How many people?

I'm writing today from a hotel in Zurich. One of the unexpected consequences of going to the ASPO conference last year was getting invited to give a talk on my update of the "Limits to growth" model in a workshop that was all about modelling the world to answer sustainability issues. Obviously, what I have done is just the ticket and I can see now why the guy was so keen to invite me.

The workshop was fascinating, but the most fascinating part wasn't so much what the speakers had to say, but how much of what they said wasn't known by other speakers and attendants. I think everybody who was there learned something. And they were all very basic things, that the others probably ought to know. I learned that most climate modelling is done in FORTRAN, of all abstruse and outdated computer languages, and that modellers are generally ignorant of the programming techniques (version control, documentation, modularity, encapsulation, object orientation, testing, etc.) that are the bread and butter of any programmer part of any semi-decent team. My brother uses better programming techniques to write software that humanity could easily live without (drivers so that expensive mobile phones can show 3D graphics), than scientists are using to try to figure out the future of civilization!

Other people also learned fascinating stuff. For example, there was this Japanese guy, a proud part of the team of Japanese that work with the Earth Modeller, the machine that runs the most detailed simulations, with the highest resolution, used for climate modelling. Their work is a key part of the IPCC. Well, this guy was absolutely shocked to learn that my model predicted a future decline in total energy usage, because none of the IPCC scenarios have considered that possibility. And he was even more shocked because he could see I was not alone in this belief: the rest of peak oilers were on my side. You could see the wheels in his head going into a mad spin thinking about how all that expensive supercomputer time had gone in simulating scenarios that might well not be possible at all!

My claims that the IPCC scenarios are a glorious example of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) also made seriously nervous one of the guys that is coordinating one of the chapters of the IPCC (land cover, if I got him right). He insisted that I send him a detailed email with my objections. He's definitely going to get it, with a good collection of big names to corroborate that it isn't just all out of my pretty head.

Another fascinating discovery was talking with one of the guys that is running the famous carbon sequestration demonstration power plant. I asked him what was the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of the power plant, and he wasn't familiar with the concept at all. What's more, he clearly had some trouble understanding the relevance of it, though finally he just went into the defensive: "But what is it exactly the policy you are proposing?" What I'm proposing, exactly, is that people consider the possibility that the solution they want may be simply impossible. It may just not be possible to raise everybody to the standards of living of the developed world, no matter what we do, and it may well be that in trying to keep raising the bar for everybody we end up destroying what we already had. It may well be that even keeping the status quo ends up destroying what we already have.

I spent most of the time with this great Italian guy that loves looking at all sorts of resources that are in course of depletion or already depleting. He was possibly the only person in the world that did the right call on what would happen to the oil prices. This wasn't based on any deep financial knowledge, but on good historical knowledge: oil prices followed exactly the same pattern (exponential growth cut by a sudden drop) that whale oil prices followed during the nineteenth century, when whales were hunted practically to extinction. He had to leave unexpectedly, and he said his goodbye with these words: "I wish there were millions of people like you, but I'm afraid you are very special."

That really got me worried, especially because I had been thinking along those lines the day before. It's one of my pet fruitless obsessions: I call it "how many people?" or "the numbers game". It comes from a silly song that goes like this:
How many people stand on a line?
How many people never get a chance to shine?
The question that goes round and round in my head is: "How many people have a real grasp of where the world is going and are actively trying to find the best solutions?" I usually try to attack the problem from the angle of rarity. Are people like me one in every hundred, in every thousand, in every million? Members of Mensa (the high IQ society) are happier the rarer they think they are, I feel exactly the opposite. When I come to an international sustainability conference like this and I find that even among this supposedly enlightened bunch disagreement and simply not grasping fundamental issues is rampant, and I find that certainly less than one in ten seems to have what I feel is a good handle on all the main issues, my heart sinks. Then I think of all the people on the Internet that obviously "get it", and I feel better. But I have to accept it: I just don't have enough information to estimate how common is real understanding of the limits of planet Earth.

I wish the future of the world didn't depend on a question that nobody can answer.