Well said, daggett :)

Odd that Malcolm was a media adviser to the Democrats - that Party for a couple of decades had a population policy, voted for again and again by the great majority of the membership, pretty much along the lines of what Sandra has been arguing for.

But the policy was white-anted from within by the likes of Sid Spindler, Andrew Bartlett, and no doubt M King, making the idea of the party's policy formulation being democratic somewhat laughable. No wonder it went bust.

Somehow Malcom and his fellow-growthists have a brain seizure immediately they hear the word population, and come up with howlers like his conclusion that people arguing for population to come into balance with the environment have a "loathing for every human".

Just the opposite. If the human population grows to the point where it overhwhelms its support system (9 billion, which is the projected population for 2050, will do it), the only long-term consequence will be for the human race. The planet itself will recover within a few centuries and humanity will have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

The very reason humanity needs birth control (after a century of death control through modern medicine) is its future survival. Those who warn about the population do so not because they "loathe" humans but because they would like to see the human race continue to exist.

But for Malcolm, this is clearly hard to grasp. What do you want, Malcolm - the numbers to keep growing to the point where there ALL the resources have reached their limits? What then - resource wars, of course, famine on an unimaginable scale, disease running riot, and the whole of humanity in peril.

Malcolm 25,000 people a DAY are dying of starvation, now. This situation will not be made any better by the arrival of another 2.5 billion in the next half century. 2.5 billion was the entire population of the world in 1950!

Tenacious indeed, clownfish. And always good for a laugh. According to Ho Hum's fave Spiritual Philosopher who clearly has a penchant for Capitalizing Concepts like Green Domain and Tipping Point to make Silly Simplistic Ideas sound substantial, Gaia is self-balancing but our Planetary Ecosystems are heading for collapse. Well, which is it? I suspect most populophobes are first born or only child baby boomers who never did like the idea of more babies around. How dare these newbies take over My World!

Aust without immigration has negative pop growth.Even if everyone has 3 children the pop still falls because of accidents and disease,infertility etc.Population is really only the problem in poor countries where they have up to a dozen children.

So the Geeenies had better take the poor countries to task on this one,but ah they won't listen.Somehow ,it is all our fault even with negative replacement rates.

Economists have long been weighing and measuring Malthuse's ideas and the general concensus is that up until 1800 or so Malthuse's view of the economy was right and applied almost universally. After that he was wrong, with the major difference being the rate of innovation which kicked up sharply at that time. This is thoroughly discussed in 'A Farewell to Alms' by Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California. You may not agreed with the main thesis of the book - which is not relevent here - but there is little doubt about the basic point above.
The argument now is that the rate of innovation and rise of populations using new technology has strained the earth's whole eco system and run into absolute limits on resources. This is a different argument which has nothing to do with Malthuse (although it is also pretty gloomy like his theories), but basically there is simply no support for it in any of the figures. There are some local eco-strains but global temperatures have been going down not up (look at the figures on Hadley, NOAA or UAH), and resource prices in real terms have been trending down over the decades not up. Of late, after a big spike, this even seems to be applying to oil, despite all the screaming about 'peak oil'. One would think that easy-lift oil must run out sooner or later, but when? Best to find another crisis..

plerdsus: "an elementary exercise in arithmetic that the only way the world could support a population of 9 billion would be with a substantial cut in first world living standards".

OK. Let's road test plerdsus' "elementary exercise in arithmetic", and the other Malthusians' "intuitive" mathematical processes around "the Human Being Question" (a la "Armenian Question", "Jewish Question", "Irish Question", etc.). Clownfish got in first on this screamingly obvious point, but I'll try getting Malthusians to follow the bouncing-ball here...

10,000 BC
Living standards: PRIMITIVE.
Population: very small.

200 BC
Living standards: STILL PRIMITIVE (a bit less crap). Localized occurrence of food surpluses and basic infrastructure.
Population: fraction bigger.

1850 AD
Living standards: LEAPS & BOUNDS DUE TO TECHNOLOGY. Majority at primitive, but hitherto unseen access to efficiencies in transport, manufacturing, information, food surpluses, etc.
Population: considerable spike upwards.

2000 AD
Living standards: WIDE ACCESS TO CIVILIZED ADVANCEMENT. Ongoing improvement since industrial and green revolutions. Still many challenges for neglected and underprivileged majority, but negligible total still in primitive conditions. Near-universal advancement in life expectancy.
Population: 6 billion, largest to date.

Looks like plerdsus won't be reappearing on 'Top Gear'! Maybe s/he could start a new, dark fantasy game show with a catchy title like "Malthus-matics" or "The Biggest Genocidalist"? Not suitable for children, of course...

[As I suggested earlier, these guys must be really getting off on the anthropogenic rolling crashes euphemistically aka "the GFC", and the conditionally related swine flu outbreak... licking their chops in anticipation of some hefty bodycounts]

Btw, dagget: "...Of course I won't be holding my breath..." Ah but you should do so dag. It'd be a respectable case of 'leadership by example' instead of what still seems no more than irrational misanthropic hypocrisy. After all, you're using up too much of that "finite oxygen" already so precisely calculated by your omnipotent Malthusian abacus-brain.