mil-observer,

If you had read my previous post, you would know that the FAO calculated a minimum of 0.053 hectares of arable land to adequately feed a person on the basis of the best modern farming technology, not Bronze Age methods.

Instead of sniping at people like me and attributing base motives or conspiracies to us, why not try pulling your head out of the sand? Look at the statistics on the Worldwatch site, say, on how we are experiencing shortages or losses of arable land, fresh water, fish stocks, biodiversity, fossil fuels and minerals that are vital for our technology, and capacity of the environment to safely absorb wastes. Check their numbers, if you can find a source that you won't immediately dismiss as part of a conspiracy. If prominent scientists who have been working on climate all their lives say that AGW is a potential threat and publish their evidence for this in peer reviewed journals, why shouldn't I believe them instead of someone who gleans information from random web sites and is perfectly prepared to believe scientists when they write on cancer therapy and the like?

Do you really believe that the global elite have been faking their opposition to AGW and are actually in a vast conspiracy with much of the world's scientific community? Why is this different from other conspiracy theories, such as that the Moon landings were faked, Elvis lives, or the aliens landed at Roswell and the world's governments are covering it up?

Yeah, Elvis, UFOs, and the emperor's mad abacus saying "the poor in their place".

I never even implied "secret" stuff about your views. I merely identified how your gullibility on AGW clearly serves powerful vested interests. That's why there's no significant opposition to AGW by a global elite so I could not, and did not, claim some more sinister "faking" there.

I restate for your benefit: Bush-Howard merely accommodated concerns among significant constituents, especially those resource sector producers, investors and donors, who had diversified little into the finance and other sectors. By the end of their terms, their meek efforts were disproved repeatedly by their own statements anyway.

"0.053 hectares per person": a magic, Malthusian number. What of such "multipliers" as infrastructure, including transport, irrigation, desalination, and fertilizing technology? Do not debase this discussion further by claiming that the same magic ratio applies with those factors too. No, the Malthusians would have the vast majority of humanity dependent on little more than oxen, prayers for rain, and Malthus' bosses in the imperialist East India Company.

Your reference to the euphemistically termed "Irish Famine" is another appalling demonstration of your misguided Malthusian faith. The pre-starvation population number is much closer to Ireland's current total, but the mid-19th century potato then could not spread in such diversity in that foreign clime and soil. As your own comment implies but does not explore, the potato was grown there precisely because of the relative efficiency of its production. That's an issue concerning a "political and economic system", which you're on record as not giving "a damn about". Ireland's rentier-based exploitation forced much of its populace to seek nutrition from relatively small plots, intensified by encroaching tithes and rents. "Colonial masters" did not "make matters worse" - they created the problem from the outset. Comparable European cases revealed similar political and economic causality. Therefore, you damn yourself with your glib political and economic apathy and primitivism. Or is it just middle class smugness and even cowardice?

It's obvious who populates the actual "global elite" backing AGW. For starters: World Bank economists pushing IPCC exec summaries.

And we must put a stop to the consumer-minded, wasteful chicanery driving this perverse AGW dogma. Middle class westerners consume and waste an inordinate amount of almost every resource; there is very little efficiency, but much ostentatious claim to such efficiency. "Recycling bins" whose contents nearly all deposit to landfill anyway; "recycling bags" that are largely unnecessary except to give some middle class consumers that extra glow of self-righteous superiority, and; a disposability in almost every major household purchase.

Of course such people would worry if the developing world followed suit! The trouble is, the developing world's much more efficient than that. During my time with middle class families in the developing "south", such people lived very comfortably, with constant access to internet and worldwide satellite TV. One such family I know very well leaves very little "footprint" because it lives efficiently in every aspect. The only excess I saw were among the very small minority of "westernized" types who'd spent years (typically) in the US and aped such bad habits as both fashion and status statement.

So the New Scientist spiel should renounce its alarmist simple-mindedness and paranoia. Instead of "with modern technology, it would take the resources of 3 earths to give everyone a modest European standard of living", it should state that it would take such resources only to fuel profligate, inefficient waste on a model of consumption and disposability that is largely rejected anyway.

The whole argument is spurious, and very conveniently so. The real point made there is that middle class westerners are hopelessly wasteful and inefficient (most can't even change their own sump oil), but that's just how they inevitably and irredeemably become - by default - simply because they live in a developed country.

Like all AGW pseudo-science and its compatible Malthusian genocidalism, such a mindset is intended to validate not only laziness and greed, but a much greater injustice against those many who can and do develop much more efficiently than from any template drafted in a decadent imperialist culture.

mil-observer,

No one is disputing that the British did terrible things in Ireland, but they had no way to force the Irish to procreate. Eventually families must have realised that any further subdivision of land would leave their children and grandchildren with no Plan B, that people would starve if the potato crop failed.

Likewise, no one is disputing that we could not do better at eliminating waste and discouraging conspicuous consumption. The Europeans are doing better than we are. According to the same New Scientist graph, it would take 5 or 6 Earths if everyone was to live like the average American or Australian. However, no country with a very low environmental footprint ranks high on the UN Human Development Index. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Highlight_Findings_of_the_WA_S0E_2007_report_.gif

I want something better for my (two) children than cramped high-rise accommodation, with noise, pollution, and lack of privacy, freezing cold in winter and a stifling sweatbox in summer, a joyless limited vegetarian diet, one shower and change of clothes a week, and plenty of neighbourhood monitors and secret police to see that no one rocks the boat. All so that some other morons can go on having big families for another generation.

You will have to be more convincing if you want to persuade people that you know more than the climatologists or the agricultural scientists at the UN or the Worldwatch Institute. Do some research on the costs for infrastructure and energy to supply desalinated water for agriculture or the costs to pump the desalinated water inland. Pull your head out of the sand.

No, pull yourself out of humanity and try leading by example in your nasty, simplistic depopulation scheme, misanthropic hypocrite. Such absolutist predictive certainty about what happens if others develop, and all based on "models", of course, just like the rubbish pushed on us by the World Bank men's IPCC and related scams.

On Europe: no, the UK and Netherlands are of course actually very wasteful and inefficient economies, because such countries remain central to the parasitic monetarist imperialism that caused this massive ongoing global crash.

And spare us the classic self-righteous, anti-Catholic and Malthusian explanation of the starvation in mid-19th century Ireland. You fail entirely to even acknowledge the actual effect from imperialist policy on the Irish people and the natural response of procreation in an effort to meet the oppressive labor needs and try a "reproductive lottery" whereby increased offspring raised the chances of wretched families escaping the poverty and extreme exploitation.

The same processes were at work at the same time on the other side of the world, in Java, under very similar Dutch policies. The population there spiked upwards, with increased subdivisions, to meet those oppressive challenges too. They could have just chosen not to procreate, you say, but then they would have been absorbed into a Dutch program of migrant-driven adjustment for that rentier system's intended "growth", forming as it did the Dutch colonialists' own (closely inter-related with the British) exploitative and inefficient imperial economy. No coincidence either that both British and Dutch imperialists also openly dominated the opium trade at the same time, trying to get as many hopelessly dependent junkies as possible to consolidate further their anti-human policies of globalizing enslavement.

With misanthropes like you cheering on such arrogant, parasitic empires, even the Romans would have degenerated much faster by being prohibited from such basic infrastructure as an aqueduct. "The financial burden of our perfectly finite monetarist system prohibits such a 'footprint' - it has no place on our finite abacus".

mil-observer,

You are clearly as emotionally wedded to your growthist notions as a Creationist is to the literal truth of the Genesis creation story and as impervious to rational argument or evidence. In fact, any attempt to introduce such is evidence of a conspiracy of some sort. Fine, although I see no point in further debating this, other than to suggest that you study some math and science, you know, such boring stuff as exponential functions and conservation of matter and energy. You might be able then to understand the physics of how greenhouse gases work and why, say, Q&A thinks as he does about the climate.

I do object to your dishonest debating tactic of reading things into my posts that I never said and never intended. I have never said or suggested any of the following:

1. I want some sort of cull. (I do think that people in most places would be better off and the planet in better shape if they had fewer babies.)
2. The 19th century Irish should have stopped reproducing altogether, instead of dropping back to replacement level to avoid an irresponsible further subdivision of land (perhaps 4-5 children per woman, given the high infant mortality rates at the time).
3. The current economic system is wonderful for all and produces no exploitation or injustices.
4. Imperialism is an excellent system, and the problems of the subject peoples were/are entirely of their own making. (I do reject the idea that poor brown (or white) people can do no wrong.)
5. The Europeans are not only doing better than we are, but are completely above reproach when it comes to using resources.