Testing the MEDEAS world model during the Summer School of the Club of Rome in Florence

The Summer School of the Club of Rome in Florence. Above: one of discussion groups engaged in proposing parameters to be run with the MEDEAS world model. In the back, standing, Ilaria Perissi (researcher at the University of Florence) and Jordi Sole (Coordinator of the MEDEAS project). 

A Comment by Gianni Comoretto


42 years ago, when I was 16, I read “The Limits of growth” and it changed my life. I was already worried about things like pollution and overpopulation, but I did not suspect the entity of these problems. I was fascinated by these models, by the possibility to at least have hints of the future we were approaching. I learned programming and I was even able to put the simplest models in a programmable hand-held calculator (a Texas SR52), and some years later on an AppleII. I began to tackle more seriously the problems of an exponential growth in a finite world, sustainable development, renewable energies, energy efficiency…

Therefore when I heard that the Club of Rome was organizing a summer academy in my city, I subscribed enthusiastically. Even after 42 years of activism and study, I have plenty of things to learn. And I met about a hundred of wonderful persons down all over the world. Some I know from a long time, some were for me just names on the front pages of books and papers I read. Most of them much younger than me. Saturday we were presented a new, much improved model of the world resources, society and economy, developed as part of a European framework program. It is much more detailed than the original one, but the basic results are quite similar, and equally gloomy than those of 45 years ago: in the “business as usual” scenario the global economy will still be able to grow for a few years, slowing down until, in 15-20 years, it will begin to collapse very quickly, leaving little behind. 

But this is a school, and the best way to learn is trying. So we divided into 3 groups, and each one had to decide which measures were necessary to guarantee at least a minimum of energy and services for everybody. We settle to 30-40 gigajoule per person per year (about 1 kW of average power use). Of the three groups mine was the only one to be able to guarantee this level at least up the end of the century, basically by adopting: an immediate “controlled recession” of 1% per year a decrease in the global population at a rate of 0.5% per year, that we considered feasible just preventing unwanted pregnancy and increasing women education an increase of 22.5% per year of the installed renewable energy capabilities measures to control the financial market, to reduce inequalities massive reforestation 

Other groups were less aggressive, both in the PIL decrease and in the necessity of installing renewable energies. As a result, their economy stayed significantly higher than ours for a couple of decades, but collapsed only a bit later than in the “business as usual” model. Our controlled recession strategy gave us more time to implement renewables, that in the end saved the day to our slightly reduced population. This lesson taught us lots of things. First, even among people dedicated to these problems, it is not easy to understand what is really necessary. Renewables are not a luxury, and we have not much time to implement them. Last but not least, we will never win the next elections with our program.

Below, Sara Falsini, researcher at the University of Florence (white shirt, standing), engaged with another group of testers of the MEDEAS model.

Interview with Ugo Bardi: Climate, Fossil Fuels, Resources and All That

The MEDEAS project team at a recent meeting in Barcelona. At the center, the project coordinator, Jordi Solé, Another group of well-intentioned people engaged in saving the planet. Yes, we know it is difficult: we are doing our best. 

This interview was recorded this February and is reported here from the site of the European Project MEDEAS, only minimally edited. Take into account that none of the people involved (interviewers and interviewed) are native English speakers and you can understand why the grammar and the syntax are, well, let's just say "not perfect". Then, as in all non-edited interviews, the flow of the concepts is also far from being perfect. However, I thought to reproduce it here because it contains much of what I have been trying to say, lately. Maybe you'll find it interesting (U.B.)

On 17th February 2017, during MEDEAS first General Assembly in Brno, Czech Republic, Ugo Bardi from INSTM, partner of MEDEAS Project was interviewed by Mikuláš Černík for Deník Referendum, an independent online newspaper focused on social and environmental issues. The interview discussed how science nowadays can address challenges as climate change and possible limitations of resources for the transition to a low-carbon economy. The whole interview can be found below in English, while the original version is published in the newspaper’s webpage. 

INTERVIEW WITH PROF. UGO BARDI (UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE, ITALY), IN BRNO, CZECH REPUBLIC (17.2.2017) DURING MEDEAS GENERAL ASSEMBLY.

Your main topic is resource depletion. Since the release of your book on the Limits to Growth, how has the situation changed?

The thread that runs through everything I study is resource depletion in the broadest sense. You can restrict its sense to minerals, which is to take the core meaning, but then there is also climate change. Climate change can be seen as the depletion of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases without overheating. So it’s also depletion—everything’s a question of depletion. And everything is a question of resources. People have spoken about limits to growth, which at one time was a very innovative concept, but these limits on growth derive from limits on resources, and that’s something we’re still working on.

You’re writing a blog called the Cassandra Legacy. How did you, as a scientist, decide it was necessary to write a blog?

Because many people speak about there being two cultures, humanist culture and scientific culture. And in my modest opinion, this is completely wrong. There are no two cultures, there is only one culture. And so a scientist should be within the limits as much as possible, should be a humanist as much as possible within the limits, should know something about hard science such as thermodynamics and physics, and so on. But unfortunately our world has fallen into the trap of overspecialization, which means that a lot of people study so much that eventually they know everything about nothing—which is the definition of a specialist. So we have specialists who know absolutely everything about nothing, which is a little useless in my opinion. So we need a modern view of science, and this is a concept that some of us are working on. It’s a new conceptualization that tends to deemphasize what we call “reductionist science”. To emphasize what we call “systemic science”, which looks at changes at the whole-system level. Because if you are a reductionist, you would say What is the problem? I’m slowly running out of fuel for my car. So you say, No problem, hydrogen will fix everything. If you follow a systems approach, you say well, okay, maybe hydrogen is a way to change the system, but how will the system react? I think that’s a fundamental part of the MEDEAS project we’re working on. To take a systems approach. We have a valuable collaborator in Brno as well. We’re sure we can get this done.

Do you think that, as a scientist, when you publish a scientific paper, it has any impact on a broader readership and on the general public and policymakers? How do you perceive the relationship between science and politics?

There is no difference. Scientific communication is just one of many kinds of communication. And that has to do with the fact that we communicate within a system. The world—call it the mediasphere or the cybersphere or the brainsphere—the world is a huge system in which ideas, comments, novelties, the news and everything moves and competes in a space. All these things grow, they evolve, they change and they take over spaces, and that’s the most “systemic system”, if you like. It is hugely interesting to study, and that’s what we’re doing. You might not have noticed, but my coworkers and I are developing models for dissemination, for spreading ideas in the websphere, the world wide web, in the mindspace. What we’ve discovered is that your message—you want to know the theory of messaging my coworkers and I are developing? Messages are made up of two parts—the message itself and the communicator who sends it. So the message must be simple enough that it can reproduce, but that’s not enough. The message has a signature that makes it recognized as ‘self/nonself’ and if it is not recognized as “self” it is discarded and the whole attempt to transmit it is useless. So what you do when you send the message is you send yourself. And that’s it. You don’t always hit people with facts. The relevant fact is you, because you are relevant. If you are relevant, you send a message which is understood. You need to understand who is sending the message, you need to understand what a person is. So if you don’t know what you are, you can’t send the message.

This leads me to the next question. Don’t you think that, when scientists put out messages to the public, the public may believe in their correctness and yet feel that what they say is overly pessimistic? That they’re not enough to make them change their behaviour? I’m talking about alarmism. Some people argue that when you scare people too much, as a consequence they won’t be willing to change their behaviour. Do you agree?

This is because most scientists are children when it comes to communication. They know very little, nothing in this field. I won’t use the term ignoramus, but the definition is that when you don’t know anything about something, you are an ignoramus on that topic. Scientific education doesn’t cover communication. So when you try to do work in a field you’re ignorant of, you may achieve zero. And you’re likely to make mistakes. Just think of riding a bicycle for the first time. You don’t know what a bicycle is, what pedals or brakes are, and so on. You don’t really know how a bicycle works. You fall off the bike straightaway. This is what happens when scientists try to communicate all these pessimistic things about climate science to the public. They’re using the wrong communication model. Their message—its penetration—doesn’t depend upon pessimism or optimism. This is a mistake. Think about Christianity. What is the message? It is that there will come an apocalypse. And it is spread easily. Even though it’s predicting an apocalypse. Because Christians knew much better - the old, the ancient Christians, they knew how to promulgate their message. They were able to emphasize the messenger. If you’re willing to get eaten by lions, then the message is important for you, it carries weight. But you must be ready to be eaten by lions to demonstrate the message is real and that, I think, scientists are not willing to do for Climate Science. Maybe we don’t need to arrive to that point but the essence is the same - it doesn’t matter if the message is optimistic or pessimistic. The power is not in the message, it’s in the messenger. The messenger must be believable and this is the problem with climate science. Scientists have made a lot of mistakes and they are presenting a contradictory message. Some scientists say, “don’t worry, we have the solution: you don’t have to do anything” and maybe they start babbling about hydrogen or nuclear energy or whatever. Other scientist say, “well, you have to make sacrifices” and they talk about investing in double paned glasses, using bicycles and the like. But these two messages are not compatible with each other. And if the messenger doesn’t send a coherent message, he or she is not believed.

What about the term peak oil—which was much more widely used in the recent past than it is today. Could you tell us how this term has evolved in public debate?

It’s a good example of how to spread a message. Generally because the message was simple: just two words. “Peak oil”. It has a ring to it, it was interesting, and it was simple enough to spread. And spread it did. These messages have a cycle. They peak, and then they go down. But I think the spread of this message was successful in the sense that it was not only viral, but became part of our culture. Its greatest diffusion came around ten years ago. Then it lost popularity a bit because people had difficulty understanding the term. They see that oil isn’t expensive right now and think that’s because it’s abundant. But that changes. It’s like limits to growth. It was criticised, rejected, demonised, but it was a successful concept, because it is still with us. We debate it, maybe over a long period, but still we debate it. And that’s what we can do with messages. They don’t necessarily need to take over the world, but they remain with us. They can’t be ignored.

Could you also tell us something about the project you’re currently involved in? About MEDEAS; and how it is changing the debate?

MEDEAS is an extremely important project, as a next step after Paris. Paris COP21 told us what we should do, and it was a very good meeting with a huge impact because the communication was taken care of by people who knew what they wanted to do. To have a message which will take root, it must be simple. So Paris - we had thousands of people, hundreds of models, tens of thousands of scenarios, the whole climate science with uncertainties and things like that and final result was one number: 2 °C. You condense everything into something like a piece of genetic code which will then be unpacked. You send a little virus to the mind with a very tiny chink of genetic code. It takes up residency in your brain. It reproduces and grows.

So do you really think the Paris agreement is a step forward in tackling climate change?

Absolutely. It was a remarkable success because it was well packaged. But the numbers in it are not enough, because we don’t know how to achieve them. And that’s what MEDEAS is answering. We give you another number—how much it will cost? If we can afford it and the degree of sacrifice it entails. How much are you willing to pay for your survival?

Let’s imagine that we achieve a post-carbon future. Who will be the loser and who the winner in the transition?

Some scientists in the MEDEAS group have developed a concept they call Thanatia, which refers to a world not meant to be—one in which people have survived, but the planet has died in terms of minerals. This means there is no longer any ability to mine rare minerals, and these minerals are what allowed us to build our civilization. The result is a future that is completely different. There are no more mineral resources like oil and cobalt, because these mineral resources are concentrated—you can’t just find them anywhere you want. If you need something that you lack but someone else has, you may have to fight to get it. But in the future, this will no longer be done, because we will stick to resources that are abundant, like sunlight, silicon, aluminium, magnesium, etc. Society can be built in a locally-structured way that may give rise to less competition for resources and fewer wars.

In our country, the Czech Republic, if we want to achieve what was promised in the Paris agreement, we need to cut our coal consumption, despite its abundance as a resource. How would you advocate this position with the public?

I don’t think this is such a big problem. I mean, the Czech Republic is a very small part of the world and of what’s going on in the world. And if the world starts moving in a certain direction, the Czech Republic will follow. We have coal in Germany, in Poland, in Ukraine, and these regions are burning it. It has to be phased out slowly, and I think we are moving in that direction because the cost is really increasing. Coal is not as cheap as it seems. In the future, you won’t be able to afford to burn the coal, whatever the politicians may say. Mr. Trump said “we have a thousand years of coal” and this is an alternative fact, in other words, a lie. I think we will cease to burn coal sometime over the next decade or two. And hopefully we will do so because we have agreed to stop burning coal and also because we have agreed to deploy renewable energy and replace it.

So basically what you’re saying is, the sooner we make the move, the more we gain?

Yes, that’s correct. The change is going to take place anyway. People talk about problems and that’s bad. Once you say there are problems, you begin to think of solutions. But not all problems are problems, and not all solutions are solutions. If you remember the “Jewish Problem” at the time of Adolf Hitler, well, once you start to say the Jews are a problem, you start thinking of the solution, and the solution they found was a very bad idea – as we all know. So we don’t have to think in terms of problems/solutions – that may lead us to very bad ideas. Instead, we must emphasize change. That change is ongoing, and you have a choice: either you go along with the change, or you reject it. If you reject it, the change will change you, and you will not be happy but will be swept away by the change. In other words, you can solve a problem but there is no solution for a change. There is only one way to face change: to adapt to it.

Ok, thanks very much.

You’re not going to ask me anything about Italian football...?

MEDEAS: The Next Step after the Paris Climate Agreement

Jordi Solé, coordinator of the MEDEAS project speaks in Brno (Czekia) on Feb 15th, 2017. The European project MEDEAS has the ambitious goal of providing the tools necessary to put into practice the 2015 Paris agreement on climate

Let me start with something to dispel the confusion about what models are for. When you deal with complex, adaptive systems, models are NOT meant to predict the future. As John Gall said in his book on complex systems, "systems always kick back" - to which I may add, "and sometimes they kick back with a vengeance". (another way to express this concept is "forecasting always fails.")

But if dynamic models cannot predict the future, what are they good for? Simple, they are about being prepared for the future. Think of the Paris climate treaty of 2015. It was the result of millions of runs of various climate models, none of which claimed to predict "the" future. But these models are tools to prepare for the future; they tell you what may happen, depending on what you do. They are tools to shape political decisions. Out of all those runs, a goal was extracted, a setpoint, a number: "we don't want temperatures to rise of more than  2 °C and, for that purpose, there is a limit to the amounts of fossil fuels we can burn." It was a political decision that took into account not just what the models say, but what could be concretely achieved in the real world.  No model would give you that number as an output.The Paris agreement was a masterpiece of diplomacy and of communication strategy because it concentrated so much noise into a simple, stark, number: a goal to reach.

And there we stand: with Paris, we set the goal, but how do we get there? This section of policy planning was poor in Paris, where the best that could be done was to line up the INDCs, the intended nationally determined contribution; that is how single countries think they could reduce emissions. That's not planning, it is a first stab at the problem; it shows the good will to do something, but no more. As they stand, the INDCs won't get us far enough.

So, we are again at the task of getting prepared for the future. We know that we need to reduce carbon emissions, but how fast? Besides, it is not just a question of reduction, it is a question of substitution. We need to maintain the essential energy services to the world's population: surely, as a society, we can shed a lot of fat and keep going, but without a minimum of energy input, the system collapses. At the same time, we need to maintain the current input without exceeding the emissions limits. A difficult challenge, although not an impossible one.

Here, we need models, again. No model can tell you exactly how to get there, but models will tell you what is likely to happen given some choices and some decisions. And out of the models, you have to extract a concrete, politically feasible goal: how to invest the remaining resources into attaining the Paris objectives? In other words, what fraction of the world's GDP need to be invested in the transition to a renewable economy?

Giving an answer to this question is the ambitious task of the MEDEAS project which has now reached a full year of work and set up the basis for an extensive modeling effort. MEDEAS takes an approach mainly based on system dynamics, similar to the one of the well-known "The Limits to Growth" approach. It is not the only ongoing project in this area, others projects take different lines of approach. But in al cases the idea is to build up knowledge on what is needed for the transition. Some data are already available that tell us we need a major effort to replace fossil fuels fast enough. The transition that won't come by itself, pushed by purely economic forces. But we need to explore the issue more in depth before these considerations can be turned into a number that can be agreed upon by the interested parties. We need to take into account both what's needed and what is politically feasible. Then, we will have a goal to reach.

If you want to know more about MEDEAS, you can see the MEDEAS website. There is also a MEDAS newsletter, still in a preliminary phase. And, if you would like to be involved, contact me (ugo.bardi(strangething)unifi.it)


Below: an intense discussion held in Brno about the project with the coordinator, Jordi Solé from Barcelona and two Italian researchers from Florence, Sara Falsini and Ilaria Perissi. 

MEDEAS: the more we wait before acting, the more difficult the transition will be

Michael Green of the Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin presents his models at the workshop of the MEDEAS EU project held in Barcelona on Nov 2-3 2016. Note in the image how waiting before acting requires more drastic measures than acting immediately, assuming that it is still possible to attain the goals of the Paris agreement.

The MEDEAS models are still being refined, but the main results are already robust. At the recent workshop that was held in Barcelona, it was clear that business as usual (BAU) is not taking us where we want to go, that is to attain the targets of the Paris agreement. Only drastic policy measures can do that. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

This is nothing new: we were already alerted long ago about the crisis that we would be facing. It was in 1972 that the "Limits to Growth" report was published, and its results were also robust. Relying on non-renewable resources would have brought the human civilization to a crisis that could be expected for somewhere during the first 2-3 decades of the 21st century. Today, the  models tell us that the crisis is here.

40 years ago, we could have acted decisively and with little pain to avoid the present crisis. Today, it is extremely difficult, although not yet impossible, but it takes pain and effort. But we can't wait much longer before taking drastic measures to boost renewable energy and phase out fossil fuels.

MEDEAS begins

The European project "MEDEAS" is starting. The acronym has little to do with the mythological figure of Medea but stands for "Modeling the Energy Development under Environmental And Socioeconomic constraints" and it is an ambitious attempt at creating a new model that will define the future of the energy system in Europe, taking into account the physical constraints involved.  This is not a new idea, it goes back to 1972, at the time of the "Limits to Growth" study. What is new is that the concepts developed at that time are re-emerging after a period of neglect and are now sponsored and financed by the European Union. A remarkable vindication of the ideas of the group of pioneers who carried out the early 1972 study and that turned out to be prophetic, beyond perhaps the expectation of even those who had developed the model. 

As one of the partners of the MEDEAS project, I'll see to cover the development of the project in the "Cassandra's Legacy" blog. As a start, let me propose to you a post by Antonio Turiel, also involved in the project, from his blog "The Oil Crash"

The MEDEAS project begins

by Antonio Turiel




Dear readers,

Today and tomorrow (Feb 18 and 19 2016) the institute of sciences of the Seas of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - CSIC hosted the kick-off meeting of the MEDEAS project.

MEDEAS (acronym of Modeling the Energy Development under Environmental And Socioeconomic constraints" is a European project financed in the framework of the "Horizon 2020" program to finance European research. This project is coordinated by my institution, and in practice by my colleague, Jordi Solé.

From the institute of Marine Sciences, we have in this project Antonio García-Olivares, Joaquim Ballabrera, Emilio García and yours truly.

Two more Spanish institutes also participate in this project: CIRCE (with Alicia Valero among others) and the University of Valladolid (with Luis Javier Miguel as head, but there are also well known people, such as Margarita Mediavilla and Carlos de Castro).

The other partners ar the Consorzio Interuniversitario Italiano di Scienza e Tecnología dei Materiali, INSTM (Ugo Bardi), The Centre for Renewable Energy Sources and Saving, The University of Masaryk, The Anglia Ruskin university, the Sdruzhenie Chernomorski Izsledovatelski Energien Tsentar, the International Institute for Applied system analysis (IIASA), the Friends of the Earth (Czech Republic), the Austrian Energy Agency and Blue4You. 

The objective of MEDEAS, as shown by its acronym, is to create the tools necessary to support the planning of policies that would favor the transition of the European Energy system toward a new system, based on renewable energy. On this task, the principal objective of MEDEAS is to produce a socio-economc model, the "MEDEAS model", that will be flexible enough to be modifiable in such a way to be able to study different scenarios and pathways toward the transition. The MEDEAS model will be programmed in a free code, (Python) so that it will be easy to use by different social and economic users. It will be based on the WoLiM model, developed by the System Dynamics Group at the University of Valladolid. The MEDEAS model will be a system dynamics model which will introduce new variables, additional to the ones habitually considered, so that it will be possible to adapt the model to create a more detailed analysis model for what is needed to implement a pathway or another, mostly as a function of specific socio-economic aspects, such as the evolution of the unemployment or of income inequality; parameters not always taken into account by the models.

MEDEAS implies a remarkable effort of coordination between the compilation of the necessary data that will be used to define and verify the sensitivity of the model, and the creation of the model itself (to be also compared with some already existing models) and the verification of the different scenarios. MEDEAS is an ambitious attempt to create a new model that might go much beyond the presently available models, in particular being sufficiently flexible to accept very different scenarios, and that will be able to carry out a detailed analysis both at the European scale, as well as that of single countries

Given my role in the project, and its interest for the questions discussed here, during the coming 4 years, I will be informing the readers about the development of the actions of MEDEAS. MEDEAS needs time in order to propose answers in a world where the questions about the future are multiplying. Stay tuned: we hope in good news from MEDEAS.

ATB

Antonio Turiel