Sustainability through Stabilization

international | environment | opinion/analysis Thursday October 30, 2008 19:44 by Grattan Healy grattan_healy at compuserve dot com Galway

High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos

A recent BBC TV programme called: "High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos" documented how mathematics has come to better understand the instability in complex system, such as our economy and our climate. Our attempts to predict and control such unstable systems are unsuccessful, as illustrated by the ongoing finance and market crisis. We face much the same sort of unpredictable development with the climate, and for the same reason, a sudden, potentially irreversible, change cannot be ruled out. The unstable and unsustainable economy is now driving climate instability. Our first task is to stabilize our economy, change its purposes, move to sustainability and try to avert the worst effects of climate change.

A BBC programme on mathematics might seem like an odd way to gain insights into the state of the World. However, an excellent TV programme on BBC4 called: "High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos" illustrated, amongst other things, the philosophical nature of higher mathematics, and how that is relevant to all our lives.

Our rational Western philosophy, with its deterministic world-view, suggests that humanity can predict and control pretty much all outcomes and events in the World. The trouble is that the work of mathematicians such as Poincaré and also major incidents of instability should by now have convinced us that this view is false. Indeed, despite so many warnings and reminders and also the development more recently of chaos theory, we still maintain a world-view that suggests we can effectively analyze and control everything.

What these mathematicians discovered, and we later proved with computing, is that tiny errors in complex systems can lead over long periods to surprisingly and radically different outcomes. Complex systems are inherently unstable, and it is most likely that the greater the complexity the greater the instability.

Now, the relevance of this starts to emerge. We live in a system, the Earth, that is so complex we find it impossible to model it with any accuracy. Nevertheless, we are now changing its operating conditions - causing errors in that system - without understanding what effect this will have in the end.

In the mathematics of instability we speak of a tipping point. Today we use this term to describe a point at which the climate system is likely to go out of control with unknown consequences. Effects will accelerate through what is called 'positive feedback', such as the melting of ice, which will increase the retention of heat, and melt more ice. Burning forests will cause more warming, and more forests to burn. Frozen methane gas will be released from the tundra, causing more warming and the release of more methane; and so on. It should by now be recognised that we simply have no way to predict such events, and that our apparently pathetic modelling is inevitably wrong.
James Lovelock suggested that even the tipping point idea may also be wrong, as he now believes we are on an irreversible path. He compares the situation with a similar one 55 million years ago, where a CO2 shock caused a severe change in climate, which lasted 200,000 years, even though the CO2 level dropped quite quickly! So even if we stop, some effects will persist. Presumably the severity depends on when we decide to stop, and how effectively we do so.

A subsystem of the Earth that is in a similar state is the 'economy'. We have just had another warning of its instability, which caught all but a tiny few completely by surprise. A significant but potentially manageable problem with housing finance the USA, combined with an 'asymmetric shock' in the form of rocketing oil prices, sent the unstable world economic order into a tailspin, which will be with us for a good few years.

The underlying problem is the unstable nature of our burgeoning economic system, most especially its monetary system, based on massive debt. Many years ago it was reported that around 160 times as much money flows around the planet as is traded in real goods. It is nothing more than a casino, and we all just lost; well almost all. And of course it is our burgeoning economic system that is the engine of the environmental damage that threatens our very existence.

How can we claim to have a rational philosophy and pretend to know what is going on when these two pictures are considered? Is it any wonder that peoples living more sustainably look at us aghast.

There are a few conclusions we can draw before we move on to deciding what to do:

1. Instability in our economic system is tied to the instability we are creating in our climate;
2. Pushing these systems well beyond their point of stability is a destructive, and probably irreversible, way to discover that they are unstable and a recipe for finding this out well after it is too late;
3. We now have sufficient warnings from both systems to indicate that they have been pushed beyond their limits;
4. Inexorable traditional economic growth implies exponential demand for limited resources and ultimately catastrophic environmental damage, and that is not sustainable or even thinkable;
5. That economic growth has become necessary to prop up our unstable and unsustainable economic system, in particular our debt-based monetary system;
6. We cannot predict or control everything, in fact we cannot reliably predict very much at all over the longer run, so greater prudence is a key to the survival of humanity and the Planet;
7. Policy going forward must focus on stability, in the first instance of the economic system, with a view to stabilizing our climate; new tools and measures are required to stabilize our systems, and to maintain that stability;
8. Simple logic dictates therefore that, in future, human fulfilment cannot come from greater and greater quantity, and social experience would indicate this to be true in any event;
9. Human fulfilment can only be associated with greater quality, in particular as regards time, albeit where the World's poorest have also benefitted with everyone else.

So what must we now do not only to bring the instability to a halt, but to reverse it insofar as possible?

1. To stabilize our economic system, we need to reduce the debt burden, much of which is associated with debt-based currency and limited capital reserve ratios in banks;
2. To stabilize the climate insofar as now possible, we need to massively save energy and radically progress all forms of renewable energy, and eliminate fossil burning as soon as possible; nuclear is also a limited resource, and is not useful as a stabilizing force; we also need to develop renewable driven technologies to absorb CO2, in addition to the planting of trees;
3. Our economic management must focus more on stabilization and redistribution globally, while not smothering initiative; development should remain commercially based, but rely on sustainable businesses; progress should be measured in terms of equality and peoples free time, not how many foreign holidays they have.