Advanced industrial civilization will collapse by 2100

1. Industrial Civilization is Doomed The population of the earth has been growing rapidly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1804, the global human population reached 1 billion. It took only 123 years for that to double. It took 32 more years for the population to reach 3 billion, and then 15 years for the next billion, and 13, and then 12. (. https://www.pbs.org...) From this graph it appears that the population began increasing very rapidly around 1950, right after WWII:(. https://ourworldindata.org...) After the war, major nitrate plants that had been creating nitrates for explosives using a fossil-fuel-intensive process called nitrogen fixation shifted to fertilizer production. The use of chemical fertilizers and the ability to mass-produce them allowed for industrialized farming on an unprecedented scale. (. https://www.motherjones.com...) This industrial farming, coupled with advances in medicine, is what is responsible for this massive population. As mentioned above, nitrate fixation is a heat-intensive, and therefore resource-intensive process. The most commonly used process for industrial fertilizer production is the Haber process (. https://en.wikipedia.org...) which uses natural gas. The Haber process has been described as the main catalyst for population explosion:. http://vaclavsmil.com... If the nitrogen fixation process is seen as the breakthrough that allowed population to take off, that means it is also the process that sustainsthe global population. Population increases whenever there is an increase in human carrying capacity--like with the birth of agriculture, the use of iron tools, the invention of firearms that allowed Europeans to build overseas empires that fed massive population growth at home, and finally the use of fossil fuels that allowed for industrialization and enormous increases in agricultural production. If we have made the continued growth or maintenance of the global population dependent on massive industrial farming, and the fertilizers that keep the industrial farms running are entirely dependent on an abundance of fossil fuels like natural gas, then there is a problem. These resources that prop up our global population are finite. Someday--be it tomorrow, in fifty years, or five hundred--their extraction will peak. It may not collapse sharply after that, as peak oil theorists believe, but it will peak, and it will start to go down. Eventually, these resources will be being extracted at such a slow rate (due to dwindling reserves) that they will no longer be able to support the enormous demands of industrial-scale agriculture, and the agriculture industry will collapse--and with it, the global population. The global human population is living on borrowed time. Carrying capacity is defined as "the maximum, equilibrium number of organisms of a particular species that can be supported indefinitely in a given environment. " ( . http://www.dictionary.com...;) The key word here is "indefinitely. " If a species' population is dependent on the rapid drawdown of resources that will not renew themselves within several lifetimes or even millions of years (in the case of fossil fuels) that species is exceeding its carrying capacity, and a crash is inevitable. Humans have found a way to "escape", for a time, the limitations of global human carrying capacity. We have done this through the extensive use of fossil fuels in our agriculture and industry. We have propped up our population on the use of resources that are in no way renewable. Fossil fuels took millions of years to form and deposit and they will take millions of years to regenerate once we have depleted them. They cannot support our population indefinitely, so any increase in population that relies on them is an overshoot of carrying capacity--and any overshoot in capacity will always lead to collapse. We have decided to use nonrenewable resources to fuel extreme population growth and have therefore doomed ourselves to collapse. Increasing Pressures on Population and Governments I have (hopefully) shown that the collapse of industrial civilization is inevitable--but not that it will necessarily happen any time soon. However, there are certain global trends that could aggravate the effects of resource depletion, or further decrease the ability of the human population to sustain itself in the short term. In this section I will attempt to prove that these converging trends will cause collapse by 2100. ----------------------------- The climate is changing due to human activity. 97% of scientists agree (. https://climate.nasa.gov...). I don't expect this to be a major point of contention, so I'll move on to its effects. a. Refugees As the climate warms, sea level will rise and periods of drought will increase and become more severe. Deserts will expand and farmable land will dramatically contract, especially in places that are already at constant risk of drought, like sub-Saharan Africa. Africa especially will feel these effects because so many people rely on subsistence farming to survive. Beyond even subsistence farming, Africa has a comparatively enormous farming economy—60% of jobs on the whole continent are in agriculture (. https://www.brookings.edu... ). Droughts are already starting to become more common in Africa, and people (and aid organizations) are beginning to feel the stress brought on by climate change: (. https://www.nytimes.com... ). As this process continues, a massive flow of refugees will be forced out of Africa and other impoverished, drought-stricken areas and into Europe, as we have seen with the current refugee crisis, and into Asia. Because such a huge part of Africa’s economy is agriculture, if African agriculture collapses we will likely see millions of economic migrants in addition to people fleeing drought, famine, or war. Projections for the influx of climate refugees range from 25 million to 1 billion, and the most commonly accepted number is 200 million (. https://reliefweb.int... ). For context, the size of the current Syrian refugee crisis is estimated to be about five million (. https://en.wikipedia.org... ) --the refugee crisis that, at 1/40th of the projected climate refugees, is destabilizing European countries. Climate change will also increase the number of armed conflicts in already unstable areas, since climate disasters have been shown to increase conflict in ethnically divided areas like Africa and the Middle East (. https://www.theguardian.com...) It's important to note that global food supply lanes are restricted to 14 global chokepoints, many in politically unstable areas, like the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Strait of Bab al-Mandab (. https://www.theguardian.com...). As these areas become more and more unstable, both through native climate conflicts and a massive influx of refugees, these chokepoints could be cut off, causing famines in import-reliant countries in much of Africa as well as richer countries like Japan or South Korea. All of these areas will be becoming more import-reliant for food, as they are impacted by drought, and if food supply was severed severe population collapse could occur. b. Water IssuesAs the world warms, clean water will get more and more scarce. As the recent, barely-averted water crisis in Cape Town shows (. https://en.wikipedia.org...), large cities are incredibly reliant on their reservoirs for water. As population increases, and as the trend towards urbanization continues, more and more people will be reliant on these dwindling resources. The UN projects large water shortages and shortcomings in water distribution, especially in poor countries, by 2050 (. https://news.un.org...). American cities are not safe either. Phoenix, Arizona is predicted to become unlivable by 2050--only 32 years from now--due to a combination of drought and heat (. https://www.vice.com...) that will cause the city to need 3.2 million acre-feet of water--5 times what Los Angeles uses in a year--in 2050. And this will not be an isolated incident. All across Africa, Southern Asia, and the desert areas of the US, cities will suffer these crises--and thousands or millions of people will likely be pushed out of the cities--and away from the industry that is in them. This will cause the "far more simplified technological and economic practices" in the definition of collapse above. Unfortunately, I'm nearly out of characters. I could talk about dead zones in the oceans, changing current patterns, social decay, sea level rise--10,000 characters is really not enough to do this topic justice. I believe I have shown that one or more of the collapse criteria above will likely occur by 2100. Over to Con for the rebuttal :)