American beliefs in Evolution

[bilby]

I've lived through those 70 years. I would have seen it before you did youngster.

"You see, but you do not observe." - Sherlock Holmes (from Conan-Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia)

As to your assumption that you are older than I, that is warranted only by the fact that few are older than you, and grants you no special status.

For every seventy-year-old with seventy years of experience, there are a dozen with twenty years of experience, that is fifty years out of date.

 

[unapologetic]

The population is still growing.

Not in places where the solution hasn't been successfully obstructed, it's not.

The solution is a contraceptive that can be completely controlled by women, and that doesn't require anyone to do anything in the heat of the moment.

There is no place where oral contraceptives are widely available to women, and primary education is provided to a majority of girls, where birthrates remain above replacement levels.

The first oral contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA in 1960; At that point, population growth ceased to be an inevitability, and became a choice.

The solution exists and has been demonstrated at scale; Choosing not to allow a perfectly good solution is a political (and religious) issue, rather than a practical one.

I concede.
But we are still doomed.
It ain't just the politicians. People just WANT to reproduce, and ignore the reasons not to.
Pollution: people just don't want to stop consuming as much as they can afford. And they just don't give a dam how much waste they produce or where 'away' is, when they throw it away. (if you say that is a generational thing, I'll hunt you down and make you eat your own waste.)
Anyway, 'Pollution' mostly stems from the over-population problem.

 

[bilby]

People just WANT to reproduce

The evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

This was a widely held "truth" back in the twentieth century; But wherever sex and reproduction are decoupled (pun intended) we observe birthrates below replacement.

Some people still do WANT to reproduce, and some have very large numbers of children - but enough choose to have none, or one, for the average to be low enough that population declines, rather than increasing.

Anyway, 'Pollution' mostly stems from the over-population problem.

No.

Pollution is mostly caused by the tiny fraction of the world population who are wealthy.

There is no "over-population problem", and using the myth of one as an excuse to act like Americans is unwarranted.

Pollution has a number of viable solutions; The best is recycling, which is typically achievable as long as there's a plentiful supply of energy from non-polluting sources. Looking at population (much less "over-population") and declaring the problem to be "too many of them*" is a cop-out.









* ...but always just exactly the right number of me.

 

[bilby]

people just don't want to stop consuming as much as they can afford

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The problem is that they're allowed to externalise the costs of their waste streams.

So they're consuming more than they can afford, because while they pay for production, they "forget" to also pay for disposal.

Consuming stuff isn't bad - it's what makes life pleasant. Refusing to pay for ALL of the costs of that consumption (including any future cost of tidying up) is the bad part.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Unless you’re changing the definition of “clear” I have no doubt the sky would have been blue a few billion years ago.

If the sky (atmosphere) were strictly "clear' It would look black and you would see stars, like the night sky. Or the moon's sky.
It looks blue from the air diffusing the daylight. The content of the air HAS changed through time.

Oxygen absorption is mostly beyond human color perception.

But if you are looking up, you are looking through many miles of the stuff.
But OK, "Clear" is subjective.

“Clear” in meteorological context does not mean perfectly transparent as you suggest. Its finally related to clouds and aerosols. By your definition the sky is never “clear”.

Anyway, I think I didn’t communicate my point well. So don’t mind me.,,

 

[Swammerdami]

Even 8 billion is too many people to sustain. We are already seeing irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage.

Some of you don't grasp this and we've already agreed to disagree. I mention it again here lest some newcomer be misled.

People just WANT to reproduce

This was a widely held "truth" back in the twentieth century; But wherever sex and reproduction are decoupled (pun intended) we observe birthrates below replacement.

In some countries reproduction is deliberate: a purpose is to have support in one's old age. This incentive may be reduced by old-age pensions or by changes in social norms. Wiki shows me that Thailand's birthrate dropped from 1.9 to 1.3 over the past 15 years (USA's dropped from 2.1 to 1.7). Birth-control was readily available in Thailand 15 years ago.

Anyway, 'Pollution' mostly stems from the over-population problem.

No.

Pollution is mostly caused by the tiny fraction of the world population who are wealthy.

Another misconception.

For examples:

• 
  

  The Philippines is estimated to account for 35% of the total plastic waste in the ocean. [It] produces 356,371 metric tons of plastic waste in the sea each year. In fact, 75% of the plastic accumulated in the ocean comes from mismanaged waste in Asian countries, which include India, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines. Brazil was the only non-Asian country in the top 10.

• India -- not a rich country -- is in the #3 slot for CO₂ emissions and, with a whopping 4.7% year-over-year increase is the only one of the top 5 whose emissions are increasing. (Indonesia holds the #10 slot and is increasing at 6.4%.)
• India and Russia are the top emitters of SO₂

• Honduras.
  Nigeria.
  The Philippines.
  Benin.
  Ghana.
  Indonesia.
  Nepal.
  North Korea.
  Haiti.
  Ecuador.

• 
  

I could go on and on, but what's the point? Religious opinions are not easily changed. (If some pedant needs to claim that deforestation isn't "pollution," please take it to Elsewhere. Similarly we don't need to hear that SOMETIMES per capita figures are more useful. I am refuting bilby's claim specifically.)

 

[Politesse]

Even 8 billion is too many people to sustain. We are already seeing irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage.

Some of you don't grasp this and we've already agreed to disagree.

I never agreed to any such thing. Unscientific claims do not deserve to go unchallenged, especially not pseudoscientific claims that lead to dangerous inaction or misdirected action on critical ecological issues.

 

[Elixir]

Unscientific claims do not deserve to go unchallenged.

You can’t reasonably challenge every unscientific claim simply on the basis that it’s “not scientific”. Unless you have a truly scientific counter-claim, doing so is responding in kind.
It would be unrealistic to demand scientific “proof” (support) that the depletions we see are real, and that the ecological damage we witness is truly irreversible.
You can “challenge” anything of course. But to what end? It seems obvious the damage and depletions are real.

 

[Politesse]

The Philippines is estimated to account for 35% of the total plastic waste in the ocean.

Yet, the Phillipines do not account for 35% of the world's population, nor even 35% of the population of the Pacific Rim. Not even close, in fact. If plastic polution is directly related to number of children, shouldn't China and Japan, countries of enormous population sitting on that same ocean, produce the vast majority of its plastic garbage? China should be dumping more than ten times the amount of plastic trash into the ocean than Phillipines, if population is the problem. But population is not the key problem... it's a red herring designed to shift blame and delay action on plastic reduction.

We cannot afford to wait for the population of the Phillipines to "reduce its population" to start addressing the plastic waste issue. 70% of the Fillipino population has zero access to proper waste collection and recycling facilities. That isn't because there were too many children there. It's because they never built adequate waste collection and recycling facilities in the first place, and still are not prioritizing doing so. Handing out condoms on the street corner might be a laudable action from a civil rights perspective, but it will do nothing to reduce plastic waste. Some very powerful figures took advantage of the Phillipines' extreme poverty to build what's called a "sachet economy", one in which the majority of goods are sold in small packets (like the travel size bottles you might see in the travel size section of your local Target, which should also be illegal) rather than in bulk. TV ads telling teenagers not to have sex until marriage might make Catholics feel good, but that will do nothing to dismantle the sachet economy. Most of the plastic that enters the ocean from the Phillipines does so after filtering through the river system. This is a problem manageable by managing the rivers themselves better, building weirs and creating regular crews to collect plastic out of the system, as indeed citizen brigades have been starting to do in the last five years despite minimal national or international support. Forced sterilization of sex offenders might make Bongbong Marcos smile contentedly, but it will do nothing to prevent plastic waste from leaving riperian zones uncollected.

Overpopulation hype just makes no sense. It adovcates for the wrong solutions to ecological crises, while ignoring the right ones. Because you cannot design a good solution to a crisis whose root causes you do not understand. "There's just too many citizens in the Phillipines, the government is not to blame" is an explanation that makes fridge sense if you've never thought about the issue in any way, or done any research on its root causes. But we cannot afford to approach issues of critical environmental concern without thought or without data.

 

[Politesse]

Unscientific claims do not deserve to go unchallenged.

You can’t reasonably challenge every unscientific claim simply on the basis that it’s “not scientific”. Unless you have a truly scientific counter-claim, doing so is responding in kind.
It would be unrealistic to demand scientific “proof” (support) that the depletions we see are real, and that the ecological damage we witness is truly irreversible.
You can “challenge” anything of course. But to what end? It seems obvious the damage and depletions are real.

I was just warming up.

 

[Elixir]

I was just warming up

Okay, I’ll make some more popcorn.
This better be good!

 

[Swammerdami]

The "hidden elephant in the room" in all these discussions about the human over-population problem is there is no feasible way to quickly reduce the population to sustainable levels. For this reason, it may seem to be useless to discuss the problem at all.

But I'm not concerned with this futility: For me it's fun to discuss interesting topics in science or whatever. It is wildly unlikely -- to put it mildly -- that any politician will read my writings here and respond by advocating drastic steps to reduce population! I produced a write-up on the Banach-Tarski proof without fear that any Infidel would read or appreciate it -- my sole motive was my own curiosity. (And I was proud to find a severe flaw in the Wikipedia/Wikiproof proof of that theorem.) I insist that Jesus' historicity is 99% certain, but no, I am not a Christian.

And I am willing to point out that 8 billion humans is too many; yet do not advocate genocide.

Even 8 billion is too many people to sustain. We are already seeing irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage.

Some of you don't grasp this and we've already agreed to disagree.

I never agreed to any such thing. Unscientific claims do not deserve to go unchallenged, especially not pseudoscientific claims that lead to dangerous inaction or misdirected action on critical ecological issues.

The claims of irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage are "pseudoscience"? Even if these scientific conclusions were wrong, that wouldn't make them pseudo-science. YOU lose all credibility with this statement ... and are in effect insulting me, to boot.

I'm sure I don't need to post links to prove that many rivers and aquifers are over-used, and that we are entering into the Sixth Great Extinction. Or do we assume that water will be free as a result of fission/fusion (or dilithium crystals?), and that bio-engineering will reconstruct extinct pollinators and other important but missing species?

How many scientific articles do I need to present?


Frank Götmark is a Full Professor of Biological & Environmental Sciences. Not good enough?

The Philippines is estimated to account for 35% of the total plastic waste in the ocean.

Yet, the Phillipines do not account for 35% of the world's population

Keep your "eye on the ball," please. The comment about plastics was NOT to show that over-population is a problem. It was to refute bilby's claim that only the very rich are responsible for a lion's share of pollution. It was one of several facts I presented showing that, in many cases, it is the POOR countries which produce most pollution.

 

[Politesse]

The claims of irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage are "pseudoscience"?

Malthusianism is pseudo-science, yes. It adopts the language and aesthetics of science, but has no real population science underlying it. That's what pseudoscience is. If you choose to take that as a personal insult you may choose to do so, but for myself, I do not see the global ecological crisis as an aspect of your personality, any more than it is well described by defunct sociological theories.

 

[Politesse]

The "hidden elephant in the room" in all these discussions about the human over-population problem is there is no feasible way to quickly reduce the population to sustainable levels. For this reason, it may seem to be useless to discuss the problem at all.

But I'm not concerned with this futility: For me it's fun to discuss interesting topics in science or whatever. It is wildly unlikely -- to put it mildly -- that any politician will read my writings here and respond by advocating drastic steps to reduce population! I produced a write-up on the Banach-Tarski proof without fear that any Infidel would read or appreciate it -- my sole motive was my own curiosity. (And I was proud to find a severe flaw in the Wikipedia/Wikiproof proof of that theorem.) I insist that Jesus' historicity is 99% certain, but no, I am not a Christian.

And I am willing to point out that 8 billion humans is too many; yet do not advocate genocide.

Even 8 billion is too many people to sustain. We are already seeing irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage.

Some of you don't grasp this and we've already agreed to disagree.

I never agreed to any such thing. Unscientific claims do not deserve to go unchallenged, especially not pseudoscientific claims that lead to dangerous inaction or misdirected action on critical ecological issues.

The claims of irreversible depletions and irreversible ecological damage are "pseudoscience"? Even if these scientific conclusions were wrong, that wouldn't make them pseudo-science. YOU lose all credibility with this statement ... and are in effect insulting me, to boot.

I'm sure I don't need to post links to prove that many rivers and aquifers are over-used, and that we are entering into the Sixth Great Extinction. Or do we assume that water will be free as a result of fission/fusion (or dilithium crystals?), and that bio-engineering will reconstruct extinct pollinators and other important but missing species?

How many scientific articles do I need to present?


Frank Götmark is a Full Professor of Biological & Environmental Sciences. Not good enough?

The Philippines is estimated to account for 35% of the total plastic waste in the ocean.

Yet, the Phillipines do not account for 35% of the world's population

Keep your "eye on the ball," please. The comment about plastics was NOT to show that over-population is a problem. It was to refute bilby's claim that only the very rich are responsible for a lion's share of pollution. It was one of several facts I presented showing that, in many cases, it is the POOR countries which produce most pollution.

And yet, just like every nation with its specific ecological challenges, it easily disproves the idea that population reduction is a magic bullet for, or even effective at, ameliorating ecological crises that are actually created by ecological mismanagement. If killing Filipinos en masse would have resolved the Phillipines' plastics problem, our purge of their population between 1899-1902 (we killed 200,000 people and unleashed an epidemic that killed 200,000 more, about 5% of their population at the time) should have set them up for success through the 20th century and beyond. But in reality, that massacre and its aftermath set up the very neo-Colonial system of commercial exploitation that led to the expansion of the Sachet economy and underdevelopment of landfill. Not only did we not put an effective sanitation system in place, recently the Phillipine government uncovered covert plots by companies in the US and Canada to export a portion of our garbage to the Phillipines, a country utterly unequipped to handle it all.

 

[Elixir]

I do not see the global ecological crisis as an aspect of your personality, any more than it is well described by defunct sociological theories.

I don’t see all acknowledgement of the current overpopulation situation as a product of Malthusian pseudoscience. The inevitability inherent in Malthus’ thesis is belied by the hugely lower birth rates among affluent populations.

I don’t see where Swami relies on Malthusian pseudoscience, to subjectively conclude that 8b is “too many”. It’s a conclusion drawn from evident extinctions and eco-degradation, afaics.

 

[Swammerdami]

[Malthusianism is pseudo-science, yes. It adopts the language and aesthetics of science, but has no real population science underlying it. That's what pseudoscience is. If you choose to take that as a personal insult you may choose to do so, but for myself,] I do not see the global ecological crisis as an aspect of your personality, any more than it is well described by defunct sociological theories.

I don’t see all acknowledgement of the current overpopulation situation as a product of Malthusian pseudoscience. The inevitability inheren in Malthus’ thesis is belied by the hugely lower birth rates among affluent populations.

I don’t see where Swami relies on Malthusian pseudoscience, to subjectively conclude that 8b is “too many”. It’s a conclusion drawn from evident extinctions and eco-degradation, afaics.

Thanks, Elixir. You might have saved me a trip to the keyboard!

"Malthusian" usually refers to the idea of exponential growth in the FUTURE. I wrote that the 8 billion in the PRESENT was already unsustainable. Do you see the difference, Politesse? Can you understand that this total non sequitur just causes your credibility to continue its plummet?

 

[rousseau]

In a couple hundred years from now the entire planet is going to be underwater, the roaches will have taken over, and somehow we'll still be arguing about overpopulation on good ole IIDB.

There is no 'solution' to what's ailing us now, overpopulated or not. We're 8 billion idiots with too much power.

 

[Elixir]

We're 8 billion idiots with too much power.

Fret ye not … nature has a way.

 

[bilby]

The "hidden elephant in the room" in all these discussions about the human over-population problem is there is no feasible way to quickly reduce the population to sustainable levels.

Nah, the hidden elephant in the room is that people just assume there's such a thing as "the human over-population problem", and proceed as though this were a fact universally acknowledged and recognised, and not a notion that is held as a tenet of faith, but completely lacking in evidence.

I mean, if you could identify a "sustainable" level
of population (you can't), then it would almost certainly be unfeasible (a nice euphemism for "genocidal") to rapidly reduce population to that level; But without that first step of determining what the sustainable level of population is, the whole question of how to commit sufficient genocide cannot sensibly be considered.

There's no such thing as "the sustainable level of population"; Consequently, "overpopulation" is also not a thing.

The concept of sustainability applies only to specific activities. There's a sustainable level of fossil fuel burning, below which the various natural sinks for carbon dioxide will remove the gas from the atmosphere as quickly as it is produced. But that level isn't proportional to population; A million Frenchmen today produce about half the carbon dioxide generated by a million Germans; An average Qatari produces about the same amount as five hundred average Congolese.

And sustainability need not only consider natural sinks. If we extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere artificially, that sustainable amount of burning increases accordingly.

The factors we need to consider, in order to determine what level of fossil fuel burning is sustainable are therefore:

1) What natural sinks exist
2) What artificial sinks exist
3) Global population

The addition of that third factor is clearly absurd.

And we can do the same analysis for any pollutant, and any kind of resource extraction. Each such analysis will provide a measure of the total amount of 'activity X' that can be sustained indefinitely; And a measure of how much harm any unsustainable rate of 'activity X' will cause.

There exist no technological activities for which "global population" is an input to a calculation of the amount of that activity actually occurs; Nor for which it is an input to a calculation of how much of that activity is sustainable.

If we ask "how much fossil fuel is burned per capita?", we discover that the answer isn't constant, or even close to constant. It varies with time, and with geography, and even between individuals at any arbitrary level of granularity. Two members of the same household can easily have wildly differing 'carbon footprints'.

Population is just not a useful variable to consider, when looking at sustainability.

Population is a red herring. It's a pointless distraction, which adds nothing helpful to any discussion of environmental sustainability. And as that discussion is of critical importance, it's vital that we stop wasting time worrying about population.

 

[bilby]

I don’t see where Swami relies on Malthusian pseudoscience, to subjectively conclude that 8b is “too many”.

I bolded it for you. Can you see it now?

If it were science, it would be objective.