Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
In all of recorded human history, armageddon is always predicted and has never happened.
Didn't I call you hand-wringers out in the 7 billion people thread? Your win-loss record is like 0 and infinity.
Can't you see what's right before your eyes? The agricultural history of the last century includes such massive gains that poor people are now obese!
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Just noting that we disagree here. I don't have time (and didn't when the population thread was active) to discuss properly. Here is the short version:
1. Well, not "armageddon" but overpopulation leading to overconsumption causing ecological collapse leading to economic collapse leading to population crash and cultural regression.
It isn't just about population, but population times ecological impact per person. Economic activity is a pretty good proxy for ecological impact, and that is also rushing upwards. I mentioned elsewhere that 25% of ALL the economic activity in human history has taken place in the last ten years.
2. never happened ... not true. Jared Diamond (biologist turned historian) has a book called Collapse in which he carefully documents and analyses over a dozen (I think it was 17) human civilizations which have collapsed in exactly this way. Easter Island was the most obvious example, but there were others in the American South-west, Africa, other island nations, etc. All of them followed the pattern I describe in 1; and all of them kept growing and seeming fine right up until the collapse.
Each ecosystem (including the earth) has a certain amount of bio-capital and can produce a certain amount of bio-interest each year. So long as we live off the interest, all good. And yes, our clever food production CAN extract more interest without damaging the capital; but that isn't the only thing happening. Every year we exceed the bio-interest and nibble at the capital.
Our current appearance of prosperity is an illusion maintained by nibbling at the capital. The end comes suddenly and with only vague warnings that are easy to miss or deny.
If you disagree, try to buy some Atlantic cod or Atlantic tuna. These have been so overfished as to be commercially extinct. There are plenty of other fish stocks like them and more going that way. Same for forest resources, water resources, soil nutrients. Then add in the toxic pollution, the debt problem, oil supply problem, the demographic bulge problem and any others you feel like. (This is why I'm not too worried about climate change. I think it is real and will be bad, but we've got other much more urgent threats than that.)
3. poor people obese.
Has already been answered, but even if it were true, is entirely consistent with the situation described in 2. above.
BUT!
You are right in that it is possible that continued scientific progress will give us the means to deal with all of this crap. Lord I hope so. This requires that we make these breakthroughs
before we collapse, and that we don't bollocks the place up irreparably in doing so. So for these reasons I have not given up hope, and also believe it is worthwhile trying to be gentle with the Earth to stretch out the time we have to get our act together.
Remember, this was the SHORT answer.
I'm trying to conserve bits.