Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030 738
An anonymous reader writes "A recent report warns that humans are overusing the resources of the planet and will need two Earths by the year 2030. The Living Planet Report tells that the demands on natural resources have doubled in the past 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad for the "organic food" folks... (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, our planet should have been out of easily consumable resources a LONG time ago - but thanks to the Green Revolution [wikipedia.org] of artificial fertilizers and improved farming techniques, scientists like Norman Borlaug have saved more lives than any other group in the history of the world.
The same thing needs to keep happening if we're going to keep increasing our population. We're going to have to convert more sunlight into usable foods, using more than just simple soil in order to keep scaling.
Meanwhile, the "organic food" folks insist that food must be grown using only slightly modified classical techniques, for a variety of reasons from vitamin density (overstated relative to studies, at best), to mystical mumbo jumbo like vibrations and auras. The other argument is that a given technique is sustainable for a given circumstance, or allows for smaller farms - but none of them are sustainable across the populations modern farming techniques functionally do now.
It'll be interesting to see whether populations will continue to curve towards neutral growth on their own, or what decisions people will come to. I certainly hope the Malthusian worldview doesn't come back into dominance.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not refuted - we're adapting, finding ways to both postpone the inevitable, and spread the impact out over time.
You mentioned "peak oil". We are coping by various means, including (but not limited to):
- Processing oil from wells that earlier weren't considered economically viable, but now are with the oil price increase. This directly flattens out the peak.
- Replacing oil-based power plants with other sources.
- Reducing the amount of oil used per engine. Back in the 70s, 12 MPG was pretty much standard. Now you easily get several times that.
- Substitutions. It's not just the Monsanto cartel that causes most gasoline on the US market to be 10% ethanol (and in some countries, E85 with 85% ethanol).
All in all, we cope, but are still running out, and peak oil is still with us. Even the most optimistic figures state that we'll be well down the far side of the peak by 2025, and will have to make even more adjustments to cope.
But cope we will. How painful coping is going to be depends on how much time we spend in denial, and how much do today.
Two Earths (Score:2, Interesting)
How many of these so called experts have been proclaiming doomsday now for the past century.
We won't need two Earths, we have plenty of resources here.
The real problem is the social mechanisms we use to get resources, which is mainly through warfare.
(i.e. Invading countries for their lithium supply for example when there is a well known shortage.)
I mean, Africa is rich in mineral resources, most of it undeveloped. Yet the populations are in disarray.
They are meant to be, kept that way by George Soros and friends at the IMF for good reason.
A developed industrialized stable Africa would mean competition, and they don't want any.
So expect Africa and its people to continue to have all sorts of silly woes, like famines....political instability
until the IMF and George decide otherwise.
The author I think is living in a glass academic bubble and should probably investigate trends and get his feet
wet and pound the pavement a little before stating something so stupid.
I mean, we haven't even touched the ocean floors yet which have vast reserves of volcanic mineral wealth.
Technology is being developed to mine the ocean floor in the next 5-10 years in a big way for example.
Same thing with oil. We were suppose to have peaked in 1970's, now we are discovering oil, huge oceans of the stuff
in the earths crust at 32,000 feet or more....obviously produced by geological processes that dwarf anything
in the middle east.
But it is all the same thing, these oil companies NEED you to believe that oil is scarce otherwise they won't be able to charge 100 dollars a barrel for it.
Same thing with the population explosion B.S. Once you provide people who health care, food and water and a place to stay, the motivational operandi goes from worrying about food for tomorrow, having tons of kids to work the farm or look for food...too education and self improvement. In fact, populations start to contract, not grow.
Japan is going through that right now, so is the USA. Well we would be, but our crooked politicians selective enforce the laws on immigration for WalMart and co.
So the USA would be contracting as well in population, so is Europe.
But the whole thing we need two Earths, is a bunch of crap.
We do need two Earths, mainly I would say for:
1) We need two Earths to flee the tyranny and new dark age that the IMF and George and his friends have planned for humanity.
In the past you could defeat tyranny by discovering a new land, building a free nation, and destroying it.
Now, there is no place to flee which means my prediction is the 21st century is going to see incredible civil wars that are very violent because there is no place to go, and people will be forced to fight the police states the IMF have been setting up around the globe.
2) Disaster, I mean acts of God with a big G kinda thing. Asteroid impact, volcanic disaster, solar disaster. If we are only in one solar system, we could get wiped out pretty easily. (All of our eggs in one basket.)
3) Finally idiots. From scientists who think they know everything that want to start tinkering with our atmosphere to the idiots at Monsanto who are passing laws in Congress that make it illegal to grow your own food. The side affects of genetic science gone mad with Vaccines which go wrong (creating super bugs) and other madness we see with the use of Antibiotics on just about everything and anything. (Stop washing your hands with that anti bacterial soap!!!)
I think my reasons for two Earths have much more basis in historic _fact_ than this guy who claims like lots of others, we are running out of everything.
B.S.
-Hack
Re:Bull (Score:4, Interesting)
What I don't understand is not the future projection, but the PRESENT claim: "Demand is... now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."
If that statement were true, we'd be starving (needing 1.5 earths to survive).
Clearly the fellow has no idea what he's talking about.
Re:And the religions of the world.... (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, "growth" has become something of a religion itself. In public discourse and political debate, no one ever talks about stability; the need to "grow the economy" is taken as a "given", a commandment from on high. If a company's sales are merely stable from one quarter or year to the next, they are considered unsuccessful (or would be if the economy as a whole weren't currently shrinking). If a country's or state's or city's population isn't increasing, that's considered a sign of problems. There will come a day when that trend stops, whether it's in 2030 or probably much later. The only question is whether we'll bring population growth to a "controlled landing" or to a crash.
Re:And the religions of the world.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Did it ever occur to you that most major religions discourage birth control (and especially abortion) because it blocks the production of life - something they esteem to hold in the highest regard? Mind you, I'm only discussing the concept, not the practitioners.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
If that statement were true, we'd be starving (needing 1.5 earths to survive). Clearly the fellow has no idea what he's talking about.
What he means is that we need 1.5 Earths to survive in the long-term.
Think of the Earth like a retirement fund. You can take out more than the interest earned each year, but that means at some point in the future the account will be at zero. In this case, we are doing things like cutting down old-growth forests to make more farmland, overfishing, and doing other things that the Earth cannot replenish or repair on a human time scale. Unfortunately, when the Earth account balance hits zero, losing our home has a much broader meaning than having to move into a nursing home.
Reminds me of... (Score:1, Interesting)
...an online survey I took on a "planet-friendly" website. They had a form with questions like "How often do you shower / how much garbage do you throw away / how many miles do you drive." When I entered everything in honestly, I was given a number that was supposed to describe how much of the earth's resources I was using (wasting), and that I need to cut back.
So I tried filling it out from scratch again, only I responded with 0 to every question...basically I could not have filled it out the way I did unless I existed in a cave, or not at all. In the end, I still got a positive number and a report that told me I need to cut back on how much of the earth's resources I used.
Complete bunk.
Re:Then what? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's actually easy to do nowadays - a new car no longer means a 2mpg V-8 weighing in at 2 tons of steel. If you look at Japan, you see a population that makes do with a whole hell of a lot less than the typical wealthy family in, say, Eastern Europe. The trick is to bring up the affluence by generating a demand for efficient goods.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
What Carter was discussing was resources in the USA
[citation needed]
Those talks on peak oil production for 1970 were based on M. King Hubbert's theory for the US lower 48 states. With respect to the lower 48 states, he was accurate: http://dieoff.org/page1916.gif [dieoff.org]
Funny, I could have sworn that the US still has the worlds largest supply of oil shale. Plus oil sand. Plus coal. Plus plenty of offshore oil, and oil in Alaska. I guess "peak oil" to you just means "we have less than we used to"?
With the US as a net importer and a dwindling supply of domestic oil I'm not sure where you're going with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves [wikipedia.org]
The United States #1 source of oil is Canada. That oil comes from traditional wells that are drying up and more recently oil sands that are expanding production. However, the oil sands are far from a recent discovery. They have been well known since oil became a commodity but were left untouched because it is incredibly expensive to recover.
That fact that companies are paying big bucks to develop oil repositories that are expensive only proves that they're running out of traditional oil... and they're heading into the tail end of the curve.
- If you need to burn half the equivalent energy in natural gas to extract the oil from the sand as you recover in oil energy... ...then something is wrong.
OR
- If you need to drill offshore in water so deep it becomes a risk...
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
While technology might very well "save us" once again, it's a bit audacious to assume that it always will in the future. Civilizations have fallen before, and all of them could probably have argued in a similar way before the end: It has worked fine up until now, so why shouldn't it continue to?
I actually think energy is one of the easier problems to solve -- solar cells will drop in price as demand increases and technology advances, and the sun provides orders of magnitude more power than we have use for at the moment. But if you look at almost any other natural resource, demands are increasing at an exponential rate. Since resources are limited, it is impossible for this to continue for very long. I have no doubt that society will adapt, the question is how disruptive the changes will be. At the moment, it appears that some prominent economies think that even reducing oil consumption is out of the question due to the economical effects it would have.
Yeah we need a second Earth to export the STUPID! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Demographics will tell the tale (Score:3, Interesting)
"Nuclear power is proliferating, but even that will not compensate for increases in conventional pollution of cars and electrical generation"
And the fact that it's not renewable. Sure there's plenty uranium left, but the concentrations at which you will find it in rock is dropping considerably, because we go for the easiest to get stuff first.
"They will continue to lose their competitiveness to the US, South America, China"
Perhaps. The other option is that because we look after our people better, we don't need so many of them to remain competative. I mean you have to look at why our population's dropping: educated females are prefering to have careers rather than just spit out children. This means we can achieve a higher % of our population that's available for work.
"Just for a laugh, I suppose you would claim that Iraq was not a resource war?"
In 1914 when we (Britain) first went in, it was certainly about resources. The most recent time, saying it was about resources is a little harder to justify. We already had their resources, we made sure it was the only thing Sadam could trade with the rest of the world. We weren't profiting from those resources as much as if they were owned by private American companies, sure, but that's about money. There is also of course the major threat of Sadam switching his O4F account from US dollars to Euros, citing "I will not use the currency of my enemy". This was the biggest threat of all, as if other OPEC nations followed suit and switched to other currencies, the USD would be in big trouble. Currently, America has a monopoly on producing the currency required to buy oil, and this helps them run up massive debts. An example needed to be set, because if people around the world all started flushing their dollars in order to buy whatever other currency they needed for oil... the federal government couldn't last a week. So again, this is more about money than oil, although it's easier to see the involvement of oil and just yell "it's about oil", I don't think it really serves the truth well.
All that and of course, Israel really wanted the war, and we all know how massive their lobby powers are in the states (but I'll say no more on that subject cuz we all know how sensitive Americans are on the subject)
wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Technology has not progressed a whole lot this generation and its currently not moving at the exponential rate the population is.
Projections are limited (can't predict the future) and hindsight is easy to be smug about. If everybody was to live the American way, we ran out of earths long ago. If everybody lived the EU way, we'd be 3x over the limit.
You blow this off; thinking somehow new tech will save us-- we'll buy it and then TRASH it and newer tech will save the day... The cycle doesn't go on forever.
Its how you decide to measure things that impacts the results so much. You may not realize we are overpopulated already but a billion people in severe poverty around the world notice it (but may not understand why and just would like to be you... but there are only so many slots available at the top end... yeah yeah, we have enough to feed everybody but its a COST and distribution problem - give them all jobs... doing what? all the livable jobs are filled...)
Peak OIL: already hit it - if you think it amounts to output then you are grabbing the wrong stat. We can produce oil from shale at higher rates of output than ever before... if we wanted. The problem is that CHEAP to produce OIL has peaked and will never be any cheaper (barring the foolish trading games or government subsidies which only can go so far.)
Peak Copper - coming in a decade or two. Copper will still be around but it'll cost more-- recycling it costs more.
The system is designed around continual growth and there IS A LIMIT technology or not.
Solution is not very attractive, but doomed to (Score:2, Interesting)
happen: Cut down the population of the earth down to, say, 5-10% of the 6 billion people living today. Earth will be able to sustain human life for almost indefinately, in human terms at least. Nature and wildlife may even flourish again with population growth in check.
With population growth following an exponential line, the crash will happen sooner than later, as it does with ALL species on earth.. No, it most probably won't happen by our free choice.. War, famine, natural disasters is our heritage to our children, but hardly new events anyways. This has happened many times before. However, we DONT need to go down with a crash.
We don't NEED cars, holidays abroad, junk food, and lots of other stuff that destroys the environment. Yeah, now it's kinda cool, but we've lost our heritage, we're like orphans, rootless and directionless.
We don't sing, unless in a drunken stupor in a bad karaoke bar.
We don't dance, unless high on some kind of drug.
We don't relax, unless passified in front of the stare-box serving propaganda and lies.
I could go on and on. All of this are just "common" sense facts, but as long as we're immersed in life as it is now, we are unable to see how much better our lives would be without artificial foods, unnecessary junk gadgets and non-challenging lives.
Our best bet would be to start improving our lives now, and it might make it more interesting as well, instead of watching the 10.000th movie, with a plot similar to 100 other movies you've seen.
The rest of the post is left as an exercise to the sincere reader.
Changes will happen, with or without us..
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is what Peak X specifically refers to: An inexorable decline in production & major increase in prices that results as initial easily accessible supplies are depleted.
Re:Bull (Score:4, Interesting)
You're still not using the term correctly. As mentioned by others, "peak oil" concerns the point of maximum production (extraction) of oil. That is, when the rate at which we pull oil from the ground begins to decline.
What you're talking about is "oil depletion", i.e. where the physical supply of oil gets low.
These two conditions might be linked by circumstances, but they don't mean the same thing, obviously.
Re:Shameless self promotion (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't have a distribution or a resource problem, we have a starvation problem.
Distribution results in starvation. There is plenty of food in the world, it just is not distributed properly.
When I've gone on humanitarian aid trips to Haiti, Sudan, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and a half-dozen other shitholes around the world, the issue hasn't been one of getting supplies and food IN to the country, and getting it there in sufficient quantities. The issue has been making sure it goes to those who need it, rather than those who desire it.
For most of the starving world, food is a weapon used by the local thug/"political leader" to wield against the people and enforce their will. Most of the time, the ONLY reason food and medicine was properly dispensed and rationed and CONSUMED was because of those firearms carried by the soldiers around us.
You want to know how to solve the starvation problem? Use an assault rifle in the hands of a trained soldier and kill the scum who choose to enforce starvation for their own sociopathic, twisted pleasure or gain. A bullet to the head of a few dozen scum would quickly change the way most of those thugs operate and at least food supplies would get through.
Yes, that's not politically correct, and I guess many would call it uncivilized. But most of those thugs and cretins care not for Western reasoning or compassion. They get the food, drink, money and women as they want, without repercussion.
Why should the want to give up power and control - to make the West feel happy? Heck no! They WANT pictures of starving orphans, of emaciated women on the TV because they know - they KNOW - that we in West will spend billions of dollars to send food and drugs and equipment to "solve the problem". And they can sit back and take it for their own pleasure and use and power.
You either write the people off - ignore the suffering - or you simply execute the bastards in charge. There is no other solution.
It's not starvation - there is plenty of food. It's distribution. From thugs stealing food shipments to countries erecting insane barriers to the import/export of food. Distribution - not production - is the problem.
old growth (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya know, I hear this all the time, yet I have never heard of any sort of viable actual real alternative for the people living in these areas. They need jobs, any sort of income. Old growth is that, old, needs to be harvested, but oh noes, can't use any exotic old growth jungle hardwoods because....people with jobs in the developed nations say so. Can't have more farmland because...no idea, people need to eat, it has to be grown. Ya, maybe it isn't the best land, but *it is the land they have*, it is what they have to use. They have no other choices. They burn their woods down because they aren't allowed to sell the timber in the first place! Of course they would rather sell it, but it is "embargoed" and such like. They have to do something, so the woods there, the old growth forests, "accidentally" burns down instead of being harvested and used to build good furniture and lumber for homes, etc. So then they grow cattle and corn and soybeans for cattle, because they need "exports", usually to pay off rich as snot western bankers/IMF folks
Catch 22 squared.
This is what I hear as an option for hundreds of millions of very poor people, they will all exist on "eco tourism", because they shouldn't be allowed to do anything else, like logging, farming, mining, etc. "eco tourism" is supposed to support hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet. Everything else is bad for the environment, and is unsustainable, so they should just suck it up and sit under the dripping trees all day for a living.
They pull this crap in the western US every sumer, can't log, can't build roads, but it is OK to let all that resource burn up in massive millions of acres of forest fires instead. Same people cause that, misguided eco nazis who don't really understand nature and economics, they just can't see how much harm THEY cause by insisting on looney tunes policies guaranteed to keep poor people poor, and guaranteed to WASTE resources.
How quaint. Wait, how do those eco tourists get there to go visit the pristine old ready to croak trees? Oh ya, fly there in smog spewing jets...how double quaint. Then they go home and sit in air conditioned offices and luxury homes and urban apartments and pontificate about how all those poor people need to "stop destroying their environment". They can't even see that where they live and how they live is about as un-natural as it gets and about as energy intensive and resource exploiting as it gets, yet they dis and dump on the poorest for trying to make an honest living *somehow*.
Re:Misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
What the heck does this have to do with wrestling and costumes? I guess I need to keep up with the WWF better.
Re:Bull (Score:3, Interesting)
I agreed with you until you used the word "require". A free-market does not require a strictly-outside force to enforce internalization of externality costs, at least in theory.
Example: An externality of oil-discovery are accidents in the Gulf Coast, which result in billions of dollars in damages. If there is sufficient demand-side desire not to have such accidents occur, then suppliers will go to sufficient lengths to prevent them from happening, however desirable they may be for the purpose of profitability.
Now, of course, in practice you have vast information asymmetries (who outside of the supplier's management and engineering staff are aware of the firm's operational effectiveness & safety?), which such firms are happy to exploit (as BP did). And you have vast dry-gulches of long-term thinking; relatively-few people truly care enough about where their oil comes-from to care enough to check on firms' operational effectiveness, *even if* the transparency existed to do so. (I may be overly-pessimistic on this point though -- after all, how many people waste countless hours following each other's dinner plans on Twitter??)
In practice, you're right, and I fully agree with you; careful regulations can force externality internalization. The real trouble, then, is getting politicians to craft such legislation. The reality, unfortunately, is that their heads are up their asses and are corrupt beyond any possibility of usefulness. There are (many) days when I think we would be better-off with less regulation, and in its place, a vastly-expanded set of demand-side reporting/watchdog services (like Consumer Reports), as well as a cultural rejigger in which people return to voicing demand-side power, in the form of strikes, boycotts, and the like. (Of course, the problem with this libertarian idea is the cultural shift. That can't seriously happen until failures arise even more-catastrophic than the financial near-collapse of 2008, and even then, we're more-likely to go in the opposite direction anyway, towards more regulation...)
A fuel tax (Pigouvian tax) seems to me one of the most-sensible taxes, *assuming* (and with politicians, this is an enormous assumption) the taxed money is spent 100% on things that accelerates our adoption of renewable energy sources (wind, solar, tidal electricity, electric cars, etc.). Cap-and-trade never ought to have died in U.S. Congress. But, the trouble with real-world politics is that all of these sensible ideas that moderate economists create is that government cannot implement them unless:
1) voters become sensible (and regarding that likelihood, read Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter")
2) you institute a non-democratic government, in which supposedly-wise technocrats make decisions without a care for what the rest of the public wants. For an historical example, see Soviet Russia, or for a less-extreme example, modern-day Singapore.
In the end, nobody and nothing works. Those of us under the age of 60 are pretty much all fucked -- by the threat of economic collapse, by global warming, by the threat of nuclear terrorism (or mere human error in the presence of nuclear weapons), by resource misuse and/or misallocation, and, so long as we are alive in the developed world, by the growth and modernization of the 1/3 of the world's populace that has heretofore lived in squalor (India and China) that feeds those population's acceptance of worsening work environments arising out of increased competition due to increased populations in the markets served -- regardless of whether we have a free-market or socialist or thoroughly-mixed economy, and regardless of whether we have a democratically-elected government.
Re:Bull (Score:2, Interesting)
You can't possibly be criticizing "dependence on a market". You have completely failed to understand it.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone who sees the writing on the wall to experience any pain whatsoever. The people who "see the supply shock far enough in advance" serve an important market function, as "speculators". And in a functional market, these people can save, reduce their own consumption, stock up on limited resources instead, and earn huge profits in reward. They also can earn huge losses if they bet wrong.
The hilarious irony of your and the GP posts is that we have already seen drastic supply shocks in the oil markets. The last one, in 2008, did bring almost every single economy to it's knees. Oil tripled in price in the span of a few years. It caused double-digit inflation in the US. People who couldn't afford to heat their giant homes or gas up their giant SUVs completely depleted the money markets in just a few months and destroyed the banks that had lent them money for such stupid 'investments' in the first place.
But was that just a test? Prices have gone down. The world isn't out of oil yet. If it was a test, the US failed it.
What did our leaders do? Instead of thanking speculators for ensuring that we had any oil at all, they trotted out tired old collectivist anti-market bullshit, attacked speculators, subsidized failed banks, nationalized 95% of the mortgages in the US, robbed from savers and destroyed assets in an attempt at African-engineering the global economy in order to encourage not more savings, not conservation, not an inkling of responsibility or even more production, but more idiotic consumption that will be paid for by future generations.
Re:Bull (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bull (Score:1, Interesting)
United States oil production is deceptive, and it's rather meaningless to look at a chart of our production and say the US has hit peak oil.
The US made a deliberate decision, ironically enough, to rely on foreign production to fulfill our ordinary requirements. The idea being to preserve the supply of easily accessible domestic oil to keep our tanks rolling if the Soviets came through the Fulda Gap. Though the Soviets may be gone, that posture hasn't actually changed.
Take US domestic figures with a grain of weltpolitik.
Re:Noo! (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, the Banach-Tarski paradox [wikipedia.org] you're referring to uses 3D Euclidean space [wikipedia.org] instead of the curved Minkowski spacetime [wikipedia.org] of General Relativity. I'm certain the Lebesque measure [wikipedia.org] (the key ingredient to Banach-Tarski, along with the Axiom of Choice [wikipedia.org]) can be extended to that spacetime, and I'm pretty sure it can be used to generate the same type of paradox. That might actually have interesting physical consequences for the theory, which, incidentally, would be entirely avoided by quantizing [wikipedia.org] it. Considering how much most mathematicians like the Axiom of Choice, this could be a great (mathematician's) argument against GR and for Quantum.
Objects that can only be specified using the Axiom of Choice involve an infinite number of arbitrary choices. This means they have infinite Kolmogorov complexity (i.e. it's impossible to write a finite computer program that outputs a representation of the object).
That doesn't really square well with my (limited) understanding of physics where infinities are always tucked away behind event horizons and every interesting quantity is strictly bounded.
Of course, throwing out the Axiom of Choice also throws out Lebesgue integrals which you need for modern physics. My answer to that is that maybe the integrals work because they're just an approximation for very fine grained sums. (Discrete math major here. Analysis can suck it!)
Re:Noo! (Score:2, Interesting)
throwing out the Axiom of Choice also throws out Lebesgue integrals which you need for modern physics
Throwing out AC doesn't destroy Lebesgue integrals entirely. Taking countable choice should suffice, at the least, which is somewhat better and should break Banach-Tarski. (Take this with a grain of salt, though--I haven't carefully verified these statements.)
I agree about infinite numbers of choices being very fishy from a computational perspective. At least theoretically, a quantum state in Hilbert space should have countably many degrees of freedom (each a real number), so God should be able to encode infinitely large objects in them. I question if it's possible to manipulate such a thing into an arbitrary state--it'd probably take countably many operations, which would probably take infinite time. Of course, something similar can be said of the usual Cartesian model of position--you should be able to encode countably many digits into a real number, if you're God, at least :).
Re:Bull (Score:1, Interesting)
The biproduct that the grandparent mentions isn't waste heat - it's the carbon dioxide. The reduced rate of heat being expelled is due to the extra absorbtion of heat on the way out by the additional carbon dioxide (the "greenhouse" effect). Nothing to do with the heat produced by burning.
Re:Bull (Score:3, Interesting)
Partially. I have friends who have an autistic child.
Among the more successful therapies were horse training and changing her diet.
Re:Noo! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, no, no. Lebesgue integrals aren't *needed* for modern physics, they're just convenient. There are alternatives like the Kurzweil-Henstock integral that can replace Lebesgue with extra properties. All the usual integrals are actually very fine grained sums, they just cut up the space in different ways.
What makes Lebesgue useful is the fact that the L_p spaces are complete (so that physicists can actually have a Hilbert space to work in. The Riemann integral won't work for that). However, the fundamental theorem of calculus doesn't hold everywhere for the Lebesgue integral, only almost everywhere, which is why people still look for alternatives.
The other major reason why Lebesgue is commonly used is that it is an important special case of abstract (sigma finite) measure theory, which is needed for lots of things, like probability and stochastic processes, Feynman path integrals, group representations, spectral theory, etc.