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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.
This reminds me of what George Carlin said in one of his stand-up shows...
"It's a self correcting system...The Planet is fine.....The PEOPLE are fucked!"
Join the TWIT army now!
These are the same folks who predicted that the world would run out of food by 1980, then predicted we'd run out of oil by 1985.
And of course Thomas Malthus predicted imminent mass starvation in the early 1800s.
In the 1970s, they predicted:
"The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000
and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend
two facts. These facts are (1) World food production cannot keep pace
with the galloping growth of population. (2) 'Family planning' cannot
and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth."
"Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food
supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30
years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be
alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed.
Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it
is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally
impossible in practice."
Except, here we are in 2002 and those 6 or 7 billion people are eating better than any of their ancestors in all of human history, even in the poorest countries.
For more info, see The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon, and The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg.
I disagree with what you did to that town, but you really need to admire your town's commitment to education. I personally wouldn't starve to death for anyone's homework assignment.
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.
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.
~jeff
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? 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/360734
That's a load of crap; algae are responsible for the majority of carbon-dioxide recycling, and it's always been that way.
Which is PRECISELY why I haven't cleaned out my fridge in over 3 years... I'm just trying to do my part for the cause!
$0.02 (CDN)
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.
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.