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Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

theguardian.com

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Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#51

Post by acqq »

ForHackernews wrote: post #49
acqq wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean just printing more money (easy) or reducing the waste during the energy consumption (physical limits exist)? What we know about the economy today is still mostly extracting natural resources, spending energy from one natural resources to process other, distribute, sell them and finally dump the results in landfills, air and water. We measure growth mostly by the amount of the matter involved in this proce…

Printing money isn't growth, it's just inflation. Reducing pure waste, or increasing output for a given input, results in growth. Yes, there are physical limits, but we're nowhere near them for most processes.

Then as soon as you assume you'd use always more solar energy (growth in energy use), the resources are finite. You have to achieve zero growth of energy use to have a sustainable state. Otherwise there's no infinite resource, not even solar energy.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#52

Post by danbruc »

narrator wrote: post #7

The problem with studies about the future is that they tend to too easily reconfirm the ideological beliefs of the writers. For example, the Romans didn't collapse because of environmental reasons. This makes them a tough jigsaw piece to squeeze into a deep environmentalist collapse puzzle. This is probably why Jared Diamond ignores them and instead focuses on small tribes in the arctic and easter island. The only co…

Grab this PDF [1] scroll to the end and look at the charts comparing three different scenarios simulated in 1972 with the actual development over 30 years. When you look at them keep in mind that »Standard Run« and »Comprehensive Technology« lead to a collapse, only »Stabilized World« keeps humans happy. So there is definitely something quantifiable to it independent of any ideology.

[1] http://www.csiro.au/~/media/CSIROau/Divisions/CSIRO%20Sustai...

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#53

Post by fauigerzigerk »

danbruc wrote: post #44
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #35

I agree that inequality is a growing problem for our economic and democratic models, but I think we need to keep two things seperate: Inequality of resource usage and inequality of resource ownership. The super rich may be thousands or hundereds of thousands of times as wealthy as the average person, but they do not eat thousands of times as much and they do not personally use thousands of times as much energy as the…

If you don't compare the rich and the poor within countries but on a global scale the situation looks a bit different. I have no source at hand to prove my point but if I remember correctly the first world wastes enough food that we could almost feed every human on earth if we would stop that and redistribute the food instead.

They are not going hungry because we are eating too much. That causality doesn't exist. Famine is the result of wars, corruption and generally bad policy.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#54

Post by spikels »

_of wrote: post #36
narrator wrote: post #7

The problem with studies about the future is that they tend to too easily reconfirm the ideological beliefs of the writers. For example, the Romans didn't collapse because of environmental reasons. This makes them a tough jigsaw piece to squeeze into a deep environmentalist collapse puzzle. This is probably why Jared Diamond ignores them and instead focuses on small tribes in the arctic and easter island. The only co…

What are the ideological beliefs of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center?

I'm pretty sure that the article is incorrect and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has very little or nothing to do with this study. The apparent paper[1] describes the funding as:

"This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A, known as "Collaborative Earth System Science Research Between NASA/GSFC and UMCP""

I believe the Guardian writer is simply using NASA and Goddard as an appeal to authority to increase the credibility of a highly speculative study written by grad students.

That said I hope you can see that ideology is an important driver of both the reporting and the study.

[1] http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submi...

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#55

Post by Zigurd »

fargolime wrote: post #18
arcadeparade wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is capitalism compatible with human survival? You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. >Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-to... It's true that massive regulation to account for all…

> You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. Blasphemy! I bet less than half of the otherwise smart people acknowledge this. Or they think we'll just terraform Mars some other planet light years away, soon enough.

You didn't have to wait long for the Mars immigrants, did you?

The problem is that accumulating enough energy to leave Earth will be very difficult. Oil still is tightly coupled to wealth. And if we survive long enough to decouple it, and are lucky enough that that is a smooth transition and don't end up way too poor to go to Mars, getting to Mars is still going to be a trip for wealthy masochists with no impact on human survival. (Wait, maybe Elon Musk is playing some Vonnegut-esque Marxist long con on the 1%'ers.)

I would find the Pollyannas more believable if we had a production line for thorium reactors cranking them out like the Chinese build coal powerplants.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#56

Post by ForHackernews »

acqq wrote: post #51
ForHackernews wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Printing money isn't growth, it's just inflation. Reducing pure waste, or increasing output for a given input, results in growth. Yes, there are physical limits, but we're nowhere near them for most processes.

Then as soon as you assume you'd use always more solar energy (growth in energy use), the resources are finite. You have to achieve zero growth of energy use to have a sustainable state. Otherwise there's no infinite resource, not even solar energy.

You could (again, for practical purposes) always use more solar energy.

For reference, "the Sun delivers more energy to Earth in an hour than we use in a year from fossil, nuclear, and all renewable sources combined" [1]

And that's assuming only collecting solar energy incident on the Earth itself. Theoretically, we could also construct large arrays of solar collectors on the moon or in orbit.

[1] http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf

NB: I'm not saying this is likely or even realistic. In all likelihood, we are just plain fucked.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#57

Post by vixen99 »

arcadeparade wrote: post #5

Guy McPherson has a disturbingly well sourced and pessimistic summary of how climate change will affect humanity in the next few decades. In his view it's too late to stop it and we're finished: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-u...

Possibly most readers know this but if you want to check the validity of this and all the other predictions, the parameter to look for is climate sensitivity. Notoriously difficult to estimate, key to the whole business, it's the degree of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Bishophill links to innumerable articles, papers and views (from all sides) on this.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/display/Search?searchQuery...

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#58

Post by danbruc »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #53
danbruc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't compare the rich and the poor within countries but on a global scale the situation looks a bit different. I have no source at hand to prove my point but if I remember correctly the first world wastes enough food that we could almost feed every human on earth if we would stop that and redistribute the food instead.

They are not going hungry because we are eating too much. That causality doesn't exist. Famine is the result of wars, corruption and generally bad policy.

I did not want to imply that, I wanted to say that the rich are capable of wasting a LOT of resources.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#59

Post by phest »

Nanzikambe wrote: post #48

WARNING: Doom n' Gloom post :P I'm not arguing against the need for such studies, however I find it amazing that this is debatable at all. Expecting that we as a species or society aren't subject to the most fundamental laws of the universe isn't rational. Even in the negligible timescale of our own species we've seen repeated cycles of collapse, the planet is littered with the remains of failed species. The only rea…

I don't imagine this is something that sits well with the entrepreneurial spirit of HN readers

Would that explain why this post moved from number 3 on HN to bottom of page 3 in a matter of minutes?

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#60

Post by mitchty »

ForHackernews wrote: post #33
mitchty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to do that when its pronounced versus spelled I've noticed. aka: NASA = Nasa BBC = b b c I could be wrong though so whatever.

That's what makes it an acronym. Technically, an "acronym" is an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word (e.g. Radar, Nasa). In contrast, things like BBC or FBI are "initialisms" but not acronyms.

That explains it, but I thought NASA was originally spelled out as well. Take for example the world wide web and the early 2000's and people constantly trying to make www dub dub dub.

I think the only thing stopping the BBC getting in the same boat is lack of vowels.

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