Peak X (for many values of X)

02. April 2012 · 6 comments · Categories: humour, sustainability

Ever since I wrote about peak oil last year, I’ve been collecting references to “Peak X”. Of course, the key idea, Hubbert’s Peak applies to any resource extraction, where the resource is finite. So it’s not surprising that wikipedia now has entries on:

And here’s a sighting of a mention of Peak Gold.

Unlike peak oil, some of these curves can be dampened by the appropriate recycling. But what of stuff we normally think of as endlessly renewable:

  • Peak Water – it turns out that we haven’t been managing the world’s aquifers and lakes sustainably, despite the fact that that’s where our freshwater supplies come from (See Peter Gleick’s 2010 paper for a diagnosis and possible solutions)
  • Peak Food – similarly, global agriculture appears to be unsustainable, partly because food policy and speculation have wrecked local sustainable farming practices, but also because of population growth (See Jonathan Foley’s 2011 paper for a diagnosis and possible solutions).
  • Peak Fish – although overfishing is probably old news to everyone now.
  • Peak Biodiversity (although here it’s referred to as Peak Nature, which I think is sloppy terminology)

Which also leads to pressure on specific things we really care about, such as:

Then there is a category of things that really do need to peak:

And just in case there’s too much doom and gloom in the above, there are some more humorous contributions:

And those middle two, by the wonderful Randall Monroe make me wonder what he was doing here:

I can’t decide whether that last one is just making fun of the the singularity folks, or whether it’s a clever ruse to get people realize Hubbert’s Peak must kick in somewhere!

A Geoengineering Primer

29. March 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Geoengineering

I was talking with Eric Yu yesterday about a project to use goal modeling as a way of organizing the available knowledge on how to solve a specific problem, and we thought that geo-engineering would make an interesting candidate to try this out on: It’s controversial, a number of approaches have been proposed, there are many competing claims made for them, and it’s hard to sort through such claims.

So, I thought I would gather together the various resources I have on geo-engineering:

Introductory Overviews:

Short commentaries:

Books:

Specific studies / papers:

New Course: Systems Thinking for Global Problems

28. March 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: systems thinking

Sometime in May, I’ll be running a new graduate course, DGC 2003 Systems Thinking for Global Problems. The course will be part of the Dynamics of Global Change graduate program, a cross-disciplinary program run by the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Here’s my draft description of the course:

The dynamics of global change are complex, and demand new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing inter-relationships between multiple global systems. In this course, we will explore the role of systems thinking as a conceptual toolkit for studying the inter-relationships between problems such as globalization, climate change, energy, health & wellbeing, and food security. The course will explore the roots of systems thinking, for example in General Systems Theory, developed by Karl Bertalanffy to study biological systems, and in Cybernetics, developed by Norbert Wiener to explore feedback and control in living organisms, machines, and organizations. We will trace this intellectual history to recent efforts to understand planetary boundaries, tipping points in the behaviour of global dynamics, and societal resilience. We will explore the philosophical roots of systems thinking as a counterpoint to the reductionism used widely across the natural sciences, and look at how well it supports multiple perspectives, trans-disciplinary synthesis, and computational modeling of global dynamics. Throughout the course, we will use global climate change as a central case study, and apply systems thinking to study how climate change interacts with many other pressing global challenges.

I’m planning to get the students to think about issues such as the principle of complementarity, and second-order cybernetics, and of course, how to understand the dynamics of non-linear systems, and the idea of leverage points. We’ll take a quick look at how earth system models work, but not in any detail, because it’s not intended to be physics or computing course; I’m expecting most of the students to be from political science, education, etc.

The hard part will be picking a good core text. I’m leaning towards Donnella Meadows’s book, Thinking in Systems, although I just received my copy of the awesome book Systems Thinkers, by Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp (I’m proud to report that Magnus was once a student of mine!).

Anyway, suggestions for material to cover, books & papers to include, etc are most welcome.

Up for review: Assessing climate model software quality

15. February 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: climate modeling

Our paper on defect density analysis of climate models is now out for review at the journal Geoscientific Model Development (GMD). GMD is an open review / open access journal, which means the review process is publicly available (anyone can see the submitted paper, the reviews it receives during the process, and the authors’ response). If the paper is eventually accepted, the final version will also be freely available.

The way this works at GMD is that the paper is first published to Geoscientific Model Development Discussions (GMDD) as an un-reviewed manuscript. The interactive discussion is then open for a fixed period (in this case, 2 months). At that point the editors will make a final accept/reject decision, and, if accepted, the paper is then published to GMD itself. During the interactive discussion period, anyone can post comments on the paper, although in practice, discussion papers often only get comments from the expert reviewers commissioned by the editors.

One of the things I enjoy about the peer-review process is that a good, careful review can help improve the final paper immensely. As I’ve never submitted before to a journal that uses an open review process, I’m curious to see how the open reviewing will help – I suspect (and hope!) it will tend to make reviewers more constructive.

Anyway, here’s the paper. As it’s open review, anyone can read it and make comments (click the title to get to the review site):

Assessing climate model software quality: a defect density analysis of three models

J. Pipitone and S. Easterbrook
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract. A climate model is an executable theory of the climate; the model encapsulates climatological theories in software so that they can be simulated and their implications investigated. Thus, in order to trust a climate model one must trust that the software it is built from is built correctly. Our study explores the nature of software quality in the context of climate modelling. We performed an analysis of defect reports and defect fixes in several versions of leading global climate models by collecting defect data from bug tracking systems and version control repository comments. We found that the climate models all have very low defect densities compared to well-known, similarly sized open-source projects. We discuss the implications of our findings for the assessment of climate model software trustworthiness.

YPV: Young People Voting

19. April 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: politics

For those outside Canada, in case you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle of a general election. Canada has a parliamentary system, modelled after the British one, with a first-past-the-post system for electing representatives (members of parliament), where party with the most seats after the election is invited to form a government, and its leader to become Prime Minister. For the last few parliaments we’ve had minority governments, first Liberal, then Conservative.

Somewhere along the way, many people just stopped voting: from turnouts in the high 70s back in the 60’s, we’ve had 64.7% and then 58.8% turnout respectively in the last two elections – the last being the lowest turnout ever. There maybe many different reasons for this lack of enthusiasm, although listening to the main parties whining about each other during this election, it’s not hard to see why so many people just don’t bother. But one thing is clear: young people are far less likely to vote than any other age group.

So it was great to see last week Rick Mercer with a brilliant call for young voters to use their votes to “scare the hell out of the people who run this country”:

And his message seems to have resonated. Students on campuses across the country have been using social networking to organise vote mobs, making videos along the way as they challenge others to do the same. But here’s the interesting thing. The young people of this country have a very different set of preferences to the general population:

Just look at how the projected composition of parliament would look it it were up to the youngsters: the Liberals and the Green Party virtually neck-and-neck for most votes, and instead of the greens being shut out of parliament, they’d hold 43 seats! Of course, the projected seat count also throws into sharp focus what’s wrong with our current voting system: the Bloq, with lowest share of the vote of any of the parties would still hold 60 seats. And the Liberals with just 2% more of the votes than the greens would still get more than twice as many seats. Nevertheless, I like this picture much more than the parliaments we’ve had in the last few elections.

So, if you’re eligible to vote, and you’re anywhere around half my age, make my day – help change our parliament for the better!

Canada’s Climate Change Report Card

17. April 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: sustainability

This is a guest post from Kaitlin Carroll, originally written as an assignment for the course PMU199S.

How does Canada measure up on climate change? We are of course an economically developed country, and what with all our snow, our beavers and our wilderness one would think we’re doing pretty good, right? Wrong. Maybe there are a few other criteria in the fight against climate change, besides the beavers.

Taken from epi.yale.edu
EPI Ranking Map. Highest scores are yellow, and scores lower as the colour gets darker.

On Yale’s EPI (Environmental Performance Index) Canada ranks 46th out of 163 countries, including currently developing countries such as China and places recently hit by climate-change spurred natural disasters like The Maldives and Haiti. Coming out on top are countries like Switzerland, which ranked second, and Sweden which ranked fourth.  So how does Canada compare to such high ranked countries?

Based on Yale’s EPI website we can draw some basic conclusions about quality of life in Sweden, Switzerland and Canada. The average GDP per capita of the three countries is just upwards of $34,000. 100% of citizens in all three of the countries also have access to basic needs, such as sanitation and clean water. The countries are also very similar in terms of local climate, which also plays a key role in quality of life, and emissions in terms of heating and cooling. In other words, Sweden, Switzerland and Canada are all developed nations with a great quality of life.

So, if Canada has such a great quality of life, we shouldn’t have any problems setting up environmental reforms and becoming leaders in the fight against climate change! How, then, are we ranked 46th?

The problem seems to lie in policy and practice. In an article by David Richard Boyd, a well-known environmental lawyer and Canadian, he compares Sweden and Canada on ten different environmental criteria. The reason why Canada falls behind is directly linked to their policies. While Sweden has used “innovative economic policies to reduce pressure on the environment” and produced “a bold national strategy to achieve sustainability within a generation”, Canada has taken a different approach. Canada is described in the article as a country which puts emphasis on voluntary contributions to fighting climate change, instead of enforcing policies. They also favour environmental education, which I agree is necessary, but education without action and the support of local government officials will have little effect.

Boyd also seems to cite a lot of the same key issues with Canada’s policy as The Conference Board of Canada.  The Conference Board of Canada is an independent and non-profit organization what provides research studies on a wide range of Canada’s economic and political policies.  In the board’s article on environment Canada is ranked 15th out of 17 of it’s peer countries, and given a C grade.  Below is a list of some of the important issues mentioned by both Boyd and The Conference Board of Canada:

Key Issues

Population density also plays a big role in climate change, according to a study by Christopher Kennedy, Professor at the University of Toronto. This is largely due to the fact that ground transportation (such as cars, trucks, and buses) contributes a lot to the GHGs we send into the atmosphere. The chart below compares the ten different cities in Kennedy’s study in terms of their population density and GHG output.

Population Density vs GHGs

Unlike Switzerland and Sweden, Canada is huge! We have a mix of rural and urban areas, but even within our urban centers, such as Toronto, we’re nowhere near as densely populated as most European cities. This means we have to travel a lot more from the suburbs to the down town core. Toronto’s Public Transit has a system length of 70km and 69 stations, Montreal’s Metro is nearly the same, with a length of 69km and 68 stations. Not only is it the distance, but it’s the service area of the transit that affects us. In both cases of Toronto and Montreal there are only four different subway lines, which means the service area is very restricted. We can compare this to Sweden’s Public Transit, the Stockholm Metro, which has 7 different lines, and although it covers about the same distance (105km) it serves 100 different stations. Public transit is then more accessible for those living within the city. In essence, because of our lack of population density and inadequate public transportation, Canada has become a car-oriented country.

The good news is, there’s still room for improvement! Canada can make changes to its policies to make climate change an issue of its government and its citizens as a whole, not just the select few. We can take examples from those countries ranked 1st through 45th and build upon and improve our society in order to ease pressure off of the earth.  The goal should be to bring every country to the number one spot, and there’s no reason why a country which has the means and the will cannot change.

Inflo: open, shared, visual calculators

08. April 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: software tools, sustainability

Today Jonathan Lung released a new version of our open, shareable, web-based calculator, Inflo. We have a new screencast to explain what it is:

You can play with Inflo yourself (just say yes to accept the site certificate; you’ll need to register a new username if you want to save your calculations on the server). Or go see some of the calculations we’ve already built with it:

Or there’s always the tutorial for inflo in inflo itself….

Nature Climate Change on Open Data, Open Code

31. March 2011 · 4 comments · Categories: climate informatics

There’s an excellent article in the inaugural issue of Nature Climate Change this month, written by Kurt Kleiner, entitled Data on Demand. Kurt interviewed many of the people who are active in making climate code and data more open: Gavin Schmidt from NASA GISS, Nick Barnes, of the Climate Code Foundation, John Wilbanks of Creative Commons, Peter Murray-Rust at Cambridge University, David Randall, at Colorado State U, David Carlson, Director of the International Polar Year Programme, Mark Parsons of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Cameron Neylon, of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, Greg Wilson of Software Carpentry, and me.

Green IT or Greening through IT

25. March 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: greentech

I’m just collecting some readings for my grad course next week, for which the topic is Green IT. Here’s what I came up with:

Murugesan seems to give the best overview, although I also like the case studies in the GeSI report. The latter is dated November 2010, so it’s pretty much up to date.

The WWF report makes the important point that as the energy consumption of computers only make up about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the potential for incremental solutions that focus on more energy efficient computing are relatively small, while the potential for emissions reduction by applying smart IT solutions to other sectors (e.g. reducing the need for travel, smart buildings, dematerialization) is much greater. Hence the suggested shift in terminology, from “Green IT” to “Greening with IT”.

Which brings me to another plug for Bill Tomlinson’s excellent book, “Greening through IT“, which I ought to get around to reviewing properly…

Prevention

11. March 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: philosophy

This article in the NYT times, “Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives” about today’s earthquake reminded me of the classic poem by Joseph Malins, entitled “The ambulance down in the valley”. The parallel with climate policy is obvious:

‘Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed,
Though to walk near its crest was so pleasant;
But over its terrible edge there had slipped
A duke and full many a peasant.
So the people said something would have to be done,
But their projects did not at all tally;
Some said, “Put a fence ’round the edge of the cliff,”
Some, “An ambulance down in the valley.”

But the cry for the ambulance carried the day,
For it spread through the neighboring city;
A fence may be useful or not, it is true,
But each heart became full of pity
For those who slipped over the dangerous cliff;
And the dwellers in highway and alley
Gave pounds and gave pence, not to put up a fence,
But an ambulance down in the valley.

“For the cliff is all right, if you’re careful,” they said,
“And, if folks even slip and are dropping,
It isn’t the slipping that hurts them so much
As the shock down below when they’re stopping.”
So day after day, as these mishaps occurred,
Quick forth would those rescuers sally
To pick up the victims who fell off the cliff,
With their ambulance down in the valley.

Then an old sage remarked: “It’s a marvel to me
That people give far more attention
To repairing results than to stopping the cause,
When they’d much better aim at prevention.
Let us stop at its source all this mischief,” cried he,
“Come, neighbors and friends, let us rally;
If the cliff we will fence, we might almost dispense
With the ambulance down in the valley.”

“Oh he’s a fanatic,” the others rejoined,
“Dispense with the ambulance? Never!
He’d dispense with all charities, too, if he could;
No! No! We’ll support them forever.
Aren’t we picking up folks just as fast as they fall?
And shall this man dictate to us? Shall he?
Why should people of sense stop to put up a fence,
While the ambulance works in the valley?”

But the sensible few, who are practical too,
Will not bear with such nonsense much longer;
They believe that prevention is better than cure,
And their party will soon be the stronger.
Encourage them then, with your purse, voice, and pen,
And while other philanthropists dally,
They will scorn all pretense, and put up a stout fence
On the cliff that hangs over the valley.

Better guide well the young than reclaim them when old,
For the voice of true wisdom is calling.
“To rescue the fallen is good, but ’tis best
To prevent other people from falling.”
Better close up the source of temptation and crime
Than deliver from dungeon or galley;
Better put a strong fence ’round the top of the cliff
Than an ambulance down in the valley.

New game: Fate of the World

02. March 2011 · 3 comments · Categories: software tools

This only runs on Windows, so I’ll have to wait a while for the Mac version before I can try it myself, so maybe in the meantime someone else can play it and tell me what it’s like:

I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that Myles Allen (famous for climateprediction.net and the Trillionth Tonne study) was a consultant in the game design. Does this mean it brings on board some of the dynamics in the latest GCMs? The Guardian previewed the beta version of the game back in the fall, but they don’t appear to have actually played it. PC Gamer magazine did play it, and concludes that it really does succeed in it’s goal of making people thinks seriously about the issues.

Hmmm, almost makes me want to borrow a PC to try it…

Climate Heroes: Tim DeChristopher

01. March 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: politics

At the end of Garvey’s book on Climate Ethics that he concludes that direct action is necessary, and by his ethical standards, non-violent civil disobedience is appropriate. So I was inspired to read the story of Tim DeChristopher, who disrupted the auction of the oil rights for land in Utah around the spectacular Arches National Park. He pretended to be a bona fide bidder, and successfully bid for a $1.8 million of oil and gas leases, and pushed up the prices on others. Of course had no intention of buying them – the idea was to draw attention to the sale of these lands, and, as it turns out, to show that this auction, along with a whole bunch of other similar auctions, was illegal anyway. Despite the finding that the auctions were illegal, Tim is now up for trial, facing a penalty of ten years in jail.

His trial starts today, and there’s a huge campaign underway to protest at the trial, and to support Tim in his fight for justice. Having visited both Arches National Park and Salt Lake City back in December, I kinda wish I was there this week to show him some support.

« Older articles
Newer articles »