The coronavirus pandemic—sadly—has introduced or reintroduced many people to the concept of an exponential curve, in which a quantity grows at an increasing rate over time, as the number of people contracting the virus currently is doing
Paul Slovic is president of Decision Research and professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of. It is this curve that so many of us are trying to “flatten” through social distancing and other mitigating measures, small and large.
The human mind does not easily grasp the explosive nature of exponential growth. This was demonstrated more than 40 years ago in a series of pioneering psychological experiments conducted in the Netherlands by Willem Wagenaar and his colleagues. In, participants were shown a hypothetical index of air pollution beginning in 1970 at a low value of 3 and rising yearly in an exponential way to 7, 20, 55 and, finally, 148 by 1974.
Aside from the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest, most destructive exponential growth processes that we must grapple with today are those associated with global climate change. While it might be hard for humans to detect that carbon emissions and their concentration in the atmosphere are growing exponentially right now, that doesn’t mean we should rest easy. The opposite is true.
That might not sound all that worrisome on the surface. But this exponential increase signals that COemissions are likely to be considerably higher in the coming years, unless we take strong measures now to reduce them. Otherwise, the exponential growth of COemissions will drive our climate to extremes that look nothing like a linear extrapolation of recent history.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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