World population in line for a crash – revisited

Tags

Charles G. Darwin, humanities survival, Laws for humanities survival, Thomas, Thomas Malthus, William Blake, world population, World population smoothed

3 1/4 years ago, on August 6, 2019, I posted that World population was in line for a crash. The driving factor for the crash was that world population was very large and doubling so fast that there would be an overshoot of the ability to feed living people. There is a list of 11 reasons the food supply will be difficult to maintain, even at year 1 CE population levels. At that time, there were approximately 0.2 billion people, and now there are 8 billion, which is sixteen times as many people. Even in Classic Roman times, the population was pushing the ability of farmers to supply enough food, and there was a balance of people and available food. People without food simply died. The problem for modern times is that we are feeding our huge population with food created by a high-tech society based on fossil fuels. The Green Revolution will provide us with a temporary alternative if it can be fully implemented in a generation, but only with the absolute cooperation of every independent political and economic entity in the world and there needs to be population stabilization, but both of those human activities are unlikely. My generation created four times as much food, and we are planning for that trend to continue for a while longer.

The post from 2019 is copied here:

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The measure of man and everything else. Picture by William Blake.

I guess I haven’t been my usual chipper self since reading The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells and then large doses of The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin. Both of these books are an analysis of the existential relationship of the human species and obvious problems that will soon confront us with oblivion. Both are logical assessments of the future and both state clearly that a shortage of food is the limiting factor, as Thomas Malthus’s theory that population expands to its food supply stated more than two hundred years ago. Wallace-Wells states it as approaching because of climate warming ruining crop production. But that serious problems are already upon us and will during the life expectancy of children now living become unendurable. Darwin, writing in 1952, wasn’t that grim, but stated that a margin of starving people was the natural human state. Strangely, Darwin didn’t discuss atomic warfare, even though he was a major player in the Manhattan project to create the first atomic bombs.

World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

I made this World Population History Smoothed five years ago and the slope hasn’t changed appreciably. It is wonderful that our planet is now feeding so many people, but the return to the natural condition that Darwin says is the natural state of man will come within the next doubling of population. The problem with that projection is that the world population doubled in fifty years from 1925 to 1975, and is on course to double again in fifty years from 1975 to 2025 because the birth rate is about the same as it was, but with a much larger population. If the pollution-created warming continues, and much of that warming is already inevitable, the food supply will fall. When that happens, there will be incredible efforts to save one’s, own national group. And some of those national groups have atomic weapons.

If they are used, this will be what that population curve will look like at Doomsday and for a while thereafter.

If Doomsday repeats itself, there will be repeated drops.

The destruction of food creation happens in several ways in this scenario: 1. destruction of existing food supplies located in cities, along with the people in those cities; 2. destruction of the distribution of food chains to bring food from supply depots to the people; 3. heavy overcast from dust in the air preventing the crops already in the fields from maturing; 4. lack of distribution of seed for next year’s crops; 5. lack of fuel for transportation to bring seeds and fertilizers to the areas where they can be used; 6. lack of fuel to operate the farm equipment which is needed to plant, plow, cultivate and harvest the crops; 7. infestations of insects which, without insecticides, will eat what few crops are available; 8. lack of skilled farmers to operate the equipment; 9. lack of knowledge of where and how to distribute what crops are available because of lack of infrastructure; 10. continuing hostilities and threat of new hostilities and problems of local organized and unorganized hostilities; 11. and the unknown unknowns and the unknowable unknowns, which will probably bring on the worst problems.

The use of even a few of those weapons will not only kill many people but will greatly disrupt the agriculture needed to create any food at all, and the world population might drop back to “Biblical levels.” That sounds impossible, but consider how difficult it will be to create food when fields can’t be used because there is no fuel to plow and harvest and no fuel to get what is created to where you live. Our food supply is nearly impossible to create without the use of fossil fuels. On top of which, try raising your own food with overcast skies and no seed stock, and nothing but human labor to do the work.

A history of major war deaths is shown on a logarithmic chart.

World famine 1860 to 2016 from ourworldindata.org

If you are reading this, be thankful that of the billions of years the universe existed, you got to live and participate in the good times for a while.

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Then after the BIG EVENT, (BE) the living people will eat the existing food before a new crop can be created and harvested. Because of the problems listed above, creating fresh food will be very difficult, and the population will drop well below the 1 CE level of 0.2 billion. The event will be so prominent that the calendar may be revised to Before Big Event (BBE) and After Big Event (ABE).

The human population expands to the total food available.

I intend to begin all human encounters in a friendly way, and for me, that tends to be a little too joking and soliciting of improvisation from the other person. It puts off ordinary people, and even those I know well. I tend to make funny remarks about serious things. Probably I watch too much Steven Colbert and others of my improv heroes. It relaxes me to begin conversations in a lighter vein, but it makes other people anxious.

I was involved with some improv groups for a while and loved it, but being 85 years old meant my short-term memory wasn’t great. They don’t talk much about memory as part of improv, but you must be able to remember seven people’s names on one encounter, their occupation, and what they were talking about, and then to make a helpful response, or you are not going to be good at improv. The goal is to keep the conversation flowing by prompting each other with comments relevant to the flowing situation. The primary suggestion is to cultivate the habit of saying, “Yes … AND!” This means keeping the situation flowing by offering ideas for others to respond to with their “Yes, ANDs!”

My decades spent near the academics in Berkeley were dominated by finding faults with the other people’s propositions and beginning by saying, “Yes … BUT!” Then proceeding to destroy their theory. This procedure is legitimate because the goal is to reveal a deeper reality. We seek to discover Ah-ha moments.

We, as a public, never discuss the fact this can’t last forever, and in international organizations, it is off the table of discussion. Yet, during our lives, our human life expectancy has gone up by thirty years. It’s because of better food and medicine, water, sewage treatment, dentistry, surgery, and less war.

All of the things on that list lengthen life when there is plenty of food, but there isn’t an infinite supply of food at any time, so there can’t be infinite growth at a given moment. Food makes life possible, and the things on the negative side of the list have been functioning like predators which trim off the unlucky and generally sicker members of the living population.

We have an innate fear of predators! However, there are reported to be 72 shark bites per year, and no deaths, versus 100 million sharks killed by people per year. We aren’t shark food, and it’s hippos that kill about 500 per year but don’t eat their victims; lions kill about 22 out of 8 billion people. Our real problem with death these days is what is called old age.

Few people die from starvation, but that will not last much longer.

COVID – 2022-09-05 versus population

Covid’s seven-day moving average of Daily New Cases has been trending downward from 1,016,424 on July 22, 2022, to 532,052 today, and that’s down nearly 200,000 from 722,904 ten days ago. Of course, it isn’t over until it reaches zero cases detected. Today’s Covid death rate is down to 1,659, which is 208 below five days ago’s 1,867. The overall total worldwide death rate is about 152,300, so Covid only kills about one person per hundred of those who died. It is the 211,000 population growth per day combined with global pollution that is the ongoing natural threat to humanity. A major war is always a horrible possibility, but everyone is afraid of that, and it is always used as an ultimate threat. However, its happening will probably be a mistake rather than an intentional event.

It is the burning of fossil fuels because of the increasing demand of ever more people that is the current clear and present danger. The pollution is obvious, but the money made by burning the fuels overrides the danger. The world governing bodies’ refusal to discuss the population problem may change when we finally stumble into a worldwide famine. Population control will become a subject of discussion when it is hurting everyone.

World population in line for a crash

Tags

Charles G. Darwin, humanities survival, Laws for humanities survival, Thomas, Thomas Malthus, William Blake, world population, World population smoothed

The measure of man and everything else. Picture by William Blake.

I guess I haven’t been my usual chipper self since reading The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells and then large doses of The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin. Both of these books are an analysis of the existential relationship of the human species and obvious problems that will soon confront us with oblivion. Both are logical assessments of the future and both state clearly that a shortage of food is the limiting factor, as Thomas Malthus’s theory that population expands to its food supply stated more than two hundred years ago. Wallace-Wells states it as approaching because of climate warming ruining crop production. But that serious problems are already upon us and will during the life expectancy of children now living become unendurable. Darwin, writing in 1952, wasn’t that grim, but stated that a margin of starving people was the natural human state. Strangely, Darwin didn’t discuss atomic warfare, even though he was a major player in the Manhattan project to create the first atomic bombs.

World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

I made this World Population History Smoothed five years ago and the slope hasn’t changed appreciably. It is wonderful that our planet is now feeding so many people, but the return to the natural condition that Darwin says is the natural state of man will come within the next doubling of population. The problem with that projection is that the world population doubled in fifty years from 1925 to 1975, and is on course to double again in fifty years from 1975 to 2025 because the birth rate is about the same as it was, but with a much larger population. If the pollution-created warming continues, and much of that warming is already inevitable, the food supply will fall. When that happens, there will be incredible efforts to save one’s own national group. And some of those national groups have atomic weapons.

If they are used, this will be what that population curve will look like at Doomsday and for a while thereafter.

If Doomsday repeats itself there will be repeated drops.

The destruction of food creation happens in several ways in this scenario: 1. destruction of existing food supplies located in cities, along with the people in those cities; 2. destruction of the distribution of food chains to bring food from supply depots to the people; 3. heavy overcast from dust in the air preventing the crops already in the fields from maturing; 4. lack of distribution of seed for next year’s crops; 5. lack of fuel for transportation to bring seeds and fertilizers to the areas where they can be used; 6. lack of fuel to operate the farm equipment which is needed to plant, plow, cultivate and harvest the crops; 7. infestations of insects which, without insecticides, will eat what few crops are available; 8. lack of skilled farmers to operate the equipment; 9. lack of knowledge of where and how to distribute what crops are available because of lack of infrastructure; 10. continuing hostilities and threat of new hostilities and problems of local organized and unorganized hostilities; 11. and, the unknown unknowns and the unknowable unknowns which will probably bring on the worst problems.

The use of even a few of those weapons will not only kill many people but will greatly disrupt the agriculture needed to create any food at all and world population might drop back to “Biblical levels”. That sounds impossible, but consider how difficult it will be creating food when fields can’t be used because there is no fuel to plow and harvest, and no fuel to get what is created to where you live. Our food supply is nearly impossible to create without the use of fossil fuels. On top of which, try raising your own food with overcast skies and no seed stock and nothing but human labor to do the work.

A history of major war deaths shown on a logarithmic chart.

World famine 1860 to 2016 from ourworldindata.org

If you are reading this, be thankful that of the billions of years the universe existed you got to live and participate for a while.

World population, wars, famines, and atrocities

Tags

Atrocities, Famines, human survival, Long term human survival, Wars, World population explosion

I am not attracted to these issues, but they are important to consider when the subject of human beings and their long-term behavior and survival is considered.

World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

A history of major war deaths shown on a logarithmic chart.

World famine 1860 to 2016 from ourworldindata.org

The greatest modern famine was occurring in China in 1959-61, under Mao’s rule, right when I was transitioning from being a US Air Force pilot into being a grad student and prospective Unitarian minister in Berkeley, California. Both of those careers fizzled out while a deadly event of nearly the magnitude of the recent World Wars and of the 1918-19 flu epidemic was occurring. I knew of this event but it was a tiny portion of the public consciousness at that time and all but unknown now. So much of that loss of life from famine was because of economic/political/war events. Thus, the 24 million of the 3rd chart is part of the 40 million of the second chart, – #3.

The premise of yesterday’s post postulated by C G Darwin was that in normal times, that is approximately ninety percent of the time, there is a semi-starving subsistence group of humanity. That condition of constant famine always lurking he maintained hasn’t been the case since the beginning of the industrial revolution, because people discovered how to convert the energy of coal and gas buried for millions of years into food energy for humans.

The two top logarithmic charts, which go back to 3000 BCE and 400 BCE, show that growth spurt which is starting to accelerate about 1600 CE and reaching its current growth rate about 1750. The third chart only goes back to 1860, which is well after the industrial revolution was underway and it doesn’t show the thousands of years when daily near-famine was nearly ubiquitous. The difference between the many millennia of natural near-famine and the modern hundreds of years of a condition of rare famine is illustrated in the slope of the curves. When food is plentiful, as it is now, then the population grows rapidly and the line is steep, but when food is in a natural balance with a population the line would be horizontal. The fact that the human population was doubling every thousand years meant that humans were slowly developing new ways to create more food for themselves. They were discovering ways to put formerly inedible things theretofore unused as foods onto the dinner table by new methods of preparation. Such things as various ways of cooking otherwise indigestible foods, and of course the development of agriculture and livestock domestication and improvements. But all of that took lots of human effort to till the soil, etc., until the discovery of coal and oil and the development of tools to use these newly available forms of energy. 

We are living in a Golden Age of superabundance based on one-time use of limited fossil fuels. Enjoy!

 

World population passes 7.7 billion humans

Tags

7.7 billion people today, Intentional stupidity, World population smoothed

Last night I went to a movie/lecture based on David Attenborough‘s movie, Climate Change—The Facts. That’s a new movie but it is similar to this YouTube The Truth About Climate Change (BBC – Part 2).

After the movie, I spoke up with a complaint about the movie in that it never made the slightest mention of the impact of the world population on the climate change problem.

I held up my cell phone with the instantaneous rollover of population number expanded to fill the screen with the population turning 7,699,999,999 to 7,700,000,000. In the audience of about forty people, no one made a single comment on that fact. Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926, just as the world population crossed 2,000,000,000. Simple mathematical division means there are 3.85 times as many people now as when he was born. If the population were still at that level, the current climate change problem wouldn’t exist. With our current technology and its movement toward sustainable energy consumption by direct usage of solar power via solar panels and wind energy, the problem would never arise. Click here to find the exact number of people living on Earth at the present moment from http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

It can only be intentional blindness to that simple fact that is going to make the collapse of current fossil fuel civilization incredibly painful.

Intentional blindness to facts is my definition of stupidity.

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Updated 2019-04-27

Update of Probaway.wordpress.com World Population history tweaked

29 September 2014

The exact number of people living on Earth at the present moment from http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ is 7,264,145,184. This is an estimate, and the historical figures are clearly even more speculative. The previous Probaway post World population history graphed and smoothed took several authorities’ estimates and drew a more easily remembered line through their speculations. Below I have tweaked those charts to make them even easier to memorize.

Update 2019-04-13 11:40 PM PST = 7,697,122,700

People like to think the population is leveling off, but the worldometers current estimate of population growth this year is 23,042,700.

World population history estimates from the United Nations, Hyde, McEvedy, and Probaway

World population from 5000 BCE to 2025 graphed on a logarithmic chart. The data is smoothed but within error bars of demographers.

Another fact is that our population is living at a higher energy-consumption level than  previously.

A balance between food availability and population will be maintained.

Update on World Population History

Tags

A smoothed estimate of population, World population explosion

Update of Probaway.wordpress.com World Population history tweaked

29 September 2014

The exact number of people living on Earth at the present moment from http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ is 7,264,145,184. This is an estimate, and the historical figures are clearly even more speculative. The previous Probaway post World population history graphed and smoothed took several authorities’ estimates and drew a more easily remembered line through their speculations. Below I have tweaked those charts to make them even easier to memorize.

Update 2019-04-13 11:40 PM PST = 7,697,122,700

People like to think the population is leveling off, but the worldometers current estimate of population growth this year is 23,042,700.

World population history estimates from the United Nations, Hyde, McEvedy, and Probaway

World population from 5000 BCE to 2025 graphed on a logarithmic chart. The data is smoothed but within error bars of demographers.

Another fact is that our population is living at a higher energy-consumption level than  previously.

A balance between food availability and population will be maintained.

World population passes 7.4 billion humans.

Tags

Coal and oil abundance, Population is 7.4 billion people, world population

We all like to think the world population explosion is under control, and that various things like educating women will solve the problem. I am optimistic about our current population because our technology has been making it possible to support even more people. It appears likely that there will be plenty of food to supply us for this next year.

We are tremendously dependent upon stored energy in the form of coal and oil to supply our farms and economic system with the power to make the food crops grow, and to transport this food to us. However, the price of these stored energy items has been dropping these last few months, and that should mean more abundant food and lower food prices. All of this bounty permits us to eat better and grow healthier, and for us to create more babies. Those extra people will consume more food, but we now have it.

There is a new genetic technique called CRISPR that is proving its ability to modify DNA in ways that will permit much more food to be created with less energy input, and less water. That bodes well for an increase in population for perhaps another ten or twenty years. At some point, with exponentially increasing population, the trend must come into balance with a food supply that is no longer increasing. Fortunately that time is not now, but when that time comes we must act appropriately.

The human population at 06 February 2016 9:30 PM PST

For your comparison here is the up-to-the-second current world population from World of Meters.

Life is wonderful now because the Earth is supporting 7.4 billion people.

A coming reprieve from famines caused by population explosion.

Tags

DNA and CRISPR, Future technology, Human food supply

Even since Thomas Malthus’s 1798 book on the limits to population growth there has been an intellectual worry about humanity reaching its population limit. The problem is that there can not be an infinite growth based on a finite food supply. Malthus was unable to predict the vast increase in the food production because of the subsequent two hundred years of technological inventions, and during that time the population exploded from under a billion mostly hungry farmers to over seven billion mostly well fed non-farmers.

I have been one of the worriers, and still am in the long run if the population continues doubling every forty years forever, but as always, things are changing, and changing in non-predictable ways. One of the big changes is CRISPR, which is the developing ability to insert exact genes into precise locations on a DNA sequence. When the effect of a gene is known in one species, its effect in another one is often similar. Thus as these things become better known over the next several decades many species of things that are not food sources at the moment will become so, and as the total population is directly correlated to food supply the population will be permitted to increase. Or perhaps the total human population will decrease as wonderful new uses for plants are discovered and developed for other more interesting uses. It is impossible to predict what will be discovered, but with these new tools it is certain that there will be discoveries. It may be possible to grow machine parts. It may be possible to grow components of computers, such as memory devices and CPUs. It may be possible to grow plants that can filter desirable minerals out of sea water, or digest existing low concentration minerals into high concentration ores. There will be totally unexpected new things, and most of them will be good.

The shortfall of natural resources for an expanding population’s living needs other than food may hit harder than food. For example, metals such as copper are essential to our high-tech society, and there are few known resources. If we double the population we will need housing, transportation, and other things that need copper, and doubling the copper in use means doubling the amount that has ever been mined from the ground. Mine-able copper simply may not exist, and there is no good substitute, because silver is too expensive, and aluminum doesn’t work very well.

There are tipping points from obvious dangers, and there are unexpected black swan events from remote but real risks, but there are also preparations such as anti-fragile techniques of preparing for problems by building in multi-functionality into structures and processes. Also, there are standard techniques of always maintaining enough slack in the situations so you can easily recover, before your competitors do.

The problems are growing but our ability to cope with them is growing too.

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER) – review

Tags

Book review, Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, The EarthArk Project

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER) is such a powerful book that I was shedding tears of desperation at the end of it. I am still reeling from last week’s suicide of the most energetically positive person I have ever known. But that was a single human death, and when I read this book I was overwhelmed at the looming tragedy of seven billion humans and innumerably more other living beings. This book has photos that will astonish you, and overwhelm you if you let them, with the vastness of the human overpopulation problem.

I have blogged about the population problem many times, but my posts are more abstract and more grim than this book. This book is about the living and is positive in proffering the feeling that a solution can be found. I doubt that conclusion, because of the non-inclusion, or at least the soft-pedaling, of environmental degradation and major wars in their population projections. The official population projections that are published here and elsewhere are based on business-as-usual projections, the rationalization being that it is a projection of hard data of human population growth rather than speculation about the carrying capacity of the Earth. I would contend that the loss of natural resources like soil, coal, oil, air, water is predictable hard data and predictable continuing loss of them should be calculated into the population projections. But the inclusion of these factors creates an ugly picture of a major population collapse at some point within the life expectancy of newborn children. Realistic population projections are off the table for consideration in political discussion because it would lead to obviously untenable conclusions of what must be done. People are driven by confirmation-biased motives of a hopeful future and avoid facing ugly problems, like famine, until they are actually involved in their consequences.

In the book we see many beautifully done photographs of human over-success. The photo of a Beijing, China’s three-layer deep freeway interchange with  ten lanes on top of each layer, and all of them packed with cars, it’s shocking. The photos of vast cities of compacted people are eerie, because sometimes they are stacked vertically, and sometimes they are squashed horizontally, and sometimes they are squeezed on a flat island in the ocean, and sometimes hanging off a mountain hillside.

The over-success of humans is ultimately created by the super-success of the production of food, for without food to feed these seven billions of people they wouldn’t exist. That problem isn’t really developed in this book; instead they stress lowering the total population thru the emancipation of women, educating them and convincing them it would be better for humanity for them not to have children. Preaching to these people seems preposterous to me, because these women compressed into horrible living conditions have a constant reminder of over-population pressure. Also, the population reduction pundits have been saying these things for two hundred years, ever since Malthus, and it hasn’t worked yet. We have had a nonstop population explosion ever since he published. Wars and disease are temporary population reduction events and –

The only thing that consistently reduces population is lack of food, and starving is a terrible way to die.