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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
Here's another angle of the problem.
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.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo. It is too closely tied to immigration. The current mantra is that growing the population is good, and immigration is the best way to grow the population. So, the population continues to grow, pressing against the limits of sustainability -- for the developed world.
Pro-immigration (and pro-population-growth) fans claim that the issue is merely transferring some people from one country to another country and that, hence, immigration results in a net gain of zero to the world's population.
Not quite. The actual problems are twofold. The environment of the country receiving the immigrants is placed under stress. (Currently, California has no additional land for farming or ranching to meet the needs of the ballooning population.) The freeing up of resources in the home country (from which the immigrants fled) now encourages more population growth. What we have now is population growth in the target country (which receive the immigrants) and additional growth in the home country.
Wait. Now, you ask, "How will banning immigration help?" First, the population of the target country stops growing. Although the popuation in the impoverished home country may continute to grow, at some point, malnutrition and starvation will ensure that the population reaches some maximum value, or (more likely) the angry and starving mobs will wage a civil war, killing plenty of the population. The end result is a form of brutal population control. Malnutrition (and starvation) or civil war. Take your pick. The end result is the same: population control.
I point out this brutal logic without any relish. The hard facts of life are that a finite system like planet earth cannot sustain infinite population growth. We in the developed world should deal with the issue now before the Four Horsemen bring their own solution.
Although modernization may appear to slow the growth, a recent article in "The Economist" claims that modernization does not necessarily do so. I will try to find the article if I have time. Perhaps, you in the SlashDot community can help me to find the article. It was published this year.
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.
If this is not an Onion story, then the farmer better be prepared for some serious court expenses.
He would be sued by the Farm Industry and its associated EPA:
1) Pollution by releasing unauthorized elements- never mind that larger corporates do it all the time.
2) Poisoning the food deliberately- never mind the frequent salmonella outbreaks are because of unsafe corporate practices.
3) Conspiracy against State - with a view to reduce tax income from corporates by using alternate stuff - ???
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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.
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.
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.
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.
nothing untoward would happen.
if leaded gas were still legal (and it is in many countries), this would basically be pumping lead into your food. whatever comes out of the tailpipe is going to wind up in that ground, and you might want to figure out what it is before you put it there.
i am reminded of the uses of raffinate favored by mining companies... including the way they took the raffinate sludge waste from the process of converting uranium yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride, treated it, the called it 'fertilizer' and sprayed it on open fields. with the approval of the nuclear regulatory commission.
but i guess you are one who thinks it was silly of people to sue them into stopping this? what could be wrong with spraying uranium processing waste on to open fields, right next to a tributary of the mississippi river, and trusting the company to monitor and study the effects of this spraying? (the company that would otherwise have to pay millions of dollars to transport and dump it in a proper disposal facility)?
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.
Stop the Catholic and Christine spread that encourages unbridled birth and you might have a chance,
The chance you can do that == 0.0
Most every third world country they have spread their stupidity is blighted with uncontrolled birth and Poverty.
Examples: Philippines, Mexico.
The Italians have accomplished two things, The destruction of the third world and professional gangsterism and Pizza
wait, the Italians have accomplished three things, The destruction of the third world and professional gangsterism and Pizza and Picasso
wait, the Italians have accomplished four things, The destruction of the third world and professional gangsterism and Pizza and Picasso and FUCK IT
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
... 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
"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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
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'
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.