Comments on: What is scarier than Halloween?

By: Denise

Denise — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:46:11 +0000

As far as we know this population growth is pretty unprecedented. Therefore, people won’t really know how to deal with it. That’s one reason why agriculture has become so tainted. There is so much pressure to grow/herd large quantities of food, therefore it’s done in an unsustainable manner.
It’s going to take a lot of painful trial and error.

By: Knightly

Knightly — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:10:04 +0000

@Schenck: You’re right that ecosystems tend to reach equilibrium, but only if they grow slowly. Do you know what happens in a lake when there’s an algae bloom? The fish suddenly have far more food than they need, and the lake can sustain many more fish, so there’s a population boom. The population grows so quickly that there isn’t enough time for the ecosystem to rebalance. Suddenly there are far too many fish, no algae, and no oxygen in the water. Nearly all of the fish die.

By: Knightly

Knightly — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:06:43 +0000

When I finished my radiation treatment I got to keep my mask, and all the people at the hospital said I ought to use it as a Halloween costume. I’m still not sure how, unless I want to go as a brain cancer patient, which is both scary and offensively tasteless.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:24:21 +0000

Warren, when do you think various countries will figure out how to put that in other people’s water?

By: Warren

Warren — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:56:37 +0000

There’s only one solution I’ve ever really been able to come up with. Universal contraception, for both genders, saturating the human food and water supply.

The only way to conceive is for the man and woman to both agree, then to go on a specialized diet that counteracts the contraceptives in both the man and the woman. Children are never conceived without 100% mutual consent in both the man and the woman.

(Now some cultures will object to the idea of women being given a choice. Some religions will object to contraception. Fuck them. It’s not just their damn planet; it’s everyone’s, and there is absolutely no reason to give religion respect if all it’s got going for it is scribblings in a moldy old book.)

Without this, human population will lead to global catastrophe, and it will be a human catastrophe, which will mean an unimaginable amount of suffering. Way, way beyond anything in Soylent Green. Think Irish Potato Famine, worldwide, forever.

By: CherryBombSim

CherryBombSim — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:17:20 +0000

“No one anyone knows today was born prior to this interval.”

Well, there are still of few of them left. (I just went to my grandmother’s birthday party.) Can anybody think of another species that has quadrupled in size globally within the lifespan of one individual?

By: Marion Delgado

Marion Delgado — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:44:27 +0000

I won’t rest until every lemming and vole is paid out in full for their infamy in driving poor Disney camera crews over cliffs in their mad Muridaenan frenzy.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:56:13 +0000

I just want to point out that lemmings aren’t lemmings. Or, more accurately, what people think lemmings are is not what they are.

By: Schenck

Schenck — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:15:08 +0000

GL:
Ok, right, you’re talking about the impossibility of us having +1billion/decade, agreed, that’s not possible. So why is it scary? It does not mean that we’re going to have a massive pandemic killing a few billion people, it does not mean that we’re going to have mass starvation with a few billion people dying of starvation and thirst, and it does not mean that we’re going to have a few billion people dying in a global flood. It /could/ mean any of that, but it just as equally could mean that our population growth rate tapers off, and that /is/ what we’re seeing everywhere, in the west, and in the ‘undeveloped world’. In the west it happened slowly over decades and is now pretty low, and in the ‘undeveloped world’ its certainly lagging behind the west, but its dropping at much higher rates. People are moving from having 8 children to having 0-2 in a generation.
Further, as far as starvation and water resources, we have a much higher capacity for food production today than we ever had before, and we have much better technology for creating drinkable water than we ever had before. Also, a threatened population can, today, move much more easily than it could even a generation ago, to places where there is abundant, even high waste, of food resources.

We’re not lemmings, and while our history in, say, the american west is more like an ‘r’ than a ‘k’ selected species, those terms don’t really hold meaning for humans anyway.

J. Thomerson
“As someone alluded to above, the best way to slow populstion growth is for women to have their first child at a later age. Someone, maybe Sokol, did the math on this back in the 70’s or 80’s.”
In some ways this is, as i understand it, similar to lowering lifetime reproductive success, which would be similar to having only 1 child, even if you have them when young. The exception to that is you still get a cumulative effect, because you could have many generations overlapping at once if everyone has children when young.
Another alternative is to skew the gender ratio torwards males. And notice that places like India, its currently generally illegal to ID the sex of a fetus, because people are preferentially aborting females. I’m not saying that’s what we should be doing, but its interesting that the actual social response corresponds to what the management response (in, say, a wild population) would be.

By: Jim Thomerson

Jim Thomerson — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:35:43 +0000

There are a fair number of examples of populations following a logistic growth curve, but overshooting carrying capacity and making a ‘J-curve’ population crash. Humans have many of the characteristics usually associated with K-selected organisms. Creatures which can sustain a 0 growth population at or just below the carrying capacity. On the other hand, we conduct ourselves like r-selected organisms, successional beings which destroy our habitat and make it unable to sustain us.

My guess, and only a guess, is that our population will be crashed by a global epidemic, or a series of global epidemics.

As someone alluded to above, the best way to slow populstion growth is for women to have their first child at a later age. Someone, maybe Sokol, did the math on this back in the 70’s or 80’s.