Environmental, Climate and Resource Issues on Earth. Governing Dynamics in Complex Systems

Abstract

This book is based on previous papers of the author published within the International Dialogo Conference between 2018 and 2021, a conference on the dialogue between science and theology. It is mainly intended to the general audience, being easily understandable and it contains only a few sections requiring some specific mathematical and statistical knowledge. This book also raises some moral questions regarding the present day exaggerated consumption and also explains how decline in religious belief has caused, mainly in the western society, disastrous effects for Earth and its inhabitants. Present day “intelligent” human does not believe anymore in God, but warships today instead values like money and its own things and toys, with disastrous results for his home planet. It deals in its first chapter with transitions between states of an economic system and explains the initial evolution of first human economy in the ancient times and a first transition within this first economy, based on a set of assumptions. This set of assumptions and ideas used in explaining transition between first two stages of the human economy remains also valid for any of the subsequent transitions of human economy. The second chapter of this book analyses data available for the last fifty years regarding Earth, using as a tool statistical analysis in time and frequency domain and clarifies the amplitude of disaster and of danger, humans have caused on their own planet. The third chapter is the last one and presents different dynamics of an economic complex system, based on certain additional assumptions made within each of the models presented in the paper. These assumptions used allow estimating and forecasting evolution of a complex economic system. This estimation can be made in “classical” way, which is to say without use of big data, in which case results are more prone to errors, or using recordings of big data, which delivers a much more accurate estimation of evolution for the respective complex systems. This last chapter uses as general economic model an additive utility model to estimate added value in an economy, using subject assumptions for different models presented in this chapter. It also gives a practical specific solution and instructions to lower the limits (boundaries) dangerously exceeded regarding Earth, expanding on the concepts and theory of utility functions presented in the first chapter of the book. Throughout this last chapter the term “with sustainable growth” means “ecological growth” and it refers to durable economic systems where the environmental issues are taken into consideration, whereas the term “without sustainable growth” or “conventional growth” refers to the economic systems where the environmental issues are not taken into account. This third chapter also shows, using sustainability as a concept, how incorrect, inadequate and obsolete the conventional concept of GDP is. Taking into account almost all costs incurred, the value generated within the world economy is far lower than calculated GDP. Hence, this traditional concept of GDP if it is not to be completely abolished, should be seriously corrected with all the costs incurred, using big data information.