Back in 1980, the great libertarian economist, Julian Simon, and the prepetually wrong Malthusian biologist, Paul Ehrlich, entered into a little wager regarding population growth and resource scarcity. They decided on using the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals to decide the bet. Simon allowed Erlich to pick the five metals. If the 1990 prices were higher, Erlich would win. If they were lower, Simon would win. With the help of a fellow perpetually wrong Malthusian, John P. Holdren, Ehrlich selected chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), tin (Sn) and tungsten (W). Julian Simon won the bet. However, a couple of years ago, economist Paul Kedroski suggested that had the time period of the bet extended to 2010, Ehrlich would have been the winner every year since 1991…
Given its 30th anniversary, and with commodities in the news – especially oil – I thought it was an apropos time (and TED an appropriate venue) to revisit the bet’s context, outcome, controversies and implications.
Without getting into it too deeply, here are some things worth knowing. Given the above graph of the five commodities’ prices in inflation-adjusted terms, it will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year, and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was happy to bet on any period from a year on up (we don’t have enough data to do a full 21st century decade), then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s. He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.
In light of the fact that the world population clock recently crossed the 7 billion mark, I thought I’d see if there was a more accurate measure of the increasing scarcity (or lack thereof) of these metals over time.
Rather than “cherry-picking” particular decades, I took a look at the full historical price record (available from the USGS). The inflation adjusted prices of Chromium (Cr), Copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), Tin (Sn) and Tungsten (W) exhibit no statistically meaningful inflation-adjusted price trend over the last 110 years…
Cu, Ni and W have slightly negative slopes; while Cr and Sn have slightly positive slopes… Only chromium’s (R^2 = 0.3187) and copper’s (R^2 = 0.1719) trend lines approach statistical significance.
While the inflation adjusted price of these metals is a good measure of affordability, it is not a complete measure. The price is only relevant if it is measured against the financial resources available. Relative to world real per capita GDP all five metals have become more affordable since 1969…
The GDP slope is positive and highly statistically significant (R^2 = 0.98). The GDP slope (81.354) is almost three times larger than the largest positive metal slope (Ni, 32.506).
More importantly, from a scarcity perspective, the production output of all five metals has been rising over time. Four are rising exponentially …
While the ratio of price to output has been declining exponentially…
If these metals were becoming more scarce, the price would be rising faster than the supply.
The USGS estimates that the current prover reserves of all five metals are sufficient to meet demand for the next 20 to 59 years. For “fun” I estimated the crustal mass of all five metals and estimated how long it would take to literally run out at the current production rate…
Debunking the Population Bomb Dud
The human popupation hit the seven billion mark last fall…
Published online 19 October 2011 | Nature 478, 300 (2011) | doi:10.1038/478300a
News
Seven billion and counting
A look behind this month’s global population landmark reveals a world in transition.
Jeff Tollefson
What’s in a number? This month, the world’s attention turns to a big one: 7 billion, the latest milestone in humanity’s remarkable and worrying rise in population.
[…]
On one level, a figure of 7 billion is incredible for the sheer momentum it represents: a full doubling of the planet’s population since 1967, with current growth adding 200,000 people each day, and a nation larger than the size of France each year. But although the 6-billion mark was reached about 13 years ago according to revised figures, it will take nearly 14 years to hit 8 billion (see ‘Snapshots of growth’). The comparison shows that population growth is decelerating; it is likely to level off at about 10 billion before the end of the century.
Between now and then, the fastest growth will be in Africa, where fertility levels remain higher than anywhere else in the world. Population levels among industrialized countries, by contrast, will remain relatively constant. Although Asia will remain the most populous continent, decreasing fertility rates there will add to the overall ‘greying’ of the planet.
The Nature article included the following graphic, indicating that the word population will most likely level off at ~10 billion ca. 2070…
Is that a problem? I don’t think so. The human race handled the rise from 3.5 to 7 billion rather well. The global per capita food supply has steadily increased since 1960…
Per capita real GDP has risen at the same rate as the population…
Per capita food supply has also risen with the population…
And… Amazingly… Per capita food supply and per capita GDP are highly correlated…
The percentage of the world’s population suffering from undernourishment has steadily declined over the last 40 years, despite a rising population…
Very few nations have failed to reach the MDG 1 target of reducing the percentage of their population suffering from undernourishment by 50%…
The world isn’t running out of water either. The UN FAO Aquastat data base showed that in the year 2000, the world’s total renewable water resource was 53,730 x 10^9 m3/yr. The total withdrawal was estimated to be 2,871 x 10^9 m3/yr. That’s a 5% utilization rate.
The far from perect human condition doesn’t negate the fact that clear progress has been made over the last half-century to reduce hunger, despite a growing population.
Almost all of the population growth over the next 60 years will be in Africa and Asia – the two largest land masses on Earth.
Assuming that the populations of Asia and Africa reach 5 billion and 3.6 billion respectively, their population densities will be 114 and 119 people per km^2. The population densities of the rest of the world will remain about the same or decline. Asia’s density is currently 95 per km^2. The greatest stress will be on Africa, which is currently underutilizing its resources more than any other continent.
Africa has plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of water and plenty of resources. Africa just lacks the economic and political infrastructure to realize its own potential.
Current and potential arable land use in Africa. Out of the total land area in Africa, only a fraction is used for arable land. Using soil, land cover and climatic characteristics a FAO study has estimated the potential land area for rainfed crops, excluding built up areas and forests – neither of which would be available for agriculture. According to the study, the potential – if realised – would mean an increase ranging from 150 – 700% percent per region, with a total potential for the whole of Africa in 300 million hectares. Note that the actual arable land in 2003 is higher than the potential in a few countries, like Egypt, due to irrigation…
The “world” isn’t running out of anything. Global proven oil reserves have doubled since 1980.
Most other commercial mineral resources have seen its proven reserves grow at least as fast as consumption has grown.
The world has plenty of food, water, space, mineral resources and the Earth’s environment is generally cleaner now than it was 35 years ago. Crop yields have continued to maintain an increasing upward trend for 40 years… And there is every reason to believe that crop yields will continue to improve (unless we really are on the verge of returning to Little Ice Age climate conditions).
But it will get worse in the future!!!
The “bear” is always just out of sight in the woods. For centuries, Malthusians have trotted out one invisible bogeyman after another (Malthusians pre-date Malthus by at least a few thousand years). The disaster is just over the horizon, just around the corner or lurking in the woods.
The Earth is finite; but humans have barely tapped its resources… We will still barely be tapping the Earth’s resources when we hit the 10 billion mark about 90 years down the road… And the Malthusians will still be warning us about the bear in the woods.
The only thing the world has a genuine shortage of is honest and competent people in gov’t. Almost all of our problems are due to political interference with market forces.
And to just rub salt in the wounds of the Malthus followers that your article so eloquently cut ….
We haven’t even begun to exploit the resources of space yet. The book that turned me from pessimistic to optimistic about the future of mankind was Gerard K O’Neill’s “The High Frontier” (yes I’m that old). Give that book to any Malthus follower and get them to read it.
With just the material in free space, namely the asteroid belt, we could build 2000 times the surface area of Earth. Of course there are huge challenges to doing it but we will get there.
Brian H
January 25, 2012 10:50 am
williamholder says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:00 am
When viewed as a percentage of a whole this is a very effective presentation. In terms of absolute numbers however it is deceiving. There are certainly more impoverished peoples than there were a century ago – there are certainly more people without ready access to clean water than there were a century ago – there are more malnurished people than there were a century ago – there are more people without adequate health care than there were a century ago – there are more murders than there were a century ago – in fact there are many unpleasant human circumstances that in absolute terms have increased significantly over the last century
I can confidently predict that these numbers will increase over the next century. It will get worse in the future.
The percentage improvements will do just fine, and the absolute numbers will improve radically, when the population peaks and starts to decline. David, you shouldn’t cede the assumptions of the “medium” band of the UN Population Survey. It also has high and low bands — and the low band is always right. In fact, the lower bound of the low band is the best estimator, historically. The center of the low band now says peak 8 bn by 2045: UN spreadsheet; click the “Low” tab
Brian H
January 25, 2012 10:57 am
TRM;
Another estimate I’ve seen is that a 1-mi diameter nickle-iron asteroid noodged into Earth orbit would yield (substantially pre-sorted) as much precious metals as have been mined from the crust to date. And huge amounts of base metals for space-based constructions. The current prices applied to the precious metals, btw, would extrapolate to about $1 million per capita for the planet.
No matter the cost of the “noodging” operation, or extraction facilities, that’s one helluvan ROI!
1DandyTroll
January 25, 2012 10:59 am
Mr Kedroski way of calculating a race sounds like somebody who loses every race but claims he would’ve won if he had but a faster car and been closer to the finish line at start of the race.
Oh no sir, Mr policeman I didn’t speed, check my statistics covering my whole driving career…oh, sorry wait, we have to start at 1982, since then the average would be spot on the current here speed limit. :p
Toto
January 25, 2012 11:12 am
We never seem to run out of proofs that Malthus was wrong or new Malthus-like claims.
But they all miss the point. Malthus believers do not believe because of their theories, they propose their theories because of what they believe. And that is simple: there are too many people and it’s getting worse. Over the course of a lifetime, change is obvious. Some things get better, but the golden age is always in the past. There is some over-romanticizing, but there is also some truth to that. Would I want to go live in India? No way. But people adapt amazingly well, so we will all end up living in India (in effect) and not think much of it.
The “proofs” for and against Malthus are all about running out of resources. Those resources have a way of being there when needed that cannot be forecast. The real question is: can the political and social and cultural systems keep up with the population growth? Will the happiness level or standard of living go up or down? Unfortunately, that question is not any easier to answer.
Did the Roman empire fall apart because of resource reasons or social reasons? (rhetorical question)
John F. Hultquist
January 25, 2012 11:14 am
Rob Crawford says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:59 am
Don K:
“ First problem . . . “
That’s entirely Simon’s point.
—————————————–
Ahh! Now we have a third useful statement:
The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stones.
The horse-powered society did not end for a lack of horses.
The chrome plate auto did not end for a lack of chrome.
LOL! http://www.freecarkits.com/chromemercedes.htm
SteveSadlov
January 25, 2012 11:20 am
IMHO there is no way it will take until 2070 to hit the high point. The fall in fecundity, world wide, is spectacular. It is even happening in places where it’s not supposed to such as poor majority Muslim countries. Sure, some places are still above replacement but such places also still have relatively high mortality. Meanwhile, a number of places are now so far below replacement they are already out of the game and in some cases may already be in a non recoverable flat spin. My own bet it, peak population 15 years from now, max. And then …
JP
January 25, 2012 11:20 am
I think the author over-estimates the population growth of Asia. China, Japan, the Koreas, Thailand, and even Indonesia (the world’s most populous Muslim nation) all have birth rates below replacement levels; Japan and China have maintained TFRs (Total Fertility Rates) at or below 1.6 children per female for over 2 decades. Japan is now losing population. China is only half a generation behind. Even India is seeing its birthrates plunge, and could have TFRs below replacement levels during the next generation. Russia and Europe, as everyone knows, are demographically in crisis. And even th more traditionally high birthrate nations of North Africa have seen birthrates plunge to or below replacement levels this past decade.
Yes, Africa will be the only continent that actually adds significantly to its population. But much of East Asia and the Middle East (save Yemen and Afghanistan) are following in Europe’s path. In South America and Central America birthrates generall have declined from 5.9-6.0 in 1970 (Mexico and Brazil) to around 2.4 (Mexico) to 1.8 (Brazil) in 2010. At current trends these nations will go below replacement levels during the next 10-15 years (if they haven’t already gone there).
Statistically speaking, it is much more difficult to recover lost populations (discounting immigration) when a nation drops below 2.0 children per female over extended periods of time, as the pool of fertile women also shrinks. In the case of Japan, China, Greece, Germany, Italy, and Russia, it is almost impossible; the current younger generations of women would have to begin having between 6-10 children, and thier children would have to maintain that birthrate for another generation – a highly unlikely scenario. From a purely economic perspective, the consequences are obvious. Almost all of the wealthiest nations on earth will see thier populations level out or shrink the next 30-50 years. Mainy people only look at the loss of producers; but the loss of consumers is also very important. How many investors are willing to risk thier capital with markets that will be shrinking? Only throught consolidation and mergers will corporations be able to maintain economies of scale. And despite the demand for food and resoucrce coming out of Africa, there will be net decreases in demand for energy, food, and consumer goods over-all. This will not be a radical change, but a long uneven and steady change in our global populations. Aging populations consume and produce less than younger ones;
In many ways, the Alarmists will be happy.In 30 years there will be less consumption of energy and food. But there will also be a leveling off and reduction in standards of living.
George E. Smith;
January 25, 2012 11:21 am
“”””” Spartacus says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:52 am
Hi David
Great article. As a geologist I fully agree with you.
Make please a small correction:
You wrote “More importantly, from a scarcity perspective, the production output of all five metals has been rising over time. Four are rising exponentially”
The trends do not show any exponential trend because they all have arithmetic trends. “””””
I thought so too, then I noticed the vertical axis is logarithmic, not linear, so they do seem to be exponential growth.
George E. Smith;
January 25, 2012 11:34 am
Interesting information David.
I’m sorry you didn’t include one very important graphic; maybe you have the data available to you.
Years ago during the plasticine age, Scientific American published a special issue on energy I think it was, and a very interesting paper plotted FOOD OUTPUT versus ENERGY INPUT for all kinds of global societies.
“Eskimos” for example increased their food production (seals etc) using the energy of powder in the bullets they shot the seals with, instead of harpooning them, and also the gasoline for their snow mobiles that replaced sled dogs or human sled pulling.
The overall result was that regardless of technology, world food production increased linearly with energy input .
In other words if the USA doesn’t get energy, the world doesn’t get food.
Only France and New Zealand were significantly off the world line in the direction of being more efficient at converting energy into food. In both cases it was attributed to unique weather conditions for those two places, and neither one was of great significance in terms of total global food supply.
Is this something you could extract current data for and show us, it would be most illuminating, in this era of energy abhorence.
Brian H says:
January 25, 2012 at 10:50 am
[…]
The percentage improvements will do just fine, and the absolute numbers will improve radically, when the population peaks and starts to decline. David, you shouldn’t cede the assumptions of the “medium” band of the UN Population Survey. It also has high and low bands — and the low band is always right. In fact, the lower bound of the low band is the best estimator, historically. The center of the low band now says peak 8 bn by 2045:
UN spreadsheet; click the “Low” tab
You’re absolutely correct. I should have thought of that. The true most likely scenario almost always tracks at or below the alarmists’ lowest case scenario.
a reader
January 25, 2012 11:36 am
BrianH:
A great meteorite story is at the end of Peary’s “Northward Over the Great Ice” vol.2. He describes the 3 meteorites that he found at Cape York in the arctic and managed to remove in the late 1890’s. The largest, the “Ahnighito”, was 90-100 tons, and if I’m reading the assay correctly, was 92% iron, 7% nickel and the rest traces of “other”. I assume there may be others buried here or there, although these 3 were exposed and had been used for centuries by the Eskimos to make their tools.
Brian H
January 25, 2012 11:37 am
SteveSadlov says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:20 am
IMHO there is no way it will take until 2070 to hit the high point.
…
Steve, see my post just above referencing the UN Population Survey spreadsheet, pointing out the low band estimates. It’s historically been right; indeed, its lower edge has the best record. The band estimate is 8 bn by ’45, then dropping. Elsewhere, someone who seemed to have full data base access said the lower edge shows <8 bn by 2035 as the peak.
Not as soon as your 2027 estimate, but getting there.
George E. Smith; says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:21 am
“”””” Spartacus says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:52 am
[…]
I thought so too, then I noticed the vertical axis is logarithmic, not linear, so they do seem to be exponential growth.
I used a log scale because it the annual production numbers varied by several orders of magnitude.
Interstellar Bill
January 25, 2012 11:39 am
If you think the Malthusians were wailing loudly at the 7 billion mark,
just wait until old age is abolished for their screams to be deafening,
especially when anti-aging is advanced enough for the old to reproduce.
Brian H
January 25, 2012 11:43 am
David Middleton says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:35 am
Brian H says:
January 25, 2012 at 10:50 am
…
. The center of the low band now says peak 8 bn by 2045:
UN spreadsheet; click the “Low” tab
You’re absolutely correct. I should have thought of that. The true most likely scenario almost always tracks at or below the alarmists’ lowest case scenario.
David, the implications are immense. I’ve never seen a proper, or even a half-vast, assessment of the consequences at the level of detail of this posting. Care to consider a re-do??
😉
Mooloo
January 25, 2012 11:45 am
@ur momisugly William Holder
there are more murders than there were a century ago
Some other people have addressed your other mistakes, but I picked this one because it is the most egregious..
Did you think to check before you made this statement? You know, use facts, rather than make them up? The murder rate in 1911 was higher in the US than it is now. Nationally it was 5.5 per 100,000, compared to 4.8 now. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0E16F63A5E13738DDDAA0894D8415B828DF1D3
Brian H
January 25, 2012 12:03 pm
Mooloo says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:45 am @ur momisugly William Holder
there are more murders than there were a century ago
Some other people have addressed your other mistakes, but I picked this one because it is the most egregious..
Did you think to check before you made this statement? You know, use facts, rather than make them up? The murder rate in 1911 was higher in the US than it is now. Nationally it was 5.5 per 100,000, compared to 4.8 now.
Yabbut, to give the ijit devil his due, his point was that there were so many fewer of us then, that 0.055 x few << 0.048 x many. He doesn't accept relative improvement, he demands ABSOLUTE improvement! As I noted above, that will happen after (or immediately leading up to) the significant decline in population beginning in the '30s or '40s.
Brian H
January 25, 2012 12:08 pm
JP;
Statistically speaking, it is much more difficult to recover lost populations (discounting immigration) when a nation drops below 2.0 children per female over extended periods of time, as the pool of fertile women also shrinks. In the case of Japan, China, Greece, Germany, Italy, and Russia, it is almost impossible; the current younger generations of women would have to begin having between 6-10 children, and thier their children would have to maintain that birthrate for another generation – a highly unlikely scenario.
No problem-O!! See A. Huxley, Brave New World. Artificial wombs, or surrogate gestation in pigs or cows, will make up the difference.
>8-)
Don K said @ur momisugly January 25, 2012 at 7:17 am
Overall, an excellent article. But there are some problems…
Third. Water. It’s heavy and expensive to move. It may well be true that only 5% of water resources are currently utilized. But vast amounts of water in the North American lake belt or the Amazon basin, aren’t much help to the guy trying to raise tomatoes in Bakersfield or Cairo. A lot of agriculture is currently dependent on mining diminishing amounts of fossil water in arid or semi-arid regions. That’s almost certainly not sustainable.
There’s another problem here and it’s what got me interested in what we call sustainable agriculture (we don’t know of any agriculture yet that is sustainable indefinitely).
Irrigation of crops in an arid climate leads to accumulation of salts in the topsoil. Once those salts reach a certain level, the land can no longer grow crops. In ancient Mesopotamia irrigation agriculture and civilisation had their beginning some 7,000 years ago. That civilisation that irrigation had enabled collapsed when the crops began to fail due to salt accumulation. Crop irrigation only works indefinitely when there’s sufficient rainfall to prevent the accumulation of salts in the soil.
Before someone says: but we can always go to hydroponics, bear in mind the cost of production. Go dehydrate a pound of hydroponically grown tomatoes, weigh them, and then ask yourself if you are prepared to pay the same amount of money for that weight of wheat, rice, or other staple.
FWIW, I believe the best thing we can do to mitigate this problem is double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That would lead to a calculated decrease in crop water needs of ~25%. But then I’m a heretic.
MarkW said @ur momisugly January 25, 2012 at 9:19 am
Everytime someone builds a multi-story building, they are making more land.
Unfortunately that’s not true. There’s a saying that the most valuable crop a farmer can grow is a housing subdivision. We build our houses on arable land in preference to land unsuitable for growing crops. Go figure…
Everyone is ignoring the basic problem with resource extraction. The rate of extraction. These are indeed growth curves, and that is the problem. All growth curves have a doubling period. At 3% growth that’s a doubling period of about 25 years. That means in the next 25 years we will consume more resources than ALL OF HISTORY COMBINED. That’s what exponential growth means.
So here are the problems going forward.
Demand not only increases with population increase, but as poor countries modernize they consume more per person than a country with a growing population but has no modernization. Thus the doubling period of that consumption is shorter.
Second, mining operations can only extract their resourse so fast. So as ore grades drop, not only does the production rate fall, but the energy required to extract that same amount of metal increase.
Going forward the rate of demand will grow faster than the capable rate of extraction for crucial resources like oil, copper, chromium.
We are like a bacterium in a test-tube that has a resource consumption double period of one week. At the 50% mark all the bacterium are claiming we’ve been here for months and have half our resources left, so there is no foreseeable problem.
Berényi Péter
January 25, 2012 12:38 pm
Nick Shawsays: January 25, 2012 at 4:13 am
As far as I can see, the world is about to run out of nothing
Do you mean we have already passed peak nothing and as nothing is indispensable, we are getting doomed by the impending lack of nothing?
TomB
January 25, 2012 12:43 pm
Gerard says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:56 am
What Ehrlich hadn’t thought of is that population growth in underdeveloped countries made for extra masses of people working in inhumane conditions in copper mines. Yes humanity is able to proliferate but are we able to make circumstances better for the majority of people on this planet. I think your are better of when a cake is divided by 8 then by 16 and that still holds when that cake doesn’t have a fixed size.
To quote Arnold J. Rimmer, “Wrong, wrong, absolutely brimming over with wrongability!” You won’t be dividing a single cake 16 ways. You’ll be dividing 4 or 8 cakes 16 ways. You’ve fallen into the trap of imaging you already known how many cakes there will be, how large they are, and how many can be made, and how many you’ll need. You’ve lost the entire thread and context of the article. Willfully I presume.
Brian H
January 25, 2012 12:54 pm
I see jrwakefield is on the job again, exponentiating his brain into ecstasies of impending vacuum exposure. Yawn.
Here’s a primitive start on a technology that will turn all history’s waste products into pristine purified resources when fully developed: http://www.plascoenergygroup.com/
Then, to power that and everything else till about the sun goes red giant, there’s this:
LPPhysics.com (at a capital cost and output price <<10% of best current retail market.)
And to just rub salt in the wounds of the Malthus followers that your article so eloquently cut ….
We haven’t even begun to exploit the resources of space yet. The book that turned me from pessimistic to optimistic about the future of mankind was Gerard K O’Neill’s “The High Frontier” (yes I’m that old). Give that book to any Malthus follower and get them to read it.
With just the material in free space, namely the asteroid belt, we could build 2000 times the surface area of Earth. Of course there are huge challenges to doing it but we will get there.
The percentage improvements will do just fine, and the absolute numbers will improve radically, when the population peaks and starts to decline. David, you shouldn’t cede the assumptions of the “medium” band of the UN Population Survey. It also has high and low bands — and the low band is always right. In fact, the lower bound of the low band is the best estimator, historically. The center of the low band now says peak 8 bn by 2045:
UN spreadsheet; click the “Low” tab
TRM;
Another estimate I’ve seen is that a 1-mi diameter nickle-iron asteroid noodged into Earth orbit would yield (substantially pre-sorted) as much precious metals as have been mined from the crust to date. And huge amounts of base metals for space-based constructions. The current prices applied to the precious metals, btw, would extrapolate to about $1 million per capita for the planet.
No matter the cost of the “noodging” operation, or extraction facilities, that’s one helluvan ROI!
Mr Kedroski way of calculating a race sounds like somebody who loses every race but claims he would’ve won if he had but a faster car and been closer to the finish line at start of the race.
Oh no sir, Mr policeman I didn’t speed, check my statistics covering my whole driving career…oh, sorry wait, we have to start at 1982, since then the average would be spot on the current here speed limit. :p
We never seem to run out of proofs that Malthus was wrong or new Malthus-like claims.
But they all miss the point. Malthus believers do not believe because of their theories, they propose their theories because of what they believe. And that is simple: there are too many people and it’s getting worse. Over the course of a lifetime, change is obvious. Some things get better, but the golden age is always in the past. There is some over-romanticizing, but there is also some truth to that. Would I want to go live in India? No way. But people adapt amazingly well, so we will all end up living in India (in effect) and not think much of it.
The “proofs” for and against Malthus are all about running out of resources. Those resources have a way of being there when needed that cannot be forecast. The real question is: can the political and social and cultural systems keep up with the population growth? Will the happiness level or standard of living go up or down? Unfortunately, that question is not any easier to answer.
Did the Roman empire fall apart because of resource reasons or social reasons? (rhetorical question)
Rob Crawford says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:59 am
Don K:
“ First problem . . . “
That’s entirely Simon’s point.
—————————————–
Ahh! Now we have a third useful statement:
The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stones.
The horse-powered society did not end for a lack of horses.
The chrome plate auto did not end for a lack of chrome.
LOL! http://www.freecarkits.com/chromemercedes.htm
IMHO there is no way it will take until 2070 to hit the high point. The fall in fecundity, world wide, is spectacular. It is even happening in places where it’s not supposed to such as poor majority Muslim countries. Sure, some places are still above replacement but such places also still have relatively high mortality. Meanwhile, a number of places are now so far below replacement they are already out of the game and in some cases may already be in a non recoverable flat spin. My own bet it, peak population 15 years from now, max. And then …
I think the author over-estimates the population growth of Asia. China, Japan, the Koreas, Thailand, and even Indonesia (the world’s most populous Muslim nation) all have birth rates below replacement levels; Japan and China have maintained TFRs (Total Fertility Rates) at or below 1.6 children per female for over 2 decades. Japan is now losing population. China is only half a generation behind. Even India is seeing its birthrates plunge, and could have TFRs below replacement levels during the next generation. Russia and Europe, as everyone knows, are demographically in crisis. And even th more traditionally high birthrate nations of North Africa have seen birthrates plunge to or below replacement levels this past decade.
Yes, Africa will be the only continent that actually adds significantly to its population. But much of East Asia and the Middle East (save Yemen and Afghanistan) are following in Europe’s path. In South America and Central America birthrates generall have declined from 5.9-6.0 in 1970 (Mexico and Brazil) to around 2.4 (Mexico) to 1.8 (Brazil) in 2010. At current trends these nations will go below replacement levels during the next 10-15 years (if they haven’t already gone there).
Statistically speaking, it is much more difficult to recover lost populations (discounting immigration) when a nation drops below 2.0 children per female over extended periods of time, as the pool of fertile women also shrinks. In the case of Japan, China, Greece, Germany, Italy, and Russia, it is almost impossible; the current younger generations of women would have to begin having between 6-10 children, and thier children would have to maintain that birthrate for another generation – a highly unlikely scenario. From a purely economic perspective, the consequences are obvious. Almost all of the wealthiest nations on earth will see thier populations level out or shrink the next 30-50 years. Mainy people only look at the loss of producers; but the loss of consumers is also very important. How many investors are willing to risk thier capital with markets that will be shrinking? Only throught consolidation and mergers will corporations be able to maintain economies of scale. And despite the demand for food and resoucrce coming out of Africa, there will be net decreases in demand for energy, food, and consumer goods over-all. This will not be a radical change, but a long uneven and steady change in our global populations. Aging populations consume and produce less than younger ones;
In many ways, the Alarmists will be happy.In 30 years there will be less consumption of energy and food. But there will also be a leveling off and reduction in standards of living.
“”””” Spartacus says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:52 am
Hi David
Great article. As a geologist I fully agree with you.
Make please a small correction:
You wrote “More importantly, from a scarcity perspective, the production output of all five metals has been rising over time. Four are rising exponentially”
The trends do not show any exponential trend because they all have arithmetic trends. “””””
I thought so too, then I noticed the vertical axis is logarithmic, not linear, so they do seem to be exponential growth.
Interesting information David.
I’m sorry you didn’t include one very important graphic; maybe you have the data available to you.
Years ago during the plasticine age, Scientific American published a special issue on energy I think it was, and a very interesting paper plotted FOOD OUTPUT versus ENERGY INPUT for all kinds of global societies.
“Eskimos” for example increased their food production (seals etc) using the energy of powder in the bullets they shot the seals with, instead of harpooning them, and also the gasoline for their snow mobiles that replaced sled dogs or human sled pulling.
The overall result was that regardless of technology, world food production increased linearly with energy input .
In other words if the USA doesn’t get energy, the world doesn’t get food.
Only France and New Zealand were significantly off the world line in the direction of being more efficient at converting energy into food. In both cases it was attributed to unique weather conditions for those two places, and neither one was of great significance in terms of total global food supply.
Is this something you could extract current data for and show us, it would be most illuminating, in this era of energy abhorence.
You’re absolutely correct. I should have thought of that. The true most likely scenario almost always tracks at or below the alarmists’ lowest case scenario.
BrianH:
A great meteorite story is at the end of Peary’s “Northward Over the Great Ice” vol.2. He describes the 3 meteorites that he found at Cape York in the arctic and managed to remove in the late 1890’s. The largest, the “Ahnighito”, was 90-100 tons, and if I’m reading the assay correctly, was 92% iron, 7% nickel and the rest traces of “other”. I assume there may be others buried here or there, although these 3 were exposed and had been used for centuries by the Eskimos to make their tools.
Steve, see my post just above referencing the UN Population Survey spreadsheet, pointing out the low band estimates. It’s historically been right; indeed, its lower edge has the best record. The band estimate is 8 bn by ’45, then dropping. Elsewhere, someone who seemed to have full data base access said the lower edge shows <8 bn by 2035 as the peak.
Not as soon as your 2027 estimate, but getting there.
I used a log scale because it the annual production numbers varied by several orders of magnitude.
If you think the Malthusians were wailing loudly at the 7 billion mark,
just wait until old age is abolished for their screams to be deafening,
especially when anti-aging is advanced enough for the old to reproduce.
David, the implications are immense. I’ve never seen a proper, or even a half-vast, assessment of the consequences at the level of detail of this posting. Care to consider a re-do??
😉
@ur momisugly William Holder
there are more murders than there were a century ago
Some other people have addressed your other mistakes, but I picked this one because it is the most egregious..
Did you think to check before you made this statement? You know, use facts, rather than make them up? The murder rate in 1911 was higher in the US than it is now. Nationally it was 5.5 per 100,000, compared to 4.8 now.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0E16F63A5E13738DDDAA0894D8415B828DF1D3
Yabbut, to give the
ijitdevil his due, his point was that there were so many fewer of us then, that 0.055 x few << 0.048 x many. He doesn't accept relative improvement, he demands ABSOLUTE improvement! As I noted above, that will happen after (or immediately leading up to) the significant decline in population beginning in the '30s or '40s.No problem-O!! See A. Huxley, Brave New World. Artificial wombs, or surrogate gestation in pigs or cows, will make up the difference.
>8-)
Don K said @ur momisugly January 25, 2012 at 7:17 am
There’s another problem here and it’s what got me interested in what we call sustainable agriculture (we don’t know of any agriculture yet that is sustainable indefinitely).
Irrigation of crops in an arid climate leads to accumulation of salts in the topsoil. Once those salts reach a certain level, the land can no longer grow crops. In ancient Mesopotamia irrigation agriculture and civilisation had their beginning some 7,000 years ago. That civilisation that irrigation had enabled collapsed when the crops began to fail due to salt accumulation. Crop irrigation only works indefinitely when there’s sufficient rainfall to prevent the accumulation of salts in the soil.
Before someone says: but we can always go to hydroponics, bear in mind the cost of production. Go dehydrate a pound of hydroponically grown tomatoes, weigh them, and then ask yourself if you are prepared to pay the same amount of money for that weight of wheat, rice, or other staple.
FWIW, I believe the best thing we can do to mitigate this problem is double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That would lead to a calculated decrease in crop water needs of ~25%. But then I’m a heretic.
MarkW said @ur momisugly January 25, 2012 at 9:19 am
Unfortunately that’s not true. There’s a saying that the most valuable crop a farmer can grow is a housing subdivision. We build our houses on arable land in preference to land unsuitable for growing crops. Go figure…
Everyone is ignoring the basic problem with resource extraction. The rate of extraction. These are indeed growth curves, and that is the problem. All growth curves have a doubling period. At 3% growth that’s a doubling period of about 25 years. That means in the next 25 years we will consume more resources than ALL OF HISTORY COMBINED. That’s what exponential growth means.
So here are the problems going forward.
Demand not only increases with population increase, but as poor countries modernize they consume more per person than a country with a growing population but has no modernization. Thus the doubling period of that consumption is shorter.
Second, mining operations can only extract their resourse so fast. So as ore grades drop, not only does the production rate fall, but the energy required to extract that same amount of metal increase.
Going forward the rate of demand will grow faster than the capable rate of extraction for crucial resources like oil, copper, chromium.
We are like a bacterium in a test-tube that has a resource consumption double period of one week. At the 50% mark all the bacterium are claiming we’ve been here for months and have half our resources left, so there is no foreseeable problem.
Nick Shaw says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:13 am
As far as I can see, the world is about to run out of nothing
Do you mean we have already passed peak nothing and as nothing is indispensable, we are getting doomed by the impending lack of nothing?
To quote Arnold J. Rimmer, “Wrong, wrong, absolutely brimming over with wrongability!” You won’t be dividing a single cake 16 ways. You’ll be dividing 4 or 8 cakes 16 ways. You’ve fallen into the trap of imaging you already known how many cakes there will be, how large they are, and how many can be made, and how many you’ll need. You’ve lost the entire thread and context of the article. Willfully I presume.
I see jrwakefield is on the job again, exponentiating his brain into ecstasies of impending vacuum exposure. Yawn.
Here’s a primitive start on a technology that will turn all history’s waste products into pristine purified resources when fully developed: http://www.plascoenergygroup.com/
Then, to power that and everything else till about the sun goes red giant, there’s this:
LPPhysics.com (at a capital cost and output price <<10% of best current retail market.)