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The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

rogerpielkejr.substack.com

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Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#171

Post by pmiller2 »

saddlerustle wrote: post #98
jaegerpicker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food has two types of cost, market value and ecosystem cost. It always has been this case. It's the very reason that crop rotation was discovered. By improving the ecosystem that you farm in (in this case soil but Tree windbreaks also count etc...) you increase the productivity. The issue is that most ways to improve productivity are terribly short term. Think slash/burn. So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but w…

What, exactly, will "run out" that affects most food production? The remaining soil lifespan in societies with developed agriculture is hundreds of years, and relatively cheap practices can extend that to thousands of years.

Land? The trend is obvious, and we probably don't have anything like Haber-Bosch to save us in the next 50-ish years.

https://tradingeconomics.com/world/arable-land-hectares-per-...

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#172

Post by chiefalchemist »

Fricken wrote: post #24
chiefalchemist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of the environment and more specifically climate change, it's not overpopulation per se but a growing middle class. The middle class, drives cars, have larger homes (to heat, cool and furnish) and so on. A million people in poverty is not the same as a million living a traditional middle class lifestyle.

It's either middle class people consuming huge amounts of resources per person, or it's subsistence dwellers cranking out 5 kids for every fertile woman.

In general...where there are 5+ children there is very little hope; there is extreme poverty (read: little consumption); and so on.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#173

Post by _iyig »

OrbitRock wrote: post #119
clarkmoody wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "we" and how do "we" get to decide how many humans there should be?

No one is forcing anybody. 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://fs.blog/2016/04/hans-rosling-population-growth/

China has forcibly implemented strict birth control policy for decades. They're also forcibly sterilizing ethnic minority populations, Uyghurs in particular:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-xin...

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#174

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

xyzzyz wrote: post #138
slibhb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> All of Malthus’ predictions have come true. They just did so in his past, not future.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#175

Post by slibhb »

xyzzyz wrote: post #144
slibhb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Predictions" are about the future, not the past.

When the past is as murky as the future, there is little reason to distinguish between the two.

I have no opinion about your broader argument (that Malthus' model is accurate with respect to his past) but the way you choose to express it simply makes no sense.

You can't use the word "prediction" if you're unwilling to make a distinction between the past and future.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#176

Post by dillondoyle »

eloff wrote: post #134
xyzzyz wrote: 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…

I just read a study showing this europe crops crisis.

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...

http://archive.is/YRqDY

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...

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#177

Post by yongjik »

BurningFrog wrote: post #105
jaegerpicker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure and I agree with that but that doesn't mean that armageddon isn't coming either. For example Climate Change and the Covid19 pandemic, both are examples of very real problems with the potential to severally harm/kill large numbers but both are dismissed with that attitude. I'm not sayin that the sky is falling in either case, though with Climate Change I can't imagine not thinking that, but if we continue to igno…

> For example Climate Change and the Covid19 pandemic, both are examples of very real problems with the potential to severally harm/kill large numbers but both are dismissed with that attitude. 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…

> What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll be the end of human civilization.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#178

Post by subsubzero »

There are so many catastrophes that have been thrust upon people by the media that never borne out their outcomes. A few of note:

-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

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#179

Post by TulliusCicero »

ericmay wrote: post #57
TulliusCicero wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, but I’d argue that the replacement rate itself is at an unsustainable level. ...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 wi…

> ...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"? 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…

Personally, I don't focus on individual/free choices for the day-to-day at all, just policy. E.g. moralistic arguments about how people should ride bikes more are ineffective, you need actual on the ground changes in bike infrastructure to get real change for that sub-area. People trying to guilt each other constantly is just a distraction imo.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#180

Post by Animats »

The author has one anecdote about the US and India arguing over food aid, and he projects that into "population growth was not a problem".

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

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