Strange Attractors  

Jeff Vail has an article on an old fashioned way of collecting fertiliser for small scale agriculture - the dovecote.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending a few days at my wife’s aunt’s farmhouse in Vaour, in the south of France. It was one of the high points in a most unusual—and quite enjoyable—four weeks, five countries, and an itinerary that was completely trashed on day two. I had recently read "The Da Vinci Code," as well as the similar, deeper, and far more interesting novel "The Eight" by Katharine Neville. Suffice it to say that Robert Anton Wilson’s spirit of synchronicity was alive an well that August: I found myself accidentally—and quite literally—transported from hiking on the dales of northern England to being attacked by bats while exploring a Cathar stronghold next to a Templar fortress that cast a shadow on the aforementioned farmhouse. Oh, and to cap it all off, the entire village is a de-facto retirement home for 1968-era counterculture circus performers. Seriously. Imagine the classic scene of the old men playing petanq in the village square, only substitute fire dancers. But I digress… in a sharp and much needed departure from the geopolitics focus of late, let me return to another of my favorite topics, and in the process explain how my rambling introduction is actually relevant. The farm house, you see, had a dovecote…

If you read through the comments as well you'll see Jeff talks about the use of dovecotes during medieval times and how the needs of larger scale fertiliser acquirers (often abbeys or large landowners) needed to be balanced against the damage that could be done by large flocks of birds to crops. Past Peak also has an excellent post on how cultures that have evolved over a long period of time often developed elaborate structures to make themselves sustainable and balance the needs of different groups of people so that everyone prospered (in his case, the people of Bali). Unsurprisingly the "green revolution" has put paid to that.

The Long Now Foundation seeks to foster the long view, looking ahead to the next 10,000 years of human society. It sponsors monthly lectures by some of the West's most original thinkers, the audio for which is archived here. It's an extraordinary collection. Go explore. (The talk by Bruce Sterling is a hoot.)

I want to touch on just one of the lectures here, a recent talk by anthropologist Stephen Lansing, who has studied the planting and water management practices of Balinese rice farmers. From Stewart Brand's summary of the talk:

With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen Lansing exposed the hidden structure and profound health of the traditional Balinese rice growing practices. The intensely productive terraced rice paddies of Bali are a thousand years old. So are the democratic subaks (irrigation cooperatives) that manage them, and so is the water temple system that links the subaks in a nested hierarchy.

When the Green Revolution came to Bali in 1971, suddenly everything went wrong. Along with the higher-yield rice came "technology packets" of fertilizers and pesticides and the requirement, stated in patriotic terms, to "plant as often as possible." The result: year after year millions of tons of rice harvest were lost, mostly to voracious pests. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to ever decreasing effect...

MonkeyGrinder has a good look at a George Monbiot column on the drawbacks of palm oil, and once again points out the biofuels are more a problem than a solution...

George Monbiot reminds us of a blind spot in our culture. There is a tendancy to mentally "greenwash" anything involving living plants, even if they are to be harvested and burned as fuel, in the process using indigenous peoples and their land as a consumable commodity.

Malayasia might as well be a big wad of toilet paper for Westerners. Use once, call it "green" and throw away a functioning forest ecosystem for 100,000 years.

Delusion is not acceptable. Bio-Fuels are not acceptable. They will persist only as long as abundant energy allows.

It is called "the peak" for a reason.

Of course, while chopping down forests to plant crops that are then turned into biofuels is rather short sighted and no doubt downright dangerous in the long term, there are some biological processes that create fuels that are worth pursuing (biodiesel from algae has always been one of my favourites). Wired has an example of a process that could be promising - a modified form of algae that produces hydrogen naturally.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have engineered a strain of pond scum that could, with further refinements, produce vast amounts of hydrogen through photosynthesis.

The work, led by plant physiologist Tasios Melis, is so far unpublished. But if it proves correct, it would mean a major breakthrough in using algae as an industrial factory, not only for hydrogen, but for a wide range of products, from biodiesel to cosmetics.

The new strain of algae, known as C. reinhardtii, has truncated chlorophyll antennae within the chloroplasts of the cells, which serves to increase the organism's energy efficiency. In addition, it makes the algae a lighter shade of green, which in turn allows more sunlight deeper into an algal culture and therefore allows more cells to photosynthesize.

The Oil Drum has an interesting post on gas shortages in China - no wonder they are willing to butt heads with the Japanese over the East China Sea (and given the enormous gas deals they have done with Iran, its very hard to see them acquiescing to any military action being taken next month).

The China Daily is carrying a story that the gas-fired power plants in East China are unable to get enough natural gas to operate.

The shortage of natural gas has put the bulk of China's gas-fired power plants on the verge of closure, and industry leaders are calling for the government to trim its gas power development plans.

Due to the lack of gas supplies in East China, gas-fired power generation units with a total capacity of as much as 4 gigawatts (GW) must remain unused in the region where the country's biggest gas pipeline ends, Wang Yonggan, secretary general of China Electricity Council (CEC), said.

The same is true with the energy-guzzling southern areas of China, primarily driven the fast-growing regional economy of Guangdong Province. "In the south, the construction completion of a gas power plant also means it's shutdown - because there is no gas to run it," Wang said over the weekend at a power conference hosted by CEC, the industry association of China's electricity generators.

Rigzone has a number of interesting reports - Belize is about to struggle with the curse of oil, East Timor is trying to set up a fund to manage their oil and gas revenue over the long term (sticking to "safe" investments like bonds might turn out to be not a particularly good move though, particularly if they are US treasuries), drilling is about to start in New Zealand to try and forestall New Zealand's looming natural gas shortage and there is continuing turmoil in Ecuador disrupting oil exports (though apparently protesters have declared a truce for the time being).

WorldChanging has a post on "Greenland, Antarctica, and Beach-Front Property" which takes a look at Staurt Staniford's recent comprehensive post on global warming and melting ice packs at The Oil Drum. They also have posts on an Al Gore speech and Natural Sequestration and Terraforming the Earth.

Quick tip: if you live somewhere that's a meter or less above sea level, you should probably move inland soon. This may well also be the case if you live somewhere that's three meters or less above sea level. And there's even a chance this may be the case if you live somewhere that's five meters or less above sea level. In short, head for the hills.

That's the hard-to-avoid conclusion when looking at the speed at which the glacial ice of Greenland and Antarctica is melting. Recent studies indicate that Greenland's ice cap is turning to water at a rate more than double what geologists had predicted. And, as Stuart Staniford's troubling and fascinating Living in the Eemian entry at The Oil Drum describes, the last time the planet had average temperatures around what's predicted for later this century, sea levels were 25' higher than at present.

Energy Bulletin points to an article that notes that things are getting "Hotter, faster, worser".

Over the past several months, the normally restrained voice of science has taken on a distinct note of panic when it comes to global warming.

How did we go from debating the "uncertainty" behind climate science to near hysterical warnings from normally sober scientists about irrevocable and catastrophic consequences? Two reasons.

First, there hasn’t been any real uncertainty in the scientific community for more than a decade. An unholy alliance of key fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians have waged a sophisticated and well-funded misinformation campaign to create doubt and controversy in the face of nearly universal scientific consensus. In this, they were aided and abetted by a press which loved controversy more than truth, and by the Bush administration, which has systematically tried to distort the science and silence and intimidate government scientists who sought to speak out on global warming.

But the second reason is that the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.

Iraq seems to be teetering on the brink of civil war - you can read straight reports about the bombing of the Askariya shrine at Past Peak and Paul McGeogh's report in the Herald, with Sunni extremists getting the blame.

Past Peak has a more analytical follow up post, which wonders what the Sunni's could hope to gain from such an act, and points out that a war could ruin our chances of successfully dealing with peak oil and global warming. I'm not so sure that this is entirely true - a big war would quite likely cause a rather large drop off in oil production and consumption (partly becuase of supply disruptions and partly becuase of the economic dislocation it would cause).

Since the target was a Shiite shrine, everyone seems to assume the attackers were Sunnis, but there are any number of possible candidates. All-out sectarian civil war would bring Iraq a giant step closer to partition into three statelets along sectarian lines — a happy outcome, for example, for neocons here and abroad. Are they pulling the strings? I have no idea. But it is sometimes hard to escape the feeling that the whole Iraq campaign has had, from the outset, the unstated goal of Iraq's partition. Pretty much everything that's happened has furthered that end. But it's perhaps even harder to believe that the people managing the war are secret (evil) geniuses — given that they still can't manage, for example, to armor their own troops. Meanwhile, who knows what other actors are working for Iraq's partition to further their own ends.

Dark days in Iraq.

A longtime reader of PastPeak who sends me thought-provoking emails from time to time wrote me late last night (excerpt):

The destruction of Iraq cannot be undone. The bombing today today of the Shiite shrine, which serves no conceivable Sunni insurgent purpose, but brings much closer the final breakup of what was once a modernizing, secular and economically equitable country, cannot be undone. And of course an attack on Iran, by what will, given current European rhetoric, be viewed by Muslims everywhere as an attack by the West, will finally make real the "Clash of Civilizations" the neocons have been dreaming of.

You are right about the overarching importance of Global Warming, and the consequences of the end of the oil economy. In the meantime though all possibility of a rational response to these things will be destroyed by war with the Islamic world.

That last paragraph brought me up short. Of course, he's right. Should the Middle East continue its downward spiral into a far wider war, the war's deadliest consequence would be that the world would miss a critically important window in time, perhaps our last best chance, to avert catastrophe on the climate and peak oil fronts.

As we slide towards war in Iran or Syria, let us remember this: peace is a prerequisite for rational and constructive action on the real problems facing humanity. The stakes couldn't be higher. We need peace.

There doesn't seem to be much of the usual tinfoil analysis of the shrine's destruction (with no obvious hooks to hang a conspiracy theory on like British troops in plain clothes being caught outside with a truck full of fertiliser or such like) and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the Iranians had something to do with this one (if you believe we can fake the occasional act of aggression to kick off a war here and there, then obviously its not out of the question other countries can too).

Using the usual conspiracy theorist yardstick of "cui bono", you could argue that an inflamed Iraqi Shiite population bent on strife would make a US invasion of Iran a bit trickier to manage in the coming weeks, so the Iranians might not be entirely unhappy about the turn of events (plus the lunatic fringe of "mahdi returns" nuts might find the destruction of his tomb appropriate at this point in time).

From RI, which is taking on an millenarian edge:

Afraid the time's too short today for writing, but time's getting shorter every day. I don't mean to get all John the Revelator about it, but as Juan Cole's written, "Tuesday was an apocalyptic day in Iraq."

The destruction of Samarra's Askariyah shrine marks a Biblical moment of provocation in Iraq's ersatz Civil War. And just in time, too, because there's a time-table to keep where "real men" want to go.

These must be hard times for soft-headed apologists of "benign" empire, who thought there could be something of worth even to the fiction of liberation and democracy; who believed that civil war would be the last thing sought by Western powers, which wanted peace and security rather than provocation and chaos.

The Samarra mosque contains the shrine of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, whom many Shiites believe is about to manifest himself. It's a belief shared and encouraged by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as Iraq's Muqtada all-Sadr. (The United States, of course, couldn't comfortably confront Iran so long as its presidency was held by the frustratingly reasonable Mohammad Khatami. In Ahmadinejad - who, like Bush, most probably won his office as well by election fraud - the US has a fine millenial foil.)

As Washington's Republican Guard must know, one advantage of cultivating a base which believes in the imminent end of the world is that the more catastrophic a regime's governance, the more encouraged its supporters become that they picked the right horseman for an apocalypse. Is all hell breaking loose? Great - all hell should break loose.

And as I close, Gerard Henderson is on the TV complaining about all the people decrying the Anglosphere's slide into fascism. The silly old coot really doesn't have a clue (though at least he isn't seeing reds under the bed tonight, unlike some of his newspaper columns in recent months - it's liberal democrats who are whinging about what is happening Gerard, not some phantom band of commies)...

Given that I've quoted a lot from Past Peak tonight I'll steal a couple of his collected jokes as well (on the sale of a number of US ports to the UAE):

The White House has given permission for a company owned by the government of Dubai to run six US ports, including the Port of New York. Now Dubai was accused of supporting the September 11th attacks and was one of only three countries to support the Taliban. Now they're going to run the Port of New York. What's next, we'll put Mexico in charge of immigration? How about Dick Cheney in charge of gun safety? Courtney Love in charge of Olympic drug testing? — Jay Leno

President Bush now is apparently giving an Arab country control of American ports. Does that seem like a good idea? He's going to give control of American ports to an Arab country. If he keeps this up, people are going to start questioning his judgment. — David Letterman