I *think* you still don't get it. It is not as simple as losing one resource causing a dieoff. It is all the feedback loops attached to that resource, and that act independently of the resource, that are going to greatly increase, if not ensure, the future scenario of eventual massive dieoff. This site is full of debate and explanations regarding this topic. Please do a bit more reading in the current topic threads and in the archives.
[edited to fix typo.]

There were about 25 million original inhabitents of the Americas at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Incas. 90% of the population died of diseases like Small Pox brought by the Spanish, against which the Americans had no immunity. In many places, the Europeans advanced into areas deserted by pandemic.

Quite to the contrary, the Holocaust is highly relevant to Peak Oil. Although the hardcore of the Nazi party drove it out of racial hatred, the population reduction caused by the murder of Christian Poles, Ukranians and Russians (inter alia) was supported by many economists on the basis of necessity. It was believed that the population had to be reduced to the maximum feeding capacity of the land. This mentality of "demographic economics" will become all too attractive once we enter a world of shortages in which we have only 70% of the food to feed the planet.

Not that I think systematic mass murder will return. It will be more passive than that - an academic rationalisation to justify classifying people as "surplus" and looking the other way as they die of starvation. This already happens of course. The scale of it will magnify, thus the need to rationalise will strengthen.

I agree. This is a realistic perspective. Societies do not easily degenerate to Mad Max, and that state of hoodlum mayhem never lasts long. Always there arises an organising authority to assert order, peace of the commons, in order to exploit the commons. The victory of the organised over the disorganised. Humans are game-playing animals. The rulers agree on the game and they stick to the rules in their collective interest. This is such a predictable pattern that it can be taken as "human nature".

I have no expectation that society will "disintigrate" to anarchy. If it happens, it will be localised cases due to extreme events and order will soon return. However, the mood of the society may be very nasty, intolerant. Who wold want to live under the Inquisition? There is always a danger that faith will be used for tyranny. A Carbon Tyranny? You can already observe how far the Safety Tyranny has sunk its grip on our society.

Many nice points, Monkey. I think it is, in fact, overlooked by some how much excess is in the system that could be lost quickly. Car sharing and a quick increase in bus use both for local and intercity use could drop gas use significantly.

On the other hand, we have seen gas prices more than triple in the last eight years, and through much of that period, gas-sucking SUV's were among the most popular vehicles to buy, only dropping off recently as prices approach and pass $4/g.

The main reason PO will lead to a major population reduction (die off, not extinction) on a global level (not necessarily as severe in every location) is that most of the exponential growth in world population in the last century or so has been enabled by increasing efficiencies on the farm, enabled in turn by fossil fuels, particularly:

--mechanization (tractors, trucks to bring produce to market)
--fertilizer (made directly from fossil fuels, or produced with energy from ff)
--pesticides

It may be possible that rapid conversion to latest organic and permaculture methods could help ween agriculture from dependence on pesticides and some fertilizers, but we're still a long way from that for most of the major food crops.

Keep reading. Have you read any Heinberg or Kunstler yet? They are some of the most accessible, even if they aren't considered experts in geology or any of the other speciallized areas relating to this important topic.

Anyway, welcome, and don't write people off as irrationally doomerish too soon--after all some paranoid people really do have people who are out to get them

But all the arguments against my asking the questions is that this involves the entire planet. That leads to the assumption that there is no place to move to. Which leads to simply sitting in one place because your neighbors are also dying off. So I will hold to my basic question, where is the example of a population dying off because of the loss of a single resource. Granted the population may decline and the example of the American Indian is a very good one. The example of the South and Central American is not. There the Spanish were interested in the slave and peonage labor of the local Indians and so they did not decimate the local populations nearly at all like the English (and French) did in North America. It may be possible for the human population to go back to the levels of the 1800's but I still contend that much of the world is already existing at that level and so the die off will not be as drastic as being proposed, ie., up to 85%.

And to NoBodyPanic:
The pathogen which you mentioned in the Irish Famine was on the potato, not the humans. And incidentally the US lost more of its potato crop from that same pathogen than the Irish. The only difference is we used our other grains to feed the population, the British did not.

And if 125 people leaving a colony is classified as a die off than we have a die off going on every day in New York City, Los Angelos, Chicago, etc., etc. I classify a die off (at least from the term itself) as the complete depopulation of an area. That did happen in Ireland in the famine and in fact there are parts of it which have not had anybody return to it. That also has happened in New Mexico. We have several communities with less population now than in 1880. Are those die offs? The whole world is full of chost towns. Are those die offs?

And my understanding of a die off has nothing to do with the decline or loss of a civilization. The Mayans still speak the language, practise the same religion, and have much of the same culture as those in the 1400's. The government of that time is gone. If the loss of a civilization iis based upon the loss of a government then I would suppose all the monarchies of Europe and Asia were subjected to die-offs.

Did we have a die off because we went from a colonial system under a monarchy to a republic?

Before you start chastising somebody please define the terms you are basing your discussion on. I am still asking for a definition of the term die-off. I have seen at least five different ones so far in these forums.

That is one unique bus riding culture. I wonder if they ever get off for bathroom breaks!

Yes, at the police checkpoints between states. And there was actually five different buses with no chickens, but one did have a cross-eyed driver.

It isn't a single resource Friend, it it a critical, basic resource.

I guess I'd ask what you think is the most basic resource is for your survival in your current lifestyle?

Pepsi, popcorn, cable TV?

No wait, those all depend on oil.

So?

ProudFossil,

Read Nikels post again, carefully. As several have pointed out die-off does not equal extinction.

You riding on a bus with Mayans on your honeymoon while lending a personal touch to the debate in no way proves that the Mayan population did not suffer die-off when their civilization collapsed.
On the contrary, you will need to prove that their population didn't decline.

Some great responses here, and again it's good to see that there's a good number of people - even among the 'doomers' here - who are fairly open-minded on this topic.

I've got a lot more research to do, but I still remain fairly optimistic. If petrochemicals were cut off tomorrow, we'd have an agricultural crisis on our hands without parallel. But this isn't going to happen. We will have time to cultivate more land, diversify our crops, grow our own in our gardens via 'permaculture', and make use of urban space for growing crops - in ways that aren't really thought about at the moment.

My own view is that this change - or decline, if you prefer - is going to be a long-term phenomenon. Rather than a 'die-off', we may see cultural views regarding having children change as we realize the limits to growth. Where having a large family used to be considered the 'proper' thing for couples, we may see the reverse happen, and foregoing raising children might become 'the norm' as the economy changes dramatically. Such a state of affairs might make a die-off, at least on the 90% scale people here envision, fail to materialize.

Instead we might see a slow contraction of population - unfortunately coupled with 'die-offs' in the more vulnerable parts of the world - along with changes to our way of life, technological adaptations (if not solutions), and wide-ranging changes in culture and lifestyle.

One thing I am sure of, and that is that we are not heading back to the stone age. The collective knowledge, expertise, and technology we have amassed - not to mention the amount of products and machines we have already built - makes this kind of dramatic regression an impossibility. Instead, we might see some kind of quite different, more localized way of life. It might not necessarily be all bad in the long-run. My view of the coming decades is that we're going to see huge upheaval and change, and considerable economic contraction, but not necessarily widespread death and famine. Whether or not this is a catastrophe depends on how attached to modern life you are.

No they won't.

But Ag is a business and like any other business enough red ink makes it tank.

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic39608.html

Well - I think we are screwed big time.

I think we are well into overshoot and there is little (if anything) that will reverse the course we are on.

We should have started 250 years ago with the "mitigation".

No - Peak Oil WILL BE DEFINED by a complete and utter global economic meltdown.

It will just be this way.

Read this...then come back and refute what Perry Arnet wrote over 2 years ago.

Here is just a teaser...



Cheers !!

Looking forward to your posts in the Planning forum about how you are making the transition to a different way of life.

But we only need 85,000,000 bbl day.............

an 25% of tath is for the good ol USA.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
like a swirl down the drain

die off
To undergo a sudden, sharp decline in population:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/die+off



Main Entry:
die–off
Pronunciation:
\ˈdī-ˌȯf\
Function:
noun
Date:
1936
: a sudden sharp decline of a population of animals or plants that is not caused directly by human activity


http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/die-off


die-off
• n. a period in which a significant proportion of a population dies naturally, usually within a short time.
∎ a process causing this. ∎ [mass noun] the death of a significant proportion of a population in this way.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-dieoff.html