http://www.ara.cat/societat/handy-paper-for-submission-2_ARAFIL20140317_0003.pdf
Nasa's funding for the very research behind the study is explicitly acknowledged in the paper<<"This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC [Goddard Space Flight Center] grant NNX12AD03A.">>
<<And the US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (Sesync) where the lead author carried out his research for the project issued an official clarification about the study yesterday as follows, confirming the same:
"Motesharrei received minor support from NASA to develop a coupled earth system model. Some of this funding was spent on the mathematical development of the HANDY model.">>YES, LIKE IT OR NOT, NASA HAD A HAND IN THIS RESEARCH.
PERHAPS THE KEY FACTOR OF THIS PREDICTION, IF YOU CARE TO CALL IT THAT, IS INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DISTRIBUTION.
THE POOR ARE SICK OF BEING POOR AND THE RICH STRUGGLE TO STAY RICH OR GET RICHER.
EVERYTHING FROM FOOD TO WATER TO OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES IS CONTROLLED BY A HANDFUL OF POWERFUL PEOPLE WHO ALSO OWN THE WORLD'S BANKS, WHO RUN THE STOCK MARKETS OF THE WORLD, AND WHO CHOOSE TO IGNORE THE VERY REAL, VERY SERIOUS PROBLEMS THAT AFFECT THE VAST MAJORITY OF EARTH'S PEOPLE.
WE HAVE, WITHIN THE PAST DECADE, SEEN RIOTING AND THE OVERTHROW OF "GOVERNMENTS" OVER FOOD, OVER POVERTY, OVER THE WEARINESS OF HUMAN BEINGS BEING DOMINATED BY THE INFLUENTIAL WHO TURN BLIND EYES TO HUMAN SUFFERING.
WE WILL SURELY SEE MORE OF THE SAME.
AS ONE OLD MOVIE PUT IT, (I PARAPHRASE) "WE'RE FED UP, WE'RE MAD AS HELL, AND WE JUST WON'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!"
A model based study is full of gloom and doom: Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?
GLOOM AND DOOM MAYBE, BUT IT WAS REALLY AND SIMPLY INEVITABLE.
<<A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse – often lasting centuries – have been quite common.”
The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature Dynamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:>>
By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.
These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."...
Unequal Society
FROM THE PAPER ITSELF:
<<The scenarios most closely resembling the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see section 5.3), where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, we noticed that collapse is diffi cult to avoid. Importantly, in the rest of these unequal society scenarios,5.3.1, even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the
solution appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, then Elites grow and consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. This Type-I collapse is due to a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature. Despite appearing initially to be the same as the sustainable optimal solution obtained in the absence of Elites,
economic strati cation changes the natural result: the Elites become sizable and keep growing until the society collapses.
In scenario 5.3.2, with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites. It is important to note that in both of these scenarios, the Elites due to their wealth do not su ffer the detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners. We could posit that this buffer of wealth, as well as the initial apparently sustainable
trajectory, allows Elites to continue "business as usual" despite the impending catastrophe. It is likely that this is an important mechanism that would help explain how historical collapses were allowed to occur by seemingly oblivious elites (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). >>
BUT WAIT! THERE IS FAINT HOPE!
<<The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:”Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.”>>
Led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri, a new study made possible by the Goddard Space Flight Centre warns that global industrial civilisation is doomed to catastrophe because of the overstretched demand for resources.
‘The process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history,’ explains the academic paper set to be published in the Ecological Economics journal.
A combination of unsustainable resource exploitation, unequal wealth distribution and overconsumption could lead to the collapse of industrialed society within a few decades, it warns.
SEE ALSO THIS PDF DOCUMENT:
http://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/A-View-from-the-Future.pdf
DID NASA FUND THIS STUDY?
ABSOLUTELY!
BUT THEY WERE NOT THE ONLY ONE.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/thisweek/2009/06/01_oreskes.asp
WHEN WILL JOHN Q. CITIZEN BELIEVE THIS?
WHEN HELL SENDS ENTRANTS TO THE BOBSLED RACES AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS.
BY THAT TIME, IT WILL BE A MOOT POINT.
VERY FEW WANT TO ADMIT THAT WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF RESOURCES,
EVEN FEWER WANT TO ADMIT MAN HIMSELF HAS A HAND IN THIS COLLAPSE.
AND WHO WANTS TO IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE THE "HAVES" MUST STRUGGLE TO FEND OFF THE "HAVE-NOTS"?
TOO SCARY, RIGHT?
WE'LL SEE...
No comments:
Post a Comment