Populations

I am going to express the unpopular position now.  The number one threat to continued human existence is the run-away population explosion that we have seen since the Industrial Revolution, and driven forward at an amazing rate since the Green Revolution.  We have been well aware of it since at least the 60s.  America's birth rate is still too high, and our life-expectancy continues to grow our numbers too quickly, but nothing as compared to the developing world.  There, you can not avoid seeing exactly what the population explosion is doing.  It is the main driving force behind our increase in resource consumption, green house gas emissions, and poverty levels.

More people are being born into a state of abject poverty from which they have no hope of ever getting out of than ever before in human history.  More people with the same or less resources = poverty for a vast majority, e.g. the US must create more than 300,000 new jobs every month just to employ all the people coming into the market, but we can't even manage half that amount.



While this is only one part of the overall global climate change puzzle, it is by far the greatest driving force, and something we cannot fix within our lifetime; population growth has a 20-40 year inertia and normally results in small changes in the overall birth rate per generation.  Changes we make today wont have any effect on our population growth until past the point of no return, and the changes we could make today will be inadequate to stop run-away global warming if that is all we do.

Survival of our species not only requires that we (internationally) reach a zero population growth, but also that we quickly reduce our numbers.  As we reach a world-wide population of 10 billion, the probability of mass kill-offs from pandemics, famines, and war (resource competition) gets drastically higher.  This is the same for all species that overpopulate beyond the environment's ability to support them.

Now, that is the big picture of human population.  Human life is not cheap, in fact it is so expensive it is overtaxing the entire planet in every measurable way.  Just to pay for our lifestyle we are causing between 10,000 to 100,000 other species to go extinct every year.  We are witnessing the first ever life-created mass extinction event, and we are the cause.  So that is the big picture.

Now, I'm not advocating that people start removing themselves via suicide to fight global warming.  No matter what we do as individuals, the political inertia of nation-states will likely thrust us head-long into war as our resources dry up.  Drug resistant strains of common illnesses are already well-established in our populations.

As people begin to starve when they are unable to get the nutrients they need to stay healthy normally for want of adequate food, outbreaks will happen.  The developed world will begin to resemble the third world as world-wide crops fail, and so we will not be spared the mass outbreaks that are all to common in places like Africa and India.  Pharmaceutical companies already don't produce enough of all the types of medicines necessary to fight off the wide variety of potential pandemics.

The percentage of the population that is psychologically able to commit suicide is just too low to prevent these things from happening.

Individuals might as well live and try to make themselves positive forces of change in the world.