{"id":63501,"date":"2022-09-14T06:30:53","date_gmt":"2022-09-14T11:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63501"},"modified":"2022-09-14T06:30:53","modified_gmt":"2022-09-14T11:30:53","slug":"death-by-hockey-sticks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63501","title":{"rendered":"Death by Hockey Sticks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Death by Hockey Sticks<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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\"hockey<\/a><\/p>\n

Courtesy Pixabay (PhotoMIX-Company)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

You may be familiar with the term \u201chockey stick curve,\u201d used describe a trend that has been flat\/stable for a very long time, but shoots up at the end of the series in dramatic fashion, resembling the shape of a hockey stick. Hockey can be a violent sport, and it\u2019s easy to get hurt by even one well-aimed swing. Today\u2019s world is being battered from all sides by countless hockey sticks. Mostly, they seem to be targeting Earth\u2019s critters, who are getting bludgeoned unsparingly. But in the end, we\u2019re only harming ourselves.<\/p>\n

This post is structured as a gauntlet of hockey stick curves that may leave the reader feeling a bit bruised. Depending on what\u2019s being plotted, many of the graphs shoot up like an exponential, but a few are careening downwards. A theme emerges: the \u201cbads\u201d go up, and the \u201cgoods\u201d go down\u2014and not by coincidence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

People and Money<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019ll start simply. Human population looks like a hockey stick curve. This is not a surprise to anyone. The fact is greeted with a range of reactions from joy to despair, but mostly simple acceptance. Whatever your disposition, here\u2019s what it looks like.<\/p>\n

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Human Population<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

All the plots in this post will share the same time axis, from the year 1000 to 2200\u2014even for those lacking information across the whole span. The point will be to emphasize the anomalous nature of recent history: what I call the fireworks show.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe it would be more fair to use a 10,000 year span (civilization), or 200,000 for modern homo sapiens, or even 3 million years for the entire human saga.\u00a0 On such scales, the present era loses its graceful curve and looks rather more like a sudden brick wall.<\/p>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Death by Hockey Sticks Courtesy Pixabay (PhotoMIX-Company) You may be familiar with the term \u201chockey stick curve,\u201d used describe a trend that has been flat\/stable for a very long time, but shoots up at the end of the series in dramatic fashion, resembling the shape of a hockey stick. Hockey can be a violent sport, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4],"tags":[9128,286,391,33155,31103],"class_list":["post-63501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-do-the-math","tag-exponential-growth","tag-growth","tag-hockey-stick-curve","tag-tom-murphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63502,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63501\/revisions\/63502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}