The Uncertain Future of Global Population Numbers 279
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."
Almost 7 Billion People... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and all still on the same rock.
We need to get out more.
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]
Re:Self limiting to a certain extent? (Score:3, Interesting)
Its theorized that diseases that hit a high population tend to mutate into more lethal forms because it helps them spread more easily.
I just hope that modern science could defuse a pandemic before it turned into the next black plague.
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.
They plan to kill of 80% of us (Score:1, Interesting)
If you don't have an Infragard membership or a place secured in [the real] Iron Mountain, you are like me and are fukced.
Why is FEMA building all these prisons that remain empty? When you drive down the street, look at the backs of the signs on the opposite side. Do you see all the stickers? Those are tactical markers. Not in any language since they are designed for UN (Chinese? Russian? blankaznian?) troops to direct them to the local resources. Just start looking.
Still the Sarah Connor Chronicles is entertaining. Don't pay attention to the banks beginning to crumble. The Visa check card is here so why use cash?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Malthusian fear-mongers as in China which is economically in vastly better shape then it was when its population was significantly less then it is now.
It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever.
On the basis of the examples you offer, it's quite clear that the world can go on like this forever since your examples are either a) inapplicable or b) unsupportive of your claim.
In fact, history does provide a guide to the way the future's likely to unfold. When incomes rise to a certain level the population increase grinds to a halt.
All the wealthier nations, once you subtract the population additions made by recent immigrants, have either very low population growth or a shrinking population. Japan's robotic technology expenditures are driven by a combination of their aging (shrinking) population and a refusal to allow immigration. Who's going to take care of Japan's rapidly increasing geezer population? The U.S.'s population increase is driven by immigration.
If you look at the trends in global per capita income the conclusion to be drawn is that the global population increase will start slowing down within twenty years and top out about 2050 with global population decline to follow. I know that's the sort of thought to fill the zero-population racists hearts with glee but they'll have about as much to do with it as a rooster's crowing does with the rising of the sun.
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.
Not just historians and there's no need to wait till the future. You can offer examples to the contrary but I'm unaware of any "socialist experiment" that can be deemed a success. With utter uniformity socialism's been either a failure or a disastrous failure.
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.
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.
Re:Self limiting to a certain extent? (Score:2, Interesting)
From this. Long, but very worth the read if you find this stuff as interesting as I do.
http://endofspecies.com/?page_id=10 [endofspecies.com]
Re:Nope (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There is plenty of evidence. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:3, Interesting)