Climate change by greenhouse gas emission is just the cherry on top. The knife to the eye, so to speak.
Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. Our biological support systems are collapsing all around us. System shaped by natural selection are extremely resilient. That has prevented much of the damage to manifest itself in clear signals. But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore and we start to witness more and more systems fragment and fail. See the Great Barrier reef.
This is just the start. Water is beginning to get critically scarce in many regions of the world. The political upheavals caused by the effects of predatory over exploitation and pollution will bring down nations.
And so forth.
This is clearly an absurd claim. Did you mean to qualify this somehow, like “non-livestock mammalian biomass”? That would still be incorrect, but at least might not be off by orders of magnitude.
> Water is beginning to get critically scarce
Not really. Even desalination is cheap enough at this point (on the order of 1kL/$, last I checked) that we’d be fine with modest cost increases.
> But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore
What exactly are you predicting here? This sounds very apocalyptic but doesn’t match any plausible model I’m aware of for ecological failure modes.
Not necessary. The loss in biomass in fish[0][1] and insects[2][3] and tropical rainforests[4] can account for that. Birds have also taken a deep dive[6]. The most visible I think it is for fish. There alone we've lost an approximate 80% since the 1950ies. Imagine that. 80% of fish biomass, just gone. Similar for insects. German nature reserves have seen a decline of insect population by 75%. Really; non-livestock mammalian biomass is the least of our problems.
> Not really. Even desalination is cheap enough at this point (on the order of 1kL/$, last I checked) that we’d be fine with modest cost increases.
That only covers populations near bodies of water. Ironically these are the most vulnerable to climate change and threatened by the rising sea level. And while it might be possible to build and maintain the desalination infrastructure for the 9M people in Israel, good look trying the same thing in countries like India[8] or Balgladesh[8a]?
Water crises have been ranked in the top five of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012[9].
A quarter of the world's population faces severe water shortage[10]. Are you going to provide water to 3 Billion people using desalination plants? In many of these places, even water treatment plants are too expensive to operate. What are you going to power these plants with? Coal? We don't even have a plan to migrate the already existing energy infrastructure to renewables.
> What exactly are you predicting here? This sounds very apocalyptic but doesn’t match any plausible model I’m aware of for ecological failure modes
Here's a helpful link[11].
The norther African coast of the Mediterranean used to be woodland. The continued depletion and over exploitation of the has led to it being the arid region it is today [12]. Now imagine that, but on a global scale. Because the last 250 years have been harsh for our ecosystem and it's now as threadbare as it can be. Ecosystem fragmentation is already a dire issue. The strings in the web are breaking, one by one [13].
[0] https://www.aaas.org/news/researcher-reports-stunning-losses...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266684781_A_century...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326657472_Loss_of_b...
[5] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210225082525.h...
[6] https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Bird-Decline...
[7] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309200743_Defaunati...
[8] https://qz.com/india/1114843/chinas-grand-plan-for-the-brahm...
[8a] https://undark.org/2021/08/04/the-water-crisis-in-climate-vu...
[9] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_202...
[10] https://news.trust.org/item/20200902202142-ku0o2
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_collapse
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...
[13] https://theecologist.org/2012/feb/27/humanity-has-already-ha...
No non-trivial total biomass change occurs on scales shorter than thousands of years
"The biomass is the mass of living biological organisms in a given area or ecosystem at a given time."
Of course fish and insects are part of the biomass.
This paper tries to measure the thing you claimed as 75% over the last hundred or so years as actually being around 45% over the last 5,000 years. http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs61... I found this on the greenpeace website, so if anything this is probably a gross overestimate.
Let's assume good faith on both sides, otherwise this discussion will go nowhere. Agreed?
> They’re not the total biomass
No, they're not. I never claimed that. My claim was that
>> Of course fish and insects are part of the biomass.
Anyway. That out of the way, let's have a look at
> Just because a couple species types have declined by X%,
It's not a couple of species. It's whole ecosystems that are being emptied. The Zoological Society of London report [0] monitors 4392 vertebrate species. There's a consistent and dramatic reduction.
> This paper tries to measure the thing you claimed
Thanks for the research and for taking it serious enough to do some data hunting. I'll happily dig into the report. Since it's from 2011, I wonder if there's an updated version that includes more recent data.
I honestly don't have a better source that aggregates the loss globally over all species. I would be interested in more exact numbers. (Ask HN?!)
>>>> but at least might not be off by orders of magnitude.
I think we have established that the 75% is not "off by orders of magnitude". Could it be 60% reduction? Or 50%? Sure. Absent more data this could be possible, certainly. Given that it's only been a few decades, I don't think that matter too much - it's devastating in any case.
But I think we can agree that it's definitively above 7.5% or 0.75%. I honestly think that 75% is not too far off.
[0] https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/LPR%202020%20Full%20...
It’s hard to assume good faith when you keep saying nonsense and then acting like you didn’t. You said:
> Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity.
That’s obviously untrue, so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish?
> I think we have established that the 75% is not "off by orders of magnitude". Could it be 60% reduction? Or 50%? Sure.
Did you notice that the 45% reduction was over five thousand years, not ~75 years as you claimed?
Once again, you are saying totally whack stuff to the point where I have to assume you are trolling me somehow.
> That’s obviously untrue,
I've provided quite a bit of material for your research. Here are some highlights:
- birds: reduced by 29% (north america) since 1970
- birds: reduced by 20% (europe) since 1980
- ocean fishes: 80% lost in the last 100 years (global)
- insects: 82% lost in the last 27 years (Europe)
- freshwater fishes: 80% lost since 1970
- non-livestock mammals: 78% lost since 1960
I freely admit that the 75% since 1950 number is a ballpark guess. Given the data I refer to above, I reckon it's not far off. Certainly not orders of magnitude and it is certainly not "obviously untrue". We can debate if we lost 75% or 65% or 55%, but given the consequences in any case it doesn't really matter[0].
> so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish?
What? No. I'm talking about global, total biomass. Every species, every habitat. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. (Why would you think that I was talking only about fish? Are you trolling me?)
With regards to fish I wrote
> The most visible I think it is for fish. There alone we've lost an approximate 80% since the 1950ies.
To rephrase; the decline of fish is easily observed by the ever diminishing returns of fishery fleets and there's a lot of data about development of the fish population.
> Did you notice that the 45% reduction was over five thousand years, not ~75 years as you claimed?
That's one paper that makes some assumptions and comes up with a model. I have to check it in detail and it looks interesting. But that does not in any way refute the data in the papers I already provided or the very comprehensive report by ZSL[1]. This is a very thorough study that compiles data for 21,000 populations of animals from 4392 species.
To quote: "The population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have seen an alarming average drop of 68% since 1970.
> Once again, you are saying totally whack stuff to the point where I have to assume you are trolling me somehow.
I'm sorry if you got that impression, because it's not my intention. I thought that I'd made a good case by quoting the research and various papers. I'm not sure why you say that this is "totally whack"; everything is sourced pretty well.
[0] We're staring into the abyss and the abyss is winking back.
[1] https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/LPR%202020%20Full%20...
It would be a truly miserable experience, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of civilization.
The wars started by those who no longer can afford food might end civilization, but that's not assured either.
Eh, no. We don't have the infrastructure to live in air conditioned houses powered by solar or nuclear power. Both solar and nuclear only can power a fraction of houses. And if you need additional power to grow food that fraction gets ever smaller.
For both nuclear and a solar power you need an extensive, global infrastructure that will require raw materials (nuclear; fuel, solar; finished products) from all over the world. Good luck trying to acquire enough uranium from all over the world when all is going to shits. Who do you think exactly is going to do the extraction?
So, I guess we'll all die, rich and poor.
Uranium is easy. That comes from Northern Canada.
Well... one half of the country is working on such a budget. The other half is doing everything to sabotage that budget, get back control of the senate and the house and spend that $3.5 trillion on a tax bill for the super-wealthy. You know, like the last time they did that [1].
Bit even if the infrastructure got $3.5 trillion; that isn't enough to even fully repair the existing infrastructure[2]. The last time the ASCE released an infrastrucutre report, fixing the infrastructure would cost about $4.8 trillion.
That's just to fix the existing infrastructure. That money isn't going to build new nuclear reactors. By the way; how many nuclear reactors are currently being built in the US?
... Two... Two reactors with each a bit more that 1TWh. The latest one to come operational one was the Tennessee’s Watts Bar Unit 2, which began operation in June 2016. Before that Watts Bar Unit 1 in 1996. So, two new one ones in operation in 25 years. Two new ones being built.
How many more do you think we would need?
Well, we don't just have to cover the existing energy needs. Since it's getting hotter (I'm taking +1.5°C by 2050 as granted, since we're already at +1.25) we're going to need a bit more - but hey! - let's discount that. Let's say for living we don't need more energy, as generous as that is. Unfortunately you also want to grow food using electricity. And desalinate water. But let's also discount that. Let's discount all that and go with our current energy needs, for the sake of argument.
We currently have 100 reactors with each about 1TWh. That covers about 20% of US energy needs. Let's say we can get the other renewables also up to 20%. That would still leave us with about 600 new reactors to be built. By about 2060.
Do you honestly thing that this country has the political will to build 600 nuclear reactors over the span of forty years? This country cannot muster the political will to phase out coal or gas. This country cannot even muster the political will to stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
Sorry, my friend. I'm afraid that brute-forcing technology will save none of us. It might play a part in saving us, but unless we have a radical rethink about our current economic structure and incentives[3], this is just hot air.
[0] https://wusf.org/heres-whats-in-the-democrats-3-5-trillion-b...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017
[2] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
[3] And we know that this isn't going to happen. See [1]
You'll say "but storage". However, storage is getting cheaper even faster than solar/wind production is, and storage is not necessary for its use in food production.
Uff! I certainly didn't write it as a rant. But fine, I'll take that. But my intentions are good. I just want to make it clear to all of you that we face calamity and destruction and that there's no magical technofix that will save us. We will have to completely overhaul our socialeconomical value and incentive structures. Fat chance of that happening. (Prove me wrong! Do it!! Save mankind!)
> Not a word about solar (or wind)
Not a word about my pretty conclusive rebuttal of nuclear power as the technojebus to save mankind! I guess today no one gets what they want.
Hey, sure, we can do a feasibility examination of solar too.
> You'll say "but storage".
Haha, no. Storage is fine. There are pretty nice battery concepts in development. Liquid metal batteries are one crazy idea that I think has promise.
No, the problem lies elsewhere. Let's see: nowadays about 1.5% of energy comes from solar power, both PV and CSP. That's about 100GW (about one nuclear plant) and takes up about 1000 square miles.[0]
Let's say we somehow have the political will to cover a third of our energy needs with solar, somewhere in the ballpark of 2TW. That would cover an area of about 22,000 square miles.
So, to get to only about 33% of solar power by 2050, we'd have to cover 785 square miles with PV or CSP. Every year. For the next 28 years. Every year.
As a metric; in 2020 we've added about 190 square miles (or about 19GW) of solar power. Even if the current growth of solar power installations continues for a few years; we're still ridiculously off target. The bottleneck is installation capability.
The story is different but similar with wind.
First, there is no local mechanism by which having too small of a fraction of the total wealth that exists everywhere will cause a group to “crash”. Groups “crash” (assuming a sane interpretation of that word) usually due to local effects, like not having enough money to buy food, and not because they’re poor compared to someone else somewhere else. Obviously relative poverty could inspire a political movement or something, but I’m not seeing the “crash” here.
Second, power law distributions for wealth are natural, seem to have existed for all of civilizational history, and are arguably the only kind of stable equilibrium state that is possible with current technology.
Third, the appeal to greenhouse gas emissions seems less like part of a coherent economic argument and more of an irrelevant appeal to the idea that wealthy people (90% of Americans, in this case) are bad because they do wealthy people stuff like enjoy abundant food and energy.