ClimateChangeFork

Do We Have To Argue? Do We Even Know How To Argue?

Posted on March 25, 2014 by climatechangefork

A few years ago I was attending an academic retreat. These usually take place somewhere outside the campus and they often involve overnight stay. They are generally organized as a forum in which to discuss an institution’s important policy issues. In this case, the subject of discussion was the changes in the institution’s general education requirements.

During lunch I was sitting near a friend that specializes in the history of the Middle East. Since I grew up in Israel (I hold dual American – Israeli citizenship) the lunch chat quickly drifted to a discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is Jewish and the student population he teaches is mixed. I asked him how he teaches such a controversial topic to a mixed student population who, in most cases, hold fossilized opinions on the topic. Since, among many student populations, climate change is as confrontational as the Middle East conflicts, I was interested in learning his practices. He smiled at me and said: “simple: I rely on original documents.” I shifted the conversation to a different topic because I didn’t want to be confrontational and point it out to him that since he is the one responsible for the selection of the original documents, his teaching is not much different from preaching.

A few months ago, an early, unofficial version of the first part of the 5^th IPCC reports was released. Even before the official release of the report, the Heartland Institute released its own report that denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change. They presented it in the same format (if a bit longer) as the IPCC report. I thought that this was a teaching moment, especially because the Heartland arguments hadn’t yet been sliced and diced by the media. I wrote earlier on some aspects of these reports (October 1 and October 15, 2013). The timing was in the middle of the semester; the students read the textbook, and I gave them some quizzes to make sure that they actually understood the issues and were ready for the midterm exam. Among other things, I wanted to test how they would do at arguing the issues. To prepare for the test, we went through the arguments section of the wonderful website Skeptical Science. The site is probably the best available resource for arguments and counter arguments. In the test, I gave the students the assignment of arguing in response to one assertion each from the Skeptical Science and Heartland sites. This section of the test is shown below:

Part B

Some of the deniers’ more popular arguments against anthropogenic contributions to climate change are summarized below (http://www.skepticalscience.com/). Construct a thoughtful, data based, response to one of these arguments.

a.      Climate’s changed before
“Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age.” (Richard Lindzen)
b.      Models are unreliable
“[Models] are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behaviour in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”  (Freeman Dyson)

Part C:
Arguments against the new IPCC recent report came out even before the original report. The two arguments below have appeared recently in http://heartland.org/media-library/pdfs/CCR-II/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf. Construct a thoughtful, data based, response to one of these arguments.

a.      CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.
b.      Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8% increase in atmospheric CO2, which represents 34% of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.

They didn’t do well. I decided, therefore, to devote a significant portion of the remainder of the semester to practicing argumentation on these kinds of issues.

Well, since argumentation is an “academic field,” but is not my specialty, my logical response was to call on some experts for help. The first department that I approached was the Department of Speech Communication Arts and Sciences. The present Chair is a friend and the previous Chair was arguably the best debater on campus. Unfortunately, the previous Chair had already retired by then and the department doesn’t have anybody to teach argumentation. They have asked a lawyer on campus to give the course on argumentation (this is supposed to be their bread and butter). I knew that argumentation in law is not the same as arguing on climate change but I decided to try getting through to him. He didn’t respond to my request. Next, I tried Philosophy – I went through their course offerings – no argumentation. Our college has a very good forensics club with a national reputation. I asked about the faculty adviser to the club, but found that there wasn’t one. Fortunately, I had an Honors College Physics major that took a course with me on climate change and was member of the forensics club, and asked her to come to my class to teach the students how to argue. She did a great job.

At this junction, I decided that learning how to argue and how to construct a decent argument should be an important objective of the course that deserves classroom effort.

As I have mentioned before (March 18, 2013) I am now using Team Based Learning (TBL) to teach my class and find this method to be very effective. In the lingo of this methodology teaching relevant argumentation can count as “application.” The class is already divided to teams of 7-8 students each. I gave every team one of the Heartland arguments and asked them to construct opposing and supporting presentations for the arguments and present them to the class toward the end of the semester. A few days later I got an email from one of the teams telling me that all of them fully agree with the Heartland argument. I asked them to try harder. They did, and since they had to divide the teams into those students presenting the supporting arguments and those opposing, by the end of the semester, we reached a more or less balanced positioning. But the balanced positioning didn’t convince anybody. Something was missing here and the semester was coming to its end. It became clear to me that I was unintentionally ending with the same strategy for arguing controversial issues as my history friend had been using to teach the Middle-East conflicts – a biased selection of observations.

In the case of Heartland and the IPCC, their findings are shown as conclusions to detailed full reports that are more than 1000 pages long. Obviously, none of the students read these reports in their entirety (they took the arguments in both cases from the provided “Summaries for the Policy Makers”), so they took the claims in the arguments on both sides to be equally valid.

This semester I decided to repeat the exercise with somewhat different rules. Every time that students need to make an argument, they are advised to refer to the three basic cycles shown below. As far as I know, none of these are controversial. Please stay tuned for the results.

Arguments:

Deniers vs. Believers – try to convert the opposing group to your side.

Elements:

Refute the premises of the other side
Support your own premises
Comment on the methodology of argumentation

In the next blogs I will focus on causal relation between the drought in the Western US and climate change as a case study to explore.

Posted in Climate Change, Education | Tagged Arguement, Arguementation, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Change Deniers, Climate Skeptics, Debate, DNNer, Education, Global Warming, Heartland, IPCC, Israel, NIPCC, Science, Skeptical Science, TBL, Teaching | 7 Comments

Publishers

Posted on March 18, 2014 by climatechangefork

My book, Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now was published in the early summer of 2011. I wrote it as a textbook for the general public, and it was used mainly for general education – both in my school and a few other schools. Some members of the “general public” with no special background in the sciences also bought and read it. I was not, for obvious reasons, able to follow this audience closely and became aware of that only after they contacted me.

Like many other books and articles on contemporary issues, the book was out of date the moment that it came out. I wrote about the obvious reasons for that in a previous blog. (October 22, 2013). The sale figures were decent for such a book – decent enough for my publisher to approach me during the spring of 2013 to start talking about a second edition. We met, started to exchange ideas and contacted people that have used the book.

During this summer, however, while I was traveling abroad, I got an email from my publisher saying the following (any identifying words omitted):

I am terribly sorry about the long, long delay in getting back to you with a decision about your proposed plan to revise your book, Climate Change.

As I believe xxxxx and I have both let you know in recent weeks, the owner xxxxxx has been reviewing our editorial strategy going forward. As a result, a decision has been made by xxxxxxxxx will from this point on be focused exclusively on what we call “collections” publishing: groups of 20-40 small concise monographs organized around a particular engineering topical theme aimed at primarily upper level undergraduate and graduate level college students.

So this means that I will not be publishing any more stand-alone books, particularly for professional/reference use. Moreover, I have been asked to not pursue any revisions of our currently published books. That latter directive may, perhaps, change in the future. But for now, I will have to decline a new edition of your book.

I was obviously upset but I accepted that it was a business decision. I changed my focus, starting on the demanding task of trying to pass the publishing torch. Because of the relative complexity of the efforts required to find a new prospective publisher, I have decided that the search will proceed serially; one publisher at a time, to eliminate the possibility of wasting precious publishers’ time in case of overwhelming enthusiasm to take on the job.

First, I approached a well-known publisher that I thought would be receptive. I received this response (again omitting identifying marks):

Thank you very much for forwarding this material and explaining your plans for a second edition of your textbook on the science of climate change. Although the topic is very much of interest to us and the book appears to offer an excellent introduction to the subject, it is not a fit for xxxxxxxx textbook program, which focuses on graduate level texts.

I wish you the best of luck in finding a suitable publisher for the new edition of the book. Thank you again for the chance to consider it.

Since this reason was basically identical to my existing publisher’s new changed business plan, the response made me think more generally about “graduate level texts” for highly interdisciplinary programs.

I have some experience in this business. I founded and directed (for 13 years) the Environmental Studies program at my school, which involves the participation of 14 departments. I also recently developed an interdisciplinary graduate course (Master’s level) called “Physics and Society.” The objective of the course is to engage students to apply the advanced quantitative skills that we teach our majors to broader societal issues. We used the following formal rationale to justify the course:

Rationale: “Physics and Society” is now a forum of the American Physical Society with its own publication; the most prestigious Physics journal – “Physical Review Letters” – includes a “catch all” section titled “Soft Matter, Biological and Interdisciplinary Physics.” A “typical” article in this section is titled “Environmental Versus Demographic Variability in Two-Species Predator-Prey Model” (prl – 2012- by Ulrich Dobramysl and Uwe C. Taber). Last year (2012), a new division of the American Physical Society was formed that is dedicated to Climate Change. The new division is the “Topical Group on the Physics of Climate” (GPC).

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Physics (among other definitions) as: “science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe.”

The goal of physics is to formulate comprehensive principles that bring together and explain all discernible phenomena. With 7 billion people (October 2012) and growing, humans have become part of the physical environment. For most of our graduate students, the Master’s is a terminal degree that should lead to job opportunities. The objective of the course is to explore career opportunities beyond the usual boundaries of textbooks that include human activities.

The anchor throughout the semester was a selection from periodic reports issued by agencies such as the United Nations (IPCC) and the US National Intelligence Council that attempt to predict the future of the world and define activities necessary in the present to optimize the prospects of such a future. Typical driving forces that are estimated in such reports include the following:

Population growth
Economic growth
Income distribution
Governmental practices – power distribution
Environmental impact
Climate change
Science & Technology
Energy
Water
Food

Throughout the course, students adopt specific driving forces to perform a technical quantitative study of topics such as Gini coefficients (Income Distribution), tipping points (Climate Change), climate sensitivity (Climate Change), demographic distribution (Population growth), and frequency of extreme events (Climate Change). Class work is dedicated to the mutual dependence of the forces, again searching for issues that might benefit from attention of physicists.

Samples of Required Reading include:

National Intelligence Council: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds
Weatherall, James Owen. The Physics of Wall Street. Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 2013.
Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. Doubleday, 2011.
Kahn, Herman and Anthony J. Wiener. The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. Macmillan, 1961.
Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

None of these books can be classified as “graduate level texts,” yet the material was completely foreign to all of the students and they were thankful for the exposure.

Meanwhile, Congress has finally approved a budget. Research organizations such as the National Science Foundation got their 2014 budget that they can allocate as research grants. Congress did not specify to which research areas the money should go; however they did add this directive: “further growth of interdisciplinary research initiatives shall not come at the expense of the core disciplines.” Many have seen this as code for do not give any more money to climate change research.

They say when it rains, it pours – but in this case, I think the situation is more of a drought.

Posted in Climate Change, Education | Tagged Bjorn Lomborg, Book, Brooklyn College, Climate Change, Climate Change Fork, Climate Sensitivity, CUNY, Demographics, Education, Gini Coefficients, Herman Kahn, IPCC, Michio Kaku, National Intelligence Council, National Science Foundation, NSF, Physics, Publishers, The Physics of Wall Street, Tipping Point, Weatherall, World Population | Leave a comment

Bard CEP Talk

Posted on March 11, 2014 by climatechangefork

Last Wednesday, I did a talk, Desalination as Adaptation as part of Bard College Center for Environmental Policy’s National Climate Seminar. The seminar, which is biweekly, was in the form of a conference call. Unfortunately, this format is completely new to me, and we had several technical difficulties. I apologize for the poor sound quality and regret that the talk had to end early. I will be posting some of the Q&A transcripts in the comments section below, since they are so hard to understand. I welcome your questions, hope that you will join the conversation in the comments section below.

I am including below a transcript of my talking points, and my answers to several questions emailed to me by students who were listening to the talk.

Transcript of talk:

Thanks to all of you. Before I start, let me say few words about my setting here. The timing of the seminar has small overlap with my regular climate change class. I have invited the students to hear the exchange during the seminar. As usual, many of them have conflicts and I have no idea how many will show up out of the 50 students take the class. To accommodate everybody, our IT guys helped me connect my iphone to the class audio system for everybody to hear. Two students, Desiree Dymond and Dylan Tobia are standing near me to warn me about the timing and help me in case I have difficulties in hearing your questions and comments.

I have asked Eban to be able to post the audio file on my blog so my students will be able to join all of you in the discussion.

I would like to thank you for hosting me and I would like also to thank Sonya Landau for suggesting to you my participation in this important seminar. Sonya is a graduate of Bard College and she now works in the public relations office LCG Communications with Linda Gross. In that capacity, Sonya is my right hand lady in publishing my blog and trying to help me spread the word to the furthest possible reach. Sonya has coordinated with Eban the poetic title – Desalination as Adaptation.

Friday morning I woke up with my usual breakfast and the New York Times. As usual, my wife got the first section and I got the rest. I started with the business section. One of the front-page articles started with the following intro: “The part of the past that you deem most relevant can be critical in determining your outlook for the future.” The article had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this seminar but I have decided to go along with that sentiment.

I was born in Warsaw, Poland 3 months before the German invasion that started WWII. I was born to a Jewish family and I survived the war with my mother, spending the first three and a half years of my life in the Warsaw ghetto and the next two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On February 13, 1945 I was saved by a unit of the American Army. After the War I went to Palestine (now Israel) where I grew up in boarding schools to follow in the army and University. I was trained as a scientist to try to quantify the physical environment with a focus on energy.

My present work is targeted at the modest objective of trying to assure long term survival of the planet as a supportive habitat of the human race. I define “long term” arbitrarily as 1000 years – a random number that has been cited as the time needed to develop the technology necessary to move from this planet to an alternative suitable planet in case we succeed in making this planet uninhabitable. So I define myself as a “quantitative survivalist.”

When I was born the global population was about 2 billion. Less than two years ago we crossed the marker of 7 billion – that’s an addition of 5 billion people in my lifetime. Over this period the average GDP/person in constant US$ has increased from around $2000 to about $8000. The GDP per person of the US is more than $50,000. The resources to support this growth came mainly from the physical environment. The price that we are paying is that we have become part of said physical environment.

The basic ingredients that characterize such survival are population, energy, food, water and natural resources.

The main life ingredients are described in terms of three cycles: The energy cycle, the carbon cycle and the water cycle. All three of these cycles are now being directly shaped by humans. Without human influence all three cycles balance nicely. Human influence drives all of them out of balance.

Climate change is caused mainly through the imbalances that we introduce in the carbon cycle through emission of greenhouse gases that impacts our energy balance. Most of the impact of these changes comes through the water cycle. The changes come in the form of sea level rise, extreme weather events and changes in the spatial and temporal pattern of precipitation.

There is a growing interest now to find exoplanets (Planets that are outside our solar system). There is even greater interest to find planets that can accommodate life. The interest is driven by scientific curiosity about our place in the Universe and, more pessimistically, attempts to find ways to save humanity in the case that we fail and make our planet uninhabitable. For a planet to be able to accommodate life, it must first accommodate liquid water on its surface and stay around long enough for the chemistry to take shape.

The water cycle is driven by solar energy that evaporates water into the atmosphere. The salt remains in the ocean. So the water cycle is a global gigantic desalination process with total recycling capabilities on a global scale – great system. The water vapor condenses in the atmosphere and joins the weather system. About 10% of the water returns to land in the form of rain or snow. The rain and snow eventually find their way back to the Ocean. With about 70% earth covered by Ocean, we will not run out of water – so long as the planet can stay habitable. Yet – increasingly we are running into severe shortage in the water that we can use – fresh water.

We use fresh water in agriculture to grow our food, in industry to drive our manufacturing and much of our energy needs, for drinking and for sanitation. As our numbers and our standard of living increase we need more fresh water. To satisfy our needs we borrow from storage pools and deplete our reservoirs. Water stress means that the storage pools are getting dry and that the natural water cycle cannot satisfy our needs.

What can we do?

We can use less
We can recycle
We can add to the water cycle through technological desalination.

We are doing all three but some of us are doing more than others

Let me elaborate a bit on desalination. We can mimic the natural water cycle by doing artificial thermal desalination through enhanced evaporation and condensation. This is an energy intensive process. In a place like Saudi Arabia where energy is low cost and money is in abundance, this is the preferred method. The largest desalination plants are the thermal desalination plants in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries. A much more efficient method is the reverse osmosis method.

If I take a cup of concentrated salt water and dump it into a container of fresh water, the salt will spread around very quickly through the entire sample, making a larger amount of diluted salt water (you can safely try it). If I want to do it in a controlled way I can put a membrane on the cup that can transport only water. What will happen is: water will move from the container to the cup in an attempt to equalize the concentration. The reason for that is one of the most basic laws of Physics called the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. The process is called osmosis defined as the spontaneous net movement of solvent molecules through a partially permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration. To desalinate, I need to accomplish the reverse. To do that, I need to invest energy in the process. We know how to do that. The process is called reverse osmosis (RO). Let’s get some numbers:

From 1990 – 2008 global desalination capacity rose from 3.7 Billion US gallons/day to 17.5 Billion US gallons/day; a rise of more than 350% or an average of 20% per year.

In 2012 global desalination capacity reached 20 Billion US gallons/day.

Largest capacity RO plants (all around 120 million US gallons/day):

Largest capacity thermal desalination Plants:

Saudi Arabia – 225 million US gallons/day. Under construction – SA – more than 250 million US gallons/day.
California – the largest desalination facility (basically the only one) – near San-Diego (Carlsbad) to be operational in 2016 has a planned capacity of 50 million gallons/day with a construction time about 20 years.

Probably the most important thing that we can do is integrate all three water saving methods with the natural water cycle. Equally important, to adapt to the great spatial and temporal variability in the natural water cycle, we have to be able to adjust our water supplement to complement the natural variability.

Israel is doing just that. My last blog details some of the issues that Israel had to confront in doing that.

What is the global situation and why should we care? Let’s go through some numbers again: Average water use in the US is about 150 gallons/person. day – in Kenya it is 13. The largest water users everywhere are in agriculture to produce our food. 70% of Kenyans are employed in agriculture as compared to 1% of Americans.

Close to a billion people lack access to clean water and sanitation. Water recycling and desalination need resources that most countries can not afford. As the situations in many countries show, water doesn’t recognize borders and when people are desperate, security threats cross borders as well. What we do in the rich world should be addressed to solve global issues and not confined to our own backyards. In the rich world we should be willing to provide the technology and resources to address the global water stress through integration of saving, recycling and desalination.

Dear Professor Micha Tomkiewicz,

We are the graduate students from Bard CEP that asked you a couple questions during your National Climate Center talk. Our names are Emily and Sonam. Thank you again for joining our talk on Wednesday. We are currently writing our blog post as a response to the talk and we have a couple follow up questions for you. If you could answer a couple of these questions for us, whichever ones you wish to answer, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Emily McCarthy and Tso Sonam

I understand this question is a bit of an extreme case, but bear with me for a moment: 2 earth system scientists, Timothy Lenton and Andrew Watson, wrote a book “Revolutions that Made the Earth” that argues that large changes in the amount of energy available to the biosphere have, in the past, always marked large transitions to the way the world works. They then consider that growing availability of solar and nuclear over coming centuries may mark the greatest new energy resources since and they suggest that the energy may be used the change the hydrologic cycle with massive desalination equipment, or a whole lot of other changes that this burst in energy could cause. In our graduate studies, we have seen that humans can completely change some earth cycles by our actions …

Our question is: at what amount of world-wide desalination, would you say that we should stop? It is good to think of where you would have to expanding the quantity of water being desalinated.
Great questions. I haven’t read Lenton & Watson’s book, though I probably should. From the title, I would expect it to cover something about Terraforming (the artificial formation of a planet with characteristics of the Earth) but your explanation makes it clear that is not the case. I would be a bit more comfortable answering your questions if I could remove the descriptive adjectives such as “large transitions,” “large changes,” and “massive desalination equipment,” but I can live with them.

Solar and nuclear are the two basic forms of energy that describe everything we are using. For example, energy forms such as wind, biofuels and hydropower all derive their energy from the sun. The fossil fuels from which we get our chemical energy originally derived their energy from photosynthetic organisms, which in turn derived their energy from the sun – the difference is that they did it millions of years ago. Tidal energy is probably the only form that cannot be characterized directly as either solar or nuclear.

Solar energy drives the water cycle. However, the water cycle operates on a global scale as part of the weather system, so we don’t always get the water when and where we need it. As our demand for fresh water grows, we need to supplement the water cycle. By this, I mean that when there is a short supply, such as in drought, we can draw from the desalinated supply, and when we have enough or more than enough (floods) from the natural cycle we don’t use the desalination facility. This necessarily means that we construct water systems that can move large quantities of water whenever –to wherever they are needed. This also requires an efficient water management system to ensure that the price that we pay for the water covers the cost and that the investment in the construction will be economically viable.

In last week’s blog I described the water management system in Israel, which approximately satisfies these requirements.

We need to expand desalination only to the most necessary level. That means that if we are good with the other management tools that we have such as efficient water use and recycling, our needs will be manageable.

What progress in particular would you like to see happening? Improved technology and research? or outreach and education? Or getting industry / investors/ government involved directly?

How do you feel about combined power and desalination plants?
Combined power and desalination plants are fine but they are not necessary. They each require specific settings and we should not have any issue moving either the energy or the water to wherever it’s most needed. The main argument against using desalination is the large amount of energy that we use to operate desalination plants. We are becoming much more energy efficient with the technology but we still need large amounts of energy. The only sustainable scenario here is to find an equally sustainable energy source. This of course would also contribute to the cost.

What do you think about trying to encourage industry to desalinate instead of cities?
The way it works now is that industry desalinates and not cities. In most places the cities don’t even initiate the desalination capabilities but instead contact the water authority to supply the water when needed at an agreed price.

Do you encourage other desalination processes other than the major families of reverse osmosis and distillation?
Right now, reverse osmosis is the leading technology – one that is being continuously improved. We don’t have too many options here because the process itself is a reverse osmosis process – the real issue is how we achieve it: through a thermal process (distillation) or through application of pressure.

Have you thought about a collaboration with a separation processes engineering class about a design project? They could perform a design of a theoretical plant and then perform an economic assessment of the investment. Desalination is often covered in these classes.
As I mentioned in my chat, I don’t work in the desalination industry and I am a bit old to switch jobs but there are plenty of very gifted engineers and scientists that are doing fine work.

Do you think private-public partnerships could be useful for desalination?
Public-private partnership is not only very useful, but absolutely necessary for desalination. I don’t see any way to run an efficient water management system without such a partnership.

Do you think desalination ever poses any environmental justice threats?
Which are the highest variable costs of operation, and which parts of the equipment are the most expensive (pressure vessel, membrane) in general?
The price of energy constitutes about 50% of the cost. We are making great strides in reducing membrane and vessel cost. These are a fixed price, since they do not scale with the amount of water that we desalinate, while the energy used does.

I sort of reversed the orders of the last two questions because the issue of environmental justice is probably the most challenging issue in the discussion. I will be delighted to continue the discussion starting with your opinion on how to address the environmental justice issue. It is important here to define the scale that we are taking about (global, country, individual?).

Take care and thank you.

As always, I welcome everyone’s feedback, questions and comments – I would love to continue the conversation with you in the comments section.

Update: the Bard CEP blog just posted about desalination and my talk: Desalination as Adaptation: Energy intensive, but sometimes necessary. I want to thank them again for inviting me to participate in their National Climate Seminar.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, Algeria, Australia, Bard, Bard CEP, California, Clean Energy, Climate Change, Desalination, Distillation, Education, Energy, Fresh Water, Global Population, Israel, Power Plants, Quantitative Survivalist, Reverse Osmosis, Salt Water, Saudi Arabia, Seminar, Solar Energy, Sustainability, Thermal Desalination, Water, Water Cycle, Water Recycling, Water Stress, World Population | Leave a comment

Back to Water – Israel in the Lead

Posted on March 4, 2014 by climatechangefork

I am back to focusing on water (you can use the search engine here to find the previous related blogs) for two important reasons:

On Wednesday (tomorrow) I am participating in Bard College’s Bi-Weekly National Climate Seminar and will be discussing desalination. The audio file of the conversation will be posted here (in addition to the posting on the Bard site – I am thankful to the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy for facilitating the talk). I invite you to continue the conversation through comments here.
My last few blogs looked at various attempts to achieve demographic stability, as implemented by China and Israel. Unfortunately, the efforts of both countries were found to be wanting, so I am shifting back to water as I continue the search for policies that will achieve sustainable long-term human development.

Here I would like to shift to water management, using the example of Israel once again, since it has become a figure for emulation in the United States. Through its efforts in water management, Israel, which sits in a historically water-thirsty region, has gone from a country in severe water stress to one that can actually export significant amounts of water to its neighbor to achieve policy objectives. Israel is now receiving almost universal praise for its efforts in this area. I will elaborate later on the meaning of “almost.”

The graph above is probably one of the best testaments to the success of this water management policy. Over the last 20 years or so, water use for agriculture has been kept steady, even while crop production increases. As we will see shortly, one of the main tools for this accomplishment has been an increase in the price of the water. The graph was posted by an objective arbiter, and I am using it so as to avoid any potential political (pro-Israeli) bias.

I will introduce the Israeli water management system with the use of two documents: the first is a 2006 PowerPoint presentation by Gilad Fernandes, who served as Deputy Director-General of the Water Authority, while the second document is an article from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz that describes the present situation.

The Water Authority Document:

To make the presentation readable I have converted it into an outline in document form.

Management of the Water Section in Israel:

Legal Basis – The Water Law 1959:
1. Water availability is insufficient for needs.
2. Water is owned by the public and managed by the Government (as trustee) for the benefit of the people and the development of the country.
3. Administrative control over all aspects of water use (Consumption, Allocations, Productions, Pollution…).
4. The Water Law created a balance between water scarcity and the need to provide water for the most important needs.
Physical Infrastructure – The National Grid.
Institutional Infrastructure – The Water Authority.

Water Authority responsibilities:

Water Authority strengthened and regulation decreased.
Water Authority provides efficient organizational solutions: economic management of water system, supply and demand criteria, cancel allocation system.
Water prices – express real cost.
State of reservoir and supply area determine utilization limits.
Stabilizing the water sector – the produced water resources are of steady production rate, the scope of utilization from natural resources depends on the status of the reservoir.
Guaranteeing water supply at fixed quality for drinking and industrial needs.
Efficient integration of the water resources in the regional systems while referring to development and operation considerations.
Desalinated water as the source for urban and industrial provision – an examined option – while detaching networks.
Establishing an operational layout – operating all water resources according to the hydrological situation, their transfer and distribution to the consumers.

Economic Background:

Usable water from all sources – natural, salinated, desalinated and even effluents – are rear public resources and therefore should be regulated, using Hydrological operational and economical measures.
The economic regulation is based on tariffs that cover the recognized costs of various water supply services and therefore creates an efficient use of this resource.
The economic regulation is subjected to sectarian and political agreements such as the agreement with the agricultural sector and the water supply agreements with Jordan & the PA (Palestinian Authority).
Unrealistic tariffs è Enhanced Demand èrisk of water supply crisis.
Realistic cost based tariffs è efficient allocation of water.
In the future – significant increase in water supply costs (Desalination) and therefore an increase in cost based tariffs.

Economic Policy: Methodology for recognized costs of water supplies:

The Goal – creating a “transparent” methodology for analyzing recognized costs that enable an efficient supply of water.
Providing resources for infrastructures needed for water supply (separate component in the tariff, separate designated fund).
Defining normative expenses components (& profit) essential for providing services whilst enhancing efficiency.
Creating regulatory environment that enables non-discriminatory (consumers, competition).
Creating regulatory environment that encourage the use of efficient water technologies.
Representing the cost (and derived tariff) methodology alternatives to the Water Authority board (Inc. public hearing if necessary).
Implementing the Water Authority board decisions.

The main trend – Increase in costs & tariffs

Potable water-production and transfer:
1. Increase in Desalination increase in production costs. Currently the annual production of Desalinated water is 290 MCM (Million Cubic Meter) (= 10 billion ft³) (20% of total potable water (drinking water)). In 2013 the annual production of Desalinated water will be 600MCM (40% of total potable water).
  1. Results:
  2. Increase in water costs – Desalinated water cost about 0.6 – 0.8 US$/meter cube (1.7 – 2 US$/ft³).
  3. Investment in connecting the desalination plants to the national grid.
  4. Investments in adopting the transfer system.
2. Creating a regulation system for Mekorot (the main water supplier) that will enable an efficient investment plan.
Potable water-Agricultural Sector:
1. Decrease in allocated annual quantities – a decrease from 1000 MCM a decade ago to 480 MCM today (the agricultural potable water tariffs are about 0.14US$ lower than the supply costs).
2. Results:
3. Increase effectiveness of potable water usage in agriculture.
4. Increase of other water – treated sewage water (400 MCM) drainage and salinated water (250MCM).
5. Increasing agricultural potable water tariffs to the average water supply cost (in 7 years span according to the agreement).
Municipal water supply – Municipal authorities:
1. The water supply system wasn’t based on authentic finance economy è ability to use water revenues for other municipal services..
2. The municipal authority as a customer (for instance in water in parks & gardens) doesn’t pay a realistic tariff (Mekorot tariff, excluding distribution).
3. Creating incentives for new water service corporations & creating a tariff basis similar to the municipal corporations.
Municipal water supply – Water & sewage corporations:
1. Defining tariffs that reflect recognizing water & sewage services costs.
2. Using corporate revenues for maintenance & development of the municipal water system including additional investments in water distribution & sewage collection.
3. Construction/upgrading sewage treatment facilities.
4. In accordance with government policy-creating regional corporations for water distribution, sewage collection & treatment whilst enhancing economy of scale advantages.

Water Supply Costs:

Natural water supply costs range from 0.15 – 0.45 US$/m³.
Seawater desalination costs at the distribution system range from 0.6 – 0.8 US$/m³ (excluding connection to the main system).
The average cost of the National Water Supply System is about 0.35 US$/m³.
This cost will raise in the following years in 40% – 50% (grate investments).
Distribution costs range from 0.4 – 0.75 US$/m³.
Based on recognized costs to every Corp.

Tariffs (per cubic meter (CM)):

Domestic:
1. Corp./Municipality: $1.15
  1. Consumers:
  2. $2.4 per first 7 cubic meters
  3. $4 per additional cubic meter.
Industrial:
1. Potable water (in addition to sewage tariff) – $1.35
2. Treated effluent 20% less than potable
3. Saline water 15% less than potable.
4. Inferior quality water 20% less than potable.
Agricultural:
1. Potable Water
  1. 1^st. Tranche (50% of allocation) – $0.5
  2. 2^nd. Tranche (30% of allocation) – $0.6
  3. 3^rd. Tranche (20% of allocation) – $0.75
2. b. Treated Effluent
  1. About $0.35 (varies with the treatment plant)
3. c. Saline Water
  1. Gradual reduction from composite tariff for potable water based on salinity level.

Excerpts from the Haaretz article about the present situation:

In ancient times and even during the years of the British Mandate (1917-1948), the shortage of water in Palestine, as well as among its neighbors in the Middle East, had a decisive influence not only on the area’s economic development, but also on the political strife between Jews and Arabs. Technology has changed all this. Now, the ability to produce all the water that’s needed, whether for human consumption or for agriculture, may soon change our way of life and perhaps even, if our neighbors agree, bring peace closer.

There is now a surplus of water in Israel, thanks largely to the opening of several new desalination plants – and the development of natural-gas fields that can power them cheaply. Since water is the source of life, the well-known Israeli imperative to “save every drop” should still be respected. But the price the Israeli population is charged for its water supply should be reduced by more than the 5 percent drop announced on January 1 of this year.

Desalination in Israel began in 1973, when Mekorot built facilities that operated by reverse osmosis; these supplied the Dead Sea, Eilat and communities not served by the National Water Carrier. It was only 35 years later, in 2008, that the government decided to establish five large desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast, with the aim of providing 505 million cubic meters of water a year by 2013 (a forecast met in full) and 750 million cubic meters a year by 2020. However, since 2008, two technological revolutions – both of which also have far-reaching political implications – have radically altered the water situation in Israel.

The first revolution is the immense decrease in the cost of desalination – from $1 per cubic meter to 40 cents, and even less than that in desalination plants built in Hadera, Palmahim, Ashkelon and at Sorek. The savings will grow further thanks to the use of Israeli natural gas instead of electricity to power the plants. The second revolution is the success of the plants used to purify sewage water that were built adjacent to Israel’s cities and towns. Thanks to efficient usage, this water now irrigates most of the country’s field crops

There are at least three explanations for this uncharacteristic silence, in the face of success and the concomitant abundance of water Israel now enjoys. One is that even though the cost of desalination has fallen considerably, the government promised the investors a high price for the water. The government can reduce the amount of water it buys from the desalination facilities, but it cannot pay less than what it promised.

In the next blog I will compare the situation in Israel to the one in the US, focusing specifically on California.

For now, let’s revisit the “almost” qualifier that I mentioned in the beginning of the blog. Two related events took place recently. One is the water situation in Gaza, for which Israel is partially responsible. The Gazans don’t have the power to clean their sewage and are forced instead to dump it in the Mediterranean. The northern border of Gaza is only a few miles from the large Israeli city of Ashkelon, where one of the largest Israeli desalination facilities is located. Ashkelon will not be isolated from the sea dumping for long. I detailed this situation in a previous blog (December 2, 2013), which was based on an Op-Ed in the New York Times. The article was co-authored by Alon Tal, who teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is a visiting professor at the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, and Yousef Abu-Mayla, a water expert at Al Azhar University in Gaza.

The second issue is more recent. The President of the European Parliament came to visit Israel. He was heckled during his speech in the Israeli Parliament for saying that he had heard that “Palestinians get 17 liters of water for every 70 Israelis get,” and his comment prompted the Economic Minister and his entire Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party to leave in protest. The strong prevailing impression is that while the water management system is great for the Jewish population, it is not disconnected from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli water management system’s success can serve as an encouraging example of how to handle human development indicators for long term sustainability – provided that it is combined with a clear non discrimination policy. On the face of it – in terms of theory – the system is disconnected from short term politics. This disconnection needs to be extended to the implementation stage. More on this in future blogs.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Bard College, CEP, Climate Change, Desalination, Israel, National Climate Seminar, Palestine, Sustainability, Technology, Water, Water Authority, Water Cycle, Water Management, Water Stress | 1 Comment

Top-Down Stabilization Attempts

Posted on February 25, 2014 by climatechangefork

In a previous blog (February 11, 2014) I summarized some of the current measures being taken to reverse the existing trend of fertility rates lowering to below replacement levels in countries throughout the world. These attempts include restricting abortions (although, as I have mentioned before, most of such measures have nothing to do with demographic considerations), giving families money as an encouragement to have more children and providing incentives to attract and keep women in the workforce. Additionally, attracting women to the workforce serves to mitigate negative consequences associated with a shrinking workforce. I also mentioned other plans working toward the same purpose, including incentives to keep older people in the workforce and the development of robotic technologies to supplement human labor.

On the face of it, none of these steps target demographic stabilization, but I will try to use this post to describe two possible stabilization efforts. In the February 4^th, 2014 blog I tried to describe the science of stabilization, using a thermostat as an example of our goal. In short, we need to find the means to set the temperature (or in this case, population) to a desired value, lowering the temperature to that value when it goes higher and increasing the temperature when it drifts below the desired value.

The crudest attempt in that direction can be associated with China’s one-child policy, which was instituted in 1979. Many demographers consider the name a misnomer because of the many exceptions that it entails. It was enacted to alleviate the social, economic and environmental problems associated with growing populations. Indeed, China’s fertility rate is now well below replacement (See data on the January 28, 2014 blog). However, as we saw in a previous blog, about half the world’s countries now have fertility rates below replacement. This is in spite of the fact that with the exception of China, none of these countries have instituted a policy similar to the one-child policy. Over the last 20 years the total fertility rate in China was kept approximately constant. Meanwhile, in economic terms, China was developing at the fastest global rate – approaching a constant of 10% in US$. Clearly the term, “development is the best contraceptive” applies here, with the two driving forces (one-child policy and the economic development) working in parallel. To isolate the separate contributions of the two is not an easy task. The similarities between China’s decrease in fertility rates and those of other developing countries provide a solid argument that the major contribution came from the economic development.

The exceptions that demographers claim makes the one-child policy a misnomer actually make it more apt to qualify as a stabilization policy or as an attempt at a demographic thermostat. The exceptions (which can be changed, as we will see shortly) are listed along with the policy’s main negative impacts on Wikipedia, as quoted below:

Rural families can have a second child if the first child is a girl or is disabled, and ethnic minorities are exempt. Families in which neither parent has siblings are also allowed to have two children.^[2] Residents of the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and foreigners living in China are also exempt from the policy. In 2007, approximately 35.9% of China’s population was subject to a one-child restriction.^[3] In November 2013, the Chinese government announced that it would further relax the policy by allowing families to have two children if one of the parents is an only child.^[2]^[4]

The policy has been implicated in an increase in forced abortions,^[8]female infanticide, and underreporting^[9] of female births, and has been suggested as a possible cause behind China’s sex imbalance. Nonetheless, a 2008 survey undertaken by the Pew Research Center reported that 76% of the Chinese population supports the policy.^[10]

The policy is enforced at the provincial level through fines that are imposed based on the income of the family and other factors. “Population and Family Planning Commissions” exist at every level of government to raise awareness and carry out registration and inspection work.^[11].

The resulting sex imbalance is shown below:

Jim Foreit (guest blog – January 14, 2014) emailed me an article from the Washington Post written by Lauren Sandler regarding the policy’s recent change to allow families a second child. Her article was skeptical of the ability of the changes to reverse the decline in fertility rates. She should know because she wrote a book on the topic (“One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One.”). In the article she claims that most Chinese share this view. It seems that development really has acted as a contraceptive, and China can now join the rest of the world by abandoning the one-child policy altogether without fear of adverse consequences.

A friend of mine is making a movie that was intended to document family life under the one-child policy. Below is part of my email exchange with him after seeing the movie.

My remarks:

I was glued in-spite of the fact that for a guy that was constantly preaching that a movie has to have a story, this movie doesn’t have a story. Similar footage in a very raw form can be obtained by attaching a small mobile camera on almost every one of the 7 billion or so global inhabitants (including your two kids). As such, the movie itself has very little of the one-child’s consequences. That means very little about sex, child prevention, issues with gender ratio, selective abortions, etc. it’s fascinating.

His response:

Yes, the film is not about the policy—I wanted to steer clear of the heated political debates about it—the film is certainly about the consequences of a family living under that policy and all you are seeing is one third of the film. More is expected to be covered to contrast the 2nd daughter and young boy, we will see the true nature of how this family must survive in China. Last month China just fined a famous Chinese filmmaker, Zhang Yimou, for having 3 children—so this topic and penalty levy is still an active issue.

On a completely different premise, US Secretary of State John Kerry cited demographic stabilization as a driving reason for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians in some form of a two states solution.

Here is a recent quote from a speech that he made on the topic:

The US Secretary of State said that a team of American experts headed by General John Allen has “extensively analyzed Israel’s security needs in any future agreement and presented Israel with a concrete plan. According to the proposed plan, Israel would be able to defend itself against any potential threat while the United States will lead countries that will support it during an emergency.” Kerry said that “Israel needs to understand the fact that its security is associated with the two-state solution. Military force cannot defeat or defuse the demographic time bomb. The scene tomorrow will differ from today.”

The sentiment about the demographic time bomb is shared by many – both in and out of Israel – but it is wrong. It seems that the US State Department didn’t do their homework.

Here are the data:

The population is divided to the following groups (the exact borders to which this division applies to is described on the site):

Group	Population	%
Jews	5,907,500	75.4%
Muslims	1,354,300	17.3%
Christians	155,100	2.0%
Druze	129,800	1.6%
Other	289,900	3.7%

As to fertility rates:

Jewish total fertility rate increased by 10.2% during 1998–2009, and was recorded at 2.90 during 2009. During the same time period, Arab TFR decreased by 20.5%. Muslim TFR was measured at 3.73 for 2009. During 2000, the Arab TFR in Jerusalem (4.43) was higher than that of the Jews residing there (3.79). But as of 2009, Jewish TFR in Jerusalem was measured higher than the Arab TFR (2010: 4.26 vs 3.85, 2009: 4.16 vs 3.87). TFR for Arab residents in the West Bank was measured at 2.91 in 2013,^[46] while that for the Jewish residents was reported at 5.10 children per woman.^[47]

Fertility rate, by year and religion^[42]
Year	Jews	Muslims	Christians	Druze	Others	Total
2010	2.97	3.75	2.14	2.48	1.64	3.03
2011	2.98	3.51	2.19	2.33	1.75	3.00
2012	3.04	3.54	2.17	2.26	1.68	3.05

The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998 and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose to 8.51 in 1996 from 6.91 in 1980. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/MizrahiHaredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.^[48]

The demographic time bomb is not necessarily between the Arab and the Jewish populations. The fertility rate of the Arab population is higher than that of the Jewish population, but it is quickly decreasing, following the trends in many developing countries. The larger “time bomb” seems to apply instead between the secular and religious nationalist Jews (presently approximately 80% of the Jewish population) which have relatively small fertility rates and the more orthodox Jewish population (the Haredim – presently around 20% of the Jewish population) with a much higher fertility rate than either the Arabs or the less orthodox Jews. It seems that there are two demographic time bombs that are in danger of “exploding,” with perhaps the most imminent one being within the Jewish community itself. Small steps are now being proposed to apply “development is the best contraceptive” to the Haredi Jewish community but few people outside Israel know much of these efforts.

From these two examples, we can see that so far the construction of a demographic thermostat has taken a lot of work, but does not show much progress. The next series of blogs will take us back to the water shortage issue. I will start with an Israeli example where the construction of a hydrological thermostat has been a bit more successful.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Abortion, Arabs, China, Contraception, Democratization, Demographics, Family Planning, Fertility, Fertility Rate, Global Population, Israel, Jews, Muslims, One-Child Policy, Populationstat, Stabilization, Thermostat, Workforce, World Population | Leave a comment

Economic Impact of Fertility Rates Below Replacement

Posted on February 18, 2014 by climatechangefork

The golden rule of free enterprise economy seems to be that everything that contributes to economic growth is good, while anything that detracts from the same is bad. The rationale behind this is that as the population grows, the economy has to accommodate the growing population in order to maintain or improve the standard of living. I have argued against this reasoning before, especially as it relates to long-term planetary sustainability (see Economic Growth and Problems With My Sourdough Bread blog Feb. 11, 2013 and the series of blogs surrounding it). The previous argument was based on the idea that continuous economic growth inevitably comes at the expense of the deterioration of the physical environment, with climate change as one of the major impacts. The argument there was that for the long term (again, my standard is 1000 years) with stabilized population, the only justified economic growth is for homogenizing the economic structure to ensure that everybody can afford a decent living.

This perspective agrees with the recent quote from Dilama Rousseff, the President of Brazil, in an email correspondence with Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker: “The main aim of economic development must always be the improvement of living conditions,” she told him. “You cannot separate the two concepts.”

The conclusion I reached in my most recent discussion was that in order to be successful going forward, we must learn to shift the paradigm of the holy grail of economics from growth to stability. Here I would like to shift the focus to economic consequences of decrease in population that results from fertility rates consistently below replacement. Since, as I have mentioned in a number of recent blogs, more than half of the world’s developing countries and the majority of its developed countries currently live with below replacement fertility rates, the economic consequences need not be deduced from long term extrapolations. They should start to be visible now – indeed, we are already starting to see some of the impacts.

The issue recently gained some attention due to some comments made by Larry Summers in a short speech that he gave at a research IMF conference to honor Stanley Fischer (President Obama’s recent nomination to serve as Vice Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank). A key paragraph is given below:

It is a central pillar of both classical models and Keynesian models that stabilization policy is all about fluctuations – fluctuations around a given mean – and that the achievable goal and therefore the proper objective of macroeconomic policy is to have less volatility. I wonder if a set of older and much more radical ideas that I have to say were pretty firmly rejected in 14.462, Stan, a set of older ideas that went under the phrase secular stagnation, are not profoundly important in understanding Japan’s experience in the 1990s, and may not be without relevance to America’s experience today.

The term “secular stagnation” is reintroduced here from its original use in the mid 1950s. The stagnation itself and the responsible driving forces are still controversial, but the demographic shift is a very likely contributor.

One important reason for the recent discussions rests on an apparent anomaly in the statistics of the recovery from the last recession. The unemployment rate is shrinking quickly, but this actually corresponds less to the addition of new jobs, and more to the increasing number of people leaving the workforce. If people are leaving the workforce because they don’t believe that they will be able to find work, it indicates an unhealthy economy that needs to be fixed. If, however people leave the workforce because they choose or are forced to retire because they have reached the retirement age, it’s a different issue. The baby boomers (born after the 2^nd World War) are now starting to reach the retirement age and the economy needs to accommodate them. This is a demographic transition that is coming about because of changes that took place in the demographic pyramid caused by events that took place more than two generations ago.

The relative weight of the demographic changes compared to cyclical job availability, is a controversial issue, loaded with political arguments across the political spectrum. The dynamics (and the politics) hold similarities to the debate about climate change: i.e. whether the causes are anthropogenic (caused by humans) or “natural.” It is much more likely the two components both play important roles; attempts to differentiate between the two show up periodically across this blog.

A related discussion (and political debate) has now opened around the new healthcare law in the US (Obamacare). It has recently been projected that the law will lower the labor force by more than two million toward the end of the decade (people will not need to go to work simply to guarantee health insurance). Opponents of the law immediately started trying to brand the law as a job killing legislation. Supporters, meanwhile, have maintained that the law allows people the freedom to choose whether and how much they want to work.

A recent piece in the Economist (January 4^th – 10^th 2014) describes an interesting dynamic with a new building site in Battersea, London. The site is being built as a retirement village. Its 112 flats are available only to buyers over 65. It will include restaurants, gym, a swimming pool and a care home. It describes the background:

Britain’s population is ageing fast. The number of people older than 85 is expected to double by 2030. Yet Britain’s elderly are badly served by the housing market. Although 71% of people over the age of 65 own their homes outright, lots still live in large family houses, paying dearly to heat empty bedrooms and struggling with too-large gardens, broken boilers and council tax bills.

It’s bad for the old people and contributes to Britain’s housing shortage:

According to data from the English Housing Survey, roughly 49% of owner-occupied homes have at least two more bedrooms than the government deems necessary. Among those who rent—either privately or from the state—the figure is just 13%. Neal Hudson, an analyst at Savills, a big estate agent, estimates that there are almost 1.2m inefficiently used homes in London and the south-east alone.

Demographic changes have major impacts on everything that we do. We need to learn how to accommodate those changes. If our population is shrinking, with older generations outnumbering those that must care for them, it is imperative that we learn how to manage and redistribute essential goods and services. This goes double for when we take into account climate change and the resources that will be available in the times to come.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, Anthropogenic, Baby Boomers, Brazil, Britain, Climate Change, Demographics, Economics, Economy, Fertility, Fertility Rate, Fertility Replacement Rate, Global Population, Growth, Obamacare, Population, Secular Stagnation, Stagnation, Unemployment, Workforce, World Population | 1 Comment

Attempts to Reverse Negative Impacts of Fertility Rates That Have Crossed Below Replacement

Posted on February 11, 2014 by climatechangefork

As Jim mentioned in his guest blog (January 14, 2014):

Half of the countries worldwide now have sub-replacement fertility. The downside to this trend is shrinking labor forces – a factor which has led some governments to try to reverse the course and increase fertility. Romania banned abortion, and fertility briefly increased – until illegal sources of abortion appeared to meet demand. Other countries like France and Germany in the 1930s provided families with generous incentives ranging from free childcare to cash payments for additional children, but these actions did not produce substantially higher fertility. The relaxation of China’s one-child policy may result in higher fertility, but the effects will not be known for several years.

There have been several attempts to reverse these negative impacts, specifically with regards to the shrinking labor forces.

Abortion: As the figure below shows, there is no correlation between the legal grounds on which abortions are permitted globally and the demographic concern about crossing the replacement fertility rates. While abortions on request are permitted in most developed countries, this is not the case in most developing countries. Public debates and demonstrations about abortion are almost always front page news. These often correlate with individual religious beliefs, arguments about the sanctity of life, and women’s safety and autonomy over their own bodies. Spain is going through such a debate right now, and fertility rates and population growth play no part in the argument.

Money: About eight years ago I visited Russia, one of the countries with the most serious fertility declines below replacement. Vladimir Putin was a new president at the time and he had promised Russian women $5,000 for every new baby that they gave birth to. I asked my young Russian guides if they planned to go along with this and “produce” some babies – apparently it was the patriotic thing to do. Without exception, they laughed and said that if Putin were to promise them an apartment, then they would think about it.

Incentives to attract and keep women in the work force: As we saw in the previous blog, this is clearly working and is a major factor to account for the lack of clear correlation between the decline in fertility rates and changes in the size of the work force. The relative number of women does not increase beyond their demographic ratio. The recent effort on this score can be found in South Korea:

South Korea will adopt a name-and-shame policy, publicly identifying companies with low female employment levels, as President Park Geun Hye targets 1.65 million extra jobs for women.

Policy steps will include increased subsidies for parents on childcare leave and preferential treatment for “family-friendly” companies seeking government contracts, six ministries said in a joint statement today.

With an aging population threatening to undermine South Korea’s economic growth, Park, the nation’s first woman president, has pledged to lift the female employment rate to 61.9 percent, from 53.5 percent, before her term ends in 2018. Cho Yoon Sun, the minister for gender equality, is working with the family-run industrial groups called chaebol to try to end male-dominated employment practices.

Incentives to keep older people in the workforce: I am nine years past the upper limit of the age of the “working population.” I keep working because I have the choice. I like my work, I am in reasonably good health, and by any available standard I do as a good job now as I did when I was younger. For most positions in the US, an employer could not fire me for being old, without facing a lawsuit for age discrimination. Many older workers don’t have this choice. They would love to retire, but they cannot do so because of economic concerns. The pension obligations of many public employers and some private employers are deteriorating to such a degree that they are incapable of paying those already owed, much less those who have yet to retire. Perhaps in part due to that, the age definition of “working population” is drifting upward. This drift, similar to the limits on female participation in the work force, is self-limiting by biology. Life expectancies are not increasing at the same rate as our ability to be healthier and stay longer in the workforce.

In the long term (again, I will use 1000 years as my yardstick) these trend will not stabilize the negative impacts of a steadily declining population.

There is one “remedy” that might do the trick by changing the equation for stabilization: replacing humans with robots, where applicable.

Robotics: Let’s examine two other paragraphs from Jim’s guest blog:

Barring massive migration to extra-terrestrial planets, global population growth will continue to be determined by the difference between births and deaths. If there are more births than deaths, the population will grow. If there are more deaths than births, the population will shrink. It’s as simple as that.

Let’s look at deaths first: Death rates have been declining for more than a century, even taking into account the overall aging of the population and the ongoing HIV epidemic. Purposefully containing population growth by increasing deaths would require us to resort to the apocalyptic factors of war, pestilence and starvation; strategies which few would advocate.

These two paragraphs are indeed as true as they seem. The times in which we purposefully “adjusted” global populations on a massive scale through deaths using wars and epidemics as tools, are hopefully long past, not to return. I am obviously excluding possibilities of collective insanities such nuclear Armageddon. But technology and innovation offer other options that work to achieve the same objective. Our moral code objects to the use of death to control population, but it doesn’t object to the destruction of machines to control the workforce.

As I have mentioned repeatedly, at the time that I was born the world population was around 2 billion, a number which has increased to 7 billion during my lifetime (as of October 2011). I have also mentioned that if we allow the population to shrink back to around two billion, the population pyramids (January 21, 2014 blog) will drastically change, reducing the number of working age adults that are available to support the rest of us. Can we – instead of stabilizing the population – stabilize the “working hands,” while letting the overall population shrink? It seems that not only is such a solution feasible, but we are already (inadvertently) making great “progress” with such a scenario.

The figure below shows the estimated worldwide shipment in industrial robots (in thousands). In 2011 sales of industrial robots reached 166,000 units, an increase of 38% compared to 2010. The shipments are estimated to exceed 200,000 by 2015. Presently, the largest purchaser is the automotive industry.

This number doesn’t include domestic robots or those that are being used in the service industry, but it reflects a clear trend toward their increased participation in the workforce.

The increasing participation of robots in the workforce, along with their growing ability to replace humans in many tasks, has often been labeled as the Second Industrial Revolution. Once or twice in some academic meetings, I have also heard the term “Third Industrial Revolution,” which limits the second one to the introduction of computerized gadgets. Whatever your preference, once we use the trend in the same context as the original Industrial Revolution, we have to include Luddites in the discussion. “The Luddites,” according to Wikipedia, “were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817.” In each case, the advents of these technological breakthroughs have been met by some with strong disapproval. Since this happened following the use of machines to replace workers – both in the 21^st century and the 19^th century predecessor, it seems fair to use the same term to describe the like-minded groups. In any case, our economy will require a new paradigm in order to assuage any current or future Luddites. It is key to emphasize that what we need robots for now is not so much to replace human workers as supplement them. We have a large job ahead of us: using a shrinking percentage of working age people to care for the growing percentage of older generations, and some of it might be easier if we can delegate certain tasks to machines.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Abortion, Adaptation, Climate Change, Environment, Fertility, Fertility Replacement Rate, Global Population, Incentives, Industrial Revolution, Jim Foreit, Korea, Labor Forces, Luddites, Population, Replacement Rate, Robots, Spain, Sustainability, Women, Working Population, World Population | 1 Comment

Stabilization

Posted on February 4, 2014 by climatechangefork

My latest series of blogs has focused on long term population growth; one of the main aspects has been an attempt to understand the United Nations’ medium projection and the reasoning behind its very large margin of error (December 24, 2013 blog).

Here are the two key paragraphs that I quoted from the original report:

Future population size is sensitive to small but sustained deviations of fertility from replacement level. Thus, the low scenario results in a declining population that reaches 3.2 billion in 2150 and the high scenario leads to a growing population that rises to 24.8 billion by 2150.

The long-range projections prepared by the United Nations Population Division include several scenarios for population growth for the world and its major areas over the period 1995-2150.The medium scenario assumes that fertility in all major areas stabilizes at replacement level around 2050; the low scenario assumes that fertility is half a child lower than in the medium scenario; and the high scenario assumes that fertility is half a child higher than in the medium scenario. The constant scenario maintains fertility constant during 1995-2150 at the level estimated for 1990 – 1995, and the instant-replacement scenario makes fertility drop instantly to replacement level in 1995 and remain at that level thereafter.

Mathematically, based on achieving long-term replacement fertility rates, these projections are very easy to compute. The main question raised was how to get there. Jim Foreit in his January 14, 2014 guest blog concluded that:

A sub-replacement fertility world seems inevitable, with fewer productive adults supporting larger numbers of the elderly. What this will mean for human welfare will depend on both the future productivity of working adults and living the expected living standards for their parents.

I see an obvious conflict in the two statements and an unanswered question of how we can achieve a stable global population in the long term (which I have somewhat arbitrarily defined as 1000 years). In my last blog I explored the populations in countries that have already crossed the fertility replacement rate. For some of the reasons that I mentioned there, I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer. It seems that we need more time to observe the trends. Since it seems I cannot get answers on the ground, I will try instead to use simple mathematical models and simple examples. That’s what physicists usually do. I will start first with the math:

We need to explore two modes of growth: exponential growth and logistic growth. A good pictorial presentation of these two modes of growth, as related to population growth, is given in the graph below:

The term dN/dt on the left-hand side of both curves represents the rate of population growth over time; d represents change, N represents population and t represents the time. The horizontal axis represents the time in units of passing generations. The exponential growth grows unabated because the growing number of kids each have their own kids. This is represented by the fact that the growth rate is proportional to the population. The logistic curve reaches stabilization at the arbitrary population of K = 1500. The equation is identical to the exponential growth with an additional term on the right that is responsible for the saturation. This term represents negative feedback: “when the result of a process influences the operation of the process itself in such a way as to reduce changes” and the system becomes self regulating. The simplest example – and probably the most familiar – that we often use for regulating a physical system, is the thermostat. It regulates the temperature of an enclosure by measuring the actual temperature and switching on or off the heating or cooling system or regulating the flow of the heating element. I was looking for a “populationstat,” with the planet as my enclosure. The stabilization doesn’t have to be as smooth as the one showed in the logistic curve above. I can live with bumps. I can also live with reasonable limits on my ability to stabilize the system but I cannot (or we cannot) live with unbounded systems. We have found out that we know how to switch population growth off (“development is the best contraceptive” :() but I have no idea how to switch it on again. Jim Foreit says that we will have to learn how to live with this. In the next few blogs I will try to explore some alternative options.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Decline, Exponential Growth, Global Population, Growth, Jim Foreit, Logistic Growth, Math, Negative Feedback, Physics, Population, Population Decline, Population Growth, Sustainability, Thermostat, World Population | 2 Comments

Crossing the Fertility Replacement Rate – the Last 20 Years

Posted on January 28, 2014 by climatechangefork

As I have shown in previous blogs, long-term (I use 1000 years as the “magic” number – see the December 17, 2013 blog) exponential growth (or decline) cannot continue unabated without serious consequences. Lately, I have emphasized this concept mainly with regards to population growth, but these arguments apply equally to economic growth. As long as we are stuck here, the planet will eventually impose its own limits. Over the last 60 years we have learned how to collectively reduce fertility rates, thereby controlling population growth rates. While fertility rates and growth rates are now declining almost everywhere, regardless of a country’s wealth, we have not seen them stabilize around replacement rates.

In his fabulous guest blog (January 14, 2014) Jim Foreit, wrote that “half of the countries worldwide now have sub-replacement fertility” and that “the downside to this trend is shrinking labor forces.” After mentioning some sporadic efforts to reverse this trend, he concluded his blog with the suggestion that, “A sub-replacement fertility world seems inevitable, with fewer productive adults supporting larger numbers of elderly.”

In this blog I’d like to examine some specific cases, using data from the World-Bank database from the last 20 years. Based on the population pyramids I showed in my last blog, one should expect a time delay between the reduction in fertility and the expected reduction in population growth, which determines the distribution of the workforce

The tables below show some of the countries whose fertility rates have dropped the furthest below replacement rate (2011). We see that they are not restricted to rich countries. I have selected 5 countries for a more detailed longitudinal (study of changes over time) analysis.

Total Fertility Rates (TFR) Below Replacement (2011)

Country	TFR	Country	TFR
Armenia	1.7	Hungary	1.2
Albania	1.7	Italy	1.4
Austria	1.4	Japan	1.4
Belarus	1.5	South Korea	1.2
Bosnia-Herzegovina	1.3	Latvia	1.3
Canada	1.6	Lebanon	1.5
China	1.7	Macedonia	1.4
Croatia	1.5	Moldova	1.5
Cuba	1.5	Romania	1.3
Czech Republic	1.4	Serbia	1.4
Estonia	1.5	Slovakia	1.5
Germany	1.4	Spain	1.4
Greece	1.4	Thailand	1.4

World TFR (2011) – 2.5

China

	1995	2000	2005	2010
TFR	1.7	1.5	1.6	1.7
Population(Millions)	1200	1260	1300	1340
Population Growth (%)	1.1	0.8	0.6	0.5
GDP/Capita ($2005)	778	1,122	1,731	2,869
GDP/Capita Growth (%)	9.7	7.5	10.6	9.9
Age Dependence Ratio^*	53	48	39	36
Share of Women Employed^**	39	——-	——-	——-
Total Labor Force (% population)	56.4	57.5	58.4	57.8

Japan

	1995	2000	2005	2010
TFR	1.4	1.4	1.3	1.4
Population(Millions)	125	127	128	127
Population Growth (%)	0.4	0.2	0.0	-0.1
GDP/Capita ($2005)	32,438	33,957	35,781	36,473
GDP/Capita Growth (%)	1.6	2.1	1.3	4.7
Age Dependence Ratio^*	44	47	51	57
Share of Women Employed^**	39	40	41	43
Total Labor Force (% population	53.5	53.2	52.0	52.3

Thailand

	1995	2000	2005	2010
TFR	1.9	1.7	1.5	1.4
Population(Millions)	59	62.3	65.6	67.4
Population Growth (%)	0.8	1.2	0.7	0.2
GDP/Capita($2005)	2,280	2,206	2,690	3,164
GDP/Capita Growth (%)	8.3	3.5	3.9	7.6
Age Dependence Ratio^*	49	44	43	39
Share of Women Employed^**	41	44	45	45
Total Labor Force (% of population)	53.7	55.2	56.9	57.6

Spain

	1995	2000	2005	2010
TFR	1.2	1.2	1.3	1.4
Population(Millions)	39.4	40.2	43.3	46
Population Growth (%)	0.2	0.8	1.6	0.4
GDP/Capita ($2005)	19,997	23,921	26,056	25,596
GDP/Capita Growth (%)	2.5	4.2	1.9	-0.6
Age Dependence Ratio^*	47	46	45	47
Share of Women Employed^**	36	39	42	47
Total Labor Force (% of population)	42.1	45.0	48.5	50.4

Italy

	1995	2000	2005	2010
TFR	1.2	1.3	1.3	1.4
Population(Millions)	56.8	56.9	58.6	60.5
Population Growth (%)	0.0	0.0	0.7	0.2
GDP/Capita ($2005)	26,464	29,872	30,479	29,163
GDP/Capita Growth (%)	2.9	3.6	0.2	1.2
Age Dependence Ratio^*	46	48	51	52
Share of Women Employed^**	37	40	43	44
Total Labor Force (% of population)	40.1	40.9	42.1	41.5

* Age dependency ratio is the ratio of dependents—(people older than 64 or younger than 15) –to the working-age population–those ages 15-64.

** Share of women employed in non-agricultural sector as % of total non-agricultural sector.

Among these selected countries, in spite of the fact that these countries have crossed the replacement fertility rate for almost a full generation, this has only translated to negative population growth very recently in one country (Spain). The rest are still growing (including zero growth), albeit at a very slow pace. The only consistent trend, not surprisingly, can be seen in China. The situation in China is somewhat unique and I will try to analyze it in more detail in one of the future blogs. The time period that these tables cover includes the recent global-wide recession. The data for labor force availability (% of population) show an actual increase except for Japan, which shows a small decrease. The age dependency ratio (ratio of the non-working population ages to the working population ages) is sharply decreasing in China and Thailand, increasing in Japan and Italy, and staying approximately constant in Spain. The share of women employed is increasing in four of the countries (data were not available for China). All the data show that the impact of crossing the fertility replacement rate has yet to crystallize into a decipherable trend – in spite of the passing of almost a generation.

Obviously, the empirical evidence of the impacts of crossing the replacement fertility rates is not yet available. However, over the relatively long period of time that we are discussing, it should be clear that we cannot let exponential decline go unchecked.

The next blog will focus on some of the science involved in trying to stabilize the system.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Age Dependency Ratio, China, Climate Change, Demographics, Fertility, Fertility Rate, Fertility Replacement Rate, Global Population, Italy, Japan, Jim Foreit, Population, Population Decline, Population Growth, Spain, Thailand, World Population | 2 Comments

Crossing the Fertility Replacement Rates – Background

Posted on January 21, 2014 by climatechangefork

One of the fascinating things in trying to do what I do, be that teaching, writing or lecturing, is to try to anticipate long term future trends, given the ever changing present. Sometimes the present gets my full attention, and sometimes I choose to ignore it in favor of developments that might become important factors in our future. The last few weeks are no exception. We were freezing over here with the Polar Vortex; meanwhile, the best tennis players in the world have been competing in 2014’s first big tennis tournament – the Australian Open. The temperature in Melbourne reached 111⁰F (~ 44⁰C). The players, the ball boys/girls and the spectators were very unhappy, but the tournament management was, for a time, dismissing the complaints. The Chief Medical Officer of the tournament was quoted as saying, “We’ve evolved in the high plains of Africa chasing antelope for eight hours under these conditions.”

Both ends of the temperature scale were blamed on climate change, with the deep freeze of the Polar Vortex to be used as the “absolute proof” that we are not experiencing global warming but instead we are going through global cooling. This stream of thought seems to come up no matter how many times scientists assert that a single weather event on either scale can never be used as a proof for or against anthropogenic (human influenced) climate change. Since I already wrote about the extreme temperature and the abundance of fires in Australia (January 14, 2013 blog) I decided that this time, I would skip the discussion of the present, and instead continue to focus on the future and population.

Jim Foreit’s wonderful guest blog last week (January 14, 2014) summarized the great success over the last 60 years in reducing both fertility rates and the growth in global population, but it ended with a less cheerful note about trying to reach a stable population over the long term. His blog ends with the following two paragraphs:

Half of the countries worldwide now have sub-replacement fertility. The downside to this trend is shrinking labor forces – a factor which has led some governments to try to reverse the course and increase fertility. Romania banned abortion, and fertility briefly increased – until illegal sources of abortion appeared to meet demand. Other countries like France and Germany in the 1930s provided families with generous incentives ranging from free childcare to cash payments for additional children, but these actions did not produce substantially higher fertility. The relaxation of China’s one-child policy may result in higher fertility, but the effects will not be known for several years.

A sub-replacement fertility world seems inevitable, with fewer productive adults supporting larger numbers of the elderly. What this will mean for human welfare will depend on both the future productivity of working adults and living the expected living standards for their parents.

I have decided to focus the next few blogs on the consequences and possible remedies to a relatively recent phenomenon: the decline of the fertility rate to below replacement rate (we call this “crossing” the fertility replacement rates), which leads to shrinking future global populations. Since, as I have mentioned before, the world population was around 2 billion when I was born, and the world was more or less functioning (remember, this was 3 months before the start of World War II), the question remaining is what issues would be associated with a shrinking world population. The UN scenario of a global population stabilizing around fertility replacement rates is not a bad scenario. The question is how we get there. The past 60 years have taught us how to move toward those numbers from high fertility rates – mainly though economic development and the use of modern contraceptives. As Jim clearly points out, we have no idea how to stabilize once global fertility has crossed below these rates.

It is not too difficult to visualize what will happen if population continues to grow. My estimation for such a scenario was that in few hundred years, with present constant population growth the world would reach the present density of Mumbai, India. This would include populating the presently completely unpopulated areas such as Antarctica and the Sahara desert.

This graph, which I also used in a previous post (January 2, 2014), was originally presented in the special Science Magazine issue that was dedicated to the global population crossing the mark of 7 billion people in October 2011. It shows a sharp decline of the global fertility rate. The fertility rate in the developing countries declined from around 6 children per woman to around 3 in 2010, while that in the developed countries changed from under 3 to below 2. The fertility rate didn’t stabilize anywhere near replacement. In some countries it went as low as 1.3 – 1.4, well below replacement. As a result, the population of these countries is shrinking quickly.

As Jim mentioned, the fertility rates in about half of the world’s countries are below replacement rates. Some of these countries are well below these rates, and not all of them are rich countries. In a future blog I will show in some detail the demographic changes that took place in some of the most populous countries that crossed the barrier of replacement rates.

The key changes can be examined in terms of the two graphs below:

These two graphs were taken from the same 2011 Science Magazine that I mentioned before. They help give insight into Jim’s last two sentences. The first one shows what are referred to as population pyramids of developed and developing countries. These pyramids directly describe the relative numbers of the various age groups in 5-year intervals, illustrating the changes in the distribution of age groups with changing fertility rates. The second graph demonstrates one of the most direct consequences of the changes shown in the pyramids; the customary definition of working age populations includes those from 15 – 64 years old. In 2010, the highest ratio of working age adults to older adults was 17, while in the more developed countries it was down to 4, with a projected decline to 2 by mid century.

When a country or a world crosses the fertility replacement rate, it means that fewer babies are born, and with the death of the parents, the population should decrease (this is true for the global accounting but doesn’t include immigration and emigration in national accounting). As a direct result, fewer babies grow up to be part of the working age population. If at the same time, the number of older people that leave the work force grows, there are fewer working-age adults to support them. However, the process of growing up into the work force takes time: approximately one generation. In addition, other demographic transitions took effect during the last 60 years. Of these, the two most important transitions, as they closely correlate with economic development, are the much broader participation of women and the increased participation of those aged 65+ in the work force. Both transitions blur the declining ratio of working adults per non-working older adults.

In the next blog I will describe the specific cases of a few countries that have significantly crossed the fertility replacement rate. In the following blogs I will try to go into some details to fill the gaps in the UN predictions and try to outline what we need to do to get there.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Age Distribution, Australian Open, Climate Change, Demographics, Extreme Weather, Fertility, Fertility Rate, Fertility Replacement Rate, Global Cooling, Global Population, Global Warming, Jim Foreit, Melbourne, Polar Vortex, Population, Population Decline, Population Growth, Replacement Rate, Stabilizing, Weather, World Population | Leave a comment

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