Plants of the Devonian period would like a recount on "the longest period of exponential population growth for any organism... ever" competition.
No Population Bomb
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: No Population Bomb
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget abortion and euthanasia. I'm breathing better already.
I was amazed to learn that the abortion rate per 1000 pregnancies in the US (in 2008 or 2010) was 138 (for white women) and 501 (for black women) (and somewhere in between for hispanic, native american, etc.) I intuitively thought it was like 10-20/1000. So I think abortion is doing pretty well for itself. Euthanasia really needs to step up its game, though.
501/1000 pregnancies completed (amongst black women) is absurd. I had no idea US had so many abortions.
Re: No Population Bomb
#83I wonder if the lower frequency in nation-state warfare is an effect of increasing education levels of females?
That's a nice thought, but it is probably not the cause. "There is a steep positive slope in the numbers of battle deaths between 1816 and 1914 and a steep negative slope between 1945 and 1997." [1] Obviously, something happened in 1945 that changed everything. This change can be almost entirely explained by the United States acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the subsequent policy decision in the United States with…
It's funny that richard gatling invented the gatling gun with the goal of reducing conflict by making it too costly, but it took the invention of the nuclear bomb to actually accomplish this.
>It will be interesting to see what happens as this strategy is abandoned as the survivors of WWII die off, and memory of why the US spends so much on its military fades.
What about all of the other members of the nuclear club? To me it seems that full scale war of the WWI/WWII type isn't really possible between nuclear armed opponents.
And since we're talking about the number of battle deaths, it seems like the numbers will only decrease further once human front line combatants aren't really necessary.
It seems like the scale of WWII isn't really possible anymore either, even if we remove nuclear weapons. How would you move millions of troops when satellites are tracking your every move?
Re: No Population Bomb
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the hydrogen used in the Haber process (to produce ammonia for fertilizer) comes from methane (natural gas). Most of the hydrocarbons used to produce commercial pesticides come from petroleum. They are not just energy sources, they are raw materials.
They only get hydrogen that way because methane is also an energy source. It would be trivial to replace it with water plus external heating if you had some other energy source. You can get hydrocarbons anywhere, petroleum is convenient, but certainly not required. The raw material of fertilizer is nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. Methane is none of those - it's just a carrier for nitr…
It's that IF that's the problem... We can solve a lot of the world's problems, not just this one, if we can find an energy source with the kind of lifetime EROEI (energy return on energy investment) characteristics of petroleum based fuels. The non-trivial problem being we have yet to discover anything close to that. NPK inputs are energy intensive (check out Phosphorous mining).
95% of the world'a food supply is dependent on petrochemical based inputs of which we are starting to see a decline in availability.
If you can show me ANY process to turn trees into pesticides as you suggest in any kind of energy efficient manner I'm open to revising my opinion, and would probably change careers to focus on that industry as I think it'd be a world changer. However I think you are very wide of the mark on the science in making such a suggestion.
Re: No Population Bomb
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are nit-picking my post. Like I said, we are reached peak phosphorous as we mine it currently, and reaching peak energy as we currently use mostly fossil fuels. And like I said, I believe we can use new technologies (like, solar power... or underwater phosphorous mining) to fix it.
I read Tuna's comment as disagreement with your claims, not nitpicking. Do you have any reasoning to support your claims that we'll run out of phosphorus or energy?
Phosphorous mining is incredibly energy intensive. It's relative proportion in the Earth's crust is not pertinent - what matters is its availability in extractable forms. Google phosphorous mining and you'll see the parent's claim that Phoshoprous production rates have peaked is well supported.
Re: No Population Bomb
#86Could someone clarify what the author means by "Women in developed affluent countries tend to have 2-3 children (or 0-1 children)"?
Does he mean that in some countries the range is 2-3 and in others 0-1? Or is it that there are two peaks in the histogram?
Re: No Population Bomb
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are nit-picking my post. Like I said, we are reached peak phosphorous as we mine it currently, and reaching peak energy as we currently use mostly fossil fuels. And like I said, I believe we can use new technologies (like, solar power... or underwater phosphorous mining) to fix it.
I think what's he's saying is that "peaking" is meaningless. There's a book that was written back in the early 90s called The Ultimate Resource , by Julian Simon. A fair amount of it is typical libertarian wishful thinking, but he very strongly makes the point that in a free society, there is no such thing as a peak. There are always alternatives, and if a resource becomes more expensive, we will start switching to t…
Just because a book makes a claim doesn't make it so. It is ridiculous to claim that you cannot have peaks or shortages because there's always a replacement - this is nonsense. The physics and chemistry involved is fixed. As a famous Scotsman once said, you cannee change the laws of Physics Jim. Economics and physics are not interchangeable. Sure, with certain kinds of economic utility you can interchange the underlying mechanisms used to achieve it, but with chemical reactions necessary to sustain life, as one example, you cannot just swap on a cheaper element. Likewise you cannot change the energy density characteristics and EROEI of supply on one material because petroleum is priced out. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the science behind the problem.
Re: No Population Bomb
#88There's no reason to believe that current prognostications about the future will be any more accurate than past ones, and many reasons to believe that they aren't.
The demographic transition can be viewed as a failure of our adaptations, made during times when birth control and sex education were unavailable, and children were useful workers instead of expensive luxuries, to the modern world. Some people's adaptations have failed harder than others. The people who have 0-1 kids are being selected out; those who have more than 2 are expanding. Future generations will be descended from the latter group, not the former. Unless you believe that fertility is completely invulnerable to selection, genetic or memetic, this must lead to increased fertility, just as selecting for bigger dogs would lead to bigger dogs.
There are already groups which are immune to the demographic transition - Hasidic Jews in the middle of NYC who have ~8 kids per couple, for example - and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change.
And if evolution did turn out to be false and the demographic transition turned out to be permanent, there's no reason to believe that fertility rates would magically converge at 2.0 (replacement rate). If they stayed below replacement rate, eventually the human race would go extinct. That's a far more dire prediction than any Malthus ever made. If they started going up again, is there any reason to believe that they would stop at 2.0?
And having read Malthus, I'd also bet that the author never has.
Re: No Population Bomb
#89I wonder if the lower frequency in nation-state warfare is an effect of increasing education levels of females?
In addition to the other points made on this thread, I think a big factor is that winners don't gain much from war, so why bother.
Historically, when economies grew at the rate of population, the only way to become wealthier is to conquer more land. Now, with the global/knowledge based economy, you can become wealthier without having to take over someone else's land. In fact, the costs of the war probably outweigh the spoils.
Re: No Population Bomb
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
They only get hydrogen that way because methane is also an energy source. It would be trivial to replace it with water plus external heating if you had some other energy source. You can get hydrocarbons anywhere, petroleum is convenient, but certainly not required. The raw material of fertilizer is nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. Methane is none of those - it's just a carrier for nitr…
It's that IF that's the problem... We can solve a lot of the world's problems, not just this one, if we can find an energy source with the kind of lifetime EROEI (energy return on energy investment) characteristics of petroleum based fuels. The non-trivial problem being we have yet to discover anything close to that. NPK inputs are energy intensive (check out Phosphorous mining). 95% of the world'a food supply is dep…
Petroleum isn't magic. It's just mixed random hydrocarbons.
Use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification to turn the tree into useful feedstock gases, then use the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process to turn those gases into the exact same mixed hydrocarbons found in petroleum.