You can't make hockey sticks out of just a few data points, as this author does in several of the charts. For example, the deforestation chart is based on a few data points from a UN study (where Our World in Data that the author links to cites as its source). But tree coverage has actually increased over the past 30 years according to some studies by NASA and elsewhere. For example, one 2018 paper from Nature says:<p>"We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally5—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics. Global bare ground cover has decreased by 1.16 million km2 (−3.1%), most notably in agricultural regions in Asia. Of all land changes, 60% are associated with direct human activities and 40% with indirect drivers such as climate change."
[0]<p>0: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9</a>
I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?
> This, to me, is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two (essentially, the GWP curve from before).<p>The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.<p>It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason.<p>Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda:<p>> Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure.<p>He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag.<p>He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution:<p>> In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations<p>No, it's not.<p><a href="https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-solar-panels" rel="nofollow">https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola...</a>
Some of these graphs are pretty silly. The downward hockey stocks are extrapolating based on two data points, and the shape of the curve is just not at all plausible.
Some thoughts:<p>> [Graphs showing exponential population up, outputs up, resource extraction up]<p>Ok, great<p>> [Graphs showing logistic wild animal biomass, forest cover]<p>Ok, not good<p>> Whatever model we have adopted for existing on this planet, it seems to be a poor choice. It appears to be on track to fail.<p>WHAT? Where did this conclusion come from? There's so many hoops jumped to arrive at this conclusion that I'm astounded. How is "fail" defined by forest cover? Or number of wild animal species? As though we will blindly march towards 0 forest cover over the next N years and immediately suffocate ourselves? No, of course we are paying attention and will come up with new inventions or policies as requirements come up. We are resourceful and intelligent and we'll find ways to adapt.<p>On another note, curves like this in ecology almost always end up as an S-curve (see Carrying Capacity [0]). It's just a matter of finding what our capacity is and thinking about how we can gracefully decline in growth and avoid the Malthusian trap [1]). Tangentially, I guess this might eventually lead to policies like China's One Child policy [2], and interestingly that means whatever percentages of different cultures exist when our population growth slows will probably remain about the same.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy</a>
Kinda funny. Just before seeing this article I had just finished watching a wonderful video on the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4</a>) which isn't exactly the same as what's being talked about here... but in the same class of problem if you make that class big enough :-).<p>When looking at these sorts of things, surely such "hockey sticks" are often times just not considering the limiting factors? I'm no mathematician (by any approximation) but it seems like more often than not finding such a result should point to some incompleteness or some closer look being required to get the full picture.<p>(P.S. that video was very math heavy and no, I didn't understand most of the math beyond hand-wavy terms... still glad they went into the detail.)
For a 500 page version of this analysis with correspondingly more rigor (including an acknowledgment of S-curves), see Growth by Vaclav Smil. Although this is just a tiny, flawed snapshot of the argument, the conclusions are the same.
Ohh, I loved this blog - glad to find it again! Particularly remember <a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change/" rel="nofollow">https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change...</a> - an understandable back-of-the-envelope calculation of how f*&ked we are with CO2 emissions.
Old and fairly trivial insight is that most hockey-stick graphs end up being S-curves and that's already in sight for most of the ones given here. Population is on its way to a plateau, so is energy consumption in the rich world, and so on. Economic growth due to poor nations caching up will still keep going for a while but it's not that unlikely that we'll eventually end up in a fairly static situation at least for a time, which wasn't uncommon in human history.<p>runaway scenarios without anything reigning them in are very rare or otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about them because we'd all have drowned in Tribbles already.<p>There's a lot of psychology in these imagined scenarios and relatively little long-run empirical observation because complex systems tend to have a significant amount of constraints and regulatory mechanisms that kick in either voluntarily or involuntarily to impose some limits on growth. They tend to be more cyclical in nature rather than tending towards unlimited or even linear growth.
The amount of plastic discarded looks terrible, but it's on a graph that starts in 1100 AD, so it would look outrageous even if people only threw out a single plastic bottle in 1920 and 10 this year
Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing.<p>Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
The recently added postscript is my favorite part of the article.<p>It comments how traffic appears exponential due to the recent HN traffic. Then says:<p>> I trust I need not explain how funny I think this is. I also have a fairly robust idea for how this curve will look a week from now. Just sayin’.<p>Traffic will drop fast and return to normal (slightly higher base) in a few days.<p>Every thing in this article discusses current curves. But there’s actually good reason to assume those curves will return to baseline. Particularly, ones such as “gonad tree cover”. Tree cover is increasing and will return to base as we no longer are using it as a primary energy source and are increasingly using less to build.<p>My point is the doom and gloom in most cases is not really warranted as it will adjust.<p>The author also mentions our “global civilization”, we don’t have one. I get their point, but it’s an important note that we have multiple civilizations. That means these curves are happening due to the sun of independent actions of all civilizations. There’s probably no way to change the outcome.<p>The destruction of the rainforest is out of the control of all civilizations beyond Brazil. China is by far the largest polluter in the world, no one can stop that.<p>Those hockey stick curves might be inevitable; but they probably aren’t “globally true”. I’m betting if we look at mammal populations in places like Idaho or Alaska they’ve been less impacted than say, Massachusetts.<p>The problem isn’t really clear from the global charts
The ultimate conclusion that human population and economic activity are bad does not follow. We have only just started to begin working with efficient resource management and renewable energy sources.<p>Just to point out some natural counterexamples trees dropping their leaves seasonally is a fairly recent catastrophic pollution situation that nature has dealt with in ways that actually increase biomass. Large ruminant herds actually propagate productive environments which we learned when trying to quantify the damage done by their activities. So it is entirely possible that a large population of humans with high economic activity could actually interact positively with the environment. The problem is that we have barely even begun to experiment with how this might work.
The PS at the end of the article made me laugh until I realized that I read it too fast. I thought someone submitted the article to Hockey News - which would have been incredibly funny, not Hacker News.
I failed to read the full article as the warmup graph of human population is not the full story, and the conclusion is incorrect. We need to look at the full picture, and that is that we are on track to reach a stable human population of approximately 10 billion iirc. This is due to greater global education levels, and subsequent lowered birth rates. There is a fantastic book called factfulness that addresses this directly, and also calls into question the dramatic effect of graphs in isolation, and how they can ver much be S curves etc.
> Here’s a proposed rubric for deciding what things in life are “good” and what things are “bad.” If its plotted curve is a hockey stick pointing up in the present system, it’s probably a bad thing.<p>I would guess that the number of professors is also going up like a hockey stick and I am sure the amount of documents published on the Internet is going up like a hockey stick.<p>According to the author’s rubric, the world would be a better place if the author resigned and quit publishing.<p>After reading this facile analysis, I encourage the author to make the world a better place in this manner.
Some valid info here, but also some utter absurdity, and they're mixed together without distinction or comment.<p>For example: with a completely straight face, the author constructs an "inverted hockey stick" from two data points on wild land mammal mass and predicts the complete extinction of wild land mammals in a matter of decades.<p>It seems like, after plotting a few hockey sticks, the author bought into his own conceit and started hallucinating them everywhere.
Every hockey stick is the beginning of a logistic curve (if you are optimistic), or a bell curve (if you are less optimistic). Exponential growth is impossible given limited resources.
Finally! A website that highlights the root cause ...<p>Human population growth.<p>This is the input to all the other stuff. The past few generations thinks they're the most sophisticated and intelligent, but they're living on an ecological credit card. And the bill is going to come due.<p>Just like any bill after a spending spree, this is going to be a doozy. Probably extinction level...
The biggest problem with our sustainability is we literally piss massive amounts of nitrogen into the ocean and replace it with the Haber-Bosch process. You had farmers in Asia farm the same land for 40 centuries all powered by "night soil" or humanure or the various other euphemism for it.
Don’t plot the amount of wild mammalian biomass, plot the amount of totally mammalian biomass.<p>Doubt you’ll see a downward hockey stick in that case.<p>What makes a wild mammal more special than a domestic one?