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Taking the standard run of the Limits to Growth World3 model as a starting point, it's more or less too late to begin efforts to prevent a population collapse. In the simulation per capita food and industrial production go into permanent decline after about 2012 and the population begins to collapse within a few decades after that. To address the problem of sustainability, we should have begun doing something about it in the 1970s or 1980s, at the latest.
Kenny-
While I think it's likely that the Earth can't support the present population at present consumption in a sustainable manner, I'm not convinced that it's too late to engineer a "soft landing" where population declines without starvation or other mass die off. However, even IF some form of die off is inevitable at this point, without addressing the problem of growth itself we'll just reset the population at some lower level, then grow again in excess of carrying capacity, and crash again, ad infinitum. The scale of these subsequent crashes may tail off in time, but I still think that even IF we accept that a crash is inevitable, it still makes sense to lay a groundwork for future sustainability today.
About the World3 simulation, to quote Monty Python "it's only a model!"
But I haven't seen any alternative scenarios either. If there is a population readjustment, what we might call a disorderly retreat from 7 billion to 1 billion or less, it will likely wipe out any groundwork in the process.
Jeff:
kenny:
Greer's Catabolic Collapse is one alternative model, that plays out much as Jeff describes above. In his the comment section of his most recent post on his Archdruid Report blog, he discusses the idea that the current financial thrashing is an example of the model in that area.
It'd be interesting, but beyond what I have the time or knowledge to take on, to try to apply his 4-factor model to the recent credit bubble and its collapse. Anyone here have good tools and expertise in system dynamics?
Greer's an interesting person. And of course he's a winner of the prestigious Order of Bards Ovates and Druids Mount Haemus Award for Druid scholarship...
I like the piece on Catabolic collapse, but it doesn't seem to be much more than a restatement of the ideas behind the World3 system dynamics model discussed in Limits to Growth.
There isn't any solid evidence that 10 billion or more people can't be sustainably provided for, so I don't understand why so many assume that the population will implode. We have ample nuclear fuel for millions of years at 1000 times the global energy demand now and thats been demonstrated on a large scale (say all of france) without even bothering getting into the argument that renewables can also provide energy to power civilization.
I guess it depends on whether one thinks of your estimates as being able to see into the future or as hypothetical, and on whether it really is just a matter of energy as to being able to provide all of the resources and food that we we consider vital, without severely damaging our habitat, for a population of 10 billion, at moderate standards of living.
I'm sure many people disagree with both.
I know many do. On the later point, its based on undemonstrated assertions that there are somehow components that aren't producable by energy despite reasonable evidence to the contrary.
On the former, they're just plain wrong.