Here is a close-up, again from the Settling Space presentation. It shows a number of other variables in addition to population, normalized to the values they had in 1970. Normalization, you may recall, is a way of comparing data that have different units, as a fraction of what they were with the same value of some related variable (such as time).

Note in particular the world population projection, which is based on the "business as usual" scenario in the book Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. That book is by famous "Club of Rome" authors who did the first systems analysis of humanity's resource consumption in the 1970s, showing that we are limiting our own future by excess consumption. In many respects, my own work on the subject has been an attempt to test that idea, albeit in a much more simplistic way.

Also shown is a projection of the Living Planet Index (LPI), a measure of the populations of other species which I'll discuss later. The LPI has changed in its definition since the data used in this graph, but this clearly illustrates the quite significant negative impact we have had on the rest of the biosphere.

 

 

 

© Copyright 2011 Bradley Jarvis. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2011 Bradley Jarvis. All rights reserved.

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