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The Forum > Article Comments > Elephant in the greenhouse part II > Comments

Elephant in the greenhouse part II : Comments

By Michael Kile, published 4/12/2015

The current world population of 7.3 billion is increasing by 83 million a year. It will reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

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Yeah, sorry, mhaze, I meant 'Areas .... are still slowly rising, sort of on the rebound. Hence the perception of a FALL in sea-levels.'

Cheers,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Monday, 7 December 2015 9:58:02 PM
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mhaze,

You are only looking at the last 200 years, when we have been able to keep ahead of population growth. If you go back further, you can see times when living standards really did deteriorate due to overpopulation. Prof. Paolo Malanima wrote a paper about Italian wages from 1270 to 1913 and found a strong inverse relationship between population size and wages and living standards. He makes the point that an Italian labourer in the 19th century had to work half again as long for bare subsistence as a labourer in the 15th century after the Black Death, the "Golden Age of the worker". This was despite 400 years of technological progress and the introduction of some amazingly productive New World crops.

http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Articles/Wages_%20Productivity.pdf

See also the work of biological anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel, who examined a great many bones from the Eastern Mediterranean and was able to determine average height and life expectancy (good indicators of average well-being and living standards for different periods).

http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/angel-1984/angel-1984-1a.shtml

Overpopulation was also pretty clearly one of the main causes of the Rwandan genocide even in our own time. See

http://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/volumes/2002/2-1/magnarella2-1.pdf

Your simple picture of unending progress and human ingenuity always triumphing over our problems simply isn't true. Fertility rates have come down in most countries, but there are still quite a few recalcitrant cultures, mostly, but not exclusively, in Africa and the Islamic world where they remain stubbornly high (why the UN has to keep revising its medium population projection upwards). Even if they all got with the program, we are due for billions more just due to demographic momentum. Even with our present numbers and so many living in grinding poverty, we are also doing serious damage to our environmental life support systems, as scientists from a lot of different fields have been telling us. It isn't just global warming.
Posted by Divergence, Tuesday, 8 December 2015 7:53:59 PM
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Note the case of India too.

AFR's Tony Walker missed the elephant in the greenhouse (“’C+’ Turnbull back in climate class”) last weekend.

Poor air quality indices in New Delhi - and Beijing - are a consequence of more people driving more vehicles.

If Nature is sending a message from the capitals of the world’s largest developing countries to COP21 delegates in Paris, it is one more about demography than ‘climate change’.

Expect 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to UN Population Division’s latest medium variant projection released last July.

India – which had only 260 million people in 1950 - will overtake China - 550 million in 1950 - as the most populous country in just seven years, with 1.4 billion.
Posted by Alice Thermopolis, Wednesday, 9 December 2015 12:18:09 PM
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Hi Alice and Divergence,

It's not all doom and gloom, you know. As standards of living rise in developing economies, human rights tend to improve as well, especially for women: women get better education, postpone their child-bearing years, have fewer children. Hence birth-rates fall.

Africa is a huge continent, about four Australias, with vastly better rainfall and soils. Vast areas are really quite undeveloped economically. Give it twenty years and its population may exceed two billion, in line with its size. By 2100, its birthrate will be close to zero growth, but its population will keep growing for some time due to longer life-spans, like it is elsewhere currently.

Cheers,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Wednesday, 9 December 2015 3:33:39 PM
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Divergence,

Firstly thanks for the links. Really interesting and I can see I'll be spending the next period following up on all this. I did do a deal of work way-back-when on ancient life expectancy. My conclusion, and I think that of many archeologists, was that the records we have distort the true picture. We are most likely to find the bones and artifacts of those who were buried and/or otherwise honoured in death. These are likely to be the elite and the wealthy who had disproportionate access to better food and medicine. In Rome, for example, vast numbers of the poor were simply dumped in the Tiber or country-side. So the averages we get are for the better-off members of those societies, not the full spectrum.

Anyway...

Yes I was only looking at the current era since that's what is pertinent. Its very true that in the pre-industrial era population and conditions fluctuated significantly, mainly due to climate and natural events. But we can't compare then with now. We now have access to vastly better knowledge and understanding of agricultural process and transport means that climate issues in one area is no longer disastrous for that area. It may be that we will come to an end of the uninterrupted improvement in output. Maybe there is an upper-limit to agricultural yields that we are pushing. However referring to the past declines is no longer relevant.

As to population and the fact that as you say there are parts of the world where fertility rates remain high, this was rather my point. These are places where development has either stalled or never started. My point was that everywhere, everytime development has pushed a society into a more prosperous position, fertility rates fall. So the solution to the high birth rates in parts of Africa is progress. Get wealthy and get population under control.
Posted by mhaze, Wednesday, 9 December 2015 3:59:51 PM
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Climate is the most urgent problem. Once we switch to clean energy, we'll roughly halve our environmental impact. Gradually we can reduce the impact of all other human endeavours.
http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english/
Posted by Max Green, Wednesday, 16 December 2015 2:59:41 PM
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