I don’t think population growth is the problem per se. If the world were to hit zero population growth, or even decline somewhat, that wouldn’t be the issue. The issue is not so much countries with high population growth (as in sub-Saharan Africa), as the major polluters and consumers actually have negative population growth (once we take out immigration). Generally speaking, homosexuals are as much of the problem of over-consumption in developed nations as heterosexuals or anyone else.
That used to be the case; however, it is rapidly changing. As Peter Huber said in a recent Intelligence Squared debate:
But a more telling (and terrifying) analysis is here:
[quote]Here’s a classic chart displaying exponential growth – a chart pattern that is often called a “hockey stick.” We are charting an amount of something over time. The only requirement for a graph to end up looking like this is that the thing being measured grows by some percentage over each increment of time.
The slower the percentage rate of growth, the greater the length of time we’d need to chart in order to visually see this hockey stick shape.
Another thing I want you to take away from this chart is that once an exponential function “turns the corner,” even though the percentage rate of growth might remain constant and possibly quite low, the amounts do not. They pile up faster and faster.
In this particular case, you are looking at a chart of something that historically grew at less than 1% per year. It is world population, and because it is only growing at roughly 1% per year, we need to look at several thousands of years to detect this hockey stick shape. The green is history and the red is the most recent UN projection of population growth for just the next 42 years.
Certainly by now, math-minded folks might be starting to get a little uncomfortable here, because they might feel that I am not presenting this information in a classical or even accurate way.
Where mathematicians have been trained to define exponential growth in terms of the rate of change, we are going to focus on the amount of change. Both are valid; it’s just one way is easier to express as a formula and the other is easier for most people to intuitively grasp.
Unlike the rate of change, the amount of change is not constant; it grows larger and larger with every passing unit of time, and that’s why it is more important for us to appreciate than the rate. This is such an important concept that I will dedicate the next chapter to illustrating it.
Also, mathematicians would say that there is no “turn the corner” stage of an exponential chart, because this is just an artifact of where we draw the left hand scale. That is, an exponential chart always looks like a hockey stick at every moment in time, as long as we adjust the left axis properly.
But if you know the limits, or boundaries, of what you are measuring, then you can fix the left axis, and the “turn the corner” stage is absolutely real and vitally important.
This is a crucial distinction, and our future depends on more of us appreciating this.
For example, the total carrying capacity of the earth for humans is thought to be somewhere in this zone, give or take a few billion. Because of this, the “turn the corner” stage is very real, of immense importance to us, and not an artifact of graphical trickery.
The critical take-away for exponential functions, the one thing I want you to recall, relates to the concept of “speeding up.”
You can think of the key feature of exponential growth either as the AMOUNT that is added growing larger over each additional unit of time, or you can think of it as the TIME shrinking between each additional unit of amount added. Either way, the theme is “speeding up.”
To illustrate this using population: If we started with 1 million people and set the growth rate to a measly 1% per year, we’d find that it would take 694 years before we achieved a billion people. But we’d be at 2 billion people after only 100 more years, while the third billion would require just 41 more years. Then 29 years, then 22, and then finally only 18 years to add another, to bring us to 6 billion people. That is, each additional billion people took a shorter and shorter amount of time to achieve. Here we can see the theme of speeding up.
This next chart is of oil consumption, perhaps the most important resource of them all, which has been growing at the much faster rate of nearly 3% per year. So we can detect the ‘hockey-stick’ shape over the course of just one hundred and fifty years. And here, too, we can fix the left axis, because we know with reasonable accuracy how much oil the world can maximally produce. So, again, having “turned the corner” is extremely relevant and important to us.
And here’s the US money supply, which has been compounding at incredible rates, ranging between 5% and 18% per year. So this chart only needs to be a few decades long to see the hockey stick effect.
[b]And here’s world-wide water use, species extinction, fisheries exploited, and forest cover lost. Each one of these is a finite resource, as are many other critical resources, and quite a few are approaching their limits.
And here is the world you live in. If it seems like the pace of change is speeding up, well, that’s because it is. You happen to live at a time when humans will finally have to confront the fact that our exponential money system and resource use will encounter hard, physical limits.
And behind all of this, driving every bit of every graph is the number of people on the surface of the planet.[/b][/quote]
That is from Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course”. I can’t post the image of the graphs he’s describing because the text is from the transcript of a video, but you can very easily imagine them.
So, without meaning to be patronizing, not only should the people of the world stop discriminating against homosexuals - we outta give them a damn medal!
Great read that. Population/population growth is/are the biggest problem(s).
It irks me when people worry about the low birth rate in so many developed countries. It’s going to be a problem, sure, but it’s a going to be an easier problem to deal with if we deal with it now.
If people living in Taipei don’t realize this, I don’t know who will.
Zender, they are worrying about a different problem. The worry about birth rates in developed countries has to do with maintaining the social net.
Having too many people for the Earth to support is a global, not national, problem. While shrinking population rates in developed nations will make it easier to deal with the overpopulation problem now, it doesn’t address a more immediate concerns for said nations. They care more about how to pay for the social benefits they promised.
To maintain benefits for the poor, elderly and sick, you need a growing population so that the next level on the pyramid is larger than this current. If you have a stagnant, or shrinking, population then you get an inverted pyramid (ie the “Baby Boomer” generation in America) when it comes to paying taxes for social programs. Fewer are paying in than taking out.
I think I understand that.
What I want to say is that, at some point, “maintaining benefits” must not be solved by having a growing population. A “growing-pop. solution” just puts off the inevitable.
At some stage, things will come to a head. People are living too damn long, and the number of babyboomers that will get Alzheimers, or Parkinsons in the next 35 years is going to stretch health care to the limits. It’s going to mean that young, willing nurses are going to be able to charge whatever to take care of you, your spouse, or your dad. I know many have been promised too much, but they weren’t promised the world by the youth that will have to pay for it. So the young will get back by charging $100 plus per hour just to keep the old company.
This is getting far from the homosexuality in Uganda topic, but with all the incentives to have more children, I just feel that we are punishing people (homosexuals and heterosexuals) who are doing (what I think is) the right thing; not having children.
All of this ignores the concept of demographic transition:
It’s somewhat disingenuous to conflate China’s rise of its middle class (and its increased consumption patterns) with population growth given that China has negative population growth. Sorry, nice try. Replacement fertility rates are generally regarded to be 2.1. China’s 2005-2010 projection is 1.73. Looking at other countries that are somewhat developed, you see that a fairly broad range of countries from Chile (1.94) to Iran (2.04), and even big ones such Brazil (1.90) and Indonesia (2.18), are either already below replacement rates or are right on the cusp of slipping below such rates.
Stats taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
Looking at the world trends though, we find the following:
[quote]For the world as a whole, the number of children born per woman decreased from 5.02 to 2.65 between 1950 and 2005. A breakdown by continent is as follows:
Europe 2.66 to 1.41
North America 3.47 to 1.99
Oceania 3.87 to 2.30
Central America 6.38 to 2.66
South America 5.75 to 2.51
Asia (excluding Middle East) 5.85 to 2.43
Middle East & North Africa 6.99 to 3.37
Sub-Saharan Africa 6.7 to 5.53
In 2050, the projected world number of children born per woman is 2.05. Only the Middle East & North Africa (2.09) and Sub-Saharan Africa (2.61) will then have numbers greater than 2.05.[/quote]
States taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Demographic_transition
So what’s this then, some anti-Muslim tirade? Should one commit mass infanticide in all Middle east and south Asian countries, for now and forever ? Probably not a good move, but it is correlated somewhat with religion.
The stats on birth rate do not tell the whole story in developed nations, as the life span is increasing inexorably too. For a society where people all died off at, say, 60, the longer you live past that, and the more people there are living longer, you build a surge that has nothing to do with fertility rate. That’s where China’s population is and will surge, to say nothing of India which has a large birth rate too.
And sub-Saharan Africa’s stats are frightening until you realise how many of them die before age 5.
But, yes, it is clear that there are way too many people in the world, but we have discussed this [url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/a-new-economic-model/47876/1 and [url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/nuclear-industry-loves-global-warming-dont-you/39479/1 before[/url]. And we should again… I’m doing my bit.
AMEN. This “growth = prosperity” ideology is or whatever you want to call it spells doom for our species. It can only be perpetually true under conditions of infinite surplus, which we sadly lack on our spacially-finite planet… However, I suspect this ridiculous glorification of growth will abruptly die when our cheap energy glut comes to an end, probably in a matter of decades (or years).
unfortunately, by then the bulk of the damage to the planet and its ecosystems will have been done. I look forward to the days of hiking through ‘lush green forests’ populated entirely by holographically generated giant trees, ferns, squirrels and song birds. Lovely!
You will probably have to be holographically generated too!
Things always find their own equilibrium. It’s inevitable that we’re going to have ecological disasters, an increase in climatic catastrophes, and of course, an increase in wars as a result of people competing for resources, all of which will lead to the required number of people dying and/or being beaten down to attain equilibrium. The 21st Century is not going to be some love-in, no matter what these naive fools in Copenhagen wish for. It’s going to be pretty ugly and there are going to be big winners and big losers. These things are inevitable, so the question becomes one of how to be on the winning side. So what though? That’s hardly unusual. In fact, it’s business as usual. A third of modern Germany died in the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), but life and civilisation went on and prospered in fact.
Talk of humans wiping out themselves or life on the planet vastly overstates our power as a species. Even if we wiped out 99.99% of each other (highly unlikely), it would still leave 650,000 people on the planet, which is not even remotely close to pushing us to extinction as a species. To think that we could even begin to wipe out life as a whole when we can’t even find cures for many very common diseases also grossly overstates our power. There’s a lot of alarmist nonsense out there.
Yeah, won’t argue with that - though the Permian extinction, which many scientists attribute to global warming, did manage to kill off 100% of 95% of species on Earth. The question is, what kind of world will the survivors be left with. No more coral reefs? A fetid stinking plastic-filled cesspool for an ocean? Rubber-tree plantations as far as the eye can see and actual rainforests nowhere to be found? Left to its own devices, this is where the free market and its “natural law” proponents will take us. Things like clean air and nature left to its own devices just don’t turn a profit.
Paging Thomas Malthus, paging Thomas Malthus…
Vay: So what exactly is your response to the perils of the free market? Government intervention? Because that’s worked so well so far. What if the government intervention is to promote rampant growth that causes pollution and to give its cronies in big business absolutely no incentive to clean up because everyone is making a huge profit in the short term? What if the populations of developing nations actually don’t mind because they can see, in real terms, that their lives have improved?
The whole grab bag of environmental issues is so ridiculously informed by a handful of the Western bourgeois intellectuals and their hangers-on who have absolutely no idea about how the world really works or their place in it. They think that everyone else is a spent civilisation like Europe, and that everyone else wants to grow old and hold hands together, instead of supplanting tired, weak civilisations with those that are more vital, that the rest of the world has the same notion of “fairness”. Developing nations want money from developed nations so they can buy the rope to hang them with.
The other day, some of my colleagues were talking about the Amazon Rainforest, and they were saying we need to protect it, by force if necessary, claiming that it would probably have more international support than the invasion of Iraq. What an inane bloody comment to make. It’s all more of the same “convert the poor heathens to the one true faith, through force if necessary” crap. As though we need to stop those evil, savage Brazilians from cutting down our trees (yes, our trees, God damn it, they’re our trees, though funnily enough, our trees are not their trees, nor are our cities their cities, and so on), despite the fact that the West did it themselves back in the day, but also because Brazil cuts down its trees because everyone wants wood, or more likely, sugar, oranges, soy bean oil, ethanol, coffee, chocolate or bananas. I don’t see any of these same people stopping consuming those products, or stopping eating fish because the world’s fisheries are in collapse or stopping from spending in one drunken, shopping filled weekend to some impoverished nation what the locals consume in a month, or any other ludicruous behaviour. No, that would require people to put their money where their mouths were. Just because some clowns in the West decide they’re not going to have children does not mean they’re in the position to say that’s suddenly some panacea, when it’s business as usual in their naive little worlds of shopping and holidays in the tropics.
Brazil, China, India or anyone else would rightly laugh in the faces of developed nations if they dared to suggest that they should forego development (or having children) whilst Westerners, Japanese, etc. lived in luxury. Frankly, I don’t think the average Indian gives two hoots if Westerners don’t want him to chop down a tree or fish the last fish from the ocean to buy a mini-van and fill it with kids. He’s going to do it anyway. In fact, he probably thinks the sooner all these nihilistic Westerners die off, the better, because then there’ll be more land for his great grand-children to colonise.
What do you think will happen to the planet when all the methane now trapped in the soils below the polar seas and in the permafrost is released as the planet warms?
Note that I am not asking you a question about politics, or ideology, but about chemistry and science.
Vorkosigan
I’m guessing that you think it will kill everyone and everything, though that seems highly alarmist. Regardless, politics and ideology have everything to do with it. India, for instance, is quite resistant to the idea of anything that is legally binding and has declared it won’t “compromise on India’s national interest”. With developing nations pursuing such a line, how is your Roland Emmerich-like doomsday scenario to be averted?
It will turn into CO2, water or escape into space.
Al Gore will make a documentary, An Inconvenient Fart which will get him an another Academy Award and Nobel Peace Prize. 
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Fucked up, but hardly “The End of All Life on Earth” stuff.
I didn’t ask you to guess what I was thinking nor did I ask you to provide your personal labels for possible scenarios. I asked you what the science says about the effects of a massive methane release of the gigatonnes of methane now trapped in the arctic.