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We’re Dumb about Exponential Growth. That’s Proving Lethal

July 16, 2020

We’re Dumb about Exponential Growth. That’s Proving Lethal

And not just for COVID-19. The same ignorance accelerates the climate crisis.

ExponentialGrowthArrow.jpg
Exponential growth looks like a jet taking off. It is rapid and explosive and follows a geometric progression. It is often about doubling times. Image via Shutterstock.

Gradually, and then suddenly. That’s how exponential growth can ruin your day, undo your family, evaporate your economy, destroy your climate, crush an empire and destabilize a planet.

Consider the performance of COVID-19.

Last month a 30-year-old male attended a “COVID party” in San Antonio, Texas.

At a COVID party, the host has tested positive. He or she then does not sit down with a math primer to understand how many human dominoes they might cause to fall. Nor does the host watch this handy video which, in three short minutes, explains the deadly implications of exponential growth of infection.

WATCH: A mathematician explains the power of exponential growth to spread the coronavirus at increasing speed throughout a population if unchecked by social distancing and other measures.

No, at a COVID party the host invites others to come over and mingle, have a few drinks, test fate, laugh in the face of reality.

The 30-year-old male who came to the COVID party died several weeks later, but not before he made a brief confession to the nurse attending him. “I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”

That’s how exponential growth can ruin your day.

The percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 in Texas has risen steeply in recent weeks. Up to 22 per cent of tests showed positive in the San Antonio area last week.

The exponential function is all about growth, and growth follows a logical curve. It can be linear or exponential. Linear is what children do as they grow in weight. Or what stalagmites do as they grow with dripping water.

But exponential growth looks like a jet taking off. It is rapid and explosive and follows a geometric progression. It is often about doubling times.

After China reported its first case of COVID-19 last January, it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 global cases.

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Human Consumption of Natural Resources Exceeds an Annual 100 Billion Tonnes.

February 29, 2020

Human Consumption of Natural Resources Exceeds an Annual 100 Billion Tonnes.

In 1969, the late Professor Albert Bartlett famously delivered a lecture, entitled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy”, which begins with the observation that, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” The truth of this is profound and irrefutable, as is further compounded by Bartlett’s averment, as the first law of sustainability, that “You cannot sustain population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources”. Nonetheless, exponential growth has continued, unabated, over the past half century, as is attested by an increase in the consumption of natural resources from 27 billion tonnes in 1970, to 92 billion tonnes in 2017, which corresponds to around 12 tonnes/year for every person on Earth. If recycled material is also included, the total rises to 100.6 billion tonnes, and hence 13 tonnes for every breathing human on the planet, and significantly, the proportion being recycled has fallen from 9.1% to 8.6% in the past two years. This rate of material consumption is expected to rise to between 170 and 184 billion tonnes by 2050, on the basis of a BAU, “take-make-waste” economic model, which equates to more than 18 tonnes per person, given an expected population of 9.8 billion by then. 

Over the entire 1970-2017 period, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for resource consumption of 2.6% may be deduced, and hence we may infer that, by 2021, total annual demand for virgin natural resources will have exceeded 100 billion tonnes. The breakdown of this tally into individual components is interesting, and for 2017 amounts to: 24.06 billion tonnes [Gigatonnes (Gt)] of biomass, 43.83 Gt of non-metallic minerals, 15.05 Gt of fossil fuels, and 9.12 Gt of metallic ores; when these figures are compared with those for 1970 (9.00 Gt biomass, 9.20 Gt of non-metallic minerals, 6.21 Gt of fossil fuels, 2.58 Gt of metallic minerals), some patterns begin to emerge. Thus, the corresponding (2017/1970) ratios are: 2.67 (biomass), 4.76 (non-metallic minerals), 2.42 (fossil fuels), 3.53 (metallic ores).

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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