248 comments on The World's Expected Carrying Capacity in a Post Industrial Agrarian Society
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GliderGuider,
Firstly I think you need to ditch Fig3 in your analysis, it detracts from an otherwise good piece of work. Notwithstanding the value of the ELM, to extrapolate based on such a small data set is erronous and misleading IMO.
Having said that your analysis does give some hope and points to a future where conservation and efficiency are numero-uno considerations.
Personally I think we will see much much larger introduction of PV than you are predicting given the upcoming TF technologies and perhaps double your Wind rollout. Far from being dead-zones the Oceans will be bought to life effectively tripling usable area (actually its better than tripling as oceans are 'more 3D' -i.e. we don't just rely on 1 metre of topsoil but tens of metres of depth). Nuclear will undergo a renaiscence.
The thing I see scuppering survival is a potential collapse due to the shock of decline but surely once the cause of decline is widely recognised and the full extent of the problem grasped it will be full steam ahead on the solution?
Nick.
On reflection, I agree with your comment about my inclusion of net exports in this analysis. It really belongs in a yet-to-be-written chapter on geopolitical influences on the energy supply. Accordingly, I've dropped the entire discussion from the article.
As I say in the article, the speed and depth of penetration of wind and PV is fraught with unknowns. Worse, it will vary drastically from country to country - I would expect Germany to end up with a much higher amount and proportion of wind power than Indonesia, for instance. I'm content with my projections as they stand. In fact I think I've been uncomfortably optimistic. If developments prove them to have been pessimistic, so much the better for humanity.
How exactly are the oceans going to be brought back to life? The state of the oceans is among the most dire of any ecosystem on Earth right now. As Scripps oceanographer Jeremy Jackson is fond of hyperbolizing, we have eaten everything in the oceans over a meter long. All that's left seems to be jellyfish and plastic. I'm not sure how to revitalize an ecology that's been that badly damaged, especially within the next 40 years. But maybe that's just my doomer heart mourning.
Full steam ahead yes, but within tightening resource constraints and a closing ecological/environmental window. There's no advantage in denying the challenges.
Haha, I'd better not go in the sea then as I am over a metre long myself!
Seriously though the oceans do represent a great opportunity for humanity but it takes a bit of lateral thinking. The upwelling zones of the oceans are amongst the most productive areas -where deep sea nutrients enter the sunlit upper layers of the ocean plankton blooms cause huge amounts of life to be found. There's about 30+ metres of sunlit region so it represent a vertical stacked farm opportunity in theory.
Do some research on OTECs -Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. A by-product of this energy conversion technolgy is deep sea, nutrient rich water by the kilo-ton...
Another by-product is fresh water. So we already have three major prodcuts that look to be in shorter supply: Energy, Water, Food and there are a lot more. I am one of the editors of www.otecnews.org -OK its currently just a fascinating bit of 'GreenTech' but given a fair wind...
Regards, Nick.
Another view on the oceans:
It really doesn't matter how deep you go fishing. The productivity of the oceans is dependent on the amount of solar energy that falls on the surface. All living things are, ultimately, solar powered via photosynthesis.
You've entirely neglected the ocean thermal vent ecologies powered by the endogenous heat energy of the Earth.
We could start eating these vent worms:
Doesn't that look tasty?
Some people even think that those thermal biosystems are the origin of life on earth and, gosh, they could amount to a tiny fraction of the bio-productivity of the ocean even today.
I am of course seriously joking.