Humans are generally good, when given an opportunity to be.  I have no evidence to this only my experience but I have seen people from all walks of life do nice things in extreme situations.

Humans are generally good when they have a full stomach, clothes on their back and a roof over their head. Have you ever observed a few million people in sheer desperation? Were you in Argentina in 2001?

People, in times of severe crisis, behave entirely different than they do in times of plenty. One does not have to be a psychologist to figure this out. All one must do is study history.

Ron Patterson
 

So you are assured of famine in the future?  I have observed people act all sorts of ways under all sorts of conditions and I am saying that if someone has to they will steal the coins of a dead mans eyes but if they can they'll buy you a cup of coffee.  Believing either scenario is not "blind faith" it is a conclusion based on past observations.

Blind faith is thinking we will overcome X via technology that hasn't been invented because we must.  

I am saying this is not a blind faith scenario, thats all.

"I am saying that if someone has to they will steal the coins of a dead mans eyes but if they can they'll buy you a cup of coffee."

ORM,

This is exactly what is happening right now in Iraq. BUsh is killing Iraqis so Halliburton and friends can steal their oil and then slosh the money they make around the private accounts of their friends. =)

A new study shows that the stress of overcrowding and lack of resources trigger primitive parts of the brain in mammals that activate aggression and lots of bad stuff.  Our genes are not optimal for the present situation.

Will post article if I am able to find it again.

A new study shows that the stress of overcrowding and lack of resources trigger primitive parts of the brain in mammals that activate aggression and lots of bad stuff.  Our genes are not optimal for the present situation.

However I came accross this interesting article;

General Adaption Syndrome
(cf. Selye, 1974)

Evolutionary safeguards are triggered in social species when populations grow exponentially and stress levels rise. This results in a predictable spectrum of physiological and behavioural responses that invariably reduce the population's fertility below replacement level. The Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye in 1936 named these responses the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), and many other studies have corroborated Selye's findings. A GAS decline typically appears well before famine and disease begin to cull the population, and its hormonal `fingerprint' often persists in wild mouse populations long after the population has shrunk to preplague levels and the habitat has recovered. GAS has led to the local extinction of a species in some instances.

Why should this concern us? There are four reasons:

  1. There is no evidence that we are fundamentally distinct from other species. We too are shaped, driven and manipulated, both directly and indirectly, by our DNA, and no basic distinction has ever been detected in the biological fabric of our bodies --or in our behavioural drives.

  2. The graph of our population growth for most of the past century was exponential and precisely mirrored that of any mammal entering what we call a plague phase.

  3. All plagues end in similar fashion, with a population collapse that mirrors their exponential growth. Such an abrupt termination is essential to the evolutionary process. If it did not occur, `successful' species could proliferate indefinitely, endangering the existence of all life on Earth. This does not happen.

  4. It follows that evolution's auto-collapse mechanism must therefore reside in the evolutionary process itself and persist via genetic replication. I would argue that this safeguard is essentially expressed via Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome. I would further argue that our species now displays most of the GAS symptoms and has already begun its GAS decline. And most significantly, many of our fertility inhibitors are associated with either a surfeit or dearth of hydrogen.

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Link Punctuation Marks!!

that graph sucks.  I want to live long enough to see the newly unpopulated earth.
that graph sucks.  I want to live long enough to see the newly unpopulated earth.

Odds are you wouldn't if die-off proceeded too fast.  But don't be glum.  If you're young enough you'll probably get to witness the last stomach wrenching gyrations of a whole planet-wide species in overshoot (complete with its own version of the "undulating plateau") before you're done down here, if that graph plays out.  
Isn't that an HL for people?
Isn't that an HL for people?

Yes. This should not be a surprise that the above graph follows a bell-shaped curve as apparently Hubbert adapted the basis for his model from ones pre-exisiting and proved in the life sciences.
But didn't we say yesterday that HL couldn't be used for renewable resources, such as ethanol?

I do realize that it would be a completely separate calculation than the orginal HL for oil (and probably far more complex), but not wrong as such.

But didn't we say yesterday that HL couldn't be used for renewable resources, such as ethanol?
I do realize that it would be a completely separate calculation than the orginal HL for oil (and probably far more complex), but not wrong as such.

But is any resource in the end truly renewable?  And even if it could be argued otherwise are not animal populations ultimately constrained by Liebig's law of the minimum?  I think this is what this graph is implying.  In our case one could argue that oil "is" that scarcest resource.  
And even if it could be argued otherwise are not animal populations ultimately constrained by Liebig's law of the minimum?

Sorry, animal populations should just read populations.
Thanks. I'll look into this a bit more and may have further questions. Will also study up on the "Father of the Fertilizer Industry".