That is the title of a review of Tim Flannery's Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet in the latest (October 13) issue of the New York Review of Books (p 29) written by John Terborgh. As I read about politics I wonder? The review starts like this:
Here is the anguished cry of another distinguished scientist distressed by our collective incapacity to grasp the enormity of the earth’s looming environmental crisis. It has been obvious for a long time—many decades—to legions of individual scientists, and to prestigious scientific organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the National Academy of Sciences, that the global human enterprise is on a collision course with the physical and biological limits of the earth.
As one of those distressed scientists (maybe not so distinguished) I have to make a few comments for the political people to ignore one more time. My diary Sunday,
What does science have to say about politics? had so little attention that I probably should give up on these science tutorials. I reference the Sunday diary because it has the abstract of my latest paper and I don't want to re post that in this diary. Take a look at the abstract if you get a chance because it is related to the work I am discussing here. Look below for more on this very depressing issue.
There are a lot of facts and statistics used, as usual, to try to drive home the urgency of the situation. Also the work of James Lovelock is discussed in some detail. Here is how that starts:
The concept of Gaia as a metaphor for how the earth maintains conditions congenial to life appears to captivate Flattery
Well it kind of captivates me too as the abstract of my latest paper referred to will show. The irony in Terborg's discussion comes out as he says:
In a formal sense, the Gaia concept rests on a circularity.
Yes it does indeed! However in the context of the Theory of Complex Systems, circularity is the central idea. None of this shows up in Terborgh's review yet he does appreciate the fact that the earth is a complex dynamic system.
unfortunately, most of the work showing the role of circularity in the form of closed loops of causality is so new and so isolated by prejudice that it has little audience. If this were not the case, the statement
The self-regulating qualities of the earth that led James Lovelock to concieve of the Gaia hypothesis fall into the domain of biogeochemistry...
(whatever that is) would not have appeared. This whole issue has been studied at some length and much of that work is referenced in my article. Let me give a brief summary here. I hope people will begin to take this stuff seriously for the crisis is part of the circle of causes that we are confronted with.
Complex systems are not "complicated" systems. All real systems are complex. Physics and its applications in science and engineering is a surrogate world created by us to try to understand the complex world. Unfortunately, the way we have succeeded so far is by reductionist methods. Reducing a complex whole to parts and hoping that understanding the parts will enable us to understand the whole complex real system. This is just not possible. Nor is it possible to construct a model of Gaia that is based on mechanistic computer models. The main lesson we have learned is that mechanistic computer models must leave out the closed loops of causality because they are not computable!
The book A Louie I cite in my paper is a magnificent work using modern category theory to prove what I just stated. This is not an esoteric exercise but an real useful explanation of why the reductionist approach has us in political trouble. If we want science to be part of the solution it has to stop being part of the problem. Time may be short and there certainly is nothing to be gained from sticking one's head in the sand. It is out there and it needs to be brought forth so we can unscramble the mess reductionist science has gotten us into in the political sphere.