Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Hopefully there is some natural stasis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox

the problem isn't with continued, unending population growth - the UN projections have some shaky assumptions, but it's still likely that world population will top out at 9 - 12 billion by mid-to-late century. the problem is that the amount of people on earth right NOW is already way more than the earth can sustainably handle. we're already using 1.5 earths per year.

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Number_of_Planet_Scenarios_2008.JPG
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/

but certainly that usage will go down w/ broad implementation of alternative energy, no?

7 billion now. The most comprehensive survey of sustainable population estimates I've seen is Joel E. Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? which offered a lot of estimates, most clustering between 1.5 and 2.5 billion. By those we are at 2.8-4.6 earths already.

In the long run, it may come down to something trivial, like just how much phosphorus is available for agriculture once mineral deposits run out.

xpIt may not go down as fast as the extra population and higher wealth of China/India makes it go up.

xpost

like sanpaku just mentioned, the earth footprint goes beyond things like fossil fuel consumption. it's also about things as basic as access to potable water, and topsoil. everybody could be speeding around a Jetsons landscape in flying solar cars, but it doesn't mean shit if you can't grow food.

How close are we to being able to mount some rockets on a comet full of water ice and push it into earth orbit for mining?

Much easier to desalinate seawater, tbh.

just feel like a huge government leap/push/war on warming/etc is the only thing that can possibly help. but right now (or 40 years ago). and, you never know, if a republican gets in as prez four years from now it might be the only chance for a while. the president can sign, like, state of emergency legislation, right? make it a matter of life and death/national security or whatever.

we're already using 1.5 earths per year.

what does this even mean?

7 billion now. The most comprehensive survey of sustainable population estimates I've seen is Joel E. Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? which offered a lot of estimates, most clustering between 1.5 and 2.5 billion. By those we are at 2.8-4.6 earths already.

― in the Land of the Yik Yak (Sanpaku), Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i find it really hard to believe these estimates

realize that is from a reputable source but... i don't buy it

the sustainable rate of resource consumption is the amount that the earth can regenerate every year. just to take one tiny bit of the puzzle, think of forests. every year humans destroy a certain amount of forest. if we're exploiting forests sustainably (i.e., 1.0 earths per year), then we're destroying exactly as much forest as will grow back in a year's time. if you destroy more forest than that, than you are cutting into the "stock" of earth's resources.

another example. you have $100 a year, and it's in a kickass bank account that gives you 5% interest. the sustainable amount you can spend each year is $5, because you started with $100 at the beginning of the year, the interest added $5, giving you a total of $105, and then you spend that extra $5 and you're back at $100. if you spend more than $5, you're cutting into the principle.

another example let's say you have a bathtub full of water. let's say 5 gallons of water is coming out of the faucet per minute. and every minute, 5 gallons is draining out of the bathtub. the bathtub is in equilibrium, because the amount coming into the bathtub through the faucet is exactly as much as the amount of water leaving the bathtub through the drain. if the drain somehow got wider and 10 gallons were leaving the bathtub every minute, than the water level would start dropping.

these examples are all around us. if you consume at higher than a sustainable rate, you cut into the stock of resources (like soil fertility) that humans depend on to survive.

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go get into my full bathtub that has a faucet that flows at 5 gal/min and an open drain.

anyway, all of this talk of equilibrium and renewable resources and stocks is a little misleading when it comes to climate change, unfortunately. the popular perception, i think, is that if we could manage to find a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we'll be safe. but that ignores three key things: 1) lags in the system. the climate change that we're already experiencing isn't caused by our emissions today, it's the result of greenhouse gas emissions from 30+ years ago. Similarly, the greenhouse gases that we emit today won't fully impact the system until 2040 and beyond. 2) once greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere, they stay there for a loooooong time. thousands of years. it's not like we're trying to finally reach a peak of climate change/warming that we will then quickly draw down from over the course of a century. we're establishing a new baseline of greenhouse gas concentration/warming. 3) the tipping points that have been cited here and elsewhere, the albedo effect, METHANE CATASTROPHE, etc

we're already using 1.5 earths per year.

what does this even mean?

sorry, i have a bad habit of going off on a long explanation that never manages to address the question.

using "1.5 earths per year" means we're using 50% more than the sustainable rate of consumption of the planet's resources every year. for example, again with the forests, if there are 100 trees in a forest, and it's capable of regrowing 10 new trees every year, and you cut down 15 trees in a year, you just used 50% more than the sustainable rate. that doesn't mean the forest is totally useless the following year and that everyone dies. it means that now that forest is starting with 95 trees rather than the 100 it used to have, and that if you keep using it unsustainably, the stock will continue to decline every year until it's depleted.

How close are we to being able to mount some rockets on a comet full of water ice and push it into earth orbit for mining?

― WilliamC, Sunday, 11 November 2012

there's actually water on the moon, it turns out, from comets colliding with it. also for a mere half a trillion we could put a strip of solar panels around the moon and beam the energy, enough for all earth iirc, back as microwaves.

Its probably also a composite of a lot of resource consumption ratios. Obv there are hillsides that have been terraced for rice cultivation that have remained fertile (thanks to nightsoil) for thousands years. Then again we exhausted the southern Ogallala aquifer in 70 or so years and Orange Roughy fisheries in 30. That 1.5 Earths is probably combination of a lot of factoids that says little other than we're exploiting even Earth's renewable resources a good deal faster than they are replenished.

Yeah, catching solar from outside our atmosphere and microwave-relaying it down is something I've thought about a lot, and mentioned a couple of times on ilx. It seems to me that clean energy isn't the problem -- undoing the overheating, unstressing the oceans and feeding too many people are the problems. xpost

I hate to interrupt the parade of catastrophe, but this Wednesday, California's going to start auctioning off some CO2 emissions credits.

it even disturbs me now when i see stories on human longevity. billions of people + everyone wants to live forever. of course this is only applicable in fancy first/western world populations where people can afford high tech treatments and medicines, but still...

but then they say that higher temperatures will bring higher rates of insect/rodent-borne diseases, so maybe things will even out.

i just try to go about my day mostly. but its hard sometimes. i find myself wondering about the futility of new things. or the madness of spending money on things that are wasteful. little things even. let alone future 200 billion dollar star wars movies.

but then they say that higher temperatures will bring higher rates of insect/rodent-borne diseases, so maybe things will even out.

That's it. And the more people you have living in any given area, the more people die when something bad happens there (fire, tsunami, nuclear accident, bomb, quake, plague, famine, etc)--see Bangladesh, which has a massive population density and is regularly hit with horrible diasters.

thanks for the explanation z s

i haven't looked too seriously into this stuff & what i have read tends to have been from more optimistic sources like bjorn lomborg or stuart brand, both of whom might i should probably be more suspicious of. still, something too malthusian about all this that rubs me the wrong way

there's actually water on the moon, it turns out, from comets colliding with it. also for a mere half a trillion we could put a strip of solar panels around the moon and beam the energy, enough for all earth iirc, back as microwaves.

― zvookster, Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh, sorry, nope. official chinatown of ilx statement about the water on the moon

xpost,

oh man, please, if you remember nothing else, BE EXTREMELY WARY OF BJORN LOMBORG

what about george monbiot?

i don't read him too often, so i dunno.

not someone i follow too closely but monbiot is generally good on climate change i think. he rides hard against denialists/right-wingers/industry in general/government fannydangle/corporate meddling and spends a lot of his time trying to beat the same usual suspects over the head with the science which can get a bit shrill at times, although it is frequently quite funny too. think that a lot of environmentalists went a bit sour on him when he started boosting the nuclear option as our only real chance of de-carbonising on any great scale (all the same, he doesn't seem to be someone who has much faith in nuclear energy suppliers themselves). way too much of a lefty to ever have much of an influence on government opinion. doesn't have a lot of truck with people singling out rising global population, his arguments always come back to the fact that we in the west are living way beyond our environmental means

bill gates is fairly big on (and is heavily pushing) nuclear as well as a logical but frankly unimaginative energy solution. i think he means well but i can't help but think his charity ought to be broken up even more than microsoft.

i dont hate nuclear but i would not put $ on it post-fukushima

didn't they just invent some kind of new reactor that dramatically reduces the half life of nuclear waste

there's always some fantastic new technology that either just happened or is purported to be right around the corner w/ nuclear that would make it safer or a billion times more efficient, problem is the existing plants periodically breaking down in near-apocalyptic ways obliterates any goodwill ito public opinon

didn't they just invesnt some kind of new reactor that's a billion times better than the one they just invented

Won't fiber optic computing be a thing in a few years? I imagine that will cut down drastically on resources used.

If you were looking at a spreadsheet of cost/benefits, I'm going to assume that nuclear is the brightest option on the page because these are all very smart people who have come to that conclusion.
Still, if you have a few billion, why not make a game-changing stab at solar? (which is currently pretty dirty, apparently)

If you were looking at a spreadsheet of cost/benefits, I'm going to assume that nuclear is the brightest option on the page because these are all very smart people who have come to that conclusion.

somewhat surprisingly, the main problem with nuclear (putting aside all the issues with disasters and disposing of the waste, which are huge problems but generally not anything that have dissuaded financiers in the past) is that it's NOT cost-effective to build new nuclear plants. it's one of the most expensive forms of energy, when you consider the startup costs. it only was possible in the past because of huge subsidies. there hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in the U.S. since the 1970s. yes, part of the reason is because of three mile island and chernobyl, but the main reason is that electricity from coal and natural gas is just less expensive to generate. and even clean energy like wind and solar, which once was more expensive than nuclear, is now the less expensive option, and continues to drop in price as technologies develop. nuclear, on the other hand, is just really fucking expensive and will continue to be for the foreseeable future (those Generation IV nuclear reactors that address, in part, waste management problems? yeah, they're really fucking expensive too).

sorry to link to grist yet again, but they do good work: http://grist.org/nuclear/2011-06-04-nuclear-power-is-expensive-and-uninsurable/

there hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in the U.S. since the 1970s.

? Perry Nuclear Power Plant, which I grew up down the street from, came online in 1987.

it only was possible in the past because of huge subsidies.

I think it's kind of inevitable that whatever the least fatal solution to the energy question is, is not going to be short of huge subsidies.

xpost

d'oh, I think the soundbyte I was looking for was "since the 1980s". But looking at this, two nuclear licenses were granted in the 1990s. None since 1996, though.

well given the huge startup costs it's all the more disheartening to see Gates et al tackling that hurdle in favor of nuclear instead of for hydro/solar because it's too boutique for him.

that said, apparently a solar cel currently uses more resources in its creation than it puts back over its lifetime. I can't really find a good source of updated info to see if this equation has changed or is likely to with new tech.

I saw this reported in the LA Times once but it was followed by a retraction a few days later. I doubt this is true. (But have no definitive links either.)

as i understand it, solar requires a huge outlay of costs upfront, but definitely returns value + over lifetime.

this is a really creative business solution for this problem:
http://www.economist.com/node/21548482?zid=313&ah=fe2aac0b11adef572d67aed9273b6e55

wait, that's not even the one i remembered reading about. this is the one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/solving-solars-biggest-problem-didnt-take-technology-development/263756/

The other thing about nuclear is that our current climate change problems stem from the unintended and, for a long time, unexpected consequences of our fossil fuel use.

Nuclear fuel use already has two massive environmental problems assoviated with it that we DO know about (accidents, and the fact that nobody knows what to do with such long-lasting and toxic waste), so it seems a poor alternative for that reason alone.

pparently a solar cel currently uses more resources in its creation than it puts back over its lifetime

lol @ this ridiculous calculation

i think that calculation is way antiquated at this point

solar is kinda intuitive to me as a source of energy bc it's the fucking sun. that shit is huge.

it's the main reason why we have global warming iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jpVtYQIols

by "using more resources" I mean the entire cost of production -- energy, raw materials, extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, and cleanup/disposal of the toxic byproducts. In the same way consumers don't pay for the hidden costs for fossil fuels, buyers of solar currently don't pay similar costs, especially if these are cels produced in china where environmental standards are likely not as strict.

yeah sorry there's just no way that's true

like, the number of variables/assumptions in that purported calculation is bonkers - what unit are we converting all these "resources" to? Dollars? kWh? MMBtu?