I saw a video (might even be the one you linked), where Rosling points out that despite the whole cycle of poverty being very difficult to escape, it actually does not take much increase in income to result in significant improvements in standard of living. Like literally going from 2 USD per day to 3 USD will see this.
Now this does have a real affect on the environment and climate change. All the newly escaped from poverty increase their carbon footprint substantially and exponentially. 2 billion extra small motorcycles with their two stroke engines won’t help CO2 levels decrease. Cheap tubewells and filters permit the formerly poor to bypass corrupt and inefficient municipal entities and get water into home directly, whicn fucks up aquifers and ground water. While the global working class and poor have embraced solar energy, the chemicals used in the manufacture of solar cells are horrible, they literally cause water to catch fire.
At the end of the day, it’s prosperity, as you say.
What **AK84 **is going on was as I suspected as he posted in his latest post. Obviously he is also missing the point that Hans Rosling also dealt with this issue and Rosling’s point is that controlling population is happening by increasing the prosperity of nations. Now, as noted many times before (and Rosling also touches on emissions), **AK84 is going on like if no changes are happening or will take place on the reduction of pollution front while increasing the standards of living. As pointed before, it does not follow that nations will be destined to increase the human released global warming gases.
Again, as it was ignored: **AK84 **and others are indeed denying in the recent posts that humans (in developed nations) did control waterborne diseases, control acid rain, control phosphates in rivers and lakes, etc, with government and private enterprise efforts. It will be harder with the issue of global warming, but past efforts tell us that it is not impossible.
Past efforts that BTW, as others have noticed before, did not take us back to the stone age as many critics of those efforts told us was going to take place or implied about.
If the population does hit 11 billion and the sea level does rise and desertification increase there will probably be enough migration to trigger many wars.
As a poster already pointed out above, there’s basically no non-offensive way to propose or enact population control. If you say, “We need to cut back on carbon emissions,” that’s fairly non controversial - carbon atoms don’t have feelings. But if you say, “Such and such a group of people needs to breed less/be wiped out/be reduced,” that’s far more feather-ruffling and problematic.