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

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

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

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

Kevin Kilty says:
January 13, 2013 at 9:06 am
“Moreover, there are other inputs required to meet the sort of production that you, Dirk H., and Henry Clarke keep talking about–land for producing phosphorus, natural gas for making ammonia, and more environment for taking care of wastes, cleaning waste water etc., etc. It is no use just talking in the abstract about laboratory scale production of 22 tonnes per hectare. What is needed for industrial scale production? That is the question to answer.”
The bulk of industry is concentrated into and around the mere 1.5% of Earth’s land area that is urban areas, plus a small amount of mines and installations elsewhere. Industry is compact relative to farms. A fertilizer plant supporting a vast number of farms has a tiny fraction of their area.
Affordable natural gas reserves have surged and been booming. Ammonia can also be produced with no natural gas, as I noted before, being just NH3 (as in N from air, H from H2O). Actually http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/10/29/nuclear-ammonia/ estimates that appropriate nuclear power could produce ammonia for merely $200 per ton and much cheaper than current natural gas production, but, even if the exact estimate was off, the important thing is that it isn’t a figure orders of magnitude higher but quite reasonable. The U.S. Army in the Cold War considered having portable nuclear reactors produce ammonia for ammonia-fueled vehicles without a conventional logistics train. Phosphorus, again, I discussed before.
There’s no grand problem with current wastewater treatment plants and the area required for them (small in the big picture), nor would there be if the world’s population eventually reached 10 billion instead of 7 billion — aside from problems which, as now, are created primarily by poverty. Nothing solves most problems so much as economic growth and prosperity, for which it is best to not let Club of Rome types gain power; Ehrlich opposed the Green Revolution, for instance.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” he [Ehrlich] confidently declared in an interview with then-radical journalist Peter Collier in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Ehrlich and others were openly contemptuous of the “Green Revolution,” underway in countries such as India and Pakistan, that had already nearly doubled crop yields in developing nations between 1965 and 1970. Ehrlich sniffed that such developments meant nothing, going so far as to predict that “the Green Revolution…is going to turn brown.”
http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now
Kevin Kilty says:
January 13, 2013 at 9:06 am
“When I use the phrase “not reversible”, I do not mean the reaction cannot be undone. I am not referring to the direction of the reaction in the reaction equation. I mean it cannot be undone without a positive change in entropy–I am using the formal engineering definition of reversible/irreversible. This is the nub of the problem of sustainability.”
Not really a problem. Stars produce entropy, and many last for billions of years. So did life and Earth even before humans. Despite constantly having non-reversible reactions in that sense, some types of stars would last for up to trillions of years nominally, in other words as long as the universe itself under many scenarios (although whether the universe will end sooner is a matter of scientific and religious debate). Anything lasting as long as the universe itself is as sustainable as anything can be in total duration.
About everything under the sun results in some waste energy, some waste heat, radiating out into space in the end, and that’s normal.
Whether intelligent life consisted of a few apes in jungles and caves, or a Kardashev level 3 civilization with Dyson Swarms, it’d produce entropy.
References to the second law are a tactic often attempted by some environmentalists to try to impress people with the words and phrases used; the second law actually implies nothing like that human civilization must be so-and-so environmentalist’s random figure of 0.Y billion instead of X billion people that they pulled out of their rear end for their sake of their own biases.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 13, 2013 at 9:06 am
“And there was no reason to sneer at my example of Helium. It was meant to illustrate my point. Apply it to more important instances of technological materials if you like, it applies to everything, eventually anyone ought to see implications to the long term problem of sustainability.”
The most important elements are present in far greater quantities and abundances on Earth than helium. For instance, aluminum, iron, magnesium, and titanium comprise 16% of the average rock by mass (amongst quadrillions of tons of such in the crust). There are quadrillions of tons of hydrogen and oxygen in the oceans. What is needed for concrete, steel, and plastics (if need be even hydrogen from water and carbon from anywhere) are all present in astronomical amounts. There is an economic argument for developing asteroid mining, but even on Earth there isn’t a single element that is a show-stopper. Even such as gallium and indium exist in quantities which are large relative to the amounts needed.
If using the term sustainability, the best attitude and understanding is that expressed in http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
But elsewhere “sustainability” is usually poorly defined anyway, so, rather than “the long term problem of sustainability,” the “long term problem of survival” is more apt. For that, it is best not to be limited to this planet, to expand into space, to have a positive vision of the future, of seeking increase and not decrease in mankind’s industrial and economic capabilities. (Low expectations are indirectly much of the real problem there; for instance, popular misconceptions have grown of assuming current space launch prices are unavoidable rather than actually around a thousand times the cost of propellant used, mostly liquid oxygen of cents per pound, and, without such public misconceptions, there would be more funded efforts to change the situation).
And part of what maximizes the odds of positive advancement and expansion of capabilities is stopping ideology like the following:
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S.” — Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Ehrlich
“We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.” – Ehrlich
Ehrlich was a co-author of a book with Holdren. Holdren has said things like that 210 million was too many people for the United States (quoted in 1970s) and advocated adding sterilants to drinking water to prevent such as the 300 million people in the U.S. today. Now Holdren is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren ).
Being surrounded by people like that is why, for instance, when the President of the United States said “under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”, he didn’t see that as an utter problem with it. (Quote source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/13/we-have-met-the-1-and-he-is-us/ ). Many, under messed-up ideology, would consider that a bonus. Allied groups also led to the President closing Yucca Mountain after billions had already been spent.*
* For some basic perspective on nuclear waste:
“Since the fraction of a radioisotope’s atoms decaying per unit of time is inversely proportional to its half-life, the relative radioactivity of a quantity of buried human radioactive waste would diminish over time compared to natural radioisotopes (such as the decay chains of 120 trillion tons of thorium and 40 trillion tons of uranium which are at relatively trace concentrations of parts per million each over the crust’s 3 * 10^19 ton mass).[93][94][95]
For instance, over a timeframe of thousands of years, after the most active short half-life radioisotopes decayed, burying U.S. nuclear waste would increase the radioactivity in the top 2000 feet of rock and soil in the United States (10 million km^2) by ≈ 1 part in 10 million over the cumulative amount of natural radioisotopes in such a volume, although the vicinity of the site would have a far higher concentration of artificial radioisotopes underground than such an average.[96]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Extremely messed up views are not just in small non-influential niches of society but are why, for instance, the CAGW movement’s BSing has spread as far as it has. Although the term cult doesn’t really apply to anything so widespread, Dr. Zubrin, a famous proponent of space colonization (a bit overbiased towards Mars over space habitats but with many good writings in general), has written a book on Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism; http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2012/06/people-matter-robert-zubrins-powerful.html
“I’m not advocating people dying by the billions, nor do I hope for world government, no other prospect is as horrifying in my mind than world government.”
The tendency over time has been for larger and larger scales of organization. For instance, over the centuries, Europe went from having many small chiefs, to larger holdings of nobles, to the strengthening of the power of nationwide monarchs, and so on, until finally the E.U. Such gradually approaches closer and closer to being like a single nation. The European Community came about essentially as a successor to stacking more and more international agreements on top of each other. More and more global environmental treaties, international taxation, and so on as advocated by Club of Rome types are exactly how a de facto world government would start to form over the decades, of a type subsequently crippling mankind’s future.
Someone in Europe in the 19th century would not likely have guessed the E.U. of today would exist, and likewise many today assume differences between nations today are a bulwark against the formation of a world government. Yet that bulwark is disturbingly weak in the long term actually. I greatly oppose world government, at least in any form like that which the world is presently headed towards, one in which its top advocates are often the worst kind of ideologues (like the CAGW movement type), who would execute policies bordering on anti-human, founded on their typical mathematical illiteracy, extreme dishonesty, and refusal to constructively listen to skeptics — quite conceivably enforcing stagnation and decline from which nobody could escape.
For a real positive future of mankind, to stop that (or at least delay it hopefully long enough for some to have escaped into deep space first), impeding them is critical.
I don’t fear, for instance, one day mankind discovering that the 30,000,000,000 megatons of phosphorus in the crust suddenly magically became below 200 megatons/year usage. Mankind has always done well versus natural challenges. I do fear, though, what mankind’s own governments can do, a lesson the past hundred years teaches very strongly. If civilization dies out, never leaving this planet, it won’t be from lack of materials, nor from advancing too fast, nor from too high industrial capabilities and prosperity, but from applied stupidity / misanthropism / corruption / twisted ideology.

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

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

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