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Reprinted from downwithtyranny.blogspot.com
The "Seneca Cliff" is the point at which a system that grew large slowly, starts to collapse rapidly. This is the way the 1929 stock market and 2008 banking assets collapsed (image source). Any complex system can go over the Seneca Cliff, says climate scientist Ugo Bardi. (Can you guess why he's studying it?)
by Gaius Publius
I won't belabor this here, since I have a longer piece in draft that makes the same point much more directly. But the basic idea is this: Climate people -- activists, scientists, concerned citizens, "woke" politicians -- think that the elite drive to march human civilization over the climate cliff is, to put it frankly, "nuts." Irrational. Or "insufficiently self-interested," to put it much too mildly.
I've begun to think differently though. I've begun to think that elites who are driving us over the cliff are not at all irrational. Someone who's had that same thought as well is climate scientist Ugo Bardi, who offers a lay person's view of much of his current work at The Seneca Effect.
Bardi's goal is to study, in his words, "why complex systems fail," and further, why they often fail rapidly. For more about Bardi's work on rapid system collapse, see "The Seneca Effect: Why decline is faster than growth." It explains phenomena like those detailed here -- as well as what might soon happen to Uber (see "Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Ten: The Uber Death Watch Begins"). The Seneca Effect is named after the Roman philosopher Seneca, who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."
The Maldive Islands and Climate Change
Now to my own point. In a recent post, Dr. Bardi looked at the Maldive Islands, one of the most seriously threatened inhabited places in the world when it comes to climate change. According to the IPCC, 75% of the Maldive Islands could be under water by 2100.
Yet here's what the rulers of the Maldives plan to do -- stimulate development:
Full Guardian article here. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Actually it doesn't. Dr. Bardi:
Is this an epidemics of brain disease? Or do the Gods really drive crazy those whom they want to destroy?
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