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."

Comments

From TFA

[almitydave]

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?

Re:From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Well, it's based on empirical data. You'll have to provide your personal definition of "real science" for me. Because, there's no double blind study where we instantiated multiple Earth's on January 1st and then removed all humans from one to use as the control variable. I can't believe I have to explain this but Slashdot is just getting more and more conservative lately so ... it's based on data from prior years and what is reported by country. No, it's not truly falsifiable -- then again you don't have multiple runs at this. No, nobody's actually measuring all the carbon in the air. No, nobody's actually testing that we've saturated the rate at which our resources are being replenished. We're making intelligent estimates. Well, those of us concerned with this stuff are (evidently you aren't).

The part where you said "climate activism" means you're just going into confirmation bias here anyway so even though it won't help, I'll do the very little googling required to find their their numbers here. Just for you. Even though it doesn't matter because you've clearly already made up your mind.

Re:From TFA

[Alomex]

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.

Re:From TFA

[almitydave]

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.

Re:From TFA

[Coisiche]

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

Re:From TFA

[The Grim Reefer]

Nature occasionally killed nearly every living thing on the planet.

Mankind has never done that. So who's really the evil doer here? I suggest we kill nature as quickly as possible. It's the only way to save the living things on this planet. It's practically self defense.

Re:From TFA

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:From TFA

[nightfire-unique]

You needn't worry. It will always be cheaper to make water than go to war for it.

Re:From TFA

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:From TFA

[umafuckit]

[citation needed]

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

Population is one factor, the other is per capita emissions and resource usage. It's the latter that's increasing. A common theme in the news recently has been the alarm expressed by scientists at the rapidity with which changes are happening. Nobody is saying that things are progressing at lower than expected rates. They're all shocked at how fast it's hitting home. People can make cute comments about Malthus to imply that there's nothing to worry about, but that's not what we're seeing. Just because Malthus wasn't right in his lifetime, that doesn't make him wrong. Malthus died in 1834: that's really not that long ago.

Re:From TFA

[liquid_schwartz]

Our cities on the coastlines (where we've historically loved building cities) will get flooded.

You had me at LA gets flooded. Makes me want to buy a hummer right now. That applies to both the city in California as well as the state in the South.

Re:From TFA

[Curunir_wolf]

Plants are evolved in a given CO2 level and their response to rapid changes is highly unpredictable - it isn't all good for plants.

Gee, maybe someone should do some experiments to find out. You know, use some actual science. Then we can make predictions that actually work, rather than extrapolations of something so complex and untestable it's easier just to spout a bunch of alarmist propaganda.

TL;DR plants not only grow faster and produce more biomass in higher CO2 concentrations, they are also more efficient in the use of water.

The Earth is used up

[Empiric]

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.

Re:The Earth is used up

[scatbomb]

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.

We ate up all the food...?

[nikkipolya]

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?

Re:We ate up all the food...?

[DesertNomad]

Don't know about you, but I went through my year's supply of frozen Hot Pockets and Snickers bars back in late July. We're doomed, I say, doomed.

Required reading - limits to growth

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

---

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).

Re:Required reading - limits to growth

[almitydave]

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).

Don't be so pessimistic - at the rate medical science is advancing, you'll be able to live well into the apocalypse!

Re:Required reading - limits to growth

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Activism

[Ichijo]

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

False.

FTA

[doug141]

Fishery depletion.

Re:If Water is Scarce

[nightfire-unique]

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.