Man wrecks planet...yeah right.

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

I comment occasionally on columns, but I’ve never had cause to start a thread like this before. Today’s column gave me one.

Are we wrecking the planet? Well, sure, in many senses we are. Is the paranoia about all the millions of species and acres of “lost” rainforest justified? I don’t think so. Not at all.

It’s really easy to find or generate statistics that show what monsters humans are (and we are), but it’s dangerous as hell to buy into all the hype because it sounds cool and we like to think we want a better world.

Doomsayers, meet the Doomslayer:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/4388/wiredsimon.html

I realize that many of you are already familiar with this man’s work, but if you ain’t you should be. Here’s the first sentences for those of you too lazy to go to the link:

"The Doomslayer
The environment is going to hell, and human life is doomed to only get worse, right? Wrong. Conventional wisdom, meet Julian Simon, the Doomslayer.
By Ed Regis
This is the litany : Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. The planet’s species are dying off - more exactly, we’re killing them -at the staggering rate of 100,000 peryear, a figure that works out to almost 2,000 species per week, 300 per day, 10 perhour, another dead species every six minutes.We’re trashing the planet, washing away the topsoil, paving over our farmlands, systematically deforesting our wildernesses, decimating the biota, and ultimately killing ourselves.

The world is getting progressively poorer, and it’s all because of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There’s a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our small and fragile tiny planet, and we’re fast approaching its ultimate carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we’re living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable. Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death.

Time is short, and we have to act now.

That’s the standard and canonical litany. It’s been drilled into our heads so far and so forcefully that to hear it yet once more is … well, it’s almost reassuring. It’s comforting, oddly consoling - at least we’re face to face with the enemies: consumption, population, mindless growth. And we know the solution: cut back, contract, make do with less. “Live simply so that others may simply live.”

There’s just one problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is false. Incorrect. At variance with the truth.

Not the way it is, folks."

Please please please go and read the rest of it. I know I’m opening myself to a barrage of letters about “sure, maybe he’s right, but our responsibilities to our planet…”

I know that. I live that. Don’t worry about that. I live on the earth. It is a beautiful earth, although it has some problems. Sure, we make it worse in many ways, but scare tactics do more damage than good. Cecil, I’m sorry to say, but that column was a bit out of line.

You have killed so much ignorance since 1973. I’m proud to be your reader, but this one disturbed me.

Indy

2

Link to Cecil’s column:

http://straightdope.com/columns/030620.html

The item Indy links to is basically a puff piece on Julian Simon, and thus lacking in citations of data. One will have to hunt up Simon’s work to see what lays behind his “facts.”

(I use quotation marks because Simon appears to be the “true believer” sort. While some, maybe even most, of his data may be correct, his passionate belief in his own correctness doubtless colors things.)

My own take? This little cosmos of ours is so huge and complicated that getting a good handle on how it works will never happen. Thus, anyone claiming certitude about anything is full of gas. Conversely, since we don’t have a good grasp of how the things works, prudence is a good idea, rather than finding out the hard way that something has some nasty side effects.

3

Hmmm, I see. Well, then. It would seem that considering the planet has been whizzin’ around its orbit of the sun in its greased groove further in the dim past than the original arrival of life that it will continue to ride that groove. Assuming some high velocity and huge bit of a cosmic fragment doesn’t interfer with that before the Sun’s core becomes clogged with soot and ballons.

Previously many species have come and gone and for various differ reasons, some known and others unknown. We know this thanks to the work of those folks who study such things. And since life opened its suit case and settled in, the coming and going of species has be continuous. So why should we think that should be different now?

This planet (the green one with the clocks) has been in a state of change since it coalesced out the disk. Cooling, warming, ice ages, tropical ages and etc. So why should we think that would be different now? There are those that believe that man has pitched (or is pitching) wrenches into the global weather works. Supposedly the evidence is based on collected data and computer modeling. Hmmm, really? One might question the accuracy of the models since to be able to write the software the writer would need a detailed and exacting knowledge of what makes weather work. Modern meteorology seems to have trouble making exacting predictions for three days in advance, so it would be logical that years in advance would be extra troublesome and even less accurate.

We as a species are just another tooth on the cog. If you buy into the Darwinism idea, those species that are going extinct do so because they couldn’t adapt to the changes being present to them. Naturally it would be next to impossible to adapt quickly enough to prevent somebody from shooting you out of your tree or something with a similar effect. But Man can make choices, right? Sure he can, under the right circumstances. His needs play a role, so do his wants in that choice.

Man, perhaps, is the most successful species yet to open its suit case. And maybe that level of success will be Man’s undoing and pack up his suitcase. That suit case, packed or unpacked, won’t really change anything in the long run. Species will continue to come and go, there will be more ice ages, more tropical ages and etc. The planet will continue orbiting the Sun in its greased groove. Don’t worry be happy and enjoy those clocks!

4

We may very well have the power to destroy our own species and perhaps take a couple along with us but I think what a grandiose statement it is to claim we will be the end of the entire planet. The Earth’s ecosystem runs like a well-oiled machine, it’s a living breathing entity. We as humans, in the grand scheme of things, seem to be more like a virus. If we screw the Earth up too much, I think she will bne rid of us long before we could be rid of her. Of course, we should still try to be as green as possible.
But let’s not lose too much sleep at night eh?

5

As a student of overpopulation, a supporter of ZPG, and someone who never intends to breed, let me say this.

“Overpopulation is the root of every problem that exists in our world today.”

Anything and everything that people consider difficult about their lives can be traced back to this phenomenon. Why does it take two people’s incomes to do what one person’s income would do in the 1950s? Why do people from 3rd world nations starve. Obviously, according to Simon (if you read the link), more people means more production, right? Why does the tuna and salmon industry suffer a cumulative 1% reduction in fishing each year dispite the increase in the number of trawlers in the pacific ocean?

Critical mass is real. It is not a theory. It does not care if you invent a new way to plow the earth, or a new alloy that can be made from carbon sluice and camel dung. Eventually, resources run out. Go to Target and see the amount of PLASTIC furniture. Plastic. Not wood. Americans don’t deserve wood furniture. Oh sure. For $50 you can buy a presswood desk, but trying buying oak, or for that matter, anything solid. And so long as I’m talking about depleted wood resources, how about the cost of paper?

And no where in either arguement does anyone talk about the effects of populants (bleach, inks, dyes, and so on) on our wildllife and oceans. The ocean doesn’t clean that stuff up 100%. It just gets washed to a different part of the ocean. And all the while, our skies get dirtier, our water supplies dwindle, and our ability to sustain the lives around us at a fair and equitable standard diminishes.

The truest sign of ignorance is believing that science will solve this problem. Making more babies, under the assumption that these people (10% of whom come from 1st world countries) will grow to be productive and creative members of a society is as specious as logical arguement as saying that by shipping food to Rwanda, eventually the people will learn to farm.

If we could find a humane way to cut the population of earth in half, I would say do it. As it stands we’re nearly 7 billion people on earth and by 2010, there will be 10 billion total inhabitants. 10 billion! Where are these people going to live? How will they get fed? How much more land will be converted to furniture and livestock and bottled water to feed the needs of our burgeoning planet.

You don’t need charts and graphs to know what happens to rats when they overextend themselves. And I don’t think it takes a rocket science to know that even if the numbers on the shirt were DOUBLED or HALFED, the fact that these conditions continue unchecked a systemic of a people who frankly can’t see the big picture and wouldn’t know what to do with it, if they could.

We need another ice age.

6

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

–Robert Frost

7

As a student of overpopulation, a supporter of ZPG, and someone who never intends to breed, let me say this.

“Overpopulation is the root of every problem that exists in our world today.”

Anything and everything that people consider difficult about their lives can be traced back to this phenomenon. Why does it take two people’s incomes to do what one person’s income would do in the 1950s? Why do people from 3rd world nations starve. Obviously, according to Simon (if you read the link), more people means more production, right? Why does the tuna and salmon industry suffer a cumulative 1% reduction in fishing each year despite the increase in the number of trawlers in the pacific ocean?

Critical mass is real. It is not a theory. It does not care if you invent a new way to plow the earth, or a new alloy that can be made from carbon sluice and camel dung. Eventually, resources run out. Go to Target and see the amount of PLASTIC furniture. Plastic. Not wood. Americans don’t deserve wood furniture. Oh sure. For $50 you can buy a presswood desk, but trying buying oak, or for that matter, anything solid. And so long as I’m talking about depleted wood resources, how about the cost of paper?

And no where in either argument does anyone talk about the effects of pollutants (bleach, inks, dyes, and so on) on our wildlife and oceans. The ocean doesn’t clean that stuff up 100%. It just gets washed to a different part of the ocean. And all the while, our skies get dirtier, our water supplies dwindle, and our ability to sustain the lives around us at a fair and equitable standard diminishes.

The truest sign of ignorance is believing that science will solve this problem. Making more babies, under the assumption that these people (10% of whom come from 1st world countries) will grow to be productive and creative members of a society is as specious as logical argument as saying that by shipping food to Rwanda, eventually the people will learn to farm.

If we could find a humane way to cut the population of earth in half, I would say do it. As it stands we’re nearly 7 billion people on earth and by 2010, there will be 10 billion total inhabitants. 10 billion! Where are these people going to live? How will they get fed? How much more land will be converted to furniture and livestock and bottled water to feed the needs of our burgeoning planet.

You don’t need charts and graphs to know what happens to rats when they overextend themselves. And I don’t think it takes a rocket science to know that even if the numbers on the shirt were DOUBLED or HALVED, the fact that these conditions continue unchecked is systemic of a people who frankly can’t see the big picture. And wouldn’t know what to do with it, if they could.

We need another ice age.

8

sorry about two posts… the second one is edited and the first one wasn’t showing up on my screen

9

There is a simple way to deal with the over population problem, and that is increase education. In every instance i know of, an increase in education translates to fewer births. In the united states today, the birth rate has fallen to slightly below replacement levels, the only reason our population increases is due to immigration. I think it is also ridiculous that you blame all the worlds problems on overpopulation. The isrealies and the palistiniens would be fighting if there were 2 people on both sides probobly.
Note, this does not mean I agree with the first poster. We have a severe enviromental problem, but it is caused by the tremendous amount of waste people and industries make, it would still be around if there were only 1 billion people.

10

Correct me if I am wrong in the following statement, but Cecil seems to have used some slipshod citationing for this article. In particular,

Is Kofi Annan’s statement really something that can be used as a factual citation, especially when it comes in the field of desert growth? I know he is leading the U.N., but does this give him some special knowledge regarding erosion? I am fine with the quote if Kofi is getting his data from a true scientific source, but if that is the case, why wouldn’t Cecil reference that source or use it rather than Kofi?

11

Get out your calculator and your atlas and crunch the numbers. If this really was happening every day for the last 13 years, there would be no rain forest today and virtually the entire planet would be a desert.

  1. Get the calculator again. If this were true, all the topsoil would already be gone.

  2. And quoting an environmentalist activist? Sundquist is not exactly an objective expert.

Again, use your common sense. 4 million tons a day - every day - for years on end? How is it we can still see the sun with 4,000,000 tons a day x 365 days per year x how many years do you want to go back?

:confused: Isn’t this quote pure gibberish? How could you write something this foolish?

You’re credibility has taken a major hit this day, Cecil.

12

The “40-100 species” is also based on bad science. It was a number chosen by a panel examining species extinction in the 70’s and extrapolated by a radical environmentalist who wanted good copy.

As for overpopulation, its a bugaboo. Most UN models have been saying for some time that the population is very likely to max out at around 10 billion. This is not an unsustainable level. Already the countries with the highest birth rates, India and China, are seeing substantial reduction in the brith rate. Either due to policies or just the nature of their Industrialization.

http://www.wri.org/wri/trends/popgrow.html

I would reccommend “The Skeptical Environmentalist” to most. Even if you disagree with many of his conclusions, you can see that his data shows that the doomsayers are definately more off base than he is.

13

This is not up to Cecil’s usual standards. Try reading The Skeptical Environmentalist, Earth Report 2000, But is it True, and check out www.reason.com and search environmental articles. Not suggesting not to read opposing views but you should see these as well and attack them if you wish on the facts rather than with ad hominem or political arguments. Squidboy should stay away from Malthus and Ehrlich.

14

This is a great debate that has been going on for years (since before Malthus), and each year each side backs up their claims with whatever science of the day helps their argument. Just look at what our Govt has recently done with regards to the Kyoto treaty and with that environmental report this week (watering down the concept of global warming).

Regardless of science, we must ask ourselves what to believe. I agree the doomsayers are probably too far to one extreme, and the nay-sayers too far the other way. The truth is somewhere in between - and I am surprised Cecil did not go to the middle ground.

With regards to species extinction, altho I have no cite, I understand that there have been many times more species extinct over the eons than are alive today. This will continue as one post pointed out earlier, as survival of the fittest and most adaptable. Even if we lived in caves species would still be going extinct. The dinosaurs got wiped out and we had nothing to do with it. However, this does not give us the right to purposely wipe out a species.

On overpopulation, even tho the more industrialized nations are reducing population growth, they are still consuming more resources per capita than the developing world. I agree wholeheartedly with the post on education as birth control, but we must also be mindful of resource consumption as part of the equation. And, thanks squidboy for not breeding. But if you were for ZPG, you would need to have one offspring to replace yourself. Sounds like you are more for population reduction.

IMHO, the habitat destruction we should be most mindful of is our own. The most habitable and productive areas of the world are becoming more crowded and degraded as people move from rural areas to the cities. If left alone, the rain forest will come back in time, but we still should not irresponsibly obliterate the entire place in pursuit of our own comfort and excesses - we have no other place to go. We should take a conservative approach when dealing with our environment - lest we soil our nest…

15

38 million acres per year, or 104,000 acres per day.
If I recall correctly, 640 acres = 1 square mile, so 38 million acres p.a. = 60,000 square miles per year, equivalent to a square 250 miles on each side, less than Colorado (?). When you then consider the size of the South American, African and South East Asian rainforests, the amount of loss is alrming, but not yet catastrophic.

16

“Overpopulation is the root of every problem that exists in our world today.”

This is an extraordinarily oversimple way of looking at the world. I don’t have time to discuss all of your points, but here are my thoughts on a few of them:

“Why do people from 3rd world nations starve?”

War and government corruption and incompetence are the major reasons.

“our skies get dirtier, our water supplies dwindle, and our ability to sustain the lives around us at a fair and equitable standard diminishes.”

By any objective measure, the air and water in the U.S. has gotten considerably better over past 30 years, even as our population has increased. Measures of ‘quality of life’, such as life expectancy, literacy, child mortality are also improving.

“and by 2010, there will be 10 billion total inhabitants.”

Maybe by 2050, maybe never.

There many things that determine the quality of life and the environment - population is a relatively minor one. If you doubt that, ask why highly populated Hong Kong or Holland are better places to live by any objective measure than lowly populated Congo?

17

OK: Land area of the earth = 1.49 x 10^8 sq. km = 3.68 x 10^10 acres.
41,000 acres of desert / day = 15,000,000 acres / year
Result: ~ 2500 years (not 13) to desertify the earth

The land area above is from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. The same source does not give rainforest area, but we do have this statement from “Rainforest Facts.”

That gives us about 2.23 x 10^7 sq km = 5.52 x 10^9 acres of rainforest.
At 104,000 acres of rainforest lost / day = 38,000,000 acres / year, we get 145 years (not 13) to lose all the rainforest.
If “Rainforest Facts” is right about the rainforest going from 15% of the earth’s land surface to less than 7%, and we accept the average rate as 104,000 acres / day, that works out to 77 years.
Of course, the rate is probably accelerating, so the average loss rate is lower. But people have been chopping down rainforests for longer than 77 years.
As rough estimates go, this one seems about right.

18

As for the ZPG comment. I live in southern california. The average citizen here is hispanic, has 4 or more children, and lives a very meager life below the standard of living for a human, say for instance, in the 1950s. It takes two incomes to pay his rent, his furniture is plastic or presswood, and his diet consists of the lowest grades of ingredients in order to make ends meet.

So one, I have to have zero to offset the guy having 6.

Two, I don’t want my children having to fend for water and oxygen when the resources of this planet become dangerously low in the next 50 years.

Am I a doomsayer? I don’t think so. I know that all mammals eventually MUST learn to live in balance with their eco-system, less they die off. But man, has a propensity for staving off the effects of poor harvest, mad cow disease, and global warming much longer than the polar bear or the gorilla. But what happens when the rubber band snaps back?

You cannot argue that the world’s resources are limited. Cripes. Even if we clone our food and our trees, we don’t have an unlimited water supply. Read your facts. The Yellow River in China is drying up. Each year, less and less water makes it to the South China Sea. And when it does its litered with pollutants. Just because America is cleaning up (however slowly), doesn’t mean other nations are.

As for standard of living. Ask yourself why the amount of steel in your car is so much less than it was 50 years ago? (And i know heavy cars get bad gas milleage, but there are now 50 million cars in California. More than 2 per person. The steel supply in the US couldn’t handle that kind of demand in every car were fitted with chrome, reinforced doors, and son.)

Why you don’t own anything with oak wood or for that matter why you’re $8,000 in debt (average american), while the bread winner in the 1950s was socking money away, buying a house, a car, and preparing for his children’s college education?

Why is it that if we slow our spending the economy itself will slow down? We’re tied to it, and as a result, we can’t just start living more meager lives to increase our standard of living anyway. Toasters breakdown because they are designed to. VCRs are replaced by DVDs and computers with laptops and palm pilots. Our wants and needs are so inextricably connected now, that even if we all decided to slow down, and put some money away, we wouldn’t know how.

All, because the third world has more people willing to work for 8 cents a day, because they are in worse shape then we are, and all are manufacturing jobs are shipped there. (I’m not crying buy American either. So please don’t rebutt that half of the argument).

Yes, productive nations are slowing in their population growth, but not before they grow to be just as hungry and needy as americans who use 30% of the world’s resources. What happens when China and Nigeria (4th most populace country in the world) and Mexico all decide they want to live like americans. What happens then?

Resources = supply
People = demand
lack of supply = overpopulation

It’s not complicated, but it is systemic of our continued growth and the demand for more and more. Check out rents and property taxes in California if you don’t believe me. We’re reaching saturation point and when we do, things aren’t going to be as simple as, cut back your consumption in order to rectify.

Sorry for the soapboxing. That wasn’t my intention. But, I’ve been studying this stuff for so long and the problem is Ehrlich and the like were so dramatic about it, that people are tired of hearing it. And the more I read, UN Reports, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Almanacs, and so on, the more depressed I get about the future.

19

I like the math, jimbobboy - makes sense. However, we must also remember to inlcude rates of growth (or decline) for these calculations. For example, is the rate of rain forest destruciton increasing each year - is there a trend? And, is anyone taking stock of areas reclaimed by the rain forest - this is happening as well. After an area is slashed and burned, it has a couple of good years of crop production, but the soil is not fertile enough without the forest on top, so farms are also being abandoned. The soil is there becuase of the forest, not the other way around.

On desertification, we are ready to see areas that were once non-desert becoming desert, but what about vice-versa? Has anyone here been to Phoenix, AZ?

I maintain that resource consumption is the problem, not too many people. The West’s wasteful lifestyle and increasing demand for resources (clean water, wood products, fuels, wild fish stocks, land for housing and strip malls, etc) is the true problem in my eyes. We must guard what we have and improve where we can and conserve.

20

squidboy, you do not have to punish yourself for other people’s folly. Sure, if you live in SoCal I can understand your frustration and dour outlook.

I have travelled a lot in the US and Europe, cities and wilderness, and I can agree with you that there are A LOT of people struggling to maintain the “western quality of life”. However, everyone can control their own part of the world the best way they can by making conservation part of their everyday routine. That is why I believe if we can control the appetite for resources we will be better off as individuals and as a society. You cannot tell everyone what to do, but you can control yourself. When people reach a pain threshold, they will change their behavior. When China starts to feel the pain of the Yellow river you describe, people will change – it’s human nature to wait until our backs are up against a wall to take evasive action – and they are evidently not there yet, despite warning signs. Or, China will just accept their polluted environment and finds ways to live in it, just like the rest of us. It may not be like it was, but it will be there.

What alarms people is change – and in many cases we have no idea of how that change will affect us. Is less rainforest good or bad? Is more desert good or bad? Who is to say – people evidently are able to adapt to a multitude of living conditions from Park Avenue to shanty-towns. Whatever environment is presented to people, we seem pretty clever in adapting to it. The point is that the world will continue to change, and we all need to determine how much change we are willing to accept before standing up and saying no more. We as a species have yet to reach a threshold where the pain of our actions is greater than our ability to adapt. Altho as individuals, we are eager to set other people’s agenda.