Why Is The Corporate Media Concealing The Over Population Threat?

Isaac Asimov lectures in Barbados, on Feb. 6, 1976. He focused on the Moon, but also touched on the dangers of overpopulation with respect to Earth and its finite resources.

As I read an article in the local paper (COS Gazette) from 15 years ago, by Mitzi Perdue, it again occurred to me how the danger of excessive population growth is being soft-soaped, suppressed as if our consciousness of it is being hollowed out.  Ms. Perdue's article ('Population Quietly Keeps On Exploding') began:

"If you're over 50 you may remember in the early 1960s, one of the hottest topics for discussion was the population explosion. You could read about it on the cover of TIME magazine", e.g.


"Or in a book by Paul Ehrlich that topped the best seller list", e.g.


as well as constant editorials and articles.   Fast forward to the present and you'll see a startling reversal has taken place:The subject is rarely mentioned in the popular corporate media or by political figures. And this is in spite of the fact that many scientists will tell you that the population explosion is the number one problem facing mankind."

Indeed, one of those scientists - Albert E. Bartlett- within one year of Perdue's piece, wrote a stirring article ('Thoughts On Long Term Energy Supplies - Scientists And The Silent Lie') in Physics Today July, 2004, p. 53):

https://www.colorado.edu/physics/phys4810/phys4810_fa08/4810_readings/bartlett.pdf

Writing that, in respect to why so many scientists remain silent on the issue:

 "Scientists’ general reticence stems from the fact that it is politically incorrect or unpopular to argue for stabilization of population – at least in the U.S. Or perhaps scientists are uncomfortable stepping outside their specialized areas of expertise”.

Adding that whatever the reason, it is equivalent to perpetuating a “silent lie”, a term derived from a Mark Twain quote:

“Almost all lies are acts, and speech has no part in them…I am speaking of the lie of silent assertion: we can tell it without saying a word.”

But while too many scientists have remained silent, the loopy bastion of neoliberal economists continue to chirp that more people are needed!  For example, The Wall Street Journal  article, Nov. 23, 2015, p. A1, 'Population's Flagging Growth Undermines Global Economy', wherein we learn:

Previous generations fretted about the world having too many people. Today's problem is too few. This reflects two long-established trends: lengthening lifespans and declining fertility.

Simply put, companies are running out of workers, customers or both. In either case economic growth suffers

Which is total balderdash given the World Bank and IMF at the time noted the OECD nations had well over 230 m citizens unemployed thanks to a combination of reasons including:   corporate restructuring, increased automation and offloading jobs to cheaper nations.  In other words, the adequate population to carry out whatever labor certainly exists, but just not in the same places!  The solution then isn't to produce more people but to move existing workers to places where jobs need to be filled.

And yet the propaganda that the world and most populous countries need more people continues to be piled on. Such as with the April 30 WSJ piece (p. A1) 'Limit  To China's Economic Rise: Not Enough Babies'.  - accompanied by the subsidiary header: 'The workforce is aging but Beijing's policies still discourage childbirth'.  And why shouldn't they? It was precisely those policies that have allowed China to compete with the industrialized West in terms of financial assets, including a large middle class.   As I've written before, castigating high birth rate morons like Bret Stephens (e.g. Nov. 5, 2015 post), after insisting China certainly has the "space" to pack another billion:

"The point is this numskull has no clue that supporting a massive population isn't simply based on finding the space in which to squeeze them. You also need to consider the support systems, for growing enough food to feed them all each day, as well as the water (clean water) to meet basic needs - not to mention an energy and transport infrastructure. And we aren't even going to get into the number of hospitals (or even urgent care centers) that'd be required to serve all their medical needs."

Then, taking on Stephen's criticism of China's "one child" policy:

"Nowhere in his little rant is Stephens honest enough to cite what China's fertility rate was in 1950. As per an earlier article in the WSJ (Nov. 2) it was 6.11 per woman.  (Compared to 1.55 now).

Does this bozo have any remote idea what such a birth rate would have translated into had China not acted? It would have meant a population exceeding 2.2 billion by 1990 and the Chinese never would have been able to support it, nor would the country have reached the near superpower status it has  - even being a creditor to U.S. bond debt. (Owning nearly $1.3 trillion of our bond debt). Further, China's trade capacity would never have evolved to what it become, nor would it have been able to support the military it has - now rivaling the U.S. in the Pacific.  For all intents, China would have remained little better than one of those poor, overpopulated African nations - from which hundreds of thousands are now trying to flee to get to Europe. "

Or, would have remained as generally impoverished as India in relative terms. (Difference of 10- 15 percent in economic growth, and ability to support a significantly bigger middle class.)   While it's true Indira Gandhi and others tried more coercive sterilization measures to halt India's exploding population, it never worked as well as China's one child policy. See e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRBxqDuPei4

The dirty little secret? As India's numbers continued to explode beyond 2000, the Indian government was hard pressed to keep up in terms of providing support, resources.  This is why, when the WSJ pressed China's Deputy Director of its Family Planning Commission (Wang Peian)  - on whether the nation had enough fresh blood to provide able workers, and didn't need more babies, Mr. Wang tersely replied:

"China doesn't have a population shortage. Not now, not in 100 years."

Which is true. Its issue is not in the numbers per se, but the distribution of workers. The worker deficit problem can be solved by allocating more workers, more people then,  where they are needed.  It isn't solved by reproducing more mouths to feed who then must be tended to in their old age! That is the classic definition of a pyramid scheme.

As I've noted already,

"Here is the essential axiom: a nation cannot at once have a vast  rapidly growing population and material wealth. If the population outstrips its available resources it is condemned to destitution. The Chinese themselves, if the earlier WSJ story ('Chinese Face Hurdles To Baby Boom After Policy Shift')  is to be believed, are in no hurry to make more babies via the revised policy either. (And if Stephens took the time to read "ambitiously" the articles in his own paper he'd see that - before writing a column full of codswallop)."

Adding:

"Maybe in Bret Stephens little pie-eyed capitalist clown fantasy world population can grow unabated with material wealth per person, and a family with seven or eight kids can afford "the best'. Alas, it doesn't work like that in most of the real world, by which I mean outside the gated enclaves of the rich.

The Cornucopians like Stephens get it wrong because they don't see population growth for the toxin it is, and can't put 2 plus 2 together to see how it leads to the Malthusian nightmare."

Which brings us to the issue of why the corporate media are so assiduously concealing or minimizing the problem of excess population. Well, first because they don't want you to know there is a problem!  How often, indeed, in the past ten years have you read anything concerning overshoot, i.e. that our numbers and their derivative consumption of existing resources is overtaking what is available? Even moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, then by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us.  This is shown in the following graph:

Which I doubt any major newspaper has published since it became available. Why not? Because it would cut through all the propaganda, PR and 'feel good' economic bunkum (e.g. about needing more people to increase global GDP) to show we are unambiguously in a crisis with regard to resource sustainability.

Second, there is no mention that every energy use and conversion pollutes and degrades the environment we depend upon. Hence, the more people, the more energy conversions and the more rapidly we descend into a high entropic, high waste world. (Already nations are refusing waste from the U.S,, e.g. piled onto ships and dispatched from NYC because it has insufficient landfill space). 

Too many of our citizens then fail to appreciate that every energy conversion process has as an accompaniment entropy, or disorder. In most cases this appears as waste heat, as well as pollutants. For example, a car engine produces carbon monoxide as well as carbon dioxide and waste heat generated via the internal combustion engine.  The 2nd law of thermodynamics or entropy law  states that the expelled gas constituents cannot ever be combined again to produce the original fuel. In other words, resource consumption here is a one way process. Resource extraction, such as oil shale fracking also has many adverse effects on the terrestrial environment, apart from the CO2 released when the stuff is burned (e.g. as kerogen)

Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be converted into resources puts us in global ecological overshoot, depleting the very resources on which human life and biodiversity depend.

Lastly, the hedge funds and corporations that own the newspapers and run the boards of directors are in thrall to consumption and ever more debt.  If they spilled the beans about too many people already, they'd have to admit to their agenda of not only exploding population and exploding consumption but exploding debt. Already, consumer debt of all types (including student loan debt) in the U.S. has hit $15 trillion.   The increasing debt itself is a pronounced signal that things cannot go on as they are, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/09/44-trillion-in-deficits-by-2024-minus.html

The astute and aware citizen must be sentient enough to know more people is not in humanity's best interest. Isaac Asimov, as part of his Barbados lecture (see top image), warned that humans had two choices: decrease their population to the carrying capacity limit to live in an equilibrium with the Earth and its resources, or let nature “increase the human death rate” (e.g. by starvation, pestilence, wars over resources etc.)

He also remarked:

"It is now the willingly childless woman who is the heroine of our planet. She is the one who now deserves all the kudos and praise, for helping to do what is necessary to spare humanity from the ravages of over-population"

Trump's Latest Trash Talking Should Make Him Unelectable

Donald Trump's latest trash talking about Hillary is beyond belief. I had to play the clips (featured on Chris Hayes 'All In') several times before I could absorb the magnitude of it. As political journalist Chuck Todd noted on the NBC News just minutes before, if any ordinary mortal had spewed the vomit Trump did before an audience of howling groupies in MI (who Trump himself described as "nine thousand maniacs"), he or she would have been fired on the spot.

As I paused the DVR control and examined the faces of those Trumpie groupies, I compared them with the separate stills from one of Hitler's rallies captured by his Third Reich filmographer Leni Reifenstahl, on a separate TV set. What struck me was the similarity. These yahoos were literally drowned in a hate fest, just as Hitler's groupies were. Who would have believed 50 years ago that America could havc mutated to this point to unleash such political deviants upon us?

Incredibly, assorted Fox News puppets insisted he meant nothing vulgar. As one female spokesperson for Trump's campaign put it: "He meant slung to the ground!" Uh no, dearie, the word was "schlonged" - described by most U.S. media as a "Yiddish" term but in fact many Germans use it as an Anglicized alternative for "fucked". (In strict German there is no specific counterpart, though "fucken" is used by semi-literate boors of the lowest classes, like in the slums of Munich, Berlin or Dresden. "Schlong" for penis, also - I am told- is a common Anglicized term used by actresses in German porno films.)

So, let's not get cute here, Trump knew damned well what he was saying and what he meant, and anyone who needs to "interpret" his remarks is a moron.

Hillary herself, to her credit, took the vile epithets and calumny in stride at a separate meeting, where she counseled a girl suffering from asthma not to be intimidated by the bullies. She also described how she has had a long experience with this lot, and indeed she (and Bill) have, dating back from the mid -1990s, when the right wing nexus tried to pin Vince Foster's murder as well as drug dealing out of Mena, AR on them. All of this was finally exposed in a superb Newsweek article entitled 'The Right Wing Web'. (February 22, 1999, p.34)

As Trump himself crosses each new barrier of impropriety, under the phony mantra of "attacking political correctness", his hate mongering fans are in a state of near euphoria. I even read yesterday in The Denver Post (p. 11A) how the Ku Kluxers now see him as their man, their voice. They want their members to bone up on the issues and pay attention to Trump with a view to catapulting him to high office.

Ain't gonna happen! Already the new polls show 50 percent of Americans affirming they would be embarrassed to have this turkey as their president. Of course, it vastly breaks down along party lines with only 20 percent of Repubs in the embarrassed category while 82 percent of Democrats are. But what do you expect when the R-party has mutated to become one of poltroons and knuckle draggers?

Jeb Bush to his initial credit, began to knock Trump (after the latest remarks) as the "chaos candidate" but then quickly attacked Hillary for cultivating "victimology". Huh?  So wait, Jebbie - you effing loser, it was Hillary's fault that Trump used such crude and abusive language? To be sure, as one MSNBC guest noted, this latest outburst ought to seal Trump's fate certainly for female voters.

Meanwhile, historian Michael Beschloss - appearing last night on Rachel Maddow- insisted there is no history for such venomous rhetoric (including inciting a mob against reporters) other than segregationist George Wallace back in 1968. Wallace also used vitriolic, racist and degenerate rhetoric in trying to stir up the semi-literate masses. He tried to do it again in 1972, but was felled in Laurel, MD by a would be assassin's bullets. That was Arthur Bremer from Milwaukee.

Incredibly, it took that turn of events to temper Wallace and in later years he actually regretted his hate- spewing rhetoric. By the end of his life he'd almost become a changeling.

A recent (Dec. 5th) article in The Economist really puts the Trumpies in perspective noting (p. 30):

"The anxiety Trump supporters betray by looking for scapegoats says most, of course, about themselves. Typically members of the white lower middle class, they are at once jealous of the small privileges that distinguish them from the toilers below, and bitterly resentful of the faraway government that provides their Social Security, VA care and Medicare.

Remonstrating in hard times, they are the "radical centre" in academic jargon, who turned out before for George Wallace, a populist southern Democrat who ran for President four times in the 1960s and 70s."

The article then identifies the iconic Trump supporter of this "radical center" with a character  from a John Updike novel named Rabbit Angstrom "from whose flabby mouth dripped endless expressions of impotence, anger and glum humor...having retired to Florida to nurse his disappointment".

As WSJ author Bret Stephens also noted in a recent op-ed outburst of establishment GOP despond, "Why Don't We Just Elect Hillary Now?",  the upending of the GOP race and the tilt to Trump cuts across the whole freakish Republican coalition. What had once been an unholy alliance of business -Wall Street types, evangelicals and libertarian followers of Ayn Rand has now metastasized (according to The Economist, ibid.), to become "pro-Trump Tea Party agitators, racist evangelical Christians (who believe Obama is really a "Muslim" with a fake birth certificate) and national security obsessives" (who believe Snowden is a "traitor")

The Economist's final words on this (and bear in mind this is before Trump's latest venom directed at Hillary):

"Almost none of Mr. Trump's jokes are good jokes. It would be good for America if the end of him, as seems likely, is in sight"

Let's hope it's sooner rather than later. As one savvy political analyst pointed out, Trump's actual testing of "the law of political gravity"  will start with the first caucuses and primaries next year. Then we see an end to power by polls, and whether the Trump rise is just another mirage. (Like Pat Buchanan in 1992).

See also:

http://gawker.com/donald-trump-believes-his-supporters-are-morons-hes-ri-1729279807

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jack-lessenberry/65310/they-created-trump

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/65307/a-red-white-and-black-christmas-with-donald-trump

You Can't Fix Stupid: Rebutting The Climate Change Threat Belittlers

It was hard enough watching the spot on Chris Hayes' 'All In' three nights ago featuring a clip from Stuart Varney's show on FOX Business Channel. It featured a red-bearded Brit buffoon who fairly relished ridiculing Bernie Sanders' claim that climate change is the most serious threat faced by humanity. He said: "Oh, he's really brilliant that guy! El Baghdadi will be sawing  Bernie Sanders' head off and he'll be screaming: 'If only we had an emissions trading scheme"

Ha, ha and ha. Funny, but it really isn't funny. Nor will it be when this imbecile, his host Stuart Varney and Peggy Noonan (who spouted on a different show that "most people would see Sanders as slightly daffy"   have parasitic worms infesting their brains within ten years, along with amoebas bearing amoebic dysentery and also dengue fever. All this as the temperatures rise to new record levels in long lasting heat waves. Nor will they be laughing when five to six years earlier some ten million more migrants rush our borders because their own lands have become unlivable owing to global warming. What? Will Trump or whoever try to kill them all or build a wall as high as the Empire State Bldg.?  Get real!

The problem with morons like this is that they are basically unaware they are morons. They have no clue, nor do they know enough science to even be spouting off about CO2 levels, or climate change, or the Paris Climate Summit now going on.

As another example, we can take Denver Post columnist Ross Kaminsky who is the closest thing to a Neanderthal - in image- that one could imagine, e.g.

Not that I've anything against Neanderthals if they can write some sense, which Kaminsky clearly can't. A radio host on 850 KOA in Denver, Kaminsky had best keep his day job rather than churning out offal like his 'Climate Conference is Meaningless" dreck in last Sunday's paper.  He also, like the Fox buffoons, asks "How can it be that even a dozen people take Bernie Sanders Seriously?'

Well, because as Sanders noted in his on air response to the FOX Business clowns, the CIA and Pentagon are taking it seriously! See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/11/climate-deniers-still-dont-get-it-on.html

As noted therein:

In  The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the authors compiled detailed statistics showing that water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq and Turkey, killed livestock, drove up food prices, sickened children and forced 1.5 million rural residents to the outskirts of Syria's jam-packed cities - just as the country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq War. The stage was literally set for a human tinderbox.

And further:

on April 24 this year the 'Defense, National Security And Climate Change Symposium' was held in Washington, D.C.  At the Symposium Brigadier General Stephen Cheney stepped up to the podium to discuss 'Conflict and Climate Change'. Cheney, like some other speakers- zeroed in on climate-driven migration, asserting:

"We know for a fact that climate change is already driving internal and cross border migration"

Referencing here, for example, that in Bangladesh - the 'ground zero' of global warming- rising sea levels could displace 15 million by 2050. Oxford University's Norman Myers has projected there could be as many as 200 million climate refugees by mid-century.

Do Ross or any of his FOX nitwit pals have any remote idea what a human catastrophe such mass migrations would create?

Well, the defense and security establishments do which is why they are freaking terrified about the prospect and trying to get plans in place to cope with the floods. Not just water floods!

Ross then asks the most stupid question of all:

"How can it be that people fail to see a world boiling over with Islamofascism and say to themselves: 'We really need to focus our time and resources on climate change/"

Well, because ISIS are little irritating roaches compared to the magnitude of the peril we face in planet-wide climate change!  You can easily step on roaches but not rising seas inundating your cities, see e.g.




















But that's not all! We can also expect raging fire storms from coast to coast similar to what struck Tasmania back in 2013, forcing people to flee for their lives, and escape to water areas to stay cool,  e.g.


And we already know that West Nile Fever and Dengue fever will spread to most of the nation by the first year of no seasons (ca. 2040), but other viral and parasitic infections will also abound, probably infesting most of the U.S. by 2025. (And already the "kissing bug" is devastating areas with Chagas disease. Google and learn more!)Two of these are illustrated below:












Thus, worm infestations, especially of the brain (above left) will proliferate as well as elephantiasis,  from  filariasis which will occur throughout the U.S. by 2040. Right now, there are in excess of 9 BILLION worm parasites inhabiting the vertebrates of our world, according to the author of Parasite REX. The human population alone may carry within it up to 2 billion worm parasites, including: hook worm, one of 5,000 forms of tape worm, round worm, trypanosomes, schistosomiasis-causing flukes and the protozoan that causes Toxoplasma (which over 1 billion may carry, mostly in their brains.).

With the stimulative effects of runaway cusp warming these numbers can expect to double or triple, especially amongst the human denizens of the planet. For an excellent insight into what we're in for and how bad it will be consult the paper: Global Climate and Infectious Disease:The Cholera Paradigm, in Science, Vol. 274, 20 December, 1996, p. 2025.

Imagine half a population sickened by cholera and dysentery and the other half by dengue fever, Chagas disease and parasitic worm infestations.

Now, if you still don't believe those are more serious to prevent happening than solely focusing on ISIS, well...no comment. But I believe you might be able to complete the thought!

Then we have the uber Moron Bret Stephens,


babbling away in another WSJ piece ('Liberalism's Imaginary Enemies')  in which he claims (presumably with a straight face) :

"I am not the first to have noticed the incongruity of this huge gathering of world leaders meeting to combat this notional enemy in the same place a real enemy just inflicted so much mortal damage."

Radical climate change a "notional" enemy? As in dreamt up by scientists on diets of MJ waffles and who have mere "notions"? What sort of nincompoop is this guy? As for defining a "real enemy" I defy this ignoramus to read again what is posted above - in terms of imminent climate threats if we don't get our acts together, and tell me these constitute a "notional" as opposed to REAL enemy. You would have to be either batshit crazy or with an IQ less than room temperature to do so.

Obviously, no one is disputing ISIS as a threat. But as I said in a post some two years ago, one must weight threats on a scale of consequential magnitude. It is true that the ISIS vermin may somehow in some way inflict a mini-holocaust on one of our cities if they get hold of something like sarin - say, as depicted in the current 'Homeland' TV series. That may indeed wipe out tens of thousands and that is truly horrific.

But rapid climate change is no duppy or ghost! It is also a real threat and we are talking about the death of millions not just tens of thousands. It is true this comprises a ghoulish calculus but one must make it to set the record straight on the greater threat to humanity worldwide. In this calculus we can include - by 2040:

- 5 million dead or dying from potable water shortages- resulting in amoebic dysentery, cholera etc..

- 4 million dead from famine as the last of the 'green revolution' expires and GMOs are found not to meet the needs, even as they sow cancers, Alzheimers.

- 3 million dead from MRSA, and other antibiotic -resistant bugs

- 6 million unproductive and more like walking dead because of parasitic worm infestations, especially of their brains.

Stephens, as per his wont, also writes other specious nonsense including of the "hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 F since 1880."

Well, say one thing say the next, at least the simpleton isn't claiming a  "one hundredth of a degree" increase as he did on the Bill Maher Real Time show back in January. Some would say that's progress - even for an imp like Stephens.

But the new fact is that recent documents flatly declare that a 2˚C temperature rise is passé and that a 4˚C rise is already in the cards, moving towards a staggering 6˚C rise . That is an almost 11˚F temperature rise globally! and has always been the increment that Carl Sagan specified as the immediate trigger for the runaway greenhouse. Fortunately, this would not take hold until 2100, but it will take hold if we as a species continue to sit on our butts and do nothing.

In this regard, it is clear rational humanity's battle must be against ISIS and also allowing increased fossil fuel output to the atmosphere which would trigger the worst case scenario.

Unless we really fancy the image of parasitic worms crawling around inside our brains - wreaking havoc.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/65144/us-journalists-duck-the-big-climate-question-can-capitalism-and-mankind-both-survive

Bret Stephens - As Ill-Informed On Population As He Is On Climate Change

Bret Stephens - Permanent moron on climate change and population.

Blog readers may recall just over nine months ago I skewered the WSJ toadie columnist Bret Stephens on is imbecilic takes to do with climate change while appearing on Bill Maher's Real Time, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/01/bret-stephens-conservo-climate-skeptic.html

"In the end, the fact that Stephens confuses scientists with economists in the "Copenhagen Consensus"  discloses he's not even remotely qualified to be involved in any climate change-global warming discussion. Hell, he wasn't even aware that global dimming (google!) was responsible for the aberration of cooling in the 70s and the fact that "theory" has long since bit the dust."

Now, as if to go one better - to prove he's an even bigger moron than demonstrated on 'Real Time', he unloads on the Chinese and "Malthusians" (who have predicted scarcity with increasing population) in his latest column, 'The Tyranny of a Big Idea' (Nov. 3).

He begins by castigating China for its "one child" policy which it recently revised, referring to it as "a 35 year experiment in folly and human cruelty, instituted in the name of resource conservation"  TO cap it off he ends his screed by writing this refuse:

"China's one child policy has been one of the great unrecognized tragedies of our time. It is a modern day lesson in the danger of environmental fears and the misanthropic solutions they typically inspire".

Which, to be sure, even exceeds in bollocks the assorted nonsense spouted on Maher's segment about climate change. In fact, it makes one wonder if Stephens is qualified to comment on anything environmental or to do with climate change and its prime driver, overpopulation. Indeed, it's clear this asshole doesn't even believe in overpopulation when he also writes such claptrap as:

"The idea of a population bomb was always preposterous. The world's 7.3 billion people could fit into an area the size of Texas with each person getting 1,000 square feet of personal space."

Yes, Stephens actually wrote that - perhaps in a state of drug-induced delirium given that the resource footprint of each person - to get the food, water, etc. needed would be a least 2 hectares. (The U.S. mean is 9.5 hectares per person). Next time you Google, compare the area of a hectare to Stephens' "1,000 square feet" then tell me the man isn't a moron. And now, to continue that line of thought - imagine all those people - hell, even half of them - taking a dump all at once. Where the fuck is that effluent going to go? You'd need a sewage treatment system even larger in area than that on which this bozo would place all those people! And we won't even go into the colossal traffic jams  - even if barely one tenth used cars and the rest bikes. 

And what about potable water?  Where is that going to come from to slake the thirst of all those billions in one limited area?  Would he have it pumped in from the Great Lakes? What about the energy sources? You'd need something like 6 to 7 power grids on the scale of the U.S. or European grids. Where would the grids go with people stacked cheek to jowl?  Where would the transformers, etc. go?

The point is this numbskull has no clue that supporting a massive population isn't simply based on finding the space in which to squeeze them. You also need to consider the support systems, for growing enough food to feed them all each day, as well as the water (clean water) to meet basic needs - not to mention an energy and transport infrastructure. And we aren't even going to get into the number of hospitals (or even urgent care centers) that'd be required to serve all their medical needs.

It is such limits that factor into the carrying capacity, or rather the bio-support capacity of the planet. Even now, 1 billion people live in water-stressed conditions, meaning that renewable water supplies drop below 1,700 cubic meters per capita. One notable ‘State of the World’ report (2000, pp. 46-47), warned that the ever increasing water deficits will likely spark “water wars” by 2025

Now, let's consider the implementation of China's one child policy in view of what I just noted - on the dependency of a population on accessible resources.  Nowhere in his little rant is Stephens honest enough to cite what China's fertility rate was in 1950. As per an earlier article in the WSJ (Nov. 2) it was 6.11 per woman.  (Compared to 1.55 now).

Does this bozo have any remote idea what such a birth rate would have translated into had China not acted? It would have meant a population exceeding 2.2 billion by 1990 and the Chinese never would have been able to support it, nor would the country have reached the near superpower status it has  - even being a creditor to U.S. bond debt. (Owning nearly $1.3 trillion of our bond debt). Further, China's trade capacity would never have evolved to what it become, nor would it have been able to support the military it has - now rivaling the U.S. in the Pacific.  For all intents, China would have remained little better than one of those poor, overpopulated African nations - from which hundreds of thousands are now trying to flee to get to Europe.

China chose boldly not to do that, but to contain its numbers so as to strive for higher life quality for all its people. The proof 'is in the pudding' as they say, and if anyone doubts it they merely have to look at the size of China's middle class which now is vastly greater than the U.S. And when you travel to Europe, If you do, you will see Chinese tourists all over- from Jungfraujoch in Switzerland, to Bratislava, Slovakia, to Vienna, Austria and Prague, Czech Republic. There is NO way that many well off Chinese would be turned into globe trotters had the population policy not been changed to provide more material support for Chinese citizens. So Stephens, like many other Right wing American yahoos is talking through his ass.

And let's get it straight that lower fertility rates in correlation with greater material abundance and financial status is not peculiar to China.  South Korea is also such a success story, despite the fact its fertility rate is now so low its government is worried that its population "will go extinct by 2750". More likely, however, is that humanity will go extinct well before that year due to the runaway Greenhouse effect.

The same applies to all the European nations, e.g. Germany, Denmark, Norway, etc. to which all those poor Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Gambians, Zambians, Ghanians etc. are fleeing. Why do you suppose so? Well, because those destination nations have the space and resources that the others lack because of lower birth rates (To be honest, they also haven't faced the brunt of climate change, which most experts believe has been responsible for displacing at least one third of the 11 million Syrians headed out.)

So here's the essential axiom: a nation cannot at once have a vast population and material wealth. If the population outstrips its available resources it is condemned to destitution. The Chinese themselves, if the earlier WSJ story ('Chinese Face Hurdles To Baby Boom After Policy Shift')  is to be believed, are in no hurry to make more babies via the revised policy either. (And if Stephens took the time to read "ambitiously" the articles in his own paper he'd see that - before writing a column full of codswallop)  As one Chinese mother, He Yanping, said when asked about having more children:

"There are so many pressure with having a baby. It's exhausting to take care of a child and also requires so much energy".

And money too!  As one Chinese official, Li Jianmen, observes in the same article:

"To raise a child is very expensive these days. To send your child to a good kindergarten could be as much as 5,000 yuan ($787) a month".

And the cost of sending the kid to a university is vastly greater.

Maybe in Bret Stephens little pie-eyed capitalist clown fantasy world population can grow unabated with material wealth per person, and a family with seven or eight kids can afford "the best'. Alas, it doesn't work like that in most of the real world, by which I mean outside the gated enclaves of the rich.

The Cornucopians like Stephens get it wrong because they don't see population growth for the toxin it is, and can't put 2 plus 2 together to see how it leads to the Malthusian nightmare (not necessarily on Paul Ehrlich's timetable).  All of this comes back to net energy which is that energy humans need to survive. If the oil taken from the ground, say by fracking, only has a ratio of 1:1 (for energy produced to energy consumed) then it is useless to extract it. The same amount of oil-energy you are using up to get it, is basically what it carries. There is no net gain.

It is the net gain that has allowed humans to reproduce and thrive in many places around the globe. It is the erosion of net gain (reflected in ever lower GDP)  that will eliminate a majority of  humans. Right now, with humans consuming nearly the equivalent of 1.6 Earths per year there is no way even a population of 7.3 billion can be sustained - far less squeezed into an area the size of Texas as the dimwit Stephens claims.

Bret Stephens - Conservo Climate Skeptic - Gets 'Spanked' on 'REAL TIME'

Conservo author and WSJ columnist-nitwit, Bret Stephens, was throttled so comprehensively on Bill Maher's 'Real Time' last night, it was almost like seeing a whelp eaten by wolves. From income inequality, to taxes, to the Obama State of the Union and the environment, this turkey displayed being lost at sea as Howard Dean then Maher took turns skewering his foolishness.

There isn't the space or time to deal with everything so I will just focus on Stephens' evident idiocy to do with global warming and climate science. In the opening part of the segment Maher noted the recent  NY Times headlines (in the past 5 days)  to the effect that  'Ocean life faces mass extinction'    whereupon Stephens butted in,  saying:  "But also from 1975". As Maher pressed him, he babbled "and in 1935 and onwards".

 Maher pressed him some more, asking:  'So you're saying the oceans are not dying?':

And the twit twittered:

"I am saying we've been hearing predictions of imminent environmental destruction for a very long time."

Bill then put him on the spot, asking: "So you're saying there was a prediction in the New York Times from 1935 that 'ocean life faces extinction'?"

Whereupon Stephens replies:

"What I'm saying is if you look at a Newsweek from 1975 you will see it"

And  Maher moaned, 'Oh no, not the cooling thing!'

To which Stephens responded: "Yes, the cooling thing!"

For those who may not know, global cooling was once all the rage--  briefly! Some popular  'zines picked it up in the mid to late 70s but it was soon left in the scientific dustbin. This was after it was discovered a decade or so later, that it had been incepted by particulates and aerosols in the atmosphere.  After the Clean Air Act and similar bills were passed overseas (e.g. in the UK), those particulates disappeared and the cooling was no longer evident. (Aerosols remained and gave way to the global dimming phenomenon which also concealed the worst of global warming - but when aerosols were also controlled - after similar legislation, global dimming also receded and warming assumed dominance.)

So what Stephens ought to have read was the more recent Newsweek piece on the global warming disinformation industry (Aug. 13, 2007, ‘The Truth About Denial’, p. 21) noting the corporate media has been especially guilty in its misplaced notions of objectivity and fairness since they:

“qualified every mention of human influence on climate change with ‘some scientists believe’ when the reality is that the vast preponderance of scientific opinion accepts that human-induced greenhouse emissions are contributing to warming”.

Maher then noted 2014 as the hottest year ever and hence asked whether the talking point that warming has halted since 1998 "shouldn't die" - since 1998 was an El Nino year so was an aberration. To which Stephens replied:

"No because it was the hottest year ever by a hundredth of a degree so what the people are pointing out is we've had the same high temperatures for the past fifteen years."

Which is bollocks. First, because the temperature actually rose as a global mean by 1.24F not  "one hundredth of a degree"

Also the deniers never claimed the past 15 years were all high temperature years, they claimed warming had ceased from 1998, which is not the same thing.  The fact that 14 of the past 15 years have all been progressively  hotter puts the kibosh on this flatulence. See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/george-will-no-warming-for-last-16.html

When Maher cited work detailing 10,855 peer-reviewed climate papers of which only two rejected the notion of man-made climate change-  2 out of 10,855 - and asked: 'Doesn't that persuade you?' and adding "Don't you think scientists know more about science then we do?', Stephens blurted:

"What doesn't persuade me is that scientists ought to know more about public policy  than we do and ought to dictate what public policy is."

He then cited the example of Bjorn Lomborg "bringing together some of the greatest scientists alive" and  Lomborg had asked them: "What are your priorities?" Stephens testily claimed this lot agreed that the "least amount of resources should be devoted to climate change."

Maher laughed and joked that: "Maybe these were different scientists from the 10,855 I mentioned". He also admitted he was not familiar with "the study"  - but let's provide some contextual  background, in particular first noting it was not a "study" but a contrarian climate convocation and also these were not scientists but economists. According to Wikipedia:

"In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, a project-based conference where prominent economists sought to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methods based on the theory of welfare economics.   Lomborg campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argued for adaptation to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and for spending money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition. In his critique of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Lomborg stated: "Global warming is by no means our main environmental threat"


In April, 2008, a fellow Mensan - Marty Nemko - also brought this up in a Mensa Bulletin piece and asked:

Why did the Copenhagen Consensus, a group of 36 experts including four Nobel Prize winners, conclude that, among 17 challenges facing the world, efforts to stop global warming should receive the lowest priority?

To which I replied in an April 10, 2008 blog post:

"The Copenhagen Consensus – organized by longtime skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, and composed entirely of economists- would naturally have rated global warming lowest in its priorities for challenges facing the world. They are not climate scientists, after all! They’ll be vastly more concerned with economic blowback!"

I also showed how these dopes were only able to pursue their economics by discounting the resources of the natural world as irrelevant "externalities". For more on this and economics' other failures as a real science, see:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-economics-science.html

In the end, the fact that Stephens confuses scientists with economists in the "Copenhagen Consensus"  discloses he's not even remotely qualified to be involved in any climate change-global warming discussion. Hell, he wasn't even aware that global dimming (google!) was responsible for the aberration of cooling in the 70s and the fact that "theory" has long since bit the dust.

But maybe if "Bozo the Clown" ever returns there will be a place for Stephens there! Especially when he claimed at the end of the relevant segment that Galileo was engendering a paradigmatic revolt with  his "heliocentric theory" - "given the consensus of science at the time held the geocentric as true". But Maher had to correct him again noting that Galileo was on the side of real science (known since the time of Copernicus) and was actually inveighing against the religious orthodoxy of the time. (The Pope at the time, Paul V, actually confided to Galileo that he supported the heliocentric theory but was unable to do so because the geocentric view was dogma. Get it? Dogma - i.e. religious belief).

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/27/wsj_columnist_failed_snow_predictions_mean_we_must_be_wrong_about_climate_change_too/

And:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/maher-rips-gop-on-climate-what-do-you-have-against-listening-to-scientists/