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Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome (TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
They believe all these problems are created by humans but exacerbated by a growing population using technology. “Changed attitudes and behavior” basically means what it has meant from the time Thomas Malthus raised the idea the world was overpopulated. He believed charity and laws to help the poor were a major cause of the problem and it was necessary to reduce population through rules and regulations. TCOR ideas all ended up in the political activities of the Rio 1992 conference organized by Maurice Strong (a TCOR member) under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The assumptions and objectives became the main structure of Agenda 21, the master plan for the 21st Century. The global warming threat was confronted at Rio through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was structured to predetermine scientific proof that human CO2 was one contribution of the “common enemy”.
The IPCC was very successful. Despite all the revelations about corrupted science and their failed predictions (projections) CO2 remains central to global attention about energy and environment. For example, several websites, many provided by government, list CO2 output levels for new and used cars. Automobile companies work to build cars with lower CO2 output and, if for no other reason than to appear green, use it in advertising. The automotive industry, which has the scientists to know better, collectively surrenders to eco-bullying about CO2. They are not alone. They get away with it because they pass on the unnecessary costs to a befuddled “trying to do the right thing” population.
TCOR applied Thomas Malthus’s claim of a race to exhaustion of food to all resources. Both Malthus and COR believe limiting population was mandatory. Darwin took a copy of Malthus’s Essay on Population with him and remarked on its influence on his evolutionary theory in his Beagle journal in September 1838. The seeds of distortion about overpopulation were sown in Darwin’s acceptance of Malthus’s claims.
Paul Johnson’s biography of Charles Darwin comments on the contradiction between Darwin’s scientific methods and his acceptance of their omission in Malthus.
Malthus’s aim was to discourage charity and reform the existing poor laws, which, he argued, encourage the destitute to breed and so aggravated the problem. That was not Darwin’s concern. What struck him was the contrast between geometrical progression (breeding) and arithmetical progression (food supplies). Not being a mathematician he did not check the reasoning and accuracy behind Malthus’s law… in fact, Malthus’s law was nonsense. He did not prove it. He stated it. What strikes one reading Malthus is the lack of hard evidence throughout. Why did this not strike Darwin? A mystery. Malthus’s only “proof” was the population expansion of the United States.
There was no point at which Malthus’s geometrical/arithmetical rule could be made to square with the known facts. And he had no reason whatsoever to extrapolate from the high American rates to give a doubling effect every 25 years everywhere and in perpetuity.
He swallowed Malthusianism because it fitted his emotional need, he did not apply the tests and deploy the skepticism that a scientist should. It was a rare lapse from the discipline of his profession. But it was an important one.
Darwin’s promotion of Malthus undoubtedly gave the ideas credibility they didn’t deserve. Since then the Malthusian claim has dominated science, social science and latterly environmentalism. Even now many who accept the falsity of global warming due to humans continue to believe overpopulation is a real problem.
Overpopulation was central in all TCOR’s activities. Three books were important to their message, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment (1977) co-authored with John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, and Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, published in 1972 that anticipated the IPCC approach of computer model predictions (projections). The latter wrote
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.
Here is what the TCOR web site says about the book.
They created a computing model which took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios. Part of the modelling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection.
They estimated the current amount of a resource, determined the rate of consumption, and added an expanding demand because of increasing industrialization and population growth to determine, with simple linear trend analysis, that the world was doomed.
Economist Julian Simon challenged TCOR and Ehrlich’s assumptions.
In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” – a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with – Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 … on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”
Simon proposed,
You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted – copper, tin, whatever – and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
John Holdren selected the materials and the time. Simon won the bet.
Global warming used the idea that CO2 would increase to harmful levels because of increasing industrialization and expanding populations. The political manipulation of climate science was linked to development and population control in various ways. Here are comments from a PBS interview with Senator Tim Wirth in response to the question, “What was it in the late 80s, do you think, that made the issue [of global warming] take off?” He replied,
I think a number of things happened in the late 1980s. First of all, there were the [NASA scientist Jim] Hansen hearings [in 1988]. … We had introduced a major piece of legislation. Amazingly enough, it was an 18-part climate change bill; it had population in it, conservation, and it had nuclear in it. It had everything that we could think of that was related to climate change. … And so we had this set of hearings, and Jim Hansen was the star witness.
Wikipedia says about Wirth,
In the State Department, he worked with Vice President Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting the administration’s views on global warming. A supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol Wirth announced the U.S.’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
Gore chaired the 1988 “Hansen” Senate Hearing and was central to the promotion of population as basic to all other problems. He led the US delegation to the September 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo Egypt.
That conference emerged from Rio 1992 where they linked population to all other supposed problems.
Explicitly integrating population into economic and development strategies will both speed up the pace of sustainable development and poverty alleviation and contribute to the achievement of population objectives and an improved quality of life of the population.
This theme was central to Rio+20 held in June 2012 and designed to re-emphasize Rio 1992.
The Numbers
The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global warming and latterly climate change. So what are the facts about world population?
The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was 6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it passed 7 billion; the difference is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242 listed by Wikipedia. It confirms most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them
Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5 percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world with approximately 35.3 million residents estimated in 2013 with California where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010. Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person. Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans.
Population geographers separate ecumene, the inhabited area, from non-ecumene the uninhabited areas. The distribution of each changes over time because of technology, communications and food production capacity. Many of these changes deal with climate controls. Use of fire and clothing allowed survival in colder regions, while irrigation offset droughts and allowed settlement in arid regions. Modern environmentalists would likely oppose all of these touted evolutionary advances.
Ironically The Fallacious Problem is The Solution
It all sounds too familiar in the exploitation of science for a political and personal agenda. But there is an even bigger tragedy because the development the TCOR and IPCC condemn is actually the solution.
All of the population predictions Ehrlich and others made were wrong, but more important and damning was they ignored another pattern that was identified in 1929 and developed over the same period as the Mathusian claims. It is known as the Demographic Transition.
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It shows and statistics confirm, population declines as nations industrialize and the economy grows. It is so dramatic in developed countries that the population pyramid results in insufficient young people to support the massively expensive social programs for the elderly. Some countries offset this with migration, but they are simply creating other problems. Countries that don’t allow or severely limit migration such as Japan face completely different problems. Some countries offer incentives for having more than two children, such as the announcement by Vladimir Putin in Russia. China took draconian, inhuman, steps by limiting families to one child. The irony, although there is nothing funny about it, is they are now the largest producer of CO2 and their economy booms. If they had simply studied the demographic transition and let things take a normal course the tragedies already incurred and yet to unfold could have been avoided.
The world is not overpopulated. Malthus began the idea suggesting the population would outgrow the food supply. Currently food production is believed sufficient to feed 25 billion people and growing. The issue is that in the developing world some 60 percent of production never makes it to the table. Developed nations cut this figure to 30 percent primarily through refrigeration. In their blind zeal those who brought you the IPCC fiasco cut their teeth on the technological solution to this problem – better and cheaper refrigeration. The CFC/ ozone issue was artificially created to ban CFCs and introduce global control through the Montreal Protocol. It, like the Kyoto Protocol was a massive, expensive, unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem.
TCOR and later UNEP’s Agenda 21 adopted and expanded the Malthusian idea of overpopulation to all resources making it the central tenet of all their politics and policies. The IPCC was set up to assign the blame of global warming and latterly climate change on human produced CO2 from an industrialized expanding population. They both developed from false assumptions, used manipulated data and science, which they combined into computer models whose projections were, not surprisingly, wrong. The result is the fallacy of global warming due to human CO2 is a subset built on the fallacy of overpopulation.
Mark and two Cats says: January 5, 2014 at 5:32 pm “Freedom, liberty, education, self-determination; these could solve many of the problems in Dr Ball’s excellent article. The common enemy of humanity is liberalism/socialism/communism.”
The common enemy of humanity is progressivism that does not except the right-wing ruling parties. Progressivism is merely the au courrant euphemism for the conspiracy theory of “making things better.”
DirkH says:
January 5, 2014 at 5:23 pm
GregS says:
January 5, 2014 at 5:16 pm
“Agreed, and I am, so far, anyway – 49 with no children. Try to follow my lead everyone. A lot of you will fail, which is ok because if you all succeeded that wouldn’t be good.”
“Congratulations for not having offspring. It makes the next generation smarter.”
It is my observation, and not only mine, that it is the educated classes that stopped “breeding”.
Mike Mellor says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 3:47 am
…. A good bellwether for population levels is the unemployment rate which even in developed nations is today unacceptably high.
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You forgot to add “because of bureaucratic red tape and interference.”
Bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves. From the point of view of a bureaucrat, especially a low level bureaucrat the safest action is to STALL until the person goes away.
It has been thirty years and I am still waiting for the information a state of Massachusetts bureaucrat promised me about the regulations on the business I wanted to open. (And yes I badgered the heck out of the guy.)
“Arguing with a Bureaucrat is a lot like wrestling with a pig in a mud hole and half way through realizing the pig is enjoying it!”
I asked on January 6, 2014 at 5:30 am
“I can’t think of anything that we used to be able to do that we can’t do now.
Can you?
In fact, I can’t think of anything that we used to be able to do that isn’t more widely available now -except when restrained by regulation.
Anything?”
And Peter Taylor says at January 6, 2014 at 6:07 am:
So that’s a No then. Not yet.
Yet this is rotten-jam tomorrow. I can understand the benefits of Hope. It may not be rational but it is beneficial. It can inspire endurance and survival.
But what is the point of irrational despair?
Steve from Rockwood says:
January 5, 2014 at 6:05 pm
Indeed Canada has a lot of uninhabitable land, but it’s not the extreme view you take. A lot of my work as a geologist/engineer is in Northern Canada and people live almost all over the place. Yes a high percentage live below the 49th parallel, that is Ontario and Quebec’s major cities. All the western provinces share the 49th with the USA so the pop there is above that line. Your bread, beef, oil, gas, potash, timber and a host of other resources come from there. You Torontonians should get out more.
” MarkW says:January 6, 2014 at 6:43 am
Still seeing what you want to see, I see.
The US budget surplus was accomplished by controlling welfare costs. The small drop in defense spending was a very small part of it. ”
For the USA correct but as clearly stated in my original post the point was “world wide” and “global” NOT just the USA. 100 billion a year dropped into the world’s economy for most of the decade for things other than armaments. That is a very good thing.
We are talking about 2 very different things here.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
January 5, 2014 at 10:13 pm
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There are huge amounts of all mineral resources in the crust. The problem is that most of those resources are in concentrations too low to mine economically, AT PRESENT.
Each time technology improves, we are able to mine more ore at an economically viable price.
Every time the price of a mineral increasese, we are able to mine more ore at an economically viable price.
Another truth is in how ore’s are distributed. There are very few high concentration deposits, but as the concentration goes down, the amount amount of ore goes up geometrically. Just to put some made up numbers on it, say an ability to mine ore that is 10% more diffuse, means that there is twice as much of that ore available for exploitation. This is one reason why horizontal drilling and frakking have resulted in such huge increases in available oil and natural gas. It’s permitting developers to exploit deposits that were too diffuse using older technologies.
In some places, engineers are going back and processing the tailings from earlier mining activities. New technology has made it possible to economically extract ore’s that were considered trash, only a few years ago.
Rhys Jaggar says:
January 5, 2014 at 10:58 pm
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One of the scariest things in the world, are people who talk about whether other people should be allowed to breed or not.
richardscourtney says…
Richard as usual both your posts are spot on. Thanks.
Greg Goodman says:
January 6, 2014 at 12:28 am
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Speaking of silly strawmen, you are an expert.
If you want to buy high quality stuff that will last for decades, go ahead. It’s out there, it just costs an arm and a leg. There’s no conspiracy to force people to buy stuff that will wear out soon, it’s basic economics. Building to last costs money, and most people don’t want to spend the money.
One of the reason’s people trade in stuff that hasn’t worn out is because they perceive the new to be better. So if you want to stop technological develpment in it’s track, go ahead and mandate that everything made must last for decades.
Finally, it’s a myth that growing prosperity requires more resources. Compare how much material is used in a flat screen TV compared to an old style one of the same size.
“Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person.”
That’s not a valid or remotely complete analysis. All land is not created equal. Some land is fertile, other land is not. Some is steep slope, other alluvial plain; some almost solid rock (and the rock varies, too), other rich loam; some desert, some swamp, some tundra, some rain-forest…
And then even if all land were equal, one must make a judgement call on how many square feet or square miles per person is “optimal”, all things considered. The last I checked, large areas of Montana and Wyoming had about 16 people per square mile. That feels only a bit over-crowded, to me; and in that area there are crowding problems amongst the ferrets, prairie dogs, wolves, bison, elk, dogs, and humans (with associated disease issues, from brucellosis to black plague, brought over from eastern India in about 1895 through Asia and then spread throughout the rodent population of California, then intentionally transferred in an effort to kill off prairie dogs), and forage quality issues. Meanwhile, Union City, NJ, has about 10K people/square mile; totally unfit for a free human, IMO, but others might not be comfortable unless they were living 6 to a room and thousands per square mile. It’s important to try to keep that choice open.
But then, we have water issues. It used to be that people were spread widely enough that pathogenic parasites and microbes died/were killed off before traveling through water from one village to the next. That hasn’t been the case for at least 50 years, probably more. We use chlorine, hydrogen peroxide, ozone, UV, filtering…
Atlanta, GA, has gotten large enough that the people in Florida complain about the reduction in flow of the Chattahoochee river, and reduction in mussel and shrimp populations as a result. California, Nevada, and Arizona had similar disputes long before. Too many people, not enough fresh and potable water with the technology of the day, without steep price rises or cost-shifting. Trace radioactive element analysis show that what were believed to have been huge multi-state spanning deep, well-filtered aquifers turn out to conduct rainfall only 8-15 miles, over streets, carrying used motor oil and anti-freeze, brake- and other hydraulic-fluids to what were formerly believed to be pristine springs.
My umpty-great aunt+uncle had a 10K acre ranch with over 630 head of cattle, but they couldn’t make a go of it economically, the soil wasn’t rich enough, the sons and sons-in-law had more pressing matters driving them, wars…; now most of it is an ExxonMobil refinery and chemical plant, with shipping docks next to where their home used to be, before the hurricane of 1900… unless you want an apartment on top of a cracking tower; just think of the morning view of sun-rise over Galveston Bay and the delicate scents on the breeze. Just because it is possible to pack people like sardines does not mean that it is healthy or desirable.
Yes, the leftists leveraged projected over-population and notions of eugenics into their schemes for oppression. I certainly argued vehemently enough against such in my econ classes. OTOH, even some of my best economist friends have from time to time fallen into the fallacy of believing that every square inch of land that does not have a building or pavement on it is “undeveloped”. A farm is a developed farm, a wood-lot is a developed wood-lot, a hunting preserve is a developed hunting preserve, a garden is a developed garden, a stand of timber for lumber is a stand of timber for lumber, an open pit mine is a developed open pit mine, a big side yard is a developed big side yard (providing increased privacy amongst other things)… all are valid economic uses of land. Yes, as some things become more scarce the prices go up and we can shift to substitutes. Substitutes are usually better for some human purposes and not as good for others.
“In 1940, 34 species of burrowing rodents and 35 species of fleas in the United States had become plague carriers, thanks in part to the ranchers’ efforts… In 1992 alone, at least 10 cases were reported in the United States. One man in Arizona died from pneumonic plague after handling an infected domesticated cat…” — Edward Tenner 1996 _Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of UnIntended Consequences_ pg39 (Several cases were reported in Florida in 2002, but the same goes for other diseases: malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, meningitis, equine encephalitis, BSE. Higher densities means more effort+cost to control the diseases and more illnesses and deaths.)
Population decline triggered b collapsing birth rates is a long time subject from Spengler, channeled by Asian Times, who wrote entire books about the subject and several great articles: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-03-220713.html#
Rhys Jaggar says:
January 5, 2014 at 10:58 pm
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Furthermore, your requirement that populations must be able to grow food to support them locally is absurd. It’s much better to put the people where food can’t be grown, in order to leave the productive land available for food production.
Peter Taylor says:
January 6, 2014 at 6:07 am
“I despair!”
_____________________
Obviously.
Want to change the world? Change your thinking.
Peter Taylor says:
January 6, 2014 at 6:07 am
You should despair, because the American Dream isn’t built on “increasing material wealth”–it’s built on American Exceptionalism, Material wealth is simply one of the consequences
And what, exactly, is American Exceptionalism?
Simple: For the first time in human history, a government and country was founded on the belief that leaders serve the population.
All other nations have that in reverse, and America is now going through a reversing transition as well.
Global Warming, like all the other UN-sponsored “people-control initiatives” is designed to get rid of American Exceptionalism. No longer will the government serve the people; people will serve the government and be owned by the state.
We’ll become just like the rest of the world as a consequence.
richardscourtney says:
January 6, 2014 at 2:00 am
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Another factor is that when the cost of a resource increases, people find ways to use less of that resource. An example is people voluntarily adding insulation to their houses when energy costs increase.
An excellent essay. There are surely analogies between the simple-minded notion of Malthus, a notion that was easy for people to think was incontrovertible, and that of those who push the simple-minded notion that man-made CO2 is an important, even dominant, driver of the climate system. They assert the science is settled and not to be argued with. In each case, the layperson can get a sense that they have mastered a profound and basic insight.
In each case, awful suffering has been tolerated because the simple-minded views are enough for people to shut-down both their brains and their consciences. See the Irish and Indian Famines of the 19thC for example – why help those people, it would only make things worse for more in the future? See the bio-fuels causing starvation – why stop that since many more would die from rising CO2? The mindset is convenient for some, and also poisonous, and destructive.
Malthus has been contradicted by observations. So has the CO2 conjecture. But both are so attractive to a ruthless mentality that holds humans in low regard, that I fear they will always be with us.
Gail Combs says:
January 6, 2014 at 2:36 am
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The part you quote supports me, not you.
Technology meant that we didn’t need as many people to farm as we used to.
It was the technology that moved those people off the farm.
The conspiracy is in your mind only.
Mike Mellor says:
January 6, 2014 at 3:47 am
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Speaking of simplistic, you could write a book on the subject.
Unemployment has absolutely nothing to do with population. It is instead caused when govt created impediments to working.
More people means more demand which creates work.
The ultimate cause for the “world owes me a living” crowd.
Jimbo says:
January 6, 2014 at 3:50 am
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Another problem with the UN projections is some of the assumptions built into it.
The UN assumes that every country where fertility is falling, the rate will continue to fall at the same rate until replacement is reached, and then the rate will stop falling and hold at replacement. Out here in the real world, that has never happened, the rate has always fallen to below, sometimes well below replacement.
The UN also assumes that over the next decade or so, all the countries that are below replacement level will return to replacement level. That too has never happened in the real world. No country that has fallen below replacement level has ever returned to replacement level.
Gail Combs says:
January 6, 2014 at 3:51 am
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Wow, so much paranoia wrapped in so much ignorance. Let me guess, you work for the UN.
1) The WTO has not eliminated tarrifs world wide. I wish it had, but it hasn’t even come close.
2) If countries are subsidizing the growing of grain that is then being sold to others, that’s the stupidity of politicians and only hurts the taxpayers of that country.
3) In your fevered imagination, corporations buying more food causes the price of food to collapse to below production costs?
RockyRoad says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 6:28 am
I disagree, richard.
I believe affluent people care more for material things than for other people….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As an educated female, I refute your statement.
When I considered having kids the first thing I took into consideration was their future well being. With my first husband I observed his treatment of animals (pets) and decided he lacked the qualities of a good father. With my second husband I was thirty-five and had been a chemist working with what turned out to be mutagens for years. Shortly thereafter my cousin, two years younger, gave birth to an autistic child. My husband and I discussed the subject and decided not to risk having a child under the circumstances. Instead we now have a small business doing entertainment at children’s birthday parties and tutor for free.
One of the other points missing is the window in which a woman can give birth to healthy babies. It is generally from the early-teens to 35. However on average women in the USA are waiting til they are 25. Fertility rates begin to decline gradually at age 30, more so at 35, and markedly at age 40
Higher education means you just cut the number of years an intelligent woman would consider having kids in half.
MarkW says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 7:46 am
Gail Combs says:
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Wow, so much paranoia wrapped in so much ignorance.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Right back at you dude.
You might try READING.
What most of you fail to understand, is that this is really just about control. Control over the people in how they travel, eat and most of all… their private property- LAND! Tagged animals, tagged trees etc. Oh , and don’t forget people. All of this falls under Agenda 21; which would not have been possible if not for the Global Warming propaganda. And for those that think i’m incorrect,…. i say this: When you have spent 7 years dealing with corrupt local de-facto governments, lawyers, land rights groups and pseudo environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy of Canada, you to will then come to the same conclusion as i did.