Welcome, Monkeydust. Please feel free to browse the current topics, and don't forget to check the archives when you have the time. I suspect that most of your questions will be more than answered!
None of us are experts in predicting the future; that being said, I must say that you will find here some of the most interesting and informed people on the peak oil topic.

Most do not take these predictions lightly; the conclusions come after much debate (and if you hang around here, you will find there are all kinds of debaters-smart, silly, newbies trying to learn, and the occasional bully who accepts no vision but their own), using as many facts as can be found scattered in both the world's media and personal experience.
As for alternative fuels: together, they probably will lessen the decline of fossil fuels; however, they are a)only temporary fixes, and b) one of the big problems is that TPTB are dragging their feet regarding the development of alternative energies, and do not seem to understand that the development of such alternatives require the use of fossil fuels.
Your other points are covered in other topics much better than I can do here. And, the posts are well worth your time.
. Very wise move!
Finally, many of our posters (myself included) handle the stress of the situation with gallows humor. It is a lot cheaper than psychiatric care or having to add a rubber room to the house!
You get two brownie points: one for understanding that there is a serious, worldwide problem, and one for finding PO.com.
Enjoy the show, and feel free to ask questions. I won't guarantee that you will always get a serious response, but isn't free speech a wonderful concept?

Africa and Russia will lose a lot of population. Russia currently is #1 country in declining population. But African nations will takeover.

in die off.

Until the final resource war.

I'm a doomer. My view of the future (based on what I've learned here and elsewhere) goes like this:

1. recession
2. depression
3. collapse
4. die off


This is based on historical examples, anthropology, and biology, and it's all been covered on here a gazillion times.

Some really helpful posts there from a few people, and I suppose the moderates exist but are (inevitably?) less outspoken in the debates that I've read on here already.

In spite of my points in the opening post I have to admit - as everyone here does - that I don't know exactly what's going to happen. There are a number of uncertainties - the prospects for renewable energy, the fragility of modern economies in the face of declining cheap energy, the propensity of humans for cooperation rather than conflict - which I simply don't have the answers to, and I doubt anyone else does.

One of the reasons I'm fairly optimistic is pragmatic. I can't actually do much to affect the situation, and neither can many people - unless they have a well-hidden plot of plentiful land. The prospect of being optimistic and being proved wrong later on, therefore, doesn't bother me all that much - what will happen, will happen anyway. On the other hand, if I'm pessimistic and wrong, I'll have spent a lot of time worrying and catastrophizing and living my life in a pretty gloomy way...only for everything to turn out not as bad as I thought it would be. It just "makes sense" to me not to be gloomy so long as the jury's still out.

New Monkey - the only reason that you can 1. Believe that Peak Oil is upon us, and 2. Believe that things will be ok, is . . .

you haven't read enough yet.

Read up on alternatives and all your other "counter points" and you will eventually figure out that it's going to be really bad - the only question is how bad.

Please give me one example from anthropology of the die off a population. The closest I can think of real quickly is the Mayan Empire. It did go through the first three but don't tell the thousands of Mayan Indians in the Yucatan they are dead.

I agree that a society (or nation/state) can dramatically change and even disappear but the people do not. The Anasazi of the Southwestern US are still found in the Pueblo Indians, the Egyptian empires may be gone but there are still Egyptians, etc., etc.

The only historically recent case which could be made for the die off of a population would be the Nazi elimination of the Gypsies and Jews. And even though that did follow a depression, I don't think that is in the same context as PO.

You can possibly stretch that context to bring up the extinction of 99% of all species which have ever existed on the planet Earth. But if you do then you are getting into the whacko world of global warming or global cooling or global whatever. That is a natural consequence of living on a dynamic planet and it is the planet and not the inhapitants which is causing the die off.

That is not a belief, is not something you pick up, to shape the way you see the world, look at what sustains our civilization, all that is being taking away right now . When you erode the foundations of any society, it collapses. All the alternatives you suggests have been discussed here already, browse a bit more. In the context of the societies now, WW1 and WW2 are not good examples, look instead what happened to those societies that were in overshoot.

Monkeydust wrote
Would not a very, very serious problem bring very, very serious consequences? I'm not going to drill my beliefs into your head, you are free to make up your own mind. I am a doomer. My research has led me to that conclusion. I believe we'll see recession, it will deepen to become a depression, and continue into regression if solutions are not found. I also believe there are problems for which there are no technical solution. Oil is the fundamental resource upon which modern society is based. As production falls into terminal decline, bottlenecks in the economy and world systems will present. Transportation, food production, home heating and cooling, communication, the entire economy, and military activity all depend on a finite and soon to be shrinking resource. At the start, and we are here now, there will be a slow down. As production continues to decline, the effects of the problem will expand and compound. I suggest you browse Dieoff.org, read the papers, check the references and credentials, put together a larger view of the problem. There is a fantastic amount of material to assimilate.

Greenland Vikings.

See Montequest's many very long threads about the causes of population die off.

If you believe humans are not subject to the same biological limits as other creatures, I can see how you might think we will escape die off, if that's what you actually think.

One can be totally pessimistic and not gloomy.

MonkeyDust, here's a book that does an excellent job of discussing human behavior in the face of differing crisis over a few thousand years...and I think it might help explian the viewpoints of Ludi and others...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed





I highly recommend this book for a historical analysis of human behavior in the face of divergent sociological, enviromental and ecological challenges.

The first one I noticed this morning is sales of SUV's has dropped 24% during the last year.

Here's a nice little essay about collapse:
Collapse

see the rest of the essay series for supporting points.

As someone who has spent a life working with paleontologists I realize species go extinct. But at the same time one percent of those species evolve into other organisms. There have been at least four mass extinctions in the last 3 billion years which were the result of a catastrophic change in the environment, asteroid impact, massive methane release, etc., etc. But the normal run of the mill die offs as far as species goes is due to loss of habitat. If you think oil is part of our habitat then I can see where you think we will all die off.

A much greater crisis in my mind than the loss of oil is the loss of water. That is a significant change of habitat and did result in the depopulation of the Saharhan Desert. But at the same time their descendants still live in Sub-Saharhan Africa. We also have one large advantage over the butterflies and dinosaurs. We can modify our habitat to help our survival. That is why we have survived through ice ages and dust bowls while the animals and plants did not.

As far as the Greenland Vikings, they did not die off. The weather got too cold to sustain crop growing and they returned to Norway. They are still there the last I knew.