Slashdot Mirror
Will Earth Expire By 2050?
_josh writes: "Will overconsumption force humanity off this planet in less than 50 years? It may sound sci-fi, but according to the WWF in this story at the Observer, it's entirely possible. Maybe now I can convince my brother not to buy that SUV ..." Take with as large a grain of salt as you think appropriate.
From the article:
The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now.
Okay, does this strike anyone as leaving out the most likely option? It's highly unlikely we'll massively change our ways. It's also highly unlikely that we'll colonize other planets in the next 50 years.
What's that leave? Simple! Massive resource wars! Woohoo!
It just amazes me that the whole article ignores the inevitable outcome... we'll all fight over dwindling resources, thus thinning the population down to sustainable levels.
so let me think... first they said we'd be gone by 1985, then it was 2000, now its 2050? hrm...
I love reading about our doom... its so funny.
I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe
The population is growing at a rate much higher than the Earth can sustain.
No, it isn't. The developed countries are actually LOSING population.
The best way to cut back on population growth is by high technology, the very thing the greenies are trying to stop.
There's plenty of food to go around. It's just poorly distributed, and equitable distribution requires 1) Cheap energy and 2) the rule of law.
Expire is a pretty strong word. Will the earth exceed critical mass and humanity implode? Maybe. Maybe humans won't survive at all - but believe me, SOMETHING will survive.
As the lyrics to an In Flames song goes:
Species come and species go, but the Earth stands forever fast
Soccer moms of America and yuppie cockeaters need to belly up to the table and cut out the fucking consumption competition..
On the other hand, you could look at it like this: if they hadn't done the research and made such predictions from it, it may very well have happened like that as we would have taken no steps to prevent it.
Similarly, the Y2K bug was hyped for a reason - to get people doing something about it so it actually went smoothly in the end. Without the hype, we probably would have problems much worse than automatic web pages printing '19100'.
Analyzing the future, and publishing the results, generally changes the described outcome as people do something about it.
The Earth will not expire in 2050. Simple economics will keep it from doing so. When certain resources become scarce, they will become expensive, and people will be forced to stop using them and seek alternatives.
Interesting they compare the United States' use of resources to that of Burundi. This comparison is truly startling. For those who enjoy startling statistics, allow me to offer a few others:
The population of Burundi is expanding at three times the rate of the United States. The percentage of people in Burundi infected with HIV/AIDS is 20 times that of the United States. The average lifespan in Burundi is 31 years shorter than that of a person living in the United States. The literacy rate of Burundi is 35%. 1 in 3000 people have Internet access. (Statistics courtesy of CIA World Factbook).
Are you still interested in reducing your resource consumption by a factor of 24? Personally, I'm not interested in selling my pickup, as I don't think it has any connection to the fact that the number of black rhinos has fallen from 65,000 to 3,100. Considering that my "extravagant lifestyle" doesn't involve poaching, I don't think I can help.
As an aside, this article brings one more thing to mind: every environmentalist needs to understand that he is not "saving the Earth." He is only saving himself and his descendants. The Earth will recover from every incosiderate act man has done to it in the blink of an eye (relative to its lifetime), and graciously replace us with other species if we destroy our way of life.
And Timothy, you might want to encourage your brother to go ahead and buy that new SUV. If his current car is more than five years old, that new SUV will be adding less pollution to the atmosphere.
I guess this wasn't as important 18 hours ago? Ahh well, that's Slashdot journalism for you... it must have been a slow news day today. Or maybe they're just gay. I suppose it's who's at the controls at that particular time --- oh wait, it WAS timothy!
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Whether it's 50 years or 500, we are currently using resources faster than they are replenished. And the U.S. does consume a disproportionate amount of the resources in the world.
100% accurate or not, reports like this aren't going to change the way the U.S. lives -- we're too comfortable in our lifestyles to make big changes. It's going to take some catastrophic change that impacts the U.S. directly to get us to wake up. Unfortunately it's developing countries which are going to feel those changes first.
Unfortunately and perhaps ironically, it may be that the rapid spread of HIV will devastate the population enough to save us.
Many here are pointing out that economic pressures will help limit consumption. The problem is that people often reject the market process as being unfair, immoral, etc and do all they can to substitute something else ala socialism.
You can bet that once prices start to rise to check consumption, the government will step in "in the name of the people" and fix prices.
Hell, it happened in the 1970's with Nixon's price controls on gas and gave us long lines at the pump and gas shortages.
The truth is that, when the market gives people economic information they don't like, they try to use the political process to make it go away instead of making changes in their habits.
When prices go up, instead of conserving, they'll bitch about those "evil greedy corporations." Hey, just like on Slashdot. The fact is, people don't change unless it hits them in the wallet, and they'll do everything they can to stop that from happening.
If the market suggests they be paid less for their out-dated skills because of less demand, they'll blame someone else. It happens over and over. People want it all for nothing.
I think what will happen ultimately is that the democratic process will force us all to drown together.
Instead of helping the "third world" countries with infrastructure, stable government, and ways NOT to pollute, they want to take the "first world" countries and take wealth away from them and give it to the poorer countries (of course, they'll help do the redistribution ... one for you, one for me)
Go ahead and mod me down for this, because it is a different angle on this type of story.
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
WWF wrestling is more beleavable than the WWF Tree Huggers.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
The Earth will not expire in 2050. Simple economics will keep it from doing so
You can't use economic arguments. Why? Beacuse our current economics don't take into account the cost of pollution (externalities) -- what makes you think that things will change in 50 years? Has current pollution made us change? Please.
What we need is reasoned leadership, not to keep running towards what everyone knows is a cliff. By the time we get there we may not be able to stop... how can we bring extinct species back? how can we stop global warming... Assume for a moment that global warming is like any force, just beacuse the change is still relatively small doesn't mean that the accelleration isn't huge. Once you want to "change" it's like stopping a car... it will take a while. A long while. If it took us 200 years to start serious warming, it may very well take us 300 years to do the cooling. And by then it may be just too late.
There are four types of people: those who are ignorant and know it; those who are knowlegable and don't; those that are knowlegable and know it; and those who are ignorant but think that they are knowlegable. You my fellow biped are in the latter category; and what a dangerous person you are beacuse of this. Why a moderator would mark you as insightful is beyond me. Spreading ignorance under the guise of wisdom is the worst of all sins.
First attempting to explain to people who want to have more then 2 children why that is a bad idea.
and if that fails?
Could somebody PLEEEEAAASSEEEE legalize strangling the motherfuckers to death? PLEASE
Yes the adoption system in America needs to be revamped, but that is no excuse for having buttloads of kids! People who cannot love a child because of the color of the child's skin should NOT be parents at all.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Supplies don't? Well, you're right to some extent, but in other ways, totally wrong. Food, for instance. The food supply increases as technology allows growing more food per acre, and as it allows fewer people to grow more of it, even in less than ideal soil. Technology also brings electricity from the atom. There is also solar, wind, wave, and nearly uncountable other ways of generating electricity, with which you can do anything - especially loose hydrogen and oxygen from water to fill your fuel cell, and make breathable air.
;p
Honestly, with only 1/3 of the earth land, and even less than that actually habitable, I think the first thing we'd run out of given enough technological innovation is a place to stand.
What will happen will be this - eventually we will run out of oil... rather - the cost of getting more oil out of the earth will outweigh the value of the barrel of oil you could extract. I hope fervently for this day, since while everyone equates this with disaster, this will solve the vast majority of our problems. This will stop the pollution that makes me wheeze. Nuclear waste is amazingly insignificant when compared with burning coal and oil. Just build a big lead thing, deposit the (amazingly, amazingly small) 30,000 tons/year, and keep it around for a thousand years, by which I'm sure some bright boy will have developed a way to use electricity to power am effecient railgun, and fire it off into space a bit at a time. Then just keep on keeping on until we either run out of room to stand, or run out of material to power a nuclear power plant. By that time (upsettingly far in the future) well, someone else can come up with another damn idea.
The fact of the matter is not that we will somehow 'run out' of resources - the stuff we have used is all still here, simply in a degraded form. Where's the carbon in those fossil fuels? In the atmosphere as CO2. Where's all that plastic? Landfills.
Certainly, the easy to use resources will run out. Things like petroleum, fresh water, timber and such - but with enough energy we can replace those things. Sure, it's costly to such CO2 out of the atmosphere and use it to make petrochemicals, but with enough energy it certainly can be done. Sure it's hellaciously expensive to run a de-salination plant instead of diverting another river - but with cheap enough energy it becomes cost effective. Sure, we may eventually run out of easy to exploit copper mines, but all the copper we have ever mined is still out there - it might be hard to find and convert, but again, with enough energy it's doable.
It's all a problem of energy. If we have enough of it we can keep recylcing the natural resource that are already here, indefinitely. Instead of shipping our idiot progeny off to space, we should be sending up orbital power stations. If they captured just a minute fraction of the solar energy that passes between the earth and the moon's orbit we'd have absolutely no resource problems and the only waste product we'd have to worry about in the long run is heat.
-josh
Nestle was boycotted by most of europe for a while before it was advertising in africa that it's baby formula was healthy and better for a baby than mother's breast milk. The result was children started to become malnurish as their impoverished mothers, wanting to do the best for their children, ONLY fed their children the expensive formula, and since they couldn't afford enough of it to be a suitable replacement for breast milk, the children were malnurished.
You also do not realize how immune we are to our own culture. We all know to question advertisements, we are used to them, and they are just there to make money for the company. However, people in 3rd world countries who have never been exposed to the corporate advertising machine don't realize that they are being LIED to (many of these countrys do not have regulations against mis information / mis leading ads, because they are willing to take any money they can get).
A companies only interest is in money. Making more of it, acquiring more wealth, and the end result is that the only way to regulate companies is through their proverbial wallet.
That is why nestle has stopped its ads. It started losing revenue in first world nations because of it.
Our freedom has come at the cost of others. Those others have started to strike back, and it is going to get worse. Realize the privileges that you have, and do something for the better, not for you.
Actually, capitalism doesn't work when you are dealing with externalities such as pollution where costs are externalized. Its econ 101. In addition, to quote Chomsky, if car company 1 puts 50% of its resources into developing a cleaner car for the future, and car company 2 puts those resources into lowering the car's cost, who do you think will be out of business and who will be still selling the pollution cars?
I think folks who think we'll run of oil very soon are deluding themselves.
The problem with the alarmists who think we'll run out of oil are only considering the idea that the last deposits of oil will be in the Persian Gulf.
How wrong they are! Considering the following factors of the last 12 years:
1. The oilfields of the former Soviet Union are now being exploited on a very large scale by Western oil companies. There are massive oilfields in Siberia and Kazakhstan have barely been touched, not to mention we haven't even begun to exploit the Caspian Sea oilfields on a large scale.
2. China has large oilfields in Xinjiang Province that haven't been exploited due to transportation issues.
3. Afghanistan is potentially sitting on top of a big oilfield.
4. The Gulf of Mexico--according to British Petroleum engineers--have an amazingly large amount of oil yet to be exploited. The only reason why we haven't gotten more is the high expense of drilling for oil well into the Gulf of Mexico.
5. Canada has huge tracts of oil tar sands that could yield enough oil to equal all of the Persian Gulf states combined.
6. The Saudis are only concentrating their oil production on the oilfields near the Persian Gulf, not yet exploiting oilfields in other parts of the country. Tests by ARAMCO engineers have shown there are large oil deposits in the southern part of Saudi Arabia (called the Empty Quarter), but the Saudis have yet to tap these oilfields.
As for the issue of food production, the very rapid development of farm machinery, agricultural chemicals and better means to store and transport food has increased the amount and variety of food available to everyone on a scale that is mind-boggling. Think about it: compare what is available at your local food market in 1902 versus 2002, and you can eat foodstuffs today from literally all over the world.
In short, the alarmists don't know what they're talking about--a classic case of junk science.
This is just like the 50s when US enviros were screaming that the 1/4 mile-wide clear-cutting in the Rockies would ruin the forest forever. Thanks to their lack of forsight these 1/4 mile "fire barriors" were nowhere to be found this year. We lost far more wooded acres this year alone to forest fires than would have been clear cut in the last 52 years (and this summer is just getting started).
Then you start thinking about all the unused lumber that went up in flames that would have been cut down (usable)...which really would have saved many more acres and you just get sick.
Thanks to them I'm personally out five acres of personal land and the nice camping trailer that was on it.
I'm sure the smoke was great for the air too...yah, that reminds me. The old-lady neighbor of my parents died the day after the worst forest-fire-smoke day and complaining about breathing problems.
They're extremests and nothing more. There needs to be compromise and smart management of forests...and we've been letting these whacos (with strange ideals and no knowledge of logic, reasoning, and cause-effect) tell us how to manage our natural resources.
If we continue to listen to groups like the WWF we probably will do something stupid to make the earth expire by 2050.
I vote for common sense.
You're still a moron Canada boy. Stop posting when you have no idea what's going on. The point is still valid that the studies can't take into account everything that's going to happen in the future. And even without genetic manipulation the USA can provide enough food for the whole world. The only reason they don't is because the government pays farm subsidies to keep prices up.
There was a guy in the '70s named Paul Ehrlich who became quite popular making these sames claims: the Earth would be destroyed by pollution and overconsumption before the next century. Ehrlich relied on the same Malthusian theory: that a population growing at a geometric rate would outstrip its resources growing at an arithmetic rate. The thing Ehrlich (and Malthus) didn't consider was human ingenuity. Ehrlich thought we'd all be starved by now; instead we're all too fat for our own good. Sure environmental problems can be devastating and tricky to solve, but the sky is not falling. Humanity enjoys better material conditions now than ever before.
The best resource for countering doomsayers is the writings of Julian Simon. People who get a perverse pleasure from proclaiming doom hate him. A good introduction to "doomslaying" is Wired Magazine's interview with Julian Simon.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
This is the classic Liberal's delimma. The liberal screams and shouts that something is very wrong -- people open there eyes a bit and things get quite a bit better. Then the conservatives come along later and say: "Gee, the liberal was wrong, see we're ok now."
About 15 years ago I remember the "Skeptical Environmentalists" saying that the temperature of the earth won't even go up one degree by 2050. Well. It appears as if they are wrong. In some parts (the artic regions) we are anywhere from 4 to 7 degrees warmer. As I remember, it may have even been Julian who made these predictions (or who re-quoted them).
It's clear that we are seeing an acceleration in global warmth which is going to dramatically change our climate (and is doing so as we speak). What are you going to do about it? Close your eyes and say that we humans will adapt? Do you have that much faith in technology... I don't. How can you be sure it doesn't warm even faster?
I don't know about you, but I'd rather err on the "conservative" side of things and take action now rather than wait till it becomes a crisis. No?
I will list what I know of population dynamics, in order to show you my point of view.
Even if a 50-year limit seems like an alarmist position, many conservative scientists agree that 100 years looks like the maximum timeframe. Change must happen quickly for us to save a habitat that humanity can live in.
Some possible research materials for you:
http://www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodpop.pdf
1 02 6074943.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/01
http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Science/
---
Jt
crulx@iaxs.net
Why is this being posted as science when it's actually science fiction? Anyone who's really in that part of the science business knows that it would take a minimum of 100 years before we could leave earth for new in any signifigant numbers. Even then those numbers wouldn't be large enough to make an impact......
If you believe that enviromentalist wacko crap.
No, here again we see "enviromentalists" pulling at peoples emotions. If they were really concerned about the enviroment they would use some actual science and come up with some real answers.
Sorry but camping in trees, jumping nude in front of logging trucks, or posting sci-fi stories on the internet doesn't make anyone appear knowlegable. It certainly doesn't do anything towards presenting a solution to whatever you think the problem is.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
> Should the American public go back to the stone age?
/ car/ ch6.pdf
the article says:
America's consumption 'footprint' is 12.2 hectares per head of population compared to the UK's 6.29ha while Western Europe as a whole stands at 6.28ha. In Ethiopia the figure is 2ha, falling to just half a hectare for Burundi, the country that consumes least resources.
The UK does have hot running water, automobiles, computers, TVs and sturdy houses _and_ it is also an industrialised nation..
Germany also does quite well if these figures are to be believed..
So does the EU want to 'cripple' the US so it can 'catch up'? (see discussion above)
I find the US patriotism in these discussions
a bit scary - does any criticism of the US have to be dismissed as an 'Unamerican' threat?
what does the US EPA think?
US Climate Action Report 2002 - chapter 6:
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/publications
"Based on studies to date, unless there is inadequate or poorly distributed precipitation, the net effects of climate change on the agricultural segment of the U.S. economy over the 21st century are generally projected to be positive"
I live in Australia which is following the US lead not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and is also up there with the US in the per capita greenhouse emissions.. & I don't interpret environmental concern as an "attack" on my country.
In the 70s they said we had 30 years left. In the 2000s they said we had 50 years left. The predicted lifetime of the earth is getting longer and longer! Just wait and see - come 2050 they'll be predicting that the world will end by 2150 if we don't change things. By 2150 they'll be putting the end around 2500!
More seriously though, do they really advocate us trying to move to another planet? Launching a space ship is one of the most polluting things we do. Seriously, the indsutry required to build and launch enough space ships to colonize other planets would dramatically increase the pollution (and presumably hugely accelerate the death of the earth). It would seem that they really haven't thought through this at all, but are just using it as a scare tactic and give them something to do.
They tend to do that a lot. If we were to listen to all the environmental groups, we'd quite cutting down trees and start making all our buildings out of metal and concrete, which require far more pollution and resources to produce than does timber. One of the former heads of green peace actually admitted that timber is our most renewable resource and perhaps the one we least have to worry about. But save the iron just doesn't have the same appeal as save the trees!