[LINK] electromagnetic fields effect brain activity

[Antony Barry]

On 09/01/2007, at 12:47 PM, Alan L Tyree wrote:

> Am I the only one here old enough to remember the Club of Rome?

Yes. I read their report in draft and commented on it suggesting that  
they should transfer the demand for oil to coal when the oil ran out.  
as a consequence they cut their figure for the lifetime of coal  
reserves.

> Of
> course, those weren't scientific tests, they were computer models.  
> Like
> most of the "scientific" predictions of today.

ALL mathematical based theories are models. Also as soon as you get  
away from anything trivial there are no exact analytic solutions and  
you have to go to numerical approximations. This means computers for  
anything other than the extremely simple. Then to top it all off any  
set of equations which aren't dead simple are chaotic and after a  
period of time the prediction will rapidly drift away from what the  
real world does because of the impossibility of pinning down the  
initial conditions. The key is doing a sensitivity analysis to have a  
handle on what the likely time into the future the prediction will  
hold.  Even planetary dynamics are chaotic over a sufficiently long  
timescale.

The Club of Rome said we could be in strife through a resource  
crisis, a food crisis or a pollution crisis around the end of the  
century depending what we did. They checked the sensitivity of the  
prediction with respect to resources and showed that a doubling(?) of  
reserves just moved the problem back a decade or two because of the  
nature of exponential growth. They refined the model twice since.

Donella H Meadows, Dennis L Meadows and Jørgen Randers. "Beyond the  
limits: global collapse or a sustainable future". Earthscan, 1992

Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. "Limits to  
growth; the 30-year update". Earthscan, 2005.

Their conclusions overall haven't changed. The timeline has shifted  
back a few decades not unexpectedly and there is trouble coming a few  
decades ahead. Depending what we do it will be very nasty or only  
somewhat unpleasant for a time.

Look where we are at now -

Resources
---------
Crude oil production will probably peak by 2015 and then start to  
decline with natural gas not to far behind.

For many metals we are going to lower and lower quality ores.

Pollution
---------
Global warming

Rapidly increasing dead zones in the oceans

Ozone hole not decreasing as expected

Inexplicable rise in cancers in the developed world

Food
----
Soil depletion

Rapid fall in the water tables in key grain growing areas which rely  
on ground water

Per capita grain reserves lowest for 35 years

Loss of crude oil will impact heavily on the green revolution


The crunch is coming.

If anybody wants to discuss this could we shift it to unlink.

While I write this it is 40.8 degrees in my part of Canberra so I'm  
feeling a bit crabby. It was over 40 yesterday but there is a change  
coming although the storms appear to have gone to the south of us.

Tony

phone : 02 6241 7659 | mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
mobile: 04 1242 0397 | mailto:tony.barry at alianet.alia.org.au
http://tony-barry.emu.id.au