Yes, during the last upgrade we ended up with two servers. We are experiencing difficulty keeping them in sync. Right now, they are manual set clocks that are perhaps 30 seconds apart.

This causes this posting error and the one you get that says you can't post again so soon.

Patience?

Ah, therein lies the rub.

The tropical rain forest has abundant sunlight, warm temperatures, and daily rain which leads to a fast turnover of nutrients.

The soil is not rich; it is actually nutrient poor. Over the millenia, the rain has washed essential minerals out of the soil, so all the nutrients are actually in the living plants and animals.

If a leaf falls from a tall tree, immediately the detritivores (bacteria and fungi that eat dead material) get to work and start digesting the fallen piece of organic matter. Their digestive processes make the minerals available again, and a vast network of shallow plant roots lies ready to suck them up into the trees and vines. This means that the nutrient resources of the forest are all being used by the life forms living there. If the rain forest is cut down, nothing remains but a thin layer of low fertility soil.

Tropical Rain Forest

A better way to think about it:

40% of terrestrial net primary productivity (photosynthesis) is being appropriated by humans.

How much more can we appropriate before destroying the functional integrity of the ecosphere? 50-60-70-80%?

I think we are past that tipping point already. The feedback mechanisms have just not kicked in, yet. At least not in a way that everyone recognizes.

And one of the rules of ecology is that when a problem becomes rather obvious to a casual observer, it is too late to do anything about it.

If we look at this as a measure of carrying capacity (for illustration purposes), the earth could effectively go from half to completely full within the next doubling period—currently about 54 years.

I sometimes think the entire planet would have to become desert before some people admit there's a problem...

Feeling doomish today.

I think a large unused potential is suburban lawns and ornamental trees and shrubs. For my own part, I am converting part of our lawn to veggie beds, and replacing some flowering bushes with currants. We already have five big apple trees. They were planted right after WWII when people were worried about food security - houses built in the 1950s and later have none of these and often useless ornamental spruces instead.

When I walk around my neighborhood, I notice that very few lots have any veggie beds, even though most have at least a few square meters available in sunny locations (crucial in our northern location, the 59 parallel). Replacing garages with greenhouses (greenhouse effect?) would give lots of new land and extend the growing season.

And there is no need to buy fertilizer for home gardens - everyone has urine to spare. (For those who do not know this, urine is a complete and powerful fertilizer, it needs to be diluted, but contains Nitrogen (N), Potassium (K) and Phosphorus (P) and trace elements, just what the veggies need. And even if you hesitate to fertilize things you eat with urine, there is absolutely no reason to spend money buying fertilizer for your non-edible house plants. It is fecal matter, not urine, that contains harmful bacteria and other organisms.)

nocar

Ok, satellite mapping for land-cover and land-use is interesting. But this doesn't tell us anything about how land is actually used. (It tells us whether it is used or not, but not how.)

So I just want to repeat that in vast stretches of this planet, land is used very unintensively. All studies indicate that for Sub-Saharan Africa, the introduction of modern agronomical techniques can easily triple or even quadruple the yield of the crops there. For most of Latin-America and SEAsia doubling yields is very feasible in the medium term.

World Agriculture: towards 2015 / 2030.
http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.a ... 557e00.htm


So let's not exaggerate. At least half of all land that's being used today is up for some serious improvement in techniques.

And after that, we can expand to use more land. (Actually, it won't be necessary because quadrupling and tripling yields on 50% of all used land would give us abundant food, even taken into account demographic trends).

Although nature has used millions of years, refining ecosystems, occationally they collapse naturally. Nothing is ever in perfect balance. But nature is moving SO slow when adapting ecosystems, while we may change an entire continent in a hundred years. Nature can't keep up with us. And even us mighty humans cannot fulfill every role in a healthy ecosystem. We depend on other lifeforms, both big and small, although we no longer accept it.

But where does the nutrients and minerals go today? In past times they became quite evenly spread around as we didn't have sewers and sanitary systems. Today the nutrients end up outside the big cities. Some are recycled as manure, while a lot is mixed with garbage and is so intoxicated that any food grown on it would be considered waste itself.

In other words, the cities suck nutrients from the rural farmlands and the western civilisation from the whole world. This cannot go on forever.

Torjus Gaaren

[topic merged by MQ}

"New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle."

The whole article can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story ... ?gusrc=rss

Our current situation is very bad. It's peak arable land.

Interesting article. And those cultivated lands are helped by artificial fertilizer. What happens when we have less available artificial fertilizer and no more available land?

Global famine, perhaps?

So, should I adjust me present doomer 5.25 rating upward?

Sorry to go OT on this, but I thought all Unix servers come with the ntp utility to sync to atomic-clock time?

Looks like that's going to encounter the same problem with increasing the availability of resources of any kind - will it be used to provide a better life for the existing population level as it is or will it enable a further increase in the population?

From Texas Agriculture:

Fertilizer prices sky high!

By Glen Jones
Director
Research, Education & Policy Development

The U.S. is the world's second largest nitrogen producer after China. Currently, the U.S. has capacity to produce slightly more than 20 million metric tons of ammonia, which is used as a fertilizer and as a building block for other nitrogen products.

During the past year, fertilizer prices have risen dramatically. Prices have increased due to increased energy costs for production (especially natural gas), increased transportation costs, and increased demand. As natural gas prices have risen in the U.S., the cost of producing anhydrous ammonia has increased to the point that much of the U.S. production capacity has been closed. This is because the value of natural gas is greater for other uses...i.e. home heating and electrical power generation, than for nitrogen fertilizer production.

Natural gas is the fundamental ingredient, for which there is no practical substitute, and the major cost component of making all basic nitrogen fertilizer products. The cost of natural gas represents 70 to 90 percent of the production cost of one ton of anhydrous ammonia nitrogen fertilizer.

The United States needs significantly greater supplies of natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer production to meet critical agriculture and food production needs. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, fertilizer costs are up 30.8 percent in 2005 from 2003. In Central Texas, farmers paid $290-$300 per ton for anhydrous ammonia in 2004, $390-$415 per ton in 2005 before the hurricanes, and it got as high as $480 per ton after the hurricanes. Prices have decreased some in November to around $460 per ton.

Natural gas used in North America for industrial purposes, heating homes, and other uses comes from numerous oil and gas fields located in many states. Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alaska, California, Kansas, Colorado, West Virginia and Pennsylvania are just a few of the traditional U.S. oil and gas producing states, along with the Gulf Coast.

The U.S. produced 18.9 million cubic feet of natural gas in 2004 with an average price of $5.49 per thousand cubic feet. Production numbers through August are down 1.5 percent in 2005 with an average price of $6.65 through September. A significant but varying amount of natural gas is also imported to the United States—mostly from Canada via pipelines. Total U.S. imports of natural gas in 2004 were 4.3 million cubic feet. Import numbers through August are down about 1 percent in 2005.

Sources of nitrogen and potash have changed markedly in recent years from domestic to foreign suppliers, making the U.S. increasingly dependent on fertilizer imports. Today, the U.S. imports over half of the nitrogen and 80 percent of the potash fertilizer. In 2004, the U.S. imported $4.4 billion worth of fertilizer, up $1 billion from 2003.

Farmers have benefited from lower nitrogen and potash prices because of the imports. The U.S. went from being the world's largest exporter of nitrogen in the 1980s to becoming the largest importer in the 1990s. Domestic production declined when the price of domestic natural gas increased because of demand for natural gas in the U.S. expanding faster than production. Imports of nitrogen—mainly from Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, and Russia, all with lower natural gas prices—quickly filled the gap.

So, there's another industry that's going bye, bye. I'll bet the days of cheap fertilizer are over.

Peak oil, peak water, peak fish, peak arable land. Yet we still got our foot on the accelerater.

I supose we are beyond the point of no return now. Its up to nature to get rid of us since we aren't capable of behaving responsibly.

The Chinese have based their food production to sustain a high population density for millenia on using human urine for fertilizer.

I believe there are two major system faults in the Western societies' infrastructure: The car transport system and the sanitation system with water toilets.

The car transport system uses immense amounts of raw material and energy to destroy neighbourhoods and farm land in order to move cars (and lots of other dispensible stuff) around, increasingly long distances for little sensible purpose - very little of the enery is used to move people, most is to move the cars. That is why we are facing peak oil.

Our sanitation system uses precious drinking water to transport shit (transmits diseases) and pee (carries nutrients) to places where they foul the ecosystem instead of going back to (recycled) where they came from - human food. The risk of disease? - there must be better ways to dealing with that.

If we (modern humanity) were as clever as we think we are, we would not be in big shit until we hit peak pee!

nocar

I must remember to tell the police that I am carrying out a service to society by fertilising the local flora the next time I am caught pissing in public.

Might get off with just a warning!!!!!