Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#101

Post by Majestic121 » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:33 PM UTC

philipps wrote: post #54

montenegrohugo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human population by itself is not the measure we should worry about. With enough technological progress, the earth could reasonably sustain 100+ billion people. The problem lies in the doubling of human population in little more than a generation. The problem lies in that we are not being sustainable with this. We are depleting resources whilst polluting and rapidly changing our environment. For the moment, we only h…

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.

Quick calculus :

TLDR : 100+ billions is a hard reach today, but 50+ billions might not impossible

There is approximately 63,824,448 km² or liveable land on earth today.[1]

Let's cut that in half to account for farms/land lost due to global warming/industries/etc... We get 31,912,224km² of land usable for habitation.

Let's assume we cover the remaining with a huge city with the density of Hong Kong (6,690 people/km²). This is for the whole city, not the most populated quarters.

We arrive at a population of 213,492,778,560 people, so twice as much as the parent's estimate, with half of the remaining liveable land usable for farms/industries/wildlife parcs/inefficiencies of repartition...

Would that be enough ? According to a Sweden study [2], we use 1.6 billion hectares (16,000,000 km²) of farmland today, for approximately 7 billions people. It means that for 200 billions, we need 486,857,142 km². That's a huge increase, and currently the Earth can only sustain 44,000,000km² (same source as earlier, FAO), so an order of magnitude lower. According to a study on the effect of diets on land [3], switching to a vegetarian/vegan (not much change in the result) diet allows to cut the land use by ~4. So we're left with 121,714,285 km² of required land : a bit better, but we still fall way short. That's going to be our actual bottleneck.

Let's cut population by 3, and we arrive at ~40,000,000 km² of required land for 66 billions people.

It would be a pretty grim dystopia, that's for sure. Most of nature would be erased, there would be a lot of natural catastrophes, and clearly the Earth would be way less welcoming than it is now.

But 66 billions people on Earth, given 'sufficient' technological (and most notably political) advancements is not completely out of whack, especially if we manage to produce clean energy (or at least clean on Earth) and to radically improve our crops (with genetic engineering, hydroponic culture, exploitation of oceans maybe ?)

Bottom line : this is napkin calculation, a lot of factors have been left out (water to give a main one)

[1] : https://www.quora.com/If-every-person-on-earth-was-to-be-giv... (I know, Quora is not the most reputable source, but it seems decently sourced)

[2] : http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/newsroom/docs/en-so...

[3] : https://www.elementascience.org/articles/10.12952/journal.el...

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#102

Post by pvaldes » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:34 PM UTC

infinite8s wrote: post #88

pvaldes wrote: post #84

False 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 the collapse of insect populations argues against that.

More nematodes and earthworms then. Both compete seriously for the crown of higher biomass on terrestrial invertebrates. Is said in many textbooks of ecology that there are much more Kg of tiny nematodes in an area of forest than Kg of deer.

And much more rodents also, of course.

We could assume that more or less a half of the biomass of each tree in a temperate forest is under the surface. Number of animals is not a good measure to explain the current situation.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#103

Post by trentnix » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

feistypharit wrote: post #19

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

Sadly, I think this is right. The "fix" involves one group of people telling another group of people what to do. That never goes over without a fight. Especially when it will involve land, life and death, and reproductive rights. I think what we're seeing with government's moving more right wing is the first step of this. These people are already operating on this assumption and plan on being the ones doing the telli…

It's a shame you've been downvoted on this point, and it's more evidence Hacker News is becoming more like Ars: upvotes are votes of agreement as opposed to votes that you providing insight.

And your comment is not only extremely insightful, it is exactly right - the current global political climate is a populist reaction by people tiring of being told by elites what they should and should not have and what they should and should not believe.

All of the fixes being proposed are, if we are honest, some form of rationing or another. That will necessarily reduce the quality of life of a large group of people, and they won't accept that no matter how strongly bureaucrats insist they should.

So such insistence will need to be backed by force, because it will be resisted by force.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#104

Post by r7000 » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

neetdavid wrote: post #86

Rotareti wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My equivalent of this is insects. My family and I made a lot of trips with our car in the 90th. The front of the car was full of squashed insects when we arrived. There was a constant knocking on the windshield. The amount of insects that I find on my car today is far less. I think it's about 10-20% of what it was in the 90th. I'm worried.

This has to be one of the funniest takes I've seen

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insect...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/08/26/windscreen-ph...

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#105

Post by RankingMember » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:38 PM UTC

mlcrypto wrote: post #55

Those animals weren't suited to reproduce in the modern era and were thus eliminated. End of story

Let's see how glib you are when humanity succeeds in wrecking the environment enough to begin exterminating itself.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#106

Post by CalRobert » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:38 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #95

code_duck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be devastating for individual organisms, but what would the large scale ecological impact be? Chernobyl is home to quite a bit of wildlife as I understand it.

Also, if we're talking about a world after the exchange of thousands of ICBM's I'm not sure how much relative impact the melting down of the world's nuclear power plants would have.

The problem has been considered before, though probably as a general safety issue rather than trying not to further irradiate a barren world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#107

Post by arbitrary_name » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:39 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #94

montenegrohugo wrote: post #10

Human 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

This does not cut it as a response. The earth does not have capacity for us and all the living plants and animals. A healthy future should include biodiversity and not 9 billion people. Things are not getting better for most of the planet.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#108

Post by bengrunfeld » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

The only way to stop this is to drastically reduce the human population immediately. No shitty carbon tax will even remotely address this problem. Anyone want to give that a shot?

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#109

Post by titzer » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #98

titzer wrote: post #68

Earlier 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. 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)

Well, war is good for the war racket, but generally not good for trade in the vast majority of other goods.

Re: Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

#110

Post by trentnix » Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

dao- wrote: post #74

trentnix wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And by what conditions would the problem be judged as fixed? I’ll believe it’s a real crisis when the people insisting it is actually live like it is. But while they get their Starbucks and fly on their planes and watch their Netflix and shop their Whole Foods and stack their Amazon boxes all while claiming we need to collectively engage in some sort of “lifestyle sacrifice”, I remain skeptical. If such a sacrifice i…

I stopped eating meat five years ago and made the decision not to get a car. It's a start but it's not enough. I'd welcome the government forcing more change on me, but more importantly I want the government to encourage if not enforce change on a larger scale (like the EU banning old-school light bulbs some years ago), because that's what governments are there for. I can't do that on my own and the looming ecologica…

Centuries of fear-mongering by those warning of ecological disaster and yet we've experienced no global ecological disasters. But you want government forcing change despite many, many examples (within a century!) of that resulting in political, and subsequently human, catastrophe. You might want to think this through...