Actually if you take the climate scenario in conjunction with the looming crisis for phosphate supplies, the future looks very bleak.  Sorry to be a harbinger of doom and gloom, but what happens when we can no longer produce fertiliser doesn't bear thinking about. Without inorganic fertiliser, crop yields plummet, and with 6.9 billion people on earth and counting, I wouldn't like to be around 40 years from now.

http://sei-international.org/index.php/news-and-media/1618-the-looming-crisis-fo...

Quote:



May you live in interesting times indeed.

There is no alternative to inorganic fertilisers if we want to maintain the current population base.

Basically we need N (nitrogen), P (Phosphorus) and K (Potassium) plus a heap of trace elements. The P supplies are  the bottleneck.

There are some plants that thrive in low P environments - most Australian species for a start. That's because P species are very insoluble in water, so in the absence of a lot of water, it's not possible to maintain higher P levels.

It's all very nice to say that we'll all buy organically grown food and be good hippies. The problem is that if we suddently stopped producing high yield crops, something like 50% of the world's population would die from starvation as a result.

It's like piling more and more people in a bus and driving the engine harder and harder. Eventually something's got to give.

Peak Phospohorus is a pretty mainstream idea. It's floating around  in most Fertiliser manufacturers' boardrooms as an impending crisis of gigantic proportions.

There is just no viable alternative. The cost of phosphorus has gone up 700% due to increased demand/ dwindling supply.

Yeah - Lignite as a fertiliser and petrochemical substitute - I think there was an article in the Science Show about it a couple of weeks ago. It made perfect sense.

mozzaok wrote on Dec 7^th, 2009 at 12:39pm:


Well in the long term - no. In the short term, people have a fairly long life-span. Even if we started tomorrow, your one child policy might work by 40-50 years or so, but what can we do in the meantime? - because it's that imminent. We're talking about a P peak about 2030.

I already worked out the economics of using bullets   and there just aren't enough munitions factories in the world to do it, and not enough guns.  (it's my dark humour - ok?)  Maybe we should subsidise people to be gay LOL.

So either way, we're going to have to settle this business as humanely as possible. Allowing 3 Billion people to starve to death is not very humane either.