Over population derail from "Humans as non-animals"

[bilby]

The problems of overpopulation are not hypothetical: We can see them now.. Precious resources are being depleted: groundwater, phosphates and petroleum are among the most obvious examples. About fifty species of life already go extinct every week during this Great Man-made Extinction and this number is increasing. Even without extinctions, there are profound changes to the ecology: I've already mentioned the widespread replacement of fish with jellyfish.

Nobody has ever denied that over-exploitation of natural resources is a problem.

I have, and do.

The accusation is that the true perpetrators of the crimes are using "overpopulation" as a smoke-screen. It blames the urban poor of third-world nations (who don't actually benefit much from the destruction of wide swaths of the environment in search of oil) for the decisions made by global elites for their own selfish reasons. We aren't obliged to destroy our planet because that's the only way to feed all the people on it, we choose to destroy the planet because doing do is profitable in the short term. The populations that make those decisions aren't the same ones whose family size is growing at present. Those who personally consume the most resources are, in fact, the least likely to have large families. It is a fact well-established that wealth and family size are negatively correlated, and vice versa. So killing or sterilizing a bunch of disadvantaged people is not going to do anything to solve the ecological crisis. They are the excuse for, not the cause of, ecological destruction.

This is true too. If resource use is your concern, you need to get rid of a few hundred billionaires, not a few billion poor people.

 

[Swammerdami]

It's true that rich countries and rich people use more resources than poor countries and poor people, but isn't it an implicit goal to increase general prosperity? Ten billion people living the good life will consume a lot more resources than ten billion people most of whom lack access to plentiful meat, electric conveniences and high-speed transport.

Nothing is being depleted, except biodiversity; And biodiversity depletion is not due to sheer numbers of humans - we did more of it when there were fewer of us.

I realize that humans have been making big changes to the ecology for thousands of years. But I'll need a cite for "more of it." Whether measured by acreage of land transformed by man or number of species driven extinct, man's negative influence on ecology is bigger than ever now, and getting worse.

Anyway, I'd still like the proponents of overpopulation to answer my Hypothetical Question: If the choice is between a world of 10 billion happy humans and a world with 5 billion happy humans, is it fair to say the former has a humanity that's twice as happy?

 

[bilby]

It's true that rich countries and rich people use more resources than poor countries and poor people, but isn't it an implicit goal to increase general prosperity? Ten billion people living the good life will consume a lot more resources than ten billion people most of whom lack access to plentiful meat, electric conveniences and high-speed transport.

Nothing is being depleted, except biodiversity; And biodiversity depletion is not due to sheer numbers of humans - we did more of it when there were fewer of us.

I realize that humans have been making big changes to the ecology for thousands of years. But I'll need a cite for "more of it." Whether measured by acreage of land transformed by man or number of species driven extinct, man's negative influence on ecology is bigger than ever now, and getting worse.

Anyway, I'd still like the proponents of overpopulation to answer my Hypothetical Question: If the choice is between a world of 10 billion happy humans and a world with 5 billion happy humans, is it fair to say the former has a humanity that's twice as happy?

All else being equal, no.

But all else isn't equal. How was the choice enforced? Who made it? Five billion people who wanted big families but were unable to have them because the government added contraceptives to the water supply are probably not happy. Nor are ten billion people who wanted small families, but were denied contraception by the government.

Right now, with little coercion, population is settling at around ten billion. Any intervention to reduce (or indeed, increase) that number is unlikely to be 'happiness neutral'. On the whole, individual freedom seems to be one of the things people require in order to be happy. But of course, one person's freedom may impact on another. A man whose wife wants fewer children than he does may be unhappy that she has access to contraception without his input; But as she has to do the actual child-bearing, with all the pain and risk that entails, I am inclined to value her happiness on this subject over his.

Regardless, the only way to obtain a population around five billion without massive genocide or coercion would be to hop in your DeLorean, and invent the contraceptive pill some time in the late 19th or early 20th century. Inventing it in the 1960s inevitably created a fairly inflexible ten billion peak about 80-100 years later. And it is pretty inflexible; Not many other things in history have had significant long term impacts on population. Wars, famines, pandemics, genocides - all caused visible blips in the curve, but none had much impact in the long term, until women were given the ability to choose how large their families would be. People have generally responded to low life expectancy by having an over-compensating number of children. They respond to high life expectancy, low infant mortality (which is the flip side of that coin), wealth, education, and access to effective contraception that is controlled by those who actually get pregnant, by having fewer than replacement levels of children. No coercion necessary.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I realize that humans have been making big changes to the ecology for thousands of years. But I'll need a cite for "more of it." Whether measured by acreage of land transformed by man or number of species driven extinct, man's negative influence on ecology is bigger than ever now, and getting worse.

Don't have a cite but my best guess would be loss of habitat. Human animals, as their population expands, destroy the habitats of other organisms. Some species can coexist, some even experience population increases and are better off, but generally the cost of loss of habitat is loss of species.

 

[bilby]

I realize that humans have been making big changes to the ecology for thousands of years. But I'll need a cite for "more of it." Whether measured by acreage of land transformed by man or number of species driven extinct, man's negative influence on ecology is bigger than ever now, and getting worse.

Don't have a cite but my best guess would be loss of habitat. Human animals, as their population expands, destroy the habitats of other organisms. Some species can coexist, some even experience population increases and are better off, but generally the cost of loss of habitat is loss of species.

No.

Human animals, as their range expands, do this.

It mostly happened back in the distant past, when total population of humans was minuscule compared to today.

Adding another million people to Shanghai or Mumbai makes very little difference. Adding a billionaire to California makes more, but not much more. A handful of people crossing the Timor Sea with their dogs 40,000 years ago wiped out vast numbers of species. The same happened in the Americas a few thousand years later.

Human impact on our environment has very little to do with raw population numbers.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I realize that humans have been making big changes to the ecology for thousands of years. But I'll need a cite for "more of it." Whether measured by acreage of land transformed by man or number of species driven extinct, man's negative influence on ecology is bigger than ever now, and getting worse.

Don't have a cite but my best guess would be loss of habitat. Human animals, as their population expands, destroy the habitats of other organisms. Some species can coexist, some even experience population increases and are better off, but generally the cost of loss of habitat is loss of species.

No.

Human animals, as their range expands, do this.

It mostly happened back in the distant past, when total population of humans was minuscule compared to today.

Adding another million people to Shanghai or Mumbai makes very little difference. Adding a billionaire to California makes more, but not much more. A handful of people crossing the Timor Sea with their dogs 40,000 years ago wiped out vast numbers of species. The same happened in the Americas a few thousand years later.

Human impact on our environment has very little to do with raw population numbers.

Just have to disagree with you there, I think. Lots of contradictory claims in that short post. Can you find anything that supports your position, a credible source? I'd love to read an argument that agrees with you based on numbers and documentation but I don't think it's out there. Plus it only makes common sense that as people build homes and strip malls they destroy habitat for other organisms. You're peddling a weak argument but if you have documentation that supports it I'd be curious to see it.

 

[skepticalbip]

^ ^ ^

Forested area in the U.S. reached its lowest area (~735 million acres) in about 1920 when the U.S. population was ~106 million. In 2000 the U.S. population was ~282 million (close to three times the 1920 population) and forested area had increased to ~749 million acres.
https://www.thoughtco.com/us-forest-facts-on-forestland-1343034#:~:text=Since%201900%2C%20forest%20area%20in,was%20about%20749%20million%20acres.

But I think Bilby was probably referring to the extinction of the mega-fauna around the world as small bands of hunter-gatherers would move into an area.

 

[steve_bank]

Nobody has a plan to sharply reduce human population in the short term, so the following comments are purely hypothetical — a thought experiment.

Question: If the choice is between a world of 10 billion happy humans and a world with 5 billion happy humans, is it fair to say the former has a humanity that's twice as happy? This is a philosophical question with, perhaps, no easy answer. I would answer No, but perhaps many would say Yes. The Yes-sayers may stop reading after the next paragraph; my comments aren't addressed at them.

A world with fewer happy humans will have more happy squirrels, happy dolphins, happy birds, happy insects and happy fish but some will find this suggestion silly. However, many would agree that humans would be happier in a world where other creatures thrive. Why do some promote a 10-gigahuman world? In what sense is it better than a 5-gigahuman world? Or is it just about accepting the inevitable: There will be a high population so let's hope it's for the best.

Some say that with ten billion instead of five billion, we'll have twice as many geniuses like Mozart and twice as many like Archimedes. This fails the sniff test! There were less than a billion humans alive in Mozart's time, and perhaps just 100 million in Archimedes' time. Yet both these great geniuses are still spoken of in superlative terms.

The problems of overpopulation are not hypothetical: We can see them now.. Precious resources are being depleted: groundwater, phosphates and petroleum are among the most obvious examples. About fifty species of life already go extinct every week during this Great Man-made Extinction and this number is increasing. Even without extinctions, there are profound changes to the ecology: I've already mentioned the widespread replacement of fish with jellyfish.

I'm sure that the supporters of overpopulation have glib answers to these concerns. Fusion power will provide the huge energy needed to replenish phosphates and groundwater. Extinctions are not a concern: only H. sapiens matters. And clever chefs will find ways to prepare varieties of jellyfish as delicious as fish. I find these answers overly glib. Groundwater depletion is already a serious concern in many parts of the world; a huge portion of arable land is already dedicated to humans and their food; pollution of various sorts is already a big problem. And extinctions are irreversible.

Overpopulation is a stupid idea. It was a reasonable fear in the mid to late twentieth century, but it's long since been resolved.

There are no resource issues we cannot solve that would prevent us sustaining the ~10 billion humans that represent our likely peak population. Of course, we might not be smart enough to actually implement those solutions - look at the reluctance we have to completely replace the burning of fossil fuels with nuclear fission - but the problems are political and ideological, they're not resource, technology, or population driven.

Population is just people. "Overpopulation" is a fundamentally anti-human concept, and belongs in the same ideological dustbin as other anti-humanitarian ideas such as apartheid, slavery, and fascism.

You acknowledge that 30 billion would be too much; that leaves me confused about your strong support for 10 billion. Especially since you admit that there may be obstacles to the dramatic changes needed to sustain such a population. Are you especially fond of jellyfish as a food?

Our unrestrained economic and population growth will eventually collapse.

We are seeing indication with COVID. COVID is relatively harmless, but we see what happens when w crowd 9n cities like LA and NYC. Another pathogen could decimate population.

Something has to give. The economy as is does not really support a large part of the population. Mny live paycheck to paycheck. Any interruption in the system and people go hungry and homeless.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

^ ^ ^

Forested area in the U.S. reached its lowest area (~735 million acres) in about 1920 when the U.S. population was ~106 million. In 2000 the U.S. population was ~282 million (close to three times the 1920 population) and forested area had increased to ~749 million acres.
https://www.thoughtco.com/us-forest-facts-on-forestland-1343034#:~:text=Since%201900%2C%20forest%20area%20in,was%20about%20749%20million%20acres.

But I think Bilby was probably referring to the extinction of the mega-fauna around the world as small bands of hunter-gatherers would move into an area.

And in that same period bird populations dropped by 3 billion, just as an example. Why didn't they increase if forested areas increased?

Just because forested areas increased does not automatically mean that species were benefitted. It is the quality of those forested regions and other regions that matters. Lots of those forested areas are not native forest which support native populations of biomass. For example we planted lots of ginko trees by the millions and they support zilch in terms of insects that feed birds and other wildlife. And there are hundreds of these invasives.

We literally planted exotic species precisely because native bugs and critters would avoid them. Seems kinda stupid but that's what we did.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Our unrestrained economic and population growth will eventually collapse.

We are seeing indication with COVID. COVID is relatively harmless, but we see what happens when w crowd 9n cities like LA and NYC. Another pathogen could decimate population.

Something has to give. The economy as is does not really support a large part of the population. Mny live paycheck to paycheck. Any interruption in the system and people go hungry and homeless.

What happens when an animal loses all of its food and habitat? What happens to an animal population when it loses 95 percent of its food and habitat? The Ivory Bill is extinct because we cut down all the trees that it required for survival and cleared the land that provided it with the grubs and larvae that was its food supply. The Pileated Woodpecker, on the other hand, because its diet was largely carpenter ants survived.

What happens if Homo bilbyens loses 95 percent of its house and 95 percent of its food supply? What happens to Homo bilbyens if we give it plenty of food in the form of hay and grasshoppers instead of its preferred diet? We just let other species use his food and habitat and expect him to thrive on 100 calories a day and live in a 20 square foot house? And btw, we also get rid of 95% of his roads and reduce his energy demands by 95% so he has to get by with 5% of what he used to, and fill his water supply with bird and buffalo droppings. And we also scatter those meager resources out into little patches everywhere.

According to Homo bilbyens there isn't any problem. Of course, Homo bilbyens isn't on the short end of that stick so it doesn't matter that that is precisely what Homo bilbyens has done to most of the other species on the planet.

 

[Swammerdami]

Here is a webpage that isn't so sanguine about the on-going Sixth Great Extinction. Excerpts:

Scientists detect mass extinctions using carbon dating of ancient rock layers. It's only happened five times in the earth's history. In May 2019, the United Nations reported that 1 million species face extinction, many within decades. Most scientists agree that the earth is in the process of the sixth mass extinction.

The common culprit in all the past five mass extinctions was a change in the level of greenhouse gases. Rising levels caused global warming while falling levels cooled the planet.

The Ordovician extinction occurred 440 million years ago ending the Age of Invertebrates.

The Devonian extinction occurred 365 million years ago, ending the Age of Fishes.

The Permian extinction was the largest extinction event in history. It occurred 250 million years ago and lasted only 200,000 years. It ended the Age of Amphibians.

The Triassic extinction occurred 200 million years ago. The landmass Pangea broke apart. The resultant widespread volcanic eruptions lasted for 40,000 years. They spewed greenhouse gases that caused global warming and ocean acidification. Over 75% of species went extinct. The extinction of other vertebrate species on land allowed dinosaurs to flourish.

The Cretaceous extinction occurred 65.5 million years ago. A nine-mile wide asteroid hit the Gulf of Mexico. The heat wave burned most of the forests and created a dust cover that blocked the sun. It ended the Age of Dinosaurs. Only animals smaller than a dog survived. Ground-dwelling dinosaurs survived the deforestation to evolve into modern birds. It ushered in the Age of Mammals.

Over the past 100 years, species have been going extinct 100 times faster than the natural rate. The usual rate of extinction is a healthy result of evolution by natural selection.

The U.N. report said that 500,000 species no longer have enough land area to support their survival. More than 85% of wetland areas are gone. More than 79 million acres of forest disappeared between 2010 and 2015 alone.

[Four species of great ape, three species of rhino, three species of big cat, two species of porpoise, the Sumatran elephant, and several other species of large mammals are expected to go extinct in a few years. Other animals at very high risk include Chimpanzee, the blue whale, and two species of tuna.]

.... The biggest cause of insect decline is habitat destruction due to farming and deforestation. Contributing factors also include pesticide pollution, invasive species, and climate change.

Amphibians. At least one-third of the 6,300 known species of frogs, toads, and salamanders are at risk of extinction.... The current extinction rate [of amphibians] is at least 25,000 times the background rate. The chytrid fungus is decimating those that have survived habitat destruction, pollution, and commercial exploitation. [and is said to be] s "the most destructive pathogen ever described by science."

... BirdLife International estimates that 12% of the world's 9,865 bird species are now considered threatened.... Globally, one out of five species [of fish] faces extinction. This includes more than a third of sharks and rays. Also at risk are bluefin tuna, the Atlantic white marlin, and wild Atlantic salmon.

The six major causes of this catastrophe are loss of habitat, the introduction of foreign species, pandemic diseases, hunting and fishing, pollution, and climate change. All of these are man-made. This impact is so prevalent that some scientists are calling this the Anthropocene extinction.

A 2004 study found that human population density was the biggest cause of local higher extinction rates. When people moved into an area, animal species died off. They were hunted, their habitat was cleared for farming, and they were polluted by waste. Humans also brought along foreign species, such as rats, and pandemic diseases that killed off other species.

According to a 2019 United Nations study, the increase in the extinction rate has hurt agriculture. Since 2000, 20% of the earth's vegetated surface has become less productive. In the oceans, a third of fishing areas are being overharvested. Birds that eat crop pests are down by 11%.

Bats and birds that pollinate plants are down 17%....

Farming practices are themselves to blame. Most farmland is used for one of only nine crops: sugar cane, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, palm oil, sugar beet, and cassava. These crops rely on pesticides that also kill useful insects. Although organic farming is on the rise, it only accounts for 1% of farmland.

"Around the world, the library of life that has evolved over billions of years our biodiversity is being destroyed, poisoned, polluted, invaded, fragmented, plundered, drained, and burned at a rate not seen in human history," Ireland's president, Michael Higgins, said at a biodiversity conference in Dublin on Thursday. "If we were coal miners we'd be up to our waists in dead canaries."

ee colony collapse disorder has reduced the U.S. honeybee population by over 40%. This affects the 100 crop species that make up one-third of the average diet....

As coral reefs die, flood damage from storms will double to $4 billion a year. These reefs protect the shoreline from hurricanes by slowing them down.

Other animals play an important role in keeping the earth's ecosystems functioning. If apes go extinct, the jungles they lived in could disappear. Many plants depend on them to propagate their larger seeds. Whales play a similar role in the ocean by recycling nutrients from the bottom to the top layers.

The sentence I've reddened surprised me so I clicked to see the source article in Scientific American.

Exaggerated? Probably. But the real concerns that the page points to, of which I've excerpted only a few and which anyway are dwarfed by many problems the page does NOT touch on, make the view that a human population of 10 billion — or perhaps even 30 billion — is sustainable seem ... overly optimistic.

 

[skepticalbip]

^ ^ ^

Forested area in the U.S. reached its lowest area (~735 million acres) in about 1920 when the U.S. population was ~106 million. In 2000 the U.S. population was ~282 million (close to three times the 1920 population) and forested area had increased to ~749 million acres.
https://www.thoughtco.com/us-forest-facts-on-forestland-1343034#:~:text=Since%201900%2C%20forest%20area%20in,was%20about%20749%20million%20acres.

But I think Bilby was probably referring to the extinction of the mega-fauna around the world as small bands of hunter-gatherers would move into an area.

And in that same period bird populations dropped by 3 billion, just as an example. Why didn't they increase if forested areas increased?

That sounds like the loss of passenger pigeons once estimated to be about 4 billion. Their disappearance wasn't due to loss of habitat but because of commercial hunting. Meanwhile populations of street pigeons and starlings are soaring.

Just because forested areas increased does not automatically mean that species were benefitted. It is the quality of those forested regions and other regions that matters. Lots of those forested areas are not native forest which support native populations of biomass. For example we planted lots of ginko trees by the millions and they support zilch in terms of insects that feed birds and other wildlife. And there are hundreds of these invasives.

What forest is planted with gingkoes? I see gingkoes but the ones I see are decorative trees in cities and suburban landscaping. National forests I visit are native trees.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

That sounds like the loss of passenger pigeons once estimated to be about 4 billion. Their disappearance wasn't due to loss of habitat but because of commercial hunting. Meanwhile populations of street pigeons and starlings are soaring.

Just because forested areas increased does not automatically mean that species were benefitted. It is the quality of those forested regions and other regions that matters. Lots of those forested areas are not native forest which support native populations of biomass. For example we planted lots of ginko trees by the millions and they support zilch in terms of insects that feed birds and other wildlife. And there are hundreds of these invasives.

What forest is planted with gingkoes? I see gingkoes but the ones I see are decorative trees in cities and suburban landscaping. National forests I visit are native trees.

Is your point that the only decline in bird populations has been the passenger pigeon, and that was due entirely to hunting? The billions I am referring to has ocurred long since the passenger pigeon went extinct, along with the auk, dodo, eskimo curlew, imperial, ivory, etc. These numbers are recent.

Do your realize that starlings are an invasive that compete with native birds in North America?

 

[skepticalbip]

^ ^
I'm not familiar with the auk or eskimo curlew but the demise of the dodo was definitely due to over hunting and in the 1600s, long before passenger pigeons were killed off. As was the moa and elephant bird a lot earlier than the dodo.

 

[abaddon]

Staggering decline of bird populations

Because birds are conspicuous and easy to identify and count, reliable records of their occurrence have been gathered over many decades in many parts of the world. Drawing on such data for North America, Rosenberg et al. report wide-spread population declines of birds over the past half-century, resulting in the cumulative loss of billions of breeding individuals across a wide range of species and habitats. They show that declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species—those once considered common and wide-spread are also diminished. These results have major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of birds and native ecosystems on which they depend.



https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120

 

[bilby]

Here is a webpage that isn't so sanguine about the on-going Sixth Great Extinction. Excerpts:

Scientists detect mass extinctions using carbon dating of ancient rock layers. It's only happened five times in the earth's history. In May 2019, the United Nations reported that 1 million species face extinction, many within decades. Most scientists agree that the earth is in the process of the sixth mass extinction.

The common culprit in all the past five mass extinctions was a change in the level of greenhouse gases. Rising levels caused global warming while falling levels cooled the planet.

The Ordovician extinction occurred 440 million years ago ending the Age of Invertebrates.

The Devonian extinction occurred 365 million years ago, ending the Age of Fishes.

The Permian extinction was the largest extinction event in history. It occurred 250 million years ago and lasted only 200,000 years. It ended the Age of Amphibians.

The Triassic extinction occurred 200 million years ago. The landmass Pangea broke apart. The resultant widespread volcanic eruptions lasted for 40,000 years. They spewed greenhouse gases that caused global warming and ocean acidification. Over 75% of species went extinct. The extinction of other vertebrate species on land allowed dinosaurs to flourish.

The Cretaceous extinction occurred 65.5 million years ago. A nine-mile wide asteroid hit the Gulf of Mexico. The heat wave burned most of the forests and created a dust cover that blocked the sun. It ended the Age of Dinosaurs. Only animals smaller than a dog survived. Ground-dwelling dinosaurs survived the deforestation to evolve into modern birds. It ushered in the Age of Mammals.

Over the past 100 years, species have been going extinct 100 times faster than the natural rate. The usual rate of extinction is a healthy result of evolution by natural selection.

The U.N. report said that 500,000 species no longer have enough land area to support their survival. More than 85% of wetland areas are gone. More than 79 million acres of forest disappeared between 2010 and 2015 alone.

[Four species of great ape, three species of rhino, three species of big cat, two species of porpoise, the Sumatran elephant, and several other species of large mammals are expected to go extinct in a few years. Other animals at very high risk include Chimpanzee, the blue whale, and two species of tuna.]

.... The biggest cause of insect decline is habitat destruction due to farming and deforestation. Contributing factors also include pesticide pollution, invasive species, and climate change.

Amphibians. At least one-third of the 6,300 known species of frogs, toads, and salamanders are at risk of extinction.... The current extinction rate [of amphibians] is at least 25,000 times the background rate. The chytrid fungus is decimating those that have survived habitat destruction, pollution, and commercial exploitation. [and is said to be] s "the most destructive pathogen ever described by science."

... BirdLife International estimates that 12% of the world's 9,865 bird species are now considered threatened.... Globally, one out of five species [of fish] faces extinction. This includes more than a third of sharks and rays. Also at risk are bluefin tuna, the Atlantic white marlin, and wild Atlantic salmon.

The six major causes of this catastrophe are loss of habitat, the introduction of foreign species, pandemic diseases, hunting and fishing, pollution, and climate change. All of these are man-made. This impact is so prevalent that some scientists are calling this the Anthropocene extinction.

A 2004 study found that human population density was the biggest cause of local higher extinction rates. When people moved into an area, animal species died off. They were hunted, their habitat was cleared for farming, and they were polluted by waste. Humans also brought along foreign species, such as rats, and pandemic diseases that killed off other species.

According to a 2019 United Nations study, the increase in the extinction rate has hurt agriculture. Since 2000, 20% of the earth's vegetated surface has become less productive. In the oceans, a third of fishing areas are being overharvested. Birds that eat crop pests are down by 11%.

Bats and birds that pollinate plants are down 17%....

Farming practices are themselves to blame. Most farmland is used for one of only nine crops: sugar cane, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, palm oil, sugar beet, and cassava. These crops rely on pesticides that also kill useful insects. Although organic farming is on the rise, it only accounts for 1% of farmland.

"Around the world, the library of life that has evolved over billions of years our biodiversity is being destroyed, poisoned, polluted, invaded, fragmented, plundered, drained, and burned at a rate not seen in human history," Ireland's president, Michael Higgins, said at a biodiversity conference in Dublin on Thursday. "If we were coal miners we'd be up to our waists in dead canaries."

ee colony collapse disorder has reduced the U.S. honeybee population by over 40%. This affects the 100 crop species that make up one-third of the average diet....

As coral reefs die, flood damage from storms will double to $4 billion a year. These reefs protect the shoreline from hurricanes by slowing them down.

Other animals play an important role in keeping the earth's ecosystems functioning. If apes go extinct, the jungles they lived in could disappear. Many plants depend on them to propagate their larger seeds. Whales play a similar role in the ocean by recycling nutrients from the bottom to the top layers.

The sentence I've reddened surprised me so I clicked to see the source article in Scientific American.

Exaggerated? Probably. But the real concerns that the page points to, of which I've excerpted only a few and which anyway are dwarfed by many problems the page does NOT touch on, make the view that a human population of 10 billion — or perhaps even 30 billion — is sustainable seem ... overly optimistic.

I am fully aware that lots of people are very worried about "overpopulation". The existence of articles bemoaning our terrible future is not evidence for a problem, they are just evidence of a belief in that problem.

And any article that claims that rocks are carbon dated; Or that implies that carbon dating works for anything in the order of tens or hundreds of millions of years, is very clearly not written by someone with a solid grasp of the subject and a strong commitment to accuracy.

 

[bilby]

Our unrestrained economic and population growth will eventually collapse.

We are seeing indication with COVID. COVID is relatively harmless, but we see what happens when w crowd 9n cities like LA and NYC. Another pathogen could decimate population.

Something has to give. The economy as is does not really support a large part of the population. Mny live paycheck to paycheck. Any interruption in the system and people go hungry and homeless.

What happens when an animal loses all of its food and habitat? What happens to an animal population when it loses 95 percent of its food and habitat? The Ivory Bill is extinct because we cut down all the trees that it required for survival and cleared the land that provided it with the grubs and larvae that was its food supply. The Pileated Woodpecker, on the other hand, because its diet was largely carpenter ants survived.

What happens if Homo bilbyens loses 95 percent of its house and 95 percent of its food supply? What happens to Homo bilbyens if we give it plenty of food in the form of hay and grasshoppers instead of its preferred diet? We just let other species use his food and habitat and expect him to thrive on 100 calories a day and live in a 20 square foot house? And btw, we also get rid of 95% of his roads and reduce his energy demands by 95% so he has to get by with 5% of what he used to, and fill his water supply with bird and buffalo droppings. And we also scatter those meager resources out into little patches everywhere.

According to Homo bilbyens there isn't any problem. Of course, Homo bilbyens isn't on the short end of that stick so it doesn't matter that that is precisely what Homo bilbyens has done to most of the other species on the planet.

There are lots of problems. There's little evidence that simple population numbers are particularly important as a cause of any of those problems.

Economic growth isn't constrained, because it doesn't depend on growth in materials use, but rather on growth in value. Which is just numbers. We can't run out of dollars, ever.

And population growth is stopping, so any discussion of whether unconstrained population growth is or is not sustainable is simply not based in our reality. It's of exactly zero importance whether the Earth could sustain thirty billion humans, because it will never be asked to do so.

And population density isn't the same as population. If local population density is high in our cities, that implies that it's low in rural areas. People did a lot more harm to the environment when they were mostly rural. Habitat loss in cities is massive and total for lots of species; But in the rest of the world, it's less and less severe, as people abandon rural districts to move to cities.

 

[bilby]

Because birds are conspicuous and easy to identify and count, reliable records of their occurrence have been gathered over many decades in many parts of the world. Drawing on such data for North America, Rosenberg et al. report wide-spread population declines of birds over the past half-century, resulting in the cumulative loss of billions of breeding individuals across a wide range of species and habitats. They show that declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species—those once considered common and wide-spread are also diminished. These results have major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of birds and native ecosystems on which they depend.



https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120

So it's a big problem.

Is it a population problem though?

What evidence is there that this wouldn't have occurred if population were half what it is? Given that much of the problem actually occurred when population was half or less of what it is, it seems likely that it would.

If these problems are caused by the actions of a small subset of humans (and that does seem to be the case - burgeoning population in Asia didn't have any impact on the Passenger Pigeon, which was wiped out by a very small population in North America), then what help would it be to massively reduce the number of humans? If the problems are cumulative, then having fewer humans would do nothing to prevent them - it would just slow them down a little.

Take carbon emissions for example. We're putting more carbon dioxide into the air than the natural processes can remove. And we have been doing so since the 1850s.

If population had been frozen in 1900, we would still need to find ways to get energy without burning fossil fuels. For any given concentration of carbon dioxide that we want to consider as the threshold of disaster, we would still reach that threshold with one fifth of our current population (ceteris paribus), it would just take a bit longer. If we are looking at a disaster in ten years with our eight billion population, then we would be looking at the same disaster in fifty years with the 1900 population of about 1.6 billion.

The only human population level that would have no impact on the environment would be zero.

The actual population doesn't matter much. What matters is how we behave. Regardless of whether there's one billion of us, or eight, or ten.

And if there are serious additional problems that would arise with indefinite growth in population without limit, then who cares? We are NOT going to grow without limit. We are going to stop within the lifetime of most people currently alive.

 

[abaddon]

The actual population doesn't matter much. What matters is how we behave. Regardless of whether there's one billion of us, or eight, or ten.

I'm not one of the persons going on about overpopulation. I think I mentioned "overshoot" earlier, but I never sided with people going on about overpopulation. Why I posted was this: skepticalbip was talking about bird extinctions like they're something in the past. So I posted to say they're a current problem.

I see the overpopulation thing as misdirection whether it's argued for or against. When people focus on population numbers as sustainable or unsustainable, we don't talk about changing how we live - which is the dialogue that needs to happen. Instead, we just talk about how we can sustain our excesses if only there were fewer people. Or sustain them if only people used energy differently.

If we're like deer and can't help how we behave, then the numbers can matter (relative to resources) just as they do with deer. But I think humans are not as fixed in their natures and don't have to settle for the middle-class American lifestyle as the horror for everyone to aspire to.

 

[bilby]

The actual population doesn't matter much. What matters is how we behave. Regardless of whether there's one billion of us, or eight, or ten.

I'm not one of the persons going on about overpopulation. I think I mentioned "overshoot" earlier, but I never sided with people going on about overpopulation. Why I posted was this: skepticalbip was talking about bird extinctions like they're something in the past. So I posted to say they're a current problem.

I see the overpopulation thing as misdirection whether it's argued for or against. When people focus on population numbers as sustainable or unsustainable, we don't talk about changing how we live - which is the dialogue that needs to happen. Instead, we just talk about how we can sustain our excesses if only there were fewer people. Or sustain them if only people used energy differently.

If we're like deer and can't help how we behave, then the numbers matter just as they do with deer. But I think humans are not so limited and don't have to settle for the middle-class American lifestyle as the horror for everyone to aspire to.

Indeed.

Discussion of overpopulation invariably blocks any discussion of ethical or reasonable solutions, in favour of providing justification for totalitarianism, genocide, and racism.

There are always too many of "them", but just the right number of me.

Belief in overpopulation falls into the same conversational grooves as all the other irrational beliefs people love so much. Facts and rebuttals just bounce off; No matter how many times I point out that we are almost at peak human population, the same people will come back with the same argument that I am wrong because unrestrained growth isn't sustainable.

It's analogous to a house on fire. Running around waving your arms and shouting "Call the fire department!" was a good idea back in the 1960s; But when the firefighters are on site hosing down the remaining embers, running around waving your arms and shouting "Call the fire department!" is not only unhelpful, it's making it difficult for the sane people to start working on the next steps to fix the damage.