I really hate to be considered a purveyor of doom-and-gloom. I don't want to do that. But greed and politics make policy and it's bad policy. Looking the other way is ostrich policy. The other common way out of thinking is praying for Jesus to return. If people believe in that particular supernatural solution it is because they have not read Revelation all the way through. Churches purvey 'feel-good Christianity' because no one wants to hear the bad stuff. Just like politicians. Even the news media. "Why doesn't anyone report the GOOD news?" Remember that? Because there isn't any. We are doubly cursed with two generations of 'no child left behind'; another stupid government plan which had the effect of making teachers teach the tests and not the material and required them to pass everyone on up the line. Those people have now graduated from college. They still cannot find the US on a globe...but they can vote...and politicians pander to them. Rome is burning because we set it on fire. The problem of course, is the same as it has always been. There are 6.8 billion people on a 3.5 billion person planet. I understand quite clearly after all these years that no one wants to hear it; that it is politically and religiously correct to believe that every life has an equal intrinsic value (or is sacred...yet we send them off to war); that the planet will support as many people as we can produce....keep' em coming. That we can't possibly run out of food or water or oil (because it is produced abiogenically faster than we can find it). These are mainstream opinions (except abiogenic oil which is just nutty). So the mainstream is swimming WAY below median intelligence. I'd like, once again, to post this link and ask you to scroll down to 'Environment' and then, below that, 'Food' and 'Water'.Everyone (here) has surely cultured various things in Petri dishes and no doubt observed what happens when the dish gets full of the culture. Why is it improbable to interpolate that observation to a planetary scale? To my mind, it is not. So I am left with the conclusion, derived from my own tortured form of logic, that a mathematical formula can be developed by which the RATES of population increase, water availability/usage, food production, loss of arable land and the energy required to sustain that rate can be used to predict a sink rate and, depending on technology, a fail date. I cannot publish it because I cannot imagine all of the possible connections involved, so it will never be accurate. But it can show a trend. I will provide a few of my assumptions going in.The first one concerns fresh water. There isn't enough now and there isn't any more available to us. Two-thirds of it is locked in ice which will melt into a salty ocean. We cannot get at it. Recycling wastewater is fine as long as you have a supply of fresh water to replace losses but those facilities are not efficient, and use a lot of energy.. Desalination is not a solution (even though wonderful desalinization methods are in the works which will desalinate with far less energy than is currently required), for a few very simple reasons. The plants have to be at or very near sea level with access to relatively deep (and therefore clean) water. Yes, you CAN clean sludge to recover water, just as you can clean bituminous sand to recover 'oil'. If you can pay $4 a gallon for water. But not trillions of gallons. Not even billions. There are other issues with desalinization. The saline sludge will immediately become toxic waste at any reasonable scale. You can't just pump it back into the ocean...and you can't maintain lakes of it. The random plant here or there can be sustained by evaporation to a point. After that point is reached, you have a huge mess. While it isn't too difficult to channel and collect melt which flows downhill. It is absolutely impossible to acquire or pump that much water uphill or even short level distances. That much energy doesn't exist. If it did, it would generate heat. A lot of heat. The second one concerns food. We are already pouring so much nitrogen and phosphorus on the land that the runoff is creating dead zones in the ocean. Those dead zones are coincidentally the very same places that small fish hatch and grow until they can compete in deeper water. So not only are we fishing our oceans out, we are destroying their ability to replenish. So much for fish; they will be gone soon. But what will not be gone is plankton. And if nothing is there to eat it, it will take over the oceans in a heartbeat. Harvesting it for biofuel or food is not an option because we cannot harvest 7/8 of the world's oceans at once....or at all...(there are a plethora of other reasons). That will create an hypoxic zone at the sea-air interface. I won't bother discussing the way meat and poultry are produced at the scale they are, but I will suggest that the current practice of feeding the offal from one processing plant to another species is a really bad idea and that it is too late to become vegetarians again with only the occasional infusion of meat, except as a luxury which most people cannot afford. Those vegetables compete with government-subsidized biofuel crops and depend on water, sufficient land, a cheap and fast transportation and distribution system and ....pollinators. Bees. Oops. Go to the store. The meat is dyed. The fish is spray-painted. Pretty soon all the vegetables will be irradiated. And all of that just to feed the people who can afford to go to the store. Maybe three-quarters of the world can't. Shall we accept that the planet is 'missing' some of the heat we should be able to measure and has been cooling since 2004 or shall we instead conclude that something else is in play? I suggested the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation but that was merely a toss-off; not a valid scientific observation. However...if, by some strange twist of fate, the cold currents at the bottom of the oscillation are warming, even a little, we have an impending problem with methane clathrate . Bigger than the huge problem we already have with it. I am not particularly concerned with carbon. We are over that cliff already. But people focus on carbon and ignore everything else. Humans think and act and plan at the scale of our lifetimes because no other reference stands out. It appears to me a fatal flaw even without any additional help like a supervolcano or an earth-impactor. Follow me at http://drtom.posterous.com\"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
- President Thomas Jefferson
- President Thomas Jefferson
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