Jokodo
Veteran Member
Said the dodo bird as extinction beckoned!Well, a much smarter man than I can only wish I could emulate, Professor Stephen Hawking has been quoted as saying recently that we have around a century to find another earth or face the very real prospect of becoming extinct. Uncontrolled growth can only hasten our fate. Remember, extinction is the norm not the exception.You see no alarming bottom graph of pop. increase in the least developed world?
Given that it is entirely consistent with the other figures I have presented, wherein population increase stops in the mid-21st century, and given that it is a pretty similar distribution to the not-at-all-disastrous last three decades, no.
Have you been living and paying attention to the last three decades? You are living in Australia. That may just explain your attitude. We have people who think similar to you living in places like Nevada, Wyoming, and Oklahoma...places unfit for large populations due to water and other resource shortages. The world looks deserted there because that is a desert.
Gosh, really; how many have died? (To the nearest hundred thousand)?
Is it as bad as the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s yet? Should we be getting Bob Geldof involved?
You clearly have a very middle class American view of what constitutes a 'disaster'.
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You see no alarming bottom graph of pop. increase in the least developed world?
Given that it is entirely consistent with the other figures I have presented, wherein population increase stops in the mid-21st century, and given that it is a pretty similar distribution to the not-at-all-disastrous last three decades, no.
What will happen as people live longer, or the world economy picks up and people have more disposable income and decide they no longer want just 0.5- 1.5 children but prefer 2.5 children because they now can afford it. I'm referring to the first world as I think the third world is a lost cause regarding child birth and population control.
Increased wealth has the exact opposite effect. People with more money have fewer children. Your fears are groundless.
ETA:
And people ARE living longer. That is one of the main reasons why population has not yet levelled off. The only more significant one is demographic lag - the large cohort of today's 0-5 year olds will be a large cohort of parents in 20 year's time.
All of this is accounted for in the UN projections.
Hawking is a Physicist, not a Demographer.
When your toilet springs a leak, do you call a Neurosurgeon, or a less smart, but better qualified, Plumber?
Seriously, this is getting more and more like debating a creationist. You have no facts to present; but you are going through the list of fallacies like syrup of prunes through a short grandmother.
Appeal to irrelevant authority - check.
Appeal to consequences - check.
Non-sequiturs - check.
Citing sources that don't support your position - check.
What's next? Crocoducks?
Remember your claim about accelerated breeding in developing countries? I see that you still have neither retracted it, nor propped it up with better data than the World Bank's. Is that going to happen anytime soon?
And, you made the same claim about "Islamic" countries, didn't you? Turned out the Middle East and North Africa has a TFR of 2.7 (as of 2012), again down from 2.9 in 2004, didn't it? That makes the regional aggregate TFR actually lower than that of the single country in the region that doesn't have a Muslim majority, Israel. Turns out if you if you start your life as a Middle Eastern country, being Islamic is correlated with a lower TFR (although the correlation is not significant).
But you may say what about those other Islamic countries outside the Middle East? Indonesia and Bangladesh already have TFRs below the global average, while Pakistan's is falling rapidly, now at 3.3 down from 3.9 in 2004. Here's the updated graph: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN/ountries/1W-XL-ZQ-ID-PK-BD-IL?display=graph
There's a number of predominantly Muslim countries that do have extremely high TFRs, but what they have in common is that they are in the Sahel, not that they're "Islamic" - so wrong generalisation.
By the way, if you want to make forecasts, don't look at current growth rates, or even birth rates. Birth rates are defined as number of births relative to the total population. Knowing that only women of child-bearing age give birth, this rate thus depends on at least to other figures: The number of children a woman typically has, and the number of women in child-bearing age as a proportion of the population. So if a country has a high birth rate or population growth rate, it can mean two things: Its women are having a lot of kids, or there are many women (and generally, people) around because one generation ago, the women were having a lot of kids. TFRs let you distinguish between the two, birth rates don't.