da Vinci said, “Learn how to see.” Here’s what I see.
It’s true: all the world’s a stage. We The People watch as politicians, media figures, self-proclaimed authorities, and other “leaders” prance around the stage, painting an upbeat picture of “the truth”. The passive audience, wanting to trust, accepts that truth. The Surface Truth. All is well.
A few brave souls from the audience (maybe 10%) venture back behind the curtain and into the wings. They find science fiction and fantasy writers feeding lines to the actors. They find technologists, billionaires, and lawyers huddling in every one of the dressing rooms engineering the real story; engineering the Deep Truth. All is NOT well.
The audience ignores the returning brave souls. About 30% are hypnotized by the actors’ words. The rest prefer to check messages in their seats rather than venture backstage. There’s comfort in those familiar habits and routines.
We The Skeptical, the brave souls, see an urgent need for intervention. The urgency story is told in the difference between Surface Truth and Deep Truth. It is large and still growing. The 30% hypnotized at the foot of the stage reject logic out of hand and are lost. The others are mostly fearful and distracted. It takes noise to raise the heads of the distracted. Let the real noise begin.
Tom Murphy is an experimental physicist who has put out an excellent textbook on energy and growth (“Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet”)
In section 1.3 he does a calculation to demonstrate that irrespective of the energy technology involved continued exponential growth (2.3% annually) in energy consumption would raise the surface temperature to boiling with in a few centuries simplly due to the inevitable waste heat created by any energy conversion process.
One key aspect of this thermal radiation scenario is that it does not depend on the form of power source. It could in principle be fossil fuels, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or some form of energy we have not yet realized and may not even have named! Whatever it is, it will have to obey thermodynamics. Thus, thermodynamics puts a time limit on energy growth on this planet