Sixth mass extinction: The era of ‘biological annihilation’ | Hacker News Reader

Sixth mass extinction: The era of ‘biological annihilation’

dlgnaturals.com

106 pointsdlgnaturals56 comments

Isn't Paul Erlich the guy who, in 1968, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to overpopulation?

Yes. Turns out the "population bomb" didn't occur as he had predicted. I don't think that rules out the possibility of the effect human populations are having on our ecological resources.

The current global demand for beef has led to massive deforestation of the Amazonian rainforest in order to plant soy crops... just to feed cows.

We might be able to sustain our population at the current size but I doubt our consumptive habits will be maintainable.

> I doubt our consumptive habits will be maintainable.

Found the commie-pinko bleeding-heart liberal! Economic theory says that nothing bad can ever happen so long as demand increases, and the economy grows! /s

Does your comment add anything productive to the discussion?

Exponential economist meets finite physicist is a fun read.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

It's not a mystery why economics is treated with such disdain, when economists are portrayed as bumbling idiots unable to comprehend anything outside of the narrow mindset of perpetual growth and deregulation.

It's a fun read (of a hopefully fictional story), but I would seriously doubt the qualifications of any such "economist" had they replied in the same manner in real life.

It should, however, be noted that Economics is a fairly young science, so people trained in the 20th century maybe be stuck in their obsolete growth mindsets forever. Unfortunately there seems to be little hope to change their minds, so we should all do our best to ignore them, since their views no longer represent reality when you consider the newest data.

I doubt the economist agreed with this - or maybe there'd been a little too much alcohol consumed:

"then GDP continues to grow while energy remains at a fixed scale. This means that energy—a physically-constrained resource, mind—must become arbitrarily cheap as GDP continues to grow and leave energy in the dust.

Economist: Yes, I think energy plays a diminishing role in the economy and becomes too cheap to worry about."

This inaccurately conflates two concepts - decoupling economic growth from energy (we see this in computing, as you carry an 80s supercomputer in your pocket) and the cost of fixed resources in a growing economy.

A necessary, fixed resource increases in cost as GDP increases. That is, if there are only 100 works by van Gogh, and the available cash goes for $100 to $100,000,000, people will be willing to pay more $ for the fixed set of van Gogh works.

The cost of the fixed resource depends on the economic efficiency of that resource, and may go up or down as a percentage of GDP. Limits to energy efficiency hypothesized in the article would suggest that energy costs would go UP as a percentage of GDP (and inescapable energy demands would thus form the limit of economic growth).

Malthusianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

Close. He said that 4 billion people would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, including 65 million Americans.

Other Ehrlich scenarios (he gets prickly nowadays if you call them "predictions", as well he might):

"Smog disasters" in New York and Los Angeles, claiming of the order of 200,000 lives.

U.S. life expectancy falling to 42 years by 1980.

All "important animal life" (whatever that means) in the oceans being extinct by 1980.

Why anyone still pays attention to this chucklehead is a mystery to me.

He also "predicted" that a basket of five common commodities would become more scarce in the face of increased demand contrary to classical economic theory[1]. He was thoroughly defeated.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

> "Smog disasters" in New York and Los Angeles, claiming of the order of 200,000 lives.

And in fact air pollution kills about 7 million people per year.

Almost entirely in developing nations from indoor cooking smoke. Dirty coal plants and electric ovens (or better, gas ovens and natgas fraking) would vastly improve the average air quality for these people.

On the "other scenarios", he made these projections before the EPA came into existence in 1970. Regulation DRAMATICALLY dropped levels of pollution, very rapidly.

https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning...

He can be counted on for reliably projecting the worst case scenario if nothing changes. If something changes he pats himself on the back for saving the world by sounding the alarm and does it again.

This doesn't mean that he should be entirely ignored as an idiot. But it does mean that his projections should be doubted.

His projections should be understood in the same way that you understand the mental exercise of projecting the current exponential population growth a few centuries in the future and wind up with a sphere of writhing humanity expanding into the universe at the speed of light.

(If human beings achieve relativistic spaceflight and start colonizing the universe, would more advanced beings see this as a sphere of writhing humanity expanding into the universe at (some fraction of) the speed of light, then come and squash us as a pestilence?)

"On the "other scenarios", he made these projections before the EPA came into existence in 1970."

The EPA is a U.S. government agency. It had (and has) no authority in the Third World countries that were the subject of Ehrlich's most extreme "scenarios".

What I gather is that he came out just around the time global population growth changed from ~exponential to ~linear.

This was a big topic on many minds back in the late-60s to late-70s, because if growth would have continued exponentially, we'd all be very much more screwed today. What else falls in the time window, popular attention to "The Limits to Growth", "Peak Oil", and introduction of China's one-child policy.

As often, historical context I think aids perspective =)

To add, the winner of the Hugo award that year was Stand on Zanzibar [1], although Brunner successfully guessed the population growth rate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar

This was a big topic on many minds back in the late-60s to late-70s, because if growth would have continued exponentially, we'd all be very much more screwed today.

Pretty much the same kind of mistake Malthus made. Exponential growth will eventually change the conditions that enabled the exponential growth. One of these changes in a human societal context will be the formation of an opportunity for people to get rich by solving the problem. Malthus didn't take this into account.

IIRC Al Gore was predicting as recently as in early aughts that ice caps would be gone by now and we'll all be underwater. And look at him, still the authority on global warming, private jetting all over the world from his 5000sqft mansion.

Close.

He predicted ice-free arctic summers by 2014. We are not quite there yet -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#/media/...

He did not predict that ice caps would be gone by now.

Things would've been far worse, had the green revolution not happened, and if we didn't have things like the Clean Air Act.

With all the current attempted and actual dismantling of the factors you mention, perhaps his predictions just need to be time shifted a few decades. Obviously, I hope not.

So I went to look at the EPA's global greenhouse emissions data. I couldn't readily determine when the passage of any major environmental regulation occurred just by looking at the chart. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

It turns out the Clean Air Act was passed in 1955. Not even a blip on the radar. Then in the 60s they amended it significantly to apply to motor vehicles. Not even a blip on the radar.

Basically, the Clean Air Act doesn't seem to have done one iota of good with regards to total global greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore nothing for Global Warming. Mostly it has helped move dirty jobs overseas.

I don't know why you're focused on greenhouse gas emissions with regards to the Clean Air Act. So far as I'm aware, the Clean Air Act didn't attempt to address greenhouse gasses.

Does social/political smog not count?

"All "important animal life" (whatever that means) in the oceans being extinct by 1980."

The 'all' was an exaggeration, but if herring fishing in the North Sea wasn't completely stopped from 1977 to 1983, herring likely would have become extinct there, fishermen would have moved to other species, and things likely would have ended disastrously.

Also, to this day, the EU limits the amount of fish caught in its waters because, unregulated, the North Sea would have long been effectively empty of cod, herring, etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy)

That didn't happen because the green revolution increased agricultural productivity faster than population. That process was just getting started in 1968, and Erlich acknowledged the possibility.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-01/why-paul-...

It's difficult to imagine a similar possibility for wild populations, short of humans using much less land area.

Early editions of The Population Bomb began with the statement:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate

Even if he completely missed the possibility of dramatically increased food production, it's irrelevant to my point, which is that there's no realistic way for him to be wrong in the same way about this new claim.

I guess you could argue that because he's demonstrated that he can't perfectly predict the future, we shouldn't pay attention to anything he says, but in that case we shouldn't pay attention to anyone.

I'd say that, because he has demonstrated a willingness to exaggerate predictions and maintain them in spite of evidence to the contrary and even direct falsification, I consider his predictions to have no predictive power. The informational content is incidental, the analysis is suspect.

Yes, and in 1970 he predicted that in "ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich#Reception

Most of the comments here are talking about previous predictions that failed to come true.

the current species extinction rate is estimated to be orders of magnitude higher than the baseline rate. I.e. this is not a prediction of the future, this is an estimate of what has been happening in recent history, based on observations of reality.

But it's biased toward large animals we can see, especially charismatic animals. We don't see a collapse of the network of life that is a characteristic of the mass extinctions in the paleo record.

“People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument,” he said. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action, when in fact, if it’s actually true we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology.” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...

Since the server is down, here's the NYTimes story about this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/climate/mass-extinction-a...

Here is the the original paper that caused the article on CNN that caused thid blog post: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114.full

Abstract: The population extinction pulse we describe here shows, from a quantitative viewpoint, that Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions. Therefore, humanity needs to address anthropogenic population extirpation and decimation immediately. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction (indicative of population shrinkage and/or population extinctions according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature) using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species. We find that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is extremely high—even in “species of low concern.” In our sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851/27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which we have detailed data, all have lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species have experienced severe population declines (>80% range shrinkage). Our data indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.

Right now I can see how the website has died out.

I've read just somewhere that if we're in the middle of max extinction, we should be worrying about coyotes and pigeons, not about elephants and tigers.

If we're not we're probably not there yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Species extinction is 100 to 1000x the baseline rates due to humanity.

Medium-large animal extinctions are well-documented, primarily because of predation and introduction of invasive species. This is largely complete, as cats and rats and people are pretty much everywhere now.

The vast majority of the 100-1000x baseline extinctions are hypothesized: we estimate that richly biodiverse areas hold N unknown species per area M. We have destroyed M' area, therefore estimate N' species are now extinct.

I have been able to find no actual evidence of such extinctions.

The mass extinctions in the Paleo record are driven by more significant disruptions of the base ecology - bees are probably the most vulnerable foundation species talked about now.

“There is only one overall solution, and that is to reduce the scale of the human enterprise,” he said. “Population growth and increasing consumption among the rich is driving it.”

It's conceivable we can reduce the global impact of humanity while keeping human population stable. We could consolidate people into higher density settlements, and if we master energy production with much more manageable externalities, perhaps we can make agriculture much less land intensive, with things like vertical farming.

As resource hungry as wealthy humans are, at the very least, we appear to naturally form populations that don't grow. So that gives me some hope for the future.

I remember reading a statistic that if all people in the US lived at the population density of Manhattan, then the entire US population would fit within the state of Rhode Island. Think about what kind of impact that would have on reducing the impact on the rest of the continental US.

Edit: Calculating that out:

    321,400,000 people (pop. of the US)
  ÷      66,940 people per mi² (pop. density of Manhattan)
  -------------
         ~4,801.31 mi²

The area of Rhode Island is 1,212 mi². Looks like it might be more accurate to say Connecticut (5,543 mi²)

I would much prefer to live in a low-tech low-density rural society than live in a Rhode Island-sized Manhattan.

Probably somewhere in between those extremes is more prudent.

But even without agriculture, things like highways can be really disruptive.

In terms of area of impact, farms impact far more land than cities and suburbs do. The farms would all still be there.

Yeah, but as mentioned, it's conceivable we could consolidate farms too. We only lack the energy to pull it off.

is this the reason for the dark HN header?

If only.

It's actually some kind of net-neutrality thing, for which you will find a link embedded in the gray header.

Am I the only one that feels like this article is out of place on hacker news?

I'm confused. There are about 40,000 known species of vertebrate. There were 18,000 NEW species of life in general discovered in 2016 alone (http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-new-spec...). It's estimated there are more than 8 million species of plant, animal and insect life on the earth. Population decline doesn't equal extinction. So how, pray tell, do we find ourselves in a mass extinction event when less than half of vertebrate species are in decline, less than 1% of species in general are in decline, and when we're still discovering new species and adaptations by existing species every year?

population decline != extinction but that is the direction that it's going. There's a huge problem when one population is increasing (i.e. humans) and everything else is declining. We can't invent a robot for every job that animals occupy in nature.

There are other species thriving as well, largely due to human activity. This is because of decimation of their predators, elimination of competitors, or introduction to new environments where they are more fit than indigenous species. But global biodiversity appears to be in a nosedive.

I wouldn't use recent increases in species discover to hide this trend, we're a lot better at discovering and (re) classifying species nowadays and there's a lot more people around (and going into remote areas) to notice new species.

I cannot read your link (the url is incomplete) and I cannot read the OP's link (site overloaded perhaps) but when we discover 18000 new species of life that does not mean that they did not exist before we discovered them.

My best guess is that there are several species that we already did know about that have gone extinct. Here's a depressing wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions_in_the...

It's possible that there are species that have gone extinct as a result of human activity that we never even knew existed. So scientists make approximations to the extent of the damage we are causing. Because of the decline in the populations of species we are aware of, it seems like we will be adding many more species to that wikipedia page soon.

Here is a link to a CNN story with a similar headline for those of you unable to see the OP's story like me: http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/11/world/sutter-mass-extinction-c...

Species exist whether they've been discovered yet or not. According to this article, scientists believe they're going extinct at rates resembling an ongoing extinction event rather than stable periods. The rate at which species are being assigned names by humans is irrelevant.

Look at two numbers:

Square km of non-desert wilderness vs human agriculture.

Mass of all domestic animals vs mass of wild animals.

Gives a sense of the problem.

Or, the complete disruption of ocean ecosystems by over fishing, killing of top predators, fertilizer runoff, and so on.

Your comment wasn't good enough to lazily copy and paste from that other thread. I mean, it's even got a broken URL.

> we're still discovering new species

Just an observation: this has literally nothing to do with how many species exist in the world. If you're interested in finding something to comfort yourself about with regard to current high rate of extinctions, this isn't it. You'd have to observe the birth of new species.

(your link is broken. Does it contain a scientifically credible claim that new species are being born at the rate that old ones are going extinct?)

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