Cheryl,

The environmental footprints include industrial consumption of resources, not just consumption at the household level. The fact remains that if global resources were divided equally, we would all be poor, even with the present population. You haven't shown otherwise.

You also haven't shown that everything is hunky-dory with the environment. This paper from Nature, probably the world's leading peer-reviewed science journal, is concerned that we will cross nine different environmental thresholds so that we are no longer in "a safe operating space for humanity". Climate change is only one of them, so even if the sceptics are right, we still have a lot of other problems. According to the paper, we have already crossed the thresholds for biodiversity, climate change, and interference with the nitrogen cycle, and are rapidly approaching four more.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

Or is it all a vast conspiracy? You lie about aquifers being pumped dry under major food bowl regions, and I will lie about collapsing fish stocks and dead zones in the oceans?

It is quite likely that population will decline after 2050 - as a result of collapse in a number of countries. According to a news report this morning, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is very worried about global food supplies this year and the effect of high oil prices on them. They are reminding us of the food riots we had in 2008 in 34 different countries.

Our main concerns here in Australia have to be to stop degrading the environment, to discourage senseless waste, and to maintain generous safety margins against possible really nasty effects of peak oil, climate change, peak phosphate, etc., as well as long, severe natural droughts. Foreigners are not the childlike little brown brothers of your rescue fantasies. They are (mostly) grown up people who live, and want to live, in independent countries. We can't tell them how to think or what to do. Nor can we, or are we obliged to, shield them from the consequences of their bad decisions. Except for a token few, they will have to fix their own problems.

Thanks for that Divergence.

First of all I reject that climate change is a function of population. If climate change is categorically proven, I suggest it may be a function of first world consumption. Population is a meaningless ill defined term and its used like a battering ram by the Unsustainable People lobby to try scare the bejesus out of people.

As I have said in other posts, it is not individual net consumption. It is industrial consumption of goods which is a problem as the externalities cause environmental degradation. This is capitalism in action.

This is a long, long way from discussions of population control in the developed or developing world or the postulates of the Catholic Church. Yet time and time a collective of posters on this forum keep hammering away at what is essentially a misguided notion that it's people who are the cause of all the world's problems.

People are the solution.

There are some environmental problems that are not related to population. It only took one idiot to introduce the rabbit into Australia. However, most, including greenhouse gas emissions, are covered well by

I = PAT

where, I is the impact on the environment, A (affluence) is the average consumption, and T is a factor for the "dirtiness" of the technology used to sustain that level of affluence. If you double any one of them, you double the impact. China, not the US, is now the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and would still be one of the largest even with a fair system that assigned emissions to the country of the final consumer. The average Chinese is hardly wallowing in luxury, but there are a great many Chinese, so all the small numbers add up to something very large.

There are abundant examples of societal collapses in history and in the archaeological record, with overpopulation and mismanagement of the environment, often provoked by overpopulation, playing starring roles. See for example, Jared Diamond's "Collapse", "Constant Battles" by Prof. Steven LeBlanc (Archaeology, Harvard), and "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations" by soil scientist Prof. David Montgomery. You probably watched one such collapse, the one in Rwanda, on your television screen in 1994. See this account by James Gasana, Rwanda's former Agriculture Minister, including a table showing the correlation between massacres and calories per person

http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/EP155B.pdf

*It's all the Catholic Churches fault! The CC are an easy target.*

Cheryl, your constant attempts at strawman arguments or ridicule,
win you no brownie points I'm afraid.

Nobody has claimed that its all the Catholic Churches fault. The
claim is that no organisation on this planet has done more to
prevent third world women from benefitting from modern contraception,
then the Vatican. If they'd elected a little more enlightened
popes in the past, the world would not be facing a population
increase of 250'000 a day, as it does now.

*People are the solution.*

Err, not people forced to live in poverty, people missing out on
education, people unable to provide for their huge families, because
of church dogma. The Time article presented the situation in
the Philippines, rather well. But what does Cheryl care. She's
right, living the cushy lifestyle in Australia.

Luckily many nations are starting to wake up to the fact, that
ever more people, can actually be the problem.

Divergence's Nature article is quite good. I think he has posted that before.

Yabby, lets talk about the anti-pops attitude to developing world poverty. The anti-populationists want to pull back aid to Africa and Asia to ensure population falls - dies. It's hardline for sure.

They say the only way we (us in the West) will survive is if we erect trade walls and reduce foreign aid.

There's another odd Marxist cliche of anti-pops who say that world capitalism is keeping the poor people of Africa poor - that grinding poverty is due not only to external forces and that the only way to solve the problem is NOT to attack capitalism, but to reduce the population of Africa.

Lets call a spade a spade. The anti-population movement has the intellectual consistency of a dog's breakfast. It's so full of internal contradictions, of dangerous far left and right fascist and social engineering tendancies, as to be a danger to progressive groups such as the Greens.

Well there you go again Cheryl. You throw anyone with a basic
understanding of biology, into your neat little anti pop bucket.

Then you make all sorts of weird and wonderful claims about them,
creating your own little strawman arguments as you go.

Its rubbish, Cheryl. It might make you feel better about yourself,
but that is about all.

When Bob Geldorf went back to Africa a second time, to rescue the
starving millions, it eventually hit him that now there were twice
as many to feed. Fact is that feeding the starving millions without
family planning, creates even more starving millions. This is not
rocket science, but seemingly well beyond you.

Yet the evidence shows that these mega millions would like access
to family planning, many simply can't afford it, or its not available
to them.

I saw an interesting documentary on CNN a while ago, about Nigeria.
The female reporter was quite shocked, when she went into the
backblocks of the country. Women were coming up to her, offering to
give her their babies, as they simply could not cope with them all.

Now mothers who try to give away babies, are clearly desperate people.

But you ignore all that, raving on with your strawman arguments about
the anti pops. Anyone who understands the ramifications must be
in a "movement".

I belong to no movement Cheryl, but clearly I understand biology
far better then you do.

Stop raving Cheryl. Its making you look foolish.