The Royal Society Disaster Movie: starring the Ehrlichs and The Prince of Wales

Unfortunately, there has only been a collapse in the careful science that the Royal Society is famed for.

” Disaster Movie ”
sounds more like a Royal sit-com

Prevaricate:
Speak or act in an evasive way: “he prevaricated when journalists asked questions”.
So he advises Hisself to seize the initiative provided by The Erlichs Chorus and stop being evasive.about intentions

Sales 101: create a sense of urgency.

Martin Clark says on January 11, 2013 at 4:26 pm:
“The esteemed Charles really ought to get back to what he is good at, eg raising contented herds of cattle and growing rhubarb.”
= = = = = =
He can talk to the trees too you know – and they are good listeners as they keep stum when he speaks. – Shame he now wants to restrict their CO2 intake —-.

Caleb says:
January 11, 2013 at 4:35 pm
“In our lifetimes we may see England basically vanish from the map, leaving only the legacy of its language (and its thought), and the mystery of how such a great nation could have fallen so far so swiftly.”
Not a mistery. A planned transformation; planned by the Fabians. It’s documented.

Oh were it so easy but alas not so. Our most pressing societal problems have nothing to do with climate and everything to do with greed, avers, True Belief and our willingness to listen to all these demigods.

There are only two possible conclusions that can be drawn about people like the leaders of the Royal Society:
– either they are frauds, posing as scientists, lacking any knowledge or training in the scientific method, otherwise they would relent on their belief and accede that their position is unsustainable
– or this is not about science for them, and they are cynically using their position to argue from authority, in order to sell their world view and politics
In both cases – they abandon the title of scientist and take on new titles: activist and ignoramus.

Unfortunately the most learned Royal Society has form in the field of concentrated pompous arrogance at its most senior levels having had the honour to have as one of its Presidents, one of the greatest of scientists, Lord Kelvin, President of the Society in 1895 who is reported to have declared “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” Why ? – presumably for no other reason than because he said so!.
Where did his ignorance lie – firstly he was totally ignorant of ‘aerodynamics of the wing’; but even worse, he was blind to the possibility of there being a field of physical science of which he was not aware!
The honourable Lord followed up that gem with this one to an assemblage of physicists at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900 in which he stated, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
Oh, and as to the Royal Society’s Motto –
“Nullius in verba” – (“Take no one’s word for it”.)
Which claims the Society – “ is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment”.
Yes, quite so. Time for a new motto?- perhaps ‘Incumbo inflatus superbia’
As to his Royal Highness – I do hope we do not skip a generation; it’s just the succession Australia needs to go Republic!

troe says:
January 11, 2013 at 4:09 pm
“bring out the clowns” Paul Erlich is an proven idiot period. I’m happy to see this jackwagon is still at it since refuting him is like shooting fish in a glass barrel. As for HRH his every utterance makes the case for a skip in generations. De-funding the organizations they write of is a high priority.
=============================================
The UN and the IPCC have been corrupt forever… they both need to go.. pronto
they most certainly need to be defunded and disbanded.

some possible reasons for the panic!
11 Jan: ICIS: Vote to ban Russian carbon emission reduction units from EU ETS set for 23 January
The EU’s Climate Change Committee is set to vote on 23 January on the European Commission’s proposal to restrict rules regarding the use of emission reduction units (ERUs) in Phase III (2013-2020) of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS)…
http://www.icis.com/heren/articles/2013/01/11/9631170/vote-to-ban-russian-carbon-emission-reduction-units-from-eu-ets-set-for-23.html
11 Jan: Reuters Point Carbon: ERUs plummet 61 pct on commission ban plans
LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters Point Carbon) – Emission Reduction Units (ERUs) plummeted as much as 60 percent on Friday on news the EU had watered down its proposal to restrict the use of some types of U.N. carbon credits from the bloc’s emissions trading scheme, traders said…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2134315?&ref=searchlist
10 Jan: Reuters Point Carbon: California to net less than planned from carbon market
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 10 (Reuters Point Carbon) – Weaker-than-anticipated demand for permits at California’s inaugural carbon auction has caused the state to lower its forecast for expected cap-and-trade revenue from $1 billion to $200 million for the year, dealing a blow to the governor’s plans to use the money to fund a costly high-speed rail project…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2132722?&ref=searchlist

Stupidity annoys me. Unfortunately scientists are not immune to it as James Watson points out in the Double Helix: “One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.” Fifty years on we see the Royal Society boosting the Ehrlich’s stupidity, evidently approved by its president, Sir Paul Nurse.

The Future King of Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain, would-be Defender of the Faith & Commander-in-chief of the British Armed Forces is determined to seize the initiative and prevaricate no further. Am I surprised?

We know that David Cameron’s father-in-law makes £1,000 per day from his small wind farm.
Prince Chuckles (and the’family’) owns vast swathes of the UK, including (through the Crown Estates) the Rights to the entire coast below low tide. Much of the Royal land holdings include areas that are being developed by BigWind. Chuckles must be trousering Millions per day from the wind scam.
Is this a clue as to why he is so keen on cAGW lies? I doubt that any individual in the UK has abigger direct financial interest in this scam.
Bad King John was a philanthropist compared with this guy.

I’ve just looking at a program on National Geographic about the greatest threat against Britain during the 17th century, witchcraft and the increasing influence of the devil, which greatly worried the royals at the time!
Nothing really changes. Human nature stays the same.

“Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s paper provides a comprehensive description of the damaging effects of escalating climate disruption,
CAGW falsehoods.
“overpopulation”
The world population growth rate as an annual percentage rate has halved in the past several decades and continues to decline due to the demographic transition, projected to drop to 0% and negative later this century. Some countries like Japan have already started declining.
“overconsumption,”
From human energy usage of 2 terawatts electrical power plus several terawatts other, tiny compared to 200000 terawatts of sunlight hitting Earth, tiny compared to the energy reserves in billions of tons of uranium in seawater and thorium on land (quite affordably extractable especially if breeder reactors were used)?
From human material usage of the equivalent of several cubic kilometers or less of material per year on a planet where the crust is hundreds of millions of cubic kilometers?
There isn’t a single element which is the grand disaster of running out that activists claim. Aluminum, iron, and a number of others are high percentages of the crust with quadrillions of tons available. Elements which are less common are needed in around proportionately lesser quantities anyway; for instance, while phosphorus is only 0.1% or so (IIRC) of the average rock by mass, it is also a comparably low percentage of vegetation by mass, and mankind will never run out of phosphorus affordable to extract relative to the amount needed for fertilizer. Hydrocarbons, including plastics as well as fuels, can be synthesized by Fischer-Tropsch methods using any hydrogen source, any carbon source, and any energy source (though the amount of fossil fuels is vastly more than common false claims imply anyway).
Sometimes there can be trouble like too many people littering in a locale, but there is no intrinsic problem with current and future consumption, rather great benefits compared to how much life sucked for the average peasant or slave of past ages. In fact, increasing consumption, production, and industrial & economic capabilities is the proper destiny of mankind. Although obviously not done overnight, there is enough material in the solar system for millions of times Earth’s surface area in artificial worlds, space habitats (with pseudogravity by rotation, radiation shielding from local extraterrestrial material or magnetic shields, and original launch of immigrants by options including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram where each $70 billion generation 2 installation could send up 4 million people per decade).
“pole-to-pole distribution of dangerous toxic chemicals”
Predominately vastly overrated.
On the whole, people are living longer and healthier than ever before. With something like 99% of cancer mortality occuring to people over age 50, cancer is primarily a subdisease of aging (senescence) effectively. While cancer existed eons before technological civilization (as can be seen in old fossils), more people are living long enough to encounter cancer now, but that is better than how in the old days people died of other causes at earlier ages.
“poor technology choices,”
Economics is a valid consideration. Poverty sucks (and statistically kills).
“depletion of resources including water”
Mankind couldn’t use up the oceans if we tried; desalination is quite affordable now if needed, only a few hundred dollars per acre-foot; and water goes in a cycle. There are some local cases of underground fresh water which can be depleted, leading to a need to switch to other sources, but no show-stopper for mankind as a whole.
“soils”
More mathematical illiteracy on the whole.
“biodiversity essential to food production,”
There are only a moderate number of thousands of vertebrate species. Saving them (and bringing back some cool extinct species like mammoths by cloning) is desirable but does not require the demands of Ehrlich-type people. Most total biodiversity, as in figures like millions of species in press releases, consists of the number of invertebrates (such as insects). Such as the number of different types of bugs in a jungle in South America has little to do with such as the yield of growing corn in Iowa. Increasing CO2 greatly aids food production, though.
————————————
The BSing debunked above is among the real roots of the CAGW movement, part of why it is an excuse for the cuts to mankind’s consumption, production, and capabilities that they want anyway. Rarely does direct argument on CAGW touch on these, but that is partially why such argument is so rarely effective, because someone believing the quotes above tends to want CAGW to be believed by others (regardless of the actual facts of climate and not really caring that much about them).

The Alarmists seem incapable of facing the major contradiction in their position.
On the one hand, they see mankind as so powerful as to be radically changing the planet and its climate, and on the other hand, so puny that it cannot successfully adapt to changes like it has always done in the past.
This is why they are always wrong.

Perhaps i’m wrong then – Per Strandberg, and have it in reverse. A Prince might be worried about schoolroom fantasy, but a Scientific academy ought to have better standards

“””””…..Vinceo says:
January 11, 2013 at 6:06 pm
“…our grandchildren’s future depends entirely on whether we seize the initiative and prevaricate no further.” Surely he meant “procrastinate” not “prevaricate”? “””””
No you have it completely wrong; he said prevaricate, and that is what he means. This prevarification has gone on long enough; time for some truth to shine through.

“””””…..Caleb says:
January 11, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Don’t be such a dunderhead, Paul Erhlich. China will not collapse. India will not collapse. It is WESTERN civilization that is likely to fall apart.
As for Prince Charles….he and his mother have overseen the collapse of a great world power. In our lifetimes we may see England basically vanish from the map, leaving only the legacy of its language (and its thought), and the mystery of how such a great nation could have fallen so far so swiftly……”””””
Perhaps you don’t understand the role (actually lack of a role) of the British Monarchy.
The people and the governments they elected are entirely responsible for the “collapse of a great world power.” QE II had nowt to do with it.
What was it Sir Winston Churchill said: “I am not come to power to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” or words to that effect.
Then of course he did just that. The Royal Family simply looks on; they play no part in the politics of the country.

What an idiot, more a leech. I think the prince needs to labor for a day, no, a year. That poor fellow couldn’t last month as a laborer espousing his views. I contend he would need counseling after the experience if he couldn’t fly away.
Boys will be boys ya know.

I don’t believe Ehrlich has ever acknowledged he was wrong about anything. The timing just required adjusting. In the same sense, I suppose, that Harold Camping’s predictions about the end of the world weren’t wrong per se, just the timing was an issue…

Ditto Canman,
Great idea. That is sooo Ehrlich. Really?
Really?

Every evening the Queen prays, dear lord, please one more day, to keep that …… of mine off of the throne.
But the Brits still have one claim to fame, the Royal Family is the longest ongoing soap-opera in the english speaking world,the above; its the Arslick episode.

I saw this post over at AmericanDigest a few days ago and, after reading this post about the Ehrlichs and the Prince, I thought it might provide some needed perspective to all those folks who are so confident in and attached to, their own prognostications.
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/1910.php
JANUARY 8, 2013
1910: Car and Nation
[Note: Item received in email this morning.]
This car was assembled on November 11th of 1910. Normally, 1909/1910 style bodies were wooden, but this 1910 style body is partially steel, the only one known; presumably a transition to the use of all steel bodies in 1911. It was originally delivered to R.E. Lawrence in Astoria, IL. Vernon Jarvis of Decatur, IL, purchased the car in 1951 and later displayed it in his Early American Museum at Silver Springs, FL, until in 1967, when the current owner bought it. After 30 years in storage, restoration was completed in March, 2007.
The year is 1910, over one hundred years ago.
The average life expectancy for men was 47 years.
Fuel for this car was sold in drug stores only.
Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
The average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour.
The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME.
Ninety percent of all Doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press AND the government as ‘substandard.’
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.
The five leading causes of death were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2, Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars.
The population of Las Vegas Nevada was only 30!
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn’t been invented yet.
There was no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.
Two out of every 10 adults couldn’t read or write and only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.!
I am now going to forward this to someone else without typing it myself.
From there, it will be sent to others all over the WORLD… all in a matter of seconds!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at January 8, 2013 11:00 PM
Does anyone really suspect that the changes the world will experience between now and the end of this century will actually be less dramatic than those that have occurred over the last hundred years? I have no idea what the world of 2100 will look like and, since I won’t be here to see it, I can’t say that I am much bothered by that. What does bother me is the growing flock of morons who, having firmly established that they are entirely oblivious to what is actually going on in the present moment, nevertheless cling like barnacles to the notion that they can know the limitless future with such rock solid certainty that anyone who challenges their Malthusian visions is committing a crime against humanity which merits a capital sentence.

Perhaps the Royal Society has a point. What they have gotten wrong is the cause of the collapse for those which did fail and dis: the return of the cold.
Selection of completely inappropriate tools will just make an even bigger mess.

Here is something I posted on tips and notes but seems more appropriate here.

“A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today. And then it will fall……………………
From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s…………
And in the long term—on the order of centuries—we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.single.html

Counter argument with a response from the author of the above.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/11/why_the_world_population_will_not_decline.html
The graph Ehrlich probably doesn’t want you to see.
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/worldgrgraph.php

If Prince Charles was concerned about the environment he wouldn’t insist on being driven everywhere in his Bentley that does an environment saving 18 mpg. Not that that kind of hypocricy will come as a surprise to readers here.
He is a deluded fool.

Martin Clark says on January 11, 2013 at 4:26 pm:
“The esteemed Charles really ought to get back to what he is good at, eg raising contented herds of cattle and growing rhubarb.”
Prince Charles? Be informed, people, we are dealing with someone who’s stated ambition in life is to become a tampon.
Says it all, really.

Steve Jones says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:56 am
He is a deluded fool.
Steve, that’s quite an insulting statement. Many deluded fools of my acquaintance would be most upset that you’re comparing them to Loonie Prince Charlie.
😀

[snip . . OT . . mod]

Jimbo, from your quote:

And in the long term—on the order of centuries—we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity.

This is truly awe inspiring – both that someone would take it seriously and that someone would write it in the first place.
This is exactly the same kind of woolly-headed thinking that the whole AGW thing is based on. See a trend? Draw a straight line, extend to infinity (or catastrophe, whichever comes first).
Honestly, if the world population gets low enough that humanity is facing extinction, I have to say that if people don’t do something about it they would then DESERVE that extinction. How could any sane, rational person actually extend that “trend” to zero? While there probably is a population optimum, that number is firmly rooted in culture, not resources. From what I’ve seen, people used to high density populations like India or China immigrate to new, open spaces and immediately long for the comfort of people. The wide-open spaces that many North Americans take for granted (and consider desirable) are perceived as lonely and unwanted. Personally, if I could afford it, I would be HAPPY to have a ranch somewhere 1/2 hour or so out of town… close enough to get supplies, far enough to be isolated. With enough property to wander around without encountering neighbors.
When I was a kid we went to World’s Fair 74, in Spokane, Washington. I clearly remember the giant population clock, dinging each birth, counting upwards at an alarming rate. I figured it was horrible, because I had no frame of reference. It seemed like a “population bomb” at the time, but mostly because we were being told it was. Never mind that most of that “explosion” was happening in countries that were experiencing incredible advances in food production and medical care, that even the poorest person in almost every First World nation has a better life than Royalty even just decades ago.
It’s pretty much a given that as prosperity and quality of life improves, fertility decreases. Most First-World nations are below replacement numbers, thus essentially forcing governments to open the doors to immigration just to ensure a healthy tax base. Population worriers need to consider that the only answer to overpopulation is to increase the standard of living, which is ironic given that they want to decrease living standards as a sacrifice to the AGW god.
Fertility Rates: (2.00 = minimal replacement)
Canada: 1.59
US: 2.06
Australia: 1.77
UK: 1.91
Russia: 1.61
(from http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?t=0&v=31&l=en )
As for Prince Charles, we can try, but the only combinations of words that would accurately describe him would certainly not get past moderation.

CodeTech says:
January 12, 2013 at 4:05 am
Jimbo, from your quote:………..

You may have missed the counter argument I put because I have my doubts too. Unlike Warmists I have not nailed my flag to the mast and believe in looking at both sides of an issue.

Counter argument with a response from the author of the above.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/11/why_the_world_population_will_not_decline.html

“Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?”
Only if we can manage to shake off the leaches, parasites, sociopaths and meglomaniacs that are he!!bent on killing it.
“Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” ~ Maurice Strong, September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine. Strong was the Chair at the First Earth Summit in 1972 at about the same time the Erhlichs and Obama’s Science Czar, John Holdren were writing about Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
Sure sounds like they are intent on becoming Global Dictators doesn’t it? And not just dictators but dictators who will treat humans as chattel (aka cattle)
A primary weapon is the World Wild Life fund
The WWF’s Vast Pool of Oil Money
World Wildlife Fund ~ 20% of its revenue from government tax money, 10% from industry, and half from prescriptive foundations.
The WWF and the 1001 Club
Prince Bernhard and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) ~ The White Man’s Game
As we have seen as skeptics the greatest tool the elite have is condemning those who look behind the curtain as ‘Conspiracy theorists’
Seems Bill Clinton believes in ‘Conspiracies’ too. (Search Clinton and the London School of economics) When Bill Clinton delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on July 16, 1992…[he] paid tribute to the memory of his Georgetown professor…Carroll Quigley Here are excerpts from the book – Tragedy and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time, by Carroll Quigley, 1966
And the connection of Carroll Quigley to the UN Millennium Summit
Remember bill Clinton and Hillary were really pushing two pieces of legislation. The Food Safety Act that placed US agriculture under the control of the World Trade Organization and a health care bill.
If you want a way out conspiracy theory. Think of the Erhlichs and Holdren’s desire for “mass sterilization” and a “Planetary Regime” The World Trade organization’s demand for livestock Traceability and then read these articles and connect the dots.
RFID tags for Hospital Application
There’s not a lot of middle ground on the subject of implanting electronic identification chips in humans. Advocates of technologies like radio frequency identification tags say their potentially life-saving benefits far outweigh any Orwellian concerns about privacy…
[Florida] Senate Sneaks RFID Drivers License, Internet ID into Transportation Bill… this database already includes biometrics in the form of computer facial recognition data..
[UK] Every newborn baby could undergo DNA testing and have their genetic code stored in a nationwide data bank…[is] being considered by ministers, who said yesterday that genetic technology could bring about a huge change in healthcare.
If you’re a fortune teller, cheat on your spouse, or are loud in church, in New York State, the government will soon legally have the right to retrieve your DNA and put it in a DNA Databank
[Holland] Hospital dna samples may be used to help solve crimes

Laws in all 50 states require hospitals to collect a sample of every newborn baby’s blood… Some states (California and North Carolina, among others) retain the DNA samples collected from newborns indefinitely, and other states keep them for up to 23 years.
The stakes in this data war are high, as researchers and government agencies are realizing the value of such a databank of DNA and other genetic information. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has at least since 2002 been advocating for a national databank, calling such “leftover dried blood spot specimens” a “valuable . . . source for public health surveillance and . . . population-based data on prevalence of genetic variations.” The National Institutes of Health is using $13.5 million in taxpayer dollars to create a national blood sample repository.
These efforts are being aided by federal legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush last year that allows the federal government to screen the DNA of all newborns in the country. The purported justification for this far-reaching, privacy invasive law was the need to have a “national contingency plan” to meet “public health emergencies.”
State governments are moving quickly also to develop regimens for retaining and accessing what Sharon Terry of the Genetic Alliance calls a “national treasure” of data. Michigan, for example, reportedly has set up state-run freezer facilities at a “neonatal biobank” in Detroit….

The Drugging of Our Children – All of a sudden, it seems, millions of American children are said to be afflicted with mental illnesses. And they’re being put on strong medications—over periods of years—as treatment. Isn’t it time we stopped and looked at what the mental health establishment is getting us to do to our children?
How Public Schools Coerce Parents Into Giving Mind-Altering Drugs To Their Children
Freedom? Liberity? Our great-grandchildren won’t know what those word’s mean, if they are still capable of think that is.

It just could be that the Prince of Wales has put all of the Royal Chips on the marker, by precipitating the House of Winsdor into the climate debates. He is an utterly foolish fellow.

Jimbo says:
January 12, 2013 at 5:00 am
Will we have enough food to feed 9 billion people? I don’t know but it seems that as much as 50% of the world’s food output goes in the garbage. The potential is their.
http://www.imeche.org/knowledge/themes/environment/global-food
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You can blame the US government here in the USA. Thirty to forty years or more ago pig farmers had ‘garbage’ (food waste) routes and would pick up the town’s garbage, cook it to kill bacteria and feed it to the pigs. USDA regulations and USDA corn subsidies made garbage as pig food too costly and too much hassle so farmers now feed cheap corn or distillers grains (left overs from ethanol manufacture) instead. Farmers now work a full time job as well as farm so a garbage route is a time waster too.

….Beginning in 1973, policy changes promoted by Nixon Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz deregulated the corn market. He dismantled supply management policies, selling off government storage bins used as food security reserves and implemented “fencerow to fencerow” planting. Butz believed any overproduction should then be dealt with thru exports and “free trade.” The Russian Wheat Deal and the World Food Crisis of the early 1970s gave Butz the chance to promote the false notion that free markets would be good for farmers. Butz and agribusiness giant, Cargill, along with the Farm Bureau argued that farm prices crashing would be a positive because they would be remedied by more exports and new uses such as ethanol and corn sweeteners. The 1996 Freedom to Farm Act represented the culmination of this “free market” ideology by calling for the elimination, over 7 years, of all price floors and grain reserves. Instead, the “free market” would determine prices. This would “get government out of agriculture.” What actually happened was that prices collapsed by 1998 and the government had to bail out farmers with millions in emergency subsidy payments.…
The Facts Behind King Corn

h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard

– – – – – – – – –
Leif,
I see the paper had an in depth peer review (sarcasm):

Received November 28, 2012.
Accepted December 7, 2012.

Congratulations to your fellow Stanford associate.
An Aside not specifically to Leif: why do I find the admirable concept ‘Nullius in verba’ inconsistent with the very concept of ‘Royalty’ as in the Royal Society and Royal Prince Charles? Something privileged?
John

Notice the small print: the paper was invited to commemorate the election of the author P.R.E. to a R.S. Fellowship (Foreign Member). Therefore one should question whether the paper has been peer reviewed.
Notice the submission date:28 November 2012, with an acceptance 10 days later on 7 December 2012. This looks to be a fast process with little time for careful refereeing.
Notice: the grey literature in reference 4 to a speech by H.R.H The Prince of Wales 5 days before submission of the paper.

Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Finally, there is the statement attributed to Leewenhoek that he couldn’t imagine a comfortable world having a population density greater than that of the Netherlands. It may only be my perspective as a westerner, but a crowded world doesn’t seem ideal
Hi Kevin, Indeed Leeuwenhoek stated that he could not imagine the whole planet being as densely peopled as Holland, which seemed crowded to him even at that time. He calculated that the maximum carrying capacity of the earth was 13.385 billion people. That was in the 18th century when there were an estimated 500 million peole in the world.
You may be surprised that an updated calculation was made in the 20th century based on improved farming and technology. Roger Revelle (Al Gore’s professor) estimated in 1974 the carrying capacity of the earth was 40-50 billion people.
Here’s a fun calculculation you can do yourself. If you added the current population of China, plus the current population of India, and put them in the contiguous US (not including Alaska and Hawaii) in addition to the current population, the population density would be lower than The Netherlands is today. If you’ve been to The Netherlands you will know there is considerable open space.
I cannot understand why anyone would pay any serious attention to Ehrlich.

Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
“I hesitate to enter a posting that appears to parallel the Ehrlichs, or worst of all HRH, but there are a couple of limitations that I see real trouble getting around; notwithstanding the apparent removal of limitations through ingenuity.
The first is sunlight, which is truly a finite resource. There is sunlight enough to support a population of perhaps eight billion–maybe genetic engineering will get us around this one, but I think not.”
Chuckles. You think the amount of sunlight limits the world population to 8 billion? Let’s run some numbers.
8 billion people times 2300 calories per day gives 1.84e+013 calories a day. That’s our collective caloric needs.
That’s 6.716e+015 calories a year.
Japanese rice yields are 6 tonnes/hectare and you can harvest 4 times a year, that’s 24 tonnes a hectare (other high productivity countries like South Korea achieve the same).
Some experimental plots have achieved 22 tonnes in one harvest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice
But let’s stick with easily achievable 6 tonnes per harvest.
100g of Basmati Rice contain 262 calories.
So we need 2.56335877863e+012 kg of rice a year to satisfy collective caloric needs. Or
2.56335877863e+09 kg metric tons. Given 4 harvests and 6 tonnes/hectare we would then need
1.06806615776e+08 hectares or
1.06806615776e+06 km^2 of area planted.
So that’s a million square kilometers, about twice the size of Germany. Sufficient to produce enough calories for 8 billion people without using new experimental rice breeds. Or other higher yielding plants.
I think sunlight is not what limits us.

Unfortunately, the whole argument is proceeding from a false assumption ….that “civilsation” is present …To describe what is occurring on the planet at present as “civilisation” is no where near the truth ….fear, hate, greed and violence are present daily in the life of many populations on this planet and in many of our own daily lives.
The question isn’t whether we are in danger of losing civilisation ….it’s are we in danger of not ever reaching it.

Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
“The first is sunlight, which is truly a finite resource. There is sunlight enough to support a population of perhaps eight billion–maybe genetic engineering will get us around this one, but I think not.”
About 170000 trillion watts of sunlight hits earth.
There is 1360 watts per square meter of sunlight in space. After averaging day and night and angles of incidence (as related to a sphere’s surface area being 4 pi r^2 and thus 4 times its cross-section), except for what is reflected by clouds or otherwise lost in the atmosphere, sunlight averages 340 W/m^2 over Earth’s surface (which is 500 million square kilometers, 500 trillion square meters).
Human electrical power generation is about 2 trillion watts on average (and total human power usage, including non-electrical thermal power, just a few terawatts), tiny in comparison. Primarily it is not solar-powered, nor does it necessarily need to be (especially with billions of tons of extractable uranium in seawater, thorium on land, etc., as well as fossil fuels far beyond common false claims). But running out of sunlight is not happening.
When the world’s average cloud cover changes by 0.5%, a small portion of how much it has gone up and down over the decades in http://s7.postimage.org/69qd0llcr/intermediate.gif , even that nominally small variation is an albedo change impacting Earth’s solar energy balance more than the waste heat from every manmade generator on Earth. Yet that magnitude of change is not even very directly noticeable, with different datasets disagreeing on average cloud cover by more than that (for example, http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/further-attempt-to-falsify-the-svensmark-hypothesis/ ).
Any hypothetical civilization actually consuming a high fraction of sunlight received by Earth would be vastly beyond today’s capabilities and quite capable of expansion into space, where the sun puts out in total literally trillions of times more power (4E26 W) than is utilized by current civilization. (And any civilization reaching a full Dyson Swarm, in terms of starting to consume a large fraction of that, would be interstellar-capable, and there are billions of stars in the galaxy).
“The second is even more fundamental. The second law of thermodynamics requires a “reservoir” to dump waste energy, chemical wastes, and so forth, unless we somehow figure out a way to do everything in a reversible manner.”
Waste heat from the few terawatts of human power usage is tiny compared to sunlight received by Earth, as previously illustrated. One of the reasons you don’t see new continents or mountain ranges made from the waste of civilization is that its volume and mass is limited in context compared to the hundreds of millions of cubic kilometers of rock in Earth’s crust. As a thought experiment regarding volumes, while I’m not literally implying that people should or would do this, technically setting off some nukes in a desert somewhere would produce enough cubic kilometers of craters to hold human waste, though it is cheaper to utilize more local landfills.
“Finally, there is the statement attributed to Leewenhoek that he couldn’t imagine a comfortable world having a population density greater than that of the Netherlands. It may only be my perspective as a westerner, but a crowded world doesn’t seem ideal.”
The population density of the Netherlands is 405 people per square kilometer. The population density of the world today is 47 people per square kilometer of land area, about 12% as much on average.
Perhaps you’ve lived in cities all of your life, so the world seems crowded to you, but that is a matter of most people choosing to concentrate themselves into the 1.5% or so of land area that is urban.
“Fourty to fifty billion is something to contemplate.”
If you meant forty to fifty billion people, the world’s population is projected to peak at such as around 10 billion later in this century. The exact figure depends on the projection, but the observed demographic transition applies. The world’s population growth rate was once more than 2% per year in the 1960s; in decline downwards since then, it has already dropped below 1.2%.
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/images/worldgr.png
If you thought population was headed for forty to fifty billion, that could speak for the frequency of propaganda not showing the real picture. What will break the ability of media outlets to mislead there is how eventually results of the demographic transition become increasingly blatant. While the drop in fertility rates (average children born per woman) foretells the future without being initially seen by most people, after a lag period median age substantially goes up (the E.U. for instance), and then finally a country starts declining in population (Japan for example).
“What other inputs are needed for the yields of which you speak?”
Among the top inputs for agriculture:
Water: Natural fresh water is enough in most places, but desalinating seawater only costs a few hundred dollars per acre-foot extra now.
Carbon: The atmosphere is kept rich enough in carbon dioxide.
Hydrocarbon fuels for convenient running of farm equipment: Gasoline, diesel fuel, plastics, etc. can be made with the Fischer-Tropsch process from any carbon source (natural gas, biomass, garbage, atmospheric CO2, etc), a hydrogen source, and about any energy source. In practice, fossil fuels are abundant enough to be generally a bit cheaper so far, mostly keeping synthetic fuel displaced out of the market (with a few major exceptions like WWII Germany and Sasol in South Africa today), but either way fuel is produced and available.
Nitrogen for fertilizer, such as via NH3: The Haber process works with about any energy source and about any hydrogen source (albeit mostly using natural gas due to it being cheapest in most regions), while there is practically unlimited nitrogen in the atmosphere. Energy requirements for fertilizer production are actually small in overall context, as only like 5% or so of global natural gas production is used for making fertilizer.
Phosphorus for fertilizer: The amount of phosphorus in and needed by plants is a small fraction of 1% of their mass. Even the average rock (amongst quadrillions of tons in Earth’s crust) is 0.1% phosphorus. It is cheaper to mine higher-grade ores (which are available in lesser but still plentifully huge enough amounts), but the net result is mankind is not running out of phosphorus.

These facts seem to make no dent in the doomers thinking, which seems to believe we are as ill equipped as the Mayans to manage ourselves, our resources, and our environment. One wonders about their sanity.
———-
That’s an odd thing to say because I have gained the impression that the WUWT audience is against any attempt to manage ourselves, our resources or our environment.
And that includes both government regulation or by externalising costs so implicit costs can produce pricing signals in the free enterprise system.
In fact the whole WUWT message is short termism and my selfish hip pocket nerve is sacred.

“””””…..LazyTeenager says:
January 12, 2013 at 4:59 pm
These facts seem to make no dent in the doomers thinking, which seems to believe we are as ill equipped as the Mayans to manage ourselves, our resources, and our environment. One wonders about their sanity.
———-
That’s an odd thing to say because I have gained the impression that the WUWT audience is against any attempt to manage ourselves, our resources or our environment……”””””
Well Lazy, I think you would find a plurality of WUWT audience are not “against any attempt to manage ourselves, our resources or our environment.”
But that is NOT what the AGWMMGWCC crowd is interested in.
They want to manage OTHERS and OTHER’s resources, and OTHER’S environment.
We’re not interested in slavery by a self appointed elite.

“””””…..george e. smith says:
January 12, 2013 at 5:34 pm
“””””…..Nigel S says:
January 12, 2013 at 2:18 am
george e smith says: January 11, 2013 at 10:37 pm
‘Churchill Ghandi (sic) clash over India; which was many years later. ‘…..”””””
I went back and listened to the Churchill “End of the beginning” speech again; and he made no comment relating to India, or Gandhi; his comment re “liquidation” related to the possibility that the allies might lose the war.

HRH Charles said: “I have said it before, and I will say it again – our grandchildren’s future depends entirely on whether we seize the initiative and prevaricate no further.”
Jeremy wrote (here) January 11, 2013 at 5:53 pm: “I think HRH means “procrastinate” not “prevaricate” – someone needs to remind HRH of the Queens English. HRH would make Mrs. Malaprop proud.
I found that British and Australian publications regularly misused “prevaricate”. I have written to The Economist on more than one occasion pointing out that they had (again) misused the word. I asked them what dictionary I could look at to find this definition, but they sent nothing back to me. It’s more than just the Queen’s English…..
IanM

Typo fix:
The relevant part of a sentence should read:
“0.25 tons/hectare [instead of 0.16 tons/hectare] as would more than exceed the relative difference between current population and the world’s peak population under demographic trends of an eventual 10 billion people or so“

Global warming is probably a non-probem but excessive population growth is creating major problems throughout the world right now. I feel some of the remarks directed at Paul Ehrich are unfair.
“All the world’s environmental problems have the common factor of too many people.” – (British) test pilot the late Harald Penrose.
Can anyone name an exception?

Somehow I get the feeling that, if there was a perceived toilet paper shortage, the response of some groups would be let’s have most of the population die so that we don’t have to spend a fraction of 1% of GDP on making more toilet paper.
Dodo birds didn’t die out fundamentally because X hundred million people refused to sacrifice their lives or that of their descendants to save the birds. They died out because not even 1 person out of millions bothered to save them by breeding a population of the birds, because not one millionth of GDP was spent trying. Having X billion fewer people than now is not necessary to save the polar bears or any other significant species. (Polar bears are actually doing fairly well, even with the Canadians shooting hundreds a year IIRC, but that’s another topic). There are only some thousands of vertebrate species (as opposed to invertebrates such as bugs), and only a small fraction of those are in much danger of extinction. Pretty much all of relevance could be saved from extinction for mere billions of dollars all combined, not much on the scale of global GDP which is many trillions of $ a year.
As someone who values human life, as well as the benefits of the size and scale of modern industrial civilization in countless ways down to how many movies can be produced today, I don’t share an ideology of wanting mass human dieoffs as the first and preferred solution. As noted before in this thread, world population is projected to max at around 10 billion (a result of the demographic transition as in http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/images/worldgr.png ).
Most matters blamed on overpopulation are rather due to poverty, often poverty partially caused or perpetuated by lousy governments. Japan, for instance, has higher population density by far than any area traditionally called overpopulated, but the difference is that they had sufficient development of industry and hence economic prosperity.

Kevin Kilty says:
January 13, 2013 at 9:06 am
“Moreover, there are other inputs required to meet the sort of production that you, Dirk H., and Henry Clarke keep talking about–land for producing phosphorus, natural gas for making ammonia, and more environment for taking care of wastes, cleaning waste water etc., etc. It is no use just talking in the abstract about laboratory scale production of 22 tonnes per hectare. What is needed for industrial scale production? That is the question to answer.”
The bulk of industry is concentrated into and around the mere 1.5% of Earth’s land area that is urban areas, plus a small amount of mines and installations elsewhere. Industry is compact relative to farms. A fertilizer plant supporting a vast number of farms has a tiny fraction of their area.
Affordable natural gas reserves have surged and been booming. Ammonia can also be produced with no natural gas, as I noted before, being just NH3 (as in N from air, H from H2O). Actually http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/10/29/nuclear-ammonia/ estimates that appropriate nuclear power could produce ammonia for merely $200 per ton and much cheaper than current natural gas production, but, even if the exact estimate was off, the important thing is that it isn’t a figure orders of magnitude higher but quite reasonable. The U.S. Army in the Cold War considered having portable nuclear reactors produce ammonia for ammonia-fueled vehicles without a conventional logistics train. Phosphorus, again, I discussed before.
There’s no grand problem with current wastewater treatment plants and the area required for them (small in the big picture), nor would there be if the world’s population eventually reached 10 billion instead of 7 billion — aside from problems which, as now, are created primarily by poverty. Nothing solves most problems so much as economic growth and prosperity, for which it is best to not let Club of Rome types gain power; Ehrlich opposed the Green Revolution, for instance.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” he [Ehrlich] 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.”
“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.”
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.”
http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now
Kevin Kilty says:
January 13, 2013 at 9:06 am
“When I use the phrase “not reversible”, I do not mean the reaction cannot be undone. I am not referring to the direction of the reaction in the reaction equation. I mean it cannot be undone without a positive change in entropy–I am using the formal engineering definition of reversible/irreversible. This is the nub of the problem of sustainability.”
Not really a problem. Stars produce entropy, and many last for billions of years. So did life and Earth even before humans. Despite constantly having non-reversible reactions in that sense, some types of stars would last for up to trillions of years nominally, in other words as long as the universe itself under many scenarios (although whether the universe will end sooner is a matter of scientific and religious debate). Anything lasting as long as the universe itself is as sustainable as anything can be in total duration.
About everything under the sun results in some waste energy, some waste heat, radiating out into space in the end, and that’s normal.
Whether intelligent life consisted of a few apes in jungles and caves, or a Kardashev level 3 civilization with Dyson Swarms, it’d produce entropy.
References to the second law are a tactic often attempted by some environmentalists to try to impress people with the words and phrases used; the second law actually implies nothing like that human civilization must be so-and-so environmentalist’s random figure of 0.Y billion instead of X billion people that they pulled out of their rear end for their sake of their own biases.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 13, 2013 at 9:06 am
“And there was no reason to sneer at my example of Helium. It was meant to illustrate my point. Apply it to more important instances of technological materials if you like, it applies to everything, eventually anyone ought to see implications to the long term problem of sustainability.”
The most important elements are present in far greater quantities and abundances on Earth than helium. For instance, aluminum, iron, magnesium, and titanium comprise 16% of the average rock by mass (amongst quadrillions of tons of such in the crust). There are quadrillions of tons of hydrogen and oxygen in the oceans. What is needed for concrete, steel, and plastics (if need be even hydrogen from water and carbon from anywhere) are all present in astronomical amounts. There is an economic argument for developing asteroid mining, but even on Earth there isn’t a single element that is a show-stopper. Even such as gallium and indium exist in quantities which are large relative to the amounts needed.
If using the term sustainability, the best attitude and understanding is that expressed in http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
But elsewhere “sustainability” is usually poorly defined anyway, so, rather than “the long term problem of sustainability,” the “long term problem of survival” is more apt. For that, it is best not to be limited to this planet, to expand into space, to have a positive vision of the future, of seeking increase and not decrease in mankind’s industrial and economic capabilities. (Low expectations are indirectly much of the real problem there; for instance, popular misconceptions have grown of assuming current space launch prices are unavoidable rather than actually around a thousand times the cost of propellant used, mostly liquid oxygen of cents per pound, and, without such public misconceptions, there would be more funded efforts to change the situation).
And part of what maximizes the odds of positive advancement and expansion of capabilities is stopping ideology like the following:
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S.” — Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Ehrlich
“We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.” – Ehrlich
Ehrlich was a co-author of a book with Holdren. Holdren has said things like that 210 million was too many people for the United States (quoted in 1970s) and advocated adding sterilants to drinking water to prevent such as the 300 million people in the U.S. today. Now Holdren is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren ).
Being surrounded by people like that is why, for instance, when the President of the United States said “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”, he didn’t see that as an utter problem with it. (Quote source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/13/we-have-met-the-1-and-he-is-us/ ). Many, under messed-up ideology, would consider that a bonus. Allied groups also led to the President closing Yucca Mountain after billions had already been spent.*
* For some basic perspective on nuclear waste:
“Since the fraction of a radioisotope’s atoms decaying per unit of time is inversely proportional to its half-life, the relative radioactivity of a quantity of buried human radioactive waste would diminish over time compared to natural radioisotopes (such as the decay chains of 120 trillion tons of thorium and 40 trillion tons of uranium which are at relatively trace concentrations of parts per million each over the crust’s 3 * 10^19 ton mass).[93][94][95]
For instance, over a timeframe of thousands of years, after the most active short half-life radioisotopes decayed, burying U.S. nuclear waste would increase the radioactivity in the top 2000 feet of rock and soil in the United States (10 million km^2) by ≈ 1 part in 10 million over the cumulative amount of natural radioisotopes in such a volume, although the vicinity of the site would have a far higher concentration of artificial radioisotopes underground than such an average.[96]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Extremely messed up views are not just in small non-influential niches of society but are why, for instance, the CAGW movement’s BSing has spread as far as it has. Although the term cult doesn’t really apply to anything so widespread, Dr. Zubrin, a famous proponent of space colonization (a bit overbiased towards Mars over space habitats but with many good writings in general), has written a book on Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism; http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2012/06/people-matter-robert-zubrins-powerful.html
“I’m not advocating people dying by the billions, nor do I hope for world government, no other prospect is as horrifying in my mind than world government.”
The tendency over time has been for larger and larger scales of organization. For instance, over the centuries, Europe went from having many small chiefs, to larger holdings of nobles, to the strengthening of the power of nationwide monarchs, and so on, until finally the E.U. Such gradually approaches closer and closer to being like a single nation. The European Community came about essentially as a successor to stacking more and more international agreements on top of each other. More and more global environmental treaties, international taxation, and so on as advocated by Club of Rome types are exactly how a de facto world government would start to form over the decades, of a type subsequently crippling mankind’s future.
Someone in Europe in the 19th century would not likely have guessed the E.U. of today would exist, and likewise many today assume differences between nations today are a bulwark against the formation of a world government. Yet that bulwark is disturbingly weak in the long term actually. I greatly oppose world government, at least in any form like that which the world is presently headed towards, one in which its top advocates are often the worst kind of ideologues (like the CAGW movement type), who would execute policies bordering on anti-human, founded on their typical mathematical illiteracy, extreme dishonesty, and refusal to constructively listen to skeptics — quite conceivably enforcing stagnation and decline from which nobody could escape.
For a real positive future of mankind, to stop that (or at least delay it hopefully long enough for some to have escaped into deep space first), impeding them is critical.
I don’t fear, for instance, one day mankind discovering that the 30,000,000,000 megatons of phosphorus in the crust suddenly magically became below 200 megatons/year usage. Mankind has always done well versus natural challenges. I do fear, though, what mankind’s own governments can do, a lesson the past hundred years teaches very strongly. If civilization dies out, never leaving this planet, it won’t be from lack of materials, nor from advancing too fast, nor from too high industrial capabilities and prosperity, but from applied stupidity / misanthropism / corruption / twisted ideology.

LazyTeenager says:
January 12, 2013 at 4:59 pm
And that includes both government regulation or by externalising costs so implicit costs can produce pricing signals in the free enterprise system.
———————————————————–
You’ve got the rap down pat. I’m curious. Where else has such a system been utilized other than the wildest dreams of eco-scocialists? From my observation government artificially introduced cost on such a scale is anethema to the free enterprise system. Of course, I’m no climate scientist.

Kevin Kilty:
You are making implied claims without quantification. What Dr. McCarthy noted is that the reference to the Second Law is irrelevant because “the energy costs imposed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics grow only as the negative logarithm of the concentration and are quite small for the processes of interest” whereas “other costs, such as material handling and the energy associated with breaking chemical bonds are much larger.” If you want to claim otherwise, show or link a quantitative demonstration.
Aside from prior discussion on helium, helium is literally the single most atypical example imaginable, where the difference between helium concentration in natural gas and the atmosphere is totally unlike the situation with every non-gaseous element and also every higher molecular weight element (which is all of them aside from abundant hydrogen). Helium escaped from the atmosphere into space over time, something not a single other element on Earth to such a degree. (Hydrogen would come closest but got chemically bonded often, being not a noble gas; some non-helium noble gases are rare but never were obtained by mankind starting from much above atmospheric concentration ever anyway). That you must repeatedly resort to presenting helium as typical speaks volumes. Try for a single other element.
Copper is an example of abundant resources. As previously noted in a prior quote from http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/sustainability-faq.html , “copper is presently being mined in the U.S. at a concentration only ten times its concentration in the earth’s crust.” For conventionally counted resources at about present mining concentrations, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/copper/mcs-2012-coppe.pdf notes such exceed 3 billion tons on land. While the preceding is “just” 200+ times world annual copper mine production of 16 million tons, that’s only the start of the picture.
When Earth’s 3E19 ton crust contains around 2E15 tons of copper or thus around 2000 trillion tons of copper, mining would not have to jump from 3 billion tons available at current mining concentrations to 2000000 billion tons at an order of magnitude lesser concentration with nothing in between. Rather, for instance, allowing a mere factor of 2 change in concentration would make the 3 billion ton figure become much more than 3 billion tons. Copper prices now are no more than they were a century ago, if expressed in constant-year dollars to adjust for inflation.

E.M.Smith:
That’s a good example indeed.
Actually I’ve visited your site before from time to time, enjoying a number of articles.
Some points I was going to make in this thread at some time:
Often, large segments of the population expecting decline for civilization turns into them making such feel not cognitively unpleasant to themselves by rationalizing it as for the best anyway under environmental claims. Once fully believed, that can turn to actively discouraging real material advancement in the scale of material and energy capabilities (such as massive nuclear power expansion or fracking or really anything not particularly small scale, expensive, and limiting). Other large portions of the population start more the other way around: starting with a desire to have mankind be particularly limited under their form of environmental beliefs, then either going from that to believing industrial inputs are headed for decline or simply wanting everyone else to believe so.
There are other factors too, such as how nothing is historically more effective at getting people to voluntarily give up freedoms and accept higher taxes or the like than creating the perception of need, a crisis. That is quite understood by many seeking the expansion of government anyway. Besides, in general, bad news usually sells more than good news, which is rather important for groups which have their income and success dependent on being meme sellers. For instance, an utility operating nuclear power plants has most of its success from selling a physical product, from selling electricity, not propaganda, but an anti-nuclear group has no product of intrinsic material value and depends 100% on selling claims to the public. Despite how most people falsely assume activist organizations have less tendency and reason to be biased than businesses, it is non-producers in the physical sense who specialize most in the war of words, and anti-producers most often put out dishonest propaganda, more so than producers.
An individual lawyer or an individual engineer can be either honest or dishonest. Yet on average (with no insult meant to some good lawyers), it is essentially only natural that lawyers more often lie and have mathematical illiteracy than engineers, as is so on average for politicians and activists versus engineers and businessmen, as is so for those specialized in meme conflicts versus those most grounded in the real world other than popularity contests.
All of the preceding factors unfortunately synergize with each other and combine, while there would also be more factors not listed here.
Prior to the 20th century, there was particularly feel of a frontier existing (as in such as the “here there be dragons” on old maps). Then the late 19th century through the 1940s were a time of rapid advancement in the sense of particularly physical mechanical engineering technology. The 1950s had a particularly optimistic attitude as I’m familiar with from reading many books published during that era. But advancement in electronics did not prevent such starting to diminish, like by now the magazine Popular Science (and many others) mixes some remaining pro-technology attitudes with much pessimistic ideology like CAGW propaganda. (Now, for example, someone is extra unlikely to try to envision ways to make aesthetic houses technologically made in a day, more likely even in science fiction to assume equally primitive construction in future centuries, and to assume the foundation of a strong economy is seeking to have the labor-equivalent price of the main living expense continuously rapidly go up).
The fizzling of perceptions of the space age by the 1970s and beyond was indirectly one major part of what allowed and contributed to the rise of pessimistic ideology then, along with other influences like the 1973 oil crisis.
For psychological and general societal reasons almost as much as other reasons, I hope to see a start of serious expansion into outer space, as an ultimate blatant counter to those ideologies. Reduced feel of a frontier has become increasingly unhealthy for western civilization.
The delay so far to a real space age is not having step #1 completed yet: to get beyond rockets costing on the order of thousand times basic propellant costs (with propellant mostly liquid oxygen costing cents per kilogram but thrown-away expendable hardware costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per kilogram). The problem is amortizing multi-billion dollar programs over launch goals of a handful of tons, with millions of dollars a ton cost impractical for most potential applications, essentially infinite cost per pound for all but limited niche purposes like commsats (with the 200 tons/year total sent to orbit now by the entire world less than one guy with a truck can tow back and forth across the U.S. per year, not industrial scale).
Ironically, the 30 megajoules/kilogram kinetic energy requirement of 8 km/s LEO orbital velocity (“halfway to anywhere in the solar system” in delta v terms, to borrow a phrase from Heinlein), from KE = 0.5 mv^2 before inefficiencies, is not that much different than a transoceanic airline flight’s energy usage. Jet fuel gives around 130 MJ/gallon in a more terrestrial application not counting ambient oxygen mass. However, rockets carry their own oxidizer, burn propellant in minutes instead of hours in a flashier high power-to-mass-ratio manner, have more inefficiencies, and, most of all, so far lack rapid-turnaround reusability like airline aircraft. If such as a 747 was expended on a single flight without reuse or was technically reusable but had a particular design of thousands of ceramic heat shield tiles taking months between flights to refurbish (Space Shuttle analogy), airline travel would be hyper-expensive too.
Fortunately, there are alternatives for orders of magnitude improvement in launch costs (although requiring briefly some extra upfront capital investment), several actually but a particularly good one being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram . If nothing like the Startram is funded, the best hope is for suborbital tourism startups to potentially approach airline-like reusability and economics over time, especially under economy of number, not because suborbital flights are much of orbital velocity in themselves but because very similar technology from rocket engines to launch operations could lead to rapid-turnaround orbital launch vehicles later.
From asteroids to inactive comets to moons and beyond, there is orders of magnitude more than enough material even in this star system alone to make thousands of times Earth’s land area in artificial worlds, in space habitats ( http://space.mike-combs.com/ et cetera), obviously not overnight but with room for growth even in total effective land area for up to eons upon eons to come. The economics of making space habitats may superficially seem implausible, but vapor deposition of metal possible in the vacuum can allow vast voluminous structures to be made with a relatively small number of personnel, alien to terrestrial experience. Once a starting industrial base with some thousands of personnel is obtained, one NASA estimate is:
“If automation permits a moderate increase of productivity to a value of 100 t/person-year, which is twice the value now appropriate for processing and heavy industries on Earth, the large Bernal sphere could be built for an investment of 50,000 man-years of labor. That is equivalent to the statement that 12 percent of the maximum population of one such sphere, working for 3 yr could duplicate the habitat. Automation is much better suited to the large scale, repetitious production operations needed for the habitat shell than to the details of interior architecture and landscape design. It seems quite likely, therefore, that the construction of new habitats will become an activity for specialists who supply closed shells, ready for interior finishing, to groups of prospective colonists.”
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Chapt7.html
Bone loss in astronauts experiencing continuous weightlessness for months occurs from not enough periodic stress, as also seen with people who have months straight of hospital bedrest without being able to get up and walk periodically. However, in both cases, part-time exposure to walking around in 1g gravity (or rotational pseudogravity) eliminates the problem without having to be done 100% of the time.
Done right, it would be fun, for those taking part and for their future descendants. For instance, as a thought experiment, pretend one could fly. I don’t mean fly as in own a private airplane, file a flight plan, run through a half hour of preflight checks and preparation, go up in a glass cockpit to thousands of feet of altitude, circle around the terrain around the airport for a hour, and then land, to maybe repeat once or twice a week if an avid recreational pilot. I have nothing against such recreation. But that is not remotely the same as if someone could fly like this, indoors, anytime, at a moment’s whim, to the ceiling, to a treetop, almost anywhere, in fact relatively starting to live in 3D instead of 2D thanks to varying levels of pseudogravity:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070426002835/tmp2/images/8/88/Plate10.jpg
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/Living/leisure.jpg
http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/60256-1152359707-large.jpg
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/Images/Art/Hardy/lowgswm2.jpg
For a huge psychological effect on society, so much as a serious start would be enough to impact perceptions of the future and to greatly matter. For instance, while billions of people in space would be great and should eventually come, so much as the first 10000 people (as in http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html or similar), if actively engaged in further construction and expansion, would start to make a major difference.
However, in the meantime, pointing out the still enormous amount of resources available on Earth also helps counter the rise of harmful decline-assuming and decline-promoting ideologies.

Indeed and agreed. Some types of asteroids are almost like giant chunks of non-oxidized, non-rusted stainless steel, alien to what is encountered on Earth. Other objects are rich in oil shale kerogen and ice ( http://neofuel.com ). Etc.

One typo:
2Fe2O3 -> 2Fe + 3O2 was meant to be 2Fe2O3 -> 4Fe + 3O2
But the calculations illustrated subsequently are already correct and unaffected by the typo, including where I already referenced 4 moles of iron several sentences later.