1. Some Introductory Remarks

A. Why Data Matters

Sustainable growth may be difficult to ever achieve but managing resources in an intelligent, responsible and long term way is achievable when data driven decision making is employed. Unfortunately, in the real world now there seems to be total abhorrence to quantitative thinking. All too often this abhorrence translates to student exposure to certain environmental issues, particular climate change, is both superficial and inaccurate. To counter this, this course will be focused primarily on the use of quantitative data methods to illuminate a variety of outstanding global environmental issues. The various homework assignments will help build this skill set. The point of all of this is simple: if data exists to define a problem, then use that data to become informed instead of relying on unverifiable arbitrary opinions.

Furthermore, the words "quantitative data methods" do not translate to math, but instead translate to thinking about data using simple data anlaysis tools (all available on line or within this course). If your scared of data, then you can not do anything sensible about environmental management, because all management plans would be based on Disney's First Law, best shown in the image below:



In this course we will touch upon many topics but will remain grounded in the physical reality that the root of all environment problems lies in global consumption which has now disrupted most of the equalibrium pathways in the Earth system. We will later use various data to demonstrate this but for now we introduce this concept as follow:

B. Global Consumption

For the most part, consumer goods are shipped via containers on large container ships. These containers are known as TEUs (20-foot equivalent units). These ships disembark at about 25 major container ports around the world from which the goods are distributed via road, rail or plane. The total energy associated with this process is large and consists of


• the energy associated with extracting the raw resources
• the energy associated with converting raw resources in to consumer products
• the energy associated with the integrated transportation and distribution of these goods.


We refer to this as the embodied energy associated with the need to maintain our consumptive habits. Remarkably, the global industry has been able to keep up with consumer demand simply by building larger container ships and larger container port and shipping more container traffic every year as shown below:



The black line plotted shows an exponential growth rate of 10% meaning that total container traffic will double ever 7 years. Currently the world's population is set to double on a 60 year time scale. Per capita consumption is increasing and the world is currently living in the most unsustinable time in history. As more and more consumers emerge on the planet, those consumers are using up resources at an accelerating rate. That is the physical reality and global cliimate change, via ocean heating, is the Earth system response to global consumption run amuck and the embodied energy needed to maintain hist business as usual (BAU) trajectory.

The collective behavior of humanity is to process Earth resources, as fast as possible, and churn those resources into consumer products, which we are now consuming at an accelerating rate. The embodied energy associated with this processing is not a natural system of the Earth and therefore represents an additional source which cause a temporary energy imbalance in the system. That added energy directly manifests as increased ocean heat content (OHC) and subsequent climate change leading to a more volatile weather system. From the physical point of view, humans are in a necessary partnership with nature. The existence of this energy imbalance in the system means that humans have now put the system into a new state, precisely because they have not acted like this necessary partnership even exists.

C. A Brief view of History

Despite boundary conditions implied by the nature of partnership, many human cultures have historically pursued dominance over the Earth's resources as their operational philosophy. Until the invention of the steam engine, that operational philosophy had only local impact on small scales. But how does such an operational philosophy come about? Indeed, where do humans get the very notion that they are not part of nature? Here we greatly simplify history and assert that this ethos becomes operational with the rise of the Mechanical Philosophy, primarily through the thinking and writing of Descartes (1635). Under this world view, the Earth is nothing more than a (soul-less) machine -- it has no spiritual value and no sacred value. Furthermore, it becomes established that man is distinct from nature and therefore entitled to dominant it. As Descartes often espouses,



... and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature

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This Mechanical view of the world is firmly in place before the industrialized revolution so that sustainable harvesting of Earth resources is never part of our value system. The invention of the steam engine launches the industrialized era that be to eventually take the Earth system out of equilibrium; slowly at first, but rapidly escalating in the post-World War II consumer world. This mechanical philosophy mode of digging up the planet as fast as possible and churning the crank for the escalating global distribution of consumer products is completely opposite of the physical manner in which the Earth system operates. Our real-world behavior strongly suggests that we still live in the mechanical philosophy system. In that system, nature has no intrinsic value but serves humans only as a resource. Thus, a change in our collective value system must occur to foster sustainability.

D. Why are Environmental Problems so Difficult to Solve

Here are some basic issues that serve as obstacles:


• Everyone thinks they know the best solution (e.g. solar power will save us all ...)
• People tend to argue and decide from a position of belief instead of a position of knowledge
• In general, people believe there are simple solutions and fail to recognize that envrionmental problems are intrisically comples because human behavior is part of the environmental system
• Blamestorming now replaces personal accountability - i.e. I am a concienctious consumer, its just the rest of America that has bowed down to big bad Corporate America.

These issues are quite relevant to any environmental debate. If one just makes-up the relevant data, or pays no attention to existing relevant data then no convergence can be achieved. For instance, in a newspaper headline says that 1 billion salmon are killed a day by Bonneville dam, most people will just believe that because why would a news "authority" publish a fake number? Besides, I already know that dams are salmon killers, and 1 billion per day seems like a killer number so who am I to try and verify the accuracy of this statement - I will just assume that it is true. Big mistake - you are a much more informed citizen if you go through life via the Observe and Verify strategy rather than assume everything is always the way you think it is.

An uninformed public is both dangerous and largely useless. At a time whe the public participation process in environmental decisions is increasingly important, we need a well-informed public so the process can really work. If everyone continues to act in their own self interest, then this does not manifest that we are all partners in the same system.

E. Monitoring the World

To truly appreciate the overall scale of consumnption, it is useful to revist this section of monitors throughout this course. You should probably just right down all the number the very first time you accessed this section, and compare those values to the ones at the end of the course.

As said before, currently, at the global scale, we are living in the most unsustainable period in history and yet the typical consumer remains blissfully ignorant and certainly doesn't understand or care about why their individual consumption footprint might matter. At the same time we are being told (through media and urban legend) that we are becoming greener and achieving sustainability. This course will critically and quantitatively exam some aspects that claim and the following collection of widgets will serve as remainders of real global consumption. (note that some widgets are still mislabelled as 2017 - all of the data are for the current year)



Some World Monitoring Widgets








F. Some OverArching Principles


The following is a small list of basic principles you, the students, you instill:


• You should never believe what anyone says initially about and environment issue. You should always require that they back up their asserations with real data - not heresay or urban legeng or mythology.
  
  
• You should always go through the exercise of determining what sources of information carry with them the most credibility and why you believe that they do.
  
  
• You should always seek to be objective when it comes to describing a problem. With objectivity thare are solutions. With subjectivity, there are only opinions.
  
  
• All measurements and all data have errors and thus data has a verying level of reliability. It is important to recognize the amount of random error that may be present in data and that sometime clear signals do not yet arise from the noise in the data.
  
  Finally, some remarks about science as provided in the video summary of the table below.
  
  

  The Value of Science

  The Value of Data

  1. Science has been tremendously devalued. Society doesn't see science as a process of asking questions which always returns limited knowledge. Science can never return "Truth" it only returns consistency with available knowledge at the time. 2. Science can provide rational explantions so that society doesn't believe the world is arbitrary. Rationality is a way to solve problems. 3. Science is a process whereby aspects of a problem are discovered. It is a process without answers but a process that points to the kinds of questions or kinds of experiments which should be done to gain more knowledge.

  1. People are losing the skill to distinguish between credible and incredible infomrmation sources. 2. In general, society thinks we are a lot smarter than we really are and that problems have therefore been solved. The beautiful thing about data is that it always illuminates our uncertainty. 3. Without and informed public we see the perpetuation of myth and the polarization of environmental issues. The value of objectivity with respect to environmental management lies in its ability to bring about convergnece. There is nothing like good data to illuminate a problem. There is nothing like bad data or no data to make a problem worse.