I Am So Tired of Malthus

Good one as usual Willis.
But look at the pacific islander nations listed amongst the LDCs….have you seen the size of those lovely islander people? Their sustanance intake cannot possibly be low

Then there is the huge amount of food that goes rotten before it gets to market because of bad transportation or bad government, as an example here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thor-halvorssen/a-rotting-chicken-in-ever_b_666805.html

There are several assessments of the food impact of IPCC predicted climate change. The most comprehensive is by a IIASA team, coordinated with FAO, and headed by Gunther Fisher. Even using the worst-case A2 scenario (absurdly high population growth with lowest growth of output), and even more so with other IPCC scenarios, average food consumption, and even more significantly, percentage of people undernourished (ie consuming less than the bare minimum to survive at minimum weight with only light physical activity) will both improve greatly. The current worldwide undernourishment rate is about 14%, and about 17% in all developing countries taken together (developed countries are nearly zero). By 2080 both figures would fall to about 6% in A2 and 1-3% in other scenarios (FAO regards undernourishment rates below 5% as non significantly different from zero because of inherent uncertainties). The future rates of undernourishment are estimated by Fischer et al using a complex “Linked System” using climate projections plus economic models plus agricultural production models, and respecting agroecological zones ie without farms encroaching over unsuitable land such as virgin forests, and under very conservative estimates of future technological change and economic growth (much below current or recent rates).
References
Fischer G., M.Shah & H. van Velthuizen, 2002a. Climate change and agricultural vulnerability. A special report, prepared by IIASA as a contribution to the World Summit on Sustainable Development. IIASA, Johannesburg. Laxenburg (Austria): IIASA. http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/XO-02-001.pdf.
Fischer, Günther; Harrij van Velthuizen; Mahendra Shah & Freddy O.Nachtergaele, 2002b. Global agro-ecological assessment for agriculture in the 21st century: methodology and results. IIASA RR-02-02. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA. http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/RR-02-002.pdf.
Fischer, G., M.Shah, F.N.Tubiello & H.van Velthuizen, 2005. Socio-economic and climate change impacts on agriculture: an integrated assessment, 1990–2080. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 360:2067-2083.
Fischer, Günther; Mahendra Shah, Harrij van Velthuizen & Freddy O. Nachtergaele, 2006a. Agro-Ecological Zones Assessment. IIASA RP-06-03. Laxemburg, Austria.
Fischer, Günther; Guy Jakeman, Hom M. Pant, Malte Schwoon & Richard S.J.Tol, 2006b. CHIMP: A simple population model for use in integrated assessment of global environmental change. The Integrated Assessment Journal 6(3):1-33.
For undernourishment: FAO’s State of Food Insecurity in the World, an annual publication found at http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/.

Well put Willis.
Matt Ridley’s new book (The Rational Optimist) is excellent on all this.
A second thought: your recent post on Armagh showed their land record against SST in the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. SSTs have of course changed from testing a bucket to engine inlet measurement and then the satellite date. The former was surface temp, and probably sporadic, the middle was deeper water, and the final method surface again, and more systematic. Maybe your fit with the land record was not that good after all?

Very good, Willis! I’m so tired of Malthus and the neo-malthusians myself, and try to stop the mouth of them whenever I can. I agree with you that per capita wealth is a bad measure, but that’s because arithmetic mean is such a bad measure of the expected value for skewed distributions. If they had only used MEDIAN wealth as a measure of per capita wealth, the numbers would have been much more interesting.
Your food statistics is a very good weapon against the doomsayers, I’ll make use of that! My personal favorite evidence that the well-being of humans has been drastically improved even in the last few years is the fact that child mortality has plummeted since 1990: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64N0PM20100524

Thanks Willis for another elegantly simple debunking of the green brigades alarmist rubbish.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of what modern technology can do to improve traditional food production in the third world, and in the developed world the move to hydroponics will have a massive impact on efficiency and yield.
The ‘peak ???’ doom-sayers always fail to take into account that circumstances change as we move forward in time. History proves that mankind makes progress in leaps and bounds rather than plodding along in the same groove.

THANK YOU, Willis! I had a geography professor who lauded Malthus day in, day out, and I’m like: “This guy’s ideas are bogus! Doesn’t anyone else think so?”
I’ll read your post in full later (just took a look for a minute), but your title sums up my thoughts about Malthus pretty well.

Mike Haseler you’re thinking like a malthusian and missing the A and O of demography. The fact is that when a country reaches a certain level of development (and thus, of food supply and energy consumption), it reaches the “fourth phase of demographic transition” and fertility plummets. The main reason is that in such societies, women decide to make a career instead of having ever more children. Even some countries which are considered very backwards by the west, Iran is a good example, now have unsustainably low fertility rates. Iran still has population growth, but if their fertility rate stays at 1.7-1.8 their population will of course start decreasing in a few years. Many European and Asian countries have now reached the fifth stage, where population starts decreasing. Some very rich countries have had a slightly higher fertility rates the last few decades, but it is still below sustainable, and the increase is IMHO solely a result of policies (availability of cheap day care, for instance).

Mike Haseler says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:39 am
That is why I have a keen interest in history, because history teaches us what is likely to happen when energy (aka food) supplies run out — and the main thing it teaches us is that politicians even democratic forms of government are incapable of handling such situations and therefore the likely outcome of the end of oil is a profound decrease in democracy worldwide.

I agree that energy is pivotal to all the rest.
I disagree about peaks in oil or this that and the other.
IF, a big if, there is a peak in oil, there is still coal, shale in large quantities, not to forget oil bearing sands.
I tend to go with the Russian school who think that oil is endogenous to the earth mantle and is created/rises continuously. The finding of a Titan, I think, satellite with methane speaks to that.
We then have sun energy, which is slowly materializing, maybe the flexible panels will become cheap enough to compete with oil, and other alternate solutions .
And to top it all there is fission power, and fusion power. Once fusion is harnessed for production, there will no longer be an energy problem, but an occupation problem.
Progress in technologies, from nano to micro to large scale, inevitably replace human labor with machine and robot labor. There will be this mass of humanity which will be fed and tended by machines, very few people needed for work and intellectual occupation. That will be the real problem.
We have the start of it already, having taken agriculture workers who where over 30% of the population and are producing food with 1% of the population as workers.
And now technology is taking away industrial jobs, that had become available to former farmers. ( ignoring outsourcing for the argument) This has given rise to the dole, and things will get worse and worse instead of better. How many service jobs can there be?
One of the reasons for the rise of bureaucracies is that there is that enormous surplus of workers who in olden times would have been occupied in agriculture and are now in some government NGO niche creating work for themselves an others.
This is the real problem the future humanity will have to solve: a leisure society created by free energy and robotics. History will tell us how the leisure societies worked: some were decadent, some produced Newtons and Da Vincis.

Willis, I usually love your contributions but I take some issue with this one in that I am extraordinarily tired of people who have missed the bulk of what Malthus said.
The Essay on the Principle of Population was a very scholarly work produced at the end of the 18th / beginning of the 19th century and should be read in this context. At this time farming methods had been largely static for centuries, implying constant food supply (subject of course to weather) but new developments were occurring as the Agricultural Revolution started up. Medicine had not had any radical developments and would not for a long time to come. New land was becoming available in North America.
This enabled him to do two pieces of research. The effectively infinite new food supply in the colonies enabled him to draw the conclusion that, unchecked, population would double geometrically – every 25 years if I remember rightly. This figure is probably exceeded today in the Third World, given better medicine.
The second piece of research was into historical records of population, pre Agricultural Revolution, including the many centuries of censuses in the Swiss cantons which provided a form of control environment. This showed that populations in fact tended to remain static.
These findings simply provided empirical measurements backing up the intuitive propositions of the effect of unlimited food and the effect of trivial growth in agricultural production.
Given this hard data, Malthus put the two together and posed the question “what happens to the potential population growth which has not happened if the population has in fact remained static?” His conclusion was that this potential excess would have died off from one of three basic causes – famine, war or disease. (At the time, contraception was virtually unknown and he advocated “moral restraint”, ie abstinence, as a means of avoiding the three nasties).
So far, all eminently sensible. Malthus’ basic principle – as I understand it – was that sustained population growth cannot exceed sustained growth in food supply. One could restate this to say that the population will rise to meet the food supply available, as many examples in the Third World demonstrate.
The discreditation of Malthus stems from his attempt to put a figure on the potential growth in food supply. At the beginning of the 19th century this was OF COURSE a finger in the wind and his estimate was that “the best that can be expected is that food supply increases arithmetically”.
As we know, the point in time at which this estimate was made preceded the vast impacts that science and technology have made on food supply in the last couple of centuries. In damning Malthus for this misguesstimate – he never claimed it was anything more than that, unlike the metrics on history – critics sidestep the enduring issue Malthus raised, namely that population will rise to match any increase in food supply unless it is voluntarily limited (by the contraception he did not envisage or the postnatal contraception the Chinese used) or involuntarily by famine, war or disease.
The ultimate issue is not whether we can continue to geometrically increase the food supply in the short term, but whether we can continue to do this for a sufficent period of time that worldwide people move to a contraception mindset which limits growth.
I will avoid the issue of an ideal population, which is contentious in itself. However I think that the availability of water is going to be the factor which brutally limits growth in the medium term. No matter the other scientific improvements, some areas of the world are soon not going to increase agricultural production the way they have been doing. Look at the Nile valley. And then the pundits will have to acknowledge that Malthus’ basic principle (as opposed to his guesstimate) were right.

John Marshall says:
To divert land from food production to biofuel is stupid.
Absolutely. This is why policies based on the AGW scare are actually doing real and grave harm today. If, in a few years or decades, it turns out that the sceptics were right, that CO2 warming is mostly benign, it will be too late for those that lost their lives due to food shortages. It will also be too late for ecosystems lost, e.g. the rain forests that have been converted to palm oil farms, and for the species that possibly got extinct on the way.

Tenuc says:
The ‘peak ???’ doom-sayers always fail to take into account that circumstances change as we move forward in time. History proves that mankind makes progress in leaps and bounds rather than plodding along in the same groove.
Quite the contrary Tenuc, history shows there has been virtually no change in the basic forms of energy supply for over two centuries.
The fact is that the main relationship between “innovation” and energy, is that making energy supplies available have enabled innovative ways to consume that energy. In fact, it is very hard to think of any “innovations” that have caused a drop in energy use … that is because “innovation” is really the concept of finding new ways to consume energy.
We innovate because we have energy, unless you have a very long memory innovation hasn’t significantly changed our supply of energy:
Heat from burning coal has been common since the 17th century
Gas hasn’t really changed since the Victorians
Electricity and (perhaps you could count Nuclear power) are the only new forms of energy.
Wind power … was used by the Egyptians to sail up the Nile
Bio-fuels, etc. are all green nonsense.
… oh and I suppose I have to add the infernal combustion engine, which was developed over two centuries ago … together with the technology of drilling a hole and pumping out oil.
To put it another way, the wave of innovation during the 20th century was driven by the previous century’s discovery of another way to delivery energy to the home: electricity. Unless I missing something, there has been no new mechanism to deliver energy to the home/factory in over a hundred years, it is therefore inevitable that sooner or later, that we will run out of innovative ways to use this new form of energy supply, much as previous civilisations ran out of ways to use previous “new” technology.

What I hate about the climate science is the old, white, male conservative denier can sound a heap more progressive than the young, post-modern, radical environmentalist.
You’re turning the world upside down. Congratulations on this article Willis.

I hope you haven’t alerted the manipulators of statistics to the fact there’s still an honest and credible disseminator of information out there. The FAO will now need to be pulled into line, surely.

I was quite distressed during Richard Dawkin’s first documentary on Charles Darwin (which was really an apotheosis of himself). He dealt with Malthus’ theories, then the documentary immediately switched to the HIV epidemic in Africa. Could Tricky Dicky have made his rather sinister views any clearer?
Ehrlich said there would be starvation on a massive scale due to food shortages by the 1980s at the moment. The huge droughts in Africa were due to corruption, not shortages, and a cadre of Westerners with too much money to spare who made things worse with their gullibility.

Normally I agree with the postings on WUWT, but not this time. I believe the dangers of AGW to be grossly exaggerated but the danger of adding 6 million more humans a month to the planet to be much understated.
Probably shortages of water, rather than food, will hit first, and indeed in some parts of the world are already doing so, but food will do so when price or shortage of oil hits agricultural output. The halting of Russian grain exports and riots over food shortages in Africa and elsewhere should be ringing alarm bells.
Malthus is much maligned – his theory is sound even if mechanised farming, which he could hardly have foreseen, delayed its reality.

I wonder how many have actually read “An Essay on Population”? All the Rev. Malthus was pointing out is the difference between the arithmetic increase of food production and the geometric increase in population. If you increase your effort or land area you can double the food you grow, but you have then to maintain the same effort year in year out because the output is a linear function of effort and area. The increase in population, however, is a function of population – i.e. there is positive feedback. The current doubling period of humanity is lss than thirty years.
The much-maligned “Club of Rome” did a similar exercise in “Limits to Growth” in the sixties, taking great pains throughout to repeat that theirs were not predictions but illustrations of the mathematics. Naturally, this message was lost.
It seems that Willis is making the same error for which we castigate the warmisti – extrapolating a short trend. Surely nobody actually believes that continuing geometrical increase in the human population will not at some point overwhelm the available food supplies? Food, anyway, is not the only factor which makes life worth living. What about space? Many people are apparently happy to live crammed into small spaces, but anecdotal evidence shows movement away when wealth permits.
I am reminded of the chap who jumped off a skyscraper and was heard to say, as he passed the 13th floor, “See, I told you it wasn’t dangerous”.

I can’t see how, on a finite planet, there can’t but be, at some point, a limit to population and growth.
Perhaps it wont be with 16 billion people and doubled economic output, perhaps not with 32 billion people and another doubled economic output but at some point things and space run out.

Andrew W says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:52 am
“This is a very light weight post, all you’ve done Willis is extrapolate a trend.
Whether or not the planet can feed 8 billion or 10 billion people hasn’t been addressed in any sensible way. The planet feeds more people now because we consume more resources, those resources are finite”
Andrew, there is more to this than summarized by Willis, as I tried to convey in a previous comment. As a person involved in estimating food production and food security for a long time, I can say something on this.
1. World population is currently predicted to peak at about 9 billion around 2050-60 and then starting to decline. Currently published UN population projections go only up to 2050, when population is seen as still growing at a nearly zero rate, but using their own assumptions (not an extrapolation) to extend the projections a few more years, you may see the population falling. Declining from 2050-60, population by 2100 should be between 7-8 billion, and still declining.
2. This may happen earlier indeed, because the UN uses a simplifying assumption that world fertility would stabilize at 1.85 children per women (worldwide and in each country) in the coming decades, forgetting that fertility levels are a function of economic per capita output, education, and similar variables. The decrease in fertility as a function of per capita GDP (or the wider Human Development Index of the UN encompassing GDP, education and health) extends down to about 1.3 children per woman, and then (at extremely high levels of income) it climbs back to about 1.5-2.0, still below replacement level. As observed trends agree with this, demographic growth in the coming decades is quite likely to be lower than expected by the UN (their figure for 2050 has been steadily falling at each yearly or bi-yearly revision since 1996 to 2008).
3. Food production is not an extractive process, like burning oil. It is done by combining carbon with nitrogen and other substances, through photosyntesis. This year’s food is recycled (via your body waste and your own body decomposing in the future) into future food production. Moreover, increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations imply significantly increased photosynthesis and then higher yield for C3-type crops like wheat or rice, and not so high increase in photosynthesis but significant reduction in water requirement for C4-type crops like maize. Also, any global warming would enable plenty new land for agriculture and increased yields in temperate and cold regions like North America, Northern Europe, Russia or Argentina. All in all, including the negative impact of severe warming on agriculture in some tropical regions, world food production would increase even without any further technical progress. For the time being, thus, neither a population explosion nor an exhaustion of the planet resources is expected to cause increased hunger. The complex human/natural process of reproducing and feeding ourselves through agriculture has a lot of self-adjusting mechanisms.
3. It is not true that “Whether or not the planet can feed 8 billion or 10 billion people hasn’t been addressed in any sensible way”. It has been addressed, including the case of 15 billion people by 2100 in the absurdly high population hypotheses underlying the A2 scenario. See my previous comment and references for more details. According to all serious endeavours in this matter (see also Mendelsohn 2000 and Mendelsohn & Dinar 2009) per capita food availability will be higher, and the prevalence of undernourishment and malnutrition would be decreasing towards vanishing proportions along the present century. Some analyses expect climate change to have an impact, either positive or negative for the world as a whole, but always by a very limited proportion of future food production. That does not preclude alarming predictions by some others (like Cline 2007 & 2008) using extremely faulty concepts, but the serious guys all agree on this.
4. Note that predictions about future agriculture are carefully based on suitable arable land only, not involving any encroaching onto non suitable agro-ecological zones such as tropical forests. Even at its most conservative hypothesis, Fischer et al (2002, see refs above) predict increased rainfed cereal production in 2080, with predicted climate change but with today’s technology on land currently cultivated with rainfed cereals, thus not including more irrigation, not including new land opened to cultivation by global warming, and no technical improvement at all during the 21st century. All these omitted factors would have a positive impact.
Cline, William R., 2007. Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country. Washington DC: Center for Global Development and Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Cline, William R., 2008. Global warming and agriculture. Finance & Development 45(1): 23-27.
Mendelsohn, Robert, 2000. Measuring the effect of climate change on developing-country agriculture. In FAO 2000, Two essays on climate change and agriculture – A developing country perspective. FAO Economic and Social Development Papers No.145. Fao, Rome. http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x8044e/x8044e00.htm.
Mendelsohn, Robert, William D. Nordhaus & Daigee Shaw. 1994. The impact of global warming on agriculture: A Ricardian analysis. American Economic Review 84(4): 753–71.
Mendelsohn, Robert & Ariel Dinar, 2009. Climate change and agriculture: An economic analysis of global impacts, adaptation and distributional effects. Cheltenham (UK): Eduard Elgar.

Rod Gill says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:14 am
———–
Furthermore, there were those who though that sanitation would be a problem because of the copper drainage pipes on the outside of houses would run out. Humans simply switched to pvc. :o)

Rod Gill says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:14 am
———–
Finally, the real shocker might come in 20 or 30 years should nuclear fusion become viable. This would render solar and wind power redundant for the West at least and end the dreams of the eco-nuts who want us to return to wattle and daub housing.

RW says: September 9, 2010 at 1:33 am

Willis, I usually love your contributions but I take some issue with this one in that I am extraordinarily tired of people who have missed the bulk of what Malthus said…

Thanks RW, an enlightening post.
Ralph says: September 9, 2010 at 1:43 am

…Pakistan has quintupled (x5) its population in 50 years, and then complains that floods are killing many people, and it needs American food aid…

Thanks Ralph for crucial reminders. These issues are very difficult to put in a way that all sides can work with together. Good luck on developing this art further.
Mike Haseler says: September 9, 2010 at 1:45 am

…history shows there has been virtually no change in the basic forms of energy supply for over two centuries…

Good reminder. But you seem to forget nuclear energy AND the future potential here w.r.t. LENR and thorium; to say nothing of even more exotic possibilities whispered about no debunked no illustrated well, at least, h’m, suspected.
Willis Eschenbach says: September 9, 2010 at 1:56 am

Andrew W says: September 9, 2010 at 12:52 am…technology gives us the ability to use what’s there, not the ability to create resources that aren’t there….
Quite the opposite. Technology is what turns a raw material into a resource… there is enough potential rain-fed farmland lying idle in the Sudan to feed all of Africa…

Here’s a classic case of where, IMO, the one is not quite the opposite of the other – both are important considerations. Thanks Willis for a generally thought-provoking thread and posts. But your Sudan link is not telling me anything. However, my awareness of permaculture definitely supports that possibility.

Peter H says:
September 9, 2010 at 2:20 am
I can’t see how, on a finite planet, there can’t but be, at some point, a limit to population and growth.”
As with most things Peter; Education, education, education.

Yes I know Newton was a scientist. Just thought I’d mention that.

Everything I’ve ever read about this that relies on the figures rather than pet theories says Willis is right. The population has grown due to decreased mortality. The population will stabilise due to increased prosperity. Food production has so far outstripped population and will continue to do so. Even water supplies will support projected populations, provided such supplies are properly managed. The only “if” is that development, innovation and change be allowed to continue and grow. Hence the only chance the doom-mongers predictions will prove true is if we follow their advice and just give up. Our choice, I’d say.

Rod Gill says:
For peak agiriculture look back to …
Back in the days when I was into such thing I spoke to the civil servant in charge of renewables and asked why we didn’t have a renewables obligation for petroleum. But the futility of that course of action soon became very apparent when I actually did the sums – on a typical farm, around 50% of the “bio-fuel” crop needs to be used on the farm to power the machinery.
That is to say, 50% of the energy output from a farm is energy input in fossil fuels. When you then add fertilisers, herbicides, and then add to that the energy in transporting that food off farm to manufacturer, from manufacturer to supermarket, then from supermarket to home. Then add to that cost any fossil fuel used in cooking.
Well it soon dawned on me that the reality of “bio-fuel” is that we’d need some 3-7 times as much farmland as we have now just to grow the bio-fuel. At which point I realised that
food production is just another fossil fuel powered manufacturing process
Fossil fuel in, food out.
Or … No fossil fuel in, no food out to the consumer.
QED:
PEAK OIL === PEAK FOOD === PEAK HUMAN POPULATION

Have just read through some amusing comments that really ignore your facts Willis that humans are managing to feed the rapidly increasing world population despite all the doom and gloom.
Why can’t we be thankful and at least think positively of ways that man can adapt and work with nature, produce new foods and energy sources. I wondered about the gent that thought we would run out of sources of fertiliser, and the other that talked about politicians talking crap. Thought, the penny might drop, that the increasing number of humans will also produce increasing amounts of crap (fertiliser) surely enough to combine with the rubbish that they don’t eat or waste and recycle that as composted fertiliser.
The dreary tales of water shortages, lots of that to treat and recycle too, and already some countries with money are desalinating water from the ocean. and some advanced countries have been using less water to produce more food for years. Matter of education and opportunity meets need!!
We do know that the one thing that does work to decrease the rate of population increase is to improve basic living standards and access to education, so therein lies part of the solution.
Otherwise if you cripple those countries that have the ability to raise the technology and increase food production and the methods of delivery, all you are left with is natures way of controlling population, war, pestilence and starvation or,” worse still nature aided by “mad scientist”meddling in the efficiencies of control and culling, trying to play god. (the nature of man!!).
It might not be our idea to use crap as fertiliser, but the chinese have done this for centuries, water conservation and drip feeding plants, or developing new food plants that need less water, new sources of protein?. Why do some recoil at eating horses and dogs for goodness sake, when they eat cattle, rabbits, little wooly lambs or whatever.
I am sure that there will come a time when man finds to survive they need to adapt, I hope that future generations will ethically agree that eating their own is not the “only” solution, and look to other ways to limit population growth and continue to provide sufficient food, shelter and comfort to share among all.
If they can’t then the matter will be completely in the hands of nature and whatever “god” you believe in.
My two cents!!

Keeping humans fed, educated, sheltered, entertained, healthy and comfortable right now is the best preparation for the future of humanity. In fact, it’s the only preparation, because it creates a class with high expectations. It must, of course, be a large and dominant class, not an elite. (Sorry Al and Rajendra, you’ll have to share.)
As far as predicting the future goes, it’s a bit like your grandfather pronouncing that one day there’ll be a punch-card machine in every home. Predictions and extrapolations from present conditions are mostly wrong. Probably always wrong.
Shop hard. Turn on the heating or the air conditioner, go for a drive for no reason, and generally enjoy this generation’s resources. Don’t “sustain” them for coming generations. They won’t want them.

Change your diet and eat a tree!
After you chew on the bark, you can use the wood to build a house!
Beavers do, and so should you!
🙂

Lee Kington says:
September 9, 2010 at 3:15 am
Yes… I suppose if I pick nits I should expect my nits to be picked in turn. 🙂

The capacity of the planet may be finite, but anyone who claims to know what this “capacity” is is simply guessing and has no idea what they are really talking about. Heck, with high density housing, we could theoritically fit trillions of people on this planet, grow enough food given technological increases, and all at the same time increase GDP.
But this is all a case of “possibilities.” Truth is, no one knows what the human capacity of the planet is. With scientific development typically resulting from “necessity” and not “whim” its difficult to peg at what point our farming practices will max out at if they do indeed max out at some point.
Given any resource, its price over time drops (see Julian Simon). Peek oil/gas/food is over-hyped. Its a given at any point we will reach the maximum production of a certain commodity but this is based on economics, not on need. If oil becomes too expensive, well then we will probably switch to other sources (common sense) and the production total of oil is maxed out, but this does not create huge economic issues as stated, rather its just a gradual change from one commodity to another.

Apparently the authors has zero awareness of basic principles of ecology. You will never do better than the moment when you are in maximum overshoot just before the crash begins. And then, of course, the crash begins, but you’re so deep in overshoot that it’s too late to do anything about it.
This is your typical pipe-dream cornucopian post that is really the intellectual equivalent to the person who jumped from the 88th floor and while he was passing the 20th on his way down, said “See, I’m doing fine, nothing to worry about”
Yes, we produce enough food to feed our present population. No, we aren’t going to produce even a fraction of that when the converging effects of peak oil, gas and phosphorus, fossil aquifer depletion, topsoil loss and climate change make our present way of producing food impossible in most areas. So there is plenty to worry about.

Hector M. says:
September 9, 2010 at 2:29 am
1. World population is currently predicted to peak at about 9 billion around 2050-60 and then starting to decline. Currently published UN population projections go only up to 2050, when population is seen as still growing at a nearly zero rate, but using their own assumptions (not an extrapolation) to extend the projections a few more years, you may see the population falling. Declining from 2050-60, population by 2100 should be between 7-8 billion, and still declining.

These are often quoted numbers, the problem is that it is very unlikely that they will ever be reached. Two things are more likely to happen:
1. The die off will begin before that, around 2030.
2. As the demographic transition in the Third world is predicted solely on the assumption that the Third world will become rich and developed, it is useful to ask the question is the Third world going to stop reproducing at the current rate if it doesn’t develop. And it is 99% certain that it will not develop as the energy and resources for that simply aren’t available, which means that fertility rates aren’t going down any time soon there. Of course the die off is still 100% certain in such a case, but it may be that it will not start before 2050 and then those projections will be surpassed.

3. Food production is not an extractive process, like burning oil. It is done by combining carbon with nitrogen and other substances, through photosyntesis. This year’s food is recycled (via your body waste and your own body decomposing in the future) into future food production.

Food production at present is not only an extractive process like burning oil, it is in fact burning oil. We are essentially using soil to convert oil, gas, fertilizers and fossil fresh water into food, while destroying a lot of that soil in the process. And it is not recycled, it typically goes into the ocean

[Snip]
[REPLY: Aligning / comparing AGW supporters with Radical Islamic Terrorists is NOT going to fly… (biglee57 ~ mod)]

Everyone believing that there are too many people in the world, should lead by example…

The population of the planet and the land area of Ireland in m^2 are similar. Now imagine everyone standing in Ireland with the rest of the world available for housing, agriculture, energy, manufacture etc. A silly idea I know but helps to put things into perspective. BTW, last time I was in an Irish pub on a Saturday night, 1m^2 per person would have been a luxury!

Why do Malthusians have large families? Why don’t neo-Malthusian groups like the ‘Optimum Population Trust’ ask for proof of sterilisation before granting membership? If they lead by example, people may trust them more.

Willis, you should enjoy (or be infuriated by ) this set of position papers by the UN recently. The story is carried by: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/09/08/years-setbacks-looks-world-leader/?test=latestnews and the actual position papers are linked to within the story.
The UN seems to think they can address all these “problems”, if only the rest of the world would give them the unlimited power to do so.

Great post, Willis. Great comments. I especially enjoy those who try so hard to be pessimistic in this group of trained specialists in how optimism works. The “bad government” argument is a very serious one. I think no funds (tax-payer money) should go to those bad governments under the guise of helping (feed, etc.) the “poor people of the world”. When we do these things, we primarily support bandits and thugs. Instead we should encourage the inventive use of human minds through technology in the presence of raw materials How? By sending our helpful tax dollars to those governments/societies that are creatively enabling their populace to work productively at their food supply and to live enjoyably (yes, many different definitions here, but the possibility seems to encourage amazing work efforts), men and women with relatively equal opportunities. Anything else seems like shooting ourselves in the foot. We know Earth can feed everyone.
As to the bad times — when we cannot feed ourselves, other than when bad governments are in charge — these seem to come not from “peak” something, but from drastic “climate change”. A massive volcanic eruption or multiple large ones, large impactor(s) from space, or our present unknown — the creep into the next ice age. Knowing that almost every civilization has fallen from these kinds of events (if you can’t feed your people or if those who can’t feed themselves want your land….), one would think that the malthusian-types would turn their pessimism, along with inventiveness, toward prevention, including food storage for the bad (cold) times. Historically, geologically, cosmically, these events/conditions are inevitable. We simply are very fortunate if they do not happen in our individual life times. Someone mentioned the model of Christchurch-New Zealanders building with those inevitable destructive earthquakes in mind. That’s the model I have in mind.

RW says: (September 9, 2010 at 1:33 am) Willis, I usually love your contributions but I take some issue with this one in that I am extraordinarily tired of people who have missed the bulk of what Malthus said. […] The Essay on the Principle of Population was a very scholarly work…
Thank you for this comment. RW; it brings a nice addition to knowledge. It is all too easy to suffer from a little knowledge to the detriment of our attempts to gain wisdom.

This is what is all about:
http://euro-med.dk/?p=13656

There is, however, a big problem in developed countries: starving of real knowledge and starving for lack of human values.

“Fat in excess is justly maligned in the Western diet”
Actually, it is unjustly maligned. The cause of the “diseases of civilization” (diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease, alzheimer’s, and other chronic diseases) is not dietary fat, but dietary carbohydrate. We’ve misdiagnosed the problem for the past 40 years thanks to low-fat advocates who twisted and tortured the science worse than anyone at CRU.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216
Fat, *real* fat (not the trans fats in “I can’t believe it’s not butter”), is good for you, in any quantity. The killer is the carbohydrate we eat.

Mike Haseler says:
September 9, 2010 at 1:45 am
“…Quite the contrary Tenuc, history shows there has been virtually no change in the basic forms of energy supply for over two centuries…”
Sorry Mike, but you are completely wrong about this!
The first Nuclear powered generator (Calder Hall at Windscale, UK) was connected to the grid and delivering electricity in 1956. Nuclear power stations currently produce around 15% of the worlds demand for electricity and it would be feasible to build enough new stations to provide for the energy needs of the world for the next several thousand years.
The only reasons we do not use the nuclear option are that it costs more than fossil fuel generation and there are political issues which need to be resolved. Safety and disposal of nuclear waste are no longer a serious problem regarding modern plant designs.
While fossil fuels remain plentiful and cheap, there is little interest in developing pf commercialising alternative energy generating technology. The current crop of uneconomic ‘green’ solutions are not suitable for base load generation and have only been introduced as a sop to liberal sentiment.

I don’t see what the problem is. Given the fact that CO2 is a plant food and less than doubling it could create >35% crop yields and a doubling of pine tree growth
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.pdf
The answer seems simple to me. More CO2 = More food.
Now, how man can affect the atmospheric CO2 content to such an extent given his current, minuscule contribution in comparison to the natural is, quite frankly, one for the boffins to sort out. 😉

Today we have more obesity than hunger in the world. We also have a lot of government meals at schools and huge amounts of food are wasted.

Patrick Davis says:
September 9, 2010 at 4:03 am
Ethiopia is not the dust bowl many poeple think it is

Indeed. Ethiopia is the source of the Blue Nile and contains some of the most fertile land on the planet.
And despite the doomsayers claiming that the Ethiopian forest ( yes, forest, not desert) could be gone by 2020
(BBC 2000) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1766717.stm
The forest cover today is in fact very healthy and 3 times what it was when those comments were made.
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0721-hance_ethiopia_trees.html
It’s not a lack of arable land that halts the progress of the poor. It’s the governments who deny them use of, and access to it.

the oil situation is gonna put a big dent in people’s idea that we are going to just keep breeding like rabbits
the “green revolution” wasn’t green at all, we simply convert petroleum into food

To anyone who pays attention to recent trends in global fertility rates know that over-population will not be a problem. Quite to the contrary, de-population is and will continue to be a problem through-out most of the world. According to figures posted by both Wiki and the CIA Factbook, almost all of the G20 nations (including China, but excluding India) have TFRs (Total Fertility Rate) below replacement levels. As a matter of fact, nations like Japan, Russia, Italy, Greece, and Spain have had TFRs below 1.5/female for a decade or more. Even in the more fecund East Asia, nations like Turkey and Iran have seen decreasing fertility rates in recent decades. Yes, Yeman and Afghanistan have TFRs in excess of 4/female. But they are the exceptions. In Africa, war, famine, and AIDs are devestating populations. And even in Central and South America, the rate of population growth is slowing.
And for the first time in world history, large segments of global populations will age to levels not dreamnt of even 50 years ago. This means that in the short term our populations will continue to grow, as fewer eldery will die at younger ages. That is, the median age will go up. But, all of these grand parents and great grand parents will have a much smaller legacy. And thier grand children and great grand children will have even less offspring.
The UN has global populations peaking sometime around 2050. I cannot remember the exact numbers; but, like the IPCC the UN tends to over-estimate things.

I planted 75 vines of Cabernet Franc this spring, just doing my part. Its growing but has been struggling against the cold. Oh well, waiting and counting on some warming.

the oil situation is gonna put a big dent in people’s idea that we are going to just keep breeding like rabbits
No, the “oil situation” is going to put a big dent in environmentalist’s idea that we are going to just shut off all oil exploration and development, and shrink as a people and economy.
We have over a century worth of oil in the Green River shale formation. We have centuries worth of energy that can be converted into oil and auto fuels sitting in our coal deposits. When living standards start to seriously decline because of the artificial restraints placed on oil extraction and use, people in the U.S. are going to become an angry mob. They are going to learn about the readily available and easily extracted alternatives we have. When they do, any environmentalist or politician in their way is going to be removed from power if not physically harmed.
We need nuclear power and we need to continue to research ways to use electricity to power our vehicles. While we work on that, we must have oil. Not having it is simply not an option. I’m guessing we’re a good 40-50 years away from an electrically powered auto fleet. Until then, we must have and we will have oil.
Right now we have a green bubble, no different from the housing or education bubbles, a malinvestment of resources and political power into a given area, group, or ideology. Environmentalist policies have dragged on the U.S. economy, but there hasn’t been a shock to the system that causes the average apathetic voter to clearly link green policies and lower living standards. When that shock comes and the bubble bursts, watch out. Right now it’s popular to say you’re green. After the bubble bursts telling someone you’re green will likely endanger your well being. No politician will touch the phrase or the policies. It’s like anything else in American politics. A good idea is converted to a rigid ideology that then goes too far and is pulled back by the voter. It happens every election cycle.
Keep dreaming that government can place restriction upon restriction on fossil fuel use to “save the Earth.” You think Americans are mad at their government now? Wait until gasoline hits $6 a gallon, THEN you will see mad. And you will see every politician who doesn’t promise shale and coal fuel development sent packing to the unemployment line.

Keith Battye says:
September 8, 2010 at 11:59 pm
The real threat to people is poor governance.
I would modify that a bit – the real threat to people is OVER-governance. Less government = more freedom, more prosperity, less wastage, less laws, less tax. Less politicians. Less BS.

Exactly the same doom and gloom statments have been made for the last thousand years.
Here in Britain they pay farmers not to produce food.

Why don’t all these people that can predict the future, do something really useful…
….tell me which lotto numbers to pick

It’s strange that so many people think having more people on Earth is a bad thing. The good news is that most of the leaps forward mankind makes is down to geniuses who, often working alone, come up with world changing ideas.
Only about 2% of the population meet Mensa’s standards and can be defined as real geniuses. Based on today’s population there are about 120 million people worldwide who would qualify for Mensa membership. As world population grows, the extra geniuses will improve the chance of further major leaps forward, in areas no one can envisage now.
Mankind’s future is bright provided world population continues to grow.

Tenuc said on I Am So Tired of Malthus
September 9, 2010 at 8:08 am
It’s strange that so many people think having more people on Earth is a bad thing. The good news is that most of the leaps forward mankind makes is down to geniuses who, often working alone, come up with world changing ideas.
Only about 2% of the population meet Mensa’s standards and can be defined as real geniuses. Based on today’s population there are about 120 million people worldwide who would qualify for Mensa membership. As world population grows, the extra geniuses will improve the chance of further major leaps forward, in areas no one can envisage now.
Mankind’s future is bright provided world population continues to grow.

Ah, I was waiting for that canard to come up.
First, your 2% is in all likelihood only true for developed countries. In the Third world (and probably in the US too) where the majority of population growth occurs, it is much lower.
Second, by the way you worded your post, I take it that you definitely don’t belong to those 2% and you have never taken one of those tests. So let me enlighten you – the vast majority of those 2% are neither capable of nor will they ever contribute anything to the advancement of humanity (by becoming scientists or engineers which is what you imply), they will go on to such not just unproductive but totally counterproductive activities such as becoming bankers, lawyers, etc. There isn’t much correlation between MENSA scores and scientific productivity, it is more like a necessary but far from sufficient conditions. Those 2% tests are a joke anyway so it is laughable to call the people who pass them geniuses.
Third, what proportion of he population right now is involved in productive R&D activity that will help (in your pipe dreams, not in reality) raise the carrying capacity of the planet? 2%? Or much much lower than that. And what proportion is useless eaters? Wouldn’t it be wiser to aim for a smaller population with a much larger proportion of people involved in productive activity? Say, instead of having 10 million out of 7 billion involved in R&D, having 50 million out of 100 million?
Because, and this is fourth, no amount of technology can beat the combination of exponential growth against very finite carrying capacity, much less in the time frames we are speaking of right now (for those who haven’t woken up to reality yet, we basically need a miracle in the next decade or two, and miracles only happen in works of fiction like the Bible and the Quran). So you either face reality and shrink or you overshoot and collapse.

Access to water will be the limiting reagent on human population growth.

A priori reasoning gives birth to Malthus and his clones. It is the kind of reasoning that teenagers with no experience give their parents. Their theses are always “obvious”. In Malthus’s case, he saw cities spreading so wide that horse-drawn carts could’nt deliver the goods necessary. In his a priori (linear) he thinking didn’t perceive buildings rising above a few stories, he couldn’t anticipate more efficient, speedier transport, not only for goods but for people too. They keep dusting off this old preacher’s idea because they can’t escape his kind of thinking. They don’t believe we will taper off in pop growth, which demographers give us sensible reasons for this development. I haven’t read much about the man himself, but from his clones, I would surmise he hated people, too, like Erhlich.

Posted on the oil drum yesterday:
Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room – Revisited
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6924

pedex says:
September 9, 2010 at 6:10 am
the oil situation is gonna put a big dent in people’s idea that we are going to just keep breeding like rabbits

Do you know what happens in the bottom of the seas with all the organic residues, under such pressures and in some places (thermal vents) with temperatures up to 400 C (water does not boil up at those pressures)?
This is a well kept secret..an oily secret…

The problem with nearly all of these predictions is that future technology, inventions, processes, discoveries, improvements, and energy sources are never accounted for. You cannot take a population trend and extrapolate that out to infinity while using current technology to infinity. The creativeness of humans is infinite, and with population growth we will have more humans around to think of new inventions. Add to that the fact that necessity is the mother of invention and there is no foreseeable limit to human population on earth. We can live and grow plants underground, underwater, and in space. There is no limit.

I don’t often look into the overpopulation issue, but from what I gather it’s that the population in the future (9 billion by 2050, the UN projects) that may cause problems. Or maybe not, I don’t know.
“We have doubled the population and more, and yet we are better fed than ever.” I think you’re making an implicit assumption that because we doubled the population in the past and nothing bad happened, we can increase it by a third again in the future and nothing bad will still happen. I don’t have any data with me but I have to wonder, is that a valid assumption?

@ Phillip Bratby says:
September 9, 2010 at 2:21 am
Nice article. Too bad it’s junk science. The sources for the article you cite come from Kudryavtsev N.A work in the 50s, all of which has been shown false.
You folks just believe anything you read if it fits your narrative?

GM,
Your idea that the laws of thermodynamics impose an imminent cap on growth is an intriguing one, but is a little short on detail. Could you flesh it out a bit for those of us less intellectually endowed?

@ David, UK says:
September 9, 2010 at 10:02 am
“Apart from all that, it’s utterly naive to think we’re anywhere near peak oil now. Of course we’re not. There are myriad untapped oil fields in the world, which will be exploited as soon as it is economically feasible to do so (i.e. when current sources run dry).”
Oh yeah? What are some examples of those myriad of untapped oil fields? Now keep in mind, these will have to be pretty big to keep pace with current demand, and a whole hell of a lot of them.

Everyone recognizes natural varying climate cycles, warming equals prosperity, cooling equals disaster ! WHO is doing the science on what will happen with the earths population is and when we encounter the next LIA, it will happen sooner or later. This is part of the AGW disaster the inability to do any science that runs counter to the AGW dogma.

Benjamin P. says:
September 9, 2010 at 9:09 am
“@ anna v says:
September 9, 2010 at 1:16 am
“I tend to go with the Russian school who think that oil is endogenous to the earth mantle and is created/rises continuously. The finding of a Titan, I think, satellite with methane speaks to that.”
Really? Just because? That idea is total nonsense.
”
Really ?
Methane is classified as a “fossil fuel”.
Finding not just abundant but omnipresent Methane on Titan where there are , arguably NO Fossils, kind of blunts your resistance.

Seamus Molloy says:
September 9, 2010 at 1:35 am
What interests me is the amount of arable produce (wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, sugar beet etc.) that is used to make alcohol. The figure I have been told is about a quarter of the worlds production. Can anyone confirm this?
I also understand that 80% of grapes grown are used for making alcohol and as we can see from the Muslim world alcohol is not needed to sustain a healthy life, so an awful lot of good food is grown not to feed people but just to make them drunk!
I am taking strong exemption with above statement
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/AlcoholAndHealth.html
Alcohol And Health
Moderate drinkers tend to have better health and live longer than those who are either abstainers or heavy drinkers. In addition to having fewer heart attacks and strokes, moderate consumers of alcoholic beverages (beer, wine or distilled spirits or liquor) are generally less likely to suffer hypertension or high blood pressure, peripheral artery disease, Alzheimer’s disease and the common cold.
Sensible drinking also appears to be beneficial in reducing or preventing diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, bone fractures and osteoporosis, kidney stones, digestive ailments, stress and depression, poor cognition and memory, Parkinson’s disease, hepatitis A, pancreatic cancer, macular degeneration (a major cause of blindness), angina pectoris, duodenal ulcer, erectile dysfunction, hearing loss, gallstones, liver disease and poor physical condition in elderly.
Moderate drinkers tend to live longer than those who either abstain or drink heavily.
A Harvard study found the risk of death from all causes to be 21% to 28% lower among men who drank alcohol moderately, compared to abstainers. (Camargo, C. A., et al. Prospective study of moderate alcohol consumption and mortality in US male physicians. Archives of Internal Medicine, 1997, 157, 79-85.)

David, UK said
September 9, 2010 at 10:43 am
OK, here are some examples. Montana has an untapped oilfield amounting to 40 billion barrels. Alaska has an untapped oilfield of about 10 billion barrels. The Bakken is the largest one we currently know of – the Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.

1. OOIP = Original Oil In Place
2. URR = Ultimately Recoverable Reserves
URR < OOIP.
URR <<<< OOIP if rock porosity is very low. So it happens that the Bakken shale has an extremely low porosoity (which is why it is shale and you can't just poke a pole in the ground and collect the resulting gusher as people were doing in Texas and the Middle East back in the days). Which makes you 530 billion barrels more like 1 or 2, and at a very meager flow rate on top of that

Some nice viewpoints on the reality of population size vs the size of the available land. (Texas, Ireland) When in doubt, I always find it comforting and enlightening to estimate that the entire world population could merge into one organism probably less than half a cubic kilometer in size. While that would be a formidable creature, it would be barely a speck of dust on the surface of the earth. Now exactly how unsustainable can that be? I don’t claim to know, but I do find it a reality check.. Earth really is huge, and man filled with hubris as to his own importance….

Jaye Bass said on I Am So Tired of Malthus
September 9, 2010 at 10:31 am
1. It appears that the unit of food produced for each hectare per human is going up.

It can not go higher than the theoretical limit of conversion of sun light into chemical energy by photosynthesis. and sun light is very limited. So much for your “we can grow as much food as we want” fantasies.

What produces starvation, poverty, etc. it is not reproduction of people but the unconscious reproduction of bad politicians. An example:
Now he tells us: Cuba economic model doesn’t work, says Fidel
http://www.smh.com.au/world/now-he-tells-us-cuba-economic-model-doesnt-work-says-fidel-20100909-153bb.html?from=smh_sb

GM says:
September 9, 2010 at 8:31 am
“Ah, I was waiting for that canard to come up.
First, your 2% is in all likelihood only true for developed countries.”
What a load of nonsense. People in the third world are no different as to innate metal ability, but they don’t get the same educational opportunities. However, history shows that geniuses are good at self learning and a western style education is not necessarily good for promoting new thought – too much rote learning and scientific dogma. Perhaps geniuses are not as easily recognised amongst them, but the are most certainly there. It is vital to development of mankind that the world population continues to grow as quickly as possible.
Every single new genius is incredibly important, as he/she could be the one to make a paradigm shift in our understanding of science. Without these inspirational people mankind would still be back in the caves!

“Simple. Entropy always increases in a closed system, human bodies are a very low-entropy system, human civilization as a whole is at even lower entropy. So you need an external source of energy/negative entropy to keep things from falling apart. The size of the external flows of negentropy puts a hard limit to the growth of any human civilization”
[snip] and doubletalk.
{ re-organizing desk} “I refute it thus”.
[watch the language ~jove Mod]

It is a logical fallacy to think that, because things are the way they are currently (i.e. because we more than doubled caloric production in the past that we will be able to again), that they will continue to remain this way. It is a logical fallacy to think that, simply because Malthus has not be right up to this point, that he will always be wrong.
Famines have never been caused by a lack of food production but by a breakdown in mechanisms to deliver those foods.
We may be on the cusp of such a breakdown currently, as peak oil begins to take hold. That top-secret German army intelligence report had some pretty ominous predictions regarding this.
The Oil Drum’s article on the German military’s assessment of the geopolitical impact of peak oil: not for the squeamish

On the issue of population expansion in Africa where the birth rate is high.
“…However, until the late 1980s there was little evidence of any change in fertility. Since then, many changes have occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. Although population growth rates remain high, signs of reductions in fertility are appearing in several populations once regarded as having little or no prospect of lower levels of reproduction in the short term…
Barney Cohen reviews levels, differentials, and trends in fertility for more than 30 countries from 1960 to 1992. He finds evidence of fertility decline in Botswana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, confirming the basic results of the DHS. What is new here though is his finding that the fertility decline appears to have occurred across cohorts of women at all parities, rather than just among women at middle and higher parities, as might have been expected on the basis of experience in other parts of the world. He also presents evidence that fertility may have begun to fall in parts of Nigeria and possibly in Senegal…”
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=2207&page=3
And as I have mentioned before there allegedly has been work done on sterilization with or without consent of those sterilized.
Epicyte’s Spermicidal corn: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/56608
Covert Sterilization programs: http://www.whale.to/m/sterile.html

Correction: I understand that ENTROPY always increases. . .

I have a very easy solution to yer problem right. It’s not considered a kind of heart solution but alas that’s a more philosophical problem.
Any person or persons that think the world is getting overpopulated or that the world otherwise can’t sustain the world population or that the world otherwise that the mass of population is creating a less sustainable environment than the world can handle, well they are all, hopefully, free to off ’em self to help support their own claim and be part of their own solutions.
I’m not sorry if that sounds crude for a person who want to dictate for others first need to live up to his own solution to his dictated problem.

Ralph,
“So who puts the Foraminifera into the oil deposits, and the fern leaves into coal deposits eh??
I should have pointed out as well, it is universally accepted that coal is a fossil fuel. It is only oil that has the alternative theory.

Willis Eschenbach says:
September 9, 2010 at 1:56 am
Iron ore, crude oil, natural gas are all resources by any definition I’ve ever heard of, what’s made as a result of processing these things and turning them into useful items are called products.

GM says:
September 9, 2010 at 10:48 am
“[…]So you need an external source of energy/negative entropy to keep things from falling apart. ”
Bugger. Exactly quantified as usual. But i wanted to say a different thing. I found out who GM is.
The Ghost of Malthus.

DirkH said on I Am So Tired of Malthus
September 9, 2010 at 12:16 pm
GM says:
September 9, 2010 at 10:48 am
“[…]So you need an external source of energy/negative entropy to keep things from falling apart. ”
Bugger. Exactly quantified as usual. But i wanted to say a different thing. I found out who GM is.

Sid I just see some cretin reject the Second law? I never thought I will live to see this day, they never go that far, but there’s always someone….
The Ghost of Malthus.

Willis,
Population growth and food production do not have to be geometric or arithmetic but they will be roughly the same. They are closely linked because people grow food for their own consumption – directly or indirectly (by feeding cattle for example). More people, more food. The link between population growth and food production is similar to the link between temperature rise and CO2 increase, although the time lag of the former is much shorter 🙂 (couldn’t resist).
Great work Willis. Enjoy reading your thoughts.
Malthus did not know that mechanized farming would change food production. He was just another unfortunate soul whose theory was wrecked by the future.

Ralph says:
September 9, 2010 at 10:03 am
Take the Holodomor, for instance. Stalin destablilises the economic/political system that organises agriculture in the USSR, and up to 10 million people starve in the Ukraine.
Yes, up to 10,000,000 people starved, in just one small region.
It was a bit more than simply destabilizing the economic/political system that organized agriculture in the USSR. The famine was most certainly pre-designed, the last scraps collected by armed militia, hiding food was punished by imprisonment and forced labor, people were prevented fleeing by barbed wire fences and the food collected this way was sold on the international market. That’s what happened, a fine act of social engineering.
It has nothing to do with Malthus, as neither the Bengal famine of 1943 or the post-war German famine, when infant mortality went up to a horrible 60%.
It is the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-51 that comes closest to a Malthusian catastrophe. Population of the Irish isle even now is smaller than it used to be in 1840, at the same time there are about seventy million people worldwide claiming Irish origin.

Tenuc says:
September 9, 2010 at 11:57 am
No-one knows how much oil and natural gas the large areas of shale can produce and the experts estimates vary widely. The late Lee Price, who spent most of his career researching the Bakken shale, estimated the yield could be as high as 50% of reserves, while values presented in ND Industrial Commission Oil and Gas Hearings have ranged from a low of 3 to 10%.
————-
50% is not possible for Bakken. Even light sweet crude deposits give up only 40-60% with high porosity. The official USGS figure for Bakken is about 1% of the deposit over it’s life span.
You need to understand, all who question peak oil, it’s not about what’s in the ground. It’s about flow rate and ERoEI. Soon as a deposit costs more energy than you get out of the deposit, it’s game over for that deposit. In the 1960’s EroEI was about 100:1. Today it’s 20:1. The Alberta tar sands is 6:1 (their number) for extraction and production at site, not including local infrastructure and down stream refining and transport. 4:1 is the break even for society.
Flow rate is also very important. If the decline rate of older fields is greater than the extraction rate of new fields, then we are in an over all terminal decline. No matter how much is in Bakken, or the Arctic or in the “oil” shales of Colorado (It’s not oil, it’s kerogen).
Soon as net available oil is smaller than demand, then countries will out bid others for that oil.