A new study in PNAS by O’Neill et al. (2010) describe “population shifts” as having a substantial influence upon greenhouse gas emissions. From the abstract of Global demographic trends and future carbon emission:
Substantial changes in population size, age structure, and urbanization are expected in many parts of the world this century. Although such changes can affect energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, emissions scenario analyses have either left them out or treated them in a fragmentary or overly simplified manner.We carry out a comprehensive assessment of the implications of demographic change for global emissions of carbon dioxide. Using an energy–economic growth model that accounts for a range of demographic dynamics, we show that slowing population growth could provide 16–29% of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change. We also find that aging
and urbanization can substantially influence emissions in particular world regions.
Thankfully, the authors did not make any assumptions about how reduced population growth would occur. From the discussion: (O’Neill et al. 2010)
Economic development is one factor that can facilitate declines in fertility and slower population growth. If it were assumed that increases in economic growth rates were driving fertility decline, our results would differ: faster economic growth would have an upward effect on emissions, offsetting the emissions reductions caused by slower population growth to some degree.
And from the final paragraph:
However, more rapid economic development is not the only factor, or a necessary one, in facilitating fertility decline. Policies can also significantly affect fertility trends. Although the appropriateness of policies that encourage even lower fertility in countries where it is already low is debatable and would require consideration of the trade offs associated with increased aging (29), in other regions, there are several such policies already considered desirable in their own right. For example, household surveys indicate that there is a substantial unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services in many countries. Policies that meet this need would reduce current fertility by about 0.2 births per woman in the United States (30) and 0.6–0.7 births per woman in the developing world (SI Text has details of this calculation). This reduction is comparable with the 0.5 births per woman difference in fertility assumptions between the population scenarios used here. In our analysis, emissions reductions in these regions (i.e., the United States and developing country regions other than China) amount to about one-half of the total reductions that result from following a lower global population growth path, suggesting that family planning policies would have a substantial environmental cobenefit.
Note the paper is freely available online through the PNAS open access option. Nature.com has a blog posting that’s helpful:
Aging reduces emissions as elderly people contribute less to economic growth. Urbanization has the opposite effect: The migration of people from the countryside to large cities boosts the supply of labour and so fuels economic growth and the demand for energy, the study finds.
Aging is likely to dominate future demographic development in most industrialised countries, the study concludes. But in China and India, which together account for more than one third of global population, urbanization is likely to be the key factor.
“…Let’s see, what do we have in history. Easter island. Check. Roman Empire. Check. Anasazi. Check. Ancient Mesopotamia. Check. Mayans. Check. The list goes on and on…”
Rome didn’t fall due to a lack of resources; niether did Ancient Mesopotamia.
Simple solution, forbid the US, Canada, and Western Europe from using fossil fuels to export food to the rest of the world. Third world population, the only segment rapidly expanding, would start decreasing rapidly. Read an article a week or two ago about the impending death spiral of the populations of Japan, West Europe, and yes, even China. By 2050 these countries will have serious shortages of productive citizens in relation to the aged. The US is breaking even basically due to Latin American families still having more than the requisite 2.1 kids. White and Black America are both teterring on the brink.
The US also has a huge advantage in that LOTS of people want to relocate here and continue to build the population base.
Clowns are those who think that supraexponential growth is possible for an indefinite amount of time in a finite system. Those people have skipped math, physics and all other science in school.
The funniest thing in the whole discussion is the accusation thrown by people who rarely have much to do with scientific and technical fields (most of them are economists) that the scientists and engineers who try to explain to them some really simple truths about the way the world works are illiterate and anti-technology…
Easter Island? Not exactly a comp for the 21st Century globalized world. My history on the Roman Empire may be a bit rusty, but I recall a lot of that had to do with incompetent and treacherous leadership, military overexpansion (and relying on mercinaries, foreigners), an nasty Germanic folk with big a** axes to grind (into Roman skulls). Don’t recall famine playing any part in the fall.
Another very aggravating thing is the tendency of some people to repeat the same old BS after you have repeatedly shredded it to pieces. The ironic things here is that the projections for peak population of 9 billion will probably turn out correct. However, for completely different reasons. Setting aside the hypothesis that the demographic transition actually reverses after some level of material well being, the whole conjecture that the world population will stop growing is based on the assumption that the demographic transition will be completed everywhere in the developing world. Which is in turn contingent upon developing and third world countries developing to Western lifestyles. If that development doesn’t happen, fertility rates will remain high there (we will set aside the religion factor too, which will prevent the demographic transition from happening in a number of places even if they were to become rich) because those places will remain mired in poverty and illiteracy. The “small” detail that’s left out of the projections is the fact that it is an biophysical impossibility for the rest of the world to join the party the West has been having for the last 150 years because the resources for that do not exist. So there will be no demographic transition and no global reduction of global fertility rates to below replacement levels. What there will be a lot of though, is an increase in the death rates, and a serious die off as the century unfolds (precisely the thing that the people that are usually called “eco-fascists” round here are trying to prevent). So we will probably indeed end up getting to 9-10 billions, but then there will be a rapid shrinking to much much less, possibly zero if the nukes end up being used.
That’s not even what had in mind when I mentioned people refusing to understand what you repeatedly explain to them in great detail. When I said that I meant the fact that the whole discussion about the demographic transition is completely irrelevant because even if we were to remove the whole of the Third World from the face of the planet, what’s left will still be in deep overshoot when Peak Oil hits. The average American has an ecological footprint more than 30 times larger than that of the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa, after all.
GM says:
October 13, 2010 at 7:45 am
Clowns are those who think that supraexponential growth is possible for an indefinite amount of time in a finite system. Those people have skipped math, physics and all other science in school.
The funniest thing in the whole discussion is the accusation thrown by people who rarely have much to do with scientific and technical fields (most of them are economists) that the scientists and engineers who try to explain to them some really simple truths about the way the world works are illiterate and anti-technology…
GM fails to mention that the “supraexponential growth” is slowing and while it has been occurring, wonders of wonders, the human race survived it just fine. Another example of GM not understanding history. Simply put, this a very poor attempt to respond by GM. I would expect nothing else from a clown. Once again GM ignores innovation and history.
Oh yeah, did I forget to mention my major was math and my minor was physics. They used to teach critical thinking when I went to school, but I’d guess GM is young and got through school by memorization. Clearly s/he lacks critical thinking skills.
This is the crux of GM’s argument:
“The “small” detail that’s left out of the projections is the fact that it is an biophysical impossibility for the rest of the world to join the party the West has been having for the last 150 years because the resources for that do not exist.”
This clearly shows the lack of critical thinking. Exactly why would the “resources” not exist? What will be critical resources in the future?
Of course, GM does not know and so blindly assumes they will not exist even though they have existed throughout history. Not only that, but s/he parades around here spouting off this lack of critical thinking like it was a badge. What a clown.
The primary problem in sub-Sahara Africa is not population, food or natural resources, it is irresponsible and corrupt government and an almost total lack of law enforcement. Or even the presence of a legal code. Then add on petty tribal fueds that go back centuries. Most of these countries (generally speaking) have plenty of water, ariable land, and in some cases massive natural resources: oil, uranium, diamonds, gold, lumber. Not to mention a huge potential tourist economy. If sub Sahara Africa could get a solid infrastructure and something resembling a stable and responsible government those nations could thrive. It’s happened in Latin America, India, China (which only 100 years ago was a complete shambles), it can happen there.
GM:
You continue to ignore all corrections to your errors and to blather additional ones.
For example, at October 13, 2010 at 8:10 am you assert;
“what’s left will still be in deep overshoot when Peak Oil hits. ”
Peak Oil will never “hit”. In the extremely improbable event that we run short of natural crude then we will make syncrude from coal, natural gas and tar sands.
There is sufficient coal for it alone to supply need for the next 300 years. Nobody can know what will be needed as energy supply then. 300 years ago the main fuel requirement was hay for horses. According to your logic 300 years ago we should have stopped development so we did not run out of hay. Such a stop would have prevented the present need for oil but would have continued poverty, diseases and pollution which have been severely reduced and in some cases eliminated.
Please read the several posts from people providing a variety of explanations why your assertions are plain daft.
Richard
(Sarc On) New evidence found in Rock Hyrax urine indicates that people were happier during the Stone Age when there were a whole lot less people on the planet. See related link at –
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/13/new-in-paleoclimatology-pseudo-rodent-piss-as-climate-proxy/
Likewise, data from supercomputer analyses indicate that the MAX CAP of the Earth is 1Billion people and that immediate steps MUST be taken to reduce the present population to that number. See supercomputer link at –
http://www.wired.com/wired/st_formula.html
Law and Order in civilized countries has been found to cause population to expand to its enormous levels seen today. Henseforth, all Laws and all Orders are hereby declared defunct, null, and void, and for the next 10 years everyone over the age of 6 MUST carry a deadly weapon and take no lip off anyone their own age or older. (Sarc Off)
The solution is simple and doesn’t cost much at all.
PS: Another way would be to divide the current land mass of the earth in square miles (including Antarctica and Greenland of course) by 1Billion and based on the current area of each country calculate the MAX CAP of each country. Simple! Painless! Inexpensive! Fixes Responsibility! ETC.
Because of course it is only the P part in PAT I am talking about…. Oh, wait, in order to understand this you need to have an actual education…
What the paper whatever institution you went to says and what knowledge you actually acquired are two very different things.
It has already hit most of the world, the US being the most famous example. So apparently you have no clue what you’re talking about
Another totally moronic comment. When someone makes tens of millions of barrels of oil a day from coal, natural gas and tar sands, call me back. And the EROEI of all of those things is in the single digits. But EROEI is another concept too complicated for the brains of the mentally retarded posters here to grasp
GM, the Germans produced millions of barrells of fuel from coal in 1944-1945. I’m pretty sure where there is a will (and cash) there is a way in 2010. German logistics were terrible and methods exremely crude compared to today. When oil becomes scarce/overpriced I guarantee you coal based and other synthetic fuels WILL be produced in quantities to meet US needs barring government diktats forbidding it. The technology is here, it will just get more efficient and cheaper over time, just like every other technological innovation. Not to mention new reserves are being found, and are much easier to find, due to… technological advances. We just need to get the politics out of oil and drilling and come up with a sustainable and logical plan. Oil drilling isn’t exaclty the same as mountain top removal, although the Mean Greenies would love to have you think that.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/debates/copenhagen_article/9202/
Has an article about ‘peak wood’. Yes, about 400 years ago the Elizabethans were in panic about running out of wood. These scares are nothing new !!
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
When someone makes it possible for me to carry view 100 hours of porn on a device that fits in my shirt pocket, or get 700hp out of 2.5L stock engine, or share GPS coded vacation pictures on a magic box with billions of other people, or build a telescope that can see back in time 14 billion years… you let me know.
——-
When someone makes tens of millions of barrels of oil a day from coal, natural gas and tar sands, call me back.
There are lots of things we can use to power vehicles, and the US has enough petroleum for other needs for hundreds of years. The reason we use oil like we do is because there is so much of it making it the cheapest alternative. Economic models do not fit in with “population bomb” theories because economics says the opposite. If we do run into peak oil, which we could argue all day that it has happened twice in the US, once in Russia, and various other countries at one point or another.
1970’s US: US domestic production reached its “peak” status. Prices went up, vehicles started becoming more effiient, the US became an importer of oil.
Mid 2000’s US: prices sky-rocketed and this has the indication that we did reach peak oil, but look at what happened….
What was the effect of this? In the 1970’s we suffered and changed numerous things including effiency on automobiles which until that time oil was no longer an issue. Russia in the 1980’s is a mystery since it was a planned economy and its really hard to tell what they really did to change things. US in the mid 2000’s is a classic example of people changing society for themselves. When gas hit 4.50 a gallon, this motivated people to change their driving habbits, some moving into the city (maybe starting the housing bubble crisis), some using mass transit, etc.
But in every instance of peak anything, society deals with it by changing its ways. There is no catastrophe, and the purveyers of peak anything miss the point that society always finds a solution that takes the missing quantity out of the picture and finds something else to use. Other civilizations did not die due to scarcity of resources, in fact that theory in itself demands proof since I think most people would disagree that especially the Roman empire died due to scarce anything. Rome got sacked, and usually if a city is dying by itself with no resources, you don’t sack it….
Lets set your fear aside for a moment and assume that we can no longer import oil……
It takes a minor adjustment in normal cars ($500 according the mechanic I asked this question of about a year ago.), and normally no changes for diesel engines. we would run our society on corn, and we would simply turn currently fallow fields into production. This would require mass shifts in society and we would tend to see for the first few years people moving from the cities to the rural areas to put more fields into operation, an increase in coal, nuclear and other power plants, and more then anything, giant aquifer projects using desalinated water to keep water out of the equation. As for econological effects? Yes the environment may be harmed by this, but if it comes to it we can also open up domestic fields that have also been fallow for awhile for oil. It will be more expensive and very energy intensive, but our country does have the education and engineering expertise to survive this without much of a hiccup.
Some facts about the US from the latest census: Our current death rate is higher then our birth rate. Our population is heading downwards except for immigration. Our population is scheduled to plateau from 10-40 years depending on immigration policies.
Other trivia:
The US is one of the only countries in the world that has land that altogether takes more carbon out of the atmosphere then we send into it. Not that I think it matters for the discussion on global warming, but I see this repeated very few times.
The US is using less land for farming then we did 100 years ago. Our yield has increased so much its not economical to use as much land for farming as we used to. Hence our fallow fields….
Anything else I can add, feel free to ask.
Thanks for dazzling us with your brilliance , GM . We benighted ones stand in awe and agape at the depth of your knowledge . Or at least I did until you called Richard Courtney a moron . You might have just gotten in over your esteemed head .
GM beclowns himself:
“Clowns are those who think that supraexponential growth is possible for an indefinite amount of time in a finite system. Those people have skipped math, physics and all other science in school.”
What is “supraexponential” growth? Is it scarier than regular exponential growth? Either growth is linear or exponential. No doubt GM “skipped math, physics and all other science in school.”
Being a Malthusian worry-wart ignores both history and trends. If oil was running out the price would be rising steeply. It’s not, meaning supply and demand should be in balance. They are.
There is plenty of oil. The problem is the eco-fascists, who block every attempt to add to our usable supply. That keeps the price high. High gasoline prices are entirely due to the actions of the eco-Luddites.
And the planet’s population is doing fine. Increasing wealth is moderating population growth. The population is easily ‘sustainable,’ to use that meaningless word; if it were not sustainable, it wouldn’t be sustained, it’s as simple as that.
GM is simply a victim of extreme pessimism. He’s frightened because the glass always looks half empty to him. But the history of the human race is a series of examples showing that we overcome the kind of problems that GM worries about.
In fifty years there will be new problems, and the things GM worries about now will be just a footnote in the history books — with CAGW being a classic example of cognitive dissonance formed around speculation and flimsy arguments that are based on “what if” conjectures rather than evidence and the scientific method.
“The “small” detail that’s left out of the projections is the fact that it is an biophysical impossibility for the rest of the world to join the party the West has been having for the last 150 years because the resources for that do not exist.”
GM,
That impossibility is already occuring (perhaps you should stop your blathering and check some facts). In Mexico the TFR dropped from 5.5 in 1970 to just 2.7 today. In Thailand, the TFR went from 6.0 in 1980 to 1.8 today. Algeria, Morroco, Lybia, and Egpyt have seen thier TFR plunge from 4.5-5.0 in the 1970s to less than 3 today. In Vietnam, Brazil, Indonesia, and Central America, the TFRs are now half of what they were just 20 years ago. Ditto for Turkey, Iran, and the former Soviet Republics of East Asia. So much for your “biophysical impossibility”.
Only Western and Central Africa (along with Yemen and Afghanistan) continue to have birthrates above 4.0 per female. But in many of these nations, infant mortality, AIDS, and war far outpaces the birthrate. Numbers do not lie. The so-called Third World has joined the rest of the world, by and large. And by 2020, the number of people being born into this world will not be enough to replace those already here. Do the math.
GM says:
October 13, 2010 at 10:24 am
What the paper whatever institution you went to says and what knowledge you actually acquired are two very different things.
Well, what do you know. A narcissist practicing projection at its finest. The only way to describe this clown is in the inimitable words or Mr. T … Fool!
Actually, the older I get the more I seem to have extra emissions…oops excuse me!
GM says:
October 12, 2010 at 9:11 pm
“1. You can’t prevent collapse due to ecological overshoot by providing plenty of one resource because you collapse when the resource in shortest supply becomes limiting (a well known principle known as Liebig’s Law of the Minimum that’s been around for some 150 years).”
Hi GM. Liebig’s Law applies to the growth of plants.
Thought i’d better tell ya.
GM must stand for Grumpy Malthusian.
The man’s fervour, his posting rate and lack of scientific literacy and historical knowledge leave him very little time to think. This is quite typical of the Population Fanatic.
Dreaming up new words and metaphorical uses for scientific principles is quite creative however.
I think GM is in high school.
DirkH says:
October 13, 2010 at 2:13 pm
GM says:
October 12, 2010 at 9:11 pm
“1. You can’t prevent collapse due to ecological overshoot by providing plenty of one resource because you collapse when the resource in shortest supply becomes limiting (a well known principle known as Liebig’s Law of the Minimum that’s been around for some 150 years).”
Hi GM. Liebig’s Law applies to the growth of plants.
Thought i’d better tell ya.
You forgot the part about how we all believe in pseudo science, and that his take on what Liebig’s law means is what it means. The limiting factor for plants does not really correspond to humanity (or even animals..but that digresses so to speak) as seen by economics, but lets not let little facts get in the way of a little scare now, should we?
He also failed to say how his doomsday solution was better then reality’s….I mean we should pick who dies versus “natural selection” and the planet, but then again, we are talking what I would call the ultimate pseudo-science, the sustainability equation. Lets come up with arbritary equations that can be as optimistic or pessimistic as we want them to be. I came up with 5 trillion for how many humans the planet can hold in ecological balance…but then again when we use equations based on “feelings” similar to Drake’s equation for ET, we are not discussing science, but rather feelings anyway.