{"id":1700,"date":"2012-03-24T07:31:52","date_gmt":"2012-03-24T12:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1700"},"modified":"2014-11-16T14:32:43","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T19:32:43","slug":"approaching-30-days-from-the-40th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/approaching-30-days-from-the-40th-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"Approaching 30 days from the 40th Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

There seems to be no news yet. \u00a0 The recent 40th anniversary meeting at the Smithsonian<\/a> on the publication of “The Limits to Growth” and the clearly most urgent of our many dire environmental dilemmas of our time, with little exception<\/a>, has gotten almost no attention in the mainstream popular or environmental press. \u00a0So you’ll have to hear it from a real scientist as to why. <\/em><\/p>\n

The reason is that the mainstream press is limited to discussing social issues. \u00a0That our means of sustaining our prosperity\u00a0is rapidly exhausting the earth just isn’t one of them, as the resource scientists who study “the blue ball” actually “have no social standing”. \u00a0 There’s a fascinating history to that, that reveals some eye opening new science.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A nice place to visit,
\nWas a wonderful place to live,
\nwith tremendous open spaces, and overflowing with natural wealth<\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

The Limits to Growth – On the 40th anniversary of publication<\/h3>\n

I. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0_<\/span><\/p>\n

There was a well attended meeting in Washington on Mar 1, the 40th<\/sup> anniversary of the Club of Rome sponsored study \u201cThe limits to Growth\u201d by Dennis and Donella Meadows et. al.\u00a0\u00a0 The study\u2019s major predictions are largely being upheld as accurate predictions of the future, as far as sharp resource shortages developing globally if no prompt action is taken (in the 1970\u2019s).\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The great interest in the subject has dwindled since then, accompanied by popular negative characterization of the study as \u201cprofessional doomsaying that often dominates development discourse\u201d.<\/p>\n

How the seemingly authoritative environmental blogs have responded, characterized by Dot Earth of the NY Times, is with silence.\u00a0 \u00a0Said \u201cdoomsaying\u201d is in fact often discredited as in the Mar 8 post on Dot Earth, Closer Look: Deep Poverty in Retreat<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0It contrasted the anxious views of resource scientists with the highly optimistic work of Charles Kenny<\/a>, described the latter as \u201can invaluable counterweight\u201d, to said \u201cdoomsaying\u201d.<\/p>\n

There is undoubtedly cause for optimism about the limitless resources of the earth when looking how we have always succeeded in accelerating our use of them.\u00a0\u00a0 What optimists like Charles Kenny omit, and others such as Hans Rosling<\/a> too, is how completely unsustainable that history is.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s just not socially popular to discuss that at the moment.\u00a0\u00a0 All our giant steps of social progress over the last dozen generations have been based on inventing ways of depleting the earth\u2019s resources ever faster.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

II. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0_<\/span><\/p>\n

There is also a quite long history of first rate science on understanding our future being treated as \u201cdoomsaying\u201d to be distained and ignored, with the limits to growth just one of them.\u00a0\u00a0 To be balanced, of course, there is surely a great deal of the opposite in history too, lots of \u201cdoomsaying\u201d that was popular for a moment but groundless.\u00a0 \u00a0Instead of just falling flat of , what seems to happen to the good science treated that way is for social groups to select the more negative parts for ridicule?\u00a0 \u00a0Ostracizing people and groups by selecting out offending aspects of what they represent is very common way of social decision making, as in the social discrediting of opposing politicians we see so very much of.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not surprising that after introductions and formalities, one of the first topics Dennis Meadows raised was just that. Why did the public only give attention to ridiculing the danger of our doing nothing? \u00a0\u00a0A number of the scenarios the study presented showed successful outcomes, but the journalists who called him for comment simply never brought those up!\u00a0\u00a0 All the public and popular press responded to was the chance to discredit the astounding predictions for ignoring the findings and doing nothing.\u00a0 Even the huge irony of that has been missed it seems.<\/p>\n

The public never seems to notice that even the most pessimistic studies tend to show the very same thing as the most optimistic, up to the point when our fortunes suddenly reverse, as now seems to be taking place. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The point has always been that getting better and better at using things up comes to a relatively sudden end.\u00a0\u00a0 The deeper problem that warning is intended to help identify is that of the economy, our collective creativity, and their resource use, have long been managed to expand by ever bigger steps the bigger they get.\u00a0 That\u2019s also how money is managed and needs to pay ever growing returns to investors.\u00a0 It creates a kind of societal \u201cjoy ride\u201d that people don\u2019t seem to understand much, and definitely don\u2019t want others to spoil for them<\/p>\n

Since Malthus published \u201cThe principle of population\u201d two centuries ago, his finding that population growth seemed to have no limit but the exhaustion or the food resources of the earth has been ridiculed by generation after generation.\u00a0\u00a0 We now see a substantial form of what he predicted physically happening, though, as a continually spreading world \u201cfood crisis\u201d.\u00a0 It\u2019s occurring even as prospering parts of society can continue to increase their food consumption.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The form it is taking is as a global price spiral for all resources, not just food.<\/p>\n

The important work of Stanley Jevons has long been discredited in popular circles too, for pointing to the quite clear evidence that technological efficiency makes resource use more profitable. It\u2019s very evident with no more analysis than just plotting the world GDP, energy use & energy use GDP efficiency<\/a>, as I discuss in talks.\u00a0 \u00a0Consequently it generally gets used for profitable investments.\u00a0 That accelerates the expansion of the whole economy and the depletion of every resource the economy uses.\u00a0\u00a0 It does save resources for any use, but then multiplies uses.<\/p>\n

The major contribution to the field of J M Keynes was also ridiculed and discarded.\u00a0 He observed in Chapter 16 of \u201cThe General Theory\u201d<\/a> , to the great dismay of the economics profession, that over-expansion of capital investment would naturally cause \u201cemployment [] low enough and the standard of life sufficiently miserable to bring savings to zero.\u201d\u00a0 Identifying over-investment as making the economy unprofitable as a whole as a problem, the alternative he identified was for investors to voluntarily end their automatic use their financial savings to accumulate ever growing capital investments.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s helpful compare the reception to the IPCC\u2019s studies of CO2 and climate change to that given The Limits to Growth.\u00a0\u00a0 The two studies are quite similar, discussing ranges of good and bad scenarios, using similar kinds of computer models, having similarly valid assumptions and now being similarly successful in their predictions, for the \u201cdo nothing\u201d option.<\/p>\n

The limits for rapidly depleting the earth\u2019s resources are coming far sooner than the effects of climate change, is one difference, and the consequences would arguably be much more severe, already being felt with regularly escalating price spikes for resource of most kinds.\u00a0 Logically it would be given priority attention.\u00a0 \u00a0At least everyone\u2019s heard of the IPCC studies, though, and most people today might never have heard of the Limits to Growth.<\/p>\n

III. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 _<\/span><\/p>\n

I think the real reason the public as well as most of the scientific community is largely ignoring the rather well established hard limits to growth, is that it presents the scientific community a new problem it hasn’t yet learned how to deal with. \u00a0It has yet to\u00a0find a good way to make sense of self-designing and self-managing systems, like weather systems, cultures and economies,\u00a0that have working designs that are \u00a0hidden internally, displaying\u00a0organization\u00a0much too complex and localized to be determined\u00a0by\u00a0external forces.<\/p>\n

I think the real reason the public is largely ignoring both is that science has yet to find a good way to make sense of self-designing and self-managing systems, like weather systems, cultures and economies. \u00a0 Science is built around identifying how one thing controls another, not on how uncontrolled systems design and work by themselves. \u00a0 So science is naturally somewhat lost in discussing how they work, having no model for what are better described as “opportunistic” than “deterministic” systems. \u00a0 Though both climate and economies display highly inventive systems, they do still necessarily operate within what traditional science can define as their natural bounds. \u00a0 \u00a0 Climate is still\u00a0fundamentally\u00a0a complex pressure-temperature behavior, of unchanging deterministic\u00a0processes following fixed laws of science.<\/p>\n

Economies though, are able to be far more creative, and move the boundaries of what is possible by innovative design, much further than the push and pull forces of the weather can. \u00a0 It has given traditional science very little to anchor reliable theory on, except as in the Limits to Growth study, fixing boundary conditions and experimenting with multiple options. \u00a0Still, because economies do display\u00a0deeply creative behavior, constantly inventing new ways to use\u00a0energy\u00a0as a normal rule, that natural science still lacks a widely accepted way to study them as\u00a0natural systems, adds uncertainty for others to\u00a0what anyone might say about them.<\/p>\n

Constantly inventing new organization is just what natural systems ‘do’. \u00a0 It lets economies as well as ecologies create new kinds of organization and uses for their energy resources, making formerly useless things highly profitable often enough. \u00a0 Using the profits as\u00a0returns on energy investment to grow by building more innovations. \u00a0 It’s complicated by not being a ‘numeric’ process, though we can see it through our measures. \u00a0 It’s an “organizational process”, of fitting complementary parts together, more amenable to study as a “pattern language” of “design elements” than equations.<\/p>\n

The rigid limits of any mode of productivity still do exist, of course, but as limits of the organizational processes science has yet to find a way to study. \u00a0 Those limits are still determined by the earth and the organization of the\u00a0internal and external systems that any innovation depends on, but with each new innovation there are new unknown limits. \u00a0It leaves a stubborn problem for traditional scientific prediction. \u00a0 What seems to work better is a language of observing such systems to see when their own organization is being stretched.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Natural systems generally link individual units of organization in an open rather than deterministic environment, each with\u00a0its own internal organization that emerged during\u00a0its own development, creating a serious mis-match between\u00a0the natural design and the\u00a0information an\u00a0observer could collect,\u00a0and with the kinds of behaviors that can be emulated by equations.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That big problem for science also makes a big and very fascinating subject of study, that science has quite generally not realized is there, having avoided the study of self-designing and managing systems in general. \u00a0 \u00a0Self-designing ans managing systems not only seem to develop by themselves, but to have their “works” hidden internally within the boundaries of their design, as an individual system maintaining internal organization for responding to external systems, like we see in living systems as a special case in point.<\/p>\n

So their behaviors are not really determined externally, as if by the information outside observers can collect the way deterministic systems can be modeled. \u00a0 \u00a0They have to be studied as negotiating\u00a0their own behaviors between independently organized internal and external systems, quite an unusual posture for traditional science. \u00a0 I means outside observers normally\u00a0have no information on their critically important internal designs a behaviors. \u00a0 How that becomes a fascinating subject of study is recognizing their natural boundaries define enormous holes in our information<\/a> about how things work, a true gold mine for new science.<\/p>\n

How to begin studying the thermodynamics of\u00a0energy crossing boundaries of\u00a0self-organization is a very basic but important step, and the subject of my longer research paper last year, \u00a0System Energy Assessment (SEA)<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0By aggregating the data not by our arbitrary categories for how we collect it, but by how the system’s parts are connected to work together, produces a profoundly meaningful new result, the ability to study such systems as individual\u00a0wholes.<\/p>\n

There are many ways to identify the natural boundaries of self-managed systems, \u00a0as closely interconnected\u00a0parts distinct from an\u00a0otherwise passive environment, for example. \u00a0 When a concentration of energy uses is notably more complex than the external forces on it, you identify the system by its distinctive “miss-match in variety”. \u00a0 You can confirm such identifications with tracing how they developed, always displaying “S” curves of accumulative design over time, with recognizable processes for generating an energy surplus to be invested in expanding the system producing it. \u00a0 Those identifiers locate the heart of the working system, and how it is organized to work as a whole. \u00a0 You then understand what you are looking at, as you see them:<\/p>\n