Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
The world focus on CO2 is simply the end objective of a much larger political agenda. The Club of Rome (COR) and then UNEP’s Agenda 21 under Maurice Strong created a political agenda based on certain assumptions all related to overpopulation.
1. The world and all nations are overpopulated.
2. All population growth is at an unsustainable rate.
3. All nations are using up resources at an unsustainable rate.
4. Developed Nations use resources at a much greater rate than Developing Nations.
5. Developed Nations achieved wealth using fossil fuel driven industries.
6. Developed Nations must pay compensation to Developing Nations for benefits gained at their expense and for hardships and adaptation costs involved in dealing with climate change created by CO2.
7. Reducing activities of Developed Nations and slowing growth of Developing Nations requires a world government.
8. Once a world government is established population control can progress.
Global warming and climate change are simply the emotional threats used to confront overpopulation. The problem is the world is not overpopulated.
The current attack on Developed Nations includes punishment for their success, and for the redistribution of their ill-gotten wealth. It is ironic that they chose Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834) and his ideas as the basis for their agenda because he argued that increased prosperity was hampered not by inequality of wealth but too many people unable or unwilling to create wealth. He didn’t want across the spectrum population reduction, just a reduction of those who were holding society back. His views and proposals are markedly different than the socialist solutions of Agenda 21. His major work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, proposed what today’s socialists would consider completely unacceptable reasoning and solutions. He wanted the government to end policies that encouraged people to have more children. Instead of reducing the population totally and taking from the wealthy to give to the poor, he wanted fewer poor people born.
The Club of Rome, under the facade of saving the planet, adopted and expanded the work of Thomas Malthus as an agenda for population control. As one group explains,
Malthus was a political economist who was concerned about, what he saw as, the decline of living conditions in nineteenth century England. He blamed this decline on three elements: The overproduction of young; the inability of resources to keep up with the rising human population; and the irresponsibility of the lower classes. To combat this, Malthus suggested the family size of the lower class ought to be regulated such that poor families do not produce more children than they can support.
This is important for the modern debate because overpopulation is still central and the driving force behind the use of climate change as a political vehicle.
Malthus blamed government social policy and charity for exacerbating the overpopulation problem by encouraging people to have more children. As he explained,
I entirely acquit Mr Pitt of any sinister intention in that clause of his Poor Bill which allows a shilling a week to every labourer for each child he has above three. I confess, that before the bill was brought into Parliament, and for some time after, I thought that such a regulation would be highly beneficial, but further reflection on the subject has convinced me that if its object be to better the condition of the poor, it is calculated to defeat the very purpose which it has in view. It has no tendency that I can discover to increase the produce of the country, and if it tend to increase the population, without increasing the produce, the necessary and inevitable consequence appears to be that the same produce must be divided among a greater number, and consequently that a day’s labour will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions, and the poor therefore in general must be more distressed.
Malthus’ objective was to reform or eliminate the Poor Laws and curtail charity. Unfortunately, his argument lacked hard evidence, and the examples he used were not relevant. For example, he used US population increase that more than doubled from 2 million in 1775 to 4.3 million in 1800. He failed to identify immigration as the major reason for the increase.
Malthus had a crucial influence on the theory of evolution, as Darwin acknowledged in his 1876 autobiography.
“In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work”.
Darwin demanded evidence to support any theory but somehow overlooked it for Malthus. However, he clearly liked the idea of “favourable” (desirable) or “unfavourable” undesirable traits. It suited his acceptance and inclusion in the sixth edition of Origins of Species of Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest”. The problem is Malthus
Malthus and Darwin also ignored technology apparently because they were only interested in biological evolution. They didn’t include the Agricultural Revolution that preceded the Industrial Revolution. This omission still pervades society today as many assume evolution has stopped. It is also central to the underlying theme of environmentalism that technology is a dangerous anomaly in human development. It underscores creation of the meaningless term sustainable development.
Alarmism over population growth was central to the ideas of the Club of Rome. It received momentum through Paul Ehrlich’s even more egregious and incorrect book, “The Population Bomb.” The fact that every single prediction Ehrlich and John Holdren, advisor to President Obama for Science and Technology made, have proved completely wrong doesn’t stop extremists seeing the need for total control. Some believe people should not exist. Holdren thinks they should be limited and controlled as detailed in a list of his totalitarian proposals.
· Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
· The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
· Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
· People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
· A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
Crucial to all alarmism is a mechanism to bypass public resistance to draconian controls, especially in the US with its constitutional guarantees. Holdren proposed a method for bypassing the Constitution by using the Constitution. He wrote,
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
It sounds very official, legal and plausible until you realize how it cedes control. He is the person who explains how the Constitution could be used in for this purpose. He is the one who decides when the crisis is sufficiently severe to endanger the society. This technique is applicable to any perceived threat, including climate change.
Holdren told his Senate confirmation hearing that he no longer held his views and refused to answer media questions about the views expressed in Human Ecology. His actions and support of global warming and climate change contradict the assertion. Certainly de-development, which is achieved by eliminating fossil fuels, is central. In a 2010 interview, he was asked to explain the thinking behind views expressed in Human Ecology.
CNSNews.com asked: “You wrote ‘a massive campaign must be launched to restore a high quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States’ in your book Human Ecology. Could you explain what you meant by de-develop the United States?”
Holdren responded: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality. Thanks a lot.”
Sir John Houghton, the first co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead editor of the first three IPCC Reports, confronted the overpopulation issue differently. In an article for the Global Conversation in Lausanne in 2010;
First let me write a few words about God and science. A few prominent scientists are telling us that God does not exist and science is the only story there is to tell. To argue like that, however, is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is about. At the basis of all scientific work are the ‘laws’ of nature – for instance, the laws of gravity, thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and the puzzling concepts and mathematics of quantum mechanics. Where do these laws come from? Scientists don’t invent them; they are there to be discovered. With God as Creator, they are God’s laws and the science we do is God’s science.
The Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24), and Jesus is the agent and redeemer of all creation (John 1:2; Colossians 1:16-20; Ephesians 1:16). As we, made in God’s image, explore the structure of the universe that God has made with all its fascination, wonder and potential, we are engaging in a God given activity. Many of the founders of modern science three or four hundred years ago were Christians pursuing science for the glory of God. I and many other scientists today are privileged to follow in their footsteps.
A special responsibility that God has given to humans, created in His image, is to look after and care for creation (Genesis 2:15). Today the impacts of unsustainable use of resources, rapidly increasing human population and the threat of climate change almost certainly add up to the largest and most urgent challenge the world has ever had to face – all of us are involved in the challenge, whether as scientists, policy makers, Christians or whoever we are.
The COR and its manifestation Agenda 21’s arguments are considered neo-Malthusian because they expand his hypothesis to say that the population will outgrow all resources. The threat was laid out in the COR book Limits To Growth. It became the format for all subsequent claims, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Based on totally inadequate data including on population and resource reserves, it was subjected to analysis using very restricted development mechanisms and forced through a computer model to a predetermined result. Economist Julian Simon challenged the hypothesis of The Limits with a bet that resulted in an empirical study. Simon won the battle but lost the war. It is 35 years since Simon made the bet, but still most believe the world is running out of resources.
So the resource and population predictions are wrong, which is not surprising because Malthus was wrong about both. However, many still want to control and limit population. A summary of their proposals is revealing.
- Malthus wanted population reduction, but he decides which group must decline, but he was a church minister.
- As an atheist Darwin says nature will limit numbers, but that’s confusing because humans are natural.
- Houghton wants numbers to decline but claims God gave him the authority to decide.
- Holdren wants numbers to decline but since he or the political party he supports is superior to everybody they will decide.
The insanity of it all is that none of what they think matters because there is no overpopulation, no shortage of resources or any connection between CO2 and climate change. It is a story of science without evidence or at best-concocted evidence from Malthus through the COR to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The world often elevates someone like Malthus to semi-deity status, for some odd reason that escapes me. But if you read the stuff it’s just the rant of an idiot. There’s no starting point, no set of falsifiable postulates to build a foundation for the rant, it’s just pontification.
I had a prof my sophomore year. In the first few weeks of the term he had us read Veblen, Malthus, a little bit of Marx, some Mill, and 3 or 4 others, and to write a one sentence “impression” of each of them. Then in weeks 5 and 6 he proceeded to rip each one of them by revealing flaws in their logic, to show how predictions or assumptions they made were just nonsense, and then he told us, “just because their bust is on the mantle, gold gilded and all, don’t mean they’re crap. Learn to think for yourself!” Other than the coursework in math, computer science, etc, etc., it was the most excellent adventure I’ve had on the formal side of education.
Why did you think John Stuart Mill wrote nonsense?
Mill didn’t write nonsense, but there are all kinds of practical problems with much of his work. Just a couple examples: He argued for inclusive society and broad rights to vote, (good so far), but then also claimed there were exclusions for “barbarians and the uneducated.” He never sufficiently articulated a working definition of barbarians or uneducated, and left it as something that should be somewhat self-evident. If you take large parts of Utilitarianism there are all kinds of issues in defining “greatest good.” On the one hand it was individual happiness, whatever that might be, and on the other he was arguing that people were capable of being educated and enjoying the more refined and intellectual pursuits, and that’s the end to which society should strive. Seems like a practical contradiction, after all, I’m more educated that 99.95%, of the people in the U.S., (Masters in Math, Masters in Cognitive Psych, PhD in Information Theory). I enjoy a good Wagner Opera, but sometimes I’m just happiest when I’m outback unloading my 9mm into a pile of dirt, something that many people would consider the act of an uneducated barbarian.
Where we left off in 1973: Don’t take Mill too seriously just because he argues for the greater good, take him seriously when he tells you something you didn’t already know. In the later respect I’ve learned a lot more from old farmers and mining engineers than I did from most of the 18th and 19th century philosophers and scholars.
Warrenlb,
Mills wrote this: “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
That is not nonsense. In fact, the logic there is so compelling, the advocates of ‘action’ on AGW, must insist that they know the future and its CAGW (sorry I know you hate CAGW). The reason AGW has to be turned into a catastrophe is to pass Mills test for coercion. It isn’t the science of climate that is catastrophic, its the politics of AGW that compel a catastrophic outcome. That is the justification for all state-mandated coercion.
That is the point of Dr. Ball’s post. ANY catastrophic prophecy is brought to serve the same end. Coercion and control by the government to save, (A) the planet (B) mankind (C) specific species, aka the tribe, nation, sacred animal, etc.
Philosophically John Stuart Mills and myself are not simpatico – but he did not write nonsense.
@Willybamoo.
I agree with you, and with Mill’s ideas on individual freedom. His writings also have no bearing on AGW, since the atmosphere behaves according to the Laws of Physics, not according to the writings of a philosopher.
warrenlb,
Your funny little brain behaves “according to the Laws of Physics” but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense!
@mebbe
Are you saying that the atmosphere does not obey the Laws of Physics?
warrenlb “Are you saying that the atmosphere does not obey the Laws of Physics?”
I had not thought of it that way, but it is exactly correct. It is more correct to say that the principles of physics are revealed by the atmosphere.
The atmosphere neither obeys nor disobeys; that is something for dogs and people, neither is it a law established by an Authority, although some believe it to be exactly so.
warrenlb,
You managed to get the implication of my flippant comment exactly reversed.
The point is that everything obeys the laws of physics and it’s a tiresome diversion to constantly claim that the climate is “basic physics”.
Protein folding is “basic physics” but not understood.
Like clouds.
And lightning…
Of course these are the same fools who believe that democracy is a problem and needs to be gotten rid of.
It’s all your fault.
Submit, pay up, then die.
/s?
Buckminster Fuller pointed out that we use technology and substitution to solve material shortages. He pointed out that almost everything we do can be done using much less material. In other words, we innovate our way out of shortages.
Thomas Homer Dixon points out that problems may come at us so fast that we can’t innovate quickly enough.
Have we suffered from overpopulation? You could argue that it happened in the late middle ages.
Andrew Nikiforuk points out that the reason the plagues spread so readily was that the population was already weakened by malnutrition (because of overpopulation and ‘politics’).
I think we have a lot to fear from another ‘little ice age’. The crap could hit the fan. It’s happened before.
US Census graphic depiction of world population trends:
https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/worldgrgraph.php
The accompanying text:
“The world population growth rate rose from about 1.5 percent per year from 1950-51 to a peak of over 2 percent in the early 1960s due to reductions in mortality. Growth rates thereafter started to decline due to rising age at marriage as well as increasing availability and use of effective contraceptive methods. Note that changes in population growth have not always been steady. A dip in the growth rate from1959-1960, for instance, was due to the Great Leap Forward in China. During that time, both natural disasters and decreased agricultural output in the wake of massive social reorganization caused China’s death rate to rise sharply and its fertility rate to fall by almost half.”
Politicians all over can and will lie to us to further their agendas.
It’s sort of like when there was gambling in Casablanca. NOT shocking, just normal.
“The problem is Malthus”
This part, about halfway through Tim’s article, needs either a period to finish the sentence or some more words.
Richardcourtney
The fallacy of overpopulation derives from the disproved Malthusian idea which wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
________________________________________
You do have some strange ideas Richard. We ARE constrained, because we live in finite countries, with finite resources, within a finite world. The world IS a large petri dish, and if you disagree then please go to Mars next week and tell us all what it is like. What, you cannot do that?! Welcome to the Earthly petrie dish, Richard.
And why this pre-civilised desire for humans to breed like rabbits or bacteria? Is this madness reIigiously inspired? A species that cannot control its population cannot be called civilised. But why would anyone want to push human populations as close as possible to their theoretical limit? These are the truly bad people in the world, not Malthus. These population-promoters must be aware that with populations at their maximum, any disruption to supplies and production (be that natural or man-made, temporary or long term) will lead to mass starvation and death.
And if we understand the potential hazards and still choose to strive for maximum populations, like the classical lemming imagery, then these will not simply be unavoidable deaths but deliberate institutional deaths. This is what politicians who will not entertain population controls are promoting, and so they are not simply misguided they are ambassadors from the underworld.
R
Silver Ralph,
The world is a large petri dish and mankind is just an complex microbe? eh? That’s grim.
“A species that cannot control its population cannot be called civilized”
No one has ever called any other species apart from man ‘civilized’ to my recollection. But we don’t apply that to all the tribes. Some are uncivilized. As far as I know all civilizations were expansionists, until they entered a period of decline and fall.
No one that I know is trying to push human population to its ‘theoretical limits’ Certainly not Richardcourtney. Who is striving for maximum populations? I think the idea is the great population expansion of the last fifty years has been far from catastrophic. On the contrary, man is better of now than he was fifty years ago, when the world’s population was not even half of what it is today.
Maybe we ought to leave how many babies up to the families to whom they belong. We need to stop thinking about people belonging to the state. That is not the sort of civilization I would advocate.
“Ambassadors from the underworld” that sounds religious. I think you’re slipping Ralph
Most of the folks who disagree with Malthus couldn’t be called ‘population-promoters’. They’re just disagreeing with bad thinking.
I think you miss the point made entirely. Nobody is striving to push the population to its maximum limit. The point was that history has shown that the population has increased with the ability of humans to provide for that population. There is nowhere in that idea, the conclusion that this correlation will continue. Indeed, the evidence cites a decoupling, such that as wealth reaches a certain per capita level, population growth ceases.
This amazing serendipity should be loudly cheered. It is saying that technology can, with abundant cheap energy, lift humanity out of poverty, AND, as an additional benefit, prevent populations continuing to rise.
Let me know when the martians figure out how to create energy from rocks.
Human ingenuity is unlimited, and because of that, our resources are unlimited.
If the politicians hadn’t interfered, there’s a chance we could be mining the moon for resources by now.
In many industrialized countries: USA, Russia and Japan to name a few, birth rates are insufficient to maintain their respective populations.
If Japan’s current birth rate continues, it’s population by the year 3,000 will be 50,000 (not a typo) 50,000… The rapid decline of birth rates is primarily due to a devastated economy following decades of insanely wasteful Socialist/Keynesian public spending, excessive corporate, personal and inheritance taxes, awful monetary policies, huge and growing national debt, money printing, excessive state control of the economy, crony crapitalism and overregulation.
Japanese simply can’t afford to have more than one or two children, so they don’t…
This is playing out in many industrialized countries.
For countries in abject poverty, most are run by Socialist/Communist/Dictators that don’t allow free-market capitalism to bring them out of poverty..
If the world wishes to develop strong, growing and innovative economies, they need to end their failed experiments with Socialism and command control econimies and implement free-market economies…
CAGW is simply a last ditch effort by Socialists and Communists to keep their failed economic/social theory alive… Like the rest of their failed plans, CAGW simply doesn’t work and economies are being further ruined by implementing inefficient and expensive CO2 sequestration policies.
Had America and other Western countries embraced and maintained limited governments and stuck with free-market economies, we’d have warp drive by now and all our energy would be from fusion and/or thorium… $100’s of Trillions of global wealth has been squandered by Socialism/Communism over the past century.
How long will it take for people to wake up?
I am not convinced that these demographic problems are the result of all these economic policies. Yes, they have ruined the economy and made people poorer, but poorer populations have had higher fertility rates, so I think there are other issues at play.
Vince– if you look at economic freedom rankings, per capita GDP, birth rates and infant mortality rates, the counties with the worst economies, the least economiic freedom and the highest infant mortality rates have the highest birth rates.
It’s a matter of survival. Parents need to have as many children as possible to assure enough of them survive to take care of the family. They live in hovels with no running water, no electricity, no sewer systems and often burn dung to cook their food. Wood is often very scarce as it has been all used up ( see Haiti). Their economies are still agrarian in areas with poor soils, very low crop yields and over grazed fields and are often in desert to semi-desert climates.
Even destitute countries with fertile soils, good climates and massive natural resources, Socialist dictators nationalized industries and implement destructive taxes and massive rules and regulations, which prevent foreign capital investment and efficient use of land, labor and capital.
It’s a complete mess.
Free people and free economies are the answer to solve 3rd-world problems as can be seen in Chile and Mauritius.
Dr. Ball,
I love your article because you are getting at the heart of the matter: CAGW has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with mass mind control.
People see what the expect to see, and not what is really there.
To control what people do, you control what they think.
To control what people think, you control what they see.
And to control what people see, you control what they expect to see.
Here is a fascinating video on the origin and history of the psychological operations leading up to the Club of Rome, Agenda 21 and CAGW.
The basis of the psyops is a keen understanding of how to induce shell-shock in whole populations, reduce them to apathy and compliance.
THE TAVISTOCK AGENDA
by Iona Miller
(On a minor fun note, Iona is pictured in two frames: “Keep Them in Tavi-stocks”, and “Bread and Circuits”. I’ve been in contact with her a few times, and she is a brilliant and fascinating lady.)
ibid
@max did you do that on purpose? Line 5 the ‘y’ is missing on they and there’s no space between and & not.
‘the’ should read ‘they’
On my screen there IS a space between ‘and’ & ‘not’, so I don’t know what to say about that one.
🙂
At the age of 40 Malthus married in 1804 and proceeded to father 3 cylinder. Now, this is above the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Thus, if Malthus merely fathered a reasonable 2.1 children he would not have contributed to overpopulation. But, no, instead of walking the walk he merely talked the talk and fathered an additional 0.9 child.
The proper approach to overpopulation would be the one advocated by my sister, my older sister. In her 20s and 30s all of her 12 husbands were wealthy old men in their 60s and 70s. Since they were all in poor health, or would soon be after marriage, I never understood her physical attraction to them. Suffice it to say they all were incapable of fathering any children and nary a child was born by my older sister. Now that she’s in her 70s and no longer able to replicate she’s proceeded to swear off marriage. Now, however she lives with cohabitants all of whom are young males in their 20s and 30s; a few of whom have mysteriously disappeared.
I meant 3 children. 3 cylinders are the number in my car.
Chips off the old block.
In other words, a political power-grab under the guise of spurious “science” for a putative “public good” that’s neither particularly public in its stated objectives nor good for the common weal in any sense whatsoever.
First and engineering look. Let’s measure the physical problem. Lake Superior would hold 6B people, each with 15sqm to tread water in. If we were to have only 1 sqm, the lake could accommodate 90B people. The earth can support the projected population with ease and ingenuity. What the antediluvian Ehrlichs don’t realize, is by keeping large portions of the population in poverty, they get the unintended result of greater population than we would if we permitted them cheap energy. The fertility rate of well off people has shrunk to below 2 children per family. This is a forecast for all of mankind when we improve the lot of the poor. We should hasten their development to acheive the best outcome.
Being a California survivor, and having engaged with countless ‘environmentalists’, I can assure you that most of them HATE HUMANS.
They will tell you in the most cavalier manner that the ‘carrying capacity’ of Earth is 500 million.
Translation: we need to get rid of 6.5 billion people.
In other words, these groove, loving people, who claim to want peace and harmony and all that good stuff, would happily exterminate every 13 out of 14 people.
Feel the love.
But Max, does anyone really “survive” California? I “survived” Aspen in the late 70’s, but as my wife often points out “there was some serious and permanent damage done.”
Good Lord … Aspen.
When I was a young lad in grad school I dated the hottest, sweetest, brightest Jewish gal in all of Wharton. (And she’s the one who approached me! Go figure!!)
Her family was a bazillion times wealthier than the world I came from, and they had a place in Aspen where you could ski right to the garage. The entire family lived for skiing, so I got to go to there a few time. It was pretty sweet.
Her parents were very kind and generous to me, but I was perfectly clear they knew that if they just laid low and played it cool long enough, that I’d disappear in due time after their precious daughter out-grew her goy-toy phase. (I don’t begrudge Jewish parents hoping that their daughters marry Jewish boys, so I never took it personally.)
Anyway, what I remember about Aspen is twofold: that it is a superb place for road cycling in the summer — gorgeous scenery with great climbs; and that had I not been subsidized, I would have been absolutely destitute in less than a week. I don’t think I couldn’t even afford to dumpster-dive there.
Max:
I actually had a pretty cushy summer gig there for 3 years, working for a landscaper who built things like bonsai gardens and croquet courts for people with way too much money.
Ever been hugged by a women in a cashmere sweater while you have hydraulic fluid all over your pants and smell like diesel, just because you made her backyard look just the way she had imagined it?
Funny you should mention that. The gal I mentioned had a mole of cashmere sweaters, and none of them under $500 — at least her everyday slumming-it wear — while her dress cashmere required scientific notation. For some reason ‘MaxMara’ just surfaced in my brain after decades of repression.
So in fact I HAVE hugged a woman in a cashmere sweater while covered in an exotic blend of gasoline, oil, anchovies, and salmon slime. (She and I had been salmon fishing off of Point Reyes, CA.)
Dating a woman with an inexhaustible supply of cashmere is a definite bonus. High quality cashmere has got to be the softest, coziest, most heavenly material to snuggle up with on Earth!
Thanks for reminding me about that part 🙂
I think world is over populated just because I don’t like most people and hate them moving out near me.
but I would never push for policies to address that as its just a personal foible on my end.
Malthus, the Eugenicists, the Marxists, all pseudo twaddle. All wanting to create a more “desirable” or more “perfect” man. Ask the simple question: who decides what is “desirable” or “perfect” and you will invariably find that they are of course the proponents of those ideologies. The implicit arrogance is breathtaking.
The quote by John Houghton is interesting, if not funny. The cyclical reasononing is obvious but more to the point is that he thinks the existence of “laws of nature”, that is that happenings in nature can be described by mathematics, as a proof of the existence of a creator, of God. I wonder if Sir John, as the devout Christian he clearly is, believes in miracles. If so, he has a problem. Miracles are, by definition, deviations from those perfect God-made laws. The work of the Devil, perhaps? Or are they not perfect laws in some situations after all? If so, then has God made imperfect laws? With Epicurus: then why call him God? But if he does not believe in miracles, why be religious?
When did the religious leaders of the world decide that God want’s us to take better care of this planet than we do of each other?
Lately, St. James is stomping St. Paul in dogmatic popularity (when the new testament is even cited).
It is sad, but not surprising, that an extremist like John Holdren, who masquerades as a scientist, is a top advisor to the leader of the free world. Given the many other buffoons in this Administration, Holdren probably appears reasonably credible, by default.
I am completely appalled to discover that John Hodren, the Science minister of the USA, is identified in his own published books as a genocidal fascist indistinguishable in any way from Heinrich Himmler. Himmler started ideating the same as Holdren – the only difference – so far – is that Himmler was given free reign to his desires while Holdren has not.
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
Recently I have been reading about the history of Treblinka, the extermination camp which in a little over 18 months in 1942-1943 just under a million people were killed. What is striking about Treblinka was the chilling focus on killing only – off the trains and straight into the chambers in a hurry. No messing with a labour camp and dormitory sheds. In this interview with Treblinka guard Franz Suchomel
He recited the song that the Treblinka guards and killers would sing every day:
Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous
at the world
The squads march to work
All that matters to us now is Treblinka
It is our destiny
That’s why we’ve become one with Treblinka
in no time at all
We know only the word of our Commander
We know only obedience and duty
We want to serve, to go on serving
Until little luck ends it all.
Hurray!
With the coming to power of individuals like John Holdren, this song could well find a new role and purpose. Here is an updated version of the Treblinka employees’ song adapted for today’s need for population control in the name of environmentalism and John Holdren:
Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous
at the warming world
The squads march to work
All that matters to us now is the Club of Rome
It is our destiny
That’s why we’ve become one with Agenda 21
in no time at all
We know only the word of John Holdren
We know only obedience and duty
We want to serve, to go on serving
Until the Planetary Regime stops all the CO2.
Hurray!
Dr Ball,
I would like to use your opinion piece text directly in a communication with Cardinal Turkson, the author of the climate encyclical and the Pontifical Academy of Science, the councilors of which some are non-believers, simply experts in their respective fields.
Your opinion piece is well thought out, well summarized, and correct IMO. It is clear that the advocates of the green movement are anti-life, anti-poor, racists, eugenicists, & socialists, all natural and deceptive enemies of the RC Church and humanity.
I intend to use your good words to present that point this week, as are many others.
Listen to prof. Hans Rosling
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dymPP9RhPjw&w=560&h=315%5D
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Indeed Hans Rosling speaks a lot of sense into this population and global economic debate.
Essential antidote to ignorant Malthusian panic.
Sooner or later this planet will shake the fleas off it’s back like it has in the past. This earth has the human race on a leash. It’s not the other way around. The human ego never fails to amuse. The earth is doing just fine as George Carlin says. The people are fudged. let’s save the earth lol. if you can’t see the arrogance in that…
Demographic shocks are about to play havoc with national economies. Countries like Japan, soon to be followed by China and Germany, have swollen numbers approaching retirement followed by shrinking numbers following behind. How on earth are these huge numbers to be supported in retirement?
Since the idea of welfare state is very new in human history, it has not been tested over many generations. It may even be fortuitous, that the state pension system (in the UK) was introduced at about the time when the baby boomers were being born. What a marvellous coincidence that the boomers were able to pay for the pensions of the generation that had the foresight to reproduce so generously. The fact that the boomer generation would need to reproduce an even bigger boomer to fund their own retirement, seems to have been missed by the boomers and politicians alike (who happen to be the same). The poor boomers may not receive the pensions they were promised. But there is more.
Not only does it make no sense to expect a population to produce each cohort larger than the one before it, but it is now obvious that a nation cannot even control its demographics. What we are faced with is a future where cohort sizes follow each other in unpredictable ways, bulging and narrowing in different patterns. How is society to cope with these impossible demographic time bombs?
One possible way is robotics. Reduced to the simplistic interpretation, robots take up the slack in society. But there is yet another problem with this, for if robots are the private property of employers, then the rent earned by their labour is their own, and thereby enriches themselves not society at large. So the issue is one of socialisation of the labour of robots. For this to happen there would have to be very high taxation indeed, and a degree of government control not likely to win support from libertarians.
The problem is that robots are not consumers. Yes,, robots can produce. But, they do not consume. The loss of tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of consumers will hit everyone from farmers to energy producers.
In the long run it all depends on how intellectual property rights are implemented.
With the advent of molecular nanotechnology ownership is no longer about actual physical agents, but design.
A single instance of a virus sized programmable nanobot is enough to bootstrap a desktop production facility due to its self-replication capability, if programs for its design are freely available in the public domain. As soon as the desktop factory is ready, you can download another program, this time one that enables it to produce whatever goods you need. Again, the cost depends on how much license fee you have to pay, if any.
Beyond design you only need energy and raw materials, which can be produced at a low cost with that kind of technology.
The funny thing is intellectual goods behave in a radically different way than physical property does. If it is in the public domain, you do not need a huge state bureaucracy to control it. In fact you do not need any control structure at all.
Therefore abolition of intellectual property rights is the key to a free society of abundance.
Do you believe that people will go through the effort of creating intellectual property if they are unable to generate any benefit from that effort?
In all likelihood, you are just one of those people who doesn’t like having to pay for what he wants, and comes up with an elaborate theory to justify his desire to just take from others for his own needs.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point out to you the role intellectual property rights have played in creating the free society of abundance we currently enjoy.
MarkW “It shouldn’t be necessary to point out to you the role intellectual property rights have played in creating the free society of abundance we currently enjoy.”
Then by all means do not do what is not necessary!
I have a doubt that society is any more free because Microsoft patented the “tab key” as a method to navigate a web page, nor is society free when almost anything you can think of has already been thought of by patent trolls that do nothing but sit on portfolios of patents waiting to sue anyone that succeeds with this idea or that.
If you do not know what you are talking about, it would be better to remain silent.
Sometimes people go through lots of effort for no immediate or tangible benefit at all. It does not mean, however, that they can’t benefit from it in the long run. More importantly, people who create intellectual goods for their employer, do it for a wage. It is the business of the employer to decide how to draw benefit from that effort. Currently it is an attractive option to turn it into intellectual property and treat it as a capital asset. However, it is not the only viable business model, far from it.
For example, the Linux kernel is published under the GPL. In fact it does not mean it is in the public domain, but in a sense it is even better. Not even derived works can be published under any other license than the GPL itself, so whoever does work on it, can’t have the fruits of his labor as his own intellectual property.
In spite of this restriction, the development of the Linux kernel is a multi billion dollar business. Corporations like IBM or Red Hat let their own employees do work on it while they are on the payroll. They do not do it as a charity. IBM is trying to sell its PowerVM platform and it is an excellent selling point to be able to advertise it as a Linux friendly environment. Red Hat, on the other hand, runs a service business based on Linux. They sell services like timely security updates or support contracts and make good money on it.
However, the kernel is only a tiny fraction of any Linux distribution, they also include tens of thousands of software packages, most of them released under the GPL or equivalent. Still, many company can do business in this field, like Ansible who gives away their base product for “free” and sells add-ons like the Ansible Tower.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point out to you the role slavery has played in creating the free society of abundance we currently enjoy. In spite of this I hope you do not insist it was a particularly good idea.
See The Blessings of Slavery by George Fitzhugh for details.
The only predictions ever close to the mark have been the UN Low Fertility Band ones, and it now shows a ’40s peak at ~8bn, declining thereafter. Depopulation will be the actual crisis, unless androids step into the breach.
Brian H.
The only predictions ever close to the mark have been the UN Low Fertility Band ones, and it now shows a ’40s peak at ~8bn, declining thereafter. Depopulation will be the actual crisis, unless androids step into the breach.
Observing some countries, its like watching them commit national suicide in slow motion.
Let’s admit that the Earth is not overpopulated…
Would it nevertheless provide a better environment for the human race if there was a stable world population of about one billion people?
What are the end benefits for Man and the Environment of cramming more and more people on Earth?
The benefit is obvious. The freedom for men and women, who choose to do so, to create life, in their image in an act of love. For some people, who own nothing, about 1/2 of the worlds population, this is all they have. I would consider that not just a benefit, but the only purpose of human life.
It is contingent on science and engineering to improve the bounty from the earth to serve this end.
No government, NGO, or individual, should have influence over a couple who wants have a child through an act of natural love…not ever.
What is your evidence that a population of 1 billion would provide anyone with a better life?
Why this use of the silly scare word “cram”? We are so far short of having to “cram” people onto this planet that it is ridiculous to even use such terms.
When we get to 100 billion, then perhaps we will be “cramming” people in. But not necessarily. Perhaps by then we will have perfected floating habitats.
We can always send them to the Moon, after it’s been mined. Or perhaps Mars…..
Why wait for the moon to be mined. I’m sure that a lot of people would take the opportunity to move as soon as it is available. Much as they came to the new world as soon as they had the chance.
Malthus did not look critically enough. If population followed typical animal populations, then he might have had a point. But, people are different critters. Look at population growth in the so-called “wealthy” countries. After the initial recovery from WWII, standards of living rose, standards of education rose and women took back responsibility for their own fertility. The result was that population growth dropped to below replacement levels creating an urgency among Western Governments to increase net immigration. Without that immigration, most of the `wealthy west’ would still be below the replacement rate.
Look at the countries where the highest rates of population growth occur. Look at the levels of poverty. It’s not coincidence. You want high rates of population growth then oppress the people. The lesson lies in biblical history in the books of Genesis and, especially, Exodus. The Pharoah oppressed the Hebrews and they grew from 12 families to 12 tribes.
Where there are high levels of poverty, look closely at the land tenure and the land tenure laws. Where most of the land is owned by few, the poor are plentiful. Why are they poor? Because they cannot participate in the economy and look after themselves adequately. Children are had because they are seen as the parents `superannuation scheme’ and because access to reliable contraception and contraception education is not there. These are the countries where men control women and their fertility.
Henry George in `Progress and Poverty’ pointed to this.
If you haven’t read George, then you should.
… and send complimentary copies to Erlich and the other members of the COR.
MarkW, I was being sarcastic.If the Earth is so underpopulated why the heck should we start mining the Moon for its resources? Your analogy about people moving to the New World is not quite the same as people moving to the Moon or Mars. Dream on……