Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years. —Paul Ehrlich, April 1970
The world’s total fertility rate has been cut in half since 1950, but the population is still rising, according to a study published Thursday in The Lancet. The total fertility rate — or the average number of children a woman would have if she lived through all her reproductive years — declined from 4.7 live births in 1950 to 2.4 in 2017. —Michael Nedelman, CNN, 9 November 2018
There has been a remarkable global decline in the number of children women are having, say researchers. Their report found fertility rate falls meant nearly half of countries were now facing a “baby bust” – meaning there are insufficient children to maintain their population size. The researchers said the findings were a “huge surprise”. And there would be profound consequences for societies with “more grandparents than grandchildren”. –James Gallagher, BBC News, 9 November 2018
Population Bombed: Exploding the link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change is an extensively researched, well-written and concise new book published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The book comes out exactly 50 years after Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, in which the Stanford University biology professor famously claimed that population growth would result in resource depletion and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. The authors of Population Bombed, Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak take stock of past scholarship on “depletionism” and provide a cheerful rejoinder to the doomsayers. Marian L. Tupy, CapX, 7 November 2018
This nonsense was all thoroughly debunked by Hans Rosling in his BBC talk, using the government data collected b his foundation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
The hysterical Malthusians simply made up all their assertive nonsense to scare people and hence gain fame and wealth, as with Al Gore and climate change, by assuming nothing changes and change must thus be due to humans, the opposite of reality, exploiting ignorant humans who don’t live long enough to see planetary change before they die. Similarly with climate change but there was also easy money to be made by blaming CO2 for the exaggerated change, so politicians and lobbyists got involved to create the legalised renewable energy protection rackets to “save the world” by pocketing Billions in the name of renewable energy saving the planet, which was and is in fact fine and looking after its own equilibrium, thanks.
When people’s children stop dying, they stop reproducing to match. Obs.
Health care did that before even wealth made living conditions much better. We still have most of corrupt and warring Africa left to fix, but c.2 per woman is normal in most of the rest of the world.
Technology and the energy use that creates the wealth to drive it is behind this. Human society progresses through technology, nothing stays still. Only the ignorant believe in the fear inducing rantings of deceitful prophets of pseudo science for their own gain, like Erlich, Gore and the IPCC climate change con men and their pseudo science computer prophesies.
In technical fact, CO2 reduction and the sustainable, affordable, adequate energy we must have to maintain this progress is NOT available from renewables, ever. Too weak and inetrmttent to deliver what is promised from them. It’s the law. The laws of real physics, not those of climate priests and subsidy lobbyists with their partial models and phoney claims for what they are selling, for a fast buck at the expense of the progress of civilisation, while claiming to improve it. THose are just the provable science facts. I left the opinion out.
Well according to that cracked urn Paul Ehrlich our coasts would all be deserted by now because of the stench of dead fish and Al Gore predicted Ice Free Arctic by now if these two were prophets back in the old days they would have been stoned by the Hebrews as False Prophets
Books such as the Population Bomb have been heavily criticized on this web site and with good reason. Their predictions have failed. This article also has an obviously false prediction in that hundreds of millions will not be starving to death in the next ten years. As far as feeding people, in ten years the situation will mostly like have improved.
However, to know what will happen in the long run we need to turn to math. It governs the universe. A linear function basically is governed by addition. A simple example is 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 … A logarithmic function increases (or decreases) much faster. An example is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.
The ability to increase our food supply is a linear function. There have been some steps where it has gone faster such as using fossil fuel to make fertilizers, but it is still linear. Growth in population is a logarithmic function. There is no way we will be able to continue to keep up with the population growth. If the birth rate does not decline to a sustainable level, we will reach a point where there are hundreds of millions starving to death each year. It won’t be in ten years. It might be in thirty, sixty, or a hundred years, but it has to happen.
Like with most issues, liberals make this situation worse. What should happen is nations with high birth rates start experiencing negative feed back to limit the population. This is in the form of their economies not being able to keep, the same with food and other resources. When nations such as the United States permit nations like Mexico to dump their excess population, the negative feed back does happen in the high birth rate country. However, nations like the US which by birth rate are at zero population growth, will experience the starvation of the rest of the world due to immigration.
Most seem ignorant of this situation, and those who understand it tend to ignore it.
It was about 15 years ago that a study was done in India. As color television spread to the more rural areas, the birth rate tended to decrease. It was determined that it wasn’t from just watching. The women saw a life-style that they wanted to have for themselves – fewer children seemed to be the way to achieve it.