Mil-observer,

My source for arable land per person in Rwanda at the time of the genocide is from the Worldwatch Institute

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update21_printable.htm

The CIA World Factbook also gives arable land figures for the different countries.

If you want to dispute with the UN experts on how much arable land is needed to support a person at current technology or on human nutritional requirements, perhaps you should give us your qualifications. If population is growing rapidly, talk of what technology might be able to do in the distant future is irrelevant. The population of Rwanda tripled between 1950 and 1990, just before the genocide.

I stand corrected about the cull. Hungry people may indeed be in favour of thinning out their neighbours, and there may be a few sociopaths in the West who want it too. I certainly don't, and neither does anyone I know.

Personally, I don't give a damn about the free market or any particular economic or political system. I am concerned about a mass extinction and a civilisational collapse, in which AGW, our current topic, may play a part. In "Collapse", Jared Diamond gives examples of all sorts of societies that saved themselves from a sustainability crisis from the top down or the bottom up.

Divergence, you don't care about politics or economics, only some sort of apocalyptic annihilation. That sounds familiar. Oh yeah, religion.

The Second Law of the Church & Religion of THERMODYNAMICS:

dS=dE/T. Change in entropy=change in energy-rate divided by ambient Temperature.

Human civilisation is a Quasi-Closed Thermodynamic SYSTEM. IE a system that on AVERAGE has a RATE of energy input per population member always slightly increasing or zero. IE a system that has a slightly DECREASING average ENTROPY.

All Quasi-Closed systems, whose EENNTTRROPPYY is slowly INCREASNG due to increased population growth and/or decreasing energy input will rapidly converge towards THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM.

Thermodynamic Equilibrium is defined as maximim disorder, disfunctionality or Chaos for that system.

Such a Thermodynamic Equilibrium can be reversed to a functional system IF & only if internal parameters of the system (such as population numbers) are reduced so that existing average energy inputs are again slightly increasing for that system. Complex systems such as climate and human economics have historically shown they have Quantum Leap mechanisms analogous to population inversions in Laser firings (War & Disease in the case of human civilisations) that automatically QUENCH population numbers in order to resume a lesser sized but perhaps smarter functional system.

Further the above Law holds true for all Quasi Closed Thermodynamic SYSTEMS no matter what religious beliefs their individual population members or components MAY or MAY NOT hold. In fact religions ar irrelevant. It has been historically demonstrated that in the advent of WAR, Church groups are the first to side with Tyrants, to protect themselves from annhiliation.

COROLLARY:
Nations whose governments boost national economic growth by printing money and forcing complex immigration-for-GST schemas will rapidly drive their nations to the Thermodynamic equilibrium of WAR followed by prolonged periods of disease. The leaders of such governments and their religious bliefs will be viewed in history if such history remains in tact, as MONSTERS as a feedback & warning to future civilisations.

Like all Laws of PHYSICS this Second Law of Thermodynamics & all its corollaries are inviolable.

See www.dieoff.org for further information.

Also http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=519607
PS Perhaps Australian political leaders like Rudd & Gillard should take to wearing Moustaches to fit in with their ultimate Historic & thermodynamic realities.

Yes, Divergence, your Rwandan reference is still bizarre: applicable to Bronze Age farming perhaps? And of course the CIA ran with the primitive and simplistic "arable land" concept: agencies like CIA were tasked with overseeing the implementation of Kissinger's paranoid, genocidal NSSM 200-depopulation strategy - and whether CIA hands understood its psychopathic criminal nature or not. Likewise with Worldwatch, a grab-bag of the west's middle-class green hypocrites with dependent imitators from developing countries. Not that they're not "well intentioned"; it's just that they're only really well intentioned for themselves as a special class of "intelligentsia" privileged above the common plods.

Which leads to my next riposte to your claim that "what technology might be able to do in the distant future is irrelevant" in the context of population. I refer not to "the distant future" at all. If developing countries access latest technology for agriculture, irrigation and power, and instead of wasting their resources on the useless and onerous debt of a long-useless, parasitic and imperialistic monetarist system, then their ensuing prosperity will bring stability to their own population.

As I stated on a related OLO thread: "As clear from western and Japanese precedents, prosperity is the great population stabilizer: established urbanization, life expectancy, and enhanced education and work prospects for women, in particular, all reduce people's natural urges to play a "reproductive lottery" of sorts, or try overcoming their wretched condition by a game of percentages via increased offspring" (see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8326&page=0).

And I'm not surprised that you "don't give a damn about the free market or any particular economic or political system". Your comment there just proves that you care for your own subjective interests and whims and not a jot for the common welfare, because you fail to identify the inter-related processes at work. When that happens to us, we can fall under the spell of Frankensteins like neo-Malthusian KAEP and their creepy, apocalyptic dungeon experiments that will ensure the world will never laugh at them again...mwuhahahahah!

SHOULDNT WE AIM TO KEEP PEOPLE IN THE THIRD WORLD WHERE THEY EMIT LESS GAS? Like we are bringing to australia and converting them and making them emit 100 times the gas they would emit. Methinks we should reduce immigration and deport as many people as possible.

fungochumley,

mil-observer and others have been asserting that people like me are motivated by some sort of secret economic or political agenda. We are either secret free marketeers who want to loot the world, or for Libertarians, secret Socialists. I strongly reject any such accusation in my case and that of friends with similar views. The best economic or political system is worthless if people are too dead to enjoy it. It is a second order issue. Birth rates do normally stabilise with prosperity, but the resources simply aren't there to raise everyone out of poverty. See the various environmental footprint sites where they are calculated or the graph on p. 10 of the 7/10/07 New Scientist. It shows that with current technology, it would take the resources of 3 Earths to give everyone a modest European standard of living even with no social inequality.

It is true that Paul Ehrlich and others did not anticipate the success of the Green Revolution, but that does not mean that such collapses don't happen.

Example of a Malthusian collapse: If your soil and climate are really suitable for potatoes, you can feed up to four times as many people to the hectare as with grain. The population of Ireland grew from about 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million in 1848, with most of the increase entirely dependent on two varieties of potato. The Irish may have been aware that they were in a precarious position. Peasant farmers know very well that they need genetic diversity in their crops and livestock. The Andean farmers who domesticated the potato have more than 250 varieties. Population growth was especially fast in Ireland because inheritance customs and colonial laws required land to be divided among all the sons. In the 1840s, the late blight arrived from Mexico and devastated the potato crop. 1 to 1.5 million people starved and 1.5 to 2 million had to emigrate. It is true that Ireland's British colonial masters made matters worse, but hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe too.

Apocalyptic enough for you?