James Dyke

You are currently browsing articles tagged James Dyke.

“We Can Neither Get Back To Nature Nor Continue As We Are”

June 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

You can never go home again not only because things were never quite the way you remember, but also because they do actually fundamentally change. In the case of the natural world on Earth, there’s really no pristine patch that hasn’t been altered by humans and our inventions. We’re clever but we leave a mark. Our impact doesn’t have to lead to existential risk, though it currently is.

In a Conversation article, James Dyke wisely points out the path forward should be mapped by learning from the past but not by trying to recreate it. Two short passages follow.

What is natural? What is artificial? It is often assumed that natural is better than artificial. Getting back to nature is something we should aspire to, with kids in particular not spending enough time in nature. But if you want to escape civilisation and head into the unaltered wilderness you may be in for a shock: it doesn’t exist.

New research now suggests that there are practically no areas that have escaped human impacts. But not only that, such impacts happened many thousands of years earlier than is usually appreciated. In fact, you’d have to travel back more than 10,000 years to find the last point when most of the Earth’s landscapes were unaffected by humans.•

As well as detailing some of the havoc that humans have wrought on the biosphere, the researchers also highlight some positive interactions humans had. For example, the long presence of prehistoric societies that flourished within the Amazon basin show that careful stewardship of ecological resources – in that instance the cultivation of rich productive soils – can enhance ecosystems and provide sustainable livelihoods.

This is perhaps the most important lesson gained from the study. If we are to feed and care for the nine billion people that will be living on Earth by the middle of this century, then we need a more subtle and complex understanding of nature and sustainability.

The industrial age we now live in has taken human impacts to a planetary scale. We are changing the global climate and some argue that we have become a geological force. We can neither get back to nature nor continue as we are.•

Tags:

“On Its Own It’s Doomed To Failure”

June 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There was competition for the Apollo program emanating from Russia, but there were no giant multinationals actively working to quash it. That’s what carbon-free energy must circumvent, as James Dyke explains in a Conversation piece, which lauds the Global Apollo initiative for renewable energy while simultaneously worrying about it. The opening:

A group of prominent scientists has launched an “Apollo programme” for renewables, called Global Apollo. Its mission is to make carbon-free electricity less costly than that generated from coal, and to do it within ten years. It’s an international effort that will promote the technological advances required to produce the rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and so keep climate change to within the “safe” limit of two degrees celsius.

It’s an ambitious if not audacious statement of intent that will seek to marshal the efforts of current and new generations of engineers and scientists.

And on its own it’s doomed to failure. Let me explain.

The Global Apollo mission takes inspiration not only from the Apollo Program that sent humans to the moon, but also the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). What’s that got to do with climate change? Well, the ITRS is a collaborative effort between the world’s largest chip manufacturers to understand, plan and ultimately resolve technological challenges that allow faster semiconductor chips. Over the past 30 years this has produced continual decreases in microchip prices along with steady performance improvements.

Faster and cheaper chips translates to better and cheaper electronic products that spur further innovation. It’s a win-win. But this is a terrible analogy for our current dependence on fossil fuels.

It’s a terrible analogy because the ITRS doesn’t operate in a world in which electronic vacuum tube manufacturers spend millions of dollars actively trying to undermine the development of semiconductors.•

Tags:

“These End Points Are Decades Not Centuries Away”

February 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Eventually the Big Bang goes bust, the Earth becomes uninhabitable and then eventually the air goes out of the whole tire that is the universe. The finitude galls me. You? A post at The Conversation has Complex System Simulation lecturer James Dyke answering questions about resources and the lack thereof. An excerpt:

Question:

If the world has a finite amount of natural resources, and these resources have been diminishing steadily since the industrial revolution, how is the model of infinite economic growth possibly expected to continue? Doesn’t it have to end eventually?

James Dyke:

This is a good question, however I think it’s possibly something of a red herring. That is, we don’t have to worry too much about ultimate or absolute limits to growth. What we need to worry about is how we move towards such limits from where we are right now.

We have an increasingly narrow space within which to operate, to organise ourselves on Earth. Essentially, we have seriously eroded our choices.

Question:

Do you agree that it is already too late to prevent global catastrophe caused by global warming?

James Dyke:

No. There is nothing physically insurmountable about the challenges we face. I think it’s very important to continually stress that. Yes, in about a billion years time the increase in the size of the sun will mean the death of the biosphere. We have plenty to play for until then.

Sometimes people talk about social transitions. For example in the UK, drunk driving and smoking in pubs/bars. It’s become the norm to do neither and that happened quite quickly. It always seems impossible before it is done.

Question:

Best estimate. How long do we have to spend all our savings before this hits?

James Dyke:

I find it hard to be optimistic about the welfare of some people around the middle to the end of this century if we continue as we are. If we maintain business as usual with regards carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, biogeochemical inputs (we keep exceeding planetary boundaries) then I find it hard to see how our current connected, distributed, industrialised civilisation can function in the way it currently does.

There is no natural law, no physical principle which means the tremendous increases in wellbeing, industrial output, wealth etc observed over the past 300 years have to continue. Consider the broader historical context and you realise we live in extraordinary times. But we have become habituated to this and simply expect the future to resemble the past – and that includes future rates of change.

What largely keeps our current civilisation aloft is fossil fuel use and an unsustainable consumption of natural capital (sometimes discussed in the context of ecosystem services). There are end points for both of these and these end points are decades not centuries away.•

Tags: