re: #73 Rightwingconspirator

In that time we went from 6 billion to 7 billion people roughly. Has anyone ever run the numbers to see what size population the ecosphere could deal with? Just for perspective as in “we are 14 times beyond the ecological population limit with these emission levels” or whatever the number would be.

That is a difficult question to answer.

If global warming were stopped, and everyone was limited to an average of 2000 calories a day, and we maximally utilized all of our land and sea resources in a sustainable way, you can calculate based on the amount of sunlight coming into the earth and the amounts of energy we can get for food from from it, that the max is around 18- 20 billion. Energy is after all conserved.

However,

That assumes that the oceans don’t acidify and there aren’t massive marine die offs (there are) that we don’t destroy our breadbaskets - we are, and that the food is equally distributed.

With climate change, more and more, we will not be able to support our current population.