dw2 » climate change

Chapter completed: Crises and opportunities

David Wood — Sun, 09 May 2010 00:16:54 +0000

I’ve taken the plunge. I’ve started writing another book, and I’ve finished the first complete draft of the first chapter.

The title I have in mind for the book is:

The Humanity+ Agenda: the vital priorities for the coming decade

The book is an extended version of the 10 minute opening presentation I gave a couple of weeks ago, at the Humanity+ UK 2010 event. My reasons for writing this book are spelt out here. The book will re-use and refine a lot of the material I’ve tried out from time to time in earlier posts on this blog, so you may find parts of it familiar.

I’ve had a few false starts, but I’m now happy with both the framework for the book (9 chapters in all) and a planned editing/review process.

Chapter 1 is called “Crises and opportunities”. There’s a copy of the current draft below.

I’ll keep the latest drafts of all the chapters in the “Pages” section of this blog – accessible from the box on the right hand side. From time to time – as in this posting – I’ll copy snapshots of the latest material into regular blogposts.

It’s my hope that the book will benefit from feedback and suggestions from readers. Comments can be made, either to regular blogposts, or to the “pages”. I’m also open to receiving emailed comments or contributions. Unless someone tells me otherwise, I’ll assume that anything posted in response is intended as a potential contribution to the book.

(I’ll acknowledge, in the acknowledgements section of the book, all contributions that I use.)

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1. Crises and opportunities

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The decade 2010-2019 will be a decade of crises for humanity:

As hundreds of millions of people worldwide significantly change their lifestyles, consuming ever more energy and generating ever more waste, the planet Earth faces increasingly great strains. “More of the same” is not an acceptable response.
Alongside the risk of environmental disaster, another risks looms: that of economic meltdown. The massive shocks to the global finance system at the end of the previous decade bear witness to powerful underlying tensions and problems with the operation of market economies.
The rapid rate of change causes widespread personal frustration and societal angst, driving a significant minority of people into the arms of beguiling ideologies such as fundamentalist Islam and the militant pursuit of terrorism. Relatively easy access to potential weapons of mass destruction – whether nuclear, biological, or chemical – transforms the threat of terrorism from an issue of national security into an issue of global survival.

In aggregation, these threats are truly fearsome.

To improve humanity’s chances of surviving, in good shape, to 2020 and beyond, we need new solutions.

I believe that these new solutions are emerging in part from improved technology, and in part from an important change in attitude towards technology. This book explains the basis for these beliefs. This chapter summarises the crises, and the remaining chapters summarise the proposed solutions.

In the phrase “Humanity+”, the plus sign after the word “Humanity” emphasises that solutions to our present situation cannot be achieved by people continuing to do the same as before. Instead, a credible vision of wise application of new technologies can bring humans – both individually and collectively – to operate in dramatically enhanced ways:

Humans will be able, in stages, to break further free from the crippling constraints and debilitations of our evolutionary background and our historical experiences;
We will, individually and collectively, become smarter, wiser, stronger, kinder, healthier, calmer, brighter, more peaceful, and more fulfilled;
Instead of fruitless divisions and conflicts, we’ll find much better ways to cooperate, and build social systems for mutual benefit.

This is the vision of humanity fulfilling its true potential.

But there are many obstacles on the path to this fulfilment. These obstacles could easily drive Humanity to “Humanity-” (humanity minus), or even worse (human annihilation), rather than Humanity+. There’s nothing inevitable about the outcome. As a reminder of the scale of the obstacles, let’s briefly review five interrelated pending crises.

1.1 The environmental crisis

Potential shortages of clean drinking water. Rapid reductions in the available stocks of buried energy sources, such as coal, gas, and oil. Crippling impacts on our environment from the waste products of our lifestyles. These – and more – represent the oncoming environmental crisis.

With good reason, the aspect of the environmental crisis that is most widely discussed is the potential threat of runaway climate change. Our accelerating usage of fossil fuels means that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has reached levels unprecedented in human history. This magnifies the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, tending to push the average global temperature higher. This relationship is complex. Forget simple ideas about increases in factor A invariably being the cause of increases in factor B. Think instead about a dance of different factors that each influence the other, in different ways at different times. (That’s a theme that you’ll notice throughout this book.)

In the case of climate change, the players in the dance include:

Variation in the amount of sunlight striking earth landmasses, due to changes over geological timescales in the axis of the earth, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and the distribution of landmass over different latitudes;
Variation in the slow-paced transfer of heat between different parts of the ocean;
Variation in the speed of build-up or collapse of huge polar ice sheets;
Variation in numerous items in the atmosphere, including aerosols (which tend to lower average temperature) and greenhouse gases (which tend to raise it again);
Variation in the amounts of greenhouse gases, such as methane, being suddenly released into the atmosphere from buried frozen stores (for example, from tundra);
Variation in the sensitivity of the planet to the various “climate forcing agents” – sometimes a small change in one will lead to just small changes in the climate, but at other times the consequences are more severe.

What makes this dance potentially deadly is the twin risk of latent momentum and strong positive feedback:

More CO2 in the atmosphere raises the average temperature, which means there’s more H2O (water vapour) in the atmosphere too, raising the average temperature yet further;
Icesheets over the Antarctic and Greenland take a long time to start to disintegrate, but once the process gets under way, it can become essentially irreversible;
Less ice on the planet means less incoming sunlight is reflected to space; instead, larger areas of water absorb more of the sunlight, increasing ocean temperature further;
Rises in sea temperatures can trigger the sudden release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and permafrost – another example of rapid positive feedback.

Indeed, there is significant evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth a number of times in the past, most notably in connection with the Permian extinction event, when 96% of all marine species became extinct about 250 million years ago.

Of course, predicting the future of the environment is hard. There are three sorts of fogs of climate change uncertainty:

Many of the technical interactions are still unknown, or are far from being fully understood. We are continuing to learn more;
Even where we believe we do understand the technical interactions, many of the detailed interactions are unpredictable. Just as it’s hard to predict the weather itself, one month (say) into the future, it’s hard to predict the exact effect of ongoing climate forcing agents. The effect that “a butterfly flapping its wings unpredictably causes a hurricane on the other side of the planet” applies for the chaos of climate as much as for the chaos of weather;
There are huge numbers of vested interests, who (consciously or sub-consciously) twist and distort aspects of the argument over climate change.

The vested interests include:

Both anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear campaigners;
Both anti-oil and pro-oil campaigners, and anti-coal and pro-coal campaigners;
Both “small is beautiful” and “big is beautiful” campaigners;
Both “back to nature” and “pro-technology” campaigners;
Scientists and authors who have long supported particular theories, and who are loath to change their viewpoints;
Hardened political campaigners who look to extract maximum concessions, for the region or country they represent, before agreeing a point of negotiation.

Not only is it psychologically hard for individuals to objectively review data or theories that conflicts with their favoured opinions. It is economically hard for companies (such as energy companies) to accept viewpoints that, if true, would cause major hurdles for their current lines of business, and significant loss of jobs. On the other hand, just because researcher R has strong psychological reason P and/or strong economic incentive E in favour of advocating viewpoint V, it does not mean that viewpoint V is wrong. The viewpoint could be correct, even though some of the support advanced in its favour is non-logical. As I said, there’s lots of fog to navigate!

Despite all this uncertainty, I offer the following conclusions:

There is a wide range of possible outcomes, for the climate in the next few decades;
The probability of runaway global warming – with disastrous effects on sea levels, drought, agriculture, storms, species and ecosystem displacement, travel, business, and so on – is at least 20%, and likely higher;
Global warming won’t just make the temperature higher; it will make the weather more extreme – due to increased global temperature gradients, increased atmospheric water vapour, and higher sea temperatures that stir up more vicious storms.

A risk of at least 20% of a global environmental disaster deserves urgent attention and further analysis. Who among us would enter an airplane with family and friends, if we believed there was a 20% probability of that airplane plummeting headlong out of the sky to the ground?

1.2 The economic crisis

The controversies and uncertainties over the potential threat of runaway climate change find parallels in discussions over a possible catastrophic implosion of the world economic system. These discussions likewise abound with technical disagrements and vested interests.

Are governments, legislators, banks, and markets generally wise enough and capable to oversee the pressures of financial trading, and keep the systems afloat? Was the recent series of domino-like collapses of famous banks around the world a “once in a lifetime” abnormality, that is most unlikely to repeat? Or should we expect a recurrence of fundamental financial instability? What is the risk of a larger financial crisis striking? Indeed, what is the risk of adverse follow-on effects from the “tail end” of the 2008-2009 crisis, generating a so-called “double dip” in which the second dip is more drastic than the first? On all these questions, opinions vary widely.

Despite the wide variation in opinions, some elements seem common. All commentators are fearful of some potential causes of major disruption to global economics. Depending on the commentator, these perceived potential causes include:

Clumsy regulation of financial markets;
Bankers who are able to take catastrophic risks in the pursuit of ever greater financial rewards;
The emergence of enormous monopoly powers that eliminate the benefits of marketplace competition;
Institutions that become “too big to fail” and therefore derail the appropriate workings of the market system;
Sky-high accumulation of debts, with individuals and countries living far beyond their means, for too long;
Austerity programmes that attempt to reduce debts quickly, but which could provoke spiraling industrial disputes and crippling strikes;
Bubbles that grow because “it’s temporarily rational for everyone to be irrational in their expectations” and then burst with tremendous damage.

We must avoid a feeling of overconfidence arising from the fact that previous financial crises were, in the end, survived, without the world of banking coming to an end. First, these previous financial crises caused numerous local calamities – and the causes of major wars can be traced (in part) to these crises. Second, there are reasons why future financial problems could have more drastic effects than previous ones:

There are numerous hidden interconnections between different parts of the global economy, which accelerate negative feedback when individual parts fail;
The complexity of new financial products far outstrips the ability of senior managers and regulators to understand and appreciate the risks involved;
In an age of instant electronic connections, the speed of cascading events can catch us all flat-footed.

For these reasons, I tentatively suggest we assign a ballpark risk factor of about 20% to the probability of a major global financial meltdown during the 2010s. (Yes, this is the same numeric figure as I picked for the environmental crisis too.)

Note some parallels between the two crises I’ve already discussed:

In each case, the devil is in the mix of weakly-understood powerful feedback systems;
Again in each case, our ability to discern what’s really happening is clouded by powerful non-rational factors and vested interests;
Again in each case, the probabilities of major disaster cannot be calculated in any precise way, but the risk appears large enough to warrant very serious investigation of solutions;
Again in each case, there is deep disagreement about the best solutions to deploy.

Worse, these two looming crises are themselves interconnected. Shortage of resources such as clean energy could trigger large price hikes which throw national economies into tailspins. Countries or regions which formerly cooperated could end up at devastating loggerheads, if an “abundance spirit” is replaced by a “scarcity spirit”.

1.3 The extreme terrorist crisis

What drives people to use bombs to inflict serious damage? Depending on the cirumstance, it’s a combination of:

Positive belief, in support of some country, region, ideology, or religion;
Negative belief, in which a group of people (“the enemy”) are seen as despicable, inferior, or somehow deserving of destruction or punishment;
Peer pressure, where people feel constrained by those around them to follow through on a commitment (to become, for example, a suicide bomber);
Personal rage, such as a desire for revenge and humiliation;
Aspiration for personal glory and reward, in either the present life, or a presumed afterlife;
Failure of countervailing “pro-cooperation” and “pro-peace” instincts or systems.

Nothing here is new for the 2010s. What is new is the increased ease of access, by would-be inflictors of damage, to so-called weapons of mass destruction. There is a fair probability that the terrorists who piloted passenger jet airlines into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon would have willingly caused even larger amounts of turmoil and damage, if they could have put their hands on suitable weapons.

Technology itself is neutral. A hammer which can be used to drive a nail into a piece of wood can equally be used to knock a fellow human unconscious. Electricity can light up houses or fry someone in an electric chair. Explosives can clear obstacles during construction projects or can obliterate critical infrastructure assets of so-called enemies. Biochemical manipulation can yield wonderfully nutritious new food compounds or deadly new diseases. Nuclear engineering can provide sufficient energy to free humanity from dependency on carbon-laden fossil fuels, or suitcase-sized portable weapons capable of tearing the heart out of major cities.

As technology becomes more widely accessible – via improved education worldwide, via cheaper raw materials, and via easy access to online information – the potential grows, both for good uses and for bad uses. A saying attributed to Eliezer Yudkowsky gives us pause for thought:

The minimum IQ required to destroy the world drops by one point every 18 months.

(This saying is sometimes called “Moore’s Law of mad scientists“.) The statement was probably not intended to be interpreted mathematically exactly, but we can agree that, over the course of a decade, the number of people capable of putting together a dreadful weapon of mass destruction will grow significantly. The required brainpower will move from the rarified tails of the bell curve of intelligence distribution, in the direction of the more fully populated central region.

We can imagine similar “laws” of increasing likelihood of destructive capability:

The minimum IQ required to devise and deploy a weapon that wipes out the heart of a major city drops by one point every 18 months;

The minimum IQ required to poison the water table for a region drops by one point every 18 months;

The minimum IQ required to unleash a devastating plague drops by one point every 18 months…

Of course, the threat of nuclear annihilation has been with the world for half a century. During my student days at Cambridge University, I participated in countless discussions about how best to avoid the risk of unintentional nuclear war. Despite the forebodings of some of my contemporaries at the time, we reached the end of the 20th century unscathed. Governments of nuclear-capable countries, regardless of their political hues and ideological positions, found good reason to avoid steps that could trigger any nuclear escalation. What’s different with at least some fundamentalist terrorists is that they operate in a mental universe that is considerably more extreme:

They live for a life beyond the grave, rather than before it;
They believe that divine providence will take care of the outcome – any “innocents” caught up in the destruction will receive their own rewards in the afterlife, courtesy of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity;
They are nourished and inspired by apocalyptic writing that glorifies a vision of almighty destruction;
They operate with moral certainty: they seem to harbour no doubts or questions about the rightness of their course of action.

Mix this extreme mindset with sufficient raw brainpower and with weapons-grade materials that can be begged, bought, or stolen, and the stage is set for a terrorist outrage that will put 9/11 far into the shade. In turn, the world’s reaction to that incident is likely to put the reaction to 9/11 far into its own shade.

It’s true, would-be terrorists are often incompetent. Their explosives sometimes fail to detonate. But that must give us no ground for complacency. The same “incompetence” can sometimes result in unforeseen consequences that are even more destructive than those intended.

1.4 The sense of profound personal alienation

Environmental crisis. Economic crisis. Extreme terrorist crisis. Added together, we might be facing a risk of around 50% that, sometime during the 2010s, we’ll collectively look back with enormous regret and say to ourselves:

That’s the worst thing that’s happened in our lifetime. Why oh why didn’t we act to stop it happening? But it’s too late to make amends now. If only we could re-run history, and take wiser choices…

But there’s more. Here’s a probability that I’ll estimate at 100%, rather than 50%. It’s the probability that huge numbers of individuals will look at their lives with bitter regret, and say to themselves:

This outcome was very far from the best it could have been. This human life has missed, by miles, the richness and quality of experience that was potentially available. Why oh why did it turn out like this? If only I could re-run my life, and take wiser choices, or benefit from improved circumstances…

The first three crises are global crises. This fourth one is a personal crisis. The first three are highly visible. The fourth might just be an internal heartache. It’s the realisation that:

Life provides, at least for some people, on at least some occasions, intense feelings of vitality, creativity, flow, rapport, ecstacy, and accomplishment;
These “peak experiences” are generally rare, or just glimpsed;
The majority of human experience is at a much lower level of quality than is conceivable.

The pervasive video broadcast communications of the modern age make it all the more obvious, to increasing numbers of people, that the quality of their lives fall short of what could be imagined and desired. These same communications also strongly hint that technology is advancing to the point where it could soon free people from the limitations of their current existence, and enable levels of experience previously only imagined for deities. Just around the corner lies the potential of lives that are much extended, expanded, and enhanced. How frustrating to miss out on this potential! It brings to mind the lamentations of a venerable French noblewoman from 1783, as noted in Lewis Lapham’s 2003 Commencement speech at St. John’s College Annapolis:

[A] French noblewoman, a duchess in her eighties, …, on seeing the first ascent of Montgolfier’s balloon from the palace of the Tuilleries in 1783, fell back upon the cushions of her carriage and wept. “Oh yes,” she said, “Now it’s certain. One day they’ll learn how to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead.”

Acts of gross destruction are often motivated by deep feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration: the world is perceived as containing significant wrongs, that need righting. So there’s a connection between the crisis of profound personal alienation and the crisis of extreme terrorism. Thankfully, people who experience dissatisfaction or frustration don’t all react in the same way. But even if the reaction is only (as I suggested earlier) an internal heartache, the shortcoming between potential and reality is nonetheless profound. Life could, and should, be so much better.

We can re-state the four crises as four huge opportunities:

The opportunity to nurture an amazingly pleasant, refreshing, and intriguing environment;
The opportunity to guide global economic development to sustainably create sufficient resources for everyone’s needs;
The opportunity to utilise personal passions for constructive projects;
The opportunity to enable individuals to persistently experience qualities of human life far, far higher than at present.

I see Humanity+ as addressing all four of these opportunities. And it does so with an eye on one more crisis, which is the most uncertain one of the lot.

1.5 The existential crisis of accelerating change and deepening complexity

Time and again, changes have consequences that are unforeseen and unintended. The more complex the system, the greater the likelihood of changes leading to unintended consequences.

However, human society is becoming more complex all the time:

Multiple different cultures and sub-cultures overlap, co-exist, and influence each other;
Worldwide travel is nowadays commonplace;
Increasing numbers of channels exist for communication and influence ;
Society is underpinned by a rich infrastructure of multi-layered technology.

Moreover, the rate of change is increasing:

New products sweep around the world in ever shorter amounts of time;
Larger numbers of people are being educated to levels never seen before, and are entering the worlds of research, development, manufacturing, and business;
Online collaboration mechanisms, including social networks, wikis, and open source software, mean it is easier for innovation in one part of the world to quickly influence and benefit subsequent innovation elsewhere;
The transformation of more industries from “matter-dominated” to “information-dominated” means that the rapid improvement cycle of semiconductors transforms the speed of progress.

These changes bring many benefits. They also bring drawbacks, and – due to the law of unintended consequences – they bring lots of unknowns and surprises. The risk is that we’ll waken up one morning and realise that we deeply regret one of the unforeseen side-effects. For example, there are risks:

That some newly created microscopic-scale material will turn out to have deleterious effects on human life, akin (but faster acting) to the problems arising to exposure from asbestos;
That some newly engineered biochemical organism will escape into the wild and turn out to have an effect like that of a plague;
That well-intentioned attempts at climate “geo-engineering”, to counter the risk of global warming, will trigger unexpected fast-moving geological phenomenon;
That state-of-the-art high-energy physics experiments will somehow create unanticipated exotic new particles that destroy all nearby space and time;
That software defects will spread throughout part of the computing infrastructure of modern life, rendering it useless.

Here’s another example, from history. On 1st March 1954, the US military performed their first test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb, at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosive yield was expected to be from 4 to 6 Megatons. But when the device was exploded, the yield was 15 Megatons, two and a half times the expected maximum. As the Wikipedia article on this test explosion explains:

The cause of the high yield was a laboratory error made by designers of the device at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They considered only the lithium-6 isotope in the lithium deuteride secondary to be reactive; the lithium-7 isotope, accounting for 60% of the lithium content, was assumed to be inert…

Contrary to expectations, when the lithium-7 isotope is bombarded with high-energy neutrons, it absorbs a neutron then decomposes to form an alpha particle, another neutron, and a tritium nucleus. This means that much more tritium was produced than expected, and the extra tritium in fusion with deuterium (as well as the extra neutron from lithium-7 decomposition) produced many more neutrons than expected, causing far more fissioning of the uranium tamper, thus increasing yield.

This resultant extra fuel (both lithium-6 and lithium-7) contributed greatly to the fusion reactions and neutron production and in this manner greatly increased the device’s explosive output.

Sadly, this calculation error resulted in much more radioactive fallout than anticipated. Many of the crew in a nearby Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, became ill in the wake of direct contact with the fallout. One of the crew subsequently died from the illness – the first human casualty from thermonuclear weapons.

Suppose the error in calculation had been significantly worse – perhaps by an order of thousands rather than by a factor of 2.5. This might seem unlikely, but when we deal with powerful unknowns, we cannot rule out powerful unforeseen consequences. Imagine if extreme human activity somehow interfered with the incompletely understood mechanisms governing supervolcanoes – such as the one that exploded around 73,000 years ago at Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia) and which is thought to have reduced the worldwide human population at the time to perhaps as few as one thousand breeding pairs.

It’s not just gargantuan explosions that we need fear. As indicated above, the list of so-called “existential risks” includes highly contagious diseases, poisonous nano-particles, and catastrophic failures of the electronics infrastructure that underpins modern human society. Add to these “known unknowns” the risk of “unknown unknowns” – the factors which we currently don’t even know that we should be considering.

The more quickly things change, the harder it is to foresee and monitor all the consequences. There’s a great deal that deserves our attention. How should we respond?

>> Next chapter >>

Embracing engineering for the whole earth

David Wood — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:14:37 +0000

One thing I’m trying to do with my blog is to provide useful pointers, into the vast amount of material that’s available both online and offline, to the small small fraction of that material which does the best job of summarising, extending, and challenging current thinking.

“Whole Earth Discipline: an ecopragmatist manifesto“, the recent book by veteran ecologist and environmentalist Stewart Brand, comprehensively fits that criterion. It is so full of insight that virtually every page contains not just one but several blogworthy quotes, ideas, facts, putdowns, and/or refutations. It’s that good. I could write a book-length blogpost signing its praises.

Brand turned 70 while writing this book. In the book, he indicates that he has changed his mind as he grew older. The book serves as a landmark for various changes of mind for the environmental movement as a whole. The argument is sustained, easy-to-read, detailed, and compelling.

The core argument is that the future well-being of the whole planet – human societies embedded in biological ecosystems – requires a thoroughgoing embrace of an engineering mindset. Specifically, the environmental movement needs to recognise:

That the process of urbanisation – the growth of cities, even in apparently haphazard ways – provides good solutions to many worries about over-population;
That nuclear energy will play a large role in providing clean, safe, low-carbon energy;
That GE (genetic engineering) will play a large role in providing safe, healthy, nutritious food and medicine;
That the emerging field of synthetic biology can usefully and safely build upon what’s already being accomplished by GE;
That methods of geoengineering will almost certainly play a part in heading off the world’s pending climate change catastrophe.

The book has an objective and compassionate tone throughout. At times it squarely accuses various environmentalists of severe mistakes – particularly in aspects of their opposition to GE and nuclear energy – mistakes that have had tragic consequences for developing societies around the world. It’s hard to deny the charges. I sincerely hope that the book will receive a wide readership, and will cause people to change their minds.

The book doesn’t just provide advocacy for some specific technologies. More than that, it makes the case for changes in mindset:

It highlights major limitations to the old green mantra that “small is beautiful”;
It unpicks various romantic notions about the lifestyles and philosophies of native peoples (such as the American Indians);
It shows the deep weakness of the “precautionary principle”, and proposes an own alternative approach;
It emphasises how objections to people “playing God” are profoundly misguided.

Indeed, the book starts with the quote:

We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.

It concludes with the following summary:

Ecological balance is too important for sentiment. It requires science.

The health of the natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering.

What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.

And what is an engineer? Brand states:

Romantics love problems; scientists discover and analyze problems; engineers solve problems.

As I read this book, I couldn’t help comparing it to “The constant economy” by Zac Goldsmith, which I read a few weeks ago. The two books share many concerns about the unsustainable lifestyles presently being practiced around the world. There are a few solutions in common, too. But the wide distrust of technology shown by Goldsmith is amply parried by the material that Brand marshalls. And the full set of solutions proposed by Brand are much more credible than those proposed by Goldsmith. Goldsmith has been a major advisor to the UK Conservative Party on environmental matters. If any UK party could convince me that they thoroughly understand, and intend to implement, the proposal in Brand’s book, I would be deeply impressed.

Note: an annotated reference companion to the book is available online, at www.sbnotes.com. It bristles with useful links. There’s also a 16 minute TED video, “Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental ‘heresies’“, which is well worth viewing.

Thanks to Marc Gunther, whose blogpost “Why Stewart Brand’s new book is a must-read” alerted me to this book.

By a fortunate coincidence, Brand will be speaking at the RSA in London on Tuesday. I’m anticipating a good debate from the audience. An audio feed from the meeting will be broadcast live.

Vital for futurists: hacking the earth

David Wood — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:16:04 +0000

Here’s a tip, for anyone seriously interested in the big issues that will dominate discussion in the next 5-10 years. You should become familiar (if you’re not already) with the work of Jamais Cascio. Jamais is someone who consistently has deep, interesting, and challenging things to say about the large changes that are likely to sweep over the planet in the decades ahead.

In 2003, Jamais co-founded WorldChanging.com, a website dedicated to finding and calling attention to models, tools and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In March, 2006, he started Open the Future.

One topic that Jamais has often addressed is geoengineering – sometimes also called “climate engineering”, “planetary engineering”, or “terraforming”. Geoengineering covers a range of large-scale projects that could, conceivably, be deployed to head-off the effects of runaway global warming. Examples include launching large mirrors into space to reflect sunlight away from the earth, injecting sulphate particles into the stratosphere, brightening clouds or deserts to increase their reflectivity, and extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It’s a thoroughly controversial topic. But Jamais treads skilfully and thoughtfully through the controversies.

A collection of essays by Jamais on the topic of geoengineering is available in book format, under the title “Hacking the earth: understanding the consequences of geoengineering“. It’s a slim volume, with just over 100 pages, but it packs lots of big thoughts. While reading, I found myself nodding in agreement throughout the book.

At present, this book is only available from Lulu.com. As Jamais says, the book is, for him:

an experiment in self-publishing…

… in recent weeks various friends have tried out – and given high marks to – web-based self-publishing outfits like Lulu.com… I thought I’d give this method a shot.

The material in the book is derived from articles published online at Open the Future and elsewhere. Some of the big themes are as follows (the following bullet points are all excerpts from Jamais’ writing):

Feedback effects ranging from methane released from melting permafrost to carbon emissions from decaying remnants of forests devoured by pine beetles risk boosting greenhouse gases faster than natural compensation mechanisms can handle. The accumulation of non-linear drivers can lead to “tipping point” events causing functionally irreversible changes to geophysical systems (such as massive sea-level increases). Some of these can have feedback effects of their own, such as the elimination of ice caps reducing global albedo, thereby accelerating heating.
None of the bright green solutions — ultra-efficient buildings and vehicles, top-to-bottom urban redesigns, local foods, renewable energy systems, and the like — will do anything to reduce the anthropogenic greenhouse gases that have already been emitted. The best result we get is stabilizing at an already high greenhouse gas level. And because of ocean thermal inertia and other big, slow climate effects, the Earth will continue to warm for a couple of decades even after we stop all greenhouse gas emissions. Transforming our civilization into a bright green wonderland won’t be easy, and under even the most optimistic estimates will take at least a decade; by the time we finally stop putting out additional greenhouse gases, we could well have gone past a point where globally disastrous results are inevitable. In fact, given the complexity of climate feedback systems, we may already have passed such a tipping point, even if we stopped all emissions today.
Geoengineering, should it be tried, would not be a replacement for making the economic, social, and technological changes needed to eliminate anthropogenic greenhouse gases. It would only be a way of giving us more time to make those changes. It’s not an either-or situation; geo is a last-ditch prop for making sure that we can do what needs to be done.
We don’t know enough about how the various geoengineering proposals would play out to make a persuasive case for trying any of them. There needs to be far more study before making any even moderate-scale experimental effort. This is not something to try today. The most important task for current geoengineering research is to identify the approaches that might look attractive at first, but have devastating results — we need to know what we should avoid even if desperate.
Like it or not, we’ve entered the era of intentional geoengineering. The people who believe that (re)terraforming is a bad idea need to be part of the discussion about specific proposals, not simply sources of blanket condemnations. We need their insights and intelligence. The best way to make that happen, the best way to make sure that any terraforming effort leads to a global benefit, not harm, is to open the process of studying and developing geotechnological tools.
Geoengineering presents more than just an environmental question. It also presents a geopolitical dilemma. With processes of this magnitude and degree of uncertainty, countries would inevitably argue over control, costs, and liability for mistakes. More troubling, however, is the possibility that states may decide to use geoengineering efforts and technologies as weapons. Two factors make this a danger we dismiss at our peril: the unequal impact of climate changes, and the ability of small states and even nonstate actors to attempt geoengineering.
It is possible that, should the international community refrain from geoengineering strategies, one or more smaller, non-hegemonic, actors could undertake geoengineering projects of their own. This could be out of a legitimate fear that prevention and mitigation strategies would be insufficient, out of a disagreement with the consensus over geoengineering safety or results, or—most troublingly—out of a desire to use geoengineering tools to achieve a relative increase in competitive power over adversaries.

I particularly liked Jamais’ suggestion of a “Reversibility Principle” as an alternative to the “Precautionary Principle” and “Proactionary Principle” that have previously been suggested as guidelines for deciding which actions to take, regarding the application of technology.

Geoengineering is, by its nature, a huge topic. The “Technology Review” magazine contains a substantial analysis entitled “The Geoengineering Gambit” in its Jan-Feb 2010 edition. And the authors of Freakonomics, Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt, included a chapter on geoengineering in their follow-up book, “Superfreakonomics“. As it happens, there seems to be wide consensus that the freakonomics team were considerably too hasty in their analysis – see for example the Guardian article “Why Superfreakonomics’ authors are wrong on geo-engineering“. But the fact that there were mistakes in that analysis doesn’t mean the topic itself should fade from view.

Far from it: I’m sure we’re going to be hearing more and more about geoengineering. It deserves our attention!

Predictions for the decade ahead

David Wood — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:28:54 +0000

Before highlighting some likely key trends for the decade ahead – the 2010′s – let’s pause a moment to review some of the most important developments of the last ten years.

Technologically, the 00′s were characterised by huge steps forwards with social computing (“web 2.0″) and with mobile computing (smartphones and more);
Geopolitically, the biggest news has been the ascent of China to becoming the world’s #2 superpower;
Socioeconomically, the world is reaching a deeper realisation that current patterns of consumption cannot be sustained (without major changes), and that the foundations of free-market economics are more fragile than was previously widely thought to be the case;
Culturally and ideologically, the threat of militant Jihad, potentially linked to dreadful weaponry, has given the world plenty to think about.

Looking ahead, the 10′s will very probably see the following major developments:

Nanotechnology will progress in leaps and bounds, enabling increasingly systematic control, assembling, and reprogamming of matter at the molecular level;
In parallel, AI (artificial intelligence) will rapidly become smarter and more pervasive, and will be manifest in increasingly intelligent robots, electronic guides, search assistants, navigators, drivers, negotiators, translators, and so on.

We can say, therefore, that the 2010′s will be the decade of nanotechnology and AI.

We’ll see the following applications of nanotechnology and AI:

Energy harvesting, storage, and distribution (including via smart grids) will be revolutionised;
Reliance on existing means of oil production will diminish, being replaced by greener energy sources, such as next-generation solar power;
Synthetic biology will become increasingly commonplace – newly designed living cells and organisms that have been crafted to address human, social, and environmental need;
Medicine will provide more and more new forms of treatment, that are less invasive and more comprehensive than before, using compounds closely tailored to the specific biological needs of individual patients;
Software-as-a-service, provided via next-generation cloud computing, will become more and more powerful;
Experience of virtual worlds – for the purposes of commerce, education, entertainment, and self-realisation – will become extraordinarily rich and stimulating;
Individuals who can make wise use of these technological developments will end up significantly cognitively enhanced.

In the world of politics, we’ll see more leaders who combine toughness with openness and a collaborative spirit. The awkward international institutions from the 00′s will either reform themselves, or will be superseded and surpassed by newer, more informal, more robust and effective institutions, that draw a lot of inspiration from emerging best practice in open source and social networking.

But perhaps the most important change is one I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s a growing change of attitude, towards the question of the role in technology in enabling fuller human potential.

Instead of people decrying “technical fixes” and “loss of nature”, we’ll increasingly hear widespread praise for what can be accomplished by thoughtful development and deployment of technology. As technology is seen to be able to provide unprecedented levels of health, vitality, creativity, longevity, autonomy, and all-round experience, society will demand a reprioritisation of resource allocation. Previous sacrosanct cultural norms will fall under intense scrutiny, and many age-old beliefs and practices will fade away. Young and old alike will move to embrace these more positive and constructive attitudes towards technology, human progress, and a radical reconsideration of how human potential can be fulfilled.

By the way, there’s a name for this mental attitude. It’s “transhumanism”, often abbreviated H+.

My conclusion, therefore, is that the 2010′s will be the decade of nanotechnology, AI, and H+.

As for the question of which countries (or regions) will play the role of superpowers in 2020: it’s too early to say.

Footnote: Of course, there are major possible risks from the deployment of nanotechnology and AI, as well as major possible benefits. Discussion of how to realise the benefits without falling foul of the risks will be a major feature of public discourse in the decade ahead.

Can Open Innovation help to save the world?

David Wood — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:19:06 +0000

One of the highlights at the FT Innovate 2009 conference in London this week was the presentation by UC Berkeley adjunct professor Henry Chesbrough on the topic “Open Innovation: Can it save the world?”

Dr Chesbrough is Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and inaugurated the whole field of research into Open Innovation with his 2003 book, “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology“.

Today’s talk was divided into two parts:

A recap of previously published work – providing a whistlestop introduction to the concepts of Open Innovation;
A proposal that the ideas of Open Innovation could usefully be applied in the context of log-jammed discussions over technologies to address climate change and renewable energy sources.

The background to Open Innovation was research that Henry Chesbrough did into research projects within Xerox PARC. All companies need to make regular “tollgate review” decisions about which innovative research projects to cancel, and which to progress. These decisions can go wrong in two different ways:

A “type one error” is when a project is continued for too long. It looks promising, but it eventually fails to deliver. In the process, it consumes budget, personnel, and management attention, which could (instead) have been applied on other projects;
A “type two error” is when a project is cancelled, that actually had the capability to generate lots of value.

Any process that decreases the chance of type one errors is likely, at the same time, to increase the chance of type two errors – and vice versa. That’s a fact of life. No company can have perfect foresight – given that markets change, technologies change, and projects change, all in unpredictable ways.

Chesbrough noted that cancellation is often surprisingly ineffective for innovation projects. A company may withdraw its formal support, but the project can continue nevertheless. For example, people inside the company who believe strongly in the project may work on that project outside of formal work hours, and may even cease employment at the company, in order to continue working on the idea in a new startup.

What happened to the projects that were shut down by the company (Xerox, in this case), but which had at least a temporary external lease of life? The majority of these projects failed – providing an element of vindication for the company’s decision-making process. But a number turned into spectacular successes, generating more stock market value in new companies outside Xerox than the value of Xerox itself. (These startups include 3Com, VLSI, and Adobe.) This again raises the question: in retrospect, can a parent company (Xerox, in this case) improve its decision-making and other innovation-review processes so as to reduce the impact of these type two errors?

The answer given by the theory of Open Innovation is that companies cannot and should not strive to avoid all such type two errors. It is inevitable that some good ideas will be unable to flourish inside the company. However, a change in mindset is required. This new mindset makes it more likely that the company can still benefit from the fruit of the idea, even though development of the idea passes outside the company. The new mindset (“Open Innovation”) can be contrasted as follows with a “Closed Innovation” mindset:

The “closed innovation” mindset:

The smart people in our field work for us

To profit from R&D we must discover it, develop it, and ship it ourselves

If we discover it ourselves, we will get to the market first

The company that gets an innovation to market first will win

If we create the most and the best ideas in the industry, we will win

We should control our IP, so that our competitors don’t profit from our ideas.

The “open innovation” mindset:

Not all the smart people work for us. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company

External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value

We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it

Building a better business model is better than getting to market first

If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win

We should profit from others’ use of our IP, and we should buy others’ IP whenever it advances our own business model.

A couple of diagrams help to highlight the contrast:

To be successful, the new mindset requires different skills from before – particularly skills in ecosystem management and IP management.

The really interesting question addressed by Chesbrough in today’s presentation is as follows: can these new skills help address issues of failed innovation management in the context of ideas for addressing runaway climate change, and the adoption of sustainable energy sources?

Chesbrough mentioned the GreenXchange supported by Science Commons. To quote from their website:

Patent Strategies for Promoting Open Innovation

Nike and Creative Commons are calling upon other companies and stakeholders to bring the network efficiencies of open innovation to solving the problems of sustainability. GreenXchange will seek to bring together stakeholders in working groups to discuss strategies for advancing the commons by exploring ideas such as using patent pools, research non-assertions, and using technologies that support networked and community-based knowledge transfer and sharing.

Networks work best with a standardized and simple set of protocols. The Internet is one example of a network based on the TCP/IP Protocol. The Creative Commons community is a network based on users of Creative Commons licenses who share content under these standard transfer regimes. For the proposed network of sustainability innovation, the core protocols relate to the freedom to experiment and conduct research, the standardization of transfer of ideas, and the use of technology to monitor and quantify downstream impact.

Building a Better Innovation Ecosystem

Nike and Creative Commons share a vision of creating an open innovation platform that promotes the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide challenges. Open innovation is characterized by leveraging knowledge shared across many participants in a market, including companies, individuals, suppliers, distributors, academia, and many others to solve common problems and to assist internal innovation. Open innovation is an investment in the capacity of the market to support a firm’s ability to innovate and implement revolutionary technologies. It enables the development of new business models that leverage the creative output made possible by open collaboration to create new value and products. Open innovation is also a key component of engaging the resources and capabilities of large communities in finding ways to create sustainability, such as developing new ways to promote efficient resource use, implementing green manufacturing techniques, and delivery of products to consumers with lower impact to the environment.

Traditional collaboration is face-to-face. However, increasingly, modern collaboration, powered by the Web, is distributed. Examples of distributed collaboration include the Google search, the Wikipedia article, and the eBay auction, all which bring together disparate and distributed sources of information into a collaborative network mediated by common rules. Network mediated collaboration is based on small transactions, built upon standard technical and policy platforms, that enable low transaction costs both at a technical and legal level. By doing so, network mediated collaboration has a democratizing impact and therefore can engage mass audiences of users, contributors, and mediators, in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Likewise, open innovation is based on the mediated network collaboration concept: by making it easier to share documents, music, software, data, ideas, discoveries, and other kinds of knowledge, it has the potential to engage mass communities in the creative process. That brings with it innovation potential that not single company can match throw internally funded R&D…

The particular problem that Chesbrough mentioned as likely to obstruct progress in ongoing talks about measures to avoid runaway climate change is the following one. Companies are, understandably, trying to develop new technologies that could help with processes such as carbon capture and storage, or moving to new sources of energy. Being accountable to shareholders, these companies are driven to gain maximal financial return from the intellectual property they invest into these technologies. With such a mindset, there is a risk that these companies will take decisions that result in the rough equivalent of the type two errors mentioned earlier: projects are stopped, because companies don’t see how to gain adequate financial return from them.

One response to this dilemma is to decry the financial motivation. But another response is to seek a more enlightened operating model – once which will deliver both financial returns and highly worthwhile products. This deserves more thought!

Footnote: The “Open Innovation blog“, by Joel West, one of Henry Chesbrough’s co-authors, is a mine of useful ideas about Open Innovation.

A tale of two meetings

David Wood — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:31:00 +0000

In the past, I’ve enjoyed several meetings of the London Skeptics in the Pub (“SitP”). More than 100 people cram into the basement meeting space of Penderel’s Oak in Holborn, and listen to a speaker cover a contentious topic – such as alternative medicine, investigating the paranormal, the “moon landings hoax”. What’s typically really enjoyable is the extended Q&A session in the second half of the meeting, when the audience often dissect the speaker’s viewpoint. Attendee numbers have crept up steadily over the nine years the group has existed. It’s little surprise that the group was voted into the Top Ten London Communities 2008 by Time Out.

Last night, the billed speaker was the renowned (many would say “infamous”) climate change denier, Fred Singer. The talk was advertised as follows:

Global Warming: Science, Economics, and some Moral Issues: What Al Gore Never Told You.

The science is settled: Evidence clearly demonstrates that carbon dioxide contributes insignificantly to Global Warming and is therefore not a ‘pollutant.’ This fact has not yet been widely recognized, and irrational Global Warming fears continue to distort energy policies and foreign policy. All efforts to curtail CO2 emissions, whether global, federal, or at the state level, are pointless — and in any case, ineffective and very costly. On the whole, a warmer climate is beneficial. Fred will comment on the vast number of implications.

Since this viewpoint is so far removed from consensus scientific thinking, I was hoping for a cracking debate. And indeed, the evening started well. Singer turned out to be a better speaker than I expected. Even though he’s well into his 80s, he spoke with confidence, courtesy, and good humour. And he had some interesting material:

A graph that seemed to show that global temperature has not been rising over the last ten years (even though atmospheric CO2 has incontrovertibly been rising over that time period)
A claim that all scientific models of atmospheric warming are significantly at variance with observed data (and therefore, we shouldn’t give these models much credence)
Suggestions that global warming is more strongly influenced by cosmic rays than by atmospheric CO2.

(The contents of the talk were similar to what’s in this online article.)

So I eagerly anticipated the Q&A. But oh, what a disappointment. I found myself more and more frustrated:

Quite a few of the audience members seemed incapable of asking a clear, relevant, concise question. Instead, they tended to go off on tangents, or went round and round in circles. (To my mind, the ability to identify and ask the key question, without distraction, is an absolutely vital skill for the modern age.)
Alas, the speaker could not hear the questions (being, I guess, slightly deaf from his advanced age); so they had to be repeated by the meeting moderator, who was standing at the front next to the speaker
The moderator often struggled to capture the question from what the audience member had said, so there were several iterations here
Then the speaker frequently took a LONG time to answer the question. (He was patient and polite, but he was also painstakingly SLOW.)

Result: lots of time wasted, in my view. No one landed anything like a decisive refutation of the speaker’s claims. There were lots of good questions that should have been asked, but time didn’t allow it. I also blamed myself, for not having done any research prior to the meeting (but I had been pretty busy on other matters for the last few days), and for not being able to do my usual trick of looking up information on my smartphone during a meeting (via Google, Wikipedia, etc) because network reception was very poor in the part of the basement where I was standing. In conclusion, although the discussion was fun, I don’t think we got anything like the best possible discussion that the speakers’ presentation deserved.

I mention all this, not just because I’m deeply concerned about the fearsome prospects of runaway global warming, but also because I’m interested in the general question of how to organise constructive debates that manage to reach to the heart of the matter (whatever the matter is).

As an example of a meeting that did have a much better debate, let me mention the one I attended this evening. It was hosted by Spiked, and was advertised as follows:

Nuclear power: what’s the alternative? The future of energy in Britain

As we seek to overcome our reliance on fossil fuels, what are the alternatives? Offshore turbines and wind farms are often cited as options but can they really meet more than a fraction of the UK’s energy needs? If not, is nuclear power a viable alternative? Public anxieties about nuclear plants’ safety, their susceptibility to terrorist attacks, and the problem of safely disposing of radioactive waste persist. But to what extent are these concerns justified? Is the real issue the public’s perception of both the risks and potential of nuclear energy? Ultimately, does nuclear energy, be it the promise of fusion or the reality of fission, finally mean we can stop guilt-tripping about energy consumption?

Instead of just one speaker, there were five, who had a range of well-argued but differing viewpoints. And the chairperson, Timandra Harkness (Director of Cheltenham Science Festival’s Fame Lab) was first class:

She made it clear that each speaker was restricted to 7 minutes for their opening speech (and they all kept to this limit, with good outcomes: focus can have wonderful results)
Then there were around half a dozen questions from the floor, asked one after the other, before the speaker panel were invited to reply
There were several more rounds of batched up questions followed by responses
Because of the format, the speakers had the option of ignoring the (few) irrelevant questions, and could concentrate on the really interesting ones.

For the record, I thought that all the speakers made good points, but Keith Barnham, co-founder of the solar cell manufacturing company Quantasol, was particularly interesting, with his claims for the potential of new generation photovoltaic concentrator solar cells. (This topic also featured in a engrossing recent Time article.) He recommended that we put our collective hope for near-future power generation “in the [silicon] industry that gave us the laptop and the mobile phone, rather than the industry that gave us Chernobyl and Sellafield”. (Ouch!) Advances in silicon have time and again driven down the prices of mobile phones; these benefits will also come quickly (Barnham claimed) to the new generation solar cells.

But the conclusion I want to draw is that the best way to ensure a great debate is to have a selection of speakers with complementary views, to insist on focus, and to chair the meeting particularly well. Yes, collaboration is hard – but when it works, it’s really worth it!

Footnote: the comparision between the Skeptics in the Pub meeting and the Spiked one is of course grossly unfair, since the former is run on a shoestring (there’s a £2 charge to attend) whereas the latter has a larger apparatus behind it (the entry charge was £10, payable in advance; and there’s corporate sponsorship from Clarke Mulder Purdie). But hey, I still think there are valid learnings from this tale of two different meetings – each interesting and a good use of time, but one ultimately proving much more satisfactory than the other.