I am wondering if the earth’s population has reached a tipping point. What I mean by that is if all of earth’s problems with pollution, global warming, energy crisis with oil, etc., were resolved, has our population reached a point of no return where it doesn’t matter what we do, we are fucked?
Please look into a documentary called 'Perspectives in Population". I guarantee you will learn many surprising things. It is presented (exceedingly well!) by a Swedish statistician/professor.
Among other things you will learn that what most everyone perceives about world population is vastly inaccurate when you look at the actual numbers. A real eye opener!
If you’re truly interested in the truth about population, over conjecture and impression, it’s a great place to start!
There is plenty of room on earth to put people, the problem comes with feeding them, providing them with clean water and keeping them healthy (removing human waste, insect born disease, medicines etc.). Technology is helping on all of these fronts, but politics, and practical matters of distribution, keeps the poorest of the poor from adequate food, water, medicines etc. We’re not at a tipping point yet… we’re just not very good at providing the things humans need to all of the humans on the planet.
Can you provide a link please for that documentary, assuming it’s available on YouTube.
What the OP is talking about relates to the logistics curve and to the earth’s carrying capacity. There is a practical limit to population, but also as technology improves we’ll be able to feed and house more people.
Sorry, I misremembered the title, it’s actually called “Don’t Panic, The truth about Population”.
A Google search will bring up several sites you can watch it on. I think I watched it on TVO, it’s probably available on their site as well.
I’d love to hear your impressions if you watch it!
One possible issue is sustainability. It’s not just a question of how much food you have now. It’s a question of how much food you can produce on an ongoing basis. (Food’s just an example here, albeit an important one. This also applies to other resources.)
This is a potential problem in food production. We have techniques for producing food on an ongoing basis. We also have techniques for producing greater amounts of food using methods which are not sustainable.
Let’s create a hypothetical situation using potatoes. If you plant one of these hypothetical potatoes, it grows into two potatoes. And these are really big potatoes, so one of them will feed a person for an entire year.
Now let’s have a village with fifty people and a hundred potatoes. The villagers set aside fifty potatoes to eat and plant the other fifty. They eat their potatoes that year and at the end of the year, the fifty they’ve planted have grown into a hundred potatoes. They’re back where they started and they’ve got a sustainable food supply.
Then the village population grows to fifty-one. So they set aside fifty-one potatoes to eat and plant the other forty-nine. Everyone has enough to eat and they still have potatoes to plant. And when the forty-nine potatoes grows, they’ll have ninety-eight potatoes so everyone will have enough for next year as well. They can take fifty-one potatoes out of the ninety-eight they grew and feed everyone and plant the other forty-seven. And next year, they can take fifty-one potatoes out of the ninety-four they grew and feed everyone and plant the other forty-three.
I think it’s obvious that while everyone in the village is eating regularly, the village is facing a problem with its food supply.
We may be facing a similar situation in the real world. Although in the real world, the food supply is a lot more complicated.
There is good evidence that we are catching and eating more fish every year than the amount of new fish being born. The net result (no pun intended) is that every year there are fewer fish.
Or there’s the issue of irrigation. Agriculture in the American Mid-West uses water form the Ogllala aquifer. And we are taking more water out of the aquifer than is going in. Every year, the water level is reduced.
Or there’s fertilizer. We keep agricultural production high by adding manufactured fertilizer to the soil every year. But fertilizer is made out of petrochemicals and we only have a finite supply of those petrochemicals.
So it’s possible that we are like the villagers and are eating more potatoes than we can produce. And we just don’t realize it because everyone has enough food now.
IMO, it is not what is possible but what reason is there to do it.
Take care of the population at present levels. Would need uncorrupted people in the whole chain… ( yeah, that is going to happen )
Max out the population to the absolute level that with all the added tech, is all that can be handled. Would need uncorrupted people in the whole chain… ( yeah, that is going to happen )
To what purpose is it desirable to go to the max with no room for uncontrollable variations from natural global changes?
The real question IMO is human life really that scared?
What is the advantage of uncontrolled human population growth over the problems of a foreseeable overpopulation?
Are we there yet? No.
Will we get there? You betcha.
The time for planning is when we get there? Or now?
The numbers of non belief in any after life vs the number of believers ( pretty much all religions ) indicates that just a couple of fact sheets printed by the scientific community will sway the believers is a belief by the non believers is too idiotic to for them to really believe.
So, when do we need top start the education of the worlds masses? And how are we to do that considering our present track record when looked at on a world wide scale?
The prevalent historical and present day consensuses is that, "If it will not affect me in my life time, " I don’t care what future harm I am propagating. I want mine now and to hell with the future.
Many supposedly religious people and non believers are this way, seems to be human nature.
So what are those that see the end of this road clearly going to do? What can they do? So far, they are failing miserably.
Maybe we/they need another approach, ya think?
I try to do some of my part by debunking the notion that all human life is worth any cost and worth more than any other life form at any time under any conditions.
Sort of a “Hurt my dog & see where I place you on the need to exist scale” type of thing.
One might say that at our present state world wide on smart thinking about the future of mankind is still best served by disease and war in that that most effectively slows population so we have the needed time to get our heads screwed on correctly. ( yeah, very few agree with that because they still think, despite thousands of years of proof that we won’t, humans will do so. Bawahahaha
So, the tipping point IMO is way in the past because we are not learning the right things. We are still trying to fix yesterday and ignoring the future we ourselves have so plainly written on the wall.
Ever since the The Population Bomb came out people have been wringing their hands over the tipping point and yet, while our population is more than it’s every been, one could argue that, overall, human culture has never been better*. That doesn’t mean we won’t ever have a major catastrophe but I don’t think we’re close.
(* - I did NOT say we don’t have problems. If you say “yeah, but…” and point out one problem I will slug you with a sack of angry wet badgers.)
It’s not as self evident as it may seem. The math is actually quite complicated, I suggest the documentary/statistician. You might be surprised by what you think you know, versus the reality.
It’s very interesting and enjoyable to watch.
Huh. I’m thinking hurt my eyes etc etc.
As I pointed out, just because we have a growing population and everyone is well fed, doesn’t mean we can automatically dismiss the possibility that we have a food production problem.
Sure. Neither of us are talking in absolutes, just vague possibilities. However, right now we probably have the lowest level of starvation (as a % of total population) that we’ve ever had, despite all the recent predictions of doom. I’d have to see some evidence that we’re trending down before I put much credence in the predictions.
If you slaughter and eat half the badgers, and breed the other half for the next generation…
Evidence? Most of it. The starvation levels June 25, 2015 aren’t an important metric when we have plenty of other indicators that we are already well below replacement levels for many vital outsources. Global warming is the most well known of those but only one. It is a result closely correlated with overpopulation. It is also closely tied into other problems like rapid deforestation in the Amazon, Africa and Asia. Unprecedented species extinction due to loss of habitat and over-fishing is yet another problem closely tied to overpopulation.
I am generally conservative on most issues but this is one that I truly do not understand from most political groups. There is strong evidence the Earth’s ecosystems are on extreme jeopardy through man-made activities and that is an undeniable scientific fact. Yet, many people of all persuasions hand-wave the simple fact away that current overpopulation had anything to do with these results. That simply isn’t possible and the proposed remedies for the current such as bringing everyone up to a First World standard of living so that birth rates level off are not tenable either.
Current predictions are that the world population will level off wheresoever around 9 billion people a few decades from now. That is a gain of 2 billion (with a 'B"). That may not sound like much because we are so far above that but it is still a metric shit-ton of new people comparable to the entire world population in the early 20th century when most of these problems really started to gain traction.
We can sing ‘We are the World’ all we want but there are only so many resources to go around and things have already started to fail in major ways from a long-term prospective. Everything I have read indicates that the long-term, sustainable world population is only 1 -2 billion people and that isn’t an option. If you exceed carrying capacity for too long, the reserves run out and then you get war and mass starvation that makes WWII look like a friendly game.
Environmental issues have very little to do with the raw number of people, and almost everything to do with their standard of living.
That isn’t true in the long-term or even necessarily in the medium to short term either. Overfishing the oceans can and will affect most of the world’s food supply. Widespread drought exasperated by climate change certainly can as well and we have already seen a preview to that in the U.S. Much of the U.S. (and we aren’t particularly overpopulated in general compared to much of the world) depends on really deep, large aquifers that take decades to centuries to recharge, You can take lots of water out of them but they are like a trust fund. Once they are depleted, you are done and they aren’t coming back on their own in the foreseeable future.
California, and the American West in general, have extremely serious water problems both now and long-term. There are simply too many people there and not enough water to support them unless you stop virtually all agriculture that grow food for themselves and everyone else.
That is the basic problem. It is game in which everyone is looking for the short-term solution to keep current systems and growth rates going while knowing perfectly well that they won’t last long and they will have to switch to a new one as soon as they exhaust the last. That wouldn’t be much of a problem if systems could recover on their own rather quickly but they can’t. Every innovation or ‘solution’ is too short lasting in ecological terms and it leaves a scar that will last for much longer than the purpose it was intended to serve. This goes into a feedback loop that grows faster and faster (it is happening now) until the whole thing crashes catastrophically because it has to at some point.
The difference may be that Californians have to take extremely short showers and forgo swimming pools twenty years from now but people in other parts of the world are already close enough to the edge that they will get true famines that kill millions.
As Jared Diamond pointed out in “Collapse” someone chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, knowing that that act would destroy their way of life. Short term thinking abounds!
I would say we are close. take India-they can import food to make up a shortfall in local production. But what happens if crops fail all across the world? then, look for famines in such places.
Great book. I suggest you read it again, though.
One of Diamond’s important points was that there wasn’t a case of someone going out and chopping down that last tall tree. Instead, the tallest trees kept steadily getting smaller, until there were only trees too small to do the job of moving the huge statues. So, the statues got smaller. Eventually, there were only tiny trees left, and not enough to sustain both the forests and the civilization. The “last tree” myth is important to bust because it gives a false sense of security.
Like the Easter Islanders, we won’t see that last big tree and wonder whether to chop it down. Things will just get steadily worse.
Jared’s main point was that the societies that faced a critical shortage and survived had to make a significant value change, involving a change in identity. Good luck convincing the Fox News crowd on that!