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Earth Approaching Tipping Point Say Scientists
Hugh Pickens writes "The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a prestigious group of 22 internationally known scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation. 'It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,' warns lead author Anthony Barnosky. 'The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.' The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. Humans have already converted about 43 percent of the ice-free land surface of the planet to uses like raising crops and livestock and building cities. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity. 'My view is that humanity is at a crossroads now, where we have to make an active choice,' says Barnosky. 'One choice is to acknowledge these issues and potential consequences and try to guide the future (in a way we want to). The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.'"
Posting as AC because I'll probably get modded flamebait or troll, especially with my hint of sarcasm...
Why should we worry about things like this? Aren't people generally in favor of letting nature do its thing? If humans are a product of nature, then whatever we do is natural. Any way the planet changes is a natural process toward a new equilibrium. Whatever happens to us because of our actions will cause (read: force) future generations to adapt to any changes we bring about --- and in this case, perhaps cause them to learn to be dependent on fewer resources. Don't we want to be dependent on fewer resources? The only thing we're doing is forcing that change to happen, instead of trying to let humanity voluntarily do it before this "tipping point" occurs.
This "tipping point" seems to simply be a change in how we are used to life. I am interested to know how the species will adapt to changes we bring about beyond the tipping point.
Watch out when you are propagandized like this
And your scientific evidence that this group of scientists are lying is where exactly? Because when you call their conclusions "propaganda", like Fox News, then you're accusing them of lying.
The Earth's load limit is 5 billion and we're over 7 billion already. There aren't enough resources to go around no matter how you divide it.
This is a call for sanity. We need to appreciate, accept, and design for the best and the worst that human beings are prone to and for. The genius of the American form of Government was checks and balances (before greedy self serving people removed them.) We need to understand that there are conflicting interests, belief systems and human enterprises and we need to account for them all.
There must be a sane position between human desire and human need. We need to find and develop that position. We need to evaluate our behavior and our beliefs against hard physical reality and abandon philosophies which are fundamentally bankrupt and ideologies which are inherently self destructive. We can't react our way out of this problem. We need to come together embracing our differences and honoring our distinctiveness. Together we must pick a target, an inspiring and achievable future that serves both the human condition, and the future condition for life on the planet. The problem is not and has never been about life. Life can't be stopped. Its about a world capable of sustaining complex higher lifeforms capable of intelligence. We are an apex species. Destroy the habitat and our numbers will collapse (its happened before, at one time the human population dwindled to less than 5,000.)
That said, we must not let the Plutarchs push the vast majority of humanity off the edge. There is clear indication that education is transformative. Bring knowledge to superstition, starvation, plague and famine, and life improves instantly. Where there is education the natural environment is seen as a value outside of its ability to be burned or eaten. Where there is education, there is social change, contraception, medicine, increased health and lifespan and decreased reproduction rate. We need to educate the developing world and we have amazing new tools to accomplish this. We need to remove the false gods and dangerous superstitions from our midst. Starting with Profit and Endless Material want. Its time to discover what is good for us as human beings and pursue that with passion and joy. It is time for us to honor the miracle of our world and protect it, because until we can leave it, it is the only home we know and we are unfit for any place else. It is time for us to appreciate the miracle of being human and put an end to strife and hatred, fear and war, xenophobia and discrimination.
This is a call for sanity.
Watch this, and stop hyperventilating.
sig: sauer
The coordinated effort which these genocidal loons want is the murder of billions of people and the return of the few survivors to Stone Age technology--they are Pol Pot on a planetary scale.
When we convert land to agriculture, don't we usually want it to stay that way? Sometimes I wonder if people appreciate just how harsh the natural environment is for people. I don't think it's reasonable to say we should kill half the population just to restore the environment to it's original condition (if that's even possible). Most people wouldn't want to live that way anyway. Rather, we need to be making decisions about how to deal with the environment change that we expect to occur.
Besides, who's to say if it's 50% or 90%? Since the earth is very large, I'd bet on 90%. Also, why are we excluding oceans and ice covered land from our equation?
Long story short, humans alter their environment. Deal with it.
Hmm... we can see it in historical record for past regional cultures - climatic patterns changed, threw off the food system, and collapse. Incan and Mayan civilizations had past their tipping points by the time they were "discovered". Smallpox and other things helped hastened the decline, if not of all the people, certainly of their civilizations.
Same for Easter Island. or Nauru, Anasazi, et al. Granted, those two were very small, contained physical locales, but both were mined out of their natural resources, which fucked the civilization/society on those islands.
To think that globally we may be special and not run into the same kinds of walls?
Friend you forget that the 99% envy the 1% and now folks who were living subsistence lives 20 years ago all looking more and more like those Americans. The problem is that even accounting for the idiocy of the 1%, we need to bring a higher quality of life, starting with education to the developing world so they can begin to mitigate their own birth rates with longer life spans, higher quality of life, and more stable governments.
We need to energize that one percent to invest in its own future by creating an explosion of sustainable technologies and new industries that serve life and living as opposed to undermining life for billions while enriching dozens. Its time to turn things on their heads. Its time to kill the sacred cows, and shatter the broken paradigms that have been shaping this slow motion catastrophe for the last 30 years. Its time to put an end to business as usual, and making the kinds of changes that will ultimately serve the future.
I don't think that is completely true. Science is like anything else, the conclusions you draw from the data and how much confidence you place in those conclusions are subjective. Science just allows you to be right about 20% of the time rather than 1% of the time.
The Universe may not care, but Fox News will report that it is patently not true because scientists have not had long enough time to study the effects of climate and pollution, so any "facts" produced by liberal (they would call it that, not me - I find it ironic because of who's talking) media and scientists are wrong. Heck, knowing the religious conservatives I know (like, say my brother, a card carrying member of the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity fan clubs), they would say it can't be true because God wouldn't let it happen.
I just don't fully believe either side in most of these arguments because most have an agenda. I loved it when the crazies panicked when Fukishima had what is essentially a relatively minor leak - I mean, people, we were blowing up islands with fusion devices 50-60 years ago, and obviously we all died from the fallout from that (sorry, forgot my sarcasm tag again). That disaster was a tiny fraction of the radiation released from those devices. Some of these nut jobs don't even realize granite is radioactive or that they need to consume a radioactive alkali metal to survive (Potassium).
Things are not always black and white. To say that there is little or no effect on climate by humans is just as absurd as claiming humans are totally responsible for climate change. I work in emergency management and can attest through personal experience that the amount and severity of natural disaster has increased over the past decade alone. Hurricanes have become more frequent and tornado activity has increased. Flooding and mudslides are occurring more often as well especially in built up areas where runoff from all the paving has nowhere to go. To see massive changes in a biosphere all one has to do is visit a surface mine operation. Although they attempt to restore the biosphere somewhat it never fully returns to its original state.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Hey, we're still here, aren't we?
There's this guy, he's jumped out of the 70th floor of a skyscraper. ..."
As he's dropping past the 40th floor, he's thinking "so far so good
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
"Science just allows you to be right about 20% of the time rather than 1% of the time."
Oh, really? Then you'll probably want to reconsider ever flying again. Or taking medicinal drugs. Or...
The whole idea of science is objectivity. Sheesh.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Maybe, but then again one may also not like the results of government trying to correct nature.
At least when nature corrects itself we can be sure it was really necessary and not purely for personal gain.
The positive feedback loop of a previously sequestered source of greenhouse gas causing yet more release of same.
The mass die off in the seas of the base of the food chain and the sudden follow on of all other species that depend no that food chain.
The outbreak of nuclear or biological war as a result of governments toppling under food and or water scarcity pressures.
The breakdown of civil order owing to the bankrupting of nearly all nations in a now-too-late, and ultimately futile effort to avert climate change. A tipping point is reached regarding the human acceptance of climate change and all it entails, including any and all of the above. Just as in the stock market, the full event doesn't even have to happen before the force of the disaster is felt - that happens as soon as a tipping-point consensus understanding of what is inevitable takes hold amongst observers.
It's not too late now, or at least , it's not certain it's too late now.
By the time the symptoms become indisputable, then.. then it will really be too late.
The Princeton Stabilization Wedges concept. An idea we can all benefit from, however you feel today about the certainty of climate change:
http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/
The relativity of wrong - Asimov
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Except that the bottom 90% are having 2x as many babies as the rest.
We could all be forced to "share", and in the end, the breeders will still ruin everything.
Unless of course, the same benevolent dictator that "shares" our property back to us also dictates who has kids and when.
Your "solution" doesn't sound all that appealing to me.
THL phish sticks
And how is declaring "engineering solutions will be found" not just simply passing the buck to the future?
Well, of course, it has to be in the future, because we've so resolutely refused to solve the problems in the past. ;-)
But various others have pointed out that the "engineering solutions" may not be very far in the future, if we want to implement them. One of the consequences of the accumulated evidence that the recent climate changes are primarily due to human activity is that we know that we're capable of pushing the world' climate around, and we know how we've been doing it. So from an engineering viewpoint, pushing it in a different direction (e.g., stability or slower change) is within our capabilities. Granted, the "Further Research is Needed" mantra applies, but we know enough to take effective action now if we want to.
The major questions aren't scientific or technical; they're economic, political and religious. That is, it doesn't do much good to convince the engineers that there's a problem that they can fix. They already know about it (and are looking for funding ;-). We also have to get the go-ahead from the leaders of our governments and major corporations.
The outlook isn't necessarily good. We do have documentation about various major disasters throughout human history, including many that were caused by humans who understood that they were causing a disaster. History says that humans often don't act on such knowledge, even when their society is collapsing around them.
We saw a good small-scale example of this back in 2005. Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the US Government ran a simulation study of such events. Google "Hurricane Pam" to read all about it. Katrina was pretty similar to Pam. The US Army Corps of Engineers produced a thorough report on the physical infrastructure of the Mississippi Delta, which listed all the places where the levees would later break during Katrina, plus estimates of the maintenance required to fix the problems. Congress turned down the applications for funding. Everyone involved knew that it was just a matter of time until the disaster hit, but the government didn't fund the maintenance, and the disaster followed the engineers' prediction practically to the letter.
This is a local example of the sort of disasters that our political systems have historically perpetrated with full knowledge beforehand. It looks like the climate-change story is a repeat performance. Some of the scientists involved decided to try to publicise it a couple of decades back, on the grounds that it was a growing problem that we could probably fix if we want to. But history says that we probably won't do anything about it, although we know how to.
(If you want a bigger example, look up the history of ozone depletion. That's actually a fairly good example of partial success. The depletion is known to be almost entirely due to chemical compounds added to the atmosphere by human activity. Our dumping of those compounds has been radically decreased, and the depletion has nearly leveled off, though it hasn't been reversed. But it is an interesting example of human governments cooperating on a global level to deal with a global problem. So there's some hope. We don't always fail when facing such large-scale problems. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Just 22?
We can safely ignore them then.
I mean, if 22 prestigious non-AGW scientists made such a bold statement, it would not even be reported.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Look up what "propaganda" means. It doesn't (necessarily) mean lying. It can also just mean focusing on one aspect of reality, while conveniently leaving out others.
And yes, it DOES matter how you "divide". And yes, there ARE more resources than needed to feed, clothe and shelter every human being on the planet. It's just that food gets destroyed to keep subsidized food prices high. It's just that banks speculate with this stuff, and so on. But the amount of things we have are NOT the problem.
If two people have food, and person B takes the food of person A away, person B doesn't have twice as much prosperity: person A and B end up with nothing. It's not a zero sum game.
More importantly,
-- George Orwell
That is the stuff that's actually happening. The leeching of money and resources from the general public, and crystallizing it at the top in pointless structures, isn't only still going on, it's speeding up. Remember when banks fucked over everyone, and got paid for that? Try to pay some attention, seriously.
You and others are toys, fools, and you're being had; only your pride keeps you from seeing that and getting over it. It's abuse 101 really. Take someone's dignity, give them fake dignity, and they'll cling to that and WANT to believe it's the real thing. I'm really sorry, but this is about someone with no legs thinking they still got legs, and being a drain on everybody who tries to help; and if we keep this up, our arms will be gone, too.... yeah, let's just stop pretending we're the Black Knight, shall we. Because that's not badass or cool, it's just dumb. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on all of us.
Except that the bottom 90% are having 2x as many babies as the rest.
It has been demonstrated time and again that education decreases birth rate, partly by decreasing religious membership, as the people who are breeding the fastest in particular are overwhelmingly members of a religion that tells them to be fruitful and multiply... but partly because people understand the consequences of their actions. And yet, in THIS country we are systematically dismantling education at the behest of the upper class, who writes our laws and makes our decisions. Neither educators nor parents wanted NCLB but here it is, fucking us up.
If you really think that your fascist overlords who want to deny us health care etc have our best interests in mind, you're a tool and a half.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ignoring them? We very successfully mitigated the acid rain problem, water pollution problems and dioxine pollution problems of the 70s and 80s. In my youth, forests were full of dead trees and swimming in large rivers was a big no-no. Nowadays forests are back to being green and nearly all surface water is ok to swim in again.
In the mean time China is rather successfully countering the growth of its population, Germany recently ran a full day on 50% solar power, other countries are producing their energy by durable means with an ever increasing pace, water desalination is slowly replacing natural sources, cars are getting more efficient every day, recycling is quickly becoming a profitable industry and in some countries forested area is actually increasing.
We're slowly but steadily steering to towards the right path, partially because it is economically sound, partially by not ignoring scientific predictions of apocalyptic scenarios. If we successfully counteract the massive deforestation going on in rainforests, there's actually a chance of humanity getting on a sustainable track before it really is too late.
0x or or snor perron?!