61–70 of 143 posts
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.
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:…
The background extinction rate in the absence of humans is probably much higher than 0. New species are also continuously emerging while others are going extinct, so that the total number remains steady.
[1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No coincidence of wants is also a requisite for zero-sum. If my estate were used primarily for logging, but people also found it beautiful, I could teach my children how to manage a hostel business and increase its value without devaluing anything else. 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.
What ever happened to peak oil? Seems like a similar argument here.
Limits of growth said it would happen between 2010 and 2030. So the answer to "whatever happened to peak oil" is "it's on track as scheduled"
Disclaimer: We do have some economic transition in europe due to a (cold/hot) war, that may conflagrate the actual year due to spikes and valleys, though. Psychohistory Data science works for a large populace but does not take into account individual events.
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> 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.
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(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.
tang ping
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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…
The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.
It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason.
Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda:
> Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure.
He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag.
He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution:
> In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations
No, it's not.
https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola...