There is much to-do about anthropogenic climate change, but little attention is given to the ever-rising number of climate changers. Humanity does not seem willing to curb its size or its appetite. Are we heading for those positive checks that Malthus listed?
Nearly 4000 pages of dense technical data and scientific findings about global warming and its dire consequences for humanity, and we are left with the puzzle of how the population elephant in the living room could have been ignored.
Humanity is breeding itself out of existence and making the near-collapse of the entire human species in three or four generations a near certainty.
Humanity is breeding itself out of existence and making the near-collapse of the entire human species in three or four generations a near certainty. And the most celebrated scientific report on the impact of human population on the climate has not made population control the focus of its attention.
Political leaders, of course, never look beyond winning the next election, and the rare leaders who do suffer the consequences in the hands of ignorant masses or fanatical religious zealots. Indira Gandhi was such a rare political leader who saw the grave consequences of population explosion for her country and was riddled with machine gun bullets by the fanatical Sikh who was her own bodyguard. Of course, there was a more immediate reason for the fanatical guard’s heinous crime: Indira Gandhi had ordered the military operation to remove Sikh militants who were accumulating weapons in the Harmandir Sahib Complex (Golden Temple).
Gandhi had begun a program of voluntary mass sterilization to limit uncontrolled breeding by the ignorant masses. Had she lived and was able to continue the policy, much suffering due to overpopulation would have been prevented in India.
No political leader since has initiated such population control measures, and sadly the most populous country in the world (China) which had a one-child policy for several decades reversed its policy drastically recently by allowing couples to have up to three children so as to increase the birthrate.
The reverend Thomas Robert Malthus was correct to predict that disease, wars, and famine would ultimately limit human population, since we have seen since Malthus’ time that the bulk of humanity is incapable of self-control in the realm of procreation.
Obviously, as long as the world has a population arms race with the aim of furthering each nation’s economic power, no country would be willing to control, let alone reduce, its population in order to assure the protection of Nature on which human survival depends.
The reverend Thomas Robert Malthus was correct to predict that disease, wars, and famine would ultimately limit human population, since we have seen since Malthus’ time that the bulk of humanity is incapable of self-control in the realm of procreation. Covid-19, especially the Delta Variant may “help” humanity where humanity has proven incapable of helping itself. However, due to the technological advances in medicine and vaccine development, Covid-19 and its new Delta variant have had limited impact in population control. To illustrate how serious is the magnitude of the overpopulation problem, if, for example, one million people would die of Covid every day for the next two years in India, thus reducing India’s population by 730 million, India would still be overpopulated with the remaining 570 million in relation to the natural resources available for a decent living. The same analogy could be applied to China and proportionally to other overpopulated countries.
Then, what is a rational solution to avoid starvation and disease? Theoretically the solution would be for all humanity to limit procreation to one child per couple or, in the case of single motherhood, to one child per woman for four generations (taking time lags into calculation). Such a rational solution will of course never be achieved due to mass ignorance, religious dogmatism, and political leaders’ greed for power worldwide. So, ultimately the Malthusian solutions will predominate. 