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The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

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Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#201

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kiliantics wrote: post #186
leppr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then stop it, or support the people who are. Vote with your feet and your wallet to the extent you can, and add your voice to the clamour. Don't just complain about the problem; complain about its instigation too. See if you can get just one change made; there are enough of us that that could add up.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#202

Post by thu2111 »

Animats wrote: post #187
tzs wrote: post #154

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. 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 seaw…

A few meters? That's the scenario where there's some runaway global warming and all the poles melt, right? Actual observed sea level rises are measured in millimeters per year. Historical trends can't lead to Miami needing to move several meters up unless you're talking about, like, 1000 years from now.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#203

Post by phkahler »

dwaltrip wrote: post #93
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 agree that it is a shame that many people make over-confident predictions such as “in exactly 10 years, X will happen”. You often have to dig when reading a story to find out which parts are strongly supported by our scientific understanding, which can be frustrating. 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…

If humans did nothing, we could expect glaciation in the next 100 years or so. Do people really think what we're doing can prevent that? If so, do they really think we can regulate the planet well enough to avoid both bad outcomes?

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#204

Post by lurquer »

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.

Each of us is heading to our own personal Armageddon. Could happen at any moment.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#205

Post by wizzwizz4 »

throwanem wrote: post #189
wyldfire wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ki…

> How do the "Precursors" get around evolution?

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

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#206

Post by thu2111 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #171
saddlerustle wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Land? Enormous amounts of land are used to raise animals or food for animals, many of which could be replaced with slightly improved Impossible Burgers. Artificial meat is already pretty much acceptable and its primary constraint is the cheapness of real meat. Land is unlikely to ever be a constraint given demographic trends. If there's ever any pressure on food prices due to lack of land, meat prices will go up and a bunch of farms will switch to crops to use as input to artificial meat processes so they can produce more of it. That's a very deep pool to draw from.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#207

Post by corty »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #132
corty wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much can we increase agri productivity? Will it grow exponentially along with the population? Otherwise, we will need that land.

Population growth hasn’t been exponential for half a century. Get your facts straight.

It has, the only obscuring factor is China's one-child-policy and Europe's and North America's decline. The rest is still very much in exponential growth. Only the last 20 years at best saw some possible downward trend, but there have been similar variations before. So that's like reading the climate from small changes in weather, a fool's errand. Until there is a firm trend for a shrinking or stagnating population, all the small variations just lead to wishful thinking like yours. You cannot just ignore math and biology, populations will grow exponentially until they hit a limit.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#208

Post by watershed123 »

pascalxus wrote: post #193
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…

is it so hard to understand? the material wealth of the developed world has dropped by quite a large amount (at least for shelter, medical insurance, education). Don't trust those GDP per capita figures (even adjusted for PPP), they don't tell you the true story because inflation isn't being counted correctly and the basket of goods used is questionable at best. there's a lot of subsitutions going on in those figures…

Generally, high fertility is associated with a lower standard of living. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility)

If people are functionally poorer than GDP per capita would have you believe, we would expect abnormally high fertility rates, not low.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#209

Post by thereddaikon »

yellowstuff wrote: post #80
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.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. It could be that worrying about doomsday is an innate human trait, and that as the article asserts, certain types of worries are motivated by racism. I still think it's a good idea to allocate some resources towards mitigating low probability, high impact events.

Being prepared for emergencies is prudent. And most contingencies require the same basic preparations and planning. A store of non perishables, water and a way to purify more, a good rifle and ammo, clothes for adverse conditions, perhaps a generator etc are all good to keep on hand.

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.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#210

Post by thu2111 »

foobiekr wrote: post #153
fallingfrog wrote: post #121

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…

Nobody "kept" half the world poor, they did that to themselves. Look at the vast amounts of aid that's been sent to nearly every poor country over the decades. Huge sums. In the end the big success is China, which didn't need such aid. They solved their own problems (well, sort of, economically at least). The poor parts of the world are still poor because they make a lot of bad decisions, it's terrible but when you drill in and study what goes on in those places it's plain to see.

The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.

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