Human race ‘will be extinct within 100 years’, claims leading scientist

That's not the sky. It's just the goose migration season.

 

There was a story in the newspaper yesterday about how they have determined that phytoplankton levels are down 40% from ~1955, and how that is such a key to survival of many species, not just aquatic.

They mentioned warming as a main reason, but I wonder at how much interference in the life cycle of phytoplankton has occurred from pollution, as well.

It is possible that we've effectively shot ourselves in the foot, and that our demise is already on its way.

 

Who knows ?

Runaway AGW will reduce us to 1B by 2100, apparently. Then there is peak oil.

Read "Under a green sky : global warming, the mass extinctions of the past, and what they can tell us about our future by Peter D. Ward".

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis[/ame]

 

I'm not sure whether human population growth is properly described as geometric or exponential, but either way, we overshoot the Earth's carrying capacity. Industrialization and the green revolution vastly increased the carrying capacity, but population growth will eventually surpass it.

We have an economic model that requires growth, and that model is so beneficial to the very small number of people who hold political power that it's not likely to change. If we do not stabilize population, we surpass our food production capability, but if we do stabilize population our economy will collapse due to the inability of the reduced working population to support the retired population. There may be solutions to this dilemma, but they run counter to the interests of the rulers, who benefit from a consumer-based growth-dependent economy; and they are thwarted by the biological urge to keep making more babies. People want to make babies, and will rebel violently against anyone who tries to limit their baby making.

Thus in the end it is politics that prevents us from using our brains to avoid the Malthusian boom and bust cycles that plague all other species.

A pessimist sees the glass as half empty; an optimist sees the glass as half full; a realist sees that the glass is half full of water and half full of cow manure and goes off and drinks an artificially-sweetened chemically-flavored bottle of carbonated soda pop instead.

 

I remember that book, it was a good read. I also read "The Last Gasp" about that time, the science was a bit more contrived, but it's a good doomsday scenario as well, starting with polluted oceans.

I've got a few acres in MN near my relative's farm, and I can get there with one tank on the Prius. While I don't ever expect anything that dramatic, it's always nice to have a contingency plan.

 

To go off-topic a little bit, a pessimist sees the glass as half empty; an optimist sees the glass as half full; an existentialist sees the glass as all full, just half of it is water, the other half is air; a paranoid person is too busy worrying about who left the water behind and is it poisoned to notice how full it is; and a corporate bean-counter sees a case where somebody purchased a glass that was twice as big as needed, and hurries off to update the purchase request forms so that doesn't happen again.

 

That's it in a nutshell. Only, we may have already 'overshot' the carrying capacity (if all 6B humans on earth today were expected to 'enjoy' the lifestyle current americans do).

 

ya, they go right over my house.

 

i wonder what the population would be if pesticides hadn't been invented.

 

Darwin saw the problem of overpopulation right away, but figured wars and disease would limit growth. Not true enough, as science is prevailing. Or at least trying to, battling ignorance. My guess is religion has to come around if man is to survive. Thank heavens I won't be around.

 

That's the real nutshell: degredation of quality of life rather than outright extinction. Increasing population necessarily decreases the share of natural resources available to each individual, whether renewable or not, so somebody somewhere will lose something of the life they used to enjoy (the majority of those somebodies will be those already in poverty or on its brink, since they're least able to defend against the wealthier portion of humanity grabbing as much as it can to stave off the inevitable for as long as it can).

While the degredation could certainly be severe enough to increase mortality, it would not happen evenly, and even something as cataclysmic as sea level rise, everything closer to the equator than 60 degrees of latitude turned to desert, asteroid collision or even total thermonuclear war would leave surviving pockets of humanity which, given the demonstrated infinite ingenuity of our species, would find a way to avoid dying out completely.

And after a few generations no one alive would know what they're missing; they'd have the tattered records of what life had been like, but it'd be so fantastic compared to the life they know it'd quickly become myth, not something they'd feel any loss of.

 

An all-out nuclear war would very likely cause our extinction, since global levels of radiation would be too high for humans to survive anywhere. A big enough asteroid, or the eruption of Yellowstone, might leave a few pockets of humans.

If Stephan Jay Gould is right (punctuated equilibrium -- the theory that most evolution happens in small, isolated populations) then after an asteroid or Yellowstone, remaining populations might be small enough to evolve into something more suited to the new conditions. However, most evolutionary branches are dead ends, so it's likely that we'd be extinct in fairly short order.

If there are habitable planets in space, whatever is living there will be much better off if we go extinct before we develop space travel. Though, of course, one scenario is that we send colonists to another planet, where they are captured and bred for food by creatures even more vicious than us.

 

Boy, you guys know how to party on a Friday night!

 

Glad you could join us! Grab a beer. I'd offer you chips and dip but all the dip chips are all at Fred's House of Politics

 

Hey, I've got nothing better to do than read a book, play Finger Physics on my iTouch, and post on Prius Chat. When I'm not traveling Fridays are no different than any other night.

 

Speaking of partying...I would post something witty and insightful, but my head still hurts too much from yesterday.

 

To Serve Man