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

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.

This chapter presents the main stages in the history of mankind using the concept of system and how a certain system of a certain stage is evolving out of the previous stage into another new one, using also the mathematical theory pertaining to the transition of a system between two different states. This chapter also deals with rational laws and rules governing economy, laws and rules necessary to explain evolution. One important fact resulting out of this chapter is that although necessary, those rules and laws of economy are unfortunately insufficient to explain gaps one can always find everywhere one looks in the history.

This chapter analyses data available from the last fifty years, with regard to Earth and it has the purpose to analyze them from both perspectives: the time domain analysis and spectral domain analysis. Following this analysis, one can conclude about the correlations within the analyzed data or about future forecasted evolution and necessary measures to be taken in order to reduce the dangers

God has given us an almost perfect home planet to live on. Since then, man has continuously chosen to spoil and poison it through his actions and overuse of resources. Science should now help to repair damages thus inflicted upon our planet. This chapter is presenting different dynamics of a complex economic system, based on certain assumptions made within each of the presented models. The assumptions used allow estimating and forecasting the evolution of the respective complex economic system. This estimation can be made in the “classical” way, which is to say without the use of big data, in which case the results are more prone to errors, or by collecting big data, which delivers a much more accurate estimation of the evolution of the complex systems. Throughout this 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.