Does overpopulation worry you?

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I think human overpopulation is one of the most difficult challenges facing the planet. Countries like China and India are producing more and more people who will need food, electricity, cars. All these will increase fossil fuel use and the conflict the need for oil and gas appears to be fueling. The US, Europe, Japan also have much responsibility.

It seems everyone is ignoring this problem in favour of global warming which is simply a side effect of the massive increase in the population of humans over the last few centuries.

What is your opinion about this?

Get rid of the gas powered vehicles and have every able body work on farms. Develop the land, build canals and reservoirs like the Sumerians did, put people to work and don't punish them if they have difficulties but rather support and help them.

There's plenty of land and sea for everyone, just the current attitudes and greed of those in power prevent people from being productive and having enough to live on.

Population is a problem; so is waste and consumption.


M.

My opinion is...you are correct; it is a problem. However I have already done my fair share to exacerbate said problem by giving birth...not once, but twice. So, I guess I won't complain about China or India...

Actually 2 offspring per couple is required to keep the population at stable levels. Any more than two is a little irresponsible but totally understandable.

No, I don't worry about it; I'm 64 years old. But you younger people better worry...

I have no children, so at least I haven't contributed to the problem

Well since there are nuclear weapons out there in the world it won't always be a problem. What I mean is we will overpopulate until the nuclear nations are locked in unavoidable conflict over resources and at least one of those nations will become desperate and the overpopulation problem will be solved. Either that or pandemic. Perhaps even both at the same time.

A pandemic would be Mother Nature’s way of taking care of things. A nuclear holocaust would be man’s desperate way out of a ’controllable’ situation.

QFT

I do worry about overpopulation; we’re living in nothing more than overcrowded rat cage. If you think things are out of control now, wait another fifty years when very few other people haven’t pick up on the message that this planet is going to hell in a hand basket. At that point I believe Arbie’s idea will come to fruition.

Doom and gloom, folks... Doom and gloom...

yes i think its quite a problem...and i don't necessarily blame India or China..though some countries need to have more kids while others have more than enough....its just that the wrong people are having children...like irresponsible teens, people having more children than they can support, and what not...people everywhere think whats best for them and what they want and don't think about how that's affecting the world all together, they have the right to live their own lives...so its not just a country or two, its everyone.....its a big mess!
you can't control who can have and not have children...well the government can, and they have in the past but its unethical...

its something that i believe can't be solved through diplomacy or free will of people...it will eventually come down to natural disasters caused by lack of resources or not...and even war...

I think people should be educated about contraception and the effect that human overpopulation will have on any children or descendants they may have.

I think its more likely we'll see another Black Death but with a different disease or simply people will starve as we won't have enough food to go around.

It is grim. Very grim. And yet I haven't heard anyone mention this problem for years.

Out of all the "doom n gloom" people, how many live in a medium to big city? How many live in the open country?

As countries develop, birthrates decline. In places where people are in the best positions to be controlled (Europe, Japan) the population growth rates are already below replacement, and the economic issues of having a large unproductive elderly are beginning to surface (this is especially true in Japan).

Over population isn't a huge problem in the long run (unlike global warming etc) because as the world develops further, birthrates are going to decline, and indeed the population of the earth could reach a peak as early as the 2050s by some measure. On the contrary, the burgeoning elderly population is going to create significant economic challenges in the future (think: social security).
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

I'm aware of the problems in countries like Japan but that is what immigration is for.

Overall the global population has grown at an enormous rate over the past 2 centuries. China and India contain about 2 billion people between them. That's a lot of potential polluters.

My main point was that global warming is going to increase a lot as the developing nations like China and India become more industrialised. I doubt any measures taken by Europe and North America will do much to stop the growth in CO2 emissions.

Population control globally and the redistribution of populations is the only long term solution to these problems in my opinion.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation

No, I worry about the next emerging infection.

But non-inhumane methods of population control aren't going to impact the population curve for quite some time; the short term deviation from the projected laissez-faire population curve wouldn't be enough.

China and India are going to be the most important factors in future emissions and likely long term solutions aren't going to work without them, but the emissions are going to be a result of the fact that their populations are already huge; their modernizing so the per capita CO2 emissions are going to rise; but their less developed economies can't accommodate cleaner technology yet. Capping their population wouldn't be enough, you'd need to halt their development.

China is a huge producer of CO2, but its per capita emissions are still much lower than the US (and god know how many other developed countries; although, on the subject of the efficiency it can't afford, China has poor GDP per emission ratios; thus, you stand to gain quite a bit if China can get "cleaner"), so unless you kept the place poor or offed half the population, the emissions have to go up. You can't reasonably depopulate this problem out of existence. It would be interesting to calculate what degree of the rise in emissions in places like China will be due to population growth or modernization; my current guess is that population growth especially in China is going to account for only a small fraction of the total increase.

Yeah. Nature has a way of taking care of itself. I've always said that is what the ebola virus is for.