The Future as Seen by the Doomers. It Will be the Seneca Rebound!

Recently, RE (Reverse Engineer) of the famed "Doomsday Diner" carried out an opinion poll among the people frequenting some of the most doomeristic/catastrophistic/millennialistic sites of the Web (including Ugo Bardi's blog, Cassandra's Legacy).

Refreshingly, a majority of the members of this group of hard-liners are in favor of renewable energy! Only 36% of the group think that renewable energy is useless, while 57% think it will power a sustainable technological civilization.

So, maybe you are one of those people who feel it is their duty to pester the discussions on this subject with your favorite statement that goes as "renewable energy plants are built using energy coming from fossil fuels, therefore will never be anything but fossil fuel extenders." Then, know that not only you are wrong, you also understood nothing of the concept of EROI, and, finally, you are also a minority even among the minority of the millennialists of the Web.

Yes, the transition will not be easy, but renewable energy is the future of humankind. It is the Seneca Rebound, baby!

How do you Stop the Arms Race? By Starting a New War, for Instance

Do you see a ghostly Seneca Cliff in this graph? (source)

There is a good rule that you should always be careful when extrapolating your data, especially over the long term. And there is an even better rule saying that you should never, never extrapolate an exponential growth. The uncertainty in the data of an exponentially growing curve increases exponentially, too, and that makes your extrapolation meaningless very soon.

But, in the figure above, they extrapolated an exponentially growing curve for the military expenses of the US and China over more than 30 years!  The origin of that curve above seems to be the RAND Corporation. I couldn't find the original source, but it has been reproduced in the blog of the Wall Street Journal and on Zero Hedge. 

It looks like someone seriously proposed this extrapolation. But consider a few numbers: according to the chart, by 2050 the US would spend more than 20% of its present GdP for the military! (it is now about 3%). It might be possible if the US GdP were to increase in proportion. But, from the graph, they assume a growth of nearly a factor of 5 (from ca. 600 billion dollars, today, to 2.9 trillion in little more than 30 years. It means that the GdP should double at least twice in 30 years, that is, the US economy should grow at the rate of 6% (twice the current rate!) every year for the next 30 years. Otherwise, the US government would bankrupt itself even faster than it is doing now. 

Now, you might want to dismiss this graph as one of the many silly forecasts that are part of the everyday chat on how this or that sector of the economy is going to grow -- and therefore everyone should invest on it. But, there is something in this idea that military expenses are going to rise in the future. It has to do with a typical enhancing feedback effect. One side raises its military expenses and causes the other side to do the same. And that's the feedback that creates a ladder on which both contenders climb without knowing how to step down. Another parallel effect is the financial mechanism. Large investments in military expenses create a powerful lobby representing the military-industrial complex. A powerful lobby successfully pushes for higher investments and that, in turn, creates an even more powerful lobby. It is all part of what we call "arms race."

Here is another example of an arms race: how military expenses grew in the years before the 1st World War. (from Our World in Data -- see also this link)

The impression is that, by 1913, nobody knew how to stop the race and that the only "solution" that could be found to block the ever-increasing costs was to start a war -- which they did.

The similarity of the current situation with that of the years leading to WWI has been noted more than once. So, are we going to see a new world war in the near future? We cannot say: history doesn't really repeat itself, although it does rhyme. It might not be necessary to start a new world war to stop the exponential growth of military expenses, but the data are not encouraging. A new war could really be near. And, a nuclear war could generate a Seneca Collapse so drastic and disastrous that it could really be the "war ending all wars" -- as WWI should have been -- at least those not fought with clubs and stone axes only.

The Seneca Effect in Six Easy Steps

The Seneca Effect illustrated in an image by Roman Pfeffer

The Seneca Rebound: why Growth is Faster after Collapse. Explaining the European World Dominance

Lisbon: the monument to the European sailors of the age of explorations, starting with the 15th century. What made Europeans so successful in the task of conquering the world? My interpretation is that it was the result of periodic "Seneca Collapses" of the European population which made it possible to accumulate resources that would then be available to propel the European expansion. It is an effect that may be called the "Seneca Rebound" that makes growth faster after a collapse.

The Middle Ages are sometimes referred to as the "Dark Ages" -- this is mostly untrue, but it is not wrong to apply this term to the early Middle Ages, called also the "Late Antiquity"(1). According to some estimates, in 650 AD the European population had shrunk to a historical minimum of some 18 million people, about half of what it had been during the high times of the Roman Empire. If you think that today the European population is estimated to be as more than 700 million people, it is almost impossible for us to imagine the Europe of the early Middle Ages: it was a minor appendage of the Eurasian continent, a poverty-stricken place, nearly empty of people, where nothing happened except for the squabbles of local warlords fighting each other.

Yet, a few centuries later, the descendants of the inhabitants of this backward peninsula of Eurasia embarked in the attempt of conquering the world and were successful at that. By the 19th century, practically all the world was under the direct or indirect control of European countries or of their American offspring, the United States. How could it happen?

The conventional explanation for the European ruling of the world has to do with factors related to the "white man's burden", a term invented by Rudyard Kipling in 1899. According to this interpretation, the European domination was a sort of manifest destiny generated by the superior qualities -- genetic or cultural -- of the European people in terms of being smarter, more laborious, better organized, driven by their Christian faith, and the like. In comparison, the populations of the rest of world were lazy, disorganized, uncultured, and in the grip of superstitions.

Maybe, but the idea that the Europeans conquered the world because they are smarter than the others is not supported by any data. Europeans may find it flattering, but it is an ad hoc interpretation that doesn't help us understand much of what led to the European world dominance. I have been scratching my head on this question for quite a while, until I stumbled into the graph below, showing two drastic "Seneca Collapses" of the European population. The term "Seneca Collapse" indicates a situation where the decline of a complex system is faster than its growth.

Graph from William E Langer, "The Black Death" Scientific American, February 1964, p. 117 -- note how growth is faster after the collapse than it was before. This is what I call the Seneca Rebound.

Note first of all that the data are uncertain and not all authors see the population drop in the European population to have been as drastic as Langer does. But there is a general agreement that a drastic collapse of the European population took place starting in mid 14th century AD. The collapse is often attributed to the spread of the "black death," a continent-wide epidemics of plague. In reality, there were several factors that led the European population to crash down so badly, including famines and a widespread economic crisis. In a complex system it always is difficult to establish a clear-cut chain of causes and effects: when the system crashes, many factors collapse together. The population crash plague that hit Europe in mid 17th century was less drastic, but also associated with a new outburst of the plague. These two Seneca Collapses followed the one I already mentioned, when the Roman Empire collapsed during the 6th-10th centuries AD.

There is a common element of these three collapse: the remarkably rapid recovery that followed. Let's describe that in more detail.


The first collapse (from the 5th to the 8th century). After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe started recovering and soon it was able to mount military attacks against neighboring regions. The first crusade started in 1095 and for some three centuries successive waves of European armies attacked the region we call today the Middle East, succeeding in creating a number of European kingdoms in the area. The result was, ultimately, a failure and the European crusades and the European Middle Eastern kingdoms withered with the mid-14th century.

The Second collapse (mid-14th century). The population crash was brutal, but as soon as Europe started recovering, a new phase of expansion started: it was the age of exploration that we may consider to have started with the discovery of the island of Madeira in 1430 and then proceeding with a remarkable burst of explorations that lasted for about a century from mid 15th century to mid 6th. This burst included Columbus' travel of 1492 and the start of the gradual expansion of Europeans in Africa and in the Americas.

The Third Collapse (mid-17th century). In this case, the collapse was not so drastic as the first two and it didn't really stop Europeans from expanding. But, with the restart of population growth, Europe saw a new phase of economic growth which ushered the age of coal and, with it, the "age of divergence" when Europe truly conquered the rest of the world and started thinking of themselves as carrying the "white man's burden."


So, there is clearly a pattern here: the expansion of the European social system didn't go on smoothly, but in bursts. Over some two millennia, the European population grew from a few tens of millions up to the current 700 million people. In the process, it underwent at least three major crashes but, every time, it restarted growing. This bumpy expansion trajectory is typical of complex systems which tend to show what I call the "Seneca Effect," cycles of slow growth and fast collapse.

Europe, intended as a social system, is a complex system and it does tend to show the Seneca behavior. It is the result of the combination of resource depletion and pollution. Before the fossil fuel age, society had two main natural resources to exploit: fertile soil and forests. Both tend to be overexploited, that is destroyed faster than they can regrow. Forests are cut faster than trees can regrow and the fertile soil is eroded and washed to the sea faster than it can reform. The decline of agriculture not only puts an end to population growth, it causes it to collapse ruinously as an effect of famines and epidemics. The loss of the revenues from forests typically weakens the state and the result is internecine wars which, of course, hasten the collapse. Both wars and epidemics can be seen as forms of pollution and the final result is what I call the Seneca Effect: a decline which is much faster than growth.

But there is life after the Seneca Collapse. The disappearance of a large fraction of the population frees some previously cultivated land for forests to regrow. Then, when the population starts re-growing, people find the new forests as a near-pristine source of wood and -- once cut -- of fertile soil, and the cycle restarts. The new cycle may grow faster than the earlier one because society still remembers the social structures and the technologies of the previous cycle. This is the "Seneca Rebound" -- growth may be faster after collapse. You can see the Seneca Rebound in the curves made by Langer for Europe. Note how growth is faster after the collapses than it was before. This is because, I think, the Europeans had kept the social and technological structures they had developed before the crash -- there was no need, for instance, to re-develop their ship-making technology (3). So, they could exploit more effectively the resources that the collapse had freed.

Then, Forests are the basic resource needed to conquer the world and the Europeans exploited them effectively. Trees provide the wood for ships and the charcoal made from wood provides the material needed to make steel for weapons. Not for nothing, it was said that England had conquered an empire with ships of wood and men of iron.

But how was it that the Europeans were so much better than others at exploiting their forests? As always, success is a question of timing, opportunities, and luck. On the opposite side of the Mediterranean, the Arab civilization was socially and technologically as sophisticated as the European one - perhaps more - but their climate didn't allow forests to grow fast enough to avoid rapid overexploitation (2). The American civilizations we call "pre-Columbian" had forests, but they hadn't yet developed the technologies of steel and of oceanic ships -- they also lacked horses for transportation and as a military weapon. The Chinese, instead, had the technologies and also the forests and, indeed, they embarked in a parallel phase of explorations.

During the 12th-13th centuries an outbreak of the same plague that had affected Europe caused a decline in the Chinese population, that was followed - possibly as a consequence - by the Mongol invasion which led to the fall of the Song dynasty. When the Chinese economy experienced its own Seneca Rebound, the age treasure voyages started in the early 1400s, during the Ming dynasty, in a period when the population had restarted growing. (4)

China population trends according to a reconstruction published by Columbia University.

But the Chinese stopped their exploration phase and retreated within their borders. So, the Europeans found no competition in their worldwide expansion and that was the origin of the history we know.

These considerations are qualitative, but I think there is something in the idea of the "Seneca Rebound" as an engine that propels civilizations forward in bursts. If this is the case, if the world's civilization goes through a new Seneca Collapse, as it is likely to happen, will it restart expanding afterward?  If we manage to avoid that the coming crash is so bad that we lose the knowledge we accumulated over several centuries and that climate change doesn't erase humankind as a species, we may well restart expanding using renewable energy -- this time into space. Why not?




___________________________________

(1) If you are interested in the late antiquity period, and you can read Italian, you should read "L'Impero Globale" a recent book by Alessia Roberta Scopece who finds many parallels that age and our modern Globalization.

(2) The destruction of the Middle Eastern and North African forests may have been irreversible, as I note in this post of mine. (h/t Steve Kurtz)
 
(3) Nor there was any need to reinvent luxury and, with the rebound, Middle Ages ladies started dressing like high fashion models, as I describe in this post.




(4) Another reconstruction of the Chinese population is shown below, from an article dealing with the same question as this one -- they arrive to completely different conclusions, but it is normal. 

The Fall of Empires Explained in 10 Minutes

This is the presentation I gave to the meeting for the 50th anniversary of the Club of Rome on Oct 18th in Rome. The gist of the idea is that the fall of ancient civilizations, such as the Roman Empire, can be described with the same models developed in the 1970 to describe the future of our civilization. States, empires, and entire civilizations tend to fall under the combined effect of resource depletion and growing pollution. In the end, they are destroyed by what I call the Seneca Effect.

You can find the paper I mention in the talk, coauthored by Ilaria Perissi and Sara Falsini, at this link.

The Coming Population Crash: A Seneca Cliff Ahead for Humankind?

This is a condensed and modified version of a paper of mine that appeared on "The Journal of Population and Sustainability" this year. The image above is the well known "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" by Albrecht Durer - 1498. Yes, I know it is catastrophistic, but it is not my fault if biological populations do tend to collapse! (see also my previous post: "Overpopulation Problem? What Overpopulation Problem?"

A Seneca Collapse for the World’s Human Population?

By Ugo Bardi (a similar version has appeared in 2017 on "The Journal of Population and Sustainability")


1. Introduction


“The world has enough for every man's need, but not enough for every man's greed.” Gandhi [1]

While Gandhi's observation about greed remains true even today, it may not be so for the ability of the world to meet every man's need. Gandhi is reported to have said that in 1947 when the world population was under 2.5 billion, about one-third of the current figure of 7.5 billion. And it keeps growing. Does the world still have enough for every man’s need?

It is a tautology that if there are 7.5 billion people alive on planet earth today there must exist sufficient resources to keep them alive. The problem is for how long: a question rarely taken into account in estimates purportedly aimed at determining the maximum human population that the Earth can support.

The problem of long-term support of a population can be expressed in terms of the concept of “overshoot,” applied first by Jay Forrester in 1972 [2] to social systems. The innovative aspect of Forrester's idea is that it takes the future into consideration: if there is enough food for 7.5 billion people today, that doesn’t mean that the situation will remain the same in the future. The destruction of fertile soil, the depletion of aquifers, the increased reliance on depletable mineral fertilizers, to say nothing of climate change, are all factors that may make the future much harder than it is nowadays for humankind. The problems will be exacerbated if the population continues to grow.

So, will the human population keep growing in the future as it has in the past? Many demographic studies have attempted to answer this question, often arriving at widely different results. Some studies assume that population will keep growing all the way to the end of the current century, others that it will stabilize at some value higher than the present one, others still that it will start declining in the near future. Few, if any, studies have taken into account the phenomenon of rapid decline that I have termed “Seneca Effect” (or “Seneca Collapse”) [3]⁠, from a sentence written during the 1st century AD by the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

The Seneca Collapse is a phenomenon affecting complex systems where strong feedback relationships link the elements of the system to each other. Biological communities where predators and their prey are linked to each other are a good example of these systems. The Seneca Effect describes a situation in which the feedbacks of the system act together to generate a rapid decline of some of the stocks (populations) of the system. The typical “Seneca Curve” (or "Seneca Cliff")  is shown in the figure below [3] ⁠

Figure 1. A typical “Seneca Curve” calculated by means of system dynamics The x-axis shows the time, the y-axis can be a parameter such as population. It shows how decline can be faster than growth [3]

In the following, I'll list a series of examples showing that the Seneca Curve is relatively common in biological systems, including for historical human population. The possibility of an upcoming Seneca Cliff affecting humankind in the near future is real

2. Population collapses in natural ecosystems

There are many historical examples of the collapse or rapid decline of biological populations. The causes can be seen as mainly three:

1. Predation
2. Resource depletion
3. Birth control

The first, predation, is the result of the appearance in the ecosystem of a new and highly efficient predator when the prey population has little or no defense against it. There are many examples of this phenomenon in modern times, especially when humans have transported new species to biomes where they didn't exist before (e.g. hornets as predators of bees). A clear example can be found when the predator is humankind and the prey is the Thylacine species (the “Tasmanian Tiger”) [5]

⁠Figure 2. The population of Tasmanian tigers (Thylacines) before their complete extinction in the 1930s From ref. [5]⁠

These data are not a direct measurement of the size of the Thylacine population but can be reasonably assumed to be proportional to it. When the last Tasmanian tigers were killed, in the 1930s, the species was assumed to be extinct. The obvious origin of this collapse is human hunting, although disease has been sometimes blamed. Whether human or microbial pathogens were the predator, the graph shows how rapidly a biological population can collapse because of high predation rates. Note how the decline is much faster than growth.

Case 2, resource depletion, is often the specular case of efficient predation. It occurs when the predator species is so efficient in using its preys as food that the prey population crashes. It is a classic case of "overshoot" that leaves the predator without food and with the only perspective of a population collapse. A well-known case is that of the reindeer of St. Matthew Island, where the predators are the reindeer and the prey is grass. Obviously, the reindeer were so efficient in removing the grass that the whole population went in overshoot and then collapsed [4].⁠

Fig 3. The Reindeer Population of St. Matthew Island. Image created by Saudiberg.


The third possible case, active birthrate control, doesn’t seem to exist in the wild but we can see it in domesticated populations. Here is the case of horses in the United States.

 

Figure 4. Horse population in the United States (data source: The Humane Society) 

The horse population went down rapidly and abruptly from a maximum of more than 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960. Today their population has increased again to about 10 million but has not regained the level of the earlier peak.  In this case, horses were simply no longer competitive in comparison to engine-powered vehicles. As a result, horses were not allowed to breed. When old horses died, they were not replaced.


3. The collapse of human populations in history

This survey of the collapse of biological populations shows three causes for the “Seneca Collapse" to take place: 1) predation, 2) overshoot, and 3) reproductive control. Do the same phenomena take place with human populations? It seems to be possible and let’s see a few historical cases.

Humans have no significant metazoan predator, but they are legitimate prey for many kinds of microbial creatures. In history, diseases are known to have caused human population collapses. A good example, here, is the effect of the “black death” in Europe during the Middle Ages. The data are uncertain, but the “Seneca Shape” of the collapses is clear.

Figure 5 – European Population in history, including the effects of the Great Plague of mid 14th century (from Langer [6])


Regarding overshoot and resource depletion, perhaps the best example is that of the Irish famine that started in 1845. A graph of the collapse is shown in fig. 5

 Fig. 6 – Irish population data before and after the great famine of 1845.


The Irish catastrophe has been interpreted in different ways and politically biased interpretations are often invoked. Nevertheless, as discussed in detail in “The Seneca Effect” [3], the Irish famine is a classic case of overshoot-generated collapse. That doesn’t mean that the Irish had overexploited their land in the same way as the reindeer of St. Matthew’s Island, but it is clear that – given the economic, social, and political conditions of the time - the land couldn’t support for a long time the population level reached before the collapse. Then, the parasite of the potato which destroyed the Irish crops was only a trigger for a collapse that would have taken place anyway. After the crash, the Irish population continued to decline for more than half a century and even today it has not reached the pre-crash levels again.


Finally, we can examine cases in which the human population declined mainly because of lower birthrates. There are several modern examples, especially in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. An especially evident case is that of Ukraine, shown in figure 7.

Fig. 7 – Ukrainian population – data from the World Bank

There were no widespread epidemic diseases nor famines in Ukraine during the period that covers the recent population collapse. Factors in the decline were emigration and increased mortality due to a declining health care system, but what’s impressive is how the Ukrainian population reacted to the economic crisis with a decline in birthrates. Apparently, Ukrainian families and Ukrainian women thought that they had no benefit in having many children, a reasonable position in a situation of economic decline. The Seneca shape of the population curve is observed for most of the countries which belonged to the Soviet Union.


4. Conclusion


All biological populations need food and are affected by predation. Wild populations have no internal mechanisms to plan ahead and the result is normally what we call “overshoot,” where the population grows over the limits which the resources can sustain over a long time and finally collapses. The result is population curves which take the typical "Seneca Shape" described in [3]

The future of the world’s human population may well be described in similar terms, that is decline caused by overshoot, predation, or birth control. Of the three, predation could take the form of a microbial infection spreading all over the world and killing a substantial fraction of the human population. Another likely effect is overshoot, especially in terms of the decline of the world's agriculture or, more simply, to the loss of the capability of the globalized economic system to deliver it worldwide.

Unlike in non-human populations, for humans there is also the possibility of birth control. A decline in natality doesn’t necessarily require top-down government intervention to force people to have fewer children. An economic slowdown may be sufficient to convince couples and single women that they have no need and no interest in having many children. In particular, the economic value of human beings is constantly eroded by the development of automated systems that replace them in the workplace. So, if women have access to contraception, we may just see a worldwide expansion of what we call the “demographic transition” and which is commonly observed in the so-called “developed countries” where agriculture ceases to be the main source of wealth.

Will the demographic transition be sufficient to reduce the human population before the evil demons of overshoot and plague intervene? This is hard to say, but it cannot be excluded. Humans are, after all, intelligent creatures and they may still be able to take their destiny in their hands.



References

1. Pyarelal. Mahatma Gandhi: the last phase. (Navajivan Publishing House, 1956).

2. Bardi, U. Jay Write Forrester (1918–2016): His Contribution to the Concept of Overshoot in Socioeconomic Systems. Biophys. Econ. Resour. Qual. 1, 12 (2016).

3. Bardi, U. The Seneca Effect. Why Growth Is Slow but Collapse Is Rapid. (Springer Verlag, 2017).

4. Klein, D. R. The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island. J. Wildl. Manage. 32, 350–367 (1968).

5. McCallum, H. Disease and the dynamics of extinction. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 367, 2828–39 (2012).

6. Langer, W. L. The Black Death. Sci. Am. 210, 114–121 (1964).

The Impossible Battle against Fake News: The Horse Manure Crisis in London

Illustration and initial text from a recent post on WUWT

Sometimes, I have this horrible feeling that the battle against fake news and propaganda is just impossible to win. The latest example is an article appeared on the unnamable WUWT blog, which repeats the story that someone in 1894 "predicted" that 9 feet of horse manure would soon accumulate in the street of London. And, of course, since that didn't happen, we are free forever and ever from any and every possible kind of catastrophe.

Let me repeat it, this is a legend. I wrote that two years ago on the Cassandra blog: nobody ever wrote such a thing on "The Times" nor anywhere else. People keep repeating what they hear from other people and keep thinking that sheer volume means truth. It is pure invention, fake news.

What I found most bewildering is how slick it is the report on WUWT - note how subtly they link an article with the words "but fake". It is a recent article by Rose Wild where she says exactly what I said in my 2016 article: There never was such a headline on The Times.

But the WUWT author, Larry Kummer, never states that explicitly. The hurried reader will surely think that the term "but fake" refers not to the existence of the 1894 article, but to its wrong predictions. This is reinforced by the sentence "accurately describing the views of the time." It is hard to think that a non-existing article could be accurate about anything. Slick, indeed.

You would think that people have had enough of propaganda after having been duped so many times on so many issues but, no, propaganda continues to exist and thrive. Actually, it seems to be increasing in volume and importance. Maybe it is part of the way the universe works. Maybe the universe itself has been created as a giant propaganda machine to convince the Gods that the Ragnarok will never come and that Odin will never be eaten by the wolf Fenrir. Who knows? Maybe we are all the dream of a sleeping God who is having a nightmare.



Note: there are hundreds of thousands of Web pages reporting the story of the "Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894" as if it were a historical fact - If there are any which say it is a hoax, they are extremely difficult to find.

Climate Change as a Game of Russian Roulette

Ugo Bardi speaks at an event on climate change in Florence, on May 25th, 2018. Obviously, what I am holding is a toy, not a real gun. I was discussing guns as a metaphor for our penchant for doing dangerous things without exactly knowing what we are doing - for instance injecting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. With climate, we are playing a dangerous Russian Roulette game involving the whole of humankind (photo courtesy, Ilaria Perissi). 

In a science fiction story I read years ago, the protagonists live in the future and have forgotten what guns are. Then, someone finds a still working handgun and starts playing with it. As you may imagine, the results are tragic.

Now, let's make a small exercise in epistemology. Suppose that you are one of the characters of that sci-fi story. You have never seen a gun before and you would like to understand what it is and what it does. Basically, there are two ways of approaching the question: the scientific/reductionist way and the Bayesian/evolutionary way. Let me explain these concepts.

The scientific/reductionist way. You dismantle the unknown object and try to build a model of its inner workings. You note the mechanical system that makes a metal hammer hit on the chambers of a spinning drum. One of these chambers contains a brass cylinder partly filled with a mixture of chemicals that you can analyze. You find that the mechanical stress generated by the hammer may ignite the chemicals, producing high-pressure gases which might push an ogival chunk of some 100 g of lead through the front barrel at a speed of the order of 300 m/s. If you align the barrel with a human head, the effects of the chunk of lead passing through the brain would be hard to simulate, but they might involve serious damage. You conclude that it is, most likely, a weapon.

The Bayesian/evolutionary way. You examine the gun and try to build a probability estimate based on empirical tests. You note a small lever at the bottom and proceed to pull it, noting that it generates a clicking sound. You pull it a few more times: nothing happens as long as the hammer doesn't hit the loaded drum chamber (which you don't know about since you didn't dismantle the gun). Then, you conclude that it is probably a musical instrument.

The difference in this approach shows mostly if you use the gun to play the Russian Roulette (*) with one bullet in a six-chambers drum. Then, after five "clicks" the frequentist would tell you, "pull the trigger one more time and you are dead." But the Bayesian would say (**), "since you tried five times and nothing happened, then you are reasonably safe if you try once more."

Of course, these two viewpoints are extreme, there are plenty of intermediate ways to approach a problem, but they indicate how difficult it may be to deal with something unknown. And that's the big, big trouble with climate change. It is gigantic, enormous, complicated, and most likely dangerous. But we are like the characters of the science fiction story of the unknown gun: we have no direct past experience to rely upon. Without disparaging the Bayesian method, surely helpful in many cases, it may be a suicidal approach to use when dealing with something dangerous for which you have insufficient statistical data. That's the case of the Russian Roulette and also of climate change.

There follows the question: do people think Bayesian of Frequentist? It is a controversial subject but, personally, I'd say that it makes sense to say that most people think Bayesian. That may be the reason why humankind has such a cavalier attitude toward the danger of climate change. The statistics we have on climate for the recent past don't tell us anything about the possibility of a true catastrophe. So, we might be tempted use a Bayesian approach to conclude that we have no reason to be worried - and the more time goes by without catastrophes occurring, the more this conclusion seems to be reinforced. After all, haven't we pulled the trigger of this thing you call "gun" already five times? It has to be harmless.

Of course, the scientific/reductionist approach tells us otherwise when the climate system is analyzed and modelized. It tells us that the change may be extremely destructive - actually catastrophic. But that approach seems to be reserved for a small fraction of the population trained in the scientific method. There follows that humankind is playing the Russian roulette with the Earth's climate. And that might well end the way a Russian Roulette game must eventually end.



(*) During the past two decades, the number of suicides in the US has increased by some 25% and the most common method was using firearms. A peculiar form of suicide consists in playing the game of the Russian Roulette. There are no worldwide statistics but 10 years of records in Kentucky alone reveal 24 cases of people who killed themselves in this way. Clearly, it is not a form of mass entertainment, but it does happen. It is hard to say what goes on in the mind of the people who engage in this kind of game, but likely it has to do with the fascination we feel for guns. Nobody knows exactly how many small firearms exist in the world, but the number could be more than half a billion. In the US, there is about one gun per person although, of course, they are not evenly distributed. Some people take guns as true objects of worship and some seem to believe in the existence of a Gun God requiring human sacrifices - that may be the ultimate reason why some people play the Russian Roulette.

From the paper by Lisa Shields. "In one situation, a 22-year-old African American man used a 0.22 caliber revolver in a game with a friend. Each participant pulled the trigger on 2 occasions; the victim discharged the fatal bullet on his third attempt. The decedent was a university student, a member of the varsity football team, and was studying electrical engineering with a 3.0 GPA. Blood and urine toxicology screens yielded no ethanol or other drugs. In another circumstance, a 46-year-old divorced white man employed as a custodian engaged in Russian roulette with his “drinking buddy,” a male friend suffering from cancer. After placing 2 shells in a .38 special, the victim died with the first pull of the trigger. Four of the victims had pulled the trigger at least 3 times before their fatality. A 19-year-old white man significantly increased the likelihood of a Russian roulette fatality. He had a history of depression with a previous commitment at a mental hospital and several previous suicide attempts. Playing a variation of traditional Russian roulette with his brother and 2 friends, the victim placed 5 live rounds in the cylinder, leaving one empty chamber, of a .357 Traus revolver. He spun the cylinder, put the gun to his right temple, and pulled the trigger. <..> The decedent had played Russian roulette on 2 occasions in the previous several weeks, each time placing only one live round in the cylinder." 


(**) A formal statement of Bayes' theorem is:

In the problem of the Russian Roulette, X= you pull the trigger and A= you die

P(A|X) is what we want to estimate: what is the probability that you die when pulling the trigger? P(X|A) is the probability that when you die it is because you pulled the trigger. We may take it as equal to one, neglecting the occasional heart attacks that might strike the player when they pull the trigger on an empty chamber. For the P(A)/P(X) term, we need statistical data but it is obvious that, in a limited number of attempts, as long as the player is alive, the more times they pull the trigger, the larger P(X) becomes and hence P(A|X) becomes smaller. So, you wold be led to conclude that the more times you pull the trigger, the safer you are. Then, of course, for a large number of players (and a large number of deaths), the Bayesian analysis will converge to the reductionist results: n*3.5 attempts are needed in order to kill n people, assuming that the drum contains six chambers and one bullet. The problem is that the Russian Roulette doesn't allow a large number of attempts when played by a single person (or by a single planet in the form of a climate catastrophe).

See also this article on freakonometrics

 

Those Weird Italians: do They Really Think Italy is a Sovereign State? A Comment on the Recent Failure of Forming a New Government

The political history of Europe during the past 5 centuries or so. Note how nation-states crystallized in the current form mostly during the 19th century. These entities turned out to be extremely resilient and they survived two major world wars and all sorts of disasters. Nation-states are much less important today in the age of the Globalized empire, but they are still alive and kicking. The recent events in Italy the attempt of creating a more independent national government clashed against the international political imperatives. It is all part of a general trend that may lead to the disgregation of the Eurozone and, perhaps, to a Seneca Collapse for the weaker European economies, including the Italian one.

A few things became clear in Italy during the past few days. One is that Italy is not a real "sovereign state," as it became evident when President Mattarella refused to accept a government which included people who had taken critical positions against the European Union and against the Euro. It was a necessary outcome of the situation: from 1943 Italy has been occupied by the troops of the victorious American Empire. Only a certain degree of fiction has been maintained to imply that Italy is able, in principle, to take independent decisions in matters dealing with the economy and foreign policy.

In practice, whenever Italian officers tried to take such independent decisions, they discovered that it was an unwise choice - even for their own physical survival. There have been several instructive cases in the past, starting with Enrico Mattei, president of the Italian National Oil Company (ENI). He pursued a politics of independence for the Italian energy system and he died in a mysterious (but not so much) airplane crash in 1962.

History, as usual, rhymes with itself and, recently, the winners of the latest Italian elections, the leaders of the M5s and the Northern League (now simply the League) parties, tried to form a government with a program of sweeping reforms which included an attempt to gain a larger degree of independence from the European Union in financial matters. The program didn't include anything equivalent to the British "Brexit" but it was, clearly, a step in that direction.

It didn't work, and it should have been obvious from the beginning that it couldn't. The rules of the imperial game are not based on democracy: defeated and occupied countries can't vote for their independence (it happened to Catalonia, too). Try a little exercise, imagine that, after the defeat of Queen Boudicca, the Celts of Britain had voted for a National government pursuing a policy of independence from Rome. You get the point, I think.

What's perhaps most surprising is how a lot of Italians reacted to the events. They took Mr. Mattarella's decision as an insult to the sovereignty of Italy. That is, they seem to believe that such a thing as an Italian sovereign state exists, despite the American troops occupying Italy with more than 10,000 men in at least a hundred military bases (all your bases are belong to US). And the military occupation is just a marginal element of a much more in-depth political and financial occupation.

Yet, in a certain sense, the Italians are right. In politics, often beliefs are stronger than reality - politics creates its own reality. And so, if Italians truly believe that Italy is an independent country, then at least it could become one. It is what happened in 1861, when Italy was created as an independent state for the first time in history.

Now, there are events that highlight long-term trends. The power scuffle about the new government in Italy is one of these events. It shows that the Global Empire is still strong, but also in evident decline because it could be challenged - although unsuccessfully - by the winning parties of the recent Italian elections. Empires are fragile things in the sense that they need a lot of energy to keep moving - and they tend to have a short lifetime in comparison to the more resilient entities we call "nations." Empires, in other words, are subjected to the kind of rapid collapse that I call the "Seneca Collapse"

The Global/American Empire is no exception. It is the product of the power of fossil fuels and it will persist only as long as fossil fuels are cheap and abundant. That can't and won't last forever, although at present it is impossible to say for how long. Rome was said to be eternal at the time of the Roman Empire, but it wasn't. The same is true for Washington D.C. (and for Brussels, which will probably fall earlier).

So, at some moment Italy may become again an independent state, as it was from 1861 to 1943. Most Italians, right now, seem to think that it would be a good idea. But will it be? Think about this: after the Roman Legions left Britain, were the Britons richer? Or happier to be ruled by tribal chieftains? Debatable, to say the least.

The people who are proposing that Italy should leave the Eurozone seem to think that all the problems for the Italian economy are financial and political. They don't understand the structural problems of an economy which is almost 100% dependent on the import of mineral commodities, and of fossil fuels in particular. Leaving the Eurozone or making cosmetic changes in the taxation system won't do anything to address this dependency. And, if it is true that nation-states are more resilient than empires, they too can suffer the Seneca Collapse if they lack the energy needed for their economy to function. So, the future is obscure, as always, but one thing remains clear: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid" (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 BC-65 AD)

The Seneca Ruin of the Dinosaurs - a Report from Berlin

The death of the dinosaurs as shown in the 1940 movie "Fantasia" by Walt Disney. An incredibly powerful and moving scene - a true Seneca ruin for the poor creatures walking in a hot and dry landscape. This scene is also reasonably realistic: at that time it was already clear that heat had caused the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs (although a branch of the group survived in the form of birds). The same threat that we face nowadays: global warming generated by an enhanced greehouse effect.

I was in Berlin on March 26th to present my book, "The Seneca Effect" to the Urania Scientific Society. It was not a presentation for scientists but for the general public and I decided to have some fun by presenting an assorted series of catastrophes. That included the demise of the dinosaurs, showing a scene from Disney's "Fantasia" movie, and the nearly obligatory scene of the collapse of the towers of the world trade center.

Of course, my talk was not just a list of collapses, one after the other. I tried to highlight the physical reasons behind the catastrophes, how the collapse of complex systems tends to follow some laws, although it cannot be described in terms of simple mathematical equations. The basic theme of the book is that there is a common core in all these cases and that the collapse of social systems, such as the Roman Empire, can be described in terms similar to those of the blowing up of a balloon.

Not everybody agrees with me on this point, some people say that humans are different, they are masters of their destiny, and that human ingenuity can overcome the laws of physics - at least in some cases. I agree that it is a controversial point, but I noted that my talk was well received by an audience of nearly 100 persons - not bad for a Monday evening (and they had to pay a ticket, too!). Germany is one of the few countries in the world where you can still discuss matters such as mineral depletion and the concept of resource overexploitation. With the exception of France, in the rest of the Western world it seems to me that these matters are by now taboo. Not really forbidden, but actively marginalized and ignored.

There was also a lively discussion after my talk. It is always a pleasure to note how Germany has maintained at least something of the inheritance of a great man as Alexander Von Humboldt, today nearly forgotten everywhere else in the world. But Humboldt had caught not only the infinite variety but also the beauty of complex, natural systems.

Berlin is also a lively city and I found the time for a rapid visit to the aquarium. I've always loved aquariums, but I went there also for professional reasons. As you know, we have been studying the overexploitation of fisheries as examples of the collapse of economic systems and it was curious to note how the ongoing destruction of the fisheries is having consequences also on what's being shown in aquariums. Here is a picture of me looking at a tank of jellyfish.

I was amazed: it was the first time I saw live jellyfish in a tank. I don't think they were shown in aquariums until recent times, but now their population has exploded as the result of the destruction of their predators, fish. So, they seem to be appearing also in aquariums. From the viewpoint of jellyfish, humans must look like benevolent deities, even though that doesn't save us from being stung when we swim in the sea.

Jellyfish are eerie, beautiful creatures, but also the prototypical image of the "alien". They are not yet big enough that they can attack submarines but, if things keep going the way they have been going, who knows? The world seems to be changing faster and faster, and this may not be a good thing.

To conclude, a little satori on my part, when I saw this sign on the door of the bathroom of my hotel room, in Berlin. After seeing this n-th invitation (all hotels have it) to save the world by having my towels washed a little less often, I concluded that we'll never make it. Humboldt, Jellyfish, Seneca, dinosaurs, or whatever, it is always greenwashing that wins.

Presentation of "The Seneca Effect" in Florence, on April 5th, 2018

This Thursday, in Florence, we'll have the first "official" presentation of my book "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017), the 42nd report to the Club of Roma. The presentation will be in the Aula Magna of the University of Florence. The President (*) of the  University of Florence,  prof. Luigi Dei, will introduce and comment the book. Then we'll have two presentation, one by the author and the other by Dr. Roberto Peccei, Vice-president of the Club of Rome (in the photo)



The presentations will be in Italian, everyone interested is welcome! Below, a more detailed description of the event.

(*) I think that "president" is the best translation for the role that in Italian we call "rettore"

The Seneca Effect: A Review

Writing from Berlin, where the presentation of "The Seneca Effect" is going to start in a few hours.  And here is another review by Ronny Wagner, in German, which I translated the best I could with the help of Google.

The Seneca effect

by Ronny Wagner | 3 Jan, 2018 |

 

"It would be a comfort to our weak souls and our works, if all things would pass away as they arise; but as it is, growth is progressing slowly, while the road to ruin is fast. "Lucius Anneau's Seneca"

The "Seneca Effect" describes many phenomena that grow slowly and quickly decline. As it turns out, collapses can occur in many different forms and everywhere. They have many different causes and develop in different ways. However, all breakdowns have certain consistent characteristics. They are always collective phenomena, that is, they occur only in so-called complex systems. Complex systems have the property that they are linked by many links. The collapse of a complex system is the rapid reorganization of a large number of such links.  

These nodes are in our case humans and their interactions with their environment. This is the research field of the social sciences, economics and history. All of these systems have a lot in common: a nonlinear behavior. In a complex system, there is no simple relationship between cause and effect. Rather, a complex system can multiply the effects of a small perturbation. Conversely, a disturbance can also be damped so that the system is barely affected. These facts mean that predictions in complex systems are impossible. Predictions by experts about the future development of a complex system are simply fantasy. You should not pay attention to them.

But how can a person adjust to the Seneca effect?

"Growth is progressing slowly, while the road to ruin is fast. "Seneca

In fact, the Seneca effect is the result of trying to resist change instead of accepting it. The more resistance you make to change, the more that change will bounce back. It is no coincidence that philosophers often advise not to cling to material things that are part of this difficult and volatile world. That's good advice.

"The hard and the rigid accompany death. The soft and weak accompanies life. "Laotse

In dealing with a collapse, we should therefore adhere to the advice of Epictetus: "We must set up the things in our power as well as possible, but take everything else as it comes."
 
It follows that one can mitigate the "Seneca cliff", if one accepts the change, instead of resisting it. It means that you should never try to force the system into something it does not want to do.

Jay Forrester: "Everyone is trying to 'steer the system' in the wrong direction."

Politics seems to have given up any attempt to adapt to change. Instead, it resorts to simplified but powerful slogans that try to prospect the return to aimpossible prosperous past. People often make tremendous efforts to keep relationships together that should be closed. Also, we stubbornly cling to our workplace, though we may hate it and realize that we should seek a new one. Whole civilizations experienced a decline and disappeared because they did not adapt to change, a fate thatwe could experience, too, if we don't learn how to accept changes.
 

It should not be forgotten that you can fix a problem, but not a change. You can only adapt to a change.

"The Seneca Effect" Will Be Presented in Berlin on March 26th

I will be in Berlin for a presentation of "The Seneca Effect" this Monday, March 26th. The presentation is organized by the Urania society and it will be in English, with symultaneous translation in German. There follows a good critical comment of the book by Alexander Behr on "Brennstoff." I used Google translate the text into English and then I refined it using my modest knowledge of German. I know it is not a great translation, but it seems to be readable to me. And I hope that it is also faithful enough to the original

Slow growth, rapid ruin - the "Seneca collapse" of our society

A Review by Alexander Behr
Who remembers the Club of Rome? It was a late 1960s coalition of scientists who warned against overexploitation of the planet's natural resources through exploitation and exploitation. The first report to the Club of Rome entitled "The Limits to Growth" in 1972 created a tremendous response. Today, the 42nd report to the Club of Rome was published. The author, the Italian chemist Ugo Bardi, attempts to explain why complex systems collapse and how we can handle them.

In the 1970s, the founders of the Club of Rome created a model to calculate the "limits of growth" generated by increasing resource use. Ugo Bardi, himself a longtime member of the Club of Rome, continues to develop the theses of that groundbreaking work and presents his new study on the subject with his book "The Seneca Effect - Why Systems Collapse and How We Can Handle It".

Bardi is particularly interested in the collapse of the ancient Roman Empire and the transferability of this historical event to the present day. The eponymous Roman philosopher Seneca is quoted by Bardi with the memorable phrase: "Growth is slow, while the road to ruin is fast." Seneca, born in 4 BC, was first an influential advisor to Emperor Nero and later fell out of favor. He foresaw the collapse of the Roman Empire well before its actual entry.

Considering that Rome was founded in the 8th century BCE and reached its apogee in the 2nd century AD, one can attest that the Roman Empire grew for about a thousand years, to decay in a mere two to three centuries - Ugo Bardi calls this phenomenon the "Seneca effect". But why do complex systems collapse? Bardi tries to test the "Seneca effect" on the basis of the current world order.

He explores the question of whether it would be conceivable that today's complex world system could experience a more or less abrupt collapse due to mutually reinforcing effects. According to Bardi, small causes can lead to big effects in complex systems. The problem is that modern industrial society, as soon as it goes into a crisis, usually tries to solve the problems it faces by expanding its governance structures - in other words, it is doing a fatal "more of the same" instead to initiate a change.


The silver runs out
So, inevitably, the so-called "tipping points" occur and that makes it extremely difficult for complex societies to respond to disorder with adaptation. One of the main reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire was that the mines in northern Spain were no longer able to supply the silver necessary for coin production in the usual quantities. The cost of controlling the controlled territories became too high. In addition, trading on the Silk Road devoured large quantities of the coveted precious metals.

The exhaustion of the gold and silver mines was followed by a cascade of feedback effects that was far more visible and spectacular than the influences that caused it. The Roman Empire experienced political unrest, internal conflicts and the collapse of its army. Ugo Bardi believes that this "Seneca collapse" can teach us a lot about the difficulties facing our current empire, the globalized world under Western hegemony. Due to the fact that the modern world has grown so fast, it could collapse with a bang, said Bardi.

In his book, Ugo Bardi takes us on a journey through materials science and physics: he explains material breaks in ships and airplanes. Repeated, especially cyclic, loads lead to the weakening of the structure, to the so-called material fatigue. Cracks appear, which are barely visible at first - the break is often treacherous and in one rapid swoop: it is the "Seneca ruin" of the material. Bardi argues that in complex systems the unexpected and sudden change from one state to another can always lead to surprises.


The earthquake equation

Bardi assumes that the "Seneca effect" can be observed within materials is the same effect, within certain limits occurring in social, economic and biological systems. All these systems would have to obey the general laws of thermodynamics, from which certain rules and tendencies could be deduced. But the findings from physics in many cases also tell us what we do not know. Thus, so far, there are no such things as an "avalanche equation " or an "earthquake equation" that would be able to determine exactly when and where an avalanche would go off or an earthquake would occur.

Therefore, according to Bardi, despite all our knowledge of earthquakes, we can only protect ourselves from them by constructing buildings to withstand them in the event of a fall. Similarly, it is in the case of financial crises: due to the complexity of the financial world, no one is able to know exactly when the next collapse of the banking system will arrive. Bardi interprets the mortgage crisis of 2008 as a classic example of a "Seneca collapse" as the property market crash was much faster than its previous growth.

In the transfer of complex physical systems to social and social processes there lies an innovative strength of the book, which contains numerous graphics. At the same time, however, it is also his enormous weakness. In order to transform physical phenomena into social phenomena, one needs a more or less rigid image of man. So Bardi assumes that "people tend to overuse resources." He misses the fact that the depletion of resources always has to do with power and governance structures that must be historically determined and are always changeable.

 
Missing social theory

Elsewhere, Bardi attempts to apply the "Boltzmann Gibbs distribution", which was developed to describe entropy in atomic systems, to the social distribution of monetary wealth. In the next paragraph, he relativizes his mind game. In some ways, one has the impression of listening to a professor who is chatting with himself. Ugo Bardi lacks a coherent social theory that could provide orientation in his quite interesting theses on the collapse of complex societies.

As an additional problem, Bardi attaches high importance to the highly problematic theses of the British economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus developed in the early 19th century, named after him Population theory, which was directed primarily against the "excessive proliferation" of poor sections of the population in England. Already Friedrich Engels argued as the main objection that "overpopulation" basically does not represent a technical, but a socio-economic problem. According to Engels, capitalism is repelling an industrial "reserve army" of labor, a "lumpenproletariat", who in the worst case will be denied any right to life.

Today, nearly one billion people worldwide belong to this lumpen proletariat - outcasts who do not even benefit from being exploited. Even today, all horror scenarios of the so-called danger of overpopulation are aimed at these people. But Bardi overlooks the fact that according to the World Food Report report, today's agriculture could feed twice as many people as currently living on the planet. Overpopulation cannot be the reason for the uncontrolled exploitation of resources.

It is the current economic system that, with its inherent compulsion to maximize profits and drive economic growth, has caused enormous damage for about 200 years. Profits are more important than the satisfaction of human needs. Hunger and environmental destruction could be ended, distributive justice enforced. Despite the fact that Bardi misses this knowledge, he clearly takes position on this point and advises to develop economies that are secure against the unpredictable shocks of the global financial system.

Likewise, Bardi advises that we "rid ourselves of the stubborn craving for fossil fuels that are ruining our planet." Because peak oil could have a similar effect to a "peak silver" of the Roman Empire. But even before this happens, several tipping points of the ecological earth system are threatened, which cause not only a "Seneca collapse" of our society but of the entire ecological system. Despite some daring scientific pirouettes, Bardi's new book provides important evidence that rethinking our view of the world is more than necessary.

The View from Les Houches: The Seneca Collapse

I gave a presentation focused on the Seneca Effect at the School of Physics in Les Houches this March. Here I show various concepts associated with overshoot and collapse with the help of "Amelie the Amoeba" (This picture was not taken in Les Houches, but in an earlier presentation in Florence).

Here are some commented slides from my presentation. First of all, the title:

And here is an image I often use in order to illustrate the plight of humankind, apparently engaged in the task of covering the whole planet Earth with a uniform layer of cement, transforming it into Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire of Asimov's series "Foundation"

I moved on to illustrate the "new paradigm" of resource exploitation: the idea that mineral resources never "run out", but simply become more and more expensive, until they become too expensive.

It is not a new idea, it goes back to Stanley Jevons in mid 19th century, but for some reason it is incredibly difficult to make it understandable to decision makers:

Then, I spoke about the Seneca effect, there is a lot to say about that, but let me just show to you one of the slides I showed during the talk: the Seneca Cliff does exist!

Fisheries are an especially good example of overexploitation (or perhaps a bad example, there is nothing good about destroying all the fish in the sea. And this leads to a rather sad observation:

I also showed how the Seneca Effect can be used for good purposes, that is to get rid of things we need to get rid of. This is an image from a paper that we (Sgouris Sgouridis, Denes Csala, and myself) published in 2016.

You see the Seneca cliff for the fossils, the violet part of the curve. It is what we want to happen and it would be possible to make it happen if we were willing to invest more, much more, in renewable energy. But, apparently, there is no such idea on the table, so the future doesn't look so good.

But never mind. We keep going and, eventually, we'll arrive somewhere. In the meantime: