New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin has launched a new “dot earth” blot with an entry about population that draws on the work of the Program for the Human Environment about implosion and explosion published in the journal article “Human Population Dynamics Revisited with the Logistic Model: How Much Can Be Modeled and Predicted?”

Abstract
Decrease or growth of population comes from the interplay of death and birth (and locally, migration). We revive the logistic model, which was tested and found wanting in early-20th-century studies of aggregate human populations, and apply it instead to life expectancy (death) and fertility (birth), the key factors totaling population. For death, once an individual has legally entered society, the logistic portrays the situation crisply. Human life expectancy is reaching the culmination of a two-hundred year-process that forestalls death until about 80 for men and the mid-80’s for women. No breakthroughs in longevity are in sight unless genetic engineering comes to help. For birth, the logistic covers quantitatively its actual morphology. However, because we have not been able to model this essential parameter in a predictive way over long periods, we cannot say whether the future of human population is runaway growth or slow implosion. Thus, we revisit the logistic analysis of aggregate human numbers. From a niche point of view, resources are the limits to numbers, and access to resources depends on technologies. The logistic makes clear that for homo faber, the limits to numbers keep shifting. These moving edges may most confound forecasting the long-run size of humanity.

The current madness for biofuels has raised again the question of the proper hydrogen-to-carbon ratio to use to index wood and other biomass against other fuels. We offer a note on the proper H:C ratio for wood.

The Richard Lounsbery Foundation sponsored a new survey of political attitudes of American professors by Neil Gross (Harvard) and Solon Simmons (George Mason U.).  Jesse offered opening remarks on behalf of Lounsbery at a lively symposium on “Professors and Their Politics” 6 October 2007 at Harvard to review and discuss the findings of the survey.  Journalist Scott Jaschik provides and excellent account of the survey and symposium in Inside Higher Education.

The movement to create a library of DNA barcodes for plants, animals, and fungi began with the Cold Spring Harbor Banbury meeting that Jesse Ausubel and Mark Stoeckle helped organize in 2003. During the 17-21 September 2007 the Consortium for the Barcode of Life convened its 2nd International Conference in Taipei along with meetings of working groups concerned with fish, all forms of marine life, plants, fungi, regional initiatives, and techniques. The progress, reported in a press release and covered in The Economist and also recounted in Mark’s Blog, is thrilling. The happy mood of the exciting conference shows in the photo of attendees. Thanks to Kwang-Tsao Shao (Academia Sinica), David Schindel (Consortium for the Barcode of Life), Karen Armstrong (New Zealand, chair of conference program committee), and many others for making a great success.