Skepticism

[William]

Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown disease to emerge

So maybe nature has its own way of restoring balance?

William

[Apoclima]

Right, William!

I don't want to seem a fatalist, but Humankind is very poor at refraining from things. We will use things up until they are gone and then regret it, bemoaning the fact that we didn't save some for later.

Human history is a catastrophe of needs and wants. We all want to live like kings, being deprived of nothing good. We build on the sands of diminishing returns and then wonder how it could have gone so wrong.

It just seems that we "eat, drink, and be merry," leaving the problems of tomorrow for tomorrow. I don't see a way around human nature with its greed and waste.

But one thing we always do as humans is suffer until we enter a crisis, and then, and only then, do we find new ways to exploit nature and survive and thrive again.

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. ~Welsh Proverb

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. ~Martin Luther

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
~ Martin Luther

Apo

[KatyBr]

Thanks, Henri, I am glad she is growing in New York. I guess If I had enough money I'd create a hospital for wholistic healing. Utilizing whole foods, and creating a whole body wellness. but gardens are a good start.

Katy

[M. Henri Day]

...

But one thing we always do as humans is suffer until we enter a crisis, and then, and only then, do we find new ways to exploit nature and survive and thrive again.

The problem, of course, is what happens when previous actions have so predjudiced the outcome of the crisis, that we as a species find ourselves unable to recover. We can usually deal with this matters over the short term, but our ability to make meaningfull predictions over the long term, say with a century as a unit, rather than a day, a month, or a year, is notoriously unreliable.Should people around the Indian Ocean basin all remove from the shore, from which many of them gain their livelihoods, because they know that in the long run, deadly tsunamis are bound to occur again ? How can we make decisions dealing with long-term risks when the future is so uncertain ? An article by Popper, Lempert, and Bankes published recently in Scientific American might just provide a common basis for discussion (and decision-making) by persons so diverse in their thinking as Apo, William, and myself. The article is some five pages long, but well worth the time and effort necessary to read and understand it....

Henri

[KatyBr]

Ah, but dear Henri, Life is uncertain. Who will you blame when an astroid blasts it's damage on the earth making life as we know it untenable? Would you have tried to save the dinasaurs when they became extinct? Would you have forced legislation to continue to mist the earth when rain became the way of watering instead? Change is part of life. I 'm not saying some change is not bad and should be allowed to run rampant, but I still await your personal decisions to lower your own standard of living to accommodate the preservation of status quo.

Katy

[M. Henri Day]

I agree with you, Katy, that change is inevitable, and that blaming asteroids (or comets) is futile. But while change itself is inevitable and must therefore be accepted, we are not indifferent to the nature of that change. Generally speaking we try to direct change, both to avoid harm to ourselves (the more important) and to increase our pleasure. As for my humble person, I lead, by so-called «Western» standards, a fairly abstemious life ; thus, for example, I do not own a motor car and always try to turn out the lights when they are not being used (which drives my girlfriend to the brink of ...), but I must confess to having, on many occasions, owned several bicycles at a given time, and I am a dedicated carnivore, so I scarcely qualify as a model for ecological sainthood. Be that as it may, what did you think of the Scientific American article ?...

Henri

[KatyBr]

The article: from a literary standpoint it was redundant and a bit obtuse, from a Scientific standpoint it made points but nothing really new, unless it was startling at the end, I'm too flu-bound to read it all at present.

Katy

[tcward]

I'm still fascinated by the fact that Henri chose to spell skepticism with a 'k' instead of a 'c'. I thought you would have learnt the English spelling, Henri...?

-Tim

[M. Henri Day]

Tim, I use the spelling with «k» as I find it more closely corresponds to that of the Greek root. The Latins didn't have a «k», so in transcribing Greek terms containing the phoneme, they made do with a «c», but as English and other Germanic languages do possess this letter, I prefer to transcribe «κ» with «k». You've probably noticed that I write the philosophers' names «Sokrates» and «Aristoteles» (I am not, however, so abject a slave to consistency that I write *«filosofer») - all these customs, I presume, more honoured in the breach than in the observance....

Henri

[Apoclima]

Well, Henri, I read "Shaping the Future" and I must say that I am underwhelmed. Sure, it sounds great, with computer models and the lastest in mathematics and technology. Certainly I am not against planning, and trying to understand our effects on the enviroment. The problem I see here is that we are basing these conjectures (no matter how many scenarios we run and no matter how we calculate) on two very fundamentally unpredictable factors: the weather (albeit called climate change) and the economy.

I know that we love our computers, and I think there is the downfall. How do we know that we have factored in enough variables? How do we know which variables will play the most important parts in our future?

Without fascism or totalitarianism, how do we get the world to follow on the course we determine is the most likely?

Apo

[M. Henri Day]

If I have understood the paradigm correctly, Apo, I think it deals with precisely the problems you mention, i e, those of the unpredictable (over terms lasting more than a few days at our present level of knowledge and technological sophistication) nature of both the weather and economic activity, and that of how to tell whether a «sufficient» number of variables have been factored into the equations used to make predictions. It does so - again, if I have understood it aright - by using a step-by-step approach that permits checking to see whether assumptions need to be revised on the basis of experience, and by picking strategies which can perform reasonably well, if not necessarily optimally, in various differing scenarios. If you felt «underwhelmed» upon reading the article, this may be due to the fact that you yourself already use similar strategies to deal with your own problems and that, for you, the suggestions made by the authors represent nothing new. In my case, to take an example with which I am familiar, I use, more or less consciously, such strategies in medicating my patients. But what I think is important to remember - and what makes the work of Popper, Lempert, and Bankes significant, is that this has generally not been the way in which longterm strategies have been constructed. As a model not of phenomena like climatic change, but of choosing (and implementing) strategies for dealing with these phenomena, I think it possesses a great deal of originality, and not least, utility.

This work is obviously a response to those who have been skeptical concerning, e g, predictions on climatic change ; thus these latter have performed a valuable service. The recent report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment constitutes another such response, as I think is evident from Andre Revkin's article in the Science section of today's New York Times, which I take the liberty of reproducing below....

Henri

April 5, 2005

Report Tallies Hidden Costs of Human Assault on Nature

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

For decades, scientists have been warning that human activities were extinguishing species, altering the climate and degrading landscapes. Now a group of experts has reframed the issue, releasing a sweeping report that measures damage not to nature itself, but to the things nature does for people.

In the report, part of a continuing project called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, more than 1,300 ecologists and other researchers from 95 countries focus on the capacity of ecosystems to perform valuable functions like filtering water, providing food and pollinating crops.

Their conclusion is bleak: over all, 60 percent of those functions are being degraded by human activities, both through direct actions like overfishing and through indirect ones, like the tendency of deforestation to raise the risk of floods.

The report - which was released last week and online at www.millenniumassessment.org - lists some instances in which destructive practices have changed and damage has been prevented, but says far more action is needed in the next several decades.

"We must learn to recognize the true value of nature - both in an economic sense and in the richness it provides to our lives," said an accompanying statement by the board of scientists who led the project.

"Above all," it continued, "protection of these assets can no longer be seen as an optional extra, to be considered once more pressing concerns such as wealth creation or national security have been dealt with."

Under the current method of measuring progress, the report said, "a country could cut its forests and deplete its fisheries and this would show only as a positive gain." And in too many instances, it said, that is exactly what is occurring.

The study considered various kinds of "ecosystem services": simple provisioning, like supplying water and protein; regulatory functions, including a forest's ability to store and filter water and to cool and humidify the air; cultural services, like providing a place for recreation; and life-support services, including photosynthesis and soil formation.

Many of the regions where such natural assets are being most rapidly degraded are also the world's poorest, the scientists said. And as a result, deteriorating environments are likely to hamper efforts to stem poverty, disease and hunger in developing countries.

But the study also said wealthy countries were contributing greatly to some problems - for example, in soaring increases in agricultural runoff containing nitrogen, a fertilizer that can create oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters.

The assessment, which cost $24 million, was commissioned five years ago by the United Nations and by countries adhering to global environmental treaties on preserving wetlands and migratory species, preventing the spread of deserts and conserving the diversity of species on earth.

Some ecologists not involved with the project credited the authors for avoiding old arguments that tended to set people against nature.

"We have to start thinking about nature as a design issue," said Dr. Daniel B. Botkin, an ecologist and author of several books charting ways to mesh human activities and life on earth. "For too long we've been seeing everything people do as a negative. This is a break from that. They're trying to bring people and nature together."

The study said the degradation of potentially renewable natural resources was being fueled in part by destructive subsidies, uncoordinated policies of government agencies dealing with overlapping activities like forestry, farming and land tenure, lawlessness in frontier regions and the persistent treatment of nature's bounty as free for the taking.

Subsidies and other artificial incentives to overharvest resources are especially vexing problems, said Dr. Harold A. Mooney, a biologist at Stanford and a lead author of the report.

"A third of the global value of farm production in 2000 was the result of subsidies," he went on. "In many places we spend more catching fish than we make selling fish," Dr. Mooney said.

Unlike many earlier environmental assessments that have compiled trends for losses of forests, reefs and other wild places, this one focused on how such losses directly affected human welfare, using as its yardstick trends in "ecosystem services" rather than simply lost species or acreage.

Besides identifying losses in familiar trouble spots like rain forests and reefs, it focuses on less known danger zones, like dry-land ecosystems, where human populations are growing fastest and depend most heavily on fragile natural systems.

A prime example is the parched band of Africa below the Sahara Desert, where drought, combined with ever-growing demands for water, has contributed to recent social upheavals and bloodshed in Sudan.

Around the world, Dr. Mooney said, "the dry-land problem really jumps out at you."

"You have two billion people there and huge limits on water," he continued. "Some of the world's highest population growth rates are in these dry regions and in mountain systems that are the least productive. That creates conditions for conflict."

He added that global warming, which is expected to disrupt weather patterns in the same dry regions, will make matters only worse.

Dr. Botkin said an unavoidable weakness in this kind of assessment was that the complexity of global ecology and economic activity made it hard to specify causes and effects.

The authors of the report acknowledged huge gaps in data, but pointed to small successes that helped crystallize the idea that nature is more than pretty pictures.

Dr. Mooney cited several recent studies that put a monetary value on natural services. In one study in Costa Rica, Dr. Gretchen C. Daily of Stanford and other researchers measured the increase in coffee yields to a plantation from the pollinating efforts of bees living in two nearby fragments of forest.

From 2000 to 2003, they calculated, the presence of the forest bees lifted the plantation's income $60,000 a year.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[M. Henri Day]

...

"With respect to science, the assumption behind the [alarmist] consensus is science is the source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists [who agree.] But science is not primarily a source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science -- consensus is foreign," Lindzen said. [Bold mine]

...

Apo, I promised you to return to some of the questions about the nature of (physical) science that you took up before Easter. I hope you will regard thisfeature article in today's Guardian as at least somewhat related to the matter (I'm looking forward to checking the full results of the survey in a couple of weeks). Note that the practitioners quoted do not necessarily agree with each other....

Henri

PS : The fact that Robert Garfinkle confuses Latin with Italian does not, to my mind, detract from the interest of the replies. Note also Kathy Sykes Collier's pregnant response....

Life lessons

What is the one thing everyone should learn about science?Spiked asked 250 scientists - here we bring you some of the most provocative responses

Thursday April 7, 2005

Guardian

Seth Lloyd Professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
You do not have to be a scientist to do science; you can be a child, a computer, or an intelligent rat. As long as you can verify a result, it is part of science.

Freeman Dyson Emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

Science is about uncertainty. We do not yet know the answers to most of the important questions — nature is smarter than we are. But if we are patient, and not in too much of a hurry, then science gives us a good way to find the answers.

Richard Dawkins Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster

I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

Lewis Wolpert Emeritus professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College London

I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world, and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology — from medicine to industry.

Kathy Sykes Collier professor of public engagement in science and engineering at the University of Bristol

I would teach the world that science is not about truth, but is about trying to get closer to the truth. This is important because, too often, people look to scientists as having the "truth". What we have is wrapped in uncertainties, caveats and simplifications.

John Gribbin Astrophysicist and science writer

I cannot improve upon the comment of the American physicist Richard Feynman: "The most important information … is the atomic hypothesis … that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

Bernard Lovell Astronomer and founder of Jodrell Bank Observatory

I would teach the world that fundamental scientific research is neutral, but the dividing line between good and evil in the eventual use of the results of research is often thin and tenuous.

In the first half of the 20th century, research into the structure of matter led to a detailed knowledge of atomic structure, and to a knowledge that in certain transmutations, there was a loss of mass. The second world war led to the enormous concentration of tech­nological effort, to convert this knowledge into devastating weapons of mass destruction, instead of providing atomic power for the benefit of humanity. That contrast between the good and the evil, in the eventual use of research, confronts us today.

Simon Baron-Cohen Professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, and director of the Autism Research Centre

I would teach the world that scientists fall in love — with experiments. An experiment can be beautifully stunning. Experiments are not just about proof — some of them have an intrinsic elegance, that you just want to go back to and look at again and again. Take men with two X chromosomes. This puzzle of nature just called out for the experiment, conducted in 1990, to search the two X chromosomes in such individuals — to find a bit of the Y chromosome, that might have broken off and become integrated into one of the X chromosomes. It just had to be there. And sure enough, it was. What we now know to be the SRY gene — the sex-related Y gene — had got into the X chromosome. And this is the gene that turns on the process to grow testes, and become male.

Antony Hoare Senior researcher at Microsoft Corporation

I would teach the world that scientists start by trying very hard to disprove what they hope is true. When they fail, they have a good reason for believing what they hope is true, and can even convince others of its truth. A scientist always acknowledges the possibility of error, and is less likely to be mistaken than one who always claims to be right.

Harry Kroto Professor of chemistry at Sussex University, and joint recipient of the Nobel prize in chemistry

The methods of science are manifestly effective, having made massive humanitarian contributions to society. It is this very effectiveness which the purveyors of mystical philosophies attack, because they recognise in it the chief threat to the belief-based source of their power and financial reward.

Michael Baum Emeritus professor of surgery and visiting professor of medical humanities at University College London, and chairman of the Psychosocial Oncology Committee of the National Cancer Research Institute

I would teach the world that science = imagination + humility². If only politicians were ruled by the scientific prin­ciples of conjectures (hypothesis generation) and refutations (controlled experimentation), then the world would be a better place. To quote the 19th-century British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley: "The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

Susan Blackmore Science writer and broadcaster, and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol

Frighteningly, most people do not understand Darwin's great insight. What people miss is the sheer inevitability of the creative process. Once you see it —copy, vary, select; copy, vary, select —you see that design by natural selection simply has to happen. This is not like Isaac Newton's laws, or quantum physics, or any of the other great theories in science, where one can ask "why is this so?" It simply has to be the case. Then, the scary implications follow. If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.

John Sulston One of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, and joint recipient of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine

We have to accept responsibility for the survival of the human race, instead of praying about it. The prize, if we can embrace this humanist philosophy, is an infinite and unimaginably exciting journey ahead of us.

Brian Davies Professor of mathematics at King's College London

Without doubt, the most important single scientific discovery ever made was the connection between electricity and magnetism. This was discov­ered by the 19th-century British physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, at the Royal Institution in London; and it was systematised by the 19th-century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, at King's College London.

This discovery led directly to the electric motor and dynamo — the basis of all electrical power — and also to telephones, radio, television, and computers, upon all of which advanced civilisation now depends.

Eric Drexler Founder and emeritus chair of the Foresight Institute, and inventor of the term 'nanotechnology'

Physical technology evolves towards limits set by physical law, and a technology approaching the limits set by physical law must build with atomic precision. Molecular machinery provides a way to accomplish this.

In today's biological cells and in future manufacturing, large molecular structures can fit together and work together, forming molecular machine systems.

Marcus du Sautoy Professor of mathematics at Oxford University, presenter of the BBC TV programme Mind Games

I would teach the world how the Greeks proved, more than 2,000 years ago, that there are infinitely many prime numbers. In my mind, this discovery is the beginning of mathematics — when humankind realised that, by pure thought alone, it could prove eternal truths of the universe.

Prime numbers are the indivisible numbers, numbers that can be divided only by themselves and one. They are the most important numbers in mathematics, because every number is built by multiplying prime numbers together — for example, 60 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 5. They are like the atoms of arithmetic, the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers.

Stanley Feldman Emeritus professor of anaesthesiology at Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School

I would like it to be universally known that whatever we eat, it is broken down into basic building blocks of food in the gut, before it can be absorbed into the blood.

The cholesterol in the food you eat is not the same cholesterol as that in your blood. Whatever meat you eat — whether it be prime organic Angus, or chopped-up scrag end from an old cow — it ends up as the same amino acids in your blood. No matter what the source of the fat, it is essentially the same fatty acids that enter the bloodstream. We are not what we eat.

Richard Fortey Senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and science writer

Everyone should know about plate tectonics. We all relate to our own landscape — it is what gives us our sense of homeland. Yet the ultimate controls on the shape of the Earth are based upon the slow movement of the tectonic plates. To understand these geological forces gives us all a new respect for our planet — an awareness of how it has been sewed together over 4,000m years, and how it continually remakes itself.

Through geology, we understand our identity. It is sad that geology is sometimes regarded as a "dry" science, for it underlies everything. Geology is a kind of unconscious mind for the world.

Lynne Frostick Professor of physical geography at the University of Hull, and director of the Hull Environment Research Institute and the Environmental Technologies Centre for Industrial Collaboration

I would like to teach the world about climate change, and the role of every human being in causing it. This is far and away the biggest threat to our planet. We will only fight the more serious consequences of climate change if every individual accepts responsibility, and if every individual modifies their behaviour.

Robert Garfinkle Lunar section historian at the British Astronomical Association

I would teach the world the famous quote, attributed to Galileo Galilei, eppur si muove — Latin for "but still it moves". It lays the groundwork for understanding the Earth–moon–sun system. Without this orbiting triangle, life as we know it might not even exist on Earth.

I would want my students of science to understand that from this simple 17th-century quote flows all of our knowledge of our place in the local universe. Our movement about the sun creates our seasons, and gives us the joy of the changing night sky. The changing seasons, in conjunction with the movement of the moon around the Earth and — to a lesser extent — around the sun as well, cause the tides, ocean currents, and worldwide temperature and atmospheric pressure variations, thus causing the weather and ocean movements. This movement helps to promote life in the seas, and the formation of rain clouds — basic building blocks for all life.

Peggy Lemaux Cooperative extension specialist in plant biotechnology at the University of California at Berkeley

I would nominate the basic formula for photosynthesis: CO2 + H2O + sunlight/chlorophyll —> O2 + C6H12O6. Why is this so important? Because without this chemistry, life on earth would not be possible. Glucose (C6H12O6) is the basic energy source for all living organisms. The oxygen released as a photosynthetic byproduct, principally of phytoplankton, provides most of the atmospheric oxygen vital to respiration in plants and animals. And animals, in turn, produce carbon dioxide (C02) necessary for plants. Therefore, photosynthesis is consid­ered the ultimate source of life for nearly all plants and animals, by providing the energy required to drive their metabolic processes. Without this important reaction, life on this planet would cease.

Dr Robert Maynard Senior medical officer at the UK Department of Health

The principle of refutation put forward by the philosopher Karl Popper, in his books The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations, is my choice. Popper argued that scientific knowledge advanced most reliably by the development and refutation of hypotheses — much more reliably than by the accretion of evidence in support of theories.

He said you cannot prove that all swans are white by counting white swans, but you can prove that not all swans are white by counting one black swan. Popper's approach is now accepted, in principle, by many scientists. And yet much research is still based upon induction — upon the collection of facts to support our ideas. Erecting hypotheses that can be falsified, and designing experiments capable of doing so, is the hallmark of the true scientist. In fact, it distinguishes the scientist from the non-scientist.

John McCarthy Emeritus professor of computer science at Stanford University, and inventor of the term 'artificial intelligence'

Find the numbers, and compare them. As the physicist Lord Kelvin said in 1883, in a lecture to the Institution of Civil Engineers, "when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind".

Channapatna S Prakash Professor in plant molecular genetics at Tuskegee University, and director of the Centre for Plant Biotechnology Research

I would teach the world not to be afraid of the genetic modification of our crops, and to accept GM crops, as they can help to feed the growing world in an environmentally sustainable manner. There is much apprehension and confusion about this technology, especially in Europe. This has led to the needless slowdown of the application of biotechnology in agriculture.

If the world were to embrace GM crops, then we could conquer hunger and poverty much more easily, cut down the use of chemicals on farms, help mitigate the cutting down of tropical forests to expand the area of agriculture, bring more reliability to farming, make farming more profitable, help developing countries through crops that are hardier and tolerant to drought, improve food safety, and improve the nutrition of crops. GM crops are as safe as conventionally developed crops. The fear of this technology is unnecessarily holding back progress, and is denying the fruits of that progress to the developing world, where it is needed the most.

Martin Rees Astronomer Royal and professor of cosmology, and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge

I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead — for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that exist then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Our concern with Earth's future is, understandably, focused upon the next 100 years at most — the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. But awareness of this longer time horizon, and the immense potential that human actions this century could foreclose, offers an extra motive for proper stewardship of this planet.

Matt Ridley Founding chair of the International Centre for Life

Science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it. The myth that science gets rid of mysteries, started by the Romantic poets, was well nailed by Albert Einstein —whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling, and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets.

Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world's stock of awe.

Roderich Tumulka Researcher in physics at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Tübingen

Paranormal phenomena do not exist. Magic, witchcraft, mind-reading, clairvoyance, faith healing and similar practices do not work and never have worked. It makes a crucial difference whether we imagine ourselves surrounded by supernatural beings and happenings or whether instead we see ourselves in a world that science can help us understand. Many scientific principles, concepts, or discoveries need not, despite their importance, be understood by the public, but just by the experts. The question of the paranormal is different in this respect.

Stuart Zola Professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Emory University, and director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre

I would teach the world the importance of staying actively intellectually engaged throughout our lives, especially as we become elderly. There are good data now that point to the fact that continuing to challenge yourself late in life — taking up a new hobby, learning to play a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles, etc — actually helps to maintain cognitive function, and protects against the onset of cognitive decline.

Gerardus 't Hooft Professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University and joint recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, for his work on the quantum structure of electroweak interactions

Is it really true that the world wants to hear only one thing about science? And then continue after that, with its ongoing religious, superstitious and political disputes? Maybe the world wants to hear only one thing from me. What could that be? All the important things that the world has already heard from my colleagues might be incomplete — my colleagues may have forgotten to tell the world something. What could that be? I do not know.

· This research was carried out by Sandy Starr at spiked and supported by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). The full results will be published at www.spiked-online.com/einstein at the end of April, alongside an online debate and a series of films made by the science communicator Alom Shaha. A debate will take place at the Royal Institution in London on the evening of Tuesday 10 May, bringing together some of the scientists who took part. To book tickets, telephone the Royal Institution on 020 7409 2992.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

[Apoclima]

I’ll just deal with a few that I think are important or interesting, Henri!

You do not have to be a scientist to do science; you can be a child, a computer, or an intelligent rat. As long as you can verify a result, it is part of science. -Seth Lloyd

Sort of nice, sort of silly! Perhaps a child or an intelligent rat can verify a result, but computers cannot verify their own results (yet), it takes an operator to make a hypothesis and understand that something has been verified. I hate that sort of anthropomorphism about computers!

Science is about uncertainty. We do not yet know the answers to most of the important questions — nature is smarter than we are. But if we are patient, and not in too much of a hurry, then science gives us a good way to find the answers. -Freeman Dyson

His assumption here is that everything (about the physical universe; what else is there?) is knowable, but I would say “science gives a good way to try to find the answers."

I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

Let’s go deep here! I find this man the most hubristic of all the evolutionists, and the most absurd.

Since Man’s consciousness and intelligence are just accidents, how does it follow that an accidental arrangement of chemicals can “design” something? In evolutionary biology we are only that, a random arrangement of biomass. What we think, feel and say has nothing to do with external reality, per se, and everything to do with “natural selection.”
Consciousness, by the way, is simply an adaptive phenomenon that serves this purpose.
If it were “adaptively” beneficial to believe that the Moon were made of green cheese, I don’t know how we could “see” past that belief and survive.

The materialism that underlies the sciences is fine for areas that involve only the material universe, but for questions concerning the working and origin of the human mind, materialism is vacuous.

“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.” –C. S. Lewis

“Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitos or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.” -William Lane Craig

I would teach the world that scientists start by trying very hard to disprove what they hope is true. When they fail, they have a good reason for believing what they hope is true, and can even convince others of its truth. A scientist always acknowledges the possibility of error, and is less likely to be mistaken than one who always claims to be right. - Antony Hoare

Refreshing!

The methods of science are manifestly effective, having made massive humanitarian contributions to society. It is this very effectiveness which the purveyors of mystical philosophies attack, because they recognise in it the chief threat to the belief-based source of their power and financial reward. -Harry Kroto

Could I get a few examples, Harry?

What he should have said, to be honest: “The methods of science are manifestly effective, both in having made massive humanitarian contributions to society, and in having made possible the massive destruction of individuals and the environment. It is this very destructive effectiveness which the purveyors of mystical philosophies attack, because they, as we, scientists, recognise in it (the horror of its destructive efficiency) the chief threat to our scientifically-based source of power and financial reward.”

The principle of refutation put forward by the philosopher Karl Popper, in his books The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations, is my choice. Popper argued that scientific knowledge advanced most reliably by the development and refutation of hypotheses — much more reliably than by the accretion of evidence in support of theories.

He said you cannot prove that all swans are white by counting white swans, but you can prove that not all swans are white by counting one black swan. Popper's approach is now accepted, in principle, by many scientists. And yet much research is still based upon induction — upon the collection of facts to support our ideas. Erecting hypotheses that can be falsified, and designing experiments capable of doing so, is the hallmark of the true scientist. In fact, it distinguishes the scientist from the non-scientist. - Dr Robert Maynard

Very good!

Well, Henri there are so many!

One last one!

I would teach the world not to be afraid of the genetic modification of our crops, and to accept GM crops, as they can help to feed the growing world in an environmentally sustainable manner. There is much apprehension and confusion about this technology, especially in Europe. This has led to the needless slowdown of the application of biotechnology in agriculture.

He should be locked away in his lab with nothing to eat but his own GM plants!
And we see what happens, that’s science!

Apo

[M. Henri Day]

...

Science is about uncertainty. We do not yet know the answers to most of the important questions — nature is smarter than we are. But if we are patient, and not in too much of a hurry, then science gives us a good way to find the answers. -Freeman Dyson

His assumption here is that everything (about the physical universe; what else is there?) is knowable, but I would say “science gives a good way to try to find the answers."

...

I agree with your emendation of the Freeman Dyson citation, Apo ; indeed, I wonder (but have no way of knowing) if he would not himself. Science is certainly about uncertainty and trying, as you point out, to find methods to deal with that uncertainty. During the last 350 years or so, these methods seem to have demonstrated their utility and made plausible their validity, but they are, at least to my mind, far from perfect. Is, indeed, everything knowable ? This, again to my mind, is more a philosophical than a scientific problem (and the risk of circular definitions in dealing with it seems to me very high - the philosophical equivalent, as it were, of dividing by zero in mathematics and the natural sciences) ; the scientific attitude seems to be that very much of what is now unknown is, in fact, knowable, and the scientific endeavor the attempt to uncover this knowledge. Below I reproduce Professor Brian Greene's New York Times OpEd, which shows one of Natural Science's most gifted practioners wrestling with the problem....

Henri

April 8, 2005

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

One Hundred Years of Uncertainty

By BRIAN GREENE

JUST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein's discovery. Nevertheless, say "Einstein" and most everyone thinks "relativity."

What is less widely appreciated, however, is that physicists call 1905 Einstein's "miracle year" not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the universe. One of these papers - not on relativity - garnered him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. It also began a transformation in physics that Einstein found so disquieting that he spent the last 30 years of his life in a determined effort to repudiate it.

Two of the four 1905 papers were indeed on relativity. The first, completed in June, laid out the foundations of his new view of space and time, showing that distances and durations are not absolute, as everyone since Newton had thought, but instead are affected by one's motion. Clocks moving relative to one another tick off time at different rates; yardsticks moving relative to one another measure different lengths. You don't perceive this because the speeds of everyday life are too slow for the effects to be noticeable. If you could move near the speed of light, the effects would be obvious.

The second relativity paper, completed in September, is a three-page addendum to the first, which derived his most famous result, E = mc2, an equation as short as it is powerful. It told the world that matter can be converted into energy - and a lot of it - since the speed of light squared (c2) is a huge number. We've witnessed this equation's consequences in the devastating might of nuclear weapons and the tantalizing promise of nuclear energy.

The third paper, completed in May, conclusively established the existence of atoms - an idea discussed in various forms for millenniums - by showing that the numerous microscopic collisions they'd generate would account for the observed, though previously unexplained, jittery motion of impurities suspended in liquids.

With these three papers, our view of space, time and matter was permanently changed.

Yet, it is the remaining 1905 paper, written in March, whose legacy is arguably the most profound. In this work, Einstein went against the grain of conventional wisdom and argued that light, at its most elementary level, is not a wave, as everyone had thought, but actually a stream of tiny packets or bundles of energy that have since come to be known as photons.

This might sound like a largely technical advance, updating one description of light to another. But through subsequent research that amplified and extended Einstein's argument (see Figures 1 through 3), scientists revealed a mathematically precise and thoroughly startling picture of reality called quantum mechanics.

Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later. You tell me the velocity of a baseball as it leaves Derek Jeter's bat, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate where it will land a handful of seconds later. You tell me the height of a building from which a flowerpot has fallen, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate the speed of impact when it hits the ground. You tell me the positions of the Earth and the Moon, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate the date of the first solar eclipse in the 25th century. What's important is that in these and all other examples, the accuracy of my predictions depends solely on the accuracy of the information you give me. Even laws that differ substantially in detail - from the classical laws of Newton to the relativistic laws of Einstein - fit squarely within this framework.

Quantum mechanics does not merely challenge the previous laws of physics. Quantum mechanics challenges this centuries-old framework of physics itself. According to quantum mechanics, physics cannot make definite predictions. Instead, even if you give me the most precise description possible of how things are now, we learn from quantum mechanics that the most physics can do is predict the probability that things will turn out one way, or another, or another way still.

The reason we have for so long been unaware that the universe evolves probabilistically is that for the relatively large, everyday objects we typically encounter - baseballs, flowerpots, the Moon - quantum mechanics shows that the probabilities become highly skewed, hugely favoring one outcome and effectively suppressing all others. A typical quantum calculation reveals that if you tell me the velocity of something as large as a baseball, there is more than a 99.99999999999999 (or so) percent likelihood that it will land at the location I can figure out using the laws of Newton or, for even better accuracy, the laws of Einstein. With such a skewed probability, the quantum reasoning goes, we have long overlooked the tiny chance that the baseball can (and, on extraordinarily rare occasions, will) land somewhere completely different.

When it comes to small objects like molecules, atoms and subatomic particles, though, the quantum probabilities are typically not skewed. For the motion of an electron zipping around the nucleus of an atom, for example, a quantum calculation lays out odds that are all roughly comparable that the electron will be in a variety of different locations - a 13 percent chance, say, that the electron will be here, a 19 percent chance that it will be there, an 11 percent chance that it will be in a third place, and so on. Crucially, these predictions can be tested. Take an enormous sample of identically prepared atoms, measure the electron's position in each, and tally up the number of times you find the electron at one location or another. According to the pre-quantum framework, identical starting conditions should yield identical outcomes; we should find the electron to be at the same place in each measurement. But if quantum mechanics is right, in 13 percent of our measurements we should find the electron here, in 19 percent we should find it there, in 11 percent we should find it in that third place. And, to fantastic precision, we do.

Faced with a mountain of supporting data, Einstein couldn't argue with the success of quantum mechanics. But to him, even though his own Nobel Prize-winning work was a catalyst for the quantum revolution, the theory was anathema. Commentators over the decades have focused on Einstein's refusal to accept the probabilistic framework of quantum mechanics, a position summarized in his frequent comment that "God does not play dice with the universe." Einstein, radical thinker that he was, still believed in the sanctity of a universe that evolved in a fully definite, fully predictable manner. If, as quantum mechanics asserted, the best you can ever do is predict probabilities, Einstein countered that he'd "rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist."

This emphasis, however, partly obscures a larger point. It wasn't the mere reliance on probabilistic predictions that so troubled Einstein. Unlike many of his colleagues, Einstein believed that a fundamental physical theory was much more than the sum total of its predictions - it was a mathematical reflection of an underlying reality. And the reality entailed by quantum mechanics was a reality Einstein couldn't accept.

An example: Imagine you shoot an electron from here and a few seconds later it's detected by your equipment over there. What path did the electron follow during the passage from you to the detector? The answer according to quantum mechanics? There is no answer. The very idea that an electron, or a photon, or any other particle, travels along a single, definite trajectory from here to there is a quaint version of reality that quantum mechanics declares outmoded.

Instead, the proponents of quantum theory claimed, reality consists of a haze of all possibilities - all trajectories - mutually commingling and simultaneously unfolding. And why don't we see this? According to the quantum doctrine, when we make a measurement or perform an observation, we force the myriad possibilities to ante up, snap out of the haze and settle on a single outcome. But between observations - when we are not looking - reality consists entirely of jostling possibilities.

Quantum reality, in other words, remains ambiguous until measured. The reality of common perception is thus merely a definitive-looking veneer obscuring the internal workings of a highly uncertain cosmos. Which is where Einstein drew a line in the sand. A universe of this sort offended him; he could not accept, as he put it, that "the Old One" would so profoundly incorporate a hidden element of happenstance in the nature of reality. Einstein quipped to his quantum colleagues, "Do you really think the Moon is not there when you're not looking?" and set himself the Herculean task of reworking the laws of physics to resurrect conventional reality.

Einstein waged a two-front assault on the problem. He sought an internal chink in the quantum framework that would establish it as a mere steppingstone on the path to a deeper and more complete description of the universe. At the same time, he sought a grander synthesis of nature's laws - what he called a "unified theory" - that he believed would reveal the probabilities of quantum mechanics to be no more profound than the probabilities offered in weather forecasts, probabilities that simply reflect an incomplete knowledge of an underlying, definite reality.

In 1935, through a disarmingly simple mathematical analysis, Einstein (with two colleagues) established a beachhead on the first front. He proved that quantum mechanics is either an incomplete theory or, if it is complete, the universe is - in Einstein's words - "spooky." Why "spooky?" Because the theory would allow certain widely separated particles to correlate their behaviors perfectly (somewhat as if a pair of widely separated dice would always come up the same number when tossed at distant casinos). Since such "spooky" behavior would border on nuttiness, Einstein thought he'd made clear that quantum theory couldn't yet be considered a complete description of reality.

The nimble quantum proponents, however, would have nothing of it. They insisted that quantum theory made predictions - albeit statistical predictions - that were consistently born out by experiment. By the precepts of the scientific method, they argued, the theory was established. They maintained that searching beyond the theory's predictions for a glimpse of a reality behind the quantum equations betrayed a foolhardy intellectual greediness.

Nevertheless, for the remaining decades of his life, Einstein could not give up the quest, exclaiming at one point, "I have thought a hundred times more about quantum problems than I have about relativity." He turned exclusively to his second line of attack and became absorbed with the prospect of finding the unified theory, a preoccupation that resulted in his losing touch with mainstream physics. By the 1940's, the once dapper young iconoclast had grown into a wizened old man of science who was widely viewed as a revolutionary thinker of a bygone era.

By the early 1950's, Einstein realized he was losing the battle. But the memories of his earlier success with relativity - "the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light" - urged him onward. Maybe the intense light of discovery that had so brilliantly illuminated his path as a young man would shine once again. While lying in a bed in Princeton Hospital in mid-April 1955, Einstein asked for the pad of paper on which he had been scribbling equations in the desperate hope that in his final hours the truth would come to him. It didn't.

Was Einstein misguided? Must we accept that there is a fuzzy, probabilistic quantum arena lying just beneath the definitive experiences of everyday reality? As of today, we still don't have a final answer. Fifty years after Einstein's death, however, the scales have certainly tipped farther in this direction.

Decades of painstaking experimentation have confirmed quantum theory's predictions beyond the slightest doubt. Moreover, in a shocking scientific twist, some of the more recent of these experiments have shown that Einstein's "spooky" processes do in fact take place (particles many miles apart have been shown capable of correlating their behavior). It's a stunning finding, and one that reaffirms Einstein's uncanny ability to unearth features of nature so mind-boggling that even he couldn't accept what he'd found. Finally, there has been tremendous progress over the last 20 years toward a unified theory with the discovery and development of superstring theory. So far, though, superstring theory embraces quantum theory without change, and has thus not revealed the definitive reality Einstein so passionately sought.

With the passage of time and quantum mechanics' unassailable successes, debate about the theory's meaning has quieted. The majority of physicists have simply stopped worrying about quantum mechanics' meaning, even as they employ its mathematics to make the most precise predictions in the history of science. Others prefer reformulations of quantum mechanics that claim to restore some features of conventional reality at the expense of additional - and, some have argued, more troubling - deviations (like the notion that there are parallel universes). Yet others investigate hypothesized modifications to the theory's equations that don't spoil its successful predictions but try to bring it closer to common experience.


Over the 25 years since I first learned quantum mechanics, I've at various times subscribed to each of these perspectives. My shifting attitude, however, reflects that I'm still unsettled. Were Einstein to interrogate me today about quantum reality, I'd have to admit that deep inside I harbor many of the doubts that gnawed at him for decades. Can it really be that the solid world of experience and perception, in which a single, definite reality appears to unfold with dependable certainty, rests on the shifting sands of quantum probabilities?

Well, yes. Probably. The evidence is compelling and tangible. Although we have yet to fully lay bare quantum mechanics' grand lesson for the underlying nature of the universe, I like to think even Einstein would be impressed that in the 50 years since his death our facility with quantum mechanics has matured from a mathematical understanding of the subatomic realm to precision control. Today's technological wizardry (computers, M.R.I.'s, smart bombs) exists only because research in applied quantum physics has resulted in techniques for manipulating the motion of electrons - probabilities and all - through mazes of ultramicroscopic circuitry. Advances hovering on the horizon, like nanoscience and quantum computers, offer the promise of even more spectacular transformations.

So the next time you use your cellphone or laptop, pause for a moment. Recognize that even these commonplace devices rely on our greatest, yet most puzzling, scientific achievement and - as things now stand - tap into humankind's most supreme assault on the idea that reality is what we think it is.


Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of “The Elegant Universe,’’ and, most recently, “The Fabric of the Cosmos.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[M. Henri Day]

...

You know as well as I that the U.S. economy is based on the use of energy. ...

William, I take the liberty of reproducing below yet another article from a source of which you do not approve, but which might interest you anyway. It could serve as subject for a discussion in your high-school class, or perhaps with your economist brother-in-law. In any event, I'd be interested in hearing what you think of article and what conclusions concerning future development, if any, you draw from it....

Henri

The end of oil is closer than you think

Oil production could peak next year, reports John Vidal. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye

John Vidal
Thursday April 21, 2005

Guardian

The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age.
They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.

"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh next week. "The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," he says.

Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil - the kind associated with gushing oil wells - is approaching fast, perhaps even next year. His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.

"About 944bn barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764bn remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142bn of reserves are classed as 'yet-to-find', meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year," he says.

If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2-3% a year, the cost of everything from travel, heating, agriculture, trade, and anything made of plastic rises. And the scramble to control oil resources intensifies. As one US analyst said this week: "Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye."

But the Campbell analysis is way off the much more optimistic official figures. The US Geological Survey (USGS) states that reserves in 2000 (its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about three trillion barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that oil will peak between "2013 and 2037" and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries with much of the world's known reserves, report little if any depletion of reserves. Meanwhile, the oil companies - which do not make public estimates of their own "peak oil" - say there is no shortage of oil and gas for the long term. "The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current consumption rates," said BP this week.

Indeed, almost every year for 150 years, the oil industry has produced more than it did the year before, and predictions of oil running out or peaking have always been proved wrong. Today, the industry is producing about 83m barrels a day, with big new fields in Azerbaijan, Angola, Algeria, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere soon expected on stream.

But the business of estimating oil reserves is contentious and political. According to Campbell, companies seldom report their true findings for commercial reasons, and governments - which own 90% of the reserves - often lie. Most official figures, he says, are grossly unreliable: "Estimating reserves is a scientific business. There is a range of uncertainty but it is not impossible to get a good idea of what a field contains. Reporting [reserves], however, is a political act."

According to Campbell and other oil industry sources, the two most widely used estimates of world oil reserves, drawn up by the Oil and Gas Journal and the BP Statistical Review, both rely on reserve estimates provided to them by governments and industry and do not question their accuracy.

Companies, says Campbell, "under-report their new discoveries to comply with strict US stock exchange rules, but then revise them upwards over time", partly to boost their share prices with "good news" results. "I do not think that I ever told the truth about the size of a prospect. That was not the game we were in," he says. "As we were competing for funds with other subsidiaries around the world, we had to exaggerate."

Most serious of all, he and other oil depletion analysts and petroleum geologists, most of whom have been in the industry for years, accuse the US of using questionable statistical probability models to calculate global reserves and Opec countries of drastically revising upwards their reserves in the 1980s.

"The estimates for the Opec countries were systematically exaggerated in the late 1980s to win a greater slice of the allocation cake. Middle East official reserves jumped 43% in just three years despite no new major finds," he says.

The study of "peak oil" - the point at which half the total oil known to have existed in a field or a country has been consumed, beyond which extraction goes into irreversible decline - used to be back-of-the envelope guesswork. It was not taken seriously by business or governments, mainly because oil has always been cheap and plentiful.

In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from "if" there is a global peak to "when".

The US government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves last year, "world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the re­serves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available."

It continues: "Although there is no agreement about the date that world oil production will peak, forecasts presented by USGS geologist Les Magoon, the Oil and Gas Journal, and others expect the peak will occur between 2003 and 2020. What is notable ... is that none extend beyond the year 2020, suggesting that the world may be facing shortfalls much sooner than expected."

According to Bill Powers, editor of the Canadian Energy Viewpoint investment journal, there is a growing belief among geologists who study world oil supply that production "is soon headed into an irreversible decline ... The US government does not want to admit the reality of the situation. Dr Campbell's thesis, and those of others like him, are becoming the mainstream."

In the absence of reliable official figures, geologists and analysts are turning to the grandfather of oil depletion analysis, M King Hubbert, a Shell geologist who in 1956 showed mathematically that exploitation of any oilfield follows a predictable "bell curve" trend, which is slow to take off, rises steeply, flattens and then descends again steeply. The biggest and easiest exploited oilfields were always found early in the history of exploration, while smaller ones were developed as production from the big fields declined. He accurately predicted that US domestic oil production would peak around 1970, 40 years after the period of peak discovery around 1930.

Many oil analysts now take the "Hubbert peak" model seriously, and the USGS, national and oil company figures with a large dose of salt. Similar patterns of peak discovery and production have been found throughout all the world's main oilfields. The first North Sea discovery was in 1969, discoveries peaked in 1973 and the UK passed its production peak in 1999. The British portion of the basin is now in serious decline and the Norwegian sector has levelled off.

Other analysts are also questioning afresh the oil companies' data. US Wall street energy group Herold last month compared the stated reserves of the world's leading oil companies with their quoted discoveries, and production levels. Herold predicts that the seven largest will all begin seeing production declines within four years. Deutsche Bank analysts report that global oil production will peak in 2014.

According to Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a monthly magazine published by the Energy Institute in London, conventional oil reserves are now declining about 4-6% a year worldwide. He says 18 large oil-producing countries, including Britain, and 32 smaller ones, have declining production; and he expects Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India all to reach their peak in the next few years.

"We should be worried. Time is short and we are not even at the point where we admit we have a problem," Skrebowski says. "Governments are always excessively optimistic. The problem is that the peak, which I think is 2008, is tomorrow in planning terms."

On the other hand, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome, Chad and Angola are are all expected to grow strongly.

What is agreed is that world oil demand is surging. The International Energy Agency, which collates national figures and predicts demand, says developing countries could push demand up 47% to 121m barrels a day by 2030, and that oil companies and oil-producing nations must spend about $100bn a year to develop new supplies to keep pace.

According to the IEA, demand rose faster in 2004 than in any year since 1976. China's oil consumption, which accounted for a third of extra global demand last year, grew 17% and is expected to double over 15 years to more than 10m barrels a day - half the US's present demand. India's consumption is expected to rise by nearly 30% in the next five years. If world demand continues to grow at 2% a year, then almost 160m barrels a day will need to be extracted in 2035, twice as much as today.

That, say most geologists is almost inconceivable. According to industry consultants IHS Energy, 90% of all known reserves are now in production, suggesting that few major discoveries remain to be made. Shell says its reserves fell last year because it only found enough oil to replace 15-25 % of what the company produced. BP told the US stock exchange that it replaced only 89% of its production in 2004.

Moreover, oil supply is increasingly limited to a few giant fields, with 10% of all production coming from just four fields and 80% from fields discovered before 1970. Even finding a field the size of Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, by far the world's largest and said to have another 125bn barrels, would only meet world demand for about 10 years.

"All the major discoveries were in the 1960s, since when they have been declining gradually over time, give or take the occasional spike and trough," says Campbell. "The whole world has now been seismically searched and picked over. Geological knowledge has improved enormously in the past 30 years and it is almost inconceivable now that major fields remain to be found."

He accepts there may be a big field or two left in Russia, and more in Africa, but these would have little bearing on world supplies. Unconventional deposits like tar sands and shale may only slow the production decline.

"The first half of the oil age now closes," says Campbell. "It lasted 150 years and saw the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture and financial capital, allowing the population to expand six-fold. The second half now dawns, and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital."

So did the Swiss bankers comprehend the seriousness of the situation when he talked to them? "There is no company on the stock exchange that doesn't make a tacit assumption about the availability of energy," says Campbell. "It is almost impossible for bankers to accept it. It is so out of their mindset."

Crude alternatives

"Unconventional" petroleum reserves, which are not included in some totals of reserves, include:

Heavy oils

These can be pumped just like conventional petroleum except that they are much thicker, more polluting, and require more extensive refining. They are found in more than 30 countries, but about 90% of estimated reserves are in the Orinoco "heavy oil belt" of Venezuela, which has an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels. About one third of the oil is potentially recoverable using current technology.

Tar sands

These are found in sedimentary rocks and must be dug out and crushed in giant opencast mines. But it takes five to 10 times the energy, area and water to mine, process and upgrade the tars that it does to process conventional oil. The Athabasca deposits in Alberta, Canada are the world's largest resource, with estimated reserves of 1.8 trillion barrels, of which about 280-300bn barrels may be recoverable. Production now accounts for about 20% of Canada's oil supply.

Oil shales

These are seen as the US government's energy stopgap. They exist in large quantities in ecologically sensitive parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah at varying depths, but the industrial process needed to extract the oil demands hot water, making it much more expensive and less energy-efficient than conventional oil. The mining operation is extremely damaging to the environment. Shell, Exxon, ChevronTexaco and other oil companies are investing billions of dollars in this expensive oil production method.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005