klapauzius said:
I think the whole lecture by Dr. Bartlett is a bit beside the point:
Watch it again with feeling this time
because he provides a tool that can open a really huge doorway to understanding!
klapauzius said:
Around 1. A.D the world could probably sustain ~ 100-200 million people, maybe a bit more or maybe a bit less.
Had someone told them that 7 billion would live on the earth, they probably would have told you the same as Dr. Bartlett is telling us today: No way, our ecological footprint will not allow it. Farming was just not very efficient back in the day, and while diseases and war were decimating people at much higher rates than today, food was probably the limiting factor.
Yet here we are, at 35-70 times more people than 2000 years ago.
And the Earth has been showing the strain - and so have the two-headed turtles and the 6 year old girls shopping for training bras.
klapauzius said:
So given the right technologies, we can squeeze quiet a bit out of existing resources, certainly no enough
to sustain exponential growth (unless we manage to grow efficiency exponentially too, which is, like exponential growth not going to happen), but that will not be necessary.
There is no question that we will run out of oil, but that will hopefully not put a damper on overall progress...
As for all the other non-transportation related uses of oil: Any other hydro carbon, e.g. coal, will do. You could even make gas from coal (its an established technology since WW2), its just not economical at below $140/barrel.
Not that I would look forward to a continuation of the fossil fuel binge, but, until population growth and consumption will slow down, there are technologies that can bridge the transition to a sustainable energy economy.
It doesn't matter what happened in 1 AD - we're in an entirely different world now because while humans have been changing the planet from the very beginning, now they are REALLY making a mess!
Disconnect from 'gas' for a minute and step back here with me. Look around. See that corn over there? Yes - all those bazillions of acres? Well, it's fertilized with oil, the insecticides are oil, the herbacides are petrochemicals as well...and then we get to transportation.
So sure - let's do GTL and coal to gas. One problem. All that CO2 is harming corn growth - because C4 plants don't do as well as soybeans and other C3 plants when the CO2 goes up. Increased CO2 also increases the need for herbacides (but reduces their effectiveness). And then there's heat - 1°C cuts productivity 10%, increases the need for water (but fresh water supplies are not used sustainably now), and a bit more temperature pushes the plant out of it's reproduction zone - and darn it all - if those yellow corn kernals are the blasted seeds! :lol:
So, If I read you correctly, we'll have a future world with tons of energy, GTL, liquified coal, increased CO2, increased heat, the US breadbasket in shambles as Canada takes over growing corn after they cover the tarsands pits and clear cut the boreal forest to prepare the new farmland. That'll take some time, and of course we'll wait until it's pass midnight to start making the changes, so world hunger, disease, starvation, and war will get all hyperactive until things reach a new normal. But - on the bright side - the population drop will take a load off the food supply...
No thanks.
And that's why that 'crappy survey' gives us a less-than-rosy grade - because even those organic tomatoes we move to are shipped in from Canada and Mexico and Argentina!