I am also excited to see work on such an important, neglected topic.
While I haven’t looked into this much, I feel fairly convinced that hundreds of thousands or millions of people could survive using traditional approaches to agriculture in parts of the world with more moderate climate effects (and basic mitigation strategies, like switching to crop types that are more resilient to temperature and precipitation fluctuations).
ALLFED has indeed found a number of cool tolerant crops that could likely grow in nuclear winter conditions in the tropics. However, they are generally planted far away from the tropics, so if there were not long distance cooperation, the situation would be bad. Even without long distance cooperation, artifacts have moved thousands of kilometers, but I think it takes thousands of years. One possibility would be relocating crops from nearby mountains, but that would only work in specific circumstances.
On the other hand, there could be long distance movement of people, perhaps with remaining above ground fossil fuel and current ships. But then places where agriculture is easier in nuclear winter such as Oceania could be overwhelmed with migrants.
The carrying capacity of the Earth for hunter-gatherers is thought to be around 10 million if the survivors regress to pre-paleolithic levels of technology (if they lose, for example, flakes, handaxes, controlled use of fire, and wooden spears) (Taiz, 2013).
It appears that this is not the correct reference for that quote. Taiz says that the global population was 10 million in 8,000 BC and another one of your references said that by then the hunter gatherers had covered the globe and had 10 million population (some say only 1 million) and they would generally have had those pre-paleolithic technologies. Ellis says 100 million hunter gatherers would be possible with prehistoric technology, which is much higher than the actual population in 8,000 BC (though it would be consistent with your statement).
Several experts, including ALLFED director David Denkenberger, have affirmed this conclusion — they do not expect humanity to dip below the minimum viable population even in relatively extreme sun-blocking scenarios.
To be clear, I don’t expect it, but I think extinction is a non-negligible probability.
Before getting into the likelihood that society would recover from civilizational collapse under these starting conditions, I’ll briefly discuss whether we should expect human civilization to actually collapse in my sense in this scenario.
I am also excited to see work on such an important, neglected topic.
ALLFED has indeed found a number of cool tolerant crops that could likely grow in nuclear winter conditions in the tropics. However, they are generally planted far away from the tropics, so if there were not long distance cooperation, the situation would be bad. Even without long distance cooperation, artifacts have moved thousands of kilometers, but I think it takes thousands of years. One possibility would be relocating crops from nearby mountains, but that would only work in specific circumstances.
On the other hand, there could be long distance movement of people, perhaps with remaining above ground fossil fuel and current ships. But then places where agriculture is easier in nuclear winter such as Oceania could be overwhelmed with migrants.
It appears that this is not the correct reference for that quote. Taiz says that the global population was 10 million in 8,000 BC and another one of your references said that by then the hunter gatherers had covered the globe and had 10 million population (some say only 1 million) and they would generally have had those pre-paleolithic technologies. Ellis says 100 million hunter gatherers would be possible with prehistoric technology, which is much higher than the actual population in 8,000 BC (though it would be consistent with your statement).
To be clear, I don’t expect it, but I think extinction is a non-negligible probability.
Doesn’t appear to be public?