The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."
The "mousetrap chain reaction" from Disney's 1957 movie "Our friend, the Atom." A fascinating experiment that brings a curious question: Why is the mousetrap the only thing you can buy at a hardware store that can create a chain reaction? Another mousetrap-related mystery is why, with so many experiments done, so far nobody had tried to make measurements to quantify the results? Eventually, two Italian researchers, Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi re-examined this old experiment, showing how it can be seen as much more than a representation of a nuclear reaction, but a paradigm of the behavior of complex systems.
Walt Disney's 1957 movie, "Our Friend the Atom," was an absolute masterpiece in terms of the dissemination of scientific knowledge. It was, of course, sponsored by the US government. It was supposed to promote their energy policy which, at the time, was based on the concept of "atoms for peace." So, the movie was propaganda but, at the same time, it is stunning to think that in the 1950s, the US government was making an effort to obtain an informed consent from its citizens, instead of just scaring them into submission! Things change, indeed. But we can still learn a lot from this old movie.
So, "Our Friend, the Atom" is a romp through what was known about atomic physics at the time. The images are stunning, the explanations clear, and the story is fascinating with a mix of hard science and fantasy, such as the story of the genie and the fisherman. I went through my studies in chemistry having in mind the images from the movie. Still today, I tend to see in my mind protons as red, neutrons as white, and electrons as green, as they were shown in the book.
One of the fascinating elements of the story was the chain reaction made with mousetraps. I was so impressed by that experiment that I always had in mind to redo it and, finally, last year, my colleague Ilaria Perissi agreed to give me a hand. Together, we built our wonderful, new, improved, mousetrap machine! We braved the risks of flying balls and we managed to make our experiments with only minor damage to our knuckles. And we were the first, it seems, to make quantitative measurements of this old experiment.
I will tell you about our results below but, first, a bit of history. The idea of the mousetrap chain reaction was proposed for the first time in 1947 by Richard Sutton (1900-1966). He was a physicist working at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania: a maverick physics teacher who loved to create demonstrations of scientific phenomena. And, no doubt, the idea to use mousetraps to simulate a nuclear chain reaction was nothing less than a stroke of genius. Too bad that Sutton is not mentioned at all in Disney's movie.
Here is how Sutton proposed the experiment:
Sutton seems to have actually performed his demonstration in front of his students, although we have no pictures or records of it. We tried to use the same setup, but we found that the corks are too light to trigger the traps, and the reaction dies out immediately. It works only if the traps are not fixed to the table and are left free to fly around, Indeed, Sutton doesn't mention that he fixed the traps to the table. The "flying trap problem" plagues most of the experimental setups of this experiment. But if the chain reaction is generated by flying traps, it is not anymore a simulation of an atomic chain reaction.
After that Sutton published his idea, performing the mousetrap experiment in public seems to have become fashionable. You can find another illustration of the setup in the 1955 book by Margaret Hyde: "Atoms today and Tomorrow."
Note how the experiment has changed, probably because of the problems to make it work with corks. Now there are no corks, but a marble is used to trigger one trap, which is linked to other mousetraps by a "heavy thread." Maybe it works, but it is not what Sutton had proposed, and it is hard to present it as a simulation of anything.
So, in 1956, the filmmakers at Disney were probably scratching their heads and thinking of how they could make the mousetrap experiment work. Eventually, they decided to use ping-pong balls and a large number of mousetraps. You can see the results in the movie: traps are flying all over. Same problem: this is not what the experiment was supposed to do. And there is a reason: also, in this case, we tried to use the same setup, and we found that ping pong balls are too light to cause traps to snap. If the traps are fixed to the table, the experiment just fizzles out after triggering one or two traps at most.
Strangely, so few people noted the problem: an exception was the nuclear physicist Ivan Oelrich, but that was in 2010! Most of the mousetrap experiments you can find on the Web (and there are many) are of the "flying-traps" type. It is a problem with science for the public: it is often flashy and spectacular, and signifying nothing.
We found only two experiments on the Web where the traps were fixed to the supporting plate, as they should have been. But, even in these two cases, no quantitative measurements were performed. Strange, but there is this curse with popular science to be often despised and, sometimes, carry a negative mark on a physicist's career.
But never mind that. Your dream team, Ilaria and Ugo, engaged in making the experiment in the correct way, with fixed traps, and at the same time measuring the parameters of the experiment. Our trick was to use relatively heavy wooden balls that could nicely trigger the traps. We also enlarged the area of the metal triggers using cardboard disks. Then, we used commercial cell phone cameras to record the results.
It took a lot of patience: it is not easy to load 50 traps with 100 wooden balls, avoiding that they start going off when you don't want them to go off. To say nothing about the gate snapping directly onto the experimenter's fingers. Painful, but not a cause of permanent damage. We did that in the name of science, and it worked! Of
course, some reviewers were horrified by a paper that was not
using expensive equipment and complicated and mysterious calculations.
But, with patience, we succeeded in seeing it published in a serious
scientific journal.
Excuse me for being proud of our brainchild, but I truly found it elegant how we could fit our data with a simple mathematical model. And how the trap setup mirrors not only the chain reaction in a nuclear explosion, but also several other phenomena that flare up and then subside. For instance, the trap array may be seen as a mechanical simulator of the Hubbert curve, with the traps as oil wells and the balls as extracted oil. It can also simulate whaling, various cases of overexploitation of natural resources, the diffusion of memes in cyberspace, and more. Not bad for an object, the mousetrap, that had been developed with just one purpose: killing mice.
Mousetraps seem to be the only simple mechanical device that can be bought at a hardware store that can be used to create a chain reaction. We do not know why this phenomenon is so rare in hardware stores, but chain reactions are surely common in complex adaptive systems. We believe that the results we reported in this paper can be helpful to understanding such systems and, if nothing else, to illustrate how chain reactions can easily go out of control, not only in a critical mass of fissile uranium but also in similar dynamics occurring in the ecosystem that go under the name of “overshoot” and “overexploitation”.
Yes, really, why are mousetraps so exceptional? Who would have thought?
Here is the post that I published a few months ago on this subject.
Ilaria Perissi with our mousetrap-based mechanical model of a fully connected network. You can find a detailed description of our experiment on ArXiv
You may have seen the "mousetrap experiment" performed as a way to demonstrate the mechanism of the chain reaction that takes place in nuclear explosions. One of its earliest versions appeared in the Walt Disney movie "Our Friend, the Atom" in 1957.
We (myself and Ilaria Perissi) recently redid the experiment with 50 mousetraps and 100 wooden balls. And here it is.
But why bother redoing this old experiment (proposed for the first time in1947)? One reason was that nobody had ever tried a quantitative measurement. That is, measuring the number of triggered traps and flying balls as a function of time. So, we did exactly that. We used cell phone slow-motion cameras to measure the parameters of the experiment and we used a system dynamics model to fit the data. It worked beautifully. You can find a pre-print of the article that we are going to publish on ArXiv. As you can see in the figure, below, the experimental data and the model go reasonably well together. It is not a sophisticated experiment, but it is the first time that it was attempted.
But the main reason why we engaged in this experiment is that it is not just about nuclear reactions. It is much more general and it describes a kind of network that's called "fully connected," that is where all nodes are connected to all other nodes. In the set-up, the traps are nodes of the network, the balls are elements that trigger the connection between nodes. It is a kind of communication based on "enhanced" or "positive" feedback.
This experiment can describe a variety of systems. Imagine that the traps are oil wells. Then, the balls are the energy created by extracting the oil. And you can use that energy to dig and exploit more wells. The result is the "bell-shaped" Hubbert curve, nothing less! You can see it in the figure above: it is the number of flying balls "produced" by the traps.
We found this kind of curve for a variety of socioeconomic systems, from mineral extraction to fisheries (for the latter, you can see our (mine and Ilaria's) book "The Empty Sea." So, the mousetraps can describe also the behavior of fisheries and have something to do with the story of Moby Dick as told by Melville.
You could also say the mousetrap network is a holobiont because holobionts are non-hierarchical networks of entities that communicate with each other. It is a kind of holobiont that exists in nature, but it is not common. Think of a flock of birds foraging in a field. One bird sees something suspicious, it flies up, and in a moment all the birds are flying away. We didn't have birds to try this experiment, but we found a clip on the Web that shows exactly this phenomenon.
It is a chain reaction. The flock is endowed with a certain degree of intelligence. It can process a signal and act on it. You can see in the figure our measurement of the number of flying birds. It is a logistic function, the integral of the bell-shaped curve that describes the flying balls in the mousetrap experiments
In Nature, holobionts are not normally fully connected. Their connections are short-range, and signals travel more slowly through the network. It is often called "swarm intelligence" and it can be used to optimize systems. Swarm intelligence does transmit a signal, but it doesn't amplify it out of control, as a fully connected network does, at least normally. It is a good control system: bacterial and ant colonies use it. Our brains are much more complicated: they have short-range connections but also long-range ones and probably also collective electromagnetic connections.
One system that is nearly fully connected is the world wide web. Imagine that traps are people while the balls are memes. Then what you are seeing with the mousetrap experiment is a model of a meme going viral on the Web. Ideas (also called memes) flare-up on the Web when they are stimulated it is the power of propaganda that affects everybody.
It is an intelligent system because it can amplify a signal. That is that's the way it reacts to an external perturbation. You could see the mousetraps as an elaborate detection system for stray balls. But it can only flare up and then decline. It can't be controlled.
That's the problem with our modern propaganda system: it is dominated by memes flaring up out of control. The main actors in this flaring are those "supernodes" (the Media) that have a huge number of long-range connections. That can do a lot of damage: if the meme that goes out of control is an evil meme and it implies, say, going to war against someone, or exterminating someone. It happened and keeps happening again as long as the memesphere is organized the way it is, as a fully connected network. Memes just go out of control.
All that means we are stuck with a memesphere that's completely unable to manage complex systems. And yet, that's the way the system works. It depends on these waves of out-of-control signals that sweep the web and then become accepted truths. Those who manage the propaganda system are very good at pushing the system to develop this kind of memetic waves, usually for the benefit of their employers.
Can the memesphere be re-arranged more effectively -- turning it into a good holobiont? Probably yes. Holobionts are evolutionary entities that nobody ever designed. They have been designed by trial and error as a result of the disappearance of the unfit. Holobionts do not strive for the best, they strive for the less bad. It may happen that the same evolutionary pressure will act on the human memesphere.
The trick should consist in isolating the supernodes (the media) in such a way as to reduce their evil influence on the Web. And, lo and behold, it may be happening: the great memesphere may be rearranging itself in the form of a more efficient, locally connected holobiont. Haven't you heard how many people say they don't watch TV anymore? Nor do they open the links to the media on the Web. That's exactly the idea. Do that, and maybe you will start a chain reaction in which everyone will get rid of their TV. And the world will be much better.
Image from "Wired.com" Note that they call the report "infamous" -- they are still influenced by the defamation campaign against it carried out in the 1970s and 1980s.
The interest on "The Limit to Growth" is returning. 50 years after that a vicious denigration campaign had consigned the report to the trash can of wrong science, we see the study resurfacing, reappraised, reviewed, being discussed again.
And we are realizing that the study had been correct and that today is still relevant for us. It was never intended as a prophecy of doom, but its true message was drowned in a sea of irrelevant criticism, political slander, and plain insults that prefigured the current way of dealing with "science" in the media.
The latest evidence of this new interest in the "Limits to Growth" is the interview with the vice-president of the Club of Rome, Carlos Alvarez Pereira, that recently appeared on "Wired".
Carlos does not keep a blog and he doesn't appear so often on the social media, so you may not have heard of him. But he is very active in various sustainability projects. Among many other things, he has edited, together with Ugo Bardi, the new report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond" that summarizes and reviews 50 years of history of the first "Limits" report. Carlos' interview on "Wired" is a deep and wide sweep at the many facets of the problems we face. Absolutely worth reading.
Here are a few excerpts from Carlos' interview.
Fundamentally, it is about equity, managing the resources in an equitable way, knowing in advance that they're limited. Realizing that it's not higher and higher consumption which makes us live in a good way, have a healthy life and well-being. It's the quality of our relationships with other humans, with nature, that makes possible the scenarios in which you can decouple well-being and the growth of consumption.
............
We have to be in a good balance with the planet where we live. And that part of the message was completely lost, very rapidly. Jimmy Carter, when he was president, was listening to this kind of approach. And then of course, the political mood changed a lot with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan himself has a discourse in which he says, literally, there are no limits to growth. So from a political point of view, there was a complete denial of what the book was saying.
...........
What the system has done, as a mechanism to continue with growth at all costs, is actually to burn the future. And the future is the least renewable resource. There is no way that we can reuse the time we had when we started this conversation. And by building up a system which is more debt-driven—where we keep consumption going, but by creating more and more debt—what we're actually doing is burning or stealing the time of people in the future. Because their time will be devoted to repaying the debt.
.......
The paradox is that capitalism is also based on the notion of scarcity. Our system is organized around the idea that resources are scarce, then we have to pay for them, and people in the value chain will profit from this idea of scarcity. Conventional capitalism is saying that while these resources might be finite, we will find others: Don't worry, technology will save us. So that we continue in the same way.
A scientist guards his knowledge, making sure that nobody else profits from it. It is the theme of an article of mine (and my coworkers Chiavenuto, Lavacchi, and Perissi) titled "Science and the Dragon:" We were inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, the developer of the concept of "Mind Size" science. We need to tame the dragon and redistribute the treasure to the people. Science belongs to everybody!
There is a book that I would warmly suggest to you: "The Clot Thickens" (2021) by Malcolm Kendrick. There are various reasons why this book is interesting, one is that Kendrick gives you several good ideas on how to take care of your circulatory system. You have to: that is the leading cause of death in our world.
But there is more in Kendrick's book. He is a Scottish MD, a specialist in cardiovascular diseases. He is known as a heretical scientist for his negative evaluation of statins and other medicines that bring large profits to the pharmaceutical industry (so much that he attracted a rabid attack from the "Daily Mail" -- an honor!).
Kendrick is not only a sharp scientist, but he has been developing new methods for communicating science to everyone, not just to specialists in a specific field. That's another reason why I recommend this book. Can you believe that I read this book three times? Yes, I did. Very few books deserve this kind of focused attention -- I don't think I have done that for more than three or four non-fiction books in the life of an avid reader, as I have always been, and I still am. And this one I may read a fourth time.
Kendrick's book is truly amazing in the way the author masters the use of text for communicating complex ideas. This is not a "popular science" book, that is, it is not a watered-down version of science where a journalist explains to the uncouth masses the wonders that scientists have produced -- you know, galaxies, supercomputers, life extension, that kind of stuff.
No. Kendrick's book is written by a scientist for scientists, or at least for people who have a certain degree of scientific literacy. Kendrick asks difficult questions, does not always have the answer, and does not shun reporting from the specialized scientific literature. The beauty of the way it is written is that it takes into account the fact that not everyone, not even scientists, understands the dialect of every scientific field.
So, when we encounter the term "pultaceous," Kendrick stops to note that he himself at first wasn't sure of what it meant, then he explains that it stands for "having a soft consistency: pulpy." Kendrick also focuses the attention of the reader using italics, boldface, quotes, etcetera. And he makes wide use of irony, jokes, and asides, all with the idea of maintaining the attention of the reader. He does use acronyms (CVD for "cardiovascular disease") but sparingly enough that the reader is not forced to stop and think what the heck a certain acronym stands for.
Let me state it once more. This is NOT the kind of watered-down science that goes under the name of popular science. This is science. Real Science. Hardcore science, if you like, presented in all its multi-faceted complexity. The matter of cardiovascular diseases is difficult, complicated, variegated, and sometimes baffling. But it is not impossible to understand if it is presented in the right way.
What Kendrick is doing, here, is a major innovative feat: he is developing a new language for scientific communication. Let's ask ourselves a question: why are scientific papers written in such obscure jargon, for instance using the word "pultaceous" when "pulpy" would be just as good? Why do scientists feel obliged to write such hash as "it has been observed that...:" while it would be so much easier and clearer to say "We observed that...."? It is a "defensive" way of writing that scientists use for some reason -- the most likely one is to generate a defensive barrier to avoid incursions in their scientific turf.
But these little tricks of scientific jargon are mostly harmless. The problem is that scientists almost never ask themselves who would or should read their paper, apart from their colleagues working in closely related fields. So, the destiny of a lot of science is to remain confined to obscure scientific journals that will be read by just a few people (if any). If it is bad science to be wasted in this way, no big damage (actually, it is better if it never sees the light). If it is good science (yes, there still is such a thing) then it is a shame that it is wasted in this way.
And not just that: even good science is often hidden behind paywalls set by the publishers. This is another nice trick of the way science is managed nowadays. Scientists produce papers mostly using public money. Then they give them to publishers for free. Then, the publishers proceed to have the public pay exorbitant prices if they want to access the papers they have already paid for with their taxes. Are we shooting ourselves in our feet? Sure, multiple times!
In short, scientists have been behaving like the dragons of epic stories, keeping their knowledge for themselves, making sure that nobody else could access it. We need to tame these awful beasts (not necessarily kill them, dragons can make nice pets, as you may have learned watching "The Game of Thrones"). Then we can redistribute the treasure of knowledge that the dragons have been guarding so jealously. But we have to be careful: much of the treasure is fool's gold. Wrong studies, useless studies, repetitions of older studies, fully incomprehensible studies, and many studies are the result of corruption by special interests outside science. Can we sift this enormous mass and keep what's really valuable, turning it into something useful?
A difficult task, certainly, but not impossible. Clearly, it goes beyond the capabilities of the human mind, but we are starting to develop tools that may be up to the task. To acquaint yourself with the capabilities of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, take a look at the "Leonardo" site. This is an impressive tool that could be used to review the huge mass of the world's scientific literature and reorder it in ways that are both comprehensible and useful. That requires removing the publisher's paywalls, and that won't make them happy. Not at all. But it is not impossible, either.
One thing is certain: if we want science to survive, we absolutely need to develop new methods of communication. Kendrick's book is a good example of how to do that, and AI can help us a lot to do even better.
Ian Sutton continues to review on his blog the chapters of the recently published new report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond" (Exapt Press 2022)
We have reviewed the first two chapters of the new book Limits and Beyond. The reviews can be found at The Yawning Gap (Chapter 1) and No More Growth (Chapter 2). In this post we take a look at the third chapter, written by Dennis Meadows, a co-author of the original Limits to Growth. Dr. Meadows reports that he has delivered over a thousand speeches to a very wide variety of audiences. In this chapter the author summarizes “19 of the most common questions, comments and objections” that he has received over the years. Some of his insights are as follows:
The World3 model continues to be more useful than the “many models advanced by economists who refuted our work since its first publication”.
He distinguishes between physical and social models. We can predict solar eclipses or the melting point of ice with certainty, but we cannot predict how humans will act. Therefore, the fact that modern computers are much more powerful than their 1972 counterparts is not necessarily more helpful. (Engineers express the same distinction when talking about the difference between precision and accuracy. “When you’ve got baloney, it doesn’t matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney”. Or, “An engineer is someone who multiplies 2 by 2 on a slide rule, gets an answer of 3.9 and approximates to 4”.)
“Climate change was not a serious concern 50 years ago”. Dr. Meadows argues that the model is nevertheless still valid because, “magically eliminating it would still leave other grave problems”. In other words, climate change is not a root cause; instead it is a symptom of deeper root causes.
The biggest threat is to our social fabric.
He concludes by saying that the, “. . . report did not make discernible changes in the policies of the world’s leaders”. However, it did influence the thinking of many individuals.
The fact that Dr. Meadows has worked so hard to deliver the message of Limits to Growth is impressive. The question remains, however, “Why has such communication mostly failed to make a discernible impact on the body politic?”
Dennis Meadows
Communication is, of course, a two-way affair. People such as Dr. Meadows speak, but others have to listen. And, as I point out in The Coffee Shop and Small Potatoes the vast majority of people don’t “get it”. At best, they see climate change as being just one problem among many. Maybe they sense that facing up to limits to growth involves making sacrifice, and most people don’t want to go there.
One message that we have definitely learned that simply presenting well-researched information is not enough. It is possible that we need some type of '‘social tipping point’ as I discuss in Needed: A Tipping Point.
It is said that the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa wrote this haiku upon the death of his daughter: "The dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet......." (tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara). It is poetry at its best: it hints at much more than it says. Here, I start from this poem about dew being an incorporeal thing to examine how another incorporeal thing, such as money, can affect us.
A few days ago, I was looking again at the presentation that Nathan John Hagens produced for the Earth Day of 2021. I had watched it when it appeared, but something made me return to it. It is a long story, but the point that remained in my mind is when Nate shows a graph with a clear "Seneca" shape for the global oil production curve. That is, something that grows slowly, then declines rapidly (at minute 38 of the presentation). Later, at minute 44, he shows a similar curve for the GDP.
Nate attributes the slanting forward of the curve to financial effects. My first reaction to that was that financial tricks, in themselves, do not produce oil (and can't raise the GDP, either). How can a basically non-existing thing such as money, mainly numbers stored in computer memories, affect the real world in such a way?
But, rethinking the matter, I am not sure anymore that the financial world really is an ethereal and inconsequential thing. Maybe it is the opposite. As I learn more about more things, I am always surprised by what I discover. My latest epiphany came from a talk given by Fabio Vighi, who teaches at the University of Cardiff, about a correlation between the lockdowns of 2020 and the global financial situation and, in particular, of the "REPO" market (you can find his take at this link).
I must confess that I had no idea of what the REPO was, not even that such a thing existed. Now, I know that it stands for "Repurchase Agreements" and I think I have some idea of how it is supposed to work. Basically, it is a market where financial operators can resupply with money by borrowing it. Where does that money come from? Typically, financial firms with large pools of cash do not want to let that money sit around, so they lend it to financial institutions, banks, at low interest rates. Then, the banks will use this money to fund short-term needs. The REPO market is a short-term thing.
I am far from having assimilated the obscure mechanisms operating inside the entrails of the REPO market, but this much I can understand: it determines the cost of money. Now, connect this concept with the real economy. The economy is made out of real things: resources, materials, equipment, goods, people, and more. And everything in the economy is subjected to depreciation (a name that economists use for the thing that physicists call entropy). If you want to fight depreciation (entropy) you must expend energy. (you can do that in an open system -- in closed ones, entropy always increases, but this is not the case for the economic system.)
So, to keep the economy running, you need energy. In order to get energy, you need energy (you probably heard the concept of "energy return on energy invested", "EROI"). But, in order to get energy to be invested, our economic system is geared in such a way that you need that non-physical thing called "money." No money, no investments. No investments in energy, no production of energy.
What if there is no money? Energy is not produced. Then people become very poor, and many die. Incidentally, it also happens that the rich get richer, but that's another story. Apart from the rich, the poor slide down the downward step of the curve: the Seneca Cliff. I do think that Nate is right in his interpretation: the Seneca Cliff would arrive even independently of financial factors, but financial factors can make it steeper. Money doesn't create resources (as economists are fond to say). But it can direct more resources to exploitation, making it faster. That gives people the illusion that there is more of it.
You see how everything is connected: our fate is determined by such mysterious things as the one called the "REPO market." Then, something horrible happened in 2019: a cash crunch caused the repo rate to soar — reaching as high as 10 percent intraday on Sept. 17. It pushed up the federal funds rate to levels much higher than it was supposed to be (between 2-2.25 percent) at the time.
The interesting thing about the story is Fabio Vighi's interpretation that the lockdowns of 2020 were the result of the attempt of the powers that be to cool the REPO market and avoid a financial Seneca Cliff. If this was their aim, they succeeded spectacularly.
Note how the REPO rate went down from the Spike of September 2019 to a very low, and apparently stable, level in 2021. So, Fabio Vighi's interpretation could make sense. But can it be true? Personally, I think it might well be the case, but it is also true that correlation does not mean causation and the spike disappeared much before the lockdowns. On the other hand, the powers that be may have been scared enough that they put into practice an emergency plan they had concocted long before. Whatever the case, they will never tell us the truth.
The thing that doesn't cease to amaze me, though, is how it is possible that humans placed themselves to me so dependent on the thing called "money." It is an ephemeral entity that has no physical consistency. I can also understand that small disturbances in the repo (and other money) markets can ripple through the entire system. The physicists call this the "butterfly effect" and you know how small perturbations can send huge systems tumbling down to their doom. Money has no more consistency than the morning dew. And yet, and yet......
Take a look at this incredible painting by Quentin Matsys, "The Money Lender and His Wife." painted in 1514 and representing two burghers of Antwerp, the ancestors of the people who have been playing with the REPO market in modern times. Just like Issa's poem, this painting hints at much more than it shows, but in the opposite way. Whereas Issa hints that the world is not real, here we see it as even too real. Reality is gold coins, much more important than the book of devotions that the wife of the banker should have been looking at, but she is not. Yet, the true value of those coins is all in the minds of people, by themselves they are not worth more than dew in the morning.
Ian Sutton is generating a series of reviews of the chapters of the recent report to the Club of Rome "Limits and Beyond." Here is the one about the chapter written by Jorgen Randers, one of the authors of the 1972 report.
The book Limits and Beyond, edited by Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alwarez Pereira, provides a 50th anniversary review of the seminal report Limits to Growth (LtG). The following is from the back cover of the book.
50 years ago the Club of Rome commissioned a report: Limits to Growth. They told us that, on our current path, we are heading for collapse in the first half of the 21st century. This book, published in the year 2022, reviews what has happened in the intervening time period. It asks three basic questions:
Were their models right?
Why was there such a backlash?
What did the world do about it?
Our review of the first chapter drew two major conclusions.
There is a “yawning communications gap” between the scientists who developed the LtG model and the public and policy makers. This failure of communication contrasts with the way in which many Evangelical Christians believe in ‘The Rapture’. Yet both LtG and ‘The Rapture’ provide a vision for TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It). Why did scientific communication fail, while religious communication flourished?
Reports such as LtG tend to have a threatening tone. They say that if we do not take action quickly then we are going to be in serious trouble. Yet people generally respond better to a positive message. Had the report described the opportunities that a world without growth offers it may have had a better reception.
Dr. Jorgen Randers (1945- )
The second chapter is written by one of the original LtG authors: Jorgen Randers. The chapter’s title is “What did The Limits to Growth really say?”
Decoupling Economic and Physical Growth
He makes the point that LtG was not a prediction of the future. It was, in fact, “a scenario analysis of 12 possible futures of the period 1972 to 2100”, and, “. . . delays in global decision making would cause the human economy to overshoot planetary limits before the growth in the human ecological footprint slowed.”
In other words, either we manage decline in a controlled manner (which we have not done) or else collapse happens to us, whether we like it or not. One option that is not open to us to maintain Business as Usual, i.e., a continuation of material growth that simultaneously expands our ecological impact. In other words, the report did not predict the end of growth — it merely predicted, as its title suggests, limits to growth.
How economic growth could continue without simultaneous physical growth the report did not say — it did not show how to decouple these two types of growth. The experience of the last 50 years shows that the two have remained linked to one another inextricably. It appears as if decoupling is not possible. (At least, there has been no serious attempt to do so.)
The Test of Time
Randers asks, “Has the message of LtG stood the test of time?” His response is that “the real world has evolved as foreseen in LtG”. In other words, LtG has withstood the test of time. The report provides 12 different scenarios, they are all similar to one another up to about the year 2020. Events of the past 50 years have followed what these scenarios forecast.
To summarize,
Economic growth and the use of physical resources are tightly linked. Decoupling does not appear to be a possibility.
The scenarios in LtG up to our time, the present day, have turned out to be reasonably accurate.
We are now in overshoot. Managed decline has not happened; collapse is in our future.
Given this background, it is useful at this point to show one of the scenarios that were presented in LtG. (I have added the date overlays.)
The chart makes for grim reading. It shows that, starting about now,
The world’s population increases for the next 30 years (which is why some of the per capita numbers are so unfavorable),
Services per capita drop precipitously,
Industrial output per capita drops almost as quickly,
Available resources plunge,
Pollution, which includes greenhouse gas emissions, climbs steeply, but then declines, presumably as a consequence of the rapid decline in industrial output.
Food per capita also drops sharply — a phenomenon that is one of increasing concern this year.
It is no surprise that a colleague of mine who is very familiar with climate change issues prefers not to look at this chart.
Technological Fix
A common response to results such as those shown in the chart is that technology will provide “save us”. Randers says that, “many thoughtful observers . . . believe that technology will be able to remove planetary limits faster than the rate at which we approach them.”
The report does not predict whether, “investments in electrification and renewable energy will take place at sufficient pace to halt global warming.” In fact, it seems unlikely that such a transition will happen in the short amount of time available. (Once more, we could have managed such a transition had we acted with resolve 50 years ago — but we didn’t.) We now understand that no source of “green” energy has the unique combination of properties provided by fossil fuels, particularly crude oil. Moreover, the transition to new energy sources will require an immense use of fossil fuel energy. Technology may provide some useful responses, but it is not “the answer”.
Conclusion
In the ‘Final Reflection’ that concludes Chapter 2, Randers points out that LtG was published when “human belief in the power of technology was at an all-time high”. That belief is not what it was fifty years ago.
Moreover, there seems to be no way to establish economic growth while not increasing our ecological footprint. Hence, this chapter leads to the well-worn refrain that we should have taken action, but we didn’t. But we have left it much too late to implement managed decline (even if there were any serious interest in doing so, which there isn’t). Therefore some form of induced collapse is in our future.
Essentially, the message of this chapter is the same as it was for Chapter 1 — it is one of failed communication. We never gained the Name of Action.
The front page from the Italian newspaper "La Stampa" on Oct 12, 1941. A good example of wartime propaganda.
War is a complicated story with plenty of things happening at the same time. Not for nothing, there exists the term "fog of war," and it may well be that even generals and leaders don't know exactly what's going on on the battlefield. Then, imagine how the media are reporting the situation to us: it is not just a fog that separates the news from the truth: it is a brick wall. Yet, the media remain a major source of information for us. Can we use them to learn at least something about what's going on, discarding the lies and the exaggerations?
To start, we can look at how wartime news was reported in historical cases. As an exercise, I examined how Italians were (dis-)informed by their government during World War 2. I used the archive of "La Stampa," one of the major Italian newspapers of the time, still existing today. The other national newspapers weren't reporting anything really different. Another advantage is that the archive of La Stampa is free to peruse.
The archive contains a huge amount of material (all in Italian, sorry). I don't claim that I examined everything, but I did go through the decisive moments of the war, in 1941/43. It is a fascinating experience to imagine people reading the news of the time and trying to understand what was really going on. Could they figure it out? Probably not, at least for most of them. But let's go into the details.
Above, you can see an example of how news about the war was presented to Italians. The front page of "La Stampa" of Oct 12, 1941, was titled the "destruction of the Azov pocket." It was true: the battle of the sea of Azov was a major victory for the Axis forces. Even the report on the number of prisoners taken, about 100,000, was approximately correct.
On the lower left part of the front page, you read of another front: in Ethiopia. The Italian troops fighting in the Amhara region ("Amara" in the text) are said to be offering an "indomitable resistance" against the attacking British troops. Again, it was true. The stronghold of Gondar, in Northern Ethiopia, was successfully resisting.
That's just the first page. You can read more in the inner pages: reflections on how the defeat of Bolshevism in Russia will unavoidably bring the final defeat for England, of the victorious advance of the Italian troops in the Donetsk region, of heavy losses of the enemy on all fronts, including long lists of British warships damaged or sunk.
So, if you were an Italian reading one of the national papers in October 1941, you would reasonably conclude that the Axis powers were winning in Russia, that Italy was successfully resisting in Ethiopia, and that the British were facing serious difficulties in all war theaters. That would not have been such a bad evaluation at that moment, perhaps the most favorable for the Axis during the whole war.
The problem is that, as we know from our modern viewpoint, in October 1941 the German advance was already starting to slow down, and it would completely stall in early December. In Ethiopia, Gondar was just the last pocket of resistance of the former "Italian Empire." It was surrounded by the British, and it had zero chance to survive. It surrendered on Nov 27th 1941.
How was this less than exciting news presented to the Italian readers? About the Russian front, in December they were told that the Germans had decided to stop their advance and that they were preparing to restart the offensive in spring. At the same time, they were repulsing Russian attacks. Then, about the defeat in Ethiopia, the Italians were told nothing. The fall of Gondar in November was simply not reported. Only on Dec 6, more than a month later, you could read that the "Italian officers of Gondar" were allowed to keep their swords while surrendering. From this, you could finally understand that Gondar was no more in Italian hands. As a compensation, you could read in the column nearby of "more British ships sunk in the Atlantic."
This is very typical. Bad news was simply not reported or delayed during the war. When the Italian contingent in Russia was destroyed, in 1942, it just disappeared from the news. As another example, in 1943, the British had been attacking the island of Pantelleria in the Mediterranean Sea. Up to June 12th, "La Stampa" was reporting the heroic resistance of the Italian defenders facing superior enemy forces.
Remarkably, when the news above appeared, Pantelleria had already surrendered without firing a shot. That was not reported until June 14th as just a few lines in a corner of the front page. One day later, one of the pundits of the time explained why the loss of Pantelleria was of no importance and that the final victory of Italy was certain. Then, it was silence.
This kind of disinformation is normal: it happens everywhere, surely not just in the Italian press during WW2. The interesting part is whether we can learn something from this story. I think I can propose a few rules of thumb on how wartime misinformation works.
RULES FOR DETECTING DISINFORMATION DURING WARTIME
1. When the news reports a major victory of your side that involves a verifiable result, say, the occupation of a city or of a region, then it is most likely true.
2. When the news reports that an enemy attack has been repulsed and that the enemy suffered heavy losses, it may be true, but it means that the enemy has superior forces in that area and that sooner or later will break through.
3. When you don't hear anything anymore of a specific contingent, city, or region, it means that the contingent has been destroyed or that the city/region has been conquered by the enemy.
4. When you read non-verifiable positive news ("enemy cruiser sunk" "40 enemy planes downed"), it is most likely false.
5. Whatever you hear from the "experts" has zero value. With one exception: when the pundits start saying that "the situation looks bad, but the final victory is certain," it means that the war is lost.
6. The golden rule: never, ever trust anything that the media tell you.
These rules have a certain logic: despite the attempts of the media to "create their own reality" (Rumsfeld style) they cannot completely suppress the real reality. During WW2, even with the heavy censorship of the Fascist regime, Italians could find other sources of information, including what returning soldiers were telling, and the broadcasting from "Radio Londra," the British radio. Tuning to that station was forbidden and could be dangerous, but surely many people did that. Not that the British propaganda was any more truthful than the Italian one but, at least, Radio London provided Italians with a different version of the news. For instance, the fall of Gondar in 1941 was announced in British newspapers the day after it took place, with titles such as, "END OF MUSSOLINI'S EMPIRE." Radio Londra surely broadcast that and the people who listened were informed about the event several days in advance in comparison to those who had to wait for the Italian press to report it.
About the current war in Ukraine, these rules can help. For a start, they can be used to filter out the most blatant lies. For instance, you surely heard the story of the "Ghost of Kyiv," the Ukrainian pilot said to have downed as many as 40 enemy planes (some say just six, others 10 or 20). It was non-verifiable news, and hence you could have suspected from the beginning that it was false. Indeed, it was confirmed to be fake by the Ukrainians themselves. The same is true for many reports of the rape of Ukrainian women and children. The originator of these reports, Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine's commissioner for human rights, was removed from her post by the Ukrainian parliament under the accusation of having provided exaggerated and false news. And the same goes for the many obviously exaggerated reports of heavy losses on the Russian side.
Then, even with the heavy censorship we are embedded in, we can still manage to find a trickle of information from the "other side," not better than from this side, but still providing a different angle of view. The official Russian channels do not report heavy Russian losses (obviously!). Pro-Russian pundits repeat that Russia is winning, although they have toned down their statements several times. They have been telling us, repeatedly, that the Ukraine military was going to collapse, but that is just good evidence for the validity of the rule that says, "The opinion of the experts has zero value." In any case, the reports from both sides agree that, at present, the Russians are advancing, although slowly. Therefore, it is probably true.
About the final outcome of the war, for the time being, we are in a condition similar to that of Italians in 1941. It would have been difficult for them to understand who would win, although they might have concluded that things were not going so well as the official reports said. But, by late 1942, a critical analysis, even just of the national news, should have made clear to anyone with a functioning brain that the war was lost for the Axis. About Ukraine, instead, we cannot say much for the time being, but it is hard to think that the war could last years. So, we should be able to know more in the near future. For the time being, just don't forget the golden rule: never, never trust what the media are telling you.
The blog of El Gato Malo is fun to read and, often, reports useful data and correct discussions of the COVID pandemic -- of course, it is very political, as you can see if you peruse the site. But when the Gato tries to apply his skills to climate science, it is a complete disaster, such as in this screed about the climate of planet Venus. The Gato's failure is a good example of how you should always maintain a certain degree of humility when you approach a field you are not familiar with.
The problem is not so much the site of a person who signs himself as "The Bad Cat". The problem is that it is a wave. It could become a tsunami. There is a clear phenomenon of loss of trust in science resulting by the mounting evidence of corruption and politicization of those who claim to be the "voice of science" and whose advice the public should follow. The result is a wholesale rejection of everything that's supposed to be supported by "Science." It is not just that climate science becomes a conspiracy by the Greens. It also becomes a commonplace opinion that chemtrails exist, that renewables consume more energy than they produce, that electric cars pollute more than diesel and gasoline cars, that peak oil is an invention of the oil companies, and much more.
Climate science is an easy victim of this phenomenon because it is a complicated matter that most people do not completely understand (and maybe nobody does). It is relatively easy to comb the data to find examples that don't (or don't seem to) agree with the standard interpretation. From there on, it all becomes politics and all attempts to use reason or data are destined to fail. Politics is not based on data. Just look at the comments to El Gato's post and be horrified: you are staring directly into the abyss.
Yet, we must cling to science because it is the only thing we have that allows us to understand the world around us. In a sea of corruption, ossification, and ignorance, there do exist islands of sanity and understanding. Below, you can see an example of an attempt to develop a new way of looking at the ecosystem. It means not just turning CO2 into the villain of an adventure movie, but trying to understand how the whole system works and the role of the biosphere in maintaining the climate we need to survive. If we lose good science, we lose everything (UB)
Have we exaggerated with the idea that CO2 -- carbon dioxide -- is the arch villain of the story? Aren't we overemphasizing solutions that imply CO2 removal? How about geoengineering, sometimes touted as "the" solution that will allow us to keep going on burning fossil fuels?
There is no doubt that the emissions of carbon dioxide are returning the ecosystem to a condition that was never seen before at least one million years ago. There is no doubt that CO2 is warming the planet and that none of our Sapiens ancestors ever breathed in an atmosphere that contains a concentration of CO2 of 420 parts per million -- as we are doing.
But by focussing so much on CO2 alone is easy to forget what humans have been doing to the ecosystems that keep the biosphere alive (and with it, humankind). The ecosystem is a giant holobiont that strives for stability: a fundamental element to stabilize Earth's climate. It is a dangerous illusion to think that we, humans, can replace the work of Gaia with our fancy carbon capture machinery, or whatever other tricks we may concoct.
Here is a reminder by a group of people from Eastern Europe who managed to maintain a certain degree of mental sanity. They remind us of the damage we are doing. Will anyone listen to them? (UB)
Appeal to the international community, governments, scientific, public organizations and business
RECOGNIZE THE VALUE AND ROLE OF NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE!
Terrestrial and marine natural ecosystems are the basis for preservation of biological life on Earth. They have existed almost unchanged for millions of years and all this time have supported climate stability, biochemical flows, global water circulation and many other processes, irreplaceable and essential for preservation of life on our planet. Undisturbed natural ecosystems maintain the Earth's temperature, suitable for human life.
The laws of nature are the basis of life on Earth, and all the laws of human society that regulate economic, political, social and cultural relations are secondary to them and must take into account the biosphere’s operating principles and man’s place in it.
However, over the past decades, human activities aimed at meeting the needs for food, energy and water have caused unprecedented changes in ecosystems, including land degradation and deforestation. These changes have helped improve the lives of billions of people, but at the same time, they have destroyed nature's ability to regulate the environment and maintain the climate.
According to current estimates, more than 75% of natural ecosystems are subject to degradation and loss of their functions, which undermines all efforts to preserve the climate and threatens the achievement of SDGs, including hunger, disease and poverty eradication.
Humanity is standing on the edge of a precipice. Over-threshold disturbance of ecosystems leads to irreversible loss of the gene pool, up to complete disappearance of ecosystems. In the face of growing efforts and understanding of the threat of climate change, it is now necessary to recognize and support the unique role of natural ecosystems in preserving the climate and a vital environment. International climate policy adjustments and fundamental changes in national development strategies are required.
We call to wake up and recognize the fundamental and irreplaceable value of natural ecosystems and for strong and urgent action, including:
To recognize the goal of preserving natural ecosystems as humanity’s highest priority and stop their further destruction through adopting a global moratorium on any further development of territories still untouched by human activities, with international support mechanisms, including funding.
Promotion of large-scale natural reforestation is an urgent task. Climate-regulating functions of forests, associated with the ability to retain soil moisture and maintain continental water transfer, are their main value, which are orders of magnitude higher than the cost of wood. Undisturbed forests should be completely removed from economic activity by law and allocated to a separate category with the maximum degree of protection.
At all levels, from international to regional, national and local, it is necessary to review ongoing development strategies and take urgent measures to protect natural ecosystems and wildlife. It is necessary to adjust all sectoral policies, including agricultural practices, in order not only to meet the demand for food, but also to minimize the burden on natural ecosystems
A transition from conventional sectoral management to basin and ecosystem management is required, including raising the status of nature conservation goals. Water resources management should ensure that natural ecosystems are guaranteed priority in water supply that is necessary for their conservation, as well as protection and restoration of aquatic and other ecosystems - from mountains and glaciers to deltas and reservoirs.
Measures aimed at preserving natural ecosystems also require a review of existing incentives and tools and creation of new ones, so that ecosystem services are no longer perceived as free and unlimited, and their management takes into account the interests and roles of the populations and local communities which directly depend on them and are their custodians.
International Socio-Ecological Union, Eco-Forum (of 54 public organizations) of Kazakhstan, Association (non-governmental organizations) «For Sustainable Human Development of Armenia», Eco-Forum (independent non-governmental organizations) of Uzbekistan, as well as professional and non-governmental organizations of Armenia, Moldova, Russia, USA and others
