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Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030
An anonymous reader writes "A recent report warns that humans are overusing the resources of the planet and will need two Earths by the year 2030. The Living Planet Report tells that the demands on natural resources have doubled in the past 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."
I told you not to take the axiom of choice!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
.. and we've run out of ipv4 addresses "in about a year" for the last decade or so..
and people will probably pay about as much heed to this warning as they do to ipv4 exhaustion.
AND just like ipv4 exhaustion, nothing serious is going to be done about this until stuff actually starts falling apart. And by falling apart I don't mean charts and graphs, I mean "The Day After Tomorrow" falling apart. And even then...
still refuse to discuss population control.
get rid of US'ians and that wll reduce resource level consumption by half for while.
Haven't "scientists" been saying stuff like this since about the mid-1800s? "Peak Oil", "Population Overcrowding", "Global Warming"... all modern-day myths that never seem to die no matter how much they're refuted.
see subject.
And by falling apart I don't mean charts and graphs, I mean "The Day After Tomorrow" falling apart.
So, superstorms that freeze the Earth, and CGI wolves?
Back when I was growing up, we had those quaint little videos where the Statue of Liberty's hand was the only thing showing above the ocean. And a grandfather was passing on his wisdom to his grand daughter about what they could have done differently to avoid this coast catastrophe. Which happened in 2020.
Now, I know we're still 10 years out, but I would expect NY to be at least a couple inches under water by now.
Humanity will adapt and survive. That's our strength. Fossil fuels run out? We'll figure something else out..oh, we already have. It's just not cheaper than fossil fuels...yet.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What is the purpose of this post? What does it even mean? What is the purpose of posting a link to a nebulous summary of a highly suggestive report on an extremely politically charged subject on a site that bills itself "News for Nerds"?
If this is true, nobody's really listening. They're embroiled in their own personal battles, and they _know_ that finding a job is hard now. Any radical change 20 years away (good or bad) is almost always false. Global cooling, flying cars, personal robots, futuristic looking cars and buildings...
Quick, someone say "we're using the resources at a larger rate than the earth can provide" ! before the cornucopians come out of their caves to declare infinite growth through infinite resources.
The bottle maybe big but the spout is killing us.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
if Americans all die tomorrow.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
Gimme a break. Somebody is just trying to get a buck in their pocket. Fiddlesticks I say!
"population control"
freudian slip there, lefty? Think you meant to say "birth control"....
This has F-U-D written all over it. Yes, we might need 2.75 Earths worth of *some* minerals or resources, such as tungsten or cork trees, in 20 years, but we certainly do not need 2.75 Earths worth of other, vaster resources, such as breathable air or silicon. To say that we'd need two Earths in order to quench our ravenous thirst for light bulb filaments is overkill, and certainly does more to make me discount these studies than think poorly of how humanity manages the resources we have.
Limit population growth, but no, we can't have that.
One child per couple one would lower the population over a few generations to more sustainable number.
But I still remember in the 70s how oil was going to run out by 1990; we seem to have had only twenty years' supply of oil left for as long as I remember. Similarly, half the world was going to have starved by 2000, but instead we've seen population continue to increase.
The hair-shirt left have cried disaster so many times that it's impossible to take them seriously anymore.
So when are we going to start regulating birth rates? I know this is seen as racist by many, since the minorities are the main ones reproducing at an alarming rate, with obvious octomom exceptions, but it is about the future of our planet and the survival of our race at this point. Race isn't even a factor.
Actually, our planet should have been out of easily consumable resources a LONG time ago - but thanks to the Green Revolution of artificial fertilizers and improved farming techniques, scientists like Norman Borlaug have saved more lives than any other group in the history of the world.
The same thing needs to keep happening if we're going to keep increasing our population. We're going to have to convert more sunlight into usable foods, using more than just simple soil in order to keep scaling.
Meanwhile, the "organic food" folks insist that food must be grown using only slightly modified classical techniques, for a variety of reasons from vitamin density (overstated relative to studies, at best), to mystical mumbo jumbo like vibrations and auras. The other argument is that a given technique is sustainable for a given circumstance, or allows for smaller farms - but none of them are sustainable across the populations modern farming techniques functionally do now.
It'll be interesting to see whether populations will continue to curve towards neutral growth on their own, or what decisions people will come to. I certainly hope the Malthusian worldview doesn't come back into dominance.
Ryan Fenton
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
We've been on the verge of running out of oil, running out of fresh water, and killing our oceans how many times now? I have no doubt that some day humans will go the way of the dinosaurs but it will probably be a long time from now unless a killer virus morphs into something that spreads uncontrollably and kills off all of earth's connected humans. If that happens then the lost tribes in the Amazon and on some Asian islands will probably still be isolated enough and will be able to repopulate the earth.
Is this need for a second earth as urgent as the need to switch to IPv6? Or are they just going to keep pushing it back to a distant future.
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
Why, slashdot, do you insist on posting article after article wrote by Al Gore and the global conspirators of Climate Gate. Clearly if just drill in the Arctic it will solve ALL of our environmental woes.
People have been predicting this kind of gloom and doom since the 1850s. Thomas Malthus comes to mind but he was by no means the only one. The Club of Rome chanted the same thing. At some time in the mid 1900s we were supposed to run out of something critical and civilization would spiral downwards toward the stone age again.
By the mid 1900s, we clearly hadn't crashed like we should have done (in theory).
Buckminster Fuller proposed that we wouldn't have a problem because, if we were about to run out of one material, we would substitute another. He was able to present several examples.
You can still hear both sides of this debate. I really trust neither side. It has become obvious to me that global warming hysteria was a fraud. I really did believe in it until about a year ago. The global warmers tried to cook the books and erase the Medieval Warm Period. All the bristlecones in the world will not convince me that hundreds of years of historical documents are wrong. That caused me to check the science more closely.
The skeptic side of the argument is just as bad as the AGW alarmist camp, maybe worse. Some of the people posting on the blogs are real scum.
My problem now is that I believe no one. So, are we going to run out of resources and will civilization collapse. I'm willing to bet it won't. I hope I'm right. In any event, I'm not willing to bork the economy on the chance that the alarmists are right.
well then, we just better have a few more large wars, that'll kill off lots of the planetary population - problem solved, right? riiiight...
Where do reuse, recycling and conservation factor into this? The article, like the others before it carefully ignores these things.
It seems like yet another deliberately vague scare piece by another hack. People are tired of all this chicken little crap. Many reading this story are going to be moved only by their BS detectors.
By the way, the article is really at www.indiareport.com/India-usa-uk-news/latest-news/917700/FeaturedArticles/14/54/14 for those who don't want to deal with iframes.
Fortunately, things are being dramatically better managed than even just 30 years ago. For instance, the birth rate of most densely populated countries has flattened to almost zero; agriculture is far more efficient than before; trees are being reforested in earnest. As things get gradually get worse, people will gradually put more emphasis on sustainability, and an equilibrium will eventually be reached somewhere between the Utopian and Doomsday extremes. Might not be quite as rosy as it is, comparatively, today, but it will be manageable.
I drank 1 soda yesterday,
I drank 2 sodas today...
Tomorrow I should drink 4 sodas ... ... ...
the day after that I should drink 8 sodas
By month's end, I should be drinking over 1 billion sodas.
Well, all i can say is that everything needs to be recycled, and i'm not big on doing that by any means, but that doesn't mean that companies can't start and work to just divide up all of our waste. I mean, it's not like we are running around eating plastic and metal! It's all still there, we have just decided to put it in landfills. And who care!? It's our nature to grow and expand and evolve! No matter what, the human race will survive. If i make it through or not is not up to me, so why worry about it. I say we continue to grow and strive for better things, no matter what the cost.
It ends in 2012...we just need to last about 2 more years.
They forgot about 2012! Plenty of room after that!
is here. Contains lots of nice, big, hard to interpret charts and stuff.
Sig this!
Somehow I doubt that the groups who created this report are impartial and it is well known that if one goes looking for a specific conclusion, one will find the conclusion whether the conclusion is correct or not.
WE NEED BREATHING ROOM!
If i keep climbing stairs, i will get like 20 meters in the air over the buiilding. It works in cartoons, why not in real life?
Near the point you used all the resources, population, and/or use of resources will stop growing, just because we reached the ceiling. You can raise the ceiling being more efficient obtaining/using resources, but will always be a limit after which people will die or stop growing.
When people get the idea that getting more children will mean death in short time from them, and religions understand that anticonception save lives instead of terminating them, then we could be at a good distance of such limits.
Bah, joking... they won't change their way to be, and just will die hundreds of millons, by wars, famine or disease, and people will blame whatever they want to blame, except themselves.
understanding how the market sets prices
AH, Malthus
Sigh
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
The overpopulation myth. Bottom line - we could provide for every single person living on this planet with just the resources inside the US. Never mind the rest of the world. We're a LONG way from overpopulation... We have a distribution - not resource - problem to solve.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
How many of these so called experts have been proclaiming doomsday now for the past century.
We won't need two Earths, we have plenty of resources here.
The real problem is the social mechanisms we use to get resources, which is mainly through warfare.
(i.e. Invading countries for their lithium supply for example when there is a well known shortage.)
I mean, Africa is rich in mineral resources, most of it undeveloped. Yet the populations are in disarray.
They are meant to be, kept that way by George Soros and friends at the IMF for good reason.
A developed industrialized stable Africa would mean competition, and they don't want any.
So expect Africa and its people to continue to have all sorts of silly woes, like famines....political instability
until the IMF and George decide otherwise.
The author I think is living in a glass academic bubble and should probably investigate trends and get his feet
wet and pound the pavement a little before stating something so stupid.
I mean, we haven't even touched the ocean floors yet which have vast reserves of volcanic mineral wealth.
Technology is being developed to mine the ocean floor in the next 5-10 years in a big way for example.
Same thing with oil. We were suppose to have peaked in 1970's, now we are discovering oil, huge oceans of the stuff
in the earths crust at 32,000 feet or more....obviously produced by geological processes that dwarf anything
in the middle east.
But it is all the same thing, these oil companies NEED you to believe that oil is scarce otherwise they won't be able to charge 100 dollars a barrel for it.
Same thing with the population explosion B.S. Once you provide people who health care, food and water and a place to stay, the motivational operandi goes from worrying about food for tomorrow, having tons of kids to work the farm or look for food...too education and self improvement. In fact, populations start to contract, not grow.
Japan is going through that right now, so is the USA. Well we would be, but our crooked politicians selective enforce the laws on immigration for WalMart and co.
So the USA would be contracting as well in population, so is Europe.
But the whole thing we need two Earths, is a bunch of crap.
We do need two Earths, mainly I would say for:
1) We need two Earths to flee the tyranny and new dark age that the IMF and George and his friends have planned for humanity.
In the past you could defeat tyranny by discovering a new land, building a free nation, and destroying it.
Now, there is no place to flee which means my prediction is the 21st century is going to see incredible civil wars that are very violent because there is no place to go, and people will be forced to fight the police states the IMF have been setting up around the globe.
2) Disaster, I mean acts of God with a big G kinda thing. Asteroid impact, volcanic disaster, solar disaster. If we are only in one solar system, we could get wiped out pretty easily. (All of our eggs in one basket.)
3) Finally idiots. From scientists who think they know everything that want to start tinkering with our atmosphere to the idiots at Monsanto who are passing laws in Congress that make it illegal to grow your own food. The side affects of genetic science gone mad with Vaccines which go wrong (creating super bugs) and other madness we see with the use of Antibiotics on just about everything and anything. (Stop washing your hands with that anti bacterial soap!!!)
I think my reasons for two Earths have much more basis in historic _fact_ than this guy who claims like lots of others, we are running out of everything.
B.S.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
A nice world war will solve that pesky overpopulation problem!
First off, why are we linking to a frame/url shortener rather than directly to the article?
But blind extrapolation tells us nothing. If you're an economist then you think exponential growth can happen indefinitely. If you're a biologist you know that populations follow a sigmoidal curve if they approach their carrying capacity. For humans, our population curve will likely fall somewhere in between.
The most developed nations are already at zero population growth, and the developing world isn't going to magically become developed if the resources simply aren't there. For those countries, maintaining an agrarian birth rate despite modern medicine and an economy transitioning away from food production is a good way to ensure lasting poverty. That's a big problem for them, but not for English speaking Internet users. Or, more precisely, it's not "our" problem unless we want to involve ourselves in their affairs (for better or for worse).
Israel is a horrible example of sustainability! First of all, they are subsidized by the United States (but lets not get political).... Have you noticed that the Dead Sea is quickly disappearing? Israel uses proportionally magnitudes more water than those of their neighbors. They are sucking the Dead Sea dry to grow cash crops to give the illusion of prosperity (oh, not that all the other countries in the region don't do this as well).
The FACTS are MEGA-Cities of greater than 20M people will become the norm. Natural fresh water will become an ever more scarce and expensive commodity. Levels of pollution will become greater as reliance of these megacities on fossil fuels for electricity and desalinization plants becomes greater. Nuclear power is proliferating, but even that will not compensate for increases in conventional pollution of cars and electrical generation.
And not much changes in our daily lives?.... Can one really say this as the American Middle class is steadily eroding? Your life will not change THAT much, but your childrens' life will be much different.
Anyway, I live in Cairo, Egypt at the moment. It's a city of 20M people and growing bigger every day. This is the future for most of the world, where most of the growth is happening.
I'm an optimist, but from my globetrotting I can say with certainty that there will be resource wars, they have already begun. (Just for a laugh, I suppose you would claim that Iraq was not a resource war?) har har...
Harry Harrison wrote a book based on a similar 1950's report. The book is called "Make Room, Make Room". The book was used as the basis for the movie Soylent Green.
Hasn't this been the story for hundreds of years now? Based on current technology, known resources and consumption of resources to support said technology yes. Give my regards to Thomas Malthus.
The game.
The link is http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/wwf_lpr2010_lr_1_.pdf hopefully, after I read I would comment, because the numbers from the article seems, as many already noted, are taken out of thin air. But to comment - it is better to read details
Please watch the video "Nature as God" here: http://www.radiofreechurch.com/conference_display/16
Ok, I'm big on conservation, saving the planet, etc., but this report is total FUD. One of the charts on this report illustrates the point perfectly: "In 2007, people used the equivalent of 1.5 planets in 2007 to support their activities." So, either we just decimated the earth 3 years ago and are living on some fairy planet now, or we've got some Library of Congress measurements going on here. What next? Earths Per Minute? Earth calories per square mile? Presenting this kind of data is WORTHLESS except as an alarmist view on the matter to grab headlines. Now, there ARE good pieces of well-established information in the report I saw (such as loss of biodiversity, habitat, excess carbon, etc.) but the way this report presents the (glossed over) data is entirely misleading, pointlessly biased, unscientific, and just shameful. Data should speak for itself, and not need headline grabbing lines such as "We're going to need another planet guys! ZOMG, WE'RE ALL DOOMED!"
Great. Now let's get to the next step: getting affluence without consuming resources.
Define "need". Then define exactly which (and how many) humans. Then we can talk.
...an online survey I took on a "planet-friendly" website. They had a form with questions like "How often do you shower / how much garbage do you throw away / how many miles do you drive." When I entered everything in honestly, I was given a number that was supposed to describe how much of the earth's resources I was using (wasting), and that I need to cut back.
So I tried filling it out from scratch again, only I responded with 0 to every question...basically I could not have filled it out the way I did unless I existed in a cave, or not at all. In the end, I still got a positive number and a report that told me I need to cut back on how much of the earth's resources I used.
Complete bunk.
I recall asking a similar question of my biology teacher way back in high school. Something like, Didn't WW1 and WW2 put a pretty big dent in world population? The answer was, not really.
i never realized how far behind the times /. was on these "science" articles. it is a week btw
Uh oh, another "non-profit" group must need money to supplement their jet's and expensive dinners.
That is a stupid argument. Imagine you see someone disemabarking from a private jet, wearing a suit that costs more than the salaries of you and I combined, just so that they can attend an expensive dinner in another city. Which is more likely?
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout. But no, I am sure that you are right that it is the tree-huggers who are the ones trying to greedily screw us all for money.
Assuming they are correct (they know how many resources are available on the entire planet [I think some natural resource extraction companies would like to talk to you]? They can forecast future technology?) People will invent new technology as needed, tastes will change, and price rationing will take care of the rest. This is like complaining that there aren't enough Aston-Martin DB5s in the world, or that we need to find another Earth to allow everyone to have prime beachfront real-estate.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
We are not going to use all the resources, when the going gets tough we are going to turn on each other.
You can not use up earth. Matter is not destroyed, we create, we use, we throw away, and later on can just use the old crap to create new crap. You can't use up anything, and you can't kill the planet, the planet is not alive. We will not need more than 1 earth, unless we want to start building planet sized objects. So please stfu already with your pathetic fud.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Our race will at some point in the future develop a source of energy that makes what we can produce today trivial so that we can manufacture whatever type of substance we need. Until that happens they may be wars for resources, countries may be wiped out merely for their natural resources. Even past that point, our ability to produce relatively huge amounts of energy from some future technology will cease and the cycle may repeat itself.
I foresee that in the very distant future our descendants will have the technology to build stars for energy, an extremely refined fusion technology or some tech that is centuries/millenniums beyond our current capabilities. The rate of growth of our technology is at least directly proportional to the rate of growth of our population, the more people that are alive the more opportunities that exist for discovery and advancement.
Humans will survive to some extent short of some intentional trying cause extinction or a planet leveling event. Our numbers may greatly decrease but as long as we can produce energy we can create the conditions however limited to carry on.
OK, I've read all the posts and apparently I'm the only one (today) who reads this article, goes outside and looks up at the starry sky... Ignoring the article's source and Doomsday message, there may come a day ( in the distant future ) when resources become (excessively) difficult to obtain. Then it will be a good day to notice that this is but one smallish planet in a much larger solar system.
Alright, let's create one on Mars. Send all the Democrats, illegal aliens, moslems, and 2/3s of the populations of China and India there and all will be well.
Of course. Human civilizations are about 3000 years old, but industrial civilization is only 200 years old. Only in the past 100 years has large-scale resource extraction, large enough to make a big dent in potential supply, been feasible. The really rich ores, like veins of copper with over 1% metal, are long gone. Over the next century, lots of stuff is going to run out. Oil production peaked in 2005. There hasn't been a major new energy source in the last half century; just improvements on previous ones.
The "free market will solve all problems" crowd was insisting that peak oil would never happen. But it did. The price of oil has tripled without an increase in supply.
Efficiency is a good idea for its own sake. Use less, have more. Even in circumstances of abundance it is a good idea since there is always cost associated with getting materials. If you can be more efficient, then it is a good thing.
However that doesn't make scare crap like this useful. Not only is it wildly inaccurate, but repeated shit like this can encourage people to do nothing. After all, if we are really fucked and the only thing we can do to survive is make drastic cuts or go back to pre-industrial society or to have a massive decrease in population then why do anything? Live it up, waste while you can, enjoy life because it'll all come crashing down.
It is far better to show people what we CAN do, where there are problems, how they can be fixed, how we can work towards a future where we have a better quality of life through greater efficiency. Give people hope and inspiration, because that really is the truth. We can make things better, we can improve things. Shortages are things that can be dealt with.
Unfortunately most of the eco side is dominated by shouting. Predictions of imminent doom unless we all follow their One True Way(tm) which just happens to require massive sacrifices. This, coupled with the fact that they are wrong all the time (as all doomsayers have been). This leads to people just not listening, even when some of what they say is right.
Personally I think we need more people like Saul Griffith, who gave a wonderful talk about the energy problems facing us, and how we can over come them. If we ever get teh media release paperwork straight, I'll post it online.
THIS IS TRUE! I try to stay current with current events with current.com, but you know everyone reads the peer reviewed "Living Planet Report"!... by the WWF?
WTF.
Even at our current levels of inefficiency and wastefulness, all but an insignificant amount of potentially usable energy and resources is not harnessed. The infrastructure simply does not exist to use it.
Predictions about sustainability aside, if our demand currently remotely approached the limit of available resources (let alone outstripped it by half), the economy would completely collapse. If it affected raw materials or energy, industrial growth would stagnate, prices would skyrocket and consumer culture would be dead in its tracks, with governments putting a strategic stranglehold on their remaining resources, and blocking all exports. If "natural resources" refers to biomass or arable land, enormous agricultural subsidies would not be necessary to ensure a stable price floor on produce.
This kind of crap damages the credibility of the very real ecological dangers we are facing - oil spills, rampant pollution in nations with rapid industrial growth, and resulting climate change.
My only question is how many times does this sort of myth have to be debunked? It's getting really, really, old.
should be enough for anybody
Never mind that we constantly continue to find new resources, never mind that our technology continues to change and improve, nah its DOOM the freaking SKY is FALLING, mass extinction, whitey guilt, global colding, lack of DIVERSITY, we need one more planet. I agree with that last part - we need one more planet, because the amounts of STUPID, self righteous, pseudo intellectual, whiny douchebags who believe in wealth redistribution and entitlement has reached the limit. We need a second planet to export the STUPID.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Whites... and Coloreds
What bullshit. You have to be a non-thinking ideological pinhead in your 20's to believe this kind of crap that gets repeated every 5-10 years by some new doomsday prophet. I just shake my head at the idiocy that people continually spout about the coming of Armageddon -- it's only the cause of Armageddon that changes each time another "prophet" appears to prophecy our doom. And so many of you people eat it all up...
that "the fall of modern society and a return to agrarian, low power" lifestyles couldn't make you happier.
--
http://simplyshrug.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63:the-overpopulation-myth&catid=31:general&Itemid=50
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Soothsaying Doomsday Futures is a favorite pastime of those with nothing better to do than scare the rest of us with their nonsense.
Conjecture is just imagination. Predicting the future is a challenging business for there are so many possible futures so anyone just giving one possible future is already debunking themselves as they've left out all the other possible futures that contradict the possible future they are soothsaying doomsday about.
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
"According to the Living Planet Report, human demands on natural resources have doubled in under 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half"
Then how are we getting the resources? If I can provide 2 apples and the customer takes three where does the third one come from?
"The report said that wildlife in tropical countries is also under huge pressure, with populations of species falling by 60 per cent in three decades, the'Daily Mail reported."
60 percent? O' RLY? I don't think even the National Enquirer would buy that.
"And the report, from the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, said that British people are still consuming far more than the Earth can cope with."
Then how is the Earth coping?
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
EVERY closed ecological system eventually burns itself out. We learned that in the 3rd or 4th grade, when looking at ant farms.
cjacobs001
Technology has not progressed a whole lot this generation and its currently not moving at the exponential rate the population is.
Projections are limited (can't predict the future) and hindsight is easy to be smug about. If everybody was to live the American way, we ran out of earths long ago. If everybody lived the EU way, we'd be 3x over the limit.
You blow this off; thinking somehow new tech will save us-- we'll buy it and then TRASH it and newer tech will save the day... The cycle doesn't go on forever.
Its how you decide to measure things that impacts the results so much. You may not realize we are overpopulated already but a billion people in severe poverty around the world notice it (but may not understand why and just would like to be you... but there are only so many slots available at the top end... yeah yeah, we have enough to feed everybody but its a COST and distribution problem - give them all jobs... doing what? all the livable jobs are filled...)
Peak OIL: already hit it - if you think it amounts to output then you are grabbing the wrong stat. We can produce oil from shale at higher rates of output than ever before... if we wanted. The problem is that CHEAP to produce OIL has peaked and will never be any cheaper (barring the foolish trading games or government subsidies which only can go so far.)
Peak Copper - coming in a decade or two. Copper will still be around but it'll cost more-- recycling it costs more.
The system is designed around continual growth and there IS A LIMIT technology or not.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
so long as some folks get a new yacht etc, etc, etc.... like most of us get a new roll of toilet paper, things will be going DOWnhill (more yachts, less toilet paper). there's plenty of room & resource for twice as many of US if 2% of US would cut DOWn on their need to disable/destroy around 50%+ of US. it's not about math at all.
the corepirate nazi holycost (life, liberty etc...) is increasing by the minute. you call this 'weather'?
continue to add immeasurable amounts of MISinformation, rhetoric & fluff, & there you have IT? that's US? thou shalt not... oh forget it. fake weather (censored?), fake money, fake god(s), what's next? fake ?aliens? ahhaha. seeing as we (have been told that) came from monkeys, the only possible clue we would have to anything being out of order, we would get from the weather. that, & all the other monkeys tipping over/exploding around US.
the search continues; on any search engine
weather+manipulation
bush+cheney+wolfowitz+rumsfeld+wmd+oil+freemason+blair+obama+weather+authors
meanwhile (as it may take a while longer to finish wrecking this place); the corepirate nazi illuminati (remember, (we have been told) we came from monkeys, & 'they' believe they DIDN'T), continues to demand that we learn to live on less/nothing while they continue to consume/waste/destroy immeasurable amounts of stuff/life, & feast on nubile virgins while worshipping themselves (& evile in general (baal to be exact)). they're always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere/planet (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, I
happen: Cut down the population of the earth down to, say, 5-10% of the 6 billion people living today. Earth will be able to sustain human life for almost indefinately, in human terms at least. Nature and wildlife may even flourish again with population growth in check.
With population growth following an exponential line, the crash will happen sooner than later, as it does with ALL species on earth.. No, it most probably won't happen by our free choice.. War, famine, natural disasters is our heritage to our children, but hardly new events anyways. This has happened many times before. However, we DONT need to go down with a crash.
We don't NEED cars, holidays abroad, junk food, and lots of other stuff that destroys the environment. Yeah, now it's kinda cool, but we've lost our heritage, we're like orphans, rootless and directionless.
We don't sing, unless in a drunken stupor in a bad karaoke bar.
We don't dance, unless high on some kind of drug.
We don't relax, unless passified in front of the stare-box serving propaganda and lies.
I could go on and on. All of this are just "common" sense facts, but as long as we're immersed in life as it is now, we are unable to see how much better our lives would be without artificial foods, unnecessary junk gadgets and non-challenging lives.
Our best bet would be to start improving our lives now, and it might make it more interesting as well, instead of watching the 10.000th movie, with a plot similar to 100 other movies you've seen.
The rest of the post is left as an exercise to the sincere reader.
Changes will happen, with or without us..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Actually, we might theoretically colonize Venus using structures that float high up in the Venusian atmosphere.
Since we'd be living in sealed units, we probably wouldn't give a damn about pollution, either... so we'd play even less nicely with Venus that we have with Earth.
In some ways, Venus is a more attractive colonization target than Mars.
Start killing chinks and niggers..
Isa 5:14 Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it.
Erm, who are "they"?
Maybe there is some more magical thinking going on here, right in this forum?
I've trouble reading your posts for all those strawmens falling out of it..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The writer ignores technological innovation at his (and the readers) peril.
Funny, I was sure you were going to say A. Al Gore.
eventually you will have to take as much off the earth as yo put on thus a doubling of sorts per pound of resource you wish unless you wish to affect the earths orbit and attraction of um er that big er moon over there.
Malthusianism: scaring the shit out of ignorant do-gooders for more than two centuries now.
Based on the previous growth rates of iphone sales, Apple will need to crank out a staggering 800 trillion by the end of 2012 to keep up with demand. I'm sure they're ramping up their production lines now.
Supply, demand, and cost. Rare resources will price themselves out of extensive use and alternatives will have to be found. If you are truly a "we should go back to cavemen status" type, why fuss? We'll get there soon enough if you are right. If not, all your fussing was useless.
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers. From the perspective of employees these non-profits are for-profit entities.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
we planning on having the robot uprising before then, which will free up a lot of resources, once we eliminate most of you humans.
Love,
R2D2
So the health of the Earth is in a tailspin and we've still got people/corporations that continue to large-scale strip whatever they can get their hands on.
Tar sands of Alberta, Canada will eventually be the size of Florida, USA. Besides the completely destroyed wildlife habitat, millions (yes, really) of birds will die in the toxic tailing ponds and billions of gallons of pristine glacier water will be made toxic. This when thousands of species are endangered and millions of people don't have safe drinking water.
Shark finning for the Chinese market have caused over 90% of the world shark population to disappear.
What issues are you aware of?
but I need two earths now.
Al Gore was already a very rich man long before Climate Change got so big.
The world is going to end in 2012! Who really cares about a year that won't exist! Any-way, I thought we still had Mars... /sarcasm/
Quote:
copper—which is everywhere around you—will be gone in about 61 years;
antimony—widely used in medicines—will be depleted in 20 years;
while indium, rhodium, platinum, or silver—which are present in many essential consumer electronics—won't last much longer.
And those estimations are only valid if we manage to consume half of what we are consuming now.
http://gizmodo.com/5219598/how-long-will-our-world-last-yes-we-are-screwed
But not to worry that was 4 years ago, before the GFC. Surely the future is so much rosier now.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Ya know, I hear this all the time, yet I have never heard of any sort of viable actual real alternative for the people living in these areas. They need jobs, any sort of income. Old growth is that, old, needs to be harvested, but oh noes, can't use any exotic old growth jungle hardwoods because....people with jobs in the developed nations say so. Can't have more farmland because...no idea, people need to eat, it has to be grown. Ya, maybe it isn't the best land, but *it is the land they have*, it is what they have to use. They have no other choices. They burn their woods down because they aren't allowed to sell the timber in the first place! Of course they would rather sell it, but it is "embargoed" and such like. They have to do something, so the woods there, the old growth forests, "accidentally" burns down instead of being harvested and used to build good furniture and lumber for homes, etc. So then they grow cattle and corn and soybeans for cattle, because they need "exports", usually to pay off rich as snot western bankers/IMF folks
Catch 22 squared.
This is what I hear as an option for hundreds of millions of very poor people, they will all exist on "eco tourism", because they shouldn't be allowed to do anything else, like logging, farming, mining, etc. "eco tourism" is supposed to support hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet. Everything else is bad for the environment, and is unsustainable, so they should just suck it up and sit under the dripping trees all day for a living.
They pull this crap in the western US every sumer, can't log, can't build roads, but it is OK to let all that resource burn up in massive millions of acres of forest fires instead. Same people cause that, misguided eco nazis who don't really understand nature and economics, they just can't see how much harm THEY cause by insisting on looney tunes policies guaranteed to keep poor people poor, and guaranteed to WASTE resources.
How quaint. Wait, how do those eco tourists get there to go visit the pristine old ready to croak trees? Oh ya, fly there in smog spewing jets...how double quaint. Then they go home and sit in air conditioned offices and luxury homes and urban apartments and pontificate about how all those poor people need to "stop destroying their environment". They can't even see that where they live and how they live is about as un-natural as it gets and about as energy intensive and resource exploiting as it gets, yet they dis and dump on the poorest for trying to make an honest living *somehow*.
The Simon-Ehrlich wager is required reading for anyone making or reading about such claims.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
The key phrase in tfa looks like "absorb the carbon dioxide they emit." How many earths will be needed if we shift to a low/no carbon economy? Have they factored in any allowance for increased efficiency? It'd it be nice to see some breakdown of the analysis, not just a bald number.
Give me a break. the issue that the "organic food" folk are concerning about is farm animals being pumped full of antibiotics because they're crammed into confined places in which their walking on, breathing in, and ingesting fecal matter and the remains of other dead animals. This has nothing to do with "vibrations", "auras", or any such bull that you pulled out of your ass, and the fact that you have to lie about the viewpoint that you oppose speaks volumes.
"We're doomed!" Ever since, it has been true for each of us. As they say, "nobody gets out alive."
Earth has space for over 50 billion in comfort.
Plus the population curve has leveled off.
Can anyone tell me what that is in Libraries of Congress?
al gore has done quite well for himself.
The Earth is NOT a closed system: Random Proof #423789527.
If you can't find better examples, then you must be literally blind. That example was just the first I thought of.
CAPTCHA: refine
Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, Saul of Tarsus, and any extant Cargo Cult all predicted doom within our lifetime. Never happened. Oh! We're running out of oil! (If you believe oil is made of dead dinosaurs, I suppose so. But what if, ==just== what if oil is not from dead dinosaurs? What if it's from the formation of the earth? Oh! we're running out of food! Umm, we haven't. All this doomsday stuff is just like any number of millenial cults claiming we're all going to die. Conserve resources? You bet! But let's not be stupid about this. It's much more likely an ice age is goug to get us than global, er, umm, "climate disruptionn."
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Take away all alcoholic beverages and makeup and the population explosion would cease!! Then all the 'baby boomers' die out and... Problem solved!! Hahhaha.
Yes we will need two earths, because it's inconceivable that human beings ever adapt.
Somebody call Starbuck and get some Hendrix records, we'll have this thing solved by dinner.
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers.
Let's see, the CEO of the WWF (the authors of the report) earns a whopping $465,427. Now have a look at this list of CEO compensation by industry type. Can you see any under $1,000,000? How many over $10,000,000? They are certainly not on par with the WWF salaries.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
No, not the ones we are talking about. Do you really think that the mining industries are funding the climate advocate groups? No, I don't think so. Sure they have their own industry groups and think-tanks, but none of those could be called "tree huggers".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem Seriously, how did you get modded up to 5, "insightful" for just saying "Durrr, they're biased"
Please help metamoderate.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs [go.com] of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout.
So it would have made more sense for the people that have huge companies to run to waste their time driving there or flying commercial? I loved seeing politicians that regularly fly on private jets (whether it's POTUS on AF1 or Congress-critters that fly on lobbyist jets or military flights) condemning others for doing the same.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It seems to me that modern society has a fascination with 'end of the world' scenarios. Whether they be zombie apocalypse, meteor strike or climate change, there seems to be some inherent human comprehension that the planet is overpopulated.
Perhaps this is driven by our biological desire to kill off the competition (literally), or perhaps it is that we have a real internal comprehension that there are too many people on the planet.
Interestingly, our fascination is with a massive reduction in world population due to some external factor. This is very typical of a natural human tendency to avoid taking responsibility. 'Wouldn't it be nice if a meteor came and wiped out 90% of the population? Then, I wouldn't have to do it. And of course, I'd be one of the survivors...'
What concerns me is that human-controlled population growth is very unpopular. Which I find fascinating when there are so many attractive opportunities. Imagine the elimination of every genetic disease and human abnormality. Reduce pre-disposition to alcohol addiction, violent crime, Polio, MS... perhaps even nail some nasty diseases like Herpes. Whilst I don't believe in the Aryan ideals, I fully expect to be labelled as such. One more way in which we are refusing to accept responsibility.
Exactly 42 Libraries of Congress.
WAR!!!
http://www.vhemt.org
Even less-known: The "shocking twist" which was shoe-horned into the movie was utterly stupid, and there's really nothing wrong with cannibalism. Nobody in the movie was killed for purposes of cannibalism (rather: they were killed due to indifference or to put less of a drain on resources). The proclamation that "soon they'll be breeding us like cattle!" is not only quite a stretch, but utterly impossible (breeding people to feed people because you don't have enough people food? wtf?) It is simple to deduce that corpses are being used to feed people where no alternative exists. This is not a bad thing at all. The idea that "Human meat is being eaten!" should, with no other qualification, be considered evil or shocking, is absurd.
Let's just get another Earth then!
We should procure another planet.
A witty
Predicting the end of the world every year for the past millennium has to be getting dull and old. The only people with a more consistent record of being wrong about the end of the world than Malthusians are religious cults.
Malthus did not predict the end of the world. He did not say we should protect the environment, recycle or anything like that at all. What Malthus, who was an ultra-conservative cleric, was arguing was that we should not feed the poor. He was anti-welfare, that's all. His aim was to show that it was pointless to take any measures to avoid starvation.
In fact the big error he makes, in presuming geometric population growth, was due to his religious conservatism. He argued that it was unacceptable to counter the population growth which would result from feeding the poor by providing contraception. Contraception could not be countenanced because it doomed the user to eternal damnation. Far better that they starve.
Malthus was not a proto-greenie by any shot of the imagination, and people urging restraint in the consumption of resources cannot accurately be referred to as Malthusians. People who argue that we should not send aid to Africa are Malthusian.
so wait. does this mean that we're just going to be out of oil in 20 years? who cares? we have electric cars, and we have solar and wind farms! its not like we "NEEEEED" an entire new earth!!! plus the likelihood of us finding a suitable world for us within 20 years is isn't looking very good. much less constructing transportation to ship necessary oil-gathering equipment there!! it would take a lot longer then 20 years!!! by the time it gets to the new earth. we'll already have adapted to what we have! so i think that option is a no-go. imo
My father runs a mid-sized farm which produces corn, soy, wheat, green beans, and other assortments of agricultural goods. Anytime I've brought up how over-tapped our Earth is for space or food, he laughs at me and says we are barely covering a tiny bit of what our land is capable of, both in living space and food production. And, I know for a fact that with a 3 foot by 2 foot small garden my father keeps for personal enjoyment in his backyard that it can more than provide abnormally large vegetables in ridiculous quantities; tomatoes, celery, cauliflower, cucumbers, eggplants, etc. In fact there is always more than we can eat, he overproduces even on that small little personal garden, filling baskets to the brim with food. He gives it away to neighbors, friends and family. The tomatoes and other produce you purchase in the stores have been plucked too early and frozen, that's why they're so small. Real tomatoes for example, are big, juicy and far more tasty than the ones you get on your fast food burger. The same goes for other produce. It used to be that families could provide for their whole family with a cow for milk, chickens for eggs, and a small plot of land for vegetables. If you look at the massive quantities of eggs just a handful hens produce, you could feed an army on just that.
I really think we should take these guys with a grain of salt who keep saying the world will come to an end by 2030. What do they even know, ask someone who grows food for a living and they'll tell you the truth.
Anyone who argues we'll be out of oil just wants the price of crude to go up because they're invested in it. We haven't even tapped some of the wells that are being built right now, many of them are just sitting there unused. More are being drilled every day and those won't even start to be tapped for their resources for years to come, and it will be a long time before they're empty. Enormous quantities of oil are still to be had underneath both continental landmasses and in the oceans, not to mention the ridiculous quantities available if we ever need to convert shale.
Go ahead and argue that potable water is running out? Desalinate the ocean instead. Did you know that the FDA has outlawed that in the U.S.? Does anyone realize if the morons out west did that instead of damming up the rivers and making giant reservoirs so they can have fancy golf courses, they wouldn't be running out of water, the farmland there wouldn't be drying up and they'd still have a riverbed. Instead they spray it on people in Arizona as they walk past shops, and irrigate large commercial sod manufacturing plots that destroy the top soil permanently.
The Earth has more than enough to go around.
You're just doing it wrong.
If you really believe that you are delusional. In most emerging economies you're getting 5-10% year on year growth. Thats real growth. In the US what is it this year? 1.5%? Same in most of Europe. The only way these countries will grow as consumer based societies is to make more consumers, and that will mean greater immigration. This is also why many predict that in 20 years most people will be speaking Spanish and Mexican in the US. It all comes down to demographics.
Uh oh, another "non-profit" group must need money to supplement their jet's and expensive dinners.
That is a stupid argument. Imagine you see someone disemabarking from a private jet, wearing a suit that costs more than the salaries of you and I combined, just so that they can attend an expensive dinner in another city. Which is more likely?
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout. But no, I am sure that you are right that it is the tree-huggers who are the ones trying to greedily screw us all for money.
For a moment there I thought that the so called mining executive was Al Gore. A big problem with politically charged issues such as this is that you often have a situation where the pot is calling the kettle black, and both the pot and kettle are right. Then you have the pot and kettle charging their political bases to keep in power.
It's clear that the earth can sustain only so much. The problem of rallying all the people of the earth to do something responsible is a tough one. Personally, I don't believe that it's likely. Anyone with a clear head should plan for the worst possibility while working for the best solution, but it's such a tattered mess right now that only an act short of brainwashing 6 billion people would be effective.
The real issue should be stated properly. Just how much can the earth handle before everything falls apart?
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/apophis/
Hey, WTG! I think he solved Global Warming!!!
Alternatively the Earth will simply need less humans. Time for another pandemic or two methinks.
We have just under an unlimited amount of resources on Earth.
Oil is just a fraction of all the resources we have. Coal is just a fraction of all the resources we have.
We could invest in proper nuclear reactors, with minimal waste. We could invest more in fusion reactors. Fuck, why even care about such complicated ways of extracting energy, when we could invest in the likes of solar power, tidal power, wave power, and wind power. Most fuel based power (I cant come up with a better word), like coal, oil, and nuclear, is messy and expensive.
The oil companies are starting to see the problem. I promise, the oil companies (the same companies that rule the world) are going to get the same retard safety net that all the banks got, and i don't think we will recover this time.
In the end, it's all about energy, and thats is something we have plenty of.
Who wants to design some open source/open schematics alternative generators?
One thing that people do not think about is how bad policies should not be supported. In the long run, this means that people will die due to shortages, and perhaps the rest of the world should let this happen.
Look at China, and I mean seriously look at China. The levels of pollution are getting so high, I predict there will be mass deaths due to how bad the air quality is, if that has not already started happening. If the rest of the world does not help, the population in China will go down over time, reducing the demand for resources. I am not saying it is a good thing, but the Chinese government is pushing for production at all costs, and at some point, all that pollution will end up killing their population off.
There have been starving children in Ethiopia for decades....and if people would stop helping over there, the population would drop, there would be fewer children, and things there would balance out, rather than having people reproducing when they can't even feed themselves.
If there are food shortages to the point of starvation, do you really think that the rest of the world will jump in to help if they are also having problems with food production? Most countries already are taking the attitude that they can not help in the event of a natural disaster, and the USA is the only country that has been taking on additional debt just to help other countries when they have a problem. When the USA stops bailing out the rest of the world, then we will see things balance out a bit when it comes to supply and demand. This may sound cold, but honestly, if people are predicting that there will not be enough food to feed everyone in only 20 years, then we SHOULD let those who have no hope of feeding themselves just die out NOW, since an increasing population of people who can't help themselves is the problem.
Oil and such is an issue that the USA is dealing with by looking for other ways to generate power, and if oil were to suddenly become unavailable, do you honestly think that any other country would help US? Helping friends is one thing, but just trying to "save the world", is hurting the world more than helping. Getting people past a natural disaster is only useful if the people getting help NOW will be able to take care of themselves. But, we should not save people from themselves, because that just isn't a viable long-term solution. If the Chinese government wants to kill off the population of China with pollution, let them! If after 40 years Ethiopia can't provide enough food to feed the population, then isn't it time to let the population there SHRINK to the point where they can feed themselves?
Thisaway to thems Asteroids. And Mars. And gas-giants' moons. The other way to Venus. Resources enough for at least 10 Earths.for centuries. Or millenia. Now git.
One has a financial interest (the businessman), the other has a political interest (the Climate Scientist - especially if he's a post-normal scientist) and his employers (most likely an academic institution) have a financial interest. It's likely that the scientist will be involved in consultancy, so he will actually have a financial interest tangentially too. Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
How many climate scientist are in WWF? None.
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The minerals still exist it's called recycling.
Never happen. Long before we need the resources of two earths, the population will start dying off in huge numbers as they starve to death. Its a self-limiting system.
Then in 2031 we'll need 4 Earths... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&p=6A1FD147A45EF50D&index=1&feature=BF
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Is the asteroid belts worth?
Do you know what 'humans will need two earths..." really sounds like? It is like Barney Gumble on a Simpsons episode expounding under the early effects of intoxication, "I'm just saying that when we die there's going to be a planet for the French, a planet for the Chinese, and we'll all be a lot happier." Of course, the main part is that we will have to die first.
wtb EV1 back from gm if they hadn't been greedy fucks we wouldn't of been in this discussion of oil in the first place......
Pretty sure we produce enough corn in the US to feed all of us. We may have to resort to peasant diets, but I don't think the world is doomed. Not to mention, once the fish are gone from the sea someone will try to farm them. Its a sad sad thing, but the only way to fix it is to stop breeding, which people seem to not want to do.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
1) Will be far later then 2030. For the simple reason technology will likely create efficiency. :0)
2) Mining off planet resources is doable with current technology, so Earth is not the on source.
3) A species that does not continuously expand its range will be eliminated by statistical causes, therefore we MUST colonize moon, mars, etc. etc. starting now...if no other reason to get all of our eggs out of one basket, and to diversify further the human family and spread earth ecosystems (our plants and animals get to come along too...have to eat something
Net-net...get cracking...time for the next age of exploration and colonization...us geeks will (again) save the world :0)
Like those people who showed up at Copenhagen?
Instead of the 1960s steel desk & chair, particle board & plastic took those over & we went on.
We will do with scarcity until someone gets rich with a solution. Someone recently found a dirt-cheap replacement 90% of our use for Platinum. Fluorescent lights skirted the extreme Tungsten scarcity so well that most people didn't even know. Future articles should list unsolved problems so sharp minds can get started.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
The solution is never going to be less humans (wars & genocide). That story never ends...
The solution is to really end poverty as soon as possible.
Then, everybody should expect a better way of living. Thus, simplify their own lives.
Then, even non violent cultures tend to birth control authomatically.
End wars and poverty, now!
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
http://scienceblog.com/cms/blog/6696-do-not-consume-earth-resources-just-use-them-generate-energy-16938.html
It's a good thing that the Singularity is near.
How much does each oil work get paid in the US? Unions? Oil is cheaper to produce elsewhere.
Even if something existed as close as the moon but with the resources of the earth, it wouldn't help.
I don't know the latest figures, but I'd guess you could march the human population of the earth into the sea 10 abreast for ever and the population would still grow due to births outnumbering deaths.
So you can't lift those people off the planet, and bringing stuff back will only help for a while (if at all, it's not really practical to run up and down the gravity well with any significant amount of stuff.
Essentially without cutting births down to about .001% of their current rate, we're kinda screwed--and I don't see that happening voluntarily.
Funny how people come up with observations like this but are so reluctant to follow them to their clear, obvious conclusion (or believe that conclusion when it's presented to them). Humans are funny.
As long as the Terrains don't kill us, we'll be ok.
Come, on go check the box that says "I don't want to moderate any more because I'm too lazy to look up abbreviations and so gullible that I accept things that are posted as jokes as being factual.".
You're right that the executive's time was worth more than the cost of flying a private jet to the Washington show trial they were extorted into attending. That said, they were remarkably careless not to think that their failure to car pool to D.C. would be a leftist publicity bonanza
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Just don't let our new Earth have too many Windows made by Bill Gates. We will have bugs everywhere!
The people of "this" earth cannot even take care of it, yet, it is said that we need another one? Continuous wars, hatred, racism, greed, a throw away society, and all you can say is, "May I have some more?"
I say, emphatically, no!
You, and I mean all of you, having trashed the land, air, seas, the future, deserve what you have. Lie in the bed you made.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Fine, let us spend the last amount of oil, coal whatever, etc... On clothes, shoes, tents pillows & iphones/ipads. We can also make some bows & arrows so we can chase the deer/pigs. Then we can act just like the Indians did so many years ago. When the earth is in good shape again, we can start making cars and other buildings. Any opinions for additional before-hand purchases?
Don't bother to find another planet, earth men. In the 2012, we will reset yours.
Say wood and steel became too valuable, we'd resort to other materials like stamped earth, or whatever. We tend to not find alternatives until we have to, and life goes on.
Lucky for us there is a large Moon nearby. It has a lot of resources.
As a geologist I once knew had on his bumper, "EARTH FIRST! we'll mine the rest of the planets later."
Meanwhile, a little judicious recycling will be helpful. So will more nuclear power plants. Solar, wind and Hydro all have too many environmental impacts.
If the US has problems with building Nukes, we can always buy them from the French!
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
having 5 or more kids is TOTALLY acceptable.
Privacy is terrorism.
exists, due to the Banach Tarski paradox. We just slice up our Earth, and reassemble it in two identical copies!
The only reason you are being modded up is because the /. story is over a day old and you have your friends with mod points for todays stories using them here (evidenced). If anyone else was reading this you would be losing in mod points. Not like it matters you finally got the opposing view point modded up because no one will see this anymore. Give up, its very apparent you are peddling propaganda (AKA snake oil), and everyone knows it.
Do you really want to be that crazy guy holding the end of the world sign on a street corner in 5 years? You are heading straight for it by allowing yourself to be manipulated by The Great Hoax peddlers. You should read a little history because its repeating itself again.
Everyone should know by now that we are destined to start running out of resources here on Earth1. It is really elementary to observe and deduce that we will not pursue Earth2 until we have depleted Earth1. Wanna know when we'll have 'domed', self-contained colonies on other planets? Easy! When we master the art of building 'domed', self-contained cities here on Earth1.
Nice Cuccinelli reference there.
I think you'll find that most scientists are far more motivated by their science than they are by money except as a means of doing science. People who are that intelligent and motivated by money will usually go into business or law.
AC2PM
Hey, thanks for replying. I know when the trolls come out to play that I must be doing something right! I'm afraid that most of my friends are outside the tech community, so I don't have anyone to call on to mod me up. I can give you some tips on how to get modded up.
People respect you more if they can put a name to your posts.
Don't just post general claims like "global warming is wrong". Make a specific claim. If that claim gets refuted, then you may need to adjust your ideas. If you keep posting the same claims after being shown that they are wrong, then it is you who are peddling the propaganda.
The reason my post was modded up, when the grandparent that made the opposite claim to me wasn't, was that I posted evidence of my position. Once again, if your sources are shown to be posting unfounded propaganda, then you should find some new sources to quote. Don't just limit yourself to like-minded websites. You really should look at what the other side says. You never know, some of it may make sense.
You say I read a little history because it is repeating itself. You should read up on the politically motivated backlash against the scientific community on smoking, passive smoking, vaccinations, asbestos and evolution. The strategies that we see today against climate change are carbon copies of what we saw in the past on those other topics.
Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Really? Let's have a look at that. You have to construct an elaborate scenario to show climate scientist have an ulterior motive. The climate scientist has a political interest? How many scientists do you see in politics?
The academic institutions have a financial interest? I know people who are researching ethnicity in the arts, which is not going to earn their institution wads of cash. So why is it that when it comes to climate science that the great universities of the world suddenly are assumed to be greedy? They study the climate because they study everything.
Finally, you guess that the scientists have a consultancy to give them a scientific motive. How many scientists do you know who have a consultancy. Exactly who is paying them, and is it based on them coming up with a particular answer in their work? Doesn't it seem quite likely that they might also get a consultancy with someone else if they disputed the majority view? For example, Ian Plimer is a geologist who disputes climate change. He is on the board of three mining companies, as well as being associated with right-wing think tanks.
Now let's see how hard is it to claim a motive for the businessman. He has one job, to make money for his shareholders. If his company is forced to stop polluting the world (or even limit selling their product in the case of mining companies) then the company stand to lose millions, if not billions of dollars. There is no ambiguity there with the financial motive to wanting to sweep climate change under the carpet. I don't have to guess at extensive scenarios to explain away the motives of the businessman.
It seems quite bizarre how you can make up a twisted web of intrigue to show a financial motive for climate scientists and then claim that it is entirely bogus to attribute motive to somehow who has a direct financial relationship to keeping the status quo.
If the entire population of the planet today enjoyed the wealth & prosperity that we enjoy in the USA, Europe & other rich countries, it would require the resources of 2.3 Earths.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.