Unles somebody can whip a couple more Earths out of their ass.
I’m not entirely surprised by this, the question is: How are we going to solve the problem? Are we going to switch to non-greenhouse gas producing energy sources and mining asteroids or are we just going to blow ourselves up?
The second, in case you haven’t noticed.
Lots of us are going to die.
Humans are adaptable. When we run out of one material, we’ll use another. Gloom-and-doom prophesies have never come to fruition so far.
(And by the way, a shoutout to those in this Pit thread who thought that end-times prophecies were primarily from fundie groups. Howzitgoin?)
Reverend Malthus…Reverend Malthus, please pick up the white courtesy phone!
If we do solve that problem there’s always the upcoming magnetic field reversal.
Fortunately, in the realm of housing, at least, it is easy to build a single-family house that needs NO heating or cooling to maintain a comfortable temperature, even in a cold mid-continental climate.
All the house needs is sunlight, suitable-arranged windows, and heavily-insulated massive walls to both store the sun’s heat and moderate temperature changes.
True, the house does not look conventional, but I’d rather look unconventional than freeze to death. 
The same heat-storage principles can be applied to any building, even if the shape of the building precludes direct solar heat. In such cases, one needs to ‘charge’ the walls with an initial load of heat, but then you can size the insulation such that the building gets all needed heat from internal activities (though a backup heat source is useful in such cases).
This heat storage and flow is calculatable using standard building-science principles. See “Building Science for a Cold Climate” by Hutcheon and Handegord (National Research Council of Canada), especially chapters 2, 4, 8 and 9.
Cut heating and cooling bill and reduce their reseource use by 50%? Try 100%, baby!
Sunspace, I assume that you’re talking about an Earthship house? I wouldn’t mind living in one myself. I didn’t say that it was an absolute certainty that we were going to be wiped out by 2050, only that it was a possibility. (Though I think we’d better get busy, if we’re going to survive.)
If anyone’s interested, a 3.06 meg PDF of the report is available here.
Yes. I know the people who built one of the first ones in Ontario. Their architect had an interesting time getting it past the building-code authorities.
Yes. I find that the biggest and most difficult thing to raise the efficiency of will be transport, because it is so embedded in our land-use patterns and planning. Biuldings can be built or retrofitted, but to really increase energy-use efficiency will require things to be rearranged (so that we can walk to shops and work, for example).
What on earth would make anyone think the current trends will continue without change for 40 years?
So what? Is there a direct correlation between the number of species on the planet and human existance?
Assuming things are really as bad as the article suggests, the problem will eventually solve itself. Lots and lots of humans and animals will die, then nature will balance itself out again. No big deal, really. Unless you’re a human, that is.
I totally don’t want to live on the ass-pulled earth. ew.
Eh, humans have had a good run. I say we enjoy the last 44 years we have.
How are we going to solve the problem?
I’m sure we’ll be just fine. Those reports are largely a lot of nonsense. It’s like someone writing a report in the 1800s that with 10 million people, the streets of New York City would be covered 1 foot deep in crap from all the horses. It’s not relevent in 100 years because the technology has changed so much.
I will now refer you to the Simon-Ehrlich wager:
Are we going to switch to non-greenhouse gas producing energy sources?
Probably, if it makes sense to do so
…and mining asteroids or are we just going to blow ourselves up?
No. It will always be much more efficient to mine iron and nickle from the large planetary body we currently sit on. What do people think? Asteroids are full of petroleum, gold, and humpback whales?
Maybe we already do!! :eek:
Seems to me that we’re WINNING! BOOYA!!! TAKE THAT EARTH!!
Wow, an organization that funds itself by predicting ecological disaster is (still) predicting ecological disaster.
That’s breaking news.
For a real laugh, find some original copies of Dr. Erlich’s books from the '60s and '70s. According to him, the world came to an end in 1980. Or 1985. Or 1987. Or whatever, depending on which book and which edition you come across. That clever sideshow carnie is still publishing books proclaiming doom, thirty years after his predictions turned out to be idiocy. And people are still buying them, and saying “Oh my, we’re doomed!” It’s pretty funny, really.
Or, if you’re not into it for the laughs, just turn up the logic and skeptic meters a tad when reading anything predicting imminent doom.
To paraphrase Pratchett, we’re facing impending ecological disaster. All higher life forms scoured away, just like that. Nothing left but dust and environmentalists.
Oh my God… A friend’s mouse just gave birth to five offspring! And I read that they can each give birth in five weeks!
That means he’s going to have almost 10 million mice in his house by next year!
My god, what will he do? And this isn’t just his problem - it affects all mankind. If current rates of birth continue, there will be 7.89 X 10^69 mice. That will wipe out the planet.
See, while you were all off worrying about some piddling little trend regarding resources, I used the same logic to show that the true threat is the domestic mouse, which will destroy us all in just a few years.
Oh, fer gawds sake.
Dang it, I came in here to mention Julian Simons bet with Paul Ehrlich. Got beat on that one.
Anyway, I find it interesting that people still pay attention to the end of the world predictions.
I suggest reading some of Julian Simons work to get a different perspective. The doom and gloom predictions miss the most important resource available, the human mind. The doom and gloom predictions work on the assumption that humans aren’t going to do anything different in the future. That is a bad assumption to make. People are always creating new and better ways of doing things.
Slee