But I strongly oppose introducing 4th law, or what some refer to as 3-rd law (syntropy), etc, because that is still only DESCRIPTIVE and not PRESCRIPTIVE, and obviously a law should have a prescriptive quality.
Instead, to make progress in this field (and make it universally applicable to economic systems, ecosystems, climate systems, technological systems, etc), it is about a proper generalization of the 2nd law: a thermodynamic system will not only increase its entropy, it will do so AS FAST AS POSSIBLE (relative to its initial position).
This is better known as the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production you refer to, but this is still not accepted as a fundamental, ubiquitous principle (let alone in 'living' and economic systems) although it has been empirically demonstrated in many domains. That is because most cannot grasp the level of abstraction required to understand this, but actually it is the same exact statistical inference that yields the 2nd law.
The thing missing from the synthesis is Chaos Theory or Complex-Dynamic Systems, with its strange attractors, fractal nature of some thermodynamic systems, which allow for the formulation of chaotic attractors of entropy production, and its associated bifurcations (birth, death), etc.
Surely we are getting there! As Stephen Hawking noted: the 21st century will be about Complexity (complexity sciences, where for example the SFI has been leading the way regarding economics).
Thermodynamics + Complexity is the synthesis that makes a 4th law unnecessary.
Thanks for the links to the papers. Good stuff.... Yes chaos theory needs to be factored into here, how it interacts and morphs dissipative structures.... I wrote a previous piece about chaos theory and the small water cycle https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/how-does-rain-turn-into-floods-a
One of the most fascinating reads this year. This is absolutely unbelievable work, Alpha. Don't know how long it took you to synthesize this and not sure I want to know..
Thanks. This article was a bit late because there were so many pieces I was trying to digest, clarify and put together into a single more integrated account. I was mind-blown as I put all these pieces of the puzzle together. I thought I knew about water and climate already before, but as these ideas came together, I realized there is so much more to know.... The earth is working at deeper levels of integration than many of us realize.
great, thanks for references. Interesting to know biology is having such a large impact on geomorphology. And i looked up the Karman vortex sheet , thats pretty cool.
How much do historically intriguing storms, such as Hurricane Otis from October of this year, share a relationship with the thermodynamic laws of Earth's extremely complex climatological systems?
The driven - dissipative systems of the earth dissipate energy in fractal power law ways. So for instance earthquakes dissipate their energy in power law chunks. There are small earthquakes, and earthquakes that are ten time and a thousand times bigger . Hurricanes are driven by suns energy. The sun heats up the earth . That heat energy dissipates in power law chunks . Some of the suns energy goes into jet streams that can energize large hurricanes. That energy is then dissipated in power law chunks. So we have power law size hurricanes. Some of them much bigger.
So the thermal heat energy absorbed by the ocean, dissipating through evaporation in these "power law chunks", is scooped up by these tropical cyclones like ice cream. The system then converts these chunks of heat energy into mechanical energy in the form of wind, which is acting in response to the vacuum of air pressure created by the sinking and warming atmosphere in a Hurricane's eye/core. And in the end, the Hurricane itself releases "power law chunks" of energy dissipation as it churns (with some of the most powerful releasing the equivalent energy of tens of thousands of nuclear explosions over their lifetimes).
As usual very enlighting. Thank you. Also EntropeMetrics Comment. The question is of course what can we do about it, apart of preparing a substition of GDP. Would love your feedback on the following.
In agricultural governance, I hold the application looks as follows and then should be incentivized as quickly as possible with context and relative performance specific NPP payments per farmed area.
As you well know, the main limiting production factor of agriculture as well as a decisive variable in society’s climate change mitigation and adaptation, proves ever more to be the element of the largest biogeochemical cycle: water.
In general, 4 ecosystem services (water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow and community dynamics/agricultural labour) need to be working as a whole and any interruption of the 4 will become limiting. However actual yields in Europe in the last 20 years are limited predominantly by water impacts.
This can be seen by the impacts on yields all over Europe of either too much water caused by torrential rains or too little water caused by droughts, or too high temperatures leading to too much evapotranspiration, plant stress and greater irrigation need or too cold temperatures leading to frozen water at irregular timeslots – all with negative yields impacts.
Apart of water impacts, animal and plant diseases develop serious negative impacts on European yields. Diseases can be mitigated and adapted to sustainably only through increasing the health of microbiomes achievable through improved below and above ground biodiversity. For land use management to achieve this in times of accelerating climate change, the first condition is again better water management.
Hence, for resilient and nutritionally integer food security in the 21st century we need water farming, which works through carbon farming, which, according to an up-to-date understanding of agronomic and ecological sciences, works through net primary productivity and soil health / biodiversity farming. To date, this is in science, practice and political discourse generally understood when integrally talked about regenerative agriculture (including AE, CA, etc.).
To scale-out this renewed agronomic praxis farmers need new socio-economic guidance. NorthStar setting by governance for farmers must switch from classic ‘standard output’ to yield resilience (standard output as modeled future developments without discounting the future) and yield quality. Ecological guidance is fully integrated into this socio-economic guidance if understood with newest scientific insights on microbiology, biogeochemistry, earth sciences etc. The socio-economic guidance as an agronomic praxis aims at optimizing overall net primary productivity (NPP) of farmed land over the entire year to regenerate soil health year over year as the capital to finance the critically important agricultural production factor: A vital soil microbiome which can nourish the biome of the crops, which is decisive for their capacity to grow under stress (i.e. water or pests) as well as nourish the regeneration of biodiversity and of biogeochemical cycles while detoxifying the environment and decarbonizing the agricultural sector. Instead of only focusing on the human appropriated part of NPP, understood in science as HANPP, moving from standard output to yield resilience means moving the agronomic NorthStar of solely HANPP to NPP & HANPP.
Yes thats a good way to put it, that the water cycle is limiting the yield of ag. There many ways to spread the word to ag and govt so that we can shift the paradigm to one of restoring the water cycle. If this awareness is raised in the ag world, they can put pressure on the govt to restore the water cycle.
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. The part that doesn't is the 'anthropocentric' piece. If the Earth is a cell with a membrane, then everything contained within that cell is 'the Earth', including human beings. Unless you are suggesting that humans came from somewhere else not Earth and are therefore an interloper inside this particular cell. If you are not suggesting we are a relatively recent and alien arrival into the Earth cell , then human activity is part of the ecosystem activities. Our current, and possibly short sighted, historical view, is that 'we' the people are somehow separate from ecosystem processes, including those that aim for maximum power. This makes no sense at all. I would like to see someone research the role that humans are currently playing in tuning the temperature gradient. We look only from one perspective - that we have and are destroying planetary processes to the detriment of everything. Perhaps we are the gradient applied? Perhaps we are tuning the gradient? Perhaps someone much smarter than me could apply their intelligence to this. It seems ridiculous that we continue on with the idea that we are separate to the Earth cell.
There is a degree of freedom in the system for all organisms. So they take different paths. Over time it has tended to move towards the maximum power state. Humans can be keystone species that help move towards healthy cycles eg, the Amazon is supposedly so rich in biodiverse forests in part because the indigenous people tended them towards that pattern. The west coast of the US was supposedly tended by Native Americans into its current forest state.... Humans can destroy cycles or enhance them.
Here's my layperson's synopsis: In order to deal the enormous amount of solar energy coming in, the earth has developed biological systems to get rid of much of the energy and put the rest to use in complex processes that regulate climate, among other things. Therefore rising atmospheric carbon levels are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself, which is that we are destroying biological systems and interfering with the planet's ability to maintain equilibrium. Overly simplified perhaps, but this is my takeaway. What do you think?
I am glad you are trying to write a synopsis.... I think what you are saying is close to how I would say it.... I would say the earth develops biological system that regulate climate by using order that comes out of the incoming sunlight. When we humans destroy some of the biological-climate order, it destroys some of the earths ability to regulate itself.
I would add to the synopsis - a nonequilibrium system evolves to absorb more energy and output more entropy. When it does this it has more order available to extract. It uses the order it gets to run at a higher power. So earth evolved to absorb more sunlight and output more entropy. In this way it can produce more order. More order on earth correlates with more entropy beamed back out to space. If outgoing radiation is spread in more directions and more evenly over time its more entropic. Soil helps create that spreading of the radiation. Which means the earth wants to create more soil. And it wants to do this faster. Which it does with the plant-animal-fungi-bacteria cycles. Animals help produce soil faster because they turn plant food into poop faster.
Another way to create more entropy is if photons are released from higher in the atmosphere where they are cooler. The small water cycle allows photons to be released from higher in atmosphere because water vapor condenses releasing heat that turns into radiation into space.
When there is more order in the system, the system is more able to adjust and restore itself to run at maximum power. The earth runs at higher power when it has the right temperature and rain. With enough order it can adjust itself to those values. In the earths case the soil and plants adjust the temperature and rain. And the fungi, bacteria, and animals adjust the soil and the plants. The soil adjusts temperature and rain by taking sunlight in and time releasing the heat, and by taking in rain and release the water over time.
I love this quote "So earth evolved to absorb more sunlight and output more entropy"
It is easy to understand and correlate it with how a landscape evolves and regenerates after a masive disruption.
After a Volcano eruption you haba a bare land than can only reflect light of turn it into heat , but soil evolution comes and from rock to lichens, to sand dirt, moss and it continues until a forest is established.
But if the earth developed life to do this work, why don’t other planets develop life to increase order? I’d take a little more objective approach and say the earth/sun system developed into what it is today by countless interactions that are physical and chemical, and are by chance. This is still consistent with complexity science, just less subjective.
I think there has to be a certain initial conditions on planets that are in a certain range, that allows the first stages of life to begin to develop..... Theres speculation that Mars may have once had life, but then had a runaway feedback loop that destroyed it.
I wonder where Victor Schauberger is in this and Luigi Fantappie, the "father" of syntropy (described in 1944) both describing the complementary process to entropy, vortex structures and ever evolving complexity of living systems. Where is Ernst Götsch who described how this is seen in the living macroorganism called Life on Earth and how life moves through time and space to evolve from colonizing systems to accumulation systems that - with enough syntropy - move to abundancy systems? Where is Victor G. Gorshkov and Anastassia M. Makarieva linking it to the global water cycle and descibing the biotic pump and the work of Jan Pokorny?
Well it is an interwoven story and complex just like life - this is an amazing synthesis already, just miss some very vital works of people contributing to it. Thank you @Alpha for this big work you did here!
Haha, this is the most challenging intellectually essay so far by a lot. Lots of concepts to integrate and understand.
Great stuff!
But I strongly oppose introducing 4th law, or what some refer to as 3-rd law (syntropy), etc, because that is still only DESCRIPTIVE and not PRESCRIPTIVE, and obviously a law should have a prescriptive quality.
Instead, to make progress in this field (and make it universally applicable to economic systems, ecosystems, climate systems, technological systems, etc), it is about a proper generalization of the 2nd law: a thermodynamic system will not only increase its entropy, it will do so AS FAST AS POSSIBLE (relative to its initial position).
This is better known as the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production you refer to, but this is still not accepted as a fundamental, ubiquitous principle (let alone in 'living' and economic systems) although it has been empirically demonstrated in many domains. That is because most cannot grasp the level of abstraction required to understand this, but actually it is the same exact statistical inference that yields the 2nd law.
The thing missing from the synthesis is Chaos Theory or Complex-Dynamic Systems, with its strange attractors, fractal nature of some thermodynamic systems, which allow for the formulation of chaotic attractors of entropy production, and its associated bifurcations (birth, death), etc.
Non-technical: https://medium.com/@EntropoMetrics/one-of-the-biggest-misunderstandings-in-science-531b22e57ac8
And : "It's the entropy, stupid!" http://entropometrics.com/docs/EntropyStupid.pdf
Life and death as bifurcations in a larger system: http://entropometrics.com/blog/biflc.jsp
Technical paper: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202103.0110/v1
Surely we are getting there! As Stephen Hawking noted: the 21st century will be about Complexity (complexity sciences, where for example the SFI has been leading the way regarding economics).
Thermodynamics + Complexity is the synthesis that makes a 4th law unnecessary.
Thanks for the links to the papers. Good stuff.... Yes chaos theory needs to be factored into here, how it interacts and morphs dissipative structures.... I wrote a previous piece about chaos theory and the small water cycle https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/how-does-rain-turn-into-floods-a
Thank you Alpha, will definitely read it!
I agree. Prigogine wrote the book(s) on it.
One of the most fascinating reads this year. This is absolutely unbelievable work, Alpha. Don't know how long it took you to synthesize this and not sure I want to know..
Thanks. This article was a bit late because there were so many pieces I was trying to digest, clarify and put together into a single more integrated account. I was mind-blown as I put all these pieces of the puzzle together. I thought I knew about water and climate already before, but as these ideas came together, I realized there is so much more to know.... The earth is working at deeper levels of integration than many of us realize.
I love your work! Many thanks for your time spent on it!
I would add some subtopics to it, if you do not mind:
- the study comparing the landscape transforming force of biodiversity/nature with geophysical forces: American Journal 2009, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250164502_Biological_energy_in_landscape_evolution
At the landscape-scale biological energy dwarfs geophysical energy by six orders of magnitude...
- the species called ecosystem engineers, like beaver (the best one maintaining biodiversity and small water cycle where native)
- the trophic cascade: how wolves have changed the Yellowstone river;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320711004046 one of the best examples of biodiversity and small water cycle working together....
- vortexes, Todor Karman vortex street, movements of fluids and the movement of fish;
- stage zero restoration of rivers and streams, how rivers evolved with biodiversity.
- fractal pattern through the system with the golden ratio ...
It is a wonderful world...
great, thanks for references. Interesting to know biology is having such a large impact on geomorphology. And i looked up the Karman vortex sheet , thats pretty cool.
How much do historically intriguing storms, such as Hurricane Otis from October of this year, share a relationship with the thermodynamic laws of Earth's extremely complex climatological systems?
https://open.substack.com/pub/backpirch/p/the-coriolis-clock-episode-ii?r=2z1mmj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The driven - dissipative systems of the earth dissipate energy in fractal power law ways. So for instance earthquakes dissipate their energy in power law chunks. There are small earthquakes, and earthquakes that are ten time and a thousand times bigger . Hurricanes are driven by suns energy. The sun heats up the earth . That heat energy dissipates in power law chunks . Some of the suns energy goes into jet streams that can energize large hurricanes. That energy is then dissipated in power law chunks. So we have power law size hurricanes. Some of them much bigger.
So the thermal heat energy absorbed by the ocean, dissipating through evaporation in these "power law chunks", is scooped up by these tropical cyclones like ice cream. The system then converts these chunks of heat energy into mechanical energy in the form of wind, which is acting in response to the vacuum of air pressure created by the sinking and warming atmosphere in a Hurricane's eye/core. And in the end, the Hurricane itself releases "power law chunks" of energy dissipation as it churns (with some of the most powerful releasing the equivalent energy of tens of thousands of nuclear explosions over their lifetimes).
yeah thats a pretty good description
As usual very enlighting. Thank you. Also EntropeMetrics Comment. The question is of course what can we do about it, apart of preparing a substition of GDP. Would love your feedback on the following.
In agricultural governance, I hold the application looks as follows and then should be incentivized as quickly as possible with context and relative performance specific NPP payments per farmed area.
As you well know, the main limiting production factor of agriculture as well as a decisive variable in society’s climate change mitigation and adaptation, proves ever more to be the element of the largest biogeochemical cycle: water.
In general, 4 ecosystem services (water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow and community dynamics/agricultural labour) need to be working as a whole and any interruption of the 4 will become limiting. However actual yields in Europe in the last 20 years are limited predominantly by water impacts.
This can be seen by the impacts on yields all over Europe of either too much water caused by torrential rains or too little water caused by droughts, or too high temperatures leading to too much evapotranspiration, plant stress and greater irrigation need or too cold temperatures leading to frozen water at irregular timeslots – all with negative yields impacts.
Apart of water impacts, animal and plant diseases develop serious negative impacts on European yields. Diseases can be mitigated and adapted to sustainably only through increasing the health of microbiomes achievable through improved below and above ground biodiversity. For land use management to achieve this in times of accelerating climate change, the first condition is again better water management.
Hence, for resilient and nutritionally integer food security in the 21st century we need water farming, which works through carbon farming, which, according to an up-to-date understanding of agronomic and ecological sciences, works through net primary productivity and soil health / biodiversity farming. To date, this is in science, practice and political discourse generally understood when integrally talked about regenerative agriculture (including AE, CA, etc.).
To scale-out this renewed agronomic praxis farmers need new socio-economic guidance. NorthStar setting by governance for farmers must switch from classic ‘standard output’ to yield resilience (standard output as modeled future developments without discounting the future) and yield quality. Ecological guidance is fully integrated into this socio-economic guidance if understood with newest scientific insights on microbiology, biogeochemistry, earth sciences etc. The socio-economic guidance as an agronomic praxis aims at optimizing overall net primary productivity (NPP) of farmed land over the entire year to regenerate soil health year over year as the capital to finance the critically important agricultural production factor: A vital soil microbiome which can nourish the biome of the crops, which is decisive for their capacity to grow under stress (i.e. water or pests) as well as nourish the regeneration of biodiversity and of biogeochemical cycles while detoxifying the environment and decarbonizing the agricultural sector. Instead of only focusing on the human appropriated part of NPP, understood in science as HANPP, moving from standard output to yield resilience means moving the agronomic NorthStar of solely HANPP to NPP & HANPP.
Yes thats a good way to put it, that the water cycle is limiting the yield of ag. There many ways to spread the word to ag and govt so that we can shift the paradigm to one of restoring the water cycle. If this awareness is raised in the ag world, they can put pressure on the govt to restore the water cycle.
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. The part that doesn't is the 'anthropocentric' piece. If the Earth is a cell with a membrane, then everything contained within that cell is 'the Earth', including human beings. Unless you are suggesting that humans came from somewhere else not Earth and are therefore an interloper inside this particular cell. If you are not suggesting we are a relatively recent and alien arrival into the Earth cell , then human activity is part of the ecosystem activities. Our current, and possibly short sighted, historical view, is that 'we' the people are somehow separate from ecosystem processes, including those that aim for maximum power. This makes no sense at all. I would like to see someone research the role that humans are currently playing in tuning the temperature gradient. We look only from one perspective - that we have and are destroying planetary processes to the detriment of everything. Perhaps we are the gradient applied? Perhaps we are tuning the gradient? Perhaps someone much smarter than me could apply their intelligence to this. It seems ridiculous that we continue on with the idea that we are separate to the Earth cell.
There is a degree of freedom in the system for all organisms. So they take different paths. Over time it has tended to move towards the maximum power state. Humans can be keystone species that help move towards healthy cycles eg, the Amazon is supposedly so rich in biodiverse forests in part because the indigenous people tended them towards that pattern. The west coast of the US was supposedly tended by Native Americans into its current forest state.... Humans can destroy cycles or enhance them.
Is that true of other keystone species? Do other species also destroy cycles
Sometimes herbivores can destroy an environment if there are not carnivores to keep them in check.
Here's my layperson's synopsis: In order to deal the enormous amount of solar energy coming in, the earth has developed biological systems to get rid of much of the energy and put the rest to use in complex processes that regulate climate, among other things. Therefore rising atmospheric carbon levels are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself, which is that we are destroying biological systems and interfering with the planet's ability to maintain equilibrium. Overly simplified perhaps, but this is my takeaway. What do you think?
I am glad you are trying to write a synopsis.... I think what you are saying is close to how I would say it.... I would say the earth develops biological system that regulate climate by using order that comes out of the incoming sunlight. When we humans destroy some of the biological-climate order, it destroys some of the earths ability to regulate itself.
Very concise and helps me remember key concepts. Thank you. Great piece by the way.
I would add to the synopsis - a nonequilibrium system evolves to absorb more energy and output more entropy. When it does this it has more order available to extract. It uses the order it gets to run at a higher power. So earth evolved to absorb more sunlight and output more entropy. In this way it can produce more order. More order on earth correlates with more entropy beamed back out to space. If outgoing radiation is spread in more directions and more evenly over time its more entropic. Soil helps create that spreading of the radiation. Which means the earth wants to create more soil. And it wants to do this faster. Which it does with the plant-animal-fungi-bacteria cycles. Animals help produce soil faster because they turn plant food into poop faster.
Another way to create more entropy is if photons are released from higher in the atmosphere where they are cooler. The small water cycle allows photons to be released from higher in atmosphere because water vapor condenses releasing heat that turns into radiation into space.
When there is more order in the system, the system is more able to adjust and restore itself to run at maximum power. The earth runs at higher power when it has the right temperature and rain. With enough order it can adjust itself to those values. In the earths case the soil and plants adjust the temperature and rain. And the fungi, bacteria, and animals adjust the soil and the plants. The soil adjusts temperature and rain by taking sunlight in and time releasing the heat, and by taking in rain and release the water over time.
I love this quote "So earth evolved to absorb more sunlight and output more entropy"
It is easy to understand and correlate it with how a landscape evolves and regenerates after a masive disruption.
After a Volcano eruption you haba a bare land than can only reflect light of turn it into heat , but soil evolution comes and from rock to lichens, to sand dirt, moss and it continues until a forest is established.
But if the earth developed life to do this work, why don’t other planets develop life to increase order? I’d take a little more objective approach and say the earth/sun system developed into what it is today by countless interactions that are physical and chemical, and are by chance. This is still consistent with complexity science, just less subjective.
I think there has to be a certain initial conditions on planets that are in a certain range, that allows the first stages of life to begin to develop..... Theres speculation that Mars may have once had life, but then had a runaway feedback loop that destroyed it.
I wonder where Victor Schauberger is in this and Luigi Fantappie, the "father" of syntropy (described in 1944) both describing the complementary process to entropy, vortex structures and ever evolving complexity of living systems. Where is Ernst Götsch who described how this is seen in the living macroorganism called Life on Earth and how life moves through time and space to evolve from colonizing systems to accumulation systems that - with enough syntropy - move to abundancy systems? Where is Victor G. Gorshkov and Anastassia M. Makarieva linking it to the global water cycle and descibing the biotic pump and the work of Jan Pokorny?
Well it is an interwoven story and complex just like life - this is an amazing synthesis already, just miss some very vital works of people contributing to it. Thank you @Alpha for this big work you did here!
Oh yeah I had to leave a number of people out of this synthesis because so many are involved..... I hadnt heard of Fantappie before, so thanks for mention..... If you look at part I of this essay, I discuss Makarieva's work , see https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/biodiversity-regulates-climate-part . Also I recorded a podcast interview with Makarieva, and wrote an in depth article about her work. See here https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/biotic-pump-anastasia-makarieva-interview
I expect some sort of university degree by the time I finish all your essays Alpha.
jajaja I feel the same.
But even not getting a degree I feel profoundly empowered to trigger some actions to move forward the problem.
Brilliant synthesis, Alpha. Thank you.