PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (7)
Margaret MacMillan, an Oxford historian who wrote “Paris 1919” and “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914,” says the US president is right that we probably are more aware of what’s going on around the world, even with all the “rubbish” on the web, but she also believes that, from voracious Putin to vicious jihadists, “sometimes we’re right to be scared.”
How true!
She predicted that instead of World War III, “The 21st century will be a series of low grade, very nasty wars that will go on and on without clear outcomes, doing dreadful things to any civilians in their paths.”
How true! We are well on the way to see that happening. I think we have to expect terrorist attacks in Europe and the USA: there are scores of well-educated citizens of these continents now fighting with ISIS, eager to return to their homelands to carry out suicide missions. In our society there simply is no longer a place for these chaps, so they will take revenge for being declared surplus by committing acts of extreme cruelty. Be prepared. Ebola too could well become a pandemic. So be prepared to see many different matters explode in the near future, something foretold by a book published more than 40 years ago. I refer to the book Limits to Growth available for free on the WWW.
This book predicted that our civilization would probably collapse in the 21st Century. Of course it has been criticized as doomsday fantasy since it was published in 1972. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the ‘dustbin of history’. Totally unwarranted. The book has influenced my thinking as few other books have. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.
Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Remember the Club of Rome? It consists of politicians, businessmen and academics from around the globe. This illustrious gathering commissioned researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows to explore what would happen when we proceeded on the path we were going. The first thing the team did was to build a computer called World3 to track the world’s economy and environment, then the most cutting edge machine available.
The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialization, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modeled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If that didn’t happen, the model predicted “overshoot and collapse” – in the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called the “business-as-usual” scenario.
The book’s central point, much criticized since, is that “the earth is finite” and that the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc. would eventually lead to a crash.
So were they right? Dr. Graham Turner decided to check in with those scenarios after 40 years. He gathered data from the UN, from UNESCO, its department of Economic and Social affairs, from the FAO, its Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN statistics yearbook. He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP Statistical Review, and elsewhere. These data were plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.
The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. In other words, we are well on the way to COLLAPSE.
As the MIT researchers explained in 1972, under the scenario, growing population and demands for material wealth would lead to more industrial output and pollution.
We all know that resources everywhere are being used up at a rapid rate, that pollution is rising and that industrial output and food per capita is still growing as is the population, completely in line with the projections made in the Limits to Growth.
So what happens next?
According to the book, to feed continued growth in industrial output, industry must exploit ever-increasing use of resources. As always happens “the low-hanging fruit is picked first”. After that resources become more expensive to obtain as the readily available oil, iron ore, water are first used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall, for which the book estimate to be the case in about 2015: dead on in this case.
The book predicted that as pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate from about 2020, a mere 6 years away. It estimates that global population will begin to fall from about 2030, by about half a billion people per decade. If Ebola becomes a pandemic, all bets are off, of course. Even without such an event living conditions will fall to levels similar to the early 1900s.
The book projected that resource constraints will bring about global collapse, factoring in the fallout from increasing pollution, including climate change thanks to Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions.
In spite of the recent Fracking Boom, making the USA the world’s largest oil producer, the issue of Peak Oil does not go away. Many independent researchers have concluded that “easy” conventional oil production has already peaked. That issue alone could be the catalyst for global collapse because fuel sources such as shale oil, tar sands and coal seam gas basically are temporary saviors. If the price for oil becomes too low – and it is dropping fast as the current economic depression has stymied consumption – the oil products obtained via these high-cost methods of oil production may prove to be uneconomical.
Yet politicians like Stephen Harper of Canada only talk about Economic Growth, as if we live in an Infinite World. I believe it is too late to convince the world’s politicians and wealthy elites to chart a different course. Let’s not be fooled by political claptrap. It time to think about how we protect ourselves as we head into a diminishing future.
Limits to Growth concluded in 1972: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next decades. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
Need more evidence?
Here is a scary news item. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, according to the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London.
I found this particularly disturbing because in an essay that I wrote with the title When will Christ Return? – available right here on my website – I made the suggestion that Collapse and the arrival of The New Creation will occur when we humans have laid claim to 50 percent of Primary Productivity.
Let me explain. Primary Productivity represents Humanity’s impact on the biological component of earth systems. In other words it points to our negative influence on everything that lives, the way we affect animals, plants, as well as fungi, bacteria, and any carbon-based life forms on earth.
It is exceedingly difficult to measure the impact of Primary Productivity. Sanderson and others have classified up to 83% of the global terrestrial biosphere as being under direct human influence, based on geographic givens such as human population density, settlements, roads, agriculture, horticulture, the state of the oceans – now filled with plastic and empty of fish. Another study, by Hannah et al., estimates that about 36% of the Earth’s bio-productive surface is “entirely dominated by man”. I imagine that the two differing findings are due to the methods used in measuring. Basically Primary Productivity is the rate by which the Human Race – you and I in other words – have deprived the non-human world to function. That’s why the discovery that 50 percent of wild animals have disappeared, scares the wits out of me. Fact is that with human numbers growing, the impact of us men and women accelerating, we may well be approaching the tipping point. The Bible states that nobody knows exactly when COLLAPSE occurs, except God Creator. It seems to me that God, in his plan for creation, inserted a tipping point of which only he knows the exact hour and minute: “not even the Son of Man.”
Collapse will come in multiple forms
One of the laws of ecology is that ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Of course this applies to money also. We live in a world of electronic money, which means that money is created out of nothing. But its source is prone to “Hacking”, which is the new and often painless way to counterfeiting and bank robbery. This poses a colossal danger to the integrity of the money supply and to the economy as a whole. A word of advice: always have a considerable amount of cash handy: we never know when ‘hackers’ shut down the banking system. There’s a much greater threat to the Western world from hackers targeting financial institutions than from ISIS, barbaric though they may be. Writes one computer expert: “The bottom line is that anything on the Internet – or any system that has connected to the Internet at some point or can be accessed telephonically – is potentially vulnerable.
I like Gail Tverberg’s website: The Finite Earth. In her latest blog she writes that ”There have been many studies of collapses of past economies. These collapses tended to occur when the economies hit diminishing returns after a long period of growth. The problems were often similar to ones we are seeing today: stagnating wages of common workers and growing debt. There were more and more demands on governments to fix the problems of workers, but governments found it increasingly difficult to collect enough taxes for all the needed programs. Eventually, the economic systems have tended to collapse, over a period of years.”
Our world situation in short is: today more than 7 billion people are trying to copy the Western way of life, meaning using more energy, buying more cars, covering the planet with more roads, causing more pollution, destroying more forests, wiping out more animals, creating more Climate Change. A perfect recipe for Collapse.