Population crisis

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Actaeon said:
This is an excellent point, and I’ll use it to reenforce my statement that the world has a distribution problem and not a population problem:

The ability to have suburban sprawl in the United States is made possible by two factors: availability of transportation and presence of functional road systems… something sorely lacking in developing cities and their surrounding areas. Those countrysides are bare precisely because the means to build the infrastructure to allow people to gain and live on land outside the city crowding are not available for want of funds and distribution of resources. Starvation in the world, at present, is the fault of the broken nature of man’s inability to provide charitable distribution.
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And who will buy the grain, the ships, the trucks and pay the workers? In Africa, there was one incident where the drivers of trucks were all gunned down and their grain shipment was diverted to the army. In another case, a “tax” had to be paid to transport the food.

Who will build the roads and who will pay for the land? Still, in small parts of Africa, people still live as their primitive ancestors did. And even if you build roads, who will pay for a means to transport the food?

Your point is well taken but there’s no money in giving away food for free. We are still living in feudal times. Generations of the wealthy no longer wear robes and crowns and other obvious signs, but they’re mostly the same people.

Peace,
Ed
 
billg3436 said:
Do you ever wonder why some nations that have been around for over a thousand years don’t ‘fill up’ (England, Gernamy, France, etc) whlie other nations that have been around for barely over a century or much less are starving or have to implement ‘One-Child’ policies and forced abortions (North Korea, China)? But both systems, indeed every system, is subject to the law of ‘X Resources Will Only Support N People’.
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Did you really just say that North Korea and China have only been around for 100 years? Seriously? Do you realize that China has literally thousands of years of history - the Xia Dynasty was established around 2000 BC! All those “old” countries you are talking about were little barbarian tribes for several thousand more years! Yikes! History is important to learn.
 
Poseidon said:
Did you really just say that North Korea and China have only been around for 100 years? Seriously? Do you realize that China has literally thousands of years of history - the Xia Dynasty was established around 2000 BC! All those “old” countries you are talking about were little barbarian tribes for several thousand more years! Yikes! History is important to learn.
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Oh please, I didn’t even make that post and I’ll step in to answer this one: the china that we know today did not exist before shortly after world war II, before that it was a national capitolist country. Thousands of years of history, sure, but the core governmental concepts are younger than some people alive today.

As for North Korea, as a nation it only formally began to exist in 1945, when the soviets occupied the Northern half of Korea and the United States occupied the southern half. Before that, it was just Korea… and again, the core policies in place today make Northern Korea totally incomparable to Korea of old…
 
_Abyssinia said:
Entire population of the world could fit in state of Arkansas in 2003
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This argument is a strawman, and demonstrates lack of understanding the subject.

Yes, you can put a lot of people on Earth at the population density of central Tokyo (2000 persons / sq.km.). They will do just fine. This is not an issue.

The issue is that keeping one person alive requires a certain amount of arable land and fisheries to produce food, and a certain amount of non-renewable energy resources, namely oil and coal. It’s these things we are running out of, and not the land surface.

Next, the amount of arable land will decrease in the 21st century due to global warming, as previously fertile land will change into deserts. Overfishing is already a problem; the famous Somali pirates are actually former firshermen whose fisheries were devastated by pollution and industrial fishing. Increasing ocean acidification will further disrupt marine ecosystems and decrease fishing yields.
 
kompaz said:
Next, the amount of arable land will decrease in the 21st century due to global warming, as previously fertile land will change into deserts. Overfishing is already a problem; the famous Somali pirates are actually former firshermen whose fisheries were devastated by pollution and industrial fishing. Increasing ocean acidification will further disrupt marine ecosystems and decrease fishing yields.
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Assertions not in evidence. There’s some currently marginally farmable land may become less productive in a warmer climate. Other marginal land will become MORE productive in a longer growing season. CO2 is a trace component of the atmosphere, but a crucial building block of plant life. There’s good reason to think that slightly higher CO2 levels will actually stimulate plant growth rates and subsequent crop yields. This stuff is so nebulous nobody really knows what is going to happen.

As for Somali fishermen, this is NOT fundamentally a pollution issue, but an anarchy issue. When the Somali government collapsed, it eliminated any restraint on irresponsible fishing methods. Sustainable fishing needs to leave enough behind to reproduce. Without any seasons or limits, local fishermen simply turned the area barren. That’s not a population OR a pollution problem. As usual, Malthusians attempt to reduce everything to “too many people” instead of actually solving actual problems.

Oceanic pollution IS a problem, but not one of the character you present here.
 
manualman said:
Assertions not in evidence. There’s some currently marginally farmable land may become less productive in a warmer climate. Other marginal land will become MORE productive in a longer growing season.
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It’s not about temperature. Warmer climate means different rainfall patterns.
 
kompaz said:
It’s not about temperature. Warmer climate means different rainfall patterns.
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You’re talking to a hydrologist / civil engineer. Anybody who tells you he can predict what warmer temperatures will due to global rainfall patterns is just fooling you. Sure, it might be slightly easier to predict what will happen just downwind of the Sahara. But not so much in North Dakota. The alarmists are loathe to admit this, but we just don’t know very much yet. So little that we’re best off addressing problems we DO understand instead of tilting at windmills we don’t.
 
Actaeon said:
Oh please, I didn’t even make that post and I’ll step in to answer this one: the china that we know today did not exist before shortly after world war II, before that it was a national capitolist country. Thousands of years of history, sure, but the core governmental concepts are younger than some people alive today.

As for North Korea, as a nation it only formally began to exist in 1945, when the soviets occupied the Northern half of Korea and the United States occupied the southern half. Before that, it was just Korea… and again, the core policies in place today make Northern Korea totally incomparable to Korea of old…
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It doesn’t matter how long the current government has been in power. It matters how long civilization, and thus population growth has existed there. People have been living in that area far longer than the PRC or North Korea have been political entities. We’re talking about population here, but the person I was responding to seemed to think that somehow no one existed there until recently. I was merely pointing out that advanced civilization has existed there far longer than any of the European countries he used as examples of “old” places.
 
“The latest forecasts by the United Nations show the number of people in the world shrinking by mid-century—that is, before today’s young adults reach retirement age. Many nations, especially in Europe, are already in a death spiral, losing a significant number of people each year. Listen closely, and you will hear the muffled sound of populations crashing.”
Source and full article here.

The collapsing world population over the next several centuries may also have the side effect of solving the global warming problem: A collapsing world population won’t contribute very much atmospheric CO2. Of course, humans will by then be more worried about reviving growth and increasing population than they will be about that.
 
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