Population Issue?

[BodhiDharma]

From 300,000 B.C., it took until 1800 A.D. for the Human race to achieve a population of 1 billion. It was a cause for celebration and celebrate we did, because I think somebody got a little too drunk, and screwed a few too many girls. From this time, just 200 years ago, Human population has risen to roughly 6.6 billion.

Human population tends to grow geometrically, while the resources available to support it tend to grow arithmetically or in laymans terms, Humans multiply faster than our food (supply).
We can't die fast enough to match the number of us being born, nor can wars/conflicts/diseases kill enough people fast enough.

By 2050, it is expected that Human life will reach 10 billion. This is the comfort limit. At 10 billion, our cities become cramped to the point that traffic bursts at the seams. Any more, and we lose 'comfort'. Theoretically, the Earth can support 10 billion people comfortably. Humans are already depleting the Earth's natural resources at an alarming rate. Water is a particularly sensitive resourse.

Soon we hit 15 billion, this is the survival limit. Theoretically, this is the maximum number of Humans that lower-level species on the food chain can sustain, all life on Earth will be devoted to sustaining the health of the Human race.

Once we begin to pass 15 billion, the famine starts. There are no longer enough resources on Earth to feed the hungry, not enough fresh water to tame the thirsty, people begin to die. Not by the millions as is the case today, but by tens of millions. As we continue to multiply, hundreds of millions will die each day. The undeveloped world starves and becomes savage,cannibalism may be a possibility. The "civilized" world begins to fight over resources and land, slowly becoming more and more savage. In western USA, legal battles are already in progress over water usage/rights.

It may not seem like a serious problem today, but it slowly affects us every day. As a direct result of Humans even existing, an average of 1 species of bird per year vanishes, they are extinct because of us. Obviously, 6 billion is a number that already begins to taint the balance of things on our planet.


Well, do you have an answer? Do you have a comment? What the hell is the human race going to do about this problem? And it is a problem. And even faced with this, most people aren't even willing to execute the violent deviant humans in society! They want to keep EVEN THOSE undesirable people!

Isn't it obvious that humans aren't willing to do anything about this problem? Perhaps worldwide nuclear war is the only answer? We're "horrified" of nuclear war and capital punishment, but seem to think nothing of fucking our way slowly to the devastation of our own home!

 

[BodhiDharma]

^

 

[Ffactor]

You are right. It's a huge problem. In China if you have more than two kids now you go to jail. The same law should be implemented in India and other developing countries.

 

[casavant]

Good point. We gonna overcrowd ourselves like a herd of deer.

 

[Doktor Bollix]

I disagree:

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0500overpopulation.htm

The myth of over-population

By Antonia Feitz
web posted May 8, 2000

The world is over-populated and heading towards demographic catastrophe, right?

Wrong. According to Max Singer, writing in The Atlantic Monthly of August 1999, "Unless people's values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than live in the United States today." How does he come to this startling and unorthodox view? Simply because no demographer predicted that when fertility dropped to replacement level - which is 2.1 child per woman per lifetime - it would keep falling. But it has. In Western Europe, Japan and the East Asian tiger economies, the total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.5. and falling. Italy's has fallen to a national suicidal 1.2. North African immigrants look like inheriting Italy.

Fearing a population explosion because the population grew exponentially over the past two centuries is like fearing your baby will grow to 1000 pounds because it doubles its weight three times the first seven years, says Singer. In the 1960s, population grew at 2 per cent. It's now growing at 1 per cent and if it continues to drop as the pattern suggests it will, it will head into negative numbers. Many demographers now think the world's population will peak at 8 billion within fifty years or so, and then go into a rapid decline. So far from facing a population explosion, we're more likely looking at a population implosion.

According to Pierre Chaunu, professor emeritus of the Sorbonne and member of the French Academy, the implosion began fifty years ago. He said there's been little recognition of the demographic collapse of the West, which will take a time lag of thirty years to become obvious because of longevity. "According to my calculations, in the totality of the planet, the generations will not be replaced beginning the year 2020." [1]

Though the UN announced that the world's population reached 6 billion on October 12 1999, Chaunu denounced the claim as "false". He says that African population figures are inflated, doubts China's figures, and notes that in the former USSR, where there is one live birth for every 7 abortions, 292 million people have never existed. Then there's the 80-120 million killed under communism who haven't been officially recognised as being not part of their countries' population statistics.

So why the population explosion scare? Chaunu says the international agencies have to justify the huge sums spent on imposing authoritarian birth control programmes in many countries. So they claim imminent danger for the planet through 'over-population'. He also indicated that a "certain number of North American experts play with fear: fear of invasion and asphyxiation by the citizens of the third world." In plain English, they're playing the race card: there's not too many people, just too many of THEM.

Now we're getting the picture. There's even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Its website (www.vhemt.org) proclaims the usual people-hating message with the usual pagan overtones in the usual emotive rhetoric: "...the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions, possibly billions, of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens...us.

"Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory...Good health will be restored to the Earth's ecology...to the life form known by many as Gaia. It's going to take all of us going." [2]. Such self-loathing is pathological.

Then there's Sister Miriam MacGillis, an American nun who presents seminars on ecology and spirituality. Though her own God charged man to be fruitful and multiply, she claims humans are like cancer cells devouring the host. Ozone depletion, global warming, genetic deformities and deforestation are all symptoms of the human 'cancer' destroying the environment according to her warped and decidedly un-Christian thinking.[3]

The likes of her are talking nonsense. Some readers may be surprised, but there is no scientific consensus that global warming is actually a problem. Many scientists think it could even be beneficial. And what arrogance it is to suggest the world's climate should remain exactly as it was in the baby boomers' youth! Sea levels have risen and fallen before. Antarctica was once lush. Ice ages have come and gone. Perhaps we should have the humility to accept that Nature knows what she's doing.

Though about $2 billion a year is spent on projects designed to produce "evidence" to justify the harsh global energy rationing, they have failed to deliver the goods. Consequently, despite strong political pressure to support the Kyoto Treaty, more than 17,000 scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees and many in climatology, have signed a petition which reads as follows:

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth..." [4]

Compare their informed testimony with the astonishing fact that President Clinton has issued a directive to his President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) that the science of global warming is not to be discussed any more! [5]. Yes, despite the scepticism of reputable scientists, the UN has banned discussion of the science of global warming. Instead the UN, the NGOs, and compliant governments continue to spend millions of dollars on propaganda campaigns.

With this level of propaganda, no wonder it's hard for people to contemplate the idea that over-population might be a myth. Yet according to Nicholas Eberstadt, who holds the Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, the planet-wide TFR decline over the past four decades "has already curbed the relative and absolute pace of world population growth, in spite of increased life expectancy." In the early 1950s the planet-wide TFR was 5; in 2001 it will be 2.8. And falling. [6].

The figures he quotes are astonishing: 79 countries and territories, with 44 per cent of the world's population, are now in the below-replacement category. These include 27 of the 29 OECD countries, plus Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Bulgaria has the lowest TFR ever witnessed in a modern nation not at war - just 1.14 births per woman per lifetime. If that rate remains, each new generation in Bulgaria will be half the size of the preceding one. That's how quickly things can change.

Then there's the above-replacement but rapidly declining group of countries. According to the UN Population Division, TFRs for the less developed regions dropped by half in the past four decades - down from 6 births per woman per lifetime to 3. And falling. In Asia, TFRs have dropped by half as they have in Latin America and the Caribbean. Coercive family planning programmes are not needed: the fertility decline in Brazil, which never sponsored family planning, has been almost identical to Mexico's which did.

And finally there is the high and resistant high fertility group. These are sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab Middle Eastern countries which comprise under a sixth of the world's total population. Some people are beginning to describe them as child rich.

It's all very interesting and contrary to the environmental doomsdayers' predictions. It seems we are not facing the Malthusian spectre of uncontrolled breeding. Quite the contrary.

The Japanese island of Oshima is giving us an inkling of what the future may be like. Children are so rare that an old people's home set up dummies of a little boy and a pig-tailed little girl waving on the front porch "to soften the atmosphere of the place", according to the manager. [7]

The majority of people are old. Octogenarians outnumber teenagers three to one; septuagenarians outnumber teenagers by seven to one. The paper seller is 84, as is the barber. The workers who manoeuvre the heavy ferry gang-plank are grey-haired. A sprightly octogenarian prepares meals-on-wheels for the housebound. Many schools are empty as there are so few children. As people die, houses are abandoned.

Twenty years ago, one village had 500 people; now there are 230; in another twenty years there might be none. The town of Towa's population was 20,670 in 1945; under 10,000 in 1970; and 5553 in 2000. There's just one little eight-year-old girl in second grade at Towa's elementary school. According to the reporter, "what has happened here will also happen, to one degree or another, throughout Japan - and in many other developed countries."

Japan's TFR is 1.39. The Japanese government is in a state of "low level panic", realising it's too late now to reverse the inevitable decline. It has estimated that without any increase in fertility, "its population will have fallen from 125 million today to just 500 by the end of the next millennium... " (News Weekly, 6/11/99).

Of course that won't happen, but it's very exotic food for thought.

 

[ripper2]

VERY intersting article!

 

[Doktor Bollix]

Yeah, it's a very unorthodox opinion, it always fucks with the doom and gloomers. But the population of Russia and some western european countries has already gone into freefall. Russia has less than 120 million people now. In Europe and Japan they are already figuring out there won't be enough young people to pay for social welfare benefits for the old.

America avoids this fate by assimilating 1 million legal immigrants a year, plus plenty who come off the books. Europe finds it very difficult to assimilate other peoples because of the cult of the nation state. It looks like they had better learn, or they they'll end up lightweights on the world stage.

 

[cockdezl]

BOLLIX presented a very good article rebutting the doomsayers overpopulation crap. Another un-popular dissenter is Julian Simon, who articulated and supported similar arguments in many books and articles, most notable is "The Ultimate Resource".

Who is Julian Simon? (these facts borrowed liberally from an article by Stephen Moore for Wired)

Julian Simon was an economist who in the 1970's was shaken out of his comfortable tree by the rabid environmental and ecological doomsayers, who proceeded to capture the attention of the media and public with their apocalyptic warnings. Chief among them was one Paul Erlich - author of The Population Bomb, who predicted worldwide famines that would kill hundreds of millions of people during the 1970's and 1980's. Simon met these prophets of doom head-on, and countered their catastrophic claims with facts. Lots, and lots of them!

Simon is particularly famous for the wager he won with Erlich and a few other doomsayers over the scarcity of a number of commodities. The Malthusians were hugely embarrassed in the wager, where Paul Ehrlich bet Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich's choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

As Simon articulated in his arguments, the only resource that is crucial is human intelligence, with it all things can be overcome. Obviously this is anti-thetical to the environmentalists who wish to claim that it is humans who destroy, not create, and therefore human numbers must be controlled. This dictatorial mindset is flawed since evidence shows that Western societies, American mainly, have increased food production far in excess of demand, not to mention that we utilize extremely efficient means of production.

Environmental Scientist: Dr. Paul Ehrlich
Dr. Paul Ehrlich is a Stanford University biologist and author of the best-selling book The Population Bomb. Since the release of this book in 1968, Ehrlich has been one of the most frequently cited "experts" on environmental issues by the media, despite the fact that his predictions on the fate of the planet, more often than not, have been wrong. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation during the 1970s because the earth's inhabitants would multiply at a faster rate than world's ability to supply food. Six years later, in The End of Affluence, a book he co-authored with his wife Anne, Ehrlich increased his death toll estimate suggesting that a billion or more could die from starvation by the mid-1980s. By 1985, Ehrlich predicted, the world would enter a genuine era of scarcity. Ehrlich's predicted famines never materialized. Indeed, the death toll from famines steadily declined over the twenty-five year period. Though world population has grown by more 50% since 1968, food production has grown at an even faster rate due to technological advances.

Perhaps Ehrlich's best known blunder is a 1980 bet he made with University of Maryland economist Julian Simon. Dr. Simon, who believes that human ingenuity holds the answers to population growth problems, asserted that if Ehrlich were correct and the world truly was heading toward an era of scarcity, then the price of various commodities would rise over time. Simon predicted that prices would fall instead and challenged Ehrlich to pick any commodity and any future date to illustrate his point. Ehrlich accepted the challenge: In October 1980, he purchased $1,000 worth of five metals ($200 each) -- tin, tungsten, copper, nickel and chrome. Ehrlich bet that if the combined value of all five metals he purchased was higher in 1990, Simon would have to pay him the difference. If the prices turned out to be lower, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Ten years later, Ehrlich sent Simon a check for $576 -- all five metals had fallen in price.

Selected Ehrlich Quotes

"Actually, the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people..." - Quoted by the Associated Press, April 6, 1990

"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992

"We've already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." - Quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet (1990)

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer." - Ehrlich in his book, The Population Bomb (1968), predicting widespread famine that never materialized.

 

[MP5]

If you people don't think there is a population problem, just open your eyes. On every corner land is getting plowed under and new homes being built. Ever think that every single newborn is going to need a house to live in someday? Here in Colorado, everything is getting developed, there is already a water shortage, yet people keep shitting out the kids, no one cares. throw in the minorities that fuck like animals, and the immigrants, and you have a global problem. AIDS is a gift from god.