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]

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.