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.

Comments

In a related story...

[plastercast]

The Chicago Trib is running this story on the shrinking of various glaciers around the world that is also pretty terrifying. Perhaps its time for Bush to reconsider Kyoto?

Re:Another option?

[crawling_chaos]

And as someone else noted up-thread, Malthus "proved" it would happen in his lifetime. It didn't. We get this every so often, and I generally file it with the "Christ is coming back and the world is going to end next year, so you better repent now" freaks. Same thing, different words.

Hmmm... perhaps a bit overblown.

[RobertFisher]

While we have to be very cautious with regards to our environment and consumption, I do believe there is a tendency for reports from environmental agencies to be overblown. (And this is coming from a long-standing member of both the Sierra Club and CALPRIG.) I am skeptical with regards to this recent report, because of two facts.

1) The highest per-capita consumption occurs in the first world. (see below)

2) The population of the first world is rapidly shrinking, and will amount to a small fraction of the total world population by 2050. (According to the UN. See this link for details.)

3) By 2050, even the 3rd world population is expected to reach equilibrium, so that the entire world population will actually begin to decline.

Taken together, it seems unlikely to me that the conditions stated by the WWF may actually come about, unless the 3rd world population increases its consumption dramatically, or the UN study is substantially incorrect. This is because, even though the world population is expected to increase from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050, that additional growth will occur almost exclusively outside of Western nations. Significantly, the population of the first world will actually diminish. Now, the report itself states

"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."

So if indeed the third world consumes a large factor (an order of magnitude!) less "footprint" than the Western nations, it would seem to me that the world might actually be better off by 2050 : they are, quite simply, more efficient at using existing resources.

Bob

Take it with a grain of salt

[UnrefinedLayman]

...but consider the possibilities before you do. I won't get into the validity of the claim, but if we assume that it's true, then take this into account: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=104918 1 It is possible to fit 6 billion people into the Isle of Wright with room to spare. In fact, you could fit 27 billion people into a cube one mile by one mile by one mile.

Only catch is, each person would have 12 cubic feet, or six feet by two feet by one foot. Now imagine that you're at the bottom of the cube.

What is overlooked time and time again in the "you can fit x people into ____" argument is that just because you can fit a population into an area doesn't mean that area can support it. The most common example is Texas, at least in America. But what about arable land?

"If you divided the world's 6 billion humans into Texas's 261,914 square miles, each person could claim .028 acres of land. It is obvious, however, that the land in Texas, (or even the land in North America for that matter), would not be able to sustain these people. Resource experts say a minimum of 0.17 acres of arable land is needed to sustain a person on a largely vegetarian diet without the intense use of fertilizers and pest controls.

An estimated 253 million people currently live in countries with scarce arable land--which have on average no more than 0.17 acres available per person -- and this population is expected to at least triple by 2025 if current trends continue. Only 11 percent of the Earth consists of arable land, and that area is rapidly diminishing due to erosion, salinization and a decline in the practice of fallowing land."

http://www.zpg.org/Reports_Publications/Reports/re port83.html

As for space, let's say people will be transplanted to Mars by 2030. The world population will be 8.1 billion by then (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldpop.html). In order to maintain current population levels, we would have to devise methods to transplant 2 billion people within thirty years. At a round trip of two years to get to Mars at the optimal revolution of the planets around the sun, with 50,000 people making the trip each time, you would need to make 40,000 trips before you could transplant 2 billion people, over the course of 80,000 years, at which point you might see H.G. Wells and his time machine where London once was.

What's my point? Look for answers close to home. Keeping your head in the clouds can be fun, but not always productive. Rather than trying to find solutions to the effects of overpopulation, one should try to find solutions to the causes of overpopulation.

For those interested, let's say we started sending people now and wanted to make sure we were at 6 billion people in 2030; the number of trips that could be made is 15, at 133 million people per trip. The maximum number of people to send at today's capability per ship is about ten. That's 13 million ships being sent every two years, plus enough food and water to feed people for the ten to twenty years it would take to allow for food to be grown on Mars. Put the cost of sending each ship at 20 billion dollars (http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/world/3607347 .htm), not counting the cost of constructing habitats on Mars, and not counting the cost of constantly sending supplies (and even then 20 billion dollars is very modest). That's 260,000,000,000,000,000 dollars (two-hundred sixty quadrillion dollars) every two years, at a total cost of 3,900,000,000,000,000,000 (three-quintillion nine-hundred quadrillion dollars) over the course of thirty years. If every person in the United States (287 million as of this year) were to pay an equal amount towards this, the cost over thirty years would be 13 and a half billion dollars, each. --- You tell me, is it worth ignoring what is obviously well-researched information? Organizations, especially those with a high and well-respected world-wide image like the WWF, don't typically lie outright in papers like this, and anyone who outright disregards what's printed, especially without reading it, is asking for the outcome presented to happen.

Re:No.

[zerocool^]

Essentially, population level fluctuates around a line called the carrying capacity, which is the number of a type of animal an ecosystem can support.

Populations, however, do not reach the line by steadily growing in number and tapering off, treating the carrying capacity as an asymptote. Think of the line as a horizontal line on a graph, the horizontal axis representing time, the virtical representing population. Population grows with an exponential function until it overshoots the carrying capacity, then it starts to die off until it is below the capacity. The population level oscillates around this level with a logarithmic function, looking somewhat similar to a sine wave, and as time goes to infinity, the oscillations become smaller and closer to the carrying capacity.

This is a fact of nature. It happens with mice, antelope, fish, bacteria, and apes. Why would people think it wouldn't happen to humans? Sorry, creation scientists, we're animals too, and though we use different resources, we're not immune to laws of nature because of divine providence.

Some interesting things to note: The carrying capacity is not always constant, it changes, for example, over seasons. More animals die off in winter because of this function.
Also, animals that take better care of their young grow the population graph somewhat slower - as it takes time to care for and train an offspring, you produce less offspring. Introduce a pair of mice to a situation where they are far below the carrying capacity of the environment, and they will reproduce extremely rapidly, overshooting the line by quite a lot.

But, anyway, the long and short of this is that one, people have been predicting this for years, since at least the 50's. It hasn't happened yet. And so what if it does? It's a fact of nature. Live goes on, or the cycle of life does. I am unconcerned.

My girlfriend is an animal science major, pre vet. We have some interesting conversations.

~Will

Re:some salt, some truth

[Jerf]

This kind of post exemplifies the whole problem with the debate, which is the painful oversimplification of the entire problem, until no opinion is left without overwhelming evidence in its favor.

Some sample problems:

• Resources are not constant. Some replenish themselves. The amount of wheat that I consume is a virtually irrelevent point, because that amount of wheat can be grown again. Much the same goes for many other products, such as wood and any chemical that can be produced by a lifeform.
• Resources are not a constant. Resources can be recycled, re-used, and re-allocated. We may not be doing the best job of this... or are we doing such a horrid job? The true answer is difficult to ascertain and cannot be done with such a limited analysis.
• Resources are not constant. Improved extraction and refining techniques effectively increase the amount of any given resource that can be extracted from the Earth. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this. Remember how we were supposed to run out of oil by 19x0? Well, we did, we just found more. It may not be reasonable to suppose an infinite supply exists, but again, it's not reasonable to project linearly, either. There may be enough to last us two hundred years, assuming the population growth is slowing as it seems to be in some ways. Or there may not be enough, in which case the economy will throw significant non-linearities into the equation as it raises the price of oil. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this.
• Resources are not constant. Any space activity in the next few decades completely throws everything off. More realistically, any new refining technique increases resources, any new genetic engineering technique increases resources, any new drilling technique or location technique or recycling technique increases resources. As technology improves, so does efficiency, the moreso if anybody cared. Linear analysis can not correctly predict this.
• As a consequence of much of the above, resources are created, not found. Oil no longer wells up out of the ground, and all the easy resources are long gone. The US may use a 'disproportionate' share, but by being the technology leader, it also produces a vastly disproportionate share of the world's resources, both directly and indirectly. Better oil-finding technique benefit many people, not just the US, and the agricultural research done in the US benefits Third World countries astoundingly. Arithmetic analysis does not lead to understanding this issue. Linear analysis can not correctly predict the effects of this.

It's going to take some catastrophic change that impacts the U.S. directly to get us to wake up.

We have woken up. Personally, I worry more about everybody's use of linear or God help us all, constant projection techniques in understanding these phenomena. We'll stupid ourselves into the cosmic grave yet...

Re:All the 'used' resources are still here

[davecl]

Yes - if you have access to an infinite supply of energy you can sort a lot of these problems out. Solar power stations are a way to do that.

But hold on, how are you going to build them if all the energy you need for the launch vehicles has been used up already?

This is a bootstrapping problem. You have to invest energy to get more. If you don't have the initial amount of energy to invest, then you're stuck.

If we burn all our fossil fuels in SUVs etc., and not in building the solar power stations, that's it, game over.

We live in a unique period in history. We can either invest the energy we have easily available at the moment to ensure a large future supply - and perhaps have some generations of hardship while that's happening - or we can go on using up the local resources living a good life, and sealing the fate of future generations. This takes conscious planning, and is not something that a blind 'market solution' is capable of, because that always works on a much shorter timescale.

I don't see anyone taking this long view and doing something about it, so by 2050, we may be stuck on this planet forever.

Now that's a believable solution to the Fermi Paradox.

As George Carlin so aptly put it

[praedor]

The earth isn't going to go anywhere (to die), WE are.

The earth will not "expire", though many invaluable species will die, invaluable habit will be destroyed, and so forth. What WILL happen is the human population will crash in a very ugly way. The 3rd World would be less affected by a collapse as they are already close to rock bottom. It is the developed nations, with the US at the pinnacle, that are going to have a very nasty crash.

It is unacceptable to waste/consume/waste resources at the rate we in the US do and it will lead to irreparable harm on the overall world ecosystem BUT the ultimate, and much deserved, outcome will be collapse of human "civilization". The human population will drop precipitously (maybe not by 2050 but it is absolute certainty that without substantially change in practices it WILL happen in the not distant future), below preindustrial levels, because the environmental damage and depletion will support much less and it will take a long time for earth to recover...perhaps longer than the human species lifetime because evolution will act to reproduce a new biodiversity without regards to what is best for us. Empty niches, depleted and descimated by human overconsumption and greed, will be filled - that is what evolution and life does, it fills available niches. It will take a long time and I believe that humans will not recover to anything remotely like today's tech levels before it all comes to a end (there are two articles out there - can't presently find the refs - dealing with the "useful" lifetime of earth. One gives life 1 billion more years before the oceans are fully subsumed into the earth's mantle based on the current rate of ocean water loss due to subduction. Complex life like horses and dogs and humans will be dead LONG before the last oceanic water is lost to the mantle. Another study gives the earth 2 billion years tops based on the changing sun - it gets hotter and hotter all the time and LONG before it goes Red Giant stage, the earth will be rendered dead).

This may be why we detect no radio signals from advanced tech alien lifeforms in the galaxy. By the time they are approaching the means to be able to do this, they have totally screwed up their own nest (like us) and drive themselves into ignomie instead.