The Big Picture

Some of us are naturals at seeing the big picture. Give us any bit of information, and the first thing that comes into our mind is how that fits into the rest of the world and relates to everything else. Like everybody who's a natural at anything, I'm surprised every time that anybody else seems to have difficulties with what's so easy for me.

The Club of Rome are possibly the best-known example of people looking at the big, BIG picture. I have finally found time in my busy schedule to put together a paper describing my additions to the "Limits to Growth" model, and in the process I discovered my equations had a fundamental bug, so please disregard the graphs I posted before. Now they look different, with a much gentler decline:

The end of the world has been rescheduled and now due to begin around 2030... ;)

And it's because people now can switch from one energy source from another. The bug was stopping them from doing so, not EROEI. Ooops!

If anybody feels intensely curious about my model, you can download it from:

http://www.uploading.com/files/NSTMFGEG/WRLD3-03-energy-sources.mdl.html

And the software to run it (Vensim PLE) can be downloaded here:

http://www.vensim.com/freedownload.html

I've sent the paper to a few people to look at, including Dennis Meadows himself (the guy that appeared under the title of the "Limits to Growth" book, you know). And, surprise, surprise! He's completely against anybody saying that they're introducing changes to the World3 model, even when that's exactly what one is doing! He says it's a completely different model, and World3 shouldn't be mentioned at all. Apparently, this is nothing personal, this is what he has been saying to anybody that has come to him with changes to World3. If it was anybody else saying this, I would be tempted to attribute it to classic narrow-mindedness and difficulties with seeing the big picture. When it's Dennis... well, as only the English can put it, puzzlement ensues. I can only guess that he has received enough attacks about World3 and he doesn't want to put up with attacks to models more or less loosely based on World3, as well. But surely somebody who sees the big picture should be able to rise above that... Like I say, puzzlement ensues.

That hasn't been the only example of apparent lack of big-picture thinking in my week. On Thursday I went to a talk by the guy that is doing Oil Vulnerability Audits, and had a chance to have breakfast with him after that. You'd think that somebody who gets peak oil and then proceeds to do oil vulnerability audits for businesses definitely gets the big picture. But when I asked him a couple of big picture questions, like "How would you do an oil vulnerability audit for a city?", it was absolutely clear he hadn't ever thought about it, and couldn't even come up with a good improvised answer. And among the solutions he proposed to business to resolve areas where they were highly vulnerable to high oil prices, he cheerfully mentioned outsourcing. Now, "outsourcing" is a word that strikes dread into anybody who sees the big picture. Moving the problem somewhere else is obviously not resolving it, but sweeping it under the carpet where you can't see it. Selling your risks to a different company is exactly what got us in the current credit crunch mess. And the best he could say to that is that there is good outsourcing and bad outsourcing. Well, that reminds me of the clever people that thought there were prime mortgages and subprime mortgages, and they knew how to handle them... only to discover we're all subprime now.

And as a final proof that most people don't get the big picture, you only had to look at the attendance to the Action Plan meeting last Saturday. It clashed with the Climate Change March in London. Now, you would think that most people who know about climate change would realize that working on a local plan to prepare for the problems of climate change and peak oil would have higher priority than going to a march fifty miles away to tell the national government something they already know, and have been told every year by the same bunch of people. But it doesn't seem to work like that.

It looks like the only people left who get the big picture are some SF writers... and the kindly blogger that wrote a comment to my previous post got it backwards. What I was saying is that SF, generally, is getting darker, and the cheery stuff seems to be disappearing. The science-fiction lot have a good feel for the big picture, even when they don't have all the data.