Yes it's good that the population will stabilize, we need that to preserve the environment.Probably start dropping soon.
The way some seem to be happy with the way we are going I doubt it will keep growing.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction event so it is really good that the population will stabilize in this century, it needs to happen to keep enough room for biodiversity and the health and welfare of all creatures.Ahhh its not that little, space makes it look liitle.
Earth is plenty big enough for us right now, we simply have to get some perspective and work on our existing technologies to do things better.
In fact things are alot better than they have been in the past.
Getting us all out of poverty and making energy cheaper seems like a good goal.
Then the more brain power we have to work on building better ideas can't be a bad thing.
I am not sure I agree with you.We are in the middle of a mass extinction event so it is really good that the population will stabilize in this century, it needs to happen to keep enough room for biodiversity and the health and welfare of all creatures.Ahhh its not that little, space makes it look liitle.
Earth is plenty big enough for us right now, we simply have to get some perspective and work on our existing technologies to do things better.
In fact things are alot better than they have been in the past.
Getting us all out of poverty and making energy cheaper seems like a good goal.
Then the more brain power we have to work on building better ideas can't be a bad thing.
Yes population growth is flattening which is a good thing, a proper balance is needed.I am not sure I agree with you.We are in the middle of a mass extinction event so it is really good that the population will stabilize in this century, it needs to happen to keep enough room for biodiversity and the health and welfare of all creatures.Ahhh its not that little, space makes it look liitle.
Earth is plenty big enough for us right now, we simply have to get some perspective and work on our existing technologies to do things better.
In fact things are alot better than they have been in the past.
Getting us all out of poverty and making energy cheaper seems like a good goal.
Then the more brain power we have to work on building better ideas can't be a bad thing.
Is it not true that more than 80 percent (Don't quote me) of all life that has ever existed is already gone.
I am not saying that I want biodiversity to die but I do not think we are in the middle of a mass extinction.
I don't think population is going to grow rapidly anymore anyway if you look at the demographics.
Remember we are still coming out of a fairly long ice age and life has done pretty well surviving that.
I am optimistic.
That's an interesting addition about the rate of species birth. The thing with mass extinctions is, usually after they happen we see an explosion of biodiversity (I believe this occurred about 100,000 years after the K-T event.) I'm glad you brought up population sizes and I'm sure that monotypal farming and relying on a small number of agricultural products has something to do with that. There is also the effect of pesticides on the death rate of critical pollinators. UN scientists came out with a report about how pesticides are overused and that there better ways to protect farmlands without using them and without driving pollinators towards extinction. It seems like Bayer, Dow, et. al, and their consumers don't want to listen to that sustainable message and continue to overuse these dangerous pesticides like neocortinoids that have been strongly implicated in pollinator die offs.I take bigger issue with calling it "the sixth mass extinction" than recognizing that the extinction rate is currently significantly greater than the "background extinction rate". The latter is a strong claim to make, especially given the biases in determining past extinction rate from the fossil record and comparing to currently derived rates (my own greatest source of skepticism toward this claim until more recently), but it has been repeatedly borne out by different researchers with different methods. From what I can tell, in the scientific community it is not that controversial anymore. A quick look on google scholar will reveal many recent articles investigating this question and coming to essentially the same conclusion about it being real. What's causing it is also not very controversial. It is a combination of land-use change and climate change, and it is affecting species differently depending on where they are and what their vulnerabilities vs. adaptive or migration potentials are. The harder questions are "how serious is it?", "how is it likely to evolve in the future as the world continues to warm", and "what actions should we take?". My guess is that minimizing land use change and warming are better options for a variety of reasons, more so than trying to preserve vulnerable species directly.
The problem with calling it the "sixth" mass extinction, though, is that the previous "big five" are not clearly defined. When they were first being studied it seemed logical to describe them this way, but now our understanding of species loss over geologic time is much better, and we realize that those five extinctions were not the largest nor the most statistically significant. Calling this one "the sixth" is a bit arbitrary or even confusing if one looks at the extinction record.
One counterpoint I could find to the current claims of high extinction rate implying a crisis, is that there is less attention given to the rate of species birth (i.e., speciation). At least one author found evidence that the current speciation rate roughly matches the rate of extinction. Their conclusion is that the current problem is not so much the loss of species, but the diminishing of population sizes to a small fraction of what they once were. That sounds logical, I suppose, though I don't see it being verified and catching on.