Peak oil, peak food, peak population

I ran across a couple of interesting posts in the last few days. This one:

According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are now chronically hungry.

From Hungry World: A Silent Crisis Calls for Urgent Action

and also:

Fresh population projections put the number of humans over seven billion in 2011, just 12 years after humanity passed the six billion mark.

From A Billion Teenagers, for Better or Worse

Now, there is good reason to think that the world is at peak oil. There is also good reason to think the world is at peak food right now. [I'm not going to go find the quotes, I shall just assert it for the purposes of this thought experiment.]

Given peak food, that implies that food to feed the 200 million or so new people to be born in the next 2 years will come from that being eaten by those already here. Most likely, it will come from those who are already poor, so that people who are now getting by barely will move into the category of hunger. [The world population now is about 6.8 billion.]

Just for the heck of it, let me assume that each new person represents two new hungry person -- the person just born & someone else who moves from having just enough food to not eating enough.

This would mean that the 200 million new people added in the next two years means 400 million more hungry people -- or 200 million more each year.

Thus, in 2011, we would expect to have 1.4 billion hungry, or about 20% of the world population. In 2016, another 5 years, there would be 7.5 billion people, of which 1.9 billion would be hungry, or about 25%. By 2018, we would be looking at something on the order of 30%.

People who are hungry tend to be angry, quarrelsome, scared and all sorts of unpleasant things like that, and arguably for good reason. I think that when the percent of hunger gets into the 30% and climbing range we are going to see widespread conflict.

Scientific goverment

A decisionmaker may make decision x, thinking it will produce effect X, Nature. cats its vote -- nature decrees that decision produces effect Y, totally different and possibly quite undesirable.

The problem here could be described as a disconect between the model the descison maker is using and the relevant reality.

It doesn't matter if the decision makers in question are dictators, monarchs, an oligarchy, a democracy or a group of clowns standing on their heads. In principal, any of these could make decisons that have the expected effect or not (though if the clowns make good decisions, it might be surprising, since I doubt they would have much attention to put to the task). In general, it is more likely to make a decision that produces the desired outcome if the mental model behind it is sufficiently accurate.

A case in point is the discussion on the health care reform which is being proposed. Krugman makes a cogent argument why it is needed, which makes sense. Other people just say "This would cost money" and want it to fail:

The much-feared Obama healthcare initiative seems to be stalled. Markets are relieved, because this initiative, as it was presented, amounted to a huge transfer payment that would be funded by future tax increases.

Personally, I think Krugman is making all kinds of sense and is right (leaving aside Malthus). However, my point here is that Krugman has a meaningful economic model he is using, while David Kotok seems to be parroting the conservative line, which seems to basically consist of "we don't like it, so it is bad".

I am coming to the conclusion that we would be far better off being governed by some kind of scientific process, one that in effect, consults the natural world on the effect of decisions rather than prejudice and preference only.

Questions of value are not answerable by scientific processes, these must continue to be decided by people. However, the question of how to implement policies that produce the outcomes that are valued can meaningfully have scientific inputs, which if followed have a hope of leaving we the people better off.

Scientific models can only go so far and they are of limited accuracy, of course. However, with research and feedback they can be improved.

Energy bottleneck?

I was reading Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (which I recommend as interesting, at least to those interested in complex systems and/or biology).

Along the way, when he was talking about the evolution of plants and the way that chloroplasts manufacture plant material and energy from sunlight, he said something to the effect that when we figure out just a few more details, we'll have the solution to the energy crisis.

This points up something interesting. The commentators on energy seem to fall into these main groups:

1. There isn't any problem, what peak oil? And anyway, if oil gets scarce, we'll invent something else.
   
2.  OMG, oil is running out and we are all doomed. We must give up driving, water in bottles and all sorts of extravagance to survive. Everyone should sit in sackcloth and ashes and do penance for the sins of the recent past.
   

So far as I can tell, each of these has a hold of some part of the elephant for their facts. Peak oil is real and in the short run, it is going to be of great importance and produce a huge bottleneck. The world has a huge amount of infrastructure that is tied to oil and, even more important, it has no alternative that is able to bridge the gap over the next decade or so. That is, there isn't any other source available that could inject enough energy into the system to replace the oil shortfall. Even if there were, the existing infrastructure could probably not manage an alternative form -- e.g. there is no way to power 18-wheeler trucks on electricity, even if there were a distribution system to deliver from, say, a wind farm, to them.

However, there is lots of energy that is potentially available and, given the resources, people are able to figure out technology to extract it from our environment and make it useful. Artificial chloroplasts are one idea, solar thermal is another. Wind power, solar panels, whatever. It can be done, but there is a form of activation energy, as it were, that is needed to develop such systems and build the infrastructure. It is apparent that this won't happen until peak oil is staring us in the face, and then it will take time to develop and deploy them.

Thus, there is a bottleneck in energy availability, which is coinciding with a time in which the population growth rate combined with population size is producing a rapid increase in absolute population size -- hence "interesting times".

Constraints

It seems to me that when people put on their thinking hats and start devising ideas of how political life should be organized, they act almost as if human nature and human society are tabula rasa, something they can form into any shape they want.

In fact, there is every reason to think that both human nature and human social organization have deep internal structure. While it is certainly admirable to set goals to organize them into ways that will be good for all the inhabitants, these goals can only be met if the methods, the structures that are set up, work according to the rules of human and social nature.

At a practical level, we don't know what these natural laws are and we must have some structure. However, it seems to me that this should be a very active field of research, with much input from mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, biologists, evolutionary theorists and people of that nature that study complex systems. In our complex social world, we have only the faintest understanding of what effect any action will have at a macro level. Doing experiments on the real system is dangerous, plus there are a very limited number of scenarios that can be explored.

Epidemics

The virulence of pathogens is related to how quickly they can move from one host to another. The more quickly they jump, the more virulent they are.

In the 3rd world, so I am told, the population density is high and the sanitation is low. Why don't they have epidemics? They do have endemic disease -- malaria, TB and so on. They don't have the reruns of the black death. Why not?

I now have a guess at an answer. Having high population densities and poor sanitation doesn't by itself mean that pathogens move quickly from one host to the next. It is the job of the immune system to protect the individual against invasion, with endemic disease, the immune systems have had a chance to develop defenses against the prevailing diseases going around. Some people will get sick, sure, but many will not and the velocity will still be fairly low, low enough to keep the virulence in check.

It follows, then, that if a novel disease, one that immune systems are not familiar with, were to get loose, then an epidemic could follow. This could be caused by evolution, some new disease evolves from the existing ones (e.g. the new flu) or it could be caused by population movement, diseases that are endemic in one area moving to a new area in which they are unfamiliar.

This might be how the plague developed in the 14th century. I read, if I remember correctly, that one of the things that happened in the early 14th century was increased trade between Europe and the far east. It is fairly well agreed that the plague came from the east, perhaps it became an epidemic due to increased population densities (making transmittal easier) and having a novel pathogen introduced from some distance away.

An imaginary future

I read recently that in Pakistan, about 20% of the population is hungry -- presumably as defined by the UN, which is less than 1800 calories/day for an adult. The population growth rate is is 1.99% (according to google just now). That implies that they'll add on the order of 3 million people a year (starting from 150 million, again from google).

It is reasonable to think that peak oil happened last year & that peak food will happen at about the same time. In all probability, as the world population grows, richer countries (and people) will get more food while poorer countries get less.

Thus, as a first approximation (and this post is in hugely round numbers) let us assume that as the population of Pakistan grows over the next few years, the amount of food available to the country stays constant. Also, the new people get fed something, which takes food away from people already there. Another wild approximation -- each new person added means that an existing one moves from adequate nutrition to being underfed.

By that logic, Pakistan will add 15 million people in the next 5 years and another 15 million people will move to being underfed, taking the percent of the population that are hungry to about 36% (60 million out of 165 million).

When enough of the population is malnourished, society is likely to become unstable. The options are famine, civil war or external war or some combination of these. The most politically popular is likely to be external war, by the logic that someone is going to die, but better them than us.

What are Pakistan's options for external war? Going against India may be attractive, but perhaps suicidal. Also, India is crowded with people, as is China. There isn't a lot of room for Pakistanis to move in and set up shop. Afghanistan is already seen as part of themselves. Iran has lots of people and is ethnically Persian, plus it's on the bad side of the US - a possiblity. Then there are the northern 'stans ... Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhastan. These areas are lightly settled and the al Quada doctrine says they should be "liberated". The problem, of course, is that Russia would object.

Suppose they do decide to go north. They cut a deal with India, that Pakistan will quit fighting with India over Kashmir if India will support them in moving against the central Asian states. They cut a deal with China, that it can have part of Russia and/or Kazakhastan if China helps them out against Russia.

So, now there is Pakistan, India & China, moving into central Asia. Russia objects & the US and Europe back them up. Saudia Arabia backs the US and the government is overthrown, then the new one comes in on the Asian side (giving Asia lots of oil at the expense of the west). Africa & the rest of Asia, except Japan & Australia (western side) come in one the Asian side. It's the West against the East ...

Aux barricades

Ethnic Uighurs waited with sticks behind a barricade in their neighborhood in Urumqi on Wednesday.

It's 1848 again, or something like that.