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 ...
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.
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