Only 60%? I would have thought we had made more progress at this point.
Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
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Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s not sustainable? The human population doubling again? Or maintaining the current population? Clearly we have to address climate change but it’s not a growing population that is unsustainable, if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.
The earth definitely has a carrying capacity. Our ability to push our food production further doesn’t change this fact. I’ve seen around 10 billion people floated as a food production limit in several places. Crossing this with climate change, particularly our love of beef and pork, is not easy to disentangle. We may also never hit that carrying capacity if something else other than food supply limits our population…
Most countries are already below the replacement rate. America fell below 2 children per couple in the 1970s, and it's only through immigration that our population bubble continues to inflate.
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it ever proven wrong? Or just delayed by a bunch of last-minute technological breakthroughs? Also, the problem is still here even if we maintain current population levels. It's here even if we do nothing, and in reality, we have 2/3 of the world desperately trying to grow their quality of life, which involves growing their energy use.
Proven wrong? Yes! ehrlich said the human lifespan in 1981 would be 42. He assured us that, if we didn’t do something , there would be mass famine and billions dead and all manner of horror that never came to pass. It is not all that impressive to note that more consumers than producers creates a scarcity problem. That’s the entire driver behind Malthusian fear-mongering. But over and over and over those that stoke t…
> The fact is, if you want to improve the state of humanity on the Earth, your only effective means of doing so is technology.
This I agree with to some extent. We need the tech to save us, but I'm not convinced that we can get to that tech in time, without reducing our quality of life now, or having it reduced by the climate degradation in the next decades.
> As you call it, “last-minute technological breakthroughs”, dismissing centuries of human progress as some sort of accidental stroke of luck.
I'm trying not to, but looking back, how many more tricks like Haber–Bosch process can we find? We've always somehow risen to the challenge, but then again, almost all fields of science and technology were severely underexplored back then. We've fixed that now, we know the general landscape in which we're moving. I fully expect we can pull some more rabbits out of a hat, but will we be able to do that in time?
And the flip side of this is that we need those new miracle technologies to continue growing. Which means we need to actually fund and encourage them, and that seems to become a problem lately. Insert anything from "best minds of our generation wasted on getting people clicking on ads" to Bret Victor's musings on cleantech funding[0].
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Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#94Human Population has more than doubled in the same timespan (from 3.7 billion to 7.7 billion today). This is not sustainable. We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it. We are overfishing the oceans, cutting down entire forests to make way for pastures, warming up the planet and acidifying the plastic-filled ocean. Even insect populations are plummeting. The consequences of this will not be f…
> Human Population has more than doubled... This is not sustainable
Hans Rosling had some interesting findings on population growth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock[...] I wouldn't call WW3 a fix (short term anyway). Even a small nuclear exchange would have devastating ecological consequences [0] [0] "Radioactive fallout from these weapons’ debris clouds would reach the stratosphere, where it would travel worldwide, potentially contaminating crop…
I think the idea is that the massive depopulation caused by what you describe would function as a ‘fix’.
A fix or an end. It is said that without enough population to watch and repair the current nuclear systems, the problem would quickly scalate in a few years when nuclear plants in the planet would deteriorate, get out of control and explode one after one.
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#96If this headline feels overwhelming to you, I highly recommend this article by Stewart Brand: https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-not-edging-up-to-a-mass-extinc... Note that it’s animal populations that are decreasing rapidly, not species.
Stewart Brand recently hosted Chris D. Thomas to talk at the Long Now Seminar about anthropocene speciation [0]. The premise is that current wild species are under severe duress due to changing environments, however nature is thriving in the age of extinction. 0. http://longnow.org/seminars/02018/jun/19/are-we-initiating-g...
There's some recent discussion here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1080.2
I don't know if the citations therein are cherry-picked, but oddly enough it seemed like mostly what you might call "public intellectuals" on the "it's not so bad" side and lower-profile ordinary lab/field scientists on the "doom and gloom" side - a bit of a reversal from the usual trope
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#97Human Population has more than doubled in the same timespan (from 3.7 billion to 7.7 billion today). This is not sustainable. We only have one small planet to live on, and we are destroying it. We are overfishing the oceans, cutting down entire forests to make way for pastures, warming up the planet and acidifying the plastic-filled ocean. Even insect populations are plummeting. The consequences of this will not be f…
Human behavior is vastly more impactful on the planet than human numerosity. We are not feeling the consequences of simply people - it is our gross behavior.
impact = people * behavior
Behavior can improve by orders of magnitude and even reverse polarity amicably and rapidly, through culture, inspiration, technological potential, historic renaissance - this is the solution to envisage - not come on... you know... people ~reductions.
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Climate change will cause famine, natural disasters and mass migrations. Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase.
> I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Nah, I doubt it. War is bad for business, and the global economy needs peace in order to extract maximum profit. Best to keep those wars to little backwater countries so we can keep spending trillions on mega-high-tech weapons without really disrupting the flow of money to bigcorp.
War is good for business - 34th Rule of Acquisition (Ferengi, Star Trek)
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no scientific basis for the claim that the earth could sustain 100+ billion people. These types of unsubstantiated claims are not just false but dangerous, as they suggest there is no need for significant action and change.
The size of the worlds livestock is around 100 billion. If all humans turned vegetarian, the human population could easily be of the that size.
I think that's making the assumption that having 100 billion livestock + the current human population is sustainable. Even if that were the case, humans consume a lot more resources than animals living on factory farms.
Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
#100False statement. In any case would be 60% of vertebrates, not animals. Big animals are being systematically wipped, but smaller animals had probably increased in total number. With the same amount of grass you can have 1 cow, or lets say '50' rabbits, or '1000' voles, or "1billion" of nematodes. I we could really measure it, I bet that we would find a big increase in number, and a big decrease in diversity.
I think you might be mistaken.
Not just vertebrates: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
It's biomass that's decreasing, not just numbers: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/amazon-may-lose-65-percen...
Yes, maritime animals too: https://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m512p155.pdf
And yes, plant biomass too: http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 (This one's on a much longer timeline, so hard to compare)