Should we be suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene?
aeon.co
aeon.co
Our food is made of non-renewable resource.
Every year, we use:
* 105m tons per year of nitrogen-based (natural gas) fertilisers[1]
* 22m tons per year of phosphate-based (mineral based) fertilisers[2]
* 3m tons per year of organic (poo and pee) fertilisers[2]
Nitrogen-based fertilisers are made from natural gas, and phosphate-based fertilisers from rock. Use of fertilisers grow by 10% every couple of years.
Even if there was no further population growth from now, there's not enough resources on Earth for everyone to have a car, not enough space in cities for every couple to have a house. There's not enough food made from renewable resources.
Are you going to give up your car?
Are you going to give up having a nuclear-family home?
Are you going to give up eating meat?
Can you convince everyone on Earth to do the same?
The goal of every politician is to boost GDP, aka spending, aka consumption. How do you convince politicians they are facing the wrong direction?
Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. It's only because we've discovered a very large cache of oil and natural gas, allowing the population to continue to expand, for now.
The world is fucked.
QED.
[1] http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publi...
[2] http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_p...
Ah, yes he has, and so has Ehrlich and every other 'the world is ending' doomsayer that ever walked.
Does the human race have problems? Well, obviously. deep seated religion and superstitious unreason remains a key problem.
Has there never, ever been a better time to be alive as a human? Self evidently, yes. It's the best time to be alive right now.
No one ever comes back and says they're glad they convinced someone - they just switch targets and find new people to call doomsday prophets and bloviating windbags.
Thank you for your prejudice and have a nice day.
I'm all for optimism, but optimism and ignoring problems are very different things.
All these predictions are wrong. They are all wrong because of an unexpected development. The OP says Malthus was right, but for the discovery of cheap energy. Maybe an Ehrlich supporter was right, but for the development of better crop yields.
The point is these 'buts' are the fatal flaw. An unknown unknown comes along and destroys the premise. (At this point we can safely classify it as a known unknown) As these are unpredictable, and down to a known factor - human ingenuity - it's safer to say things will be all right. The human genome is a successful critter because it selects for intelligence and ingenuity.
The numbers might look bleak because they're based on current assumptions, which will prove to be false. We know they will be false, the assumptions always prove to be false. It's the one thing we can rely on being constant. At the turn of the 20th century, New Yorkers were convinced the city would be rendered completely unliveable because of the amount of horse shit in the streets. The numbers were depressing. Everyone assumed that horse use was going to continue to go up in a straight line. Someone was probably looking for government grants to design a shitless horse. The assumption was wrong. its always wrong
But hey, if the inventors of cars didn't think the horses can be improved upon there would have been less incentive to invent the cars. The problems still have to be recognised somehow.
Until it isn't.
Presumably you haven't read 'collapse' by Jared Diamond. Even if you disagree with his argument, you can't disagree with his facts - which are that all prior human civilizations have failed catastrophically, typically with environmental collapse.
Why should we believe that ingenuity will prevail this time, when it has never done before?
Can we stop saying this as though it's some kind of argument. It's not.
Many people are diagnosed with a fatal disease in the prime of their lives. The fact that they were doing well before they received the diagnosis doesn't mean they aren't sick.
This is inescapable fact. Peoples lives in aggregate are getting better. That it is irritating to people pushing the opposite view is understandable, but doesn't invalidate the data. You can't just hand-wave it way and say 'doesn't matter'. You can't say it's not a valid argument because it 'might end' - which is in itself a poor argument.
It does matter. Life is getting better for a very large group of people, and that's good.
The concern is not that the good outcomes don't currently exist.
The concern is that the good outcomes are unsustainable because we are an increasing population consuming finite resources and generating serious new problems.
Do you have an argument that the current level of development is sustainable, or do you simply not know?
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...
We don't have to say disproven* I guess, but maybe overshadowed? ie, I want a theory that explains not only population collapse, but also natural decreases in population growth (or sharp decreases not motivated by war or famine) that we're currently witnessing throughout the developed world.
Malthus simply can't explain it and Rosling can. I'm going with the theory with more explanatory power, because that's how empiricism generally works.
* Unless you're talking about the predictions Ehrlich made about things that didn't ultimately happen. Yeah, maybe "disproven" works.
This is a common enough thought, it's listed as number #14 on the skeptical science site.
Unfortunately current anthropogenic warming and glaciations operate on vastly different timescales.
"Worry about global warming impacts in the next 100 years, not an ice age in over 10,000 years."
malthunianism isn't about the biophysics of some sustainability paradigm hatched out of a theoretical model that places massive amount of assumptions about bio blablaba.
the real malthusianism is wrapped up in the nature of the relationship between population growth relative to the political-economic societies interacting with the realities of hierarchal governance.
all socieites are based on hierarchchal pyramids of one version of cheap labor or another dominating the bottom, with dominant 1% at the top. call it capitalism, communism , or any other ism to describe every society that has almost ever existed, but the few at the top are always contending with the demographics of the many at the bottom.
in our present circumstance we have a fairly intricate global dollar/euro/yen based credit system.
the economics of the western aging population don't add up to increasing amounts of cheap labor going forward.
even in china this is a problem.
so the solution of outsourcing everything and importing streams of young immigrants (dilution of middle class) is clearly not going to work as a strategy for keeping up the stability of the banking systems and governments layered on top of the western system.
malthusianism is not so much that everything will 'collapse', but that the structure of governments and societies elite power institutions cannot remain remotely stable going into, and especially out of, population explosions.
social structure is highly dynamic in response to the bubblenomics of long term human population explosions.
world wars, failed states and many more things are deeply guaranteed by the underlying demographic realities.
bizarrely enough , it's not because there are too many people. it's because there aren't enough slaves to replenish the pen of tax producers and the pen of 'demand' for usurous credit offered by banks. when decades of pricing mortgaged assets at near zero interest rates, the banks are having a harder and harder time finding people to burden with 30 year mortgages , or as bill clinton liked to emphasize , the american dream of home foreclosureship.
eventually the price and tax reset comes (like in post soviet russia) and the clearing of the pricing and taxing system once again allows for growth in spite of the dynamic balance of debt and demographics.
then again there's always tons of high birth rates in the developing world. so long as that is the case, there's no real problems
The author is a remarkable man, but one whose advocacy comes with being enmeshed in Corporate USA culture (and DC). Stints at the New America Foundation, background in Law & property rights rather than science, early ties to The American Prospect and so on: definitely a wunderkind of the political class.
What's actually being said in the piece is a lot different to the title.
Tangential link (or not really, work it out).
In January 2011, The Nature Conservancy and The Dow Chemical Company announced a breakthrough collaboration—one that will help Dow and the business community recognize, value and incorporate nature into global business goals, decisions and strategies.
Over the course of six years, scientists from The Nature Conservancy and Dow will work together at three pilot sites to implement and refine models that support corporate decision-making related to the value and resources nature provides. Together, we are choosing sites that will be distributed around the world—and at each site, we will be looking for opportunities to take what we’ve learned there and transfer knowledge globally. These sites will serve as a “living laboratories”— places where we will validate and test our methods and models so they can be used to inform more sustainable business decisions at Dow and hopefully influence the decision-making and business practices of other companies.
http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/compan...
Their revenue streams are simply amazing, btw:
http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf [warning: PDF]
In short - the Anthropocene definitely exists, and there's no doubt about it. If you doubt it, compare and contrast forest cover circa ~12k BC and now. (And know the difference between mono-crop plantations and actual forest ecosystems - a good case study is Germany, where reforestation after the total losses 8th-18th C which ironically destroyed large amounts of soil quality due to conifers being a net parasite due to their lack of symbiotic fungi evolution. http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311... [warning: PDF] - that's a case study Germany / China)
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geologica...
So. Policy wonks vrs Science. I know who I choose.