Regardless, at current global growth rates we can expect the world's population of 6.5 billion to double to 13 billion by 2067 and to 26 billion by 2128. What do you think the price of corn flakes will be then?
Those interesting in watching can go here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop
--Doug
On 8/16/06,
Bill Eldridge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Douglas Roberts wrote:Well, perhaps I'm completely wrong, and there is always going to be the ability to produce plenty of food for our exponentially growing world population.Perhaps not an exponential population growth rate (those spikes and dips in the 1950's and 1960's probably had a lot to do with Chairman Mao -
"the total population of China increased 57% to 700 million [in 1976], from the constant 400 million mark during the span between the Opium War and the Chinese Civil War"
as well as the 1959-1962 deaths from the "Great Leap Forward"
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But I don't believe it. On a related topic, let's hear how we're going to address this issue:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060816/wl_nm/environment_water_dc_2
I did note that water was a greater worry in this area than availability of land.
Sorry to switch subjects, but from Steve Boyan:
(I'm not sure I absolutely believe these astronomical water figures, but I do believe they're high)In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I'd give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won't have that impact: it probably won't have any impact on anything at all, except me.
I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I would have been moved.
...John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned 3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you'd save maybe double that.
Anyway, back to crop efficiency.
Perhaps, as the new director of Los Alamos National Laboratory has claimed, wonders will be worked through the implementation of miraculous improvements in efficiency.
Please note that the efficiency gains below are for the most part without the relatively recent genetically modified grains,
which as one focus includes improved plant usage of water.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of exponentiation, at least when it comes to the compound interest law. Not, however, when it involves populations breeding beyond the food supply's ability to sustain.--Doug
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Doug Roberts, RTI International
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