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Plowing Carbon Into the Fields
OzPeter writes "A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing carbon into the atmosphere and at the same time saves himself up to $500,000 (AUD) that would have been required to fertilize his 3,900 hectares in the traditional way. Yet his crop yields over the last two years have been at least on par with his best yields since 2001. The technique was developed by a Canadian, Gary Lewis of Bio Agtive, and is currently in trial at 100 farms around the world."
Not that blowing it into the atmosphere is much better, but doesn't diesel exhaust contain all sorts of nasty toxins? If he's polluting his ground water then in a few years he'll have more to worry about than his dying crops..
What chemical process is converting the CO2, into not-CO2? He's not burying that carbon deep enough to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few days. Best case for him, perhaps some nitrogen compounds in the exhaust are ending up in the soil, but otherwise, this sounds like a gimmick.
It's great that he can inject carbon dioxide during planting, but most farmers use the tractor for more than just planting. Can he inject it into the ground at other times when driving around, or would it disturb the plants? The article didn't say.
If he can really go without fertilizer in the long term, then it may also help with the human impacts on the nitrogen cycle.
Qxe4
1100 Kilos of Carbon per Hectacre? That seems a little off to me. Perhaps I don't understand the how its calculated.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Having absolutely no experience with any farming techniques, any real knowledge of the chemical composition of cooled diesel exhaust or even having read the article, I still somehow feel confident enough to give a vague denouncement of this farming technique.
AHEM.
This will never work because the gas will escape/it will poison the ground/I am so much smarter than whoever came up with this.
Thank you, thank you. Love ya Slashdot. Never change.
Fertilizer is nitrogen and phosphorus. Exhaust is carbon and oxygen. Can one pair really be replaced by the other?
What keeps the injected CO2 from leaking back out?
Why doesn't the CO2 in the air already do the same thing?
Given what's in diesel exhaust, I don't think I want any of that winding up in my bread.
AccountKiller
So few facts, so many opinions.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I think it has more to do with the NOx from the exhaust. Not that I have any clue how nitrous oxide could be made into something useful like niter by pumping it into the ground. My issue is that this article claims it has something to do with carbon, which makes even less sense.
Most journalists are worse at science than I am.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Let's ignore for the moment the problem that carbon isn't fertilizer.
He can't possibly be getting enough exhaust to make a difference. There's just not enough carbon in the tank of Diesel to make a difference when spread across the field in the amounts he burns it during tilling/planting.
As much as we talk about carbon emissions, the exhaust coming out of his equipment is barely changed from what went in. If pumping in the exhaust from his equipment had a noticeable effect, then pumping in twice as much just plain air (readily available) as that would have a much larger effect and being nearly free would seem rather tempting for all farmers.
This sounds like bunk.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The problem with the idea of controlling population is who exactly is going to have less babies. I mean, if you keep hammering home in people's heads that the planet is crowded and there's too many humans, it sorta makes the idea that life is sacred seem rather foolish now, doesn't it.
I mean, when your overpopulation is 3 billion, it makes even a nuclear war a workable proposition.
This is my sig.
This farmer clearly lacks an elemental (pun intended) understanding of chemistry.
What a load of bunk. Let's see if Mythbusters would be willing to bust this myth.
I think the argument to this mechanism is that he is providing an extra carbon source for the nitrogen fixers natively present in the soil. These bacteria convert N2 into ammonia, which can then be absorbed by the plants. Essentially drives the nitrogen cycle more quickly than would occur otherwise. Alternatives in place are to do alternate plantings with plants that have rhizobiums such as legumes.
As to the people saying this is not carbon neutral, I think you should read up on the Haber-bosch process - how ammonia is made for fertilizer. Unlike microbes which can do this at room temperature and pressure, it takes something like 400 C at several times Earth's pressure. This is a very expensive process, and cutting down ammonia production will save a lot of energy.
Funny this sounded familiar, I submitted the story about the Canadian farmer three years ago. That article says it was developed by a farmer named Darrel Carlisle and is generally more informative.
(Currently, California has no additional land for farming or ranching to meet the needs of the ballooning population.)
California has plenty of land for farming. All along the back of the Sierra Nevada there is a huge valley full of decent land; the problem is water. All the water is being diverted into LA for drinking. If LA starts getting their water from the ocean, then we can begin to grow stuff there. The foothills would be another potential place to start growing, if the water were there. Also, if we really need to, we can switch from crops like almonds to crops like wheat or oats.
Wait. Now, you ask, "How will banning immigration help?"
Anti-immigration laws are like the war on drugs: neither one works. You may not realize it, but after drugs, one of the best sources of income for organized crime is human-trafficking: sneaking poor people into rich countries. If you continue to support anti-immigration laws, you will continue to support violence, human exploitation, and all the other problems that come with organized crime. There is no way to stop it. The only thing to do is legalize it.
People who worry about overpopulation don't realize that if we increase women's rights and reduce poverty in developing nations, the problem will take care of itself.
Qxe4
The EPA?
Wrong country dumbass.
I am a farmer in Canada and fertilizer does not cost 1200 to 1500 a tonne. There's no way in hell it costs half a million dollars to fertilize 3900 HA of wheat. Injecting diesel exhaust fumes in a single planting pass to totally fertilize each HA of wheat sounds like junk science to me.
You could fix overpopulation and starving with exactly the one thing. Cannibalism.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
First, Diesel COMES from degraded bio matter. So, what is in there? MOSTLY, the same stuff. That means that is contains the same micro elements. As other have pointed out, NOx are being generated and it would appear that these are also being injected. As to the nasty stuff, ALL of those will ALWAYS be generated in a diesel system. AND just about ALL will SINK TO THE GROUND. So wether you inject it into the soil, OR you lay it on the top, it is the same. The question is, is it a small amount? If it is, then not a big deal. And it would appear to be the case.
This approach makes good sense ASSUMING that you are using a diesel tractor. I am guessing that this will be the norm in another 5 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... and they whine about why the new technique must not replace the old one (which they are also whining about - of course).
I'm morbidly curious how - or if at all - these malcontents would actually envision the ideal society running, but unfortunately that requires handing one over to them, and I don't know of any spare ones.
Thus, I will continue to see all the whiners as replying to articles saying "We solved environmental problem X" not as "wont work - " but rather as "No! Don't take away our reason to complain against the United States. We need to have something to complain about in order to force our ridiculous policies down everyone's throat!"
And for the record - I think the whole thing is an absurd sham since I refuse to believe that a gas that every living creature exhales is going to destroy the world. The world is really big, filled with many strange things we do not yet even comprehend, and certainly not that fragile.
1) Pollution by releasing unauthorized elements- never mind that larger corporates do it all the time.
Ok, yes, people and businesses can be fined for dumping certain chemicals.
2) Poisoning the food deliberately- never mind the frequent salmonella outbreaks are because of unsafe corporate practices.
Could you give an example of this?
3) Conspiracy against State - with a view to reduce tax income from corporates by using alternate stuff - ???
Could you give an example of this?
I prefer grain that has rotten egg like quality to it.
But really, I can't see there being enough anything in the exhaust to make a big difference. I'm not quite understanding the setup here.
Maybe because diesel+fertilizer = bomb, then
diesel - bomb = fertilizer?
hmm, nope, that would be negative fertilizer. I'm out of ideas.
Sent from my PDP-11
How does avoiding the release of CO2 help prevent global cooling, which is our most pressing concern in the near future.
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
I found the article by "The Economist". The article debunks the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population. The implications for excessive population growth are alarming.
Anti-immigration laws are like the war on drugs: neither one works. You may not realize it, but after drugs, one of the best sources of income for organized crime is human-trafficking: sneaking poor people into rich countries. If you continue to support anti-immigration laws, you will continue to support violence, human exploitation, and all the other problems that come with organized crime. There is no way to stop it. The only thing to do is legalize it.
All you need to do to end it is require proof of citizenship(that's actaully checked out) to get hired in this country. Then charge companies who don't comply with rico laws (sieze their assests etc) . This will never happen since companies make too much money off the backs of illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage.
I would agree with you except I've known too many immigrants who've gotten fake social security cards, id's and all the papers a normal person would need to work in the US. Doing what you suggest would only make it a little harder. Just like drugs, which is actively persecuted.
Qxe4
The first reaction of "oh no heavy metal compounds and other toxins will get into the food" may be a bit of.
Yes it is the case that certain plants will absorb toxins from the ground, but those toxins will generally accumulate in one part of the plant. In some cases this may be the part of the plant we eat. ie coconut milk and shell accumulate many heavy metals. But this is not a big problem.
There are 3 things worth considering:
a) testing the food produce for unsafe levels of the toxins in diesel fumes is trivial.
b) there exists already toxins in our food (for thousands of years) and most human & animal bodies are more than capable of handling a small amount. We have entire organs just for this!
c) Humans & animals have not evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air. If we are to intake diesel exhaust we are better able to handle it in our digestive system then our respiratory system
It is worthwhile pointing our that globally ash and toxins from coal/petrol/diesel emissions kill around half a million people per year. So you must adjust your thinking from "toxins in food is bad" to "toxins moved away from the atmosphere is good".
Its a similar thing to getting over the fear of "nuclear waste", "recycled drinking water" &"geneticly modified foods". Let the science speak, don't let your fear control you.
-anon
Why don't you respond to some of the people who responded to you instead of looking up statistics that vaguely back up an argument from a tangential hypothesis.
In Australia, we don't "plow" anything into our fields; we plough it, as the original submission correctly said.
BTW: Your ideas are not controversial. They are boring and old hat. They've been discussed ad nauseum. Get a degree.
The funny thing is you seem to think the 'home' country is immune to malnutrition, starvation and civil war, and that these problems are in somehow in the future and not right here with us now. Actually, the funniest thing is people have been saying what you are saying for hundreds of years, well before there were even a billion people on the planet let alone 3. Yet here we are.
Immigration is already legal. It's those that try and skip the system in place that give it a bad name. I know many legal immigrants and they hate illegal immigrants more than native Americans because they (the illegals) just made it harder for them (the legals) to follow the rules.
While it sounds good in theory a stagnate or declining population is also an aging population which brings about it's own problems. Pretty much all successful species will populate to the limits of their resources. For us, the only necessary resource is energy. It's use and abundance is perhaps the only thing that will ever limit our growth.
I seem to recall something like 2/3 of the Earth's land cannot currently be used for crops because of salt. Enter desalination(plenty of water on the Earth) and genetic engineering.
If that problem is solved we could theoretically reach 18 billion people or more. We could also cultivate and utilize the oceans better. I do not think we are anywhere near shaping the Earth's ecosystem to completely benefit us.
After that, on to the stars!
PS Ant's global biomass is between 900 million and 9 billion tonnes. Human's global biomass is a mere 100 million tonnes. That's a lot of ants and I don't think they're worried. source
And they actually use that stuff to grow food. I mean it's the feces of animals, and they're dumping it on our food to make it grow. But somehow the food is okay and safe to eat. http://www.google.com/search?&q=Salmonella+Contamination
Spinach, romaine lettuce, pistachios, peanuts, tomatoes, onion sprouts, cantaloupes, alfalfa sprouts, and that's when I stopped looking around page 2-3.
Funny definition of "okay and safe to eat."
Please help metamoderate.
I would agree with you except I've known too many immigrants who've gotten fake social security cards, id's and all the papers a normal person would need to work in the US. Doing what you suggest would only make it a little harder. Just like drugs, which is actively persecuted.
Getting a fake is easy. Actually getting a real SSN that traces back to person who isn't dead is a little harder. A simple background check would eliminate a lot of the fakes.
The second problem with this FTA, it that fertiliser does not cost $1200 a tonne.
unless TFA is grossly wrong, this sounds a lot like the "magnetic water" bullshit sold to people.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
PS Ant's global biomass is between 900 million and 9 billion tonnes. Human's global biomass is a mere 100 million tonnes. That's a lot of ants and I don't think they're worried. source
Well, yes, but consider: how much energy does one tonne of ant biomass use/need? Then compare with the amount of energy used by the average tonne of human biomass. I think you'll find that the latter is well over a hundred times that of the former ...
Have you even seen what's in pig, chicken, cow, and sheep manure?
Bullshit.
It seems to be these days that there are a lot of people that can't possibly believe there are any ecological solutions that don't involve the massive reduction in human emissions. When the talk is about global warming and reducing carbon output, they are on board and scream "You aren't a scientist, you have to listen to the scientists!" to anyone who questions it. However, when scientists have any other solution, one that DOESN'T involve an emission reduction, they get pissed off, and denounce those scientists. Suddenly they are experts in all the reasons that must be wrong.
A good example of this is what has happened with the new book Super Freakonomics. Levitt does the same thing he does in the original Freakonomics of stripping away morality from various issues and applying economics. His original book drew ire from conservative types because it presented a convincing argument that legalized abortion has lead to a reduction in crime, but liberal types were generally ok with it.
Well, now he's become someone high up on the enemies list because in Super Freakonomics he analyzes the economics of combating global arming through geoengineering methods, rather than reducing emissions. Note that he doesn't say it isn't real or isn't a problem, just looks at different solutions as being more economically feasible. Yet that has drawn massive ire from the environmentalist types.
It just seems to be an article of faith these days that the only thing good for the environment is to use less. Any solutions that involves anything else is shouted down. This being the same sort of thing. People point to science as the ultimate bastion of truth... so long as what it shows agrees with their world view. Any time something contrary comes out, all of a sudden they are the experts instead of the scientists.
We have a lot of coal power here in Victoria, Australia and I have long thought that instead of pumping it straight up into the atmosphere we should pump it sideways into huge glasshouses. They could be built as automated food factories because the air in there would not be healthy for humans. The gas venting at the far end should have much less CO2 than when it goes in.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree with the junk science bit. As for the price of fertilizer, it's highly variable and is doubtlessly different across the world, depending on the price of natural gas usually, or shipping costs if it's imported. Given that two seasons ago in Alberta, Canada our fertilizer bill was about $200k for 2500 irrigated acres (this season was about $100k), it's not inconceivable that prices could double, triple, or even quadruple, depending on oil prices. Not sure what kind of farm you have, but if it's high yield crops on irrigation in sandy soil, fertilizer costs can be staggering. I agree the article is probably exaggerating the savings, though.
You're right that NOx is a tiny fraction of the output, still N2 makes up over 75% of the fumes. It is thought diesel particulates can act as microscopic sponges and help soil absorbtion of nitrogen and other compounds. Still, little is known as to why this works which is why it is in a controlled trial development stage so scientists can study it. They've found reduced soil pH, increased nitrogen absorbtion and other good things, so the question isn't if it works but why it works.
It's too limited. Getting a visa to come to the US is essentially like winning the lottery. In fact, they even call it a 'green card lottery.'
Qxe4
Someone a few posts lower linked to a blog with more info. It says "Mr Lewis calculates a zero-till rig will put 1100 kilograms of air through the tractor engine to work a hectare."
I still don't see how this works, but I'm sure enough people will test it eventually.
This won't do. I guess he is not telling the whole story.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Start your own thread, jackass. What the hell has that got to do with the post you're replying to, that you even quoted in bold?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I don't use to feed trolls, but Picasso was a spaniard, born in Malaga (Andalucía).
Also, most of the third world is not catholic nor christian. Examples: the whole islamic world, India and China.
...after drugs, one of the best sources of income for organized crime is human-trafficking: sneaking poor people into rich countries.
The people that are being trafficked are not the poor, but the wealthy and/or middle classed people. After all, you have to have enough money to pay the traffickers (well, the women can work as sex slaves, but other than that...). Do you think some peasant from Zaire (or whatever it's being called these days) has enough money to get himself shipped to America, when he's lucky to make five dollars a month? Sorry, but the poor stay put.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's kdawson's job to promote Australia here on SLashdot. Or it's his hobby. Unsure which. But it is all he does.
Or shut the fuck up.
If you're arguing that it's ok to kill people for some pseudo-scientific ideas about population, then put your money where your mouth is. And a bullet.
You apparently never been to or live in the central valley, I do. There is little to no farm land left, yes water is an issue but you are fucking retarded to think that is the problem. The sprawl the central valley has had in the past 8 years have been horrendous. All the dick heads from Frisco and LA decided that they would sell their mansions and clog up the central valley. Not only have they ruined the housing market here but they also can not drive. The central valley is drowning in sprawl, growth is happening at a rate so fast the land here cant support it. Its shit here now things sucked 10 years ago, but now its like a getting offered a blow job and having no dick. I moved from the central valley to the foot hills and sadly its turning into the same thing. The growth up here is ridiculous.
Visit my Forums?
You should go hang out with illegal immigrants sometime, you would learn something.
Here's how it works: all the family pools their money together to make the downpayment. The price varies depending on where they come from. Mexico will run around $2000 to $5000 but a trip from China will cost $20,000. Of course a Chinese peasant can't pay all that at once, so they come to America, and work, and pay it off while they are here. Of course it takes time, but they pay it off, otherwise something might happen to their family back at home.
So yes, poor people are the ones who get snuck into the US. Middle class/rich people usually have no desire to come here, at least not the ones I've talked to.
Qxe4
What is it with you brain-washed greenies? Ya look at me like some kind of oddball because I believe in Jesus Christ; there's a lot of indication. But then when I point to the fossil record, an indisputable record of the long-term effects planet development, you want to believe in personalities, not science.
CO2 is both exuded and attracted to 3/4 of the world's surface.
A good sized volcano's blast and we make mankind's march to lower prices look like a booger in a few minutes.
Get over yourselves; you're surprisingly smaller than the planet. Everything is recycled. Oil spurts out of the ground that is covered with seawater and SURPRISE! It takes care of it's self.
You live in a riduclously-complex world, not a cardboard box. Stop playing peid piper and look at the science.
How many more times will a worldwide hoax take you off your game? GlobalCooling(TM), GlobalWarming(TM), AcidRain(TM), OzoneHole(TM), PopulationBomb(TM).
Can you scientists go back to suggestion-and-proof again? Can you stop acting like young-Earthers believing in a six-day creation despite truth? And can ya do it quickly? We're freezing our asses off in this "GlobalWarming"!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
When I was at school plants needed Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium in their fertilizer ( http://www.google.es/search?q=npk+fertilizer ).
I'm guessing the bumper crop won't last very long...
No sig today...
As a matter of fact, I do live in the central valley. If you drive along 580, or 99, it feels like it's getting crowded, but try flying over it sometime, or try driving down 5, and you'll see the vast majority is still farmland.
Now, if you read my post, you'll see I wasn't talking about the central valley, I was talking about the luscious region here, which would be quite green if it weren't for LA siphoning off the water. And if you've ever been there, you'll see it is quite empty at the moment. In addition, the foothills are largely empty of agriculture, and although getting the water up there is somewhat of a pain, over the past few years farmers have been expanding into the foothills as well, at a rate that sometimes has exceeded the rate of land being lost to houses.
Qxe4
Most tractors have diesel engines and there is no lead in diesel.
See, we have no actual idea of how many is enough. If technology progressed to such an extent, who's to say that 12 million people couldn't live on Earth sustainably? A few breakthroughs in sustainable power generation, and likewise water production.
What you're really suggesting is a lack of resources. Then, in that case, the solution isn't to have less people, but to produce less waste during production. Instead of halving the population, we should be doubling the efficency that goods and services are produced.
The world economy is based on growth as a mechanism to increase the standard of living, but this is unsustainable. How is it possible for every country in the world tries to maximise exports relative to imports?
All we need to do it alter the market with a bias towards efficent production instead of overproduction. I'll give an example. If I buy a digital camera, they're so cheap to buy new, I'm not going to buy second hand. I should, though, because it's one camera that society doesn't need to produce, and I still get a camera to use. It costs society nothing for me to buy second hand, but if I buy new, then society has to produce that camera for me. That's wasteful production. Let's not forget why I'm buying a camera (because the internal battery became unchargable). If we adjust the economy so business makes camera that will last 10 years, then that's 10 cameras that society doesn't have to make over the next 10 years. There's no incentive for companies to make products that last, but as a society, that's what we really need.
if leaded gas were still legal (and it is in many countries), this would basically be pumping lead into your food.
Except, of course, those engines run on diesel fuel, not gasoline.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I found the article by "The Economist". The article debunks the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population. The implications for excessive population growth are alarming.
You didn't find an article that backs your assertion. There are at least two effects to note. First, high HDI countries (which boils down to high GDP per capita countries) tend to have high immigration by more fertile populations from low HDI countries. Second, that hypothetical increased fertility rate is spread over a longer period (ie, people having children later) which results in lower population growth.
Bull. Shit. Note that Levitt is NOT a climate scientist or even an engineer, so he is not the martyred expert you paint him as. On this subject he is just another lazy sensationalist amateur who got his facts very wrong as anyone prepared to think for themselves can easily discover.
please analyze the rest of my post with as much +2 vigor as you attacked my small misquote.
Women's rights don't come into it. People don't have 14 kids because they're not allowed to abort them.
As has been mentioned here before, the point of fertilizer is to provide nitrogen, and to a lesser extent, phosphorus and sulfur, not carbon. So how is diesel exhaust providing those elements in sufficient quantity? It's worth noting that this farmer has only been doing it for two years. That's far too short to make the sort of claims he's making.
Doing the math, he's claiming that he saves on about 400 tons of fertilizer for a 3900 hectare farm by pumping roughly 4,000 tons of diesel exhaust into the soil. At a glance, most of this is water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. There's a little bit of nitrogen oxides and sulfur. But I don't see the advantage. I'm wondering, if he's getting some nitrogen and other elements from the death of necessary fauna in his soil. That is, he might be getting a couple of good years of crops by killing off most of his earthworms, nematodes, and other animals in the soil who would be poisoned by excess CO2 and CO levels.
It's still an absolute increase, and as such, it's a problem. We're well past sustainability, unless you want to define sustainable as in a reduced standard of living as Malthus takes his dues.
You don't need an article from the Economist or any other rag to know that. NO species has ever had continuous growth forever. It's just not physically possible.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo.
Actually giving EVIDENCE that we're anywhere close to overpopulation worldwide (as opposed to we have an inefficient method of natural resource distribution) also seems taboo. The distinction is important to me. If we reduce the population of the earth by half somehow, I think we'd still be seeing most of the same problems we see now, like carbon emissions. Carbon release doesn't match population. For the topic at hand specifically, carbon emissions, overpopulation is not the cause, and reducing overpopulation would likely not be a solution.
Not any more. That's what the article in The Economist was about - that after a certain level of affluence, births INCREASE again.
The best way to "let the problem take care of itself" is to walk away from problem areas and let the natives sort it out among themselves. Aid to starving populations where their past population was unsustainable has led to even more mouths to starve. Not too smart, Sally Struthers.
Hiere let me fix that for you.
Women's rights come into it. People have 14 kids because they're not allowed to abort them, or practice safe sex, etc. Religion has always been against women's rights.
As one of the citizens of one of those countries, let me assure you it's not frightening at all. Sure, it means that we have to continue to work as we get older, but we CAN work as we get older. The idea of retirement at 65 was good when most people died by 60. It's not such a good idea now, between increased productivity and longevity.
Do you really want to spend the last years of your life in an old farts' home, watching Coronation Street, waiting to die? Fuck that!
If that's your idea of "retirement", just pull the f*ing plug now and spare us your waste of oxygen.
Based on the fuss there was in Ireland when the wrong type of oil was used when milling animal feed http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/1207/pork.html, I can't imagine this is a good idea. Combustion is exactly the process that generates dioxins, and they build up in animals that cosume them, so if these crops end up used for plant feed, or the process becomes more widespread, eventully even traces of dioxins in the fumes would cause problems.
It's still an absolute increase, and as such, it's a problem. We're well past sustainability, unless you want to define sustainable as in a reduced standard of living as Malthus takes his dues.
Nonsense. It's an absolute increase in a mixed population of high HDI natives and immigrants. There's no indication that high HDI results in increased fertility. And we're not well past "sustainability". There's still a bunch of orders of magnitude till we reach the capacity of the Earth to radiate heat (and keep the surface cool enough for human habitation). That's the only real obstacle ("sustainable" or otherwise) to high population.
That so-called study is a fine example of lying with statistics - see debunking here http://www.stubbornmule.net/2009/09/baby-bounce/
>>All the water is being diverted into LA for drinking.
Actually half of that water is wasted on watering lawns. People and their precious lawns...
Let me summarise the article you misquote: when a poor country gets richer, it's ratio of children per woman drops from eight to somewhere under two. When that country gets richer still, it begins to creep up over two again.
You seem to imply that increasing wealth no longer decreases population grown, and I call bullshit. Eight down to two is a massive decrease.
Make people richer, they stop having so many kids, it's as simple as that and proven over and over again.
Cannibalism
Cannibilism is people! We've got to stop them somehow!
All you need to do to end it is require proof of citizenship(that's actaully checked out) to get hired in this country. Then charge companies who don't comply with rico laws (sieze their assests etc) . This will never happen since companies make too much money off the backs of illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage.
This is how it is in this country (DK), and it hasn't stopped illegal immigration. It beats me how anyone can live in DK without a CPR (roughly eq. to US social security number), yet it is a well-known fact that it happens. Besides, I don't think a democratic population could live without allowing some kind of immigation/emmigration; e.g. in the case of marriage.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Many developed countries are facing the frightening reality of negative birth rates.
I don't think you know what birth rate is. It is number of births per (1000) people, a number which cannot be negative. If it lower than 2.xx, then you have negative population growth, which of course might be a bit worrying from an economic growth (GNP) perspective.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Do you really want to spend the last years of your life in an old farts' home, watching Coronation Street, waiting to die? Fuck that!
If that's your idea of "retirement", just pull the f*ing plug now and spare us your waste of oxygen.
Actually that's your idea of retirement, it certainly doesn't have to be that way and thats not just a question of money. It's not a bad thing to allow people to work beyond pensionable age if they wish too maybe volunteer work could be better than shifts in Macdonald's, finance shouldn't be the reason. Thats a key point at that age you should be able to decide what you want to do with your life and watching coronation st isn't an aim.
I've come close to dying twice this year I got out of hospital on Friday and the last thing I want is to die anytime soon. I have a lot more living to do yet. There is no good reason why I can't be doing pretty much the same range of activities in my 60's and beyond that I am capable of now. I'm a bit more focused on living and getting healthier knowing that I am only alive today thanks to modern medicine. Thirty years ago I would have died about 4 months ago.
Odds of my making it to retirement are a bit piss poor to be honest, however there is no reason to quit just yet.
Quit smoking eat less, fats especially , keep active mentally and physically and then you might get the choice of sitting in your slippers watching coronation st - you probably still wouldn't want to.
It's strange to me that 90% of the things we can buy to eat today damage us so that by the time we hit retirement age we are about ready to croak. You don't think about this till the damage is done usually but it doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to make healthier choices and thats whats going to save you from Coronation st.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children. Our population declines from 6 billion to 3 billion. Then, humankind does not need so much food and so much energy. The farmer in this thread of discussion can shutdown his farm and engage in another activity.
Brilliant idea, but it falls flat due to one simple reason: evolution. Whoever doesn't go with this, whoever produces more children than they should, for whatever reason as long as it is affected by genes at least a bit, will have an evolutionary advantage.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it. Those that were "resistant" to you method of population control will prosper and spread their "resistant" genes. Absent-minded, careless and/or uncaring people are resistant to birth control methods. People with strong maternal/paternal instinct are resistant to high standard of living and active lifestyle reducing number of children. Etc.
No, the only way to sensibly limit number of people is to decide how many people there should be. Then if there are too many, have peope fight each other until only desired amount is left. Not only would it solve the overpopulation problem, it'd make great reality TV too ("Remember, you could be the next Real Survivor(tm)!").
Bars are able to verify IDs, but employers can't? No American would expect a SS card to be serve as identification, but if you are Hispanic a little piece of paper somehow is transformed into proof? Despite their hypocritical words, the government fully supports underground labor because their sole constituent, Business, does.
People have 14 kids because that way at least some of them are likely to survive to continue the line and take care of their parents in their old age. Population growth usually levels off once medicine reaches the level where surviving to adulthood is the rule rather than exception, and social services provide for you whether you have children or not.
Some do, some don't. Religions typically reflect the values of the society that spawned them, and some of the older ones have grown more civilized with time. There are people who wish to oppress others in the name of their God, but they'd simply use a different excuse if religion was not available ("one race, one nation, one leader" / "will of the proletariat" / "taxes are robbery" / etc).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
... we plough Uranium into our fields.
I wonder if the effect is in any way similar to what has been observed in terra preta. Terra preta (black dirt) is a unique man-made type of soil produced by mixing in lots of carbon, in the form of charcoal. The technique was used to convert nutrient poor soil in the Amazon rain forest into some of the richest land on earth. It was produced thousands of years ago, no less. Before the discovery of terra preta, it was largely assumed that rain forest soil could never be rich enough for productive agriculture, because the heavy rains cause all the important nutrients to leach out. The carbon apparently helps the sequester these nutrients, which would otherwise be lost. What's more, terra preta appears to be regenerative - i.e. it gets richer all by itself.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Sigger than your average
Having no experience whatsoever in any of the relevant fields, I can positively state that this will not work because I am a lot smarter than all the people who were involved in this and invested their time, grants and own money.
I am cow, hear me moo; I am /. and lots smarter than you!
If you had read the Economist article, you'd know that this assumption has now been proven false. Birth rates start rising again after a certain level of affluence. People figure they can afford a few extra mouths to feed.
While I respect your modest proposal, I've always felt that human flesh to be a bit gamey. Even as a zombie I still prefer chicken.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
No, the article suggests that with increasing development, fertility rate drops as low as 1.3 children per woman but then returns to 2 children per woman, in other words to approximately the zero population growth level. There is no evidence suggesting a further increase above zero population growth.
You may have been mislead by the graph shown in the article: it has a log scale which strongly exaggerates the rise from 1.3 to 2.0 compared with the decline from 8.0, and it tempts you to extend the trend line if you don't realise that the x axis is not time, but an index which ranges from 0 to 1. More and more countries are probably going to crowd into the space above 0.95 but the axis can't get longer and there's no reason to think the trend line is going to sharply rise as you get closer and closer to 1.0.
And if they do, they come on a visa and go to college most of the time anyway.
Grow up. That has to be one of the most childish, stupidest things posted in this thread. "A bunch of orders of magnitude." Do you even know what an order of magnitude is? Let's take 5 orders of magnitude as a "bunch" - 70 trillion people. 149 million square kilometers total land area (including desert, mountaintops, swamps, etc) ... That's 470,000 per square kilometer, or 2.2 square meters per person. They'd be drowning in their own shit, except that they'd already be dead because there simply isn't enough oxygen-generating capacity in the oceans (even if the algae, etc. were to survive the pollution) to support that much biomass.
I agree that we do the most damage to ourselves. People die mostly from lifestyle diseases. It's a sad state of affairs when most people are so fat they can stand in a shower and the tops of their feet don't get wet, or they can't reach around to wipe their behind properly when they're done on the toilet, or they continue to smoke because "I'm addicted" after decades of saying "I can quit any time I want."
Keeping the brain going is key, and part of that is regular exercise. Most people would benefit from owning a large dog (not a "rat ona rope", but something large enough that you have to walk it for an hour a day, rain or shine, snow, sleet, hail, heat, cold, whatever). Vegging out in front of the tube doesn't do it. Mental activities that encourage creativity, such as crossword puzzles or trolling slashdot, will help keep the brain from atrophying.
Good luck with your continued good health.
I have a friend who works in an old-age home. It doesn't matter how nice you treat the people, or how good the facilities, it's not a way to live. Humans just aren't people any more when all the fight is gone out of them and they're resigned to their fate.
Europe's middle class and wealthy run here in front of their Road Runner clouds due to our lower tax rates and tax structure... George Soros et al...
Not only would it solve the overpopulation problem, it'd make great reality TV too ("Remember, you could be the next Real Survivor(tm)!").
For some reason I was reminded of smash TV, "BIG MONEY! BIG PRIZES! I LOVE IT" (if you don't get the reference, play that game, preferably snes version since it was the only one with proper controls besides the arcade one)
So then they steal a real SSN.
I know some people who work in fast foods and hire a fair number of immigrants. Why? At the amount is he allowed by management to pay them, he can't get Americans with a work ethic to apply for the job. But it keeps the hamburgers cheap.
Anyway, first time he got a bad Soc card (I think they actually mis-spelled security on it) he brought it to his boss and asked him what to do about it. Boss said "I'm not trained in identifying legitimate social security cards, are you?" and told him to put down that they presented him with a card.
Another time someone's ID got hit by a random check and was found to be bad. They hired him back the next day when he came back with a better card.
There would have to be so much more government oversight than there is currently to actually have a chance of stopping this. And even then:
Fast food wages would have to increase drastically to get people to work there (not saying it's entirely a bad thing, but it has consequences, such as..).
Food prices would increase to match.
A lot of good (but illegal) people would be out of work. My friend doesn't hire people just because they're cheap - he's looking for good people who are solid workers, same as any employer.
Our large portions of our economy built on cheap labor would collapse. We lost full-service gas stations when they implemented minimum wage laws. A lot of the bottom end of our economy would fall out.
I'm not saying that this is a good situation - I'm saying it's the situation we have right now with illegal immigration. Personally I think we could fix 90% of the problems if we just let the damn people immigrate legally. I have another friend who is trying to get citizenship - even as a college-educated person with an upper-middle class job (ie, not someone walking across the border with no job and few prospects) it will take her between seven and fourteen years. Do people honestly think that people would pay thousands of dollars to smugglers, risk their lives and possessions to sneak across the border to work at a fast food joint if standing in line were a reasonable option?
As an interesting note - my friend is losing a lot of his Mexican workers soon. The DMV introduced much more stringent ID requirements to be able to renew a license plate. Since most of them want to lay as low as possible - they have valid plates and most of them have accident insurance - not being able to get a valid plate is causing them to move on to other states that aren't as strict.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children.
It already has. Most countries have population pyramids that now look more like population trees. Population is falling already in many countries that once were thought of as densely populated e.g. Japan. In about 60 years population will be dropping so rapidly that the biggest problem will be how to pay for the pensions and health cost of senior people.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo. It is too closely tied to immigration.
It is not taboo. What it is not tolerated is bigots trying to stop immigration from brown countries under the guise of population control.
Mod the parent down. The link provided does not portend to "debunk the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population." The article clearly shows that increasing wealth takes the reproduction rate down to 1.3 children per women after which it starts to bounce up a bit.
> See, we have no actual idea of how many is enough. If technology progressed to such an extent, who's to say that 12 million people couldn't live on Earth sustainably? A few breakthroughs in sustainable power generation, and likewise water production.
I take it you meant to say 'billion'?
Besides, why would we even WANT 12 billion people? Why not try and aim for 1 billion? You yourself claim that choosing quantity over quality is a problem, yet you advocate having more people around. Why? I'd rather live like a king with 1 billion other people than live as efficiently as possible with 12 billion others.
The illegal immigrants are not making the rules, the government is.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Middle class/rich immigrants arrive with a green card in hand. There are millions of them living legally in the US.
Your suggestion has been made before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
A modern diesel tractor burns very little fuel (we're talking many acres/gallon), so whatever stays in the soil with this process is not going to replace the hundreds of pounds of fertilizer he was applying before.
I for one have no problem if the cost of crappy fast food services go up.
I have no opposition to immigrants working, and I in no way believe that they are 'stealing jobs'. But I do believe that the exploitation of them is just wrong and I would far rather pay more for a burger and know that the person who made it is making a decent wage.
Of course, then the jobs would be held by lazy locals who wanted the higher pay and my food would take forever to be made. So never mind.
...equalize organic matter (as in the organic matter from plants and animals found in the soil) with organic compounds (as in anything from amino-acids to plastic)?
You do know that there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between those two?
Or do you usually go to your local store to get some ham and cheese and instead you return home with a tractor tire and some axle grease?
I mean... Considering that apparently it is the same thing to you.
Something coming out of a tractor exhaust - and something coming from an exhaust belonging to a pig or a sheep.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How much farmland are we talking about? My numbers are dated (Cadillac Desert), but what I recall is that 85% of California's water goes to agriculture, 15% goes to the cities. So as insane as it is to maintain lush lawns in a semi-desert, cutting off the cities would only increase the water supply for agriculture by about 1/6.
On the other hand (at least when Cadillac Desert was written) agriculture had bizarre water use incentives, and could have used the available water much more efficiently.
For your "average Jose", no immigration is not legal. An unskilled laborer with no family already here legally (parents, siblings, adult children, or spouse/fiance) can not get a green card, period.
Totally ridiculous.
If his$500 of Diesel exhaust had $500,000 of fertilizer in it, there would be dozens of companies making "Rudolph"-brand fertilizer using the same method, for like the last 100 years.
Crops need nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and a few other trace elements. Almost none of those in Diesel exhaust.
. They don't get carbon from the ground.
My cousins had some neighbours who had spent a lot of money on this and were going one about how good it was, so they decided to give it a try. However, they decided to just do a couple of strips in the middle of an ordinary crop for a side-by-side comparison. We went out and had a look. The strips strips weren't hard to find. The crop was quite sparse there and only about half the hight of the stuff around them.
Ideas are good, but if you don't put them to an at least semi-rigorous test, you're just throwing darts.
There is also the Heinlein method. You could subsidize children by older couples who elected not to have children when they were young. Extending the time between generations slows down population growth just like having fewer children does. As a bonus, over time this would gradually weed out risky genes and behaviors which cause early death. * This would be rather damaging to any social security like ponzi scheme though unless you could raise productivity so it is doubly politically impractical and some nations (Italy and Japan that I know of) actually encourage the opposite.
* There was a research project involving east coast opossums which demonstrated that selecting for late reproduction could significantly extend individual lifetimes in later generations by removing early cancer causing and other early onset debilitating genes. In the specific case of the opossums, a couple of generations of selection did much better than double individual lifetimes.
I seem to recall something like 2/3 of the Earth's land cannot currently be used for crops because of salt.
I can believe that, but it's not just salt. A goodly chunk of Africa, for example, is unarable because of some particularly nasty parasites. We have a long way to go before we can farm anywhere we want to.
Besides, we will probably come up with more efficient ways to feed ourselves than stuffing seeds into dirt. Soylent Green, anyone?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Why don't you respond to some of the people who responded to you instead of looking up statistics that vaguely back up an argument from a tangential hypothesis.
One my friends moved to Germany over a decade ago, and he tells me that that country is indeed suffering a significant population decline. Personally, I think it's the fact that humanity invented condoms, followed by other more advanced methods of birth control. We can have children when we want to, and not just because we have sex. The more affluent sectors of a wealthy nation will often delay having families until "we're financially stable" or "can afford a big enough house". Often that means having no kids at all because time flies, and suddenly you're too old. That's what happened to me. My fiancee, fortunately, had four so she made up for my poor performance in that area.
Also, there's the issue of farming technology: here in the U.S., in particular, it's become so automated that a very small part of the population is required to grow it. That means that the traditional large farm families are no longer needed, and have not been for a long time. A society that is largely agrarian absolutely requires a lot of kids, especially if there is a corresponding poor level of health care (kids are needed to work the farms, and most of them don't make it to adulthood, so you need more kids.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Don't you believe in darwinistic evolution? The drive to make zillions of babies is its single most obvious implication. Every species strives to reproduce, obviously.
What religion is, is conservative - that is, after a formative period, it wants beliefs to remain the same. The appeal of religion is that it offers certainty on all of life's imponderables - why we exist, how we should act, etc. Change means admitting you don't have all the answers, and never did, so religion is incompatible with change. But I don't know of any reason to think religion is the original source of inequality for women, rather than just a momentum term on that sentiment. Animal life is all about physical domination, that's what put women at a disadvantage, but it was true long before religion came about. (Similar to war, do you really think people wouldn't find things to fight over if not for religious differences?) They'll come around, eventually.
You forgot thousands of meters depth of ocean. I was thinking at least 6 orders of magnitude myself. At five orders of magnitude, you're only up to around 1-10 watts per square meter of heat dissipation from human beings. And by 5 orders of magnitude, you'd be pulling power from elsewhere anyway. So you can power additional oxygen generating capacity (whether in the oceans or elsewhere). Once again, heat is the fundamental restriction on the number of humans on Earth.
Would such an outcome be unpleasant? Probably. But I tire of hearing how "unsustainable" current human population levels are from someone who doesn't know.
Oh, how I love social engineering. "If you continue to support anti-immigration laws;" or calling pro abortion "Pro choice"
Just as pro-lifers support choice (i.e., making the choice before conception; at least use the pill or a condom; all we ask is you don't murder a baby for the sake of convenience), the people against illegal aliens are only asking people who are emigrating to their lands to immigrate to our land legally, and to embrace OUR language and OUR flag, and carry their own weight.
If I wanted to emigrate to say, Mexico, do you really think that they would allow me to get free health care, work under the table, get free education in their colleges, and to give me legal and government services forms in American English? Germany? Sweden, or even Saudi Arabia (they probably wouldn't let me drive or work there, let alone provide forms in English).
I am certainly not against immigration. If it weren't for immigrations, I wouldn't be here. My ancestors immigrated from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Germany. The difference between then and now is they immigrated LEGALLY. They worked hard to carve out a living in the land of opportunity. They didn't come here illegally, demanding free health care, free food, free schooling, and free cars (yes it has gone as far as that in some cases!). They worked hard to make it here.
I have friends who are here from Costa Rica, Venezuela, China, and India who entered legally. They are having a heck of a time getting their green cards. They pay into social security even though they can't use it, they learned to speak, read, and write English fluently, and otherwise do things in a legal manner, and yet they keep getting the runaround. They want to become naturalized citizens and keep hitting roadblocks, and they don't get ANYTHING for free; if they end up out of work and poor enough to need welfare, they'll get deported. They are all very pro-American (except one Chinese friend, until after China took down one of America's surveillance plane, he eventually realized it's not we who are out to get them. He is now very pro america, has his green card, and is on his way toward naturalization).
Meanwhile, people who enter here illegally go right on welfare or social security, get free education, free food, free housing, have their forms translated to English, and in some cases have even gotten free cars from welfare programs, and they don't pay any taxes. They fly the flag of their countries of origin, and hate the American flag. It is disgusting.
There is a difference between being against illegal aliens and being against immigration. I haven't heard of anyone except the clan being against immigration (which is extreme hypocrisy; if it weren't for immigration "aryan" types wouldn't be here at all; it would be all red-skinned natives - who themselves supposedly "immigrated" here from Russia so for the KKK to refer to any color/creed an infection on this land is completely ridiculous. Their racist outlooks are the infection). I've heard only of extreme leftist liberals being pro-illegal-alien.
Illegal Alien: that is the correct term. Those people trespassing here, being here illegally, are NOT immigrants. They are invaders. They are here to cheat the system. They are here to get a free ride on welfare, work under the table, and take what they earned under the table back home to live like royalty when they go back home. They have no interest in being American, earning their keep, or contributing back to the system they are leaching off of.
What we need to do is give INS and the police the power they once had to enforce immigration laws; pack illegal aliens into crates and air-drop them back into their countries of origin. Treat them like the criminals they are, giving asylum(amnesty) only to those who are here to escape persecution or to those who are defecting from enemy states.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
We're well past sustainability, unless you want to define sustainable as in a reduced standard of living as Malthus takes his dues.
Another point of nonsense here is the idea that population growth, no matter how little, results in a reduced standard of living. The developed world already disproves that point with increasing standard of living and a small population growth rate.
Well, self-service is a gain, IMHO. I avoid filling up in Weymouth, MA, and I fill up right before entering Jersey. Why? "Full Service" is no longer full-service staffed by entry-level mechanics or senior mechanics manning the pumps during slow times; it's now mouth breathers, and NOT full service. They don't clean your windshield, check your fluids, or the air pressure in your tires. What they do is top off the tank, keep clicking the pump until they can't get any more in (often times damaging your charcoal canister), scratch your paint, and be rude to you. Why should I pay a premium to damage my car?
In SOME rare cases a "loss" in service is actually a net gain. I'd rather get out, fill it myself, taking care to not overfill, not scratch the paint, and clean the window without leaving streaks, and clean the back window if it needs it. The ONLY drawbacks are my hands smelling like gasoline for a short while, and dealing with cold in the winter.
Now, if "full service" were the full service that used to be in place through the '70s, I'd agree.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Women's rights do matter; it's a lot more than abortion. I feel like I'm feeding a troll, but here goes. Women that are more free to leave their husbands and to pursue careers are likely to have fewer children. That doesn't mean that they all will, that all housewives with many children are oppressed, or anything like that. And it has to do with more than laws, it's about social attitudes and family pressures. If women feel free to pursue careers many do, which reduces, on average, the number of children they have. If women are given no control over their lives they're likely to wind up with more children.
There are definitely other factors. Instability in the food supply and high infant/child mortality rates, if I recall correctly, tend to increase the drive to reproduce.
This would be true if our goal were to help said starving masses, our real goal is to dump our excess crops while accruing good PR.
The population pyramid scheme is like any other, it's great while it lasts (for the last several hundred years) but disastrous in the end. The population must stabilize eventually; we can either accomplish that while the earth is still a nice place to live, or after we're stuffed in elbow-to-elbow, choking on each others' excrement.
Billions of ants starve to death all the time. Avoiding the plight of dumb animals is exactly what sustainable population is all about.
"If that problem is solved we could theoretically reach 18 billion people or more."
Thank God that I won't be alive to see 18 billion humans on this earth. Let's just say that I couldn't survive long in cities like Hong Kong. There are precious few places on the North American continent where a man can just get lost, without meeting anyone for a week or more.
As for the stars - one of the best reasons for going out there is the wide open spaces. Even assuming a FTL drive, people can get lost, and stay that way if they choose. Sweet!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Dude, I'm French and even by trying the legal way (visa lottery) I didn't get anything. Even if I had the chance to be picked by the computer, it would have taken two years before I would have been allowed to move to the USA. Fortunately being European if I want to move to a decent country I can just move to some place like Ireland (which I did).
Mexicans aren't even eligible to that visa lottery thing. That doesn't leave them a lot of solutions, unless they've got close family in the USA. Immigration law in the USA is completely absurd, and it makes illegals because it leaves so many people without any legal solution.
Think about it, a hundred years ago all you had to do was show up at Ellis Island and if you didn't have tuberculosis you were in. Now you can be Australian or English and if you manage to get in you live under the permanent threat of deportation for no good reason.
You just got troll'd!
Middle class/rich people usually have no desire to come here, at least not the ones I've talked to.
No wonder we don't. Emigrating to the USA is such a hassle, given that we most likely live in a decent situation wherever we live it gives us little incentive to want to go ahead with all that immigration PITA to begin with. So all the USA attract are really poor people with no qualifications, while the better people fail to even see the point of trying.
You just got troll'd!
Just stop selling beer.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The most gruesome war ever, the IIWW, left 65 million dead
Was World War II really the -worst- war ever? Sure, in terms of numbers, it may seem that way, but if we turn to the Islamic expansion, or, any of the conquests of ancient times, we find entire civilizations and cultures were simply evaporated. After World War II, Germans were still predominantly German speaking and Christian (except for what was once called East Prussia), but, after the Islamic conquest of Egypt, the native tongue was completely eradicated and a 3000 year old religion was destroyed. Or, look at the essential extermination of Celtic cultures due to Roman incursions from the South and Asian cultures from the East... People were going house to house, killing the men, the children, taking the women, basically raping them, and then producing new children to a new culture. Compared to that, firebombing might almost seem civilized. I would even bet that the likes of Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan would see Hitler's invasion of Russia as probably even a bunch of pussies.
This is my sig.
If you can make your way to Massachusetts or California, it is EASIER to "immigrate" illegally. The police and local INS are prohibited by their superiors from doing anything about it, and the government is pushing for "free" welfare, "free" transportation (including in some cases not just mass transit but actual "free"[sic] cars), "free" housing, "free" healthcare, "free" tuition and books at local colleges, while many local residents can't afford the health care or schooling.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I smoked for 30 years and quitting in the end was easy. In all that time I reckon I quit for a fortnight and I quit for 2 Months.
On the 18th of July at about 6:45 I had a coronary I was strong but unfit and thats when I smoked my last cigarette waiting for an Ambulance. I probably wouldn't have smoked it had I known what was going on.
Smoking narrows the arteries and that makes it easier for blood clots to lodge and block the arteries. If the artery is feeding the heart muscle then the starvation of oxygenated blood causes the heart muscle to die and in time be replaced by scar tissue. It never pumps so well again. If it gets badly damaged it can't pump and everything dies. The blood clots are created when fat deposited on your artery walls after years of crappy food tears maybe after doing something or nothing.
Strokes are similar , blockage of an artery taking oxygenated blood to the brain.
Cancer is a gamble and no one thinks they will lose so its not a reason to quit smoking the artery problem is.
I quit smoking by means of Niquitin patches and it was easy although I modified the program i changed the patches when I needed to change the patches it might be 12 hours or 48 hours I just let my body decide when it was low on nicotine. In a social situation where I was around other people smoking I put a fresh patch on and after a few minutes i got a reassuring itch where the patch was. other than that it was 4 weeks on high 2 weeks on medium and 2 weeks on low. That was pretty easy. I don't need a cigarette now , I want a cigarette some times but I know i would start again so I don't. I have a few spare patches so i can put one on if i really want the nicotine, I have done that once or twice.
I'm feeling good for quitting and its hopefully dropping the risks of another heart attack, even so the stats suggest 50% of survivors die in 6 - 8 years most of them in the first year. 30% died from the first heart attack. So I'm lucky already.
Everyone says I should quit smoking and nobody does because withdrawal turns us into grumpy nasty people, well the patches work I smoothly managed to quit, so having read this I hope you see that you can too.
Don't die younger than you have too try and avoid the first heart attack.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
+ 1 Damn' true
Perhaps Islam is, and Catholicism was, and maybe Mormon is still just a little bit, but if you read the New Testament you'll see that the first person who saw Christ resurrected was a woman. What is notable about that? A woman was not considered to be a credible witness in Roman-occupied Israel.If someone were to make up the story, he'd have chosen a man to be the witness, not a woman.
Also, it's worth noting that the feminist movement here in America didn't start out as a man-hating movement. It started out as a Christian organization founded by mainstream Protestants pushing for voting rights and for a little respect. That's about it. It has long since been corrupted into a almost-strictly-lesbian "we don't need men except as sperm donors" movement that, like affirmative action does with racism, only serves to perpetuate problems rather than resolve them. Women CAN earn the same as men, but if a woman decides to raise a child, well, that woman just decided to take weeks to years out of work. This reduces her reliability and experience compared to her competition (either childless women or men) and thus should reduce the amount of compensation she should be entitled to, unless she is willing to hop jobs rather than proclaim "entitlement" and demand the same raises everyone else who didn't take time off received.
The sad reality is women have to choose between child rearing or their career if maintaining the same pay level as a man is her goal; OR telecommute RELIABLY and have at least a moderate amount of "face time" at the office, OR start a home business so there are no significant gaps in experience.
Me? I have no choice to focus on my career. I'm intersexed and sterile, so there isn't any child rearing in my future at all, barring miracles or modern science being able to regenerate organs. It's simply not going to happen, so when I am working for "the man" there are no gaps in my experience, so I get paid on par with peers. *shrug* YMMV, batteries not included, and all that.
It all comes down to what everyone seems to shun nowadays: personal respnsibility and merit. Everyone "feels" "entitled" to a pony, or a big screen TV, or a McMansion, or a BMW, Caddie, Porsche or Lexus. Sorry, life doesn't and shouldn't work like that. You can't make both childen and career your priority. If you try to, you'll be both a lousy provider and a lousy parent, in that you'll be more distant from your children than you'd like. Pay should be awarded based on merit, not based on gender, color, religion, sexual orientation, or based on the company one keeps or what secret societies one belongs to.
On a tangent: There is a lot to be said for the "nuclear" family where the mom is the homemaker and the father is the sole provider, but there's a lot more going for more traditional families where the grandparents and aunts and uncles (an entire clan) lives and works together, helping everyone out, where the man might be making a very good living working for someone, and the mother might have a part-to-full-time business. Unfortunately, modern society has driven housing costs out of sight, women have been pressured to work (even when they would prefer to be full-time "homemakers"), and usually have to in order to afford third-to-half million dollar homes in most densely-populated states. Also, modern society has discouraged clans, painting them as antiquated and outmoded ways of living, whereas it is actually more efficient and ideal, aside from some, uh, "privacy" issues.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Several years ago I did some numbers. Addressing solely the fundamental physical limits, neglecting politics.
For >>100 billion - you have to vastly reengineer the planet - under 100 billion, there is hope you could do it more or less normally.
For >>500 billion, you need to completely resurface the planet or large fractions of it.
At around 15 trillion, you reach thermal limits, where the waste heat will cook the earth - even cutting off the incoming sunlight. This would be pretty much 'Trantor' - though growing food locally - if you offworlded the food production, you might get a factor of several more.
At about a trillion trillion, the solar system runs out of resource limits. (unless you can mine the sun)
If you refefine what human is, such as for example massive bioengineering, you might multiply some of the numbers by 10 - for example - reducing phosphorus usage in the human body will allow you to make more humans of the solar system, as it's an element in shortage.
Or if you allow digitised humans, vastly more.
650 billion may be just about doable, when you consider
that biosphere II, if you put them down all over the world, comes
to 200 billion, it's possible a more optimised system could hit
that sort of figure.
I'd say that's on the ragged edge of what could be done with a "soft"
system though.
(normal plants, though engineered for optimal growth, a few animals and reserves)
A "hard" system, could sustain at least 5 trillion, even assuming that
you leave 2/3rds of the planet alone. (eating plants/algae grown under
lights, stacked 20 stories high, with 200 square meters per person.(you
might melt some of the icecaps with the emitted heat though))
"we will instead find ourselves sacrificing a lot of modern conveniences in order to put more energy into food production"
Not even that: with the kw consumed by a fridge 40 years ago we power a whole kitchen now ...
Overpopulation is the wet dream of [insert color here ]-supremacists : resources are limited only on very short term, and it's not likely, or even possible, that population will suddenly grow beyond that. For every 10 new humans on the planet we get 1 farmer who can feed 100 other people if allowed to.
The neo-malthusians should read Malthus, not only commentaries: 90% of that fellow's book are about people who have sex a lot and because that their children are sickly and would die when the crops they grow, crops that are poor because the people are too busy drinking, carousing, and having sex, would fail. Malthus is not about economics, but about telling the Brits that all fun loving, non-presbiterian (or wahabi ... the Brits were in love with the wahabi for most of the XIXth and almost all of the XXth century), non-tea-totaling people are going to die anyway, so why bother giving them a fair deal ... they should go read their idol: his problem is not with people eating more than they are producing, but with men having sex out of wedlock, men having sex more than once a month, women having sex with with more than one man in their life, men having sex before they are quite old, people generally having sex for fun ... there is talk about food, but his point is that people who have a lot of sex are not going to make it through a crop failure.
And most people with an SSN also have a driver's license attached to that SSN - thus providing easy photo verification of ownership of said SSN.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"I am guessing that you grip about any environmentalist no matter what they do."
Not true. If they would either shut up or go away, hardly anybody would complain.
I disagree, I think this planet has more than enough nutrients to support a pile at least 50 feet thick of humans covering the earth.
We already are doing a pretty good job covering the earth, and we haven't really even started mining underground, volcanic, or seabed areas that we know are packed with huge amounts of nutrients. The reason is simply because it isn't worth it yet. Skyscraper farming can even yield huge amounts of food, with very little transportation overhead, but we don't need it yet. When we do need those things, they will be built.
The world's hunger problem is not an overpopulation problem, it's an economic imbalance problem. When certain people are under represented in a capitalist society, shit gets bad, and resources are mis-allocated. That's where democracy is supposed to step in. Even with a guy like Obama, the voter turnout was still 56.8%. The people who didn't vote could start their own party, and would have won by a landslide. When stuff really needs to change, it will change.
What we need now is MORE people in the US. We have vast stretches of land that are going completely to waste. I think that the more minds we have in the country working on ways to progress the sciences, the better off we are going to be.
If true, the farmer is saving a lot of money, a lot of fossil-fuels (in the form of fertilizer), and temporarily sequestering carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere. I hope this proves successful, and becomes wildly popular.
Two possible responses:
1) This proves that the market can respond to the global warming crisis just fine, and we therefore don't need government intervention.
2) This proves that, with proper incentives, amazing solutions can be found for our carbon problem, and we therefore should expect that CO2 mitigation will be far cheaper than the economic doomsayers claim.
I think they're both partly right. The biggest problem with response 1 is that without government intervention, the market will remain forever 'carbon blind', externalizing the costs of pollution. The only mitigation strategies that will ever be pursued are the ones that also pad the bottom line.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Middle class/rich people usually have no desire to come here
I second this. My wife's American and so for family reasons we moved to the US. Didn't like and so we moved on to Canada. Still close enough for family visits but with decent public education, health care and less toxic politics (only downside is that the border is pain in the buttocks).
Mexicans aren't even eligible to that visa lottery thing.
First, thats not entirely correct. I do know legal Mexican immigrants.
Secondly, there are huge restrictions on how many are admitted (from anywhere) because there are huge numbers that are ignoring the system. The illegals are ruining it for everybody else. If they weren't cheating, the system for legal immigration would be much more open.
Any continued population growth, if carried out within a closed system for long enough, will indeed lead to a reduced standard of living. It's just a mathematical fact.
You're also ignoring part of the "sustainability" argument, which is that the things that are fueling our current growth -- cheap access to dirty energy -- are not going to hold much longer. The sky is getting too crowded with exhaust, and the earth doesn't have much more cheap oil to give us. You can argue over whether this is a surmountable obstacle, or whether switching to a new source of energy will be easy or difficult. But until we actually start recognizing and respecting the limits of our planet, we're going to hit these walls with increasing frequency.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
According to US Census, world's rate of population growth peaked at the 1960's and has been in decline ever since.
Furthermore, according to its own about page, The Economist has an agenda, so frankly, any claim made by it is suspect (assuming it even made the claim, since the article seems to be still missing). Do you have a link to a scientific study proving your claims?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Apparently you didn't read the Economist article. Read it again and you'll see that even with the uptick in birth rates, the problem of overpopulation seems to take care of itself.
Qxe4
Not quite as simple as that. The move out of poverty leads to much smaller families. The move from the countryside into the cities also leads to much smaller families. But continuing to pour wealth on after you reach a decent standard of living has little or no effect, as decisions start to be more a matter of personal preference and cultural influences.
"More growth" works in some circumstances, not others.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
When you speak in real life, do you also fail to think before saying something, or is that just something you do when posting on the internet? Have you never heard of teenagers with fake ids to get into a bar? There are ways to fake all these documents. Please think before opening your mouth.
Qxe4
Add to this the fact that The Economist is a pro-free market publication, which nowadays means ultra-capitalist "taxes are robbery" crowd, and a very nasty picture begins to emerge: less foreign aid => less money spent => less taxes => more profits for the elite.
Of course, those profits come at the cost of humans starving to death, which rises another interesting question: is everyone in power a psychopath? Answering that one, and what to do about it if the answer is "yes", is far more important for our future than a how many children some woman in Africa has.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That is a really good question and I wish I had an answer to that, but unfortunately I don't. I do know that slowly farmers have been moving up into the foothills, so the area of land being farmed is increasing (at least during non-drought years).
Qxe4
People like you are inevitably against the obvious solution: increase the number of visas available so that anyone who wants one can get one easily. Most people prefer to come here legally, in an airplane, because it's cheaper and not nearly as dangerous.
Qxe4
The article is a little light on details, but makes claims that this method accomplishes carbon sequestering.
I can see how any soot (unburned carbon and friends) would stick to the soil but I'm a little skeptical that C02 itself would be trapped.
Perhaps microscopic plants in the soil manage to capture the C02 before it makes it's way back out to the atmosphere?
Anyone know what is the percentage by volume is C02 versus nitrogen gas?
Interesting.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
If they are legal its either because they have family in the US already, or because they have money. Without one of those two, it's pretty much impossible to get a visa. You Mexican immigrant friends either had one of those or they came to the US a long time ago.
Qxe4
Wiki doesn't mention the lack of a throttle as the reason for low CO, but rather that diesel fuel is burned with excess air. The phrase "50% lean of stoichiometric" satisfied the chem eng in me more than "no throttle" but I would love it if you could elaborate on your explanation.
I come here for the love
The solar system is not a closed system, its part of the universe and you can't base anything on the solar system alone.
As far as we know at this moment, our universe is a closed system, however I would just like to point out that most of the time when talking about things that we don't understand, we are more often than not, wrong.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Fine. That is the hard fact that can't be overcome for population growth. No matter how many orders of magnitude of people we pack in, we'll eventually run out of something.
But it still leads us back to square one. Namely, that developed world countries have shown us how to do it. High standard of living and full employment of women results in negative population growth. I don't believe the concern about global population growth is warranted.
The problem with 'sustainable population', however, is the most a-scientific of people are the ones who concocted the myths: not that 'sustainable population' needs be a mythological subject, but the current thinking on the subject is popular and sensational, and unfortunately the 'scientists' who like to touch on it are often where they are and who they are because they themselves like to stir and foment sensation: even a basic university education is quickly able to demonstrate that many of the supposedly superior thinkers of our day are heavily into sensation, rather than sober thinking: I'm more into the rogue thinkers's thoughts and evaluations than these 'consensus' 'thinkers' [idiots] of our day. It is possible as we speak to fit the world's population into quite tiny areas. Now, if we remove the populations from the arable regions (much of Europe, much of the western coast of the U.S., the Nile River Valley, the Eastern coasts of China and America, Africa's rims, . . .) we suddenly have a much larger field to plow: and the population will be PLENTY feedable. It's not that we're ANYWHERE near capacity of population, but that behaviors, not even as much consumption rate or quantity as this one: location, must change. If we also work on a few tiny things here and there (rather than just that biggy) those each save a lot themselves. You're such a worry wart.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Wow. A Latter-day Singularitan. :)
I think it's safe to say that we are well past the limits of sustainability, given the current set of technologies we're using to provide for ourselves. In the short to mid term, oil disappears. In the next couple of centuries, coal disappears (even if we did find a way of harvesting its energy without a huge increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations). Even nuclear fuel will eventually hit a peak. Water is going to be a huge issue over the next couple of decades.
I'm sure that solutions will be found for many of these challenges. But generally speaking, each solution usually brings about its own new set of problems. The import of the potato to Ireland led to a massive population increase, as food suddenly became far cheaper and more plentiful than before. But the underlying dynamics of poverty didn't change, so when the technology supporting the growth suddenly disappeared (as it did during the potato famine), it resulted in mass starvation and emigration. In the same way, we're now completely dependent on the technology that supports us in a way that we wouldn't be had we limited our population to perhaps half a billion from the outset.
In that hypothetical, small population world, we could survive the sudden disappearance of oil relatively easily. We'd all have to be farmers for a while, but it's a much simpler problem than trying to feed thirteen times as many people with the same resources and technology. Engineering our way to ever greater populations is a risky path. I'm hoping that we'll level out around 10B
I'm half-inclined to agree with what your blog post says about population control. But I think you overestimate the population effects of differential breeding on attitudes (and apparently, intelligence). Arguably, Republicans have been outbreeding Democrats for quite a while now, but that trend has been pretty much negated by the increasing urbanization of the United States (urban dwellers tend to vote Democratic). Even if you had a hard-line group of ideological non-breeders, they would never entirely die out, because their attitudes didn't come from being descendants of a long line of childless people. Their attitudes also come from the cultural influences of the day, from the way their formative experiences wired their brains, etc.
You wrote, "We need a political party that encourages intelligent, resourceful people to have lots of children--and to educate them well." Given the massive wave of genetic manipulation that will happen over the next fifty years, will a couple of generations of incentives for selective breeding make a hint of difference? No, we should grow our supergeniuses the way God intended: in giant plexiglass cylinders filled with green glop, overseen by a cackling mad scientist.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
First, thats not entirely correct. I do know legal Mexican immigrants.
The question is, did they get their visa from the lottery? No? Wikipedia says Mexico is ineligible for it. I'll trust Wikipedia for that.
The illegals are ruining it for everybody else. If they weren't cheating, the system for legal immigration would be much more open.
No, that's utter bullshit. The system created the illegals, the illegals didn't indirectly create the system. That's just some bullshit justification to keep Mexicans, legal or not, out. Cause we don't like them, that's the real reason. Lou Dobbs will never tell you he doesn't like Mexicans, he'll make some bullshit reasons like "illegal immigrants = crime" when everybody knows the real reason is he's sick of seeing his country "invaded" with brown people who don't speak good English.
You just got troll'd!
I tried fertilizing my garden with used motor oil, but was unable to duplicate the results cited in TFA.
I often wonder if governments allow unhealthy food & lifestyles so they do not have to deal with a large population of geriatrics. Especially in America. Most food here should read 'if you eat this regularly you won't make it to 60'
I've only seen the print version, and the article has a graph with a line showing that most rich countries, even the ones richer than the "dip" you're referring to, are still under the sustainable rate of 2.1 children per woman. So although it's true that the line trends upwards with wealth in rich countries, it still doesn't mean that rich countries have a net positive growth rate (excluding immigration-based growth). So I wouldn't say the "assumption has now been proven false."
Don't you believe in darwinistic evolution? The drive to make zillions of babies is its single most obvious implication. Every species strives to reproduce, obviously.
We're a little more complex than that. Survival rates of offspring matter, too, and our species takes a really long time for offspring to be able to survive on their own. It has its benefits, sure, but that also means that the "I'm going to have 15 babies" reproductive strategy isn't actually usually all that great for humans. So that means it'd probably get selected out of the population over the thousands of generations that this has been true./p
Printing out a fake SS card would take me about 10 minutes. Printing out a fake SS card with a valid SSN that doesn't come back as a dead person is much much much harder. The U.S. government used to run a system that ran checks into this automatically, it was conveniently shut down for being far too effective.
any idea what plants consider NOx's? Diesels make them.
They consider them "fixed nitrogen". Alias "fertilizer" - or at least its arguably most important component.
You need one atom of fixed nitrogen for each amino-acid produced, to be strung together into protein. Lots of nitrogen in the air (it's the BULK of the air.) But plants don't "fix" it (react it into a form they can then use to make amino acids).
Some plants (legumes) have symboitc bacteria living in the roots which fix nitrogen. The rest have to get it from the ground - which means it has to get INTO the ground. Mineral nitrates, animal urine and feces (manure), ammonia (reacted from the air by a moderately expensive industrial process) all work.
But if the soil is alkaline enough that acidifying it a tad will make it no worse for the plants, injecting NOx (which becomes nitric, nitrus, and other acids on contact with water) and CO2 (which becomes carbonic acid) will improve the soil. The nitrogenous acids provide fixed nitrogen.
Further, it is a three-way win to adjust the engine to burn lean and be "more polluting". This increases the horsepower-minutes per gallon, greatly increases the NOx output, and reduces the other potential pollutants - partially-burned fuel - by completing their combustion to CO2. (Use high-sulfur fuel while you're at it to put sulphurous and sulphuric acids into the ground for making Lysine, too.)
With the right crops and soil types it's entirely reasonable that buring the exhaust might reduce or eliminate the need for added fertilizer.
As to sequestering carbon: Maybe some as carbonates and soot particles. Certainly more than venting it into the air. But without some study by a chemist I wouldn't put any money on it being a significant level of sequesteration.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"it's now mouth breathers"
When is this ridiculous phrase going to go away? It's a Victorian relic like phrenology.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm not saying we're close to global carrying capacity now. My question is, why push it?
Have you ever seen the smoke come out of a diesel truck!, Its black. That black color is not CO2, it is larger carbon chains. Black carbon soot. Its full of carbon black particles that are quite large and will integrate into the soil. This entire slashdot thread is full of retards, that keep obsessing about CO2 sequestering. Thats NOT what the article is talking about, and it never even mentions it. That dosent mean it works, but at least these trolls should be bickering about the right subject matter,
Humans & animals have not evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air.
Actually, we have evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air.
We used fire in residential enclosures (caves, tents) for long enough to evolve some AMAZING detoxification mechanisms.
At this point there are highly toxic chemicals (such as some dioxins) that kill darned near any other animal (except maybe dogs), to the point of causing birds in flight to fall from the sky, which are not a major issue for human beings (except perhaps as a long-term carcinogen).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Because sex is goooood, and aside from welfare, large families are an individual boon.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
We lost full-service gas stations when they implemented minimum wage laws
US has had minimum wage laws since 1938.
We didn't lose full-service gas stations until the '70s.
We already discussed the ease of obtaining fake IDs.
Fake ID, real stolen SSN.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it. Those that were "resistant" to you method of population control will prosper and spread their "resistant" genes. Absent-minded, careless and/or uncaring people are resistant to birth control methods. People with strong maternal/paternal instinct are resistant to high standard of living and active lifestyle reducing number of children. Etc.
Umm, no. Genes really do not play a role as it is not the physical body that is evolving. It is our various different cultures that are fighting for supremacy. And because people born into a culture typically adopt that culture, a higher birth rate is advantageous. But because we are not dealing with genes, there are other ways cultures can grow. For example, they can poach from other cultures. This is essentially what the western nations do.
So because a culture can prevail without high birth rates, population control can have an impact. A culture that adopts such policies must aggressively poach from other cultures in order to survive, but it is possible. Hollywood, for example, acts as a huge distributer of American culture.
In 40 years, we will have the technology to fix the issues we cause today. It's a gamble worth taking. Even if we'll fail, we might solve the whole issue of overpopulation.
Playing the "you're a racist" card already? I see Obama has taught you well.
I dont care about skin color. I care about what you do and what kind of person you are.
No, they said it *might* eventually take care of itself - a big difference between a certainty and a maybe, and not something I would want to bet the species' future on, Clyde.
We're seeing further vindication that raising standards of living past a certain point increases birthrates from the contrary beheviour this recession has provoked - people putting off having kids because they don't feel they can afford them."at this time."
So, rather than have 2 people starve to death 40 years ago, and two others who can make it on what's left, we have all their descendents starving now ... not smart. It's called triage for a reason. It's from the french for "sort" - and helping maintain too large a population isn't "sorting it out."
Foreign aid too often is done to benefit the donor country, not the recipients. We'll sell them a tractor because that benefits our manufacturers, when what they really need is an ox and a few goats. We send them missionaries to "educate" them - using the bible as reading material - then teach them that contraception is "against god's will" - because the church wants to reap the benefits as well - more bodies.
You want a foreign aid program that works - try a combination of emigration and sterilization. No "snip, snip", no aid, and no entry into the emigration lottery. Come to the new host country, make something of yourself, and we'll see about maybe reversing the snip-snip, but no "family reunification" programs allowing people to jump the queue. Each person strictly on their own merits. Anything else is not fair to everyone else.
We only have limited resources, and if you take too many people into the lifeboat, everyone sinks.
No it doesn't. Look at the fucking statistics, you self-complacent illiterate troll. When people feel economically secure, the birth rate goes back up, not down. It's called a "J" curve for a reason. Look at how many people bought 4, 5, 6-bedroom McMansions during the last bubble. Look at how many people are now postponing their plans for having kids. It has nothing to do with education, and everything to do with $$$.
What are you, a fundie, facts can't sway you?
BTW - Americans are the worst in the Western world when it comes to reining in their tendancy to over-populate. A sense of entitlement, "I've got mine, Jack, screw the rest" - the same shit that caused the last bubble, where over MILLIONS of Americans committed acts of outright criminal fraud, and you bail them out! WTF is wrong with you people?
The ocean has a limited heat sink capability ... after its' temperature rises more than a few degrees, it will undergo a thermal inversion, with very nasty consequences for life as we know it on the planet.
No it doesn't. Look at the fucking statistics, you self-complacent illiterate troll. When people feel economically secure, the birth rate goes back up, not down. It's called a "J" curve for a reason.
They aren't taking into account immigration and its effect on fertility.
That doesn't mean that the population isn't still growing - it just means that it's not growing as fast as it was. World population is expected to continue to grow for quite some time.
Saying the population isn't growing as fast as it was is like saying you're not accumulating debts as fast as you used to - your debt is still growing.
I'm lucky - I never smoked, never wanted to, and never will want to. Some of my sisters do, and they've all gone from "I can quit any time" to "I'm addicted" to "Don't bother me - it's the one thing I enjoy in life." I'm the oldest, but I'll probably outlive at least 3 of them.
We should give more support to people who are trying to quit or stay off by raising the price constantly, by continuing to impose further restrictions on when and where people can light up (for example, take a page out of several divorce judgments that ban smoking around the children), and by stopping the war on drugs. The war on drugs undermines our credibility, and besides, tobacco is a much greater "gateway drug" than any other ... We could reduce both tobacco and other drug abuse if we treat both tobacco and "recreational pharmacology" like the stupidity it is, and not by hypocritically selling one for profit and banning the other.
Then again, what are the chances the US will adopt a sane public health care plan when there's billions of dollars being funneled to politicians' campaigns?
The Owens Valley depended on irrigation before the water was diverted. This doesn't work long-term, as the water evaporates and leaves salts and minerals behind. Eventually the land can be ruined for agriculture.
As of yet there's no evidence that it will get over the sustaining level. In fact, it still looks more likely that we'll see a drop in population.
So, while it may not be something you want to bet the species on, it is probably the most realistic solution you're likely to find. Plus it has the nice side effect of raising everyone's standard of living and making life better for women. What's there to complain about?
Qxe4
If irrigation doesn't work long term, we're in more trouble than just worrying about that valley, because essentially all of California relies on irrigation for crops, as well as a good portion of the rest of the world.
I'm not sure what you have said is a real problem. After all, people have been irrigating for millennia.
Qxe4
after its' temperature rises more than a few degrees, it will undergo a thermal inversion
Doubtful, warm water on top is the normal heat flow pattern for ocean and that gradient would merely grow larger with a warmer planet. Sure there would be some temporary local effects like disruption of the Gulf Stream (at least till the Greenland ice cap is mostly melted) where large amounts of cold fresh water from the Greenland ice cap could cover the warmer saltier water of the Gulf Stream.
Nah I don't think you're racist. You just make very dumb assumptions about all that illegal immigration thing.
"there are huge restrictions on how many are admitted because there are huge numbers that are ignoring the system. The illegals are ruining it for everybody else." Don't know who you picked that up from (I doubt you'd even remember, people rarely remember whose opinion their opinion was before they made it theirs) but that's just bullshit.
I care about what you do and what kind of person you are.
Oh yeah? Well, what kind of people are illegal immigrants?
You just got troll'd!
I'm having a hard time following your logic. You seem to be saying that CO2 reduction is a wasted effort, because we'd spend at least as much energy converting CO2 to benign forms as we did from burning the fossil fuel in the first place.
But conservation of energy only holds in closed systems. My house is not a closed system, my car is not a closed system, and my body is not a closed system.
I could burn a log of wood, let the CO2 float up into the atmosphere, and in 10,000 years it might be absorbed by a growing tree in a peat bog. In the meantime, it'll warm the atmosphere a smidgen.
Or I could burn a log of wood, bubble the CO2 through an algae pond, and let them confine it to a bed of gunk at the bottom. Sure they need energy for that process, but they can use solar energy that I don't have the technology to use myself. So I personally could still come out ahead on the energy balance and simultaneously avert the atmospheric warming.
Or I could put the CO2 in a balloon and leave it as a problem for later. Maybe my great^N grandchildren could pop the balloon when the next ice age hits.
Of course burning diesel and then using the energy of combustion to synthesize diesel from the exhaust would be a waste of effort. But burning diesel and putting the exhaust in a place or a form that hurts me less needn't be a net loss of energy for me.
Don't give them any ideas. In the morning they'll plow a field with the exhaust tilled back into the dirt. In they afternoon they'll plow a field and release the exhaust into the air. Then they'll note that the air temperature was warmer in the afternoon and declare that exhaust tilling cures global warming.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also, most of the given examples while formerly 100% part of the 'third world', are now part of the G20, which is set to replace the G8 as the world's leading economic forum. China, India, Indonesia and Mexico have economies that are on par or rival those of some of the Western powerhouses.
According to various world organizations, as of 2008 the USA was in first place, China tops the UK, Italy, Germany and France with 3rd place, both India and Mexico top Australia...
These days the largest distinction is income distribution per capita rather than technological advancement or GDP
+Raider of the lost BBS
Simple - it's not what you claimed it was, and you're trolling when you misrepresent speculation on future outcomes as established fact, or, in this case, you misread and/or misunderstood the speculative nature of the supposed balancing out.
Want to really make life better for women around the world? Have men get pregnant. Immediately, abortion would be available on demand, and forced sex that leads to unwanted pregnancies would be punishable by slow death over a firepit.
We've already got too many people as is. Either we reduce our numbers on our own initiative, or we'll find that we're in a situation where we don't have options. It's the same as the deficit - the tipping point was $10 trillion. Once that was passed, the only way to "fix" the deficit was to invoke massive inflation, to "inflate away" the debt ... and that's what we're seeing. Expect the dollar to drop by more than half its' value over the next decade (considering that it lost about 95% of its' value in the last 50 years, it's just "business as usual, just more so").
People are pretty much going to do their thing: I'm not saying 'push it' either, but rather 'no FUD': it's too simplistic to assume 'we might be near', or anything like it; especially considering our ability to harness more energy--there's a giant ball spewing it out right above us. ; ) It's not so much, I think, we need push for population controls: those would be useless with current populations being as high as they are even if largely obeyed: their the simpletons' and knee-jerkers' reaction. Rather behavior is more important right now: crack down upon corrupt politicians, deal with corporatism, public and private, where the institution is the end and is protected at all costs, rather than living or dying as it should; force recycling (or storing recyclables until recycling them is economical), and incinerate what cannot be (this is much more earth-friendly than burying it, and the emissions can be scrubbed of toxins--while C02, contrary to the alarmists, is GOOD: pump it to greenhouses or emit it on farms); farm arable, rather than arid, regions; require manufacturers NOT to make the packaging 'an experience' (Apple); and etc., and etc.. There are all sorts of things that can be initiated now which would have massive impacts, big and tiny, which are possible (telling people 'no more children', or 'just so many', is assanine, as China is discovering: networks of families just hide the offspring from the government).
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
It's not only immigrants whose birth rates go up when they feel more economically secure. Or do you believe it's only immigrants who bought McMansions because they thought they could now afford to have larger families because of the phony economic boom?
The economist article is actually quite unoriginal. A much earlier study (in the '70s, so you'd have actually had to read it from dead-tree journals) showed the same effect in Argentina (and you can't claim immigration had an effect there). Populations are complex systems, and exhibit non-linear behaviour. Anyone who expected a straight line or simple curve was either naive, willfully ignorant, or whistling past the graveyard.
We already represent a disproportional amount of the biomass on this planet. Fresh water is going to be a major problem within the next 20 years, not just in the 3rd world, but in the United States as well. There are already shortages, and it's going to get worse, not better. Even if ALL immigrants were shot at the border, it won't solve the problem, since the population will still increase. The US has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, and its' disproportionately the kids of fundies who are having kids, since they're denied both access to birth control and abortion.
Putting the warm water on top will immediately result in large algae blooms and dead zones (higher temperatures encourage algae growth at the immediate surface, blocking sunlight and hence the plant life at lower levels dies, it also result in less 02 dissolved in water, at the same time increasing metabolic demand for 02, so most marine animals die off), so the warm water has to be stored deeper - which means eventually, a thermal inversion, and all that gase from the decomposition of dead stuff that was held in solution because of the high pressure now bubbles off, with disasterous consequences. This is why we can't just sequester CO2 by pumping it deep into the ocean. Dammed if you do, damned if you don't.
Want to really make life better for women around the world? Have men get pregnant.
Fortunately there are other ways to make the lives of women better, otherwise we would be in trouble, because we don't know how to get men pregnant. Also, making things better for women is more than just easy access to abortion and anti-rape laws.
It's the same as the deficit - the tipping point was $10 trillion.
OK, here's an interesting idea. While I agree that the national debt is a serious problem right now, I find no evidence that $10 trillion is a tipping point. It is mostly a matter of our ability to pay it off; $10 trillion is only 70% of our GDP, which is not out of reach. Italy had a higher debt level, and Japan still does. When a person buys a house, they often go into debt around three times their annual income.
On the other hand, if you have evidence to believe that $10 trillion is a tipping point, I would be interested in hearing it. I have heard no economists, or anyone really, arguing that, and I would be surprised if they did.
Also, when talking about the national debt, you need to remember that the deficit is a different thing than the debt, and the deficit is nowhere near $10 trillion. The way you worded your comment seems a bit confused.
Qxe4
You forgot about the nuclear bombs. Why sire a new society when you can just vaporize it? I suppose you'll try to make another comparison regarding civility and how it matters in how "bad" or "worse" one war is than another. When you do, don't forget to blame Islam.
+= E
Proof of citizenship is a little more involved than simply checking a list. You forget that in the Land of the Free, anyone that is born here has a birthright to citizenship. Birth doesn't guarantee inclusion in any supposed lists of citizenry.
+= E
Same thing here... Took a heart attack because of a blocked artery for me to quit smoking. No patches, no gum. Damn gum gave me a head ake. Life savers was my out.
Can't beleive how easy it was to quit. Hell, I found it easier quiting smoking then I did to quit drinking.
Now it's fun again going to the bars though. I watch all the drunks for entertainment.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Population rise in some parts of the world, some parts of Europe for example, is actually falling. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/27/population.eu
However there are some groups that are deliberately increasing their populations, Mormons and Moslems come to mind.
I'm not necessarily slamming those groups. Just pointing out that what may sound good to you could greatly change the makeup of the world.
AG
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
FFS, just ask your friends if they're planning on having any kids when the job market is crap. There's plenty of evidence that bad economic times or reduced earnings result in people postponing starting families, so obviously, when the good times return, they breed.
Japan's economy has been in the shitter for more than a decade. Just search for "japan lost decade". They're still not out of it; 2 decades later asset prices haven't recovered. The US is going to have the same problem - at least a lost decade, probably a lost generation, in terms of economic growth. The problem was the same, and we're seeing the same refusal to mark to market and clear out bad debts. The government continues to try to prop up real estate prices, but it simply can't be done.
The Chinese made it quite clear during the first half of the decade that $10T was their limit; they are now in the process of diversifying their holdings; so are other countries, who are now investigating ways to abandon the greenback as a reserve currency. China has been quite vocal about it; the increase in the US debt (projected to hit $20 trillion) is a disaster.
The US can't pay it off without a significant reduction in the standard of living. It's the same as any other debt - paying it down means less cash for other spending.
Thanks for bringing Italy up - it's exactly the sort of example I'm talking about. It's public debt is rated AA2, two levels below AAA. Do you really want the US to have its' debt downgraded, which is seen as more likely nowadays? Every notch down costs billions in interest points, with further impacts on state and municipal bonds (California is already junk ..)
Forecast: Even without a downgrade, there will be less appetite for US dollars, since they no longer hold their value over even the medium term. Less demand means higher interest rates. Debt spirals are an ugly thing to watch.
Nothing against you or your fiance, but it seems that she has more than made up for you, since while in this generation there are just the two of you, your childrens' generation has four. Congratulations, you've doubled the population in a generation.
so the warm water has to be stored deeper
Why? I see warm water staying on top, hence no thermal inversion. Thermal inversion happens in the atmosphere because most of the heating occurs at the bottom of the atmosphere (namely, by sunlight absorbed by the ground). We do have geological evidence of some sort of oxygen deprivation in the oceans, eg, the Permian extinction. I just think your description of the process is inaccurate.
At this point, I will admit that we've lost one significant criteria for sustainability. Namely, that the global ecological system passively stays in a human-friendly range. Some sort of active control system will need to be employed.
Well around here then most of them are drunk and violent. The vast vast VAST majority of crime in my area is by (and luckily among) illegals. There are whole neighborhoods that you don't go down as a citizen, even the hispanic citizens avoid them. They also are the largest consumers of public funds, which is strange because they aren't really eligible for them.
Was that a mis-print 4000 tons of diesel for 3900 hectares?
Let's see:
My Deutz has a 20 gallon tank. Working hard, I can use
that tank in a day. Call it 2.5 gallons per hour.
If it was water, that would be 20 lbs.
Ploughing with a 3 bottom plough does a strip about 4 feet
wide. Moves about 2 mph so that's 12 square feet per second.
That's about 43,000 square feet per hour or just under an acre. 2.5 acres per hectare. So it would be about 50 lbs
of fuel per hectare.
The fertilizer numbers are about right. 100 lbs of fertilizer
per acre works out to 500 tons for 4000 hectares.
Keep in mind that 3900 hectares is 15 square miles. Not
your average homestead.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
The vast vast VAST majority of crime in my area is by (and luckily among) illegals.
lol, well you're not that different from Lou Dobbs after all! How do you know most crime is committed by illegals? I mean how the hell would you know? You investigate each crime, find the culprits and determine their legal status? Or do you and your legal buddies see what they want to see?
They also are the largest consumers of public funds, which is strange because they aren't really eligible for them.
Yeah, that makes just SO MUCH sense. Damn illegal immigrants and their welfare checks they can't possibly receive. If only these guys knew English as well as they know how to trick the American government bodies into sending them money...
You just got troll'd!
Brilliant idea, but it falls flat due to one simple reason: evolution. Whoever doesn't go with this, whoever produces more children than they should, for whatever reason as long as it is affected by genes at least a bit, will have an evolutionary advantage.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it.
I think this oversimplifies things. Homo Sapiens adapted a more sophisticated strategy than churning out offspring ten-to-the-dozen. We have long gestation periods, and twins are fairly rare.
You want your genes to survive, you could have 12 kids and watch 10 of them die or screw up, or you could have 2 kids and give them the best care possible.
Because, as I pointed out, warm water on the top will kill the life there. It's the same as with hot water from nuclear power generators - you can't just flush it into the environment - it can't hold enough oxygen in solution to sustain marine life, and at the higher temps, the organsms need more 02, so it's a double whammy for them. Add in the algae blooms and you've got massive dead zones.
It's a moot point. Have you ever seen anything collapse in a non-catastrophic manner? You can't just stop the growth. Besides, the US has some of the lowest population density in the world. We have tons of room to grow. Europe can slow down, but then they will have their neighbors population crash down on them with nothing to cushion the shock.
What would you prefer our children inherit. A world with enough diversity and growth that there is some hope that we will continue to innovate our way out of problems, or a stangnant world with no growth? The worst option would be a world where the "free" world's population stabalized or decreased enough to be destroyed or enslaved by the less free parts of the world. It could happen.
Cheap storage VM.
The US has a pretty low population density compared to other parts of the world. When we look like Europe, or Asia, I'll worry.
Most of the western hemisphere has room for growth.
reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
Anyway, limiting your fertility is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you want your genes to continue you need enough out there when the inevitable killing off comes. It is inevitable...
Even if you don't care about your genes, your children or other family members will be at a disadvantage because their "tribe" will not have the numbers to come out on top of any situation, be it riots, government, disease, or something else.
Cheap storage VM.
Yes, 100 years ago you could just show up at Ellis Island. However, 100 years ago the US also didn't have absurdly extensive (and expensive) social programs. You were expected to work, and we had poor houses (farms) where anyone could labor for a meal and a bed while they got back on their feet. I also believe those that emigrated via Ellis Island possessed a very strong work ethic, and were coming to be part of the American dream, join the culture, and make a better life for their children.
While there are exceptions, this is no longer the norm. A large portion of immigrants- generally the illegal portion- come for the handouts and free medical care (yes, via emergency rooms) that their shithole countries don't provide. They game the system and don't assimilate.
20 years ago CA had the best school system in the country. Today it is the worst. Care to guess why?
Desalination isn't good enough, eventually salt will build up in the soil, the garden oasis of Mesopotamia is now called the Iraqi salt marshes.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If every woman had twins and died during child-delivery then 2.0 children would be zero population growth, but be cause we give birth primarily in the first third of our lives, the real situation is much more complex. Perhaps one day I'll write a computer simulation and find out for sure, but I'm sure it's much closer to 1.3 than 2.0.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Knowledge of fake ID cards? Ouch, such knowledge without action could put you at more risk than the holder of the fake ID. Worse you might be easier to prosecute too.
It's kind of funny that you say there is plenty of evidence that people stop having kids when times are bad, but then don't actually provide anything more than something vaguely anecdotal. Come on, you should know better than to try to conflate the issue of 'postponing breeding' and 'not breeding at all.'
About the national debt: the general consensus among economists seems to be that there is still time to fix things, but we won't (for an example, check out a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124458888993599879.html">this article by Arthur Laffer. He clearly explains what needs to be done to fix some of our problems, then explains why he believes it won't be done). China doesn't really want to see a collapse in the dollar any more than we do (by 'we' I mean 'you and me'; there ARE people in the US who want to see the dollar collapse). If the US government makes a clear, reasonable plan for how they are going to address their fiscal problems, then the crisis could be avoided. Unfortunately I see no way that they will do such a thing.
Qxe4
Who says we use dirt? You know that lettuce you see in the supermarket? It was most likely grown on water no dirt needed. If I remember that science channel show correctly, they are looking into other crops as well. Lettuce was easy and it worked for commercial purposes.
I know some people who work in fast foods and hire a fair number of immigrants. Why? At the amount is he allowed by management to pay them, he can't get Americans with a work ethic to apply for the job. But it keeps the hamburgers cheap.
Anyway, first time he got a bad Soc card (I think they actually mis-spelled security on it) he brought it to his boss and asked him what to do about it. Boss said "I'm not trained in identifying legitimate social security cards, are you?" and told him to put down that they presented him with a card.
Another time someone's ID got hit by a random check and was found to be bad. They hired him back the next day when he came back with a better card.
There would have to be so much more government oversight than there is currently to actually have a chance of stopping this. And even then:
Fast food wages would have to increase drastically to get people to work there (not saying it's entirely a bad thing, but it has consequences, such as..). Food prices would increase to match. A lot of good (but illegal) people would be out of work. My friend doesn't hire people just because they're cheap - he's looking for good people who are solid workers, same as any employer. Our large portions of our economy built on cheap labor would collapse. .
Right,,,theres a lack of potential labour out there right now which is why unemployment is 9.8%.
Might it have something to do with the perpetual budget crisis brough on by Proposition 13?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Yes, I'd imagine that the world will have plenty of poor countries for quite some time. However, it doesn't have as many poor countries as it used to, so the population is growing slower than it used to. Ergo, your newspaper's is horseshit.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And most people with an SSN also have a driver's license attached to that SSN - thus providing easy photo verification of ownership of said SSN.
No. My SSN is not now or has even been on my driver's license. And I have had a driver's license for over 20 years in 5 states. I needed my SSN to get the driver's license the first time. That was it.
Besides if you have ever gotten you ID stolen you know how easy is was for someone else to get your SSN. And how much of a bitch it is to get it cleared up.
Zero population growth actually requires more than 2 children per woman. It would be 1.0 if every woman gave birth to one girl who survived to have a baby girl of her own. But since you get 105 boys for every 100 girls, you need 2.1 children per woman. And then add a bit more to compensate for the children who don't survive to child-bearing age. (See replacement rate)
I expect you are thinking of demographic transition: when a population with high birth and death rates experiences a change (e.g. the invention of sanitation) to low birth and death rate, the death rate drops first so the population grows until the birth rate drops and a new equilibrium is reached, typically at a higher population. If you wanted to keep the population stable through a demographic transition, then you would indeed need to drop the birth rate dramatically. But once the birth and death rates stabilize again, the population will shrink unless the fertility rate goes back up to 2.
And that is what the article observes: as countries become wealthy, life expectancy shoots up, populations grow, and fertility rates drop to a low of 1.3. But once the easy gains have been made, life expectancy increases more slowly and fertility rates return towards the replacement rate of around 2.
Why should I want my genes to continue? And "tribes" today are such nebulous things, the idea of intertribe competition on any scale smaller than the nation-state is laughable.
Get over your genes and learn to enjoy other people.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Who says we use dirt? You know that lettuce you see in the supermarket? It was most likely grown on water no dirt needed. If I remember that science channel show correctly, they are looking into other crops as well. Lettuce was easy and it worked for commercial purposes.
Yes, I know, hydroponics ... been around for ages.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Labor supply for things like this are very local. In the fast food industry, at least, all workers are on the books and making the normal wage for anyone applying for that job - they are all pretending to be legal. I'm pretty sure most places would prefer to hire people who speak English if they're available.
Someone who just lost his white collar job doesn't just go apply at McDonald's, though. They live off of savings and unemployment until those run out while they're looking for another white collar job. Flipping burgers isn't going to make the difference on their mortgage payments. I expect the recession to eventually lead to more competition for low income jobs, but from what my friend's seen at his location, they aren't applying yet.
That sounds about right, although I wonder if it will extend to other countries that become as rich as the United States (in terms of per capita GDP).
The U.S. is an anomaly among rich countries though. We're a bit more religious, which may translate to lower rates of birth control (I'm just guessing). And like you said, our infant mortality rate is a bit higher than most rich countries.
Who knows? Maybe the birth rate will drop in response to the lowered infant mortality rate. In any case, since we have positive immigration flow we'll have growth regardless.