What needs to be understood is "over-population" is a conclusion reached through analysis of the number of predators to the number of prey. (Using "predators" and "prey" in an abstract sense.) Climate change is a systematic variant (changeable) first directly lowering prey, e.g., global wheat production, which follows through to stressing and then lowering predator population. Typically in these scenarios the predator population crashes below objective conditions for the predator population. The typical run of events:
Unfortunately, there is another canonical scenario where the rate of predation is above the rate of prey population renewal and the prey goes extinct. This seems to have happened with the mastodon; humans over-predated the species to extinction; I note Climate Change was also affective in this scenario. Something similar is happening with oil/human "predation."
If you will.
But you also have to note that we as a predator have already exhausted pretty much all of the available prey (the Grand Banks fishery was problably the last truly abundant source) and are thus no longer following that progression. We've learned that once we clean out an existing ecosystem, we then have to create our own dedicated (and grossly over-simplified) ecosystem as a replacement. We're still working the bugs out of this one.
I find it illuminating to use, e.g., "we are predating oil to scarcity along an exponential growth curve," as an analytical heuristic. Thinking along these lines it becomes immediately apparent if the replacement rate of the prey (oil) is below predation (extraction) rate systematic use of the prey (oil) MUST, at some point, change the "ecology," or Fitness Landscape, necessarily leading to a change in consumption patterns of the predators (Actors) to accommodate lowering availability of the prey. This change in consumption patterns changes the predation rate, which changes the Fitness Landscape, changing the predation rate, & round and round we go.
There is more that fall out of the heuristic, I'll only mention one: emergent behaviors, and everything that EB drags along, are inherent. This is in sharp contrast to NCE where EB, e.g., "Black Swans," are always a surprise.
imagine that the red line in the chart is humanity and the black line its renewable resource base.
