I heard from one of my right-winger friends that the reason for global warming is that we have more volcanoes erupting today. The extra volcanoes probably explains the rebound in whale populations too - at least if I'm a right winger.
Maybe. Anything's possible of you just make shit up.
But the existence of bad arguments for a position doesn't make the good arguments for that position any less good, so to refute my claims, you need to refute the arguments I make, not the easily defeated arguments you wish I was making.
Your arguments are in support of the continuance of the human species at high and increasing population levels. I don’t doubt that the planet, with only incremental increases in technology could support hundreds of billions of humans*. But not much else concurrently. I can envision a lot of futures I would not want to inhabit.
* maybe trillions if we go full “brains in glass jars”.
No. My arguments are
NOT in support of the continuance of the human species at high and increasing population levels; Nor have they ever been. That would be an easy set of arguments to refute, but as I am not making them, it would be futile to do so.
My arguments are in support of the fact that human population is rapidly approaching its peak, and will stop rising without further intervention at around the ten billion mark, in around three or four decades time; And further that the carrying capacity of the Earth (for humans living a moderately wealthy lifestyle such as that typical of the developed world today, leveraging our current technologies to ensure sustainability and effective recycling of resources) is considerably higher than the peak human population, rendering concern about population approximately as rational as concern about alien invasion, or giant monsters stomping on downtown Tokyo.
The idea that we need to worry about handling hundreds of billions, or even tens of billions, of humans is a hangover from mathematics done in the 1960s and '70s, before the wide availability of effective contraception controlled by women. It's persistence as an example of a plausible existential threat is now almost entirely driven by the very human inability to grasp that major trends have changed (essentially, conservatism; The wish for the present to be the same as the recent past) leavened with a dash of racist fear that "they" will overwhelm "us".
Paul Ehrlich had a point in 1968, and had no way of knowing that an invention just fourteen years earlier, which had only been available in a tiny number of places, to a tiny number of people, for seven or eight years at the time of his writing
The Population Bomb, would completely eliminate the problem he could so clearly see.
By 1990, there was sufficient data to show that the crisis he envisaged had been averted. In the 2020s, there's no longer any excuse for rational people who care about the facts to still rate population as an important issue facing humanity. Not because the Earth's carrying capacity is far higher than Ehrlich thought it was (though it is); But because the Earth will never be asked to carry more than twelve billion people, assuming the very highest plausible uncertainty in the data, and probably will never need to carry more than ten billion.
Malthus was wrong. Ehrlich was wrong. They didn't have the information necessary to understand how their predictions would be prevented from coming to pass; Their fears were rational and reasonable, given the data that was available to them when they formulated their prophecies of doom. But we found and implemented a solution; The crisis has been averted, and we can and should now divert our attention to problems that still exist.
How on earth are you figuring a long-distance pipeline or a desalination plant bears no cost?
