Earth's Vulnerable Biosphere

"Once the shift occurs, there'll be no going back.  [A shift or tipping point is] speculation at this point, but it's one of those things where you say: 'Hey, maybe we better find out', because if it's true, it's pretty serious."  Arne Mooers, Simon Fraser University

A report that researchers finalized and which was published in the journal Nature states in a summation: "Humans now dominate Earth, changing it in ways that threaten its ability to sustain us and other species."  And, as the lead author, Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrated biology at the University of California, Berkley, states: "It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point."

Should that scientific speculation come to fruition, in other words, it could very well be catastrophic, claiming that "a state shift" might very well be mere decades away from occurring.  Of course, well-meaning and reputable scientists have often enough in the past given dire warnings of dreadful occurrences sitting on the cusp of disaster for humankind as related to the condition of our Planet.

We're still here.  The warnings did not, in the end, result in a "state shift" that was calamitous in its effect, from warnings about population density and the Earth's inability to feed all those people, to warnings many decades ago about what was termed "the Greenhouse Effect", that never quite materialized.  Unless one might wish to claim it simply metamorphosed into Climate Warming.

A conference that took place in 2010 questioned whether human activity could potentially set off a "state shift".  The questions were there but the answers were tantalizingly elusive.  Twenty-two biologists, ecologists, theoreticians, geologists and paleontologists took up that challenge, to eventually produce the report published in Nature.  They reviewed past "state shifts", the most recent of which represented the last Ice Age.

The report claims that the world's climate is on a warming trajectory that is occurring so swiftly that mean global temperature by 2070 (or a few decades before) will be higher than it has been since the evolution of humankind, according to their scrutiny of records and educated scientific hypotheses as a result of putting all those wise heads together in consultation.

In support of the world's present population of seven billion, roughly 43% of the Globe's land surface has been turned over to agricultural or urban use.  By 2045 the world's population is expected to rise to nine billion; current trends, they say, suggest that fully half of Earth's land surface will be altered by humans by 2025.

Which is "disturbingly close" to a possible global tipping point.  Hence the "state shift".  Can the Earth tolerate that shift?  Can we?

Professor Mooers hopes they are proven wrong.  "It would be great if the naysayers were right, I wouldn't have to worry", he said, as one of the report's co-authors.  "But there is no evidence to suggest they are right.  The evidence is the opposite."

Unpalatable food for thought.