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The world is becoming overpopulated. How would you fix it?

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Alexthenoob
12 years ago
Let's assume for the sake of the thread that we are in fact nearing overpopulation to a point of actual danger.

The only solution is to build up.

Killing people for more resources decreases production and doesn't solve the problem for any long duration of time. The only true solution is scientific advancement (and not the warfare type, the making food from otherwise useless materials kind)

Forced labor for production wouldn't hurt either, but that's more "In case of very major immediate change"

Not that proper sex education and legalizing abortion won't help greatly obviously, but that still doesn't improve anything, it just delays the issue: We use more than what we and our offsprings (when they cannot produce for themselves) can make.
1
42
12 years ago
Woah woah woah, stop.


Ok, let's go question per question.

I mean, have you taken a LOOK at the state of the world lately?


Yes, it's going down. But certainly not because there's too much people.

Impending large scale international war?


Bad politics.

Ecological disasters?


You mean the ones that have been happening since this planet was formed?

Rising gas and fuel prices?


Economy and politics.

People reproducing like rabbits in many 3rd world countries, which only makes them poorer and poorer?


I live in a 3rd world country and people are reproducing fine here. Brazil, average of 2 kids per person. If you are referring to africa that place has administration problems, that place have been pretty fucked up since... well, since ever. Also, the lifestyle in that area has contributed a lot for it, being mainly for religion. And again, if you want to discuss african problems, create a topic about african problems, even though africa is inside the world, africa is not the world.

There is a rising gap between the upper class and lower class. The middle class is becoming smaller.


Economical issues. There's a thread for that already here and you can have a look at my opinion here.

Education is falling.


For sure, but that is again, a political problem that has nothing to do with population number nor resources.

Per capita per person in many countries is falling.


Economical issues, talking about world financial crisis...

You are requesting to ignore these issues and not discuss it any further because you get annoyed seeing them since you have read a few articles saying otherwise. Sure. I'll take full heed of your words (sarcasm).


Nope, I'm refusing to talk about the issues of superpopulation and resources. Being that all of the world problems today are not sourced in super population nor lack of resources, there's nothing to talk about in this topic, specifically.

We need more power and more resources readily available to continue to expand at the rate we have in the last century without major collapse.

Have you at least taken a look in the graphics? We're NOT expanding at the same rate we've been in the last century (talking about population growth). Population boom from the XX wore off already.

The earth is a finite set of resources.


That we're not even near from completely depleting. When something starts actually getting depleted (like, say, petroleum), then it will become more expensive, and people will start getting replacements, like biodiesel and alcohol that can replace gasoline already.

In many of your posts you talk about expansion being an easy thing. Its not. Expansion costs money, wealth that is spread out too thinly and unevenly amongst the ever-growing population.


Again, economic issue.

3rd world countries are mostly headed by unstable political sectors, are ripe with strife. There is no way they could afford to expand and develop their entire country.


Yes there is, I live in a third world country, I know what can be done. It's just the administration which is retarded. Again, political issue.

Most people don't even want to expand and destroy the earth's natural beauty. Nobody wants us to turn into freaking ecumenopolis, I can tell you that.


But you don't need to. Let's suppose population reaches a point for 14 billion people tomorrow, do you think expanding cities to “destroy our green forests” would be the only option? Arable land in the world would jump from 10% to 20%, still 80% of “natural earth” (yeah, like wheat is a piece of metal) to enjoy.

I also cannot believe you said that pollution is not a problem globally. It might as well be a global problem with the sheer number and scope of local problems because of it. Are you blatantly ignorant that in quite a few places its literally unhealthy to breathe the air because of it?


Global means it affects worldwide, not that exists in many places around the world. Yes there are many polluted places around our globe, as there are a lot of healthy ones. The definition of global is that will affect every place at the same time, a global warming makes everything warmer, not just Beijing or whatever. And correct me if I'm wrong, Beijing pollution is not making the place were I live substantially worse, so not global, local.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't care about nature, I even plant myself some of my own food here. You have plenty of good reasons to care about nature but global warming is certainly not one of them.

That in some locations merely stepping in water would probably kill you?


When there are still people dying from diarrhea they got by drinking untreated water around here I know that probably better than you do.

That rising ozone, the primary source as pollution, has destroyed most of the upper atmosphere around Antarctica? Who is to say it won't spread, causing intense UV radiation in many areas, driving up cancer rates and destroying ecosystems?


No, it hasn't. This is going to get a little long so bear with me.

First, ozone layer is a not layer of “stock ozone”, the ozone layer is an ever creation and destruction of ozone in real time. Ozone is actually a very unstable molecule, it's hard to form up, its hard to maintain, it's a very unstable gas. Mainly because it is the connection of three atoms of Oxygen while a big portion of earth's air is made of connection by two atoms of Oxygen, which are much more stable and easy to form as they require less connections and less energy per molecule than O3 (ozone). To build O3 from O2 you need a high amount of energy to cause the reaction and O3 easily degrades to O2 as it's unstable. Also one misconception people have about ozone is thinking that ozone protects us from UV rays. Ozone doesn’t protect us against UV rays, ozone is the by product of that protection. Ozone is formed in the upper atmosphere when sun's light, rich in UV radiation, hits the upper atmosphere. The air, filled with gases in ionized states, specially in the upper atmosphere which includes ionized O2, starts to receive a shower of UV radiation, which is a big amount of energy by itself. These molecules in ionized states start to absorb a portion of that energy causing photo-chemical energy reactions, which one of these reactions is to form many O3 molecules from O2 molecules. The ozone is a byproduct of UV radiation hitting ionized O2, and the O2 absorbing the energy to form O3 is what actually protects us from strong UV rays, not ozone itself. It's the same reason why our sky is blue, and becomes red at sunset as the light needs to travel a thicker layer of ionized air to hit our eyes. So just to begin with, ozone doesn't have anything to do with UV protection, if you were god and could make all ozone disappear from the earth in one second, one second later it would all have formed up again because of O2.

All the CFC “destroying the ozone layers” is just pure bullshit of high school chemistry. The idea is that CFC contains chlorine and chlorine breaks ozone molecules. As we produce CFC gases as by product of our use of refrigerators, aerosol cans and whatever, we destroy earth's “protection against UV rays”.

To begin with, there is not a hint of real evidence that our CFC gases managed to travel 65km up in the air. And that is because CFC is 5 times heavier than air. It doesn't travel up, it travels down. It's like throwing a brick inside a pool of water. Will it float? I guess not. Some alarmists say that the UV rays are so strong that they manage to travel with an strong intensity way down near the earth crust and break CFC, releasing the chlorine which will travel up. And any chemistry expert worth their weight knows that this simply cannot happen in such an inert gas.

Second, the amount of CFC we produce couldn't even bite the amount of ozone produced in the upper atmosphere, if it actually manages to get up there. CFC is inside a factor of 1 to 100.000 to ozone. No way such window could revert ozone levels. Even if a very bizarre chain reaction of chlorine breaking, getting released to break more ozone actually happened, it would be just accelerating the degradation of O3 to O2, which would again turn to O3 and it goes on and on. But there is not even theoretical evidence that such reaction could happen.

And third, the hole behavior doesn't follow our pattern of CFC production. The first “proof” of man-made ozone destruction came from 1988 Nimbus' data, which showed the southern hole getting larger. However what most alarmists don't tell is that the same data from the subsequent year show the ozone hole getting smaller again, and that many papers actually point out that the increase from 88 is likely linked to a sunspot activity in the same year, changing the amount of UV rays, changing the amount of ozone and thus changing the hole. The ozone hole – the lesser amount of ozone in the southern hemisphere in comparison to equatorial ozone – has been reported and studied since the 60s, way before we started our mass production of CFC and other pollutants, and it is probably there for a long period before we even noticed it.

The reason why the ozone holes are situated at the poles is because the poles are that special place on the earth that given the earth's inclination in regard to the sun, the sun shines less, completely shielding a big portion of the atmosphere in that region from a lot of UV rays. Less UV rays, less Ozone. You add that to the earth's wind system and flow of hot and cold air, and ozone layer will develop a pattern depending on the season. That's why the southern hole gets bigger from winter to spring, and shrinks again in december, at the start of the summer with its stronger sunshines and bigger exposition to UV Rays.

And if you think about it there is a strange thing about these hole sizes. The southern hole is actually bigger than the northern, being that much of the first world countries are at the northern hemisphere, if the pollutants from society actually affected the holes then the northern hole should be bigger and the southern hole should be smaller. But they aren't, Antarctica’s hole is larger. And the reason for that it is because Antarctica has an volcano called Mount Erebus which releases more than 1.000 tons of chlorine per day since 1972, and differently than our cold and heavy CFC, it releases super hot light chlorine to go up in the atmosphere. The amount of chlorine Erebus releases per year is more than 10 times larger than the whole mankind could release.

No, we are not creating the ozone hole. It has been there for a long time, and probably will continue to be. I don't think we should care about that.

That in China, which in going full industrial has entire cities covered in nothing but smog and fumes, making the air incredibly unhealthy?


Local.

We aren't solving the problems faster than they generate. Wood products are a finite resource, and we cut down rainforests, one of the greatest CO2 eliminators besides the ocean, daily. They take decades upon decades to grow back.


The only other CO2 eliminator besides the ocean basically, and all trees in the world account for only a small fraction of that compared to the oceans. Plants, if they could speak, would actually thank us for supposedly increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as most of them actually benefit from bigger quantities of CO2 and grow faster and larger.

Even the ocean isn't free of it. We carelessly spill oil in there.


According to historical data, we released much more pollutants into the ocean in WWII by means of thousands of tons of sinking battleships/cargos, much more than what is spilled today, and the ocean went fine through it. The pollutants simply got dispersed through the years, and yes killing many animals in the process, but today, the bastards are actually living inside our sunken crap.

Tsunamis destroy much of the infrastructure around coasts and wash it into sea creating large floating chunks of toxic environments.


Local.

We dump byproducts into water supplies like no tomorrow.


Local.

Reefs are getting rarer and rarer due to increased CO2 levels in the ocean. CO2 increase can pretty much be a natural event as our contribution to it as minimum.


Considering the lag period, it is much more likely that the natural global warming that is increasing CO2 levels. Also, the acidification of water per CO2 actually affects more positively sea life than negatively. Yes, it does affect the corals negatively, but life isn't a chain system, it's a dynamic system, the reason why it survived many mass extinction events. Even if the acidification per CO2 does destroy coral reefs, that even using the ridiculous overestimation from IPCC would take at least 20 years (ha, doomsday predictions again) to actually happen, would account little for life itself on the planet. Life is dynamic, it would just change, adapt, evolve. Alarmists make the energy chain appear to be much more fragile than it actually is.

That's us now. Most of that has happened in the last 100 to 200 years, much faster than any cycle the Earth has ever had.


Nope, we don't know if it has been faster because we don't know how fast it was on the past. We know the time frame of the temperature oscillation but not its actual effects on the system. For example, the MWP probably generated a higher acidification of the oceans at the time (CO2 lag behavior), but we don't know exactly how that affected sealife on that time.

If we ignore this like you say, then it will get progressively worse.


Considering that we didn't cause much of this in the first place, I disagree.

I haven't even gotten started on global warming, but that's not what this thread is about I'd like to see these articles you speak of that debunk pollution as an issue that isn't worth worrying about.


First I did not say pollution isn't a issue, it is, a local one. I said it isn't the cause of global warming giving all the data we have available. If you want data, just ask about any specific “global warming issue” and I'll show you the papers as I have shown the MWP papers. And like I'll show the ocean acidification per CO2 now.

Those are all the experiments recorded there so far, but you can find the general results here.

To me, this Global Warming dilemma should have been solved long time ago for a very simple fact. According to the classical theory of man-made global warming, the increased heat happens because we intensify the greenhouse effect by our production and release in the earth’s atmosphere of CO2, being CO2 a greenhouse gas, we make the greenhouse effect stronger and that adds up heat. However, what they don't show to the public are the actual numbers. The earth atmosphere is made by 77% of Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen and only the remaining 2% of greenhouse gases. 95% of these 2% greenhouse gases is actually water vapor, the main component of the greenhouse effect. Of the remaining 5%, about 75% (3,5% aside from the 95% of water vapor) is CO2. And of these 3,5% of CO2, about 97% are natural CO2 and only the remaining 3% are actually contributed from us, which means, out of the 5% of greenhouse gases, that are not water vapor, we contribute to only 0,12%.. There's no way a 3% contribution of a gas which constitutes 0,038% of earth’s atmosphere would create such drastic changes in the earth's temperature system. We couldn't change the climate even if we wanted to.

You expect us to ignore these issues? Hell I can't even see the horizon where I live because of the smog. THAT worries me.


Some of the problems you mention are indeed things that could use better caring, or solving, and I am not saying to ignore them. This topic is about overpopulation and resources issues, and I am saying that none of the problems you point out are caused by overpopulation, and that resources are not a problem, and so, discussing resources or overpopulation is pointless, because neither are an issue. Other things are, and for their own reasons.

Don't forget that money and education are also resources we are discussing here. Much of the world is in a giant wealth shortage right now. While education can be infinitely reproduced, in general it is also falling. Why? Not enough teachers for the current population.


What? Seriously? Not enough teachers? Do you think this is a problem of lack of teachers? This is a problem of quality of content and educational methods, not exactly lack of teachers to perform the methods. I have yet to see a shortage of teachers and schools in the world.

All of this is us now at all those consumption, land development, and population density numbers you pulled. We aren't going to maintain those figures, and we aren't going to get better either. Our consumption levels only get progressively larger over time.


Actually, if you have seen the charts you would know it tends to decrease, and we are very far from reaching our resourcing limit. I told you, we had a boom in XX mainly because of medicine, don't expect us to keep that ridiculous rate in XXI.

The world is a very unstable place right now, both ecologically, politically, and economically.


But the economic and political problems are an administration issue, not a lack of resource issue. The global ecological problem is yet to be proven. And the local ecological problem also is an administration issue.

There is only one Earth. There is only one humanity. She is literally a garden on the edge of an abyss. If we push what she can take a little too much, we all die with nowhere to go.


Nope, we suffered many ridiculous narrowed population events in our history, down to 10.000 humans, and we managed to come back. This alarmist speech always becomes too heated with emotional bias and starts to deform reality. Even in their speak that our supposedly destruction of the environment is threatening life on earth, it gets ridiculous. Even if we were causing all that harm to the ecosystem, life would have suffered things far more drastic and worse than us, life is not in any way threatened by us, we might be, but not life. Seriously, if this discussion is going to get that emotional I'll just start throwing a bunch of one liners for more drama too.

Of course we have a impending fucking overpopulation problem. Too many people and inefficient resource production are fucking ruining our planet. That's the source of most of our problems, indirectly or directly. There are simply too many people for our resources to be spread in a fair way. Damnit, there isn't even enough wealth for our population to be stable. The best way to get rid of a problem is to cut it off from the source, and the source of most of society's problems are greed, corruption, and simply too many people. The first two are human nature. To get rid of those would to have us lose our humanity. However, the third one CAN be solved, albeit slowly and carefully.


Administration problems means problems managing resources, not problem with lack of resources.

Regardless, I appreciate your posts. They add a lot of color to this thread, and its making the discussion a lot more interesting.


Me too, though my reputation meter wishes people wouldn't take it so personally, geez.
0
Zeream
12 years ago
42 wrote...
Spoiler:
Woah woah woah, stop.


Ok, let's go question per question.

I mean, have you taken a LOOK at the state of the world lately?


Yes, it's going down. But certainly not because there's too much people.

Impending large scale international war?


Bad politics.

Ecological disasters?


You mean the ones that have been happening since this planet was formed?

Rising gas and fuel prices?


Economy and politics.

People reproducing like rabbits in many 3rd world countries, which only makes them poorer and poorer?


I live in a 3rd world country and people are reproducing fine here. Brazil, average of 2 kids per person. If you are referring to africa that place has administration problems, that place have been pretty fucked up since... well, since ever. Also, the lifestyle in that area has contributed a lot for it, being mainly for religion. And again, if you want to discuss african problems, create a topic about african problems, even though africa is inside the world, africa is not the world.

There is a rising gap between the upper class and lower class. The middle class is becoming smaller.


Economical issues. There's a thread for that already here and you can have a look at my opinion here.

Education is falling.


For sure, but that is again, a political problem that has nothing to do with population number nor resources.

Per capita per person in many countries is falling.


Economical issues, talking about world financial crisis...

You are requesting to ignore these issues and not discuss it any further because you get annoyed seeing them since you have read a few articles saying otherwise. Sure. I'll take full heed of your words (sarcasm).


Nope, I'm refusing to talk about the issues of superpopulation and resources. Being that all of the world problems today are not sourced in super population nor lack of resources, there's nothing to talk about in this topic, specifically.

We need more power and more resources readily available to continue to expand at the rate we have in the last century without major collapse.

Have you at least taken a look in the graphics? We're NOT expanding at the same rate we've been in the last century (talking about population growth). Population boom from the XX wore off already.

The earth is a finite set of resources.


That we're not even near from completely depleting. When something starts actually getting depleted (like, say, petroleum), then it will become more expensive, and people will start getting replacements, like biodiesel and alcohol that can replace gasoline already.

In many of your posts you talk about expansion being an easy thing. Its not. Expansion costs money, wealth that is spread out too thinly and unevenly amongst the ever-growing population.


Again, economic issue.

3rd world countries are mostly headed by unstable political sectors, are ripe with strife. There is no way they could afford to expand and develop their entire country.


Yes there is, I live in a third world country, I know what can be done. It's just the administration which is retarded. Again, political issue.

Most people don't even want to expand and destroy the earth's natural beauty. Nobody wants us to turn into freaking ecumenopolis, I can tell you that.


But you don't need to. Let's suppose population reaches a point for 14 billion people tomorrow, do you think expanding cities to “destroy our green forests” would be the only option? Arable land in the world would jump from 10% to 20%, still 80% of “natural earth” (yeah, like wheat is a piece of metal) to enjoy.

I also cannot believe you said that pollution is not a problem globally. It might as well be a global problem with the sheer number and scope of local problems because of it. Are you blatantly ignorant that in quite a few places its literally unhealthy to breathe the air because of it?


Global means it affects worldwide, not that exists in many places around the world. Yes there are many polluted places around our globe, as there are a lot of healthy ones. The definition of global is that will affect every place at the same time, a global warming makes everything warmer, not just Beijing or whatever. And correct me if I'm wrong, Beijing pollution is not making the place were I live substantially worse, so not global, local.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't care about nature, I even plant myself some of my own food here. You have plenty of good reasons to care about nature but global warming is certainly not one of them.

That in some locations merely stepping in water would probably kill you?


When there are still people dying from diarrhea they got by drinking untreated water around here I know that probably better than you do.

That rising ozone, the primary source as pollution, has destroyed most of the upper atmosphere around Antarctica? Who is to say it won't spread, causing intense UV radiation in many areas, driving up cancer rates and destroying ecosystems?


No, it hasn't. This is going to get a little long so bear with me.

First, ozone layer is a not layer of “stock ozone”, the ozone layer is an ever creation and destruction of ozone in real time. Ozone is actually a very unstable molecule, it's hard to form up, its hard to maintain, it's a very unstable gas. Mainly because it is the connection of three atoms of Oxygen while a big portion of earth's air is made of connection by two atoms of Oxygen, which are much more stable and easy to form as they require less connections and less energy per molecule than O3 (ozone). To build O3 from O2 you need a high amount of energy to cause the reaction and O3 easily degrades to O2 as it's unstable. Also one misconception people have about ozone is thinking that ozone protects us from UV rays. Ozone doesn’t protect us against UV rays, ozone is the by product of that protection. Ozone is formed in the upper atmosphere when sun's light, rich in UV radiation, hits the upper atmosphere. The air, filled with gases in ionized states, specially in the upper atmosphere which includes ionized O2, starts to receive a shower of UV radiation, which is a big amount of energy by itself. These molecules in ionized states start to absorb a portion of that energy causing photo-chemical energy reactions, which one of these reactions is to form many O3 molecules from O2 molecules. The ozone is a byproduct of UV radiation hitting ionized O2, and the O2 absorbing the energy to form O3 is what actually protects us from strong UV rays, not ozone itself. It's the same reason why our sky is blue, and becomes red at sunset as the light needs to travel a thicker layer of ionized air to hit our eyes. So just to begin with, ozone doesn't have anything to do with UV protection, if you were god and could make all ozone disappear from the earth in one second, one second later it would all have formed up again because of O2.

All the CFC “destroying the ozone layers” is just pure bullshit of high school chemistry. The idea is that CFC contains chlorine and chlorine breaks ozone molecules. As we produce CFC gases as by product of our use of refrigerators, aerosol cans and whatever, we destroy earth's “protection against UV rays”.

To begin with, there is not a hint of real evidence that our CFC gases managed to travel 65km up in the air. And that is because CFC is 5 times heavier than air. It doesn't travel up, it travels down. It's like throwing a brick inside a pool of water. Will it float? I guess not. Some alarmists say that the UV rays are so strong that they manage to travel with an strong intensity way down near the earth crust and break CFC, releasing the chlorine which will travel up. And any chemistry expert worth their weight knows that this simply cannot happen in such an inert gas.

Second, the amount of CFC we produce couldn't even bite the amount of ozone produced in the upper atmosphere, if it actually manages to get up there. CFC is inside a factor of 1 to 100.000 to ozone. No way such window could revert ozone levels. Even if a very bizarre chain reaction of chlorine breaking, getting released to break more ozone actually happened, it would be just accelerating the degradation of O3 to O2, which would again turn to O3 and it goes on and on. But there is not even theoretical evidence that such reaction could happen.

And third, the hole behavior doesn't follow our pattern of CFC production. The first “proof” of man-made ozone destruction came from 1988 Nimbus' data, which showed the southern hole getting larger. However what most alarmists don't tell is that the same data from the subsequent year show the ozone hole getting smaller again, and that many papers actually point out that the increase from 88 is likely linked to a sunspot activity in the same year, changing the amount of UV rays, changing the amount of ozone and thus changing the hole. The ozone hole – the lesser amount of ozone in the southern hemisphere in comparison to equatorial ozone – has been reported and studied since the 60s, way before we started our mass production of CFC and other pollutants, and it is probably there for a long period before we even noticed it.

The reason why the ozone holes are situated at the poles is because the poles are that special place on the earth that given the earth's inclination in regard to the sun, the sun shines less, completely shielding a big portion of the atmosphere in that region from a lot of UV rays. Less UV rays, less Ozone. You add that to the earth's wind system and flow of hot and cold air, and ozone layer will develop a pattern depending on the season. That's why the southern hole gets bigger from winter to spring, and shrinks again in december, at the start of the summer with its stronger sunshines and bigger exposition to UV Rays.

And if you think about it there is a strange thing about these hole sizes. The southern hole is actually bigger than the northern, being that much of the first world countries are at the northern hemisphere, if the pollutants from society actually affected the holes then the northern hole should be bigger and the southern hole should be smaller. But they aren't, Antarctica’s hole is larger. And the reason for that it is because Antarctica has an volcano called Mount Erebus which releases more than 1.000 tons of chlorine per day since 1972, and differently than our cold and heavy CFC, it releases super hot light chlorine to go up in the atmosphere. The amount of chlorine Erebus releases per year is more than 10 times larger than the whole mankind could release.

No, we are not creating the ozone hole. It has been there for a long time, and probably will continue to be. I don't think we should care about that.

That in China, which in going full industrial has entire cities covered in nothing but smog and fumes, making the air incredibly unhealthy?


Local.

We aren't solving the problems faster than they generate. Wood products are a finite resource, and we cut down rainforests, one of the greatest CO2 eliminators besides the ocean, daily. They take decades upon decades to grow back.


The only other CO2 eliminator besides the ocean basically, and all trees in the world account for only a small fraction of that compared to the oceans. Plants, if they could speak, would actually thank us for supposedly increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as most of them actually benefit from bigger quantities of CO2 and grow faster and larger.

Even the ocean isn't free of it. We carelessly spill oil in there.


According to historical data, we released much more pollutants into the ocean in WWII by means of thousands of tons of sinking battleships/cargos, much more than what is spilled today, and the ocean went fine through it. The pollutants simply got dispersed through the years, and yes killing many animals in the process, but today, the bastards are actually living inside our sunken crap.

Tsunamis destroy much of the infrastructure around coasts and wash it into sea creating large floating chunks of toxic environments.


Local.

We dump byproducts into water supplies like no tomorrow.


Local.

Reefs are getting rarer and rarer due to increased CO2 levels in the ocean. CO2 increase can pretty much be a natural event as our contribution to it as minimum.


Considering the lag period, it is much more likely that the natural global warming that is increasing CO2 levels. Also, the acidification of water per CO2 actually affects more positively sea life than negatively. Yes, it does affect the corals negatively, but life isn't a chain system, it's a dynamic system, the reason why it survived many mass extinction events. Even if the acidification per CO2 does destroy coral reefs, that even using the ridiculous overestimation from IPCC would take at least 20 years (ha, doomsday predictions again) to actually happen, would account little for life itself on the planet. Life is dynamic, it would just change, adapt, evolve. Alarmists make the energy chain appear to be much more fragile than it actually is.

That's us now. Most of that has happened in the last 100 to 200 years, much faster than any cycle the Earth has ever had.


Nope, we don't know if it has been faster because we don't know how fast it was on the past. We know the time frame of the temperature oscillation but not its actual effects on the system. For example, the MWP probably generated a higher acidification of the oceans at the time (CO2 lag behavior), but we don't know exactly how that affected sealife on that time.

If we ignore this like you say, then it will get progressively worse.


Considering that we didn't cause much of this in the first place, I disagree.

I haven't even gotten started on global warming, but that's not what this thread is about I'd like to see these articles you speak of that debunk pollution as an issue that isn't worth worrying about.


First I did not say pollution isn't a issue, it is, a local one. I said it isn't the cause of global warming giving all the data we have available. If you want data, just ask about any specific “global warming issue” and I'll show you the papers as I have shown the MWP papers. And like I'll show the ocean acidification per CO2 now.

Those are all the experiments recorded there so far, but you can find the general results here.

To me, this Global Warming dilemma should have been solved long time ago for a very simple fact. According to the classical theory of man-made global warming, the increased heat happens because we intensify the greenhouse effect by our production and release in the earth’s atmosphere of CO2, being CO2 a greenhouse gas, we make the greenhouse effect stronger and that adds up heat. However, what they don't show to the public are the actual numbers. The earth atmosphere is made by 77% of Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen and only the remaining 2% of greenhouse gases. 95% of these 2% greenhouse gases is actually water vapor, the main component of the greenhouse effect. Of the remaining 5%, about 75% (3,5% aside from the 95% of water vapor) is CO2. And of these 3,5% of CO2, about 97% are natural CO2 and only the remaining 3% are actually contributed from us, which means, out of the 5% of greenhouse gases, that are not water vapor, we contribute to only 0,12%.. There's no way a 3% contribution of a gas which constitutes 0,038% of earth’s atmosphere would create such drastic changes in the earth's temperature system. We couldn't change the climate even if we wanted to.

You expect us to ignore these issues? Hell I can't even see the horizon where I live because of the smog. THAT worries me.


Some of the problems you mention are indeed things that could use better caring, or solving, and I am not saying to ignore them. This topic is about overpopulation and resources issues, and I am saying that none of the problems you point out are caused by overpopulation, and that resources are not a problem, and so, discussing resources or overpopulation is pointless, because neither are an issue. Other things are, and for their own reasons.

Don't forget that money and education are also resources we are discussing here. Much of the world is in a giant wealth shortage right now. While education can be infinitely reproduced, in general it is also falling. Why? Not enough teachers for the current population.


What? Seriously? Not enough teachers? Do you think this is a problem of lack of teachers? This is a problem of quality of content and educational methods, not exactly lack of teachers to perform the methods. I have yet to see a shortage of teachers and schools in the world.

All of this is us now at all those consumption, land development, and population density numbers you pulled. We aren't going to maintain those figures, and we aren't going to get better either. Our consumption levels only get progressively larger over time.


Actually, if you have seen the charts you would know it tends to decrease, and we are very far from reaching our resourcing limit. I told you, we had a boom in XX mainly because of medicine, don't expect us to keep that ridiculous rate in XXI.

The world is a very unstable place right now, both ecologically, politically, and economically.


But the economic and political problems are an administration issue, not a lack of resource issue. The global ecological problem is yet to be proven. And the local ecological problem also is an administration issue.

There is only one Earth. There is only one humanity. She is literally a garden on the edge of an abyss. If we push what she can take a little too much, we all die with nowhere to go.


Nope, we suffered many ridiculous narrowed population events in our history, down to 10.000 humans, and we managed to come back. This alarmist speech always becomes too heated with emotional bias and starts to deform reality. Even in their speak that our supposedly destruction of the environment is threatening life on earth, it gets ridiculous. Even if we were causing all that harm to the ecosystem, life would have suffered things far more drastic and worse than us, life is not in any way threatened by us, we might be, but not life. Seriously, if this discussion is going to get that emotional I'll just start throwing a bunch of one liners for more drama too.

Of course we have a impending fucking overpopulation problem. Too many people and inefficient resource production are fucking ruining our planet. That's the source of most of our problems, indirectly or directly. There are simply too many people for our resources to be spread in a fair way. Damnit, there isn't even enough wealth for our population to be stable. The best way to get rid of a problem is to cut it off from the source, and the source of most of society's problems are greed, corruption, and simply too many people. The first two are human nature. To get rid of those would to have us lose our humanity. However, the third one CAN be solved, albeit slowly and carefully.


Administration problems means problems managing resources, not problem with lack of resources.

Regardless, I appreciate your posts. They add a lot of color to this thread, and its making the discussion a lot more interesting.


Me too, though my reputation meter wishes people wouldn't take it so personally, geez.


+rep.

Alright, I won't lie, I was wincing as I read that post. Pretty nice amount of points you got. You really have done your data mining, and I like that. I'll bite, you've informed me. Honestly, and you can probably tell this, a good part of everything I said in my last post is just random bits of data from various documentaries across the years. A big stinking pile of bull-shit that I was trying to hide my ass behind. I know relatively little of the topic as a whole, which is why I made this thread in the first place. So, thanks for the insight in the matter. I really should learn to assume less and research more.

I really didn't know that about the ozone and CO2 levels, though. An active volcano in Antarctica? Well, that does explain quite a lot. Science teaches us new things every day. I guess I'll move on to a different topic then.
0
Koyori
12 years ago
42 wrote...
Zeream wrote...
Decided to fix the thread title and OP post so people don't make anymore misguided posts.


The world isn't overpopulated, isn't becoming overpopulated, and there isn't and won't be a lack of resources. That was my first point, so I don't see why discuss an imaginary issue.


I don't really agree to anything you are saying tbh. I'll just point out two things tho.

1: Arable and Agriculture land isn't the same thing.
If we go by wikipedia, agriculture land use is at 32% for the world. My country is at 6%. That doesn't mean we got huge opportunities to go into the farming business, it means that the land is better used for something else.

2: If we live like we currently do everything will go to hell. It's like using 10000 dollars per month while having a salary of 6000, it's very possible, for very long time, but eventually it stops working. You seem to believe that technology and human inovation is going to solve all the problems. I don't. So in my eyes your posts doesn't really bring any arguments, no offence.
0
42
12 years ago
Zeream wrote...
42 wrote...
Spoiler:
Woah woah woah, stop.


Ok, let's go question per question.

I mean, have you taken a LOOK at the state of the world lately?


Yes, it's going down. But certainly not because there's too much people.

Impending large scale international war?


Bad politics.

Ecological disasters?


You mean the ones that have been happening since this planet was formed?

Rising gas and fuel prices?


Economy and politics.

People reproducing like rabbits in many 3rd world countries, which only makes them poorer and poorer?


I live in a 3rd world country and people are reproducing fine here. Brazil, average of 2 kids per person. If you are referring to africa that place has administration problems, that place have been pretty fucked up since... well, since ever. Also, the lifestyle in that area has contributed a lot for it, being mainly for religion. And again, if you want to discuss african problems, create a topic about african problems, even though africa is inside the world, africa is not the world.

There is a rising gap between the upper class and lower class. The middle class is becoming smaller.


Economical issues. There's a thread for that already here and you can have a look at my opinion here.

Education is falling.


For sure, but that is again, a political problem that has nothing to do with population number nor resources.

Per capita per person in many countries is falling.


Economical issues, talking about world financial crisis...

You are requesting to ignore these issues and not discuss it any further because you get annoyed seeing them since you have read a few articles saying otherwise. Sure. I'll take full heed of your words (sarcasm).


Nope, I'm refusing to talk about the issues of superpopulation and resources. Being that all of the world problems today are not sourced in super population nor lack of resources, there's nothing to talk about in this topic, specifically.

We need more power and more resources readily available to continue to expand at the rate we have in the last century without major collapse.

Have you at least taken a look in the graphics? We're NOT expanding at the same rate we've been in the last century (talking about population growth). Population boom from the XX wore off already.

The earth is a finite set of resources.


That we're not even near from completely depleting. When something starts actually getting depleted (like, say, petroleum), then it will become more expensive, and people will start getting replacements, like biodiesel and alcohol that can replace gasoline already.

In many of your posts you talk about expansion being an easy thing. Its not. Expansion costs money, wealth that is spread out too thinly and unevenly amongst the ever-growing population.


Again, economic issue.

3rd world countries are mostly headed by unstable political sectors, are ripe with strife. There is no way they could afford to expand and develop their entire country.


Yes there is, I live in a third world country, I know what can be done. It's just the administration which is retarded. Again, political issue.

Most people don't even want to expand and destroy the earth's natural beauty. Nobody wants us to turn into freaking ecumenopolis, I can tell you that.


But you don't need to. Let's suppose population reaches a point for 14 billion people tomorrow, do you think expanding cities to “destroy our green forests” would be the only option? Arable land in the world would jump from 10% to 20%, still 80% of “natural earth” (yeah, like wheat is a piece of metal) to enjoy.

I also cannot believe you said that pollution is not a problem globally. It might as well be a global problem with the sheer number and scope of local problems because of it. Are you blatantly ignorant that in quite a few places its literally unhealthy to breathe the air because of it?


Global means it affects worldwide, not that exists in many places around the world. Yes there are many polluted places around our globe, as there are a lot of healthy ones. The definition of global is that will affect every place at the same time, a global warming makes everything warmer, not just Beijing or whatever. And correct me if I'm wrong, Beijing pollution is not making the place were I live substantially worse, so not global, local.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't care about nature, I even plant myself some of my own food here. You have plenty of good reasons to care about nature but global warming is certainly not one of them.

That in some locations merely stepping in water would probably kill you?


When there are still people dying from diarrhea they got by drinking untreated water around here I know that probably better than you do.

That rising ozone, the primary source as pollution, has destroyed most of the upper atmosphere around Antarctica? Who is to say it won't spread, causing intense UV radiation in many areas, driving up cancer rates and destroying ecosystems?


No, it hasn't. This is going to get a little long so bear with me.

First, ozone layer is a not layer of “stock ozone”, the ozone layer is an ever creation and destruction of ozone in real time. Ozone is actually a very unstable molecule, it's hard to form up, its hard to maintain, it's a very unstable gas. Mainly because it is the connection of three atoms of Oxygen while a big portion of earth's air is made of connection by two atoms of Oxygen, which are much more stable and easy to form as they require less connections and less energy per molecule than O3 (ozone). To build O3 from O2 you need a high amount of energy to cause the reaction and O3 easily degrades to O2 as it's unstable. Also one misconception people have about ozone is thinking that ozone protects us from UV rays. Ozone doesn’t protect us against UV rays, ozone is the by product of that protection. Ozone is formed in the upper atmosphere when sun's light, rich in UV radiation, hits the upper atmosphere. The air, filled with gases in ionized states, specially in the upper atmosphere which includes ionized O2, starts to receive a shower of UV radiation, which is a big amount of energy by itself. These molecules in ionized states start to absorb a portion of that energy causing photo-chemical energy reactions, which one of these reactions is to form many O3 molecules from O2 molecules. The ozone is a byproduct of UV radiation hitting ionized O2, and the O2 absorbing the energy to form O3 is what actually protects us from strong UV rays, not ozone itself. It's the same reason why our sky is blue, and becomes red at sunset as the light needs to travel a thicker layer of ionized air to hit our eyes. So just to begin with, ozone doesn't have anything to do with UV protection, if you were god and could make all ozone disappear from the earth in one second, one second later it would all have formed up again because of O2.

All the CFC “destroying the ozone layers” is just pure bullshit of high school chemistry. The idea is that CFC contains chlorine and chlorine breaks ozone molecules. As we produce CFC gases as by product of our use of refrigerators, aerosol cans and whatever, we destroy earth's “protection against UV rays”.

To begin with, there is not a hint of real evidence that our CFC gases managed to travel 65km up in the air. And that is because CFC is 5 times heavier than air. It doesn't travel up, it travels down. It's like throwing a brick inside a pool of water. Will it float? I guess not. Some alarmists say that the UV rays are so strong that they manage to travel with an strong intensity way down near the earth crust and break CFC, releasing the chlorine which will travel up. And any chemistry expert worth their weight knows that this simply cannot happen in such an inert gas.

Second, the amount of CFC we produce couldn't even bite the amount of ozone produced in the upper atmosphere, if it actually manages to get up there. CFC is inside a factor of 1 to 100.000 to ozone. No way such window could revert ozone levels. Even if a very bizarre chain reaction of chlorine breaking, getting released to break more ozone actually happened, it would be just accelerating the degradation of O3 to O2, which would again turn to O3 and it goes on and on. But there is not even theoretical evidence that such reaction could happen.

And third, the hole behavior doesn't follow our pattern of CFC production. The first “proof” of man-made ozone destruction came from 1988 Nimbus' data, which showed the southern hole getting larger. However what most alarmists don't tell is that the same data from the subsequent year show the ozone hole getting smaller again, and that many papers actually point out that the increase from 88 is likely linked to a sunspot activity in the same year, changing the amount of UV rays, changing the amount of ozone and thus changing the hole. The ozone hole – the lesser amount of ozone in the southern hemisphere in comparison to equatorial ozone – has been reported and studied since the 60s, way before we started our mass production of CFC and other pollutants, and it is probably there for a long period before we even noticed it.

The reason why the ozone holes are situated at the poles is because the poles are that special place on the earth that given the earth's inclination in regard to the sun, the sun shines less, completely shielding a big portion of the atmosphere in that region from a lot of UV rays. Less UV rays, less Ozone. You add that to the earth's wind system and flow of hot and cold air, and ozone layer will develop a pattern depending on the season. That's why the southern hole gets bigger from winter to spring, and shrinks again in december, at the start of the summer with its stronger sunshines and bigger exposition to UV Rays.

And if you think about it there is a strange thing about these hole sizes. The southern hole is actually bigger than the northern, being that much of the first world countries are at the northern hemisphere, if the pollutants from society actually affected the holes then the northern hole should be bigger and the southern hole should be smaller. But they aren't, Antarctica’s hole is larger. And the reason for that it is because Antarctica has an volcano called Mount Erebus which releases more than 1.000 tons of chlorine per day since 1972, and differently than our cold and heavy CFC, it releases super hot light chlorine to go up in the atmosphere. The amount of chlorine Erebus releases per year is more than 10 times larger than the whole mankind could release.

No, we are not creating the ozone hole. It has been there for a long time, and probably will continue to be. I don't think we should care about that.

That in China, which in going full industrial has entire cities covered in nothing but smog and fumes, making the air incredibly unhealthy?


Local.

We aren't solving the problems faster than they generate. Wood products are a finite resource, and we cut down rainforests, one of the greatest CO2 eliminators besides the ocean, daily. They take decades upon decades to grow back.


The only other CO2 eliminator besides the ocean basically, and all trees in the world account for only a small fraction of that compared to the oceans. Plants, if they could speak, would actually thank us for supposedly increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as most of them actually benefit from bigger quantities of CO2 and grow faster and larger.

Even the ocean isn't free of it. We carelessly spill oil in there.


According to historical data, we released much more pollutants into the ocean in WWII by means of thousands of tons of sinking battleships/cargos, much more than what is spilled today, and the ocean went fine through it. The pollutants simply got dispersed through the years, and yes killing many animals in the process, but today, the bastards are actually living inside our sunken crap.

Tsunamis destroy much of the infrastructure around coasts and wash it into sea creating large floating chunks of toxic environments.


Local.

We dump byproducts into water supplies like no tomorrow.


Local.

Reefs are getting rarer and rarer due to increased CO2 levels in the ocean. CO2 increase can pretty much be a natural event as our contribution to it as minimum.


Considering the lag period, it is much more likely that the natural global warming that is increasing CO2 levels. Also, the acidification of water per CO2 actually affects more positively sea life than negatively. Yes, it does affect the corals negatively, but life isn't a chain system, it's a dynamic system, the reason why it survived many mass extinction events. Even if the acidification per CO2 does destroy coral reefs, that even using the ridiculous overestimation from IPCC would take at least 20 years (ha, doomsday predictions again) to actually happen, would account little for life itself on the planet. Life is dynamic, it would just change, adapt, evolve. Alarmists make the energy chain appear to be much more fragile than it actually is.

That's us now. Most of that has happened in the last 100 to 200 years, much faster than any cycle the Earth has ever had.


Nope, we don't know if it has been faster because we don't know how fast it was on the past. We know the time frame of the temperature oscillation but not its actual effects on the system. For example, the MWP probably generated a higher acidification of the oceans at the time (CO2 lag behavior), but we don't know exactly how that affected sealife on that time.

If we ignore this like you say, then it will get progressively worse.


Considering that we didn't cause much of this in the first place, I disagree.

I haven't even gotten started on global warming, but that's not what this thread is about I'd like to see these articles you speak of that debunk pollution as an issue that isn't worth worrying about.


First I did not say pollution isn't a issue, it is, a local one. I said it isn't the cause of global warming giving all the data we have available. If you want data, just ask about any specific “global warming issue” and I'll show you the papers as I have shown the MWP papers. And like I'll show the ocean acidification per CO2 now.

Those are all the experiments recorded there so far, but you can find the general results here.

To me, this Global Warming dilemma should have been solved long time ago for a very simple fact. According to the classical theory of man-made global warming, the increased heat happens because we intensify the greenhouse effect by our production and release in the earth’s atmosphere of CO2, being CO2 a greenhouse gas, we make the greenhouse effect stronger and that adds up heat. However, what they don't show to the public are the actual numbers. The earth atmosphere is made by 77% of Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen and only the remaining 2% of greenhouse gases. 95% of these 2% greenhouse gases is actually water vapor, the main component of the greenhouse effect. Of the remaining 5%, about 75% (3,5% aside from the 95% of water vapor) is CO2. And of these 3,5% of CO2, about 97% are natural CO2 and only the remaining 3% are actually contributed from us, which means, out of the 5% of greenhouse gases, that are not water vapor, we contribute to only 0,12%.. There's no way a 3% contribution of a gas which constitutes 0,038% of earth’s atmosphere would create such drastic changes in the earth's temperature system. We couldn't change the climate even if we wanted to.

You expect us to ignore these issues? Hell I can't even see the horizon where I live because of the smog. THAT worries me.


Some of the problems you mention are indeed things that could use better caring, or solving, and I am not saying to ignore them. This topic is about overpopulation and resources issues, and I am saying that none of the problems you point out are caused by overpopulation, and that resources are not a problem, and so, discussing resources or overpopulation is pointless, because neither are an issue. Other things are, and for their own reasons.

Don't forget that money and education are also resources we are discussing here. Much of the world is in a giant wealth shortage right now. While education can be infinitely reproduced, in general it is also falling. Why? Not enough teachers for the current population.


What? Seriously? Not enough teachers? Do you think this is a problem of lack of teachers? This is a problem of quality of content and educational methods, not exactly lack of teachers to perform the methods. I have yet to see a shortage of teachers and schools in the world.

All of this is us now at all those consumption, land development, and population density numbers you pulled. We aren't going to maintain those figures, and we aren't going to get better either. Our consumption levels only get progressively larger over time.


Actually, if you have seen the charts you would know it tends to decrease, and we are very far from reaching our resourcing limit. I told you, we had a boom in XX mainly because of medicine, don't expect us to keep that ridiculous rate in XXI.

The world is a very unstable place right now, both ecologically, politically, and economically.


But the economic and political problems are an administration issue, not a lack of resource issue. The global ecological problem is yet to be proven. And the local ecological problem also is an administration issue.

There is only one Earth. There is only one humanity. She is literally a garden on the edge of an abyss. If we push what she can take a little too much, we all die with nowhere to go.


Nope, we suffered many ridiculous narrowed population events in our history, down to 10.000 humans, and we managed to come back. This alarmist speech always becomes too heated with emotional bias and starts to deform reality. Even in their speak that our supposedly destruction of the environment is threatening life on earth, it gets ridiculous. Even if we were causing all that harm to the ecosystem, life would have suffered things far more drastic and worse than us, life is not in any way threatened by us, we might be, but not life. Seriously, if this discussion is going to get that emotional I'll just start throwing a bunch of one liners for more drama too.

Of course we have a impending fucking overpopulation problem. Too many people and inefficient resource production are fucking ruining our planet. That's the source of most of our problems, indirectly or directly. There are simply too many people for our resources to be spread in a fair way. Damnit, there isn't even enough wealth for our population to be stable. The best way to get rid of a problem is to cut it off from the source, and the source of most of society's problems are greed, corruption, and simply too many people. The first two are human nature. To get rid of those would to have us lose our humanity. However, the third one CAN be solved, albeit slowly and carefully.


Administration problems means problems managing resources, not problem with lack of resources.

Regardless, I appreciate your posts. They add a lot of color to this thread, and its making the discussion a lot more interesting.


Me too, though my reputation meter wishes people wouldn't take it so personally, geez.


+rep.

Alright, I won't lie, I was wincing as I read that post. Pretty nice amount of points you got. You really have done your data mining, and I like that. I'll bite, you've informed me. Honestly, and you can probably tell this, a good part of everything I said in my last post is just random bits of data from various documentaries across the years. A big stinking pile of bull-shit that I was trying to hide my ass behind. I know relatively little of the topic as a whole, which is why I made this thread in the first place. So, thanks for the insight in the matter. I really should learn to assume less and research more.

I really didn't know that about the ozone and CO2 levels, though. An active volcano in Antarctica? Well, that does explain quite a lot. Science teaches us new things every day. I guess I'll move on to a different topic then.


That is pretty normal actually. I myself had many problems with this kind of topic in the past. You see, here in Brazil access to information is way worse than in the first world countries and the political biased teaching that we have in our schools is enormous. To the point that I couldn't bear it. All the documentaries, meetings and all they showed us was basic brainwashing as you could never challenge it. I remember that we studied WWII and Nazism like, 4 or 5 times in high school, and when we would move further to talk about something like USRR or China (political dominant wing in brazil is left-wing) my teachers would just change topics and never even touch the subject. There was a point when I just got sick of all that crap and simply stopped going to school, went home and started to study in home, and then I started to read a lot about anything they didn't show to us in the school, and that included much of these environmentalism subjects.

Did my final exam to get my high school diploma. I managed to jump over the brazilian high school time, fortunately. But that doesn't change much of my scenario, you are smart and a serious person so scientific data is enough to challenge your views as it have challenged mine, but try to explain these complex subjects to my mom who have been hearing these things for more than 40 years. She just thinks I'm insane. Truly, sad. And I'm sure most people here agrees, but whatever. I prefer to trust science. And I apologize if I sound too harsh, I thought many people here were being jerks with Lishy's point of view so...

I don't really agree to anything you are saying tbh. I'll just point out two things tho.

1: Arable and Agriculture land isn't the same thing.
If we go by wikipedia, agriculture land use is at 32% for the world. My country is at 6%. That doesn't mean we got huge opportunities to go into the farming business, it means that the land is better used for something else.

2: If we live like we currently do everything will go to hell. It's like using 10000 dollars per month while having a salary of 6000, it's very possible, for very long time, but eventually it stops working. You seem to believe that technology and human inovation is going to solve all the problems. I don't. So in my eyes your posts doesn't really bring any arguments, no offence.


1: Not exactly. Agricultural land of 38% accounts for Arable, Orchard and Meadows land percentage, while orchard is insignificant (permanent crops, roughly 1% of total land), Meadows have a very variable land use as the amount of land animals need to be created and used varies a lot, it actually occupies much more space than it can actually use mainly for technological reasons. So that's why only arable land truly weights for anything. As human living doesn't occupy the remaining of 90% (counting only arable land) we do have much space to grow up, not even accounting technological changes that increase production in the lands already in use, and as the other graphs about BMI and kcal intake showed, there's not a lack of food in the world and not even near that, which means our low land use is more than enough to feed everyone right now. If not everyone is being fed enough that accounts more for distribution issues than lack of food issues. And considering we're not growing that fast as we were in the XX (triplicating our population in 90 years), it's hard to believe we will have food production problems anytime soon. The graphics are meant to be read altogether, not separately.

2. The world is facing great political and economical issues, but these issues are not caused by population size, they're administration issues, problems with the way the governments are treating the economy and social stability, it can be solved simply by changing these methods. We don't have a deficit in resources as you imply by your spending logic, nature doesn't have credit expansion to spend more than you have. If we had a lack of resources, prices would have gone up by Supply and Demand laws, which they haven't, things are not more expensive because they are getting harder to find/produce, they are getting more expensive over administration flaws. As for technological advances I find hard to believe we've reached a dead-end in our production values. It seems more sane to believe technological changes can reduce the possible issue because... well, that's what have been happening since the beginning of mankind. Population alarmism is not a recent topic, Malthus came with these ideas 200 years ago and he was obviously wrong because he couldn't predict technological advances. And that is simply because market evolves on Supply and Demand grounds. When our production output value starts to not be enough, Demand for new technologies will rise (a true demand, not a political imaginary demand as we have today) and the new technologies will start to appear and increase output values. It has always been like that. I don't see any reason to believe it would be different. Actually, some of these technologies have already appeared, they are just not in use yet because there's no real demand for it, such as technology that prevents land degradation and natural sources which enhance plant growth and production, like CO2 stimuli.
0
Anesthetize
12 years ago


Btw if you're wondering, i think 42's argument's bring up some interesting points, but a lot of it's massively generalized and has some fundamental flaws to her argument. I will reply, but just not now cos i'm busy with uni. For now though, i've linked a documentary about the issue.
0
42
12 years ago
Anesthetize wrote...

Btw if you're wondering, i think 42's argument's bring up some interesting points, but a lot of it's massively generalized and has some fundamental flaws to her argument. I will reply, but just not now cos i'm busy with uni. For now though, i've linked a documentary about the issue.


Incredible. Just after I complain how these documentaries they showed on the school's had a lot of misinformation, you go and post one. Even one made by David Attenborough, the same man who made “Can we save planet earth?”, a documentary filled with scientific errors. Way to go. Not because it was made into a documentary that it has any actual truth in it, The Inconvenient Truth had one and was still blatantly wrong, as well the original book. As well as Inside Job and many others that even would back up my point of view like The Great Global Warming Swindle. I'm not here to debunk movies, I'm here to show facts. Seriously. That's why I'm writing myself and backing up with scientific data.

If you think I'm wrong, then prove what is wrong, don't throw a documentary at me to talk for you.
0
Anesthetize
12 years ago
42 wrote...
Anesthetize wrote...

Btw if you're wondering, i think 42's argument's bring up some interesting points, but a lot of it's massively generalized and has some fundamental flaws to her argument. I will reply, but just not now cos i'm busy with uni. For now though, i've linked a documentary about the issue.


Incredible. Just after I complain how these documentaries they showed on the school's had a lot of misinformation, you go and post one. Even one made by David Attenborough, the same man who made “Can we save planet earth?”, a documentary filled with scientific errors. Way to go. Not because it was made into a documentary that it has any actual truth in it, The Inconvenient Truth had one and was still blatantly wrong, as well the original book. As well as Inside Job and many others that even would back up my point of view like The Great Global Warming Swindle. I'm not here to debunk movies, I'm here to show facts. Seriously. That's why I'm writing myself and backing up with scientific data.

If you think I'm wrong, then prove what is wrong, don't throw a documentary at me to talk for you.


What's incredible is that you have this close-minded approach to everything. And once again you show it here. You list a few documentaries that i too agree are discredited and are more about propaganda than science, but then you make quite frankly what are ignorant assumptions to the nature of all documentaries. Not every documentary is bad and full of holes and mis-information, nor can it be said for the opposite. I mean you've just threw this out the window without even watching it, how would you even know that it's worthwhile or not? I'VE NEVER ATE AN APPLE BUT IT TASTES BAD BECAUSE I'VE ATE OTHER FRUITS AND THEY TASTE BAD.

You've just massively generalize things without taking a look at them by a case by case basis. I mean you do this a lot. Your statement "The world is facing great political and economical issues, but these issues are not caused by population size," is a perfect example of you doing this sort of thing in your statements. It's rather naive and short-minded to imply that all political/economic issues[of the world] are not or can not be directly related to population. I can think of one straight of the bat, the population of China heading forward is going to cause massive economic and societal problems that Japan are now facing with an increasing elderly population relative to the mean. You go onto say that they are caused by governmental administrative issues, to which i agree that some are, but to say all are or that it is the sole reason is a massive generalization again. I could go on and on about other flaws in your arguments but like i said previously, i don't have the time at the moment.

Not only that but the documentary isn't even directed at you nor is a catalyst for my opinion as a retort to anything but fueling the subject matter. I really don't know how you got an imaginary negative connotation out of that.
2
42
12 years ago
What's incredible is that you have this close-minded approach to everything. And once again you show it here. You list a few documentaries that i too agree are discredited and are more about propaganda than science, but then you make quite frankly what are ignorant assumptions to the nature of all documentaries. Not every documentary is bad and full of holes, nor can be said for the opposite. I mean you've just threw this out the window without even watching it, how would you even know that it's worthwhile or not? I'VE NEVER ATE AN APPLE BUT IT TASTES BAD BECAUSE I'VE ATE OTHER FRUITS AND THEY TASTE BAD.


Close-minded? Searching for data from all sides is close-minded? Do you think I'm talking these stuff out of a political agenda? I did not make an ignorant assumption for all documentaries, I said they don't serve any purpose at all in these discussions because they are, well, documentaries, they expose data and draw a conclusion for you without actually letting you analyze all the data and and other datas. They’re made to teach, not to discuss, that's why they are used in schools or TV. Very, very few documentaries actually present an honest exposition of data. And again, a documentary made by the same man who fell for these alarmist speeches, David Attenborough himself fell for CO2 graphs fallacy and still believes it probably and since these two alarmisms walk together, Population and Environment, he obviously loses a lot of credibility just for that even if we were using documentaries to debate. These were my points.

You've just massively generalize things without taking a look at them by a case by case basis. I mean you do this a lot. Your statement "The world is facing great political and economical issues, but these issues are not caused by population size," is a perfect example of you doing this sort of thing in your statements.


It could be a generalization if I didn't have an idea of what causes those problems, but the point is, I have a very clear idea and they're not about superpopulation, so that's why the statements. I'm not talking all that stuff out of a hint, I have read many books about politics, philosophy, economy, physics, sociology and history and I can definitely say that with all my knowledge these problems are not sourced in population size. I have studied to talk about that stuff, I have not just read journalistic articles and watched documentaries. That's not a generalization, that is a thoughtful conclusion.

It's rather naive and short-minded to imply that all political/economic issues[of the world] are not or can not be directly related to population. I can think of one straight of the bat, the population of China heading forward is going to cause massive economic and societal problems that Japan are now facing with an increasing elderly population relative to the mean.


Of course there are problems aggravated and caused by population characteristics, but these problems cited till know are not sourced (the main cause, the principle, the origin) in overpopulation world wide. If the super population was the cause, the source, then obviously by reducing the population these problems would be gone, but guess what? They won't be gone, even with a low population these problems will persist as they always have, because overpopulation is not the issue, and in this case, even the aggravation.

I can think of one straight of the bat, the population of China heading forward is going to cause massive economic and societal problems that Japan are now facing with an increasing elderly population relative to the mean.


Again, I didn't say there weren't problems caused by demographics, I said the problems presented here are not caused by world wide superpopulation. This elderly problem is something already common in europe, and not even just that but there are problems about gender distribution in india and china too. But again, not superpopulation.

Not only that but the documentary isn't even directed at you nor is a catalyst for my opinion as a retort to anything but fueling the subject matter. I really don't know how you got an imaginary negative connotation out of that.


So you mean the notification I got from you quoting my post was just you mistaking it for the reply button? Alright then.
-1
aquranium
12 years ago
we have very limited resources and an ever increasing population our resources will not increase so the only solution to this crysis is to control the population. If you notice the main reason of over population is illiteracy the the population is high in those countries where illiteracy rate is high because prople are illiterate they do not know the burden overpopulation has on the economy
0
Zeream
12 years ago
Before any more pointless discussion (aka points that have already been made and argued) I should probably request to get this thread locked...

...the problem being that I do not know the name of the forum moderator off the top of my head.
0
say what!
12 years ago
Zeream wrote...
Before any more pointless discussion (aka points that have already been made and argued) I should probably request to get this thread locked...

...the problem being that I do not know the name of the forum moderator off the top of my head.


The name of the mod is Tegumi.
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EZ-2789
12 years ago
The mark we've left on this planet is pretty big. I doubt much of anything can fix it. That's why some people have started to seriously consider trying to make Mars a habitable planet in case this planet rage-quits before the sun goes supernova on ours asses.
0
Cruz Dope Stone Lion
12 years ago
Zeream wrote...
Please keep in mind that this thread is NOT about the population itself. Its about our resources versus our population. My definition of "overpopulation," the one that is used here, is when the population reaches a point to where resources available cannot sustain it.




Wait what? Isn't overpopulation a problem when the there's not enough resources to sustain that population?

I can see there being a discussion about problems in overpopulated places, but since when was it our responsibility to police people who just simply exist?
0
HentaiMukai
12 years ago
Create underwater domes where people can live in and maybe large oversea crafts so we can live above and under water.
0
say what!
12 years ago
TheLoneGentleman wrote...
Overthrow governments. Begin the chaos. Survival of the fittest. New world order. Profit.


I suggest you read the articles given before posting to further grasp the topic of this thread.
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Razah
12 years ago
HentaiMukai wrote...
Create underwater domes where people can live in and maybe large oversea crafts so we can live above and under water.


That's kinda inefficient and expensive. We have enough land for billions more.
0
omnomimous
12 years ago
HentaiMukai wrote...
Create underwater domes where people can live in and maybe large oversea crafts so we can live above and under water.


The issue with overpopulation isn't space, it's having a reliable income of resources in relation to the population.
I don't really see it as an issue to "fix" though, as it will inevitably fix itself. Probably when the United States has a revolution and becomes either unable or unwilling to act like the rest of the world's older brother.
I'm fairly certain that I'm in the vast minority on this, but modern medicine being able to "cure" diseases and the US preventing legitimate wars seems to be a pretty bad thing. It will only make things that much worse when those things lose their potency.
Sure, its really nice that the US is acting like the rest of the world's older brother and preventing full-scale wars, but when the inevitable revolution comes (and it will) then all the tension that's built up is going to tear the world apart. In the same way, when modern medicine can't reach a region, diseases will wreak havoc because the people who have less resistance to them and would have died off didn't, and were able to breed, making even more people who are susceptible to disease.
Think of it like the economic bubble that popped a few years ago. It was really nice while it lasted, but the aftereffects were much worse than things would have been without it.
0
Lolasoar
12 years ago
I'm going to go completly sy-fy here.

We could ( in some event ) make an entirely new unpopulated dimension and fill it with planets that could sustain life. You would have to belive in the different dimension theory to make it work though.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[color=blue]My dimension theory is thus
1)There are a finite yet vast number of universes.
2)Every fiction story has had it's own dimension. (the storys were made by a tiny rift in time that alowed the universe's influence to be consumed by the brain of the writer.)
3)What! Dose that meen that even the bad storys's have a dimension?
4)Yes even a story without a plot has it's own dimension!
5)Now that I think about it, my life dose not have a plot. Dose it?
6)(back on topick) a man (yes man not wo-man) nicknamed ultimate, world eater, angel of death, or son of satan devours worlds when he feals like it so some storys might not be alive currently. :D
7)Yes i know that none of the names are original and i opligize for the length of this message and the extreme off topick ness[/color]
0
Typholsion
12 years ago
EZ-2789 wrote...
The mark we've left on this planet is pretty big. I doubt much of anything can fix it. That's why some people have started to seriously consider trying to make Mars a habitable planet in case this planet rage-quits before the sun goes supernova on ours asses.


Wrong the planet will heal itself over time. It did once b4 when a meteor killed over 95% of life on earth(killing the Dinosaurs).The planet was in darkness for Millions of years, 97% of vegetation was destroyed. It was a catastrophic event on a global scale and yet Earth managed to heal. Sure humans are destroying it once again but now on a scale of a meteor the size of the moon hitting the planet.

We already some forms of population controls like,marriage, homosexuality, transgender, abortion etc.
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