The fate of humanity

As a friend of the blog asks, will there really be 10 billion humans alive in 2050? Well, maybe not.First of all, can we feed that many people? Right now 50% of the habitable surface area of the earth is dedicated to agriculture.There is no way we can afford to cut down any more forest, which will just accelerate climate change -- but we ' re doing it anyway. Nevertheless, there ' s hardly any room left.Actually, we would have run out of food a long time ago, except for a development called the Green Revolution, which greatly increased crop yields using technology. Unfortunately a big part of that technology is based on fossil fuels, for making nitrogen fertilizer, traction and so on.Blogger won ' t let me show you any more graphics today, so we ' ll leave the story here and pick it up tomorrow. There ' s a problem of water, which is synergistic with climate change, and a great many more complications.
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs