World human population has more than doubled in my lifetime. That’s pretty scary re world resources etc. Time to press the panic button or will the problem solve itself?
Imagine, if we hadn’t gone through the Population Bomb of the 70s and 80s, and the famine of 1975, how much more crowded we’d be now!
Neither. The “problem” is being solved every day by millions of scientists and engineers around the world - improved crops, new agricultural techniques, desalination, construction, materials, medicine… science, so far, has managed to keep comfortably apace with population growth. I don’t see that changing in the future.
Disagree. I share the unpopular opinion that war and abortion are a necessary evil. No crap that is what keeps society from completely collapsing on itself.
I remarked on another thread recently that I think our fossil fuels (especially petroleum) will run out (that is, get scarce enough that we will essentially be all out) in the foreseeable future (I speculated another 2 or 3 generations). The use of fossil fuels, in particular petroleum, has been a MAJOR factor in increasing the carrying capacity of Earth for the human population. When it is mostly gone, I think the human population will crash, and we will fairly quickly (in just a small number of generations) revert to a population and general life style of the mid 19th century, before petroleum came into massively widespread use.
All that is, of course, if some other catastrophe doesn’t wipe out a major chunk of the human population first.
ETA: I guess I should clarify: I also think that we will not develop enough supply of alternative fuels in time.
There has to be a limit somewhere, the world’s population is increasing exponentially this can not continue forever.
Abortion, maybe, along with birth control and sex education. I agree that they’re a net good for the world. But war? WW2, the deadliest war in history, killed just 2.5% of the world’s population - barely a statistical blip.
are the people who complain about this willing to off themselves to help the situation?
didn’t think so.
- Which resources are you scared about?
- What does it mean to “press the panic button” (what actions are you advising)?
We feed the world the green revolution - a big part of which is tapping into ancient water reserves which aren’t being replenished. We’re going to face severe water scarcity relative to what’s needed, and sustaining the existing population will become more difficult, let alone an exponentially expanding one. The assumption that advancement will always get us through is not a truism - there can be hard limits that we hit.
I have limited my family size for world population, and other, reasons. What’s your next argument as to why we should charge full ahead to turn “Make Room, Make Room” into reality?
I think raw population increase is a red herring. For a long time now, particularly in the US, the rhetoric has basically been that resource-use is proportional to population.
But this diminishes the much greater effect that we in the west (with our stable populations) are having.
So the real worry is how many people can live like Americans? IMO even 3-4 billion living in this way would lead to catastrophe.
The population increase is unlikely to continue indefinitely.
By most analyses world population will eventually plateau at 10 or 11 billion as more countries go through demographic transition and their population growth greatly slows or even declines (if you’re skeptical about this note that there are countries in asia and the middle east where within a generation the fertility rate has gone from levels as high as 7 to barely replacement).
the population will resolve itself, just let the hurricanes and tsunamis do their work.
Start panicking? What have you been doing for the last 40+ years?
I’m not having any children, nor my SO, so that’s two people not replacing themselves. As Typo Knig says, what next?
Well, first we ban abortion…
Back in the late '70s, early '80s we had a movement called ZPG; zero population growth. It encouraged families to have no more than 2 children, just enough to replace the parents. It didn’t last.
I did my part, I had only one. He died before he could reproduce.
I’m afraid the genetic imparative is just too strong.
I think it will resolve itself. There is a pattern of countries birth rates falling rapidly
as they get richer. If they don’t get richer then they do not consume resources anyway.
It is resource use that is the issue - not really population growth. And in every heavy resource using country - just about - the birth rate is below replacement rate.
The real threat is surely use of finite resource and/or the effect on the environment of the use of those resources (metals, fossil fuels, water etc.). Ultimately what is needed is not global zero population growth (at least not in the foreseeable future) but zero growth in GDP.
Gross Domestic Happiness growth anyone? It will take a change in cultural mind-set that’s for sure.
Modern population forecasting began in 1891 when E. G. Ravenstein presented a paper entitled “Lands of the Globe Still Available for European Settlement” at a joint meeting of the Geographical and Economic Sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leeds. Making suitable adjustments for maximum production per square mile, he announced that the world could never hold more than 5,994,000,000, although that figure was skewed because he assumed that the tropics would always be too hot for food cultivation on European methodology.
You can go through the entire 20th century and find learned figure after learned figure announcing various learned figures about what the maximum will be. How Many People Can the Earth Support? by Joel E. Cohen is the definitive study of these studies. (Academic tome; not light reading.)
He reports estimates that are obviously too low - the seven billion people today live with more food than any smaller population in history - up to seemingly wild projections of a trillion. What’s interesting is that the limits don’t form any obvious patterns over time. They produce a scatter graph. IOW, the best estimates of science have always produced and continue to produce random results.
The only time effect is that of recession and war. In the 1920s, a world boom, everybody panicked. In the 1930s and 1940s, everybody assumed that population would be stagnant. (These were short-term predictions about the future. The limit of population, whatever that might be, was always comfortably distant.) In the 1950s people starting panicking as times got better and people had more kids. The Population Bomb was a new version of what had been said for fifty years, but people have short memories.
What’s different today is that world population is at or past what used to be considered the absolute limit, rather than just a small fraction of it. The prognosticators always assumed that farm production couldn’t be increased more than 10 times over current yields. We’re past that already.
That puts the issue close. Can we do another 10x growth in production or have we hit the max? What happens when China and India, who will soon have 1/3 the world’s population, start eating at western levels of protein and calories? Western industrial farming shattered all predictions in the past; can it be exported around the world successfully? The answers, of course, are: I don’t know; I don’t know; and I don’t know. Nobody does. This isn’t a GQ. There are no facts about the future.
Since facts will be in short supply concerning the OP, IMHO is a better fit, rather than General Questions. MOved.
samclem, Moderator