Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to ScienceMag, the issue of Climate Change is now so urgent that all available options should be considered to reduce population growth in fast growing regions like Sub-saharan Africa.
Global warming policy: Is population left out in the cold?
John Bongaarts 1, Brian C. O’Neill 2,3
1 Population Council, New York, NY, USA.
2 National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA.
3 University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA.
Email: jbongaarts@popcouncil.org
Science 17 Aug 2018:=
Vol. 361, Issue 6403, pp. 650-652
DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8680Would slowing human population growth lessen future impacts of anthropogenic climate change? With an additional 4 billion people expected on the planet by 2100, the answer seems an obvious “yes.” Indeed, substantial scientific literature backs up this intuition. Many nongovernmental organizations undertake climate- and population-related activities, and national adaptation plans for most of the least-developed countries recognize population growth as an important component of vulnerability to climate impacts (1). But despite this evidence, much of the climate community, notably the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the primary source of scientific information for the international climate change policy process, is largely silent about the potential for population policy to reduce risks from global warming. Though the latest IPCC report (2) includes an assessment of technical aspects of ways in which population and climate change influence each other, the assessment does not extend to population policy as part of a wide range of potential adaptation and mitigation responses. We suggest that four misperceptions by many in the climate change community play a substantial role in neglect of this topic, and propose remedies for the IPCC as it prepares for the sixth cycle of its multiyear assessment process.
…
Over the past decade, two unexpected developments have led to renewed concern about future population growth, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Fortunately, AIDS mortality has dropped sharply as treatment has become more accessible worldwide. In addition, and contrary to expectations, birth rates across sub-Saharan Africa have remained high, and declines in birth rates have stalled in several countries. As a result, the latest UN world population projection is the highest ever, expecting 11.2 billion in 2100, a nearly 4 billion rise from 2015 (4). Much of this rise is projected in sub-Saharan Africa (from 1 billion in 2015 to 4 billion in 2100), but Asia (excluding East Asia) and Latin America are also projected to grow substantially.
…
Policy Levers
Rapid population growth is one of the key drivers of emissions and one of the determinants of vulnerability to impacts; it therefore should be considered as a potential climate policy lever. A key first step in remedying the current neglect of the issue is for the IPCC to include population policy in its assessment of the literature on mitigation and adaptation options. Although the outline for the sixth IPCC assessment report has already been agreed upon (with no explicit mention of population policy), there is ample opportunity within its structure to assess literature on population policy as a component of mitigation or adaptation responses, as well as its costs and benefits, implementation barriers, and links to SDGs (see supplementary materials). The IPCC should also consider the inclusion of more social scientists experienced in reproductive health and population policy.
Beyond the IPCC, the climate and environmental communities and international development institutions should embrace scientifically sound analyses of population policy and human rights–based reproductive health programs. Other international environmental assessments (11, 15) have done somewhat better than the IPCC in covering this topic. Given the urgency of addressing climate change, all available options, especially those that have multiple benefits for sustainable development, should be assessed by experts and considered by governments.
Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650.full
This all seems awfully familiar – scientists promoting the view that scale adjustments to global population are desperately required to save the world from a catastrophe which is predicted by their models.
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“Vegetarians will destroy the world”. Because 10 times as much vegetable food can be grown in place of animals. Therefore we can support 10 times as many people. OK there’s a few flaws in the argument, but isn’t there a correlation between vegetarian nations and overpopulation?
This article is written by people who do not have real jobs and who have never solved a problem because they’re incapable of identifying if a problem exists. We may, only may, have a problem if anthropogenic climate change occurs. We may, only may, get anthropogenic climate change if anthropogenic warming occurs. We may, only may, determine that we have anthropogenic warming when we determine what the natural warming rate is. Until then we don’t even know if we have a problem. There are an awful lot of scenarios here and these clowns skip over all of them directly to the doomsday case. Humans are where they are because they have generally been smarter than the intellectual dwarfs at Science Mag who seem to be extrapolating on Ehrlich’s failed predictions.
I hope I don’t seem like I’m trying to pick a fight, but for those that think that the world is not overpopulated, I would suggest you make a list of the benefits of doubling the population. A list of the problems that will come with a doubling of the population should be obvious, primarily the strain on resources where the low hanging fruit has already been picked. Also it would help if those who respond have been to mainland China for a few weeks to see what living in an endless, densly populated city looks like. I’m just being logical here, the problems far outweigh the imagined benefits of adding more people. And before anyone gets snarky, no I don’t have any children and I was born before half the people on this planet were born, literally, so I don’t feel like I am part of the problem. I’m really interested to see your lists.
“the problems far outweigh the imagined benefits of adding more people”
Of course, but this is not about population, its just an excuse to wheel out the old genocidal bogeyman, now in the guise of evil climate scientists. A complete non seqitor of course, but doesn’t matter to the faithful – its guaranteed to get a few clicks.
twice the human ingenuity to solve problems. Which is why we are doing so well ever since the population started taking off…
But the problems they are tasked to solve are probably caused by having too many people in the first place. It’s a vicious circle.
Probably caused??? Is that really the best you can do?
Ok, are definitely caused. Starvation, pollution, housing, traffic, war, disease, crime, devastation from storms, floods, tornadoes, and fires are all things off the top of my head that get worse the more people you have. Do you disagree? in fact, I will challenge you to name for me any current problems that wouldn’t get significantly better if there were half the number of people living on this planet.
“If there’s less people to be negatively affected by X, there will be less X.” Sounds so temptingly tautological, don’t it? But there’s a flaw in that reasoning, and I’ll leave finding it as an exercise for the lurkers.
One’s logic can be ironclad, but if the premises are mistaken, the argument will still fall flat.
Roughly 3% of the total land area on Earth is currently taken up by the trappings of human civilization. While not all parts of the planet are suitable for human habitation, we are in no danger of running out of room. The Internet and ready access to efficient transportation make it increasingly unnecessary to crowd ourselves in urban megalopolises. Decentralized habitation and centralized communication are now achievable simultaneously. Cities as we know them are becoming an anachronism. We are slow to realize this, because five thousand year-old habits die hard.
Also, any talk of Earth’s resources being finite is TBI. True But Irrelevant. Neo-Malthusians love to extrapolate present-day consumption rates into the future, as if we’ll be incapable of doing or discovering anything different.
“Cities as we know them are becoming an anachronism.”
The trend is the exact opposite of that. The world is urbanizing at a rapid pace, and that is continuing. https://www.pwc.nl/en/topics/megatrends/urbanisation.html
And your 3% figure is dramatically off. Unless you don’t consider food production to be the trappings of human civilization, which of course it is. The figure is closer to 50%. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
One constant I’ve noticed with alarmists. They worship trend lines. They honestly believe that all trend lines will continue unto infinity.
With modern transportation, even areas that aren’t currently suited for habitation can become so.
China does not have a particularly high population density, not even in the top 20. Most European countries have a much higher population density.
Bruce, to be fair to Hoyt he did specify “cities” and I think most of us have seen TV documentaries like “wild China” to know that there are , at present anyway , some sparsely populated areas left.
From the viewpoint of someone living on the edge of a metropolitan area in one of the most densely populated countries in Europe and its associated scramble for somewhere to live , and the horrors of mass commuting (now thankfully behind me) I thought that his comments were fair , reasonable and certainly resonated with me.
The world is virtually unpopulated. You need to get out of the city and see how big the world really is.
I don’t see any problem doubling the population. The world could handle 10 times our current population.
Space is not really the issue. At 10 times the current population, how much arable land do you need to grow food for that many? I don’t think there’s that much farmland on Earth. I’d also like to point out that so far, no one but Dodgy Geezer has accepted my challenge of listing the benefits of doubling the population. And his singular idea really just proves that more humans equals more problems to solve. Not really a benefit. So why promote the idea of an ever growing population? What is the goal? We already recognize that our presence on Earth has limited the areas for wild animals to such an extent that we need to cull the herds of wild beasts often to keep them from running out of resources. Why do we think we can live in unlimited numbers while at the same time saying that animals have to live in limited numbers, so much so that we kill them regularly, be it kangaroos, elephants, lions, or coyotes and many others? What exactly is the need for more people and the problems that entails?
We don’t need 10 times the space, all we would need to do is bring the whole world up to US agro technology levels. Not to mention all of the improvements being worked on already.
Actually, it’s just your fevered imagination that proclaims that more people equals more problems to solve.
We cull herds because we killed off most of their predators, so humans have to take the place of the predators.
It really is fascinating how you to force every fact through the sieve of your religious beliefs.
Not economically viable. That’s what you keep missing. All of your answers to overpopulation don’t have enough people to pay for it. If there were, we wouldn’t have people starving and struggling for the bare necessities now. Besides, the unions in the U.S. have kept our agro industry in the 20th century requiring everything to be hand picked. Europe is way ahead of us on farming technology. But bringing the rest of the world up to speed on farming isn’t as easy as it sounds is it? Or else what’s taking so long?
Regarding the culling of herds, you miss the point I was making that we acknowledge that animals can’t be allowed to expand their numbers until they run out of room or food, but we don’t think that applies to ourselves. We don’t think we need to replace our predators.
As for religious beliefs, I’m an atheist, so I don’t know what religion you’re talking about.
Math says population will top out at 11 Billion naturally…
“Hans Rosling uses statistics to give an overview of population growth and an explanation of why the total human population will never reach 11 billion”
16:36 Published on Dec 1, 2015
https://youtu.be/2LyzBoHo5EI
Well all I can point to is the real scientific lack of proof.
https://rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com/2018/05/09/ever-been-told-that-the-science-is-settled-with-global-warming-well-read-this-and-decide-for-yourself/
Cheers
Roger
Wonder if David Suzuki is involved, with his five kiddies and four or five houses spread around the globe?
Just wait, soon some fanatic alarmists will come up with ideas for a “final solution”!
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) population projections explicitly including education, which is one factor that leads to lower fertility rates and lower projections by IIASA compared to the UN:
IIASA researchers are major contributors to Working Groups II and III of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (Wiki).
I’m wondering how the institute reconciles increasing higher education and increasing base-load energy use, as they would seem to be correlated.
Clumsy, I’ll rephrase that: how in the institute’s view are increasing higher education and base load energy use reconciled in a ‘carbon-constrained’ future?
Don’t these idiots read? I thought everyone knew that predictions of population doom go back to Malthus who predicted in the early 19th century widespread famine ( using graphs, no computers being available) . It did not happen in the West because of….. free enterprise and market forces which made everyone richer better educated and with access to pensions and life insurance, the absence of which were some of the reasons for large families. Back to the past, rather than back to the future, shows that economic growth leads to population decline.
You do not need government to make it happen, just make it get out of the way.
The Malthusians have been proved wrong by History and the Marxist have been discredited by 27 field experiments with communism, and yet they still wish to inflict AIDS, famine, population control and the like on poor suffering sub-Saharan Africans in the futile belief that this will tame the World’s weather or preserve the dwindling resources that are proved to continually expand every day. No amount of science, fact or evidence can convince these Alarmists of their malevolent confusion.
But this time, they used a computer model. /sarc
It is not Africa that they want to stop having children. We have had 20/30 years of constantly helping to feed, support and medically treat them way beyond the natural limitations of the land that they occupy. The process of moving these people to Europe/ North America to undermine the few stable parts of the world is well under way. This will make everyone scared and easy to manage in whatever way the “leaders” decide.
Gas chambers ARE GOOD FOR YOU.
Signed, “A Vegetarian Animal Lover.”
The Final Solution to global warming?
“The IPCC should also consider the inclusion of more social scientists experienced in reproductive health and population policy.”
It would be an interesting exercise to see if these same scientists were showing the rest of the world a good example in population control – but I cannot help suspecting that they may have on average rather more children as a control group than the rest of us. Funny that, it is always other people who are the problem not the scientifically disreputable and dishonest snakes at the top of the IPCC and the other Enviro-fascists who think their essential co-operation in the theft of billions worldwide represents some kind of virtue. Still just weather…after 40 years of these lies.
The only solution is to stop all illegal immigration.
Global birth rate is down massively and is heading towards replacement level by 2030-2040, so after this, within 20 years, the population will peak.
Womens education is a big part of this change IMO, not turning women into baby factories at 16.
The healthiest time to be pregnant, for both the mother and the child, is as a young adult (roughly the 10-year window between ages 19-29). After that, the chance of birth complications and defects starts to rise significantly, and the age of the mother is also a probable contributing factor for rates of autism. Menopause happens around age 40 for a reason, methinks.
Replacement birthrates don’t sound so great if we’re going to be replacing ourselves with offspring of increasingly precarious viability. That could be an unexpected long-term consequence of educated women putting off motherhood for ever longer periods (pun unintended).
Funny, these pointy headed white people always want to kill off non-white people. And they call anyone who disagrees with them racists. Incredible. Leftards are a stuck needle on a perpetually running turntable.
The population needs to stop growing and the sooner the better.
Do I sense a volunteer? We thank you very much.
Salvatore, you don’t need to wait for others to help curb the population you can do it by starting with yourself. If you don’t, you’re a hypocrite.
Why do you hate people?
Two Words: You First.
Let’s let the population grow to infinity so everyone will perish. I see some are for that. Ridiculous!
Logic/fail.
Who is suggesting population grow to infinity? no one. Population will naturally peak all on it’s own and there’s every indication that the level it peaks at 1) There is sufficient resources on this planet to sustain that peak* and 2) as the population becomes wealthier and better educated, population growth will decline on it’s own without need for draconian anti-human population reduction programs.
* the one caveat to that is that some forms of governance, such as totalitarian, communist, socialist and/or “green” policies, work against the people having the access they need to those resources, but that’s not a population problem that’s a poor governance problem, reducing the population won’t fix that problem, removing the failed governmental systems will.
What’s ridiculous is how you have to lie about what other people are saying in order to make yourself feel good about yourself.
Another volley fired in the War on Straw.
What about the total of humans ever alive? Grows to infinity? No?
What will progressives do? In what country with a generous state pensions system does the math not rely on an a steadily increasing population? Would the Left be willing to simultaneously propose reductions in social security payments along with reductions in financial support for childbirth?
Or do they mean to only reduce populations in poor countries? Maybe that’s why Westerners oppose effective prevention of malaria, which costs millions of lives.
No they dont need ever growing pop’s.
Governments simply need to stop stealing pension fund monies, by stealth or simply ”borrowing” it,…………
If it were simply left invested, it would ALL still be there, and there would not be black holes.
Actually, they kinda do. Socialist/progressive government pension programs tend to be glorified Ponzi schemes, relying on a growing pool of new payees to pay for the current recipients benefits. For each current payees that transfer into the recipient pool, multiple new payees are needed to cover the cost of those benefits.
So either you need a growing young population to pay the generous pensions of the old or else your “population reduction” needs to concentrate on reducing the number of the old rather than on (or alongside) reductions in childbirth.
Start by reducing the number of ”climate scientists’, and then incremental reduction to sustainable levels.
Great idea though, to save billions of future people from a changing climate, you just make sure they are never born, its progressive genius.
Every nation and state has the right to reproduce as you want, but only if it does not cause migration and air pollution. Otherwise, those concerned have the right to try to influence them.
Bombs are an effective way.
Socialists are always looking for any excuse to control others.
https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/
If we still think it’s desperate we can Nuke China and blame it on Canada… you should always blame Canada…
“According to ScienceMag,…” Now we are down to the “brass tacks”. The real reason for the war on Co2. Control the population.
For those who believe in population reduction, the simple answer is to stop the use of anything that prevents or treats disease. Let nature take it’s course, let them wither and die, the weak will perish and the strong will survive. Does that seem harsh? But why sugar coat it, it’s what they want and is the fastest way to accomplish their desired results.
That won’t fly with them. Disease is no respecter of social status and it’s hard to get your morning latte from inside an airlocked isolation dome. 🙂
Obviously, we should keep the hands of those who think this way off the levers of power.
And to those who say, “There are too many people; we need to reduce the population,” I say: “You first.”