Is Earth gaining or losing MASS and why this matters...

Herman Daly "GETS IT"

The vast majority of economists are in fact 'psychic' economists only, and they  greatly resent attempts of rebel economists like Herman Daly to re-establish their discipline on a physical basis.


 So they claim that thermodyamic physical restraints on human activity on earth are totally irrelevant, as we are not living in an "isolated system" planet where the limits of the second law of thermodynamics would apply, but on an "open system" planet that annually gets a great deal of new solar energy and a 100,000 tons of cosmic dust.

But is this true ?

( Is anything that mainstream economists ever say about physicality  true ? In my experience, not usually. Useful members of a sub branch of the psychology department yes, but truly brain-dead hopeless in the physical sciences.)

We also lose much matter and energy annually : in particular, we lose about as much light molecules of gases like hydrogen and helium outbound into space as we gain in cosmic dust. We also lose a small amount annually of mass from being converted into energy via natural radioactivity, which affects every atom eventually.

Yes, every atom in the universe will spontaneously break down, if the universe lasts long enough. Uranium does it quite fast, but all elements do so, at increasingly slower rates.

And energy - thankfully - escapes the Earth annually in huge amounts : or we'd be a molten chunk of dead rock otherwise.

Eventually all that inbound solar energy that helped make the huge ancient redwoods escapes back into space, slightly raising the temperature of the space vacuum ever so slightly ( if its continuing expansion doesn't lower it right back again !)

But I will argue, being first and foremost a practical politician, not some dreamy-eyed academic scientist, that what we really care about - as voters and consumers (aka the guys who actually put the groceries on economists' and scientists' breakfast tables),is neither mass or energy but work.

Engineers usually "get it" right away , but most academic scientists struggle to understand the political difference.

Politically, its all about WORK , not the scientists' mass or energy

On the way to becoming finely dispersed (useless to humans) friction-dust pollution and thermal-noise pollution, concentrated forms of  mass and energy ( commercially large bodies of iron ore  and coal ore) can do very useful work for us, as industrial humans.

But once these ore bodies are gone (over the next two centuries) they will not be replaced, at least not in any world that humans can survive in.

A world such where ocean bacteria were able to concentrate enough widely dispersed iron atoms to create the vast beds of iron ore that we run our world upon will not be one for humans --- nor would the hot swampy world that led giant ferns growths becoming vast beds of coal our electrified world relies on to run its lights and Internet.

We will have to learn to survive on the immediate biological conversion of solar energy into plants and animals.

 And upon the use of  daily solar energy to do such things as to bake abundant clay into bricks : once again in a human world of rock and wood , with metals treated as precious and only used for their most valuable applications :  such as high grade steel reserved for blade edges, as in the days of old.

What about uranium and atomic energy ? Uranium is only useful to humans if found in those rare highly concentrated ore bodies : dispersed into random atoms all over the planet, per the second law of thermodynamics, they are as useless in terms of work as they are (nearly) indestructible in terms of mass.

To misquote Brian Mulroney : "its all about work,work,work !"

The intellectual "Drift" of former mining company geologist Naomi Oreskes

LYELL, prophet of Victorian Optimism

Unlikely indeed is it to expect that the expert on the scientific debates of 100 years ago on geological Continental Drift  will turn up one day,  reborn , as the expert on present day Climate Change debates !

The head-spinning requires makes one's neck hurt to even to think about it.

Of course if continents do "drift", they do change and if they change, why not the climate as well ? One begins to see a possible connection. And both subjects do involve dissecting furious debates among scientists.

So we have some inklings of Oreskes' possible metamorphosis.

Still she IS a rarity : a former mining company geologist who stoutly defends climate change rather than climate denial.

The key may lay in a just few paragraphs on Page 199  in her first - very long - book on the debates around continental drift.

The historical geologist Charles Schuchert (1858-1942)  seems heaven-sent to make one of the "bad guys" in present day popular books about the decades-old battle over accepting the theory of tectonic plates ( with Alfred Wegener as the much-maligned "good guy").

But Oreskes doesn't fall into that trap.

Like a patient - and fair - bloodhound she goes through all information we have on Schuchert's long and troubled internal debate on the worth of Wegener's theory, rather than featuring only his few - but overheated - verbal outbursts on the subject.

To over simplify, basically in his own area of scientific expertise, Schuchert saw nothing but support for Wegener's ideas.

But like about half of all scientists, Schuchert was too overawed by strong comments of the "big guns" from other scientific disciplines, to actually put his own mind to work to consider the evidence first, through what ever he or she had learned of that discipline's methods .

The other half of scientists share the reverse flaw : believing that being an expert in say, nuclear physics, makes one an expert in every other science.

It is a quite a trick, trying to be intellectually honest, without falling down either of these slippery slopes.

Schuchert rejected his own (literally) "world-class" knowledge of the fossil record ,on the mere second-hand say so that all the "experts" in climate agreed that the climate in the past, at each latitude, was the same as it is today : climate uniformitarianism.

In 1912's intellectual "climate"  it seemed internally self evident that if climates can't change, then neither can continents.

In 2012's intellectual "climate", it is equally self evident, to what Modernists call "warmists",  that if continents can change, why not the climate as well .

Oreskes , Dawson & Daly 

I pay a lot of attention to Oreskes because I suspect that she came to see that yesterday's house wine of Modernity - the theory  of uniformitarianism - was still today's house wine of the climate deniers .

 Just as I have come to that conclusion as well - albeit coming at the subject of climate change via the distinctly odd angle of the Modernist debates over the worth and meaning of Martin Henry Dawson's  Natural Penicillin and Transformative DNA.

I think Herman Daly has also come to see the enduring strength of 1840s uniformitarianism in mainstream 21st century economics.

Given the wampum-like characteristics (In the Flanders & Swann sense of that word)  of this hyper-flexible meme, I almost hesitate to call "Uniformitarianism" a scientific theory : it seems - today - to be more a pseudo-scientific cover story, designed to  assure exuberant Victorians that their intuitive optimism had a  basis in scientific fact.

A dangerous truism today - just as uniformitarianism was in its heyday - is that in 1945 , Modernity fell and Post-Modernity arose.

I used to hold this position myself.

But now I believe that Modernity's hegemony fell apart and that modernity existed uneasily along side post-modernity (aka Global Commensality) in today's post-hegemonic era.

Now this  view at least lets us see the climate wars as the tippy-top of a much larger battle between modernity and commensality for hegemony (while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance) ....

CATO vs CASSE : skygod vs earthling , battling thinktanks

Duelling think tanks, on a flatlining planet....

The CATO Institute, spawner of the denier movement and of all mean things Koch-able, is a powerhouse in the think tank business worldwide.

(And man oh man is it ever a business.

 In most think tanks it provides steady, pensionable, profitable employment for wannabe academics who can't get tenure or peer-reviewed publication. A first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of thinker....)

And I can't think of an organization more worthy of being called the skygod of all skygods - the denier of deniers on all the biological and material limits that humanity must face up to and deal with.

By contrast,Brian Czech's  CASSE ,  the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy ,is virtually unknown outside a relatively small circle of friends and supporters ( albeit friends like David Suzuki and Herman Daly !)

I couldn't even seem to find it on Wikipedia, normally a fount of information on all things obscure.

(I might try seeing it I can edit a token bit about CASSE for Wikipedia and rely on the good will and bad bile of regular wikipedia editors to do it up right.)

But CASSE would seem the natural choice for becoming the planet's leading green think tank.

This is because the advocating a steady state economy is the ONLY thing that truly divides real Green parties from the pro-environment 'greenish' wings of the other parties who remain stubbornly and foolheartedly pro-bloat.

Any party or individual that advocates perpetual growth is really preparing mentally to abandon the Earth, once it is raped to resource-exhaustion, for other worlds.

But CASSE really seems to deserve the title of Earthling of the Earthlings.

Please support it - sign its petition and live and think and talk up a steady state economy.

Be 100% green - not 1% green.

Because 1% of anything might make you rich, but it won't make you happy....

Human Exceptionalists versus CASSE is the new "ballot question" in all future elections

Denying limits is the Kool Aid of Denial

Denying that humans must face the same biological and material restraints as all other lifeforms , is the hallmark of the climate denier and of the libertarian.

They call it "human exceptionalism" - extending to all humans the virtue they once thought only belonged to Americans.

Like skygods, they live in a plane (neat pun, yes ?) well above Nature and its material limits.

Human willpower will inevitably triumph material limits : "mind over matter".

CASSE disputes the CATO's Room 101

Herman Daly has promoted the idea of a steady state economy for decades.

He and his supporters (count me as one) argue that a world with a steady number of people consuming a steady (not ever growing) amount of the world's resources can just about manage to keep human civilization afloat for a few more generations.

His organization is known as CASSE --- think of it as the Matter to the Cato Institute's Anti-Matter ( another clever pun, no ?)

 CASSE as a sort of Earthling Central versus CATO as Skygod Central.

If we got rid of all the parties - including the Greens - and had Cato vs CASSE duke it out for our votes, we might have both a more interesting election AND truly an earth-settling election.

Doom on one side - Hope on the other....

Now, please sign the CASSE Petition  ! *

* And a hat tip to Brian Czech for telling us all about the progress this steady steady idea is making among even the "limitless-growth-is-a-law-of-nature" economists.