World not taking ‘ghastly’ future seriously
(CNS): Humanity is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for boosting incomes in the short term, scientists have said in a new study reviewing the dangers presented by the rapid loss of bio-diversity. No leaders are taking seriously the mounting, imminent threats, posing what they described as a “ghastly” but definitely not too distant future.
Writing in the scientific journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, 17 scientists led by Corey J. A. Bradshaw have reviewed the latest research and sounded yet another alarm about what humans are doing to their planet and the catastrophe around the corner.
“Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization,” the scientists warned.
The major environmental issue of bio-diversity loss has received nowhere near enough attention, despite the need for urgent action given that the planet is now in a period of major extinction. “The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms — including humanity — is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,” the scientists said.
The experts pointed out that the “continuous expansion of the human enterprise” isn’t matched by an immediate adverse reaction, so the time delay between ecological damage and the penalties for it is part of the reason why governments are failing to act and not recognising the magnitude of the challenge and the real counteraction needed.
The science underlying the issue is strong, but the experts warned that awareness is weak. “Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals,” they wrote.
In a stark summary of the state of the natural world, the scientist said the problems will worsen in the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries and that the report is a realistic “cold shower” of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future.
Now is the time for experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to “avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and tell it like it is,” the scientists concluded, because anything else is negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise.
Category: Science & Nature
CNS Could you provide a copy of the scientists’ report or at least give us a link to it? Thanks.
CNS: The title of the report in the second paragraph links to the report.
Any self-ascribing “environmentalist” that isn’t also researching and eating a plant-based diet, is literally full of bologna.
How about all those flower power flakes board a plane to China and protest against the world’s highest popular to be more environmental.
Don’t forget about privatization of low orbit by Elon Musk.
“ Beyond the operational risks, building, launching and maintaining such a gigantic network of satellites would require an enormous amount of raw materials and energy. Unlike the geostationary satellites commonly used by telecoms, Starlink satellites will stay in a low Earth orbit and cross the visible sky of a given location for just a few minutes. To follow and connect to them, buyers will have to use purpose-built phased array antennas. To make them affordable, they would have to be mass produced, and SpaceX has asked permission for 1 million of them. For starters.
More troublingly, competitors are sharpening their knives.”
The costly collateral damage from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite fleet https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2020-05-costly-collateral-elonmusk-starlink-satellite.amp
What a stupid article. Starlink simply replaces running fiber to every building on the planet and supercedes rip off providers like logic and lime or whatever they’re called now. The collosal energy consumption of the digital economy is in computation not internet distribution.
Mr. Anonymous 6:14 pm: What a stupid comment. Have you finished high school? Are you on Elon’s payroll? Orbiting thousands of pieces of junk around the earth is insane! The worlds biggest con artist should be exposed for what he is!
By your very grown up logic you must be on one of Cayman’s ISP payrolls? Starlink satellites are in LEO; when they reach the end of their life they will fall to earth and burn up. Have someone at high school explain it to you.
Beware of strangers bearing gifts!
What a stupid comment this is
Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.
“ We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (± 6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass.”
“ The world’s plastics alone now weigh twice as much as the planet’s marine and terrestrial animals. Buildings and infrastructure outweigh trees and shrubs. ”
THAT is SCARY.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-made-stuff-now-outweighs-all-life-on-earth/
So be it!!! Let it go bottom up…the land is overpriced to the point that Caymanians cannot afford to buy it! 😤
It’s always about Caymanians, isn’t it? Reread the article, dumdum
Newsflash: If you read the article too, you would understand the severity of what this says.
TL;DR: Humanity has become so greedy and selfish that people don’t even care about leaving anything for others including their own descendants. Greed is destroying the planet. Planet Earth will soon become uninhabitable. Not everyone can afford the trip to Mars. Being left behind and ignored concerns are common sentiments among the have-nots.
Skimming is not reading, dumdum.
Do you have a solution for when the sun turns into a super nova and swallows the earth? Just wondering if there’s anything we can do right now to prevent that.
Too many people on the planet. 85% of y’all need to go.
do you volunteer as tribute?
Around every 12,000 years, we are done anyway and we are overdue. Our tinkering with the planet is a mere match light compared to the power of the sun.
True that the sun is heating the anthropocene-derived greenhouse gases we’ve put out there – the millenniums of CO2 we’ve unlocked ahead of schedule in the last two hundred years, and the CH4 (four times more warming than CO2) that we have generated in just the last 75 years worth of accelerating insatiable addictions to meat and dairy. IPCC has been focused on CO2, because it is admittedly the bigger and more longer term irreversible problem. It’s half-life is measured in hundreds of years. Until recently, less focus had been on human CH4 contributions from industrial meat and dairy production, with a half-life of just 8 years. Humanity could meet Paris targets by radically changing convenience-diet attitudes and preferences to more, or all plant-based. Having done the switch myself, it’s not that radical, and in fact, quite a bit healthier anyway.
Research, read, watch, listen : Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect.
Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist who taught climate scientists long ago about the Butterfly Effect, but most of them seem to have forgotten that.
Lorenz’s butterfly simile is intentionally innocuous. The underlying order to the chaos is that we are 7.8 billion swarming locusts, every year, feverishly consuming 170% of the planet’s finite replenishment capacity, either eating, or aspiring to eat the disastrous North American convenience diet. Our number growing to 11 billion by 2100. The eventual consequence of outstripping of available biosphere is not a chaotic or random outcome, it’s a certainty over time. We can forecast reliably what is going to happen, and more or less, when.
It is more complex than it looks. Universe is electrical and electromagnetic force is far much stronger than thermodynamics of CO2. Then there is plasma physics and the Alfvén wave.
I don’t pretend that I (and most people on this planet) would ever understand what is going on, but certainly it is more complex than reducing CH4 by changing diets.
I thrive on meat. Plant diet nearly killed me. Plant diet cleans your body, but meat nourishes it.
I’m certain alfvén waves did not clear 60% of natural wild spaces since 1960, to make way for grain feed acreage. We did all of that.
been here 20 years…still waiting for a caymanian mla to mention or mention rising sea levels.
mount thrashmore tells you everything you want to know about about caymanian attitudes to the environment.
They don’t want to know because it will render the most expensive properties here worthless and the real estate industry will go 🍑🍑up!
So be it!!! Let it go bottom up…the land is overpriced to the point that Caymanians cannot afford to buy it! 😤
I think we will find that the commercial appeal of our real estate will hinge directly on the elevation of our doomed airport above MSL. We have a couple feet at the best of times, so that’s what – one or two 20 year mortgages left in this game?
Maybe locals can get some then, instead of the banks using parlor tricks to take them to basically give to foreigners.
As a Caymanian in my 20s it terrifies me to see elder Caymanians support Trump and his fossil-fuel based energy policies.
Bruh, your grandchildren going be swimming