I'm sorry Graham, looks like the consensus is against you for a variety of quite good reasons. You had better go back to the drawing board and do something useful to support your aging rellies.

David

“No resilience in low fertility”

Resilience is far from bad in Finland, Switzerland, Norway, and Holland. These nations have low (or about right) Total Fertility Rates of about 1.7 - and only one in 6 of the population is under the age of 15.

On the other hand, resilience is far from good in places with high fertility rates - as heartrendingly evidenced during the last generation or so in Uganda, Somalia, Yemen, East Timor. They all have Total Fertility Rates of about 6 or above, and about half of their populations are under the age of 15.

Homo sapiens has taxed its resilience by maintaining high fertility at old feudal rates while diminishing early death rates via modern science and technology. This impost on our resilience has been pointed out often enough by biological scientists such as Sir McFarlane Burnett, Sir Howard Florey, Norman Borlaug, Frank Fenner; and by institutions such as the Australian Academy of Science. The mathematical impossibility of maintaining population growth should be obvious, - but for those not convinced, a short visit to Professor Andrew Bartlett’s “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” might help.
The unprecedented rapid population increase over the last century has been a tremendous impost on our resilience.

Graeme Cooke’s article is a nonsense - a serious distortion. The last century’s unprecedented increase in human numbers has left us unprepared, with little resilience for whatever difficulties lie ahead from our overtaxed planet. Billions of people in the less-developed world are already struggling; yet the extreme sentiments of this article are pushing to make their situation worse.
Population decline? Moderately applied by ourselves - a good idea. Better than letting nature take its unforgiving course.

Nothing to say here- except that a person who states "We may be literally not breeding ourselves back to the Stone Age." simply cannot be taken seriously.
Graham, you should have stayed in a job where you just cite what the news actually is, instead of trying (and failing) to interpret it yourself.
Having you out of news (or more precisely, now IN public service) is a great loss to Australia.

Ha! If I said I can see into the future will OLO publish my articles just on that basis?
Unfortunately I can't and neither can anyone else, the 13th century Nobleman, couldn't have accurately predicted the rise of the machine age,much less a peasant, nor can a 21st century journalist claim to be "Seer" of demographic or climatic change.

Since when do "we" have a problem with rapid change?
White people certainly don't, Africans adapt with astonishing speed,just look at the exponential growth of Christianity and Islam on that continent. Ditto Asians, and the old "Fall of Rome"analogy just falls flat at the feet of anyone who's given that era even cursory attention, by the time Rome "Fell" it had already adapted to the coming age and taken on it's new form.
There are too many historical exceptions to the "Doomsday" rule and the only constant is that all things are not equal when it comes to Humankind, one man's famine is another man's feast.

Jay
Not quite sure what you're trying to say but I assume you're claiming that humanity will survive (though rather unevenly) the coming crises. Yes, I think so too but we have to be prepared for these crises and help those less fortunate than ourselves to survive them e.g. adaptation funds to low lying countries to help them cope with rising sea-levels. Overpopulation is going to make all crises worse so we need to start on a rapid course for stabilisation and then slow decline of our numbers - too rapid a decline distorts the age structure and leads to excessive ageing. (We can cope with some ageing but not excessive.) But if we ignore all the problems and don't prepare, then we really will have a Doomsday scenario in which there are many deaths.

Popnperish.
So cynical!
I'm a glass half full kind of guy, I believe that Doomsday prophecies are a Western luxury and an excuse to shift the focus away from practical concerns and into the realm of magical thinking.

The Third world is more than capable of dealing with it's own problems, simply put they will have to deal with climate change, if in fact the doomsday prophecies come true.
By that I mean they will have no choice but to adapt, so they will simply adapt, Third Worlders are no more tolerant of unnecessary privation and disruption than we are.
If you do a quick whip around of the websites of Third World environmental groups they come off as practical, down to earth and focused very much on the future ,I've yet to come across a non Western Group which is infected with such pessimism and magical thinking as displayed in this article.
Just to take one example BAPA, a Bangledeshi environmental group sees their nation's long term challenges as manageable and the tone of their press releases and official web page convey a sense of hope and a "can do attitude".