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Death by hockey sticks

184 points by elahieh 4y ago

Gravityloss 4y ago
"So far, we're not doing any better than the cyanobacteria" - Ray Pierrehumbert
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Here’s a proposed rubric for deciding what things in life are “good” and what things are “bad.” If its plotted curve is a hockey stick pointing up in the present system, it’s probably a bad thing. I would guess that the number of professors is also going up like a hockey stick and I am sure the amount of documents published on the Internet is going up like a hockey stick. According to the author’s rubric, the world would be a better place if the author resigned and quit publishing. After reading this facile analysis, I encourage the author to make the world a better place in this manner.
- IntrepidWorm 4y ago
  Witicism aside, im not sure your critique holds any water. Runaway growth in any context is something to pay close attention to. In fairness, the superset of examples chosen is not objective (nor could it be, practically) - plenty of datasets could be made to show aspects of life increasing or decreasing linearly, or quadratically, or with some weird quasi-sinusoidal period. That doesn't take away from the impact the chosen data has. It's not that all life follows a hockey stick curve in time - its simply that we're in the process of beating the planet to death with a few of them.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    You don't get to claim runaway growth based on graphs where the industrial age takes 10% of the X axis. You don't get to claim anything based on those, except that industries exist. If you want to do some detailed analysis to find actual problems, you are welcome. But the article is pure sensationalism.
credit_guy 4y ago
Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
- guenthert 4y ago
  > Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Considering how cheap fossil fuels are it's a miracle that 37% of electricity generated globally is done so without using fossil fuels and there is nothing but progress on this front. https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    But we are moving quite fast towards using renewable resources. For example the top 6 materials produced by the world industries are: coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, steel and fertilizers. By 2050 the first 3 will be a tiny fraction of what we are consuming today. Concrete is not made of renewable materials, it's made primarily of sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made out of limestone. All those can be considered as essentially infinite resources. Steel is one of the most recycled materials (in the US more than two thirds of all manufactured steel is recycled). Fertilizers are currently made primarily out of fossil fuels (natural gas), but that's a historical accident (fossil fuels only contain carbon and hydrogen, not nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; they are simply the feedstock for hydrogen). Once we can produce green hydrogen, we'll remove fossil fuels from the fertilizer manufacturing process. Bonus: next most produced material is plastics. Produced from fossil fuels today, can be produced from green hydrogen and carbon captured from CO2.
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HomeDeLaPot 4y ago
I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Hockey sticks usually end up being S-shaped curves. The author is just doom-screaming because we're currently in the rapid change phases of lots of them but hasn't shown on any of the graphs the point where disaster will occur. What's the critical rate of extinctions that would end global economic growth before most of the world has western quality of life? He has no clue! So his worries are just emotional and based on misleading graphs. One of the graphs (forest cover) is extrapolated into the future and shown to be zero. He could instead have shown in plateauing if he wanted to tell a different story.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    I'm not sure how S-shaped curves help when it comes to the collapse of all ecosystems is concerned... are we supposed to innovate our way out of rapidly dwindling biodiversity on the planet? insects and pollinators birds and large game animals forests and rainforests kelp forests dying coral reefs dying overfishing plastic pollution greenhouse gas pollution acidification of oceans 1/3 of all arable land underwent desertification The real question is, why AREN'T we concerned more? Is there some sort of magic hope in innovation, are we just super optimists? No, it's simply that we failed at collective action to such an extent that even thinking about a viable solution is so hopeless that most of us don't even bother. The one place where we were able to curb pollution was CFCs in the Toronto Protocol. That's it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
    - rimliu 4y ago
      your list is missing one crucial component: over sensationalised headlines
sbuttgereit 4y ago
Kinda funny. Just before seeing this article I had just finished watching a wonderful video on the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4) which isn't exactly the same as what's being talked about here... but in the same class of problem if you make that class big enough :-). When looking at these sorts of things, surely such "hockey sticks" are often times just not considering the limiting factors? I'm no mathematician (by any approximation) but it seems like more often than not finding such a result should point to some incompleteness or some closer look being required to get the full picture. (P.S. that video was very math heavy and no, I didn't understand most of the math beyond hand-wavy terms... still glad they went into the detail.)
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Some of these graphs are pretty silly. The downward hockey stocks are extrapolating based on two data points, and the shape of the curve is just not at all plausible.
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soared 4y ago
I don’t know much about forests but it seems incorrect that at any point in time 55% of land mass was covered by forests.
- lwansbrough 4y ago
  I would bet a great deal that the Mesozoic Era yielded a much higher level of plant biomass than the current era.
- anikan_vader 4y ago
  About 69% of Sweden is currently forest, so it doesn't seem infeasible to me (even accounting for the fact that Sweden is not representative).
- throwabob123 4y ago
  > I don’t know much about forests The past was amazing. One example: Trees predated organisms that broke them down, so at some point there were just piles of trees, many tens or even a few hundreds of feet, on land, and that's why some trees are theorized to grow so tall so fast. Just on the face of it though, you're a layperson, but you find soil, coal, peat, lots of biotic mass almost everywhere, what do you think put it there? Deep, deep soil. It's trees. You drive through California or Illinois or Texas or New York or wherever you live, and you see all these farms. Single stands of weird trees. There were forests. You can look at Google Maps and see how parts of the Amazon today, which are obviously being poached, look like the fringes of the US too. Not only was land mass covered in forests. You know there were indigenous Americans absolutely everywhere when Europeans arrived in the Americas. Not only that, but climate change predated the arrival of settlers. There were forests completely cleared of brush, that the settlers commented you could run horses through, because indigenous Americans had been using wildfires to manage the land as game parks. There were indigenous people everywhere in Australia too. The oceans were full of life. Just like preposterous amounts of fish before industrial fishing. Romans would routinely describe the Mediterranean as boiling. They weren't being stupid, they were describing the colossal number of fish in there. If you go diving in a genuinely protected area like the Galapagos, it's insane, there are just an incredible amount of fish. You look at a deep sea trawler, it pulls out just an insane amount of fish. It was like that everywhere. I don't know how laypeople get this idea that Earth was always as sick as it is now. It was like 10-100x more filled with life 250 years ago. It's ridiculous. People aren't wrong about the bugs. There is a far longer and stubborn cultural heritage of documenting nature, long predating Republicans, so it couldn't be just politics that has led people astray. Maybe they're just stupider.
dafty4 4y ago
Don’t plot the amount of wild mammalian biomass, plot the amount of totally mammalian biomass. Doubt you’ll see a downward hockey stick in that case. What makes a wild mammal more special than a domestic one?
- lwansbrough 4y ago
  Probably diversity, and the fact that they can exist without human oversight.
- cmgxyz 4y ago
  Nothing, but that doesn't mean they deserve extinction. It'll be a poorer Earth if it's all housecats and no tigers. What makes us more special than other animals? Also nothing, in my view.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > What makes us more special than other animals? Also nothing, in my view. If you really believe that then you should go live out in a field and eat grass like oxen rather than writing that comment on the internet. If humans aren't more special, then nothing is special at all.
EGreg 4y ago
Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... Human population growth. This is the input to all the other stuff. The past few generations thinks they're the most sophisticated and intelligent, but they're living on an ecological credit card. And the bill is going to come due. Just like any bill after a spending spree, this is going to be a doozy. Probably extinction level...
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... > Human population growth. Please don't go down this path: Every time someone does so, it always leads to eugenics in some form or another.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    All the more reason to do the things which control population growth (like educate and reduce time burdens on women, reduce child and infant mortality, and redistribute wealth) before the eugenicists start feeling the constraints of a finite world then.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    We can do plenty with women's education and condoms. What path would you prefer instead?
  - agileAlligator 4y ago
    We practice eugenics with almost every lifeform we have domesticated but refuse to do so with ourselves, just coz some guy with a funny mustache got it confused with muh white masterrace.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Wow that skidded off the beaten track quickly. Population controls !== eugenics Dominating animals is part of human nature / DNA. Not sure what we do about it. Stop eating meat probably becomes ahead of stop breading poodles.
influx 4y ago
What ever happened to peak oil? Seems like a similar argument here.
- a3w 4y ago
  I feel like feeding a troll, but peak oil happened in 2020. Says BP. Limits of growth said it would happen between 2010 and 2030. So the answer to "whatever happened to peak oil" is "it's on track as scheduled" Disclaimer: We do have some economic transition in europe due to a (cold/hot) war, that may conflagrate the actual year due to spikes and valleys, though. <strikethrough>Psychohistory</strikethrough> Data science works for a large populace but does not take into account individual events.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    To give a recent citation, from April of this year: > The energy transition continues to gain steam, with oil demand projected to peak in this decade, perhaps as soon as 2025, according to new research by McKinsey & Company. https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/the-environment/27042022/peak-oil-may-be-three-years-away-mckinsey-reports/ https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/the-environment/27042...
WoodenChair 4y ago
You can't make hockey sticks out of just a few data points, as this author does in several of the charts. For example, the deforestation chart is based on a few data points from a UN study (where Our World in Data that the author links to cites as its source). But tree coverage has actually increased over the past 30 years according to some studies by NASA and elsewhere. For example, one 2018 paper from Nature says: "We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally5—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics. Global bare ground cover has decreased by 1.16 million km2 (−3.1%), most notably in agricultural regions in Asia. Of all land changes, 60% are associated with direct human activities and 40% with indirect drivers such as climate change." [0] 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9
- mupra 4y ago
  A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.
  - WoodenChair 4y ago
    You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. For example, you can draw many curves through 2 data points, but you can also draw a straight line. The Our World in Data "Primary vs. planted forest" data that he cites for the "Old Growth Forest Cover" chart has just 2 data points (1990 and 2019).
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. Having a rich data set doesn't help. https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192 https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192
Barrin92 4y ago
Old and fairly trivial insight is that most hockey-stick graphs end up being S-curves and that's already in sight for most of the ones given here. Population is on its way to a plateau, so is energy consumption in the rich world, and so on. Economic growth due to poor nations caching up will still keep going for a while but it's not that unlikely that we'll eventually end up in a fairly static situation at least for a time, which wasn't uncommon in human history. runaway scenarios without anything reigning them in are very rare or otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about them because we'd all have drowned in Tribbles already. There's a lot of psychology in these imagined scenarios and relatively little long-run empirical observation because complex systems tend to have a significant amount of constraints and regulatory mechanisms that kick in either voluntarily or involuntarily to impose some limits on growth. They tend to be more cyclical in nature rather than tending towards unlimited or even linear growth.
narrator 4y ago
The biggest problem with our sustainability is we literally piss massive amounts of nitrogen into the ocean and replace it with the Haber-Bosch process. You had farmers in Asia farm the same land for 40 centuries all powered by "night soil" or humanure or the various other euphemism for it.
joegibbs 4y ago
The amount of plastic discarded looks terrible, but it's on a graph that starts in 1100 AD, so it would look outrageous even if people only threw out a single plastic bottle in 1920 and 10 this year
telotortium 4y ago
Oh God, it's the Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist[1] dude again. [1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  Sadly he's still at it. To save people from subjecting themselves to all of his tortured logic, here's just a sample from the article you linked: > The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. Basically his conclusion is that at some point in the next 400 years, the predominant economic system on Earth will have to change in some way (and that economists are short-sighted for not believing this). The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)" [0] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    That's the entire point though. For economic growth to continue, the economy must completely decouple from all necessary resources. At that point all real commodities are not part of the economy which is growing so the thing with the commodities in it is the real economy which is static. The inevitability of the conclusion is ironclad. The only matter is which limiting resources necessitate moving to a steady state economy.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).
shmageggy 4y ago
For a 500 page version of this analysis with correspondingly more rigor (including an acknowledgment of S-curves), see Growth by Vaclav Smil. Although this is just a tiny, flawed snapshot of the argument, the conclusions are the same.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  The good thing about this type of fossil fuel fan fiction is that it's self-refuting. They put all that effort into saying "energy made us rich" so implying we must worship fossil fuels. But as soon as the cost curves cross over the argument switches and works against them. So then they need to argue that its not actually cheaper, its just a conspiracy to deceive you while even fossil fuel producers, corporate and state, are saying the opposite.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> This, to me, is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two (essentially, the GWP curve from before). The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently. It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason. Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda: > Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure. He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag. He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution: > In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations No, it's not. https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-solar-panels https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently. Land, energy, and other finite resources are zero sum. Unless the amount of land required to have a good quality of life exponentially decreases then the following holds. If your system permits me to increase the amount of land I control in direct proportion to the amount of land I control (ie. it is possible to profit). Your rising tide isn't lifting all boats, it's lifting the superyacht while all the small boats are chained to the bottom.
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jbu 4y ago
Ohh, I loved this blog - glad to find it again! Particularly remember https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change... - an understandable back-of-the-envelope calculation of how f*&ked we are with CO2 emissions.
atemerev 4y ago
Every hockey stick is the beginning of a logistic curve (if you are optimistic), or a bell curve (if you are less optimistic). Exponential growth is impossible given limited resources.
GrandaPanda 4y ago
I failed to read the full article as the warmup graph of human population is not the full story, and the conclusion is incorrect. We need to look at the full picture, and that is that we are on track to reach a stable human population of approximately 10 billion iirc. This is due to greater global education levels, and subsequent lowered birth rates. There is a fantastic book called factfulness that addresses this directly, and also calls into question the dramatic effect of graphs in isolation, and how they can ver much be S curves etc.
personjerry 4y ago
Some thoughts: > [Graphs showing exponential population up, outputs up, resource extraction up] Ok, great > [Graphs showing logistic wild animal biomass, forest cover] Ok, not good > Whatever model we have adopted for existing on this planet, it seems to be a poor choice. It appears to be on track to fail. WHAT? Where did this conclusion come from? There's so many hoops jumped to arrive at this conclusion that I'm astounded. How is "fail" defined by forest cover? Or number of wild animal species? As though we will blindly march towards 0 forest cover over the next N years and immediately suffocate ourselves? No, of course we are paying attention and will come up with new inventions or policies as requirements come up. We are resourceful and intelligent and we'll find ways to adapt. On another note, curves like this in ecology almost always end up as an S-curve (see Carrying Capacity [0]). It's just a matter of finding what our capacity is and thinking about how we can gracefully decline in growth and avoid the Malthusian trap [1]). Tangentially, I guess this might eventually lead to policies like China's One Child policy [2], and interestingly that means whatever percentages of different cultures exist when our population growth slows will probably remain about the same. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
m0llusk 4y ago
The ultimate conclusion that human population and economic activity are bad does not follow. We have only just started to begin working with efficient resource management and renewable energy sources. Just to point out some natural counterexamples trees dropping their leaves seasonally is a fairly recent catastrophic pollution situation that nature has dealt with in ways that actually increase biomass. Large ruminant herds actually propagate productive environments which we learned when trying to quantify the damage done by their activities. So it is entirely possible that a large population of humans with high economic activity could actually interact positively with the environment. The problem is that we have barely even begun to experiment with how this might work.
lettergram 4y ago
The recently added postscript is my favorite part of the article. It comments how traffic appears exponential due to the recent HN traffic. Then says: > I trust I need not explain how funny I think this is. I also have a fairly robust idea for how this curve will look a week from now. Just sayin’. Traffic will drop fast and return to normal (slightly higher base) in a few days. Every thing in this article discusses current curves. But there’s actually good reason to assume those curves will return to baseline. Particularly, ones such as “gonad tree cover”. Tree cover is increasing and will return to base as we no longer are using it as a primary energy source and are increasingly using less to build. My point is the doom and gloom in most cases is not really warranted as it will adjust. The author also mentions our “global civilization”, we don’t have one. I get their point, but it’s an important note that we have multiple civilizations. That means these curves are happening due to the sun of independent actions of all civilizations. There’s probably no way to change the outcome. The destruction of the rainforest is out of the control of all civilizations beyond Brazil. China is by far the largest polluter in the world, no one can stop that. Those hockey stick curves might be inevitable; but they probably aren’t “globally true”. I’m betting if we look at mammal populations in places like Idaho or Alaska they’ve been less impacted than say, Massachusetts. The problem isn’t really clear from the global charts
westcort 4y ago
I dread being around when Malthusian predictions start to be realized.
flashpoint31415 4y ago
The PS at the end of the article made me laugh until I realized that I read it too fast. I thought someone submitted the article to Hockey News - which would have been incredibly funny, not Hacker News.
civilized 4y ago
Some valid info here, but also some utter absurdity, and they're mixed together without distinction or comment. For example: with a completely straight face, the author constructs an "inverted hockey stick" from two data points on wild land mammal mass and predicts the complete extinction of wild land mammals in a matter of decades. It seems like, after plotting a few hockey sticks, the author bought into his own conceit and started hallucinating them everywhere.

184 points by elahieh 4y ago

Gravityloss 4y ago

"So far, we're not doing any better than the cyanobacteria" - Ray Pierrehumbert

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> Here’s a proposed rubric for deciding what things in life are “good” and what things are “bad.” If its plotted curve is a hockey stick pointing up in the present system, it’s probably a bad thing. I would guess that the number of professors is also going up like a hockey stick and I am sure the amount of documents published on the Internet is going up like a hockey stick. According to the author’s rubric, the world would be a better place if the author resigned and quit publishing. After reading this facile analysis, I encourage the author to make the world a better place in this manner.

IntrepidWorm 4y ago
Witicism aside, im not sure your critique holds any water. Runaway growth in any context is something to pay close attention to. In fairness, the superset of examples chosen is not objective (nor could it be, practically) - plenty of datasets could be made to show aspects of life increasing or decreasing linearly, or quadratically, or with some weird quasi-sinusoidal period. That doesn't take away from the impact the chosen data has. It's not that all life follows a hockey stick curve in time - its simply that we're in the process of beating the planet to death with a few of them.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  You don't get to claim runaway growth based on graphs where the industrial age takes 10% of the X axis. You don't get to claim anything based on those, except that industries exist. If you want to do some detailed analysis to find actual problems, you are welcome. But the article is pure sensationalism.

credit_guy 4y ago

Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

guenthert 4y ago
> Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Considering how cheap fossil fuels are it's a miracle that 37% of electricity generated globally is done so without using fossil fuels and there is nothing but progress on this front. https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
- credit_guy 4y ago
  But we are moving quite fast towards using renewable resources. For example the top 6 materials produced by the world industries are: coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, steel and fertilizers. By 2050 the first 3 will be a tiny fraction of what we are consuming today. Concrete is not made of renewable materials, it's made primarily of sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made out of limestone. All those can be considered as essentially infinite resources. Steel is one of the most recycled materials (in the US more than two thirds of all manufactured steel is recycled). Fertilizers are currently made primarily out of fossil fuels (natural gas), but that's a historical accident (fossil fuels only contain carbon and hydrogen, not nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; they are simply the feedstock for hydrogen). Once we can produce green hydrogen, we'll remove fossil fuels from the fertilizer manufacturing process. Bonus: next most produced material is plastics. Produced from fossil fuels today, can be produced from green hydrogen and carbon captured from CO2.

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HomeDeLaPot 4y ago

I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?

sacrosancty 4y ago
Hockey sticks usually end up being S-shaped curves. The author is just doom-screaming because we're currently in the rapid change phases of lots of them but hasn't shown on any of the graphs the point where disaster will occur. What's the critical rate of extinctions that would end global economic growth before most of the world has western quality of life? He has no clue! So his worries are just emotional and based on misleading graphs. One of the graphs (forest cover) is extrapolated into the future and shown to be zero. He could instead have shown in plateauing if he wanted to tell a different story.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I'm not sure how S-shaped curves help when it comes to the collapse of all ecosystems is concerned... are we supposed to innovate our way out of rapidly dwindling biodiversity on the planet? insects and pollinators birds and large game animals forests and rainforests kelp forests dying coral reefs dying overfishing plastic pollution greenhouse gas pollution acidification of oceans 1/3 of all arable land underwent desertification The real question is, why AREN'T we concerned more? Is there some sort of magic hope in innovation, are we just super optimists? No, it's simply that we failed at collective action to such an extent that even thinking about a viable solution is so hopeless that most of us don't even bother. The one place where we were able to curb pollution was CFCs in the Toronto Protocol. That's it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
  - rimliu 4y ago
    your list is missing one crucial component: over sensationalised headlines

sbuttgereit 4y ago

Kinda funny. Just before seeing this article I had just finished watching a wonderful video on the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4) which isn't exactly the same as what's being talked about here... but in the same class of problem if you make that class big enough :-). When looking at these sorts of things, surely such "hockey sticks" are often times just not considering the limiting factors? I'm no mathematician (by any approximation) but it seems like more often than not finding such a result should point to some incompleteness or some closer look being required to get the full picture. (P.S. that video was very math heavy and no, I didn't understand most of the math beyond hand-wavy terms... still glad they went into the detail.)

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

Some of these graphs are pretty silly. The downward hockey stocks are extrapolating based on two data points, and the shape of the curve is just not at all plausible.

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soared 4y ago

I don’t know much about forests but it seems incorrect that at any point in time 55% of land mass was covered by forests.

lwansbrough 4y ago
I would bet a great deal that the Mesozoic Era yielded a much higher level of plant biomass than the current era.
anikan_vader 4y ago
About 69% of Sweden is currently forest, so it doesn't seem infeasible to me (even accounting for the fact that Sweden is not representative).
throwabob123 4y ago
> I don’t know much about forests The past was amazing. One example: Trees predated organisms that broke them down, so at some point there were just piles of trees, many tens or even a few hundreds of feet, on land, and that's why some trees are theorized to grow so tall so fast. Just on the face of it though, you're a layperson, but you find soil, coal, peat, lots of biotic mass almost everywhere, what do you think put it there? Deep, deep soil. It's trees. You drive through California or Illinois or Texas or New York or wherever you live, and you see all these farms. Single stands of weird trees. There were forests. You can look at Google Maps and see how parts of the Amazon today, which are obviously being poached, look like the fringes of the US too. Not only was land mass covered in forests. You know there were indigenous Americans absolutely everywhere when Europeans arrived in the Americas. Not only that, but climate change predated the arrival of settlers. There were forests completely cleared of brush, that the settlers commented you could run horses through, because indigenous Americans had been using wildfires to manage the land as game parks. There were indigenous people everywhere in Australia too. The oceans were full of life. Just like preposterous amounts of fish before industrial fishing. Romans would routinely describe the Mediterranean as boiling. They weren't being stupid, they were describing the colossal number of fish in there. If you go diving in a genuinely protected area like the Galapagos, it's insane, there are just an incredible amount of fish. You look at a deep sea trawler, it pulls out just an insane amount of fish. It was like that everywhere. I don't know how laypeople get this idea that Earth was always as sick as it is now. It was like 10-100x more filled with life 250 years ago. It's ridiculous. People aren't wrong about the bugs. There is a far longer and stubborn cultural heritage of documenting nature, long predating Republicans, so it couldn't be just politics that has led people astray. Maybe they're just stupider.

dafty4 4y ago

Don’t plot the amount of wild mammalian biomass, plot the amount of totally mammalian biomass. Doubt you’ll see a downward hockey stick in that case. What makes a wild mammal more special than a domestic one?

lwansbrough 4y ago
Probably diversity, and the fact that they can exist without human oversight.
cmgxyz 4y ago
Nothing, but that doesn't mean they deserve extinction. It'll be a poorer Earth if it's all housecats and no tigers. What makes us more special than other animals? Also nothing, in my view.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > What makes us more special than other animals? Also nothing, in my view. If you really believe that then you should go live out in a field and eat grass like oxen rather than writing that comment on the internet. If humans aren't more special, then nothing is special at all.

EGreg 4y ago

Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... Human population growth. This is the input to all the other stuff. The past few generations thinks they're the most sophisticated and intelligent, but they're living on an ecological credit card. And the bill is going to come due. Just like any bill after a spending spree, this is going to be a doozy. Probably extinction level...

x-complexity 4y ago
> Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ... > Human population growth. Please don't go down this path: Every time someone does so, it always leads to eugenics in some form or another.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  All the more reason to do the things which control population growth (like educate and reduce time burdens on women, reduce child and infant mortality, and redistribute wealth) before the eugenicists start feeling the constraints of a finite world then.
- EGreg 4y ago
  We can do plenty with women's education and condoms. What path would you prefer instead?
- agileAlligator 4y ago
  We practice eugenics with almost every lifeform we have domesticated but refuse to do so with ourselves, just coz some guy with a funny mustache got it confused with muh white masterrace.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Wow that skidded off the beaten track quickly. Population controls !== eugenics Dominating animals is part of human nature / DNA. Not sure what we do about it. Stop eating meat probably becomes ahead of stop breading poodles.

influx 4y ago

What ever happened to peak oil? Seems like a similar argument here.

a3w 4y ago
I feel like feeding a troll, but peak oil happened in 2020. Says BP. Limits of growth said it would happen between 2010 and 2030. So the answer to "whatever happened to peak oil" is "it's on track as scheduled" Disclaimer: We do have some economic transition in europe due to a (cold/hot) war, that may conflagrate the actual year due to spikes and valleys, though. <strikethrough>Psychohistory</strikethrough> Data science works for a large populace but does not take into account individual events.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  To give a recent citation, from April of this year: > The energy transition continues to gain steam, with oil demand projected to peak in this decade, perhaps as soon as 2025, according to new research by McKinsey & Company. https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/the-environment/27042022/peak-oil-may-be-three-years-away-mckinsey-reports/ https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/the-environment/27042...

WoodenChair 4y ago

You can't make hockey sticks out of just a few data points, as this author does in several of the charts. For example, the deforestation chart is based on a few data points from a UN study (where Our World in Data that the author links to cites as its source). But tree coverage has actually increased over the past 30 years according to some studies by NASA and elsewhere. For example, one 2018 paper from Nature says: "We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally5—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics. Global bare ground cover has decreased by 1.16 million km2 (−3.1%), most notably in agricultural regions in Asia. Of all land changes, 60% are associated with direct human activities and 40% with indirect drivers such as climate change." [0] 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9

mupra 4y ago
A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.
- WoodenChair 4y ago
  You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. For example, you can draw many curves through 2 data points, but you can also draw a straight line. The Our World in Data "Primary vs. planted forest" data that he cites for the "Old Growth Forest Cover" chart has just 2 data points (1990 and 2019).
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. Having a rich data set doesn't help. https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192 https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192

Barrin92 4y ago

Old and fairly trivial insight is that most hockey-stick graphs end up being S-curves and that's already in sight for most of the ones given here. Population is on its way to a plateau, so is energy consumption in the rich world, and so on. Economic growth due to poor nations caching up will still keep going for a while but it's not that unlikely that we'll eventually end up in a fairly static situation at least for a time, which wasn't uncommon in human history. runaway scenarios without anything reigning them in are very rare or otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about them because we'd all have drowned in Tribbles already. There's a lot of psychology in these imagined scenarios and relatively little long-run empirical observation because complex systems tend to have a significant amount of constraints and regulatory mechanisms that kick in either voluntarily or involuntarily to impose some limits on growth. They tend to be more cyclical in nature rather than tending towards unlimited or even linear growth.

narrator 4y ago

The biggest problem with our sustainability is we literally piss massive amounts of nitrogen into the ocean and replace it with the Haber-Bosch process. You had farmers in Asia farm the same land for 40 centuries all powered by "night soil" or humanure or the various other euphemism for it.

joegibbs 4y ago

The amount of plastic discarded looks terrible, but it's on a graph that starts in 1100 AD, so it would look outrageous even if people only threw out a single plastic bottle in 1920 and 10 this year

telotortium 4y ago

Oh God, it's the Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist[1] dude again. [1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...

dane-pgp 4y ago
Sadly he's still at it. To save people from subjecting themselves to all of his tortured logic, here's just a sample from the article you linked: > The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. Basically his conclusion is that at some point in the next 400 years, the predominant economic system on Earth will have to change in some way (and that economists are short-sighted for not believing this). The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)" [0] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  That's the entire point though. For economic growth to continue, the economy must completely decouple from all necessary resources. At that point all real commodities are not part of the economy which is growing so the thing with the commodities in it is the real economy which is static. The inevitability of the conclusion is ironclad. The only matter is which limiting resources necessitate moving to a steady state economy.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).

shmageggy 4y ago

For a 500 page version of this analysis with correspondingly more rigor (including an acknowledgment of S-curves), see Growth by Vaclav Smil. Although this is just a tiny, flawed snapshot of the argument, the conclusions are the same.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The good thing about this type of fossil fuel fan fiction is that it's self-refuting. They put all that effort into saying "energy made us rich" so implying we must worship fossil fuels. But as soon as the cost curves cross over the argument switches and works against them. So then they need to argue that its not actually cheaper, its just a conspiracy to deceive you while even fossil fuel producers, corporate and state, are saying the opposite.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> This, to me, is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two (essentially, the GWP curve from before). The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently. It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason. Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda: > Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure. He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag. He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution: > In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations No, it's not. https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-solar-panels https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently. Land, energy, and other finite resources are zero sum. Unless the amount of land required to have a good quality of life exponentially decreases then the following holds. If your system permits me to increase the amount of land I control in direct proportion to the amount of land I control (ie. it is possible to profit). Your rising tide isn't lifting all boats, it's lifting the superyacht while all the small boats are chained to the bottom.
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jbu 4y ago

Ohh, I loved this blog - glad to find it again! Particularly remember https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change... - an understandable back-of-the-envelope calculation of how f*&ked we are with CO2 emissions.

atemerev 4y ago

Every hockey stick is the beginning of a logistic curve (if you are optimistic), or a bell curve (if you are less optimistic). Exponential growth is impossible given limited resources.

GrandaPanda 4y ago

I failed to read the full article as the warmup graph of human population is not the full story, and the conclusion is incorrect. We need to look at the full picture, and that is that we are on track to reach a stable human population of approximately 10 billion iirc. This is due to greater global education levels, and subsequent lowered birth rates. There is a fantastic book called factfulness that addresses this directly, and also calls into question the dramatic effect of graphs in isolation, and how they can ver much be S curves etc.

personjerry 4y ago

Some thoughts: > [Graphs showing exponential population up, outputs up, resource extraction up] Ok, great > [Graphs showing logistic wild animal biomass, forest cover] Ok, not good > Whatever model we have adopted for existing on this planet, it seems to be a poor choice. It appears to be on track to fail. WHAT? Where did this conclusion come from? There's so many hoops jumped to arrive at this conclusion that I'm astounded. How is "fail" defined by forest cover? Or number of wild animal species? As though we will blindly march towards 0 forest cover over the next N years and immediately suffocate ourselves? No, of course we are paying attention and will come up with new inventions or policies as requirements come up. We are resourceful and intelligent and we'll find ways to adapt. On another note, curves like this in ecology almost always end up as an S-curve (see Carrying Capacity [0]). It's just a matter of finding what our capacity is and thinking about how we can gracefully decline in growth and avoid the Malthusian trap [1]). Tangentially, I guess this might eventually lead to policies like China's One Child policy [2], and interestingly that means whatever percentages of different cultures exist when our population growth slows will probably remain about the same. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

m0llusk 4y ago

The ultimate conclusion that human population and economic activity are bad does not follow. We have only just started to begin working with efficient resource management and renewable energy sources. Just to point out some natural counterexamples trees dropping their leaves seasonally is a fairly recent catastrophic pollution situation that nature has dealt with in ways that actually increase biomass. Large ruminant herds actually propagate productive environments which we learned when trying to quantify the damage done by their activities. So it is entirely possible that a large population of humans with high economic activity could actually interact positively with the environment. The problem is that we have barely even begun to experiment with how this might work.

lettergram 4y ago

The recently added postscript is my favorite part of the article. It comments how traffic appears exponential due to the recent HN traffic. Then says: > I trust I need not explain how funny I think this is. I also have a fairly robust idea for how this curve will look a week from now. Just sayin’. Traffic will drop fast and return to normal (slightly higher base) in a few days. Every thing in this article discusses current curves. But there’s actually good reason to assume those curves will return to baseline. Particularly, ones such as “gonad tree cover”. Tree cover is increasing and will return to base as we no longer are using it as a primary energy source and are increasingly using less to build. My point is the doom and gloom in most cases is not really warranted as it will adjust. The author also mentions our “global civilization”, we don’t have one. I get their point, but it’s an important note that we have multiple civilizations. That means these curves are happening due to the sun of independent actions of all civilizations. There’s probably no way to change the outcome. The destruction of the rainforest is out of the control of all civilizations beyond Brazil. China is by far the largest polluter in the world, no one can stop that. Those hockey stick curves might be inevitable; but they probably aren’t “globally true”. I’m betting if we look at mammal populations in places like Idaho or Alaska they’ve been less impacted than say, Massachusetts. The problem isn’t really clear from the global charts

westcort 4y ago

I dread being around when Malthusian predictions start to be realized.

flashpoint31415 4y ago

The PS at the end of the article made me laugh until I realized that I read it too fast. I thought someone submitted the article to Hockey News - which would have been incredibly funny, not Hacker News.

civilized 4y ago

Some valid info here, but also some utter absurdity, and they're mixed together without distinction or comment. For example: with a completely straight face, the author constructs an "inverted hockey stick" from two data points on wild land mammal mass and predicts the complete extinction of wild land mammals in a matter of decades. It seems like, after plotting a few hockey sticks, the author bought into his own conceit and started hallucinating them everywhere.