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Melting Glaciers Cutting Peru Water Supply
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a story that may repeat itself in all mountainous areas dependent on glaciers for their water supply, the glaciers in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly (PDF) that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected. Of the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades, researchers now believe, 'those years don't exist.'"
This melt off should be an interesting opportunity for archaeology and paleontology. Will such treasures reach back 1000, 5000, 40,000 years?
So basically the projections were wrong, but the culprit is the evil consumer who does not recycle his soup can, not the guy who made the projections in the first place.
Unless God himself gave the schedule for those glaciers to melt, the notion of having them melting "earlier than expected" is a joke.
lucm, indeed.
Why even bother posting this? It will just dissolve into a global warming debate within seconds, and slashdotters are by far the stupidest people I've ever conversed with on the topic of climate change and global warming. Normally slashdot opinions are above average on a given topic, but with global warming they're well below average: it's all fuzzy, intuited 'science' from physicists and programmers with zero understanding of ecology, copious libertarian babble, and wanton libertarian bashing.
It's just going to be a giant flamewar, and the average reader will truly be stupider for having read it.
Easy to say if you were raised in a more habitable place or if you're financially sound enough to move. Otherwise, I guess you're stupid for being born poor or in a poor place.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Oddly enough, there is a pretty sizable intersection between people who don't care about global warming, or have no interest in mitigating it, and those people who are staunchly against open borders.
These are people who lived in places with water. And that water is going to go away, suddenly, as could happen to literally any source of water other than desalinated ocean.
The history of the human race has involved a great deal of migration. Unfortunately, the earth is now full, and there is no place to migrate to anymore which is not already oversubscribed. Migration from now on means war.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Climate change denial is an act of treason against life on Earth.
Now let's not get hasty. Life on Earth will do just fine, it'll be just another mass extinction from which new life will spring forth, as it always has.
Now act of treason against humanity, that might fit...
I agree 100% with this comment. In the end some form of life will survive, I even think that humans will survive. We will just shrink our population and lose our advancements in technology, we will be cavemen again...
What was their original model / projection? Has anyone else verified it? And if so, what measures will they be taking to supplement their water supply?
I am John Hurt.
I feel truly privileged to read a number of posts in a row which EACH had a chance to deviate from the apocalyptic vision of the others, but instead chose the easy path. So many different ways we'll all die, so little time!
For heaven's sake, sometimes I think that the reason we have so many problems around the world today is what appears to be an incredibly cynical, doomsday view of everything. I could blame it on pervasive media (negative headlines are the best headlines), but that feels cliche.
Let's be realistic. Man will not go back to being a caveman. Population may shrink, but unless something truly horrifying happens mankind will go on. We'll probably innovate in different ways but we'll go on.
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Not everyone believes in evolution, which is part of the problem, but this is an issue of time scales.
Species go extinct because they could not adapt to the environment. That is normal. What is not normal is man made acceleration of environmental changes. Where I live there used to be an ocean, but that was on geological time. What we are doing is like radically changing the temperature and pressure in a room in 1/1,000,000 of a second.
Evolution simply cannot allow species to adapt that fast, and there will be extremely few species that can. Man will probably be one of them, but I don't want to be around for that level of adaptation. It is going to suck.
Then factor in how complex the interaction is in the various ecosystems and you start having a chain reaction where all life might cease, or at least a mass extinction event where the planet "resets" itself and different live evolves all over again.
Yeah, I was about to say. Nothing more ignorant and simplistic said on /. in awhile.
"Like just move"
That's worked out real well for the Ethiopians. The animals that are too "stupid" to move, well sucks to be them I guess.
Why is the parent marked Troll? Closed borders are exactly why people can't move en-mass from one area of the planet to another... And countries that are upset by such serious issues and cannot sustain broad migration are not suitable for internal migration.
In fact, it seems a perfectly logical response to the post it was referencing...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Yes and when they move the neighboring countries will welcome the refugees with open arms. Oh wait your a fucking moron never mind.
The science was so bad in this report it's already been torn to pieces. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/20/this-is-glacial-tap/
Can this comment be construed as an invitation for those effected by melting glaciers, to pack up their stuff in an RV, and take up residence in your back yard?
It's more of a racial thing than an individual thing. Some individuals will inevitably be caught between rock and hard place when the habitable area moves.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Let's be realistic. Man will not go back to being a caveman. Population may shrink, but unless something truly horrifying happens mankind will go on. We'll probably innovate in different ways but we'll go on.
Of course humanity will survive, we're like cockroaches, but there's no reason (except profit) to make life harder for everyone. Otherwise, why not just nuke everything?
For heaven's sake, sometimes I think that the reason we have so many problems around the world today is what appears to be an incredibly cynical, doomsday view of everything. I could blame it on pervasive media (negative headlines are the best headlines), but that feels cliche.
Media sells entertainment, only a fool would take them seriously. Still, if you trust climatologists over uneducated opinions you know there's a very good chance that we're fucked.
For heaven's sake, sometimes I think that the reason we have so many problems around the world today is what appears to be an incredibly cynical, doomsday view of everything.
And ironically life has never been better. We've conquered major diseases. Childhood death is rare: how many people in your family died young? In mine none, but in my great-grandma's, 14 out of 16 died as children. Go back farther, during the black death as much as 60% of the population of Europe died in two years. That is something no AGW scenario dreams of, and yet it happened.
In the worst case, we won't die out, we will go back to how things were before.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A friend in Reno says the mountains (between Reno and Lake Tahoe) aren't even snowcapped this year; that it looks more like the first dusting they usually get in September or October.
Of course, lack of snow in winter may just mean *dry*, not warm. Lack of snow doesn't disprove GW any more than last year's storms prove it. Receding glaciers is a different matter, if it continues year after year. Already 5-10 years ago they were saying that Glacier National Park had lost half its glaciers. And this kind of thing has been happening all around the world.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Lack of snow doesn't disprove GW any more than last year's storms prove it.
Uhm... I got that backwards.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You misunderstand evolution. Any adaptation that allows for survival in a given environmental condition is *already* there when that given environmental condition appears. It just so happens that everyone that *doesn't* have that adaptation dies off. Natural *selection* picks for traits that have already existed. An organism doesn't observe the environment and suddenly tries to "evolve".
I agree 100% with this comment. In the end some form of life will survive, I even think that humans will survive. We will just shrink our population and lose our advancements in technology, we will be cavemen again...
Runaway GW could turn the planet into a desert, with no life but microbes (if any). I think some planetologists think that's how Mars got its wonderful climate.
Barring that, I don't think we'll be reduced to cavemen. We'll just have more wars and social disturbances, as the agricultural/hydraulic "haves" become "have-nots", and vice versa.
And of course, we'll have to start moving our coastal cities to higher ground in 50-100 years.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not that difficult.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Cosmic irony would be that wealth is used to save the lost rather than gain the stars.
I love space opera as much as the next gnerd, but unless Einstein was seriously wrong we're never going to gain the stars.
A life-long one-way trip to the nearest neighbors may be feasible, but it's not likely that anyone will every want to pay for it, and even less likely that there will be anywhere to live once we got there.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's really just that simple. If the local environment is not conducive to human habitation, fucking move somewhere else.
And you'll welcome them into your country with open arms, right?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I guess you are putting out the welcome mat so they can move in with you then?
Must stop using electricity and save the planet before man made global warming frees us from this ice age we're in.
By some accounts, GW is in fact counteracting the onset of an ice age. Unfortunately, according to these analyses, GW's forcing is much stronger the IA's forcing, so it's not keeping us in a stable state. (Hence the melting glaciers, shifting habitats, etc.)
If we could cut our GW's forcing back to a small fraction of what it is, we might be able to apply it as some practical terraforming, to extend the duration of the paradise that our species grew up in.
But most people just invoke "ice age" as an excuse to avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run.
And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run. Politicians like to fall down and kick their feet over the public debt that our descendants will inherit, but those same clowns don't care a fig if we leave them a foobar planet to live in.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You misunderstand evolution. Well, at least your comprehension of it isn't as absolute as you seem to think. The scenario you put forth is one possible example of evolution, but not the only possible one. A more likely scenario is one in which the environmental change is fairly gradual and, during the transition, a variation occurs making some subset of organisms more able to survive in the conditions the environment is transitioning to. The case where the environment shifts overnight is almost certainly less common and, even when it does occur, it's still more likely that the mutated subset of organisms that take over the niche don't come from the affected region, but repopulate it from nearby areas unaffected by the environmental change.
In any case, the kind of changes that require rapid adaptation by a population generally aren't very pleasant for the population. They're usually mostly, or absolutely destructive to the local population. Humans, as a species, or in smaller groupings, can survive all kinds of things. That doesn't mean that big changes don't cause all kinds of suffering and death on the individual level, however. This is something that some people seem to misunderstand (or callously dismiss when it doesn't affect them directly) leading to statements like "Don't live in places without water, stupid".
Beck even has a chalkboard....I don't see Watts with a chalkboard.
Creating dams makes land uninhabitable: No problem!
Global warming makes land uninhabitable: No problem!
Nuclear accident makes land uninhabitable: Burn more coal!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
[quote]Unfortunately, the earth is now full[/quote]
Actually, it's not.
http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population-lived-in-one-city/
http://true-progress.com/the-earth-can-feed-clothe-and-house-12-billion-people-306.htm
One problem is big ass North Americans taking too much food and space.
Actually, there's mass methane poisoning of our atmosphere if the gas melts out of glaciers faster than the biosphere can handle it:
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And, in mass quantities, could supplant other gases like oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere. That by itself would be a mass extension event.....
He understands it just fine. Take the polar bear, for example. It's dependent on arctic ice forming in the ocean so it can go out and hunt seals. Now, if that ice were to be drastically reduced over the course of a couple thousand years, the polar bear would have some time to adapt to finding new sources of food or migrate. But make that drastic reduction in ice over the course of a few decades, and now the bear doesn't have the time to make those adjustments without flirting with extinction.
Shorter version: it's the sudden change in environments, stupid. See also: the meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs.
Migration from now on means war.
So we must refuse any governance/ownership system where this is the case. For the interest of longevity, I cannot accept it as necessary!
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
For heaven's sake, sometimes I think that the reason we have so many problems around the world today is what appears to be an incredibly cynical, doomsday view of everything.
And ironically life has never been better. We've conquered major diseases. Immunisation is still effective (when used, lots of FUD about it), but our anti-microbials are seriously becoming less effective, and the "easy to find" antibiotics are mostly mined out. We'll have to work much harder on new ones and try 'phage technology and God knows what else to have effective drugs for bacteria quite soon. We may soon see untreatable ghonnarea, TB, phumonia etc, even in the first world. And yet we still allow "growth promoters" in animal feed and care which are anitbiotics with different names, leading to highly resistant bugs in out food animals. Yay! Childhood death is rare: how many people in your family died young? In mine none, but in my great-grandma's, 14 out of 16 died as children. Go back farther, during the black death as much as 60% of the population of Europe died in two years. That is something no AGW scenario dreams of, and yet it happened. In the worst case, we won't die out, we will go back to how things were before.
Except we've mined with very advanced techniques and farmed our soils intensively, we cannot go back to say the 19th century level sustainably as the old techniques and materials just can't cut it. We need to act now and not wait until it's too late, but we will. Until it happens in the EU/Canada/USA/Australia, the media and big multinats will not care or be forced to act.
[quote]Unfortunately, the earth is now full[/quote]
Actually, it's not.
http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population-lived-in-one-city/
http://true-progress.com/the-earth-can-feed-clothe-and-house-12-billion-people-306.htm
One problem is big ass North Americans taking too much food and space.
And where do the people in your hypothetical city grow their food?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Maybe I should have said, no realistic AGW scenario, there hasn't been a single peer reviewed paper saying that there will be a mass extinction from the methane that is released in the arctic. Even the thing you linked to doesn't claim it, all it does is try to make you think about it.
The quote you have there is exciting, but even the article it came from doesn't support it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
One problem is big ass North Americans taking too much food and space.
That's the problem??? If there were less people on the planet we'd all be able to take up more food and space... seems like the problem is too many people. To take your argument to the ridiculous, if we all lived in 2m x 1m x 1m (taller people would need to bend their knees) boxes being fed nutrients intravenously there would be room for 5 x 10^14 people (assuming the boxes could float on the ocean), and that's only if we stack them 1 box deep. That doesn't mean those people would have a happy existence.
http://true-progress.com/the-earth-can-feed-clothe-and-house-12-billion-people-306.htm
Maybe it could... but just because it could it doesn't mean it's a target we should aim for.
Why mod this post Troll?
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
What makes you think 19th century farming techniques were sustainable? Crop rotation wasn't even commonly used in the US through most of the 1800s.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Extremophiles will hang around even after extinction level events - those things are currently living in the most acid, heated places of our planet; granted, if earth got stripped down to its core by a local supernova or our own star decided to call it a day life would have a hard time, but the sky turning black and oceans turning red wont be enough.
Looks more like dismissing real problems with cute hypotheticals that would never actually happen. And just how much land would be required to support these one-world cities? That bit if information seems to have been left off the pictures for some reason....
And post modded Troll. Sheesh. It's like some folks don't want to hear anything that challenges their religion...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
So we're at a mere 60% of the absolute maximum capacity even now? You realize, right, that at max capacity, one extra person born means one dies. Now think about the mechanism of how that happens. Now think about whether or not that mechanism would be operating even now. Now you're getting it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The earth is in no way full, there is plenty of space for everybody.. Probably what you meant to say is that the earth is now fully claimed and the folk wallowing in luxury don't really want to share with poverty stricken peruvians.
So no freedom then? Because free people will act selfishly, and keep more than they need (in case of a rainy day, or perhaps more apropos to this case, a droughty day). People will rightly (in terms of their self interest) turn to hoarding if their assets are threatened by migrants. It's a terrible misfortune, but your choices really are limited to war, oppression, or radical change in human nature.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
before there was the means to ameliorate local suffering, this was called evolution, or survival of the fittest. Now that it is technologically possible to spread the wealth, should we? To take from the lucky and give to the unlucky do we propagate mediocrity and perpetuate neediocrity?
What does luck have to do with fitness or mediocrity? I'm pretty sure that you and me have no inherent genetic advantages over somebody who finds himself on the wrong end of an environmental disaster. I admit that there may be exeptions, like people who willingly live in cities in a dessert without sustainable water supply or near the ocean but below the level of said ocean.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
In principle yes, in practice it doesn't work so well. Moving has costs and we're writing about millions of people and possibly billions on a global scale in future. A lot of them won't move or will be left behind. Furthermore there is historical evidence that people living in places that are still good don't like the idea of getting snowed under by immigrants and oppose resistance to their arrival. There is no need to go back in time, just think of all the restriction to immigration any country has in place, from visa to border patrols. That might be a display of lack of compassion but it's is also true that if living in a place is OK with one million people around, that very same place could become ecologically unsustainable when many more people arrive. We can't move all the people of the world in some "still good areas". They'd be destroyed as well. Where would be a nice place to live in a one billion people USA? What about a two billion people Europe? We'd better have kept climate under (its own) control.
Creepy... in the bible, didn't the seas turn red for the apocalypse? Sorry, I know this is a science site, but it just sort of gave me a little shiver.
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Climate change denial is an act of treason against life on Earth.
Now let's not get hasty. Life on Earth will do just fine, it'll be just another mass extinction from which new life will spring forth, as it always has.
Now act of treason against humanity, that might fit...
Well, not so much. As you stated, there might be another mass extinction. This, Sir, is an act of treason against the current life on Earth.
Does the fact that we estimate life will still grow strong after the disaster gives us the right to wipe out billions of species? I'm all fine with the human race disappearing. We do want we want with our kind. But for all the other living things that are going to be lost, isn't it like a kind of a genocide?
(Obviously, all this discussion is considering that GW hypothesis is true, which I tend to believe, otherwise there's no culpability or whatsoever)
Video of some good progressive thrash music
This and the fact that stop global warning by talk- with-big-business-and-US,-Chinese-and-other-silly-but-authoritarian-govs'-(are those not the same???)-so-that-a-common-approach-and-global-action-can-be-achieved sort of approach was never going to go beyond talk makes me think t hat one indeed should start looking at the ways to adopt instead of talking with idiots. OTOH these idiots have enough burning power to make you choke anyway so dealing with them is a must only talking instead using a stick is not working as we see.
fits nicely into immigration policies of majority if not all countries on earth....
avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run. And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run.
I'm interested in your source for this. The only reason I'm asking is because of an article I read early this year in one of the Business Review Weekly magazines. The economist was arguing the exact opposite, that the global effort to change the lifestyle and energy sources of half the population of the world would be orders of magnitude more expensive than to simply adapt as a species and relocate or provide resources in some other means to people dispersed by global warming.
Of course this ignores any emotional attachment which people have to their homes, but I can see where he may be making a valid point. For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years. That's a lot of money for a 0.0005% reduction in carbon output in the world.
I think we as a species need to come up with a smarter way of tackling this problem because if the numbers are right we'd basically be bankrupting the world to get humans carbon neutral.
Sorry, but that much space is more than enough for each person to house, clothe and feed themselves at the level expected for a person living in the early 21st century, WITHOUT the use of any technology invented in the last 2000 years.
Not to mention the advancements made in the last half a century or so.
Relax. Watch and read this.
We have a whole planet for ourselves. We just need to be a bit more rational in the use of all the resources at our disposal.
Also, a bit less effort in killing each other and a bit more invested in education NOW might prove highly useful when the population of poorest nations outnumbers the population of the richest by four to one.
40 or so years down the road.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That's the problem??? If there were less people on the planet we'd all be able to take up more food and space... seems like the problem is too many people.
Bingo! All the major issues we face are because there's too many people. Famine? too many people, not enough food. Oil crisis? Too many people, not enough oil. Global Warming? Too many people, not enough trees If by some bizarre occurance the planet was restricted to a stablised population of much less than now (let's start with 1Billion people for arguments sake), then pretty much most of the major problems would disappear overnight. This is why I have a big problem with charity. While it sounds bad to not help other people in need, saving lives is merely fueling the fire by allowing more people to survive and breed. We need less people. For the greater good, let those who are suffering die and give the rest of us a chance at a sustainable future.
Makes you wonder if I was referering to that or it was totally random, eh?
but there's no reason (except profit) to make life harder for everyone.
The thing is that not doing what we are doing is completely unacceptable. Cheap energy lifts populations out of poverty.
This idea that we would be better off if we didnt burn so much fossil fuels is complete and utter bullshit. It could be argued that the wealth generated by burning fossil fuels could be spread out better (especially into places like Africa and India) but it really cannot be argued that a Hot Earth scenario is better than a Poor Earth scenario.
"His name was James Damore."
The vast majority of humanity live in coastal regions, the regions that will be inundated with floods, rising sea levels, and increase intensity of storms. Best to move to high land!
If your premise is that you need less people I think statistics indicate that helping people in need would be your best bet (in addition to sounding, as you put it, less bad). As I understand the general mechanism, people tend to compensate for uncertainty regarding the survival of their offspring by having more children. With access to for example better medication, the argument goes, parents can afford to have fewer babies.
userfriendly 8 Dec 2010
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20101208
da da da dum indeed.
It is more complicated than that.
Evolution builds on variation. Each generation is quite similar to the parent generation, but the individuals differ slightly from each other and from the parents. Thus they are differently adapted to the environment they live in and have thus different chances of survival and having offsprings themselves. Recombination (mostly) and mutation (quite seldom) will provide for new variations in each new generation.
But individuals can also react to environmental pressure, by either influencing and adapting the environment to their needs (like plants, beavers or ants, or humans), or by migration away from the environment into new biotops and trying to gain a foothold there.
If the environment changes gradually, the chances are high that in each generation there are enough individuals well adapted to the slightly changed environment, so the species as such survives, even with individuals whose habitus is gradually moving away from the ancestor's.
If intensive environmental changes happen, species with high variation, short generation cycles and a high number of offsping per individuum have higher chances to adapt fast enough to the changes. If the environment is stable, species with low variation have less to invest into new offspring, because each descendant will be about as well adapted as the respective parent, thus those species have advantages.
For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years.
You ask for a source for his claim, then throw that out there in the same post without any hint of a source? (And Andrew Bolt isn't a source. Indeed, he's an anti-Source. He (and his ilk) suck the validity out of any claim they make.)
The Carbon Credit scheme is supposedly revenue negative, that is, the amount of "compensation" and tax cuts exceeds the amount of carbon tax added. It will have a minimal effect on long term revenue, and therefore a minimal effect on the GDP. How would it somehow cost us $26 billion per year?
But think about, it's just moving taxes from one part of the economy to another, even with a small net change (positive or negative), how could it have any greater effect on GDP than any other future policy change? Or than major policy changes in the past, like floating the dollar, bank deregulation, the GST, or the Resources Super-Profits Tax? So how does someone come up with such a general number (a trillion) over such a specific timeframe (exactly 38 years, not 35, not 40, 38!) Doesn't any of it ring your bullshit alarm? Mine's going like a firehouse choir.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Well, there's difference between "life on Earth" and "current life on Earth".
The worst genocidal crazies probably were the first oxygen generating (presumably) cyano-bacteria. They were responsible for perhaps the worst ever destruction of biosphere, first filling oceans and then atmosphere with highly toxic gas, wiping out most of the life as it was then. Yet I have hard time blaming those bacteria for what they did...
I'm actually more worried about humanity than anything else. Sun is getting hotter all the time as part of it's natural life cycle (or what we believe is the natural life cycle of a Sun-like star), and I think it's estimated that there's less than a billion years, possibly even just some hundreds of millions of years, before things get too hot and oceans start to evaporate, ending most life. Assuming appearance of intelligent life is not very common event, if we blow it, if we go extinct instead of spreading to our solar system and eventually to the stars, then that's end of story for Earth's life (and I'm defining that broadly, including for example any AI descendants of humanity).
Then again, I'm hopeful, because I'm pretty sure humans will be about the last vertebrates to go extinct at this point. We just know too much, and more importantly we have learned how to know more, and even after any civilizaton-wiping disaster, survivors will have a planet covered with artifacts from today, to spur them on the road of scientific progress.
Gore. Fraud. Awwk. Scientific conspiracy. Fake data. Awwk. Awwwwwk. Hockey stick. Sunspots. There is no Global Warming. Gore. Gore. Awwwk. Gore. Conspiracy.
There. Now all the anti-Global Warming conspiracy nuts can consider the bases covered and go home to their bat caves.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Indeed, some European countries and places like Japan are actually seeing declining population as people wait even longer to have kids with longer life expectancy and healthcare.
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
While I agree with the up-front logical argument of "We have too many people, we need to get rid of the excess", I do not agree with the social implications. One could further argue that strait out mass executions of excess poor people would help also, as it is for the greater good.
Who gets this power to kill? Who over sees them? What ramifications will this have on other humans in society? Will it cause civil wars and uprisings that will undermine the existence of society in the first place?
We need better education on over population, financial rewards for not producing, and some sort of punishment to stem offenders, preferably in the form of fines and taxes. One child policy?
"You realize, right, that at max capacity, one extra person born means one dies."
It's worse than that. The deaths will be delayed, starvation will increase, making lots of people susceptible to disease. Eventually a breaking point will be reached and there will be a collapse and many more than just the "each extra" will die. You also have the problem that food production varies over time. What the Earth can support one year, may not be enough for the next. We don't even know the sustained long term of 100+ years would be.
Like a bridge that can support 1000 people. When you add an extra person, no one dies. So you add a few more. At some point the bridge breaks and/or weakens at a faster than expected rate, maybe at 1100 people, then 800 people die.
How much do you think it's going to cost to move, say, New York City, to higher ground?
How many other cities would that question be relevant to?
And that's just the one glaringly obvious cost.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The economist was arguing the exact opposite, that the global effort to change the lifestyle and energy sources of half the population of the world would be orders of magnitude more expensive than to simply adapt as a species and relocate or provide resources in some other means to people dispersed by global warming.
But I will have to go with "nonsense" on that diagnosis.
Haven't read the article, can't comment on the said economists motives but I am fairly sure that he/she IS making his/her arguments from an ignorant position and a with a highly specialized and limited outlook of the world.
First off, saying "half the population" indicates that he lives in some past age when the developed nations (ones who are responsible for the greater part of the human influence on the climate) were approximately one half of the world population.
Which is no longer the case. "Traditionally poor" continents of Asia and Africa amount to ~5 billion of the ~7 billion humans currently on this planet.
Second, rest assured that the poor nations would be the ones who would feel the effects of global warming the most.
Millions would likely die from hunger, wars caused by said hunger and health issues (disease and lack of medicine) caused by both.
Calculating the "cost" of change in developed nations energy policy merely in dollars, when it is clear to anyone who would take 5 minutes to meditate on the subject that the current policies would cost in lives, lost generations and even in those utterly immeasurable categories such as loss of culture and civilization indicates that the proponent of the "just send aid" has traded his/her moral compass for something more... quantifiable.
Then, there is the problem of "WTF?" in such a solution.
We can't adapt energy policy of developed nations with their (comparably) functioning economies and bureaucracies but at the same time it is a perfectly acceptable idea that we should be able "to simply adapt as a species"?
I'm guessing this will be accomplished through spontaneous mutation of chlorophyll cells in our bodies so that we can harvest the energy of the Sun, dispensing with that pesky habit of eating altogether?
Or perhaps by growing gills and webbed hands and feet so that we can live under water?
Then there is the utter lack of foresight. Which does not surprise me since the said economist is working with numbers from decades ago.
I.e. Is stuck in the past.
We don't need a solution for a world of 5, 6 or 7 billion people, with maybe half of them living in the developed nations.
We need an adaptable, scalable solution for at least 9 billion humans, with at least 7 billion of them living in the developing nations.
Which is where we will be 40 or so years down the road, just as the world's supply of oil nears the end of its economical use.
And saying to those 7 billion "Ah, just move somewhere else" basically means "Come, take my already strained resources - you're gonna take them by force anyway since you and yours outnumber me and mine by 4 to 1. And you've grown up in the society where human life is very cheap.".
So, unless we come up with cold fusion in the next decade or so we MUST start relying on renewable energy resources.
Cause "poor" of the world sure as hell will not. Can not.
At the same time they will be faced with increased population and dwindling resources - perfect conditions for declaring war.
On their cousins, on their neighbors, on the "wealthy", on those of a different color...
So, developed nations either come up with a solution for both energy and the climate crisis and give it to the developing nations OR be faced with the possibility of being on a losing side of a global war couple of decades down the road.
Not that there can be a winning side in a war whose goal is to manage couple of billion humans through reduction of their numbers.
It's just that some people have a lot less to lose.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Do you reckon that recent breach of lightspeed might indicate that Einstein was seriously wrong?
For the greater good, let those who are suffering die and give the rest of us a chance at a sustainable future.
Back in your socioeconomically illiterate grave, Malthus! Back I say! The power of christ compels you! The power of christ compels you!
It's really just that simple. If the local environment is not conducive to human habitation, fucking move somewhere else.
Leaving Las Vegas.
Fandroids hate facts.
hyep. Habitable places just moving all over the place for no reason at all. I found a rainforest on my lawn yesterday. Had to shoo it away with my water hose. Left genetic diversity all over my patio.
Look at the glaciers as a key reserve of water for the dry season. A glacier in equilibrium will replenish itself during wet season, and act as a source of water during dry season. A melting glacier means it doesn't replenish itself during wet season, and thus a diminishing source during dry season. At some point it means a lost source of water during dry season.
The US & Chinese presidents. Those close enough to stage coups if they get out of hand. Full employment via military conscription. Depends on what you call "society."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
On some part of the 40 million square kilometers of arable land that isn't part of the city.
There is quite a bit of unused land in Detroit right now. Seriously people generally don't seem to like cities, and from what I see only live in them when they have no other viable alternative, Humans seem more likely "Village People" than "City People". Even when people do live in cities, they self-organize into neighborhoods, when can be likened to "villages" inside the cities.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Relatively, it was much more sustainable. Sure they would have to leave areas fallow, but they didn't need to use petroleum fertilizers and vast monocultures the scale of which we have today were completely unheard of..
And we all thought that science was settled too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Obligatory Soylent Green reference.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The reality is if you don't get a choice, adapt or die. Nature doesn't care what you want and mercy doesn't exist.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There are some places in which the population currently exceeds its carrying capacity. It's foolish to extrapolate that to the entire planet.
The problem is not having enough food--there is more than enough food on Earth to feed every person on the planet. The problem is distribution--and economics, politics, etc. The problem is getting the food to the people who need it.
The real problem is corruption and greed and just plain evil in governments, and in some places, in the society and culture as well. The real problem is people who don't work together as a community or a nation but instead play "every man for himself", seeking not the common good but to gratify oneself.
We don't need less people--we need fewer evil people. We need more good people.
Your suggesting that we need a global population reduction is a dehumanizing proposition, devaluing the lives of billions of real human beings. It is people like you who are the problem, people wanting to selfishly "cut off the dead weight" for the sake of themselves--people who think they are more important than everyone else. Shame on you.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Damn, there go my plans for a lawn care start-up in Peru.
Exclusivity protects ME from competition. I demand MY country favor ME because....MY country belongs to ME.
The idea that the strong should sacrifice for the weak outside their own culture may be morally delectable under certain constructs, but is NOT at all logical. Given finite resources, in nature animals COMPETE for them. If you aren't fast enough to catch the slowest zebra, tough shit.
I'm not interested in filling MY lifeboat until it sinks. At some point one has to push off and smash fingers until they let go.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The problem is that all these conclusions are inferences. Without time machines, we can't verify that the inferences and models upon which they're based are truly accurate. In a few hundred years we can dig up some cores and compare the inferences with recorded data. Until then, one should not take such inferences as fact--to do so is not science but dishonest.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
"Some have speculated that he might be trying to wrestle control of the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water reserves, from the Paraguayans."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/oct/23/mainsection.tomphillips
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarani_Aquifer
POTUS has pretty good Intel on likely future scenarios, in a dry World what's more valuable than oil? Water.
IMO the answer to all the World's problems is human population reduction.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
War is actually a NORMAL human process though the modern pretense is different.
War trumps law, for in the end law requires force to enFORCE it.
"Migration from now on means war."
If I have one loaf of bread and need to feed self and wife, anyone else attempting to take that bread will be killed if I am able. That's Nature's way. Hungry bears don't give up food to competitors, so why should I?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
... used to say, "Well, gee! Melting glaciers will give people more water, not less! So even if it's happening, climate change is a good thing!"
An absolute example of an argument in favor of roasting the golden goose to prevent hunger.
Check your premises.
The number does ring the bs alarm, but the premise does not. Australia is a country which makes the vast majority of its wealth through the export of carbon intense products, mainly coal, iron, and all that other wonderful stuff. The tax cuts are directed at isolating Australians from the increase in cost that the carbon tax puts on producers. Unfortunately that ultimately makes us less competitive on the world market. The government's own numbers recognise this. They've address and acknowledged that the introduction of a carbon tax will have a negative impact on GDP. Ultimately though who knows if the economists are right.
Also w.r.t source I'm interested in his source to counteract something I've read, a source I no longer have. I presented this not as an argument but rather as something I've heard and I'm interested in his other view. It's for my benefit, not yours.
The whole moving money via a fixed tax is a stupid idea to being with. At least a few other countries have rolled out a ETS without some silly complicated phase in tax period. The problem with it is that I know who the "big polluters" are. I see him every morning in the mirror. Magically pretending that by moving money around a bit we can produce energy that is magically clean yet doesn't cost more than the dirty energy defies all logic. We're going to pay heavily for this.
Well that's the thing. It's not places like New York City that need to be moved, but rather low-lying pacific islands.
There are entire countries that basically have large parts of the population living below sea level. Not all solutions to rising sea levels involve picking up a city and moving it up a hill.
[quote]Unfortunately, the earth is now full[/quote]
Actually, it's not.
http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population-lived-in-one-city/
http://true-progress.com/the-earth-can-feed-clothe-and-house-12-billion-people-306.htm
One problem is big ass North Americans taking too much food and space.
And where do the people in your hypothetical city grow their food?
In the vast rest of the world.
Fandroids hate facts.
Do you reckon that recent breach of lightspeed might indicate that Einstein was seriously wrong?
I would be more willing to bet that the findings were flawed. But we'll see.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The nation-state is not the only, nor the strongest, unit of human association. I have more in common with many Canadian, Europeans and South Americans - including affiiliation by family and work - that with most US citizens. National citizenship should be an administrative category, a mechanism for participating in the public sphere - not a team sport.
Maybe that will put an end to Peru's cholera epidemics (common because Greenpeace convinced them to stop chlorinating their water).
Climate change denial is an act of treason against life on Earth.
Now let's not get hasty. Life on Earth will do just fine, it'll be just another mass extinction from which new life will spring forth, as it always has.
Now act of treason against humanity, that might fit...
David Brin thinks denialists may end up getting sued.
Pah. They'll probably end up at the ICC at the Hague.
They grow their food in the places that are not city (most of the world, based on the first link) and import it in. They'd just have to leave open the most fertile growing regions and put the city elsewhere. Or, they grow their food vertically in vertical farms (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming). I'm sure we could come up with some sort of technological solution to where and how we grow food if we all lived in one large city.
We have deserts in America, we just don't live in them
Whoever said this has clearly never strayed far from the coasts...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
adapt or die
It's nice being cavalier with peoples lives. Best hope they aren't so cavalier with yours when yours is on the line...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
its becoming true because its principals behind its message caused this mess. and its believers think the solution is to follow it harder
I'm not assuming. The evidence is already out there. Look what happens every time there is a starvation situation. People hoard food, and people die. Thinking that the solution to the impact of climate change will be to handle it differently is wishful thinking, things aren't going to get better, they're going to get worse as we multiply food shortages by water shortages.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I agree with you completely. I'm only suggesting that smart people be preparing for this outcome.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I'm not interested in filling MY lifeboat until it sinks.
Very true. How about when your lifeboat is no longer 'adaptable' to the new environment? Hopefully the other people aren't quite as 'me first' as you are. It's called compassion...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
No, I merely meant to contrast it with when migrations sometimes didn't mean war.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Why do we need any of those things?
In the civilized parts of the world, population is already declining, once you ignore immigration. Yes, even the USA is in a slight population decline, ignoring immigration and the children of immigrants (legal and otherwise). Europe is heading for a moderately massive population implosion at current rates....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Except that the corporations polluted, over-fished or otherwise mismanaged it...so it no longer produces enough to sustain.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Yes, but each of those individuals use more resources than an entire family of 6 in a Lima slum. If we intend to reduce birth rates by improving living conditions and education we're going to need an order of magnitude more resources to accomplish that.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Actually mass executions of rich people would be more productive. Britney Spears alone consumes enough resources for an entire town in the Amazon to survive on, and the annual spending of Larry Ellison probably exceeds the entire social budget of some countries.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
IPCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers
The UN's climate science body has admitted that a claim made in its 2007 report - that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 - was unfounded.
The admission today followed a New Scientist article last week that revealed the source of the claim made in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not peer-reviewed scientific literature – but a media interview with a scientist conducted in 1999. Several senior scientists have now said the claim was unrealistic and that the large Himalayan glaciers could not melt in a few decades.
In a statement (pdf), the IPCC said the paragraph "refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly."
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the people are threatened? I don't think water itself feels much one way or another. : o P
Ration and take it away from corporations?
There was a great line on "penn and teller's bullshit" when they talked about organic farming.
"We can feed about four billion if entire world goes to organic farming for food supply. There are six billion of us now. I don't see two billion volunteers to vanish..."
It does. Governments around the world are planning on spending trillions of dollars and rerouting much of the energy structure in response to these reports. The reports are based on a few computer models and a few more wild predictions. The programmers here know that computer programs can be wrong, and we all know the wild predictions can be wrong. We want to see the source code and check things ourselves. The IPCC has not done that, and in fact has hidden the source code.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
So what was the point of showing the whole world population as a single city? If they still need the rest of the world to supply the food, then is does not matter how the humans are dispersed on the globe.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
petroleum fertilizers and vast monocultures
These things don't make farming unsustainable. Petroleum is a scary word but that doesn't make it somehow unsustainable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's almost exactly how hsthompson69 described it
There's a small change in the environment, and the creatures that can't cope die. Then there's another small change and the creatures that could cope with the first but not the second change die off. Eventually it changes far enough that only the best adapted to that change are left. In the case of a sudden change, all the creatures that would have died over the course of the change die all at once.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years
I consider the "cost" argument a very poor argument: we have to realize that a huge part of the "costs" have never been factored on the balance sheets in the first place when it comes to environmental damages ("damages" as in decreased productivity in the long run). These costs were kept off balance sheets because of the view that all economic activities were taking place inside a huge, seemingly infinite sphere from which we could draw and in which could discard carelessly.
Unfortunately, we realize now more and more that what at first appeared as a seemingly infinite sphere is actually very finite, and even shrinking. A lot of the costs to move toward a sustainable global economy were just costs which existed in the first place, they were just left out of the accounting equations of the global economy.
If everyone were like "Village People" overpopulation would not be a problem. On the other hand, YMCA's would be overcrowded. And you'd have to put up with disco. So I'm not sure this would be of overall benefit...
That is all.
To show that there's enough space for everyone to fit in a first world urban environment without using up all the world's farmland, etc.
Well I'm guessing since I didn't make the point in the first place.
Petroleum is a finite resource; we can and are using all of it up. That is the very definition of non-sustainable. Beyond that were we able to replace our petroleum-based fertilizer with another equally cheap fertilizer the result would still not be sustainable. Both the pesticides and nitrogen runoff that comes from maintaining these vast monocultures cause massive fish kills. Check out the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
There is far more petroleum than we need for fertilizer in the foreseeable future. The dead zones are something interesting to watch, but there is no indication they will keep us from growing crops (which would be unsustainable)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, I disagree:
:-) not after 57 years of paying taxes to raise the country's flood defenses to the current (inadequate) level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works (N.B. note the cost calculation in that article :-) )
Look at this NASA picture: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167.
Then, think: why is it that you can recognize the outline of the continents?
Almost all transcontinental container traffic goes by boat. Harbor cities is where the commerce is, so that's where the people move to for work.
When harbor cities such as Shanghai, New York, Rotterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Antwerp need rebuilding because of rising sealevel, watch what happens to the price of bananas. Or coffee. Or cars.
Doesn't matter if it takes 50 or 150 years; most of the large harbor cities are much older than that. It would still be an enormously painful and expensive investment.
And that's only talking about the economy; but giving up or relocating all the coastal churches, libraries, musea etc. because of 7 meter sea level rise also has a price tag.
To conclude: the picture in this (Dutch) Wikipedia article shows what half of the Netherlands looked like in Roman times: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdronken_Land_van_Saeftinghe. The real-estate brokers don't want those times to return
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
1. Corp polluted, over-fished production area
2. Take it back from Corp.
3. ????
4. Eat?
If it's already wasted/squandered/polluted, taking it back isn't exactly useful.
Look to the Gulf for examples. Or perhaps that Russia that's leaking a BP Gulf spill every 2 months...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The real alarmists are the people who say we're going to bankrupt ourselves responding to global warming. Most of the money spent would be the same money we would be spending on non global warming friendly energy anyway. The global warming friendly part just adds maybe 3% from the studies I've seen.
Almost exactly except for the part saying: "Any adaptation that allows for survival in a given environmental condition is *already* there when that given environmental condition appears". That situation is unlikely most of the time.
I don't think we'll have to move NYC. I think we can hire some Dutch engineers to build dykes along the lower-west side, across the East River to Brooklyn, and then up by the Throg's Neck, between Queens and the Bronx. Aside from keeping above water, you'd get the reclaim all the land under the East River.
This would be the coolest project to work on.
So, is it okay if people start migrating from the Sahara to your backyard?
I think your definition of sustainability is flawed, but I don't think you're going to change your mind so I'm going to leave it at that.
The question is not how many people we can squeeze on to the Earth. It's how many can we have and sustain indefinitely into the future.
Hmm, "Shifting habitats"... I've read that climate changes so fast that even birds can't keep up with it. They didn't mean those of seasonal migrating kind?
Around a decade ago they noticed a problem in the far north, with plants and the critters that eat them getting out of synch on when spring is supposed to happen. Apparently one depended on the time of year, the other on the ambient temperature, which of course is happening earlier w.r.t. time of year. So the plants were blossoming before the bugs that depend on them come out, or vice versa. (Sorry; don't remember the details.)
More recently, the buckeye tree, namesake of a certain powerhouse football team in Ohio, has had its range shifted northward due to warming, so that the team's home town is now barely within the trees range, and won't be within it at all in another decade or two.
As one wag put it, when it starts messing with football, people will get serious about global warming.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Do you reckon that recent breach of lightspeed might indicate that Einstein was seriously wrong?
I would dearly love to learn that Einstein was wrong and we can go as fast as we please.
But although we occasionally get an experimental result that tells us our understanding of nature is all wrong, it's vastly more common that we learn that the experimental result is wrong. If you're going to bet, go with the odds.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Childish threats like this, only too common, only reinforce the basis of my scepticism
When climate science community, and the IPCC and the activists and nutters in close orbit raise their game, and stop acting like cargo cult doomsday evangelists, and dramatically improve their professional conduct and the multitude of problems and limitations and conflicts of interest within their various institutions, only then can they expect broad support and respect.
Should your threat ever be realised, I'll stand by my convictions and the mental processes and methods by which I arrived at them. Should it turn out that my present, provisional rejection on the CAGW hypothesis and the recommended mitigation remedy turns out to be false, I'll stand by my convictions and the mental processes and methods by which I arrived at them.
The in-tribe is in mortal peril; an overarching moral duty supercedes all other considerations. Death to the infidel that works against the in-tribe. Echo's of history.
You'd be surprised how well nature reclaims and rejuvenates itself when extreme load from human activity is removed.
There are two main reasons that glaciers are melting faster today than they have been historically (since the beginning of this latest ice age). One is that the temperature seems to be increasing. This is, for many glaciers, not the main culprit however. Deforestation is. A thorough study of the glacier of Mt. Kilimanjaro showed that a rather small amount of the melting could be attributed to increasing temperatures, the majority was caused by deforestation.
Why does deforestation impact the glacier thus? Sublimation. Forests adds moisture to the air. Remove the forest and air goes much drier. Drier air means a significant increase in ice/snow sublimation, and poof goes the glacier. This would happen even with zero increase in temperature.
Religious nut-case alert. They are all the same. Any word against the "truth" and they yell treason or worse. Go get some knowledge, and you'll drop your religious superstitions.
PS. Yes, I think it has been documented that the world is heating up. No, I don't think that is a significant threat to human kind, I don't even think it is on my top five list. Neither are nuclear weapons for that matter.
billions of species
Someone gotta get some serious speciation going here. I think the current guesstimate of the number of species on this planet is a few orders of magnitude lower than billions. Somewhere around 8 million last I heard.
And ironically life has never been better.
That reminds me of the joke where a guy jumps from the 100th floor of a building and someone asks him as he passes the 50th floor "How are things?" His reply "Couldn't be better!"
hehe, clearly, even by extrapolating from past human experience, we have some bad times ahead.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, but it might mean that light has an extremely small mass, and that the mass of high-speed neutrinos is even smaller, and thus the true C is slightly higher than the speed of light.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think your definition of sustainability is flawed,
It's not.
but I don't think you're going to change your mind so I'm going to leave it at that.
ok, you win.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, I guess it all depends on your definition of full. There are those people that won't believe there is an over population problem until the bodies are stacked to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and fed by single-cell organisms. Then there are those people who think a place is crowded if they can see a neighbor from their front porch. You can enjoy living like a cockroach so long as I can't see you from my front porch...
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
"Doomsday evangelists"? Just check the extinction rates. Even without climate change, we're in the middle of a very rapid mass extinction, and this is just by raw numbers. Climate change is only going to make it worse, no matter the cause.
How this mass extinction is going to affect humanity is another matter, since we have ability maintain many of the other species we depend on, but it won't be pretty even then.
Not funny in the least. What we're talking about is runaway global warming with positive feedback loops from non-human sources of GHG. If those start to go at all, it can lead to an avalanche of GHG such that even if we cease all GHG production completely tomorrow, it won't stop runaway heating of the earth to 6 degrees above what we have now which, in case anyone is wondering what that number means to humans, represents the guaranteed extinction of civilization.
I assert that the mere presence of inaction on the part of democratically elected governments heavily implies that democracy itself, at least in it's present form, has failed.
Clearly the funding of elections by corporations is at the heart of this. Politicians cannot take positions unpopular to corporations and also stay in office. The small group of people at the heads of corporations who decide what campaign to support are far removed from both economic and physical reality. They are ideologues who are ignorant of science and what science is saying. Yet they and they alone decide what laws will be passed. The Chamber of Commerce is a case in point.
If democracy has failed and short term interests and the absolute ignorance and blind greed of the elite are driving us to extinction, then ti will be a repeat of what Jared Diamond has documented in his book about how once great civilizations collapse , titled "Collapse".
The elites are immune to the consequences of the disastrous decisions they generate until it's too late for everyone, including themselves.
I'm sorry, but this exactly describes our current situation.
I call on the President of the United States to take any and all action including suspending the Constitution and nationalizing all industries at the point of a gun if needed, detaining and imprisoning anyone who doesn't like it, and using whatever other powers he sees fit to impose whatever is needed to stop runaway global warming from happening.
It could happen within a decade that massive amounts of GHG are suddenly released from the permafrost thanks to the unprecedented level of 380 ppm carbon we have now.
For three decades now scientists have been certain of their facts and prevailed upon us to stop business as usual. For three decades our democracy ignored them. Our democracy as it is is a mortal threat to our nation and the world's peoples. It is lethally and irretrievably broken , by definition it has shown that it cannot cope with this situation. Time has run out and I enjoin slashdotters to accept and encourage the suspension of democracy for the purpose of saving life on this planet. I enjoin them to be prepared to do whatever the President says needs to be done in order to survive.
If it means turning the drought ridden Southwest into a gigantic concentration camp where deniers go to fend for themselves amongst themselves while the rational portion of this nation mobilizes and rations food, then do it.
We are right now in nothing less than a civil war, declared against the United States by the likes of the Koch brothers and the Cato institute and the Heritage Foundation and FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal and all the rest of the denier machine. These people are terrorists and it's time to start thinking about them as terrorists and treating them like terrorists.
This much is certain. We are heading towards civil war between those in this nation who want us to take a rational course of action in order to preserve the species and those with a unconscious death wish, those well known sociopaths who populate the right wing airwaves and print media and those who deny all science and seek to impose their otherworldly view of reality on all humanity.
It's civil war and it's happening now, being fought for now online and in the media and in Congress. But it won't stop there, just as it didn't in the first Civil War. Like then, this is a nation divided and it canot stand. It's divided between the rationalist children
You might be surprised that there is still a restriction in Germany on eating wild boars because of Chernobyl.
Hundreds of miles away, 25 years later. They don't reclaim stuff to the point of being able to consume the produced goods quickly enough to support a planet when the arable land area starts changing by the decade.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I think what you're trying to express is the idea of a gradual "evolution by out-breeding", rather than "evolution by natural selection". Natural selection is always cruel -> organisms are killed before they can produce offspring. Natural selection is never going to be a pleasant thing, on any timescale, for those selected against.
As for out-breeding, that's actually pretty cruel as well -> those being out-bred are essentially starved out for resources as they can't compete, and again, start dying before they can produce offspring.
Now, as for which scenario is more or less likely (indirect natural selection by outbreeding by a competing subset of your species, or direct natural selection by cruel forces which cut your life short before you can produce offspring), I'll argue that you're making a distinction without a difference.
People would love to think that evolution is some sort of inherently good and noble thing, since we're a product of it and we like being the top of the food chain living in first world conditions, but make no mistake, nature is a cruel fucking mistress. Those majestic redwoods? They had to kill off a whole ecosystem to take over their current range. And their predecessors had to do the same before that. And so on, and so on. Life is a messy, ugly thing, and trying to reconcile it with human ideas of "good" and "evil" is kind of silly.
If the adaptation for a given environmental condition *doesn't* exist when that environmental condition appears, the entire species dies when that environmental condition appears. Species survive because they are diverse enough to contain at least *some* subset which will be able to survive in a state that is different from the current one.
So while you may correctly assert that this scenario is unlikely, (and in fact it's categorically true that *most* species fail to survive), it is categorically true that for all species that exist today, their ancestors had the necessary adaptive genome *before* every point in time in the past where conditions changed to the detriment of their peers.
Those polar bears that could find new sources of food or could figure out how to migrate somewhere else *already* have that trait within them. Those polar bears that could *not* find new sources of food or figure out how to migrate somewhere else would be doomed no matter how slowly you adjusted conditions. The polar bears don't sit around, watch the food move away and the ice melt, and then decide "oh hey, let's evolve!" They either have the traits necessary (however complex those traits may be) to survive changes (on any timescale), or they don't.
As for meteor impacts that killed off the dinosaurs, be very clear -> natural selection doesn't care *what* the selection is, how quick or slow it is, or whether or not it has anthropogenic or extra-terrestrial origin. A meteor hit. Things changed really quickly. Those things that *already* had the necessary adaptations to survive lived, and those that didn't have them died off. In some cases, species survived because some subset of them already had the necessary adaptations. In other cases, entire lines went extinct. Such is nature.
Shorter version: the environment is always changing, stupid. See also: Darwin's "On the origin of species"
You're simply describing complex behavioral traits. Individuals react to environmental pressure because of genetic endowments that give them the capacity to react while their peers that die off fail to react. Regardless if the environment changes gradually or quickly, those reactions *are traits too*.
Now that's an awful simplification of an elegant but complex concept of natural selection. It all depends on *what* intensive environmental changes are happening - you could have intensive change that selects *against* high variation, short generation, large # of offspring individuals. Say some extra terrestrial race comes down to earth, and specifically comes here to test bio-weapons against high variation, short generation, large # of offspring individuals. They spray the planet with "Agent Purple", and kill off all the species that fit that stereotype. In that case, low variation, long generation, small # of offspring species actually *win* the evolution game, under what is arguably a *very* intensive environmental change.
The important thing to understand here is that *evolution doesn't care*. It doesn't have a direction it wants to go in, and it doesn't have to fit our ideas of "good" and "bad". It's all about survival, no matter what may come, and make no mistake, we've got *no* idea what could possibly come.
This has nothing to do with me being told I'm wrong; I've never posted in one these threads before. I've never put forth any opinion, that I can recall, on this topic. I'm simply tired - as someone with university training and research experience in evolution and ecology - of seeing global warming, drug resistance, etc. completely and inexcusably mangled by slashdotters showing off their distant memories of high school biology.
Nice try, though, dismissing my entire multifaceted objection as pure, simple stubbornness. Way to oversimplify.
Also your whining is part of the "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert and I don't wanna hear that we have screwed up everything" crowd.
Criticizing pseudo-scientific babble doesn't amount to saying "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert". I'll talk to an educated layman or an inquisitive ignoramus all day long. What I don't like is politically motivated fools with no training in any type of science babbling on about global ecology.
I'm also rather tired, as an evolutionary biologist with some training in ecology and climate, of hearing slashdoters with CS and physics degrees spout off about climate change, drug resistance, ecosystems, etc. when a solid 8 of 10 responses on those topics are so fundamentally wrong that any competent AP Bio student could correct them.
There's nothing pretentious or avoidant about saying it's a waste of time to carry on discussions I know for a fact will promote politics and wrong-headed intuitions over science. When someone so firmly believes a wrong opinion as to bother posting it, and 4 other people mod up their ignorant drivel, and not a single person mods it down...and this happens over and over and over...why shouldn't I point out that it's clearly a waste of time?
As for your contention that I simply "don't wanna hear that we have screwed everything up" accusation, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion but I believe quite firmly in the dangers of anthropogenic global warming, and I have no problem facing that or any other problem of our species head-on. My criticism of this topic and this posting refers to the virulent climate change deniers I see on slashdot, people who are especially dangerous because they often have enough training in some sort of science and enough practice in informal debate to make some serious bullshit sound reasonable. So your second criticism is in fact precisely opposite the truth.
Would it had been only 2 species, the point would still stand. Try to have a broader look at arguments.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
That would be because of "even small amounts of radiation are unhealthy" hypothesis. It has been rebuked many times in science, but it's extremely popular among people so it's politically impossible to truly address the people.
At the same time Chernobyl itself is a nature haven, with wild animals returning and due to lack of hunters, they are much more abundant then in any other nearby area.
That would be because of "even small amounts of radiation are unhealthy" hypothesis. It has been rebuked many times in science
Bullshit. Sources? And then prove that the levels seen in Germany are below 'normal' levels.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
More recently, the buckeye tree, namesake of a certain powerhouse football team in Ohio, has had its range shifted northward due to warming, so that the team's home town is now barely within the trees range, and won't be within it at all in another decade or two.
I assume you are referring to:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-09-12-3324435158_x.htm
which states:
The coalition doesn't have any evidence that the buckeye's range has been pushed north but says global warming threatens to make that happen. and Lytle said healthy adult buckeye trees can tolerate a wide climate range, although seedlings are more sensitive. Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan could eventually give buckeye trees a more comfortable habitat.
So, basically... There is no evidence the range has shifted at all. It may shift in the future but the existing trees are not likely to be threatened.
I'm not a denier. I am convinced the science behind AGW is basically true because I have examined the evidence to the best of my ability not because I had a "revelation". I'm in favour of taking reasonable and effective action to reduce CO2.
I don't believe you were trying to intentionally mislead anyone but there are too many sensationalistic articles out there that basically follow the template: *Global warming causes X... We're all going to die! * note: global warming has not been found to cause X
You can find countless sources through google, ranging from the (in)famous study on hormesis, to multiple researches done in 50s and 60s on low level radiation which was hushed because "low level radiation is either harmless or beneficial" didn't win big grants - "radiation mutates, kills and destroys" on the other hand... As several scientists were quoted back then, "the best way to get funding in 50s and 60s was to scare the pants off congress". Which is what they did.
Take the study on mice they did in 50s. They put two mouse groups in cages, test group and control group. Test group got constant low level gamma irradiation, while control group didn't. They measured that mice (and their descendants) in the irradiated group constantly lived LONGER (hormesis) then control group while having no statistically visible difference in things like cancer and birth defects. After tests with active irradiation were over, they continued to monitor the mice and noted that the only difference was that longevity benefits went away along with radiation. Test group mice lived and bred just as well as control group ones. No long-term defects or harm was noted to have come to test group mice.
If you want an example of human "testing", take a look at Mexico City. Background radiation in there is at least twice as high every day as it was in Tokyo on the worst day after Fukushima. No visible spike in birth defects, cancer and other problems associated with high doses of radiation in comparison to other large cities of same level of wealth.
And I urge you to try and find a single peer reviewed study that proves that low level radiation is harmful. There are several that hypothesize this, but none (that I know of) that could present proof that stood the test of peer reviews. What we know is that HIGH doses of radiation are harmful and that the level of irradiation is related to way you're irradiated, with internally sourced radiation having more impact then external. What you find in pigs in Germany is low doses of Cs-137 which is known to cause problems in significant concentrations due to the way it's metabolized by out bodies and because irradiation is internal. Problem is, you're not very likely to get significant doses from "irradiated boars", who themselves live with Cs-137 radiation in their tissues just fine. The authorities are being cautious here (and rightfully so), but if you had to choose between going hungry and eating a german boar, you'd likely cause far more damage to yourself by going hungry then by eating the said boar.
So, basically... There is no evidence the range has shifted at all.
The article I read showed maps, 'then' and 'now'.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No.
The reason being that environmental conditions in fact often do change slowly enough that numerous generations exist during the transition. Now, the conditions that drive evolution often are harsh and involve massive die offs, but it's a long way from universally true that beneficial mutations always pre-exist the event that drives change. Sometimes there isn't even an event that drives change. Sometimes a subspecies branches off from another species not because conditions changed, but because the mutation allowed the subspecies to move into an adjacent environmental niche it previously couldn't survive in.
Still, it's probably stretching for me to say that your scenario is in the minority. The fact is that we understand the basic method of evolution, but the exact circumstances are going to be broad and varied and no-one really can say what circumstances dominate.
Without even getting into the actual costs of adapting to the changed climate, a slow and measured move from inherently problematic energy sources (that also happen to contribute to the air pollution problem) to alternative sources (that also happen to not contribute to air pollution, though they each may have their own problems) is less costly than a rapid change when everyone panics because the end comes much faster than anyone expected and generates multiple was for control of those last resources (and, likely, also consumes more of them than are actually gained by victory). You can then tack on the reduced pressure for the adaptations required (as the change will likely still happen, just more slowly), which again reduces costs as the demand increases more slowly allowing supply to keep up.
Any way you look at it, the costs are lower to start making changes now, and major changes made now will have compounded impacts over the coming years.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
This doesn't logically follow. An open border does not guarantee migration will work nor does a closed border make it work. A closed border protecting you FROM migrating people's might well save you. Harsh, but reality is like that at times.
You seem to be missing the point. If you allow everyone into the lifeboat, no one lives. Survival frequently requires cruel things. So many people cry and white about what is fair and compassionate, but the truth is there is nothing in nature much that cares. Nature is a deer screaming in the woods while its eaten, alive. To believe in some fantasy where the world is any different from that is delusional.
Yes, when possible, we mitigate that harsh reality as much as we can, but don't criticize someone for pointing out where the limit is.
We take up food and space because we earned it by building an infrastructure to support ourselves. A lot of the rest of the world cannot because they breed uncontrollably and do little to sustain themselves.
American has many faults, not currently being over populated isn't one of them.
don't criticize someone for pointing out where the limit is
You mention compassion when possible. yet the original poster had none.
I'll point out he's an ass all day long and be perfectly justified.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If the adjacent environmental niche is different than the current environmental niche, then conditions local to the organism have changed. Only those organisms that *already* have adaptations that will survive in the different, adjacent niche, will survive there, so again, the capacity to survive in an environment must exist *before* the environmental conditions are imposed (by whatever means that may be) upon that organism.
Evolution, by its elegant characterization by Darwin, is an act of *pruning* and destruction, not one of directed or constructive post hoc adaptation. Calling them "beneficial" mutations is placing a value judgement that has no place in natural selection -> either the organism has mutations that will let it survive and procreate in local conditions, or it doesn't. If it doesn't *already* have the mutations necessary to survive and procreate in whatever local conditions it finds itself in, it is cruelly pruned from the genetic tree.
Believe me, I have no fantasies about evolution being a kind process or having an end goal. I have a major problem with your notion that the traits to adapt to new conditions always exist within the population already. Maybe one reason I have such a problem with this is that it's an argument heavily used by creationists. They use it to explain away examples of adaptation, essentially claiming that mutation never produces useful new traits but that all useful traits are already extant in the population.
In any case, if conditions change extremely suddenly and in such an extreme fashion that all members of a population that don't have the right adaptive trait die off right away, then the situation you posit is the only way evolution can occur. The changes that drive evolution, however, usually aren't quite that sudden or absolute. It is very hard to make an absolute statement about what actually happens more in nature, however. It does seem likely that most environmental changes driving evolution are going to happen over such a time period that numerous generations are going to occur.
Make no mistake, I'm not making a creationist argument :) Random genetic variation within a population is more than enough to host a bunch of completely "useless" traits *right now* that will become critical to survival *later*. Calling a trait "useful" or "useless" is again, a value judgement that evolution simply doesn't care about. Either a trait that already exists in an organism allows an organism to survive and procreate in given local conditions, or it doesn't - natural selection makes no judgement calls beyond that.
Now "gradual" evolution may only prune out a very small percentage of organisms in a given generation, rather than "extreme" evolution, where a large portion, if not a majority of organisms in a breeding group are pruned within a generation, but again, the trait *must be there* (due to whatever random mutations may exist within any given population) before it is selected for.
For example, if a small and gradual environment change simply increases the average mortality rate of a certain subset of organisms in a breeding population, it may indeed take generations upon generations to breed out that trait (especially if it's recessive in some fashion and doesn't necessarily get expressed). But from evolution's point of view, timescale doesn't matter. The same effect could be accomplished in one generation if that trait that was selected against couldn't make it to sexual maturity and pass on their genes.
And therein lies the rub, I suppose - I seem to get the impression that you believe there are two scenarios for evolution, that depend on timescale, and you consider the one that works on the longer timescale somehow "better" or more moral than the one that works on the shorter timescale. I take umbrage at that implication because it reeks of religious moralizing, which is an argument heavily used by creationists :)
In the end, evolution (or more properly, the origin of species - "evolution" can be a loaded term, assuming that we're always moving to "higher" life forms), is a combination of dumb luck environmental factors and random genetic mutation. It doesn't care if the environmental factor pruning an organism from the population is a kid with a bb-gun, a solar flare, a meteor impact, a local carnivore, or a microscopic virus - all of it (even the bb-gun) is simply part of natural selection.
The argument is silly. A little warming will not have the effect you seem to think. Quite contrary, a warmer earth is beneficial for most species. Higher temperatures have, historically, meant better life for plants and animals on this planet. If we prevent the next ice age (they are regular as clockwork) we will save billions of animals.
But ass or not... he is right that sometimes if you use compassion, you end up saving no one at all.
Sometimes life forces you to make tradeoffs, correct? If you are compassionate to the ones wanting into the lifeboat, and doing so kills everyone, was your compassion of any worth?
Just thinking out loud, I have no idea about the OP :)
Ultimately it looks like we're arguing a matter of perspective. I certainly don't consider any particular form of evolution in any way moral or immoral (leaving eugenics out of the debate since ethical considerations clearly apply there). I think part of the problem with our disconnect is that I am thinking of traits that arise from a mutation and spread to a subset of the population to be, at that point, evolved. In other words, if it hasn't been selected against, then it has essentially made it. It may die off out of the population again before it gets a chance to convey an advantage to its carriers, or some environmental change or migration to a new niche might occur and give it a chance to shine. The way you seem to be looking at it, you don't consider it evolution until something happens that causes outright speciation with the old population gone or at least geographically or otherwise environmentally isolated.
So, it looked to me like you were saying that, when whatever environmental change occurs, evolution occurs only when individual x exists who happens to have had a beneficial mutation. Rather, it seems what you're saying is that trait X exists among a subset of the population which stems from an individual who had a mutation that wasn't beneficial at the time, but wasn't harmful enough to prevent it spreading to numerous descendants. All we really seem to be disagreeing on is how sharp or fuzzy the line of natural selection is and where exactly it falls. Whether or not a moment of natural selection from existing phenotypic variation is also the moment you call evolution.
For example, if we have population A, with subset Ax, who have mutation-derived genetic trait X that's been passed down for generations and whose members can still freely interbreed with the rest of A (the mutation doesn't make offspring infertile, nor does it make members of Ax undesirable enough that breeding is unlikely), I would argue that Ax has already been naturally selected for. In other words, from my point of view we're past the bright line where trait X can be considered to have evolved. However, A clearly has not yet been naturally selected against and Ax is clearly not a new species yet, so the trait has evolved, but no speciating natural selection event has yet occurred. Then a big enviromental change may happen that kills off all local members of A and leaves Ax. At that point, I think we can both agree that evolution has taken place, and possibly speciation. The problem there is that speciation has only occurred if all members of A are either dead, or if the other members are now isolated from Ax again. If all members of A are dead, then Ax is a new species or is inevitably on its way to becoming one. If they're just isolated, then A and Ax might get back together and be one species again. It will probably take many more mutations before they're a completely separate species. Then there's the whole problem of where you draw the line. There are species like lions and tigers and donkeys and horses that are still close enough that interbreeding still works and the hybrids are sometimes even fertile. There are other species that are fully genetically compatible but that simply don't mate because they're natural enemies or because they're not physically compatible or because they consider members of the other species too wierd (completely alien mating dance, for example) or ugly to mate with.
Anyway, the more I think about this, the more I get overwhelmed by the possibilities. The whole thing is gigantic and chaotic. We understand the general process. We can look at the genetics of all kinds of things and get a pretty good idea of what went down, but we can't really be 100% sure about many of the specifics. We're probably both wrong and both right to a degree. I suppose we should just thank our lucky stars we're not creationists or Lamarckians or something like that.
Fun fact - Lamarck was actually right in certain circumstances (where in utero conditions, created by behavior of the mother, can affect the phenotype of the offspring - for example, women who consume lots of carbohydrates and have elevated blood sugar levels make their children more susceptible to insulin resistance, which leads to a generation who has even *worse* blood sugar levels during carbohydrate consumption, which will get even worse for *their* children in utero - you can see this effect in populations where the western carbohydrate heavy diet has been introduced, and each successive generation seems to be more obese and more diabetic at younger and younger ages).
I think I now understand your point of view - for you, mutation *is* evolution. For me, the origin of new species is evolution. And in regards to species, I find that the only real bright line we can use is "can these two organisms produce viable offspring" (and even that gets funky when viable offspring is only *occasional*), so for me, even vastly separated breeding populations, if they can actually produce viable offspring (even if "artificially" by some sort of intervention beyond normal mating patters), they're the same species. So if a mutation occurs that drops an organism out of the breeding pool (which, could theoretically occur twice in close succession, leading to a new breeding population), you could have de novo creation of a new species, but I'd argue that this kind of phenomenon is incredibly rare.
Put another way, I'd argue that a mutation is only evolution if it lets those organisms with that mutation out compete their peers - essentially creating a harsher environment for their peers that drives them out of the breeding pool. Random mutations that don't confer any survival advantage (however small) are just as likely to rewind as fast forward. Now, doesn't *have* to be about species, per se, you could simply imagine that there is a "micro evolution" with the competition of genetic sequences within a species, and while such genetic changes might not create an incompatible species, they will only propagate if they are not selected against in comparison to other alternate genetic sequences in the same location of the genome.
Anyway, thank you for the interesting conversation, and Happy new year!
I'm not terribly concerned about New York, but New Orleans shouldn't have been resettled after the hurricane...that place drew the short straw badly...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?