Inconvenient Models of our Likely Future

by Gary Berg-Cross

 At a recent WASH MDC meeting on Peace Issues main panelist Edd Doerr

noted how the hope of advancing the world peace agenda will be challenged by a number of destabilizing forces as detailed in Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. As Edd noted Diamond discussed collapses of once-powerful societies including the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. He also features the iconic Easter Island collapse as inhabitants destroyed their environment 

“where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!” The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.”  From the Long Now Foundation

All of current society might face similar collapse.

Along with climate change and environmental degradation there is the pressure of population growth.

These were time observations and Edd and Jared are not alone in their concern. Recently the Guardian newspaper had an article by researchers Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander which looked back at earlier predictions about what the earth of 2100 might be like.  Their focus was a study commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome in the 1970s. I've blogged on this before.  The club’s research developed a model using of key factors including population but also - industrialization, food, use of resources, and environmental pollution. Their data base was modest by today’s standards but they had 20^th century data up to 1970.  To look forward they developed a range of scenarios (optimistic, pessimistic, likely etc.) out to 2100. An optimistic view was that human societies and institutions would take the problem seriously and take substantial action on environmental and resource issues. Well we know that these along with carbon abatement didn’t happen. The club’s central warning that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc. would eventually lead to a crash was, much criticized and shouted down by the establishment and its operatives such as the Club for Growth. After all business as usual and its growth was threatened as it is by a serious response to climate change. Indeed even in the “business-as-usual” scenario rather than the pessimistic view the club’s model predicted “overshoot and collapse” within the economy (yes Club for Growth think of 2007-8), environment and population before 2070.  As the population grows resources are used up and get more expensive, we metaphorically cut down our trees like the Easter islanders and impoverish our environment.

So where are we now as we are half way from the 1970s to 2070?  Right on schedule for overshoot and collapse it seems as the Guardian reports the models are on track.

“The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. The data doesn’t match up with other scenarios.

These graphs show real-world data (first from the MIT work, then from our research), plotted in a solid line. The dotted line shows the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario out to 2100. Up to 2010, the data is strikingly similar to the book’s forecasts.”

To be clear the Club’s models developed by MIT are not as good as we have now but their crustal ball has been better than the business as usual folks. As Turner and Alexander say their research like the earlier work is not a definitive prediction of worldwide economic, environmental and population collapse. They aren’t here to say the future will unfold exactly in the pattern described in the “Limits to Growth” scenarios. We don’t know enough to predict things like resources wars or large panic migrations or as they say the emergence of “genuine environmental leadership” that could dramatically affect what happens.

Turner and Alexander end their article by quoting a paragraph from the conclusion of “Limits to Growth” which still seems like good advice even if we are 40 years closer to 2100:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. (from Current Trends Follow Book Predicting Global Collapse)

Doing CO2 Math

By Gary Berg-Cross

The Do the Math Tour and Rally organized by 350.org blew into DC for a post-election  protest on Sunday Nov. 18, 2012. The Washington Post didn’t seem to cover it on a normal weather day.  The rally chanting "Forward to Clean Energy" included 3 thousand or so people and a symbolically inflated, plastic pipeline (for the Keystone pipeline that if approved would carry tar sans oil to a port).  The pipeline, lofted by protestors, was carried from Freedom plaza, across the ellipse and in front of the White House where the chants included "Hey Obama, we don't want no climate drama," and "Michelle Obama, tell your man, stop that dirty pipeline plan!." There people called on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all because it would open a vast new reservoir of carbon-based energy at a time when we need to be moving in the opposite direction - closing strip mines, offshore oil wells, and coal-fired power plants. This and other points were made by post-march speakers including Bill McKibben, Sierra Club President Allison Chin, Indigenous Environmental Network organizer Marty Cobenais, Gulf Coast activist Cherri Foytlin, and others.

The 21-city tour is yet another creative move from the mind and heart of environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben and worthy of note, so here are a few of the points it makes.

McKibben and his 350.org organization hopes the rallies and marches will ignite  groundswell of nationwide protest movement which in turn can be focused to pressure more traditional institutions to divest funds in the fossil-fuel industry and in the immediate stop the XL pipeline.

The challenge is great as past efforts since environmentalists and regular folk are:

“ up against the most profitable, powerful, and dangerous industry in history. But we have our own currency: creativity, courage and, if needed, our bodies." (McKibben quoted from his rally speeches)

Bill Clinton was able to make quite a point about arithmetic and things not adding up at the Democratice convention and environment Bill McKibben  used arithmetic to equal effect in Rolling Stone to discuss the  Global Warming's Terrifying New Math:

June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Now he adds year end stat that to this point 2012 has been the warmest year on record and points to a series of disasters (fires, floods, Sandy etc.) including “we melted the arctic this summer!” Former UN  Secretary General Kofi Annan has his own list:

 “Global warming is causing more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/science/earth/29climate.html

What to do and where to start?  The big new statistics  concerns CO2, fossil fuel use and what it will do to the climate:

Rally at Freedom Plaza

Rally Stage

There's more fossil fuels (nearly 2,230 gigatons more) that corporations want consumers to buy and burn than climate scientists says is safe to do if people want to live on a planet the climate-wise resembles the one we live on now.  Even the most conservative governments in the world, he argues, have agreed that global warming should be limited to no more than 2°C. And climate scientists say to meet that target we can only emit an additional 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2)  into the atmosphere. But how much fossil fuel is in the ground? The fossil fuel industry itself says there is about enough reserves of fuel to produce  2795 gigatonnes of CO2. It’s simple math.  There is about  nearly five times what will produce a dire atmosphere.  Do we have the wisdom and confidence to leave some 4/5ths of the reserves where it is?  The fuel industry & funded  friends have a business model that externalizes damages.  They want to burn it all as spend their profits looking for more. As Bill says, our grandchildren  looking back 50 or more from now won’t be asking what we thought of the fiscal slope or sex scandals.  They will be asking about our moral wisdom. They will want to know what were thinking, doing and planning when the climate was changing around us.

Oh,  and with this in mind there will be another rally in February on President's day weekend.  This will be organized by front-line groups like the Sierra Club, the oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization with 755,000 members, who will be driving the nation-wide efforts as a way of keeping pressure on Big Oil.

350.org is building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. You can connect with them on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for email alerts.  

Images

Tour Logo: http://ecowatch.org/2012/350-org-launches-do-the-math-tour/

Bill McKibben speaking at NTC rally: http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/8195858617/

Occupy Sandy: http://www.facebook.com/greenpeaceusa/posts/432317803489817

DC rally: picture taken by Gary Berg-Cross