11 ms·

The Population Bomb?

28 points by yugoja 11y ago

dang 11y ago
Url changed from http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused, which points to this. HN prefers original sources.
clumsysmurf 11y ago
One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors. When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed. Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal. I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected from nature, they forget or never understood how much they depend on it - not just from nutrition & ecological services standpoint, but psychologically and spiritually as well.
- ak39 11y ago
  The world is too much with us indeed. Have you heard of Calhoun's mouse experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experime... Maybe we are exhibiting the attitudes Calhoun observed in the "beautiful ones". Scary.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    Fascinating read. Thanks.
    - ak39 11y ago
      Truly. The concept is depressing and liberating at the same time. Here's a video on Dr Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        Our Disneyland isn't going to be a ride in the park.
- tgflynn 11y ago
  I think I agree with you. The world seems overcrowded to me. I've never been much of an out of doors person but sometimes I'd just like to get away from it all. That seems difficult these days. Anywhere you go in the US it seems like the land is either privately owned or government owned with tons of regulations that nobody really wants to deal with. Those regulations are probably at least somewhat needed because without them the sheer number of people visiting government lands would probably do great damage. Anything above about 1 billion people on this planet seems probably suboptimal to me.
  - bcg1 11y ago
    Some people think it should be 500 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...
  - dagw 11y ago
    Not overcrowded, just spread out too thin. The reason the US looks like it looks is that everybody wants an acre of land around their house, so they chop down forests and build suburbs instead. If people gave up on that notion and where willing to live in cities then there would be an abundance of unspoiled nature.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Every place is pretty much owned in America. Land is valuable. And there is admittedly little or no unspoiled land left. But don't blame houses. People in America still live on a tiny fraction of the land. Its all about farming and grazing and mining.
      - mplscoder 11y ago
        The Feds own most of the land. See chart "Federal Land as a Percentage of Total State Land Area" http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-of-federal-government.html http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-...
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  In Canada you can just camp out on crown land. We have so much extra space its mind boggling.
  - dagw 11y ago
    One thing to do to cure yourself of the whole the world is too crowded feeling is to take a flight from Europe to Either Vancouver or Japan and just marvel at how many hours you'll spend flying over Russia or Canada and not seeing any signs of civilization.
noselasd 11y ago
There's a nicely illustrative video by Hans Rosling here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg on the population growth.
- userulluipeste 11y ago
  There are a lot of unproven assumptions there, such as that the education is a decreasing factor of population growth. That is only a correlation. I don't claim to know exactly how things are revolving in this matter, but as an educated guess I can say that, outside the necessary physical conditions (like enough nourishment and such), the culture of family is the most influential here. The education and the opportunities it opened for a better life just happened to be seductive enough to attract the individuals out of that family culture, but I wouldn't take this effect for granted.
  - noselasd 11y ago
    You can look at the the other videos of Hans Rosling which might answer that. Whether it's a correlation and not a cause might still be up for debate, but the observation of that effect have been observed in virtually all places around the world.
sohkamyung 11y ago
For more statistics and a historical look at world population growth (including references), see the "World Population Growth" charts at OurWorldInData [ http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/world-population-growth/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-stati... ]
facepalm 11y ago
Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium. If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation? When we produce lots of young people now, and those become old, we need even more young people, and so on? So population growth is the only way forward? Not even mentioning that today fewer people are needed to take care of other people than in former times. For example one farmer can produce food for many, many more people than one hundred years ago. It's obvious that population can not grow indefinitely. Just think of the surface of the earth. There is a limited number of square meters. Eventually you would have so many people that there would be one person per square meter. Maybe we could even live like that. We could live in skyscrapers, or even in little boxes Matrix style and spend our days in spacious virtual reality. But the question is: do we want to live like that? We have to also think how we want to live, and how that can be made possible. In the same vein, I guess the world obviously can not be overpopulated. If if were overpopulated, people would start dying until it would not be overpopulated anymore. That's presumably what is already happening in some regions of the world anyway, and has always happened. In "Collapse" Jared Diamonds describes a tribe living on a small isolated island. When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. It's not a new problem. But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.
- shoo 11y ago
  re: the anecdote that was shared from Diamond's "Collapse" > When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. This was an example of a society which had developed bottom-up knowledge and management of population levels. As well as cases of "virtual suicide", as described, there were also traditions dictating which siblings were allowed to have children, and which were not. From memory, they also developed appropriate agricultural practices to not damage their limited available productive land. In my opinion, this society developed a successful reaction to the limits of their environment, although some aspects of it might seem very confronting or perhaps even unethical to us in other societies. On a personal note, in a strange way I found it was peaceful to read "Collapse", to learn that there have been many civilisations that have collapsed in the past -- civilisations that were in some sense more successful (by lasting for a longer period) than the civilisation I am part of. Similarly there is a sense of peace in learning more about the non-human parts of natural history. It's not all about us.
Shivetya 11y ago
The population bomb went the same way as every other doom and gloom scenario - no where, people just ignored it till the zealots finally shut up. too many people? too little food? do people even realize how much land in this world isn't being used for people or food? most issues with food and population are caused by politics and usually bad politics. population numbers didn't cause the issues, greedy and power hungry people who went unchecked do.
- stared 11y ago
  By now most ecosystems are dead and many species became extinct. No matter if we eat meat or vegetables, ride cars or bikes, the biggest contributor to environmental devastation is the sheer population size. Now it is a lot, and it will be more. Of course, once can take an anthropocentric approach. But, in my humble view, world is not only about people.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Reposting comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205 because it's still relevant: This is a bit like saying that the people causing panic over Y2K were unwarranted because everyone checked their systems and sorted it out in advance. If nobody had panicked about it, then nothing would have been done. There has been a major, coordinated effort to give women family planning information and technology worldwide, along with economic and social change. Efforts against overpopulation have been a common theme of development planning.
transfire 11y ago
Idiotic article. It ignores the real decremental effects of overpopulation that are taking place presently. Moreover, 50 years is not that long. Consider how things will look in another 200 at any appreciable positive growth rate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk
nice1 11y ago
The was also the "global cooling" alarm some years back. Gloom scenarios are important for stability: they are what used to be called "opium for the people". It keeps people's minds away from real issues.
eleitl 11y ago
The whole essence of overshoot and die-off is due to running into limits in a finite world. Any sophisms detracting from that basic facts are criminally insane, or just criminal.
graeham 11y ago
Forecasting is a art - I think the Population Bomb (and other predictions made ~ that era - Hubbard Peak Oil? Ozone holes? Space Travel? Robots?) are subject to the initial conditions of the prediction. Why were mothers in India having so many children compared to to those in Europe and North America? The model assumed static conditions that would continue the trend. Economics (cost of raising children, no need for extra farm help) and social factors (women's education and access to birth control) changed trends. Population growth does continue to be a problem and concern for the future - both from over-use of resources and pollution of the environment. But I think this does show an important point of not putting too much weighting into future predictions. The process of planning is very important, but the plans themselves are useless. People worry about running out of oil. While not an excuse to be wasteful, I think its likely we will move to alternative energies before supply becomes overly constrained. Mega-batteries (reported today in Japan and proposed by Tesla) could be a key to make other energies feasible, and would not have been predicted even a few years ago. The future is exciting times!
mangeletti 11y ago
Is this article meant to be sarcastic? The world population has quite literally doubled since 1968 when there were 3.5B people worldwide. Yes, the population has doubled since most of your parents were born.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Which implies an interesting statistic: the majority of people who ever lived, are still alive.
  - eCa 11y ago
    I don't think it does. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that a total of 107 billion Homo Sapiens have lived (since 50,000 BC) [1]. [1] http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...
  - dagw 11y ago
    Doesn't work like that: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      That's interesting. An optimistic guesstimate assuming uniform growth from 50KBC. But humans have been boom and bust since then, with things like ice ages putting a monkey wrench in the works. I'm thinking it could have busted to 10M repeatedly through history.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
shoo 11y ago
I think it is unhelpful to look at something like population in isolation from other deeply related issues, such as affluence, pollution per affluence, technology, unsustainable consumption of resources / production of pollution, changes in efficiency. For example, one simple way of modelling things is the `I=PAT` equation (see also the critique under "Reception") [0]. I'll quote from VHEMT [1]: > For example, in terms of energy consumption, > when a North American couple stops at two it’s > about the same as an average East Indian couple > stopping at 30, or a Bangaledesh couple stopping > at 97. Maybe energy consumption is a bit abstract - it is not immediately obvious what, if anything, is wrong with that. Instead we could consider per-capita CO2 pollution, taking the 2005 statistics from Wikipedia [2]: United States: 19.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year) Bangladesh: 0.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year) From these numbers, a 1 additional US person has the same immediate short-term impact in terms of CO2 pollution as about 64 additional Bangladeshi people [2]. CO2 pollution produced by humans is primarily the cause of recent global warming. If the current trend in greenhouse gas pollution continues to track the high end of (conservative) IPCC baseline models [3] then it will not be surprising if we end up with a world that is +3.5C -- +4C -- or more higher than baseline, by the year 2100 (from memory, we're already at about +0.6C this year). It really doesn't look like we will limit the temperate increase to the "agreed 'safe'" +2C in the real world, outside of modelling scenarios[4]. It doesn't appear that the world has experienced a temperature of +4C for quite a long time (either hundreds of thousands or millions of years, depending on which graphs you look at)[5][6]. The last time it was that warm certainly pre-dates human agriculture (~12000 years ago) [7], and perhaps the human species (100s of thousands of years ago)[8]. I.e., we are rapidly pushing the climate toward a state where humans and human civilisation have never previously existed. The result will likely be unpleasant, in the sense that many people will suffer and die, due to heat stress, natural disasters, reduced crop yields, disease, and conflict caused by displaced people / resource shortages [9][10]. I have focused here on climate change in isolation, but that is just the first hurdle. Other serious concerns are human impacts upon biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle - and those are just the impacts that we're able to measure [11]. There's reasonable evidence that the world is currently experiencing a period of mass extinction [12]. So -- bringing it back to population. From the perspective of everyone else alive right now, assuming they are well informed and rational, should they think it is a good idea for me to have a child, particularly if I live in an affluent, polluting society[13]? I doubt it very much. Of course, it isn't all grim. There is still time for us all to get better at being altruistic, thinking clearly, predicting the future, cooperating, changing our minds about what might be important, and modifying our environment (for better or worse). But, at best, it is obviously a race between positive and negative trends. There is not much time left. But, from historical evidence, so far the metrics of biodiversity and CO2 pollution are very much going in an undesirable direction, with no sign yet of change. edit: I'll finish by quoting David MacKay out of context. He is talking about the UK's sustainable energy debate [14]: > We need to choose a plan that adds up. It is possible > to make a plan that adds up, but it’s not going to be > easy. > > We need to stop saying no and start saying yes. We need > to stop the Punch and Judy show and get building. I pretty much agree with this sentiment in the realm of sustainable energy, and I'd also agree with the sentiment if it were extended much more broadly, beyond MacKay's intended context, to questions of population, affluence, equality, poverty, intergenerational fairness, and how economies should be run. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception [1] http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm [2] we're glossing over the fact that some of these additional people might choose to have children, or that annual per-capita CO2 pollution could change. [3] For 2014 data, see figure 3 (a) of https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outlines/2014-15/GEOG4411/Friedlingstein%20et%20al.pdf https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outl... [4] http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-warming-possible/ http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-warm... [5] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page... [6] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human [9] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-... [10] http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ [11] See figure 6 of: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=iss_pub&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com.au%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Decosystem%2Bsafe%2Bboundaries%26btnG%3D%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%252C5#search=%22ecosystem%20safe%20boundaries%22 http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... [12] http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publication/50267709_Has_the_Earth%27s_sixth_mass_extinction_already_arrived/links/00b7d5183edf5b6c76000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publicatio... [13] assuming they don't have some kind of interest in driving down the cost of labour in the short term, to reduce the labour cost of producing this season's model of useless widget. [14] http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml
wmil 11y ago
India seems like a very poor example. Instead look at Chad. It's had exponential population growth for decades without slowing. It's mostly young people. It's already flooding Italy with refugees. I'm not convinced that "The Population Bomb" was wrong.

28 points by yugoja 11y ago

dang 11y ago

Url changed from http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused, which points to this. HN prefers original sources.

clumsysmurf 11y ago

One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors. When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed. Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal. I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected from nature, they forget or never understood how much they depend on it - not just from nutrition & ecological services standpoint, but psychologically and spiritually as well.

ak39 11y ago
The world is too much with us indeed. Have you heard of Calhoun's mouse experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experime... Maybe we are exhibiting the attitudes Calhoun observed in the "beautiful ones". Scary.
- deelowe 11y ago
  Fascinating read. Thanks.
  - ak39 11y ago
    Truly. The concept is depressing and liberating at the same time. Here's a video on Dr Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      Our Disneyland isn't going to be a ride in the park.
tgflynn 11y ago
I think I agree with you. The world seems overcrowded to me. I've never been much of an out of doors person but sometimes I'd just like to get away from it all. That seems difficult these days. Anywhere you go in the US it seems like the land is either privately owned or government owned with tons of regulations that nobody really wants to deal with. Those regulations are probably at least somewhat needed because without them the sheer number of people visiting government lands would probably do great damage. Anything above about 1 billion people on this planet seems probably suboptimal to me.
- bcg1 11y ago
  Some people think it should be 500 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...
- dagw 11y ago
  Not overcrowded, just spread out too thin. The reason the US looks like it looks is that everybody wants an acre of land around their house, so they chop down forests and build suburbs instead. If people gave up on that notion and where willing to live in cities then there would be an abundance of unspoiled nature.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Every place is pretty much owned in America. Land is valuable. And there is admittedly little or no unspoiled land left. But don't blame houses. People in America still live on a tiny fraction of the land. Its all about farming and grazing and mining.
    - mplscoder 11y ago
      The Feds own most of the land. See chart "Federal Land as a Percentage of Total State Land Area" http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-of-federal-government.html http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-...
3pt14159 11y ago
In Canada you can just camp out on crown land. We have so much extra space its mind boggling.
- dagw 11y ago
  One thing to do to cure yourself of the whole the world is too crowded feeling is to take a flight from Europe to Either Vancouver or Japan and just marvel at how many hours you'll spend flying over Russia or Canada and not seeing any signs of civilization.

noselasd 11y ago

There's a nicely illustrative video by Hans Rosling here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg on the population growth.

userulluipeste 11y ago
There are a lot of unproven assumptions there, such as that the education is a decreasing factor of population growth. That is only a correlation. I don't claim to know exactly how things are revolving in this matter, but as an educated guess I can say that, outside the necessary physical conditions (like enough nourishment and such), the culture of family is the most influential here. The education and the opportunities it opened for a better life just happened to be seductive enough to attract the individuals out of that family culture, but I wouldn't take this effect for granted.
- noselasd 11y ago
  You can look at the the other videos of Hans Rosling which might answer that. Whether it's a correlation and not a cause might still be up for debate, but the observation of that effect have been observed in virtually all places around the world.

sohkamyung 11y ago

For more statistics and a historical look at world population growth (including references), see the "World Population Growth" charts at OurWorldInData [ http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/world-population-growth/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-stati... ]

facepalm 11y ago

Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium. If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation? When we produce lots of young people now, and those become old, we need even more young people, and so on? So population growth is the only way forward? Not even mentioning that today fewer people are needed to take care of other people than in former times. For example one farmer can produce food for many, many more people than one hundred years ago. It's obvious that population can not grow indefinitely. Just think of the surface of the earth. There is a limited number of square meters. Eventually you would have so many people that there would be one person per square meter. Maybe we could even live like that. We could live in skyscrapers, or even in little boxes Matrix style and spend our days in spacious virtual reality. But the question is: do we want to live like that? We have to also think how we want to live, and how that can be made possible. In the same vein, I guess the world obviously can not be overpopulated. If if were overpopulated, people would start dying until it would not be overpopulated anymore. That's presumably what is already happening in some regions of the world anyway, and has always happened. In "Collapse" Jared Diamonds describes a tribe living on a small isolated island. When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. It's not a new problem. But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.

shoo 11y ago
re: the anecdote that was shared from Diamond's "Collapse" > When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. This was an example of a society which had developed bottom-up knowledge and management of population levels. As well as cases of "virtual suicide", as described, there were also traditions dictating which siblings were allowed to have children, and which were not. From memory, they also developed appropriate agricultural practices to not damage their limited available productive land. In my opinion, this society developed a successful reaction to the limits of their environment, although some aspects of it might seem very confronting or perhaps even unethical to us in other societies. On a personal note, in a strange way I found it was peaceful to read "Collapse", to learn that there have been many civilisations that have collapsed in the past -- civilisations that were in some sense more successful (by lasting for a longer period) than the civilisation I am part of. Similarly there is a sense of peace in learning more about the non-human parts of natural history. It's not all about us.

Shivetya 11y ago

The population bomb went the same way as every other doom and gloom scenario - no where, people just ignored it till the zealots finally shut up. too many people? too little food? do people even realize how much land in this world isn't being used for people or food? most issues with food and population are caused by politics and usually bad politics. population numbers didn't cause the issues, greedy and power hungry people who went unchecked do.

stared 11y ago
By now most ecosystems are dead and many species became extinct. No matter if we eat meat or vegetables, ride cars or bikes, the biggest contributor to environmental devastation is the sheer population size. Now it is a lot, and it will be more. Of course, once can take an anthropocentric approach. But, in my humble view, world is not only about people.
pjc50 11y ago
Reposting comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205 because it's still relevant: This is a bit like saying that the people causing panic over Y2K were unwarranted because everyone checked their systems and sorted it out in advance. If nobody had panicked about it, then nothing would have been done. There has been a major, coordinated effort to give women family planning information and technology worldwide, along with economic and social change. Efforts against overpopulation have been a common theme of development planning.

transfire 11y ago

Idiotic article. It ignores the real decremental effects of overpopulation that are taking place presently. Moreover, 50 years is not that long. Consider how things will look in another 200 at any appreciable positive growth rate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk

nice1 11y ago

The was also the "global cooling" alarm some years back. Gloom scenarios are important for stability: they are what used to be called "opium for the people". It keeps people's minds away from real issues.

eleitl 11y ago

The whole essence of overshoot and die-off is due to running into limits in a finite world. Any sophisms detracting from that basic facts are criminally insane, or just criminal.

graeham 11y ago

Forecasting is a art - I think the Population Bomb (and other predictions made ~ that era - Hubbard Peak Oil? Ozone holes? Space Travel? Robots?) are subject to the initial conditions of the prediction. Why were mothers in India having so many children compared to to those in Europe and North America? The model assumed static conditions that would continue the trend. Economics (cost of raising children, no need for extra farm help) and social factors (women's education and access to birth control) changed trends. Population growth does continue to be a problem and concern for the future - both from over-use of resources and pollution of the environment. But I think this does show an important point of not putting too much weighting into future predictions. The process of planning is very important, but the plans themselves are useless. People worry about running out of oil. While not an excuse to be wasteful, I think its likely we will move to alternative energies before supply becomes overly constrained. Mega-batteries (reported today in Japan and proposed by Tesla) could be a key to make other energies feasible, and would not have been predicted even a few years ago. The future is exciting times!

mangeletti 11y ago

Is this article meant to be sarcastic? The world population has quite literally doubled since 1968 when there were 3.5B people worldwide. Yes, the population has doubled since most of your parents were born.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Which implies an interesting statistic: the majority of people who ever lived, are still alive.
- eCa 11y ago
  I don't think it does. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that a total of 107 billion Homo Sapiens have lived (since 50,000 BC) [1]. [1] http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...
- dagw 11y ago
  Doesn't work like that: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    That's interesting. An optimistic guesstimate assuming uniform growth from 50KBC. But humans have been boom and bust since then, with things like ice ages putting a monkey wrench in the works. I'm thinking it could have busted to 10M repeatedly through history.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

shoo 11y ago

I think it is unhelpful to look at something like population in isolation from other deeply related issues, such as affluence, pollution per affluence, technology, unsustainable consumption of resources / production of pollution, changes in efficiency. For example, one simple way of modelling things is the `I=PAT` equation (see also the critique under "Reception") [0]. I'll quote from VHEMT [1]: > For example, in terms of energy consumption, > when a North American couple stops at two it’s > about the same as an average East Indian couple > stopping at 30, or a Bangaledesh couple stopping > at 97. Maybe energy consumption is a bit abstract - it is not immediately obvious what, if anything, is wrong with that. Instead we could consider per-capita CO2 pollution, taking the 2005 statistics from Wikipedia [2]: United States: 19.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year) Bangladesh: 0.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year) From these numbers, a 1 additional US person has the same immediate short-term impact in terms of CO2 pollution as about 64 additional Bangladeshi people [2]. CO2 pollution produced by humans is primarily the cause of recent global warming. If the current trend in greenhouse gas pollution continues to track the high end of (conservative) IPCC baseline models [3] then it will not be surprising if we end up with a world that is +3.5C -- +4C -- or more higher than baseline, by the year 2100 (from memory, we're already at about +0.6C this year). It really doesn't look like we will limit the temperate increase to the "agreed 'safe'" +2C in the real world, outside of modelling scenarios[4]. It doesn't appear that the world has experienced a temperature of +4C for quite a long time (either hundreds of thousands or millions of years, depending on which graphs you look at)[5][6]. The last time it was that warm certainly pre-dates human agriculture (~12000 years ago) [7], and perhaps the human species (100s of thousands of years ago)[8]. I.e., we are rapidly pushing the climate toward a state where humans and human civilisation have never previously existed. The result will likely be unpleasant, in the sense that many people will suffer and die, due to heat stress, natural disasters, reduced crop yields, disease, and conflict caused by displaced people / resource shortages [9][10]. I have focused here on climate change in isolation, but that is just the first hurdle. Other serious concerns are human impacts upon biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle - and those are just the impacts that we're able to measure [11]. There's reasonable evidence that the world is currently experiencing a period of mass extinction [12]. So -- bringing it back to population. From the perspective of everyone else alive right now, assuming they are well informed and rational, should they think it is a good idea for me to have a child, particularly if I live in an affluent, polluting society[13]? I doubt it very much. Of course, it isn't all grim. There is still time for us all to get better at being altruistic, thinking clearly, predicting the future, cooperating, changing our minds about what might be important, and modifying our environment (for better or worse). But, at best, it is obviously a race between positive and negative trends. There is not much time left. But, from historical evidence, so far the metrics of biodiversity and CO2 pollution are very much going in an undesirable direction, with no sign yet of change. edit: I'll finish by quoting David MacKay out of context. He is talking about the UK's sustainable energy debate [14]: > We need to choose a plan that adds up. It is possible > to make a plan that adds up, but it’s not going to be > easy. > > We need to stop saying no and start saying yes. We need > to stop the Punch and Judy show and get building. I pretty much agree with this sentiment in the realm of sustainable energy, and I'd also agree with the sentiment if it were extended much more broadly, beyond MacKay's intended context, to questions of population, affluence, equality, poverty, intergenerational fairness, and how economies should be run. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception [1] http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm [2] we're glossing over the fact that some of these additional people might choose to have children, or that annual per-capita CO2 pollution could change. [3] For 2014 data, see figure 3 (a) of https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outlines/2014-15/GEOG4411/Friedlingstein%20et%20al.pdf https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outl... [4] http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-warming-possible/ http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-warm... [5] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page... [6] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human [9] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-... [10] http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ [11] See figure 6 of: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=iss_pub&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com.au%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Decosystem%2Bsafe%2Bboundaries%26btnG%3D%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%252C5#search=%22ecosystem%20safe%20boundaries%22 http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... [12] http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publication/50267709_Has_the_Earth%27s_sixth_mass_extinction_already_arrived/links/00b7d5183edf5b6c76000000.pdf http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publicatio... [13] assuming they don't have some kind of interest in driving down the cost of labour in the short term, to reduce the labour cost of producing this season's model of useless widget. [14] http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml

wmil 11y ago

India seems like a very poor example. Instead look at Chad. It's had exponential population growth for decades without slowing. It's mostly young people. It's already flooding Italy with refugees. I'm not convinced that "The Population Bomb" was wrong.