3 ms·

Been doing pretty well considering we apparently haven't had enough biocapacity for us to survive for the last 40 years.

pavlov 6y ago
It’s more like taking a new payday loan every month, and never fully paying off the old ones. You may think you’re managing until finally nobody will lend you and the house of cards comes down. The lender here is the ecosystem, and the skyrocketing interest rate is the planet’s temperature and loss of biodiversity, among other warning signs.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Better analogy would be getting inheritance and using it up at a growing pace while congratulating yourself for doing good job by getting the growing under control a little bit while the inheritance is still drying up very quickly. Our children and grandchildren won't have the luxury of inheritance and are going to pay for our carelessness.
paulryanrogers 6y ago
Down voted because this seems like a flippant response in the face of evidence that human activity is significant. And that regardless of whether past estimates were accurate to the decade or even century. Mercury didn't suddenly fill the oceans by itself. If the core samples are to be believed.
shoo 6y ago
It's the difference between stocks versus flows: the flow has been negative for the last 40 years, depleting stocks accumulated over the last n hundred million years. Earth overshoot day is defined from the imbalance in flows, it doesn't capture what's going on with the stocks. Things will get exciting when the stocks are reduced below critical thresholds, that'll generate a bunch of obvious symptoms, but the underlying problem is the imbalance in flows. This is all a bit abstract, for something more concrete in terms of specific quantifiable metrics, one arbitrary place to start is the 2009 paper "Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity Space for Humanity". https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=iss_pub https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Figure 6 estimates that the rate of biodiversity loss, climate change, the nitrogen cycle all exceed estimated boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity.

pavlov 6y ago

It’s more like taking a new payday loan every month, and never fully paying off the old ones. You may think you’re managing until finally nobody will lend you and the house of cards comes down. The lender here is the ecosystem, and the skyrocketing interest rate is the planet’s temperature and loss of biodiversity, among other warning signs.

lmilcin 6y ago
Better analogy would be getting inheritance and using it up at a growing pace while congratulating yourself for doing good job by getting the growing under control a little bit while the inheritance is still drying up very quickly. Our children and grandchildren won't have the luxury of inheritance and are going to pay for our carelessness.

paulryanrogers 6y ago

Down voted because this seems like a flippant response in the face of evidence that human activity is significant. And that regardless of whether past estimates were accurate to the decade or even century. Mercury didn't suddenly fill the oceans by itself. If the core samples are to be believed.

shoo 6y ago

It's the difference between stocks versus flows: the flow has been negative for the last 40 years, depleting stocks accumulated over the last n hundred million years. Earth overshoot day is defined from the imbalance in flows, it doesn't capture what's going on with the stocks. Things will get exciting when the stocks are reduced below critical thresholds, that'll generate a bunch of obvious symptoms, but the underlying problem is the imbalance in flows. This is all a bit abstract, for something more concrete in terms of specific quantifiable metrics, one arbitrary place to start is the 2009 paper "Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity Space for Humanity". https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=iss_pub https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Figure 6 estimates that the rate of biodiversity loss, climate change, the nitrogen cycle all exceed estimated boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity.