Nobody has done anything of the sort. At best that is a simplistic strawman characterisation of our position. At worst it evidence of a deliberate attempt to misrepresent our stated position because the conclusions that would necessarily be drawn from the evidence contradict your own prejudices.
The trouble is that Cisco et al have not used it as a start to a discussion. Rather they have blatantly used it as a basis on which to t conclude their position. This depite the fact that all the facts show unambiguously that all things don’t remain in any way equal.
You tried to teach your grandma to suck eggs when you reminded em that correlation does not equal causation. Allow me extend some similar advice to you: You cannot justifiably extrapolate a linear trend beyond the dataset when the current trend is not linear.
That’s a reasonable definition. But all the facts show that there are not too many people and that both the utilisation of resources and the efficiency with which they are utilised is both acceptable and improving.
So where the hack are people getting the idea that there is overpopulation? What is the objective, factual basis for such a claim?
It seems that simply reading the thread would be a good idea. Never mind the reply. Then you may not be so prone to constructing strawmen that represent a position that other posters have explicitely disavowed.
To quote a good friend of mine, I appreciate your precognition abilities and all but somehow I need more than your say so. And I need more than the wild-eyed apocalyptic ramblings of James Hansen. And I need more than the laughable forecast for climate 100 years from now from some computer programmer. I need more than Paul Ehrlich’s Malthusian doomsday claims.
I need facts. Evidence. Here’s four facts that I think most scientists would agree on.
During the three+ centuries since the Little Ice Age the world’s temperature has gone up maybe a degree or so. Call it about half a degree C or so per century, which is in agreement with instrumental records.
I know of no disasters attributable to that warming.
All of the predicted “disasters” which are forecast to arrive from another degree or two of warming are with us today. We already suffer from them all. We have now, and we have always had, storms, floods, people displaced by rising sea/subsiding land, droughts, deaths from cold, tornados, eroding coastlines, diseases, hurricanes, killing frosts, hailstorms, too much rain, deaths from heat, ice damage, too little rain … we have every foretold climate apocalypse already, and we have had them since humans have been on this earth.
The Vostok ice cores from the Antarctic and the GISP ice cores from Greenland both show a number of 2°C swings in a century or less. It is far from uncommon.
At any given instant, at any given timescale, the climate is either warming or cooling. At no period in the historical record do we see anything like a stable climate.
From those facts I make these inferences:
Modern climate temperature swings are neither as large nor as fast as many swings during the Holocene. They are in no way unusual historically.
The rise in average temperature since the Little Ice Age did not cause a notable increase in disasters. The rise in average temperature during the 20th century did not cause a notable increase in disasters. In fact, for the temperate zones (the world’s breadbasket), the rise in average temperature was generally beneficial. Growing seasons got longer. Ports were ice-free for more of the year. Less energy was needed to keep warm. The world became wetter, since more evaporation leads to more rain. Overall, it was an easier world for plants, animals, and humans.
The worst that further warmth might do is increase the frequency or severity of some of the on-going, same-old, been here forever myriad of climate catastrophes listed above.
On the other hand, further warming would likely make some of those catastrophes less frequent or less severe. A warmer world is a wetter world. Droughts occur more during cold times. Ice is not good for plants. Cold kills more people than heat. Longer growing seasons are a good thing. And so on.
I see nothing indicating that another degree or so of warming in the 21st century will lead to any disaster of any kind.
Finally, I mentioned computer models above. I wrote my first program (as in drew the flowchart, laid out the steps, wrote them in the computer language (Alcom?), punched them into the Hollerith cards, gave them to the man who fed the room-sized mainframe computer, and got the results back the next day) in 1963. I wrote programs for one of the first desktop computers, the Datapoint. I have written blackjack programs and tide modeling programs and financial modeling programs and solar system barycentric variation programs and yes, even a radiation-convection-evaporation balance climate model. I have been programming for forty-five years now, I speak about eight computer languages, four of them fluently. I have written computer models that told the truth, and I have written computer models that told more lies a cheating husband coming home at three AM, and I’ll tell y’all one thing about computers:
Anybody who believes in a fifty-year weather forecast from an untested, un-Verified, un-Validated computer model with no Software Quality Assurance program and no demonstration of convergence is computer illiterate. Including some of the programmers that wrote the models. And every climate model fits that description.
Climate models don’t provide evidence. They can only do what their programmers tell them to do. Nothing more or less. If the programmer tells them that cloud feedback is positive, it won’t be negative. A program is nothing more than the solidified beliefs and assumptions and ideas and conceptions of the person who wrote the program. It is not an independent unbiased seeker after truth. It is the programmer’s belief structure made real.
People say “I believe the computer model results” as if that meant something, as if there were such a thing as a “computer model”. Consider: everything the computer does could be done by a guy with a pencil. Oh, it would be slow, but it could be done.
So once it was done, once he came out with exactly the same results using the pencil, would people say “I believe the pencil model results”? …
There is no “computer model” any more than there is a “pencil model”. There is only the programmer’s model of the world, with all of its warts and flaws, with its simplifying assumptions and its tunable parameters, with the beliefs and the ideas of the programmer hard-wired into it. Whether on a computer or pencil-driven, the program does what the programmer wants it to do, and when it doesn’t … he tunes it until it does.
So yes, computer models predict a whole host of stunningly fanciful things about the future climate. You can believe them if you wish. I know far, far too much about computer models in general, and climate models in particular, to be that naive and trusting.
To bring all this back to population, I see no evidence that a 50% increase in population plus a degree or so of warming will somehow automatically bring disaster. It is possible, as is anything. But seems awfully doubtful to me, given the historical record. I’ve seen the population increase by 3 million in my lifetime. Everything got better during that time. I’ve watched the temperature rise and fall and rise again and fall again for well over a half century. Didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference, no big disasters from either one.
intention as I have stated multiple times there are others who engage in debate about whether or not the vast majority of climate scientists (who indeed use computers as tools to help them model out various scenarios) know what they are talking about or are just yakking with nothing it up but that I am not that person.
But one could use some concerns expressed in this thread to argue that even the Climate Change deniers have reason to be concerned if we both continue to increase our population and continue to consume resources and produce waste as much per capita. The variable most likely to change the most of the two is the how much per capita one - and unfortunately busines as usual has it going the wrong way dramatically.
You continue to ignore history, and so you seem doomed to repeat it. Humans have increased both their per-capita consumption of resources and their per-capita waste for the last several hundred years. Despite that, people are currently better fed and better educated and healthier and have longer lifespans than at any time in history.
So I fail to see the “cause for concern” you list above. Sure, you, or climate modelers or anyone can say “The End Of The World Is Near”. Unfortunately, the arguments (increasing per capita consumption and increasing population will cause huge problems) are identical to those of Paul Ehrlich, who famously predicted mass starvation and food riots in the 1980s … and everyone (except Paul and you, apparently) noticed how accurate that prediction was.
Growing more food is a major problem? Improving people’s health is a major problem? Decreasing infant mortality is a major problem? Educating women in the developing world is a major problem?
Yes, all of those have problems associated with them. Just about anything we do has both benefits and costs, advantages and problems.
But until you can show me that educating women in developing countries has more costs than benefits, I’ll continue to believe that you have not thought this all the way through. Until you can show that saving the lives of kids dying of common diarrhoea is more of a problem than a solution, I’ll continue to think that you are not considering the whole picture.
I’m sorry but to compare the rantings of Paul Erlich with the analysis of the climate modellers en masse is a bit silly, to put it as politely as I can.
By your style of thinking the following is true: I have a 20 gallon fishtank and put in one fish. It does well. I put in another three fish and add a small filter. They do well. I can therefore add another ten fish without adding any more filtration capacity and they will do well.
Now any hobby fish owner can tell you that tanks have a limit on how many fish they can hold before you have a massive die-off and can quote you the standard guide of one inch of fish per gallon. And any more serious hobbyist will be able to tell you that the standard guide is only a rough guide. Shape of the tank matters. What kind of filtration matters.
Our planet is our tank and we are both owner and fish. We’ve been clever enough to get ourselves pretty well stocked but hey we are pretty well stocked and some of our fellow fish are still growing, producing more poop and eating more too. Some are just letting food rot on the bottom of the tank. If you think that we don’t need to invest in some better filters because we’ve done okay so far then fine. I’m not panicked that we are past the one inch per gallon, I know it is an overly simplistic rule, but neither am I foolish enough to believe that the tank can just handle all these fish eating and pooping more without some planning ahead.
I was actually comparing the rantings of Paul Ehrlich more to your claims, not so much to the climate modelers, although their claims are quite similar as well, and just as poorly grounded in observations and evidence as are Paul’s. I keep asking for evidence that the AGW theory is true, and you keep pointing to the climate models. Sorry, but computer models are not evidence of any kind. If they were, I’d be a very rich man …
“By [my] style of thinking the following is true:”? No, that’s true by your style of thinking, not my style. I have warned before about the stupidity of applying simple rules to complex systems. This is a perfect example.
You put too many fish in a small tank … they die. You put too many Dutchmen in a small country … they put in dikes and make the small country bigger.
You put too many bacteria dependent on magnesium in a tank … they use up the magnesium and die. You put too many humans in the same situation … they figure out how to extract magnesium from seawater and they don’t even slow down.
Like my high school English teacher used to say, “Compare and contrast these situations.”
Your claims would be true if humans were fish or bacteria … but we’re not. Come back when you have some idea what difference that difference makes. Like I said, your claims are identical to Paul Ehrlich’s “Oh noes, there’s too many of us, we’re all gonna die, there’s nothing we can do, we’re doooomed!”
Not only are there plenty of things we can do, we’re doing them quite successfully.
That may change in the future. But to make that claim that things will change, you have to explain why what has worked very well in the past will suddenly not work in the future. We doubled the population of the planet in forty years, from three billion to six billion. At the end of that time, conditions were better for rich and poor alike. To me, that is a stunning accomplishment.
Now you claim that’s suddenly going to stop, and we’re going to go over a cliff. That may be so … but since you are arguing against history, you need to do more than just make the claim. You need to show exactly why what worked when we doubled the population won’t work when we add 50% more to the population. You have not done that … so all we are left with is the naked claim that “Yes, it worked in the past, and worked very well, and in a much tougher situation … but DSeid says it won’t work in the future” …
Which parts won’t work in the future, and which will, and why? Or are you saying you just generally have a foreboding feeling about the whole thing, a feeling that’s not necessarily based on any facts?
intention we seem to have reached the point of talking past each other as you are responding to positions that I do not hold and have not articulated. There is little to be gained in a back and forth over that or to repeating ourselves to no end.
I will content myself with recapitulating my position once only.
Overpopulation is neither the major problem this planet is facing nor a particularly ignored problem. The bigger issue is the change in how the current populations consume and produce and, in terms of my analogy, the fact that we’ve been able to grow more and bigger fish in the same tank so far is no assurance that we can continue to do so in the future without planning ahead for those demands. Assuming that a bological system is a simple linear response curve is naive. Increased growth in populations that are rapidly increasing their consumption and their waste production increases the risk. It is possible to address the increased population growth in those regions and their increasing waste production and consumption needs per capita at the same time but time is the issue - ie it takes some time. I merely argue for some proactive management of these issues.
That’s pretty close to how I feel too, and I think you’ll agree that my statements have been pretty grossly misrepresented here. My guess is that this is part of some larger political issue that I’m not aware of, and that’s why some of the folks here are arguing with all the level-headedness, objectivity and rationality of Rush Limbaugh.
You said that “growing all that food and buying all the things that money can buy are major problems.”
Since “buying all the things money can buy” includes spending money to save kids from diarrhea, and it includes educating women, those must be “major problems”.
Given that, how is my statement a strawman?
It appears that I misinterpreted what you said, not an uncommon occurrence on this planet. Perhaps if you were to state it more clearly, we could all understand what you were trying to say
However, accusing me of creating a strawman simply because you can’t write clearly enough to get your point across is … well … I’ll just call it impolite. My rule of thumb is, never ascribe to ill-intention what is adequately explained by miscommunication …
You’re kidding. If not a strawman if was a gross mutilation. And I don’t see how it could’ve been unintentional. I said nothing about the people already here on Earth. In fact, with less people being born, we’d have MORE resources to take care of those of us already living. So why don’t you want to educate women and cure babies with diarrhea?
The mountainous snowcaps that so many populations rely upon are shrinking. People in these parts of the world could be in big trouble in a few decades.
we’re moving into uncharted territory here, so pointing out that dire predictions have not yet come to pass is not evidence that unlimited population growth is sustainable.
When relying on technology we must be aware of the principle of diminishing returns.
Overpopulation is indeed compartmentalized by geographic region and even economic class. Isn’t it at least arguable that problems such as overcrowded schools, costly health care, and illegal immigration can be traced to overpopulation within their source?
It’s interesting that many overpopulation deniers are conservatives, even while many argue that the solution to population growth is global redistribution of wealth. And even if it were a question of applying technology or socialism to poverty-stricken third world regions, wouldn’t the extreme need there tend to absorb any influx of resources that would otherwise form that basis of this new system?
Look, my friend, I just told you it was not deliberate. If (as you say) you can’t see that, the solution is to improve your vision, not to accuse me of lying.
You said “You’re basically saying we have more food and money than ever, without realizing the growing all that food and buying all the things that money can buy are major problems.” Now you claim you “said nothing about the people already here on earth”. Perhaps you see no conflict between those two statements, but I and others do.
If we “have” more food and money, and because of that things “are” major problems, who are they major problems for if not those already on earth? People talking about the future usually use a combination of conditional and future tenses to do that. If your claim is that growing food and spending money will be problems for future people, then say so. If you say they “are major problems”, you are talking about the present, about current problems, and about people who are presently here.
So why don’t you just back up, take a Prozac and a deep breath, and as I invited you to do before, state your proposition more clearly? Arguing that it was clear when I and others have obviously and greatly misunderstood it does not move the discussion forward.
Well intention, he’s endorsed my last post (#91) as summarizing his POV. So how about we all resist the urge to tell everyone else about how they need to take a chill pill and the inevitable (and inevitably tiresome) back and forth of who misinterpreted what and who meant what and use that as a proposition to agree or disagree with?
You make two very good points here. One is that water is one resource that we use in a raw, unmanufactured state, for which there is no substitute.
The other is that overpopulation is not distributed equally around the planet.
Regarding water, the good news is:
Most of our water use is for agriculture, and a huge amount of that is wasted. So there is a lot of slack in the system.
The world of plants, animals, and humans use only a very small part of the rain that falls. Don’t think so? Just take a look at any river where it meets the ocean …
The shortage is not of water, but of fresh water. The cost of desalination has been dropping steadily. Last I looked it was below US$1 per cubic metre (1000 litres). This is cheap enough for it to have become a major domestic water source in certain areas of the world. And the price continues to drop.
Regarding the distribution of overpopulation, redistribution of wealth is, in general, just a band-aid solution. This is because, just like a lottery or a Ponzi scheme, no new wealth is created. To improve the situation, we need to create wealth, not just move it from A to B.
Do I think that there is no limit on how many people the world can support, that “unlimited population growth is sustainable”? By no means.
Do I think that there is a fixed amount of people that the world can support? Again, by no means.
More than any other factors, the number of people the earth can support is dependent on energy and technology. With enough of both, limits expand. Water is a great example. What does it take to convert salt water to fresh water?
Well … energy and technology. If I have both, I can make you all the fresh water you need.
We have doubled the number of people in the world in my lifetime, I’ve watched it happen. It did not have any of the horrible outcomes foreseen by Thomas Malthus, by the Club of Rome and their computer models, by Paul Ehrlich and his computer models, and by some of the posters on this thread. Humans are not fish subject to some limit on how many will live in a certain aquarium.
Does this guarantee there will be no horrible outcome in the future? Again, by no means. But the fact that Malthus was 100% wrong, and the Club of Rome was 100% wrong, and Paul Ehrlich was 100% wrong, means that there is no one-to-one correspondence between population increase and catastrophe.
So if you, or anyone, wants to claim that population catastrophe is right around the corner, you are flying in the face of historical evidence. Because you are saying the future will suddenly be different than the past, you need to say why the system which has worked at least since the time of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) will suddenly stop working. It may … but whoever makes the claim has to show what will stop working, and why.
PS - The glaciers in Alaska are growing. The glaciers in New Zealand are growing. The oceans are cooling. The world has not warmed in a decade. Your claim that the “mountain snowcaps are shrinking” is way past its use-by date …
PPS - “overpopulation deniers”??? Oh, please. Why do you want to turn this into another parallel with Holocaust deniers? People tried it with global warming, now it’s overpopulation. It was a despicable tactic (guilt by association) the first time, and it has not improved since then. I’m sorry, but just because someone doesn’t happen to subscribe to your particular beliefs does not make them a “denier”.
DSeid, thanks for the offer, but since I was unable to understand what he was talking about, I am absolutely unwilling to discuss his kinda-sorta agreement with what you are talking about. That’s too many levels of abstraction.
I asked him to clarify what he meant, and to stop making accusations that I am acting in bad faith. If he wants to do that, the discussion can continue. If not, I’m not interested.
PS - there’s no argument about who misinterpreted what. He says he was talking about the future. I misunderstood what he wrote as referring to the present. No argument.