Growing world population will cause a “perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned.
By 2030 the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences, Prof John Beddington said.
Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion, he told a conference in London.
Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways, he added.
If “Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways”, then why is he making a prediction?
Why does anyone think his, or any 20 year out prediction means anything?
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”– H.L. Mencken
See also: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager]Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon’s futures wager.[/url]
#1 – so you don’t believe it’s possible for us to overpopulate and have more people than we have resources? Have you ever been to sub-saharan Africa?
#4: I grew up in Sub-Saharan Africa (southern central Africa) and lived there until I was 30. It has the potential to be the richest region in the world, blessed with vast tracts of superb agricultural land, huge mineral wealth, great river systems. Since the 1960’s, gross incompetence, corruption, war, and lack of education and skill has created an entirely unnecessary series of famines, epidemics, and shortages.
Using Africa as an example for a Malthusian argument makes sense only if you believe that humans have no power to alter their environment to sustain themselves.
Weren’t the same academic hippies preaching this same doomsday scenario 35 years ago? And look what happened — the population has tripled, and worldwide people are healthier and living longer lives than ever before.
Apparently, Prof. Beddington either isn’t aware of, or has doubts about TEC’s MDGs. PB Jefferts Schori and her gallant crew will put all these worries to rest well before 2030. As Episcopalianism spreads around the globe, former neanderthals will be enlightened and begin aborting their babies left and right. The population will actually decrease to a comfortable 4 or 5 billion by 2030. Supply will far exceed demand and prices will drop to 1960s (the Golden Age) levels. Utopia will be ushered in, and we’ll all look back on Prof. Beddingtion’s dire forecast and chuckle.
This is basically Paul Ehrlich with a new date. However, Beddington did say one thing that was salutary:
[blockquote]Professor Beddington said: “We have to address that. We need more disease-resistant and pest-resistant plants and better practices, better harvesting procedures.
“Genetically-modified food could also be part of the solution. We need plants that are resistant to drought and salinity – a mixture of genetic modification and conventional plant breeding.[/blockquote]
Europeans (and many Africans) have a paranoid attitude toward GMF that has no basis in science whatsoever. While I don’t want an apocalypticist like Beddington to have too much influence, if he could get his fellow Europeans to start acting rationally about GMF an awful lot of people could be saved from premature death. Of course, he wouldn’t necessarily consider that a good thing….
“so you don’t believe it’s possible for us to overpopulate and have more people than we have resources? Have you ever been to sub-saharan Africa?”
Yes Andrew Johnson, I was born there. It is dying of AIDS, and crises caused by corrupt, warring governments and factions.
I’m guessing from the implication of your question that *you* have never been there. Or you would see thousands of miles of uninhabited, FERTILE countrysides. Zimbabwe, for example, went from being the bread basket of Africa to being its basket case.
It’s amazes me how easy it is to fear the vast teeming horder “over there” in Africa and Asia, when really, we’re just like you are. We want to live quiet lives, working with our hands. Technology has provided ways to provide food for a world population orders of magnitude larger than the current one. (And that is not even considering the precipitous decline in populations in the west and industrialized east, along with a leveling off in the middle east.)
I tired of these population bomb horror warnings in the eighties. I wonder what the predictions will look like in the 2030’s.
Please excuse my many typos. The grammar in my mind is not half as bad as the way it is once it reaches the keyboard.
Thanks for your firsthand perspective justinmartyr. Typos and all.
I have never been to Africa myself (always wanted and still intend to) but from my extensive readings about the continent, it seems to have always been suffering from starvation, famine, and “overpopulation” in various parts — so much so that their own tribal leaders would sell their vassals (or more likely, the captured vassals of a neighboring tribe) into slavery. But none of the starvation and famine that has been so nearly constant since before their history was first written on paper appears due to “too many people but too few resources”. No, it seems to have always (and still) been the withered fruit an endemic “backwardness”, of which war and corruption are either the cause or the result.
At some point, the world may have to grudgingly acknowledge that Africa, as a continent, was at its most productive, and at its most peaceful, in the days when European countries extended their influence there, into their colonies. “Independence” for Africa has often brought Marxist dictatorships, or right-wing Fascism, and resultant and coincident poverty and misery.
Is it possible that we, as a world-wide “society,” could ever bring ourselves to acknowledge this, and somehow reverse the trend of Africa toward dusty death? Africa appears to be dying, slowly committing suicide. And no, I have never been there. What I “know” of it is from what I read, what I see in media, and what I hear from those who have been there.
Africa was for the most part better off under the colonialists than “independent” — as a large proportion would acknowledge. Having visited Zimbabwe recently and witnessed the (recent and irrational) devastation I’m left with more questions than answers as to solutions.
I am certain though that democracy is not the god it is made out to be. A failing majority will vote in failure. Also, cultures that put a strong emphasis on personal and family achievement and individuality succeed where those that play the blame game fail. (Compare the failures of the African Americans, Africans, and South America, with the incredible successes of the Vietnamese, Chinese, and other Asians.)
Is he nuts?!? Birth rates are falling world-wide. Sheesh.
[blockquote]March 19, 2009
[url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/global_warming_alarmists_propo.html]Global Warming Alarmists Propose Limiting Population … to the Point of Extinction[/url] Gregory Young
In a statistical study entitled “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,†published in Global Environmental Change by Murtaugh and Shlax of Oregon State University, and again published here, the authors propose that the potential savings from reduced reproduction rates among humans are some 20 times more effective than the savings wrought by life style changes.
It is clear that the authors follow the Liberal mantra of the ends justify the means. If we can reduce carbon emissions by reducing the number of children, then we should do it, they gloat. It appears that carbon reductions trump even “life†itself. They summarize:
[i]Much attention has been paid to the ways that people’s home energy use, travel, food choices and other routine activities affect their emissions of carbon dioxide and, ultimately, their contributions to global warming. However, the reproductive choices of an individual are rarely incorporated into calculations of his personal impact on the environment. Here we estimate the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual causes when he or she chooses to have children. The summed emissions of a person’s descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-to-day activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment.[/i]
The following very compelling [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFgyjlStBYQvideo analysis[/url] explains the study in some detail: {note: follow the link for the video}
By the authors’ desires, if we would limit every couple to having only one child, we would solve the Global Warming problem for every one. Again, humanity itself is the cause of all the woe, and the best thing for us to do is just stop procreating — or just drop dead. Living human beings are bad for the planet.
Indeed, the authors purposely fail to mention that their proposal puts humanity on a fast-tack extinction curve, as reproduction rates fall below population replacement rates. Surely, as statisticians they know this well. Within a few generations, there wouldn’t be any one around to measure, least wise care, about carbon emissions. We would all be dead.
But golly, we would save the planet! Just goes to show you, Liberals are all about death and destruction. They absolutely live for it!
I’ve got a thought, why not have liberals first show us how it’s done…. Go ahead liberals — take the lead in this thing. Limit your own population first, and the rest of us might, “maybe,†consider what you have to say.[/blockquote]
Sorry, the video link should have been:
The following very compelling [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFgyjlStBYQ]video analysis[/url] explains the study in some detail: {note: follow the link for the video} .
I forgot to close the first bracket.
And [url=http://davidwilkersontoday.blogspot.com/2009/03/urgent-message.html]David Wilkerson[/url] speaks again (remember his book “the Vision” put out in the 1970’s?):
[blockquote]I am compelled by the Holy Spirit to send out an urgent message to all on our mailing list, and to friends and to bishops we have met all over the world.
AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE – EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US.
For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires—such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago.
There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be looting—including Times Square, New York City. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, not even a depression. We are under God’s wrath. In Psalm 11 it is written,
[i]“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?†[/i](v. 3).
God is judging the raging sins of America and the nations. He is destroying the secular foundations.[/blockquote]