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
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.
No need, we’ll do it ourselves
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
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.