The · Bureau · of · Iskandran · Prediction · and · Diversion

I'm recording this for later analysis. [Ultimately, I want a functional population dynamics model. Multiple aspects of the science fantasy depend on it.]

Mirror sources: PeakOilNews/Alternet.

Turn off the gas, and a lot of American families would have a hard time cooking dinner -- but a lot of families in places like Nepal and Guatemala would have nothing to cook.

.....

A world of 6.4 billion people, on the way to 9 billion or more, needs more protein than the planet's croplands can generate from biologically provided nitrogen. Our species has become as physically dependent on industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer as it is on soil, sunshine and water. And that means we're hooked on natural gas.

Or other cheap energy/base stocks for nitrogen fixation, etc. Technically, natural gas (methane) is a renewable resource — not only can it be harvested from the sewer system, agriculture has elevated its atmospheric level above geological normal for the past five thousand years or so. This shows not only directly (ice cores), but in a greenhouse effect that is indirectly observable by comparing estimated temperatures with one ice age cycle back.

Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba and author of the 2004 book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, has demonstrated the global food system's startling degree of dependence on nitrogen fertilization. Using simple math -- the kind you can do in your head if there's no calculator handy -- Smil showed that 40 percent of the protein in human bodies, planet-wide, would not exist without the application of synthetic nitrogen to crops during most of the 20th century.

That means that without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer, about 2.5 billion people out of today's world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed.

While these numbers need fact-checking, I'm willing to bet they're a gross overestimate; the actual population limit should be much closer to pre-industrialization normal (~1.25 billion?).