Newfie wrote:Good points by both. It also demonstrates how complex the whole system is, how many variables there are. LTG did not model the downward slope and stated that the best their model could do was find the inflection points because after that everything became so chaotic that the model lost credibility. I suspect that is true.
Tanada, one thing I’ve not heard you address is soil depletion.
Tanada wrote:pstarr wrote:"People lived in all those places before industrial civilization, and those who have kept the necessary skill sets will be able to do so after the collapse of industrial civilization. You seem to have a blind spot Pete"
You have the blind spot Tanada. Skill sets don't revegetate forests or refill the mines. It takes hundreds to thousands of years to form an inch of topsoil. There is little or nothing out there to subsist on. Sorry (:
Bull Pucky. I can make an inch of topsoil out of raw silica sand by dropping it on the ground and leaving it alone for a few years, it in no way shape or form has ever taken the often claimed 'thousands of years'. The land where my fat butt is sitting right now was under a 2000 meter pile of ice 20,000 years ago. 10,000 years ago it was under a glacial lake caused by the melting of that ice. 8,000 years ago more or less that ice water had all drained away and within decades there was mossy tundra, which seceded to mixed pine forest and then mixed hardwood forest as the climate warmed to the Holocene Maximum. Topsoil is not some magical combination of special elements it is dirt full of bacteria with a little organic carbon to sustain it. That organic carbon comes from mosses and lichens and algae and critters doing #2 as they wander around eating. The first secession of plant life are the ones that don't need organic carbon to thrive, but they leave behind organic carbon for all of the other plants that do need organic carbon in the soil.
I will make you a bet right now Pete, go to the hardware store and get a bag of pure silica sand with no organic material in it. Dump it in a tight pile on any corner of your property you want so that it is thick in the middle at least several inches. Put a little fence around it to remind yourself hands off. Observe it for two years without disturbing it. Do not water it unless you are watering the soil around it at the same time. Come back in two years and tell me it is barren and nothing is growing in it.
You can try this yourself any time instead of believing the speculations of someone who never tested their assumptions. Heck write up a nice column for some eco-journal or op ed page of the LA Times after you try it. By the time the bugs and birds and small mammals have been walking over, digging through and dropping #2 all over it for 24 months it will have a nice layer of top soil and likely be covered with plant colonies of different sorts of weeds and grasses from the area where you dump it. It will only cost you about $10.00 for the bag of sand and the little fence around it. And the struggle to not do anything and just observe how nature works.
Nature thrives in the absence of interference. You could get lucky, maybe the drought will last another two solid years and everything around the pile will be dead from lack of moisture, then you can crow about how dumb I am.
Tanada wrote:onlooker wrote:Wow, I am wondering Tanada if in your opinion this could theoretically be done for much of agricultural land in the US. I heard you see that the soil is pretty dead from excessive use, pesticides and fertilizers and having a denuded landscape for growing crops which is not a teeming climax ecosystem. Permaculture I imagine would also be involved. All this by the way from reading "The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future"
Book by William H. Kötke
Onlooker you should read
Wormwood Forest by Mary Mycio and
Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepherd.
What is Topsoil? Topsoil is rock, both powdered and granular (sand) mixed with organic carbon and filled with bacteria and tiny animals. That is all it is and everything it is. It ranges from sticky clay to sandy loam to sandy gravel as the matrix, but the bacteria and tiny animals and fungi and mosses living in it are what make it 'topsoil'. Everywhere the roots of plants penetrate is a source of organic carbon and a pathway for the bacteria, fungi and tiny life to use. You can do the same experiment I challenged Pete to do above. If you have the least bit of an open mind you will prove to yourself for minimal cost which of us is correct.
Tanada wrote:pstarr wrote:Tanada, you must think I make this stuff up because I am a doomer and I hate civilization lol Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation ContinuesGenerating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.
About a third of the world's soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day.
I loves me fine wine I'll miss it.
I know you are a doomer Pete I have been typing back and forth with you since April 2005. The soil degradation comes from the retarded industrial farming model that monocrops and pours petrochemicals onto the soil to make the crop grow and pests die. Appeals to authority are meaningless when I have seen that the claims are false with my own eyes. Are you afraid to accept my sand challenge because it will prove the bureaucrats are as full of gas as they seem to be?
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Newfie wrote:.
I have no clue why yours and Ibons experience is so markedly different from mine. I see a very fragile Earth that does not regenerate easily. I’m sure this isn’t the case in some places. But even here in Dominica I see signs of the earth being played out, greatly r diced fertility. I’m just learning but what I’m seeing is large areas covered with lemon grass, an invasive the locals are trying To burn out. There are whole hillsides covered with the stuff to the exclusion of all else. Back in the Bush there are all kinds of small farm plots, none very productive. What got me that as wet as this place is they are irritating, at great ecfort.
Newfie wrote:I get that Ibon, things will grow back not as they were.
What I’m talking about is the soils ability to regenerate while still being used to produce crops. What I see in these manual farming areas is relatively fertile places that don’t produce much, where the folks move there lot ever year or two and let it rest for a few years in between. I see a lot of land that is easily played out for agriculture.
In Germany they seem to use more crop rotation to help regenerate. I’m no farmer and could be mistaken but I think that helps.
My understanding is that our capacity for production relies upon many things beyond fossils fuels such as adequate water (we are now using fossil water) and essentially fossil soil nutrients. These resources regenerate but at a rate much below our current usage. It is really the Peak Oil argument applied to other resources.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Newfie wrote:The pine trees in NJ and PNW I believe have a huge tap root that goes deep. There were stories (Ken Keesy) of folks falling into their rotted cavern and suffocating. Ive not experience that but I have STEPPED into the smaller NJ version and gown in up to my hip, painful.
But Tanada, I may need schooling on this, are you saying we can continue farming as we do now, including irrigation, for an indefinite time? I don’t thinks so but sometimes it sounds that way.
KaiserJeep wrote:Re: Nuclear energy and Coal energy after cheap oil is gone.
Both of these energy sources depend heavily upon petroleum fuels for the machinery that digs them out of the ground. In fact the nuclear fuel cycle is very FF dependant, after mining it uses grid energy to refine uranium and then enrich the fuel via high speed centrifuges spinning uranium hexaflouride gas to seperate U235 from U238.
By my off-the-cuff estimate, nuclear energy still produces about 15% of the carbon as coal, because it uses both oil (for mining) and coal (for grid power used to refine and enrich nuclear fuel). That figure would be even higher except that fission reactors produce rather a lot of energy for each fuel cycle.
Similarly, solar panels and wind turbines use a lot of embedded energy from FF's when they are fabricated.
The most correct view of a future without cheap petroleum fuels is that we will have whatever energy sources we have before we run out of such fuels. That is why it is so critically important to transition to renewable energy before we run out of cheap oil.
YES it is possible to design electric powered mining machinery, and electric transports for ores, and electric alternatives to whatever we use fossil fuels for today. Some (but all too few) machines have been designed, most such systems remain concepts, detailed designs don't exist, nor do prototypes, much less available electric machinery substitutes. The longer we wait, the more painful the transition and the more difficult the task and the more we suffer from energy shortages.
Newfie wrote:The pine trees in NJ and PNW I believe have a huge tap root that goes deep. There were stories (Ken Keesy) of folks falling into their rotted cavern and suffocating. Ive not experience that but I have STEPPED into the smaller NJ version and gown in up to my hip, painful.
But Tanada, I may need schooling on this, are you saying we can continue farming as we do now, including irrigation, for an indefinite time? I don’t thinks so but sometimes it sounds that way.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests