Replies to post #285631 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

SoxFan, top post. i remember that one of Ehrlich's well too. He got his time-frame wrong, but his concerns
re running out of resources and his general position on unsustainable population certainly will always hold.

[migo]

yeah.
Paul Erlich was my intro to "serious world problems".
no one gets all the details exactly right, but big picture, we are on a course by 2050 to need the resources of several planet earths to sustain growth.
is it possible we will begin to see deep sea mining?
asteroid mining?
by 2035 or so?
as i have mentioned, there are looming problems that are not pesky, they are life threatening for humans.
that said, for many humans on this planet, this is no paradise, but hell. that is so because of our need for resources, and if they have them, they are in our way. there livelihoods, and their lives are the price we pay for our lifestyles.
how much tough do we give to our fellow humans?

extinction of species we drive there, and soon, extinction for humankind.


and we bicker about the color of someone's underwear.

[fuagf]

SoxFan, How much of the world's cropland is actually used to grow food?

"When I was in college in the sixties I took a course called Environmental
Biology which was based on the book called the Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich."

One easy way each and every individual can do good for the planet, and good for themselves
and good for their great-great grand children and theirs - cut eating meat to 3 times a week.

By Brad Plumer@[e-mail] Updated Dec 16, 2014, 3:11pm EST

This fascinating map .. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/ .. from National Geographic shows the proportion of the
world's crops that are grown for direct human consumption (in green) versus all the crops that are grown for animal feed or biofuels (in purple):

Crops grown for food (green) versus for animal feed and fuel (purple)


Click to enlarge. (National Geographic)

--
"Just 55% of the world's
crop calories are
directly eaten by
people"
--

Just 55 percent of the world's crop calories are actually eaten directly by people. Another 36 percent is used for animal feed. And the remaining 9 percent goes toward biofuels and other industrial uses. (Those figures come from this paper .. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034015.pdf .. by Emily Cassidy and other researchers at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.)

The proportions are even more striking in the United States, where just 27 percent of crop calories are consumed directly — wheat, say, or fruits and vegetables grown in California. By contrast, more than 67 percent of crops — particularly all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the rest goes to ethanol and other biofuels.

Some of that animal feed eventually becomes food, obviously — but it's a much, much more indirect process. It takes about 100 calories of grain to produce just 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories worth of beef, for instance.

So why does this map matter?

The map itself comes from Jonathan Foley's fascinating, visually rich exploration .. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/ .. in National Geographic of how we can possibly feed everyone as the world's population grows from 7 billion today to 9 billion by mid-century. (Foley directs the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment .. http://environment.umn.edu/ .)

Feeding 9 billion people won't be easy: that's basically like adding two new Indias to the world in the next few decades. And, making matters even trickier, humans have now cultivated most of the world's arable land and are pushing up against the limits of freshwater consumption. So the traditional strategy of "find new farmland to grow more food" is getting even harder.

--
"Feeding 9 billion
people won't be easy"
--

There are lots of possible strategies here. Farmers could increase agricultural productivity by boosting crop yields — either through new farming techniques or through improved crop genetics. But even if the rapid rate of improvement in crop yields over the 20th century continued, that still wouldn't produce enough food for everyone.

Another possibility, as the map above shows, is that the world could devote more existing farmland back to feeding people. Again, as the numbers suggest, just 55 percent of crop calories go directly toward people. The rest goes toward biofuels or animal feed. Humans can't eat biofuels, obviously. And animal feed is also an inefficient way of feeding people — about one-tenth as efficient, on a calorie basis, as eating crops directly.

One implication of that is that, as countries like China and India grow and consume more milk and meat, the pressure on global farmland will grow. But, alternatively, if the world shifted even a small portion of its diet away from resource-intensive meats or grew fewer biofuels, we could wring more food calories out of existing farmland.

There are other strategies too, which Foley details in his piece. Many countries still don't farm as efficiently as they could due to insufficient fertilizer use. And a lot of food still gets wasted, either by consumers or due to poor storage infrastructure. In August 2014, one of Foley's colleagues, Paul West, published a paper .. http://www.vox.com/2014/7/18/5913093/were-not-growing-enough-food-for-everyone-heres-how-to-change-that .. in Science showing that farming tweaks in just a handful of countries could fix a lot of these inefficiencies.

Further reading: How to feed 3 billion extra people — without trashing the planet
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/18/5913093/were-not-growing-enough-food-for-everyone-heres-how-to-change-that

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed

See also:

nlightn
i have heard of Diamandis.
i know that there are many people in the world that aim much higher and toward a sustainable future.
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