One of the other themes discussed here over the past decade has been the ignorance and arrogance of authoritarians seeking to control society, especially paleo-environmentalists but also economists with political designs.

Donella Meadows was one of the leaders of a blundering, ineffective sort of environmentalism for many years in the last part of the twentieth century. As lead author of the doomsday book Limits to Growth - commissioned by the doom think tank Club Of Rome - she epitomized a heart sick, mean spirited and anti-humanist approach to change. Meadows built her career around doom mongering and hectoring humanity to stop developing, stop growing and stop enjoying itself.

Inspired by Systems Dynamics, a.k.a. systems thinking, Meadows and a coterie of fellow travelers fully embraced command and control governance as a mechanism to contain and diminish humanity, an objective that she and others justified with model based scenarios of impending global doom due to anthropogenic causes, especially population growth and resource consumption. A generation of concerned but uninformed believers treated her pronouncements as gospel and her methods as enlightened.

Meadows recanted in part before her death.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything.

In more recent times the villains have been climate alarmists. With sparse data and sloppy models they made crushingly stupid projections of world economies and their expected GHG emissions, coupled with crushingly stupid models of world climate consequences of those emissions. Their objective was still command and control governance and used doom scenarios of climate catastrophe as an excuse to seize control. None of their projections or predictions have proved to be accurate.

Environmental concerns in general, and climate concerns in particular, are real issues, but the ignorant and arrogant activists have made a mess of everything by exaggerating their ability to foresee the future, and prescribing policies that are destructive even for the factors that they claim to care about.

Insights about complexity and chaotic systems helped illuminate the defective thinking of activists, and revealed their inimical objectives. In response they tried to tart up their old cybernetic views with the language of complex adaptive systems without actually grasping the implications. This was possible in part because complexity science stalled, failed to progress beyond early insights and provide useful new tools for thought. A new, unifying approach has emerged.

Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity, as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly developing into a new discipline: network science. ...

[D]ecades of research on complexity were driven by big, sweeping theoretical ideas, inspired by toy models and differential equations that ultimately failed to deliver. Think synergetics and its slave modes; think chaos theory, ultimately telling us more about unpredictability than how to predict nonlinear systems; think self-organized criticality, a sweeping collection of scaling ideas squeezed into a sand pile; think fractals, hailed once as the source of all answers to the problems of pattern formation. We learned a lot, but achieved little: our tools failed to keep up with the shifting challenges that complex systems pose.

Yet something has changed in the past few years. The driving force behind this change can be condensed into a single word: data. As scientists sift through these mountains of data, we are witnessing an increasing awareness that if we are to tackle complexity, the tools to do so are being born right now, in front of our eyes. The field that benefited most from this data windfall is often called network theory, and it is fundamentally reshaping our approach to complexity.

In some ways this sounds like an invitation to pull his finger, again. We fell for that a couple of times before so a wait and see attitude seems appropriate. Network theory has had some small successes but the promise of big data and methods to mine it are still mostly just promises. My expectation, based on nothing but experience, is that this too will prove to be inadequate, partial at best, and so we shouldn't get too invested. It's interesting and is the best we have to talk about now, but stay calm, this too shall pass.

On the surface, network theory is prone to the failings of its predecessors. It has its own big ideas, from scale-free networks to the theory of network evolution3, from community formation4, 5 to dynamics on networks6. But there is a defining difference. These ideas have not been gleaned from toy models or mathematical anomalies. They are based on data and meticulous observations. The theory of evolving networks was motivated by extensive empirical evidence documenting the scale-free nature of the degree distribution, from the cell to the World Wide Web; the formalism behind degree correlations was preceded by data documenting correlations on the Internet and on cellular maps7, 8; the extensive theoretical work on spreading processes was preceded by decades of meticulous data collection on the spread of viruses and fads, gaining a proper theoretical footing in the network context6. This data-inspired methodology is an important shift compared with earlier takes on complex systems. ...

Reductionism deconstructed complex systems, bringing us a theory of individual nodes and links. Network theory is painstakingly reassembling them, helping us to see the whole again. One thing is increasingly clear: no theory of the cell, of social media or of the Internet can ignore the profound network effects that their interconnectedness cause. Therefore, if we are ever to have a theory of complexity, it will sit on the shoulders of network theory. ...

The twentieth century has witnessed the birth of such a sweeping, enabling framework: quantum mechanics. Many advances of the century, from electronics to astrophysics, from nuclear energy to quantum computation, were built on the theoretical foundations that it offered. In the twenty-first century, network theory is emerging as its worthy successor: it is building a theoretical and algorithmic framework that is energizing many research fields, and it is closely followed by many industries. As network theory develops its mathematical and intellectual core, it is becoming an indispensible platform for science, business and security, helping to discover new drug targets, delivering Facebook's latest algorithms and aiding the efforts to halt terrorism.

That's from a Nature Physics Insight issue devoted to complexity. There are several other editorials, commentaries and reviews that are interesting too. Network theory is the new mental tool of the big data era, so pay attention.

I never got into Facebook. It was nearly universally scorned by those that I followed on weblogs and other media, and seemed to be non-verbal - amateurish photos of friends and families - which isn't interesting to me and challenged my primitive dial-up net connectivity.

I do pay some attention to Twitter but I seldom tweet. Those that I follow are prolific linkers to sometimes interesting material. They are media filters. I "tune" the tweet stream by adding and dropping tweeters to shift the focus to subjects that are of current interest.

But lately I have gotten into G+. I like its asymmetrical structure. It's like Twitter in that I can circle those who interest me without their reciprocation. I find that it is possible to find a more verbal community that better suits my interests. I've speculated that this is in part due to better affordances for composition. The imbedded text editor is better than FB. It also isn't crufted up with so many annoying advertisements and other crassness. I have also been able to engage in some conversations, something that seldom happens here.

And so, I seem to have been neglecting this weblog for a month or so. It's so easy to "share" something on G+ that I do so, and then move on without composing a thoughtful weblog post. But the honeymoon is over. G+ seems to be degenerating into a more Facebook like place, innudated by griftersand hustlers with commercial objectives, cluttered with images and videos, and too slow for my primitive connectivity. Often it won't even load for me. It just gives up and leaves me with a blank screen.

I've made a couple of new posts and generally kicked the tires and tightened loose nuts here and there. I took a look at the stats to see if anyone had been reading here while I was gone. There is still substantial traffic from search engines, RSS readers, spiders and spammers trying, and failing, to leave their turds in comments, but the general drift away from weblogs to social media is apparent, and has been so for some time, even before I drifted off too.

What struck me as a bit surprising is that the old posts that have gotten the most hits are still interesting to me, and are relevant to currrent concerns. Some things haven't changed in a decade. The recent post Crystal Ball referenced an old post from 2003. The most frequently read post lately is from 2006. The difference may be that what I said years ago was heretical at that time and is now pedestrian.

The environmental, health and economic benefits of grass fed beef and managed grazing are widely noted and somewhat fashionable now rather than fringe ideas. The significance of natural climate variation is discussed due to the flat trend in climate change. Even the dingbat-in-chief Obama is gingerly supporting some new efforts to develop advanced nuclear power. Advanced genetics as well as nuclear power have been hugged by some of the perpetually tardy west coast digerati. The insanity of efforts to impose globally harmonized regulations - such as a carbon tax - though still advocated by some retarded thinkers is derided as the perpetual quest for magical unicorn sweat that can cure what ails you. The collapse of the "blue social model" is plainly evident to deniers of yore. The impact of information and communication technologies for enabling all manner of peer-to-peer behaviors is no longer speculative.

I think that we may be in a period of backing and filling now as these emergent issues have become mainstream issues. For example, the melt down of higher education has begun, to be replaced in large part by networked education. Just as home brew radio communication was replaced by home brew computing and networking, home brew genomics promises - threatens? - to change things greatly. The consequences of widely and easily available information will almost certainly be larger than we have yet imagined.

Or is it cooperation? Coopetition? Are the boundaries between tropic levels too diffuse to make such distinctions meaningful? Perhaps it's better to see life as unitary in some respects. There is a single organism with organs. For example, it is a truism of ruminant livestock husbandry that cattle and grasses benefit one another, and over deep time can be seen as having created one another, co-evolved. Cattle hunt and eat grasses alive, which results in grasses thriving. The benefits of such relationships aren't always so direct or clear, and sometimes they aren't binary so much as circular among several species. Perhaps the cattle and grasses are better seen as organs of an organism that includes mycorrhizal fungi growing in the soil, or nitrifying bacteria?

Whatever. Even if the distinctions are arbitrary and ultimately misleading they are useful for thinking about parts of the organism. Consider speculation about the consequences of the evolution of autotrophic land organisms: photosynthesizing plants.

The arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages, according to a research team that set out to identify the effects that the first land plants had on the climate during the Ordovician Period, which ended 444 million years ago.

During this period the climate gradually cooled, leading to a series of 'ice ages'. This global cooling was caused by a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon, which this research now suggests was triggered by the arrival of plants. ...

The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. This cooled global temperatures by around five degrees Celsius.

In addition, by weathering the nutrients phosphorus and iron from rocks, the first plants increased the quantities of both these nutrients going into the oceans, fuelling productivity there and causing organic carbon burial. This removed yet more carbon from the atmosphere, further cooling the climate by another two to three degrees Celsius. ...

Professor Liam Dolan of Oxford University, one of the lead researchers, said, "For me the most important take-home message is that the invasion of the land by plants – a pivotal time in the history of the planet – brought about huge climate changes. Our discovery emphasises that plants have a central regulatory role in the control of climate: they did yesterday, they do today and they certainly will in the future."

Jump cut to a more recent yesterday than 444 million years ago.

After the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago, wiped out by an asteroid impact or other calamity, plants seized their chance. The emergence of the first grasses was the breakthrough. Grass doesn't hold much CO2 itself, but it can create mollisols, soils that are very rich in organic matter and hence carbon. "Typically they are 10 per cent organic matter down to a depth of a metre, whereas forest soils are only that rich down to about 10 centimetres," says Retallack. So a grassland ecosystem can, despite appearances, contain more carbon than a forest ecosystem.

Over the past 40 million years or so, tall grasslands spread across the globe, taking over many formerly forested zones. These ecosystems, Retallack argues, took control of the planetary thermostat, securing lower CO2 levels for their own advantage. New grazing animals evolved to live on and coexist with the grasses. "The co-evolution of grasses and grazer created a carbon-hungry ecosystem of a kind never before seen," says Retallack. "I think mollisols are saving our skins right now. Without them the world would be a lot hotter."

As the Earth cooled under the influence of grasslands, it seemed to hit an era of abrupt swings into and out of ice ages, beginning about 5 million years ago. Could this too be explained by the battle between plants and animals? ...

His research has revealed strong fluctuations in the make-up of soils in the middle of continents as the ice ages come and go. "They switch from humid grasslands to dry sagebrush and back." Soils in the wet periods are full of earthworm pellets. In dry times they contain cicada burrows. Retallack believes this shows that the carbon economy of these soils is synchronised with global CO2 levels.

How does this follow? The conventional view is that these changes merely represent the response of ecosystems to climate change. But Retallack believes it may be the other way round: the ecosystems drive the glaciations, as carbon enters soils when grasslands dominate and leaves again in sagebrush eras. ...

Retallack says he has come across a huge reluctance to publish some of his claims. "In particular, the idea of grasslands causing cooling has excited great opposition, even though I have a huge amount of evidence to support it," he says. The data will appear shortly in The Journal of Geology, after being rejected by a series of major journals. "I have data from 2000 soil samples, from Oregon and the Great Plains in the US to Kenya and Pakistan. They all show the rise of mollisols as grasslands evolved, till they covered about a fifth of the planet. That's a lot. You'd expect them to have an effect," he says.

Retallack is at pains to say he does not discount the power of geology. He is no Gaian purist. He even admits that the geology-based theories are right now "probably closer to proof" than his own. "Meteorite impacts, volcanic eruptions, hot-spring degassing and Milankovitch control are all well accepted by most scientists," he says. "But I think there is a middle way." He believes that biology has played a crucial role in the switchback of climate change over much of our planet's history. And, being a pedologist, he is convinced that the evidence lies in the soil.

Another biological rather than geological account of atmospheric composition change focuses on human agriculture.

The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.

But gathering physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world's most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.

What's more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years. ...

Vavrus and colleagues John Kutzbach and Gwenaëlle Philippon provided detailed evidence in support of a controversial idea first put forward by climatologist William F. Ruddiman of the University of Virginia. That idea, debated for the past several years by climate scientists, holds that the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming.

That one-two punch, say Kutzbach and Vavrus, was enough to set human-induced climate change in motion. ...

Using three different climate models and removing the amount of greenhouse gases humans have injected into the atmosphere during the past 5,000 to 8,000 years, Vavrus and Kutzbach observed more permanent snow and ice cover in regions of Canada, Siberia, Greenland and the Rocky Mountains, all known to be seed regions for glaciers from previous ice ages. Vavrus notes: "With every feedback we've included, it seems to support the hypothesis (of a forestalled ice age) even more. We keep getting the same answer."

In an odd sort of way humans may be better seen as another part of the earthly life organism, and is serving the larger purpose of stabilizing climate in a range conducive to life in spite of the geologic forces that would otherwise cycle between ice ages and short respites between them.

Nearly a decade ago I was worrying about drought cycles in the west.

The PDO changed phases in the late 1990s for the first time in nearly 30 years, corresponding exactly with the current Alaskan warming period. The next 30 years should be colder in Alaska but the PDO has many other effects. Weather all along the west coast of the Americas is affected by this oscillation. Further south along the coast of S. America waters are warmer. This not only affects weather but also sea currents and upwellings which nourish sea life. The effects of ENSO, the shorter period oscillation popularly called El Nino/La Nina, are altered. Warm periods are even warmer and cool periods are less cool.

Much of the western US is greatly affected by the PDO. The current phase of the PDO which brings cold waters to Alaska correlates with multi-decadal drought periods in the plains states, especially the Colorado plateau. Much of California, Oregon and Washington states face the same prospect. Like S. America those areas are also affected by ENSO but being farther north both the PDO and ENSO have different characteristics than in the south. Though we don't have clear understandings of the various oscillations it seems reasonable to expect significant change in the coming decades compared to the previous decades. A 30 year oscillation period is hard for a human to study or comprehend personally. People who have lived long lives close to the land and weather tell stories of how different things were in their youths (..uphill, both ways...) and are laughed at by younger people for telling tall tales. But sometimes they are just recounting observations of long cycle oscillations. I've been listening more closely to grizzled old farmers these days since the PDO flipped.

Thinking about natural climate variation was out of style then, and became more so in subsequent years, but it is now becoming more fashionable again due a decline in global warming hysteria and more sober analysis of future climate scenarios.

With regards to natural internal variability, we are currently in the cool phase of the PDO. Based upon the recent historical record, we would anticipate several decades in the cool phase, although these oscillations aren’t predictable. We are currently in the warm phase of the AMO, and based upon the recent historical record, we might expect another decade in the warm phase, although these oscillations aren’t predictable. ...

Previous warm AMO/cool PDO occurred 1946-1964, and cool AMO/cool PDO 1964-1976, both of which were cool periods.

It is a plausible scenario that we will continue to see relatively flat trend in temperature for the coming decade. The most recent climate shift has been argued (Tsonis et al) to have occurred 2001/2002.

This isn't just a local concern of course, it is part of a larger question about global climate and the significance of those factors that may be relevant. An increasingly spurious assumption of the IPCC was that the only thing that mattered was anthropogenic change, chiefly CO2. But that doesn't explain historical climate changes, and has failed to explain current climate trends. Solar, volcanic and natural variations as expressed by PDO, AMO, El Nino cycles etc. have been getting more attention lately.

Given that my ranching world seems to face an extended period of drought and cold weather the notion of warmer, wetter winters due to climate change was almost appealing. It seems that is a false hope. Climate change won't save me so I'll have to adapt to normal variation.