[HARM]

The New York Times just made it official --the debate over "overpopulation" (that persistent doomer/liberal myth) is over and the cornucopians have won!

The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion:
http://tinyurl.com/q9ccy3v

Also see "23 Genuises at Kunstler":
http://tinyurl.com/pmd7buz

Apparently the ongoing Anthropocene extinction event (occurring at 10,000x the "background" rate of past epochs), vast oceanic dead zones, plastic trash gyres, deforestation and desertification, last-seen-in 400,000 years (and still rising) atmospheric carbon levels, Chinese killer smog, massive Mediterranean refugee flotillas and wars over food and water insecurity across the Middle East and North Africa are all just figments of my deranged Luddite mind. I need to "get with the program" and start breeding and consuming! Why anything else would be un-American! Rah-rah, go team!

[Pops]

In Mr. Pearce’s view, the villain is not overpopulation but, rather, overconsumption. “We can survive massive demographic change,” he said in 2011. But he is less sanguine about the overuse of available resources ...

“Rising consumption today far outstrips the rising head count as a threat to the planet,”

[HARM]

@Pops, overconsumption is an important part of the equation, sure, but it pales in comparison to the 800-lb gorilla in our midst: overpopulation. For most of human history (as hunter-gatherers), human beings numbers oscillated between ~50,000 and 250,000. With the rise of agriculture, it jumped between 100 - 300 million and stayed there until the Renaissance. Only with the Industrial Revolution (and its harnessing of FFs) did we really achieve escape velocity, reaching 1 billion around 1800. Now we're at 7.3 billion, set to hit 10 billion by mid-century. We've colonized every continent, cultivated, mined or built on practically every patch of marginally arable land, and are driving most complex organisms on land and sea to extinction at an appalling rate. Is that sustainable?

Impact = population x consumption
Ignore half of that equation at your peril.

[Lore]

In Mr. Pearce’s view, the villain is not overpopulation but, rather, overconsumption. “We can survive massive demographic change,” he said in 2011. But he is less sanguine about the overuse of available resources ...

“Rising consumption today far outstrips the rising head count as a threat to the planet,”

I think there was a movie about how to fix that? Something about batteries for the Matrix.

[ROCKMAN]

"In Mr. Pearce’s view, the villain is not overpopulation but, rather, overconsumption." Aha! Just as I've argued for years. It's those greedy bastards in Haiti, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, CAR, Niger, etc. that have been sucking the life blood out of the global economy. The faster we starve those folks to an early grave the better off the rest of us consumers will be. They needed to stop using "our" resources long ago. LOL

[yellowcanoe]

Over-consumption is a big part of the problem because per capita consumption in third world countries that have a high fertility rate is pretty low. What the NYT misses is that the developed countries are still growing their populations which in turn drives more over-consumption. It isn't a fertility problem as the birth rate in most if not all developed countries has dropped significantly. The unpopular truth is that population growth in developed countries is being driven by immigration and by the fact that immigrants on average have a higher fertility rate than people native to a country. In the case of Canada and the US, immigration is what built these countries and having a high immigration rate is seen as an essential part of our culture. What baffles me is why so many European countries have jumped on the immigration bandwagon when until recent times they had a net outflow of migrants to North American.

In the case of Canada, a large share of our immigrants are coming from countries where central heating isn't required and the average person doesn't own an automobile. The resource requirements to provide a basic level of shelter, food and transportation are going to be far higher than they were where they came from.

[ROCKMAN]

Yellow - So the solution is to castrate all male immigrants? Hmm...might slow the flow up a bit. LOL

[Keith_McClary]

Also Forbes:

... But regardless of one’s opinion, the current demographic trends mean that Ukraine is going to be much less populous in the future than was expected even a year or two ago. As noted, the 250,000 loss recorded from 2014-2015 was almost entirely the result of natural trends, of deaths exceeding births. An accurate reckoning of all of the people displaced by the war would likely result in a much larger figure, perhaps upwards of one million. Right at this very moment permanent damage is being done to Ukraine’s future output.

So what does this mean? Well I would suggest that it means that Ukraine’s future financing needs are going to be much larger than anticipated. The Ukrainian economy will have many fewer productive workers in future years, and this decline is only going to accelerate. The country’s demographics were already rather bleak, but they are lapsing back into the catastrophic.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/05/30/ukraines-economy-is-a-disaster-its-demography-is-even-worse/

[Newfie]

Yellow - So the solution is to castrate all male immigrants? Hmm...might slow the flow up a bit. LOL

Someone needs to spend some time on a dairy farm. No bull!

[Pops]

@Pops, overconsumption is an important part of the equation, sure, but it pales in comparison to the 800-lb gorilla in our midst: overpopulation.

Obviously the article is corny raspberry told-ya-so techno-cherry-pie... but you can't ignore the fact that the cornies were correct, the "We're All Gonna Die By Tuesday" guy was wrong, we didn't all die in the '70s, or the '80s, or the '90s, or the oughts or here halfway through the teens and there have been a lot of people right here saying the very same thing over and over for 10+ years.

I wore a ZPG T-Shirt in '74 (not that I needed any help in not reproducing, LOL) so my gut tells me there are too many now fer sure. But you gotta admit, hollering "wolf" at the top of your lungs when over and over you've been wrong is no way to get people to think of you as anything but a crackpot. That is the reason I rail at the Headlines of Doom! it just makes you look like a MOnster Shouter.

Women, given the choice, understand that kids in the city are a luxury and in the places they do get a choice to control their own reproduction, they choose fewer. Birth rates are falling across the spectrum and the main driver of that is urbanisation and maturing economies. No draconian measures were needed, we just have to hang in until birth rates fall to match mortality.

And the fact is we did figure out how to grow enough food, so much in fact that we are all closer to dying due to too many calories rather than too few.

But for many countries the bigger problem (ignoring PO/CC/Whatever) will be too few young people compared to too many old-and-in-the-way.

The facts change, you gotta keep up.

[Newfie]

Consider this...

If you stopped over consumption(whatever that is) eventually human population would rise so high as to strip Earth.

If you stopped over population( say limited to 500 million max) you could have a much higher level of consumption than now, Earth would be able to restore itself.

[Newfie]

Pops,

I dunno, perhaps we did cross the rubicon in the 70's or 80's, but momentum has carried us forward.

The inevitability of a nasty overshoot probably did occur then or even before.

That the die off has not happened does not mean it won't happen, and every day of delay makes the depth of the event that much more bleak.

When these threads come up I am always in imaginary conversation with Al Bartlett. What would Al say?

Surely, on the short term you are quite correct. It's the long term that bothers me. The abrupt stop at the bottom of a fall.

[Pops]

I'm not saying we're in tall clover, just that the situation has changed since Ehrlich when we were adding a billion every 7 years. Repeatedly arguing he was right, that we're all gonna die, but it is going to be THIS Tuesday, not the next Tuesday predicted every week for the last 50 years is not gonna convince anyone.

[yellowcanoe]

Another way to look at it is to ask the question "Does having more people help solve any of the serious problems the world faces?". Most people would conclude that the answer is "no" if they were to think about it.

[HARM]

"...just that the situation has changed since Ehrlich when we were adding a billion every 7 years."

Yes, we're now *only* adding a billion every 12 years:
4 billion in 1974
5 billion in 1987
6 billion in 1999
7 billion in 2011

Totally sustainable.

And for the record Ehrlich was not "wrong", just way too early on his estimates. Things get very interesting once we pass 10 billion people on a planet with enough renewable resources for maybe 1-2 billion living at marginally Western standards.

[onlooker]

To think NYT once upon a time was a very good newspaper, how pathetic. We can debate over consumption versus over population till we are blue in the face the reality is both have contributed to our current situation. For the record Paul Ehrlich along with other Cassandras were not wrong just somewhat off with their timing. But never mind the OP is going to take care of all the over's . till then as the English say

keep_calm_and_carry_on_union_jack_mini_poster_raw.jpg

[Pops]

And for the record Ehrlich was not "wrong", just way too early on his estimates. Things get very interesting once we pass 10 billion people on a planet with enough renewable resources for maybe 1-2 billion living at marginally Western standards.

LOL, of course he was wrong. If I say "the Giants are going to win Sunday" and they don't, I'm wrong. Doesn't matter if they win Monday or not until next season, I was wrong because the important part is the date.

So no matter how you cut it Ehrlich was indeed wrong. I'm pretty sure we didn't die off in the 70s.

Just like Simmons was wrong that oil would be $500/bbl by whatever date and however many folks were wrong that we'd be down 30% in oil production by now...

See the pattern?

Was Erlich wrong in his date only and we're going to die off this coming tuesday? I don't know, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. When he made his predictions and gave warning we were reproducing faster and faster and had just doubled the population in 30 years and resource use, oil especially was accelerating at the fastest clip ever and indeed food supply was reaching a limit.

But, the full effects of chemical contraception had not kicked in, many regions of the world were just starting their migration to town, the transition enabled by container shipped globalisation and somewhat later by automation had just started and of course we didn't starve. Now we are reproducing slower and slower. Doubling time today is "only" 60 years.

OTOH, the moving to town and getting a job that made us less prolific also makes us consume faster and faster, kind of a double edged sword. My plan for the worst scenario is the energy plateau extends out a ways and we continue BAU, because we really do have way too much to eat. My hope for the best, is energy peaks and declines but slow enough to transition cities


But I know you all like to root for and wallow in die off in it so I won't bother you any more.

[Lore]

I'm not saying we're in tall clover, just that the situation has changed since Ehrlich when we were adding a billion every 7 years. Repeatedly arguing he was right, that we're all gonna die, but it is going to be THIS Tuesday, not the next Tuesday predicted every week for the last 50 years is not gonna convince anyone.

Doom, by my estimation, is a long time coming. In the end we're all dead people here. As Jimmy said; nobody gets out alive. We're just not prepared though to discuss taking the rest of the life on the planet with us.

The science and math are pretty clear, although the timing may not be. I'm fairly sure though, if we continue on the path we're on, the human race will still go down kicking and screaming all the way. So, at the very least, cheer the fact that we will be defiant right up until the end.