EDIT
But knowledge is a social animal, and nothing is ever gained without its collective contract. As such, I've since heard and sifted through some quality feedback after posting that initial blast, and all of it makes me feel like I'm on the right track. And the mounting stack of news on global warming, oil consumption, viral media and social upheaval is doing the same job of convincing me that exponents -- of the numerical and behavioral variety -- are vastly underestimated and poorly understood. In fact, the only certainty I have unearthed in my research into what was once a very weird dream is that the only thing everyone knows about them for sure is not too much at all.
Take this eye-opening talk given by Susan Solomon, senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the co-chair of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example. While the damning yet conservative IPCC report laid bare the role of humanity in both the rise of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels and the fall of Earth's snowpack, Solomon nevertheless gave global warming doubters a pillow-soft comedown, noting that "It would take centuries, if not millennia, to get a four to six meter rise" in sea levels once the ice shelfs and glaciers of the world gently retired into the good night. But when pressed on the fact that several indicators of global warming over the last few years have accelerated at an alarming rate, and whether or not she foresaw the same mechanism in place for the inevitable melt, Solomon had no love for exponents. In fact, she flat out claimed ignorance. "We just don't know," she said. Let's remember that this is a co-chair of the IPCC talking, not some boneheaded Bush administration appointee. A scientist who once targeted chlorofluorocarbons as the prime suspect in the depletion of the ozone layer, long before the public knew or cared what the ozone layer was. A fellow UC Berkeley grad, the head of the atmospheric chemistry division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, confiding to all that, in the end, she has no idea whether or not we can expect exponential increases in sea levels.
EDIT
Which brings us back, again, to the other side of exponology's coin. In our barely born new millennium, consumption has found no shortage of exponents. After the horrors of 9/11, a moment that should have given us all pause, President Bush asked us to go back to our shopping. Our hunt for the last of the planet's fossil fuels promises to be a catastrophe in itself: Indeed, a report from Wood Mackenzie, an Edinburgh-based consultancy, explains that "It becomes unclear beyond 2020 that conventional oil will be able to meet any of the demand growth." And if you think that 2020 is the cutoff date, you don't know exponology. Or exponential demand growth. And for that, we return to China, whose thirst for what the Beverly Hillbillies called black gold is a runaway train speeding towards an indeterminate future. The peak oil theorists at The Oil Drum have analyzed the numbers on China, and the results are pure exponology:
"The increase in Chinese oil consumption in the past years is mostly seen as a recent development, supposedly driven by the industrial development of China. In reality, the growth in Chinese oil consumption has been the same in the past two decades. Between 1990 and 1999 annual oil consumption growth in China was 6% on average. Between 2000 and 2006 the average annual oil consumption growth in China was 7%. Also the 2004 anomaly of 13% growth in a single year is nothing new. In 1993 Chinese oil consumption growth happened to be 10%. This misconception of Chinese oil consumption growth is a typical example of underestimating the power of exponential growth. Between 1990 and 1999, absolute growth was around 2 million barrels per day (mb/d), from 2.3 mb/d in 1990 to 4.4 mb/d in 1999. In the past seven years, absolute growth has been 3 mb/d per day according to preliminary figures, from 4.4 mb/d in 1999 to 7.36mb/d in 2006. If this present trend continues, the demand for oil (and other liquid fuels) in China will grow to 9.2 mb/d in 2010 and 12.4 mb/d in 2015." Sit back and soak it all in. Because wherever we turn, there is a disturbing preponderance of confusion or quiet -- by choice, by accident, by ignorance -- about where we are headed in the very near future. And we can tackle the problem in many different ways. We can start hacking snow, if the planet won't give us any. We can use nanotechnology to create energy in hopes of weaning us off our fossil fuel addiction. Hopefully, we can get smart enough to keep the killer asteroid Apophis from smashing into Earth in 2036, a date that may or may not take exponology into account at all. Let's hope it does.
EDIT
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-thill/exponology-shit-happens_b_41776.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
