial a little more. This is what happens when systems hit their limits. They don’t do so smoothly, but bump up against the wall, hitting hard, then bouncing off equally hard. It is the behaviour of a system trying to break through. But if the limits are solid, as is the case with our economic system hitting the limits of the planet – defined by unchangeable physical capacity and the laws of physics, chemistry and biology – then it can’t find its way through. So eventually, when the pain of hitting the wall gets too much, it stops.

Then it will hit. Like a grenade in a glasshouse, shattering denial and delusion and leaving it like a pile of broken glass on the floor of the old economic model. Then we’ll be ready for change.

I’ve been arguing the inevitability of this moment since 2005, mostly inside the business community. Before the 2008 financial crisis hit, the idea was almost universally rejected, with a belief in the indomitable power of globalised markets to overcome all challenges and keep growth on track. Most audiences believed that while markets always wobbled, they also always recovered. My suggestion, that this level of arrogance was the hallmark of empires before they fell, landed on deaf ears. They were the masters of the universe and markets and growth would always reign supreme.

Now the response is different. The financial crisis saw many break off from the pack and start to ask the difficult questions. I now find as I tour the world speaking about The Great Disruption to community gatherings, corporate executives and policy makers that minds are increasingly open. While not the dominant view, the previous confidence in the inevitably of growth has become shaky and the group asking the challenging questions is rapidly expanding.

As I argue in the book, the fundamental cause of what’s coming is resource constraint and environmental breakdown, which when combined with an overstretched financial system and high levels of debt puts unbearable tension into the global economy. While no one can know what event will pull the pin out of the grenade, the underlying pressures make that moment inevitable. Yes, the dominant commentary still blames each individual problem on unique circumstances, but the underlying systemic causes are clear for those who wish to look.

The continued level of denial still surprises me, especially given the pressures driving this are not esoteric and can be measured in clear economic indicators. A good example was recently published by one of the more interesting voices to join the growing chorus that we have a system-wide problem. The legendary contrarian and fund manager Jeremy Grantham is co-founder of the Boston based firm GMO, with over $100 billion of assets under management. So this guy is a solid capitalist and market advocate, pursuing wealth for the wealthy. But he sees the data and is raising the alarm, calling this moment “one of the giant inflection points in economic history” – referring to the end of a 100-year steady decline in commodity prices. His views were echoed by Stephen King, group chief economist at HSBC, who wrote in the FT: “After the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression, economic theory tells us that world commodity prices should not be this high. But they are and the West quickly needs to wake up to this new economic reality. Commodity prices are now permanently higher.”

Grantham provides the detail, pointing out that the 100 year trend of falling prices in the 33 most important commodities, except for oil, were wiped out with a price surge from 2002 to 2010 – a surge even greater than experienced in WW2. We have now reached what Grantham calls the Great Paradigm shift; not a price spike but a new reality. Within this new reality, Grantham says: “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”

This is why hitting the wall is inevitable – because limits are not philosophies, they are limits. We can understand what to expect – and why the grenade will shatter the glasshouse of economic growth – by going back to how systems behave when they hit their limits. Our economic system first hit the wall in 2008 – that was when The Great Disruption began with food and oil prices hitting record highs and a credit crisis driven by reckless monetary policy pursuing growth at all costs. The resulting recession meant we backed away from those limits (bouncing off the wall), and then borrowed massive amounts of money from our children (think Greece) to try to get the economy moving again.

Now that the global economy is slowly entering a so-called “recovery”, the prices of commodities (representing our use of earth’s resources for food and materials) are on the way up, accelerated, in the case of food, by climate change. Of course if significant growth kicks in, the prices of oil, food and other commodities will surge, this timestarting from near record highs. Then we will bounce back into recession and prices will back off again. Hit the wall, bounce off. Hit the wall, bounce off. Ouch.

By itself this would pose enough of a challenge to growth. But now we also have the debt we used to get the economy moving again. This debt can only be paid off with significant economic growth – but such significant growth is impossible as outlined above. So the debt itself becomes an enormous additional tension in the system, as argued by Richard Heinberg in his important forthcoming book The End of Growth. With the global economy and ecosystem now both burdened by unmanageable debt, effective global default is only a matter of time.

So we’re living in a glass house with the grenade sitting there for all to see. Who knows what will pull the pin. It could be Greece, a Chinese food crisis, peak oil or any number of other triggers. But it’s coming.

The question to ask yourself is simple. Are you ready?

Back to Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Precisely!

TomDispatch – The Great American Carbon Bomb.

A powerful and insightful essay from Bill McKibben about our love affair with carbon-based energy.

Introduction

I subscribe to a number of Blogs and one of them is TomDispatch. Here’s how Tom describes what the writings are all about.

Tom Engelhardt launched Tomdispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features Tom Engelhardt’s regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte, and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director.

Tomdispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.

I read the TomDispatch essay from Bill McKibben on the 14th. It caught my eye, not only because of the power of Bill’s conclusions, but also because I was deeply impressed with Bill’s book ‘eaarth’, which I reviewed on Learning from Dogs here and here.

Tom Engelhardt has given written permission for that TomDispatch to be re-published in full on Learning from Dogs. It now follows.

First the introduction by Tom Engelhardt,

The Great American Carbon Bomb

These days, even ostriches suffer from heat waves. More than 1,000 of them reportedly died from overheating on South African farms during a 2010 drought. As for American ostriches, the human variety anyway, at the moment it should be increasingly hard for them to avoid extreme-weather news. After all, whether you’re in sweltering heat, staggering drought, a record fire season, or a massive flood zone, most of us are living through weird weather this year. And if you’re one of the lucky few not in an extreme-weather district of the USA, you still won’t have a problem running across hair-raising weather stories, ranging from the possible loss of one out of every ten species on this planet by century’s end to the increasing inability of the oceans to soak up more atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Then, of course, there are those other headlines. Here’s a typical one: “As Water Rises, Florida Officials Sit on Their Hands” (a former member of the just abolished Florida Energy and Climate Commission points out that, thanks to Republican governor Rick Scott and the legislature in the part of the country most vulnerable to rising sea levels, “there is no state entity addressing climate change and its impact”). And here’s another: “Economy Keeps Global Warming on the Back Burner for 2012” (American climate-change “skeptics” are celebrating because “the tide of the debate — at least politically — has turned in their favor” and “political experts say that… concerns over global warming won’t carry much weight in the 2012 election”). And then there are the polls indicating Americans are confused about the unanimity of the scientific consensus on climate change, surprisingly dismissive of global-warming dangers, worry less about it than they did a decade ago, and of major environmental issues, worry least about it.

It’s true, of course, that no weird-weather incident you experience can definitively be tied to climate change and other factors are involved. Still, are we a nation of overheating ostriches? It’s a reasonable enough conclusion, and in a sense, not so surprising. After all, how does anyone react upon discovering that his or her way of life is the crucial problem, that fossil fuels, which keep our civilization powered up and to which our existence is tethered, are playing havoc with the planet?

TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben, author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a man deeply committed to transforming us from climate-change ostriches to climate-change eagles. Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, for the environmental movement to get one heck of a lot blunter. Tom

Here’s the essay from Bill,

Will North America Be the New Middle East?
It’s Yes or No For a Climate-Killing Oil Pipeline — and Obama Gets to Make the Call
By Bill McKibben

The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistansuffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.

The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States. Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history. Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.

Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”

There’s another shift, too, and that’s in the response from climate-change activists. For the first two decades of the global-warming era, the suggested solutions to the problem had been as abstract as the science that went with it: complicated schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, or the cap-and-trade agreement that died in Congress in 2010. These were attempts to solve the problem of climate change via complicated backstage maneuvers and manipulations of prices or regulations. They failed in large part because the fossil-fuel industry managed, at every turn, to dilute or defang them.

Clearly the current Congress is in no mood for real regulation, so — for the moment anyway — the complicated planning is being replaced by a simpler rallying cry. When it comes to coal, oil, and natural gas, the new mantra of activists is simple, straightforward, and hard to defang: Keep it in the ground!

Two weeks ago, for instance, a few veteran environmentalists, myself included, issued a call for protest against Canada’s plans to massively expand oil imports from the tar sands regions of Alberta. We set up a new website, tarsandsaction.org, and judging from the early response, it could result in the largest civil disobedience actions in the climate-change movement’s history on this continent, as hundreds, possibly thousands, of concerned activists converge on the White House in August. They’ll risk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the U.S., ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands will only increase.

Forget the abstract and consider the down-and-dirty instead. You can undoubtedly guess some of the reasons for opposition to such a pipeline. It’s wrecking native lands in Canada, and potential spills from that pipeline could pollute some of the most important ranchlands and aquifers in America. (Last week’s Yellowstone River spill was seen by many as a sign of what to expect.)

There’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb. Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.

If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature. It won’t happen overnight, thank God, but according to the planet’s most important climatologist, James Hansen, burning even a substantial portion of that oil would mean it was “essentially game over” for the climate of this planet.

Halting that pipeline wouldn’t solve all tar sands problems. The Canadians will keep trying to get it out to market, but it would definitely ensure that more of that oil will stay in the ground longer and that, at least, would be a start. Even better, the politics of it are simple. For once, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives can’t get in the way. The president alone decides if the pipeline is “in the national interest.” There are, however, already worrisome signs within the Obama administration. Just this week, based on a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Timesreported that, in 2009, the State Department’s “energy envoy” was already instructing Alberta’s fossil-fuel barons in how to improve their “oil sands messaging,” including “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories.” This is the government version of Murdochian-style enviro-hacking, and it leads many to think that the new pipeline is already a done deal.

Still, the president can say no. If he does, then no pipeline — and in the words of Alberta’s oil minister, his province will be “landlocked in bitumen” (the basic substance from which tar-sands oil is extracted). Even energy-hungry China, eager as it is for new sources of fossil fuels, may not be able to save him, since native tribes are doing a remarkable job of blocking another proposed pipeline to the Canadian Pacific. Oil, oil everywhere, and nary a drop to sell. (Unfortunately that’s not quite true, but at least there won’t be a big new straw in this milkshake.)

An Obama thumbs-down on the pipeline could change the economics of the tar sands in striking ways. “Unless we get increased [market] access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary.

Faced with that prospect, Canada’s oilmen are growing desperate. Earlier this month, in a classic sleight of hand, they announced plans for a giant “carbon capture and sequestration” scheme at the tar sands. That’s because when it comes to global warming, tar sands oil is even worse than, say, Saudi oil because it’s a tarry muck, not a liquid, and so you have to burn a lot of natural gas to make it flow in the first place.

Now, the oil industry is proposing to capture some of the extra carbon from that cooking process and store it underground. This is an untested method, and the accounting scheme Alberta has adopted for it may actually increase the province’s emmissions. Even if it turns out to work perfectly and captures the carbon from that natural gas that would have escaped into the atmosphere, the oil they’re proposing to ship south for use in our gas tanks would still be exactly as bad for the atmosphere as Saudi crude. In other words, in the long run it would still be “essentially game over” for the climate.

The Saudis, of course, built their oil empire long before we knew that there was anything wrong with burning oil. The Canadians — with American help, if Obama obliges the oil lobby — are building theirs in the teeth of the greatest threat the world has ever faced. We can’t unbuild those Saudi Arabian fields, though happily their supplies are starting to slowly dwindle. What we can still do, though, is prevent North America from becoming the next Middle East.

So there will be a battle, and there will be nothing complicated or abstract about it. It will be based on one question: Does that carbon stay in the earth, or does it pour into the atmosphere? Given the trillions of dollars at stake it will be a hard fight, and there’s no guarantee of victory. But at least there’s no fog here, no maze of technicalities.

The last climate bill, the one the Senate punted on, was thousands of pages long. This time there’s a single sheet of paper, which Obama signs… or not.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of 350.org, and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Copyright 2011 Bill McKibben

Final note from yours truly.

Guess what I read about on the BBC News website on the 15th, the day that I put this article together? I read about a fabulous new ship about to start construction at the Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea. When launched and loaded, at 600,000 tonnes, it will be the world’s largest ship. Wow that’s impressive!

Now read here as to what is the purpose of this ‘ship’. Here’s a flavour of that BBC news item,

Shell has unveiled plans to build the world’s first floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) platform. The 600,000-tonne behemoth – the world’s biggest “ship” – will be sited off the coast of Australia. But how will it work?

Deep beneath the world’s oceans are huge reservoirs of natural gas. Some are hundreds or thousands of miles from land, or from the nearest pipeline.

Tapping into these “stranded gas” resources has been impossible – until now.

At Samsung Heavy Industries’ shipyard on Geoje Island in South Korea, work is about to start on a “ship” that, when finished and fully loaded, will weigh 600,000 tonnes.

That is six times as much as the biggest US aircraft carrier.

By 2017 the vessel should be anchored off the north coast of Australia, where it will be used to harvest natural gas from Shell’s Prelude field.

Yes, it’s more technology to enable us to use more carbon! As the article (just) touches on,

But there has been opposition from environmentalists. Martin Pritchard from Environs Kimberley says he is concerned about the potential for “oil leaks and spills”.

WWF Western Australia, [my inserted link, Ed.] meanwhile, argues that the underwater wellheads and pipelines will harm the tropical marine environment, and estimates the project will emit more than two million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year.

Sort of reminds me of that old Devonshire saying (and you need to imagine hearing it in that wonderful dialect that just still exists in this far part of SW England)

“All the world’s a little queer except thee and me …. and I have me doubts about thee!”

We are all very ‘queer’ indeed!

What exactly is the truth?

What makes an open society function healthily?.

I suspect very few of you regular readers will recall that in 2009 (24th June to be precise) I ran a very short article under a similar title. This is what was published.

A simple heading but, in truth, a very complex subject. This was brought home by a recent article in The Economist by Bagehot. That is “Politicians frequently lie. So does everyone else. Why all the fuss?”

Bagehot writes a Blog so those who don’t read the newspaper can read the rest of his thesis here.

Here’s some of that essay by Bagehot,

On lying

Jun 30th 2009, 14:43 by Bagehot

THE WORD “lie” means something very specific. It doesn’t mean a misleading statement, or an exaggeration, or a half-truth: it is a falsehood advanced intentionally and knowingly. That is why, in my column last week, I wrote that probably only Tony Blair and his crew could know whether they “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Only they can know what was in their heads, and how far their public utterances diverged from their inner convictions. For that reason the question of lying over Iraq seems to me a bit of a red herring and distraction. What can be proved about their sloppiness and embellishments, and has been, is bad enough.

Lying is back in the news this week. Gordon Brown stands accused by various newspapers and columnists of deliberately misleading the public about the government’s fiscal position. Ditto Ed Balls, the prime minister’s henchman, who evidently doesn’t take kindly to having his integrity impugned in this way. David Cameron is a bit more periphrastic, knowing that in political parlance the “l” word is a nuclear accusation; but he came pretty close to it yesterday with his talk of “a thread of dishonesty” running through Mr Brown’s premiership.

There are (at least) two big questions provoked by this revived interest in lying. First and most obviously, are Mr Brown, Mr Balls and others really and indisputably liars? Do the fiscal figures they cite and twist in any way support the interpretation they put on them–at least enough to make it credible that they believe what they are saying, even if no-one else does? If so, they may not be lying. They may be over-optimistic, incompetent or deluded. But they are not obviously liars.

Just re-read those last few sentences, “Do the fiscal figures they cite and twist in any way support the interpretation they put on them–at least enough to make it credible that they believe what they are saying, even if no-one else does? If so, they may not be lying. They may be over-optimistic, incompetent or deluded. But they are not obviously liars.”

Delay your judgement for just a few minutes while we go to this next item. This next item is a recent essay from John Maudlin, the financial expert, about the latest jobs report in the US.

What Happened to the Jobs?

By John Mauldin

July 7, 2011

The US jobs report came out this morning, and it was simply dismal. This week we look at not only the jobs report but also “what-if” proffers for the US and global economies. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump in.

First, there were only 18,000 jobs created in June, the lowest since September 2010. While private employment rose by 57,000, government workers dropped by 39,000, continuing a trend as governments at all levels work to cut their budgets. Long-time readers know I think it is important to look at the direction of the revisions, and we got no help. May was revised down by 29,000 jobs and April a further down 15,000.

I saw some headlines and talking heads in the mainstream media saying the poor number was due to “seasonals,” and I just shook my head. If you are that reflexively bullish when presented with what was clearly a bad report, how can you be taken seriously? You know who you are. And then Philippa Dunne of the Liscio Report sent the following note. She is one of the best data mavens there is on jobs and employment.

John M. then includes quite a long extract from Philippa’s note. You can read it and the rest of John’s article here. Here’s how that extract from Philippa Dunne ends,

Also, there is no adjustment to the headline number – the sectors are adjusted separately (96 different industries at the 3-digit NAICS level, to be precise) and the total is the sum of those components. The whole argument is bogus.

Notice that last sentence, “The whole argument is bogus.” [My emboldening, Ed.]

OK, clearly not lying, in the strict definition of the term. But still delay your judgement.

Back on the 25th June this year, I wrote a piece with the title of Lying is OK, that’s official! Duh! I stated very clearly that lying is wrong! Mind you, one could at least congratulate Jean Claude Juncker for honestly admitting being a liar. (Jean Claude Juncker is the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and the head of the Eurogroup council of eurozone finance ministers.) Here’s that video clip with Juncker admitting that when it’s serious one has to lie! (Listen carefully, the words are quietly spoken.)

Finally, I have long followed Yves Smith’s excellent Blog, Naked Capitalism. Just yesterday, Yves wrote a powerful piece,

MONDAY, JULY 11, 2011

More Proof That Obama is Herbert Hoover

Not only is Obama assuring that he will go down as one of the worst Presidents in history, but for those who have any doubts, he is also making it clear that his only allegiance is to the capitalist classes and their knowledge worker arms and legs.

It’s an angry essay that has, at it’s heart, an anger at the lack of true representative government, remember the one that Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he wrote, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Yves concludes in that article thus,

Even knowing how dedicated to bad ends Obama is, I still feel like I’ve walked into a parallel universe. He’s now determined to make these horrific entitlement cuts a sign of his manhood. This is “Change” for sure, to a more brutal, grasping, dog eat dog society, all administered by self serving elites. They will in the end reap the whirlwind they are creating, but not before it mows a path of destruction through our social order.

Right, time to draw it all together.

Despite my chest-beating on the subject of politicians and leaders deliberately lying in that recent piece about Juncker, there’s something much more fundamental. What defines lying is really not that important. It’s whether or not we trust that our leaders are doing their best for their constituents, to the best of their abilities.

Whether you support left-leaning or right-leaning policies is unimportant; indeed political differences and the ability to vote for one’s beliefs is at the heart of an open democracy.

But if we don’t trust that our leaders are doing their best for our country then that causes the destruction of faith. If we do not have faith in those that lead us then the breakdown of a civilised social order becomes a very real risk.

These are such difficult times impacting us across so many fronts. Scarily, one seems to find many who have lost much faith in their leaders.

That, my friends, is the truth.

What is freedom? Part Three

The Trap – 3 – We Will Force U 2 Be Free

[Note: Part Two of The Trap is available to watch in my post of the 7th where one can also link back to Part One. Ed.]

This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. What is discussed in this episode is the alternative idea to freedom that currently exists and traps the western societies in which we live.

Space, where to now?

A rather poignant moment as the last NASA Space Shuttle is programmed to launch today.

Many of my age will have been fascinated by man’s progress in exploring space, from the Russian Sputnik 1 launched into earth orbit in October, 1957 (I was 12!) through to man first putting a foot on the surface of the moon on 20th July, 1969 on the US Apollo 11 Mission.

first-man-on-moon-2 — Still frame from the video transmission of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the Moon at 02:56 UTC on 21 July 1969.

Today, the end of an era is being played out. Today, the last Space Shuttle, Atlantis, is due to be launched. From the NASA website,

Date: July 8
Mission: STS-135
Launch Vehicle: Space Shuttle Atlantis
Launch Site: Kennedy Space Center – Launch Pad 39A
Launch Time: 11:26 a.m. EDT
Description: Space shuttle Atlantis will carry the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module to deliver supplies, logistics and spare parts to the International Space Station. Atlantis also will fly a system to investigate the potential for robotically refueling existing spacecraft and return a failed ammonia pump module.

The BBC recently had an interesting news item where all six crew members of Shuttle Discovery were interviewed after that last flight, more details including a video of the interview here.

Astronauts of shuttle Discovery describe ‘amazing’ craft

At almost 27 years old, and with more than 143 million miles on the clock, the space shuttle Discovery returned from her final mission in March.

The crew of Discovery’s final mission, Commander Steve Lindsey, astronauts Eric Boe, Stephen Bowen, Alvin Drew, Michael Barratt and Nicole Stott, spoke to Breakfast News about what it was like to fly the shuttle for the last time.

So where does it go from here?

The current edition of The Economist has a quite a lot to say about that. A leader starts with raising the question of how big the Earth is?

HOW big is the Earth? Any encyclopedia will give you an answer: its equatorial diameter is 12,756km, or, for those who prefer to think that way, 7,926 miles. Ah, but then there is the atmosphere. Should that count? Perhaps the planet’s true diameter is actually nearer 13,000km, including all its air. But even that may no longer be an adequate measure. For the Earth now reaches farther still. The vacuum surrounding it buzzes with artificial satellites, forming a sort of technosphere beyond the atmosphere. Most of these satellites circle only a few hundred kilometres above the planet’s solid surface. Many, though, form a ring like Saturn’s at a distance of 36,000km, the place at which an object takes 24 hours to orbit the Earth and thus hovers continuously over the same point of the planet.

Later, this leader speculates,

The reason for that second objective is also the reason for thinking 2011 might, in the history books of the future, be seen as the year when the space cadets’ dream finally died. It marks the end of America’s space-shuttle programme, whose last mission is planned to launch on July 8th (see article, article). The shuttle was supposed to be a reusable truck that would make the business of putting people into orbit quotidian. Instead, it has been nothing but trouble. Twice, it has killed its crew. If it had been seen as the experimental vehicle it actually is, that would not have been a particular cause for concern; test pilots are killed all the time. But the pretence was maintained that the shuttle was a workaday craft. The technical term used by NASA, “Space Transportation System”, says it all.

But the shuttle is now over. The ISS is due to be de-orbited, in the inelegant jargon of the field, in 2020. Once that happens, the game will be up. There is no appetite to return to the moon, let alone push on to Mars, El Dorado of space exploration. The technology could be there, but the passion has gone—at least in the traditional spacefaring powers, America and Russia.

From STS-1 launched on 12 April 1981 through to today’s planned launch of STS-135, it indeed has been an era for science, for exploration and for adventure.

Shuttle in orbit — Iconic view of man's urge to explore

UPDATE 10:30 am Mountain Time

Still awe-inspiring after all these years. Live BBC feed is here. Travel safely guys!

What is freedom? Part Two

The Trap – 2 – The Lonely Robot

Part One of The Trap is available to watch in my Post of the 4th, US Independence Day. It also provides some background thoughts. It really is a most powerful set of programmes so, if you haven’t already done so, best to watch Part One first.

This is Part 2 of the brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. This episode focuses on the 1990’s and how the politicians decided to apply the model of a free market economy to the rest of society and consequences of these actions being felt all over the world in western democracies.

What is freedom?

As a US resident since just mid-April, perhaps no better day than July 4th to pose this question.

As a British citizen, born in London towards the end of WWII, I am well aware that Britain has had a long tradition of ‘owning’ colonies. In 1770 explorer James Cook charted the East coast of Australia and returned to Britain recommending colonisation in the area that became known as Botany Bay, now part of Sydney. Britain’s response was to set up a penal colony in 1778.

In 1617 the British East India Company was given permission by an Indian rajah to trade in India. Via lots of convolutions that I don’t understand, that led to the British Crown taking over in 1857.

So far as America is concerned, the British ended up with 13 colonies along the Eastern seaboard during the period 1607 to 1733. Then we had the British West Indies and Canada and …… well, you get the message!

Wikipedia has a summary of the US independence timetable,

During the American Revolution, the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain occurred on July 2, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence that had been proposed in June by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. After voting for independence, Congress turned its attention to the Declaration of Independence, a statement explaining this decision, which had been prepared by a Committee of Five, with Thomas Jefferson as its principal author. Congress debated and revised the Declaration, finally approving it on July 4. A day earlier, John Adams had written to his wife Abigail:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Adams’s prediction was off by two days. From the outset, Americans celebrated independence on July 4, the date shown on the much-publicized Declaration of Independence, rather than on July 2, the date the resolution of independence was approved in a closed session of Congress.

Thomas Jefferson April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826

Thomas Jefferson became the third President of the United States of America. As one of the founding fathers, Jefferson envisioned America as an “Empire of Liberty”.

So it came to pass that Independence Day is annually celebrated on July 4. The celebrations have deep roots in the American tradition of political freedom.

Reflect then on that notion of liberty and freedom as you watch the first episode from a most compelling series from Adam Curtis that was broadcast by the BBC in 2007. The series is called The Trap, the first programme entitled “F**k You Buddy” (11 March 2007)

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It’s what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it’s a strange and limited kind of freedom.

Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy, but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management, driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom.

The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behavior of the Soviet enemy.

Part Two of this article is being published on the 7th, next Thursday, and Part Three next Monday, the 11th.

The Winston Churchill effect?

Forgive me for making this a much shorter contribution but the efforts of the previous two posts took rather a long time!

This is about the debt situation in the United States of America and, as always, Learning from Dogs trying to get to the underlying truth.

It’s from the BBC and it’s a radio programme that is included in this Post.

But why the headline referring to Churchill? Well in the programme Justin Webb, of the BBC, reminds the world of a characteristic of the American Nation noted by Sir Winston Churchill, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” (But caution about the precise wording of that quote – see here!)

Here’s the article that accompanied the BBC broadcast, the radio programme is after this article,

Is the US in denial over its $14tn debt?

Is America in denial about the extent of its financial problems, and therefore incapable of dealing with the gravest crisis the country has ever faced?

This is a story of debt, delusion and – potentially – disaster. For America and, if you happen to think that American influence is broadly a good thing, for the world.

The debt and the delusion are both all-American: $14 trillion (£8.75tn) of debt has been amassed and there is no cogent plan to reduce it.

The figure is impossible to comprehend: easier to focus on the fact that it grows at $40,000 (£25,000) a second. Getting out of Afghanistan will help but actually only at the margins. The problem is much bigger than any one area of expenditure.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, is no rabid fiscal conservative but on the debt he is a hawk: “I’m worried. The debt is large. It should be brought under control. The longer we wait, the longer we suffer this kind of paralysis; the more America boxes itself into a corner and the more America’s constructive leadership in the world diminishes.”

The author and economist Diane Coyle agrees. And she makes the rather alarming point that the acknowledged deficit is not the whole story.

The current $14tn debt is bad enough, she argues, but the future commitments to the baby boomers, commitments for health care and for pensions, suggest that the debt burden is part of the fabric of society:

“You have promises implicit in the structure of welfare states and aging populations that mean there is an unacknowledged debt that will have to be paid for by future taxpayers, and that could double the published figures.”

Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations acknowledges that this structural commitment to future debt is not unique to the United States. All advanced democracies have more or less the same problem, he says, “but in the case of the States the figures are absolutely enormous”.

Mr Haass, a former senior US diplomat, is leading an academic push for America’s debt to be taken seriously by Americans and noticed as well by the rest of the world.

He uses the analogy of Suez and the pressure that was put on the UK by the US to withdraw from that adventure. The pressure was not, of course, military. It was economic.

Britain needed US economic help. In the future, if China chooses to flex its muscles abroad, it may not be Chinese admirals who pose the real threat, Mr Haass tells us. “Chinese bankers could do the job.”

Because of course Chinese bankers, if they withdrew their support for the US economy and their willingness to finance America’s spending, could have an almost overnight impact on every American life, forcing interest rates to sky high levels and torpedoing the world’s largest economy.

Not everyone accepts the debt-as-disaster thesis.

David Frum is a Republican intellectual and a former speech writer to President George W Bush.

He told me the problem, and the solution, were actually rather simple: “If I tell you you have a disease that will absolutely prostrate you and it could be prevented by taking a couple of aspirin and going for a walk, well I guess the situation isn’t apocalyptic is it?

“The things that America has to do to put its fiscal house in order are not anywhere near as extreme as what Europe has to do. The debt is not a financial problem, it is a political problem.”

Mr Frum believes that a future agreement to cut spending – he thinks America spends much too big a proportion of its GDP on health – and raise taxes, could very quickly bring the debt problem down to the level of quotidian normality.

‘Organised hypocrisy’

I am not so sure. What is the root cause of America’s failure to get to grips with its debt? It can be argued that the problem is not really economic or even political; it is a cultural inability to face up to hard choices, even to acknowledge that the choices are there.

I should make it clear that my reporting of the United States, in the years I was based there for the BBC, was governed by a sense that too much foreign media coverage of America is negative and jaundiced.

The nation is staggeringly successful and gloriously attractive. But it is also deeply dysfunctional in some respects.

Take Alaska. The author and serious student of America, Anne Applebaum makes the point that, as she puts it, “Alaska is a myth!”

People who live in Alaska – and people who aspire to live in Alaska – imagine it is the last frontier, she says, “the place where rugged individuals go out and dig for oil and shoot caribou, and make money the way people did 100 years ago”.

But in reality, Alaska is the most heavily subsidised state in the union. There is more social spending in Alaska than anywhere else.

To make it a place where decent lives can be lived, there is a huge transfer of money to Alaska from the US federal government which means of course from taxpayers in New York and Los Angeles and other places where less rugged folk live. Alaska is an organised hypocrisy.

Too many Americans behave like the Alaskans: they think of themselves as rugged individualists in no need of state help, but they take the money anyway in health care and pensions and all the other areas of American life where the federal government spends its cash.

The Tea Party movement talks of cuts in spending but when it comes to it, Americans always seem to be talking about cuts in spending that affect someone else, not them – and taxes that are levied on others too.

And nobody talks about raising taxes. Jeffrey Sachs has a theory about why this is.

America’s two main political parties are so desperate to raise money for the nation’s constant elections – remember the House of Representatives is elected every two years – that they can do nothing that upsets wealthy people and wealthy companies.

So they cannot touch taxes.

In all honesty, I am torn about the conclusions to be drawn. I find it difficult to believe that a nation historically so nimble and clever and open could succumb to disaster in this way.

But America, as well as being a place of hard work and ingenuity, is also no stranger to eating competitions in which gluttony is celebrated, and wilful ignorance, for instance regarding (as many Americans do) evolution as controversial.

The debt crisis is a fascinating crisis because it is about so much more than money. It is a test of a culture.

It is about waking up, as the Americans say, and smelling the coffee. And – I am thinking Texas here – saddling up too, and riding out with purpose.

NB: Copyright BBC © 2011 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

Here’s the 30 minute broadcast under the Analysis series from Radio 4 on the BBC.(Just click on this link) analysis_20110628-1024a

Global climate confusion, part one

This is a long theme that is being broken down into two posts. Hope you can stay with it because it seems to me to represent how difficult it can be, when the topic is complex with significant implications for society, to determine the truth of an issue.

To set my own position clear, I have for many years taken it more or less for granted that mankind, through the mechanisms of increased population, increased standards of living and increased use of carbon-based fuels must be having a deleterious effect on the planet’s atmosphere.

Indeed, there have been a number of articles on Learning from Dogs that support that position of mine. However, my dear friend Dan Gomez sent me a piece that I published on the 16th. June under the heading of Always two sides. Frankly, I was still a little sceptical.

Then on the 22nd June, I published an account about the increasing quietness of the sun which, at the end, included a quotation from Dr Frank Hill, “It is unfortunate that the global warming/cooling studies have become so politically polarizing.” H’mm, I thought, what is it that Dr. Hill sees that causes him to write this way?

Then another good friend of Learning from Dogs, Patrice Ayme, reminded me that he had written a comprehensive article on his own Blog about the apparent enigma of the sun cooling while at the same time the ice caps were melting. Ah ha, I thought, a thoughtful and erudite explanation that while it was complex we are still in a phase of climate change (i.e. warming) most likely caused by man. Patrice gave me permission to reproduce his essay in full, which I so do below.

But then reading the comments sent in to Patrice’s original essay on the 31st May, 2009, I was set right back to the position of being very, very confused. More about the confusion that exists tomorrow, but now here’s Patrice’s original essay.

SUN COOLING, ICE MELTING…

By Patrice Ayme

TWENTY FIVE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE ALL TOO SOON FROM MELTING OF ANTARCTICA’S ICE BASINS?

How to enlighten the conversation with one picture worth 10,000 words. Watch the red line below, and how much it dips lately:

Synopsis: More than 98% of scientific papers considering the subject opine that recent human activities have warmed up the climate. But the percentage of the public who believe that is only around 55% … in the USA. This disbelief, far from being healthy, is related to the propaganda of big polluters, allowing the latter to avoid making the economy of the USA efficient (so they have less to do, avoid public inquiry, and make greater profits, while being beyond any suspicion).

One recent tactic of these sneaky types has been to talk about the sun and planets. The main argument they make is that the sun is acting up, thus allegedly causing the warming. Fair enough. Considering the sun is a must, indeed: there is plenty of evidence that the recent Little Ice Age was caused by a sort of Solar Winter. So let’s look at the sun: as the graph above shows, it is COOLING. The sun is cooling. The warming would have been much greater, had the sun not been so kind. Ooopss.

Other climate deniers made some noise about a recent cover article in Science that computed that the collapse of the WAIS (West Antarctica Ice Shield) would rise sea level by only 3.30 meters. But this article sort of cheats: reading its fine print shows that the rise would be rather be 3.80 meters, and it brazenly ignores all possible melting of part of the Antarctica Peninsula (contriving to do so by the not so subtle artifice that said peninsula is not semantically part of the WAIS; however, the peninsula is more north and warmer, so, one ought to suspect, it would melt even more, as it has actually started to do!).

The authors in Science also ignore other mountainous regions of the WAIS itself, using, once again the artifice that being on land does not make them part of the WAIS, formally speaking, since the WAIS is a shield, and nothing inclined is, although, of course, having deep blue sea all around the present mountainous areas of the WAIS would warm them up.

I then turn this argument around. Looking towards the east, and I ponder what could happen with East Antarctica. Answer: very serious trouble.

By the way, the expression “climate change” is misleading. The biosphere is attacked in all ways by the rise in Greenhouse Gases, and not just by direct warming. It is losing the battle quickly. Changes that have happened before in millions of years are now happening in decades, so biological species cannot adapt through migration, and, or, biological evolution.

Half of the CO2 recently produced has sunk into the ocean, where it reacted with water to make carbonic acid. So millions of species of the plancton, many making oxygen, are dissolving in an acid prepared by the average American household and its refusal to endure a stiff carbon tax. Moreover entire zones within the oceans have warmed so much that they lost enough oxygen to support life as we know it (most sea species are highly sensitive to tiny temperature variations). And as evolution presently knows it. These gigantic zones are now dead: life does not have time to evolve species adapted to this new environment. What is going on is a BIOSPHERICAL CATASTROPHE, as a result of stuffing life’s environment with 400 million years of carbon deposits.

——————–

SOLAR INPUT:

No climate change discussion can be considered complete without considering the sun. This is one point greenhouse deniers have been making. It is indeed extremely correct.

Greenhouse deniers have been loudly proclaiming, that because some planets (Mars, Pluto) are warming (perhaps), then the sun has got to be warming. This argument can be put to rest: Mars and Pluto’s climates are dominated by astronomical and peculiar factors (see notes).

And, unfortunately for greenhouse deniers, the sun output has been slowing down, as the graph below shows.

What does this mean? We should be cooling down, because the sun’s output has been going down as much as an astounding 6% in some frequencies. But, nevertheless, the lower troposphere has been warming up (while the stratosphere, robbed of heat by the greenhouse blanket BELOW it, has been cooling, a predicted effect of the greenhouse; this warming at low elevation accompanied by a cooling higher up shows that the observed changes of temperatures are due to a greenhouse, not just a global change in solar output).

Thus the warming of recent times is indeed caused by greenhouse warming, as humans augmented greenhouse gases by more than fifty percent in 150 years. Notice that in the graph above that we are reaching a local minimum of solar output, and that solar output should soon increase again in the next 11 years cycle.

Another tactic has been for some greenhouse deniers to turn into outright friends of the greenhouse, and claim that we were spared a new ice age from the human induced greenhouse. (That many people living in the Arctic will love the considerable heating the poles will experience is only natural though.)

Indeed, some scientists have speculated that herding augmented the production of methane during the Neolithic, thus preventing the cooling that would otherwise have happened. Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas. Basically Neolithic man killed the carnivores, and reduced the forests, so the herbivores would have plenty to munch on, and the herbivores became more numerous. As they did, the worldwide density of methane went up significantly, durably warming up the lower atmosphere.

Maybe. But that is not the point. The point is that we are doing GEOENGINEERING on our own planet, haphazardly, driven by short term profit and hubris. In particular what would happen if Mr. Sun would wake up, and produce as much output as it used to a few decades ago? Well, the gentle warming up would turn into outright swift heating.

(This being said, a lot of people living in high latitudes can only be pleased by polar heating: an entire world is opening up, and many of the big polluters know there are significant fossil fuel reserves around the poles, piled up there in warmer eons past…)

LUBRICATION, OR HOW TO LOSE AN ICE CAP:

A few years back, only the fringes of Greenland were melting in summer. The ice cap flowed majestically to the sea, at a sedate pace, through enormous flowing glaciers entering the sea. Greenland’s ice cap towers more than 3000 meters above sea level and the possibility of its melting sounded like bad science fiction.

In recent summers, though, up to half of Greenland has been melting, and “icequakes” have gone from about five a year in 1996 to around 30. In a typical icequake, a glacier the size of Manhattan, and 500 meters thick, slips by say ten meters in one minute (icequakes release their Richter 6 energy with lower frequency waves than the most destructive tectonic earthquakes, so one needs special seismographs to pick them up; although about half of the energy of the tsunami quake of 2004 was released that way, making the waves two-thirds as high as they would have been otherwise; hence that tsunami quake is viewed as 9.1 Richter, or 9.3 Richter, depending whether one counts the low frequency waves, or not…).

The reason for icequakes is undoubtedly lubrication by water gushing below the glaciers, having ended down there by what is called a moulin (a giant waterfall chute, up to twenty meters across and 3 kilometers deep). On the margins of Greenland, where the slope is strong, the glaciers avalanche down. Before 2000, glaciers on the West coast of Greenland had never done so. Now they do.

Interestingly, something a bit similar is found down south. Hundreds of lakes have been found under the main ice shield in Antarctica. They are most probably caused by geothermal heating, but they communicate with each other, and can propel (by appropriate swelling of their liquid mass) the ice shield above. That ice shield can be up to 4,000 meters thick. My point? One could imagine the same formation of moulins occurring down south (although there, right now temperatures, even in summer, oscillate between minus 50 Celsius and minus ten, so there are no dangers of lakes forming on the surface yet, as they now happen on the Greenland ice cap; such lakes can vanish into a newly formed moulin in minutes).

WHY GLACIATIONS COME AND GO, AND WHY IT’S GOING TO BE WARM FOR 50,000 YEARS:

One thing to know about Antarctica is that it was long covered with the same forests found nowadays in Patagonia. Trees and even dinosaurs (!) had adapted to the long nights. Glaciers were only found in the numerous high mountain ranges of the polar continent. In the last four million years, after 70 million years of steady cooling, perhaps because of the closing of the bridge between North and South America, and the rise of mighty mountain ranges, plus the opening of a circumpolar ocean which insulated Antarctica from the rest of the planet thermally, earth’s climate became much cooler. The apparition of glaciated poles was, most certainly, itself an accelerating cause of cooling. Sea level dropped 135 meters below the present level, as water ice gathered in colossal ice shields. Glaciations oscillated, between the poles and the temperate zones, as the parameters of earth’s orbit varied.

Joseph Alphonse Adhemar (1797 – 1862), a French mathematician, was the first to suggest that glaciations occurred from astronomical dispositions, in his 1842 book “Revolutions of the Sea”. Then the self educated Scottish scientist Croll, using Leverrier’s precise math (which had allowed him to discover Neptune) revealed the relationship between ice, albedo (that is the measure of how much sunlight is reflected back to space), and the eccentricity of earth’s orbit.

Croll suggested the basic idea of orbitally forced insolation variations influencing terrestrial temperatures. This comes from a geographical oddity, the fact that the continents of Earth are gathered up in the North. That allows support of enormous ice shields.

The sea does not allow support of huge iceshields, kilometers thick, as it is too warm (except in Antartica). Why the sea stays warm is another miracle, related to CO2 and volcanoes. Basically ice shields all over, as in “Snow Ball Earth”, lock up in the atmosphere CO2, bringing a strong greenhouse, which, in turn, melts the iceshields. A “Snow Ball Earth” related to the rise of complex life, is suspected to have occured a few times around 700 to 600 million years ago. So CO2, life, volcanoes, plate tectonic, active geology and temperature of the biosphere are tightly connected.

So, if not enough sun falls on those northern continents during summer, the ice from the preceding winter will not melt, and the continents will gather ice, and the ice will spread south, if it can.

This lack of sun exposure in summer will happen from celestial mechanics interacting with the inclination of the rotation axis of the earth. Croll’s work was widely discussed, but by the end of the 19th century, the theory was generally disbelieved. Much later, the Serbian Milutin Milankovitch further developed the theory that eventually triumphed in 1976, in modified form.

The bottom line is that the present astronomical calculations show that 65° North summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years, and that no declines in 65° North summer insolation sufficient to cause an ice age are expected in the next 50,000 to 100,000 years.

Hence Earth should warm up for the next 50,000 years, an exceptionally long interglacial. [Berger A, Loutre MF (2002). “Climate: An exceptionally long interglacial ahead?”. Science 297: 1287–1288]

A DAMOCLES ICICLE, READY TO CRUSH US ALL: THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHIELD (WAIS)

The West Antarctic Ice Shield (WAIS) looks all white and solid from space, with a few huge mountains ranges coming out. Those mountains are, in truth, massive islands coming out of a frozen mass of fresh water that stands in place of the ocean. The WAIS connects the Antarctic peninsula, which goes north towards Patagonia, to the main part of the polar continent. The WAIS is covered with ice, it is made of ice. The crucial point, though, is that most of the rock supporting the solid ice of the WAIS is below sea level. It is a giant ice cube resting on what ought to be the bottom of the ocean.

The sea is out there, lapping against the boundary of the WAIS, which rests so heavily on the continent, that it pushes it down. The rocky boundary has no ice pushing it down, except a bit on the side, so it is not as low. Thus the rock below the WAIS forms a bowl that would be under water, if it were not under ice. That bowl is glued on its margin by ice. The surface oceanic water is salty, and would be below freezing if it were not so salty, thus it glues efficiently the margin of the WAIS, since the WAIS is made of freshwater, and thus freezes solid below zero Celsius. This system sounds contrived, and it is indeed a rather unstable arrangement.

Water has the curious property that it is denser at 4 degree Celsius (8 degrees Fahrenheit above the freezing point of pure water). Hence the sub freezing salty ocean water is above relatively warmer ocean water. If at some point some warm water can come in contact with the boundary of the WAIS, it could suddenly melt the sweet water ice of the WAIS at the margin, and then flow below the WAIS, melting it from below, and organizing some sort of satanic Carnot thermal engine with a strong circulation squeaking below, and accelerating the whole thing (it maybe how and why the ice shelves dislocate so fast, by the way: sudden circulation forming a thermal engine underneath, I would suggest).

From previous studies, it was widely assumed that the WAIS would cause a sea level rise of 5 meters if it melted. But an article in Science, May 15, 2009, claiming more precise radar telemetry, revisits the threat: “Theory has suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be INHERENTLY UNSTABLE. Recent observations lend weight to this hypothesis. We reassess the potential contribution to eustatic and regional sea level from a rapid collapse of the ice sheet and find that previous assessments have substantially overestimated its likely primary contribution. We obtain a value for the global, eustatic sea-level rise contribution of about 3.3 meters, with important regional variations.”

The important regional variations have mostly to do with the rise of the local shores in West Antarctica: as the ice goes away, the continent rebounds. The authors count ONLY regions of where the bedrock slope is opposite to the glacial flow, a pointless restriction, in my not so humble opinion. Counting all regions below sea level, as they should have, the same authors find a rise of 3.8 meters. The authors also ignore the melting in the colossal mountainous islands that would be left, some as large as medium size countries.

THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHIELD (WAIS) IS ALL SET TO BREAK UP:

Temperatures have increased enormously in the polar regions (up to 5 degrees Celsius in some regions such as the Antarctica peninsula, although the overall planetary warming is only 0.75 C, less than one degree Celsius; some say only 0.4 degree Celsius!). This comes from the poles being the planet’s heat sinks: all the heat is sent there, as the greenhouse effect proceeds apace (another why little is being done about it, as temperate areas, where the deciders live, have barely warmed up).

This warming up at the poles has a very practical effect: the surface waters in Antarctica are in danger of reaching zero degree Celsius, the temperature at which fresh water ice melts. That means that the margin of the WAIS could come unglued, and warm ocean water could flow below it. In other words, we are within an easy warming reach of a WAIS catastrophe. Something like this happened to the ice shield over Hudson Bay, which dislocated very fast a few thousands years ago, as warm ocean water slipped below it. (I just suggested a mechanism for this otherwise unexplainable speedy break-up.)

COULD THE EAST ANTARCTIC ICE BASINS DISSOLVE TOO?

As if this looming WAIS disaster was not enough, there is another Damocles icicle hanging above the carbon banquet. A mechanism is revealed with a new actor, that I am perversely pleased to introduce, the East Antarctic Ice Shield, allowing a sea level rise of 35 meters in one generation. I am not saying that it will happen, but that there is a mechanism that could make it happen, and political leaders who claim to be cautious will now to have to consider this.

I looked at the pretty pictures in the same article in Science trying to minimize the danger posed by the WAIS, and looked again. And then looked again, and looked on the side, where East Antarctica, most of Antarctica, is found; disbelief setting in ominously all over.

Incredible. How interesting. There I saw a positively enormous area where the ice cap bottom is LOWER than 200 METERS BELOW SEA LEVEL. Yes, 200 meters below! Imagine the disaster when warm water is going to slip below that… There are actually two areas, next to each other, the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and the Aurora Basin, and they obviously communicate below sea level, and moreover front hundreds of kilometers of Antarctic ocean below 200 meters below sea level. They do this nicely by a pleasant 67 degrees of southern latitude, just under the Antarctic Polar Circle, about as close to the pole as Fairbanks, Iceland, and further than the Lofoten islands or the city of Murmansk, or Europe’s North Cape. (All those areas are free of ice, and Fairbanks is not under the influence of the Gulf Stream!)

The ambiance of that article in Science was reassuring in this typically reserved way scientists affect, in the hope of being taken seriously: “Collapse is considered to be a low-probability, high-impact event with, for example, a 5% probability of the WAIS contributing 10 mm per year within 200 years.” Of course, this is pseudo science, because “is considered to be” is not science. Science is about events that can be repeated at will. It’s not about getting consideration in a social setting.

Hence, if anything, I found the conclusions of that article scarier than ever. I want to see an article evoking not just the WAIS, but all the potential flash flood in EASTERN ANTARCTICA. Now, methinks it’s got to be of the order of twenty meters of sea level rise, just looking at it the maps. So thank you science, thank you lord, and let’s get ready for real nomadism, running for the hills! A bad emotion (the melting of the iceshields can only be a multimillennial event) reinforced by a little bit of the wrong knowledge (speciously minimizing arguments on a fraction of the problem, namely the WAIS) often spells disaster.

Conclusion: HELL NOW?

If the poles melt, there is no coming back. The Earth’s albedo will be irreversibly reduced, the dark polar oceans and polar forests will absorb light and heat, instead of throwing it back to space. The planet will switch to its HOT REGIME. To its hot regime it is very familiar with. But the present biosphere is not. We would be back in a flash to Jurassic Park. But without the dinosaurs in Alaska (as they used to be!)

We used to have about 280 ppm of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases, 150 years ago. Now we are around 450 ppm, and increasing fast (3 ppm a year in CO2 rise alone, which is itself at 385 ppm). From long term geological records, we know that Antarctica covers itself with ice at 425 ppm. Even an American politician should be able to understand what this means; the southern polar icecap is now unstable.

At the most extreme, adding to the preceding tipping points the “clathrate gun” (massive eruptions of frozen methane stores, apparently greater than all the other fossil fuels combined), a hellish scenario seems possible where this would all happen WITHIN A CENTURY. Massive melting within much less than that is also possible: in 2007 frozen methane in the warmest Arctic ocean ever erupted a bit. In 2008, the ocean was a bit colder, and methane came out of the tundra instead. Before, for an entire decade, methane’s density had not augmented.

Methane, CH4 has 100 times the greenhouse capability of CO2; some fancy man-made gases have 10,000 times the greenhouse capability of CO2, hence the difference between 385 ppm of pure CO2, and the 450 ppm of warming by CO2 equivalent gases I evoked.

There is no doubt that at least 90% of mankind would die in the process (nuclear bombing of coal plants for ecological reasons may be an ironical twist, with a rare touch of ecological humor).

That of course, was the bad side of things. On the good side, carbon addicts will be able to burn coal like there is no tomorrow, for a few years more, thanks to the antics of Mr. Sun conveniently truly going to sleep, as CO2 build up. A self-fulfilling prophecy: there will be indeed no tomorrow, thanks to them.

Humankind, playing fast and loose with things it digs up from underground, where they have been buried for hundreds of millions of years, if not billions, burns those things in the atmosphere. The USA, apparently hoping to transmogrify itself through platitudes, is taking its sweet time to do nothing significant about climate change. Not only is the USA also culprit, indirectly, of a lot of Chinese emissions, but, as (still) the world number one industrial power, the USA, through competition of its products worldwide, has an unfair carbon advantage it is using to the hilt (most of the electricity of the USA comes from indigenous coal, cheap and plentiful).

Obama should have put a ten cents per gallon gas tax on his first day, but he found much safer to send more taxpayer money to Afghanistan, and his friends in high finance, so convenient, in truth, with financing him. At least, very short term, so it is: the sea has not reached the White House yet (when it does, it will be too late, as the greenhouse effect is highly non linear, as I described above).

Weirdly, and perniciously, Mr. Sun, which was supposed to be steady as a rock, has been cooperating with the polluters, in the last two decades. But we are at the bottom of the 11 year cycle, so this should be less of a factor for a while.

The Sun has slowed down for decades at least twice in the last millennium. This caused the Little Ice Age (which destroyed Viking Greenland). Should the Sun persists in cooling down in the coming decade, the catastrophe would be even greater than if it did not. Indeed, temperatures would not rise as much. Thus polluters would be encouraged to stuff the atmosphere with even more CO2, perhaps even arguing that they are sparing us an ice age. However, the CO2 would keep on building up, and half of it dissolves in the ocean, where it reacts with water to make carbonic acid. Thus the oceans would die even faster.

Ultimately, when the Sun wakes up from its slumber, all the heat would return, and more. Moreover a lot of CO2 would come out of the oceans, thanks to the temperature rise.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of knowledge is necessary to those who want to be morally right. Planetary engineering, as we are presently doing, without knowing enough, is the most terrible thing. When the hand of fate comes upon us, not only will the planet get hellish, but many of the vengeful ones in flooded countries will make sure that there is hell to pay.

Patrice Ayme
***

Notes: 1) Mars and Pluto’s climates are dominated by the enormous wobble for the former, and the amazing eccentricity of the second. Sometimes, Pluto is so far from the sun, its atmosphere snows down, and freezes on the ground. As it approaches the sun a century later, or so, the atmosphere goes back up, and puts a greenhouse around the planet, warming it up (right now Pluto is going away from the sun, but there is inertia to its greenhouse, so it keeps on warming).

Mars’ axis of rotation can be so inclined on the ecliptic plane (it oscillates between 10 and 45 degrees!) that then the poles get sun full on, once a year, and melt, and the Martian atmosphere is then thick with CO2 and H2O, two powerful greenhouse gases, so the planet warms up a lot (conversely, when the planet stands upright on its orbital plane, light grazes the poles, and the atmosphere freezes around the ice caps, the greenhouse effect goes way down, and the planet freezes.

2) The glory of SUBOCEANIC ANTARCTICA:

Fig. 1 Antarctic surface topography (gray shading) and bed topography (brown) defining the region of interest. For clarity, the ice shelves in West Antarctica are not shown. The brownish and yellow parts are the WAIS’ bed, and are all below sea level, and are why the WAIS will disintegrate.

Areas more than 200 meters BELOW SEA LEVEL in East Antarctica are indicated by blue shading. NOTICE THAT A LOT OF EAST ANTARCTICA, WHERE THE SUB SEA LEVEL BASINS ARE, HAVE THEIR MARGINS WELL NORTH OF 70 DEGREES (and actually just north of THE SOUTH POLAR CIRCLE).

AP, Antarctic Peninsula; EMIC, Ellsworth Mountain Ice Cap; ECR, Executive Committee Range; MBLIC, Marie Byrd Land Ice Cap; WM, Whitmoor Mountains; TR, Thiel Range; Ba, Bailey Glacier; SL, Slessor Ice Stream; Fo, Foundation Ice Stream; Re, Recovery Glacier; To, Totten Glacier; Au, AURORA BASIN; Me, Mertz Glacier; Ni, Ninnis Glacier; WSB, WILKES SUBGLACIAL BASIN; FR, Flood Range; a.s.l., above sea level.

(Illustrations from Bamber and al. Science May 15, 2009)

P/S 1: We are just coming out of a solar minimum so pronounced that cosmic rays, less deflected by the sun’s weakening magnetic field, have become a problem… Sunspots had nearly completely disappeared for the first half of 2009, before reappearing violently in July… There are mysterious strong correlations between sunspots and Earth’s temperature (mysterious, because, although very strong, they inverted in the 1970s;Vincent Courtillot, 2009).

P/S 2: Thus, we have had a sort of solar winter in the last generation, and we seem to have reached its nadir right now, in the spring of 2009. (That would explain why the lowest icepack in the Arctic was in 2007, and the second lowest in 2008, with 2009 the third lowest ever recorded.)

Nothing says that the sun will not be even weaker in its next cycle. Maybe the greenhouse effect will save us!

Indeed… During the “Little Ice Age“, there was a considerable cooling, apparently originating from the sun’s reduced activity. After a slow start around 1300 CE which had, nevertheless, dramatic consequences in Europe (famines, and maybe a contribution to the massive war and plague that quickly followed; soon the Greenland Vikking colonies were decimated and had to be evacuated), the SOLAR cooling accelerated around 1600 CE. Galileo still saw some sun spots. But just a few. Soon they completely disappeared (the so called “Maunder minimum”). And they stayed disappeared for centuries. The glaciers in the Alps advanced dramatically, sometimes by several miles. In the late nineteenth century, sunspots reappeared, and the CO2 went up significantly, from industrialization (although warming itself extracts CO2 from sea and tundra). The result was an even faster retreat of the glaciers.

We cannot predict the sun (aside from its 11 year and 22 year, and an apparent 1,000 year cycles). We can only assume it will pick up, back up to what has been its normal activity over the last 5,000 years of civilized history. If it did, solar warming would combine with the greenhouse, and it is to be feared that the planet will switch SUDDENLY to the hot mode. It may be in a way even more violent than anything movies have imagined so far (because of the methane stores, and the dramatic changes their release would lead to: melting poles, CO2 bubbling out of the oceans). Good luck to us all…

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