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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

#181

Post by 8draco8 »

Animats wrote: post #180

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 st…

IMHO education plays huge role. More often people decide to go to collage, then have a career, people also learn what a huge effort have to be put into rising child. On top of that there is so many fantastic things that person can do and have to give up at least to some extend if having a baby. In my opinion those are huge factors. This is a reason why on average successful, well educated people tend to have less children even though they have all the resources to have a lot of them.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#182

Post by carapace »

BurningFrog wrote: post #63

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.

> ... there is an unavoidable anthropic counterargument, which is for the people who do in fact live in some kind of end times, this is exactly how it will seem to them too. We can't just rely on induction, you still have to at least attempt the deductive due diligence.

~ ppod https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433419

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#183

Post by simonh »

MikeUt wrote: post #167
simonh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I think that's very useful historical context. Yes Malthus had useful and valuable insights, but also yes we have since discovered mechanisms and processes that can largely mitigate these risks which he could not have foreseen.

Mitigate, or offload? Instead of facing a global famine, we're causing a global ecological catastrophe. The world didn't end, but species are rapidly going extinct, and it's only a matter of time before it comes back to bite us.

It's a statement about what we could do, not what we are doing. Sustainability is achievable, but not inevitable.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#184

Post by woeirua »

nahuel0x wrote: post #15

Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.

What are you talking about? Humans have already irrevocably altered the natural ecosystem over the past 100k years. We have: killed off all the megafauna, domesticated thousands of plants, drastically changed the landscape through agriculture, literally changed the courses of rivers, diverted water all over the planet, etc. And that was all before the modern era.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#185

Post by danans »

Animats wrote: post #180

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 st…

> It's still not really understood.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#186

Post by kiliantics »

leppr wrote: post #161
BurningFrog wrote: post #63

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.

Given that humans are the most successful species on the planet, if this is "an innate part of human psychology", then this trait is probably useful. Beware of survivor bias.

Will be hard to consider humans successful if they don't prevent the human-made climate catastrophe from completely destroying most sustainable life-supporting ecosystems on the planet.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#187

Post by Animats »

tzs wrote: post #154
xyzzyz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Miami needs to move a few meters straight up. This is quite possible. Galveston, TX [1] and Chicago [2] did that a century ago. Miami Beach is raising some main roads, finally. Here's Miami's flood zone map.[3]

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=...

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#188

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

The biggest issue with Malthusian predictions is that humans are Earth’s greatest resources. Nature is very unforgiving. It is human cultivation and exploitation of natural resources that allows for humans to thrive. The more we can educated and develop our population, the higher the chance of breakthroughs that enable us to support even more people with the same amount of raw resources.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#189

Post by throwanem »

wyldfire wrote: post #155
BurningFrog wrote: post #63

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.

How do the "Precursors" get around evolution?

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.)

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#190

Post by lupire »

lucian1900 wrote: post #52
jojobas wrote: post #13

There are way more people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what we consider a life worth living. 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 peo…

Capitalism is the cause of poverty, not what ends it. If you look at the last decade, global poverty outside China has increased. Only within China has it decreased, for now by enough to offset the rest of the world. The problem is the constant expansion (which comes with warfare and extreme waste) that capitalism mandates.

China is capitalist and imperialist.
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