Friday 29th of March 2024

getting crowded...

 

mad 1975

Planet Earth is becoming an ever more crowded place, and by 2023 the world population is expected to top 8 billion people, a new United Nations report projects.

Men are forecast to make up the majority of the population, according to the annual report released Wednesday; In fact, figures show there were already 102 men for every 100 women on the planet.

As of mid-2017, there were about 7.6 billion people living across the globe, according to the report. Asia currently holds the title of most populated continent, with more than 4.5 billion people living in its countries in 2017. The number is expected to rise to 4.9 billion people by 2030 and 5.2 billion by 2050.

read more:

http://www.newsweek.com/population-world-earth-planet-people-628109

There are two major ways to extinction: dwindling numbers and overpopulation (soon leading to dwindling numbers by conflicts, lack of resources, unsustainability and monotone DNA) ... Do rats commit suicide?

 

 

still ticking...

This is when we need the machines (Artificial Intelligence) to help us out of the major problems facing us in this race towards the maximum possibility, in which we get less and less leeway to solve our inadequacies, including global warming. Artificial Intelligence does not fear pain, nor death and does not have the responsibility of failure, yet it can make the most elegant prognostic and solution for human happiness...

See: winning intelligence...

 

See: 

http://www.dieoff.org

living planet...

Research suggests that the scale of human population and the current pace of its growth contribute substantially to the loss of biological diversity. Although technological change and unequal consumption inextricably mingle with demographic impacts on the environment, the needs of all human beings—especially for food—imply that projected population growth will undermine protection of the natural world. Numerous solutions have been proposed to boost food production while protecting biodiversity, but alone these proposals are unlikely to staunch biodiversity loss. An important approach to sustaining biodiversity and human well-being is through actions that can slow and eventually reverse population growth: investing in universal access to reproductive health services and contraceptive technologies, advancing women’s education, and achieving gender equality.

read more:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6335/260

 

population

the sin of growth...

 

...

Smith has pushed population higher up the agenda and, among other things, shone light on the madness of baby bonuses and the need for family planning in overseas aid. He’s also highlighted the lack of planning to sustainably meet Australia’s infrastructure needs while maintaining our quality of life. Yet, so diminished are these positive contributions by his cherrypicking alarmism, the man arguably most responsible for eliciting the Gillard government’s new Sustainable Population policy has received a level-headed repudiation in it. Happily, the government seems to recognise that it’s a self-serving chimera to think that rapidly stabilising Australia’s population somehow helps to combat global population growth. It doesn’t avoid 500,000 extra people per year, reduce fertility rates, save battery kids, cut our contribution to climate change, or fend off starvation and thirst. This reasoning just dissolves into a colourful cocktail of excuses to keep Australia to ourselves.

In a world like the one the happy little flock of sheep enjoys out at Bowylie, the impulse towards a ‘small Australia’ seems fair enough. It seems less fair in a world struggling with 7 billion people, and having to accommodate the population equivalent of another 520 Sydneys by 2050. Australia should stabilise its population over the coming decades, but in a way that helps the world manage the enormous challenges of doing likewise. For one of the world’s richest, least populated, best fed and watered countries per capita, to do otherwise is neither reminiscent of Wilberforce’s fight against slavery nor worthy of the generous can-do spirit we associate with Dick Smith.

Read more:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/june/1306984106/guy-pearse/comment

Guy Pearse — a research fellow at the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, a former political adviser, lobbyist, speechwriter and author — like Dick Smith, gets it half right. The problem in Australia also reside in the very fragile ecosystem, apart from kangaroos that breed like rabbits. Did I mention rabbits? Or cats? Or foxes? Or humans for that matter? Dick has found his niche — his estate — cleared some bush-land unless someone had cleared it before he bought it, say in 1852. I am sure (I would not have a clue) that the electronic king is now totally self-sufficient on his plot with a vegie patch, solar panels and some chooks — and a shit-recycling plant. One needs a lot of dosh and space to reach this level of graded bitumen two-kilometre road with a private airport. So, I trust that Dick with his many kids, feel the pain and pangs of being highly privileged. He'd like less junk on shop-shelves and more carefully made long-lasting product. This makes sense, but, unfortunately, the procurement of continually obsolete junk is what makes some people richer — people who can thus reach Dick's glorious serene level of richness. Dick's vision is flawed but Pearse's views are too. Harvey, the king of retail floorage, is not that embarrassed about selling more stuff: the more people the more buyers. He has more property than Dick and some pooping horses as well, for racing — horses that may or may not provide him with a tax deduction.

The overpopulation problem is getting urgent. Nature gives us a few hints as nearly 500 people got killed by a landslide in Sierra Leone due to record rain. Nature is showing with one and half million people being presently displaced by record monsoons that it still rules the roost. But is it enough? How many people being wiped out by global change do we need to take proper notice? a couple of billions? Will nature eventually kill off more people than we can give birth too? Or will human nature do the trick with little wars? Who knows...

There might not be a drop of rain on Dick's property for the next three and a half years and his bore could run dry. This is the risk we take. The next level of global warming won't be so kind — but global warming does not exist in the mind of too many poor people breeding like rabbits... Sorry, I already have mentioned rabbits. Record weather change is on the cards. Not totally a wipe out yet. Look if you live in Sydney, Sydney has one of the mildest winter on record, today's minimum was 12 degrees Celsius above average and the maximum is predicted to be six above average. at six o'clock in the morning it was 22, but by now the temperature has dropped to 21 (due to evaporation), before climbing to 24 or more in the afternoon. It's Winter for crissake, with pockets of miserable cold around the country but mostly warmer than average everywhere.

Summer here is likely to be like hell. Europe's "Lucifer" will seem like a picnic. That's why a couple days ago, the firies did some "back-burning" of the bush around Sydney to "prevent the risk of massive bushfires"... The air of Sydney became worse than Beijing on its worse days of pollution. My chronic bronchitis took a hit. I had to stay indoors. I soon will be out feet first. Meanwhile let me be like a poor Dick and warn you about overpopulation. 

Read from top. 

 

 

you don't need to be einstein...

‘Every particular mode of production has its own special laws of population, which are historically valid within that particular sphere. An abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man’ – Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, pp783-784

‘You don’t need to be a scientist to know what’s causing the sixth mass extinction,’ began Professor Paul R Ehrlich in a Guardian article on 11 July. Given the ‘developed’ imperialist world’s throwaway consumerism and the well-documented destruction of the environment by multinational corporations, it should indeed be fairly obvious. Ehrlich however names one main culprit: population growth. His solution? Some unspecified form of ‘humane’ population reduction. Apparently the reason you don’t need to be a scientist is because the pseudo-science of eugenics suffices. Ehrlich must be refuted with science – the science of Marxism. It is capitalism’s need for infinite economic growth that is destroying life on earth. BARNABY PHILIPS reports.

Ehrlich is best known for his 1968 book The Population Boom, which warned that the next two decades would produce mass starvation across the world. He advocated ending US food aid to ‘developing’ capitalist countries, government-imposed population control and enforced sterilisation of fathers of three or more children in India (p151). Time proved Ehrlich wrong, but now he is back with a team of researchers who have announced that earth’s ‘sixth mass extinction is underway’.

read more:

http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/environment/4944-the-sixth-mass-ex...