You are a very silly man. I agreed with the entire list, yet you are not happy. You are having an argument with something or someone other than me.
Nah - as in “Dont Look Up “it’s what most people don’t WANT to know that’s the real, catastrophic problem
[quote=“triplex69, post:8, topic:8770, full:true”]
Already seen it ages ago and who is the clown here ? You’re the guy in the film that says the comet would be good to depopulate the earth ! What an own goal
Obviously you have no clue about the “exponential function”.
If you want to learn something that is actually indisputably true, watch this video and you will begin to get an understanding of what the human race is facing in the next 70 years (a single lifetime).
Note that current population stands at 7,953,952,567 and is growing @ 1% p/yr.
If this does not drop, then in 70 years the population will double to
7,953,952,567 x 2 = 16,000,000,000 , an untenable number.
All other lower estimates depend on the population growth falling to below 1% .
And a lower population growth means only three things;
a) lower birth rate
b) higher death rate
c) a combination of both (a) and (b)
I know this is pretty much over, and one of the contributors had to go, but I just found this article that assesses the Club of Rome. Sorry if I’m linking too much Richard Carrier lately, but he does good research, and I like his style. He has a lot of links, so take on whatever facts you want.
Basically, he’s debunking the mindset that I grew up with, driven in part by the Club of Rome. It could be argued that fear drove environmental improvements, but, was it a good strategy to exaggerate and lie in the effort? It seems conservatives have stolen that and used it to promote things that are worse than what we had back then.
I probably wouldn’t have linked it, except for his comments on population.
And this is predicted by three things: an already-observed global decline in population growth rate ( not caused by “starvation” but simply human choice); the already negative growth rate of many first world populations ( not caused by “starvation” but simply human choice); and the matching observation that as third world populations advance toward first world conditions (and as the remaining first world nations approach the others in development), their population (as well as economic) growth rates also correspondingly decline. Which means the best way to stop population growth is to…end global poverty.
I believe this is widely known by those who have the power to make changes, but either not profitable to point it out, or if you do, you will sound like you are promoting “Western” values, or worse “Communism”, and suggesting some cultures should just fade away. Personally, I’ve always focused on hunger issues, but they connect directly to poverty.
I thank you, since he’s one of the few talking head philosophers I can take seriously.
That said and I haven’t read that, but I’m going to make a prediction that, next to nothing is said about the state of our biosphere, including river systems that humanity depend on, etc.
Nothing less than a sea change in our attitude toward Earth, and an appreciation for evolution and how it formed us, has the power to slow this rocket to self destruction we are talking about.
And so long as people try to normalize this, we’re all in big trouble.
Gotta love that Pollution curve, how’s that going to work?
I will be reading the article but first I’ll wonder out loud, if he’s going to incorporate this physical reality information.
He puts that very chart in there and notes the time line is loose, no detail. He destroys the pollution curve, saying they never give evidence for the causation.
RC: To the contrary, historically Earth has thrived with life at CO2 levels far higher than humanity will ever produce (during the Cambrian Explosion it was ten times higher than even today; human industry won’t produce even half that).
Ouch that hurts. Big Red Flag that one. Shows absolute disregard for how radically different those conditions were from today and that our society and infra-structure isn’t made to handle that kind of weather.
Nor are we doing anything to prepare for it because so many have been deluded into thinking it’s no problem.
RC: but think scaring people with lies is going to succeed at that (pro tip: that not only won’t succeed, it will also discredit your entire project
Ironically, it worked like a charm for the right wing lie factory. I wonder if he figures in that part into his equation.
RC: Civilization has been around for over six thousand years, and will likely be around for millions of years more. In that time-frame, a setback of a few hundred years is nothing.
By that comment I must wonder if Carrier has ever studied evolution, or even just the changes of the past million years - why he’s even commenting on this topic is something to wonder about. Is he a Bible and Jesus scholar? No?
RC: It actually won’t likely even rise more than two feet in two lifetimes
Also, rather delusional, for starters, sea levels will rise to different levels in different places.
From the article: Estimates of future warming and sea level rise are often made by analogy to warm periods in the geologic past. Favorites are the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum because of its fast rise rate, the Pliocene because CO2 concentration was similar to today, and the last interglacial period because the most accurate data is available on it.
Sea level at these times is believed to have been much higher than any of the projections for this century presented here. They may be good indicators of ultimate sea level rise being at least several meters over a period of centuries, but not for rise in the near future. University of Houston Energy Fellows
An overlooked detail in a story focused on distracting attention from the fundamentals and the facts that the changes being observer are way the heck more rapid than scientists predicted
This article by Carrier seems like an exercise in looking in the rear view mirror - in the hand folks like University of Houston Energy Fellows, it’s no wonder he was taken for his own ride. In a way he’s playing just as disingenuous and disconnected from Earth’s physical realities as the “MIT Study” he taking to task. (Skimming this article has really dented my high estimation of Carrier - wish he’d stick to religion.)
I don’t get the contribution this article is supposed to be making.
Picking on the faults of the Club of Rome is easy, recognizing the truth of the overall humanity’s predicament here on Earth, was something that deserves being take seriously that this sad rehash of old talking points.
It’s so easy to point to past trends, but the ignored fact is that we have entered a new era of extreme infrastructure destroying, regional ecology altering, weather events the likes of which we can’t imagine. But the numbers speak for themself.
Carriers article is one of those things that like being stuck in a runaway truck, and arguing about whether your going over the edge at 40 or 70 mph. Rather than advocating to hit the f’n brakes and get this thing under control, although that runaway has pretty well passed us by. We caught in the rush of momentum.
If we were all grown up, who loved honest debates and learning from the evidence at hand with all sides committed to honestly portraying their evidence and the evidence of their opponents. Then we could do incredible things and probably survive incredible changes.
But only with the whole team working on the same side, today all we have is back stabbers.
The monster in the room, one Carrier ignores, is how much corporate energy is dedicated to backstabbing any and all efforts at nurturing Earth and preparing for what’s coming our way. Profits and power always takes a back seat to sober education, and in this piece, Carrier is simply carrying on the tradition of hyperbole that does more to confuse than clarify, no matter which side it comes from. I’m very disappointed.
Thought you might not like that one.
It’s unclear what his idea of “collapse” is. He states a few times that “it will really suck” and “we should do something about it”, but then goes back to debunking the report, which is almost a straw man, except a lot of people believe it and use it or similar arguments.
Not defending him, but I frame it something like this; To people who own yachts and eat steak every day, the system will collapse, and they know it. They just want it last their lifetime. The people living on a few dollars day are living like it was before this system and will still be poor after it, but their lifestyle won’t collapse, just the system around them. The people that will experience collapse are the ones in the middle, they depend on the infrastructure, but have little say in how it’s built.
That’s why I focused on the “ending poverty” paragraph. The yachts and clubs part needs to be collapsed to end poverty. To do that, a lot of voluntary sacrifice is needed, to quit participating in whatever holds up the top end. Doing so would mean fewer middle educated people, so, fewer nurses, fewer engineers, fewer educators, fewer caretakers. It would be a downward spiral, but result in a less bad landing than letting the top burn itself out.
More likely, we’ll keep going like we are, maintaining just enough middle class to build the yachts and letting the lower class keep fighting over the scraps, growing and shrinking depending on where the floods and fires happen as well as successive technology successes and failures. It’s worse than collapse in my opinion. And it’s not some frightening dystopian future, it’s now. But it’s where rhetoric of fear meets sorting out policy, and you lose a lot of people at that point.
I’m infused with climate science awareness and watching the changes on this planet this past half century, plus.
Sadly it still seems that to most people our society sustaining global heat and distribution engine is an irrelevant aside that they simply can’t relate to.
So we keep talking about human systems as if something monstrously, hugely significant isn’t creeping up on us as it’s altering this planet’s hospitality for ever, and it’s a nasty something that’s going to batter us worse and worse, avoiding recognizing the profound physical reality of it.
How can we adapt, when we don’t even recognize and confront.
Here’s another one, in NYT today. I’m not sure if this will be a paywall for you or not. This guy says,
The point is that we are being greedy, we are wasting yet improving our efficiencies at the same time. This is where I become unpalatable to the media because I do not have one message like “everything is getting better.”
He talks about how what we are asking for a shift in thinking, to where we know that we do today won’t make any difference until 2070. That might exist in some indigenous cultures, but it’s not what built the world we live in now. I don’t think that shift can be made by repetitious points about a crisis.
I share your view.
Some believe that we CAN have a world that can uplift ALL people to our form of lifestyle which tends to make people voluntarily have less children. The delusion for this view is that it is not even possible. War is the more attractive means to ‘cull’ the overpopulation given it is more economically profitable by the conservative capitalist; Pandemics are nature’s way of doing this. Either way, all animals (or living things in general) evolve to take advantage of procreation without concern for the whole and will always tend towards overpopulation without being stopped by other competing living things or by artificially creating some organized rational means to prevent it from occurring.
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I skimmed the entire thing and noticed not an f’n word about the mega million dollar campaign of deliberate deception and stupidification that’s been played on the American people.
I’m told that historically it hasn’t works out that way.
Hey, there’s something we agree on. 
Sad thing is we were supposed to be these wise humans with these fantastical brains that could figure out everything - expect for greed, and confronting the deliberate fraud & deception that’s be foisted upon the work of climate science!
Now that Prof. Emeritus Albert Bartlett is dead, there is no one left to teach the world about the “exponential function” in a limited environment.
Albert Allen Bartlett (March 21, 1923 – September 7, 2013)[[2]]
(Albert Allen Bartlett - Wikipedia) was an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. As of July 2001 Professor Bartlett had lectured over 1,742 times since September, 1969 on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy .[3][4] Bartlett regarded the word combination “sustainable growth” as an oxymoron, since even modest annual percentage population increases can represent exponential growth. Over time, huge changes will then occur.
He therefore regarded [human overpopulation] Human overpopulation - Wikipedia) as “The Greatest Challenge” facing humanity.
I was just looking for some more links to further information and came across a VOX article poop the idea that there’s a problem and of course they start out with such a causal misstatement that they probably haven’t even notice their blindspot.
VOX - We’ve worried about overpopulation for centuries. And … -
Aug 20, 2019 — All around the world , birthrates are declining rapidly. Global population growth has been slowing since the 1960s, and global population…
It’s the freak’n RATE of growth that slowed slightly.
First billion took about 200,000 years to reach.
2nd billion 1927-1804= 123
3rd billion 1960-1927= 33
4th billion 1974-1960= 14
5th billion 1987-1974= 13
6th billion 1999-1987= 12
7th billion 2011-1999= 12This adds up to a quarter of the world’s population rise since 2000.
Then the poop started hitting the fan.
Plenty of other blindspots on display in that article. Sure if one gets to cherry pick and focus on how wonderful life is for the Haves and totally ignore the HaveNots, or our biosphere, that is required for supporting all these gluttonous humans, it’s a beautiful rosy picture, the next stop, Mars. 
Back in from the world our daydreams and mindscapes, here’s the rest of the story, which will surely catch up to all of us:
Human population growth impacts the Earth system in a variety of ways, including:
- Increasing the extraction of resources from the environment. These resources include fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal), minerals, trees , water , and wildlife , especially in the oceans. The process of removing resources, in turn, often releases pollutants and waste that reduce air and water quality , and harm the health of humans and other species.
- Increasing the burning of fossil fuels for energy to generate electricity, and to power transportation (for example, cars and planes) and industrial processes.
- Increase in freshwater use for drinking, agriculture , recreation, and industrial processes. Freshwater is extracted from lakes, rivers, the ground, and man-made reservoirs.
- Increasing ecological impacts on environments. Forests and other habitats are disturbed or destroyed to construct urban areas including the construction of homes, businesses, and roads to accommodate growing populations. Additionally, as populations increase, more land is used for agricultural activities to grow crops and support livestock. This, in turn, can decrease species populations, geographic ranges, biodiversity, and alter interactions among organisms.
- Increasing fishing and hunting , which reduces species populations of the exploited species. Fishing and hunting can also indirectly increase numbers of species that are not fished or hunted if more resources become available for the species that remain in the ecosystem.
- Increasing the transport of invasive species , either intentionally or by accident, as people travel and import and export supplies. Urbanization also creates disturbed environments where invasive species often thrive and outcompete native species. For example, many invasive plant species thrive along strips of land next to roads and highways.
- The transmission of diseases . Humans living in densely populated areas can rapidly spread diseases within and among populations. Additionally, because transportation has become easier and more frequent, diseases can spread quickly to new regions.
Can you think of additional cause and effect relationships between human population growth and other parts of the Earth system?
WHY POPULATION MATTERS
“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.”
– Sir David Attenborough, Population Matters patron
Human population has grown beyond Earth’s sustainable means. We are consuming more resources than our planet can regenerate, with devastating consequences.
It took humanity 200,000 years to reach one billion and only 200 years to reach seven billion. We are still adding an extra 80 million each year and are headed towards 10 billion by mid-century.
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That is the exponential function at work. Few people actually know what that means .
The formula is very simple.
A steady growth of 1% p/yr results in a doubling time every 70 years
A steady growth of 2 % p/yr results in a doubling time every 35 years
(2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, … etc)
And so forth:
5% = doubling time 14 yrs
7% = doubling time 10 yrs
The Fibonacci Sequence is a form of exponential increase.
Here we go again. Trapped within our mindscape. Exponential function is math and it is very real - but we have long known that exponential function doesn’t actually work within the confines of a living material planet Earth and her processes. So it’s not the answer to everything.
Not seeing the forest for the trees, or is it not seeing the trees for the forest. Either way, you’re missing a lot of what’s actually happening within our middle domain, of a dynamic Earth that created this biosphere and its creatures and evolution.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:79, topic:8770”]
Here we go again. Trapped within our mindscape. Exponential function is math and it is very real - but we have long known that exponential function doesn’t actually work within the confines of a living material planet Earth and her processes. So it’s not the answer to everything.
Yes it does, especially within the confines of a limited space. It is the unalterable fact that @ 1% steady growth anything will double in 70 years
and @ 7% growth it will double every 10 years.
It is the growth factor that is variable, never the math.
Not seeing the forest for the trees, or is it not seeing the trees for the forest. Either way, you’re missing a lot of what’s actually happening within our middle domain, of a dynamic Earth that created this biosphere and its creatures and evolution.
In the middle domain is where the growth factor usually changes.
@2000 the remaining oil supply was estimated to be 40 years at that “current use”
@2020 the remaining oil supply was estimated to be 40 years because the use had dropped and cars were more fuel-efficient. IOW, the doubling time was extended by more efficient use of the remaining oil supply.
Just for illustrative purposes:
When all cars are electric, remaining oil will not have an exhaust date because no one will be using it anymore .
Not seeing the lemmings running over a cliff
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Sometime you leave me astounded.
It is the unalterable fact that @ 1% steady growth anything will double in 70 years
and @ 7% growth it will double every 10 years.
That’s a mathematical fact. That is not a physical reality fact here on Earth!
Because that mathematical growth rate depends on the environment the organism exists within, and the ability of that environment to provide the nutrients and space for unfettered growth.
Talk about a glaring example of this confinement within our minds and our disconnect from Earth’s natural rules, that I’m constantly crying about.