That's because we've spent several millennia figuring out how to live more and more densely and we do the same with our livestock.
If beavers invented a lifestyle that enabled them to live at densities up to thousands per square mile they'd compromise a hell of a lot of biomass too.
The fact that there's more humans doesn't imply anything about the other animal population (though I suspect that it's not good for the other animals though).
I recently listened to a great podcast talking about beavers and it mentioned some population stats for North America (can't recall the numbers now). Beavers are right behind humans in terms of how they have shaped the land.
You need to include our food production spaces when talking about population density for that to be a fair comparison. Our urban density is mirrored (and supported) by the sparseness of our farmland.
a) Counting areas where resources come from get complicated quick. Are you gonna count the ocean because the grizzly bear eats the salmon? Do Nile crocodiles get their population density counted based on the entire watershed they depend on?
b)There are about 50 people per square kilometer of land.
Even adjusted for farmland humans are still gonna blow every other large predator out of the water. Even if you include commercial fisheries that still blows every other large predator out of the water. Maybe there's a couple seasonal localized concentrations of certain predators that are higher but nothing else comes close to that number.
I've always wondered why horses are not used as livestock since they can also produce milk and have commercial use as well such plowing fields or transportation.
Agent Smith is generally one of my favourite parts of The Matrix, but his speech is factually incorrect. Plenty of mammals will multiply until they run out of food.
I worry quite a bit about the habitat distruction necessary to comfortably sustain 7–10 B people, but the comparisons to a virus and the implied moral judgment have always seemed off-base. Nature doesn't care if we destroy everything. I care.
I guess it was alluded to in the article but my main concern is the amount of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides we use. As we clear more land for Ag we are of course limiting habitat for animals but also zapping them constantly with these chemicals.
Fertilizers get into water and decimate the life in there. Herbicides coupled with pesticides decimate insect ecosystems. The development of land gives larger animals nowhere to go.
I get why we farm like we do - abundant food for everyone. So much so that we waste so much. I just wish there was some way to develop effective farming that didn’t do all this. But it feels like a catch-22.
It's a complete lie that industrial agriculture is the only effective way of feeding everyone. It seems to be that it produces the most yield of a crop, but therein lies the problem: The only metric that we look at is crop yield. Sure it yields a lot, but it's completely destroying the land in the process. If we continue to use industrial agriculture practices (which are completely dependent on oil) humanity will collectively starve when all the topsoil is dead and the water sufficiently poisoned.
We've created our own vicious feedback loop by planting massive areas with a single crop that has been bred for size and shelf life more so than disease/pest resistance and nutrition. The monoculture is ripe for attack by pests due to lack of biodiversity. Our response to this problem has been to double down by spraying the crop with herbicides and pesticides. The chemicals kill beneficial fungi, bacteria, and insects which leave the crop entirely defenseless against the pests unless it is sprayed again and again. The bacteria and fungi that make soil "soil" and not "dirt" also die, and the only way to grow the next crop in dead soil is to till it (which kills even more soil life) and dump synthetic fertilizers all over it. The fertilizer runoff pollutes water sources.
Much like how large centralized computer systems make everyone vulnerable to massive failures (think Cloudflare or AWS outages), large monoculture farming makes our food system very fragile and the resulting food isn't even particularly nutritious. We need to use regenerative farming practices, but that means defeating the oil industry, among others.
I agree, it reminds of Nassim Taleb's idea of anti-fragility in that because our monoculture and reliance in chemicals to sustain it, it would only take a certain devastating thing to endanger the national food supply.
Do you have examples of or references to regenerative farming practices? I ask because I'm curious about them to see if they scale like modern Ag which for all of its problems (many you pointed out), has been effective in many ways. I feel like in the end it will always come down to money.
Sure, starting really generally: "regenerative agriculture" and "permaculture" are good keywords.
I think looking for any solution to scale the way industrial agriculture does is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. The scaling of industrial agriculture is the problem. I don't think any one alternative is "the" solution, but rather that many alternative methods need to be applied where appropriate and at smaller scales. Smaller farms but lots more of them. Food needs to be grown in places that we currently don't think of as farmland: mass lawn conversion, urban farming, etc.
Okay, onto some references of techniques that I can think of off the top of my head:
Riparian buffers separate rivers from farmland. They filter runoff from the fields, guard against floods because healthy soil and vegetation act like a sponge, and, if many land owners participate, they create uninterrupted habitat for wildlife. This sacrifices some field area, but it means that a "100 year flood" that now happen more frequently due to climate change won't destroy a family's source of income by washing away all the soil away. https://www.extension.iastate.edu/smallfarms/what-riparian-b...
"No till" or "no dig" cultivation. Tilling breaks networks of fungi and bacteria, causing a short-term burst of available nutrients for plants, but done year after year reduces soil health (in other words: diminishing returns.) Sowing or transplanting with minimal soil disturbance and top-dressing with compost builds soil life over time and is less labor intensive. https://charlesdowding.co.uk/faqs/
Cover cropping means that the field isn't left bare. There's always something growing on it to keep the soil from eroding or blowing away in the wind. Cover crops act as a living mulch, and then as a regular mulch when they are slashed down when it comes time to plant the cash crop. Legumes are often used as cover crops because they are a natural fertilizer due to a symbiotic relationship they form with a special kind of bacteria that takes nitrogen from the air and deposits it in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop
This is a really great source of resources and search terms, thanks!
It feels like a lot of people are doing active work here to change the way we think about Ag from a WW2 inspired industrial model to something that is sustainable, good for the ecosystems, and still affordable so poor people can eat food too. It just doesn't seem like it gets the media attention it should and it's something that effects everyone.
I only became interested in these things when I bought a home and had a lawn and decided to make it a hobby of mine. I started off buying various herbicides and fertilizers and applying them safely and responsibly. But started to read the labels a bit more and research the chemicals since it occurred to me that wearing safety equipment and staying off areas for 3 days means that I'm probably working with potentially dangerous things. And even if they are "safe" to be on after a day (they claim) it's still sort of weird to think about applying these things when pets and family and friends will be on it, oblivious to the chemicals that have been applied. Maybe with the limited use and reduced concentrations for home use mean they won't really harm anything, but it still makes me feel a bit uncertain about using them.
My wife maintains an organic vegetable garden (which is really tough so I now have so much more respect for organic farmers that bring to market pricy but delicious produce) and I wonder about these chemicals drifting to the garden in the soil. I've sort of found a balance of using organic fertilizers, compost we make, and good old fashioned manual weeding, etc so I don't have to use the herbicides so much. I still use them in areas where hand weeding isn't practical, like if a weed is coming out of a crack in the hardscaping, for example. But, it's a lot more work to be sure than using chemicals which were very effective.
I'm happy I never used any pesticides. We don't have a huge bug problem but it's nice to see butterflies, honeybees, etc even if you have to put up with the occasional mosquito.
None of this works at scale. The problem is that we are past carrying capacity. We need to control population. I am in favour of E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth solution where we set aside half the planet for habitat and inhabit only half of the land and leave the oceans alone.
I feel like I need to address the ‘ecofascist bullshit’ gem. Fascism promoted eugenics. Population control through responsible procreation is not eugenics. It is an incentive to make sure ones children and future generation has the best possible chance to thrive and flourish along with everyone else of our species without just a few gene pools monopolizing all the resources.
The 1/2 surviving child/per person is derived from rational thought and evaluation of our planet’s existing resources. Children are expensive and everyone pays for all the children in one way or another. It’s not always about the money.
When we have a planet that doesn’t expand and most of our resources are not renewable, it’s a zero sum game. Someone in the gene pool who spends all their life making a dozen babies benefits proportionally more than someone who has 1-2 children.
Also..this need to keep having babies is a scam perpetuated by organized religions of all types because the state was always funded by religion. And more subscribers means more power. That’s the kind of bullshit that needs to be stopped in its tracks. Have a nice day!
I don't know if it's useful to see it as a zero sum game. The sun is beaming practically unlimited energy out towards us (and a whole lot more that doesn't reach Earth but is still available eventually).
Even if it is zero sum: if we all stopped eating meat, we could pretty easily sustain ourselves. Putting it on population size instead of how that population behaves is not useful and frankly fatalist.
There's more than just food energy, though. Lots of things that we rely on for modern civilization and survival are finite -- the most obvious being petroleum / gas and various minerals + metals. Additionally, retrieving these resources is extremely environmentally destructive in ways which take centuries or millennia to recover from (we've already extracted the locations where getting at this stuff was easy and less destructive). It's a lose/lose situation.
Population voluntarily goes down with increased education and reproductive rights for women. You don't need something heavy-handed. You just need feminism. Get the fertility rate down to something like 0.9 and just wait.
You don't need to deny the facts because of some fringe-right boogeyman. There really are too many people. But there are perfectly-good solutions no more extreme than the center-left.
> This is so completely wrong I can't believe I'm responding to it.
And yet you provide no logical refutation.
> We are not past carrying capacity.
Because... you say so?
> Population control is some ecofascist bullshit.
Because... you say so?
"Fascist" doesn't mean "someone told me what to do." Not everything you don't like is "fascist". The environmental movement even at its worse doesn't encourage nationalism, or venerate the military or industry, promote sexism, have an obsession with national security. - it simply has zero connection to fascism.
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Population increases exponentially, and individual consumption increases exponentially. No one wants to stop having kids. No one wants to stop consumption. No one wants people to tell them what to do. So how is society going to survive?
The answer: it won't. The exponential growth will never stop until it all collapses. People will scream "fascism" at any attempt to stop any of this exponential growth... and we will devastate the ecosystem for all time to come.
Who gets to decide who has children? And how many?
This is a really dangerous line of thought you are pursuing here. "We need to control population" is a scary thought and I hope this never becomes a serious solution to the problems we have to solve.
Don't worry, there won't be any solution at all, so you can rest easy.
Everyone will resist any attempt to limit their God-given right to reproduce as much as they want, to consume as much as they can afford, and to discard the waste wherever they please.
By the time humans figure out that this attitude is not compatible with a functioning biosphere, it will be far too late.
It’s not so everywhere in the world. I think it’s fair that the ones with the uterus get to decide what they want to do with their body.
Maybe if we start making pod babies that can gestate outside the female human body, it would be a free for all decision to make. I hope someone works on it.
Not married? What you do with your body is kind of the whole deal there, never mind just having kids. Yet the decision about kids is very, very one-sided.
fwiw, i think 'marriage' should be abolished entirely. it is the single most effective and likely the oldest surveillance tool upon the human species since ancient times. i have such a dim view of marriage or rather the need for it...in terms of why it was concocted.
marriage as a man made social construct is the end result of so many undesirables. our world would be a better safer equitable place without it. women, for example..would be free from the tyranny of ownership.
Everyone gets to decide how many children they have...there has to be an universal child tax.
Of course, only those who can afford children should have them. The environment and the commons are for everyone. And there is a cost to bringing new lives and to make sure we have diversity in the gene pool, we ought to have everyone contributing to the gene pool. Otherwise it would just become an inbred mess like we have seen happen with animals and plants. It just makes us weaker as a species.
That doesn’t imply we aren’t killing the world, though. Agriculture in rich countries often needs fertilizer to get the higher yields it gets, newer forests aren’t as diverse and often never will be as the ones that were torn down, etc.
Forestation may be going up but what about fragmentation of wild land? It seems like because of cars, people can and do build houses all over, scattered about. This causes habitats to be broken up by busy roads, which kills animals, messes up migration patterns, and more. A lot of those people will kill or drive away all the animals surrounding their house. They spray for insects, trap all the animals, block their food sources, etc. Sure, they have trees since they are not using the land for agriculture, but I'm not certain that it is ultimately better for animals.
It's not a new problem, either. Growing up in a rural, agricultural zone we learned thoroughly about run-off and the potential for harm, and the harm that had happened in the past.
Yeah it’s crazy to think that a chemical can be developed that can effectively destroy organic life and we just decide to spray it everywhere.
I’ve read things about people that live near certain farms have higher rates of birth defects and diseases like cancer. I can only imagine being exposed to chemicals over and over for years is not only devastating to the local ecosystem but to the people nearby.
But we also don't even take the most basic actions to prevent that fertilizer from making it into our waterways. Farmers insist on putting in thousands of miles of drain tile and running it straight into creeks and streams. They plow their fields right up to the very edge of marshes and streams instead of leaving grass strips to act as a barrier to runoff. It's shocking how little people seem to realize or care about the fact we can't even handle minute changes to help mother nature. The ironic part being, at least around here, every year some group spends millions and millions of dollars on "Farmer's Care" commercials and billboards.
Also, not trying to be a grammar nazi - I just appreciate when people point things out to me so take it in that spirit.
Alluded to - eluded means you're evading/escaping something.
Farming has changed since 1930. I know your history textbooks stopped covering it then (for good reason, after 1930 farming hasn't been significant), but that doesn't mean farming has stood still. Plowing as practiced in your history books is out of style and only rarely done. Farmers are well aware that soil washed away is gone forever, and are working to conserve it. Farmers are aware that fertilizer is a significant cost and what washes off is wasted money. No-til, strip til or other minimal till farming is the normal for many farmers. Cover crops are fast becoming popular. The old plows often are sold for scrape when in perfectly good shape (plows wear out fast in use)
Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.
No I remember the opposite. I'm over 50 and when I was young in the 70's the water in ditches and canals was so polluted that nothing lived in it anymore but algae.
In Amsterdam, where I moved to after leaving home, you had to be suicidal to be willing to take a swim in the canals.
Nowadays fish are back everywhere, even in the canals in Amsterdam. There seem to be salmons swimming in the big rivers, this was unthinkable in my childhood. Species higher in the food chain such as otters are slowly returning to the Netherlands as well.
There was indeed a big mentality change. Significantly less casual pollution (Diemerzeedijk in Amsterdam North, the open chemical dump for Europe, comes to mind), and .. lots of the polluting industry outsourced to Asia, China mostly.
My personal impression is that there are way less insects than there used to be.
However, isn't a lot of the improvement you see in clean air and water in Europe thanks to the fact that a lot of the manufacturing that used to happen in Europe has now relocated to China after its efforts to open up its economy that started in the 80s.
The net result may be a win for the environment in developed Western nations, but considering how polluted China now is, I wonder if it's still a net negative for the world as a whole.
No, the improvements started in the 70's and 80's already due to more strict regulations for companies. Although maybe this helped the industry in Asia get a competitive advantage.
Also a lot of the water pollution was due to washing powder that used to contain phosphates. Those were forbidden in the 80's.
I'm in my 50's... and I remember filthy air you could barely breath and horribly polluted rivers that caught on fire. I remember people tossing trash on the side of the road without regard. I remember trash floating in our lakes, which were so filthy you were scared to let the water touch you, much less eat the fish (if any) in them. I remember when all cars belched clouds of black smoke. I remember national parks with no wolves and no bears.
Today, the skies and rivers are noticeably cleaner. There seem to be more large wild animals (wolves, bears, buffalo, cougars, elk) in national parks and forests now than when I was a kid. And you can eat the fish in the Great Lakes now. Wild deer are, seemingly, everywhere around here and rise to nuisance levels. On the other hand, there seem to be less earthworms in suburban areas, somewhat less bugs and less birds. But that may just be related to where I now live (a much more urbanized area than that of my youth). Or it may be a harbinger of doom. I don't know.
Of course, my perspective on this is rather limited since I can only say what I've seen. Larger wild animal populations in Western Europe, for example, are essentially non-existent in comparison North America. I suspect that most or all of the decline described in the report happened in what were pretty poor regions of the world 50 years ago. But now that some of those nations are approaching the levels of wealth where they can start to care, I'm confident they'll start to clean things up over the next half century like most of the developed world did over the last half century.
I'm interested in the fact that almost every comment replied to your anecdotal comment with anecdotes of their own about how, in fact, there are so many more animals and the world is so much cleaner.
Yet, clearly, the statistics in this article and elsewhere show that this is plainly not the case. We are killing off wildlife at an unprecedented speed.
Why the disconnect? Are all our efforts really directed towards feel-good efforts at home, maybe, which make the world look cleaner and better for nature, while obscuring the huge amount of invisible damage we're doing?
As a sibling poster said, I think one of the issues is that the first world countries have significantly improved in many environmental metrics (litter, air, and water quality most of all), so people there have a lived experience which includes things getting better. Meanwhile it’s really hard for us to grasp how much the population of places like Africa, Indonesia, and India have exploded in the last fifty years, nor how much environmental damage has occurred there. Not to mention China.
This is going to be increasingly difficult part of dealing with environmental damage. It will not be enough for North America and Europe to decarbonize. Somehow we have to bring the rest of the world along with us. But they haven’t enjoyed the benefits of all the environmental destruction over the last 200 years, as we have, and (understandably), they are trying to catch up.
I guess it's a 1st World vs 3rd World thing.
Also although larger animals seem to be doing better nowadays, insects are not. But those are much less visible.
> Recent reports of dramatic declines in insect abundance suggest grave consequences for global ecosystems and human society. Most evidence comes from Europe, however, leaving uncertainty about insect population trends worldwide. We used >5,300 time series for insects and other arthropods, collected over 4–36 years at monitoring sites representing 68 different natural and managed areas, to search for evidence of declines across the United States. Some taxa and sites showed decreases in abundance and diversity while others increased or were unchanged, yielding net abundance and biodiversity trends generally indistinguishable from zero.
I live in Minnesota. I used to take trips in high school to the boundary waters area. The water was so clean, you didn't need a filter, you could drink right out of the lake. We didn't have to carry a ton of water, we just had cups that hung on the inside of our canoes. Thirsty? Just dip your cup and have a drink.
Nighttime was always an adventure. The bears and other animals out there were always vocal and nighttime is when a lot of animals came out and hunted. There were always an abundance of birds as well during the daytime. Hawks, bald eagles, falcons.
I've gone back through college and after college in the early 2000's. Everything has changed. Now we have a TON of ugly cell towers because people can't spend 5 min away from their phones. Less birds, the nights are a lot quieter, there didn't seem as many bears as I remember, and the nights have this eerie quiet to them.
Never mind now you have to haul in your own water, or bring a decent filter to filter the water now because its so polluted and not safe to drink. It used to be crystal clear, now its just mucky mud filth.
The other depressing thing is the trash. It was hammered into my brain when I was young the idea of "leave no trace" all through high school by my guides and in college all my roommates who were loyal to the idea. We took it on ourselves to self police each other. You leave a wrapper, a beer can? We all got on each other. It almost became a game, but it also taught us the importance of leaving an area as prestige as you found it. The last two times I was in the Boundary Waters (2008, 2014), I spent a LOT of time picking up others trash - beer cans, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, you name it, I picked it up. There were two articles recently in the local paper saying it was getting worse now too.
I'm not sure if its a generational thing, people just don't care anymore or I've grown older and have no patience for people leaving their campsites a mess when they leave. Either way, the changes over the past decade have soured my attitude on going there anytime soon.
This. The urban areas and inner suburban areas where most of HN grew up and lives are much less polluted and have more animals now because we mostly kicked out industry decades ago and the areas have recovered.
...but the outer suburban areas and rural areas have far less wildlife because they are so much more developed than they used to be. There has been some recovery of species in those areas too because many species were widely hunted at the turn of the 20th century and populations have rebounded but that mostly only effects the big visible species.
The water in the boundary waters was never safe to drink. However people often got lucky and didn't get any harm.
I remember in my last trip seeing a pile of garbage and being mad about why people would do that. Then when I got back I happened to look it up and see that the dump was on the guides as something to notice - loggers left it there in 1800s.
Remember fireflies? I myself almost don't believe that there were insects that would light dark fields in summer, and that children would fill jars with the these creatures because they were so plentiful you could grab a handful of glowing insects!
I honestly feel that if I were to have grandchildren they would not believe me describing them or at the very least thing that I was greatly exaggerating.
I know they still exist but I haven't seen a yard filled with fireflies in a long time.
I live in the middle of Chicago, in the city itself and in a very dense and urban part of it, and we had fireflies all summer. I'm guessing as an adult you're not out much during the hours they're out, or at least not in backyards and alleys where they tend to congregate.
They do seem fewer to me, but who knows, I'm comparing my memories to a kid's from decades ago. I wonder if anyone keeps track of this stuff. I did notice less bumblebees this year, in fact I don't think I saw a single one, but that's my own experiences and not anything scientific of course. Miss those chonky little guys.
I live in a decently rural area. This summer had a lot, for some reason, but overall I can't remember seeing many in recent summers. Same with earthworms coming out after a rain
I am not that old, but aside from the shitty insects like wasps and mosquitoes, they seem to have almost vanished. Birds still seem ok, but they can pick up food left behind by humans and many feed them in winter.
Also snow... we had cross-country skis and used them almost every winter (northern Germany) 15 years ago. Today they are basically useless and you would certainly stand out if you used them here. Some birds that usually migrate with seasons just stay or are only absent for a few weeks.
No data, but it certainly looks that way.
People telling us that we live in an age of mass extinctions seem to be correct.
Mosquitoes, I'll grant you, even though they're a significant prey source for dragonflies. But wasps? You should be thanking them for the fact you still have trees, with the way they keep bagworms and tent caterpillars down. Flowers, too, for quite a lot of which they're the major or even the only pollinators.
I don't know. I had a hornet nest in my garden last year. They make a bit of a mess and you shouldn't go to near to their nest, but they are awesome insects and far better than wasps. They also eat them so you won't find that many flying around.
They are just the larger, more peaceful versions that somehow aren't interested in humans the slightest. Sadly, they move every year and this time around the wasps are back.
I mean, hornets are wasps, genus Vespa. Other social wasps tend to be largely peaceful as well; most of the polistids ("paper wasps") in particular are almost totally unconcerned with humans, although I understand some of the tropical and neotropical species can be fierce. Yellowjackets, genus Vespula and ironically more closely related to hornets than are other social wasps, mostly get the bad name, but that's mainly just because their underground nests are less obvious and thus easier to trespass on. But there's generally enough daytime traffic at nest sites to make them observable, if you're paying attention at least.
I'm careful to approach only lone foragers and not nests, and I have yet to be stung while taking pictures of any wasp, something I typically do from as close to my macro lens's six-inch minimum working distance as I can manage - usually within 12 inches (30cm). Hornet, yellowjacket, paper wasp, or solitary, they all seem about equally willing to leave me unbothered, so long as I don't bother them first. Happily, having a camera lens and flashes going off nearby doesn't seem to count as bothering!
I remember when the city had a real limit, you could leave it. Now the suburbs seem endless. Towns 300km away, were once distinct towns, now just part of one large metropolis - pretending that they are still distinct. If you want to know the real size of a metro, map out the delivery areas for furniture stores and restaurant suppliers.
It's been progressively so throughout the entire 20th century. George Orwell wrote about the suburbanisation of rural life in his "Coming Up for Air" [1] back in the 1930s. Highly recommended.
I think this is dependent on where you live. If you're near a city-center or urban area at all, I believe you're right. With development being what it is, I believe you absolutely would see fewer animals in that setting.
In my rural area, though, there are much more animals, of a much varied type than ever before. I saw a badger this year for the first time, ever. I think this is partially because of conservation efforts actually working, and partially because animals are being displaced by humans/climate change now.
We have armadillos now, too. Midwest Illinois/Iowa area. We should not have armadillos.
It seems to be the opposite at my house, not that I can do any actual numbers. We have more deer, tons of squirrels that we never saw growing up. Turkeys that didn't even exist in the state. Flocks of geese that land in fields like never before. We live in a very rural area but not a crop farming one, mostly just cows.
This is my distinct memory too but I'm never sure how to separate it from the confounding factors of moving across the country and changing economic levels.
My childhood in the South was spent in a cacophany of frogs, birds, and cicadas. We'd have to yell at each other on the back porch to be heard over the treefrogs. Everywhere you looked was a reptile, bug, or other critter. Throw a hook in the water with a piece of bread or worm on it, and you'd have a bite nearly instantly.
Today, here in the Pacific Northwest, the forests are beautiful but almost entirely silent aside from a bird here and there. The last time I went camping, I didn't see a living thing larger than a banana slug. Much of that is surely the temperature difference, but I'm never sure if that explains all of it.
A lot of replies to my comments mention environmental pollution. I definitely agree there is less now. I was recently shocked to see that the once nasty brown river that runs through my home town is now Nile blue. The numbers on pollution levels agree with this anecdote too.
However, no one I asked had seen a horned toad or armadillo in years. And these are definitely the kind of folks that used to. Cicadas used to deafening on summer evenings, but now they were barely audible. Sample size = 1, but the numbers seem to bear out these anecdotes too.
It's totally possible for both of these to be true. Pollution can go down at the same time that animal populations are suppressed for some other reason.
Yup. Fireflies come to mind - I grew up in suburban Virginia and they were all over. I don't see them any more, and I live 20 miles from where I grew up.
I also remember more snow as a child. I found a source once that had yearly snowfall in DC and it's gone down a fair bit in the last 30 years.
Not necessarily animals but I remember seeing way more insects when I was younger -- living in Normandy, but it might be because I used to spend more time outdoor than I do today.
Do you live in the same place as when you were a kid? Anecdotal, but I now live in a bird sanctuary in South Carolina, and there are a lot more birds here than where I grew up. It’s really hard to gauge things based on personal experience. One thing that has definitely changed is insect levels around lights at night. Every streetlight in my childhood was positively swarming. Now, I can literally count the insects on my hands.
The Hacker News and geek community is weird. Ask them about reaching Mars or fusion and they say it's inevitable. They're unqualified good results.
Suggest we have fewer children for a few generations and consume less and it's absolutely impossible, against human nature. The One Child policy proves it.
We idolize people who change the world as entrepreneurs but say one person can't make a difference in changing culture.
Yet many cultures have chosen to lower birthrates through peaceful, voluntary means resulting in prosperity and stability. On a personal level, I've lowered my footprint by about 90 percent in a few years according to online calculators and every change improved my life. I figure most westerners could drop 75 - 80 percent with just the low-hanging fruit, improving their lives -- buying less junk, wasting less food, living closer to family, camping instead of visiting Timbuktu.
Changing course is a matter of belief and choice far more than technology. While it's not monolithic, this community seems to choose to believe living sustainably is harder than space travel. I'd argue space travel is more attainable when we aren't pushing the Earth's limits to sustain life and human society.
You aren't wrong but to me you are focusing on the wrong things. As you say, the west is already dropping the birth rate and being more and more focused on sustainability, etc. Eventually, it will get there. Change takes time.
The big problem is the 3rd world. People there don't a have a choice. They don't want their family to starve. Women are largely forced into a reproduction role only. But we know that the way to reduce birth rate is to educate women and give them jobs and careers. We know that if we can create stable jobs in the 3rd world, they will stop clear cutting forests. To me, that is where the billionaires should be putting their money. If we raise the global standard of living enough, our high population problems will slowly revert.
I read quite a long article once, it was about efforts to teach Iraqi farmers how to use modern techniques and modern equipment.
The main problem they encountered wasn't conservative mindset. No, the farmers were willing to try something new.
It was missing infrastructure. Once you start using any sophisticated equipment, you need repairs, distribution of spare parts, good documentation in local language etc. Such a system is not easy to set up in a really foreign country, much less so if security is problematic.
The wolves eat the deer. The deer population collapses to the point that the food supply for the wolves cannot support the wolves. The wolves starve and the wolf population collapses. Without pressure from the wolves, the deer make a comeback and flourish.
The population cycles occur in both large and small ecosystems. The process is slow and steady. Often it seems like the embers of life have gone out. However, something always comes back from the ashes.
Except no other animal harnesses the power of oil to make machines that can wipe out hundreds of thousands of square km of ecosystems (on land and sea) in a single day.
I don't know how near a collapse is, since catastrophes in systems tend to come as a surprise, not a gradual event. I do agree, however, that there is substantial evidence to suggest a collapse in the human population is inevitable.
In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.
First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above. After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
One of the major themes in the story are animals; most species have been wiped out and people own artificial versions instead. Decker himself is motivated by a desire to own a "real" animal. Interesting that they mostly left this out of the film version (Blade Runner) and only vaguely mentioned it. In general, the book is very different, but discussion of animals takes up at least 1/4 of the narrative.
“What we are facing now is a person whose crime dwarfs all of the crimes ever committed in human history. We were unable to find a single law applicable to his crime. So we recommend that the crime of Extinction of Life on Earth be added to international law ...”
I think that'll be a pretty hard book to adapt. The story goes off the rails in the later books. Especially the 3rd, it's just a random tour of interesting scifi ideas.
I'm also wondering if the de-emphasis of individual will make it harder to make a show. There is no through line of character.
While the book has some great ideas, I personally wasn't a huge fan of how they were strung together. First book was great detective noir book. Second book had the great concept of the wallfacers and one amazing badass. And then you can just see disaster coming with the change of the guard, the story is just as bad as the end of the rama series from there.
Or to say it another way, if it makes it to the screen it will be heavily altered imho, but that's par for the course, and I've come to enjoy other people's interpretations on things I've already read when they bring new stuff.
I think about this aspect of the book all the time when I see kids (and increasingly adults) invested in games like Pokémon during our ongoing mass extinctions. The book doesn’t cover the intermediary steps between its barren world and our own, but it’s a pretty easy to draw a through line between the digital ecosystems we’ve built in the past 40 or so years and the synthetic life of Blade Runner.
You sound like someone who's never played or watched Pokemon. It regularly hits on these themes. One Pokemon's whole shtick is wearing its dead parent's skull. It evolves by growing past that trauma.
Ecology is a huge theme through the whole thing. It is not a happy-go-lucky franchise isolated from the troubles of the world.
I grew up playing Pokémon. It was the second Gameboy game I ever owned. I think I played every one through the DS era.
What I think you miss is that individual works can be contrary to certain negative trends or values, without posing any real opposition to them. A Pokémon game can embrace a pro-environmental narrative, while the material reality of the franchise in the context of Capitalist exchange involves all kinds of ecological destruction. Just think of all of the Pokémon tchotchkes, bought and discarded, since the series began.
I’m not trying to single out Pokémon as some especially bad actor, but indicative of how the widespread fetishization of these imagined ecosystems might result in a future not dissimilar from the one described in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? PKD wrote that book in the 70s, contemplating trends in the world he inhabited. It makes sense that we do the same in engaging with it.
I read the book first and was deeply disappointed in the movie. They could have done so much more. Instead they spent like half an hour on dumb fight scenes which are only a couple pages in the book. I can't enjoy it just because of how much they cut out. For those that haven't read the book, here's an example:
When Deckard Cain meets Rachael for the first time, she has an owl, and she claims it's real. He says "I thought they were extinct." She says no, you just can't buy them on the open market. He then tests his humanity detector on her, which she fails. They explain that she grew isolated on a spaceship leaving Earth which turned around and came home after the war, so she grew up without a sense of empathy. He is horrified to learn his detector may be flawed, and he may have killed real humans thinking they were androids. They then offer him the owl to cover it up. He finally realizes that they're lying and she's an android after all. He then says "And the owl?" "It's robotic, of course. Owls are extinct."
In the movie? He shows up and says "Nice owl, is it robotic?" Rachael goes "Yup, and so am I". Welp, there goes like 50 of the best pages of the book.
Another example, which really shows just how unnecessarily shallow the movie is: in the book, Rachael and Pris are identical model androids, and sex with androids is forbidden. The whole conflict Deckard experiences is based on the fact that he becomes infatuated with Rachael: not only is it extremely taboo, but his feelings start to interfere with his mission of killing her identical twin Pris. In the movie? Completely different replicants, and Pris is a standard-issue sex-bot. There's just no internal conflict at all.
Seriously people, read this book. It is fantastic.
Woah. That’s not what happens in the movie. Rachael does indeed say the owl is fake. However she has no idea she is a replicant. If I remember correctly she’s a “different kind of replicants” more human like because she was given pre-canned memories.
I do agree that the removal of the extinction of animals theme, the removal of Deckard's wife, and to some extent the removal of mercerism detracts from the movie (or at least with the second two significantly alters bits), however not sure if the removal of the "it's difficult to kill someone when you've had sex with their double"-theme is really detrimental.
the whole fake police precinct full of androids thing was probably also better removed from a cinematic standpoint.
It's an interesting case of literature-movie adaptation. The film is one of my favorites, but mostly for the atmosphere and cinematography, not the story itself.
Yet, after recently re-reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I came away thinking that the movie could have been so much better. They left a lot of the interesting details and Phillip K. Dick weirdness out.
> It's an interesting case of literature-movie adaptation.
Indeed. It's one of my favorite films as well, and consider that I'm a PKD fan: I don't think it's even a companion piece to the book. It hits some of the same themes, but Blade Runner is more neo-noir with smoke-filled rooms, and Do Androids is more PKD exploration of ideas, religion, anxieties, etc. PKD loved what he managed to see of the movie before dying, mind you.
I think what makes Blade Runner engaging is that it's not trying to be a direct translation of the book. It even reverses some of the book's characterizations: "Rachael" is in the book manipulative and a liar, but in the movie she's naive and the one being lied to. The androids from the book are cold and callous, almost completely unempathetic even for their own kind. The replicants from the movie are way more empathic -- Roy Batty is arguably an antihero rather than a villain. I've watched Blade Runner many times, being one of my favorites, and there are times I consider Roy the true protagonist of the movie.
It does hit some of the same themes of PKD's works: what is real and what is fake? What is human, and what deserves to live?
The best works of art leave space between the ideas, words and images. Blade Runner is a bit more like a poem than a novel and that's why it works so well and why it was rejected so soundly at the time of release.
Sometime it takes a while to grasp the significance of a poem.
I've had this book on my shelf for a couple of years. I was put off it because I finally saw the film (and the remake) and didn't like them. Especially the remake, fell asleep trying to get through that film on three seperate occasions before giving up on it.
But I need to give the book a chance if it's quite different to the film.
I think instead of "remake" you meant sequel, because there is no remake.
If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe.
I, for one, think that the sequel is as good as the original. Cinematography was stunning and the world was a believable evolution of the world from the previous movie.
As a die-hard Dune (1984) and book fan, I'm not really ecstatic yet. Old movie had some unique qualities, and would be a great movie if it was 7 hours long.
Also, why on earth they changed jihad to crusade in new movie?!
> Also, why on earth they changed jihad to crusade in new movie?!
Do you really have to ask or do you not believe words have associations that aren't their exact dictionary definitions?
Dune was written well before the word was associated with religious extremism in modern times, the word didn't have the associations of terrorism and caliphates and 9/11.
Aren't they describing the attack by Harkonnen and Imperial forces on the Atreides rather than the later jihad by the Fremen - the latter presumably being in the next movie?
One of the biggest cinematographic disappointments I’ve ever witnessed.
Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy.
The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that creates a hierarchy alongside the risk of oppression and servitude.
God created men, men is subservient and inferior. Men create replicants, same thing. Now replicants have “holograms”...
The plodding and limp segment in the ruins of Las Vegas really killed the pace and punch of that whole film. Even assuming there was any point in having Deckard in it all, 15 minutes of that could have easily been cut out with almost no impact to the story.
There was a point in having him: he fathered a replicant-born child (while possibly being a replicant himself), aka the central theme of the movie. Execution could have been better, though. And at least the Vegas section had great cinematography ad times: I take much more issues with the final fight, which I thought was anticlimactic both visually and story-wise.
I know but even there they lacked imagination, finesse, esprit. How much better would it have been for Ryan G’s character to find remnants of Deckard proving he lived there but had been long gone. Some indication that he may or may not have been a replicant. Maybe the replicant child is a cross between humans and replicants. But nooo, Deckard had to be a replicant, obviously given his longevity and strength, and a “tough” guy who wants to have a biff with Ryan G. No nuance, no deeper meaning.
I thought the first half was magnificent. The scene with Ryan Gosling having the intimate moment with the hologram made me weep, it was so sad because that’s all he could get.
The movie became terrible once Harrison Ford was introduced and kept diving. Everything about it was horrible. The scene in the water looked like a sound stage. Absolutely terrible.
Everything with Deckard was awful. I also felt the Rachael clone was both a "fanservice" moment and at the same time terribly disrespectful to the character of Rachael. I hated it, a "we did this with CGI because we can" moment.
In my opinion, Deckard and Rachael's story was over at the end of the first film. Let them have their moment, be happy for an instant, and forget them.
If the sequel was even necessary at all, it should have moved on without sullying old characters.
For us, not really. The generations that come after us? Probably.
And therein lies the problem. The people making the rules and pulling the strings don't have a bleeding, burning pressure to change course. And they won't until it's too late.
Complain all you want about climate and biodiversity and pollution, but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top. That's just how the short-sighted, hill climbing algorithm called humanity works. We're like an ant colony, and we can't optimize for things happening outside of an N x (human lifespan), where 0 < N < 1.
A better solution might be to increase human lifespan to the point where people begin to worry about a hundred years from now. Because they're just not going to care enough to act otherwise. Everything else is more immediate, more pressing.
When's the last time you turned off your electricity? Or started a coup to remove the policy makers?
Humans aren't equipped to solve this. It's because of the algorithm of society.
>but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top
Do people honestly believe "nothing" is being done? We are chipping away at these problems, otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it in a mainstream newspaper article. People (especially younger people) are more conscious about these issues than at any time in my lifetime. It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society that has developed over millennia.
The concern is that compared to what's necessary to change the apparent course of the planet, what has been done so far is basically nothing. On a global scale the amount of change necessary is orders of magnitude larger than what has changed so far, and it needs to happen fast (and the problem is getting worse: the second derivative isn't even in the right direction in that carbon emissions per year are still increasing globally. Given what we know about the climate it's not clear if we would avoid substantial shifts even if we reset the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to the levels from the start of the century). And the fact is much more action could be easily taken even right now, but some governments are still in denial that there's even a problem in the first place (and the fact is this is a problem which needs government action: individual consumers do not have the power to change the behaviour of industry, even if well organised).
No, "we" are not. Some people are chipping away at some of these problems, but "we" (in the global, UN-sized scheme of things) are still adding and exacerbating these problems much faster than the solutions are being developed and/or deployed.
It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society
Our response to the Corona virus suggests that yes, if the will is there, we can manage to flip at least some switches. But yes, I do realize that these measures are considered temporary, and Covid is a much more immediate threat than the implosion of society.
What is being done? Nearly every "green" initiative is much more marketing than reality when you look at the details. Renewable energy sources are widely supplementing not replacing hydrocarbons. Decreased emissions are largely from a financial switch from coal to natural gas and offloading your CO2 production to somewhere else. Global emissions are still rising.
Consumer capitalism is the largest driver of our CO2 usage and we have done worse than nothing about changing the way our economies operate. Consumer spending has been a perpetually increasing part of the US GDP. Currently 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. We have a pandemic which has forced that to drop and everyone with political power is doing everything they can to get that back up.
> It's not like you can flip a switch...
Well unfortunately we don't have time. Historically every major sudden climate change period seems to have reached a tipping point where positive feedbacks initiated rapid temperature increases. We don't entirely know what these feedback are (we have some guesses that they might be methane hydrates and melting permafrost) but once we hit these it's over, it doesn't matter if you reduce CO2 emission to 0. It's worth noting that IPCC projections typically do not include feedbacks, which may explain why 'faster than expected' is the new norm.
We might see a blue ocean event before the decade is out. That will have immediate impact on the entire global climate.
There’s a lot to what you say, but: if you’re under 40-50 or so, I also expect a rough life. Assume you’re 30 and live to 85: 55 more years is until 2075.
I started to change my bevahiour. I stopped buying fruit and vegetables in plastic wrapping. I buy milk in glass or paper containers. In my household I pay super close attention to how much water is running when we do dishes. We fill up the sink and wash it there. We turn off lights wherever possible and use energy efficient devices.
I only bought A++ electrical kitchen appliances, we invested in a new energy efficient boiler and have a smart metre where we track our gas and electricity usage. I also switched our energy provider who uses 100% renewable energy.
I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.
I stopped eating meat in 2018, don't own a car and I've started to book 15h train journeys when I travel to Europe instead of going on a 3 hour plane.
There is a lot we can do, but I agree the most effective way would be to start civil unrest and force leaders into their knees to enforce more measures to everyone and not rely on people's good will like myself.
“I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.”
COVID-19 really is a benign virus, as far a viruses go. I don't agree with the rest of that statement, but its effects on people infected are absolutely mild when compared to some other viruses: Polio, HIV and Ebola have much worse effects.
Other viruses that we control for with vaccination regularly have much more severe long-term effects than we now know from COVID, like causing birth defects (Rubella), deafness (Mumps), immunocompromization (Measles) or cancer (HPV).
Yes, humans in previous generations wouldn't even bat an eyelid at the death rates. it wasn't long ago that people used to willingly go on boat journeys even though 10% of the passengers would typically die on the way
Deaths at sea definitely occurred. Credible accurate records don't seem to be available however, as this article's abstract notes:
Farley Grubb, "Morbidity and Mortality on the North Atlantic Passage: Eighteenth-Century German Immigration" (1987).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/204611
"Coffin ships" that carried the Irish fleeing the potato famine to America were notorious for their death rate and generally bad conditions. Of course, this was an already weakened population of passengers.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, my guess is the reference to COVID.
The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
Do you know anyone who died because they volunteered?
Besides that, when I was 10 years old and I asked at that time 30-40 year old people to not smoke cigarettes indoors because the passive smoking was damaging my young lungs and can lead to severe cancer and early death I was told that this is none of my business. Those people voluneered to damange their own health and knowingly also damanged my and other children's health. Now the same people are in their advanced age and demand from me to wear a mask because they don't want to bear the consequences of their earlier decisions. They essentially harmed themselves, and now they want to harm me again so that I have to carry the burden on my shoulders for their own wrongdoing. No thank you very much. I had COVID and my body fought it off in no time and I feel great. Other people have got their own immune system to deal with it. It's none of my business after all, like I was told.
So your solution to the problem is to just do as those 30-40 year olds did? This isn't a revolution that can be won with retribution. You have to be better than the people you're rallying against. Any time you sink to their level it's a tool they will use against you. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
It’s not preventable without harming other people as a result. My point was about unsustainable measures and that is definitely true. Sure, try to prevent getting COVID, but if that involves to harm other people, which it currently does, then you have zero support from me. If people die then at least they should die because of how nature intended us to die, which is from old age and becoming unhealthy. People should not die from being young and hungry which is exactly what the current response to COVID does.
"Feed it right now" is true. "Feed it sustainably" - that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about. And there are some worrying signs about sustainability - the Ogallala Aquifer, the collapse of ocean fish stocks, and so on.
Does that prove it's unsustainable? No. The way to prove it's unsustainable is to have a massive die-off, which is not a way I'm interested in proving anything.
A catastrophic failure in any food chain can make ANY population have a massive die off.
> that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about.
This is disingenuous. In general, no one cares about the famine in Syria except starving Syrians. When's the last time you heard that on the news over a Trump tweet?
Enforcing population limits in theory sounds like a great idea - in human practice, it will just be an excuse for genocide. The only ethical way to do it is to bring all of humanity out of poverty - which rich people do not want to pay for.
I don't know where you got the idea that I was talking about famine in Syria. I'm not. I'm talking about world-wide famine. If the way we feed the world isn't sustainable, then there's going to be a global problem eventually.
Nor am I talking about enforcing population limits.
Bringing all of humanity out of poverty isn't going to do it either, if they all want to have an American diet.
I didn't get that idea - I posited that idea. No one is talking about the famine in Syria. If people don't care that people are starving now, they won't care when a few billion more from poor countries are either.
> I'm talking about world-wide famine. If the way we feed the world isn't sustainable, then there's going to be a global problem eventually.
That's not how it works - the world has enough food for current population P + x offspring. Whenever food supply starts to dwindle P+x will go down. Less people will survive at the fringes - the poor will die, much like they do now, hence I brought up Syria, which no one on here talks about, because they don't care.
A worldwide famine would be the result of catastrophic failure. Catastrophic failures you're suggesting will impact any population size regardless of its sustainability. Sustainability is about maintaining resources without depleting them - it's inherently different than catastrophic events destroying most of the system. No amount of sustainable farming matters if, say, a meteor impacts the earth, or global warming renders most land un-farmable. There is no sustainability fix here.
> Bringing all of humanity out of poverty isn't going to do it either, if they all want to have an American diet.
It's the only proven way to reduce birthrate without war and disease.
One of the issues of plunging headlong into solar and wind (and bio-fuels) is that those sources require huge land-areas around mining of rare metals, deployment, and finally waste. As our global population and energy needs grow, this problem gets bigger and bigger and therefore place stress on existing, and already stressed, ecosystems. On the other end, nuclear is energy dense, and requires tiny amount of land for energy generation and waste storage. Sooner or later we will be moving back to large scale nuclear deployment because there isn't anything like nuclear power which checks the global warming box and reduced stress on ecosystem box.
Modern solar panels and their batteries do not require any "rare" metals. A lot of wind turbines use neodymium however it accounts for a very small amount of total usage.
Yes, this is just the latest attack angle. Office buildings and cats kill ~4 orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines (https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...). Let's also not wonder about the land cost of pumps/pipeline/refineries, or the rare metal content of the cracking catalysts, catalytic converters on all of the IC cars.
The arguments start from bad faith attempts to sabotage mass adoption of renewable energy. Some people aren't using them in bad faith, but are just useful spreaders of them.
Yeah. There is no modern consumption without detrimental effects. And the thing is that the total effects of a system are difficult to estimate even for experts.
And when we talk about birds, let's not forget the devastating effect of light pollution, which seems to get only worse with the availability of cheap, power-efficient LEDs...
Some modern consumption is far better than others. Plant based meat substitute is generally much better than beef. Electric vehicle are much better than non-electric. LEDs are better than incandescent (light pollution is much less severe problem than climate change, obviously, and solving it simply involves turning of lights).
Solar and wind are diffuse, low-density, energy sources. This is why you need to use a lot of land to collect that energy and therefore a lot of panels and turbines. This also implies a lot of land for mining the necessary metals, and a lot of land when they are inevitably decommissioned. There are costs to this in a world which has a growing population numbering in billions and growing per/capita energy needs and which is going through environmental collapse already.
This is NOT a bad faith argument. Wind and Solar may never be viable outside of niche areas. Wind and Solar may not even be that great against climate change given that they are not viable without fossil fuel base-load (natural gas companies are some of the biggest proponents of wind and solar these days).
Nuclear just so happens to be an energy source that doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't need fossil-fuel base-load, and has minuscule land-use requirements. All I argued is that it is inevitable that we will have to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure because there aren't any other options.
>Modern solar panels and their batteries do not require any really "rare" metals.
The salient point was that manufacturing millions (billions?) of panels and turbines has a huge toll on the ecosystem - regardless if rare metals are used - and they are used in components of solar panels and wind turbines.
How does it compare to the ecosystem cost of coal strip mining? How much platinum and palladium is out there to reduce toxic partial combustion pollution? How much lead is out there in car batteries?
>How does it compare to the ecosystem cost of coal strip mining?
I think we're all in agreement that coal is terrible and we don't want to use it anymore. Having said that, the one benefit it has over solar and wind is that it doesn't actually need to be backed-up by any other power source. As in, it doesn't need an alternate base-load to be provided.
But again, I take your point ... coal is bad.
The question is, given the environmental impact of solar and wind, coupled with significant limitations (like needing base-load to be provided by fossil fuels) can we do better? It turns out nuclear is much better in every respect. That's all I argued.
We should make some tough calls about how much off peak baseload is supplied.
Nuclear is probably a bit overrated (very capex heavy, carbon intensive at build time) and still ultimately not renewable. We should and do have a massive investment in non-PWRs, for current baseload replacement, right? At some point you have to ask if there was an obvious nuclear solution, why nobody picked up the dollar bill on the ground. Gen 4s have been around for 20 years and the underlying ideas have been around a lot longer.
It's not just nimby or irrational phobia, nuclear has a lot of drawbacks that routinely get ignored because they are a small component of generating portfolios. Ironically, the best thing for them would be a high carbon tax credit system, but sometimes the same people arguing nuclear are against that for some reason.
>We should and do have a massive investment in non-PWRs, for current baseload replacement, right?
Like what? Because I'm seeing Germany sign massive multi-decade contracts for natural gas, at the same time as they are investing in wind energy.
>At some point you have to ask if there was an obvious nuclear solution, why nobody picked up the dollar bill on the ground.
We know why. Nuclear energy is highly regulated and therefore very expensive to build. But we know it works. There's also a dedicated anti-nuclear lobby that does spread anti-nuke FUD.
By the same measure, given how 'cheap' renewables are (I've heard for the last decade that renewables are cheaper than almost anything out there), why aren't renewables powering any economy? Maybe price isn't the issue with renewables. Maybe they just can't do the job.
And there is a bait-and-switch going on. Anytime you hear about some nation powered fully by renewables it's always Hydro (Hydro and Geothermal are great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it)
A thing often stated years ago was that it costs more energy to produce a solar panel than it produces over its lifetime; I never read a source so I googled it. [1] is a pretty insightful post; it takes the price of a solar panel, assumes that 100% of that cost equals energy pricing, and calculates it'd take nearly 30 years, worst case, for it to recoup its energy cost. But then it goes deeper with other costs, e.g. co2 sequestering and the like.
>Everything has an impact on the ecosystem, is your point that nuclear has less of an impact than solar?
Yes. That was my point. Much less.
The other argument I would make is I'm not seeing any evidence that solar actually solves any problem for us. It can't replace fossil fuels, and in fact needs fossil fuel back-up because there is no battery technology (today or upcoming) that can store enough energy to, say, power a city overnight. The global population continues to grow and with it energy needs. Worse, energy/capita is also growing. This means that as bad as solar is today on the environment, it is only going to get worse.
Look, it’s fine if you’re pro nuclear but why not be pro nuclear on its own merits? Your argument would be so much stronger without the parts disregarding wind and solar, as if energy sources are mutually exclusive. I urge you to do some more research on modern renewable technologies, specifically with regard to baseload and not see them as just an enemy of nuclear energy.
>I urge you to do some more research on modern renewable technologies
I see no evidence that solar and wind can actually replace fossil fuels. I think they are great in niche areas, but I see no evidence that they are even a partial solution to climate change. The nature of solar energy and wind energy is such that it is diffuse, and therefore needs massive number of collectors, and that requirement is directly proportional to population size, and per capita energy use (both of which are going up). This also means that you need to over-provision because solar and wind output varies daily, seasonally and even inter-annually (there are years when wind output is high, and years when it is low). And there is no battery technology now, or upcoming, that is capable of even storing that energy to even bridge daily variability at city-scale (for even a moderately-sized city).
Occasionally you'll see an article about some small country X getting 100% of their energy from renewables. In every case, that 'renewable' is hydro or geothermal (and hydro/geothermal is great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it). It is never solar or wind. Every week for the last decade we have an article about how cheap (and getting cheaper) solar and wind is, and yet no country or even region is powered solely through these renewable. Germany is investing heavily in wind, while at the same time building pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades - WHY?!?!
Maybe renewable just can't do it and we should be honest about that. I think solar and wind are a distraction and they've become a religion.
By the way, here's a live view of the energy mix of my home province of Ontario (pop ~15 million)[1]. Because of nuclear and hydro we're pretty much at 85%-97% non-carbon power any given day ... and yet there is an irrational push for solar and wind (which also requires investment in natural gas) - what does solar and wind do for us? As a bonus, Ontario is one of the few places that you can make a credible argument against nuclear because we could sign long-term contract to ship hydro from Quebec ... but that's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that we should decommission nuclear in favour of ... can you guess? ... wind and solar - guaranteeing that we would need to build up natural gas for baseload. Insanity.
>specifically with regard to baseload
They need fossil fuel baseload. That's a fact. There is some talk about bio-fuels (i.e. burning wood!) but that's a disaster for the environment. We'd literally be clearing land to grow things that we then burn. And did you ever imagine that the energy technology of the future would be burning wood (or corn, or garbage)? And outside of biofuels, there is nothing else. In some cases, if you have the geography for it maybe you can build a pumped-storage reservoir, but that's the best you can do.
Yes, I live in an area of Canada where they are trying to put up wind turbines in major bird migration routes. Wind/solar/hydro cheerleading is really hard to fight despite the massive ecosystem damage that each generation source does.
I was surprised that ESGV (Vanguard Index for responsible environmental friendly investing) does not include nuclear power there. I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?
1) Generations of nuclear engineers either told big lies or made huge errors of engineering; resulting in staggering disasters in Russia & Japan which will mark our planet for a period far longer than current human history.
2) The main use of nuclear plants was to create refined product for nuclear weapons, now we have vastly more of that stuff than you can imagine lying around. We don't need or want any more. I believe that a single facility in the north west of england has sufficient plutonium for 40,000 nuclear weapons.
3) They are wildly expensive compared to other forms of "clean" power - solar, hydro and wind are just far far cheaper in terms of both invested carbon, $ and collateral environmental damage.
Several different issues. Nuclear is necessarily large & centralized energy production, with all of the antidemocratic politics and corrupt economics that comes with that.
The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nuclear construction are their own problem.
And you get a lot of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the safety aspect.
I am sure you know the answer but because you ask for it: Radioactivity is nasty. Example Germany: When I grew up my parents couldn't pick mushrooms and I couldn't play in a sandbox because a few thousand kilometers away there was a reactor incident and the wind blew it over. Today people living near a power plant receive free jodium tablets in case there will be an accident. The government spends endless years looking for places to store the nuclear waste because nobody wants it in their backyard, obviously. The waste in the old starage, designed to last 10000 years, leaked already and noone knows how to handle it. France built most of their power plants directly at the border so that hopefully we will receive all the fallout. Uranium mining is said to be desastrous for the environment. Probably there's a lot more.
Often quoted, and while it's true that coal fumes and (worse) the leftover slag is a huge problem, the fear of nuclear is that it's a lot more sudden. Slag is less of a risk than nuclear waste is but has to be treated similarly. Fumes are dangerous and are basically destroying the world / ecosystem, but it's a slow process as opposed to a nuclear power plant meltdown (Chernobyl, Fukushima) which cause much shorter term issues.
Basically people live to a hundred even with pollution, but life expectancy and quality of life is much lower near a meltdown site.
That said, if you look purely at numbers, nuclear (assuming it doesn't explode) is better for humanity than coal.
That said that said, loads of countries recognize how bad coal is, and it's being phased out in favor of gas and renewables.
> Slag is less of a risk than nuclear waste is but has to be treated similarly
Im my country (Poland) over 20 000 people die yearly of lung cancer. Significant percent of them never smoked cigarettes and the main reason they got that cancer was smog. Which in Poland is almost exclusively seen in winters and caused by burning coal.
Chernobyl caused up to 4000 victims according to the worst estimates (including cancer developed later).
Every year in just one country there's more victims of coal energetics than victims of nuclear power in the whole world over all time.
It is. Nuclear plants don't emit pollution. They don't emit carbon. They have tiny land-use requirements (especially compared to wind and solar), as does nuclear waste (for example, all of the nuclear waste generated in US since inception of nuclear power, would fit in an area the size of a single football field). There's nothing else like it.
The storage of nuclear waste for the time during which it needs to be stored without leaking is not a problem that has been solved, no matter how much government officials like to claim that it has. You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.
That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will. Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment. The risk is low, the impact is very very high.
>The storage of nuclear waste for the time during which it needs to be stored without leaking is not a problem that has been solved
Yes it has. You just store it. It takes up minuscule amount of land. The argument I hear is: "You can't store waste safely".. why? "Because you just can't".
>That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will.
Inevitably? I'm not sure about that. Right now that's not an issue and it hasn't been an issue for the the 60 years we've had nuclear power.
>You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.
Sure. How many times did you hear about nuclear waste from commercial reactors leaking and causing damage to the environment?
>Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment.
No. That's not true. That's not how radioactivity works. The longer the half-life of a radioactive substance, the less potent it is, and as you spread it over a larger area the potency goes down EXPONENTIALLY. Waste from commercial reactor is tiny - if you spread it, you dilute it to the point where it is engulfed in background radiation. There is no chance that waste from a commercial nuclear reactor will ruin a 'large swathe of environment'.
My son is now 26 and I wonder if the environment will make it to the end of his life. I hope it does. And I hope, that lacking any substantive change in how humans behave, that he and his GF opt out of kids, because I'm certain they would live to see the world fall apart (probably not end in a literal sense, but it's going to get ugly).
I'm optimistic. I work in agriculture and so see all the advances coming - right now there is more than enough food to go around despite bad weather, and yields are still going up fast. In the mean time world population growth is slowing down as third world countries advance to the point where more babies is bad for the family.
The end of the world has always been right around the corner. One of many things that having children represents is hope for the future. Maybe you don't find that compelling or realistic, but I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel on humanity.
"Fascism," "democracy," what's the difference? There's always an elite class pulling the strings. The world has always been a mess. The only thing that is dying is our illusions.
Edit: for those that downvote me, go tell the millions living in violent poverty how magical democracy is. There will always be a show. What matters is who's putting on the show.
If that was the case, then why aren't our schools teaching white supremacy and nationalism? Isn't the opposite the case?
Also, what's wrong with nationalism? Isn't it better to have nations who are interested in the well being of their people as opposed to a world controlled by globalist corporations?
It seems to me like the people have been conditioned against nationalism and towards globalism which favors corporate control.
There's really no way of stopping or reversing this without billions of people dying. Since the end of WWII, killing others for the survival of your own kind has become extremely taboo (outside of Israel, that is), so nothing is going to be done until it's way too late.
Well the world population is expected to stabilize around 10 billion or so for a long while. So that new normal may also stabilize the wild animal population. The exponential population growth of the past 100 years seems to have stopped so that is one good news.
Once the animals are gone, we won't last much longer. It is extremely naive to think we can engineer ourselves a new biome that can sustain anything even close to what we have now.
Don't people engineer new biomes pretty frequently? It seems pretty defeatist to look at a world where we regularly transform dirt fields into grassy plains into food and think that we'll never be able to sustain ourselves if the climate changes.
Engineering new biomes for fun is different than having to do it every year or you die.
What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of the year? We're not prepared for that kind of migration, we didn't even deal with Syria well.
Farming and other activities often require decades to truly show a profit. When rainfall patterns are changing on short timescales, you will not be able to plan for food production given the underlying churn in fertile locations.
In general large animals have been already devastated by the last ice age and then changes resulting from that. Even without humans large animals would be significantly less diverse than in many periods before.
Of course human's killing spree is not helping either.
The xkcd article is probably about large animals, but that's a kind of large animal chauvinism. Why do the small guys not matter? Yes they're in decline too
Well, it's written right in the title: "Earth's land mammals by weight". So no, it doesn't include bacteria, insects, other invertebrates, or anything living in the sea, but the point it's trying to make about the impact of humans on the planet is still important...
Remember how everyone made fun of Al Gore? Manbearpig? Leaving the Paris accord?
Remember how they are mocking the Green New Deal?
Remember Dominionism, making fun of "soy boys", and everything else?
You should remember this when they try to pretend they do everything they could to remove environmental regulations and delay dealing with global warming until it was too late.
Also remember a good percentage of them believe in End-Time Theology (ever wonder why Evangelicals care so much about a Jerusalem embassy?)
edit: California is burning down just like Australia did earlier. So is Siberia. Pay attention to methane emissions from permafrost and shallow clathrates. This article is a different facet of the same problem. We are beyond the Earth's carrying capacity and it's because the wealthiest wanted to keep getting wealthy and because some religious fanatics believe in the Rapture (including a fair number of the top members of the current US administration).
I think the end-time theology thing is understated. There's a significant part of the US population who actually believes that the reason they don't need to be concerned about the environment is because God will rapture them up before the shit hits the fan. This also allows a fringe of that fringe to actively ignore political leaders who don't cater to their specific subset of interests because they "might be the anti-christ."
Between Obama + Antichrist and Trump + Antichrist alone there are over 7 million results on google including a ton of kindle books.
We are not beyond carrying capacity. We have enough food and other resources to clothe, house and feed everyone in the world and forever if we could organize ourselves. Capitalism has failed us in doing so. We need a new way of organizing.
The Malthusian idea of "there are too many people" leads us to only one logical conclusion: eugenics, genocide. Don't fall into that trap. The basis is provably not true.
Do you have the numbers to prove that we have resources to ‘live forever’?
Capitalism is the only reason we have survived as a species. It is because of capitalism that we are able to procreate relentlessly and without a thought to our future resource management.
Population control through incentivizing responsible procreation is not ‘genocide’ and ‘eugenics’. Negative incentives is not the same as coercion/genocide/eugenics.
If we're talking about survival as a species, capitalism has been around for only an incredibly brief flash. Compared to millions of years of nomadic living.
There are only two reasons not to promote responsible procreation :
1. Religion
2. Creating a labour force.
When reproductive rights are restored back to women and automation/AI takes over most of the mundane tasks, humanity can live to the best of its ability.
We also need anti ageing therapies so we can all live long and healthy as well as ways to preserve and manipulate genetic material so that subsequent generations have the best future in every possible way.
All while restoring our eco system and bringing our planet back to equilibrium. Does this sound like genocide to you?
If we had longer life spans and can live healthy lives without the ravages of ageing, how many of us would want to procreate in a hurry so we remain immortal through our genes?
I don’t see responsible procreation and advanced bio therapies as something negative. I think it’s the next level of our evolution.
There were always problems. Would you rather be living through the World Wars? Or even Vietnam/Korean wars. Slavery. Nuclear Cold war. Acid Rain. Crippling economy and crime in the 70s. 80s crack crime epidemic. Covid sucks but otherwise things are pretty good right now.
This is dismissive in the form of "Other people suffered, why are you complaining?"
Nuclear war is still possible. Acid rain is still bleaching forests and marshes near me. Our economy is kinda hosed at the moment. Endless conflict in the Middle East/SW Asia. Uiyghurs are enslaved. And of course resource depletion and climate change.
Nuclear war is possible but much less likely, compared to when the Soviet Union and the US were watching each other "knowing" the other was itching to launch, and so if they do you better attack back first lest you lose. Acid rain is still a problem, but not nearly the problem it was 40 years ago. The economy has always been kinda hosed about something - but overall your standard of living is better than it would have been. There have always been endless wars - where they are have changed over time. There has always been slavery, again much less today than years ago. I have seen newpapers from 1880 (not a typo, in the 1800s) where the editors were wondering what they would do when the oil wells went dry.
A big difference is that now you learn (faster or at all) about issues that 30-50-100 years ago would have been completely obscure to most of the world, and you're getting the news hammered into your head on so many channels until you can only see them as important. So most issues today hit people far harder than they used to because the world used to be a bit more (unwittingly) ignorant and what you didn't know couldn't hurt you. Knowing about every bad thing everywhere, and knowing the impact of that can hit harder than the actual issue. It takes a huge emotional toll.
If issues command more attention time each day they feel more important. Generalplan Ost might have killed twice as many people at the same time as the Holocaust but most people never heard of it because it didn't get that much prime time. And the Bangladesh or Indonesian genocides flew under the radar for most people around the world.
Lots of things are possible but the likelihood, and the fact that this is hammered into your head via every channel make all the difference. Nuclear war is possible but if FB would throw this possibility at you every day I can guarantee you'd see it with very different eyes and feelings.
Just going back a few decades you had things like AIDS or the hole in the ozone layer. So each generation had their own burden to bear. And things like global warming aren't something that hit one particular generation (unless it triggers a catastrophic and quickly unfolding event), it just erodes away the niceties of life with each generation.
You could write a similar paragraph about any time in history. China, for one, is far less genocidal than they were a few decades ago, as hard as it is to believe. Overall it's far less likely for people to die in wars than at any time in human history.
>Between climate and the looming covid recession, is there even a point to planning for the future?
For real? Imagine having lived through a global depression, fighting a world war on the other side of the planet and watching an entire society vapourized by nuclear weapons, all in the span of a decade.
>I might as well enjoy my money while I can do things with it.
You should always enjoy your money, because you can't take it with you.
Presumably by that you mean to imply the entirety of Japanese society was vaporized by nuclear weapons?
It wasn't. Japan and its society are still there, even the cities those bombs were dropped on weren't vaporized in their entirety, nor were their societies.
I would be more worried about the US's partisan death spiral than climate change. It's very likely we could destroy ourselves way before climate change has a chance to destroy us.
Part of the reason we have this problem now is similar thinking in the cold-war era. When you believe a WWIII-induced apocalypse is just around the corner you're not likely to make a priority out of long term planning.
Can’t find text online but it’s a good story. Most humans want to live when older, even if circumstances bad.
As for the future, you may consider a few things:
1. What will happen of everyone sensible to problems lives a life of empty hedonism? Rather than trying to improve them.
2. Will the change really happen so fast that death will be preferable? See the story above. Young you can not reliably plan for what older you will consider early of living.
3. Certainly your analysis cautions against working to death in a job you hate to enjoy it all at 65. But, that plan is not a good idea even if the world at 65 is paradise. These are your most capable years and it makes sense to enjoy them.
In my own case, I worked really hard for about three years, built a working business, and now work a moderate amount on it. (I mean really hard. Sacrificing three years can be rational, sacrificing 30-40 is not. And I still did some memorable things in that time, like travel)
The other option is to pick some work which is moderately enjoyable, and leaves ample free time and mental space to pursue your interests.
Or work you love for itself.
But again, I fail to see what the end of the world does to either of these calculations. In my view the hate your life then retire then die was obsolete regardless.
However, there is a fourth option that presents itself regarding the future apocalypse: work against it. For instance, if you have the technical skills, there is a booming field in renewable energy or carbon extraction.
What about animals specifically? Current nature reserves exist because people in the past decided to make them. You can be part of making one.
Or you can make a lot of money and fund these causes directly.
If everybody gives up hope then hope is lost. My expected future scenario is so grim it startles my parents. But I also think we could still avert much of and it’s worth trying.
As for the recession, that’s far too short term to worry about. If you’re posting here you surely have the skills to avoid it. I came into the market through the 2008-09 recession. Statistically, it was worse for my cohort, but my friends are doing just fine. It lowers results on average, but that doesn’t mean all individual results are disastrous.
I'll read the book, thanks for the reccomendation.
1. Maybe I'm just being a doomer, but I don't think it makes a difference, all of the money is on being a hedonist staying the course and that seems to be the only relevant thing.
2. 68% of life in 50 years is pretty fast, it will only really take 1 global war between powers over resources for things to slip it seems to me
3. That's a sensible plan. I enjoy the field I'm currently in, for the most part. But it feels pointless.
I had to wake up early for work today and didn't get enough sleep, I'm sure I'll care less about this situation after I take a nap and keep ignoring it like the rest of the world, I guess. I'll have to look into changing careers to something a little more noble, though, I guess.
If you think you have the aptitude for it, you might consider starting a business. You can make it so you’re totally free of time and location, and have a fair bit of money.
It requires a bunch of upfront work, but then you’re free. For hedonism or more useful purposes. (Though directly working on the problem is more effective than what I suggest)
And yeah, 68% in 50 years is a lot. Our default trajectory is very bad. But if all those who see this collapse into hopelessness, what chance do we have?
And the book is just a short story. A cautionary tale against believing that a happy life can be hedonism in youth with a planned early end. Most older people, it turns out, still want to live, once they get older.
A lot of people are driving the "the sky is falling" mentality. Ignore most of this and do your own research. The world is overall getting better everyday. Keep planning for the future and contribute to changing the world to how you'd want it.
If there is something you should do as a young person who thinks the future is bleak is to invest. Invest in stuff that will be worth a lot when the shit hits the fan.
Long before the economic system will collapse you will have a lot chances to buy properties make money from stocks and build to prepare for a potential collapse.
If you invest now and prepare for a dystopian future you will be well prepared when and if it arrives. If you waste your money on goods and experiences you will instead face the same destiny as so many others.
"If you invest now and prepare for a dystopian future you will be well prepared when and if it arrives"
I mean this is what I'm talking about, who cares about living in a dystopia future. Surely it's better to go all in on enjoying the world now for 10 or 20 years than desperately try to carve out a maybe somewhat tolerable middle aged life in a dystopia. At least I'll have good company at the bottom in the future
Sure, but I don't think you or me will experience any dystopian future. Such a future is still far from being here and we will most likely die before that happens.
But I guess it's different ideologies, by going "all in" as you suggest you simply add haste and helps to ensure that such a dystopian future is actually going to become reality.
I am on the other hand preparing, trying to become self sustainable and lower my consuming to such a degree I don't need any income from any other source than my investments. This will help reduce emissions, by "enjoying the world" you will help to create emissions. Who told you cannot enjoy life as the same time you plan for a shitty future? Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
This is a good talk about the economics but you can take it further than that:
Since I've started to follow this mindset I have moved to the countryside, sold my car, started to grow my own vegetables, got chicken from a specific race that is threatened of extinction (thus helping its continued existance) and stopped purchasing unnecessary stuff. I can already feel how I have improved my life in such a way that I have more money than ever before and I can save about 50% of my income.
> Sure, but I don't think you or me will experience any dystopian future. Such a future is still far from being here and we will most likely die before that happens.
This must be subjective, since to me it is most certainly already here and just intensifying, rapidly.
At the very least, even if a full government dystopia hasn't happened, the environment will be almost gone. Even if the headline is off by a huge amount its not like we're slowing the course. We're going full steam ahead on overfishing and destroying coral reefs, I made a comment not too long ago on here about noticing there no longer being lightning bugs during summer where I live. Even my dad has stories of pulling over on the highway because bugs have encrusted his windshield, something I can't imagine. I rather enjoy hiking, I'd like to get my full while there's still things to see I guess. I can respect you're decision to lessen your impact, definetely, but I can't see enough people doing that to stop anything
I like your positive sentiment. Responsible preparation isn't necessarily selfish. Charity starts with the freedom allowed by abundance. Surpluses allow for creation.
When the effects of global warming and extinction finally will hit us hard, people will die of in billions and life will begin to come back.
Of course a lot of species will be extinct forever, but so is the natural cycle of life. Almost all species that ever existed has already gone extinct and it's foolish to think that we won't have the same destiny, especially how we're treating our food chain.
Assuming some negative feedback mechanism kicks in. There is a chance a positive feedback occurs, global warming spirals and Earth becomes uninhabitable. See Venus for an example.
You realize that all of the carbon in fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere right? The earth spits out a little bit of CO2 naturally, and the sun is a bit hotter than it was 100 million years ago, but we aren't turning into Venus anytime soon.
Back then the continents were configured rather differently. That has a huge effect on hothouse vs icehouse regime. Right now we are in a continental configuration that should be icehouse (circumpolar currents with cold deep water). If we force the climate into hothouse against its natural state what will happen?
It's very much not settled how balanced the mantle vs surface carbon cycle is. How much carbon is in MORB? Is subducted sediment actually entrained into the mantle?
A major store of CO2 is sedimentary dolomite. We did't even really understand how that formed! (Last time I checked but I'm no sedimentologist so that might have been solved.)
Speaking as a geologist your statement is dangerously naive. I'm not saying Venus and the end of all life is definite but it is the worst case scenario of a situation that we don't understand and that will soon be (maybe already is) out of our control.
>Speaking as a geologist your statement is dangerously naive.
I'm skeptical of you being a working geologist because I haven't seen any credible claims that there is any reason to believe Earth could turn into Venus. But even outside of that, scaremongering with incredibly unlikely scenarios is also dangerous and detrimental to fighting climate change, because somebody is going to call bullshit on you and will result in your and even the general credibility of climate scientists, to be diminished.
You should speak to some more Geologists then. We really don't understand the systems of our planet and we are currently sticking a big spanner into them. Many of us are more concerned than we can publish - precisely because we don't want to scaremonger.
Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.
Can we be sure than some positive feedback mechanism might make life as we know it untenable on Earth? I'm not sure myself and I don't think anyone can know.
"We really don't understand the systems of our planet and we are currently sticking a big spanner into them."
There's a presumption that man is somehow an unnatural creature divorced from nature here.
If only we had multiple Earths to experiment with. One without humans as a control, another with humans as we are now and a third with humanity following whatever dictates the warmist technocrats prescribe.
Hypothetically speaking, I wonder how one would measure the utility of humanity existing at all? Some environmentalists may suggest that the Earth without humanity is the "best" of them all. There is a proximity between warmists and population control advocates.
Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury. From my perspective the "spanner in the works" analogy better fits with the economic centralization & suffering the warmist dictates may cause.
I'm politically very in favour of personal liberty. Climate change being a real and causing problems is a fact at this point (we are mainly working out how big the problems will be). I wish that some liberterian politicians would start to accept that so we can get some freedom respecting solutions!
Humanity created agricultural systems. Likewise beavers modify their environment and create ecological systems. The Internet only moralizes about the former.
I'm inclined to agree that climates change. Whether the weather is wrong, correct or otherwise undesirable due to immoral actions of men seems like a separate issue. As you mentioned, we don't fully understand the systems involved. Consequently, I prefer to err on the side of humility rather than judgement.
That said, responsible forestry management and storage of carbon in the form of cut lumber has a profit incentive. For those inclined to accept the premises of global warming, this is a solution which respects freedom. Interestingly, it is downplayed and dismissed as untenable. Even further afield are environmentalists who oppose logging and propose regulations which set the stage for CO2 emitting forest fires.
I don't see climate change as a moral issue. To me it's a practical issue. Best case climate change will seriously mess up our way of life. Worst case is very bad.
I'm not sure that we can grow and store enough trees to bring CO2 levels down to non dangerous levels in time. If we could it would certainly be worth doing. Can you point me to any calculations?
Even if this specific solution isn't viable, it is an example of what we need to do to solve this problem. Fundamentally we need to scrub a huge amount of carbon out of the atmosphere as soon as possible. Everything else is just moving the deckchairs.
There's several of these if you look. I believe one outlines how much land exactly needs to be used.
I see it as a philosophical issue. For me the warmist perspective is incoherent.
A bug's lifetime is measured in weeks. He cannot see beyond the next tuft of grass. His world is few meters in diameter and inches in height. If the aforementioned beaver floods the meadow, is it "unnatural" for the bug? Does this qualify as "sticking a spanner into a natural system"? Clearly the bug would be justified in doomsaying from his perspective.
Luckily, we are not bugs. We have the ability to adapt and gain larger perspectives than just looking at the next hedge. What we don't have is an omnipotent ability to understand the complex details of nature. Thus, we are ill qualified to make statements like, "putting a spanner in the works". Who are we to say that man's activity is worse or somehow different than nature's?
There's so much doomsaying. As you admit, we don't understand the complex systems of the Earth. A warmer period might be better for us all. We don't know. If you ascribe to the apocalyptic vision it is hard to claim that controlling other's consumption habits is not a moral issue. Either they follow the advice of their betters or are complicit in manifesting the climate apocalypse.
If we start with the moral premise that men are free, then restrictions upon that become a moral issue.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but "cui bono" provides a more coherent explanation of the warmist agenda. It also explains why solutions like tree planting are not more popular. Carbon credits issued by a supranational entity raises alarm bells for me.
>Many of us are more concerned than we can publish.
Maybe you should be a little braver? As in, let your work be actually scrutinized by your peers (isn't that what tenure is for?) instead of scaremongering anonymously and accosting others for not understanding the science you are not willing publish? Seriously, what is the public supposed to take away from that kind of statement? Especially given that the public cannot ascertain the truth value of your Earth-will-turn-to-Venus theory. Are you trying to convince the public (on this forum no less) that this is a reasonable hypothetical situation to worry about? Come on. Put it to your peers and if they agree, then sure, let's talk policy.
>Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.
Didn't OP say that? Didn't I say that? What is it that you're arguing? Saying that we don't understand fully how our climate works and how many of the systems that drive it works is reasonable and nobody will dispute that. But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways. That's all I'm saying. We have a well-defined problem of ecosystem collapse and climate change, such as it is, don't muddle the water by coming up with new hypothetical problems.
I think I get what you are saying but maybe you could reformat it in a civil way rather than berating me.
I listed some very simple examples of places where we don't understand the Earth's carbon cycle fully. No one will publish a study saying, 'Hey guys we don't understand this yet'. We know we don't! That's why we do research to chip away at the problems.
> But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways.
The way I think about it like this. When I do an experiment I (am supposed to) do a risk assessment. If a proceedure has a low probability of causing a huge hazard like death I should take steps to reduce the risk of that hazard occurring as much as possible. Similarly climate change has a none zero possibility of causing humans to become extinct (and a much more than none zero chance of cause society as we know it to breakdown). Shouldn't we lower that probability?
I don't want to defend the original commenter's tone, but you must understand how frustrating it is to ask for evidence and get only a confident declaration that there's secret evidence hidden where it can't be checked. We can't drive global policy based on unverifiable insinuations about what the worst case is.
1. We don't really understand how these systems work. (The evidence for that is basically a lack of evidence and the type of thing we are still working on...)
2. Certain outcomes in the system could be very very very bad.
3. We are changing part of the system massively.
4. Because of (1) we don't know what (3) will do.
I'm not alluding to any hiden knowledge here. I'm not a climate scientist. My published work is related to other parts of the Earth's carbon cycle.
I'm sure you can see why "many of us are more concerned than we can publish" could be read as alluding to secret knowledge.
The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
Luckily we were able to discuss it further and clear up some of the confusion.
> The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
I can't think of any comparible examples where human activity is known to be causing massive problems... Various forms of pollution maybe? But I would argue for action there too.
Sure, but getting rid of life seems to be quite hard and for it to happen it must be some extraordinary event like the surface getting as hot as the surface of venus.
People still believe there can be life on venus in it's clouds, most likely bacteria or something like it but it's not impossible that life will find a way.
There has been extinction events where the surface of earth pretty much became uninhabitable, but bacteria lives in the earth and underground and life spirals back as soon as the surface or oceans are habitable again.
Even in the worst case projections I’m aware of, global warming won’t kill people in the billions. This kind of frankly fearmongering is a large part of why it’s so hard to get consensus on environmental issues in the first place.
I am a former geophysicist, and credibly we could see on the order of an 8C rise this century. It's much worse than the general public thinks, and the picture keeps worsening as understanding of the system and its feedbacks increase.
A rise of 5-8C make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and would collapse food production and global civilization. Billions dying is not scaremongering, but is a very probable outcome of business-as-usual.
Our civilization, and our population of 9 billion, takes an immense amount of resources to maintain, and it will collapse if the Earth can no longer supply it.
The IPCC says that the worst case scenario is a 5C rise, and their analysis of food production (https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5-Chap...) doesn't indicate any sort of catastrophic collapse. What source are you getting this information from?
The IPCC report is rather out of date at this point.
There's a number of positive feedback mechanisms such as cloud cover and methane clathrates that are still poorly constrained and could credibly lead to a rise like that. It's not the most likely scenario, on the high end of current projections, but it should be planned for.
You buy fire insurance for your house even if you don't think it will catch on fire. I wear a seatbelt even though the vast majority of times I'm in a car, I don't get in a crash. We rationally prepare for unlikely but severe events all the time. With climate change, people have this blind spot with thinking about risk.
Here, it's the planet and our civilization. We should take existential threats very, very seriously.
This article is describing a rise of 8C only in some specific areas. That's a very different thing; there are all sorts of localized rises of 8C, and most of them don't matter.
We should definitely take existential threats seriously, but part of that seriousness requires us to be rigorous about what we call existential. If we go around calling things existential threats when they're merely bad, the truly existential threats won't be taken as seriously as they deserve or get the attention they require. Temperature rises in particular are strange to present as an existential threat, because we have pretty solid ideas (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/06/22/seeding-t... for a general review) for how we could quickly force the temperature down if we absolutely had to.
It literally says 8C average surface warming globally in the abstract, just a few sentences in:
"In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred."
edit: There are also a tremendous amount of problems with all proposed geoengineering solutions. They are uniformly an emergency backup, not something we should ever choose.
The most realistic option, sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, needs to be maintained continually to avoid a sudden onset of warming. It also does nothing for ocean acidification from CO2 or the cognitive problems higher concentrations cause.
Thinking that we can just tech-magic our way out of this is very dangerous. This will require hard choices. It would have been 100 times easier if we just started 30 years ago, but it will be 100 times harder if we wait another 10.
Yes, but it is possible due to a number of feedback effects that are still very, very poorly constrained. It's a low-probability risk, but the damage if it occurs is literally apocalyptic. We should plan for it, just like how people wear seat belts even if they usually don't get into car wrecks.
Also, government websites like climate.gov typically don't have the most current information.
The only solution to is to live in harmony with more animals. People think wild animals can't be domesticated, but they are wrong. Living in the wild makes any animal wild, including humans, but raised from birth, generations of animals can learn to cohabit with humans. We could even train the more intelligence animals to assist us. Imagine local monkeys trained to collect trash and recyclables, rewarded with food to bring bottles and cans to a local depository.
Unfortunately, these sorts of claims are impossible to verify. Did they measure like we do? Have the numbers been adjusted? Because everything is politicised, I have low levels of trust in any of these voices that self-purport themselves to be authorities. It seems so far away from my personal, anecdotal experience.
It seems clear to me that rural areas are far less populated nowadays - small rural farms the world over, are being run by parents (or now, grandparents!) in their 80's it seems - the younger generation are in cities. From my school class no one has more that 3 children, and most have none. That should bode for a crashing population, but instead we are told it is increasing drastically.
So, while cities may feel busy, I tend to think the population is in decline. And that if lots of rural areas are in decline, that animal populations are probably on the increase, only there's no one there to see it.
All wild whales, bears, lions, deer, moose, mice, rabbits, wild horses, camels, beavers, buffalo, elephants, tigers, rhinos, chimpanzees, pandas, goats, etc... are in that remaining 10%.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...