Fig 1.
Illustration of the short-term thermodynamic balance between primary energy consumption and dissipation at rate G/τd (Eq 1) in a civilization experiencing long-term, proportionate material
and specific potential μ growth (Eq 14).
Fig 2.
Evolution of world economic production Y in trillion 2010 USD per year (solid line) and the integrated contribution to the world cumulative production W in trillion 2010 USD proportional to the shaded area under the curve.
The period between 1980 to 2017 that is used for comparison with world primary energy consumption as described in the text is delineated by the dashed line and shown by the gray arrow.
Fig 3.
Relative evolution since 1980 of the world real GDP Y, economic potential (Eq 19), primary energy consumption
,
(Eq 18) and the energy intensity of production
.
Table 1.
The global value of λ (gigawatts per trillion 2010 US dollar with standard deviation) defined by Eq 18 for various time periods.
Table 2.
Measured average growth rates (%/yr) compared with rates derived assuming λ is a constant in bold.
Pertinent equations are in parentheses.
Table 3.
Average growth rates in carbonization and CO2 emissions (%/yr).
Rates derived assuming λ is a constant are shown in bold, and pertinent equations in parentheses. The units of C/W are Gt C yr−1 per quadrillion 2010 USD.
Table 4.
Average growth rates of population and standard of living (%/yr).
Summed rate derived assuming λ is a constant from efficiency estimates are shown in bold.
Table 5.
Average values of the scaling W/Δ [CO2]eq = σ/(κcλ) defined by Eq 39 for various time periods, in trillion 2010 USD ppmv−1.
Fig 4.
Historical reconstructions of world cumulative production W and atmospheric CO2 concentrations with projections assuming ηc = 0 and (2017) = 2.4%yr−1 (circles) and corresponding stabilization concentrations from Eq 39.
The halving time between predicted and committed is about 30 years. Concentration data includes flask samples from Mauna Loa [41] and Antarctic ice core data [42, 43].