File: c:/ddc/Angel/Papers/LostWorlds.txt Date: Mon Feb 02 17:09:51 2015 (C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux Lost Worlds The world got a little jolt in 1972 March: 29 year old Dennis Meadows gave a presentation at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution about the fate of the World based on the insights of his team who made the World3 simulation model. Things did not look good. Business as usual would lead to a massive, global collapse. Tinkering with the model did not change the outcome. Only through drastic, global interventions could a collapse be avoided. A pocket book size report "Limits to Growth" was translated in 37 languages and sold 12M copies. The authors invited experts in multiple disciplines to improve their model while at the same time they emphasized that policy makers needed to consider their worrisome findings. The cold war was at that time still in full swing with a proxy war in Vietnam. Europe was recovering from student revolts that started in 1968 Paris. Politicians must have looked closer at the report and found that the predicted turmoil - without interventions - were at least 60 years in the future. They likely also found scenarios produced by the World3 simulator that avoided collapses due to interventions. Hence, it was clearly, for them, not urgent to take policy actions. The World3 model is aggregated; differences between developed and developing regions of the planet are abstracted away. Policy makers of poor regions can't do much with worries about pollution when having to deal with hunger and deprivation while improvements led to the unintended side effect of rampant population increases. Policy makers in developed regions had to deal with local affluence differences. Explaining to the less affluent segments of the societies that there are "Limits to Growth" was avoided - to this day. 1992 ---- While the 1972 publication was titled "Limits to Growth", the next publication in 1992 was ominously titled "Beyond the Limits". The World had changed substantially. The cold war had ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1989. However, the world population had increased from 3.6B in 1971 to 5.4B in 1991, an increase of 50% in just twenty years. Pressures on the environment had increased and they declared in the Preface: "The present way of doing things is unsustainable. ... Poverty cannot be ended by indefinite material growth; it will have to be addressed while the material human economy contracts." Still they were able to generate scenarios with interventions that avoid collapses. They appealed to humanity to do the right thing as suggested by their model interventions. 2004 ---- The next publication was titled "Limits to Growth: The 30th-Year Update". Donella Meadows was again a co-author, although she had died in 2001. She had been the most optimistic, believing that humanity would change its ways due to the findings of their model's scenarios. They were still able to construct interventions that would prevent collapses, although with more difficulty. Timing was terrible. The world was focussed on a culture war between the West and fundamentalist terrorism. 2012 ---- Jorgen Randers, a member of the team that made the World3 model and a coauthor of the publications mentioned above, made a new model, called 2052. This model runs from 1970-2050. It is somewhat similar to a scenario of World3 that assumes favorable technology interventions and thereby avoids a collapse before 2050. The 2052 model avoids a collapse (before 2050) as well by assuming that further urbanization will reduce fertility, that food per capita will increase way beyond the standard scenario in World3 and that the impact of climate change will have triggered substantial replacement of fossil fuel usage with renewable sources. He acknowledges that there is a good chance that his assumptions are wrong and that global warming will get out of hand if not before 2050 then after. His model has replaced collapses due to increased pollution impacting the food supply by collapses as a result of run away temperature increases creating havoc on the planet. Policy makers dilemmas ---------------------- Another reason why the World3 model has been ignored by policy makers is that there was initially no consensus in the academic world about its validity - to phrase it gently. An immediate problem in 1972 was that the inside details of the model were not available for inspection. The definitive technical description in "Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World" became only available at the end of 1974. Well established academic disciplines may have felt threatened by sophisticated computer system modeling that glued together cherry-picked elements from their discipline, which they hardly could recognize. Economists may have been astonished that money had been abstracted out in the model. The causal relationship: decrease in supply -> rise in price -> social response was simplified into: decrease in supply -> social response Disciplines that write lengthy articles, with established traditions of presenting newer insights, may have been surprised that the World3 model used parameters in differential equations to capture their hard won results. The model has been critiqued as being too simple. Geographic differences were abstracted away. The different types of pollution were abstracted away in a simple global parameter. Non-renewable resources were also abstracted away into a simple parameter. These abstractions are certainly conceptually wrong and thus this critique appeals to the non-technical general public as well as to the policy makers. The World3 authors, aware of this topic, however discuss and explain their choices extensively. The opposite critique that the model is overly complex has been made as well. No model is required to agree that ongoing exponential material growth is not sustainable given the finite resources of the planet. This would, however, not yield an indication of when an inflection point is reached, which is obtained - roughly - by the World3 model scenarios. When the academics themselves are engaged in vigorous combats it becomes impossible for policy makers to act given that in their realm they have to deal already too often with incompatible positions. Thus they had yet another good reason to push forward to successors the problems identified by the World3 scenarios. Things get way more problematic for policy makers, at all levels, when they are confronted with what they are supposed to impact. The main driver of the collapses in the World3 scenarios is the exploding size of the World population. The Demographic Transition process where high death and birth rates decline due to increased affluence allows a comfortable hands-off approach. The World3 scenarios showed otherwise: the declines are too slow. This was recognized by the Chinese but their one child policy in 1979 has been condemned ever since. Thus it is fair to say that policy makers elsewhere have no appetite to deal with population policies as advocated by the World3 authors. The second dimension that is open, in theory, to manipulation is the aggregate amount of industrial activities (which is the main driver for resource declines and pollution increases that impact the food production). Collapses are avoided in the model by interventions where (among others) the aggregate industrial activities are capped. This is also difficult to swallow because to this day - even when confronted with climate change - the policy makers are wondering why the economists do not know the secret for resuming economic growth to address unemployment and to fire up inflation in order to reduce, in relative terms, the national debts. Welfare societies are financed by taxes, among others, on the companies operating in the private sector. These companies have become addicted to growing markets due to growing populations and by inventing new material "needs". Capping industrial activities is a difficult proposition not only for the private sector but also for the Governments due to their dependence on the taxation revenues to finance mandatory, social services on which ever increasing majorities now depend. Validity of the World3 model ---------------------------- A comfortable way out for policy makers is an argument that the simulation models are 'questionable'. A philosophical argument starts with observing that individuals can be inexplicably creative. That applies to humanity even more. Hence why believing that World3 type models capture the fate of humanity in the 21st century? This reminds of the last rebuttal in the sequence that Dennis Meadows used in 2009 to characterize the history of rejections of their model: -- 1970s: There are no limits. -- 1980s: There are limits, but they are distant in time. -- 1990s: The limits are near, but they are irrelevant since the market will deal with them. -- 2000s: The market is not adequate, but new technologies will let us evade the limits without requiring that we stop growth. Fourty years later, however, human ingenuity has not yet kicked in. Earlier claims of falsification of the World3 model have been invalidated. A confirmation that the model is not wrong was provided by G. Turner, 2008 and reported in a paper "A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality". This paper compares the predictions made by the World3 model standard scenario during 1970-2000 and what actually happened. The conclusion: The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run' scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st Century. Validity of the 2052 model -------------------------- The Randers model description comes with a spreadsheet with time series. Unlike the World3 model there are five sub models for the: USA, China, OECD-USA, the upcoming nations and the rest of the world. Lacking are descriptions of the formulas that generate the dynamics that explains Randers's numerous "I believe that ...". Hence checking his assumptions as for the World3 model is not possible. For now, one can wonder whether his assumptions are too optimistic. Lost worlds ----------- The 1992 publication tried to entice our politicians by showing what a wonderful world would have resulted when their proposed interventions were applied in 1975 in contrast with applying them in 1995. The same maneuver was done in the 2004 publication. Interventions that produce a stable world in 2002 would have produced a way more attractive world when applied twenty years earlier in 1982. It did not work; and Dennis Meadows refused to write a last book that was announced for 2010. He must have been sadder but wiser, or rather wiser but sadder. Now what? --------- We cannot rule out magic that will mitigate what is unfolding relentlessly due to the lack of long term perspectives in our democracies. A good crisis will ultimately get the ball rolling. An example was the 2008 September global financial gridlock. Henry Paulson got the mandate to 'bypass' democracy as we know it and save the day. We are waiting now for the next crisis that triggers the insight that we should not loose yet another world. It may come from the military when we are confronted with a massive (man-made) natural disaster. It may come from the multi-nationals when we finally refuse to deal with more chaotic indecisiveness to legally constrain harmful practices. It may come from .... who knows?