We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[steve_bank]

There are no choices, nature will run its course.

 

[bilby]

You can look at my sources.

Oh, I have.

Paul Ehrlich famously proposed a formula for our impact on the planet: I=PAT.

Paul Ehrlich is also famous for his predictions:

In 1968, he predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s...

Flapdoodle. If you had looked at my references, you would see that I don't even list Ehrlich as the lead writer in any of the works I cite.

Flapdoodle yourself; I am literally responding to you directly citing him.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Imagine if the world needed to reduce to a sustainable population of say 1 billion in 150 years. Would you tell us we could not possibly do a controlled descent by lowering the birth rate voluntarily? Would you tell us that the only humanitarian option would be to keep pumping out babies until the population suddenly crashes from 12 billion to 1 billion due to mass starvation in a few decades? Can you honestly not even visualize an alternative?

What you fail to understand is that reducing the population to 1 billion will not save us.

I don't think you addressed the question.

No, I think you failed to get my point.

I think you agree with me that, eventually, when the accessible non-renewable resource extraction is very low, population will probably need to be below 2 billion.

An epic understatement. If we hit a point with an essential resource becoming unavailable it's not 2 billion. We would crash to below a million.

OK, so if the population is 10-12 billion and needs to drop below 2 billion, I see two options: 1) Voluntarily reduce births or 2) allow starvation, deprivation, and resource wars to reduce the population. When we come to that choice, which would you prefer? Its not a hard question. Please answer.

I don't believe either scenario is relevant. We either reach a sustainable point or we crash.

Yes, I know you think that will be a long time from now, perhaps many millions of years. But regardless of the time frame, someday it will likely be a choice that needs to be made. Which would you choose? If faced with the choice, would you ignore the question?

Personally, I think we may be limited by resources to less than 2 billion people 200 years from now. If that is the case, then the time to talk about humane voluntary population reduction is now.

I don't think it's millions of years out. As we are currently going it's probably decades, perhaps centuries. The difference is that I don't think there's a soft landing. I see your approach as trying to address a bonfire with a glass of water.

Regarding the assertion that reducing the population to 1 billion will not save us, yes, I understand that. There are two reasons why I think we should consider more aggressively asking for voluntary population reduction. First, it will reduce our footprint on the planet, and thus will delay the day of reckoning, perhaps even adding thousands of years. Second, when the time comes that the population does need to be at a sustainable level--without much non-renewable resource extraction--it will be much easier to keep under the limit.

1) I place the value in people-years, not in years. If a crash is inevitable, 10 billion for 150 years is superior to 1 billion for 1000 years.

2) The sustainable level is early stone age with a sub-million population. We have already taken all the easy-to-get resources, a low-tech society would already be on their way to a crash. The existing stuff will last for a while but it will wear away eventually.

I show the following graph on my post. The blue line is representative of the curve we need to keep below. The gray line is the population projection by the United Nations (which some people here seem to treat as the absolute, infallible inspired Word of God regarding future population level )

1) There is no reason to project a gradual decline in the blue line. Very few resources are being produced, thus the concept of a sustainable population makes no sense. We are gathering resources, not producing them. As time goes on they will become harder to gather. Eventually we cross a line where the resources needed to gather resources exceed the resources gathered. We will make due with substitutes until we can't.

2) That graph is a normal S-curve you see all the time in population graphs. Why should we think it's wrong?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

when the accessible non-renewable resource extraction is very low

What is this even supposed to mean?

There's a lot of assumption built into this phrase, much of it highly dubious, which you seem to accept as unneeding or unworthy of discussion.

Yeah, it's part of the creed of the greens.

OK, so if the population is 10-12 billion and needs to drop below 2 billion

It doesn't.

Why would it? How would that help anything?

Exactly

Yes, I know you think that will be a long time from now, perhaps many millions of years.

The likely human population in "many millions of years" is zero. Few species survive that long, and there seems little reason to assume humanity to be one of the exceptions.

when the time comes that the population does need to be at a sustainable level--without much non-renewable resource extraction--it will be much easier to keep under the limit.

I don't think you have any grasp at all on either the massive size of the lithosphere, or the fact that the Earth is effectively a closed system. We literally cannot run out of anything*, as long as we have access to energy.

But it can become too dispersed for recovery given available capability.

* Except Helium.

* and Hydrogen. As the sun warms we are going to eventually lose our oceans this way. A water molecule that gets too high in the atmosphere may be photodissociated and the hydrogen may escape. The rate of loss is low if the upper stratosphere is cold enough, but it will increase considerably if that warms.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There comes a point where the new designs are sufficiently better than the old that replacement is the right course of action. The reactors being replaced are an early generation.

Yes, new designs could last longer.

The main problem we have is that most of the existing reactors are of older design. Thus, there are many current reactors that will have reached the end of their economical life sometime in the next 10 years. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023 (p 74) projects that the number of reactors closing this decade will exceed the number of reactors that are currently in construction by 30. In other words, it is likely we will reduce from the current 407 reactors to 377 in the next 6 years.

And that is a big problem if we are saying Nuclear Power is our Lord and Savior. It's dying. Will it resurrect?

It's dying for political reasons, not economic ones.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is pretty clear that I was responding to your point: we don't need to talk about voluntarily population reduction because it's already happening. Turns out that women just tend towards having fewer babies once they are empowered to make that choice.

In the old days for most of their childhood kids were net producers on the farm. In an industrialized society they are not net producers until they finish whatever schooling they go to--and they will produce for their own household, not for their parents'. Kids are thus basically pure cost and only produced by people who desire children and by oopses.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

OK, so if the population is 10-12 billion and needs to drop below 2 billion

It doesn't.

Why would it? How would that help anything?

It would reduce the pressure to convert remaining wildlife habitat into farmland, and thus help reduce the rate of loss of endangered species.

It wouldn't help. Farm products always have value.

Yes, I know you think that will be a long time from now, perhaps many millions of years.

The likely human population in "many millions of years" is zero. Few species survive that long, and there seems little reason to assume humanity to be one of the exceptions.

How do you figure? Species go extinct because all their members are in a confined area that's hit by a local disaster, or because they have some systematic ecological problem they can't solve. Humans are everywhere, and we're the world champs at problem-solving, at least among the multicellular.

Systematic ecological problem they can't solve is easy: climate. By itself it won't drive us to extinction, but humans are far more mobile and far more able to fight over territory than any other creature in existence. When a place becomes locally uninhabitable most of the animals die, the humans move. And note that the warmer Earth becomes the closer to the poles we would want to go--but the closer to the poles the more variable the weather becomes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

OK, so if the population is 10-12 billion and needs to drop below 2 billion, I see two options: 1) Voluntarily reduce births or 2) allow starvation, deprivation, and resource wars to reduce the population. When we come to that choice, which would you prefer? Its not a hard question. Please answer.

Yes, I know you think that will be a long time from now, perhaps many millions of years. But regardless of the time frame, someday it will likely be a choice that needs to be made. Which would you choose? If faced with the choice, would you ignore the question?

Well, if you're serious about considering a million-year time scale, it's not a hard question: (2) allow starvation, deprivation, and resource wars to reduce the population. It's not a choice; it's an inevitability. As Charles G. Darwin* argued, "voluntary birth control (family planning) establishes a selective system that ensures its own failure. The cause is that people with the strongest instinct for wanting children will have the largest families and they will hand on the instinct to their children, while those with weaker instincts will have smaller families and will hand on that instinct to their children. In the long run society will consist mainly of people with the strongest instinct to reproduce." Voluntarily reducing births is just a stopgap that kicks the can down the road.

(* The quantum physicist, not his more famous grandfather.)

While "instinct" isn't the right word there is a strong evolutionary pressure towards what makes some want kids and others don't.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We've already reached "peak child", which means that the world's population will peak this century, in line with the UN projection.

Population Growth

Explore global and country data on population growth, demography, and how this is changing.

ourworldindata.org

Here is the chart from your link. I overlayed a red line showing the trend I see in child population since 1985. It looks like it is rising to me. OK, if you just look at 2017 onward, there is a little downturn. How would you extrapolate the curve from here? When I look at this chart, I don't see a clear downward trend.
View attachment 45209
Yes, 2017 looks like it could be a peak, but there was a time when 1959, 1975, and 1991 all looked like peaks.

So no, this chart alone is not evidence to convince me we are at peak child.

Peak child is irrelevant, you're ignoring demographics.

Hint: The population continued to increase during China's One Child policy.

 

[Elixir]

OK, so if the population is 10-12 billion and needs to drop below 2 billion, I see two options: 1) Voluntarily reduce births or 2) allow starvation, deprivation, and resource wars to reduce the population. When we come to that choice, which would you prefer? Its not a hard question. Please answer.

Yes, I know you think that will be a long time from now, perhaps many millions of years. But regardless of the time frame, someday it will likely be a choice that needs to be made. Which would you choose? If faced with the choice, would you ignore the question?

Well, if you're serious about considering a million-year time scale, it's not a hard question: (2) allow starvation, deprivation, and resource wars to reduce the population. It's not a choice; it's an inevitability. As Charles G. Darwin* argued, "voluntary birth control (family planning) establishes a selective system that ensures its own failure. The cause is that people with the strongest instinct for wanting children will have the largest families and they will hand on the instinct to their children, while those with weaker instincts will have smaller families and will hand on that instinct to their children. In the long run society will consist mainly of people with the strongest instinct to reproduce." Voluntarily reducing births is just a stopgap that kicks the can down the road.

(* The quantum physicist, not his more famous grandfather.)

While "instinct" isn't the right word there is a strong evolutionary pressure towards what makes some want kids and others don't.

The profile of evolutionary pressures - the topography of the fitness landscape - can change a whole lot over timescales of millions of years.
It’s doubtful that HSS will be around that long anyhow. Trying to preserve a human technological capability for the next couple hundred years might be too tall an order, but it would be something to shoot for, regardless of whether 20 million or 20 billion humans are living at the time.

 

[Elixir]

No science needed, just FOX.

LOL, I know some people like that.

You’re “discussing” with one.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can look at my sources.

Oh, I have.

Paul Ehrlich famously proposed a formula for our impact on the planet: I=PAT.

Paul Ehrlich is also famous for his predictions:

In 1968, he predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s...

Flapdoodle. If you had looked at my references, you would see that I don't even list Ehrlich as the lead writer in any of the works I cite. He is listed as a member of the writing team for one of the works, but not as the lead author. https://mindsetfree.blog/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what/#References .

Do you seriously think you can discredit a paper by finding one contributing author of one of the works cited that wrote something wrong? With your attack strategy, you could discredit almost any scientific paper.

I would not trust any paper that considered him a worthwhile contributor.

Being wrong is not magically turned into being right by quoting (or citing) a bunch of other people who were also wrong.

"I believe this, and I must be right because lots of other people, many of them highly regarded and respected, also believe this" isn't science; It's religion.

"I believe this, and I might be right because observing reality doesn't find any contradictions between my beliefs and those observations" is science.

Neither of these are statements I make. So why should I even address this ridiculous attempt to caricature what I write?

No, my paper is not based on religion. It is based on my research into the available scientific writings on the topic. Yes, there are many other works that I did not include. If you would like me to consider a paper that I have not listed, please recommend it.

We are calling it religion because it is. You are defending a faith-based position.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

1. This all may be the best us humans as we are can do morally and practically. Russian and Chinese communism thought they could create a just system by declaring it,
2. The historical result of conflict, local climate change, and overuse of resources.
3. China tries it and it backfired, Couples killed female babies and tued again for a male. Led to a ]n imabalce between males and females. Now China is now promoting population growth, it has to sipprt an aging population.

Natural selection, if or genetic inheritance does not enable us to solve the problems humans will decline or die out. A natural balance will be returned.

Happened even more in India without any government pressure, just that boys bring benefit and girls bring cost.

 

[Bomb#20]

A noted too, declining populations bring their own problems, some of which will be severe. Japan’s current population is in decline, and stands around 124 million. Estimates show that unless trends change, the population will sink to only 70 million by 2060.

Good.

 

[Bomb#20]

Let's give you four options. Which do you pick?
...
3. Have a totalitarian world government force people to have fewer children.
...

Why would forcing people to have fewer children take a totalitarian world government? Democratic nation-states force their people to do all manner of things their leaders consider good for the general welfare that a lot of the citizenry wouldn't do voluntarily, from little things like tolerating minority religions and respecting other people's property rights, to big things like military service. If the case for limiting reproduction will become as clear as you think it is, why do you assume it couldn't be enacted by vote and enforced by normal legal means?

 

[Elixir]

Let's give you four options. Which do you pick?
...
3. Have a totalitarian world government force people to have fewer children.
...

Why would forcing people to have fewer children take a totalitarian world government? Democratic nation-states force their people to do all manner of things their leaders consider good for the general welfare that a lot of the citizenry wouldn't do voluntarily, from little things like tolerating minority religions and respecting other people's property rights, to big things like military service. If the case for limiting reproduction will become as clear as you think it is, why do you assume it couldn't be enacted by vote and enforced by normal legal means?

Nobody needs anyone to force them into anything. Totalitarianism would probably have more of effect on net population by lowering life expectancy than by limiting reproduction. All that would be needed to lower population would be to empower women to make their own reproductive decisions.

 

[bilby]

A noted too, declining populations bring their own problems, some of which will be severe. Japan’s current population is in decline, and stands around 124 million. Estimates show that unless trends change, the population will sink to only 70 million by 2060.

Good.

While I will agree that the train in that picture is overpopulated, I would hesitate to declare it to be representative of the whole of Japan, much less the entirety of planet Earth.

"Overpopulation" entusiasts often seem to have difficulty distinguishing local overcrowding (which is a real thing) from global overpopulation (which isn't).

 

[DBT]

Many regions, being arid, mountainous, etc, simply cannot support large human populations, hence the concentration along the coasts and riverways. Overall, Australia is low density, yet our cities are becoming ever more congested.

 

[steve_bank]

In the old nuclear apocalypse movie On The Beach Australia is the last place on Earth untouched by a cloud of radioactive dust as it closes in.

 

[bilby]

In the old nuclear apocalypse movie On The Beach Australia is the last place on Earth untouched by a cloud of radioactive dust as it closes in.

I don't think Godzilla ever trampled Sydney or Melbourne, either.