To paraphrase T. E. Lawrence who was, at one point, a bit critical of the Arab irregulars who fought under him in the desert: "The Howeitat shoot much but hit little."



There was already a rich literature on transnational threats prior to this publication, i.e., by the Organization for Economic Development and Co-Operation (OECD), in "The Shield of Achilles" by Phillip Bobbitt, by most of the Big-4 consulting companies, and half of Princeton University (at least the half dealing with National Security), to say nothing of the Santa Fe Institute, Booz-Allen-Hamilton, and two Chinese Army Colonels in a 1999 treatises titled "Unrestricted Warfare." So we have a pretty good idea of threats and amplifiers (as I call them) that exacerbate those threats. I am not sure we have gained anything new here.



H-D does a good job in writing about the essentials of complexity theory. And that's not a small accomplishment. But so has "everybody" involved in complexity, save perhaps my dog, Mickey. And that's only because he doesn't have thumbs (making writing a tad difficult).



Bravo for the C. S. Holling interview. H-D should have dedicated much more space to Holling and his theories than proposing "wacky" theories about the fall of Rome and "high end" energy.



Department of Wacky Theories - energy at the brink. Need I say more? One Thomas Friedman a century is one too many.



There is an irony at work. If complex systems are non-linear and, by their nature, unpredictable, how can H-D predict our demise based on a diminishing pool of high end energy and consumption? Do we conveniently suspend those properties of CAS to make use of H-D's theoretical mask? Look folks, there is darn little empirical evidence in this book, about... well...anything. The yarn about ancient Rome was based on a model developed by a grad assistant. H-D should have either formally state the deductive theory or show the inductive evidence. If you haven't got either of those the book becomes normative prose.



And even though I fawningly agree with C. S. Holling about the adaptive cycle, how can we reconcile his deterministic model with the emergent and unpredictable properties of complex-adaptive-systems? The answer is provided in Kauffman's "At Home In The Universe," is that we give up precision for generality. Indeed, as systems become more complex they become more rigid and prone to failure...we just don't know when (Kauffman) or under what circumstances or thresholds (Per Bak, "How Nature Works"). And there in lies the rub....catastrophic change (meaning sudden and discontinuous change) can be caused by darn near anything. Energy is H-D's personal favorite, but it could be a variety of things that initiate a catastrophic change.



H-D would have been better served to elaborate on complexity theory and ecological theory than to join Friedman in the deep end of the climate risk pool.

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