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A kind of similar xkcd diagram of Earth's Land Mammals by Weight https://xkcd.com/1338/ - there's hardly any wild animals, comparatively.
I've always wondered why horses are not used as livestock since they can also produce milk and have commercial use as well such plowing fields or transportation.
I have to 'pick a lane' very soon re: having kids or not. This stuff really weighs on my mind all the time. People with young kids what are your feelings about this?
I'm optimistic. I work in agriculture and so see all the advances coming - right now there is more than enough food to go around despite bad weather, and yields are still going up fast. In the mean time world population growth is slowing down as third world countries advance to the point where more babies is bad for the family.
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I started to change my bevahiour. I stopped buying fruit and vegetables in plastic wrapping. I buy milk in glass or paper containers. In my household I pay super close attention to how much water is running when we do dishes. We fill up the sink and wash it there. We turn off lights wherever possible and use energy efficient devices. I only bought A++ electrical kitchen appliances, we invested in a new energy efficie…
Wait what? “I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.” Benign?
Other viruses that we control for with vaccination regularly have much more severe long-term effects than we now know from COVID, like causing birth defects (Rubella), deafness (Mumps), immunocompromization (Measles) or cancer (HPV).
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Not sure why you're getting downvoted, my guess is the reference to COVID. The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
The population exists because we can, in fact, feed it, right now.
Does that prove it's unsustainable? No. The way to prove it's unsustainable is to have a massive die-off, which is not a way I'm interested in proving anything.
Remember how everyone made fun of Al Gore? Manbearpig? Leaving the Paris accord? Remember how they are mocking the Green New Deal? Remember Dominionism, making fun of "soy boys", and everything else? You should remember this when they try to pretend they do everything they could to remove environmental regulations and delay dealing with global warming until it was too late. Also remember a good percentage of them bel…
Between Obama + Antichrist and Trump + Antichrist alone there are over 7 million results on google including a ton of kindle books.
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Yes, humans in previous generations wouldn't even bat an eyelid at the death rates. it wasn't long ago that people used to willingly go on boat journeys even though 10% of the passengers would typically die on the way
> on boat journeys even though 10% of the passengers would typically die on the way Source? Seems highly implausible (in general).
Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.
My childhood in the South was spent in a cacophany of frogs, birds, and cicadas. We'd have to yell at each other on the back porch to be heard over the treefrogs. Everywhere you looked was a reptile, bug, or other critter. Throw a hook in the water with a piece of bread or worm on it, and you'd have a bite nearly instantly.
Today, here in the Pacific Northwest, the forests are beautiful but almost entirely silent aside from a bird here and there. The last time I went camping, I didn't see a living thing larger than a banana slug. Much of that is surely the temperature difference, but I'm never sure if that explains all of it.
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I am a former geophysicist, and credibly we could see on the order of an 8C rise this century. It's much worse than the general public thinks, and the picture keeps worsening as understanding of the system and its feedbacks increase. A rise of 5-8C make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and would collapse food production and global civilization. Billions dying is not scaremongering, but is a very probable outcom…
5-8C is much higher than most scientific projections. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Also, government websites like climate.gov typically don't have the most current information.
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The population exists because we can, in fact, feed it, right now.
"Feed it right now" is true. "Feed it sustainably" - that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about. And there are some worrying signs about sustainability - the Ogallala Aquifer, the collapse of ocean fish stocks, and so on. Does that prove it's unsustainable? No. The way to prove it's unsustainable is to have a massive die-off, which is not a way I'm interested in proving anything.
> that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about.
This is disingenuous. In general, no one cares about the famine in Syria except starving Syrians. When's the last time you heard that on the news over a Trump tweet?
Enforcing population limits in theory sounds like a great idea - in human practice, it will just be an excuse for genocide. The only ethical way to do it is to bring all of humanity out of poverty - which rich people do not want to pay for.
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You aren't wrong but to me you are focusing on the wrong things. As you say, the west is already dropping the birth rate and being more and more focused on sustainability, etc. Eventually, it will get there. Change takes time. The big problem is the 3rd world. People there don't a have a choice. They don't want their family to starve. Women are largely forced into a reproduction role only. But we know that the way to…
"They don't want their family to starve." We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know better. We can farm in ways that build high carbon soils. We can do this even in the 3rd world. Teach people the proper techniques. It's nonsense to claim that we just have to accept this kind of collapse.
I read quite a long article once, it was about efforts to teach Iraqi farmers how to use modern techniques and modern equipment.
The main problem they encountered wasn't conservative mindset. No, the farmers were willing to try something new.
It was missing infrastructure. Once you start using any sophisticated equipment, you need repairs, distribution of spare parts, good documentation in local language etc. Such a system is not easy to set up in a really foreign country, much less so if security is problematic.