I don’t see how a problem from one continent that has a marked effect on another could possibly still be characterised as “regional” just one sentence before.
I don’t have much time to type up a full response, but I heavily recommend this mini-documentary on it:
The short version is overpopulation has always been linked to classist, and eugenicist ideals, ultimately stemming from Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population which had an incredibly flawed exponential model of population growth. However, people have been convinced the world was thiiiiiiis close to overpopulating dating back to Plato.I think you need to define what you mean by a dire problem. If you’re a white supremacist, then overpopulation is definitely a ‘dire problem.’ If you’re anti-religious, then yep, also a ‘dire problem.’ If you think that an African moving in next door is bad, then you’re out of luck and it’s indeed a ‘dire problem.’ If you’re more concerned about your ability to feed your family and mass starvation and death, then overpopulation is heavily regional and only a ‘dire problem’ in a very small subset of the world - basically the places where it’s a ‘dire problem’ right now.
All population shifts whether positive or negative have winners and losers. The losers over the next 100 years are white people, some of the Caribbean, developed East Asia and a few Latin American countries. The winners are predominantly Africa and the Middle East. Of course, how you define winner and loser is a subjective thing. The bottom line though is that the world in 100 years is going to be less white and less East Asian, more African, more Middle Eastern, more religious, possibly richer(but that’s harder to predict.) Europe’s population by 2100 is likely to be close to what it was in the 70s barring unforeseen massive immigration and its white population is likely going to be closer to what it was in the 20s. The US by 2100 is likely to be somewhere in the mid-400 millions (assuming very high rates of migration, if migration slows to a moderate level, we’ll cap at around 400 million.) Half of that growth will be people over the age of 65. Most of the growth will be Hispanic and Asian immigrants. The US will not be even close to its agricultural carrying capacity.
We know the crises of the next 100 years. Water is our big one, especially in the West. It’s not unsolvable, but it won’t be cheap. We’ll likely see migration away from the coasts, but the US is a big place with a lot of land and as we saw from Katrina, it’s really not that hard to absorb climate migrants here. Especially if it’s non-catastrophic migration. It’s not like you wake up tomorrow and everyone’s house is under water. The first houses to get hit will be owned by rich people anyway. The path of sea level rise is slow. We’re already seeing it in the barrier islands. Most of the time it’s fine and then you get a flood. Then a flood every few years and then it’s flooding yearly and you get sick of it and move inland. There will likely be more and more civil unrest as we see the demographic turnover. The US is a bit better prepared than Europe for this since Hispanics share religious and in many ways cultural traditions with the US.
We know that Europe will likely hit its population max in the next decade, two at the most even including migrants. The US would hit its max by about 2030 if it weren’t for migration and probably hit it somewhere in the early 2100s even with migration. China is going to hit their max probably somewhere around 2025-although their government is better able to muck with things, so who knows? India is projected to peak around 2070 or so. Once you’ve knocked India and China out of the running, really it’s only Africa and the hyper-religious middle East that are keeping things going. If the Saudi’s actually start giving women rights, who knows? That could spread and you could see a Middle Eastern collapse as well. Even Africa is seeing slowing growth rates. Bottom line is that it’s not much ado about nothing, but it’s not ‘Soylent Green’ either.
You’re seeing the “solution” already. Italy is getting fed up with the flood. So is Malta. How long before Spain and all of Europe starts turning away economic migrants? (Australia too already stops them from reaching the mainland if it can). How long before deporting economic migrants becomes standard? (As the USA is trying to do)
So sub-Sahara Africa sinks into a morass of starving overpopulation and cut-throat wars and the rest of the world sits back and keeps their walls up.
So it is regional - can Africa get its population growth down and economic growth up soon enough to avert disaster? Can the continent support twice as many people? The areas that can support agriculture already do so. Perhaps Zimbabwe can get its farming system working again in a way that is more socially equitable. (One story says white farm confiscation was more about giving party insiders nice payoffs, less about actually giving farms to he poor general population.) Will South Africa avoid the same farming mess Zimbabwe created?
Another issue is the rain - much of Africa has a monsoon season - up until now, water storage has not been a major part of African agriculture, but it may need to be so for a decent level of food production.
And then, as many allude to, there’s climate change - existing food production may be devastated, let alone expansion. That’s a whole more unpredictable problem.
[quote=“a_dudes_thought_s, post:1, topic:819735”]
So I have been arguing with some people at another site about over population. We have all seen many films like Soylent Green,and many tv shows depicting over population. After doing some reaserch I feel that over population is not as big a problem as originally thought. With advancing technology and a declining birth rate I think the problem can be managed effectively. What are your thoughts on over population and do you agree with me or think I am wrong and being over simplistic in my opinions.
[/QUOTE]Yeah, I think it’s overblown. Basically, a lot of the current population increase is just inertia. In almost every case, especially those countries experiencing economic growth and increased prosperity it’s only a matter of time before their populations essentially go on the same trend as Western Europe or Japan, with populations either right at replacement or below. The US is only positive because we have over a million immigrants a year. All that dire Soylant Green stuff is just Malthusian theory bullshit. The planet can fairly easily support the projected 10 billion, without even major agricultural changes…just efficiencies and perhaps getting the anti-science anti-GMO folks to shut up. A bigger issue is climate change and the effects of prosperity on the global system, but population alone? It’s an issue, but not a huge one IMHO, and one that is kind of solving itself. As nations become prosperous and their people gain wealth and stability their populations will taper off and go flat or even start to retract.
On Africa,
What I’m reading is China is going in, taking over African lands, farming them, then all the food goes to China. Other than the cronies they pay off very little goes to the African people.
I’d need to see a cite on that. What I’ve heard (well, read and seen discussed) is that China makes large loans to African countries to build infrastructure, then uses mainly Chinese labor to do the actual work, then snaffles up the properties when/if the country in question defaults. They are pushing in Africa, to be sure, because of the vast resources available there, and they certainly are using almost colonial tactics to get it.
Not sure what this stuff has to do with population growth. Africa, as a whole (obviously it’s going to vary by country) is still on an upward population growth. In theory with a lot of Chinese investment this will position many African nations for better economic growth in the future…if the Chinese don’t rip off the African nations too badly. It would obviously be better for those nations to have had their own people do the work instead of China bringing in it’s own workers en masse to do it, but just the building of infrastructure SHOULD be a benefit that eventually will pay off. In theory.
I *would *need to do that - if I’d used the word “dire” anywhere.
I dont see it being too big of a problem since more people die of obesity and diseases related to diet than who die of malnutrition.
Plus why am I only getting $3 a bushel for my corn?
I cannot compute $3 a bushel. Give me market prices, please.
Corn prices are controlled by the global market. More and more corn is being used to make high fructose corn syrup. Driving the price up. Making it difficult for the poor folks to buy corn for their diet.
I think this ignores at least three classes of problems.
1. Scarce resources. The world’s supply of easily accessed petroleum is diminishing. Uranium is diminishing; yes, breeder reactions can convert U238 to Plutonium, and maybe Plutonium reactors can produce some other kind of fuel, but there has to be an end to it – otherwise you’d have a sort of perpetual motion machine. Helium is a useful gas which has already been squandered … by party balloons! Rare-earth metals will need expensive recycling projects to recover.
Even some nominally “renewable” resources pose a severe threat. California’s Central Valley undergoes an average net loss of well over 1 million acre-feet of groundwater per year. India’s Ganges Basin is in much worse shape. Russia has big water problems. Agriculture is increasingly dominated by artificial fertilizers which are not renewable in any normal sense. A society which barely survives a century while resources deplete will have more trouble the next century. And these examples are all just off the top of my head — this is hardly a field of knowledge for me.
Biological species may also become scarce. Bee colony collapse has never been fully explained, but even if bees recover this time, can we be sure no more serious problem will arise over the coming millennium? Or the millennium after that?
2. Waste accumulation. Disposal of nuclear waste will continue to grow as a problem. Aren’t waste disposal sites finite? What about plastics? Man has already badly degraded the oceans, and wastes continue to accumulate. Can man solve these problems? Maybe. But for millions of years the world’s ecology kept a careful, almost clever balance with one species’ waste being another species’ food. And that is not the mode in which a planet dominated by 11 billion humans will operate.
3. Bad luck. Technological man may survive for a century or three, developing new antibiotics as bacteria become resistant to the old ones; thinking of new non-renewable materials to make fertilizer from; housing cows in elevator silos to reduce land use; using jellyfish as food when oceanic support for vertebrate life fails; moving to Antarctica when required by climate change; and so on. But a reckless driver lucky not to have an accident in the past ten years might crash into a tree next week.
And all for what? In what sense is the world a better place with 11 billion people instead of 2 billion? To the contrary, it is the very people who are fans of an 11-billion population that proudly tout birth patterns that may avoid a 12-billion count. If 11-billion is better than 12, why not 10 billion? or 9?
Ironically, your first one is exactly what Malthusian theory is based on. It’s what the gloom and doom stuff from the horrible whale oil crisis is based on as well. I’m not buying it. Will some resources become scarce? Sure. Oil is one of them, no doubt. But I don’t see it as a show stopper unless the peak oil folks are right and the oil is just going to sudden stop flowing world wide. Uranium? I don’t see that as a major issue either, especially since it’s not like we are building a ton of new plants (or actually looking hard for more difficult to find reserves for that matter). Almost everything on your list is something we have alternatives too or, well, is so abundant in the broader solar system as to make our worries about it fairly laughable.
The second one is kind of funny too. True, there are real issues with plastics in the ocean and other environments, but if you are thinking of something like Wall-E it’s not going to happen. Even nuclear waste is a pretty small thing, even if we ramped up our use of it which seems unlikely. Really, the main issue with waste disposal wrt nuclear waste in the US has more to do with politics and NIMBY thinking than space or engineering.
I honestly don’t know what the point is of the last one. Why is 12 billion people ‘better’ than 2? Well, I don’t know that they are, but off the top of my head you could say that with 12 billion people you have a lot more genus level intellects than with 2 if you go as a percentage of population. Interconnecting them as we’ve been doing means that you have more opportunity for them to come up with the next Apple…or the next cure for polio or whatever. I don’t think it will be a major issue, regardless. Eventually, the population will stabilize, and I imagine it will be at fewer (on Earth anyway) than 11 or 12 billion or wherever it’s currently predicted to finally start a downward trend. As the world becomes more affluent, something that is definitely happening, the population will peak and start a downward trend.
Well, until we start making space habitats all over the solar system, at which time we could have trillions. 
Yes. It was red alarm with Malthus. Then came Haber, then came logistics, computers, education, medicine, education again etc. It is down from orange to yellow now. Energy on the OTOH is not yet at red. There is your rabbit in that bush right now. And resources are ALL renewable, if time is not important.
I feel this is missing a major issue which I mentioned above: sustainability. It’s not just a question of “We can support a world population of eight billion, so will we be able to support a world population of nine billion?” The bigger question is “We can support a world population of eight billion in 2018, so will we be able to support a world population of eight billion in 2068?”
Because I think you’d agree that if the world is capable of supporting a population of eight billion in 2018 and only two billion in 2068, the intervening fifty years will be very bad.
That’s an almost Trumpian mistating of what peak oil people are saying. What peak oil people are actually stating is that there is a finite amount of oil in the world and it will become increasingly difficult to maintain a constant level of oil production.
Peak oil deniers concede that the first fact is true; how can they deny it? But they then insist that it somehow doesn’t matter. They act as if we will somehow always be able to produce the amount of oil we want. I don’t understand that kind of cognitive dissonance; how can you produce an endless supply of oil from a finite amount of oil?
Oil shortage might be issue now and in near future, but problem somewhat deescalates if you can see the big picture here. Oil can be synthesized from practically anything. You just need a lot of energy. Heck, oil itself is in demand because it is (very handy) energy.
Basically, if you solved energy crisis, you solved oil crisis. And possibly avert eco crisis.
Of course, if you “solve the energy crisis” (by which I assume you mean develop dramatically increased energy generation, storage, and transmission methods), the “oil crisis” becomes irrelevant.
My point exactly. And that mission is not impossible. Problem with oil is it is too damn handy for energent. It is like using alcohol to cope with anxiety. It is efficient, cheap, available practically everywhere and for anyone, but has some down sides and on a long run it will cripple you (it can act as a hard drug) if you don’t find another solution.
And food shortage globally is not problem at least for some time now. There is still famine, I know, but this is political and logistical issue. Have enough energy and know how to make (grow or synthesize) food for 3x of current population (my educated guess). If we increase global population too much and too fast that could become more serious tho. Luckily, current predictions regarding global population do not go this way. Looks like it will stabilize somewhere at around 2x.
Do you understand how we increased food production? The bottleneck was nitrogen. Plants need nitrogen in the soil to grow. But when plants grow, they consume the nitrogen. As the nitrogen gets consumed, the soil becomes infertile.
This used to be a major issue in agriculture. Restoring nitrogen to soil was a major problem and greatly reduced the amount of crops that could be raised.
Then about a hundred years ago, scientists figured out a way to artificially introduce nitrogen into soil. They developed ways of making fertilizer so farmers could keep raising crops over and over again on the same piece of land and just restoring its nitrogen every season. Artificial fertilization is why we produced four times as much food in 2000 as we did in 1900.
But where does that fertilizer come from? Fossil fuels. And other sources of energy won’t replace them. You can’t make fertilizer out of nuclear or solar power.
[quote=“a_dudes_thought_s, post:1, topic:819735”]
So I have been arguing with some people at another site about over population. We have all seen many films like Soylent Green,and many tv shows depicting over population. After doing some reaserch I feel that over population is not as big a problem as originally thought. With advancing technology and a declining birth rate I think the problem can be managed effectively. What are your thoughts on over population and do you agree with me or think I am wrong and being over simplistic in my opinions.
[/QUOTE]A huge problem down the road. We might not live to see it, but one day there will be too many people and too few resources.
There is only so much water to go around, and if a nation is food starved, you’ll get war. The trouble these days is nations with food and water issues include say India, who has nuclear weapons.