Bill Gates asks," does saving more lives lead to overpopulation?"

Paul Ehrlich back in the news

 

Sounds (and looks) like he was an incel before the term existed, and this was the excuse he came up for it.

 

Sounds like a horrible idea for a capitalist system.

 

Well it does appear like there is a mass extinction thats still happening right now.

He did whiff on the resource crunches in the 70s. Technology improvements with rare earths solved dependencies for copper and other heavy metals.

Personally, his position gives a veneer of agency and control over a matter that takes a large collective will to overcome. On the meta level, I admit positive energy and drive (bigger population, more minds to solve the problem) is a better approach to drive things. I just think the whole tragedy of the commons issue will repeat itself until there are no rollbacks out of scale and scope.

Just because we don't notice 3/4th of the life vanishing around us doesn't mean they're not unimportant.

 

well . . . this is also a contested claim.

see for example

Earth Is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction
“As scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/

sorry for the paywall, I can try and post excerpts later. There are other similar analyses out there.

 

Hmm that guy's point seems to be a semantic issue.

This is because by the time a mass extinction starts, the world would already be over.

“So if we really are in the middle of a mass extinction,” I started, “it wouldn’t be a matter of saving tigers and elephants—”

“Right, you probably have to worry about saving coyotes and rats.

“It’s a network collapse problem,” he said. “Just like power grids. Network dynamics research has been getting a ton of money from DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. They’re all physicists studying it, who don’t care about power grids or ecosystems, they care about math. So the secret about power grids is that nobody actually knows how they work. And it’s exactly the same problem you have in ecosystems.

“I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,” he said.
​

There's a shitload of insects dying off that are crucial to any food chain. We still mainly consider them as pests while pumping tons of chemicals into the ecosystem. Biodiversity has been a solid pillar to prevent "power grid collapses" but humanity's push into more arable land is definitely making things more fragile.

I guess the ultimate question outside the alarmism is what we can actually do, who are the winners/losers, how can we create a system that monetizes untapped nature for future generations to benefit, and whether it's ultimately worth the effort.

 

Pressed for time today, but if you look at the analyses that try to actually quantify known extinctions, the numbers they come up with are exceedingly low. I'll try to pull some of those out later if I get a chance. Easy enough to google though

 

Thanks for the link. I was able to bypass paywall via private mode in my browser. It seems like the main disagreement is whether we're currently in a mass extinction or whether signs just point to us getting close to one (but which we still have the power to stop).

It closes with the following:

While Erwin’s argument that a mass extinction is not yet under way might seem to get humanity off the hook—an invitation to plunder the earth further, since it can seemingly take the beating (the planet has certainly seen worse)—it’s actually a subtler and possibly far scarier argument.

This is where the ecosystem’s nonlinear responses, or tipping points, come in. Inching up to mass extinction might be a little like inching up to the event horizon of a black hole—once you go over a certain line, a line that perhaps doesn’t even appear all that remarkable, all is lost.

“So,” I said, “it might be that we sort of bump along where everything seems okay and then . . .”

“Yeah, everything’s fine until it’s not,” said Erwin. “And then everything goes to hell.”

Or put another way, mass extinctions may unfold the same way that a dissolute character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises explains that bankruptcies do: “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

“The only hope we have in the future,” Erwin said, “is if we’re not in a mass extinction event.”
​

So we're not currently in a mass extinction, according to him, because if we were things would be a hell of a lot of worse than they currently seem to be. But this is not an argument for complacency. The point is that the effects we're having are still somewhat reversible, and if we don't pay closer attention then within the next few hundred years we might very well end up in the midst of a mass extinction event that we won't be able to survive.

 

here's a summary of the point I was making yesterday

Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?
Is it 150 species a day or 24 a day or far less than that? Prominent scientists cite dramatically different numbers when estimating the rate at which species are going extinct. Why is that?

https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly

excerpt:

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which involved more than a thousand experts, estimated an extinction rate that was later calculated at up to 8,700 species a year, or 24 a day. More recently, scientists at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: “Every day, up to 150 species are lost.” That could be as much as 10 percent a decade.

But nobody knows whether such estimates are anywhere close to reality. They are based on computer modeling, and documented losses are tiny by comparison. Only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, according to data held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Out of some 1.9 million recorded current or recent species on the planet, that represents less than a tenth of one percent.

Nor is there much documented evidence of accelerating loss. In its latest update, released in June, the IUCN reported “no new extinctions,” although last year it reported the loss of an earwig on the island of St. Helena and a Malaysian snail. And some species once thought extinct have turned out to be still around, like the Guadalupe fur seal, which “died out” a century ago, but now numbers over 20,000.

Moreover, the majority of documented extinctions have been on small islands, where species with small gene pools have usually succumbed to human hunters. That may be an ecological tragedy for the islands concerned, but most species live in continental areas and, ecologists agree, are unlikely to prove so vulnerable.

But the documented losses may be only the tip of the iceberg. That’s because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. It’s also because we often simply don’t know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.
​

more at the link

 

Yes, it’s pretty hard to determine how many species are really out there….

This seems more of a semantics issue as others have mentioned. We are losing species at rate not seen for some time….

 

Took me awhile to get to this and reading the below paper. There's agreement that there's a counting issue, and the paper goes into how losses the further down the food ladder is usually more serious than what's going on with "charismatic species" and trees. When invertebrates die off, there isn't much of a record that proved it existed in the first place. The research paper asserts that it'd take "over 300 years to describe the remaining undocumented 6 million species of the planet."

None of that really discounts the underlying points of the Yale article, but I disagree that the debate should reside primarily in academic circles when the changes we make on earth can be seen from satellite images or every country is more or less forced to dump or exploit their territorial waters for commercial and local gain.

The Yale article's point of focusing on local biodiversity seems more realistic and pragmatic, but the underlying issue of lacking means for absolute and timely counting practices still remain (no iron-clad proof? drill baby drill!) all while we continue to live in a state of hopeful ignorance despite these alarmists pointing out extinctions that have no relevance to us during our trip to Costco.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816

 

That's a faulty argument given that we don't know for certain how species are out there and in many cases we find species in such tight niches that they pretty much go extinct not long after we find them.

 

The highlighted portion supports that there is a good likelihood we are in the a 6th mass extinction. Also why I noted in my previous posts that the argument about quantied known extinctions is faulty.

 

this is why we need to terraform Mars or Titan pronto

 

I do support going to Mars. If human population continues at the same rate and lifestyles keep on improving the Earth can't support that. It's doubtful the Earth now could support it if everyone in India and the PRC led the same lifestyle as most Americans.

For the longtem the Earth is always vulnerable to an extinction level event not having anything to do with humans, such as massive meteor, solar flare ect.. The more we can spread out humans the more likely the species will continue even if the Earth is no longer livable.

 

There were a bunch of extinction events where some humanoids survived and some didn’t

some random dude didn’t make up a story about Atlantis
A whole city can go down with a natural disaster
And advanced civilization can turn into legend

 

it may be a weak argument but it is not faulty.

The argument from ignorance, however, is both faulty and a fallacy at the same time.

 

I also like the idea of deporting violent inmates into space like how Krypton did general Zod and his gang

 

The link you posted counters that argument.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly

 

Don't think this is worth starting another thread over but the PRC's population is falling with deaths outstripping births. This will lead to some major problems in the short term as they are below the replacement level for their workforce.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/business/china-birth-rate.html
China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis
Deaths outnumbered births last year for the first time in six decades. Experts see major implications for China, its economy and the world.

HONG KONG — The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.

The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine and death in the 1960s.

Chinese officials have tried for years to slow down the arrival of this moment, loosening a one-child policy and offering incentives to encourage families to have children. None of those policies worked. Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.

Indeed, data released on Tuesday showed that the Chinese economy last year had one of its worst performances since 1976, the year Mao died.

Over the last four decades, China emerged as an economic powerhouse and the world’s factory floor. The country’s evolution from widespread poverty to the world’s second-largest economy led to an increase in life expectancy that contributed to the current population decline — more people were living longer while fewer babies were being born.

That trend has hastened another worrying event: the day when China will not have enough people of working age to fuel its growth.

“In the long run, we are going to see a China the world has never seen,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in China’s demographics. “It will no longer be the young, vibrant, growing population. We will start to appreciate China, in terms of its population, as an old and shrinking population.”

Government handouts like cash for babies and tax cuts, have failed to change the underlying fact that many young Chinese people simply do not want children.

“I can’t bear the responsibility for giving birth to a life,” said Luna Zhu, 28, who lives in Beijing with her husband. Both their parents would be willing to take care of grandchildren, and she works for a state-owned enterprise that offers a good maternity leave package. Still, Ms. Zhu is not interested in motherhood.

Births were down from 10.6 million in 2021, the sixth straight year that the number had fallen, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. China’s overall population now stands at 1.41 billion. By 2035, 400 million people in China are expected to be over 60, accounting for nearly a third of its population.

Labor shortages that will accompany China’s rapidly aging population will also reduce tax revenue and contributions to a pension system that is already under enormous pressure.

Whether the government can provide widespread access to elder care, medical services and a stable stream of income later in life will affect a long-held assumption that the Communist Party can provide a better life for its people.

The news of China’s population decline comes at a challenging time for the government in Beijing, which is dealing with the fallout from the sudden reversal last month of its zero-tolerance policy toward Covid.

The data on Tuesday showed a small increase in mortality last year, to 10.41 million deaths, compared to around 10 million in recent years, raising questions about how a recent Covid surge may have contributed to the numbers.

Last week, officials unexpectedly reported the Covid death figures for the first month after reporting single-digit daily deaths for weeks. But experts have questioned the accuracy of the new numbers — 60,000 deaths between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12.

On Tuesday, Kang Yi, the commissioner of the National Bureau of Statistics, said the Covid death figures for December had not yet been incorporated into the overall death totals for 2022.

China also on Tuesday released data that showed the depth of its economic challenges. The country’s gross domestic product, the broadest measure of its commercial vitality, grew just 2.9 percent in the last three months of the year after widespread lockdowns and the recent surge in Covid infections. Over the whole year, China’s economy grew only 3 percent, its slowest rate in nearly four decades.

This historical demographic moment was not unexpected. Chinese officials last year conceded that the country was on the verge of a population decline that would likely begin before 2025. But it came sooner than demographers, statisticians and China’s ruling Communist Party had anticipated.

China has followed a trajectory familiar to many developing countries as their economies get richer: Fertility rates fall as incomes rise and education levels increase. As the quality of life improves, people live longer.
more at link.

“It’s the kind of situation that economists dream of,” said Philip O’Keefe, the director of the Aging Asia Research Hub, ARC Center of Excellence in Population Aging Research.

But the government shortened its timeline to prepare for this moment by moving too slowly to loosen restrictive birth policies as the country grew wealthier. “They could have given themselves a little more time,” said Mr. O’Keefe.