Well thank you Aidan, for your assurance that global warming is true. It must give you some pause, that there has been a slight cooling these last 17 years, despite an increase in CO2.

Pray tell, from where did you gain this inside knowledge. It obviously can't be from understanding the physics, so please tell.

Was it inspiration from your god, or did some greenie tell you so.

Once you have this assurance, please advise the 32,000 BSc scientists who signed the petition telling the US government they did not accept the theory, which has no proof.

Hasbeen the science is abundantly clear if you change the composition of the atmosphere you will affect surface temperatures.

The following has been known and understood for well over 100 years.
The sun heats the surface to an average temperature of about 15 Deg C. Now all objects that have a temperature above absolute zero emit radiation. The surface thus emits infra-red radiation, some of which just happens to be in a part of the spectrum that CO2 absorbs thus heating the atmosphere and slowing the rate at which the surface cools.

The above does not require proof as it can easily be observed, but never the less it is well understood from theoretical physics.

By the way I agree with the gist of the article.

"but there is little doubt that the world can feed its present population."

True, even with more, but not by bread alone do we want to live.

Survival of the body is one thing and the welfare of the soul is another. The more people there are, the more restricted and regimented our lives become. To support all those numbers, higher technology is required, which treats us like numbers.

Depression has become a new epidemic because being "numbers" in an increasingly virtual reality away from nature and with families broken down, most of us find no real purpose to live for.

The article 'Population and the Environment' was intended to provide 'a perspective' and by no means the only possible one. However, some people evidently did not read beyond the limit of prejudice. Environmental problems can only be solved by first adequately defining the causes and effects. Treatment without accurate diagnosis leaves a great deal to chance.
By the 1970's, pollution had become so serious that environment protection legislation was passed in many countries. Modern medicine, pollution control and sanitation, which are closely inter-related, have also contributed to a steeply declining death rate. If nothing had been done about pollution the death rate would have been far greater. Being one of those responsible for some of those environmental improvements, I prefer to take a tiny share of the credit and not the 'blame' for helping to protect water supplies and solving water recycling problems.
The world population rose from 3.7 in 1970 to around 7 billion in 2015. Australia's population increased from 12.7 to 23 million over the same period. To paraphrase 'Aidan', where we've decided to 'fix' the environment, there has been improvement [despite population increase]. If our environmental problems are defined exclusively in terms of population, the corollary is that reducing the population to its pre-1970 level, would return the the environment to something like its condition at that time. But surely that is not the desired outcome.
The article contends that although further population growth is undesirable, the behaviour of a wealthy and wasteful minority is the main cause of environmental degradation. Greenhouse gas emissions would not reduce much if most of the world’s poorest people moved to another planet. The idea that environmental damage inevitably results from population growth is tantamount to blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich. This can lead to a 'convenient' acceptance of severe economic injustice and even genocide, by neglect, if not by force. The worst tyrants in history thought that the ‘ends would justify the means’. However, in this debate, are we expected to believe in unspecified ends to be achieved by ill-defined means?

MaxT,

While wasteful consumption is clearly a serious problem, I don't think that it is the main problem on a global scale. If you look at the tables in the last Global Footprint Network Atlas,

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_Atlas_2010.pdf

you can work out that the top billion people in the richest countries are responsible for about 38% of global consumption. People have to consume in order to survive, and if there are enough of them, it doesn't matter if per capita consumption is low. If you look at the graph on page 21, you can see that essentially all of the high and very high human development countries on the UN Human Development Index are using more than their fair share of the Earth's biocapacity. Sure, you can feed and accommodate more people without wrecking the environment if you force them to live heavily regimented lives on a vegetarian diet in cramped surroundings, but not all of us agree that maximising the population should trump personal freedom and quality of life.

China is now the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, even if you exclude production for export, but due to the historical contribution of the US and other Western countries, they are responsible for most of what is now in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, greenhouse gases are not our only problem, as is clear from the Safe Operating Space paper in Nature that I linked to in my previous post. While the bottom billion are responsible for very little of the extra carbon dioxide, they are responsible for a lot of the deforestation, land degradation, and loss of biodiversity. It simply isn't true that poor brown people can do no wrong, even if that is what many on the Left would like to believe.

No matter how much the ACF, Dick Smith, Sustainable Population Australia, Bob Carr, Planned Parenthood, Club of Rome, FAIR, John Tanton, Scaifes, Bob Birrell, Rockefellers, Paul Ehrlich and the population bombers go on about their supposed 'science' of population growth, they got it wrong, like Malthus.

By the 70s it was not a population bomb due to high fertility rates of non white people which had already started plunging, but a baby boomer bomb through prosperity and longevity.

The issue we face is how to manage ageing populations and the international competition for working age people emerging in support of retirees and oldies.

No matter how much ageing white wealthy neo cons dressed up as hippies and environmentalists rant about population growth and the impact on the rich world and/or the environment, it is becoming more inter related, assimilated and brown, while the status quo inevitably changes...... that's what really bothers them.