The information presented here cannot be used directly to calculate Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for human beings because, among other things, carrying capacity depends on both the affluence of the population being supported and the technologies supporting it. – Paul Ehrlich, 1986

One would expect scientists to pause when they realize their argument about resource collapse makes the king of environmental catastrophe, Paul Ehrlich, look moderate by comparison. Ehrlich is best known for a 40-year series of wildly inaccurate predictions of looming environmental disaster. Yet he looks positively reasonable compared to a paper recently published in the scientific journal Nature titled “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere.”

The paper predicts we are rapidly approaching a moment of “planetary-scale critical transition,” due to overuse of resources, climate change and other human-caused environmental damage. As a result, the authors conclude, this will “require reducing world population growth and per-capita resource use; rapidly increasing the proportion of the world’s energy budget that is supplied by sources other than fossil fuels,” and a range of other drastic policies. If these sound much like the ideas proposed in the 1970s by Ehrlich and others, like The Club of Rome, it is not a coincidence. TheNature paper is built on Ehrlich’s assumptions and cites his work more than once.

The Nature article, however, suffers from numerous simple statistical errors and assumptions rather than evidence. Its authors do nothing to deal with the fundamental mistakes that led Ehrlich and others like him down the wrong path so many times. Instead, the paper simply argues that with improved data, this time their predictions of doom are correct.

Ultimately, the piece is a good example of the great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s hypothesis, written 50 years ago, that scientists often attempt to fit the data to conform to their particular scientific paradigm, even when that paradigm is obviously flawed. When confronted with failure to explain real-world phenomena, the authors of the Nature piece have, as Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, devised “numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.” Like scientists blindly devoted to a failed paradigm, the Nature piece simply tries to force new data to fit a flawed concept.

“Assuming this does not change”

During the last half-century, the world has witnessed a dramatic increase in food production. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, yields per acre of rice have more than doubled, corn yields are more than one-and-a-half times larger than 50 years ago, and wheat yields have almost tripled. As a result, even as human population has increased, worldwide hunger has declined.

Despite these well-known statistics, the authors of the Nature study assume not only no future technological improvements, but that none have occurred over the last 200 years. The authors simply choose one data point and then project it both into the past and into the future. The authors explain the assumption that underlies their thesis in the caption to a graphic showing the Earth approaching environmental saturation. They write:

“The percentages of such transformed lands… when divided by 7,000,000,000 (the present global human population) yield a value of approximately 2.27 acres (0.92 ha) of transformed land for each person. That value was used to estimate the amount of transformed land that probably existed in the years 1800, 1900 and 1950, and which would exist in 2025 and 2045 assuming conservative population growth and that resource use does not become any more efficient.” (emphasis added)

In other words, the basis for their argument ignores the easily accessible data from the last half century. They take a snapshot in time and mistake it for a historical trend. In contrast to their claim of no change in the efficient use of resources, it would be difficult to find a time period in the last millennium when resource use did not become more efficient.

Ironically, this is the very error Ehrlich warns against in his 1986 paper – a paper the authors themselves cite several times. Despite Ehrlich’s admonition that projections of future carrying capacity are dependent upon technological change, the authors of the Nature article ignore history to come to their desired conclusion.

A Paradigm of Catastrophe

What would lead scientists to make such simplistic assumptions and flat-line projections? Indeed, what would lead Nature editors to print an article whose statistical underpinnings are so flawed? The simple belief in the paradigm of inevitable environmental catastrophe: humans are doing irreparable damage to the Earth and every bit of resource use moves us closer to that catastrophe. The catastrophe paradigm argues a simple model that eventually we will run out of space and resources, and determining the date of ultimate doom is a simple matter of doing the math.

Believing in this paradigm also justifies exaggeration in order to stave off the serious consequences of collapse. Thus, they describe the United Nations’ likely population estimate for 2050 as “the most conservative,” without explaining why. They claim “rapid climate change shows no signs of slowing” without providing a source citation for the claim, and despite an actual slowing of climate change over the last decade.

The need to avoid perceived global catastrophe also encourages the authors to blow past warning signs that their analysis is not built on solid foundations – as if the poor history of such projections were not already warning enough. Even as they admit the interactions “between overlapping complex systems, however, are providing difficult to characterize mathematically,” they base their conclusions on the simplest linear mathematical estimate that assumes nothing will change except population over the next 40 years. They then draw a straight line, literally, from today to the environmental tipping point.

Why is such an unscientific approach allowed to pass for science in a respected international journal? Because whatever the argument does not supply, the paradigm conveniently fills in. Even if the math isn’t reliable and there are obvious counterarguments, “everyone” understands and believes in the underlying truth – we are nearing the limits of the planet’s ability to support life. In this way the conclusion is not proven but assumed, making the supporting argument an impenetrable tautology.

Such a circumstance creates the conditions of scientific revolutions, where the old paradigm fails to explain real-world phenomena and is replaced by an alternative. Given the record of failure of the paradigm of resource catastrophe, dating back to the 1970s, one would hope we are moving toward such a change. Unfortunately, Nature and the authors of the piece are clinging to the old resource-depletion model, simply trying to re-work the numbers.

Let us hope policymakers recognize the failure of that paradigm before they make costly and dangerous policy mistakes that impoverish billions in the name of false scientific assumptions.

Todd Myers is the Environmental Director of the Washington Policy Center and author of the book Eco-Fads.

The Washington Policy Center labels itself as a non-partisan think tank. It’s a mischaractization to say the least but that is their bread and butter. Based in Seattle, with a director in Spokane, the WPC’s mission is to “promote free-market solutions through research and education.” It makes sense they have an environmental director in the form of Todd Myers who has a new book called“Eco-Fads: How The Rise Of Trendy Environmentalism Is Harming The Environment.” You know, since polar bears love to swim.

From the WPC’s newsletter:

Wherever we turn, politicians, businesses and activists are promoting the latest fashionable “green” policy or product. Green buildings, biofuels, electric cars, compact fluorescent lightbulbs and a variety of other technologies are touted as the next key step in protecting the environment and promoting a sustainable future. Increasingly, however, scientific and economic information regarding environmental problems takes a back seat to the social and personal value of being seen and perceived as “green.”

By recognizing the range of forces that have taken us in the wrong direction, Eco-Fads shows how we can begin to get back on track, creating a prosperous and sustainable legacy for our planet’s future. Order Eco-Fads today for $26.95 (tax and shipping included).

This is what the newsletter doesn’t tell you about Todd Myers.

Myers has spoken at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change. In case you didn’t know, the Heartland Institute has received significant funding from ExxonMobil, Phillip Morris and numerous other corporations and conservative foundations with vested interest in the so-called debate around climate change. That conference was co-sponsored by numerous prominent climate change denier groups, think tanks and lobby groups, almost all of which have received money from the oil industry.

Why not just call it the Washington Fallacy Center? For a litte more background, including ties back to the Koch Brothers, go HERE. In fact, Jack Kemp calls it “The Heritage Foundation of the Northwest.”

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Photo by USAF.

The wildfires raging through Colorado and the West are unbelievable. As of yesterday there were 242 fires burning, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Almost 350 homes have been destroyed in Colorado Springs, where 36,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. President Obama is visiting today to assess the devastation for himself.

Obviously the priority is containing the fires and protecting people. But inevitably the question is going to come up: Did climate change “cause” the fires? Regular readers know that this question drives me a little nuts. Pardon the long post, but I want to try to tackle this causation question once and for all.

What caused the Colorado Springs fire? Well, it was probably a careless toss of a cigarette butt, or someone burning leaves in their backyard, or a campfire that wasn’t properly doused. [UPDATE:Turns out it was lightning.] That spark, wherever it came from, is what triggered the cascading series of events we call “a fire.” It was what philosophers call the proximate cause, the most immediate, the closest.

All the other factors being discussed — the intense drought covering the state, the dead trees left behind by bark beetles, the high winds — are distal causes. Distal causes are less tightly connected to their effects. The dead trees didn’t make any particular fire inevitable; there can be no fire without a spark. What they did is make it more likelythat a fire would occur. Distal causes are like that: probabilistic. Nonetheless, our intuitions tell us that distal causes are in many ways more satisfactory explanations. They tell us something about themeaning of events, not just the mechanisms, which is why they’re also called “ultimate” causes. It’s meaning we usually want.

When we say, “the fires in Colorado were caused by unusually dry conditions, high winds, and diseased trees,” no one accuses us of error or imprecision because it was “really” the matches or campfires that caused them. We are not expected to say, “no individual fire can be definitively attributed to hot, windy conditions, but these are the kinds of fires we would expect to see in those conditions.” Why waste the words? We are understood to be talking about distal causes.

When we talk about, not fires themselves, but the economic and socialimpacts of fires, the range of distal causes grows even broader. For a given level of damages, it’s not enough to have dry conditions and dead trees, not even enough to have fire — you also have to take into account the density of development, the responsiveness of emergency services, and the preparedness of communities for prevention or evacuation.

So if we say, “the limited human toll of the Colorado fires is the result of the bravery and skill of Western firefighters,” no one accuses us of error or imprecision because good firefighting was only one of many contributors to the final level of damages. Everything from evacuation plans to the quality of the roads to the vagaries of the weather contributed in some way to that state of affairs. But we are understood to be identifying a distal cause, not giving a comprehensive account of causation.

What I’m trying to say is, we are perfectly comfortable discussing distal causes in ordinary language. We don’t require scientistic literalism in our everyday talk.

The reason I’m going through all this, you won’t be surprised, is to tie it back to climate change. We know, of course, that climate change was not the proximate cause of the fires. It was a distal cause; it made the fires more likely. That much we know with a high degree of confidence, as this excellent review of the latest science by Climate Communication makes clear.

One can distinguish between distal causes by their proximity to effects. Say the drought made the fires 50 percent more likely than average June conditions in Colorado. (I’m just pulling these numbers out of my ass to illustrate a point.) Climate change maybe only made the fires 1 percent more likely. As a cause, it is more distal than the drought. And there are probably causes even more distal than climate change. Maybe the exact tilt of the earth’s axis this June made the fires 0.0001 percent more likely. Maybe the location of a particular proton during the Big Bang made them 0.000000000000000001 percent more likely. You get the point.

With this in mind, it’s clear that the question as it’s frequently asked — “did climate change cause the fires?” — is not going to get us the answer we want. If it’s yes or no, the answer is “yes.” But that doesn’t tell us much. What people really want to know when they ask that question is, “how proximate a cause is climate change?”

When we ask the question like that, we start to see why climate is such a wicked problem. Human beings, by virtue of their evolution, physiology, and socialization, are designed to heed causes within a particular range between proximate and distal. If I find my kid next to an overturned glass and a puddle of milk and ask him why the milk is spilled, I don’t care about the neurons firing and the muscles contracting. That’s too proximate. I don’t care about humans evolving with poor peripheral vision. That’s too distal. I care about my kid reaching for it and knocking it over. That’s not the only level of causal explanation that is correct, but it’s the level of causal explanation that is most meaningful to me.

For a given effect — a fire, a flood, a dead forest — climate change is almost always too distal a cause to make a visceral impression on us. We’re just not built to pay heed to those 1 percent margins. It’s too abstract. The problem is, wildfires being 1 percent more likely averaged over the whole globe actually means a lot more fires, a lot more damage, loss, and human suffering. Part of managing the Anthropocene is finding ways of making distal causes visceral, giving them a bigger role in our thinking and institutions.

That’s what the “did climate change cause XYZ?” questions are always really about: how proximate a cause climate change is, how immediate its effects are in our lives, how close it is.

There is, of course, a constant temptation among climate hawks to exaggerate how proximate it is, since, all things being equal, proximity = salience. But I don’t think that simply saying “climate change caused the fires” is necessarily false or exaggerated, any more than saying “drought caused the fires” is. The fact that the former strikes many people as suspect while the latter is immediately understood mostly just means that we’re not used to thinking of climate change as a distal cause among others.

That’s why we reach for awkward language like, “fires like this are consonant with what we would expect from climate change.” Not because that’s the way we discuss all distal causes — it’s clearly not — but simply because we’re unaccustomed to counting climate change among those causes. It’s an unfamiliar habit. As it grows more familiar, I suspect we’ll quit having so many of these tedious semantic disputes.

And I’m afraid that, in coming years, it will become all-too familiar.

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Perspective On The Hot and Dry Continental USA For 2012 Based On The Research Of Judy Curry and Of McCabe Et Al 2004

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com

Hotter summers could be a part of Washington’s future

http://www.washingtonpost.com