Population: The real problem

[Bryan]

Don't you all agree? Less people equals less CO2, fuel usage, electricity, footprint, food, space used, everything in general? I find that the car isn't the problem, its the amount of cars; people eating chicken isn't the problem, the amount of chicken eaten & thus the means to which that chicken MUST be grown by to meet supply... Not saying we should off people... but maybe its time to start limiting ourselves. Discussion: And go!

[Danny Dowling]

There is some interesting things that have been surfacing lately.
People seem to be the source of the way the world is. But we can still live in it.

I read this and I'm tired, so I'm going to simplify it.
If no humans = super long ice age of around 200 million years.
It was a theoretical study done by what the local newspaper called scientists.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/2131743/posts

As for fuel usage. I just think we're all way off when it comes to what we're burning.
Ground testing of the jatropha-based fuel has shown it is lighter and has more energy than existing fuel.
Jatroha Nuts are half made up of the fuel which is a good diesel substitute, and is more effective. Bonus is that it grows in arid remote regions.
Put that in your smart and smoke it.

I'm a hater, for nuclear waste. I mean the half life of 40 thousand years. Combine that with
the new mini units designed to power 20000 homes each and need recharging every 7 years.
I hate how it's all just gonna pile up, there are a lot of people on the planet. And thats a lot of
nuclear waste being dumped in someones home.

Getting back to the topic, yes, the rise in population scares me. The world has a lot of people.
The days of mass genocide seem to be over. Who knows though, world war 2 happened
after the great depression.

[NeoMorpheus]

The population is fine. The planet is big enough.

It's the agenda of the Powers that be that's messing everything up. We have the tech to run everything from clean sources IE: HHO, magnetic, tidal energy, geothermal, solar, etc. etc. The greedy people in charge are keeping the masses from using clean sources of power. It's as simple as that. The entire population of the planet could be given a 1.25 acre lot with a house each and they would all fit into Australia.... with the entire rest of the planet left! We aren't overpopulated... that's just a lie thats permeated everywhere so people will think that thought. -That's my opinion

[Iz]

I completely agree that population is the problem! This was something that really frustrated me when I had class discussions on industry sustainability standards. Everyone has an opinion about sustainability indicators, but when I mention population I'm always met with blank stares. Nobody understands that population is the major issue! None of what we're doing would be unsustainable if the world population had remained stable. Natives in South America had been using slash-and-burn techniques in agriculture, for example, for millennia without problems before the world population skyrocketed. The problem is not the pollution or using up resources itself, but it's the SCALE of pollution and resource use that makes it unsustainable. This is a typical economists vs. biologists war, where the first believe in continual growth and the latter believe in the concept of carrying capacity.

[josecuervojoe]

I think you all have great ideas and have enjoyed reading them, but in my opinion the planet is fine and can deal with what ever we give it, what is the problem is the is how long we the human race will last?

The world is gonna be grand... its just us who aint gonna see it through.

[chr1s]

I just think that it's the way that people use resources that puts us into a crisis.

People use things to excess, like constant hours on the computer for instance, you don't need to, and it wastes electricity. People need to be educated in the right mannor so that they can evaluate their daily usage of electricity, especially if the electricity is coming from nuclear sources, or evalute their over all amount of things thrown out, and to generally conserve future lost or wasted energy and to not use potentially harmful products that would affect the earth. It's not the population number to blame, it's the way the population uses and makes, and after, dispose of the product.

[Hannah Crum]

That's true, but what kind of examples are we given as a society? there is no social pressure for us to behave with a conservation mindset, but rather a spend as much as you can and who cares about waste manner. It would be nice if we could take these steps at the national level as well as individual level. We got to work together on this.

[chr1s]

I agree and also I think more large influential companies, all governments, individuals (Like you said), organisations across the globe should reduce wastage of CO2 etc and therefore set an example to the consumer. Hopefully this will significantly change everyone's perseption of their use of resources so that the planet can benefit. Even small, local companies and clubs can set an example for the community, and perhaps that community could pass on the word and so on. What happens on a local scale could have a global impact, hopefully that is true.

[PseudoNinja]

Science has been aware of this problem for years. Its called the sigmoid growth curve, but there are ways to work around it.

The phases are:
lag - while the organism reproduces to catch up with its available resources.
growth - while the organism exponentially (2=4=8=16) reproduces to fill the environment.
plateau phase - when the organism feasts on the resources in the environment.
decline - the beginning of death phase, where the toxic products of the feast (meaning waste) destroy the environment and/or there is no more food left.
death - its all over.

However i take comfort in three facts;
1 - energy cannot be created or destroyed merely changed into a different form, therefore; theoretically everything can be recycled and reused.
2 - humans are clever, we aren’t some micro-organism in a dish. We have survived everything life has thrown at us, including overcoming this problem when we were micro-organisms.
3 - there’s a universe of space out there, and a bunch of planets for us to hop to.

Recycle and buy a gun to defend yourself from those who are better at taking than making.

[PseudoNinja]

As a side note;

My father and i both have a theory that homosexuality is some strange genetic response to the plateau. Naturally, its not happening to everyone but i predict that as we reach the plateau more of them will develop. Our reasoning is this:

Gay people don't have children, so if there is a gay gene as they insist then they are all doomed to die off. However there have been gays through history, so more are developing. This implies that it is some environmental factor effecting their psychology. I would call it perversion, and unhealthy but perhaps it is some form of self moderation.

Does this sound horrifying? Well then it will surprise you to know that human cells have something called apoptosis; As soon as the cell is damaged beyond repair, it begins dismantling itself. The advantage to this is that it doesn’t absorb nutrients and allows the rest of the cells to survive.
China limits the number of children a family is allowed, this similarly limits the call on resources, 1 in 5 people in the world is Chinese and they have an estimated 2.25 million male homosexuals. However I don’t believe many/any Chinese statistics.

Yup i defenatly have a theory there, i wish i could use that for a graduate thesis...

[BadWolf]

There have already been studies that show that in higher population densities of mice, the gay population of mice increases. I'm not sure of the specifics, but it appears to support your hypothesis.

[Iz]

I wish I could applaud the tiny ecological footprint of people living in India and Africa, except they have a tiny footprint because they are living in horrible poverty and have to deal with disease and famine and lack of sanitation or nutritious food all the time, not because they have oneness with nature.

The fact is that each person needs a certain amount of resources, and these resources are finite in this planet. Even renewable resources are finite. So in fact there IS a limit to how many people this planet can support, there IS a carrying capacity.

For those of you who think the world is not overpopulated at 6.7 billion, then what in your opinion is the carrying capacity of Planet Earth and why?

[Charles A. Smith]

Iz,

Your point regarding the fact that poverty in some ways leaves a smaller ecological footprint than affluence is definitely valid. But on the other hand, it is not reliable to draw a linear relationship between population numbers and resource consumption. Within certain bounds, a higher population does not automatically mean higher consumption of resources. But there is an inevitable point in population growth where more people will inevitably consume more resources.

I am nit picking here to make the point that equating population growth with consumption of resources is an argument often used by North Americans (of which I am one) to let themselves of the hook for our disproportionate per capita consumption of resources.