1. As you may have noticed, I’ve radically simplified the website. I regret having to remove the Twitter integration and coolest navigation features. Nonetheless, it was unavoidable. The website loaded far too slowly most of the time, and when I got linked to from A Fistful of Euros, the resulting upsurge in visitor numbers repeatedly crashed the site. I thus decided on a minimalist revolution from above so that you, readers, will hopefully always be able to quickly and easily access S/O content. PS. I also expanded the Best Music page – check it out!
2. When I meet people, I sometimes mention the S/O blog as one of the things I do if I think they might be interested in its material. My problem – somewhat paradoxically, as its author – is that I also have difficulties in summarizing what it is about. Erm… Russia. Peak oil. EROEI. What’s that? Futurism. So what do you think will happen? I look at trends, and possible discontinuities, for example… Anyhow, I don’t feel like I’m doing it right. I’d appreciate it if you could help me out, e.g. by writing down three or four sentences that distill the essence of S/O.
3. A lot of Not So Good news on the climate change front. The subsea permafrost of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is destabilizing, possibly threatening to uncork massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere over just a few decades (i.e. instantaneous on the geological timescale). This is bad because methane is much more potent than CO2 over timescales of decades. There is a danger that the process will pass a threshold beyond which it acquires runaway characteristics, raising global temperatures by as much as 8-10C. Needless to say, such an extreme hothouse state would spell the end of industrial civilization, maybe even homo sapiens. Therefore, should global warming runaway, geoengineering will almost certainly be attempted as a “last gamble”.
Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH4 [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”
Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!
The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra. [AK: See MIT study using upgraded model that takes this into account].
The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d). The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” The NSF is normally a very staid organization. If they are worried, everybody should be.
It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.
There are so many positive feedbacks to global warming in the Arctic – it is both the canary and the gas in the coal mine. Do yourself a favor and read the whole article.
James Cascio (one of the leading thinkers about geoengineering) writes about using methanotrophic bacteria, genetically-engineered to survive the cold Arctic seas, to oxidize the excess methane in that region. He also stresses that if the methane gun goes off, we may have no choice to attempting large-scale geoengineering.
If the frozen methane in the Siberian ocean is melting faster, our options are extremely limited. We’d no longer be in a position to stop the melting, even by ceasing all greenhouse gas production today; the temperature increases we’re seeing now are the results of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere decades ago. And when methane melts, it appears to do so quickly — there are signs that past methane clathrate events took less than a human lifetime. This is why I think that methane melt would inevitably mean geoengineering.
Probably a more realistic, and certainly cheaper, proposal than a 100,000 square mile sun shade.
4. A good, albeit depressing, article by George Monbiot on the intellectuals’ fallacy that reason persuades. Unfortunately for the world, it’s the opposite.
5. Iraq Opens Up to Foreign Oil Majors – Mission Accomplished!
The contracts awarded in two auctions, which pay a per-barrel fee for development work rather than granting a share in the production itself, will cost the companies a total of about $100 billion to develop deposits, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said in December. Iraq, with the world’s third-largest oil reserves, will earn about $200 billion a year. …
A group led by BP, which vies with Shell as Europe’s largest oil company, will receive $2 billion per year in fees to develop the Rumaila field. A Shell-led group will get $913 million and a group led by Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, will receive $1.6 billion per year. Each calculation is based on the agreed-to per-barrel fee times the maximum production level.
“We see this as the beginning of a long-term relationship with Iraq and will continue to look for further opportunities,” Andy Inglis, BP’s chief executive for exploration and production, said on a conference call March 2.
This is not looting, as hardcore critics of US foreign policy / imperialism assert. The contracts were signed on favorable terms to Iraq (i.e. not the production-sharing agreements, or PSA’s, typically arranged with corrupt Third World states). The main hope is that under the current plans, a rapid surge in Iraqi production will postpone global peak oil (World Oil Capacity to Peak in 2010 Says Petrobras CEO) by up to a decade. This is important because cheap oil flows are one of the key foundations of Pax Americana and of the global (neo)liberal internationalist order.
[History of Iraqi oil production].
Will this actually work? I am skeptical. The optimistic scenario assumes the confluence of all the best outcomes in the following:
- Iraq’s reserves are not massively overstated for political reasons like in the rest of OPEC.
- The security situation in Iraq remains stable, unlikely given the fragility of the post-2008 agreements between ethnic / religious clans, and the influence Iran weilds over key political factions.
- No geopolitical disruptions, such as Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz or raiding Iraqi oil installations, e.g. in response to a US-Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.
- Iraq manages to attract the technical talent to make this work. Developing oil fields is a highly complex organizational endevour, and most of its managerial talent emigrated in 2003-2008.
Finally, history itself suggests that the odds are against the Al-Shahristani plan / optimistic scenario from being realized. Note that at three distinct prior points in the last three decades, it appeared that Iraq might become a dominant oil exporter. The buildup in the 1970′s was interrupted by the Iran-Iraq War. The late 1980′s recovery was utterly reversed by the Gulf War. The 1990′s recovery was stunted by UN sanctions, and output again dipped during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and remained depressed throughout the anarchic 2003-2008 period.
The common pattern? All Iraq’s historic rises in oil production, or recoveries, were interrupted by geopolitical flux in decadal cycles. Considering the current, irreconcilable tensions between Iran, Israel and the US, is it really outlandish to suggest that some renewed geopolitical shock in the early to mid-2010′s once again disillusions the Iraq oil bulls?
6. Collapse of Pax Americana watch. Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos by Niall Ferguson, court historian of the American empire. I highly recommend registering with FP and reading the article free.
What matters most is that in such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate — and sometimes fatal — disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment, threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade.
Though the more fundamental source of system strain was the first peak oil shock, this analysis is still valid and correct.
Regardless of whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority — either a hereditary emperor or an elected president — but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social, and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems — including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognized because of the collective addiction to cyclical theories of history. …
But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome’s fall was sudden and dramatic — just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. … the final breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. … Byzantium lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, king of the Goths.
What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire’s collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls “the end of civilization” came within the span of a single generation.
I am an adherent of the fast collapse school. Most historical examples conformed to this pattern.
The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that “averted Armageddon.” But this did not seem to be the case at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy. This estimate is now known to have been wrong, but the Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets’ favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff — rather than gently declining — it was the one founded by Lenin.
True that it collapsed suddenly, but as I wrote previously, this was because the dictator (Gorbachev) lost the will to enforce coercion – i.e. the thing that made central planning work. Otherwise, the Soviet system was entirely sustainable (which is not to say that it was “optimal”, “good”, “dynamic”, etc). See Harrison 2001.
If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time — it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. All the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion — about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60 years — and another for 2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than double in the coming decade, from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent.
These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if not more so. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States’ ability to weather any crisis. For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the deficit seem overblown, and 2080 — when the U.S. debt may reach staggering proportions — seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency — will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
… The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal measures that the Obama administration has taken in response [AK: this has been a constant S/O theme for a year now]. Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational expectations, demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations. In the same way, it is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt [another major S/O theme - compound debt trap or inflation]. Just ask Greece — it happened there at the end of last year, plunging the country into fiscal and political crisis.
Finally, a shift in expectations about monetary and fiscal policy could force a reassessment of future U.S. foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory entitlements, it is discretionary. [AK: see my argument that the US military-industrial complex will be hit particularly hard by the coming debt & fiscal crises] … And what about the United States’ other strategic challenges? For the United States’ enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas military operations in the years ahead. [AK: This is the geopolitical component of collapse]
Defeat in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago, like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of The Course of Empire, the shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.
That said, the suddenness shouldn’t be overstated. In reality, when a complex system collapses, its constituent parts tend to reassemble into a simpler structure after some period of flux; but since this simpler structure requires fewer investments to maintain itself, the resulting entity can, in principle, be even more vigorous and expansionist than the hypertrophied empire that preceded it. For instance, the late USSR was decrepit, at home and abroad; today’s Russia is brashly expansionist, for its radical post-Soviet “simplification” has freed up resources away from the maintenance of complexity. Likewise, following the collapse of Pax Americana, the American Republic will remain; it will be like a crustacean that has shed its shell, and it will, if anything, be enthusiastic about reclaiming its old spheres of influence in a far blunter, more aggresive manner than it maintains Pax Americana today.
[Desolation by Thomas Cole (last stage of empire)].
(Overall I like Ferguson’s work, especially the earlier ones before he became famous and adopted an air of aloof arrogance - The Pity of War is a masterpiece of historical revisionism. BTW. I met him once when he was giving a talk about his new book The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (certainly not his best book, IMO). He made the surprising claim that Iran today is as big a threat to US hegemony as Imperial Germany was to the UK in 1914. I took issue with this, citing Iran’s vastly weaker economy, military, etc relative to Germany a century ago, which by 1914 had twice the UK’s steel production, Europe’s most powerful armed forces, and leadership in the new chemical and electrical engineering industries. His answer to my criticism was unsubstantive and unimpressive. Nowadays, I realize that in a way he was correct, however. Though Iran cannot stand head-to-head against the US, 1) today’s US Empire is a much more fragile system than the British Empire and 2) in particular, Iran can hit it the US at a criticial position – its reliance on cheap oil. British power in 1914 relied on its financial strength, Royal Navy, and coal. Germany was powerless to do anything about the latter two, though over four years of total war it did indirectly undermine the former, since Britain’s military expenditures shifted the balance of financial power to the US. In contrast, Iran can hit directly at the heart of US power – the global oil system.)
7. Who owns US debt? One interesting thing I observe in those figures is that in the last half-year, America’s strategic competitors (China, Russia) have slightly reduced US Treasury holdings, whereas its allies (Britain, Canada, Japan, France, Australia, Poland) tended to increase them. Plus, there are suspicions / conspiracy theories? that the US, it’s own best ally, is buying its own debt.
8. Economic apocalypse watch. Europe’s banks brace for UK debt crisis - UniCredit has alerted investors in a client note that Britain is at serious risk of a bond market and sterling debacle and faces even more intractable budget woes than Greece.
Fitch warns Britain and questions Greek rescue as sovereign risks grow:
A string of European states are stepping up the pace of retrenchment, aiming to cut deficits to 3pc of GDP within three years. The risk is that Britain will soon stick out like a sore thumb, left behind with a shockingly large deficit long after such loose fiscal policy can be justified as a crisis measure. The UK deficit this year is 12.6pc of GDP, the highest among G10 states.
The Government is clearly counting on a “Korean” recovery, modelled on Korea’s fast return to trend growth following the Asian crisis in 1998. It relies on rising output and tax revenues to plug much of the deficit. “This is an optimistic assumption,” said Fitch.
The Coming Greek Debt Bubble by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson.
By the end of 2011 Greece’s debt will around 150% of GDP (the numbers here are based on the 2009 IMF Article IV assessment; we make some adjustments for the worsening economy and the restating of numbers since that time – for example, the fiscal deficit in 2009 will likely turn out to be about 8 percent, which is double what the IMF expected until recently). About 80 percent of this debt is foreign owned, and a large part of this is thought held by residents of France and Germany. Every 1 percentage point rise in interest rates means Greece needs to send an additional 1.2 percent of GDP abroad to those bondholders.
What if Greek interest rates rise to, say, 10% – a modest premium for a country which has the highest external public debt/GDP ratio in the world, which continues (under the so-called “austerity” program) to refinance even the interest on that debt without actually paying a centime out of its own pocket, and which is struggling to establish any sustained backing from the rest of Europe? Greece would need to send at total of 12% of GDP abroad per year, once they rollover the existing stock of debt to these new rates (nearly half of Greek debt will roll over within 3 years).
This is simply impossible and unheard of for any long period of history. German reparation payments were 2.4 percent of GNP during 1925-32, and in the years immediately after 1982, the net transfer of resources from Latin America was 3.5 percent of GDP (a fifth of its export earnings). Neither of these were good experiences. …
The French and Germans are apparently actually encouraging banks, pension funds, and individuals to buy these bonds – despite the fact senior politicians must surely know this is a Ponzi scheme, i.e., people can get out of Greek bonds only to the extent that new investors come in. At best, this does nothing more than postpone the crisis – in the business, it is known as “kicking the can down the road.” At worst, it encourages less informed people (including perhaps pension funds) to buy bonds as smarter people (and big banks, surely) take the opportunity to exit.
While the French and German leadership makes a great spectacle of wanting to end speculation, in fact they are instead encouraging it. The hypocrisy is horrifying – Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel are helping realistic speculators make money on the backs of those who take seriously misleading statements by European politicians. This is irresponsible.
Eurozone could risk ‘sovereign debt explosion’ - Europe’s governments are at increasing risk of an interest rate shock this year as the lingering effects of the Great Recession drive debt issuance to record levels and saturate bond markets, according to Standard & Poor’s.
9. John Michael Greer makes a post excellent even by his high standards, Barbarism and Good Brandy. Emergy, energy concentrations, and economic triage for dummies.
10. A stunning 80% of Internet users around the world see Internet access as a fundamental human right. (This is an illustration of the amazing centrality the Internet has assumed in our lives over the past decade. The son of ARPANET is easily the most significant invention of late industrialism – so significant, that as far as I know uniquely, it created an entirely new social, economic, and military environment – that of cyberspace).
The BBC has a map of the spread of Internet penetration around the world from 1998-2008. Just ten years ago, the only “wired societies” were those of the advanced world. Today, even nations like Brazil, Iran, and Belarus have widespread Internet penetration. With 29% penetration as of end-2009, China has decisively overtaken the US as the nation with the most netizens.
Within the next 2-3 years, the Internet is projected to 1) become much, much faster, by orders of magnitude, and 2) penetration will become near-universal in all but the poorest nations.
11. One example of how the Internet is changing the world – people put their shit up and it is coming back to bite them in the ass. Back from 2005 - Bloggers Need Not Apply.
That’s when the committee took a look at their online activity. In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck. [AK: I don't mention my blog on these occasions unless what I've written there is directly relevant to it. That said, I make absolutely no effort to hide my online work - nor would I ever consider doing it]
We’ve all done it — expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we’re giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person’s attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off. …
It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people’s choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one’s childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It’s not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order. …
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, “Oh, no one will see it anyway.” Don’t count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up. [AK: This is really stating the obvious]
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum. … [AK: I would suggest Tribble's department go the whole nine yards and ban the Internet in their workplace. I mean past good behavior is no guarantee that someone wouldn't go over to blogger.com and start up a blog within 5 minutes. Even better, we wouldn't have to read his parochial diatribes]
We’ve seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they’ve got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can’t wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn’t want to know more. [AK: Likewise, this is enough for me to conclude that I don't want to work with or study under Tribble and his ilk either. So we do each other a favor
]
Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.
The anonymous beigeocrat who wrote this article is both 100% correct and an excellent reason to blog under one’s own name.
It’s true that associating your real-life “True Name” with the writings, rantings, and ravings of an online avatar may potentially result in real-life consequences. Unsuccessful job applications, denunciations, and other Kafkaesque nightmares are distinct possibilities. (We live in a society that likes to pretend it’s free, even makes a religion of it, whereas in reality it is just a multitude of centrally planned corporate dictatorships and professional guilds). Surely it’s best to conform, get yourself a nice cushioned job, and pursue the American Dream of ever bigger living boxes and higher-horsepower wheeled boxes with Stakhanovite fervor?
That is what most people do – the premeds with no life except studying, the grad students desperately seeking tenure, the office robots who don’t make it to the top of the corporate pecking order, all in thrall to the Tribbles of the world. But is this really a free, or even satisfying, existence?
I too was under the System’s spell until about a year and a half ago (I assume the timeline based on when I dropped my anonymity). I now realize – true, still more in theory than in practice – that expending great efforts on spinning the careerist hamster wheel is pointless, even idiotic (far better to own the wheels and hamsters yourself). I also realize that the world now has so many hamsters and so many wheels that sustaining them far into the future is probably unrealistic. I am also thankful that I’ve come to these conclusions in my early 20′s, rather than in my 40′s, a time when the same realizations tend to cause midlife crises… Real freedom only begins with freedom from fear.
Incidentally, that is why I respect people who are unafraid to tell it like it is under their true names (e.g. Leos Tomicek), even when I don’t agree them on most things (e.g. Craig Pirrong).
[Zaporozh'e Cossacks writing a letter to the Sultan by Ilya Repin].
I guess I’m rambling now, displaying a lack of focus to the search committee picking over this entry. Back on topic. Leaving aside questions of principle, I don’t even think that Tribble is correct in his practical conclusions that blogging is almost always bad for job applications, etc. If you annoy someone with your Russophile or doomer views*, big deal – you don’t get the position (one out of at least hundreds of others), and you are the better off for it – i.e. you won’t have to deal with a judgmental, opinionated boss. However, every so often your views will find a surprisingly warm reception, allowing you to establish a strong, friendly rapport based on common values with your prospective employers and colleagues.
Finally, the source of Tribble’s critique of public blogging comes from his infatuation with the traditional academic establishment, which is very conservative and mafia-like in its cliquishness. The democratic Internet, which eliminates the need for the current, broken system of peer review, and gives voice to organic intellectuals as never before, is viewed with deep suspicion. No wonder. I’ve blogged for two years as a hobby, and I already managed to get cited on Google Scholar with absolutely zero effort on my part. Such possibilities must be immensely frustrating to the old school who have to jump through the traditional hoops. But they are losing the war. As the Internet becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives, and as limits to growth constrain the traditional, bureaucratized academic system, it will be bloggers and amateur enthusiasts, eccentrics and organic intellectuals, who will take over as the driving force behind social and cultural progress (though probably not technical R&D).
* That said, I probably wouldn’t recommend going public with extreme and unpopular views, such as neo-Nazism, “race realism”, or political Islamism (fundamentalist Christianity is totally cool though). Perhaps I’ll yet regret writing about Green Communism and ecotechnic dictatorship. Then again, one can always take up sustenance permaculture or sail off in a boat.
12. Turkey watch. Zavtra.com.ua: Turkey might activate its relations with Russia in retaliation to US (recognition of Armenian genocide). Turkey’s interests are diverging from those of the US on a range of issues, causing it to edge a bit closer to Russia.
That said, there’s absolutely no point in speaking about a solid alliance. This Eurasianist fantasy is just that, a fantasy. Russia and Turkey simply have too many potential clashes of interests (the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and Central Asia), which will eventually emerge into prominence because they are both rising Powers.
What is more likely are temporary marriages of interest, such as what we have now. Turkey might be interested in this to free up resources for increasing its influence over Iraq, Syria, the Balkans, and former-Soviet Central Asia; Russia will be interested in freeing up resources for its own geopolitical projects, i.e. reasserting hegemony over the Caucasus. Once the new Russian and neo-Ottoman Empires are both consolidated, their relations will deteriorate.
13. China watch. Beijing seeks a shift in geopolitics
More importantly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is gunning for a paradigm shift in geopolitics, namely, new rules of the game whereby the fast-rising quasi-superpower will be playing a more forceful role. In particular, Beijing has served notice that it won’t be shy about playing hardball to safeguard what it claims to be “core national interests”. …
Likewise, Central Party School strategist Gong Li said Beijing should “not yield a single inch” as far as matters such as Taiwan and Tibet are concerned. Professor Gong said while China is not yet a superpower that can throw its weight around on a global scale, Beijing should “brandish the sword” in areas affecting the country’s “core values and major interests”.
According to Yang Yi, a well-known scholar at the Beijing-based National Defense University, China has been thrust to the forefront of the global stage by force of circumstances. “Under such circumstances, it’s better that we take the initiative and be proactive and creative,” said General Yang. When faced with challenges and provocations, China should “show the flag and hit hard [at opponents]“, he added. “While we may suffer temporary damage, it is imperative that our opponent be dealt a blow that it cannot sustain.”
14. Robert Amsterdam writes about The Rise of the Franco-Russo Axis. I don’t agree with this characterization – as with Turkey and even Germany, it is more a temporary marriage of interests. France gets snubbed by the US, e.g. the most recent - France vows retaliation against US in air tanker dispute. Though volatile Sarkozy shows his displeasure by acquiescing to major commercial and military deals with Russia, the longer-term analysis suggests that France and Russia will be natural strategic competitors.
This comment by georgesdelatour (arguing that Britain and Russia are natural partners) got me thinking of European geopolitics in the 18th century. A rising Russia, surrounded by non-friendly Poland, Sweden, and Turkey. Friends with Habsburg Austria, and sometimes Prussia and England. Almost always aligned against France, which in turn allies with nations like Turkey and Poland to check Habsburg designs. Italy is disunited and Spain is weak. In essence, Russia’s relations tended to follow a chequerboard pattern – enemies with its neighbors (Turkey, Sweden, Poland), friends with its neighbors’ neighbors (the German states, Austria), enemies with its neighbors to the 3rd degree (France), and friends with its neighbors to the 4th degree (Britain).
As I noted in Europe, The Black Continent, a broadly similar geopolitical structure may appear within the next two decades, albeit with some differences – e.g. modern day Germany is more powerful than Prussia, whereas Habsburg Austria has no modern equivalent; Italy is an independent player; Turkey’s power is rising, rather than declining as with the Ottomans; and the US, though its global empire will probably collapse, will nonetheless remain a very powerful and significant player.
Based on the 18th century precedent, there is ground to believe that Russia and Britain will pursue good relations – especially since Britain will want for gas supplies since it will be suffering an energy crunch by the mid-2010’s. On the other hand, Britain is closely aligned with the US, whose primary goal is to preempt the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon. Since the Russian Empire is reconsolidating itself, this might limit the scope of any Anglo-Russian friendship.
15. Rise of Russian Empire watch. Azarov, close Yanukovych supporter/ POR member, becomes Ukraine’s PM. The new cabinet is dominated by the pro-Russian Party of Regions, with a few independents and smaller party members in the less important posts. The BYT bloc is in the opposition and seems to have reverted to its strident anti-Russian stance; the pro-Russian coalition now in power (POR / Litvin bloc / Communists / some defectors) is currently strong, though potentially unstable.
PS. The new cabinet is also all-male, which is surprising even by the generally low levels of political participation of women in E. European politics. Did Yanukovych get an allergy to all female politicians after his struggle with Yulia?
16. Even more on new Eurasian Empire. Stratfor has a series summarizing Russia’s designs on and activities towards reconsolidating its Eurasian Empire. The analysis is steretypically Stratforish, logical and hard-knuckled realist (perhaps to a fault?). But I essentially agree with it.
- Russia’s Expanding Influence, Introduction: The Targets
- Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 1: The Necessities – Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia are considered vital. The first three are already back within Russia’s sphere of influence.
- Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 2: The Desirables – the Baltics, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
- Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 3: The Extras – Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.
- Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 4: The Major Players – maintain good relations with Turkey, France, Germany, and Poland so as to prevent them from interfering too much in imperial reassertion.
See also Vladimir Putin forging ahead with vision of Eurasian empire.
17. Commentator Randy McDonald sent me this link which argues that nothing substantial may come out of the recent Eurasian-integration trends, just as nothing substantial came out of the Union state of Russia and Belarus after 1997. I could potentially sympathize with this view.
However, one major difference between today and the past two decades is that now 1) the West is in rapid decline, whereas 2) Russia’s relative rise is accelerating. Indeed, as suggested by Ferguson above (and numerous times on S/O), the entire global system may now be approaching a discontinuity that kills off today’s (neo)liberal cosmopolitan internationalism and massively reduces American influence. The old rules of the game will be thrown overboard.
Just like in human societies aspiring people flock around the alpha male of the tribe, so all nations like to bandwagon with what they believe is the stronger – or will soon become the stronger – nation. Or as Osama bin Laden put it, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse”. From the perspective of nations bordering a resurging Russia in the 2010′s, the new Eurasian Empire will appear to be the strongest horse in their vicinity.
18. Anti-neoliberal rant about Latvia’s economic collapse. You think Greece has problems? Try Latvia.
19. War watch. Indian Su-30 Fleet Expands Still More. A Russian Tragedy – conscript hazing (dedovschina) still influential. China roundup. North Korea Builds An Operating System (cyberwar). A Different World – interesting article about China’s encouragement of out-of-the-box military thinking. The South African Scam – it’s Navy is regionally dominant (no surprise there), but ill-trained. Picture Perfect – India’s military-industrial complex is inefficient.
20. Limits to Growth watch – water shortages. One of the less discussed issues, but one that is easily as significant as peak oil.
PS. I hope to write a review of Pearce’s book When the Rivers Run Dry within the next few weeks.
21. America’s watch / Rise of the Rest / Waning of Pax Americana. Nikolas Gvosdev, a realist, on the BRIC Wall about the waning of Washington’s influence amongst the BRIC democracies.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned empty-handed from Brazil. Neither Foreign Minister Celso Amorim or President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were responsive to her arguments for supporting stronger sanctions against Iran.
This shouldn’t have been a surprise. Brazil has long made clear its stance on the Iranian question: it wants proof that Iran is working not on mastering nuclear technologies, but on actually constructing a weapon. … Brasilia is not eager to condemn what it sees as activities that any rising power should have the right to engage in.
But the ramifications go far beyond getting Brazil’s support in the Security Council. Efforts to get a new stronger sanctions resolution are running against not only the expected resistance from China, but reluctance on the part of Turkey to endorse this approach. Meanwhile, India’s private sector shows no real enthusiasm for cutting off commercial relations with Tehran. Instead of showcasing the determination of the “international community,” the Obama administration is facing the reality of a divided world. Even if successful French diplomacy with Russia ameliorates Moscow’s opposition, the current drive for sanctions looks largely like a “Euro-Atlantic” initiative—and if so, it loses a good deal of its punch if half the world chooses to ignore them.
Two years ago, Washington was abuzz once again with the prospects for a “League of Democracies” that would support U.S. global leadership. But in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Burma/Myanmar, a very clear rift opened up between the democracies of the advanced north and west, which advocated an intervention on humanitarian grounds, and the democracies of the south and east, which proved to be far more receptive to China’s call for defending state sovereignty. In the Doha round of trade talks and in the ongoing climate change negotiations, the leading democracies of the south and east—Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India and Indonesia among them—have tended to line up with Beijing instead of joining Washington’s banner. …
The rebuff of Clinton in Brasilia this past week did not have to be a foregone conclusion. But it is a dramatic reminder that even the inspirational presidency of Barack Obama is not sufficient to pull the “southern democracies” into a closer partnership with the United States.
See also As NAFTA Growth Slows, Mexico Should Look South.
22. International Women’s Day.
- Some Thoughts on Russia and Feminism… (poemless)
- Domesticating March 8th; Consuming Russian Feminism (Sean)
- What I Believe: Feminism (my dialectical interpretation)
24. Other stuff.
- Could the Taliban be genetically linked to the Jews?
- Navy Recruitment Commercials: USA vs Japan (video humor)
- French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment (I wonder if the CIA still makes them and if so how I could get a sample… strictly for research purposes of course)
24. Liberasm watch. Valeria Novodvorskaya: Normal Collaborationist. (Leos)
Related posts:
I commented on Ferguson’s essay with a post over at my place. To quote the relevant material:
The “straw that broke the camel’s back” image is a good metaphor for the more general concept of “system strain” and “critical points”. Two things I would add to your excellent commentary.
1) “Some of the societies find the power within themselves to overcome these challanges; others fall prey to them… It is when they lack the capacity to respond to these unexpected challenges that collapse ensues.”
Very true. Rome had plenty of challenges in its early days, e.g. the wars with Carthage, and the barbarian incursions were actually stronger in the 1st century than in the 5th. In the early days Rome was resilient. But by the later periods, the Roman Empire became hypertrophied – too much of its energy was expended in maintaining its own complexity, in Tainter’s interpretation, with too little left over for effective defense.
2) In periods of stress and decline, political entities – including empires – need some way of maintaining order and rationalizing their own decline. This typically involves increased coercion and suppression of “scanning” activity, including of the very people who are pointing out the fundamental problems.
One thing I observed is that it is always the easiest targets that are attacked – e.g. intellectuals, “decadence”, etc. Even the post-1970′s America is a good example – it is rap, teen promiscuity, abortion, etc, that is attacked in its “cultural wars”, while the near-permanent primary deficits, deindustrialization, soaring inequality, etc, are ignored. The root problems are not solved – assuming they are even at all solvable – and the internal rot goes on.
I agree, resiliency is a nice word for it. In fact, I think I might have used just that word on your forums sometime last year.
I would not be so quick to claim that the two are unrelated. While I do not agree with all that is said in this analysis, I do sympathize with the spirit behind it. Material determinism has never been my thing; as far as my mortal mind can deduce, the common attitudes and beliefs of a society reflect its ability to maintain cohesion and engage themselves in an effort for the long haul. I am told that Peter Turchin (of cliodynamics fame) makes a similar case in his book, War and Peace and War. (Though like Tainter’s work, I have not yet read it. I plan knock both of these off – in conjunction with Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations sometime this summer.
Greer, you might be interested to know that Turchin (and Nefedov’s) latest book, Secular Cycles, is available free on his site here or in chapters. In the analyses of demographic-political dynastic “cycles” of societies from the Roman Republic to Imperial Russia, his interpretations are almost fully materialist/Malthusian.
Incidentally, I have The Rise and Decline of Nations in a pile on my desk right now, where it has been since I took it out of a library a few months ago. I stopped reading it after discovering the first few dozen pages consisted of a tiresome, banal discourse about the inescapability of subjectivity. I do hope to finish it sometime though, since it was highly recommended by a few people I know.
Thanks for the links, I will be sure to check them out.
From the reviews I have read of War and Peace and War (this is an excellent one – actually I recommend that entire site to you, it is right up your alley) Turchin places a lot of stock in Ibn Khaldun’s “Asabiya” – in Khaldun’s words, “mutual affection and willingness to fight and die for each other”, in Turchin’s “the capacity of a social group for collective action”, and in most normal folk, “social cohesiveness”. (I have heard ‘social solidarity’ as well, but I like the cohesive rendering better).
Now, I have not read the book, but from what I have read about the book Turchin has developed a model for the creation, and decline of cohesiveness in human societies. While material (or as seems to be the case here, geographic) conditions might have an effect on this sense of solidarity, social cohesion itself is a matter of ideology and culture – in other words, fully within the realm of public morality.
Which is an interesting idea in and of itself. If you can unite a people through a devotion to common creed and brotherly identity, how much easier is it to get them to sacrifice “for the greater good”? Where else lies the source of any civilization’s greatest accomplishments? I am attracted to his work because I feel this makes a great deal of intuitive sense – those groups with the highest amounts of social capital have the highest capacity for working together as a group. A society divided by culture wars is a society bereft of this capital.
**
As an aside, I notice you wrote quite a few words on Mr. Ferguson, but none of Mr. Taleb, the man of honor at Ferguson’s table. I have been wondering for a while now if you would ever take up the challenge Taleb poses. I will admit that Taleb’s black swans have changed the way I look at forecast and futurists quite a bit. As an aspiring futurist, you might do well to read his book and provide a rebuttal, lest others like me dismiss the entire project as fantasy.
I’ve taken out W&P&W and will read it sometime over the next few days. I like your summary – it seems to correlate a lot like Trubetzkoy’s writings on cultural clashes, and my own rantings about the sobornost’ – poshlost’ and rationalism – mysticism belief matrix.
As for Black Swans, I haven’t read the book (I hope to do so) but I’m somewhat familiar with his arguments. So I always try to stress the fallibility of long-term forecasts (including my own), the significance of discontinuities in history (both past and future), the importance of identifying truly fundamental trends instead of ephemeral ones, etc…
I don’t know if I can make you dismiss futurism as fantasy. In some sense it is, the more so as you go down the future far enough (incidentally, one of my goals is to write a fantasy book set 1000-3000 years in a wet, hot world with no more accessible fossil fuels!). Nonetheless, I do think that there is some hope for making more or less reliable predictions down one generation – e.g., Japan’s population will age; renewables won’t displace fossil fuels as the dominant power source; computers will be far more powerful and intelligent; ABM systems will proliferate, etc…
Privet.
Here’s an interesting link – http://t-yumasheva.livejournal.com/
It’s a memoiristic blog of T. Yumasheva, (nee T. Eltsina). She writes about politics, Berezovsky, her father, Korzhakov, Chubais and so on.
“Needless to say, such an extreme hothouse state would spell the end of industrial civilization, maybe even homo sapiens.”
Homo sapiens has survived at least two major episodes of rapid global climate change already. Possibly three, four or five — it depends on how you define “major”, “rapid”, and “Homo sapiens”.
For that matter, the hominids evolved during the most climatically unstable period of the last 50 million years. Yet as best we can tell, no hominid species has ever gone extinct from climate change.
If Homo habilis managed, I suspect we’ll be able to.
Doug M.
I’m not so sanguine. The current rates of atmospheric CO2 buildup have no match in geological history and the Sun has never been brighter. If we 1) succeed in burning up most accessible fossil fuels before industrialism ends, 2) if the newest projections are correct, and 3) if geoengineering is unsuccessful, an anoxic event or even a runaway GW to Venus-like conditions is entirely possible (this will just essentially bring forwards the end of life on Earth by a billion or so years).
As always very interesting. I read the Ferguson piece in Foreign Affairs and found it very interesting. I even had a mini debate with Thomas P.M. Barnett over on his blog (he is far more optimistic than I, though I probably am more optimistic than you regarding future global trends, if not “American” trends).
Also, two other interesting items, I thought you might like this old article from Russell Kirk about “American Caesars”, I think this is what you by shedding the “crustacean’s shell.” http://www.mmisi.org/ma/32_03/kirk.pdf
Finally, since I noticed you like Nightwish, you may want to try listening to Within Temptation and especially Epica and Therion. Operatic, symphonic metal. Therion especially is evocative of Wagner.
Thanks for the article, Greg.
In particular, quoting the conclusion, I would note there is already much evidence for #1 and #3, and #2 remains a distinct possibility (Afghanistan, Iran).
Incidentally, I think there are grounds to consider Vladimir Putin as a precursor to the coming Caesars.
Just an observation: there’s nothing wrong with it just being “your personal website/blog”.
I run into the same problem with mine: is it about finance/economics? Political theory? Urbanism? Geography? Pittsburgh? Or maybe it’s just about “Me” and those are the things that I think about…
I know it’s hard – marketing a website that is essentially a personal notepad has always been the opposite of what most people want when they are trying to focus and improve their traffic… Especially these days when everyone has one.
The problem with “my personal website/blog” is that I’m actually interested in getting people to check it out, because I only tell about S/O to those who express an interest in Russia-, geopolitics-, or collapse-related issues. Few would be interested in checking out something as bland-sounding as “my blog”.
I was already accustomed to the old theme. But I definitely appreciate the change since my internet speed is so crappy. I came across this article about the Chinese wanting to use frozen methane with water as fuel. If this becomes a feasible way of obtaining energy you should consider this in your theories.
Anatoly, a 5-7 C warming puts us in the Pliocene — the Earth of 4-5 million years ago, before the Pleistocene glaciations.
10-12 C puts us in the Oligocene, ~25 mya. That could be pretty bad — during the Oligocene, the Sahara stretched from the Atlantic to China — but it’s still not, by itself, a mass extinction event.
It would need an increase of around 20 C to put us at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The PETM was pretty freaky; the North Shore of Alaska was warm temperate, and tropical rain forest reached as far north as modern New York. The Arctic Sea was warm enough for swimming. Antarctica was ice free except at high altitudes — in fact, the whole Earth was without ice except for a few small patches on very high mountains.
And yet, life — including what passed for humans back then (lemurs, basically) — came through just fine.
Note that at the time of the PETM, 55 mya, the Sun was just about as bright as it is today. (The long-term warming trend is about 1% per 150 my. So, 55 mya gives a difference was of about 0.3%.) So, the PETM probably stands as a proof-of-concept: we could melt the Antarctic ice caps and turn San Francisco into Kinshasa, and that still wouldn’t be enough to trigger Venus-style runaway greenhouse.
Doug M.
Doug, the figures for temperature rises you refer to seem to be way off. The PETM was around 5C warmer than today (the Ice Ages were 5C colder).
The latest forecasts tend to be on the high side of the IPCC’s estimates (e.g. 5C), i.e. will result in PETM-like temperatures by 2100 (given the short timespan, wide adaptation is very unlikely to succeed). Many of these later models also have “fat tails”, extending up to as much as 11C (e.g. The Tale of the Fat Tail by Melinda Kimble and Letha Tawney for an explanation). If reality happens to fall on the far side of those tails, the resulting temperatures will be off the paleoclimate charts and I do not think it can be excluded that the GW process becomes truly runaway.
Not that I’m saying a runaway effect is the likeliest, or even a likely, outcome – just that it is possible if 1) climate sensitivity is higher than indicated by the models, or 2) the Arctic methane releases occur much faster than expected.
– I have to groan a little here. No offense.
That graph is from Boucot and Gray (2001), “A critique of Phanerozoic climatic modes
involving changes in the CO2 content of the atmosphere”. Boucot and Gray were being deliberately contrarian in that article; they thought that estimates of global temperature changes had become much too wild, with some estimates claiming variation of 30 C across the Cenozoic. So they came up with an estimate based on (some) biogeographic data that purported to show much smaller swings.
They intended this as a provocative counterargument, and it worked; the paper has been widely cited. However, its was a deliberate oversimplification that has since been aggressively attacked by, well, pretty much everyone. Even Boucot has backed off from it (don’t know if Gray has).
But ironically, because it supports the “small changes will cook us!” concept, it’s gained wide circulation among global warming alarmists. I say “ironically” because Boucot and Gray were, if not climate change skeptics, certainly among the more conservative interpreters of the data — they thought that increasing CO2 levels, alone, would cause much less change than expected, because various biogeochemical cycles would tend to buffer the effects. I don’t know if they’re aware of how their graph is being used, but if they are, they’re probably ticked.
Here’s a tip: any graph that purports to give global temperatures before the Pleistocene should be read in the context of an accompanying paper. There is still fierce and continuing controversy on a lot of these issues. To oversimplify a complicated topic, you have biogeographic data (which can be reasonably complete, but has problems), isotope ratios, especially oxygen isotopes (can be very complete, but has big problems) and CO2 sampling (useful but rare). Pleistocene temperatures can be inferred a lot more accurately (1) because we have a large database of atmospheric samples, and (2) it’s so recent that biogeographic stuff is much more compelling — landmasses hadn’t moved much, and organisms were identical or very similar to contemporary ones. Go back to the Paleogene, and that’s no longer the case.
An increase of 5 C could not melt the Antarctic ice caps. (Most of the interior of Antarctica never gets above -20 C.) Nor would it give us any of the craziness we saw during the PETM, like alligators on Ellesmere Island and tropical invertebrates north of Newfoundland.
The PETM /started/ with a 5-6 C temperature increase over the pre-existing late Paleocene — which was already a warm ice-free world, with temperate hardwood forests on the coasts of the Arctic.
BTW, my claim of “20 C” was towards the high end (though not without support!). But the consensus would put the global temperature difference at over 10 C — that’s pretty firmly supported by deep sea data — and I don’t think you could find anyone today claiming the PETM was as little as 5 C warmer than today.
Doug M.
Just for the hell of it, here’s a recent paper:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n8/abs/ngeo578.html
– note that they give an increase of 5-9 C above the late Paleocene baseline.
Also, if I’m reading this right, they’re using a carbon cycle model that postdicts a release of about 3000 gigatons of carbon — roughly equivalent to all current fossil fuel reserves. And that’s going into an atmosphere that was already CO2-rich compared to the present.
Paleoclimatology is a very fast-moving science. It barely existed a generation ago. We weren’t even clearly aware of the PETM until the 1990s, and the first paper on the Azolla Event came out around 2004 IMS.
So, view anything more than five years old with some skepticism. If it’s older than ten years, don’t even bother — go and look for something more recent.
– Minor correction on an earlier post: the Sahara excursion happened at the Oligocene-Miocene boundary, not within the Oligocene. Something weird happened at the end of the Oligocene: the Antarctic icecap (which had formed at the end of the Eocene) shrank back almost to nothing, while global climate simultaneously warmed and dried for a while. Then, a few million years later, it went into reverse, sort of — the climate cooled again, and the icecap came back. Things got wetter too, but not as wet as they had been: the huge deserts of the Oligocene-Miocene boundary were replaced by a mix of deserts, savannah and grasslands similar to modern Earth.
Why? An honest paleoclimatologist will tell you: we have no goddamn idea.
Doug M.