Children.

[Blake]

You seem to be confusing Priceguy with me,

My apologies.

I also need a clear definition of the terms you would like to use.

These aren’t terms I would like to use, These are mostly terms that you have been misusing. I introduced a couple, but most of them you have been misusing willy nilly, and now you admit you don’t even know what they mean?

What does “maximum sustainable carrying capacity” mean?

Carrying capacity from ‘Dictionary of Ecology’, Random House, 1989

“The maximum number of individuals of a defined species that a given environment can support over the long term. The notion of limits is fundamental to the concept of carrying capacity. However, our limited understanding of complex, non-linear systems leads to uncertainty in calculating carrying capacity in relation to humans. Some argue that the concept is meaningless as free market conditions and technological innovation can extend limits indefinitely.”

What does “population capacity” mean?

You introduced the term, how about you tell us in what way you used it? I personally thought it was fairly obvious.

OED

population2
2. a. ‘The state of a country with respect to numbers of people’ (J.); the degree in which a place is populated or inhabited; hence, the total number of persons inhabiting a country, town, or other area; the body of inhabitants.

capacity

1. a. Ability to receive or contain; holding power.

What does “bust period” mean?

Outbreak-crash dynamics from ‘Dictionary of Ecology’, Random House, 1989

…These populations typically exhibit unstable growth curves with exponential growth regularly interspersed with dramatic declines due to disturbance or overexploitation. Also referred to as boom and bust cycles.

What does “population cap” mean?

You’ve already defined this. I’m happy with the definition you’ve provided.

That you can just throw out numbers willy nilly without documentation to back them up and think we wont hold you to them because you said “will almost certainly be” instead of “will”?

Please show me one number that I have thrown out without references supporting it? If you can do so I will cheerfully and rapidly provide a reference. As I said above, I always provide cites when requested, which is more than you have managed.

if you proved both the premises, and the argument follows logically from those premises, then the conclusion is valid regardless of intention.

Except that I never proved anything. I stated what maybe. Nothing has been proved and nothing can be proved.

I take it form this that you are gong to cling to your outright dishonest misrepresentation of what I said?

Well, the FAO reports deal pretty exclusively with the last ten years.

So you don’t have access to the required information to support your position. And that makes your position more tenable does it?

I think I know where the quote on the Forest Information site came from.

Yes, the FAO. The FAO report it comes form is referenced their and the same report with exactly the same figure showing exactly the same increase is referenced at the Planetark website.

I’m guessing that some creative individual took the numbers from 1948 and compared them to the numbers from 2000.

You are wrong. The FAO published reports annually. I have access ot the total figures from those reports. That is where those figures come for. As I ponted out above, 1993 was an abnormally low year. The upward trend has been consistent since 1960.

Let me guess, you read this in Skeptical Environmentalist?

I have already provided my references. I have read it on the forest products website and the Planetark website. Why are you now telling me I obtained that information elsewhere? This is a blatant red herring. If you have cause to suspect the FAO figures or either Planetark or Forestproducts, then say so. This comment is meaningless and misleading.

Doesn’t seem to follow from the information on the FAO site. Perhaps you have a better cite?

Yes, I have the original data from the FAO reports, I have the FAO publication stating that there is an increase. Please provide a cit for our decrease figures. Bear in mind I have already pointed out that 1991-1995 are abnormal years and an invalid reference point.

Scientific American considers Bjorn a crackpot.

Ahh well, that’s good enough for me. They thnk he’s a crackpot.
Fortunately science doesn’t work that way, neither does logic or valid argument. Only ignorance operates by declaring someone a crackpot an then preventing them form responding.

You can not base a [sustainable] capacity using [depleting] resources.

Why not? If I deplete all the world’s oil tomorrow but have alternatives available with which to replace it, why can’t I base a sustainable carrying capacity figure on that usage?

A resource is defined however one cares to define it.

No, it isn’t. A resource is either renewable or non-renewable based on whether we use it up faster than it can replenish.

Please explain how the renewable status or otherwise of a resource in ny ay affects whether it meets the definition of a resource?

This is getting really confusing now. I can’t even see where you are going with this. You start out declaring how resoources are defined, I provide a definition and now you are saying that definition it is incorrect because of something about renewable.You really have to clarify what you are saying here. I can happily use most definitions, but you have to give me some hint of what the bloody relevance of any of this is.

That was priceguy, genius.

Please cease these ad hominems. One more direct insult like this and I will report the post to the moderators. This behaviour is unacceptable.

[Blake]

Tell you what, Blake. Since I, if this is true, have been falsely informed for my entire life, if you provide a cite for this (and explain, for my education, where the oxygen does come from if not from the rainforests), you can consider this discussion won. You can even put it in your sig.

Well I wouldn’t put it in a sig, but you have indeed been misled.

The forest as an oxygen source is a popular myth perpetrated by the environmental industry.

http://www.edie.net/gf.cfm?L=left_frame.html&R=http://www.edie.net/news/Archive/5505.cfm
“A study of long term data from the Amazon rainforest has put into question the use of the region as a carbon sink under the Kyoto Protocol, with the forests even acting as a carbon source during some periods.”

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-2.1/broecker.htm
“Furthermore, the Earth’s forests do not play a dominant role in maintaining O2 reserves, because they consume just as much of this gas as they produce. In the tropics, ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic O2 product. Only a tiny fraction of the organic matter they produce accumulates in swamps and soils or is carried down the rivers for burial on the sea floor.”

Trees don’t produce oxygen out of nothing. They make it by destroying water. The hydrogen from the water is then combined with CO2 to produce sugars. The sugars have weight and sequester carbon. For a tree to be producing oxygen it would need to also be sequestering carbon and putting in weight. The same would need to be true for a group of trees. Of course the Amazon isn’t sequestering carbon, and it isn’t putting on weight. If it were it would be getting infinitely big, which is impossible. A tree produces oxygen while it is growing, then when it dies it decays and either decays or burns, both of which consume exactly the same amount of oxygen as was originally produced. Of course in a mature forest the number of trees growing averages out with the number of trees rotting.

This is all available in any high school biology text. Autotrophs can’t produce oxygen without also producing sugar, and they can’t produce sugar without consuming carbon and water and putting on weight.
As for where the oxygen comes from, that’s a long story that involves a lot of geology and is too much for a biologist to handle. I suggest you ask over in GQ. The refernce above provides the following response: “Just how O2 came into being remains a mystery. The most likely explanation is that water molecules that wandered to the outer edges of the atmosphere were knocked apart by ultraviolet rays from the Sun. The light hydrogen atoms were able to evaporate to space, while the much heavier oxygen atoms were bound to Earth by gravity and mated with the reduced sulfur and carbon exposed at the Earth’s surface.”
The first oxygen came from the rocks or atmospheric gasses as a result of chemical reactions.
Then once the first photosynthetic bacteria appeared they began producing lots of oxygen/sequestering carbon (they are two sides of the same process). Much of the carbon has become part of carbon pools including forests but mostly as soil carbon and oceanic ooze. The carbon in these pools still decay and consume oxygen, but so long as there is as much entering as leaving we will retain oxygen in the atmosphere.
The other bigger source of oxygen has been the effect of the rocks themselves. Some rocks sequester carbon dioxide, which alters the oxygen balance in our favour. Still other rocks such as limestone are actually formed by living things, and are physically made of he carbon that they sequestered in life. This has tied up a lot of carbon dioxide and quite a bit of oxygen in the process.
Mature trees don’t produce any oxygen today. In fact nothing much produces oxygen today, the system is more or less in balance. What little oxygen is being produced is being doe by algae. In point of fact the oxygen balance is so strongly in the black ATM that if every single photosynthetic organism on the planet were killed off it would decrease oxygen levels in the atmosphere by an almost immeasurable amount any time I the next million years or so. Only after the forests, and soil carbon and oceanic ooze had completely decayed and volcanoes had oxidised the existing atmospheric oxygen would we start seeing a fall. Organisms were responsible for producing most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but geological processes are largely responsible for maintaining it.

So, are you willing to concede the debate?

[Drabble]

don’t have time to read all the posts, but I believe a lot of our breathable oxygen comes from the small plant creatures (phytoplankton) in the ocean…the ones that live near the surface of the water.

But that is being threatened by polllution and such

One reason that the ocean is essential to plants and animals on land is because the tiny ocean plants called phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into oxygen during photosynthesis. Those ocean plants produce more than half of Earth’s oxygen. In the process, they remove carbon dioxide (one of the greenhouse gases that contributes to global climate change) from the air.

http://www.kidsnet.org/seaweb/pto_earth.html

[Drabble]

And if you don’t have trees/plants recycling oxygen back into the air…then you’ll have less breathable oxygen available…right?

[tracer]

*Originally posted by tastycorn *
**For more information, see The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - http://www.vhemt.org/ **

Please tell me those guys aren’t serious.

They must be aware that the people who don’t join their Movement are the ones who are going to have children, and pass on their dislike of said Movement to their children…

[Drabble]

*Originally posted by tracer *
**Please tell me those guys aren’t serious.

They must be aware that the people who don’t join their Movement are the ones who are going to have children, and pass on their dislike of said Movement to their children… **

Lmao!!! I love that! Even if they’re serious…it’s funny! Don’t tell me you have never thought of it yourself…LOL!!!

[Blake]

No Drabble. It’s understandable that you didn’t read my last long winded post. The relevant part is

“Mature trees don’t produce any oxygen today. In fact nothing much produces oxygen today, the system is more or less in balance. What little oxygen is being produced is being done by algae. In point of fact the oxygen balance is so strongly in the black ATM that if every single photosynthetic organism on the planet were killed off it would decrease oxygen levels in the atmosphere by an almost immeasurable amount any time in the next million years or so.”
The global oxygen cycle is far more complex than I can understand, but living organisms are an insignifiant part of the total pools.

If you don’t have trees etc. then it may, just possibly, be technically correct to say that you have less oxygen. But only in the same way that putting a penny on the railroad tracks means the US economy has less value. The difference is so small it may well be immeasurable.

With no trees/plants at all you would never notice difference in breathable oxygen. A very sensitive machine just might.

[tastycorn]

Blake

Since you have refused to cite anything more than unsubstantiated quotes and discredited quasi-scientists, and have offered up minimal research to back up most of your claims, I am officially backing out of this meaningless exchange. It’s sad, in a way. The optimist in me really wanted to see some hard data behind your arguments. When you believe what I believe, any good news is welcome, regardless of the source.

For the rest if the readers of this thread, my point is simple. The world does not need any more people. In my opinion, we have quite a few too many as it is. The easiest and most painless way to reduce to population is to reduce the birth rate.

Tracer
Yep, they’re serious. Funny as hell, but serious.

[Blake]

Yes, we all know the FAO is a ‘discredited quasi-scientist’. As is

As for my claims, I only made one: that Tastycorn’s assertion that humans are theiving organsims lving out of harmony with the environemnt is a load of old cobblers, base don emotive rhetoric and myths.

I think we’ve esatblished that pretty clearly.

[Teelo]

Cripes, I am so sorry for my absence for the last…3 pages.

The Straight Dope E-mailer thingy decided to remind me of this thread about 30 minutes ago.

I totally forgot I made it, and if it had the decency to e-mail me sooner I would of been happy to respond.

K, to clarify, yes tastycorn was right, I am 16, male, virgin, and of course, Not sterilized.

Well sadly, around half way through the second page, I just had to stop reading. It was tooooo much and toooo long!
And frankly its mostly its just the same arguments back and forth, right?
I’m glad to see you arent arguing, but debating which is really nice to see that immature asshole responses are not here.
Good for the post count, eh?

Anyways, for now I still say No to having children.
Thanks for opininons, etc. I’m still thinking. Even discussed this topic with my mom.

But we’ll see.

[tastycorn]

Tastycorn’s assertion that humans are theiving organsims lving out of harmony with the environemnt

Again, that was Priceguy, genius.

btw, the above is not ad hominem. I was not trying to say that your argument was invalid because you are an idiot. The above is known as sarcasm, implying that you are either not a genius, or hopelessly confused