Report from 2050: Too Many Mouths to Feed

Scientists warn current food crisis will worsen as human population growth rate officially outpaces world food output

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

JANUARY 3, 2050 (New York) -- Over forty years ago, in a 2009 interview with 13.7 Billion Years, executive director of the Living Oceans Foundation Capt. Philip G. Renaud said, "We’re really stressing the Earth’s natural resources due to population explosion...This is one of the most difficult issues we humans must come to grips with...If population continues to expand unchecked, we'll be facing food and water shortages and we'll quickly deplete our world’s natural resources."

The following year, in his book "The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It," Professor Julian Cribb wrote, "The world has ignored the ominous constellation of factors that now make feeding humanity sustainably our most pressing task -- even in times of economic and climatic crisis."

Now that the numbers are in, it is clear that humans did not come to grips with that issue back then. In 2010, the world human population was 6.9 billion. Today, with the population surpassing the 9.3 billion mark according to a new study released the U.S. Census Bureau, the demand for food and energy has jumped 50 percent and the demand for fresh water by 40 percent.

Central Africa faces another famine. Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay have been ravaged by near-constant food riots. China has placed a moratorium on food exports. Warlords across Central Asia exert power primarily by controlling regional water supplies.

In real terms, the world population growth rate has now officially outpaced the current global growth in food production and fresh water availability rates: There are simply too many mouths to feed.

"We have reached the apex of the perfect storm," said Professor Ignatius J. Reilly of the Institute of Climate Change Adaptation. "Unchecked human population growth has led to a list of worldwide crises -- the food crisis, the water crisis, the temperature crisis, the sea level rise, ocean acidification, desertification and the rapid loss of once-healthy ecosystems. Also, the spread of human habitat over the past several decades has put the final nails in the coffin of the Sixth Extinction."

Noting the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identification of human population growth as a "consistent contributor to growth in worldwide greenhouse gas," a Worldwatch Institute report released in 2010 argued that "assuring all women have access to contraception and taking steps to improve women's lives should be among key strategies in the fight against global climate change."

"Population is associated with sensitive issues like sexuality, contraception, abortion, migration and religion," wrote Worldwatch Vice President for Programs Robert Engelman, the report's author. "But increasing women's reproductive rights should be at the heart of the climate discussion, in the same basket as strategies like increasing energy efficiency and researching new technologies."

Though efforts like the Center for Biological Diversity's "Endangered Species Condom" Program (which distributes 350,000 free condoms annually in the United States), have expanded around the world, there simply hasn't been enough political or popular will to deal with the ills associated with human overpopulation, especially from the point of reproductive rights and contraception.

And when it comes to climate change, there has been a grand imbalance: The poor world is now paying for the past and current excesses of the rich world -- while having many more hungry mouths to feed.

"The dots have been there all along," said Professor Reilly. "But the rich world never really cared to connect them, as that would have revealed the cognitive dissonance that has marked the average Western-based consumerist lifestyle since the end of World War II. No one in the rich world wanted to change their behavior, and now the poor world is paying the heftier price."

image: world population from 1950 to 2050 (credit: U.S. Census Bureau International Database)

Report from 2050: Vertical Farming Takes Off in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi becomes first major city to get most of its produce from vertical farms

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

JANUARY 5, 2050 (New York) -- Over half-a-century ago, in 1999, American ecologist Dickson Despommier, at the time a professor of public health in environmental health sciences at Columbia University, developed the concept of "vertical farming" with graduate students in a medical ecology class.

In 2010, he published "The Vertical Farm," an agri-eco-adaptation text that explored the possibility of farming in skyscrapers as a sustainable urban agriculture solution. The book is now required reading in "verti-agriculture" classes around the world.

That year, Smithsonian Magazine reported that "urban farms are seen as an antidote to industrialized agriculture’s excesses, including chemical fertilizers that pollute waterways and the high costs, both monetary and environmental, of transporting food to urban markets."

In the past four decades since, the human population has grown by almost two-and-a-half billion, reaching 9.3 billion people -- with 80% living in urban areas.

And now, Abu Dhabi is feeding the majority of its population with food grown in local vertical farms. According to a new study of the world's vertical farms by the Baffin Island-based Institute of Climate Change Adaptation (ICCA), the capital of the United Arab Emirates is the first city that can make this claim.

"The Abu Dhabi model is proof that vertical farming is not only possible on a grand scale, but necessary," said Professor Arkady Voronov of the ICCA, in an email. He also noted that since 2010, Abu Dhabi has lost approximately 445 square miles (1,155 square kilometers) of its coast due to the rise in sea level.

"As the rising sea continues to claim vast tracts of shoreline around the world and people migrate to urban centers, growing food vertically in cities will be a key part to any successful solution to the global food crisis," Voronov said. "The world is undergoing a large-scale loss of arable land due to the effects of climate change, desertification and human development -- and that is not likely to change anytime soon."

In the foreword to "The Vertical Farm," New York-based environmental justice activist Majora Carter wrote, "If the skyscraper farm is like a 747 jetliner, we are now at the stage of the Wright Brothers."

If Carter's prediction (and metaphor) holds, then the 747 of vertical farming is just a little over a few decades away. In the meantime, the residents of Abu Dhabi are currently reaping the benefits of a sustainable meal aboard something akin to a 1949 de Havilland DH 106 Comet.

image: Composite image showing vertical farm designs by Chris Jacobs, Gordon Graff and SOA ARCHITECTES (Wikipedia)

Report from 2050: San Francisco's Dead Zone

Pacific salmon is one of many native San Francisco Bay estuary species declared extinct

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

JANUARY 6, 2050 (San Francisco) -- Almost four decades ago, in 2011, the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit conservation network Endangered Species Coalition (ESC) published the report "It's Getting Hot Out There," which outlined the ten most threatened ecosystems in the United States at the time.

Now a new study by the San Francisco-based non-profit conservation group Bay Delta Wildlife Alliance (BDWA) has found that one of them, the San Francisco Bay and Delta ecosystem -- a complex system of rivers, inland and coastal estuaries and riparian habitats located at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers -- is finally succumbing to the effects of anthropogenic climate change as well as various man-made stressors such as habitat encroachment, eutrophication and water redirection.

The health of this ecosystem is so degraded that scientists have little hope for its recovery. In 2011, 12 of the original 29 native delta species were declared either extinct or endangered. Today, all but one are extinct or endangered, according to the BDWA report.

The most difficult factor to combat -- the rise in temperature -- has warmed the waters of the Bay-Delta to such a degree that cool-water fish such as the Pacific salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and delta smelt simply cannot survive there any longer. Their populations are now extinct.

Though there have been many efforts to save these species over the past few decades -- including a ten-year fishing moratorium established in 2045 that has criminalized the catching, selling and buying of these food fish -- it has been a classic case of too little, too late.

"The combination of climate change, unchecked human activity and decades of rampant overfishing to satisfy consumer demand for these species has led directly to their ultimate demise," said BDWA executive director Harry Callahan. "The sad story of the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem should be a warning to residents of other sensitive and critical regions around the world."

The report also declared extinct Swainson’s Hawk, California least tern, California black rail and clapper rail, Smith's blue butterfly, salt marsh harvest mouse, northwestern pond turtle, tiger salamander, tidewater goby, California freshwater shrimp and several vernal pool species.

The other threatened ecosystems that were listed in the 2011 ESC report include: Arctic sea ice, shallow water coral reefs, Hawaiian Islands, southwest deserts, California Sierra Mountains, Snake River Basin, Greater Yellowstone, Gulf Coast and the Greater Everglades.

"Climate change is no longer a distant threat on the horizon, it has arrived and is threatening ecosystems that we all depend upon, and our endangered species are particularly vulnerable," said ESC executive director Leda Huta at the time the report was released. "If we are serious about saving endangered species from global warming, then these are the places to start."

Now, as many of these fragile ecosystems and species are gone or teetering on the edge, it is becoming quite clear that we weren't really serious after all.

image: Male and female Sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) (credit: Dave Menke)

Report from 2050: Cloudy Skies Frustrate Stargazers

Most ground-based telescopes declared "worthless"

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

JANUARY 7, 2050 (Kagawa, Japan) -- Over forty years ago, in 2006, science correspondent Paul Rincon of the BBC News reported that telescopes might be worthless in 2050, due to an increase in aircraft exhaust pollution and climate change.

"Climate change is...expected to increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere through evaporation, contributing to overall cloudiness," Rincon wrote. "The increase in cloud cover would affect both optical and infrared astronomy, which would have to be carried out from space."

"You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy," said astronomer Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University in the article. "You can't do both."

Well, suffice it to say, at least we still have trips to Majorca, though they're not all that cheap.

"It is already clear that the lifetime of large ground-based telescopes is finite and is set by global warming," Gilmore said. "There are two factors. Climate change is increasing the amount of cloud cover globally. The second factor is cheap air travel.

According to a 2009 article in the Guardian, the UK advisory committee on climate change warned that "without steps to stop growth in aviation emissions, planes could account for as much as a fifth of all CO2 produced worldwide by 2050."

That prediction was close -- currently, aircraft contribute a sixth of man-made global carbon emissions. One reason that the emission percentage isn't higher is the fact that air travel today is actually more expensive than Professor Gilmore estimated.

In 2030, member states of the United Nations agreed to an international mandate that airlines must pay for their carbon emissions. As a result, air ticket prices worldwide have doubled, forcing down the total number of commercial flights.

But even though this scheme has been in place for 20 years, aircraft pollution has still contributed greatly to the opacity of the sky. To make matters worse, cloud feedback -- increased atmospheric warming from clouds trapping more surface heat -- is responsible for a significant portion of global warming during the last 50 years.

"It's a vicious cycle, warmer temperatures mean clouds trap more heat, which in turn leads to even more warming," said atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University, in a 2010 ScienceDaily article.

There are few places on Earth that are not affected by increased cloud cover and air pollution, and astronomers have been relocating to two of them -- the poles.

"We are in the process of moving our telescope to the Arctic Circle to take advantage of clearer skies because it is virtually useless where we are now," said Professor Kimiyo Hoshi of the Large Photonic Telescope in Kagawa, Japan. "But I don't know if we'll be able to afford the airfare to get it there."

It seems that the future of ground-based astronomy is as murky as the world's skies.

image: Albert Einstein and the staff of Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, Wisconsin, in front of a 40-inch refractor telescope (credit: Yerkes Observatory)

Report from 2050: Goodbye Adélies

Though they could have been saved, Antarctica's Adélie penguins have finally succumbed to global warming

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

JANUARY 12, 2050 (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) -- In his 2010 book Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica, Fen Montaigne wrote, "After flourishing for thousands of years in the harshest environment on earth, the Adélies in one part of Antarctica have encountered an obstacle they seem unable to overcome: Us."

Montaigne spent five months tracking penguins through the breeding season on the northwestern Antarctica Peninsula with biologist Bill Fraser, who spent his life studying Adélie penguins, one of the very few species to live and breed exclusively in Antarctica.

"Thanks largely to our emissions of greenhouse gases, the western Antarctica Peninsula has warmed faster than virtually any place on the planet, rendering sea ice-dependent Adélies in some areas unfit to live in an ecosystem where all forms of ice, on land and in the Southern Ocean, are in retreat," Montaigne wrote.

"Fraser attests that much has changed since he first arrived in the polar region in 1975," wrote Rick Roche in a Booklist review.

"Temperatures are up, the area’s glaciers have receded, and the ice shelf covering the nearby Weddell Sea has shrunk considerably. Krill that used to thrive under the blue ice are now harder for Adélie penguins to find. Receding ice has also allowed more predatory seals into the area. Sadly, Fraser has watched numerous penguin colonies established over 500 years ago disappear. In this sympathetic firsthand report, Montaigne describes the lives of both the researchers who brave the harsh weather and the penguins whose habitat is quickly becoming inhospitable to their reproduction. Montaigne’s compelling account is a clear and impassioned call for environmental action before the consequences of global warming turn catastrophic worldwide."

The call for action wasn't heeded, and now the Adélie penguins have been declared extinct. But this is not the end of the sad story of ecological disaster that has befallen the continent, an ongoing degradation that is a direct result of human activity. There are other species that are still there -- but on the brink. Seabirds and fish that call Antarctica home may no longer have a home to go to if warming trends continue. The melting sea ice is disappearing fast.

"Antarctica’s most pressing issue is its environment and how best to protect it," asserts Lonely Planet. "The major impacts on the Antarctic environment are caused by people who have never even visited it. Climate change and ozone depletion are prime examples of the way human activity elsewhere affects Antarctica. But studies have also found that lead particles from gasoline combustion are blown to Antarctica as soon as one month after they leave exhaust pipes in South America, Australia and New Zealand, and pesticide residue has been found both in seabird guano and in penguin tissues. Plastic and other rubbish washes up on Antarctica’s beaches in ever-increasing amounts."

"Human activity in the Antarctic is also having negative impacts. Longline fishing for Patagonian toothfish has been a twofold environmental disaster. Toothfish are caught in enormous and unsustainable numbers, with much of the catch illegal, and albatrosses in their thousands are also caught on the steel hooks, dragged down hundreds of meters and drowned -- an ignoble end for such magnificent fliers."

"The Adélies are gone, but there are still species that can possibly be spared from the effects of anthropogenic climate change and other destructive human activities, such as tourism and fishing," said Professor Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen of the Institute of Climate Change Adaptation, via email.

"I would like to think that the extinction of the Adélie penguins will at the very least provide a wake-up call," von Bellingshausen said. "But considering how humans have reacted to similar calls to action over the past 50 or 60 years, I'm not holding my breath. With regard to endangered species here and around the world, humans have generally been a huge disappointment."

image: Samuel Blanc, Wikimedia Commons

Report from 2050: Livestock Production Breaks Safe Threshold

Rainforests and thousands of species wiped out as human demand for animal flesh finally exceeds Earth's limits

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

JANUARY 19, 2050 (Brussels) -- Four decades ago, in 2010, a study concluded that the projected global demand for meat, poultry, eggs and dairy could be responsible for 70 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, reaching a level considered to be a safe threshold for the planet.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by Nathan Pelletier with Peter Tyedmers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They said that livestock could generate an even greater proportion of the sustainable threshold for other environmental indicators.

The researchers looked at current and future projections of levels of greenhouse gas emissions, biomass consumption and nitrogen emissions, and compared them to estimates of the Earth's safe limits.

"We're not suggesting that everyone in the world become vegan or vegetarian," said Pelletier, in a DiscoveryNews article. "We really stress the importance of policies aimed at production and consumption over time by changing not just how much we eat, but what we eat and how frequently we eat it."

Today, that "safe limit" has finally been breached, according to a new report released by the Brussels-based Institute of Planetary Change (IPC). "The increase in livestock production to feed the Earth's 9.3 billion humans has officially pushed the levels of greenhouse gas emissions and biomass consumption into the red zone," said IPC director Ty Thorn.

"With most rainforests destroyed to support livestock farming, there is simply no sink big enough to contain even a fraction of today's man-made carbon emissions," said Thorn. "The loss of untold numbers of species, while devastating, is currently the least of our problems. There are just too many mouths to feed, and the global food crisis is going to grow." Thorn is leading an international team of scientists to develop projections of when we will hit the Earth Sustainability Threshold (EST), what he calls the "final point of no return."

"We are in essence eating the world's tropical rainforests and savannas," said University of Minnesota ecology professor David Tilman, in a 2010 DailyClimate.org article. But, he adds, "There is no reason for even one more acre of rainforest to be cut. If we farmed them properly, the lands that have already been cleared could fully meet global food demand for at least the next 50 years," he said.

"Too bad no one listened to the warnings of scientists in the early part of the century," Thorn said. "Now it's only going get worse. We must prepare for the great human die-off."

image: PETA

Report from 2050: Epilogue - Why This Century Is Special

And you thought the 20th century was rough

[Note: This was originally published on 13.7 Billion Years as part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, based on current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.]

by Reynard Loki, 13.7 Billion Years

It is often said that the real beginning of the process now known as "anthropogenic climate change" was the Industrial Revolution. No longer were things done by human sweat and draft animals. Machines did the dirty work. And boy was it dirty.

Burning the decomposed remains of prehistoric animals and plants in the form of coal, petroleum and natural gas, we pumped out so much global-warming carbon dioxide that the planet's natural carbon cycle couldn't absorb it all. But back then, no one knew. Steam engines and internal combustion engines created the modern world -- and it was wonderful. Or was it?

With all that creation came the rather rapid destruction of the Earth's terrestrial environment and its atmosphere, making life difficult -- and in many cases, impossible -- for countless species whose habitats were destroyed by the advancement of the industrialized human civilization. And by increasing the planet's surface temperature through the emission of greenhouse gases, we have endangered our own habitat.

This past month, 13.7 Billion Years touched upon a host of predictions about the year 2050 -- from the extinction of a Peruvian tribe to the rise of the cyclist, from crop failures affecting the World Cup in Nepal to gardening on Mars -- but the one that really sticks out (and is related to the others) is the unchecked growth of the human population, which is expected to hit a staggering 9.3 billion in four decades. To put that number in perspective, there were less than 3 billion people on the planet in 1960. It's very simple math but a very scary proposition. The rate of human population growth is simply not sustainable.

But there is "one firm forecast that's important," as cosmologist and Royal Society president Martin Rees wrote in a 2009 article in The Guardian: "A widening gulf between what science enables us to do, and what applications it's prudent or ethical to pursue."

And there you have it, the crux of the modern human condition. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

We can take all the fish out of the oceans, cut down all the rainforests, use plastic bags and drink bottled water. We can experiment on, wear and eat other species. We can use pesticides and antibacterial soap and products tested on animals. We can eat out of season by buying food that comes from thousands of miles away. We can drive big cars and live in big homes. But even a cursory assessment of the rational or moral basis for doing these things clearly shows that we really shouldn't be doing any of it. These behaviors are unnecessary. And all of them have grave consequences.

"Our sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it's got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out," Rees writes. "Any creatures who witness the sun's demise, here on Earth or far beyond, won't be human. They will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug. But even in this 'concertinaed' timeline -- extending millions of centuries into the future, as well as into the past -- this century is special. It's the first in our planet's history where one species -- ours -- has Earth's future in its hands, and could jeopardise not only itself, but life's immense potential."

Indeed, we are the first species to have changed the Earth's environment and atmosphere. That is no small feat. And as a result, the 21st century will likely see a tipping point, a culmination of centuries of human civilization. Without enough food to feed the human population, with rainforests cut down to make room for livestock, with higher surface temperatures and a rising sea from melting glaciers and polar ice caps, it is going to go from bad to worse in a very short period of time.

A 1999 Cornell University study found that without "democratically determined population-control practices and sound resource-management policies...12 billion miserable humans will suffer a difficult life on Earth by the year 2100."

Most of us won't be around for that. But make no mistake -- the decisions that we make today will most certainly affect those who will.