Policies are already in place. The people not enforcing those policies share the fault in the failure and should be made to be.

At this point, anyone clearly involved who points fingers is at fault, in my eyes. They should be made to pay – financially, as well as with jail time for crimes against humanity, the environment, and anything else we can trump up.

“That I know very well the difference between what is going to happen in the world, and what should happen is also the reason why you don’t see me proposing detailed plans on how the latter is to be done. It makes little sense to list details if it is simply not going to happen although I can of course do that.”

Well, that’s fair enough. People can believe what they like.

My worry is that there are people who think they can make it happen, and intend to try.

It would have simplified things if you had said from the first that you didn’t advocate such actions, just that you thought we were doomed if we didn’t do them. The way you phrased it often made it look like you was advocating it. Hindsight is 20:20.

“Please, stop quoting Julian Simon for anything. The guy has the same sort of credibility on these issues as Sunday school pastors have on evolution.”

There are different opinions on that. To some people he has credibility and to others he does not. You can’t take your own opinion and assume everybody holds it. Especially if you’re then going to claim something like that Paul Ehrlich was “100% correct in everything he says in the long term”.

“To end it, let me address my supposed “incivility”. If you say things that uninformed or outright stupid, I will form a certain opinion about you, as will anyone else who can sport the errors. You can not do anything about that. The difference between what most people would do and what I do is that I am going to tell you my opinion about you in your face. I call this honesty, in our society it is called incivility. So be it.”

You can tell somebody that they’re wrong without calling them a moron, clinically insane, or on the intellectual level of yeast. Even better, you can explain to them why they’re wrong. It’s actually a lot more effective at making the point than simply calling them stupid.

This is intended to be helpful to you in making your case. Personally, I think that sort of incivility is just funny, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If you resort to ad hom instead of presenting an argument, it gives the impression that you have no argument, and is an easy win for me. You can carry on doing it as much as you like as far as I’m concerned.

But on an intellectual level I do prefer a debate that challenges me to construct a proper counter argument. Your point of view is interesting, and has in the past been influential. It is not without influence even today. So in considering the merits of what one might call the Ehrlich-Simon debate, it is desirable that each side is represented by the strongest arguments for it possible.

The strongest arguments, even for Ehrlich’s thesis, do not include ad homs, association fallacies, assertions that it’s “obvious” and one would have to be stupid not to see it, or that one has a marvellous proof that the margins of this blog are unfortunately too narrow to contain. It’s such a shame that having found such a solid believer in Ehrlich, that he is unwilling to act as an effective advocate.

Still, it is your choice, and you may well choose not to waste your time with me. I think if you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t be doing it.

And if we’re doomed whatever we do, you had might as well enjoy life while it lasts, eh?

1. First, I think it should have been clear by now, but if it’s not, I will state it again. I have no illusions about what is realistically politically possible in the world we live in. Which is why my predictions about the future our clear. Massive die off and civilizational collapse at some point in this century. I am not arguing about what can be done, I am explaining what should be done based on purely physical arguments. You keep coming back to me with objections about how it is unethical, how totalitarianism has been a disaster in the past, how I have no right of telling people what to do, etc. These are completely different planes of conversation. When I say that the laws of physics dictate that we restrain ourselves because you can’t wish matter and energy into existence, I do not care at all about the ethical implications of this statement. Ethics is a purely cultural concept with zero relevance to the real world. What matters is whether the species survives or not. Am I being “unethical”? Probably yes, but it does not matter with respect to the issues we are discussing.

2. That I know very well the difference between what is going to happen in the world, and what should happen is also the reason why you don’t see me proposing detailed plans on how the latter is to be done. It makes little sense to list details if it is simply not going to happen although I can of course do that. When I talk about global governmental structure I mean that we need to dissolve nation states and have decision making based on taking into account what happens in the world as a whole, because in the physical world that we live in (as opposed to the fictional world we think we are living in) borders do not exist, but if you have nation states whose primarily objective is maximization of the perceived inclusive fitness of their own citizens, this is not going to happen. In a way states are very large tribes and an extrapolation of the stone-age between-group competition on a grand scale. But we need global cooperation and coordination, not global competition. It seems a very obvious conceptual point to me.

3. When I say that coercion will have to be used if we are to get the situation under the control, this does not mean that I embrace the use of violence. It is an empirical observation (in general, I claim that there is very little ideology in what I say and my position is mostly values-free). Is it bad and unpleasant? Yes. Would it be good if we could avoid it? Yes. But it is not possible at this point. It is also not possible to really implement it because for this to happen a sufficient mass of people to provide strength behind such an effort should be present, and I don’t see it happening, as you very correctly point out.

4. The US is indeed the second most overpopulated place in the world because it uses a quarter of the world’s resources, the majority of which it imports because it has already exhausted them on its own territory. It may export large quantities of food but imports most of its raw materials (oil being on top of the list) and has also exported most of its pollution (which is the reason why lunatics (it is the exact word) like Lomborg and Simon claim that the environment has been getting better – locally maybe, but in general not; more pollution and environmental destruction is happening right now, but it takes place in the Third world in the process of producing goods for the First world). This is by definition a state of overpopulation as the amount of resources used exceeds what the environment can provide.

5. I indeed see infanticide is not being a murder. The abortion debate has centered around the issue of whether an embryo is a “person” for a long time. It is ridiculous to think it is, but if it is not, then why should the newborn be considered a person? It has no experience and self-awareness (human infants do not recognize themselves in the mirror, for example), so what is it that makes it a person? And as it was again correctly pointed out, it has not been considered a murder in many cultures. So why not? I again stress that this is not a desirable thing to do, but is empirically necessary.

6. It is absurd to claim that agriculture enriches soil. You grow a plant on it, then you take aways that biomass and the nitrogen and minerals it contains, then it ends up in the river and from there in the sea. Net results – nitrogen and minerals taken aways from the soil and deposited in the sea, soil is poorer. That is unless you return all those nutrients back to the soil which has generally not been happening historically, much less in civilizations that built big cities. If you irrigate, it becomes even worse, because irrigation leads to build-up of salt in the soil which makes it useless eventually. So in the long-term (it is really not that long, ancient Mesopotamian agriculture collapse in a matter of a millenium or so due to that problem) it is unsustainable, unless you develop very complicated systems of closing the natural nutrient cycle. For which you need very good understanding of ecology and soil science among farmers.

7. This is the reason for the 50 million figure I mentioned. It is indeed “pulled out of thin air” in the sense that it was meant to be a ball park figure to serve as a guide to what is close to the true desired figure, to be arrived at after careful analysis of the data. I don’t understand why anyone would trust figures of the 4 to 40 billion kind as realistic estimates for any other reason than that it matches what they wish the number to be. Just because someone compiled some estimates does not mean that this estimate it correct and too everything into account. Such estimates assume agriculture of the present kind or better, but even present-day agriculture is simply not going to be possible without the huge energy and fertilizer inputs that have made it possible and that will not be available in the future. Remember, it is not just energy, once phosphate rock reserves are gone, agriculture collapses, and this is not the only factor (there is something called the Liebig’s law of the minimum, the implications of which everyone should seriously think about). Once you take those things into account, the maximum supportable numbers go down significantly. The concept of maximum carrying capacity is somewhat fallacious too, however. Because carrying capacity varies with variations in climate, disasters, etc., humans should never be at maximum carrying capacity. Other species are, but once the carrying capacity decreases, even temporary, death rates increase accordingly, which we do not want. So we should be safely within limits, say at 1/3 or 1/2 of it at most, to avoid such disasters. Then there is the issue of maximum carrying capacity at what consumption level. Obviously, you can have a lot more subsistence farmers than people developing high-tech, the question is what do we want. I happen to think the latter is better, again, not for ideological reasons, but because it is better for the species in the long-term, but this means a further reduction. In the end the 50 million is a ballpark figure, it may actually be even lower than that, or it can be in the 100-200 million range, but there is very little reason to think it is feasible to have a billion or more human beings on the planet.

8. The reason why think radical action is needed urgently is that the data shows that the time between now and the point at which overshoot will cause global collapse is very short. It maybe as short as a decade, or as long as 4 or 5 decades, but it is highly unlikely that we have more than that. Given that human ingenuity does not seem to be on course to solve the problem in that time, it is foolish to just let things take their natural course (although this is what will happen in reality). You can have as much faith in human ingenuity as you want, but you need not also have faith in that, but have faith in the ability of human technology to rapidly reorganize the whole of human society in a matter of few years, against the background of diminishing resources and rapid disintegration of social organization, which will be the only signals of sufficiently large magnitude to cause us to start seriously thinking about “solutions”. This has been discussed so many times that I do not understand why people keep bringing it up

9. What really ticks me off it the combination of the following two claims. First, it is stated that we need more humans on the planet because this will somehow increase the total amount of “human ingenuity” and will give us a better chance of overcoming the resource crisis (never mind that if by doing so you increase the chance of the numerous technological silver we need to make it being found simultaneously from something like 0.00006% to 0.0009%, while you increase the chance of collapse before that from 60% to 90%, you have only dug yourself in a deeper hole). Then when I stress the importance of education I am accused of being elitist. Well, if practically the the entirety of that population consists of poor illiterate people in the Third world and of religious fundies in the West, with both groups being extremely unlikely to contribute to advancement of any science or technology, then how exactly are we going to increase the amount of human ingenuity on the planet? It is never made clear.

10. Please, stop quoting Julian Simon for anything. The guy has the same sort of credibility on these issues as Sunday school pastors have on evolution.

To end it, let me address my supposed “incivility”. If you say things that uninformed or outright stupid, I will form a certain opinion about you, as will anyone else who can sport the errors. You can not do anything about that. The difference between what most people would do and what I do is that I am going to tell you my opinion about you in your face. I call this honesty, in our society it is called incivility. So be it

11.

If you’re trying to prove a point, you should try to avoid bullying people with insults. According to most professional mathematicians, that last thing you want to do in proof is to bully someone in accepting what you say because it’s “Obviously” true, just because you say so and you’re the expert. If you want to prove something, provide empirical evidence and show us the method you used to arrive at your conclusion. If the Earth can only support 50 million prove it! Show us the data and the equations that provide definitive proof.

Overpopulation is a problem. The Earth’s biosphere has a finite carrying capacity and we need to start figuring out ways to live within the means of what the planet can support. Few people would support going to extremes to rapidly reduce population. This debate over “culling” the population down to some arbitrary number is pointless. It would be more useful to develop sustainability models so that we can try to plan accordingly.

That answer was far better. Although still laced with unhelpful insults (you rarely persuade anyone more easily by insulting them first), you do at least present some serious argument. That’s good.

[To the moderators - apologies for the long length. I think GM's post is worth answering in detail. I'm happy to break it up into more manageable chunks if you wish.]

“Carrying capacity is very well established ecological concept.”

Unfortunately, yes. It’s also poorly defined and virtually impossible to calculate in other than the most trivial of circumstances. The problem is that the capacity depends on the behaviour of the organisms, which depends on their number, so you can’t extrapolate from low population examples. And it depends on external circumstances – the responses of other organisms, the weather, etc. which have noisy distributions. It is many orders of magnitude harder for humans, who also have technology.

“In the absence of other negative feedback mechanisms, populations grow exponentially until they overshoot the carrying capacity”

They don’t; or rather, those negative feedback mechanisms always exist. Growth is very rarely an exact exponential. Even yeast only behave the way they do when put into unusual circumstances for which they are not naturally evolved – they normally live in stable communities on the surface of the fruit.

Some species do live with unstable reproduction, which causes periodic population crashes. It’s not entirely clear whether this is deliberately evolved – the rapid expansion in good times enables them to take advantage of short-lived but abundant resources – or whether it is to do with external changes like the removal of predators by humans. Either way, population biology isn’t as simple as you make out.

“it is true for humans. If you have found evidence that invalidates decades of research on the subject”

Julian Simon wrote an entire chapter of his book, going through the decades of research showing that even primitive humans pay a great deal of attention to controlling their population. Ability to support a family is an important aspect of dowry calculations, and many people have taboos and primitive birth control practices to try to prevent them. Including, unfortunately, infanticide.

See Chapter 24 of his book The Ultimate Resource.

“it can happen through changes in one or both of the two quantities that determine population size, birth rate and death rate”

That’s right. Well done!

“the much less painful choice is decreasing the birth rate. What is so hard to understand? That the majority of people will have to be forced into complying with such a policy is an unfortunate consequence of the mass ignorance of the population about the way the real world works.”

I agree that the less painful choice is reducing the birth rate, and as discussed above, people do that anyway. (In the West, birth rates have in many places fallen below replacement level.) The problem is the coercion, and your assumption that you know more about the way the world works than the people whose lives you are interfering with.

There is a political philosophy given the technical name “totalitarianism” which holds that the authorities have the right and duty to regulate every aspect of people’s private lives, for what they see as the common good. Their domain is the totality of human society, hence the name.

This isn’t offered as an insult – there are rational arguments for totalitarianism, as you have noted. The basic problem with it is that in many past cases the totalitarians have turned out to be totally wrong about what was best for society, or at the least, to have opinions that other peoples and eras have disagreed with. And it has no built-in means of self-correction – dissent and experimentation with alternatives being disallowed. It has as a result acquired a bad reputation, and the dangers are seen as outweighing the possible advantages. You might want to have a think about that.

The problem is that you have got your calculation of carrying capacity wrong. Billions of people are telling you it’s wrong, but you have decided that you know best, they’re all ignorant, and will have to be forced to follow your prescriptions for their own good.

Anyone who argues with you, you classify as “people to be mocked for their idiocy”, and ignore. If you had the power, would you shut us up entirely? If you happened to be wrong, how would you find out?

“What maximum the carrying capacity is is determined by the combination of population size and per capita environmental footprint.”

If this is meant to be a definition, it is incorrect. Firstly, you can’t have population size itself as an input – the carrying capacity cannot vary with population size. Secondly, the per capita environmental footprint is not a constant. And thirdly, environmental footprint is not defined, and people will argue about what should and should not be included as an “impact”. (Mostly, it is any effect on the environment that they personally do not like.)

You also don’t mention resource availability, renewal, substitutability, etc.

“You can have a lot of poor, illiterate and hungry people, or you can have a smaller number of well educated, healthy and well fed people leading fulfilling lives.”

Oh dear.

“while poor illiterate and hungry people will keep breeding themselves into ecological collapse, because their understanding of the issue is usually not better than that of yeast.”

Oh, dear, oh dear.

“The only way you could have the population and per capita environmental impact growing indefinitely is if you can indefinitely increase the long-term carrying capacity of the environment.”

Well done.

That is indeed the question. Technology can increase carrying capacity, by getting more from less, or more from more widely available resources. Can it do so indefinitely? I don’t know. If I knew the future, it wouldn’t be the future, it would be now. But we are in the process of finding out, one step at a time. And so far as the current step is concerned, there are no problems.

“Historically, we have increased the carrying capacity of the planet on two occasions.”

Historically, we have done so on millions of occasions. Any helpful technology frees up capacity we can use to solve other problems.

“it is unsustainable in the long-term due to soil degradation”

Agriculture makes the soil more fertile.

Soil is something that is made continuously. It is created, recycled, destroyed, and reborn. Agriculture manufactures soil on a large scale. There is no more reason (less, probably) to think that artificial soil is any less sustainable in the long run than naturally created soil, which has been continuously created for hundreds of millions of years. We use basically the same process.

“The second was the use of fossil fuels and other mineral resources, which is quite obviously a temporary increase in carrying capacity, even on the surface.”

I’d be interested to know if you would say the same about nuclear.

But as has been said before, fossil fuels only need to act as a stepping stone. Nobody thinks they’re going to last forever. But they don’t have to; they only have to last long enough to fuel our development of the next step.

We have to keep on moving to get to the next step. If we stop, and try to eke this step out forever, then we will crash.

As they say, the stone age did not end for lack of stones.

“because we are rapidly destroying the ecosystems of the planet on which we depend”

The statistics and measurements indicate that the environment is getting better, healthier, cleaner, and better protected. The more prosperous we are, the more resources we can devote to preserving and controlling our environment, to make sure we’ve still got it. (As you know, entire books have been written making that point.)

That doesn’t mean we should make a fetish of it. Like any species, we are going to have an impact on the environment, and some level of impact is tolerable. But with prosperity and technology we have a choice.

“we have exhausted the top of the resource pyramid”

we have exhausted the top of this resource pyramid. There are others.

“So this technological miracle will have to not only happen, but happen very fast.”

It is happening all the time. Take a look at the history of the world since the industrial revolution. Take a look at the 20th century. It’s happening very fast, and it’s still accelerating.

“the empty claim that “We’ve been fine before, we’ll be fine again”.”

We can’t offer any guarantees – just good odds.

We look at technological progress: through the age of steam, of steel, of skyscrapers, roads and railroads, of engines and motors, of telegraphs and telephones, of aeroplanes, of gas lights, of electricity, of explosives, of fertilizers, of plastics, of radio, of textiles, of mass production, of automation, of computers, of lasers and fibre optics, of nuclear reactors, of mobile communications, of medicines and implants, of X-rays and 3D body scanners, of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, and a million other revolutions that I don’t have space to mention.

And you think it might stop?!

Well, yes, it might. If you get your way, it almost certainly will. But it is all a reflection of the ultimate resource: human ingenuity. The greatest danger is that we run out of human ingenuity, and it seems to me that the only way we could do that now is if we run out of humans.

Humans are what drives that progress – six billion of them running in parallel, trying to solve problems. Each of them possessing one of the finest problem-solving engines that three and a half billion years of evolution has been able to come up with. And finally, they have the numbers to start to set aside the daily fight for survival, and put that vast power to use.

And now you want to stop it.

“Again, if you can not provide a better argument than that, you will be treated accordingly.”

You only had to ask…

“And until I see you properly address these points or agree with them, you will be treated with zero respect, period.”

Which is a shame, because it will put people off listening to you, and convince them that your ideas are just as unpleasant.

You have to constantly test your own ideas out, to make sure you are not falling into error, and the best way to do that is to talk to people who disagree with you, who will point out any flaws if they can. You have to be tolerant and pleasant enough that they will keep on talking to you, without that meaning you have to agree with them. And you have to respect other people’s right to hold different opinions, even if you think they’re wrong.

It is perfectly possible for intelligent and knowledgeable people to disagree honestly. Just because they don’t agree with you doesn’t mean they are ignorant morons, on a level with yeast. Nor does it mean they are part of a grand conspiracy funded by political or industrial interests to deliberately and dishonestly distort the truth.

While I disagree with you, I don’t want people to ignore you because of your decision not to respect any opinion that differs from yours. I wasn’t entirely joking when I said that I found your attacks useful in making my case. Others have to look at our respective arguments and claims, and come to some judgement of their own. And I’m well aware that I’m not exactly playing on home turf, in here.

This last post of yours was pretty good in that it had a lot of solid content. If you can get over the need to have everybody agreeing with you, it could be good.

Instead you wish to play semantic games about word choice. So here are some definitions. While you have not used “cull”, the meaning is “anything selected from others; especially something inferior picked out and set aside”. This seems wholly in line with the gist of your commentary. If not please explain why not. You state you do not mean “genocide” and have not used such. “Genocide” means “the systematic extermination of a whole people”. How can we achieve your “required” results and avoid committing such an act? Nowhere in your “plan” (however void of details it is) do I see the necessity of ensuring that each and every distinct “people” have some representation in the resulting numbers, and indeed some of your statements would imply such is not viewed as important at all (that they be well educated seems to be the only requirement you offer) – thus the end result would assuredly be numerous acts of genocide (whether stated or not). You state you never stated anything about “humane”, just “less cruel”. Humane means “kind, merciful, civilizing” – such would generally be considered as acting in a less cruel manner. While you never stated anything about “sterilization” such would assuredly have to be viewed as “less cruel” then forced abortion and infanticide. Thus I do not understand why you protest over the word choice. They are very much in line with your implied meaning.
By point:
1: Yes, it is a well established concept, and one that includes many subjective determinations involving standards of living, acceptable dietary make up and other such variables. There is nothing in my statements that indicate on any level I believe in unlimited, never ending resources being available for our never ending population growth. Our disagreement has nothing to do with an argument that such limits exist. You may want to try reading more carefully so as to understand what, exactly, is being questioned. Again, I have seen realistic estimates ranging from 1~2 billion all the way up to 40 billion depending on the precise make up of the above variables. The closest you have come to any such number is “50 million”, which is obviously just something you pulled out of the air in a moment of attempted hyperbole and does little to establish my being able to determine if your subjective assumptions are agreeable to me.
2: As we have not established an agreeable estimate of carrying capacity I am not willing to agree with you that at this point we need do anything in regards to the current population size. Even given the possibility that we *may* agree that such a capacity has been reached, or is likely to be reached in the near and foreseeable future, there is no compulsory requirement that I agree with your assertion that it is more desirable to take the actions you champion rather than to allow a more natural birthdeath rate to prevail. I in no way need agree that a forced “global governing body” performing acts of state sanctioned violence is more desirable then allowing natural selection, which for many reasons may well be more beneficial to our species then trying to “play God”. Such is an ethical construct, and one we have not even begun to explore in this conversation. You simply pound your chest like an adolescent male with too much testosterone and profess your “solution” to the problem is uncontestable. I see no pressing need to agree with your undeveloped moral views.
3: While an over simplification of the theories I’ll grant the basic validity of your definition. Granting such in no way means I must agree with the rest of your rant as it has moved from science into the realms of ethicsmorality, sociology, politics, psychology and demographics, at a minimum. There are many reasons the footprint between different societies are different, not just the extreme of starvation level on one side and 1000 word computer bloggers on the other. Even prior to the population increases due to industrialization and the “green revolution” there were vast disparities between areas and societies “per capita environmental footprint”. You are also failing to acknowledge that even without the increased crop yields attributable to fossil fuel byproducts, huge increases in yield are equally attributable to genetically developed crop strains which have greatly added to the yields as well (part of the “green revolution” is in fact the development of substantially higher yielding crop varieties). Thus your implication that we would, or have no choice but to, return to pre-industrial population levels is debatable.
4: Again, who said anything about infinitely growing anything (be it resources or population)? You really need to stop creating make believe counter arguments that you then use to pontificate in order to try and somehow show the world how superior your thinking skills are. In fact one of the ongoing disagreements I have with some in this blog is the idea of Keynesian economics as mostly it’s just a good way to ignore, at least for awhile, the terrestrial limits of our resources. In fact at its core is the idea of unending growth controllable by government through monetary policy…
5: Again, you are arguing against your own made up argument. There is nothing in what I have said that even approaches an attitude that I believe there will be some “technological miracle” negating the need to recognize natural limits. I did state that after the fall of Rome the world transformed itself back to a more agrarian society and population levels throughout the previous empires boundaries returned to levels which could be locally supported, and that such would be very likely to be the result in an energy reducedlimited future (though the path may indeed be bumpy). Again, you state we have reached the point of over reach and the end is upon us. Leaving aside that there have been those proclaiming such for centuries (as the line in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” puts it in regards to Tiny Tim’s demise “reduce the surplus population…”), I again ask you *which* number in regards to carrying capacity you are championing? Here are a few estimates and the reasoning behind them, some say we have reached it, others suggest we are just now approaching it (and I can’t even get you to actually take a stand on an estimated number that would allow an actual discussion of its merrits): http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu03pe/uu03pe0c.htm (estimates range from 4 billion to 7 billion, depending on living standards), http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html (1 billion long term sustainability in the absence of oil), http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.optimum.html (2.7 billion up to 5.1 billion, depending on assumptions concerning the variable of global biocapacity and average footprint), http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3090 (roughly 3 billion, a return to the levels reached around the start of WW2)

You started with the statement of the desire for the solution to be “less cruel”. I pointed out that who considers something “less cruel” is greatly affected by which side of any such equation they find themselves on. You then proceed to propound that your idea of “better” is unquestionable, and worse, fail to even realize that you have moved from pure scientific understandings of theoretical limits to the realm of philosophy, sociology, political science, demographics, economics and other such studies concerning mans relationships to each other and societies requirements. What credentials do you have for making such arguments, or are you one of those who feel due to their mastery of one area they are thus magically endowed with the same skills in any area of knowledge no matter how superficially studied somewhere in their distant past? Your trivialization of the existential problem of establishing a comparative “better” only shows your undeveloped thinking in this area. We have 3 thousand years of examples concerning just how hard such determinations are.

It also conceals an elitist attitude that those who have received an education (and, of course it must be the “right” education) are the only ones who have anything to offer the world and even more, should obviously be the ones doing such decision making. Personally I doubt many of them would have the first clue as to how to survive outside of a civilization that provides all the necessities to them. You also seem to think having free time to ponder abstract knowledge is somehow more important than possessing the skills required to live in a true state of subsistencebalance. Having the theoretical knowledge does not mean one also poses the capability of performing the required labor. There is also an ignorance of the reality that serfdomslavery are the only reason the elites in a less industrialized world ever had time for such pursuits as the study of science and art in the first place (generally they were all somewhat removed from the actual work required to keep themselves maintained). Spend a year or two being totally self-sufficient and let me know how much time you have left to pursue the “finer” pursuits of life.

Perhaps if you stuck to answering the questions asked without the hyperbole, grandstanding and the need to create imaginary dragons to then battle and slay through your superior mental abilities you wouldn’t have to write so much.

Your “arguments” to the extent that you even present such are pathetically inadequate to counter the main point, as you focus on things that are of complete insignificance compared to the crisis we face, while in the same time displaying the same kind of denial that creationists, anti-vaxers, and global warming denialists are infamous for.

1. Carrying capacity is very well established ecological concept. In the absence of other negative feedback mechanisms, populations grow exponentially until they overshoot the carrying capacity, then they stay in a state of overshoot for a little bit, during which time they destroy the carrying capacity of environment, then they crash. It is true for yeast in culture, it is true for deers, it is true for humans. If you have found evidence that invalidates decades of research on the subject, please show it. Until you do that, I will consider you on the same intellectual level as young earth creationists and the other sorts of denialsts and you will be treated accordingly (i.e. not very respectfully)

2. Since populations eventually have to be brought in line with carrying capacity, it can happen through changes in one or both of the two quantities that determine population size, birth rate and death rate. And since the state of overshoot DESTROYS CARRYING CAPACITY it is highly desirable to do that BEFORE the population has entered the state of overshoot, or if it is too late for that, as soon as possible so that to prevent collapse. Yeast and bacteria in culture don’t know anything about such things as carrying capacity so they just keep growing. We, in contrast, do so we can use this knowledge to alter our behavior accordingly. So how do you do that – do you increase death rates or you decrease birth rates? I spend about 10 posts explaining how we have to choose between the two, and how the much less painful choice is decreasing the birth rate. What is so hard to understand? That the majority of people will have to be forced into complying with such a policy is an unfortunate consequence of the mass ignorance of the population about the way the real world works. This is totally irrelevant to the choice we have to make though, it is stop having kids or have a mass die off.

3. What maximum the carrying capacity is is determined by the combination of population size and per capita environmental footprint. Again, nothing to argue with here, if you dispute that, you once again are relegated from the group of people which it is wroth one’s time to have a conversation with to the group of people to be mocked for their idiocy. For other species, the environmental footprint factor in the above equation is relatively constant, for humans it is not, as evidence by the difference between the environmental footprint of starving kids in Sahel and people writing 1000-words posts on internet blogs. You can have a lot of poor, illiterate and hungry people, or you can have a smaller number of well educated, healthy and well fed people leading fulfilling lives. The reason why the latter is preferable is not so much for some ideological reason that puts people leading a Western lifestyle (and of Western European ancestry, which BTW I am not of) above the rest, it is for the a lot more important reason that well educated people at least have the chance of understanding the above-mentioned limits of ecological dynamics and could restrain their behavior so that they do not destroy their life-support systems, while poor illiterate and hungry people will keep breeding themselves into ecological collapse, because their understanding of the issue is usually not better than that of yeast. Of course, here we don’t have just two possibilities, we have the possibility of a lot of well fed people with high per capita environmental impact, who however are not at all well educated, but are actually just as totally ignorant about the way the world works as the kids dying of hunger in Darfur. Which is the worst possible situation as it leads to the fastest and worst kind of collapse, and is exactly what we have now.

4. The only way you could have the population and per capita environmental impact growing indefinitely is if you can indefinitely increase the long-term carrying capacity of the environment. Note the use of the word “long-term”. Historically, we have increased the carrying capacity of the planet on two occasions. The first was the invention of agriculture, which on the surface may seem like it has permanently increased the carrying capacity, but this may not be the case as unless you can create a closed-cycle ecosystem that incorporates agriculture in it, it is unsustainable in the long-term due to soil degradation, and this is without taking the natural climate variations into account (current civilization would end if another Ice Age was to come, just as it will end due to the effect of global warming and it will be because of global failure of agriculture in both cases). The second was the use of fossil fuels and other mineral resources, which is quite obviously a temporary increase in carrying capacity, even on the surface. Temporary increases in carrying capacity do not increase the long-term carrying capacity, as once the temporary-acting factor that allowed them is not longer present, the carrying capacity will be back to what it was before that. If, however, the population has expanded to the maximum of the temporary carrying capacity, as population driven by nothing more than basic animal instincts tend to do (as opposed to rational judgement of the situation), then the population will suddenly find itself in a condition of deep overshoot, and we know what happens then. Again, there is nothing to debate here. So the only way you can have population times per capita impact continue growing (or even remain at current levels) is for another revolution, this time of even bigger scale happens, that will this time increase the carrying capacity permanently and indefinitely.

5. So it happens that not only nothing like this is seen on the horizon, but the data shows that we are in a deep overshoot even without considering the temporary carrying-capacity increasing factors (because we are rapidly destroying the ecosystems of the planet on which we depend) and in the same time those temporary factors that have been keeping us at that level will very soon no longer be there (we have exhausted the top of the resource pyramid). So this technological miracle will have to not only happen, but happen very fast. There are no indications that this is going to happen so it is extreme foolishness to claim it will, yet this is all I hear from you, with zero evidence to back up that claim other than the empty claim that “We’ve been fine before, we’ll be fine again”. Again, if you can not provide a better argument than that, you will be treated accordingly.

I am not going to write any other long posts trying to explain obvious things in this thread, this should be sufficient. And until I see you properly address these points or agree with them, you will be treated with zero respect, period.

You can make all the cracks you wish about others intelligence and comprehension levels, including mine, but pointing out the logical conclusions of what you are proposing isn’t a sign of illiteracy. Mathematical equations are great for understanding how inert substances interact – not so great for explaining animal behavior and not helpful at all when dealing with ethical questions. The logical conclusion of your wish is that you should support every war, cheer each instance of famine and disaster and in general be joyous at every death as it helps balance your equation of carrying capacity.

I really do wonder what type of person it would be that remains alive at the end of your proposed culling of the population, and why you think the scientists and artists stand of chance of being the survivors. It would seem obvious to me that those whom succeed in your plan would be the most brutally unenlightened segment of the population (look around the world and explain to me were you see the intellects “winning” in such circumstances – “civilization” is the first aspect of our existence to fall…). Your desire for such to be carried out by some “universal governing body” is only a veiled desire to be one of those who gets to decide who the losers are in the hopes that you personally would be spared (yes, I noticed your “highly educated” conditional and while you may not recognize which groups would thus be part of the culling I don’t suffer from such delusions). When such starts getting carried out in the lived world there are never such guarantees and chaos tends to reign. Control is the illusion you cling to. If you truly feel this strongly I must assume you have and will not have any children in order to not add to the problem…

Your statement about what occurred in China shows you never actually studied what transpired there. Do yourself a favor and do such so you understand better the all too real consequences of your “dream”. I’m still trying to understand how infanticide, something that unquestionably occurs as a result of the policy, is not “killing” anyone. What are they, microbes? Maybe their infant status somehow makes them not human in your mind? Even Amnesty International recognizes that such has been a direct result of the program (along with abandonment of “undesirable” infants, mostly females). At present the forecast is some 30 million more young adult males than females by 2020 and then there is the 4-2-1 problem – I guess it depends on what you wish to include in “killed by” (and we’d all better hope that 30 or so million young males with nothing to do and no prospects of female companionship remain “peaceful”). Unintended consequences are, as they say, a bitch. And of course we won’t count the deaths caused by the protest riots in the southwestern Guangxi Autonomous Region during 2007 over the regions enforcement of the policy…