As pointed out in email

[james_davis_nicoll]

India’s declining fertility rate, now only slightly higher than that of the United States, is part of a global trend of lower population growth. Yet the media and many educated Americans have entirely missed this major development, instead sticking to erroneous perceptions about inexorable global population growth that continue to fuel panicked rhetoric about everything from environmental degradation and immigration to food and resource scarcity.

In a recent exercise, most of my students believed that India’s total fertility rate (TFR) was twice that of the United States. Many of my colleagues believed the same. In actuality, it is only 2.5, barely above the estimated U.S. rate of 2.1 in 2011, and essentially the replacement level.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

So an additional hundreds of millions of people somewhere between malnutrition and starvation in the next twenty years.

That reads to me like you think that's no big deal? I'm assuming I'm wrong. Either way, that would reverse the trends of the last 20 years where we've actually been, generally speaking, getting better at getting people out of malnutrition and starvation (although thirst and water born diseases on a 19th century scale might be worse)...

But to your other point. That is exactly what worries me about the potential situation in Western South America the most. The glaciers, at least in that part of the world, are continuing to shrink. The fresh water supply is largely dependent on that particular cycle, and having millions of previously 'well off' urban dwellers hitting problems that you normally see in less developed parts of the world isn't a good thing.

I'm not saying that there aren't technological fixes to problems like having your drinking water disappearing, just that we've not really had to deal with issues of this scale for advanced technological urban societies before. Historically, the climate removing your water supply has led to some amazing archaeological sites. I'm not sure that's an option today is it?

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Personally, I think Anglophone north America and Europe should ride out climate change OK, if perhaps with some internal shifts of population and areas of agricultural concentration, but I'm less sanguine about Latin America and Asia (they're losing their glaciers too, and there's all sorts of unpleasant things that could happen if the Monsoon gets messed up, plus or minus - note the recent massive flooding in Pakistan), and downright worried about Africa (the maps I've seen for rainfall shifts have not been encouraging, and they have a lot less economic surplus to throw at the problem). Right now the Green Revolution is a bit topped out in much of the world (rising energy costs aren't helping) and things are a bit marginal: there was a bit of a global food shortage just a couple years back, with a sharp rise in prices. As usual, a lot of the problem is political will: major investments to deal with problems with the weather years down the road isn't very popular anywhere,and less so in countries where much of the government remains in denial about global warming (I'm not saying here the US will face famine or something due to this, just that our position of global food bank of last resort may be in trouble, especially if the SW returns to medieval patterns of 20-year droughts).

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

No, I simply don't see that happening.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think it's unlikely, but I certainly think it's more possible than I would like it to be.

It's not a certainty of climate change, like the US East Coast needing to learn how to function with regular Katrina and Sandy storm events, but it's certainly not something we can completely dismiss.

I don't think the food supply for North America is really at risk.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Let's put it this way: I think the chances of food scarcity affecting hundreds of millions of people due to political reasons are much higher, and I don't think that's very probable.

I've brought up the work of Ester Boserup before, and so has James. If we can expect women to have greater knowledge and control over their fertility in this era, why shouldn't we expect farmers to have greater knowledge and control over their crops?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I don't think food supply is a problem either. I'm less comfortable with clean water. Even in parts of the US I think people are going to be a little upset about what's going to happen to their water access over the next 20 years, but they'll have to live with dirty cars and something other than grass on their lawns.

In some areas, dramatic water shortages could lead to significant political problems and that could easily affect hundreds of millions of people across the world.

Water and dealing with once a generation storms every other year, or a couple of times a year is going to be more than enough to deal with.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

The west coast of South America is more than rich enough to weather water shortages. They're richer per capita than the US in 1950, but with a much higher level of technology. It comes down to a failure of political will, which isn't caused by climate change.

(To be fair, they have no shortage of political stupidity. It's a generation ago, but in the 1990s, coastal Peru was the ground zero of a major cholera outbreak, due to underfunding of necessary infrastructure.)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Being realistic, I see the problem of failure of political will coupled to the time required to effect change before things get bad.

Likewise, I don't see New York or the East Coast gearing up all that fast for Sandy II, III or IV.

Frankly, I'm astounded that London actually built the flood barrier ahead of a massive flood event in central London.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Desalinization and other water treatment isn't exactly science-fictional technology. If cities recycled water at the level that goes on in the average underground mine, their overall water usage would shrink dramatically.

Moreover, there's obviously a lot of plain and simple complete waste usage of water: having a green lawn is not the measure of one's existence.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

No, but it's not exactly a trivial thing to do either and would require some fairly radical changes that would be a pain to deal with. Not to mention it isn't exactly energy free.

As I've said, I think an advanced technological species can handle stuff like this but we shouldn't turn a blind eye to the potential problems we probably will hit.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Heck, isn't turning a blind eye to the potential problems a plank in the platform of the US Republican party?