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The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

rogerpielkejr.substack.com

151–160 of 280 posts

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#151
post #48

Poluation x Goods/Services x Energy/Resource demand x Waste production = Human impact on earth 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 no…

It's possible to generate energy, harvest resources and store waste with minimal impact to other life on earth.

This is a “no true Scotsman” argument. We quite obviously have not demonstrated this is an actual possibility.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#152
I do think many challenges are painted in worst possible case terms -- like Hollywood blockbusters where the stakes are always the world, of even the galaxy or the entire universe -- but by fixating on how that particular exaggeration is nearly always invariably wrong we miss the fact that, even at lower stakes, predicted catastrophes are often still plenty catastrophic. To give a quick, immediate example, though I'm currently writing from a internet connected, well heated house rather than from a scene from The Stand, 500,000+ and counting deaths in my country and many more worldwide isn't exactly something to shrug at...

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#153

The population bomb thesis was reasonable, up until about the 1970’s. But it turns out, if you give women access to education and birth control, the problem mostly goes away. I don’t know if I really fault people before then for worrying about it, perhaps the worrying was partly responsible for the solution. People say the same thing about nuclear war: all those marches were useless because the war never happened. Ho…

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory of human population as crazy/fringe but the other prediction as some kind of scientific law.

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.”

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#154
post #143
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not directly. 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 wides…

No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen. By the way, the scientific consensus for predicted sea level rise in the worst temperature growth scenario is still less than 1 meter by 2100. That’s less than the difference between low and high tide. Some areas will get flooded (eg large part…

> No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#155

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.

> I've started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate part of human psychology.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#156

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.

It is weird, indeed. Every so often I’m amazed at how many people will say yes, on surveys, if you ask them if they are living in the end times.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Developed countries produce, not a little bit, but multiples of calories than is consumed because people choose to pay extra for tastier but less efficient calories through livestock, and tolerate food waste for convenient packaging and higher quality selection. I don't see any sign of a downwards trend in this ratio.

Oh yes; you can slaughter millions of extra cows and pigs in the US to realize a huge number of available calories, while redirecting the grain back to humans, all with no more ethical worries than you've already accepted in producing & consuming meat. A number of other inefficiencies can also go away under emergency conditions -- people will get less picky about their fruits and vegetables in a hurry, and it won't spend as long on supermarket shelves anyway.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwate...

Managing groundwater is an economic co-ordination problem, not a limit to food production. We currently produce crops that are very, very inefficient in terms of water per calorie, because people like them and some jurisdictions like California don't have effective water markets.

I predict nothing will change until nature forces it, at which point the damage will be irreversible.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#159
post #134
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably not directly. 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 wides…

Any flooding of cities will take decades.

This gives plenty of time for people to build and/or move to new cities on higher ground.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#160

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…

>Malthusianism itself is wrong

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

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