Is Earth gaining or losing MASS and why this matters...

Herman Daly "GETS IT"

The vast majority of economists are in fact 'psychic' economists only, and they  greatly resent attempts of rebel economists like Herman Daly to re-establish their discipline on a physical basis.


 So they claim that thermodyamic physical restraints on human activity on earth are totally irrelevant, as we are not living in an "isolated system" planet where the limits of the second law of thermodynamics would apply, but on an "open system" planet that annually gets a great deal of new solar energy and a 100,000 tons of cosmic dust.

But is this true ?

( Is anything that mainstream economists ever say about physicality  true ? In my experience, not usually. Useful members of a sub branch of the psychology department yes, but truly brain-dead hopeless in the physical sciences.)

We also lose much matter and energy annually : in particular, we lose about as much light molecules of gases like hydrogen and helium outbound into space as we gain in cosmic dust. We also lose a small amount annually of mass from being converted into energy via natural radioactivity, which affects every atom eventually.

Yes, every atom in the universe will spontaneously break down, if the universe lasts long enough. Uranium does it quite fast, but all elements do so, at increasingly slower rates.

And energy - thankfully - escapes the Earth annually in huge amounts : or we'd be a molten chunk of dead rock otherwise.

Eventually all that inbound solar energy that helped make the huge ancient redwoods escapes back into space, slightly raising the temperature of the space vacuum ever so slightly ( if its continuing expansion doesn't lower it right back again !)

But I will argue, being first and foremost a practical politician, not some dreamy-eyed academic scientist, that what we really care about - as voters and consumers (aka the guys who actually put the groceries on economists' and scientists' breakfast tables),is neither mass or energy but work.

Engineers usually "get it" right away , but most academic scientists struggle to understand the political difference.

Politically, its all about WORK , not the scientists' mass or energy

On the way to becoming finely dispersed (useless to humans) friction-dust pollution and thermal-noise pollution, concentrated forms of  mass and energy ( commercially large bodies of iron ore  and coal ore) can do very useful work for us, as industrial humans.

But once these ore bodies are gone (over the next two centuries) they will not be replaced, at least not in any world that humans can survive in.

A world such where ocean bacteria were able to concentrate enough widely dispersed iron atoms to create the vast beds of iron ore that we run our world upon will not be one for humans --- nor would the hot swampy world that led giant ferns growths becoming vast beds of coal our electrified world relies on to run its lights and Internet.

We will have to learn to survive on the immediate biological conversion of solar energy into plants and animals.

 And upon the use of  daily solar energy to do such things as to bake abundant clay into bricks : once again in a human world of rock and wood , with metals treated as precious and only used for their most valuable applications :  such as high grade steel reserved for blade edges, as in the days of old.

What about uranium and atomic energy ? Uranium is only useful to humans if found in those rare highly concentrated ore bodies : dispersed into random atoms all over the planet, per the second law of thermodynamics, they are as useless in terms of work as they are (nearly) indestructible in terms of mass.

To misquote Brian Mulroney : "its all about work,work,work !"

The GREAT DISCONNECT : our 200 year old party ideologies vs today's Science

Today's parties are as old as her !!

It might surprise many but all of our governing party ideologies - ALL of them - are as old as Queen Victoria.

Before the rise of mass democracy, there were no need for formally constituted political parties with a consistent political ideology to rally around --- all that began to change after the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Check out the formal birth date for any party of your own choosing : from the British Conservative party to the American Democrats to the German Social Democrats to the Russian Communists to the Spanish Anarchists and you will find the ghost of Queen Victoria hovering over them.

All of them born trying to deal with the new world, post Napoleon and post the American and French Revolutions.

(Note ye well , I said our governing parties: the Green Parties decidedly postdate the Queen's death in 1901 but have not yet been the sustained majority government in any country.)

So all our parties have moved along, more or less, with changing times --- but their ideologies have not - by definition.

(Any "ideology" that changes with the polls, like some Mormon weathervane or Etch a Sketch, is many things but it is not an ideology.)

We can not modify or update core ideologies anymore than we can modify or change our date of birth : we can only drop one and take up another, as many did in the decade of the 1910s , going from being Liberals to become Labour voters in Britain.

The problem with all our Victorian political ideologies, from Conservatism to Communism, is that they are - well - so bloody Victorian : so optimistic , so activist, so human-oriented.

They are all the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed children of the optimistic First law of Thermodynamics --- the governing meme of the physical and social sciences of their day.

Other philosophies of their day (based upon religious or on  science of the natural history kind) were more Nature-oriented and more skeptic of the possibility of humans successfully controlling reality.

But these philosophies failed to engender any really successful political ideologies, though they did sponsor some fairly successful political parties.

 Such as Germany's Christian Democrats , who despite their 'Christian' name are rather too easy to confuse with plain old Conservatives or Republicans.

The GREAT DISCONNECT : in the 200 years since our party ideologies were created, science has changed ---- but they haven't.

Roll the movie ahead 200 years : now the Second law of Thermodynamics is the governing meme of today's (21st century) science ----- and it is as mutually hostile with our creaking old 19th century party ideologies as can be imagined.

Unless we develop new - 21st century - political ideologies to go along with our better current understanding of natural reality than what we held in 1812, we will find our political Rhetoric will always fall short of our real world physical Reality - to great cost to us and our world....

19th century simplified REALITY but 20th century "complexed it up" again ....

photo of actual ATOMS

At the beginning of the 19th century, most people saw Reality as made up of literally millions of different kinds of objects : from all the species and types of animals to all the different kinds of minerals and rocks to all the different types of weather events.

By the end of the 19th century, they all knew that all of Reality was fundamentally simple : made up of no more than about 80 different, elemental, building blocks called atoms of elements.

19th century : reality complex and unstable at macro level, stable and eternal at atomic micro level.

The surface complexity and instability of wood rotting to humus and rocks eroding to clay was merely an illusion - Reality, at the basic level was simple and stable.

These relatively few elements and atoms were permanent and eternal and universal : they couldn't be created or destroyed - merely arranged and re-arranged in an endless variety of patterns to create all the old world that Nature created and all the coming new world that Man's mind could invent.

Chemistry became the new Queen of Science and chemists saw their job as stripping Reality down into 80 (100% pure) basic building blocks and reassembling those blocks in interesting new ways.

Nature's attempts, they said, often failed because her "pure compounds" really ended up as "impure mixtures".

But under Man's command, purity was real, desirably and obtainable.

Purity became the chemists' - and the Age of Modernity's - Holy grail.

This thought became a basic meme of High School and undergraduate education by the 1890s (and is still with us 125 years later).

But ironically, cutting edge science began to feel it simply wasn't true by those same 1890s , a feeling that grew ever stronger among researchers in the basic sciences as the 20th century played itself out.

But their new knowledge failed to make it inside the door of the high school Chem Lab and still hasn't - and the resulting cognitive break between what we are taught and what is true is literally killing our planet.

We still act like we can easily control Reality for fun and profit ; Climate Change suggests we can't.

High School teachers, whether they know it or not - accept it or not - are killing us all.

On Earth, post Peak Oil, we may feel that Matter (all the soil and rock of this solid planet) is abundant and Energy is scarce, but in the total universe, the reverse is true.

Day to day ordinary matter is actually very scarce and most of the Universe seems to consist of ordinary energy, dark energy and dark matter.

Only under a relatively rare set of conditions does some of that energy become the stable atoms of  80 or so stable elements we know of on Earth.

20th century: Reality unstable at micro level, is most stable in appearance, at the macro level.

Underneath the elements ( which turn out to be composites or mixtures not at all elemental : think isotopic mixtures), are hundreds and hundreds of weird building blocks that may only exist under unbelievably extreme conditions and even then only for a trillionth of a second.

Reality, at the fundamental level turns out to be anything but simple and stable.

Even Earth's semingly stable elements are not in fact stable - while some will outlast the expected life time of the Universe , others are quite willing to break up into smaller more stable atoms and elements (think of uranium).

Day to day Iron is ever ready to rust away at the drop of a hat, but as an element, it is very reluctant to break up via natural radioactivity and so is the most stable of all the elements.

It is plunk in the middle of the periodic table in effect : too big to be easily mashed into a bigger element, too small to easily break apart into smaller elements.

So purity is absolute only as a mental construct ---- nothing in the world is 100% pure for very long : even those bars of metal in vacuum in Paris that represent the mass of a kilogram are no longer pure - they have seen some of their atoms spontaneously self destruct into smaller atoms and a bit of loose energy ; ie they now weigh LESS than a kilogram !

Purity and stability fundamentally are blue sky scientific illusions ; all matter and energy is in a state of constant eternal flux - down at the level of the basic building blocks of atoms and elements.

Surprisingly, as ordinary non-scientists, ie for the bulk of us, stability is best found away from basic science of the chemists and found instead in the geologists' lumps of minerals we see everywhere .

True they will eventually become soil and wash into the sea - but not in our's or our great great grandchildren's lifetimes.

At the macro level, we don't see a big piece of a mineral as slowly but steadily changing into something else at the individual atom (micro) level and we can enjoy thinking of it as stable enough for us and our purposes ---- to use as a building material for a 'permanent' monument for example.

Reality, under the Second Law of thermodynamics, turns out to be stable and simple at the macro level but unstable and chaotic at the fundamental building block level - a surprising and total reverse of what the First Law of thermodynamics taught the 19th century chemists .....

Thermodynamics laws for laypeople (the Entropy of War)

First Law : Fool's GOLD !

I am frequently called upon to explain the two main laws of thermodynamics that are my two lead characters in SVE and I generally try to explain them in a pared down sort of way.

 I begin by saying that the First law deals exclusively with the quantity of mass and energy in the universe : that quantity can never get bigger or smaller --- it can merely change its state ( ie character).

By contrast, the Second law deals exclusively in quality not quantity : it says that the quality (ie the character) of mass and energy becomes steadily less useful (to K-selected creatures like humans) as parts of it become more and more widely dispersed.

"Useful" for giant K-selected beings like humanity, is really code for "concentrated" : being giant in size and hunger and few in number, one molecule of sucrose every few miles along a trail won't keep us alive.

(Thus the concept of "lack of physical concentration as an biological limiting factor" is anathema to classical economists ,who have bathed exclusively in the Kool-aid of the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

Tell us, about ALL the gold in seawater...

Glad you asked, because 'Gold molecules in seawater 'is the classic 'dividing' example.

 People of the First law always proudly *deny* that we can be running out of gold - 'gosh, the amount in the oceans alone will last us folks for, oh say, billions of years at least.'

True, predictably sigh the folks of the Second law sardonically : only too true - if we but had the trillions of trillions in dollars needed to recover those molecules of gold scattered ocean wide!

But bacteria, being widely dispersed themselves (and thus being the ultimate in r-selected lifeforms) can profitably recover those widely dispersed gold molecules : they may only need a few dozen atoms of gold to make enough copies of a vital enzyme to survive and reproduce.

We humans demonstrate the superiority of the fundamental second law to the  derived first law every time we go to war.

The embodied energy in the artillery shell and gunpowder used to propel it along and blow it up, along with the embodied energy in the building it destroys , will never cease to exist as a quantity.

But as a quality, we can never usefully use them ever again : the energy has gone off to heat up the air and ultimately the Universe.

And the tiny fragments of shell body? They are now widely scattered and rusting in the soil. The building fragments have been used as rubble to fill holes in the ground.

That ,my friends, is a very uniquely human form of entropy : a wide - and useless - dispersing of once-usefully concentrated energy and matter.....

"Blue Sky" libertarian think tanks are today's "Boiler Rooms" of deceit

Libertarianism = Blue Skyism

Who says God doesn't have a sense of humour ? How else to explain that in Standard & Poor's dictionary of financial terms, "boiler room" follows immediately upon "blue sky" stock laws?

As grandmother recalled to you when you started to invest a little for your retirement, a "boiler room" is where the conmen operated that sold your grandfather a pile of worthless blue sky (stocks) in return for all the retirement money he had socked away earning a low but safe return in a bank.

If the rate of return on a stock seems too good to be true it probably isn't true --- but instead is just blue sky optimism or fraud.

Washington's (and London,Canberra,Ottawa et al) libertarian think tanks are not frauds - they sincerely believe that their political ideology and economics are firmly based upon the physical reality of the Science they were taught in High School.

And it is.

Unfortunately High School science is not itself based on physical reality, not at least as professional scientists of today understand it to be.

Rather High School science is still - still  - based upon physical reality as understood by the professional scientists of  200 years ago !

By no coincidence, the state-of-the-art science of 200 years ago was far more optimistic and upbeat (seeing nothing but blue skies from now on, skies so blue I gotta wear shades) than the state-of-the-art-science of 150 years ago and later.

Given the choice : either an older science that flattered their self-centered worldview or a newer science that humbled humanity into merely one among many commensalist beings on a resource-limited Earth, guess which one the selfish of the world choose to have taught ?

Clashing thermodynamics

Libertarianism and the First Law of Thermodynamics were spawned on the same rock : just as us post-Scientism commensalists equally favour the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

A Mexican Stand-Off ?

Not exactly ; because the far bigger, unlimited - fundamental - law of the two is the Second Law.

The First Law is but a smaller, derived law : think of it as a special case of relativity versus the general Law of relativity.

Physical reality looks like , acts like, the commensalists' Second Law.

But traditional political parties and traditional economics, both grounded in the science of 1812 are not : this is why our world is in such a mess.

Extremely rhetorically self-flattering , traditional parties and economics win every voting contest among fallible humanity ---- but loses every clash with cold ,hard ,firm physical reality.

Until our politics, economics and High School science (above all else) aligns with the Universe's actual physical reality, this planet and this human civilization is going to continue to flatline....

200 yrs old (and I do mean OLD) : today's politics & 1st law of thermodynamics that spawned them

200 years DEAD !

Let us Honor the Dead , before we bury them. Because today's most popular political ideologies (Manchester Liberalism, Benthamite Libertarianism and Owenite Socialism) are all two hundred years old .

As is the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of science that actually unites all them as emerging from the same frozen moment in time, despite seemingly profound surface differences.

Science has moved forward two centuries - our political ideologies haven't

Throw in a handful of less popular political ideologies ( Nazi, Fascist and Stalinism among them) and it is clear that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the idea that the Universe is one great big perpetual motion machine of mass and energy, set up for the eternal use of Man) has had a overwhelming powerful impact on human politics.

Unfortunately Science has long moved on from the attractive-to-human-Hubris derivative First Law  to the human-Humility-inducing truly fundamental Second Law of Thermodynamics , without most of humanity noticing.

Certainly the politicians and the political chattering classes have not noticed.

(A little knowledge of High School Science from 40 years before is truly a dangerous thing.)

Ideologies that are in defiance of physical realities are almost bound to be seductive politically (a sophisticated form of whistling past a graveyard) but then fail miserably, when as an elected government, it tries to anything physical out in the real world.

I do not suppose that the brain cell lesions that produce the optimist small "l" liberal and the cautious small "c" conservative are ever likely to mutate out.

But inside the big tent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we might expect all of us (global commensalists by necessity) would at least fight out our political differences within a world view that is at  sync with the universe's physical realities.

Maybe most of us still can't re-program our VCRs (remember them ?) but isn't it time we learned to re-program our political views in tune with physical reality ?

We can't continue to go through life drinking socialist Kool-Aid and dropping capitalist Acid ....

MATTHEW 7:3 to Josh Floyd & Frank L. Lambert : Lighten up !

Science's uncivil War : Part XXXCCCVIII

OCEANS of GOLD !

Not a second goes by, but without some hard scientist bristling at the (mis)use of the term of entropy by someone without a PhD in , and a career, in the hard sciences. The usual depressing "science turf war while the world burns"  poop -- or so it must seem.

By way of complete contrast, not an Eternity goes by without all the world's hard scientists all ignoring the far more egregious (mis)use of the First Law of Thermodynamics in areas like geology (shout out to Sir Charles Lyell) or in economics (shout out to almost everyone with tenure).

Ignoring beams to focus on moles usually signifies a much deeper mental issue, as my old shrink Dr Jesus would say .

I would suggest this is because the First Law of Thermodynamics paints quite a rosy picture of Man's ability - particularly Scientific Man - to profitably manipulate the Universe, while the Second Law of Thermodynamics  is much less hopeful in this respect.

The Constant - conscious - touting of the First Law of Thermodynamics, by scientists, as the fundamental law of all human activity is what convinced gullible lay people all those years back to pay basic scientists to just sit about and think,  rather than to put themselves out to work as traditional ,Non-U, hands-on inventors.

Replacing the First with the Second threatens paycheques, pensions and (above all)  prestige and this why I believe the Second Law is always attacked when used as a metaphor while the first law's foundational use in, of all things, the science of human behavior cum economics is ignored .

Here is how I describe entropy to friends and foes alike : in the form of a joke.

In fact, a classic good news / bad news joke.

See, a feller walks into the bar and tells all the patrons that "There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea".

That's the good news, he says.

The patrons ask - in one voice : well what then is the bad news ?

But the silly feller just repeats what he told them.

"There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea."

Yes indeed. There is lots of gold in the sea but unlike in a miner's mother lode, it is so finely and widely dispersed over such immense distances and depths that it effectively worthless --- actually worth far less than zero .

This is because it will cost more ( money=energy) to collect it than it is worth (gold=money=energy),  when it is sold to pay back the energy used to collect it.

Now entropy as useless because dispersed energy versus concentrated and hence useful energy is not strictly a case of "order versus disorder", at least to the 70,000 or so hard scientists who object strongly every time lay people use this metaphor to describe entropy to other lay people.

But unfortunately the 7 billion rest of us find it works - as a metaphor - just fine.

Why ? I blame Mom.

A Iraqi college inside a brick building is nice and orderly, till a big smart bomb enters and blows all those bricks into a fine powder and the desert winds scatter that dust all over the Middle East.

Dispersed and useless and messy and dirty : disorderly, as my Mom would say.

Hard scientists  - like Floyd and Lambert - apparently never had a Mom - or at least not one like mine.

 My Mom had a acute sense of "disorder" being defined as me scattering (dispersing as people with PhDs say) all my clothes all over the floor,  instead of hanging them up neatly and "orderly" in one corner of my closet.

My advice to Josh Floyd and Frank Lambert ?

Get some Metamucil , loosen up, have a beer, watch some TV and think back again to whatever metaphors that their Moms did use whenever little Frankie and Joshie's rooms were messy .....

Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes

"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing - and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"

After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.

Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.

Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.

Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.

Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.

Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.

In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE

Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.

As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.

Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.

And  modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.

Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science  : the new young whippersnappers.

Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.

Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.

Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.

The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.

The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.

The deniers'  Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.

Shat happens : suck it up....