232 comments on DrumBeat: September 24, 2006
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232 comments on DrumBeat: September 24, 2006
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How much human life can planet Earth sustain?
I suppose someone enterprising could adjust the proposed 10 billion fed cereal grains by some offset to represent biofuel incursion.
Anyhwo, there's this corrolary to Malthus: at what quality of life? Do you really want to live in a 200-sq.ft. apartment and eat triticale gruel and never travel further than you can walk for your entire life?
You can count me as a disciple of John Michael Greer. Well, except for the druid thing ...
I agree totally. I actually think a plateau at "China everywhere" is a scarier scenario than an explicit crash.
So much for your "moderate" views, "China life" is worse than billions of deaths!
Poor dear!
Have solace, there may be room for you in "China everywhere".
You obviously missed the link from step back two days ago.
I went to the beach today with my nephew, and then we went for a hike through the park and over the river, finally playing frisbee on a green lawn.
I'd like that to be possible 10 generations from now.
My guess is that we are going to muddle along from one crisis to another ... wars, famines, floods, storms, droughts ... the human population only declining slowly over a century or two and taking most everything else with it. By the time the decline is over the earth will no longer have the topsoil to support much land based life at all. It'll be like Easter Island.
I just think people are a little too clever to participate in the fast crash. They'll be looking for ways to hang on, to burn that last tree, eat their dogs and cats, cook bush meat over a camp fire...
When it comes to the question of "How many people can the planet support?", the answer is a lot more complex than just resource availability and equitable distribution. The "Limits to Growth" authors have made careers out of examining this question, and I'm happy to defer to their conclusion. They maintain that we are in a 25% overshoot situation. That means that when considered from a systems perspective, the planet can support about 5 billion of us. However, given that the underlying resource base is already eroded the decline will undershoot below that number and will stabilize at a somewhat lower level.
My opinion is that they are optimistic, and that the carrying capacity in the presence of an intact resource base is realistically about 4 billion, meaning that we are in a 35% overshoot right now. This leads to a post-correction steady-state population prediction of around 3 billion.
There are still some possible replacements though. They aren't where I'd count them as done deals, but neither are they to where I can write them off, and lock into a future without them.
Versus :
I went to the beach today with my nephew, and then we went for a hike through the park and over the river, finally playing frisbee on a green lawn.
I'd like that to be possible 10 generations from now.
Doesn't matter if you are contradicting yourself in the very same responses thread as long as you can defend "business as usual until technology saves us".
Hey, jerk!
The only person who can say new breakthroughs over the next century will "not" help us is the one who knows them all.
Do you?
WELL SAID!
The only person who can say new breakthroughs over the next century WILL help us is the one who knows them all.
Do you?
Plus, these "breakthroughs" better show up in no more than one or two decades, NOT "the next century".
What is the Plan B in case no "technological miracle" happens?
Some readers here at TOD may not appreciate that there is a world of difference between coming up with a "technological breakthrough" and getting that breakthrough recognized, implemented, and implemented to sufficient scale to make a difference.
Assuming some scientist does come up with a breakthrough. There are so many scientists vying for attention that the one breakthrough may get drowned out in the noise.
And even if some people do take notice, do they have sufficient capital resources to make it happen and then to make it happen to scale? None of that is a given.
So we better have some Plans B, C and D. Even the success of a Plan B is not a given. Remember Murphy's Law. Things can go wrong. All of them at once!
Trying to "outdoom" me?
There are so many scientists vying for attention that the one breakthrough may get drowned out in the noise.
A very serious risk which is not acknowledged by many...
A lack of imagination about the potential uses of real breakthroughs whereas "Star Trek science" has a huge following.
Are you pretending something else?
Yes I do : "I don't think it is moral to deny anyone growth."
I support powerdown now.
Powerdown WITH growth, anything goes to stick with "business as usual".
Idiocy or mendacity?
It's not likely idiocy...
I don't count "chickens before they're hatched."
Yeah! Not counting, only saying there might be plenty of chickens.
Are you pretending something else?
I am "pretending" that you are a TPTB sponsored bastard.
I don't deny anyone growth, but I argue for better forms of growth.
I argue for better paths to happiness:
http://odograph.com/?s=happiness
If you look, you will also find the TOD posts where I suggested that GDP is not the best measure of happiness, or growth.
Of course, if you forget all that, you can pretend something else.
As a reduction in our energy supplies comes closer, energy prices will go up. This will encourage people to do more with less. I expect that the world may produce less steel, less large cars, less manufactered foods, and transport less low value junk around the world.
But that doesn't have to lead to an economic slowdown.
If everyone is fed and cared for, drilling oil on the beaches, or chopping down the last forests, might have a detrimental effect on happiness (esp. that of future generations), while still boosting GDP.
I break with the CATO, libertarain, end of this, when they argue for ever-higher GDPs as a path to ever-higher happiness.
I don't know, maybe some are angry with me here because I don't want to set myself up as emperor and "deny" anyone what I think is a bad choice (chasing diminishing returns on a hedonic treadmill). They're angry because I just suggest something else to think about.
http://odograph.com/?p=373
You're dreaming in technicolor. We reached 4 billion in the early 1970's (and 3 billion 10 years prior) when there were still ample resources available after a century of exponential growth in both the use of those resources and in population numbers. The water was clean, the seas were full of fish, the 'green revolution food explosion' was just starting to kick in, and the true weight on the ecosystem of pollution was evident only to dedicated researchers.
Now, we have water scarcity, food scarcity, resource scarcity, energy scarcity, more pollution than anyone today is aware of (that ignorance has remained kind of constant), and a climate that is fast moving towards a 'state' that is hostile to our species and many others. All these issues will become worse in the near future, and there's nothing left that we can do about that.
How will we set all this straight in order to maintain 4 billion people?
In the early 1800's, 200 years ago, we reached 1 billion. That is a lot more realistic, but even that is questionable.
Did we mention extreme unpredictable climate conditions, ultra-resistant insects and microbes, unfit obese people, coastal plains becoming uninhabitable, no more snow-driven glaciers and rivers coming down mountains, collapsing food-chains missing several links, human education systems that completely overlook basic skills, etc etc.
Carrying capacity and overshoot are serious terms. Don't joke around with them, think them over.
That said, my objection to these broad measure ("in the early 1800's, 200 years ago, we reached 1 billion"), is that they average across areas with very different population densities.
In the early 1800's, those wonderful crops from the fertile cresent had not spread to every corner of the world. A south America with those crops has a very different density potential than one with.
Heck, "in the early 1800's" north America barely had exposure to those crops.
Predicting a level of post-crash population is a mug's game. Whether it's one billion or three, it still involves a lot of death and misery. The important point to get across to people is that we are already in overshoot and a correction of some magnitude is inevitable. I went to hear Kunstler speak on Friday, and he showed us all these lovely drawings of post-crash villages and cities, all with obviously low population densities. He then showed some illustrations of 1800's era soldiers, and mobs and people lying on the ground injured and dying, and he talked about the "troubles" that lie between here and there. He never once mentioned overshoot or die-off, but the message came through loud and clear.
I think predicting a post-crash population of 3 billion still allows me to keep my doomer card, no?
Talk about disaster porn ...
I have read the "30 Year update" and from what I remember from their likely scenarios, they predict:
- worst case: about 75% fallback
- best case: standard of living as about now with 8 Billion people (assuming best case energy transition and use of technology)
Don't pin me on the exact details as I would have to open the book again, but it seems that in between these 2 there is a lot of room for personal opinion.Steven
We are ruled by those who demand unlimited growth. The negative effects of that growth are fine with them because they profit from it and because they are wealthy enough to buy their own open spaces. And, further, they want to invade what public space we have left with their developments, off road vehicles, and snowmobiles. For them, where there is no noise and no crowds, there is no progress.
The history of environmentalism has really been about making the case to the center. When they could do that, they won. A long list of environmental regulations are the result.
Unfortunately we've got some real bad guys at the Federal level now, who will play that "it's only wacko environmentalists" card hard every time. And for the last few years, people have been believing them.
But no, I don't think most people put growth before all else. When they are forced to choose, they'll protect nature.
Laughs, I just got back from a 5 mile hike this afternoon. You do know that in the "Olden days, long before the American experince" people walked the globe, sailed the globe and rode animals over all the globe, without cars or oil?
I know that is likely not what you meant, but Life is never going to be simple and it never really was even though we can sit at home and never leave our home and still see the Thai shore, and our Bar-b-que from the farm next door delivered.
I see my dad who never really has been over weight and I see myself, who is even though I did hike 5 miles, living in differant worlds. Yet the americans in general are seen as fat, dumb, and happy by everyone else, including ourselfs.
I have to question your question-- i.e. define "Earth". Do you assume the benign conditions that have prevailed for the last 12,000 yrs or so? The world that we generally take for granted in such calculations?
Well, I would argue that's dishonest even now, when enough evidence has accumulated that that a climate future at all like the past is definitely not in the cards. The last two or three years have shown a marked acceleration and global warming is outpacing the computer models...
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20060922183723322
Remember, for instance -- there about a 10% decrease in grain yeilds for every 1 degree C rise in planetary temperature. That can add up very quickly.
but yes it does add up.
There's some variation as I understand it. Lester Brown, for instance, uses the 10% figure:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006.htm
He doesn't a cite source here, but I believe that number is based on the work of an organization that monitors rice yeilds. Can remember the name, but it's called Rice something.
I wonder if 6% isn't converted to Farenheit.
I recommend the below as a well-researched summary of what is possible in terms of CO2 reduction (using the UK as a test example).
It seems to me the problem with the PO community is the thought that the worst problem is the topping out of oil production. But whereas the evidence for that is mixed (ie the evidence that it is happening now, as opposed to its certain inevitability at some point in the next 1-50 years) the evidence for global warming is irrefutable. And the possible consequences of GW are much worse than we feared: the recent geologic evidence suggests that climate swings violently, in very short periods of time, from one set of outcomes to another. And many of those outcomes would not sustain human life, or at the very least, western civilisation.
If conventional oil tops out, and the solution is more CO2 intensive ways of creating energy (tar sands, heavy oil, gas-to-liquids, coal-to-oil, etc.), then we simply accelerate ourselves past the point of no return.
http://www.amazon.com/Heat-How-Stop-Planet-Burning/dp/0385662211/sr=8-2/qid=1159167608/ref=sr_1_2/10 4-2798541-1751165?ie=UTF8&s=books
Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning (Hardcover)
by George Monbiot (Author)