Carrying Capacity, Overshoot and Species Extinction

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First, let us define carrying capacity and overshoot. And none has done that better than Paul Chefurka.

Carrying Capacity: Carrying capacity is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning: “the maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment”.  Unfortunately, that definition becomes more nebulous the closer you look at it – especially when we start talking about the planetary carrying capacity for humans.  Ecologists claim that our numbers have already surpassed the carrying capacity of the planet, while others (notably economists and politicians…) claim we are nowhere near it yet!

Overshoot: When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition known as overshoot.  Because carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be temporary.  Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity.  How long they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated numbers.  Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that helps maintain their numbers.  For humans one of the primary resources is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.).  A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but exhaustible stock of a resource.  Like oil, for instance…

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Special Thread: The Camp of the Saints

Wiki’s take on Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints:

The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences. In Calcutta India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.

An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.

The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the West shares its fate.

Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.

 The novel was published 42 years ago but it is suddenly back in the news again, ‘Camp of The Saints’ Seen Mirrored In Pope’s Message.

Pope Francis is urging America to throw open her borders to thousands of impoverished migrants, in part to atone for the “sins of the colonial era.

“We must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible,” he declared before a joint session of Congress. “Thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities…We must not be taken aback by their numbers.”

Indeed, as the Pope addressed the nation today it is clear that the immigration issue has hit a boiling point. Headlines blare:

European Migrant Crisis: Austria, Germany Near Tipping PointAs Europe Grasps For Answers, More Migrants Flood Its BorderPope Francis Urges Congress To Embrace Migrants… Western and UN Aid Falling Far Short… Five More Fleets On The Way, From Africa, India and Asia… Refugee Fleet Is Headed For Europe, For France…

The last three headlines, however, are ripped not from today’s papers, but from the pages of a controversial 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail, which many say has predicted with shocking accuracy the events unfolding today.

The novel, which has been translated into English, is entitled Camp of the Saints, and posits that the liberalism of the West would cause Western nations to throw open their doors to so many migrants that it would spell the doom of liberal society itself. Raspail’s thesis, quite simply, is that liberalism is inadequate to defend liberalism.

Being a lifelong liberal myself, I find that last sentence shockingly true. We love all mankind and that love will be the roots of our downfall. I see the shocking pictures of the tens of thousands fleeing the war torn areas of the Middle East. They are not fleeing into other overpopulated countries like India or Pakistan but into the relatively low population countries of Europe. And of course the US has volunteered to take its “fair share” of the masses. But they will not stop coming. Overpopulation, by its very nature, breeds war and insurrection. 

Garrett Hardin thrashed this straw for the last 40 years of his life. He saw clearly what was happening and tried to warn the world. But he was the Cassandra of his time, the only ones who paid any attention to his message were those who were already aware of the problem.

Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, three years after his first major work, Nature and Man’s Fate. Harding ended most of his works with a few paragraphs or pages describing what we must do to avoid disaster. Here are the last two paragraphs of The Tragedy of the Commons:

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”–and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

Many others have written on the overpopulation and food supply problem. Lester Brown is one of the most prolific writers on the subject. Lester also ends his work with “What we must do”. He even wrote one entire book and 4 revisions of that book on the subject of what we must do to save civilization:
Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised)
.

I have some very bad news for Lester and all the other authors who write of the actions required to avoid any future disasters brought about by overpopulation, global warming or depletion of natural resources: The vast majority of people just don’t believe a damn word of it.

Francis Bacon wrote: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” And that is what the vast majority of people do. Only a tiny minority of people are capable of looking at the facts and are able to then believe what they would very much desire to be untrue, what they would desire not to believe.

Denial of the undesirable consequences of overpopulation, or any other nasty problems looming in our future, is innate for the vast majority of the human race, it is of our very nature. It is just what we do and there is no way to change that fact. If there are some very nasty facts out there, something that suggests that our future, and particularly the future of our children an grandchildren will not be as we would like it to be, we will simply deny those facts. We will go even further than that, we will organize resistance groups, create institutions and experts that will legitimize our denial.

This means of course that, in the minds of the vast majority of the people, the problems do not exist. We will do nothing because in our minds there is nothing that needs to be done.

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Notice: The thread on JODI Data and Giant Field Depletion is still open. Please post all comments on oil and other subjects there and limit posts on this thread to the subjects mentioned in this post.

The Problem of the Human Population

This is a guest post by Javier

Javier holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and has been a scientist for 30 years in molecular genetics and neurobiology. He wrote a blog on macroeconomy and investments from a cyclic point of view for over two years and currently writes a blog in Spanish about the economic crisis, energy crisis and climate change at http://www.rankia.com/blog/game-over/ . Javier goes by the name of Knownuthing on his blog.

Opinions expressed in this post are those of Javier and not necessarily those of the blog owner Ron Patterson. This post was translated from the Spanish by computer and may therefore contain some grammatical errors.

The Problem of the Human Population

 The question of whether or not overpopulation in the world is clearly debatable. For starters there is no agreement on what should be the world’s population and is also clear that currently the world is able to withstand the seven billion people who live and there is little doubt that it can support more, as the number increases constantly.

However, there is concern for decades that in a finite world at some point should be the limits of the world’s population, and that may not be very smart to reach those limits. Although efforts to limit population growth in some countries like India or China, today these efforts have been abandoned or are abandoning were made in the second half of the twentieth century, mainly due to the pace of population growth is declining alone globally.

As in all matters based on the laws of nature, we can use science to analyze the problem of the human population. The science that helps us in this case is ecology, which has a specific branch of human ecology . Anyone who thinks that we do not apply the laws of biology, is that it has lost touch with the reality of human nature. For very rational to presume to be, we are still animals and not very rational forget.

1. How many and how fast we grow?

The world’s population at the time of this writing is 7,301,880,780 people on the face of the Earth. You can see the current figure on pagehttp://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Seven 1300 million and growing at a rate of 1.1% per year, ie 80 million people each year , the equivalent of two Spains completely filled each year.

Jav 1Fig 1 Growth of world population and growth rate estimates up to 2050. Source: World Population Data

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