Is there really a Limit to Population Growth?

I wonder why you think it necessary to maximize the number of people on the earth.  What ridiculous belief system do you have that drives you to want billions more of us on this planet without regard to the damage to the eco system that would do.

Regardless of the possiblilty of genetic engineering in the future (I for one do not want to be green and leafy) or of technological breakthroughs that might provide us access to more and more energy (energy by the way creates waste heat, where does that go) why maximize our numbers at the obvious harm of all other species (just try to maximize two or more variables in an equation).

Why not limit our numbers to the point that we do not overload the earths systems, take the long view in terms of a species rather than race to the horrible crash that you are hoping for, and keep the biodiversity that is necessary for a healthy ecosystem.  Don't overuse resources like water and power, don't over pollute beyond the earths capacity to manage, don't over consume the oceans and the fertility of the land just to sustain a balloning number of people.

Chris is correct in his statement of facts and I am pretty sure that you should seek some professional help.

I don't think it is necessary to maximize the number of people on the earth, and the figure was 400 trillion not mere billions. I was merely responding to an argument using the reductio ad absurdum technique and I regret that you were unable to appreciate the absurdity of my conclusion.

That would be a great idea but historically the human animal is no better at limiting its numbers than yeast growing in a sugar (grape sugar) solution. I never said I was hoping for a horrible crash. Please don't put words in my mouth or accuse me of things I have never said.

Chris has a good grasp of exponential growth as does any biologist or mathematician and has an excellent ability to explain the consequences. Unfortunately most people do not understand exponential growth and its consequences. I frequently seek professional help. Is there any issue I should focus on?

My Favourite graph.

The Standard or Business as usual model. From this article

Things to note.

1. There is a nice gentle downslope for population. (Attempts to “fix things” result in a much steeper down slope. Not good.)
2. In subsequent (not good) runs resources are presumed to be double. ie we manage to “fix things” by finding more resources like oil.
3. I like the business as usual run. It is the least worst scenario.
4. With more resources we end up with more pollution. Which is intuitively correct. Pollution mitigation measures  were implimented in other runs with mixed success.
5. Capital will have to be withdrawn from industry into agriculture, as the per-capita calorie intake plunges. I guess that would make a lot of sense to the Egyptians.

I urge you to get a copy of Limits to Growth and read it. It is similar to Darwins Origin of the Species. No-one has read it but everyone has an opinion. The greater the ignorance the stronger the opinion.

This is where the "Limits to Growth" team show what happens when we "fix" things by doubling the resource base.

What is the history of human evolution? The current human species has remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, apart from some slight adaptations due to migrations. Our brains are the same as our ancestors' were hundreds of thousands of years ago. Intelligence and abilities are no different. "Progress" is arbitrarily defined. What is your definition?

Hogwash.  Humans have "fiddled with nature" ever since the species arose. Plant breeding and agriculture techniques, vaccines and medicine, pasturization and all other technological developments, heck our entire human society, are in defiance of the "natural order of things". If you disagree, go live off the land somewhere and see how long you last.  I've lived for a couple of years in a rural village in Africa, where the people really do live off the land.  And I tell you what, they want every chance to go against the natural order of things like the rest of us do.

How have GMO plants made a mess of anything? There hasn't been one case of natural environments or human health being damaged by them, although we've used them for decades.You hear false claims so often from uninformed liberals, while real problems like global warming and pollution go underaddressed.  Let's focus on real problems, not fake ones.

Population doesn't need to be controlled unless some of the more dire predictions of peak oil proponents come to pass.  As countries develop economically, their birth rates decrease.  The non-immigrant population growth in the developed world is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids per couple ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4768644.stm )  As long as people have a social safety net, the historical need for your children to take care of you in your old age is gone (again, in the developed world).   However, if Social Security, Medicare, and the other safety net programs really go away, and farming starts to be done by hand again due to lack of cheap energy, this would revert back to the way it used to be!

As a result I find Chris' opinions (and those of any other neo-malthusian for that matter) with regards to limits of population greatly myopic, as they assume humanity will not learn and/or evolve.

Humanity has become too left brained. So Left brained that they no longer understand metaphore. I often make metaphorical statements on this site and they either irritate or go over heads. QED.

As a consequence people are threatened by assults to their models of reality, because to the Left brain the models are indistinguishable from Reality itself.

The upshot of this predicament is that when It is pointed out that we must go-off planet or that Cold Fusion is real people react badly. These things threaten the Left's precious models of reality.

We have changed from our ancestors. We cannot accept new ideas.

Arthur,

Huge fan of your litany of metaphor; allegory; irony; etal ...

Thought you'd appreciate a nibble at a corner edge of C.P.Snow, with a relevant snippet of his 1959 Rede lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, since I have often considered that like Snow, you and I each have one foot planted in both of the 'Cultures' he describes.

As a rufle aside, I also include neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor who gained an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for. One morning she realised she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment ...

C.P. Snow : -

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists.  Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.  Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of “have you read a work of Shakespeare?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

{Continued ...}

As a further aside, I recently had the pleasure of a fairly short discussion with a fellow of 84 years old named Stanley. When I mentioned that in just his lifetime the population of the planet had expanded human number by three and a half times from 2 to 7 billion - and that the oil that created such numbers was in catastrophic global decline - he raised an eyebrow, and for one moment gave the impression that he was going to say something equally profound. Then, he looked down at his left shoe, began to sniff, walked to a small oblong of grass, and began to wipe the dog-sh*t he'd stepped in a few feet from where we stood ...

... Oh, the wonder of metaphor ... ...

Paul

I am long on Mother Nature, with both stocks and leaps.

And I hear Soylent Green tastes like chicken....

I don't think much of Beauchamp, honestly.  Give me my pasteurized milk, cheese and yogurt, and I'm a happy man.

I understand the exponential function, but thanks for the good video.  Martenson does it quite a bit more succinctly, though. I wish either would mention, though, that with increasing education levels people are simply less likely to choose to have children.  Bartlet laments the development of these advances in human quality of life in the left side list, and you might expect him to say that "of course controlling population by allowing any these natural pressures to act would be immoral"  but he doesn't.  I guess we should forgive him his lack of empathy, he is a physics prof ;p

The UN demographers project 9.3 billion people by 2050 as a middle-of-the-road estimate.  I think we'll have a major pandemic between now and then, which might give an unfortunate solution to that problem.  Or maybe we'll provide ducation to the women in the developing world, which is the best way to reduce birth rates.  However, if we are 9.3 billion by then, and due to oil scarcity we are unable to use fertilizers like we do now to (just barely) feed the world, producing enough food for everybody is going to be a real nightmare.  To make matters worse, climate change will most likely render much of our current farmland unusable by that time. Bartlett ends strong on thse lines, pointing out that it's global warming and the American lifestyle that are worse for Earth and human survival than developing-world population growth.

I don't see any way to get through the next century except by using technologies that many greens despise: nuclear power and genetic modification of crops.  These technologies understandably make people uncomfortable, but seeing mass starvation makes them more so.

So yes, I am new here and thanks for the welcome!  What is the general consensus, if there is one, about what to do about world population growth?

Thanks for the Bartlett video, Vanityfox. I needed to see it again.

It should be compulsary viewing at least once a year by the entire population of the World.

Arthur,

You're very welcome. And as I've highlighted in your post above, you are, as ever, spot on ...

Paul

I am sooo glad you get my humor Dogs.

On the way home last night, my son asked a question about those who "chew tobacco" and stated that while it is a vile and disgusting habit, not to mention the health risks, he wondered why it was packaged in a pouch and said that wouldn't it be better compressed into a bar? Where one could just bite off a hunk and chew? I chuckled and replied, "Someone already beat you to the idea son. Pouches are the 'new' way its packaged. When I was your age it was sold in 'bars' that a 'cut' was taken from and chewed."

Soylent Green was dispensed in bars was it not?

@ those who don't get my humor: As for "fiddling" with Mother nature, selective breeding, pruning, cross polinating, etc. while it is "fiddling" - it isn't "fornicating" Mother Nature. There is a difference, ask Bubba. He "fiddled" with Monica.

Isildur22,

Can I first assure you that age has absolutely nothing to do with these subjects. Over the three years that I've read the information posted by members at this forum, and of my writing here since registering in late December 2008; of the years before I knew of this forums existence - and as I found then, and find now - only one in a hundred are really paying attention to these issues, and bearly two or three out of one hundred of those remaining lowly 1% are actually doing anything constructive with their time.

Will you trust me by assuming a new role. This role requires you to close out all of the organisations, and all of the camps that people such as I can be placed in? Neither left or right; up or down; rich or poor; old or young; educated or ignorant, and take from what I say next - not from a bias from any of these confounding groups, but from an objective stance built upon years of studying the inter-play of each of the issues combined as a whole?

You asked me a question earlier : -

Based on my own study - over many sites, books and films - I answered you as best I felt I could with Richard Heinbergs book The Party's Over. I do not expect you to read this book and take what is written by him as gospel. What I expect of you - with your scientific background - is to break down each and every issue within it and find a medium that mostly fits with what facts you can draw from it, by being neither of opinion or belief. It is a grounding book, filled with information that in many cases I've found that people had not as yet considered many of the facts within it. This I feel is useful to you.

I cannot countermand the types of bias that are written within this forum that I wouldn't put my name to. Firstly, I vehemently disagree with those that believe climate change is not caused by humanity, but, in my honest opinion, with the heavy use of the media in the United States, and with billions of dollars pumped into dis-imformation by think-tank organisations supplying propaganda inspired astroturf organisations from such deep pocketed individuals as the Koch brothers, the US as a whole appears to have been brainwashed into going back to sleep and allowing no great expenditure to be invested into seriously vital and necessary sustainable infrastructure, and is instead plowing revenue into recreating an abominably ridiculous assurance to the American public that the world can wind back to the early 1980's, where Reagan cast the shackles of double dime speed-limits, telling America "it's morning again". Here's a nice new word for you for your dictionary if you hadn't already realised I'm writing to you from England - Yes - Bollocks!

More Bollocks! - and counter to many of the writers at this forum is my opinion that -  A country continually building an infrastructure of nearly a thousand American bases around the world, chewing through over half of the income tax of Americans to the tune of one and half trillion dollars a year (how many zero's is that?), when history has proven time and again with the likes of the Romans, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the Spanish, the Russian, and the Germans etal- that if a nation finds itself in a position where it is spreading itself thinner and thinner around the globe for the resources to maintain the illusion of certainty for its population, eventually - as has previously happened to the former USSR in its quest for nation building - the US is heading most definately for a similar fate.

Now, with this in mind, how would you approach a refraiming of your reply now : -

In regard to this site, the subject of Global Climate Change has continued to be a hot button subject, and has ended up with a solitary stand-alone thread grand-fathered in. You can find that Here : -

Global Climate Change: Is It Worth Brushing Off

In my honest opinion, I believe Dr Chris Martenson did the right thing not to make this subject front and centre to his on-line Crash Course three hour seminar. If he had, it would have eaten out from underneath it any attempt to portray the other great many issues he'd framed within his subject matter, and we would therefore not be holding a written conversation five thousand or so miles apart now if he had. The forum wouldn't exist in the schale and scope it is today. It is a really good way to see just how invasive the political sway of a subject can be framed if enough private money can be thrown at a policy that creates a population that self-polices and therefore sits on its hands - splintered off into so many camps that each of those camps bearly makes the minimum squeak heard in the mainstream before it is pummelled back down by dis-information.

The same can also be said of the military, which is most definately destroying any remaining attempts to reduce the chances of "a war to end all wars", by creating such an opportunity in spades while the resources needed to support the American nation are re-directed away with yet more propaganda that splinters and seperates any voices from loudly proclaimng that cutting libraries, maintaining a health-care system that only the rich can afford, smashing the education system with a policy of insurmountable and unpayable debt through student loans for jobs not invested in, outsourcing American jobs and reducing the present growing crop of teenagers and twenty-somethings into a greatly shortened life-span filled with poverty.

If you've yet to find the definative thread that gets to the marrow (In My Opinion) of the mad inconsistencies of war-mongery, I urge you to take a long and weaving protractive journey here : -

Timeline/Stages For Collapse of our Way of Life

Now, lest I should be seen to miss a thing from your post, and against anything other that I've written  - what I've written above pales into insignificance when you consider that it is isn't electrical power that is the greater requirement for the US as a whole, but that of liquid fuels to maintain them. The infrastructure in the US is entirely dependent on 65% of its daily usage - amounting to roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day - of which roughly two thirds to three-qurters of which is imported from foreign nations that have bases either circling or inside their lands. Applying scientific logic to the framing of Time, Scale and Cost then, building hundreds of nuclear power stations around the country, moving vital remaining fossil fuel resources in creating an energy supply to a country that will also require using untold amounts of energy rebuilding the transport system for a country devised on the bases of suburban settings will bearly get but a few million of the 311 million citizens mobile.

Much more impotantly - food transportation. A quarter of this 20 million barrel daily US quota is for food production, that of course includes a massive export strategy that creates dependence of foreign nations as a food weapon, aligned against an array of those countries resource exports. Against this backdrop you can surmise for yourself exactly what type of knife-edge this fifty-year fossil-fuel inspired green revolution has had built into the cake with the global peak of fossil fuels.

The more you read, the more you can maintain the fact that it isn't about how optimistic or pesimistic the subject matter is that I prescribe. If what ever the subject, if it is grounded in reality and built upon facts - if it is what it is - and from it opportunity can be positively created - then that is what I give you as a gift of my time. Time so pressing that I'm not even going back to tidy this writing by line, or spell check for want of written credibility. I've written this as a stream of personal thoughts in the hope they'll be found useful for both you and those who also read this.

I have little time to argue with you over fine details, or what approximates a camp of one type or another, and urge you to dissect from what I've written what you may. Draw from it what you wish to keep, and what you wish to cast as pointless, but most importantly, and with each step of the way, ask yourself again and again like mantra - "Why would I assume this particular point holds no value?"

Take Care,

Paul