Evaluating Existential Threats

In a recent post, I talked about how most people are loath to discuss collapse, some even believing that talking about it makes it more likely to happen. After all, Business As Usual is working just fine and everything is going to be alright. Right?

In contrast to this sort of head-in-the-sand optimism there are people (admittedly a much smaller number of us) who like to focus on existential threats—things that promise, at the very least, to wipe out a large chunk of our human population and, at the worst, to bring an end to life on earth. When you start looking into this you'll find that there are quite a variety of such threats. In my next two posts, I'll take a look at a selection of them. I'll explain why I think that the kind of collapse that I've been talking about is the threat most worthy of most of our attention. And in the process we'll get a clearer picture of what kind of collapse that is.

This post, though, is about the virtues of worrying and how to evaluate existential threats.

What "virtues of worrying", you ask? Worry certainly isn't in fashion these days. On social media one frequently sees this little flowchart about when to worry. All paths seem to leads to the same conclusion—"don't worry".

Now, I admit to being somewhat of a worry wart. Perhaps because of that I can see several things wrong with this flowchart. First, when you don't know, you need to find out. While you are finding out, worry serves as an incentive. And at the bottom of the chart the possibility that there is a problem, and that you can do something about it, is very much under emphasized. Worry serves as an incentive to find out what you can do, make a plan and then execute it. When you've set that in motion, I guess maybe you could quit worrying, but instead I would swing back around to the top left of the chart and see if there is anything else to worry about.

On the other hand, it is true that you can waste a great deal of time and mental anguish worrying about things over which you have no real influence. You have to identify problems that you can actually do something about and concentrate your efforts there. Of course, different people will reach different conclusions—it's a big world and there is lots of room for disagreement. We can't really determine what the right thing to do is without a lot of trial and error, so a diversity of response is a good thing in that it makes it more likely that some of those responses will be more or less successful.

I'll borrow a "new word" from John Michael Greer—"dissensus". The opposite of consensus, dissensus means agreeing to disagree and wishing the other guy all the best even if you think his ideas are outright crazy or stupid. Provided, of course, that he extends a similar courtesy to you. I've noticed that when people are willing to do this, and then find themselves faced with a serious threat, it often turns out that on important points like "what the heck do we do next" there is a remarkable degree of agreement. Ideological differences can be set aside when we are dealing with more immediate problems.

What I am expressing here on this blog is my own point of view, which you are free to disagree with. I do wish you all the best in pursuing your own point of view. And if we find ourselves coming up with similar plans, it may be that we can help each other to put them into action.

What is my point of view? Well, I have a great deal of faith in the scientific consensus—we really don't have any better way than science of finding out about the world around us, and in the last few hundred years science has built up a pretty useful picture of that world.

Some will no doubt ask, "How can you question BAU and expect it to collapse and yet still be in favour of the scientific consensus?"

It is a common error to conflate the scientific consensus with the "official stories" that are the basic myths of Business As Usual. You can hardly blame anyone for jumping to the conclusion that BAU and science are on the same side, since every effort is made to use science to legitimize the ideas of BAU. Those myths are pushed by politicians, economists and business. They are dressed up in the kind of pseudoscientific costumes that make them hard to distinguish from reality. The "Biggest Lie" that I talked about recently, the idea that our population and consumption can go on growing forever on a finite planet, is at the heart of this false worldview.

There are lots of people who don't completely buy into BAU. And there are multi-billion dollar per year businesses (organic farming, health food, and alternative medicine to name just a few) who take advantage of that, spending a great deal on propaganda and doing a good job of positioning themselves as being in opposition to Business as Usual. There is money to be made in that business, but the pseudoscience they are selling is just as bad as the myths from regular BAU. The people pushing both of these ideologies are very adept at finding the parts of science that happen to agree with their positions and flogging them for all they are worth to further their cause.

The idea of these two conflicting ideologies, both of which are wrong, is central to what I am talking about on this blog and you'll find it coming up again and again. Last year I wrote a series of posts on the subject:

• Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 1
• Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 2: BAU and The Religion of Progress
• Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 2b: More on what's wrong with Business as Usual
• Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 3: Focusing on the Woo in Crunchiness
• Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 4: A Reality Based Approach

If anybody can suggest a better term than "Crunchy", something less pejorative and more mellifluous, I'd sure be happy to use it. Setting aside all the pseudoscience for a moment, Crunchiness, in its opposition to BAU, is on the right track.

Anyway, if you actually take the time and make the effort to understand how science works and what the current scientific consensus is, you'll realize that it does not particularly support either of these ideologies. But for a great many people, who don't have any real background in science, the combination of conflicting ideologies and pseudoscience is extremely misleading.

One unfortunate side effect of this is that a great deal of worry and effort is wasted on problems that nothing need be done about (because the risk is vanishingly small), or that nothing can be done about (because solutions are beyond our reach). Risk assessment is the key to avoiding this sort of thing.

Ask yourself four things when considering any particular problem or threat:

1. Risk: what is the likelihood of this happening?
2. Severity: what are the consequences if this does happen?
3. Difficulty: how hard will it be to do something about this?
4. Timescale: how soon will this happen?

If you study up on any existential threat, you'll find reliable experts who have already considered the problem and have a lot of wisdom to offer.

Based on the answers you find to each of those questions, you will decide to worry or not:

 

• If risk is small, there isn't much to worry about and little need to plan a response.
• If the severity is small, same conclusion.
• If it would be easy to do something about the threat, you may want to take some action even if the risk and/or severity are small. If response is difficult then it will require detailed planning and the mobilization of forces beyond yourself. And you will need time to mount a response.
• Sometimes it is simply not possible to stop a threat from happening, so the action we can realistically take consists of preparing to cope its effects.
• If the timescale is short, you'll want to plan and act immediately. Preferably to draw on resources you already have in place.
• If the timescale is long then you may use that time to plan and mobilize your response, or, you may decide to just watch and wait until it is more clear what's going to happen and when. Of course, ignoring threats that are on a long timeline is a tempting but dangerous approach. Eventually that timeline will get a lot shorter.

You'll plan a response based on the nature of the threat and follow up with action, or go and look for something else to worry about. After the first few times you run through your list of threats, you will already have made plans and started to implement them, so the time for worry is over. Of course, you'll always want to keep a "weather eye" out for trouble that you haven't anticipated, or established threats that have changed and now require a different response.

There are a few challenges involved with this approach that we should consider here.

How to identify a reliable expert is certainly one of those challenges. Unfortunately the letters "Dr." in front of a name is no guarantee that someone is either an expert or reliable. I can recommend only skepticism, critical thinking and learning to identifying the many types of bias and the sort of dirty tricks used by those producing pseudoscience. After a while you will develop at sort of "BS" detector that goes off when you are confronted with pseudoscience. A big part of that is knowing what the current scientific consensus says and being skeptical about claims that contradict that consensus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And it is reassuring to find many researchers turning up the same findings, and interpreting them in similar ways.

Some will be eager to point out that scientists working for business concerns are certainly not reliable and their work just can't be trusted, as it will be biased to the advantage of the company. Sometimes this is true, but just as often it is not true. Your evaluation of that work must be based on the evidence, not on ideology—theirs, or yours.

Evaluating risk can also be quite challenging. In my experience there are a couple of particular pitfalls that people encounter. There are probably more, but these are the ones I know personally.

People often look at risk as being "monotonic". That is, if something is dangerous in large quantities, it must also be dangerous in small quantities—it may take longer for the harm to become evident, but there is still harm. This certainly sounds reasonable, but in most cases it is simply not true. Take radiation as an example. There is no doubt that ionizing radiation can kill in large quantities. This makes it frightening and since it can't be seen and is poorly understood, many people don't want to have anything to do with it, assuming that any release of radiation will affect them negatively.

But life on earth has been dealing with small quantities of radiation since day one and has evolved mechanisms for coping with the "background radiation". Most releases of radiation result in a barely detectable increase in the background and are not a serious concern. Of course, if you work in the nuclear industry, where there is the chance of exposure to significant amounts of radiation, you should take safety procedures seriously. And that brings me to my second risk evaluation pitfall.

The majority of the people I worked with during my career in the electrical transmission and distribution industry were quite brave. We often worked in close proximity to serious hazards and while a healthy respect was vital, outright fear would have been crippling. So far, so good. But some of the hazards we encountered were less straightforward. If there is a one in ten chance of serious injury, essentially everyone will take the appropriate precautions. But at some level of decreasing risk, many people will decide to just accept the risk, rather than do much about it. Especially if the precautions they are expected to take (procedures and protective equipment) are rather onerous.

At what level of risk is that a reasonable response? One in a million? Probably. But what about one chance in a thousand? My experience is that there is a range of risk that is significant, but many people find hard to take seriously. The trouble is, if a large population is exposed to the risk on a regular basis, the odds good are that someone is going to get hurt fairly soon. That's why the safety rules are written and why supervisors (me at one point) have to enforce them, even if they didn't take them so serious when they were workers. Something to keep in mind when evaluating risks.

One final thing I should point out—it seems to me that mankind as a whole is at or just past the peak of our ability to respond to large existential threats. From here on in, as collapse proceeds, it's all a bumpy downhill ride. The best we will be able to do, in a great many cases, is to mitigate the effects of what is coming. And since it appears that governments aren't interested in, and increasing don't have the resources to organize such a response, this will have to be done on an individual, family, or at most, community level.

So, what are some of these threats? I've divided them into two groups: non-anthropogenic (not manmade) and anthropogenic (manmade), and I'll be covering them in my next two posts.

The Limits to Growth, Part 5

In my last post we looked at The Limits to Growth, Chapter V—The State of Global Equilibrium. The post concludes my review of this book, with a look at the last two sections and some thoughts of my own.

Commentary

This chapter is by the Executive Committee of the Club of Rome and contains their comments on the book. They make it clear that they did want a study on limits.

...we had two immediate objectives in mind. One was to gain insights into the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity....

A second objective was to help identify and study the dominant elements, and their interactions, that influence the long term behavior of world systems....

The report has served these purposes well. It represents a bold step toward a comprehensive and integrated analysis of the world situation, an approach that will now require years to refine, deepen, and extend. Nevertheless, this report is only a first step. The limits to growth it examines are only the known uppermost physical limits imposed by the finiteness of the world system. In reality, these limits are further reduced by political, social, and institutional constraints, by inequitable distribution of population and resources, and by our inability to manage very large intricate systems.

But the report serves further purposes. It advances tentative suggestions for the future state of the world and opens new perspectives for continual intellectual and practical endeavor to shape that future.

A preliminary draft was submitted to 40 people, mostly members of the Club of Rome, who responded with just the kind of weak criticisms that have become so familiar in the years since the book was published.

1. Since models can accommodate only a limited number of variables, the interactions studied are only partial. It was pointed out that in a global model such as the one used in this study the degree of aggregation is necessarily high as well. Nevertheless, it was generally recognized that, with a simple world model, it is possible to examine the effect of a change in basic assumptions or to simulate the effect of a change in policy to see how such changes influence the behavior of the system over time. Similar experimentation in the real world would be lengthy, costly, and in many cases impossible.

2. It was suggested that insufficient weight had been given to the possibilities of scientific and technological advances in solving certain problems, such as the development of foolproof contraceptive methods, the production of protein from fossil fuels, the generation or harnessing of virtually limitless energy (including pollution-free solar energy), and its subsequent use for synthesizing food from air and water and for extracting minerals from rocks. It was agreed, however, that such developments would probably come too late to avert demographic or environmental disaster. In any case they probably would only delay rather than avoid crisis, for the problematique consists of issues that require more than technical solutions.

3. Others felt that the possibility of discovering stocks of raw materials in areas as yet insufficiently explored was much greater than the model assumed. But, again, such discoveries would only postpone shortage rather than eliminate it. It must, however, be recognized that extension of resource availability by several decades might give man time to find remedies.

4. Some considered the model too "technocratic," observing that it did not include critical social factors, such as the effects of adoption of different value systems. The chairman of the Moscow meeting summed up this point when he said, "Man is no mere biocybernetic device." This criticism is readily admitted. The present model considers man only in his material system because valid social elements simply could not be devised and introduced in this first effort. Yet, despite the model's material orientation, the conclusions of the study point to the need for fundamental change in the values of society.

Overall, a majority of those who read this report concurred with its position. Furthermore, it is clear that, if the arguments submitted in the report (even after making allowance for justifiable criticism) are considered valid in principle, their significance can hardly be overestimated....

Although we can here express only our preliminary views, recognizing that they still require a great deal of reflection and ordering, we are in agreement on the following points:

1. We are convinced that realization of the quantitative restraints of the world environment and of the tragic consequences of an overshoot is essential to the initiation of new forms of thinking that will lead to a fundamental revision of human behavior and, by implication, of the entire fabric of present-day society.

2. We are further convinced that demographic pressure in the world has already attained such a high level, and is moreover so unequally distributed, that this alone must compel mankind to seek a state of equilibrium on our planet.

3. We recognize that world equilibrium can become a reality only if the lot of the so-called developing countries is substantially improved, both in absolute terms and relative to the economically developed nations, and we affirm that this improvement can be achieved only through a global strategy.

4. We affirm that the global issue of development is, however, so closely interlinked with other global issues that an overall strategy must be evolved to attack all major problems, including in particular those of man's relationship with his environment.

5. We recognize that the complex world problematique is to a great extent composed of elements that cannot be expressed in measurable terms. Nevertheless, we believe that the predominantly quantitative approach used in this report is an indispensable tool for understanding the operation of the problematique. And we hope that such knowledge can lead to a mastery of its elements.

6. We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the primary task facing humanity.

7. This supreme effort is a challenge for our generation. It cannot be passed on to the next. The effort must be resolutely undertaken without delay, and significant redirection must be achieved during this decade.

8. We have no doubt that if mankind is to embark on a new course, concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent.

9. We unequivocally support the contention that a brake imposed on world demographic and economic growth spirals must not lead to a freezing of the status quo of economic development of the world's nations.

10. We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national, and world levels. This change is perhaps already in the air, however faintly.

But our tradition, education, current activities, and interests will make the transformation embattled and slow. Only real comprehension of the human condition at this turning point in history can provide sufficient motivation for people to accept the individual sacrifices and the changes in political and economic power structures required to reach an equilibrium state.

The question remains of course whether the world situation is in fact as serious as this book, and our comments, would indicate. We firmly believe that the warnings this book contains are amply justified, and that the aims and actions of our present civilization can only aggravate the problems of tomorrow. But we would be only too happy if our tentative assessments should prove too gloomy.

The commentary concludes with the following thoughts:

The last thought we wish to offer is that man must explore himself-his goals and values-as much as the world he seeks to change. The dedication to both tasks must be unending. The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

Appendix

Simply a list of related studies, and the last section in the book.

---

My thoughts

I think it is first and foremost important to understand that the idea of exponential growth leading to overshoot and collapse should not be a surprise to anyone. This is simply the way ecosystems behave. It is the height of hubris to believe that the human race is an exception to this. Of course, many people do believe exactly that—that because we are intelligent and can anticipate problems before they occur, we will always be able to solve them.

There is also a common misconception that there is "a balance of nature", that leads us not to expect ecosystems to undergo change. Of course our ecosystem has undergone drastic change during the last two centuries, but many people have become inured to this, see it as normal and expect that it can go on forever.

It may be that the authors of The Limits to Growth should have spent more time familiarizing their readers with these issues...

At any rate, once one has understood the implications of exponential growth, it also should be of no surprise that none of the proposed technological solutions in Chapter 4 provide more than temporary relief. Or any other technological solutions, really. The problem, after all, is the exponential growth, not the technology. If we could just get the growth under control (stopped, in other words), the judicious application of appropriate technologies might lead to a stable system, as discussed in Chapter 5.

Stopping that growth, though, would be a social, not a technological solution. And it seems that we don't have a very good grasp of how to engineer social change. For the most part it just happens in reaction to whatever is going on, rather than as part of any sort of plan.

I can't help observing that except for the Standard Run, all the other model runs in The limits to Growth involve ridiculously optimistic assumptions. Even the ones that still end in collapse. The "successful" ones shown in Figures 46 and 47 take that optimism even further, especially as regards social change. And while population and industrial activity are stabilized in those runs, resources are still being used in a non-sustainable way. If those runs were continued on into the twenty second century, at some point they too would run into a resource crisis.

A great many otherwise intelligent people were totally gobsmacked by this book, and reacted very negatively. They simply didn't believe in limits and it seems that The Limits to Growth only hardened that irrational disbelief.

But here we are 44 years after the book was published. Can't we just look at how things turned out to see if there was anything to the future they predicted? Yes, indeed we can—have a look at Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data by Dr Graham M. Turner, who is a Principal Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia.

It turns out that the Limits to Growth standard model run is a pretty good match to how things have turned out since then. In the standard run, resource depletion started early in this century and required more capital to be diverted to the resource sector.

With significant capital subsequently going into resource extraction, there is insufficient capital available to fully replace degrading capital within the industrial sector itself. Consequently, despite heightened industrial activity attempting to satisfy multiple demands from all sectors and the population, actual industrial output (per capita) begins to fall precipitously from about 2015, while pollution from the industrial activity continues to grow. The reduction of inputs to agriculture from industry, combined with pollution impacts on agricultural land, leads to a fall in agricultural yields and food produced per capita. Similarly, services (e.g. health and education) are not maintained due to insufficient capital and inputs.

I'd say there is every indication that we have already seen the start of something very much like this in the past decade or two. As early as the 1990s real economic growth slowed due to resource depletion and surplus energy issues. The markets started blowing bubbles in an attempt keep growth going. First the dot com bubble and then the real estate and derivatives bubble in 2008. After that, higher prices for depleted resources (especially energy) slowed a faltering economic recovery, reduced the demand for those same resources and brought their prices down below what it costs to produce them, leaving the extraction industries in a very rough spot. I certainly expect a further down turn and eventually collapse during the next few decades—just what the standard run shows us.

But you can look at the same evidence, squint a little and hold your mouth just right, and conclude that what we are seeing is just a bump on the way to growth with no end in sight—the techno-optimist's wet dream. Are we already deep into overshoot or just nicely getting started on our way to the stars? Depending on who you ask, you can hear spirited arguments on either side of the issue.

Based on The Limits to Growth and the intervening years of history, during which essentially nothing was done to address our headlong approach to those limits (and lots of other evidence as well), I'd say you'd have to be pretty deep in denial not to see that we are already well into overshoot. Time will tell, but my nature is such that I want to be prepared for the worst. In the unlikely event that it doesn't happen, I'll be quite relieved.

I've just finished reading Nicole Foss's The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space. I mention this here because it deals mainly with defining things that are outside the set of feasible responses. And because most of what is suggested in The Limits to Growth is indeed outside of that set. She looks in detail at the kind of changing social conditions which will be brought on by collapse—the sort of thing that was anticipated but not explored in detail by the authors of The Limits to Growth.

I think looking at things to avoid is a very good place to start. Here's Nicole's list:

• Given that the cost of capital will be very high, and there will be little purchasing power, proposed solutions which are capital-intensive will lie outside solution space.
• Proposed solutions to our predicament that depend on the functioning of large-scale organizations operating in a top-down manner do not lie within viable solution space.
• If proposed solutions depend on a cooperative social context at large scale, they will not be part of solution space.
• Given that the energy supply will be falling, and that there will, over time, be competition for increasingly scarce energy resources that we can no longer take for granted, proposed solutions which are energy-intensive will lie outside of solution space.
• Proposed solutions dependent on the current level of socioeconomic complexity do not lie within solution space.

In the early 1970s, The Club of Rome was advocating the sort of top down, co-operative response that needed to be started almost immediately if it was to be successful in moving towards a "equilibrium state". None of this happened, and the model run illustrated in Figure 48, where stabilizing policies are not put into effect until the year 2000 and which leads to another collapse, serves as a cautionary tale. All the more so in 2016 with no move toward stabilizing policies anywhere in sight.

Ms. Foss believes there is little hope of ever achieving a worldwide steady state economy. The fact that there is no such thing as a "balance of nature" would tend to support that. It is a new concept for me, but one worth considering. I definitely agree with her that our efforts need to be focused at the family and local community level. And that reliance on government and high level activism to convince governments to change course, would be foolhardy in the extreme.

I should add at this point my usual comments about the shape of the collapse I am expecting. First of all, I am not talking about sudden, apocalyptic change. The collapse I expect, and indeed am already seeing, will take place very unevenly both geographically, chronological and across the various social classes. It will take place over decades—a slow, step-wise descent to a level of economic activity that can be support by our remaining energy resources.

For many people it will be detectable only after it has happened. If you are a member of the elite, moderately lucky and perhaps a bit dense, you may not be aware that it is happening until it is pretty much over. On the other hand, if you are a refugee in a war zone or starving in the middle of a famine, collapse has already happened for you. And if your investments have turned out to be worthless and you've just lost your job and your house, then collapse will very real for you, even if most of the people around you are oblivious.

Already, even for those of us that collapse hasn't quite caught up with yet, it is easy to see what Ms. Foss is talking about. Most of us don't have access to much in the way of capital, or much influence in large scale organizations or government. So what shape should our preparations take?

In the early days of this blog, I talked about that quite a bit and I think most of what I said still applies. You might have a look at the following posts:

• Emergency Preparation, What to do first, Part 1
• Emergency Preparation, Part 2 — what I am doing — Bugging In
• Deliberate Descent Part 1
• Deliberate Descent – Part 2
• Deliberate Descent — Part 3

Well, this concludes my first attempt at a book review. I still have several shelves full of books I'd like to talk about, but I clearly need to find a way to do this that doesn't take more than one post per book!

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.

The Limits to Growth

• The Club of Rome and a System Dynamics Model of the World, Thursday, 1 September 2016
• The Limits to Growth, Part 1, Sunday, 18 September 2016
• The Limits to Growth, Part 2, Sunday, 2 October 2016
• The Limits to Growth, Part 3, Tuesday, 18 October 2016
• The Limits to Growth, Part 4, Sunday, 23 October 2016
• The Limits to Growth, Part 5, Sunday, 30 October 2016