Oh jeez. I thought we moved on from the Population Bomb hysteria.

Was it ever proven wrong? Or just delayed by a bunch of last-minute technological breakthroughs?

Also, the problem is still here even if we maintain current population levels. It's here even if we do nothing, and in reality, we have 2/3 of the world desperately trying to grow their quality of life, which involves growing their energy use.

Proven wrong? Yes! ehrlich said the human lifespan in 1981 would be 42. He assured us that, if we didn’t do something, there would be mass famine and billions dead and all manner of horror that never came to pass.

It is not all that impressive to note that more consumers than producers creates a scarcity problem. That’s the entire driver behind Malthusian fear-mongering. But over and over and over those that stoke the fears of overpopulation (and it’s been going on for thousands of years) are especially terrible at estimating the capacity for supply. As you call it, “last-minute technological breakthroughs”, dismissing centuries of human progress as some sort of accidental stroke of luck.

You say we “do nothing” but every something I see proposed has to, by necessity, damage the quality of life of lots of people. The majority of people. If we are honest with ourselves, that’s effectively what is being proposed when we pontificate over how the wizards of smart will dole out resources according to their flawed definition of sustainability.

That will, inevitably, result in war.

The fact is, if you want to improve the state of humanity on the Earth, your only effective means of doing so is technology.

Actually, I'm wrong about one thing: Ehrlich didn't warn us that catastrophe was inevitable if we didn't do something. He said catastrophe was inevitable period:

  The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

> At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Well, technically that's not wrong. Bigger population = more deaths.

> The fact is, if you want to improve the state of humanity on the Earth, your only effective means of doing so is technology.

This I agree with to some extent. We need the tech to save us, but I'm not convinced that we can get to that tech in time, without reducing our quality of life now, or having it reduced by the climate degradation in the next decades.

> As you call it, “last-minute technological breakthroughs”, dismissing centuries of human progress as some sort of accidental stroke of luck.

I'm trying not to, but looking back, how many more tricks like Haber–Bosch process can we find? We've always somehow risen to the challenge, but then again, almost all fields of science and technology were severely underexplored back then. We've fixed that now, we know the general landscape in which we're moving. I fully expect we can pull some more rabbits out of a hat, but will we be able to do that in time?

And the flip side of this is that we need those new miracle technologies to continue growing. Which means we need to actually fund and encourage them, and that seems to become a problem lately. Insert anything from "best minds of our generation wasted on getting people clicking on ads" to Bret Victor's musings on cleantech funding[0].

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[0] - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#funding

A single prediction being wrong does not mean the concept is wrong. Especially a single prediction that was not based on evidence and that the scientific community said was nonsense. Al Gore said there would be no snow on any mountains by 2012. Since that was wrong, climate change is debunked right? Science is all wrong because one guy said something dumb one time!

Technology can not magic you up some more land. The earth is finite. When people say "technology will save us" they actually mean one of two things. Either "I don't want to think about this so star trek will come true!" or "we can develop the technology to completely eliminate all non-human life on earth and live in pods being fed an industrial slurry that has the highest % return of solar energy to chemical energy so stop worrying!". Both are dumb. Our standard of living is already going down. It does not make sense to choose to have more people living worse lives rather than fewer people living better lives. There is no benefit to increasing our population.

You can never prove it wrong.

It has to be wrong in perpetuity, because even if it is correct just once, it results in a wasted/depleted planet.

And honestly, considering how much non-renewable resources we are using and the rate of warming, worrying about the population bomb is sort of like trying to get enough cardio exercise while you have acute appendicitis.

Those are connected, though. Energy use is a lagging indicator of population - which is why we're screwed even if population growth were 0, as we have a large part of the world still going through industrialization/development.

It’s neither hysteria nor something you can “move on” from. Please either provide facts or other evidence for your opinion or don’t comment. There is no basis for the suggestion that we can sustain a growing population on this planet, even with technology and science continuing to progress.

What evidence is there that we can't? The issue again isn't the number of people on the planet, its the number of people combined with our current usage of planetary resources. But between the fact that the vast majority of those resources are being used by a small amount of the population, and the fact that people have been claiming the "population bomb" will be going off imminently for hundreds of years and it not actually happening, seems to imply that the issue isn't the number of people on the planet, and way in which those people use planetary resources.

There are two reasons why we can’t: We live within a finite ecosystem of resources and finite systems can by definition not sustain infinite consumption. And we are currently consuming an unsustainable and growing rate of resources. Maybe at some point our aggregate consumption will slow, but all credible models of population growth (leveling off around 11B) and associated consumption suggest that it would be far too late.

> There are two reasons why we can’t: We live within a finite ecosystem of resources and finite systems can by definition not sustain infinite consumption

Yeah this gets thrown around a lot, but people clearly misunderstand what it actually means. It just means that there is _some_ amount of people we can't feed, but it says _nothing_ about what the amount is. It can be 10 billion, it can be 10^27. You just "proved" nothing of substance.

> And we are currently consuming an _unsustainable_ and growing rate of resources. (emphasis mine)

[citation needed]

I am serious, it does not matter how many times people say this, it still is not obvious truth.

> And we are currently consuming an unsustainable and growing rate of resources.

And when you finally claim something that would be easy (I guess, you seem confident in it) to back up by links, you don't do that.

This reads like unfounded hysteria.

The concept of carrying capacity estimates human consumption versus the planet’s ability to regenerate resources. Have a look at the reports and data cited on the Wikipedia page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

I think you are suggesting that earth can carry many more people than 10B. I’d like to understand how you think that is possible.

Furthermore, even at the current population size human activity is causing potentially irreversible climate change. The scientific consensus is that even a small increase of 1.5C will have severe consequences on the planet. Limiting the increase to 1.5 C will require significant action by all of us. Addding many more people makes this much harder.

http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf

I hope the links can help convince you that we are facing a serious crisis that is causally related to the size of the human population.

Carrying capacity of Earth is frequently revised upwards, but I am not paying much attention to research around it, that is why I would appreciate some concrete links / citations.

> I think you are suggesting that earth can carry many more people than 10B. I’d like to understand how you think that is possible.

Because I have not seen anyone argue for the limits in convincing ways, it's all FUD from my PoV.

Intuitively - energy is not (very big) problem, we can make dense nuclear sources, solar & offshore wind is viable in many places, and gas peaker plants / limited enetgy storage should cover the rest.

Hydroponics and similar advanced agricultural methods are showing nice gains in effectivity of produce per sq km, at the cost of (IIRC) energy (see above). EVs are finally starting to be viable. Etc. Etc.

And that's before we get to really long-term solutions like colonizing space.

Where are the real limits?

> Furthermore, even at the current population size human activity is causing potentially irreversible climate change ...

Yeah, we are making a lot of externalities. This is not impossible to solve, see above.

Extrapolating from our past failures is extremely shortsighted and has been proven wrong numerous times, see e.g. WW3 and end-of-humanity scare in 50's/60's. We can learn from our mistakes, and we seem to actually do that a lot! Spreading hysteria is not helping I think.