Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by trish

That reminds me, the headline you linked says, "Ethanol from corn waste may be worse for the environment than gasoline." Thanks.

---

Well done. Never trust that an article he posts says what he claims it does because he generally does not read them. He once posted an article about the number of people killed by marijuana to show that people were obsessed with guns and not drugs. The point of the article was that marijuana does not cause death by overdose, which I think he realized eight minutes into the edit period and removed. He literally said something like, is anyone gonna address all the deaths caused by marijuana. There is no chance he's reading the book by Jared Diamond you recommended.

Trish, do you have a book recommendation for someone with little to no science background who wants to understand this subject a bit more? If you don't that's okay. I can't promise I'll have the discipline to go cover to cover but I will put in on my kindle for a rainy day (it may take a monsoon for me to read:):). Hope you had a merry christmas and will have a great new year.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by trish

You most certainly have been crying, "Overpopulation," for the last several posts.

---

I wonder if Redvex has any recommendations for dealing with overpopulation....oops forget I said that I don't want to know.

I decided to read your articles for you Fanti. They propose different ways that ethanol could increase global warming. First, if you divert crops towards biofuel production, people still need the same amount of food and this requires diverting land and resources by burning down rainforests and plowing grasslands. This obviously increases carbon dioxide. The other article says that removing corn residue from fields reduces the field's ability to trap carbon dioxide. Both of these problems are surmountable and both articles offer solutions. Here are excerpts:

If you use corn residue and don't take up more land: "That said, the EPA dismissed the study because it assumed all of a corn field's waste would be used for ethanol production, an assumption the EPA said was "an extremely unlikely scenario that is inconsistent with recommended agricultural practices." And the study did note that emissions could be offset by planting cover crops, so it's not guaranteed that cellulosic ethanol production using corn would have to be more harmful to the planet than gasoline." In other words, the EPA claims this study overestimated the effect of taking corn residue and did not account for a practice that could remediate the problem.

As for using land for crops which need to be replaced: Alex Farrell at Berkeley sees a way out of this. He says the focus of the biofuels industry needs a rapid change of direction, away from using cropland — which is where most U.S. biofuels come from today — and toward other sources of starting material.

"We could replace all of the ethanol that we consume in California just using waste that goes to the landfill today, and turning that into ethanol," Farrell says.


Environmentally friendly biofuels could also be made from agricultural waste or grasses grown on land that's not suitable for crops. The biofuels industry is heading in that direction, but the technology to make use of fuels other than corn and soy is still in its infancy.

So both articles recommend ways to overcome the pitfalls of current ethanol production. The first recommendation does not require any new technology and the second one requires development of biofuels that use waste and do not divert crops that would otherwise be consumed. But of course if you are just looking for articles that say any attempt to remediate a problem makes it worse and are thereby recommending quietism, you will not read the articles or consider possible solutions recommended by scientists. If everyone took this approach to solving problems nobody would do anything.

Conclusion: Read the articles you post. Don't just search for propaganda to support a conclusion you are going to uselessly repeat. Thanks.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by trish

There are two uses of the term 'primary' that we need to distinguish. When I say that the primary cause of our current warming trend is the release of sequestered greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere, I’m am saying that release is the foremost or proximate cause. When a doctor says the primary cause of death was loss of blood due to the severed artery he's giving the proximate cause. When the detective says the artery was severed because Mr.A fired a bullet into the deceased's chest, he's giving the first (in the temporal sense) cause. When you say “...that warming is due to secondary and tertiary effects of overpopulation - nothing else. In other words high smog is due to over population, not the emissions themselves...” you’re claiming that overpopulation is the first cause (in a temporal sense) of global warming.


In theory it's possible that a population not change in size, but to act in such a way as to lower the carry capacity of its environment to the point where their numbers exceed the carrying capacity and they go extinct. What then is the first cause of their demise? Overpopulation or the actions that deteriorated their environment? I find the question somewhat academic. It's more helpful to simply understand how the two causes are interrelated.

If a population of people has the capacity to deliberately or accidentally raise or lower the carrying capacity of their environment, then what one would regard as overpopulation depends upon the actions the population takes toward the environment. Overpopulation occurs when the population size approaches or exceeds the carrying capacity. The carrying capacity is determined by how the population interacts with its environment. The two issues are intertwined.

Both the Anasazi Indians and the original inhabitants of Easter Island grew beyond the carrying capacity of their environments. In part the causes of these two extinctions was overpopulation. But the demise of the Anasazi was also due to poor farming practices and soil erosion. On the other hand the Easter Islanders deforested their environment for the purpose of moving and erecting massive blocks of carved stone for apparently religious/political purposes. Both civilizations grew in size, but both also behaved in ways that diminished the carrying capacities of their environments. Many other civilizations elsewhere also grew, but managed to maintain ways of life that raised (or at least did not diminish) the carrying capacity of their environments.

Jared Diamond’s book Collapse examines a number of very interesting examples.

---

I know this is my fourth post in a row, but this is an incredibly thoughtful post that deserved a more thoughtful response. I recommend reading all of Trish' posts in this thread but this one is particularly good.

I'll post this as help to those that don't understand.
Until the root cause is eliminated, it doesn't matter how "green" one goes, it doesn't matter how much is "banned", the "problem" will always remain.

So here's an example: Ban everything bad, go 100% green, and the "extinction of our species" will still happen as all farmable land mass and oxygen producing plants will not support our population growth.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MrFanti

I'll post this as help to some that don't understand.
Until the root cause is eliminated, it doesn't matter how "green" one goes, it doesn't matter how much is "banned", the "problem" will always remain.

---

It is you who do not understand, on so many levels it's mind-boggling. First of all, even if you were correct in what you wrote about the causal chain what you say here is not true. Take Trish's example of the person being shot. The root cause of his death is him being shot and the most proximate cause of his death is him bleeding to death because an artery is severed. Is there more than one way to prevent his death? Yes! One could approach the problem by preventing the shooting. But what if you aren't able to prevent the shooting? Should the doctor let him bleed to death if he has means to prevent it? Of course not. He should use whatever life-saving methods he can.

You also misunderstood Trish' post discussing the relationship between carrying capacity and population. What matters is not necessarily which moves in an absolute sense but their relationship to one another. What you don't want is for these two lines to converge on one another. Whether the convergence is caused by population increase or by a reduction in the carrying capacity, you either come up with a solution or you have a great deal of needless suffering. BTW, the causal chain is probably much more complicated than you indicate. Perhaps technology increases population size by improving efficiency but also reduces carrying capacity by depleting resources and causing other ecological and climatic changes. Furthermore, yes population increase also causes climatic changes independently so there are many layers there. But what matters is how we prevent our population from exceeding the carrying capacity of our environment.

Your response to Trish' post was the forum equivalent of a book-burning. It was written with the clear thinking that inspired witch trials. I can only imagine you reassuring the family of an accused witch by saying "don't worry, if she drowns she'll be cleared of all charges."

For someone who likes guns so much it's strange you have a penchant for bringing a swiss army knife to a gunfight.

And additional clarification.
For those that think I'm a Republican....WRONG.

As I explained in another thread, the world does not consists of absolutes such as Republican & Democrat....2 examples to illustrate, Independents and Libertarians fit neither the Republican nor Democrat models.

Quote:

---

Trish, do you have a book recommendation for someone with little to no science background who wants to understand this subject a bit more?

---

The journal Nature will often publish articles related to climate change that aren’t too technical. Scientific American also publishes related articles by active researchers which are aimed at the lay public.

Not being a climate scientist nor a planetary scientist myself ,I do not regularly read the technical papers in these fields. I do, however, attend general conferences of the APS where I listen to and interact with just these sorts of experts.

There’s one technical book I find myself going back to frequently (partly because its on my shelf and therefore handy) it's The Physics of Atmospheres by John Houghton. It’s a graduate level text on exactly what the title says: the physics of the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not about climate change per se (although there is a chapter devoted to the topic-which may be somewhat dated by now - my edition is the 3rd). But the text is good at introducing a mathematically competent novice to the standard models of various atmospheric phenomena. A nice book but not for everyone.

I’m not sure I can recommend any particular popular books on climate change. I don’t read ‘em myself.

The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart gets good reviews from some of my friends. It purports to be a history of the science of climate change.

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann is touted by activists. Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything:Capitalism vs The Climate gets goods reviews from one end of the political spectrum, but that’s exactly what I’d like to avoid in a book on science.

When I peruse the popular titles I see books on the uncertainty of climate change, the climate change hoax and titles about the devastation that will result from climate change. It would be nice to find a decent popular book that explained the science and the predictions without political bias or being alarmist. If anyone has one to recommend jump right in. One problem with finding such a book is that the predictions are indeed alarming.

It’s important to distinguish between the predictions of climate science and those of political science, economics, and other sciences related to the behavior of humans and their institutions. One of the predictions of climate science is that within the century the sea level is expected to rise somewhere between 11 to 38 inches (this according to The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Predictions concerning how this will effect our civilization, our political practices, how it may initiate mass migrations of people, famine, plagues etc. do not properly belong in the realm of climate science. I would like to see a popular book that deals only in the latter phenomena.

I think we can save MrFanti’s pov that overpopulation is the ‘root’ problem, but not his view of causality.

First we have to be careful not to confuse population growth with overpopulation. I think MrFanti will agree that a perpetually growing population will very likely overtake the carrying capacity of its environment - even if that capacity is also rising due to technological efforts. I base this on my prejudice (which I think MrFanti shares) that its easier to procreate than advance and implement new technologies. When a population approaches or overtakes the carrying capacity, we then have overpopulation.

Populations of plants and animals tend to grow ‘logistically’; i.e. they follow a curve (called the logistic curve) that rises exponentially, makes a sharp bend and then asymptotically approaches a horizontal bound (the carrying capacity of that population’s niche). People, on the other hand, have the capacity to think ahead, cooperate, and change their behaviors. Our populations have the ability (if not the inclination) to climb at slower rates and stabilize well below the carrying capacity associated with our life-style and environment.

But we also have the ability to raise and lower the carrying capacity of our environment. Without actually increasing our numbers, we can act stupidly and drop the carrying capacity to a point below the size of our population.

I agree, if we don’t stabilize the size of our population our continued growth will result in overpopulation and its concomitant problems. But even if we do stabilize our population, if we continue to do stupid things to the environment it can deteriorate to the point where it will no longer sustain a population of our size. In both cases overpopulation is tautologically the ‘root’ cause of the problems concomitant with overpopulation (MrFanti’s position). However, in the first case the cause of overpopulation is population growth (to the point where it exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment) whereas in the second case where population size is stabilized well below the carrying capacity, the cause of overpopulation are behaviors that deteriorate the environment and drop its carrying capacity. In the actual world I suspect both of these things occur together.

Addendum:
Notice under this way of looking at it, overpopulation doesn’t explain climate change. The stress that an oversized population puts upon an environment can take many different forms. We might have poisoned the planet before we covered the planet with greenhouse gasses. We might contaminated the surface with radioactive debris and initiated nuclear winter.
The word ‘overpopulation’ explains very little by itself.

To know why climate change is currently a concomitant problem of overpopulation you have to know what humans have been and are now doing to their environment and quantitatively how that effects the environment when it’s done by large numbers of people. The primary cause of the current climate shift remains the anthropogenic release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. It’s the cause that explains why climate change is concomitant with the current practices of large numbers of people.