culling the species

[Dan M]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: brin-l-bounces at mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-bounces at mccmedia.com] On
> Behalf Of Kevin B. O'Brien
> Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 11:48 AM
> To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion
> Subject: Re: culling the species
> 
> >
> > What I said was that, with present technologies, we shouldn't expect
>> China
> > to do that.  So the world warms, and the best farming zones shift north.
> > Canada and Siberia will gain, others will lose.  On the whole, higher
> > rainfall is exspected.
> Only China? You don't expect anything from India, or the rest of the
> world? 

I tend to rely on data.  China is increasing its emissions significantly
more than the rest of the world combined.  India is increasing, but at a
slower rate.  There are two factors that influence this.  First, China tends
to grow economically the old fashioned way: with manufacturing.  India, due
to the wide use of English, has been able to integrate itself with the US
economy via the service economy and engineering.

I am fairly certain that everyone in the world want to have the
> same standard of living that we in the wealthy west have. 

True.

>A quick-and-dirty estimate is that this will require about a 6x increase
> in output per capita. And that output will come with some load of
> pollution, energy use, carbon emissions, etc. I don't think you can be
> quite so Panglossian with these trend lines.

But, this assumes that no progress at all is made while other areas of the
world go from undeveloped to developed.  And, China is the largest country
in the world, with the greatest economic growth.  It is also one of the veto
powers in the UN, probably has or will have the 3rd greatest military force
in the world, so it is the least likely to be influenced.

I'd guess we'd need to plan on a 4C-5C increase in temperature before new
technologies become cheap enough for greenhouse gasses to stop going up.
After that, I'd expect them to drop.

>> Fishing suffers from the tragedy of the commons.  Whale's were
> overhunted a
> > century ago, yet the green revolution of the '60s massively cut into
> world
> > hunger.  I recall when India needed massive imports of US food just to
> keep
> > its people alive.  Until the latest stupidity with regard to biofuels,
> food
> > shortages were almost always caused by men with guns who kept food away
> > from starving people and by real studid government policies.
> >
> I don't quite see why applying the label "Tragedy of the Commons" voids
> the main point here. For there to be healthy fisheries there needs to be
> a balance between the rate of reproduction and the rate of withdrawal,
> and that has clearly been violated here, with fisheries collapsing just
> about everywhere you look. And this is a fairly recent phenomenon. I
> think the correlation to population pressure is pretty robust.

Except that fish consumption continues to go up, as the fraction of fish
that are "caught" goes down

http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000383/index.html

That's the type of trend that counters the idea that we are all about to
starve.



> >> For example, the so-called bread basket of the U.S. used to be called
> >> the great desert.
> >>
> >
> > The Great Desert was in the SW.
> >
> see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Desert

OK, Pike got it wrong. :-)



> I'm pretty sure I never brought up Iowa, Illinois, or Minnesota. I
> brought up the depeltion of the Oglala Aquifer, and you can find more on
> this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer. Note that it is a
> deposit of ground water laid down 2-6 million years ago, and is begin
> depleted at a rate equal to the flow of 18 Colorado Rivers every year.

I looked at the map there.  Now, compare that map, and especially where the
aquifer is being significantly depleted (say >10% over 15 years) and lay it
over a map of the density of food production in the US.  If _all_ of that
land were to drop out of agriculture tomorrow, it would have a smaller
impact than the ethanol program has.



> "There are a number of Great Plains areas where large-scale irrigation
> developments are important. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is on
> the High Plains from Colorado and Nebraska to Texas. The area is
> underlain by the Oglala aquifer, a vast underground geologic reservoir
> under 250,000 square kilometers of the area that contains an estimated 2
> billion acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is the volume of irrigation
> water that covers 0.4 hectares to a depth of 0.3 meters.) This is
> "fossil" water, much of it deposited more than a million years ago.
> About a quarter of the aquifer's area is irrigated, almost entirely with
> Oglala water. The High Plains is a major agricultural region, providing,
> for example, two-fifths of America's sorghum, one-sixth of its wheat,
> and one-quarter of its cotton. Irrigated lands here produce 45 percent
> more wheat, 70 percent more sorghum, and 135 percent more cotton than
> neighboring nonirrigated areas. Groundwater withdrawals have more than
> tripled since 1950, to more than 20 million acre-feet annually."


OK, we don't eat cotton, so I'd like to look at the other two crops you
mentioned with the two crops I know are planted quite a bit (corn and
soybeans).  We have, from 2007 (in millions of bushels

corn	      13,074
soybeans	 2,585
wheat	       2,067
sorgum	   278

total	      18,004


Now, let's assume every last bushel of wheat and sorgum from these areas are
gone.  That's a loss of 456 millions bushels of food or about a 2.5% drop.  

Let's compare that to what's happening with ethanol consuming 30% of the
corn crop last year That's a loss of 21%.  And that didn't make the food
prices rise.  It's the planned increase to 40% that's doing it (a loss of
28% of food production).

I'd advocate making the farmers pay a good price for the water to discourage
use.  I'd also encourage the engineering of drought resistant plants to cut
the losses.  But, your numbers indicate that, from a national perspective,
it would pay to just let the farmers deal with lower crop production by
making the aquifer prices so high as to be prohibitive for farming.


 
> The term was applied to this area historically. But it does some justice
> to the idea that without irrigation these areas would not be major
> agricultural producers. 

The far western parts....and they aren't anyways.


>The fact on the ground is that agriculture in
> these places *does* rely on irrigation right now. Maybe all of these
> farmers are just being foolish and investing money in irrigation for no
> good reason and ignoring all of the rainfall that they are getting for
> free.

They are getting the irrigation water for next to nothing.  That's political
and useless.  We would be better off as a nation not giving them the water
and not having made up programs to use up our agriculture surpluses.


> For the U.S. it is not overall a critical problem yet, though in certain
> areas it is becoming more of a problem. I note that California is
> casting covetous eyes at the Great Lakes, for instance. As a resident of
> Michigan, my first reaction is that anyone stupid enough to move to the
> desert deserves their problems without my help. But I suspect it won't
> exactly play out that way. And I agree that for the U.S. the money to be
> spend is relatively a "modest sum". But take a look at what happens when
> you try to increase output by 6x. Water consumption per capita goes way
> up, not just for agricultural and home use, but for industrial use,
> which has the side-effect of generally polluting the water. 

The water downside of industry is far cleaner than it was 40 years ago in
the US.  One of the nice things about economic advancement is that we can
afford to pay for pollution control.  Getting big economies through the
brute force industrial part of the economy is the problem.  


> So the real question is whether the water supply is sufficient to cover a
>global population of over 6 billion (and still growing) producing
>approximately 6x the current level of global output. If you are looking at
> sustainability, that is the real test. And I don't think water supplies
> can stretch that far, frankly.

But, they are doing fine in countries like the US and Europe.  In the US,
we've suffered from too much food production capacity for 50 years or so.
Half the EU budget is to subsidize inefficiencies in farm production.  And,
with genetic manipulation, we have all sorts of opportunities to improve
yields, drought resistance, pest resistance, etc.  


> OK, let's look at Europe. The environmental problems that they are
> having are modest at this point. And they do have a high population
> density. Europe has a pretty benign climate, good soils, and an
> abundance of water. Two of those factors depend critically on global
> climate. The benign climate and high levels of rainfall are dependent on
> the current global climate, in particular the Gulf Stream. 

Things will change, but it's not clear that you will have a catastrophic
change.  First, global models have been understating the increase in
rainfall due to global warming.  

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070531_gw_rainfall.html

many other sites exist for backup

Second, these models predict, on average, slightly more rainfall in Europe
in the future than at present.

At least as far as I can read the map at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/6528979.stm


I'm _am not_ arguing that there will not be changes.  But, since we have
excess food productivity as it stands; low food productivity in
underdeveloped countries improve with technology, and vast northern areas
will open up for large scale food production, I don't see the world not
being able to support the peak in population expected in about 40 years.


> The point of my argument, to restate it, as that numerous indicators are
> pointing to the fact the human populations have risen beyond what can be
> sustained within our environment, and I think that is still a valid
> point.

But, the indicators you point two are isolated parts of large wholes.  For
example, your US example involves only 2.5% of the food production....and
there has been a massive excess in capacity for 50 years.  Starvation, for
the last 30 years at least, has been a distribution, not a supply problem.


> I could also have mentioned extinctions/loss of biodiversity and
> the loss of habitat, which are also clearly caused by population
> pressure from humans. Some of these can be overcome, to a degree, by the
> clever use of technology, but that must do so at a level of output that
> provides a standard of living to all humans equal to those enjoyed by
> the West to be viable over the long-term. And even that probably
> understates the task, since I don't see any sign right now that people
> in the West are willing to settle for stagnating standards of living.

Which means that we'll have to live with global warming over the next
century and that we need to invest in new technology so that in 100 years we
can shift our source of low entropy states (that's what there actually is a
shortage of, the heat in the ocean contains far more energy than we'll ever
use.  I think that's doable, given all the chances we have.  That will allow
the world to enjoy the living standards of the whole world.

I'm not arguing that there won't be problems during this transition.  I'm
arguing that they won't be catastrophic as in "of Revelations proportions"
catastrophic.  Let's put it this way, I'd expect the horrors of the 21st
century to be less than the 20th.

Dan M.