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Death by hockey sticks

dothemath.ucsd.edu

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Re: Death by hockey sticks

#121

Post by mxkopy »

Dig1t wrote: post #116
jimbokun wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving up a access to modern medicine would probably be the biggest downside.

Also indoor plumbing/showers/toilets, all the hygiene products we use everyday that cost us basically nothing, indoor lighting (everything done at night was by candlelight and candles were expensive). So much of modern life we take for granted, it all adds up to a very different quality of life experience.

Different is the key word. We now also have parasocial relationships and disrupted circadian rhythms.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#122

Post by mxkopy »

bckr wrote: post #58
mxkopy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yeah. I'd rather have a deathbed that came really quickly with me remembering a good social life than one in which I'm remembering all the times I almost died but didn't.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#123

Post by dane-pgp »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #100
dane-pgp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly he's still at it. To save people from subjecting themselves to all of his tortured logic, here's just a sample from the article you linked: > The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. Basically his conclusion is that at some point in the next 400 years, the predominant economic system on Earth…

That's the entire point though. For economic growth to continue, the economy must completely decouple from all necessary resources. At that point all real commodities are not part of the economy which is growing so the thing with the commodities in it is the real economy which is static. The inevitability of the conclusion is ironclad. The only matter is which limiting resources necessitate moving to a steady state e…

Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#124

Post by sdenton4 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #115
wongarsu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all developed countries have birth rates below the replacement level. The cluster of reasons for this effect is indeed almost certainly why population levels will level off

And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets. The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd cent…

For what it's worth, for me 'getting our shit together' is shorthand for availability of birth control and improving availability of mass education, especially for women. These are the things that have concretely driven reduction in population growth.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#125

Post by betwixthewires »

actionfromafar wrote: post #101
betwixthewires wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author also mentions that their forest cover graph is "old growth", and even claims that this strengthens their point! So if I plant a tree today, or did so 30 years ago, this does not count against their deforestation graph, even though the tree exists, this somehow makes their plot more accurate.

Tree farms are not at all the same environment as old forest growth. I'm all for the critique of S-curves in other responses but this resembles dog-piling. Or would you say an old meadow full of species of bird, foxes, rabbits and insects, is equivalent to a wheat field? Planting trees is better than not planting trees, but it's not going to restore the ecosystem that came before it.

Dog piling? I've made one comment on the matter.

I know that old growth is not the same as a freshly planted pine farm. But that's not my point, my point is the author talks about reduced forest cover in aggregate across the land surface of the earth, which is not true, then admits to limiting it to old growth only and hilariously claims that it strengthens his point. It doesn't. When you basically say "forest cover older than 100 years is all that counts" of course the numbers look bad, you're preventing the measure of any repair to the forest cover by definition.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#126

Post by Robotbeat »

sdenton4 wrote: post #124
Robotbeat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets. The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd cent…

For what it's worth, for me 'getting our shit together' is shorthand for availability of birth control and improving availability of mass education, especially for women. These are the things that have concretely driven reduction in population growth.

I agree about that, but the implication was that we are doing those things to slow or reduce population, not just, you know, because we ought to do them anyway.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#127

Post by Schroedingersat »

dane-pgp wrote: post #123
Schroedingersat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the entire point though. For economic growth to continue, the economy must completely decouple from all necessary resources. At that point all real commodities are not part of the economy which is growing so the thing with the commodities in it is the real economy which is static. The inevitability of the conclusion is ironclad. The only matter is which limiting resources necessitate moving to a steady state e…

Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).

Again. The point is a reductio ad absurdum on exponential growth.

Exponential growth in a static environment is impossible. This is provable.

With that conclusion ironclad you no longer get to tapdance around the point. Which is that we must end reliance on growth.

There are other much sooner limits. Thermal forcing becomes as important as GHG forcing within a century, for example. Similarly you can't assert light water reactors as a solution (including idiotic ideas like making depleted fuel permanently unavailable) because there is not enough uranium to maintain exponential growth for more tha 80 years or so at 3% burnup.

Without exponentially increasing energy you don't get exponentially increasing resource extraction.

'The pie will grow exponentially fast forever so it doesn't matter that I'm stealing an exponentially larger share of it' is a lie.

There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#128

Post by Schroedingersat »

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…

Other than the entertainment one, substantially less than 90% of people have access to those. Even for the entertainment part, lords and kings had plenty of options (like not woeking 12 to 16 hour days).

But moreover they (and many lower stations) had security, free time, and a lack of precarity that is unavailable to roughly 90% of the population today. This is worth far more than better circuises and ranks about as highly as things like medicine and refrigeration.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#129

Post by Schroedingersat »

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.

All the more reason to do the things which control population growth (like educate and reduce time burdens on women, reduce child and infant mortality, and redistribute wealth) before the eugenicists start feeling the constraints of a finite world then.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#130

Post by mxkopy »

selimthegrim wrote: post #114
mxkopy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots, a good social circle Famous last words…

They say a large branch fell on him, near the plains...we'll miss that fellow
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