RealClimate: Unforced variations: Jan 2023

Ned Kelly says

12 Jan 2023 at 2:20 AM

A 2 hr commentary of the natural threats to civilization, climate change, ecological overshoot and limits to growth and so on. by William E. Rees: “The Fundamental Issue – Overshoot” recent video interview.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQTuDttP2Yg

Looks into the long ignored/avoided notion of Human Ecology, exponential population growth, connects back to fossil fuel energy use, pollution, wastes, climate change impacts, and the global economic system and mindsets.

William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning in Vancouver, Canada. He researches the implications of global ecological trends for the longevity of civilization, with special foci on urban (un)sustainability and cultural/cognitive barriers to rational public policy.

This is a more holistic view of the state of the world’s problems. Seen more of this approach lately. It’s a good interview / scientific discussion which covers a lot of interrelated dynamics in a clear and constructive manner. Sorry if it is too much off topic for here, but some here might be interested in this broader aspect around climate change issues and long term solutions.

sample text about climate change being yet another symptom, and not the cause: @ 37 minutes

Q. (There) is a minority view in the environmental movement you highlight, that climate change isn’t “the problem” but instead is “a symptom” of the problem; can you unpack what you mean by this?

Rees: Sure, to do that I’m going to take a wee step back. I believe that human beings and our cognitive capacities have become obsolete in the world in which we live. If you think about the evolution of humans we grew up in relatively simple circumstances, in small groups living in home ranges that weren’t all that extensive. We lived and died within a few dozens of kilometers of each other. There was no real pressures on the human mind to think beyond simple cause effect relationships.

Bottom line is that the human brain our cognitive capacities tend to be limited in most people to rather simplistic reductionist perspectives on reality.

If you think about that, climate change is a perfect illustration because there are hundreds of things happening but we fixate on climate change. The focus gets shifted a little bit when something like a pandemic comes along. Then it’s all about the pandemic we forget about climate change. Then there’s the war in the Ukraine and we talk about that for a while and now we’re back to climate change. And nobody (very few) bothers to connect all of those dots because human beings are not inherently intrinsically capable of thinking systemically.

When’s the last time you had a dinner conversation about lags and thresholds, chaotic behavior and collapse syndrome which is called catastrophe and systems theory and so on? It just doesn’t happen okay. So climate change is our fixation because there are obvious “symptoms” that many people can relate to but it’s only one symptom – there is also plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, soil and land erosion, on and on. Every single so-called “environmental problem” is a symptom of the same issue (cause) which is overshoot.

Overshoot is the fundamental issue.

The fundamental issue is the cause of all of these other problems. Overshoot means that human beings are using even renewable resources, the products of ecosystems, much faster than they can regenerate and we’re dumping wastes far in excess of the natural assimilative capacity of the eco-sphere.

On the one hand we’re drawing down all of our natural Capital – fish stocks are collapsing, soils are eroding at 10 to 40 times the rate of restoration, we’re polluting far beyond the capacity of the systems to assimilate. Climate change is a pollution problem because carbon dioxide is the single largest waste product by weight of industrial economies. The anthropogenic component of climate, the carbon emissions, is a waste management issue. The Earth system cannot cope in a timely manner, it will over time but not in time (for us) with the quantity of carbon dioxide that we’re putting out there.

By weight CO2 is the the largest waste product.

It’s like an invisible gas but if you add it up it actually has a weight putting out 36 billion tons a year of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of which a significant proportion is the carbon – it’s what goes in as fuel the coal oil natural gas is all carbon based and of course it has to go through the system and is emitted as waste but as you say because it’s an invisible gas no one tends to think of it as waste.

Overshoot is the problem – human beings are destroying the biophysical basis of their own existence. We are literally consuming that which we need to maintain the system even at a reasonable size and it’s not at a reasonable size any longer.

Overshoot means you’ve exceeded your carrying capacity. If you think of any farmer who has a bunch ofcattle, they know that if you put too many cows out in the pastures they’ll eat the grass until there’s nothing but mud left, then they die.

Now if you import a lot of grass from some other farmer you can keep your cattle going so that’s what humans have been doing. I mean we talk about an Urban Ecology that’s nonsense. The city is not a complete ecosystem, the city as we I currently think of it is the human equivalent of a livestock feedlot because you have all of these consumer organisms jammed into this one area. And you know, geologists geographers and urban economists often say well cities are no problem, only two or three percent of the surface area of the Earth. They’re narrow Keyhole is a Reductionist, simplistic perspective.

If we look at human beings from an Ecological point of view then each City occupies on Earth an area anywhere between a hundred and a thousand times more land than is within the built up area of the city. So the human Urban Ecosystem now is larger than the entire planet!

It’s because cities have become parasitic on their environments, because of globalization. I did an early study of Tokyo, has 38 million people the whole population of Canada. But Tokyo uses more Bio Capacity than the entire nation of Japan. Twice as much as a matter of fact. The ecological footprint of Tokyo is larger than the entire country of Japan and it’s only something like a quarter or a third of the Japanese population. Japan has exceeded its carrying capacity because of globalization.

The capacity to bring in the resources needed to sustain its Overpopulation, and because we can do that we become blinded to the reality of our Overshoot.

As long as you can import from elsewhere you are blind to the fact that you’ve exceeded your local carrying capacity. But what you’re doing in the meantime is drawing down the available productive (Bio) capacity in other places. Every country in Europe is in that circumstance. Japan is in that circumstance where they are living on imported carrying capacity or the assimilative capacity of the rest of the planet to absorb their carbon and other wastes we don’t actually measure the other wastes.

And this is in addition to the Energy Flux being provided by imported Fossil carbon and hydrocarbons. (end)

The url is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQTuDttP2Yg