A new study performed by 18 scientists and published in Nature reveals that we should not be at all optimistic when it comes to the integrity of the ecosystem. Their modeling, involving multiple disciplines, suggested that are just a step away from wreaking an irreversible imbalance that would destroy our civilization.
They called it the “tipping point,” or “planetary state threshold” and predicted it could be reached this century. Nothing new so far – except the fact that the effects of the imbalance will not be felt over a longer time span, like we’d been accustomed to think, but over a very short amount of time.
“The last tipping point in Earth’s history occurred about 12,000 years ago when the planet went from being in the age of glaciers, which previously lasted 100,000 years, to being in its current interglacial state. Once that tipping point was reached, the most extreme biological changes leading to our current state occurred within only 1,000 years. That’s like going from a baby to an adult state in less than a year,” explains Arne Mooers. “Importantly, the planet is changing even faster now.”
“The odds are very high that the next global state change will be extremely disruptive to our civilizations. Remember, we went from being hunter-gathers to being moon-walkers during one of the most stable and benign periods in all of Earth’s history.
“Once a threshold-induced planetary state shift occurs, there’s no going back. So, if a system switches to a new state because you’ve added lots of energy, even if you take out the new energy, it won’t revert back to the old system. The planet doesn’t have any memory of the old state.”
The study says that we shouldn’t exceed the 50 percent mark (the tipping point). If we do that, we’ll have trespassed into the realms of the unknown, and we won’t be able to come back. Current policies are not able and not interested to invest the energy enough to balance things.
Just like these scientists, we should all be worried to despair and should only make the right choices and elect the right people in the proper positions. It’s not only an individual choice, but a mass one, and we have to somehow think collectively, just like ants do.
Maybe WALL-E won’t be science fiction any more in a couple of decades…
[via eurekalert]
“a threshold-induced planetary state shift (occurs)” is interesting. Since Earth’s current inhabitants are blinded by money an economic progression, over the life of the Earth, the law of diminishing returns is not recognized as such. Just as surely and we create diseases, we create a cure. But as stated above “The planet doesn’t have any memory of the old state”, which opens the door to the point of ‘no return’.
Not being a Physicist, I have an idea that simply put, the extraction of oil, by it’s weight alone (millions of barrels p/day), ultimately being ‘refined’ and then burned-off into the Earth’s atmosphere, has already pushed the Earth in a direction of probable demise, and ‘the planet having no memory of it’s old state’, will be forced to evolve, and so it’s people, provided that life, as we know it, is sustainable by Earth in the future.
My Theory:
The Earth’s ‘eggshell’ crust will become compromised, while the magnetic pull of Earth’s core will hold-in-place the fragmented pieces of crust (as if, bodies in orbit) while the imploded core expands to many times it’s current size. Each crust or ‘body’ fragment evolves independently depending on its newly disbursed elements. New life could eventually be supported, depending on particular elements and atmosphere, though not life as we know it to be (i.e. two eyes, two ears, two arms, etc.).