This week, an article was released on a digital forum called “Why climate change is an irrelevance, economic growth is a myth and sustainability is forty years too late”. Commenting on the piece,Dick Smith (a very well known Australian ….) observed that it was “A very powerful article on the link between climate change and population growth. I wonder why organisations like United Nations have policies on climate change, but not population growth? Well worth the read!”
Meanwhile, memes on the internet have been floating around since 2013 quoting David Attenborough remarking that: “Someone who believes in infinite growth is ‘either a madman or an economist’”. More recently, speaking at the start of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Attenborough picked up the same theme in a speech in which he declared:
“I am quite literally from another age... I was born during the Holocene – the 12,000 [year] period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm, and create civilisations.”
As Attenborough went on to explain, the Holocene period supported trade in ideas and goods, and made us the globally connected species we are today. Stability has allowed business to grow, nations to co-operate and people to share ideas but, as Attenborough warned:
“In the space of my lifetime, all that has changed. The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans.”
So, why would an Australian record-breaking aviator, philanthropist, political activist and serial entrepreneur and a globally known broadcaster and natural historian be saying these things …?
Simples … Our family got big – fast!
The website ‘Our World in Data’ has a chart that shows the increasing number of people living on our planet over the last 12,000 years, including the mind boggling changes over time. That is: the world population today is 1,860-times the size of what it was 12 millennia ago when the world population was around 4 million – half of the current population of London.
What is striking about the data is that almost all of this growth happened very recently. Historical demographers estimate that, around the year 1800, the world population was only around 1 billion people. This implies that on average the population grew very slowly over the period from 10,000 BCE to 1700 (by 0.04% annually). After 1800, however, this changed fundamentally: The world population was around 1 billion in the year 1800 and has increased 7-fold since then.
All of these people need to be feed, watered, and sheltered. And all this has an effect.
There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about Cascade Theory – that is, the existence of an inevitable and sometimes unforeseen chain of events caused by an act affecting a system. While people will draw their own views as to the validity of the theory, there are a few inescapable facts:
· We have recently seen Glaciers, which have existed since the last Ice Age, melt.
· The Living Planet report estimates the number of vertebrate animals in the world (everything from mammals to birds to fish) has halved since 1970.
· In the six years to 2016, the annual rate of land clearing in Queensland increased by 330 per cent - from 92,000 to 395,000 hectares. (395,000h can be hard to visualise, but it's an area roughly the size of Sydney or Melbourne. It's the equivalent of 1,500 football fields cleared per day per year.)
· 1.7 million hectares have been burnt across Australia—mainly on the eastern seaboard in NSW and QLD in the last month. As a comparison, the Amazon fires that spread through Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay burnt through 900,000 hectares; and the recent fires in California burnt 100,000 hectares.
· Current tests have found Microplastics in canned fish. Meanwhile current estimates are that by 2050 there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish.
· Groundwater bores are designed to draw fresh water out of the ground, but the pressure on bores has been so intense in some locations along Perth's south coast that the bores have begun pulling up salt water instead.
· Modern scientists and Generals alike already think that future wars will be fought over water.
While dire predictions and unpleasant facts are one thing, the real challenge is to work out what to do about the overcrowding of the plant. In the article quoted at the start of this blog that Dick Smith commented on, the conclusions were fairly clear:
“Firstly, to stop getting side-tracked by the climate change industry and recognize that the problem is our sheer numbers and blatant disregard for the planet’s health – not the climate. We must replace political and economic agendas and warped ideologies with better education (especially in science). We need more global promotion of family planning, more female empowerment and government incentives to have fewer children – not more. And sadly, we should have been proactive about all this stuff at least 60 years ago, instead of just waking up to our self-inflicted predicament now.”
Of course opinions on all this vary, and like Arseholes everyone has one. In the past Scientists have been wrong, but then again so have Mums n’ Dads, the Vatican, Farmers and Governments.
So what’s your plan for your future and that of your offspring? Because if you don’t act now the fires, dust storms and water shortages we are experiencing now may seem like a pleasant holiday for your grandkids.
Do the right thing - because it’s the right thing to do.
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