rigorousintuition.ca

Interesting little blip there in that graph, right at the top. For the first time in a generation or more, population has outsripped oil production.

Looks like it's been since 2000.

Hmmmm......

Bit drunk after work, but I do have demolishing replies to everything, maybe tommorow or in a few hours if I can't sleep because I'm worried about the future.

In any case

wintler2 wrote:Half a ton of chicken a year from half a hectare? Not without many tons of feed imported from elsewhere, & water, and a heated shed etc.

Half an (imperial) ton is actually an underestimate, though to be honest I haven't taken into account the heated shed or water (the imported feed is what the number is obviously).

In the meantime,

1). Here's a lovely graph:

Global food production per person:

y-axis is percentage of 1999-2001 average; food production per person has massively outstripped population growth in the last 50 years The dip at the end is due to higher oil prices (for fertiliser) and biofuel production ('cos there's so much food that it's cheaper to grow fuel). The yield figures I used in my calculations were from 1981 since more recent numbers are behind pay-only scientiic papers.
[On drunken edit you can't se that clearly, sorry]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Food_ ... 1-2005.png

2). A link that shows that one hectare of US farmland grew 8.9 tonnes (9.8 tons) of corn per hectare on average in 2003/2004 (2007 was a bumper year; grew over over 10 tonnes per ha).
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/agr_y ... yield-corn

3). A link that shows that one hectare of US farmland grew 2.2 tonnes (2.4 tons) of soybean per hectare on average in 2003/2004. Intensively farmed chickens are fed a lot of soy because it's high protein content makes them grow more fasterer, although, being a mainly vegetarian animal it's body can synthesise protein from fat and carbohydrates (in the same way that when you look at a cow under a magnifiying glass it doesn't look like it's made out of grass).
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/agr_y ... ld-soybean

Sooooo, say you wanted to grow chickens fast, right. You'd intensively farm them and give them 50-50 soy and corn. Bah, we wantz da mudafukkin chikenz. We'll give them 66% soy and 33% corn. So *counts on thumbs* I reckon we'd get from a 1 hectare soy field with a third growing corn 4.4 tonnes of feed.

4) Here's a link from our friends at wikipedia saying that chickens gain 1kg in weight from every 2kg of food they eat (now remember, our intensivly farmed chickens barely have room to sit down, but they've got an effing awesome diet).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_fa ... en_farming

So, by the magic of a calcumalotor: 4.4 tonnes of feed = 2.2 tonnes of chicken = cha-ching for the farmer, the chicken husbander and lots of tasty chicken for me (I do feel sorry for the chickens btw since they live their entire lives in a space the size of a place mat). So that's 990kg of chicken from my .45 hectare bodybuilder's farm. He's gonna throw half of that in the garbage heap and eat some greens (which take 1/4 per calorie of chicken to grow) and grains (which use 1/6 per calorie per calorie to grow).

I didn't make this up off the top of my head. This is based on hard numbers. I know animals suffer to feed people. I know that fresh water in not limitless. But people should not be starving.

Please do the numbers yourself. I'm not criticising anyone, but marketeers say that a person only has to hear something 8 times before they start parrotting it themselves. You have seen this eco propaganda repeated hundreds of times. Forget the headline, do the numbers. The whole population of the world could be on bodybuilding diets with the farmland we use now with a third left over for biofuel (palm oil looks crazy amazign for this, and algae biofuel is expensive but could be done on wasteland)

wintler2 wrote:Fusion has never worked, its just one of the 'jam tomorrow' promises used to subsidise the nuclear industry. Let me guess, you derive your living from membership of some tech priesthood.

Fusion has never been tried in fairness, and if the fission industry had advanced since the 1950 instead of being hld back by oil interests that would probably do the trick safely. I buy and sell finished goods for a living, if I wasn't a good mathematician I'd be a pauper, please let me try to sell you on these facts as opposed to hyperbole.

Sorry for typos etc, near bedtime for me, take care =)

EDITED numerous times due to cider (fruit is a very farmland hungry crop btw) so durnk edited again sorry

That destruction is being wreaked on the planet by humanity is a matter for debate.

honestly, when you make a statement like that, there's almost no chance anything else you say will be taken seriously

Technology advances all the time. The agricultural advances made in the last 200 years were spurred on by economic considerations rather than to reduce starvation.

technology does not advance all the time
it advances in fits and starts with lulls that can span centuries,
it is also the case that many technological advances represent regressions for human society, especially in weaponry

a lot of the advances in chemicals and fertilisers have come with a tremendous price tag and to think that new technology can constantly fix the problems that old technology created is insane

it is worth noting that the great leaps in agriculture that first occurred in the mid fifteenth century occurred after half of europes population was wiped out in the black death, (some say brought about by overpopulation)
new techniques were necessary because cheap labour was gone,
so in that case it was a population plunge that spurred innovation and re-ordered society in a more equitable way

saying things cant go backwards for periods is just plain stupid,
reminds me of the people three years ago explaining to me that house prices never went down

(high energy physics research being the most likely source of cheap freely available energy)

bullshit, bullshit, bullshit

the sun is the most likely source of cheap energy,

high energy physics is chasing phantoms that will never be found because physics has regressed into ideas as ridiculous as the wheels within wheels of the middle ages,
there was no big bang, there is no dark matter and higgs boson is a speck of shit in the physicists glasses

to think that humans can fix the problems they have created with technology takes a special kind of ignorance that i have no understanding of,
it takes as well an absolute denial of our history

to thinks that we are not damaging the planet boggles my mind,
you'd have had to have been living in a cave for half a century not to know what is happening

smiths wrote:to think that humans can fix the problems they have created with technology takes a special kind of ignorance that i have no understanding of,
it takes as well an absolute denial of our history

Even birth control is a technology.

smiths wrote:

That destruction is being wreaked on the planet by humanity is a matter for debate.

honestly, when you make a statement like that, there's almost no chance anything else you say will be taken seriously

I guess we cross posted while I went for a snooze and that you started drinking as soon as you woke up so we're probably about as drunk as each other.

The next sentence after the quote was 'Except among those who've already had their minds made up for them by a constant bombardment of one-sided "journalism."' This means you. Please direct me to some evidence of enviromental destruction that was caused by overpopulation rather than greed.

I'm assuming that you missed my last post. It involved the voodoo science of mathematics to calculate that there is plenty of food for loads of more people without cutting down a single tree. And also without catching a single fish.

smiths wrote:technology does not advance all the time
it advances in fits and starts with lulls that can span centuries,
it is also the case that many technological advances represent regressions for human society, especially in weaponry

Perhaps you've been toking on a crack pipe? We went from the first powered flight to setting foot on the moon in less than 70 years. I stated in my post before last that spending $5 billion (0.5% of the global military budget) on a project that could achieve advances in energy production is a sign that the PTB aren't interested in human welfare. I should have gone further, the entire Apollo program cost less than $150 billion in today's money. To spend so little on even a possible source of cheap energy and God knows what other advances is a crime against humanity.

smiths wrote:a lot of the advances in chemicals and fertilisers have come with a tremendous price tag and to think that new technology can constantly fix the problems that old technology created is insane

I agree with the first part but strongly disagree with the last part.

smiths wrote:it is worth noting that the great leaps in agriculture that first occurred in the mid fifteenth century occurred after half of europes population was wiped out in the black death, (some say brought about by overpopulation)
new techniques were necessary because cheap labour was gone,
so in that case it was a population plunge that spurred innovation and re-ordered society in a more equitable way

You seem to be slipping into toxic psychosis. Less people needed to grow food more efficently? That doesn't make any sense. The opposite is true. The agricultural revolution occured hundred of years later after the population recovered. The Black Death was caused by overpopulation though: a overpopulation of rats infested with fleas that carried the Black Death, which arrived aboard ships and devastated a population with immune systems that were naive to Black Death. Unless you are a medieval European scholar I call bullshit on that whole paragraph. "re-ordered society in a more equitable way" - are you living in a parallel universe?

smiths wrote:saying things cant go backwards for periods is just plain stupid,
reminds me of the people three years ago explaining to me that house prices never went down

I'm richer most people in my country because I resisted just about everyone I met telling me to mortgage my home and buy property to rent out to pay the mortgage. I'm not stupid. Thing go up and down, I know the universe is enthropic, but humans are sentient and must strive to maintain order, unless we want global society to collapse, which is what the "Good" club want. That's what their media has convinced you of.

smiths wrote:the sun is the most likely source of cheap energy,

high energy physics is chasing phantoms that will never be found because physics has regressed into ideas as ridiculous as the wheels within wheels of the middle ages,
there was no big bang, there is no dark matter and higgs boson is a speck of shit in the physicists glasses

The Sun is powered by fusion energy (according to currently accepted models). Are you as good a theoretical physicist as you are an historian? If physics has regressed that's because it has been led astray by the "Good" club and their cronies.

smiths wrote:to think that humans can fix the problems they have created with technology takes a special kind of ignorance that i have no understanding of,
it takes as well an absolute denial of our history

I assume this was automatic writing or channeling or something, because it makes no effing sense since humans have been solving problems they created a far back as history can tell us. That they solved the problems in crappy, degrading and ingenius ways is factual. You are possessed of an extra special type of ignorance all your own.

smiths wrote:to think that we are not damaging the planet boggles my mind,
you'd have had to have been living in a cave for half a century not to know what is happening

Prove it to me. Every environmental scare story I've looked into has turned out to be bullshit. Read my last post. Seriously, they have you so brainwashed that if you saw a youtube clip of a penguin raping a dolphin's blowhole, and the penguin cocked its head, winked at the camera and said "This is happening because of climate change", you'd start thinking of ways to convince your neighbours to get sterilised and subsist solely on a diet of lentils.

Read my last post before this one, please. Think for yourself. Stop reading bullshit newspaper articles unless you're going to do an hour's reasearch to see if they're true.

EDITed for (some of the ) typos and to reiterate that one hectare of farmland can produce 2,200kg of chiken. That's approximately 25 gazillion fucktonnes of chicken for the whole world.

Hairball wrote:...if you saw a youtube clip of a penguin raping a dolphin's blowhole, and the penguin cocked its head, winked at the camera and said "This is happening because of climate change", you'd start thinking of ways to convice your neighbours to get sterilised and subsist solely on a diet of lentils.

Okay, that's a pretty funny image there, like a perverse version of "Happy Feet". But even conservative studies I've looked at like the one I quoted upthread in response to Mac attribute at least 8% of rainforest deforestation to population pressures. And no matter how you slice it, more folks equals more opportunity for exploitation, more pollution, and more greed, up and down the line. So I think there is a good case to be made for population impact on the environment as it now stands, that is, in the configuration of the world's people and resources today and for a while now. Nonetheless, I see this as a series of human failings rather than an inexorable consequence of population growth.

barracuda wrote:But even conservative studies I've looked at like the one I quoted upthread in response to Mac attribute at least 8% of rainforest deforestation to population pressures. And no matter how you slice it, more folks equals more opportunity for exploitation, more pollution, and more greed, up and down the line.

Yeah, that's the problem. People farm because they need food. People cut down forests because they need a 50" plasma screen TV to show off to their neighbours, because they saw it on their 24" CRT. The consumer culture is at fault not the human population.

I hope those who think there is plenty of food to feed a growing population aren't depending on the midwestern US to reliably produce much of that food. I read some tree ring study several years ago that described megadroughts, lasting as long as fifty years in some cases. .

as it happens hairball i am doing a history degree and i am studying some medieval units, i dont happen to have any books with me
but the basic dynamics worked liked this


one third to one half of the population died

labour suddenly became much more valuable and because of this, mobile,

labourers could move to wherever someone offered them the best wages

labour, the middle class and towns all increased wealth and pwer relatively,
feudal lords and the church decrease power and wealth

high labour costs, being a problem for the lords led to labour saving innovations of which there were many from this time, the most famous of which was the printing press

the resulting social change led straight into the renaissance and the reformation




as for birth control being a technology, humans have been practising natural forms of birth control for thousands of years,

and i happen to think that the pill is very bad for womens health, and wouldnt be recommending it to anyone

and i happen to think that the pill is very bad for womens health, and wouldnt be recommending it to anyone

You're male, aren't you?

smiths wrote:as for birth control being a technology, humans have been practising natural forms of birth control for thousands of years,

"Natural" birth control is a technique or technology as well, dude.

smiths wrote:as it happens hairball i am doing a history degree and i am studying some medieval units, i dont happen to have any books with me
but the basic dynamics worked liked this


one third to one half of the population died

labour suddenly became much more valuable and because of this, mobile,

labourers could move to wherever someone offered them the best wages

labour, the middle class and towns all increased wealth and pwer relatively,
feudal lords and the church decrease power and wealth

high labour costs, being a problem for the lords led to labour saving innovations of which there were many from this time, the most famous of which was the printing press

the resulting social change led straight into the renaissance and the reformation

Oops, I guess I picked the wrong time to to pretend I knew something about something I know very little about

I've been to Italy many times though, and any increased egalitarianism caused by the Black Plague didn't last more than a couple of hundred years. Sorry for being so surly :\

Hairball, i'm unconvinced. Food production has increased, thanks largely to petrochemical subsidies a.k.a N.Borlags 'Green Revolution', shame about declining supplies, goodbye phantom carrying capacity. How many workers you got raising your 2 ton of chicken, and do they live with the chickens, or in town, and commute daily? Do your notional chickens walk themselves to the customers pot, or ride in a refrigerated truck to an airconditioned packing plant, supermarket and kitchen? What will be the productivity of your chicken factory when feed is $10/lb and gas $15/gallon? Have another hectare, it wont help.

Without accounting for the energy and resource inputs, not merely land, your numerical efforts are somewhere between meaningless and misleading. Your unspoken assumption that mechanised US ag could be applied globally fails as soon as all inputs/effectively subsidies are noticed; not all farmers can have their hands in taxpayers or natures pockets.

i might be male chig, but i resent your inference,

both partners in a hetrosexual relationship should be responsible for any birth control that is taking place,
there is a massive epidemic of 'unexplained infertility' in the western countries and although there are a number of contenders when it comes to causes, the female pill has to be a leading candidate for causing longer term problems,
especially to do with the production and regulation of estrogen and progesterone


A technique is a procedure used to accomplish a specific activity or task

Technology is a broad concept that deals with human as well as other animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts


they are not the same things

Hairball, your math above was of the voodoo crack pipe variety, sadly.
You never read much of the link I gave a couple pages ago, did you?
(The final empire - book)

You left out a large number of variables from your math. The green revolution depends on oil inputs as fertilizers and pesticides (as others said above), and fuel for the machines. Modern farming methods also deplete the soil and cause erosion, especially your toted chicken and other meat production, as well as nutrient runoff into waterways causing all sorts of problems. Take away cheap oil and your equation collapses.

Humans have currently simply devised ways to turn oil into food thru intensive agriculture. This is damaging the soil systems and the ecosystems that are razed for farmland. These additional costs are in no way acknowledged or taken into acount by your simplistic chicken math.

Im just waiting for the first longer term droughts to hit US midwest, and a few storms after that to carry away the thin layer of topsoil.
After that they will probably need to deploy some kind of artificial ponds to grow Monsanto algae or something

Sustainable farming methods that also take care of the vitality of the soil and ecosystems in the long term are currently very rarely used, especially in the western countries where agribusiness has the longest history.