Well, of course there are gigantic oceans in the depth of earth's mantle that contain an infinite number of archaic sturgeons. They have been swimming there since the proterozoic age. As you know, it is from there that the Caspian sturgeon comes, they trickle up from deep sturgeon wells. Indeed, it has been noticed that when there is no fishing activity, sturgeons gradually increase their numbers. This is absolute proof of the existence of abiotic sturgeon.

What is the point of that question? Is that some sort of ham-fisted attempt at denying abiotic oil?

The only reason most people dont believe in abiotic oil is because they've been fed a steady diet of lies about basic geology. If you dont know anything about how the earth was formed, you're probably not going to be able to understand where oil comes from. Or the salt in the oceans. Or evidence that dinosaurs moved in ways not possible under today's gravity.

This is a good place to start understanding:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prkt8attugY

Or you can make jokes and say the earth is flat.

Instead of making jokes and/or clicking the rate down button, perhaps you should take the time to learn how easy it is to propagate a Big Lie, and how incredibly often it happens.

wow- the sturgeon caviar (as opposed to whitefish) starts at $78 per ounce...how much is in an ounce (like how many bites). Hard to drop that kind of cash on something so salty, (but my old partner from Poland was nuts for it)

Or http://www.sterlingcaviar.com if you prefer. You may also want to try caviar from http://www.caviar-sturia.com/ . People are pretty creative in finding substitutes to products as they become more expensive.

Germany's remaining coal supplies are being extracted in a situation where coal is substitutable i.e by NG, Nuclear etc etc. This is the same situation for the US which peaked early and declined under conditions of ready availability of other source primarily ME oil.

You have to look also at the price action to see if the resource was under "stress". I think you will find that German coal never showed a exponential increase in price and was therefore never in short supply in the sense that alternatives resulted in extraction rate matching fairly low pricing pressure.

The US oil production is finally under exponential price stress and I expect that given the extensive use of technology in the US for extraction our current production plateau will undergo a steep decline unlike its historical decline rate where we were extracting increasingly efficiently but without the price pressure.

Indeed we had started with a limited set of data. Then, when we had the whole set we saw that the simple bell curve didn't fit. Life is a continuous improvement.

I greatly doubt that oil production will suddenly plunge as Caspian Sturgeon did because oil from unconventional resources (e.g. tar sands)

But thats not oil. Thats like saying caviar availability didn't go down that much because we can still buy lumpfish and whitefish caviar which isn't as good as the black caviar from caspian sturgeon...Quality was important in caviar and will be in oil.

We're not stupid.
Its just that the evolutionary definition of 'smart' was to maximize current intake of resources. This manifests in what economists call steep discount rates and psychologists call impulsivity and what the market calls this quarters earnings.

I don't think it is stupidity exactly. It is tragedy of the commons. Every fisherman is rewarded for wiping out the Sturgeon population. No fisherman acting alone can restrain enough to save the Sturgeon.

The only possible solution is via some collective action. And collective action is hard to organize because it cuts the short term profitability of those doing the destruction. They buy up politicians and start denier organizations and fund publicity campaigns. And they can afford to do that because they are destroying the resource. Those not destroying the resource, are not making the profits.

Some days I wonder if this class of problem is solvable at all. Evolution seems to have taken the grab now/suffer later strategy. Maybe that is the only one that works long term (is ESS). Quite frustrating.

Catfish are creatures that grow quickly to sexual maturity in stinky shallow warm waters that many creatures would suffocate in.

Sturgeons grow slowly, require DECADES to reach sexual maturity (minimum 20 years), can live for over a hundred years, and prefer deep waters.

Any catfish farmer trying to wait for the big payoff would be bankrupt within 2 years

It would be like raising elephants for their ovaries.

But there is growing concern about the Mississppi River's shovelnose sturgeon now that the Caspian Sea fishery has collapsed.

"Personally I think we will squeeze out a few more years out of the current system, resulting in that sometimes next decade we will face a production cliff, similar to the one shown up there."

Me too, LevinK. More and more as I dig around indicators, evidence, and just plain straws in the wind, from many sources, the year 2012 gives me the willies. So many frighteners pointing towards about then.

I'm not holding my breath.

Misha Glenny rocks - I recently saw a copy of his book on the Balkans on a used bookstore's shelf and I really had to fight to not pick it up for a reread. This sounds like a good one to hunt up ... but I suppose it's too new to be in the $5 bin yet :-(

You just answered your own question. Given the time interval over the peak from about 1975 to 1990 is 15 years and the cycle for sturgeons is 20 years no sturgeon actually reached maturity from 1975 till collapse.

I vaguely recall discussions of the caviar problem at the time of the hot controversies about the extent of the oil finds around Baku. I think that I may have posted on this subject somewhere, possibly Prodigy, Debunkers or the Usenet??

How about Peak cod?
I guess Ugo's approach could demonstrate 'Peak cod' preceding the collapse of the Newfoundland cod stocks and fisheries, with new fishing technology doing it's final bit. The lower trophic level presumably is still in place but the cod show no signs of recovery?
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/cbio/cancod.html
I agree with Luis that biological collapses are not exactly the same as depletion of finite resources, although his example of lichen (in this case the lowest trophic level)comes close. Biological collapse presumably becomes irreversible (a collapse of the Amazon forest might be such a future example?)if it resets ecological parameters and removes the lower trophic level. I guess we are getting closer to modeling the resetting of our industrial ecology with fossil fuel analogous to a biological lower trophic level ?
Other biological collapses are interesting: the 19thC depletion of pine trees in the Scottish Highlands for example, I think, has shown how even the soil seed bank can decay over time in some areas under the resulting new ecology (e.g. sheep and grouse farming). Perhaps human culture might be our equivalent of seed banks?

I am adding (EDIT)QUOTES from the above link.
The whole Canadian fisheries policy has uncanny and instructive parallels with our energy policies it seems to me.

Northern cod ... peaked at just over 800,000 tons by 1968. ... . The "foreign" fishing fleets were banished to the "high seas"... Catches naturally declined after the departure of the foreigners to just 139,000 tonnes in 1978, which is probably the level where the federal government should have capped it then, and left it for many years to recover. Instead, government and investors in fishing were, like the foreigners, thinking big. Soon, the stern factory-trawlers, or draggers as they became known, ... By the mid-1980s, it was the Canadians who were landing more than 250,000 tonnes of northern cod annually. ... Throughout the 1980s, ... hovered around the 250,000 tonnes mark, ... By 1992, the biomass estimate for northern cod was the lowest ever measured. ... [government]had no choice but to declare a ban ... For the first time in 400 years the fishing of northern cod ceased in Newfoundland. ... in 1995 the entire northern cod population had declined to just 1,700 tonnes and showed no sign of recovery ...

Very interesting. Lets hope the oil production curve doesn't look like that. The only way it seems feasible is if we're to have a catastrophic nuclear exchange or pandemic or something.

I do think the curve will be skewed some way towards the right though, and I'm sure the net exports curve will.

I've argued this before and at the heart of the problem is these types of solutions depend on some sort of logistic like behavior.

The mistake is assuming that logistic equations or Gompertz type curves for extraction of a finite resource are directly related to the physical resource like they are in biological systems. They are not !!!

What they are measuring is the demand or extraction pressure on a finite resource by a biological entity i.e man or reindeer. The quantity of the natural resource simply adds a scale factor if your will or sets the units for the system. As long as the rate of exploitation is fast then the ability of the resource to breed or the discovery curve for finite resources is secondary. In particular for oil for example we discovered oil far faster than we could extract it for most of the curve this for all intents and purposes could be treated as either a large population of "oil" that could be extracted or a smaller population with some breeding.

At the end of the day it does not change the dynamics. What causes collapse is that in our attempts to extract or capture a resource is that the goal of the predator us is to capture the same amount of resources this year as last year or more.

The intrinsic driving force is really simple and at its heart its driven by the fact that money is borrowed to accomplish resource exploitation. You have to pay back your loans which you took out based on your ability to either meet or exceed last years performance. We are a predator that cannot live in balance because we have tied our predatory relationship to a financial system based on infinite growth.

Whats breeding is investment dollars the more you make the more you can borrow to make more money. The logistic curve is driven by the rate of investment and is independent of the nature of the resource. As long as you can extract enough to pay back your loans your allowed to continue to extract if you can do better you can grow your operations by taking on more debt.

The logistic curve becomes asymmetric and sensitive to collapse if you can use some of your money to increase the efficiency of your operations esp as the underlying resource depletes. The financial system rewards working harder as a resource becomes scarce by increasing the price of the resource as older methods are unable to meet past performance and elimination of "predators" via bankruptcy and reallocation of extraction resources and rights to the survivors at pennies on the dollar.

Because the curves are measuring how we breed money from natural resources the exact nature of the resource is really not that relevant and I argue that as long as technical advances allow the extraction efficiency to increase that you will eventually fall into a collapse condition as investment cannot overcome the decline of the resource itself. Notice that only at the beginning do investment dollars flow into the system as prices increase once its clear that regardless of how much money you throw at the problem you cannot get more oil the investment dollars dissipate.

In the sturgeon case are any other I think you will see that investment dollars disappeared once it became clear the resource was exhausted.

Its obvious to me at least that this was the driving force since we fished for Sturgeon out of the Caspian sea for thousands of years and the same for Cod in the north sea. Its only when you couple our modern financial systems to resource extraction that you get the classic logistics either symmetric or asymmetric depending on the financial driving force.

To continue to understand better how and why we destroy natural resources you have to understand what we the predator really are. Collectively we are one of natures most efficient killing machines the cannibalistic super predator. Cannibalistic super predators occur when a predator learns how to prey on itself when its normal diet becomes difficult to find. As omnivores we are able to efficiently strip a land of resources then eat ourselves normally in the nature of nearby "tribes" that are different then internally in a group.

This super predator capability allowed us to pillage a land then use ourselves as food as we moved into new lands that had more resources. Natural constraints such as diseases and warfare kept our population in check but we have always destroyed. Overtime this intrinsic predatory cannibalism was redirected to ritual forms such as slavery and finally financial warfare and monetary slavery in the form of debt.

So once you understand the predator its pretty obvious that we can and will collapse our current civilization now that it has reached the limits and a few of use will eventually rule a much poorer civilization that probably adopts more direct and obvious forms of slavery as we simply don't have the resources to use more sophisticated carrot and stick approaches via monetary debt. People only willingly become debt slaves if the resources exist to make their lives "better". Once we are resource constrained and its obvious that most people will be poorer in the future to support the wealthy then we can and will revert to more brutal forms.

This cycle will not stop until we recognize what we are and take drastic steps to evolve away from our super predator heritage.

World oil exploration is taken place globally and not on a constrained territory.

That little blue Earth ball is much more constrained than Easter Island.

cfm in Gray, ME

This is a great example of non-dispersive growth curve.