Int Ice, Episode 15.2: Global Environmental Impact

You are listening to Intellectual Icebergs, February 10th, 2011, show number 15B.

This show is recorded on June 27th, 2010.

Today's topic is global environmental impacts.

Emotion.

Welcome everybody back to Intellectual Icebergs.

It's been a while.

I'm your host, Jim Vance, with the illustrious Big Brains Unbred, Dr. Christian Shorey, a

lecturer, Department of Geology and Geological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.

Specialty is paleoclimatology, using the cave formations as an archive.

And we are here talking about global environmental impacts and the challenges that we have over

the next roughly 100 years.

Sounds like a cheery topic.

Isn't it though?

Well, welcome.

Thank you for being here today.

Thanks, Jim.

Let's start off with the topic that everybody's probably thinking about right now.

That would be the oil spill in the Gulf.

Ah, yes.

I'll let you run with your thoughts.

Well, the first thought is this is a risk that we know that we're going to take, drilling

for oil on offshore areas.

And it would be silly for us to say that we need to stop drilling right off the bat.

Here we are.

We have the infrastructure that is going to be run on oil for a while.

However, it's becoming clear that there are so many problems with this source of energy

that we might start thinking about where we can get it from sources that are a little

less damaging to the environment.

As a scientist, you see the pictures of the birds with oil on them.

And to a public conscious level, that's huge.

But to a scientist, that's kind of minor.

Okay, some birds are getting knocked out.

What's major is what is oil on top of the Gulf?

That area of oil coverage going to do to photosynthesis of plankton in the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

How much oil are we talking?

Well, best estimates right now say we're getting about 35,000 to 65,000 barrels per day coming

out of that.

Of course, some of that is being siphoned off, but it's been going on since April 20th.

We're talking somewhere around 2 to 4 billion.

2 billion barrels of oil escaping into the Gulf of Mexico.

No laughing matter.

No laughing matter at all.

And containment has not been successful yet.

When you spread that much oil over the surface, you can look at pictures on Google Earth and

you can get an idea that that's going to block sunlight to underlying areas of water, what

we call the photic zone.

And that will reduce photosynthesis in plankton, which are the base of the food chain of the

Gulf of Mexico.

And when you cut down on the base, about 10% of biomass energy gets used every time you

go up a level of the trophic pyramid.

So if you're cutting out the bottom that supports all that.

Yeah.

Above you, every step only being 10% of the biomass of what was below it, you're going

to start knocking out things completely at the top of the food chain.

The other big concern is we shouldn't think of this as an isolated environmental issue.

This is compounding other problems that are already in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Mississippi Delta dumps into the Gulf of Mexico and carries with it all the material

that it's gathered up through its watershed, which is basically the upper Midwest farming

territories and the central farming territories.

So we have a huge amount of soil coming out of that mouth of that river.

We have a huge amount of water, nutrients, which are causing something we call eutrophication.

This is when you cause a drop in oxygen levels in the water, mainly due to the fact that

you're allowing algal blooms and you're also warming the water, which reduces the amount

of oxygen that can be held.

The main point is that there is an anoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast

of Louisiana that is, I believe now about 24 miles long and a few miles wide.

You're getting pesticides into the water from that river system as well.

You're getting increased coastal development.

Communities along the shore.

Which is going to increase the amount of soil eroding off into the waters and destroy

mangrove swamps, which are protecting the shores from being eroded away during storms.

And these mangrove swamps are breeding grounds for basic organisms.

And if you're removing those, you're removing a large part of their life cycle.

You add all these things together and you go, okay, you're having an oil spill on top

of all these other issues.

And so we are seeing that we're having significant effects on large ecosystems of the planet

right now.

It's not a laughing matter.

It's not left wing tree hugging hippie stuff.

This is basic science, you know, to say that the oil spill is a natural event as some talk

show hosts have mentioned is, is absurd.

Like you said, cherry topic.

Yeah.

Good way to start.

Well, let's, let's dive.

Let's dive a little bit more into, you have a podcast of your own, which I highly encourage

everybody to check out the earth and environmental systems podcast for that.

You chose the earth rise taken by the Apollo eight astronauts.

Can you explain why that was your choice?

I, I not only chose the Apollo eight astronauts, but I also chose the Apollo eight astronauts.

I, I not only chose the Apollo eight astronauts, but I also chose the Apollo eight astronauts, but I also chose the Apollo eight astronauts.

I only use that for the podcast.

I use that as the opening and closing slide for my class that I teach.

There's many reasons to use it.

There's a personal reason.

And that is that I know I'm in that picture.

I was born two months before, and I can look at that picture and go, I'm on the dark side

of that earth there.

And that's kind of a cool feeling.

The other reason to use it is because this is an earth system.

That picture had such a significant impact on earth systems science.

Before that, we had these universities with these departments, like the biology department,

the geography department.

Okay.

department the environmental sciences department even talking their own language but not talking

to each other suddenly you get this picture of the earth in space and you see that that's just

one system and it's interconnected interdependent and so the university system should also start to

be a little more interconnected interdependent one of the first courses to come out of that

mentality was earth system science a few universities at first started with courses

right after that in the early 70s and my job has always been in the earth system science side of

geology and so i've inherited a legacy that came from that picture so the big blue marble really

was huge it was impact yeah when you see that picture you really get hit by the sense that hey

this is it this is where we can live there's often an idea that we call that spaceship earth and i

kind of take umbrage with that a spaceship you can get on and off this is home earth this is

the place you can live we have these ideas that we could jump off and go to another planet the

two most commonly named are things like venus or

mars the idea of trying to get the carbon out of venus but always ask the question where's the

water the amount of water in venus's atmosphere is about as much as an olympic size swimming pool

the early venus was like early earth it probably did have a lot of the water in its atmosphere

but it got so hot that the oxygen in the water was split off from the hydrogen hydrogen leaks

off into space the oxygen locks into oxide minerals and is now trapped there for eternity

as far as we're concerned and you can't get the hydrogen from the oxygen from the oxygen from the

oxygen back to recreate the water so living there pretty much impossible mars if you looked at the

mass of earth about how much do you think the mass of mars would be compared to that 40 it's a common

number you look at the size of mars you look at the size of earth you go that's about half it's

11 of the mass of earth we have an unusually large metal core we think that's due to the fact

that we had an impact with about a mars sized object early in the earth's history and the two

cores melded together to have a very massive planet we have about the highest density of any

astral planet so our gravitational field here is quite strong our massive planet is important

that we can hold an atmosphere a protective atmosphere and keep internal heat going to

keep a magnetic field and that magnetic field is nothing to sneeze at that protects us from

solar wind which protects our atmosphere from eroding away it protects our biology from being

hit by cosmic rays which would tear our dna apart in my podcast i do a history of the earth

and a history of the earth the history of the geological

history and in geology we say that the earth is 4.56 billion years old i've been doing this for

a long time i still can't get my head around that so i use an analogy to where we say pretend the

earth is a year old the earth began on midnight january 1st we are in this room listening to this

podcast at the end of midnight december 31st of that year when in that year do certain things

happen i've said that the earth was hit by a mars sized object and formed the moon on about

january 3rd new research that came out from just last week

says maybe it's more like january 9th we know that the moon mars and earth at that time had

magnetic fields it was about february 22nd that there were two big impacts on mars the hellas

basin and the argyre basin and those have infilled lava that then froze and should have locked in the

magnetic field if it was still present on mars it's not there mars lost its magnetic field about

four billion years ago and the atmosphere just got blown away by the cosmic wind it was very

there to begin with it's 11 of the mass of earth it can't hold a heavy atmosphere so the ideas of

us going to mars and living there i find that to be kind of a pipe dream you might be able to unlock

the water under the surface that's frozen there but it will bleed off into space quickly the whole

time you are there you will have to live in caves because you need protection from the solar winds

and the cosmic rays or else you will die on its surface if you hang out there too long so the idea

of us just jumping to another planet is pretty fanciful and the premise of finding an

alternative earth likewise yeah that's a good question finding an alternative earth elsewhere

around another star we right now as of june 27th 2010 we've found 463 extrasolar planets none of

them could we live on we talk about getting a planet in a habitable zone a right distance from

its start we're actively looking for those with two different satellites and we still haven't found

any that we could go and live on right now and the idea that we could say oh all right let's take off

and go live on it is also fanciful

you've got to be finding a habitable planet at the right period of its evolution when you look at a

distant star you were looking at that star in the past so when we find these extrasolar planets if

we find one that looks habitable we're seeing it as it was plus the amount of time that it takes

you to build some kind of a spacecraft that will get you to that planet and then actually making

the trip itself so by the time you get there you might not have just a habitable planet you might

have a habited planet and then they're gonna maybe greet you with open tentacles or put

you in their own district 9 so you have to find a planet right in its formation that would be

habitable how many planets are going to just happen to have a massive core that could sustain a surface

system like our surface system the moon that we have very large compared to the planet how many

of those are out there that stabilizes our tilt which if it wasn't stabilized our seasons would

be ridiculous you would burn up in the summer and freeze to death in the winter it's not just

spaceship earth you don't just get a hop off to the next place and that's why i love that picture

we're focusing on the more here and now, not the future so much. We have our planet when we're on

it. So how has our humanity's behavior since, say, the Industrial Revolution, fairly specific

point, how have we affected our life system? The way to think about this to start with is that

our planet is what we call a closed system. In science terms, closed system would be one that

can allow energy to cross the boundaries. Energy comes in mostly through solar and goes out through

heat mostly. However, matter does not cross the boundaries, which means that the matter you have

here is what you get. It also means that subsystems in the Earth system are interdependent. If you

cause a change in one, closed systems have to borrow material from some other subsystem. So

any effect that you start causing in one area may cause unintended effects in other places. When you

think about how we use the Earth system, we use it as a source for raw materials. We use it as a

waste receptor.

We throw things away, but away is actually into the Earth system. There is one idea that

dilution is the solution to pollution. That's a mouthful.

Yeah, the Earth system is so big that if you throw out a little bit of trash, well,

it's a small amount and it'll slowly just diffuse into the Earth system and be back-to-background

levels and not cause a problem. Pollutant is defined as being out of the natural balance

and causing ecological harm. In early days, we had a low population. On top of that,

they were not technologically advanced.

Not just population level, it's population times the technological ability of the individuals.

Every individual, I, myself, consume resources and I put out waste products. I put out a whole

lot more waste product than, say, a very poor individual in a third world country. For the

most part, it's your technological ability that's going to determine how much impact you can make

on the environment. For a long time, we had low population, low technological ability,

not a huge impact. There were local areas that were that dilution is the solution,

pollution started to break down. And there became ecological problems enough to cause

collapses of communities or even entire empires. And I highly recommend Jared Diamond's book

Collapse, which goes through a documentation of many cultures that have collapsed and the

reasoning for that. And it's mostly ecological and nature. For us, we're talking about global

environmental impacts today. The reason why the Industrial Revolution is an interesting time to

note is that's about when we start seeing the population increase. We hit our first

big global environmental impact. And that's when we start seeing the population increase.

We hit 1 billion mark, 1 billion people on the planet in 1804. It took 100,000 years to reach

that level. 100,000 years of humanity to hit 1 billion. We hit 2 billion in 1927. We doubled

the number in 123 years. If you want to talk about the next doubling, I hit 4 billion in 1974.

We're talking about 47 years. I think our growth rate right now is 1.2%. We're doubling our

population every 58 years now. We hit 6 billion right before the millennia in 1999.

And right now, we're at 6.83 billion people on the planet as of June 27th. We expect we're

going to hit our 7 billion mark in 2012 when the world comes to an end.

Good timing.

Yeah.

So the population impact, obviously, we're talking about the consumption of resources.

And there has to be something that we're talking about here that's going to be

used up sooner or later. Is there any particular examples where we are using things up at a

measurable rate?

A measurable rate that might not be sustainable, we could say.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. There are some resources that we can refer to as renewable. You have to

be careful with the term renewable. It means renewable within a human time span, maybe 100

years, 200 years. You can renew this material and keep using it. Fresh water is said to be a

renewable resource. Nuclear fuel, as we now use it, is not. There's a finite amount. We're talking

about fossil fuels. Onion Radio News recently talking about how the world is demanding that

geologists quit digging up rocks because we need to bury this stuff to make fossil fuels. They're

not leaving the fossils in the ground long enough. Well, you don't get the fossil fuels. You get the

oil from dead dinosaurs. You get it mainly from plankton. That takes a long time. It's not a human

lifetime. So we refer to that as a non-renewable resource, even though it is constantly being made

on this planet, not at a rate that we can see it renewed within our lifetimes. We have a lot of

resources that you don't tend to think of as big ones. If I say, hey, phosphorus is a limited

resource and we may run out of it in the next 100 years, are you concerned?

Off the top of my head, no.

I'm off the top of my head as an environmental scientist. I'm incredibly concerned. Terrified

to a degree. Phosphorus, it's a main constituent for fertilizers. If you run out of phosphorus,

your ability to support the green revolution that has actually allowed a growth of our population

to 6.83 billion people will not be sustained. And we'll run out of Coca-Cola.

Oh, the whore.

That's right. The phosphorus is also used as a leavener. It's used in Twinkies and Coca-Cola.

You might be able to find substitutes for those

particular uses. The use as a fertilizer for plants, you're not going to find a substitute.

This is a limited resource because it mainly comes from bird and bat droppings. Yes,

they do replenish it, but like the oil, we use it faster than they can replenish. And so we

consider that a non-renewable resource. It was about a half a year ago that a major study on

phosphorus found that we were probably going to start running out of supplies within the next

century. That's a big concern.

That's a legitimately short time, obviously.

Gold.

It has a possibility of running out. Silver, tin, all these things have a limit to how much we can

pull out. There's a good chance we may start mining our dumps pretty soon because we've been

considering these to be wasteable materials and putting them back out and using the environment

as a waste receptacle. Now we suddenly see that as an ore material. What we consider recoverable

resources also depends on how easily it is recovered compared to other sources.

On a flip side, using the environment as a waste receptacle also affects its ability to

act as our life support system. There's a term we use called the

carrying capacity of the environment. The idea is how many individuals in a population can be

sustained by the environment without the environment being damaged. Environmental damage can be measured

in various ways. It almost sounds like circular reasoning, but it can be measured by how many can

that environment sustain in the first place. How much biodiversity can it sustain? How many levels

of the trophic pyramid are there? You look at the planet right now. We have 6.83 billion people.

What is the carrying capacity for humanity on this planet?

I'm guessing lower than 6.83.

Well, I don't know.

have a direct answer for that question my answer is my favorite scientist answer i don't know i

don't know what the carrying capacity is for the earth there are some who say look we're already

causing environmental damage therefore obviously we are past our carrying capacity others like the

economist julian simon say oh but humans are our greatest resource more minds working on problems

mean more technological advances and what we consider a carrying capacity today may actually

be too low in the future we may be able to sustain six billion right now but in the future we may be

able to sustain 20 billion that's where the high end of most people's optimism goes paperless

offices are a good example of technological advance that could actually improve the system

and allow more people to live on it we don't need to cut down as many trees therefore the trees are

there to act as they hold down soil they clean the air of pollutants they produce oxygen they take

out carbon dioxide they have what we call environmental services they perform when they're

not paper but to play devil's advocate then you're hooking more people up to the grid which consumes

more power which consumes more power which consumes more power which consumes more power

which consumes more coal and other energy resources absolutely right so where's the balance

you have to look at all the inputs in any system one of the things i was working on with my video

podcast just how much energy is consumed by downloading a megabyte of data what exactly

size of a lump of coal would that take i want to actually do a podcast where i show you a pile of

coal and this is how much coal had to be burned for you to download this podcast and view it i

would love to see that yeah it'd be an interesting question and that's another one where i don't know

i have to say i don't know which one's the better the paperless office or the consumption of trees

there are some more clear-cut ones obviously julian simon points out things like copper we

use it for pans to make food what if you could actually find a way to inject nutrients directly

into your body and trick your mind into thinking it had a meal and you're satiated you don't need

copper anymore if you can find alternative technologies you may be able to circumvent

needs for raw materials necessity is the mother of invention i'd find that faith in

technology a bit concerning this is the only planet we can live on we do seem to be causing

environmental damage already and as such to just say hey don't worry about it because technology

will save us i think is a rather unwise position to take we should take more of a precautionary

stance which is a good stance to take always i would say to that theory of precautionary and

the way we've influenced the planet since the industrial revolution going back in history is

this the only time that we've had this sort of or any influence on the earth's environmental system

we've definitely had an effect on this planet before this point in time most directly through

biodiversity every time in the anthropological record you see humans move into a new area you

see the biodiversity drop you see humans come into australia there are many more species of

kangaroo than there are today that many of them dropped off right then humans enter the north

american continent megafauna extinction it's rather consistent humans make it to the hawaiian

islands you see a population drop so no everywhere we've gone as a human species

we have caused an effect a global effect on this world through the biodiversity loss we started to

have kind of an effect on it about 5 000 to 8 000 years ago it was william rudiman who proposed this

idea saying that it looked like methane levels started to rise around then when you look for

possible causation we'd see that rice cultivation in asia starts right about then and we know that

rice cultivation through terrace fields will produce methane so a rise in methane would be

easily explained by agricultural cultivation

that may have actually slowed the advance into the next ice age one of the biggest arguments i

hear against worrying about climate change is a climate change has happened in the past it's

natural and life is still here when we look at changes in the past one of the things that changes

it is milankovitch cycles when you look at how our earth orbits around the sun and see what it's

supposed to be doing to our climate the best studies on this say that a cooling trend should

have started 6 000 years ago and we see it in the record but it's not quite as intense as we would

expect it to be it looks like the humans doing their agricultural activities such as rice

cultivation and deforestation in europe helped to keep that cooling trend from being as bad as it

might have been there's an idea that we actually caused a change that might have actually helped

our civilization however if you're getting cold do you put on a sweater or do you climb into a

furnace how much change is good and at what rate the industrial revolution is a period of time

that some geologists argue should be given its own time period in the geologic time scale we mark epics

of geologic time things like the pleistocene the pliocene we are now in what we call the holocene

the recent there are some of us who think that we should have a marker about 200 years ago that

marks a new epic in geologic history and we call this the anthropocene the human dominated time

because when you look through the geologic record you mark these changes by things like extinction

events changes in biodiversity the amount of sediment coming off the land if you see a sudden

change in sedimentation rates rocks suddenly forming out in the ocean

at a heightened rate you would mark this as a significant change in the earth's history

enough to at least give it another epic name and possibly enough to give it another period name

era name i mean when we're talking geologic terms to give a new period is to say you have

significant really significant change on the planet and to give a new era the eras are things

like the paleozoic mesozoic the mesozoic ended when the dinosaurs went extinct right so we're

talking about some significant changes and could we call the change we're seeing today

an era changing event my personal opinion

very likely if it keeps going the way it's been going over the last 200 years over the next 200

years yes i would say that it would be enough to call it a an era changing event humanity's had

that much of an impact i think we're starting to the issue is that these things come online slowly

the earth system doesn't work at the same resonant frequencies you and i we work on a daily time

scale our politicians work on two to four year time scales the earth system works on centuries

millennia as we start warming a planet and we start warming the earth we start warming the

oceans we would expect the ice to start responding by melting back in the oceans to rise but not in a

decade not even in a 100 years we're talking about three centuries approximately that you're going to

start seeing this thing ramp up we've had about 200 years on that we've started the ramping process

we've seen the ocean levels rise we've seen the glaciers melting back this isn't hyperbole we can

measure this this is quite clear what's it gonna do in the next hundred years because that ramp up

It ramps up rather quickly once it gets esteem behind it.

That's where my concern is, is the next 100, 200 years.

I often tell my students, you know, this isn't my problem so much,

and it's not even your problem so much.

Your children, yeah, they're going to have problems.

Your grandchildren, definitely.

Don't buy your grandchildren property in South Florida.

Buy it in Macon, Georgia, where the slope breaks,

and they'll have beachfront property.

Manhattan, not the place to live.

Manhattan, no, no.

Though this leads into ideas of adaptation to the changes that we're causing.

Manhattan may have to turn into Vienna.

In Italy, that area is already building giant walls to keep the oceans out.

Or in the Netherlands, most of the land's underwater.

They have giant dikes.

I think you're going to see a lot more of those around Louisiana,

Manhattan, southeast coast, Bangladesh.

Most of that country is below one meter sea level.

We expect about half a meter sea level in the next century.

Isn't that sort of the greatest catch-22 to the whole situation, though?

It's our ability to adapt and overcome and continue and grow as a species

that's...

Partially, or if not 100% responsible for this whole scenario,

and yet we're talking about the scenario increasing to, theoretically,

the detriment of humanity, but we're just presuming we can overcome, adapt, and continue on.

There's many who would say, you hear it all the time, save the planet.

The planet is in jeopardy.

I don't go there.

I don't think that the planet's in jeopardy.

I think the planet has survived some incredibly massive disturbances,

such as the one that we're doing now.

We've seen 97% of all marine species going extinct at the end of the Paleozoic.

You know, 97%.

The Earth made it through that, and it regrew itself.

These massive extinctions, the Earth can recover,

but it takes about 10 million years to get your biodiversity back,

and the thought is, how many generations of our children are going to have to live

with lowered biodiversity standards, lower environmental services that support our economy?

The concern is not that we're going to go extinct for me.

The concern is, what is the standard of living going to become?

When you look at these exponential increases like we're going through right now,

we see us doubling every 58 years.

There are huge concerns.

If we're not...

If we're not at the carrying capacity, we're probably very close.

There's this infamous story of the lily pond.

If you had an algae that covered a lily pond, it grew in a manner that's exponential.

So let's say it doubles every day instead of every 58 years.

Every day it doubles its size over the pond.

The question is, on what day is that pond half full?

And the answer is, the day before it's full.

It takes one day to go from half to full.

You may go many days before that slow increases.

Like I said, these things build up slowly.

With the human population approaching its carrying capacity,

we, over the past century, have kind of been building up slowly.

We may be at the day before day zero.

Or maybe we're already there.

Maybe we're at the carrying capacity.

The concern is, once you jump over it,

you do degrade the environment's ability to support your population.

Every time you see this in ecology, in natural systems,

what you see after that is what we call a dieback.

You think about boll weevils in a box of oatmeal.

They find a new food source, they will reproduce exponentially.

Just like we're exponentially reproducing.

Eventually, they run out of food.

What happens to their population?

Dieback. Huge crash.

Miserable conditions.

I pray my children don't have to go through a dieback.

The hope is that we can peak out just under the carrying capacity

and learn to live at a balanced level with the system, not against it.

There's a lot of ideas out there and it leads into the idea of solutions.

Solutions would be great because the idea

of an environmental dark ages is not too appealing.

We've touched on some of the problems.

You know, I've said in my podcast that I

think soil erosion is one of the greatest environmental problems we have.

You know, we keep talking about climate

change here. We mentioned that we might try to stay away from climate change.

We can't. It's such a big issue of global environmental issues.

There are others, though. Soil erosion.

If you're going to feed people off the agricultural lands and their soils

disappearing or being degraded, you just can't feed 6.83 billion people.

So, again, the possibility of a dieback because of soil erosion is very

concerning. Over harvesting of our natural resources,

not just things like the minerals we talked about, but let's say fish in the ocean.

Ocean biologists are telling us the entire ocean ecosystem is in jeopardy.

The top predators in the ocean are crashing, and a lot of those are our food fish.

We've got aquifer depletion.

We talk about fresh water being a renewable resource.

One of our biggest sources of water to irrigate our farm fields is from aquifers.

And we are pumping out more than goes back in.

It is a limited resource in that sense.

To give an example, the Ogallala Aquifer in the central United States is the source

of water for agriculture for West Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Dakota,

North Dakota, Eastern Colorado. You could not grow the crops that are grown

in those regions without the Ogallala Aquifer there.

It would just be impossible.

You're pumping out water from that system.

And from about 1940s to the 1980s, when we developed gasoline pumps,

we were watching what we call the water table level dropping at a foot per decade.

Since the 80s, we've got better irrigation techniques,

and now it's only dropping at about a tenth of a foot per decade.

It doesn't matter when you look at it this way.

If you were to stop pumping on that aquifer today,

it would take 2000 years to get back the water you pumped out in the last 70 years.

This is not sustainable.

This isn't rocket surgery here.

If you take out more than is getting back in, you will deplete the resource.

But you don't see water tables dropping around the planet.

It's not a visible environmental problem,

but there are locations already on the planet that are going into what we call water shock.

There comes a day when the well just runs dry and you can only pump out what

it uses and suddenly we used to be able to pump out 100 gallons a day.

Now you can pump out one.

There's a town in Iraq that actually had to abandon the town.

It's a ghost town now because they were pumping their water as lively as could be.

You know, no problems.

You can take out as much as you want,

but they didn't respect the limits of this limited resource.

And so suddenly they were cut to about one percent of their pumping capability.

Can't survive on that.

So the town was abandoned.

And you're going to see more and more of that through your lifetime.

So solutions behind all this is our

population. It is the fact that it's population times technological ability

to influence our environment that is causing a lot of these global environmental issues.

There are two ways.

I mean, it's this simple.

There's two ways to control human population.

One is to decrease the birth rate and the other is to increase the death rate.

Now, no politician is going to say, hey, let's go out and increase the death rate.

Nobody's going to propose this as a solution.

Birth rate is obviously the place to hit it.

China tried it from the top down, said, all right, one child.

And then, of course, there are major problems there with female infanticide.

The towns that are in China now that are

solely male because there aren't enough women to go around.

I mean, it's a really disturbing problem over there.

Top down didn't work.

The most efficient way to control population from the birth side,

lowering birth rates is education of females.

It's by far of everything that's ever been studied.

We're controlling populations, female education.

And I know you don't mean that from any sort of a sexist.

No, this is purely from a education.

I mean, I'm not talking about the situation because traditionally in most

patriarchal societies, females have been denied education.

Also, the population in general may be

denied education just as a standard in third world countries.

If you educate everybody,

you will be educating the females and therefore the same effect will come through.

Well, what happens then is that females can take control of their own lives.

They are not just at the whim of the male

who may want more children for posterity's sake or for Social Security.

We know that in many

third world countries, you have to have a lot of children

because there is no retirement benefit, pension plan, Social Security.

Your children are your Social Security.

They will be there to support you in your old age.

If the females are educated, they can then take control of the finances

of the family. And I don't want to be sexist again,

but it has been shown that females do a better job of household finances than

the males in a lot of societies. And if they do that, they will become

financially better off, be more secure in their future, not feel like they need to

have as many children to support them.

And population growth can slow that way.

There is a transition that most societies

go through from going from third world countries to develop status economically.

It's called the demographic transition.

First thing that happens is your death rates drop through medicine,

sanitation, but your birth rates stay high because this thought, hey,

I need more children to support me in my old age.

As slowly you get an improved infrastructure, education does improve.

The birth rates do come down and you usually end up at a higher population level.

But it stabilizes out.

Our concern is how do we bring everybody up to our level and still sustain this planet?

The answer is we can't.

If everybody lived like you and I here in the United States, there's no way.

Absolutely no way.

So, again, female education will help to stabilize countries not just develop,

but underdevelop from having their populations explode and the standard

of living increase at the same time.

We also have to look at things like the way that you vote.

And I don't just mean vote in a democratic society.

Vote with your dollars.

With your money.

You want to affect how businesses interact with our environment because that's

really our interface with our environment is how the businesses that make our

products do business. Are they trying to do a zero waste program?

Is every one of their waste products an input for some other business?

I would support that.

This has been that's been proven time and time again that the viral stopping

a particular company's practices by not choosing their product.

It works. It clearly works.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

The dollar does talk louder than anything else.

But do your research.

There's a lot of these like the EcoStar label that's on products was recently given a very bad name.

It's a government run program and they were putting the EcoStar certification

on products that were supposed to be energy efficient or good for the environment in some way.

It was found by a test by another government agency who sent in some false

products, one of them being a nuclear powered alarm clock to see if it could get the certification.

These products did not even exist.

And obviously a nuclear powered alarm clock.

Clock is not going to be an environmentally safe product.

So it was given the Energy Star certificate.

So now we're feeling like, well, Energy Star in the past has been completely bogus.

Anybody who bought a product for that reason was being fooled.

And so, you know, bottom line is you've got to educate yourself.

If you're going to vote with your dollars, do it with intelligence.

Are there any particular good resources for that thing that you can recommend right off the top of your head?

I'd say my podcast to start off.

My goal there was to get an entry level

education in Earth systems that anybody with a basic science level and interest could understand.

I do realize that it's not a visual podcast.

It's an audio podcast.

So I do attempt to describe things with enough verbiage that you could see

the graphs in your head if I have to talk about something like that.

I have been concerned with some other podcasts that you tend to have a lecturer

in front of his class that you feel like you're outside of the arena.

My goal is trying to get as many people educated on these topics as possible.

Having that empowerment when you're in a discussion with

a friend and colleague who you're trying to maybe influence their views on certain

environmental topics, it's best that you have knowledge on these subjects.

And so that's what my course was designed to do is give that for free.

And I'm trying to encourage my colleagues

to put out their course material free on podcasts as well.

I think that's one of the major solutions

to a lot of our problems is just being properly educated on them.

There are certain watchdog groups

and environmental groups like the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace.

They do keep an eye on certain practices at times.

I'm not as knowledgeable on where you can find other sources online.

I think those are great sources to start with.

Yeah. So then there's also a solution

of voting with your actual vote if you are in a democratic society.

Obviously, if we can get people in there

who are sensitive to the environmental concerns and sensitive to the uncertainties

of science, that they realize that they're not going to get certainty

from scientific investigations, what we give is probabilities.

When we say that global warming is a concern, we don't say we're absolutely

certain that it's happening, that climate change is happening.

And what we say is,

there is a body of evidence that makes it perverse to withhold provisional consent

to the idea that we're causing climate change.

It's just easier to say, hey, we're worried.

So voting for people who are also worried

and sensitive to the science on these environmental topics and not just

the verbiage is very helpful.

And lastly, I think that podcasts like this one where we're reaching out not just

to people in the United States, we're reaching out to people across the world.

When I did my podcast, that was one of the most enjoyable aspects

of it.

And I think it's really important that we have a global audience.

And when you start a global audience, you start to see the world as that picture,

you know, from that Apollo 8 picture, the Earth in space, that's where all the wars

and catastrophes and loves and hates and dramas have ever occurred.

Right there on that pale blue dot, that's an awesome thought.

And it leads you to a sense of unity.

There are so many ways to see ourselves as different from each other.

From a scientific point of view, that picture of us in space.

If you look at the relatedness of us genetically as a human species,

we're so similar to each other.

The fact that we are related to all other life on the planet is

a scientific outcome of evolutionary theory.

It's an awesome thought.

And it leads to a more empathic consciousness.

And it may start to sound a little fruity for a scientist like myself to start

talking about empathic consciousness.

But I do think that if we're going to solve a lot of the problems in the next

hundred years, we do need to start thinking in a manner of us instead of just us and them.

If we keep thinking there's us humans and them humans, we're going to have a hard

time over the next century if we can think of it as, hey, there's that planet in space

and we're all in this together, you know, male, female, black, white, Islamic,

Christian, gay, straight, it really does not matter at the end of the day because

all of us are in the same ballgame, we're all conscious beings who realize our own

mortality. And that's a pretty intense thought.

And all of us have this drive to know our origins, to know where we came from,

who we are at core.

And I think a study of the environmental system gives that to you and may lead to a

more empathic consciousness that can actually help us through the next hundred years.

Very awe-inspiring thoughts there.

Good way to close things out.

Obviously, you touched very briefly on the concept of religion, even being part of this.

And that's a whole broader topic, so we won't touch that one today.

But I do thank you for your time.

And invite a scientist back to talk about religion.

Why not?

The deep thoughts I'm sure will give a lot of people a lot of things

to think about and hopefully good things to think about.

There's a lot of hope underlying all the dread.

Hope is good.

We should be concerned, we should be aware, but we should not despair.

Excellent. No Soylent Green yet.

No.

But soon.

No, the zombies that will come first.

I'm sorry, the zombie invasion is coming, my particular favorite topic.

Yes, absolutely.

And we'll discuss that at a later time.

How to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Excellent. And on that note, well, thank you very much.

Thank you. Appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Hello again, everyone.

Every now and then I run into someone who is so fascinating to listen to that I

just have to do a podcast with them, and this is one of them.

Christian's Earth and Environmental Systems podcast is a fascinating listen

for anyone with an inkling of interest in geology, weather, evolution and most

other forces that have existed since before the dawn of man.

He manages to pack something like three

years of college level science into a mere 60 something hour long podcasts.

You kind of have to shift

mental gears when he gets to the part of world history where man shows up on the

scene, but I also found that thoroughly interesting.

And don't miss his send off at the end of the last episode.

There are a few interesting points that I

ran across while researching this podcast that I wanted to relate to you.

In April, before the podcast was recorded,

our world was projected to hit peak phosphorus production around 2037.

Since then, other projections have been issued by concerned and biased parties

suggesting that we have a couple hundred years worth of phosphorus in the ground.

And the only thing I can derive

from that is that we'll eventually run out of phosphorus.

But those who sell it want us to continue buying it like we won't.

Other news items have mentioned techniques of pulling phosphorus out of wastewater.

I couldn't find any information to

determine whether this method could be done cost efficiently.

And it's only being done on sewage anyway.

Most phosphorus in our system is lost in rain runoff.

And you could imagine the effort it would

take to filter all the water rolling down the Mississippi.

Another interesting statistic is that of loss of biodiversity.

We can think of biodiversity as an

unrenewable resource.

It renews like an aquifer at a rate of somewhere between five and 100 species per year.

Currently, we're eliminating species

at a rate of somewhere between 27,000 and 130,000 per year and rising.

Here's a word problem for you.

Given the total population of between five and 100 million species,

how long will it be before we're the only ones left?

This is a trick question, of course.

That's all I have today.

Thanks for joining in.

For those of you who are subscribed to the podcast,

you should see another podcast coming out in a month or so.

That is actually this one in the previous

one combined into a full two part episode.

I hope you all enjoy it. Have a good day.

Initiating shutdown sequence.

Intellectual Icebergs is produced by Robert and Tiffany Rauplin.

The music for the intro and credits is

speaking in electronic tongues by synthetic movements.

The music for the main segment is emotion

from the well by synthetic movements.

The music for the closing comments is

pocket orchestra energy by synthetic movements.

Please visit us at www.intellectualicebergs.org.

Intellectual Icebergs is released under

a Creative Commons license and is an Ankh Infinity production.

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