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[Moo]

Aha, that's who it is doing the bike ride !

Yes, and it's given me a couple of sleepless nights, I can tell you.
Wednesday was the worst, knowing that he was riding all alone over Dartmoor in conditions that merited a Severe Weather Warning with only his iPod for company. You can imagine the field day my imagination was having. However, he's still in one piece, so all fingers and toes are crossed here in Naarch.

 

[biffvernon]

@Wiggs Incorrect use of

tag. 'Twas Joce wot said that, not me.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

@Wiggs Incorrect use of

tag. 'Twas Joce wot said that, not me.

Corrected!

 

[biffvernon]

Nicked this from the Green Building Forum as it has a certain literary je ne sais pas about it.

My friends, we are on the brink of a catastrophe that dwarfs even your wildest imagination. We now know for certain the effects of our profligate past on the course of our future. Each day brings more news of the changes that are occuring as a result of climate change. Our neighbours in Greenland are seeing their hunting grounds disappear. Those in Tibet and others living on the the slopes of the Hymalayas are seeing their livestock perish. Drought is afflicting our cousins in Ethiopia and Kenya and a nomadic way of life that has been enjoyed for more than ten thousand years is no longer possible today because there is no rain, there is no grass and there is nowhere to go.

The seas and the oceans will become as barren as deserts and what once we took for granted will no longer be true. The whale and the dolphin, the herring and pilchard that form the great chains of life in the vast oceans will vanish, and we will be left with a featureless and acid sea, something that has not been seen since life began.

India is building walls because they know their Bangladeshi family will soon be seeking sanctuary due to the rising ocean and they fear being overrun. Other island people will lose their homes and become refugees in already crowded planet. Soon, patience will be lost and men will turn to violence to provide for themselves and their families. The world has a terrible aresenal of weapons that once unleashed, will touch every man, woman and child on this precious land we call home.

There will be enormous sacrifices to be made. Your life will never be what it was, but you will have life, and you will have hope, for you and for your children, and their children after them if we grasp the nettle today,

Always good to remember the pilchard.

 

[Lime]

More like déjà vu, I've heard it all before.
It's overpopulation that is the problem.It's overpopulation that is the problem.It's overpopulation that is the problem.It's overpopulation that is the problem.It's overpopulation that is the problem.It's overpopulation that is the problem.It's overpopulation that is the problem.

 

[Ushy M]

It's overpopulation that is the problem.

Yup - like the man didn't say - it's the population stoopid. Not being smug, but I wonder how much carbon Mr M and I have saved by choosing not to add another little consumer to the planet? (Though I sometimes wonder about the amount of methane we produce as curry-loving vegetarians with two flatulent cats) And that's not including the real beer (Adnams Carbon Neutral of course)

 

[biffvernon]

It's overpopulation that is the problem.

Fair enough, but there are two important provisos.

First, it's less about the number of people as what the people do. The environmental damage that different folk do varies by orders of magnitude. If we all lived like, say, the people of Bhutan, the planet could easily support ten times as many people as if we all lived like Americans (or Brits!).

Secondaly, population is not something individuals can do anything about (except in the obvious way) other than campaigning for more resources going into women's education, health care, social security and pensions, the fundemental factors that are responsible for the demographic transition to a stable population. Most of the richer part of the world now has a birth rate that does not produce an increasing population. Fighting poverty is our best hope for population stability.

 

[Lime]

there are two important provisos

#1. it's less about the number of people as what the people do

Absolutely wrong. It's all about numbers.
Your example of the people of Bhutan seems to ignore the fact that they live in sparsely populated villages in inhospitable places with at least 90% 0f them existing on subsistance farming.
The complete opposite of the majority of the world's population living in densely populated cities and/or countries with land becoming an increasingly expensive luxury because of population growth.
Hardly a lifestyle for everyone in an overcrowded world is it?

#2. population is not something individuals can do anything about (except in the obvious way)

Whether people control themselves or other members of mankind attempt to control them it makes little difference.
If birth rates continue to rise nature will eventually take control over them, guaranteed.
The idea of fighting poverty as a means of escape from the reality of overpopulation is also a nonsense.
with large numbers of people, wealth produces more problems than poverty.
It always has done.
Compare a wealthy country with an equivalent population from a country of poor people and ask yourself the question who consumes more of the world's resources?
There has never, ever been any example anywhere of a rich population exploiting their world less than a poor population.

(Anyway fighting poverty is a non-starter because rich populations rely on the poor to remain poor in order to maintain/obtain their "standard of living".)

Bluntly, throughout history whenever mankind has improved "his lot" he (generic sense) has always taken it out of the earth's resources and used the advantage gained to breed.
Very poor people also breed but do not breed successfully.

 

[biffvernon]

Good Lord, where to start :roll:

Let's try here:

If birth rates continue to rise...

How many nations can you name where the birth rate is rising? Any?

 

[Lime]

Good Lord, where to start :roll:

Let's try here:

If birth rates continue to rise...

How many nations can you name where the birth rate is rising? Any?

So, the world population ceases to grow as from today?

Or is it just a question of splitting hairs to avoid facing the problem?

 

[MdB]

I had to reread Biff's statement a few times before I got it.

Birth rates in most countries are falling. This is not the same as saying that the population in most countries is falling. Two different things. The birth rate can increase the size of the population but be falling itself.

 

[Lime]

I had to reread Biff's statement a few times before I got it.

Birth rates in most countries are falling. This is not the same as saying that the population in most countries is falling. Two different things. The birth rate can increase the size of the population but be falling itself.

Hence my splitting hairs comment.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

I'm with Lime - this has everything to do with population.

Whilst I am sure we could sustain a population 10x the current one if they were all of a Bhutanese standard of living, the problem is that the developing nations are all aspiring to (and working towards) a Western standard of living/resource consumption. Further, the controls on population that Biff mentions (healthcare, education, pensions, etc) all require a much more developed economy than they currently enjoy, requiring energy and resource consumption closer to our own.

Ergo, the question is whether the planet can accommodate 7bn or more of us with a broadly Western style of resoruce consumption (accepting we could/should reduce it somewhat).

The answer I suspect is no.

The quandry is what to do about that - as it is probably more of a problem than AGW (which may be part of the "solution"? :shock: )

And the paradox is that whatever we do to control population growth (besides the obvious which is not feasible), will contribute to resource consumption and at best will stabilise populations at current (unsustainable) levels - I'm not aware of any developed nations whose population has stabilised at levels significantly lower than its developing population level.

I'm going back in my Malthusian bunker now - remember kids, stockpile food, guns and sandbags... 8)

 

[JoceAndChris]

I though we were going to deal with overpopulation by moving to Mars at some point?

 

[biffvernon]

Ah, you don't understand the meaning of the term 'birth rate'. No problem but to save me explaining it please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate and then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth for a straightforward introduction to the topic.

As far as I know there is no nation that currently has a significantly increasing birth rate. (The UK's just went up a bit but that was largely owing to immigration of people of child-bearing age - beyond that the UK's and most of Europe's has a sub-replacement level)

World population is of course rising, but as you will see from the Wikipedia page, the rate of increase is falling and is expected to fall further, with stabilization in mid century around 9 billion, if things carry on as they are. (Big if there.)

 

[biffvernon]

Whilst I am sure we could sustain a population 10x the current one if they were all of a Bhutanese standard of living,

Exactly my point - which shows you agree with me, not Lime!
How people live is an order of magnitude (your '10x') more significant than how many there are.

Of course many of our problems would go away if the population were smaller, but we are not empowered to achieve that. We can, however, change the way we live and, fortunately, that turns out to be "10x" more significant.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

I though we were going to deal with overpopulation by moving to Mars at some point?

A Mars a day helps keep the population at bay?

Biff - so what standard of living is sustainable for a population of 9bn?

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Biff, how's this for a stunningly simple and cheap idea to provide safe drinking water for everyone on the planet? $20bn and everyone could have access to safe sterile drinking water:

http://order-order.com/2009/09/05/pure-capitalism/

Watch the vid - well worth 11 mins of your time on a fine Sunday morning.

Now there's a reason I would sign up to to reduce carbon. Stop burning oil to power my home, and use it instead to make those plastic bottles. Hell - I even think Flyfisher would sign up to that carbon reduction!

Here's the company website. Most of the applications on there seem to be military though. Just shows where the balance of resource is

http://www.lifesaversystems.com/index.html

I love the idea of installing it in the concept car that produces clean water - why not have only grey water systems at home (and thus save the cost of the energy required to make all our water potable) and produce your drinking water as you drive your hydrogen car around. Just plug it in when you get home and refill your home tank...

 

[biffvernon]

http://www.biosandfilter.org/biosandfilter/index.php/item/271 is much more sensible.

>so what standard of living is sustainable for a population of 9bn?

I wonder how you define 'standard of living'. The standard of living that Christopher Wren, John Ruskin, William Morris et al had. I guess their carbon emissions would have been at a pretty sustainable level and they did well for Period Properties.

 

[Flyfisher]

I agree with Lime. Reduce the human population and all the environmental problems we're facing will solve themselves. It's not easy, of course, but neither is trying to convince people to reduce CO2 emissions.

The point about population not being as important as standards of living is, I think, disingenuous in the extreme. It may be true in an absolute sense but, as FW rightly points out, people living the "western-style highlife" don't 'aspire' to live a Bhutanese life-style; indeed, the reverse is true.

Biff admits that the 10:10 initiative is a big ask, yet even if by some miracle the entire population signed up to it, and even more miraculously actually achieved it, it would still pale into insignificance with the projected 50% increase in the human population by the middle of this century.

We were discussing the problem of getting the 'green' message across to people and convince them to change their lifestyles in order to save the current state of the planet. This is, largely, a negative message; we must consume less energy (which broadly means reducing our lifestyles) to survive. Wouldn't it be more positive to promote population reduction as a means to increasing everyone's lifestyle?