bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
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- Strong Atheist
Then who is causing it? Are you blaming global warming on the cattle? If so, the widespread cultivation of cattle is still a by product of human civilization. All of global warming is caused by carbon ultimately traced back to human civilization.Population doesn't cause climate changeThen that is exactly how many people the earth can not sustain on current technology.Population reductions can't help much, even if you killed off nine out of ten people right this instant.The population is something we can control today. Your pie in the sky technology may not ever happen. Or it will happen too late.What can and does help is getting energy from non-fossil sources. In fact, in the long run, that's the only viable solution for any practically achievable population level.
The human population simply has to match what the earth can provide today with the technology of today. Otherwise the planet is in trouble and all life (even plants) are in peril.
You couldn't be more wrong. We CANNOT control the population today, other than through genocide - and I for one will fight to my last breath against genocide. Birthrates are at an historic low, but population will continue to rise for about another three decades, simply because the current population is very young, as the result of the earlier high growth-rate. But we have already demonstrated the ability to implement a complete replacement of fossil fuel for electricity generation in a developed nation in less than two decades.
If every human were sterilized today, population would not fall much for about 30 years. Energy use would likely continue to rise for at least that long - children grow up into energy users, and they massively outnumber the old people who die and stop using energy.
The technology of forty years ago is perfectly capable of providing for all the humans we are ever going to have. We are just stupidly choosing to use the technology of 150 years ago instead, and it's fucking everything up.
Worrying about population stopped being sane about thirty years ago. Until then, it was a reasonable concern, given the then state of knowledge and the then trends in birth rates. Worrying about nuclear power was never sane - but it was conflated with the (perfectly rational) worry about nuclear weapons, and people are very bad indeed at changing their political positions on the basis of new evidence, so anti-nuclear activists and population control activists are still commonplace, despite their positions being based on untruths.
If nuclear power is pie in the sky, how did the French manage to make it work some forty years ago? Do you think that people were better at engineering and materials science forty years ago?
Population is irrelevant to the solution, regardless of its contribution to the problem. All that matters is how much coal, oil and gas gets burned over and above what natural sinks can remove from the atmosphere. Seven billion people burning seven billion tonnes of coal a year add the EXACT same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere as seven hundred million people burning seven billion tonnes of coal a year, or as 70 billion people burning seven billion tonnes of coal a year.
The solution is to burn less coal. Having fewer people might (or might not) tend to make that happen (depending on what the remaining people choose to do); But it's clearly not the primary driver of the problem, and saying that it is is a hugely dangerous and pointless distraction. No matter how few people there are, they will all want to be wealthy, and will all want to consume lots of energy. Getting rid of the people who currently are not wealthy enough to use much energy doesn't help - the big consumers will just keep consuming more. Get rid of a big consumer, and a lower consumer will likely take his place.