The two existential crises of the 21st century

billsreef

billsreef

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MagentaLine said:
In the 70s I was told we needed to prepare for the ice age coming in 40 years or so. Is it here yet?
P.S. Gretta can lick my taint.
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Yes, we had a few crackpots running around calling for an ice age in the '70's. Funny thing though, had they been paying attention to the actual scientific literature at the time, they would have been talking about global warming instead.
 
Lark

Lark

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Bristol-Cruiser said:
I should have made the point that a declining population is a good thing. The problem is how do we deal with the transition. The demographic transition model as it was taught for decades (I know I did it) was that birth rate and death rate would stabilize at a low, but pretty much equal rate. There was really no evidence, for even theoretical take, to suggest why this should be case. Japan (TFR is 1.37) has a birth rate of 6.4/1000 while the death rate is 12.4/1000 or basically twice as much. World population will decline (a good thing) as more and more countries have TFRs below 2.1 - here's looking at you India. The fascinating thing is to imagine what the world be like in 100 years if TFRs in all countries that matter demographically and economically (ignoring the Upper Voltas etc) are in the 1 to 1.7 range. The map below uses the UN medium-variant projection, which typically has proven to be high in the past.

800px-TFR-HighRes-2020.png
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I don’t see the transition as being so bad, since I’ve lived through it on a microcosm. There are a thousand dying towns in the American Midwest. There are houses plowed into wheat on the prairie, where nobody lives anymore. I was an economic refugee, but able to sell my house after five years and a bath.

You need to abandon old ideas about your house being an investment, but those living in Florida or the American desert are beginning to face the same math from climate change. It’s just a house.

Automation will solve most of the labor issues. Controlled immigration from those areas yet to get the word will solve the rest. Its more rational then Andrew Yang’s idea of paying people not to work.

The half percent already have multiple homes. Others will follow their lead and migrate like snowbirds, leaving the sun belt when it’s too hot to walk the dog at midnight and return when the occasional snow belt loses daylight. Some coastal cities and some desert cities are unlikely to survive. They will decline over decades, likely slower then my last town did after NAFTA.

I just don’t see the problem.
 
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kent_island_sailor

kent_island_sailor

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Steam Flyer said:
That's a false parallel, the population was SO MUCH smaller flushing their toilets straight into the bay, that the number doing so now even with sewage treatment is providing far more waste to nourish the wrong kind of bugs.

If people living along the shores did that now, the Bay would be a total cess pit in a week.
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That is the ENTIRE POINT. Too many people = too much environmental damage.
 
M

Mark_K

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Bristol-Cruiser said:
Time for a serious chat denizens. Seems to see that there are two existential crises that the world faces in the next decades - note I say decades, not years, both of these will be critical for the remaining years of those reading this.
  • Climate - This has been thrashed around for years. We are slowly making progress but more needs to be done everywhere. Current state of affairs - https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
  • Demographic transition - I think this one may be as serious as climate change but is only emerging into prominence. Just a few examples of the impact.
    • Aging populations needing support, healthcare and otherwise. In richer western countries this might mean delayed retirements (hello Macron), pension schemes at risk (US), strains on hospitals and other parts of the system. China has passed a law saying that children must look after their parents, and by extension, grandparents, i.e. give them somewhere to live and feed them. Social media is busy with discussion of a man who abandoned his children 20 years ago and is now demanding his son and DIL take him in. The court ruled in his favour btw. It is a particular problem since most of the children are of the age that they were born during the One Child Policy so the couple have four parents (and possibly grandparents, and no siblings to share the load.
    • A shortage of the labour force as people age. China has raised retirement age (a lot) and France just did it. Other countries are considering similar actions.
    • Some countries are attractive to immigrants who can fill in gaps in the workforce but in many countries this is seen as threat to existing cultural structures. As I mentioned in another thread I just came back from Iceland which is now accepting many immigrants as the fertility rate declines and thee economy is strong. Virtually all Icelanders speak English, as do the vast majority of immigrants. The result is that the economy mainly operates in English. Many fear that, given a generation or two, the Icelandic language and much of the traditional culture could disappear.
    • The potential destruction of the real estate market. Most people have much, or all, of their wealth tied up in their homes. What happens if the country's population declines by 10%, by 50%? These are realistic scenarios for this century for countries like China and Japan whose populations have only started to decline. The rates of decline will only get worse as fewer and fewer women have fewer children (South Korea's TFR is less than 1.0 - that means every two people will produce (less than) one child to replace them. What happens when there is a large and growing housing glut?
    • There are military implications, especially for countries that rely on boots on the ground rather than tech to fight their wars. Russia is experiencing this now. Ukraine has a lower TFR than Russia but is only able to make up for the shortage with more women in uniform, older folks fighting, some foreign fighters and just a higher motivation to fight.
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There would certainly be winners and losers.

A historical example would probably be when about a third of Europe's population was wiped out by the plague. It caused a major transfer in wealth from the wealthy to the workers, who suddenly found themselves in high demand. Crashed the "real estate" market on fiefdoms but went a long way towards dismantling the existent serfdom. Had there not been a shortage of specie it might have been un-done even more. The Spanish/Americas gold infusion was still a long way off.
 
phill_nz

phill_nz

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Ease the sheet. said:
Except too many people does not have to equal too much environment damage.

Science/technology has played a large role in minimising and occasionally fixing human impacts.
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look around at the organized, the behind the scenes organized and the blinkered outright adamant nothing is happening that is humans fault campaigns and say that again

we are 8 billion on a planet that will happily be an eden oasis for 1.5 - 2.5 billion
 
E

Ease the sheet.

ignoring stupid people is easy
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phill_nz said:
look around at the organized, the behind the scenes organized and the blinkered outright adamant nothing is happening that is humans fault campaigns and say that again

we are 8 billion on a planet that will happily be an eden oasis for 1.5 - 2.5 billion
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Yet the planet has sustained a population greater than your 1.5-2.5 billion for a long time and hasn't failed. And may continue with a population of 8 billion for another 1000 years.

The blanket statement "too many people=too much environmental damage" is too simple to be seen as accurate.
 
Lark

Lark

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Ease the sheet. said:
Yet the planet has sustained a population greater than your 1.5-2.5 billion for a long time and hasn't failed. And may continue with a population of 8 billion for another 1000 years.

The blanket statement "too many people=too much environmental damage" is too simple to be seen as accurate.
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I rest my case,
 
phill_nz

phill_nz

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Ease the sheet. said:
Yet the planet has sustained a population greater than your 1.5-2.5 billion for a long time and hasn't failed. And may continue with a population of 8 billion for another 1000 years.
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wasn't what i said though was it
or
do you not comprehend a difference between
existence living
and
living in an eden oasis

fuk me
if all you want on the planet is rats, humans and cockroaches we could easily sustain well over 30 billion
 
3to1

3to1

Super Anarchist
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Ease the sheet. said:
Yet the planet has sustained a population greater than your 1.5-2.5 billion for a long time and hasn't failed. And may continue with a population of 8 billion for another 1000 years.

The blanket statement "too many people=too much environmental damage" is too simple to be seen as accurate.
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that 'long time' you allude to sure as fk isn't on a geological/planetary time scale. 'long time', my ass, more like the blink of an eye.

we don't deserve to be here or belong here. our human legacy is ecocide.

I can barely wrap my head around this shit...
 
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B

BeSafe

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Lark said:
I rest my case,
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If you look into the literature and there does appear to be a biological 'fail safe' that deals with overcrowding in mammals. The 'rat utopia' experiment is an easy one to find but we aren't rats and we have technology to mitigate some of the programming.

But chronic stress - such as that caused by overcrowding - does have some rather pernicious and life-shortening impacts. My personal belief is that the rather dramatic increase in Gastrointestinal ailments including things like stomach and colon cancer will get ultimately correlated to chronic stress. Given how the limbic system works, that seems like an pretty straight forward conclusion. But I also believe that some of the societal changes are likely to be similarly correlated. Since we're not allowed to do science above the neck, that'll always just be a correlation, but it's there and seems logical to me.
 
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