This'll make you stop worrying about your training program.

Not really!! Scientists put this crap up all the time and then the media blows it out of proportion. If they didnt then nobody would care. Its a shame because one day there acutally might be something really horrible happening but since the media has basically "cried wolf" so many times, no one will listen.

And 6 billion human beings isn't something to be concerned about? I'm not being facetious. Seriously.

Nature has a nasty way of restoring balance when it's necessary.

Somber but real wrote:

Yikes.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2739926.ece

It is worse than I thought.

Somber but real wrote:

And 6 billion human beings isn't something to be concerned about? I'm not being facetious. Seriously.

Nature has a typically gradual way of restoring balance when it's necessary.

We need a huge war to wipe out 50% of the earth's pop. this will ease the problem for a time

Holy shit it's Al Gore! I didn't know he was a runner!

One of the all-time great gloom-and-doomers was Paul Ehrlich. He was wrong on so much of this stuff, it was just amazing:

"All of [Ehrlich's] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about 'famines of unbelievable proportions' occurring by 1975, about 'hundreds of millions of people starving to death' in the 1970s and '80s, about the world 'entering a genuine age of scarcity.' In 1990, for his having promoted 'greater public understanding of environmental problems,' Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award.

. . .

"For some reason [Simon] could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days 'experts' spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

The reason so much of this stuff is hooey is that, in most cases, each human mouth is accompanied by a human brain and a pair of human hands. People don't just consume, most of them produce, as well.

Oh, and the "exponential growth of the human population"? Human population growth has actually been *slowing* for the last half-century or so. Shhh--don't tell the gloom-and-doomers...

Final tidbit: There are more trees (quite a lot more) in the US now than there were 50 years ago.

present wrote:

Oh, and the "exponential growth of the human population"? Human population growth has actually been *slowing* for the last half-century or so.

Saying growth has been slowing for the last 50 years might be a bit misleading. Depends if you mean growth rate (%) or the actual increase in the number of people. Here's an example (based on rough numbers).

Say 50 years ago in 1957 the human population was 2 billion, and say it was increasing at a grwoth rate of 2% per year back then, thats and increase of 40 million people from '57 to '58. (0.02*6b = 40m)

Now say growth has "slowed" to 1.5% per year in 2007, and current global population is 6 billion. There will be an increase of 90 million people from '07 to '08. (0.015*6b = 90m).

90 million is more than two times more than 40 million, even though the growth rate has slowed.

Also even if it is the actual increase in the number of people that is slowing, the population is stil increasing. Surely there's some point where there are just too many people for the earth to sustain. Whether we are approaching, have passed, or are not even close to that point is probably where the debate lies.

The sky is falling!!!

::buys cabin in the woods::

::becomes a hermit::

a precise history of things wrote:

Saying growth has been slowing for the last 50 years might be a bit misleading. Depends if you mean growth rate (%) or the actual increase in the number of people.

Valid and important point--thanks.

However, per the link above:

"UN projections show that it [i.e. the total population] may actually decline after 2040."

Fortunately, as the world's population has increased, so has the average number of calories consumed per individual (regrettable for some of us, actually, but good for humans overall).

What they don't take into consideration is the productivity miracle, the technology gains that enable the utililization of fewer resources to produce more finished goods, be it food or gas or whatever. Peak oil has been bandied about for decades, and the projection keeps being pushed further and further out because technology gains allow the discovery and extraction of previously unknown or unreachable supplies. Government tends to hinder technology and misallocate and squander capital investment, exploiting this useless propaganda to further its own ends.