The Global Population Crisis That Never Was | Hacker News Reader

The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

rogerpielkejr.substack.com

93 pointsmellowhype272 comments

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.

>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 ..

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?

If you want to reduce the size of a population, and you can pull strings at international scale (as is the case with the institutions I referenced), you have a few options in targetting that population:

a) war/genocide b) famine/food crop failure c) birth control

Which of these is the most palatable to the Western moral authority mindset, and most likely to gain popular support among the classes with the most democratic agency? You won't have feminists calling for outright war in order to de-populate your targetted society - you will have them supporting population-control if you couch the argument as 'women expressing agency over their bodies'. (note: I personally 100% agree that women should have full agency over their bodies - just like men should, too, be able to avoid going to war if they desire...) Plus, birth control means more sex, and everyone likes that - so you can easily get buy-in by your targetted population, too. At least, a little easier than the war option.

The premise is the same for all cases: someone 'in authority' has decided that a population must be culled. The only thing that differs is the means by which this is achieved.

It has already been demonstrated that the planet can actually support us all. We are suffering because we, as a species, cannot manage what we've got. We, as a species, are mis-managing things - we could be doing a lot, lot better. And unfortunately there are power structures out there which would rather not manage things, and instead just solve the problem by a)/b)/c), or all of the above.

That will change - not by people demanding 'culling of other lesser populations', but by actually caring for other populations, and developing the technology and management structures required to support their lives ... Would you be outraged if China called for all Westerners to be sterilized in order to prevent population explosion? Are you outraged about the genocide of Yemen, because someone decided 'there are too many lower humans living there'? Or, have you decided 'your team' is more deserving of the future of humanity, somehow? Our real problem lies in the answers to those questions, not in the ability of the planet to support us all ..

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

Who is "we" and how do "we" get to decide how many humans there should be?

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/

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...

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.

No true Scotsman is forcing any other true Scotsman.

"I think that increasing education and birth control will decrease birth rates."

"But haven't you considered that forcing people not to reproduce is horrible?"

"Who said anything about forcing? I'm not advocating for forcing anyone?"

"Hah! But in fact people are being forced!"

"Well yeah, lots of bad things are happening. That doesn't have a whole lot to do with available birth control and high income."

"No TRUE Scotsman!"

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.

But that was exactly why he was so wrong - he thought that the limits to resources was static, and they are not always.

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.

But he was wrong about the growth and therefore wrong about the consequences. Population is expected to peak and decline.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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)

"Proof of Malthus' farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet"

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.

"Predictions" are about the future, not the past.

When the past is as murky as the future, there is little reason to distinguish between the two.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a statement about what we could do, not what we are doing. Sustainability is achievable, but not inevitable.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Some of this does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

That's the focus of the classic prepping guide: Doomsday Prepping For Less Crazy Folk

https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/

Nice Heller/Kobain reference.

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.

Your advice is good, I agree that the most important thing is to be prepared for these smaller events. I would like to add an entry to your list of armageddons though. The indigenous people of the Americas had a pretty bad century after first contact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno...

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.

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

That's assuming that only controlling our own impact is sufficient to limit the problems.

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

> 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.

See also radiation/nuclear power. The risks should ABSOLUTELY be taken seriously, but so should the alternatives to nuclear power.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Well, you've jinxed it now.

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.

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?

Source?

Sorry, I meant 1000 years. Source: the historical record shows the planet has been in cyclical glaciation for several million years.

Edit: ok maybe several thousand years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

But the norm seems to be an ice-free planet. Remember, there are plant remains buried under the arctic permafrost.

From the article:

“The situation in the United States is that to get a response, the need must be somewhat overplayed”

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.

Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions

Any prediction being right doesn't really have much to do with all the wrong predictions IMO.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Related to that, destabilizing weather patterns in general - a few weeks ago the polar vortex dipped further south in the US than ever before and Texas was caught really off-guard.

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.

> 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.

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.html?id=...

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.

You can't look at historical trends because it's not rising linearly. Most of the warming and melting will happen in the last decades of this century. That's part of what makes it easy to underestimate.

But you are right that it will keep rising for a thousand years or more. But now at that timeframe we're talking 6-12 meters or more.

This is all in the fairly conservative public estimates that so far have underrepresented the pace and scale of change.

Will happen, according to academic models that have been frequently wrong in the past. Projecting prior trends forwards doesn't get you anywhere near meters of rise, that's my point. And no they have not so far under-represented the pace and scale of change, far from it. That's the kind of revisionist history that makes arguments about climatology fruitless. How can we even debate the accuracy of such forecasts when the past is inverted like that? Here's the sort of thing that was actually predicted, from an AP news report in 1989:

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.

The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

It's thirty years later now and the temperature rise since then has been at the very lowest end of the most conservative estimate (which was itself so wide that it was basically useless and hardly an estimate at all).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where do you move the hundred million people in Bangladesh?

What do you do in Florida?

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.

>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.

> Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.

Because of Russia's famous open borders policy, and China happy to open their borders to let refugees pass through? What planet do you live on?

That's like saying the US would open its southern border to let migrants pass thorough up to Canada.

I find this comment naive in the extreme. There is a strong overlap between areas subject to the worst impacts of climate change, and areas hosting some of the poorest people in the world (or in their countries).

With respect to the "If" statement around countries closing their borders - seriously, where have you been? The sudden and significant rise in popularity of the far-right in Europe almost coincides to the Syrian refugee crisis, and that was roughly one million people. In my country (Australia) we give our Pacific islands neighbours platitudes while still pushing coal on the rest of the world, and then indefinitely detain those seeking asylum for years (including years after they've been assessed as legitimate refugees). Countries are now proposing the Australian approach to "protect" their own borders. To think that this issue (of climate-change forced population movements) will not cause existential threats for those people is plainly wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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/metoffi...

https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?shari...

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberian_a...

> 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.

I'm more asking that we take dramatic, drastic, and gigantic efforts to 'fight' the 'last battle' on climate change if you will take this thread metaphor lol

i agree with you on the nitty gritty for a general audience. mostly i dont think bogging down the public with research helps and it's way too often used in bad faith to do the opposite by industry and certain political groups acting in their own interest

on the other hand

on the other hand if like half the country experiencing some weather catastrophe in the last 5 years doesnt do it im not sure ;( so i do think we need more fear and for sure a lot more alarm, but yeah probably not alarmism in the sense i think you are probably referring to

i do love HN though for a higher level discussion

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.

interesting. the study i read did mention the UK as a big effect if it slows down, would get much colder. and maybe im not understanding the west to east air over ocean, isn't that specifically what we're talking about slowing down / potentially worst case stopping or totally changing?

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-weather-typically-so-much-b...

It's actually more complicated than that - the Gulf Stream contributes not to warming Europe but to cooling the eastern seaboard of the US:

https://www.livescience.com/13573-east-coast-colder-europe-w...

"Kids these days":

> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

― Socrates (~470BC - 399BC)

Socrates probably didn't say that and if he did so what? What argument are you actually making?

"Two thousand years ago someone complained about X and people also complain about X now. So X is no big deal!"?

Hippocrates complained about malaria. Does that mean contemporary concerns about malaria are invalid?

Fair enough though not the point I was trying to make :)

The parent mentioned "kids these days" and also "It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.".

Whether Socrates actually said this (or some other famous or not so famous guy from over 2000 years ago), it does show that that assessment is probably very very correct. And very funny to read indeed. Even if you don't agree with all of the parts of the statement (I don't) you will most probably find some you'd agree with. YMMV if you don't have kids :)

OTOH, Socrates lived through the rise of Athens to prominence (their great generation?) and the generation he complains about would have been the ones to stop it's decline (our boomers -millenials.)

(So his observations could be of a cultural cycle rather than what every generation experiences from each perspective.)

Malaria is largely the same - we have better treatment options but it is still the same disease.

Society is very much not the same - for one pedastry is a severe crime instead of an accepted institution. Insensitivity to changing circumstances hints at a fixed belief. If your compass always points to the same place on the dial as north it is broken. Not to mention that nearly everybody loves luxury - that is partially why it is expensive above and beyond production price!

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.

> 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.

Or a very realistic hypothesis that the trait has been selected due to numerous tribe-ending disasters in prehistoric times.

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.)

> 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, à la Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

How does anything "rely on specific bits of it" if it's noncoding? How does the gene drive remain intact across millions of generations' worth of mutation events? How are mutations in noncoding DNA selected against?

> How do the "Precursors" get around evolution?

One way would be to apply selection pressure over time and let the people experience "numerous tribe-ending disasters" as one other commenter said. Then there is no need for these "Precursors" in this theory, it could very well just be all natural.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> ... 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

Perhaps we can thank evolution for that. The people alive today are descended from the survivors of disasters.

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.

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.

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.

I suspect it is fear of death and the world moving on without them gone somewhat narcissistic. So as they fear their own uncertain death in their lifetime they project it onto the world.

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.

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

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.

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.

Citation to back up your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

> 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.

I think it might be caused by the modern pension system. There's no need for children if pension is provided by other means.

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).

Urbanization alone has long been observed as causing a drop in observed ferility rates as they no longer get the useful free labor investment, space is more expensive and they are no longer self sustaining.

Low sperm count is not the reason why most people do not have three plus kids - it isn't like people give up on birth control at 30 or 40 and never have any kids again. Most of is "won't have more kids" as opposed to "can't have more kids".

Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.

Return to monke.

Human-only perspective? That is assuming we can thrive if not not without an ecosystem.

We should always value humans over other species, and if you disagree you're an enemy of our species.

You can value humans over other species without assigning a nil value to the latter

What does that mean concretely?

Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000 chicken lives = 1 human life?

More like "if all the bugs die because we use too many pesticides, the systems that support life on this planet will collapse."

Which is exactly how someone caring only about human lives would reason.

> 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.

You can assign a value to both that says we should not harm these things.

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?

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.

Valuing humans over other species at all costs leads to humans collapsing our environment and thus harming humans.

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.

Well then you come back around to valuing nature imo

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Water

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwate...

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

Why not? Land used for crops that are then eaten by humans is more efficient than using it grow crops to feed animals. Even if you assume no animals graze on arable land (why would you assume that?) there's still large efficiencies to be had.

The market can stay irrational longer than our biosphere can stay solvent.

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.

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.

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.

The first effect of the margin narrowing would be lower meat production, which would exactly coincide with higher prices for meat.

> 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.

The US is a strange beast when it comes to Agri. It's worth noting that there are conditions under which we are -destroying- surplus crops due to price controls rather than flooding the market.

Which to me is a bigger concern; this 'buffer' may cause price shifts to come with less warnings, and perhaps the first 'shock' will be a bit more than we would expect.

Isn't a lot of land in the developing world still producing far less then it could?

African agricultural productivity is at about 1/10 US rates. So lots of headroom for improvement there.

> with almost all arable land already being farmed

Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.

Well, we are currently removing the last big forests like Amazonas for agriculture. Have the population double again, then it's gone for certain.

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.

And how much can we increase agri productivity? Will it grow exponentially along with the population? Otherwise, we will need that land.

Assuming increasing wealth and technology development, infinitely, because there's crops we can grow with no land assuming very cheap energy

Population growth hasn’t been exponential for half a century. Get your facts straight.

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.

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.

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?

I downvoted you because you used racism and genocide as a thought-stopping cliché.

There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past.

Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.

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...

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.

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.

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.

It's possible to generate energy, harvest resources and store waste with minimal impact to other life on earth.

This is a “no true Scotsman” argument. We quite obviously have not demonstrated this is an actual possibility.

So why do we pollute and kill?

It is possible for you and me to climb Mt. Everest. In all likelihood, neither of us is going to spend several years and all his savings towards this goal.

Possible does not mean practical.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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

"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.

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.

> 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).

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

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?

Who knows, considering developed countries produce science at higher rates the climate change might have already been solved.

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.

Why do single out exactly these two countries and not the dozens with higher footprint per capita? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecologica...

To conveniently leave out North America.

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?

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.

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...

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).

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.

glad to hear it :) but your comment concerned only greenhouse emissions, which is all I was addressing.

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.

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_carbon_...

> 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.

This is silly. If it only cost cents to feed a person, food wouldn't cost dollars.

A cup of rice and dry chickpeas will feed a person for cents.

You cant subsist on these only.

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.

No, you would not.

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.

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.

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).

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?

I don't think finding that optimum is a hard problem. Convincing the world to abide by it is.

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.

> 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

No mention of famine

If you just grep the list of articles for "famine", you'll miss the "malnourished children" and "hunger" mentioned in the articles.

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.

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?

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.

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Every famine has a socioeconomic component. Theoretically you could just dump food from elsewhere into every Somali village, practically you cannot, because of the lack of security.

Is it possible to build a functional government and maintain peace if food shortages are a regular thing? I am not so sure. This kind of conditions brings warlords to power, who cement economic instability, thus never alleviating food shortages. A vicious cycle.

> They're all political issues.

... where do you think these political issues come from ?

Inequality mostly. Which is due to the economical system, and wealthy countries are largely responsible for this.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

This is incorrect. The richest 10% of the population causes 49% of climate change. The poorest 50% of the population causes 10%.

Please cite sources for statistics like these.

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.

> 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.

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!".

> 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.

We would have a moral right if we repented and retrofitted our society to be sustainable. We're not doing that.

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.

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.”

Thank you both for expanding my perspective.

We? '... in what we consider a life worth living'?

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.

China is capitalist and imperialist.

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.

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.

China is a poor country that was forced to accept some level of exploitation to avoid invasion or blockade. Thankfully the working conditions have been improving steadily and many of the exploitative practices by foreign companies are now banned.

Most CPC members are working class, especially in the leadership. They’re almost 10% of the population, of course they’d be a typical sample.

China offers loans for development with mutual gain, not extraction of profits. Even just comparing interest rates to the IMF is telling, let alone the many loans forgiven. Talk to some Africans affected by the Belt and Road Initiative, they’re overwhelmingly in favour.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Worst? You mean _highest_? These people will be caring for your kids in their nursing home.

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.

> 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.

> ...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.

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.

The sheer ignorance of this statement:

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!

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.

Really makes you think

> 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.

The Indian population went from 50 million to 300 million under British rule, then tripled again after 20-30 years when most did not have access to that medical care.

There aren't "western" or "eastern" or "southern" scientists.

There are just scientists.

And deal with that chip.

Who told (Indian) Punjab to hook up electric pumps to tube wells 24/7 and destroy/deplete their aquifers?

Intensive farming did, to get most out of the soil as pesticides and fertilisters drove all that need for extra water

Reply on news.ycombinator.com