weather adjustment as a society

[burntcopper]

Achieved hat that actually covers my ears and looks halfway decent. Which makes me ponder if this weather (cold winters with snow) continues, how long the UK will take to adjust and take it in stride so everyone just goes 'oh. snow.' without it disrupting transport or work. Problem being that mass (electric) transport/motorways in the UK didn't exist the last time we had regular heavy snow in winter across the country, they only came in *after* the weather started getting warmer, so weren't built to cope with it. Hence why we don't have many snowploughs, wheel chains, or bloody great snowshovels in every garage. My parents are the only people in our street to own a proper snowshovel, and that's because they lived in Oklahoma.

It's relatively easy for individuals to adjust to cosmetic stuff. Since last winter, people are stocking up on more practical clothing and learning what kind of footwear is good for walking on ice and snow. Similar for buying blankets and getting insulation, as well as getting road salt and snowshovels. What I'm pondering is infrastructure. It's all very well to moan about the local councils not having sufficient snowploughs like in Russia, but snow ploughs are seriously expensive, and simply not worth buying if deep snow isn't a regular event. And as for rail, the rail network isn't even built to cope with wet autumns that frost over, or hot summers. Which we've been able to rely on for the last few decades.

So has anyone done any forecasts on how long it would take for society to adjust?

In related news, taking Meg up on her offer of the sofa bed tonight as have theatre expedition tomorrow to Legally Blonde and I don't really want to risk the rail network. last time they had warning, it was screwed. Course, this means I will have to buy clothing and makeup and will probably find that the rail network coped fine... I wouldn't have given a flying fuck and just stayed home if it wasn't for the theatre factor.

Comments

[akadougal.livejournal.com]

This is interesting to me. We have snow shovel and I've been carrying the cold weather kit in the boot of the car since November - welly boots, blanket, corrugated cardboard, grit, shovel and de-icer and scraper mitt (it's pink). It's just a facet of life. On the other hand, this is the 19th day of snow for me. The main roads are clear for the buses but the side roads have been abandoned to ensure arteries are kept open. I'm now worried about powercuts and food shortages because this is exceptional.

[miniosiris.livejournal.com]

I have fingers, toes and everything else crossed that I can get into London by train tomorrow. I finish work at 13:45 but will probably not be able to get a train much before 16:00 because of other stuff I have to do. Hope this will be long enough to get in, to be honest it's the getting home afterwards that has me more worried!

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Well, since the rail infrastructure companies are so surprised by the winter they can't keep their website up, I'm not holding my breath.

The thing is you don't need to get expensive plow trucks - you can get removable plows to fit to any sort of truck, like garbage trucks for instance. Add training for the drivers, and you've got a much higher preparedness for not that much extra cost (well, compared to getting plow trucks and drivers for those).

I have a feeling preparedness and the experience needed to cope is something that'll come creeping south from Scotland.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Which is what they do in the Highlands - even the little tractors that cut grass are adapted as snowploughs in winter.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Which makes me ponder if this weather (cold winters with snow) continues, how long the UK will take to adjust and take it in stride.

...which is an entirely possible side-effect of climate change; if the North Atlantic Conveyer switches off, we can look forward to winters appropriate to our latitude. Helloo New England...

(Though, of course, one bad winter doesn't indicate anything, as it's a single data point.)

Might be interesting to see a Frost Fair again, though.

I expect that we will suddenly start taking a lot more notice of the Scandinavian systems of dealing with winter.

My dad's got it tough - he lives on the west coast of Ireland in Connemara, where they're having the worst winter for decades; the pipes have all frozen solid and burst, they have no running water and are currently collecting meltwater for use for day-to-day needs.

[andromakie.livejournal.com]

Even here we never have enough snowplows and things, and Canada is supposed to have heavy snow. Once they called in the army!

There's a law here about people being responsible for clearing the pavements in front of their houses or establishments. And if people followed the law that would be awesome. But I have friends in the suburbs who have to wade for ages through knee-high snow because no one has bothered removing it. I'm in a heavily populated area and leave for work later than most, so it's usually not bad when I go. Except when it turns to ice because it's been left to partially melt and then refreeze.

Good luck on that infrastructure thing.

Blizzard!

[blairprovence.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you say your folks were better prepared because they'd lived in Oklahoma - we had a blizzard here the day before Christmas and just about everyone around here was completely UNprepared. I didn't even know about it until about two hours in and drove home in a white-out without anything in my car to help if I slid off of the road like half of the people I passed. I spent four days after that hiding in my house.

Whereas it probably didn't phase anyone in Minnesota.

I do think weather knowledge has cycles, though - I remember a lot more snow when I was little, but we haven't had very much for years, and then BLIZZARD!!!!

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Interesting, isn't it? Because what will it take to jolt us out of out climate change denial? (I mean the "things will happen [are happening] to YOU in YOUR country and YOUR town" denial.) And politically, for any big org (particularly a council) to say they're investing in infrastructure for changed climate because it's happening now, that's a big admission with political consequences.

[mrslant]

So unprepared is Britain for the annual onslaught of the same weather as this time last year that people are even convincing themselves that snow in January and storms in October are somehow new phenomena, no doubt to be attributed to Global Warming like everything else the weather does.

My parents could tell you about the winter of 1947, the floods of 1968 and the drought of 1976. The authorities were useless then and will no doubt continue to be useless indefinitely.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

A couple of points here.

Firstly; this last month has been unusually harsh by UK standards; as far as my own memory goes, this is one of the most sustained cold snaps I've ever seen. As far as the UK goes, we usually have a week or two of wintry weather and then maybe another couple of incidents later in the year.

There are parts of the UK that don't normally get too much snow that have been under snow for much of the last month.

It's certainly worse than February 2009 (if not for London); it's worse than the 8th-10th of December 1990, and the chill has gone on longer than the heavy snow in February 1981 (when I had the privilege to go tobogganing in a motorbike and sidecar).

Also, weather =/= climate. The overall atmospheric system is a mix of various gases in which there are a continuum of different energies; the sum total of the molecules' energy equating the energy of the system (you'd have to hope!)

If you shove more energy into the atmospheric system, the overall energy distribution of the molecules varies according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution - if you look at the probability density function, the black line represents a low-energy state; the red a medium-energy state and the blue high-energy.

The area under the graph represents the total probability of a gas molecule having an energy in the range covered. So if you look at the black line and pick the energy value '4' (the x-axis), you can see that pretty much all of the black line lies inside that; the probability of a gas molecule having energy < 4 is ~ 1. For the red line, the probability would be closer to 0.5, and for the blue line it's closer to 0.25.

Simply put, shove more energy into a gas and you're less likely to find low-energy molecules; the distribution curve changes such that the energy is more evenly distributed among higher-energy molecules (which makes sense, since gas molecules distribute energy by crashing into each other!).

So far, so academic; this is one of the gems of Victorian physics.

However, an increase in extreme or unusually high-energy weather events correlates with an increase in the overall energy of the system; something like a hurricane is more likely to emerge in a system with a certain proportion of gas molecules over a threshold energy level (known in chemistry as the 'activation energy' for a reaction).

Pick a threshold energy value of 6 on the graph above; the area of the black line >6 is effectively nil; almost no probability of molecules possessing the activation energy to trigger an event.

In the medium-energy state, there are a certain fraction of molecules above the activation energy; a minority, certainly, but the probability of any given molecule having energy >6 is roughly 0.05.

In the high-energy state, the majority of molecules have an energy greater than the activation energy; the probability of a random molecule having >6 energy is roughly 0.6 - i.e. better than even odds.

So while inspection of any single molecule can't tell you much about the system as a whole, the area of the graph beyond the activation energy is very significant; and a comparatively small shift in energy distribution can result in the probability of actual events doubling.

[mrslant]

The current weather is certainly uncommon, but hardly outside the expected range: 1947 was much worse. And it's got nothing to do with climate change because, as you so rightly say, weather =/= climate.

As for the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, I'm no climatologist but I'm pretty sure the atmosphere isn't an ideal gas close to thermodynamic equilibrium, so it really has no application here. And activation energy is the energy required for a chemical reaction to take place, which is also not relevant to weather.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

And it's got nothing to do with climate change because, as you so rightly say, weather =/= climate.

Not quite. We have no way of saying unambiguously that it is a product of a long- or medium-term climatic variation; it is a single data point.

However, there are specific warming-related possible events (e.g. shutoff or significant weakening of the North Atlantic Conveyor) where a small change has the potential to create a much larger effect.

Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, I'm no climatologist but I'm pretty sure the atmosphere isn't an ideal gas close to thermodynamic equilibrium

As it happens, atmospheric physics was part of my degree (Physics with Space Science); hence my interest in the subject.

For atmospheric systems, the ideal gas is a workable abstraction; it's certainly good enough to describe the planet's troposphere to a useful degree, which is where the vast majority of the atmosphere's mass is located.

Ditto the question of equilibrium; although the atmosphere is not per se in equilibrium, in the denser parts of the atmosphere, the gas atoms and molecules collide often enough and with enough force to provide a local thermal equilibrium (LTE) - Maxwell-Boltzmann still works well enough.

I stand by the analogy of activation energy, though; after all, what initiates a chemical reaction is the collision of a sufficient proportion of the reagent molecules with enough kinetic energy to initiate a change in the mixture; not ultimately that different from the atmospheric processes that trigger precipitation.

[mrslant]

No doubt a warmer atmosphere would lead to increased precipitation, but that doesn't necessarily correlate directly to an increase in extreme weather events. In fact, contrary to media hype, there doesn't actually seem to have been any increase in hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., and we're agreed that the present weather is evidence of nothing. I highly recommend Bjørn Lomborg's Cool It for a thoroughly lucid analysis.

As for the North Atlantic Conveyor, the IPCC's 2007 report is pretty unambiguous: "none of the current models simulates an abrupt reduction or shut-down." (Climate Change 2007: WGI: The Physical Science Basis, Question 10.2, emphasis added.) The Day After Tomorrow is fiction, whatever Al Gore might think.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

Really? One climate change lecture used the UK as an example of 'places you didn't think of as being affected by climate change' due to our increase in flooding since '99, as that went from rare to yearly. Not sure if the autumn gales have increased in recent years, though.

[mrslant]

Sounds like pretty dodgy science. An increase in flooding over 10 years is hardly indicative of a long-term trend. Climate change is a slow process - IPCC estimates have been homing in on a most likely prediction of about 2°C increase in global temperature by 2100. The short-term trend has actually been slightly cooling since 1998! So the fact there's been more snow/rain/whatever in the last year than 10 years ago really doesn't amount to much.

Read the Lomborg book, it's most illuminating, not least as to what an utter charlatan Al Gore is!

[gmh.livejournal.com]

It's kind of hard to say with certainty, as the UK is a fairly small area with fairly specific climate, thanks to the prevailing sou'westerly.

There are various things that have changed year-on-year; distribution of various species of plant and animal, flowering periods of plants and so forth; something I've personally seen is the increasing frequency of sightings of little egrets in the UK over the last 20 years (I saw my first one in St. Ives in 1987!).

Flooding's a bit more difficult; quite apart from all else, there's been a fair old bit of building on flood plains in the last half-century and the middle of the 20th C. was comparatively dry.

Happy Birthday and apologies for the great big Responses-of-Doom below - if you prefer, I'll take this to my lj!

[gmh.livejournal.com]

No doubt a warmer atmosphere would lead to increased precipitation, but that doesn't necessarily correlate directly to an increase in extreme weather events.

A few points to consider here:

Firstly, global data on extreme weather events pre-1965 is based on local observation; it was only with the Nimbus and Seasat projects that the modern science of remote sensing really took off; and a remote sensing satellite is capable of telling you far more over a far larger area than the previous methods; and to a far greater degree of accuracy.

(The data we got to play with at UCL included stuff from ERS-1; some of my then colleagues were later involved with Envisat.)

As such; the baseline frequency of events pre-1965 is sometimes based on anecdotal rather than exhaustive observation.

Secondly, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) states that there is as yet no firm evidence for a global increase in extreme events, but that there is quite possibly a causal link between the increase in the annual frequency of extreme events in the North Atlantic region in the period 1990-2007 as opposed to the period 1850-1990.

Thirdly, while the frequency of extreme events has not yet shown a clear trend (which may yet manifest under greater warming), there is some correlation between the sea surface temperature (SST) and observed increase in the number of Category 4/5 events in the North Atlantic during the period 1970-2004. There is not currently enough data to make a firm conclusion on this (see the argument between Trenberth/Webster+Holland versus Gray/Landsea on this subject); however, all parties agree that more study is needed.

The IPCC's position is that some degree of causative link between SST and North Atlantic events is probable - it will be interesting to see what AR5 says on the subject.

A single weather event is evidence of nothing, climate-wise; but a measureable trend is a lot more significant.

(cut for length - part two below!)

[gmh.livejournal.com]

...

With regard to Lomborg, I have a half-finished essay on him lying around at home; while there is some small merit to some of what he says, and critics are always needed, Lomborg's methods are frequently supported more by assertion than evidence; his figures are often either invented, quoted to a misleading degree of precision or just plain wrong.

(e.g. 'Technology Can Fight Global Warming' - WSJ 28/09/09:

'Some economic models find that target impossible to reach without drastic action, like cutting the world population by a third. Other models show that achieving the target by a high CO2 tax would reduce world GDP a staggering 12.9% in 2100—the equivalent of $40 trillion a year.

... Mr. Green's research suggests that investing about $100 billion annually in noncarbon based energy research could result in essentially stopping global warming within a century or so.'

Lomborg sets out the two diametrically-opposed plans: charging for emission which will beggar everyone (cue pantomime boos) and investment in clean technology (which will save everyone and make everyone rich - yay!)

These are cartoon positions (the UNEP estimate cost is 3% - and Lomborg doesn't apparently read the WSJ, despite writing articles for it:

'Despite the global economic slump, total clean-energy investment last year grew 5% to $155 billion.'

Renewable-Energy Investments Top Traditional Investments, Report Finds

- in other words, the required 'solution' for Lomborg is already in place; what he's arguing is essentially the free-market laissez-faire approach.

Which isn't terribly surprising, considering that his ideas expressed in The Skeptical Environmentalist are a partial rehash of Julian Simon's ultimate resource argument.

I've been arguing with disciples of Simon's position since 1995 - neither Simon nor Lomborg are physical scientists, and the assumptions behind the cornucopia theory are a) based upon some very dodgy logic-chopping around the nature of 'infinity' with regard to resources and b) somewhat in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; his argument does not apply in a situation where system entropy always increases.

Finally, there are enough documented examples of system failure in human societies to suggest that humanity is quite capable of stuffing things up bigtime; Jared Diamond's 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed' is a good work on the subject.

[mrslant]

If you're going to accuse Lomborg of inventing his figures, I think you need better evidence than the fact that a newspaper article he wrote is contradicted by someone else's press release.

You're also misrepresenting Simon's position, which is in fact clearly set out in the Wikipedia article you refer to. No one is suggesting that resources are physically infinite, but we're still waiting for any evidence that Malthus was right!

No, Lomborg's not a physical scientist, but then nothing in his writings seeks to question the climate science. He's a political scientist criticising the political-economic response.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

If you like, I will, though it's really not hard to find any number of fairly in-depth rebuttals of Lomborg's position.

Let's take an easy example from the WSJ article; the model Lomborg cites as costing 12.9% of GDP is by Richard Tol (The Analysis of Mitigation as a Response to Climate Change)

(Which was funded and commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center, but that's by-the-by.)

Tol's model is selective to a worrying degree; it takes only the most conservative benefit analyses (e.g. Nordhaus), assumes that nothing ultimately changes until 2100, and then plumps for a CO2 target that is generally associated with a probable global mean surface temperature rise of ~3 deg C; and says effectively 'well, yes, there may be additional effects to deal with (as opposed to the 450 ppm ~2 deg C raise) plans, but I don't think they'll be terribly significant' (See section 2.3: Missing Impacts).

Does the WSJ article mention the revised 550ppm atmospheric CO2 level?

No.

Nor does the Reuters article covering the same press release.

So what it is actually saying is that limiting atmospheric CO2 to 450 ppm is likely to cost more than limiting it to 550 ppm. Which is hardly news; but neither is it a fair comparison to the likes of the Stern Report.

But this is where Tol's pick-and-choose approach to the analyses comes in; by choosing the models with the lowest benefits (i.e. the most optimistic models in terms of possible climate change impacts on humanity) he is playing down the potential negative costs of a given temperature scenario - whilst at the same time talking up the hypothetical fiscal efficiency of spending a given sum of money his way.

And yes, if nothing really bad will happen anyway, it makes sense to spend the money as efficiently as possible; but if there is a genuine risk of seriously Bad Stuff happening, then you pay out double if you don't budget for it.

For all of the scenarios outlined, there is a non-zero chance that climate change will cause one or more catastrophic results; I'm talking about (for example) rainfall patterns and the presence of nuclear-armed nations in water-poor areas (such as the Pakistan/India border or the Golan Heights); I'm talking about population pressure on land that is not capable of supporting the level of use humans make of it (like Rwanda).

These are potential costs that Tol does nothing to describe - bar dismissing them as 'relatively small'.

(The Red Cross World Disasters Report 1999 discusses climate-related human costs; alas, it's no longer available online.)

So, to recap: Lomborg is quoting the result from a somewhat selective study that he commissioned and using them to make an apples-to-oranges comparison to policy recommendations coming from Stern and the UN Environment Programme.

Again, Lomborg and Tol are both recommending limiting atmospheric CO2 to 550 ppm. The IPCC recommends a maximum of 450 ppm; and there are a number of scientists such as Hansen arguing for a reduction to 350 ppm to minimise risk to the biosphere.

Now, as you have agreed, Lomborg (and Tol) are not physical scientists. On what basis are they advocating a level of atmospheric CO2 that is a) greater than the IPCC recommendation and b) significantly greater than the stated opinion of James Hansen, who is a physical scientist in the relevant field?

It's getting a bit long; I'll post the Simon reply below.

[mrslant]

You only have to read the opening paragraph of your alleged "in-depth rebuttal" (which gives no indication as to its peer-review status, incidentally) to smell the prejudice: "In 1999 – compelled by the errors and misrepresentations voiced by Bjørn Lomborg, Associate Professor – the Danish Ecological Council published a book intended as a countermove."

Well, that's clearly an entirely unbiased and objective assessment...

Now, as I understand it your argument here is that Lomborg is a liar and a knave because something he wrote in a newspaper article refers to a paper by someone else entirely whose analysis you don't agree with, apparently on the basis that there's a "non-zero chance" of catastrophic results from climate change.

Well, as you know there's a non-zero chance that the sun will explode in the next three seconds, but I can confidently predict that it's not going to happen. There's a non-zero chance of winning the lottery, but it won't be you. In the real world, where people's lives and livelihoods are at stake, we don't make policy based on remote possibilities but on the likely outcomes. Which is exactly what Lomborg does in his book - which, as you seem to be fixated on some article in the WSJ, I presume you haven't read.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Right. Ultimate Resource: the quick version.

As per the Wikipedia article:

'Simon argues not that there is an infinite physical amount of, say, copper, but for human purposes that amount should be treated as infinite because it is not bounded or limited in any economic sense, because:

* known reserves are of uncertain amounts
* new reserves may become available, either through discovery or via the development of new extraction techniques
* recycling
* more efficient utilization of existing reserves (e.g. "It takes much less copper now to pass a given message than a hundred years ago." [The Ultimate Resource 2, 1996, footnote, page 62])
* development of economic equivalents, e.g. optic fibre in the case of copper for telecommunications

The ever-decreasing prices (and thus decreasing scarcity) despite population growth suggest an enduring trend that will not cease in the foreseeable future.'

----

Right. firstly, in the book, Simon refers to copper, but also extends the analogy to oil:

("But the number of oil wells that will eventually produce oil, and in what quantities, is not known or measurable at present and probably never will be, and hence is not meaningfully finite.")

This is simply untrue; Simon's way of explaining this is that other things replace oil, ultimately devolving to the Sun and solar power; the term 'meaningfully' is used as a chimera.

But that fails to acknowledge how and why; and it utterly fails to take the cost of retooling and rebuilding your infrastructure into account; it doesn't simply blink into existence as and when it is needed.

For example; the transition from fossil fuel to other sources of energy requires a considerable downpayment in terms of resources and equipment. That expenditure needs to happen before you can get anything back on it; and if, for whatever reason, there isn't enough of a critical resource, then the change will simply not happen, no matter how much we might wish it.

Someone once posited space-based solar power to me as a possible solution to the energy crisis; either space-based cells or solar mirrors. We can't do it yet; and the possibility of our ever being able to do it is a big 'if'.

Leaving aside practical problems such as material outgassing in vacuum, high-energy particles, space debris, reliable attitude control and safe transmission of power back down to the ground, you've got the simple problem of the gravity well; the amount of energy expended to get a spacecraft into orbit is not trivial; it requires construction, transportation and safe launch; and that's if everything goes according to plan. The energy outlay to get a solar mirror or usefully large cell array into space is such that a spacecraft would have to operate more efficiently than current solar cells and for a longer time than the average spacecraft lifetime just to break even in terms of getting the thing up into space in the first place.

Secondly, Simon treats resources in isolation: he talks, for example, of the recycling of copper and the improvement of techniques for using copper; but not how this factors in with the availability of other key materials such as energy, manpower and transportation. Every time you reshape copper, you do so at an energy cost; and that energy is not necessarily sustainable or recoverable.

Finally, and most damningly to my mind, Simon simply fails to recognise (or does not say) that not all uses of a resource are equally recoverable; it depends upon the entropy of the system.

Take a lump of copper, split it in two, take one half and keep it as a lump of copper. Grind the other half up, mix it with sulphuric acid to form copper sulphate - and then dump that into the ocean.

The lump is trivially simple to recycle. The extremely diluted solution is nigh-on impossible to recycle; it is in a higher entropy state than the lump; and no amount of human ingenuity can address that; it's basic thermodynamics.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

...

In short, Simon posits that humanity will always be able to do something; to improve methods, to recycle, to find new resources; and that to talk of resource shortage is thus not meaningful.

(Correct me if you feel I'm misrepresenting his position here.)

Unfortunately, this doesn't square with the physics and it doesn't square with the history.

In physical terms, retooling requires spare energy; you have to keep running your society whilst also investing enough to develop new techniques; and once you have new techniques, you need to expend more energy to roll them out across your civilisation. Also, energy is not infinitely recoverable or renewable; as overall system entropy has to increase as per the Second Law.

In historic terms, there are any number of historic societies with intelligent, adaptable problem-solving humans which collapsed due to their inability to deal with resource shortage and related factors; the Easter Islanders, the Greenland Vikings, the Polynesians of Mangareva and Pitcairn, the Anasazi Pueblo, the Classic Mayans.

(It would be massively arrogant to assume we're significantly brighter or more inventive than the average Mayan or Anasazi!)

Julian Simon's cornucopia argument is ultimately faith-based - wishful inductive thinking. It's a religious position, not a rational one.

[mrslant]

This is the same old Malthusian argument. Attempting to criticise economics on the basis of thermodynamics is akin to arguing that we should be making preparations urgently for the day the sun runs out of fuel. The scale is out by orders of magnitude. The Earth's natural resources are vast, and there is simply no danger that we are going to use them up, particularly as technology becomes progressively more efficient, and as the world's population stabilises and then (probably) gradually declines (if the global fertility rate stabilises below 2).

The reason Greenland, Easter Island and the rest collapsed can be summed up in a word - isolation. Hence they were unable to import resources or export people. The modern, globalised world doesn't suffer from this problem - heck, in a few hundred years we could even be mining asteroids or colonising Mars - so is unlikely to suffer the same fate. No, we're not individually smarter than Mayans or Anasazis, but we do have greater accumulated knowledge and superior technology.

Anyway, we're clearly not going to agree on this so perhaps we should stop flooding burntcopper's journal!

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Fair enough; this will be my last comment, after which I will leave this subject well alone!

I would just like to conclude with a couple of short points.

Firstly: we are currently isolated on this planet. The gravity well is a harsh mistress, and any significant moves into space would require a massive investment in resource and capital - in a world where we cannot afford to feed and clothe the current inhabitants. Generally speaking, people prefer to know that they've got enough to eat before trying to engage in interplanetary exploration; theorising that technological advance will make resource use more efficient is all very well, but the gravity well remains a constant; and we're certainly nowhere near getting around that at present.

Secondly: if economics attempts to posit a theory based on the wilful misunderstanding (or ignorance) of the physical world, then it is going to get slapped down like the soft science it is.

Ye cannae break the laws of physics.