Can we avoid limiting the number of people?

[Sadsack]

Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People?

Slowing the rise in human numbers is essential for the planet--but it doesn't require population control

By Robert Engelman

In an era of changing climate and sinking economies, Malthusian limits to growth are back—and squeezing us painfully. Whereas more people once meant more ingenuity, more talent and more innovation, today it just seems to mean less for each. Less water for every cattle herder in the Horn of Africa. (The United Nations projects there will be more than four billion people living in nations defined as water-scarce or water-stressed by 2050, up from half a billion in 1995.) Less land for every farmer already tilling slopes so steep they risk killing themselves by falling off their fields. (At a bit less than six tenths of an acre, global per capita cropland today is little more than half of what it was in 1961, and more than 900 million people are hungry.) Less capacity in the atmosphere to accept the heat-trapping gases that could fry the planet for centuries to come. Scarcer and higher-priced energy and food. And if the world’s economy does not bounce back to its glory days, less credit and fewer jobs.
It’s not surprising that this kind of predicament brings back an old sore topic: human population and whether to do anything about it. Let’s concede up front that nothing short of a catastrophic population crash (think of the film Children of Men, set in a world without children) would make much difference to climate change, water scarcity or land shortages over the next decade or so. There are 6.8 billion of us today, and more are on the way. To make a dent in these problems in the short term without throwing anyone overboard, we will need to radically reduce individuals’ footprint on the environment through improvements in technology and possibly wrenching changes in lifestyle.
But until the world’s population stops growing, there will be no end to the need to squeeze individuals’ consumption of fossil fuels and other natural resources. A close look at this problem is sobering: short of catastrophic leaps in the death rate or unwanted crashes in fertility, the world’s population is all but certain to grow by at least one billion to two billion people. The low-consuming billions of the developing world would love to consume as Americans do, with similar disregard for the environment—and they have as much of a right to do so. These facts suggest that the coming ecological impact will be of a scale that we will simply have to manage and adapt to as best we can.
Population growth constantly pushes the consequences of any level of individual consumption to a higher plateau, and reductions in individual consumption can always be overwhelmed by increases in population. The simple reality is that acting on both, consistently and simultaneously, is the key to long-term environmental sustainability. The sustainability benefits of level or falling human numbers are too powerful to ignore for long.
In the U.S., this discussion remains muted all the same. Population concerns may lurk within the public anger over illegal immigration or over the unwed California mother of octuplets earlier this year. But to the extent that the news media address domestic population growth at all, it is through euphemisms such as “sprawl” (the theoretical culprit in pollution of the Chesapeake Bay, for example) or the economy (the theoretical driver of increased greenhouse gas emissions). You are more likely to read about population growth in a letter to the editor than in a news story or editorial.
When President-elect Barack Obama pledged in late 2008 to bring U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, environmentalists struggled to swallow their dismay. The European Union, after all, had committed itself to 20 percent reductions from 1990 levels. But on a per capita basis, President Obama’s pledge was somewhat more ambitious than the E.U.’s was. Because of much more rapid population growth than in the E.U., Americans would be cutting their individual emissions by 26 percent under his plan and Europeans by 25 percent under theirs. Any pledges to lower emissions by a uniform percentage among industrial countries will be much harder for the U.S. to achieve, simply because it is gaining people so fast through immigra­tion and a birthrate that is higher than average for a developed nation.

Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People?: Scientific American

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[jonsi]

Here's something to think about: Found 20 light years away: the New Earth | Mail Online

Now I'm going to sound like I'm crazy, (and I am not stupid) but I believe that some of us have a higher frequency/vibrational level and this is why we suffer from "M". I believe that are immune systems are working and this is why we are suffering. We are getting ready to go to this new earth... I'm not too worried. 2012 is less than 3 years away. See ya there!

In the white light,
~jonsi

[Sadsack]

I certainly hope you are right (only I wish it were tomorrow!).
My only concern/question is that so many of us are very sick and many dying. It doesn't add up.

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[carla]

I don't think there is over population Sadsack.
I think it is a scam ,like Global warming.
I don't know of anyone who has had a baby in years.I know of plenty of people who have died in their forties though.
They don't expand Urban areas ,just build up.Knock a factory down and build 200 houses in the space.
Can you imagine the health of the population in another 20 years.

[Kritters]

Originally Posted by carla

I don't think there is over population Sadsack.
I think it is a scam ,like Global warming.
I don't know of anyone who has had a baby in years.I know of plenty of people who have died in their forties though.
They don't expand Urban areas ,just build up.Knock a factory down and build 200 houses in the space.
Can you imagine the health of the population in another 20 years.

OMG Carla. You cannot be serious!! YOU don't know anyone who's had a baby in years....so the world is not becoming over-populated? There's a thing called census. You can actually count people these days, and make note of when they die!!!

[Sadsack]

The term world population commonly refers to the total number of living humans on Earth at a given time. As of 24 July 2009 (UTC), the Earth's population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6.773 billion.[1] The world population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death around 1400.[2] There were also short term falls at other times due to plague, for example in the mid 17th century.[citation needed] The fastest rates of world population growth (above 1.8%) were seen briefly during the 1950s then for a longer period during the 1960s and 1970s (see graph). According to population projections, world population will continue to grow until around 2050. The 2008 rate of growth has almost halved since its peak of 2.2% per year, which was reached in 1963. World births have levelled off at about 134-million-per-year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s, and are expected to remain constant. However, deaths are only around 57 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. Since births outnumber deaths, the world's population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040

AND CONSIDER THIS:





The Club of Rome -
'Limits To Growth' ABC Government Radio - Australiawww.abc.net.au/science/slab/rome/default.htm7-17-99
"Limits to Growth" was commissioned by The Club of Rome, a thinktank of scientists, economists, businesspeople, international civil servants, and politicians from the five continents. The Club began in an informal way at the behest of Aurelio Peccei, an Italian businessperson based in Rome. In 1965, Peccei gave a speech on the dramatic changes taking place in the world, especially relating to science and technology. The speech attracted considerable attention. Alexander King, who had not previously known Peccei, received a copy of the speech. King was a British scientist, who had been a scientific adviser to the British Government, and who was then at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (<http://www.oecd.org/OECD), the organization of rich Western countries. King had similar concerns to Peccei about the commonly-held veneration for growth that allowed little thought for any long-term consequences, and decided to meet Peccei to see how these ideas could be followed up. 'Limits to Growth' was full of complex graphs like this one, which predicted if global policy changes weren't changed by 2000, "Population and industrial capital reach levels high enough to create food and resource shortages before the year 2100." (p.169) Peccei and King were not confident that either the market or technology could function as a way of solving environmental problems. After calling together groups of economists and scientists to discuss problems facing the world, they asked a group of computer experts at MIT in the US to examine what would happen if people continued to consume such a high amount of resources. This study became the basis of the "Limits to Growth" book. The study had some obvious limitations, most of which stemmed from the use of computer modelling. This was the first time that computer modelling had been used for such an ambitious exercise. The success of such modelling depends on both the quality of data and the capabilities of the computer. In 1970, methods of data collection were still rudimentary. Many countries, for example, did not know the true size of their populations. There have been many improvements in national data collection but, even today, we are still far from getting all the data we need to produce accurate models. For example, there is debate in many countries on how to work out the exact numbers of unemployed people, with official statistics usually being lower than those of non-governmental organizations that work with unemployed people. In addition, the quality of the model used was limited by the available computer technology and could only use a low number of equations in its construction. Computer modelling has now become more sophisticated with the far greater computer power that is available meaning that models have become more complex. However, computer modelling still leaves a great deal to be desired, as is evident with the failure of government finance departments to predict the size of economic growth in the coming years. Leaving aside the details of the projections, there is the question of the essence of the warning: is the earth approaching its "Limits to Growth"?

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[pat]

Just to focus on jonsi post..it would be interesting to know how many morgies ever suffer from the common cold...I haven't had one in years and I know of someone else who hasn't which i find odd to say the least.If our immune systems are up to scratch from taking all the supplements etc will we be less likely to catch the swine flu??
Carla twas in the paper that in 5 years time there will be far more old age pensioners here than kids under 5 or 10 (can't remember age) also said that the immigrants were having more children than the white british,yet they are tipping the population here to be 70 million in the next few years.I guess that will be from importing.

[carla]

I don't think we get the correct fiqures Kritts .It is all 10 years behind anyway.
I forgot about Immigration Pat.
That will be how they hide the falling population.
I've heard that everyone in the world could fit in the State of Texas.

[Sadsack]

Including China and India??? lol

Here's an interesting site where "live" numbers are calculated:

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

And...for the first time ever...there is a global food shortage.

How to End the Global Food Shortage - TIME

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[carla]

This speech by the author of Brave New World,Darling of the Rothschilds ,Audos Huxley is a must listen.
He explains how populations will be controlled.
I don't think he liked us much.

CheckTheEvidence.com - Audio Page