131–140 of 280 posts
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Population crisis, peak oil, 'kids these days', rando 'not enough people believe in my ideology' driven crisis, 'Rome fell because people did a thing I don't like'... It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.
Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions
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Agricultural land use only went up ~10% as the world went from from ~4 billion to ~8 billion people. It has been almost entirely offset by increased agricultural productivity.
And how much can we increase agri productivity? Will it grow exponentially along with the population? Otherwise, we will need that land.
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Population crisis, peak oil, 'kids these days', rando 'not enough people believe in my ideology' driven crisis, 'Rome fell because people did a thing I don't like'... It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.
Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions
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Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions
Climate change definitely is the next one. It is most surely happening, and probably faster than we want or expect, but if you listen to scientific consensus (eg. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), it is pretty clear that, while serious and troublesome issue, it most definitely is not an existential threat.
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.
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If we were running low on resources for food production you'd expect to see food prices increasing. But broadly, food is cheaper than ever.
The thing everyone always forgets about food production in armchair analysis is that it is not constant. Some years we produce more, some years we produce less. We can smooth across space and time to keep short-term or regional shortfalls from becoming a famine, and we do so most of the time, most places. In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wan…
As I've gotten older and seen predicted doomsdays come and go, I've started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate part of human psychology. 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.
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Population crisis, peak oil, 'kids these days', rando 'not enough people believe in my ideology' driven crisis, 'Rome fell because people did a thing I don't like'... It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.
Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions
the dismissal of Malthus seems itself ideological. It's not due to any necessary reason that Malthusianism itself is wrong, quite obviously putting population pressure on restrained resources is an actual disaster. 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. The…
"Proof of Malthus' farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet"
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.
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"Proof of Malthus' farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet"
All of Malthus’ predictions have come true. They just did so in his past, not future. Malthusian model is the standard one to describe evolution of human populations up until 17th century or so. If you are familiar with scientific literature, with economic history, with population genetics etc, the Malthusian model is pretty much the consensus view these days. See, for example Gregory Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” or Sh…
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Ecological damage and collapses occur well before we'd run out of resources. Just because we can encroach on more and more land, at the expense of the environment, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. And the developing nations, where the populations are booming, are still on the lower end of agricultural productivity. 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.