Candide,

This post is especially for you.

What is the difference between 100 million years, one year and infinity?

As Prof Ian Goldin of Oxford University says, the anti immigration and anti population growth advocates have no evidence for their claims, it's simply beliefs and opinions

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2012/07/04/europe-needs-migration/

As many in the USA know, much of the anti immigration and anti population growth movements are based on a neo Malthusian philosophy, and the reality is "racism wrapped in a fancy green wrapper".

... or Pauline Hanson dressed in a rented koala suit.

Well, I'm sure that the Nazi party had a few good ideas, but when I listen to Wagner, I listen to the music: An idea needs to be assessed according to merit, not its supporters. Would you trash Wagner's music on the basis of his character?

A starting point for considering population growth and its effects is an acceptance that living standards are based on education and infrastructure.

Thus, for Afghanistan you have uneducated population + bugger all infrastructure = cesspit.

In contrast, for South Korea you have educated population + excellent infrastructure = great country.

So for Australia, we might consider the per capita education and infrastructure needed to support a given standard of living. What might be the per cost of this?

If there is no effort to make the argument quantitative, then it will degenerate into tiresome name calling.

Hi Fester,

One of the criticisms I made against the peak everything brigade, was the oversimplification of very complex issues in order to promote grossly oversimplified ideological solutions.

You offer us education and infrastructure as the keys?

The parameters by which we measure a society’s capacity for anything are social, political, economic, religious, ecological and scientific. Each of these entities contains tens of thousands of individually variable elements.

Each of these elements has to be evaluated, weighted and quantified before being assigned to algorithms for entity relationship analysis (ERA).

Then and only then can expert assessments be started.

But I guess if you can’t get your head around reality, you can sound intelligent by proselytizing oversimplified utter rubbish.

Thank you so much for making my case for me.

Spindoc,

I have a first class honours degree in Physics, so I do know something about how science works. No need to worry about what will happen in a hundred million years: we will be hitting thermodynamic limits to growth in a few hundred years if our energy use continues to grow at the present rate, long before standing room only, just because the waste heat that we have to emit in the process will cook us. A/Prof Tom Murphy explains this very well

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

He has some other interesting articles on his blog such as “Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist”.

A great many fields of science are involved in my list. I don’t pretend to be an expert in marine chemistry, soil science, hydrology, conservation biology, atmospheric physics, etc. The difference between you and me is that I am prepared to listen to the experts, not because they are infallible, but because they are more likely to be right than laymen who believe what they want to believe.

Many people like yourself see the world like a cartoon of Mickey Mouse. The face is the economy, while the environment and the society are the less important ears. Wrong. The real picture is one of concentric circles. If you trash your environment, you trash your society and your economy. The laws of physics trump human social constructs every time.

Andras Smith's childish accusations of racism are getting tedious. Are Australians really so stupid that they can't object to overcrowding, gouging on housing costs, or miserable long commutes unless some American like John Tanton tells them to?