Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

It's realistic to assume that we can't beat climate change without the US on board, yes.

In the period 1975 – 2018, world population increased at an average of 83 million per year, and reached 7.6 billion in 2018. The increase in 2017 was the difference between approximately 145 million births and 62 million deaths. Despite population growth, the global average daily food supply per person rose from 2440 kilocalories in 1975 to 2940 kilocalories in 2015 (1). However, over 800 million people are undernourished and 300 million adults are obese.

Cereals are the most important crops for food and feed; globally, 45 percent of the cereal production is consumed by humans, and 35 percent by livestock. The remainder is used for industrial purposes, including ethanol, beer, whisky and vodka. The rise in world cereal production since the 1960s is mainly due to two technological advances. The first was Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis, in which atmospheric nitrogen is fixed as ammonia (containing 82 percent nitrogen) which plants utilize for protein formation. Production of Haber-Bosch ammonia began in 1913, but did not begin to rise rapidly until the 1960s. The second advance was the Green Revolution that began in the mid-1960s, after agronomist Norman Borlaug had bred varieties of dwarf wheat that give higher yields in response to heavier applications of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation. The breeding and use of semi-dwarf rice and hybrid maize paralleled that of wheat.

The most striking achievement of chemical agriculture is the maize yield in the U.S., which rose from 2.5 tonnes per hectare (40 bushels per acre) in 1950 to 11.0 tonnes per hectare (175 bushels per acre) in 2016. The global cereal yield rose from 2.81 tonnes per hectare in 1992-96 to 3.91 tonnes in 2012-16 (2). Linear extrapolation of the 1992 - 2016 yield trend (52.3 kg per hectare per year) gives a yield of 5.73 tonnes per hectare in 2050. If the population in 2050 is taken as 9.85 billion (3), and the harvested cereal area remains 718 million hectares (as in 2016), production per person in 2050 would be 420 kg, 10 percent above the 2016 level of 382 kg; the uncertainty is about 10 percent either way. Assuming that the global average cereal yield without using nitrogen fertilizer is 1.6 tonnes per hectare, and that fertilizer increases grain yield by 30 kg per kg nitrogen applied, the global average nitrogen application on cereal crops, 80 kg per hectare in 2015, would be approximately 140 kg per hectare. If the incremental yield-nitrogen ratio rises to 35 by 2050, the nitrogen application would be 120 kg per hectare.

The success of the Green Revolution created three major ecological problems:

1. Globally, about half the applied nitrogen is taken up by the crop plants; the remainder volatilizes in the form of ammonia and nitrous oxide (a powerful greenhouse gas) or leaches to groundwater, resulting in eutrophication (the formation of algae) in rivers, lakes and coastal waters; this creates “dead zones” in which fish cannot live.

2. Applying nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizer to crops changes the balance between these nutrients and those needed in small or trace amounts; the latter include calcium, sulphur, magnesium, iron, manganese, copper, zinc, cobalt, boron and selenium.

3. Approximately 40 percent of global irrigation water is obtained by pumping groundwater from tube wells; this has resulted in the depletion of aquifers and the lowering of groundwater levels, thereby contributing 0.4 mm to the global sea level rise of 3.4 mm per year (4).

As population growth increases the need for fertilizer, it follows that population reduction would ultimately solve the ecological problems. Unfortunately, human nature is such that global population reduction is not feasible. The reasons for this are given in the following.

In 1950, France had a population of 42 million and 20 million hectares of arable land, i.e. 2 persons per arable hectare. The nitrogen fertilizer application on cereals was negligible, and cereal production per person was about 400 kg per year, slightly higher than the present world average. If the ratio of population to arable land were 2 persons per hectare on the world’s 1.6 billion arable hectares, world population would be 3.2 billion. Reducing world population to this size would mean reducing the global average fertility rate (currently 2.5 children per woman) to 1.5 by 2050 and holding it at that level until 2200. The proportion of the population in the 65+ age-group would rise to 35 percent. Such a drastic change in the age distribution would mean raising the pensionable age to 70 years or more.

Adopting and enforcing a population limit for each country would be an insurmountable obstacle, as Charles Galton Darwin pointed out in 1952 (5). To lower the global average to 2 inhabitants per arable hectare, countries such as Canada, Russia, Australia and Argentina would not be required to reduce their populations, but would not be permitted to reach 2 inhabitants per arable hectare; they would be obliged to have a grain surplus for export to countries that need grain imports. China and India would each have to reduce its population to roughly 300 million; the combined population of the two countries would then be 20 percent of the world population instead of the present 35 percent (6). The relative population reductions in Japan and Egypt, which have 30 and 33 inhabitants per arable hectare respectively, would be much greater (6).

The population of China is projected to peak at 1.45 billion around 2030 and decline to one billion by 2100. This is partly a result of the so-called one-child policy launched in 1979 (in reality a 1.5-child policy). It was replaced by a two-child limit in 2016, but the fertility rate remains 1.6. Japan has a population of 126 million and a fertility rate of 1.4; the population is projected to decline to 102 million in 2050 and 60 million in 2100. These projected long-term declines are likely to be halted by pro-natalist policies based on the advice of growth-obsessed economists who believe that population decline results in a shortage of labour. A world population peak of at least 10 billion is almost inevitable, and this would make 70 percent of the world’s population dependent on Haber-Bosch ammonia. This is not sustainable, but there is no solution in sight. As a sustainable population cannot be attained by fertility decline alone, a mortality rise is highly probable. We can only guess when.

Your nation is an enemy of climate sustainability, I grant you that.

Why is Overpopulation Ignored by the Media?

There's no homogeneity at the national level, ever.

To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.

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There's no homogeneity at the national level, ever.

I'm sure that was true in Hiroshima in 1945. There were plenty nice and peaceful Japanese folks there. But they were part of a nation that was at war, and they got bombed like anybody else.

Nations matter. Yours is the main financier of CC denial, the country that went out of the Paris accord and Kyoto before that and disparaged them profusely, and the country with the highest emissions per capita. Your nation behave as a pack of enemies of sustainability and criminals against mankind, mixed with the occasional nice folk.

Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

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To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.

Tell you what: I'm gona say "your nation" if I want to, and you start a war if you want to... It's called freedom.

Beside, don't be ashamed of being an American. Just make sure your next president is not a total asshole, 'kay?

Indeed the implication is that all species of animal or microbe are equally valuable and that the benefit of all (except, by implication, that of mankind) is equally "good".

Mankind has indeed wiped out large numbers of animals who were inclined to kill and eat them. We have caused other species to thrive because we kill and eat them. How bad is that?

Our scientific understanding of the geologic and thermodynamic history of our planet is far from complete, and there are a number of observed cyclic variations in the solar heat reaching the earth, few of which are well understood.

It is interesting to note that about 15% of the land in the Netherlands is about 12 feet below sea level, and no disasters have yet befallen the Dutch people.

Experts believe that New York will set a trend for other coastal cities as it comes to selecting adequate measures. Both Dutch flood experts Bas Jonkman and Ellen Tromp suggest New York also to consider multi-functional levees. Cities as The Hague and Rotterdam have recently completed flood protection projects with levees succesfully integrated in the urban surroundings.

The truth is that nations DO exist, that they are headed by governments who also DO exist and that they DO all sorts of things that DO have an impact on economy, culture and the environment. Your denial of nations does not make them go away.

Ask the good folks in the migrants caravan if borders are real or not, and whether it matters or not which country you live in. Ask anyone who has ever lived abroad, for that matter.

And if nations DO exist and matter, it follows that we should be able to talk about them... If such talk is offensive to your tenders ears, you're welcome to leave the conversation.

None of these explanations has been trotted out in the current case because we have a actual situation before our eyes; we can see the predicted effects of the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

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Well we can read of the projected effects, however the starkly evident fact remains is that the IPCC predictions haver been consistently high with respect to warming. Only in the last few year have they reacted to the growing embarrassments of earlier predictions and made corrections to their models, such as the faster growth of CO2 absorbing green plants in an atmosphere with more nutrients for them - an omission that would not pass muster with any graduate level thesis.

hightor wrote:

That's precisely because the Dutch have long been aware of their precarious situation and have invested heavily in the infrastructure needed to protect them from rising seas. We should be following their lead instead of simply dismissing their situation in order to make some putative debating point.

I agree. They have indeed done that, and, in addition have, and continue to, reclaim more and more land in the Zuider Zee.

I agree that while much effort has gone into often exaggerated estimates of the environmental and economic effects of warming and sea level rise ( good effects are usually omitted and bad ones magnified), far too little has involved a comparative analysis of the relative cost of managing these effects.