"It’s almost hilarious that, in the global change discourse, we still tend to view life merely as a physical-chemical system, even though we know that information governs everything. We’ve embraced artificial intelligence and supercomputers, yet when faced with the ultra-super-hyper computer of life itself, we reduce it to simple chemical reactions—CO₂, carbohydrate production—little more. This perspective is not only flawed but also dangerous."
Thank you, John. It is an absolutely key point. What is the alternative to describing the biota by explicit empirical fitting? We proposed as follows:
"...a global climate model built around the stabilizing impact of natural ecosystems can become such an alternative. This will require an interdisciplinary effort and an account of global transpirational cooling, the role of natural ecosystems in the long-distance moisture transport and water cycle stabilization and the distinct impact of ecosystems at different stages of ecological succession on the surface temperature and fire regime and the cloud cover.
Living systems function on the basis of solar energy that under terrestrial conditions can be converted to useful work with a near 100% efficiency. What processes are enacted with use of this energy, is determined by the genetic programs of all the organisms composing the ecological community. Randomly changing the species composition and morphological status of living organisms in the community—for example, by converting to developed land (removing natural elements altogether), replacing natural forest with a plantation, clearing large expanses for farmland, or forcing areas of forest to remain in an early successional or degraded state—disturbs the flow of environmental information and disrupts the ecosystem's capacity to buffer environmental disturbances."
I am reading the 57 page paper for understanding, so not too fast, but there is a 16 minute video interview with a dumb, clickbait title here, and the answers Langan gives are good, resonating well in my own truth-seeking consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkYzTDYKRPY
What is coming to my mind is that seeking to remove freedom of choice in complex living systems harms the total-function efficiency of the systems, whether human economy or Amazon rainforest.
100% agree the bubbles of discussion around climate change problems and solutions.
Desconexión seems to be the mother of all disasters, between the people, the scientists even the data and the models. It isn’t CO2 vs Water, it is CO2 and water and their interactions with all living and no living things.
I like your point of discrepancy in the models between the water vapor risen with temperature and the decrease of precipitation unexpected ( I hope didn’t get it wrong) any way, data cannot be disregarded, the system is evolving in a way we don’t have the equations and parameters that define it.
Thank you, Maria! Regarding "I like your point of discrepancy in the models between the water vapor risen with temperature and the decrease of precipitation unexpected ( I hope didn’t get it wrong)", I am not sure what post/paper you are exactly referring to, but I will be discussing this in the next post and yes, you are right.
I'm glad you have given your summary. It will be easier to be optimistic about a future when we see the climate change indicators in a better state and when they stop getting worse faster. As a "discouraged world federalist" I must confess your optimism about not needing anything but everyone doing their best to preserve our biotic heritage seems misplaced. But buying time is a good thing as you say if it allows us to manage the Ecological Overshoot Unraveling. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk9vulmEbqc
"Everyone doing their best to preserve our biotic heritage" would be a grand shift from where we are now, it does justify a lot of optimism if it materializes. Such a shift won't happen if we don't fully rethink our relationship with Nature. Currently the importance of preservation is critically undervalued, especially where people's intellects (rather than emotions) are concerned.
Nice piece. It's great to incorporate some of the complexity. One of my pet peeves is that climate models (GCMs) focus almost exclusively on the albedo effects of vegetation rather than any of the microclimate-moderating effects at the surface. Well, I guess it's hard to expect more when the surface represent just one flat side of a state-sized pixel--but then they shouldn't try to draw conclusions about surface vegetation from such a one-dimensional view of it. I appreciate your work, here and in your scientific papers.
Thank you. One problem that I see that given GCMs strive to generate robust predictions/scenarios, there is an implicit incentive to not look into those areas that may generate more discrepancies. A codified appreciation of "the stability of knowledge". In space travel research, for example, the attitude is the opposite: simulate as many extreme situations as possible, such that the spaceship is robustly safe at all times. I once proposed a similar attitude to climate modeling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yr5bm4bw-0&t=14s
Yes this is very good. Maybe we can use a clear exploration in the Gaia Theory. If you're familiar with it? If not everything is online. Natures' complexity cannot be much different than most Animals. As a matter of fact live inhabitants of this planet more than likely all share similar functional biological systems and the big question that we need to come to grips with is why not this planet? Shouldn't it have same similar systems? And the answer as you know is YES
Of course on a planetary level all systems are supersized. Let's think about these systems and I will suggest that the oceans of Earth, water being a feminine aspect, I would think our oceans as the heart = cardiovascular arrangement. The lungs of the planet, its respiratory system =the atmosphere, Rivers are the main coronary arteries carrying nutrients, minerals, and elements, the blood supply for oceans and all marine life. Blocking the flow of major rivers behind dams, well we know what can happen. Human regulated flows can stop centuries old flow patterns and literally bio geochemically transforming water, reducing oxygen, and trapping that critical blood flow.
Forcing large flows at the wrong season can disrupt sensitive and delicate energy pulses, Every spring for eons of time rivers flowed freely, now in a blink of an eye human regulation has disrupted the spring freschet stored it behind dams. So this strong
spring-summer pulse affecting oceans around continental shelves particularly the subarctic is now occurring in the dead of winter, now the spring and summers are but a trickle over these monster dams. One other thought, the natural remedy for Co2 sequestering are the phytoplankton diatoms, a natural immune system, and along with forests can provide up to 45% of Oxygen we breathe. Speaking of natures, Earths systems.
Anyone interested in a deeper dive into dams and the problems that are inherently being ignored by scientists. Our small organization:
New England Canadian Provinces Alliance, hydrodamtruth.org is leading a series of webinars Starting March 12. I’m kicking off/ leading the 1st in the series March 12 "Damming Rivers, Melting Sea Ice, And Waming Oceans” Certainly would appreciate your involvement.
Thank you for your extensive comment and for the webinar link. "Forcing large flows at the wrong season can disrupt sensitive and delicate energy pulses, Every spring for eons of time rivers flowed freely, now in a blink of an eye human regulation has disrupted the spring freschet stored it behind dams."
This is also true concerning the pulses in atmospheric motion. E.g., replacing climax evergreen forests by early successional deciduous forests in the boreal zone greatly changes the sea-land temperature contrast in spring (the evergreens begin to transpire immediately keeping land cool, the deciduous trees can't transpire until their leaves form, so the surface warms a lot), which results in disruptions of moisture transport.
What a brilliant article! You say so clearly what has been rather confusing. I could sense this, but you said it perfectly. Your diagrams were brilliant.
There is a lot of talk about the clearly present aspects of land change through our developmental needs but not much about fire derived ecological systems and how far removed from evolved ecological complexity derived stability they are. Living in Australia one lives with this fire evolved ecosystem and we treat it as something to be nurtured but there is increasing evidence that much of the world has suffered a similar fate , there are examples in the East coast of the USA where fire has been withdrawn form the system for over a hundred years and the forests are re-evolving naturally back toward a pre fire ecological stability offering a greater buffer from climatic extremes. Much to think about Many thanks
This is extremely important: "where fire has been withdrawn form the system for over a hundred years and the forests are re-evolving naturally back toward a pre fire ecological stability offering a greater buffer from climatic extremes."
The ecosystem is self-restoring and escaping from the dry landscape trap. The notion of landscape trap is the one that should be more widely known, in my opinion, as it systematizes very well what's going on and the seemingly opposite processes begin to make sense in a single coherent picture. By the way, the notion of landscape trap was introduced by Australian researchers.
What still gets me is in all discussions there is still little talk about daily temperature fluctuations and the increase in daily and yearly maximum and minimum which create the instability that leads to ecological decline. The dry landscape trap is in part an explanation as is the cloud and temperature discrepancy you point out and not adequately covered in climatic models but with the removal of vegetation also is the removal of the energy shock absorber water offers, This is easily witnessed with ocean vs land variations of daily temperature, Climatic stability or the climatically stable maximum as some would put it which allows for an ecological maximum is of prime importance. If our ultimate goal is species preservation climatic stability is also water preservation and the many ways that we and nature can use it to reduce the increasing temperature fluctuations and the resultant ecological changes, I would say nature thrives with stable daily and yearly gradient changes that maximize opportunity for interaction, to go straight from winter to summer like farmers report in the mid west UAS we have lost autumn and spring and all the life that that entails.
I will be attending the conference where you will be speaking in Paris on March 15th at the UNESCO's Université de la Terre. Very excited to see you in person. Thank you for all that you do.
I very much like this. It resonates:
"It’s almost hilarious that, in the global change discourse, we still tend to view life merely as a physical-chemical system, even though we know that information governs everything. We’ve embraced artificial intelligence and supercomputers, yet when faced with the ultra-super-hyper computer of life itself, we reduce it to simple chemical reactions—CO₂, carbohydrate production—little more. This perspective is not only flawed but also dangerous."
Thank you, John. It is an absolutely key point. What is the alternative to describing the biota by explicit empirical fitting? We proposed as follows:
"...a global climate model built around the stabilizing impact of natural ecosystems can become such an alternative. This will require an interdisciplinary effort and an account of global transpirational cooling, the role of natural ecosystems in the long-distance moisture transport and water cycle stabilization and the distinct impact of ecosystems at different stages of ecological succession on the surface temperature and fire regime and the cloud cover.
Living systems function on the basis of solar energy that under terrestrial conditions can be converted to useful work with a near 100% efficiency. What processes are enacted with use of this energy, is determined by the genetic programs of all the organisms composing the ecological community. Randomly changing the species composition and morphological status of living organisms in the community—for example, by converting to developed land (removing natural elements altogether), replacing natural forest with a plantation, clearing large expanses for farmland, or forcing areas of forest to remain in an early successional or degraded state—disturbs the flow of environmental information and disrupts the ecosystem's capacity to buffer environmental disturbances."
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1150191/full
CTMU, Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe, is something that I found yesterday, explained in a Wiki here https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Cognitive-Theoretic_Model_of_the_Universe
I am reading the 57 page paper for understanding, so not too fast, but there is a 16 minute video interview with a dumb, clickbait title here, and the answers Langan gives are good, resonating well in my own truth-seeking consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkYzTDYKRPY
What is coming to my mind is that seeking to remove freedom of choice in complex living systems harms the total-function efficiency of the systems, whether human economy or Amazon rainforest.
100% agree the bubbles of discussion around climate change problems and solutions.
Desconexión seems to be the mother of all disasters, between the people, the scientists even the data and the models. It isn’t CO2 vs Water, it is CO2 and water and their interactions with all living and no living things.
I like your point of discrepancy in the models between the water vapor risen with temperature and the decrease of precipitation unexpected ( I hope didn’t get it wrong) any way, data cannot be disregarded, the system is evolving in a way we don’t have the equations and parameters that define it.
Thank you, Maria! Regarding "I like your point of discrepancy in the models between the water vapor risen with temperature and the decrease of precipitation unexpected ( I hope didn’t get it wrong)", I am not sure what post/paper you are exactly referring to, but I will be discussing this in the next post and yes, you are right.
You mentioned it in the webinar/ conference with Michal Kracvick about Australia desertification or soil restoration
I'm glad you have given your summary. It will be easier to be optimistic about a future when we see the climate change indicators in a better state and when they stop getting worse faster. As a "discouraged world federalist" I must confess your optimism about not needing anything but everyone doing their best to preserve our biotic heritage seems misplaced. But buying time is a good thing as you say if it allows us to manage the Ecological Overshoot Unraveling. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk9vulmEbqc
"Everyone doing their best to preserve our biotic heritage" would be a grand shift from where we are now, it does justify a lot of optimism if it materializes. Such a shift won't happen if we don't fully rethink our relationship with Nature. Currently the importance of preservation is critically undervalued, especially where people's intellects (rather than emotions) are concerned.
Nice piece. It's great to incorporate some of the complexity. One of my pet peeves is that climate models (GCMs) focus almost exclusively on the albedo effects of vegetation rather than any of the microclimate-moderating effects at the surface. Well, I guess it's hard to expect more when the surface represent just one flat side of a state-sized pixel--but then they shouldn't try to draw conclusions about surface vegetation from such a one-dimensional view of it. I appreciate your work, here and in your scientific papers.
Thank you. One problem that I see that given GCMs strive to generate robust predictions/scenarios, there is an implicit incentive to not look into those areas that may generate more discrepancies. A codified appreciation of "the stability of knowledge". In space travel research, for example, the attitude is the opposite: simulate as many extreme situations as possible, such that the spaceship is robustly safe at all times. I once proposed a similar attitude to climate modeling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yr5bm4bw-0&t=14s
Yes this is very good. Maybe we can use a clear exploration in the Gaia Theory. If you're familiar with it? If not everything is online. Natures' complexity cannot be much different than most Animals. As a matter of fact live inhabitants of this planet more than likely all share similar functional biological systems and the big question that we need to come to grips with is why not this planet? Shouldn't it have same similar systems? And the answer as you know is YES
Of course on a planetary level all systems are supersized. Let's think about these systems and I will suggest that the oceans of Earth, water being a feminine aspect, I would think our oceans as the heart = cardiovascular arrangement. The lungs of the planet, its respiratory system =the atmosphere, Rivers are the main coronary arteries carrying nutrients, minerals, and elements, the blood supply for oceans and all marine life. Blocking the flow of major rivers behind dams, well we know what can happen. Human regulated flows can stop centuries old flow patterns and literally bio geochemically transforming water, reducing oxygen, and trapping that critical blood flow.
Forcing large flows at the wrong season can disrupt sensitive and delicate energy pulses, Every spring for eons of time rivers flowed freely, now in a blink of an eye human regulation has disrupted the spring freschet stored it behind dams. So this strong
spring-summer pulse affecting oceans around continental shelves particularly the subarctic is now occurring in the dead of winter, now the spring and summers are but a trickle over these monster dams. One other thought, the natural remedy for Co2 sequestering are the phytoplankton diatoms, a natural immune system, and along with forests can provide up to 45% of Oxygen we breathe. Speaking of natures, Earths systems.
Anyone interested in a deeper dive into dams and the problems that are inherently being ignored by scientists. Our small organization:
New England Canadian Provinces Alliance, hydrodamtruth.org is leading a series of webinars Starting March 12. I’m kicking off/ leading the 1st in the series March 12 "Damming Rivers, Melting Sea Ice, And Waming Oceans” Certainly would appreciate your involvement.
Registration link: https://act.sierraclub.org/events/details?formcampaignid=701Po00000hHWp7IAG&mapLinkHref=
March 12
For anybody interested in a deep dive into more detail
Thank you for your extensive comment and for the webinar link. "Forcing large flows at the wrong season can disrupt sensitive and delicate energy pulses, Every spring for eons of time rivers flowed freely, now in a blink of an eye human regulation has disrupted the spring freschet stored it behind dams."
This is also true concerning the pulses in atmospheric motion. E.g., replacing climax evergreen forests by early successional deciduous forests in the boreal zone greatly changes the sea-land temperature contrast in spring (the evergreens begin to transpire immediately keeping land cool, the deciduous trees can't transpire until their leaves form, so the surface warms a lot), which results in disruptions of moisture transport.
What a brilliant article! You say so clearly what has been rather confusing. I could sense this, but you said it perfectly. Your diagrams were brilliant.
Thank you for this feedback, Kathryn. It is great to know that the explanations make sense.
There is a lot of talk about the clearly present aspects of land change through our developmental needs but not much about fire derived ecological systems and how far removed from evolved ecological complexity derived stability they are. Living in Australia one lives with this fire evolved ecosystem and we treat it as something to be nurtured but there is increasing evidence that much of the world has suffered a similar fate , there are examples in the East coast of the USA where fire has been withdrawn form the system for over a hundred years and the forests are re-evolving naturally back toward a pre fire ecological stability offering a greater buffer from climatic extremes. Much to think about Many thanks
This is extremely important: "where fire has been withdrawn form the system for over a hundred years and the forests are re-evolving naturally back toward a pre fire ecological stability offering a greater buffer from climatic extremes."
The ecosystem is self-restoring and escaping from the dry landscape trap. The notion of landscape trap is the one that should be more widely known, in my opinion, as it systematizes very well what's going on and the seemingly opposite processes begin to make sense in a single coherent picture. By the way, the notion of landscape trap was introduced by Australian researchers.
What still gets me is in all discussions there is still little talk about daily temperature fluctuations and the increase in daily and yearly maximum and minimum which create the instability that leads to ecological decline. The dry landscape trap is in part an explanation as is the cloud and temperature discrepancy you point out and not adequately covered in climatic models but with the removal of vegetation also is the removal of the energy shock absorber water offers, This is easily witnessed with ocean vs land variations of daily temperature, Climatic stability or the climatically stable maximum as some would put it which allows for an ecological maximum is of prime importance. If our ultimate goal is species preservation climatic stability is also water preservation and the many ways that we and nature can use it to reduce the increasing temperature fluctuations and the resultant ecological changes, I would say nature thrives with stable daily and yearly gradient changes that maximize opportunity for interaction, to go straight from winter to summer like farmers report in the mid west UAS we have lost autumn and spring and all the life that that entails.
I hope that you can make our Webinar on the 12th4pm Rob Lewis has registered. Climate According To
I will be attending the conference where you will be speaking in Paris on March 15th at the UNESCO's Université de la Terre. Very excited to see you in person. Thank you for all that you do.
Susan❤️🐞❤️