re: #8 Randall Gross

Here’s a hint: if we can farm at least as well as 16th century Japanese peasants did, then we will have enough food for 12 billion people or more.

Japanese peasants often lived a marginal lifestyle. They were quite a bit smaller than we in the West are today. They were even smaller than the average Japanese today. Many Japanese diets were supplemented by sea food. On top of all of that, the Japanese islands have abundant fresh water supplies because of generous year round rains.

The population of Japan in the 16th century was around 15 million. The northern regions were fairly wild and outside the control of the central government, and these areas depended upon harvesting the sea. The intense farming that came to the Edo region from western Japan helped grow the population in that area when the capitol was moved there. But even then it was a peasant’s life, and again the people were much smaller on average.

This brings up another topic skipped completely by Ellis: dependence upon ocean resources. Many of the most popular sea foods are under serious stress. Most people, like Ellis, ignore the oceans. Yet you raised Japan as an example and here is a case where sea food was an important supplement to the agricultural lifestyle. A diet of rice alone is a very poor one, nutritionally. If we continue to rely on collecting protein from the sea to supplement our diets at the rate we are today we will definitely have an effect on the sea biome, and that is demonstrated today in stocks of our favorite sea food.

So I challenge Ellis to stop fighting the boogeymen of “many scientists” and to describe a timeline of human development over the coming centuries and show how in parallel the ocean and land surfaces will change.