tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post4667175670262090990..comments2024-03-06T06:34:42.881-05:00Comments on EconoSpeak: The Father of Systems Dynamnics Dies: Jay W. ForresterUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-33582334878240974602016-11-30T08:52:12.048-05:002016-11-30T08:52:12.048-05:00I have the Club of Rome's 'Limits to Growt...I have the Club of Rome's 'Limits to Growth' book lying around somewhere. I've read it and found its basic message to be profound and extremely relevant. Barkley you wrote: "In the case of the Club of Rome book, this led to exaggerated forecasts of impending global ecological-economic doom that did not happen, even as many of the problems highlighted in that book remain serious." <br /><br />But “There has been no systematic study of the potential for abrupt shifts in state-of-the-art Earth System Models” (found a large team of researchers at institutes in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and France). See: 'The biggest question about climate change isn’t ‘if’ or ‘when.’ It’s ‘how abrupt?’By Chris Mooney October 15, 2015. Washington Post.<br /><br />I list some of the most recent earth observations that evidence abrupt and alarming changes :<br />** "extreme heat that once happened across 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the Northern Hemisphere every year now happens across 10 percent every year." [ A quote from Jeff Masters,director of meteorology for the site Weather Underground. “In the more than 30 years I’ve been a meteorologist, I’ve always enjoyed sitting down each day and taking a look at the latest computer model forecasts of the weather for the upcoming ten days,That pleasure began becoming tinged with anxiety beginning in 2010, when we seemingly crossed a threshold into a new more extreme climate regime. The relatively stable climate of the 20th Century that I grew up with is no more.’’<br /><br />** "Antarctica has begun to lose ice 100 years ahead of projections."<br /><br />** “Lots of scientists think that ocean acidification is not going to be a problem until 2050 or 2060,” says Chris Langdon, a marine biology professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “This is happening now. We’ve just lost 35 years we thought we had to turn things around.” (Acidifying oceans are causing Florida's coral reef’s skeleton—a key habitat for fish—to break down rapidly).<br /><br />** a steady decline of global ethane emissions following a peak in about 1970 ended between 2005 and 2010 in most of the Northern Hemisphere and has since reversed, said CU-Boulder Associate Research Professor Detlev Helmig, lead study author. Between 2009 and 2014, ethane emissions in the Northern Hemisphere increased by about 400,000 tons annually, the bulk of it from North American oil and gas activity<br /><br />** "Across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, spring phenologies have advanced by 2.3 to 5.1 days per decade... "A combination of climate warming and higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations has extended the growing period of many plant populations."<br /><br />** significant "climate tipping" points have already been passed . These include large ice sheet disintegration, significant sea level rises of up to 5 metres this century and devastating species loss. The Arctic will soon be free of summer sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet is in imminent danger.<br /><br />** The dramatic Arctic warmth and related damage to sea ice ...It’s a situation that Bob Henson at Weather Underground has aptly dubbed ‘the crazy cryosphere.’ But from this particular observer’s perspective, the situation is probably worse than simply crazy. It appears that we are now in the process of losing an element — Arctic sea ice — that is critical to the integrity of seasonality as we know it. (Robert Scribbler, November 2016).<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Myrtle Blackwoodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07427043367624101075noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-27261081283183685652016-11-27T04:39:59.884-05:002016-11-27T04:39:59.884-05:00I'd love to read more about the 'sharp com...I'd love to read more about the 'sharp competition he engaged in intellectually with Norbert Wiener and his cybernetics approach'<br /><br />ripcorkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16931370358344125604noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-17444541384875233202016-11-19T07:36:17.916-05:002016-11-19T07:36:17.916-05:00I remember reading an interview with him in the ol...I remember reading an interview with him in the old CoEvolution Quarterly, around 40 years ago. It sent me off into studying the epistemological premises of mathematics.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12089899213893716685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-72204890463628125032016-11-18T21:48:29.730-05:002016-11-18T21:48:29.730-05:00Thanks, Alan. You are a great guy.
Iron City,
T...Thanks, Alan. You are a great guy.<br /><br />Iron City,<br /><br />Thanks for your remarks. This reminds me of courses that used to be given, and I suspect that they may still be in various places, "Physics for Poets." At the UW-Madison where I went and wrote the paper, they had such a course, and I knew very well the first two people to teach it, a course I much approved of but did not take. Such courses are lots of fun, and I approve of them.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-64464794626625305242016-11-18T20:06:41.219-05:002016-11-18T20:06:41.219-05:00Used Urban Dynamics as the text in an undergraduat...Used Urban Dynamics as the text in an undergraduate Sociology course (!). Taught by an Industrial Engineer (!!). But this was a sociology for engineers course to civilize us. You should have seen English for Engineers and Philosophy for Engineers. <br /><br />The problem we all had was taking real world data and using it in the model to get results that reflected the real world. Nobody I'm aware of in the course ever got the model to behave. In concept the idea was appealing that one could somehow cause more middle and upper income housing to be built and people living in lower and middle class housing would move up into it, sot of "trickle up economics". Sorry to hear the gentleman is no longer with up caused more than one young engineer to think about social issues and application of operations research techniques. Iron Cityhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01582579281154856635noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-90641380553023071882016-11-18T17:39:28.535-05:002016-11-18T17:39:28.535-05:00Thanks for this useful perspective.Thanks for this useful perspective.Alan G Isaachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09341961773823237435noreply@blogger.com