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[mainiac]

The Haber Bosch bottleneck was a problem 100 years ago.  It's not a problem anymore.  We could make ammonia in other ways.  We don't because fossil fuels are cheaper.  But it's not like we'd starve or go back to pre-green revolution farming techniques.  We'd just use green energy to get nitrogen out of the air.  And we will have a long time to do this.  Natural gas deposits abundant enough for cheap power generation will last for decades.  Deposits cheap enough for ammonia production will last even longer.

[GlyphGryph]

Do you actually have any information contradicting this that I don't?

I already told you, Haber-Bosch. Our agricultural yields are tied directly to it.

I looked into that, and not using it seems to indicate that, at most, we'd lose a third of our yield. That's a LOT of food, a 50% increase in crop yields, and obviously economically attractive - but we have the ability to make a lot of food, a lot more than we are now, but the demand is so low the government pays people not to. No one would starve (assuming the poor still receive government assistance), it's just that more of our economy would be directed to pushing money through foodstuffs than now.

Do you have any actual predictions that would indicate we wouldn't be able to grow enough food to feed our current population? Cause Haber-Bosch aint it.

[SalmonGod]

I'm personally more worried about global destruction of biodiversity and over-pollution.  We're already on a pretty well-defined course to killing everything in the oceans with rising acidity and plastics.

[Lord Shonus]

Or reprocess it from waste. The Plant-Meat-Shit-Plant cycle is normally a closed one. Modern sewage treatment has opened it along with bringing massive sanitation benefits, but there's no reason that it cannot be reclosed with technology. Likewise, wasted nitrates and phosphates from fertilizer runoff can be reprocessed from streams and rivers, or recycled from any of a number of forms of industrial waste.

Quite a lot of our crop yield is currently lost to spoilage or run through non-food processes such as distillation for fuel. Even more is used for "luxury" foods such as alcohol, sweets, or cow fodder. Further, the cotton industry uses a massively disproportionate amount of fertlizer as opposed to food crops. It's questonable whether a 1/3 drop in output would even be difficult to manage, assuming you had the political muscle to buck the cotton lobby.

Pollution is a serious issue, but recycling (or the outright ban on plastic packaging that I've always supported) would greatly reduce the problem.

[GlyphGryph]

Kind of a separate issue, though. I'm sure if we reduce our population, we'll just see that as an opportunity to pollute more somehow...

Anyway, if we ever get really desperate, I'll imagine algae-farming will take off big time. It's hugely efficient energy-wise, if not exactly tasty.

[SalmonGod]

Even if we stopped producing plastics now, we have already produced enough to get the job done.  The problem with plastics is that it all ends up in the ocean.  All of it.  Unless drastic measures are taken to specifically capture and permanently retain all plastic waste, it will all eventually photo-degrade to microscopic levels and be washed into the oceans.

[Shadowlord]

Human population will likely crash on its own as a result of water stress and farmland becoming non-arable as a result of climate change, before we ever run out of fossil fuels (as the prices go up, it becomes economical to extract sources which were previously uneconomical). At this point there is a substantial amount of warming locked in, along with the consequent changes to weather patterns and climate that will come with it. Right now most everyone ignores the already high death rates in many of the third-world countries - considering it either not their problem, or that there's really nothing they can do to stop it, as well as ignoring the future deaths to come. You can't drive blindly for long without hitting something, though.

I doubt there's any way to convince everyone in the world, or even most of the world, to go along with any kind of population reduction program, and few people would choose voluntary sterilization at a young age. Also, forced sterilization is a terrible thing to suggest, and that whole line of thought is a slippery slope to looking in the mirror and seeing Hitler staring back.

[Godwin intentional.]

[Duuvian]

I think we ought to look up, instead of look down to forced sterilization.

[Scelly9]

I think we ought to look up, instead of look down to forced sterilization.

Mind explaining your rational on that?

[SalmonGod]

At this point there is a substantial amount of warming locked in, along with the consequent changes to weather patterns and climate that will come with it.

Yarr... I recently saw a headline stating that the number of methane leaks counted in the arctic is up in the thousands.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The warming isn't necessarily locked in. There is evidence to suggest that putting sulfates into the atmosphere will directly counteract the C02 and leave Earth colder.

[SalmonGod]

It's locked in in the sense that positive feedback systems will ensure warming continues whether we continue to directly contribute to it or not.  We're at the stage where it will happen unless we take drastic measures to counteract it, and "evidence to suggest X might work" is not very comforting in these circumstances.

[Nadaka]

 ItHuman population is likely to plateau around 10 billion without any catastrophy. All we really need is a way to produce enough clean energy to bring the rest of the worlds population up to a semi western standard of of living.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's locked in in the sense that positive feedback systems will ensure warming continues whether we continue to directly contribute to it or not.  We're at the stage where it will happen unless we take drastic measures to counteract it, and "evidence to suggest X might work" is not very comforting in these circumstances.

We have some time before the situation reaches criticality. By "some evidence" I mean that we know for a fact that reflective sulfates will cool down the planet. The problem is that we'd have to be very careful about how much was deployed and where, or it won't stabilize and will just spiral further out of control.

We also don't really know what that much sulfate could do to plant life.

[Rose]

Just don't go and use the wrong fix before understanding the implications of it, like with killing the wolves in yellowstone or stopping all forest fires.