31–40 of 143 posts
Human population growth.
This is the input to all the other stuff. The past few generations thinks they're the most sophisticated and intelligent, but they're living on an ecological credit card. And the bill is going to come due.
Just like any bill after a spending spree, this is going to be a doozy. Probably extinction level...
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> I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots. You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
Still, I'd have plenty of time to worry about those things. In fact that would probably be my "job" - developing, maintaining, and expanding the estate that I would eventually leave to my kids.
Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
> not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two
He just spins it as a bad thing.
He has, essentially, 3 actual graphs (GWP, extinction rate, CO2 emissions). The others are all subsets or proxies of those three or based on too few data points and fit to a curve that flatters his point.
This population explosion apocalypse is as old as time and each version of it fails to come true.
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> I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots. You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
Still, I'd have plenty of time to worry about those things. In fact that would probably be my "job" - developing, maintaining, and expanding the estate that I would eventually leave to my kids.
I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?
Hockey sticks usually end up being S-shaped curves. The author is just doom-screaming because we're currently in the rapid change phases of lots of them but hasn't shown on any of the graphs the point where disaster will occur. What's the critical rate of extinctions that would end global economic growth before most of the world has western quality of life? He has no clue! So his worries are just emotional and based…
insects and pollinators
birds and large game animals
forests and rainforests
kelp forests dying
coral reefs dying
overfishing
plastic pollution
greenhouse gas pollution
acidification of oceans
1/3 of all arable land underwent desertification
I don’t know much about forests but it seems incorrect that at any point in time 55% of land mass was covered by forests.
The past was amazing. One example: Trees predated organisms that broke them down, so at some point there were just piles of trees, many tens or even a few hundreds of feet, on land, and that's why some trees are theorized to grow so tall so fast.
Just on the face of it though, you're a layperson, but you find soil, coal, peat, lots of biotic mass almost everywhere, what do you think put it there? Deep, deep soil. It's trees. You drive through California or Illinois or Texas or New York or wherever you live, and you see all these farms. Single stands of weird trees. There were forests. You can look at Google Maps and see how parts of the Amazon today, which are obviously being poached, look like the fringes of the US too.
Not only was land mass covered in forests. You know there were indigenous Americans absolutely everywhere when Europeans arrived in the Americas. Not only that, but climate change predated the arrival of settlers. There were forests completely cleared of brush, that the settlers commented you could run horses through, because indigenous Americans had been using wildfires to manage the land as game parks. There were indigenous people everywhere in Australia too.
The oceans were full of life. Just like preposterous amounts of fish before industrial fishing. Romans would routinely describe the Mediterranean as boiling. They weren't being stupid, they were describing the colossal number of fish in there. If you go diving in a genuinely protected area like the Galapagos, it's insane, there are just an incredible amount of fish. You look at a deep sea trawler, it pulls out just an insane amount of fish. It was like that everywhere.
I don't know how laypeople get this idea that Earth was always as sick as it is now. It was like 10-100x more filled with life 250 years ago. It's ridiculous. People aren't wrong about the bugs. There is a far longer and stubborn cultural heritage of documenting nature, long predating Republicans, so it couldn't be just politics that has led people astray. Maybe they're just stupider.
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I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago. I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..
The Lords and Kings had plenty of entertainment. Entertainment did not begin with the invention of smartphones. In fact I would say their entertainment was far better and more wholesome than what we have today. Imagine going on hunts in lush untouched wilderness, or watching men fight to the death in an arena, or slithering off to your harem of beautiful women and having your way with whichever ones you fancy that da…
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Still, I'd have plenty of time to worry about those things. In fact that would probably be my "job" - developing, maintaining, and expanding the estate that I would eventually leave to my kids.
Yes, but in a world without growth, this was a zero-sum game. If you won at that game, it was only because someone else lost.
Also, who's to say the world isn't zero-sum now? I'm certainly feeling squeezed, even with all this supposed growth and modernity.
I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?
Still, if the biomass number is anywhere near accurate, it's pretty insane. 96% of mammal biomass is humans + domesticated animals? Throws the biodiversity thing into a new light, no wonder animals are going extinct when we're strangler-fig-ing their world.