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Image from OECD Skills Outlook 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204256-en. These data show that most people in OECD countries have very limited capabilities of managing contrasting information. This lack of skill is the source of traditional propaganda (presenting to people a single side of the issue) but also of the rise of “unpropaganda;” that is, presenting to people so much contrasting information that they can’t arrive to a firm conclusion. The result is uncertainty and inaction. Unpropaganda has been used with great effect on the issue of climate change.

The “official” story that you normally find about “literacy” is that people all over the world are becoming more and more literate, that is, more and more able to read and write. Yet, there is another side to literacy: it is the concept termed, “literacy proficiency” that classifies people according to their ability to understand what they read.

A recent survey on this point has been published by OCSE. It is a massive document of 460+ pages that examines the abilities of understanding and processing text by citizens of OCSE countries. The result is a subdivision in 5 “literacy levels,” as you see in the figure at the beginning of this post. You can find the exact definition of these levels on page 64 of the document, but, summarizing, the lowest levels, below 1, 1, and 2, are relative to people able to arrive only at the simplest levels of understanding of a text. Even at level 3, one may be able to perform inferences based on the text being read, but the texts are said to contain “no conflicting information”. Only at levels 4 and 5, some capability of critically discerning data from competing information is required.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Limits to Growth in the Soviet Union and in Russia: the story of a failure

August 25, 2015

The Limits to Growth in the Soviet Union and in Russia: the story of a failure

Above, you can see the full recording of a 2012 lecture given in Moscow by Dennis Meadows; one of the authors of “The Limits to Growth” report of 1972. It is long, more than an hour, but – if you don’t have the time to watch all of it – I suggest that you go to minute 21 and watch Dennis Meadows showing this book.

It is titled “Soviet Union and Russia in the global system.” According to Meadows, in the 1980s, Viktor Gelovani, first author of the book, adapted to the Soviet Union the world model used for “The Limits to Growth” and he ran it; finding that the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Then, Meadows says “he went to the leadership of the country and he said, ‘my forecast shows that you don’t have any possibility. You have to change your policies.’ And the leader said, ‘no, we have another possibility: you can change your forecast'”

Meadows’ anecdote is basically confirmed by Rindzevičiūtė, who wrote an excellent article that tells the whole story. It turns out that it is not true that “The Limits to Growth” was ignored in the Soviet Union, as it could be the impression from the documents available in the West. The “Limits” study was translated into Russian, although it was distributed only to very limited circles (generating, by the way, a brisk black market, as Rindzeviciute describes at p. 6). Several Soviet scientists knew very well the study, they had contacts with its authors and a number of them made a considerable effort to warn the Union’s leadership that the system was going to collapse. They didn’t have much success, as Meadows says in his talk.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fiorina: the next line of defense of climate denialism

August 22, 2015

Fiorina: the next line of defense of climate denialism

The recent Republican entrant to the US presidential race gave an interview on Yahoo where she spoke about several issues, including climate change. It is an extremely interesting clip to understand what we could call a “moderate” position in the Republican field. Ms. Fiorina’s statements on climate change are in this clip and are summarized in text form on Vox, with the title “everything she said was wrong” I think it is worse than that.

In my opinion, Ms. Fiorina is expressing what will be the next line of defense of climate denialism. She does not flatly deny climate change, as many of her colleagues do, even though she states that it is a minor problem in comparison to others, such as terrorism. But, yes, she admits that it is a problem. So, what should be done about it? Here, Ms. Fiorina puts forward a series of lies and half truths to push for the idea that we wouldn’t/shouldn’t/can’t/ do anything. Why? Because, you know, coal is too important for us, and even if we fight it, China won’t. And, without coal, the economy can’t work; don’t you see how many jobs are being lost because of these silly environmental regulations? It is much better to work at making coal cleaner, isn’t it? Besides, renewables don’t work because, you know, wind turbines kill birds, they are ugly, and solar plants need a lot of water, etc…

I think that with this interview we have a glimpse of the future of the debate on climate change. As the evidence becomes undeniable, deniers will shift back to admitting that, yes, it exists and even that it may be human caused. But they will propose to do nothing about it because it is impossible/too expensive/will cause jobs to be lost, etc…. And we’ll be back to square one: we’ll keep doing nothing, for one reason or another.

So, the fight is still long and hard. And I am afraid that if we don’t change our strategy, we are not going to win it.

Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB)

August 16, 2015

Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB)

August 15th is a big holiday in Italy. Here is a translation of the post I published today on the Italian version of this blog.

Happy Aug 15th, everybody! Here, in Florence, the worst seems to be over and the forecasts tell of rain today and tomorrow. This July has been the hottest ever recorded in Italy, but we suffered, on the whole, only limited damage. We had more than a month of brutal heat, but also some rain that eased the problem of the forest fires. Now, we can hope to arrive toSeptember without big troubles, at least in terms of sheer heat.

It is sure, anyway, that this Summer we got a taste of what the “new normal” is going to be. Apart from the horrible heat, we saw a number of spectacular disasters created by bad weather. I can tell you that I had never seen the roof of a house blown away by the wind. I had seen something like that only on TV, and mainly in the US, where the wooden homes always have that look as if they were coming from the tale of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. But seeing the roofs of concrete buildings in Florence being ripped off and deposited in the courtyards, below, well, it has been a shock.

So much the shock caused by these events, that on TV someone mentioned the term “climate change”. Fortunately, they immediately found an “expert” who appeared on screen and said that everything was fine and that it had been just a normal summer thunderstorm.

Apart from the shy, and immediately removed, intrusion of the real world on the TV screen, Italy continues to operate in conditions that I would call “political Alzheimer.” That is,conditions in which the patient continues to repeat the same things over and over, without reacting to external stimuli. So, we vaguely remember that, in the past, there was a good time in which the economy was growing and there follows that there is nothing else and nothing more than pursuing growth to fix all the problems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change ommunication)

August 3, 2015

Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change communication)

A “meme” is a unit of knowledge in the communication space. Memes tend to go viral and diffuse rapidly; some are so fast that they can be defined as “supermemes”. Above, you can see the result of a Google Trends search where the meme “Cecil the Lion” shows an incredibly rapid growth, overtaking the number of searches of a well known political term, such as “Hillary”. And it keeps growing! It is a true “supermeme”.

Communication, nowadays, is mostly based on the ability to make certain concepts “go viral”, that is to diffuse by itself over the Web, generating “memes,” entities able to self- reproduce in the communication space. So, for years, scientists and policy makers have tried to create memes telling people about the danger of climate change. On the whole, it has been an abject failure, despite heroic efforts. The idea that climate change is real, it is human made, and it is dangerous just doesn’t seem to stick in most people’s mind. In other words, it doesn’t generate memes.

So, what causes a concept to go viral? We can learn something on this point by studying a recent meme, the one relative to the killing of Cecil the Lion. Using Google Trends to measure the number of the relative Internet searches, we see that this meme grew so rapidly that it can rightly be defined as a “supermeme,” comparable in intensity to searches relative to political and sporting events, that usually dominate the search space.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Western style Catastrophism: a few questions for my Russian readers

August 1, 2015

Western style Catastrophism: a few questions for my Russian readers

Weekly page views of “Resource Crisis” on July 30, 2015. Note how Russia is the largest non-English speaking country in the list. These data are not the result of any special post about Russia, they are a normal feature of the blog.

I don’t need to say that I am very pleased for the success that this blog is having in Russia. Russia is a country that I know reasonably well, I know the people, the places, nature, a little of the language and, well, about countries you can use the verb “like” regarding your attitudes toward it; but you can also use the verb “love.” Personally, I would feel more inclined to use the latter term in regard to my personal feelings regarding Russia.

This said, however, I am curious about why exactly “Resource Crisis” is having so much success in Russia. It is true that I have posted a few times about matters regarding Russia, but this is not, by any means, a Russia-oriented blog. And, for what I know about Russia, the general attitude, there, is not at all “catastrophistic” as this blog is.

So, I thought I could dedicate a post to this subject and ask my Russian readers (and also non Russian ones) if they can spare a little of their time to comment on some questions that I am asking to myself and to them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

July 29, 2015

Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

Image by James Good

Garrett Hardin’s idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons” has become well known, but not always really understood. In my case, I can say that I have big troubles in having my students grasping its mechanism; that is the interplay of individual advantage versus public goods; the basic factor that leads to what we call “overexploitation.”

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Hardin used the example of sheep and pastures to explain the reasons of the tragedy, but that’s rather unfamiliar to my students (as well as to most of us). For instance, many of my students don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of “overgrazing”, that is the fact that grass doesn’t regrow if it is grazed too much. Besides, the pastures that Hardin was considering never experienced the “tragedy”; they were well managed and well regulated, specifically in order to avoid it.

So, let me propose a different example for the mechanism of overexploitation, based on a real event that happened to me. Maybe it can explain the concept better.

Just a few days ago I was literally kidnapped inside an underground parking in Florence because I had lost my entrance ticket, with the employees of the place insisting that they won’t let me out unless I was willing to shell out 237 euros for about two hours of parking (!!).

I described the experience in detail in a post in Italian, that you may machine translate if you are really interested. The gist of the story, anyway, is that I found myself caught in a trap mainly designed to siphon out some money out of the pockets of the hapless foreign tourist passing by. In my case, I was able to negotiate my release and avoid paying the exorbitant surcharge.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gleaning: an ancient custom that may return in the future

July 24, 2015

Gleaning: an ancient custom that may return in the future

Gleaning women in Italy in 1930 (image source). The ancient peasant society had found in gleaning an elegant and efficient way to optimize the management of low-yield resources.

Gleaning is an ancient tradition, deeply embedded in the agricultural world. In the past, it was common practice that the poor were given access to the grain fields after the harvest, so that they could collect the spikelets left on the ground by the harvesters. It wasn’t done just with grain, but with all kinds of agricultural products: fruit, olives, chestnuts, and more. Whatever was left after the first pass was for the poor and for the destitute to collect.

Gleaning was so important in the past rural societies that it was even sacred. We read in the Bible that God explicitly ordered to owners to give to the poor a chance to glean in their fields. And the origin of David’s lineage in the biblical tradition is related to gleaning, as described in the story of Ruth, a poor Moabite girl who married the owner of the fields where she gleaned. Other religions do not have such explicit references to gleaning, but most of them convey the idea that the rich should partake with the poor what they don’t need. For instance, a similar sharing command from God can be found in the Islamic tradition directed to water.

Gleaning remained a fundamental feature of rural societies until recent times; it is still done, occasionally (as you can see in this movie), but it has lost importance with the onrushing growth of the industrial society. It is not considered sacred anymore; on the contrary, the suspension of the property rights associated with gleaning is often seen as subversive in a world that emphasizes fenced private property and strictly regulated activities. In some cases, it was specifically prohibited, as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. That was a terrible mistake that aggravated the famine known as the “holodomor” in Ukraine.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mini Ice Age in 2030: the new anti-science meme?

July 18, 2015

Mini Ice Age in 2030: the new anti-science meme?

Image from Gallup

The past decade has seen some truly clever media tricks being used against climate science. The most successful one was the so-called “Climategate” scandal of 2009. You can see its effects on the Gallup poll, above.

Climategate was a very successful “meme“, a term created by Richard Dawkins in analogy with “gene” – a meme is a reproductive unit in the mediaspace. It works like a virus, and, as a virus, it tends to lose its potency when the system develops ways to fight it. So, the climategate meme lost potency in a few years after its introduction and the Gallup curve started going up again.

2012 saw the birth of a new and powerful anti-science meme: the “climate change has stopped” one, created by David Rose with an article in the Daily mail. The effect was less pronounced than that of the Climategate meme, nevertheless the idea of the “pause” went viral and it is probably the origin of the drop/stasis in the Gallup curve from 2013 to 2014.

But also the “pause” meme has lost potency; with 2015 on track to become the hottest year ever recorded, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain that climate change has stopped. So, with the Paris conference on climate approaching, it is probably the right time for a new anti-science meme appearing in the media.

Not surprisingly, the media is all abuzz with the idea of a”mini ice age” that should occur at some moment in the 2030s. Look at the results of a “Google Trends” search. Remarkable, indeed!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wicked problems and wicked solutions: the case of the world’s food supply

July 13, 2015

Wicked problems and wicked solutions: the case of the world’s food supply

Can you think of something worse than a wicked problem? Yes, it is perfectly possible: it is a wicked solution. That is, a solution that not only does nothing to solve the problem, but, actually, worsens it. Unfortunately, if you work in system dynamics, you soon learn that most complex systems are not only wicked, but suffer from wicked solutions (see, e.g.here).

This said, let’s get to one of the most wicked problems I can think of: that of the world’s food supply. I’ll try to report here at least a little of what I learned at the recent conference on this subject, jointly held by FAO and the Italian Chapter of the System Dynamics Society. Two days of discussions held in Rome during a monster heat wave that put under heavy strain the air conditioning system of the conference room and made walking from there to one’s hotel a task comparable to walking on an alien planet: it brought the distinct feeling that you needed a refrigerated space suit. But it was worth being there.

First of all, should we define the world’s food supply a “problem”? Yes, if you note that about half of the world’s human population is undernourished; if not really starving. And of the remaining half, a large fraction is not nourished right, because obesity and type II diabetes are rampant diseases – they said at the conference that if the trend continues, half of the world’s population is going to suffer of diabetes. That’s truly impressive, if you think about that for a moment.

So, if we have a problem, is it really “wicked”? Yes, it is, in the sense that finding a good solution is extremely difficult and the results are often the opposite than those intended at the beginning. The food supply system is a devilishly complex system and it involves a series of cross linked subsystems interacting with each other.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What killed the dinosaurs? (hint: probably not what you used to think)

July 10, 2015

What killed the dinosaurs? (hint: probably not what you used to think)

In Walt Disney’s movie “Fantasia” (1940), dinosaurs were shown as dying in a hot and dry world, full of active volcanoes. Recent discoveries show that something like that might really have happened and that the idea that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroidal impact appears to be incompatible with the available data. Rather, it seems that the dinosaurs died out because of the global warming resulting from the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases from volcanoes. In several respects, it is not unlike what’s happening today to us.

I know what you are thinking: these silly scientists; first they tell us that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, now they tell us that it is not true. So, how can we believe them when they tell us that humans are causing global warming?

On this, I have to tell you something: science is a mighty truth-seeking juggernaut. Yes, individual scientists are not immune from mistakes, political biases, and human failures, but, on the whole, science manages to filter away bad ideas and keep the good ones. The case of the extinction of the dinosaurs is a beautiful example of how well the mechanism works.

As you will read in the article below, the non avian dinosaurs, it seems, went away not with an asteroidal bang, but with a volcanic whisper. They were killed over several tens of thousands of years by the global warming created by the emission of gases from the giant basaltic eruption known as the “Deccan Traps”, today located on the Indian subcontinent. To be sure, the discussion is far from being settled and many scientists still favor the impact theory (e.g. Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink in their recent book “A new history of life“). Personally, I am no specialist in these matters but, if I did my homework well (and I think I did), my impression is that the data overwhelmingly favor the volcanic hypothesis over the asteroidal one.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greece: the bad apple of the bunch?

July 3, 2015

Greece: the bad apple of the bunch?

Posted by Ugo Bardi

Image by Vicky Brock

The present debate about the Greek financial situation tends often to pit Greece against the rest of the Eurozone. As an example, Joergen Oerstrom Moeller writes that:

Since 2010 the Eurozone economy has turned around from contraction to growth – the growth forecast for 2015 is 1.5 percent, work to set up a banking union is well under way, and measures constituting bulwarks have been put in place. The little stroke can fell great oakeswas a proverb that ominously sounded in the corridors 4-5 year ago; not any longer.

and

Unless Greece is willing to restructure its economy implementing policy objectives and instruments used by the majority of the EU member countries why should the Eurozone bail it out? What is the virtue of having a member that consistently and continually refuse to bring its economy into a shape similar to the one that the rest of the club is running. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy have all gone through painful reforms and been rewarded with a much improved economic situation and a promising outlook for the future. What are the arguments for not asking Greece to do the same?

Unfortunately, the data tell a different story. Greece is not alone in having economic problems and all the Southern European countries tend to show similar trends. For instance in terms of GdP per capita, the Greek decline is sharper than that of the others, but not qualitatively different. (image from Google public data)

If this were not enough, take a look at the industrial production data (from Bilbo Economic Outlook). Greece is sinking, yes, but so are Italy and Spain, and France is hardly doing better.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave a powerful speech on the need of acting against climate change….. or did he?

June 25, 2015

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave a powerful speech on the need of acting against climate change….. or did he?

The international media seem to be fascinated by the similarities in the physical aspect of Mr. Bean and of Mr. Matteo Renzi, prime minister of the Italian Government. There may be some similarities, indeed, but it is also true that Mr. Renzi is a shrewd politician who can be seen as a good example of a political style that privileges form over substance.

A few days ago, Mr. Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, attended a meeting on the climate situation. He was praised for having taken a stance against climate change, but I think his speech is a good example of how a smart politician can say a lot and, at the same time, say nothing. It is a political style that is not specific to Italy, but is, rather, universal today.

So, I took the liberty of translating some of Mr. Renzi’s statements at the meeting on climate, (as reported here) and adding their real meaning as Mr. Renzi himself could have done. (boldface: Mr. Renzi actual statements)

“I don’t believe in a culture of negativity and of pessimism, I am optimist, but it is necessary to assume one’s responsibilities and the time of choices is today” – So, I am starting with this remarkable platitude, and don’t think I’ll stop here!

“…to say that for us climate is a priority means to give back a sense of identity to our country…” which is, of course, another platitude, but it serves a purpose: note that I said “a” priority and I didn’t say which are the other priorities so that, as you may well imagine, there will always be some priority higher than climate (and in a moment I’ll tell you what these priorities are).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sustainability is boring! (or: why Wayne Visser is right)

June 24, 2015

Sustainability is boring! (or: why Wayne Visser is right)

Results of a “google trends” search of the term “sustainability”. Note the 6-month periodic oscillations. People regularly lose interest in sustainability in summer and at Christmas time. A clear evidence that they found the concept boring.

Some days ago, I tried a Google Trends search of the term “sustainability” and I was surprised by the regular oscillations you can see in the search frequency.

It doesn’t take much head scratching to understand the reasons for this behavior. When it is vacation time (summer or Christmas) people get into a festive mood and lose their interest in things they evidently find boring; probably dedicating themselves to more active pursuits.

I kept checking, and I found similar oscillations for other terms, both related and unrelated tot he environment. Try “Shakespeare”, for instance, and you’ll see seasonal oscillations; just as you see them for “environment”. Try instead “sex” and you won’t see anything like that.

Probably, these oscillations could provide a way to measure how boring people find a certain concept but I think this is enough to conclude that most people find the idea of sustainability boring. That explains a lot of things, I believe.

The reason why I made this search on Google Trends is that Wayne Visser was so kind to send me a review copy of his latest book “Sustainable Frontiers“, which I read through during a long wait at the airport of Munich (one good thing about airports is that while waiting hours and hours for your plane to arrive, you can do things you wouldn’t even dream to be able to do in your office!)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The climate encyclical: hang the pope?

June 19, 2015

The climate encyclical: hang the pope?

Image above: an internet site with wild accusations against Pope Francis. That’s, of course, just the work of an isolated crackpot, but, a hundred years ago, Pope Benedict XV was widely accused of “defeatism” and threatened with hanging when he requested to stop the “useless slaughter” of the first world war. Could something similar occur because of Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change?

The Pope’s encyclical on climate is out. I went through it, I think I agree with just about everything in it. From a scientific viewpoint, it seems to me flawless (at least after a first read). In terms of its ethical and human approach, it is even better. I don’t see myself as a very religious person, but I think we badly need ways to overcome that peculiarly evil view of the world that sees each one of us as a mere economic agent, interested only in maximizing profits and accumulating capital. That can’t be the way to run things on this planet and if we need a religion to tell us that we should do better than that, then welcome religion!!

This said, now what? It was Stalin who mocked the pope by asking how many division he could muster on the battlefield, but – apart from armored divisions – if I were a denier, I would feel dismayed. The beauty of the pope’s intervention is that it demolishes right away one of the main stumbling blocks that prevented most people from understanding the gravity and the seriousness of the situation. So far, the forces of denial could paint the whole story of climate change as a silly idea concocted by an isolated group of crackpot scientists. But, now, not anymore. You may agree or not with the pope, but you can’t ignore that he represents more than a billion Christians. Not an isolated group of crackpots, for sure. Clearly, the pope’s encyclical has forever changed the terms of the debate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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