I'm just now seeingarticles about a study by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer published by the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan which reports that the poorest of the poor has increased 130 percent since 1996 in the United States.
Two dollars per person per day is used to describe "moderate" poverty in developing nations in the sense that local currency is converted to purchasing power parity. The World Bank doesn't even list data for the United States. It's a standard of living that seems impossible, even as people move in and out of this category month to month. The worldwide estimate for 2008 was 2.7 billion people living on $2 per day or less.
"Peak Farmland" is the phrase used by authors from Rockefeller University's Program for the Human Environment to refer to the trend that less farmland will be needed to due higher crop yields and stabilizing populations. They estimate that an area the size of ten Iowas could be taken out of production by 2060.
This phrasing isn't parallel to "Peak Oil" which refers to geological limits on oil production.
And the authors' assumptions seem troubling: Can yields continue to rise if past results depended heavily on oil based fertilizers? Biofuel production has already contributed to rising food prices -- is a slow rise in production reasonable in the face of peak oil? Does it make sense to not factor in the impacts of climate change on food production?
It's not that I want to be pessimistic, but we need a realistic analysis for how issues like energy, climate, and food production intertwine.
Update (January 8, 2013):More about the impact of climate change on food production.
Update (January 19, 2013):New studies predict falling harvests and rising food price in the face of unchecked climate change.
Update (January 31, 2013): World grain production and grain stocks dropped in 2012.
Update (April 20, 2013): An overview of indications that climate change will create a global food crisis.
Update (November 1, 2013): A report from the World Resources Institute finds that over one-fourth of the world's cropland is experiencing high water-stress.
Update (December 20, 2014): A study published in Environmental Research Letters says that food production could decrease 18 percent by 2050. Climate change could restrict water supply due to changing precipitation patterns.
A large international study has determined that the melting of land ice in both Greenland and Antarctica is at a rate three times higher than during the 1990s. While eastern Antarctica is gaining ice, losses on the rest of the continent are twice as large.
Update (December 24): The temperature rise in West Antarctica may be twice as much as previous estimates (2.4 degrees Celsius since 1958).
Update (April 15, 2013): The summer ice melt in parts of Antarctica is at the highest rate in 1000 years.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demonstrates that the gap between the lowest and highest incomes has increased in most of the country since the late 1970s. The ratio of the top fifth to lowest fifth exceeds 8 in fifteen states -- thirty years ago no state exceeded a ratio of 8.
The World Bank has released a report that describes the impact of a 4 degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Current trends would lead to this change by the end of the century.
Update (November 24): The United Nations Environment Programme warns that the gap between carbon dioxide emissions pledges and reality continues to grow.
Update (November 25): It looks like we are locked in to a 5 foot sea level rise.
Update (November 26): Chris Hedges summarizes the World Bank report.
This year's report from the International Energy Agency forecasts that the United States will surpass Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer. This increased production seems largely due to the hydraulic fracturing of shale. It's not clear how much of the potential will pan out or what the net energy return would be.
Of perhaps greater significance is a statement in the report that no more than one third of proven fossil fuel reserves can be consumed by 2050 if global warming is to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide emissions grew by 2.5 percent in 2011.
Update (November 19): Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed takes a critical view of fracking.
Update (November 22): A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers concludes that staying below the 2 degree Celsius target requires 5.1 percent annual reductions in carbon emissions (relative to GDP) for the next 40 years.
Update (November 30): Michael Klare points out that the US will be the top oil producer by default as Saudi and Russian production declines.
Update (December 3): Robert Howarth argues that fracking will speed up climate change.
Update (April 1, 2013): Brad Jacobson reports that shale gas production has been hyped and may not be sustainable.
Update (April 5, 2014): Michael Klare gives examples of "carbon delirium".
Update (May 21, 2014): Louis Sahagun reports that the U.S. Energy Information Administration has revised their estimate of the amount of recoverable oil from the Monterey Shale deposits in California. The new estimate of 600 million barrels (about one month of U.S. consumption) is about 96 percent below a previous estimate of 13.7 billion barrels. The Monterey formation contains two-thirds of the U.S. shale oil reserves.
Update (June 7, 2014): IEA estimates that $48 trillion needs to be invested to meet growing energy demand by 2035. Richard Heinberg points out that the oil industry is actually cutting back on investment because oil prices are too low to justify development of harder to reach sources.
In their report Born Equal, Save the Children demonstrates that while the number of people in extreme poverty has decreased from about 2 billion to less than 1.3 billion since 1990, the income gap between the poorest and richest children has grown 35 percent. That gap is larger than that between adults.
A child in the richest 10% of households has 35 times the effective available income of a child in the poorest 10% of households.
The distribution of poverty has changed. In 1990, 93 percent of people in poverty lived in low income countries. Now 70 percent live in middle income countries. The effect is that while absolute poverty is declining, many poor people struggle with relative poverty - unable to meet their needs where they live.
A report by the Congressional Research Service was withdrawn from official circulation after Senate Republicans raised concerns. What could those possibly be?
The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.
Climate is complex and while Antarctic sea ice has expanded slightly due to wind patterns, the net change globally is a loss of sea ice.
Update (September 19, 2014): Antarctic sea ice extent is on track for another record year, but the growth is explained in part by melting land ice that refreezes when it reaches the ocean.
Update (October 13, 2014): Joe Romm explains how expanding sea ice in Antarctica is a manifestation of global warming.
Update (February 26, 2017): That growth trend in Antarctica suddenly reversed and now we see record low extent at both poles.
Peak oil presents a liquid fuels problem. Transportation depends heavily on oil and nothing is in place to take on the demand. Every once in a while, a new technology hits the news. Air Fuel Synthesis is a company with a process that reacts hydrogen with carbon dioxide to produce gasoline.
Now, it's probably helpful to have a process to produce fuel that doesn't depend on crude oil or biomass. And it's nice to extract some carbon dioxide from the air. But electrolyzing hydrogen from water involves a net energy loss. The plan calls for renewable energy to do that, but we're better off using that power more directly. They hope to produce a ton per day in two years and don't mention any energy return on energy invested.
There seems to be a never ending quest for a silver bullet to solve intractable problems.
Update (April 3, 2013): Research at the University of Georgia is using a modified microorganism to directly produce biofuel from atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Update (April 8, 2014): The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has demonstrated using carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater to produce hydrocarbon fuel.
Update (August 1, 2016): A study published in Science describes using a catalyst to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide which is easier to further convert into hydrocarbon fuels.
Chrystia Freeland argues that as people start to accumulate wealth, they seek to protect their own position and transform an inclusive society of economic mobility into an extractive one where elites try to get as much as they can out of the rest of society. She reiterates a point made by Stiglitz that growing inequality has led to lower mobility. The super rich are confusing their own interests with the common good.
The preliminary minimum for 2012 is 3.41 million square kilometers. This is 49 percent below the minimum extent average from 1979 to 2000. It is also 18 percent below the previous record in 2007.
Update (January 25, 2015): Watch the arctic ice cap melt away.
Today was the anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Rebecca Solnit reflects on what it means.
Update (September 16, 2013):Further reflections from Solnit at the second anniversary. It's not about instant results, but rather the seeds that get planted.
Too Much Magic is James Howard Kunstler's follow up to his 2005 book The Long Emergency. His answer to the sentiment that technology will save us from a myriad of ecological and economic problems is that we need to focus on intelligent responses rather than on solutions. Daily life will be changing in ways we don't prefer, and yet we are going to have to make "other arrangements" (as Kunstler likes to say).
He's been writing about these issues at least since the early 90s with The Geography of Nowhere. There Kunstler wrote about car centered lives and the disaster of suburban sprawl. At the time I didn't pay much attention to his comments about declining oil reserves or that burning fossil fuels was causing a global warming effect. It was already clear that "the joyride is over" and "[w]hat remains is the question of how we can make the transition to a saner way of living."
It was a little over seven years ago that the concept of "peak oil" grabbed my attention. I spent a couple of nearly sleepless nights reading through The Long Emergency. It also redirected some of my attention to climate change. I read a lot that summer in preparation for a public lecture in November. It was one of those times when a huge dose of reality meant you can't ever see the world in the same way again.
For some time, I kept up with Kunstler's blog. I could agree with everything he wrote while still wishing he was wrong. Or more selfishly, hoping that he was wrong for a few more years.
I concede a bias toward Stiglitz from the beginning and nothing I read changed that. Sowell's book was easy to read and had me ticked off several times. Stiglitz spends a lot of time telling you what he's told you and what he's going to tell you, but I found his argument thoughtful and information dense. It's one of the most informative books I've read.
The books aren't really addressing the same topic. Sowell covers a broader range of topics as demonstrations of economic thinking--getting past "stage one" to see the long term consequences which are often unintended. And I get it; it's a rather basic point to make. In a functioning government, you want that kind of debate with one side or the other asking, "did you think about such and such?" Our ideological opponents force us to think things through and ideally that produces better results.
What I found infuriating is that Sowell really has axes to grind. Simple minded liberals can't get past stage one with their do-gooder intentions. It takes deep thinking conservatives to foresee the true outcomes. And so he cherry picks his evidence with few academic references. Over and over I end up wondering, what is he not telling me?
Rather quickly into my reading of both books, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't care less about unintended consequences--mistakes get made, but in principle they can be corrected. The real problem seems to be the deliberately intended consequences of policy.
Stiglitz addresses more recent events which have highlighted as well as worsened the problem of inequality in the United States. Economics and politics are bound together and policies have been in place to deliberately enhance wealth at the top over the past 30 years. Greater wealth translates into greater political power to the detriment of most of society. Stiglitz goes into enormous detail on the various impacts of inequality with an abundance of evidence.
And solutions are sketched out, albeit solutions that will never see the light of day in our modern dysfunctional Congress. Stiglitz paints a stark contrast between where we are headed and where we could be. He acknowledges the Arab Spring last year and the Occupy Movement that followed in the US last fall. The future of that movement isn't clear and Stiglitz discusses how much effort goes into getting the 99% to believe that their interests are the same as those of the 1%. Ultimately he seems to appeal to the 1% to do the right thing--in de Tocqueville's words, "self-interest properly understood". Stiglitz concludes with the notion that it's not too late, but hope is flickering.
I'm not without my quibbles: Stiglitz is a capitalist. His focus is on restoring growth rather than on redistribution (he does refer to sustainable growth). But there are serious questions about how much (if any) growth is possible in the coming years.
But finally, it pleases me to think that a couple conservative friends got the chance to read Stiglitz. I'm curious to find out just how persuasive he is.
Update (February 15, 2013): Satellite observations are confirming a University of Washington model that shows summer sea ice volume has declined by one-third in the past ten years and by four-fifths since 1980.
Update (May 2, 2013): An animation showing the decline in sea ice volume. And a White House meeting about the rapid changes in the arctic.
The area of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice shrank to a record low of 4.21 million square kilometers breaking the 2007 record of 4.25 million square kilometers. Melting should continue for a few more weeks.
Update (December 10, 2013): A study indicates a possible link between melting sea ice and summer heat waves and drought. Warming in the arctic and antarctic reduces the temperature difference between the poles and equator which pushes the jet stream toward the poles.
It seems part of gloom would be the fact that more and more workers are "contingent". An estimated 30 percent of the workforce doesn't have permanent jobs. That generally means lower pay and less security.
Update (December 3, 2013): Harold Meyerson recounts how the middle-class have been in a 40 year slump.
Update (January 5, 2014): David Wessel was surprised by the fact that most of the growth in the past 25 years went to the top and didn't trickle down to the middle class.
Update (April 27, 2014): Lynn Stuart Parramore reports that the average after-tax income of the Canadian middle class has now surpassed that of the United States. Poorer income groups in most European countries to better than those in the U.S. The analysis is based on data from the Cross National Data Center in Luxembourg and conducted by The Upshot at The New York Times.
Update (June 1, 2014): Edward McClelland describes Canada as a land of averaging out, while the United States is a land of extremes.
Back in April, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the Ryan budget as failing to meet basic moral criteria such as promoting the common good and protecting "the least of these."
Mitt Romney's campaign is floundering. He doesn't trust the American people to make an informed choice by disclosing his tax returns.
He can't admit that his health care law in Massachusetts is a good idea.
All he offers is more tax cuts for the wealthy.
As Mr. Romney slides in the polls, his selection of an extremist like Mr. Ryan reveals a concern that he still hasn't won over his conservative Republican base.
By the way, Mr. Ryan is a big fan of author Ayn Rand. I'm sure we'll be learning more about "the virtue of selfishness." But I doubt most sensible people will like what they see.
The Center on Education and the Workforce reports that workers with a high school education or less were hit hardest by the Great Recession and have yet to recover.
While recent college graduates have a higher unemployment rate than graduates overall, they still do better than those with high school diplomas.
But with decreasing government support for higher education, student loan debt is growing quickly and now exceeds one trillion dollars--more than credit card debt. College graduates in 2010 averaged $24,962 in outstanding loans.
So college pays--eventually--but choose wisely. For-profit schools get up to 90% of their revenue from student financial aid and less than half of those students earn a degree.
Update (May 17, 2013): Joseph Stiglitz writes about the crisis of student debt.
Update (June 30, 2013): Tim Donovan suggests that additional earnings from a college degree are overstated. Increasingly, prospective students are faced with a choice of taking on enormous debt for a degree where the prospects for cognitive work are diminishing or foregoing college to compete with recent graduates for the available low skill jobs.
Update (July 17, 2013): Despite rising costs and massive debt, there is a relationship between education and employment.
Update (July 26, 2013): College enrollments declined by two percent last year and are expected to continue to decline.
So, yes, a college education is a great thing, and you probably need one now more than ever--the problem is that it may very well be mandatory, may have less of a chance of ever getting you a job, and you may still be paying for it on your deathbed no matter what.
Update (February 22, 2014): Matthew Saccaro argues that massive debt and poor quality make attending college the worst decision a young person can make.
Update (March 19, 2014): Hannah Gold reports that the average student loan for an American 25-year-old has risen 91 percent in the past ten years. She also reviews Creditocracy And The Case For Debt Refusal by Andrew Ross.
Update (March 25, 2014): The increasing cost of graduate school is driving up student debt.
Update (June 9, 2014): President Obama announces executive action on student loans including capping loan payments at 10 percent of income.
Update (June 16, 2014): A discussion about making higher education free.
Update (June 20, 2014): David Dayen calls for eliminating student loan servicer middlemen.
Update (September 17, 2014):Strike Debt is using the Rolling Jubilee fund to buy delinquent student debt and cancel it. $3.9 million of debt was bought for $107,000.
Update (October 19, 2014): Kyle Schmidlin calls for debt refusal.
Update (December 15, 2014): A Brookings Institution report shows that 51 percent of first year college students underestimate the amount of debt they are taking on.
Update (January 10, 2015): President Obama has a proposal to make attending community colleges free.
Update (December 12, 2015): Joseph Pomianowski says students need a bailout.
Update (June 1, 2016): A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that for-profit universities are a bad investment if you don't graduate. And most students at those schools don't.
[O]n average associate’s and bachelor’s degree students experience a decline in earnings after attendance, relative to their own earnings in years prior to attendance. Master’s degree students and students who complete their degrees appear to experience better outcomes, with positive earnings effects.
Update (June 24, 2019): Senator Bernie Sanders proposes cancelling all student debt.
Update (September 16, 2020): Mary Green Swig, Steven L. Swig, David A. Bergeron and Richard J. Eskow give a history of student loan debt.
It is time to recognize that the cruel experiment in financing higher education through student loans has failed. It has captured 46 million people and their families in a student loan trap.
It’s time to restore funds for higher education and cancel student debt for the victims of this failed experiment.
Particular events such as recent heat waves or droughts were always discussed with the caveat that no single incident can be attributed to climate change, only that such events are more likely. James Hansen says that's no longer true. A new analysis shows that the probability that recent extreme weather is due to natural variability is nearly zero. It is caused by climate change.
Congress cannot get its act together to help farmers because organizations like Heritage Action believe that when disaster programs expire then we all need to be prepared on our own for events like severe drought.
This month, over a period of nine days, one million square kilometers of Arctic sea ice melted. Sea ice extent dropped below five million square kilometers at the earliest date ever.
Also this month, surface thawing on the Greenland ice cap grew from 40% to 97% of the ice cap area over a period of four days. A NASA scientist first thought the instruments were in error.
Update (April 3, 2013): A study from the University of Wisconsin connects the unusual melt to low level clouds.
Update (March 7, 2015):Greenland is the warmest its been in 100,000 years.
Update (January 6, 2016): A study in Nature Climate Change finds that a type of snow called "firn" that usually stores melting water is now losing its ability to hold more water. That means more melting water running into the ocean.
Update (January 13, 2016): A study in Nature Communications finds that cloud cover over Greenland traps heat and helps increase the outflow of meltwater. It's amazing we keep finding new ways for climate change to get worse.
Update (April 15, 2016): Greenland is experiencing record breaking melting for this time of year. Greater than ten percent of the ice sheet is melting more than a month earlier than usual.
Update (June 16, 2016): The capital of Greenland set a record for June with a high of 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature anomalies for April were far above even the recently established "normal" of 2001 to 2010.
Update (May 31, 2017): "Solitary waves" observed during the melt seasons of 2010 and 2012 seem to have caused increased ice flow. Rink Glacier saw a 61 percent increase in ice flow in 2012.
Update (July 30, 2017): Summer snow might mean no net loss on the Greenland ice sheet for the first time in 20 years.
It's important to remember that banks aren't here to serve you, they exist to make money. And one way to make money is to offer low income customers products such as prepaid debit cards or payday loans with high fees and interest charges. With poverty at the highest rate since 1965, I imagine the banks stand to make a bundle. Who needs the middle class when you can profit so much from the poor?
Three fourths of Americans aged 50 to 64 face bleak futures with a mean savings of $26,395 for retirement. A general rule of thumb is that you need 20 times your income in savings to maintain your standard of living in retirement. 401(k) plans have been a failure.
Update (February 18, 2013): Michael Fletcher reports on a Center for Retirement Research study that estimates 53 percent of Americans age 30 and above are at risk of being unprepared for retirement. In 2001, only 38 percent were at risk.
Update (June 22, 2013): The National Institute on Retirement Security released a report indicating that the crisis is worse than previously portrayed with the "typical" working age household having only about $3000 in retirement savings.
Update (July 16, 2013): A report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute suggests that under certain circumstances a 401(k) plan provides more retirement income than traditional private sector pension plans. The study is a survey of workers who may or may not be contributing to a 401(k) they are eligible for. But those who seem to do the best are those who pay in for 30 to 40 years and those with higher incomes.
Update (September 3, 2013): The Economic Policy Institute charts retirement savings trends and concludes that 401(k) plans have created a few big winners and many losers. Percentiles below 50 are not shown because half of workers have no retirement savings.
Update (September 6, 2013): A report from the IRS shows that fewer workers are saving money in retirement accounts and the amount saved is also decreasing. Two-thirds of workers saved nothing (seven-eighths among those in their twenties).
Update (September 24, 2013): Lynn Stuart Parramore reports on the EPI's Retirement Inequality Chartbook referred to above.
Update (October 2, 2013): HR 2374 is supported by the financial industry to replace "fiduciary" standards with "suitability" standards for consulting advice.
Update (October 31, 2013): In response the the 401(k) disaster, blogger Duncan Black (Atrios) pushes to expand Social Security.
Update (November 19, 2013): The anti-pension movement is not popular.
Update (November 22, 2013): Paul Krugman also supports expanding Social Security to address the retirement crisis.
Update (December 15, 2013): Michael Lind, co-author of the April New America Foundation report arguing to expand Social Security, claims that the discussion has shifted from "how much to cut" to "whether to cut or expand" Social Security thanks to people like Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Update (January 7, 2014): Paul Buchheit explains four ways in which American retirement is worse off than it needs to be.
1. Federal Tax Avoidance is the Biggest Threat to Social Security 2. State Tax Avoidance Defunds Pensions 3. Corporations Play One Underfunded State Against Another 4. Banks Take a Big Chunk of Our Retirement Accounts
Update (January 10, 2014): Steve Rosenfeld reports on the need to expand Social Security.
Update (March 3, 2014):More from Paul Buchheit about the retirement crisis.
Update (March 18, 2014): An Employee Benefit Research Institute survey reports confidence in having enough money for retirement is up, but only among those with higher incomes. The grim news is that over one-third of workers have saved $1000 or less for retirement.
Update (April 13, 2014): Josh Boak and Paul Wiseman explain how the fees on 401(k) accounts reduce savings by significant amounts. You might need to work an extra three years to compensate.
Update (May 7, 2014): With home values down, more people are taking early withdrawals from their 401(k) plans when they need extra cash. The median savings are now $24,400 overall and $65,300 for those age 55 or above. The early withdrawals will likely make the retirement crisis even worse.
Update (May 10, 2014): An excerpt from James Russell's book Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis.
Update (August 12, 2014): A Federal Reserve survey reports that 31 percent of Americans have no retirement savings. That includes 19 percent of those age 55 to 64.
Update (September 13, 2014): The retirement crisis and the student loan crisis are starting to converge for a few people according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study.
Update (November 7, 2014): A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the wealth of the middle quintile of those age 55 to 64 has been declining since 2004.
Update (February 27, 2015): Pensions get more expensive as retirees live longer than expected.
Update (June 5, 2015): An analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds that 52 percent of households age 55 and older have no retirement savings. A good reason to expand Social Security.
Update (October 29, 2015): A report from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government gives a stark contrast. The top 100 CEOs have as much retirement savings as the bottom 41 percent of Americans. That's about $50,000,000 per CEO and about $100 per family.
Update (March 5, 2016): A report from the Economic Policy Institute explains how retirement inequality has grown as 401(k)s have replaced pensions.
For many groups—lower-income, black, Hispanic, non-college-educated, and unmarried Americans—the typical working-age family or individual has no savings at all in retirement accounts, and for those that do have savings, the median balances in retirement accounts are very low.
Update (April 10, 2016): Transamerica has an annual retirement survey. Retirement savings by age group:
People in their 20s have a median retirement savings of $16,000.
For people in their 30s it's $45,000.
For people in their 40s it's $63,000.
For people in their 50s it's $117,000.
For people in their 60s it's $172,000.
Update (May 11, 2016): A U.S. Government Accountability Office report finds that the prevalence of 401(k) plans (defined contribution or DC) contributes to greater inequality.
Update (March 18, 2018): Keith Spencer talks to younger adults who are deliberately not saving for retirement because they don't see much of a future for capitalism.
Many millennials expressed to me their interest in creating self-sustaining communities as their only hope for survival in old age; a lack of faith that capitalism as we know it would exist by retirement age; and that alternating climate crises, concentrations of wealth, and privatization of social welfare programs would doom their chance at survival.
Update (January 30, 2019): Representative John Larson has a plan to expand Social Security. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans want to eliminate the estate tax. Priorities.
Update (June 15, 2019): Retirement savings gaps around the world will leave many people outliving their plans.
The Congressional Research Service released a report on the distribution of wealth in the United States. One of the most glaring statistics is the fact that the poorer half of American households have just 1.1% of the country's wealth. The report indicates that share had generally been around 3% until the recent financial crisis. Meanwhile, the top one tenth of households have 74.5% of the wealth.
Another way to see the skewed distribution is by comparing the mean amount of wealth to the median level of wealth. If everyone were given an equal share (the mean), each household would have $498,800. But the dividing point between the poorer half and richer half (the median) is $77,380. The mean is that much larger because relatively few very rich people skew the calculation. And the ratio between the mean and median is the highest in the 21 years covered by the report.
Bill McKibben explains a concise way to understand the climate crisis using three numbers:
2 degrees Celsius is the maximum amount of warming that most countries have agreed is necessary to prevent catastrophic change. Since 0.8 degrees of warming have already happened and another 0.8 degrees are on the way with current carbon dioxide emissions, there's not much room to work with. And there are climate scientists who think a 2 degree limit won't save us.
565 gigatons is the estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released by 2050 and stay within the 2 degree limit. Unfortunately, emissions have been increasing by about three percent per year and we would use up our carbon "budget" in about sixteen years.
2795 gigatons is the estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide that would be released from burning all the existing fossil fuel reserves. This is far beyond the carbon budget even as the search is made for more fossil fuel supplies.
McKibben tries to remain optimistic and suggests that a moral case can be made against the energy corporations. They are the enemy needed to energize the environmental movement. But those fossil fuel reserves are worth $27 trillion. And it's this fourth number that explains all you need to know about our fate.
Update (July 30): Nicholas Arguimbau has a response to McKibben.
Update (December 27): Rebecca Solnit declares 2013 to be Year Zero in the battle against climate change.
Update (October 28, 2013): A study from the University of Oxford estimates that the carbon budget would be exceeded in about 27 years.
Update (December 23, 2013): Sean McElwee and Lew Daly explain the carbon bubble. If world governments do adhere to a carbon budget, carbon assets face a $20 trillion devaluation.
Update (December 6, 2014): A reminder that the world has already used 65 percent of our carbon budget.
Update (September 16, 2015): Burning through all the world's fossil fuels would melt of the ice on Earth and bring a sea level rise of 200 feet. But disaster would occur well before that happens.
Alone in the Universe is John Gribbin's argument for why ours is the only technological civilization in the universe (well, galaxy anyway). The book is more or less an expansion on the famous Drake equation which has been used to estimate the number of civilizations in the galaxy. Estimates have historically ranged from a few hundred to several million.
Gribbin goes into great detail with a lot of science about galaxy and planet formation, the history of the earth and the evolution of life. I had been aware of habitable zones around stars due to the need for liquid water for life to develop, but I hadn't realized that galaxies also have those zones--regions where sufficient amounts of metals exist due to previous generations of stars fusing the heavier elements before the stars exploded.
The details build up--each one slicing away at the likelihood of us being here: earth-like planets are rare, it's unusual for stars to form singly, our moon is unusually large compared to the planet, the tilt of the earth was from the collision that formed the moon, the moon stabilizes the earth's rotation, the tilt gives us seasons, our large metal core gives us a magnetic field, the thinness of the crust gives us plate tectonics, climate changes prompted and accelerated the evolution of our species. The extent of uniqueness is staggering.
And if all that isn't enough, Gribbin ends with a discovery from about two and a half years ago I hadn't been aware of--an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is on a collision course with the solar system. Sure, it will take about 1.4 million years and will likely pass through the outer regions of the solar system (Oort Cloud). But it turns out that the sun typically has a "close" approach with another star about every two million years. And the Oort Cloud is where comets come from. If Gliese 710 also has its own cluster of comets, the near pass could send a bombardment of objects toward the earth. Large impacts have caused mass extinctions before; future impacts could destroy civilization (if any then still exist) or even destroy all of life.
It's strange to consider how contingent our presence is on being at the right place at the right time. I can't help but believe that simple life exists in many places. Of course, we don't know for sure. To be truly alone flies in the face of a lot of science fiction. Our human history is full of great achievement but also great disappointment--surely this can't be all the universe (or galaxy) has to offer?
Climate change split our ancestors into two groups--one stayed in the trees and one learned to live on the grasslands. Gribbin mentions that all humans on earth are descended from a group of only one thousand individuals. Is the intelligence we ascribe to ourselves merely a freak occurrence, a lethal mutation? Anthropogenic climate change tests the limits of that intelligence. We have the technology, but not the political smarts to solve the problem. Obviously, Gliese 710 is the least of our concerns. Perhaps we would have been better off staying in the trees.
Update (January 7, 2013): Perhaps Earth-like planets are not so rare, but most orbit stars much different from ours.
Update (July 30, 2013): A study from the University of Victoria finds that the habitable zones around stars are narrower than previously assumed.
Update (November 4, 2013): Based on a survey of 42,000 stars by the Kepler Space Telescope, there may be as many as 4.4 billion Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Still unknown is the probability of any planet for supporting life. MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager points out that "Earth-sized" doesn't mean "Earth-like". And Washington Post commenter 'wolfeja' lists several other factors relevant to life on Earth such as a molten iron core, gas giants in the solar system, a moon, active tectonic plates, chemical composition, and an axis tilt. The same sort of factors discussed by Gribbin.
Update (April 4, 2014): The Cassini spacecraft has confirmed the presence of liquid water between the rocky core and the surface ice of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Update (August 20, 2014): A complete ecosystem of microbes is discovered under the Antarctic ice sheet.
Update (August 27, 2014): Caleb Scharf, author of The Copernicus Complex, points out that just because an improbable series of events lead to humans on Earth doesn't mean there aren't other paths that could lead to similar outcomes on other planets.
Update (January 5, 2015): A study by Coryn Bailer-Jones of The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy identifies a second dwarf star called Hip 86505 that could reach the edge of the solar system within one-quarter to half million years.
Update (March 18, 2015): A study projects that billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy have one to three planets in their habitable zones.
Update (April 25, 2015): A survey of 100,000 nearby galaxies lead by The Pennsylvania State University concluded that there were no signs of advanced civilizations. At least according to our assumptions about how advanced civilizations would collect energy.
Update (July 23, 2015): NASA announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet so far. Kepler-452b is 1400 light-years away, is 60 percent larger is diameter, and orbits a similar star to our Sun within that star's habitable zone.
Update (October 23, 2015): Is it possible that most potentially Earth-like planets haven't been formed yet?
Update (January 22, 2016): A paper by Aditya Chopra and Charley Lineweaver from the Australian National University hypothesizes that life on most planets goes extinct very quickly. Early life forms need to evolve fast enough to be able to regulate the planet's temperature. Lineweaver:
The mystery of why we haven’t yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces.
Update (May 1, 2016): A paper by Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modifies the Drake equation and places a lower bound on the probability that humans are unique in the Universe. They argue that other technological civilizations are likely to have evolved before us, but are also probably extinct.
Update (August 2, 2016): Low mass stars are much more common and a hypothesis suggests that if they can support life, it may be too early for sentient organisms to have evolved.
Update (July 16, 2017): If there were no earthquakes, life would not be possible. Earthquakes are caused by circulating magma. The iron in moving magma generates a magnetic field. The magnetic field protects the atmosphere from being blown away by solar wind. Atmospheric pressure prevents the oceans from boiling away. Also, fault lines where earthquakes occur are areas where resources are brought to the surface. Mineral rich soil and water made civilization possible.
Update (February 18, 2019): Joe Scott discusses the Rare Earth Hypothesis.
Update (October 14, 2019): In an interview with Keith Spencer, Erik Asphaug discusses the possibility that life on Earth would not exist without the moon.
Update (December 23, 2020): A radio signal from Proxima Centauri was detected in the spring of 2019.
The researchers studying the wave emission have not yet been able to identify any Earthly origin, whether a satellite in orbit or something on the ground. As a result, scientists at the Breakthrough Listen project — an organization based at the University of California, Berkeley that searches for radio signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms in the universe — believe that the radio signal could originate from extraterrestrial intelligent life.
