Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I see that there’s another neo-Malthusian trying to convince us that global starvation and food riots are just around the corner. This time it’s David Archibald right here on WUWT. Anthony had posted a graph showing gains in various human indicators, viz:
But David disagrees, showing various looks at wheat production.
Now, back in 2010, I wrote a post called “I Am So Tired of Malthus” … and I am. For those not born before 1800, a bit of history is in order. Thomas Robert Malthus was an English cleric who made a famous claim in 1798. His claim was that population increases geometrically, doubling every 25 years. But the food supply only increases arithmetically. If you are a fan of original documents as I am, you can find his claim here. In it he says;
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
To him, this meant inevitable starvation was provably true … hey, it’s mathematics. However, in the event the population disagreed and kept growing … and we didn’t all die from lack of food. Go figure.
But this colossal failure did not kill Malthus’s idea, oh, no. In the 1960s the cudgel was taken up by the failed serial doomcaster, Paul R. Ehrlich. In 1968 he wrote “The Population Bomb”, which starts as follows:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate …”
His solution?
“We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.”
Charming fellow, compulsory population control in the US … of course, he’s a tenured Professor at Stanford so he must be right.
Riight … but once the 1970s were over and he had been proven just as wrong as Malthus, did he change his tune? Oh, no … in 1990 he wrote another book called “The Population Explosion” in which he claimed that there would be widespread food riots by the turn of the century.
Riight … but once the 1990s were over and Ehrlich had been proven just as wrong as Malthus for a second time, did he change his tune? Oh, no. He now says he was 100% correct, but he just got the timing wrong. It’s all gonna happen any day now, he says.
And David Archibald agrees with him.
The Limits To Growth isn’t discredited, just a couple of generations too early.
Riight … so I decided to take another look, as I did seven years ago, at how much food the world actually has. Per capita food consumption is the best indicator for this. A man can own a thousand automobiles on a given day … but he cannot eat a thousand breakfasts on a given day. So there is no distortion of average food consumption by a few rich people as there would be of average car ownership. Here are the latest figures from the FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Association. I’ve shown the poorest groups of countries, along with the EU countries and the world average for comparison. First, total food consumption in calories per person:
As you can see, people are eating better than ever. The poorest of the poor, the Least Developed Countries (“LDCs”, including the Solomon Islands where I’m writing this) get more food now than the global average in 1961, the first year for which we have data. And in turn, the world average is nearly up to where the EU countries were in 1961 … “widespread starvation”? Hardly …
Note also that the EU countries have leveled off. They are now eating as much as they want.
Nor is this just “empty calories”. Here is the corresponding graph, this time for protein consumption:
Again, we see the same pattern. The LDCs are up to the 1961 world average; the world is approaching the 1961 EU average; and the EU protein consumption has levelled out.
So while Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, and David Archibald all assure us that global starvation and food collapse is just around the corner … well, not this corner but the next corner … well, no, I didn’t mean that corner, I meant the corner after that … meanwhile, the people of the world pay no attention to failed doomcasters and grow more food per capita year after year after year.
Now, the increase in food is usually attributed to the “green revolution” of Norman Borlaug. And while this had a huge effect starting in the 1940s and increasing in the 1960s, Borlaug got the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work. However, a corollary of that is that by 1995 the further gains from the Green Revolution would have been minimal. Paul Ehrlich specifically said that the Green Revolution is what screwed up his predictions, but with the Green Revolution behind us, he reiterated that we’re all doomed to starvation … not.
Are there still problems regarding food? Assuredly, although these days they are more problems of distribution and storage, not problems of production.
Are people working to solve those problems? Again, assuredly, it’s important work.
But while no one knows what tomorrow may bring, me, I’m not going to concern myself with people feeding themselves. Seems like we’re doing rather well on that score, with no sign of an impending disaster.
Best to all from the warm climes, join me over on my blog for my further adventures in a Least Developed but Most Interesting Country, the Solomon Islands.
w.
It is the same thinking of Malthus and Ehrlich. The idea that we will stay essentially stagnate in technology as time marches on. That somehow we will not find a way to increase production and so forth. That being said, his idiot problem seems to be one that is entirely self correcting. If the food riots come and people starve, won’t the population decrease significantly all by itself? Again, this is the kind of thinking that we can’t count on technology, but we can count on the statistics of today concerning population. I think they are in search of a problem to solve since the whole global warming argument is swarming before them. It was one of the reasons I suspect that they picked CO2 as the pollutant. If it really was, then you have a case to regulate population.
It may well be the case that it is not only more likely, but nearly inevitable, that human population will crash due to some reason completely unrelated to lack of food or other resource.
After all, the biggest (haha…get it?) and fastest growing (gotcha agin!) health issue in the world today is…wait for it…obesity!
Even in what were not long ago considered poor countries, people are getting fatter and fatter.
Now, if we wuz only gettin’ fat and happy, ‘stead o’ fat and panicky.
There is no reason to think obesity would crash population. The only thing it would crash is the sofa.
I realise you’re probably joking, but it does raise an interesting point.
I have seen it stated that, globally, today more are dying from obesity than from starvation. But the obesity-related deaths are probably far smaller in number than starvation-related deaths a hundred years ago.
And of course the global statistics for average life expectancy are getting better all the time.
Chris
I never said or meant to imply that I thought obesity was going to crash the population or is a major killer.
In fact, available evidence seems to indicate that the negative health effects of being overweight are greatly exaggerated.
I merely point out that rather than scarcity, we have an ever increasing overabundance of food.
Before large numbers of people starve to death, it stands to reason that food prices will simply go way up.
At this point in time, food is a minor expense.
Growing up in the sixties and seventies, we ate far more austerely and spent more money doing so.
The point made by the author is a ridiculous one, and ever more prevalent obesity is evidence that such is the case.
Other evidence is the amount of food which is simply wasted in places like the US…as much as half of all food produced is thrown away uneaten.
People throw away food that is still perfectly good, and do so regularly.
Stores do it, restaurants do it, consumers do it…
People make more than they can eat and then toss any leftovers in the trash.
People throw away food items that have passed the expiration date, or even the last sale date, with no regard to whether it is actually spoiled or unsafe or that anything is wrong with it at all.
Regarding mortality…there are a lot of things which could caused large numbers of human deaths having nothing to do with food…such as a global pandemic, outbreak of war, natural disasters, etc.
Food is way down the list, and one of many possible reasons for such, and so logically it is more likely to be something else.
Chris – food more abundant and comparatively cheaper. The greens are working overtime to screw the economics up, though, destroy agricultural advances and civilization itself.
But you are right that no one is talking about the obesity problem as an ironic backdrop to the idiot Malthusian arguments. The beautiful people would be quick to brand you anti-diversity, гасisт, misogynist (fat and thin male deplorables of course are not included in the diversity fold).
I believe I was talking about exactly that.
The original words of Malthus that Willis has dug out are instructive. Looks like he wasn’t actually wrong, he was merely the first guy to place too much reliance on models. And he, also, ignored the feedbacks…
We didn’t lose the game, we just ran out of time. – Vince Lombardi
That’s always been the head-scratcher for me about the whole “we’ll have so many people we won’t be able to feed them” line.
So somehow people are not subject to the same forces that keep other populations in check?
Any real shortfall in food must end up in the eventual shrinking of a population, the seeming willingness of some populations to bear children even when the prospect of feeding those children is poor notwithstanding.
By the bye, that mystifies me: some populations will curtail their reproduction for seemingly the most trivial of reasons such as the awful prospect of having to move to the suburbs. Others will continue to reproduce and bring children into circumstances in which there is no hope of anything other than a short life of misery, disease and violence. But I digress.
I struggle to imagine how the population can out-grow the food supply, at least for very long. The pattern of human behavior being what it is, some strong group of people (say, a nation) will decide that it needs “lebensgrub” and will take by force the food of those unable or unwilling to defend it.
Others will see an opportunity to enrich themselves and figure out a way to make more food, which they will then sell to those who have something to exchange.
Fortunately we’ve seen much more of the latter than of the former, although who knows how much of the former takes place in uncivilized territory. We know that something similar happens over the distribution of narcotics, so its not a stretch to believe that somewhere someone is organizing to steal someone else’s grub.
For the losers who neither develop anything of value to exchange for food nor learn to grow food efficiently for themselves, well, if they’re “lucky” an industry built around feeding them will develop. But the downside of that, of course, is that the industry then has an interest in seeing that their clients *never* develop the ability to feed themselves since that would put the industry, and the people it feeds by way of salary and wages, out of business.
nitpick, Willis – (just for accuracy)
‘ in 1990 he wrote another book called “The Population Bomb” ‘
It was “The population Explosion” in 1990, having learned nothing since 1968
safe travels
Thanks, Bubba, fixed.
Thomas Malthus, Willis.
Not Robert.
Thomas Robert Malthus, thanks, fixed.
w.
Malthus used his middle name as his first name.
“The Population Bomb” was also re-printed in 1975, removing some of his failed predictions and extending the time period under which others could occur.
Ehrlich can at least claim one thing he is good at and which is trendy among the green blob: recycling rubbish.
Responding to Peter Campion:
Willis is in a country far from electronic libraries. His memory is not so far off. The correct name is THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS.
Cheers
and what of the “Obesity Bomb” that is afflicting the USA and now parts of Europe …… in the UK this has led to predictions that the current generation of young people and children have a shorter life expectancy than their parents ….
“Willis is in a country far from electronic libraries.”
Umm, he posted this, on the Internet. So. no, he’s not.
“If you are a fan of original documents as I am”
Indeed. He lays it out very logically, with postulates, which were:
“First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.
Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.”
Maybe the second one failed.
BC came along. The 2nd is still there.
It’s just the Millenials want someone else to pay for $9 USD of BC/month.
Walmart and a bunch of other places have dozens of kinds of BC pills for $4 per month, or $10 for 90 days worth.
https://www.walmart.com/cp/1078664
They will even mail em to ya.
Oops, my mistake. Been a while since I checked. I guess when everyone made such a big deal of it and it was required by law for insurance to pay for this specific thing, they raised the price. When the paw passed they were $4 and $10 like everything else.
Nick, thanks, a great find.
“…Maybe the second one failed…”
No, Ehrlich failed. Why would you defend what has become an absolute joke? Sure, Ehrlich won’t admit how wrong he was and claims he was “too optimistic,” but history says otherwise. Are you going to go that pathetic route as well?
I said nothing about Ehrlich. I quoted Malthus.
Should you say something about Ehrlich?
Didn’t have the birth control devices we do now for one thing. Though what’s happening in Japan can be considered a failure of the second one.
Didn’t have the birth control devices we do now for one thing. Though what’s happening in Japan can be considered a failure of the second one.
Like it, Nick. Some people here need a humour transplant.
Nick Stokes,
Both Malthus and Erlich were utterly wrong, though like all who are making primarily political statements, they never admitted they were wrong. Reality does not have much impact on political thinking. Much like the lack of influence of observation on the evolution of GCMs…. GCM diagnosed ECS is alarmingly high, and will remain so no matter what.
In Malthus’s defense many of the reasons he was proven wrong couldn’t be imagined in his day. The only effective birth control was abstinence, most of the world’s area was nearly uninhabited, and almost all the improvements in farming for thousands of years only improved how MUCH land each farmer could cultivate, not how much each acre produced. From Malthus’s era these all seemed like unbreakable laws of nature. It was only through mankind’s thirst for knowledge and imagination that these ‘Laws’ were broken.
And in Erlich’s defense… well, there isn’t much. By the time he wrote ‘Population Bomb’ several forms of birth control were on the market or in development. Hell, they formed a cornerstone of one of his plans to control the masses. Mankind had tamed vast reaches of the wilderness and was proving that the coldest parts of Antarctica, the scorching deserts, and even the depth of the sea could be inhabited by man with enough planing and will. Why, even space itself was opening to us.
And while it might not have been in full swing yet, the seeds of the Green Revolution where planted, and already starting to sprout. More importantly, greenhouses and hydroponics had already shown that food production DIDN’T rely on nature providing suitable acreage. Indead, we could grow crops and raise livestock UNDERGROUND if need be, as long as we had enough Power.
THIS is why Malthus, Erlich, and anyone else claiming a ‘Limit to growth’ exist for mankind is fundamentally wrong. Because Man is no longer bound by Nature. We have the knowledge, imagination, and will to survive and even thrive where no other species can. And Millenia from now (baring some stupid accident or twist of fate) when our population numbers in the hundreds of Trillions, our descendants will marvel at the thought of how there was once only a few Billion of us tucked away on a single rocky world.
~¿~
schitzree,
HUBRIS: “Man is no longer bound by Nature.”
From Wikipedia:
“The American economist Henry Charles Carey rejected Malthus’s argument in his magnum opus of 1858–59, The Principles of Social Science. Carey maintained that the only situation in which the means of subsistence will determine population growth is one in which a given society is not introducing new technologies or not adopting forward-thinking governmental policy, and that population regulated itself in every well-governed society, but its pressure on subsistence characterized the lower stages of civilization.”
So the clearest argument against Mathus was around a couple of decades after his death. I can cut Mathus himself some slack; it was a dumb idea (essentially equating humans to rats in a cage with limited food), but he may never have heard a solid counterargument against his nonsense. But there is no excuse for those who had heard the correct argument against Malthusian thinking…. right up Erlich and the greens of today. All utterly wed to a crazy theory, and all unwilling to have their thinking informed by historical reality.
Nick stokes says, “Maybe the second one failed.” Excellent! If I may…
The problem with the comparison is that we have very sparse data from the 1790’s on passion between the sexes in the So hemisphere. Then they colonized Australia.
Actually we do know a bit about passion between the sexes in the SH during the late 18th century.
Shaka Zulu was purportedly conceived as a result of traditional sexual foreplay gone out of control in 1786.
We have yet to reach man’s total food production ability/capacity and probably never will.
As most of the arable land in Africa is not at all farmed by modern methods, imagine the food production that would ensue. We have not begun to reach a food maximum for the world. In the meantime, as the population growth rate is dwindling, the crisis is essentially a done deal, gone, left the building. If we can get the dictators and such gone, then the hungry can get the food. Hunger in the world is all manmade, by their leaders.
The tragedy of Zimbabwe illustrates good and bad African farming pretty well (bread basket to basket case) and much else besides.
The biggest problem of course is places like Africa where they are huge net importers of grain foods. An extended global shortfall in production is not likely because the price point would rise to incentivize more land into production. But the net importers without deep financial reserves (again Africa) do have to worry about delivery and price shocks.
Of course, if those net importers without financial reserves were to learn to produce something of value…
..and yet these are the same people that try to keep CO2 limiting for C3’s
EXACTLY. For those not in agronomy, C3 plants like wheat use less efficient photosynthetic processes and have better growth with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Corn (maize) is a C4 so it is less affected.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/27/report-global-warming-debate-at-rice-university-soon-vs-sass/comment-page-1/#comment-2329289
Allan wrote:
“10. In one of the next global Ice Ages, atmospheric CO2 will approach about 150ppm, a concentration at which terrestrial photosynthesis will slow and cease – and that will be the extinction event for terrestrial carbon-based life on this planet.”
Leif wrote:
“There have been thousands of glaciations over the history of the Earth. It is not likely that one of the next ones will be an extinction event when none of the previous ones were. Don’t be so alarmist.”
Allan again:
I wish it was alarmist Leif. Atmospheric CO2 is inexorably declining as it is being sequestered in carbonate rocks. In the last Continental Last Ice Age, atmospheric CO2 declined to about 180 ppm – next time it could drop lower, even closer to the extinction point of C3 plants at about 150-160 ppm.
It is a bit more complicated – a few plants (less than 1%) are use the C4 photosynthesis pathway, including corn and sugar cane – but I doubt terrestrial life could survive on Sugar Frosted Flakes – notwithstanding the persistent rumour that “They’re Great!”
CO2 is life – for all carbon-based life on Earth..
Burn lots of wood, peat, coal, oil and natural gas Leif – all the plants and animals will be grateful to you.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/27/report-global-warming-debate-at-rice-university-soon-vs-sass/comment-page-1/#comment-2329389
The C4 Rice Project is attempting to adapt normal C3 rice to become C4 to improve crop yields at current CO2 levels. The UK government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are sponsoring this effort.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535011/supercharged-photosynthesis/
At the same time, governments and individuals are trying to abate and sequester CO2, the world’s best plant food, due to the false assumption that it causes dangerous global warming.- despite the fact that CO2 lags temperature at ALL measured time scales.
Could it be any more obvious that CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense?
If impending starvation confronts the world, any chance the political class will stop fretting over an impending climate catastrophe construct?
Probably not – that’s the only platform many of them have.
“….that’s the only platform many of them have….” no, sexual anomalies are the latest go to.
To them wearing a dress and wacking off your wiener isn’t an “anomaly”. It is perfectly rational.
Squiggs,
That would be “their weiner”. Please leave mine alone.
I’d rather think it in terms of human rights. Cutting parts off to get the gender right is pretty anomalous, there is no choice there. But is it your problem, or rather just a problem of the person and the medical personnel helping hem/hir do it? I’d vote it is not your problem, at least not much until you’re forced to pay the expenses.
There is a continuing market for apocalyptic prophesies. Ehrich found his particular scare scenario salable, so he kept on pushing it, and will probably continue to do so until he loses his readership. Political/economic scenarios are out there too, and sell. Religious and social horror stories are also a marketable commodity. How many books did Harold Camping sell?
What is as interesting is why there is such a desire to be scared. Perhaps Griff or ivankinman could expound on why they are True Believers?
H.L.Mencken put it in a nutshell:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Politicians instinctively know this. There is no better election slogan than ‘vote for me or the world is doomed … doomed’.
As to why people are so eager to believe this, I think it might be described as a religious feeling. “We have sinned O Lord, and must do penance for our sins.” Confessing one’s sins and doing penance always makes one feel good.
Looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
I’d put it in quotes, but I’m not sure I got it right.
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” ~ Groucho Marx
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” ~ Groucho Marx
Groucho was favorite Marxist. He spawned a huge, destructive political movement:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/06/aussie-liberal-press-notices-the-importance-of-reliable-electricity/comment-page-1/#comment-2573966
The Groucho Marxists are the leaders – they want power for its own sake at any cost, and typically are sociopaths or psychopaths. The great killers of recent history, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot. etc. were of this odious ilk – first they get power, then they implement their crazy schemes that do not work and too often kill everyone who opposes them.
The Harpo Marxists are the followers – the “sheeple” – these are people of less-than-average education/intelligence who are easily duped and follow the Groucho’s until it is too late, their rights are lost and their society destroyed. They are attracted to simplistic concepts that “feel good” but rarely “do good”. George Carlin said: “You know how stupid the average person is, right? Well, half of them are stupider than that!”
One can easily identify many members of these two groups in the global warming debate – and none of them are skeptics.
Don’t forget the snake oil salesmen Mann and Jeremy Rifkin.
” so he kept on pushing it, and will probably continue to do so until he loses his readership.”
I think Enrich is counting on two things. “A sucker is born every minute” and “A fool and his money are soon parted”.
Willis, thank you for this article.
The Archibald article made me so irritated I just decided to ignore it…lest spoil my perfect record of politeness and I lose all my many friends here by being irate 🙂
I have looked at world food production numbers in detail, many times over the years, and have used various metrics to get at the increase in food production, mainly to refute warmista claims that climate change is proving disastrous for food production.
Of course no such thing is occurring.
Food production around the world continues to set new records by any metric one may think of and research: Total tonnage of food produced; total calories of food produced; calories per person living on the Earth; production per acre as measured by weight; production per acres as measured by calories; total acreage in production…all set new records nearly but not quite every single year, as fluctuations about the uptrend lines do occur.
In fact, the insistence that climate change, or global warming, is bad for food production and a looming catastrophe is so demonstrably untrue that I have been under the delusion that pointing this out with hard data could be used to deprogram the warmista herd, disabuse them of their folly…even if only one or a few head at a time.
Nope.
Facts and logic are useless, as are charts and graphs or even, as it turns out, the method of simply having an observant look around.
The religion of CAGW is as fact free as any ideology can be, it seems.
And this conviction of imminent peril is but one facet.
It is interesting to note though, that such convictions seem to cut across the line between skeptics and True Believers.
It seems to be the case that human beings are hard wired to worry about stuff, and for some this adaptive survival mechanism…that of being worried about bad things happening…overrides all logic, education, and even common sense.
*sigh*
There are a lot of ways to be crazy.
nail on head menicholas, people seem to like worrying for worrying sake.
Being constantly worried is a selective advantage when you are nothing more than prey for predictors on the African savanna. Alarm is hard wired, and many never get past it via rational thinking.
I have to agree menicholas; the article by Archibald just about drove me crazy. I’m just a random, casual poster though, so I kept my mouth shut out of courtesy, since I find Archibald to be an original thinker. Disagree with him on this but at least he is an original, out of the box thinker.
The process and systems for growing and transporting food have an incredibly large amount of potential for finding inefficiencies and areas for powerful, incremental improvement. Even if we were to use up every available amount of acreage for growing, there would still be a multitude of ways to increase production through elimination of inefficiencies and redundancies in the overall system.
Frankly, it appears to me that some people just see the worst and if they happen to have a greater education it makes them no less gullible in their viewpoint, it just gives them a larger toolset to use to try to justify their mentality.
Malthus – “Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” The world generally has moved on from subsistence farming.
Malthus, Erlich and M King Hubbert (peak oil)all assumed technology static..such is the case of dystopian myopia. This same logical fallicy is the reason CAGW acolytes fail. Even the models are fraught with dystopian myopia. Nature is too broad to be captured in finite lines of code. Instead of expanding the models, the boundary conditions are tweaked in hopes of greater accuracy.
M King Hubbert did some good work – here is a critique:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2016/09/08/what-hubbert-got-really-wrong-about-oil/2/#52b868a315d5
I wonder if Mr. Archibald supports the renewal fuel standards. There is enough food going into US gas tanks to feed half of Africa and it has increased the prices of food enough to make it hard to feed a family in Guatemala. Last I looked it took more calories from fossil fuels to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get out of it so the process is not only stupid it is immoral.
Corn based ethanol only makes energy sense if the mash (after fermentation and distillation) is fed to animals that can digest the remainder. Once you’ve got all the animal feed you need it is a net loss of BTUs. How far the feed has to be transported matters, also. I believe we are past that point.
Corn based ethanol is not a waste. Ask your grandpappy.
Okay, it sucks when it’s diluted with gasoline.
The recovered distiller grains are in fact used as animal feed.
Dammit, you CAGW guys are tampering with the production of Bourbon!
“The recovered distiller grains are in fact used as animal feed.”
Leading to more methane
One thing I have noticed in pretty much all of the 60 countries I have visited that there are a lot of fat people.
Malthus –
pro – he inspired Darwin to think about natural selection
con – he inspired and continues to inspire doomsday cults
They say that rats and other pests eat about half of the 3rd world food production.
I’ve always thought that a good charity to start would be to send pump pellet guns and ammo (copper) to the 3rd world. Lots of the people in the 3rd world eat rats (they are just squirrels with hairless tails anyway).
Win – win. Get rid of the competitors for food and pick up a source of protein, but people would be too squeamish.
A co-worker ( Nam vet ) enjoyed telling people about a bar there …eating jerky …and bar lady laughing and telling him ” You eating RAT ! ” And yes , he was !
Like Jimmy the bar owner’s special ingredient in ‘Good Morning Vietnam’. “Formaldehyde. We put in just a touch of formaldehyde for flavour.”
More years ago than I care to recall, during my merchant navy days, I enjoyed a Coypu (large water rat) stew in Venezuela,
I suppose the suffering population nowadays would enjoy such haute cuisine.
Wasn’t sure at first what a Coypu was. It’s apparently what they call here in the States a Nutria.
Otherwise known as ROUS’s.
^¿^
Minor things could improve the 3rd world situation more than all the big projects. Just distribute galvanized trash cans to store food in for example. Not something the rats can gnaw through.
Hear-tell that sewer rat may, in point of fact, taste like pumpkin pie.
Someone check that out and get back to us on that, eh?
https://youtu.be/RxZK1gfLyA8?t=25s
Menicholas,
Legend has it that the besieged French Foreign Legion in Dien Ben Phu ate rats sauteed in white wine. Having eaten a number of different small animals, some not considered to be traditional ‘game’ animals, it is my experience that they often taste a lot like what they have been eating. Perhaps that sewer rat you refer to was eaten after Thanksgiving.
This article makes me hungry. Think I’ll go eat some wheat.
https://youtu.be/u0DXHAruCB4
North Korea and China both look like they are going to have a harsh winter. The other end of the polar vortex is pushing a cold wave southward which is now down to 42 N latitude. …https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-238.35,51.18,1107/loc=126.994,40.426
I think that Archibald has a point with his post. It is predicated on the possibility that there may be a moderately severe or worse NH cooling trend which will develop over the next several decades. I also see that scenario as a likely future possibility, and that would be a game changer for food production in the NH.
Goldminer I don’t think it will be any worse than the 1950s and 60s, so no game changer. I know people alive today who survived that dip in world temperatures.
Until the big volcano goes off exacerbating any cooling from all the cycles the oceans go through and low solar.
We will find out in the years ahead.
I was born in 1950, the year of the special Tiger in the Chinese calendar.
We will most likely one day experience a cooling trend all the way down to a deep ice age. Anything we do wrt population won’t help Man’s survival a whit. A population of million can freeze or starve to death just as assuredly as ten billion. If that is his concern, he should be advocating for developing large scale survival strategies for a cold climate – electrically heated homes or caves for shelter, hydroponic crops grown in massively large, heated structures, nuclear power plants, etc.
Any cooling short of that could be addressed by shifting cultivation toward the equator, irrigating where necessary. There is still a lot of fertile land in the tropical zone not being cultivated. If the speed of cooling is so fast that people in under-developed countries starve before the shift is completed, the rest of us will at least be able to stay warm by burning global warmists at the stake. All the money wasted by them could have been used to prepare for colder climate, the real threat to Mankind.
Indian monsoon failure is exacerbated by global cooling, but nobody on the subcontinent will starve.
That ‘Progress 1990-2015’ graph would be even better with the addition of CO2 levels.
Let’s have a couple of years without a Summer and see how things look. People may begin to question why we ever worried about warming.
Ms. Christiana Figueres (whose dad was a head of a military junta – but he then abolished the army) said it nicely: It is not about warming. It is about a redistribution of wealth. Keep your pockets zippered.
Curious George
How interesting. I wasn’t aware Christiana Figueres is from a military family. Rather explains the, command and control at any cost, mentality.
It was pointed out to me once that business and politics are littered with combative military terms and attitudes e.g. achieving ‘targets’, ‘battling’ crime, ‘combating’ climate change, even.
Blind determination to achieve an objective at any cost, like stifling the ambitions of millions in developing countries to satisfy the narrative of fictitious CO2 warming, has echoes of the the Somme or Passchendaele. Men driven to certain death by politicians and generals who hadn’t a clue about ‘modern’ warfare.
The only “scientific” solution Ehrlich addressed was the absurd one of using other planets for agriculture and transporting food via space travel.
That is so stupid that he should be kept away from sharp objects.
No, the man is genius! Not touched by mortal problems, and wants to spend on space travel when the people are supposedly starving.
Good stuff if you’re 15 years old. But hey, please do give sources to jewels like this! I don’t imagine finding them in Wikipedia since there appears to be a funny bias around when your motive is climate sanity.
Acorns. Just finished blowing a bushel off my decks for the fifth time this year. Just pound to meal with a rock, leach the tannins out with hot water, enjoy! Can be sautéed pita style in animal fat over the fire on a flat rock. Who needs wheat? /wink
I have a bunch of oak trees on my property and some years they cover the ground with acorns.
I live on enough land that I could supply my own food if there were ever a shortage. I imagine there are a lot of people who could grow their own if they really had to do so, although city folk would have some difficulty.
It was a mast year here. The squirrels were very happy. 🙂
No Oaks where we live. There are some pampered ones 15 miles south on a university campus. Going farther south (70 miles) there are smallish Garry oak (Oregon white oak) .
We could easily grow enough food to feed ourselves at my sisters place… if we knew ahead of time that we’d need to. People sometimes forget that it can take a month or two to grow even the fast growing plants, and 3 to 6 months for others. And they have to be the right months, no starting your corn or tomatoes in December.
Which is why we keep a supply of canned goods and bags of beans and rice, and rotate a portion into the pantry by buying replacements every few months so everything has at least a year from expiration. Doesn’t even cost us anything since the initial investment, since it’s all stuff we’ll use eventually.
Not that we really think a major collapse of society is all that likely, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. And it also leaves us prepared in case of a smaller disruption like a major storm, earthquake, or what have you. Those are far more likely, and almost as much trouble if you’re in one.
And if the worst does come to past? Well, we have the seeds for the garden on rotation too. Never can be to careful.
If it gets so cold here in Georgia that we can’t grow Canadian winter wheat, then Man is in trouble regardless of its population. The onset of cold weather must be very fast or extremely severe for us not to be able to adapt to it.
Willis
I think it is important to distinguish between the food types of the 1950,s and the manufactured food like products of today.
The additional cost and strain on health services has gone up faster than any of the gradients on your charts.
Regards
David Archibald focused on wheat and grain. Even white bread is significantly different product, with the only benefit it really provides these days is keeping the walls of the stomach from touching.
Gluten development is geared to maintaining loaf strength during processing to give a picture perfect loaf on the supermarket stand that remains fresh for days.
A diet of bread to day is not what it once was.
Gluten intolerance is a manufacturing related problem.
Gluten intolerance its a genetic disorder and is related auto-immune function… runs in my familly…. affects less than 1% of the population (at least in the west I don’t know the global distriution)… the gluten free fashion diet is another story! The plebs use it as another excuse as to why thier bad diet choices are making themselves unhealthy…. and of course you can charge more if it’s gluten free!!!
Pixie
How long has it been running in the family
Regards
That may have more to do with people living longer and the manufactured hypochondria that enriches Big Pharma and their enablers. As I recall from my TV days, every second commercial was for some pill for some ‘problem.’
How much are we spending on ‘Type 2 Diabetes’ or ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ and other invented ‘diseases’ now? More recently some supposed authority – think it was the American Medical Association – decided that ‘good’ blood pressure levels were actually much lower, thus greatly increasing the ‘need’ for blood pressure pills, doctor visits, etc. It is even worse in the ‘mental health’ business.
In other words, the level of ‘health’ spending has no relationship to health.
I was told I had Type 2 so lost a bit of weight round the middle and was tested again. HbA1c normal. Still get calls to see diabetic nurse and last week retinal photo. There is no evidence of diabetes and yet I am labelled as such.
ozonebust December 10, 2017 at 6:14 pm Edit
So how do you explain the reduced infant mortality, reduced maternal mortality, and increasing lifespan worldwide? Is that from manufactured foods too?
w.
Willis
Knowledge, system’s, proceedures.
Extended life is not quality of life.
Take a look around you at the significant change in the human form in fifty years.
Now that is progress.
ozonebust December 11, 2017 at 7:41 am
Willis
ozone, you had said:
I said, how does that explain
You reply:
First off, try telling that to someone on their deathbed … “Well, we could save your life, but it will not be as good. You’ll tire more easily and be in a bit of pain”.
Sounds like you are claiming that they’d say “Extended life is not quality of life, let me die” …
Second, in general modern food is quite healthy and nutritious. Sure, if you gorge on sugar you won’t live as long … but that’s true of the guy who gorged on honey in the year dot.
So no, I don’t blame for example the obesity crisis on modern food … I eat modern food and I weigh about what I weighed in high school.
Again, look at the charts. If a man is trying to live on 50 g of protein and 1500 calories per day, if he can increase that by 50% he is likely to be both healthier and happier, even if it is “modern food”.
w.
The ideas of Malthus and Ehrlich are easily debunked simply by looking at historical downward trends for grain prices. Unfortunately for the farmer, with the exception of a few areas in Africa there are no shortages of grain anywhere in the world.
http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/10/real-deflated-prices-corn-soybeans-wheat-cotton.html
The major problem in the less developed world is the local distribution and storage systems. That is where the main effort by these peoples has been turning in recent years.
one of the biggest problems in the developing world is anything worth any money is controlled by thugs and bullies masquerading as politicians/armies. corruption and theft is the main issue ,some of these people have warehouses full of grain while the population starves.
That too is a major problem.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential fiunction” Albert Bartlett, Emeritus Professor, University of Colorado.
Malthus was right. Sooner or later, growth will stop. Not a prediction, an absolute certainty. In the history of the earth, no living thing has contravened this rule, and none, on this planet, anyway, ever will. No virus, bacteria, parasite, invertebrate, or vertebrate, has ever survived exhaustion of the resources necessary for its survival.
“Malthus was right. Sooner or later, growth will stop. Not a prediction, an absolute certainty. In the history of the earth, no living thing has contravened this rule, and none, on this planet, anyway, ever will.”
“on this planet”
Human beings have the ability to leave this planet, and the solar system has unlimited resources, so the human race can continue to grow into the future, as soon as we figure out how to get to low-Earth orbit cheaply enough.
” on this planet”
Pay attention, please.
“Pay attention, please.”
I’m paying attention, I just like discussing our future in space, when I hear about “limited resources”.
Professor Bartlett passed away in 2013.
… but the exponential function lives on. Did you think he invented it?
And if he was so smart, how come he’s dead?
Population growth has stopped in most industrial countries. The formula for controlling population is simple a prosperous industrial economy. and educated women. Let us spread that across the world.
well said walter,education is the key to human prosperity and standard of living.
Not a wiser word has been spoken on this topic. Thank you Walter, you saved me the time.
Damon December 10, 2017 at 6:33 pm
Science by tautology … what’s not to like?
w.
Agreed, Willis.
Too much tautology and circular logic is used these days. Geoff.
“No virus, bacteria, parasite, invertebrate, or vertebrate, has ever survived exhaustion of the resources necessary for its survival.”
Not even remotely true! In reality, all species, even the most primitive ones have always survived resources exhaustion by natural self-limitation, ALWAYS.
The idea peddled by doomster that a population would crash and even go extinct because of resource exhaustion is so idiotic and so contrary to reality that it fits perfectly with the Goebels’ definition of a “big lie”.
What about those evolution experiments where bacteria are in a system with limited resource of their existing food source and they evolve to consume the available resource.
Yup. The dinosaurs only lasted for 180 million years. They must have been on the verge of mass famine when that asteroid hit. If humans last 0.5% as long there’s no telling where evolution will take us. I think we’re far more likely to blow ourselves up than to run out of resources.
But the exponential growth function is the wrong model for population growth. The logistic growth function seems like a ‘better’ [more realitic] model.
A sigmoid curve is an even more realistic model.
Yeah, the logistic function is one of the sigmoids.
Malthus spoke like Ed Sullivan.
Let us remember the anti-Malthusian economist Julian Simon, who wrote a book — “The Ultimate Resource”. Simon held that every mouth comes with a brain and a pair of hands, and that the ultimate resource is the human imagination. Simon famously bet Ehrlich that 5 natural resources would be more abundant and less expensive in a decade. Simon won.
Yes, and John Holdren, Obama’s so-called “science advisor” was a pal of Ehrlich’s and was in on the wrong side of the bet as well.
w.
If they had chosen a different starting date, the result would have been different. link
Economics is a lot like the climate. It’s subject to wild fluctuations. The climate is, or is not, warming depending on your chosen starting date. That enables everyone to cherry pick data that confirms their pet thesis.
Over the long term, Simon, and Buckminster Fuller before him, are right. Human ingenuity has thus far meant that we use less resources, relative to the size of the economy, than we used to.
We have a tiger by the tail. If, for some reason, we quit innovating then material shortages will emerge and society could crumble.
There are examples of failing innovation.
In pharmacology we’re seeing Eroom’s Law which is the inverse of Moore’s law. More and more research is producing fewer and fewer useful drugs.
To make solar and wind energy feasible, we need viable energy storage. We’ve been working on that for a long time and the required breakthroughs aren’t happening.
Breakthroughs don’t happen on demand. link In fact, “Setting an objective can block its own achievement.”
The greenies think that, if we squander enough resources, we will get the breakthroughs necessary to make renewable power a success. They are wrong.
Natural gas is $2.50/MMBTU
That bet was remarkable! Gutsy – prescient.
Too bad the our witted Poopus Goofus the Worst has added Ehrlich to Vatican scientific council.