The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable
www.mdpi.com
Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics—nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ and sub-system of the ecosphere—it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system, the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host. The population increase from one to eight billion, and >100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.

Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics

  • @SineIraEtStudio@midwest.socialEnglish
    7•23 days ago

    Interesting piece of the journal article:

    On the contrary, many analysts reject historical precedents as guides to contemporary policy. Perhaps they should take warning from the aforementioned infamous 1972 Club of Rome/MIT study, Limits to Growth (LTG) [99], which showed that, on a business-as-usual track, global society would face collapse by mid-21st century. As might be expected, many economists and techno-optimists roundly rejected this assessment—economists ignore overshoot and even grossly underestimate the damage from climate change; their concepts and models are divorced from biophysical reality [100]. However, subsequent studies show that the real world is behaving with disturbing fidelity to LTG modelling, particularly the two (of four) scenarios that indicate a halt in growth over the next decade or so, followed by subsequent declines and collapse [101].

    [Emphasis mine]

    Complete Abstract:

    Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics—nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ and sub-system of the ecosphere—it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system, the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host. The population increase from one to eight billion, and >100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.

    • HanrahanOPEnglish
      5•23 days ago

      As might be expected, many economists and techno-optimists roundly rejected this assessment

      Nordhaus surley leads this group of asshats.

      https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

      Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.

      This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “

      • @maketotaldestr0i@lemm.eeMEnglish
        2•22 days ago

        the nobel in economics is just a fake award of other pseudoscientists tugging each others dicks.

        There are plenty of absolutely damning counterarguments to nordhaus that make it so that nobody serious takes him seriously. hes a shill plain and simple

        • HanrahanOPEnglish
          1•19 days ago

          the nobel in economics is just a fake award of other pseudoscientists tugging each others dicks.

          For sure . for those not in thr know the Economics Nobel is set up by a Swedish Bank and uses Noble’s name.

          There are plenty of absolutely damning counterarguments to nordhaus that make it so that nobody serious takes him seriously. hes a shill plain and simple

          I don’t agree he’s not taken seriously, which is unfortuante. He’s the professor of Economics at Yale. Lots of his work was leant on by other confident idiots like Bjorn Lomborg and the likess of Richard Tol when he was involved in working group 3 of the IPCC and that’s often what informs policy decisions governmentally.

          PS nice to see you here from Reddits collapse group? I don’t visit there anymore but did fire over a decade.

  • @TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5•23 days ago

    The obvious is simple and has been there the entire time:

    Wolves. We need to genetically engineer fast breeding, hyper intelligent, rapidly growing wolves to curtail the human population.

    There is no possible way this could go wrong and I’ll take no notes.

    • HanrahanOPEnglish
      3•23 days ago

      No need, we’ll do it ourselves

      https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

      Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”

      Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.”

      Hans Shellenhuber suggests that if we get to around 2c or thereabouts, 4c is inevitable becase of cascading tipping points we won’t be able to stop.