[HN Gopher] The Global Population Crisis That Never Was
___________________________________________________________________
The Global Population Crisis That Never Was
Author : mellowhype
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-03-01 09:35 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rogerpielkejr.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rogerpielkejr.substack.com)
| tonetheman wrote:
| Maybe there is not a population crisis. But if you interrupt the
| supply chain where I live in the smallest bit (as we have seen)
| then there is not enough food for every person. Perhaps that is
| not a population crisis but as we add more people it will only
| get worse. Maybe enough people are dying that it evens out.
| 74B5 wrote:
| Poluation x Goods/Services x Energy/Resource demand x Waste
| production = Human impact on earth
|
| It seems fairly common to picture the earth heading to an
| unstable overpopulation but imo this is only a comfortably
| narrowed down perspective on large scale problems. Especially for
| western countries, it is tempting to focus on the global
| population issue because this is primarily a phenomenon of rural,
| poor regions, so not their own. The other three mayor factors at
| play here would unfortunately require to rethink basic economics
| and this would reach deep down into societies. I suspect some
| sort of psychological "the others fault" self defense emerging in
| large. I have to be honest here, i fell for it too at first.
|
| Even if the overpopulation would be the only factor we face, its
| solution would still be large scale and system questioning
| because either you throw away any moral standards or you end up
| creating and distributing wealth in a sustainable way. No, simply
| the delivery of contraception is no solutions only good
| healthcare and especially the education of girls/women.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| It's possible to generate energy, harvest resources and store
| waste with minimal impact to other life on earth.
| foobiekr wrote:
| This is a "no true Scotsman" argument. We quite obviously
| have not demonstrated this is an actual possibility.
| subsubzero wrote:
| There are so many catastrophes that have been thrust upon people
| by the media that never borne out their outcomes. A few of note:
|
| -In the mid 80's every newspaper in California was warning of
| killer bees[1] that were going to invade the state and kill many
| people, alot of my family members were quite nervous about them
| and the media made a point about its not a matter of if but when
| these bees arrive in the state, the coverage was blanket until
| about the 90's when it died down.
|
| - Y2k meltdown - This was also hyped beyond belief by the media
| and doomsday scenarios were drummed up to an extraordinary frenzy
| until really nothing bad happened after the new years[2], I
| remember being at a new years party in menlo park and people were
| saying that the lights may go out due to the bug.
|
| - In the years 2017/2018 the media was drumming up automation of
| all jobs by AI/robots/self driving cars, people were extremely
| worried that the most wouldn't have a job in a few years, but in
| 2019 unemployment hit a 50 year low[3], I'm not saying this won't
| come to pass, just the media's timeline was totally wrong.
|
| The stuff thats been really bad, 9/11, financial crisis of 2008,
| covid-19 has all come on very suddenly and most people were
| caught totally off guard.
|
| The things people should really worry about are:
|
| Lack of water (aquifers that took tens of thousands of years to
| be filled are close to be drained in many parts of the midwest
| and west[4] of the US.
|
| A large solar storm similar to the Carrington event[5] knocking
| out all of the electrical grid(and electronics) of a large
| portion of the planet.
|
| A supervolcano/or caldera erupting and cooling the earths climate
| down dramatically, think crops dying and extreme famine.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee [2] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem [3] -
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019...
| [4] -
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishin...
| [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
| roenxi wrote:
| I think a mindset has developed in some circles that runs "well,
| in the 1960s it looked like we were all doomed and we did fine
| without a plan. So if it looks like we're all doomed now we can
| just rush in head first and we'll be fine".
|
| Planning to be pleasantly surprised is not a clever plan. The
| fact that the world didn't end from 1960-2020 in defiance of the
| evidence of 3,000BCE through 1960AD is not that comforting.
|
| There will also be doomsayers, but there will also always be
| resource constraints.
| jansan wrote:
| I never fails to puzzle me that a potential rising of the sea
| level of 50cm by 2050 resulting in 11% loss of land in Bangladesh
| is seen as a major threat, while at the same time its population
| growth that will roughly double in the same period is brushed off
| as nothing.
|
| Also, news tell us that in Syria climate change has resulted in
| food shortage in recent years. But having to feed twice as many
| people from the same land compared to 1985 sure cannot be the
| reason, right?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| A quick googling suggests that Bangladesh's current fertility
| rate is around 2 births per woman, which is actually just
| _under_ replacement rate.
|
| The birth rate across the globe has been steadily on the
| decline for some time, there aren't many more places left where
| rapid doublings are still possible.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| There's almost nowhere in Asia with high fertility anymore.
| All 21st century population growth will be African,
| specifically sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are
| stubbornly holding around 4 to 4.5 births per woman. And the
| worst countries, like Somalia and Niger, are still well above
| 6 births per woman, declining by much less than 1 birth per
| woman per decade.
| chub500 wrote:
| Worst? You mean _highest_? These people will be caring for
| your kids in their nursing home.
| ericmay wrote:
| Sure, but I'd argue that the replacement rate itself is at an
| unsustainable level.
|
| Climate change and the loss of species and such is one
| manifestation of overpopulation. Covid-19 could be viewed as
| another, in my opinion.
|
| Obviously this is all rich coming from an American living in
| the suburbs (I don't really see what my alternatives are),
| but I can't help but think we can only sustain around a
| billion people without destroying the planet (speculation).
|
| We live in a golden age of cheap energy and consumption.
| People get in gasoline powered cars and drive a mile down the
| road to get a snack. That's impossible to maintain. Not only
| do we have overpopulation, but we built unsustainable cities,
| predicated on infinite cheap energy ($2.50 gas). Electric
| cars won't fix this, although they'll help.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Sure, but I'd argue that the replacement rate itself is
| at an unsustainable level.
|
| ...I don't know what that even means. Or do you just mean,
| "we already have too many people, the population needs to
| go down"?
|
| Probably the biggest thing you could do, I'd say, would be
| to politically support pro-environment measures. There's a
| lot of "yes, but..." Americans who only support 'green'
| regulations and whatnot when it will not cause the
| slightest inconvenience to them. E.g.
|
| "Yes I support bike lanes, but this +0.25% sales tax
| increase to build them is just too much, taxes are already
| too high."
|
| "Yes I support mass transit, but I don't support
| redirecting any money from roads for cars to them because I
| drive a lot."
|
| "Yes I support higher density housing, but I don't want to
| hurt my neighborhood's character."
|
| You get the picture. From a practical perspective, America
| would easily make strong progress on reduced energy
| consumption, but the political will there is weak.
| ericmay wrote:
| > ...I don't know what that even means. Or do you just
| mean, "we already have too many people, the population
| needs to go down"?
|
| Hey there. Sorry for the poor choice of words. That's
| pretty much what I mean. I see comments where people
| mention a replacement rate for a country, and that maybe
| a country might be just at or slightly below the
| replacement rate. I believe that even at current levels
| we're far and away in excess of where we should be. So...
| when someone says "but Country N is now at the
| replacement rate" - I just think that the population at
| that level is beyond where it should be.
|
| > You get the picture. From a practical perspective,
| America would easily make strong progress on reduced
| energy consumption, but the political will there is weak.
|
| Completely agree, and include myself as one who is guilty
| here (to some extent). I try to minimize a lot of things,
| but ultimately it's hard when the environment we live in
| itself is very geared toward doing the opposite.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Personally, I don't focus on individual/free choices for
| the day-to-day at all, just policy. E.g. moralistic
| arguments about how people should ride bikes more are
| ineffective, you need actual on the ground changes in
| bike infrastructure to get real change for that sub-area.
| People trying to guilt each other constantly is just a
| distraction imo.
|
| I had a car in the states and don't have one now in
| Munich. Did my values change? No, not really, I just
| moved somewhere where a car was much less necessary.
|
| Now, I did still bike a fair bit in the states, but I
| didn't beat myself up over also driving a lot, because I
| recognized that the environment was not well set up for
| it in most places, which is how I got hit by cars twice
| the last year before I moved.
| jojobas wrote:
| There are way more people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what
| we consider a life worth living.
|
| As bloodthirsty capitalism pulls more and more people out of
| poverty we discover that putting a steak on everyone's table and
| a fresh car in everyone's garage is too taxing on the atmosphere,
| wildlife, forests and what not.
|
| We seem to have to choose between a smaller luxurious population
| and billions and billions of people living in pods eating
| synthetic food.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| Capitalism is the cause of poverty, not what ends it. If you
| look at the last decade, global poverty outside China has
| increased. Only within China has it decreased, for now by
| enough to offset the rest of the world.
|
| The problem is the constant expansion (which comes with warfare
| and extreme waste) that capitalism mandates.
| lupire wrote:
| China is capitalist and imperialist.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| It allows limited forms of private property and profit
| seeking in order to develop the productive forces. It's a
| way to avoid invasion or sanctions by the US while keeping
| the working class in control of the state.
|
| China doesn't extract profits through the export of capital
| at usury rates from other countries at gunpoint, though. It
| is not imperialist.
| jojobas wrote:
| China allows sweatshops that work people to suicide. CCP
| has nothing to do with the working class, it developed
| it's own bureaucratic class. Chairman Xi hasn't worked a
| day outside power structures as he was born to a bigwig.
| China does extract profits through usury, most of Africa
| is proof to that. It also buys up Western countries
| through universities and politicians. There's no honest
| way to look at it as anything else than an autocratic
| empire.
| rayiner wrote:
| > There are way to many people on Earth than Earth can sustain
| in what we consider a life worth living
|
| This point of view comes up a lot in connection with climate
| change, and I always find it incredibly offensive. My dad was
| reminiscing the other day about his happy childhood growing up
| in a village in Bangladesh in the 1950s. This was back when 1
| in 3 kids didn't live to the age of 5.
|
| Even an RCP 8.5 scenario isn't going to turn the developed
| world into Bangladesh circus 1950. Hell it won't turn
| Bangladesh into Bangladesh in 1950. People will still have a
| standard of living that makes life incredibly worthwhile,
| because _we as human beings were designed to need little to
| find life worthwhile._
|
| That's not an argument against investing in renewables or
| whatever. But the Malthusian arguments about climate change are
| quite misanthropic. Trump got in trouble for calling places
| "shithole countries." But nobody blinks and eye when someone
| casually implies that people in those countries would have been
| better off never having been born.
| captain_price7 wrote:
| I agree with your broader point- one shouldn't tell others
| that their life isn't worth living. But I'm afraid maybe
| you're downplaying the struggles a poor Bangladeshi have to
| go through.
|
| I currently live in Bangladesh. And my father made a off-
| handed comment few days ago about how there isn't many "thin"
| people in our village anymore. When he grew up in 60s, a big
| chunk of our village people didn't have two meals regularly,
| people dying of hunger wasn't so uncommon. Just two days ago
| a doctor friend told me hundreds of people die in his
| hospital every week due to lack of proper equipment. I have
| several times witnessed the heartbreaking scene in pharmacies
| where people ask for the price of a medicine, and then turn
| away without buying anything after hearing the price.
|
| Overpopulation at least partly contributes to this, if not
| the biggest contributor. It may not be a global problem, but
| it definitely is a problem for a country like Bangladesh (and
| maybe India too). I'm not saying this people's life is
| worthless, but I would definitely not want a new generation
| of people to go through this.
|
| Population control here is not just the pragmatic and
| necessary option, it's also the most humane thing to do.
| rayiner wrote:
| My dad works in public health, including in Bangladesh, I'm
| well aware of the issues. (That said, I think the anti-
| natalism of the international development field is under
| appreciated as a double-edged sword, as countries like
| South Korea and Singapore are beginning to find out.)
|
| My point isn't in disagreement with yours. Of course being
| poor is worse than being richer. My point is that even in
| Bangladesh, the level of prosperity is sufficient to exceed
| the threshold for humans to find life "worthwhile."
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Thank you both for expanding my perspective.
| jojobas wrote:
| One may be happy in a mud hut eating nothing but corn, but
| generally not after getting used to proper construction,
| sanitation, food etc.
|
| Recent history shows that there's no holding previously
| backwards countries from advancing their consumption. As
| Russians joke, the global famine will come when the Chinese
| start using forks.
|
| China, India and SE Asia are quickly upping their per-capita
| production and consumption of carbon-heavy goods. Brazil
| doesn't destroy Amazon out of spite.
|
| We have no moral right to say "Nonono, you can't do what we
| did in the 20th century and live like us!".
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| > We have no moral right to say "Nonono, you can't do what
| we did in the 20th century and live like us!".
|
| Yes, we do. Now that we know what the effects of climate
| change could be. That being said, we do have a moral duty
| to help out. Populations tend to grow slower when they
| become "more advanced", so it might not be the end of the
| world.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| We would have a moral right if we repented and
| retrofitted our society to be sustainable. We're not
| doing that.
| [deleted]
| vixen99 wrote:
| We? '... in what we consider a life worth living'?
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The biggest issue with Malthusian predictions is that humans are
| Earth's greatest resources. Nature is very unforgiving. It is
| human cultivation and exploitation of natural resources that
| allows for humans to thrive. The more we can educated and develop
| our population, the higher the chance of breakthroughs that
| enable us to support even more people with the same amount of raw
| resources.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is
| very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.
| woeirua wrote:
| What are you talking about? Humans have already irrevocably
| altered the natural ecosystem over the past 100k years. We
| have: killed off all the megafauna, domesticated thousands of
| plants, drastically changed the landscape through agriculture,
| literally changed the courses of rivers, diverted water all
| over the planet, etc. And that was all _before_ the modern era.
| kiliantics wrote:
| Sure, this sounds reasonable, but it's really not when you
| look at the magnitudes of our impact over time. It's clear
| that the actions of the last 50-100 years or so are in
| extreme excess of what can be stabilised by the global
| weather and ecological systems. We've gone from about two
| thirds remaining natural wilderness in the world in the early
| 1900s to one third remaining today. The continued survival of
| most species, including ours, is very much in danger if we
| don't reverse a lot of this.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| We should always value humans over other species, and if you
| disagree you're an enemy of our species.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| We don't, however, have any idea how to keep humans alive
| after killing of all the other species. We appear to be
| totally reliant on some part of the natural world continuing
| to work, and we don't know what part of it is required.
| Prudence suggests we be cautious about how much of it we
| decide to kill off.
| mint2 wrote:
| What if we found a living Neanderthal village. They're taking
| up space that an equivalent human village could, should we
| get rid of them?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I mean, I'd say Neanderthals _are_ humans. I 'm 2.x%
| Neanderthal myself, according to my DNA vendor.
|
| If we're talking about other sentient and moral species,
| those are admittedly hard questions.
| namdnay wrote:
| You can value humans over other species without assigning a
| nil value to the latter
| BurningFrog wrote:
| What does that mean concretely?
|
| Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000
| chicken lives = 1 human life?
| iterati wrote:
| More like "if all the bugs die because we use too many
| pesticides, the systems that support life on this planet
| will collapse."
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Which is exactly how someone caring only about human
| lives would reason.
| autosharp wrote:
| > What does that mean concretely?
|
| E.g. you value your spouse more than you value a random
| other human. It doesn't mean you don't value the other
| human.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| You can assign a value to both that says we should not
| harm these things.
| lupire wrote:
| We should always value our family and friends over others, or
| else you are an enemy of family and friends. Also race,
| religious and ethnic group...
|
| What's your point?
| OrbitRock wrote:
| Valuing humans over other species at all costs leads to
| humans collapsing our environment and thus harming humans.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Only if you apply the idea in a stupid and shortsighted
| way.
|
| I advocate for doing it smartly.
|
| It's a bit exhausting to have to point out something so
| obvious.
| OrbitRock wrote:
| Well then you come back around to valuing nature imo
| ravi-delia wrote:
| That assumes that population growth is somehow the primary
| cause of climate change and space expansion. The issue is lack
| of caring and technology, not population.
| kiba wrote:
| Human-only perspective? That is assuming we can thrive if not
| not without an ecosystem.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Return to monke.
| Animats wrote:
| The author has one anecdote about the US and India arguing over
| food aid, and he projects that into "population growth was not a
| problem".
|
| Why fertility rates declined worldwide is the big question.
| Worldwide, births per female were about 5 in 1960 and about 2.4
| worldwide now. That is a huge, and unexpected, trend. Japan,
| South Korea, and the EU are in actual decline. Nobody really
| expected a change that big. It's still not really understood. The
| usual explanations are contraceptives, more women working, etc.
| Lower sperm counts, maybe, but probably not.
|
| (Not central Africa, though. There, the fertility rate is still
| around 4.)
|
| India population growth - graph.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population
| danans wrote:
| > It's still not really understood.
|
| Is it really not that well understood? In countries and regions
| that are highly industrialized (like the societies you
| mention), having more than 2-3 children doesn't provide any
| more economic security like it does for largely agrarian and
| manual-labor based societies.
| pascalxus wrote:
| is it so hard to understand? the material wealth of the
| developed world has dropped by quite a large amount (at least
| for shelter, medical insurance, education). Don't trust those
| GDP per capita figures (even adjusted for PPP), they don't tell
| you the true story because inflation isn't being counted
| correctly and the basket of goods used is questionable at best.
| there's a lot of subsitutions going on in those figures that
| understate inflation.
|
| On an interview with an older guy from the 50s, he was
| explaining how a painter could have support a family and 6 kids
| and a house, all on a single income. Try doing that today.
| These days, it would be hard for a painter to just support
| himself, much less a wife, a house and six kids.
|
| In the US, in blue states, millenials are now spending upwards
| of 40 to 50% of their incomes just on shelter.
|
| In the bay area, it's not uncommon for couples in the highest
| income brackets to rent out rooms in their townhouse (notice i
| said townhouse) to make ends meat ( at least for those who
| bought recently). and that's just the top 2-3%. you can imagine
| how everyone else lives.
|
| We need to get away from using GDP per capita as a measure of
| wealth and instead use number of hours worked to earn
| necessities (shelter, food, water, transportation, education
| and medical).
| watershed123 wrote:
| Generally, high fertility is associated with a lower standard
| of living.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility)
|
| If people are functionally poorer than GDP per capita would
| have you believe, we would expect abnormally high fertility
| rates, not low.
| 8draco8 wrote:
| IMHO education plays huge role. More often people decide to go
| to collage, then have a career, people also learn what a huge
| effort have to be put into rising child. On top of that there
| is so many fantastic things that person can do and have to give
| up at least to some extend if having a baby. In my opinion
| those are huge factors. This is a reason why on average
| successful, well educated people tend to have less children
| even though they have all the resources to have a lot of them.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Agreed, the best way to raise the standard of living is to
| educate women and loan them money. They now have options.
| They are stuck being baby factories. When this happens,
| population growth quickly follows.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Citation to back up your comment:
| https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-
| the-...
| Geee wrote:
| I think it might be caused by the modern pension system.
| There's no need for children if pension is provided by other
| means.
| firebaze wrote:
| Humans are bad in estimating exponential growth (like, totally -
| we're good in suppressing bad news, and _very_ bad in accepting
| ideas we don't like)
|
| Still, we're depending on exponential growth (be it pension
| funding, companies, inflation, you name it).
|
| We're lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many
| people - we'll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that's not
| sustainable, too many people. Well, we'll be vegans! Oh wait, not
| sustainable also, we'll need gene editing (bad, but we'll accept
| that reaching a certain threshold). Well, then let's grow our
| food in vertical farms! Seems sustainable, until we reach the
| next (last?) limit.
|
| This expands to anything (ICE vs EE, flying vs train travel).
| Unless we accept this inherent flaw and restrict us accordingly,
| we'll outgrow anything.
|
| Oh well, then let's just ... ? Go to mars :) (I truly believe
| this is the only mid-term sustainable1 option, since we'll never
| be able to have at most only 2 children as a population - and I'd
| love to gain as much hate for this statement as possible if I
| were proven false).
|
| 1 Mars will not be enough in just a few centuries, probably even
| just decades
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Humans are indeed bad at estimating exponential growth, but you
| may have fallen into your own trap. We have already vastly
| exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet in Malthus's time.
| The reason is exponential growth in technology. Technological
| progress is dependent on current level of technology, and
| population. As population grows, so does technology. It's hard
| to imagine how to effectively feed the theoretical maximum
| population, but then again it was hard to imagine profitably
| extracting oil from arctic shale or natural gas from long-
| tapped reserves in Appalachia. I wouldn't bet against this
| exponential continuing long into the future.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| As I've gotten older and seen predicted doomsdays come and go,
| I've started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate part
| of human psychology.
|
| I'm not aware of any era or place where many people have not
| expected the world to meet disaster soon. It's a part of all
| major religions.
| solarengineer wrote:
| Several warnings have come true: rising sea levels,
| disappearance of bees, extinction of several animal species,
| melting of glaciers, disappearance of coral reefs, loss of soil
| surface due to deforestation.
|
| Armageddon for me is thus not a one-day event like in movies
| such as The Day after Tomorrow, but a gradual and accelerating
| destruction all around. This is a "boil the ocean" project that
| humans have inadvertently initiated and it is taking the
| required time to complete.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > I've started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate
| part of human psychology.
|
| Sci-fi novel plot starter: it's a quality that has been
| selected for by interstellar progenitors who seeded life on
| Earth, so that we would be wary of the need to mitigate real
| planet-scale disasters.
| throwanem wrote:
| How do the "Precursors" get around evolution?
|
| I've seen this used as a plot seed for any number of space
| operas, but as far as I can recall, I haven't seen any that
| used it and _also_ explained how they were able to somehow
| instill traits which, over hundreds of millions or billions
| of years, could not only remain present but unexpressed in
| the genomes of Nth-generation offspring, but could then, in
| response to some kind of extremely specific and complex
| stimulus, _be_ expressed - but only when needed, and in
| perfect accord with the original intelligent design.
|
| It sounds like I'm making fun here, and I'll admit I picked
| the phrase "intelligent design" with puckishness
| aforethought. But it's a serious question, and what I'm
| really looking for is media recs. Does anyone actually
| _reckon_ with this, in a way that 's plausibly compossible
| with our current understanding of genomic heredity?
|
| (Introns and pseudogenes don't count, and _yes_ , I remember
| that _hilarious_ TNG S6 episode that used them as an excuse
| to give Barclay even more not-very-well-depicted
| psychological problems. Sure, these regions aren 't
| translated into proteins, but they remain as susceptible to
| all the ordinary mechanisms of mutation as any other part of
| the genome. Not only that, being unexpressed, they are if
| anything _less_ likely to be conserved than exons, so the
| "alien space magic hidden in non-coding DNA!" thing doesn't
| fly.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > How do the "Precursors" get around evolution?
|
| Easily. Make the genetic machinery responsible for the
| trigger _hideously_ complex, redundant and, if possible,
| self-repairing (perhaps via a gene drive), and have loads
| of other genes rely on specific bits of it, so that a
| single alteration in that machinery will make life _suck_
| for the mutant without much preventing the trigger.
|
| Evolution can't make big changes, because there is no
| guiding intelligence behind it, only statistics; that's why
| our retinas are still backwards, and why a giraffe's
| laryngeal nerves take five metres to connect points ~30cm
| apart. Even though life without this massive lump of "junk
| DNA" that everything seems to rely on would work better,
| evolve faster, thrive more, waste fewer resources,
| reproduce more efficiently... it'll take a lot of mutations
| for it to unravel, none of which are selected for. Parts of
| it might get corrupted by sheer fluke, if the corruption
| also disables each anti-corruption mechanism and happens to
| coincide with a beneficial mutation, but that's what the
| redundancy's for.
|
| You'll never keep the phenotype the same, but you _can_
| keep a certain mostly-useless genetic mechanism intact, a
| la Robin Hood and Friar Tuck:
| http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Or a very realistic hypothesis that the trait has been
| selected due to numerous tribe-ending disasters in
| prehistoric times.
| lurquer wrote:
| Each of us is heading to our own personal Armageddon. Could
| happen at any moment.
|
| Perhaps the dread and angst is projected into concerns about
| society as a whole. Easier for some to worry about the
| coastline of Miami in 100 years instead of the indisputable
| fact that death is approaching.
| duxup wrote:
| Population crisis, peak oil, 'kids these days', rando 'not
| enough people believe in my ideology' driven crisis, 'Rome fell
| because people did a thing I don't like'...
|
| It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will
| again.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom
| scenarios seem in line with all those predictions
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| Any prediction being right doesn't really have much to do
| with all the wrong predictions IMO.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| It does if taken in the context of all the wrong ones
| being taken as a bayesian prior, and that strategy will
| have predictive value.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Climate change definitely is the next one. It is most
| surely happening, and probably faster than we want or
| expect, but if you listen to scientific consensus (eg. The
| Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), it is
| pretty clear that, while serious and troublesome issue, it
| most definitely is not an existential threat.
| eloff wrote:
| Probably not directly.
|
| It will cause mass migration and refugee crises as
| coastal cities and low lying areas slowly flood. That
| seems inevitable at this point.
|
| That could maybe lead to wars, and nuclear war is still
| an existential threat.
|
| If the changes somehow disrupt the ability to support
| cereal crops in the northern hemisphere (which actually
| is also the biggest risk from nuclear winter), that could
| lead to widespread starvation and more wars. Not an
| existential crises necessarily, but not pretty.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I just read a study showing this europe crops crisis.
|
| And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant
| research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in
| their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many
| respects).
|
| Armagedon is the last battle. To me that's what climate
| crisis is and how we need to look at it and take
| immediate action. We battle and win or we lose and it's
| really really really bad.
|
| Maybe others have better examples of worse than imagined
| climate problems, but here is one I read from Reddit/HN
| last week.
|
| New research shows faster slowing Gulf Stream. I can't
| find the exact thread that summarized - it did a direct
| comparison to the recent article to IPCC showing IPCC's
| worst case is not even close to as bad as the new
| measured slow down.
|
| A few sources below, one decade old one says 10x from
| IPCC's worst and the recent article showed even faster
| slowdown; like on the scale of a less than a century we
| could be past a tipping point. When it tipped in the past
| it made europe very cold and rose eastern us sea levels a
| lot.
|
| From my understanding, this would affect staple crops in
| Europe (google says europe 300 tonnes, us at 440), help
| melt a LOT more ice & sea level rise etc.
|
| I think that the faster than expected melting ice in
| greenland we're seeing also increases the slowdown?
|
| "totally unexpected decline in the AMOC of about 30% -
| far greater than the range of interannual variability
| found in the climate models used for the IPCC
| assessments" "10 times as fast as predicted by
| climatemodels."
|
| https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-
| syste...
|
| http://archive.is/YRqDY
|
| https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/meto
| ffi...
|
| https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?sh
| ari...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberia
| n_a...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing
| constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy
| off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in
| many respects).
|
| Of course, that's expected. Even if you assume that IPCC
| is 100% on point, then with p-value threshold of 0.05,
| you'd expect 1 in every 20 studies to show that IPCC is
| off.
|
| The real question is whether the scientific consensus
| changes by the time the next IPCC report comes out. Maybe
| it will, we shall see. At the same time, consider what
| kind of message you are sending here: you are asking
| everyone to not listen to scientific consensus, and
| instead promote alarmism, because there are a few studies
| that challenge the consensus.
|
| There is nothing wrong with challenging the consensus,
| that's how we get progress, but how do you want to win
| trust of the society, which is required to deal with this
| planet-wide situation, when, right after the (mostly won)
| fight for people to stop with denialism and believe the
| science, you turn around and say "yeah, that consensus we
| asked you to believe, instead of a handful of contrarian
| papers, is not what we actually want you to believe,
| instead you should believe this other handful of
| contrarian papers"? That's only going to sow distrust and
| alienate people.
| spiralx wrote:
| The effect of the Gulf Stream on European climate isn't
| as large as often made out to be. The simple fact that
| Europe is on the western side of a continental landmass
| accounts for a huge portion of its climate - air
| travelling west to east over the ocean absorbs warm
| moisture and heats up, as the wind travels east across
| land it sheds that moisture via rain and becomes dryer
| and colder.
|
| It's one of the reasons why Vancouver and London have
| similar climates, and both never get as cold as either of
| New York or Vladivostok, both of which are to the south
| of them.
| xwolfi wrote:
| It will most likely not do all this. It s sad and bad,
| it's happening and our fault, but there has been costal
| cities in trouble before, people already mass migrate in
| time of despair without the need for the climate, and
| wars happen for far less.
|
| You can roll up agonizing in fear, or you can prepare
| yourself for a bit of struggle. We can help lower the
| impact, but there's no reason to panic.
|
| Most likely the impact on humanity will be minimal, if
| not the impact on life itself will be medium, and the
| Earth will spin a few more cycles with or without us.
|
| This doesn't really matter, and we should just take it
| calmly, and talk to each other. No need for end of the
| world nuclear war hysteria.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm fine with taking things calmly. But what your
| advocating is the ostrich approach to problems.
|
| That's just being blind about the problems. Nuclear war
| is all one of the biggest existential threats to
| civilization. It didn't end with the cold war.
|
| Think of all the close calls we've had. Now look forward
| 100 years, what's the odds it happens? 1000 years? 10000?
|
| We're our own worst enemy and our civilization is the
| biggest threat to civilization.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It'll cost a few trillion to prevent climate change from
| getting worse.
|
| It'll cost a few tens of trillions to mitigate climate
| change and many non-human species will be in serious
| trouble if we don't do anything about it.
|
| Either way, humans will be fine. But I still advocate
| strongly for option number 1.
| OrbitRock wrote:
| What worries me most is the patterns of precipitation
| shifting.
|
| If we saw significant changes to where is wet and where
| is dry, we'd be scrambling to catch up and the fallout
| could be pretty large.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Any flooding of cities will take decades.
|
| This gives plenty of time for people to build and/or move
| to new cities on higher ground.
| eloff wrote:
| Where do you move the hundred million people in
| Bangladesh?
|
| What do you do in Florida?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| First of all, people can move themselves. They don't need
| someone else to move them.
|
| Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move
| to.
|
| The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're
| approaching 200 million and might need to cross a
| political border.
|
| _If_ the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe
| they 'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or
| maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe
| they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or
| maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
|
| The "if" is funny. There's already many hundreds of
| millions of poor people around the world that have the
| borders closed to them. I don't see why 200M extra poor
| Bangladeshis wouldn't suffer the same fate.
|
| And there is no reason to believe Siberia will be
| habitable, at least not in exactly the timeframe it needs
| to be to offset other habitable areas that are lost.
|
| Climate change will be a slow moving, albeit
| accelerating, series of crisis that will grind those who
| are poorer and don't have the power to move to suffer
| losses.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent
| basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap
| relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask
| medieval Dutchmen. By the way, the scientific consensus
| for predicted sea level rise in the worst temperature
| growth scenario is still less than 1 meter by 2100.
| That's less than the difference between low and high
| tide. Some areas will get flooded (eg large parts of
| Florida Everglades), but 1 meter is really not a big
| deal.
|
| Similarly, there is no reason to be very concerned about
| crops: we already are able to grow crops in a very wide
| variety of climates, and we have cultivars specially
| selected for local climate conditions. While climate
| change is very fast on geological scale, it's rather slow
| on human scale, which gives us plenty of time to adjust
| our crops and farming patterns.
|
| This is the biggest reason why climate change is not an
| existential threat: we are not going to sit on our
| thumbs, and watch the steamroller slowly ride over us, at
| speed of 1 cm per day. That's not going to happen:
| mitigating the problems associated with climate change is
| rather simple, relative to other problems our societies
| solve on a regular basis, and we have a lot of time for
| it.
| tzs wrote:
| > No large coastal city will become flooded on a
| permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and
| cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask
| medieval Dutchmen.
|
| Levees don't work in south Florida. Well, they work to
| stop water that comes in horizontally above ground level,
| but in south Florida floods usually come in by bubbling
| up through the porous ground.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. Miami needs to move a few meters straight up. This
| is quite possible. Galveston, TX [1] and Chicago [2] did
| that a century ago. Miami Beach is raising some main
| roads, finally. Here's Miami's flood zone map.[3]
|
| Worldwide, cities on river deltas face problems. Mostly
| in Asia. New Orleans is the only US city built on sand
| flatland at the mouth of a huge river. Asia has several
| of those.
|
| New York is building a seawall around lower Manhattan.
| The West Coast isn't that vulnerable because the coast is
| mountainous. Even in areas of LA that look flat, go a few
| blocks inland and you're up 10m or so above sea level.
| The parts of SF built on fill may have problems.
|
| This isn't the end of the world. But some cities will
| need rebuilding.
|
| [1] https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas-story-
| project...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
|
| [3] https://mdc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.h
| tml?id=...
| thu2111 wrote:
| A few meters? That's the scenario where there's some
| runaway global warming and all the poles melt, right?
| Actual observed sea level rises are measured in
| millimeters per year. Historical trends can't lead to
| Miami needing to move several meters up unless you're
| talking about, like, 1000 years from now.
|
| There are some problems with the assumption of a flooding
| crisis. The historical record from tide gauges have been
| retroactively altered over time, to make apparent level
| rises in modern times worse and level rises in older
| times less so (this seems to be a common theme with data
| from climatologists - they rewrite historical datasets to
| make the magnitude of changes seem larger).
|
| Additionally at some point they switched to satellites
| and stopped using tide gauges but it's not clear that's
| more accurate and may actually be less accurate (but it
| did make the rises seem larger, so there's a conflict of
| interest there). In particular, NOAA and NASA disagree by
| a large amount on what the actual level of rise is. NOAA
| say it's about half what NASA say it is.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| It appears that in the case of Galveston and Chicago, the
| government paid to raise the streets and sidewalks, and
| it was up to private property owners to deal with it
| themselves.
|
| In the USA, is that even possible anymore? I've been to
| both Galveston and Chicago, and you can see oddities here
| and there in some neighborhoods. In many cases, homes
| were not actually raised - the main floor became a
| basement and above it new doors were made into the
| existing walls!
|
| In a lot of locations, you cannot have a basement and get
| flood insurance. So what poorer people did in Galveston
| and Chicago is no longer an option.
| eloff wrote:
| We're going to have sea level rise in the region of 1-2
| metres by end of the century, and 5-10 longer term.
|
| Levees are expensive, and not always viable. It depends
| on the geography, the wealth of the city / county, the
| porosity of the ground, etc.
|
| Some places will be sure to use levees, some won't.
|
| With regards to crops, we don't know the outcome. If the
| Gulf stream stops or some regions dry out it could
| greatly affect crop yield, especially over the short-
| term. And that's all that matters for starvation to
| occur. The term year average yield isn't as important as
| this year's harvest.
| undefined1 wrote:
| it's not an overnight disaster, so it won't work like
| that.
|
| people are moving to Miami in droves right now and
| there's a big push to turn it into the next Silicon
| Valley. that's an aspirational goal and future facing in
| a geography that's among the most vulnerable to climate
| change. they know we can solve slow moving disasters.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I agree that it is a shame that many people make over-confident
| predictions such as "in exactly 10 years, X will happen". You
| often have to dig when reading a story to find out which parts
| are strongly supported by our scientific understanding, which
| can be frustrating.
|
| However, nonsense like that doesn't change the fact that more
| co2 in the air increases the Earth's temperature. And
| unfortunately we don't seem to be that interested in
| significantly reducing our emissions anytime soon.
| phkahler wrote:
| If humans did nothing, we could expect glaciation in the next
| 100 years or so. Do people really think what we're doing can
| prevent that? If so, do they really think we can regulate the
| planet well enough to avoid both bad outcomes?
| weakfish wrote:
| Source?
| munificent wrote:
| I read an interesting anecdote years ago hypothesizing that the
| impulse to imagine the end of the world is a selfish
| subconscious response to not being comfortable imagining the
| world continuing on without us.
|
| If the world blows up in your life time, at least it means you
| aren't missing out on anything after you're gone.
| yellowstuff wrote:
| Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to
| get you. It could be that worrying about doomsday is an innate
| human trait, and that as the article asserts, certain types of
| worries are motivated by racism.
|
| I still think it's a good idea to allocate some resources
| towards mitigating low probability, high impact events.
| mc32 wrote:
| Nice Heller/Kobain reference.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Being prepared for emergencies is prudent. And most
| contingencies require the same basic preparations and
| planning. A store of non perishables, water and a way to
| purify more, a good rifle and ammo, clothes for adverse
| conditions, perhaps a generator etc are all good to keep on
| hand.
|
| But the number of times in human history the world has
| "ended" can be counted on one hand. That time 10k years ago
| when the human population had a big bottleneck, maybe a super
| volcano. The bronze age collapse is another. The fall of the
| western roman empire. That's about it.
|
| But there are many more smaller events that still warrant
| emergency preparedness. Catastrophic weather, civil unrest
| and war count.
| basilgohar wrote:
| An even more rational approach is think about it in terms of
| classes of scenarios to prepare for - many threats can be
| averted and/or mitigated through common preparations. Seed
| stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival
| training, and so on. But given how remote many scenarios seem
| to most people making decisions, the extra effort for long
| term benefits over short term gains tends to favor the latter
| over the former.
| OrbitRock wrote:
| > Seed stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival
| training, and so on.
|
| If we actually thought like this and prepared ourselves in
| this manner during good times it'd increase the resilience
| of our species so profoundly.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| We can. _Now_ is good times. Apart from the pandemic -
| but that 's only one type of bad time; we're mostly okay
| as regards climate change, we don't currently have much
| crop blight, nuclear armageddon seems far away... and
| we're mostly in a position to prepare and mitigate those
| issues, even if we missed the boat on this particular
| pandemic.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Sure and I agree with that but that doesn't mean that
| armageddon isn't coming either. For example Climate Change and
| the Covid19 pandemic, both are examples of very real problems
| with the potential to severally harm/kill large numbers but
| both are dismissed with that attitude. I'm not sayin that the
| sky is falling in either case, though with Climate Change I
| can't imagine not thinking that, but if we continue to ignore
| them it's very likely that we will make human kinds worst
| nightmares come true.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _For example Climate Change and the Covid19 pandemic, both
| are examples of very real problems with the potential to
| severally harm /kill large numbers but both are dismissed
| with that attitude._
|
| No. I _have_ that attitude, and I 'm not dismissing either!
|
| I think they're both serious problems that will cause a lot
| of pain as they're being worked through.
|
| What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll be
| the end of human civilization.
| csours wrote:
| See also radiation/nuclear power. The risks should
| ABSOLUTELY be taken seriously, but so should the
| alternatives to nuclear power.
| yongjik wrote:
| > What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll
| be the end of human civilization.
|
| The problem I have with this argument is that "the end of
| human civilization" is such a high bar that it's
| practically a tautology that it won't be met.
|
| WW2 didn't end the human civilization - it didn't even make
| a dent. In fact, if the Axis had won the war, conquered the
| rest of the world, and massacred everybody between Moscow
| and Shanghai, the human civilization still wouldn't have
| ended.
|
| So any talk about whether the civilization will end or not,
| ultimately doesn't mean much.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll
| be the end of human civilization.
|
| I don't know anyone that's concerned about end of human
| civilization. What they are concerned about is the end of
| their lifestyle, part of which is due to relative world
| peace, which is in turn due to resources being somewhat
| available, at least to those with power.
|
| Once those resources stop being so (cheaply) available,
| then you'll see conflicts start emerging again. I already
| see it in my country, the US, with the widening gaps in
| places with economic opportunity and those left behind.
|
| Add in water, electricity, changing weather patterns and
| there will be some pain in the future.
| frockington1 wrote:
| There have been doomsday Climate predictions as long you can
| go back. Historically, look at the flood stories and you can
| see climate worry in biblical times. More recently Miami
| Beach is always going to be underwater 5 years from the
| prediction date. It's a serious problem, but there has always
| been a cult like following to climate change. Personally, I
| think it's best to ignore the hysterical predictions and
| focus on your own impact and responsibilities
| ta988 wrote:
| That's assuming that only controlling our own impact is
| sufficient to limit the problems.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| periods of global cooling and warming have always
| happened (ice age). The fear is our activities are
| accelerating the change, not that it causes it
| everdrive wrote:
| I think the earth is too large to have an Armageddon over a
| very short period of time (perhaps the span of one life.)
| Instead, things become worse at local scale. Yemen has been
| having (and continues to have? I haven't kept up) a nice,
| local Armageddon. The United States is large, and well
| resourced. Short of nuclear war, there will be nice places in
| the US for a long time, even if the overall measure of things
| becomes objectively worse. It may just be that "disaster" and
| "Armageddon," as BurningFrog has suggest is a pretty bad
| heuristic. The climate crisis is quite real, but it won't
| make the whole earth unlivable in a short period of time.
| Instead, some places will get worse, and humanity will be
| squeezed into different locales.
|
| [edit]
|
| I do accept that it could become a whole-earth disaster that
| affects everything, but my point is that this may take
| generations.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Well, you've jinxed it now.
| carapace wrote:
| > ... there is an unavoidable anthropic counterargument, which
| is for the people who do in fact live in some kind of end
| times, this is exactly how it will seem to them too. We can't
| just rely on induction, you still have to at least attempt the
| deductive due diligence.
|
| ~ ppod https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433419
| esja wrote:
| Perhaps we can thank evolution for that. The people alive today
| are descended from the survivors of disasters.
| leppr wrote:
| Given that humans are the most successful species on the
| planet, if this is "an innate part of human psychology", then
| this trait is probably useful. Beware of survivor bias.
| kiliantics wrote:
| Will be hard to consider humans successful if they don't
| prevent the human-made climate catastrophe from completely
| destroying most sustainable life-supporting ecosystems on the
| planet.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Then stop it, or support the people who are. Vote with your
| feet and your wallet to the extent you can, and add your
| voice to the clamour. Don't just complain about the
| problem; complain about its instigation too. See if you can
| get just _one_ change made; there are enough of us that
| that could add up.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| It is weird, indeed. Every so often I'm amazed at how many
| people will say yes, on surveys, if you ask them if they are
| living in the end times.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Yeah exactly the same here. Sometimes big awful crisis appear
| in a country but more often than not, people scoff and get on
| with their life.
|
| As I grow older and start raising a child, I realize why the
| anger and will for change, the passion and hysteria you show
| when you're young are never followed by those who ve seen a bit
| more. This all doesn't matter, and living a regular monotonous
| life, making your little monkey turn into a human, is all most
| people end up caring about.
| curation wrote:
| Agreed. I take it to the end here and argue that what it is to
| be a free human is to make cuts to the regular order of
| functioning power instead, in other words to ask whatever
| powers preside over the order we are born to 'am I what you say
| I am' and to keep power afraid of human solidarity in the
| struggle to be against power.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the dismissal of Malthus seems itself ideological. It's not due
| to any necessary reason that Malthusianism itself is wrong, quite
| obviously putting population pressure on restrained resources is
| an actual disaster.
|
| What was wrong with Malthus or the food scare talked about in the
| article is simply that they made their argument about the wrong
| thing and at the wrong time, the rebuttal is based on contingent
| facts.
|
| There may very well come the point, and as others have pointed
| out climate is already maybe one such issue, where we run into a
| situation where the right technical solution or political fix
| does not exist. Locally of course there have been countless of
| Malthusian examples, put a city under siege, or a country (see
| Yemen's blockade) and you will see how Malthusian the world is
| pretty quickly.
|
| Of course some of the conclusions Malthus drew (the mentioned
| culling of the sick) in the article are inhumane and
| reprehensible, but nobody today really argues for any of that
| stuff. But what Malthus today is still useful for is provide an
| antidote to the 'perpetual growth' mindset that has no other
| answer to anything than to grow yourself out of every problem.
| oilbagz wrote:
| >nobody today really argues for any of that stuff
|
| _ahem_
|
| https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-pol...
|
| https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.htm...
|
| https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fert...
|
| https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/
|
| Malthus should be targeted by the time-travellers for culling
| as soon as convenient ..
| lupire wrote:
| Those pages promote birth control (with a focus on avoiding
| forced reproduction/birth) not culling the sick.
|
| Are you making a handwaving argument about supposed genocide
| via birth control?
| OrbitRock wrote:
| Those are good things.
|
| We don't want 12-14 billion humans. The biosphere is already
| under enormous stress.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11018
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Who is "we" and how do "we" get to decide how many humans
| there should be?
| OrbitRock wrote:
| No one is forcing anybody.
|
| It's more just sharing things like birth control
| technology and education.
|
| This whole discussion is actually a sort of win-win
| scenario, because what proves to lower birth rates more
| effectively than anything is improved regional health,
| education, and wealth, so helping along those factors is
| the biggest impact.
|
| https://fs.blog/2016/04/hans-rosling-population-growth/
| _iyig wrote:
| China has forcibly implemented strict birth control
| policy for decades. They're also forcibly sterilizing
| ethnic minority populations, Uyghurs in particular:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-
| xin...
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Ok yes, some people are forcing people. Clearly the
| person you responded to meant that they, and most people
| concerned about overpopulation, don't want to force
| anyone.
| slibhb wrote:
| The UN has predicted that population will be stable around
| 10-12 billion by 2100. There is no reason to think the
| planet can't support that.
|
| The places where the population is still growing don't pay
| the slightest attention to the anti-natalist stuff linked
| above. Population is already stable or declining in places
| where people care about that stuff.
| megiddo wrote:
| Malthus was refuted by the early 19th century on economic
| grounds - namely that the pricing system prevents people from
| over-exploiting scarce resources.
|
| While there has certainly been some poor husbandry of the
| earth's resources, there have been and continue to be
| significant efforts to improve resource utilization in
| environmentally friendly ways - not the least of which is
| increased costs of basic resources leading to self-imposed
| limitations by consumers.
|
| Basically, on net, people choose more luxury over more
| children. They economize when presented with prices that
| reflect the reality of underlying scarcity. They make choices
| that often result in improved environmental stewardship, either
| implicitly or explicitly.
| roenxi wrote:
| Picking something unlikely but possible, imagine if water
| becomes scarce enough that half the population of India can't
| afford market price and must do without.
|
| That thought is pretty much enough to refute the refutation.
| The idea that a resource can't run out because "economics
| happens" is simply a non-sequitur. Economics is perfectly
| comfortable with optimising a bunch of humans out of the
| system because they can't produce enough to justify their
| resource consumption. That is what a Malthusian collapse
| would look like economically speaking.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if water becomes scarce enough that half the population
| of India can 't afford market price and must do without_
|
| This would require importing water and/or energy. If there
| was an ability to pay by the government, desalination would
| create new fresh water. There probably wouldn't be, which
| would cause short-term pain, but that's the feedback
| mechanism OP alluded to.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| A Malthusian collapse would entail running out of resources
| because the population grew too fast, not because the
| resources are otherwise affected. Conditional on some
| constant access to a shared resource, the price increase
| would smoothly counter the population increase, bringing
| everything back into stability without ever leading to
| massive starvation. Supply shocks are certainly a thing,
| but we have not seen anything like a Malthusian collapse
| since he wrote about it.
| refurb wrote:
| But that was exactly why he was so wrong - he thought that the
| limits to resources was static, and they are not always.
| simplicio wrote:
| People always say this, but it isn't true. Malthus lived in a
| time of quickly increasing productivity, he of course knew
| crop yields, etc. would likely increase. But he also knew
| there were eventual limits to that increase, the Earth only
| gets so many watts of solar energy, only has so much land
| area to cultivate, etc. So he thought that the exponential
| growth of human pop. would necessarily eventually hit those
| limits.
|
| Indeed, Malthus actually ages better then he's given credit
| for. His solution to the problem he poses is pretty close to
| the modern one, that a more educated and well-off population
| will decrease their fertility, so that eventually population
| growth will level off. (Malthus's actual view of the
| mechanism here is pretty Victorian, he talks a lot about
| "Public Morality" and I don't think he mentions "birth-
| control" in any form, but his basic idea is correct)
| corty wrote:
| The problem with that refutation is, population growth is
| O(2^n), available space is O(1) and available food is limited
| by available space and energy. Maybe there will be advances
| in science, increasing food production. However, to keep up
| with O(2^n) we need to double food production in constant
| time intervals, around 40 years. Otherwise, there will be
| overpopulation. There is no escaping it, except if
| exponential population growth is stopped and prevented in the
| future.
|
| And food production following an O(2^n) curve is highly
| improbable, the best we can imho do is something polynomial
| or linear.
|
| That's why Malthuus might have been a little wrong back then,
| but basic mathematics or computer science knowledge instantly
| proves him right, just not back then, because humanity got
| lucky.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| > The problem with that refutation is, population growth is
| O(2^n)
|
| WTF, no it isn't. Human population increased exponentially
| for a period of time while we adjusted to lower infant
| mortality but fertility rates quickly altered to account
| for the new situation. Humans aren't rabbits, we don't give
| birth in large litters and we can reason about and control
| the number of children we have. As the last few places on
| earth finish their journey through industrialization we're
| going to see population stabilize and then decline. Set a
| reminder for 2050 when we'll all be panicking about there
| not being enough young people to fund our social security.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| > And food production following an O(2^n) curve is highly
| improbable, the best we can imho do is something polynomial
| or linear.
|
| Why? All technology has so far outpaced population growth.
| corty wrote:
| Moore's law was famously exponential, until it wasn't,
| because there are physical limits. Grain per hectare made
| some noticeable jumps, but no growth or even negative
| growth due to organics. Limit now is probably what the
| ecosystem will bear, and that is something linear or
| constant.
|
| The reason why I think a polynomial is the best we can do
| is that some very special processes generate exponential
| behaviour, mostly stuff that is self-replicating. I don't
| see those in technology. Technology doesn't reproduce all
| by itself, it needs to be invented, financed, etc. Those
| are limits that force it subexponential.
| lupire wrote:
| In computing we say that all problems are O(1) in the limit,
| because there is a practical limit to the available
| resources.
|
| The devil is in the details, and escaping the trap once isn't
| a permanent solution. Feeding us more efficiently now by
| poisoning our environment isn't a long term solution.
| refurb wrote:
| But he was wrong about the growth and therefore wrong about
| the consequences. Population is expected to peak and
| decline.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >Malthusianism itself is wrong
|
| It's not about being right or wrong. It's about making good
| decisions. Malthusianism is a bad model. It takes two
| variables, population and resources and extrapolates. This is
| bad because the world is much more complicated. Making costly
| choices based on this bad mode is bad decision making
| slibhb wrote:
| "Proof of Malthus' farsightedness is that none of his
| predictions have come true yet"
| xyzzyz wrote:
| All of Malthus' predictions have come true. They just did so
| in his past, not future. Malthusian model is the standard one
| to describe evolution of human populations up until 17th
| century or so. If you are familiar with scientific
| literature, with economic history, with population genetics
| etc, the Malthusian model is pretty much the consensus view
| these days. See, for example Gregory Clark's "Farewell to
| Alms" or Shennan's "First Farmers of Europe".
|
| The biggest fail of Malthus was that he made his argument at
| exactly the worst possible time, when the growth in
| productive capacity has for the first time in history
| exceeded the growth in population. However, since at his
| time, the past was much more of a mystery than it is now,
| predicting the past was almost as difficult back then as
| predicting the future. Since his predictions have been
| completely validated by the historical and archeological
| record we have since then recovered, this must be credited to
| him.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > All of Malthus' predictions have come true. They just did
| so in his past, not future.
|
| This is trying to win an argument by changing the meaning
| of a term. "Predictions" refer to future events.
|
| All of my stock pick "predictions" also came true. However,
| I did not become a billionaire, because they did so in the
| past.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| So what words you are using for astronomers and their
| theories of stars and galaxies? After all, almost all of
| the events they observe and test their theories on have
| happened in the long, long past. If you don't call it
| "prediction", then what?
|
| The crucial issue is not when the event happened
| chronologically, but rather whether you have _knowledge_
| of the event. If you have knowledge, then indeed it is
| not prediction. However, in Malthus time, there was very,
| very little historical econometric data available.
|
| The point here is that if you judge Malthus by quality of
| his predictions for immediate future, then yes, they
| turned out badly. However, that's not because his model
| was wrong, but rather because some of his assumptions,
| that have been valid for entirety of the past history
| before him, have just stopped being valid anymore.
| slibhb wrote:
| "Predictions" are about the future, not the past.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| When the past is as murky as the future, there is little
| reason to distinguish between the two.
| slibhb wrote:
| I have no opinion about your broader argument (that
| Malthus' model is accurate with respect to his past) but
| the way you choose to express it simply makes no sense.
|
| You can't use the word "prediction" if you're unwilling
| to make a distinction between the past and future.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Of course you can. The crucial distinction is not about
| actual chronology, but rather about your state of mind.
| The scientific method is about predicting the outcomes of
| experiments, natural or artificial ones. It works just as
| well regardless of whether the thing you are trying to
| predict happened in the past or is yet to happen.
|
| Otherwise, the whole field of astronomy wouldn't be
| possible, as it by its nature is all about observing the
| past, and building models to explain and predict other
| events that happened in the past. If you grant that
| astronomy is a scientifically sound pursuit, why is
| astronomy observing and testing their theories on events
| that happened thousands or millions year ago in another
| galaxy fine, but observing and testing econometric
| theories on events that happened hundreds or thousands
| years ago make no sense? How is archeology, or ancient
| population genetics supposed to work, if you only allow
| scientific method to be applied to future events?
| slibhb wrote:
| You're making a tortured semantic argument. We were
| talking about whether Malthus is still relevant, whether
| we can still use him to make predictions. Malthus being
| "correct up until the 17th century" is beside the point.
|
| You've also made bizarre arguments elsewhere in this
| thread. Apparently Malthus can't be proven wrong because
| the Earth can't support an infinite number of people.
| That's true, of course, but it's not a model. It's the
| statement of an obvious fact.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > We were talking about whether Malthus is still
| relevant, whether we can still use him to make
| predictions.
|
| We can, and we do, just not for human population in
| future. Again, Malthusian models are completely standard
| way to model past human populations, and also animal
| populations.
|
| > Apparently Malthus can't be proven wrong because the
| Earth can't support an infinite number of people. That's
| true, of course, but it's not a model. It's the statement
| of an obvious fact.
|
| Yes, that's why Malthusian model is so popular: because
| it is obviously correct, and because its assumptions
| cover very wide range of observed past and future
| conditions. We live in pretty unique circumstances when
| they don't: we both had the technology grow carrying
| capacity faster than the population had grown, and also
| we had population growth slow down a lot, and then go
| down to shrinking regime.
|
| I expect these trends to continue in my lifetime, and
| probably in the lifetime of my children -- but not
| forever. Instead, I believe that in around 200-300 years
| we will return to high-fertility regime, that will
| require governmental measures to curb, if we want to
| preserve the quality of life. However, I have much less
| confidence in this prediction than I do in the validity
| of Malthusian model.
| slibhb wrote:
| > Yes, that's why Malthusian model is so popular: because
| it is obviously correct
|
| It's not correct right now, for humans, which is what we
| were talking about.
|
| > and because its assumptions cover very wide range of
| observed past and future conditions
|
| Ah yes, those magical "observed future conditions".
|
| > We live in pretty unique circumstances when they don't
|
| There are no grounds for insisting that we "live in
| unique circumstances". That statement is either a
| tautology (like your interpretation of Malthus) or it's
| meaningless.
|
| > I believe that in around 200-300 years we will return
| to high-fertility regime, that will require governmental
| measures to curb, if we want to preserve the quality of
| life.
|
| I like science fiction as much as the next person but
| that's all this is.
| [deleted]
| simonh wrote:
| Thank you, I think that's very useful historical context.
| Yes Malthus had useful and valuable insights, but also yes
| we have since discovered mechanisms and processes that can
| largely mitigate these risks which he could not have
| foreseen.
| MikeUt wrote:
| Mitigate, or offload? Instead of facing a global famine,
| we're causing a global ecological catastrophe. The world
| didn't end, but species are rapidly going extinct, and
| it's only a matter of time before it comes back to bite
| us.
| simonh wrote:
| It's a statement about what we could do, not what we are
| doing. Sustainability is achievable, but not inevitable.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, we quite obviously have much higher carrying
| capacity, thanks to improvements in farming technology
| and in expanding farming into places that haven't been
| farmed before. Right now, Europe has more forests and
| less farmland in use than it had during medieval times,
| despite having much higher population.
|
| We devised ways to mitigate the problems associated with
| population growth, but we have not solved it: the
| fundamental logic of Malthus is still very much valid.
| The carrying capacity of Earth may be much larger than he
| thought: it may be 50 billion, or 100, or 500 (but
| probably not 1 trillion), some people surely have created
| an analysis to get a good estimate given current
| technology and available land. But, make no mistake, it
| is very much finite. The good news is that with current
| trends in population growth, we aren't likely to hit it
| in the next few hundred of years.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| The real death knell is that technological growth grows
| with population, which means that until some kind of
| discontinuity is hit the population won't ever be able to
| hit the carrying capacity before the capacity is
| increased again. Is there a way to support a trillion
| people? I can't see one, but technological progress has
| been doubted before, and rarely correctly.
| adevx wrote:
| "The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-
| twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many
| people being born and not enough food being produced. This
| combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked
| migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the
| inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced,
| Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a
| population crisis."
|
| Maybe we do have a population crisis. Our climate issues are in
| large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for
| resources. Sure we can cut down even more of the Amazon
| rainforest to supply food for more people, but not attributing
| any of this to population growth seems dishonest.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| This is incorrect. The richest 10% of the population causes 49%
| of climate change. The poorest 50% of the population causes
| 10%.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Please cite sources for statistics like these.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| In the context of the environment and more specifically climate
| change, it's not overpopulation per se but a growing middle
| class. The middle class, drives cars, have larger homes (to
| heat, cool and furnish) and so on.
|
| A million people in poverty is not the same as a million living
| a traditional middle class lifestyle.
| Fricken wrote:
| It's either middle class people consuming huge amounts of
| resources per person, or it's subsistence dwellers cranking
| out 5 kids for every fertile woman.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The latter seems to be solving itself, as birth rates are
| steadily on the decline. Though it tends to happen in
| conjunction with development (and thus more intensive
| energy usage).
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Then we should find the optimal point of socio-economic
| development with regards to co2 emissions? Or is upward
| mobility impossible to remove from the system?
| Fricken wrote:
| I don't think finding that optimum is a hard problem.
| Convincing the world to abide by it is.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| In general...where there are 5+ children there is very
| little hope; there is extreme poverty (read: little
| consumption); and so on.
|
| Children don't survive in those environments. Higher
| birthrates is a family's / culture's answer to that. It's
| playing the odds.
|
| Put another way, if there was consumption to Western middle
| class levels, there would be no need to have 5+ children.
| This is why, as a middle class grows, birth rates fall.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine,
| unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities.
|
| ... and.. it does ? https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-
| stories
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| No mention of famine
| yorwba wrote:
| If you just grep the list of articles for "famine", you'll
| miss the "malnourished children" and "hunger" mentioned in
| the articles.
| simonh wrote:
| The top 7 regions creating refugees are Syria, Venezuela,
| Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, Somalia or Democratic
| Republic of Congo. None of them do so due to overpopulation,
| or even environmental or ecological crisis. They're all
| political issues.
| orwin wrote:
| South-eastern Mediterranean situation was caused by
| repeating drought since 2006 collapsing their agricultural
| production. A drought in 2010 in Russia reduced their grain
| production by 30% and doubled the price of grain during the
| winter 2010-2011: it was basically a death sentence to
| already famished people in some African countries
| (Centrafrique, but also Sudan at the time), but what wasn't
| expected was the price of oil declining sharply, making
| Syria, Lybia, Tunisia and Egypt and Algeria less solvent.
| Algeria managed, but other countries less so. What do you
| think these countries have in common?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Again, these famines are also entirely a socioeconomic
| crisis, not actual lack of food. If Sudan wasn't a
| terribly run place at war with itself on two fronts, it
| would not have food shortages. If Somalia had a
| functioning government at any point in the preceding two
| decades, it would not have food shortages. Supply chain
| disruptions occur all the time in the global food market,
| but in non-basketcase countries there's enough resiliency
| for this to never reach anywhere near "death sentence"
| territory.
|
| >What do you think these countries have in common?
|
| Terrible authoritarian governments that buy off its
| impoverished populaces with a mirage of huge food
| subsidies, while stealing most of the wealth of their
| nations for themselves.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > They're all political issues.
|
| ... where do you think these political issues come from ?
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| Inequality mostly. Which is due to the economical system,
| and wealthy countries are largely responsible for this.
| simonh wrote:
| Other countries in the same regions facing the same
| issues are not in the same situation. Can you be more
| specific about the causes and effects you seem to be
| alleging?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Bangladesh has some struggles. It is the most densely populated
| (large) country on earth. They have major floods often which
| cause big problems. But they manage to survive. Thus there
| isn't really a threat to anyone else. There's enough food to
| feed everyone, and the only problem remaining is political and
| with distribution. It would not be difficult or expensive to
| end world hunger, cents a person.
| paganel wrote:
| > Bangladesh has some struggles. It is the most densely
| populated (large) country on earth. They have major floods
| often which cause big problems. But they manage to survive
|
| Countries like Denmark and Norway are a lot more detrimental
| to the planet's ecosystem because they consume a lot, lot
| more per capita compared to what Bangladesh does (and they
| consume lots of bad things that Bangladeshi people do not
| consume).
| liaukovv wrote:
| But if you look at this from country abstraction level,
| what does it matter how much they consume per capita? All
| that matters is absolute number
| magicalhippo wrote:
| If every country had the population of Norway, the globe
| would host just over 1 billion people.
|
| So then, would 1 billion Norweigans be better or worse
| than our current situation?
| liaukovv wrote:
| Who knows, considering developed countries produce
| science at higher rates the climate change might have
| already been solved.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| So countries like Luxembourg can continue to pollute
| because at an absolute level it doesn't matter but
| countries like India or China can't have any development
| because at an absolute level their emissions are huge. I
| can't see poorer countries accepting that argument.
| bildung wrote:
| Why do single out exactly these two countries and not the
| dozens with higher footprint per capita? https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecologica...
| thefz wrote:
| To conveniently leave out North America.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| Bangladeshis spent the second half of the twentieth century
| having about 6 kids each, while Danes and Norwegians were
| having less than 2. Why is that factor excluded from your
| assignment of which country is "more detrimental to the
| ecosystem"? The Bangladeshi behaviour of having 6 kids each
| from 1950-1990 is overall far more detrimental than the
| Norwegian behaviour of consuming a lot per capita.
| g8oz wrote:
| Per capita resource consumption dominates raw population
| to a surprisingly large extent. Bangladesh vs Denmark +
| Norway seems like a contrived example doesn't it? A
| population of 163 million for the former vs a combined 11
| million for the latter. And yet total consumption based
| CO2 emissions are about equivalent. It's even worse when
| you look at production based emissions. Bangladesh emits
| less than half the total of CO2 vs Norway + Denmark. Take
| a look at this page and do the math:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carb
| on_...
| watwut wrote:
| > Bangladeshis spent the second half of the twentieth
| century having about 6 kids each
|
| This is not true. That was true in 1950, started to drop
| in 1970. Now it is 2.04 kid per woman. And when you
| compare contemporary consumption of Danes, you have to
| compare it with contemporary consumption of Bangladeshis.
|
| Currently, the fertility rates are 1.73 vs 2.04 kid per
| woman. Which is much smaller difference.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm always curious about this.
|
| Cambodia (for example) has a terrible rubbish problem. They
| burn their trash, and vast amounts of it get thrown in the
| Mekong river and washed out to sea. There's also a big
| problem with unlicensed forest logging, and all sorts of
| environmental concerns. This is, primarily, because poor
| people are too busy with immediate survival concerns to
| worry about their environment.
|
| Norway (for example) has a higher per-person consumption of
| resources, but also looks after its countryside and
| environment.
|
| What's the relative damage being done to the global
| environment? Is there an argument that raising people out
| of poverty will actually reduce their impact on the
| environment even though it increases their resource
| consumption?
| samvher wrote:
| Norway looks after _its own_ countryside and environment.
| But it imports lots of stuff meaning it effectively has a
| pretty large footprint elsewhere. Also while Norway looks
| clean, that doesn 't mean it's not affecting the
| environment negatively (e.g. greenhouse gases). Of course
| none of this is specific to Norway.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| It's pretty well known that when you look at individual
| consumptions habits, which account for overseas
| production emissions, there's a clear correlation between
| income and greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| Though it has been shown that some countries are
| beginning to reduce emissions while increasing GDP. Much
| of that shift could be explained by a global shift to
| renewables as they become the cheapest form of power, but
| this is a tide that lifts all boats, and the correlation
| remains.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-
| emis...
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Yeah but emissions are only one part of the equation -
| logging a forest will produce more net atmospheric carbon
| than taking a long-haul plane trip, even though cutting
| down trees doesn't emit anything.
|
| The biggest carbon sink is the ocean, so doing things
| that damage the ocean (like dumping trash into a river)
| are more of a concern.
|
| There's also other environmental concerns than CO2 and
| climate change. Damaging jungle and ocean ecosystems
| creates other effects that we need to be concerned about
| (not least biodiversity losses from loss of habitat and
| population).
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Not sure why you'd think I wouldn't be concerned about
| logging, or waste, or environmentalism in general -
| especially given what I wrote. I am, for the record.
| lupire wrote:
| This is silly. If it only cost cents to feed a person, food
| wouldn't cost dollars.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| A cup of rice and dry chickpeas will feed a person for
| cents.
| watwut wrote:
| You cant subsist on these only.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| You could survive for a long time on this, and if you add
| cheap produce like carrots and beets for a few cents more
| you could survive indefinitely.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| But in many ways the situation described was true, until
| artificial nitrogen fertilizer was invented. It is apparent
| that we've been pretty good at improving productivity and
| efficiency. But use of fertilizer has caused other problems.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and
| subsequent increasing demand for resources
|
| Industrialization, not population is to blame. Maybe we have an
| industrialization crisis. But it's difficult to blame that on
| "developing nations" so it probably won't get much press.
|
| Then again, things like the Paris Agreement provide incentives
| to move polluting industry to China, so nationalist anti-
| Chinese media may eventually lay the blame on
| industrialization.
| lupire wrote:
| Another way to frame it is we have a developed-world
| population crisis. I agree that still makes "8billion+" a
| false alarm.
|
| But another way to say it that if we are to lift the
| materialistic standard of living for the other 4 billion
| people, there needs to be same or less population of them.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| I do think many challenges are painted in worst possible case
| terms -- like Hollywood blockbusters where the stakes are always
| the world, of even the galaxy or the entire universe -- but by
| fixating on how that particular exaggeration is nearly always
| invariably wrong we miss the fact that, even at lower stakes,
| predicted catastrophes are often still plenty catastrophic. To
| give a quick, immediate example, though I'm currently writing
| from a internet connected, well heated house rather than from a
| scene from The Stand, 500,000+ and counting deaths in my country
| and many more worldwide isn't exactly something to shrug at...
|
| I wish our collective psychology was able to accept crises as
| serious without resorting to raising the stakes to cosmic levels
| or dismissing it as not a real problem if you, personally, come
| out mainly ok.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| The population bomb thesis was reasonable, up until about the
| 1970's. But it turns out, if you give women access to education
| and birth control, the problem mostly goes away. I don't know if
| I really fault people before then for worrying about it, perhaps
| the worrying was partly responsible for the solution. People say
| the same thing about nuclear war: all those marches were useless
| because the war never happened. How do you know the marches
| weren't the _reason_ the war never happened?
|
| People are definitely going to say the same thing about climate
| change, if we manage to mitigate it: see, nothing bad happened,
| you wasted your time. No, the fact that we acted will have been
| _why_ nothing bad happened.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always
| amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory
| of human population as crazy/fringe but the other prediction as
| some kind of scientific law.
|
| In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a
| moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping
| half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental
| footprint of the rest. It's like a king in a massively
| overpopulated nation of relentlessly constrained citizens
| looking out at his gardens and saying, "see? No problems, and
| those fools predicted the country would collapse."
| fallingfrog wrote:
| True, there's a survivorship bias too especially in the case
| of nuclear war where we probably got through the Cold War
| more by dumb luck than anything else, but people assume there
| was no other way that could have turned out.
|
| The human population is expected to peak at around 11
| billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that
| many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right
| now.
| thu2111 wrote:
| Nobody "kept" half the world poor, they did that to
| themselves. Look at the vast amounts of aid that's been sent
| to nearly every poor country over the decades. Huge sums. In
| the end the big success is China, which didn't need such aid.
| They solved their own problems (well, sort of, economically
| at least). The poor parts of the world are still poor because
| they make a lot of bad decisions, it's terrible but when you
| drill in and study what goes on in those places it's plain to
| see.
|
| The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many
| babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is interesting political analysis, but the fact remains that
| the global population is topping out at several billion with
| almost all arable land already being farmed and ecological
| impacts accumulating. All these related problems may have
| solutions, but reframing the situation doesn't really address
| potential for improvement.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > with almost all arable land already being farmed
|
| Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.
| corty wrote:
| Well, we are currently removing the last big forests like
| Amazonas for agriculture. Have the population double again,
| then it's gone for certain.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Agricultural land use only went up ~10% as the world went
| from from ~4 billion to ~8 billion people. It has been
| almost entirely offset by increased agricultural
| productivity.
| corty wrote:
| And how much can we increase agri productivity? Will it
| grow exponentially along with the population? Otherwise,
| we will need that land.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Assuming increasing wealth and technology development,
| infinitely, because there's crops we can grow with no
| land assuming very cheap energy
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Population growth hasn't been exponential for half a
| century. Get your facts straight.
| corty wrote:
| It has, the only obscuring factor is China's one-child-
| policy and Europe's and North America's decline. The rest
| is still very much in exponential growth. Only the last
| 20 years at best saw some possible downward trend, but
| there have been similar variations before. So that's like
| reading the climate from small changes in weather, a
| fool's errand. Until there is a firm trend for a
| shrinking or stagnating population, all the small
| variations just lead to wishful thinking like yours. You
| cannot just ignore math and biology, populations will
| grow exponentially until they hit a limit.
| dmurray wrote:
| It's true in a no-true-Scotsman way. There aren't vast tracts
| of land that are fertile and have been prepared for farming,
| but are being neglected, because human economic activity
| easily expands to fill the space available. So with the
| exception of some parks, sports facilities, etc, most fields
| in the world are being used for farming.
|
| On the other hand, there's plenty of land that is nearly
| suitable for growing sustenance crops but just needs a little
| preparation. We don't always favour converting that land to
| agricultural use, e.g. in the Amazon rain forest.
|
| However, the claim misses the point for a different reason.
| Even if all arable land is being farmed, it's very far from
| being exploited to its maximum capacity. In terms of calories
| per hectare per year, much of that land could be improved
| tenfold or more with a switch of crops or farming methods, if
| the economics demanded it and potatoes became as expensive as
| steak.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| If we were running low on resources for food production you'd
| expect to see food prices increasing. But broadly, food is
| cheaper than ever.
| beckingz wrote:
| The market can stay irrational longer than our biosphere can
| stay solvent.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The thing everyone always forgets about food production in
| armchair analysis is that it is not constant. Some years we
| produce more, some years we produce less. We can smooth
| across space and time to keep short-term or regional
| shortfalls from becoming a famine, and we do so most of the
| time, most places.
|
| In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we
| are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to
| consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals.
| Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price
| will fall.
|
| Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food
| production, until at a predictable time we cross from
| producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to
| producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline
| reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma
| weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some
| regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills
| production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair
| weather, and the production for the next N months falls below
| the level of the stockpiles to last.
|
| _That_ is the point at which the market will react and food
| prices will go crazy. It won 't do anything to help
| production -- some things take time, not money. It will just
| be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left
| without enough food to eat.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Developed countries produce, not a little bit, but
| _multiples_ of calories than is consumed because people
| choose to pay extra for tastier but less efficient calories
| through livestock, and tolerate food waste for convenient
| packaging and higher quality selection. I don 't see any
| sign of a downwards trend in this ratio.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Oh yes; you can slaughter millions of extra cows and pigs
| in the US to realize a huge number of available calories,
| while redirecting the grain back to humans, all with no
| more ethical worries than you've already accepted in
| producing & consuming meat. A number of other
| inefficiencies can also go away under emergency
| conditions -- people will get less picky about their
| fruits and vegetables in a hurry, and it won't spend as
| long on supermarket shelves anyway.
|
| From purely a US standpoint, yeah, I suspect our
| agricultural buffers are good enough for anything but a
| "volcano blotting out the sun" level deviation from the
| norm. Call it, four sigmas of food security. You'd need
| an event that only happens once every ten thousand years
| or so to really bring the US to its knees,
| agriculturally.
|
| My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much
| as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows
| -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal
| lands, grain spending less time in silos before being
| processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food
| security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise
| significantly, from market pressure.
|
| I think _if_ things go badly (and there 's no guarantee
| of it at this point), it happens slowly at first, and
| then quickly, and you can't just point at food prices
| being low to say it's not about to turn from slow to
| quick.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| The first effect of the margin narrowing would be lower
| meat production, which would exactly coincide with higher
| prices for meat.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Ecological damage and collapses occur well before we'd run
| out of resources. Just because we can encroach on more and
| more land, at the expense of the environment, doesn't mean
| there isn't a problem.
| majani wrote:
| Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't
| involve encroaching more land. And the developing nations,
| where the populations are booming, are still on the lower
| end of agricultural productivity.
|
| Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top
| off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize
| that we'll be just fine.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't
| involve encroaching more land.
|
| What are you talking about? 41% of US land is used for
| livestock production. It's not that efficient, and the
| perpetual increase in population will just push that
| higher.
|
| > Combine that with the fact that populations appear to
| top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll
| realize that we'll be just fine.
|
| We don't all share in that prosperity. Population is
| still set to grow in the (perpetually) developing world
| plagued by poverty. The population growth rate in the 1st
| world is a _targeted rate_ , a matter of policy, which is
| met by increasing immigration. Fertility rates on the
| global scale won't drop so long as child mortality and
| quality of life isn't improve across the board, and
| consequently the growth rate in the 1st world is also
| here to stay.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Food has two types of cost, market value and ecosystem cost.
| It always has been this case. It's the very reason that crop
| rotation was discovered. By improving the ecosystem that you
| farm in (in this case soil but Tree windbreaks also count
| etc...) you increase the productivity. The issue is that most
| ways to improve productivity are terribly short term. Think
| slash/burn.
|
| So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning
| through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible
| rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too
| late and the land stops producing at the current level.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| What, exactly, will "run out" that affects most food
| production? The remaining soil lifespan in societies with
| developed agriculture is hundreds of years, and relatively
| cheap practices can extend that to thousands of years.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Water
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-
| groundwate...
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Managing groundwater is an economic co-ordination
| problem, not a limit to food production. We currently
| produce crops that are very, very inefficient in terms of
| water per calorie, because people like them and some
| jurisdictions like California don't have effective water
| markets.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I predict nothing will change until nature forces it, at
| which point the damage will be irreversible.
|
| A small fraction of people live the high life, but a
| large fraction has tasted it, and almost everyone has
| seen it. Effectively no one is going to cut down on their
| consumption because they're calculating (correctly, in my
| opinion) that even if they do, someone else will step in
| and consume their portion anyway.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Land? The trend is obvious, and we probably don't have
| anything like Haber-Bosch to save us in the next 50-ish
| years.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/world/arable-land-hectares-
| per-...
| thu2111 wrote:
| Land? Enormous amounts of land are used to raise animals
| or food for animals, many of which could be replaced with
| slightly improved Impossible Burgers. Artificial meat is
| already pretty much acceptable and its primary constraint
| is the cheapness of real meat. Land is unlikely to ever
| be a constraint given demographic trends. If there's ever
| any pressure on food prices due to lack of land, meat
| prices will go up and a bunch of farms will switch to
| crops to use as input to artificial meat processes so
| they can produce more of it. That's a very deep pool to
| draw from.
|
| As for not having any scientific process to fall back on,
| that's far from true in most of the world, even the
| developed world. Sadly the EU has been blocking the use
| of GM crops for years, supposedly on 'safety' grounds but
| in reality as a form of trade barrier designed to protect
| local farmers from having to become more efficient
| (mostly French farmers). So the EU isn't even using
| genetic engineering to increase yields, a by now very
| mature technology! Large parts of Europe don't even use
| advanced technology because the CAP subsidy scheme pays
| them to _not_ grow food!
|
| When you look around the world there's plenty of low
| hanging techno-fruit almost everywhere, except maybe the
| USA where new tech is embraced and farming is quite
| efficient already. But even then, there's plenty of tech
| on the horizon should we want it. Genetic engineering is
| still at the start of what it can do - it's capable of so
| much more than just pesticide resistance.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| The graph I linked is of _arable_ land per capita.
| "Arable" means capable of growing crops. It does not
| matter that we raise animals on it currently.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| The article is not arguing that the Earth should support 1
| trillion people or some equally unsustainable numbers.
|
| This is not the point.
|
| The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by
| malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can
| thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global
| south can starve and die of disease to reduce population"
|
| EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?
| riffraff wrote:
| Isn't a lot of land in the developing world still producing far
| less then it could?
| hnmullany wrote:
| African agricultural productivity is at about 1/10 US rates.
| So lots of headroom for improvement there.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Fortunately land use has been pretty much steady since 1990[1],
| despite world population increasing by around 45%[2].
|
| This is due to land use for agriculture per person dropping
| rapidly[3].
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-
| area-o...
|
| [2]
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..lat...
|
| [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-
| land-u...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Yes. Problems like this one:
|
| https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....
|
| are an unintended consequence of scale.
|
| I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set
| up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe),
| and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so
| many of our problems are not a problem with technologies
| employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
| amriksohata wrote:
| The sheer ignorance of this statement:
|
| "The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-
| twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many
| people being born and not enough food being produced. This
| combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked
| migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the
| inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced,
| Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a
| population crisis."
|
| But also thanks to the green revolution we have pesticides and
| fertilisers that made this happen, that are causing cancer all
| over Punjab and created massive wealth disparities. Not to
| mention we never needed all this food, if the population was in
| control. But the population exploded because of Western invasions
| that resulted in mass poverty!
|
| Thanks "western" scientists!
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| The article agrees with you. It was all a ruse to satisfy US
| domestic political concerns. As were/are a lot of the 20th
| Century world "problems", it is becoming apparent.
| liaukovv wrote:
| Really makes you think
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| There aren't "western" or "eastern" or "southern" scientists.
|
| There are just scientists.
|
| And deal with that chip.
| jansan wrote:
| _> But the population exploded because of Western invasions
| that resulted in mass poverty!_
|
| I disagree. IMO it exploded because improvements in medical
| care resulted in a dramatic reduction in child deaths, but
| people kept having the same number of children.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Who told (Indian) Punjab to hook up electric pumps to tube
| wells 24/7 and destroy/deplete their aquifers?
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