Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

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Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Jeff » Sat Jun 19, 2010 1:56 pm

Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years', claims leading scientist

By Niall Firth
Last updated at 1:59 AM on 19th June 2010


As the scientist who helped eradicate smallpox he certainly know a thing or two about extinction.

And now Professor Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, has predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years.

He has claimed that the human race will be unable to survive a population explosion and 'unbridled consumption.’

Fenner told The Australian newspaper that 'homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years.'

'A lot of other animals will, too,' he added.

'It's an irreversible situation. I think it's too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.'

Since humans entered an unofficial scientific period known as the Anthropocene - the time since industrialisation - we have had an effect on the planet that rivals any ice age or comet impact, he said.

Fenner, 95, has won awards for his work in helping eradicate the variola virus that causes smallpox and has written or co-written 22 books.

He announced the eradication of the disease to the World Health Assembly in 1980 and it is still regarded as one of the World Health Organisation's greatest achievements.

He was also heavily involved in helping to control Australia's myxomatosis problem in rabbits.

Last year official UN figures estimated that the world’s population is currently 6.8 billion. It is predicted to exceed seven billion by the end of 2011.

Fenner blames the onset of climate change for the human race’s imminent demise.

He said: 'We'll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island.

'Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we're seeing remarkable changes in the weather already.'

'The Aborigines showed that without science and the production of carbon dioxide and global warming, they could survive for 40,000 or 50,000 years.

‘But the world can't. The human species is likely to go the same way as many of the species that we've seen disappear.'

Retired professor Stephen Boyden, a colleague of Professor Fenner, said that while there was deep pessimism among some ecologists, others had a more optimistic view.

'Frank may well be right, but some of us still harbour the hope that there will come about an awareness of the situation and, as a result the revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability.'

Simon Ross, the vice-chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, said: 'Mankind is facing real challenges including climate change, loss of bio-diversity and unprecedented growth in population.'

Professor Fenner's chilling prediction echoes recent comments by Prince Charles who last week warned of ‘monumental problems’ if the world’s population continues to grow at such a rapid pace.

And it comes after Professor Nicholas Boyle of Cambridge University said that a 'Doomsday' moment will take place in 2014 - and will determine whether the 21st century is full of violence and poverty or will be peaceful and prosperous.

in the last 500 years there has been a cataclysmic 'Great Event' of international significance at the start of each century, he claimed.

In 2006 another esteemed academic, Professor James Lovelock, warned that the world's population may sink as low as 500 million over the next century due to global warming.

He claimed that any attempts to tackle climate change will not be able to solve the problem, merely buy us time.


http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencete ... osion.html
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:24 pm

Doomsday logic or....WISHFUL THINKING???

I'll go with option #2. This guy is a tool if he thinks we're even capable of eradicating the hominid virus.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:39 pm

2014 - How to survive the next world crisis, written by the University of Cambridge academic and President of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Professor Nicholas Boyle.

2014 – the next world crisis?

17 June 2010

A cataclysmic “Great Event” is approaching which will occur in or around the year 2014 and determine the course of the rest of the 21st century, according to a startling new thesis published this week.

The remarkable claim forms the central message in a new book, 2014 - How to survive the next world crisis, written by the University of Cambridge academic and President of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Professor Nicholas Boyle.

His study brings a lifetime's research in fields including politics, economics, philosophy, theology and literature to bear on the state of global politics and the causes, consequences and wider meaning of the present financial crisis.

It warns that the economic collapse of 2007-2008 could mark only the start of a wider breakdown in international relations, and predicts that by the middle of the decade just dawned, the United States will find itself the key player in a series of make-or-break decisions about the future of the world.

The choices the US makes will either condemn us to a century of violence and poverty, or usher in a new age of global co-operation, the book asserts.

It adds, however, that the more peaceful alternative will only be realised if the international community can accept that nation states are no longer strong enough to deal with the world's problems and construct an effective system of global governance instead.

"We are approaching a moment of decision, when the deeper issues that have begun to make themselves felt in recent years can no longer be postponed," Professor Boyle said. "By 2014, our legacy to the 21st century is likely to have been determined, for better or for worse."

Those issues represent some of the major flashpoints of world politics; among them economic management, the emergence of new powers such as China and India, and the need for international co-operation on climate change.

While these are all 21st century problems, the book suggests that the timing is not a new phenomenon. Professor Boyle argues that the themes which characterised world politics in each of the last five centuries became apparent over the course of their second decade. In 1914, the result was a catastrophic war which heralded decades of conflict and tension. By contrast, in 1815, the Congress of Vienna ensured almost 100 years of relative peace.

Similarly, the study says, the middle of this decade appears set to witness the convergence of the most pressing concerns of the present day. It draws parallels between Germany's rise circa 1910 and China, which is similarly squaring up to the modern era's leading superpower, the US. America will have had to come to terms with the rising powers of Asia as they approach parity by 2014. Meanwhile, the effects of a prolonged economic downturn could restore an aggressive, Bush-like figure to the US Presidency.

"Everything, in the end, may depend on whether America can react more imaginatively to a decline in relative economic power - to sharing with others both the world's resources and its own standards of living - than, sadly, Britain was able to do in the years before 1914," Professor Boyle writes.

At the heart of that response, he says, should be the realisation that a model of global governance is needed to bring politics into line with the global economy. The book argues that the recent banking collapse happened because no such form of regulation existed to control international finance.

To strengthen existing international structures, one measure the author calls for is a Tobin-style tax on banking to provide the revenue needed to guarantee financial stability and support other "global goods", such as the Millennium Development Goals and the dramatic changes needed to fight climate change.

The book adds, however, that global governance can only occur if there is an accompanying change in the philosophy that underpins international relations. Professor Boyle describes sovereign nation-states as a "20th century experiment that failed" but warns that they are also in many ways an American invention which the US needs to accept as out-dated and no longer fit for purpose.

With the exception of the 20th century, Boyle contends that the model which has guided world progress throughout history has been that of Empire. Similarly, the book argues that in the 21st century, it is a network of global organisations - from multinationals to the still only partly-acknowledged "Empire" of America - that determine many aspects of our lives.

"It is a profoundly hopeful sign that we begin the 21st century with very many more international and intergovernmental organisations than we had at the start of the 20th," Boyle says. What longer history suggests, he adds, is the need for a system of "imperial of global regulation, if the 21st century is to be one of relative peace.

"The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal is through a continuation of the pax Americana," he writes. "But both the world's understanding of America, and America's understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved."

2014 - How to survive the next world crisis, is published by Continuum Books on Thursday, June 17th.

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2010061701
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Nordic » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:44 pm

What a great way to start my Saturday.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Simulist » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:47 pm

As a former listener to Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM, I developed "doom fatigue," eventually — but only because of the loquacious pronouncements and ludicrous prophecies of many of his charlatans guests.

I'm now beginning to wonder if "doom fatigue" might also be a sort of "conditioned response."

For anyone who has listened to Ed Dames for more than 19.5 seconds, it can be tempting to think that anyone who is warning of the possible extinction of the human race is... well, nuts. (Or a tool that is being used on nuts.)

I do not think this of people warning humanity about the extinction-level threat posed by (1) over-population and (2) over-consumption.

These are disturbingly real threats, in my opinion, and they might in fact spell the eventual extinction of the human race itself, just as they are contributing to the extinction of many other species right now. I take these warnings seriously.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:51 pm

^^They're definitely real threats. We could depopulate by billions overnight, between nuclear and biological options. It's like the Sword of Damoceles or whoever, just...fucking...dangling there.

But "extinct" I find to be an insane proposition. We have habitat diversity and saturation like cockroaches could only dream of. We non-extinctable.

Are we in mid-air over a cliff right now, though? Yes. That I am not pffffting at.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Simulist » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:55 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:We non-extinctable.

I sincerely hope you're right, Wombaticus Rex, but you may not be.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jun 19, 2010 2:58 pm

When Boyle gets thrown in there with the voodoo numerology based on a calendar, you know it's bullshit. (In an ironic bit of Western-centrism, the 2012 woo is considered funny but Boyle gets a hearing.)

The idea of complete eradication in 100 years is bullshit, I mean, not the inevitable disasters.

People are always confusing the collapse of civilizations with the end of the world. (Also: their own deaths.)

I posted about this before, so I will now feed my narcissism and maybe please a couple of readers:


JackRiddler wrote:
Maddy wrote:Considering the possibility that human beings have been around for 200,000 years or more, I'm not overly concerned that the earth is going to just die off. Civilizations have come and gone - perhaps this is simply the end of another era. Perhaps its simply the end of an era that should have ended before it became so toxic. I am relatively certain the earth is going to heal herself when we're gone. And its not going to take the earth to "shake us off", we're doing a grand job of destroying this civilization without her help.


Let’s define it, though. Barring a very large collision, Earth the planet is almost certainly not going to cease to exist for billions of years. Earth even has a chance to survive the expansion of Sol prior to its depletion in four or five billion years. In that case it will remain in orbit around the brown dwarf for many more billions of years, again barring any other significant astronomical events in the vicinity.

The biosphere - let’s call it Gaia - has seen at least six major species die-offs since the Cambrian explosion (arrival of first multicellular organisms) 600 million years ago, and after each it has returned again to a higher level of biodiversity. Humans are very unlikely to kill it, even if (to take a purely theoretical extreme) we pledge ourselves to Sauron and consciously deploy all our weapons and resources for the express purpose of wiping everything out. All kinds of stuff will live, including bacteria, fungi, protista and very likely many kinds of plants, insects and possibly even vertebrates. They will adapt to new circumstances and within a mere 100 million years evolution is likely to be producing big dumb lumbering animals again, like ourselves.

Obviously we won’t all agree to act as one in actively trying to exterminate ourselves down to the very last person killed. So humans as a species are pretty much a lock to survive the worst ecological disasters for many thousands of years yet. That would probably include even a nuclear war, hydrocarbon depletion, mega-plagues, a new ice age or a rise in average temperatures by 20 degrees, black clouds blocking out the sun, the collapse of the present civilization and a substantial rollback of technology. Even then, millions of people very likely will still find ways to survive in select habitats. Shakespeare, Homer, and Mickey Mouse will also survive. People will weather a series of catastrophic centuries, adapt, set themselves up under domes, engineer themselves to eat and breathe crap, and hate all of their ancestors with an abiding passion.

Not that it's altogether guaranteed. During the 200,000 years you speak of, according to present knowledge of population history, the total population of humans in the first 100,000 years grew to higher than 10,000 people, but then declined to just about that around 100,000 years ago. At that time, the right plague or a minor astronomical event could have put an end to us.

It took another 90,000 years to get to six million people, 10,000 years ago.

Going by rule of thumb measures, that’s 95 percent or more of all human history to get to one one-thousandth of the present human population, and at that point gathering and hunting was already getting difficult by the means and in the habitats available at the time. Over the next few millennia, independently of each other, people on several continents started settling and figuring out agriculture. That was the first big explosion, and it took almost all of the remaining 10,000 years to reach a population of about half a billion, 500 years ago.

After more growth, interrupted briefly by the black plague, we reached a billion people 200 years ago, at the dawn of the industrial and hydrocarbon age. In 1950, we were still at just over two billion people! (Imagine it: We're talking already after World War II!)

Population has tripled in sixty years, whereas 800 years ago the growth rate was such that it would still take 300 years to double. (10,000 years ago the implied doubling time was about 5,500 years. I’m getting these figures from David Christian, Maps of Time, Table 6.2, p. 143.)

We constantly and collectively mislead ourselves and deny reality by calling the present dilemma of the human species an environmental or ecological crisis. It’s not. The environment is indifferent to us. An environment will continue to exist no matter what happens.

The crisis is only that of our collective (by the decisions and actions of some more than others) destruction of the biospheric basis for sustaining our civilization in its present form and our species at the present numbers - and also of Gaia’s ability to support most other higher life forms (the latter probably only for the short term of mere millions of years).

Nevertheless Earth and Gaia will survive, and you may think that (as I also do in some of my more philosophical moods) it’s no big deal, in the big picture, that billions of us will prematurely die as our population crashes, and also no big deal that most species in the vertebrate and arboreal classes will be wiped out, if our civilization continues consuming everything in the way we do, until it collapses. This still won’t mean our extinction… so okayfine?
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Simulist » Sat Jun 19, 2010 3:03 pm

"The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See"

For anyone with the stomach to sit through what is arguably the most boring — and probably most important — series of YouTube videos you will ever see on this subject, I would highly recommend this:



Here is the playlist for the entire lecture. And here is how it is described on YouTube:

1.4 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Albert Bartlett) has to say.

I introduce this video to my students as "Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important." But then again, after watching it most said that if you followed along with what the presenter (a professor emeritus of Physics at Univ of Colorado-Boulder) is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because it is so damn compelling.

I consider this lecture well-worth the time.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby justdrew » Sat Jun 19, 2010 4:52 pm

great video Simulist, thanks

so I thought I take a look at what is claimed today for proven US coal reserves. here's what I find:

from http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm
a pro-coal industry site, so the numbers should be as generous as possible.
their shtick hasn't changed...

U.S. Resources

The United States has enormous coal "resources" and "recoverable reserves." { Map Terms Defined } The most reliable information about coal is published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The most recent figures available from the EIA, show that America's estimated recoverable reserves of coal --

Stand at 275 billion tons, an amount that is greater than any other nation in the world.

Are capable of meeting domestic demand for more than 250 years at current rates of consumption.

U.S. Demand

America's coal is used primarily for the production of electricity. According to the EIA, in 2001 --

There were 315,000 Megawatts (net) of coal-based electrical generating capacity in the United States.

This represented approximately 37% of the total installed capacity.

However, coal plants accounted for 52% of the electricity generated since these facilities and nuclear plants are normally operated as "baseload" generators (the generating equipment normally operates on an around-the-clock basis).

Some 965 million tons of coal were consumed for the generation of electricity. This amounted to 86% of total U.S. coal production.

The EIA also makes energy production and consumption estimates for future years. Under these projections, domestic coal consumption is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.1% - 1.5% through 2025.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Elvis » Sat Jun 19, 2010 6:00 pm

the more peaceful alternative will only be realised if the international community can accept that nation states are no longer strong enough to deal with the world's problems and construct an effective system of global governance instead.


Naturally this kind of pronouncement always makes me nervous; 'globalism' (small "g") is more or less inevitable, and could be a fine thing, while Globalism (capital "G") and its corporatocracy ala WTO, will surely hasten some massive die-off (which, I'm beginning to believe, is part of the plan).

So, did this Boyle guy just get back from a local Bilderberg committee meeting where this year's Word is filtered down for dissemination? or something?
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby kool maudit » Sat Jun 19, 2010 6:00 pm

i said this on another board, so this is a copypaste:

this is an essentially political claim. it's rhetoric.

if the anthropocene apocalypse happens --and i am not someone who feels any need to deny the possibility -- we would likely return to a waste land setting, isolated groups in caves and marginal regions, as we were in the ice age.

this rhetoric, these fancies, are kind of a book of revelation for a secular, mechanized world.

they are also magickal works, in the sense that they use symbol combinations -- words, in this case -- to try and effect a mass shift in consciousness.

the idea of the world's end is a haunted region of the human culture and mind. it's spooky and people are always using it for their purposes.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Cosmic Cowbell » Sat Jun 19, 2010 11:10 pm

As for extinction and time frames, that will depend on the oceans and how rapidly acidification accelerates.

I'd also add the caveat "on Earth"...depending upon who your friends are.

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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby vanlose kid » Sun Jun 20, 2010 1:20 am

Cosmic Cowbell wrote:...

Image


"Rapture" for the space-heads.

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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby vanlose kid » Sun Jun 20, 2010 1:29 am

The idea that academic = intelligent will be extinct by the end of this year.

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