Study predicts imminent irreversible planetary collapse

[Atheist-Lite]

The artwork on the coins deterioted, glassworking too went into decline. I guess using emotionally loaded words like collapse is bound to polarise debate but there was the loss of complex trade law and debasement of terms like 'love' replaced six or seven subtler alternatives...basically the civilization collapsed and there wasn't much left by the time Rome was 'rediscovered' by the French a couple of hundred years ago. What was built on the ruins was a different beast altogether, more humane and better capable of harbouring a large population...it may happen again, some progressive return in centuries to come, but for climate change? that's the thing...makes a big difference, forces in play now are not going away.

[Seth]

That may be correct, Tyrannical, but this thread is about a planetary collapse, which is quite a different thing.

Well, there may be no such thing as planetary collapse because a series of localized events merely gets mistaken for one of planetary scale.

There is no such thing as "planetary collapse" except perhaps in the event the sun goes nova and destroys it utterly. There is only planetary CHANGE, and that's been going on for some billions of years and will continue to go on for the foreseeable future.

That planetary changes may make it uncomfortable or unsurvivable for human beings, or indeed any other living organism is of absolutely no importance whatsoever in the long view because we have absolutely no reason to expect things not to change for the worse for the human species, and many reasons to expect precisely that to happen, since that's what history demonstrates.

Now, if the study had predicted imminent irreversible collapse in human population I'd have some respect for the authors, and for the arguments, but maundering on about "planetary collapse" is just so much anthropocentric, egoistic eco-propaganda.

[Atheist-Lite]

That may be correct, Tyrannical, but this thread is about a planetary collapse, which is quite a different thing.

Well, there may be no such thing as planetary collapse because a series of localized events merely gets mistaken for one of planetary scale.

There is no such thing as "planetary collapse" except perhaps in the event the sun goes nova and destroys it utterly. There is only planetary CHANGE, and that's been going on for some billions of years and will continue to go on for the foreseeable future.

That planetary changes may make it uncomfortable or unsurvivable for human beings, or indeed any other living organism is of absolutely no importance whatsoever in the long view because we have absolutely no reason to expect things not to change for the worse for the human species, and many reasons to expect precisely that to happen, since that's what history demonstrates.

Now, if the study had predicted imminent irreversible collapse in human population I'd have some respect for the authors, and for the arguments, but maundering on about "planetary collapse" is just so much anthropocentric, egoistic eco-propaganda.

It is all a matter of perspective. We are all dead in the long run. What comes after is undeterminable. Albeit it is going to be bleak on the balance of the probabilities, or some such in the weighing of things to come and happening outside our lifetimes....very bleak you might say is the primary state of the human condition as it looks into deep time moving forward.

[Blind groper]

we have absolutely no reason to expect things not to change for the worse for the human species, and many reasons to expect precisely that to happen, since that's what history demonstrates.

Quite the reverse.

History shows a steady and continuing improvement in welfare for humans everywhere. We can get a rough quantitative measure of this by means of average longevity. Anything that improves human welfare tends to increase life span. Anything that reduces human welfare tends to reduce life span. Over the past several hundred years, there has been a steady growth in average longevity, even in third world countries. In the USA, couple hundred years back, average life span was less than 30 years. Today, in Afghanistan, which is just about the worst in the world, it is approaching 50. The current world average is 67.2 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Human violence is falling, and has been for a long, long time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk

Global health is rising. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_ ... _seen.html

So I utterly refute Seth's argument. My claim is that history shows a steady progress and improvement of the human condition. There is no reason to assume this will be different in the future.

[Rum]

To add to an opposing view, or at least a reasonably optimistic view in comparison to the shudderingly negative ones that too often appear here from certain members there is an idea out there called 'peak stuff' which basically postulates that the developed world is radically slowing down its consumption. It isn't cloud cuckoo but it sees a way forward.

Here's a link:http://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/03/peak-stuff/

[Blind groper]

There is a form of selective blindness that is rampant in environmental discussions. That is : to ignore the gains and exaggerate the problems. The worst pollution the world has known was all 100 years ago. Back then, no laws prevented discharge of wastes where the generator wanted to discharge them. Rivers ran black with pollution, and empty of fish. The air was thick with coal smoke. London smogs were legendary.

Then came regulations under various clean air and clean water acts. We now have rivers that are much, much cleaner. Air that is fit to breathe. Sure, problems till exist and we have a way to go, but we have been steadily making gains. Like the ban on leaded fuel for cars. Like coal burning plants having precipitators and scrubbers fitted to their smoke stacks. Like bans on tributyl tin compounds in anti-fouling paint. Like many other bans on chemicals found to be harmful. Every decade or two, another development happens that reduces pollution further.

What will happen in the next few decades? We will have electric cars as widespread means of transport. The remaining internal combustion engines will be much more efficient and reliable, with much reduced emissions. Large numbers of governments already have emissions level legislation on the books which will require cars of the future to produces massively reduced emissions. More such legislation can be expected.

The nay sayers and pessimists tend to ignore such inconvenient facts, which run counter to their views of impending catastrophe.

[macdoc]

The worst pollution the world has known was all 100 years ago.

how about adding "some of" to that rather blanket statement.

The gains in water quality and air quality are indeed admirable and no question there are improvements coming.

But all those gains are offset by continually accelerating injection of fossil carbon into the atmosphere.

Not one of your tech solutions will change that reality in time to prevent at the very least a 4 degree C rise.

While rivers and air clarity can indeed be restored and in Europe, North America and Japan have been....there is no feasible method to remove carbon. Just stopping does not "restore" the atmosphere the way a river can be flushed or S02 or carbon black falls out of the atmosphere in a couple or few years.

C02 in the atmosphere accumulates and stays there -
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812 ... 8.122.html
the impact is out as long as 100,000 years tho the bulk of it is picked up with a mere 3,000 years or so. So the warming will continue whether we are adding to it or not until the planet reaches a new equilibrium ( energy balance ).

Our only tech solution ( aside from the non-starter of injected S02 ) is to shift the albedo of the planet so that less radiation reaches the ground to be reflected as longwave which is reflected by GHG gases and creates the warmth which is stored both in air and ocean and indirectly in ice ( by latent heat of melting )

But that is only one aspect of a biota collapse both from mining species and destroying habitat.
In the ocean acidification is already here
A good resource on acidification here
http://bcsga.ca/ocean-acidification/
and like the atmosphere this will not cease when we do. It will continue to rise over time until a new balance with the atmosphere is reached.

Species can adapt to new conditions but not in the time span industrial changes are compressed into. It's the additive nature of the stress on populations from human activities as well as the atmospheric and ocean changes.

When one keystone species falls out it impacts others.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 161947.htm

You focus on the atmosphere and fresh water when the ocean is critically endangered and a major food source.

We've seen collapse after collapse in species due to over exploitation of a resource. This is just one of hundreds of articles that profile the problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/scien ... wanted=all

While I agree there are very positive changes in some aspects - they are limited and do not address the fundamentals of which there are a couple we are facing.

Irreversible changes in the atmosphere and ocean.

Unsustainable exploitation of biota resources ( mining species instead of allowing sustainable harvesting )

We have a witching hour arriving in the next 30 years as population peaks and demand by growing economies for resources peak.

Energy concerns have been somewhat relieved by shale gas and at least it is preferable over coal as far as AGW goes.
The down side of that is it still does not address sustainability as all fossil fuels are finite. But that's a far horizon hurdle.

Biota collapse and food and water supply exhaustion are near term and really with us right now as extreme weather and shifting climate bands due to climate change exacerbates the problem of feeding and supplying 50% more people with resources over the next 3 decades.

Resting on the limited laurels of cleaner air and water in some first world nations can lead to complacency over the much more difficult fundamental issues of over population, unsustainable use of resources both mineral and biota and climate change.
The thin edges are here now particularly with water
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... avey-warns

Some places inundated as expected and others facing epic drought - also as expected. This is now not at some future point and mining of fossil water reserves is lifting sea level more than melting glaciers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... sea-levels

So saying the worst pollution was 100 years ago has some small truth - but 100 years ago the population was circa 1 billion and most of the planet in subsistence agriculture.

Now the majority of the population is in cities
http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm

and there will be 6 to 8 times more people and those people consuming resources at perhaps 10 times the rate per capita 100 years ago.

This is a good overview of the problem

http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3 ... ustainable

we need three planets.....we only have one

[Seth]

we have absolutely no reason to expect things not to change for the worse for the human species, and many reasons to expect precisely that to happen, since that's what history demonstrates.

Quite the reverse.

History shows a steady and continuing improvement in welfare for humans everywhere. We can get a rough quantitative measure of this by means of average longevity. Anything that improves human welfare tends to increase life span. Anything that reduces human welfare tends to reduce life span. Over the past several hundred years, there has been a steady growth in average longevity, even in third world countries. In the USA, couple hundred years back, average life span was less than 30 years. Today, in Afghanistan, which is just about the worst in the world, it is approaching 50. The current world average is 67.2 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Human violence is falling, and has been for a long, long time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk

Global health is rising. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_ ... _seen.html

So I utterly refute Seth's argument. My claim is that history shows a steady progress and improvement of the human condition. There is no reason to assume this will be different in the future.

Nonsense. Humans are very adaptable, but not infinitely so, nor is life expectancy any measure of survivability in the event of catastrophic irreversible climate change that makes the planet hostile to human life. For the vast majority of time that this planet has been around, the environment has been extremely hostile to human life. Only in the last 150 million years have conditions been amenable to human evolution, which is an eye-blink in time. Moreover, humans have faced extinction several times from global climate change, and there's no reason to think that another glacial cycle will be any more forgiving than the last ones, and might be much more harsh. It may be that "anthropgenic global warming" is what saves the planet from yet another glacial cycle, thus sparing humans mass destruction and perhaps oblivion.

[macdoc]

Snort.....
The next ice age has already been cancelled
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles ... ge-delayed

and no ice age is a threat compared to the Permian which we are currently mimicking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/scien ... wanted=all

Last time I checked the implicit issue is the collapse of industrial civilization due to environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The planet will roll on in a different state....that already is a reality
http://eideard.com/2011/01/15/best-case ... year-3000/
- no going back home to Kansas Toto.

[Seth]

Not one of your tech solutions will change that reality in time to prevent at the very least a 4 degree C rise.

Meh. Speculation.

Our only tech solution ( aside from the non-starter of injected S02 ) is to shift the albedo of the planet so that less radiation reaches the ground to be reflected as longwave which is reflected by GHG gases and creates the warmth which is stored both in air and ocean and indirectly in ice ( by latent heat of melting )

Fucking around with planetary albedo is a highly dangerous thing to do because even a slight shift in the OTHER direction, global temperature-wise, results in global glaciation and mass die-offs. I'd prefer to adapt to wearing Bermuda shorts and drinking fruity alcholic drinks with little parasols on them than freeze to death in the dark.

Humans can easily tolerate a 4C temperature rise. They cannot tolerate a 100C temperature drop, so no fucking about with planetary albedo, okay?

But that is only one aspect of a biota collapse both from mining species and destroying habitat.
In the ocean acidification is already here

Meh. Time to start dumping iron ore in the oceans.

When one keystone species falls out it impacts others.

Meh. There's no evidence of "keystone species" extinction that results in anything other than a new ecological balance.

We've seen collapse after collapse in species due to over exploitation of a resource. This is just one of hundreds of articles that profile the problem.

Meh. If we want fish from the sea, we can farm them in the sea, just like we're doing with salmon.

Biota collapse and food and water supply exhaustion are near term and really with us right now as extreme weather and shifting climate bands due to climate change exacerbates the problem of feeding and supplying 50% more people with resources over the next 3 decades.

Meh. Monoculture agriculture works as well with food animals as it does vegetables. We don't need all those wild critters running around eating up our resources. If we need food, we'll grow cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs. Everything else is just in the way of human need and can be sacrificed to feed the masses.

Seventy percent of the earth's surface is covered with water, and with adequate technology desalinating it for human use is not difficult. Besides, there's lots of water in Canada that they aren't using, we just need to take it from them and pipe it down south.

Some places inundated as expected and others facing epic drought - also as expected.

Meh. Don't live or build in floodplains, or build dikes and polders to control rivers. Child's play that humans have been doing for more than a hundred years now.

This is now not at some future point and mining of fossil water reserves is lifting sea level more than melting glaciers.

Sounds like horseshit to me, but if so, then move away from the rising tide. After all, you've got centuries to do so.

So saying the worst pollution was 100 years ago has some small truth - but 100 years ago the population was circa 1 billion and most of the planet in subsistence agriculture.

Now the majority of the population is in cities

That's great! Centralization of populations provides vast economies of scale and efficiencies in serving their needs for shelter, food and water.

and there will be 6 to 8 times more people and those people consuming resources at perhaps 10 times the rate per capita 100 years ago.

Evidently you've never been to Montana, or Wyoming, or Nevada or any of the other vast, unpopulated regions of the planet that humans can live in.

we need three planets.....we only have one

And we've got centuries to solve the problem of moving humanity onto other planets. No hurry at all.

[macdoc]

you got one thing correct and I'll repeat it since it's useful copy and paste regarding your post contents and it's implicit denial of reality

"sounds like horseshit" ...indeed...nothing new there.....unsupported horsepucky aka wishful thinking

[Hermit]

All the predictions continue to have the one thing in common. History proves them all to be wrong.

The thing everyone forgets is human ingenuity and human progress.

We had much the same discussion in this thread, and you are arguing the same point you were making there, and making the same mistake. In this case it's "because human ingenuity has always averted cataclysmic outcomes in the past, it will always continue to succeed in doing so in the future." It's a classic example of what Bertrand Russell illustrated with his inductivist turkey. For all I know, human ingenuity will continue to save the day - at least for part of the unforeseeable future - but there is no guarantee that it will.

Today, the same old predictions of disaster get made, using the same tired old logic.

Where's the logic in your argument?

[Blind groper]

macdoc

On a 4 Deg rise in temperature. That is pure opinion. We simply do not know how much warmer the planet will get.

On global engineering?
I am not fond of such ideas, since massive interventions can lead to massive harm. The only idea I ever liked for that was the silvered balloon idea. A large number of giant balloons in orbit, with silvered surfaces to reflect heat away from the planet. The good thing about this idea is that each balloon can have a mini bomb attached with a radio code to activate it. If the proverbial hits the fan, the balloons could then be taken out of the equation very quickly.

The world will warm up. The impact on humans is that some adaptation will be required. Depending on how much warming there is, will determine the adaptation needed. We might find that sea dykes will need to be erected around the world's coastal cities.

The best amelioration of global warming will come from technologies to remove the need for excessive CO2 and methane emissions. Many of these are already in use, and many more are under development. I predict that the real impact of such measures will take another 40 years to hit, and another 50 years after that before the world stops warming further.

Global warming is a problem, but not one that is unsolvable.

[macdoc]

On a 4 Deg rise in temperature. That is pure opinion. We simply do not know how much warmer the planet will get

That is far from speculation - it's quite straight forward to calculate warming based on C02 emission levels.
These guys know a fair bit more about it than you or I.

what we don't have is any clear indication of any particularly robust effort to control emissions and if we don't here is the range of outcomes.



http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/clim ... -1002.html

With a robust policy - and this is confirmed by other studies attempting to limit the rise to 2 degrees or less.... the risk range is less.


Insurance companies are pretty hard headed and they understand risk ......they are pricing for it.

Unless you deny fossil C02 as a driver ( an impossible position currently )- then there is a clear trend to go by....



what IS pure speculation is that we will limit C02 emissions any time soon - after all it was up 5% last year alone
.....what possible evidence do you have that says things will change ......you are the one that is speculating..

[Blind groper]

macdoc

Nice pretty graphs, but nothing new in them.

We still do not know how much the world will warm up. Estimates vary enormously.

Nor have I ever denied global warming is a problem. It is a serious problem, and one that deserves strong attention. However, I doubt it is the problem that will cause a planetary collapse. Warming is something we can adapt to, and greenhouse emissions are something we can control, even though it will not be easy. Such management of this problem will not happen overnight. It will take many decades. But it is doable, and I am sure it will be done.

What evidence do I have that human emissions will reduce? Recent history - the last 20 odd years. The first small steps have been taken. The first new technologies to manage climate change and its consequences have been introduced. New, and better technologies are being developed as I write this. Even though there are plenty of nutters who deny that climate change is a problem, there are enough powerful and educated others who appreciate its reality and are already working on the first changes to human technology and human behaviours to manage the problem.

You will be aware of the Chinese proverb about the longest journey beginning with the first step. Well, that step, and many subsequent ones have been taken. Progress so far is minimal, but measurable. From here, developments will accelerate.