Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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I think that we lose credibility when we speak of the end of civilisation.

It won't take much of a change in the climate before we see significant conflict over access to water. India and Pakistan have a treaty they both signed in 1960 regarding access to water from 6 rivers they share (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Waters_Treaty). These are two nations that have nuclear weapons... if that treaty fails and results in a war, that'd almost certainly end up being World War III, and could very well result in the end of civilisation.

This isn't speculation on my part. We're already at the point where nations have civil wars over access to natural resources like water and agricultural land. It was a key factor in civil war in Sudan. Wars around the middle east between Israel and it's neighbours are rooted in religion but are often also about access to water from the Jordan basin.

Climate change isn't simply things getting hotter and sea levels rising. People literally go to war over resources. It really matters.

That is clearly very bad, but people also go to war because of scarce resources. The US doesn't have a Special Relationship with Saudi Arabia because the Saudi's are lovely people.

Climate change isn't the threat, the problem is that population growth is exponential. We don't have a reliable mechanism to shrink population apart from run out of resources and have a war. Claiming that climate change is making resources scarce isn't grappling with the fact that in 100 years at 2% population growth, resources are going to be scarce anyway.

While population development historically is exponential, looking at current societies all over the world indicate that there are ways to significantly reduce the growth: economic development, women's rights and education.

In particular, population growth slows down where it matters, i.e. for those people that have the biggest carbon footprint.

Population growth is an S-curve, not an exponential. Fertility rates will stabilize once developing nations catch up with the rest of the world.

Sigmoid is one option. Overshoot/crash another.

And, in the short term, exponential may be a reasonable fit. Doesn't make it a long-term guarantee.

For the last 5 decades or so we've been stuck on linear growth. ~ +80m/yr, 12-14 years per +1b. That looks like it might be the middle straight line part of a sigmoid curve that started exponential and transitioned to linear.

There's no real evidence yet in the stats for the next transition to a drop in the absolute growth numbers per year.

Just to be clear, who is "we" in that? I'm assuming it's "people living in industrialized nations," but if it's just "humans," then that seems like it could be misleading -- linear growth internationally with exponential births/deaths (net effect -- linear) in undeveloped nations, combined with scarce essential resources is already a severe problem, leading to global strife.

"We" is global human population growth. Trend is no longer exponential, since ~1970, but it is still growing linearly.

UN historical & projected data:

https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/1_Demographic%20Profiles/...

https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/

Humans have always gone to war, but recently that is less and less the case. Just like in USA, India and Pakistan's massive military spending is motivated more by corruption and self-dealing than by water shortages. They're not going to empty their nuclear stockpiles on each other. If they did, it would be a disaster, but it would still not amount to "the end of civilisation".

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