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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.'"
Just coincidence? I think not...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm sure we're going to pick Choice B, "throw up our hands and say, 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.'" Choice A would require some serious coordinated effort from all the world's industrialized nations, and there's absolutely no way that's ever going to happen.
No really, it really IS reaching a tipping point, no matter what your energy company overlords are saying. The problem is the denier class didn't take chemistry and physics in high school and they know nothing of how peer-reviewed science works. And I say that as a general contractor that did get some science education well after high school, while the deniers were at Bible study.
Good time to cancel the special parking permits for Nobel Prize winners
* http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/10/04/new-nobel-winner-gets-real-prize-a-special-parking-permit/
* http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274
"Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter joked that the “only reason to win a Nobel Prize” was to receive the famous Nobel laureate (NL) parking permit, reserved for laureates on the Berkeley campus."
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
How greedy must a religion be to try to breed more members by banning birth control when we have soaring population growth? Makes me think that the leaders of churches banning birth control or some of the most morally corrupt people on the planet for all the unwanted births they have caused.
Thanks for the broad sweeping generalizations, it was highly informative.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Indeed. You first :)
I'm unclear what your accusation means. If I retrain myself from beating you to death with a baseball bat, does that represent a denial of evolution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Good luck with that. Humans will continue plodding along exactly the same as they always have, until they start dying off suddenly once the reserve is gone and some minor catastrophe or other strikes that is just too much to deal with, pushing everyone over the edge. After all that's how disease happens. You're fine until the day you're not. This will happen because everyone thinks it's someone else's problem. Witness people - not even only lower class uneducated peasants but middle class supposedly educated people - gladly boasting of having 5 or more kids even today. Now consider the undevelopped world parts of which are still growing at rates like 6% (which means doubling in size every 12 years). I'd say a few generations is too generous.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hey, we're still here, aren't we?
Apocalyptic visions of the future seems to be a human pastime. Ignoring them seems to be the other human pastime.
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.
evolutionist's what?
Apostrophes are not for plurals, even when you're talking about evolutionists.
Next news: there are no more patentable ideas.
The report cites "explosive population growth" [citation needed] and "rapid temperature increases" [citation needed].
While I'll agree that there is a lot of harmful stuff that humans do to the environment, I don't agree with this whole "tipping point", panic now, panic often, "the sky really IS falling this time!" message. It doesn't help.
Because people listen to that hyperbole and then find out the population growth isn't "explosive" and the temperature rise isn't "rapid" and that invalidates the whole message.
Do they really think they can still sell their "Oh God! Panic now!" message?
Everything will correct itself. Once things get real bad, there will be large scale fighting which will kill off a fairly significant number of people which should bring us to the balance needed. Nature is self-correcting after all.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Perhaps they do and are trying to delay our species' "adapt or die" phase.
Blank until
We don't believe in evoltution. Your phrase implies a faith that is not necessary. We merely understand evolution. For example, we understand that evolution is a biological mechanism, not an all encompassing silver bullet that guarantees survival of the human race regardless of the behavior of the planets inhabitants on a global scale. It is called an ecosystem for a reason, which leads to a need to understand entropy. Note that you don't need to believe in entropy. It is going to happen even if you become best friends with the flying spaghetti monster. The question is, can we dynamically counteract it. Some of us believe we can, and so it matters how we behave. Others don't believe it is necessary to change our behavior as a species, and will keep ignoring any evidence that is contradictory to their comfortable world view.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Someone has been reading too much Science Fiction and not enough History.
What other country besides the PRC could successfully implement a one-child policy? (Even then, it's fertility rate is 1.7.)
Huge-scale genocide or pandemic are the only solutions to getting the population down to a more manageable 4Bn.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to find life in the universe. Most of them burn themselves out.
-
Obviously the apostrophe was a mutation.
It has been said many times before.
"What if we were wrong about all of this science? We will have built a better Earth for nothing!!"
We are approaching peak Human. See:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html
Peak Human doesn't address the damage done to the ecosystem though.
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.
"Instant access to this article: $32" I'd say were doomed.
Since there are a slew of climate scientists who claim the IPCC is making many absurd claims, you come off as the real denier for cherry-picking who you pay attention to. You just can't stand being wrong so you've doubled down on your cultism.
You are ignoring the work of REAL scientists, not those backed by governments that stand to gain hugely by the changes they wish to force upon us.
Sorry pal, but the world has woken up to the massive scam you nearly succeeding in pulling over on the world - now the earth will go on just as it did, in some centuries warmer, in some cooler. But 20 years hence when there's not a problem to be found YOU and your puppeteers will not be able to claim credit for it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD-yN2G5BY0
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.
I did not need to be told that altering an area by 90% will change it's ecosystem into something different. Changing anything by 90% usually ends up with something completely different... 50-90% seems close to shoot from the hip science to me anyways...
"Humans have already converted about 43 percent of the ice-free land surface of the planet"
So if we have global warming that will free up more land from the ice reducing the percentage making Global Warming a good thing... Hmmm. Okay.
But seriously folks, to give a historical example, here in Vermont and New Hampshire almost all the forests had been cut back in the 1700's and 1800's to make land for agriculture. Then due to the mini-ice age of the 1800's people left this area and the farms grew up to be forests again. This is real. Nature recovers the land if you don't keep it as grass lands. The beavers know all about this.
So... we've altered 43% of the land mass.. and catastrophic things happen *somewhere* between 50-90%... So either in like 10 years the world will fall apart, or it won't because it turns out that the number is much closer to 90% than 50%...
It would be nice if these "scientists" could you know.. provide some accurate data upon which to make their oh so important decision. Last time I looked that was their job, not making sensationalist claims with little to know proof or evidence.
He means we'll all be okay in the end because we'll evolve. As a species, that's almost certainly true. But I wouldn't want to have been around during the time of the major extinctions, even though we all did get through it as a group. The individuals who were there went through hell. George Carlin said it best: "The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!"
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm making the humanitarian sacrifice and choosing not to mate... yeah, choosing, that's it.
For anyone who's been keeping up with the literature, whether it's rainfall patterns on the major climate zone boundaries, the reaction of wildlife to their environment, acidification of oceans, and polar conditions, it's obvious major change is already underway. That this occurs after a couple centuries of man-made increases in atmospheric CO2 isn't likely to be coincidence.
It's known that we could moderate and reduce said concentrations without sending everyone back to the farm. But, most of the practical methods absolutely will result in a short term income cut for most of the US top 0.1%. Virtually nobody likes a cut in income, the top 0.1% has ready access to the levers of political power and astroturf propaganda PR, so the US has sat on its collective ass. Until the US commits to act, China and India won't.
The parent post is a very common example of the result, someone who at least claims to think that this is all a plot to take most of your stuff and give it to someone else. The funny thing is that as recently as four years ago, pretty much everyone in the GOP leadership agreed we needed to get off our asses and implement some of the solutions. But, after the crash of '08 wiped out about a third of the 0.1%ers net worth, they're not in the mood anymore, and with the ongoing joblessness, their mood is an easy sell.
So, I think it's getting to be time to admit we're just going to have to cope. You and me, able to sit at a computer to hash this out, we'll manage. The current generation in places like Bangladesh and large swaths of India, China, and southern Africa... they're going to get screwed. Our kids, they're going to get screwed. Their kids? They're going to get really screwed.
Us? We've got a demonstrated tendency to discount future hardship. Like the demotivational poster says: Procrastination: hard work pays off over time, laziness pays off now.
We can fight over the resources, the losers will die, and humanity moves on.
Nature has no mercy and humans won't either under pressure. Some of the group die, the species lives on.
There is realistically nothing to be done about this except insist ones preferred group be ready to compete.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
... when its a sphere?
No other solution.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Albert Bartlett's anaysis is miguided because he ignores that while problems can grow exponentially, so can solutions, especially when you have a lot of people to think them up and implement them. Julian Simon's take on things in "[The human imagination as] The Ultimate Resource" was much better in that regard. That's one reason aluminum used to cost more than gold, but now it is so cheap we throw it away. Soon we will have dirt-cheap solar panels and maybe even hot and cold fusion power, all thanks to all those "too many" people using too much stuff that people like Bartlett or William Catton might just as soon be rid of because they use resources and make places crowded, ignoring that people also produce resources and make places worth being in. Same for robotics, 3D printing, and someday self-replicating space habitats. The solar system may have limits to growth, but we are nowhere near them. Carrying capacity is a function of both lifestyle and technology, both of which are affected by imagination.
The main problem humanity faces right now is more the other direction -- highly educated and affluent people tend to stop breeding; you can see that in the demographics. Having so many modern distractions just makes the Peak Population crisis problem worse due to "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli". Contributing to that is also a scarcity mythology, made very dangerous because people will then ironically fight over perceived scarcity with the technologies of abundance like nuclear power, rocket ships, robotics, and nanotechnology...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Is the amount of altered land mass even 4.3%?
Asking people to stop destroying the planet is like asking rabbits to stop fucking and making new bunnies.
The problem is that there are no "smart solutions" on the horizon to the energy problem, to the global warming problem or to the biodiversity problem. We are also running out of most finite natural resources, and we have no viable replacement options. You can dream all you want about thorium reactors, fusion power plants or asteroid mining, but none of these will be a realistic option for the next two or three generations that are a topic of the article.
The parallels with the English industrial revolution ignore the worldwide plundering that has gone on since then and has brought the world to where we are now. Also, the fact that there is not much left to plunder.
However, we will be needing a few more million to study this further.
Got Code?
"We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.” G. Carlin
These guys are the science equivilent of that sad end of days christian cult. If the world is really near it's tipping point then we're screwed because nothing is changing that fast.
Can we return to environmentalism devoid of the stupid scare tactics? Tell us to save the rain forest or the whales... we liked those campaigns and there is actually something we can do about it. But tell us to stop emitting CO2?
*holds breath*
*turns blue*
*starts panicking*
*passes out and hits the floor.*
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Will it be precipitous?
Considering that the only really constructive solutions OTHER than " 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.'" are essentially genocidal and/or totalitarian, I'm going to go with 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.'
Simply put, the only REAL solution to the overwhelming number of people on this planet is to remove great chunks of them (and prevent people from re-breeding to those levels) or a society in which we're all "have-nots" living at some government-decreed minimum functional level (Soylent Green is the tastiest, I understand), everything else is really just twiddling at the edges.
The alternatives are to find some way of making it NOT a zero sum game (ie space exploration, which our governments have decreed is not worth the opportunity cost of making sure SueAnn and her 14 kids all are fed and cared for), or 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.'.
-Styopa
It's mankind. The Earth couldn't care less.
Probably panicked that their pot crop didn't come in on time this year.
Have gnu, will travel.
As far as mother nature is concerned, business as usual is business as usual. We're the first species with enough hubris to think there's any other way to do it. A worthy experiment? Perhaps. There's a first time for everything, followed by chagrin and retrenchment.
Who cares, the world will end in December anyway LOL.
This reminds me of http://www.theonion.com/articles/nations-leading-alarmists-excited-about-bird-flu,1283/
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/
No wait....I meant to say Absynthe..... Seriously, so what are we all just supposed to chill off with the reproducing until the population dies off a bit? HEY!!! EVERYONE ON EARTH!!! PLEASE KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS FOR 20 OR 30 YEARS!! KTHANXBYE!!! Love, The Scientists
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.
That lack of change is normal, desirable, or even possible.
Since they start with these proven untrue postulates, the whole thing is a worthless mental exercise in what things might be if things weren't as they are.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
we're also nearing the tipping point of virtually limitless, self-sustaining fusion energy. Long story short, the world's energy grid would basically run on magic and we'd have electric transportation that operates at the cost it takes to maintain the system only, as any matter would suffice to create energy. Then there would be a market for bulk mass so there goes our trash problems. And poverty would be ended with unlimited free energy alone. So yeah, I think we're nearing that tipping point too.
"The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, 'Let's just go on as usual and see what happens."
We're doomed. Congress won't even be able to agree upon whether or not to throw up one hand or both...
Who's to say we haven't already reached it, especially taking into account civilization's inability to stop its destructive behaviors?
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
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
Ah yes, because the species from previous major extinction events managed to pull through. Oh wait, no they didn't - last time those tiny shrewlike things somehow managed to take over and became all sorts of hairy milk-producing monstrosities, mammals I think they're called.
Our ingenuity would probably allow some of us to survive a minor extinction event, provided the atmosphere remained breathable. On the other hand a major extinction event could alter atmospheric chemistry to the point that we couldn't breathe it, there's some evidence that it may have happened before with massive hydrogen sulfide accumulation from a change in the ocean biosphere - mammals suffer brain damage and revert to a psuedo-reptilian state, saurians and othersmay not have been so lucky. Vaults might keep us alive for a brief while, but even a few centuries of an inhospitable atmosphere could be enough to put our survival in jeapordy, a long-term shift in atmosphere
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
To illustrate the low intellectual frame of mind that starts your message, I need to point out your title. Someone, somewhere did not educate you in the usage of the apostrophe.
"An apostrophe does not mean 'uh-oh, here comes an s.'" - Dave Barry as "Mr Grammar Person"
And I highly recommend buying this poster to hang on your wall, so you don't ever forget: http://angryflower.com/aposter.html
Similarly, someone, somewhere, did not educate you in the scientific concepts like the scientific method, what a theory is, what a hypothesis is, what evidence is, etc., and I am being kind here. I could accuse you of being a lay-about all through school not paying one whit of attention to what was being taught because you were smoking dope or something.
Now to get to your actual question: It is without merit and assumes that "evolutionists" (there is no such thing - evolution is not a system of belief) "believe" in evolution as a matter of faith. This is pure unadulterated nonsense. Before Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, thinking people understood that "change over time," i.e., evolution happens. Lamarck was one of them, but while his was one of the first self-consistent theories of evolution and set the tone for future research, it had major problems. What was ground breaking about Darwin's book was that he wrote down what the more sensible method by which Nature does it and had hundreds of pages of observational notes and logical argument to back it up. He did this by going out and observing how the world actually works instead of sitting on his arse and pontificating like Aristotle, who while a smart guy in many respects, was laughably wrong in others.
And to this day, the evidence points in the direction of evolution as fact and away from bronze-age mythology ever more so. While people may debate the finer points (punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism) the overall fact of evolution gets more understood every day.
Now if you are unwilling to buy into the fact of evolution and wish to call it nonsense, I demand that you put up or shut up and present your case as to why you think you have a better idea for how the universe works. If you do have indeed a better case, the next Nobel prize and lots of cash and fame is yours and someone might name a city after you. If you do not, we can ridicule you mercilessly.
Do you feel lucky, punk? Well do ya?
So present your case.
--
BMO
Meh...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
You wouldn't be from North Carolina, would you?
A few did, but at a cost that makes it prohibitive to repeat.
I realized that we are the f*cking universe.
Try looking up on a clear night. Those points on light you see are stars - there are several billion in our galaxy alone but most are too faint for the naked eye to see. Some of the fuzzy blobs that you'll see if you know where to look are distant galaxies, so far away that when the light you are seeing from them set out human beings had not yet evolved. There are billions of galaxies out there almost all of which are invisible to the naked eye.
...and all this is just the stuff that we know about.
All of that just makes up the luminous matter of the universe which is just over 1% of the whole universe. There is about 3 times more matter which is not glowing and which forms dust and gas clouds to make a total of just under 5% of the universe made up of the same basic stuff as you or I. However there is about 23% of the universe made up of something called Dark Matter which does not contain atoms or even the constituents of atoms and the remaining 72% is made up of dark energy which is the energy in a vacuum when you have removed everything from it.
So no, we are not the universe, sorry.
It seems? How does it seem? There are no working thorium reactors in the wild that can recover their costs of operation. And no, I don't know how this "cloning" thing is going to help with biodiversity. Species are disappearing at the rate of tens a day. What cloning facility has the capacity to successfully clone tens of a animals a day?
to be us.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
We're not running out of natural resources any time soon... We have hundreds of years of fossil fuel supplies left, and more are discovered all the time (along with new ways of getting more out of the ones we have).
Our problem with $4 a gallon gas is one of supply and demand, but the supply problem is that we don't have enough production capacity to produce enough oil for it to be cheap (and there's no incentive for oil companies to make gas cheaper... why spend more money to make fewer profits?)
It's like Commercial Open Source like Red Hat or Cononical. There's no profit in making bug-free software that's easy to use. There would be no reason for companies to purchase training and support contracts. You think Canonical keeps fucking things up by accident? Hardly.
In any event, this doom and gloom is pointless. We're not at an "irreversible tipping point". If we can "accidentally" fuck up the earth within a few decades, we can certainly fix it if we are actually trying.
If we wanted to invest the money, we could have safe fusion power within a decade. But we don't invest the money. If we wanted to invest the money, we could have colonies on mars, and terraforming it within a generation. But we don't want to invest the money.
We're only at a "tipping point" if we assume that we won't do anything to change our behavior, ever. And I don't see that as likely.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
We have plenty of space. We are not at our tipping point. We are simply spending resources like a drunk sailor. Think for a moment about the amount of resources that is being spent in self destruction. Frivolous things like alchohol, candy (especially candy), and junk food. A detriment to our health in every single way. The amount of resources poured into research, physical items, shipping, consumption and then hospital visits. It is a huge waste, a tremendous waste even. What about all the damn toys? Plastic crap that breaks for nothing, being shipped over from another continent most often, simply because kids are bored. Sure kids should have something to play with, but the amount of toys that are being sold and wasted it ridiculous. Look around you. What items do you have in your own home that is wasteful? I got more pens that I certainly need and notepads I'd probably never use, and that is just looking at my desk. Could go into length about all the bad food I have eaten before, creating skin problems (eczema) and thus I needed medical supplies of various kinds. I corrected my eating habits, and my problems went away. I eat less with my new eating habits. I'm consuming less and producing less waste. Do you really care? If you care about this you will take the time to really figure out how you can be more efficient. Do you buy more than needed? Are you wasting your own resources (time and money)? Do you buy silly toys for your children, family in general that is rarely or never used? I don't want you to restrict yourself to nothing. The only thing I want is to engage your mind. Think about the steps involved, necessary, for creating that little thing you buy that is frivolous and not necessary at all. If you want to change the world you need to start with yourself. Does not have to be in a douchebag, "I am holier than thou" kind of way, but simply changing your own set up.
Rome was not built in a day (I know, I hate clichès, that one especially) and the same goes for changing the world. I can argue for the "be a part of the solution, not the problem", but I don't need nor want to judge anyone. I will do what I feel is morally correct, yeah, I'm that guy. Even if you have read through my rant and feel it is all BS, just remember one little thing; Doing nothing is definitly not the solution (if you want to do anything about it though).
"new ways to reach natural resources. The beauty of the future is that it does not have to be restricted based on our current technological inabilities."
When planning on population sustainability, you may only look at what we can extract *right now* since future tech is uncertain and may never ever come actually. Imagine this : people in the 50th saying, "well in 4 to 5 decade we will have fusion, so let us binge on oil" well they would have been wrong we are not within month of having a stable fusion reactor.
Secondely, sure we can sustain 14 billiuon people.... If all live in crass misery with next to no amenities. Or if all eat gruel and we forgoe all other type of food. And if we all decide to distribute generously the food equaly among us. Firstly that is utopic, secondely that is not what I would call living. Goal among us is rather to strive to have the maximum number of people live HIGH standard, not subsistance standard, and that is impossible with 7 billion people, not even 14 billion or so, which is IIRC the prediction of population in a few decade if we continue on our growth (population prediction HIGH). No. The only way for a high standard is to have the whole earth population go the same way as first world nation : go down in a few decades (population prediction LOW).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Natural resources" is not the same thing as fossil fuels. We are running out of more stuff than just fossil fuels - metals, minerals, farmland and, not in the last place, wilderness.
In any event, this doom and gloom is pointless. We're not at an "irreversible tipping point". If we can "accidentally" fuck up the earth within a few decades, we can certainly fix it if we are actually trying.
Really? What makes you think so? What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago? To the deforestation of Europe? To the desertification of many places in the world today? To the thousands of species of plants and animals that become extinct every yeaer? We have not fixed anything, we have, in some small circumstances, begun destroying less, but that has made practically no change in the general trend.
If we wanted to invest the money, we could have colonies on mars, and terraforming it within a generation. But we don't want to invest the money.
Wishful thinking. We don't have anything that would allow us to even approach the question of terraforming. Asking for "investing" is fine, how about a back-of-the envelope calculation of what kind of money are we talking about?
We're only at a "tipping point" if we assume that we won't do anything to change our behavior, ever. And I don't see that as likely.
We're at a tipping point, because very soon there won't be enough biosphere left for it to be able to sustain itself, and us. Once most wildlife is gone because we eat up its habitat to build, farm, produce natural gas, grow biofuel or whatever, it isn't coming back. And there is no indication that we're about to change our behaviour as a species. We will eat until we drown in our own excrement.
This link will show why...http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population-lived-in-one-city/
1) Building human arcologies, self contained cities that do not interact with the environment. We _EASILY_ have the technology to do this.
Biosphere 2 cost several million dollars, barely supported a half-dozen people for a couple of years, and failed due to the death of all the pollinating insects and rising CO2 levels.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The fundamental problem is the fraudulent monetary system. This was not mentioned in your populist political screed even once.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Then there can be little doubt the mutation was in any way beneficial after some as yet unknown cataclysmic apostrophe.
The Admin and the Engineer
We're not at an "irreversible tipping point". If we can "accidentally" fuck up the earth within a few decades, we can certainly fix it if we are actually trying.
A very smart man once said that you cannot solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
We have peak population of around 10 billion
You should be old enough to know that this number is revised upwards every decade or so.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The medieval warming period was quite localized, with some areas getting hotter and some getting colder. When that is taken into account, the earth has been warmer than that since the middle of the 20th century. This also means that weather patterns are different in the two scenarios (medieval warm period vs. global warming), with different precipitation levels. The analysis of global food production is a bit more complex then just comparing average temperatures.
When it is described as that it removes all obligation of those making the declaration from having to be right.
As in, they won't be around to admit they were wrong. Sounds like typical consultant work.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I don't get this argument. Let's trace the steps ...
1) global warming ... warms the planet
2) it has warmed before
3) profit ! (or we profited back then)
4) but this warming will be bad because it is different
Is that the argument ? Because what grounds do you have ? I mean sure there's uncertainty about what's going to happen, but when you down that path, why wouldn't you have uncertainty about global warming not suddenly reversing for a long time ? Plenty of ways that could happen, right, like the asteroid, or simply slightly reduced solar output (a ~1% drop in solar output would more than cancel out global warming, and solar output varies by up to 4% without any identifiable reason, and we know the sun has had long periods of reduced and increased activity). Or nuclear war. Or ...
It is certainly true that most places would become easier to live in if average temperature would go up (and before you say it, the most common cause of desertification is cooling, which results in the inability of the air above the desert to transport water vapour, resulting in no rain, resulting in what you see on the ground. It does seem that the warming of the last 30 years has partially reversed the advance of the sahara for example. Or at least ... something did)
Is Bloggers!!!!!!
Climate change can do the same thing for an economy as a war. It was WW2 that brought the US economy back from the great depression, because people had stuff to make, stuff to rebuild. Same thing for a changing climate. Construction business will boom. New levees to build, new houses to build away from the coasts, repairing flooded and hurricaned areas and so on. Preventing the change is very unlikely, but adaptation will be the new priority. It won't be based on predictions, just adapting to what already happened. Just let mother nature run its course and deal with it.
Dear Scientists: The earth is changing. Get over it. Study it, and have fun doing so. Your recommendations however, are just ego driven and likely wrong. We know you smart and all, but really, not as much as you think.
Dear Everyone Else: If you really think we have sufficient engineering and scientific knowledge to keep the planet from changing, to bend it to our will, then you are hopelessly stupid. Get back to your partying, soaps, reality TV, or whatever. Or get a bit of an education so that you understand what a crock of BS the well meaning, self-infatuated scientists are feeding you.
The climate change debate is simply an ego driven load of claptrap promoted by selfish, opportunistic business and political motives. When nature ceases to surprise scientists, then perhaps their pronouncements will be credible. Until then, all they have are educated guesses.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It astounds me that you are typing such drivel on an object that is in itself an obvious example of why that energy cost bullshit hasn't been true for many decades. Some time back mass production of large silicon wafers happened and both the computer you are using and cheaper (due to requiring far less energy and materials to manufacture) photovoltaic cells were a spinoff.
'Renowned' scientists and worry-prone smart people have been railing and ranting about imminent earthly catastrophe for a very long time. Without exception, they have never been correct. The problem is that the Earth, as a system, is far too complex for our current crude modeling and understanding to be used to forecast anything correctly about. Those 22 scientists don't have any idea of what really will happen to the Earth in 5 years, 100 years, or 500 years, and for them to claim some sort of insight to use as a warning is misleading at best and a damnable lie at worst. In the end, all they really have are worries about disastrous possibilities. That's fine for debate and discussion but it is not anything that should ever be used to make any plans for the future or to guide politicians. As an example, 50 years ago worry-prone smart people were predicting that the Earth would run out of fossil fuels completely within 30 years, that 'overpopulation' would lead to widespread famine, that epidemics of deadly viral disease would sweep the population, that the Earth was headed toward a new ice age, that nuclear power would lead to inexpensive energy, that pollution of air and water would make large portions of the planet uninhabitable, etc. Forecasters of the future, even if they are worry-prone smart guys, should be approached with caution.
This week's Chicken Little announcement.
Back in the 1970s we had estimates that we'd all have run out of food long before the world got to the population it has now. If things had continued the same way since then they would have been correct - but Mao died, giving China a chance to halt it's decline, as well as a lot of improvements elsewhere.
Of course there are limits, but it's not only hard to determine what they are but also hard to determine what may change them. For instance in the UK more than half the rural land is used for grazing. While a lot of that wouldn't be suitable for anything else a lot of it could feed a lot more people if used for crops.
We might not run out of resources for a long time but it's likely we won't be able to expect to eat much beef or whatever other changes are needed in the next few decades.
And its repeated every few years
Overpopulation alarmism is just that - alarmism.
Some countries - such as Japan - are already facing population aging and decline, which
is bad for their economy. Other countries already have sub-replacement fertility rates,
and only keep marginal population growth because of demographic lag and immigration.
Even in the countries that still have over-replacement fertility rates, such rates are declining
fast. Mankind is predicted to increase only 2B until 2045, and then start declining.
Meanwhile, saying "Humans will continue plodding along exactly the same as they always have"
is insane. Ecological problems are already being addressed, with heavy investment in solar/wind
energy, biofuels, next-generation nuclear, emission regulations, and more. It is predicted that
photovoltaic energy will start to become economic viable _without subsidies_ by 2015. Meanwhile,
Photovoltaic production growth has averaged 40% (thus doubling every two years) per year since 2000.
Agricultural yields continue to grow fast, thus being easily able to feed a growing population without need
for additional deforestation. For example, Brazilian ethanol productivity (per hectare)has grown at a rate
of 3.77% per year between 1975 and 2004, thus doubling every 19 years.
I always find it troublesome when these types of articles post on Slashdot. It is a best guess (for varying values of best) at what could happen, if things continue at a certain rate, without major improvements/changes elsewhere. Science has been been painting bleak pictures of the future for as long as we've been effectively paying attention to science (and likely well before that as well).
To be clear, I'm a big fan of the scientific method and all that it entails, but the whole "Oh no! We're all going to die!" type of crap is just sensationalist. It's great that it may help wake a few more people up that things need to be reigned in, and advancements must be made, but to completely ignore the capabilities of man (and nature) to invent and adapt is as short-sighted as continuing blindly on our current path.
Blind worship of a deity is stupid. Blindly following anything you read/see simply because it's "science" isn't much brighter. We have brains capable of complex thought, let's say we use them a little, eh?
Just another ignorant American.
Overpopulation alarmism is just that - alarmism.
Some countries - such as Japan - are already facing population aging and decline, which
is bad for their economy. Other countries - such as most of Europe - already have
sub-replacement fertility rates, and only keep marginal population growth because of
demographic lag and immigration.
Even in the countries that still have over-replacement fertility rates, such rates are declining
fast. Mankind is predicted to increase only 2B until 2045, and then start declining.
Meanwhile, saying "Humans will continue plodding along exactly the same as they always have"
is insane. Ecological problems are already being addressed, with heavy investment in solar/wind
energy, biofuels, next-generation nuclear, emission regulations, and more. It is predicted that
photovoltaic energy will start to become economic viable _without subsidies_ by 2015. Meanwhile,
Photovoltaic production growth has averaged 40% (thus doubling every two years) per year since 2000.
Agricultural yields continue to grow fast, thus being easily able to feed a growing population without need
for additional deforestation. For example, Brazilian ethanol productivity (per hectare)has grown at a rate
of 3.77% per year between 1975 and 2004, thus doubling every 19 years. And there is revolutionary
technology in the queue - cellulosic ethanol, algae-based ethanol.
I guess it's about time to move out of the Earth.
Overpopulation alarmism is just that - alarmism.
Some countries - such as Japan - are already facing population aging and decline, which
is bad for their economy. Other countries - such as most of Europe - already have
sub-replacement fertility rates, and only keep marginal population growth because of
demographic lag and immigration.
Even in the countries that still have over-replacement fertility rates, such rates are declining
fast. Mankind is predicted to increase only 2B until 2045, and then start declining.
Meanwhile, saying that nothing good is being done to the environment is insane.
Ecological problems are already being addressed, with heavy investment in solar/wind
energy, biofuels, next-generation nuclear, emission regulations, and more. Photovoltaic power
is getting cheaper at an exponential rate, and it is predicted that it will start to become economically
viable _without subsidies_ by 2015. Meanwhile, Photovoltaic production growth has averaged 40%
(thus doubling every two years) per year since 2000.
Agricultural yields continue to grow fast, thus being easily able to feed a growing population without need
for additional deforestation. For example, Brazilian ethanol productivity (per hectare)has grown at a rate
of 3.77% per year between 1975 and 2004, thus doubling every 19 years. And there is revolutionary
technology in the queue - cellulosic ethanol, algae-based ethanol.
Similar prospects hold for other crops.
In short, the world is not ending, move along.
The problem is that the measures needed to stop this won't ever happen. It will take population control, which means either people will be limited to 1 child, or mandatory sterilization via a lottery system maybe. Who knows. The only way to stop our encroachment is to reduce the population growth. Otherwise we will just throw our hands up and say "it'll take 2 generations, it's not my problem".
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
That may be true, but my only point is that it seems unlikely that any damage we've done cannot be reversed if we go about it the right way.
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The key words I used are "actually trying" and "If we wanted to invest the money".
Yes, it would be expensive. Yes, it could even take almost all of the GDP of every human living on earth, but I think it could be done, if the need were dire enough, and we as a whole decided to invest in technologies to save the biosphere and seek out other planets for life.
Look how far we've come on commercial space flight in only about a decade. And that's with very little global investment.
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Not the argument.
There are cycles. No one says otherwise. Then there is warming that is on top of the cycles. SO when cyclic events are what they where, say 100 years ago, the temperature does not return to the temperature it was 100 years ago.
"It is certainly true that most places would become easier to live in if average temperature would go up "
That is certainly NOT true.
"like the asteroid, "
Could some unforeseen event happen to change things? of course. Why the hell would you be that way?
"a ~1% drop in solar output would more than cancel out global warming, "
no it wouldn't. It might prolong the time to get the the tipping point, but it won't stop it. And of course dimming the sun has other unpleasant effect.
You act like there is an end? there isn't a practical one for humans. Your whole point would have merit, if we stopped putting CO2 in the air, and wanted to just lower the condition until CO2 naturally lowers.
" Or at least ... something did"
I suspect the massive amount of money to start making it usable might have something to do with that... as well might that shifts in the weather belts around the world.
And even if the sahara become perfectly habitable, more farm land is lost. But if we don't stop, then another couple of degree after that, we would loose this hypothetical sahara as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Global warming will not cause much higher food yields as less rather than more land will be arable, for lack of water over the interior of most continents. Botantists looking into to this already are predicting that about 80 percent of all plant biotomes will change dramatically over the next 100 years. Most forests will become grasslands and most grasslands, deserts. Arctic soils are too poor to support most food crops and they are not adapted to surviving without sunlight for much of the year.
twitter is not a solution to the problems I describe. IT can optimize the logistics of digging up a resource, but it won't produce more chromium ore once we use up the stock.
You fail to account for the inertia already built into the system. There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 800,000 years. We now know that carbon dioxide increases ended the last ice age, just moving from about 240 ppm to 340 ppm over a 5-10 million year period. Humans have moved carbon dioxide from 340 to 400 in just 100 years and it will likely reach 500 in the next 20-50 years even given our best efforts to stop it. Above 500 we will see heat probably too great for all but the most hardy and desiccation resistant plants to grow. Soil temperatures will simply cook the roots of most plants.
If you don't think we have a problem, just think about the fact that temperatures this May in Greenland have hit 76.6 F and summer is just getting started.
We have not mitigated the acid rain problem. It may be marginally lower in various US locals, but globally acid rain is still on the rise, particularly over the Pacific where much of the acid rain from India and China is deposited every day leading, along with carbon dioxide acidification, of marine waters. Considering that a pH drop of just 0.2 in the world oceans would probably eliminate the source of 50% of all human protein humans are presently consuming, its a very big UNSOLVED problem.
"Preservation campaigns have successfully spared fishery stocks, forest, wetlands, etc."
This may be true in a few isolated instances, but overall fisheries are still collapsing everywhere and satellite imagery demonstrates that total forest cover and healthy wetlands are continuing to shrink every year.
Hansen's climate models are almost on the money after 30 years, although he was a bit optimistic as to how quickly it is getting hot.
It's been a while. Shall we have a war between my most athletic supporters and the legions of trolldom?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
try to explain the Pony Express and the Telegraph system to a 10 year old.
it's interesting that you list a number of examples that show that function of technology is similar over these last few generations even if the form is different, then turn around and use it as a basis for an argument that insists there is a huge technology gap between these generations.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When you wake up and see that your surroundings have improved, that your room is cleaner, your items are more organized, and your laundry has been done, you do realize that was the work of your mom, right?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yes, i could even take almost all of the GDP
What if it costs more than the GDP by then? What if, in addition, GDP declines very, very much because of the factors, described in the article, putting a solution totally out of reach?
Of course, there is the obvious question too -- why wait until a problem requires most of the GDP, instead of using the amazing predictive powers of science, see the problem before it occurs and mitigate it at a much smaller fraction of the GDP?
how far we've come on commercial space flight in only about a decade.
How far exactly? Russia is still dominating commercial space flight and have the cheapest and most capable launch platform. Incidentally, it is over 50 years old. The new developments in the US are mostly NASA-licensed tech cobbled together in a smaller package by staff plucked from NASA. That is, we're still talking Herr Wernher, more or less.
Besides, LEO commercial launches are largely irrelevant to the problems we need to solve, outside of the improved ability to monitor the destruction of the environment or a better GPS, in addition to being probably a serious environmental hazard.
Incidentally, you sidestepped my question. Show me at least one case when a technology was deployed to "fix" a global environmental issue, and "fixed" it successfully. Wait, I'll make it even easier for you, forget "fixing", show me a PROPOSAL to "fix" a global environmental problem, a proposal that is based on existing, commercial technology and has reasonable expectations to succeed.
I know all this , they could have asked, me instead of getting all the biggest minds in the planet to waste their time when they could be used elsewhere on a simple matter such as this.....oh wait.... you mean its not about what they are saying but more so about who is saying it???
I don't know if you remember,r but back in the 70's and early 80's there was this thing called "Ozone Layer Depletion", and a gigantic hole in the Ozone layer.
Through changes in world-wide CFC usage, the problem was reduced greatly, and some would even say "fixed".
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Cool, let's do nothing then. It can only get better, doesn't it?
This is not an example of deploying technology to solve a problem. We just stopped outputting more CFCs, and we are waiting for the nature to take its course, eventually. As of today, the ozone hole is still there, and we're still waiting. You can watch nature's progress here: http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
There are cycles. No one says otherwise. Then there is warming that is on top of the cycles. SO when cyclic events are what they where, say 100 years ago, the temperature does not return to the temperature it was 100 years ago.
In the sense that there are individual cycles, like the orbit of the earth around the sun, yes there are cycles. If you combine all cycles, they are chaotic. While it's not entirely impossible that all cycles take up the same previous position as they did at some previous point in time, that is such an extremely rare event that it doesn't happen in practice. Once you take even 100 factors that influence the climate, every day in the entire history of the planet will essentially have a unique position in the "cycle-space". It just isn't that simple.
You act like there is an end? there isn't a practical one for humans. Your whole point would have merit, if we stopped putting CO2 in the air, and wanted to just lower the condition until CO2 naturally lowers.
Then it has merit. Oil usage will drop for the simple reason that easily extractable oil is finished and we won't be able to keep up today's extraction levels. You can't burn things you don't have.
And even if the sahara become perfectly habitable, more farm land is lost. But if we don't stop, then another couple of degree after that, we would loose this hypothetical sahara as well.
How do you get to that point ? It is plainly established that the previous warming massively expanded the amount of arable land, supported by historical fact. By the way, have you checked on a map just how massive the Sahara is ? If it were to become arable, it could easily feed 15 billion people.
"a ~1% drop in solar output would more than cancel out global warming, "
no it wouldn't. It might prolong the time to get the the tipping point, but it won't stop it. And of course dimming the sun has other unpleasant effect.
Yes it would. You forget that we are very close to the absolute maximum of energy ANY amount of co2 in the atmosphere can absorb. It isn't a linear relation at all. Removing 100ppm from the athmosphere would more than half the energy co2 absorbs globally, while adding 100ppm will make less than 5% difference in absorption. An athmosphere made of nothing but co2 would only absorb about 7% more energy than what co2 is currently absorbing. None of these amounts come even close to 1% of the solar output hitting our planet.
Given the fact that solar output varies 4% on a regular basis for long times, I think we'd find plants well-prepared for a 1% drop by evolution. Sure it would have some effect, but I think you'll be disappointed. The cooling cycle that that output reduction would initiate would have a much more dramatic effect than the output change itself.
And while we are looking at a warming cycle short term, we're looking at a much bigger cooling in the mid-term. In the next 100 years, if it is valid to go by past variation, temperature will rise 1.5, maybe 2 degrees. It is equally obvious that in the next 1000-2000 years temperature will drop 16 degrees. Why ? Because it has done so dozens of times before, at a relatively regular pace, and we're at the warmest point in time that graph.
You do realize that plant roots didn't cook when the atmosphere was much higher in co2 than today and had massive amounts of methane as well, right ? While it was warmer at that point in time, it wasn't nearly warm enough to cook anything.
What you're saying is insane.
The key to the industrial revolution was fossil fuels. The amount of energy output these new fuel sources made possible dwarfed everything else at the time (which mostly involved animals or humans, or for more advanced purposes, dead trees). The industrial revolution was based on harnessing this new abundant source of energy in new and interesting ways. Notice that every "breakthrough" in the late 19th century into the early 20th century involved using more energy than previous methods. It's not that the technology kept up with the needs of society so much as technology was playing catch-up to the potential that fossil fuels allowed.
At this point, there is no new (relatively) immense source of power to facilitate the next technological revolution. Fission was at one point one such viable candidate, but there's a social stigma attached to it now. It can be considered a stepping stone to the next thing, but at the moment, there is no next thing. We're more or less hit the limits of how cheap energy can become.
The only solution to the looming crisis at this point requires a real breakthrough that somehow allows using less energy to perform the same task. I find that unlikely to happen, simply due to the fact that nobody's really looking in this direction, and the second law of thermodynamics (which explains the former).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Nobody believes we can reverse entropy. That's about as difficult an engineering task as it gets, and as close to impossible as there ever will be.
Most people are merely trying to cushion the blow as much as possible. There's a big difference between landing on concrete from falling 10 stories, landing on water, and landing on a giant air cushion.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
It seems like you are trying to say that I used the word reverse somewhere. You should probably re-read my post. Also, your sweeping statement is absurd on its face. There are people in the world who believe evolution is a myth because the holly bibble tells them so, so you can bet that there are people who believe we can reverse entropy. Furthermore, history is full of things that seemed impossible - that nobody in their right mind would believe - that later turned out to be true. So I wouldn't be so smug on the whole reversible/irreversible position.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
until we can figure out this whole air/water deal...
As usual, the politics of "scientists" vying for continued funding to do redundant *political* things is "news", and the elephant in the room remains ignored.
Stop your fucking breeding, you fucking retards.
The most important question on my mind is: will it last another 40 years? Because if so... then Im good and have little interest.
This is the same thing the a few concerned dinasours were preaching on and on about, but it really didnt matter to the lives of most of them
You make some good points, but why are so few people aware that solar energy from solar PV panels is exponentially becoming cheaper than power from coal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
Consider that about half the land in the USA is used for raising grain to feed to livestock in factory farms (where eating that sort of meat may be shortening our lives):
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Consider that it would take about 1% of the USA's land area to produce all the energy it currently needs for all purpposes via solar PV at 10% efficiency, or about the amount of land currently devoted to either mining or roads directly or indirectly. If we cut back on meat consumption by 2%, that is enough land for PV panels to power the USA.
Beyond that, there are many exotic types of energy under investigation from thorium power to hot and cold fusion.
And that is not even thinking about what we could do in space, like with huge solar mirrors.
So, why the doom and gloom about energy?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Doomsterism can be seen as immoral because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy leading to lack of effort, as well as can lead to people fighting over perceived scarcity with the technologies of abundance (like using nuclear energy to fight over depleted oil fields, or using genetically engineered plagues to fight over poorly yielding farmland, or using killer robots to force other humans to work like robots in factories and plantations and such).
"The problem is that there are no "smart solutions" on the horizon to the energy problem,"
Hort term, solar power and probably cold fusion; logn term, hot fusion and space-based solar power used in space by trillions of people.
"to the global warming problem"
As above and by making the best of the changes by cooperation (since other planets may be warming too, some of this may also be from increased solar output).
"or to the biodiversity problem."
I agree what we are doing to the biosphere to is tragic and immoral (especially the depletion of fish stock in the oceans). However, much biodiversity is represented by bacteria who are not going away. Also, we are getting digital worlds and designed DNA sequences, so eventually the total genetic diversity may be much higher, maybe much much higher if we think about total information diversity.
"We are also running out of most finite natural resources, and we have no viable replacement options."
Citation needed. Counter citation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
I'm not disagreeing that we have serious problems. We may also blow ourselves up fighting over them. But we have no irresolvable technical problems in giving every human on Earth a very high standard of living, and further expanding the human population to trillions living in space.
And just to help people move beyond a doomsterish ecofascist paradigm that seems to be growing all too common in the USA, here is something by me from twenty years ago, and some commentary on it:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/ac0ffaab1aa1c8ca
====
A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation
Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.
What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep. In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.
Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.
Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space. With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.
Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure. You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.
There is
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"According to the Agenda 21 crowd, the carrying capacity of the world is actually only about 500 million."
Unlike for most animals, carrying capacity is a function of lifestyle and technology where humanity if concerned. The more people you have around, generally the more ideas you have for improving lifestyle and technology. For example, people are busy working on fusion energy technology and cheaper solar power, more energy efficient transportation, advanced bioremediation processes for toxic waste, ways to live in outer space or the oceans, and ways to grow vegetables and meat indoors in vertical farms. If 90-99% of people were killed off, there would be much less innovation, perhaps making that doomster agenda a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, as Julian Simon suggests, the human imagination is the ultimate resource.
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
That said, it might be a good idea to set an occupancy limit for the Earth at around a billion people or so when we have much nicer self-replicating space habitats to live in and the Earth becomes more of a tourist destination. Although, a limit might not be required because probably no one born in space would probably want to go there. After all, how many people living in the USA feel a need to take a pilgrimage to Africa to see where humanity came from?
I can't disagree that some crazy ignorant callous frightened scarcity-obsessed people could try what you mention with the technologies of abundance. Weaponized bird full is probably more likely, btw, as it would spread more easily than smallpox. It's a good idea to optimize your health with adequate vitamin D and phytonutrients from vegetables, which is a good thing to do regardless of fears about groups with such a regressive agenda: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago?"
Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner. The air is many places in the USA is cleaner from regulation of car exhaust. In general, North America has been reforesting over the last century now that most people no longer burn wood for heat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#Examples
Some fisheries in the oceans have been protected and started to recover. Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance, which given so many people live in cities in mainly a political issue at this point.
Right now, about half the land in the USA goes to raise grains to feed to livestock in factory farms, producing meat that overall is probably shortening our lives (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's website, the Rave Diet site, etc.). If we started eating more vegetables, we'd free up plenty of land for wilderness (half the USA) and be much healthier. So, both lifestyle and technology affect carrying capacity for humans on the Earth.
To reforest the Sahara might be a big project, but it is not clear that desertification is entirely human-caused, and it may relate more to global climate changes in thousand long year cycles. But, in any case, the way nature makes fertile soil is to weather rock, so we can grind up rock and spread it as slow acting fertilizer. Then we need to protect the appropriate succession of plants and make sure they have water until they change their climate to be water attracting. See the real:
http://remineralize.org/
And the fictional:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees
However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually, so there are both good points and bad points about climate change. Overall, plants grow better with more CO2. The issue is more how to deal politically with the externality that, after lots of burning of fossil fuels by the USA and other industrialized countries, some people living on islands or in coastal areas or in areas with more storms will suffer, while people living in Canada and Siberia may end up much better off. That is a deep political question for a world with no unified government and no unified economic model that can account for externalities.
There are many solutions to environmental problems. Whether we decide to implement them is mainly a moral social choice about priorities (and to a lesser extent an issue of education that alternatives exists or imaginatively coming up with even better ones).
For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them? Yes, it takes energy to mine landfills, but the universe if full of energy, with a vast amount reaching the Earth's surface every day from the sun, and with people even working on ways to tap into fusion energy or the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum. Also, btw, right now I've heard the US automotive industry is a net producer of metal, as people switch to smaller cars and cars with more carbon fiber and plastic.
Other ideas include "Plan B" by Lester Brown:
http://environment.about.com/od/activismvolunteering/a/lesterbrown.htm
The big problem is that by claiming there are no solutions, you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology. There are plenty of solutions. The issue is just whether we implement them (or put our minds to imagining even better solutions).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's just go on as usual and see what happens.
Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner...
Exporting pollution isn't a technological "fix". US may be cleaner today, but the most important reason is that polluting production was moved abroad where there are no environmental regulations.
The rivers in China now burn just as bright, it is easier to cut the air in Beijing with a knife on a bad day than to breathe it, and in the wrong season the pollution goes almost as far as California, killing the forests in Northern Japan on the way. Of course, you're not seeing this in the US, so you believe the problem is "fixed". Alas, you're wrong.
Incidentally, this is how you have notebooks for less than $500. Mine is (mostly) made in Japan according to all pesky government environmental standards, and costs upwards of $2000.
Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance
Wrong on all counts.
First, "Nature can rebound when given the chance" is not a technological fix.
Second, nature can only rebound from a limited damage, not any damage. If you have read the article, you'd know the assumption that we've not yet inflicted the kind of damage nature can't handle is at least highly suspect.
Worse, "Nature can rebound" is the same attitude that caused the burning rivers in Pennsylvania in the first place, that is, shifting the cost of your pollution into someone else's backyard, preferably the backyard of someone who can't get back at you.
There are also limits to how much, and how quick is "very quick". Even if you reforest the 1000 year old forest you cut down for a decade, it will take at least another 1000 years for it to achieve the diversity you've had in the first place. Maybe. So, your reforestation example is also very much short of a technology that can "fix" deforestation at the pace and cost it was caused in the first place.
Overall, plants grow better with more CO2.
Wrong. Plants grow better with more CO2 only compared to the "normal" conditions that we are experiencing now. Once conditions change, the plants may or may not grow, depending on how the effects are distributed. If history is any indication, any major shift in global temperatures has caused extinction events massive enough to be noticed millions of years later.
However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually
"Eventually" in this case is likely measured in millenia or more. In the long run there is probably a "fix" for everything, but int he long run we're all dead. The assumption of the OP is that there is always a "fix" that is available when we needed. You have miserably failed to demonstrate such a fix for any significant problem I've mentioned so far.
For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them?
I assume they go into the finished products, and unless you want to unravel your existing infrastructure, you'd need more. Also, it seems that recycling isn't that easy, as we're still mining instead of recycling. You may claim there is a technology, which is just "expensive", but this is the same as having no viable technology. We know of fusion, but cannot use it for power generation.
you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology
It is exactly the other way around. By praying that "future technological development" will solve anything, you're not addressing the real and significant costs imposed by reckless current consumption. And you're very likely contributing to the undermining of development of future technologies.
So, for the tl;dr crowd, I agree with many of your points, but you miss the big picture on solar PV in a big way. It is inconsistent for you to predict forward pessimistic trends while dismissing optimistic ones. The truth is more that both sets of trends are happening together, and we need to make related political and economic choices. More on that below.
You make some good points, and I agree that much of what humanity is doing to our nature world is both immoral and short sighted. One point of the Gaia essay is to address the assumptions of those who think keeping things just the way they are is "natural", when any inspection of natural history shows how much change is constantly going on -- as well as to suggest hat those who claim to speak for Gaia may have taken a rather narrow short-term view of things.
You're also correct that a technological possibility does not mean that something is proven, and indeed almost all those more exotic technologies including space habitats would require significant investment. However, given the world GDP is around US$70 trillion a year, and it has been suggested we are just $100 billion dollars away from hot fusion and such, there is plenty of resources potentially to invest in alternative technologies (including space) if we collectively wanted to. But instead we use up much of the surplus that could go into resolving these problems when we collectively put trillions of dollars a year into military spending, and then trillions more into "guarding" of other sorts -- and worse, get most of our best and brightest to devote all their time, emotion, and imagination to think up even better ways to kill people, disrupt their infrastructure (like with Stuxnet), to create computer software that competes in a zero sum financial game on wall street, and so on. So, in many ways we are probably much closer to agreement than you might think at first.
The place where I most strongly have to disagree with you though, beyond your assumption that we are running out of metal given how recyclable it is even from landfills, is when you write something like: "We have no solar power tech that can deploy in space and provide cheap energy to the Earth, and the one we use on Earth is manufactured cheaply only in places where the environment is the victim."
Have you spent any time investigating this? Seriously investigating what is going on? Did you twenty years ago, or even ten, look at the exponential growth of solar energy and the reduction of costs and predict the implications forward in the same way you are willing to project forward a notion of unchecked environmental damage? If not, why not? Why pay attention only to doomster trends and ignore optimistic ones? If you had looked into PV optimistically, you would see that, at market prices, the cost of solar energy from PV is generally now cheaper in the non-industrialized world than any other form of energy, and the cost of PV power is rapidly approaching grid parity in the industrialized world (as in, the head of GE R&D says by 2015 or so).
And further, if we include the costs of externalities, like remediating pollution, like dealing with the health consequences of air pollution, the cost of economic uncertainty, and the cost of military spending to secure long oil supply lines, renewables have been *cheaper* in real economic terms since at least the 1970s? The only reason we still use fossil fuels is political; they are way more expensive financially than renewables, all things considered. This is the fundamental thing most resource doomsters do not understand, in part because their is a vast legion of highly-paid mainstream economists involved in denying this every day in every way possible.
As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warne
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Exporting pollution isn't a technological "fix". US may be cleaner today, but the most important reason is that polluting production was moved abroad where there are no environmental regulations."
Most people who write on this sort of stuff do not understand that the USA produces as much as it did decades ago, just using less people and better technologies (in the same way that US agriculture produces more food than ever, but with 2% of the population instead of 50% like a century ago).
We do buy additional stuff from China, true, but the price difference between clean and dirty production does not have to be as big, and often the costs can eventually be lower to be clean through innovation. Again, this is a political issue, especially because the costs of cleaning up a mess is generally much more than the costs of preventing it, which someone eventually has to pay either for remediation or health costs. So, we don't have to have this level of pollution. As you point out in your example from Japan, we know how to do better. The main issue with that cost difference BTW is much more likely to be mostly about wages and working conditions than about overall pollution.
"It is exactly the other way around. By praying that "future technological development" will solve anything, you're not addressing the real and significant costs imposed by reckless current consumption. And you're very likely contributing to the undermining of development of future technologies."
This would be an insightful point if not applied to me in this discussion. :-) I suggest that both extremes are problematical -- both saying we don't have problems because someone else will fix them in the future, and also saying our problems are unfixable so there is no point in trying. But I have pointed to solar PV being cheaper than coal in a few years, as just an extension of a trend that goes back decades. That is about as solid a prediction as one can make, and it's much more solid than predictions about societal collapse from lack of "resources" many decades from now -- even as I'd readily agree there is a huge risk we will blow ourselves up fighting over mis-perceived scarcity (or other related issues).
By the way, I don't know what you would accept as a technological contribution towards reforestation (better shovels? seed vaults?), but certainly using the internet to lobby for it and coordinate it would seem like an improvement. :-) Like human health, most doctoring is just about letting nature do its thing. I agree with you that habitat destruction is a big thing, but again, about 50% of the USA is devoted to producing grain for livestock agriculture, which is entirely unnecessary; so this is a lifestyle choice thing or political-socioeconomic issue with unpaid externalities. India has a billion+ people in a much smaller area who are mostly vegetarian.
"I assume they [metals] go into the finished products, and unless you want to unravel your existing infrastructure, you'd need more."
Something like 98% of products are discarded within a year of production (perhaps a tragic waste, but that is the way it is right now). Things can be recycled, and they can be designed to be recycled. Nature is constantly recycling materials like solar-collecting leaves into soil into trees into leaves again, so it is possible. You obviously know a lot about all these topics, but I'd encourage you to look a lot deeper and question even your most basic assumptions about this.
One way to do that is to try to quantify all these issues. You might ask, how much metal is in our infrastructure in kilograms in the USA? How much new metal do add to that every year? Unless you can answer such basic questions, everything is just potentially erroneous assumptions. And even then, you would need to ask, can we substitute more common things for metal, like fiber optics from sand instead of copper wire?
Or maybe even do transmutation of one material to another at the nuclear level, like Mitsubishi-Toy
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's just go on as usual. We're but a bump on the planet, it'll survive without us.
I agree the human race remains at high risk of war, including over IMHO misperceived resource scarcity. Here are two examples of key representative issues, about copper (to pick just one item from your long list, but I could probably do the same for any other), and about the biosphere and biodiversity.
=== Copper as an example
Two things on copper from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Reserves
"Copper has been in use at least 10,000 years, but more than 95% of all copper ever mined and smelted has been extracted since 1900. As with many natural resources, the total amount of copper on Earth is vast (around 10^14 tons just in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, or about 5 million years worth at the current rate of extraction). However, only a tiny fraction of these reserves is economically viable, given present-day prices and technologies. Various estimates of existing copper reserves available for mining vary from 25 years to 60 years, depending on core assumptions such as the growth rate. Recycling is a major source of copper in the modern world. Because of these and other factors, the future of copper production and supply is the subject of much debate, including the concept of Peak copper, analogous to Peak Oil."
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Criticism
"Julian Simon was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a professor of business and economics. In his book The Ultimate Resource 2 (first printed in 1981 and reprinted in 1998), he extensively criticizes the notion of "peak resources", and uses copper as one example. He argues that, even though "peak copper" has been a persistent scare since the early 20th century, "known reserves" grew at a rate that outpaced demand, and the price of copper was not rising but falling in the long run. For example, even though world production of copper in 1950 was only 1/8th of what it was today, known reserves were also much lower at the time -- around 100 million metric tons -- making it appear that the world would run out of copper in 40 to 50 years at most.
Simon's own explanation for this development is that the very notion of known reserves is deeply flawed, as it does not take into account changes in mining profitability. As richer mines are exhausted, developers turn their attention to poorer sources of the element and eventually develop cheap methods of extracting it, rising "known reserves". Thus, for example, copper was so abundant 5000 years ago, occurring in pure form as well as in highly concentrated copper ores, that prehistoric peoples were able to collect and process it with very basic technology. As of the early 21st century, copper is commonly mined from ores that contain 0.3% to 0.6% of copper by weight. Yet, despite the fact that the material is far less "widespread", the cost of, for example, a copper pot is vastly lower today in real terms than it was 5000 years ago.
Simon essentially states that all viable copper has been not been discovered and that all technological advancements in mining and refining have not occurred, so statements that the point of peak resources, in this case copper, have been or will be reached must be false. Simon supports his argument by showing that supplies copper have increased and prices have fallen. Simon's thesis of peak resources, however, is not based on current scientific analysis or geological measurements."
Beyond new mining techniques, we can also substitute materials for copper. For example, as as we move to fiber optics (mostly from sand) and to wireless communications, we may have a huge surplus of recycled copper wire.
Pretty much all the materials you listed will have a similar story; we can either improve our extraction techniques or find substitutes. And if it takes more energy to recycle some things, as I pointed out, PV is rapidly falling in price and we will likely also have other
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The world has had "serious reductions in biodiversity" before and it is still here.
The Earth could be in " a state far different from the original" and we would still be here.
Spoken as if Earth were a laboratory experiment, we knew all the variables, knew all the interactions and could predict and control all the outcomes. What hubris!
Why such fear of the unknown? If I didn't know better, I might conclude that someone was trying to manipulate me.