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Earth's Resources Used Up at Quickest Rate Ever in 2016 (france24.com)

Posted by msmash on from the save-yourself dept.

An anonymous reader writes: In just over seven months, humanity has used up a full year's allotment of natural resources such as water, food and clean air -- the quickest rate yet, according to a new report. The point of "overshoot" will officially be reached on Monday, said environmental group Global Footprint Network -- five days earlier than last year. "We continue to grow our ecological debt," said Pascal Canfin of green group WWF, reacting to the annual update. "From Monday August 8, we will be living on credit because in eight months we would have consumed the natural capital that our planet can renew in a year."

20 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. From TFA by almitydave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To calculate the date for Earth Overshoot Day, the group crunches UN data on thousands of economic sectors such as fisheries, forestry, transport and energy production.

    Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it said, are now the fastest-growing contributor to ecological overshoot, making up 60 percent of humanity's demands on nature -- what is called the ecological "footprint".

    I've never even heard of this metric. Is this based on real science or climate activism?

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    1. Re:From TFA by umafuckit · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've never even heard of this metric. Is this based on real science or climate activism?

      Whether or not this particular number is "real" or "climate activism" is somewhat irrelevant. The real science is very clearly telling us that our negative impact on the planet is substantial and that this is accelerating. This is the reason for the activism.

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    2. Re:From TFA by Alomex · · Score: 4, Insightful

      our negative impact on the planet is substantial and that this is accelerating.

      [citation needed]

      You see population growth is rapidly decelerating, albeit still positive. Hence our impact is likely to be decelerating too.

    3. Re:From TFA by almitydave · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've never even heard of this metric. Is this based on real science or climate activism?

      Whether or not this particular number is "real" or "climate activism" is somewhat irrelevant. The real science is very clearly telling us that our negative impact on the planet is substantial and that this is accelerating. This is the reason for the activism.

      Sure, but good activism needs to have a solid foundation - the world is full of people twisting numbers and facts to suit their ends, and alarmist claims revealed to be based on bogus data do more to hurt the cause than help it. I'm not passing judgment on this particular claim, just asking.

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    4. Re:From TFA by MightyMartian · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How about almost every climatology study done in the last forty years?

      I tell you what. If you don't think AGW is real, why don't you explain where all the energy being absorbed by CO2 in the atmosphere is going. Are you advocating the "magic heat sink back into space" theory?

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    5. Re:From TFA by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "climate activism"

      A lot of us never trust activists of any kind because they can't help but make themselves untrustworthy. This article is an example of that kind of hysteria. The verbiage used sometimes tends to anthropomorphize consumable resources in a way that begets images of hippies in a drum circle. For example "humanity's demands on nature" conjures images of a haggard old lady being asked for her second kidney because she soon won't need it anymore. That's not science, that's an emotional appeal. From my standpoint the earth is here to be consumed as we see fit, but as we lack a suitable alternative, we probably shouldn't destroy it just yet.

      Couple this to some phony attempts to contextualize our ecological disaster in economic terms, which is a stretch at best, makes me want to ignore this entirely.

      Not that I disbelieve that we are over-consuming and over-polluting in the slightest. I'm just pointing out why this sort of reporting makes the problem worst, not better and why when people who haven't come around to your point of view, and also do not speak precisely, may try to distinguish "science" from "terrible reporting".

    6. Re:From TFA by Coisiche · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I suspect that the wars over water are going to be a lot more vicious than the wars over oil ever were.

    7. Re:From TFA by Speck'sBacon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You clearly don't understand the term "accelerating" then. Think of driving a car. Even when you're "decelerating," you're still traveling forward, but your speed is slowing. The same applies to population, but replace the word "speed" with "growth," and it's equally accurate.

    8. Re:From TFA by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First off, volcanos are dwarfed by the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that people pump into the atmosphere annually. Secondly, what we pump into the atmosphere came from an area deep underground where it had been sequestered for millions of years. So for millions of years, the trees/plants didn't need to take care of this carbon dioxide and it wasn't part of the natural carbon cycle. Now, though, it's suddenly being tossed into the atmosphere and some people act surprised that the existing plant life can't just magically handle all of the new stuff too.

      Will climate change end life on Earth? No, it won't. Might it make life on Earth really horrible for humans? Yes. Our cities on the coastlines (where we've historically loved building cities) will get flooded. Traditional crops won't grow in their usual farm areas and the new areas that have the right temperature might not have suitable farmland/soil conditions. (If you want to grow corn in the new "corn belt" area, it won't be good if that happens to lie on a mountainous terrain.) In short, humans can pay to fix climate change now or we really pay for it later.

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    9. Re:From TFA by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, it's based on empirical data. You'll have to provide your personal definition of "real science" for me.

      Empirical data of the rate of consumption is insufficient. Without measuring whether we're really depleting resources faster than they can be replenished, any so-called "allotment" is little more than a fiction. It's an arbitrary number.

      If you had done this study in the late 1700s, they would have said that we were at the limits for how many people the world could support, too. Since then, modern agriculture has increased crop yields, brought water to fertile soil that was previously too dry to grow crops, and provided machines that can pick crops at a rate that makes it possible to support a much larger population.

      Thus, any discussion of an "allotment" is predicated upon the false assumption that resource shortages are fundamental problems with the world that cannot be corrected through technological means of increasing those resources. It is also predicated upon the dubious assumption that resource shortages won't take care of themselves without out intervention. For example, we panic about CO2 levels, worrying about a runaway greenhouse effect, forgetting that our greenhouse gas percentages are dramatically lower than they were in the distant past. This isn't an experiment. We already have empirical data from previous periods with high greenhouse gas numbers, and we know what happened: plant life flourished, died, got buried, turned into coal, and served as a carbon sink. Anyone arguing that this won't happen again is making an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof.

      This is not to say that global warming isn't a concern. It is. It has the potential to turn fertile lands into deserts and vice versa. It has the potential to seriously disturb the geopolitical climate of our planet, and to make the U.S. become much more dependent upon foreign food sources (Canada in particular). It has the potential to raise the sea level, flooding coastal areas where lots of people live. It can make hurricanes and tornadoes more prevalent, costing human lives. But I think it is important to talk about the concern realistically instead of Chicken Littling the subject and acting like we're about to destroy the world. We really aren't. Earth was around for billions of years before us, and will probably be around for billions of years after we're gone.

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  2. sooooo, okay, I am a physicist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    How was this measured? Where is the data? Citation?

    Is this methodology open so we all can see how this was arrived at?

    I have calculated the amount of Carbon Humankind puts in the atmosphere, so I am aware of (generally) how such calculations are arrived at, but this seems to be rather broad and much more full of error than a more simple calculation (like the carbon one I mentioned above)

    Without seeing any data or methodology, I am afraid I can't buy this.

  3. The Earth is used up by Empiric · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, we had a good run.

    Or, maybe like the entire history of mankind and economics, "used up" means there's demand for more production, or alternative production.

    More CO2 is resulting in more foliage. Seems nature has it's own kind of "balancing market".

    I'll be looking for a better arbitrary wordplay metric of impending doom.

    --
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    1. Re:The Earth is used up by scatbomb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It is true that CO2 stimulates plant growth, if you isolate other factors. The problem is that we are deforesting our planet, so the net change in plant biomass is negative. Furthermore, the excess CO2 in the atmosphere is about 37% of the existing 3E12 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 1.13E12 tons of excess CO2 from human activities. A single km^2 of rainforest contains about 356 tons of biomass (wikipedia), so assuming it's all carbon (it's not) we'd need another 3.2E9 km^2 of rainforest to consume all of the excess CO2 in the air. The earth's surface area (including oceans) is only 5E8 km^2. So we'd need 6.2 earth surface areas of Amazon rainforest to sequester all of the extra CO2 in the air. You see, the carbon stores were saved up from fossilization over millions and millions of years and we've attempted to release all of them into the atmosphere in about 100 years. The earth cannot "bounce back" from such a rapid change, it will take millions and millions of years for geological processes to bring carbon back into the Earth's crust. Hope that you see now this is a major problem that won't be solved by sitting back and watching. My sources are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://micpohling.wordpress.c... feel free to check my math.

  4. We ate up all the food...? by nikkipolya · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How can we end up eating all the food meant for the whole year? Who is giving the food for credit then? The Fed? Are the plants doing "Quantitative Easing" of food then?

  5. Activism by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You can tell from the fact that the are talking about "using up" a year's allotment of clean air. Uhhhh... No. Air doesn't work like that. While we can, and do, pollute the air we don't "use it up." What's more in terms of breathable air, pollutants in it are a local problem, not global. So in given areas there is heavy pollution that causes the air to be poor quality for breathing, however the amount is very small compared to the total amount on the planet and it doesn't cause a decrease in quality globally.

    This is another activist group. They aren't doing science, they are pushing a point of view. Science on CO2 is about it causing more thermal retention, leading to a long term increase in average temperatures. It isn't about "using up" a certain amount in a year.

    1. Re:Activism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You can tell from the fact that the are talking about "using up" a year's allotment of clean air. Uhhhh... No. Air doesn't work like that. While we can, and do, pollute the air we don't "use it up."

      But there are natural systems that purify/replenish air, right? And we're not so fucking stupid that we can't estimate the rate at which we're polluting and weigh it against our estimates for how these natural systems replenish it, right?

      Estimations aren't "doing science" but for the last goddamn time they are useful to policy makers.

      Here let me turn your own stupidity on yourself: You can tell from the fact that the are talking about "doing science". Uhhhh ... No, we can't run multiple instances of Earth to perform a double blind study on Earth with one Earth having people and the other Earth not having people. Therefore no falsifiable statements can be made about the two Earths. So no, it's not "doing science" to say anything about our situation.

      Grow up.

    2. Re:Activism by Ichijo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      in terms of breathable air, pollutants in it are a local problem, not global.

      False.

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  6. FTA by doug141 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fishery depletion.

  7. Re:Required reading - limits to growth by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IMO, they're probably wrong, because they're ignoring fungibility. As the cost of the rarer metals goes up, other materials will take their place, and the net impact on society as a whole will be minimal.

    In the grand scheme of things, you really only need a couple of metals to get things done—iron and copper. Fortunately, these are also two of the most plentiful metals in Earth's crust, so we're not going to run out of either one for the foreseeable future, though the cost of extracting copper may go up as the quality of ore deposits decreases.

    As for the others, right now, people use chromium because of stainless steel, but powder coats or sealants could serve the same purpose in many situations. We might run low on lithium, which is a problem for batteries, but we're also on the cusp of getting supercapacitor capacity to the point where many uses of lithium will no longer be needed, making that largely moot in the long term. And so on. And we use metal for many things that we could use plastics for, too (either oil-based or plant-based).

    Like I said, fungibility.

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  8. Funny how "climate activism" has become code for by Rujiel · · Score: 1, Insightful

    giving a shit at all about the suatainability of your species and its planet.