November 6 2014, 2.26pm EST
No quick fix for overpopulation — let’s focus on climate
"The rise in population since 1900 has been so rapid that up to 14% of all humans that have ever lived are still alive today, according to recent research.
Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook at the University of Adelaide argue in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the even a global one-child policy, or the catastrophic death of billions of people, would not slow population growth enough to reduce carbon emissions and resource use.
If you have two children, your carbon legacy could be forty times higher than any savings you make.
Is population control the solution?
But all of this may be irrelevant in light of the important research conducted by Bradshaw and Brook. Their research shows that:
No matter what levers you pull, we have such a huge demographic momentum, there’s no way we can rein in the human population fast enough to address sustainability issues in the next century.
Population growth trends for the rest of the 21st Century are “virtually locked-in” unless there are “extreme and rapid reductions in female fertility”.
Even a global one-child policy and the catastrophic death of several billion people, they argued, would not materially affect CO2 emissions and resource use; the result would still be 5 to 10 billion people by 2100.
The authors of the research ultimately conclude that “there are no easy ways to change the broad trends of human population size this century”.
http://theconversation.com/no-quick-fix ... %20climateActually, reducing population to zero emissions could happen in several ways;
1st is the effect of the dollar being devaluated on initiating a global deep depression that starves billions.
2nd is the effect on the economy of a huge catastrophe like Cascadia on initiating a global deep depression that starves billions.
3rd is the same from the La Palma Tsunami on initiating a global deep depression that starves billions.
4th is the effect of a volcanic winter caused by Katla on initiating a global deep depression that starves billions.
5th is the effect of a super-volcano eruption with ten year global winter and temporary 10*F cooling with a population bottleneck,
similar to Toba 74,600 years ago. One out of a thousand people survive, but the biosphere is saved from global terminal extinction worse than the Permian "Great Dying".
Another could be too late, the known 2036 small asteroid impact..........