Tipover Point

In a pleasant conversation on sustainability economics, the question came up -- is there a tip-over point we should be watching for?  Good question.  😏

• Is there a critical threshold ...
• For population?
• For arable land use?
• For fresh water consumption?  

Well, yes. And we've perhaps passed each of those thresholds already.

Humanity’s demand for goods and services exceeds the resources our ecosystems can continue to provide. We first exceeded this limit in 1970 when population was just over half of what it is now.

Our ecological footprint is a measure of the amount of land required to sustain a country’s consumption patterns, including the land required to provide the resources people use (most importantly food and forest products), the area occupied by infrastructure, and the area required to absorb CO2 emissions. The measure also takes imports into account, so that the negative environmental impact of products is considered where these are consumed rather than where they are produced. 

Reasonable estimates suggest that each person can sustainably use 1.8 global hectares for a one-planet life.  Today though, we extract resources faster than they are regenerated. At the current levels of population, consumption, and waste, humankind needs about 1.6 Earth-like planets to sustain everyone's lifestyle.  Any improvements we attempt become progressively more difficult as quality of life issues compete for resources.

High-consumption countries have become examples of wealth out of balance – they do well on life expectancy and well-being, perhaps, but they maintain their lifestyle with an unsustainable ecological footprint, larger per capita than other countries in the world. It would require perhaps five Earth-like planets to sustain this way of life if everyone lived at their high-consumption level.  Lifestyle comes at a cost. 

How soon will this be visibly intrusive in the marketplace, in international relations, in our quality of life?  We're well past that threshold as well.

Did you know that China is buying huge swaths of land in Africa for farming? And in the U.S. and France. Saudi Arabia owns and farms large areas in California and Arizona because it's cheaper to use U.S. water reserves than their own.  Australia recently blocked China from buying a farm the size of Kentucky.  Food is expected to replace oil as the marketplace centerpiece for the 21st century.

As for the developing nations, what room is left for their improvement in quality of life?  Do your own inquiry.  This is one of perhaps several issues our children and grandchildren will view differently than we do today.

Pyramid - 2017

Have you ever spent $30 just because you wanted something?  That's a week's income for most folks.

In our tumultuous world, making a way forward for our children is difficult.  Unless you're rich. The rich never go hungry or without shelter. Children of the wealthy have reliable access to water, healthcare, and education.  And a way forward. Everyone else, not so much.

"... in the majority of countries below the median per capita income, wealth is accumulating more slowly than the population is growing."  ~UNDP HDR

Individual countries sized by percentage of population in poverty
Click on the chart to see the data in detail.

The international community is making progress in many areas. The percentage of folks in extreme poverty is perhaps going down, but we are struggling with increasing population.  Food, health care, sanitation, water, education, all are far from equitably available.  Large changes are needed.

Meanwhile, it doesn't take much to lend a hand in the developing countries.  For the price of a restaurant dinner here, a kid there can attend school for a semester and get a meal each day. For a few hundred dollars, they can attend college or a trade school for a semester.  With help, a family can put a floor in their house, bed pads under their children, and start a garden or a small business.  They can make progress by their own labor with a little help for some resources.

In distressed regions that today are dealing with drought and famine, sponsoring meals for their small school will ensure kids get at least one meal a day. A little support will help them rebuild their herds and replant their crops now that rain has finally come. Feel free to join in.

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Uh oh.

In the grand banquet hall, folks smile and chat cheerfully as they enjoy a wonderful dinner.  They eat and drink to their heart's content - food that is better and more abundant than at the finest tables in ancient Athens or Rome, or even in the palaces of a young Europe. 

When the waiter  arrives holding the bill, the diners are in shock.  Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill.  Still others deny eating anything.  From one table comes the suggestion that the man is not really a waiter, but is only trying to get attention for himself or to raise money for his own projects.  Finally, the group concludes that if they simply ignore the waiter, he will go away.  This is where we stand today on the subject of climate change and the associated human contribution.  

For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due.  Many continue to sit around the dinner table denying that it is their bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.  (paraphrased from Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes, et al.)

Our presence on the planet changes things, of course.

• Humans annually absorb 42% of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30% of its marine net primary productivity, and 50% of its fresh water.*
• Now, 40% of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7% in 1700.*
• Fifty percent of the planet’s land has been transformed for human use.*

*Vitousek, P. M., H. A. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, and J. M. Melillo. 1997. Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems. Science 277 (5325): 494–499; Pimm, S. L. 2001. The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth. McGraw-Hill, NY; The Guardian. 2005. Earth is All Out of New Farmland. December 7, 2005.

• Equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster fifty times over, continuing oil spillage in the Gulf of Guinea has cost millions their livelihood, their communities, and their water.  Those who haven't abandoned the Niger Delta region are left in contamination and poverty; some are rising up in revolt.  It's been going on, the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez every year, for FIFTY years.  If it ever stops, recovery will take a century or more.
• Pelagics (tuna and the like) are now at risk from pollution and illegal overfishing.  Total adult biomass summed across all monitored pelagic populations has declined globally by 52.2% from 1954 to 2006.  Certain regions have seen 90% decline in population bringing malnutrition and starvation among indigenous fishing communities.*

* Maria José Juan-Jordá, Iago Mosqueirad, Andrew B. Cooperf, Juan Freirea, and Nicholas K. Dulvyc, Grupo de Recursos Marinos y Pesquerías, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de A Coruña, 15009 A Coruña, Spain; Earth to Ocean Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada; Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft Laboratory, Lowestoft, United Kingdom; European Commission, Joint Research Center, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen/Maritime Affairs Unit; School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada - Global population trajectories of tunas and their relatives

• Recent changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are contributing to the ocean's acidification.  A third or so of our fossil fuel CO2 emissions are absorbed by the oceans; that's around 10 billion tons per year added to the ocean chemistry.  The changing aquatic environment is killing the coral reefs, and not slowly. The current rate of change is now 100 times faster than any changes in ocean acidity in the last 20 million years, raising questions of whether marine life can adapt to the changes.  The scope of impact is under continuing study.  NOAA. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
• Since 1850, the industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 to 409.78 ppm. The international scientific community has concluded there's a better than 90 percent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years.  Update IPCC  NASA, NOAA

The debate among scientists and the weight of evidence are well past the basics of atmospheric processes and the mechanisms of radiative equilibrium.  Skeptics tend to focus on some arguable detail, and on that basis dismiss the wealth of established facts.

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on public health, environmental science, and other quality of life issues. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of pollution, pesticides, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. Interestingly, a small subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these problems.  Why might they pursue such a course?

Who would sponsor a campaign saying that smoking (including secondhand smoke) is not a health risk? (1965-1994)
Or that acid rain is not an ecosystem risk? (1974-1990)
Or that the ozone depletion was not an environmental problem? (1976-1993)
Or that air pollution (mercury & toxic chemicals, particulates) from power plants is not a health risk? (1967-2011)
Or that emissions from fossil fuel use have no significant environmental impact? (1998-2017)

Why would someone lobby against investigation and regulation of those industries involved and spend millions doing so?  
That's what they did and continue to do today.

"The recent shift in the community of global warming deniers from merely attacking mainstream climate scientists to alleging their involvement in criminal activity is an unsurprising but alarming development in the long campaign to discredit the established scientific fact that burning fossil fuels is causing the world to warm. This latest escalation fits seamlessly into a decades-old pattern of attempts to deny the reality of environmental ills — smoking, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming. Similar or even identical claims have been promoted for decades by other free-market think-tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and, most persistently, the George C. Marshall Institute. These think tanks all have two things in common: They promote free-market solutions to environmental problems, and all have long been active in challenging the scientific evidence of those problems. ... the American public had been repeatedly fooled by the same strategy and tactics." ~Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

So, back to that banquet ...
              ... there's no such thing as a free lunch.

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Unless we've reviewed the science, broadly and in depth, we don't have an opinion. What we have is a preference and perhaps a bias.

Culture Notes - II

The appetites we have are all perhaps natural, but do they rule our lives? Should they? Here's an example.

Question:  Does it matter what you see?
In the 50's, children and dogs ran free, and no one worried about them.  We all walked to school or rode our bikes.  On the weekends, we didn't follow any particular plan, and our parents weren't worried as long as we were home before the streetlights came on.  Today ...?

Today, children aren't left unattended in the mornings while they wait for the school bus.  They aren't left unsupervised on the playground.  We don't let them wander alone, and we have a particular concern about strangers, especially men.  Our culture has changed ...

Abuse of minors, trafficking, and exploitation have increased since the 60's.  Pornography is now a multibillion dollar industry and available to youth worldwide.  Sexualization is a centerpiece of the advertising and entertainment industries (sex sells) and is increasingly presented to younger audiences.  And it's all legal.  Government regulation hasn't preserved the cultural safety our children used to enjoy.  It couldn't, of course.  All of us and everyone we know are regularly exposed to such content as part of advertisements, movies, sitcoms, and reality shows.  And the news.  Moral standards have become ambiguous and traditional families are in decline.

What we see (as individuals or as a culture) is a brain changer.  Not just an annoyance or a distraction, it actually changes our physical brain structures, content, and processes.  Here's how:

• Our brains are constantly changing and being transformed by our experiences and what we see, hear, and feel.  Example: When you sit and watch a movie, your brain is changing according to the images you see and the emotions you feel. Your brain is structurally different after that movie than it was before. (Makes you think twice about what you are watching.)
• Our thoughts influence our physical health, our emotions, and our behavior. What you think will set the course for your life.

With that in mind, here's just one of the visual exposure aspects of today's culture:

• Porn sites today receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, & Twitter combined. (HuffPost)  
• 43% of online porn viewers start between the ages of 11 and 13.
• The most common porn role is women in their 20’s portraying teenagers. (JM)  (IWF)
• The child pornography market exploded with the advent of the internet and advanced digital technology.  (US-DOJ)  In '07, the FBI identified 130,000+ child porn sites.
• In 2016, 4.5 billion hours were spent on the world’s largest porn site. (PH Analytics) And, that's just one site.

Just one site's statistics ...

So what does that mean for the culture in which we and our children live?

What goes on inside of us (as individuals or as a culture) will eventually show up on the outside.

“You have been experiencing the effects of your thoughts your entire life.” ~Dr. Caroline Leaf

Is there a healthy path forward for our culture or for us individually?  Any good news?   Of course.  Truth is unchangeable.  Everything else changes. 

We've been given a baseline on which to build our lives and raise our children, but the environment that surrounds us is toxic.  It's a battleground, and government is not the solution.  We should plan accordingly.

Update:  On internet searches for porn -- according to data released by Google, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. Pakistan tops the list at number one, followed by Egypt at number two. Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey come in at numbers four, five, seven and eight, respectively.  The impact of the industry is global and not limited to western culture.


As a youngster, I was told with a smile ...

 Things are not as they seem.
    You were born into a world at war.

       Everything you do counts. 

Culture Notes - I

The appetites we have are all perhaps natural, but do they rule our lives?  Should they?  Here's an example from western culture.

Question: How much is enough?
Starbucks former CEO, now Executive Chairman, is worth $3+ Billion and gets paid $21.7 Million each year.

He's in the top echelon for income in the US, and there are thousands more like him; folks with incomes in the $millions annually.

The lower half of individual wage earners in the US average $12.7k, net (after taxes).  That's the lower economic 50%, 80 million working folks who pay taxes. (Per SSA wage statistics for 2015)

Households depend on more than one income, The lower 90% of U.S. households average $30.7k net (after taxes).  A full-time Starbucks store supervisor nets about $21.6k.

There's a measure of validity in rewarding a workman for his labor, of course.  There's also the issue of exploiting the labor of others for personal gain.  Is there anything wrong with the current GAP between the extraordinarily rich and the labor-force that produced their wealth? Is the greed we see on Wall Street and elsewhere okay, or is it deadly?

Giving government the job of regulating ethical business standards hasn't worked well.  Curious where else that particular failure has spilled over? 

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Consider The Nation or perhaps The GAP

It has indeed been hotter in years past

Temperature ...

Click on the Chart

     Discussion of natural climate cycles are appropriate, but we'll want to understand them along the timeline of modern humans and other life.  Significant changes in the past have brought mass extinctions and a restructuring of the ecosystem. Natural cycles are perhaps physically inevitable and in the queue for our consideration. Different natural cycles appear to occur on tens to tens of thousands of years periodicity and can fall in sync to exaggerate or mitigate the combined impact.

     It has indeed been hotter in years past, but humans weren't in existence yet, and the world was a radically different place.

     Separate from those natural cycles are the changes we see ourselves causing today.  The basic physics: if you add greenhouse gasses to an experimental sunlit atmosphere, it absorbs additional heat in proportion to the amount added.  At some threshold, its capacity to shed that heat is exceeded, and a runaway increase follows. 

     There are a number of unresolved questions regarding the timeline projection and the degree of impact, but there's little reason to suggest our children and grandchildren will not face difficulty in adapting.  That's one of our modern concerns regarding our ecosystem.

... and Life since there's more going on than just warming.

Tokyo-Yokohama, 37.8 million

Through most of history, everyone lived a rural lifestyle dependent on agriculture and hunting for survival. 

• In 1800, 3% of the world's population lived in villages of 5000 or more. 
• By 1900, about 14% were urbanites, and 12 cities had a million or more residents. 
• In 1950, 30% of the world's population lived in cities and, the number of cities with over 1 million people had grown to 83, each with its economically specialized segments and associated vulnerabilities.

Jakarta, Indonesia, 30.5 million

We've seen unusual urban growth. 

• It's 2017, and more than 50% of the world lives in cities. There are more than 400 cities over a million and 35 over 10 million. The more developed nations are about 75% urban (US-81%), while 45% of residents of less developed countries live in urban areas. 
• The trend is growing worldwide. We expect that 70% of the world population will be urban by 2050, and most urban growth will occur in less developed countries.

It's a bit naive to think there's no significant impact.  Did you know extinctions have accelerated along with population? 

At the turn of the 20th century some 100,000 tigers roamed throughout Asia. Today the last 3200 tigers in the wild are scattered across 7 percent of their former range, often in small “island” populations whose isolation puts them at risk of becoming inbred and imperils their long-term survival.  ~ Sharon Guynup

We're in a mass extinction spiral.  Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. The natural background rate is one extinction per million species per year (approximately 5-10 species per year).  Human-caused extinctions, most triggered by habitat destruction, are 100 - 1000 times the background rate according to one conservative statistical model.  (The actual numbers continue to be controversial)

The current mass extinction differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or galactic physical process. When the human race — Homo sapiens sapiens — migrated out of Africa, waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos, and large lemurs extinct.

The first wave of extinctions targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave began 10,000 years ago when the advent of agriculture caused a population boom and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of domestic cattle. The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly past 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7 billion today. We'll reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former) by 2050.

"No population of a large vertebrate animal in the history of the planet has grown that much, that fast, or with such devastating consequences to its fellow earthlings. Humans’ impact has been so profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the "global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development" dominate planetary physical, chemical, and biological condition."

• Humans annually absorb 42% of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30% of its marine net primary productivity, and 50% of its fresh water.*
• Forty percent of the planet’s land is now devoted to our food production, that's up from 7% in 1700.*
• Fifty percent of the planet’s land mass has been transformed for human use.*
• More atmospheric nitrogen is now fixed by humans than all other natural processes combined.*  Although carbon dioxide may get more press, “the nitrogen cycle has been altered more than any other basic element cycle.”

*Vitousek, P. M., H. A. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, and J. M. Melillo. 1997. Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems. Science 277 (5325): 494–499; Pimm, S. L. 2001. The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth. McGraw-Hill, NY; The Guardian. 2005. Earth is All Out of New Farmland. December 7, 2005.

• Coral reefs are declining rapidly: destructive fishing practices and runoff from overdevelopment all take a toll, weakening the reefs and making them more susceptible to storms and diseases. The latest reports state that as much as 27 percent of monitored reef formations have recently been lost and as much as 32 percent are at risk of being lost before 2050.

• Coral reefs cover only about 0.1 percent of the ocean bottom but are vital to ocean life: 9 million marine species, including 4,000 kinds of fish, rely on coral reefs for food or shelter. Further, reefs form a central pillar of many countries' economies, supporting fishing industries and protecting coastlines from storm surges.

• Pelagics (tuna and the like) are now at risk due to overfishing and pollution of breeding areas.  Total adult biomass summed across all monitored pelagic populations has declined globally by 52.2% from 1954 to 2006.  Certain regions have seen 90% decline in population causing malnutrition and starvation among indigenous fishing communities.*

*Global population trajectories of tunas and their relatives Maria José Juan-Jordá, Iago Mosqueirad, Andrew B. Cooperf, Juan Freirea, and Nicholas K. Dulvyc, Grupo de Recursos Marinos y Pesquerías, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de A Coruña, 15009 A Coruña, Spain; Earth to Ocean Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada; Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft Laboratory, Lowestoft, United Kingdom; European Commission, Joint Research Center, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen/Maritime Affairs Unit; School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

Suggesting that the changes we've brought are minor or inconsequential goes perhaps beyond naive to some measure of indifference or the inattentive privilege of wealth.