Who's to blame? Petroleum corporations and those who mindlessly serve them and Manon! Simply refuse to look if the science proves they've backed the wrong pony.

And as showboat academics serving the above? Produce false facts, figures and endless obsfucation, to kick that can down the road! Deny the factual data, if that is all that's left?

No names no pack drill, but you know who you are! So does almost everyone else! Well done, thou good and faithful servant!
Alan B.

Excellent article, Don. But Alan B's comments show just how strong the magnetism of blame is (or is he just taking the piss?).

Prior to the 2015 Paris climate conference, a total of US$20 billion was offered by various countries and people like Bill Gates to find the technological solutions to climate change that you refer to. Five years later and even allowing for the pandemic diverting our interest into other areas of human endeavour, my understanding is that almost none of the promised $20 billion has been made available to researchers, hence why we are still so heavily into the blame game.

You can all forget about the anthropogenic global warming blame game because it is now too late for all of us.

So pull up a seat and watch the horror of the environmental catastrophe unfold in front of your eyes and you can say to yourselves "I could have stopped this."

Oh dear, Mr Opinion, so the world is doomed, is it? Can you please provide me the sources from which you have formed such an opinion? Thanks.

Bernie Masters,

My source?

Me of course.

If you can't trust me then who can you trust?

Surely you don't think you are qualified to determine things?

Thanks for the reply, Mr Opinion. You've answered my question perfectly. Happy Christmas.

Don,

I don't know if it's a backward, medieval sort of thing, but in the olden days, when there was a crisis or problem, if people could find someone to blame - the Jews, of course, Gypsies, women are always good value - and punish them, then the problem would go away. And the fact that it didn't proved that there were more witches, more cunning and devious followers of Satan, to find and burn, more conspiracies to believe in.

Trumpf is obviously a believer in this sort of magic thinking. Our resident Village Idiot is another - in his case, anybody who looks Chinese, because, ipso facto, by looking Chinese, they all must support the totalitarian dystopian CCP. I'll have to check that out with my Vietnamese friends.

On the other hand, capitalism is infinite in its ability to seek out opportunity: As Rahm Emmanuel, mayor of Chicago and Clinton/Obama confidante, noted, every crisis is (or may well be) an opportunity. So although I do think that there may well be climate change occurring because of human activity, mainly in the production of heat, I am confident that capitalism and the constant search for new ways to make a dollar will prevail. [Afterpay - who would have thought ?]

Thank you for your thought-provoking articles, Don.

Joe

Optimum Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) for ecosystems:

Geological and palaeontological evidence suggests the optimum GMST for ecosystems is that which existed around the Early Eocene Climate Optimum [1] and during the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, i.e. ~25–28°C (i.e. ~10–13°C warmer than present).

Mass extinction events:

1. Most major extinction events [2] have been due to bolide impacts, volcanism and ice ages, not global warming

2. The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was due to warming but it was less severe than most mass extinctions. “The most dramatic example of sustained warming is the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was associated with one of the smaller mass extinctions.” [3]. The PETM occurred when GMST was above optimum for life on Earth.

3. The Permian-Triassic Boundary mass extinction event has recently been reported to have been caused by extensive volcanism that caused acidification and an ice age, not global warming (Baresel et al., 2017) [4]

4. Apart from the PETM there appear to have been no major extinction events that were due to global warming when GMST was below the optimum (approximately ~7–13°C above present)

Rapid warming:

5. Even very rapid warming is beneficial for ecosystems. Coxon and McCarron (2009) [5] Figure 15:21 shows temperatures in Ireland, Greenland and Iceland warmed from near LGM temperatures to near current temperatures in 7 years 14,500 years BP and in 9 years 11,500 year BP. Life thrived during these events.

6. Biosphere productivity is increasing during the current warming – the planet has greened by about 14% during 35 years of satellite observations (Donohue et al., 2013) [6], Zhu et al. (2016), Greening of the Earth and it drivers [7]). GMST increased by about 0.4°C during the period analysed (1982–2010)

Biosphere productivity is higher in warmer climates:

7. Biosphere productivity is higher at low latitudes (warmer) than at high latitudes (colder). Gillman et al. (2015) ‘Latitude, productivity and species richness’ [8]
<blockquote> Contrary to the recent claims, we found strong support for a negative relationship between latitude and annual NPP of forests with all datasets, and NPP was significantly greater in tropical forests than in temperate forests. Vascular plant richness was positively correlated with NPP.</blockquote>

8. Biomass density (tC/ha) ~10 times higher in tropical rainforests than extratropical [9].
https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/tcmt20/2014/tcmt20.v005.i01/cmt.13.77/20140410/images/large/tcmt_a_10816421_f0002.jpeg
Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.4155/cmt.13.77

A rough calculation of biosphere and soil organic carbon density from Figure 2 charts A and B shows that carbon density decreases from tropics to high latitudes, as follows (tC/ha versus latitude):
Soil Organic Carbon: y = -0.125x + 105
Biomass: y = 110.31e-0.026x
Total: y = -1.975x + 241

9. The mass of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere has increased substantially during the warming from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Jeltsch-Thömmes et al. 2019 [10], find that the mass of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere increased by about 40% (850 GtC) from LGM to preindustrial times. This compares with 10%-50% (300-1000 GtC) increase from LGM to the pre-industrial inventory of about 3,000 GtC stated in IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter 6 [11]. This also indicates that warming is beneficial for ecosystems.

These points suggest that global warming is net beneficial for ecosystems when GMST is below the optimum, which empirical evidence indicates may be around 7–13°C above present GMST.

Global impacts at +3°C GMST by impact sector

Many Integrated Assessment Models have been developed to estimate the economic impact of global warming. The three most cited are DICE, FUND and PAGE. Of these only FUND disaggregates the economic impacts by impact sector.

The economic impact of the main impact sectors at 3°C global average temperature increase (relative to 2000), as projected by FUND, in % of world GDP are:

Impact sector Impact
Agriculture & Forestry: +0.61%
Storms: -0.01%
Sea level rise: -0.02%
Health: -0.03%
Ecosystems: -0.16%
Water supply: -0.17%
Energy: -0.89%
Total: -0.68%
Total excluding Energy: +0.21%

This indicates that FUND projects the overall impact is positive if the energy impact sector is excluded. Lang and Gregory, 2019 [1] finds the energy sector impact projections may be incorrect and should be slightly positive. In this case the impact of 3°C global warming on the world economy (i.e. total of all impact sectors) would be more positive.

cont ...

... cont:

Empirical data for each impact sector suggests the impacts for most or all sectors may be more positive than estimated by FUND.

1. Agriculture – may be more positive due to higher productivity, including as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration [2]

2. Storms – frequency and intensity decreases as global warming increases

3. Sea Level rise – the amount of sea level rise may be overestimated in FUND

4. Health – various studies indicate warming is beneficial for health – e.g. 5 to 20 times more deaths from cold events than from hot events

5. Ecosystems – paleo evidence, net primary productivity and amount of carbon tied up in the biosphere versus temperature (latitude) show that ecosystems are more productive at warmer temperatures.

6. Water supply – I don’t know how this will respond to global warming

7. Energy – With non-temperature drivers excluded FUND projects that +3°C global warming would negatively impact the US economy by 0.8% GDP. However, Lang and Gregory (2019) [1], using empirical data for the USA, finds that 3 °C global warming would positively impact the US economy by 0.07% GDP (see Table 2). The paper infers that global warming would also positively impact the global economy.

Conclusion:

If these findings are correct, there is no valid justification for policies and actions to reduce global warming. Such policies are reducing global economic growth and slowing the rate of improvement in human wellbeing.

References:

[1] Lang, P.A.; Gregory, K.B. Economic impact of energy consumption change caused by global warming. Energies 2019, 12, 3575. https://doi.org/10.3390/en12183575

[2] Dayaratna, K.D.; McKitrick, R.; Michaels, P.J. Climate sensitivity, agricultural productivity and the social cost of carbon in FUND. Environmental Economics and Policy Studies 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-020-00263-

Peter. Well, you seem to be able to read if not comprehend? The sun waxes and the joint warms up, as the figures suggest, then the sun wanes and the ice advances and the climate becomes a little milder during a waning phase like the current one we've been in since the mid-seventies. (NASA)

The tundras are doing something never witnessed in living memory/recorded history. They're melting and releasing billions of tons of additional methane, annually, which is at least 21 times more efficacious as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

If you and all the other super-smart eggheads/circular thinkers, don't get that this is a problem that we need to address now! With urgent alacrity. Then we are doomed. See Allan Savoy's current satellite photos, which show SFA greening, but runaway desertification) Even so, the answer is and has always been Nuclear.

By the way, did you know that the "cool burning" of one-hectare of grassland releases as much CO2 as 6,000 cars. (See Allan Savoy and sustainable agriculture/farming.)

It's half smart drongos like you, with your indubitable facts figures and charts that prove little than you studied history rather well.

Your alleged expertise prevents the change we need and you know it!

Those who give a shite, should just take a running jump off a very tall building and leave you to it! Cause you are here to simply prevent change! There are far too many pedantic single issue, small picture folks, who "think" as you do!

So why should we bother about you and your, locked and bolted mindset, status quo ilk?

It's not yet too late to do something about ruaway climate change! And we could if we could but sideline/deal out the "historically accurate" contrarian buffoons!
Alan B.

Alan B, apart from going nuclear which will maybe reduce CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel power plants which account for no more than one third of human emissions, what else should the world do to prevent the apocalypse you're predicting?

Bernie Masters,

I don't know why you keep arguing about it because I just told you it's too late to fix the problem.

You are just going to have to learn how to die in the looming environmental catastrophe.

Your grim reaper mate, Mr Opinion.

Well, Bernie, We can, using proven technology extract vast quantities of CO2 from our oceans, then combine it with hydrogen we've created by catalytically cracking the water molecule, without adding a single milligram of new carbon to the atmosphere. And make endlessly sustainable fuels diesel jet fuel and petrol alternative we can never run out of!

Something like MSR thorium and prices that could be as low as 1 cent PKWH. Would make these projects commercially viable as we as creat humungous PERMANENT jobs.

Apart from that, we could underlay our highways and byways with a clingwrap thin layer of graphene then use that instead of much more vulnerable transmission tower to reticulate the nation's energy. This would allow all-electric vehicles fitted with an electromagnetic induction coil mounted in the undercarriage to use the subsequent electromagnetic field to recharge their vehicles on the fly and constantly. Graphene is around 200 times stronger than steel and is a superconductor!

This would be a good beginning and doable now. As for how we pay for all this? There're annual billions we could earn as the world's premier nuclear waste/unspent nuclear fuel, repository. Unspent fuel that can be more fully spent in MSR technology.

And where we could first use it as free energy we could apply to almost any industrial task! Rail guns to launch/catapult satellite-carrying rockets, e.g.?
Alan B.

Alan B said-

Well, Bernie, We can, using proven technology extract vast quantities of CO2 from our oceans, then combine it with hydrogen we've created by catalytically cracking the water molecule, without adding a single milligram of new carbon to the atmosphere. And make endlessly sustainable fuels diesel jet fuel and petrol alternative we can never run out of!

Answer-

I think this is what you are talking about... co2 splitting- electrolyze carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, which is then mixed with hydrogen to produce liquid hydrocarbons like gasoline or kerosene that can be used as fuel.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/splitting-carbon-dioxide/

http://phys.org/news/2017-06-low-cost-carbon-dioxide.html

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.6b01265

http://www.sciencealert.com/the-first-low-cost-carbon-dioxide-splitter-means-a-brighter-future-for-clean-energy

Kerosene has one of the highest energy densities partly because of its liquid form. The Carbon in kerosene seems to store energy very efficiently probably because it has four bonds- kero as I understand consists of a number of chains from the alkanes group- it has one of the highest densities of chemical energy mediums- (obviously nuclear has much higher energy densities). Ammonia apparently can also be used to store energy relatively efficiently probably due to Nitrogens three bonds.

Basically the problem seems to be that there are too many people in the world using too much stuff. This seems to be the result of geopolitical adversarialism and a policy of some nations for massive population expansion.

Many are now saying that it's too late to stop global warming- I'm not sure but there are several other warning signs that indicate global issues related to human population- extinction of species, food supplies, oil, fresh water, bees, fish stocks, pollution, deforestation, desertification, inflation, debt levels, the average size of living space, average population density of nations, the speed of the internet, more draconian laws, ..

Claire lehmann of Quillette has a beautiful take on this issue of blame and responsibility, on claire@quillette.com11 :

"What worries me about today’s ideologies is that they are quick to blame human suffering on an out-group, and slow to offer inner peace and restoration. Whether it is blaming one group for systematic oppression, or another group for pulling strings behind the scenes, there is always some group or other to scapegoat in times of trouble. In contrast, if one looks at the ancient wisdom of traditional religions, we see that followers and believers are encouraged to endure pain and suffering, not blame others, and not pretend that it doesn't exist.

"Saint Augustine taught early Christians that suffering was universal to all humans. In the 16th century, Martin Luther encouraged his followers to empathise directly with Christ in his suffering, imagining the physical pain of crucifixion, and then imagining his forgiving and restorative love.

"It’s not just Christianity which promotes such spiritual practices. Tibetan Buddhists regularly meditate on their own death. Theravada Buddhists encourage a practice whereby one actively visualises the slow decay of one’s own corpse.

"While this may sound grotesque to our modern Western sensibilities, the psychological effects are far from it. The point of such contemplative practices is twofold: First, they promote the radical acceptance of reality by forcing us to look at what we’d rather turn away from. And second, they create gratitude. After sitting and contemplating our own pain and death, our gratitude for being alive is renewed, and we become thankful for the smallest of everyday experiences; watching a leaf falling to the ground, a soft breeze on the skin."

Very much worth thinking about as a start.

Joe

Don Aitkin said -

Dr Curry's conclusion appeals to me.

In context of the climate debate, the lesson from Covid-19 is this… the solution is problem solving and new technologies, not blame. While isolation and austerity can be invoked for short time periods, they are not solutions. The Covid-19 blame game didn't get in the way of finding a solution (i.e. vaccine). However, the rush to blame the fossil fuel companies and punish them is getting in the way of a sensible transition away from the worst impacts of fossil fuels on the environment.

Answer- Many believe that new technologies won't pollution issues- only reducing human population will- by reducing the birth rate in high population and high birth rate countries. Patrick Deneen says that the industrial revolution and libertarianism was predicated on increased control over the environment and a belief in unlimited growth and consumption which led to huge populations and pollution- in his view a change in mindset is required- not technology.

Canem Malum, if you're concerned about human population size and growth, I can recommend the book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. They use a sensible statistical approach to show that global population growth will cease in about 40 years, after which there will be major reduction in population sizes in many countries. In my view, if we can limited atmospheric warming to 1.5 degrees by about 2060, the anthropogenic climate change 'problem' will solve itself soon thereafter as fewer people begin to use fewer fossil fuels and other resources. In 100 years' time, people will look back at our current time and ask why were we so worried when economic prosperity was growing so quickly that human population growth stopped and solved the climate change problem with minimal cost to people and the environment.

Bernie Masters,

You have a very poor knowledge of how the world works and your understanding of the current positions of global warming and population growth is totally naive.

But keep thinking that everything will be alright if that is what makes you happy because I don't think you can handle the truth.

To Bernie Masters-

From my reading the longer term expectation medium is that it will reach 11 Billion by 2100- from looking at the figures below this seems likely perhaps even understated.

From this site- the worlds population has increased a billion/ fourteen years since the sixties. China and India have populations four times the size of the third largest US with similar land areas- Chinese and Indian's are two of the largest emmigrant groups.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

World
2019
7,673,533.97

This is interesting (from 2016)...

http://worldpopulationreview.com/continents/world-population

Here's a timeline of the world population growth:

Year 1: 200 million
Year 1000: 275 million
Year 1500: 450 million
Year 1650: 500 million
Year 1750: 700 million
Year 1804: 1 billion
Year 1850: 1.2 billion
Year 1900: 1.6 billion
Year 1927: 2 billion
Year 1950: 2.55 billion
Year 1955: 2.8 billion
Year 1960: 3 billion
Year 1970: 3.7 billion
Year 1985: 4.85 billion
Year 1999: 6 billion
Year 2011: 7 billion
Year 2025: 8 billion

Most people agree that population increases will continue, but there are arguments about the rate of increase...

The United Nations has gradually been revising its predictions downwards, and now believes that the world population in 2050 will be around 9 billion...

However, others believe that poverty, inequality and continued urbanization will encourage steadily increasing growth, particularly in countries in Africa and parts of Asia, where growth is already much higher than the global average.

Others believe that the current world population is unsustainable, and predict that humanity will simply not be able to produce enough food and oil to feed itself and sustain our industrial economy.

Country Population
China 1,367,485,388
India 1,251,695,584
United States 321,368,864
Indonesia 255,993,674

Rank City Population Country
1 Shanghai 24,256,800 China
2 Karachi 23,500,000 Pakistan
3 Beijing 21,516,000 China
4 Delhi 16,349,831 India
5 Lagos 16,060,303 Nigeria
6 Tianjin 15,200,000 China
7 Istanbul 14,160,467 Turkey
8 Tokyo 13,513,734 Japan
9 Guangzhou 13,080,500 China
10 Mumbai 12,442,373 India

...by metropolitan population Tokyo 36.9, Shanghai 34, Jakarta 30, Seoul 25.5, Guangzhou 25, Beijing 24.9, Shenzhen 23.3 , Delhi 21.7, Mexico City 21.3, and Lagos 21 million.

Hi Bernie,

Yes, the most developed countries now all seem to have stable/stagnant population growth or inexorable population decline, with low birth rates and the imminent threat of a growing proportion growing old, and having to be supported by fewer workers, who would be having even fewer babies.

China's birth rate has reached a peak and is now declining. So in less than a generation or so, its population will start to decline, as it is doing in Japan, most of Europe and Russia. India's population will reach ZPG perhaps a generation later, and most of Africa's another generation after that.

Australia's population is about to reach ZPG, and would start to decline if immigration was stopped completely. And once a population starts to age, with growing numbers of older dependants having to be supported by fewer numbers of workers, then a society is inevitably in trouble, unless some incentives were offered to encourage women to forgo careers for a time and have, say, three kids, as Costello suggested a generation ago.

But of course, babies grow up to be working adults, and in turn, they grow older to become part of the relatively growing population of dependants.

Although food production is technically unlimited, given improvements in food strains, production techniques, use of water, better storage, the opening up of vast areas of land by nuclear-powered desalination plants, etc., this may not be any sort of problem. Older populations needing to be supported by fewer populations is going to be the burden, until countries achieve a dynamic birth-death balance. No country has done that yet.

And of course, any deliberate policy of population reduction would have to be done very slowly across centuries: after all, a deliberate population reduction of, say, 0.1 % p.a. would cut the numbers of young by, say, 5 % between the ages of 0 and 60, i.e. in 60 years: declining numbers in younger generations would have a continual burden of financially supporting a comparatively growing population of dependants.

Joe

Why do the young have to support the old at all?

And everyone over 60 is not useless- many people over 80 are not useless.

If we pair back government services- make sure everyone has modular low maintenance low red tape housing- a low maintenance high quality low cost food supply- then we can reduce taxes on the young and the old.

I think many older people are better at looking after themselves and have more improvisation skills than the young.

Therefore less young people- no problem.

There are a lot of businesses that rely on growing families for their growth perhaps.

I can't see the problem- maybe I don't understand.

I agree with your views of the future, loudmouth2. The population declines in developed countries will actually provide a boost for immigration from developing countries in order to provide the workers to maintain the economy and generate the wealth needed to support rapidly aging populations. So I expect to see developed countries significantly increasing their migrant and refugee numbers over coming decades.

CM,

Wow, scratch a fascist .....

Yes, maybe everybody should work until they drop, like our gr-grandparents had to do. Weak bastards. Maybe only pansy societies allow older people to retire and spend thirty-odd years at leisure, funded by others. Unless, of course, they've inherited great wealth.

You assert, why should young people, or working people, pay taxes to support bludging older people ? Perhaps because, sooner or later, they will grow old in their turn. Perhaps we can then feed them into grinders and desiccators, so that most of us (except those of us born into wealth), in time, can become fertiliser for future generations to consume ?

I think your philosophy has actually been tried before. It demonstrated the human potential for utter inhuman evil, but if it's your thing, then be honest and go for it.

Joe

Foul-Mouth and Bernie Masters,

Maybe one of you can give us an explanation of how increasing industrialization acts to lower the birth rate in a society.

Misop,

Dumb-dumb. The industrialisation of societies requires more skilled people, and fewer 'work-horses' who tend to be the women doing all the drudge work. In agricultural societies, women tend to have to do the bulk of the work AND have more children. John Caldwell found, fifty or more years ago, that universal education dramatically dropped the birth-rate in developing countries, by increasing the cost of education on the one hand, and pulled children out of the work-force on the other, at least until they were twelve or fourteen or fifteen.

When women gain more education, they tend to have fewer children, not to mention the obvious that they are more likely to stay in better-paying jobs. And of course, the pill helps. One reason developed countries have such low birth rates is that women have taken to education and chosen careers over children.

If you ever go to university, you may learn all of this in more detail.

Joe

Foul-Mouth,

You are on the right track but you have not grasped the actual relationship between women and births that results in a lowering of the birth rate in industrializing societies.

You think women become educated so automatically population starts to decline and that you don't need to understand anything beyond that because somehow in your world everyone should know it too.

I could tell you the answer, but I won't. I'm content to know that I know and you don't.

Everyone, please ignore Mr Opinion. I think he's a Russian bot designed to try and make us all look stupid or ignorant. To date, he's contributed absolutely nothing to the discussion, so just ignore him.

Thanks, Bernie, will do :)

Cheers,

Joe

Foul-Mouth and Bernie Masters,

It's no effort on my part. Believe me when I say that it doesn't take much to make the two of you look stupid and ignorant.

I do it for the sheer enjoyment.

Mr Opinion, if you are being honest with us, then I can only reply by saying you need to take your medication and have a sleep, since your contributions are worthless and the only person you are upsetting is yourself.

This is my understanding..

The link between economic growth and labour ended in the seventies from memory.

Loudmouth said that- "The industrialisation of societies requires more skilled people, and fewer 'work-horses' ". Yes but the government and universities are importing people to satisfy this skills need rather than training people- creating a larger dependent population.

The trick for the business community is to artificially increase the number of consumers while reducing the number and costs of workers by bringing in desperate poor immigrants- increasing their profits on both sides. At some stage the consumers are squeezed on both the demand and supply sides- cost of goods and income.

One way to reduce the number of children is by increasing the cost of parents keeping them by increasing their time in education- this also reduces the productivity of society. "Skills" development perhaps need to be transferred from the university level to the high school level- with less red tape and more focus on productivity- and the teachers at the school level need to have a skills mix that focuses on productivity.

Also as Burnham said Managerialism has meant that it is harder for people to switch jobs due to skills/ certification requirements- this also has an impact on productivity- creating more dependence.

The government has a role in coordinating the transition of children into productive roles in the nation and rewarding those commensurate with their contributions- smoothing out social factors that impede productivity- etc, etc.

The universal university system appears to have had both a positive and a negative impact in this transition- and currently has a fair dominance over the process perhaps creating a monopoly in the name of standardization and quality

I think that the Liberal Globalists on the left and the right are going to have to stop dragging their feet on population reduction and find a way. My preference is through birth control as I believe this causes the least suffering. As we waste time the problem and the solution becomes worse. We need to take control from those 'playing chicken with humanity'. We need to disenfranchise Liberal Globalists from power and insert those with a more responsible and practical vision. After all it is the (Locke) Liberal philosophy that has led to this disaster.

Canem Malum, exactly what disaster are you referring to? Nuclear war, a pandemic with 80% morbidity like Ebola, mass starvation that killed tens of millions as experienced in China and the USSR under communism, the Holocaust or a truly global world war?

As for the need to force people to stop having large families, it's already happening. Read the book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson and you'll see strong evidence that human population growth is just 30 or 40 years away, after which human population numbers will decline significantly as is already happening in Japan, Italy, Russia and soon China.

CM,

Compulsory birth control ? For everybody or only for certain unter-gruppen ? Is your appointment as Minister for Compulsory Population Control imminent ?

Populations around the world are self-controlling and either static or declining in most of the developed world - Europe, the US, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia (if we abstract the effects of immigration). China's birth-rate has started to fall, despite the relaxation of the idiotic one-child policy (maybe singletons get used to be pampered little gods), so in a generation or so, its population will start to fall. India will be maybe a generation behind, and most of Africa maybe another generation behind that.

So you won't have to send in your CPC police just yet. Shelve those offender-relocation plans at Oodnadatta :)

The world produces enough food to feed ten billion people, but distributes it inequitably and inefficiently:

http://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-to-feed-10-billion-people-so-why-does-hunger-still-exist-8086d2657539#:~:text=However%2C%20global%20food%20production%20is,are%20at%207.6%20billion%20currently).

With seven billion people producing food enough for ten billion people, population is simply not the issue. And if Australia had nuclear-powered desalination plants all around its costs, pumping water inland, it could increase world food production by 10 %.

Joe

Many people have seen massive increases in the cost of power and water and living expenses. Most people can see the population driven shortages in their lives.

Loudmouth said 'the world produces enough' may not be supported by the majority given the increases in prices (including land housing prices) the decreases in jobs including job security- most just don't know what to do about it- and they are afraid- as FDR said the only fear is fear itself- the majority can't hold the authorities accountable- that horse has bolted- it needs to form new political parties support new candidates and replace the system.

Loudmouth's Socialism Blank Slate won't fix the world. Neither will global free trade. We must reward those nations and communities that are responsible at the different levels of the hierarchy and penalise those that aren't.

Nations need to take responsibility for their populations we should have trade restrictions on those that don't- and don't take care of their workers- there is a hierarchy of nations and their treatment of workers- trade with low quality IR nations can undermine workers rights and undermine the global order.

We must look to the way things were run in our grandparents time- and adopt some of their principles- a more traditional form of living- Traditional communities are the ones behaving responsibly vs population- most of us have all the freedom we want- we have broad freedom within wide constraints- despite the 'dog whistling' of the left for still greater 'freedom' for example for the LGBTI community- which most people don't identify with- and can be a burden on productivity and the community.

Probability not possibility.
The world needs more responsibility and it needs to focus more on the happiness of the many (probability) rather than the happiness of the few (possibility).

Decreasing world population 'will' increase the relative amount of resources- reducing hardship and suffering.

Loudmouth said 'the world produces enough'- someone once said 'life wasn't meant to be easy'- many know from what they see- we can do much better.

'Immortality is yours- take it'

CM,

Not sure how you leap to Socialism - I don't think Socialism, at least Marxist or Leninist Socialism - can 'fix the world'. It degenerates into fascism or something like it within a very short time, it comes to depend on its executioners to drive its unwilling producers: it certainly did in Russia, China, Cuba, perhaps Venezuela. It has nothing to offer the world except by way of bad example.

And one signature of such 'socialism' is that production usually collapses, and that peasants have to be kept on the land regardless of inevitable famines.

So any link between food production and socialism is pretty tenuous, if not completely counter-intuitive.

If anything, it will be capitalism which drives increases in production, since it endlessly seeks opportunity. And usually finds it eventually.

Joe

Foul-Mouth,

I just read your explanation of socialism and fascism.

I have never thought of them in those terms.

And as a sociologist I doubt if I ever will.

Misop,

Then you need to go back to your Weber and Tawney, don't you ?

Joe

The arty-farty young climate change protesters who can only complain and blame, on one hand

and the older, but boring, technologists who can solve the problem...that the young don't listen to.

I think that nobody can rationally deny that the
planet has a finite amount of resources or that
it can tolerate only a limited amount of pollution.
Therefore if world population continues to grow rapidly
and if pollution and resource depletion continues at an
increasing rate, sweeping social changes await us.

The time for the blame game should be long past.
The time for action is now!
Solutions not blaming are needed.

Hi Foxy,

Welcome back ! I suspect that population growth is slowing and, perhaps not in our lifetimes, will stabilise and start to decline. Not good news for half-wits like Misop or CM, certainly, but that's how it seems it will be:

http://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

What is 'blame' ? Attribution of fault, I suppose. The first step in the road to working out how to overcome a problem. Of course, the Misop and Trumpf approach is to think that, once we can find someone or something to blame, then that's it, problem solved. No, more like the first of fifteen rounds.

Love,

Joe

Dear Joe,

I certainly hope that you're right. That our population
shall stabilise and keep increasing. Hopefully solutions
will be found to help solve our problems, especially those
of resource depletion. We do not need to change our life
styles - and not keep consuming and demanding more and more.

cont'd ...

Ooos - I left out the word - "And NOT keep increasing".
Excuse my error.

Ooops - again.

We do NEED to change our life-styles.

(So there's where the "not" went to).

Please excuse.

To Foxy- Mixing the words up happens to us all. Just a reminder you've used 3 of the 4 posts allowed per article per day. I need to pace myself more than in the General Threads.

Thanks Foxy for your feedback.

I think we need much more than just suspicions that 'population growth is slowing'- if population growth is slowing it means the population is still growing at a reduced rate- weasel words to justify more growth- we need to see and confirm an actual reduction in population to reduce suffering and resource scarcity. To me it seems much easier to increase population if we reduce the population too much than to decrease it- there are many complicit in a growth mindset that need to be firmly managed. In the contemporary context the risks of growth are usually higher than the risks of not growing.

There is a business growth paradox- perhaps strictly speaking not all businesses have to grow continuously- so long as their income is greater than their costs they can survive.

Businesses can grow by acquisition, by sales, etc- there is "the law of diminishing marginal returns".

At some stage perhaps the activities of businesses tend to "return to the water" and disappear into the community- though government red tape seems to discount this effect considering them "ongoing concerns". In ancient and old times businesses were run out of homes in a more organic flexible way as part of life- perhaps modern business is a form of protectionism- with government regulation supporting it- often for ostensively different reasons such as quality and safety- that is not to say that protectionism isn't valid in many cases.

The manor houses of Britain in the 1700's seem to be centres of business supporting a labour force of dependent peasants- this then evolved into the factories of industrialism.

It seems that stability is important to avoid suffering and to maximize productivity- but many consider social mobility to be important too- and this can create instability.

Maybe there is a link between these things and the desperate impetus for growth.

Dear Canem Malum,

Hopefully we are more advanced today in understanding
which economic levers can move us in the right direction.
To a very significant extent, the separate paths of
ecology and economics is possibly the cause of our problem.
We must not let it be a fatal flaw.

Thanks for your feedback Foxy. Some interesting points- a Macro-Economic perspective- I generally favour a more Micro-Economic perspective but- there you go.

Uncertain source of information...

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNazhjUIrHePir_sJ_q6eow

peyton
6 days ago

Alice Friedemann, in her 60s, no kids by choice, and prolific writer with a hard-science background, posted this interesting and refreshingly direct information:

"Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. The more people there are, the less one individual matters." - Isaac Asimov . . .

Humans have controlled population sizes since time immemorial. As sociologist Jack Parsons said, “population control is an ancient institution.” Even cornucopian economist Julian Simon said, “every tribe known to anthropologists, no matter how ‘primitive,’ has some effective social scheme for controlling the birth rate.”

Some of our oldest literary documents, the Babylonian “Atra Hasis” circa 1750 B.C. and the Philippine Code of Sumakwel from 1250 B.C., contain population control policies.

Confucius, Plato, the “first city planner” Hippodamus in Greece, the Indian sage Kautilya, the influential Catholic Church figure Tertullian, and even Benjamin Franklin, all spoke of the dangers of overpopulation and the need to manage our numbers - before Malthus ever entered the scene.

Today’s population sizes– unprecedented... made possible by the unprecedented energy supply from fossil fuels. (Factors driving reduction need) 1) the inability of a reduced future energy regime to support our current numbers, and 2) the destructive impact (of us on the planet, non-humans, us) .

Best estimated optimum global sizes of one to three billion indicate that populations virtually everywhere need to be reduced. Given our sheer size of eight billion, reductions will take a very long time. A global one-child policy enacted by around 2045 would get us down to roughly 3.5 billion by the end of the century. On the other hand, business as usual will leave us with over 10 billion people by 2100. Our recommendations are made in light of this daunting reality and out of a commitment to reduce suffering.

What a silly article.

Why is the author and the writer he quotes talking about solving a problem that they both don't believe is real?

Is it some way of getting around having to accept there is an issue before doing something about it?

Either both of them need to come clean and acknowledge what is evident to most of the thinking population of this planet or they should just keep on being themselves.

Foxy & CM,

On the relationships between women's education and timing/amount of child-bearing:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data#:~:text=The%20economic%20theory%20of%20fertility,power%2C%20including%20on%20family%20size.

In many backward societies, there is a preference for male children, so in societies where child-bearing starts early and often, it will be the girl children who may be 'sacrificed'. BUT in societies where women can forgo child-bearing in favour of education, and higher forms of employment than the fields, they may prefer not to marry, to marry later, and not to have so many kids, or any at all.

So trying to adjust a society's future population is going to be extraordinarily difficult. Too few kids and - fifty years later - it is discovered that an ever-smaller number of working people have to support an ever-larger number of old non-working people, who (if they're lucky) sometimes look after their one grand-child. And how does a society dictate to women how many kids they will have, like it or bloody not ?

All a bit academic, since so many societies now are experiencing stagnant or slightly-falling populations (South Korea, Japan, Russia, most of Europe, the US and Australia without immigration). In a generation or so, China's population will start to slowly fall, perhaps disastrously. A generation later, India's. A generation later still, maybe most of Africa's.

And that's something that all the Chicken Littles in the world can't do anything about either way.

I suspect that an annual population decline of more than 0.1 % p.a. could indeed be disastrous, i.e., 0.1 % fewer babies being born than people dying, i.e. i.e. more than 2.5-3 % per generation, or 9 % from the grandparents' to the grandchildren's generations. How any of that can be controlled is perhaps going to be impossible to control and/or dictate for all those OLO inner-dictators.



Joe

Thanks for your feedback Loudmouth-

Loudmouth said "I suspect that an annual population decline of more than 0.1 % p.a. could indeed be disastrous, i.e., 0.1 % fewer babies being born than people dying, i.e. i.e. more than 2.5-3 % per generation, or 9 % from the grandparents' to the grandchildren's generations."

Answer- I don't believe what you have said here. Feel free to believe it yourself. Maybe you could back up your claims more to support your statements. I call them statements because what you have said is not really an argument.

Anyway thanks for your feedback Loudmouth.

Canem Malum, read Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson and some of your questions will be answered.

To Bernie Masters- Here is some information on the book "Empty Planet" you recommended.

http://steadystate.org/book-review-empty-planet-the-shock-of-global-population-decline/

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-empty-planet-the-shock-of-global-population-decline-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson-people-will-disappear-5lr726vn0

http://www.wsj.com/articles/empty-planet-review-a-drop-in-numbers-11549497631

Mr. Stone is an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.

http://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Darrell-Bricker/Empty-Planet--The-Shock-of-Global-Population-Decline/23364359

http://overpopulation-project.com/review-of-empty-planet-the-shock-of-global-population-decline-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson-part-1/

From my understanding it appears that the population of the world is increasing significantly faster than effects due to female education reducing it- but I haven't read the book or seen what data they are actually using

Canem Malum, thanks for the links but:
the first link is nit-picking with a focus on economics and not particularly relevant or useful
the next two are protected by pay walls
the 4th isn't a review
the 5th also nit picks and is not much of a review of the authors' claims.
My suggestion is you read the book and make up your own mind.

To Bernie Masters- Yes I was rushing. If I have time I'll do some better research. But I don't think I'll be reading the whole book.

From what you and Loudmouth have alluded their conclusion relates to female education as being a major causal influence over birth rate reduction in countries with female education and perhaps "female social exaltation and ascension".

Your contributions have said that India is one generation 30 years from population reduction- Africa is two generations 60 years from population reduction.

Sadly it appears that we may not have 30 years to reduce the population as the worlds population is currently increasing by 1 billion every 14 years.

The world is growing at 1.05 %/y Year 2020 Pop 7,794,798,739

Any compound interest calculator will tell you that the population will be 9 B in 14 years at this rate.

http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/compound-interest-calculator.php

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

It appears from this site that Africa is currently 1,357,960,901-
At 2.5 % Africa will be- 1,738,305,267 in 10 years.

Lets hope the growth rate continues on a downward trend and people that live in high density countries stay there