Jon Foley: You sometimes encounter these cliffs where you push the system a little too far, and things would just tip over and fall. So these boundaries were meant to be defining where the cliff was.
Jon Foley is director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. He’s talking about a 2009 paper he co-authored with an interdisciplinary team of scientists in the journal Nature. The paper introduced the concept of “planetary boundaries” as a way of measuring human impact on the environment.
Jon Foley: Where we define the boundaries are where we will cross and become something so different than we’ve seen for past 10,000 years. And that’s the time of all human history.
In other words, Foley is trying to define an upper limit to human activity on the planet, after which irreversible global damage might occur. He and his team believe boundaries have already been crossed in three major areas: climate change, biodiversity loss, and impact on the nitrogen cycle – that’s a cycle connected to soil, and pollution from agriculture. Foley said there’s no quick fix.
Jon Foley: If you lose a whole ecosystem or a complex part of a food web, how do you put it back again? How do you fix it?
Not all scientists agree with Foley’s concept, or with how and where the boundaries should be defined. Foley said the purpose is to think about how humans will adjust to large-scale environmental changes. Earth’s systems function in unpredictable ways, says Foley, and it’s hard to know exactly where the “cliffs,” or tipping points are.
Jon Foley: We worry about this with biodiversity. If we lose one more species, another species, how many can you lose before all those webs of relationships fall apart, and the system collapses?
He said that people are used to thinking of environmental damages, such as oil spills, which can be cleaned up or fixed. The effects of crossing planetary boundaries are in a different league, Foley said.
Jon Foley: What happens generally is you cross a boundary where things get a lot worse a lot faster, and they are mostly irreversible damages. If you lose a whole ecosystem or a complex part of a food web, how do you put it back again, how do you fix it?
Still, he said, there is time before we see the impacts.
Jon Foley: Sometimes people expect the environmental apocalypse, and it’s not going to happen like that. It’s going to be slow, steady deterioration, punctuated by some very big changes once in a while.
To put this in context, Foley said that for the past 10,000 years – the period known as the Holocene – humans have existed with a relatively stable climate, supply of food and water, along with many of the species we know today.
Jon Foley: So that’s everything we know as a civilization – every scrap of human history occurred during this one little period of the Earth’s record.
He said crossing these boundaries will change the world as we know it.
Planetary Boundaries was published as a Nature feature on September 23, 2009.
I guess he didn’t get the memo that it is a scam.
10,000 years may be the time of written human history, but it is definitely not all of human history. Human DNA shows a bottleneck around 75,000 years ago. That corresponds with the eruption of a mega-volcano in what is now Indonesia. Not caused by burning of hydrocarbon fuels by evil capitalists by the way.
Humans have not enjoyed a stable climate for the last 10,000 years either. The little ice age was a cooling during the recovery from the last major glaciation.
There is NO evidence to support the “fact” that humans have had any measurable effect on the earth’s climate and certainly no evidence that anything we are doing is going to cause any calamity in the climate or environment.
prior to the holocene there were vast meadows and lakes in the african sahara, and miles thick glaciers in much of north america for hundreds of thousands of years, so i would say, yes, the last 12,000 years has been relatively stable–save the two hundred or so cooler years of your \’little ice age\’.
Also, 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. Fact. Nothing to do with human activity.
This whole thing is a scam designed to ruin capitalism and destroy western civilization. An added benefit will be to transfer wealth from its rightful owners (thiose who earned and built it) to the ruling class of communists.
I don’t believe that human beings has nothing to do with these environmental systems,such as the climate pattern,ecological structure,and more.some people may admit that human should have absolute control over the nature,but the nature in itself decides all that we never expected.I trust my beliefs in Dr.Foley£¬and refuse all political matters ,which can only be barriers to our way to sustain the whole globe!
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Does he not know that 90% of the last 1 million years was ice age? That climate change is more a result of the drift back to ice age? The holocene climate optimum (warmest period) of this interglacial ended thousands of years ago and we are cooling back. Nitrogen is not a problem, it makes up most of our environment. Nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor make up 99% of our atmosphere. Soot is the only thing that has any impact at all. Put the smoke through a water bath trap. How hard is that?
Deutz does it on their permissible diesel engines, last I looked. He should spend some quality time at ICECAP US, the International Climate & Environmental Change Assessment Project and maybe he will know a bit about what he’s talking about. We’ve got much bigger things ahead with the Sun not acting right and being on the brink of a Malankovitch Cycle reducing our solar radiation. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/06/long-debate-ended-over-cause-demise-of-ice-ages-solar-and-earth-wobble/#more-9788
The Sun defines our climate.
Does he not know that 90% of the last 1 million years was ice age? That climate change is more a result of the drift back to ice age? The holocene climate optimum (warmest period) of this interglacial ended thousands of years ago and we are cooling back. Nitrogen is not a problem, it makes up most of our environment. Nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor make up 99% of our atmosphere. Soot is the only thing that has any impact at all. Put the smoke through a water bath trap. How hard is that?
Deutz does it on their permissible diesel engines, last I looked. He should spend some quality time at ICECAP US, the International Climate & Environmental Change Assessment Project and maybe he will know a bit about what he\’s talking about. We\’ve got much bigger things ahead with the Sun not acting right and being on the brink of a Malankovitch Cycle reducing our solar radiation. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/06/long-debate-ended-over-cause-demise-of-ice-ages-solar-and-earth-wobble/#more-9788
The Sun defines our climate.
An excellent and well balanced interview with Dr. Foley. It is debatable where the line gets crossed with respect to the pressures human kind place on the various systems for the reason Dr. Foley states – \”Earth’s systems function in unpredictable ways.\” But the debate isn\’t if the line can be crossed but rather where, when, and under what scenarios.
Dr. Foley, if I may make one request, focus on attracting more interest (and funding) to research on the affects of pollution, habitat loss, introduction of foreign species, and the like on ecosystems. Likewise on practical ways to address the impact. Resist selling short such important work to jump on the global warming band wagon. Thanks.