On 1/20/07, TSI Founder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> ...
> Whatever is the root cause of climate changes, Humanity should prepare
> for their sudden impact and lasting effects and ensure our governance
> systems, on any imaginable scale / level, are sensitive, adaptive and
> robust enough to minimize the negative effects these changes may have
> on our well-being and that of the systems we depend on. If not,
> humanity may have to prepare for long lasting conflict over essential
> renewable and non-renewable resources, which may even result in more
> damage to the systems we depend on, resulting in more Earth
> rearrangements ... etcetera. We can choose to fully anticipate on
> possible loss of resources like arable and inhabitable surface area,
> geographical and climatic features essential for infrastructure and
> shifts in essential ecosystems. If we wish to be successful we may soon
> need to get rid of numerous cultural and historical burdens in our
> 'control' / governance systems that prevent us from taking
> appropriate preventive, pro-active, and re-active measures.
A tall order, but there is a good deal to what you say in my opinion. The
limiting factors to our adaptation are far more social than they are
technical. Acknowledging this doesn't make it any easier. As stresses
increase, both history and current events show increases rather than
decreases in superstition, greed, xenophobia and confrontation.
If we are responsible, to whatever extent, for the root causes of
> climate change, we must act immediately to minimize the impact of
> related pursuits and technologies. But as change is slowly gaining
> momentum (Earth has started to rearrange) it is questionable whether
> the focus should be on the cause or on the effects. Let's take care
> of both ... and embed this in our 'control systems' in a more
> structural manner.
I am pleased to see you mention control systems. The technology of control
is enormously advanced in the half century since Norbert Weiner and his
crowd first advocated its application in policy. The capacity for applying
these ideas to governance has advanced, I think, hardly an iota.
At least one reason is that control systems need an objective function. It
seems to me that to apply the ideas of control systems to governance the
first issue is to obtain such a quantitative objective.
We seem to defer to economists for this, and I'd like to see some discussion
of why we do and whether we should. My impression is that their consensus
objective (maximizing commercial activity) has multiple flaws for the
purposes at hand.
I think that one main idea that you propose, that we must seek an optimal
balance between adaptation and mitigation, is generally accepted.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to know where to start on identifying such a
balance.
The quantitative complexity of making such complex interactive decisions
under complex coupled uncertainties has not, to my knowledge, been addressed
with the mathematical rigor it deserves. It may in any case be that our
social structures would be unable to cope with such a result if the rather
large requisite effort could be made. We should, nevertheless, start by
asking the right questions.
mt
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