In the early eighties I was a Special Graduate Student at MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. During my two years as a student much of my waking day was spent in the company of MIT’s System Dynamics Group. The head of this group was Jay Forrester. In his commentary on his background research for State of Fear Michael Crichton remarks that Forrester was ‘one of the must important scientists of the twentieth century’. I had little to do with the great man personally but came to be familiar with his work...and worked closely with Professor Alan Graham and George Richardson. Two entries in my Curriculum Vitae make mention of this brief interlude in my life.
Under Schools and Colleges is the entry: 1980 – 1981; Special Graduate Student; MIT Sloan School Cambridge, USA; System Dynamics & Industrial Dynamics. And in the section on Own Work (1980-2004) under America’s Atlantic Coast (1979-1987): P-E Consulting Cambridge, USA 1979-1985 is another reference to my labours at MIT that goes like this. 'Assignments for a wide range of US clients including managing the European planning cycle and carrying out a corporate integration study in the construction products sector (Norton Company, Worcester); writing a proposal to the US Energy Department on soft energy systems (Technology & Economics, Cambridge); managing partner for project to relate innovation to shareholder value in high-tech high-growth companies (Smith Barney, Chicago); and working partner for the commercial development of a system dynamics model for Canadian printing firms (Interconsult, Cambridge)'.
Professor Jay Forrester was the most influential researcher to model complex systems on the computer. He did ground-breaking studies of everything from high-tech corporate behaviour to urban renewal, and he was the first to get any inkling of how difficult it is to manage complex systems. One landmark essay from Forrester was entitled ‘The Counter-Intuitive Behavior of Complex Systems’. Forrester’s work was an early inspiration for attempts to model the world...particularly the Club of Rome Study from Dartmouth College published as The Limits to Growth.
Forrester was quick to realize that the political voices behind the Club of Rome had a poor understanding of the limits of modelling...and even less interest in the science behind the modelling. They latched onto Forrester’s work because it backed up their pre-conceived notions and political agenda. So Forrester took care to distance himself from the consistent tone of urgent overstatement...bordering on hysteria...of the Limits to Growth book published by Donella and Dennis Meadows from their ivory New Hampshire towers...even though the book was a sexed-up dossier of Jay Forrester’s more technical and conservatively written World Dynamics issued by MIT Publications a year earlier.
Two other giants from the Envionmentalists’ Hall of Fame...Amory Lovins and Rachel Carson...receive a somewhat ambivalent response from Michael Crichton. Amory Lovins became an advocate for Alternative Energy when he authored the 1970s anti-nuclear text Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace...which started life as an article in Foreign Affairs. Michael Crichton sees Soft Energy Paths as a major link in the chain of events and thinking that set the US on a different energy path from Europe...though I would not attribute it so much power and influence.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962 is a poetic persuasive text that was read with alarm and excitement when it was first published. But with the passage of time the text appears more flawed and more overtly polemical. Crichton estimates it to be about one third right and two thirds wrong. My line would be somewhat different. But I would require that Silent Spring be read in conjunction with an earlier work by Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us.
I think it unlikely that Rachel Carson would have endorsed the Global Warming by Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hypothesis. Large sections of The Sea Around Us have been airbrushed out of the Climate Debate. Central to the argument in my 1979 unpublished manuscript Green Homes or Blue Moonwaves was Carson’s reporting of the work of the Norwegian Marine Scientist Otto Pettersson. And Carson was also aware of the key role of oceans and algae in the Global Carbon Cycle...something that climate scientists have only recently started to rediscover.
Science has a poor understanding of the behaviour of the ocean’s algae...the subject of a future Shepherd on Climate weblog. Science has similar levels of ignorance about many other variables that might turn out to be crucial to an understanding of local and global climate patterns. Clouds and trees, aerosols and halocarbons, radioactivity and free radicals, solar winds and sun spots are just a few of the subjects on my current research list where I have noticed that good data is absent and well-reasoned hypotheses are thin on the ground.
But as more data is collected and as these specialist subjects are subjected to the scrutiny of Good Science so they will give up their secrets and it will become clearer what role each plays in our planet’s self-regulatory climate system. The natural greenhouse effect at the heart of the Carbonistas’ argument for Kyoto is influenced primarily by water vapour and not carbon dioxide. Does this mean a Khartoum Protocol on Steam Emissions is next on the agenda? Is fear of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to be the harbinger of a New One World Totalitarian Order?
