The Exponential Function and Ebola

 "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." 

Albert Bartlett, Professor of Physics, University of Colorado

You know the exponential function, the one which starts off so slowly you can hardly see it increasing until it literally takes off with increasing acceleration. It's often called, pejoratively, the hockey stick, when salespeople protest that sales may be small now, but just wait for next quarter!

The exponential function is particularly interesting right now because of the Ebola crisis, which is spreading at an exponential rate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have published that the cases are doubling every 15-20 days in Liberia and every 30-40 days in Sierra Leone and Guinea. It has been clear that the crisis was underestimated in the early days, probably because people didn't understand the inexorable power of the exponential function. There's the same effect in misunderstanding climate change, where feedback mechanisms cause changes to proceed exponentially.

Here's a chart from Wikipedia as of October 16, 2014, showing the number of cases of Ebola. It's a classic case of the Exponential function.

Not all exponentials are bad. I've written in a previous post about Ray Kurzweil. He also adamantly argues that people underestimate the power of the exponential, particularly as related to technological progress, which he considers unilaterally good. Some people might find his conviction that technology to support immortality is just around the corner a bit, well, spooky.

Then there is the Indian legend of the mathematician who did understand the power of the exponential. In fact, he lost his head over it! Here's how Wikipedia reports the legend.

When the creator of the game of chess (in some tellings an ancient Indian Brahmin^[1][2] mathematician named Sessa or Sissa) showed his invention to the ruler of the country, the ruler was so pleased that he gave the inventor the right to name his prize for the invention. The man, who was very clever, asked the king this: that for the first square of the chess board, he would receive one grain of wheat (in some tellings, rice), two for the second one, four on the third one, and so forth, doubling the amount each time. The ruler, arithmetically unaware, quickly accepted the inventor's offer, even getting offended by his perceived notion that the inventor was asking for such a low price, and ordered the treasurer to count and hand over the wheat to the inventor. However, when the treasurer took more than a week to calculate the amount of wheat, the ruler asked him for a reason for his tardiness. The treasurer then gave him the result of the calculation, and explained that it would take more than all the assets of the kingdom to give the inventor the reward. The story ends with the inventor being beheaded. (In other variations of the story, the inventor becomes the new king.)

Expedition to the End of the World

Climate change opens a passage into a previously inaccessible fjord in Greenland and a diverse group of scientists and artists voyage there to study the animals, search for archeological remains, take samples of the permafrost, and muse on the meaning of life.  I loved the mix of science and art, and the humour and irony so seldom seen in a scientific documentary.

Did it ultimately work?  The scenery was breathtaking - rugged and imposing - while the philosophizing was opaque, at least to me and one of the other characters in the movie.  I think this would have been better at 60 minutes than it was at 90 minutes.

Coastal Cities: Love 'em or Leave 'em

I just read Richard Florida's [1] fascinating and sobering article about the vulnerability of the planet's coastal cities.  Storms like Sandy generate a spike of interest in such topics.  Florida refers to an article in The Nation, which lays out three choices for our coastal cities:

• Abandon our coastal cities and retreat inland
• Stay put and try to adapt to the menacing new conditions 
• Stop burning planet-warming fossil fuels as fast as possible 

Or in my paraphrase, love 'em (options 2 and 3) or leave 'em (option 1).

Why should we care about coastal cities?  Remember Willie Sutton's response to why he robbed banks?  "Because that's where the money is".  Well, we should care about coastal cities because that's where the people are, or an awful lot of them in any case.

The ability to trade was a major growth stimulant for early cities whentrade flowed primarily over the water.  This correlation between big cities and location on a coast, meaning that today we have coastal mega-cities, with many millions of population.

Now that we are observing rising sea levels of an average of 3 mm/year since 1993 (see IPCC 2007 Working Group report here) and tropical storms and hurricanes of longer duration and greater intensity (see IPCC 2007 Working Group report here), the risk to these cities is escalating.  If we hit a tipping point where the Greenland icepack melts, the seas would rise a whopping 7 meters.

Economics is what seems to get people's attention, and Florida includes an interesting table about the potential for financial losses in huge coastal cities.  There is huge vulnerability today and even more by 2070.

Options 2 and 3 above are not cheap.  Doing nothing may be more expensive.

This whole discussion brings into sharp focus a major frustration of mine.  There's a common slogan "Save the Planet".  I don't agree with that slogan.  The planet will do just fine no matter what we do about climate change, including nothing.  What we need to think about is "Save our Civilization".   That's 'all' that's at risk with climate change.

[1]  Richard Florida is an urban studies theorist at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute

The Book Bill Gates Sent Me

"Climate change is real. The largest challenge and opportunity of our lifetime is inventing the future of energy - the technologies we will need to push CO2 emissions near zero by 2050. Those who contribute to these discoveries, and there will be many, will have helped lift the poor out of poverty while simultaneously ensuring the long-term health and prosperity of our planet. It's an incredible opportunity to work toward something of this magnitude and importance." ... Bill Gates

Readers of this blog will know that I raved about Bill Gates' talk at TED this year about how the planet might tackle the problem of climate change. Cogent, rational, and well articulated, its message was thought-provoking, and its delivery was a model of how a great talk should unfold. Gates is bringing his analytical mind to bear on the problem of climate change, in the same way he thought out how his Foundation could have maximum impact in improving the world.

During his talk, Gates said he would send TEDsters some relevant reading material. The quote above is from the note that accompanied Sustainble Energy - Without the Hot Air by David MacKay. MacKay takes a hard-headed approach to energy questions. He doesn't comment on the political appropriateness of different kinds of renewable energy - he simply works out the physical coefficients to determine if the projections for renewable energy are physically possible, or simply wishful thinking.

This book got a rave review in The Economist, and I've been intending to read it for months. Now I have the pleasure of having it delivered to my doorstep! With these endorsements, I can't wait. I would love to hear comments from others who've read this book.

Global Warring

How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map


This is a chilling book about global warming. The world is already undergoing dramatic geopolitical change. Western industrialized nations (read the US) are weakening, while emerging nations (read China and India) are gaining strength. These changes are going to accelerate due to the dramatic climate change we're experiencing. And Paskal makes the point that most don't see the coming challenges, don't acknowledge them, and aren't undertaking strategic actions to address the changes.

Paskal investigates several hot spots where climatic change can disrupt current international relationships. China and India both depend on Himalayan glaciers for their water supply, and those glaciers are melting (the pace may be controversial, but not the fact that they're melting). The monsoons are failing. Northern China is desperately short of water, and Chinese development is aggressively polluting their available water supply. The desperation for water will influence their relationship and their strategic goals in the world.

The Arctic is warming the fastest of anywhere on earth, and the Northwest Passage will likely sonn be navigable, fulfilling the dream of explorers of the past. This will open up the Arctic Ocean as a valuable shipping route, and also open up the treasure house of resources. But who will control these resources? Canada has the best claim, but virtually no navy and or ice breaking capability. The US argues that it should be declared international waters, opening it up to the avaricious eyes of the Russians (with their powerful icebreakers and increasing presence). Paskal argues that the best strategic move for the US would be to support Canada, and include the Arctic in its vision of a North American defense system, but when talking about continental defense, the US is still fixated on defending just two oceans.

Even the very definition of a state is under assault. How would you suggest we treat a nation whose Pacific atoll has just submerged under the rising ocean levels? Does it still have a vote in international fora? Does it still have rights to the resources in what used to be its maritime boundaries? These are just a few of the difficult questions facing us in the future.

Events like Katrina show just how dismally unprepared developed nations are to deal with harrowing climate events - and there are more of them coming.

Paskal, a Montrealer by birth, has around the world and is currently based in London. She has a penetrating and analytical mind, and a compelling writing style. Enjoyable is perhaps not the word to describe this powerful book, but you cannot read Global Warring without adjusting your view of the world's future.

Innovate to Zero - an energy imperative

The necessity for carbon-free energy
Bill Gates' incisive talk on energy was one of my favourites this year. His acute analysis went step by step through his thinking with startling clarity. (In fact, if you want a template for a perfectly formed presentation, you could do worse than use this model.)

The Gates Foundation is working on vaccines and seeds. But climate is more important to the very poor than anything else. And the price of energy is critical to them too. In order to arrest climate change,we need to do more than just reduce carbon - we have to Innovate to Zero, from the current 26B tons of carbon/year (of which the US is responsible for 20B tons).

Carbon math is inescapable

Carbon = Population x Services/person x Energy/service x Carbon/unit of energy

Gates dryly pointed out the simple mathematical fact - if you want carbon to go to zero, then one of the terms of this equation has to go to zero. We can take the terms one at a time. Population is going to rise to 9B before leveling off. Services per person are rising as huge numbers reach for the middle class. Efficiency can drive down Energy per service, but realistically, not to zero. That leaves Carbon/unit of energy as the only factor that can be driven to zero. That requires a miracle. And we need to achieve that miracle by 2050.

Next, Gates identified five candidates for that miracle:

• carbon capture and storage
  
• nuclear
  
• wind
  
• solar photovoltaic
  
• solar thermal.
  

Each approach has unsolved problems and concerns, and would take major breakthroughs to deliver the miracle. We need thousands of people working on all these challenges and he exhorted that work to begin.

The potential of nuclear
Gates pointed to nuclear as a strong contender in this race. The current technology in nuclear power plants dates back to the 1950s and uses rare enriched uranium. Furthermore, the process is quite inefficient and produces a lot of waste, without a sound plan for its disposal.

Gates disclosed that he is backing an initiative out of Intellectual Ventures, run by his friend and former CTO of Microsoft, Nathan Myrvold. Terrapower's uses U25 (i.e. spent uranium that is now considered nuclear waster) as fuel, rather than U28. It has the potential to use all that nuclear waste we now worry about so much. Even better, the process takes place in a sealed reactor in the ground, which you fill once every 60 years, eliminating the risks of accidents associated with refuelling. This approach has the potential to meet the deadline, through 20 years in development and 20 years for wide deployment. (Gosh, as much as I admired Gates' analysis, I wouldn't go so far as to put him in charge of a deadline!!)

The Gates talk is one of the first to go up on TED.com here. It's well worth watching.

Other TED talks on nuclear
Nuclear wove its way through a couple of other TED talks. Stewart Brand, an early environmentalist and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog has come to the conclusion that nuclear is the only answer. The risks of nuclear are less than the risks of climate change. And TerraPower's approach reduces those risks further. He outlines his reasoning in his new book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He participated in a debate about nuclear power against Mark Jacobson, a Stanford civil and environmental engineer, whose most persuasive argument against nuclear power was that it couldn't come online fast enough to make a difference, mostly because of regulatory delays. That's the 20 years Gates allows for deployment after development has proven the concept.

And of course one couldn't help but link the Countdown to Zero movie (described in an earlier post) with Innovation to Zero. Using nuclear power creates a market for the uranium in all those weapons that should be dismantled).