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Comment by gringomorcego | Hacker News Reader

Dude, did you read the thesis? It's the main blue part at the top, like every paper in Nature.

It says that local ecosystems are known to go through critical transitions, and that what's make these transitions remarkable is that the tipping point is so hard to identify or predict. They are extrapolating this and saying that a global tipping point may exist as well. That's it.

You are right, it's incredibly vague and there isn't any awesome undeniable evidence. That's the whole point of the paper. "Hey guys, we might be screwing up our shit more than we think, we need to start taking more measurements" is basically the entire gist of the paper.

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The article then states that "This study concludes we better not exceed the 50 per cent mark of wholesale transformation of Earth’s surface or we won’t be able to delay, never mind avert, a planetary collapse", as if that is a fact, and then claims that "We’ve already reached the 43 per cent mark through our conversion of landscapes into agricultural and urban areas" (maybe that is so for their definition).

And then therefore concludes that "governments undertake five actions immediately", the first example being "Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly" - so mankind must enter into a global depopulation program. We all know exactly what that is. It doesn't look like scientific claims at all, it looks like irrational hysteria with an agenda.

The authors do not say "drastically lower our population very quickly" anywhere in the paper. The closest I can see that they come to saying this is in the conclusion, where they talk about, "reducing world population growth and per capita resource consumption" (among other things) as being "vital".

Please save your accusations of irrational, hysterical agendas for them that advocates hysteria and the abandonment of reason.

I believe the parent was referring to the very last part of the SFU article. In full:

> “Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly. More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. It’s a very tall order.”

Ah. My refusal to read press releases about scientific papers when the original is available bites me again. The press release is definitely less useful, and the quoted coauthor's quote less measured, than the original paper.

I pasted the quote directly from the article. Thank you for the reactionary downvotes.

The problem is that it's all just BS. What are the conditions that bring about "state shift"? What are the consequences? How do you even identify when a state shift has occurred? Is it good or bad or just different?

Just look at Figure 2 (here: http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png). What is the definition of either of the axes? What is the basis for the relationship between any of the factors portrayed. It is favorable even to call this figure a schematic. If a student tried to slip such a figure into a research paper in high school or college they would certainly draw the ire of their professor, and justifiably so.

There is nothing falsifiable about this "theory", it is not science in any reasonable sense.

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