1.>> Will you tell us how the biotic pump works?

2.>> Why do you associate the biotic pump with natural forests rather than with individual tree species? Cannot a tree plantation act as biotic pump?

3.>> Have there been any significant changes to your biotic pump theory over the last couple of years?

4.>> Have you seen wider acceptance in the scientific community for your theory?

5.>> Can you give an example of why the current understanding of condensation and precipitation is wrong?

6.>> Recent evidence has linked the decline and fall of the Maya civilization to deforestation leading to less precipitation. How could the biotic pump theory connect to this?

7.>> How do you see deforestation in the Amazon as impacting regional precipitation?

8.>> How do you think widespread deforestation will effect the hydrological cycle of places like the Indonesian islands? Given their smaller size, do they need the biotic pump?

9.>> Does the biotic pump theory apply to boreal forests, such as those in Russia, as well?

10.>> Does biotic pump theory modify our current understanding of global climate change?

11.>> What policy changes does the biotic theory suggest for governments worldwide?

1. Will you tell us how the biotic pump works?

The biotic pump is a mechanism in which natural forests create and control ocean-to-land winds, bringing moisture to all terrestrial life. Winds tend to blow from areas of high air pressure to low. But how is a low pressure system created over land? Air pressure depends on the number of gas molecules. When water vapor condenses, it disappears from the gas phase; the number of gas molecules diminishes, and the air pressure falls. Therefore, if we manage to maintain the process of condensation over land, the latter becomes a persistent low pressure zone.

Water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere possesses a remarkable physical property: it is unstable to condensation. This means if an air volume containing a lot of vapor is occasionally displaced upward, the air will cool so significantly that the vapor condenses. Due to this instability, if there is a sufficient amount of water vapor in the warm lower atmosphere condensation will occur.

The green foliage and branches of trees have a much greater cumulative area than that of a tree projection on the ground. Hence, forest evaporation enriches the atmosphere with water vapor more efficiently than evaporation from an open water surface of the same area. Consequently, condensation occurs more readily over forests than over the ocean. Forests, rather than the ocean, become the low pressure zone where the moist winds converge to. Completing the cycle, moisture precipitates over the land and returns to the ocean in the form of river runoff.

This figure shows the “tug-of-war” between the forest and the ocean for the right to become a predominant condensation zone.
In Fig. a: on average the Amazon and Congo forests win this war: annual precipitation over forests is two to three times larger than the precipitation over the Atlantic Ocean at the same latitude. Note the logarithmic scale on the vertical axis: “1″ means that the land/ocean precipitation ratio is equal to e = 2.718, “2″ means it is equal to e² ≈ 7.4; “0″ means that this ratio is unity (equal precipitation on land and the ocean); “-1″ means this ratio is 1/e ≈ 0.4; and so on.
In Fig. b: the Eurasian biotic pump. In winter the forest sleeps, so the ocean wins, and all moisture remains over the ocean and precipitates there. In summer, when trees are active, moisture is taken from the ocean and distributed regularly over seven thousand kilometers. The forest wins! (compare the red and black lines) As a result, precipitation over the ocean in summer is lower than it is in winter, despite the temperature in summer is higher. Finally, in panel (c): an unforested Australia. One can often hear that Australia is so dry because it is situated in the descending branch of the Hadley cell. But this figure shows that such an interpretation does not hold. Both in wet and dry seasons precipitation over Australia is four to six times lower than over the ocean. There is no biotic pump there. Being unforested, oceanic moisture cannot penetrate to the Australian continent irrespective of how much moisture there is over the ocean; during the wet season it precipitates in the coastal zones causing floods. Gradually restoring natural forests in Australia from coast to interior will recover the hydrological cycle on the continent. Click to enlarge.

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2. Why do you associate the biotic pump with natural forests rather than with individual tree species? Cannot a tree plantation act as biotic pump?

As with all life processes, the biotic pump is a highly-organized complex process. In order to sustain condensation that keeps the air pressure low on land–so that moist winds blow to land from the ocean–there must be intense evaporation from the forest canopy. But evaporation diminishes the amount of moisture in soil. Moisture is additionally lost from soil by gravitational runoff. If all the soil moisture is gone, evaporation stops, and so does the atmospheric moisture transport. This means that a non-trivial balance must be maintained: forest evaporation must be exactly such that it never fully depletes the soil moisture but at the same time is intense enough to ensure that the amount of moisture brought from the ocean by winds compensates moisture losses in the soil.

Native species that form natural forest communities have evolved a complex set of genetically encoded biophysical and morphological traits that make the biotic pump possible. These traits took hundred million of years to evolve. For example, the root system of forest trees facilitates both storage and extraction of moisture from soil; biogenic aerosols produced by trees control the intensity of water vapor condensation over the forest; the large height of trees determines the vertical temperature gradient under the canopy, keeping soil evaporation under biotic control; tall trees are also essential for surface friction that does not allow extremely high wind velocities to develop. Thus, natural forests not only create an ocean-to-land moist air flow, but also stabilize this flow at an optimum level and prevent its extreme fluctuations like hurricanes, tornadoes, severe droughts or floods. Species other than plants (bacteria, fungi, animals) are essential for the stability of the forest ecosystem itself.

Monocultures or plantations consisting of a random set of plant species do not possess the required set of correlated traits. To give two extremely simplified examples: if one plants cacti, they will evaporate too little and will be unable to keep the atmosphere persistently moist. If one plants eucalyptus, they will evaporate readily but will be unable to prevent soil from drying. In either case, the biotic pump will not work. Generally, information fluxes processed by the natural biota exceed by twenty orders of magnitude the information processing capacity of modern civilization. It is not possible to create a technological analogue of the biotic pump.

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3. Have there been any significant changes to your biotic pump theory over the last couple of years?

The physical basis of the biotic pump consists in the statement that winds are driven mostly by condensation-induced pressure gradients rather than by temperature differences (such as warm air rises) as conventionally considered. As we judged from the first reactions to our work, this is the most difficult statement for the meteorological community to accept. Recently we concentrated our efforts on demonstrating the quantitative validity of the proposed mechanism of condensation-induced atmospheric dynamics. We have shown that it quantitatively explains hurricanes and tornadoes, having obtained from theory radial profiles of pressure and velocity that agree well with observations. On the other hand, we criticized some of the existing explanations of the same phenomena arguing that these contain physical errors. A full list of our publications concerning the biotic pump can be found here.

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4. Have you seen wider acceptance in the scientific community for your theory?

Generally, judging from the increasing number of citations of our first biotic pump papers, our work is gradually gaining more attention. The biotic pump theory calls on the meteorological community to admit a possibility that an important atmospheric circulation driver has been overlooked. As long as one continues to ignore the role of condensation in driving winds, one will continue to ignore the real role of forests in the water cycle and climate. Given the deforestation threat, there is no time to lose. So we are undertaking all possible efforts to stimulate a constructive discussion of condensation dynamics by members of the meteorological community.

Still, the progress appears to be slow. In 2010 we submitted an overview of the theory to the journal ACPD, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions that allows for an open discussion of submitted papers:

Makarieva A.M., Gorshkov V.G., Sheil D., Nobre A.D., Li B.-L. (2010) Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, 10, 24015-24052.

For six months the editors could not find reviewers willing to publicly evaluate our work. After we informed the wider scientific community of our situation, a leading NOAA hydrologist circulated our work among many of his colleagues-meteorologists. Only one of them considered the possibility of becoming a referee, and he strongly objected to our work. As we have always welcomed any criticism to be put forward openly regarding our work, we suggested that the editor invite the referee even though we knew in advance that he had a negative view of our work. After the negative review was posted, we replied to all the arguments. Since then the paper was suspended, it has now been in open review for over fifteen months and it’s been twenty months since our submission. As any scientist will tell you, such extraordinary impediments and delays would discourage any researcher; they are disrupting the normal scientific process. But we remain hopeful that our efforts are not in vain.

list of questions

5. Can you give an example of why the current understanding of condensation and precipitation is wrong?

Our work was discussed rather widely on the web, sometimes with direct or indirect participation of leading meteorologists. These discussions revealed that the physics of condensation has not been given sufficient attention by the meteorological community, the result being that even some very basic issues remained unresolved and unclear to many. For example, a question that caused a lot of confusion was: if condensation occurs in the atmosphere and some vapor turns to liquid, will air pressure at the surface be affected near instantaneously or only after the raindrops have fallen to the ground? The latter is a common view caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of hydrostatic equilibrium.

In hydrostatic equilibrium, air pressure at any height is equal to the weight of air in the atmospheric column above that height. Many meteorologists think that hydrostatic air pressure at the surface is equal to the weight of both air and all the liquid and solid bodies including the raindrops that are in the upper atmosphere. Had this been true, condensation in hydrostatic equilibrium could have never changed the surface pressure prior to precipitation fallout, because condensation of gas (vapor) into liquid does not change the total amount of matter. However, ideal gas pressure depends on the number of particles not their mass. The number of liquid drops is many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of gas molecules that have condensed into those drops. Therefore, condensation immediately lowers air pressure and disturbs the hydrostatic equilibrium. Recently a paper devoted to this question was published in a leading meteorological journal where, with use of numerical modeling, this conclusion was articulated. That a paper with such a basic conclusion has appeared only now–in the second decade of the Twenty First Century–demonstrates that the efforts to study the dynamic effects of condensation by the meteorological community are in their incipient stage.

In the meantime, practically all climate and weather phenomena where condensation and precipitation are involved are challenging modern meteorology. For example, the existing global circulation models do not adequately describe the water cycle in the Amazon, with the modeled moisture convergence being half the actual amounts estimated from the observed runoff values. It is widely recognized that despite the ever-improving observation facilities and the available computer power, there is no progress in predicting the intensity of tropical cyclones.

When analyzing how precipitation changes with time (e.g., in the Amazon or Congo regions) it is common to explore correlations with oceanic temperature anomalies. The conventional logic is that as the ocean becomes warmer, the warm air rises over the ocean and moisture precipitates there rather than over land, hence a drought occurs. However, such logic does not take into account that as the land becomes drier, it also warms significantly. It is unexplainable within the conventional paradigm why the warm air does not rise over the hot and dry land. All heat waves and droughts, like the one in European Russia in 2010 or the one in Texas in 2011, are associated with persistent descending air motion.

Neither are flooding events explained by the conventional paradigm. For example, of the two extreme floods that hit Thailand in 2011, the first one occurred early in the year during the dry season. Then the land is cooler, the ocean is warmer and winds blow from land to the ocean, so that the continent remains dry. In early 2011 the region was struck by an unusual cold wave, which caused this temperature gradient to become even more pronounced. According to the conventional paradigm, this should only strengthen dry conditions. In reality, however, a major flooding happened.

Evidence of this type, which is controversial with respect to the conventional paradigm, is mounting and the biotic pump concept gives a consistent physical explanation of how this should be interpreted. Rather than focusing on temperature gradients, which are often a consequence rather than cause of the circulation, one should investigate the conditions when condensation is likely to occur to predict changes in atmospheric circulation.

list of questions

6. Recent evidence has linked the decline and fall of the Maya civilization to deforestation leading to less precipitation. How could the biotic pump theory connect to this?

This data, as well as the data on the Nazca civilization in Peru, are in agreement with the biotic pump concept. It is noteworthy that the Yucatan peninsula is a relatively small region with maximum distance from coast never exceeding a thousand kilometers. This means that even so close to the ocean, massive deforestation can cause a significant precipitation decline.

The proposed explanation (see article: Evidence mounts that Maya did themselves in through deforestation) based on a slight change in albedo after deforestation and a corresponding decrease in solar energy available for convection does not make sense to us (although as we understand this work has not yet been published so we could not read it in detail). The power of atmospheric circulation does not exceed around 1 percent of solar power. It is not limited by solar radiation, but by the flux of potential energy available for conversion to the kinetic energy. The conventional paradigm associates this potential energy with temperature-related buoyancy. That is, to put things simply, if you do not have a temperature difference, you do not have a circulation, all other things (including solar energy) being the same. We propose a different source of potential energy associated with water vapor removal from the gas phase: after the Mayan forests were destroyed, evaporation and condensation ceased to occur over the Yucatan peninsula (irrespective of how its albedo changed). The result was that the low pressure zone was no longer there and moist air ceased to come to the Maya from the ocean. Generally, the biotic pump theory calls us to re-analyze the historical evidence associated with land cover change and the changes in the precipitation regime.

list of questions

7. How do you see deforestation in the Amazon as impacting regional precipitation?

According to recent analyses, during 1973-2003 precipitation in the Amazon River basin was declining at a rate of 0.3 percent annually, which means a trend of about 10 percent for the entire period. This does not include the most recent devastating droughts of 2005 and 2010. In the meantime, deforestation in the basin has amounted to about 30 percent during the same period. Deforestation mostly disturbed southern and south-eastern parts of the basin, where the precipitation/evaporation is less than in the basin core. Assuming that the total biotic pump intensity is a function of the integral of local precipitation over the total forest-covered area, one can conclude that the decrease in precipitation intensity is of the same order of magnitude as the degree of biotic pump deterioration. As deforestation marches to the interior of the basin and affects the ever more productive forests with the most precipitation, the disruption of the water cycle in the basin will increase disproportionately.

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8. How do you think widespread deforestation will effect the hydrological cycle of places like the Indonesian islands? Given their smaller size, do they need the biotic pump?

The total area occupied by the Indonesian archipelago, including space between the islands, is quite significant. Open water space between the forest-covered islands can only slightly weaken the biotic pump of the Indonesian forests that likely determine the precipitation regime in the adjacent oceanic regions. Indeed, there is a relatively stable low pressure zone over Indonesia that causes the so-called Walker circulation: surface air moves from the high pressure region of the eastern Pacific ocean towards the low pressure zone over Indonesia. When this low pressure zone diminishes or erodes, the Walker circulation weakens and an El Niño results. When the Walker circulation is strong, we have a La Niña. These phenomena are well-known for their long-range impacts on the climate of the Americas.

The biotic pump theory helps us understand why there is a low pressure system in Indonesia (because of intense condensation associated with forest functioning). Thus deforestation in the region should lead to a weakening of the Walker circulation. While this pattern needs to be further explored, it is worth mentioning that while the period from 1950 to 1975 was largely dominated by La Niña’s (strong Walker circulation), starting from the late 70s the frequency of La Niñas dropped. This is in agreement with the idea that Indonesian deforestation over the last 30 years could have modified the large-scale airflow.

list of questions

9. Does the biotic pump theory apply to boreal forests, such as those in Russia, as well?

Biotic pump of the boreal forest zone is fully responsible for atmospheric moisture transport from the (Atlantic) ocean over several thousand kilometers. Recent deforestation in European Russia is apparently disrupting this mechanism causing abnormal warming and droughts.

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10. Does biotic pump theory modify our current understanding of global climate change?

The widespread view is that global climate change is largely due to anthropogenic pollution of the global environment. The main anthropogenic pollutant is carbon dioxide, which is emitted by burning fossil fuels. CO₂ is the second most important greenhouse substance in the atmosphere of Earth, therefore its accumulation in the atmosphere is believed to be the main cause of the observed warming and other climatic changes. The main proposed strategy to combat climate change is by reducing carbon emissions.

However, the greenhouse effect on Earth is mostly determined by water vapor and clouds, i.e., by atmospheric moisture, which is the main greenhouse substance. The absorption interval of CO₂ molecules covers less than 20 percent of the spectrum of thermal radiation of the Earth’s surface, while atmospheric moisture absorbs thermal radiation rather uniformly over the entire spectrum. Therefore, the impact of increasing CO₂ concentrations on the greenhouse effect can be completely compensated by a relatively minor change in the hydrological cycle over land. Such climate stabilization can be performed by natural forests that control the hydrological cycle on land and the adjacent ocean, provided they are allowed to occupy a significant area. Conversely, destruction of forests leads to disruption of the hydrological cycle, which expectedly causes significant fluctuations of the magnitude of the global greenhouse effect, up to complete loss of climate stability and transition of Earth’s climate to a state incompatible with life.

Most modern climate researchers have grown up on computer models of climate and are used to believing in the model output. As illustrated by the discussion of our work, it is rarely appreciated that by artificially setting the needed numerical parameters it is possible to simulate a very broad range of climate scenarios, including those that will agree with observations of the past. The existence of simulations that mimic the past and present reality does not mean that the physics included in the models is correct or that the model can generate a trustable prediction.

What is more, modern climate modeling has been traditionally implemented by people with a technological background and little knowledge of ecosystem functioning. Such knowledge is generally poor, too. Thus, the ecological systems are “fed” into the models as a set of geophysical parameters, e.g., albedo, evaporation rate, surface roughness, amount of stored carbon etc. While the numeric values of these parameters are borrowed from reality, they do not represent the ecosystem functioning in very much the same manner as a colored high-resolution digital photo of a dead corpse does not represent a live human being. Without studying the principles of highly-organized functioning of ecological communities, including their genetically encoded ability to respond to environmental perturbations in a non-random compensatory way, the perspectives drawn from global circulation models with respect to the climatic effects of land cover change (e.g., statements like cutting all boreal forests will ease global warming) will continue to lack any resemblance to reality.

Quantitative analysis of ecological and biological variables is a very complicated task due to the complexity of living objects. Consider a flying canon and a flying bird that are both under gravity. A quantitative description of the former is straightforward, while to predict where and how the bird will fly from initial conditions is not feasible. This complexity of living systems and the number of surprises it implies for global environmental research has only recently begun to be gradually appreciated across a number of disciplines, from organismal energetics to soil biochemistry and climatology.

The biotic pump concept (and more generally the theory of the biotic regulation of the environment of which the former is a part) for the first time quantifies the stabilizing environmental function of natural ecosystems with respect to the hydrological cycle and pinpoints the physical mechanism that is responsible for this function. We must elevate the status of ecosystem conservation from a side issue in global environmental talks and treaties (that are exclusively focused on carbon) to an urgent high priority issue. We must also implement targeted research programs to study the stabilizing impact of natural ecosystems, to stimulate public discussion, and to raise people’s awareness of the real value of forests.

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11. What policy changes does the biotic theory suggest for governments worldwide?

1. The biotic pump theory shows that natural forests are indispensable if we want to have rainfall, and, consequently, agriculture on the land where we live. This scientific message has important economic implications. First of all, people and governments worldwide should realize that economic growth cannot occur at the expense of cutting forests either in one’s own country or elsewhere. It is undermining the very pillars of our civilization’s existence. When water and food security are at stake, it is not possible for forest industries to focus on growth, just to increase the global production of wrapping and toilet paper. This should be the main topic of environmental campaigns.

There are important branches of human activities where economic growth is not possible: that is, for example, fisheries. Consumption of natural fish products is limited by the rate of their recovery in nature, which is achieved by the mechanism of international quotas. Lack of such regulations could result in transient economic growth, but would ultimately lead to collapse of the entire industry when the fish base is depleted. For a different reason, economic growth is equally not possible based on criminal activities like selling drugs or human organs. Were such activities encouraged, as are other economic activities, this could lead to transient “economic growth” but then to the physical collapse of the population. Where this is understood, people are taking measures against such activities.

The case with the forestry industry is less akin to fishery but more akin to drug and human organ selling. Humanity needs a large territory of natural, intact, undisturbed forests to run the hydrological cycle on land. This strict environmental criterion is incompatible with the criterion of “sustainability” applied in modern forestry, when trees are in the best case cut at the rate at which they regrow and when the majority of trees are cut when they are 50 years of age. Conceptually, this could be compared to growing human beings for organs and killing them when they are, say, fifteen years of age. Such an “economic activity” could be “sustainable” and “profitable” for some, but one cannot expect civilization based on such “economics” to be stable and give birth to Shakespeares, Mozarts, Einsteins etc. Human beings grown for organs cannot live a normal human life, they cannot work creatively or develop. Likewise, trees grown for timber cannot perform their environmental function and stabilize the climate: only a natural ecosystem with a full suite of all the necessary biological species can do this.

In other words, society must urgently take the course of gradually shrinking the forestry industry. Destruction of natural forest ecosystems is a crime against humanity and will be increasingly perceived as such as new knowledge accumulates, environmental literacy increases, and ethical standards change accordingly. Such radical changes have happened in human history: slavery, once perceived as economically prudent and otherwise “normal,” was abolished.

We must emphasize that the responsibility for the current situation, where natural forests are being destroyed, rests on all the people of Earth rather than with the forestry industry alone. We are all consumers of timber products. Because many livelihoods depend directly on forest exploitation today, large-scale programs are needed to gradually change the professional occupation of these people, to slow down the forestry industry and ultimately radically minimize their economic scope. In the meantime, government grants should support research aimed at finding new ways of wrapping things without paper or any other tree-derived product.

2. Governments should remember that natural forest recovery takes many decades and even hundreds of years, before the biotic pump acquires its full power. It is much easier to protect forests than to re-grow them. For example, tree planting in China has nothing to do with forest restoration; it is doomed to fail. To completely restore a degraded ecological communities is as difficult as cloning a mammoth in an elephant egg cell. Ecosystem medicine and health care have not yet developed as a science. In the meantime, we should urgently conserve all that we have now.

3. Efforts should be coordinated to protect both boreal and tropical forests. In countries with strong democracy society is more efficient at achieving nature conservation goals. It becomes possible for society to mitigate the negative environmental impact of even large-scale development projects aimed at resource extraction from yet widening areas. For example, in Canada the implementation of Plan Nord aimed at a massive intensification of resource extraction in Quebec was forced by people to include conservation of 50 percent of the affected territory, including a vast area with boreal forests, in an undisturbed state. This positive experience should be studied and shared among nations.

4. In an overpopulated world forests and the environment cannot be saved. Family planning is the main strategic tool to conserve forests and restore environmental sustainability.

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The article by Will Euglund is fairly objective and highlights some major problems in Russian Science. The discussion that followed with over a hundred comments is perhaps even more entertaining. E.g., reader smithj2 bitterly complained:

Mr. Euglund understates the problem. The Ministry of Education and Science and leading research universities and institutes are also a major source of the problem. So few senior scientists in Russia conduct proper science that it is not just the 1990 to 2010 generation that is lost but also those educated in the 1970s and 1980s who no longer produce crediable scientific work. Corruption is widespread and deeply embedded. The concept of peer review is nonexistant. Having worked both in the US from 1994 to 2004 and now in Russia at top research university from 2004 to the present I can tell you from an insiders perspective that in general Russian science is lost to a sea of corruption and backroom deals.

The fact that Russian scientists do not publish in English and can not work in English is the source of the problem. They remain isolated from the general trends in scientific work.

It is interesting to compare this insider’s view with the following two comments made by readers in response to Mr. Euglund’s question

As the writer of this article, I’d like to ask — do scientists in the U.S. (and other countries) feel they have more control over their professional lives than Russian scientists do? And if so, how can Russia head in that direction?

Reader woodyag observed

I work as an “independent scholar” in the US; I’ve also worked in China, years ago. As an outsider when I visit and speak at universities, the insiders see me as a shoulder to cry on- and cry they do. I have horror stories from the top US institutions to match anything you have from Russia; though the twists tend to be different.

The biggest problem (my opinion) in the west is scientific “inflation”. How do we get so many papers published? By far the easiest way is – publish crap, lots of it. It has become a corrupt process; “you peer-review my crap, and I’ll peer review yours“. This goes on constantly, and has now reached the point where those publishing even at the highest levels don’t even KNOW it’s crap.

A specific case in point: this article in the Proceedings of the National Academy recently got headlines in science sections from the NYT to the BBC:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/12/08/1118669109

My fellow evolutionary scientists simply read that with jaws dropped. …

martini137 added another angle:

Will, I have been a scientist in the USA most of my adult life. I am now retired. I have much contact with Russian and other Eastern Bloc scientists. They can publish non-plate tectonic geophysics, non-big bang cosmology, non-general relativity gravity, non-quantum chromodynamic particle theory, and non-Darwin evolution. Try that in this country and see what happens to your career. All of my major papers were published abroad. We have more to learn from Russian scientists than they have to learn from us.

To synthesize:

(1) peer-review is non-existent in Russia; Russian scientists do not publish in international journals and remain isolated from general research trends (smithj2);
(2) western scientists publish a lot because “you peer-review my crap, and I peer-review yours” (woodyag);
(3) Russian scientists can publish what they wish not looking at the “conventional wisdom” (martini137);

While of course none of these statements is 100% true, and the percentage of their correspondence to reality is different between the three of them, the comments are meaningful. On the one hand, when you are certain that you are going in the right direction, it is good to have an efficient peer-review system. It helps quickly isolate the crackpots that would otherwise pollute the information space and interfere with the scientific march to progress.

On the other hand, when you do not actually know where to go (or worse yet, when you increasingly suspect that you may be driving in a totally unreasonable direction as is the case, for example, with the numerical global climate modeling), the same peer-review system and the same strategy “publish much, publish well” become at best counter-productive and at worst suicidal. Science is a social enterprise. Scientific research can go in any direction, including those with zero or negative outcome, fostered by competition and prestige ranking in a group of professionals. The stricter those social rules are, the more inert the scientific community becomes. The more inert the community, the larger the cost of mistakes any community inevitably commits in choosing the direction of research.

Changing a research direction is perhaps the most painful activity that a scientist can be involved in. It entails a long period when one does not produce anything but is evaluating multiple directions, setting the intellectual stage of future work within himself, making the first shy steps forward and backward again. In the meantime, his fellows continue to “publish much, publish well”. Social rating of the potential innovator slides down enhancing nervous tension that steals from productivity. Worse, when the researcher ultimately comes forward with a first paper, chances that he receives encouragement from his fellows that are all streaming in an opposite direction, are minimal. He will be unable to publish at all. As a researcher commented, his papers would

suggest that all the other investigators working in this field have been “missing the boat” for many years. Quite frankly, it is a bit insulting, and that has probably contributed to some of the resistance you’ve met.

So, were it true what smithj2, woodyag and martinil37 say about Russia versus the west, our scientists should be producing lots of crap (whatever the latter is defined). At the same time, one should not be surprised at conceptual breakthroughs coming from our country rather then from elsewhere. This especially pertains to theoretical research, where the expensive dependence on equipment (an Achilles heal of modern Russian science) is minimal. When one’s salary (whatever high or low) is largely decoupled from how much and where one publishes, one can afford more time to actually doing science.

Let us now look at this excerpt discussing the causes of floods in Thailand:

Other than looking at precipitation, one way to determine the difference between the wet and dry season is to look at air and water temperatures relative to each other. The dry season is characterized by cooler temperatures over the land, and warmer temperatures over the ocean. GLOBE schools in this region could verify this by examining both the Max/Min/Current Air Temperature protocol as well as finding a data source that provides sea surface temperatures from ships or buoys. Because of these temperature differences, a gradient forms, and the winds will blow from the Northeast, bringing cooler air in from China.

In other words, one thinks it is dry because winds do not come from the warm ocean to the cold land. In the meantime,

In early 2011, an unusual cold wave hit the region, and temperatures were below average for a few days. This caused the normal temperature gradient seen in the dry season to be even more pronounced. While this doesn’t sound like something that would cause major flooding, more convection formed due to the different amounts of heating and caused this devastating flooding.

In other words, it became even colder over land, but now it suddenly rained heavily.

Food for thought.

See also “Why the heat?” for an opposite case, when the land became abnormally hot, but not a single raindrop fell down (the 2010 heat wave in Russia).

Contents:
1. Labor of animals and man: the surplus difference
2. Millionaires, billionaires and the human population size
3. Why is concentration of surpluses encouraged/tolerated?
4. Property over raw resources: An economic black hole
5. Crisis in the developed world: how oil corroded the U.S. from inside
6. Closing remarks: a biotic regulation outlook

1. Labor of animals and man: the surplus difference

:: next section ::

Man is capable of doing some work to sustain himself. All animals can do the same. They provide themselves with food, compete with each other within their population, build homes and care for the young and so on. Observations reveal several peculiarities of animal labor. First, many animals spend working but a minor part of their time and energy budget. For hours, seals can be seen dozing on a rock, the sandpiper waiting motionless for the tide to come, a family of beluga whales enjoying peaceful communication in shallow waters under the sun… Indeed, the low rate of the baseline energy expenditures as compared to the maximum power output makes it possible for the organism to survive in critical conditions.

Second, all genetically similar individuals in animal populations perform similar work. They do not create surpluses that could be used by other (non-working) individuals of the same species. There are no individuals in animal populations that would be doing considerably larger amounts of work than their mates. There is no intraspecific parasitism in any animal populations.

The efficiency of human labor depends on technology. Modern technologies spread quite rapidly throughout the world, such that it is plausible to count, in the first approximation, that the technological component is roughly similar for all modern human workers. Similar to animals, there are no human individuals who would be able to perform exceedingly larger amounts of work than the human workers on average do. Whatever people do, they do it using the metabolic power of their body that constitutes on average about 10² Watt for an adult human. (Genius is a laborer who has performed some work at an ordinary power, but the product of his work turned out to be useful to all people of all generations.) Considering the universality of this biological basis of human labor, the pay for work should be similarly universal and independent of the type of labor. The global mean salary in the modern civilization can be estimated as the global gross domestic product divided by the total size of the global working population. This yields around seven U.S. dollars per hour, or 20 thousand dollars per year, or about 1 million dollars for half a century’s labor. Thus, for a lifetime work an average Earth citizen receives one million dollars.

The key difference between human and animal labor lies in the fact that human workers produce excessive amounts of goods, services etc. that they do not themselves consume — “the surplus” — at a rate of about 10% of the average production rate. This explains why, despite the universal biological working power of humans, the income of some individuals can be several million dollars per year (i.e., about hundred million dollars per lifetime or a hundred times the average income), while the most successful businessmen can accumulate over a hundred billion dollars. This occurs due to concentration in the same hands of the monetary value of surpluses produced by many working people.

2. Millionaires, billionaires and the human population size

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In primitive societies, social groups did not exceed several hundred people (as is still the case in the primordial societies of the Papua and the Amazon), while the production surpluses were in the order of one percent. Therefore, in every social group, the number of non-working adults could not be higher than a few.

With the advent of technology the surplus production rate raised to the modern level of about ten per cent. This means that every society is able to maintain one tenth of its adult population in a vacant state: such that the vacant people do not perform any necessary or meaningful work but consume as much of the civilization products and services as the working members on average do. To refer to such groups of people the mass media sometimes use terms akin to “lazybones” or “parasites” (e.g., “non-market parasites on a market world”). We however believe that the term “vacant population” is more correct. A vacant existence can be enforced onto an originally quite industrious population, see section 5 below, while the status of a parasite or lazybone to a certain degree implies one’s free choice to behave in that manner. Moreover, a vacant population may one day start working efficiently again. Parasites will hardly ever do.

Alternatively, at a 10% surplus rate, the society can support one thousandth (1/1000) of its adult population as millionaires, i.e. people having a hundred times higher income rate than the average working citizen. People with a ten thousand times higher than average income (billionaires) can be supported if only they constitute no more than one millionth of the adult population. These simple calculations show that neither millionaires nor billionaires can exist in small societies. Thus, by construction, these groups of people are economically interested in an unlimited growth of the global population. Likewise by construction, the reference group of a billionaire may lack a geographic or national identity in which situation the notion of “motherland” and the related behavioral norms are prone to erosion.

From the viewpoint of their energy budget, it makes no difference for a large population that exceeds a million people whether it supports one billionaire, a thousand millionaires or a hundred thousand of vacant people. As all other people, the millionaires and billionaires strive to raise their prestige within their, respectively, national and international reference groups. The millionaires signal about their high rank by demonstrating a maximally luxurious life style which effectively consumes most part of their income. The billionaires cannot do the same, because it is impossible to make a life style another thousand times more luxurious than the maximum. Billion-sized fortunes arise when the corresponding production cycle (e.g., production of automobiles, personal computers, mobile phones) has been saturated (corresponding goods consumed by the majority of the global population), such that further growth is not possible. Therefore, the only route to channel the billionaires’ income into is the sponsorship of some non-productive (non-economic) activities of millionaires (sportsmen, artists etc.) and the vacant population. Again by construction, these activities can take any form, either good or evil, as they are dictated by the billionaires’ wish and the ideals of their reference group. World war, modern terrorism, continent-scale health programs are but a few examples.

The well-known process of inflation, when the nominal price of all the products grow with time, is a unambiguous and unavoidable consequence of the existence of surpluses and vacant population.The produced surpluses are transferred to billionaires, who, in turn, freely distribute them among the millionaires and the vacant population. As a result, the buying capacity of people actually participating in the production process (the workers) is diminished — for their salary, they can now buy only a fraction (minus the share given away to the non-working population) part of the products they manufactured. That is, the money that correspond to 100% produced goods and are paid as wages to the workers are used to buy, say, 90% of the produced goods (minus ten per cent freely distributed among the non-workers). (Note that formally the vacant population is paid wages for some non-productive labor; they then use this money to buy real goods and services from the working population thus returning the money back to them. In the result, the workers remain with 100% money for which they can only buy, say, 90% of the produced goods and services.)

It is important to discuss on the biological significance of the two inherent human properties mentioned above. The first one is the desire to increase one’s rank and prestige in one’s reference group. This property is a consequence of the ultra-complex nature of life organization and is, in one form or another, common to absolutely all biological species. The complexity of life organization that is unprecedented in the inanimate nature is characterized by an ultra-high rate of decay (chaotization). The living matter has a unique way of preventing disorder accumulation that have no precedents in the inanimate world. It consists in the formation of populations of genetically similar individuals of the same species and switching on competitive interaction among them. In the course of competitive interaction that takes a huge variety of forms in the living world individuals with eroded genetic program are identified and forced out from the population in one way or another. Therefore, it is the basic property of all living objects to try to show a high competitive capacity, i.e. achieve a high social rank and prestige in the social group they belong to. (It is clear that unlike during the natural competition the high social rank acquired on the economical basis of surplus concentration does not guarantee that all the important properties of human genetic program are in order.)

The second property of human beings, the desire to do something all the time rather than simply rest as animals do, is an exclusive peculiarity of our species. It appears to be connected to our poor adaptation to those environments where our species originated, a kind of an evolutionary error. Most of such errors were eliminated from the biosphere in the course of evolution. Homo sapiens has apparently compensated his poor adaptation by an increased working capacity, which resulted in a chronic overheating and the loss of body hair that is present in the overwhelming majority of other mammalian species. A further evolutionary compensation was provided by human brain development that enabled people to participate in an infinite diversity of productive activities.

We conclude that the existence of wealth and poverty in the modern society is based on the genetic program of Homo sapiens. People wish to work (they simply cannot live where there is “nothing to do”); they also wish to continuously increase their rank in the social hierarchy. These two properties lead to surplus production and the inherent non-stationarity of the civilization and modern economy that are manifested as population growth, economic growth (exponential GDP increase) and the destruction of habitable environment. Stationarity in modern economics is understood as the end to successful entrepreneurship, crash of the bank system and disappearance of the opportunity for every citizen to make a fortune and become rich. Stationarity is labeled with a negatively connotated term — “stagnation”; governments strive to prevent it by any possible means.

3. Why is concentration of surpluses encouraged/tolerated?

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The concept of free market in the modern society presumes that a private economic initiative of successful citizens can ultimately endow the latter with million- and billion-sized fortunes. Any person is free to organize some productive economic activity. If the product turns out to be attractive to many consumers, then, until the demand is saturated, the entrepreneur is free to set any price of his choice for the new product — a price that can be much higher than the production cost. This freedom to choose a price is legally formalized as the property right of the entrepreneur over the products he manufactures and the facilities he uses to manufacture it. In the time window from the onset of production and to the moment when all potential consumers have been saturated with the new product, the entrepreneur is able to accumulate a huge fortune. World-known fortunes were born at the dawn of automobile industry, with the advent of personal computers, mobile phones, the Internet. On a smaller scale, the same process happens any time one sells a bestseller, a new movie or a popular song. As soon as the demand is saturated, the inevitable competition among independent manufacturers drives the market price of the new product down towards the production cost. A further increase of the fortune associated with the new product is no longer possible.

It is not possible to know in advance, let alone to plan, which new economic enterprises could yield attractive products. Besides being unfeasible, any regulatory attempts of such kind strongly discourage the private economic initiative. Striving for a higher rank in his reference group, a successful entrepreneur will inevitably try to grow rich. As we know from history, all large-scale efforts aimed at economic equality of all individuals in a population resulted in a slow-down or even complete disintegration of the production processes.

On the other hand, the time period from the onset of production of a new successful product to the moment when the demand has been saturated is typically quite short. The number of businessmen who manage to accumulate exceedingly large fortunes on new products is rather low. Moreover, the technological successful entrepreneurship as we have known it for a long time may be currently eyeing its end. Compared to the preceding half a century, the last fifty years did not see any conceptual breakthroughs in the auto-, avia-, space or nuclear technologies. First, the now near instantaneous spread (“leak”) of new technologies deprives their discoverers of much of the financial profit and prestige that has been traditionally associated with innovations. This naturally discourages people, such that the innovative efforts become weaker. Second, lasers, personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones and the nano-scale biotechnologies are all physically based on electromagnetism — the only long-range action besides gravity. They may well represent the last great non-dangerous technological achievements of modern civilization.

In summary, concentration of production surpluses in the hands of successful manufacturers has never constituted a noticeable burden on the population. Nor had it ever threatened the civilization as a whole.

4. Property over raw resources: An economic black hole

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A principally different set of problems surrounds the use of raw resources (energy and materials) that are indispensable for any productive economic activity in the modern world. Formally, the property rights over land areas where the resources are located and the resources themselves are recognized and protected by the law in very much the same manner as the property rights over the manufacturing facilities (plants, factories) and the land areas occupied by them. Means of production (arable lands, plants, factories, printing houses etc.) have a market price if only the product that they yield is economically competitive. Nobody is interested in owning land in desert, where nothing can be grown and where there is no infrastructure that is necessary to organize a technological process. However, if there are deposits of important mineral resources or fossil fuel in that desert, then the market price of land will be determined by the market price of those resources, irrespective of how low the production costs (e.g., mining) could be. The owner of land where such low cost natural resources are located is able to sell those resources at a market price that may greatly exceed the cost of production.

The amount of low cost sources of agricultural production (food), raw materials and energy on Earth is limited together with the number of their owners. As long as the low cost sources are sufficient to meet the demand of the global population the development of the more expensive and laborious sources remains unprofitable. Consumption of life essentials — food, raw materials and energy — is always saturated in the same manner as is oxygen consumption by a breathing organism. However, none of the existing sources of food, energy or materials happens to be large enough to saturate the global demand on its own (unlike the Microsoft, for example). Thus, no owner of a low cost resource is able to force the competitors out from the market by reducing the price of his product. There is no sense in lowering the price when you cannot elevate your production in any case. Market competition among the owners of low cost resources is not possible. When united, such owners gain an absolute monopoly over the global market; they can set an arbitrarily high price for the resources they sell and this price will never go down.

Such a speculative monopolistic deficit-based price is determined by the resilience limit of the global economy, i.e. it will be as high as the civilization will be still able to pay at the verge of a collapse and much higher than the production cost. This situation is realized today with respect to oil, natural gas and some types of agricultural production. With oil price kept in the vicinity of the resilience limit, the global economy cannot be stable and the crises must occur one after another. When the price over an essential resource like oil is elevated beyond the limit the economy crashes. Plants and factories have to be closed and the economic growth is slowed down. Then, as the demand for oil and gas diminishes, their price goes down as well. (A collapsed economy cannot pay much.)

The painful process of economic recovery culminates in new highs for energy prices, which pushes the economy back to a new collapse. The global economic crisis that burst out in 2008 and is still there is a vivid illustration of all the above.

5. Crisis in the developed world: how oil corroded the U.S. from inside

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Let us now fill the same arguments with a more specific content using the U.S. economy as an example. Until the 1950s the United States — world’s champion in energy consumption and a global leader in energy production — had been self-sustainable in terms of energy. The needs of the growing American economy were met by domestic energy sources. Likewise across the globe the growth of energy consumption was more than compensated by the continuous process of discovering new deposits of fossil fuels here and there. There was no energy deficit. Competition among the oil owners under conditions of an ever-growing low cost resource base kept the oil price at a relatively low level. It had remained in the vicinity of the production cost for near a century after a short peak in the very beginning of entering the market — a feature common to all new market products, Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. U.S. Crude Oil First Purchase Price (OP) history over the last century and a half. Data of Energy Information Administration
downloaded 19 November 2011. Text version of the data is here.

In the end of the 1950s the U.S.A. lost their energy independence and began to import energy (mostly oil), Fig. 2. (From 1970 to 1973 the share of import in total energy consumption tripled, hit the ten per cent mark and approached 20%.) Upon seeing such developments, the oil owners worldwide united very quickly. In a short time prices for oil and natural gas rose manifold having greatly exceeded the production cost. The huge difference between the market price and production cost began to flow into the hands of oil owners, then to vacant populations both outside and, predominantly, inside the U.S.A. Domestic oil owners continued to supply most part of energy, such that it was namely within the American economy that the rise of oil prices was felt most painfully. The proportion of vacant population in the US society began to grow. Real economy of the country was not able to cope with this unexpected, unanalyzed and rapidly growing burden. The government was forced to borrow money both outside and, primarily, inside the country, ultimately from the oil owners with whom the money were rapidly concentrated taken from the productive working population. Public debt started rapidly climbing up ever since, Fig. 2. Similar processes occurred in the meantime in Western Europe and the developed world as a whole.

Fig. 2. Energy dependence, oil price and public debt in the U.S. over the last sixty years. Data of Energy Information Administration (imported energy = consumption minus production), oil price as in Fig.~1) downloaded 19 November 2011. Public debt data come from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com. Numerical data can be found here and here.

A conspicuous pause in the oil price growth occurred in 1990s, Fig. 2. It was caused by the collapse of Soviet Union. Then the industrial production in Russia was near totally disintegrated and virtually ceased to exist. A significant part of the population became vacant. During this time of low state control Russian oil was poured into the international energy market at a low price with practically no revenue for the country. This drove the people to poverty as they no longer had where to work due to economic disintegration. Later towards the 2000s the state took all the resources back under its control and began to feed the now non-working population with oil dollars. This resulted in an explosive rise of oil price, Fig. 2. The status of Russia as an oil owner country with predominantly vacant population was solidified.

The increasing social chaos and tension that are gradually spreading over the developed world are largely due to the widespread lack of understanding of what is going on. Western mentality is experiencing difficulties in drawing a clear distinction between fortunes made in a productive way (e.g., due to innovations) and those made in a non-productive way (speculation-monopoly-deficit-based). In quite a remarkable opinion mess, some people in the Western society now call to “celebrate the rich” as if all the rich were the drivers of economic prosperity and not noticing that quite a few of them are responsible
for the appearance of lazybones (vacant population). Others, on the contrary, call to raise the tax for all the rich, similarly with no distinction, not noticing that they can indeed be targeting the pillars of real economy — the most active part of the working population. (The workers, on the other hand, do not quite understand where all these lazybones suddenly come from who are not used to work at all.) The traditional acutely polarized consideration of any regulation measures as strongly opposed to market freedom (see the previous section) stands in the way of a meaningful discussion as to how the suffocating energy monopolies could be efficiently fought with to the benefit of the market.

The economically intolerable price of oil and any other essential resources will inevitably push the country-importer towards trying to redistribute the resources by means of a military conflict with the current owners. However, as long as the new (post-war) national owners continue to sell oil at the same high price, the burden on the developed world economy cannot lessen. (For precisely this reason, for example, oil prices did not drop when the U.S. oil owners took Iraq’s oil wells under control. It should be emphasized that that oil corroded America from inside rather than from outside.)

To solve this problem is only possible via a series of international treaties that would set a ceiling to the oil price and ultimately abolish the property right over oil and other life essential resources on a global scale. There should not be property over oil as there is no property over air that all people breathe. Abolishment of the property right over essential resources like oil would lead to an economic boom comparable to what happened in America upon the abolishment of slavery (the property right over human bodies).

6. Closing remarks: A biotic regulation outlook

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At a first glance one could think that the existence of a 10% vacant population burden on the global economy is a good thing for the ecosystems and our still habitable environment that they maintain. Indeed, this burden apparently slows down the whole of global economy, including those branches of it that are directly responsible for the destruction of the biosphere. With oil sold at a reasonable price and petrol costing several times less than it does today one can imagine how much faster the unique Siberian forests would have been turned into wrapping or toilet paper or other single-use stuff. But the reality is not as straightforward. The recent economic crisis that drove gold prices up accelerated the gold rush in South America in Peru, where rainforests are eradicated for gold mining with an unprecedented pace. The economic instability creates a chaos where measures towards nature protection cannot be taken.

In the animal world in natural ecosystems the number of individuals in stable social structures is strictly limited by a few hundred at most. Larger social groups form for a short important period of the life cycle (migrations, locust invasions etc.) This ensures animal species against the intraspecific parasitism (when some individuals would occasionally use the randomly occurring production surpluses to raise their rank) and provides for stability of the biota and its environment. Population density in animals is confined by the resilience limit of the food production base, i.e., the ecosystem stability. Stable population density of animals is an indispensable condition for the habitable environment to remain stable. Should the humanity obey the universal natural laws or the non-stationarity of our population and the inevitable destruction of the biosphere together with the civilization collapse cannot be prevented?

Unlike animals, humans are able to analyze any problems from the scientific viewpoint. Only a wide and detailed analysis of these issues can result in elaboration of a global strategy of human behavior when the democratic choice of the majority of people could lead our civilization away from the crisis.

Makarieva A.M., Gorshkov V.G., Li B.-L. (2010) Comprehending ecological and economic sustainability: Comparative analysis of stability principles in the biosphere and free market economy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1195, E1-E18. Abstract. PDF (1.1 Mb). doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05400.x, first published as PNPI Preprint No. 2763.

More links:
The economic part of the above paper in HTML
In simple words
Another aspect (Oil and economic slavery in the 21st century)

See context here.

On pp.~C14691-C14692 of the review several suggestions are provided on how we could write a paper that would be easier to read (and review). This advice joins the many constructive recommendations that we have received while trying to communicate our ideas and findings to the meteorological community. While convinced that the text they comment upon should be rejected, some have been kind enough to suggest ingredients required for success somewhere in the future. Some believe that we should present simple thought experiments and focus on basic physical concepts. Others, including Dr.~Held, expect that our message could rather be clarified with use of explicit simulation models. Some critics discourage our use of the continuity equation as a source of information on pressure gradients. One private comment was that we might highlight our ideas as a comment on an existing related paper in the literature. Others, on the other hand, suggested that if the authors have a theory of their own they should present that rather than a critique of other people’s work.

We have appreciated all these comments and can claim some progress and efforts with almost every suggestion: we worked on a unified theory of hurricanes and tornadoes, criticized others, clarified the broader environmental implications of our findings (here is a list of our publications on the topic). However, all these recent developments occurred either in physics, environmental or ecological journals. Our success with the meteorological literature is very limited. Why is that? We have some ideas that we offer here as we hope to clarify some challenges arising in the review process.

The common practice in the meteorological literature is that the authors have to satisfy the expectations of all referees. Indeed, one editor of a high-profile journal explicitly admitted that papers are published if only all referees are in agreement. But when the authors’ findings are unexpected and, using Dr.~Held’s words, extraordinary, it is not straightforward to decide how such findings could be shaped, if at all, to meet the publicability standards. There are not many grounds either to expect that an account of paradigm-challenging findings would constitute an easy reading. In such a case the reviewers’ recommendations while expectedly diverse are likely to agree at one point: the authors should present something different to what they are presenting. The practical outcome of this process is that publication of such findings becomes impossible. In his review Dr.~Held provides evidence of this. He explains (p.~C14688) that a study that goes against the standard perspective or aims to overturn the conventional wisdom has to pass a high bar.

There has been much critical discussion in the blogosphere and further on the ACPD web site of our Equation 34 for condensation rate that is key to the presented derivation. At various times and places, including Section 4.2 of our paper, it was pointed out that if one formulates in terms of water vapor mixing ratio one obtains . If one instead uses the relative partial pressure of water vapor, , a horizontal pressure gradient is obtained that appears to be so significant as to substantiate the claim for a dominant role in the whole planetary dynamics. (Here , , , , , are molar density and pressure of water vapor, dry air and air as a whole, respectively.)

A typical value of water vapor partial pressure in the lower atmosphere is around 1-3 per cent. This means that the mixing ratio and relative partial pressure and differ very insignificantly. Reckoning up the preceding criticisms, our second referee Dr. Isaac Held referred to this difference as to “a detail”. It is the purpose of this note to show that the dichotomy is precisely the devilish detail that, as it increasingly appears, is responsible for the fact that the condensation-induced dynamics has not received the attention it deserves.

Consider the stationary continuity (mass conservation) equations written for dry air and water vapor (Eqs. 32 and 33 in M10): ,      .      These equations only tell us that the dry air mass is conserved, while the vapor mass may be conserved or it may be not: there can be a local source or sink of vapor . Irrespective of the existence/nature/magnitude of the vapor sink/source , the above equations can be combined with use of elementary algebra such that their left-hand parts take various forms. In his review Dr. Held chose , which is equivalent to

.    [1]

In the two-dimensional circulation considered in M10 the velocity vector is the sum of the horizontal and vertical components, . We also consider a horizontally uniform surface temperature, which dictates a constant saturated pressure of water vapor, such that .     [2] (If water vapor is not saturated, this assumption corresponds to a horizontally uniform surface temperature and constant relative humidity.) Combining [1] and [2] we obtain

,     where .    [3]

Equation [3] has two important implications for any given horizontal velocity . First, it shows that when , the horizontal density gradient . Second, it shows that if and differ by a small relative magnitude of the order of , this magnitude is multiplied by a large relative magnitude to determine the horizontal density gradient .

We should emphasize that the two above conclusions are unrelated to any ideas about what the condensation rate could look like. The value of in [3] is unknown. Equation [3] shows that any minor difference of the order of in the theoretical formulation of — whatever the latter might be — is not a detail but is the zeroth order term in determining the horizontal density and pressure gradients associated with vapor condensation.

Abstract.

The Bernoulli integral in the form of an algebraic equation is obtained for the hurricane air flow as the sum of the kinetic energy of wind and the condensational potential energy.With an account for the eye rotation energy and the decrease of angular momentum towards the hurricane center it is shown that the theoretical profiles of pressure and velocity agree well with observations for intense hurricanes. The previous order of magnitude estimates obtained in pole approximation are confirmed.

In simple words

Maximum wind speeds that arise in hurricanes and tornadoes are developed when the pressure gradient force significantly exceed friction forces. In the absence of friction energy along the streamline (the Bernoulli integral) is conserved, equal to the sum of kinetic and potential energy. Potential energy coincides with air pressure, while the pressure gradient determines the force that makes the air move.

The stream power is equal to the product of force and velocity. The characteristic change of pressure along the vertical is , where is partial pressure of water vapor at the Earth’s surface, is the share of water vapor that ultimately condenses in the ascending air. The mean vertical force acting per unit air volume is equal to , where is the characteristic scale height of the condensation process.

Due to the continuity constraints the vertical power , where is vertical velocity of the rising air, should be equal to radial power , where is radial velocity directed towards the center of the condensation area, is radial distance from the center. On the other hand, change of the radial air flux entering the condensation region via a circular wall of area is equal to , which is the vertical air outflow via the ring of radius and area . This equality relates the vertical and radial velocity by the well-know relationship . Putting this relationship into the equality of the vertical and horizontal powers, we obtain that condensation causes the air pressure to fall along an unusual non-linear law: .

The smallness of vertical velocity allows one to neglect it compared to radial and tangential (rotational) velocities, , where is the (partially) conserved angular momentum. This causes the Bernoulli integral for the air flow to take the form of an algebraic equation on radial velocity

The obtained transparent form of the Bernoulli integral describes the major quantitative hurricane characteristics, including profiles of pressure and velocity and the size of the eye.

A quick overview of the case (relevant documents are below). The authors (Makarieva, Gorshkov, Sheil, Li) submit a manuscript to the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) where they show that precipitation mass sink in the equatorial region produces sufficiently large pressure gradients to drive Hadley cell. The Editor writes in the first decision letter that the manuscript can be publishable provided the authors respond to the concerns of the second referee. The first referee is strongly positive and finds the paper important. The second referee writes 138 words:

This paper is interesting but somewhat confused. Without dwelling on the details of calculating the effect of precipitation on surface pressure, the attempt to relate such changes to large scale motion systems seems to ignore the fact that they are referring to balanced flows. Thus, pressure gradients per se do not drive the Hadley circulation. Rather, the momentum balance leads to circulations that maintain pressure gradients consistent with geostrophy. The actual way the pressure gradients are produced is essentially irrelevant though it would be potentially interesting if the mechanism involved precipitation. The fact that Held and Hou do not provide a quantitatively realistic description of the Hadley circulation is almost certainly due to the omission of eddies (Robinson, 2006, JAS, Walker and Schneider, 2004, GRL, 2006, JAS) and the assumption of equinoxial conditions (Lindzen and Hou, 1988, JAS).

The Editor points out that it is very important to attend to these comments and emphasizes that how pressure gradients are produced is irrelevant for the Hadley cell. They warn the authors that their response and the revised manuscript will be shown to referee No. 2 as well as to a third referee, if needed.

The authors are encouraged by the fact that one referee is excitied, another one finds the paper interesting. They draft a detailed reply, where they clarify that without a pressure gradient the Hadley cell would stall and that while the conventional paradigm considers differential heating as the cause of this gradient, they offer a new driver (precipitation mass sink).

The authors submit the revised version of the manuscript. The second decision letter from the Editor rejects the manuscript. It is accompanied by a review of Referee No. 1 (who continues to characterize the paper as a breakthrough) and a review of Referee 3. No reaction from Referee 2 to whom the authors replied.

The third referee finds the paper erroneous and recommends rejection. The authors find that the comments of the referee are in error and send the Editor their response to the comments of Referee 3. The Editor declines to consider the comments because “Manuscripts are accepted only when all the reviewers are in agreement about publication. In your case, two of the reviewers (#2 and #3), both of whom are very well-respected, were strongly against publication.”

It later turned out (see letter of the Editor-in-Chief) that Referee #2, who had found the paper interesting, refused to see the revision.

The authors do not feel that the justifications given by the Editor are valid. When the corresponding author receives a questionnaire from the ACP publishers, we express our concerns, in particular:

A journal that would employ the policy of publishing papers if only ALL referees agree will certainly be losing a good proportion of ground-breaking results submitted to it. We have never heard of such policies in any mainstream journals. If it is indeed the official policy of GRL, this should be publicly announced such that the authors know that the fate of their submissions is ultimately decided by arithmetic vote of the referees rather than by scientific logic.

…

The Editor mentioned that both referees were ‘very well-respected’. This is highly disturbing. This confirms our concerns that the decision regarding our paper was based not on the quality of scientific arguments, but on the reputation of who delivered these arguments. As a strategy, it makes it possible to accept the arguments of well-respected scientists and ignore the arguments of less respected ones, making the category of ‘respect’ the rule of thumb in publication policies.

This letter prompted a response from the GRL Editor-in-Chief who informed us that in his opinion there were no problems with our submission. We clarified our concerns:

We do understand it is normal that scientists may disagree on controversial issues. It is also normal, as you would certainly agree, that if the authors see that the referee is very seriously mistaken, they would have an opportunity to point that out to the Editor. Our concerns arose when the Editor motivated that his decision was final and that our response should be disregarded by stating that “Manuscripts are accepted only when all the reviewers are in agreement about publication. In your case, two of the reviewers (#2 and #3), both of whom are very well-respected, were strongly against publication.”

You say in your letter that the Editor “has as all latitude to make his/her decision based on his own reading of a manuscript — of course, editors’ decisions are usually strongly guided by all the reviews they obtain, as I am sure you understand since this forms the core of the peer-review process.” This contradicts the Editor’s words that the manuscripts are accepted only when all the reviewers are in agreement (which means that every reviewer has the right to veto any manuscript). Upon receiving your letter, I understand even less what was the basis for the decision to disregard our response to the erroneous comments of Referee 3.

You say that ‘GRL editors make a specific effort to find the best possible reviewers, with the strongest expertise in the fields covered by manuscripts’. In the view of this, we feel that our response to Referee 3 should have been considered by the Editor at face value, because another referee (Referee 1) was strongly in favor of the publication.

Neither do we understand the issue with Referee 2. Did the referee refuse to re-review our paper before seeing our response? If so, why did the Editor inform us he was planning to send our response to Referee 2? If the referee, who characterized the paper as interesting, refused to re-review our paper after seeing our response, how should this be interpreted? Can the reviewer be strongly against a paper without any explanations?

So please appreciate our position. Our response to Referee 2 was never mentioned. Our response to Referee 3 was ignored because the referee was well-respected. We did not understand this procedure. We were not disturbed and worried that our paper was rejected. We were disturbed and worried that, in our opinion, the scientific logic was sacrificed and scientific arguments were not taken into consideration losing force in the view of some others. When we were asked by AGU Publishers of our opinion of the peer-review process, we did express our concerns.

We did not receive any further feedbacks on our letter(s). Later we asked the journal if they had any reservations against us making this correspondence public. Having received no reply, we are now publishing this here.

1. Submitted manuscript
2. Decision letter #1 (including reviews)
3. Authors reply to decision letter #1
4. Revised manuscript
5. Decision letter #2
6. Comments of Referee 3
7. Authors reply to decision letter #2
8. Editor writes back
9. Peer review quality questionnaire from AGU Publishers
10. Authors express their concerns
11. GRL Editor-in-Chief replies
12. Authors clarify their concerns
13. Note about publicity