Collapse and its Discontents
DMITRY ORLOV / Carolyn Baker.Org 1feb2007

Many readers are familiar with Dmitry Orlov, who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and from his experience offers options for surviving the collapse of Western civilization as we know it.—CB

It's been a couple of years since I started writing on the subject of economic collapse, as it occurred in Russia and as it is likely to occur here in the United States. Thus far, I remain reasonably content with my predictions: it's all lining up, slowly but surely.

Because collapse will not be televised,
you will not know that it has happened.
You will only know that it has happened to you.

Militarily, the US, followed by Israel, seem to have landed themselves in a cul de sac of their own creation, having squandered much treasure on useless high-tech weapons while losing infantry battles against motivated freelancers, with the eventual effect of losing access to the oil fields in the Middle East. Economically, Peak Oil appears to have actually transpired some time in the summer of 2005, and is now slowly coming into focus in the rear view mirror, just as it's supposed to. Politically, the country has wobbled leftward, only to rediscover that its other Capitalist party also happens to be its other War party. Internationally, hoisting the American flag is now considered a lewd gesture, and this will probably remain so for quite some time, since honor and reputation happen to be among the most difficult things to reclaim. Financially, the US economy has degenerated into a sort of cargo cult, where people feel that they can continue to attract recycled petrodollars by dancing around piles of internet servers with their cell phones and their laptops.

In short, steady as she goes, and I see no reason to start worrying that history will prove me wrong. But that is where the satisfaction ends, and the problems begin.

A dispassionate and ironic approach is all well and good. However, my very own mother accuses me of unsympathetic sang froid in understating the horrific suffering endured by the Russian people when I describe how much better-prepared for economic collapse they were than the United States currently is. So, for the record, I am talking about a die-off, shattered lives, a missing generation of children, and much that is precious and irreplaceable burned or buried under a tide of violence and filth. I also know that endlessly recounting tales of horror and misery is the surest way to lose one's audience, as my mother would no doubt be willing to demonstrate. Others have accused me of Schadenfreude: of not being sufficiently dispassionate, but of greeting the troubles and the signs of the coming collapse with glee. This is an ad hominem argument, boiling down to "you say such things because you are the sort of person who enjoys saying such things." Again for the record, I do not feel gleeful, see above as to why. But, to be truthful, I am not a big fan of the American lifestyle. I prefer to stay out of the suburbs, I rarely drive, and I do my best to avoid flying. I don't feel that the prospect of it all eventually going away is a bad thing. In fact, I am very much looking forward to all the fresh air, although once pollution-induced global dimming goes away, global warming will proceed at a redoubled rate, and we will be forced to seek higher ground further north sooner rather than later - a prospect that does not fill me with glee either.

I suppose that if I were the sort of person who derives a deep feeling of contentment from pursuing the suburban lifestyle, extreme car dependence, shopping at malls and big box stores, jetting around, and daydreaming about full spectrum dominance, I would not be talking about collapse, because I wouldn't have the foggiest notion of such things. This lifestyle seems like sheer misery to me, but I recognize that tastes do differ. Moreover, it must be something of a blessed state, not knowing anything about resource depletion or global warming or collapse, or not caring to know. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we all die," says the preacher, and who am I to disagree? When people do find out about these things, they sometimes go through a bout of acute psychological distress, and only eventually settle down to some internal compromise. I feel almost guilty when I bring someone out of this blessed state, because it feels wrong to be breeding discontent among an otherwise pacified and well-controlled populace. They are like children when they first find out about death, and before they are consoled with stories of angels and heaven, or, in this case, hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, biodiesel, wind farms, hybrid vehicles, or whatever other eco-props happen to be on hand. Still, they often end up with a nagging worry that not enough is being done.

Such consolations are not as convincing as we would hope, and the nagging worry starts some of us on the road to questioning everything: the living arrangement, the job, the life. Some people go as far as questioning the value of technological civilization, and wondering if it is on a path to planetary-scale self-destruction. They can then become extremely tiresome and tedious company, and breed discontent in everyone they come into contact with, talking incessantly about melting ice caps, drowning polar bears, Texas-sized fields of floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, dead sea birds, fish going extinct, dying coral reefs, and so forth. "Enough!" you might say to them. "If the challenge is to avert planetary self-destruction, then let's all get on the same page: formulate a project plan, define the next steps, and start executing." Then you realize that the person you are talking to is serious, and the situation becomes awkward.

Because, you see, there really is not much to be done, on a global scale, and most serious people sense that intuitively. The biggest "if" in the world is the one in sentences that start "If we all..." If we all reduce our ecological footprint to a sustainable level, then there wouldn't be anyone left out to increase theirs at our expense. An additional complication is that we cannot make such a huge reduction because the current human population of the Earth far exceeds its carrying capacity: a lot of people would have to die. If this sort of thing has to be part of our little project plan, then doing absolutely nothing becomes the more ethically acceptable option, albeit a distressingly impotent one.

In a culture that prides itself on keeping busy, doing nothing is actually a lot harder than doing something. I was recently invited to fly to Alaska to do a presentation, but declined the invitation, because it seemed ridiculous to me to burn a few more barrels of kerosene and drown a few more polar bears for the sake of informing a group of Alaskans that it's time for them to consider moving south. To inspire them, I could have told them stories of settlements in the Russian arctic that froze when their winter fuel deliveries failed to happen. As always happens, not all of them had been evacuated. I could have also told them that fuel isn't necessary for humans to survive arctic winters. All you need is a good double-sided fur parka with matching pants, boots, and mittens (wolverine fur for the trim around the hood, please, because it doesn't ice up), an igloo, a fat-burning lamp (because months of total darkness are not healthy, and because sewing fur and leather and working bone and flint into tools is hard to do in the dark), and a pile of frozen animal carcasses to chew on. You hack off hunks of frozen meat and put them inside the parka until they thaw. For something to wash them down with, you stuff a skin bag full of snow and put it inside your parka until it melts. It's been done this way for thousands of years, but if we are now on our way to a completely different planet, one without much ice and snow, then all bets are off.

I somehow felt that drowning a few more polar bears for the sake of telling Alaskans what Alaskans should know better than me in any case was the wrong thing to do: the hypothetical benefits of my trip did not justify the quantifiable harm to the environment. But everyone I discussed this with seemed less than pleased with my decision: I got points for being consistent, and not much else. Plenty of other people have no such qualms, and feel that the means justify the ends. For them, the same industriousness that is destroying the earth can be used to save it. They fly and drive to attend conferences, champion various social and environmentalist causes, and organize energy-consuming, environment-damaging campaigns with the goal of saving energy or saving the environment. According to the news, this doesn't seem to be solving any of the big problems, or even stopping them from growing worse.

The one large and uniquely solvable problem, and therefore the one Al Gore chose as his example of environmentalist victory, is the Montreal protocol limiting the discharge of CFCs into the atmosphere. Most other problems are too complex to organize around, and so the environmental movement has failed to check either mass extinction and habitat destruction, or deforestation, or land and water degradation, or overpopulation, or carbon emissions, or a host of other, equally intractable problems. Overpopulation - the mother of all problems - is hardly even discussed, because every woman has the right to have a child (at least one, and that's already too many), and also, I think, because babies are really cute. In spite of our superficial cleverness, there is a requisite base level of mindlessness to being human, and it sets bounds on what we can do collectively to control our numbers. We can pretend to be able to control nature, for a while at least, but we can't even pretend to be able to control our own natures and appetites. Nature will have to do it for us - but then it always did and always will.

We can be sure that the living will not always outnumber the dead, as they do now, and that the flow of humanity will reach a peak and start to ebb. Based on everything I have seen and experienced, I can imagine that once the downward slide begins, it will not be a smooth transition, but an abrupt, wrenching change. The downward slide will acquire a logic and a momentum of its own. Taking the specific example of oil, which a lot of people focus on, I can't imagine that, a few years down the road, we will still be looking at annual production shortfalls of just a few percent. I imagine the number to be closer to 100% - not a slowdown, not a recession, but a collapse. I am also sure that we, collectively, will have little idea that this is happening. Once the lights go out for good in your neighborhood, nobody but your few nearest neighbors will know what is happening to you, and you will know of the larger world no more than you presently know of the goings on in the various places that are already largely in the grip of a permanent blackout, like Zimbabwe or North Korea. Our one world is fragile artifact, and places within it only exist while they have electricity, scheduled flights, and bottled water for the foreign journalists to drink.

If our last hope is that economic collapse will put a stop to our rampaging and trampling of what's left of the ecosystem just shy of the point of no return, and even if it does happen this way, each of us will be disappointed. Because collapse will not be televised, you will not know that it has happened. You will only know that it has happened to you. And so it is only fair that I warn you: caveat emptor! Collapse - for you, the putatively satisfied consumer of information products - is a faulty product that will fail to please you. If, however, you have already dropped out of the ranks of satisfied consumers, then for you collapse is already well underway, and you have far more pressing things to consider than tilting at the windmills of climate change or obsessing over countless other issues of global import. Collapse, it turns out in the end, is a single-use product. Properly applied, it produces a deep and abiding feeling of dissatisfaction. In this, and this alone, it is quite excellent.

source: 4feb2007

One building that's been built on time and on budget in Iraq: America's fortress embassy

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday May 21, 2007
The Guardian

A portion of the new US embassy under construction is seen from across the Tigris river in Baghdad, Iraq. Photograph: AP

When the idea of building a new US embassy in Baghdad was first mooted by the American administration in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, there seemed to be a grandiose logic to it.
The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush's intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.

Rising from the dust of the city's Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.

It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.

The US ambassador, however, will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft.

They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.

But commentators and Iraq experts believe the project was flawed from its inception, and have raised concerns it will become an enormous, heavily targeted white elephant that will be an even greater liability if and when the Americans scale back their presence in Iraq.

"What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are," Edward Peck, a former American diplomat in Iraq, told AP.

"What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it's blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?"

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 about 1,000 US diplomatic and military staff have been using one of his former palaces as a make-shift embassy, which several observers have criticised as giving the regrettable impression that the Americans merely replaced Saddam's authoritarian rule with their own.

Joost Hildermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group, said of the new embassy: "This sends a really poor signal to Iraqis that the Americans are building such a huge compound in Baghdad. It does very little to assuage Iraqis who are angry that America is running the country, and not very well at that."

The need to make the compound secure is a top priority. The Green Zone - the fortified four square miles in which the Iraqi and American governments and other international officials operate - used to be relatively peaceful but in recent months has come under almost daily rocket and mortar fire. This month the US embassy ordered its people to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times when in the open after four foreign contractors were killed by a rocket landing beside the present embassy.

The multiple cranes surrounding the construction site of the new embassy have already attracted attacks from insurgents. Last week five contractors were wounded in a rocket assault.

Despite the peculiar pressures, the Bush administration says the embassy will open in September, and be fully staffed by the end of the year.

Already, however, there have been suggestions that the compound will not be large enough to house hundreds of diplomats and military personnel likely to remain in Iraq for some time. Scores of US officials are currently housed in trailers which are vulnerable to bombs landing on their roofs. According to a report by McClatchy News, staff members have complained about the dangers only to be told they must wait until the new embassy is ready to take them in.

Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Queen Mary, University of London, has just come back from a month spent in Iraq, largely in the Green Zone. He thinks the Americans are unlikely to pull out of Iraq fully until the end of the next presidency at the earliest, and so the new embassy will serve its purpose for several years to come.

"A fortress-style embassy, with a huge staff, will remain in Baghdad until helicopters come to airlift the last man and woman from the roof," he said, adding his own advice to the architects of the building: "Include a large roof."

There is one added irony - the embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget.

Canadian Energy's "Exit Stage Right" Plan
2006-11-29 - By Keith Kohl

Time to Save the Oil . . . Not the Whales

With prices approaching $1,500 per barrel, what would ever make investors like Charles Morgan want to sell their stake in the oil industry?

Well, Morgan had noticed that the price of recovering the oil was increasing every year, and foresaw even further rises in the cost of his operations.

The world knew that oil wouldn't last forever, and people like Morgan thought that at the current rate of production the source would soon run dry. Fortunately for him, he recognized this trend and was able to get out of the industry at peak prices, generating a healthy profit for himself.

This may sound like a headline from the future when the earth's oil reserves will have reached dangerously low levels, but it actually happened over one hundred years ago, in 1847. The source of oil back then, however, was whales.

In the 18th century whale oil was a booming business, supplying fuel for nearly all lighting sources (like torches and candles) as well as lubrication for a growing industrial revolution in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Whaling magnates like Morgan saw that their ships' expeditions were taking longer, making the trips costlier. The decimation of the whale population caused the price to peak.

A bell-shaped curve in whale-oil production was seen over a certain period of time.

Sound familiar?

Luckily for the whales, technology was moving at an extraordinary rate, with alternative fuel options like kerosene and coal-oil becoming so cheap to produce compared to whale oil that the whaling industry all but died out in the 19th century.

The effectiveness of these new industries took a large burden off the whale population.

The comparisons are staggering, though, when you look at the data suggesting the plateau that global oil production has reached.

Even the simplest minds can see the direct correlation when this is put next to the bell chart for whale oil production in the 19th century.

Just as whale-oil production became too expensive, today's oil producers are experiencing the exact same thing.

The question that remains: Will we be able to do something about it?

When I was younger and slightly less tactful than I am today, I posed this rather arrogant question to my history teacher: "So why should we even bother learning history?"

His reply, which I will give him credit for having ready at a moment's notice, was, "If nothing else, it's to learn from our mistakes and make sure we don't repeat them."

Fortunately for some of today's oil companies, that advice isn't coming too late.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Drill

I know the hellfire and brimstone speeches about your personal everlasting doom in a fiery pit that you can't avoid without repentance.

But if you are in the oil business, either by investing or operating a drilling rig, you can't help but wonder if your fiery hell isn't located right here on earth in the near future.

Everyone knows that there is a finite amount of oil in the veins of the earth. Like we've been saying for years, the problem of Peak Oil isn't that we're going to run out of the stuff. Rather, we're coming to the end of cheap oil.

We're like those whalers spending months or years at sea each trip who saw that the oil was getting harder to find (perhaps whales had more sense than we thought) and that the cost of those trips was not even covered by the oil they brought home.

Now look at our near future, when companies will have to drill deeper than ever before merely to sustain their current production rates, let alone increase production. Chevron's recent experience with its "Jack" oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect example.

Yet companies need to increase production in the near future.

Just look at the forecasted rise in global oil demand over the next 25 years. According to the EIA, global demand for oil is going to rise by 38 million barrels per day in 2030, to a total of 118 mbpd!

With this demand knocking at the door, maybe paying $200 per gallon is not so hard to imagine, after all.

Now here's the main issue at hand.

Even assuming peak oil is nothing more than hubbub, isn't the logical course of action to spend as much money as possible on oil exploration, thereby assuring that future demand is met?

Common sense would dictate that, wouldn't it?

That's not the case, however, for many Canadian energy companies that are reorganizing themselves into large Canadian Energy Trusts.

So, how does that affect you?

Good question.

Every Relationship Comes Down to Trust

As early as 1984, Canadian companies began merging into much larger trusts, taking advantage of trust-friendly Canadian regulations.

In a Canadian Energy Trust, operating companies are acquired by the trust, usually through equity offerings, using third-party debt and funds in exchange for grants of royalties, debt and shares. The operating company's cash flow from sales (from oil, natural gas, etc.) is transferred to the Trust as distributable cash flow.

This means that the majority of the revenue is able to be paid out as monthly dividends to the Trust's shareholders.

But there's a catch there, if you look hard enough.

The characteristics of the companies these trusts acquire are pretty interesting. Due to the need to provide their investors with a constant cash flow, Canadian Energy Trusts purchase only assets that are mature, low-exploration-risk properties and toll-based energy infrastructure with predictable operational profiles and minimal or at least low capital expenditures.

This assures the trust of a higher drilling success rate than is typical of exploration and production companies.

So companies find themselves in a predicament.

They can either continue to actively spend their incoming money on exploring for new oil or organize into these Canadian Energy Trusts, thereby giving their shareholders bigger dividends.

In light of the argument by some that there is no easy and cheap oil left to find, it's interesting to note that many of these companies have chosen the latter option.

Perhaps they know something about the reality of Peak Oil that we don't.

An Absent Savior

Just as the whales were saved by technological advances like coal-oil and kerosene, we will soon be looking for something to take on the energy burden now carried by oil. But oil's knight in shining armor-alternative energy sources like solar, wind, hydro and even nuclear-haven't developed nearly enough to rescue us from the grim future of rising oil costs.

Ron Paul vs. Giuliani on the Root Causes of Terrorism
By: SilentPatriot on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 8:28 PM - PDT

When asked if 9/11 changed the American foreign policy model to "interventionalism," Rep. Ron Paul answered that it was our pre-9/11 interventionalism — and the "blowback" that ensued — that was to blame for terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. This prompted Rudy Giuliani, who maintains like George Bush that they "hate us for our freedoms," to jump in and demand Paul retract his "absurd" statement.

This is a fundamental question that Republicans — George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani especially — simply don't understand. They don't "hate us for our freedoms." Not that it any way excuses Bin Laden from leading these horrible attacks on the U.S, but it's simplistic and dishonest to state that it's solely an irrational hatred of our society. Here's what Michael Scheuer, the former station chief of the CIA's Osama Bin Laden task force, has to say:

Osama Doesn't Hate Our Freedom: The fundamental flaw in our thinking about Bin Laden is that "Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than what we do." Muslims are bothered by our modernity, democracy, and sexuality, but they are rarely spurred to action unless American forces encroach on their lands. It's American foreign policy that enrages Osama and al-Qaida, not American culture and society.

How is the United States threatening Muslim lands? The post-9/11 crackdowns on Muslim charities have effectively ended tithing, which is one of the five pillars of Islam; our casual denunciations of "jihad" sneer at a central tenet of the Muslim faith. America supports corrupt anti-Muslim governments in Uzbekistan and China, "apostate" governments in the Middle East, and the new Christian state of East Timor. And, above all, it continues to house occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's simple-minded people like Dinesh D'Souza who argue that it's our culture and "freedom" that are to blame for Islamic terrorism; intellectuals and people who actually know the history of the Middle East and appreciate the ramifications our foreign policy has, like reknowned historian Chalmers Johnson and Michael Scheuer to name a few, who understand the multi-faceted root causes.

As a matter of fact, in videotaped messages before and after 9/11, bin Laden explained his beef with the United States.

In several videotaped messages since 9/11 bin Laden gave very different, specific reasons for the attack, to wit: the U.S.-led embargo of humanitarian aid to Iraq in the 1990s following Gulf War I (in hopes that starving, illness-crazed Iraqis would arise to overthrow Saddam Hussein), later replaced with a corrupt and equally ineffective U.N. food-and-medicine-for-oil program, which together were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children; America's unwavering Israel-first Middle-East foreign policy which has so often ignored the rights of Palestinians and which contributes to so much instability in the region, and the continued, growing presence of U.S. military bases in the Middle East, specifically in Saudi Arabia, the holiest lands in Islam.

This would be scary if it wasn't so disturbing. How are we supposed to address our differences if we won't even acknowledge the source of the problem?

May 6, 2007

Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns
The latest initiatives to stop global warming won’t save us, James Lovelock tells Jonathan Leake

If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.

“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.”

Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.

In it was a message of hope, albeit a faint one. The report set out a complex mix of political, economic and technological solutions. If they all worked, said the report, they could achieve huge cuts in the 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by humanity into the air each year, thus keeping global temperature rises below 3C.

At the same time in Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich.

“I have a dream,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the delegates. He set out his belief that carbon trading will help stabilise greenhouse gas emissions and aid developing countries by transferring £50 billion a year to these nations from the First World to support green development.

For Lovelock, however, such dreams are dangerous nonsense on a par with a drowning man clutching at straws. “It’s all ridiculous,” he sighed. “These new markets do some good in that they generate wealth and keep these people employed, but they and the IPCC are just raising false hopes. We have done too much damage to the world and now it is changing too fast for us to make much difference.”

Lovelock’s view is that the world has two stable states: the “icehouse”, when ice covers both poles, sometimes extending far into lower latitudes in the form of ice ages; and the “greenhouse”, when all the ice melts. Both have already happened many times in the Earth’s history.

“Human outpourings of greenhouse gases have flicked the switch that turns the world from its colder to its warm state – and it is probably too late to stop it,” he said. “The warming impact of the carbon we have already released is such that the Earth has taken over and our greenhouse gas emissions are being amplified by nature itself.”

Lovelock believes that the transformation is happening far too fast for humanity to tackle, especially in a world that remains committed to economic growth and whose 6.5 billion population is predicted to reach more than 9 billion by mid-century.

For evidence, he points to Siberia where the melting of the permafrost, already widely reported in scientific literature, will enable bacteria to decompose organic matter that has accumulated in the soil over tens of millions of years – potentially releasing billions more tons of CO2 “I have just come back from Norway where the temperatures are even further above normal than Britain’s. The climate is changing every year now. Everyone can see it – as in this very warm April. By mid-century the heatwave [in Europe] that killed 20,000 people in 2003 will be a cool summer by comparison.”

At first sight Lovelock’s predictions seem wildly at odds with the IPCC’s reports, but in many ways the only difference is in the vividness of the language. “The progressive acidification of oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (ie corals) and their dependent species,” said the IPCC report detailing the impacts of climate change – its careful language draining the drama from a warning that vast tracts of the ocean may turn so acidic that little life will be left in them.

It added: “At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2C), which would increase risk of hunger.” What these measured tones imply, warns Lovelock, is that millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people living in equatorial lands will be forced from their homes, with most of them heading northwards. “The world will face mass shortages of food and water. That will lead to wars and the effective clearance of vast areas of land as the deserts spread,” he said.

Lovelock’s reputation as a scientific seer was founded four decades ago when he published his Gaia hypothesis. His idea, that the Earth’s chemistry, climate and life were all closely linked into a kind of self-sustaining system, is now received wisdom. It has become clear that the first life forms on Earth transformed its early climate and atmosphere, generating the oxygen that allowed life to evolve – eventually into us.

What’s more, that process continues. Oxygen is a reactive gas that would vanish from the atmosphere were it not for the plankton, and plants that keep topping it up.

Lovelock’s warnings may seem remote (and he hasn’t always been proved right) but with Britain basking in record spring heat he says our scepticism about the damage we can expect from global warming is understandable. “Britain and Scandinavia are becoming green oases. In 2050 or soon after, most of the world may be scrub and desert and most of the oceans will be denuded of life, but temperatures here will remain very tolerable. The downside of that is that we risk becoming like a lifeboat with millions of refugees trying to settle here.”

He is not alone in predicting a huge northwards shift in human populations: in his new book, How the World will Change with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic academic, predicts how population centres will move north.

“The Arctic ice cap is melting. When it goes it will open up new shipping routes, new fishing grounds and new oil fields,” said Valsson. “The Arctic Ocean will become the new Mediterranean with Siberia and Canada as the centres for human culture and civilisation.”

Lovelock is fond of recounting how, on a recent lecture tour of America, he was accosted by earnest academics seeking advice on whereabouts in Canada they should buy their second homes.

Behind such comic anecdotes, however, lies the grim possibility that billions of people face a miserable life and death as humanity finds a new equilibrium with the Earth. At 87 Lovelock acknowledges that he is unlikely to be one of them. His concern is for the generations represented by his nine grandchildren. “What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.”

Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power
US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.
The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and near fist fights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.
But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.

By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debat ing its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the south Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the antichrist (both of which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a "fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is now published in paperback

Can flu viruses survive winter in frozen lakes?
12:29 29 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic

Evidence of flu viruses frozen in Siberian lakes has prompted researchers to examine the possibility that global warming may release microbes locked in glaciers for decades or even centuries.

“Our hypothesis is that influenza can survive in ice over the winter and re-infect birds as they come back in spring,” says Scott Rogers of Bowling Green State University, Ohio, US. He believes the frozen lakes act as "melting pots" for flu viruses, allowing viruses from one year to mix with those from previous years.

Rogers has spent decades searching ice for micro-organisms. He teamed up with Dany Shoham at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and David Gilichinsky, at the Russian Academy of Sciences, to obtain samples of ice from Siberian lakes where migratory birds stop.

The group looked for pieces of genetic material from flu viruses in ice taken from three lakes that freeze and thaw each year. In the lake that is most visited by migratory birds, Lake Park, they found fragments of RNA coding for haemagglutinin, the surface protein that allows flu viruses to bind to the cells they infect.

Genetic analysis revealed the haemagglutinin was most closely related to an H1-strain flu virus that was around in the 1930s and later resurfaced in the 1960s.

Frozen droppings
Rogers’ team is now looking at ice cores from glaciers in Alaska and Wyoming in the US, and from Canada. They intend to study cores from Siberia and the Himalayas as well.

Many of these glaciers are on the flight paths of migratory birds, which will deposit virus onto the ice in their droppings, where it freezes. Rogers believes there is a possibility that, as global warming melts glaciers, they will release the viruses, and perhaps other microbes such as bacteria and fungi that have otherwise disappeared from our environment.

The idea is plausible, says Jonathan Stoye, head of virology at the UK National Institute for Medical Research in London. But he adds: "The important issue is whether or not there’s infectious virus" in the ice, rather than just fragments of RNA. Rogers is collaborating with researchers at sufficiently biosecure labs to try and answer this question.

Freeze-thaw process
Stoye says that whether or not the viruses are infectious depends largely on how the virus was frozen. Viruses frozen in water are likely to be inactivated by the water’s relatively low pH. "But if the virus was in droppings, which presumably is how it was deposited, there seems to be no reason why it should not freeze and survive at low temperatures."

He adds that viruses are more likely to survive in a frozen state if they freeze and thaw only once, as the freeze-thaw process kills at least 90% of virus each time.

Karen Lacourciere, programme officer for influenza at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded Rogers’ research, thinks the ice cores are unlikely to contain viruses shed by humans.

"The kind of consistently freezing conditions you would expect to need to preserve a virus are unlikely to be found in places that are heavily populated with people," she says. She also notes the samples Rogers has looked at so far are taken from the middle of lakes that are almost exclusively visited by birds.

The first ancient virus discovered frozen in ice was found in 1999 in the Arctic by Rogers and colleagues at Syracuse University in New York, US, (see Back from the dead). Other researchers have revived a bacterium in that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years (see Ice age bacteria brought back to life). And a 250-million-year-old bacterium stored in salt has also been brought back to life (see Eternal life)

Journal reference: Journal of Virology (vol 80, p 12229)

Deadly Ocean Burp
by Jack Penland

Could a dangerous gas buildup at the bottom of the ocean bubble up and wipe out most life on Earth? According to some researchers, it already has done so; several times. As this ScienCentral story explains, scientists are worried that global warming is making conditions ripe for another deadly ocean burp.

Attack from Below

Scientists mostly agree that it was an object from space that crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, killing off much of the planet's life, including most of the dinosaurs. But geologists have found evidence of four other major mass extinctions and more than a dozen other smaller similar extinctions over the past 500 million years. In addition they've not found any corresponding evidence of a collision from an object from space.

Peter Ward, Biology and Earth and Space Sciences Professor at the University of Washington says, "Try as people would, they could not find evidence for impact other than at, really, the age of dinosaurs." Writing in Scientific American, Ward says instead that, "A new type of evidence reveals that the earth itself can, and probably did, exterminate its own inhabitants."

The killer is a type of bacteria that needs lots of sunlight but very little oxygen to thrive. It gives off the gas hydrogen sulfide, which even in small concentrations is lethal. People generally call the gas "sewer gas."


This photo from space shows a small temporary bacteria bloom off the coast of Africa.
image: NASA
Because there was no evidence linking space objects to the remaining mass extinctions scientists began looking back to earth. Ward says, "while geologists discovered, better and better dating methods," other scientists discovered, "a fantastic new method called biomarker methodology."

Ward explains, biomarkers are, "small bits of fossil material. But, it's not a shell; it's organic remains, microscopic ... It could be as small as an organic chain of carbon that came out of the side of a bacterium, but it is particular to that particular bacteria species."

Scientists then began searching the layers of rocks that delineate mass extinctions. Ward says, "at four of the five mass extinction boundaries, the biggest ones, the microbes are microbes we find associated with lots of very toxic sulphurs." He says the evidence is quite strong, emphasizing, "We've got a mass extinction, we've got a lot of dead bodies and we have this fossil evidence, molecular fossil evidence that a very bad bug was there."

But what caused these bacteria to grow? Ward says long ago volcanic activity spewed carbon dioxide into the air and warmed the oceans. He says, "You simply need to warm the oceans, they lose their oxygen and bad bacteria take over." He adds, "There are hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria growing at several places on our Earth's oceans' bottoms today." In fact, NASA has caught from space, evidence of such growth off the coast of Africa.


image: The NewsMarket
Today, instead of volcanoes, it's human activity that is creating greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide, causing the earth to warm. Ward worries, "The last time we had one of these extinctions, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was a thousand parts per million. Today, we're at 385 parts per million and rising." He says some estimates put us reaching a thousand parts per million in 200 more years.

Ward says scientists now need to better understand this chain reaction, explaining, "We absolutely have to know how long it takes between a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and enough hydrogen sulfide to kill things." He says while industrial accidents have sadly provided us a good understanding of how lethal hydrogen sulfide is on humans, we know little about how it impacts other living things, such as plants. Since that's an important part of the food chain, that will be his next research goal in this area.

This research was published in the October 2006 issue of Scientific American and funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the National Science Foundation, and the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat
NASA
As the amount of debris orbiting Earth increases, so does the danger to spacecraft.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: February 6, 2007
For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens.

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In the last decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass — or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable — they grew more anxious.

Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.

Now, experts say, China’s test on Jan. 11 of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments means the chain reaction will most likely start sooner. If their predictions are right, the cascade could put billions of dollars’ worth of advanced satellites at risk and eventually threaten to limit humanity’s reach for the stars.

Federal and private experts say that early estimates of 800 pieces of detectable debris from the shattering of the satellite will grow to nearly 1,000 as observations continue by tracking radars and space cameras. At either number, it is the worst such episode in space history.

Today, next year or next decade, some piece of whirling debris will start the cascade, experts say.

“It’s inevitable,” said Nicholas L. Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “A significant piece of debris will run into an old rocket body, and that will create more debris. It’s a bad situation.”

Geoffrey E. Forden, an arms expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is analyzing the Chinese satellite debris, said China perhaps failed to realize the magnitude of the test’s indirect hazards.

Dr. Forden suggested that Chinese engineers might have understood the risks but failed to communicate them. In China, he said, “the decision process is still so opaque that maybe they didn’t know who to talk to. Maybe you have a disconnect between the engineers and the people who think about policy.”

China, experts note, has 39 satellites of its own — many of them now facing a heightened risk of destruction.

Politically, the situation is delicate. In recent years China has played a growing international role in fighting the proliferation of space junk. In 2002, for instance, it joined with other spacefaring nations to suggest voluntary guidelines for debris control.

In April, Beijing is to play host to the annual meeting of the advocacy group, known as the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee. Donald J. Kessler, a former head of the orbital debris program at NASA and a pioneer analyst of the space threat, said Chinese officials at the forum would probably feel “some embarrassment.”

Mr. Kessler said Western analysts agreed that China’s new satellite fragments would speed the chain reaction’s onset. “If the Chinese didn’t do the test, it would still happen,” he said. “It just wouldn’t happen as quickly.”

Last week in Beijing, a foreign ministry spokeswoman failed to respond directly to a debris question. Asked if the satellite’s remains would threaten other spacecraft, she asserted that China’s policy was to keep space free of weapons.

“We are ready to strengthen international cooperation in this regard,” the spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told reporters.

Cascade warnings began as early as 1978. Mr. Kessler and his NASA colleague, Burton G. Cour-Palais, wrote in The Journal of Geophysical Research that speeding junk that formed more junk would produce “an exponential increase in the number of objects with time, creating a belt of debris around the Earth.”

During the cold war, Moscow and Washington generally ignored the danger and, from 1968 to 1986, conducted more than 20 tests of antisatellite arms that created clouds of jagged scraps. Often, they did so at low altitudes from which the resulting debris soon plunged earthward. Still, the number of objects grew as more nations launched rockets and satellites into orbit.

In 1995, as the count passed 8,000, the National Academy of Sciences warned in a thick report that some crowded orbits appeared to have already reached the “critical density” needed to sustain a chain reaction.

A year later, apprehension rose as the fuel tank of an abandoned American rocket engine exploded, breaking the craft into 713 detectable fragments — until now, the record.

Amid such developments, space experts identified the first collisions that threatened to start a chain reaction, putting analysts increasingly on edge.

On Jan. 17, 2005, for instance, a piece of speeding debris from an exploded Chinese rocket collided with a derelict American rocket body that had been shot into space 31 years earlier. Warily, investigators searched though orbital neighborhoods but found to their relief that the crackup had produced only four pieces of detectable debris.

A year later, Mr. Johnson, the chief scientist for NASA’s orbital debris program, and his colleague J. -C. Liou, published an article in the journal Science that detailed the growing threat. They said orbits were now so cluttered that the chain reaction was sure to start even if spacefaring nations refrained from launching any more spacecraft.

“The environment is unstable,” they wrote, “and collisions will become the most dominant debris-generating mechanism.”

It was in this atmosphere of rising tension that China last month fired a rocket into space that shattered an old weather satellite — its first successful test of an antisatellite weapon.

David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., calculated that the old satellite had broken into 1,000 fragments four inches wide or larger, and millions of smaller ones.

Federal sky-watchers who catalogue objects in the Earth orbit work slowly and deliberately. As of yesterday, they publicly listed 647 detectable pieces of the satellite but were said to be tracking hundreds more.

The breakup was dangerous because the satellite’s orbit was relatively high, some 530 miles up. That means the debris will remain in space for tens, thousands or even millions of years.

Mr. Kessler, the former NASA official, now a private consultant in Asheville, N.C., said China might have chosen a relatively high target to avoid directly threatening the International Space Station and its astronaut crew, which orbit at a height of about 220 miles.

“Maybe the choice was to endanger the station in the short term or to cause a long-term problem,” he said. “Maybe that forced them to raise the orbit.”

Even so, the paths of the speeding Chinese debris, following the laws of physics and of celestial mechanics, expanded in many directions, including upward and downward. As of last week, outliers from the central cloud stretched from roughly 100 miles to more than 2,000 miles above the Earth.

A solution to the cascade threat exists but is costly. In his Science paper and in recent interviews, Mr. Johnson of NASA argued that the only sure answer was environmental remediation, including the removal of existing large objects from orbit.

Robots might install rocket engines to send dead spacecraft careering back into the atmosphere, or ground-based lasers might be used to zap debris.

The bad news, Mr. Johnson said in his paper, is that “for the near term, no single remediation technique appears to be both technically feasible and economically viable.”

If nothing is done, a kind of orbital crisis might ensue that is known as the Kessler Syndrome, after Mr. Kessler. A staple of science fiction, it holds that the space around Earth becomes so riddled with junk that launchings are almost impossible. Vehicles that entered space would quickly be destroyed.

In an interview, Mr. Kessler called the worst-case scenario an exaggeration. “It’s been overdone,” he said of the syndrome.

Still, he warned of an economic barrier to space exploration that could arise. To fight debris, he said, designers will have to give spacecraft more and more shielding, struggling to protect the craft from destruction and making them heavier and more costly in the process.

At some point, he said, perhaps centuries from now, the costs will outweigh the benefits.

“It gets more and more expensive,” he said. “Sooner or later it gets too expensive to do business in space.”

Environment in crisis: 'We are past the point of no return'
Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary-scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind's abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His astonishing conclusion - that climate change is already insoluble, and life on Earth will never be the same again.

By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor
Published: 16 January 2006

The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.

In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.

The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: " Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

In making such a statement, far gloomier than any yet made by a scientist of comparable international standing, Professor Lovelock accepts he is going out on a limb. But as the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on Earth since Charles Darwin, he feels his own analysis of what is happening leaves him no choice. He believes that it is the self-regulating mechanism of Gaia itself - increasingly accepted by other scientists worldwide, although they prefer to term it the Earth System - which, perversely, will ensure that the warming cannot be mastered.

This is because the system contains myriad feedback mechanisms which in the past have acted in concert to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they will come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2 ).

It means that the harmful consequences of human beings damaging the living planet's ancient regulatory system will be non-linear - in other words, likely to accelerate uncontrollably.

He terms this phenomenon "The Revenge of Gaia" and examines it in detail in a new book with that title, to be published next month.

The uniqueness of the Lovelock viewpoint is that it is holistic, rather than reductionist. Although he is a committed supporter of current research into climate change, especially at Britain's Hadley Centre, he is not looking at individual facets of how the climate behaves, as other scientists inevitably are. Rather, he is looking at how the whole control system of the Earth behaves when put under stress.

Professor Lovelock, who conceived the idea of Gaia in the 1970s while examining the possibility of life on Mars for Nasa in the US, has been warning of the dangers of climate change since major concerns about it first began nearly 20 years ago.

He was one of a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on global warming to Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet at 10 Downing Street in April 1989.

His concerns have increased steadily since then, as evidence of a warming climate has mounted. For example, he shared the alarm of many scientists at the news last September that the ice covering the Arctic Ocean is now melting so fast that in 2005 it reached a historic low point.

Two years ago he sparked a major controversy with an article in The Independent calling on environmentalists to drop their long-standing opposition to nuclear power, which does not produce the greenhouses gases of conventional power stations.

Global warming was proceeding so fast that only a major expansion of nuclear power could bring it under control, he said. Most of the Green movement roundly rejected his call, and does so still.

Now his concerns have reached a peak - and have a new emphasis. Rather than calling for further ways of countering climate change, he is calling on governments in Britain and elsewhere to begin large-scale preparations for surviving what he now sees as inevitable - in his own phrase today, "a hell of a climate", likely to be in Europe up to 8C hotter than it is today.

In his book's concluding chapter, he writes: "What should a sensible European government be doing now? I think we have little option but to prepare for the worst, and assume that we have passed the threshold."

And in today's Independent he writes: "We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen ..."

He goes on: "We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can." He believes that the world's governments should plan to secure energy and food supplies in the global hothouse, and defences against the expected rise in sea levels. The scientist's vision of what human society may ultimately be reduced to through climate change is " a broken rabble led by brutal warlords."

Professor Lovelock draws attention to one aspect of the warming threat in particular, which is that the expected temperature rise is currently being held back artificially by a global aerosol - a layer of dust in the atmosphere right around the planet's northern hemisphere - which is the product of the world's industry.

This shields us from some of the sun's radiation in a phenomenon which is known as "global dimming" and is thought to be holding the global temperature down by several degrees. But with a severe industrial downturn, the aerosol could fall out of the atmosphere in a very short time, and the global temperature could take a sudden enormous leap upwards.

One of the most striking ideas in his book is that of "a guidebook for global warming survivors" aimed at the humans who would still be struggling to exist after a total societal collapse.

Written, not in electronic form, but "on durable paper with long-lasting print", it would contain the basic accumulated scientific knowledge of humanity, much of it utterly taken for granted by us now, but originally won only after a hard struggle - such as our place in the solar system, or the fact that bacteria and viruses cause infectious diseases.

Rough guide to a planet in jeopardy

Global warming, caused principally by the large-scale emissions of industrial gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), is almost certainly the greatest threat that mankind has ever faced, because it puts a question mark over the very habitability of the Earth.

Over the coming decades soaring temperatures will mean agriculture may become unviable over huge areas of the world where people are already poor and hungry; water supplies for millions or even billions may fail. Rising sea levels will destroy substantial coastal areas in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, at the very moment when their populations are mushrooming. Numberless environmental refugees will overwhelm the capacity of any agency, or indeed any country, to cope, while modern urban infrastructure will face devastation from powerful extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans last summer.

The international community accepts the reality of global warming, supported by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In its last report, in 2001, the IPCC said global average temperatures were likely to rise by up to 5.8C by 2100. In high latitudes, such as Britain, the rise is likely to be much higher, perhaps 8C. The warming seems to be proceeding faster than anticipated and in the IPCC's next report, 2007, the timescale may be shortened. Yet there still remains an assumption that climate change is controllable, if CO2 emissions can be curbed. Lovelock is warning: think again.

'The Revenge of Gaia' by James Lovelock is published by Penguin on 2 February, price £16.99

James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years
Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can
Published: 16 January 2006
Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.

Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.

This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

To understand how impossible it is, think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis helps, but is no replacement for living healthy kidneys.

My new book The Revenge of Gaia expands these thoughts, but you still may ask why science took so long to recognise the true nature of the Earth. I think it is because Darwin's vision was so good and clear that it has taken until now to digest it. In his time, little was known about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and there would have been little reason for him to wonder if organisms changed their environment as well as adapting to it.

Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth's skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

The writer is an independent environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. 'The Revenge of Gaia' is published by Penguin on 2 February

Why We Disagree on Peak Oil and Climate Change: Part III - Our Belief Systems
Posted by Nate Hagens on May 1, 2007 - 11:16am

In the first two parts of this series, we looked at some of the factual reasons why people disagree on the timing and importance of Peak Oil: gross versus net oil production, better technology vs depletion, productive capacity vs flow rates, differing definitions of "Peak", etc. This post will address some social and psychological reasons why the urgency of our energy situation may not be being addressed on an individual level and only at a snails pace on the governmental level. Among the phenomena we will explore are a) why we have beliefs and how they are changed, b) our propensity to believe in authority figures, c) our penchant for optimism, d) cognitive load theory, d) relative fitness, e) the recency effect, and several others. The fact is, even if the world's energy data was transparent and freely available to everyone, it would be an open question whether people would agree on any near term action to mitigate future oil scarcity.

Our societal infrastructure was built with and expected to continue on cheap liquid fuels. This fixed infrastructure coupled with a human demand drive for more may result in a once-in-a-species crisis once our planetary resource and ecosystems can no longer keep pace. But Peak Oil ultimately is not about geology or technology. At its core it is a human problem. An overlooked human attribute will play the pivotal role in our failure or success in mitigating and adapting to the seminal challenges of both Peak Oil and Climate Change - that of our collective cognitive belief systems and the resulting behaviours they engender.

This post will outline many of the behavioral tendencies we can expect to encounter as we attempt timely and logical solutions to declines in per capita energy availability. It will culminate in an examination of our belief systems themselves, and how we process new information. As in my recent posts, I preface this one with a discussion I had this weekend with my friend Thomas, (who fittingly has still 'not had time' to read the oildrum story on steep discount rates):

N: Thomas - Im writing another story for theoildrum.com and would like your comments since you seem to represent the 'non-believer camp'.

T: Its not that I don't believe that oil will peak someday - its just that the doom and gloom people are always wrong - somehow something will come along and in 5 years you'll say "well, how could I have known about 'XXX'? No one knows the future - including you Nate.

N: Ive never said when Peak Oil would be, only that it would eventually mean the end of economic growth as we know it - and that technology and capital can't 'create' energy. The market will be too late to react to the signals once they come. The asset allocators on Wall St have used a formula for the 70 years of stock market history based on cheap oil and high energy gain. That era is over - new rules or maybe a new game.

T: No offense buddy - I know you're very intelligent. But there are thousands of smart people on Wall St and elsewhere analyzing data - don't you think its a little odd that YOU'RE opinion is the right one over all those people whose full time jobs it is to pore over oil demand and supply figures?

N: Well, when put like that it always shakes my confidence, but I do believe the street is missing the main tenets of Peak oil - that environmental limits and declining net energy will overtake conventional market and technology solutions. And by the way - there ARE a lot of analysts are talking about Peak and its implications - the new GAO report on Peak Oil came out last week and pointed out how unprepared we are..

T: Now you trust what the Government is saying? You used to say the government energy forecasts were terrible and we shouldn't believe in them -now they write something that fits your position and you use it for support?

N: Were you always this argumentative? Wait -don't answer that -Ive known you since grad school. Can you honestly say that you've read things on theoildrum and other sources for objective information on this topic?

T: I have 3 kids and work 60 hour weeks so I choose how to spend my reading time. Can you say YOU'VE read all the research saying we have plenty of oil until at least 2040 after which there will be plenty of substitutes?

N: I've started from scratch 3 or 4 times on the core Peak Oil tenets, thinking I might have something very wrong, but Ive been over it enough to unfortunately feel pretty confident I'm right, though less certain on the timing.

T: Nate, I shouldn't tell you this but our asset management arm is in the top 10 in the world in terms of assets and do you know what our number one position is?

N: Starbucks?

T: No. We're short oil futures. We think its going back to $40 well before it goes to $100.

N: Thomas this is all besides the point. I'm not predicting what will happen in the next 3 months or next 3 years - what I'm saying is that very soon, in our lifetimes, energy is going to be scarce and cause ripple effects we cant even imagine. The bullish supply forecasts either siphon that 'energy gain' from other economic sectors via inflation or by robbing it from the environment via water and ecosystem depletion and increased GHGs.

T: Whatever. And even if you're right. We're here to live life. I'm not going to sit around waiting for 'the next big change' when I can enjoy life with my kids and live large. I work hard you know.

N: Actually you're a grifter. But you're still my friend, even though you're closed minded at times. Later.

The above discussion is in many respects a synopsis of this post - that despite facts, we exhibit certain cognitive biases that prevent us from acting on complex or frightening subjects outside of our day to day realities. What follows below is a brief overview of 10 cognitive phenomenon that may inhibit wider understanding and action on oil depletion. (Caveat - Neuroscience is a complex and growing field that has many valuable contributions to offer. In discussing human tendencies for various behaviours, I am of course generalizing, as are most of the scientific studies - when I say 'people value the present more than the future', I make that claim in the same vein that 'men are taller than women (on average)' )

COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY

Cognitive load theory suggests humans have a maximum capacity of working memory. At around 7 'chunks' of information, our working memory maxes out and we can't accept anything else without losing some of the previous 'chunks'. Try remembering the following numbers 1-9-1-4-7-6-7-5-9-5-9. Its quite hard to do. But if they are rearranged in chunks 1-914-767-5959, it becomes much more manageable. Numerous studies have measured this phenomenon - a notable study by Shiv and Fedhorkhin(1) asked a group of people to memorize a two digit number, walk down a corridor and at the end choose a dessert - either chocolate cake or fruit salad. A different sample of people were then asked to memorize a 7 digit number and walk down the corridor (while internally reciting this 7 digit number) and also choose a dessert. When required to memorize the 7 digit number, almost twice as many people chose the chocolate cake as in the sample only memorizing the 2 digit number - the implication being - 'my short term memory is full - I cant access my rational, long term decision-making hardware - just give me the damn cake'.

Of course, in a society with cell phones, taxi-cabs, internet, coffee, soccer practice, Grays Anatomy, corporate ladders and a plethora of other chocolate cake-like stimuli, meaningful contemplation and education about oil depletion and the environment usually represents the fruit salad. Many people are just too cognitively taxed to take on much more.

RECENCY EFFECT

Cognitive psychologists have recognized that people tend to overweight the most recent data and stimuli they receive in their decision-making processes. A possible reason for the recency effect is that these items still linger in working memory when recall is solicited. This recency effect has two important relationships to the peak oil and global warming issues. First, we collectively assume that today will be much like yesterday and tomorrow will be like today - grocery stores chock full of oil-subsidized tasty treats, gas stations with cheap and easy fill-ups, and a plethora of novel entertainment and diversion options preclude our mind from thinking tomorrow will be any different. Second, in the various campaigns to educate and inform the public and policymakers on the dangers of oil depletion, any 'recent' optimistic piece in the mainstream media that dismisses Peak Oil has a tendency to mentally 'overwrite' some of the prior Peak Oil education one might have achieved.

Part of the reason I looked into research on the recency effect is that I noticed myself yo-yo-ing on peak oil and climate change depending on who I talked to or what Id seen. I started to notice a pattern that my 'belief' was highly correlated to whatever I'd read or whoever I'd spoken to most recently. Since there are so many unknowns on both topics, to hear demonstrative language from confident sources does a lot to sway ones opinion, until and if one has time to methodically explore the arguments during subsequent individual research.

I am not a climate expert but do know enough to believe global warming is being anthropogenically influenced and is of at least moderate concern. As a graduate student under Robert Costanza, a scientist very concerned about climate change , I felt almost embarrassed after viewing The Great Global Warming Swindle. Even though I recognized a few factual mistakes, the rhetoric and confident tone in the movie pulled me in - the general tenor made me feel that climate change is relatively benign and concerns about it are overblown. That is, until the next morning when I got a series of emails from my professors about its content after which my opinion completely flip-flopped again. I expect this is a common experience. The central issues of climate change and oil decline are so broad and complex that both science and advocacy fall victim to the recency effect. Advertisers however, must be aware that the recency effect is both valid and powerful, otherwise we would have long ago decided on which product is superior between Miller Lite and Bud Lite on the facts alone.

STEEP DISCOUNT RATES

As discussed in a recent oildrum post, we have evolved neural mechanisms to steeply favor the present over the future (measured by what economists call ‘discount rates’). The higher the rate the more one is 'addicted' to the present moment. Lower discount rates suggest more control of the neocortex in subverting mammalian impulses of 'living for the moment'. Different products are discounted at differing rates. Different subsets of people (drug addicts, young people, gamblers, men, risk-takers, low math scorers, alcohol drinkers, etc) have steeper discount rates - are less able to act for the future and are easier pulled in by short term desires.(2)

We have evolved to have instant access to our emotional minds in times of stress or danger - a million years ago too much rational thought would have essentially been suicidal. Oil depletion, climate change and loss of planetary ecosystems are long lead time problems. As such, information leading us to believe a peak in global oil production is either a) no big deal or b) beyond 2030 is essentially not 'received' by our emotional minds. The average person and politician will process such information as a free pass to continue the business as usual path. This is especially true if the assessment comes from a confident, respected, mainstream source (such as CERA), because it trickles down through corporate hierarchical society. Collectively it will be difficult to act until these issues become 'in the moment' too.

BELIEF IN AUTHORITY FIGURES

theoildrum.com contributor says "Net energy to fall - society needs to change quickly"

Think about your initial reaction to the above two assertions. Depending on your walk of life, your gut reaction and thought process might differ. However, science (and history) has shown that humans have a propensity to be externally validated - we believe in and follow instructions from confident authority figures. Though theoildrum.com contributor is clearly confident, he certainly is not an authority figure, at least outside pike fishing circles. The Pope however, influences billions. With few exceptions, most voices advocating immediate steps for mitigating peak oil are not what society would perceive as 'authority figures'.

But what if the tables were reversed?

NEWS FLASH ---“EXXON-MOBIL SAYS THE WORLD HAS PASSED PEAK OIL – THEOILDRUM.COM SAYS NOT TIL 2030”
Imagine if that headline ran through the media around the country. Corporate leaders would hold emergency meetings on how to lock in prices or even supplies. (Some might liquidate their 401ks and not even show up)…. Politicians would be on television urging people to wear sweaters or even winter coats…. A gasoline tax would be quickly implemented…. Purchases of wind turbines and solar panels would soar… Tuna and chocolate hoarding...Cats living with dogs – real Old Testament stuff.

However, the situation is precisely opposite that. Astute, reasoned analysis by concerned individuals gets easily drowned out by rhetorical op-ed pieces in respected newspapers. Portrayal of concern for peak oil as a 'chicken little', 'Cassandra' and 'boy who cried wolf' phenomenon by a credible news source effectively erases what nagging concern or belief about oil depletion someone had started to foment.

Sociology recognizes that we have a propensity to believe in authority figures. Though the why of this is yet to be sussed out, Richard Dawkins believes it is an adaptive byproduct of children who unquestioningly followed adult instructions during the thousands of generations of our ancestral environment.(3) Presumably, the penchant for adults to easily believe things that are confidently told to them is a carryover from the children who did NOT eat the berries, touch the snake, or swim over a waterfall – these children survived to have children of their own. Social psychologist Robert Cialdini has written a book related to this phenomenon, on how certain people can have outsized influence on others using certain authoritative tactics. (I wonder aloud if Messrs. Jackson and Yergin own copies)

Irrespective of its origins and as uncomfortable as it sounds, we DO inherently believe in authority figures, as the famous and controversial Milgram experiments evidenced. 65% of volunteers delivered what they thought were fatal doses of 450 volt electric shocks to human subjects while being calmly assured to continue by the experiment 'administrators' (doctors in lab coats). The other 35% of participants still delivered high voltage shocks to the point of unconsciousness but refused to administer the 'highest level' shocks. Interestingly, none of these 35% insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check that the victim was O.K. without first asking for permission. So much for independent thinking. In interviews prior to the experiment respondents predicted that only the most 'sadistic' 1.2% of participants would be willing to hurt another participant with electric shocks, yet 100% of the participants DID administer the shocks. The power of authority figures is indeed strong.

To be honest, when preparing this post, I read and reread CERAs analyses and interviews – the recency effect combined with the utter confident tone they were written in made me (again) question that maybe I have this all wrong – that we have smooth sailing until 2030. But, after some malted milk balls and a quick review of my colleagues work, which at a minimum shows CERA does not incorporate net energy, understand Hubbert Linearization or include environmental externalities, Peak Oil again had me very worried.

RISK AVERSION

Risk aversion is a financial and psychological concept that posits consumers (people) prefer a certain but possibly lower payoff than an uncertain but possibly higher payoff. With respect to Peak Oil, there is such a societal Sunk Cost that even if the average person or politician is on board with the understanding of fossil fuel depletion, the risk of stepping outside the warm cocoon of modern grid-connected energy intensive society can be emotionally daunting. Too, there aren't too many blazed paths as of yet illustrating exactly what one person or family can and should do to adapt. Our society is SO dependent on oil that most alternatives are too risky for the average family to pursue. Or at least that may be the perception.

RELATIVE FITNESS

As evidenced by the size difference between males and females (sexual dimorphism), our species is midway between a tournament species and a pair bond species. This is suggestive that in our evolutionary past, selection pressures for male/male competition at least partially contributed to higher mating success (though not as much as in sea lions). The advent of language in tribal living expanded the scope of reputation and its influence on mating competition. An individuals comments, actions and opinions thus contributed to increasing or decreasing his status within the tribe. One could argue that a good part of human communication is concerned with getting other people to think, behave and believe as we do. At the same time, those others are trying to get us to behave and believe like they do – it’s the culmination of our biological and political (social) heritage.

This concept has many demand side implications for Peak Oil not the least of which will be some variant of resource grab when per capita liquid fuel availability declines. But it also plays a large role in peoples differing and sometime entrenched viewpoints on the topic of Peak Oil, irrespective of their future actions. My friend Thomas has a career in finance - his income is dependent on his clients buying stocks, which are in turn dependent on the economy growing. He has 3 children and a huge house full of gadgets and requires alot of fuel to continue his planned trajectory (though he admits he could be happier on much less). A Peak Oil world as I've painted it could be perceived as a threat to him, his family and his lifestyle. For him to accept my worldview is in some ways admitting that his own life is built around the wrong premises. Similarly, if our current Disneyland culture continues to extract resources and environmental costs and the day of reckoning comes well beyond my lifetime, perhaps I have wasted some of my time on this planet unnecessarily calling attention to what I view as urgent risks associated with net energy decline and human social traps.

Oh, How sweet it is to hear ones own convictions from another's lips. - Goethe (1749-1832)

Some who are very vocal about the urgency of Peak Oil will take a 'perceived fitness hit' if information comes to light that delays or moderates the impact of a peak and decline in world oil supply. Similarly, those who think we have plenty of oil production and flow capacity for the next 20-30 years will look foolish (e.g damage their reputation leading to a 'perceived' drop in fitness status), if it turns out we never see 90 million bpd and have 5% annual depletion rates beginning in a few years. In truth, for many the facts are mostly irrelevant - their belief systems are relatively immutable and new facts coming to light that support their convictions are viewed as 'victories' even if they add pain to the world as a whole. Similarly, new facts contrary to their beliefs are perceived as 'failures' and are responded to defensively. Curiously, it puts certain people, myself included, in a position of cognitive dissonance - I sincerely hope society manages to amass an armory of silver BBs and reduces consumption enough so that Peak Oil is a seamless transition to a sustainable future, but if that happens, most everything Ive written about in the past few years will have been incorrect. (But maybe I impacted the experiment...;)

Those oildrum.com readers who've participated in these forums for some time now are especially aware that certain people seem to be 'rooting' for peak oil and an end to the current capitalist consumptive system. I believe at least part of this is even though post peak oil they will have less 'absolute fitness', their 'relative fitness', compared to Joe-Mortgage-Trader-Millionaire-Next-Door, will increase. In the end, we are wired to respond to relative fitness.

BELIEF IN OPTIMISM

People vocal about the risks of Peak Oil are often viewed as pessimists, though I suppose they prefer the word 'realists'. We are taught from an early age to 'look at the bright side' and 'every cloud has a silver lining'. Humans do in fact have a penchant for optimism, and this sets up for an immediate bout of cognitive dissonance when discussions of peak oil nasties are undertaken.

Individuals have a tendency to be overly optimistic, and therefore naturally discount 'pessimistic' viewpoints and worldviews. Adults are particularly vulnerable to self-deception when comparing their own intelligence and attractiveness to others.(5) Research has shown that we systematically exaggerate our chances of success, believing that we are more competent and more in control than we really are. 88% of people think they are better drivers than average. 94% of professors believe they are better at their jobs than the average professor, etc. (By definition, almost half of those surveyed are 'overly optimistic'.)

There are good neural explanations for being optimistic. Even if the pessimistic view may be the more accurate, the stress of incorporating the particular negativity into ones worldview releases a cascade of stress-activated hormones that can seriously compromise a persons health.(6) In addition, pessimism can lead to depression, which suppresses the normal functioning of important neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which in turn can lead to reduced physical activity, mood swings, and a number of other physical symptoms and diseases. Optimistic attitudes also reduce secretion of cortisol, a stress hormone that inhibits the immune system, as well as produce more helper T-cells (4). The placebo effect is a well known but little understood medical phenomenon that improves patients physical response with no actual medication. In depression patients, placebos increase wellbeing by an average of 30-50%. Apparently, when we 'think' positively that something is helping us medically - even if its a sugar pill, it 'works'. We are now seeing that the brain is helping this healing to occur through a different neurotransmitter mix.

An optimistic outlook actually is neurochemically self-fulfilling. Optimism leads to increased frontal cortical activity which itself is a strong predictor of idea generation, positive emotion and overall liveliness of thought. Similarly, sadness is marked by decreased activity in the frontal cortex, which has the negative side affect of reducing the number of overall thoughts and ideas produced. Cognitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out that our brain exaggerates reality - when the glass is half full - the brain adds a little more for zest - when the glass is half empty, the brain subtracts some and things seem worse than they really are.

Being introduced to peak oil can be quite a shock. Its tough to be cheerful about the facts and implications about oil depletion, though ultimately we definitely could (and should) be happier with less energy. But initiation to the concept of upcoming shrinkage of the lifeblood of society can easily cause internal conflict in a species obviously wired to gravitate towards optimism.

GROUP THINK / HERD MENTALITY

We originated in tribal settings where consensus was important. Consensus building and group projects are taught and experienced in our culture from an early age - though in an era facing true scientific problems, the warm fuzzy group decisions can backfire. One famous example of 'Groupthink' was the Bay of Pigs invasion, where President Kennedys key advisors had serious misgivings about the strategy, but in group strategy sessions refused to speak up for fear of disrupting the seemingly overwhelming consensus. The invasion went so badly that the President specifically ordered his staff to speak up and offer dissenting opinions in future discussions, an order that may have averted a war during the Cuban missile crisis. As most media is quick to dismiss Peak Oil, our nation could use another such warning against 'groupthink'.

There is comfort in the herd. The recent discovery of mirror neurons helps explain why our brains are prone to absorb the beliefs and behaviours of others. Neurobiologically, when we see someone performing an action, whether it is a yawn, a smile or eating an ice cream cone, unique parts of our brains respond in the same way as if we were performing the action ourselves.(4)

Homo Sapiens See - Homo Sapiens Do.

Interestingly, USC neuroscientists (Arbib and Rizzolatti) are suggesting that the origin of language began as facial expressions and hand gestures - these communication tools, along with actual speech, are regulated by Brocas area, a small knob found in the left hemisphere of the cortex. As we will see below this has important implications.

BELIEF IN MAGIC, MYSTICISM, CORRELATION, ETC. (AS OPPOSED TO SCIENTIFIC METHOD)

Knowledge is a disposition to behave that is constantly subject to corrective modification and updating by experience, while belief is a disposition to behave that is resistant to correction by experience. Eichenbaum, Howard – Boston University (5)

The previous nine points were tenderizer for the meat of the article to follow. If you've read this far you're either unemployed, retired, a psychologist, a blood relative, my girlfriend or someone on the edge of a paradigm shift. Thank you in any case.

The difficult transition to a lower energy gain society by definition has a 'best path'. Also by definition we won't ever know what that path is, or at least until well into the future. How we collectively assimilate beliefs, attitudes, science and policy will be the key determinant in how we sink or swim with the Peak Oil tide. Unfortunately, we have baggage.

So far we've looked at our propensity to believe in authority, optimism, recent events, group behaviour, etc. Taken together, these leanings might suggest that we have some sort of pre-packaged neural software for abstract systems of 'belief'. In truth, we actually have no choice BUT to believe. From the moment of birth we depend on others to instruct us about the world. While young, we are given a specific language, a specific religion, a smattering of science and history and all the while we implicitly assume we are learning facts about the world. But we are not. We are simply being told what to believe. Though this is of course practical, it has resulted in 6.5 billion different (but overlapping) belief systems, somewhat modifiable as we grow up but increasingly less malleable as we get older.

What is a belief?

As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘belief’ is:

1. A feeling that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
2. A firmly held opinion
3. Trust or confidence in.
4. Religious faith.

The English word 'belief' originated in the twelfth century, as an adaptation of the German word gilouben, which means 'to love' or 'to hold dear'. It was first used in association with religious doctrines referring to one's trust and faith in God - faith rather than fact being the operative word, as this particular type of belief cannot be tested by the rigorous proofs developed by science.

What is the Scientific Method?

a. Observe some aspect of the universe.
b. Invent a theory that is consistent with what you have observed.
c. Use the theory to make predictions.
d. Test (attempt to falsify) those predictions by experiments or
further
observations.
e. Modify the theory in the light of your results.
f. loop back to "c" above for another test. (8)

Famed scientist Richard Feynman offers an excellent description of 'good science' vs. 'cargo cult science' here.

At the cottage where I write this, there is the unmistakable sound of sandhill cranes calling for mates - when I first heard it I had no idea what it was. The fourth time I heard it I was with my father who identified it as a mating pair of sandhill cranes. The 10th time I heard it I witnessed the actual cranes by a pond. Mentally, my brain created a hypothesis and eventually ‘tested’ it to be 'true'. A certain sound represents sand hill cranes mating. Our ancestors discovered all they needed to know about the natural world in a process something like this one.

However, many stimuli in our society are much less clear cut. If I see a blue BMW sedan with an attractive blonde in the passenger side 2 or 3 times in a week, my mind will naturally extrapolate the 'ownership of a blue BMW' as a signal of successful male competition, when there could be myriad other explanations for the womans presence (the mans personality, his looks, his intelligence, his sister etc) The fact that he owned that particular car could have been completely random - yet my brain observed this pattern and extrapolated it forward.

During the 2 million+ years of hominid brain growth and development, the environment was roughly constant – in most cases for at least for thousands of years at a time. Here we developed ‘pattern-recognition’ systems of beliefs, the precursors of what economists today call ‘correlation’. The human brain was exquisitely designed to favor correlation over causation. We did not evolve mechanisms to follow regimens like the scientific method because our species would have been systematically snuffed out by predators on the african savannah and a different species might be facing oil depletion. Our neural architecture was being built to adhere to correlations we observed in everyday life, because in these stable environmental timeframes, most correlations DID lead to causations. The periods of largest brain size increase in hominids were probably when some tribal leaders got good at noticing patterns and successfully made tools, or repeated routines that added fitness - these genes and thought processes then multiplied.

"The human mind evolved to believe in gods... Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to [science] which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms." The Biological Basis of Morality, E.O. Wilson

Our stimuli laden modern world presents us with millions of small sample size events that offer our built-in pattern recognition systems plenty of fodder for creating 'beliefs' in situations where the scientific method never comes into play. Our pattern recognition system is essentially misfiring in a world of too many patterns – “NFC wins Superbowl and stock market goes up" (I had clients investing on that one) – “I can’t date guys who are Virgos” – ‘Walk under a ladder with a black cat and get really bad luck’ –‘Your second Chakra looks a little weak today’ ‘The market will solve it’ etc. We unknowingly conflate correlation with causation, a danger that is learned to be avoided early on in the career of a scientist. And overriding it all is the theme of relative fitness where we attempt to justify, through social persuasion, that our 'patterns' are the correct ones. The upshot of this tendency is that charisma, rhetoric, advocacy, and politics can all too easily trump the scientific method, just when our species will need it most to tackle climate change and the attempted transition to renewables. (Note: Scientists are humans too, and are not immune to these neural processes – clearly when they write and publish they are accessing the rational neocortex gray matter and take their time to get facts and figures right – but in everyday communication – once emotion gets involved, the built-in genetic priorities fall back on belief systems.)

Our individual constructs of reality are based on beliefs - some beliefs are changed by new information, reflection, and analysis - others are virtually immutable. (Though my friend Thomas has a decent 'factual' understanding of Peak Oil - he may never incorporate it in the larger sense into his belief system.) From recent results of research into brain injury along with those from experiments on animals, we have begun to chart the neural processes active in distinguishing emotions, fantasies and facts. With fMRI and PET scans we can watch as a priest prays or a monk meditates or even when a person encounters new information that is discrepant with a prior held belief. On brain scans, meditative and transcendent states are in many ways similar to when a person experiences pleasures from sex, music or a good meal.(4) The very concept of the peaking and subsequent decline of oil - a vital resource to our lives that may become less and less available is a very difficult one to understand let alone accept. The 'knowledge' we obtain from scientific research on energy largely depends on how our brains interpret the evidence. These interpretations are subject to the same rules that govern our perceptions of reality - they are replete with generalizations, assumptions, misunderstandings and mistakes. By the time newly acquired knowledge reaches consciousness, each of us transforms it into something that fits with our own unique worldview. This process of reconstructing reality is the foundation from which we build all of our beliefs about our world.(4)

But sometimes, reality is not reality, even to ourselves.

Our time bomb is mysticism. It's delivery system is language. And it's hiding place? The unfathomable coils of our DNA. Reg Morrison The Spirit in the Gene(9)

And finally we come to what (for me) is the most fascinating piece of the human neural puzzle. In the discount rate post last month, I pointed out that we have developed a ‘triune brain’, with the 3 layers representing the 3 main periods of our organismal development (reptilian, mammalian, neocortex regions largely corresponding to primitive, emotional and rational thought). However, the neocortex itself is split into two hemispheres, the left and right, separated by a thin straplike connector called the corpus callosum. Neurobiologist Roger Sperry states that patients who have the corpus callosum removed (split-brain patients) behave as if they have ‘two separate minds, two separate spheres of consciousness…in regards to cognition, volition, learning and memory.’

Only our left brain hemisphere has a ‘voice’ for communicating with others – emanating from 'Brocas area’, the speech control center of our brains. Any findings and opinions analyzed by the perceptive and intuitive right hemisphere must first travel through the left hemisphere before leaving our mouths as communication. If you’ve been following along, you might see how this might relate to Peak oil or climate change.

In a famous split brain experiment by Michael Gazzaniga at Dartmouth, a patient with his corpus callosum removed, was shown two large pictures – in front of the left eye – some snow – in front of the right eye, a picture of a bird’s foot. Beneath each image were a series of smaller images, only one of which was related to the image above. When asked to point to the picture below that was linked to the birds foot, the right hand (left brain) correctly pointed to an image of a chicken. Similarly, the left hand (right brain) correctly chose an image of a shovel to relate to the larger snow image. When asked to explain the decisions, the verbally controlling left hemisphere offered the obvious explanation linking its own choice of a chicken to a bird’s foot. HOWEVER, when asked why the left hand (right brain) had chosen the shovel (for the snow scene), the left brain replied that the shovel had been selected for cleaning out the chicken shed! Though our brains are not privy to their own internal workings, the left brain should have admitted it did not know why the right brain chose the shovel because it had never seen the snow scene –but instead it fabricated an answer to fit its own part of the story.(10)

Though most of us fortunately still have our corpus calllosums intact, new research is suggestive that the socially conforming and editing power of our left brains is something we need to look at further.

Reg Morrison succinctly concludes the following:

“It seems our loquacious left brain cannot abide a vacuum. As it ghostwrites our right-brain narrative, it obsessively fills in any gaps and injects snippets of its own propaganda wherever it can. Here then is the source of the so called ‘false-memory syndrome’, and no doubt the origin of most of our mystic visions and spiritual fantasies...By endowing the human brain with its language facility, evolution has ensured that human genes will continue to bypass the cerebral cortex at will, disguising fact with significance and imagination into perceived fact” Reg Morrison – The Spirit In The Gene(9)

CONCLUSIONS
As humans, we have tendencies towards certain behaviours that can now be scientifically measured. While the neurosciences are still expanding and are now asking more questions than they have answered, it is clear that our minds are not entirely rational - providing us with 'facts' does not automatically guarantee we will use them to solve problems. Competing voices, both from within and without, can easily morph those facts into something different than the pure scientific form they originated in.

Our modern education system, from which arises the standard for our culture and the education of our children, is anchored by an archaic and incorrect premise: that knowledge can come from the human mind based on assertions that require no proof or verification. The origins of this error go back to ancient philosophers who were likely geniuses but did not have access to the real scientific data and physical methodologies available to us today. Many modern philosophers and social scientists still adhere to the fallacy that knowledge comes from thought. New evidence from the cognitive neurosciences is demonstrating that pure thought cannot spontaneously come from a brain designed for correlation, emotion and relative fitness. Special steps need to be taken to teach, understand and adhere to the scientific method, which in turn builds knowledge.

In the calm before the storm, we need to take stock in what our assets and liabilities really are. We have energy assets and liabilities and we have mental ones as well. As energy events conspire, and the average person becomes more stressed, we may distance ourselves even further from the rational aspects of our collective behaviour. Plans should be made ahead of time to address local, regional and national energy (and environmental) problems with hope but careful skepticism, for its unlikely we will get too many second chances. Robert Rapier and I share some viewpoints and disagree on others, but one thing I have always respected about him is his immediate skepticism of high claims. Whether he is an expert on a topic or a novice, he approaches a problem from a scientific, provable, verifiable foundation. If more of our countries civic leaders followed the scientific principles of 1)observe something in nature 2) make a hypothesis 3) test the hypothesis using physical methods and 4)repeat until statistically satisfied, we would find ourselves better served and better prepared for an era of energy declines. We must marry facts about geology and the environment with facts about our neural tendencies.

THE BOTTOM LINE
1) Facts are important. But knowing how our brain responds to facts is equally important.

2) Peak Oil is a geologic phenomenon. Global warming is atmospheric climate science. But they both also represent belief systems. Certain people will 'believe' they are real and others will not, irrespective of what future facts come to light.

3) Humans have been the most successful species on the planet. On a planet now full of humans, our neural tendencies to look for magic solutions will be a blindspot that needs watching. Seeking causative forces through scientific methods as opposed to offering correlation as proof is important.

4) The stigma of determinism and fear of sociobiology needs to be discarded. The answers to the large scale human problems cannot be solved by facts and science of the outside world alone - we need to incorporate facts about who we are into the equation.

5) Even the recognition of our tendencies to react positively to authority figures, optimism, recent information, etc, gives our brain a neutralizing agent against these natural, evolutionary derived phenomenon.

6)The motion picture "Homo Sapiens Sapiens" is nearing a climax. Lets collectively write a happy ending.

P.S. Though my conclusions may seem a little strong, I too am subject to the recency effect and The Spirit in the Gene and some articles on the scientific method were the last pieces I read for researching this piece...;)

References and Further Reading
(1) Shiv and Fedorikhin, "Heart and Mind in Conflict: Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Human Decision-making", Journal of Consumer Research, Vol 26 1999

(2) "Intertemporal Choice" (pdf) Chablis et Al, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2007 (to be published)

(3) Dawkins, R. The God Delusion 2006

(4) Newberg, Andrew, Why We Believe What We Believe Free Press, 2007

(5) Gilovich, T. How We Know What Isn't So - The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life 1991 Free Press

(6) Sapolsky, Robert Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

(7) Eichenbaum, H. “Belief and Knowledge as Forms of Memory in Schacter and Scarry (eds) Memory, Brain and Belief Harvard University Press 2000

(8) Jay Hansons easy to understand laymans description of the scientific method.

(9) Morrison, Reg The Spirit in the Gene (Thanks to Jay Hanson who introduced me to this concept and to Reg)
(10) Gazzaniga, Michael The Minds Past

Further Reading:
Cosmides and Tooby, The Adapted Mind
Taleb, Nissem, Fooled By Randomness (Thanks to Kurt Cobb who gifted me this book)
Pinker, Steven, How the Mind Works
Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate
Boyer, Pascal, Religion Explained
Cialdini, Bob, Influence