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Originally Posted by Tradesonred
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Im not over-panicking, people dont get how serious this is. When conservative groups like NASA claims we might wipe civilization out by 2050, people should listen.
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Wow, thanks for proving my point about junk science being believed by panicked people who then base their views on that. A cursory examination (< 5 minutes) of your claim turns up a few key facts you have wrong.
First, NASA didn't make the claim. University researchers who had a grant from NASA made the claim. The primary author is a PhD candidate for this field of study (though he does have a PhD in math, so he should get some credit).
Second, to make this prediction, they use a very simple model. Now, one could debate whether any model could ever be complex enough to accurately predict something as complex as human civilization. I won't start that debate, since nobody in their right mind would think this model is complex enough to achieve that goal.
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HANDY is a 4-variable thought-experiment model for interaction of humans and nature.
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Read that again and let it sink in. It's a thought experiment. And it attempts to extrapolate the future of mankind using a whole 4 variables. The authors don't even claim it's a realistic possibility, and reading into the model, it's not even very good for such a simple model. I'd have failed a course if I turned that in as a class project. But some sensationalist reporter read more into this shoddy study than was actually there and went for the click-bait title.
This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about when I said that such a rush to fund any and every environmental science research proposal leads to all of the best ideas being washed out by these shitty ones. In less-funded fields, generally only the better ideas get the funding and so you have higher overall quality.
06-22-2015, 06:15 PM
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