Yeah, people have been laughing at Tommy for a long time. And being contemptuous of Mother Nature, who always bats last.
Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048
Study By Ecologists, Economists Predicts Collapse of World Ocean Ecology
The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.
That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.
cbsnews.com
Then, there are little stumbling blocks like this, (which may be a cycle, but it comes at an awfully inconvenient time, cuz we want more for biofuel)) They have started to call it peak food.
Message 22651645
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Wheat harvest forecast slashed
Blair Speedy
October 14, 2006
THE drought has pushed wheat prices to 10-year highs and forced exporter AWB to cut its forecast for this year's harvest to between 12 million and 15 million tonnes.
The forecast, down from 24million tonnes for the last crop, came as the US Department of Agriculture warned that global stocks of the GRAIN were at their lowest levels since 1981.
AWB spokesman Peter McBride conceded yesterday the harvest would be closer to the bottom end of the forecast range, while private sector analysts were tipping an even bigger reduction.
Australian Crop Forecasters earlier this month forecast the wheat crop would yield just 11.5million tonnes this year. Managing director Ron Storey said extreme heat over the past 10 days was likely to have wiped out another million tonnes.
Message 22932868
GRAIN Drain: Get Ready for Peak GRAIN
by Wayne Roberts
Now’s the time to brace yourself for major price hikes in food, as peak GRAINs join the lineup of lifestyle-changing events along with peak oil and peak water.
Unless this year’s harvest is unexpectedly different from six out of the last seven years, the WORLD’s ever-decreasing number of farmers do not produce enough staple GRAINs to feed the WORLD’s ever-increasing number of people. That’s been a crisis of quiet desperation over the past decade for the 15,000 people who die each day from hunger-related causes. It’s about to cause a problem for people who assumed that the sheer unavailability of food basics, usually seen as a problem of dire poverty, would never cause a problem for them.
Message 22960110
Then there is this thing called peak water, which we need for drinking and watering crops to run our cars.
Message 22676331
This doesn't help...
Message 22353018
All these peaks are take-offs on peak oil, which may be here, or may not come for another 5 years. It's not the same as peak energy, but it may amount to the same thing, especially since we waited so long to respond.
Just a bunch of nagging problems. Put them all together, and you get a grim picture.
This says carrying capacity is about 2 billion...
CONCLUSION
Clearly, human numbers can not continue to increase indefinitely. Natural resources are already severely limited, and there is emerging evidence that natural forces already starting to control human population numbers through malnutrition and other severe diseases. More than 3 billion people worldwide are already malnourished, and 3 billion are living in poverty; grain production per capita started declining in 1984 and continues to decline; irrigation per capita declined starting in 1978 and continues; arable land per capita declined starting in 1948 and continues; fish production per capita started declining in 1980 and continues; fertilizer supplies essential for food production started declining in 1989 and continues to do so; loss of food to pests has not decreased below 50% since 1990; and pollution of water, air, and land has increased, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of humans suffering from serious, pollution-related diseases (Pimentel et al., 1998a).
Fifty-eight academies of science, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, point out that "Humanity is approaching a crisis point with respect to the interlocking issues" of population, natural resources, and sustainability (NAS, 1994, p. 13). The report points out that science and technology have a limited ability to meet the basic needs of a rapidly growing human population with rapidly increasing per capita demands. Unfortunately, most individuals and government leaders appear unaware, unwilling, or unable to deal with the growing imbalances between human population numbers and the energy and environmental resources that support all life. The interdependence among the availability of life-supporting resources, individual standard of living, the quality of the environment, environmental resource management, and population density are neither acknowledged nor understood. Although we humans have demonstrated effective environmental conservation in certain cases (e.g., water), overall we have a disappointing record in protecting essential resources from over-exploitation in the face of rapidly growing populations (Pimentel and Pimentel, 1996).
dieoff.org
Some say as low as one Bil, some up to 4. But they all agree Miss Lizzie B was a problem type of kid. I suspect we will see a major global die-off in the next 10-25 years.
Cuz it's a small, small, finite, finite world after all.
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