No topsoil left in Britain in 60 years

[Alyrium Denryle]

Scale, people. Get some fucking perspective. It's one thing to talk about a garden or allotment you're spreading household waste on, it's another to apply this same method to global food supplies.

Excuse me for trying to be optimistic and practical, and for asking a simple question. Like I don't know there is a difference between half an acre and millions of acres.

I do wonder, though: Where does the waste from huge animal farms go? Could that be collected, treated, and added to fields? How about what's in landfills - could any of that be processed and added to fields? If the answer is no, just say so, and why, rather than ridiculing me.

Treatment costs would be massive. Large scale animal farm waste is pretty much deadly to breath the fumes from....

[Tritonic]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://www.ers.usda.gov), as official as you get, estimates, for instance, 718 million metric tons world wheat production in the 2019-2020 crop year, versus how it was recently 672 million tons in the 2009-2010 crop year, continuing its overall growth from 580 million tons in the 2000-2001 crop year.

<snip>
Additionally, even if I wanted to play that particular game, what you need to worry about is not overall production but production per person which has been dropping since 1996.

<snip graph>

Oh come on, do you seriously expect me to fall for that?

Let's see whether you have a shred of honesty by using your own maps.grida.no website source for world calorie consumption per person:



http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/calorie ... -1975-1995

Increasing of course. It ends in about 1995 like your graph did since I'm illustrating from your same website source, but we have later data too, the same overall trend.

We would expect the increasing consumption of meat to reduce how much of other food people eat. (Incidentally, while farm animals being fed grain in common in America, which of course greatly increases input for the output with the multiple trophic layers, such being on pastures eating non-human-edible foods like local grasses is a greater focus elsewhere). World meat consumption:



Meat is a luxury food, consumption rising because more people can afford more of it from Asia to South America.

Amazingly you had the gall to try that when I already pointed out the actual later 2009-2010 wheat production figures from USDA's international data set for the whole world (http://www.ers.usda.gov): As said before, it was recently 672 million tons in the 2009-2010 crop year, continuing its overall growth from 580 million tons in the 2000-2001 crop year. Since world population in 2010 was 6.83 billion, versus 6.16 billion in 2001, we see from basic elementary school arithmetic that world wheat production was 98 tons per person this past year, versus how it used to be a lesser 94 tons per person a decade ago (and less than that a decade further back, etc). I could do the same as the wheat example with almost any crop under the sun, though, again, total calorie consumption by the average person in the world shows the overall trend.

As a result, grain production per person has been falling since the mid 90s.

No. See above. You forget I know how your type operates, so I look up actual statistics like those at http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/internatio ... tabs10.htm et cetera.

You know what happened in the 70s that made his predictions not correct? The miracle that was Norman Borloug(sp). You know, the guy who started the Green Revolution.

The Green Revolution isn't over, as continuing increase in crop yields illustrate. But I'm not going to let you get by with acting like the Paul Ehrlich group you worship made predictions that weren't outright dishonest, utterly stupid, or both. Let's dig up the dirty history there:

Dubbed "ecology's angry lobbyist" by Life magazine, the gloomy Ehrlich was quoted everywhere. "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," he confidently declared in an interview with then-radical journalist Peter Collier in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."

"Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," wrote Ehrlich in an essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe!," which ran in the special Earth Day issue of the radical magazine Ramparts. "By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off." <snip>

Ehrlich and others were openly contemptuous of the "Green Revolution," underway in countries such as India and Pakistan, that had already nearly doubled crop yields in developing nations between 1965 and 1970. Ehrlich sniffed that such developments meant nothing, going so far as to predict that "the Green Revolution...is going to turn brown." <snip>

According to the World Bank's World Development Report 2000, food production increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 1997. At the same time, the amount of land devoted to growing crops has barely increased over the past 30 years, meaning that millions of acres have been spared for nature--acres that would have been plowed down had agricultural productivity lagged the way Ehrlich and others believed it would.

http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/e ... en-and-now

[Tritonic]

I mostly don't want to distract from the top points above, but let's add a reminder that just because I skip over a claim to save time doesn't mean it is actually true: An illustration:

But we do not use hydroponics to grow on a large scale, and can only grow certain plants that way in the first place, plants that like waterlogged soil.

Rather than just a small number of certain plants being able to be grown in hydroponics, the situation is actually:



Of course, we don't go for hydroponics when other simpler, cheaper methods suffice already (though there is a major expanding market for some vegetables like tomatoes which get exceptionally high yield increases in hydroponics, as seen in the above chart), but such is a good illustration of the general capabilities of supplying artificial nutrients when growing in a medium (even as extreme as an inert medium like gravel) with a shortage of local natural nutrients.

[Tritonic]

Scale, people. Get some fucking perspective. It's one thing to talk about a garden or allotment you're spreading household waste on, it's another to apply this same method to global food supplies.

I'm seeing in both this and the other thread a serious lack of appreciation how it is the per person cost that matters, not some intuitive judgment without math that an absolute figure seems too large (like the other poster thinking 2000 of those tomato-growing greenhouses would be a big deal for a country of 300 million people to build over the decades). If an imaginary civilization lived on a sci-fi Dyson Swarm and had 7 quadrillion instead of 7 billion people (not that we're headed towards such when birth rates are declining towards replacement levels), each $7 quadrillion of expenses would be just as affordable to them as $7 billion is to us, as both are $1 per person in that example. I can only imagine how you would think if you were back in 1899 and someone predicted our current number of everything from cars to tractors as being affordable and possible to produce.

That's why, for example, if America someday needed to produce 10% of its irrigation water by desalination, the previously illustrated $33 per person cost for that is relevant.

Desalination also only works well with very cheap energy and access to the sea.

Its energy costs are included in such as the prior total expense figure above, which means its energy requirements (especially for the modern designs, several times better than the old ones) are vastly less than you apparently think. We, first-world countries, don't need particularly cheap energy to power some desalination if necessary, only the same general order of magnitude of thermal-electrical energy costs as now, and, in between everything from coal to nukes to a price trend in future solar power in the context of past history ($30/watt 1974, $5/watt 1990, ~ $1/watt 2010, soon less, aside from that a capacity factor consideration would make all the figures several times greater), we have options. We pipe liquids like oil hundreds of miles when necessary, and that applies to water too. Sure, we don't do a lot of desalination when conventional irrigation costs only 1/3rd as much per acre-foot in many locations, but that's since we've been doing alright conventionally.

[Tritonic]

Ah, the carelessness when typing too fast:

world wheat production was 98 tons per person this past year, versus how it used to be a lesser 94 tons per person a decade ago

I omitted the zero but, of course, meant 0.098 tons per person and 0.094 tons per person respectively.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'm seeing in both this and the other thread a serious lack of appreciation how it is the per person cost that matters, not some intuitive judgment without math that an absolute figure seems too large (like the other poster thinking 2000 of those tomato-growing greenhouses would be a big deal for a country of 300 million people to build over the decades). If an imaginary civilization lived on a sci-fi Dyson Swarm and had 7 quadrillion instead of 7 billion people (not that we're headed towards such when birth rates are declining towards replacement levels), each $7 quadrillion of expenses would be just as affordable to them as $7 billion is to us, as both are $1 per person in that example. I can only imagine how you would think if you were back in 1899 and someone predicted our current number of everything from cars to tractors as being affordable and possible to produce.

That's why, for example, if America someday needed to produce 10% of its irrigation water by desalination, the previously illustrated $33 per person cost for that is relevant.

Except, net energy wasn't about stagnant and the major energy source of the world about to go into serious decline. So your analogy to turn of the century predictions I didn't make is false. I've hashed this debate over plenty enough on these forums. There is NO past equivalent.

Its energy costs are included in such as the prior total expense figure above, which means its energy requirements (especially for the modern designs, several times better than the old ones) are vastly less than you apparently think. We, first-world countries, don't need particularly cheap energy to power some desalination if necessary, only the same general order of magnitude of thermal-electrical energy costs as now, and, in between everything from coal to nukes to a price trend in future solar power in the context of past history ($30/watt 1974, $5/watt 1990, ~ $1/watt 2010, soon less, aside from that a capacity factor consideration would make all the figures several times greater), we have options. We pipe liquids like oil hundreds of miles when necessary, and that applies to water too. Sure, we don't do a lot of desalination when conventional irrigation costs only 1/3rd as much per acre-foot in many locations, but that's since we've been doing alright conventionally.

This would be the money coming from the nation that is in so much debt, a hyperinflationary spiral is nigh inevitable in the very near future. So how, pray tell, are you going to afford this, the loss of Cantarell and KSA exports, and the poor development of shale gas thanks to price crashes, before major economic hardship really sets in? Did you check to see the number of renewable projects put on indefinite hold as the credit crunch and oil price shock took hold?

Additionally, these prices may not be expensive relative to other things, but we need only look at how a fairly minor increase in gasoline prices can seriously undermine transportation usage. With the next big wave of mortgage defaults on the horizon, and nominal wages frozen, along with real wages falling, a colossal national deficit, it strikes me as rather Pollyanna of people to assume we'll be producing huge energy projects to satisfy outlandish ideas like desalination on this scale any time soon. And the cliff for oil is arriving by 2012. Tell me, how many desal plants have you got in the pipeline now? And how quickly will you build them, or nuke plants, with a global decline rate in net energy of 4% at minimum?

There are vast rooms for improvements. Modern agriculture is actually horribly inefficient, with an average of 17 Calories being used to produce 1 food Calorie. The change the game that drastically, during the worst economic climate in history, with declining energy and soaring inflation, well, I'm not holding my breath. It'll only take Greece imploding to set another major wave in the system rolling along.

[Darth Wong]

I don't know if people realize that 60 years is a really long-term projection window. Consider the fact that 60 years ago was 1950; how much has dramatically changed in the world since then?

If we assume that this projection is correct, it's on such a long window that it must represent a very slow trend, and could therefore be solved with a correspondingly moderate improvement in our behaviour. Of course, that begs the question of whether would even do that much, or whether we would in fact continue to exacerbate the problem. After all, people are stupid and short-sighted: the fact that you have to pay farmers to make responsible long-term use of their own land really says it all.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I don't know if people realize that 60 years is a really long-term projection window. Consider the fact that 60 years ago was 1950; how much has dramatically changed in the world since then?

If we assume that this projection is correct, it's on such a long window that it must represent a very slow trend, and could therefore be solved with a correspondingly moderate improvement in our behaviour. Of course, that begs the question of whether would even do that much, or whether we would in fact continue to exacerbate the problem. After all, people are stupid and short-sighted: the fact that you have to pay farmers to make responsible long-term use of their own land really says it all.

Indeed. There is a good discussion on this issue over here. While it isn't quite as rosy as some would make it out to be, it does show some very real problems that need to be addressed if anything like this many people are to be around in the future, to say nothing of a few billion more.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Increasing of course. It ends in about 1995 like your graph did since I'm illustrating from your same website source, but we have later data too, the same overall trend.

We would expect the increasing consumption of meat to reduce how much of other food people eat. (Incidentally, while farm animals being fed grain in common in America, which of course greatly increases input for the output with the multiple trophic layers, such being on pastures eating non-human-edible foods like local grasses is a greater focus elsewhere). World meat consumption:

Wow. So you are trying to shoot down the amount of grain produced per person by citing the amount consumed per person. The problem with this should be apparent to anyone with three neurons to rub together.

Amazingly you had the gall to try that when I already pointed out the actual later 2009-2010 wheat production figures from USDA's international data set for the whole world (http://www.ers.usda.gov): As said before, it was recently 672 million tons in the 2009-2010 crop year, continuing its overall growth from 580 million tons in the 2000-2001 crop year. Since world population in 2010 was 6.83 billion, versus 6.16 billion in 2001, we see from basic elementary school arithmetic that world wheat production was 98 tons per person this past year, versus how it used to be a lesser 94 tons per person a decade ago (and less than that a decade further back, etc). I could do the same as the wheat example with almost any crop under the sun, though, again, total calorie consumption by the average person in the world shows the overall trend.

First: Grain does not equal wheat. Wheat may well increase while other cereal crops drop. I am also not referring to the amount grown, but the amount grown per person. These are two different measures, you dishonest man-of-straw producing asswipe.

Second: There is this thing when dealing with with datasets called variance. You have a fitted curve, and there is spread around this fitted curve. Even with the graph I showed there is spread, that is why I used it. Nice smooth curves do not capture that variation from sample period to sample period and depending on the time scale you arbitrarily select within that curve you can linearize it to say whatever the fuck you want and draw conclusions accordingly. One must look at the entire dataset and fit an appropriate curve to the whole thing to be able to estimate trends.

Or did you fail basic statistics? I suspect you did.

The Green Revolution isn't over, as continuing increase in crop yields illustrate. But I'm not going to let you get by with acting like the Paul Ehrlich group you worship made predictions that weren't outright dishonest, utterly stupid, or both. Let's dig up the dirty history there:

You are also assuming that I am some hippy environmentalist luddite who worships certain individuals. I am not. I am a trained ecologist who also has a strong background in statistics and demographic theory. So your silly ad hominem attack will get you nowhere and earn you nothing but contempt on this board.

Remember: Increasing crop yields does not equal long term projection in per person crop yields. Do I need to drill a hole in your skull to release the pressure that keeps your from understanding that?

Rather than just a small number of certain plants being able to be grown in hydroponics, the situation is actually:

Which is a small percentage of the number of plants we eat on a regular basis.

I'm seeing in both this and the other thread a serious lack of appreciation how it is the per person cost that matters, not some intuitive judgment without math that an absolute figure seems too large (like the other poster thinking 2000 of those tomato-growing greenhouses would be a big deal for a country of 300 million people to build over the decades).

It is not for one crop that accounts for a relatively small percentage of calorie consumption compared to cereal crops

If we assume that this projection is correct, it's on such a long window that it must represent a very slow trend, and could therefore be solved with a correspondingly moderate improvement in our behaviour. Of course, that begs the question of whether would even do that much, or whether we would in fact continue to exacerbate the problem. After all, people are stupid and short-sighted: the fact that you have to pay farmers to make responsible long-term use of their own land really says it all.

Pretty much. It is also really silly to counter a 50-60 year projection with a 10 year projection using the wrong god damn numbers. Just a thought.

[Sky Captain]

With all the talk about biofuels from algae going on I`m wondering would it be possible to genetically engineer an algae that can easily grow in salt water and produce most of the nutrients needed for human? If it`s possible and usable on industrial scale it might help to take off some pressure from overtaxed farmlands in relatively near future.

[Mayabird]

It's called kelp and they already farm it.
[line 2]

[Admiral Valdemar]

Yummy kelp. I think those wanting to maintain their outlandish diets today will probably object to that somewhat. The Chindia problem is certainly not showing
any love for lowering food choice to the consumer.

[Tritonic]

Wow. So you are trying to shoot down the amount of grain produced per person by citing the amount consumed per person.

Are you seriously trying to argue that there were imaginary giant many-whole-year supplies of food set aside earlier and that the continuing increase in world calorie consumption each decade occurs due to them? Come on.

This keeps getting better.

World corn per person:



World wheat per person:

http://worldfood.apionet.or.jp/graph/pn ... RLD-e6.png

World rice per person:

http://worldfood.apionet.or.jp/graph/pn ... RLD-e6.png

World pork meat per person:

http://worldfood.apionet.or.jp/graph/pn ... RLD-e6.png

I'm not going to fill the whole thread with image spam, but your bias in carefully choosing a graph that cut off 14 years ago (1996) and that predicted an utterly false large decline by now (2010) is rather blatant.

Other stats:

http://worldfood.apionet.or.jp/graph/gr ... p=&type=e6

There have been some shifts in the average diet (especially more meat, which is an indicator of increasing abundance overall, being a luxury food), but the overall picture is even summed up in this simple graph of world food production per person:

[Tritonic]

A lot of people here are rather young, unlike the older generations who often have learned to take poorly supported predictions with a grain of salt, but much of this is not new:

Earth Day 1970 provoked a torrent of apocalyptic predictions. "We have about five more years at the outside to do something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." <snip> Then--and now--the most prominent prophet of population doom was Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. <snip> Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off."

http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/e ... n-and-now/

Increasing crop yields does not equal long term projection in per person crop yields.

In practice, it has and does, due to crop yield increase faster than the substantially slower rate of population growth.

In fact, the world's annual population growth rate has dropped to 1.1% (2010), a major decline from when it was 1.7% twenty years ago, continuing to decline and headed for under 1%/year (eventually even 0% then decline later in the century under most predictions). Meanwhile, crop yields increase far faster. Agricultural progress is not something relegated to the past of the green revolution but continuing substantially compared to even a decade ago. For instance:



With less developed countries having crop yields literally several times less than those in the more industrialized countries, even as yields continue to increase in the latter too, there's enormous opportunity for progress.

And that's how progress occurs, not by just saying we're doomed but understanding the real figures and, as always, the potential of applied technology and science.

I'm a transhumanist, and those with a problem-solving philosophy have greater potential to change the world for the better than your attitude.

[Tritonic]

And the cliff for oil is arriving by 2012. Tell me, how many desal plants have you got in the pipeline now? And how quickly will you build them, or nuke plants, with a global decline rate in net energy of 4% at minimum?

A world energy decline rate of 4% beginning in two years, like around a 12% decline per year of the 1/3rd of it from oil (unless you want to claim that about other sources)? I could go on about everything from how much liquid fuel is already produced from natural gas (which keeps having reserve figures much increased by developments, let alone eventual methane hydrates), to nukes & renewables, to dirty but significant coal and many other topics. The world energy supply is more diverse and robust than many people imagine. Everything is much more gradual for the world overall than single local sources, because of the redundancy of sources.

But I hardly even need to argue this when everyone will be around to see your 2-year prediction become wrong. You're not a petroleum geologist, nor an engineer.

I see there's a sticky in the SLAM library dating to 2007. http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 9&t=111626

It states "Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes believes production peaked in May, 2005."

It also states: "Consequently, after the peak, the United States will experience a precipitous drop in oil imports; combined with currently-declining US oil production, it will lose approximately 1/3 of the energy it consumes. This will correspond to a 1/3 drop in GDP over that period, between six and ten years after peak, in addition to the drop caused by declining domestic production."

There are many points which could be made there (even the fallacy of assuming GDP is linearly proportional to such), but let's begin by pointing out the obvious. It is been 5 years since May 2005. Let's see: 86.5 million barrels/day world oil supply first quarter 2010 now. That's a three percent rise over the prior 83.8 million barrels/day five years ago in 2005 (statistics), but, most of all, it isn't a precipitous drop.

It is easier to attack a strawman than a specific argument, so I half expect you're thinking of responding by distorting my points inaccurately into "infinite oil." But my point is that the predictions of you and similar biased amateurs with zero expertise in the field have repeatedly been seen to be of terrible accuracy. About any major government institution, or the professionals in the multi-trillion dollar industry, forecast a more gradual rate of changes overall over a number of decades, as some oilfields decline but NGLs continue their increase for many years, etc.

Sure, for instance, you probably think natural gas is going to drastically decline in several years or some other extremely short timeframe. Yet do you ever wonder why corporations and governments with access to unlimited numbers of experts put billions of dollars into building natural gas powerplants today (in many cases, though more power generation is coal)? Whether they care about the environment at all or not, they do care about profits, and building those power plants would be a fool's mistake financially if their fuel requirements for operation became unaffordable soon after completion. That's just a little illustration of how expert analysis does not equal you.

[K. A. Pital]

The world energy supply is more diverse and robust than many people imagine. Everything is much more gradual for the world overall than single local sources, because of the redundancy of sources.

Do show, if you please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World ... mption.png
So far what is seen is that non-renewable resources constitute an absolute majority of our energy consumption.

The most disturbing thing about the graph is that nuclear and hydro almost stand flat relative to other types of energy sources' use, which means were increasing the consumption of non-renewables and non-nuclear energy much faster than that of any other type of energy source present.

[Tritonic]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World ... mption.png
So far what is seen is that non-renewable resources constitute an absolute majority of our energy consumption.

Lumping all non-renewable energy resources together isn't that directly relevant to anything like the timeframes Admiral Valdemar was going on about, given the magnitude of coal reserves, natural gas / methane hydrate reserves, etc. Of course, like many people, I'd prefer a great shift to nukes / renewables and the sooner the better, as might happen if progress continues. (For instance, in modern-year dollars, solar cells cost $30 a watt for the early semiconductors in 1974, $10 a watt in 1979, $5 a watt in 1990, and now in 2010 are approaching $1 a watt while headed towards further improvement, although all those figures should be multiplied by several times if considering the low capacity factor).

[K. A. Pital]

Lumping all non-renewable energy resources together isn't that directly relevant to anything like the timeframes Admiral Valdemar was going on about, given the magnitude of coal reserves, natural gas / methane hydrate reserves, etc.

The problem is that oil currently constitutes 37% of the world's energy consumption. Assuming a 0,5% per year replenishment rate (i.e. gas or coal can replenish 0,5% of lost oil consumption per year), that would still take no less than a few decades. If oil consumption falls at a faster rate, it will produce enormous stress on the whole energy supply system.

Not that the stress isn't already evident, with demand for energy rising faster than supply of said energy.

The oil dependency of the world is still enormous. A collapse of oil consumption in 10-20 years is a catastrophic event. If the consumption will fall in a longer timeframe (30 to 60 years), it would still produce an enormous stress, which might be too much to handle.

A comfortable timespan for oil use reduction which would not produce stress or require urgent and extreme measures to expand other sources of energy' use is 60 to 120 years. In that case, oil energy reduction will proceed at a rate of less than 0,5% per year and thus be more or less comfortable for the world to shift.

Of course, like many people, I'd prefer a great shift to nukes / renewables and the sooner the better, as might happen if progress continues.

The question of speed is not purely academic. If you shift slowly to nuclear power, the stress produced by losing a large fraction of world's energy supply will lead to economic shocks that will hinder further technical progress.

Renewables are a very small fraction of world's energy use.

[Anguirus]

I'm a transhumanist, and those with a problem-solving philosophy have greater potential to change the world for the better than your attitude.

What in the hell does this have to do with anything?

It's rather ironic that someone who puts SO much stock in extrapolated past trends does not believe that mass famine, which is an event with precedent, is more likely than the machines saving us all with handwaving, an event without precedent.

Your summation of the situation is exactly false. The contempt you have for the idea that humanity is unavoidably limited by ecology makes you part of the problem.

Unless you are actively working to solve these problems, it is insanely egregious to take credit for their presumed future solutions because of your "optimism" while talking to the professional ecologist.

[Darth Wong]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World ... mption.png
So far what is seen is that non-renewable resources constitute an absolute majority of our energy consumption.

Lumping all non-renewable energy resources together isn't that directly relevant to anything like the timeframes Admiral Valdemar was going on about, given the magnitude of coal reserves, natural gas / methane hydrate reserves, etc. Of course, like many people, I'd prefer a great shift to nukes / renewables and the sooner the better, as might happen if progress continues. (For instance, in modern-year dollars, solar cells cost $30 a watt for the early semiconductors in 1974, $10 a watt in 1979, $5 a watt in 1990, and now in 2010 are approaching $1 a watt while headed towards further improvement, although all those figures should be multiplied by several times if considering the low capacity factor).

While Alyrium and Valdemar are known for making grandstanding doomsday predictions and touting their biology background to do it (even though it's not really that directly relevant), your own position seems to be based on the idea that supply fears are unwarranted because things are going fine right now. The problem is that this is only true in the broadest sense, ie- if you look at the entire world and disregard what's happening on a more regional basis.

There are many parts of the world in which things we call "environmental doomsaying" are happening right now: where the farming industry is in shambles and everything looks fine only because we either give them food or they have the money to keep buying it, like the Brits do.

[Vehrec]

I've found a soil degradation map from 1990, and while it might be 20 years out of date, it still gives you a good idea of the scope of the problem. Incidentally, I found it while searching for this article.

Link to huge screenbreaking map.

Now, these erosional problems are not impossible to solve-grass roots efforts, planting trees along rivers and streams, using more efficient irrigation and even enriching soil aggressively as was done for centuries in parts of the Amazon and the Netherlands can be still done. Unfortunately, people are generally stupid, short sighted, and fail to understand why they should give a damn about 60 years down the road, when they quite sensibly expect to be either dead or more concerned about the fucking tube the doctors have shoved up their ass. It's easy for a farmer to see that he can get more money by cutting trees and plowing all the land he owns, hard for him to see what those tree's do for his land. Easy to see that tractors and combines increase the speed of planting and harvests, and hard to see that these same machines reduce its size by compacting the soil into impermeability. Its hard to see the benefits of letting a field lie fallow when you could plant it with wheat-until you understand that not being farmed regenerates the soil.

[Tritonic]

Assuming a 0,5% per year replenishment rate (i.e. gas or coal can replenish 0,5% of lost oil consumption per year), that would still take no less than a few decades.

Most predictions, for professional ones by top institutions like the U.S. government's EIA, envision changes primarily over a few decades. (There's also the perspective of past history like wood's decline from 90% of the American energy supply in 1850 to be 15% fifty years later in 1900, or natural gas going from 4% in 1900 to be around 45% in 1950).





Also, you can't just say numbers like your 0.5% annual max changeover rate without justification over any other figure. Why not 1%, 1.5%, etc.? If you want to say such, you must back up such statements, and keep in mind the burden of proof will be exceptionally high if such differs from the default of tending to greater trust the major professional bodies like the EIA, IEA, etc. Really rates of change depend on circumstances; to take an extreme example, we didn't have a 0.5% max annual change rate of almost anything during WWII.

Besides, you live in China. You've seen changes faster than 0.5% a year, have you not?

Not that the stress isn't already evident, with demand for energy rising faster than supply of said energy.

Yes. I'm not in disagreement there. For instance, such as the 3% growth of world oil+other-liquids supply over the past 5 years I previously illustrated was much less than world GDP growth over that period, and, more specifically, less than how much usage would have increased at constant price, forcing increasing conservation and substitution. (Though the highest blip a while back was primarily from a speculator bubble, of course oil prices overall are still higher now than they were 5 years ago). In my country, for instance, automobile fuel standards are rising to 35.5 mpg planned by 2016 for new vehicles (recent announcement), which would make new vehicles use almost half as much fuel per mile driven as the current average (about 20 mpg). Likewise even President Obama is now supporting opening up more off-shore drilling, not that anybody thinks such is a full solution but just to help ease transitions over the next few decades a little. It is a significant concern.

But none of that justifies the likes of Admiral Valdemar's claim that I was arguing against. Sometimes it seems there is a common black/white fallacy, treating a situation as binary, one extreme or the other. We don't have infinite oil, but that is no excuse to go utterly off the deep end on improperly supported made-up predictions.

Renewables are a very small fraction of world's energy use.

Of course. Since, for instance, solar power is currently more expensive than coal for generating electricity, and almost 100% of companies require choosing methods as cheap as their competition to stay in business, one would expect approximately 0% solar power usage right up until such time as it becomes cheaper than coal / natural gas. Then a switchover starts to occur. If, for instance, in the year 20XY someone developed a solar panel that was as much cheaper than 2010 solar panels as 2010 solar panels are cheaper than those of the 1980s, we'd start seeing rapid rise to tens of percent of the electricity supply, producing power during the day in areas close to good locations like near-cloudless deserts. That'd allow natural gas power plants to be shut down to save fuel expenses then and rather run at night. Expanding to more of the electricity supply beyond that would be harder, but, depending on just how cheap such got compared to the competition, such might spur storage or intercontinental power transmission between daylight & dark regions. (We have commercial superconductor power transmission lines already; just the current market situation mostly doesn't justify their present economics, although, for instance, Long Island Power Authority installed some a couple years ago).

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It's rather ironic that someone who puts SO much stock in extrapolated past trends does not believe that mass famine, which is an event with precedent, is more likely than the machines saving us all with handwaving, an event without precedent.

I could reply to this "handwaving" mischaracterization, but it is so bad as to be not worthy, since you show no comprehension if you even read the thread, just determination that I don't share your general ideology / tribe, giving an unintelligent emotional reaction.

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While Alyrium and Valdemar are known for making grandstanding doomsday predictions and touting their biology background to do it (even though it's not really that directly relevant), your own position seems to be based on the idea that supply fears are unwarranted because things are going fine right now. The problem is that this is only true in the broadest sense, ie- if you look at the entire world and disregard what's happening on a more regional basis.

I don't support people jumping into believing the doomsday predictions, based on reported comments of someone at a conference when even their 75 gigaton/year figure of soil loss rate corresponds as an overall average to about 1/1000th of the first 0.3 meter of world soil (about 8E13 ton mass). Of course, regional variation is great, and some areas have more topsoil loss than others by far. We can see that in past history, when, for instance, where I live used to be the center of giant black dust clouds from soil erosion in the 1930s. The government instituted the beginning of modern soil conservation practices, planting a couple hundred million trees, teaching farmers about contour plowing, (alternating) strip farming on slopes, etc. China right now has issues there (dust clouds even blowing out to the Pacific), one of many ways in which it mirrors many of the environmental issues America had during industrialization, although the Chinese are still successfully increasing food production, and I wouldn't underestimate their ability to implement counteracting measures in the future.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Tritonic, the IEA and EIA have had notoriously bad predictions in the past. You really need to read the US military report on oil released last month which doesn't rely on trying to paint a rosy picture to satisfy a party line (indeed, the military is actively making a lot of changes given they are the world's largest single petroleum user. I trust their take on matters far more than Fatih Birol's prognostication, even). There will be a 10 Mbpd gap by 2015. Nowhere has the IEA or EIA even acknowledged such problems openly, but if you read between the lines, you see a MASSIVE shortfall in the near future as spare capacity from megaprojects past 2012 is more evident. Their predictions require, at minimum, a new Saudi Arabia each year to maintain our global output today, and that's not counting increasing production for economic growth. They don't say where this new oil is coming from. They simply extrapolate (there's that word again) that previous growth will occur as normal. However, this is simply not the case, and even the IEA and EIA duo had to revise down their idea of 120 Mbpd by mid next century, which is now hopelessly cut to barely 90, which even then, isn't achievable via oil, thus the "all liquids" definition was brought in instead. Crude peaked a long time ago; without NGLs, bio-fuels and the tar sands, we'd have had no growth in liquid fuels at all for the last decade.

You also totally missed my points on net exports eroding this supply at a greater than geological decline rate, which even at the low end (the IEA has predicted over 8% in last year's WEO), would cause tremendous problems with any economic activity in the immediate future. Not a hundred years from now, not even ten, but the next couple of years. Look at the UK and Indonesia for a good example of how far off a cliff things can go, with declines in exports of 50%. Do you seriously expect nations losing that much of their export revenue, and those who benefit from such oil for import, can weather that kind of storm in less than a decade (the UK went from a net exporter to a net importer from '99 to '06).

Pointing to technological answers belies a naïveté that the likes of Michael Klare would need to rid you of. We are not dealing with swapping a fuse in a plug here, we're talking about geo-politics making any plan to conserve or drill elsewhere a political minefield. How will the US contend with losing out on exports from the KSA to China? Are you going to ask nicely, start a war, or try and outbid them with a soon to be totally worthless dollar (check Citi's Willem Buiter for how screwed the Anglo nations are with respect to their national debts)?

[Anguirus]

I could reply to this "handwaving" mischaracterization, but it is so bad as to be not worthy, since you show no comprehension if you even read the thread, just determination that I don't share your general ideology / tribe, giving an unintelligent emotional reaction.

Don't selectively quote me. I had no idea what your "general ideology" was until YOU brought it up to imply that you were somehow superior at assessing the world agricultural situation than Alyrium. I'm simply pointing out that whatever you wish to call your optimism, invoking it fails to support anything that you're saying.

I have read the thread, and it had nothing to do with transhumanism until you evoked it as a Red Herring. You should either abandon your claim that your transhumanist ideology is relevant to your qualifications, or justify it.

[Tritonic]

You really need to read the US military report on oil released last month which doesn't rely on trying to paint a rosy picture to satisfy a party line (indeed, the military is actively making a lot of changes given they are the world's largest single petroleum user.

Testing aircraft on synthetic fuels which can be domestically produced from biomass waste (or natural gas, or coal) is a sign of progress, and the military is particularly concerned because they need to consider worst-case scenarios up to major wars disrupting oil imports.

Nowhere has the IEA or EIA even acknowledged such problems openly, but if you read between the lines, you see a MASSIVE shortfall in the near future as spare capacity from megaprojects past 2012 is more evident.

Look closely at the dark blue part of the prior graph from the IEA:



They *do* expect major declines in old conventional oil fields, many millions of barrels/day seen by 2020. Where they differ from you, though, is that there is also the continuing expansion of the other sources depicted. The industry has been playing this game of depleting one oil field to move onto the next (plus expanding other sources) for a long time, and they are rather good at it. Many local sources peaked and declined decades ago. One actually could have made a similar graph a couple decades ago, since the fields which were producing back in 1990 have often declined greatly. We aren't going to directly currently see the megaprojects of, say, 2025 as much as those scheduled for 2011, since, like in any other field, construction would not begin that far in advance.

It won't utterly last forever. There is, of course, a reason it is so valuable that electric vehicles are greatly improving and headed towards being more mainstream. But it is dragged out over a long period of time. I'm not sure if you fully appreciate how your prediction appears to someone is used to every single decade someone saying this exact year or several years is the turning point of rapid disaster. I half-expect to be here in 2012 watching you make a prediction then about a sharp cliff in 2014 or something.

Crude peaked a long time ago; without NGLs, bio-fuels and the tar sands, we'd have had no growth in liquid fuels at all for the last decade.

Crude did indeed already peak long ago in terms of the most conventional crude. In many ways, that's a good thing, though, as it has spurred the development of other methods of getting liquid fuel, which is going to help us greatly as the most conventional supplies in old oilfields continue their decline.

Look at the UK and Indonesia for a good example of how far off a cliff things can go, with declines in exports of 50%.

The global picture has been so much different meanwhile, though, because it is a superposition of many curves which are not all in sync, for different oil fields and for other sources. As a loose analogy, this is a bit like a mathematical situation, where you have a bunch of sine waves out of sync, and then you superimpose them to get a function which is relatively more flat than any single curve.

Not a hundred years from now, not even ten, but the next couple of years.

This really comes down to disputes over the specific numbers. Again, though, when you make such short-term predictions, the passage of time rapidly renders my arguments here unneeded and superfluous. I think the relative decline of oil prices after a largely speculation-driven jump a couple years ago did far more to tone down some of the 2007-2008 predictions on the internet than any argument meanwhile would have done so.