Clearly we have to address climate change but it’s not a growing population that is unsustainable, if anything the progress over the past 50 years has indicated the exact opposite.
Crossing this with climate change, particularly our love of beef and pork, is not easy to disentangle.
We may also never hit that carrying capacity if something else other than food supply limits our population growth—war, disease, artificial barriers to food (wealth inequality).
He was a very passionate and entertaining public speaker.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...
Carrying capacity is estimated at 7.7 billion. And I have seen that Hans Roslings predictions have been revised upwards. Doesn't look good either way.
Which progress are you referring to? The original article is claiming that 60% of animals have been wiped out in the last 50 years. Does that not at least call your claim into question?
The problem lies in the doubling of human population in little more than a generation. The problem lies in that we are not being sustainable with this. We are depleting resources whilst polluting and rapidly changing our environment.
For the moment, we only have one small rock in which to live and breathe. If we have to shit where we eat, then let's at least try to shit cleanly.
Right here and right now, we're still largely relying on fossil fuels and machinery up to several decades old in order to produce food and considering it seems to be hard to even get up to modern standards, hoping for future tech to save the day seems far fetched.
I don't think we can do that (although it is arguable that any drastic measures taken now doesn't have to be permanent, and that things can change again once we do have all that new fancy tech)
Does that mean we've fixed the problems? Far from it.
The number of people is only a really small factor in the damage that people do. One jet-setting westerner does many orders of magnitude more damage than the typical subsistence farmer; and the damage done by subsistence farmers varies quite widely. (Some are causing desertification and chopping down trees)
And of course there are some people doing more good than harm, reducing the population reduces those people too.
No matter what the population is, we have a lot of work to do. Greenhouse gases are the most visible problem; there are lots of others.
Other resources are a separate issue, of course.
I agree with the assertion that humanity is more sustainable (all other things being equal) vegan or vegetarian rather than omnivorous, but it's going to far to suggest we could just swap in humans for livestock.
TLDR : 100+ billions is a hard reach today, but 50+ billions might not impossible
There is approximately 63,824,448 km² or liveable land on earth today.[1]
Let's cut that in half to account for farms/land lost due to global warming/industries/etc... We get 31,912,224km² of land usable for habitation.
Let's assume we cover the remaining with a huge city with the density of Hong Kong (6,690 people/km²). This is for the whole city, not the most populated quarters.
We arrive at a population of 213,492,778,560 people, so twice as much as the parent's estimate, with half of the remaining liveable land usable for farms/industries/wildlife parcs/inefficiencies of repartition...
Would that be enough ? According to a Sweden study [2], we use 1.6 billion hectares (16,000,000 km²) of farmland today, for approximately 7 billions people. It means that for 200 billions, we need 486,857,142 km². That's a huge increase, and currently the Earth can only sustain 44,000,000km² (same source as earlier, FAO), so an order of magnitude lower. According to a study on the effect of diets on land [3], switching to a vegetarian/vegan (not much change in the result) diet allows to cut the land use by ~4. So we're left with 121,714,285 km² of required land : a bit better, but we still fall way short. That's going to be our actual bottleneck.
Let's cut population by 3, and we arrive at ~40,000,000 km² of required land for 66 billions people.
It would be a pretty grim dystopia, that's for sure. Most of nature would be erased, there would be a lot of natural catastrophes, and clearly the Earth would be way less welcoming than it is now.
But 66 billions people on Earth, given 'sufficient' technological (and most notably political) advancements is not completely out of whack, especially if we manage to produce clean energy (or at least clean on Earth) and to radically improve our crops (with genetic engineering, hydroponic culture, exploitation of oceans maybe ?)
Bottom line : this is napkin calculation, a lot of factors have been left out (water to give a main one)
[1] : https://www.quora.com/If-every-person-on-earth-was-to-be-giv... (I know, Quora is not the most reputable source, but it seems decently sourced)
[2] : http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/newsroom/docs/en-so...
[3] : https://www.elementascience.org/articles/10.12952/journal.el...
Archologies - Isaac Arther (28:43) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&vl=en
Interesting, I've never heard about this before! But isn't it basically just the question of private vs public transport (cars vs underground), but in vertical dimension?
In fact, there's a growing trend of combining fish farming with hydroponic vegetable farming; circulating water between the plants and fish tanks, monitoring nutrient and bacteria levels, can allow for a non-vegetarian diet.
Granted, they're not going to be the tastiest fish- think tilapia, not salmon. There's a CSA farm doing exactly that in a relatively densely populated suburb not too far from me.
With all of that said, I'm sure that for people who do enjoy seafood, it'd be quite tasty. The business near me was put together with eco-conscious people in mind, so the care they put into farming- nutrients, food for the fish, etc. I'm sure the difference between their fish and wild fish is a good deal smaller than stereotypical farm-vs-wild-caught salmon or what have you.
I agree, 1+1=2 will forever remain in the realm of science fiction. But what would humanity be without its hopes and dreams?
"World’s richest 10% produce half of carbon emissions while poorest 3.5 billion account for just a tenth"
Source: https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2015-12-02/...
Both
Also, the problem is still here even if we maintain current population levels. It's here even if we do nothing, and in reality, we have 2/3 of the world desperately trying to grow their quality of life, which involves growing their energy use.
It has to be wrong in perpetuity, because even if it is correct just once, it results in a wasted/depleted planet.
And honestly, considering how much non-renewable resources we are using and the rate of warming, worrying about the population bomb is sort of like trying to get enough cardio exercise while you have acute appendicitis.
It is not all that impressive to note that more consumers than producers creates a scarcity problem. That’s the entire driver behind Malthusian fear-mongering. But over and over and over those that stoke the fears of overpopulation (and it’s been going on for thousands of years) are especially terrible at estimating the capacity for supply. As you call it, “last-minute technological breakthroughs”, dismissing centuries of human progress as some sort of accidental stroke of luck.
You say we “do nothing” but every something I see proposed has to, by necessity, damage the quality of life of lots of people. The majority of people. If we are honest with ourselves, that’s effectively what is being proposed when we pontificate over how the wizards of smart will dole out resources according to their flawed definition of sustainability.
That will, inevitably, result in war.
The fact is, if you want to improve the state of humanity on the Earth, your only effective means of doing so is technology.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...Well, technically that's not wrong. Bigger population = more deaths.
This I agree with to some extent. We need the tech to save us, but I'm not convinced that we can get to that tech in time, without reducing our quality of life now, or having it reduced by the climate degradation in the next decades.
> As you call it, “last-minute technological breakthroughs”, dismissing centuries of human progress as some sort of accidental stroke of luck.
I'm trying not to, but looking back, how many more tricks like Haber–Bosch process can we find? We've always somehow risen to the challenge, but then again, almost all fields of science and technology were severely underexplored back then. We've fixed that now, we know the general landscape in which we're moving. I fully expect we can pull some more rabbits out of a hat, but will we be able to do that in time?
And the flip side of this is that we need those new miracle technologies to continue growing. Which means we need to actually fund and encourage them, and that seems to become a problem lately. Insert anything from "best minds of our generation wasted on getting people clicking on ads" to Bret Victor's musings on cleantech funding[0].
--
Technology can not magic you up some more land. The earth is finite. When people say "technology will save us" they actually mean one of two things. Either "I don't want to think about this so star trek will come true!" or "we can develop the technology to completely eliminate all non-human life on earth and live in pods being fed an industrial slurry that has the highest % return of solar energy to chemical energy so stop worrying!". Both are dumb. Our standard of living is already going down. It does not make sense to choose to have more people living worse lives rather than fewer people living better lives. There is no benefit to increasing our population.
Yeah this gets thrown around a lot, but people clearly misunderstand what it actually means. It just means that there is _some_ amount of people we can't feed, but it says _nothing_ about what the amount is. It can be 10 billion, it can be 10^27. You just "proved" nothing of substance.
> And we are currently consuming an _unsustainable_ and growing rate of resources. (emphasis mine)
[citation needed]
I am serious, it does not matter how many times people say this, it still is not obvious truth.
> And we are currently consuming an unsustainable and growing rate of resources.
And when you finally claim something that would be easy (I guess, you seem confident in it) to back up by links, you don't do that.
This reads like unfounded hysteria.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
I think you are suggesting that earth can carry many more people than 10B. I’d like to understand how you think that is possible.
Furthermore, even at the current population size human activity is causing potentially irreversible climate change. The scientific consensus is that even a small increase of 1.5C will have severe consequences on the planet. Limiting the increase to 1.5 C will require significant action by all of us. Addding many more people makes this much harder.
http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf
I hope the links can help convince you that we are facing a serious crisis that is causally related to the size of the human population.
> I think you are suggesting that earth can carry many more people than 10B. I’d like to understand how you think that is possible.
Because I have not seen anyone argue for the limits in convincing ways, it's all FUD from my PoV.
Intuitively - energy is not (very big) problem, we can make dense nuclear sources, solar & offshore wind is viable in many places, and gas peaker plants / limited enetgy storage should cover the rest.
Hydroponics and similar advanced agricultural methods are showing nice gains in effectivity of produce per sq km, at the cost of (IIRC) energy (see above). EVs are finally starting to be viable. Etc. Etc.
And that's before we get to really long-term solutions like colonizing space.
Where are the real limits?
> Furthermore, even at the current population size human activity is causing potentially irreversible climate change ...
Yeah, we are making a lot of externalities. This is not impossible to solve, see above.
Extrapolating from our past failures is extremely shortsighted and has been proven wrong numerous times, see e.g. WW3 and end-of-humanity scare in 50's/60's. We can learn from our mistakes, and we seem to actually do that a lot! Spreading hysteria is not helping I think.