6 billion?

Great Debates
41

Ben, you made an excellent point. The dangers of deforestation etc. (the “lungs’ of the planet” pale in comparison to the risks we are running from disease and yes, famine.

Agriculture has become much more intensified and sophisticated, but it has been at the sacrifice of variety and resilience. Much of our food source is genetically engineered now, and that poses a real risk. The crops that are engineered to be extremely productive in relation to land use, resistance to known diseases, etc.have limited the genetic options and made our food supply more fragile.

Overuse is also a constant danger. If you order swordfish in a restaurant, you should know that swordfish are being badly overfished. This is just one example. How many elements can be removed from an ecosystem w/o damage? Add pollution, etc. and we are pissing in our own garden.

But human disease is a real threat. We have “over medicated” known diseases and made ourselves vulnerable to those little beasties that can evolve and adapt at a much quicker pace than we can. AIDS, Ebola, hepatitis—only a decade or so, there were only hepatitis A and B. We are now up around H.

We’re spiritual creatures but we’re physical creatures too. IMO we have not been good stewards of the garden we’ve been given.

Veb

42

I think environmental attitudes like I’ve seen displayed on this board will bear poisonus fruit in the early part of the next century. Silent spring is not far off, folks. tweet tweet

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

43

JJ, don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of ‘raping the environment’. However, I think that most environmentalists (as well as others who espouse ‘causes’) try to attract followers by preaching the ‘greater good’ and lose the more inteligent people because they make outrageous claims. We are NOT ruining the planet and making it uninhabitable - life will certainly go on without humans and most other species alive today. We ARE making the future survival of humans on this planet more precarious, but that’s a different story. Don’t try to tell me that I need to recycle because otherwise I’m contributing to the destruction of life on earth, cause it ain’t so and I know it’s not. That’s nothing but guilt-tripping.

Many environmentalists (and others) get carried away, IMO, and also hurt their cause. Nature is not static - it changes constantly. Species become extinct all of the time, and have throughout history, because of changes in their environment that have nothing to do with humans. Preventing the building of a dam because of 10 little fish in an isolated pool that, because of their low numbers and restricted environment, are going to become extinct soon anyway, is plain ridiculous. Makes me want to go drop a stick of dynamite in the pool and end it all quick. The same goes for telling somebody that they can’t build an addition on their house because it might disturb the kangaroo mice or whatever they are, or claiming the 3-acre low spot in the corner of my pasture is a ‘wetland’ and I can’t drain it to keep the mosquito population down.

Sure, I think humans should strive to have less of a negative impact on the environment. But there’s a basic conflict here - making the world a better place for humans is, in one way or another, going to negatively impact other living things, often in ways we can’t predict, because we are all competing for the same resources.

Heck, the only way to ‘save the world’ from humans and our civilization is for everyone to take a quick drink of the Heaven’s Gate potion and get out of the way.

Too many freaks, not enough circuses.

44

TVeblen wrote:

Um … the “overmedication” we’re accused of has to do with the casual over-prescription of antibiotics, which caused antibiotic-resistant strains of bacterial diseases to develop, e.g. penicllin-resistant tuberculosis. All 3 of the diseases you just mentioned are viral. Antibiotics have no effect on viral diseases. Furthermore, there is no known “medication” for HIV/AIDS or Ebola that can prevent or cure either disease, and the vaccines against Hepatitis A, B and D only became available in this decade.

Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

45

If you look at the U.N’s population projections, you won’t worry as much. They projected three possible scenarios, and two of them have the population of the Earth actually declining in the future. If I recall correctly, the ‘medium variant’ model has the Earth’s population stabilizing by 2100, and the low variant model has it peaking in 2050 and declining thereafter.

Most developed countries are already experiencing below-replacement fertility levels, and would be shrinking in size if not for immigration. Japan may actually see a drop in its standard of living because the population there may shrink rapidly, to the point where there won’t be enough people to provide all the services they are used to. Japan’s problem is that it is an insular society and doesn’t have very high immigration levels. The population there may be cut in half in the next 50 years.

The U.N. low variant model has the world population spiking at 7.7 billion, and declining to 3.6 billion by 2150.

The medium-variant model has the global population growing to around 11 billion by 2100 and stabilizing there or shrinking slightly.

It should be noted though that the medium variant model originally (in 1992) predicted a population of 12 billion in 2100, and they had to revise that figure downwards by over .7 billion just three years later. And, the medium-variant model predicted that the Earth’s population would be 6.5 billion at the turn of the century. They’re going to miss that one by about 400 million, only 5 years after the model created. So it would seem that the low-variant is much more likely.

And, it’s been in the news recently that demographers are realizing that they are going to have to re-evaluate what’s going on once again, because fertility rates are dropping faster than expected, even in the undeveloped countries like India and China. Bangladesh’s fertility rate has been cut in half in just ten years.

The fertility rate in the undeveloped countries as a group has dropped from 6.0 to 3.0 in the last 30 years.

Even if the population did continue to grow, I have a hard time with the gloom-and-doom stuff, since the world standard of living skyrocketed in the last 50 years when the population on Earth increased by 30%.

46

The U.N. low variant model has the world population spiking at 7.7 billion, and declining to 3.6 billion by 2150.

The medium-variant model has the global population growing to around 11 billion by 2100 and stabilizing there or shrinking slightly]]]]hansen

How is all this going to happen? You think the world population will decrease/increase by 50% in that short a time? You don’t see that as catastrophic?

You all have some interesting views on the envirnoment.

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

47

John, think about it. As countries become more modernized, couples generally choose to have fewer children. The old 6 - 9 child families of the past are extraordinarily rare in the U.S., today.

If the overwhelming number of couples have only two children, the population will decrease without catastrophe simply because you need more than two children to maintain a steady population. There are still accidents and childhood diseases to remove kids from the population before they reproduce, teenagers still take reckless chances and die before they can reproduce, a certain number of people are simply going to be infertile, and a certain number of people are going to choose to refrain from having kids. Even allowing for some families continuing to have three or four kids, there will be enough other people who do not contribute a “replacement” human so that the population will decline. This is occurring throughout the first world countries and has begun to occur among the “emerging” nations, as well. There will still be a lot of people, but the population may begin to slowly shrink. No catastrophes or calamities are needed.

Tom~

48

John John writes:

The peak population in the low-growth model, according the U.N. population scenarios is expected around 2040. Given the extreme human lifespan, we would expect a population of zero a bit more than a century later, even in the total absence of catastrophes, unless some children are born in the interim.

It may be that Paul Ehrlich or ZPG is concealing evidence that immortality will be announced tomorrow, and that all of the people around in 2040 will still be around in 2150, but it seems unlikely.

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”

49

There are several reasons why the population will decline. First, the median age is increasing. The rapid increase in population is partially due to the fact that we are living longer, and not necessarily that we are breeding faster. As this trend continues, the average age will increase, and older populations don’t have as many children. In 2020 the largest demographic group in developed countries will be retirees, and children will make up the smallest percentage of the population in recorded history.

If you have a population of six billion, of which 2 billion are children, then you can reasonably expect that in the next generation those two billion will have 3 kids each, and we’ll wind up back at six billion. However, if your six billion people only has one billion kids, you can see that a big population trough is on the way.

The other reason is that birth rates universally decline as countries become wealthier, and worldwide wealth is increasing. In Europe, the natural birthrate is so low that without immigration there would be a complete population meltdown. I think the fertility rate there is something like 1.2 kids per couple, which is less than half of the amount needed for replacement.

I’m not worried about natural resources. All of the main natural resources that we risk running out of (oil, certain minerals) have replacements, and most of those replacements are easily renewable. We have an unlimited supply of minerals in asteroids and other planets, if we could just afford to go get them. And if you project our increase in standard of living, we’ll be able to go and get them long before we run out of stuff here.

50

About a week ago, tymp said, in effect, “If all the people on Earth visited the USA on the same day, we’d have room.” 623 people per square kilometer, to be exact.

My question is, “Who’d have to stand in Death Valley?” Or on the Alaskan tundra? Or in an active volcano in Hawaii? Or in the Everglades? Or the Sonoran Desert? Or any of the other inhospitable environments the USA has? (Inhospitable to humans, anyway.) And how much of our farmland are you willing to sacrifice to provide space? Where my mother lives in Texas, old pastureland is being sold to developers and manufactured homes and mobile homes are going up like weeds. Except for Alaska, I’ll bet that there’s not a square inch of land anywhere in the US that’s not being used by SOMEONE. Even the so-called wilderness is really Federal parkland. And, of course, what farmland we do still have isn’t used properly. Just how much topsoil have we lost in the last century? How much water and grain does it take to feed a cow?

Food for thought…

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana

51

jab1 asks:

Who’s standing there now?

Never mind, I see that you already answered that question.
Funning aside, jab, the entire USA has an inhospitable environment (Hawaii and the southernmore tip of Florida may be exceptions). Try living in it without the aid of technology. No, no, I mean without any of that Iron Age technology, either (you surely didn’t think that those mocassins and that hoe were plucked off of bushes in the wild, did you?).
Survival of human beings in any given place has almost nothing to do with its environment, and everything to do with the tech levels possessed by the would-be inhabitants. Indeed, that Death Valley and the Alaskan tundra are essentially empty of humans now has more to do with laws and not being near a Starbuck’s, than it does with the essential inhospitableness of those places (you might ask yourself how desirable those abandoned pastures near your mother would be if we didn’t have the technology for residential air conditioners).
As for farmland…dirt agriculture is quite possibly the most environmentally destructive technology that humans have ever invented (it’s probably tied with metal smelting; agriculture is less destructive per unit area, but more widespread). When you’re ready to talk about restoring things to the way they were 20,000 years BP, instead of 200 years BP, we’ll talk.

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”

52

My apologies for not responding. I have corneal abrasions in both eyes and cannot read. I have to wear two pairs of sunglasses and use magnifying glass to read. It has not healed in a week. I’ll post when I’m better.

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

53

Heavens! How did your corneas get abrated? Or is too nasty to tell?

54

The first settlers in California starved to death. How many millions are supported there now?

Hong Kong has a population of many millions, in a very high population density, despite having almost no natural resources. And the standard of living there is among the highest in the world.

Right now the Earth is very sparsely populated. From orbit you can hardly see the effect of mankind. If you fly an airplane across North America, you’re going to be flying over mostly unpopulated land.

A couple of years ago I flew my small plane from Edmonton to Denver. Along the whole flight I can scarcely remember seeing much of anything except open, unpopulated land. And that whole area is highly valuable real estate, nothing like Death Valley.

55

Try flying over Kansas. The whole landscape looks like a big patchwork of farms – even from the cruising altitude of a jet airliner.

Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

56

You’re right, I DID answer my own question. But the POINT of that question is that that land should STAY uninhabitable. We need wild lands just as surely as we need homes. We need the sun just as surely as we need air conditioning. And we need farm land just as surely as we need urban land. My point was, if everyone came to the US at once, all that open land would be gone forever.

THEN what would we do?

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana

57

I think you all will pass on the type of polluted, over-populated planet that you will tolerate now. How you miss the fact that clear, drinkable water will be harder to come by with a few billion more people astounds me.

Key to everything is a managable amount of world population that is balanced with nature. Almost every organization states that we are now at a critical amount and to exceed that is dangerous.

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

58

I live in Los Angeles. We get most of our drinking water from elsewhere, either the Sierra Nevadas or the Colorado River. A small amount comes from local wells. We’ve taken so much from the Colorado, that it doesn’t even reach the ocean most of the time. And there was a big dispute over that Sierra water that SEEMS settled now, but these days, it seems like nothing is ever settled. (The movie CHINATOWN, though fictional, tells the story of how L.A. got Sierra water. It was a con job.)

Anyway, everything is related. We pave over more open land, then the water runs off into the ocean instead of percolating into the ground to re-charge the aquifer. Wells go dry, farmland is unused. (Or water is pumped in from elsewhere. See above.) Replace farm with houses, pave over more ground, more water runs into the ocean, ad infinitum. (And did you know that the big farms in the central valley have pumped out so much underground water that they’re now facing salt-water intrusion from the ocean? Did you know that about 90% of all California water goes to agriculture?)

And there are more people coming here and being born here and elsewhere. The only thing to break the cycle is a lower birth rate.

I’m not a father and won’t be one. This is not the primary reason why, but it’s one of the reasons.

Someone’s thinking, “Well, I won’t hurt the world with just two or three children.”

True, you alone won’t do that. Trouble is, there are billions more thinking the exact same thing.

Maybe we should all go vegetarian. Some say that if we were all vegies, there would be enough food for all. As I said earlier, “How much water and grain does it take to raise a cow?” I haven’t gone vegetarian yet, but I’m considering it.

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana

59

Jab1: Have you been paying attention? The U.S. has below-replacement fertilitity rates, and has had them for a long time.

It’s actually possible that there will be a crisis in that the percentage of the world in developed nations will drop dramatically. This would be a crisis because the undeveloped nations depend on us for a lot of things. Perhaps the best thing we in the rich countries could do is breed like rabbits.

60

jab, you seem to laboring under a number of misconceptions.

You say:

Perhaps you should look at the FAOSTAT agriculture database, which shows quite clearly that diet improved in the last decade, both in terms of caloric and protein intake, despite the vile addiction to eating dead animals that many of us have.

Which of course has already occured. Again, I refer you to the 1999 UN population projections, which show this.

I suspect that the key phrase is “coming here”. It is unfortuate that the population control hysteriacs often have two mututally contradictory agendas going; they wish to limit population growth to preserve wilderness, but at the same time seem to object to the movement of people to urban areas, freeing up more land for wilderness.

(Of course, many of them try to define wilderness as some place where the hand of man has never set foot. By this definition, there is no wilderness outside of Antarctica, and hasn’t been for quite some time. The last bit of land that could be described as “temperate” without busting a gut laughing was Iceland, which was environmentally defiled by the ancestors of our favorite trolls over a millennium ago).

Why, yes, L.A. in its natural state is a desert, and ought to have a population of about six. On the one hand, perhaps all of the water should flow, unimpeded and unused, to the Sea of Cortez, and the population of L.A. should be six. On the other hand, I note in passing that you haven’t moved yet.

So, what is your point in noting that most of L.A.'s water comes from elsewhere? Is it that water ought not to be moved more than fifty feet? Or that we, as Americans, enjoy a God-given right to use more than our fair share of resources in trivial, non-productive uses as roaring rivers? Or that people are too busy being NIMBYs and BANANAs to build another Owens Valley aqueduct?

Declare the rest of the world national parks and wilderness areas, probably.

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”