A FEW THOUGHTS FROM THE IGNORANT IN A LESS THAN PERFECT WORLD
Reply to Prof. Goose

O.K., Let’s take her from the top.....first, the red flag waved in the face...

“ It has always seemed to me that one of the keys to the puzzle of why people don't understand the problems that peak oil and other sustainability issues present is a lack of understanding of measurement, pure innumeracy and/or a lack of understanding spatial/change functions--namely the meaning and implications of constant growth.”

Now we assume that folks who come here, at least a lot of them, actually must use math as a way to survive...investors and brokers and people who have spent years in the oil and gas industry actually finding and producing oil and gas would come to mind, also various branches of biology would come to mind....they have dealt with the power of exponents on a daily basis....are we to assume that they suffer terribly from “a lack of understanding of measurement, pure innumeracy and/or a lack of understanding spatial/change functions--namely the meaning and implications of constant growth.” I work with people in these professions...try telling even the most modest stock broker that “they can’t count” to their face...you might as well go ahead and slap them in the face.
These folks won’t give up clients easily, but I assure you that is about the fastest way to get off their client list!

“Now, for my sell of the Bartlett lecture, a real mainstay in the peak oil arsenal.”

If that’s actually true (I don’t really think so, or at least, I hope not) the peak arsenal badly needs some restocking.

Dr. Bartlett opens and closes his lecture with pretty much the same “tag line”:

They're all tied together. They're tied together by arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn't very difficult. What I hope to do is, I hope to be able to convince you that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function

I read the lecture because I do not have broadband or highspeed internet access, meaning the video would take forever to download. That’s interesting in and of itself.

I work in the media measurement industry as my paying profession. We did studies in the 1990’s of the rapid expansion of broadband, which was growing at an “exponential rate”, literally doubling in months, not years. Using the rate of growth as a guide, the U.S would be at 90% broadband internet access by 2002 or so. But it didn’t happen that way. Broadband internet in the U.S. in 2005 was only 19.2%, according to the OECD.
http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,2340,en_2649_201185_37529673_1_1_1_1,00...

What went wrong? Well, the real world got in the way. Expanding broadband was easy in the high density city. It was cheap, lot’s of subscribers per pile of cable. But in less dense rural areas, the math changed. The capital costs grew. But the borrowing by the broadband companies was based on the early exponential growth numbers. The next time you wonder what happened to WorldCom and Global Crossing (and their investors), you can see the weakness of making projections based on “exponential” growth (I just checked, Global Crossiing is at $20 a share, down from $35 a share in 2004...with no earnings at this time)

You see, Professor Bartlett could have added to his
“greatest shortcoming of the human race the inability to understand the exponential function” the second greatest, the human races penchant for worshiping at the alter of the exponential function. Professor Bartlett, in his rarified environment, seems to discount this human weakness. I guard against it as best I can, and let me tell you why:

I first became aware of the “exponential function” at about 11 years of age. I had an uncle who is a bit of a dreamer, always hoping to break out of the world of manual labor, and have a bit of a future for his later years. He was easy prey for the lure of the “exponential function” a common tool used by get rich quick peddlers.

Have you not heard of the lure, the “miracle” of compound interest? The math is so simple! And astounding! If you put the “The miracle of compound interest” into Google, you will get thousands of hits, so popular is it....and most of the explanations will look about like this:
http://www.fool.co.uk/school/compound.htm

IT’S SO SIMPLE! So, why aren’t more folks rich? The real world gets in the way.

The power of “exponential function” relies absolutely on set amounts of money, set amounts of time. But in the real world, one seldom deals in assured set amounts. Sorry to tell you, but the real world is damm sloppy. My uncle found out. He set up an savings plan, in which X amount of money was deposited every week, and at X percent interest. He assured me he would be set for a comfy, maybe even early retirement. I saw him the other day, and he is still working for a living. What went wrong?

What changed? Everything, of course. The “set interest has since declined multiple times. The set amount of money he deposited....well, he got laid off from his job, so he had to suspend contributions “for a while”. The transmission blew on his truck while he was using it to earn income, so....he had to pull some money out. On and on. The real world got in the way. If we lived in Professor Bartlett's rarified world of set times and set amounts, there is no doubt of the mathematical purity of “exponential function”. But it useful in the real world only in so much as conditions do not change. And conditions do change.

Let’s take population growth rate. We all know it grows everywhere at about the same pace, right, and it’s growing everywhere right now like crazy! Is that really true?
Well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Population_growth_rate_world.PNG
One will notice that the high side is 3+% while most of the world is running at 1% or so.
But note the time scales that Professor Bartlett uses!

“Now, if this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years.”

I don’t know about you, but I am not in the mood to make any projection on how much the human population growth may move around for 780 years on the short side, and 2400 years on the long side. For now, in the real world, “One factor that may ameliorate this effect is the rapid decline of population growth rate since the 1970s. In 1970, the population growth rate was 2.1%. By 2006, this had declined to 1.1%
Now, use your “exponential function” on that one....and we would see that if this trend continues forward for 780 years, it means the Earth will be essentially empty!
It is always fascinating that the “exponential function” worshipers only see exponents working in one direction. The other day, the U.S. stock market declined some 1.7%. Using the exponential function, I would recommend selling everything, because in less than 100 days, the stock market will be at 0.0.

We could go on and on and on pointing the utter futility of using set tables of “exponential functions” in a world that does not run like a clock on a set timetable in such a fashion. It is a classical “Newtonian” way of thinking, hoping for clockwork precision in a world that we know suffers from chaos, and from relativistic indeterminacy.

But just for fun, let’s look at one dear to our heart, oil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ASPO_2004.png

O course, if we use the exponential function, set time, set increase, the way it should work, on the first half of the chart from 1930 to 1970, we would have went off the top of the chart in about 1982 at some 35 billion barrels a year plus and by now should be at some, what would you say, 100 billion barrels per year...? But there was a hitch in the giddy up there, wasn’t there? And remember, what the “miracle of compound interest” soothsayers will tell you, SMALL differences at the front end mean a lot down the road, right?

All of this is NOT to say there is not a serious resource problem, and it is showing every sign of getting more serious. It IS a warning to be very, very careful about thinking in straight line simplistic models. Historically, things have never been as simple as all that.

Oh, one more thing. If you are going to think in simplistic, Platonic perfection, please be a bit more discreet before you essentially accuse folks of
“a lack of understanding of measurement, pure innumeracy and/or a lack of understanding spatial/change functions”.

The great thing about being a part of the human race is that none of us have a monopoly on ignorance.

Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom