I am a professor at the University of Utah interested in the interplay between economics, energy, and climate. Most of my funded research focuses on the complex interplay between aerosols, clouds, precipitation, radiation and climate, another complex problem. My interest in economic questions grew from a ordinary inquiry into possible solutions for some of the most pressing issues of our time. I am fairly naive about economics as a field, yet it has always seemed inescapable that human activities must be governed by the same universal thermodynamic laws as the rest of the climate system.
In 2006, I started to put together a little model for the physics governing the growth of the global economy and its carbon emissions. The basis of the model was a hypothesis that global rates of energy consumption should be tied through a constant value to the accumulation throughout history of a very general representation of global wealth. It was an exciting time to find out that this does indeed turn out be supported by the data. This constant has a value of 7.1 Watts of primary energy consumption for every one thousand year 2005 dollars of historically accumulated global civilization wealth, independent of the year that is considered.
I expected the result to have been simply "re-discovered" and probably rather standard to the field of Economics. It turned out it wasn't. What I found was that economists approach economic growth and environmental impacts by focusing on the macro and micro-economic parts, using techniques that are mathematically complex but dimensionally inconsistent, full of untestable opinion, and with little to no reference to energy and raw material resource constraints.
This blog takes a different tack by examining physical constraints on the evolution of globally and historically aggregated wealth. The intent is to step back, overlooking internal details of the complexity of the coupled human-climate system, to see their interactions as whole.
I expected the result to have been simply "re-discovered" and probably rather standard to the field of Economics. It turned out it wasn't. What I found was that economists approach economic growth and environmental impacts by focusing on the macro and micro-economic parts, using techniques that are mathematically complex but dimensionally inconsistent, full of untestable opinion, and with little to no reference to energy and raw material resource constraints.
This blog takes a different tack by examining physical constraints on the evolution of globally and historically aggregated wealth. The intent is to step back, overlooking internal details of the complexity of the coupled human-climate system, to see their interactions as whole.
Almost all detail is lost from this viewpoint. However, it offers the tremendous advantage of simplifying long-term predictions for where we might be headed by offering the robustness of physics as a guiding tool. There are some pretty pressing global problems we face this century. It's hard to see how we survive them by pretending we can beat the laws of thermodynamics.
The "little model" link appears to be broken, is it still available?
ReplyDeletecheers
Fixed. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI heard you being interviewed by Alex Smith on the Radio Ecoshock podcast and immediately began investigating your work. I have checked your sources where possible and followed your reasoning as best I can. It is the most exciting break-through in the field that I, as a keen amateur, have ever discovered. Congratulations and thank you.
ReplyDeleteToday I was investigating what value for carbon dioxide emission intensity (c) to use in my attempt to re-create your CTherm model. You use c = E/a. I checked your figures from 1970 to 2005 and verified that the value of c has indeed reduced over this period.
However when I checked the actual change in atmospheric CO2 concentration using Keeling curve data for the period 1958 to 2012 I find no evidence of any de-carbonisation.
c remains at around .13 ppm/TW.
Is E under-estimated?
Thanks for the words of encouragement!
Deletec = E/a decreased extremely slowly to 2000 then recovered since. Emissions E can grow while c effectively stays constant because energy consumption "a" is growing exponentially. The Keeling curve response is a combination of emissions E and natural uptake of about half those emissions to the land and ocean.