Over population

Here's something else to ponder... lets look at some of the people that humans kept around that might have been better off culled because they were deficient in some way.... a famous composer who was deaf, a fantastically gifted astronomer and physicist who is confined to a wheel chair, cannot survivie on his own, but yet is smarter than probably 98% of the worlds population...

We obviously need to get away from the mentality of have as many children as you can... the people who are having the most children are the ones who can least afford them. But until we can invent some method of determining a person's true worth and impact on society, I'd say we stay away from a culling mentality.

We can ask that society to turn away from the "culling mentality" and they might pause long enough to establish a few protocols so that we don't kill the next Hawking, but nature will be a bit more indifferent.

Just like a horse wiggles its skin to ward off too many horseflies, one day Atlas will indeed shrug and the globe will give a shake and knock too many parasites off its hide. It is inevitable, even if it does not seem fair.

There are only two certain facts about the future:

1 - something will happen

2 - no one *knows* what it is (even if they think they do)

-Ww

Go back and read about the English 17th Century Economist Thomas Malthus. He was an early proponent that the world's populations was getting to be too big. He was wrong then. And most demographic economists think that, at worse, overpopulation is a short term phenomena and self correcting. Others think that warning signals of overpopulation come early enough that normal supply and demand signals will work and people will have fewer children before things get really bad.

Whenever I've taken a long airline flight over any of the planet's land masses.... I look down and wonder..... "Over Population"? I don't think so!

Wiping out the planet's urban feed troughs might go a long way toward curing several of our problems.

Sounds pretty harsh, I know...... but , not entirely without merit.

Giz

Not sure what any of all that has to do with the subject. But as long as were just posting what someone else says.


Originally Posted by Rudyard K

Everything we post was taken from what someone else said. Unless you have invented something.

And Foghorn Leghorn says..."Clunk enough people and we'll have a nation of lumpheads"



Originally Posted by Rudyard K

Is Foghorn Leghorn is your population expert ?

Go back and read about the English 17th Century Economist Thomas Malthus. ... Originally Posted by TexTushHog

More recently, The Club of Rome computer simulations study published under the title The Limits of Growth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

was predicting catastrophes due to overpopulation (and thus population crashes) that got major international attention in the early 1970s, and Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb predicted similar population driven apocalypses that were taken seriously by many in the late 1960s. Some of us are old enough to recall when these concerns were common topics of conversation in well-informed circles.

We have already survived many of their more dire forecasts for the collapse of the world as we know it...which was supposed to have at least gotten under way by the end of the 20th century.

-Ww

More recently, The Club of Rome computer simulations study published under the title The Limits of Growth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

was predicting catastrophes due to overpopulation (and thus population crashes) that got major international attention in the early 1970s, and Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb predicted similar population driven apocalypses that were taken seriously by many in the late 1960s. Some of us are old enough to recall when these concerns were common topics of conversation in well-informed circles.

We have already survived many of their more dire forecasts for the collapse of the world as we know it...which was supposed to have at least gotten under way by the end of the 20th century.

-Ww Originally Posted by Wwanderer

Yep.

More recently, The Club of Rome computer simulations study published under the title The Limits of Growth... Originally Posted by Wwanderer

And we all know how accurate computer simulations are.

And we all know how accurate computer simulations are. Originally Posted by John Bull

Sad but true.

Go back and read about the English 17th Century Economist Thomas Malthus. He was an early proponent that the world's populations was getting to be too big. He was wrong then. And most demographic economists think that, at worse, overpopulation is a short term phenomena and self correcting. Others think that warning signals of overpopulation come early enough that normal supply and demand signals will work and people will have fewer children before things get really bad. Originally Posted by TexTushHog

More recently, The Club of Rome computer simulations study published under the title The Limits of Growth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

was predicting catastrophes due to overpopulation (and thus population crashes) that got major international attention in the early 1970s, and Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb predicted similar population driven apocalypses that were taken seriously by many in the late 1960s. Some of us are old enough to recall when these concerns were common topics of conversation in well-informed circles.

We have already survived many of their more dire forecasts for the collapse of the world as we know it...which was supposed to have at least gotten under way by the end of the 20th century.

-Ww Originally Posted by Wwanderer

Just because it hasn't happened does not mean it won't. We are human locust.....nonrenewable resources do not grow on trees or will be brought back by the tooth fairy. Read Harding's' tragedy of the Commons. Anyone familiar with game management knows how important understanding this basic fact is. Faith in the unknown is like faith in God. Might make ya feel good but not the best way to avert a tragedy.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rdeyoung/tragedy.html

Unfortunately, knowing the conditions that lead to a tragedy does not insure one can easily avoid it. Clearly, the nature of a resource is fixed. While one can limit withdrawal of resource units to a sustainable rate for renewables and a repairable rate for those that physically deteriorate, a subtractable resource cannot be made nonsubtractable. Furthermore, managing access involves the complex task of excluding others from using the resource. Thus averting a tragedy involves restraining both consumption and access.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth



We have already survived many of their more dire forecasts for the collapse of the world as we know it...which was supposed to have at least gotten under way by the end of the 20th century.

-Ww Originally Posted by Wwanderer

Maybe you should read your own links.....had you, you may have understood just what the authors were saying. Which is, finite resources are FINITE. Hey , I say party like a rock star. We all die in the end.




Robert M. Solow from MIT, complained about the weak base of data on which The Limits to Growths predictions were made (Newsweek, March 13, 1972, page 103). Dr. Allen Kneese and Dr. Ronald Riker of Resources for the Future (RFF) stated:

"The authors load their case by letting some things grow exponentially and others not. Population, capital and pollution grow exponentially in all models, but technologies for expanding resources and controlling pollution are permitted to grow, if at all, only in discrete increments." [12]

Some critics falsely claimed that The Limits to Growth predicted oil running out in 1992 among other natural resources. The book's real conclusion was that it was very unlikely that resources would end in 1992. The 1992 date was extrapolated out of context by critics dedicated to demolish "Limits" work, and is still present in common knowledge.
It should be noted, that the authors of the report accepted that the then-known resources of minerals and energy could, and would, grow in the future, and consumption growth rates could also decline. The theoretical expiry time for each resource would therefore need to be updated as new discoveries, technologies and trends came to light. To overcome this uncertainty, they offered an upper value for the expiry time, calculated as if the known resources were multiplied by two. Even in that case, assuming continuation of the average rate of consumption growth, virtually all major minerals and energy resources would expire within 100 years of publication (i.e., by 2070). Even if reserves were two times larger than expected, ongoing growth in the consumption rate would still lead to the relatively rapid exhaustion of those reserves.[13] On the other hand, reserves may continue to grow, considering the large amounts of minerals in the planet Earth.[citation needed]

Maybe you should read your own links.....had you, you may have understood just what the authors were saying. Which is, finite resources are FINITE. Hey , I say party like a rock star. We all die in the end. Originally Posted by WTF

I think all he was saying was...The predictions of "finiteness" are often greatly exaggerated...and we have survived them many times. That's also what the link said.

Why you trying to pick a fight with W, WTF? You constipated today?

I think all he was saying was...The predictions of "finiteness" are often greatly exaggerated...and we have survived them many times. That's also what the link said. Originally Posted by Rudyard K

Precisely so. I certainly don't want to defend the ridiculous proposition that the world can/will support an arbitrarily large population and high standard of living. My personal ***guess*** is that it could not sustain its present population if the *average* standard-of-living were anything approaching what we currently consider to be First World levels.

However, it does seem to me completely reasonable to keep in mind the *long* history of *vastly* incorrect past predictions of an overpopulation catastrophe around the corner when presented with the latest one...nothing more than "the little boy who cried wolf" common sense, basically.

Re The Limits of Growth model, perhaps the strongest reason to dismiss its validity (noted decades ago) is that the same model can be run backwards in time to "postdict" history or started at various points in the past to check its results against what actually happened. It virtually always predicts population overshoots and crashes; for example, when run backwards from the 1960s, it "postdicts" a huge world population in the 18th century that crashed in the 19th and is beginning to recover in the 20th...qualitatively unlike reality in other words. Anyway, it is so simple (5 variables to describe the economy and demographics of the whole world!) that it would require a miracle to be correct.

If you'd like to evaluate Paul Ehrlich's prophetic powers, note that The Population Bomb opines with great certainty that India could not possible feed more than 600 million (made when its population was around 400 million); the current number is just about a billion. Or check out his famous bet with Julian Simon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

And, for rational arguments favoring a more optimistic view, see the same Mr. Simon's book It's Getting Better All The Time or Matt Ridley's very recent work The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

Why you trying to pick a fight with W, WTF? You constipated today?

Thanks for sticking up for me, RK, but could I ask that you use "Ww" and not just "W". I don't want to be confused with that particular Texan!

-Ww

as mentioned there will likely be environmental responses/consequences to overpopulation in localized areas. However many areas are experiencing negative population 'growth'. that isn't to say that certain resources will not come to an end or that our way of life doesn't meander and change.

ML