Why do so many people on ATS beleive overpopulation is not a problem??

Hey I can answer that. Because there isn"t one, there is always room for one more honey. What the hell makes you think there is? The only thing there could never be any room for is greed. Try to let that rest between your ears.

Originally posted by downtown436
I am not even kidding when I tell you that if 1.7 million people moved to New Mexico in the next 1 day, it would be hard to tell they were here at all.

If I go there, will you go live off in the scrub where there is no way to grow food or get water if you let me live in one of the cities? Or, since you're limiting the argument to New Mexico, if 1.7 million more people moved there, would New Mexico be able to provide all the food, water, and energy needs without it making a difference?

That's the question. It's not about square footage. It's about how much a limited environment (like the Earth) has in the way of aerable land, fresh water, and other resources to support a population in something other than poverty and misery. How much land and water does it take to support a single person comfortably?

Until we know, and because we have the technology to do it, it might be a good idea if we chilled out on all the breeding for a while. Once we know, then we can make an intelligent decision about it.

reply to post by 2000 Yards


By all means, don't have any kids. Lead by example.

Yeah, New Mexico would have no problem supporting a population 2x what it is now. We export an insane amount of agriculture products.

Originally posted by mc_squared
...
The environmentalist' concerns in that article are completely valid in that this would just be a band-aid solution that wouldn't address any of the underlying problems at all.
....

who's selectively ignoring what now? i mean if it was as simple as picking one trace gas and blaming literally everything (hurricanes, drought, rain, hot, cold and what have you) on it, then why not reduce it IF the technology is available and cost efficient, say within the EU's 'carbon trade' scheme?!

better a bandaid than bleeding out, right?

wrong, because it's in fact just an excuse to enforce an agenda which cannot survive the light of day, that's why. i've seen all the keywords form you, all within one post, 'consensus', 'established fact' and so on, which prove nothing but your devotion to the 'cause'. imho, of course.

Sort of the same thing as trying to imply that bio-fuel is the reason 1 BILLION people in the world are undernourished.

So remind me again, what was that you were saying about manipulation?

do you even have the faintest idea how much corn is being processed into fuel?

www.ethanolrfa.org...


originally posted at www.abovetopsecret.com...

reducing supply by subsidized conversion into fuel will raise the prices of corn and in turn displace some demand, eventually affecting the entire food market -> that's when things got ugly, obviously.

all for what?

so we can have a marginal (and uncertain) reduction in CO2 while N2O emissions skyrocket?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

1 Introduction

N2O, a by-product of fixed nitrogen application in agriculture,
is a “greenhouse gas” with a 100-yr average global
warming potential (GWP) 296 times larger than an equal
mass of CO2 (Prather et al., 2001). As a source for NOx ,
i.e. NO plus NO2, N2O also plays a major role in stratospheric
ozone chemistry (Crutzen, 1970). The increasing use
of biofuels to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels and
to achieve “carbon neutrality” will further cause atmospheric
N2O concentrations to increase, because of N2O emissions
associated with N-fertilization. Here we propose a global average
criterion for the ratio of N to dry matter in the plant
material, which indicates to what degree the reduced global
warming (“saved CO2”) achieved by using biofuels instead
of fossil fuel as energy sources is counteracted by release
of N2O. This study shows that those agricultural crops most
commonly used at present for biofuel production and climate
protection can readily lead to enhanced greenhouse warming
by N2O emissions.

why are people so focused on fuel for cars, mercury containing fluorescent lamps and wind generators when there's much more to gain by f-ex. banning open freezers and coolers? (super obvious) or just reducing fertilizer use instead, thereby lessening their impact? a win win situation? can't be apparently, because we need the b'''''****d step child of the GW scare, genetically engineered crops, whose track record is yet another established fact which does not hold up under scrutiny.. there are of course more promising approaches, but... profit is based on scarcity artificially induced or not.

Ockham's Razor suggests these 'remedies' are the real goals, doesn't it?

one funny tidbit: Green idealists fail to make grade, says study

if you really haven't peeked into Fragile Earth yet, i suggest you take a look at A Call for Evidence Disproving Anthropogenic Global Warming and Peer Reviewed Scientific Research That Refutes Anbthropogenic Global Warming and More. if you don't mind long threads.

PS: i know that was Off Topic to an extent, i just believe we should understand that totalitarian desires have always approached in the guise of necessity. they will never reveal the real motivation, which is why (more vulnerable) people will fall for superficially valid arguments and in turn start to propagate them even further....

even if biofuels were not the primary cause of food shortage, which should take precedence? your need to feel ecologically viable or food for the world? why the need to compound the problem by stubbornly singling out car fuel?


there's one more sinister aspect, though which i won't ignore. the air tax many people would love to introduce would hit two birds with one stone: first, fewer people could compete with them for resources and services (due to their then diminished funds) and 2ndly, the money would have to go somewhere. typically the pockets of the insiders. the general climate within the established circles does not look promising:

If a Peer Review Fails in the woods....


[edit on 2009.11.20 by Long Lance]

reply to post by Long Lance


OK...

*deep breath*

I'm gonna try and calm things down here because I admit the pissy tone in my first post probably set a bad precedent.

And to make sure we're on topic I want to clarify my problem in this thread is with how overpopulation/GW is perceived on ATS, as in a lot of people automatically join the crowd and dismiss them as conspiracy without doing any actual critical thinking about the subject. If you want an example of what I'm referring to see this short thread that was just put up yesterday.

So at least you're trying, I'll give you that.


But now as for your post:

You ask me who's ignoring what and then you go right back to the carbon scrubber as the basis of your argument, saying

why not reduce it IF the technology is available and cost efficient.

Ironically enough you ignored the part where I already pointed out it is NOT cost-efficient (in case it wasn't clear - $200,000 for something that removes so little carbon isn't gonna cut it). Furthermore, that technology isn't available yet - it's still on the drawing board and a prototype hasn't even been built as far as I know.

As for the rest - you really seem intent on making gross generalizations about all environmentalists, the whole green movement, and apparently have me completely profiled as one of their brainwashed drones because I use certain keywords. Never mind the fact that maybe I use these keywords because this is my field of study - I'm around atmospheric scientists every day and I know from personal experience this is the consensus, not just because I watched An Inconvenient Truth or read about it on the internet.

Second of all, there's a very important reason why we throw around words like "consensus". This is to remind people that the overwhelming evidence points to global warming being man-made. Of course as with virtually anything there are bits and pieces of contradiction - but you guys always try to take those and run with them as if they refute the whole enchilada.

It's like despite all the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, you go and find the one guy who smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100 as "proof" it's all a sham.

As I tried to explain to you before, the math alone dictates global warming. But on top of that we have increasingly advanced climate models, historical geological evidence, and of course we have this and this.


But again you try to denounce all of it by now creating some sort of straw man argument that ALL environmentalists are bumbling fools who trip over themselves and can't get their story straight. Global warming is a MASSIVE subject that doesn't really have any one solution (although getting people to just be more conscientious about it - aka what I'm preaching here - is a start). But generally the issue is tackled from all sorts of different angles - from renewable forms of energy, to improved insulation in buildings, to eating less meat, the list goes on and on all the way down to even carbon scrubbers. Some of these work better than others but the point is trying to put a system together that is an efficient sum of all it's parts.

Yet now you point to the biofuel aspect as if it's some sort of be all-end all solution of ours, when in fact it's just another minor band-aid. The best part is you're using the problem of nitrogen fertilizers as if no one in the green movement has considered that. Improving agricultural efficiency is a huge part of the equation I referred to above. That, and the question of whether a potential solution does more harm than good is always one of the first ones asked, as apparently you hadn't noticed when I brought up some of the concerns over the carbon scrubber:

Other questions also remain including how much CO2 would be created manufacturing the device? What would we do with the collected CO2? And how much CO2 would it create collecting the CO2 from the scrubbers?"

Anyway, I could go on and on but this post is long enough already. The point is you can nit-pick all the little inconsistencies and throw as many ATS threads at me as you want. It doesn't change the fact that, despite the way some people may handle it, the actual problem is still very very real.


It's too bad too, because you seem like a smart guy. If you put as much effort into working on actual solutions instead of just tearing them apart we might have something here.

In answer to the OP: although it depends on what you mean by 'problem', maybe many of the people on ATS have actually researched and understood the issue of population?

Populations will always be self limiting because they depend on finite resources that are produced at a finite rate to survive. It is the same reason that populations of bacteria, which are very good at replication, do not continue to increase their population indefinately.

It is as simple as that really. The planet could support 50 billion people that live a basic lifestyle on average, or probably less than 1 billion that live as the US population do at present.

If there are more babies born than the available resource can sustain then these babies will not survive to produce more babies.


[edit on 20/11/2009 by LightFantastic]

reply to post by mc_squared


you'd be surprised i was once much more open to AGW, until i saw what was being done in its name and until it became obvious that the underlying mechanisms were being over-simplified and contradicting evidence ignored.

your intended analogy between smoking and the greenhouse effect is stretching the term, the lungs have a quite clearly understood function and clogging isn't that hard to understand either.

did you know that the Antarctic's pack ice season has increased by three weeks since the late 1970s?

www.gsfc.nasa.gov...

and www.newscientist.com...

global? except on the South Pole? On top of that, it thought Gloom&Doom was reserved for CT forums, not the mainstream news?! it's hardly conceivable that a real warming might benefit a lot of people. there have, after all trees been found under glaciers in the Alps. still, only anti-CO2, nothing else, not even preparations against flood or drought, only questionable prevention of a single factor in an immensely complex system.

none of these points will be addressed and every single day, more money will be poured into questionable developments, yes, like biofuel, which is apparently a 'bandaid' that's worth pursuing for decades, despite its miniscule direct effect and detrimental side effects.

i'm not convinced one even should attempt a reduction of CO2, because it does improve plant growth, which imho, is usually a good thing, i just mentioned the scrubber because such tech would become worthwhile if the carbon tax went into effect. i don't think there's any need to even consider the tech purely on its own (lack of) merits, though.


PS: regarding key words and phrases, i've heard them too often and they don't mean much when the chips are down

Climategate: Hadley CRU hacked

just in.

[edit on 2009.11.20 by Long Lance]

you'd be surprised i was once much more open to AGW, until i saw what was being done in its name

You and I are in complete agreement here - I don't doubt for a second there are many people/companies who exploit the green movement for their own profit and nothing else. It's part of the reason I come to ATS, but the problem I have is with the way people automatically equate this "conspiracy" with the idea that AGW therefore doesn't exist.

It's like just because there are scam artists who create fake charities does that mean all of a sudden there's no such thing as starving kids in Africa?

did you know that the Antarctic's pack ice season has increased by three weeks since the late 1970s?

www.gsfc.nasa.gov...

and www.newscientist.com...

global? except on the South Pole?

Hey right back at ya:

Also straight from NASA

This is the largest single event in a series of retreats by ice shelves along the peninsula over the last 30 years. The retreats are attributed to a strong climate warming in the region. The rate of warming is approximately 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade, and the trend has been present since at least the late 1940s. Overall in the peninsula, the extent of seven ice shelves has declined by a total of about 13,500 square kilometers since 1974.

You and I can throw these back and forth at each other for the next year and a half so how about we just call it a draw (on this thread at least) and get back on-topic.


What I keep trying to get back to is the fact that these things are all complex issues, ones that require a lot of critical thought, personal reflection, and even possible sacrifice. But a lot of people on ATS just don't want to acknowledge that. You said yourself you have a problem with underlying mechanisms being over-simplified - well how do you think I feel when I see people on the first page claiming overpopulation is a myth because "there's plenty of acres to go around"? I'll give you a hint: --> --> -->

But the main thing is these "over-simplifications" spread like wildfire around places like this. Call me misanthropic if you want, but I truly believe it's because most people are too flat out lazy to get to the facts.

They instantly gravitate towards sensationalized claims that TPTB are out to get them instead. This then becomes self-reinforcing because it quickly turns into the *cough* "consensus" opinion around here. Just because this is a conspiracy site doesn't mean everything has to be a conspiracy. The goal is to deny ignorance, and sometimes the truth happens to be kind of boring.

In the case of AGW - it's that much harder because to understand the argument for it, you have to learn the science behind it. Either that or you have to trust the scientists. And people around here don't want to do either. So there might be 100 technical articles for AGW but people will still automatically accept the 1 claiming those other 100 are a scam.


So I guess what I'm saying is if you want to focus on one side of the argument to keep the AGW movement in check then by all means go for it. But please at least be aware of the potential mob mentality you're feeding into. Because people always want the easy way out, and you might think you're opening their eyes but I see it as you're really just encouraging them to continue sleep-walking through their lives.

I mean where's the conspiracy in asking someone to turn the lights off when they leave a room or walk instead of drive to the corner store? Maybe it's all a ploy by Nike or light switch manufacturers to wear their products out faster...I dunno.

I think detachedindividual sums it up quite nicely in that last thread you linked to: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Actually never mind, I read further down and see you already poo-pooed all over his post - sticking to your ridiculous one dimensional biofuel argument and in the process completely missing the point.

I momentarily had faith in you, but I give up. Looks like it's back to misanthropy for me

It all depends on your definition of over population.We have destroyed enough of the earth and its natural resources.

If there was another species on this plant like us, we would have eradicated it.Remember this is time of plenty one great disaster either natural or manmade and the time of plenty will end.

What would happen to the high population centers if transportation was disrupted?A good example would be Louisiana after the hurricane a few years back.The government really stepped up to the plate.We really showed how civilized we are.Imagine what would happen if this was a large scale event.
Mother nature has a habit of correcting disruptions in nature.It is only a matter of time when our time will come.

reply to post by ExPostFacto


Excellent post, its a shame that politicians arent brave enough to think of and proffer superior alternatives to our current western socio-economic systems.

We can be confident that communism isn't the answer and unfortunately capitalism in it's various guises is still the best system tried so far. What it isn't though, is sustainable.

We need leaders with enough vision and intellect to envision and implement these systems. Which country wants to be the guinea pig though?

Maybe the 'NWO' is this idea and one of the requirements is for everyone to be the guinea pig?







[edit on 20/11/2009 by LightFantastic]

Originally posted by mc_squared


Hey right back at ya:

Also straight from NASA

This is the largest single event in a series of retreats by ice shelves along the peninsula over the last 30 years. The retreats are attributed to a strong climate warming in the region. The rate of warming is approximately 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade, and the trend has been present since at least the late 1940s. Overall in the peninsula, the extent of seven ice shelves has declined by a total of about 13,500 square kilometers since 1974.

You and I can throw these back and forth at each other for the next year and a half so how about we just call it a draw (on this thread at least) and get back on-topic.

yes, i know, these two things are barely compatible, obviously, but that doesn't mean either is wrong. it just means there must be additional factors at play, or something is wrong.

well how do you think I feel when I see people on the first page claiming overpopulation is a myth because "there's plenty of acres to go around"? I'll give you a hint:

-->

-->

-->

i'd like to hear what you consider the limiting factor(s) concerning population. is it food? is it energy? the general tone (in favor) basically ranges from 'It's way too crowded in London' to ' The Mayans died the same way' which are both well understood but isolated samples, so to speak.

before i'm willing to acknowledge worldwide overpopulation, purposeful destruction of usable food must stop and waste reduced to a reasonable minimum (fwiiw, to give you an idea, i guess less than 10% would be nice, but under 20 is probably good, considering the perishable nature of food). we are currently moving in the opposite direction, of course. until then, we don't know if there's too little food produced and even then, improvements are still available IF you're willing to make agriculture a little more labor intensive. f-ex. mono-cropping makes harvesting more efficient, but combining two or more varieties has show to increase yield (see this link posted earlier).

centralisation has its inherent problems and the current development of agriculture will soon rival the late USSR's if financial instruments retain their current precedence over tangible goods. flexibility is one issue, the other is the inevitable 'one size fits all' approach, which dooms the entire system to success or failure, while normal, healthy corrections would occur on a small scale.

But the main thing is these "over-simplifications" spread like wildfire around places like this. Call me misanthropic if you want, but I truly believe it's because most people are too flat out lazy to get to the facts.

not just around here, they (distorted facts) are all that's available in the 'news' you have to search the rest for yourself.

there have been lab tests on the effectiveness of 'greenhouse gas' absorption back in the late 19th century, the results were rather unspectacular to say the least and people did not seem to bother until the 1980s, or until the ozone issue started to abate, along with acid rain (both much more important and clear-cut issues i might add). what changed, exactly?

I mean where's the conspiracy in asking someone to turn the lights off when they leave a room or walk instead of drive to the corner store? Maybe it's all a ploy by Nike or light switch manufacturers to wear their products out faster...I dunno.

no, it's just a ploy by the lamp manufacturers, CFLs don't seem to last nearly as long as they should, are 10-15x more expensive than incandescent and are toxic waste. ecologically unsound, just like razing the amazon forest, so more cane can be grown elsewhere for Ethanol. a balanced view includes more than energy consumption or equivalent CO2 emissions.

I think detachedindividual sums it up quite nicely in that last thread you linked to: www.abovetopsecret.com...

deception will erode trust, to the point where nothing will be believed. So, if AGW is based primarily on deception, it will sooner or later become obvious and make the news. the longer it takes the harder the backlash will be. the food shortage of 2007 and later is not a joke, i can't imagine being held partly responsible for that.



PS: you have taken a peek at the link in my first post, 'peak humanity' is now predicted for 2020-2050 and unsurprsingly nowhere near 20bn.

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

Originally posted by Long Lance
there have been lab tests on the effectiveness of 'greenhouse gas' absorption back in the late 19th century, the results were rather unspectacular to say the least and people did not seem to bother until the 1980s, or until the ozone issue started to abate, along with acid rain

This is simply not true.

Although some of the experiments done by Tyndall were "unspectacular" as you put it, we're talking about the mid-late 19th century - when the mechanisms of things like electromagnetics, thermodynamics and planetary radiation were all still in development, and absorption spectroscopy was very primitive. People like G. S. Callendar improved these measurements as early as the 1930's to confirm that CO2 was indeed a powerful GHG. That work was expanded on over the next 20 years and then people finally began monitoring atmospheric CO2 concentration around the late 50's. Everything after that takes time because you need decades to create a sufficient data set and because yeah, even scientists can be pretty stubborn. But by the 1970's the movement was very much in motion in academic circles.

To imply GW only came into fashion conveniently when other issues went out of style is a complete distortion of the facts - so please practice what you preach.

And speaking of which - yeah I agree you can't trust information from mainstream media - but do you think that automatically makes everything you read on the internet true? In your endless pursuit to expose the giant fraud of AGW, does that all of a sudden make big oil companies trust wothy, ethical sources of info? Do you seriously not think they don't have their own agenda to push, that they don't "encourage" scientists under their big smelly thumb to put out contradictory information? They have a lot more money to do it with too.

It works both ways, and usually the truth lies somewhere in the middle - but in this case I prefer to just avoid both sides and stick to the hard science.

The science is not a conspiracy, anyone can learn it, it's not like it's some esoteric secret reserved for "the elite". But the fact is nobody around here bothers - they just focus on all the propaganda.


...
PS I have no idea where you're buying your light bulbs, but I just went out and bought a 2-pack of CFL's for $6. How in the world is that 10-15x more expensive!?

Also it's common knowledge the vast majority of the rainforest destroyed is for cattle ranching, to solve those world hunger issues with more hamburgers. A balanced view involves more than just this unhealthy obsession you seem to have with biofuels.

As for this:

before i'm willing to acknowledge worldwide overpopulation, purposeful destruction of usable food must stop and waste reduced to a reasonable minimum (fwiiw, to give you an idea, i guess less than 10% would be nice, but under 20 is probably good, considering the perishable nature of food). we are currently moving in the opposite direction, of course.

Which is a perfect argument for why people should have less babies now isn't it? I'm with what 2000 Yards wrote above - the issues involved are varied and complicated. In terms of an explicit population number - no, we don't know what the "limit" is. But until we get a better idea and sort out some of the problems you just listed it's probably a good idea to "chill out" don't you think?

The theoretical limit is irrelevant to the issue at this point, it's about taking care of what we have right now - and as you pointed out we're not doing a very good job of it - so how does adding even more unresourceful waste producing humans into the mix help any?

I personally believe the whole planet needs to re-think the economy and shift towards a more efficient resource based system. Right now capitalism is completely out of control and think about how many jobs there are in this world that are completely useless in terms of improving the overall standard of living. All the bankers, lawyers, insurance agents, bureaucrats, sales staff - these people go to work every day to accomplish little more than rip each other off. Imagine if we put all that to work improving technology, agriculture, renewable energy, education, etc (i.e. things that actually matter) how much better off the world would be. If we were pumping out more people like that I'd probably be all for overpopulation.

Originally posted by mc_squared
As for this:

Which is a perfect argument for why people should have less babies now isn't it? overpopulation.

history shows that anything can be packaged to appeal to a majority of people while sounding reasonable. i'm of course talking about creeping eugenics. what we are really talking about is a forcible influence on reproduction, which isn't needed, the consequences of overpopulation make themselves felt on a local level first and foremost, unless of course you view migration as a right....

iow, the sensible way would be to let the people who got into a mess sort it out on their own, while the way that's implicitly endorsed is spreading the issue in order to be able to propose solutions which affect and limit everyone, not just the people originally involved. (=power grab)

just to give you an idea where we stand:

Whiff of Eugenics: Ginsburg Tells NYT Roe Was About 'Populations That We Don't Want .... Too Many Of'

this is a potentially devastating issue and no, i don't consider myself over-sensitive.

Originally posted by mc_squared
All the bankers, lawyers, insurance agents, bureaucrats, sales staff - these people go to work every day to accomplish little more than rip each other off.

oh dear, societal 'misdevelopments' won't automatically go away with less people, i'd expect them to grow stronger during a phase of contraction because the people in question would hold on to their power and influence with the tenacity of desperation. hard to tell, though.



About your view of late 19th century science, experiments with a tube of gas don't change much over time and the effects of saturation aren't even in question, but read for yourself if you must:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 2009.11.22 by Long Lance]