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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.
The World Trade Organization, pushed by both Bush Sr. and Clinton got rid of import tariffs world wide and suddenly everyone is in competition and the only winners are the large corporations.
This is temporary. China is becoming “high wage” – so production is moving to Viet Nam. Which will eventually become “high wage”. etc.
How can America remain high wage? Keep inventing.
The world is equalizing. This is probably not a bad thing.
M Simon,
“Polywell Fusion looks like our best bet at this time.”
Problem is, the stated goals of Polywell fusion are always about 2 years in the future. In 2010 they said they would know by 2012 whether or not economic fusion by their method was viable. It is now 2014 and they are no nearer to answering that question. Go figure.
Vince Causey,
Yes. You have a point. Except the program has gone dark. It is my belief that they are now developing in secret because it works. If they announce in 5 years they will have a 5 year head start. That is quite a military advantage. If they are not covering up failure.
The importance of the independent farmer is summed up by this quote I captured years ago.
And for those who think the USA would not act against it’s own citizens:
1934, “[Our] future is becoming visible in Russia.” Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell http://www.archive.org/stream/rednetworkwhoswh00dillrich/rednetworkwhoswh00dillrich_djvu.txt
September 1995, Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program, and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, stated “Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize.” UN’s 4th World Conference on Women: Beijing, China. http://ngin.tripod.com/280702c.htm
I will remind you to visit Hans Roslinds “gapminder”
The birthnumber is not greater now than 20 years ago.
The greater number now in population depends on better Health and thus longer lifelength.
Thus better Life reduces nativity., sometimes too much, but that will be levelled by migration
Look for actual and scientifically correct statistics
The numbers of wasted food visavi developing and developed countries speaks clearly.
Visit gapminder.! Do not get hysterical because of illfounded propaganda.
Have a good Year.
jensen
William Astley says:
January 6, 2014 at 12:52 am
“[…] Today, one-third of American children – a total of 15 million – are being raised without a father. Nearly five million more children live without a mother. […]”
Yeah okay, we get it, life’s terrible and then you die, but what does any of that have to do with the size of the population. If the population were half as big you’d give us the same litany, only with half as big numbers.
Vince Causey says:
January 6, 2014 at 4:06 am
“Problem is, the stated goals of Polywell fusion are always about 2 years in the future.”
That’s 25 times faster than hot fusion; where economic fusion is always 50 years in the future.
Nature just said she is fed up with growth. I’m done with all this change, She says!
I wonder why people often forget we are Nature, and our biology, deep instincts, drives, and emotions, are far more powerful than our intellectual sophistications about how horrible we are as a species.
Hans Rosling had an interesting presentation that basically, we’d always try to have two kids survive, and as medical advances spread, we started having more survive. Now things are starting to readjust and parents across the world are tending towards having two kids, both of which survive. Things will level out around 9 or 10 billion. We no longer have to pop out six to be sure two live.
As for resources, Howard Bloom keeps pointing out that our imagination and deep drive for novelty (at the level of the mass mind, the global organism of humanity, so no human can change it, it changes us) is what takes the most useless of stuff, like sand, and turns it into new novelties, like microchips. Conservation and limits to growth are complete delusions, there is no conservation in Nature, just stagnation and death. Be creative or die, that’s Nature’s imperative. Materialism is also a myth. We live in a world of matter, and our inventions, be they fashion or phablets, are about connecting with other humans.
And for the Western New Agers who created their own version of American Buddhism, “don’t think, feel!” and all that, become a meditating enlightenment-seeking nonviolent vegan nonmaterialistic drop out, read Ken Wilber’s massive critique of that phenomenon, “Boomeritis, A Novel That Will Set You Free” for the long list of cultural dead ends which they took all the young creatives into, with massive self-loathing and formal self contradictions.
It takes a generation or two to shake out these cultural memes, and then we wake up one day and wonder why China just became the Number 1 Superpower.
Mike Mellor:
Your post at January 6, 2014 at 3:47 am says in total
Sorry, but your post is completely wrong.
Population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries.
Unemployment rates in the rich countries are high because
(a) their indigenous populations lack people with skills to match demand for skills
and
(b) their indigenous populations include people with an unwillingness to undertake menial tasks that workers from poorer countries will undertake.
Increased affluence in poor countries could be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase. And this is the underlying reason why there are actions to inhibit developments in poorer countries (e.g. as reported in this thread by johnmarshall at January 6, 2014 at 2:32 am).
I cannot link to my post (in this thread at January 6, 2014 at 2:00 am) which explains the fundamental error of Malthusianism because it is still in moderation. However, if my post ever does appear then I think this link should jump to it
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-of-global-warming/#comment-1526318
Richard
Mods:
Thankyou for finding and resurrecting from moderation my post at in this thread at January 6, 2014 at 2:00 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-of-global-warming/#comment-1526318
Richard
Rud Istvan says: @ur momisugly January 5, 2014 at 8:27 pm
….The issue to be engaged is not CAGW, nor even AGW. It is simply that we as an exploitative species soon loose the ability to annually produce enough fossil fuel to continue as before.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No, the real issue is that humans are an adaptive and inventive species.
If the elite with their propaganda machines (MSM) and useful idiots (NGOs) had not interfered we would already be in much better shape economically world wide.
Thorium nuclear was sidelined in 1976, now U.S. Researcher Preparing Prototype Cars Powered by Heavy-Metal Thorium
This is the type of thinking that is preventing advancing of civilization and aiding the population explosion as a result.
richardscourtney,
Very good post @2:00 today.
Darn it forgot the / in the blockquote close. Mods please fix.
This should be required viewing for anybody posting here. It is unmitigated good news re the population, so I give him a pass on his references to climate change.
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/
Brief synopsis, the number of 0-15 year olds will stabilise at 2BN in ten years time. Asian fertility is 2.5 children per woman, just above replacement rate. Europe and North and South America are below replacement rate. Only Africa is above RR with 4 children per woman, down from 6.5 about twenty years ago. And it continues to fall. Because of technology leading to people living longer, overall global population will stabilise around 2080 at about 11BN people.
Singapore is one of the nicest places to live in in the world. At the density levels of Singapore (7540 per sq km), we would need about 1.5m sq km (just over the size of two Texases). This would include all schools, industry, national parks, entertainment facilities, government facilities, hospitals, etc, etc, etc, and some agriculture, although not enough to feed everybody. At Dutch levels of farming, it would probably require two more Texases to feed all those people, or an area the size of India to house and feed everybody.
And that’s it. The whole of the rest of the world could be totally devoid of humans. I don’t say that this is what we should do, I’m just trying to illustrate that as much as we like to think the world revolves around us, it doesn’t.
Let’s look at the Joker in the pack. Africa. Does it look hopeless? Maybe, maybe not. Malthusians, pay attention.
ARABLE LAND WARS
AGRICULTURAL DECLINE
WATER WARS / WATER STRESSES
ECONOMIC STAGNATION
So much for climate change making things worse. Somehow, it’s making things better. It’s worse than we thought.
I forgot the link for my first quoted paragraph.
“Current and potential arable land use in Africa
Year: 2006
From collection: African environment collection
Author: Hugo Ahlenius, UNEP/GRID-Arendal
Description:……”
http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/current-and-potential-arable-land-use-in-africa_a9fd
Global warming and noxious co2 has lead to agricultural declines. The future looks very bleak. We must act now!
Jørgen Randers of the club of Rome and coauthor of “Limits to Growth”, now “professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School” (see http://www.bi.edu/research/employees/?ansattid=fgl99096), managed to get in the limelight in Norway again one year ago when he argued for a one child policy and the need for authoritarian regimes in order to cope with climate change. Apparently, he wrote a new apocalyptic book in 2012 (http://www.2052.info).
I’m surprised to see so many people with poor reading comprehension. Right there in Dr. Ball’s essay is a demonstration that population growth is leveling off. The solution to the Malthusian problems doesn’t even depend on the green revolution or the technological revolution, as brilliant as some of the scientists behind those revolutions were. People are having fewer children. That’s true not only in advanced technological societies, which are beginning to panic because of population deficits, but even the traditionally fertile societies of Asia, Africa, and South America. See, for example, the writings of Nick Eberstadt or Ben Wattenberg for explanations.
How do you suggest we do that? Since you posted first you might have read all the comments and references. Do you think population growth is really as bigger problem now than when you first posted your comment?
I’ll just leave this here I think:
“What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us . . . . In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.”
-Tertullian, Carthage, 2nd century Ad
Frankly, if Thomas Malthus hadn’t written his daft “theory”, someone else would have, and we’d be talking about Brownian or Smithian overpopulation theories or what-have-you. Don’t expect these idiots to disappear any time soon just because they’ve been wrong every single time for the last two-thousand-plus years 😀 .
You are getting waaaay over excited. Read all the references above. People in Africa and Asia are better off today than their grandparents. People are living longer. Slums are a part of development, they will reduce as nations develop. Take a chill pill man.
This is the problem with crazed Malthusians. They talk about the ‘population problem’ and remain silent on THEIR proposed solutions. I will ask it here, what solutions aside from family planning do you propose? I don’t think anyone here opposes voluntary and affordable family planning for all.
PS The Club of Rome et al would do themselves much good if they looked ahead towards the end of this century and even beyond. Some of the problems can already be seen in Singapore and Japan. Over population will not be our problem in 2100. ;-(
Seattle says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 1:37 am
….Women do not often need fathers for their children when they have tools to put the men into slavery (“child support”) and steal money from entirely unrelated third parties (“welfare”).
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They also do not need to look for jobs when the welfare pay is higher that minimum wage. Men do not need to look for jobs when they can bully those women in to supporting them off those welfare payments. For example a guy I know has 52 children and is known for his abusiveness…
Fabien George Bernard Shaw, said “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
Altruism has nothing to do with welfare payments. It is all about power and control.
Shaw, a believer in Eugenics also said.
I do not want to be around when this consolidation of power is finished and the other shoe drops.
I’ve been trying to think of case studies to illustrate how resources are running out.
But 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?
So, with all these extra people fighting for resources, what are we running out of?
M Simon says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:09 pm
North of 43 and south of 44 says:
January 5, 2014 at 6:59 pm,
The first mate and I decided on a minimum of three. We have four. Why? We figured the world could use more brain power.
1. An artist
2. Foreign (Russian) language expert
3. Electrical engineer
4. Chemical engineer
I’d say we have been moderately successful in our goal.
_________________________________________________________________
Well the boss and I decided on two but had three.
1. Systems dude.
2. Business owner.
3. Teacher (classroom and instrumental) and artist (musician).
Such is the way of the world huh?