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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.
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
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.
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
No really, it really IS reaching a tipping point, no matter what your energy company overlords are saying.
If you're so big into peer reviewed research, you might want to scale back your claims there, mate. The scientists in the article are a lot more careful in their claims than you, as we see from this quote, "The authors of the Nature review argue that, although many warning signs are emerging, no one knows how close Earth is to a global tipping point, or if it is inevitable." The world would be a better place if more people were careful in what they asserted,like these scientists.
In other words, don't load up on oil futures just yet.
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.
-
The report cites "explosive population growth" [citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png would be a start. For your other claims, maybe actually read TFA?
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.
From the look of your referenced chart, it looks like population is leveling off.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
When we convert land to agriculture, don't we usually want it to stay that way? Sometimes I wonder if people appreciate just how harsh the natural environment is for people. I don't think it's reasonable to say we should kill half the population just to restore the environment to it's original condition (if that's even possible). Most people wouldn't want to live that way anyway. Rather, we need to be making decisions about how to deal with the environment change that we expect to occur.
Besides, who's to say if it's 50% or 90%? Since the earth is very large, I'd bet on 90%. Also, why are we excluding oceans and ice covered land from our equation?
Long story short, humans alter their environment. Deal with it.
Hmm... we can see it in historical record for past regional cultures - climatic patterns changed, threw off the food system, and collapse. Incan and Mayan civilizations had past their tipping points by the time they were "discovered". Smallpox and other things helped hastened the decline, if not of all the people, certainly of their civilizations.
Same for Easter Island. or Nauru, Anasazi, et al. Granted, those two were very small, contained physical locales, but both were mined out of their natural resources, which fucked the civilization/society on those islands.
To think that globally we may be special and not run into the same kinds of walls?
"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.
Using that kind of graphing tricks, any increase can be made to look very steep. It's not data, it's data manipulation to make it look bad.
I'm making the humanitarian sacrifice and choosing not to mate... yeah, choosing, that's it.
Hmm, population doubled in 20 years, and the WORST CASE projection shows population doubling again in 40 years.
Wow, that's explosive growth alright - worst case is half as fast as it's been increasing.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Curious, one person replied to the graph claiming that it looks like it is leveling off (correctly noting that the rate of growth is expected to slow down) and someone else then claims the graph is somehow maniuplated. So could you explain what is manipulated in this graph? It isn't using a wonky time scale or a wonky population scale. The most common trick of this sort is to cut off the base and essentially start the y value at some higher level, but that's not the case here. It is also possible to cut off early data (say if one wanted to hide large scale fluctuations) but if you include data before 1800 the prior time looks pretty similar. So that's not. You can't just dismiss any graph as bad just because it is possible to make graphs look bad. It is a reason to actually look carefully at graphs, and if there's no problem with it, actually pay attention to it.
What no? That's only a sign that growth is less than exponential, which shouldn't be surprising at all. That doesn't mean the growth rate is half as fast. Say for example you started with the function f(t)=t^2 and looked at starting at t=1. To double f the first time one needs to go to about 1.4. To again double f one needs to go 2, to double again one needs to go to about 3.8. Here the growth rate is increasing, but the doubling time is also increasing. This is a common pattern for functions which grow more slowly than exponential.
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.
You are ignoring the work of REAL scientists
And there are no real scientists here?
Things are not always black and white. To say that there is little or no effect on climate by humans is just as absurd as claiming humans are totally responsible for climate change. I work in emergency management and can attest through personal experience that the amount and severity of natural disaster has increased over the past decade alone. Hurricanes have become more frequent and tornado activity has increased. Flooding and mudslides are occurring more often as well especially in built up areas where runoff from all the paving has nowhere to go. To see massive changes in a biosphere all one has to do is visit a surface mine operation. Although they attempt to restore the biosphere somewhat it never fully returns to its original state.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
It certainly is peer reviewed. You can see Peter Norvig's analysis of the research. You're just making shit up.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I haven't lost faith in Science... just politically motivated "scientists"
Seriously, this whole "Let's panic the uninformed so they'll follow us blindly" plan only works in the short term. That time has passed. Now, we need intelligent discussions and real solutions.
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.
Amazing. I love hearing about peer reviewd from people claiming AGW. If you actually looked into AGW research you see it is not even close to peer reviewed. The IPCC reports are all based on research done by Phil Jone at the CRU in the UK. He admitted to manipulating data to match his theories on AGW over a 20 year period. He also ignored FOI requests for years because he didn't want other scientists to review his work. He went so far as to DELETE the original unmanipulated data his research was based on instead of risking someone else double checking his work. Phil Jones is the ONLY PERSON on the planet to see the original unmanipulated data that goes into all the IPCC reports. He is a known liar and has admitted to deleteing data instead of risking peer review.
How in hell did that get upmodded? To say that Phil Jones is responsible for all of the data in the IPCC reports if ROTFLMAO laughable. The data he deleted is still available from the original sources, the various weather services around the world. There's not a single thing in that pile of crap you can support.
It's mankind. The Earth couldn't care less.
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/
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.
That is not a good source. Over the last twenty years, UN population projections have been wrong by a wide margin. Actual growth has consistently clocked below the medium projection, yet the UN continues issuing the alarmist high projection line which frankly has 0% chances of happening.
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
"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.
The funny thing is if you rewind time and look at the demographics of living standards when there were half as many people alive as today, you'll find that a greater percentage was living below the curve then as now, let alone discrete counts. In fact if you look at all of human history as a continuum, at no point in the past have more people had a better standard of living than this generation, both as an absolute value and as a percentage, and that improvement in both areas has been basically constant since the beginning of the modern era.
Until the percentage of the world's population with higher standards of living starts to decrease, which it hasn't for any meaningful period in centuries, I don't think we need to gnash our teeth in worry.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
That's right. the REAL scientists aren't backed by governments that stand to gain hugely by the changes they wish to force on us. The REAL scientists are backed by corporations that stand to gain hugely by not changing anything.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
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.
Newspapers aren't eating up old growth trees. The US practices sustainable forestry management. The trees are like crops. You plant them... you wait... you harvest... you plant... Rinse/repeat. Newspapers are no more likely to use up all the trees then eating a cheese burger is likely to use up all the cows.
Now, the amazonian hardwoods is another matter. Those take hundreds of years to grow properly and they're frequently getting clear cut not even for the lumber but just for the land. We see this a lot in africa as well. Slash and burn farming. It's very sad.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Really it should have been obvious that the thrust of this story was a genetic engineering bank on the moon. I missed it, I admit.
"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.
"that makes modern society considerably less fair"
Only in a circular-argument way.
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.