Dr.

Zeqir Veselaj

Today is Earth Overshoot Day (Earth Overshoot Day) for the year 2022, that is, the day when the limit of consumption by humanity of what the Earth ecosystem produces for a year is exceeded.

From today and for the next five months, humanity uses natural resources from next year.

And this is happening every year: we are exceeding the carrying limits of the planet.

Until when, we don't even know.

In the simplest sense, a limit is "a line or point where something ends or the maximum allowed amount of something".

Webster's dictionary defines limit as "the greatest amount, number, or level of something that is either possible or permitted."

Even the joke that makes us laugh when it crosses the line turns into a problem.

The best food, when it exceeds the limit of consumption, causes problems for the organism.

Only the border separates the sound of Mozart from annoying noise.

When a country's border is touched, war begins.

But humanity is not protecting many of the planetary boundaries that, according to Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Environmental Institute, have already been seriously breached.

Population growth limit

In 1798, the British economist Thomas Malthus anonymously published the first edition "An Essay on the Principle of Population" with wide resonance.

Malthus argued that population growth will occur by geometric progression, while means of living will only increase by arithmetic progression.

According to Malthus, the population grows faster than the food supply available for its needs.

Whenever there is a relative increase in food production over population growth, a higher rate of population growth is stimulated.

Over time, population growth will outpace agricultural production growth, while it will decline due to food shortages.

The mathematical basis of this theory is the principle that "the population grows with geometric progression: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., and on the other hand,

the production of resources increases with arithmetic progression: 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.

Malthus concluded that

Population will always grow to the limit of subsistence.

Only factors such as: "vice majors" (wars, natural disasters), "misery" (hunger, lack of food and diseases) and "moral restraints" (abstinence from marriages, birth control) can control this growth.

Two centuries ago the world's population was only one billion, while this year it "touches" the figure of 8 billion people and is growing very fast.

Malthus's theory, known as fatalistic and much criticized, gained supporters.

It has often been used as an argument against efforts to improve the condition of the poor.

During the 20th century, environmentalists used Malthusian theory to emphasize that the Earth cannot support more people than a certain limit and that resources will run out if population growth is not brought under control.

One of the best-known examples of neo-Malthusian thought is the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" report, written by a team of MIT experts.

The "invisible" limit of carbon dioxide

The Swedish Nobelist Svante Arrhenius was the first to propose in 1896 that there is a relationship between the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and the earth's temperature.

Arrhenius determined the contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect.

It demonstrated how changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations have contributed to long-term climate change.

Contrary to some misconceptions, Arrhenius did not explicitly suggest, in this paper, that the burning of fossils will cause global warming, although it is clear that he is aware that fossils are a potentially important source of CO2.

He discovered that the average temperature of the earth's surface is about 15oC, due to the infrared absorption ability of water vapor and CO2.

This is called the natural greenhouse effect, without which the Earth's average temperature would be -18oC.

Three years later, the American geologist Thomas Chamberlin further developed the idea that climate change could result from changes in the concentration of atmospheric CO2.

Chamberlin's work on glaciers led him to question prevailing notions of a gradually cooling earth, making him an important precursor to the global warming debate.

He identified that "according to the cycle of formation, growth and retreat of glaciers in that world, the Earth was warming instead of cooling".

To find an explanation, Chamberlin researched climate change by focusing on changing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

A cautionary article on the effect of coal burning and CO2 emissions was published in Popular Mechanics magazine by Francis Molena in 1912. For the first time, figures were used linking coal burning to CO2 emissions and temperature rise, noting that "furnaces of the world are burning about 2 billion tons of coal per year.

When this coal is burned, the carbon combines with oxygen and releases 7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

This will make the air a more effective blanket for the Earth and increase its temperature.

The effect may be visible after a few centuries."

Arrhenius and Chamberlin calculated that human activities could warm the Earth by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, while Molena with concrete figures predicted effects within a few centuries.

After their discoveries, the subject was almost forgotten for nearly a century, when the link of CO2 to global warming was addressed by the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1996. So Molena's effects were seen in less than a century.

Growth limits

A book that truly "changes" people's thinking about the world is rare.

In the 19th century, one such book was "On the Origin of Species" by Darwin, which shed light on the path and basic principles followed by the evolution of the living world.

In the 20th century, the book "The Limits of Growth" dealt with a different dimension to Darwin's, namely the threats to life on our planet.

A 1972 bestseller that helped fuel the environmental movement, the book showed that "the dynamics of the modern industrial world are ecologically unsustainable in the time span of a few human generations."

The book actually made no predictions, but offered 12 scenarios that could unfold on Earth between 1972 and 2100, based on whether or not humanity accepted the ecological dangers and took appropriate action.

The first scenario was based on "business as usual", without any intervention and predicted serious ecological crises at the beginning of the XXI century.

The second scenario allowed for technological advances that could double man's access to natural resources, a scenario that also brings crisis, but several decades later.

The other ten scenarios assessed the effects of interventions, individual and combined, including: recycling, pollution control, land restoration, population stabilization, limiting economic growth, and extending the life of industrial assets by eliminating planned obsolescence.

Some of these interventions were hardly thought of then and none have been achieved on the global scale proposed.

As a result, we now find ourselves facing ecological crises: global warming, dying coral reefs, collapsing biodiversity, dead lakes, polluted waterways, toxic chemicals in our bodies, supply chain disruptions from natural resources. depleted and a global pandemic, itself exacerbated by human overcrowding and shrinking wildlife habitats.

Lead author Donella Meadows, displaying scientific 'naivety', expected a different reaction from humanity, as, as she put it, 'when you tell people they have a disaster ahead, they will change direction.

If you give them a choice between a good future and a bad one, they will choose the good one.

They are even expected to be grateful.

Naive this approach, isn't it?"

When the book was published, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were 325ppm (parts per million) and the warning was that without intervention, concentrations could reach 380ppm by the year 2000. By 2022 the concentration has reached close to 420ppm or 50% above 1750 levels. .This is the highest concentration in about 4 million years, and is increasing at a rate of about 3 ppm per year.

The authors warned that this rise would have severe ecological costs in many dimensions.

Since 1972, the human population has doubled and resource consumption has tripled.

The gap between the rich and the poor is widening every day, the global temperature has risen by over a degree, while the sea level has risen 10-20 cm since 1900. About 75% of the global ocean fishing stock is exploited to the limit or beyond capacity.

These are symptoms of a world in excess, where "humanity is using the Earth's resources faster than they can be renewed, and is producing CO2 waste faster than it can absorb them".

Unfortunately for humanity, none of the book's warnings have been invalidated 50 years after publication.

Dennis Meadows says the point of the book then was whether we could slow things down before we hit the limit.

Scientists like Malthus, Arrhenius, Chamberlin and thousands of others are not "Nostradamus" to make warnings with ambiguous verses.

Their warnings are concrete figures, which are being proven in the consequences very quickly from the alarm.

Other consequences remain to be seen in the not too distant future.

Even in Kosovo.