We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[bilby]

It's the spike at the end that's the issue,

Which appears on all the graphs.

which includes consumption rate in developed nations, ecosystem and habitat loss, pollution and clearing in developing nations, etc,

No, it's a graph of population. None of those things are included in it.

as shown in numerous studies, papers, as quoted , cited and linked by several posters on this thread and others.

400 million, two billion or 4 billion was never going to be the issue that eight billion and still growing is now and in the coming decades. We should have stabilized at two, or at least no more than 4 billion.

Why?

King John could have looked at his world's population and equally well concluded that:

"50 million, a hundred and twenty five million or 250 million was never going to be the issue that 500 million and still growing is now and in the coming decades. We should have stabilized at 100, or at least no more than 200 million".

Given what happened a century and a half later, he might even have been right - half a billion people was at the limit of what the Earth could carry, given medieval levels of technology.

 

[bilby]

''Until the Industrial Revolution began, birth rates and death rates were both very high, which kept the global human population relatively stable. In fact, it took all of human history, until around 1804, to reach 1 billion people.''

That's the same error as your graph makes, now presented as a table.

You could equally validly say something similarly scary at any time in the last five thousand years. One billion is an entirely arbitrary milestone, and it's choice causes the fear factor - the same table with a ten billion milestone looks like this:

Year	Population	Years since previous milestone
2058 (projected)	10 billion	All of human history

If you plot a roughly exponential growth using linear rather than logarithmic scale, you will always see a flatish line with a big spike at the end. Presenting the data as a table doesn't change this. It's a great way to scare people who don't know much about graphing data.

 

[Elixir]

Why?

Because of the size of the average person’s environmental impact.

I lived for ten years of my life with under 3 billion people in the world. And the world that I experienced then was in much “better” (my subjective judgment) shape than it has been since.

 

[bilby]

Why?

Because of the size of the average person’s environmental impact.

I lived for ten years of my life with under 3 billion people in the world. And the world that I experienced then was in much “better” (my subjective judgment) shape than it has been since.

The average person's impact on the carrying capacity of the resources available to his community has been declining, faster than population has been growing, since at least the seventeenth century.

A person's "environmental impact" is hugely variable from one person to the next, and from one environmental concern to the next; The idea that it is useful to average across both variables is the hidden premise that I have been challenging throughout this thread.

It makes no sense to talk of the average person, when you are in a world with Elon Musk who has a carbon footprint that's millions of times that of an African peasant farmer.

It also makes no sense to talk of the averave environmental impact, when you are lumping together such dissimilar problems as climate change, micro-plastics, and the depletion of iron ore reserves under that one term, as though these issues must all have a common cause and therefore must also have a common solution.

Your subjective judgement is just that. People have been bemoaning the decline of the world since their youth for as long as people have been recording their subjective judgements; Getting older sucks.

Though as Churchill observed, it's better than the alternative.

 

[Elixir]

The average person's impact on the carrying capacity of the resources available to his community has been declining, faster than population has been growing

Nothing is significantly harmed by “the average person’s impact” except insofar as it contributes to the overall human impact. It’s the total net and cumulative human impact that has had devastating effects.

Even if our total impact was immediately reduced to a level below the ecosystem’s ability to repair itself, it won’t return to any prior state over the course of a lifetime, or a millennium - or ever. But it could get … better.

FWIW, if we were still consuming, burning and polluting at the per capita rate of 1950s America, this continent would be a real shithole by now.

 

[bilby]

The average person's impact on the carrying capacity of the resources available to his community has been declining, faster than population has been growing

Nothing is significantly harmed by “the average person’s impact”. It seems to be the total net and cumulative human impact that has had devastating effects.

It seems that way, because you are lumping together all the effects as though they necessarily all have a single cause, and therefore a single solution.

They don't.

 

[Elixir]

The average person's impact on the carrying capacity of the resources available to his community has been declining, faster than population has been growing

Nothing is significantly harmed by “the average person’s impact”. It seems to be the total net and cumulative human impact that has had devastating effects.

It seems that way, because you are lumping together all the effects as though they necessarily all have a single cause, and therefore a single solution.

They don't.

Nah, I am not proposing any OSFA “solution”. I can hardly imagine “all effects” let alone a way to mitigate them. I can’t even isolate single, or enumerate the multiple causes of single examples of degradation that I have observed. Of course I therefore use the broad brush of “human impact” as a proxy for the causes of all those effects, at least for the purpose of discussion.
Surely there are specific remedies for specific effects that can have dramatic impacts on those effects, especially with improving tech, but the general ocean of deleterious (again, a subjectivity) effects of human impact remains well beyond our current ability to control.

 

[Swammerdami]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population lets you generate graphs with endpoints before today.

I like graphs! Three comments about this one.

• Click Settings, then Logarithmic. It is silly to try to use a graph like this with the y-axis set to Linear.
• The graph shows that Europe's growth rate increased about 1700 AD and again about 1800 AD. However this data appears to be just crude interpolation. For example, the early 1940's had a higher-than-normal death rate and a lower-than-normal birth rate, with the numbers much more than large enough to appear on this graph. Instead ... nothing.
• I will guess that the data before about "0" AD is complete nonsense, gibberish. Just glancing at it, it appears they drew a straight-line (logarithmic) between numbers for 10,000 BC and "0" AD. In fact, prehistory was more interesting: There were huge surges in population associated with certain events, especially the advent of farming, and the "secondary products revolution."

 

[Elixir]

There were huge surges in population associated with certain events

Yup, if Thag the Caveman were alive in 535CE, he might be AGHAST at the fact that the wooly mammoth and other megafauna had disappeared.

 

[steve_bank]

There were huge surges in population associated with certain events

Yup, if Thag the Caveman were alive in 535CE, he might be AGHAST at the fact that the wooly mammoth and other megafauna had disappeared.

The modern technology and population today all began with spears and cutting edges,fire, and learning to cook and preserve meat.

When you think about it today putting an edge on cutting tools is still an important technology.

 

[Jokodo]

Why?

Because of the size of the average person’s environmental impact.

I lived for ten years of my life with under 3 billion people in the world. And the world that I experienced then was in much “better” (my subjective judgment) shape than it has been since.

Global population reached 3bn in 1960. In that year, child mortality in the US was what it is in India today, and indeed not all that much lower than Eritrea today. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT?end=2021&locations=US-IN&start=1960&view=chart

US life expectancy was lower than that of India, Cambodia or Egypt just before the pandemic. https://data.worldbank.org/indicato...9&locations=US-IN-EG-KH&start=1960&view=chart

Despite the much smaller population, the total number, not just the percentage, of illiterate adults was higher than our is today - illiteracy was the norm globally, with nearly 60% illiterate, while today that number is around 15%. The total number of people suffering severe malnourishment was similar to what it is today despite a much lower population.

Places as diverse as India, Laos, Morocco and East Timor are supplying electricity to 100% or nearly so of their population. As late as 1990, a majority in each of these countries did NOT have access to electricity. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?locations=LA-TL-IN-MA

Not sure what that "better shape" refers to...

 

[DBT]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population lets you generate graphs with endpoints before today.

I like graphs! Three comments about this one.

• Click Settings, then Logarithmic. It is silly to try to use a graph like this with the y-axis set to Linear.
• The graph shows that Europe's growth rate increased about 1700 AD and again about 1800 AD. However this data appears to be just crude interpolation. For example, the early 1940's had a higher-than-normal death rate and a lower-than-normal birth rate, with the numbers much more than large enough to appear on this graph. Instead ... nothing.
• I will guess that the data before about "0" AD is complete nonsense, gibberish. Just glancing at it, it appears they drew a straight-line (logarithmic) between numbers for 10,000 BC and "0" AD. In fact, prehistory was more interesting: There were huge surges in population associated with certain events, especially the advent of farming, and the "secondary products revolution."

My point was simply that human population never exceeded one billion up until industrial times. Hundreds of thousands of years under one billion.

If it is true that human population had not exceeded one billion, or that our numbers and lifestyle had not gone into overshoot, that is the distinction between then and the spike in industrial times and where we stand now with a population of eight billion and growing.

It's not about the graphs.

 

[Elixir]

There were huge surges in population associated with certain events

Yup, if Thag the Caveman were alive in 535CE, he might be AGHAST at the fact that the wooly mammoth and other megafauna had disappeared.

The modern technology and population today all began with spears and cutting edges,fire, and learning to cook and preserve meat.

When you think about it today putting an edge on cutting tools is still an important technology.

Absolutely! That’s where the manipulation of matter begins. And yet, after tens (or hundreds) of thousands of years of making blades, the sharpest blades we can make are still obsidian.

 

[DBT]

''Until the Industrial Revolution began, birth rates and death rates were both very high, which kept the global human population relatively stable. In fact, it took all of human history, until around 1804, to reach 1 billion people.''

That's the same error as your graph makes, now presented as a table.

You could equally validly say something similarly scary at any time in the last five thousand years. One billion is an entirely arbitrary milestone, and it's choice causes the fear factor - the same table with a ten billion milestone looks like this:

Year	Population	Years since previous milestone
2058 (projected)	10 billion	All of human history

If you plot a roughly exponential growth using linear rather than logarithmic scale, you will always see a flatish line with a big spike at the end. Presenting the data as a table doesn't change this. It's a great way to scare people who don't know much about graphing data.

There is too much fixation on the graphs themselves, of course populations grew with prosperity and declined with scarcity and disease in pre-industral times, the point is that the world population never exceeded one billion until the industrial revolution, which is represented by the huge spike on the graph.

It's not about the graphs or their limitations, or that population grew steadily after the ice age, but that it never exceeded one billion until very recently, where suddenly we have over 8 billion of us striving for a lavish western lifestyle.

 

[bigfield]

It's not about the graphs.

It is, though. You presented a period of accelerating growth as a flat line ("roughly steady state") because of the scale of the graph.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Your 8 million do not have the skills to obtain food without technology and they do not have the means to maintain that technology.

That's nonsense. Please 'splain to me - how did the 10k-60k survivors of the Toba catastrophe make it, and by your figuring 1000-8000 times that many survivors wouldn't be enough to maintain the species? Do you think the people of 75k years ago had big tech capabilities? (Cue that weirdo from Ancient Aliens).

1) They already knew how to survive in those conditions.

2) What they needed to obtain from nature was far more available then.

3) There's also the issue that the survivors of most any modern catastrophe will have to recover without any land mammals. They'll all go extinct as the ravenous hordes eat anything they can.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If we can provide for our needs and wants without perpetual growth, aka Adam Smith, et al, how much more and more and more do we want need? Five houses each? Ten cars? Not enough, we need to keep adding more and perpetual growth is the key?

How about more efficient houses and smarter transit systems inatead of just more of the same old crap?

A steady state economy doesn't exclude living well, innovation, efficiency or progress in science. It just excludes the notion of perpetual growth in population and exploitation of natural resources, which, given a finite world that we have alreading overburdened, is a Ponzi scheme heading for disaster.

1) If you have progress in science you do not have a steady state economy.

2) Even if it is stable you're still mining resources. That's not infinite. We aren't going to suddenly run out of something but the effort required to obtain things will increase--and such effort is no longer available for maintaining our standard of living. Eventually a point will be reached where there is negative output.

The Greens have this utterly unrealistic view of small technology that by some magical means has no resource inputs.

Progress in understanding the natural world is achieved through research, observation and testing. A steady state economy doesn't exclude allocating funds for scientific research. It just excludes perpetual growth in population, economic growth and consumption, which is impossible in any case: Adam Smith, et al.

If you apply anything you learn from that science the economy is no longer steady state.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Fundamentally, time causes inequality because some fare better at growing capital and the advantage is progressive. Change upsets this and favors equality. Periods of change are periods of relative equality. And since the Industrial Revolution got into high gear we have been in a period of change.

As Piketty(!) points out, much wealth is INHERITED. The Walton children are not super-rich because they are "better at growing capital." They are rich because they've held on to the WMT stock Daddy gave them.

There are those, but they aren't in the majority by any means.

I just looked over the Forbes 25 list--while some started from a decent position their vast wealth is mostly self-made.

Maybe it will be Zuckerberg's grandchildren who buy and sell the politicians of the future instead of Sam Walton's grandchildren -- if that's your point about "turnover" -- but high inequality is bad for society. Frankly, I'm tired of the apologists for dog-eat-dog capitalism and the present-day oligopoly system who fall for plutocrats' memes like "trickle-down."

A few generations from now the Walton wealth will be pretty widely dispersed, they won't be buying any politicians.

You're doing a bit better than Piketty on this, you at least realize it's different players. You're treating them as if they are the same, though.

We can't legislate our way out of inequality without killing the golden goose. If there's no reward for success then there's no reason to put in the effort for success.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

LOL! I shared a peer-reviewed paper with you that argued that we needed to limit consumption. That paper referenced multiple peer-reviewed papers that said the same thing. Yes, peer-reviewed papers are sometimes wrong, and you have the right to dispute them. But how can you tell us that you not only refuse to accept the conclusion of this article, but you refuse to accept it is even possible, and refuse to accept it is even plausible?

The problem you have yet to address is consumption of what?

Limiting consumption of renewable resources to their production rate makes sense. However, most resource consumption is of things that are only renewed on a geological time scale if that. There is no meaningful production to balance it against.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population lets you generate graphs with endpoints before today.

I like graphs! Three comments about this one.

• Click Settings, then Logarithmic. It is silly to try to use a graph like this with the y-axis set to Linear.
• The graph shows that Europe's growth rate increased about 1700 AD and again about 1800 AD. However this data appears to be just crude interpolation. For example, the early 1940's had a higher-than-normal death rate and a lower-than-normal birth rate, with the numbers much more than large enough to appear on this graph. Instead ... nothing.
• I will guess that the data before about "0" AD is complete nonsense, gibberish. Just glancing at it, it appears they drew a straight-line (logarithmic) between numbers for 10,000 BC and "0" AD. In fact, prehistory was more interesting: There were huge surges in population associated with certain events, especially the advent of farming, and the "secondary products revolution."

Linear makes sense for what he's showing. Log is useful for scientific purposes but the average person generally won't understand.