World Population Crash expected prior to 2100.

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Dantac
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28 Dec 2010, 1:26 pm

World population is expected to crash from an estimated 9 billion down to 1.5~3 billion before the end of this century. The crash will occur due to mass starvation and associated rioting and warfare that will happen when global food mass production and distribution infrastructure grinds to a halt.

World population timeline:

Image

Notice world population is steady until the 1900's. This is because prior to 1900's the world's food production was local. In essence, the food people consumed was produced and distributed within a 200 mile radius. Each region of the world was self-sustainable and could not exceed a certain population limit. There simply was no food for more.

The industrial revolution of the 1800's improved the production and distribution of food and amenities which improved the quality of life, life expectancy and decreased infant mortality rate. Population increase goes up from 1 billion to 1.5 billion up until 1900. 500 million people in 100 years. At that point, food production and distribution had slightly expanded thanks to food preservation techniques and improved farming techniques however food was still being grown by hand and distributed by sailing vessels and horse drawn carts.

Start the 1900's we see an explosive growth in population starting in Europe and America. The reason: Oil.

The combustion engine revolutionized farming and transportation. With it farmers could increase the yield of their farmlands up to 100X thanks to fertilizers derived from oil as well as having machines that could in one day do the work that would've taken hundreds of men a week to perform. Thanks to it, foodstuffs could be transported across vast distances before they could spoil. The increase trade network turned European and American food markets into a global market.

Fast forward to the1950's. After two world wars worth of rapid technological advance, the combustion engine is now used in every corner of the globe and food production and distribution is now truly global. the 1950's mark the time in which nations other than Europe and America begin to industrialize with modern means: fueled by oil and oil products. As a result their food production and distribution also increases exponentially ... as does their populations.

By the year 2000, population growth has, in a mere 50 years, exceeded the combined population growth factor of the past 2000 years. Oil allows sardines from Argentina to be sold in markets in Taiwan... clothing from China to be worn in Sweden... corn from the USA to be sold in South Africa at prices which compete with locally produced foodstuffs and amenities. This is possible thanks to the enormous energy output of oil.

There are 10 calories of oil burnt up for every 1 calorie of food consumed nowadays.

Oil is used in everything not just for fuel for combustion engines. Most importantly, oil is key component in the production of fertilizers. Without these fertilizers the farms cannot produce food at their current rate. Oil is used in every aspect of manufacturing: plastics, tires, composites, toothpaste, medicines, components of machinery (o-rings, sealants, caps, pipes, electronics) , etc. Oil IS the building block of our current technological industry.

World food production and distribution is possible in the current market economy because oil is cheap. Its cheaper to buy 1 gallon of oil than 1 gallon of water. Consider 1 cup of oil is 20 cents (US currency) whereas 1 cup of water is 50 cents. Oil is cheap because since the 1900's the world infrastructure has been built around the distribution of oil and its extraction from the ground.

The problem? Oil is not a renewable resource. It is finite. Current world oil reserves, if extracted at the current rate, are expected to last until 2400... but the population crash will happen much before that. The reason? The oil is still there but it will become available in decreasing amounts year after year because population will keep growing (and consuming more oil) but there will be less and less oil available. This will make oil be increasingly expensive to acquire.

This is the problem called Hubbard's Peak .. or Peak Oil. The point where oil demand and production cannot be met and oil becomes so expensive it simply cannot be afforded. This Peak Oil point is expected to occur prior to 2100.

Evidence to this is not from the raising gas prices (which are influenced by human factors such as politics) but from oil production methods themselves. From 1900 to 1970's all oil fields were land based. They supplied the world's oil with no problem. 1970 saw the first country to reach its own local Peak Oil point: the USA. Venezuela and the Arab nations now hold the largest oil fields in the world. 25% of the oil found in the world was located in Saudi Arabia alone.

1990's sees the Saudis begin to build oil wells on the ocean. This is a huge marker indicating their oil production is not expected to fulfill future demand and that they have no more land based oil deposits to tap into. Considering it costs about 2 million US dollars (about) to build one land based oil well and nearly 200 million to build a single oil rig in the ocean..and that to commercially tap a deposit you need to build dozens if not hundreds of wells you begin to see that there is indeed no other way to get oil for the saudis other than this.

The situation in Saudi arabia is repeated in all oil producing countries since they have all been extracting their oil for the same amount of time and from smaller deposits. When oil coming from rigs exceeds the oil from land based drills, it will be impossible to artificially keep the oil as inexpensive as it is now. Simple math tells you that they'd need to raise the price exponentially... and thats IF the sea rigs can produce the same, increasingly demanding, oil supply...which is an impossibility.

Hence, oil will go from 20 cents a cup to perhaps 10 dollars a cup prior to 2100. At that rate, fertilizers become too expensive to produce. Using oil to run an engine a luxury only the wealthiest can afford. Oil products like plastics and electronics become impossible to afford to be produced much less recycled since every step of our industrial base requires oil either as fuel or for its machinery parts.

Long and medium range distribution networks collapse. Farms, unable to use their machinery and fertilizers become a shadow of their former outputs (predicted output to drop to as much as 1/10th of what they used to be) which trigger mass starvation on the local and global scales.

World population drops to an estimated 2 to 3 billion worldwide which is what lowered output, local farm growing can sustain even with our modern technology.

It seems that, after all, the Amish will get the last laugh. ;)



zer0netgain
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28 Dec 2010, 2:05 pm

Somewhat accurate.

There is no shortage of oil. That's a fallacy.

However, all modern food production and distribution is 100% dependent on modern technology in farming and electricity. Without it, we'd only get maybe 10% of current food production levels.

Take transportation and refrigeration away and local stores don't even have a 72-hour supply for the local community.

American infrastructure is falling apart. The economy is broken. When the time comes, we won't be able to take care of our own...forget about the rest of the world.

It America goes down, a lot of other nations will have similar issues to struggle with.

This doesn't even factor in things like war, disease, etc.



Dantac
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28 Dec 2010, 2:15 pm

zer0netgain wrote:
Somewhat accurate.

There is no shortage of oil. That's a fallacy.


Its not a question of shortage nor did I mention we'd be running dry of oil. Its a matter of economics.

There is loads of oil left (but it will run out eventually, hence 2400 expected).. its a matter of how much it will cost to be able to extract it to keep up with world demand. When that cost translates into a selling price that makes it too expensive for oil to be used to mass produce things like plastics, fertilizers or gasoline that's when the food infrastructure will collapse.



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28 Dec 2010, 2:57 pm

You might be getting inexpensive oil, but not everybody gets it "inexpensively". We pay through the nose for it, and frankly Big Oil could easily absorb several actual price rises in oil before they needed to take more from us (if they weren't all profiteering bastards that is.)


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28 Dec 2010, 3:19 pm

I've heard this sort of thing before...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/scien ... .html?_r=1

John Tierney wrote:

Five years ago, Matthew R. Simmons and I bet $5,000. It was a wager about the future of energy supplies — a Malthusian pessimist versus a Cornucopian optimist — and now the day of reckoning is nigh: Jan. 1, 2011.

The bet was occasioned by a cover article in August 2005 in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Breaking Point.” It featured predictions of soaring oil prices from Mr. Simmons, who was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the head of a Houston investment bank specializing in the energy industry, and the author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.”

I called Mr. Simmons to discuss a bet. To his credit — and unlike some other Malthusians — he was eager to back his predictions with cash. He expected the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, to more than triple in the next five years, even after adjusting for inflation. He offered to bet $5,000 that the average price of oil over the course of 2010 would be at least $200 a barrel in 2005 dollars.

I took him up on it, not because I knew much about Saudi oil production or the other “peak oil” arguments that global production was headed downward. I was just following a rule learned from a mentor and a friend, the economist Julian L. Simon.

As the leader of the Cornucopians, the optimists who believed there would always be abundant supplies of energy and other resources, Julian figured that betting was the best way to make his argument. Optimism, he found, didn’t make for cover stories and front-page headlines.

No matter how many cheery long-term statistics he produced, he couldn’t get as much attention as the gloomy Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, the best-selling ecologist. Their forecasts of energy crises and resource shortages seemed not only newsier but also more intuitively correct. In a finite world with a growing population, wasn’t it logical to expect resources to become scarcer and more expensive?

As an alternative to arguing, Julian offered to bet that the price of any natural resource chosen by a Malthusian wouldn’t rise in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted and formed a consortium with two colleagues at Berkeley, John P. Holdren and John Harte, who were supposed to be experts in natural resources. In 1980, they picked five metals and bet that the prices would rise during the next 10 years.

By 1990, the prices were lower, and the Malthusians paid up, although they didn’t seem to suffer any professional consequences. Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Holdren both won MacArthur “genius awards” (Julian never did). Dr. Holdren went on to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and today he serves as President Obama’s science adviser.

Julian, who died in 1998, never managed to persuade Dr. Ehrlich or Dr. Holdren or other prominent doomsayers to take his bets again.

When I found a new bettor in 2005, the first person I told was Julian’s widow, Rita Simon, a public affairs professor at American University. She was so happy to see Julian’s tradition continue that she wanted to share the bet with me, so we each ended up each putting $2,500 against Mr. Simmons’s $5,000.

Just as Mr. Simmons predicted, oil prices did soar well beyond $65. With the global economy booming in the summer of 2008, the price of a barrel of oil reached $145. American foreign-policy experts called for policies to secure access to this increasingly scarce resource; environmentalists advocated crash programs to reduce dependence on fossil fuels; companies producing power from wind and other alternative energies rushed to expand capacity.

When the global recession hit in the fall of 2008, the price plummeted below $50, but at the end of that year Mr. Simmons was quoted in The Baltimore Sun sounding confident. When Jay Hancock, a Sun financial columnist, asked if he was having any second thoughts about the wager, Mr. Simmons replied: “God, no. We bet on the average price in 2010. That’s an eternity from now.”

The past year the price has rebounded, but the average for 2010 has been just under $80, which is the equivalent of about $71 in 2005 dollars — a little higher than the $65 at the time of our bet, but far below the $200 threshold set by Mr. Simmons.

What lesson do we draw from this? I’d hoped to let Mr. Simmons give his view, but I’m very sorry to report that he died in August, at the age of 67. The colleagues handling his affairs reviewed the numbers last week and declared that Mr. Simmons’s $5,000 should be awarded to me and to Rita Simon on Jan. 1, but Mr. Simmons still had his defenders.

One of his friends and fellow peak-oil theorists, Steve Andrews, said that while Mr. Simmons had made “a bet too far,” he was still correct in foreseeing more expensive oil. “The era of cheap oil has ended,” Mr. Andrews said, and predicted problems ahead as production levels off.

It’s true that the real price of oil is slightly higher now than it was in 2005, and it’s always possible that oil prices will spike again in the future. But the overall energy situation today looks a lot like a Cornucopian feast, as my colleagues Matt Wald and Cliff Krauss have recently reported. Giant new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. The new oil sands projects in Canada now supply more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. Oil production in the United States increased last year, and the Department of Energy projects further increases over the next two decades.

The really good news is the discovery of vast quantities of natural gas. It’s now selling for less than half of what it was five years ago. There’s so much available that the Energy Department is predicting low prices for gas and electricity for the next quarter-century. Lobbyists for wind farms, once again, have been telling Washington that the “sustainable energy” industry can’t sustain itself without further subsidies.

As gas replaces dirtier fossil fuels, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be tempered, according to the Department of Energy. It projects that no new coal power plants will be built, and that the level of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States will remain below the rate of 2005 for the next 15 years even if no new restrictions are imposed.

Maybe something unexpected will change these happy trends, but for now I’d say that Julian Simon’s advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 28, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.


Anyone wanna make a bet? :wink:


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pezar
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28 Dec 2010, 7:04 pm

Even if there will be plenty of oil for the next few hundred years, using it as a primary fuel has other drawbacks not addressed, usually, by the sky is falling crowd. Most of the world's cities are shrouded in smog for much of the year. Los Angeles is perpetually smoggy, yet oil focused Houston has recently taken the lead as dirtiest air in the US. In the Third World it can be even worse.

Dumping all that carbon monoxide into the atmosphere may not cause global warming, but we don't know what in fact it will do. There may yet be consequences that nobody has yet foreseen. Traffic, from all those cars, is another drawback-Chinese drivers going from city to city can encounter traffic jams that force them to sleep in their cars for weeks. Roads break down and governments lack the money to repair them.

Building our cities around cars only became an obvious issue when some US suburbs turned into slums where many residents were unable to afford cars, and left stranded by street designs that limit buses to arterial roads. The abandoned gas station, reused for another purpose or simply left to ruin, is now a permanent part of the American landscape, with at least three oil spikes (1974, 1978, 2008) leaving station owners bankrupt. 1950s suburbs in the US have plenty of abandoned gas stations, and the blight is now expanding to newer suburbs. The edifices have storage tanks that leak and require costly mitigation; in many cases, the original owners are long gone, and governments pick up the tab.

Rural areas also have plenty of abandoned gas stations-when prices spiked and travel temporarily decreased, the owners of such remote stations simply abandoned them. Stations in deserts and plains tend to lack the mitigation measures undertaken by urban govts, and the ruins sit and poison the landscape.

Soils "pumped up" with fertilizers made from oil eventually lose fertility, and excessive use of such in places like India is now causing birth defects and cancers as the fertilizers poison water tables. The external costs of oil are such that seeking to minimize its use is good policy.



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28 Dec 2010, 7:44 pm

Pretty big leap to say that the human population will be reduced by 6-8 billion in the next 100 years even if these fears are well founded. Don't see that happening unless there is nuclear war. I just don't buy population bomb stuff, the theory has been around for hundreds of years and it's never come to fruition.

An interesting thing I read once was that global warming would open up a ton of farm land for food production.



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28 Dec 2010, 8:35 pm

Jacoby wrote:
Pretty big leap to say that the human population will be reduced by 6-8 billion in the next 100 years even if these fears are well founded. Don't see that happening unless there is nuclear war. I just don't buy population bomb stuff, the theory has been around for hundreds of years and it's never come to fruition.


Population can bomb very easily. Its the same effect that growing a culture of bacteria on a petri dish has. The moment you lower the food supply by half, the population will also drop by half very quickly. Cut the food production and transportation system and inside a year the population will most certainly fall down several billion. The land simply cannot sustain that many without industrialized farming. What's worse, when it does happen those that do get arable land are still screwed as it takes on average a year to start crop cycles going and with several million people competing with you to forage what the land offers... well.. you get the idea.

Peak oil is not a theory or a spook story. Its a simple concept: oil is finite and because of this it will definitely peak at one point. When it will happen its unknown but it will happen. The current estimate is based on the existing supply compared to the expected demand (with India and China's oil requirements exponentially growing as they finish their modernization). Unless several massive new oil deposits which make Saudi oil fields look like puddles are found, the peak point is expected prior to 2100.



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28 Dec 2010, 9:55 pm

Population will probably turn downwards, but not to the extent you are suggesting. It would take more factors than those suggested in your post for that to occur. Seems like another exercise in malthusian thinking to me.


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29 Dec 2010, 2:34 am

I am of the assumption that human population growth will level off soon at perhaps 11 billion persons. Birth rates are declining world-wide as more persons move into cities and societies become more urbanized (much the case in the third-world).

People living in industrialized nations have less children for a number of reasons related to industrialization.

As for Malthus, many criticize him for not taking technology into account. Malthus was right, with the exception of the two centuries, that followed his famous essay's publication.


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29 Dec 2010, 3:01 am

Dantac wrote:
Start the 1900's we see an explosive growth in population starting in Europe and America. The reason: Oil.


Wrong. It was the result of fertilisation, advanced agriculture technique and animal husbandry.

Yield per acre had a stronger(and earlier) effect than the combustion engine. It started during the steam thresher era. It was the mechanisation of crop retrieval that increased yields. For instance, potatoes went from 1 ton per acre up to 10 tons because mechanical pickers grab almost everything and are thus more efficient than hand picking. People overlook things. The means of locomotion are irrelevant to this process.

Likewise breeding for desirable traits let to shorter stalks on cereal crops, allowing the plants more energy to produce seed. With the addition of fertilisation, this had an immense effect.

Having actually farmed i can say there is a maximum speed that you can process a field and its generally between human walking speed and a run. It wouldnt matter if you did this with a horse, a steam engine or a ferrari engine, you can only do it so fast. Fossil fuels do not allow for a order of magnitude increase in farm size.

The size of the swath that you cut matters a great deal more than your forward speed.


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29 Dec 2010, 6:50 pm

Malthus was wrong and so are you.


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29 Dec 2010, 7:03 pm

Fuzzy wrote:
Dantac wrote:
Start the 1900's we see an explosive growth in population starting in Europe and America. The reason: Oil.


Wrong. It was the result of fertilisation, advanced agriculture technique and animal husbandry.



Also improvements in health conditions, not the least of which was producing clean drinking water. One of the big steps was the construction of the sewer system in London which eliminated cholera.

ruveyn



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30 Dec 2010, 12:23 am

Orwell wrote:
Malthus was wrong and so are you.


Hubbert is right though :P


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30 Dec 2010, 12:41 am

The assumption that advanced technology can eternally counteract the clear mathematics of Malthus is blithely optimistic but not necessarily something that is totally dependable. The alteration of the climate and the acidification of the seas is not being countered effectively to any extent and those are critical in maintaining, not to speak of increasing the current population of humans and the portents are not good.



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30 Dec 2010, 12:46 am

Dantac wrote:
It seems that, after all, the Amish will get the last laugh. ;)


No, the Mormons would due to their more miltaristic mentality and larger numbers- e.g. Republic of Desert 2.0 post-balkanization of the USA.

Is's funny as an author who wrote some oil peak novels said something like that about how "Whatever you think about the religious belief of the amish or mormons, they'll be better in line for surviving the peak"


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