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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.
R. de Haan says:
January 6, 2014 at 7:08 am
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You seem to assume that education is a viable proxy for intelligence.
Gail Combs says:
January 6, 2014 at 7:53 am
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I have, which is why I can recognize paranoid garbage when I see it.
Anyone who whines about elites robbing everyone else has sacrificed any right to be taken seriously.
David Friedman says:
January 5, 2014 at 6:38 pm
“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. ”
Could you quote where Malthus said those things? That does not fit my memory of the essay on population. Nor does most of the rest of what you say about Malthus, which makes me wonder whether you are basing it on reading him or reading second and third hand accounts.
His central thesis as I remember it was neither that the world was overpopulated nor that rules were necessary to reduce population. It was that the optimistic future projected by Godwin and Condorcet was impossible because if everyone was that well off there would be no incentive for people to hold down birth rates, and if population expanded at the biological maximum it would outrun the food supply. I don’t believe he claimed that population was expanding at that rate, had, or would in the actual future–only that a stable population equilibrium required that the mass of the population be poor enough to make the cost of additional children high enough to hold the birth rate down to what economic growth could accommodate. That’s one version of the iron law of wages, other versions of which appear in Smith and Ricardo.
At last about 200 posts before one which actually shows what Malthus actually wrote rather than the mis-statement by Ball!
Malthus argued that it would be better and more humane if the population were maintained by a lower birthrate rather than a higher death rate caused by disease and starvation due to poverty. In the overpopulated cities of Victorian England 20% of children died before the age of 5, the life expectancy was about 40 in the mid-1800s. This in an extremely prosperous country with a consumer boom and rapidly growing industrialization. Large families weren’t restricted to the poor (Victoria had 9 which was typical), the high death rate was predominantly the preserve of the poor in the overcrowded cities.
Similarly in NYC, around 1900 infant mortality was over 120/1000 live births.
You often hear that we can’t produce enough food for everyone. The question is wrong. A lot of food crops go rotten before they reach the market in many poor countries due to lack of refrigeration, infrastructure etc The EU had for years been fighting against its food mountains and milk lakes – too much food. Biotech is making advances each year. Food to fuel is not a very good idea. There is no food shortage problem but a storage and management problem.
PS
Al Gore has (AT LEAST) 4 children & 2 mansions.
David Suzuki has 5 children and allegedly 4 properties and the list goes on…….
These are the kinds of people we are dealing with here folks. Those who believe that they can live as they want but want others to change their ways. They claim they care for the planet but behave in a way that makes you doubt it. They are the eco-hypocrites of today and please don’t listen to a single thing they have to say.
Read more about the saitly Suzuki who hates overpopulation. 🙂
http://www.torontosun.com/2013/10/11/the-two-suzukis-theres-saint-suzuki-the-one-you-see-on-cbc-and-secret-suzuki-the-capitalist-millionaire
Here is a great piece from Haunting The Library on environmentalists’ children and overpopulation.
Africa has an average population density of 31 people per million square meters.
Europe, in contrast, has a population density of 73 people per million square meters.
Why is the former, rather than the latter, more commonly referred to as overpopulated?
One of the reasons, aside from racism: “Overpopulation” is in reality mostly a function of technology and economic development, with what gets blamed on overpopulation being a matter predominately of poverty.
Back when the whole world had 1% the population of today, about the whole world was dirt poor by modern standards.
As relevant projections indicate, world population will peak at around 10 to 11 billion in the mid 21st century and then be declining, a result of the demographic transition (including more and more countries already with fertility rates far below the ~ 2 children/woman replacement rate).
Activists speak in terms of vague “resources.” Let’s rather speak in terms of specifics:
Water:
The cost of some modern desalination plants has already dropped to below $0.50/m^3, not much more than non-desalinated water.
Elements:
Let’s start with phosphorus as an example. Activists claim such will run out within several decades (the standard rule for about all doomsaying: a 2 digit number of years, so late enough to be forgotten by most by when the time passes or be after the doomsayer retires/dies but soon enough to scare the naive). In reality, the 190 million tons/year of phosphorus extracted from mines compares to how there is 30,000,000,000 million tons of phosphorus in Earth’s crust. While the concentration of phosphorus in the average rock is nominally low at 0.1%, its needed concentration in biomass is comparably low. When the USGS publishes a figure of 71000 million tons of “identified reserves” of phosphorus at the ore concentrations favored in present mining operations, there is a whole continuum of intermediate concentrations between those and the 0.1% concentration in the average rock.
The elements used most (aluminum, iron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.) exist at still higher concentrations by far in Earth’s crust, oceans, or atmosphere. For instance, while the Limits to Growth activist book back in the 1970s claimed aluminum would run out within several decades (which didn’t happen of course), actually aluminum is 8% of even the average rock, present in practically unlimited quadrillions of tons quantity (millions of times more than world annual mining production), although there is no reason to mine random rocks when more favorable ores exist in vast quantities too.
There is no show-stopper element for industrial civilization which is simultaneously too rare and yet critical in too large amounts.
Energy:
There are literally trillions of tons of thorium in Earth’s crust, as well as billions of tons of uranium in seawater extractable at a cost of just hundreds of dollars a kilogram as demonstrated. Activists like to pretend nuclear fuel is merely near equivalent to chemical fuel, but, much as a nuclear bomb can be a million times more powerful than a conventional bomb of equal weight, hundreds of dollars per kilogram for uranium is the equivalent of a very tiny fraction of a cent per kilogram of coal if breeder reactors are used and still low even if they aren’t used. (Misleading fuel cost figures are often published which include enrichment costs and fuel assembly fabrication costs, quite separate from the actual cost of mined uranium itself).
Food:
There is order of magnitude difference between the yield per unit area productivity of agriculture in industrialized countries versus in such as the parts of Africa which have problems. Economic development (and, in some cases, fixing problems from wars and local governments) would be the solution.
And one could go on.
The big picture: The only kind of civilization which could truly make Earth’s quadrillions of tons of resources run out is one with industrial capabilities astronomically beyond today to such a degree that massive space colonization would be relatively trivial to it; the only supertech hypercivilization which could actually use up the solar system’s billions of cubic kilometers of material is one capable of drifting to other stars; and so on until the end of the universe under many cosmological scenarios.
If ideology like that of today’s activists existed and was fully implemented long ago, mankind would still be living in a few caves (or be extinct, staying small enough to readily die out).
Dr. Ball is right to refer to “The Fallacy Behind The Fallacy Of Global Warming”: The CAGW movement is one head of a hydra, not its root. A reason serious CAGW movement supporters generally never can be “convinced” by argument on climate topics themselves is that those with much experience tend to secretly already know CAGW claims are invalid but use them as an excuse for a deeper ideology and agenda.
Gail Combs:
At January 6, 2014 at 5:54 am you say
I agree. Windpower is an example of an ancient and proven technology which requires little training to maintain so provides a stepping-stone to a fully industrialised society.
Windpower powered most of the world’s shipping for thousands of years, and primitive wind turbines powered pumps (notably in the Netherlands and England) and mills throughout Europe for centuries.
But the use of windpower in the Middle East is much older than you suggest.
Vertical-axis windmills to mill corn were first developed by the Persians around 1500 BC, and they were still in use in the 1970’s in the Zahedan region. Sails were mounted on a boom attached to a shaft that turned vertically. The technology had spread to Northern Africa and Spain by 500 BC.
Low-speed, vertical-axis windmills are still popular in Finland because they operate without adjustment when the direction of the wind changes. These inefficient Finnish wind turbines are usually made from a 200 litre oil drum split in half and are used to pump water and to aerate land.
This ‘oil drum turbine’ technology is directly transferable to poor, agrarian societies.
More advanced low speed vertical-axis windmills for water pumping and air compressing are commercially available (a selection of commercial suppliers is at
http://energy.sourceguides.com/businesses/byP/water/wPumpMills/wPumpMills.shtml).
But their maintenance would require expertise not often available in poor, agrarian societies.
The horizontal-axis wind turbine was invented in Egypt and Greece around 300 BC. “It had 8 to 10 wooden beams rigged with sails, and a rotor which turned perpendicular to the wind direction”. This type of wind turbine later became popular in Portugal and Greece. Around 1200 AD, the crusaders built and developed the post-mill for milling grain. The turbine was mounted on a vertical post and could be rotated on top the post to keep the turbine facing the wind. This post-mill technology was first adopted for electricity generation in Denmark in the late 1800’s. The technology soon spread to the U.S. where it was used to pump water and to irrigate crops across the Great Plains. During World War I, some American farmers rigged wind turbines to each generate 1 kW of DC current. Such wind turbines were mounted on buildings and towers. On western farms and railroad stations, wind turbines for pumping water were between 6 and 16m high and had 2 to 3m diameter. With 15kmh wind speed, a 2m-diameter turbine operating a 60cm diameter pump cylinder could lift 200 litres of water per hour to a height of 12m. A 4m diameter turbine could lift 250 litres per hour to height of 38m.
Yes, wind power is an old technology of use as a stepping-stone to a fully industrialised society. But its intermitency makes windpower useless as a significant electricity generator, and claims that in industrialised societies windturbines are “new technology requiring support for it to mature” are plain daft.
Richard
MarkW says:
January 6, 2014 at 7:58 am
Gail Combs says:
January 6, 2014 at 7:53 am
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I have, which is why I can recognize paranoid garbage when I see it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No Mark you don’t ” recognize paranoid garbage when I see it.” You just deny things that make you uncomfortable and destroy your world view.
So how about READING their own D@mn WORDS!
And KNOWING there were food shortfalls predicted in January of 2008 as shown in that article, the Grain Traders write to President Bush in July of 2008.
The following is what you can find if you bother to look. I have plenty more info that backs it up.
Heck all you have to do is research Dan Amstutz, former VP of Cargill, the grain trader. He later went to work for Goldman Sachs. He wrote the Agreement on Agriculture for the World Trade Organization and wrote the 1996 Farm Bill dubbed Freedom to Fail that rid the USA of her grain reserves. SEE: Congressional Record for the rest of the results of Dan Amstutz bill that helped no one but the Grain Traders.
Oh and as a result of all that Dan Amstutz did, like “has produced one of the worst economic crises that rural American has ever experienced.” [above link] the Grain Traders instituted the Amstutz Award, for Dan, who “represented and championed ideas and goals of NAEGA membership.” (North American Grain Export Association ie the Grain Traders)
If you do not like that link How about the Council on Foreign Relations? link
@Peter Taylor,
Please list those developing nations that will, by themselves, add an additional 1 billion people. Could you also provide the median ages of those nations?
And this website should follow population trends, as the IPCC uses those trends to extrapolate future CO2 concentrations.
BTW, from the UN demographics information, every single G20 nation has fertility rates at or below replacement levels. Most have had fertility rates below replacement levels for decades. Additionally, most developing nations (ie Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Algeria, Turkey, etc..) are at or below replacement levels. Mexico, in particular has seen its TFR fall from 6.0 to 2.4 in the last 40 years. For the US, the median age has gone from 24 in 1972 to 37.8 today. China’s has gone from 17 in 1980 to 30 today. In Europe, the median age is around 44. Even India has seen its TFR drop significantly. Only a handful of African nations along with Yemen and Afghanistan maintain high fertility rates (4.0 or greater). Yes, populations will continue to grow, but that is due to longer life expectancies. Populations grow as most societies age.
As a matter of fact, demographics will become the number one social-economic-political topic of the next decade. Most developed nations have their wealth tied their older demographics. Most developing and developed nations do not have large younger cohorts to maintain their tax bases and standards of living. In other words, the world’s GDP more than likely peaked during the period 2000-2007. As societies continue to age, they save more, spend less, consume and produce less. Demand for commodities, energy, and consumer goods more than likely already peaked.
Phil,
“Malthus argued that it would be better and more humane if the population were maintained by a lower birthrate rather than a higher death rate caused by disease and starvation due to poverty.”
Then Malthus was at best a fool, and at worst a precursor to the eugenicists. The solution to disease and starvation is economic development, a fact that is blindingly obvious from the vantage of hindsight.
Malthus has it exactly backwards. He envisages populations as nothing but passive consumers of food – if there is not enough food to go around, then you need a smaller population. Oh, and being humane, he will try to achieve this by reducing birthrates.
History has in fact taught us that industrialisation has fed the people that Malthus wished into oblivion. I wish Malthus was alive today. I would love to hear him recant – Yes he would.
MtK, Mac, I take your point and see that planting oats and alfalfa together like that is a great idea. Collecting three years of haylage crops from a continuous field of alfalfa doesn’t seem like “fallow” to me, though (to lie idle).
bones, I meant to imply that viable alternatives such as nuclear or even fusion will replace oil as the primary energy source long before oil becomes expensive. Meanwhile, oil will apparently remain inexpensive as the primary energy source into the foreseeable future.
Gail Combs says:
January 5, 2014 at 6:05 pm
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You might also be interested in a few other things about Mexico.
According to the World Bank Data Mexico in 2011 had 2.28 births per woman. Brazil’s is even lower at 1.81 and much of Latin America it has been plummeting.
It is obvious that (in general) as nations become richer their women have fewer kids. What will Mexico’s rate be like in 2030? Do the latest numbers bode well for 2100? Might they rise again? I don’t know but Malthusians are always getting stirred up over a storm in a teacup.
RockyRoad:
I am copying all your post at January 6, 2014 at 6:28 am so readers are avoided the inconvenience of finding my statement and your disagreement with it.
Sorry, but I fail to see the disagreement. I said,
“Population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this.”
You are claiming that the most important of those reasons is that
“God doesn’t give children to selfish people.”
Importantly, if your claim were true then it would not alter my point (or my argument) in any way.
But, incidentally, your claim is clearly not true: I know several affluent people who have children.
Richard
@richardcourtney
I don’t think economics explain falling birthrates. For there is no rational explaination why societies from several different cultures (Japapn, Russia, Indonesia Poland, for example) have seen their their birthrates fall so far behind replacement levels. If economics explained demographics, then a rational couple would have 2.1 children (which is needed to at the very least keeps the population) stable. In the US, the trend amongst younger women is not have small families, but to have no children at all.
As your post explians, there is something else at play.
1. The planet Earth, over the period of human history, had a virtually fixed number of atoms of each of the naturally occurring elements. ***
2. Man is not an animal like rodents or birds or fish or insects or reptiles , etc.
3. Malthus’ false premise in his population problem theories was that mankind, given freedom (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) will act like those other animals.
If one agrees with those statements, then Malthus cannot be salvaged from his irrationalism by anyone who reasons that any given free man (independent of any size of the population) cannot use the fixed number of atoms of elements on Earth to achieve his freely determined rational goals.
Malthus and those who consider him correct do not understand reason and its fruits In Western Civilization . . . they presume mankind as non-rational and/or irrational.
I think they do not understand what reason is. Or they understand what reason is but are ideologically against its use .
*** this may possibly change very slightly in the relatively near future with space mined minerals imported to Earth and / or human colonization off Earth. And of course fissioning / fusion machines alter the number of some elements.
John
JP says:
Thankyou for your interest in my comment.
Your entire post at January 6, 2014 at 9:32 am says
Firstly, as your concluding statement says, I did not say there is a single cause of falling birthrates in affluent (i.e. developed) countries. I said
As I said, there are “several reasons”. However, the single reason I stated is alone sufficient to explain why birthrates decline to below replacement level.
You rightly say that replacement level is 2.1 children per couple. But a couple cannot have 2.1 children (the 0.1 of a child would be still-borne) so 2.1 children is not a rational desire of a couple..
Hence, birthrate cannot equal replacement rate in the absence of altered death rate.
As I said, in affluent countries couples do not have an economic need for large families. Hence, most restrict their number of offspring to two children (“one of each”) or three children if their first two have the same gender.
And if some couples cannot have children or decide not to have children (e.g. as one poster in this thread has said she did) then the average child per two of the population is very likely to be less than replacement rate.
Richard
Peter Taylor says:
January 6, 2014 at 6:07 am
“Dr Ball is no development expert and has little grasp of human ecology and the ecosystems that support mankind”
And as a “development expert” (what development are you talking about -look at the 50 yr track record of development experts in Africa) you then wax strongly on energy and other technologies that you have no grasp of – simply putting forward the a priori linear BS that they they teach you in college. From your condescending diatribe, it is clear you have been indoctrinated (I suspect unwittingly) by the longtime-soc_ialist-hijacked and corrupted “humanities sciences” they’ve been teaching over the past 40-50 yrs. There is no shortage of resources that aren’t being caused by governments and NGOs. Let these people have cheap electric power and let them unimpeded access to investment in their resources and they will replicate the American Dream which, by the way, has long been the target of destruction of the rest of the world and its organizations. Were it not for liberal useful idiots, the UN would have had its wings clipped long ago in this enterprise.
The new oil and gas revolution is real. The UK and France, Argentina, Romania, Australia, the Middle East and North Africa all have resources that are comparable to that of the US. Canada has even more. The entire country of Romania is underlain by rich shales from border to border. Russia, China – most on the list have resources rivaling Saudi Arabia. Who knows what Africa might have? Thank goodness, the US began to develop these and as usual show the world the way or your types would have put impediments to block it generations. US superiority is a superiority liberty and democracy. Oh, and nuclear should be good for all the millennia we need it. Maybe burn your old university course notes and do some real investigation.
MarkW says:
January 6, 2014 at 7:56 am
R. de Haan says:
January 6, 2014 at 7:08 am
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You seem to assume that education is a viable proxy for intelligence.
Yeah, I know that one.
“I know you have studied economics successfully but the question is, do you have brains?”
Aaargh! I have done it again.
I wrote the stupid statement
Hence, birthrate cannot equal replacement rate in the absence of altered death rate.
I intended to write
Hence, birthrate cannot equal replacement rate ()in the absence of altered death rate as a result of your “rational choice” of individual couples.
Sorry.
Richard
JP says:
January 6, 2014 at 9:32 am
@richardcourtney
I don’t think economics explain falling birthrates…..
As your post explains, there is something else at play.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
All of you seem to think women are mindless animals.
1. First is the cost of raising and educating a child. In the USA it is $241,080 each.
2. Second we have been bombarded with the Population Bomb manta since the 1970’s and before so many conscientious people limit their families to one or two children.
3. We have been bombarded with eugenics notions of only those intelligent and disease free should reproduce.
Unfortunately when coupled with a government who pays young girls to get pregnant, you end up with the ‘dregs’ reproducing like rabbits and the intelligent reframing from reproducing.
I also wonder how much of the differences in birth rates can be traced back to how much is paid to young girls for getting pregnant and the attitude of the society towards unwed mothers.
In the USA when I was a child an unwed mother was shamed and generally gave up her child for adoption. This broke the “third generations of welfare mothers” dynamics we now see.
As nations industrialize, the life expectancy of the population goes up chiefly because more children survive into adulthood. More secure their family will live on, couples have fewer children. Modern family planning methods also become available. It also costs more to raise an infant into adulthood.as the standard of lving increases and couples choose to have fewer children.
Have you ever noticed that many of the world overpopulation zealots are also redistributionists? Isn’t there a logical contradiction in taking money from the wealthy (actually, the middle class) and giving it to the population with the highest birth rates while clamoring about overpopulation?
Gail Combs says:
January 6, 2014 at 10:08 am
“All of you seem to think women are mindless animals.”
____________________
And your point is?
(ducks)
Don’t know if the numbers are accurate but fun nonetheless.
http://www.worldometers.info/