On another note: from your plethora of Drumbeat keylinks today, I notice the problems in Africa seem to be spreading and cascading blowbacks. From a quick eyeball of the just-updated 2007 info from the CIA Factbook [Life expectancy at birth (years) by country]:
It is easy to see that this continent's people have their lives foreshortened by 20-30 years compared to much of the rest of the planet. Angola, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe appear to be the worst off.
In response to the long Drumbeat yesterday: if most of your people are dead by their thirties--technology doesn't even have a chance to get rolling, much less hoping to advance it to solve our PO & GW problems.
Assuming the CIA is still around in ten years of postPeak decline & ELM: it will be interesting to see if this rank table has gotten better or worse:
This entry contains the average number of years to be lived by a group of people born in the same year, if mortality at each age remains constant in the future. The entry includes total population as well as the male and female components. Life expectancy at birth is also a measure of overall quality of life in a country and summarizes the mortality at all ages. It can also be thought of as indicating the potential return on investment in human capital and is necessary for the calculation of various actuarial measures.
-----------------------------------------
If technocornucopia is successful, these numbers should all be much improved in ten years time. My SWAG is that they will be worse. Time will tell.
Lifespans have really increased in the last century. I look at historical land and probate records, and in the US the average lifespan was about 50 a hundred years ago. If you'll look at paleolithic lifespans from archeological sites, I think you'll find that most people lived to about 40. In other words, modern technology has doubled human lifespans through nutrition and medicine. You can see that reflected in region of total collapse anarchy like the Congo.
Another way to think about it: What other animal in a natural state outlives its breeding life?
Actually, the lifespan didn't really get an increase so much as we made a huge impact on Childhood diseases.
Take a look at the life expectancy of someone 50 years old in 1900. It was about 70ish. BUT the life expectancy of a newborn was only 40-50ish.
In 1900 if you made it to 40 or 50 you could expect to live to almost the same age we do now.
We didn't really extend how LONG someone could live, We just increased the number of people reaching adulthood(ie getting rid of whooping cough, and other childhood diseases).
True, although the life expectancy of someone 50 years old today (in a developed nation) would surely be well over 80, so there has been some improvement at the upper end.
Thanks to a lot of expensive geriactric drugs, pace-makers, etc., modern hospitilization and nursing home intervention. This postponement of death isn't getting any cheaper and won't prevail much longer in a declining petroleum regime.
From a purely population point of view, medicine is almost irrelevant (of course, on a personal level you may need medical intervention to survive). The greatest boon to health in our society is clean water, sewerage, food, etc.
If you are considering a downslope in living conditions, then basic hygene and sustenance are your key factors to staying healthy. Childhood and adult diseases killed enormous numbers of people in western countries (1 in 1000 and more per year for some of them) through till the late 1800s/early 1900s, thanks in large part to sewerage systems that were completed in major cities.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
This (childhood mortality) is in line with research I've seen.
Also the introduction of antibiotics has made a dent.
In recent decades the adoption of foods which have no history of safe consumption (highly processed, GMO, less and less vitamins minerals, high-fructose corn syrup, chemical concoctions) and a reduction in exercise are leading to a reduction in lifespan due to so many people being overweight, obese and getting the slew of diseases that come with such a diet/lifestyle (cancer, autoimmune diseases, CHD, diabetes and more). In particular bypass operations and the ilk do not extend the life of people with CHD (chronic heart disease) and so we'll continue to see lifespan decrease as more people (tr)eat their way to heart attacks. Healthy At 100 is an interesting book about people with a history of long life.
Note that infant mortality took an upturn when doctors got involved in births (partially delt with thanks to Louis Pastour) however, infant mortality is lower when midwives, and not MDs attend the birth (read The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth).
The loss of antibiotics in recent history and the breeding of superbugs by feeding our best antibiotics to animals on unimaginable scales will come home to roost.
A loss of travel speed and distance and less people in general will help with this.
The best thing would be to put a stake into the heart of modern meat production and get people onto a mostly vegetarian/vegan diet.
What evidence is there that it is modern technology that is responsible for the longer lifespans. Can you disentangle "nutrition and medicine" from simple improved hygiene?
Bob, polio is an exception to the hygine rule. Polio was known as 'rich kids disease' because it struck so often in the very clean homes of the wealthy. That is also why so much money was poured into a vaccine for polio.
If you can find a copy of 'The River: A Journey To The Source Of HIV And Aids' I believe you will enjoy reading it. I also believe some of the scientists in the search for an oral polio vaccine were involved in an early attempt at population control. Great whodunnit.
To the extent that technology is the application of scientific knowledge, and the germ theory of disease is indeed scientific knowledge, then the rest--the actions taken involving implementing mitigation techniques, seem to quite easily fall under the rubric of being a type of practical "technology".
In fact, I do believe that some of these "implementations" I speak of were indeed spurred on by pure, hard, engineering (ie water distribution systems, etc.)
The devil is in the details - or in this case, the context. The discussion was in reference to the wonderful impact of "modern" technology - not just technology in the abstract.
It was modern about 2300 years ago when the Romans installed municipal water systems and municipal sewerage. They also had double doored, meaning inner and outer, hot baths (saunas)and earth tube air conditioning. I don't believe they had germ theory... but they had figured out the concept of clean versus dirty.
shaman,
There were cholera and typhoid fever epidemics in New York and London in the 19th century. They were both big killers in the armies fighting in WWI.
There's a classic history text you might enjoy, called "Rats, Lice and History" about how sanitation changed modern warfare, also read about Typhoid Mary, a chronic carrier of typhoid fever who accidentally infected many people working as a maid.
Another book that's fascinating on the subject is "1491", about the die-offs of the indians in the Americas from various plagues.
Thanks for the book recommendations, though. R,L&H sounds interesting. I've read 1491, or at least as much as I'm going to. Interesting premise, but kind of week on execution, I thought.
But, so what was it you were trying to demonstrate by observing that disease still exists?
My point is, if we get a collapse from running out of energy, our lives will become shorter and more brutish. And if you have a realistic assessment of odds of survival, most of us aren't going to make it.
So, it behooves all of us to work towards a sustainable future, and take care of our population. I have 1 son, and got a vasectomy because I didn't want to add to the population.
I want to see a decent, clean world for my son, and every other child on the planet. I don't want to see armies of child soldiers swarming over the landscape like in the Congo. I don't want to see people so desperate for water because municipal pumps don't work that they drink polluted water. I don't want to see homeless, starving people outside my door. I don't want to shoot someone to protect food for my family. I don't want to see women and men prostituting themselves for a meal, or a place to sleep. I don't want to see climate change refugees streaming into the USA. I don't want to see religeous nuts set uo theocratic states all over the globe
So I will work as hard as I can to preserve a decent future for all of us. We are all in this together, and a hide out in the hills is a fantasy. That's why we have to wake people up and try to save our world.
In general the problem with pre-modern (and post peak oil?) mortality is focussed on the childhood years.
Child mortality is high... but once people survive to adulthood they tend to live "reasonably" long lives.
Don't confuse "average" life length with life expectancy of a person who survives to 15 years of age... two very different things.
oilmanbob, you may be in danger because of specific health conditions, but the general life expectancy for a modern and pre-modern 50 year old may not be that different.... it is childhood that is deadly.
I'd like to offer some solid numbers here, and they are available, but if you hunt around you'll find them. I'm sure that 50 year olds have better life expectancies now than 100 or 200 years ago.... but again the improvement has been much less than the improvement in the average life span, which has increased because of childhood survival rates increasing so dramatically.
Alright, I see where you are coming from. And I think we were just talking at cross purposes. My point earlier was that our health in general is not dependent on modern medicine, though that may be different for individuals with specific problems (especially those with "modern" or "industrial" health problems).
But I look at the coming changes not as descent into some Mad Max world, but as an opportunity to correct the problems of a social and economic system gone astray. I do not see the modern world as something worthy of sustaining, even if climate change threats can be overcome. I am as concerned about the "pollution" to our beings, physical, social, psychological and spiritual as I am about the ecosystem.
I'd urge you to consider that many of those "collapse" scenarios are a reflection of the modern world or of civilization in general, not a necessary aspect of the loss of central authority. For example, homelessness is an issue created by the concept of private property, prostitution occurs where women's role in society is degraded below that of men (which occurs concomitantly with the introduction of agriculture). The rest I will leave to you to imagine. But I will end with this - there are more choices available than just the collapse scenario and the clinging desperately to a technological existence scenario.
We're on the same page. Its going to take a giant attitude shift, a real inventory of our values and what's important to us, and a lot of personal investment in trying to make things work. Fortunately, most people really try to be good people, there's a lot of good in the world. The question is: How do we wake them up?
That wasn't a rant - I think you coherently articulated what many of us on here are thinking.
--
When no-one around you understands
start your own revolution
and cut out the middle man
Nice try, but not accurate. Information about hygiene was spread amongst primarily illiterate populations. While it may have been assisted by modern forms of media, it was not dependent on it.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the theory did not gain widespread acceptance until the industrial age in England had been going for 100 years. There needed to be developed an entire foundation of higher learning in order for people like John Snow to get to the point where they could figure this stuff out.
I think the reason such things took so long to catch on was in part because people tend to resist new ideas that challenge their world view.
The idea of hygiene, and in particular washing hands, was considered and pushed foremost by a doctor in the 1800s (Dr. Semmelweis). He demonstrated that when he and his staff washed their hands after seeing a patient and moving on to another (something that wasn't done by other doctors) the death rate of patients in his hospital dropped dramatically (birthing mothers was his area of specialty I believe).
What did the medical profession think of this? They poo-pooed the idea and thought it was ridiculous. It took many years for the idea of cleaning ones hands to catch on in the medical profession.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Carl Sagan has written quite eloquently on this topic.
Certainly I probably wouldn't be still alive today if it weren't for modern technology (specifically, antibiotics)...nor would my son (well, technically, he would never have been born, as we required significant fertility treatment - so he doesn't really count).
I'm willing to be at least a third of the participants here owe their life to modern medicine.
I'm less than convinced that our nutrition is substantially better now than it was at, say, the start of the 20th Century.
What other animal in a natural state outlives its breeding life?
Bob, it's very likely that the value of "old age" to an "intellectual" species such as ours lies in the opportunity to impart wisdom gained through vast experience -- no small thing. Of course, this wisdom is only valuable if someone is listening...
I didn't say that old age had no value, but rather that its a result of technology and nutrition. I'm 55, and I've had a couple of illnesses that would have killed me before modern medicine. I have Type 2 diabetes, and know that the great grandfather from which I inherited the tendency died at 50 around WWI.
If we do have a societal collapse, I'm going to die fairly quickly and not very pleasantly. And, so will most of us over 50. I guess that's why I get horrified by the doomer porn idiots, it spells my death and the death of most of the people I love. And that's why I care about peak oil. It is no joke a matter of life and death for perhaps 5/6ths of the people on this planet. So we had better have a slow slope down,and start working on solutions. Loading the silver BB's for the werewolves of doom!
I know of no better place to start than the people who care about peak oil, and no better time to start than now. That's why we all need to be at the ASPO convention in Houston October 17-20th. Network!
Bob Ebersole
So an outcome that someone sees as possible but which that person also does not want, so horrifies you that you will attack them for posting "doomer porn" rather than attempt to intellectually deal with the topic?
And this is supposed to help solve such possible problems exactly how?
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett Into the Grey Zone
Reread what I said. If modern technological society collapses, I'm dead, and so are most of the people I care about. We're older, and only young, breeding age people have much of a chance-look at other animal die-offs. A die-off to a sustainable level of population means that 5 people out of six are going to be history. Sure, its a possibility, but there have been people predicting apocolypse since I was a child being taught to "duck and cover" and kiss my ass goodbye in my elementary school. And, there have been people doing the same thing since prehistory! Sooner or later I guess they'll be right, but the odds aren't very good that I'm going to be snatched out of my sandals for the Rapture, or die in a thermonuclear flash.
I don't mind some of that talk-I think its cautionary. But every so often we get people on The Oil Drum who seem to be setting themselves up to be warlord of a cannibal crew. Talk of that kind is negative and detracts from what I see as our message-be prudent and change, or we're all going to be very sorry. It drives off reasonable people, who then associate us with Millenarian cults. Its one of the cheif weapons of the cornucopians and global warming deniers-they must be crazy, look at who they hang out with. Thats why CERA gets away with calling us peakists and a cult.
I don't like suppressing free speech. But I'm going to ridicule ridiculous positions-and let the sunlight of open discourse disinfect poisonous ideas.
Bob Ebersole
And I suggest you re-read what I said, Bob. There you are praying for a slow downslope when we don't even know what the downslope will look like yet. People keep suggesting 1% or 2%, hoping against the fates that it won't be so bad as to knock us all off our rockers. But what if it is 6%? What if it is the 8% suggested by the CEO of Schlumberger? Oh, he must be a "doomer" and not worthy of serious consideration just because he utters "doomer porn", right?
Ridiculing a problem will not make it go away. Ridiculing Hansen's work that suggests that 2-3 degrees celsius can raise ocean levels by 25 meters won't make that go away. All that ridiculing does is chases the idea out of public debate but it does not stop the real underlying problem. You might choose to ridicule conclusions but I would caution you to not ridicule basic ideas just because the consequences appear disastrous. And that is exactly what your original comment seemed to say to me - that you will attack any "doomer porn" because it scares you. If you meant something else, then maybe you need to find a better way of expressing yourself.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett Into the Grey Zone
A few days ago, PG posted news about digg and reddit. I think threads like this may be part of our problem. MSM don't like too much realism, and almost everybody doesn't like gloating over someone else's misfortune.
In the case of Peak Oil, we don't need to openly estimate the kill rate needed to achieve a world population that is sustainable in a post petroleum world. Any estimate made on the basis of current social theory is surely mistaken and largely irrelevant to discussion of the peak oil phenomenon.
But I do wonder what will happen, in the expected collapse, to discussion groups like this and to the internet in general ;-)
I'm pretty sure that Schlumberger is right about the depletion rate of oil fields in the rest of the world. Those guy's are really good.
What may slow it are 1. a huge depression cutting demand 2. growth in all liquids from ethanol, unconventional oil, gas-to-liquids, ect.3. enhanced oil recovery, economics changing on production because of price and fields produced longer
If you want to be depressed about the situation, O.K. Considering the lack of leadership in the US, its understandable.
But, if we switch to electric rail, ride bicycles and walk, act like rational humans with a plan and try to save our society it could very well work. We are not running totally out of oil, just cheap oil. We have decent people in most of the world who can cooperate. Its going to take changing expectations and values and a hell of a lot of work.
Predicting doom and doing nothing is self-indulgent and lazy. Glorying in thoughts of walled compounds fending off barbarian hordes sound like a plot for a video game, or fighting hordes of plague infected cannibals with your large breasted raven haired consort handing you ammunition on your organic farm. Come on, get real. That kind of doomerism is counter-productive.
The fact is the ice cubes haven't slid off Greenland yet. Yes, we need to cut our CO2 emmissions drasticly.No doubt we need immediate mitigation strategies. But wallering in gloom, glorying the collapse of civilization? Its doomer porn, and it diverts attention for real solutions and wastes more precious time.
This is my last post about this today. I can't believe I'm getting in an arguement about what should be obvious if we really expect to do anything. Try prozac, or zoloft or welbutrin if continue to feel depressed, I swear its pathological. I, by the way, do take welbutrin, as I've had depression all my life, its apparently genetic, plus I think I really screwed my brain chemical balance with too much dope as a kid. That's not an off the wall slur.
Bob Ebersole
Try prozac, or zoloft or welbutrin if continue to feel depressed, I swear its pathological. I, by the way, do take welbutrin, as I've had depression all my life, its apparently genetic, plus I think I really screwed my brain chemical balance with too much dope as a kid.
You've had depression, you admit you screwed up your brain's chemical balance via heavy drug use, AND you are now on powerful psychactive medications but you are accussing the doomers of being the unbalanaced ones?
It's time somebody calls shenanigans on you here.
Look guy, I've never had any depression what so ever, never done any drugs, never had a need for any psychoactive medicaiton and am as doomeristic as it comes. Perhaps my good mental health is what enables me to handle the bad news while your admitted imbalance(s) are what cause you to indulge in the false hope that "we" are all going to do much different than what we're already doing which is spending trillions on killing arabs and grabbing their oil & water for our corporate overlords.
Not trying to flame you . . .
I have a pet theory that people on anti-depressants are more likely not to be able to come grips with the reality of our situation then people who are mentally healthy. Your use of them is a single data point backing up my theory.
>I have a pet theory that people on anti-depressants are more likely not to be able to come grips with the reality of our situation then people who are mentally healthy. Your use of them is a single data point backing up my theory.
I have a pet theory that drug abuse will soar once reality of our situation sinks in. There is no better escape from reality than illicit drug abuse!
TechGuy: How about a girlfriend? Steep competition there.
DrivingChimp: Alcohol is a drug--a powerful one, deeply entrenched in our culture, amongst a myriad of others, both legal and illegal. If you don't drink now, you'll perhaps be drinking soon (judging by your very own prognostication of the patient). That is, after you're done tilling the land, in whatever ghost-town you've finally decided to set off to, and if you can even manage to keep the barricades' defenses up against the raving biker gangs armed to the teeth trying to take over your thermal energy greenhouse...
[edit] Everyone in general: all good points. I'm including myself here, humbly =]
[edit: My eyes see the word reality I always take it to mean "reality", I forget others don't know that I'm making an inversion and then I remember it's the internet and it's too late... Semantics always gets me caught up.]
Well, chump, I mean chimp, you are trying to flame me. I am at least honest about myself and where I come from, while you make a living trying to terrify people and bully them. You are a psychic vampire.
And if you aren't depressed, then you are a narcissistic evil asshole. The pornmeister of doom himself.
Thxs Leanan, for the edit,
On another note: from your plethora of Drumbeat keylinks today, I notice the problems in Africa seem to be spreading and cascading blowbacks. From a quick eyeball of the just-updated 2007 info from the CIA Factbook [Life expectancy at birth (years) by country]:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/21...
It is easy to see that this continent's people have their lives foreshortened by 20-30 years compared to much of the rest of the planet. Angola, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe appear to be the worst off.
In response to the long Drumbeat yesterday: if most of your people are dead by their thirties--technology doesn't even have a chance to get rolling, much less hoping to advance it to solve our PO & GW problems.
Assuming the CIA is still around in ten years of postPeak decline & ELM: it will be interesting to see if this rank table has gotten better or worse:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/notesan...
----------------------------------------
Life expectancy at birth:
This entry contains the average number of years to be lived by a group of people born in the same year, if mortality at each age remains constant in the future. The entry includes total population as well as the male and female components. Life expectancy at birth is also a measure of overall quality of life in a country and summarizes the mortality at all ages. It can also be thought of as indicating the potential return on investment in human capital and is necessary for the calculation of various actuarial measures.
-----------------------------------------
If technocornucopia is successful, these numbers should all be much improved in ten years time. My SWAG is that they will be worse. Time will tell.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Hi Totoneila
Lifespans have really increased in the last century. I look at historical land and probate records, and in the US the average lifespan was about 50 a hundred years ago. If you'll look at paleolithic lifespans from archeological sites, I think you'll find that most people lived to about 40. In other words, modern technology has doubled human lifespans through nutrition and medicine. You can see that reflected in region of total collapse anarchy like the Congo.
Another way to think about it: What other animal in a natural state outlives its breeding life?
Bob Ebersole
Bob: Globally, average lifespan increased dramatically up until about 1998. It has since been on a gradual decline.
Actually, the lifespan didn't really get an increase so much as we made a huge impact on Childhood diseases.
Take a look at the life expectancy of someone 50 years old in 1900. It was about 70ish. BUT the life expectancy of a newborn was only 40-50ish.
In 1900 if you made it to 40 or 50 you could expect to live to almost the same age we do now.
We didn't really extend how LONG someone could live, We just increased the number of people reaching adulthood(ie getting rid of whooping cough, and other childhood diseases).
True, although the life expectancy of someone 50 years old today (in a developed nation) would surely be well over 80, so there has been some improvement at the upper end.
Thanks to a lot of expensive geriactric drugs, pace-makers, etc., modern hospitilization and nursing home intervention. This postponement of death isn't getting any cheaper and won't prevail much longer in a declining petroleum regime.
Note on lifespans.
From a purely population point of view, medicine is almost irrelevant (of course, on a personal level you may need medical intervention to survive). The greatest boon to health in our society is clean water, sewerage, food, etc.
If you are considering a downslope in living conditions, then basic hygene and sustenance are your key factors to staying healthy. Childhood and adult diseases killed enormous numbers of people in western countries (1 in 1000 and more per year for some of them) through till the late 1800s/early 1900s, thanks in large part to sewerage systems that were completed in major cities.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
This (childhood mortality) is in line with research I've seen.
Also the introduction of antibiotics has made a dent.
In recent decades the adoption of foods which have no history of safe consumption (highly processed, GMO, less and less vitamins minerals, high-fructose corn syrup, chemical concoctions) and a reduction in exercise are leading to a reduction in lifespan due to so many people being overweight, obese and getting the slew of diseases that come with such a diet/lifestyle (cancer, autoimmune diseases, CHD, diabetes and more). In particular bypass operations and the ilk do not extend the life of people with CHD (chronic heart disease) and so we'll continue to see lifespan decrease as more people (tr)eat their way to heart attacks. Healthy At 100 is an interesting book about people with a history of long life.
Note that infant mortality took an upturn when doctors got involved in births (partially delt with thanks to Louis Pastour) however, infant mortality is lower when midwives, and not MDs attend the birth (read The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth).
The loss of antibiotics in recent history and the breeding of superbugs by feeding our best antibiotics to animals on unimaginable scales will come home to roost.
A loss of travel speed and distance and less people in general will help with this.
The best thing would be to put a stake into the heart of modern meat production and get people onto a mostly vegetarian/vegan diet.
What evidence is there that it is modern technology that is responsible for the longer lifespans. Can you disentangle "nutrition and medicine" from simple improved hygiene?
And to answer your last question - plenty.
I consider improved hygiene to be medicine. Until the germ theory of disease there was a lot less hygiene.
Look what happened to the population of India after the British cleaned up the water supply.
Bob, polio is an exception to the hygine rule. Polio was known as 'rich kids disease' because it struck so often in the very clean homes of the wealthy. That is also why so much money was poured into a vaccine for polio.
If you can find a copy of 'The River: A Journey To The Source Of HIV And Aids' I believe you will enjoy reading it. I also believe some of the scientists in the search for an oral polio vaccine were involved in an early attempt at population control. Great whodunnit.
Interesting that convincing people to take their drinking water upstream from where they bath and defecate becomes "modern technology."
To the extent that technology is the application of scientific knowledge, and the germ theory of disease is indeed scientific knowledge, then the rest--the actions taken involving implementing mitigation techniques, seem to quite easily fall under the rubric of being a type of practical "technology".
In fact, I do believe that some of these "implementations" I speak of were indeed spurred on by pure, hard, engineering (ie water distribution systems, etc.)
Alas, fire again...
The devil is in the details - or in this case, the context. The discussion was in reference to the wonderful impact of "modern" technology - not just technology in the abstract.
It was modern about 2300 years ago when the Romans installed municipal water systems and municipal sewerage. They also had double doored, meaning inner and outer, hot baths (saunas)and earth tube air conditioning. I don't believe they had germ theory... but they had figured out the concept of clean versus dirty.
shaman,
There were cholera and typhoid fever epidemics in New York and London in the 19th century. They were both big killers in the armies fighting in WWI.
There's a classic history text you might enjoy, called "Rats, Lice and History" about how sanitation changed modern warfare, also read about Typhoid Mary, a chronic carrier of typhoid fever who accidentally infected many people working as a maid.
Another book that's fascinating on the subject is "1491", about the die-offs of the indians in the Americas from various plagues.
Bob Ebersole
oilmanbob,
not clear to me what your point is.
Thanks for the book recommendations, though. R,L&H sounds interesting. I've read 1491, or at least as much as I'm going to. Interesting premise, but kind of week on execution, I thought.
But, so what was it you were trying to demonstrate by observing that disease still exists?
shaman,
My point is, if we get a collapse from running out of energy, our lives will become shorter and more brutish. And if you have a realistic assessment of odds of survival, most of us aren't going to make it.
So, it behooves all of us to work towards a sustainable future, and take care of our population. I have 1 son, and got a vasectomy because I didn't want to add to the population.
I want to see a decent, clean world for my son, and every other child on the planet. I don't want to see armies of child soldiers swarming over the landscape like in the Congo. I don't want to see people so desperate for water because municipal pumps don't work that they drink polluted water. I don't want to see homeless, starving people outside my door. I don't want to shoot someone to protect food for my family. I don't want to see women and men prostituting themselves for a meal, or a place to sleep. I don't want to see climate change refugees streaming into the USA. I don't want to see religeous nuts set uo theocratic states all over the globe
So I will work as hard as I can to preserve a decent future for all of us. We are all in this together, and a hide out in the hills is a fantasy. That's why we have to wake people up and try to save our world.
Sorry for the rant. Bob Ebersole
In general the problem with pre-modern (and post peak oil?) mortality is focussed on the childhood years.
Child mortality is high... but once people survive to adulthood they tend to live "reasonably" long lives.
Don't confuse "average" life length with life expectancy of a person who survives to 15 years of age... two very different things.
oilmanbob, you may be in danger because of specific health conditions, but the general life expectancy for a modern and pre-modern 50 year old may not be that different.... it is childhood that is deadly.
I'd like to offer some solid numbers here, and they are available, but if you hunt around you'll find them. I'm sure that 50 year olds have better life expectancies now than 100 or 200 years ago.... but again the improvement has been much less than the improvement in the average life span, which has increased because of childhood survival rates increasing so dramatically.
Alright, I see where you are coming from. And I think we were just talking at cross purposes. My point earlier was that our health in general is not dependent on modern medicine, though that may be different for individuals with specific problems (especially those with "modern" or "industrial" health problems).
But I look at the coming changes not as descent into some Mad Max world, but as an opportunity to correct the problems of a social and economic system gone astray. I do not see the modern world as something worthy of sustaining, even if climate change threats can be overcome. I am as concerned about the "pollution" to our beings, physical, social, psychological and spiritual as I am about the ecosystem.
I'd urge you to consider that many of those "collapse" scenarios are a reflection of the modern world or of civilization in general, not a necessary aspect of the loss of central authority. For example, homelessness is an issue created by the concept of private property, prostitution occurs where women's role in society is degraded below that of men (which occurs concomitantly with the introduction of agriculture). The rest I will leave to you to imagine. But I will end with this - there are more choices available than just the collapse scenario and the clinging desperately to a technological existence scenario.
Shaman,
We're on the same page. Its going to take a giant attitude shift, a real inventory of our values and what's important to us, and a lot of personal investment in trying to make things work. Fortunately, most people really try to be good people, there's a lot of good in the world. The question is: How do we wake them up?
Bob Ebersole
That wasn't a rant - I think you coherently articulated what many of us on here are thinking.
--
When no-one around you understands
start your own revolution
and cut out the middle man
Mass production/distribution of information via books, radio, etc is what allowwed for the information regarding hygiene to be spread so far and wide.
Nice try, but not accurate. Information about hygiene was spread amongst primarily illiterate populations. While it may have been assisted by modern forms of media, it was not dependent on it.
Right, but how do you think the smarty pants people were able to come up with these ideas?
Take germ theroy for instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
I don't think it's a coincidence that the theory did not gain widespread acceptance until the industrial age in England had been going for 100 years. There needed to be developed an entire foundation of higher learning in order for people like John Snow to get to the point where they could figure this stuff out.
I think the reason such things took so long to catch on was in part because people tend to resist new ideas that challenge their world view.
The idea of hygiene, and in particular washing hands, was considered and pushed foremost by a doctor in the 1800s (Dr. Semmelweis). He demonstrated that when he and his staff washed their hands after seeing a patient and moving on to another (something that wasn't done by other doctors) the death rate of patients in his hospital dropped dramatically (birthing mothers was his area of specialty I believe).
What did the medical profession think of this? They poo-pooed the idea and thought it was ridiculous. It took many years for the idea of cleaning ones hands to catch on in the medical profession.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Carl Sagan has written quite eloquently on this topic.
Certainly I probably wouldn't be still alive today if it weren't for modern technology (specifically, antibiotics)...nor would my son (well, technically, he would never have been born, as we required significant fertility treatment - so he doesn't really count).
I'm willing to be at least a third of the participants here owe their life to modern medicine.
I'm less than convinced that our nutrition is substantially better now than it was at, say, the start of the 20th Century.
Bob, it's very likely that the value of "old age" to an "intellectual" species such as ours lies in the opportunity to impart wisdom gained through vast experience -- no small thing. Of course, this wisdom is only valuable if someone is listening...
I didn't say that old age had no value, but rather that its a result of technology and nutrition. I'm 55, and I've had a couple of illnesses that would have killed me before modern medicine. I have Type 2 diabetes, and know that the great grandfather from which I inherited the tendency died at 50 around WWI.
If we do have a societal collapse, I'm going to die fairly quickly and not very pleasantly. And, so will most of us over 50. I guess that's why I get horrified by the doomer porn idiots, it spells my death and the death of most of the people I love. And that's why I care about peak oil. It is no joke a matter of life and death for perhaps 5/6ths of the people on this planet. So we had better have a slow slope down,and start working on solutions. Loading the silver BB's for the werewolves of doom!
I know of no better place to start than the people who care about peak oil, and no better time to start than now. That's why we all need to be at the ASPO convention in Houston October 17-20th. Network!
Bob Ebersole
So an outcome that someone sees as possible but which that person also does not want, so horrifies you that you will attack them for posting "doomer porn" rather than attempt to intellectually deal with the topic?
And this is supposed to help solve such possible problems exactly how?
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
GreyZone,
Reread what I said. If modern technological society collapses, I'm dead, and so are most of the people I care about. We're older, and only young, breeding age people have much of a chance-look at other animal die-offs. A die-off to a sustainable level of population means that 5 people out of six are going to be history. Sure, its a possibility, but there have been people predicting apocolypse since I was a child being taught to "duck and cover" and kiss my ass goodbye in my elementary school. And, there have been people doing the same thing since prehistory! Sooner or later I guess they'll be right, but the odds aren't very good that I'm going to be snatched out of my sandals for the Rapture, or die in a thermonuclear flash.
I don't mind some of that talk-I think its cautionary. But every so often we get people on The Oil Drum who seem to be setting themselves up to be warlord of a cannibal crew. Talk of that kind is negative and detracts from what I see as our message-be prudent and change, or we're all going to be very sorry. It drives off reasonable people, who then associate us with Millenarian cults. Its one of the cheif weapons of the cornucopians and global warming deniers-they must be crazy, look at who they hang out with. Thats why CERA gets away with calling us peakists and a cult.
I don't like suppressing free speech. But I'm going to ridicule ridiculous positions-and let the sunlight of open discourse disinfect poisonous ideas.
Bob Ebersole
And I suggest you re-read what I said, Bob. There you are praying for a slow downslope when we don't even know what the downslope will look like yet. People keep suggesting 1% or 2%, hoping against the fates that it won't be so bad as to knock us all off our rockers. But what if it is 6%? What if it is the 8% suggested by the CEO of Schlumberger? Oh, he must be a "doomer" and not worthy of serious consideration just because he utters "doomer porn", right?
Ridiculing a problem will not make it go away. Ridiculing Hansen's work that suggests that 2-3 degrees celsius can raise ocean levels by 25 meters won't make that go away. All that ridiculing does is chases the idea out of public debate but it does not stop the real underlying problem. You might choose to ridicule conclusions but I would caution you to not ridicule basic ideas just because the consequences appear disastrous. And that is exactly what your original comment seemed to say to me - that you will attack any "doomer porn" because it scares you. If you meant something else, then maybe you need to find a better way of expressing yourself.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
A few days ago, PG posted news about digg and reddit. I think threads like this may be part of our problem. MSM don't like too much realism, and almost everybody doesn't like gloating over someone else's misfortune.
In the case of Peak Oil, we don't need to openly estimate the kill rate needed to achieve a world population that is sustainable in a post petroleum world. Any estimate made on the basis of current social theory is surely mistaken and largely irrelevant to discussion of the peak oil phenomenon.
But I do wonder what will happen, in the expected collapse, to discussion groups like this and to the internet in general ;-)
Greyzone,
I'm pretty sure that Schlumberger is right about the depletion rate of oil fields in the rest of the world. Those guy's are really good.
What may slow it are 1. a huge depression cutting demand 2. growth in all liquids from ethanol, unconventional oil, gas-to-liquids, ect.3. enhanced oil recovery, economics changing on production because of price and fields produced longer
If you want to be depressed about the situation, O.K. Considering the lack of leadership in the US, its understandable.
But, if we switch to electric rail, ride bicycles and walk, act like rational humans with a plan and try to save our society it could very well work. We are not running totally out of oil, just cheap oil. We have decent people in most of the world who can cooperate. Its going to take changing expectations and values and a hell of a lot of work.
Predicting doom and doing nothing is self-indulgent and lazy. Glorying in thoughts of walled compounds fending off barbarian hordes sound like a plot for a video game, or fighting hordes of plague infected cannibals with your large breasted raven haired consort handing you ammunition on your organic farm. Come on, get real. That kind of doomerism is counter-productive.
The fact is the ice cubes haven't slid off Greenland yet. Yes, we need to cut our CO2 emmissions drasticly.No doubt we need immediate mitigation strategies. But wallering in gloom, glorying the collapse of civilization? Its doomer porn, and it diverts attention for real solutions and wastes more precious time.
This is my last post about this today. I can't believe I'm getting in an arguement about what should be obvious if we really expect to do anything. Try prozac, or zoloft or welbutrin if continue to feel depressed, I swear its pathological. I, by the way, do take welbutrin, as I've had depression all my life, its apparently genetic, plus I think I really screwed my brain chemical balance with too much dope as a kid. That's not an off the wall slur.
Bob Ebersole
You've had depression, you admit you screwed up your brain's chemical balance via heavy drug use, AND you are now on powerful psychactive medications but you are accussing the doomers of being the unbalanaced ones?
It's time somebody calls shenanigans on you here.
Look guy, I've never had any depression what so ever, never done any drugs, never had a need for any psychoactive medicaiton and am as doomeristic as it comes. Perhaps my good mental health is what enables me to handle the bad news while your admitted imbalance(s) are what cause you to indulge in the false hope that "we" are all going to do much different than what we're already doing which is spending trillions on killing arabs and grabbing their oil & water for our corporate overlords.
Not trying to flame you . . .
I have a pet theory that people on anti-depressants are more likely not to be able to come grips with the reality of our situation then people who are mentally healthy. Your use of them is a single data point backing up my theory.
Have a day.
>I have a pet theory that people on anti-depressants are more likely not to be able to come grips with the reality of our situation then people who are mentally healthy. Your use of them is a single data point backing up my theory.
I have a pet theory that drug abuse will soar once reality of our situation sinks in. There is no better escape from reality than illicit drug abuse!
TechGuy: How about a girlfriend? Steep competition there.
DrivingChimp: Alcohol is a drug--a powerful one, deeply entrenched in our culture, amongst a myriad of others, both legal and illegal. If you don't drink now, you'll perhaps be drinking soon (judging by your very own prognostication of the patient). That is, after you're done tilling the land, in whatever ghost-town you've finally decided to set off to, and if you can even manage to keep the barricades' defenses up against the raving biker gangs armed to the teeth trying to take over your thermal energy greenhouse...
[edit] Everyone in general: all good points. I'm including myself here, humbly =]
TechGuy said;"There is no better escape from reality than illicit drug abuse!"
You said: "TechGuy: How about a girlfriend? Steep competition there."
Having a girlfriend is having reality come and smack you upside the head..... unless you're already married.
How true.
[edit: My eyes see the word reality I always take it to mean "reality", I forget others don't know that I'm making an inversion and then I remember it's the internet and it's too late... Semantics always gets me caught up.]
Well, chump, I mean chimp, you are trying to flame me. I am at least honest about myself and where I come from, while you make a living trying to terrify people and bully them. You are a psychic vampire.
And if you aren't depressed, then you are a narcissistic evil asshole. The pornmeister of doom himself.
Bob Ebersole