Has Humanity’s Explosion Become a Population Bomb?

[n2doc]

Annalee Newitz
The world's population has exploded over the past century, growing from less than 2 billion to 7 billion people. And it's not stopping. The U.N.'s current projection is that humanity will number 9.3 billion individuals in 2050, and then hit 10.1 billion by 2100. Meanwhile, our energy resources are dwindling and droughts threaten our food supplies.

Have we reached a population crisis that will eventually destroy Homo sapiens entirely? How will we ever maintain our numbers at a sustainable size? The solutions to our population problem may be even more dangerous than the problem itself.

As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people — which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago. Alan Weisman, author of the influential environmental collapse book The World Without Us, has dedicated his next book, Countdown, to what he calls "the population crisis." He believes that humanity is headed to extinction if we can't deal with our species' growing numbers.

But Hampshire College developmental studies professor Betsy Hartmann and her colleagues believe that the population boom isn't the problem. She views this "crisis" as a red herring that distracts us from the real issues of "creating a sustainable solution" to humanity's basic needs for food, clean energy, medical care and education. She also worries that trying to control the birth rate will give governments an excuse to control women. Studies show that as more women around the world have access to education and birth control, they have fewer children. The population, Hartmann believes, will even out at about 10 billion — and that's an amount we can sustain.

So when it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table. One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening?

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http://io9.com/5969944/has-humanitys-explosion-become-a-population-bomb

[AngryAmish]

1. This sort of talk always ends up advocating for mass slaughter of undesireables

Creeps me out.

[FarCenter]

2. 10 billion won't happen -- most of the high-growth countries can't produce enough food

The UN projections have a number of countries in SE Asia, South Asia, and Africa more than doubling their population by 2100. However, those countries already exploit all the available arable land. There is no possibility that they can sustain the projected growth rate.

Food will not be exported from the developed world. As cheap supplies of hydrocarbons continue to be exhausted in the next three decades, more land will be devoted to producing energy supplies instead of food. There are relatively few net exporters of food anyway.

Lastly, due to climate change, arable land area will shrink, and with more expensive fertilizer and energy supplies, agricultural productivity will decline.

[galileoreloaded]

3. Yes.

Soon.

[jonthebru]

4. If it does reach 10 Billion...

it will be a sad life for most of those souls...

[SheilaT]

5. I have thought for years,

ever since the book The Population Bomb came out in 1968, that the world is overpopulated and eventually headed to a crash. Clearly, Paul Ehrlich, the author, was vastly wrong in his time frame.

But our current 7 billion is not sustainable in the long run, and 10 billion is catastrophic. The only questions remaining are: just how big will the population get before a crash, and what form will that crash take?

Even if we could magically get every woman in the world to have no more than two children, starting tomorrow, the total population would continue to grow for some time because there are so many females out there who have not yet had children. Plus, in general, life span is increasing.

Education, especially for women, and ready access to birth control is essential, but in the end it won't be enough. Because in the end, there will be many who will choose to have more children, and the planet's resources are finite. I make no predictions as to what will happen, or how it will happen, but the entire global warming thing is just a start as to how the planet simply cannot sustain the numbers of humans already here.

[Recursion]

6. Paging Dr. Malthus

Dr. Malthus, line 1

[OldDem2012]

7. Closely related topic - 2004 Pentagon Climate Change study....

The Pentagon and Climate Change

QUOTE:

Abrupt climate change has been a growing topic of concern for about a decade for climate scientists, who fear that global warming could shut down the ocean conveyer that warms the North Atlantic, plunging Europe and parts of North America into Siberian-like conditions within a few decades or even years. But it was only with the recent appearance of a Pentagon report on the possible social effects—in terms of instability and war—of abrupt climate change that it riveted public attention. As the Observer (February 22) put it, “Climate change over the next 20 years could result in global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.”