Cheryl:

.#.. Where else can a man or woman effectively retire on a disability pension for the rest of one's life and contemplate the universe on my tax dollars?..#.

A)- ... most overseas countries, for example Bali/Indonesia, cheap and convenient.

Prompete,

To be fair, it's not CO2 itself that is defined as being the problem , it's the perceived increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's what "too much" means.

If the planet can only cope with a maximum amount then that creates consequences.

It's the same for the effects of population levels, in which case there are 3 certain methods to reduce it - War, Pestilence and Famine.

Each are inevitable but it would be wiser to find better ways of living within the available environmental means.

Wobbles:
Point taken. I guess the issue is to define What is "too much" . Paleoclimatolagists and their variety of proxy data sets could suggest that we are nowhere near reaching the 'too much' point. The ppm volumes suggested by the proxy data may be a bit 'wobbly' (+- 50ppm), But volumes up to 10 times what we currently experience would appear to be reasonable in not creating the 'forcing' everyone fears and would be a positive boon in aleviating poverty, enhancing food production and perhaps averting your accurately identified population controll methods. Indeed, much wisdom in living within environmental limitations as defined by......?

Well, it just so happens that I've had a couple of beers a few minutes ago with an old aquaintent down the local watering hole.
He had just returned from visiting his son in China. We talked about the three Gorges Dam which he saw & what a marvel of engineering it is. I remarked about my theory of the possibility of all that weight unbalancing the planet. He said that that was actually a subject of conversation there. I then replied if that's possible then perhaps this could explain the way out of season seasons we have lately here in the tropics with the doldrums being two months overdue & no monsoonal rains as yet. Add to the theory the immense amount of water lost in the Aral Sea & perhaps other places so many degrees from China & eastern Siberia with their immense dammed lakes & it doesn't sound all that implausible that the planet could be a few centimetres out of its usual trajectory. Just a thought, Hmmmh.

The people who keep chanting that Malthus was wrong remind of those skits on Sesame Street where the puppets keep looking for a monster that is right next to them. In Malthusian trap societies (all of them before the late 19th century) people outbreed their resources and overexploit their environment. From a perspective of thousands of years, the graph of living standards versus time is a downward sloping curve, punctuated by occasional spikes where new crops or new technology have expanded the carrying capacity, or where some disaster has pruned back the population. The good times never last, however, because they just result in more and more mouths to eat up any surplus and restore the accustomed level of misery. The physical anthropolgist Lawrence Angel examined a great many human bones from Eastern Mediterranean countries and found sharp declines in average height and life expectancy from the Palaeolithic. There was some improvement in the Hellenistic and Roman periods ("What have the Romans done for us?"), but after that it was downhill all the way to the Industrial Revolution.

In some societies an equilibrium is reached, with most people living in grinding poverty under a tyranny where death rates balance out birth rates. (See economic historian Gregory Clark's account of early modern Europe in "A Farewell to Alms"). Collapse is likely because safety margins are too thin, as with the Irish Potato Famine. The late blight arrived in Ireland from Mexico in the 1840s. It kept coming back and wiping out potato harvests year after year. The Irish didn't have any resistant varieties, and significant numbers of people were living on plots of land that were too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes.

(cont'd)

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This was partly the fault of the British, who ruled Ireland at the time and had commandeered a lot of the best land to grow export crops, but it was also the fault of the Irish themselves, who had blown out their population from perhaps 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million by the 1840s. 1-1.5 million people starved to death, and another 1.5-2 million were forced to emigrate. Hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe as well.

If there is no strong central government to stop them, people try to drive off or kill their neighbours to take what they have. The conflict or the persecutions get blamed on "ancient tribal hatreds" or religious bigotry, but this is because religion and ethnicity make good rallying points when people are joining up sides. People can always find other excuses. In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Roman Catholic Hutus killed other Roman Catholic Hutus in districts where there weren't any Tutsis, and the people who were killed were likely to have been involved in disputes over land. This account by James Gasana, Rwanda's former Agriculture Minister, gives overpopulation star billing and includes a table showing the relationship between calories per person and massacres in the different districts of his country.

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

There are many other articles saying the same thing about Rwanda. There is also an article in last week's Weekly Guardian, "Scarce resources spur strife in South Sudan", on the massacres by the Nuer and Murle people. Do you still want to claim that Malthus was wrong?