Horizon 9 PM today - Attenborough on population

[Pappa]

I left it before the end..

The picture is terribly bleak and all I can say is I am glad I am 59 years old.

There was a recent article in SciAm about ways to feed 60 billion people with current resources. It's sounded reasonable, but then I haven't read any articles from opposing view points.

Paging Malthus!

There was a similar article in the New Scientist about 6 months ago too.

The major problem I see is that the rich are able to wield the power to control water sources, or pay for expensive desalination. The poor can't afford desalination. But, there are millions/billions of people dying in poverty every year anyway, due to lack of water and food. A water/food famine of some kind would presumable kill off more, but then we'd just be back to a slightly lower population level.

Until the whole planet is educated in the way the programme suggested, there will always be third world countries that have massively expanding populations, and thus million of people dying. I can't conceive of a time when the whole world will be educated like that. It's sadly a very long way off and lots of things could happen to knock back any progress in that area.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

There was a similar article in the New Scientist about 6 months ago too.

The major problem I see is that the rich are able to wield the power to control water sources, or pay for expensive desalination. The poor can't afford desalination. But, there are millions/billions of people dying in poverty every year anyway, due to lack of water and food. A water/food famine of some kind would presumable kill off more, but then we'd just be back to a slightly lower population level.

Until the whole planet is educated in the way the programme suggested, there will always be third world countries that have massively expanding populations, and thus million of people dying. I can't conceive of a time when the whole world will be educated like that. It's sadly a very long way off and lots of things could happen to knock back any progress in that area.

I'd say we're about ten years from affordable bulk desalination. That will help. Watering the Sahara will help encourage it to rain there, which might set off a cascade effect.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

...Basically the author calls for "vertical farms", skyscrapers doing hydroponics. A building with a one acre footprint could support 60 acres of crops, one floor above the other. And you'd be able to vary the harvest times so there would always be fresh food available. Put the outlets on the ground floor and you'd have little "to market" cost...

"Green revolutions" (and other technological solutions) only allow for more efficient use of the Earth's resources, they don't do anything to alter the fact that those resources are finite.

... I don't think we have any idea what the upper limit to the population of earth is...

No, but due to the nature of exponential growth, we can be sure that limit's going to creep-up on us a heck-of-a-lot faster than anyone expects.

...I dislike any suggestion that we should increase our productivity to help feed all the world's people. All that would happen is that the world would have more people who were starving because the population would increase past the new carrying capacity again.

And more to the point there's a limit to how much we can increase productivity. Even with the best technology in the world, and the most efficient application of that technology, the Earth still has a limit beyond which any one person getting enough to eat means someone somewhere going without.

At the moment we (in the "developed" world) have well meaning expressions like "Give a man a fish and he can feed himself for a day, but give a man the means to catch his own fish and he can feed himself for a lifetime", but the harsh truth is that one day the reality will be "Give a man a fish and that's your dinner you've just given him - you go hungry. And by the way that was the last of that species of fish they're now extinct"

...I'd say we're about ten years from affordable bulk desalination. That will help. Watering the Sahara will help encourage it to rain there, which might set off a cascade effect.

To what end? More people get fed, so more people breed and then, oops... ...we're back where we started.