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Over-Population
“Hot, Flat and Crowded” – by Thomas Freidman
I have to admit I don't really understand why Malthusianism is included in a discussion about climate change.
EDIT:
It's also a question as to whether or not the effects are as bad as certain groups are claiming. While there certainly will be consequences, I have to wonder if it really will be an "imminent threat to global civilization.Originally Posted by starcanuck64
Last edited by aquitaine; 2012-Aug-05 at 10:33 PM.
Order of Kilopi
Because one of the foreseen consequences is reduced food production globally, which brings Malthus to the front again.
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The Malthusians have been predicting "imminent doom" from "over population" and insufficient food production for 200 years now.
And needless to say every time they have been wrong. The question is why? Well, Malthusianism makes the assumption that people can't innovate, particularly in the area of food production. Today we have the most powerful tool available for adapting our agriculture to climate change: Genetic engineering. There has been a lot of success with testing drought resistant wheat, salt tolerant wheat, and many others. Which begs the question, why exactly is climate change going to reduce food production, except via the self fulfillment of the Malthusian Catastrophe prophecy? I'm seeing a whole lot of psuedoscience here........
Last edited by aquitaine; 2012-Aug-06 at 03:52 PM. Reason: url fail
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By request, three posts on "Malthus and Global Warming" have been moved from this thread to their own thread.
Order of Kilopi
Also, the flooding of low-lying coastal areas, which is where most of the populations live, will result in mass migrations of refugees and losses of major shipping and industrial centers.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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Not to turn this into a political discussion, but the US Department of Defense thinks the potential disruptions from climate change are potentially large enough that they have done some studies of the issue.
New York Time article
May 2008 study - 454 page long PDF
On the flip side, humans are pretty adaptable. My guess is that there will be, over the course of the next century, some severe disruptions and challenges, but it will not mean the collapse of civilization.
Personally, I think it will be much more of an extinction event of many other species on Earth, beside humans.
Last edited by Swift; 2012-Aug-07 at 02:56 PM. Reason: typo
Order of Kilopi
We're already doing that, it will just speed up.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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Humanity is indeed adaptable, but I guess (maybe) we might ask: Can the disruption and so-called challenges slow down our progress beyond Earth--to explore space? Could we use green technology in our launches into space?
It is surely possible that there are those who will call for a temporary moratorium of conventional rocketry ---if the planet continues to deteriorate---IMHO.
Order of Kilopi
Yes. There are already some calling for just that, for just those reasons.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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Tell that to this year's corn farmers. These putative genetic solutions need to have been in the field by last year. Are the seed companies even starting to ramp up production yet? Remember, a mere few years without harvest, has been enough to bring many a civilization to a screeching halt. There's precious little indication our current pinnacle of culture will fare any different without significant pre-emptive action.
Order of Kilopi
I live in the middle of farming country, and I can tell you none of those innovations have made it here. Drought has. Watch next year's food prices...
There are limits to what genetic engineering can accomplish. It's far from being a completed science.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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I guess my question really is how much of a net negative impact do space launches really have upon Global Warming?
As an aside, however, there is much resistance against to certain NASA contractors (in my general area of residence) due to well-water contamination from NASA's golden age of exploration in 1960s. Although there may not be a direct correlation between well-water contamination and Global Warming---there is the uptick in the fear of what would happen to subsequent generations of contaminated well-water---especially if conventional rocketry were the norm.
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Amost none. But that doesn't stop the protesters (these are largely the same people who talk about "wasting money" on space instead of feeding the children-- as if that money would automatically go towards feeding children if it wasn't used by NASA).
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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When I worked in the Ag industry---it seemed as if we were always answering to previous years problems? You may want to see what Dow, Monsanto or DuPont are doing these days.
For instance, Round-Up was a fluke in someways---if I remember Monsanto did not expect to have it---nor did anyone
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We're in the process of fundamentally changing the radiative balance of the globe, something that has been closely linked with mass extinctions in the past, when you look at the sociological fallout of something as relatively limited as the recent economic crisis then IMO it does become realistic to begin looking at a global civilization ending effect of the climate change issue.
In the coming decades as a global society we'll be dealing with food and water security issues on a large scale as a result of climate change as well as the loss of coastal areas and the invasion of salt water into fresh water resources in some of the most crucial food production areas such as the Mekong Delta. There's also species loss in some very crucial areas like coral reef systems and what will be the long term effects of ocean acidification?
I'm not denying the issue is frighteningly complex, I'm saying the consequences of not even trying to effect mitigation is going to allow the creation of chaos that will quite possibly overwhelm the limited organizations we have in place already to deal with global disasters.
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There are underwater ruins around the globe from where our shorelines have adjusted over the years.
Local subsidence is a larger signal in global sea level changes than changes in climate.
Given that human interactions are contributing to climate change (I seem to remember record lows last summer and this past winter; aside from North America), what evidence exists to show that this change is happening at a rate faster than generational migration rates?
For longer than I have been alive, climatologists have been crying about the need for change to avoid impending doom. The time-line always appears to be 40-50 years away.
For longer than I have been alive, climatologists have been crying about the need for change to avoid impending doom. The time-line always appears to be 40-50 years away. How many predictions need to fail before we dispel climatology as pseudo-science?
Do we really need to fear the days when Antarctica returns to a lush cover of ferns?
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GM crops can enhance food production, in areas that become inundated or lose access to any fresh water then food production becomes very difficult.
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They only have to be right once.
We've been doing things to mitigate the problem for as long as I've been alive. This throws off the predictions, much like the Y2K problem.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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One important element to keep in mind is the rate of change, many ecological systems can and will adapt to changes if given the chance. If however habitats change too quickly for the associated biotas to adapt or migrate with the isotherms that determine the habitats then species will go extinct...in large numbers.
Then it becomes a question of overall ecological viability.
We get a huge amount of food from the oceans and coastal regions, two areas that are being significantly affected by climate change and the rise in ocean acidity due to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
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Be very careful. You are coming very close to advocating a non-mainstream position outside of ATM (that climatology isn't a real science and I assume that AGW is false).
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There was an interesting article in the June 30th issue of Science News on this very topic.
As alpine temperatures warm and snowpacks shrink, pikas in some places have hightailed it upslope to find more tolerable conditions. But in the arid, mountainous region known as the Great Basin, pikas have disappeared altogether from 40 percent of the locales where they were found in the first half of the 20th century. Apparently already at the upper limits of their ranges, they’ve run out of places to run to.
The pika’s plight may be extreme, but the story line is not unusual. Worldwide — on land, in the sea and in rivers, streams and lakes — wildlife is responding to rising temperatures. The changes are sometimes to the animals’ benefit, sometimes to their peril, say scientists who have pored over reams of recent studies and data from centuries of naturalists’ observations.
Some animals are packing up and moving, generally heading toward the poles or up mountain slopes in search of more hospitable climes. Others are undergoing changes in physiology, behavior or body size — or they’re shifting the timing of seasonal events such as breeding, migration and emergence from hibernation to coincide with earlier springs and later autumns. Just last year, researchers reported seasonal shifts in animals ranging from snow geese in the Arctic to amphibians in a South Carolina wetland to penguins in Antarctica.
And though similar responses have been turning up in many sorts of animals, in many sorts of habitats, researchers are now finding that not all organisms are responding at the same rate or in the same direction. Long-standing associations between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, herbivores and food plants, flowers and pollinators are getting out of sync.
Communities are breaking up and reassembling with new mixtures of members, and it’s hard to predict the effects of such mash-ups, a team of environmental scientists concluded in a paper last year.
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I'm not sure if this is directly related to malthusian principles, but much of the earth may be unlivable according to this 2010 paper from Purdue explaining how high wet-bulb temperatures can be incompatible with manmmalian physiology.
To tie this into Malthusian issues, we might consider the effect this might have on livestock, and how it might force people and animals to compete for space in regions that will naturally remain more compatible with life.The researchers calculated that humans and most mammals, which have internal body temperatures near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, will experience a potentially lethal level of heat stress at wet-bulb temperature above 95 degrees sustained for six hours or more, said Matthew Huber, the Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who co-authored the paper that is currently available online and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Although areas of the world regularly see temperatures above 100 degrees, really high wet-bulb temperatures are rare," Huber said. "This is because the hottest areas normally have low humidity, like the 'dry heat' referred to in Arizona. When it is dry, we are able to cool our bodies through perspiration and can remain fairly comfortable. The highest wet-bulb temperatures ever recorded were in places like Saudi Arabia near the coast where winds occasionally bring extremely hot, humid ocean air over hot land leading to unbearably stifling conditions, which fortunately are short-lived today."
How fast might this happen? Probably not within the century, but...
Of course, we might mitigate that with air-conditioning and other technology... but those technologies use energy and all that stuff produces waste heat, and IIRC, a lot of AGW refers to GHG and sunlight and do not take into account man-made waste heat. Someone posted a link about that recently, suggesting that following the waste-heat trend-line we're on now could make earth too hot in a matter of 3-4 centuries."We found that a warming of 12 degrees Fahrenheit would cause some areas of the world to surpass the wet-bulb temperature limit, and a 21-degree warming would put half of the world's population in an uninhabitable environment," Huber said. "When it comes to evaluating the risk of carbon emissions, such worst-case scenarios need to be taken into account. It's the difference between a game of roulette and playing Russian roulette with a pistol. Sometimes the stakes are too high, even if there is only a small chance of losing."
Steven Sherwood, the professor at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia, who is the paper's lead author, said prolonged wet-bulb temperatures above 95 degrees would be intolerable after a matter of hours.
"The wet-bulb limit is basically the point at which one would overheat even if they were naked in the shade, soaking wet and standing in front of a large fan," Sherwood said. "Although we are very unlikely to reach such temperatures this century, they could happen in the next."
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
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It is interesting.
This got me thinking;
Some habitats are simply disappearing, such as the Arctic tundra and ice cover, as temperatures continue to rise in the Arctic the species associated with them will have to find radically new ways to live or go extinct. This incudes the Polar Bear, Cariboo, Arctic Cod and Krill.Another factor to consider is how quickly climate change is moving across the land, says Scott Loarie, a postdoctoral researcher who works with global ecologist Chris Field at Stanford. In 2009, Loarie, Field and colleagues found that, overall, species will need to move about two-fifths a kilometer per year to keep up with changing conditions, 10 to 100 times faster than they’ve ever had to move before to cope with changing climates. Mountain dwellers won’t have to move as far as critters in flatter landscapes to find a new home — just 10 or so kilometers over the next century, compared with more than a hundred.
One recent study suggests ocean-dwelling animals may need to move as fast or faster than land species — and to advance the timing of breeding, spawning, migration and other seasonal life events even more. The work, from the marine biological impacts working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published last year in Science.
In the case of alpine biotas, some of them are isolated from suitable habitats to migrate to and will simply disappear as the average temperatures climb in altitude. For ocean habitats, many species are associated with coral reef ecosystems at some point of their lifecycle which will have to migrate to deeper water or poleward fairly rapidly, something like 16% of coral reefs have been lost already.
The artcle also mentions how atmospheric chemistry and precipitation patterns can affect some species.
One thing you can say about climate change and the global environment in general is how complex and interconnected it is, by significantly changing something as important as the radiative balance of the atmosphere, it's become clearer that the systemwide effects are profound.“Changes at the local level are going to be a complete mix of interactions among regional climate, habitat loss and local pollution sources,” Parmesan says. Assessing and seeking to understand these interactions is a better use of time and resources than figuring out the specific role of greenhouse gases in driving biological change. Other researchers in the field also are calling for an integrated approach to future research that takes into account interacting environmental pressures, interconnected species and the varied sensitivities of different species to changing conditions. And because temperature isn’t the only driver — some animals are showing behavioral and physiological changes in response to changing carbon dioxide levels or altered precipitation patterns — there are plenty more interactions to factor in.
Order of Kilopi
I think the main point about Malthusianism is the argument that species expand to take up what is available, and that there is no built-in mechanism that stops that, so that there is always some kind of environmental catastrophe. I think you can see this very commonly in nature, brewing being a good example. The yeast just eats up the sugar and then dies out when the environment becomes bad. Malthus believed that people would experience the same thing. And you are right about innovation. Humans are inventive, and it allows us to overcome things like that. But I think that history is inconsistent in this regard. There are examples of civilizations that appear to have suddenly collapsed, and many people believe it happened due to environmental catastrophes. While on the other hand, humankind as a whole has continued to progress, but not without glitches along the way.
As above, so below
Order of Kilopi
Because, remember, when it is cold, it is weather, but when it is hot, it is global warming.
Can you prove that this drought is not just a drought? That maybe it is weather just as much as last year's cold?
And can you prove what effect you 'significantpre-emptive action' will have? Or will it be more of the feelgood nonsense that pervades the green movement?
Noclevername mentioned that the climatologists only have to be right once about global warming for a catastrophe to occur. The people engineering the global climate only have to be wrong once to kill billions, and tell me, what branch of engineering hasnt had a spectacular failure or two when the branch was new?
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Why would I want to? When the seed companies don't yet have drought resistant varieties, and the drought comes, and the crop fails, bad things happen. It doesn't matter what caused the drought.
Getting drought resistant seed in the ground before* the rains fail may be your idea of "feelgood nonsense", but that feeling won't feed anyone, will it?
Waving hands in the air and claiming genetic engineering will save us simplistically ignores a lot of hard reality about the science and mechanics of getting new varieties into the field. You need look no further than Texas male sterile corn and Southern Corn Leaf Blight for a cautionary tale of the consequences of moving to new crop strains too quickly. It'd be a shame if the world's crops stood up to drought and salinization, but fell to an onslaught of formerly unimportant plant pathogens.
With regard to your questioning the possibility that global warming might just possibly be real, see:
Climate change is here — and worse than we thought
http://scienceblog.com/55958/nasa-li...lobal-warming/
http://embargowatch.wordpress.com/20...o-op-ed-on-it/
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/20....full.pdf+html
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*pre-emptively.
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The tipping points that concern me and many others involve feedbacks like large scale release of methane clathrates from tundra and seafloor deposits, if that happens as would seem almost inevitable with a business as usual model of CO2 release then we are dealing with some very catastrophic changes in the global environment.
If we are emitting greenhouse gases and aerosols on the same scale or larger than flood basalts that in the paleoclimatic record are closely associated with some of the most destructive phases of the geological lifecycle of the planet, then IMO it's irresponsible to ignore the possible consequences...especially if we have alternatives that offer a solution as are currently being discussed on other threads here.
Last edited by starcanuck64; 2012-Aug-08 at 05:52 PM.
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That's the kick in the teeth. We have easy reliable solutions. ones that could have been implemented long ago as a logical matter of progression. from manual labor to combustion to nuclear. each of these steps adds an increase in energy density, as well as a decrease in the human cost of energy production. but somewhere along the way we got derailed. probably by good intentions that were misguided by fear.
We could have been entirely without all of this global warming issue altogether if all of the world had gone the way France did and fully adopted the most suited technology to fulfill our need for energy.
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I also agree here---but most of the "powers-that-be" (the ones who control paychecks and market forces) have long been in control of how the world uses its energy resources. All too often energy corporations will follow the path of least resistance---and thereby maximize their returns.
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I'm hoping that thorium molten salt reactors will be the kick in the pants that gets things moving this way again.
A number of European countries including France and thorium rich nations like India and China will be leading the way. If Canada and the US don't want to be left behind we're going to have to start moving soon.
Since a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision a few years back CO2 has been listed as a pollutant by the EPA, which means this will probably become a legal issue more than a political one soon. There will be little choice but to convert to low carbon intensity options as large scale litigation begins, it's a good thing we have the nuclear power option.
IMO the low cancer risk involved in responsible nuclear power production isn't even in the same league as the short and long term risks we now accept every day with the use of coal, oil and natural gas. In the short term natural gas can provide a partner to nuclear power production to provide stable baseload electricity.
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