Why isn't anyone mentioning population control in global warming i?

Question

Face it, California expects 22 million more people in 50 years. If that is an expected percentage worldwide it wont make a bit of difference if we do not use cars or other power sources. I can see a host of other issues happening on top of warming if people are the cause. The only way to stop this is by controlling population.

Answer 1

Muslims consider it to be their duty to Allah to have large families so that one day they will outnumber the people who they consider to be infidels.

If you try to force Muslim countries to limit their populations you will create a war much bigger and much nastier than the war in Iraq?

Are you willing to start a war over population control?

Most of us are not willing to start a war over population control.

Answer 2

The problem isn't overpopulation. The problem is unsustainable use of resources. There was an article in Scientific American (a fascinating read if you can find it) a while back discussing this exact issue. It said that global population is expected to level out at about nine billion people over the next fifty years. Once this plateau is reached it'll be a a very long time before the population shifts again. So the solution here isn't to control how many people there are (I think it's a scary possibility to consider anyway), but to work towards a future where we're using less natural resources than are being produced.

Answer 3

The only way to control population realisticly is through some pretty inhumane and repressive measures, it would be far easier to simply shift our energy production economy to a geothermally based one rather than a fossil fuels based one... yes we'll still have some problems as human population grows but any solution to that is either very harsh and would lead to worse problems (like rebellion or warfare when you try to force people not to breed). Essentially there are better ways to solve the problem in the immediate future and in the long term future (if we have one) the evidence available is that population growth will slow down and eventually get to the point of just about breaking even between births and deaths.

Answer 4

Over population is so 1960s, it use to be believed that the world would starve when we reached four billion people on earth. Now we are pushing twice that number and I don't see that may people who look like Nicole Richie even when I've lived in Asia.

All this global warming noise is about getting the public to loosen up their wallets to provide more money to research. Whether it be pushing their Congressman or trading in energy credits, which is a scheme for paying someone else to invest in risky alternative power infrastructure.

Hopefully someone will come up with an inexpensive way to sequester CO2 coming out of coal fired power plants. If CO2 admissions were going to fry the earth in the next 100 years then you can bet someone besides the French would have already started building a lot of nuclear reactors.

Instead we are turning a sizable portion of the US corn production over to ethanol and then we might start to see the world face starvation. More corn, less soybeans planted this year. Just watch in five years hunger will start creeping in again.

Answer 5

Because population isn't a problem.

By using nuclear technology and genetic engineering we can provide energy and food to over ten billion people without environmental disaster.

If only we're allowed to use those technologies.

OTOH if we aren't allowed to use them then we're going to be screwed because we simply aren't going to be able to produce enough energy for even 6 billion without emitting CO2 if we give up fission (and fusion won't be with us for at least a couple of decades, at least not in a form that doesn't involve destroying cities while clean coal is still a long way away and may not even work) and the environmental impact of farming will be higher because of increased land use (or even the ultra-idiotic biofuels crap that involves wasting farmland to grow fuel instead of food thereby causing a few famines here and there).

Transportation fuel will be more difficult than electricity but we should be able to come up with something, electric cars, hydrogen or synthetic hydrocarbons should do the job.

And as others have noted, population control will invariably involve quite a bit of coercion which you really don't want to be involved in. It would be a pity if we reduced our population to say 1 billion by force and then destroy the environment anyway because the people who made the population control laws want to force us to stay away from nuclear and use only faith based farming (sometimes called 'organic' farming).

Answer 6

If each person living on the earth could make less of an impact on it, the earth could support a great number of people. And aren't we already doing that in this country? How many families do you know in CA or anywhere that have 15 or 16 kids like they did back in the 1800's?? Most families have 1 or 2 children.

CA needs to stop building houses and start regulating growth in their towns. My hubby and I lived in Poway for 5 years and were very glad to leave because they were planning to build houses on the ridge beside us. They are building and building and building there and not looking at what the area can really support...

Answer 7

No one factor explains the near silence about population growth.

As one person pointed out, people who talk about overpopulation are often accused of racism. This has pretty much shut up the left wing in the U.S. The "social justice" advocates in the Sierra Club, for example, attacked the population committee as racist (yes, I was at one of those meetings), and now the Sierra Club ignores U.S. population growth.

The right wing believes that population and consumption can grow exponentially forever, regardless of basic physical laws (such as the first and second laws of thermodynamics).

As some writers said, Americans fear that government might resort to coercion. (This doesn't make a lot of sense to me -- is it better to have a child and watch it starve to death than to have the government tell you that you can't have the child in the first place? Both are unpleasant, but the first seems worse.)

And, as one person mentioned, some religious groups act as though they must win a breeding race (sort of like an arms race) so that they can displace all the other religions.

All of these are factors, but there are other factors, too.

There are major mis-understandings about basic demographic facts. For example, it's true that the U.N.'s "medium" projection is that world population will level out at 9 billion in 2050. But so far, U.N. projections have under-estimated population growth. And even a very small difference in birth rates is the difference between stabilization and continued exponential growth. The U.N.'s "high" projection is not for stabilization at 9 billion.

Furthermore, even if the population does level off at 9 billion (without increasing the death rate), that doesn't mean that there's no problem. If the earth can't sustain the current population of 6.5 billion people, then it can't sustain 9 billion people. (Yes, some people think that if technology improves enough, the earth could support more than the current population. But we generally apply technology to consume MORE, not to consume LESS. So improving technology is very unlikely to solve the problem. A recent estimate said that we would need 1 1/3 earths just to support the current population -- and of course for non-renewable resources (such as oil), even 1 1/3 earths wouldn't be enough; you'd need millions of earths.) We're not sustainable now, and we're not getting more sustainable over time.

Many people believe that the "demographic transition" will solve the problem -- birth rates in developing countries tend to fall as people move from poor to middle class. However, unless the birth rate drops all the way down to 2 children per family, the demographic transition, although it will help, won't be enough. In the U.S., the birth rate did drop below 2 children per family in the late 1970s -- but it has risen since then, and is back above 2. And when surveys ask people how many children they think a family should have, Americans answer "3". As another example, both wealthy and struggling Mid-East countries have very high birthrates. So the "demographic transition" is more complex than people think -- it's not a pure downhill sloping curve, it's more like a "U" shape, with birth rates often falling a lot as income increases, but then rising back up somewhat as people have a lot of money and can easily afford to have a lot of children.

Some people point out that there are several countries that have birth rates less than 2 (Japan, Spain, and Italy, among others). But Japan, for example, has been in an 18-year long recession, and has a very dense population and extremely high prices for housing, and imports a lot of its food. If birth rates don't drop far enough until food and housing are unaffordable, then we're in big trouble. We can't all be net food importers at the same time!

Mathematically, you can't average out countries with low birth rates and high birth rates. If country X and country Y both have 100 million people, and if X's population shrinks by half each generation, while Y's population increases by half each year, then the total population will grow. The populations look like the following

Generation 1: 100M + 100M = 200M
Generation 2: 50M + 150M = 200M (balances)
Generation 3: 25M + 225M = 250M (doesn't balance!)
Generation 4: 12.5M + 337.5M = 350M (doesn't balance!)

I won't bore you with more math, but in the long run the growth rate converges towards the growth rate of the fastest-growing country. If even a single country's population doesn't stabilize, the whole world's population won't stabilize. (Eventually, the death rate will go up, but that's what we're trying to avoid, of course.)

Answer 8

Because population is not the problem. Here's why:

over the next few decades the world population growth will deciline to zero--with a stable population about 50% greater than we have now.

That's a lot of people, granted. But its welll within sustainable levels--IF we get off the fossil fuel technology.

If we don't get off fossil fuels, however, we arent going to be able to sustain the population we have now.

So--we don't need "population conrol" to solve the problem

Answer 9

Don't worry about the population problem. The coast is where most the people live and the coasts will be flooded from warming. Much of California will be destroyed and many will die. Then your population problem will be fixed.

Answer 10

because there's not anything they can do about it...nobody's listening to the preacher. However eventually the population will even off, it's just that it's too much for mother earth right now and in the near future.

Answer 11

Would anyone support the environmenalists if they told you the way to combat global warming was to start killing off the population and limiting reproduction?