Will Earth Expire By 2050? 1638
_josh writes: "Will overconsumption force humanity off this planet in less than 50 years? It may sound sci-fi, but according to the WWF in this story at the Observer, it's entirely possible. Maybe now I can convince my brother not to buy that SUV ..." Take with as large a grain of salt as you think appropriate.
World Wrestling Foundation? (Score:3, Informative)
I, for one, have -never- heard of the World Wildlife Fund before this, and I'm sure there are others like me, who thought why the fsck are we believe the World Wrestling Foundation these days?
WWF = World Wildlife Fund (Score:3, Informative)
I also believe their new slogan is "Get the 'F' out."
Past predictions were all wrong, why believe this? (Score:5, Informative)
And of course Thomas Malthus predicted imminent mass starvation in the early 1800s.
In the 1970s, they predicted:
"The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000
and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend
two facts. These facts are (1) World food production cannot keep pace
with the galloping growth of population. (2) 'Family planning' cannot
and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth."
"Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food
supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30
years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be
alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed.
Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it
is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally
impossible in practice."
Except, here we are in 2002 and those 6 or 7 billion people are eating better than any of their ancestors in all of human history, even in the poorest countries.
For more info, see The Ultimate Resource [juliansimon.org] by Julian Simon [juliansimon.org], and The Skeptical Environmentalist [cambridge.org] by Bjorn Lomborg [lomborg.com].
Re:Oxygen Supply and Demand (Score:1, Informative)
The ocean is where most of it comes from.
Can't hear the message for all the screaming (Score:2, Informative)
This, of course, is based on 1960's factory emission averages, and projecting them 50 years down the track. Think about the advances in pollution contorl, recycling etc etc in the last 10 years. Those advances are happening at a steady rate, and aren't going to slow down. This means we will keep getting better at looking after the planet - NOT screwing it up like some want us to believe.
Look at life in a positive light and we might finally stop bitching and get productive.
Tragedy of the commons (Score:3, Informative)
Aaaah, a beautiful example of the 'tragedy of the commons [dieoff.org]'.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that globalisation et al are wrong, as long as you take *all* aspects of it, not only the short-term ones like make-money-fast and the-next-generation-will-solve-this. If you go for a certain approach, take everything including the messy parts, not only the easy gains.
Re:predictions... (Score:3, Informative)
WWF is another environmentalist group that takes turns with others in releasing "impending disaster" type predictions. This is still somewhat "hip" but I get the feeling that even the media is getting a little tired of the gloom-and-doom-oops-we-were-wrong-again.
The good news is that, for the most part, no-one really listens to these fools. They see the panda logo, hear their spew, and then say "Oh, that's too bad" and buy an SUV. Good! That's about the level of importance that should be attached to their rhetoric.
The Population Bomb (Score:3, Informative)
-Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
There's a long history of vastly misguided prophets of doom by now- starting with Malthus, I guess, but the most revealing example is probably Paul Ehrlich, who's been writing books since the sixties (The Population Bomb, The Population Explosion, etc.) about how the world will be swamped by an exploding population and run out of resources, all in the (ever-postponed) near future. In the sixties he thought that we'd be starving in the seventies, and that Great Britain would no longer exist by the nineties. I don't know what he thinks now, but he's still writing along the same lines.
Ehrlich also famously made a bet with economist Julian Simon, in 1980, that five raw materials picked by Ehrlich would be more expensive (because they would be rarer, per capita) ten years later. In 1990 Ehrlich was wrong on every pick.
An awful lot of science fiction has been written along those lines, as well: Disch's 334, Harrison's Make Room, Make Room (filmed as Soylent Green). But in the real world, I'm not too worried. We may kill off all the black rhinos, white rhinos, sumatran rhinos.... And that would be unfortunate, but it would not constitute a threat to human survival.
Also, incidentally, shipping people to other planets is not likely to be an effective way of dealing with excess population. Can you imagine the amount of chemical fuel involved in lifting just the quarter-million people born every day away from the earth?
Air, water, food... (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, I can't wait to see you seek alternatives to food and water. How do you take your soylent green?
Interesting they compare the United States' use of resources to that of Burundi. This comparison is truly startling.
Yes, its is truly startling that you stuck on that comparison, and not on the better document and much more relevant case of the UK.
(The United States places the greatest pressure on the environment, it takes 12.2 hectares of land to support each American citizen and 6.29 for each Briton.)
And Timothy, you might want to encourage your brother to go ahead and buy that new SUV. If his current car is more than five years old, that new SUV will be adding less pollution to the atmosphere.
Wow! Totally unsuported wild claim...sweet!
Lets see, small car pollutes more than car that burns twice as much fuel. Suuuuure.
Re:Another option? (Score:5, Informative)
You better go talk to some small farmers, because they see hardly any of that cash. It actually ends up in the hands of large factory farmers, etc. more than it ends up in the hands of small local farmers. Not enough people know this, and believe what you just said, which is why the folks in DC vote for these subsidies. They win votes, and distribute pork to their already wealthy buddies. They do nothing for small farmers.
Extrapolation is a dangerous business (Score:3, Informative)
Extrapolating a trend to 50 years is plain dumb when you are targeting an industrialized society. Frist, we aren't insect. If we start drowning in our own refuse, we'll adapt.
Second, God only knows what technologies will appear in the next half-century. Some of them could even be (gasp, argh!) beneficial to the environment.
As a reminder of past extrapolations gone all wrong, here is an excerpt from "The history of Taxicabs" [covent-garden.co.uk] -- note the reference to the next fifty years.
In 1900 there were 11,000 registered cabs in London and well over double that now (that's not counting minicabs) Motorised taxis appeared in London in 1904 and got the name 'taxi' from the taxometer that standardised the fares from counting revolutions of their wheels. A statistician about ten years before that had seriously predicted that, at the 'current' rate of expansion and increase of population, horse manure would cover every street in London from wall to wall, even covering windows, within fifty years. Thank you Henry Ford.
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
Examples? How about fish in Canada. [columbia.edu] Or oil. Or whales. Or clean air. Or clean water.
Fish stocks in many parts of the North sea are so depleted as to be almost clean. Yet fishing boats are still subsidised to go out and fish what little is left.
Oil supplies are down to the point where serious proposals are made to mine for shale-oil [chemlink.com.au] -- basically oil-soaked dirt.
Calling 'But they have cried wolf before!', and ignoring the evidence is madness.
Re:Another option? (Score:1, Informative)
But unless the US is using that wealth to contribute back to the ecosystem (getting rid of excess CO2, filtering poluted water etc). It's meaningless.
Were talking about the environment here, not politics or economics. $ is worthless guide here.
BTW, your equation is flawed because you forgot to take into account what the produce was.
Different products range in cost, and in the polution they cause in their production varies depending on the product aswell.
Re:Another option? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/pr
It's a little hard to ignore when all credible tunings of global models and fiddling what humans can control of those within even fanciful bounds of political acceptibility, predicts overshoot and collapse this century.
The US decided in 1974 (report for NSSM200) that the world's population was unsustainable (specifically, a threat to national security), and (very likely) engineered AIDS as a fix (since it was clear birth control programs would be anti-American in the practical sense that the US couldn't use all the resources any more).
Malthus may have been a little premature, probably not accounting for the way technologies would stretch the distibution of wealth, but that doesn't make him wrong in the important part: that there's only so much to go around and an exploding global population is going to crash and burn, no two ways about it.andwhere it counts.
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with the theory was, and will remain, the idea that resources really only grow linearly. Human agricultural technology has repeatedly increased the carrying capacity of land well beyond the expected linear growth that would have long ago resulted in us passing the expected carrying capacity of the land. Malthus himself seemed to expect to see us pass the carrying capacity of the land within a few generations of his life - not much different than more recent predictions of the same doom and gloom by people like professor Paul Ehrlich at stanford in his book Population Bomb.
This is not to say that I don't think the potential for this to happen isn't there, just that the theoretical linear/exponential relationship between resources and population growth is flawed. Looking only at agricultural and population growth, the "first world" nations have extremely low population growth relative to their total agricultural potential. Population growth is only rampant in areas of low development, for a myriad of reasons, such as high infant mortality rates, the need for more family help to farm and insurance against losing one or two children, lack of birth control, etc etc. But it all boils down to cost benefit analysis. When you have to pay to educate your kids, and their usefulness does not outweigh their cost, you stop having them in large amounts. Ok, at this point I'm rambling, but my point is made. Production is not automatically linear, and population growth is not automatically exponential, for human beings. And this was just as wrong in 1798 as it is now.
Re:Another option? (Score:3, Informative)
The first part of the statement is true, but the second is nonsense. If by resources, all you mean are natural resources, then sure. But if you mean all productive and valuable goods, then that's something else in entirely. Americans can afford to consume more because they make more: not because they're simply borrowing to consume. The amount of foriegn borrowing to fund _consumption_ in the U.S. is trivially small compared to the amount of actual production of goods and services.
Asteroids, not planets (Score:2, Informative)
Fortunately, smaller rocks have a lot more surface area than the same weight of large rocks. We can use a bunch of asteroids instead. Flatten them for more surface area (no, not Ringworld -- we don't have a material strong enough for that).
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)