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The Uncertain Future of Global Population Numbers
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Mar 16, 2008 01:47 AM
from the let's-see-one-two-three-four-five-six-a-kabillion-and-one dept.
from the let's-see-one-two-three-four-five-six-a-kabillion-and-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The question of global population is a pretty crucial one; how many people will there be in ten years? In forty? The New York Times notes research done by a group called the Worldwatch Institute, research that concludes world population figures are too fluid to make any sort of educated guesses. Childbearing populations combined with severe resource shortages in some parts of the world make pinning down a global headcount unfeasible for ten years from now, let alone out to 2050. The article continues beyond its original borders, as well, with commenters in the field of population studies noting we don't even have a good grasp on how many people were alive in 2007."
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Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Future: Way too many.
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Far future: none.
You forgot the last one, which shows we should take more notice of the preceding figures.
Parent
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Funny)
So the real terrorists are the people preventing all this.
Parent
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:4, Insightful)
People have been saying that since Malthus and predicting a massive population collapse. The funny thing is, civilization keeps finding ways to accommodate larger numbers.
You should also note that most industrialized countries are pretty close to zero-population growth without immigration -- Europe is a little below ZPG, America a little above. You want to stabilize the population, focus on industrializing the Third World.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So therefore: the world will never suffer population collapse. Good thinking 86.
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
There is plenty of evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite possible that human population will trend nicely towards an equilibrium, however, our very economic system is based on perpetual growth and not equilibrium. It is a matter of time until we see some limiting factor in the natural world, that will prevent that magic 5% year-on-year growth. At this point, investment will collapse, and we'll be forced to develop equilibrium based economics.
It is worrying that we are tending more and more to keep our system going by drawing down on our resources faster, instead of being conservative and clever about our use of the planet. If human population is going to gently move to towards equilibrium, then there must be careful consideration of sustainable development. If we continue our hack-n-slash approach, we may well end up with a disaster on our hands. We are already seeing signs of imminent future problems with arable land, energy resources, fresh water and climate change.
Perhaps it would be sane to penalize obviously myopic economic activities, like mining oil-sands, trawler fishing, and massive deforestation. Unfortutely, our economic system is structured such that companies can gain "growth" by hiding costs in externalities. That is precisely the problem with "next-quarter" economics, and characterizes much of the mentality of wall-street.
Our growth based economic system is a tradition that has grown out of the folkways of antiquity. It is no more or less wise than bacteria growing exponentially across an agar jell. This economic system co-exists with, and is ultimately subordinate to the matter-energy relationship that we have with the planet. This is analogous to the bacterial growth hitting the edge of the petri dish.
Perhaps you could try to argue that we'll just find cleverer and cleverer ways of doing things. Blind faith in the genius inventor is an excuse for pillaging the world right now. It's just that the scientific method that gave us the industrial revolution is the same scientific method that is saying we need to curb carbon emissions. The problem isn't with science, but with myopic greed and stubborn ignorance about our relationship with the world.
Expect human society to behave no wiser than the bacteria on the agar jell. We'll consume ever faster, and change our ways only after significant insurmountable problems arise. This situation is analogous to how a person sinks into depression, and then resolves to significant change after they realize that depression is not living.
We learnt nothing from the extinction of the dodo. There will be many more dodos in the future.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As intelligent tool users, the question we should ask ourselves about climate change is at what point the economic tradeoff of stopping it outweighs the economic costs of letting it continue. This is a serious discussion that we should be having, but aren't because conservatives have their heads in the sands about whether it's ha
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I personally think this is as absurd of an issue as the other extremists causes, but it is something to be aware of. I don't understand Lunar environmentalism, or the desire to preserve Mars as some sort of international version of Yellowstone (actually more drastic... they don't w
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Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Informative)
You are very mistaken, this is an extremely complicated question, moreso than TFA states. In 1798, Thomas Malthus started worrying about population growth saying because we were growing at an exponential pace. This thought continued and Hardin used at as one of his main points in his famous paper the Tragedy of the Commons [wikipedia.org]. But, as this became a more important question, we have gathered more data and it turns out our assumption that population growth would stay exponential was wrong.
Here [wikipedia.org] midway on the page are some graphs of current population estimates and global growth rates. You can see that global birth rates have already declined. And even the high end estimates for global population start to taper off. Some even predict global population will decline.
The reasons for this decline are also complicated, but the two most prevalent explanations are first, the advent of birth control finally allows women to control when they have children. And second, and more importantly, look at this picture [wikimedia.org] a growth rate of 0 means the population of that country is staying at a constant level (for every birth there is a death), negative means population decline, >0 means population growth. Notice that most of what we call "industrialized" nations are at a maintenance level or are in population decrease. That includes China and India, the two most populated countries in the world. While most the population growth is just in Africa and parts of the Middle East and South America(and note the south africa and egypt don't have growth). The reason for all this is explained as, as a society gets more 'industrialized' the need for families to be larger decreases. While in places where farming is necessary for survival, the incentive to have more children (free labor) is high. Its not that Africans don't have access to birth control, its that its more beneficial for them to not use it.
So the prevailing theory today is that as Africa gets more industrialized, their population growth will go down and global population will stabilize. We could argue about whether or not Africa will get industrialized, but I think in absence of very strong evidence, we have to believe the more industrialized a nation gets, its population growth approaches 0 or even negative.
Parent
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Almost 7 Billion People... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and all still on the same rock.
We need to get out more.
Re:Almost 7 Billion People... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the major themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (namely the volume Blue Mars [amazon.com] ) is that immigration into outer space cannot solve Earth's population problems. You could never move enough people off at once to counter the people being born at that same instant.
Parent
Self limiting to a certain extent? (Score:3, Insightful)
-Eric-
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Then I must notify you that you are thinking an unacceptable thought. With all the fluidity and complexity and variables in population change, it's okay to admit we can't predict, but with all the fluidity and complexity and variables in climate change, we can be certain of Global Warming.
Re:Self limiting to a certain extent? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the GP is right on this one. I'm far more concerned with overpopulation, because it's a driving force for the causes of global warming. As grossly overpopulated areas industrialize - and grow - so to will CO2, CFC, et al, emissions. And that's aside from the other obvious impacts on the environment overpopulation has, including the need for vast amounts of natural resources, which has and will lead to the destruction of the largest forests on this planet.
Growing populations are clearly more of a detriment to the environment than global warming, which is still arguably "part of nature". By your own admission, there are many variables in climate change, and given our inability to determine even the most basic weather phenomenon or reach consensus on global warming, the *certain* effects the overpopulation are far greater AND more likely.
Parent
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In the article, it was estimated that the U.S. was going to reach a peak of 1.1Billion
Yeah, sounds like an underpopulation problem to me. The article had very rose colored glasses on and completely ignored maj
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Its theorized that diseases that hit a high po
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A perfect storm for a disease is what happened when Cortes met the Aztecs. There appear to have been very few or no diseases in Precolumbian America, so once European diseases were introduced, they ripped through the native population with an estimated 90% lethality rate. For a perfect storm to occur again, you'd need a completely virgin population, which doesn't exist in the modern world.
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The reason we will peak is because if it wasn't for immigration developed countries would have had a negative growth rate, that coupled with the AIDS virus and effective birth control. poor countries will develop and large families will not be needed anymore. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1108-global-population-to-peak-in-20 [newscientist.com]
And your evidence is...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks to me like the optimists actually have some evidence behind them. The more crowded the world gets, the more expensive it will be to have many children, and the fewer people will have.
-Grey [silverclipboard.com]
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Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Econimists are now saying we must account for waste as a cost (insurance underwriters were saying it first), we need them (among others) to find a 'soft landing' for when oil declines and coal becomes expensive (due to sane emmision controls). However when I look at the politics and past civilization that have succum to rapid environmental change, I think it's more than likely that we will see a global population crash this century. Of course we will call the crash a war and blame the whole thing (including the initial shortage of resources), on the loser's nastyness.
Parent
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, when a society gets to a certain economic and technological stage, your birth rate declines (and in some first world countries is already below the replacement rate). So as the rest of the world catches up to our standard of living, we'll eventually reach some sort of rough global population plateau, but I seriously doubt we're going to hit that limit in a matter of decades. Africa could easily hold another one or two billion people with no new technology, just economic maturity.
Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.
Parent
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the life of me I can't remember or find the source, but a particular person in the field of sociology had figured out if the current rate of population (which is still exponential) there would be more humans than atoms in 17,000 years which he concluded something has to give at one point between now and then.
The fact of the matter is that someday humans will have to stop having kids in order to make life comfortable for the living. In fact its arguable that mass death is often followed by times of economic prosperity such as the emergence of the middle class and renaissance after the black death of the middle ages. Now I'm not arguing for humans should die off but rather they should focus on accepting birth control as a societal norm until the individual is ready to actually have a child.
Parent
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It's something that most other countries on the planet will probably have to do eventually; WTF do they want a country with a huge population and out-of-control birth rates to do? Let people breed as they want, seeking to meet immediate, individual needs, so that they can collectively cause a huge starvation die-off a couple of decades later? Or collectively enforce birth control so the die-off does
Nope (Score:4, Informative)
If that were the case, then wealthier people would be having more children and poorer people would be having fewer. In fact it is the EXACT opposite; the people who can afford the least children, have the most, and vice versa. There are many reasons/factors that come into play, e.g. cultural (it's become "socially unacceptable", for example, amongst the "educated class" to have lots of children - you are considered low class now if you have lots of kids, this was not true even just a few generations ago in our own culture, e.g. my gran was one of over a dozen kids and that was 'normal' then; conversely in many African cultures here, for example, having many children IS regarded as 'wealth'). Another factor I believe is a kind of instinct present in many animals too whereby when times are tough and infant survival rates thus lower, more offspring are produced to increase chances of survival.
The biggest drop in fertility rates amongst the world's wealthy educated minority did not actually coincide with education though, it coincided with the development and widespread availability of 'The Pill' in the late 60s / early 70s. Most of the world's poor either can't afford good contraception or aren't terribly interested in it.
For various reasons the poor are still able to survive in big numbers - their basic needs, like food, are mostly taken care of. In some cases this is thanks to welfare and AID, in others thanks to industrial agriculture allowing the earth to produce a lot of food at low cost. Also things like basic medicines/vaccines are comparatively widely available now globally. So average infant survival rates are MUCH higher than they were even fifty years ago. People just aren't dying much, even in poor countries, so producing children IS very cheap UNLESS you actually want to house and educate them properly, but most do not do this.
Parent
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Don't know about 2050, but in 2063.. (Score:4, Funny)
Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course when you look at some examples:
Easter islands, where the polynesians peaked at about 10000 inhabitants before falling to about 2000 because they chopped down all trees. (no more boats -> no more fishing, no more houses -> starvation, disease)
Haiti, where the population has stripped their half of the island almost literally bare (almost the complete population survives on food-aid, now you can imagine what happens when the food-aid stops.)
China, where groundwater continues to fall and many areas are already dry.
Great Britain, which is extremely densely populated, has to import about half of it's food and is stupid enough to let half a million immigrants in every year.
It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever. It probably can't even go on like that for more than a couple of years. The green revolution has been made possible by oil and gas and both are getting much more expensive each and every year now.
And no, it's not a "global problem" like the one-worlders want us to believe. Some countries will be able to manage well (like Iceland which with almost zero immigration and geothermal energy plants is well prepared), some will be average (like France which can keep the lights up with nuclear power, but has a huge 3rd-world immigration problem on the other hand or Japan which is overpopulated but may solve that problem with low birthrates and not mass-famine), some will turn into hell-holes (like England which has an even bigger trade deficit than the USA per capita and cannot feed it's population even now while oil and gas is still cheap and there is still some coming from the North Sea oilfields. On top of that immigration has transformed a once cohesive population into a society that with a huge potential for civil strife or even civil war, London is already one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world.) or continue to be hell-holes (like most of the 3rd world)
I would be very surprised if there will be more than 3 billion people living in 2050.
Of course the human species will carry on, future historians will probably think of the 20th century as some crazy period full of socialist (in the late 20th/early 21st-century USA usually called "liberal") experiments.
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Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Mr. Huntington, what do you think is the world's greatest problem today?
Parent
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That's quite an exaggeration. I would be surprised if there will be less than 8 billion. After doing extensive world traveling in 2007, I think non-travelers forget exactly how absolutely huge the earth is. Of course there will be some individual nations (like China, to name just one) that start to give us a window into what happens to an overpopulated land area, but I don't believe it will become a global problem befor
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:5, Informative)
You state that as fact, but as far as I know the concept of "carrying capacity" is not defined or even studied. Whilst it makes intuitive sense that there must be some limit, it also makes sense that this limit would itself be fluid - changing with the march of technology and changes in living standards. I've never seen anybody calculate a carrying capacity for 21st century Earth, especially not scientifically. People who use the term invariably assume it must be lower than our current population - how much lower is usually pulled out of thin air.
Your list of societies is disingenous - you list a primitive, fully collapsed society like Easter Island right alongside Great Britain, which last time I lived there imported half its food because you can't grow strawberries there year round, not because it was about to collapse. Britain could feed itself tomorrow simply by converting some of its farming capacity from meat production to cereal production.
Also, the green revolution was triggered mostly by the development of nitrogen fertilisers, weed killers and crop varieties that could handle being treated with them. Although we use hydrogen from natural gas to make nitrogen fertilisers today, you can produce it using electrolysis without problem. And whilst it's true that today farm machinery is mostly gasoline powered, that's something independent of the green revolution. If you haven't already read it, I suggest checking out Stanifords Food to 2050 [theoildrum.com] for a data-based analysis of whether the green revolution can be sustained.
Only a small proportion of Icelands power comes from geothermal. Most of it is hydro. Iceland has much bigger problems than electricity anyway - there's basically nothing there, and whilst it has energy in abundance the economy is mostly based on industrial fishing. Once the fish stocks are exhausted, there'll be little left to sustain it.
Ah ha, I knew it. As soon as I read the term "carrying capacity" I was waiting for the ass-pulled number. Why 3 billion? Why not 2, or 4? Or 100 million? I don't see any particular constraints on slow population growth - it's been boringly linear for most of the 20th century in most developed countries, and in large parts of Europe is going to head sharply downwards soon due to natural demographic trends anyway. Whilst places like Africa or Chian might get miserable, Africa is already miserable and there's no obvious reason why in the long term China would see different population trends from other developed countries.
Parent
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Actually, no. The ultimate bottleneck for human population growth is the amount of available phosphorous. There are theoretical work-arounds for every other limiting factor, but the phosphorous limit would require mass-scale transmutation of matter to get past. Assuming we strip mine the entire solar system for phosphorous, the upper bounds for the human population on Earth is 10e22.
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The rest of the post consists of either misrepresentation of the current situation as in your use of England as an example of the dangers of overpopulation or clear repudiation of the beliefs of
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe the Polynesian who chopped down the last tree on easter island had exactly the same thoughts? Who knows?
First of all, many of these problems DID already occur, the easter island die-off occoured before the island was descouvered by Europeans, probably somewhen around 1500 AD.
Second, many problems occured (like Haiti's complete lack of forest despite being a tropical half-island) but are merely covered up. (The do-gooders are sending food aid to Haiti to make sure the population continues to breed like crazy)
Third, problems occur when they occur. To say they never occur because they didn't occur 2 decades ago is just plain nonsense.
we aren't running out of oil anytime soon
True, but the oil will be harder to get, more expensive to extract and there will be less of it.
inspsite of what the rabid global warming nutters want you to think.
Global warming has nothing to do with the end of cheap oil.
most of the price rises are due to artificial restrictions on supply.
It's true that the oil industry has shown a general lack of interest in building new refineries in the last years. (and that was a problem during Katrina because refinery capacity was not enough)
However the reason for that is that the oil industry knows very well that oil and gas will peak (or already has peaked) and it doesn't make any sense to build a refinery which needs 10 years to pay itself when there won't be any fuel for it after 5 years. (Not because we are "running out of oil" but because the old, refineries can manage the slowly declining supply)
Parent
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:5, Informative)
I have done research (serious, major oil-company-funded research, so you know where the money lies) on some new ways to find, extract, and process oil. The oil companies are VERY interested, mainly because the future looks pretty bleak. The very fact that Shell is considering as "promising" their MASSIVE in-ground processing, sandwiched between two groundwater reservoirs in the lamosite Green River formation in Colorado and Utah should tell you something about desperation.
Parent
The solution (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait, someone's knocking on my door. BRB.
Infuriatingly presumptuous bastards (Score:3, Interesting)
Thirty-five odd years ago, there was a similar group of scientists trying to figure the same thing out (or so they said). They made some crazy predictions; namely, that the world would be over-populated, and primarily due to the heat put off by large cities, the global temperatures would result in us all looking like overdone chicken. TEOTWAWKI kind of stuff, all largely targeted at the gas guzzling, "consumerist" way of life.*
Or, at least, that's how the policy and information filtered down to school-aged kids in the late 80's/early 90's, and how it was communicated through laws and national/international (US and other Western countries) efforts to sap some of the world's hunger - primarily in Africa - to hopefully offset the problem now, so maybe in the future they could take care of themselves. Problem: Africa's population exploded, as did the disease and warfare. And the West is still funding this destructive cycle today, even though it's been proven - time and time again - to make the situation immeasurably worse, not better.
The supporters of these policies would say "oh, but this just proves the policies were effective!" (with regard to the initial population decines after those seminal works were published) - but they would be wrong. The world population was already in decline before these "runaway population" projection supporters tooted their horns. And since then, world population increase has been anything but exponential. China's population shrank markedly due to birth control; the Western countries (including Russia) have all shrunk substantially in population, and India is moving that way now.
What we should be trending and looking at predicting is what the next politically-foisted, crack theory will be. Just look back over the past 5 years, and you'll see an obscene amount of variance in just the "global warming/cooling/etc." argument; look back 30 years, and they're using the same models to predict something different still: the globe is cooling, new ice age - oh wait, it's warming, and we'll all look like overdone chicken by 2010... oh, what's that? 2008 is the coldest year on record in 30+ years so far?
And the same thing applies to population hokum. You can not predict something this complex: there are simply too many factors, internal and external, which have sway. It is significantly more complex than the global warming/cooling argument, because it directly depends (and bases most of its assumptions) on the global warming/cooling expectations. Then you've got cultural changes (ie, women having fewer/almost no children - which is exactly what happens when countries become "westernized", and what was directly overlooked/unknown in the "explosive population" projections), wars, famines, poor land management, extinction of bees (needed to fertilize all flowering plants), epidemics/panemics, and any number of other things.
* while some of it was noble, it went about it in such a reckless, dishonest manner that the message was largely discredited through the approach. yet enough was absorbed by members of my generation that much of the stupid policies and beliefs impregnated in our minds at a young age, and have taken root now that we are adults. yay, brainwashing.
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This whole approach irritates me.
snip
The world population was already in decline before these "runaway population" projection supporters tooted their horns. And since then, world population increase has been anything but exponential. China's population shrank markedly due to birth control; the Western countries (including Russia) have all shrunk substantially in population, and India is moving that way now.
From what orifice do you pull this information?
The only significant country with a factual decline in population is Russia, or a little wider, parts of the Former Soviet Union.
China's population is still increasing rapidly even though the government does since decades it's best to control it, your statement to the opposite is plain stupid.
What we should be trending and looking at predicting is what the next politically-foisted, crack theory will be. Just look back over the past 5 years, and you'll see an obscene amount of variance in just the "global warming/cooling/etc." argument; look back 30 years, and they're using the same models to predict something different still: the globe is cooling, new ice age - oh wait, it's warming, and we'll all look like overdone chicken by 2010... oh, what's that? 2008 is the coldest year on record in 30+ years so far?
That's what applied science is all about, you continually adjust your experiments with the latest knowledge.
And the latest knowledge (that's not the same as
Peak Oil will result in a global die-off (Score:5, Informative)
Industrializing 3rd world nations will only hasten the global die-off. Look at the HUGE impact on commodities that China & India have place since they industrialized. If China was to consume like we do in the US, it would take 7 planet earths. A real good DVD to watch is A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash [oilcrashmovie.com].
I strongly urged all
Let's put this into numbers... (Score:5, Interesting)
The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day (cites: Columbia River [wikipedia.org]).
We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US (cites: vegan food estimates [vegansociety.com], farmland in the US [usda.gov]).
Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.
We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn't need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.
The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.