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rockermike
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Topic Author's Original Post - Jun 5, 2018 - 01:15pm PT
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I read it in high school. Somewhat influential in my thinking at the time. I've moved on since..... but here's an interesting discussion. Not necessarily agreeing with Corbett's direction but worth a listen IMHO.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Reeotch
climber
4 Corners Area
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Looks like the "bomb" was a dud . . .
Interesting that the was an entomologist, given the way insects reproduce.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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Why would I open a video that proclaims its bias right in the thumbnail?
Which is higher? Birthrates or trollrates?
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dirtbag
climber
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Callin him a pseudoscientist is terribly misleading.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Combine the world population with its dependence on fossil fuels and well, there is a serious problem. The charlatans are the professional climate change deniers. I'll bet that video is f*#king stupid.
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rockermike
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 5, 2018 - 07:47pm PT
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I get the distinct impression no one has listened to it. ha ha
His argument... for those who only read the cliff notes.... has two central theses. 1) falling fertility is a bigger problem, and 2) human ingenuity has improved life over the last 50 years while Ehrlich predicted 100s of millions of deaths by the 1980s.
Again I don't agree with his conclusions but Corbett is a smart guy and he does a good job of presenting his argument.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Fox news reported that Monsanto's Roundup will restore fertility...Will medi-cal cover the prescription costs...?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Obviously not many read it, or heeded it, other than the Red Chinese.
See what a little self-control can achieve? Of course, we had a heads up 200 odd years ago
from the estimable Thomas Malthus but only eight people read him.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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I get the distinct impression no one has listened to it. ha ha
It doesn't matter because the human population has increased enough that it's sidekick, fossil fuel use, is going to be as serious of a problem as Erlich predicted. I get the impression you think we're in the clear because he wasn't immediately correct. HaHa.
Edit:
OK, so I watched enough to see that it's all fear mongering that we're not having enough babies, and there's plenty of oil folks, so don't worry about that. No mention whatsoever of climate change.
It just ends with visions of pretty babies that somehow the world has not nearly enough of. It's religious drivel, and of course, anti-abortion. Actually, it's right-wing drivel designed to attract religious people. My first simple search of Dr. Erlich came up with a list of right wing websites that are just hating on him. He must be a popular figure in circles that read Breitbart News. God, what horsesh#t. There are plenty of videos on YouTube where you can listen to him talk intelligently and persuasively about what is happening in the world today. Bringing up his old book and pissing on it is just what the fear mongers are doing. It's so funny, the posted movie is exactly the opposite of the Population Bomb. It's fear mongering about human extinction because we are not having enough babies. It's f*#king hilarious.
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clifff
Mountain climber
golden, rollin hills of California
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Population growth math:
1.16 %/year - 10 times in 200 years - 1.0116^200 - in 200 years a population of 7 billion would grow to 70 billion
1.16 %/year - 3.17 times in 100 years
2.345 %/year - 10 times in 100 years - 1 billion times in 900 yrs - Earth's population would be 7 billion billion in 900 yrs
3.05 %/year - 20 times in 100 years
4.72 %/year - 100 times in 100 years
9.65 %/year - 10,000 times in 100 years
10 s of millions die every year of starvation in the world. Billions are malnourished.
3.322 times the doubling rate (in years) = 10 times rate (in years)
A 2% growth rate for 6,500 years would turn all the matter in the universe into human beings. 1.02^6500 = 10^56
0.231 %/year - 10 times in 1000 years
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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Worldwide food security is at an all time low.
The US food chain doesn't warehouse food.
The population no longer has a larder at home.
In the US there is now 3 days of food security in the supply chain. If you can call it food.
This is America and we have Tent Cities and Beggars in every city. Homeless Children.
If Sigatoka keeps wiping out the Cavendish Banana everybody dies. That's it. The worlds largest fruit cultivar and calorie source. Invest in Casava and Bread Fruit before Famine makes the Americas Great Again
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6391/eaar6611
Beyond fossil fuel–driven nitrogen transformations
Jingguang G. Chen1,2,*, Richard M. Crooks3,*, Lance C. Seefeldt4,*, Kara L. Bren5, R. Morris Bullock6, Marcetta Y. Darensbourg7, Patrick L. Holland8, Brian Hoffman9, Michael J. Janik10, Anne K. Jones11, Mercouri G. Kanatzidis9, Paul King12, Kyle M. Lancaster13, Sergei V. Lymar2, Peter Pfromm14, William F. Schneider15, Richard R. Schrock16
Abstract
Nitrogen is fundamental to all of life and many industrial processes. The interchange of nitrogen oxidation states in the industrial production of ammonia, nitric acid, and other commodity chemicals is largely powered by fossil fuels. A key goal of contemporary research in the field of nitrogen chemistry is to minimize the use of fossil fuels by developing more efficient heterogeneous, homogeneous, photo-, and electrocatalytic processes or by adapting the enzymatic processes underlying the natural nitrogen cycle. These approaches, as well as the challenges involved, are discussed in this Review.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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The population no longer has a larder at home.
Guess you don’t know any Mormons or Cali Earthquake Preparedness Freaks!
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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Touché. The Mormons will survive
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Various people have gotten their dire predictions about our future wrong. He is one in a long line of know-nothings. We were also supposed to run out of metals. Of course, we have always found more ingenious ways to find new sources and reclaim and recycle others. We even had a book telling us about the upcoming New Ice Age in the '70s.
There were ancient, learned scholars that predicted the demise of the Roman Empire. For hundreds of years they were wrong. Up until they turned out to be correct.
Agriculture technology has allowed the world to produce enough calories to feed everybody. Even if human mischief has still lead to famines.
Technology has come through in areas like mining also. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
My response to those thinking technology will provide a miracle cure for climate change is a big maybe.
The analogy I use is a 20 year-old who smokes 3 packs a day and says future technology will grow him brand new lungs and a heart when he starts having problems breathing in middle age. Maybe. Do you really want to bet your life on it?
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rockermike
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 6, 2018 - 11:04am PT
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Reeotch.... that's quite a video. Loved the dynamic time series stuff...
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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I once took an economics class on population (Malthusian growth) that critiqued the Society of Rome's "Limits to Growth." The class was taught by renowned economist Eric Gustafson. The bottom line as we learned was that as societies evolve under market pressures, fertility reaches replacement. That means zero population growth. The biggest problems are apparently subsidies that encourage population growth among demographics that do not support themselves.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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The class was taught by renowned economist Eric Gustafson. The bottom line as we learned was that as societies evolve under market pressures, fertility reaches replacement.
experts making statements based on their interpretation of history without any real basis for their argument why the future will turn out ok... not very convincing.
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EdBannister
Mountain climber
13,000 feet
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oh look, my reply was deleted.. too many facts???
furthers the case for no accountability for bad "science"
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Economists don’t have a great track record on predictions when it comes to specifics but in general terms they do all right. That said the viruses will have the final say sooner than later.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Economists don’t have a great track record on predictions when it comes to specifics but in general terms they do all right.
that's why economics is referred to as the dismal science...
quantitative prediction is the hallmark of science, without it you might as well be writing horoscopes for the local newspaper (oh, there are no local newspapers anymore, at least not printed on paper, I'm sure some economist anticipated that "in general terms").
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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If the truth be told most smart ones studiously avoid predictions although they can give good ‘odds’. The main reason their predictions aren’t better is because of the ‘crankloon politician factor’. I mean how do you factor in Italians, Greeks, and sundry crankloons hell bent on economic nihilism?
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GLee
Social climber
Montucky
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**People also ask:
How long can you survive without water and food?
How long does it take to die from lack of water?
Going without water may take up to a week to 10 days to reach death. However, in extremely hot dry areas this may occur far faster. It is estimated that most people can survive starvation much longer Depending on their fat accumulation and how well hydrated they are, about 30-40 days on average.
**
How long is it safe to go without eating?
Is it painful to die of dehydration?
What are the signs and symptoms of dehydration?
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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I do agree that future prediction is not an exact science. But economics in many ways is very precise. Supply and demand which lead to marginal propensities is based on empirical observation. Prices go up, demand goes down, at least where normal goods are concerned. Taxes go up, investment declines and people save more. Fertility and mortality are similar measures. It has been precisely observed that as economies evolve into modern societies, fertility declines. As resources become scarce, conservation and innovation find new ways. These innovations are not always ways of growing more food or finding new resources. Sometimes innovation means forgoing the burden of reproduction and growth when resources are scarce. These are correlations that have been observed and recorded for thousands of years.
The free market is a cause and effect system as real and measurable as gravity. The problems we see in today's booming world can often be attributed to interference with that free market. Subsidies and over regulation attempt to hinder the natural corrective mechanisms of the free market. Overpopulation of urban areas as a result of welfare is an unfortunate example of this. Similarly, adverse selection and moral hazard are the result of over regulation. It is proven that the safety net of insurance encourages risk and irresponsible behaviors that would normally be corrected by cause and effect market forces. And of course insurance is nice to have in the short run for our health. But because insurance interferes with free market supply and demand, drug prices and care costs have skyrocketed. That is the net effect of government subsidy in a free market.
History, written by the victors of war and religions is opinion supported by fact. Economics endeavors to simply address the data. Did they flourish, or did they starve.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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^^^sounds like folk economics,
the "free market" is a theoretical entity perhaps apt for making arguments, but not something that is likely to be practical.
and certainly not something to base a calculation on.
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Overpopulation of urban areas as a result of welfare is an unfortunate example of this.
What are the worlds ten largest cities.
1 Shanghai 24,256,800
2 Beijing 21,516,000
3 Delhi 16,787,941
4 Lagos 16,060,303
5 Tianjin 15,200,000
6 Karachi 14,910,352
7 Istanbul 14,160,467
8 Tokyo 13,513,734
9 Guangzhou 13,080,500
10 Mumbai 12,442,373
Yea, if only China, India, and Nigeria didn't have all of that great welfare that caused millions of people to stay home and reproduce instead of getting a job and limiting the number of children they have.
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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Actually, Ed, the market forces of supply and demand which lead to precise measurements of propensity (tendencies) to consume and or produce are so accurate that industries invest billions of dollars studying them. That is why the cookies on your computer are tracking you now. Google has made a fortune from analytics (for better or worse.) A demand curve is not based on speculation. It is derived from actuarial data. Thus it has a very precise capacity to predict market (people's) behavior. Just as the degrees of freedom, sample size and variance govern the confidence of a normal distribution, so do these sample sizes and variances with degrees of freedom govern the accuracy or confidence levels of economic predictors. It is an exact science because economics is merely a statistical model based on empirical(objective fact) information.
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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August, you make a good point that these overpopulated nations don't have welfare. They are not modern societies. In these nations, agrarian economies of scale determine fertility. Big family means big harvest. Also these nations have not modernized their views on the emancipation of women. In time, as women achieve a measurable equality in these nations, fertility there will decline. Consider first world nations have achieved a fertility rate of about two births per couple (replacement). The outlying data for population growth in America consist of subsidized populations and immigrants from agrarian economies. Eventually, they too will become emancipated and their fertility will approach replacement. As for welfare communities, until there is no longer a financial benefit to those who produce children they don't support, those communities will continue to have high fertility. This is the classic example of adverse selection. That term refers to any policy that propagates and increases the very problem it purports to alleviate.
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Oplopanax
Mountain climber
The Deep Woods
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paul stamet says fungi can save us...
Paul Stamets thinks the universe is mycelium because a photo of mycelium looks like a photo from Hubble.
Paul Stamets first book was on psilocybin.
Paul Stamets sells mushrooms.
Are Paul's claims about mushrooms inherently unreliable?
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Schools are out time to go to the beach, hoot!
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curt wohlgemuth
Social climber
Bay Area, California
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In the 70s and 80s, the word "over-population" was on everybody's tongues. Lots of people had zero or 1 child because of this concern. When was the last time you heard a national-scope figure mention it?
Do you think the world is in a better place today (7.6m people) than in 1980 (4.4m people)? Do you actually believe we're in a better place to solve our problems with an additional 3m people? Do you think that the estimated 8.5m people in 2030 will help us out even more?
When is enough??
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Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
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"Technology has come through in areas like mining also. But past performance is no guarantee of future results."
We always have "30 years" of metal and oil left before it runs out. Always. But it never does. Why? Because there is a fixed definition for what a company can define as "reserves" on their books and the time value of money means anything beyond 30 years has very little value.
There is much much more metal and oil to be had. Peak copper is a myth for instance - at today's copper price we can mine for hundreds of years.
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10b4me
Social climber
Lida Junction
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How long can you survive without water and food?
at some point conflicts will arise from the lack of water.
Note: Vegas is looking to expand, wth!
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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The Hans Rosling video was brilliant, Reetoch. On the other hand, whatever "modeling" Ehrich might have been able to do was pretty limited by oversimplified models that were incapable of recognizing significant factors that effected the evolution of the system, a lack of sophisticated data, and most importantly a lack of computational power to analyze the data. Try analyzing data like that with punch cards.
If the current world population growth rate were to remain constant (I'm not saying that it will, and I might even say that it's unlikely to), population growth would be exponential over the the next few generations, which is completely unsustainable, even for a relatively short period time (conservatively I might say 100 years, just to be sure I'm right, but I imagine something much shorter). And I'm not the kind of guy who likes to make bold claims about what will happen.
Here is a nice graph. It shows the population growth rate (the red curve) and the population growth. The graph projects ("predicts") that the growth rate will continue to drop from 1% (current rate) to 0.1% by 2100 (decrease by a factor of 10). Even at that, there will be over 11 billion people on the planet. Sustainable? Perhaps, but I won't be around to see the answer.
Now consider what Ehrlich was looking at in 1960s and 70s. There was a huge surge in a growth rate that had been close to constant for more than a century (see the graph around 1970). It doesn't take a genius to see, at that point in time, things look pretty alarming.
At any rate (pun?), putting all the data analysis, time series, mathematical models, etc. off to the side for a moment, the simple fact of the matter is that if people keep having kids at (or above) the rate they do now, the world is looking at a major population collapse by (or before) the end of the 21st century. Period.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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It is an exact science because economics is merely a statistical model based on empirical(objective fact) information.
what's the model?
There is much much more metal and oil to be had.
of course, at a cost, and as we've seen recently, resources that are expensive to extract are not extracted below a particular commodity market price. There is a lot of gold buried in California's Central Valley, a flood plain/lake floor, all you have to do is dig it out, right?
As for energy, there is a tremendous amount of coal available in the world. However, if we switched our energy use entirely over to coal, and vented the exhaust into the atmosphere (a time honored technique that doesn't directly "cost" anything) the climate will rapidly deteriorate, demanding even more energy to mitigate, causing even more climate change.
Ignoring external costs in proclamations regarding "peak xxx" analyses would seem to lead to rather incorrect conclusions.
And one might note that this follows an ecological model much better than any economic model (people posting to this thread from positions of economic expertise often despair the attempt at analyzing external costs, where as ecologists are used to considering such systems).
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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The model is based on Bureau of mortality statistics and national census bureau data. Most modern nations have similar data services. The data are clear. Modern nations are at close to or at replacement fertility. That is fertility minus mortality. When fertility minus mortality equals zero, there is no population growth. It's not really a model. It's simple math. The "model" that economists have developed is based on the observation that all modern societies eventually emancipate women and become industrial and finally service based economies. These modern societies achieve replacement fertility and zero population growth. Those societies which do not modernize eventually do crash due to the cause and effect of scarcity and resource depletion. As a result, in the absence of external subsidies, these societies either modernize or perish. Eventually the simple cause and effect of market forces drives the evolution of modern societies. It is a form of natural selection. While some claim natural selection to be a theory, simple statistical understanding of natural selection reveals that it is an axiom as simple as 2+2 equals 4. There are those who believe this sum equals five. They will fight to the death in an attempt to force others to believe that. But their advocacy does not make their belief any less FALSE.
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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I will certainly concede that perhaps modernization must include recognition of the carrying capacity of our biosphere. It is possible that the externalities and collateral costs of our greed and self indulgence may destroy our ecology. This would lead to a big "market correction" of our population. The cost of our externalities such as pollution and degradation of the biosphere are of grave concern and must be addressed. In this way I must agree that the ecological model must be considered as a fundamental part of the economic model or vice versa. Well spoken Ed.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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The "model" that economists have developed is based on the observation that all modern societies eventually emancipate women and become industrial and finally service based economies. These modern societies achieve replacement fertility and zero population growth. Those societies which do not modernize eventually do crash due to the cause and effect of scarcity and resource depletion. As a result, in the absence of external subsidies, these societies either modernize or perish. Eventually the simple cause and effect of market forces drives the evolution of modern societies.
My major criticism of this popular narrative is that it reenforces the "goodness" of "modernizing" and of a particular economic theory for which "free markets" are central. But I believe lacks solid empirical evidence, the data are just not that good.
Not only that, but to mix in a particularly bad application of "evolution" reanimates a whole set of pernicious social theories that are obviously incorrect.
Modern "analytics" is probably less than 5 years old, and is data driven to the point that no model exists. The implicit model is that your (and my and everyone's) behavior is predictable from your past behavior. We act as agents with a limited set of rules which can be discerned by crunching the numbers from our commercial habits. Note that the basis of this idea is that the historic time-series predicts the future (disclaimers not withstanding), and forms the operational basis of much of modern "pop" economics.
This is a shaky model, and the data on which it is based is dubious, and not only that, but economic "bubbles" that form from "irrational exuberance" for some markets would seem to put a finger on the very source of the shakiness of the fundamental issue of the model underlying analytics. Who is to say that businesses are not involved in that very activity ("irrational exuberance") when they adopt the panacea of "analytics?"
To make a point, the data we have on the economic activity of the Roman Empire is very poor, but is probably as good as it gets for such an "ancient" civilization. Recently, the study of Greenland ice-core samples (that had been rejected for climate science studies, but archived) revealed the signature of lead smelting and provided a year-by-year measure of economic activity. This opened up a lot of interesting questions regarding the Roman economy, which had never been imagined by the our former, limited historical accounts.
see the reports of the work, e.g.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/rise-and-fall-roman-empire-exposed-greenland-ice-samples
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/ice-core-lead-roman-empire.html
My point is that our detailed knowledge of historic economies are very incomplete and often biased. To base an economic "theory" on the empirical "data" from those economies is a fraught exercise.
On the other hand, ecological studies can reveal amazing insight, for instance, the photosynthetic activity of plankton reveal that conversion of light-to-chemical-energy is limited by nutrient abundance. Here the "productivity" of agents is directly tied to attributes of their physical environment to determine an "economy" of resource acquisition and use, based on energy balance, and well known chemistry.
These "agents" interact with behaviors that are rooted empirical observations from the sciences, the basis of which are testable in laboratories, and modeled together in ecologies where the resource flows can also be measured, and tied to physical phenomena.
Economists could only dream...
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little Z
Trad climber
un cafetal en Naranjo
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Technology has come through
In reference to the video in the original post about how we can all relax and procreate to our heart's content because technology will save us, I love how they hold up modern science-technology as being the savior of all, but then try to blame rising infertility on some nefarious government plot run by the Malthusians. I'd say it's more likey caused by environmental pollutants, the very residues of all those great scientific and technological solutions that were meant to save us.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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The idea that technology will save us is also a part of a modern narrative that lacks analysis of externalities.
By "technologies" we refer to what happened during the 20th century.
And that means the development of the internal combustion engine, which is the root of the "technology saving us" meme... that is, utilizing a ubiquitous energy source, fossil fuel, to make power to do mechanical work.
It wasn't too long that someone figured out why the climate in the late 19th century was so very different than from the ice ages, the concentration of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, and predicted that energy production by fossil fuel would change the climate; 1896.
In the future, the technology that "saves us" will have to shift the external costs somewhere else, fission energy is not the place (at least not with our current technologies) as the external costs are now included in that analysis and make that energy source cost prohibitive.
Renewables are likely to be push the external costs elsewhere, for a while. But as demand for energy increases with the modernization (= access to energy) of the global population, those external costs will start to dominate the picture.
It makes the 3% efficiency of photosynthesis look terrific, as archaic a "technology" as that is, it serves the bulk of the biomass on the planet, sustainably. We are living off the "inefficiency" of that process, the geological processing of organic matter that was once life which built the chemical bonds that we so cluelessly break to be able to type messages to this forum.
We do this at such a prodigious rate that the hundreds of millions of years worth of biological activity represented by the reserves of fossil fuels could be arguably entirely depleted in 200 years by humans.
Welcome to the petri dish.
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Consider first world nations have achieved a fertility rate of about two births per couple (replacement). The outlying data for population growth in America consist of subsidized populations and immigrants from agrarian economies. Eventually, they too will become emancipated and their fertility will approach replacement. As for welfare communities, until there is no longer a financial benefit to those who produce children they don't support, those communities will continue to have high fertility. This is the classic example of adverse selection. That term refers to any policy that propagates and increases the very problem it purports to alleviate.
Not sure what all is being driven at here. I took the earlier post as blaming welfare for urban population increase. But it is generally the wealthy nations that have welfare and most wealthy nations are below replacements rate. So blaming population on welfare sounds like something the Heritage Foundation would come up.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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So all this talk of fecundity and economics (not sure of its relevance to pop growth) seems to be avoiding the 800 pound gorilla present: the Hydra headed growth monster. Can Yosemite handle 7 million visitors per year? When will the Democrats stop supporting the IRS fecundity subsidy?
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