Six Reasons Why Earth Won't Cope for Long

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-0

Published on Thursday, December 17, 2009 by The Irish Times
Six Reasons Why Earth Won't Cope for Long
by John Gibbons

As world leaders arrive in Copenhagen for the crunch phase of the climate conference, the focus turns to what kind of deal is likely to emerge. Pre-eminent climate scientist Prof James Hansen of the Nasa Goddard Institute has already given the entire process the kiss of death. Any political deal cobbled together is, he believes, likely to be so profoundly flawed as to lock humanity on to “a disaster track.”
Hansen voiced publicly what environmental scientists and campaigners have murmured all year. A political fudge that ducks science is the likeliest outcome at Copenhagen. Earlier this week, for instance, EU fisheries ministers agreed a deal that pleased our Government and our fishermen. However, it does little to arrest the progressive annihilation of a common resource that, like our atmosphere, is owned by no one – and so exploited by all.

The world faces a dangerous convergence of environmental and resource crises, not all directly climate related. All, however, are increasingly difficult to resolve in a rapidly warming world. Taken together, they are not amenable to a business-as-usual political response. Here, in no particular order, are six:

1. Biodiversity: “The world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five or six times in the Earth’s history,” says the World Wildlife Fund. It has tracked an astonishing 30 per cent decline in the Earth’s biodiversity between 1970-2003. Hunting, habitat destruction, deforestation, pollution and the spread of agriculture are leading to as many as 1,000 entire species going extinct every week – that’s a species every 10 minutes. The economic cost of destroying biodiversity is also immense. A 2008 EU study estimated the cost of forest loss alone is running at $2-$5 trillion (€1.3-€3.4 trillion) annually.

(details for the rest at link)
2. Ocean acidification:....
3. Population pressure:....
4. Peak oil:. ....
5. Peak food:....
6. Peak water:....

The 19th century naturalist John Muir famously wrote that “when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world”. As the Copenhagen conference draws to a close, the words of a contemporary of Muir, politician and orator Robert Ingersoll, have never seemed more apt: “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are only consequences.”

[ensho]

1. nothing much is going to come out of Copenhagen

the people of the world are on their own in dealing with the fast crumbling of the earth.

good luck to us all.

[G_j]

2. the world is stuck

the people of this planet can't depend on their leaders to do what is necessary.

[dysfunctional press]

3. people and countries are NOT going to change their ways appreciably until it's too late...

if it isn't already.

extremely interesting times lie ahead...:popcorn:

[tabatha]

4. We are in a system that is locked in to destruction.

Housing starts are an indicator of the economy.
If they are bad, then steps are taken to improve the numbers.
Yet, housing starts destroy habitat.

So our choices are becoming - bad economy, less pressure on the environment.
Good economy, more pressure on the environment.

Our social structure has to change, but it cannot change fast enough to save the planet.

[indepat]

12. Considering the very short period in geologic time this earth has been hospitable to man, to think

man's ultimate stay on this earth will have been just a very short period in geologic time would seem readily apparent. :D

[Goldstein1984]

5. The Earth will cope

It's humans who are going to suffer most.

Once the last human is gone, or the human population crashes and the last civilizations crumble into scattered tribes, biodiversity will evolve again.

Every system carries within the seeds of its own destruction. Our seeds have sprouted.

[backscatter712]

6. Oh, Earth will cope just fine.

The real danger is that as George Carlin put it, that it will shake us off like a case of fleas.

[Libertas1776]

7. I was just thinking that very same exact thing.

[cliffordu]

8. Yep. I miss george.

He would have a lot of interesting things to say about these days.....

[Gregorian]

9. It's population. The rest follows that.

Population is all we have to focus on. But as you will see people do not want to admit that. They will deny it. They will fight it. They will not listen to it.

And so all of the rest is barely worth mentioning since it all is a product of population.

[MisterP]

10. thing is, each species is dependent on its surroundings

and humanity appears especially dependent, despite our flexibility

naive 40s SF blandly assumed that, if the "resources" on the Moon or elsewhere added up, we could just trash Earth and "escape" there: turns out we'd have to drag along most of the land ecosystems and all of the oceans with us (~8 quadrillion Saturn Vs). to early SF writers, ingenuity could easily replace the oxygen and nitrogen cycles. Earth was a dead end of violence and irrational hatred; humanity had to expand or die (though it did quite well for the 95,000 years before Columbus). spaceflight would bring peace and prosperity and dissolve prejudices. not only that, but it was Mars and Venus's DESTINY to bear life: humanity had a responsibility to spread Earth life to other worlds. thing is, these writers (notably Clarke and Willy Ley) were European-style public intellectuals who took these ideas out of the SF "ghetto" and relentlessly proselytized them into public discourse. for many, it was a given that no cost was too high in space exploration, since space was the realm of boundless opportunity and resources: farms would cover the Moon, Mars, and Ganymede. dazzled by paintings of mass drivers and space habitats and Moon colonies and space elevators, the future was within arm's reach and full of promise. thus, a soppy humanism that flourished in 30s and 40s Britain was perpetuated for decades, and rocketry became very highly cacheted; when funding was cut or colonization seemed "harder" than expected (viz, physically impossible), these highly-invested people screeched about "Luddism" or the Chinese Hai jin edict that ended Zheng He's ships, and supposedly made China "stagnate" (mainstream SF is also known for its careless use of historical parallels).

the problem is, Mars and the Moon may have nitrogen or water, but those facts ultimately aren't relevant: since the 60s, we've learned that Earth life needs its ecosystems, and for more than fresh carbon and oxygen. humanity is dependent on wildlife and soils, and can't actually create a new planet on its own and for itself. the Viking landers revealed Mars as less hopsitable than the Atacama (and we don't hear the Zubrins and Moravecs clamoring for mass irrigation and colonization in highlands Chile). objectively, dreams of colonizing space should be as dated and ridiculous as the Jetsons and their (admittedly-stylish) Googie architecture, Fordlândia, Atlantropa, or Efremov's Andromeda, where dewy-eyed Russians have covered Earth in farms (including for hippos!) and have installed a space mirror to melt the tundra and make the taiga farmland. of course, the colonialists' siren song of escape, more for humanity, end to poverty, and cheerful disregard for ecology and Muirish preservation (which forces us to see the non-human world as having value independent of ourselves) is very strong (just look at any thread on space research).

ever since Rachel Carson fully broke ecology into the public, we've came up with scads of excuses for inaction or continued expansion: Earth can recover! humanity's devastation is legitimate because change and disasters happened in the geological past! Earth is bountiful! poor people are allowed to massacre chimps and obliterate rainforest! wildlife doesn't exist, so it belongs entirely to humanity! the ecosystem has no intrinsic value!

it's time for humanity to grow up and not rely on imaginary technology or ostrich tactics to bail out our asses

[G_j]

11. great post

it amazing all the creative ways we can manage to rationalize.

[amborin]

13. k&r But the Earth will be here, just no current species