Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

rogerpielkejr.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 280 posts

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#251

Post by tharkun__ »

OrbitRock wrote: post #123
basilgohar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even more rational approach is think about it in terms of classes of scenarios to prepare for – many threats can be averted and/or mitigated through common preparations. Seed stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival training, and so on. But given how remote many scenarios seem to most people making decisions, the extra effort for long term benefits over short term gains tends to favor the latter over t…

> Seed stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival training, and so on. If we actually thought like this and prepared ourselves in this manner during good times it’d increase the resilience of our species so profoundly.

Some of this does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#252

Post by tharkun__ »

duxup wrote: post #126
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.

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.

"Kids these days":

> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

― Socrates (~470BC - 399BC)

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#253

Post by dmm »

tharkun__ wrote: post #252
duxup wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Kids these days": > The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. ― S…

Socrates probably didn't say that and if he did so what? What argument are you actually making?

"Two thousand years ago someone complained about X and people also complain about X now. So X is no big deal!"?

Hippocrates complained about malaria. Does that mean contemporary concerns about malaria are invalid?

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#254

Post by [deleted] »

nooron wrote: post #244
thereddaikon wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 popul…

Your advice is good, I agree that the most important thing is to be prepared for these smaller events. I would like to add an entry to your list of armageddons though. The indigenous people of the Americas had a pretty bad century after first contact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno...

[deleted]

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#255

Post by tharkun__ »

dmm wrote: post #253
tharkun__ wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kids these days": > The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. ― S…

Socrates probably didn't say that and if he did so what? What argument are you actually making? "Two thousand years ago someone complained about X and people also complain about X now. So X is no big deal!"? Hippocrates complained about malaria. Does that mean contemporary concerns about malaria are invalid?

Fair enough though not the point I was trying to make :)

The parent mentioned "kids these days" and also "It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.".

Whether Socrates actually said this (or some other famous or not so famous guy from over 2000 years ago), it does show that that assessment is probably very very correct. And very funny to read indeed. Even if you don't agree with all of the parts of the statement (I don't) you will most probably find some you'd agree with. YMMV if you don't have kids :)

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#256

Post by phs318u »

BurningFrog wrote: post #227
eloff wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you move the hundred million people in Bangladesh? What do you do in Florida?

First of all, people can move themselves. They don't need someone else to move them. Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move to. The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're approaching 200 million and might need to cross a political border. If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Sibe…

I find this comment naive in the extreme. There is a strong overlap between areas subject to the worst impacts of climate change, and areas hosting some of the poorest people in the world (or in their countries).

With respect to the "If" statement around countries closing their borders - seriously, where have you been? The sudden and significant rise in popularity of the far-right in Europe almost coincides to the Syrian refugee crisis, and that was roughly one million people. In my country (Australia) we give our Pacific islands neighbours platitudes while still pushing coal on the rest of the world, and then indefinitely detain those seeking asylum for years (including years after they've been assessed as legitimate refugees). Countries are now proposing the Australian approach to "protect" their own borders. To think that this issue (of climate-change forced population movements) will not cause existential threats for those people is plainly wrong.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#257

Post by oilbagz »

lupire wrote: post #62
oilbagz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>nobody today really argues for any of that stuff ahem https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-pol... https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.htm... https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fert... https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/ Malthus should be targeted by the time-travellers for culling as soon as convenient ..

Those pages promote birth control (with a focus on avoiding forced reproduction/birth) not culling the sick. Are you making a handwaving argument about supposed genocide via birth control?

If you want to reduce the size of a population, and you can pull strings at international scale (as is the case with the institutions I referenced), you have a few options in targetting that population:

a) war/genocide b) famine/food crop failure c) birth control

Which of these is the most palatable to the Western moral authority mindset, and most likely to gain popular support among the classes with the most democratic agency? You won't have feminists calling for outright war in order to de-populate your targetted society - you will have them supporting population-control if you couch the argument as 'women expressing agency over their bodies'. (note: I personally 100% agree that women should have full agency over their bodies - just like men should, too, be able to avoid going to war if they desire...) Plus, birth control means more sex, and everyone likes that - so you can easily get buy-in by your targetted population, too. At least, a little easier than the war option.

The premise is the same for all cases: someone 'in authority' has decided that a population must be culled. The only thing that differs is the means by which this is achieved.

It has already been demonstrated that the planet can actually support us all. We are suffering because we, as a species, cannot manage what we've got. We, as a species, are mis-managing things - we could be doing a lot, lot better. And unfortunately there are power structures out there which would rather not manage things, and instead just solve the problem by a)/b)/c), or all of the above.

That will change - not by people demanding 'culling of other lesser populations', but by actually caring for other populations, and developing the technology and management structures required to support their lives ... Would you be outraged if China called for all Westerners to be sterilized in order to prevent population explosion? Are you outraged about the genocide of Yemen, because someone decided 'there are too many lower humans living there'? Or, have you decided 'your team' is more deserving of the future of humanity, somehow? Our real problem lies in the answers to those questions, not in the ability of the planet to support us all ..

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#258

Post by thu2111 »

eloff wrote: post #248
thu2111 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't look at historical trends because it's not rising linearly. Most of the warming and melting will happen in the last decades of this century. That's part of what makes it easy to underestimate. But you are right that it will keep rising for a thousand years or more. But now at that timeframe we're talking 6-12 meters or more. This is all in the fairly conservative public estimates that so far have underrepre…

Will happen, according to academic models that have been frequently wrong in the past. Projecting prior trends forwards doesn't get you anywhere near meters of rise, that's my point. And no they have not so far under-represented the pace and scale of change, far from it. That's the kind of revisionist history that makes arguments about climatology fruitless. How can we even debate the accuracy of such forecasts when the past is inverted like that? Here's the sort of thing that was actually predicted, from an AP news report in 1989:

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.

The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

It's thirty years later now and the temperature rise since then has been at the very lowest end of the most conservative estimate (which was itself so wide that it was basically useless and hardly an estimate at all).

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#259

Post by thu2111 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #230
thu2111 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The graph I linked is of arable land per capita. "Arable" means capable of growing crops. It does not matter that we raise animals on it currently.

Why not? Land used for crops that are then eaten by humans is more efficient than using it grow crops to feed animals. Even if you assume no animals graze on arable land (why would you assume that?) there's still large efficiencies to be had.

Re: The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

#260

Post by inglor_cz »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #92
m0llusk wrote: post #58

This is interesting political analysis, but the fact remains that the global population is topping out at several billion with almost all arable land already being farmed and ecological impacts accumulating. All these related problems may have solutions, but reframing the situation doesn't really address potential for improvement.

The article is not arguing that the Earth should support 1 trillion people or some equally unsustainable numbers. This is not the point. The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global south can starve and die of disease to reduce population" EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?

I downvoted you because you used racism and genocide as a thought-stopping cliché.

There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past.

Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.

Post reply on HN