JimD, aren't you a bit overemphasizing population? Most of people on planet don't emit much. 20% of the people emits 80% of excess GHGs (quoting Kevin Anderson from Tyndall Center). Overconsumption by rich is main driver of emissions.
domen
Sorry for the late response I was delivering a load of tools and such to my son's new farm in Calif.
Re: population. I don't think so as Mr. Anderson is not looking at the problem in a systemic fashion. If you want to read the background on what we have written here on population there is a population thread in the Consequences section that has a lot of work in it. The thing to keep in mind about population is that,
absent AGW considerations, our current population (which is projected to hit 9.6 billion in 2050) will utterly destroy our ability to maintain anything like our current civilizational structure well before the end of this century. Add in climate change and energy supply issues and my personal projection is that we collapse circa 2050.
The key non-AGW factor in terms of continuing civilization as we know it is that we are already some significant factor above the carrying capacity of the Earth for our species. Very conservatives estimates are that we are at 1.5 Earth equivalents in terms of resource consumption. The other end of the spectrum indicates as many as 5 Earth equivalents. As would be noted here on the forum, my practice is to work from the mid range numbers in order not to drift into assumptions which are difficult to support with the available data. So let's say we are at 3+ times carrying capacity. Our resource extraction rates are stunning, and for some critical items, indications are that we will be struggling to obtain them at affordable costs in just a few decades. These critical items range from strategic minerals related to high technology requirements to agriculture ones like phosphate supplies, freshwater supplies, top soil reserves and also impacts from evolved pests and diseases which impact production, negative consequences of GMO crops, super weeds evolved from reaction to herbicides, etc. Our population levels are also directly proportional to our impact on the food chain, ocean fish populations, and species extinction rates. As you probably know resource extraction follows typical patterns of discovery and exploitation in that we find the biggest and easiest to exploit reserves first and work our way downwards towards the smaller and more difficult to exploit ones. This practice puts a huge burden on the future as the resources used to exploit future reserves are much greater than they were in the past. This further crimps our ability to maintain current levels of use and runs directly into the impact of rising population. We need to keep in mind that almost ALL of the struggles we are having at this time are NOT related to AGW issues (those are just starting to impact significantly). The current struggles are just mostly do to being over carrying capacity. That is why AGW is so frightening.
A huge further consideration is that our desire to improve the standard of living of those less fortunate than the populations of the rich countries (our readers here in general) will result in the consumption of vast amounts of additional resources. I note in an aside here that we do not try and raise their standard of living due to a sense of fairness, but rather in a search for new markets to exploit for profit - but I digress. I believe very strongly that there is almost no chance that the populations of the wealthy countries will willingly give up any significant amount of their standard of living and, thus, the raising of the standard of living of poor peoples would dramatically worsen the carrying capacity ratio due to a large rise in resource consumption.. The global population "could" share more equitably and hold the rise in resource consumption to a lower level but we will not do so because of political and cultural concerns and the uncooperativeness of basic human nature . Data over the last decade bears this belief out. Economic development and rising population will eventually cause collapse as it will push us so much further past carrying capacity that natural systems will fail. This will happen regardless of the impacts of AGW.
But AGW is not sitting on the sidelines. It is going to flatten us like a bug so to speak. Add a vast and rapidly rising population that is going to continue to emit vast amounts of carbon (and methane) to the atmosphere to the resource extraction issues and you have an unsolvable problem.
We could solve the population problem if the physics of AGW did not exist. But it would be very difficult and we would not have unlimited time. Certainly less than a century. We could likely deal with AGW if our population were only 1-2 billion in that we could slow the rise in temperatures and all the side effects and our lower population would be easier to support in a world of dramatically reduced carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is not rising. AGW especially is decreasing it and this decrease will accelerate over time. Depletion of the easy to extract resources also worsens the numbers. Continuation of emissions on a large scale must stop (not that it will but it must) or they will destroy us. Continuation of large population levels will destroy us let alone letting population increase. Economic growth on a per capita basis will quickly destroy us and so will a continuation of the current level of consumption.
The only rational path towards a possible solution to our systemic problems are dramatic population reductions. And the reduction cannot be based upon just small reductions in fertility or family planning policies. We must lower population by many billions very soon. Everyone wants a miracle. Either God is going to save us or Progress is going to save us. I do not believe in fantasies of either sort.
In the population thread we talk about the least onerous methods of reducing populations. No one can come up with a way of doing this humanely. The best solution I have been able to come up with is a global ban on having ANY children at all. Probably for 20-25 years. Scary isn't it. But other than that we are left to mother nature via famine and disease, or eventually humans will resort to genocide via war or bioweapons. Would even a voluntary ban on births work in time? I don't know but it is certain that nothing else will. I wished I believed in miracles.
The above viewpoint is one reason I post so many items on what is going on in the world that are not climate change related. I am trying to build a body of evidence as to why the Green-BAU approach will not work any better than the Koch funded BAU approach we all so hate. Solar and wind energy are great developments that will be very useful to our survivors, if there are any. As will a lot of other human endeavors such as modern medicine and better understandings of biology and physics. But they will not save us. Economic development and growth will not save us. Capitalism will not save us. Carbon pricing will not save us. Population levels are problem number 1. All others are derivative. We are in huge overshoot and there is only one solution to that problem.
