Climate change and overpopulation.

Great Debates
1

If there are those that actually believe climate change is caused by people and is not a naturally occuring cycle, as it has been ever since the world came into being billions of years before people existed, why won’t they admit that there are too many people consuming too many resources and producing too much pollution?

Seems to me that it’s pointless merely building a few wind turbines, when millions more people will be born this year, all growing up to want a car etc etc.

Anyway, if people do not voluntarily reduce their numbers by a significant number ( a couple billion or more ), Gaia will sort the problem by either eliminating, or reducing human numbers on the planet to a sustainable level.

2

That is why environmentalists are concerned about heavy population growth in many countries and also the rise of prosperity in other countries which will lead to more consumption. I’m not sure where you got the idea that environmentalists aren’t concerned about global overpopulation.

3

They are. “Execute the majority of humanity” is however not exactly high up there on the list of desirable solutions to climate change, so there’s not a great deal to be done about it.

4

I have yet to hear any environmentalist or politician espouse population control as a means of combatting climate change.
Mainly it’s just an excuse to increase taxes.

5

Well, I’m not advocating mass murder, but the Chinese solution is worth a try if people are really serious about it. Of course they aren’t, so Gaia will have to do it, and that won’t be pleasant.

6

Actually, the two things that are certain to bring birth rates down to a sustainable level are education and economic prosperity. That’s the European solution, and it seems to be working pretty well.

7

:rolleyes:

That is why many environmentalists and others promote family planning in Third World countries where the bulk of the future population growth lies. Even without the ruthless Chinese methods, it has been mostly successful in Latin America and Asia with Africa being the last holdout. World population is fast stablizing.

8

  1. The OP says that climate change is “caused by people” and implies that it is proportional to world population. But this is misleading. CO2 emissions per head vary a great deal across different countries.
    In many cases the highest population growth is in poor countries that have low CO2 emissions per head (and in absolute terms).
    The low-hanging fruit may be reducing emissions in the developed world.

  2. The OP claims it is pointless building wind turbines when millions of people will want cars. Actually renewable electricity generation may be very relevant if more people were to switch to electric cars.

  3. What’s the solution, and is it worse than the problem? I think a gaia-cull would be much worse than the likely effects of climate change. No-one should be wishing for such things.
    (yes, I would agree that there is some overlap between these two concepts, but one key difference is that deaths due to climate change are unlikely to offset human population growth any time soon).

9

Really? Not so long ago it seems there were 6 billion of us, but now I’m told it’s 7 billion.
At this rate, there’ll be no other animals in existence, arable land will be covered in houses/ roads etc and we’ll be eating seaweed as all the fish will have been eaten.

10

The threat of overpopulation isn’t CO2, it’s the destruction of the environment to feed everyone. Fish have been reduced to the tipping point ( Tuna are nearly extinct ).
The use of CO2 producing machines may be highest in the west NOW, but look at China, Indonesia etc. Car ownership is exploding there.
Electric cars are pants for all but the rich, and transport is huge.
Present indications are that renewables will only reach 10% of requirement.

BTW, Gaia IS climate change.
You do know that warming of just 6 degrees C will produce methane storms, don’t you?

11

Fish has never been a major component of humanity’s nutrition.

As for the rest of the environment, thanks to modern agricultural technology, we currently produce more calories per person than at any other point in human history. We aren’t even approaching starvation due to lack of arable land.

12

Well, but that’s a farcical argument, even though it’s commonly advanced.

“Economic prosperity” for the masses in the developing world is precisely the driver for our burgeoning CO2 production. You can’t get the developing world economically prosperous unless you get them stuff–bicycles; motorcycles; cars; jets; bigger houses…etc etc. You can’t get them stuff unless it’s produced somewhere, and all that production creates CO2.

China is busy making stuff for us right now, and gradually shifting over to making stuff for themselves as they become more economically prosperous. Ditto India and many other reasonably functional developing countries. And predictably, CO2 production in those countries is rising. No one is willing to wait for some sort of environmentally correct grid to be in place before we produce stuff. Al Gore, I, and most others, want our stuff Right Now.

For dysfunctinal countries, like most of sub-saharan africa, the birth rate is not going to be diminishing anytime soon. Economic prosperity doesn’t come to populations unable to organize themselves into stable institutions that can produce on modern scales.

The emphasis on CO2 production as the nut of the AGW crisis, instead of overpopulation as the core crisis, remains the largest farce of AGW alarmists, in my opinion. Sure, alarmists “recognize” population excess as a driver, but then it’s right back to carbon credits, clean energy, and crap like that. I think part of the non-emphasis on the fact that there are just too damn many of us is because it’s an unsolvable problem, and part of the non-emphasis is that burgeoning populations are almost all in the third world. It is not politically correct to criticize the third world for anything; the current attitude is that whatever wretchedness exists there is the fault of the developed world. It is not acceptable to blame a victim…

But when you think about how uber-successful our species has been, you realize how silly it is to fight AGW in the name of either humanity or environmentalism. Nothing is worse for the “natural” environment than humans, even if energy were perfectly “clean.”

Imagine a world where there is an inexhaustible supply of perfectly clean energy. What happens? Humans use that energy to manipulate every single square inch of the planet for themselves, and billions more of us inhabit every square inch. What is left of the world might not be warmer, but it is certainly substantially altered. We’re paving the prairie; eating the oceans; modifying everything we touch. It will be interesting to see how it ends, but the idea that we should focus on CO2 production and not population control is silly.

It’s like worrying about a leaky pipe in your bathroom when outside the ocean is about to wash away the cliff upon which your house is built.

13

Then you are not paying attention to the various spokespersons on the environmental movement where population control is mentioned. (Politicians, not so much.)

The issue of population growth–a huge bugaboo in the 1960s–has already been examined. As noted, above, and a born out in a number of studies, the fastest way to reduce population growth is to eliminate the need to produce large families to support parents in their old age. In societies with high levels of technological development and wealth, birth rates drop, often below the point of population sustainability. Beyond that, artificial efforts to control population are no more successful, or are less successful, than simply increasing the standard of living in a country. India has achieved the same sort of population control in regions where technology has reached twenty-first century levels that China “achieved” by mandating single-child families.

14

I agree that over-population is the key problem, the huge “elephant in the room” that is largely ignored. I see others in the thread arguing that environmentalists are concerned about the problem, but I do not see adequate emphasis. To the contrary, many “mainstream” opinion-makers speak of the need for births or immigrations to combat the looming demographic problem (too few youngsters earning to provide for too many oldsters).

I think the problem of global warming, while very important, receives too much emphasis. The related problem of ocean acidification is also important, and there are many other problems caused by over-population unrelated to CO2. A huge portion of the Earth’s surface is now dedicated to human food (beef is especially high land usage) and this is exacerbated by the (misguided?) use of “biofuels.” Humanity makes huge changes in ecological balance in devil-may-care fashion, thinking itself smarter than Mother Nature. “Gaia” may recover by finding a new ecological balance, reducing some populations while increasing others. I’d guess H. sapiens will be a loser as Gaia acts.

Some in the thread seem to regard the degradation of ocean habitat as unimportant. :smack: This boggles my mind too much to even respond. Coral is certainly being destroyed; jellyfish populations may be increasing due to human activities; does anyone argue this is good?

Dopers suggest human population may stabilize at 10 billion or so. But even 5 billion is unsustainable (as Stranger on a Train pointed out in a post a few months ago).

15

The problem is not a family of ten in Nepal or Indonesia. The problem is the family of four in North America. Because of consumption of resources, and production of garbage, the family of four is far outstripping the family of ten, by orders of magnitude. They don’t run two cars, no power plants are being built to run their air cons and fridges 24/7, they produce no garbage, by comparison.

16

As **tomndebb **noted many environmentalists and organizations do point at population control as a very important issue to deal with; as the Chief Pedant and others ignore, even the boogeyman Gore has mentioned it, only to have by “coincidence” I guess have the deniers and skeptics of climate change bring caused by people be the same people that accuse Gore and others falsely of demanding a “one child only” China policy.

It would then be pointless to control phosphate buildup in our oceans and rivers, to control acid rain, to control ozone depletion gases, etc. Because more people were born since then, for one example, all our rivers and lakes are full of algae and with no fish now right?

News to me. What happened was that government and industry saw the evidence and a combination of regulations and voluntary restrictions from the makers of the detergents that controlled the issue. Regardless of how many more little possible polluters we added. As I pointed many times before, the point of making population the main or sole reason to not do anything, is just part of the FUD from people and groups that do not want us to do a thing against controlling our global warming gas emissions.

As even the maker of the Gaia theory has given up on his alarmist positions regarding AGW one has to point out that we are bound to make it through if we plan ahead, the problems will be worse by listening to people that claim that nothing should be done, or worse, elect them to high office.

17

We could quibble about “major,” but “between 13.8% and 16.5% of the animal protein intake of the human population” is not insignificant - also “Worldwide, about a billion people rely on fish as their main source of animal proteins.”. Tell the Japanese, the Icelanders, the historical Pacific Northwest natives and the people around the Great Lakes region of Africa that fish was not a major component of their diet. Or the parts of Europe that were dependant on Cod.

18

I’m not saying fish isn’t important - I’m sating that with a few changes to eating habits, humanity can survive easily without fish.

Of course, damage to the marine ecosystem is a horrible thing that must be taken very seriously. That goes without saying.

19

The seven billion figure is correct, rounded to the nearest billion. However, your conclusions of impending doom are incorrect.

The human race does not face any shortage of arable land. Within the USA alone, we have millions of acres of land that isn’t used because it just isn’t cost effective. We also devote who knows how much land to things we can’t eat, such as tobacco and race horses. (Well, I suppose we could eat race horses if we had to.)

Overall, the human race uses less land for growing food than it did 40 years ago. Obviously the population has shot up during that time, yet technology has improved farming dramatically. That’s why we’re in good shape, land-wise. Moreover, many of the best agricultural technologies used in the USA haven’t yet been put into use worldwide. When they are, yields in the third world will increase, and the need for land will further decrease.

As for running out of fish, that’s a different issue. When farmers own their land, they have a financial motivation to treat it well and make sure that it remains good land. Nobody owns the ocean, so nobody has a motivation to make sure that the ocean is well-stocked. What should be done is to move towards fish farming as the primary means of fish production.

May be it will, maybe it won’t.

20

Just correcting that mess of my first paragraph:

Even the boogeyman Gore has recommended population control, only to have by “coincidence” (I guess) the same deniers and skeptics of climate change caused by people to be the same that accuse Gore and others **falsely **of demanding a “one child only” China policy.

The main point here is that it is therefore mostly politics the reason why, regardless if the issue is climate change of population control, that there is condemnation from many from the right in the USA specially. The OP is not even aware of the conservative moves that discourages more open discussions of population control in the public forums.