SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the On-a-Pale-Horse-vs-Being-a-Green-Mother dept.
The world population is growing because the birth rate exceeds the death rate, so to stabilize the world population either the birth rate needs to drop, or the death rate needs to increase. The most cited reference for population studies is the projections of future population (PDF) made by the Population Division of the United Nations. The UN report projects the world population to eventually stabilize as a result of countries settling in to a birth rate that falls around the replacement level.
A commentary by Stephen Warren in the open access journal Earth's Future takes the UN report to task for focusing on birth rate. He notes that all species generate offspring in numbers well above the replacement level of two, but you don't see historically the kind of population growth like you do with humans. He argues that despite all the negative feedback mechanisms on population (such as war and pestilence), it seems that Malthus (PDF) was correct that food supply is the driving factor, and wonders whether it is even possible to stabilize the world population until food production levels off.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:00PM
How likely is it that food production is ever going to level off? I would assume it's highly unlikely unless, or until, we develop Star Trek like technology where food is print-on-demand (or replicated if you prefer that). Otherwise leveling off food productions sounds like a really poor and dangerous idea; "Ooops! Crops went bad, guess there will be famine!" -- Which might be beneficial to the birth/death-ratio but sucks for those doing the actual starving to death. Also there already is enough food on planet earth for everyone. We just have really poor logistics and distribution. Some places have a massive overproduction while others starve.
Unless you want to institute some UN mandated 1 child per family type policy this just isn't ever going to happen by itself. They (the conspiracy people) will go nuts about the UN World government thing tho. There will have to be some massive PR-campaign to get people to agree to and believe this is a good idea. Most likely they'll just keep breeding and having offspring. It's not like the Chinese 1 child policy was a massive success -- perhaps it was, perhaps they would have reach a billion even faster or be two billion by now if they had not interfered.
If I remember the classes and models in Mathematical Biology, and I do, food-based population equilibrium models sucks. "Zoomed-out" as a graph over time it will look like they (population and food availability) enter and match curves, they stabilize. But in actuality what is going on is a breed-eat-starve-die scenario as the population goes up and down very close to the available food-resource line. In times of plenty food they eat and breed and then the population size gets larger, to large and there is a starvation cycle where they keep breeding but dying until the population size falls below the resource live at which point they increase in size again. They just don't ever stop breeding. But I guess that is for the less evolved animals. Not us ...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by WillAdams on Tuesday May 26 2015, @05:10PM
Leveling off food production won't be a choice, but a consequence of physics and chemistry. Some cold, hard facts:
- we're using 2.5 earths worth of renewable resources each year (the extra 1.5 comes from non-renewable sources such as petro-chemicals)
- current food production techniques burn 10 calories of petro-chemical energy (or convert it into fertilizer) to grow 1 calorie of food energy
- a lot of fertilizer and a fair number of chemicals wash out to the seas due to modern industrial farming practices
- the limiting element for converting the earth's crust into biomass is potassium --- look up where the reserves are, how large they are, and note which country has stopped exporting, but is instead importing all that it can
- a lot of land is becoming contaminated with salt by being irrigated w/ not-quite desalinated water
On the bright side, apparently at $200/bbl of oil, it becomes economically feasible to use solar power to make long chain hydrocarbons from warm moist air using fuel-air liquefaction techniques (assuming someone solves the catalyst problem).
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2015, @09:45PM
are you sure it's potassium not phosphorus?
for the rest, spot on ..
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @01:10AM
It is both actually http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash [wikipedia.org] and http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Fertiliser [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Wednesday May 27 2015, @03:19PM
Yes, conflated potassium w/ phosphorous. Thank you for pointing that out. My thanks to the AC for noting that the two are inter-related to a degree.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @10:36AM
It's whichever that runs low/out first...
Sustainable growth is an oxymoron on a finite planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @10:33AM
Whichever's the lowest. That's how it works.
If you think "organic" produce is expensive, just imagine if much of the world had to go back to eating "organic food".