Ch. 7: Understanding the Future
Please use this thread to discuss the above referenced chapter of How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going by Vaclav Smil.
In total there are 9 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 9 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
Most users ever online was 880 on Fri Jun 28, 2024 11:45 am
ChatGPT wrote:Chapter Seven of Vaclav Smil's book "How the World Really Works" is titled "Understanding the Future". In this chapter, Smil examines various trends and patterns that have shaped the past and present, and considers their potential implications for the future.
One of the main themes of the chapter is the interconnectedness of different systems and processes in the world. Smil notes that many of the biggest challenges facing humanity - from climate change to resource depletion - are the result of complex and interrelated factors. He argues that in order to address these challenges, we need to adopt a more holistic and systems-oriented approach.
Another key theme of the chapter is the role of technology in shaping the future. Smil acknowledges that technology has the potential to drive progress and innovation, but also warns that it can have unintended consequences if not managed properly. He emphasizes the importance of carefully considering the risks and benefits of new technologies before implementing them on a large scale.
Smil also touches on the issue of global inequality, noting that while progress has been made in some areas, many people still lack access to basic necessities like food, clean water, and healthcare. He argues that addressing these inequalities is not only a moral imperative, but also essential for creating a more stable and sustainable global system.
Overall, the chapter is a call to action for individuals, organizations, and governments to think more deeply about the challenges and opportunities facing the world today, and to take a more proactive and collaborative approach to shaping the future.
I am now spending much of my time debating climate change with various expert groups. Smil’s idea that planetary physical inertia will prevent rapid change is invalid when it comes to systemic risk of tipping points. For example, melting of Arctic sea ice could cause a range of cascading tipping points, including methane release and slowing of ocean currents, while also worsening extreme weather due to destabilisation of the jet stream swapping weather conditions between the pole and temperate latitudes. These changes could happen suddenly, like an earthquake after sufficient tectonic pressure builds up.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 9:49 pm Smil's review of "the future" is dedicated to the idea that one can easily be too optimistic or too pessimistic, with some interesting cases to look at but also with plenty of rhetoric. His anchoring concept is that systems have a lot of inertia in the physical processes, so regardless of policy leanings, we won't change fast.
Smil very accurately explains that the idea of preventing global warming by cutting CO2 emissions is a laughable fantasy. Not only is it politically and economically impossible, as he explains, but as well even drastic decarbonisation would not prevent tipping points.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 9:49 pm
He applies this, in the middle part of the chapter, to climate change. It was not as frustrating as I expected, but the reader must realize that his take on it is not a thorough balancing of reasons for optimism and pessimism. Rather it is a reasonable appeal to the material constraints involved in actually changing trajectory.
My climate friends have been debating this principle in regard to climate modelling, with the view that computer models are too complacent about climate risk. The problem is that models only include what can be readily quantified. As a result, high impact medium likelihood risks are discounted, such as sudden methane release or slowing of ocean currents or collapse of ice sheets. These could have cascading effects that are as hard to predict as the timing of an earthquake, but which could be prevented by increasing albedo at low cost.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 9:49 pm
He begins with a rhetorical flourish, citing apocalyptic doomsday scenarios on one side and the extravagant promise (under a term attributed to Ray Kurzweil) of Singularity, in which AI will make all things affordable. He then reviews a number of failed predictions either too optimistic or too pessimistic. In Smil's view there are now a plethora of extreme predictions which have no foundation in quantitative analysis but just spin qualitative narratives or pack in qualitative complications without realistic structure. He then rejects quantitative models which, due to extrapolating "outside the data set" (as my econometric friends would say) have too much uncertainty to be of value. So, he argues, forecasts must hew closely to the known.
EVs are an essentially religious cult. They actually warm the planet, largely due to their high opportunity cost, crowding out recognition of the need to increase albedo. They provide religious emotional comfort through the fantasy that switching away from fossil fuels will have a more than marginal effect on the temperature, and by assuaging the irrational sense of moral evil associated with having CO2 come out of your car tail pipe. Their advocates thoroughly avoid all systematic scientific understanding of climate.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 9:49 pm He then turns to an interesting example: demographic forecasting of population size. This relatively predictable process, he argues, is more useful for forecasts than the typical set of assumptions that have been made about electric cars, for which we have very limited experience. He argues that excess optimism has characterized forecasts for shifts to electric cars, but his data as of 2020 is already slightly out of date as Tesla's order of magnitude drop in price has led to a significant surge in the EV market share.
I expect that today’s emission reduction cult will soon be seen as just as absurd as the population bomb ideas of the 1960s.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 9:49 pm In the next section, on failed predictions, he does not handle his data well. For example, in critiquing an early-60s forecast of extravagant acceleration in population growth, he simply notes that their incredible growth forecasts are impossible in a planet with finite space. Obviously this is true, but finite space is not the reason for the drastic fall in fertility rates since then. Instead, changing conceptions of family, and in particular an emphasis on (expensive) education rather than quantity of children, have dropped the birth rate to match the fallen death rate that was behind the loony forecasts. He scoffs at Peak Oil as yet another catastrophist misfire.
Many scientists are saying impacts of climate change are coming bigger and faster than models have predicted. Smil is completely wrong on this.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 9:49 pm He then sideswipes warnings about catastrophes from climate change, arguing that they are just another case of exaggeration. Unfortunately he does not engage the actual science, so that when he disparages predictions of "passing a point of no return", for example, he does not recognize that this can happen due to tipping points without us being aware that we are beyond those points. So by waving his hands and repeating "catastrophists" he wants to make us believe that the predictions of climate models are exaggerations. But the predictions to date have largely been accurate, especially within the error bars that are normally included.
Failure to understand inertia, scale and mass is a key problem in climate policy. The inertia and scale of fossil energy systems means the ability to transition to renewable energy is far slower than its advocates tend to dream. The inertia is as much cultural and political as economic or technological. People simply cannot imagine how rapid change can be achieved in a voluntary way where their economic interests are against it. This explains why higher albedo should become the main focus of climate policy, accepting that carbon reform will be slower.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 10:22 pm The heart of the final chapter is a section entitled "Inertia, scale and mass". In this he argues that improvement in technical proficiency is likely to continue, and he uses the example of food production. He dismisses speculation about hydroponics replacing farmland and argues that the basic material demands of agriculture are not going to allow such a drastic replacement. His realism is laudable, but I often had the feeling he was jousting with straw men.
The reason past changes have been rapid – in land transport, aviation, telephony, chemicals, medicine, the internet, etc – is that they have been driven by individual interests. Climate change is entirely different, in that no individual interests are sufficient to motivate change at the speed and scale required. Climate security is a public good that can only be delivered by coordinated collective global action. That is not unprecedented. The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference established the IMF and World Bank in order to prevent a repeat of the systemic imbalances that produced the Depression. We have equivalent systemic imbalances in the climate that could be managed through a similar international climate authority, but in my view the focus would need to shift solely onto albedo, leaving carbon based measures to national and firm level action.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 10:22 pm
When he gets as far as admitting that some past transitions (e.g. from raising huge quantities of feed for horses and mules to using mechanized traction power) have been rapid, he argues this may have been because the quantities involved were comparatively small. It's an important point - we are now talking about a population of 8 billion humans, not 2 billion. His point about material inertia is well made by one comparison he makes: in the first 20 years of this century renewables supply rose 50-fold, but it translated into only a 2 percent change in fossil fuel reliance, from 87 percent of world energy supply at the beginning to 85 percent at the end.
The main climate problem is a failure of thinking. Because the debate is forced into the old left right thinking of building a united front of progressive forces to capture the state, the idea that fossil fuel companies could be allies in increasing albedo is excluded, even though this is the only possible way to prevent collapse of world civilization. Climate activists prefer collapse to realism.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 10:22 pm He then turns to the optimism that has followed from the electronics revolution(s). All right for information flows, he argues, although the time lags between discovery and transformative roles have actually been quite long - often 50 or 60 years and sometimes 100. But information flows will not change the material needs to move things around, build things and grow food. And, as promising as I find Zoom meetings and the internet in general, I have to believe he is making an important point. The thing is, by the time policy-makers come to grips with this inertia, for example by actually requiring high standards of insulation rather than just giving tax breaks for it, it will be too late to avert climate disaster. Frankly it is pretty much already too late.
The climate problem is primarily one of paradigm shift, that elites cannot abide the intense embarrassment of proof that the policies they have advocated cannot work, and prefer stubbornly to stick with the decarbonisation path even though its inevitable results are steadily worsening extreme weather, species loss, sea level rise and systemic instabilities, all of which could readily be fixed by rapid implementation of albedo measures. The idea that cutting emissions could fix the climate is an ethical scandal and monstrous stupidity of the first order that will soon come to be seen as akin to supporting slavery or believing the world is flat.Harry Marks wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 10:22 pm Ignorance, persistence and humility
In the next section he uses an extended analysis of mis-steps concerning COVID to argue that policy is likely to flub the task of foreseeing the needs of the future and preparing for whatever drastic collapses are headed our way. I find his basic point solid, and his examples highly suggestive. However, I also feel he almost ignores the innovative methods employed to generate vaccines in record time, and the research money that had been flowing into the new methods before this critically urgent use was experienced. In a similar way, he argues that the response to the financial crisis of 2008 was insufficiently thorough, as though Dodd-Frank and Basel III were mild and ineffectual. While I would agree that more should have been done both before and after the crisis, I don't see this as a persuasive argument that inertia should be considered baked into policy processes.