There are important things to be learned from this article for all proponents of population stabilisation including, Thomas Friedman, Mark O’Connor and the contributors to Online Opinion such as myself. The first thing is that when your ideas are popular you don’t need strong arguments in your favour. All you need to do, is revert back to “Millions of us hate your ideas, so just give up.”

I might be too generous but I sense from this article that Mark Lawson really understands that growth can’t go on forever and that environmental problems are easier to solve when there are less people, but he would prefer to be on the winning side. Mark never says “Growth can go on forever.” He says business and government want growth today, so we should all fall in line. Mark knows that Sustainable Population Australia policy is for BOTH sustainable water practices and population stabilisation, but he barks out the old “We’ll just do this magic trick to get more water” to fill out the article. Silly, but you don’t have to be clever when you are winning 100 to Nil.

Population advocates have stood on logic for too long thinking that an obvious argument like “growth can’t go on forever on a finite planet” would be good enough. Mark Lawson correctly points out it isn’t even close to good enough. Both major parties want more population growth.

We are not a species that is designed to look at the long term. Maybe that will change when commodity prices stay high for a few years. Maybe not. It hasn’t happened with housing. In some ways articles like these strengthen my resolve to keep fighting for a more sustainable society, because if the best arguments my opponent can raise are crap, I know I must be right

curmudgeonathome , DATA SET

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/

<the Wilkins Ice Shelf comment as it has reminded me about this particular piece of nonsense. There are some people who have decided that the change in this shelf is evidence of warming. As temperatures globally have been going down not up, I'm not sure what changes in a particular region are meant to prove.>

A 3 C warming of the Antarctic Peninsula, 10,000 year old ice shelves collapsing, and an accelerating rate of ice shelf collapse over the past few decades hardly conflicts with the idea of warming.

<Those who point to the antartica and greenland supposedly melting faster than usual also have to explain away the recordings to the Topix satellite run by the University of Colorado (will supply link if you want, don't have it on me). This measures sea levels globally and, again, sorry, the results of recent years are the exact opposite of what the models forecast.>

According to the University of Colorado,

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

sea level has been rising by an average of over 3 mm since 1992.

"Since August 1992 the satellite altimeters have been measuring sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy. The TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) satellite mission provided observations of sea level change from 1992 until 2005. Mean sea levelJason-1, launched in late 2001 as the successor to T/P, continues this record by providing an estimate of global mean sea level every 10 days with an uncertainty of 3-4 mm."

Given the uncertainty of the measurement, calling the trend based on a couple of years of data cannot be done with any confidence. What can be stated with great confidence is that sea level over the past century has been rising at an accelerating rate.

From wikipedia: "Tilting at windmills is an English idiom which means attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting otherwise-unwinnable battles. The word “tilt,” here, comes from jousting."

Using this definition, one could argue that the problem might be 'unwinnable' because it does not appear our governments are listening but overpopulation is not imaginary. Have you ever been to India and seen for yourself the effects of great numbers of people sharing limited space, limited resources and limited access to social support? You can always fit more people in but what quality of life do you aspire to for those populations?

The author makes a mistake in first assuming that those who argue for sustainable populations believe that Australia alone can fix the problems of burgeoning populations and diminishing resources. It is a global problem.

Australia and Australians can only hope to ensure or lobby for rational governments that can think freely from global trendiness and economic self-interest to prevent similar problems here on our largely arid continent.

Yes we can use technology, conserve water, share resources and reduce our living standards to embrace larger populations to some extent. Lets face it, our living standards in the West are far better than our neighbours.

But to deny that resources are limited and that populations will be constrained by natural or man-made disasters denies the obvious - our escalating global populations.

The reason politicians, and many others, want growth to continue is because it is all we currently know to preserve prosperity. We desperately need economists and others to develop a new paradigm for a steady-state economy, or better still one which can prosper in the face of declining population and reduced resources. It is curious that our parents and grandparents, who lived in times of little or no resource stress, were far more thrifty and careful in their habits. Things were, however, much more expensive, so there was no question of replacing appliances every other minute as we are expected to do now.

On the population front, everyone must have a figure at which they would consider the world's population to be maxed out, be it 3, 6, 12, 24 or 48 billion. Whatever the figure and whenever it occurs, we will one day have to confront a no-growth situation (or, more likely, a catastrophic decline) and we will have not more than 50 years to adapt from half-full to full-up and from growth-as-usual to no growth at all. Proponents of sustainable population sensibly want this situation considered and addressed for the benefit of us all.

Although dated, still relevant:

http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html

hat-tip dick