The Global Population Crisis That Never Was(rogerpielkejr.substack.com) |
The Global Population Crisis That Never Was(rogerpielkejr.substack.com) |
What was wrong with Malthus or the food scare talked about in the article is simply that they made their argument about the wrong thing and at the wrong time, the rebuttal is based on contingent facts.
There may very well come the point, and as others have pointed out climate is already maybe one such issue, where we run into a situation where the right technical solution or political fix does not exist. Locally of course there have been countless of Malthusian examples, put a city under siege, or a country (see Yemen's blockade) and you will see how Malthusian the world is pretty quickly.
Of course some of the conclusions Malthus drew (the mentioned culling of the sick) in the article are inhumane and reprehensible, but nobody today really argues for any of that stuff. But what Malthus today is still useful for is provide an antidote to the 'perpetual growth' mindset that has no other answer to anything than to grow yourself out of every problem.
ahem
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-pol...
https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.htm...
https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fert...
https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/
Malthus should be targeted by the time-travellers for culling as soon as convenient ..
We don’t want 12-14 billion humans. The biosphere is already under enormous stress.
Are you making a handwaving argument about supposed genocide via birth control?
While there has certainly been some poor husbandry of the earth's resources, there have been and continue to be significant efforts to improve resource utilization in environmentally friendly ways - not the least of which is increased costs of basic resources leading to self-imposed limitations by consumers.
Basically, on net, people choose more luxury over more children. They economize when presented with prices that reflect the reality of underlying scarcity. They make choices that often result in improved environmental stewardship, either implicitly or explicitly.
That thought is pretty much enough to refute the refutation. The idea that a resource can't run out because "economics happens" is simply a non-sequitur. Economics is perfectly comfortable with optimising a bunch of humans out of the system because they can't produce enough to justify their resource consumption. That is what a Malthusian collapse would look like economically speaking.
The biggest fail of Malthus was that he made his argument at exactly the worst possible time, when the growth in productive capacity has for the first time in history exceeded the growth in population. However, since at his time, the past was much more of a mystery than it is now, predicting the past was almost as difficult back then as predicting the future. Since his predictions have been completely validated by the historical and archeological record we have since then recovered, this must be credited to him.
It's not about being right or wrong. It's about making good decisions. Malthusianism is a bad model. It takes two variables, population and resources and extrapolates. This is bad because the world is much more complicated. Making costly choices based on this bad mode is bad decision making
Indeed, Malthus actually ages better then he's given credit for. His solution to the problem he poses is pretty close to the modern one, that a more educated and well-off population will decrease their fertility, so that eventually population growth will level off. (Malthus's actual view of the mechanism here is pretty Victorian, he talks a lot about "Public Morality" and I don't think he mentions "birth-control" in any form, but his basic idea is correct)
The devil is in the details, and escaping the trap once isn't a permanent solution. Feeding us more efficiently now by poisoning our environment isn't a long term solution.
And food production following an O(2^n) curve is highly improbable, the best we can imho do is something polynomial or linear.
That's why Malthuus might have been a little wrong back then, but basic mathematics or computer science knowledge instantly proves him right, just not back then, because humanity got lucky.
I'm not aware of any era or place where many people have not expected the world to meet disaster soon. It's a part of all major religions.
Planning to be pleasantly surprised is not a clever plan. The fact that the world didn't end from 1960-2020 in defiance of the evidence of 3,000BCE through 1960AD is not that comforting.
There will also be doomsayers, but there will also always be resource constraints.
Why fertility rates declined worldwide is the big question. Worldwide, births per female were about 5 in 1960 and about 2.4 worldwide now. That is a huge, and unexpected, trend. Japan, South Korea, and the EU are in actual decline. Nobody really expected a change that big. It's still not really understood. The usual explanations are contraceptives, more women working, etc. Lower sperm counts, maybe, but probably not.
(Not central Africa, though. There, the fertility rate is still around 4.)
India population growth - graph.[1]
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population
I wish our collective psychology was able to accept crises as serious without resorting to raising the stakes to cosmic levels or dismissing it as not a real problem if you, personally, come out mainly ok.
It seems fairly common to picture the earth heading to an unstable overpopulation but imo this is only a comfortably narrowed down perspective on large scale problems. Especially for western countries, it is tempting to focus on the global population issue because this is primarily a phenomenon of rural, poor regions, so not their own. The other three mayor factors at play here would unfortunately require to rethink basic economics and this would reach deep down into societies. I suspect some sort of psychological "the others fault" self defense emerging in large. I have to be honest here, i fell for it too at first.
Even if the overpopulation would be the only factor we face, its solution would still be large scale and system questioning because either you throw away any moral standards or you end up creating and distributing wealth in a sustainable way. No, simply the delivery of contraception is no solutions only good healthcare and especially the education of girls/women.
It is possible for you and me to climb Mt. Everest. In all likelihood, neither of us is going to spend several years and all his savings towards this goal.
Possible does not mean practical.
People are definitely going to say the same thing about climate change, if we manage to mitigate it: see, nothing bad happened, you wasted your time. No, the fact that we acted will have been why nothing bad happened.
In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental footprint of the rest. It’s like a king in a massively overpopulated nation of relentlessly constrained citizens looking out at his gardens and saying, “see? No problems, and those fools predicted the country would collapse.”
The human population is expected to peak at around 11 billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right now.
The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.
Still, we're depending on exponential growth (be it pension funding, companies, inflation, you name it).
We're lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many people - we'll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that's not sustainable, too many people. Well, we'll be vegans! Oh wait, not sustainable also, we'll need gene editing (bad, but we'll accept that reaching a certain threshold). Well, then let's grow our food in vertical farms! Seems sustainable, until we reach the next (last?) limit.
This expands to anything (ICE vs EE, flying vs train travel). Unless we accept this inherent flaw and restrict us accordingly, we'll outgrow anything.
Oh well, then let's just ... ? Go to mars :) (I truly believe this is the only mid-term sustainable¹ option, since we'll never be able to have at most only 2 children as a population - and I'd love to gain as much hate for this statement as possible if I were proven false).
¹ Mars will not be enough in just a few centuries, probably even just decades
-In the mid 80's every newspaper in California was warning of killer bees[1] that were going to invade the state and kill many people, alot of my family members were quite nervous about them and the media made a point about its not a matter of if but when these bees arrive in the state, the coverage was blanket until about the 90's when it died down.
- Y2k meltdown - This was also hyped beyond belief by the media and doomsday scenarios were drummed up to an extraordinary frenzy until really nothing bad happened after the new years[2], I remember being at a new years party in menlo park and people were saying that the lights may go out due to the bug.
- In the years 2017/2018 the media was drumming up automation of all jobs by AI/robots/self driving cars, people were extremely worried that the most wouldn't have a job in a few years, but in 2019 unemployment hit a 50 year low[3], I'm not saying this won't come to pass, just the media's timeline was totally wrong.
The stuff thats been really bad, 9/11, financial crisis of 2008, covid-19 has all come on very suddenly and most people were caught totally off guard.
The things people should really worry about are:
Lack of water (aquifers that took tens of thousands of years to be filled are close to be drained in many parts of the midwest and west[4] of the US.
A large solar storm similar to the Carrington event[5] knocking out all of the electrical grid(and electronics) of a large portion of the planet.
A supervolcano/or caldera erupting and cooling the earths climate down dramatically, think crops dying and extreme famine.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem [3] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019... [4] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishin... [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
Maybe we do have a population crisis. Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for resources. Sure we can cut down even more of the Amazon rainforest to supply food for more people, but not attributing any of this to population growth seems dishonest.
As bloodthirsty capitalism pulls more and more people out of poverty we discover that putting a steak on everyone's table and a fresh car in everyone's garage is too taxing on the atmosphere, wildlife, forests and what not.
We seem to have to choose between a smaller luxurious population and billions and billions of people living in pods eating synthetic food.
Also, news tell us that in Syria climate change has resulted in food shortage in recent years. But having to feed twice as many people from the same land compared to 1985 sure cannot be the reason, right?
The birth rate across the globe has been steadily on the decline for some time, there aren't many more places left where rapid doublings are still possible.
Climate change and the loss of species and such is one manifestation of overpopulation. Covid-19 could be viewed as another, in my opinion.
Obviously this is all rich coming from an American living in the suburbs (I don’t really see what my alternatives are), but I can’t help but think we can only sustain around a billion people without destroying the planet (speculation).
We live in a golden age of cheap energy and consumption. People get in gasoline powered cars and drive a mile down the road to get a snack. That’s impossible to maintain. Not only do we have overpopulation, but we built unsustainable cities, predicated on infinite cheap energy ($2.50 gas). Electric cars won’t fix this, although they’ll help.
"The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many people being born and not enough food being produced. This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced, Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a population crisis."
But also thanks to the green revolution we have pesticides and fertilisers that made this happen, that are causing cancer all over Punjab and created massive wealth disparities. Not to mention we never needed all this food, if the population was in control. But the population exploded because of Western invasions that resulted in mass poverty!
Thanks "western" scientists!
I disagree. IMO it exploded because improvements in medical care resulted in a dramatic reduction in child deaths, but people kept having the same number of children.
There are just scientists.
And deal with that chip.
I still think it's a good idea to allocate some resources towards mitigating low probability, high impact events.
But the number of times in human history the world has "ended" can be counted on one hand. That time 10k years ago when the human population had a big bottleneck, maybe a super volcano. The bronze age collapse is another. The fall of the western roman empire. That's about it.
But there are many more smaller events that still warrant emergency preparedness. Catastrophic weather, civil unrest and war count.
It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.
> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
― Socrates (~470BC - 399BC)
[edit]
I do accept that it could become a whole-earth disaster that affects everything, but my point is that this may take generations.
No. I have that attitude, and I'm not dismissing either!
I think they're both serious problems that will cause a lot of pain as they're being worked through.
What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll be the end of human civilization.
Sci-fi novel plot starter: it's a quality that has been selected for by interstellar progenitors who seeded life on Earth, so that we would be wary of the need to mitigate real planet-scale disasters.
I've seen this used as a plot seed for any number of space operas, but as far as I can recall, I haven't seen any that used it and also explained how they were able to somehow instill traits which, over hundreds of millions or billions of years, could not only remain present but unexpressed in the genomes of Nth-generation offspring, but could then, in response to some kind of extremely specific and complex stimulus, be expressed - but only when needed, and in perfect accord with the original intelligent design.
It sounds like I'm making fun here, and I'll admit I picked the phrase "intelligent design" with puckishness aforethought. But it's a serious question, and what I'm really looking for is media recs. Does anyone actually reckon with this, in a way that's plausibly compossible with our current understanding of genomic heredity?
(Introns and pseudogenes don't count, and yes, I remember that hilarious TNG S6 episode that used them as an excuse to give Barclay even more not-very-well-depicted psychological problems. Sure, these regions aren't translated into proteins, but they remain as susceptible to all the ordinary mechanisms of mutation as any other part of the genome. Not only that, being unexpressed, they are if anything less likely to be conserved than exons, so the "alien space magic hidden in non-coding DNA!" thing doesn't fly.)
However, nonsense like that doesn’t change the fact that more co2 in the air increases the Earth’s temperature. And unfortunately we don’t seem to be that interested in significantly reducing our emissions anytime soon.
“The situation in the United States is that to get a response, the need must be somewhat overplayed”
As I grow older and start raising a child, I realize why the anger and will for change, the passion and hysteria you show when you're young are never followed by those who ve seen a bit more. This all doesn't matter, and living a regular monotonous life, making your little monkey turn into a human, is all most people end up caring about.
If the world blows up in your life time, at least it means you aren't missing out on anything after you're gone.
Perhaps the dread and angst is projected into concerns about society as a whole. Easier for some to worry about the coastline of Miami in 100 years instead of the indisputable fact that death is approaching.
Armageddon for me is thus not a one-day event like in movies such as The Day after Tomorrow, but a gradual and accelerating destruction all around. This is a “boil the ocean” project that humans have inadvertently initiated and it is taking the required time to complete.
On an interview with an older guy from the 50s, he was explaining how a painter could have support a family and 6 kids and a house, all on a single income. Try doing that today. These days, it would be hard for a painter to just support himself, much less a wife, a house and six kids.
In the US, in blue states, millenials are now spending upwards of 40 to 50% of their incomes just on shelter.
In the bay area, it's not uncommon for couples in the highest income brackets to rent out rooms in their townhouse (notice i said townhouse) to make ends meat ( at least for those who bought recently). and that's just the top 2-3%. you can imagine how everyone else lives.
We need to get away from using GDP per capita as a measure of wealth and instead use number of hours worked to earn necessities (shelter, food, water, transportation, education and medical).
Is it really not that well understood? In countries and regions that are highly industrialized (like the societies you mention), having more than 2-3 children doesn't provide any more economic security like it does for largely agrarian and manual-labor based societies.
Low sperm count is not the reason why most people do not have three plus kids - it isn't like people give up on birth control at 30 or 40 and never have any kids again. Most of is "won't have more kids" as opposed to "can't have more kids".
What's your point?
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....
are an unintended consequence of scale.
I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall.
Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last.
That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.
So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too late and the land stops producing at the current level.
Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.
On the other hand, there's plenty of land that is nearly suitable for growing sustenance crops but just needs a little preparation. We don't always favour converting that land to agricultural use, e.g. in the Amazon rain forest.
However, the claim misses the point for a different reason. Even if all arable land is being farmed, it's very far from being exploited to its maximum capacity. In terms of calories per hectare per year, much of that land could be improved tenfold or more with a switch of crops or farming methods, if the economics demanded it and potatoes became as expensive as steak.
This is due to land use for agriculture per person dropping rapidly[3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-o...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..lat...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-u...
This is not the point.
The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global south can starve and die of disease to reduce population"
EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?
There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past.
Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.
... and.. it does ? https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories
Industrialization, not population is to blame. Maybe we have an industrialization crisis. But it's difficult to blame that on "developing nations" so it probably won't get much press.
Then again, things like the Paris Agreement provide incentives to move polluting industry to China, so nationalist anti-Chinese media may eventually lay the blame on industrialization.
But another way to say it that if we are to lift the materialistic standard of living for the other 4 billion people, there needs to be same or less population of them.
Countries like Denmark and Norway are a lot more detrimental to the planet's ecosystem because they consume a lot, lot more per capita compared to what Bangladesh does (and they consume lots of bad things that Bangladeshi people do not consume).
A million people in poverty is not the same as a million living a traditional middle class lifestyle.
This point of view comes up a lot in connection with climate change, and I always find it incredibly offensive. My dad was reminiscing the other day about his happy childhood growing up in a village in Bangladesh in the 1950s. This was back when 1 in 3 kids didn’t live to the age of 5.
Even an RCP 8.5 scenario isn’t going to turn the developed world into Bangladesh circus 1950. Hell it won’t turn Bangladesh into Bangladesh in 1950. People will still have a standard of living that makes life incredibly worthwhile, because we as human beings were designed to need little to find life worthwhile.
That’s not an argument against investing in renewables or whatever. But the Malthusian arguments about climate change are quite misanthropic. Trump got in trouble for calling places “shithole countries.” But nobody blinks and eye when someone casually implies that people in those countries would have been better off never having been born.
I currently live in Bangladesh. And my father made a off-handed comment few days ago about how there isn't many "thin" people in our village anymore. When he grew up in 60s, a big chunk of our village people didn't have two meals regularly, people dying of hunger wasn't so uncommon. Just two days ago a doctor friend told me hundreds of people die in his hospital every week due to lack of proper equipment. I have several times witnessed the heartbreaking scene in pharmacies where people ask for the price of a medicine, and then turn away without buying anything after hearing the price.
Overpopulation at least partly contributes to this, if not the biggest contributor. It may not be a global problem, but it definitely is a problem for a country like Bangladesh (and maybe India too). I'm not saying this people's life is worthless, but I would definitely not want a new generation of people to go through this.
Population control here is not just the pragmatic and necessary option, it's also the most humane thing to do.
Recent history shows that there's no holding previously backwards countries from advancing their consumption. As Russians joke, the global famine will come when the Chinese start using forks.
China, India and SE Asia are quickly upping their per-capita production and consumption of carbon-heavy goods. Brazil doesn't destroy Amazon out of spite.
We have no moral right to say "Nonono, you can't do what we did in the 20th century and live like us!".
The problem is the constant expansion (which comes with warfare and extreme waste) that capitalism mandates.
This would require importing water and/or energy. If there was an ability to pay by the government, desalination would create new fresh water. There probably wouldn’t be, which would cause short-term pain, but that’s the feedback mechanism OP alluded to.
a) war/genocide b) famine/food crop failure c) birth control
Which of these is the most palatable to the Western moral authority mindset, and most likely to gain popular support among the classes with the most democratic agency? You won't have feminists calling for outright war in order to de-populate your targetted society - you will have them supporting population-control if you couch the argument as 'women expressing agency over their bodies'. (note: I personally 100% agree that women should have full agency over their bodies - just like men should, too, be able to avoid going to war if they desire...) Plus, birth control means more sex, and everyone likes that - so you can easily get buy-in by your targetted population, too. At least, a little easier than the war option.
The premise is the same for all cases: someone 'in authority' has decided that a population must be culled. The only thing that differs is the means by which this is achieved.
It has already been demonstrated that the planet can actually support us all. We are suffering because we, as a species, cannot manage what we've got. We, as a species, are mis-managing things - we could be doing a lot, lot better. And unfortunately there are power structures out there which would rather not manage things, and instead just solve the problem by a)/b)/c), or all of the above.
That will change - not by people demanding 'culling of other lesser populations', but by actually caring for other populations, and developing the technology and management structures required to support their lives ... Would you be outraged if China called for all Westerners to be sterilized in order to prevent population explosion? Are you outraged about the genocide of Yemen, because someone decided 'there are too many lower humans living there'? Or, have you decided 'your team' is more deserving of the future of humanity, somehow? Our real problem lies in the answers to those questions, not in the ability of the planet to support us all ..
I don’t know anyone that’s concerned about end of human civilization. What they are concerned about is the end of their lifestyle, part of which is due to relative world peace, which is in turn due to resources being somewhat available, at least to those with power.
Once those resources stop being so (cheaply) available, then you’ll see conflicts start emerging again. I already see it in my country, the US, with the widening gaps in places with economic opportunity and those left behind.
Add in water, electricity, changing weather patterns and there will be some pain in the future.
The problem I have with this argument is that "the end of human civilization" is such a high bar that it's practically a tautology that it won't be met.
WW2 didn't end the human civilization - it didn't even make a dent. In fact, if the Axis had won the war, conquered the rest of the world, and massacred everybody between Moscow and Shanghai, the human civilization still wouldn't have ended.
So any talk about whether the civilization will end or not, ultimately doesn't mean much.
The places where the population is still growing don't pay the slightest attention to the anti-natalist stuff linked above. Population is already stable or declining in places where people care about that stuff.
It’s more just sharing things like birth control technology and education.
This whole discussion is actually a sort of win-win scenario, because what proves to lower birth rates more effectively than anything is improved regional health, education, and wealth, so helping along those factors is the biggest impact.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-xin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno...
If we actually thought like this and prepared ourselves in this manner during good times it’d increase the resilience of our species so profoundly.
Edit: ok maybe several thousand years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
But the norm seems to be an ice-free planet. Remember, there are plant remains buried under the arctic permafrost.
"Two thousand years ago someone complained about X and people also complain about X now. So X is no big deal!"?
Hippocrates complained about malaria. Does that mean contemporary concerns about malaria are invalid?
The parent mentioned "kids these days" and also "It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.".
Whether Socrates actually said this (or some other famous or not so famous guy from over 2000 years ago), it does show that that assessment is probably very very correct. And very funny to read indeed. Even if you don't agree with all of the parts of the statement (I don't) you will most probably find some you'd agree with. YMMV if you don't have kids :)
(So his observations could be of a cultural cycle rather than what every generation experiences from each perspective.)
Society is very much not the same - for one pedastry is a severe crime instead of an accepted institution. Insensitivity to changing circumstances hints at a fixed belief. If your compass always points to the same place on the dial as north it is broken. Not to mention that nearly everybody loves luxury - that is partially why it is expensive above and beyond production price!
If we're talking about other sentient and moral species, those are admittedly hard questions.
WTF, no it isn’t. Human population increased exponentially for a period of time while we adjusted to lower infant mortality but fertility rates quickly altered to account for the new situation. Humans aren’t rabbits, we don’t give birth in large litters and we can reason about and control the number of children we have. As the last few places on earth finish their journey through industrialization we’re going to see population stabilize and then decline. Set a reminder for 2050 when we’ll all be panicking about there not being enough young people to fund our social security.
Why? All technology has so far outpaced population growth.
The reason why I think a polynomial is the best we can do is that some very special processes generate exponential behaviour, mostly stuff that is self-replicating. I don't see those in technology. Technology doesn't reproduce all by itself, it needs to be invented, financed, etc. Those are limits that force it subexponential.
Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
What are you talking about? 41% of US land is used for livestock production. It's not that efficient, and the perpetual increase in population will just push that higher.
> Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
We don't all share in that prosperity. Population is still set to grow in the (perpetually) developing world plagued by poverty. The population growth rate in the 1st world is a targeted rate, a matter of policy, which is met by increasing immigration. Fertility rates on the global scale won't drop so long as child mortality and quality of life isn't improve across the board, and consequently the growth rate in the 1st world is also here to stay.
Easily. Make the genetic machinery responsible for the trigger hideously complex, redundant and, if possible, self-repairing (perhaps via a gene drive), and have loads of other genes rely on specific bits of it, so that a single alteration in that machinery will make life suck for the mutant without much preventing the trigger.
Evolution can't make big changes, because there is no guiding intelligence behind it, only statistics; that's why our retinas are still backwards, and why a giraffe's laryngeal nerves take five metres to connect points ~30cm apart. Even though life without this massive lump of “junk DNA” that everything seems to rely on would work better, evolve faster, thrive more, waste fewer resources, reproduce more efficiently… it'll take a lot of mutations for it to unravel, none of which are selected for. Parts of it might get corrupted by sheer fluke, if the corruption also disables each anti-corruption mechanism and happens to coincide with a beneficial mutation, but that's what the redundancy's for.
You'll never keep the phenotype the same, but you can keep a certain mostly-useless genetic mechanism intact, à la Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
One way would be to apply selection pressure over time and let the people experience "numerous tribe-ending disasters" as one other commenter said. Then there is no need for these "Precursors" in this theory, it could very well just be all natural.
My point isn’t in disagreement with yours. Of course being poor is worse than being richer. My point is that even in Bangladesh, the level of prosperity is sufficient to exceed the threshold for humans to find life “worthwhile.”
Yes, we do. Now that we know what the effects of climate change could be. That being said, we do have a moral duty to help out. Populations tend to grow slower when they become "more advanced", so it might not be the end of the world.
I advocate for doing it smartly.
It's a bit exhausting to have to point out something so obvious.
Children don't survive in those environments. Higher birthrates is a family's / culture's answer to that. It's playing the odds.
Put another way, if there was consumption to Western middle class levels, there would be no need to have 5+ children. This is why, as a middle class grows, birth rates fall.
...I don't know what that even means. Or do you just mean, "we already have too many people, the population needs to go down"?
Probably the biggest thing you could do, I'd say, would be to politically support pro-environment measures. There's a lot of "yes, but..." Americans who only support 'green' regulations and whatnot when it will not cause the slightest inconvenience to them. E.g.
"Yes I support bike lanes, but this +0.25% sales tax increase to build them is just too much, taxes are already too high."
"Yes I support mass transit, but I don't support redirecting any money from roads for cars to them because I drive a lot."
"Yes I support higher density housing, but I don't want to hurt my neighborhood's character."
You get the picture. From a practical perspective, America would easily make strong progress on reduced energy consumption, but the political will there is weak.
Hey there. Sorry for the poor choice of words. That's pretty much what I mean. I see comments where people mention a replacement rate for a country, and that maybe a country might be just at or slightly below the replacement rate. I believe that even at current levels we're far and away in excess of where we should be. So... when someone says "but Country N is now at the replacement rate" - I just think that the population at that level is beyond where it should be.
> You get the picture. From a practical perspective, America would easily make strong progress on reduced energy consumption, but the political will there is weak.
Completely agree, and include myself as one who is guilty here (to some extent). I try to minimize a lot of things, but ultimately it's hard when the environment we live in itself is very geared toward doing the opposite.
I had a car in the states and don't have one now in Munich. Did my values change? No, not really, I just moved somewhere where a car was much less necessary.
Now, I did still bike a fair bit in the states, but I didn't beat myself up over also driving a lot, because I recognized that the environment was not well set up for it in most places, which is how I got hit by cars twice the last year before I moved.
From purely a US standpoint, yeah, I suspect our agricultural buffers are good enough for anything but a "volcano blotting out the sun" level deviation from the norm. Call it, four sigmas of food security. You'd need an event that only happens once every ten thousand years or so to really bring the US to its knees, agriculturally.
My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal lands, grain spending less time in silos before being processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise significantly, from market pressure.
I think if things go badly (and there's no guarantee of it at this point), it happens slowly at first, and then quickly, and you can't just point at food prices being low to say it's not about to turn from slow to quick.
The US is a strange beast when it comes to Agri. It's worth noting that there are conditions under which we are -destroying- surplus crops due to price controls rather than flooding the market.
Which to me is a bigger concern; this 'buffer' may cause price shifts to come with less warnings, and perhaps the first 'shock' will be a bit more than we would expect.
Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000 chicken lives = 1 human life?
E.g. you value your spouse more than you value a random other human. It doesn't mean you don't value the other human.
"But haven't you considered that forcing people not to reproduce is horrible?"
"Who said anything about forcing? I'm not advocating for forcing anyone?"
"Hah! But in fact people are being forced!"
"Well yeah, lots of bad things are happening. That doesn't have a whole lot to do with available birth control and high income."
"No TRUE Scotsman!"
China doesn’t extract profits through the export of capital at usury rates from other countries at gunpoint, though. It is not imperialist.
Most CPC members are working class, especially in the leadership. They’re almost 10% of the population, of course they’d be a typical sample.
China offers loans for development with mutual gain, not extraction of profits. Even just comparing interest rates to the IMF is telling, let alone the many loans forgiven. Talk to some Africans affected by the Belt and Road Initiative, they’re overwhelmingly in favour.
It will cause mass migration and refugee crises as coastal cities and low lying areas slowly flood. That seems inevitable at this point.
That could maybe lead to wars, and nuclear war is still an existential threat.
If the changes somehow disrupt the ability to support cereal crops in the northern hemisphere (which actually is also the biggest risk from nuclear winter), that could lead to widespread starvation and more wars. Not an existential crises necessarily, but not pretty.
Similarly, there is no reason to be very concerned about crops: we already are able to grow crops in a very wide variety of climates, and we have cultivars specially selected for local climate conditions. While climate change is very fast on geological scale, it’s rather slow on human scale, which gives us plenty of time to adjust our crops and farming patterns.
This is the biggest reason why climate change is not an existential threat: we are not going to sit on our thumbs, and watch the steamroller slowly ride over us, at speed of 1 cm per day. That’s not going to happen: mitigating the problems associated with climate change is rather simple, relative to other problems our societies solve on a regular basis, and we have a lot of time for it.
You can roll up agonizing in fear, or you can prepare yourself for a bit of struggle. We can help lower the impact, but there's no reason to panic.
Most likely the impact on humanity will be minimal, if not the impact on life itself will be medium, and the Earth will spin a few more cycles with or without us.
This doesn't really matter, and we should just take it calmly, and talk to each other. No need for end of the world nuclear war hysteria.
If we saw significant changes to where is wet and where is dry, we’d be scrambling to catch up and the fallout could be pretty large.
This gives plenty of time for people to build and/or move to new cities on higher ground.
people are moving to Miami in droves right now and there's a big push to turn it into the next Silicon Valley. that's an aspirational goal and future facing in a geography that's among the most vulnerable to climate change. they know we can solve slow moving disasters.
And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects).
Armagedon is the last battle. To me that's what climate crisis is and how we need to look at it and take immediate action. We battle and win or we lose and it's really really really bad.
Maybe others have better examples of worse than imagined climate problems, but here is one I read from Reddit/HN last week.
New research shows faster slowing Gulf Stream. I can't find the exact thread that summarized - it did a direct comparison to the recent article to IPCC showing IPCC's worst case is not even close to as bad as the new measured slow down.
A few sources below, one decade old one says 10x from IPCC's worst and the recent article showed even faster slowdown; like on the scale of a less than a century we could be past a tipping point. When it tipped in the past it made europe very cold and rose eastern us sea levels a lot.
From my understanding, this would affect staple crops in Europe (google says europe 300 tonnes, us at 440), help melt a LOT more ice & sea level rise etc.
I think that the faster than expected melting ice in greenland we're seeing also increases the slowdown?
"totally unexpected decline in the AMOC of about 30% - far greater than the range of interannual variability found in the climate models used for the IPCC assessments" "10 times as fast as predicted by climatemodels."
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-syste...
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi...
https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?shari...
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberian_a...
>What do you think these countries have in common?
Terrible authoritarian governments that buy off its impoverished populaces with a mirage of huge food subsidies, while stealing most of the wealth of their nations for themselves.
Is it possible to build a functional government and maintain peace if food shortages are a regular thing? I am not so sure. This kind of conditions brings warlords to power, who cement economic instability, thus never alleviating food shortages. A vicious cycle.
... where do you think these political issues come from ?
https://tradingeconomics.com/world/arable-land-hectares-per-...
As for not having any scientific process to fall back on, that's far from true in most of the world, even the developed world. Sadly the EU has been blocking the use of GM crops for years, supposedly on 'safety' grounds but in reality as a form of trade barrier designed to protect local farmers from having to become more efficient (mostly French farmers). So the EU isn't even using genetic engineering to increase yields, a by now very mature technology! Large parts of Europe don't even use advanced technology because the CAP subsidy scheme pays them to not grow food!
When you look around the world there's plenty of low hanging techno-fruit almost everywhere, except maybe the USA where new tech is embraced and farming is quite efficient already. But even then, there's plenty of tech on the horizon should we want it. Genetic engineering is still at the start of what it can do - it's capable of so much more than just pesticide resistance.
That's just being blind about the problems. Nuclear war is all one of the biggest existential threats to civilization. It didn't end with the cold war.
Think of all the close calls we've had. Now look forward 100 years, what's the odds it happens? 1000 years? 10000?
We're our own worst enemy and our civilization is the biggest threat to civilization.
It'll cost a few tens of trillions to mitigate climate change and many non-human species will be in serious trouble if we don't do anything about it.
Either way, humans will be fine. But I still advocate strongly for option number 1.
A small fraction of people live the high life, but a large fraction has tasted it, and almost everyone has seen it. Effectively no one is going to cut down on their consumption because they’re calculating (correctly, in my opinion) that even if they do, someone else will step in and consume their portion anyway.
What do you do in Florida?
Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move to.
The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're approaching 200 million and might need to cross a political border.
If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
The "if" is funny. There's already many hundreds of millions of poor people around the world that have the borders closed to them. I don't see why 200M extra poor Bangladeshis wouldn't suffer the same fate.
And there is no reason to believe Siberia will be habitable, at least not in exactly the timeframe it needs to be to offset other habitable areas that are lost.
Climate change will be a slow moving, albeit accelerating, series of crisis that will grind those who are poorer and don't have the power to move to suffer losses.
With respect to the "If" statement around countries closing their borders - seriously, where have you been? The sudden and significant rise in popularity of the far-right in Europe almost coincides to the Syrian refugee crisis, and that was roughly one million people. In my country (Australia) we give our Pacific islands neighbours platitudes while still pushing coal on the rest of the world, and then indefinitely detain those seeking asylum for years (including years after they've been assessed as legitimate refugees). Countries are now proposing the Australian approach to "protect" their own borders. To think that this issue (of climate-change forced population movements) will not cause existential threats for those people is plainly wrong.
Because of Russia's famous open borders policy, and China happy to open their borders to let refugees pass through? What planet do you live on?
That's like saying the US would open its southern border to let migrants pass thorough up to Canada.
Levees don't work in south Florida. Well, they work to stop water that comes in horizontally above ground level, but in south Florida floods usually come in by bubbling up through the porous ground.
Worldwide, cities on river deltas face problems. Mostly in Asia. New Orleans is the only US city built on sand flatland at the mouth of a huge river. Asia has several of those.
New York is building a seawall around lower Manhattan. The West Coast isn't that vulnerable because the coast is mountainous. Even in areas of LA that look flat, go a few blocks inland and you're up 10m or so above sea level. The parts of SF built on fill may have problems.
This isn't the end of the world. But some cities will need rebuilding.
[1] https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas-story-project...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
[3] https://mdc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
In the USA, is that even possible anymore? I've been to both Galveston and Chicago, and you can see oddities here and there in some neighborhoods. In many cases, homes were not actually raised - the main floor became a basement and above it new doors were made into the existing walls!
In a lot of locations, you cannot have a basement and get flood insurance. So what poorer people did in Galveston and Chicago is no longer an option.
There are some problems with the assumption of a flooding crisis. The historical record from tide gauges have been retroactively altered over time, to make apparent level rises in modern times worse and level rises in older times less so (this seems to be a common theme with data from climatologists - they rewrite historical datasets to make the magnitude of changes seem larger).
Additionally at some point they switched to satellites and stopped using tide gauges but it's not clear that's more accurate and may actually be less accurate (but it did make the rises seem larger, so there's a conflict of interest there). In particular, NOAA and NASA disagree by a large amount on what the actual level of rise is. NOAA say it's about half what NASA say it is.
Levees are expensive, and not always viable. It depends on the geography, the wealth of the city / county, the porosity of the ground, etc.
Some places will be sure to use levees, some won't.
With regards to crops, we don't know the outcome. If the Gulf stream stops or some regions dry out it could greatly affect crop yield, especially over the short-term. And that's all that matters for starvation to occur. The term year average yield isn't as important as this year's harvest.
This is trying to win an argument by changing the meaning of a term. “Predictions” refer to future events.
All of my stock pick “predictions” also came true. However, I did not become a billionaire, because they did so in the past.
The crucial issue is not when the event happened chronologically, but rather whether you have knowledge of the event. If you have knowledge, then indeed it is not prediction. However, in Malthus time, there was very, very little historical econometric data available.
The point here is that if you judge Malthus by quality of his predictions for immediate future, then yes, they turned out badly. However, that’s not because his model was wrong, but rather because some of his assumptions, that have been valid for entirety of the past history before him, have just stopped being valid anymore.
We devised ways to mitigate the problems associated with population growth, but we have not solved it: the fundamental logic of Malthus is still very much valid. The carrying capacity of Earth may be much larger than he thought: it may be 50 billion, or 100, or 500 (but probably not 1 trillion), some people surely have created an analysis to get a good estimate given current technology and available land. But, make no mistake, it is very much finite. The good news is that with current trends in population growth, we aren’t likely to hit it in the next few hundred of years.
You can't use the word "prediction" if you're unwilling to make a distinction between the past and future.
Cambodia (for example) has a terrible rubbish problem. They burn their trash, and vast amounts of it get thrown in the Mekong river and washed out to sea. There's also a big problem with unlicensed forest logging, and all sorts of environmental concerns. This is, primarily, because poor people are too busy with immediate survival concerns to worry about their environment.
Norway (for example) has a higher per-person consumption of resources, but also looks after its countryside and environment.
What's the relative damage being done to the global environment? Is there an argument that raising people out of poverty will actually reduce their impact on the environment even though it increases their resource consumption?
Though it has been shown that some countries are beginning to reduce emissions while increasing GDP. Much of that shift could be explained by a global shift to renewables as they become the cheapest form of power, but this is a tide that lifts all boats, and the correlation remains.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
The biggest carbon sink is the ocean, so doing things that damage the ocean (like dumping trash into a river) are more of a concern.
There's also other environmental concerns than CO2 and climate change. Damaging jungle and ocean ecosystems creates other effects that we need to be concerned about (not least biodiversity losses from loss of habitat and population).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
This is not true. That was true in 1950, started to drop in 1970. Now it is 2.04 kid per woman. And when you compare contemporary consumption of Danes, you have to compare it with contemporary consumption of Bangladeshis.
Currently, the fertility rates are 1.73 vs 2.04 kid per woman. Which is much smaller difference.
So then, would 1 billion Norweigans be better or worse than our current situation?
Of course, that's expected. Even if you assume that IPCC is 100% on point, then with p-value threshold of 0.05, you'd expect 1 in every 20 studies to show that IPCC is off.
The real question is whether the scientific consensus changes by the time the next IPCC report comes out. Maybe it will, we shall see. At the same time, consider what kind of message you are sending here: you are asking everyone to not listen to scientific consensus, and instead promote alarmism, because there are a few studies that challenge the consensus.
There is nothing wrong with challenging the consensus, that's how we get progress, but how do you want to win trust of the society, which is required to deal with this planet-wide situation, when, right after the (mostly won) fight for people to stop with denialism and believe the science, you turn around and say "yeah, that consensus we asked you to believe, instead of a handful of contrarian papers, is not what we actually want you to believe, instead you should believe this other handful of contrarian papers"? That's only going to sow distrust and alienate people.
i agree with you on the nitty gritty for a general audience. mostly i dont think bogging down the public with research helps and it's way too often used in bad faith to do the opposite by industry and certain political groups acting in their own interest
on the other hand
on the other hand if like half the country experiencing some weather catastrophe in the last 5 years doesnt do it im not sure ;( so i do think we need more fear and for sure a lot more alarm, but yeah probably not alarmism in the sense i think you are probably referring to
i do love HN though for a higher level discussion
It's one of the reasons why Vancouver and London have similar climates, and both never get as cold as either of New York or Vladivostok, both of which are to the south of them.
It's actually more complicated than that - the Gulf Stream contributes not to warming Europe but to cooling the eastern seaboard of the US:
https://www.livescience.com/13573-east-coast-colder-europe-w...
But you are right that it will keep rising for a thousand years or more. But now at that timeframe we're talking 6-12 meters or more.
This is all in the fairly conservative public estimates that so far have underrepresented the pace and scale of change.
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
It's thirty years later now and the temperature rise since then has been at the very lowest end of the most conservative estimate (which was itself so wide that it was basically useless and hardly an estimate at all).
Otherwise, the whole field of astronomy wouldn’t be possible, as it by its nature is all about observing the past, and building models to explain and predict other events that happened in the past. If you grant that astronomy is a scientifically sound pursuit, why is astronomy observing and testing their theories on events that happened thousands or millions year ago in another galaxy fine, but observing and testing econometric theories on events that happened hundreds or thousands years ago make no sense? How is archeology, or ancient population genetics supposed to work, if you only allow scientific method to be applied to future events?
You've also made bizarre arguments elsewhere in this thread. Apparently Malthus can't be proven wrong because the Earth can't support an infinite number of people. That's true, of course, but it's not a model. It's the statement of an obvious fact.
We can, and we do, just not for human population in future. Again, Malthusian models are completely standard way to model past human populations, and also animal populations.
> Apparently Malthus can't be proven wrong because the Earth can't support an infinite number of people. That's true, of course, but it's not a model. It's the statement of an obvious fact.
Yes, that's why Malthusian model is so popular: because it is obviously correct, and because its assumptions cover very wide range of observed past and future conditions. We live in pretty unique circumstances when they don't: we both had the technology grow carrying capacity faster than the population had grown, and also we had population growth slow down a lot, and then go down to shrinking regime.
I expect these trends to continue in my lifetime, and probably in the lifetime of my children -- but not forever. Instead, I believe that in around 200-300 years we will return to high-fertility regime, that will require governmental measures to curb, if we want to preserve the quality of life. However, I have much less confidence in this prediction than I do in the validity of Malthusian model.
It's not correct right now, for humans, which is what we were talking about.
> and because its assumptions cover very wide range of observed past and future conditions
Ah yes, those magical "observed future conditions".
> We live in pretty unique circumstances when they don't
There are no grounds for insisting that we "live in unique circumstances". That statement is either a tautology (like your interpretation of Malthus) or it's meaningless.
> I believe that in around 200-300 years we will return to high-fertility regime, that will require governmental measures to curb, if we want to preserve the quality of life.
I like science fiction as much as the next person but that's all this is.