This reminds me of tax freedom day, except the numbers are a lot fuzzier. Carsten Arnholm of Norway tips us to this website peddling this worrisome calculation. I fear and visualize there will be no more food, air, water, or “CO2 filtering” tomorrow. Photosynthesis comes to a halt, gasp, sputter, fade to black. Fin.
from: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/
August 21st marks an unfortunate milestone: the day in which we exhaust our ecological budget for the year. Once we pass this day, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year. From that point until the end of the year, we meet our ecological demand by liquidating resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
What is Earth Overshoot Day?
Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates nature’s supply in the form of biocapacity, the amount of resources the planet generates, and compares that to human demand: the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions. Earth Overshoot Day, a concept devised by U.K.-based new economics foundation, marks the day when demand on ecological services begins to exceed the renewable supply.
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What is Overshoot?
For most of human history, humanity has been able to live off of nature’s interest — consuming resources and producing carbon dioxide at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate and reabsorb each year.
But approximately three decades ago, we crossed a critical threshold, and the rate of human demand for ecological services began to outpace the rate at which nature could provide them. This gap between demand and supply — known as ecological overshoot — has grown steadily each year. Global Footprint Network’s most recent data show that it takes one year and five months to generate the ecological services (production of resources and absorption of CO2) that humanity requires in one year.
The Cost of Ecological Overspending
Of course, we only have one Earth. The fact that we are using (or “spending” natural capital) faster than it can replenish is similar to having expenditures that continually exceed income. In planetary terms, the results of our ecological overspending are becoming more clear by the day. Climate change – a result of carbon being emitted faster than it can be reabsorbed by the forests and seas – is the most obvious and arguably pressing result. But there are others as well: shrinking forests, species loss, fisheries collapse and freshwater stress to name a few.
How is Earth Overshoot Day Calculated?
Put simply, Earth Overshoot Day shows the day on which our total Ecological Footprint (measured in global hectares) is equal to the biocapacity (also measured in global hectares) that nature can regenerate in that year. For the rest of the year, we are accumulating debt by depleting our natural capital and letting waste accumulate.
[ world biocapacity / world Ecological Footprint ] x 365 = Earth Overshoot Day Day
The day of the year on which humanity enters into overshoot and begins adding to our ecological debt is calculated by calculating the ratio of global available biocapacity to global Ecological Footprint and multiplying by 365. From this, we find the number of days of demand that the biosphere could supply, and the number of days we operate in overshoot.
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Jimbo says:
August 22, 2010 at 4:33 am
“Talking about ecology and overshoot it looks like this good professor has just shot himself in the foot.
——————————————
Guy R. McPherson, Professor Emeritus”
Googled him; he doesn’t have new product on Amazon to sell, so he’s not just on a promo blitz it seems. And he seems to have abandoned his academia career to live off the grid now. At least he seems to believe in his own words; as opposed to Dr. h.c. Albert Gore.
IOW, he’s doing what we always demand from catastrophists; to let actions follow their words. He’s wrong nevertheless in my opinion, but he’s consequential.
So does the “purchase” of “just bonds” qualify for a charitable deduction on tax day?
Jimbo: August 22, 2010 at 4:33 am
Talking about ecology and overshoot it looks like this good professor has just shot himself in the foot.
“In 2009 at the height of a productive career, McPherson left the university to prepare for collapse. He now lives in an off-grid, straw-bale house…”
He’s left his job, he lives in an off-grid house straw hut, and — he maintains a blog.
Does anybody else find that incongruous?
Per Strandberg says:
August 22, 2010 at 3:55 am
“It seems to me that this is just another well funded anonymous NGO with self appointed academical experts and bureaucrats in an ever expanding network of organizations and thinks thanks in the eco-sustainability-global-warming industrial complex connected to the Club of Rome, UNEP, Soros, Rockefeller Foundation who just want to rule us and take over the world.”
Energy independence on a national, (or even a household scale) would seem to me to really rather liberating.
See what happens when they can’t get their signals straight? Obama spent how much that we don’t have to buy everyone in the US (including illegal aliens) a swine flu (H1N1) vaccine shot, of which around half are getting tossed out, when what this country and world really needs is a good-old-fashioned plague to wipe out the weak who are least able to provide their own food from the land and sea if needed, and least able to withstand extremes of weather.
Ah heck, maybe some smart bio-researchers somewhere will do humanity a favor and “cut to the chase,” and genetically engineer something to cull some of the deadwood. Offhand a good choice would be a bacterium, a modification of a common one like E. Coli for good distribution, that healthy people would shrug off but it would take hold and quickly kill off anyone with a compromised immune system. You know, people with HIV/AIDS infections, organ transplant recipients, elderly and infirm, those who due to their conditions are consuming more than their fair share. How many valuable resources are consumed by a single hospital stay? Hey, if we’re going to save the planet we have to make sacrifices, and those who can’t help using more than others should be at the top of the list.
Am I serious? Personally, nah, this article is just more “sustainability” nonsense. But seriously? We already have terrorists and other extremists willing to “do anything necessary” for their important causes. What can be more important than saving the planet? There are people out there considering this, there are people working at making this culling a reality. Count on it.
My first thought when reading this was, the overshoot problem must have been continuously shifting in the past as we increased food production through technology and increased CO2, etc. To me, the real test of this hypothesis would be when the planet can no longer support its population, something that we haven’t yet seen. This whole notion of overshoot seems to be an agenda looking for some rationale to justify it.
fredB
Where do I pay the speeding tickets? Like I don’t have to got to resource court or nothing? It’s cheaper than skipping work at the coal plant!
Articles like this can cause people to have nightmares or worse. A little crap and a little more math can be very dangerous things. By my calculations, given current world population at 6.8 billion, it kinda means that there’s about 2.3 billion more of us than there should be. When we’re given such information it leads us to thoughts we should not think, like who do we need to eradicate or deny reproductive rights to, or turn into energy bars for the rest of us to live on. Life can be so complicated. Ain’t it great that we so often find simple solutions to gordian knots?
Lets see now it is okay to go into monetary debt, spend money we don’t have, consuming earth’s resources we don’t really need to consume, via the most inefficient method (centralized government). But not okay to consume earth’s resources. Hm – I’m confused here, who is the bad guy here?
Tim Williams says:
August 22, 2010 at 5:57 am
Per Strandberg says:
August 22, 2010 at 3:55 am
Energy independence on a national, (or even a household scale) would seem to me to really rather liberating.
Energy independence? Don’t be naive. It isn’t about that at all. But it’s a nice, convenient hook for those willing to buy it. Nor is it about pollution, another one of their favorite ploys.
Tim Williams: August 22, 2010 at 12:42 am
If you liked that, you lot are just going to love this…
Needs more drowning polar bears burning up…
“-income of £68,193 from Comic Relief towards developing an alternative
carbon market product.”
a timely piece of info as I was just about to contribute, against my better judgement, to the funds of a person cycling to France on behalf of Comic Relief.
Upon reading this my double-take was comic, my relief was palpable, and my long held suspicion of the plethora of charitable institutions and the persons who direct them, confirmed.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 22, 2010 at 6:09 am
There are people out there considering this, there are people working at making this culling a reality. Count on it.
There were some people who seriously considered that AIDS was designed to that purpose.
Time to tell a tale.
There was a culture where when people became old and were not productive for the family, they were given a bowl of food and sent away from to seek life and mostly death wherever the road led them.
A grandfather was being sent off in this manner and his young grandson was watching the departure, and asked his father : “why does grand dad have to go?”
The father explained that it was time for grandfather to go, since he was so old and could not help in supporting the family any more.
Then the father sees the child taking a piece of wood and beginning to sculpt it. “what are you doing?” he asked . The child replied: ” I am making the bowl you will need when it is time for you to go”.
The story has it that the father was shamed and brought his father back.
I do not know in the scenario you describe who will be the father and who will be the child, but for sure, a boomerang there will be, as AIDS showed, even if it evolved naturally.
Yeah, with no doubt we are heading toward an ecological disaster: We may have a premature death after reading such nonsense.
Can anyone link to good quality critiques of the NEF claim? Or indeed the ‘world population is over three times the carrying capacity of the Earth’ number that the WWF came up with a few years back? And which is quoted endlessly by every environmental advocacy on the planet.
No-one seems to dare to question the numbers – I certainly cannot find academic papers that do so – but that may be because I am unusually poor at searching the web.
Any pointers would be gratefully received – and presumably of general use in debunking what I suspect is Eco Myth Number One.
Thanks
Dominic
This seems to be little more than a hotch potch of loosely related ideas in an attempt to produce a resource budget. Some of the ideas are contradictory – human release of CO2 is not the consumption of a resource, but the bestowment of a benefit; production of agricultural products, cannot, by definition, be used up 3 months before the end of the year, since there is enough available (CO2 will increase this yield further). They say fish stocks are lower than ever, but prices of frozen fish in my store are lower than ever – how can that be?
D. King says:
August 22, 2010 at 2:16 am
UK Sceptic says:
August 22, 2010 at 12:56 am
These nut jobs are British?
face/palm
I’ll trade you for these, and I’ll throw in a six-pack of Bud.
lol. I’ve gotta save that one! But I’m wondering if you know their ancestry? Any chances there’s a Brit or two in the family tree?…..whoot!
fredb says:
August 22, 2010 at 1:14 am
“Wow … I’ve never seen a better set of comments that display a collective head-in-the-sand and it’s-my-right-to-do-as-I-want mentality. No wonder the majority of the world is made of exploited people. Guess who’s doing the exploitation.
Seriously: Does no one even recognize that resource creation has a speed limit and humans are exceeding it. Too bad there are no traffic cops in sight.”
Sure Fred, because we know all of the dynamics that go into resource creation and all of the types of resources our descendants will use. And know all of the finite amount of resources available…………….oh, wait, we don’t know any of those things. Get a grip.
What a load.
This has gone beyond religion.
It is pathology.
And fortunately many of you can see it.
That professor living in his grass hut raising rabbits and tomatoes, that is the pastoral Utopia intended for those of us that survive the Eco=Fascist Culling ( to borrow some of the ideas expressed).
The political position and its self fulfilling prophecies feed one another in the worst way possible. They require us to cancel the future.
It is no different from millennial catastrophism in its fatalistic and demeaning repose.
Haven’t any of these Morons seen Start Trek ?
Star Trek.
You know what I mean.
Another name for “earth overshoot”: Lip service
Paying lip service to themselves and others in thinking they can actually quantify this crap with real numbers, in real time, with real results… they’re ‘keeping track’ and ‘staying on top of it’.
What a joke.
So, just in the interest of interest, I clicked a link and read some of the specialist definitions of the parameters that they pretend to calculate.
And then back at the article, and it struck me.
How convenient for them that all of those complex resource, capacity and consumtion data, and calculations from over 150 countries since 1961 can be boiled down to simply
3/4 x 365
An equation so simple even I could do it. ( with time, mind you)
I wonder what really goes on in these places.
2/3… 3/4 what’s a few percent in the big picture anyway ?
Bruce Cobb says:
“Energy independence? Don’t be naive. It isn’t about that at all. But it’s a nice, convenient hook for those willing to buy it. Nor is it about pollution, another one of their favorite ploys.”
Please could you tell me as succinctly as you can what ‘it’ is all about, and who exactly ‘they’ are? Please provide any pertinent links if you think that would help.
“Please could you tell me as succinctly as you can what ‘it’ is all about, and who exactly ‘they’ are? Please provide any pertinent links if you think that would help.”
Sigh, you can look this up yourself, the “they” is as I describe it.
It is about the bankers that have poured money into Carbon trading schemes. Look at the money that has gone into the CCE for one and you can see the people who want that to take effect. A lot of money went into that.
Its a trail of money, pure and simple. Just look up money that went into any carbon credit industry, and you will see a who’s who of “those behind climate change hysteria”.
The scientists are part of the “they” because they have gotten fat off of bad science for years and not doing this will make them lose their positions, careers, and possibly even result in jail time (although I find that unlikely to happen.)
The environmental groups from WWF, to Earth first have gotten fat off of this from donations from “guilty conscious” oil companies all the way down to tax-payer monies. When the first few billion that goes into an enviromental group is spent on “salaries” and upkeep every year, its time to really figure out if that group is worth anything.
Just start there, you will be surprised what you find…and a little shocked. The people in charge of those organizations and the scientists all seem linked. It is not a conspiracy as some claim, but namely a who’s who of people who are stuck in that position and removing themselves is impossible…once money is invested, or the papers published, its a little hard to say “I was wrong, give me my good name/money back.”