Atlantic: What if we never run out of oil?

Interesting

 

I'm not sure what the point of that post was?

Was it to say we should be harvesting the frozen methane in the oceans to stop it from contributing to global climate change? Or was it to restore the wetlands to mitigate the rising hotter sea levels?

 

I'll take the first option

 

It would certainly disturb a 3rd grade math teacher who would flunk the student for using a scale where 1 million on the bottom is equal to 2 billion on the top. Unless of course the intent was to post a wildly out of scale graph to make a point that the population data disproved

Starvation and malnourishment are rampant, about 1 billion in the world and 20% in the US, many children.

And current ag. system requires destroying the Gulf of Mexico (just one example...Chesapeake Bay another) both previously huge food producers killed off by unsustainable oil based farming.

The BP Gulf Disaster was the worst oil spill ever in an already dying Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

To the point of the thread, we will destroy the world ecosystem before we run out of oil if we don't aim to stop using oil. For US, cut oil use by 50% in 10 years to match the more technologically advanced economies in Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia.

 

My 3rd grade math teacher wouldn't have understood a logarithmic scale. Considering how you couldn't place the decimal point correctly on simple division in two previous posts of this thread, I no longer expect you to understand it either.

 

Chuckle....a phony graph with an "logarithmic scale" meant to deceive on the population growth the 3rd grade teacher would understand. The growth is logarithmic which the phony scale was trying to hide.

Here's the actual graph of human population growth...whadayknow, it totally disproves the phony claims made with the phony scale. Sometimes, one billion just equals one billion and you can't hide it.

Again to the point, oil use at current levels in agriculture alone is killing off the ecosystem, huge food producing ecosystems like Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay are dying.

 

He He. I don't think I've ever been chastised before for correctly using a log scale instead of a linear one. Many third grade teachers can understand logarithmic charts. Don't go dissing on the teachers.

iclaudius, I don't read your posts, they just don't seem to add anything, I simply displayed ignored content to see whet this reply was about. If you think I wrote something wrong feel free to write it to the group. When things are perported to be exponential in growth, a log scale will display them as linear and growth can be more easily understood. In the period the population doubled, food trippled, not shown. If food could only increase by increasing land, not by technological changes, as ehrlich hypothosized then that chart would have been impossible, large numbers of people would be dieing as he also predicted.

What we have instead is problems in distributing food, food scarcity has gone down a great deal. Its all about getting the food to those that are hungry now, and more importantly teaching good nutrition and exercise so that overabundance doesn't cause more problems. If you believe erhlich, then having too many children are the root cause for hunger, and you don't help. How sad. If instead, you understand better medicine has dropped infant mortality, and increased longevity, and this growth will again reach a plateau, then you help the hungry. You don't blame them or call hunger inevitable. You also understand as technology marches on, there will likely be anouther big bump in population.

I was shown this bloomberg claim, absolutely great information

FactCheck.org : Bloomberg’s Obesity Claim

There is plenty of food in the world, and plenty of bad agricultural practices. We don't need to ban big soft drinks though. Nor do we need to mandate ethanol, if there is enough oil and natural gas. We should work on food distribution problems and education about obesity, as well as make vehicles more efficient. OK off my soap box. Drill down into the data and understand it. Some idiot from stanford writes a scary book that was completely wrong in every prediction, and some want to ignore the data, to prove wrong is right.

 

Q.E.D.

Logarithmic growth would defer the population tipping point until long after the sun's natural death, maybe even until after the universe's entropic death.

 

Yes, many can. My fourth grade teacher understood. She put her husband, my high school chemistry and physics teacher, through engineering school, scholastically as well as financially. And I'm sure the later teachers (except possibly sixth grade) understood, but don't have such faith in my K-3 teachers.

 

Iduno . . . . the graph seems to look like a hockey stick to me:



It doesn't even seem folks like Pol Pot ... Hitler ... Stalin etc are slowing things down much. Unless I'm seriously missing something, it's gona take a whole lot of high tech, and a whole lot of cheep / alternative energies to even make a dent in feeding economic growth .... much less, replace the diminishing sources of existing cheep carbons we presently use. Not being gloom & doom here ... just looking at the numbers.

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Yep, you can smooth the handle with mathematical techniques What you should have seen is labels with technology, that allowed for the large increases in population, and the problem of epidemics caused by not understanding problems of moving to cities and traveling easily. You might have noticed population growth is not constant, but goes in spurts, and plateaus. That may have lead you to read on propulation figures and estimates and realize that the world is headed to anouther plateu after rapid growth during the industrial revolution, and is predicted at around 9Billion people. That means we are still in rapid growth, but the rate is declining.

The chart was about population, technology, and food. As population has grown in geometric spurts, food has also grown geometrically, not linearly. Nothing about wealth there. Say you were a black family in alabama in 1830, what do you think your chances of wealth were then compared to now with a much higher population in alabama. I have not seen a wealth chart, with population. What about a serf in france in 1500 versus now, with higher population? Yes higher population is a problem for those in the top few percent of white european decent, that complain about feeding the poor, like malthus and ehrlich.

So what say you, do you think that when hunger was a much bigger problem in the 1930s, that we were better off, because there were less people and minorities were separated from christen whites? No population growth does not seem the root cause of poverty. It is definitely true that on another frame you could look at energy. The industrial revolution which sees the most rapid growth of population used coal instead of wood. If we had stuck with wood, its likely that population would have plateaued earier and the planet would look much more barren. Many of the advances still worked on wood. Now we are rich enough, and technically advanced enough to use other power sources than coal, like wind, natural gas, nuclear, that don't seem to cause nearly the environmental destruction. We still have a huge amount of coal though. If your argument is that we will soon run out of natural gas, then the politics of the 70s will come back and we will start increasing coal use in this country, and exporting more manufacturing jobs to china to protect the environment. That does not seem like a recipe for wealth creation for the 99%.

If you think you can deny science, and want to follow malthus, then your example of hitler is exactly what is the proposed solution.
The Legacy of Malthus : The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism by Allan Chase | Earth Emperor

I am not accusing anyone that buys into these rejected theories of racism. I only wish to point out, rascism and classism are at their core, and you need to look at the numbers, and not the emotional argument. The emotional argument of malthusian math is used to justify the worst racist intentions of man.

 

I apologize for my post, which was impulsive and ill-considered. I violated my own axiom that having a serious discussion on the Internet is like winning the 100 meter Olympic freestyle in a wading pool. Res ipse loquitur.

 

I think everyone paying any attention to this post realizes this trend will not continue to 100 billion, or infinity. The question of concern, is what makes it turn back to a level or declining line. Part of the answer is to put a high power magnifying glass at the actual population numbers at the very end. Under this magnifying glass you will see an encouraging bend to the right (decreasing rate) vs an increased acceleration upward(true exponential growth). A bend that has been underway for a few decades now, so it is not a fluke, but a real breaking of the exponential growth of the past centuries. (The graph you have has hidden this bend and put in some random "The next 42 years" stuff that is meaningless.)

Don't over interpret what I'm stating. I'm making absolutely no claim as to what the future will bring. All I'm pointing out is the population numbers have been breaking significant to the right of a exponential curve. A number of countries have already flat lined (e.g. Japan, Russia, Germany, etc.)

 

Other than the fact we have likely passed the sustainable population tipping point since the artificial and unsustainable industrial food system destroys the natural and sustainable food system. We already have mass starvation and huge food producing ecosystems like Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay ruined, producing a fraction of their historic catches.

Which gets back to running out of oil, that was never the issue, the issue was the increased oil use and the destruction to the ecosystem.

 

There was nothing wrong with your first post. What did you want the serious discussion to be about? I don't see anyone claiming we won't run out of oil and everyone agreeing that better environmental control of what we have remaining is needed. (Within those broad claims, there is a lot of difference as you can see.)

 

You have a better eye than I if you see a bend, on anything but a log graph. Right now population is growing at a very high rate historically. It looks like we peaked at around a doubling in 40 years. Now things have slowed down to about a doubling every 100 years.

The reason many of us see a plateau, is from the birth statisitics. Germany and Japan are now negative. China seems to have decended into very slow growth. Bangledesh dropped from 7 children to 2.6 per couple. Unless trends abruptly change, population growth is starting to drastically slow.

 

You'll have to block yourself

 

We are talking the same thing. The graph didn't have a bend since it was setup not to show one.

 

I don't see anyone claiming we will run out either. Market conditions. Higher prices ultimately mean fewer folks can afford it. If gold were valued at $1/pound, we'd all have more gold. But if less than 1% of the world
can afford it ... well ... that's the way 99% of historical cultures were. Mostly poor and few rich.
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That was probably me. Doh. I didn't like the part about a drastic reduction in population. I hope I didn't offend, with all the data, but nothing in real data shows that. We can definitely discuss it though.

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Some people do claim it though. The truth is that oil will get so expensive that we substitute away from it, before it runs out. For those that think fertilizer will disapear quickly because we will run out of natural gas, and then starve ourselves, that doesn't appear likely. The more likely path is less grainfed meat. Grass fed heards don't take nearly the toll on the planet, but demand for pork and chicken is increasing because food is so cheap and plentiful. Once the natural gas gets expensive, there is methane from plant waste and/or coal. If you don't like that you can make ferilizer from dead animals, co2 from the air, and water, with some wind based electricity. Fertilizer will get more expensive, but people are likely to give up beef before giving up eating.