Happy Halloween

Lots of press lately about the fact that Earth's human population is projected to reach 7 billion this week, as in this New Yorker piece by Elizabeth Kolbert. She notes that the projected day is tomorrow, Halloween. Yes, it's scary, so the timing seems appropriate.

More scary than the population number, however, is research mentioned by Kolbert that corn and soybean crop yields are projected to decline significantly by the end of this century. In other words, our food supply may not keep up with population growth, which is expected to continue rising: 8 billion in 2025, 10 billion in 2100, and still climbing.

I found the crop yield article, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. Kolbert picked the worst-case number from the study. But even under a less-bad climate change scenario, corn and soybean yields in the U.S. are projected to drop 30 percent.

I'm not going to fault Kolbert for picking the bigger number. Evidence is beginning to emerge that even the worst-case scenarios in the climate change models are starting to show signs that they are underestimating what's really going on (more on that at a future date).

The message -- however you slice the numbers -- is that we're about to drive the wheels off the family minivan. Somehow, we need to reconcile how we're growing as a species (population) and how we intend to feed that population.