Too many people?

[DrZoidberg]

Here's an idea. How about we try to convince everyone that smoking is safe again? That'll solve the problem

 

[rousseau]

Except as nations develop, the baby making goes down.

Number of bodies isn't really relevant, though.

In a conversation about population?

The point is more about many African countries moving towards higher non-renewable usage at the same time the rest of the world is trying to transition away from that. Often, they're being encouraged to go straight to renewables. I'm no expert on this subject, but I hazard a guess that this isn't always a practical choice for them.

Depends. I imagine that in some places, renewable solar could work better as that can help provide electricity without the need to expand infrastructure to carry power to some locations. I'm uncertain how much of these nations that'd benefit. Being an American, my knowledge of Africa stops generally at knowing where some of the countries are.

Actual population size doesn't really mean anything in itself, the important variable is per capita energy usage. It's true that certain regions of the world are a disproportionate cause of the problem, but some of the other regions are also trending towards higher, not lower usage. Whether you have 1, 2, or 3 billion isn't as important as how those people live - and currently we have a world full of people who like living in luxury by any means necessary.

 

[Elixir]

It's true that certain regions of the world are a disproportionate cause of the problem, but some of the other regions are also trending towards higher, not lower usage.

The differences in regional consumption are insignificant compared to the economic inequities that underly those differences.

 

[rousseau]

It's true that certain regions of the world are a disproportionate cause of the problem, but some of the other regions are also trending towards higher, not lower usage.

The differences in regional consumption are insignificant compared to the economic inequities that underly those differences.

That's fair. I'm not trying to point fingers in any particular direction. All I'm saying is that the original post in this discussion was a mischaracterization of what's actually happening.

 

[Derec]

... making too many problems

There definitely is overpopulation, but it is not evenly distributed. In the West, as well as in Japan and China, we have too few children (below replacement), but other countries (Islamic World, Africa, India) they have too many, well above replacement level.

So I disagree that Westerners need to stop having babies.

 

[bilby]

Is there a limit to population?

Yes, it appears to be settling at around 10 billion people, in around 2040.

Or is indefinite exponential increase acceptable on a finite planet?

That's a loaded question that assumes facts not in evidence. Human population hasn't grown exponentially for more than fifty years now.

it was understandable for people in the 1960's and '70s to look around, see exponential growth, and worry that it could lead to disaster. But nobody has that excuse today - population growth terror is purely a hangover caused by people keeping the panic, but not looking at what's actually happening.

We have been through this debate many times before:

Exponentially growing population was a problem fifty years ago. We solved that problem

I must have missed the solution. Please enlighten us.

I have done so before; Will you pay attention if I do do yet again?

There's no "overpopulation hunger".

During the last serious famine in sub-Saharan Africa (the 'Live Aid' famine of the 1980s), it was a well known fact that overpopulation was a major cause.

Ethiopia now has over three times the population, and no famine. That's only possible if the well known fact was utter bollocks.

If population density caused famine, Manhattan, Singapore, The Netherlands, and Hong Kong would all be famine stricken hell-holes.

If population density isn't a problem, then nor is population.

Famine is caused by war, economic disruption, and political actions that are either uncaring or deliberately genocidal. Sub-Saharan Africa has these things in spades.

Population has exactly fuck all to do with it.

Overpopulation hunger happens when the population exceeds what the country can produce + what the country can buy with exporting non-food that it can produce.

That's an economic failure, not a population problem.

Adult humans can produce more food than they need to survive. They can produce FAR more non-food value which they can exchange for food, than they need to survive.

Therefore, the higher your population, the greater your potential is to obtain surplus food, and this will be true until the total farmable land on the planet is insufficient to sustain a given population.

'Local overpopulation' isn't a thing. Just ask the people of Tokyo, Manhattan, Shanghai, London, The Netherlands, etc., etc.

If you impose a political and/or economic system that prevents people from turning their skills and effort into food for themselves and their families, calling that situation 'overpopulation' is stupid, misleading, and downright wrong.

The planet currently produces enough food to feed about 150% of its current population, and the consensus amongst demographers is that human population will never reach that level - but if it did, food production would certainly be able to be significantly increased. Just using extant technologies to improve farm yields in places that don't currently use those technologies can achieve that, without even turning any further land over to food production.

'Overpopulation' isn't a thing, and never has been. It was a speculative future state for a world that had geometric population growth; And such a world must inevitably outstrip its resources. But that geometric growth was an ephemeral characteristic of a world with high productivity, good medical science, and no effective, safe, and widely available contraceptive options in the control of women. That world existed from about 1850-1960; And people near the end of that time period were (correctly) alarmed by what they could see happening.

But it's no longer happening, and we have avoided the future speculative state that was called 'overpopulation' by those who saw and feared this potential future.

Meanwhile, lots of idiots have adopted the word 'overpopulation' as an excellent handwave excuse for continuing political and economic cruelty in the third world, where any attempt at a practical solution can be dismissed by invoking the inevitability of hunger due to 'overpopulation', thereby enabling racist fucks to argue that the rest of us shouldn't help those who are suffering.

There's just the right number of us, but there are simply too many of them. As any fascist can tell you.

Out of the present world pop of roughly 7 billion, only 3 of those 7 billions are well fed or well housed. The situation can only get much worse by uncontrolled population explosion. It's estimated that by 2050 the population will be 10 billion, with the lions share of that explosion in the third world, or in developing countries. Will those countries be able to support all these extra mouths to feed or house? OK, Nigeria has extensive oil reserves, so who's benefiting from this oil wealth.

Royal Dutch Shell.

There is no "explosion". From 7.5 to 10 is only a 1/3 increase - and the projection for 2100 is also about 10 billion.

Population growth is over, apart from demographic lag, which will add about 30% to world population in the next three or four decades.

Explosion.

Paul Ehrlich was wrong. Everything he predicted for the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and '00s was wrong. There is no reason to think that his predictions for 2050 (or those of his disciples) are any better.

The overpopulation doomsday cult is a religion with no God, and seven and a half billion devils. It is bullshit. And like all religions, it diverts people's effort from genuinely useful endeavour.

Stopping people from burning oil, coal or gas might help humanity. Stopping those of them who want to from having kids is cruel and needless.

As soon as the contraceptive pill was developed in the 1960s, the Population bomb was defused. Taking a few decades to notice is, perhaps, excusable; but taking over sixty years is wilful ignorance of the kind normally expected of religious organisations.

I tend toward Koy's view. Yeah, us old fucks used to be critical containers of accumulated knowledge and sometimes even wisdom. But now we have writing, computers, spreadsheets and shit to preserve the details of knowledge, and really - how many wise people can we expect the youth to listen to? Veneration is soooo last week!

I don't believe this virus is going to solve the overpopulation problem that presents the opportunity for it to wreak havoc, but something will eventually. Even if it killed half of everyone on the planet, there would still be more people left than existed when I first realized that population growth was going to become a problem.

Population growth has stopped being a problem. It was solved by the invention of the oral contraceptive, and by the increasing wealth, education, and urbanisation in the third world (to the extent that the parts of the third world outside Africa in the mid twentieth century are largely no longer considered third world).

Population will peak between eight and twelve billion, sometime between 2040 and 2050; Already birth rates are below replacement, but the large number of children born in the last couple of decades have mostly yet to have their 1.9 kids per woman, so that demographic lag means it will take a few decades to reach zero growth (particularly as life expectancy has sharply increased, though Covid-19 might throw a spanner in that).

Population growth is not a current problem. However, people who learned of population growth in years before 1990, when it was still not clear that the problem had been solved, are often very worried about it even now - and as those people have a lot of political clout, paradoxically, we have a real problem of people trying to solve the non-existent population problem, often in ways that are frankly terrifying.

Everything from outright fascism, through to a mere acceptance of inaction against pandemic disease (on the basis that "at least it might help with the population problem") is being promoted by this generation of people traumatised by Ehrlich's "Population Bomb".

But the problem is solved. The bomb was diffused, by an invention that pre-dates the book by a few years. Malthus was wrong. Ehrlich was wrong. Geometric population growth doesn't persist, as long as girls get a sound primary education, and then when they mature, have access to safe and effective contraception that cannot easily be controlled by their priests, husbands, or boyfriends.

The world already produces enough food for all the people who will ever occupy it; And famine (as it was known in the 19th and 20th centuries) disappeared in the mid-1980s, and hasn't been seen since. The only remaining famines are small scale and are directly attributable to war and civil conflicts, not to any lack of food.

Population is NOT a problem, and saying that it's a problem is a BIG problem. Stop saying it. It's no longer true.

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

I have some questions:
1) Does this apply to other species, or only humans? Can wolves be overpopulated? What about elephants? Malaria?

Only humans*, and only since the middle of the C20th, for reasons that will be obvious from my next answer.

2) How was this 'resolved' and when? Please be specific.

The invention of the oral contraceptive pill in the 1950s, and its introduction from 1960 onwards.

Prior to the availability of the pill, contraception was often ineffective (and it only needs to fail on average three times per woman for birthrates to necessarily exceed replacement levels). Having a contraceptive that is in the control of women, is applied daily (and not 'in the heat of the moment '), and can be used in confidence, so that the woman who has to bear the child is not unduly influenced by her partner's wishes, leads inevitably to below replacement level birthrates.

Even more so if those women have at least some education, and some wealth above the subsistence farmer level.

This isn't hypothetical; It's observed to have occurred worldwide wherever the contraceptive pill is available.

It's not hyperbole, given the growth rate of population in the early C20th, to say that the oral contraceptive is the invention that saved the world.





*Well, almost. Oral contraceptives are sometimes used in baits as a humane alternative to culling for non-human mammals.

I have been in a low grade panic about about resource depletion every day of my teen and adult life. Not even kidding.

That's pretty common, and very sad - because it's all based on a single fact about humanity that was observably true, and deeply alarming, in the 1960s; But which ceased to be true due to an invention, and an idea, that both became reality at just that moment in time.

Since the dawn of the industrial age, human population had doubled and redoubled about every thirty years, despite massive die-offs due to disease, famine, and war.

But then in the 1960s, the contraceptive pill gave women the technological means to limit the number of children they bore; And the education and emancipation of women gave them the knowledge and desire to do so.

This took a few decades to have a significant effect, but by the mid 1990s it had become very clear that the "population bomb" had been defused. Today, world birth rates are below replacement level. The population isn't yet declining, but that's because the people who were born twenty or thirty years ago, when birth rates were still above replacement level, are more numerous than their parents, and so their children being born today are arriving at a faster rate than the (much smaller) grand and great-grand parental generation are dying off.

By about 2050, human population is projected to level off, somewhere between ten and twelve billion. That's a lot - it's four times the population a century earlier in 1950. But it's certainly not unmanageable - we already produce enough food for that many people today. Indeed, famine (common and widespread in the 1950s) has essentially ceased to exist. Back in the mid 1980s, Ethiopia suffered a terrible famine, and many commentators in the developed world said that this was inevitable, due to their excessive numbers. Today, Ethiopia has three times the population; And a few years ago, a similar drought. But no famine.

The reason? No war. Ethiopia can easily feed herself (or produce exports that are sufficient to purchase imported food, which is essentially the same thing). But not while it's a war zone.

Population was a problem. Past tense. Those who are still discussing it as something we need to solve are simply unaware that the solution was found sixty years ago, and has now been applied. There's nothing else left to do, but wait another few decades for the resolution to finish taking effect.

Worrying about population is unnecessary today; It's like worrying about the fact that you're still descending, after your parachute has deployed - yes, you're still falling, but it's no longer at a dangerous pace, and all you need do is relax and wait for the rest of the descent to be over. Screaming for someone to do something to save you is just needless panic.

You can rest easy. Population hasn't "grown unchecked" for almost sixty years, and the only thing keeping it going now is demographic lag - the people having children today were born a couple of decades ago, when the number of surviving children per woman was much higher; And life expectancy has steadily been increasing, so there is a long delay before the effects of falling birth rates per woman translate into falling population numbers.

The solution to the population growth problem that so engaged the big thinkers of the 1960s and '70s turned out to be right under their noses - all that was required was a safe and reliable contraceptive method that was under the control of women. This was developed in the '60s, and has been steadily improving since, in terms of quality, availability, and price.

Add to that the effects of reduced infant mortality, and access to primary education for girls, and you have a world population whose women, on average, want fewer than two children each, and have the means to make that desire a reality.

World population is expected to peak between 2040 and 2060, at between nine and eleven billion.

Population growth isn't a threat today, any more than the USSR is - and for much the same reason: These threats no longer exist.

It was reasonable to be concerned about them in the middle of the 20th Century, but anyone worrying about either since the end of the '80s simply hasn't been paying attention.

Population increase has been solved. We got a handle on it when we invented the oral contraceptive - putting contraception into the control of women, and removing the decision about its use from the 'heat of the moment', had the effect of reducing reproductive rates to below replacement levels wherever it was made available at an affordable price, with the exception of areas with high religiosity and low or nonexistent levels of primary education for girls. Basically the only problem we have remaining is that many people hold the counter factual belief that contraception is evil.

Population growth continues today (at greatly reduced rates) only because of 'demographic lag' - the number of women able to have children is determined not by today's birth rates, but by those at the time in the past when those women were born, so gross population continues to increase for a few decades after the birth rate falls below replacement rate.

We also have a handle on energy production, with the invention of nuclear power. It's clean, safe, efficient, and does almost no harm to the environment. It's fuel is effectively inexhaustible. Like contraception, the only serious barrier to our using the technology to completely solve the problem is that lots of people have a counter factual belief that it is evil.

So neither of your problems require further technical solutions; Both are solved problems. The failure of humanity to implement these solutions is entirely down to our tendency to cling to falsehoods and outdated beliefs (another example of an outdated belief is "there is a population problem which we must urgently address" - that was true in the first half of the C20th, but hasn't been true since the 1980s, when the full impact of the invention of the oral contraceptive in the 1960s became apparent).

When you understand why you STILL believe in the urgency of a problem that was demonstrated to have been solved thirty odd years ago, you will begin to understand why we still have a problem with carbon dioxide emissions. It's not a technical or scientific problem.

Population growth in the mid twentieth century was an existential threat to humanity, similar to that posed by climate change today.

But the conclusion "Population growth went away, therefore climate change will also go away" is nonsense - neither problem can be solved without direct action to solve it.

There are only two possible outcomes for a world in which population is growing exponentially. Either lots of people are going to have to die, or people are going to have to have fewer children.

Similarly, there are two possible outcomes for carbon dioxide emissions. Either lots of people are going to have to die, or people are going to have to burn dramatically less fossil fuel.

In the 1960s, the received wisdom (from mostly male anthropologists and demographers) was that women wanted large families, so only totalitarian measures to reduce family sizes could prevent ongoing population growth.

Today, the received wisdom is that people demand fossil fuel energy, so only totalitarian measures to reduce energy use can prevent carbon dioxide emissions.

Both assessments missed a vital technological solution.

It turns out that educated women, on average, don't want large families. They had large families, because they didn't have access to reliable and effective contraception. The population bomb was defused by the invention and development of the oral contraceptive pill, and population growth is now limited to places where access to the pill, or to good primary education for girls, or both, are absent.

Similarly, we have a technological solution to carbon emissions that doesn't require a mythical population of people who like living without large amounts of energy that is reliable and consistent (and, vitally, isn't affected by extreme weather).

The existence of a technological solution isn't sufficient; We need to see a demand for it, so that it's widely implemented.

The idea that "population growth was never a real problem, people just got really panicked over nothing" is nonsense. Population growth was an existential threat, and it was only the wide adoption of a technological solution that averted that threat.

Climate change is also an existential threat; We need a massive program of replacing fossil fuel energy with nuclear fission energy to avert this threat.

There are still many people today who, oblivious of the demographic impact of the oral contraceptive, are terrified by population growth. Those people are worrying about a non-problem - but their predecessors who were worried about the same problem back in the '60s and '70s were right to worry, and mostly missed the fact that a technological solution had already been demonstrated, and just needed wider use to resolve the whole issue.

There are also people who are oblivious to pretty much everything, and who just know that population growth went away without them personally doing anything, and that therefore climate change will similarly go away without anything significant changing in the world. These people are dangerously uninformed.

That's not even a complete list of the posts where I have explained this, but I got told off by the board for posting too many characters.

If you need me to say "The population bomb was defused by the invention and development of the oral contraceptive pill, and population growth is now limited to places where access to the pill, or to good primary education for girls, or both, are absent." any more times, a board search for the word 'contraceptive' and user 'bilby' will turn up several more instances of me making this absolutely crystal clear.

 

[bilby]

There's a lot of denial out there. Denial even that any problem exists. Denial based on the idea of 'we'll find a way, we always do/ science/technology will save us'. That will be hard to overcome. I think we will see no action until the threat is fully on us.

On the contrary; We HAVE FOUND a way; Science and Technology HAVE ALREADY SAVED US.

It's called the oral contraceptive pill, and I am rather surprised that you haven't heard about it - it's led to population growth rates crashing to below replacement level in every place where it is widely available.

"Denial" isn't the right word to describe "noticing that things have changed".

 

[bilby]

I tend to side with Paul Ehrlich, ever since I was too young to even spell Paul Ehrlich.

According to him, we all died in the food riots of the 1980s and '90s.

 

[Elixir]

Yes, it appears to be settling at around 10 billion people, in around 2040.

Hans Roslung said it would settle near 9 billion by 2050, but only if the income/wealth gap closes between the 1st and 3rd worlds. He makes a good case for that.

I tend to side with Paul Ehrlich, ever since I was too young to even spell Paul Ehrlich.

According to him, we all died in the food riots of the 1980s and '90s.

I didn’t say I agreed with everything he ever said, just about what would be an optimal human population - for humans. And yes, that’s totally subjective.

 

[bilby]

I expect nature will run its course and population will diminish

That is a certainty, if nature’s course includes stuff like nuclear war.

Or the contraceptive pill.

Oh, wait, that's exactly what is happening, but everyone's too busy reading out of date nonsense and panicking to notice that population growth is steadily slowing...

 

[Elixir]

population growth is steadily slowing...

Population continues to grow while its growth rate slows. Where will it stop?
I think Rosling could be right, but as you point out there are a lot of factors that could change that outlook.

 

[bilby]

we're already seeing mass starvation due to global warming

No, we aren't.

Mass starvation was a twentieth century phenomenon, and hunger on that scale hasn't been seen anywhere for thirty years or more - during which time the population in the last place to see a major famine, Ethiopia, has almost quadrupled.

The problem, then and now, that leads directly to large numbers of people suffering from hunger and even starvation, is war.

Not global warming; Not population growth; War.

The key thing that changed at the end of the 1980s, that led to the end of mass starvation, was that the end of the Cold War meant an end to the proxy wars between the Cold War powers that had plagued the third world since the "end" of WWII.

 

[bilby]

Except as nations develop, the baby making goes down. The real issue would be competition for gas and oil. Which is why we REALLY need to get moving on alternative fuels 25 years ago. China and India use paltry amounts of dino fuel compared to Europe and N.A. We had time to adapt but we had to drag a cult that worshiped decomposed and pressurized dinosaur shit along the way, which slowed down progress quite a bit.

Yup.

Surely I don't have to use the "N-word" again? I am getting tired of having to repeat the bleeding bloody obvious.

 

[rousseau]

we're already seeing mass starvation due to global warming

No, we aren't.

Mass starvation was a twentieth century phenomenon, and hunger on that scale hasn't been seen anywhere for thirty years or more - during which time the population in the last place to see a major famine, Ethiopia, has almost quadrupled.

The problem, then and now, that leads directly to large numbers of people suffering from hunger and even starvation, is war.

Not global warming; Not population growth; War.

The key thing that changed at the end of the 1980s, that led to the end of mass starvation, was that the end of the Cold War meant an end to the proxy wars between the Cold War powers that had plagued the third world since the "end" of WWII.

My reading of the situation is that climate change is already affecting the African Sahel. Would you say that's not the case?

 

[Merle]

There is no maximum number of individuals that the planet and its ecosystems can support. In effect the planet can support an infinite number of any and all species because that's how our planet works.

Uh, no, finite planets cannot support infinite numbers of inhabitants. Do the math.

The planet is self correcting when it comes to all this so humans don't have to worry about anything.

Tell that to the folks on Easter Island and other civilizations that suffered collapse. The problem is we can overshoot, leading to dramatic collapse.

 

[Merle]

Except as nations develop, the baby making goes down.

And if we hit hard times, will baby making go up? If baby making went down as civilization advanced, what will happen if we hit critical shortages? Will we end up with more babies?

The real issue would be competition for gas and oil. Which is why we REALLY need to get moving on alternative fuels 25 years ago. China and India use paltry amounts of dino fuel compared to Europe and N.A. We had time to adapt but we had to drag a cult that worshiped decomposed and pressurized dinosaur shit along the way, which slowed down progress quite a bit.

Regarding alternative energy, yes, I am all for that, but it takes a lot of energy to build alternative energy systems. See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/ . There is nothing out there that is as good as gasoline.

 

[bilby]

we're already seeing mass starvation due to global warming

No, we aren't.

Mass starvation was a twentieth century phenomenon, and hunger on that scale hasn't been seen anywhere for thirty years or more - during which time the population in the last place to see a major famine, Ethiopia, has almost quadrupled.

The problem, then and now, that leads directly to large numbers of people suffering from hunger and even starvation, is war.

Not global warming; Not population growth; War.

The key thing that changed at the end of the 1980s, that led to the end of mass starvation, was that the end of the Cold War meant an end to the proxy wars between the Cold War powers that had plagued the third world since the "end" of WWII.

My reading of the situation is that climate change is already affecting the African Sahel. Would you say that's not the case?

It certainly is. It's not causing mass starvation though.

 

[bilby]

Except as nations develop, the baby making goes down.

And if we hit hard times, will baby making go up? If baby making went down as civilization advanced, what will happen if we hit critical shortages? Will we end up with more babies?

The real issue would be competition for gas and oil. Which is why we REALLY need to get moving on alternative fuels 25 years ago. China and India use paltry amounts of dino fuel compared to Europe and N.A. We had time to adapt but we had to drag a cult that worshiped decomposed and pressurized dinosaur shit along the way, which slowed down progress quite a bit.

Regarding alternative energy, yes, I am all for that, but it takes a lot of energy to build alternative energy systems. See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/ . There is nothing out there that is as good as gasoline.

Tell that to all the people who are buying electric vehicles these days.

Anyway, you can make gasoline from electricity and air: https://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/GreenFreedom.pdf

And we have been making continuous high-output, low-resource intensity, zero-carbon emissions electricity commercially since the 1950s, with EROEI of between 60 and 120.

Seriously, don't make me use the "N-word" again.

 

[RVonse]

The planet is self correcting when it comes to all this so humans don't have to worry about anything.

Tell that to the folks on Easter Island and other civilizations that suffered collapse. The problem is we can overshoot, leading to dramatic collapse.

Its very possible. Especially when one considers other external environmental toxicity (lower sperm counts) not well understood yet. The earth is self correcting as long as there is enough time....but many times a species goes too far to recover and we may be the next example. Throughout earths history extinction has been the norm and there is no reason not to think we will be the exception.

Then consider there are also other extremely intelligent people (elon Musk) who believe we need MORE reproduction right now to reverse recent trends such as Japan and China. Honestly I don't know who is right and you probably don't either.

IMO if you are worried about this (and you should be) planning population for others is a fools errand anyway since no one is going to change what other people do anyway. Nor do we understand what we have already done nor can we know what future tech may be able to do. IMO Musk has the correct response that we should be looking to Mars and/or the rest of the universe to at least further our overall odds against extinction. Because you can explore and conquer other planets without pissing anyone off who wants to have babies. Exploration and science will work when politics and dictating reproduction can't.

 

[Merle]

IMO Musk has the correct response that we should be looking to Mars and/or the rest of the universe to at least further our overall odds against extinction. Because you can explore and conquer other planets without pissing anyone off who wants to have babies. Exploration and science will work when politics and dictating reproduction can't.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but no, you won't be taking a trip to Mars to see your grandchildren. See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/ .