This is only tangentially related to the article, but if you have small children I can't recommend Puffin Rock enough as a kids show. It teaches really simple environmental messages in a very subtle way while being absolutely adorable and fun to watch.
Compared to a lot of other kids shows, I find that it's still fun to watch but it's also really relaxing. The music, the narration and the design have a calming feeling to them. Really a good show :)
When the adults can’t catch enough to feed themselves and the chicks, they make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks starve. Dr. Fayet called her quest “heartbreaking”: “You put your hand in the burrow and feel with your hand a little ball on the floor, but then you realize it’s cold, and not moving.”
Maybe the presence of 7,646,237,844 people in the world has something to do with it; at the end of the day for as sad as it seems the best thing it could happen to wildlife is a plague that only affects humans (perhaps a plague that sterilizes us would suffice)
If there is one thing humans can't clearly do is agree on something; so I'm afraid that is not an option, specially since the desire to have kids is one of the most hard-wired desires in sexual organisms.
That's just not true, people tend to desire less and less kids, a lot of people deliberately chose to have no kids, something that was unthinkable several decades ago.
If ever there was a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's it. There's a first time for everything. And in fact, there's a proven way to make people decide to have fewer kids: make them rich. People in more affluent societies generally choose to have fewer kids, to the point where the fertility rate in some places (Japan, Italy) is below the replacement rate. So it clearly can be done.
Wealth is just a proxy. What lowers the reproduction rate is higher living standards. And having all humans on current industrialized nation living standards with current methods of production certainly would not make things more sustainable.
If you want sustainability you either need fewer humans or clean up the entire supply chain. And the latter might just suffer from jevon's paradox.
It's also possible that someone discovers a way to build a cheap commercial fusion power plant tomorrow. But we generally don't rely on these kinds of remote possibilities.
we should be able to scale our existence better. We suffer tons of macro-level inefficiencies that we could get a better grip on prior to culling ourselves.
Seems like a pretty inappropriate topic to joke about, honestly. Species-level extinction and/or extirpation is a pretty grave matter, and is accelerating.
Based on my interests and background, I have very little faith that humanity appreciates the scale of the problem, how intractable it is to short term resolution, and potentially how many people globally could die as a result of it. For example, I think there's a really substantial probability that all people could die within 50 years, because of 1) where climate change is likely to hit worst 2) the desperate nature of famine 3) the number of nuclear armed states in those areas 4) the number of automated counterstrike mechanisms out there.
So, get your cheap laughs in about the puffins while you can.
edit: To support my negativity, I will just say look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857964 to see how complicated something as trivial as building a house is... now, I cannot tell you how to avert global warming, but I can tell you that I have almost no faith at all any given poster here knows what is actually needed to successfully do a climate intervention or durable carbon sequestration program (materials, supply chain, technology, poltical coordination, etc). Another post on here notes we can't even agree to have fewer kids. It's very dire, and very few people seem to appreciate it. For example, the elected leader of the world's largest economy has already reversed policies that reduce CO2 emission and plans on reducing more, and has severely limited research on the subject.
They're delicious, but you have to like game. Kind of like a really strong tasting duck, but hard to describe. Maybe a cross between duck breast and liver?
That said, they should probably slow down on the hunting until they've worked out what's going on.
Population growth has been slowing since the late 60's, it peaked in 1968. Western countries are being particularly affected by it, as we have less and less, or no children. The predictions of humans overwhelming the Earth just isn't going to happen. Since you're just wasting our resources, feel free to sacrifice yourself though for the greater good.
We are already overwhelming the earth by just about every measure. We're already using more than one planet's worth of resources, sustainability overshoot comes ever earlier each year. As seen by the sheer number of disparate stories about earth and species' inability to cope.
"Population growth has been slowing"
Which of course means it is still growing. How many decades ago should it have started to fall in order to avoid catastrophic climate change or the incessant stream of environmental bad news and loss of species?
No one should feel obligated to sacrifice themselves. They should feel obligated to replicate less if they want their own children to inhabit somewhere worth living.
What's less? What is your approved number of children for each couple? If someone remarries, does that x number of children carry over from their previous?
Vast majority population of the world hasn't even really contributed to climate change until the last couple decades. It's not the number of people that are doing it, it's the american lifestyle.
It's both. Numbers and our model of what "developed" is.
If only 10,000 people were living an American lifestyle the planet would cope just fine. When it's 1bn it seems like it's clearly becoming problematic. What of when it's 3bn?
If, as seems to be the case, there are 7bn who want, or are advertised at to want, a throwaway Western lifestyle, we're screwed. All 7bn. We can't pretend the numbers are not there or that most are going to happily remain with subsistence lives for all future generations.
It's probably more feasible to make larger families unfashionable or nudge them via the tax system than simply "fixing" climate change globally, habit and species loss.
"Population growth has been slowing since the late 60's, it peaked in 1968."
Misleading phrasing...
"World population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new UN DESA report, “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision”, launched today."
It also does not mean it's going to stay under a limit making it a poor yardstick. As throwaway5752 said, the limit of log(x) -> infinity is still infinity even if it starts growing really slowly.
Really though we don't need to kill / sterilize all humans, getting off the planet could work just fine.
Sorry, when did anyone talk about a limit? If the slowing growth continues, then eventually it will cross zero into the negative. Look at the relative growth, by 2100 it's predicted to get close.
> If the slowing growth continues, then eventually it will cross zero into the negative.
Err, no. The growth of log(x) is always decreasing and yet it always stays positive. This is true for a huge range of functions and one of the reasons limits are important.
Now, you can argue that the way human growth is slowing suggests it might possibly go negative at some point. But, that's less obvious.
You're trying to impress us with the maths. I already took all of the statistics, and differential equation classes twenty years ago. I get it. However, there are already countries experiencing negative population growth, and the trend is continuing in other Western countries.
I am not trying to impress with high school math, I defending someone that got down voted for an accurate statement.
At best we are predicting a peak human population 30+ years from now and those kind of predictions are never very accurate. Further, even if that's one peak it says very little about human population 100's or 1,000's of years from now.
Yeah, comp sci 101 alone is sufficient to know that logarithmic growth's second derivative is negative for all x > 0, and ln(x) is still unbounded. "Growth is slowing" can be a very effective sleight of hand.
I find the discussions about american lifestyle and how much it matters and how much consumption would be acceptable fascinating, and how countries laws would need to affect birthrates and all that as well; but if dang says its off-topic and dumb, well what can I do.
> if dang says its off-topic and dumb, well what can I do.
One option would be to listen & learn rather than expressing incredulity, assume that dang knows what he's doing and that you're getting downvoted by others for a legitimate reason.
The topic of American consumption is fascinating and important, but this article is about Puffins in Iceland. @dang didn't say it's dumb, he said it leads to dumb. But he did say it was off-topic, because it is. Don't assume that off-topic means dumb, don't take it personally.
FWIW, I think there are relevant on-topic ways to introduce topics of overpopulation and American consumption into this thread. Those are related to both the climate change and to the tourism and Puffin hunting that is affecting the Puffin populations in Iceland.
If you had tied your comment to something the article said specifically, it would have helped. And, of course, you really could have done without the apocalyptic suggestion for a mass human extinction event.
Seems like a productive topic considering the feature article concludes the cause is climate. Global population is a significant factor in most climate discussions.
The problem is that the smaller, curious topics—like puffins—tend to get sucked into the nearest black hole, i.e. the nearest large generic controversy. If we allow this, then the site will consist of the same few comments about the same few topics over and over. That's bad for intellectual curiosity. It also causes the site to burst into flames—not good for curiosity either.
I called this 'dumb' above because you can reliably see such threads deteriorate as you read down and to the right.
People might also be interested in the Guardian article [1], which concentrated on the precipitous decline of Puffin numbers in Shetland. Compared to places where the drop has not been so steep, it seems that the birds are having to travel much further to find food (hundreds of kilometers in some cases), which is linked to changes in sea temperatures as a result of global warming; as sea temperatures change plankton are not available at the right time to feed sand eel larvae and so there aren't so many sand eels for the puffins to eat.
Our company uses various GPS trackers on a daily basis, the only thing that I can imagine pushes the cost that high is size. Smaller = Higher Cost. As the birds probably can only take so much extra weight
I don't know about GPS trackers, but my experience with scientific sensors in general has been that they tend to be quite expensive when compared to similar commodity items. They need to be in robust waterproof housings, compatible with other proprietary equipment and software, and accessible to non-programmers and newbs. I have seen things less fancy then a GPS tracker, like temperature or water level sensors with a few kb of storage and a serial port, that easily exceed $800 cost. This is frustrating to scientists, and many use substitute consumer equipment, roll their own when they can, or substitute cheap labor for overpriced automation. Sometimes an undergrad research assistant with sneaker-net is cheaper then then sensors' proprietary networking module. Most of this stuff has a "stuck in the 90's" kind of feel to it. 9600b serial ports, ncurses looking vendor software and propriety radio instead of wifi or cellular. Which would be cool if it was free and open, but it's not.
I think it's low-volume, high margin market, and not very competitive. An opportunity perhaps?
Global warming may be slowed down to less catastrophic levels if society changes to live more sustainably, most importantly by burning less fossil fuel. Vote for political parties who support this, lobby your elected representatives to push for sustainable policies. Try to convince as many people as possible that this an issue we need to address now.
I live in Newfoundland and here the Puffin (our provincial bird) is doing really well [1]. The town where I'm from I can drive 5 minutes to two separate puffin nesting sites and in the city where I live I can get to a colony of 300,000 in ~20mins. Not trying to diminish the issues seen by the Iceland birds but I'm glad they appear to be doing well here. Great for our tourism too. (Should also note that they can't be hunted here either)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd
If you want sustainability you either need fewer humans or clean up the entire supply chain. And the latter might just suffer from jevon's paradox.
And yet, Europe and Japan have plenty of childless people.
Based on my interests and background, I have very little faith that humanity appreciates the scale of the problem, how intractable it is to short term resolution, and potentially how many people globally could die as a result of it. For example, I think there's a really substantial probability that all people could die within 50 years, because of 1) where climate change is likely to hit worst 2) the desperate nature of famine 3) the number of nuclear armed states in those areas 4) the number of automated counterstrike mechanisms out there.
So, get your cheap laughs in about the puffins while you can.
edit: To support my negativity, I will just say look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857964 to see how complicated something as trivial as building a house is... now, I cannot tell you how to avert global warming, but I can tell you that I have almost no faith at all any given poster here knows what is actually needed to successfully do a climate intervention or durable carbon sequestration program (materials, supply chain, technology, poltical coordination, etc). Another post on here notes we can't even agree to have fewer kids. It's very dire, and very few people seem to appreciate it. For example, the elected leader of the world's largest economy has already reversed policies that reduce CO2 emission and plans on reducing more, and has severely limited research on the subject.
That said, they should probably slow down on the hunting until they've worked out what's going on.
I am 54, married (just celebrated our 23rd anniversary), and childless by choice.
Your move.
p.s. how is babby formed?
http://blogs.worldbank.org/futuredevelopment/rapid-slowdown-...
"Population growth has been slowing"
Which of course means it is still growing. How many decades ago should it have started to fall in order to avoid catastrophic climate change or the incessant stream of environmental bad news and loss of species?
No one should feel obligated to sacrifice themselves. They should feel obligated to replicate less if they want their own children to inhabit somewhere worth living.
If only 10,000 people were living an American lifestyle the planet would cope just fine. When it's 1bn it seems like it's clearly becoming problematic. What of when it's 3bn?
If, as seems to be the case, there are 7bn who want, or are advertised at to want, a throwaway Western lifestyle, we're screwed. All 7bn. We can't pretend the numbers are not there or that most are going to happily remain with subsistence lives for all future generations.
It's probably more feasible to make larger families unfashionable or nudge them via the tax system than simply "fixing" climate change globally, habit and species loss.
Misleading phrasing...
"World population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new UN DESA report, “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision”, launched today."
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-r...
Really though we don't need to kill / sterilize all humans, getting off the planet could work just fine.
Err, no. The growth of log(x) is always decreasing and yet it always stays positive. This is true for a huge range of functions and one of the reasons limits are important.
Now, you can argue that the way human growth is slowing suggests it might possibly go negative at some point. But, that's less obvious.
At best we are predicting a peak human population 30+ years from now and those kind of predictions are never very accurate. Further, even if that's one peak it says very little about human population 100's or 1,000's of years from now.
One option would be to listen & learn rather than expressing incredulity, assume that dang knows what he's doing and that you're getting downvoted by others for a legitimate reason.
The topic of American consumption is fascinating and important, but this article is about Puffins in Iceland. @dang didn't say it's dumb, he said it leads to dumb. But he did say it was off-topic, because it is. Don't assume that off-topic means dumb, don't take it personally.
FWIW, I think there are relevant on-topic ways to introduce topics of overpopulation and American consumption into this thread. Those are related to both the climate change and to the tourism and Puffin hunting that is affecting the Puffin populations in Iceland.
If you had tied your comment to something the article said specifically, it would have helped. And, of course, you really could have done without the apocalyptic suggestion for a mass human extinction event.
I called this 'dumb' above because you can reliably see such threads deteriorate as you read down and to the right.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/shetland...
http://barbaras.com/community/project-puffin/
I think it's low-volume, high margin market, and not very competitive. An opportunity perhaps?
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-despi...