Is global collapse imminent? (2014) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Is global collapse imminent? (2014) [pdf]

sustainable.unimelb.edu.au

36 pointsshoo49 comments

"The end of easy oil, and subsequent global collapse"

The paper might not be right on all points or might be completely wrong entirely. But it is right on one thing.

If you have have ever taken care of plants, what happens with a plant before it dies is something very odd - nothing.

It will look a little weak, but then it will suddenly completely die - almost overnight, shedding all leaves and going dry.

The most interesting thing about the market is how everything you think you know can be wrong. Like how bad news is good news right before a Fed meeting, or how suddenly cheap oil is now bad because it's reducing investment in new pipelines and rigs. I think these quirky inversions are reliable signals of something, I just haven't figured out quite what.

One thing's for sure, these predictions are exactly like a broken clock.

Isn't the cheap oil the result of the Saudis arm-twisting the Russians and Iranians ?

P.S: Shell is starting an exploration of oil in the Arctic, after Obama's executive order. I don't think the bit about investment in new rigs is well-founded.

Maybe in your neck of the woods the expression has a different meaning but I thought 'arm-twisting' meant getting someone to do something they initially didn't want to do. Hardly the case with the Russians and the price of oil.

The implication is that the Saudis are a US proxy, and the arm twisting is that they should change their policy on Ukraine.

In the case of Iran it's more just to try to hurt their economy.

In my neck of the woods, people are perhaps less gullible, too.

The causes of cheap oil are many, and varied. They include:

- a reduction in Chinese demand

- increased shale oil production

- Saudi desire to reduce competition from high cost producers including Russia and shale oil

- the failure of ISIS to capture the Iraqi oil fields

- unanticipated increased production from Libya

That's just first order causes. Second order causes are things like the US desire to hurt Russian foreign exchange by hitting their exports, and Saudi desires to decrease investment in new technology.

I was referring to a declining cost of oil historically being considered an economic stimulus because oil was money that was traditionally flowing out of the country. So reducing household/business energy cost meant more money in the bank for investment / disposable income spent in the local economy.

Now all of a sudden the rhetoric is the slowdown the last quarter was due to the falling price of oil leading to a decrease in manufacturing orders for pipelines and rigs. The shift being that US produces most of its own oil (or used to before the latest Price Wars). If consumer confidence is low, the energy savings are paying down debt or going to savings, so now oil price falling is a net loss to the economy? Very hard to believe this, but that's the "word on the street".

Not like the price of gas actually stayed low for long, refineries tightened up and the price recovered significantly, even while oil remains down 50%. Oh well...

I think that it's because we don't yet have appropriate mental models to think about systems of such complexity.

They're called "critical fluctuations" in physics and occur before a qualitative change in organization.

> what happens with a plant before it dies is something very odd - nothing.

No, this is what happens exactly: "Recovery rates reflect distance to a tipping point in a living system" doi:10.1038/nature10723 [pdf:] http://vasilisdakos.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/veraart-... --> https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1425709102799954480...

The term you're looking for is "Seneca Cliff", after the Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist.

It's the observation that large and complex systems tend to fail suddenly and catastrophically.

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/12/fossil-fuels-are...

We see this in business as well: the falls of MCI-Worldcom, Enron, and the collapses of multiple financial bubbles follow this dynamic.

And we see its opposite. Take lots of large, complex companies that eventually came to an end an you'll see examples of everything. Some, like Lehman Bros. in 2008: Pow! Gone. Others, former giants like IBM and General Motors, for example, are looking like old soldiers that never die. They just fade away....

The author is missing the point that technology R&D responds to oil prices. Strictly speaking, if oil becomes scarce and expensive, alternative energy develops more rapidly. It's the cheap oil that creates developmental risks.

Yes, but there's only so much power in research -- humans can find and exploit existing entropic gradients. We cannot create them.

And people have been looking at the exhaustion of fossil fuels since the late 18th century. Yes, 18th, not 19th, with the first questions arising over how long Britain's coal would last.

In that time, the three big developments have been accessing petroleum (1859), commercial electricity generation (1870s), and nuclear fission (1935).

Petroleum replaced one fossil fuel with another (albeit a vastly more useful one). Electricity allowed for energy generation and use to be decoupled by thousands of miles, if necessary (transmission losses for long-distance electricity are quite low). And nuclear fission offered one possible out, though it's been a highly problematic option.

Wind and water power have been utilized by humans for centuries, if not longer. Solar power has progressed hugely in recent decades, but it's far more fundamentally limited than many people realize. Raw availability at Earth's surface is ~8,000x present human energy consumption. Factor in land area (30% of total), population and per-capita energy growth (roughly doubling energy demand even at a small fraction of present US energy use levels), total conversion efficiencies (you're left with about 1% of the available incident energy after PV conversion, capacity factor, spacing factors, and inverters), and we're down to a 20x surplus of solar energy as available capacity if you pave over the entire Earth's landmass.

You start rapidly arriving at the conclusion that either we're 1) not going to see levels of resource consumption comparable to those of the advanced world, or 2) not for projected populations, or both.

You can hypothesize alternatives, but most are assuming tremendous advances which have been exceptionally non-forthcoming.

Nuclear being "problematic" is vastly overblown. That's why I think the answer to the title is a resounding no: we still have a lenthy nuclear buffer before a proper energetic collapse, so at the very least it is not imminent.

^ This. There might be a very harsh wake-up to energy realities for the ignorant subset of the treehuggers, but nuclear can and hopefully will keep us going energy-wise.

I am MUCH more scared of a nuclear war breaking out over diminishing oil resources than I am about peaceful nuclear energy. That would be mankind's biggest and worst irony.

IMHO, it is bordering on insane to not consider peaceful nuclear energy as someone who is keen on saving the planet.

Sure, conserving, saving, making everything more efficient is fine and laudable. But one still has to support the energy needs of some 7e9 people.

I've discussed the specifics of why nuclear's problematic at more length here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2awjj2/thought...

The issues are multiple, many are not technical in nature (which means that the solutions are also not technical in nature).

Among them: risk, particularly systemic risk (not strictly limited to fallout or acute plant operational scenarios -- think Japan stressing its grid and industrial capacity following Fukushima), scale (Derek Abbott, "Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable", IEEE), Proliferation, the 10,000 year perspective (language, cultures, institutions...), credibility.

The near-term prospects are also not great. For once-through conventional plants, there's about an 80 year fuel reserve, 6 if we go all-out nuclear. Advanced thorium designs aren't proven and are likely 20-25+ years from deployment (those are ambitious Chinese estimates). Controlled energy-positive fusion strikes me as a "never going to happen" option, and quite likely with even greater systemic risks than fission (fission reactions aren't that hard to make happen, fusion is very hard). I'm aware of claims that uranium can be extracted from seawater -- that strikes me as possibly but not hugely credible.

And nuclear fails (of and by itself) to address numerous other concerns, notably a liquid fuels replacement, or scarce minerals availability -- humans are running short of numerous resources, not just energy.

It's also worth noting that one of nuclear's harshest critics was one of its most effective engineers: US Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear navy.

What do documents like this one do to your estimates of credibility?

http://www-pub.iaea.org/iaeameetings/cn216pn/Thursday/Sessio...

Lessee:

Pro: Cost data are provided (but without comparison to existing uranium mining costs). Quick check suggests that recent prices are on the order of $83/kg, vs, > $1,000/kg given in the study.

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=uranium

If I'm reading that correctly they're delivering 1 kg of natural (non-enriched) uranium for about $1,000. The energy value delivered by that (at $0.09/kWh) is around 1,000x greater, which is a good thing.

Con:

This appears to be largely theoretical, there are no large-scale deployments, and questions of viability, durability, maintenance, recovery (of both filtration material and uranium from it), etc., isn't given. This is very immature technology (See: http://redd.it/24sdvf).

For building out infrastructures we'll be needing likely within a few decades, if not earlier, that's not much lead time.

I'd really like to see some field-trial data and comprehensive cost and durablility discussion. Marine environments are harsh.

I was mostly lampooning the way you reduced an idea that is taken seriously enough to be a DOE research project to I'm aware of claims that uranium can be extracted from seawater.

I haven't tried to figure it out very carefully, but I imagine the cost estimates include production, deployment and collection of the harvester material, and that the degradation of the material is factored in (it wouldn't be all that surprising if the estimates treated it as disposable after 1 or few uses, because that is an easy way to make a conservative estimate).

I was simply noting that I am in fact aware of the proposal. It's not possible to discuss all elements of the situation -- time, space, and understanding all impose limits.

Assume good faith.

As with risks, there are issues in how costs are computed in that for much of the present economy they're predicated on underpriced fossil fuels. Another longer discussion I don't have time for here, but it's something Charles A.F. Hall discusses in his analysis of the Cobb-Douglas production function.

They don't even have a conclusion/tl;dr section...

One hopes Betteridge's law is in effect

I was about to mention about this :)

tome's law strikes again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549

Societies do not collapse. They're merely abandoned.

This is incorrect, societies have collapsed regularly throughout history. A collapse doesn't have to be a total destruction of the society, it's most often a fast transition to a lower level of social complexity.

One of my favorite books (and a book referenced by the link above) is "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph A Tainter, he gives a great study on the nature of collapse with lots of examples (note, some of the examples are a little dated and dubious like the Ik). He also gave a few presentations on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI

A society is a way of life that has a broadly-stroked narrative everyone shares. It's not a geography or civil engineering artifacts. When that narrative stops working, some perish but generally the people don't just evaporate, they leave.

With such a broad definition of a society you would not classify as a collapse what Tainter classifies as a collapse: a fast loss of social complexity. Additionally your definition might be better as a definition of culture rather than society.

Completely agree. Tainter's definition of society is deeply biased to the one he currently inhabits as being perforce "better" (the title having the word "complex" in it is a dead giveaway). This is a superstition.

I'd argue that a society that is actually better is not necessarily at all a more complex one. It is the one that reacts more favorably to change.

I've watched this presentation. Unfortunately, I can't say I've found all of it enlightening or at least useful. For one thing, there were important omissions, like inventions/development in agriculture or communication technology that caused an explosion in resources/means available (which were to stay), whereas Mr. Tainter assumes resources to be limited and declining. Other than the omissions there are just wrong assumptions or metrics. The best example in this regard is US patents that he takes as an indicator of research and development and points that the costs got higher because patents are submitted by (costly) groups. Nowadays not only patents are submitted in groups, but also paperworks, and this is partly political (i.e. an artificial induced phenomenon). And patents become hardly a metric of invention or development, as a lot of us may acknowledge (reference to patent trolling), but for some reason in Mr. Tainter's dissemination this is again overlooked.

I'm not saying Mr. Tainter's work is worthless, it's just that I see it not that solid to consider it as a foundation to build upon.

I found the book thought provoking and compelling. I wouldn't take what Dr. Tainter says as fact, like one would for a Math textbook, it's an argument (an opinion) which he defends in his book. His book is mainly about the first half of his presentation, not the second half that relates to the modern world. I would suggest you read the book if you liked the first half of the presentation.

Thanks for suggestion. Although I (clearly) have my retentions about his theories, I've already (book)marked both the presentation for future reference and his other related works for future reading.

This seems something like the (constantly failing) climate prediction models. There are the lot of interrelated factors, many of which are not well understood and any number of possible unforeseen events arising.

Which constantly failing climate models? How do you define failing?

If I have to define failing we are just playing silly games. You have google. You can find no shortage of climate change models that failed to mirror reality.

For instance, many models have over-forcast surface warming and it hasn't happened. Probably because the deep oceans have acted as heat sinks. Not because the basic principal of the earth heating in response to CO2 is incorrect. That's what happens when you try to models complex systems with incomplete understanding... which was my original point.

But your point is moot because the "failings" of models have been very quickly corrected, and they still show that the prevailing conclusions are true.

Models have been "failing" for the past 20 years and they still provide useful information. No one in their right mind is questioning the conclusions. If anything the issue is whether we're facing an apocalypse by 2040 or if things are merely going be catastrophic by 2100.

And just to note: even though the above conclusions show that models have very wide margins, what is indisputable is that no one is claiming that things will get better or that we are not in for major catastrophe. If that isn't a useful model, I don't now what is.

"whether we're facing an apocalypse by 2040 or if things are merely going be catastrophic by 2100"

Right... like the hundreds of thousands of refuges fleeing rising sea levels that was to happen by 2010. Pardon my scepticism. We don't know what is going to happen by 2040 and retrofitting models then saying "oh, now it's all figured out!" doesn't take future things you haven't figured out into account.

Can you even cite one peer-reviewed model that said that, or are you just speculating? Because the only place I've read garbage of that sort is in conspiracy theory web sites, not an IPCC report.

I wouldn't call a major UN report un-reviewed or Der Spiegel a conspiracy site...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/feared-migration-h...

So in answer to your question.. no, I'm not speculating.

If this is the best that you can find, I'd like to make a few comments:

* This is basically one quote by one dude with dubious methodologies in a very novel field of research. If you had taken the time to understand a little bit more about the field instead of, you know, basing yourself entirely on the position of one academic, you would find that it's still a very contentious topic (see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378011...)

* The consensus is, however, that there are at least 25 million current displaced people from climate events. A lot of people consider that many of the current events of violence in the Middle East have been triggered by increases in prices of staple foods which have contributed towards destabilizing societies. While this is hard to quantify, there is a lot of research efforts towards underestanding that better.

* Absolutely none of what you quoted has any relation whatsoever to the predicting powers of the climate models, which work in considerably longer cycles but, again, have thus far been very useful at explaining the current changes in climate. They explain the melting of the Antactic ice shelves, the Greenland glaciers, the drying of California and the destabilization of the Jet Stream, leading to the current freak weather events in the East Coast and Europe. Again, this was all predicted 15 years ago to a disturbingly high degree of accuracy.

You're showing that you've really no understanding the depths of climate science. You can't say that the fact that there are a lot of unknowns in some parts of the models, or worse yet, the sociological responses to those known changes, invalidates the rest of our understanding. It sounds to me that your expectations of how models work is unrealistic or that it somehow discredits the established body of knowledge that we have.

What's important is that we understand very well how ecosystems are degrading, what are the most likely things to happen to the climate, and how the impacts will be felt. The fact that we can't yet quantify some things such as specific plant responses, particular microclimate changes, or mass-scale social behaviors (which, might I remind you, is still not understood by anyone on the world) is to be expected, and there are thousands of people currently working on filling us in on that knowledge.

"The consensus is, however, that there are at least 25 million current displaced people from climate events."

Human caused climate events? Source?

Let's get out of the weeds back and back up to the original point. Well funded models have failed in their predictions. Many.

"there are thousands of people currently working on filling us in on that knowledge"

Great. I am in sure in time we will become much better at modeling complex systems. But I hope you understand my skepticism of this article.

Constantly failing? Have you actually read the literature in climate science? The models have been predicting pretty much everything that's been happening in the past 20 year.

Collapse of Antarctic ice shelves? Predicted. Ice cover of the Arctic? Surprisingly well predicted. Atmospheric CO2 ppm? Same thing.

The predictions have been off in one important aspect - they've completely failed to predict the rate at which these things are happening. Even the more exaggerated estimates have been way too low compared to how quickly the Arctic ice is actually disintegrating.

Atmospheric CO2 ppm a prediction?

Ok. You don't know what you are talking about do you?

Yup. Do you?

I'm thinking that if you did know then you would be aware of how many (often quite prestigious and well funded) models have failed to predict global climate change outcomes, especially in timing...

That's my point about models. For such a complex system they are very difficult to make with any accuracy, and there are any number of factors that can throw them off. I see this same lack of dimensionality in this article. Has nothing to do with man affecting the climate which most reasonable people agree is likely occurring.

Hmmm... maybe I came across as someone who doesn't believe in human induced climate change.

That's not it at all. I'm pretty sure human induced climate change is happening. Not a denialist. Unlike those for instance who refuse to acknowledge so many climate change models have completely failed to mirror reality.

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