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Show THE FUTURE: Energy, Population, Pollution The Murfin Compu ter Model of 1600-3000 A.D. By Lance Christie, Association for the Iree of Life You may remember the famous "Club of Rome" computer projections done in the late 1960’s and early 1970's. These reported the work of Forrestal, who predicted world population would hit six billion in 2000, with the increase slowing to zero percent in the next thirty years, then crashing to one billion in 2060-70 because of deaths from increasing pollution and decreasing energy resources. Forrestal and his cohorts initialized their computer model on the year 1800 A.D. Special interest critics who did not like the calls from the model for limiting population and pollution pointed out technical problems with the model, eventually discrediting its use to published The Nemesis Effect by Chris Bright, which looks at the synergistic threats when the stresses of climate change, habitat destruction, bioinvasions, and biogenetic accidents combine and Overlap. There may be three" escape clauses" in the Murfin model. One was identified by Murfin: stop the increase in pollution levels. The second is hidden in the assumption by his model that energy production and use patterns supporting our civilization would not change, and that the energy’ deficit in food production and distribution would not change. In 1980, I can see why he did not see any possibility for inform public policy. Walter Murfin of Sandia National Laboratories built a new model by 1974, correcting the shortcomings in Forrestal’s, and initializing his model on the year 1600. The model proved exceedingly robust. It replicated Forrestal’s general findings: with six billion people in 2000, and a declining rate of population increase worldwide; both predictions now proved true. By 2030 a majority of people will be weakened by inadequate diet and pollution and running out of energy to such an extent that population will rapidly crash, with roughly eight out of every ten people alive in 2030 dead by 2060. According to Murfin’s model, only if we stabilize pollution at its level in 2010, and raise world energy output from 300 to 3000 quads per year by 2050 (a quad is ten to the fifteenth power British Thermal Units of energy), then world population does not'crash but instead stabilizes at seven billion and remains there for the 1,000 years the model can project.with any reliability.The importance of energy to population survival is largely due to the fact that, in the United States, we expend 1.5 calories of energy to produce one calorie of food on the table of the consumer. The calorie of food comes from solar energy fixed by photosynthesis into chemical bonds in organic matter. The expenditure of energy comes from using fossil fuels for fertilizers and pesticides, for traction on the farm, and to-move and process the food once harvested. There is also "embodied energy” in the manufactured items used to produce, process, store, handle, and move food. Scientific American published a set of articles in July, 1998, which demonstrated that the era of "cheap oil” will be over circa 2010. Oil will not suddenly become unavailable, but it will increase tenfold and then more in price due to high demand relative to supply and increasing costs of recovery. Oil is the source of most of that 1.5 calories of energy used to deliver one calorie of food to your table. Grid electric power from nuclear or other power plants is not easily substituted for petroleum in our current food production system. In the meanwhile, the Worldwatch Institute’s Who Will Feed China? estimates that China will need to import increasing amounts of food each year for the indefinite future for a variety of reasons, including increasing population and loss of farmland to urbanization and highway construction. China will have sufficient foreign exchange surpluses to outbid the rest of the world for the food they need. Other nations are losing cropland also to erosion, urbanization, salinization, etc.; and shortages of water are spreading. Because global warming is producing greater weather variability, with more extreme and frequent floods, droughts, etc., crop production is likely to become more uncertain in the temperate zones. The Worldwatch Institute documented that world per capita production of grain, fish, and other food started to decline in the 1990's. The trend lines appear to be accelerating. The era of "cheap food" is also drawing to an end. As John Muir noted, Sacre is hitched to everything else. The Worldwatch Institute says “The 21st century will be the Century of the Unexpected." They As John Muir noted, everything is hitched to everything else. The Worldwatch Institute says “The 2lst Century will be the Century of the unexpected." alternatives. Since then, effective :echnologies and techniques for sustainable energy and food production have emerged. If widely applied, these would put a large dent in the energy demand equation. Organic cultural techniques have progressed rapidly in the last twenty years. In some crops, organic producers can already out-produce chemical input farmers on every measure: yield per acre, cost per unit of production, percent of crop lost to pests or disease; and the food generally tastes better and has more nutritive value. The European Economic Union has been paying farmers a subsidy to covert to certified organic production since 1989. When the cost of fertilizers and pesticides goes up tenfold, we are likely to see mass abandonment of chemical-input agriculture. When the cost of transportation goes up tenfold, we will see a lot more emphasis on local MT. PEALE Open Mon-Sat: 9am-7pm Sunday: 12:30pm-Gpm RESORT INN & JPA To the man who owns a hammer, ever oblem Need something??? looks like We have it all right here... a nail. 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