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Earth's Resources Used Up at Quickest Rate Ever in 2016 (france24.com)
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."
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?
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
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.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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?
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.
Soon we will have to start mining asteroids. Then the other planets. Then we'll have to start harvesting the dust between the planets.
Unless we develop technology to go through our Alderson point and survive the exit from the other Aldeson point thats in the atmosphere of a star.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
So, uh, what about all the minerals that are on the ocean floor and deeper than current technology makes it economical to mine? Are those resources "used up"?
Eventually we'll run out of oil and gas to burn, but last I checked we have a crapton of unused land for solar and if we really had to there's more thorium and breedable uranium than we know what to do with...
The ecosystem may take a hit from all this increasing activity, sure. But do humans even need it to remain viable as a species? Just how close are we to being able to grow all our food with genetic engineering, and to make all our medicine with genetically engineered organisms in vats?
I'm under the impression that this is basically possible today, it's just a matter of how much money is available to develop the strains you want. Various FUD about genetic engineering has severely curtailed the interest in it.
http://collections.dartmouth.e...
Some of the items are scary spot on (like the amount of carbon dioxide we would see in the atmosphere).
A bunch of MIT types calculated that based on total assets in the earth (not just available to extract), we would hit several "limits to growth" between 2020 and 2100.
For example: We used as much chromium in 2014 as we did from 1900 to 2000 combined.
here's a summary of the 30 year update.
http://www.unice.fr/sg/resourc...
Many of their projections are following.
Food is a little higher- but so is population.
Here's the unavoidable situation they said we would hit.
Using so many resources that we overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth and then permanently lower it as a result. So if 6 billion were what it could carry for a very long time, by going to 12 billion, we might reduce the capacity to 3 billion.
And it projects a very rapid population reduction. 70 years to fall from 12 billion back to 1950s level populations.
The projection is we'll run low on multiple indusrial metals at the same time and prices of those metals will skyrocket.
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Now the fun bit. It's too late to do anything about it. We passed the point of no return back in the 1990s. It's a genuine "bend over and kiss your ass goodbye" situation.
And the good news... Many of us will be dead by 2040-2050 when it starts to get nasty tho we may see some signs as early as 2035 (I'll be 74 then-- my most likely lifespan is to 2038).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Fishery depletion.
Seventy-one percent of the Earth is covered by water. We simply lack the technology to change that statistic.
Water cannot be "scarce" on Earth.
It is expensive to desalinate water. However, war is many orders of magnitude more expensive.
Think of it this way: $0.25USD per 1,000L of desalinated water vs $2.50USD per 1,000L of ground or lake water taken by force.
There may be minor skirmishes over specific rivers, but there will never be war because it is not economically advantageous.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
No, but Israel's desalination plants are operating at under $0.40 / 1000L. Costs have come down a lot.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?