Earth’s Biosphere

The total population will grow to about eleven billion by 2100. You may wonder, “What causes this population boom?’’. Well, a series of things drive population growth. For example, the lack of education services drives birth rates up often causing misinformed decisions. In the video, The Facts about Population Hans Rosling explains that in underdeveloped countries such as Bangladesh, those who are in extreme poverty are more likely to be illiterate and have more children with higher rates of mortality.

We must break away from preconceived ideas and recognize that not all families in underdeveloped countries are big.

Taslima and Hannan live in Bangladesh and only have two daughters. Taslima encourages parents to have smaller families by offering advice, moral support, and contraceptives. Soon, we can expect more people like Taslima advocating for more informed decisions because of the tipping points that can emerge. A tipping point comprises pushing a system beyond its limits which can lead to changes, holding serious implications for the future of the planet.

We can also expect more people to strive for a better life and attempt to move upward in the economic ladder. Being better off economically entails higher energy consumption and the increased use of technology that contributes to the great threat of climate change. When determining human impacts on earth we cannot disregard the creation of different technologies that become greenhouse gas emitters for our commodity. Some common examples are cars, we use cars to get from one place to another, its efficiency and convenience blind us from the negative effects on the environment.

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Along with the industrial revolution, huge environmental impacts such as increasing water and air pollution became prominent.

In the present, corporations equipped with technology are a huge emitter of greenhouse gases and are continuing the trend. It is important to take these factors into consideration to understand how human activities risk triggering tipping points in our biosphere. We are constantly struggling to make sense of the adverse effects climate change could hold because it is a wicked problem. This means it is such a complex problem making it virtually impossible to solve it without unraveling another problem. In the reading Climate tipping points- too risky to bet against, Timothy Lenton gives examples of how the biosphere can change because of human impacts on earth. To name a few Timothy holds that climate change can lead to a reduction of arctic sea ice, droughts in the Amazon rainforest, and large scale die-offs of coral reefs. By connecting tipping points to climate change and considering it to be a wicked problem we can understand how there are no “silver bullets”. However, there may be an array of smaller diverse approaches called messy solutions or “silver buckshot” that can help derive a solution. The Anthropocene divides geological time relative to major changes in the earth’s biosphere. It suggests that we (people) have changed the earth’s biosphere at a rate, and magnitude that meets or exceeds past geological boundaries. A debate exists over the ‘start date’ of the Anthropocene, I believe that the start date that makes the most sense is the Agricultural revolution because it is something that emerged 5,000 years ago and undeniably is one of the main causes of climate change. The Industrial revolution from (1760-1840) serves as another culmination to the more contemporary time period that we are going through, the Anthropocene.