The title is a portion of the title of a new article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind.
In this paper, the authors relate the earth to a battery, that was slowly charged over billions of years as plants turned solar energy into chemical energy. Along we came and, over the last 12000 years, burned this chemical energy releasing the waste heat to space.
In this sobering paper, the authors calculate how much energy is left in the battery. As they indicate, the fact that we are using an unsustainable amount of energy is clear; what this new paper provides is:
Our synthesisdiffers from most of these treatments in two
respects: (i) it introduces the paradigm of the
earth‐space battery to provide a new perspective,
and (ii) it emphasizes the critical importance
of living biomass for global sustainability
of both the biosphere and human civilization.
They then create a sustainability metric, Omega. Omega is equal to the total amount of energy stored in living biomass, divided by the amount of energy needed to feed the human population for 1 year - in other words, how many years of food we have left. They calculated this number for the year 2000 to be 1029, and this number has been decreasing by roughly 200/decade since the 1970s.