*Food prices have been falling, in real terms, for decades. Show farmers a few dollars and food will come.*

They have, but at a huge cost. Do you know how many clapped out
farms are out there? They need lime, they need all sorts of minerals
which have been screwed out of them for years, to try and make
ends meet. Screw prices lower and lower, as has been the case,
its about survival, not farming. That means mining soils, not
farming them.

So your food production base is degrading year by year. Australia
already has poor soils. Its become a great deal worse in the last
decade or two. Future generations will wear the cost, or those
places simply won't produce much at all.

Good posts, Yabby, and here's hoping that we do everything Julian Cribb wants.

The price of phosphate rock is heading for the stratosphere again. See

http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/phosphate_rock.html

For Curmudgeon's benefit, phosphorus is an essential element for the survival of every life form. You can no more find a substitute than find a substitute for the iron in your blood, although there have been reports that a hot springs bacterium can replace some (not all) of its phosphorus with arsenic. China is one of the biggest producers of phosphate rock, and their government now has a 110% export tariff on it to keep it at home. Why would they do this if they expected enormous reserves to soon be available to reduce the price?

Clownfish,

The Potato Famine was not "extremely limited". Several hundred thousand people starved in the rest of Europe as well, and this was a factor in the revolutions of 1848. Note that human ingenuity didn't save those people. We can probably update the story about Ireland by replacing "Ireland" with "world", striking out references to emigration (no suitable other planets), and replacing "too small to feed the population on anything but potatoes" with "too small to feed the population without added phosphate." The UN FAO food price index is at record levels (above 2008) even now.

You might also take a look at some of the predictions made in science fiction and popular science in the 1940s and 1950s. We can do things they never imagined, but we have no flying cars, robot servants, nuclear power too cheap to meter, bases (let alone colonies) on the Moon or Mars, etc. Most of humanity is still living in poverty, and people are still dying of cancer. We can't regrow amputated limbs, and we certainly don't have so much leisure that we don't know what to do with it. At least back then, mothers of young children could afford to stay home with them and still keep a roof over the family's heads. What happens if the particular advances we need don't come along in time or not at all?

For one thing, phosphorus is an element, and can therefore be recycled. Quite easily from urine, for instance. 'Peak phosphorus' is yet another non-scare from the neo-Malthusians.

The potato famine was indeed extremely limited. Many people in a few places starved, but most people in the world did not. You're committing the same fundamental sophistry as Jared Diamond does in 'Collapse': using examples isolated in geography and time, and falsely extrapolating them to a modern, global society.

Oh, and thank you for proving my point with your reference to science fiction of the past. You could also list another work of science fiction that's almost laughable today: Paul Ehrlich's 'The population bomb'. What a hoot. Some fools took it seriously, but then, some fools take L. Ron Hubbard seriously.

The simple fact is that humans will always surprise us with their ingenuity. Problems that seem insurmountable are solved, often in quite unexpected ways. When the great cities of the world were literally drowning in horse poo over a century ago, who would have predicted that the internal combustion engine would make the problem disappear almost overnight?

Clownfish
Your assertions aren't holding any water, sorry. Sure, we can recycles phosphorus to some extent if we seperate every toilet in the country into liquid and solid wastes and recycle the liquids back onto farmlands. Not sure that's going to happen. With regards to Collapse, it wasn't fiction, it was history - the kind that we can learn from. And the lesson is that when human numbers grow too large for the resources available to sustain them, then civilisations or societies are at risk of collapse. In some cases, it occurs when the numbers are stable but a critical resource disappears, such as water in the SW USA, where a long term drought associated with temporary global cooling drove away the Anasazi people. As for Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, there was an element of fiction in it but based on the science of the day. In the sixties, everything pointed towards global cooling. Paul Ehrlich continues to win prestigious awards - he is held in very high regard by his peers. His body of work - especially in association with his wife Anne - is substantial.

So you agree that phosphorus can be recycled. Quite easily. Urine was but one example, and the ease with which it can be done is shown here: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/07/10/1973803.htm

I didn't say 'Collapse' was fiction, but I did say that it was sophistry, which it is. Its argument is weak in the extreme. Diamond repeatedly mis-used examples of extremely isolated, pre-technological communities, which have no bearing on a highly industrialised, global society.

Even by the science of the day, Ehrlich's book was clearly tendentious, flawed, and, as history has shown, completely and utterly wrong. That Ehrlich is held in high regard by anyone simply illustrates how mediocre and herd-like is the mindset of the neo-Malthusians.

Clownfish
Yes, I agree some phosphorus can be recycled but at what cost in energy terms? We're about to enter an energy constrained future and recycling phosphorus is going to add to food costs in a big way.
'Collapse' may have been about pre-industrial societies but the same principles apply: if you have too many people for the resources available and if the biosphere cannot absorb all our wastes (as with greenhouse gas emissions now), then you set up conditions for collapse. And there are a number of countries on the point of, or past, collapse now. Look at Somalia and Yemen. Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, will run out of water within five years and desalination is not an option because it is too far inland.
As for Ehrlich, you clearly haven't read his subsequent books. As a neo-Malthusian, I'm happy to be associated with them, and indeed, him.