As of mid-2009, nearly all the world’s major aquifers were being overpumped. We have more irrigation water than before the overpumping began, in true Ponzi fashion. We get the feeling that we’re doing very well in agriculture—but the reality is that an estimated 400 million people are today being fed by overpumping, a process that is by definition short-term. With aquifers being depleted, this water-based food bubble is about to burst.
A similar situation exists with the melting of mountain glaciers. When glaciers first start to melt, flows in the rivers and the irrigation canals they feed are larger than before the melting started. But after a point, as smaller glaciers disappear and larger ones shrink, the amount of ice melt declines and the river flow diminishes. Thus we have two water-based Ponzi schemes running in parallel in agriculture.
And there are more such schemes. As human and livestock populations grow more or less apace, the rising demand for forage eventually exceeds the sustainable yield of grasslands. As a result, the grass deteriorates, leaving the land bare, allowing it to turn to desert. In this Ponzi scheme, herders are forced to rely on food aid or they migrate to cities.
Three-fourths of oceanic fisheries are now being fished at or beyond capacity or are recovering from overexploitation. If we continue with business as usual, many of these fisheries will collapse. Overfishing, simply defined, means we are taking fish from the oceans faster than they can reproduce. The cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada is a prime example of what can happen. Long one of the world’s most productive fisheries, it collapsed in the early 1990s and may never recover.
This article is an excellent read.
Chuck speaks for the common man. As long as he (man) gets his, the rest can get fucked. It has always been this way and it always will be so. Man will come and go but his nature is eternally greedy and selfish.
*pretends to be a Republican* It’s all nuthing but tree-huggin’, baby killin’, plant eatin’, liveral lies ’cause Dick Cheny went fishin’ the other naight with Glenn Bek and they caught plenty fishin’
*spelling errors added because Republican supporters are bad at spelling*
#13 – Sea Lawyer,
My point about the cars was that they cause severe problems like global warming, one of the highest asthma rates in the country here in NYC, smog days in many areas of the country, 70-130,000 deaths per year from air pollution in the U.S. alone, etc.
U dickheads are conspiring against the United States Economy, Obama, Congress, all you loons…
You believe destroying our free market, middle class, will bring us down to using the “worlds resources” in line with our population…
Your ecological lunacy will do the opposite…once the US is powerless to stop the nut cases, WWIII will happen, while impoverished Americans are cutting down trees to heat their homes in the winter…
May you all reap the poverty your ecological loony ideas forced upon us.
#17 – amodedoma,
I was just about to say how much I liked the rant in post 15. I wouldn’t retract a word of it.
#24 – alfie,
Talk about a waste of bandwidth, try reading your own posts.
That ecological lunacy you talk about … well, a functioning biosphere provides to humanity free of charge every year, about $30 trillion with a T.
http://tinyurl.com/5rgloj
Clean water and clean air and crop pollination are among the big and obvious things we get from a biosphere that we probably can’t create for ourselves even if we do kill the economy by spending an unnecessary $30T/yr on them.
You want to see a dead economy? Just wait until we need to purify every milliliter of water we drink and every lungful of air we breathe and pollinate every crop we raise individually.
Oh, I forgot. You’ll just pray, tap a rock, and god will deliver.
Got manna?
this is why I have been saying for years that the main problem with our environment is not what we are doing to it per se, but the sheer number of people that are doing it. this planet has roughly 4x the number of people living on it that it could reasonably sustain. You see ants on all of the inhabitable continents, but you don’t see carpenter ants on all of them.
Obesity, Cancer, Increases in the number of Natural Disasters. All Mother Nature’s way of self-correcting. I know when i say this i’m about to take a lot of flak, but i think in part it also helps to explain the increase in homosexuality as well. Sort of like how in a Nation during peacetime the boy/girl ratio of births hovers around 50/50, but after a major war more boys are born to help correct the drastic loss, except now Negative Population Growth is the desired effect.
on a Geological scale, there have been mass-extinctions every 26 million years or so, and to a lesser extent every 13 million years. mankind’s entire cycle so far has been at the mercy of these cycles.
either way, i think aid workers in starving nations would be better served handing out rice and condoms instead of rice and bibles. “Be fruitful and multiply” is a motto mankind can no longer afford. Why bother feeding idiots that will only continue living and having kids in lands where food will not grow, so their kids will continue to do the same?
I know this all sounds rather harsh, but if we continue to turn a blind eye to the realities of the overpopulation of this planet, we will be left with nothing save a barren rock to call home. any other organism in a closed system that overpopulates itself will eventually die off. This planet needs Negative Population Growth, and it needs it now.
Misanthropic Scott,
That article is a great read and some brilliant analysis.
But in biology they teach that everything biological is recyclable in the ecosystem. And so is water is the biosphere.
Doom and gloom is overrated, but you are very much correct that people should devote time to researching it.
#6 for the win
“Unrestricted growth never continues – it becomes restricted and stops growing.”
Such as when a cancer kills its host.
Other than Earth drying out and becoming Mars, *we* can’t kill the Earth. But we can kill ourselves by making where we live uninhabitable. Even Palm Beach, Rush.
Har! Rush can’t buy the Rams.
Designer Soylent Greem
I like the “notion” of progress only bringing the actuality of worse conditions. Is it “true,” or in what senses is it true and false that moving to cars rather than horses was good or bad? I think that might serve as a model of the slippery slope to disaster that Scott has posted.
Lets see–don’t we have to list “all” the bads and ALL THE GOODS as well? So, global warming, asthma, and smell are bad. Where is the good?????
Scott–your thinking has to be “unbalanced” if you don’t balance the bad off anything good? AND there are SO MANY GOOD things: personal and social mobility, the internal combustion engine leading to air flight/rocketry/moon landing/technology, plastics==My God Scott===PLASTIC!!! I guess any discussion of balance should stop right there. The trump card: plastic.
Another good thread of yours: as the population increases from more food, a greater percentage of people go hungry. You got a link for that? I’ll bet people are going hungry while food is thrown away??? Distribution/political issues, not carrying capacity.
It will be interesting when world population flexes downward due to lack of water/lack of food. Probably start in Africa, maybe India? I can see world relief supplies of food being commandeered by the local militias. Yes, interesting times. Its good to live in the bread basket of the world.
Maybe with advances in solar power, the electricity to drive pumps will be relatively free and we can pump all the water that flows into the ocean and use it to resupply all the aquifers? Yep, tunnel boring machines from Lake Superior to Los Angeles. Technology.
I think we will see it starting in 20-30 years. Sure we see it now, I’m saying: oops, there it is!!
The water table is being overpumped.
The mountain glaciers are now growing so at least for now that is blooper.
Commercial ranches don’t normally overgraze. They know how many head of cattle they can grow and limit the number of cattle they run to stay inside the limit. Communal lands are commonly overgrazed.
The same for over fishing. When individuals are in charge of a resource they depend on they limit the catch to make sure they get that next catch but when it’s just a race to see who can catch the most the sea gets fished out. 90% of wild fish stocks are gone but then you get fastest reproduction and growth at maybe 80 to 90% at least with the species that can stand this sort of crap. Catches of many types of fish aren’t necessarily going down. I expect blue fin tuna to go extinct. One adult fish can be worth a new car. They take years to become adults and they are having a harder time finding food.
#30
“Other than Earth drying out and becoming Mars, *we* can’t kill the Earth.”
You are amazingly deficient in your science knowledge.
How would the Earth dry out? That’s an ignorant statement. Did you go to college?
First, water doesn’t escape the planet. It remains in the ecosystem. If water could escape the Earth biosphere, Earth would have become Mars-like millions of years ago. Water is recycled in the biosphere.
Second, the odds of a planet with 70% surface area of water drying up is silly.
Third, isn’t the consequence of “global warming” rising sea levels? How can BOTH the sea levels rise AND the world dry up?
I guess it’s people like you that vote in the elections and get us the morons that we call our elected representatives.
the problem comes as 2 things happen.
1. we are the TOP predator.
2. we are acting like MOLE RATS
MOLE rats have 1 main problem. Then ROT out their home and the main group DIES OFF.
They pollute their living section and DIE off.
Problems we have created.
Over population
Pollution, AIR, LAND, SEA..
When a predator OVER KILLS, the animals or OVER EATS a section of land it must FIND a new location to feed.
WHERE??
WE could keep adding and building and STAYING on this planet…but there is an END to it. and it wont be nice.
WE can TRY to explore…and get to space…and find another planet to DEVELOP what is here.
We are so far behind…WE SUCK..
we used to ALLOW idiots to DIE if they made a mistake..but we have advanced to the point we can RESURRECT them…
1. “Everything is wrong” – Moby
2. Soylent Green is people!
#28 – Hmeyers,
That article is a great read and some brilliant analysis.
Glad you like it.
But in biology they teach that everything biological is recyclable in the ecosystem. And so is water is the biosphere.
Yes. But this requires a functioning biosphere. Without one, we would need to purify every drop ourselves. It’s still here, yes, but harder to get into a useful state of cleanliness.
Doom and gloom is overrated, but you are very much correct that people should devote time to researching it.
1) Well, if you want to prevent or minimize the doom, you must study it.
2) Disasturbation – Wallow in it.
#33 – bobbo,
Sorry. I don’t have a link for that. I got it from the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Here’s a link to some current numbers of starvation.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35166
1 in 8 of the world’s population really does sound quite high to me. I’m sure it was a much smaller number before agriculture when the food was not locked up (also an observation from Ishmael).
However, I do not have a good link for this online. Sorry.
#34 – deowll,
The mountain glaciers are now growing so at least for now that is blooper.
Is this your idea of growing glaciers? Where’d you hear that?
http://tinyurl.com/n9fhat
Commercial ranches don’t normally overgraze. They know how many head of cattle they can grow and limit the number of cattle they run to stay inside the limit. Communal lands are commonly overgrazed.
Most cattle here in the U.S. go through CAFOs, the very model of unsustainability. I’m not sure what commercial ranchers you’re talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming
The same for over fishing. When individuals are in charge of a resource they depend on they limit the catch to make sure they get that next catch but when it’s just a race to see who can catch the most the sea gets fished out. 90% of wild fish stocks are gone but then you get fastest reproduction and growth at maybe 80 to 90% at least with the species that can stand this sort of crap. Catches of many types of fish aren’t necessarily going down. I expect blue fin tuna to go extinct. One adult fish can be worth a new car. They take years to become adults and they are having a harder time finding food.
When individuals are in charge, you get a tragedy of the commons every time. Only when regulations are in place, which are generally supported by the individuals concerned, will they not overfish or overuse whatever the common resource is. This is as it must be. People support the regulation because without it, they know that one of their neighbors will overfish so they must too. With regulation in place, they can relax and take fish at a more sustainable rate. So, yes, the people support such regulation, as a rule. But, no, in the absence of regulation, they will not trust their neighbors with their livelihood.