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Death by hockey sticks

dothemath.ucsd.edu

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Re: Death by hockey sticks

#51

Post by EGreg »

x-complexity wrote: post #45
EGreg wrote: post #31

Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... 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...

> Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... > Human population growth. Please don't go down this path: Every time someone does so, it always leads to eugenics in some form or another.

We can do plenty with women's education and condoms.

What path would you prefer instead?

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#52

Post by strken »

throwabob123 wrote: post #36
soared wrote: post #20

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.

> I don’t know much about 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…

Australian aboriginal land management probably kept the number of trees down, compared to what they would have been prior to human settlement. Dry season burns were used to clear away brush and deforest areas.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#53

Post by joegibbs »

The amount of plastic discarded looks terrible, but it's on a graph that starts in 1100 AD, so it would look outrageous even if people only threw out a single plastic bottle in 1920 and 10 this year

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#54

Post by thrown_22 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #44
mupra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.

(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be gettin…

Or will it be that people just don't find life worth living and stop having children? E.g. South Korea.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#55

Post by rimliu »

EGreg wrote: post #35
sacrosancty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure how S-shaped curves help when it comes to the collapse of all ecosystems is concerned... are we supposed to innovate our way out of rapidly dwindling biodiversity on the planet? 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 des…

your list is missing one crucial component:

  over sensationalised headlines

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#56

Post by bckr »

EGreg wrote: post #35
sacrosancty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure how S-shaped curves help when it comes to the collapse of all ecosystems is concerned... are we supposed to innovate our way out of rapidly dwindling biodiversity on the planet? 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 des…

For me, it's that it wil balance out in the end. We might have to suffer, but it will balance out. My hope is that most of us won't have to suffer that much before it balances out.

Also, I do feel good about the direction we're going in. California, where I live, is banning the sale of new combustion engine cars by 2035. 2035 will probably have some very hot weeks here, but that we're getting laws like this is a good sign.

It seems we need to be simultaneously extremely patient and extremely urgent about fixing problems like this. Constant sensationalism isn't the path, unless your work specifically is as a consciousness-raiser, perhaps. Others need to have an awareness of the problem but it does worse than nothing to be constantly panicked.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#57

Post by Firmwarrior »

glennonymous wrote: post #11
Firmwarrior wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment optio…

I have all sorts of great stuff, although to be fair, like many of the other commenters here I'm in the top income percentile of the most powerful country on the planet today

What about the people living horrible lives out in rural India or Africa, though? I think they fall under the 90% of people that the comment above was talking about

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#58

Post by bckr »

mxkopy wrote: post #17
credit_guy wrote: post #4

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.

> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue. Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly. If I cou…

> If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era

Does this take into account the difference in medicine between the two time periods?

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#59

Post by black_puppydog »

mupra wrote: post #42
WoodenChair wrote: post #41

You can't make hockey sticks out of just a few data points, as this author does in several of the charts. For example, the deforestation chart is based on a few data points from a UN study (where Our World in Data that the author links to cites as its source). But tree coverage has actually increased over the past 30 years according to some studies by NASA and elsewhere. For example, one 2018 paper from Nature says:…

A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.

> A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve.

It's also the initial part to a bell curve.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#60

Post by agileAlligator »

x-complexity wrote: post #45
EGreg wrote: post #31

Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... 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...

> Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... > Human population growth. Please don't go down this path: Every time someone does so, it always leads to eugenics in some form or another.

We practice eugenics with almost every lifeform we have domesticated but refuse to do so with ourselves, just coz some guy with a funny mustache got it confused with muh white masterrace.
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