Schwarz The Pandora Principle

The destructive power of creation
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-7481-6515-6
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Growth is commonly regarded as something positive, as something to be rewarded. At the same time the growth of the global population and economy leads to depletion of resources, violent competition and consequently, to the impairment of the quality of life on earth. Science has opened innumerable Pandora boxes, and humankind has no option but to live with the consequences. Once any item of knowledge has entered the world, it is practically impossible to remove it from the world. We could do away with all weapons of mass destruction, but still could not remove the fundamental ability of humans to construct such weapons. Progress is always accompanied by destruction. Where cities grow nature must give way, when a new technology arises it pushes aside older technologies, and where one group of humans appropriates resources it deprives another group of humans of them. The discovery of fossil fuels as energy resource around 250 years ago has allowed for tremendous growth and progress in a very short time span. If the current CO2 emissions continue, the atmospheric CO2 concentrations will reach concentrations that negatively affect cognitive functions within the lifetime of our children and reach lethal concentrations within a few generations. Methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and might apart from human economic activities be released in large amounts from melting permafrost areas of the earth. With melting of polar ice shields global warming will accelerate as sun energy that previously was reflected through the albedo effect gets saved in the oceans. With depletion of resources we think of resources to keep up our civilisation such as oil and gas. However we also have to consider the depletion of resources essential for the pure survival of human beings, such as water. While human populations grow exponentially , ground water levels shrink nearly everywhere. If we are not facing near term human extinction we will at least face enormous challenges in the coming years with potential mass dying in some regions of the world, most of them probably in poor developing countries of the tropics. The creative power of destruction is the destructive power of creation.

As an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Norbert Schwarz concentrates his attention on the risks from epidemics and health for individuals and groups. In this book he sheds light on existential risks for the largest possible group of Homo sapiens, humankind.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schwarz, Norbert Georg

Leseproben

2 The non-sustainability of sustainable growth
Al Bartlett was a physicist at Colorado University in Boulder. He died on 7 September 2013 at the age of 90. He is best known for a one-hour lecture that he held a total of 1742 times, from 1969 to his death: ”Arithmetic, Population and Energy“. He began each of his lectures with the following sentence: ”The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function“ [6]. Bartlett always started his lecture by establishing that stable growth, or sustainable growth, is something that sounds good and unproblematic at first glance. He then went on to give an impressive, but easily comprehensible explanation of what this actually means. In order to illustrate what stable growth of, say, 5 % means, he gave his listeners a simple rule of the thumb to calculate the doubling time of this fraction: Doubling time = 70 : growth in percent per unit time In this example, growth is assumed to be 5 % per year, so the doubling time is calculated as 70/ 5 = 14 years. (70 is the natural logarithm of two x 100). Let us imagine a small town with a population of 60,000 – that was the size of Boulder in Colorado in 1969, when Bartlett held his lecture on how difficult it is for the human race to understand the exponential function. The town Boulder had a stable population growth of 5% per year. Using the mathematical equation reveals doubling time of 14 years. If the annual growth rate of Boulder had been a stable 5 % during Bartlett’s lifetime, the population would have doubled to 120,000 in 1983, and, another 14 years later, in 1997, it would have quadrupled to 240,000. And finally, another 14 years later, in 2011, it would have multiplied by eight, to 480,00. This simple example clearly uncovers the fact that “stable population growth” is not linear at all, but exponential. (In reality, Boulder’s population was only 100,000 in 2011.) The world population figure was 5 billion people in 1986 with a growth rate globally of 1.7 % (doubling time 70/: 1.7 = 41 years). The figure for 1999 was 6 billion, the growth rate being 1.3% (doubling time 70/ 1.3 = 53 years), and in 2017, it was 7.5 billion, with a growth rate of 1.1% (doubling time: 70 : 1.1 = 64 years). So we see that the growth rate of the world population has been decreasing since its highest point in 1970, while the global population has continued to increase (illustration 1). Figure 1: World population and population growth between 1750 and 2015, world population projection to 2100 in billions [7] Source: Roser & Ortiz-Ospina (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU), Our World in Data The earth has a land surface of 150 million km2. The surface currently used for farming worldwide is estimated at slightly less than approximately 50 million km2 [8]. So this corresponds to a third of the land surface worldwide. With a world population of currently 7.5 billion people, one square kilometre of agricultural land needs to be shared by 150 persons on average. In figures, this means that in order to feed each individual person, the available area per person is an average of 6666 m2, that is, a square measuring 80 m x 80 m. If the world population were to grow at a stable rate of 1.1 %, in another 64 years, the world population in 2080 would count 15 billion people, which corresponds to 100 persons per km2 (1,000m x 1,000) of land surface. The available land remaining for each individual person would be a square of 100 m x 100 m - de facto even less, since not all land area is habitable, i.e. can be used for the production of foodstuff. A global economic system based on growth provides the future leaders with incentives to propagate growing population figures. A larger population is often associated with a growing gross domestic product, and a country with a larger population is considered to have more power on the international stage. Measures to reduce the population
The development of the population in any one region of the earth is influenced by the birth and death rates (natural population development), and also by emigration and immigration, while the size of the world population is only influenced by birth and death rates. In his famous lecture, Al Bartlett drew up a list of measures to increase the population and those to decrease the population figures. This list is absolutely neutral, and is soberly brutal, without any ethical evaluation. (Table 2). Table 2: Al Bartlett’s tabular comparison of measures to increase and decrease the population Increase population Decrease population Procreation Abstention Motherhood Contraception / abortion Large families Small families Immigration Stopping immigration Medicine Disease Public health Sanitation Peace War Law and order Murder / violence Scientific agriculture Famine Accident prevention Accidents Clean air Pollution Ignorance of the growth problem Some of these “measures“, such as war or disease are certainly not desirable and it would be ethically and morally reprehensible to implement them. Yet, we should not ignore them. Some of the measures to reduce the population could come about naturally as a result of a scarcity of resources, e.g. famine, or by a war for resources - and against competing persons or powers. Also, the active implementation of murderous population reduction measures by brutal totalitarian systems such as the national socialist regimes of the 20th century is thinkable. In rather dystopic scenarios one could imagine elites (genetically optimised humans, for example) that consider themselves so superior to the masses that they feel entitled to decide over life and death of inferior members of society (very similarly to the way we slaughter entire animal populations when we consider this to be necessary, e.g. to contain animal epidemics). Many of the “measures“ used to favour population growth are regarded as positive. Hygiene, medicine and peace are measures which I myself as a medical doctor and epidemiologist feel committed to and of which I am convinced that they improve human life on earth. In most parts of the world, population growth is a very recent phenomenon, which was only perceived as a problem with the onset of the industrialisation in the 19th century. Prior to this time, population growth was a sign of prosperity and wealth, and basically, it was also perceived as such in the emerging economies of the industrialisation era. However, the perception of a normal human being that competes with other normal people for resources, living space and work will tend to be less optimistic. Real reduction in population growth in some countries
The global population is increasing. However, this growth is by no means spread evenly – it is not balanced. Whereas the natural population growth in Africa of 4.7 children per woman is very high, in Europe and Japan, this figure is distinctly below the 2.1 children per woman required to maintain the population (not including immigration and emigration) [9]. This leads to new challenges for these countries, namely, to an increasingly aged population with the corresponding burdens on social systems and generational balance. Another possible concern employers may have are rising labour costs in the long run, with the working population decreasing in numbers. Interestingly enough, the number of children is decreasing in the middle classes in particular, where the parents are particularly involved in working life, while poor and rich families continue to have more children than average [10, 11]. Due to the lack of young, creative people, it is feared that less innovation coupled with a decrease in the economic growth of the society will result. Since sustainable growth becomes de facto exponential, permanent global growth does not seem desirable (this also applying for the economy). The problem is that, due to global competition, the size of the national economy is a significant element of power. This in turn creates incentives for growth (at least for the elite members of a society). Let us contemplate the results in those countries whose natural population growth has fallen to 2.1 children per female or lower. These are...