The World

What shape is the world in today?  If you are religious, you probably feel that your god will ensure that everything turns out for the best, and that in any case,we have little control over events. And of course many Christians believe we are living in the end times, that the apocalypse is soon to fall upon the Earth, and all good Christians will live to see Jesus return to create a new Eden.

However, as an atheist, I see many problems looming on the not too distant horizon that seriously compromise humanity’s future existence.

Overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that, sometime in this century, there will be an environmental catastrophe of global proportions so severe that neither our vaunted intelligence nor an imaginary God will be able to prevent the death of most of the human race.  It is far too late to avert this disaster, but the effects can be mitigated if we in the Western world drastically reduce our energy consumption from non-renewable sources, and use only enough food to meet our caloric requirements.  World-wide we will have to stop cutting down and burning our remaining forests, and slash the birth rate to no more than one child per family.

Unfortunately, the economy of the developed world depends on continued growth.  With a drastic reduction in energy use, and a shrinking world population, the West would suffer a major depression, resulting in a significant reduction in employment with all the suffering that would result.  But the steps necessary to minimize the impending environmental disaster will not be taken soon, simply because the majority of people in the affluent countries do not yet believe it will happen, and world leaders, particularly in the United States, are not ready to lead their populations in the right direction with the proper sense of urgency.

The elephant in the room is the one hundred million barrels of crude oil that the world produces daily, most needed to fuel the one billion automotive vehicles, almost all powered by gasoline or diesel fuel, plus forty thousand commercial and military aircraft and large construction equipment such as bulldozers and graders, all using similar fuel. These users are not going away any time soon, and of course don’t forget the huge amounts of coal burned to produce electricity and all the natural gas, which is also used for power generation, plus heating.  The combustion of all these hydrocarbons is pouring vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

The Earth has lost almost 90% of its forest cover and the remainder is disappearing at the rate of 80,000 square miles per year.  The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has increased by about 30% over the past 200 years, due largely to the above mentioned burning of vast quantities of fossil fuel.  The release of large volumes of methane from melting permafrost and from the flooding of tropical lowlands will multiply the global warming caused by the increased carbon dioxide.  Mean global temperature has risen by about 0.6 Deg.C in the past 100 years and is now rising faster than ever.  The temperature in Antarctica has risen 2.5 deg.C in the past 50 years, with the result that the ice cap is shrinking by 1.4% per decade, and the surrounding sea ice has shrunk by 25%in the 20th Century.  Arctic sea ice is melting at over 4% per decade, and alpine glaciers have lost almost one half of their volume since 1850. And the huge Greenland ice cap is also shrinking.   Sea levels are 15 cm. higher than in 1900.

The 36% of the Earth’s land area used to grow crops and raise food animals is degrading due to erosion, desertification, salinization due to irrigation, urban expansion and the exhaustion of soil due to the depletion of trace elements and micro-nutrients; with the result that global cropland is shrinking by about 4% per decade.

The marine harvest peaked on a per capita basis in 1970 and is expected to decline rapidly as many of the commercially useful fish stocks are over-exploited and most of the remainder have reached their limits, while the world’s fishing fleet continues to grow.  Fish farming is not the panacea it was thought to be, as it takes about three pounds of fish meal made from small species to produce one pound of salmon or other high quality food fish.

Global food production is currently sufficient to feed each of the 7 billion humans on the planet, if it was equitably distributed,  but this is based on an essentially vegetarian diet.  Based on the protein-rich diet common in North America and Western Europe, there would only be enough food to feed about half the current world population.  We can no longer increase crop yields by using more fertilizer, nor can we add to the harvest by cultivating new land, since most of the potentially arable land is of marginal quality, and clearing it will result in the further loss of forest cover.  Meanwhile, we continue to lose good farmland due to degradation and urbanization faster than new land can be brought into production.

As a member of the more affluent section of Western civilization, I personally feel like a musician in the band aboard the Titanic, merrily playing while the ship sinks under us.  But what can I do as an individual?