Posted on 11/26/2012 8:51:24 PM PST by Lorianne
Last year, legendary investor Jeremy Grantham of GMO published a treatise on exploding commodity prices.
He also offered a startlingly depressing outlook for the future of humanity.
Grantham believes the world has undergone a permanent "paradigm shift" in which the number of people on Earth has finally and permanently outstripped the planet's ability to support us.
The phenomenon of ever-more humans using a finite supply of natural resources cannot continue forever, Grantham says--and the prices of metals, hydrocarbons (oil), and food are now beginning to reflect that.
Grantham believes that the planet can only sustainably support about 1.5 billion humans, versus the 7 billion on Earth right now (heading to 10-12 billion). For all of history except the last 200 years, the human population has been controlled via the limits of the food supply. Grantham thinks that, eventually, the same force will come into play again.
The hope of the optimists, of course, is that science will find a solution to this problem, the way it has for the past 150 years.
Let's hope so.
In the meantime, here's a snapshot of Grantham's argument, along with his key points at the end.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Paging Robert Malthus, please come to the white courtesy telephone.
See Malthus.
When resources run out, we find other solutions. Every single time.
At least the disaster will be of Biblical proportions. I'd hate to just be wiped out by something as mundane as the 1917-18 flu epidemic.
/johnny
No, commodity prices are beginning to reflect the infinite supply of banknotes (they just keep printing more....). It's called inflation.
No problemo. Our ‘lord and savior’ Zero says he’ll lower the Earth’s temperature and ocean levels.
/johnny
(More people die of cold than excess warm). When it's warm, we use fewer resources to survive and flourish.
Pretty much the same argument as Peak Oil which did not include man’s ability to adapt and create new technologies to make use of oil not deposited in traditional oil fields.
It may come some day but it is hundreds of years off and by then necessity will have been the mother of invention once again and we will have new forms of energy etc.
Mel
They’ve been saying this since the 60s.
Enough already.
It always winds up with the populace of Western nations being urged to become celibate while the third world multiplies like jack rabbits on a sex sabbatical.
When it becomes necessary, the traditional population controls will kick in: War, famine and disease.
And also assuming we know with rigorous, reproducible scientific experiment how oil is formed within the earth. What do we know about that process, really? Like Global Warming, we have unproven theories accepted as fact, with significant peer reviews (i.e. circle-fest) supporting this presumed conclusion.
When resources run out, we find other solutions. Every single time.
Like the Easter Islander’s did?
“The phenomenon of ever-more humans using a finite supply of natural resources cannot continue forever”
We have, literally, only scratched the surface.
Ever see the Larson cartoon of two guys fishing and there are several nuclear mushroom clouds in the background, caption, “You know what this means? Screw the limits!” You and me bud.
I guess that would explain why we are paying people not to work.
some people would rather just sit there and itch, than scratch
And we don't know where the East Islanders went when they used up their resources.
Humankind, as a whole, has found solutions, every single time.
/johnny
Yes!
And how about Haiti? And we are mowing down the worlds forests at an ever increasing rate,,,even though they create the oxygen we need. But what the hell, once the forests are gone along with oxygen, we will find other “solutions,” right? We are a fundamentally insane species.
Unlike Global Warming, however, we've been using these models for over a century to explore for oil, and they work.
The Global Warmists are hard pressed to get next week's weather right, much less any long term climate predictions. Recall how we'd all be burning up by now? (The planet hasn't warmed for over a decade.)
Never fear, the carbon dioxide glut is coaxing up more forests to take the place of what is being harvested. And algae too, everything green.
We’re not resticted to a small island, or even this planet.
The Earth is an island, and yes, we are restricted to it. The human race moving to another planet after we have destroyed this one is science fiction. Not going to happen.
Compare and contrast.
More O2 comes from single cell organisms than comes from trees.
There are more trees in the US now than there were in the Civil War. The number of trees in the US climbs every year.
Governments tend to be the problem when humans are dying.
BTW, where does the oxygen 'go'?
Are we transporting it off planet? It's still right here on mother earth.
/johnny
Some feel the globe is a fragile accident of... what? fate? chance?
Some believe God made the globe and was no dummy, that He made it capable of standing up to whatever would be thrown at it, because there’s a story with an end He has already written.
In fact, there are commercial ventures already invested in the millions of dollars to do just that.
/johnny
Deforestation is actually slowing down.
Yep... peoples have a certain amount of freedom to make small locales into hell holes if they insist.
I hear some folks may actually have successfully designed a warp drive design, and after the Great Civil War some rocket geeks will snag an old rocket and take it for a spin proving it to be a working design.
Next thing we know some interstellar species will drop in with ideas of expanding their tourism trade to other planets.
Since so far we have been nothing more than copycatting ultra evolved primates who still cannot have proper elections these other planetary folks have been just laughing their asses off watching us.
the sooner we get our shit together and eradicate, yes I mean eradicate these social assbackwardism everyone seems so fond then we can get off this over capacity rock and head elsewhere.
Asteroids might be a fascinating place to get precious metals from, but I don’t believe that space will need mining for the “bread and butter stuff” before the Story ends due to factors that we can’t control.
If you could, you’d find you couldn’t escape sin that way.
Life isn't a zero sum game. Some folks don't want to do the work to understand that.
Math is hard, for some. ;)
/johnny
When you're 400% wrong... admit it already!
This guy must have Al Gore Syndrome.
The world will give them a hand, but it gets awful tired of handouts that don’t result in any progress.
lol...That was the first thing that popped into my head, too.
Yay Soylent Green!
One wonders what the land of China would have looked like if colonized by people who had the mindset of the pilgrims to America. Instead of a thin overcrowded band on its coast, the place would be crisscrossed with highways and railroads from east to west.
But people need CHON. And that's pretty much it. We have plenty here on earth, if we want to develop it.
Heck, the planet crust is about 15% Al. That's a LOT of beer cans.
But there's lots of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen available in the local system, should we need it.
/johnny
Damn. I was just thinking of how cool it would be to pack up the entire human race and boogie to Venus after leaving this dump in smoldering, radioactive ruins. That wasn’t what you meant?!?
Except that there will be an End, and that the description seems to suggest that until some outright supernatural punishments are wrought, the globe will have stood up mighty well.
Even as we speak Captain Sir Elton John and an intrepid rear admiral are planning a trip to Uranus hoping to root out mineral rich assterrhoids which would ... this isn’t going anywhere.
Never mind.
More sensible to mine Venus for resources (with high temperature robots, to be sure — resurgence of thermionic tube technology anybody?) than to try to move there. Unless maybe the sun decides to shrink.
I ain't cooking for 'em.
I'll stay here in this dump that isn't smouldering or radioactive (today).
I've seen rivers on fire in my childhood. It was ugly.
Today, the air is cleaner, animal populations are increasing, hunting is getting better to the point that Texas has a problem with feral hogs.
I think I'll stay here, and snag some resources from the solar system if required. ;)
/johnny
Well there goes my time-share.
/johnny
What a load of crap!
And after all, if the oracle says people will be partying right up to the finish, that doesn’t suggest something intolerably horrible is going to beset before that point. I like a lot of the astrological/cosmological ideas of Hugh Ross, http://www.reasons.org even if some of his projections seem a little too tidily tied up with ribbons. (I will cheerfully confess to being an old-earth creationist, though.) Modern science, when not driven by selective agendas that give us stuff like modern global-warmism, keeps succeeding in revealing more and more what a wonder it is that we inhabit.
It is not 7 billion people, most of whom live in abject poverty anyway, it is the few tens of millions in developed nations that are killing their economies with a mountain of debt and socialist governments.
We have peaked. Our leaders lack the will to do anything but buy votes out of the public treasury. We start wars, but for all of our might we can't seem to convincingly win them. The barbarians will only attack more frequently now, and our response will be ever more lethargic.
The disaster will be of our own making. Whatever external event will just be the background.
People who use the phrase, “ biblical proportion” probably haven’t read the bible much.
That DOES seem to suggest acts of God more than acts of man...!
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