I think you're deriding my use of "Carrying capacity" as an archaic concept, but your retort is that we're "creating ecosystems."
But, every organism within an ecosystem "creates" it just by existing as part of it, so I'm assuming you mean "heavily modifying it to suit our species' need for insatiable growth."
Taking this from that perspective, the 20th century agricultural explosion (that you link to ) is a prime example of how we've hijacked systems far beyond their natural limits, to largely deleterious effect.
That wikipedia article even enumerates some of these: biodiversity loss, GHG emissions, etc. There are many examples elsewhere [0].
Sure, there's a lot more food, and that's good for population health and well-being. But that "good" assumes that we've decided that large, consistent growth rates are "good."
[0]:https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=imp...
Worrying about the ideal balance of births : deaths, today, is like worrying about ballast in a sinking ship. Insatiable growth doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for some time, we’re squarely in flattening the curve territory with the fun twist that discharges take 18 years to raise.
As an aside: Would it be possible to favourite a reply? I have only figured out how to do that with submissions.
Conversely, depopulation on an otherwise healthy planet is a trivially solvable problem. Our species IS entirely capable of reproducing (even though the secret to doing so may have fallen into obscurity in certain incel segments of society).
Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.
Also venture capital has no interest in fighting 1000's environmental lawsuits and 10,000's of pointless regulations designed to stop any construction or development that would improve CA
> Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.
What on earth makes you think that? All sorts of hardware is designed and developed here. It has the largest aerospace sector of any state. A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.
And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m in SV and even up here though we lost most of the defense manufacturing (e.g. tanks and ships) though a lot remains further south, when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc. I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.
>> A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.
Source...
>when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc.
There are plenty of machine shops in my town, I would not proclaim my town to be a mecca of engineering.
> I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.
Ok, and?
It feeds that large patch of green/farms/food entirely surrounded by sand, and drains north into the inland sea created by the first botched attempt at diverting in the 1900s.
That’s arguably the least important part of the state that isn’t desert (anymore), and a small scale version of what we’ve done to the Central Valley.
The much derided (sometimes rightly so tho’) subject of Evolutionary Psychology will probably have a couple of books worth to support that.
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
[2] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/1...
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
Subsaharan Africa was completely bypassed by the Green Revolution and largely lacks access to basic infrastructure like eg consistent electricity (outside portable fuel powered generators) on the typical small, family, partly subsistence based farm.
It’s not a solved problem with all the geographical and political issues, but it’s quite literally the world’s last frontier for trade.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02522-6
Population growth fell much faster than expected in many places such as Singapore and Iran. Today in Africa people have mobile phones and hence much better access to information on things like birth control.
That Nature article shows that the population expected at 2100 has a realistic range from about 9 Bn to 11 Bn. That difference comes from slightly different assumptions about the change in birth rates in Africa and other places.
From the article :
"In 2014, a group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna produced its own forecast. It said that world population is most likely to peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and will fall to 9 billion by the end of the century. The group’s numbers rose slightly in a 2018 report3 that projected a peak of about 9.8 billion around 2080; a subsequent update has population cresting at a little under 9.7 billion around 2070."
We are literally unable to do that. The only thing we know how to do is burn more fossil fuels which has nothing to do with human effort.