Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely as we approach the 'official' announcement (by the U.N.) of 8 billion earthings in November. This horrific "milestone" of humanity's path to perdition was cleary called out as such by Bill Maher in his New Rules Friday Night, e.g.
New Rule: Let the Population Collapse | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) - YouTube
Maher does a superb job encapsulating in five minutes why 8 billion people on this finite world is madness and I recommend every blog reader view it. I especially enjoyed how he put down a numbskull named Matthew Yglesias ('One Billion Americans') , writing in New York magazine that the U.S. has more than ample space.
Maher made verbal mincemeat out of his nutso claim by noting - as I have in an previous post, e.g.
That having a huge population is about more than about space, but also the resources to support it, especially water (which is now disappearing everywhere in the drought -ravaged West where Lake Mead may reach 'dead pool' level by 2024). See e.g.
Rapid intensification of the emerging southwestern North American megadrought in 2020–2021 | Nature Climate Change
But see, idiots and ignoramuses like Yglesias just like to toss out B.S. and bollocks for the sake of click bait for their pieces, they could care less about facts.
Maher also kids the twit about placing millions in North Dakota,
"What are all those millions in Greater Bismarck going to eat, Soylent Green?"
Plenty of space in ND for sure, but does Yglesias really think people will be beating down the doors to get into that flyover state? Hell no. Maher also to his credit points out that it would take five - count 'em FIVE Earths - to support 8 billion people if all want to live like Americans do now. Which is to say with 330m people gobbling up 1/6 the planet's resources each year. (A Dept. of Agriculture report in 2018 forecast the average American would consume 222.2 pounds of meat and poultry in the course of the year - more than twice the amount of meat eaten by the average person on the planet.)
Even without that insane aspiration of a global U.S. standard of living we are currently consuming the resources equal to 1.8 Earths a year, catapulting to a point called "overshoot" e.g.
The interpretation of the graph is simple. By
June, 2030 TWO full Earths - the resources therein - will be needed to
support the then population. Already we are at 1.8 Earths. Every year Global
Footprint Network raises awareness about global ecological overshoot
with its Earth Overshoot Day campaign. Earth
Overshoot Day is the day on the calendar when humanity has used up the
resources that it takes the planet the full year to regenerate.
For all the talk of wind and solar energy fossil fuels supplied 84 % of the world's energy in 2019. Part of the reason for this has been the emergence of middle classes in China and India - who want every single goodie, amenity, food option, household space his counterpart in the U.S. has. All of which require intense energy as is only found in oil and gas to supply.
Meanwhile McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have basically blown it. We should have been massively using artificial birth control worldwide to limit the population to 6 billion, no more. Even that is nearly double the limit science writer Isaac Asimov once advocated.
In his February, 1976 lecture in Queen's Park Theater, Barbados, e.g.
Asimov defined carrying capacity thusly:
(usable
land-water resource base providing water + food + fuel) / (individual food,
fuel + water requirement)
If the numerator is » 11.4
x 10 9 hectares of usable aggregate equivalent land-water
resource base and if 4 hectares is the ideal "mean individual
requirement" over a lifetime (e.g. to meet all basic needs and have a few
private luxuries) , that means:
CC = (11.4 x 10 9 hectares) / 4 hectares/person » 2.85 billion
That is a figure we are now on the verge of surpassing by a factor of four.
Because we've played the fool for far too long, allowing the human population to explode beyond the capacity of the planet to support it, we are going to pay a heavy price for our complacence. This will not only be in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves - that will easily surpass current extremes - but in societal breakdowns in countries worldwide. Including possibly in the U.S. where we already got a minor 'taste' with the Jan. 6, 2020 insurrection.
As pointed out by Michael
Shermer (2015 book, 'The Moral Arc Of Science') too many people means too much strife and
competition for scarce resources, and hence a deformation of humanity's moral
arc. Citing this work in her essay in Free Inquiry magazine (Dec. 2021), Karen Schragg observes:
"Morality
- encompassing such values as equal treatment under just laws, equal job
opportunity, equal access to healthy food, equal access to potable water is
profoundly threatened by the far -reaching implications of overpopulation."
Adding:
"Simply put, whenever demand exceeds supply there will be immoral scramble to get one's fair share."
We all beheld this at a
micro-level in early 2020 when fights broke out in super market aisles over limited
toilet paper rolls- when the first supply shocks hit after the pandemic
began. Now try to imagine major food supply shortages and the mad
scramble to "get one's share". This is why Asimov - as well as
Shermer and Ms. Schragg - could see that overpopulation is a roadblock to any
kind of moral progress. To put it bluntly, in a scarcity environment incepted
by too many mouths to water or feed, ethics and morality are the first to
go. The "moral arc" is destroyed or blunted severely, and it is
"survival of the fittest" to use the phrase of the Social Darwinists.
Even as I write this law and order has almost completely collapsed in Haiti where roving gangs are increasing their chokehold on Haiti’s capital, using bulldozers to raze entire neighborhoods, overwhelming poorly armed police and taking their violence to within blocks of the seat of government.
Although Haitians have endured relentless bloodshed and tragedy for years, the escalation of lawlessness in recent weeks and the government’s inability to exert control has terrified the nation. Over nine days in July, more than 470 people were killed, injured or missing as a result of gang warfare in Cité Soleil, the country’s largest slum, according to the United Nations.
As gangs expand their territory and are now close to the presidential palace, interior ministry, the central bank and the national penitentiary, where hungry prisoners are threatening to riot, officials warn. In Cité Soleil, home to about 300,000 people, gangs fighting for control are gang-raping women and girls, killing at random and using bulldozers to topple homes, according to residents.
Things are no better in Sri Lanka where its president has already fled the country as mobs took over the seat of government, see e.g.
What to know about the protests against the Rajapaksa family in Sri Lanka - The Washington Post
Meanwhile civil upheaval, gang violence, rapes and terror continue to plague many nations in sub-Sahara Africa with the continent already exceeding 1 billion in population. All signs continue to point to ever more global violence as the crunch of human numbers and pressure on limited resources - not just water, but food and fuel, continues unabated.
One of the primary culprits, of course, in the ceaseless addition to destitution and overpopulation - driven violence is the Roman Catholic Church - on account of it criminal anti-birth control dogma. This is why the science writer Arthur C. Clarke labeled Pope John Paul II a 'dangerous man' , i.e.
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