Just speed-read my way through the comments, to most of which I'd say "amen." Except of course that anyone who thinks the world can support a population of several billion without fossil fuels had better be getting a new calculator for Christmas.
And as for the old saw that "it's not a problem of amount of food, but of distribution," again it's a mistake in arithmetic. If person A has a whole lunch, and person B has no lunch, then "re-distributing" simply means that both people have half a lunch. i.e., nothing is fundamentally solved.
However, ladies and gentlemen, what is needed for this "famine" topic that I've attempted to broach is A GOOD MATHEMATICIAN, A GOOD DEMOGRAPHER, AND A GOOD HISTORIAN. My posting was full of enormous errors, which nobody caught. The same is true of my follow-up, "Peak-Oil Doomsday," at Countercurrents. But the apparent data are truly grim, horrifying, and the more I go over them, the more it seems that the "die-off" will be a lot harder and a lot faster than even good old Jay Hanson imagined. According to my Excel program, population and oil-depletion result in a "cliff," not a "slope." Anyone who wants a copy of the Excel files is welcome to them. So volunteers are needed for the research. The pay is lousy, but it's a pleasant working environment.
--- Peter
Peak Oil and Famine: 4 Billion Deaths
Moderator: Peak Moderation
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Peter Goodchild
- Posts: 29
- Joined: 28 Sep 2007, 09:43
- Location: Irondale, Ontario
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Hello Peter,
I quite agree with your analogy of our current energy dependence on a single fossil fuel - oil for almost all transport needs, with that of the potato in Ireland. Of course other things, like apples and pomegranates, grew in the emerald isle back then, but potato was the commodity that greased the wheel for everything else, including the harvesting of said apples and pomegranates.
I quite agree with your analogy of our current energy dependence on a single fossil fuel - oil for almost all transport needs, with that of the potato in Ireland. Of course other things, like apples and pomegranates, grew in the emerald isle back then, but potato was the commodity that greased the wheel for everything else, including the harvesting of said apples and pomegranates.
"The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy" - David Price.
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biffvernon
- Posts: 18538
- Joined: 24 Nov 2005, 11:09
- Location: Lincolnshire
- Contact:
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Peter Goodchild
- Posts: 29
- Joined: 28 Sep 2007, 09:43
- Location: Irondale, Ontario
- Contact:
What needs to be looked at:
(1) My figures don?t take into account the factor of famine-induced sterility. How would that change the outcome?
(2) In ?Peak-Oil Doomsday,? I forgot (for complicated reasons) to mention the biggest of them all: China, 1958-61. There were 30 million deaths, plus another 30 million losses due to famine-induced sterility and other forms of termination.
(3) A bigger possible error: I had not tried backdating any of the figures. If the figures, as presented, are correct, then we should be able to backdate and come up with famine figures for 2006, 2005, etc. I know there were famines in Africa at the time, but I don?t think they were in the 5-figure range, and I don?t know if they can be tied to oil depletion, even indirectly.
If calculations alone don?t come up with large famine figures for those previous years, then (a) the whole equation is completely nuts, or (b) there were no large famines in those years because peak oil wasn?t until 2006 or whatever ? but it?s surely not credible that suddenly we start 2008 with megadeaths that weren?t there before. Even to me, the mathematics looks pretty shaky.
(4) My own adolescent-level mathematics needs to be replaced with something else. I don?t even know what. My guess would be algebra, but it could be statistical analysis, or even calculus. I have no idea.
(5) How does the whole set of figures compare with those of Paul Chefurka, who almost simultaneously came up with a somewhat similar figure (actually 7 billion) for famine deaths, but who used a completely different mathematical approach (which I can?t quite grasp)? He?s at www.chefurka.ca.
The basic data (of oil-production and of population), thank God, is pretty much ?public domain,? and in this year of 2007 we peak-oil doomsters don?t have haggle over it with the oil companies or the carpetbaggers (sorry, politicians). The bubbly CERA report, however, conflicts utterly with the parent company?s (BP?s) other oil forecasts ? Wikipedia has an excellent analysis of it. Too bad about CERA, since they basically took over Petroconsultants, who used to produce the ?bible.? And so on and so forth.
And with a pontifical two fingers (no, not the other kind) I leave you, so I can get back to remodeling my chicken coop.
? Peter
(1) My figures don?t take into account the factor of famine-induced sterility. How would that change the outcome?
(2) In ?Peak-Oil Doomsday,? I forgot (for complicated reasons) to mention the biggest of them all: China, 1958-61. There were 30 million deaths, plus another 30 million losses due to famine-induced sterility and other forms of termination.
(3) A bigger possible error: I had not tried backdating any of the figures. If the figures, as presented, are correct, then we should be able to backdate and come up with famine figures for 2006, 2005, etc. I know there were famines in Africa at the time, but I don?t think they were in the 5-figure range, and I don?t know if they can be tied to oil depletion, even indirectly.
If calculations alone don?t come up with large famine figures for those previous years, then (a) the whole equation is completely nuts, or (b) there were no large famines in those years because peak oil wasn?t until 2006 or whatever ? but it?s surely not credible that suddenly we start 2008 with megadeaths that weren?t there before. Even to me, the mathematics looks pretty shaky.
(4) My own adolescent-level mathematics needs to be replaced with something else. I don?t even know what. My guess would be algebra, but it could be statistical analysis, or even calculus. I have no idea.
(5) How does the whole set of figures compare with those of Paul Chefurka, who almost simultaneously came up with a somewhat similar figure (actually 7 billion) for famine deaths, but who used a completely different mathematical approach (which I can?t quite grasp)? He?s at www.chefurka.ca.
The basic data (of oil-production and of population), thank God, is pretty much ?public domain,? and in this year of 2007 we peak-oil doomsters don?t have haggle over it with the oil companies or the carpetbaggers (sorry, politicians). The bubbly CERA report, however, conflicts utterly with the parent company?s (BP?s) other oil forecasts ? Wikipedia has an excellent analysis of it. Too bad about CERA, since they basically took over Petroconsultants, who used to produce the ?bible.? And so on and so forth.
And with a pontifical two fingers (no, not the other kind) I leave you, so I can get back to remodeling my chicken coop.
? Peter