Wednesday, August 3, 2022

The Catastrophe Implicit In A World With 5 Billion More People Than It Can Support

 


"The recent report that informed us that in November of this year the population of the Earth will reach 8 billion is not good news. And those who regard it as such should be treated for Tik Tok brain. The Secretary General of the United Nations of all people, said that welcoming our eight billionth person was an occasion to celebrate our diversity.  Yeah, how wonderful people of all races will be contributing to an already unsustainable carbon footprint and choking and starving equally." - Bill Maher in last segment of New Rules on HBO Real Time Friday Night.

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.

Meet Another Overpopulation Crackpot...Errr Advocate (Matthew Yglesias) Who Insists The U.S. Can Hold 1 Billion People 

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. What is so difficult about grasping the concept of "overshoot"?  Actually nothing. Unless, that is, one has zero concept of limits. In this case, the limits of a nation - or a planet- to provide for all its inhabitants.  Hence, the need to limit population because we inhabit a limited planet, not an infinite one.   Therein lies the crux of solving the population problem.  Ans.  There isn't any unless one supports neverending growth.     What is the above graphic  telling us?  Easy!  We do not NEED any more people on this planet! Or...in the US of A.

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.



See Also:


And:


 "To Breed Or Not To Breed?" The Answer Ought To Be Obvious By Now!

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