A significant (IMO) blogpost about the work of atmospheric scientist Tim Garrett

[GliderGuider]

But it's not so much about atmospheric physics as it is about the thermodynamic nature human of civilization, and how that fact makes its collapse inevitable.

Tim Garrett of the University of Utah is one of my current favorites from the new crop of holistic, big-picture, thermodynamic-literate scientists. I've been following him for a while now, and have great admiration for his work – as you might expect, since it dovetails precisely with my own intuitive understanding of how non-equilibrium thermodynamics lies at the heart of collective human social behavior.

The blogpost is an overview of his work in this area, including published papers and a set of web pages he maintains around this topic.

It’s worth the read if you’re interested in stretching your understanding of the human predicament beyond the usual suspects – faulty morality, greed, bad education etc. – and include some physics in the equation.

I said this in one of my comments on the post:

My first glimpse of this worldview came as an intuitive epiphany just over a year ago, and everything I’ve read since then has served to confirm its validity. Look up the work of Stanley N. Salthe and Arto Anilla, for example, or you can find some of my thermodynamic reading list on my web site. It’s a perspective that seems to be spreading, even in the hard-core science community.

I am not a scientist, and no, a degree in Computer Science does NOT count. My development of the idea was based on two things – my native ability to read scientific papers, and some intuitive ability at pattern recognition. For all of my lack of rigor, the conclusions I came to were largely similar to Garrett’s: collective human behavior is deterministic (though individual behavior may be less so); this determinism is built into our genetic code through natural selection, which is itself a manifestation of the Second Law in open systems – see Odum/Lotka’s MPP; collective human behavior is guided by those inbuilt genetic tendencies towards growth; all system growth in size or complexity (including the strength and depth of social hierarchies) is dependent on energy flow and thus beholden to the Second Law; and that we cannot get off the train because even if individuals might be able to make that choice, there is nowhere else to go.

The human enterprise has manifested an emergent quality – a one-way growth function that will be pursued by the collective for as long as the conditions permit. We bend all our social structures – politics, economics, technology, education, communication – to the service of this one-way function. The fact that some individuals can go against this flow means as little as the motion vector of an individual molecule of oxygen in the eyewall of a hurricane.

While I regret that this determinism rubs so many the wrong way, as far as I can see it’s the closest thing to a core truth that has been discovered so far about the human situation today.

Here are a few excerpts from the blogpost itself:

The Biophysics of Civilization, Money = Energy, and the Inevitability of Collapse

Atmospheric scientist Tim Garrett has a few papers on this subject and a new paper on collapse which I’ll mention at the end, but first let’s review and get an understanding of what he said in his censored paper, ‘Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?‘, as well as the following recorded speech. I consider Garret to be a biophysical economist firmly rooted in geophysics and reality, much like Albert Bartlett and Charles Hall.

Conclusions of the paper entitled ‘Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?’:

• Improving energy efficiency accelerates CO2 emissions growth.
  
• Absent collapsing the economy (In other words turning the inflation adjusted GDP to zero), emissions can be stabilized only by building the equivalent of one nuke plant per day globally (or some other non CO2-emitting power supply)
  
• Emissions growth has inertia (due to the high probability of points one and two)
  
• The present state and growth of civilization are determined by the past, and the past fundamentally cannot be changed. Thus we are set on a trajectory that can lead to simplified predictions of the future.

Civilization is an organism that can be defined by how it consumes/transforms energy. Physics can be used to describe civilization. There are basic laws of thermodynamics and, fundamentally, physics is about the transformation of energy from one state to another or really the flow of energy downhill, or more strictly, the flow of material downhill from a high potential state to a low potential state. You can think of a ball rolling from a high gravitational potential to a low gravitational potential.

We can treat civilization as a single organism that interacts on a global scale with available energy reservoirs and through the transformation of that energy (stuff is done, economic activity occurs). Money is a representation of that capacity to do stuff physically (or how fast it can consume that energy).

This is a testable hypothesis and it can be expressed mathematically which means we can look at this quantitatively.

[nilram]

1. Worth reading, thanks