Full-scale Disneyland (with canals!), and sustainability issues

We recently returned from a 2-week trip to Italy.  Two of our children and their spouses live in Europe.  One couple lives in a small town in northern Italy, the other in central Switzerland.  The latter drove down to Italy where we all enjoyed seeing each other, which is not easy given the distances.  But while this vacation/family gathering was very pleasant and, to us, important, it raises some less pleasant thoughts about sustainability in our time in history.

My concerns are personal, but in a sense also global, and to some extent they relate to societal inequity: not everybody can just drop a few thou and travel across the ocean for a couple of weeks' dinners with family.  But beyond unfairness, my concerns are about other issues.  This was a very energy-bad vacation, and we weren't alone!

We flew from the east coast to Venice, the most convenient airport for our purposes.  We flew on a large plane, maybe 2/3 full of passengers. As we all know, one of the worst ways to contribute to global warming is to fly. The aircraft was largely filled with people taking cruises in the Mediterranean.  The trip was about 3700 miles each way, not including the various train and car junkets we took during those two weeks.

And then there's Venice itself.  We stayed a couple of days there to recover from jet lag, and to see the sites.  We'd been there for a science meeting once before.  Bella Venezia!  Once home to a world-leading trade empire, and to many great cultural and architectural wonders and of course its romantic lacework of canals.  The glory days were then, but what is the city today?  Venice takes in something like 100,000 tourists a day, well more than the number of people who actually live there.  The piazzas, side streets, walkways, and bridges--and they are very scenic indeed--are often a shoulder-to-shoulder river of tourists.  They (and we) sightsee in museums, shop, eat, shop, stay in hotels, eat, and shop.  It is obvious that a huge amount of money pours into the city, every day, all year, and has been doing so for decades if not centuries.

Even forgetting their thought-provoking historical value and more trivial entertainment value, and just thinking of them as Disneyesque curiosities for selfie-ops, these museums, shops, and hotels are staffed by an army of people who earn their living from the tourist trade.  So while Venice is in a sense unique and beautiful, it is also in a perhaps deeper sense something of a fake, a touristic Potemkin village, a hyper, full-time, full-scale Disneyland entertainment park, there today mainly to pluck the pockets of the relatively idle affluent and wasteful denizens of our planet (I certainly include myself in that category!).

St Mark's Square, Venice; By Nino Barbieri - Own work

Venice is but one rather small city on the global tourist map.  If you think about the amount of fuel used to transport everyone to, from, and around Venice (and even take into account that the gondolas don't require fossil fuel!), and then multiply that by the hundreds of tourist sites around the world, you have to wonder what hope there is for containing global warming.  There is no sign of self-restraint of any kind here--even on departure to return home, the airport luxury shops do a booming business as tourists part with whatever dollars they've not yet spent.

But what can one seriously do?

It is easy to chastise people who take such totally needless trips, even if accompanied by a self-incorporating mea culpa.  After all, this really is a nearly total luxury.  For most of human history those relatives who moved or sailed far away never saw their family again and corresponded by mail (if at all, if there was such a thing as 'mail').  That was just how life was!  Our family get-togethers are a new, pure luxury.  In a seriously conservation-dedicated world, we could dispense at least with the purely sightseeing, self-indulging kinds of global vacationing.  That would seem like something trivial, a luxury that a resource-conscious world could easily forego.  But even if we all were so equitable, fair, future-aware, and so on, things aren't nearly so simple.

The world is crowded with people and much of it is industrialized, with the number of people who live on the land, as subsistence farmers, declining every year.  We have hugely diverse economies, in a sense creating occupations that earn money so we can swap that for food and so on.  Most of it isn't really necessary.  Among these non-food related activities is tourism, which is huge because so many people are now wealthy and idle enough to take global junkets.

In turn that means that much of the world depends on travel and sightseeing.  Countless peoples' livelihoods are involved.  This is in a sense quite antithetical to global sustainability.  If we seriously slowed down travel to save fossil fuels and reduce warming, then tourism, air travel, cruise ships, and the people involved in the manufacture and operation of planes, ships, trains and buses, their ports and terminals, would lose their jobs. The manufacturers of tourist-related goods, including Venetian carnival masks, post-cards, luxury shopping goods, hotel supplies, restaurant foods, chefs, waiters, menu printers, clerks, etc. would be hit.  Venice, already a shell of its former self, would cease to have a reason to exist.  Even those who deliver all these goods during the night, and those who remove the trash, invisible to the tourists sleeping quietly in their beds, would be affected.  Society would somehow have to do something about their employment needs.  

This means that the idea of just paring back on consumption really is a dream--or, as every even mild economic depression shows, a nightmare.  And just the one example of tourism, essentially a luxury trade, involves countless thousands of people.  Needless to say, all of this is grossly unfair to the huge majority of people living on or below the margins.  It shows the inadvertent implications, even the distanced cruelty, of those idealists who want quick changes in sustainability directions.

It is difficult to have a non-selfish moral position on these issues.  If we say "let's change things slowly so as not to be too disruptive to too many people", the normal human tendency is to think the problem isn't so real, and not even go along with 'slowly' with much dedication. That's why car companies begin making and hawking, and consumers purchasing, bigger cars and trucks the moment gas prices drop.  [I insert this post-posting editorial change because today's NY Times had a story about the return of gas-guzzlers, in the same spirit of what this post is about]

If we say 'we must rush' then too many will find rationales for not going along ('OK, it's a good idea, but I can't do it--I have to see my family overseas!').  So where is a feasible ground to be found, and to what extent should we personally expect to be affected by it?  What will we give up for the cause?  The question, for me, is not abstractly how much one must cut out of what one does, but how much I must cut!  That gets pretty close to home, so to speak.

I can't help but add a rather gratuitous, if snide, side comment. The problems are compounded in an ironic way.  We have agricultural sustainability issues, as everyone by now should know.  The 'developed' world suffers common diseases largely due to bad nutrition and that means to over-eating. So while much of the world barely scrapes by, many in the rich world waddle along largely over-weight (these are not the minority of people struggling with genetic or epigenetic problems that make weight control a real challenge).  The obesity epidemic is why we hear complaints about airplane seats being too small!  So I remark snarkily that, as a consequence, one reason air travel is so environmentally unfriendly is the countless tons of human bulk that are being transported daily across the oceans in tourist-filled aircraft.  One thing leads to another.

We just took what was clearly a very energy-bad trip, no matter how understandable our desire to be with family and our decision to go.  We could, of course, have talked with our family members via Skype--indeed, we already do that often.  I complain that leaders in sustainability and climate change, including the very organization that documents it for the UN, fly all over the world and meet in fancy hotels to discuss the problem and tell everyone what they (that is, they) must do to 'save the planet'. The leading spokespersons for sustainability and climate-change avoidance could set a very public example and work only via Skype! 

In the context of global conservation, sustainability, and climate issues, who should feel guilty about what?  If do as I say not as I do is not acceptable, then what justifies our personal exceptionalism? For me, the answers are far from clear.

"Save the planet": a meaningless slogan?

What is all this talk about sustainability and so on?  What does the term mean and do we have historical precedents to turn to for an answer?  These days, in relation to the concept of sustainability we also hear a debate about how to 'save the planet' in the face of climate change, global warming, CO2 emissions, fossil fuels, overpopulation, industrial agriculture and erosion, antibiotic overuse, loss of clean water, and so on.  We're on various email lists that almost every day send us stories bemoaning the course of things that are not 'sustainable'.

Nothing specific triggers this post other than musing about a set of issues that may be of critical importance to 'us'--whoever 'us' is.  These various terms and slogans make sense to many people and indeed even hearing them puts others' hair on fire, because they oppose what those who want to save the planet are assumed to be advocating.  But these terms are in themselves almost without clear meaning, if any meaning at all, and that can be a problem, given how polarized society is on the issues.

Generally speaking, those on the political left express urgent fear about the current problems that are being discussed, recognized, or claimed.  The left wants to save the planet by cutting back on the use of fossil fuels and big-scale agriculture, human overpopulation, the destruction of natural habitats, and so on.

In reaction, generally those on the political right say that if there really is a problem (they tend to doubt sensory reality and science as its formalizer), then industrial innovation and the capitalist seizing on opportunity will fix it, so not to worry.  Even more, they often argue that the crises are being over-stated or data being misunderstood (or fabricated) so that, in truth, the planet doesn't need 'saving' anyway.  Global warming is either being misinterpreted or it's just part of the normal cycling on Earth and the pendulum will swing back in time.  Industrial capitalism will feed and warm us all, if we but give it the time and enough rein to do its job. The planet, in a sense, will 'save' itself.

Earth; What exactly does one want to 'save'?  Source: Wikipedia

But if you think about it, none of this has much meaning at all, no matter that it sounds like it does.
To see this, we ask in particular what, exactly, save the planet means?

1.  Does it mean save our current way of life?  Do we want to cut back on fossil fuels enough to stop or reverse global warming and resource exhaustion, but not so much that even liberals would complain?  I don't hear them saying we need to outlaw18-wheelers, or trains, tractors, air conditioners, golf carts, power leaf-blowers, backyard pools, or personal cars.  'Cutting back' generally seems to mean to people that we can have a bit less, though not a whole lot less, and still keep our lifestyle and reverse climate change, loss of topsoil, and so on.  Of course, if we really wanted to 'save' the planet in these terms, perhaps we should be advocating global equity in resources and living conditions, but nobody is actually serious about that because if we evened out the income distribution we'd all be in the soup.  Indeed, of course, we're concerned that the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians et al. want to wait til they have cars and A/Cs before they start to save the planet.

I mean, if we polluted ourselves out of supermarkets and personal cars, we would still survive, though there would be a lot fewer of us, and perhaps no global transport and even, heaven forbid, no electronic entertainment.  Some would survive all the fracking anyone could possibly imagine.  So, here, 'saving' really means something akin to delaying the demise of our way of life.

2.  Save human life on Earth?  That is an understandable if selfish thing to advocate.  The Earth would not miss us were we to go extinct.  And we will eventually be gone, of course.  So as far as that goes, again what is being advocated is not save the planet, but delaying our specific species' demise.  Likewise, saving species from extinction is, as any ecologist or evolutionary biologist (or cosmologist) knows, quite illusory.  All species become extinct and only a fraction of lineages do that by evolving into new species.  In the long term, of course, the Earth will be swallowed up by the exploding dying Sun.  So 'saving' again means 'delaying' something we, personally, in our very short-sighted, egocentric lives value.

Even more than that, we want our own lives to have some sort of long-term meaning. That's of course also an illusion, unless perhaps you have expectations of an infinite afterlife.  It's just that when we are returned to ashes, some new future ashes will harbor similar thoughts (about their own lives).

3.  Save the 'planet' as a whole?  It means little to talk about 'saving' the planet.  First, evolution has always adapted life to our planet's conditions, and there is absolutely no reason to think it won't adapt to whatever humans do to the place, including nuclear holocaust.  But since Earth is doomed to destruction eventually, what, exactly, does 'saving the planet' mean?  I think it probably means some cuddly short-term view of things, rather than a carefully considered view, unless it means preserving for the moment things we happen to like, like pandas, our kids and grandchildren or fellow countrymen and the like.  There's of course absolutely nothing wrong with that, but one should be clear, because not saving 'the planet' doesn't mean there'd be nothing; it just means it'd be different.

Our planet is not in danger and doesn't need 'saving'.  The Earth is one huge biochemical reaction and its 'Gaia', its physico-chemical unity is based on its components, energy, and so on.  When or whether or for how long people, or any given lifestyle, or any lifestyle exists is part of that.  We may try to preserve what we like, or enough of what we like, in a state that for our limited lifespan and egocentric purposes seems permanent, if that's how we wish to define 'save'.

4.   Go back to swidden hand-hoed agriculture?
There are many arguments, apparently quite valid, that we are rapidly exhausting our soil in various ways having to do with large-scale industrialized commercially capitalized agriculture.  Does save the planet mean to find and implement ways, that apparently do exist, to grow enough to feed the human population without this being forced upon us when naturally developed soils are drained away?  This might be a good objective, but it is a political one, obviously, because from the 'planet's point of view, maybe its overall sustainability would be better off if we did exhaust the agricultural soil and starved ourselves out of existence or at least back to less resource-demanding numbers. But save the planet as a slogan probably isn't advocating this.  Does it just mean we don't like the way Kansas is being farmed, that Big Ag's like Monsanto are very rich, and that we (most of us who've never really seen a farm first-hand) are venting some nostalgia about things we don't really personally even know much about?

5.  Develop 'sustainability'?
This word is as vague and in a way naive as save the planet.  Nothing in human (much less evolutionary) history is eternally sustainable.  Change is part of Nature and its geological-historical processes.  Human agriculture has more or less from its beginning gone through periods of growth, resource over-use, and decline.  That ours will do the same should come as no surprise.  Is that bad? From the point of view of our own personal nostalgia and sentimentality, perhaps.  From the point of view of 'the planet', there is no reason to impose such a purely human judgment.

In a NY Times editorial on the Canadian tar sands XL pipeline debate, Andrew Nikiforuk concludes:

"The American social critic Lewis Mumford described mining as barbaric to land and soul. By any definition, Keystone XL grants license to an earth-destroying economy."

The editorial is in itself a good discussion of the tar sands and how they are extracted and what that will do to large tracts of forest.  But the final description is just naive, in the sense I am discussing.  No matter what the ramifications in the short term, mining won't actually destroy the earth.

Yet, of course, there is something here--but what is it?  Esthetics about primeval forest?  Global warming and forest destruction?  Dislike of greedy BigOil?  Failure of society to come to grips with the potential traumas whose seeds short-term convenience and greed will lead to?

Do as I say, not as I do?
A new book by Naomi Klein called This Changes Everything, is getting rave reviews these days.  She makes a case that current global capitalism is responsible for climate change that is soon to be disastrous (not good for saving the planet!).  We must cut back, way back, on our energy consumption in the developed world.  Citing conservation advocates' estimates, for global sustainability and to curb or reverse global warming, we must, if we are humanitarian, share the wealth, that is, share the per-capita Wattage expended.  We here in the developed world need to cut back by something like 80%, and let those in the developed world grow, for humanitarian reasons, a few-fold.

Sounds nice.  I haven't read the book, and I am writing based on reviews, including an excellent recent one (OA) by Elizabeth Kolbert in the December 4th issue of The New York Review of Books.  From the reviews, I probably will agree with the book's argument, but that's not the point here.  The review notes in passing that Klein has traveled the globe so much that she's an 'elite' frequent flyer club member, that she has been flying over the world to visit places where relevant activities to curb resource extraction are taking place, that she got ideas when dining in Geneva, and that she and her husband are making a film to go with her book.  The book is printed on paper and distributed around the world.  It's not freely downloadable.  Will the film involve air travel, or a lot of resource consumption, or be free on line?

It's an ethical dilemma and by no means new.  Authors and film-makers, like missionaries for causes back through history, must make a living.  The justification for high consumption on their part is a kind of executive privilege: it's a nasty job being holier than thou, but somebody's got to to it.  This is similar to what has always been heard from powerful, pious, or privileged as they squeeze the rest of the population, exhorting them to bite this or that bullet.

Yet, obviously, authors do have to make a living, just as preachers, earls and kings do, and maybe it's simply true that someone abusing the resource issue is needed if masses are to be informed so they won't abuse the resources.  Masses need leaders.  You can make your own assessment as to what's fair, whether there are other ways than experts and spokespersons to carry a banner, and so on.  There are no easy answers (and, certainly, yours truly drives, has a warm house, travels to Europe to lecture or visit family, eats fresh food in winter shipped from the tropics, and so on).  It's very hard not to be hypocritical.  The human track record isn't very good in this respect.  Indeed, even many of today's arguments were au courant only a few decades ago--if you're old enough, you'll remember 'the population bomb' and 'small is beautiful' and daisy-painted VW buses parked in drop-out, live- naturally communes.

Is change as we are experiencing it these days any more threatening than it has been to prior human generations, albeit each in its own particular way, with likely negative as well as positive consequences?  If we individually or collectively want to alter things to satisfy some goal, and want to rally others behind that view, is the simple, catchy save the planet banner the kind of rallying point that works?

OMG, this is what really matters!
While finishing this post, nibbling a chocolate covered hazelnut, we came across this horrifying story that in an incredibly timely way showed in stark relief just the very disastrous things we face, to make our entire point.

From http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/141118/chocolate

A new story apparently reports iron-clad proof that what we are doing to the earth is going to make its most precious resource disappear completely: chocolate!  Horror of horrors, now here is some thing that really does threaten anybody and everybody in every way and that even the most rabid Republican capitalist can agree on!  This shows why we really do need to save the planet and it clearly shows that that slogan has unambiguous, and unquestionable meaning.

Well, take a breath (if you can!).  Should we be clearer and more precise about what, exactly, that might be, and why, that a consensus could agree on?  Can we be clearer?  Maybe nostalgia is enough, but otherwise, save the planet is more an advertising slogan for a vague, essentially ideological point of view than a clear statement of some objective goal.  There are serious issues for us, or at least our living descendants. Is it possible to have agreement an agenda or are people just too different in what they think about themselves and the world, whether you want to call that selfishness or whatever?

Here be Dragons: climate change and a lesson from the past

          Recently, Richard Alley, a Nobel Prize winner for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, told the Anthropology Department here a tired tale of human-driven global warming and how it will be our end (or our children’s children’s end, and then only if they live in the tropics). I’m a graduate student in Archaeology in the Department, working on land use and sustainability issues, and so I was particularly interested in what he had to say. 

          Alley provided good evidence that carbon dioxide is intimately linked to rising temperatures, as it has always been. Throughout different periods of history, changes in earth’s orbit caused heat spikes, in turn ramping up atmospheric levels of CO2. This resulted in a feedback effect, where increasing carbon dioxide spun the temperature dial in the direction of HOT. Of late, humans have opportunistically contributed to atmospheric CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels, causing uncharacteristic warming in our interglacial period and, undoubtedly, unnecessary extremes in weather. This has become a fairly well known and accepted argument across the board, and the data are only getting stronger.
          But the noteworthy bit, to me, was Alley’s generous display of humility. One of the world’s leading scientists on abrupt climate change, he began his talk with the moralizing concession that science can only know so much. In other words, he acknowledged that the story of climate change is and will remain, to some degree, unknowable. And that might be the scariest part. To bring the point home, he produced a slide of the Hunt-Lenox Globe. Dating to the early 16th century, the Hunt-Lenox is a beautiful, copper sphere, one of two historical maps with the Latin phrase HIC SVNT DRACONES, or “here be dragons.” He then posed a simple but earnest question: if people prepared for dragons in the past, if only out of fear, then why don’t we, here and now, prepare for ours, especially when we are, in terms of global warming, on firmer (though, dare I say, soon-to-be-submerged) ground?

Hunt-Lenox Globe
http://www.swiftek.net/?page=dragons

          These weren't scare tactics; Alley was being realistic. Based upon their theoretical constructs, scientists have long observed anthropogenic climate change. He pointed out that even Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, US Chief of Pacific Forces, was recently quoted in the Boston Globe as stating that melting polar ice is leading to rapid rises in sea level, posing a top threat to national security. When it comes to climate, the question is no longer if, but when and to what extent.

          Good science on climate change favors words like risk over certainty, because science deals in probability, not truth. Unfortunately, the public doesn’t like the former. This might seem odd, given that we equip our automobiles with seat-belts and airbags, our airplanes with flotation devices, and our dress shirts with that extra little button on the inside, just in case, all in the name of risk. Why, then, shouldn’t we prepare for the increased risk that attends a warming planet? The answer, I tend to believe, is that people are waiting to see direct correlations for the nearing of another Permian Extinction, where warming will be the de facto source of death and destruction. But that’s not how this works, not this time, at least. What will happen instead, and what we’re already beginning to see, is a correlation between rising temperatures and lower crop yields (at a time when one out of every eight people are suffering from chronic undernutrition), increased water usage (at a time when water scarcity effects one out of every five people), mounting violence (hello, Arab Spring), and rising seas (goodbye, Florida). There’s another problem, as well: the age-old belief that technology and innovation will be our savior. Here, archaeology presents a cautionary tale.
          Just as earth’s climate is dynamic by nature, people are naturally shortsighted in their maximization of resources, and understandably so. We prepare for what we know. Indeed, humans switched from hunting and gathering to farming some 12,000 years ago, in large part to optimize production, as agriculture provided a more consistent food supply. Famine and drought were ever-present possibilities, as they remain today, and so early farmers developed technologies, slowly over time, to increase and store their yields. Early agriculture’s shortsighted innovations had, from time to time, localized consequences, to be sure, but they remained just that: local. And that’s a fundamental difference from today.
          It was not until populations grew large enough, and technologies effective enough, that people had long-term impacts—through shortsighted decision-making—on the surrounding landscape. Maximization and stability are opposing strategies, but this becomes obvious only after certain thresholds are crossed. Particularly with the rise of state economies, individual or community interests became absorbed into fewer and fewer maximizing strategies. As humans invested ever more in their environments, and as economies of scale developed around the extraction of particular resources, institutions developed and the very fabric of a community became locked-in, part of a path-dependent, adaptational response. While this was economically and socially advantageous in the short-term, it meant decreased resilience over the long-term. With the introduction of a crisis, large, interdependent societies were faced with few options but to innovate. Often, they failed to do so, and this is why the rise and fall of empires is the stuff of legend.
          In some ways, it’s useful to think of history as a cycle of challenge and response. This is not to suggest that certain societies at certain times faltered because of a lack of creativity – to the contrary, in fact. But in terms of innovation and the environment, every technological response trades knowns for unknowns. Moreover, technological innovation is directed toward common challenges, meaning that a group’s technological advancements are designed to face common threats, meanwhile disregarding and therefore becoming more vulnerable to unsuspected but (potentially major) dilemmas. As societies and their technologies build in complexity, complex unknowns also build, inviting far-reaching and often unforeseeable consequences.
          Global warming is as much an environmental challenge as it is a social challenge. It would be an extreme myopia to believe that technological advances will save us in the future. When looked at from the perspective of the past, a people’s ability to successfully innovate is never guaranteed. A brief review of the archaeological record shows that, time and again, technological advances failed to outpace advancing interdependency and the coalescence of maximizing strategies. We now live in an era of globalization and unprecedented vulnerability, subsumed, willingly or not, under a stratagem of cheap oil maximization. The ineluctable switch to natural gas and methane hydrate, instead of the necessary and unconditional move to renewables, is further proof that technology is touted over reality, over science.
          Environmental catastrophes have never been wholly avoidable. But in the past, they were limited in extent, largely because societies were more decentralized, comprised of fewer people, and significantly, the sole reapers of what they sowed (pun intended). With the introduction of fossil fuels and the global market, we've exchanged local resilience and stability for worldwide maximization and fragility, as well as the universal responsibility of, as Richard Alley made clear, an unpredictable climate. And all with an Ozymandian arrogance. This is not to suggest that innovation is inherently evil, but to say that technology, in the modern sense, might not be able to slay the dragon.

The Land Institute and the 50-Year Farm Bill

Agriculture is a major, if not the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, unclean water and ecosystem destruction, with ominous possible prospects for the future of our survival.  But there are many people thinking about how to lessen its impact.  Mark Bittman did a fine job a few weeks ago describing the work of one of those people.  Wes Jackson and The Land Institute that he founded 37 years ago on the Kansas prairie represent a growing awareness that agribusiness can and must change.  They are working to make it possible for agriculture to transition from annual monoculture, 80% of agriculture today, to perennial polyculture, that is, from growing a single crop that must be planted from seed every year to fields of multiple, complementary perennial plants chosen to contain pests and weeds, and contribute to soil retention, not erosion.

Source

The Land has done the hard work of perennializing a grain they call Kernza, although more needs to be done before it's finally commercially available, perhaps within 8 years. (See this for a report on bread made with Kernza flour.)  We think The Land will deserve a Nobel Peace Prize when Kernza's finally on the market.  Norman Borlaug was awarded one in 1970 for his work on the Green Revolution.  Perennializing grain will be even more significant, as it has the potential to decouple farmers from agribusiness and its unsustainable practices growing hybrid annual grains requires (indeed, to reverse many of the effects of the Green Revolution).  Agribusiness is big business, but trades short-term profit for long-term survival.

Why is soil erosion such a problem?  Because soil is essentially a non-renewable resource; it takes on the order of 1000 years to create 2 centimeters of topsoil, which, given conventional monocultural practices, can wash away in a single season.  Industrial-agriculture relies on monocultures based on annual plants that must be replanted each year, and that means plowing and loosening the soil.  And, annuals, with short lifespans, only put down short roots.  

When soil erodes, it takes with it tons of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that were applied during the growing season, which end up in rivers, and then the mouths of rivers as in the Gulf of Mexico, where they can create huge dead zones, thousands of square miles of hypoxic waters, unable to support marine life (except for jellyfish, which thrive in these hypoxic zones; it's not a good sign when jellyfish take over).  Perennial plants with their deeper roots can be a major contributor to the prevention of soil erosion.  And, polyculture well-considered requires less toxic chemical use, less fertilizer, and less tilling of the land.

NASA-NOAA map of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; Wikimedia

5-Year Farm Bills/50-Year Farm Bill
But Bittman, and Jackson in the video accompanying the op/ed, already told this story beautifully.  What we want to talk about today is the 50-Year Farm Bill proposed by Jackson and colleagues.  Since the Great Depression, food and farm policy in the US has been structured according to farm bills that are passed every 5 years or so.

These bills have been largely political mine fields and pork barrels that maintain agribusiness more than they are solutions for the real environmental, cultural and financial problems plaguing agriculture today.  It's not all bleak, however -- since the 1990's a small fraction of the budget has been dedicated to funding beginning farmers, minority farmers, organic farmers, and fruit and vegetable farmers (these are "specialty" crops).  This has been important.

But, the 2008 Farm Bill has expired, and the temporary extension passed by Congress did not include funding for these programs. As Brian Snyder, president of PASA, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, put it in a recent blog post, 'What's at Stake in the Farm Bill?":

Even taken together, these important reform efforts are still a fairly small fraction of total farm bill spending, but they have an outsize impact – and they are helping to create the foundation for a more a more sustainable and equitable farm and food system in America.

Good news: these innovative programs were all funded as part of the last farm bill that ran from 2008 to 2012.

More good news:  they also receive renewed, and in some cases increased, funding in one or both of the Senate and House farm bills currently being considered in Congress.

Very bad news: when the current farm bill had to be extended in January to give Congress more time to complete it, nearly all of these innovative programs were denied funding in the farm bill extension that was negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and passed by Congress on January 1 of this year.

The Congress is currently debating very different versions of the new bill from the House and Senate.  One of the major sticking points this time around, at a time in our history when one of the fiercest debates in Washington is the extent to which the government should help the undeserving poor, is the amount of money that will go to the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), food stamps -- this is thanks in no small part to tea partiers who've decided that it's their job to keep tax money from people who need it.  But innovative farm programs are also at stake.

Again, as Brian Snyder writes,

Congress should seize the opportunity to get our food and farm policy back on track.  Congress should pass a new five-year farm bill that includes robust funding for the programs that keep our families fed and healthy, build local economies, protect and restore natural resources, and spur the next generation of farmers.

Cap carbon!
How soon Congress will pass a bill is not at all clear, mired as it is in extremist politics.  The Land Institute, in any case, proposes a much broader view, with attention to food security and sustainable practices for the long term.  Jackson and Wendell Berry wrote in an op/ed in The New York Times in 2009, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." The aim is to bring about gradual change in the way agriculture is done, to stop "the ecological spending of ecological capital necessary for food production".

The 50-Year Farm Bill document includes this paragraph:

Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change. Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries, as well as saving and maintaining the quality of scarce surface and ground water. U.S. food security will improve.

Wendell Berry puts it less prosaically in a piece he wrote about the 50-Year Farm Bill published in  The Atlantic last year. As always, his concern is for traditional agricultural communities and sensible practices. 

I have described the need for a farm bill that makes sense of and for agriculture -- not the fiscal and political sense of agriculture, as in the customary five-year farm bills, but the ecological sense without which agricultural sense cannot be made, and without which agriculture cannot be made sustainable.

The program would need the support of the president, the Department of Agriculture, the Congress, non-profits, corporations and citizens.  Five-year farm bills would be incorporated into the plan, and head incrementally toward food security and sustainable farming.  This is, we think, a good idea, but even better would be if, in addition to sensible farm policy, bold political decisions were taken to limit anthropogenic climate change, such as those recently recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change such as capping carbon emissions, limiting the burning of fossil fuels.

Sensible and smart as it clearly is, we're not terribly hopeful that such a 50-Year Farm Bill will be adopted any time soon.  Our politicians don't think long-term because it doesn't pay off in the immediate currency of politics, even if a long-term policy like this one would produce handsome returns in many ways down the road.

We're not hopeful that meaningful carbon caps will become law either, sensible as they are, for much the same reason.  Is the groundswell of interest and research into sustainable agriculture evidence of an incipient revolution in how we do business, though?  We can hope.

We will never see the real answer, however.  What we're doing is leaving the surprises for our descendants, who will have to face the societal consequences of our long-term neglect.

Malaria and climate change - the danger of applying simple answers to complex problems

As the world warms, is the potential range of endemic malaria increasing?  A story in the UK's Guardian suggests it is, and will continue to do so.

Leading health experts are urging the government to take action against the growing threat that mosquito-borne diseases, including potentially fatal malaria, could soon arrive in the UK.

The disturbing recommendation to "act now before it is too late" is being made as a growing body of evidence indicates that what were once thought of as tropical diseases are being found ever closer to the UK.

The story goes on to say that dengue has recently been reported in France and Croatia, and malaria in Greece, so the UK needs to plan public health measures now, as climate change is happening, to thwart the threat.  The story also says that climate change will broaden the range of disease-carrying ticks as well, and that Lyme Disease is increasing in incidence in the UK and Europe, and West Nile virus is poised to spread, further evidence that climate change is going to affect the epidemiologic landscape.
 

Culex quinquefasciatus; Wikimedia

But, is it that simple?  Lyme Disease is carried by a tick that does just fine in temperate zones, including surviving hard winters.  So, is this tick's habitat increasing because of climate change?  Well, perhaps indirectly. There are now more deer in the UK then in the last 1000 years, which means continual banquet for the tick.  This is thought to be partially due to milder winters, but also to changing landscape in the UK, changing agriculture, and so forth.  So, the spread of infection is a consequence of the spread of the tick, and the spread of the tick is a consequence of the spread of deer, which is partially a consequence of climate change.   

West Nile is not strictly a tropical disease either, and is transmitted by a number of mosquito species, including of the genus Culex.  Culex modestus was recently found in the UK for the first time since 1945, prompting the suggestion that West Nile will soon become a problem.  But if this mosquito was in the UK so long ago, is it right to attribute its return solely to climate change?

In essence, the issue is the casual slippage between observing correlation and assuming causation, one of the most difficult things for the public and even scientists to resist.  Which is not at all to say that climate change won't shake up disease prevalence.  Just that conflating possible effects of climate change with possible consequences of travel or spreading animal habitats and so on that may affect the spread of disease doesn't make understanding and prediction any easier. 

Aedes aegypti; dengue fever vector; Wikimedia

Malaria and dengue fever are another question.  Both mosquito-borne diseases, we think of them as tropical diseases now, but malaria was endemic in the UK and at least southern Europe and the US, and even Canada probably for centuries and dengue was endemic in the southern US and at least sporadic in Europe.  Both diseases have been been controlled in temperate zones (or rather, the rich North) since the end of WWII or thereabouts, primarily because of public health measures like cleaning up standing water, insecticide use and so on.

The map below (originally from Kiszewksi et al., 2004. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 70(5):486-498) shows the location of important malaria mosquitoes, graphically making the point that it's not just the presence of the vector that determines the presence of disease.

Global map of dominant and potentially important malarial vectors; CDC

A 2002 paper in The Lancet on the potential health consequences of climate change points out that the ability to control malaria in areas in which it has long been absent may change with the climate. 

The decline of malaria in Europe and the southern USA in the 20th century was attributable to social and economic development and improved public health services, and not to change in climate. However, this finding does not mean that ambient temperature and rainfall are irrelevant from a health perspective. Climate is one of the fundamental forces behind epidemics, and its effects become evident if adaptive measures falter or cannot be extended to all populations at risk.

Models of the effects of climate change often predict the spread of vector-borne diseases into areas currently clear of the vector and thus of the diseases, but the point of models is to simplify reality.  It's not in fact clear what will happen with diseases for which prevalence depends on a complex of interacting factors, that may not be wholly or adequately taken into account in the models.  For example, the prevalence of transmitting mosquitoes and malaria in a given area is a consequence of social and economic conditions (e.g., conflict that might be impeding public health measures, insufficient funds for public health measures like clearing standing water in public places),  numerous aspects of a country's infrastructure (impassable roads, insufficient health clinics), as well as characteristics of the at-risk population, migration patterns, multiple climate factors, and so on.

So, climate change certainly has the potential to alter disease patterns anywhere and everywhere.  But there are numerous factors that affect vector-borne disease prevalence, and climate is only one of them.  Whether or not it is a major one probably depends on how well controlled these diseases are now, even before climate change throws its wrench into the works.  

We write often about how simple answers in genetics have appeal, even when they don't fit the complex question, and that seems to be true with climate change as well.  The reality is probably going to be quite complex, with a lot of heterogeneity in factors that do or don’t contribute to disease persistence and spread.

Most countries that have been successful in eradicating “tropical diseases” are also wealthy countries; this correlation shouldn’t be ignored. For much of the world, these diseases aren’t really an emerging threat compared to what is already experienced. But perhaps the threat of spreading disease will force more people to realize global realities.

There is another, perhaps related, issue in the sociology of science.  Those who are worried about climate change, or whose political agenda it is to advocate some preventive and corrective responses to it, that might change human behaviors such as consumption of fossil fuels, tend to seize on any fact that might boost their case.  This is only natural, but it exacerbates the problem of assuming that correlations imply causation.  Opponents of climate-change concerns naturally tend to dismiss such evidence as inconclusive, of course.

Finally, there is an important thing to consider with regard to climate change and its potential effects. Already deniers cling to anything they can in order to show that it either isn’t happening or it isn’t something worth worrying about. We should be careful in our predictions so that they too aren’t turned around on us. If malaria doesn’t become endemic in the UK, does that also mean we don’t need to worry about climate change?! Things are likely to change, it’s just really hard to say which ones and in which ways.

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This post was contributed to by Anne, Dan and Ken. Please note that Dan and Ken have the cover story, about subjects related to this post, in the current (March/April 2013) issue of the journal Evolutionary Anthropology. The article is viewable without subscription.

Yes, species are adaptable, but there are limits

For a species, habitats are successful in the long term when they sustain seasonal balancing between food sources and prey.  Flowers that insects feed on have to be in bloom when the insects that feed on and pollinate them have hatched and are looking for food, insects that a given species of bird feed on have to have hatched when that bird has arrived back from its winter or summer migrations, and so on.  So, climate change has the potential to disrupt complex habitats if migration times change, flowering times change, the timing of thaws and hibernations change, food species can't survive the changes, etc., all of which are occurring at the present time. It is likely that some of this has always been taking place, but generally at not nearly the rapid pace we see today.

So a paper in last week's Science is of interest.  In "Population Growth in a Wild Bird Is Buffered Against Phenological Mismatch," Reed et al. describe the effect of recent climate change on the cycling of a European songbird, the great tit, and its food sources.  In theory, gradual environmental change is less of a threat than rapid change because directional selection would favor organisms with extreme trait values that allow them to best adapt to the change, and because that change would be gradual enough that useful variation would be present and the selective intensity would not simply make the species extinct.

When this is the case, the average organism would do less well in the new environment than a subset of organisms with more extreme but adaptive trait values.  If environmental change is rapid, however, there may not be enough genetic variation in a population to allow it to adapt and keep pace with the changes.  And so the population is expected to experience reduced fitness, or a 'demographic cost' as the speed of change increases. If too severe, extinction is the ultimate price.

The Reed et al. study was a test of whether disruptions in the phenology, or seasonal timing, of predator and prey interactions affected the demography of the predator population.  If food is no longer available in abundance at the right time due to climate changes, is there a measurable effect of natural selection on traits that affect phenology in, in this instance, the tit?

We studied great tits (Parus major) in the Netherlands in relation to the phenology of their caterpillar food supply. This part of Western Europe has experienced substantial spring warming in recent decades related to global climate change. Great tits rely on caterpillars to feed their chicks and strive to match their breeding time with the pronounced seasonal peak in caterpillar biomass, which enhances offspring survival. Previous studies illustrated how climate change has produced a steadily increasing mismatch between great tit and caterpillar phenology in our study area, because the caterpillar food peak has advanced in response to rising spring temperatures at more than twice the rate of great tit laying dates. When temperatures during the period after great tits have laid their eggs (late spring) are high, the mismatch is larger (by 2.96 ± 0.43 days per 1°C increase, F1,36 = 47.40, P < 0.001), because caterpillars develop faster under warmer conditions and hence the food peak is early relative to the great tit nestling phase. The greater this mismatch, the stronger is directional selection for earlier laying dates (linear regression slope = –0.007 ± 0.003, F1,36 = 5.066, P = 0.031).

That is, the hypothesis is that great tits that lay their eggs early enough to take advantage of the peak supply of caterpillars to feed this chicks will produce more surviving offspring than those who continue to lay eggs at the later date.  And, this would be an 'extreme' trait, so presumably the great tit population would decline in years when the peak caterpillar supply was later than usual.  And, keep in mind that if we are considering this as an evolutionary effect, the variation must have a genetic basis.

But, the researchers don't find this.  Nor do they find an association between population growth and directional selection; phenological mismatch in this instance doesn't affect fitness (the genetically based reproductive success).  They controlled for the effects of variation in winter food supply (beech nuts), but found that it had no effect on fitness either.

Population growth as a function of (A) annual population mismatch
and (B) annual standardized selection gradient.  Source: Thomas et al.,
Science 26 April 2013 Vol. 340 no. 6131 pp. 488-491

Why is fitness not affected by this predator/prey timing mismatch?  The authors suggest two reasons.  One, the timing of egg laying is never optimal for all females relative to the peak supply of caterpillars because the peak supply window is always narrower than the variation in timing of egg laying.  So, fitness is never optimal for the entire population.

And second, reduced survival of hatchlings due to scare food supply is offset by improved survival of fledglings because there's less competition due to lower population size.  The survival of young birds is highly correlated with population density.

Again, we would note that even if there were  a difference in fitness, it would have no evolutionary relevance unless it were due to specific genetic variation.  This is easy to forget, even if an effect were found. 

In our book, The Mermaid's Tale, after which we named this blog, we suggested a set of general fundamental principles of life that 150 years of observation since Darwin have made apparent.  (We've blogged about these principles before, including here.)  We referred to one such principle as 'facultativeness', or the ability to adapt, which we have suggested must have been one of the earliest traits to evolve given that it is so ubiquitous.  Another word we've used to describe this is 'slop', or imprecision -- as opposed to the exquisitely finely-tuned adaptation that many people think of when they think of the effects of natural selection.

Timing of egg laying in the great tit, however it is determined, is clearly imprecise, and there's still variation in the trait.  And, importantly, that imprecision is tolerated.  It has not been drummed out of the population by natural selection, balancing or not.  And that's a good thing for great tits, given that their food supply varies.

It might be tempting to interpret these results as meaning that climate change isn't going to be a problem because organisms will just adapt.  And yes, organisms are adaptable -- within limits. Including the great tit.  But many species have already gone extinct, and many more will do so.  The Reed paper documents the response to a 3 degree temperature change.  As with the proverbial frog in a pot of water set to boil, there's no reason to think these results are generalizable to the greater changes to come.

If evolution has led to, or tolerated, facultativeness, there is still the question as to how it is maintained.  We don't suggest that there is a gene 'for' such a trait.  Instead, genetic mechanisms have evolved the ability to react to environmental conditions, rather than requiring very precise environments.  The result is that organisms can survive and reproduce in a range of circumstances.  This should not be a surprise to anyone, but may seem so if your view of evolution is that natural selection fine-tunes every species for  highly specific, restricted circumstances.  There's a word for species that were so programmed:  extinct.

Science vs "Science"

It's got a lot to do with how you get your information, whether you trust science or not. And it's got a lot to do with whether you're exposed to real science or "science."

Like this "science"...



This product has been "proven by science," so we're fools not to buy it! I find that if I'm not watching a Nova or Nature or an episode of anything with Morgan Freeman or Stephen Hawking, most everything else that talks of science on the television is trying to sell me something. Most everything else is "science."

It seems like every beauty product advertisement is using "science" to convince me that I'm butt ugly and that to fix it (or prevent it from worsening) I should give them my perfectly good dollars. It's "science" after all.

I'm kind of stunned that it's legal for for-profits to cry "science" when it's their own study, when they merely asked opinions as evidence for effectiveness, or when they didn't do any studies at all. Science isn't allowed to be so biased. Science is supposed to want to improve your life first and foremost, not con you out of your money.

I'm not just thinking about this today because I've been hibernating this February, plopped in front of the tube, absorbing horrifying beauty ads through my aging, sagging wrinkled face. (I really should take care of it better by smearing money all over it.) I'm thinking about all this right now because of my friend Alice Roberts's nice piece "Childbirth: why I take the scientific approach to having a baby" posted on the Guardian Saturday.

Trends to move childbirth out of the hospital setting have put pressure on mothers and fathers to make decisions about what to do when it's time for theirs. You'd assume that because there's a movement to move things home that it's because some smart, science-minded, compassionate folks have figured out that it's healthier. If you can't stand the draconian and bloated government/insurance mogul-run healthcare system, a movement might feed your existing suspicions or opinions that there could be better ways to have a baby than by blindly following orders that these profit-motivated fascists at hospitals bark at us. 

But why assume that home childbirth folks are any less biased, less vested, less driven by self-interests? I don't know but it just seems so common for people to give rebels the benefit of the doubt more often than tradition, than institutions. (Something about "honest signaling" might have just popped into your mind if you've been trained in evolutionary theory.) What Alice found is that information on, that is, data or evidence for, what's healthiest--home or hospital or otherwise (birthing centers, for example)--is kind of difficult to come by!

For starters, she writes, 

"This is partly because the overall risks of maternal and neonatal death are now very small (about five per 100,000 women die in childbirth and four per 1,000 babies), so large numbers of mums are needed to assess relative risks. Maternity provision differs between countries, so looking at risks in other countries, even in Europe and the US, may not be terribly helpful."

Within that small risk there is a lot of jockeying for your support. So the second reason, she says, that makes it hard to find information is, 

"the politics of birth. It can be quite hard for mums-to-be to access impartial evidence and advice when it seems there are plenty of people wanting to influence your decision in one way or the other. Evangelical advocates of home birth often talk about the importance of women's choice and empowerment, as well as instilling distrust in obstetricians. For me, being empowered to make a decision requires access to good evidence and the freedom to make up my own mind. And whilst "maternal satisfaction" is often put forward as an important factor to be taken into consideration, I want to know what the relative risks are. And if there's not yet enough evidence to assess that – I want to know that too."

You'd think we all do. You'd think we all want to know the answer to "where and how will the risks be lowest for having my baby?" But we don't all hold  the belief that it's our right to know the answer to that, the way Alice knows it is, the way Alice demonstrates that it is. And it's not just an issue about the dissenters and the movements spinning information and evidence so we'll see things their way--a very real problem that Alice walks us through in the article. It's the doctors too.

Since the article's been posted in various places I've seen commenters complain how they asked their doctors for papers and numbers to help them make their birth plans and the doctors wouldn't go there. I've never had to make a birth plan but I've had similar experiences with doctors like when, for example, I asked for non-hormonal birth control options because I saw no reason to continue ingesting the stuff when the risks for long-term use aren't known and I was now married and ready to stop taking the pill. My doctor laughed at my question, laughed when I asked for a diaphragm or anything like it, and tried to convince me without any scientific evidence that the pill was fine to take your whole life.

Do I think medical decisions should lie completely in patients' hands? Of course not. We can't all be doctors. But they've got to be better ambassadors of science. They've got to be the best. They've got to be science.

It can't be up to us to figure it out for ourselves, not just because we shouldn't have to but because some of us are terrible at it when we try. This includes bright young people at my university, one for example who had a whole textbook on reproductive biology to answer this homework essay question: Write the life story of an egg. Because she cited it, I know that instead of using her high quality resource, she went straight to livestrong.com for all of her information.

Because of movements like the anti-vaccinators and all the people without celiac disease who won't eat gluten, it's easy to worry that unscientific trends with birth will dial back mortality rates to medieval ones. Heck, it's tempting to worry that when videos like this get around to some people who love all things PALEO, they will make it so.

No wonder so many of us can't trust climate scientists and evolutionary scientists. When it comes to our health, "science" has an agenda that's not always first and foremost what's best for us. When it comes to our beauty, "science" smells like money. If this is all we know of "science" then I'm less surprised of the push back against biology, ecology, climate, space exploration, etc... that to us scientists seems downright ridiculous.

If we're going to get non-scientists on board with real science, we need to take the word back.

Hurricane Sandy and the collapse of the Maya

On our whacked society

So, there are those enlightened members among us who have declared in their wisdom that hurricane Sandy is God's punishment for our tolerance of gays, for Obama (naturally--he's the wrong color), for our loose morals, and I forget what else (maybe too many liberals).  What an insight!

This hurricane sent by divine wisdom to punish us for allowing gay marriage was not aimed very precisely, however, and one wonders at His supposed omniscience.  After all, the people displaced or killed were mainly not gay couples or people sinning by the various means suggested.  They were just folks, minding their own business.  That suggests a God who's like a surgeon working with a band saw.  Can't He target his gales and floods to those who really deserve it?  I mean, some whole states that are under water and wind don't even allow the mortal sin of gay marriage.  We should expect more skill from the entity supposedly to be our savior!

Why do we bother to maintain schools in this country?  Obviously, the lessons are not sinking in.  After all, 40% or more of our citizenry thinks evolution didn't happen, and liken Darwin's ideas to misleading fantasies such as the idea of an Easter bunny (like fossils, those eggs in your lawn on Easter were just laid there to mislead you).  Maybe God Himself hasn't got much of an education, as his skill level in aiming floods and hurricanes is about equivalent to  many people who have college degrees these days, perhaps reflecting the slipping standards we in the profession have tolerated.  One begins to wonder whether the Noachian flood was really meant just to drown the Pharaoh's troops or something.  Maybe the Red Sea parted too early and should have drowned the Jews.  Who knows what blunders have been recorded as miracles?

On the other hand, there are those who are saying, after this recent flood, "WHY AREN'T PEOPLE  PAYING ATTENTION??  THIS PROVES WHAT WE'VE BEEN SAYING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING!!"   Well, this, too reeks of ideology and tribalism, the tendency to see in an event support for one's favorite group's  pre-existing biases.  Does the tidal surge that caused so much damage on the East coast bode poorly for the future, on the grounds of human-induced global warming?  In fact, that does seem to us to be plausible -- certainly more plausible than the idea that the hurricane was God's wrath -- and the extent of the damage could be viewed as a warning sign.  Some analysis seems to suggest that the tide was higher by a foot or so as a result of global warming, than it would have been from the same storm a century ago.  Indeed, the equation that suggests that climate change is exacerbating extreme weather takes into account more moisture in the air, warmer ocean temperatures and so on -- here's an explanation of this.  But one swallow doesn't make a spring and whether this one storm should be given much if any weight, on its own, in the global warming dialog is a relevant question.

The Mayan collapse
The climate-change argument to account for Sandy's destructiveness raises an interesting thing to think about, over and above whether it is evidence of human-caused climate change (or God's wrath).

Archeologists wonder and debate about the causes of the disappearance of major civilizations, of which there are many instances.  One on the American landscape was the collapse of major Mayan urban centers in Central America.  These had declined and largely been deserted, at least as major urban centers, by the time the Spanish arrived--that is, they were not, as were the Aztecs, done in by Spanish swords or by new diseases.

What caused the abandonment of the Mayan cities?  Was it war, a catastrophic event, a decimating conquest?  Or was it gradual, over many generations, due to the diminution of the soil or climate for supporting agriculture?  If slow, did the Mayans even know it was happening, or did each generation just do as best it could, not realizing the decline in population and so on? 

We might get a hint from Sandy and global warming debates.  What if there are more and more frequent incidents like Sandy in the next few years?  Unlike priests who may blame this on the cursed sinfulness of New Yorkers (which is a true characterization of them even if unrelated to hurricanes), climate scientists might correctly blame it on global warming.  At some point, even current skeptics would begin wondering what to do to keep from ruining their shoes several times a year.

A major company might be the first to decide that at the price of sandbags, the cost of staying in Manhattan was no longer good business, and would move to, say, Cleveland where such disasters don't seem imminent.  Banks and the stock exchange might decide to move to greener pastures, so to speak, like Omaha, where George Soros lives and seems to have done very well.  The entertainment media might move to Dallas or Minneapolis.  Once enough major companies did this, in the following decade other large entities might follow suit.  Starbucks and McD would be out of customers, and would close their doors.  Nobody would be there to see Macy's Christmas displays, so they'd move to St Louis.  There could be a kind of sheep-like trend-following by which those entities just decided to do as others have done, with or without good reasons of their own.  Or, it could become apparent that the gravitational center of the whatever-business universe had moved and that anyone hoping to make it in that business had to move to where the action was.

Fencing off of abandoned buildings, closing some subway lines or even, say, the lower tip of Manhattan, could lead the movement of even more away from the City.  After a few decades, New York could become a virtual ghost town.

Of course, we keep extensive records of what we're doing, so unlike our difficulty deconstructing what happened in Central America, future historians of the 4th millennium might know what happened here directly.  Or, records could be lost and they might have to make the  kinds of guesses about New York that archeologists today make about the Mayans:  What happened to the New York civilization to lead to its collapse?  Indeed, if the climate argument is correct, the east coast concentrations of buildings might go the way of Atlantis, submerged into mythology.

Whatever the reason, if there is any particular long-term reason, for what Sandy did, it may give a hint of how events that everyone was aware of at the time led to gradual abandonment of former civilization centers, that thousands of years later could look like sudden catastrophes.

Maybe the Mayans blamed their droughts on God's anger, too.  But whether the reason was that  they had allowed gay marriage is something one can only speculate about.

Cold chills and statistical mischief

In a Beeb story, Dr Phil Jones, a climatologist suggests that we now have evidence that global warming is real.  This is appropriate for MT because it reflects some strange, yet almost universally accepted, criteria for deciding what is really 'real'.  It is an issue biologists, evolutionary or genomic or otherwise, including anthropologists and others dealing with human variation should be more than just aware of, but should integrate into their thought-processes.

Previously, says Dr Jones (as quoted by the reporter), we didn't have enough information to be sure,

"but another year of data has pushed the trend past the threshold usually used to assess whether trends are 'real'".  Dr Jones says this shows the importance of using longer records for analysis.

Now what could this mean?  How can something become 'real' just because we have another set of data?  Dr Jones explains:

The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn't significant at the standard 95% level that people use," Professor Jones told BBC News.

If this doesn't strike you as strange, it should!  How can another year make something 'real'?  How can a 95% 'level' make something real?  Or if it makes it 'significant', does that make it real?  Or is there a difference?  Or if it's 'significant', is it important?

This is uncritical speaking that makes science seem like a kind of boardwalk shell game.  Find the pea and win a teddy bear!

In fact, what we mean is that by convention (that is, by a totally subjective and voluntary agreement), if something is likely to happen 'only' by chance once in 20 times, and it actually happens, we judge that it's due to factors other than chance. One in 20 means a 5% chance.  We call that the p value of a significance test.  (this is the complement--same meaning--as the 95% level referred to in the story).  And here significance is a very poor, if standard, word choice.  We would be better using a more neutrally descriptive term like 'unusuality' or 'rareness'.

In fact, global warming is either real or it's not (assuming we can define 'global warming').  Regardless of the cause--or the real significance for worldly affairs--the global temparature is always changing, so the questions really are something like: 'on average, is the global mean temperature rising more than usual, or in a way reflecting a long-term trend?'

Further, those who 'believe' in global warming--are convinced on various diverse grounds that it's happening, the 'mere' 90% level of previous years' data did not convince them that global warming wasn't taking place.  Indeed, if before now we didn't have data showing the trend at the 5% level, how on earth (so to speak) did anyone ever think to argue that this was happening?

There is absolutely no reason to think that very weak effects, that can never be detected by standard western statistical criteria are not 'real'.  They could even be 'significant': a unique mutation can kill you!

Perhaps a better way for this story to be told is that another year of data reinforced previous evidence that the trend was continuing, or accelerating, that its unusuality got greater, and that this is consistent with evidence from countless diverse sources (glacial melting, climate changes, biotic changes, and so on).

Suppose that no single factor was responsible for climate change, but instead that thousands of tiny factors were, and suppose further that climate change was too incremental to pass the kind of statistical significance test we use.  Global warming and its effects could still be as real as rain but not subject to this kind cutoff-criterion thinking.

This is precisely (so to speak) the problem facing GWAS and other aspects of genomic inference, and of reconstructing evolutionary histories.  p-value thinking is rigid, century old rigid criterion-of-convenience, with no bearing on real-world causality--on whether something is real or not real.  It may be that we would say if an effect is so weak that its p-value is more than 0.05, it's not important enough to ask for a grant to follow up that finding.  Hah!  We have yet to see anyone act that way!  If you believe there's an effect you'll argue your way out of unimpressive p-values.

And, again, even if the test-criterion is not passed, the effect could be genuine.  On the other side, and here we've got countless (sad) GWAS-like examples of trivially weak things that did pass some p-value test, and that fact is used to argue that the effect is 'significant' (hinting that that means 'important').

Statistical inference has been a powerful way that institutionalized science can progress in an orderly way.  But it is a human, cultural approach, not the only possible approach, and it has serious weaknesses that, because they are inconvenient, are usually honored in the breach.

Yes or no, take your pick: the implications of uncertainty

From Flickr via
Wikimedia Commons

It's holiday book-reading time, the best part of a holiday.  One isn't usually given a dirty book on these occasions, but a very interesting book under my tree this year was Dirt, by geologist David Montgomery.  This discusses a topic vital to survival: the soil.  The subtitle gives away the author's point:  "The Erosion of Civilization."

Dirt is about the repeated way that agriculture and other uses of the land by large human populations, such as cover much of the earth these days, erodes or degrades soil much faster than it can be replaced by natural processes.  Montgomery points out that soil buildup is slow, and erosion, too, may be so slow that we hardly notice it. In our current scientific, data-laden age, with huge populations and rapid growth, we seem more able to notice the changes than our ancestors may have been able to do.

Although we have only sparse data on relative rates of soil production vs soil erosion, the data do indicate that loss is greater than gain.  But in a pithy sentence the author notes that

This leaves the issue in a position not unlike global warming--while academics argue over the details, vested interests stake out positions to defend behind smokescreens of uncertainty.

And it's not just global warming.  We see the very same posturing in regard to biomedical genomics in which convenient self-serving positions are taken in regard to the effectiveness of genomic predictions of health and disease susceptibility.  Some argue that genetic causation is complex and that there are better ways to spend health resources (both in terms of research and application), while others promise near immortality from 'personalized genomic medicine'.

MT readers know where we stand on that particular issue.  But a more important and deeper point is the pervasiveness of the same kind of issues in our society.  We purport to be a fact-driven 'evidence based' society, that relies on science for important decisions.  But from foreign policy, economics, and many other fields, to genetics we face masses of data on phenomena that clearly involve many different contributing factors.  Often, we don't even know what all the factors are, much less being able to measure them accurately.

Normal science, the scientific method we pretend to follow so rigorously, is designed to answer very focused questions.  We do this by isolating one variable at a time under controlled conditions, so we can determine what that variable does.  But with complex causation this is difficult to do, if not impossible in practice, and single causes may not have much explanatory power even if we could estimate it accurately.  Often we deal with processes too slow to be accurately predicted by extrapolation from what we can confidently estimate from science.  We know that's true about evolution, but it applies also to soil abundance and climate change among others.

As 2011 starts out, dealing with such complexities is perhaps the most important general challenge to science today.  In many areas, it doesn't much matter how a question is approached or answered, and much of the perhaps properly ridiculed attention of academic research is rooted in trivia taken far too seriously (when professors should be teaching instead).  Who cares whether a hangnail led Shakespeare to write Othello, or how an ostrich leg-bone evolved?  Only a few professors struggling for dominance in their journals!

But a lot of major questions that science is being asked to answer do have major implications for our society, lifestyles, and behavior.  When that is the case, since those of us who are haves like to have more, more, more (or, at least, not to have to change from comfortable ways of living), it is only natural to see vested-interest posturing.  Each side thinks it's right, and resents the benighted opposition, and each side will tend to slant the facts or color their interpretations in their own self-interest.  Literature going back to the beginning of literature shows the natural resistance to change in human society, especially among the established generation at any given time.

There is no easy way out of this when facts are incomplete and phenomena too slow or complex, so that we need to extrapolate beyond direct observation.  Sometimes, the process is really slow in this sense.  In other times, things can change very rapidly, but we just don't understand them enough (or care to).  Major economic collapses or political dominoes leading to military disasters are clear examples.

Our lives, or those of our children, depend on acting on knowledge.  The history of dirt shows how entire civilizations can go under if they fail to act soon or definitively enough.  In the past, perhaps they had no knowledge or choice.  But we do have at least the archeological record, and some choice.  But we rarely seem to act before tragedy strikes.  We are each of us too rooted in the vested interests of our own lives to be as free to act as might be best, and uncertainty provides a handy excuse for inaction.

Can science adapt to the new landscape of complexity?