2018 Major Transitions in Planetary Evolution
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/isal_a_00024

Earth has undergone a succession of stages driven by physical, chemical, geological, biological, and social processes. Among the most significant transitions in Earth’s planetary evolution are the emergence of life and subsequent biochemical innovations, the emergence of social behavior and cognition, and the emergence of technology. After life emerged, planetary processes became much more complex due to increased diversity in what is biogeochemically possible. With the evolutionary emergence of collective behaviors, social systems, and cognition, an increasing number of planetary processes became controlled by life. Since the emergence of technology, intentional steering of the environment became possible. In each stage, new mechanisms of control, mediated by new information processing architectures, are added to existing levels of control on the planetary environment. We can classify these evolutionary stages of planets into matter-dominated, life-dominated, and agency-dominated phases, where each is distinguished by the extent to which information processing systems control planetary processes. We aim to characterize how each phase shapes planetary environments.

2020 Gaian Systems - Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/gaian-systems
https://books.google.cz/...Ll8c3iN61&sig=ckJNie6_ftoMazC0T6kftgnoQ1A&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

*Gaian Systems* reviews and assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on the discourse of Gaia. Gaia theory is systems theory. In particular, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s initial Gaia research was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory.

A primary outlet for the Gaia hypothesis was CoEvolution Quarterly, the periodical successor to the Whole Earth Catalog. This venue insured that early in their mutual developments, Gaia theory intersected with second-order cybernetics, a leading edge of systems theory’s own epoch of countercultural transformations. The recent Gaia discourses of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour variously contest its cybernetic status.

*Gaian Systems* sharpens this debate by engaging Latour in particular on the issue of Gaia’s systems description. Lovelock and Margulis consistently position Gaia theory as an application of either first- or second-order cybernetic systems theory. From these affirmations and exigencies I extend my own systems-theoretical synthesis under the technical phrase metabiotic Gaia.

*Gaian Systems* shows how metabiotic Gaia discourse illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations, including system boundaries, biopolitics, the immunitary paradigm, symbiosis, the holobiont, astrobiology, the Anthropocene, the geological turn, and the new geocentrism.

*Gaian Systems* uniquely traces the particular signature of Lynn Margulis on the evolution of Gaia theory. Other critical treatments tend to take Lovelock’s Gaia as the last word on the topic. In fact, Margulis occasionally published her own variations on Lovelock’s cybernetics. This study is the first to follow Margulis’s lead to see what the autopoietic turn can add to Gaia’s conception and description.

*Gaian Systems* also makes selections from Margulis’s unpublished professional correspondence available for the first time. Additionally, no previous study has gone into this level of detail on the commerce of the Gaia hypothesis with the systems counterculture, the remarkable collegial network established by the Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly, and the Lindisfarne Association.

2020 Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences
https://www.academia.edu/...anetary_Social_Thought_The_Anthropocene_Challenge_to_the_Social_Sciences

This is an unpublished full draft of a book by Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, due to be published by Polity Press in late 2020.

More than just putting new causes for alarm on the agenda, we argue in this book, the Anthropocene offers incitements for thinking about our planet across a range of timescales, fields of vision and trajectories. Such provocations, we propose, can and ought to prompt us to ask some far-reaching questions. What kind of planet is this on which we find ourselves? What has our planet done in the past and what might it be capable of doing in the future? And closely associated with these ‘planetary’ themes, we also need to ask: what kind of creature or being are we? How have ‘we’ inhabited and made use of this planet in the past, and what might we find ourselves doing with the Earth and all its shifting, changeable processes in the future? This is what we refer to as planetary social thought.

2018 The Anthropocene Generalized: Evolution of Exo-Civilizations and Their Planetary Feedback
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2017.1671

We present a framework for studying generic behaviors possible in the interaction between a resource-harvesting technological civilization (an exo-civilization) and the planetary environment in which it evolves. Using methods from dynamical systems theory, we introduce and analyze a suite of simple equations modeling a population which consumes resources for the purpose of running a technological civilization and the feedback those resources drive on the state of the host planet. The feedbacks can drive the planet away from the initial state the civilization originated in and into domains that are detrimental to its sustainability. Our models conceptualize the problem primarily in terms of feedbacks from the resource use onto the coupled planetary systems. In addition, we also model the population growth advantages gained via the harvesting of these resources. We present three models of increasing complexity: (1) Civilization-planetary interaction with a single resource; (2) Civilization-planetary interaction with two resources each of which has a different level of planetary system feedback; (3) Civilization-planetary interaction with two resources and nonlinear planetary feedback (i.e., runaways). All three models show distinct classes of exo-civilization trajectories. We find smooth entries into long-term, “sustainable” steady states. We also find population booms followed by various levels of “die-off.” Finally, we also observe rapid “collapse” trajectories for which the population approaches n = 0. Our results are part of a program for developing an “Astrobiology of the Anthropocene” in which questions of sustainability, centered on the coupled Earth-system, can be seen in their proper astronomical/planetary context. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for both the coupled Earth system and for the consideration of exo-civilizations across cosmic history

Earth as a Hybrid Planet: The Anthropocene in an Evolutionary Astrobiological Context - ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2213305417300425

We develop a classification scheme for the evolutionary state of planets based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of their coupled systems, including the presence of a biosphere and the possibility of what we call an “agency-dominated biosphere” (i.e. an energy-intensive technological species). The premise is that Earth’s entry into the “Anthropocene” represents what might be, from an astrobiological perspective, a predictable planetary transition. We explore this problem from the perspective of the solar system and exoplanet studies. Our classification discriminates planets by the forms of free energy generation driven from stellar forcing. We then explore how timescales for global evolutionary processes on Earth might be synchronized with ecological transformations driven by increases in energy harvesting and its consequences (which might have reached a turning point with global urbanization). Finally, we describe quantitatively the classification scheme based on the maintenance of chemical disequilibrium in the past and current Earth systems and on other worlds in the solar system. In this perspective, the beginning of the Anthropocene can be seen as the onset of the hybridization of the planet – a transitional stage from one class of planetary systems interaction to another. For Earth, this stage occurs as the effects of human civilization yield not just new evolutionary pressures, but new selected directions for novel planetary ecosystem functions and their capacity to generate disequilibrium and enhance planetary dissipation.

https://ieefa.org/china-considering-plans-to-speed-clean-energy-transition/

China’s current goal is to derive as much as 20% of its primary energy use from non-fossil fuels by 2030. One option under consideration is to bring forward that target, according to people familiar with the discussions who asked not to be identified, possibly to 2025. Another proposal is to cut the share of coal in the energy mix to 52% by 2025, from the 57.5% planned for the end of this year, one of the people said.

...

Still, China has done a little better than it expected in its transition to clean energy so far, even as it remains the world’s biggest miner and consumer of coal. The share of non-fossil fuels in the energy mix was 15.3% in 2019, surpassing the 15% goal set for 2020.

Chinese renewable energy stocks have been on a tear on speculation that Beijing could increase its requirements for solar and wind power. Bringing forward the 20% target to 2025 could see solar installations more than triple from 2019 levels to 105 gigawatts a year, while wind could almost double to 48 gigawatts, Zhu Yue, an analyst at Industrial Securities Co., said in a note.

Glosa: Složité zelené návraty - Seznam Zprávy
https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/glosa-slozite-zelene-navraty-119428

Trochu tragikomedie na pátek

WOODMAKER: https://www.lidovky.cz/...rzitelne-lide-stale-pribyva-a-spotreba-roste.A200908_114849_dobra-chut_ape

tot otazka

The Climate Alarms Are Blaring — Are People Not Hearing Them? 
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/17/the-climate-alarms-are-blaring-are-people-not-hearing-them/

As the fires on the US West Coast grow more intense, and as thousands flee their homes, one has to wonder — are we unable to perceive the climate’s warning signs or are we, as a species, truly this parasitic?