When will the mass dieoff begin? Pt. 2(merged)

[ralfy]

What Ehrlich argues looks correct if we assume that advanced health care and additional needs require an ecological footprint of around 4 global hectares, with a buffer plus considering ecological damage.

About deaths due to starvation, some sites point out that around 25,000 people die of starvation daily (16,000 of them are children below the age of 5), or more than 9 million a year. In addition, almost a billion are hungry.

[pstarr]

It's simple math. The earth supported a billion people at a time until around 1850 and the beginning of the fossil fuel epoch. Coal/oil allowed for a human population bloom, like yeast in a petri dish (or beer barrel) or algae in a summer pond. We've used up the nutrients. We dug all the convenient phosphorus, concentrated ores, and are now already on our hands and knees screening the earth for the remaining valuable elemental dust. Using the rest of the (difficult-to-extract) oil to do so. There won't be more. sorry. In spite of what you Human Exceptionalists want us to believe.

Questioning Dieoff is a religious proposition, either Creationist or Techtopian, that somehow mankind is not vulnerable to age-old forces. Unless we luck out and uncover perpetual energy under the roots of an giant, off-world, maple tree, we are FUBAR. Sooner rather than later. Arab Spring? Next it will be Planet Earth Spring.


We are living on subsidies now. Debt, rusting infrastructure, and inertia. Get Your feces together in a neat little pile, tie it up in an ole' sack, toss that over your shoulder and get the heck out of dodge. Now. Just my advice.

[SeaGypsy]

All TPTB need do to bring on rapid onset of die-off is cut supply of basic anti biotics. Our immune systems have become symbiotic with rock melon fungus. Cut out this supply, my guess is 50% dead in 1 year. My rough approximation is that my own life has been saved on average every 5 years by these simple drugs. I am in the global 1st percentile, wouldn't make me any less dead.

[Roryrules]

It's simple math. The earth supported a billion people at a time until around 1850 and the beginning of the fossil fuel epoch. Coal/oil allowed for a human population bloom, like yeast in a petri dish (or beer barrel) or algae in a summer pond. We've used up the nutrients. We dug all the convenient phosphorus, concentrated ores, and are now already on our hands and knees screening the earth for the remaining valuable elemental dust. Using the rest of the (difficult-to-extract) oil to do so. There won't be more. sorry. In spite of what you Human Exceptionalists want us to believe.

Questioning Dieoff is a religious proposition, either Creationist or Techtopian, that somehow mankind is not vulnerable to age-old forces. Unless we luck out and uncover perpetual energy under the roots of an giant, off-world, maple tree, we are FUBAR. Sooner rather than later. Arab Spring? Next it will be Planet Earth Spring.


We are living on subsidies now. Debt, rusting infrastructure, and inertia. Get Your feces together in a neat little pile, tie it up in an ole' sack, toss that over your shoulder and get the heck out of dodge. Now. Just my advice.

I note with interest that you still haven't answered my questions. And I find your doomerish Malthusianism quite charming in a quaint, backward kinda way. So thanks for the advice, but no thanks.

[dorlomin]

Questioning Dieoff is a religious proposition, either Creationist or Techtopian, that somehow mankind is not vulnerable to age-old forces.

Discounting a drop in population totally would be an unrealastic position but questioning a 'die off event' is simply a matter of acknowledging that we will have enough fossil fuels for agriculture alone for many years to come and could hold it back for perhaps a century. Also it is possible that either renewables or nuclear will be able to provide enough energy for food.

[pstarr]

I note with interest that you still haven't answered my questions. And I find your doomerish Malthusianism quite charming in a quaint, backward kinda way. So thanks for the advice, but no thanks.

But I did respond to your question. It remains an irrelevant, illogical An Argument from (negative) Authority. That was enough. Why belabor it?

Question for you; how do you justify describing environmental collapse as "quaint?" Sounds kind of callous?

[pstarr]

Questioning Dieoff is a religious proposition, either Creationist or Techtopian, that somehow mankind is not vulnerable to age-old forces.

Discounting a drop in population totally would be an unrealastic position but questioning a 'die off event' is simply a matter of acknowledging that we will have enough fossil fuels for agriculture alone for many years to come and could hold it back for perhaps a century. Also it is possible that either renewables or nuclear will be able to provide enough energy for food.

It's not just food (though it is pretty clear the 'Arab Spring' was sparked specifically by high fuel and food costs.) The real problem is the USA's dependency on myriad 3rd-world countries that are one riot or epidemic away from chaos. The breakdown of waste treatment and recent cholera crisis in Haiti is a premonition. I doubt we have the military strength to occupy 200 desperately poor nations that have "our" stuff.

[Revi]

It's simple math. The earth supported a billion people at a time until around 1850 and the beginning of the fossil fuel epoch. Coal/oil allowed for a human population bloom, like yeast in a petri dish (or beer barrel) or algae in a summer pond. We've used up the nutrients. We dug all the convenient phosphorus, concentrated ores, and are now already on our hands and knees screening the earth for the remaining valuable elemental dust. Using the rest of the (difficult-to-extract) oil to do so. There won't be more. sorry. In spite of what you Human Exceptionalists want us to believe.

Questioning Dieoff is a religious proposition, either Creationist or Techtopian, that somehow mankind is not vulnerable to age-old forces. Unless we luck out and uncover perpetual energy under the roots of an giant, off-world, maple tree, we are FUBAR. Sooner rather than later. Arab Spring? Next it will be Planet Earth Spring.


We are living on subsidies now. Debt, rusting infrastructure, and inertia. Get Your feces together in a neat little pile, tie it up in an ole' sack, toss that over your shoulder and get the heck out of dodge. Now. Just my advice.

I think this is an awesome rant, Pstarr. I agree completely. In the state of Maine one in 4 children are experiencing hunger now. Poor people are on the edge already. It won't take much to push them over into serious hunger. The only real meal they get each day is the one they are fed in school. You don't even have to do the math. Just look around.

[pstarr]

Thanks Revi. I understand from reading your many posts that non-coastal (non-vacation) Maine is a poor place. Do you think it is typical of other rural ('invisible') regions? My guess it is and that the MSM is negligent in reporting on a vast poor America.

[Plantagenet]

Maine "Farmer's Market" has huge volume of food stamp sales

4x national average in food stamp sales

People in Maine may be poor and on food stamps, but they are eating lots of fresh, healthy, organic food from the local farmer's market and hippy craft mall.


Groovy, man! Can I get this with foodstamps?

[Lore]

Thanks Revi. I understand from reading your many posts that non-coastal (non-vacation) Maine is a poor place. Do you think it is typical of other rural ('invisible') regions? My guess it is and that the MSM is negligent in reporting on a vast poor America.

Sure it is, just come to my corner of rural Michigan. The organic farmer's market is 75 miles away. Although we do have a WalMart about 18 miles from me.

[pstarr]

Groovy, man! Can I get this with foodstamps?

cute stereotype is sure to loose an argument. but that is what you do. Who are you playing to Plant? Other wealthy republicans or the Creationist wing of your clan?

[dohboi]

Global death rate seems to be bottoming out at about 8/1000/year:

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=26

After falling fairly steadily from about 40/1000/year since the middle ages.

The dying of the post-war boom generation is predicted to make for a significant and inevitable rise in the death rate in any case.

World historical and predicted crude death rates (1950–2050)
UN, medium variant, 2008 rev.[3]
Years CDR Years CDR
1950–1955 19.5 2000–2005 8.6
1955–1960 17.3 2005–2010 8.5
1960–1965 15.5 2010–2015 8.3
1965–1970 13.2 2015–2020 8.3
1970–1975 11.4 2020–2025 8.3
1975–1980 10.7 2025–2030 8.5
1980–1985 10.3 2030–2035 8.8
1985–1990 9.7 2035–2040 9.2
1990–1995 9.4 2040–2045 9.6
1995–2000 8.9 2045–2050 10

(Sorry about the formatting--kind of a klutz with that. The original is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#cite_note-2

and ultimately, with updates, here:

http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=PopDiv&f=variableID%3A65

But it may happen a bit sooner and a bit more sharply than people had thought.

Of course, a mere increase in the death rate is not exactly the same as what many people mean when they use a term like "die off." Presumably, at that point, birth rates (or survival of kids born past the first year or so), would have to drop off precipitously.

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=25

If the drop from ~20 to ~19 over the last two years continues or accelerates a bit, we could see that line meeting a rising death rate line within ten years, perhaps sooner. And this could happen even without any dramatic disruptions in food supplies, etc, just from a slight acceleration of demographic trends already in place.

When birth rate crosses below death rate, of course, is when populations start to shrink. Whether you want to call that the die off, the other side of the demographic curve, or something else, doesn't really matter. Perhaps it is a issue of how sharply and steeply we make that inevitable transition?

(Sorry, by the way, for introducing the crudities of stats and graphs to interrupt the much more refined rants and mud-slinging going on here. Proceed as you were.)

[Pops]

Here is the graphic to go with pstarr's explanation.



A person can argue that it wasn't FF's that caused the change in direction of the population "curve"...
maybe that after millions of years of relatively stable population we became infinitely wise infinitely fast and so now population can increase infinitely...
or maybe it's all God's plan and we (I mean the good people) will be whisked away in a flash...

but really, I can't see any logical conclusion other than a large part of the population is here because of FFs and the curve will decline about the same way it increased.




The whole question of Overnight Armageddon is pretty much magical thinking though, part of the slate-wiper fantasies of teenage boys and religious cultists (mainstream and otherwise) and a typical non-argument of denialists who confuse past performance with future results.

Armageddon may seem at hand when you receive your pink slip but in reality there won't be naything fast or overnight about it. We humans are individually fragile but as a specie we are tough and resourceful and resilient animals and will fight tooth and nail to stay alive.


p.s. thanks for that dohb, very interesting.

[pstarr]

teenage boys religious cultists denialists.

Pops, I'm confused. Which category do I fit into?

[Pops]

LOL P, I'm guessing you hold enviro-doom as a matter of faith, it's just the way your knee jerks, I'm the same to a smaller extent. But I doubt any argument or set of facts has ever really shaken your belief that we are going down hard and PDQ with Gaia giggling all the way. LOL

I'm too wishy-washy to be faith-based in much of anything. Most days I think we'll muddle our way to some lower standard, experiencing various spasms of pain, one kind or another – kind of punctuated power down – until we finally burn through all the FFs we can and are back to basic biomass & passive solar. Sometimes I even go so far as to think we even plateau (more or less) for a generation or two as the magic hand renders the fat.

On alternate Thursdays though, I get a case of Delirious Deflationary Credit Crunch Tremens where I imagine credit and investment will at some point dry up more or less permanently. Basically the owners decide the gig is up and move to lock in their gains via hard assets and pull all the stops to grab the final bit of fossil wealth along with complete control...

On Blue Moons I imagine they already have.

[pstarr]

Pops, back in the 1950's 'punctuated equilibrium' was quite a controversial theory of evolution. A wacky Russian-born guy named Immanuel Velikovsky the father of modern 'catastrophism' even suggested that Biblical stories were based on real geologic or astronomical events; such as the parting of the Red Sea. It wasn't until Stephen Jay Gould legitimized this new thinking, that population biology really considered that evolution was not a nice gradual subtle sleepy event. BIG EVENTS REALLY DO HAPPEN! As recently as 1980 folks couldn't imagine that the Earth had been walloped head-on . . . BANG! by a GIANT ASTEROID!!! that killed just about EVERYTHING!!!!. But it's true. It really did happen. Sometimes things go suddenly wrong. And all hell just breaks out.

[dohboi]

And, iirc, abrupt climate change of a few degrees C, can occur globally in just a few years, iirc.

What can change even faster is economics and politics, even though people always call things "economically unrealistic" or "politically unrealistic." Few things are less real than these human contrived systems.

The thing that won't happen is most Hollywood scenarios, such as in "The Day After Tomorrow." But things can go down hill awfully fast.

[Pops]

No doubt big change happens, we're living in the fastest changing period in human existence.

The thing is, not only do most people superficially believe the way things are today is the way they've always been, they've never even read a book about when there was no iPhone or cable TV, essentially unlimited travel on demand and an unquantifiable volume of "stuff" available for consumption. People just don't realize how anomalous is the little world we've built around us these last 100 years. Neither do they appreciate that in the history of the planet we are unprecedentedly dependent on our web of technology and in turn utterly at the mercy of FF energy.

I'm a firm believer in the idea of the many peaks taking shape as cresting waves. That is, the cornies are right in believing technology and economics will (and are) allowing us to pull forward production and extend the various peaks beyond a nice neat bell curve. Since the amount of whatever resource under the curve is finite no matter the shape of the curve, burning cheap/easy/high EROEI FFs to manufacture low ROI energy and other inputs will necessarily cause the inevitable decline to be steeper. It doesn't take much faith really, it is happening now so not a lot of believing is needed.

So, no, I don't deny the possibility and even probability of an attack by a flock of angry black swans but I don't believe the ones that will pick our bones will be from the asteroid belt or MRSA strain or methane bubbles but simply from the unwinding of our fossil fueled complexity. I think it will be punctuated discretely in time but also in geography but especially in social standing. It will happen quietly over time, a class or ethnic group at a time, a country or geographic region at a time, so slowly that no one notices – just like a kid raised in an ghost neighborhood in Detroit never even considers that his street might have once looked different.


BTW here is that mortality data dohb posted, in picture form for us right brainers




The Revolution Will Not Be Televised but it won't "put you in the drivers seat, brother".

[Tanada]

I still don't see a lot of evidence that any die off is taking place, big, small or in between.