Book Received, Jólabókaflóðið 2021!

[james_davis_nicoll]

Book Received, Jólabókaflóðið 2021!

Comments

[ba_munronoe]

"In forty years, Earth’s population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that?"

Possibly outdated right out the gate [1]. And yes, since 10 billion is only about 25% more than 2022, the challenges wouldn't be much more severe than they are now. (There is that quite possible 'cataclysmic drop in agricultural productivity due to anthropogenic gas-driven climate instability thingy', but that's less an overpopulation problem than a "small number of absurdly powerful apres moi le deluge greedheads" problem IMHO.)

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722#:~:text=The%20world%20population%20will%20peak%20at%208.7%20billion,sees%20world%20population%20continuing%20to%20rise%20until%202100.

[heron61]

If money was on the line, I'd also bet on the 8.7 billion being too high - since the 1960s, *every* UN population prediction has been too high, and birthrates are continuing to fall almost everywhere. Among other factors, many demographers naively assumed zero growth would be the floor, while negative population growth is becoming increasingly common.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Naked urls break recent comments.

[jreynolds197]

This is a tough one - I think that we're (the world that very much includes Homo sapiens) coming in for a lot of pain in 10-15 years. The temptation is to say civilization as we know it is completely screwed.

Then I think of all the chuckleheads who have based their notion of 'The world is going to end on this particular date. Really! My big special book¹ says so!!' and they've been wrong every time.

So I'd like to be hopeful that we're not going to be living in a Mad Max style world by 2050 (which I could conceivably live to see, but only if civilization doesn't crash - I need medications that civilization produces). But the science is pretty depressing.

~oOo~

¹ Or Mayan calendar, or other newage (rhyming with 'sewage') BS.

[graydon]

I'd like to be hopeful, too, but if hydrologic stationarity goes generally agriculture goes.

("hydrologic stationarity" = climate scientist for "it rains at predictable times, in predictable amounts, and all the consequences thereof".)

There should be a decarbonized food security every-nerve-and-sinew effort going on. Instead we're getting wars and rumours of wars.

[philrm]

From Quatermass and the Pit (1967):

Quatermass: Roney, if we found out earth was doomed - say, by climatic changes - what would we do about it?

Roney: Nothing. Just go on squabbling as usual.

[mindstalk]

Haven't read the book, but Charles Mann was a great author of _1491_ and _1493_.