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

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Yes. Some of the geoengineering proposals look pretty solid, and a combination of stabilizing carbon release levels and geoengineering should be able to greatly reduce the impact of climate change.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Well, we can probably bring the temperature down cheaply... at the cost of interfering with sunlight a bit, and not doing anything about ocean acidification...

I also worry that no one keeps granaries any more, so a bad global harvest would have no buffer. Markets work for regional variation within bounded range, not a "whoops, total wheat crop failure" event.