67 ms·

Should we be suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene?

25 points by Thevet 12y ago

rationalbeaver 12y ago
We should be suspicious of all ideas.
meric 12y ago
EDIT: Apologies for the rant, it isn't too relevant to the topic. Downvote deserved. Our food is made of non-renewable resource. Every year, we use: * 105m tons per year of nitrogen-based (natural gas) fertilisers[1] * 22m tons per year of phosphate-based (mineral based) fertilisers[2] * 3m tons per year of organic (poo and pee) fertilisers[2] Nitrogen-based fertilisers are made from natural gas, and phosphate-based fertilisers from rock. Use of fertilisers grow by 10% every couple of years. Even if there was no further population growth from now, there's not enough resources on Earth for everyone to have a car, not enough space in cities for every couple to have a house. There's not enough food made from renewable resources. Are you going to give up your car? Are you going to give up having a nuclear-family home? Are you going to give up eating meat? Can you convince everyone on Earth to do the same? The goal of every politician is to boost GDP, aka spending, aka consumption. How do you convince politicians they are facing the wrong direction? Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. It's only because we've discovered a very large cache of oil and natural gas, allowing the population to continue to expand, for now. The world is fucked. QED. [1] http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/statistics_publications/Stat_website.pdf http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publi... [2] http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_productioin.pdf http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_p...
- brc 12y ago
  >Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. Ah, yes he has, and so has Ehrlich and every other 'the world is ending' doomsayer that ever walked. Does the human race have problems? Well, obviously. deep seated religion and superstitious unreason remains a key problem. Has there never, ever been a better time to be alive as a human? Self evidently, yes. It's the best time to be alive right now.
  - meric 12y ago
    I agree. Right now, yes. But look at the numbers. In 50 years time it's going to be a bleak time to be alive.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      Said every doomsday prophet ever. No one ever comes back and says sorry we were wrong they just change to some other claptrap. Life is too short to listen to these people.
      - kjs3 12y ago
        The best part of predicting the end of the world is that if you do it long enough and shamelessly enough, one day you'll get to be right.
      - gress 12y ago
        You do realize that this attitude will lead to ignoring the one time when there is real danger. Is that what you want?
        happyscrappy 12y ago
        I am a wild and crazy guy, I will take the chance that bloviating windbags are full of it.
      - meric 12y ago
        In fact, I've already said brc might be right and decided to change to some other claptrap.[1] No one ever comes back and says they're glad they convinced someone - they just switch targets and find new people to call doomsday prophets and bloviating windbags. Thank you for your prejudice and have a nice day. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899
        brc 12y ago
        For the record I appreciated your comment but can't reply there. It shows a willingness to consider a position. I'm guessing you're probably young, and young people have a torrent of "the end of the world is nigh" thrown at them these days. It's tough to see above this and think optimistically. But the key to a calm mind is to think optimistically, tempered with rational 'what if' thinking, so if bad events do come to pass, it's not earth shattering.
- kjs3 12y ago
  QED means you've proven something. It's pretentious to use it when you're not discussing a proof, and embarrassing to use it you're just ranting and not even remotely proving anything.
  - anthonyarroyo 12y ago
    This
brc 12y ago
Of course the very idea of it is ridiculous. Elevating humans to the scale of geological forces is vanity in the extreme.
phkahler 12y ago
Either the interglacial period is not over yet, or we are actively preventing the next glaciation. Either way, it seems premature to claim human intervention AND say it's a bad thing.
- Gravityloss 12y ago
  https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age.htm https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age... This is a common enough thought, it's listed as number #14 on the skeptical science site. Unfortunately current anthropogenic warming and glaciations operate on vastly different timescales. "Worry about global warming impacts in the next 100 years, not an ice age in over 10,000 years."
DowChem47 12y ago
One should, perhaps, always be suspicious of opinion pieces. The author is a remarkable man, but one whose advocacy comes with being enmeshed in Corporate USA culture (and DC). Stints at the New America Foundation, background in Law & property rights rather than science, early ties to The American Prospect and so on: definitely a wunderkind of the political class. What's actually being said in the piece is a lot different to the title. Tangential link (or not really, work it out). In January 2011, The Nature Conservancy and The Dow Chemical Company announced a breakthrough collaboration—one that will help Dow and the business community recognize, value and incorporate nature into global business goals, decisions and strategies. Over the course of six years, scientists from The Nature Conservancy and Dow will work together at three pilot sites to implement and refine models that support corporate decision-making related to the value and resources nature provides. Together, we are choosing sites that will be distributed around the world—and at each site, we will be looking for opportunities to take what we’ve learned there and transfer knowledge globally. These sites will serve as a “living laboratories”— places where we will validate and test our methods and models so they can be used to inform more sustainable business decisions at Dow and hopefully influence the decision-making and business practices of other companies. http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/companies-we-work-with/dow/ http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/compan... Their revenue streams are simply amazing, btw: http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf [warning: PDF] In short - the Anthropocene definitely exists, and there's no doubt about it. If you doubt it, compare and contrast forest cover circa ~12k BC and now. (And know the difference between mono-crop plantations and actual forest ecosystems - a good case study is Germany, where reforestation after the total losses 8th-18th C which ironically destroyed large amounts of soil quality due to conifers being a net parasite due to their lack of symbiotic fungi evolution. http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311.pdf http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311... [warning: PDF] - that's a case study Germany / China) http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geological-period-defining-the-anthropocene-and-environmental-archaeology/ http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geologica... So. Policy wonks vrs Science. I know who I choose.
zevkirsh 12y ago
it's funny how all the people are focussed neo malthusianism. malthunianism isn't about the biophysics of some sustainability paradigm hatched out of a theoretical model that places massive amount of assumptions about bio blablaba. the real malthusianism is wrapped up in the nature of the relationship between population growth relative to the political-economic societies interacting with the realities of hierarchal governance. all socieites are based on hierarchchal pyramids of one version of cheap labor or another dominating the bottom, with dominant 1% at the top. call it capitalism, communism , or any other ism to describe every society that has almost ever existed, but the few at the top are always contending with the demographics of the many at the bottom. in our present circumstance we have a fairly intricate global dollar/euro/yen based credit system. the economics of the western aging population don't add up to increasing amounts of cheap labor going forward. even in china this is a problem. so the solution of outsourcing everything and importing streams of young immigrants (dilution of middle class) is clearly not going to work as a strategy for keeping up the stability of the banking systems and governments layered on top of the western system. malthusianism is not so much that everything will 'collapse', but that the structure of governments and societies elite power institutions cannot remain remotely stable going into, and especially out of, population explosions. social structure is highly dynamic in response to the bubblenomics of long term human population explosions. world wars, failed states and many more things are deeply guaranteed by the underlying demographic realities. bizarrely enough , it's not because there are too many people. it's because there aren't enough slaves to replenish the pen of tax producers and the pen of 'demand' for usurous credit offered by banks. when decades of pricing mortgaged assets at near zero interest rates, the banks are having a harder and harder time finding people to burden with 30 year mortgages , or as bill clinton liked to emphasize , the american dream of home foreclosureship. eventually the price and tax reset comes (like in post soviet russia) and the clearing of the pricing and taxing system once again allows for growth in spite of the dynamic balance of debt and demographics. then again there's always tons of high birth rates in the developing world. so long as that is the case, there's no real problems

25 points by Thevet 12y ago

We should be suspicious of all ideas.

meric 12y ago

EDIT: Apologies for the rant, it isn't too relevant to the topic. Downvote deserved. Our food is made of non-renewable resource. Every year, we use: * 105m tons per year of nitrogen-based (natural gas) fertilisers[1] * 22m tons per year of phosphate-based (mineral based) fertilisers[2] * 3m tons per year of organic (poo and pee) fertilisers[2] Nitrogen-based fertilisers are made from natural gas, and phosphate-based fertilisers from rock. Use of fertilisers grow by 10% every couple of years. Even if there was no further population growth from now, there's not enough resources on Earth for everyone to have a car, not enough space in cities for every couple to have a house. There's not enough food made from renewable resources. Are you going to give up your car? Are you going to give up having a nuclear-family home? Are you going to give up eating meat? Can you convince everyone on Earth to do the same? The goal of every politician is to boost GDP, aka spending, aka consumption. How do you convince politicians they are facing the wrong direction? Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. It's only because we've discovered a very large cache of oil and natural gas, allowing the population to continue to expand, for now. The world is fucked. QED. [1] http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/statistics_publications/Stat_website.pdf http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publi... [2] http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_productioin.pdf http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_p...

brc 12y ago
>Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. Ah, yes he has, and so has Ehrlich and every other 'the world is ending' doomsayer that ever walked. Does the human race have problems? Well, obviously. deep seated religion and superstitious unreason remains a key problem. Has there never, ever been a better time to be alive as a human? Self evidently, yes. It's the best time to be alive right now.
- meric 12y ago
  I agree. Right now, yes. But look at the numbers. In 50 years time it's going to be a bleak time to be alive.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Said every doomsday prophet ever. No one ever comes back and says sorry we were wrong they just change to some other claptrap. Life is too short to listen to these people.
    - kjs3 12y ago
      The best part of predicting the end of the world is that if you do it long enough and shamelessly enough, one day you'll get to be right.
    - gress 12y ago
      You do realize that this attitude will lead to ignoring the one time when there is real danger. Is that what you want?
      - happyscrappy 12y ago
        I am a wild and crazy guy, I will take the chance that bloviating windbags are full of it.
    - meric 12y ago
      In fact, I've already said brc might be right and decided to change to some other claptrap.[1] No one ever comes back and says they're glad they convinced someone - they just switch targets and find new people to call doomsday prophets and bloviating windbags. Thank you for your prejudice and have a nice day. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899
      - brc 12y ago
        For the record I appreciated your comment but can't reply there. It shows a willingness to consider a position. I'm guessing you're probably young, and young people have a torrent of "the end of the world is nigh" thrown at them these days. It's tough to see above this and think optimistically. But the key to a calm mind is to think optimistically, tempered with rational 'what if' thinking, so if bad events do come to pass, it's not earth shattering.
kjs3 12y ago
QED means you've proven something. It's pretentious to use it when you're not discussing a proof, and embarrassing to use it you're just ranting and not even remotely proving anything.
- anthonyarroyo 12y ago
  This

brc 12y ago

Of course the very idea of it is ridiculous. Elevating humans to the scale of geological forces is vanity in the extreme.

phkahler 12y ago

Either the interglacial period is not over yet, or we are actively preventing the next glaciation. Either way, it seems premature to claim human intervention AND say it's a bad thing.

Gravityloss 12y ago
https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age.htm https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age... This is a common enough thought, it's listed as number #14 on the skeptical science site. Unfortunately current anthropogenic warming and glaciations operate on vastly different timescales. "Worry about global warming impacts in the next 100 years, not an ice age in over 10,000 years."

DowChem47 12y ago

One should, perhaps, always be suspicious of opinion pieces. The author is a remarkable man, but one whose advocacy comes with being enmeshed in Corporate USA culture (and DC). Stints at the New America Foundation, background in Law & property rights rather than science, early ties to The American Prospect and so on: definitely a wunderkind of the political class. What's actually being said in the piece is a lot different to the title. Tangential link (or not really, work it out). In January 2011, The Nature Conservancy and The Dow Chemical Company announced a breakthrough collaboration—one that will help Dow and the business community recognize, value and incorporate nature into global business goals, decisions and strategies. Over the course of six years, scientists from The Nature Conservancy and Dow will work together at three pilot sites to implement and refine models that support corporate decision-making related to the value and resources nature provides. Together, we are choosing sites that will be distributed around the world—and at each site, we will be looking for opportunities to take what we’ve learned there and transfer knowledge globally. These sites will serve as a “living laboratories”— places where we will validate and test our methods and models so they can be used to inform more sustainable business decisions at Dow and hopefully influence the decision-making and business practices of other companies. http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/companies-we-work-with/dow/ http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/compan... Their revenue streams are simply amazing, btw: http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf [warning: PDF] In short - the Anthropocene definitely exists, and there's no doubt about it. If you doubt it, compare and contrast forest cover circa ~12k BC and now. (And know the difference between mono-crop plantations and actual forest ecosystems - a good case study is Germany, where reforestation after the total losses 8th-18th C which ironically destroyed large amounts of soil quality due to conifers being a net parasite due to their lack of symbiotic fungi evolution. http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311.pdf http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311... [warning: PDF] - that's a case study Germany / China) http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geological-period-defining-the-anthropocene-and-environmental-archaeology/ http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geologica... So. Policy wonks vrs Science. I know who I choose.

zevkirsh 12y ago

it's funny how all the people are focussed neo malthusianism. malthunianism isn't about the biophysics of some sustainability paradigm hatched out of a theoretical model that places massive amount of assumptions about bio blablaba. the real malthusianism is wrapped up in the nature of the relationship between population growth relative to the political-economic societies interacting with the realities of hierarchal governance. all socieites are based on hierarchchal pyramids of one version of cheap labor or another dominating the bottom, with dominant 1% at the top. call it capitalism, communism , or any other ism to describe every society that has almost ever existed, but the few at the top are always contending with the demographics of the many at the bottom. in our present circumstance we have a fairly intricate global dollar/euro/yen based credit system. the economics of the western aging population don't add up to increasing amounts of cheap labor going forward. even in china this is a problem. so the solution of outsourcing everything and importing streams of young immigrants (dilution of middle class) is clearly not going to work as a strategy for keeping up the stability of the banking systems and governments layered on top of the western system. malthusianism is not so much that everything will 'collapse', but that the structure of governments and societies elite power institutions cannot remain remotely stable going into, and especially out of, population explosions. social structure is highly dynamic in response to the bubblenomics of long term human population explosions. world wars, failed states and many more things are deeply guaranteed by the underlying demographic realities. bizarrely enough , it's not because there are too many people. it's because there aren't enough slaves to replenish the pen of tax producers and the pen of 'demand' for usurous credit offered by banks. when decades of pricing mortgaged assets at near zero interest rates, the banks are having a harder and harder time finding people to burden with 30 year mortgages , or as bill clinton liked to emphasize , the american dream of home foreclosureship. eventually the price and tax reset comes (like in post soviet russia) and the clearing of the pricing and taxing system once again allows for growth in spite of the dynamic balance of debt and demographics. then again there's always tons of high birth rates in the developing world. so long as that is the case, there's no real problems