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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.
@Cheyne Gordon
There were slums in underpopulated Victorian England, the heavy use of fossil fuels, public works and legislation got them out of it. There are glittering areas in ‘overpopulated’ India. What am I to take from your meaningless comment.
Even if you halved the population of Nigeria or Calcutta you would still have slums. It’s called poverty not overpopulation.
When you get down to it the Malthusians want mass murder to occur and for it not to be them that gets their head handed to them.
My vote goes to handing them their heads, that way they lead by example.
Jimbo: “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.”
Indeed! If Jørgen Randers had his way, and one child policy would be globally enforced, the human race would be gone in just a little more than 500 years. But Singapore and Macau are now at a shocking fertility rate of 0.79 and 0.93, respectively, i.e. they’re even doing “better” than mr. Randers suggests! The replacement fertility rate is around 2.1 for industrialized countries (higher for poor countries with higher infant mortality), but today half of the world’s countries, including many developing countries have fertility rates below that (see https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html). Even a country like Germany, which at 1.42 has a much higher fertility rate than Singapore, would be reduced to a mere 100,000 inhabitants if they closed their borders for roughly 500 years…
johnmarshall says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 2:32 am
… Environmental groups are criticizing a charity that helps third world peoples dig wells to provide pottable water in each village….
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Totally agree. This is the one place I see a windmill having a place as long as it is built by the natives out of native materials so they understand it, repair it and build others. Not necessarily just to draw water but for grinding grain, charging batteries, irrigation and other uses where intermittent power is not a problem. The windmill has been around since the ninth century in the Middle East so it is not like the technology is difficult to understand. Finding the needed wood would be the only draw back I can see.
ChiefIO goes into an easy change in primative Ag. practices that works wonders and stops “Desertification” HERE. This was KNOWN in the 1970’s and here we are forty years later with no real improvement despite all the “World Aid” to Africa.
Please remember the Danish Economist, Ester Boserup:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ester_Boserup
Who contrary to Malthus argued already in 1965, “that population determines agricultural methods”
Espen,
That method is too slow, they can’t afford 500 years..
Dr Ball is no development expert and has little grasp of human ecology and the ecosystems that support mankind – I wish this site would restrict itself to climate science. When it strays into these zones where most have little comprehension but a lot of prejudgements the whole thing gets very messy. There will be an extra 1 billion mouths to feed within the next 13 years…..not in the developed world, but in those regions currently barely able to sustain their present populations. I have been to these places – looked at soil structure, water resources and agricultural potential, and can tell you, ‘industrial’ development is not sustainable….tropical ecosystems do not respond in the same way as the temperate systems upon which the industrial ‘revolution’ was founded. Moreover, that ‘revolution’ was not simply technological….it was founded upon empire, colonialist grab of resources and labour, clearances, slavery and genocide….all too readily forgotten or never known by ill-educated commentators.
It is too easy to slag off the early ecologists like Ehrlich or the Club of Rome. In my perception, they just got the timing wrong. You cannot have a ‘post industrialisation’ in regions where you don’t have industrialisation to start with. And the reason not all of the world is industrialised is because the resources are not there at the same cheap colonial prices that underpinned the first industrialists. Only China, Russia, Brazil, India and Indonesia can afford to grab what resources are left – and their populations are relatively stable. Their GDP growth rates are between 5-8% and so is their return on capital…which is why there has been a massive relocation of industrial global capital…that fuels more demand.
But the crunch has to come….oil has peaked in production (forget the new 100 billion barrels of new shales and tarsand fields….that’s 3 years supply at current rates of use). Agricultural production has also reached a plateau. The limits are not now technological….but physical: underground water, soil, and protective forests….these cannot be ‘consumed’ in some new industrial revolution in the tropics. As the oil becomes more expensive, the industrialised north will struggle to maintain social stability. Anyone who believes nuclear technology can rescue that situation is living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Why oh why does being a sceptic on climate change science also ally with ill-informed, anti-environmentalist naive belief systems on the never-ending American Dream of increasing material wealth? I despair!
Overpopulation, Malthus and poor old Giammaria Ortes is left feeling out in the cold. Where is the love?
People should at least know his part in human history.
Giammaria Ortes: The Decadent Venetian Kook Who Originated The Myth of “Carrying Capacity”
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
Printed in The American Almanac, June 20, 1994
During their preparations for the United Nations’ so-called International Conference on Population and Development, scheduled to be held in Cairo in September of this year, the genocidal bureaucrats of the U.N. are seeking to condition governments and public opinion worldwide to accept the notion of a “carrying capacity” for our planet. In other words, the U.N. butchers would like to establish scientific credibility for the idea that there is an absolute theoretical maximum number of persons the earth can support. Some preliminary documents for the Cairo conference set a world population level of 7.27 billion to be imposed for the year 2050, using compulsory abortion, sterilization, euthanasia and other grisly means. It is clear that the U.N. and its oligarchical supporters seek to exterminate population groups in excess of the limit.
Academic kooks like David Pimentel of Cornell University argue that the earth’s carrying capacity is even lower, and claim that their studies show the need to cut world population down to 2 billion, the “optimum human population” of “number of people the planet can comfortably support.”
But where does the idea of “carrying capacity” come from? Is there any scientific basis for attempting to posit any limit for the human family? There is none whatsoever. An examination of the history of the “carrying capacity” argument reveals that it originated as one of the epistemological weapons of the dying Venetian Republic during the late eighteenth century–that is, of one of the most putrid, decadent, and moribund oligarchical societies the world has ever known. The originator of the “carrying capacity” argument was Giammaria Ortes, a defrocked Camaldolese monk and libertine, who in 1790, in the last year of his life, published the raving tract Reflections on the Population of Nations in Relation to National Economy. Here Ortes set the unalterable upper limit for the world’s human population at 3 billion.
http://tarpley.net/online-books/against-oligarchy/giammaria-ortes-the-decadent-venetian-kook-who-originated-the-myth-of-carrying-capacity/
“SIG INT Ex says:@ur momisugly January 5, 2014 at 6:34 pm
China’s Proletariat has officially abandoned the “One Child, One Family” Policy so beloved by Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore…”
Patrick says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 3:28 am
The reason is China will not have enough young people to support itself (Work and pay taxes) in a very few years.
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There is another problem.
In Chinese culture the woman becomes a part of the man’s family. The MAN takes care of his parents in their old age so females fetuses were aborted until a son was conceived. China now has a very lopsided demographics. …It is not only a population problem, but also a grave social problem as many men will fail to find a wife. It’s estimated that by 2020, China will have 24 million more men than women of marriageable age on the mainland.
Gail Combs says: January 6, 2014 at 3:14 am
Janice says: @ur momisugly January 5, 2014 at 6:51 pm
We are not overpopulated. We are underdeveloped.
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Out of the mouth of Babes.
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Thanks, Gail. Haven’t been called a “babe” in many years.
richardscourtney says:
January 6, 2014 at 4:27 am
I disagree, richard.
I believe affluent people care more for material things than for other people.
So they have less kids because kids cost a lot of money, take a lot of time, and are a life-long challenge.
God doesn’t give children to selfish people.
Josef Raddy says:
January 5, 2014 at 4:10 pm
There was no Great Famine ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_famines
Of course there was a Great famine, that;s why we now have more Irish living abroad than living in Ireland but it wasn’t a famine caused by lack of food.
During the entire famine Ireland was exporting food to the England.
It was a famine caused by poverty.
Now the US and the UN have used this “weapon” again by introducing the bio fuel mandate and the loss of dollar value.
The bio fuel mandate, processing food crops into bio fuel hiked food prices and in combination with the loss of US dollar value this triggered the food protests that started in Tunis and Egypt where over 50% of the population couldn’t afford their daily bread anymore.
Destabilizing the Middle East and promoting conflict was the principal objective of Obama, the UN and the EU.
Now the entire Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, North, East and Central Africa is turning into a slaughterhouse. All conform “The Agenda”.
Precise, with a great foundation and on point is Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, examining and damning the foundation and legacy of the Hegelian dialectic as particularly used by Marx. Popper followed ‘Open Society’ with The Poverty of Historicism.
None of Popper is amenable to weak post-modern minds as his masterworks, including The Logic of Scientific Discovery, that gave us falsification as a solution to the Problem of Demarcation of science from non-sense, are ~800 pages footnoted and annotated.
“Peter Taylor says:
January 6, 2014 at 6:07 am”
Well I have been to Ethiopia and all I see is official corruption, everwhere, at the expense of people. Poor people in rich countries funding rich people in poor countries. The land can support the population. Now lets not talk about “multinationals” and “Govn’ts” evicting peoples from their lands in favour of “carbon sequestration” projects!
bones says:
January 5, 2014 at 6:54 pm
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Any review of the history of oil extraction shows that we are far from running out of cheap oil.
TRM says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:06 pm
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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.
Peter Taylor’s comment reminds me of my ever-so-well meaning relatives on the left coast who are very earnest in their environmentalism, and who never stop preaching about the need for a reduction in world population, for the good of us all.
I take an odd delight in first pointing out to them that they don’t have any problem with population growth in the post-industrial economies, such as Europe, the US, or Japan? They agree, and think that Japan is a marvelous model for the future. (I disagree, but that’s a different topic) I then ask if they agree that the population problem that they wish to see “fixed” is almost exclusively confined to the 3rd world – they also agree with that, and usually remind me how much they approve of China’s population policy.
And then I say “So what this really boils down to is the Rich White People are trying to figure out how to guarantee that a whole lot less brown and black babies will be born, because that kind of thing scares the Rich White People.”
and then they don’t want to talk about it anymore. At least this has stopped them from ever bringing that topic up again if I’m around.
Malthus is DRM free at, for instance, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4239
It seems illogical to ask about the content of a topic/book under discussion, particularly when it is in the public domain. At least make a bald assertion and retire gracefully on its falsification, rather than shore-up your argument with adhockery infinitely regressing.
Rud Istvan says:
January 5, 2014 at 8:27 pm
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The world could easily support three times our current population if the entire world would start using the most up to date farming technologies.
With every improvement in technology, that number increases.
That is exactly what they are attempting in a roundabout manner. They think some of us haven’t worked out what they are up to.
William Astley says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2014 at 12:52 am
William:
The assertion/statements (people make statements without supporting logic and facts) above for an increase in population; leading to a better brighter world are not supported by the facts and/or by logic. We must compete with Asia and particularly with China for jobs and for resources. We are losing….
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You are just looking at the surface.
WHY is the USA and the EU losing? Because that was the intention of the globalists. They want ‘Interdependence’ but the Chinese are not that stupid (SEE: Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations
To achieve the globalist goal of ‘interdependence’ The US government has intentionally betrayed her people.
Bush tried to get the World Trade Organization ratified and did not succeed. Clinton however did by promising it would not impinge on US sovereignty.
However once WTO was ratified we get this interpretation from the FDA (old link)
Seems that little tidbit was never mentioned to Congress.
That bit of treachery was bad enough but it gets worse.
Clinton not only orchestrated China’s entry into the WTO he GAVE them US technology! From the New York Times: Clinton Approves Technology Transfer to China
The technology transfer not only included manufacturing type technology but MILITARY technology.
M Simon says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:04 pm
“Take a walk through the slums of Africa or Asia, and then tell me again that the world is not over-populated.”
The obvious problem in those places is not enough technology.
Women’s literacy (and further educational accomplishments) is the best general predictor of family size”.
Thanks to the UN and it’s NGO’s who thrive on misery.
Chili kicked out the UN NGO’s and took a hands on approach to the problems and solving them.
Today Chili ranks in the top 15 of most free countries in the world…above the USA and soon will be the first developed country in Latin America: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/chiles-path-to-development-key-reforms-to-become-the-first-developed-country-in-latin-america#
R. de Haan, thanks for the very good TED video from Matt Ridley.
David D. Friedman, thanks for the link to your excellent writings at http://www.daviddfriedman.com
Yes, I should have thought of all that, thanks for leading they way.