End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?
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Оглавление
Professor Barnosky Anthony. End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
The Journey
Past or Future?
People
Stuff
Storms
Hunger
Thirst
Toxins
Disease
War
End Game?
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
Jane Grassman Hadly & William McKell Hadly,
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If those obvious transformations aren’t enough, we also have to add tremendous amounts of energy into the global ecosystem to keep society operating at its present level, and the way we have traditionally done that, by burning fossil fuels (the stored remnants of previous life on the planet), is beginning to bite us from behind, by raising Earth’s temperature abnormally. If we keep going at the rate we have been, it will become hotter in the next six decades than it has been for some fifteen million years. The increase in temperature will be so fast that many of Earth’s species won’t be able to keep up, and in some places where lots of people currently live it will be too hot for any mammal – including us – to survive outside. That, of course, presumes that we don’t run out of the easily obtainable oil first, which would escalate what happened in Egypt in 2013 by increasing energy prices across the world. Of course there are alternative sources of energy, but the world hasn’t been pursuing them too actively.
You get the message – there’s lots of global change under way. The underlying driver of it all is that there are just so many people now, all needing their slice of the pie. And we keep on coming. As of 2014 we were adding eighty-two million people per year. That is three orders of magnitude higher than the average yearly growth from ten thousand years to four hundred years ago (which averaged sixty-seven thousand people per year). Most of the population growth has been in the last century, over which time the number of humans has nearly quadrupled. Just since 1950, we’ve increased our numbers almost threefold, and since 1969, we’ve doubled ourselves. The problem is that each of us requires our own portion of air to breathe, a place to live that is comfortable and dry, enough water to drink and food to eat, and myriad ways to amuse ourselves. And we produce a lot of waste – waste from our bodies, waste from our structures and vehicles, waste from our fun.
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