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Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

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Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#141

Post by midoridensha »

labster wrote: post #113
myshpa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanity would rather go to war to thin our numbers than give up eating meat We're using up resources at a pace that outstrips Earth's ability to replenish them. For instance, we're already consuming 1.7 times the Earth's available resources. https://www.overshootday.org/ If everyone were to adopt a diet similar to the American diet, we would require more than five Earths to sustain it. https://css.umich.edu/public…

I don’t think our grandchildren are going to care what we say. They’ll be too busy scavenging the scorched ruins of our cities for the last cans of refrigerant so they can survive another month on our doomed planet.

>They’ll be too busy scavenging the scorched ruins of our cities for the last cans of refrigerant so they can survive another month on our doomed planet.

Don't be silly. Our grandchildren won't need refrigerant to survive a hot Earth; they can just live underground. Caves stay cool year-round. Or they could dig a bunch of silos, 144 levels deep, and live in those, sending outcasts to the "outside" to die in the poisoned air.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#142

Post by midoridensha »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #100
ifdefdebug wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let them age out Doesn't work. A long time ago I thought when all the old farts are gone, everything is going to be better. Had to have faith in my own generation right? You know what happened... Humanity just grew a new set of old farts.

This, and so much this. "The hope of the world is in our generation". No, it really isn't. Any given generation is, statistically, a lot like every other generation (certainly over spans of 4-6 generations).

Exactly: look at what happened with the Hippies in the 1960s. They turned into the "Me Generation" of the 1980s.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#143

Post by midoridensha »

toss1 wrote: post #59
myshpa wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the food web One major contributor to the overshoot is our current agricultural practices, with animal agriculture being a primary offender. It's responsible for a significant amount of greenhouse gases, it's a leading driver of biodiversity loss and deforestation, and it contributes to soil degradation and water pollution. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/World…

>>Our agriculture and food production are major contributors to the damage Yes - deadly serious. I had to travel to the US midwest recently, after not having been there for a long time. As I drove out of the city the first impression of the farmlands was pleasant. But after an hour of highway-speed driving past nothing but bare fields (out of growing season) with scant rows of trees, we became a bit horrified — there…

>And they would be coated with pesticides to ensure that there were no insects, or anything that ate them, or that ate the things that ate the insects, etc.. And indeed, returning to the airport in daytime, there was remarkably little wildlife.

Did you also notice a lack of dead insects on your windshield?

Maybe you're not old enough to remember, but several decades ago, any significant drive in most of the US would result in your windshield being coated in dead bugs. Not enough to cover it of course, but enough you'd have to run your washers and wipers sometimes, and use the scrubber at the gas station to clean your windshield (back in the full-service days, the attendant did this automatically for everyone, because they needed it).

These days, you can take a long drive and get virtually no dead bugs at all.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#144

Post by dr_dshiv »

vlz wrote: post #94
commandlinefan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why this triggers such skepticism I know it does for me - because the people who claim to believe in it the most don't actually live their lives as if they actually believed it. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to do whatever I could reasonably do to create cooler summers and less smog, but I've never heard any actual concrete proposal beyond "vote democrat".

Ok, I will bite. Concrete proposals for anybody regardless of political view: * Eat half the meat you do or less * Don‘t fly unless absolutely necessary * Get on a plan for renewable electrical energy if possible I know, far from everything in this topic is about consumer choices but a lot really is. If you don‘t want the nanny state to fix your problems you can start at your own doorstep.

Yeah, but not having children blows these out of the water. I mean, its not even on the same chart.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#145

Post by matthewmacleod »

Amezarak wrote: post #111
fragmede wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry that saving the planet might cause minor inconvenience for you. There were far fewer factory farms and antibiotics 500 years ago, and 95% fewer people. What was sustainable then isn't sustainable now.

If the price is saving the planet is turning it into the dystopia we seem to be zooming towards full speed, I will be happy to not pay it and suffer the consequences of our civilization collapsing. I’m not changing my behavior and I will fight vigorously for it. If you stopped all meat production today it would not save you. (Post)industrial society itself is what is unsustainable. There is no way around that. There…

Honestly, absolutely wild that you view “reduce meat intake to environmentally sustainable levels” as dystopian. Nobody’s saying you have to eat bugs for every meal.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#146

Post by _8j50 »

I feel like climate issues are best solved by anthropologists and diplomats.

That aside, considering how much things improved during covid lockdowns, I've wondered if one of these climate failures killing a fee billion people will fix the whole problem on its own and have earth recover from the human parasite for a few more decades.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#147

Post by acqq »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #28

I don’t know why this triggers such skepticism in me. Particularly the section on novel entities. But it feels funny, somehow, and I can’t put my finger on it.

Instead of speaking of own feeling based on a "section" the rational approach is to read the actual scientific paper dealing only with that topic:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

"Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities"

Environ. Sci. Technol. 2022, 56, 3, 1510–1521

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#148

Post by Borrible »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
IKantRead wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it some time. Good news is that "faster than expected" seems to be a very common saying among people studying these areas, so you might not have to wait as long as the geological time might suggest! Honestly, as someone who has been very concerned about climate for a while now, I'm surprised how much visible disruption of the climate system we've directly been able to observe. Earlier in my life I thought that,…

You have a funny definition of 'good news'.

Bad news, you will face it in your lifetime.

Good news, you won't face the time after.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#149

Post by tuatoru »

BirAdam wrote: post #107

The one thing I don’t see people take into account is a globally declining birth rate, very rapid declining birth rate. Fewer humans will mean less consumption, and therefore lower demand and less production. This could reverse many effects within the lifetimes of millennials and GenZ.

Yes, fertility is below replacement in 183 out of 191 countries. True. But it depends.

IPAT: impact = population times affluence times technology.

Take away the 700 million people with the highest incomes (10%), then about 90% of the impact is gone. I doubt that population decline will be that swift or deep, though.

Technology won't save us either. If it isn't deployed commercially at billion-dollar scale now, it won't scale up enough in four decades to make much of a difference.

Re: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

#150

Post by tuatoru »

IKantRead wrote: post #29
Acssux wrote: post #5

How is something critical if it has been transgressed and we are still alive? Or on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?

Give it some time. Good news is that "faster than expected" seems to be a very common saying among people studying these areas, so you might not have to wait as long as the geological time might suggest! Honestly, as someone who has been very concerned about climate for a while now, I'm surprised how much visible disruption of the climate system we've directly been able to observe. Earlier in my life I thought that,…

The Club of Rome's "Limits To Growth" study in the 1970s, in its central scenario, had the 2040s as the time when we'd start to really feel the consequences of "pollution" (broadly conceived, including things like fossil water drawdown and soil exhaustion as well as the results of using fossil fuels).

A little faster than expected maybe. Not all that much though.

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