You can't make hockey sticks out of just a few data points, as this author does in several of the charts. For example, the deforestation chart is based on a few data points from a UN study (where Our World in Data that the author links to cites as its source). But tree coverage has actually increased over the past 30 years according to some studies by NASA and elsewhere. For example, one 2018 paper from Nature says:
"We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally5—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics. Global bare ground cover has decreased by 1.16 million km2 (−3.1%), most notably in agricultural regions in Asia. Of all land changes, 60% are associated with direct human activities and 40% with indirect drivers such as climate change."
[0]
A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.
It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left.
Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be getting our collective shit together and slowing down? Or will it be a massive die-off after we've destroyed the ecosystems we depend on for things like air to breathe and water to grow our crops?
> It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left.
Sigmoid functions are defined over real input values (not integers). If you were to model the decline in (integer) numbers of passenger pigeons with reals, you would get a sigmoid function were the number at the end approximates, but never reaches zero.
Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources?
No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite.
Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.
"The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . .
And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union."
What in the world does any of that have to do with birth rates and overpopulation, which is the only thing I mentioned? Are you just spamming a link and quote?
Nearly all developed countries have birth rates below the replacement level. The cluster of reasons for this effect is indeed almost certainly why population levels will level off
And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets.
The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd century as Asia is in the 21st). It’ll lead to a cratering of the working population unless we basically start to eliminate retirement (not desirable!) and enact a ton of pro-natalist policies now (in addition to as much immigration as possible).
A thing people don’t understand is that the biggest resource limit is people. Population decline won’t mean abundance but the exact opposite as the dependency ratio shoots through the roof and will be incredibly stubborn to come down (as to try to reverse it with pro-natalist policies will actually make it significantly worse for a couple decades), especially as willing migrants dry up (yes, I realize how counter-narrative that is, but it’ll happen… in the latter part of this century, Africa will become sick of being the cheap labor source of aging Europe and Asia).
Even with a pessimistic estimate about the rate of progress, fully general AI will be here loooong before population decline decimates the economy, as will good robotics and all the stuff needed to basically put resource gathering and production on autopilot. At that point "on welfare" would easily be the equivalent of living like a millionaire today.
The bigger questions are whether global warming or WW3 will fuck us all before we get there, not to mention the question of whether fully general AI will be its own mega disaster.
Population decline will be a problem in your lifetime. I’ve become disillusioned with the idea that hyper-automation is just around the corner. Observing a Chrysler assembly plant from almost a century ago, vs our current car assembly plants (wiring harnesses still very stubbornly manual), has tempered my expectations of automation progress, as has the slowing of Moore’s Law and the failure of self-driving-cars to materialize in the last few years.
Seeing modern day "best in class" is a great way to become pessimistic about progress, you see the best of now but don't realize it's the worst of "soon". In 8 years you'll reverse course completely based on machining automation, and in 11 we'll have true AGI.
For what it's worth, for me 'getting our shit together' is shorthand for availability of birth control and improving availability of mass education, especially for women. These are the things that have concretely driven reduction in population growth.
I agree about that, but the implication was that we are doing those things to slow or reduce population, not just, you know, because we ought to do them anyway.
Yes, but South Korea is leading the pack. Something unusual since they only industrialized in the 1970s and were poorer than North Korea until the 1980s.
You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. For example, you can draw many curves through 2 data points, but you can also draw a straight line. The Our World in Data "Primary vs. planted forest" data that he cites for the "Old Growth Forest Cover" chart has just 2 data points (1990 and 2019).
> You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set.
Yeah the worst thing is that with the extinction rate, he states that he implicitly sets the background extinction rate to 0 in the year 1000. This is going to bias his 3-point curve fitting even moreso.
The background extinction rate in the absence of humans is probably much higher than 0. New species are also continuously emerging while others are going extinct, so that the total number remains steady.
Around the year 1000, it's a reasonable guess to assume that emergence of new species and species extinction were roughly in balance, so net extinction rate was indeed around 0.
Today, it's well-established that this net extinction rate is as horrible as is described. A few new species emerging here and there are not enough to compensate for the mess that we are causing on the extinction front, by orders of magnitude.
I might have not expressed myself well in the previous comment, but when I say that "New species are also continuously emerging", it is to prove that the background extinction rate is not zero, not that we don't have a problem.
The curve that he fitted is not the net extinction rate. It's simply the total number of extinctions.
The graph he plots shows the total number of extinctions at year 1000 being 0 or almost 0. This is an assumption. In the absence of humans the extinction rate could be 1,2,10 per year, whatever, it's some small number. The point is that when you are fitting an exponential curve to 3 data points, the resulting curve will be very sensitive to small changes in the value of that point at year 1000. In particular, choosing a value of 0 will force the model towards the steepest possible gradient that the model can allow. i.e. it's biased towards alarmism.
EDIT: Although, when I think about it a little more, a reasonable model would model the extinction rate as an exponential plus a constant value, which would change things. Though a reasonable model probably wouldn't assume an exponential model at all based on 2 data points
Simply looking at the net species over a year doesn't really tell the full story of it.
You can lose megafauna like the American Bison or Steller's sea cow. Smaller fauna like the thylacine are also lost. Such species aren't going to re-emerge in the timescale of humanity. What I named off are just 3 species. If 3 species of ants happen to replace them, that's not really making up the difference. The world has plenty of ants in plenty of species already.
Also please don't drag out the "American Bison isn't extinct!" argument. There were less than a thousand at some point in the 19th century, so all the genetic diversity they had is gone. They've been bred with cattle to the point that the remaining herds are basically all hybrids, despite claims to the contrary. They're also functionally extinct in North America, as all herds are dependent on management at this point.
Yep - "hurr durr I fit a two parameter exponential to three data points OMG guys we should panic now" is just about the weakest argument that has ever been made about any of this stuff.
At the very least, many of the things he's showing would be theoretically expected to follow logistic curves of some form, not pure exponentials.
The author also mentions that their forest cover graph is "old growth", and even claims that this strengthens their point! So if I plant a tree today, or did so 30 years ago, this does not count against their deforestation graph, even though the tree exists, this somehow makes their plot more accurate.
Tree farms are not at all the same environment as old forest growth. I'm all for the critique of S-curves in other responses but this resembles dog-piling.
Or would you say an old meadow full of species of bird, foxes, rabbits and insects, is equivalent to a wheat field?
Planting trees is better than not planting trees, but it's not going to restore the ecosystem that came before it.
I know that old growth is not the same as a freshly planted pine farm. But that's not my point, my point is the author talks about reduced forest cover in aggregate across the land surface of the earth, which is not true, then admits to limiting it to old growth only and hilariously claims that it strengthens his point. It doesn't. When you basically say "forest cover older than 100 years is all that counts" of course the numbers look bad, you're preventing the measure of any repair to the forest cover by definition.
I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?
That was my thought too. 2 data points, and 1 is a guess (forest cover near the end). The "good" kind of hockey stick ends eventually (bitcoin!), in all likelihood we're not going to go to 0% forest cover or 0 wild animals.
Still, if the biomass number is anywhere near accurate, it's pretty insane. 96% of mammal biomass is humans + domesticated animals? Throws the biodiversity thing into a new light, no wonder animals are going extinct when we're strangler-fig-ing their world.
It looks like he’s been at it for a while, but quick googling didn’t turn up any substantive rebuttal (of him/his blog). In this post he seems to be making a simplistic Malthusian argument—but we know population growth is not Malthusian.
The trickier problem seems more to be: what happens when the hockey sticks flatline? When China’s population stops growing, will its economy also stagnate? What happens then?
I look forward to reading more of this blog, though, because it does at least appear sincere, and so can sharpen reasoning. And a more general point of his could be abstracted as being that we’re being whipsawed by so many curves, and no doubt several others not discussed, that even if reality isn’t so pessimistic as he lays out, it might still be less than “fun”.
To put this in context, here's what a recent article[0] from Fortune has to say:
> On Thursday, Yang Wenzhuang, the head of population for China’s National Health Commission, told a conference that the country’s population would start to shrink before 2025, according to state-run news outlet Global Times. Earlier forecasts expected the decline to begin in 2027.
Hockey sticks usually end up being S-shaped curves. The author is just doom-screaming because we're currently in the rapid change phases of lots of them but hasn't shown on any of the graphs the point where disaster will occur. What's the critical rate of extinctions that would end global economic growth before most of the world has western quality of life? He has no clue! So his worries are just emotional and based on misleading graphs.
One of the graphs (forest cover) is extrapolated into the future and shown to be zero. He could instead have shown in plateauing if he wanted to tell a different story.
I'm not sure how S-shaped curves help when it comes to the collapse of all ecosystems is concerned... are we supposed to innovate our way out of rapidly dwindling biodiversity on the planet?
insects and pollinators
birds and large game animals
forests and rainforests
kelp forests dying
coral reefs dying
overfishing
plastic pollution
greenhouse gas pollution
acidification of oceans
1/3 of all arable land underwent desertification
The real question is, why AREN'T we concerned more? Is there some sort of magic hope in innovation, are we just super optimists? No, it's simply that we failed at collective action to such an extent that even thinking about a viable solution is so hopeless that most of us don't even bother. The one place where we were able to curb pollution was CFCs in the Toronto Protocol. That's it.
You're just doing what the TFA did, which is notice some trends and assume they'll continue until the point of some sort of "disaster". But you don't have a clue, just been exposed to too much hype.
To be specific - how much biodiversity do we need to avoid disaster such a global economic collapse? I don't know how to measure that but you surely do or you'd have no justification for your stated opinions.
Because the people profitting from the direct causes of many of these issues, fossil fuels and industrial meat, started a culture war with the people who were concerned about them.
Anyone who popped their head up to address any of these problems was attacked and undermined by very well funded adversaries.
Any crank that argued against them even being a problem got promoted.
We struggled to get them to stop poisoning humans with lead and cigarettes and poverty for the same reasons.
For me, it's that it wil balance out in the end. We might have to suffer, but it will balance out. My hope is that most of us won't have to suffer that much before it balances out.
Also, I do feel good about the direction we're going in. California, where I live, is banning the sale of new combustion engine cars by 2035. 2035 will probably have some very hot weeks here, but that we're getting laws like this is a good sign.
It seems we need to be simultaneously extremely patient and extremely urgent about fixing problems like this. Constant sensationalism isn't the path, unless your work specifically is as a consciousness-raiser, perhaps. Others need to have an awareness of the problem but it does worse than nothing to be constantly panicked.
That is overly optimisic though, the Paris agreement was a minimal effort, California and all other governments are on track to fail miserably at following even that. Which means we are talking about a lot more than a "few hot weeks".
> the Paris agreement was a minimal effort, California and all other governments are on track to fail miserably at following even that.
Could you clarify what you mean by "on track"?
According to the Guardian[0], "California Governor Jerry Brown [issued] an executive order calling for the entire California economy to become carbon-neutral by 2045" and "In order to stay below the Paris climate threshold of 2°C global warming above pre-industrial temperatures, humanity must become carbon-neutral by around 2060 or 2070."
Are you saying that California looks like it will miss its target by 25 years?
> This, to me, is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two (essentially, the GWP curve from before).
The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.
It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason.
Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda:
> Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure.
He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag.
He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution:
> In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations
> The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.
Land, energy, and other finite resources are zero sum.
Unless the amount of land required to have a good quality of life exponentially decreases then the following holds.
If your system permits me to increase the amount of land I control in direct proportion to the amount of land I control (ie. it is possible to profit).
Your rising tide isn't lifting all boats, it's lifting the superyacht while all the small boats are chained to the bottom.
Some of these graphs are pretty silly. The downward hockey stocks are extrapolating based on two data points, and the shape of the curve is just not at all plausible.
> Whatever model we have adopted for existing on this planet, it seems to be a poor choice. It appears to be on track to fail.
WHAT? Where did this conclusion come from? There's so many hoops jumped to arrive at this conclusion that I'm astounded. How is "fail" defined by forest cover? Or number of wild animal species? As though we will blindly march towards 0 forest cover over the next N years and immediately suffocate ourselves? No, of course we are paying attention and will come up with new inventions or policies as requirements come up. We are resourceful and intelligent and we'll find ways to adapt.
On another note, curves like this in ecology almost always end up as an S-curve (see Carrying Capacity [0]). It's just a matter of finding what our capacity is and thinking about how we can gracefully decline in growth and avoid the Malthusian trap [1]). Tangentially, I guess this might eventually lead to policies like China's One Child policy [2], and interestingly that means whatever percentages of different cultures exist when our population growth slows will probably remain about the same.
Kinda funny. Just before seeing this article I had just finished watching a wonderful video on the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4) which isn't exactly the same as what's being talked about here... but in the same class of problem if you make that class big enough :-).
When looking at these sorts of things, surely such "hockey sticks" are often times just not considering the limiting factors? I'm no mathematician (by any approximation) but it seems like more often than not finding such a result should point to some incompleteness or some closer look being required to get the full picture.
(P.S. that video was very math heavy and no, I didn't understand most of the math beyond hand-wavy terms... still glad they went into the detail.)
For a 500 page version of this analysis with correspondingly more rigor (including an acknowledgment of S-curves), see Growth by Vaclav Smil. Although this is just a tiny, flawed snapshot of the argument, the conclusions are the same.
The good thing about this type of fossil fuel fan fiction is that it's self-refuting.
They put all that effort into saying "energy made us rich" so implying we must worship fossil fuels. But as soon as the cost curves cross over the argument switches and works against them.
So then they need to argue that its not actually cheaper, its just a conspiracy to deceive you while even fossil fuel producers, corporate and state, are saying the opposite.
Old and fairly trivial insight is that most hockey-stick graphs end up being S-curves and that's already in sight for most of the ones given here. Population is on its way to a plateau, so is energy consumption in the rich world, and so on. Economic growth due to poor nations caching up will still keep going for a while but it's not that unlikely that we'll eventually end up in a fairly static situation at least for a time, which wasn't uncommon in human history.
runaway scenarios without anything reigning them in are very rare or otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about them because we'd all have drowned in Tribbles already.
There's a lot of psychology in these imagined scenarios and relatively little long-run empirical observation because complex systems tend to have a significant amount of constraints and regulatory mechanisms that kick in either voluntarily or involuntarily to impose some limits on growth. They tend to be more cyclical in nature rather than tending towards unlimited or even linear growth.
The amount of plastic discarded looks terrible, but it's on a graph that starts in 1100 AD, so it would look outrageous even if people only threw out a single plastic bottle in 1920 and 10 this year
Sadly he's still at it. To save people from subjecting themselves to all of his tortured logic, here's just a sample from the article you linked:
> The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.
Basically his conclusion is that at some point in the next 400 years, the predominant economic system on Earth will have to change in some way (and that economists are short-sighted for not believing this).
The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)"
For economic growth to continue, the economy must completely decouple from all necessary resources.
At that point all real commodities are not part of the economy which is growing so the thing with the commodities in it is the real economy which is static.
The inevitability of the conclusion is ironclad. The only matter is which limiting resources necessitate moving to a steady state economy.
Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).
Again. The point is a reductio ad absurdum on exponential growth.
Exponential growth in a static environment is impossible. This is provable.
With that conclusion ironclad you no longer get to tapdance around the point. Which is that we must end reliance on growth.
There are other much sooner limits. Thermal forcing becomes as important as GHG forcing within a century, for example. Similarly you can't assert light water reactors as a solution (including idiotic ideas like making depleted fuel permanently unavailable) because there is not enough uranium to maintain exponential growth for more tha 80 years or so at 3% burnup.
Without exponentially increasing energy you don't get exponentially increasing resource extraction.
'The pie will grow exponentially fast forever so it doesn't matter that I'm stealing an exponentially larger share of it' is a lie.
There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some.
Yes, that's my point. Arguing about the economic problems of the 25th century is at best a toy exercise in sci-fi mathematics/physics, and at worst a dangerous distraction from solving real problems that exist today.
> There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some.
This I agree with 100%, and it would have made a much more productive topic for an article.
It's for the overwhelming majority of people who don't understand that "line go up will fix everything" is neither possible nor a solution even if it were.
The people who believe "line go up will fix everything", need an article that doesn't give them false hope that the problems we face won't really become serious until after their lifetime.
The ocean not boiling isn't 'not serious'. Everything dies long before that point.
If you don't start by eliminating 'line go up forever and big line means space magic will save us' then they tapdance around the same idiotic points as ever about how it's not zero sum and iphone means we all live like kings and then deflect any criticism with banal comments like
> The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)"
We must end growth or physics will end it for us. And if we pick the latter option then the result is not going to be pleasant for anyone. We have about a century (roughly the time people have been trying to sound the alarm on climate change).
"The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . .
And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union."
How is energy consumption per GDP measured? All the relevant currencies are inflationary in policy. 2020 proved you can grow the economy at any rate despite any circumstances so long as you are willing to accept out of control inflation.
Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing.
Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue.
Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly.
If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era I would do so in a heartbeat. I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots, a good social circle, access to whatever resources I needed, plenty of time to do things I want - a lot of the population doesn't have these things, and modernity doesn't give them to you.
> I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots.
You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
Still, I'd have plenty of time to worry about those things. In fact that would probably be my "job" - developing, maintaining, and expanding the estate that I would eventually leave to my kids.
No coincidence of wants is also a requisite for zero-sum. If my estate were used primarily for logging, but people also found it beautiful, I could teach my children how to manage a hostel business and increase its value without devaluing anything else.
Also, who's to say the world isn't zero-sum now? I'm certainly feeling squeezed, even with all this supposed growth and modernity.
Also indoor plumbing/showers/toilets, all the hygiene products we use everyday that cost us basically nothing, indoor lighting (everything done at night was by candlelight and candles were expensive). So much of modern life we take for granted, it all adds up to a very different quality of life experience.
Yeah. I'd rather have a deathbed that came really quickly with me remembering a good social life than one in which I'm remembering all the times I almost died but didn't.
> not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two
He just spins it as a bad thing.
He has, essentially, 3 actual graphs (GWP, extinction rate, CO2 emissions). The others are all subsets or proxies of those three or based on too few data points and fit to a curve that flatters his point.
This population explosion apocalypse is as old as time and each version of it fails to come true.
I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago.
I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..
Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment options on demand? Indoor plumbing, for God’s sake?
Other than the entertainment one, substantially less than 90% of people have access to those. Even for the entertainment part, lords and kings had plenty of options (like not woeking 12 to 16 hour days).
But moreover they (and many lower stations) had security, free time, and a lack of precarity that is unavailable to roughly 90% of the population today. This is worth far more than better circuises and ranks about as highly as things like medicine and refrigeration.
I have all sorts of great stuff, although to be fair, like many of the other commenters here I'm in the top income percentile of the most powerful country on the planet today
What about the people living horrible lives out in rural India or Africa, though? I think they fall under the 90% of people that the comment above was talking about
The Lords and Kings had plenty of entertainment. Entertainment did not begin with the invention of smartphones.
In fact I would say their entertainment was far better and more wholesome than what we have today. Imagine going on hunts in lush untouched wilderness, or watching men fight to the death in an arena, or slithering off to your harem of beautiful women and having your way with whichever ones you fancy that day.
Indeed, I would say the best lifestyle would be a combination of this and our advanced medical techniques that allow us to live longer and more comfortable lives.
And 100% of people will live much worse lives 100 years in the future, all because we're blind to see the somewhat obvious result of all this hockey stick growth...
Fitting username, when you pay the debt to the past, with debt from the future and completely ignore the present, things inevitably look great; until they don't for eternity.
> Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.
But we are moving quite fast towards using renewable resources.
For example the top 6 materials produced by the world industries are: coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, steel and fertilizers. By 2050 the first 3 will be a tiny fraction of what we are consuming today. Concrete is not made of renewable materials, it's made primarily of sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made out of limestone. All those can be considered as essentially infinite resources. Steel is one of the most recycled materials (in the US more than two thirds of all manufactured steel is recycled). Fertilizers are currently made primarily out of fossil fuels (natural gas), but that's a historical accident (fossil fuels only contain carbon and hydrogen, not nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; they are simply the feedstock for hydrogen). Once we can produce green hydrogen, we'll remove fossil fuels from the fertilizer manufacturing process.
Bonus: next most produced material is plastics. Produced from fossil fuels today, can be produced from green hydrogen and carbon captured from CO2.
Considering how cheap fossil fuels are it's a miracle that 37% of electricity generated globally is done so without using fossil fuels and there is nothing but progress on this front.
Nelson used to plant acorns because he was worried that Britain would not have enough oak trees to build ships. It turned out that we learnt how to build metal ships.
The recently added postscript is my favorite part of the article.
It comments how traffic appears exponential due to the recent HN traffic. Then says:
> I trust I need not explain how funny I think this is. I also have a fairly robust idea for how this curve will look a week from now. Just sayin’.
Traffic will drop fast and return to normal (slightly higher base) in a few days.
Every thing in this article discusses current curves. But there’s actually good reason to assume those curves will return to baseline. Particularly, ones such as “gonad tree cover”. Tree cover is increasing and will return to base as we no longer are using it as a primary energy source and are increasingly using less to build.
My point is the doom and gloom in most cases is not really warranted as it will adjust.
The author also mentions our “global civilization”, we don’t have one. I get their point, but it’s an important note that we have multiple civilizations. That means these curves are happening due to the sun of independent actions of all civilizations. There’s probably no way to change the outcome.
The destruction of the rainforest is out of the control of all civilizations beyond Brazil. China is by far the largest polluter in the world, no one can stop that.
Those hockey stick curves might be inevitable; but they probably aren’t “globally true”. I’m betting if we look at mammal populations in places like Idaho or Alaska they’ve been less impacted than say, Massachusetts.
The problem isn’t really clear from the global charts
The past was amazing. One example: Trees predated organisms that broke them down, so at some point there were just piles of trees, many tens or even a few hundreds of feet, on land, and that's why some trees are theorized to grow so tall so fast.
Just on the face of it though, you're a layperson, but you find soil, coal, peat, lots of biotic mass almost everywhere, what do you think put it there? Deep, deep soil. It's trees. You drive through California or Illinois or Texas or New York or wherever you live, and you see all these farms. Single stands of weird trees. There were forests. You can look at Google Maps and see how parts of the Amazon today, which are obviously being poached, look like the fringes of the US too.
Not only was land mass covered in forests. You know there were indigenous Americans absolutely everywhere when Europeans arrived in the Americas. Not only that, but climate change predated the arrival of settlers. There were forests completely cleared of brush, that the settlers commented you could run horses through, because indigenous Americans had been using wildfires to manage the land as game parks. There were indigenous people everywhere in Australia too.
The oceans were full of life. Just like preposterous amounts of fish before industrial fishing. Romans would routinely describe the Mediterranean as boiling. They weren't being stupid, they were describing the colossal number of fish in there. If you go diving in a genuinely protected area like the Galapagos, it's insane, there are just an incredible amount of fish. You look at a deep sea trawler, it pulls out just an insane amount of fish. It was like that everywhere.
I don't know how laypeople get this idea that Earth was always as sick as it is now. It was like 10-100x more filled with life 250 years ago. It's ridiculous. People aren't wrong about the bugs. There is a far longer and stubborn cultural heritage of documenting nature, long predating Republicans, so it couldn't be just politics that has led people astray. Maybe they're just stupider.
Near here is a state park with an interpretive natural history center. They have a photo from of a nearby intersection that always completely blows my mind.
The photo is from the very early 20th century, and the area at that time was original old growth forest. Huge trees everywhere in the photo, the road is just really a trail. It's a completely different landscape, and the only thing similar I've seen in person is maybe the redwood national park forests.
What's wild to me is the area is currently very rural. So there's forest in the area today, around that intersection. But it's still so different. The road now is so much bigger and the quality of the forest is so much different now — it just seems like succession forest by comparison.
The area was logged after the photo, which was the point of displaying it. But what's crazy is it's been 100 years and it still looks nowhere near the same.
Australian aboriginal land management probably kept the number of trees down, compared to what they would have been prior to human settlement. Dry season burns were used to clear away brush and deforest areas.
The vast majority of Australia has been inhospitable desert since before the Aboriginals showed up. Trees can only grown on a comparatively narrow stretch of temperate or tropical, mostly coastal land.
Phytoplankton are under appreciated as a carbon sink. In comparison, forests can sometimes be a carbon source!
> Phytoplankton biomass in the world's oceans amounts to only ∽1-2% of the total global plant carbon, yet these organisms fix between 30 and 50 billion metric tons of carbon annually, which is about 40% of the total
The ultimate conclusion that human population and economic activity are bad does not follow. We have only just started to begin working with efficient resource management and renewable energy sources.
Just to point out some natural counterexamples trees dropping their leaves seasonally is a fairly recent catastrophic pollution situation that nature has dealt with in ways that actually increase biomass. Large ruminant herds actually propagate productive environments which we learned when trying to quantify the damage done by their activities. So it is entirely possible that a large population of humans with high economic activity could actually interact positively with the environment. The problem is that we have barely even begun to experiment with how this might work.
The PS at the end of the article made me laugh until I realized that I read it too fast. I thought someone submitted the article to Hockey News - which would have been incredibly funny, not Hacker News.
I failed to read the full article as the warmup graph of human population is not the full story, and the conclusion is incorrect. We need to look at the full picture, and that is that we are on track to reach a stable human population of approximately 10 billion iirc. This is due to greater global education levels, and subsequent lowered birth rates. There is a fantastic book called factfulness that addresses this directly, and also calls into question the dramatic effect of graphs in isolation, and how they can ver much be S curves etc.
> Here’s a proposed rubric for deciding what things in life are “good” and what things are “bad.” If its plotted curve is a hockey stick pointing up in the present system, it’s probably a bad thing.
I would guess that the number of professors is also going up like a hockey stick and I am sure the amount of documents published on the Internet is going up like a hockey stick.
According to the author’s rubric, the world would be a better place if the author resigned and quit publishing.
After reading this facile analysis, I encourage the author to make the world a better place in this manner.
Witicism aside, im not sure your critique holds any water. Runaway growth in any context is something to pay close attention to. In fairness, the superset of examples chosen is not objective (nor could it be, practically) - plenty of datasets could be made to show aspects of life increasing or decreasing linearly, or quadratically, or with some weird quasi-sinusoidal period.
That doesn't take away from the impact the chosen data has. It's not that all life follows a hockey stick curve in time - its simply that we're in the process of beating the planet to death with a few of them.
You don't get to claim runaway growth based on graphs where the industrial age takes 10% of the X axis. You don't get to claim anything based on those, except that industries exist.
If you want to do some detailed analysis to find actual problems, you are welcome. But the article is pure sensationalism.
Some valid info here, but also some utter absurdity, and they're mixed together without distinction or comment.
For example: with a completely straight face, the author constructs an "inverted hockey stick" from two data points on wild land mammal mass and predicts the complete extinction of wild land mammals in a matter of decades.
It seems like, after plotting a few hockey sticks, the author bought into his own conceit and started hallucinating them everywhere.
Every hockey stick is the beginning of a logistic curve (if you are optimistic), or a bell curve (if you are less optimistic). Exponential growth is impossible given limited resources.
Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ...
Human population growth.
This is the input to all the other stuff. The past few generations thinks they're the most sophisticated and intelligent, but they're living on an ecological credit card. And the bill is going to come due.
Just like any bill after a spending spree, this is going to be a doozy. Probably extinction level...
We practice eugenics with almost every lifeform we have domesticated but refuse to do so with ourselves, just coz some guy with a funny mustache got it confused with muh white masterrace.
All the more reason to do the things which control population growth (like educate and reduce time burdens on women, reduce child and infant mortality, and redistribute wealth) before the eugenicists start feeling the constraints of a finite world then.
The biggest problem with our sustainability is we literally piss massive amounts of nitrogen into the ocean and replace it with the Haber-Bosch process. You had farmers in Asia farm the same land for 40 centuries all powered by "night soil" or humanure or the various other euphemism for it.
> What makes us more special than other animals? Also nothing, in my view.
If you really believe that then you should go live out in a field and eat grass like oxen rather than writing that comment on the internet. If humans aren't more special, then nothing is special at all.
I feel like feeding a troll, but peak oil happened in 2020. Says BP.
Limits of growth said it would happen between 2010 and 2030. So the answer to "whatever happened to peak oil" is "it's on track as scheduled"
Disclaimer:
We do have some economic transition in europe due to a (cold/hot) war, that may conflagrate the actual year due to spikes and valleys, though. <strikethrough>Psychohistory</strikethrough> Data science works for a large populace but does not take into account individual events.
To give a recent citation, from April of this year:
> The energy transition continues to gain steam, with oil demand projected to peak in this decade, perhaps as soon as 2025, according to new research by McKinsey & Company.
"We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally5—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics. Global bare ground cover has decreased by 1.16 million km2 (−3.1%), most notably in agricultural regions in Asia. Of all land changes, 60% are associated with direct human activities and 40% with indirect drivers such as climate change." [0]
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9