somebody who makes me feel normal...

Alas, this guy who is so far out on the fringe he makes me feel normal is quite obviously intelligent, extremely well informed (he's been writing an erudite blog on climate issues for well over seven years), and apparently not crazy. It would be way easier if he were dismissible. But my inner fears, my GUT-CHECK, tells me everything he says is probably right... except the paranoid government handing out explosives stuff. Now, that's just nuts.

aimee

Some time back (this blog is over 5 years old) I wrote about how we would experience wider and wider weather extremes, and eventually, we would reach the point where we would all be having a tough time just trying to survive. This would also have a very real and dramatic effect on world / regional food supplies, prices and the economy. I think it is pretty safe to say that we have definitely arrived at that so-called ‘prediction’.

It was just common sense, already charted in the increasing global temperatures and known effects that this would cause. Climate change has long been known to last for several thousand years into our future, but better science and better data is making these ‘predictions’ more and more accurate all of the time.

Greenland’s ice melt is dramatically intensifying, and is considered by scientist completely irreversible, as are the melting glaciers all over the world. These are not processes that can be easily reversed by humans, or in reality, reversed at all by humans. The geological time scale involved is way beyond human ability to reverse. The outflow of methane from the Siberian permafrost and the Arctic also continues to increase, creating truly “trigger events” that depict irreversible global warming and even more climatic extremes ahead.

Life on earth for all living beings is going to be increasingly difficult, this is now an absolute certainty. The only thing we do not know is how difficult, but a number of studies have been performed showing that most inhabitable regions of the Earth will experience extreme climatic events, with many of these regions becoming totally uninhabitable.

The inexorable rise of C02 cannot be ignored as this video shows:

There is staggeringly clear evidence that humans have created truly inhospitable conditions on Earth for many, many generations to come — and yet this is still being widely denied because of our incredible short-sightedness and arrogance (hubris). It is as if “until it happens to you” that the climatic extremes don’t carry any true weight or meaning. As long as the trucks continue to run and stock the supermarkets and big box store shelves, we simply don’t care how we have treated the planet, or what sort of horrifying inheritance we have given to our children and grandchildren.

Sigh…. I’ve harped on this theme again and again, and believe me, I do realize the sheer futility of telling it like it is. We are not going to make any of the critical changes to our lifestyles and living habits that are necessary in time, and indeed I believe it is far too late already. We are all, every single one of us, living on the last dregs of a once-abundant Earth and the resources that were so easy for us to plunder. We did so with abandon, a truly “the devil be damned” approach to getting as much as we could for ourselves, ignoring the ancient wisdom of indigenous societies around the world that rightly decried our unbelievable greed and arrogance as we turned their carbon-sinks into carbon dumps, desertifying and polluting entire landscapes for thousands of years to come.

It is NOT going to help us now to provide “more proof” and “more evidence” as our corporate-based dominionist culture is so indoctrinated into our lifestyles and ingrained into our way of thinking that anything that refutes this rapacious belief system is instantly denied and rejected. A “kill the messenger” attitude is being widely sponsored by the ignorant and even the informed, because the maintaining the status-quo is the unthinking and irresponsible oft-held “solution”.

Of course, this in is itself absolutely ridiculous, if the status-quo hasn’t worked up until this point, what makes anyone in their right mind think it will suddenly work now? The truth is nothing will now work, and I mean nothing and avoid collapse. We’ve already written the next several chapters, indeed entire volumes of the future human history on this planet already, but most of us are simply too ignorant to realize this. Not everyone of course, but the critical mass of humanity that refuses to comprehend the truly horrifying scale of events that lie ahead for all of us.

Many try to escape into alternative realities, through religion, new age movements or alternative belief systems, all with escape valves being “built-in” to these alternative realities that foster the illusion that we’re going to get out of this mess, somehow, someway. Either a magical rescue from above or a magical transformation of humanity from within that “remakes” us somehow into what we are truly destined to “be”.

It’s all hogwash, every bit of it. If you want to know what we are, and what we will be, just go look into the mirror. Or walk through a crowd. Or sit in the mall and people watch. Or attend any sporting event stadium. Or witness the flocking of humans to televisions, theaters and entertainment venues. Sit in a restaurant or at the bar, and observer. Take any Hollywood program, from sitcom to drama and you will very quickly realize what we are and are “destined to be”. Our future outcome is written right there in the script being played out every single day. I find this all so obvious that I can barely make myself make mention of it.

There will be no magical rescue of any sort, at any time. Any student or study of history can attest to this as a well-established fact — not one single civilization before us was rescued (ever). All either collapsed or were wiped out (same thing) or devastated their environment so badly that the few survivors left had to relocate.
We may harbor fanciful illusions of “rescue”, but the truth is already evident. We are here for the duration, long or short, and can only survive here as long as the planet still remains hospitable to life (all life, not just human life). Because we are now truly a global civilization and a terrifying global force capable of extinguishing all life very rapidly, we need to realize just how precarious our situation has now become. But more then just “realize” this, we need to finally live as if life on Earth is a valuable gift to be cherished and protected, but not raped, plundered and consumed with total disregard. But this is not happening.

I’ve also shared my thoughts on how there would be a massive increase in state-sponsored terrorism as governments turn inward against their own citizens. Any transgression to state control would be swiftly and brutally oppressed. This too was self-evident as the fear-state ratchets up higher and higher, manufacturing a state of paranoia and media sponsored fear-mongering. The true terrorists were those who were creating this artificial environment and belief system, the actual number of real terrorists events were unbelievably minuscule, far less dangerous to any American then the risk of simply walking across a busy street.

There was also the auspicious “timing” of certain events that seemed to come just at the appropriate time to gain passage of draconian legislation and political rhetoric. The number of these events and government sponsored bills trying to get passed boggled the mind, but the sleeping public bought it all, hook, line and sinker. Having landed their fatted carp with gaping mouths and sluggish world-views, it was an easy thing to mold them even further into accepting two regional wars,global state-sponsored terrorism and torture, prison camps and renditions, and even the outright assassination of anyone, including Americans that were deemed “enemy combatants” with no proof or evidence required.

This is of course, a situation that continues to exist today, with the nanny state and “Big Sis” reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 now firmly entrenched into the American psyche and consciousness. I mean, you truly cannot get away from this anywhere as they sniff our underwear and finger our wives and daughters at those places they call “security checkpoints”. Florida is now gathering DNA evidence at mandatory roadblocks, the so-called “sobriety checkpoints” where a judge is now on site in order to issue instant search warrants should anyone refuse. The DNA collected will now go into government databases for life. God forbid you sell some of your useless junk at a garage sale and two years later this shows up at the scene of a crime with your DNA still on it.

Amerika has become a helpless, pathetic country of dumbed-down sheeple, too afraid and too indoctrinated to even begin to comprehend their programmed slavery and support to state-sponsored terrorism. And then we get the blue-moon events of irate Americans who fly their planes into an IRS building or go on a shooting rampage in total but misguided event of frustration and anger, and the rest of us just brace for more draconian bullshit from do-gooder politicians that are convinced that the pathways that they are carving “are for our own good”.

Well, no thank you, I’m not that stupid, and the truth is quite the opposite as I have long shared.

Freedom, true freedom carries inherent risks. It does not require or need or justify whatsoever the nanny state underwear sniffers. It does not need or want surveillance cameras on every street corner, or Wi-Fi eavesdropping on every home or coffee shop. It does not believe that surveillance drones and cell phone eavesdropping is even remotely justified or necessary. The truth is quite the opposite, real terrorism in this country is nearly non-existent as revealed in the Foreign Policy, but the multi-billion dollar inflated budgets of the so-called “security state” being developed, the nanny-state crackdown on Americans is not about terrorism at all, it is about the total control of the Amerikan population.

Like the war on terror, targets must be identified. And if they cannot be readily identified, they must be created, to justify the very existence of the entities (and budgets) involved. Any casual search of history will reveal America’s support for Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and a large number of other notable “terrorists” sponsored by America. A slightly deeper examination will even show CIA support for the so-called terrorists training camps, and of course, especially that notorious American example, the School of the Americas where assassins are trained right here. Hey, if you can’t find them, then make some!

The FBI has been taking lessons here too, funding, training and encouraging deranged individuals around the country to plan “actions”, even giving out real explosives to kill Americans, but has yet to achieve the same level of truly stupid notoriety given to the CIA. It’s not called entrapment when it is the government itself that encourages you to attack someone, it’s called Homeland Security. Nor is it called torture when brutal methods are used on the accused without evidence, this is called National Security.

The security card has been so badly overplayed by these morons that anybody that falls for this deserves my loathing and disrespect. I have NEVER been at risk from terrorists in this country, but am constantly imperiled by these so-called protectors who are convinced that bombs may be found in my underwear or hidden in my socks. The TSA has not caught a single terrorist — or stopped a single plot, but this simple fact remains ignored by tens of millions of sheep.

Of course, I don’t fly and never, ever will as a useless protest to this stupid insanity going on at airports all over the country. But then again, I don’t have to. If I did, I’d change careers in an instant, and refuse to give any credence to the nanny-state protectors that are often-as-not, uncovered to be pedophiles and rapists. Some “security” we have there, where even their own background checks put criminals in charge of our protection.

America has become a nation of dumbed down, shaking-in-their-boots sheep, with their wool pulled up tight around their own eyes. They refuse to see what we have become and where we are going, and they are quite willing to believe anything that they are told. The outcome of all this was also predicted — a massive police-state surveillance society, the likes of which the world has never seen before. We have already surpassed the crimes of Nazi Germany — we export our torture with the approval and support of governments around the world, we bomb whatever countries we damned well please and there is none to put a stop to any of it. Our drones now circle the globe and are even being used against Americans right here in this nation. But the sheep doze on, oblivious and uncaring in the slightest as the tiny shreds of privacy and freedom they have left are vaporized.

Our technological prowess means we can watch everybody, everywhere, all of the time, especially in the digital world where cell phone, Internet, email, faxes, credit card transactions and even GPS systems all entermesh nicely together to give a total picture over an individual life. If you ever want to know “how come” they can find out so much so fast about the figures popping up into the news it is because of this. They are either already tracking everything or have the ability to uncover all the sordid details that they might possibly want.

Our complicit media is either too afraid or too stupid to report what really causes dissent abroad and here at home, we already know for certain that they are working in league with whatever they’re being told to report as “news”. Embedded journalism is the same thing as saying “we’re one of you” with all of its brutality, coverup and corruption as any gangster-led organization.

The sum total of all this is is we are all facing “extreme events” of such magnitude and scale that “coping” will no longer be appropriate terminology, whereas “survival” will be. Ask anybody that has endured any of these events — survival is their #1 thought and how to live through what is happening to them.

I’ve written extensively about personal collapse and how we have engineered the majority of these events right into our way of life. We created them, deliberately and with forethought and a whole lot of arrogance and indifference, but still, these things remain ours and we absolutely must own up to them. Every single grassroot movement in this entire country has been co-opted and derailed from accomplishing any meaningful reform and what lies ahead now only promises to be even worse. I cannot offer anyone any “hope” that restoration, restitution and deregulation will even exist within our lifetimes, there is no evidence at all in my book that we are going to make things even slightly better. The downward slide on the environment, the economy, freedom, tyranny, terrorism and state control is ever-downward with literally no end in sight.

Frankly, I suspect “we ain’t seen nothing yet” to be honest, because the bottom is still a long ways off and I suspect things will get dramatically worse long before we can ever hope for things to get better. You can’t take a grossly overpopulated and polluted, plundered planet existing on limited resources and expect any sort of magical or “legislated” turn-around. Realize that politicians are NEVER the answer and why they cannot fix anything. Our culture was the only answer their ever was, but this is like trying to explain greed to a Wall Street banker. Our corporate-controlled world simply has no interest whatsoever ensuring a habitable future, the instant gratification and profit-motives dominate all else.

So there you have it, again — the ongoing decline of Planet Earth, the Amerikan Empire and the future of man. This is exactly what I shared in the 2010-2020 predictions, my half-attempt to lay it all out there and what I think can happen in our collective futures.

2011 will be bad. The only thing you can do is assess your own life and make the necessary changes for your adaptation and survival. Don’t look for any rescue from government, politicians, religion or pie-in-the-sky answers, they won’t be forthcoming. Do what you can to help yourself because quite frankly, nobody else will do this for you.

new data

There is a plethora of new data coming out all the time - some is more alarming than others, but it all points in the same direction. The guy who compiled this is further along the doomer spectrum than I am, but not really by all that much

aimee

January 13, 2011

2010 Warmest, Wettest Year On Record

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filed under: general, environment, collapse — admin @ 12:43 pm

From Fire Earth and NOAA:

• Combined global land and ocean annual surface temperatures for 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest such period on record at 1.12 F (0.62 C) above the 20th century average. The range of confidence (to the 95 percent level) associated with the combined surface temperature is +/- 0.13 F (+/- 0.07 C).*
• The global land surface temperatures for 2010 were tied for the second warmest on record at 1.73 F (0.96 C) above the 20th century average. The range of confidence associated with the land surface temperature is +/- 0.20 F (+/- 0.11 C).
• Global ocean surface temperatures for 2010 tied with 2005 as the third warmest on record, at 0.88 F (0.49 C) above the 20th century average. The range of confidence associated with the ocean surface temperature is +/- 0.11 F (+/- 0.06 C).
• In 2010 there was a dramatic shift in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which influences global temperature and precipitation patterns — when a moderate-to-strong El Niño transitioned to La Niña conditions by July. At the end of November, La Niña was moderate-to-strong.
• According to the Global Historical Climatology Network, 2010 was the wettest year on record, in terms of global average precipitation. As with any year, precipitation patterns were highly variable from region to region.
• The 2010 Pacific hurricane season had seven named storms and three hurricanes, the fewest on record since the mid-1960s when scientists started using satellite observations. By contrast, the Atlantic season was extremely active, with 19 named storms and 12 hurricanes. The year tied for third- and second-most storms and hurricanes on record, respectively.
• The Arctic sea ice extent had a record long growing season, with the annual maximum occurring at the latest date, March 31, since records began in 1979. Despite the shorter-than-normal melting season, the Arctic still reached its third smallest annual sea ice minimum on record behind 2007 and 2008. The Antarctic sea ice extent reached its eighth smallest annual maximum extent in March, while in September, the Antarctic sea ice rapidly expanded to its third largest extent on record.
• A negative Arctic Oscillation (AO) in January and February helped usher in very cold Arctic air to much of the Northern Hemisphere. Record cold and major snowstormswith heavy accumulations occurred across much of eastern North America, Europe and Asia. The February AO index reached -4.266, the largest negative anomaly since records began in 1950.
• From mid-June to mid-August, an unusually strong jet stream shifted northward of western Russia while plunging southward into Pakistan. The jet stream remained locked in place for weeks, bringing an unprecedented two-month heat wave to Russia and contributing to devastating floods in Pakistan at the end of July.

1.73 F degrees may not sound like much — but as the world events show, this is hugely significant. Especially during therecord solar minimum we’ve been experiencing.

The parts of the world heating up the most are the Arctic and Antarctic, where temperature anomalies are far higher - 3 degrees Celsius and even 4.3 degrees Celsius: 2010 Hottest Year On Record For Canada

I recently shared this with a commentator:

There continues to be a steady rise in temperatures all over the world, especially the Antarctic and Arctic, and of course the world’s oceans. We are seeing what was expected — wild weather extremes all caused by heating.

All that evaporation (caused by heating in the hydrological cycle) has to go somewhere… it won’t stay airborne forever and when it does comes down, like it did in Pakistan and Australia, it’s “biblical”.

Don’t forget to include the United States, England, South Africa, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines too.

Expect horrific heat waves in the coming summer seasons.

I’ve already written that much of the Southern United States will become uninhabitable in time. Equatorial regions will increase in temperature to truly hellish conditions. The predictions are that our “hottest days” we experience now will become the “norm” for weeks and months on end, and that will wipe out most crops in those regions. I just don’t think it will take that long (2039) to experience these events — more like 2015.

The so-called “scientific reticence” — reluctance to tell it like it is and go out on a limb and risk your career (like I do has proven time and time again to be woefully underestimated by the “experts” on how fast climate change is occurring and to what degree and extent we can expect massive changes to our ability to exist.

We are in the end-game now as far as the Earth is concerned. The timing couldn’t be more auspicious.

National Geographics's Article on Population Expolsion 1/2011

One day in Delft in the fall of 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant who is said to have been the long-haired model for two paintings by Johannes Vermeer—“The Astronomer” and “The Geographer”—abruptly stopped what he was doing with his wife and rushed to his worktable. Cloth was Leeuwenhoek’s business but microscopy his passion. He’d had five children already by his first wife (though four had died in infancy), and fatherhood was not on his mind. “Before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” as he later wrote to the Royal Society of London, Leeuwenhoek was examining his perishable sample through a tiny magnifying glass. Its lens, no bigger than a small raindrop, magnified objects hundreds of times. Leeuwenhoek had made it himself; nobody else had one so powerful. The learned men in London were still trying to verify Leeuwenhoek’s earlier claims that unseen “animalcules” lived by the millions in a single drop of lake water and even in French wine. Now he had something more delicate to report: Human semen contained animalcules too. “Sometimes more than a thousand,” he wrote, “in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand.” Pressing the glass to his eye like a jeweler, Leeuwenhoek watched his own animalcules swim about, lashing their long tails. One imagines sunlight falling through leaded windows on a face lost in contemplation, as in the Vermeers. One feels for his wife.

Leeuwenhoek became a bit obsessed after that. Though his tiny peephole gave him privileged access to a never-before-seen microscopic universe, he spent an enormous amount of time looking at spermatozoa, as they’re now called. Oddly enough, it was the milt he squeezed from a cod one day that inspired him to estimate, almost casually, just how many people might live on Earth.

Nobody then really had any idea; there were few censuses. Leeuwenhoek started with an estimate that around a million people lived in Holland. Using maps and a little spherical geometry, he calculated that the inhabited land area of the planet was 13,385 times as large as Holland. It was hard to imagine the whole planet being as densely peopled as Holland, which seemed crowded even then. Thus, Leeuwenhoek concluded triumphantly, there couldn’t be more than 13.385 billion people on Earth—a small number indeed compared with the 150 billion sperm cells of a single codfish! This cheerful little calculation, writes population biologist Joel Cohen in his book How Many People Can the Earth Support?, may have been the first attempt to give a quantitative answer to a question that has become far more pressing now than it was in the 17th century. Most answers these days are far from cheerful.

Historians now estimate that in Leeuwenhoek’s day there were only half a billion or so humans on Earth. After rising very slowly for millennia, the number was just starting to take off. A century and a half later, when another scientist reported the discovery of human egg cells, the world’s population had doubled to more than a billion. A century after that, around 1930, it had doubled again to two billion. The acceleration since then has been astounding. Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us. And the explosion, though it is slowing, is far from over. Not only are people living longer, but so many women across the world are now in their childbearing years—1.8 billion—that the global population will keep growing for another few decades at least, even though each woman is having fewer children than she would have had a generation ago. By 2050 the total number could reach 10.5 billion, or it could stop at eight billion—the difference is about one child per woman. UN demographers consider the middle road their best estimate: They now project that the population may reach nine billion before 2050—in 2045. The eventual tally will depend on the choices individual couples make when they engage in that most intimate of human acts, the one Leeuwenhoek interrupted so carelessly for the sake of science.

With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it’s hard not to be alarmed. Right now on Earth, water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing. Close to a billion people go hungry each day. Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries. There will be billions more people wanting and deserving to boost themselves out of poverty. If they follow the path blazed by wealthy countries—clearing forests, burning coal and oil, freely scattering fertilizers and pesticides—they too will be stepping hard on the planet’s natural resources. How exactly is this going to work?

THERE MAY BE SOME COMFORT in knowing that people have long been alarmed about population. From the beginning, says French demographer Hervé Le Bras, demography has been steeped in talk of the apocalypse. Some of the field’s founding papers were written just a few years after Leeuwenhoek’s discovery by Sir William Petty, a founder of the Royal Society. He estimated that world population would double six times by the Last Judgment, which was expected in about 2,000 years. At that point it would exceed 20 billion people—more, Petty thought, than the planet could feed. “And then, according to the prediction of the Scriptures, there must be wars, and great slaughter, &c.,” he wrote. As religious forecasts of the world’s end receded, Le Bras argues, population growth itself provided an ersatz mechanism of apocalypse. “It crystallized the ancient fear, and perhaps the ancient hope, of the end of days,” he writes. In 1798 Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist, enunciated his general law of population: that it necessarily grows faster than the food supply, until war, disease, and famine arrive to reduce the number of people. As it turned out, the last plagues great enough to put a dent in global population had already happened when Malthus wrote. World population hasn’t fallen, historians think, since the Black Death of the 14th century.

In the two centuries after Malthus declared that population couldn’t continue to soar, that’s exactly what it did. The process started in what we now call the developed countries, which were then still developing. The spread of New World crops like corn and the potato, along with the discovery of chemical fertilizers, helped banish starvation in Europe. Growing cities remained cesspools of disease at first, but from the mid-19th century on, sewers began to channel human waste away from drinking water, which was then filtered and chlorinated; that dramatically reduced the spread of cholera and typhus.

Moreover in 1798, the same year that Malthus published his dyspeptic tract, his compatriot Edward Jenner described a vaccine for smallpox—the first and most important in a series of vaccines and antibiotics that, along with better nutrition and sanitation, would double life expectancy in the industrializing countries, from 35 years to 77 today. It would take a cranky person to see that trend as gloomy: “The development of medical science was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” wrote Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968.

Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, made him the most famous of modern Malthusians. In the 1970s, Ehrlich predicted, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and it was too late to do anything about it. “The cancer of population growth … must be cut out,” Ehrlich wrote, “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” The very future of the United States was at risk. In spite or perhaps because of such language, the book was a best seller, as Malthus’s had been. And this time too the bomb proved a dud. The green revolution—a combination of high-yield seeds, irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers that enabled grain production to double—was already under way. Today many people are undernourished, but mass starvation is rare.

Ehrlich was right, though, that population would surge as medical science spared many lives. After World War II the developing countries got a sudden transfusion of preventive care, with the help of institutions like the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Penicillin, the smallpox vaccine, DDT (which, though later controversial, saved millions from dying of malaria)—all arrived at once. In India life expectancy went from 38 years in 1952 to 64 today; in China, from 41 to 73. Millions of people in developing countries who would have died in childhood survived to have children themselves. That’s why the population explosion spread around the planet: because a great many people were saved from dying.

And because, for a time, women kept giving birth at a high rate. In 18th-century Europe or early 20th-century Asia, when the average woman had six children, she was doing what it took to replace herself and her mate, because most of those children never reached adulthood. When child mortality declines, couples eventually have fewer children—but that transition usually takes a generation at the very least. Today in developed countries, an average of 2.1 births per woman would maintain a steady population; in the developing world, “replacement fertility” is somewhat higher. In the time it takes for the birthrate to settle into that new balance with the death rate, population explodes.

Demographers call this evolution the demographic transition. All countries go through it in their own time. It’s a hallmark of human progress: In a country that has completed the transition, people have wrested from nature at least some control over death and birth. The global population explosion is an inevitable side effect, a huge one that some people are not sure our civilization can survive. But the growth rate was actually at its peak just as Ehrlich was sounding his alarm. By the early 1970s, fertility rates around the world had begun dropping faster than anyone had anticipated. Since then, the population growth rate has fallen by more than 40 percent.

THE FERTILITY DECLINE that is now sweeping the planet started at different times in different countries. France was one of the first. By the early 18th century, noblewomen at the French court were knowing carnal pleasures without bearing more than two children. They often relied on the same method Leeuwenhoek used for his studies: withdrawal, or coitus interruptus. Village parish records show the trend had spread to the peasantry by the late 18th century; by the end of the 19th, fertility in France had fallen to three children per woman—without the help of modern contraceptives. The key innovation was conceptual, not contraceptive, says Gilles Pison of the National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris. Until the Enlightenment, “the number of children you had, it was God who decided. People couldn’t fathom that it might be up to them.”

Other countries in the West eventually followed France’s lead. By the onset of World War II, fertility had fallen close to the replacement level in parts of Europe and the U.S. Then, after the surprising blip known as the baby boom, came the bust, again catching demographers off guard. They assumed some instinct would lead women to keep having enough children to ensure the survival of the species. Instead, in country after developed country, the fertility rate fell below replacement level. In the late 1990s in Europe it fell to 1.4. “The evidence I’m familiar with, which is anecdotal, is that women couldn’t care less about replacing the species,” Joel Cohen says.

The end of a baby boom can have two big economic effects on a country. The first is the “demographic dividend”—a blissful few decades when the boomers swell the labor force and the number of young and old dependents is relatively small, and there is thus a lot of money for other things. Then the second effect kicks in: The boomers start to retire. What had been considered the enduring demographic order is revealed to be a party that has to end. The sharpening American debate over Social Security and last year’s strikes in France over increasing the retirement age are responses to a problem that exists throughout the developed world: how to support an aging population. “In 2050 will there be enough people working to pay for pensions?” asks Frans Willekens, director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. “The answer is no.”

In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there. Though its population continues to grow, China, home to a fifth of the world’s people, is already below replacement fertility and has been for nearly 20 years, thanks in part to the coercive one-child policy implemented in 1979; Chinese women, who were bearing an average of six children each as recently as 1965, are now having around 1.5. In Iran, with the support of the Islamic regime, fertility has fallen more than 70 percent since the early ’80s. In Catholic and democratic Brazil, women have reduced their fertility rate by half over the same quarter century. “We still don’t understand why fertility has gone down so fast in so many societies, so many cultures and religions. It’s just mind-boggling,” says Hania Zlotnik, director of the UN Population Division.

“At this moment, much as I want to say there’s still a problem of high fertility rates, it’s only about 16 percent of the world population, mostly in Africa,” says Zlotnik. South of the Sahara, fertility is still five children per woman; in Niger it is seven. But then, 17 of the countries in the region still have life expectancies of 50 or less; they have just begun the demographic transition. In most of the world, however, family size has shrunk dramatically. The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,” Zlotnik says.

The bad news is that 2030 is two decades away and that the largest generation of adolescents in history will then be entering their childbearing years. Even if each of those women has only two children, population will coast upward under its own momentum for another quarter century. Is a train wreck in the offing, or will people then be able to live humanely and in a way that doesn’t destroy their environment? One thing is certain: Close to one in six of them will live in India.

I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago… The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. —Paul Ehrlich

In 1966, when Ehrlich took that taxi ride, there were around half a billion Indians. There are 1.2 billion now. Delhi’s population has increased even faster, to around 22 million, as people have flooded in from small towns and villages and crowded into sprawling shantytowns. Early last June in the stinking hot city, the summer monsoon had not yet arrived to wash the dust from the innumerable construction sites, which only added to the dust that blows in from the deserts of Rajasthan. On the new divided highways that funnel people into the unplanned city, oxcarts were heading the wrong way in the fast lane. Families of four cruised on motorbikes, the women’s scarves flapping like vivid pennants, toddlers dangling from their arms. Families of a dozen or more sardined themselves into buzzing, bumblebee-colored auto rickshaws designed for two passengers. In the stalled traffic, amputees and wasted little children cried for alms. Delhi today is boomingly different from the city Ehrlich visited, and it is also very much the same.

At Lok Nayak Hospital, on the edge of the chaotic and densely peopled nest of lanes that is Old Delhi, a human tide flows through the entrance gate every morning and crowds inside on the lobby floor. “Who could see this and not be worried about the population of India?” a surgeon named Chandan Bortamuly asked one afternoon as he made his way toward his vasectomy clinic. “Population is our biggest problem.” Removing the padlock from the clinic door, Bortamuly stepped into a small operating room. Inside, two men lay stretched out on examination tables, their testicles poking up through holes in the green sheets. A ceiling fan pushed cool air from two window units around the room.

Bortamuly is on the front lines of a battle that has been going on in India for nearly 60 years. In 1952, just five years after it gained independence from Britain, India became the first country to establish a policy for population control. Since then the government has repeatedly set ambitious goals—and repeatedly missed them by a mile. A national policy adopted in 2000 called for the country to reach the replacement fertility of 2.1 by 2010. That won’t happen for at least another decade. In the UN’s medium projection, India’s population will rise to just over 1.6 billion people by 2050. “What’s inevitable is that India is going to exceed the population of China by 2030,” says A. R. Nanda, former head of the Population Foundation of India, an advocacy group. “Nothing less than a huge catastrophe, nuclear or otherwise, can change that.”

Sterilization is the dominant form of birth control in India today, and the vast majority of the procedures are performed on women. The government is trying to change that; a no-scalpel vasectomy costs far less and is easier on a man than a tubal ligation is on a woman. In the operating theater Bortamuly worked quickly. “They say the needle pricks like an ant bite,” he explained, when the first patient flinched at the local anesthetic. “After that it’s basically painless, bloodless surgery.” Using the pointed tip of a forceps, Bortamuly made a tiny hole in the skin of the scrotum and pulled out an oxbow of white, stringy vas deferens—the sperm conduit from the patient’s right testicle. He tied off both ends of the oxbow with fine black thread, snipped them, and pushed them back under the skin. In less than seven minutes—a nurse timed him—the patient was walking out without so much as a Band-Aid. The government will pay him an incentive fee of 1,100 rupees (around $25), a week’s wages for a laborer.The Indian government tried once before to push vasectomies, in the 1970s, when anxiety about the population bomb was at its height. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay used state-of-emergency powers to force a dramatic increase in sterilizations. From 1976 to 1977 the number of operations tripled, to more than eight million. Over six million of those were vasectomies. Family planning workers were pressured to meet quotas; in a few states, sterilization became a condition for receiving new housing or other government benefits. In some cases the police simply rounded up poor people and hauled them to sterilization camps.

The excesses gave the whole concept of family planning a bad name. “Successive governments refused to touch the subject,” says Shailaja Chandra, former head of the National Population Stabilisation Fund (NPSF). Yet fertility in India has dropped anyway, though not as fast as in China, where it was nose-diving even before the draconian one-child policy took effect. The national average in India is now 2.6 children per woman, less than half what it was when Ehrlich visited. The southern half of the country and a few states in the northern half are already at replacement fertility or below.

In Kerala, on the southwest coast, investments in health and education helped fertility fall to 1.7. The key, demographers there say, is the female literacy rate: At around 90 percent, it’s easily the highest in India. Girls who go to school start having children later than ones who don’t. They are more open to contraception and more likely to understand their options.

SO FAR THIS APPROACH, held up as a model internationally, has not caught on in the poor states of northern India—in the “Hindi belt” that stretches across the country just south of Delhi. Nearly half of India’s population growth is occurring in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, where fertility rates still hover between three and four children per woman. More than half the women in the Hindi belt are illiterate, and many marry well before reaching the legal age of 18. They gain social status by bearing children—and usually don’t stop until they have at least one son.As an alternative to the Kerala model, some point to the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where sterilization “camps”—temporary operating rooms often set up in schools—were introduced during the ’70s and where sterilization rates have remained high as improved hospitals have replaced the camps. In a single decade beginning in the early 1990s, the fertility rate fell from around three to less than two. Unlike in Kerala, half of all women in Andhra Pradesh remain illiterate.

Amarjit Singh, the current executive director of the NPSF, calculates that if the four biggest states of the Hindi belt had followed the Andhra Pradesh model, they would have avoided 40 million births—and considerable suffering. “Because 40 million were born, 2.5 million children died,” Singh says. He thinks if all India were to adopt high-quality programs to encourage sterilizations, in hospitals rather than camps, it could have 1.4 billion people in 2050 instead of 1.6 billion.

Critics of the Andhra Pradesh model, such as the Population Foundation’s Nanda, say Indians need better health care, particularly in rural areas. They are against numerical targets that pressure government workers to sterilize people or cash incentives that distort a couple’s choice of family size. “It’s a private decision,” Nanda says.

In Indian cities today, many couples are making the same choice as their counterparts in Europe or America. Sonalde Desai, a senior fellow at New Delhi’s National Council of Applied Economic Research, introduced me to five working women in Delhi who were spending most of their salaries on private-school fees and after-school tutors; each had one or two children and was not planning to have more. In a nationwide survey of 41,554 households, Desai’s team identified a small but growing vanguard of urban one-child families. “We were totally blown away at the emphasis parents were placing on their children,” she says. “It suddenly makes you understand—that is why fertility is going down.” Indian children on average are much better educated than their parents.

That’s less true in the countryside. With Desai’s team I went to Palanpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh—a Hindi-belt state with as many people as Brazil. Walking into the village we passed a cell phone tower but also rivulets of raw sewage running along the lanes of small brick houses. Under a mango tree, the keeper of the grove said he saw no reason to educate his three daughters. Under a neem tree in the center of the village, I asked a dozen farmers what would improve their lives most. “If we could get a little money, that would be wonderful,” one joked.The goal in India should not be reducing fertility or population, Almas Ali of the Population Foundation told me when I spoke to him a few days later. “The goal should be to make the villages livable,” he said. “Whenever we talk of population in India, even today, what comes to our mind is the increasing numbers. And the numbers are looked at with fright. This phobia has penetrated the mind-set so much that all the focus is on reducing the number. The focus on people has been pushed to the background.”

It was a four-hour drive back to Delhi from Palanpur, through the gathering night of a Sunday. We sat in traffic in one market town after another, each one hopping with activity that sometimes engulfed the car. As we came down a viaduct into Moradabad, I saw a man pushing a cart up the steep hill, piled with a load so large it blocked his view. I thought of Ehrlich’s epiphany on his cab ride all those decades ago. People, people, people, people—yes. But also an overwhelming sense of energy, of striving, of aspiration.

THE ANNUAL meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) is one of the premier gatherings of the world’s demographers. Last April the global population explosion was not on the agenda. “The problem has become a bit passé,” Hervé Le Bras says. Demographers are generally confident that by the second half of this century we will be ending one unique era in history—the population explosion—and entering another, in which population will level out or even fall.

But will there be too many of us? At the PAA meeting, in the Dallas Hyatt Regency, I learned that the current population of the planet could fit into the state of Texas, if Texas were settled as densely as New York City. The comparison made me start thinking like Leeuwenhoek. If in 2045 there are nine billion people living on the six habitable continents, the world population density will be a little more than half that of France today. France is not usually considered a hellish place. Will the world be hellish then?

Some parts of it may well be; some parts of it are hellish today. There are now 21 cities with populations larger than ten million, and by 2050 there will be many more. Delhi adds hundreds of thousands of migrants each year, and those people arrive to find that “no plans have been made for water, sewage, or habitation,” says Shailaja Chandra. Dhaka in Bangladesh and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are 40 times larger today than they were in 1950. Their slums are filled with desperately poor people who have fled worse poverty in the countryside.Whole countries today face population pressures that seem as insurmountable to us as India’s did to Ehrlich in 1966. Bangladesh is among the most densely populated countries in the world and one of the most immediately threatened by climate change; rising seas could displace tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Rwanda is an equally alarming case. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond argued that the genocidal massacre of some 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 was the result of several factors, not only ethnic hatred but also overpopulation—too many farmers dividing the same amount of land into increasingly small pieces that became inadequate to support a farmer’s family. “Malthus’s worst-case scenario may sometimes be realized,” Diamond concluded.

Many people are justifiably worried that Malthus will finally be proved right on a global scale—that the planet won’t be able to feed nine billion people. Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute and now head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, believes food shortages could cause a collapse of global civilization. Human beings are living off natural capital, Brown argues, eroding soil and depleting groundwater faster than they can be replenished. All of that will soon be cramping food production. Brown’s Plan B to save civilization would put the whole world on a wartime footing, like the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, to stabilize climate and repair the ecological damage. “Filling the family planning gap may be the most urgent item on the global agenda,” he writes, so if we don’t hold the world’s population to eight billion by reducing fertility, the death rate may increase instead.

Eight billion corresponds to the UN’s lowest projection for 2050. In that optimistic scenario, Bangladesh has a fertility rate of 1.35 in 2050, but it still has 25 million more people than it does today. Rwanda’s fertility rate also falls below the replacement level, but its population still rises to well over twice what it was before the genocide. If that’s the optimistic scenario, one might argue, the future is indeed bleak.But one can also draw a different conclusion—that fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future. People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation. Giving every woman access to family planning services is a good idea—“the one strategy that can make the biggest difference to women’s lives,” Chandra calls it. But the most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems.

Global warming is a good example. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are growing fastest in China, thanks to its prolonged economic boom, but fertility there is already below replacement; not much more can be done to control population. Where population is growing fastest, in sub-Saharan Africa, emissions per person are only a few percent of what they are in the U.S.—so population control would have little effect on climate. Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research has calculated that if the population were to reach 7.4 billion in 2050 instead of 8.9 billion, it would reduce emissions by 15 percent. “Those who say the whole problem is population are wrong,” Joel Cohen says. “It’s not even the dominant factor.” To stop global warming we’ll have to switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy—regardless of how big the population gets.

The number of people does matter, of course. But how people consume resources matters a lot more. Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others. The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty—the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda—while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet.

The World Bank has predicted that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the “global middle class,” up from just 400 million in 2005. That’s a good thing. But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It’s too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it’s not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy. “Eating less meat seems more reasonable to me than saying, ‘Have fewer children!’ ” Le Bras says.How many people can the Earth support? Cohen spent years reviewing all the research, from Leeuwenhoek on. “I wrote the book thinking I would answer the question,” he says. “I found out it’s unanswerable in the present state of knowledge.” What he found instead was an enormous range of  “political numbers, intended to persuade people” one way or the other.

For centuries population pessimists have hurled apocalyptic warnings at the congenital optimists, who believe in their bones that humanity will find ways to cope and even improve its lot. History, on the whole, has so far favored the optimists, but history is no certain guide to the future. Neither is science. It cannot predict the outcome of People v. Planet, because all the facts of the case—how many of us there will be and how we will live—depend on choices we have yet to make and ideas we have yet to have. We may, for example, says Cohen, “see to it that all children are nourished well enough to learn in school and are educated well enough to solve the problems they will face as adults.” That would change the future significantly.

The debate was present at the creation of population alarmism, in the person of Rev. Thomas Malthus himself. Toward the end of the book in which he formulated the iron law by which unchecked population growth leads to famine, he declared that law a good thing: It gets us off our duffs. It leads us to conquer the world. Man, Malthus wrote, and he must have meant woman too, is “inert, sluggish, and averse from labour, unless compelled by necessity.” But necessity, he added, gives hope:

“The exertions that men find it necessary to make, in order to support themselves or families, frequently awaken faculties that might otherwise have lain for ever dormant, and it has been commonly remarked that new and extraordinary situations generally create minds adequate to grapple with the difficulties in which they are involved.”

Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity.

Another Good Post From Causabon

• Ten Basic Preparations for a New Year

Category: Preparedness

We live in a very strange society in many ways. Think about how weird it is that almost any kind of personal preparation for the future that doesn't involve putting money in the stock market is viewed as survivalism, and as the territory of crazy people with guns. How strange is it that the language of personal responsibility has been claimed for political purposes by the right to imply that one is personally responsible to be financially secure (and a moral and personal failure if you aren't) but not personally responsible to be able to meet basic needs in difficult times? It is regarded as perfectly normal that people in blizzard country, tornado country, earthquake country and hurricane country (which is pretty much all the country) have no food, water or ability to take care of themselves during the kind of natural disaster that regularly befalls people in their region and must rely on rescue services.

Perhaps the very oddest thing about us is simply that even in places where natural disasters occur on a regular basis most people think that it would be too much bother to prepare for them adequately. We have been conditioned to simply wait in misery for the power company to get the lights back on, and then to assume that such things won't happen again. And yet, they always do. Moreover, while no one who needs it, who experiences the worst of a disaster, or who because of age, poverty or illness cannot provide for their own needs should be ashamed of asking for help, those of us who can get out of the way so that rescue workers and social support can concentrate on the vulnerable and needy have an obligation to do so. This is personal responsibility in a legitimate sense - in which the burdens are highest on those best able to alter their circumstances.

In that spirt, I offer 10 resolutions, simple things to do to increase your basic preparedness in the new year.

1. Take some recycled bottles out of your or your neighbor's bin and fill them with tap water. What could be simpler? Old soda bottles, milk jugs, juice bottles, even wine bottles with screw tops will do. Wash them out thoroughly, and fill them with tap water. Find a corner of your house and stick them there - it is absolutely free (we get rid of a nearly infinite number of beverage bottles in this country), and they'll fit under a bed, in your freezer (if you have extra space), in a closet or anywhere. Thus, when/if the water goes out - either because you are on a well and the power goes out or because of flooding and contamination or a disruption in service or a water main break, you won't be dehydrated, thirsty and dirty. The recommendations are 1 gallon per person, with 1 liter per 2 cats or 1/2 gallon per dog per day, although if you can do two gallons, that will give you washing water. Rotate the water every 3 months - use it to flush or water the plants and refill the containers.

Water is necessary for life and good health - it is simple common sense to have some available for an emergency, and it costs virtually no money and very little time.

2. Get a tetanus booster. Besides the fact that many of us garden and work in the dirt that way, the kinds of disasters that befall us often come with penetrating injuries - wood from fallen trees or nails from fallen buildings we are repairing. Anyone who regularly spends time in the garden, shop, works with wood or might endure a disaster (ie, everyone) should keep their tetanus shots up to date - tetanus is endemic and nasty and no one wants it!

3. Purchase long life batteries for your smoke and CO detectors, or test and change regularly, and appropriate fire extinguishers. I think these are better than changing your batteries annually, because they provide long term protection if you screw it up. If the power goes out, most of us are likely to use methods of lighting, cooking and heating that have fire risks - more so because we aren't accustomed to using the woodstove, the sterno can, the candles, the lanterns all the time. So make sure your fire safety skills are good. Your local fire department probably offers some support services here, but regardless make sure you know what you are doing, have the ability to use things safely, and have appropriate materials to reduce your risk. That means smoke and CO detectors and fire extinguishers you know how to use. It also means getting your chimneys cleaned, your backup heat sources properly installed and using good common sense. Even being cold or sitting in the dark is better than dying in a fire. Make sure you also teach your children good fire skills.

4. Dress appropriately to the environment. Recently a school bus in my region broke down bringing kids back late from afternoon activities. Stuck on the highway on a bitterly cold night, after dark with temperatures dropping rapidly, many of the kids had only flimsy jackets, wore light sneakers rather than boots and were miserable and badly chilled by the time they were picked up. Had rescue not arrived fairly quickly, many of the children might have had to be hospitalized for hypothermia. Their parents had dressed them not for the environment, but for the indoors, assuming that they wouldn't have to go outside much between home and bus. I've known other people caught in snowstorms in the same circumstances. So recognize that things can happen at any time, and as much as possible, prepare. Dress for the weather, even if that means unlayering at work. Anyone who had to walk out of New York City after 9/11 or the 2004 power outage, for example, learned to make sure they brought appropriate walking shoes with them to work. It takes only a little extra thought to be able to handle most environments appropriately.

5. Know your neighbors. They will be your first line of defense if anything bad happens - it is the neighbors who will come to your aid, or you to them. This works both ways - this both prevents all of us from enduring the pain of realizing that your neighbor was suffering alone during a crisis and you didn't help, and also gives you the support you will need. Tough times make us rely on one another - think how important neighbors are when the trees are down across the road and you have to work together to make access, or when one of you has a generator and everyone else is sitting in the dark. Sure, you can introduce yourself when the building is freezing and the pipes have burst, but a little friendly interaction in advance of that is worth a lot.

The thing about disasters is that after the running-around-and-screaming part, there's usually a lot of sitting around and waiting. If for no other reason than to have someone to pass the time with while you are standing in line for your water ration or waiting for the trucks to get in, or sitting around in the dark saving flashlight batteries from 5pm on, you should know your neighbors.

6. Keep extra food around. I'm big on food storage as a day-to-day thing - it cuts down on trips to the store, saves money and adds to one's comfort. I even wrote a book about it. But perhaps that's too far for you to go - still, it makes sense for you to at least have the makings of a week's worth of simple, easy to prepare meals that can be kept on the shelf and *that your family will eat* - that means don't waste your money on all instant stuff or MREs both of which are generally salty, unpleasant and constipating. Instead, how about some potatoes kept in a cool spot for baked potatoes and a good canned (or home canned) chili to go over them? Even some cans of soup, some crackers and dried fruit will make your life considerably better if you can't get out. Don't forget coffee, tea or whatever you customarily drink - you'll be cranky without it, and cranky people are rarely at their best. None of this need cost you much - in _Independence Days_ I describe a plan, made up by an anonymous friend, for spending an additional $5 per week to provide adequate emergency food. Just do a little at a time.

7. Know how to keep warm and cool without supplemental heat or cooling. A lot of hardship, as well as injury and death is caused by temperature extremes that often accompany power outages. I've got more detailed information on not freezing here and not frying here.

8. Know how to get your family together quickly in an emergency. Which of you will pick up the kids? Where will you meet if you have to evacuate quickly? Is there a relative or friend who can be the central phone resource, with everyone checking in with them? Do you have directions, including back roads if you have to get out of town quickly? Remember the evacuations for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, where trips that normally are very brief took many hours. What will you do if the gas stations can't pump? It is worth settling on a plan "I'll go pick up the kids, you meet me at Aunt Esther's house."
Make sure the kids know too!

9. Take a basic first aid course. People get injured and burned in emergencies, because they are doing things they aren't accustomed to - shovelling three feet of snow, cooking on top of the wood stove, operating chain saws, sleeping in a cold house, unless these are your daily fare (and sometimes even if they are), people get hurt, and sometimes you can't get them rapidly to medical care, or the medical facilities are so overwhelmed that you don't want to bring someone in for something trivial. Make sure you know enough to be able to evaluate injuries and illnesses, establish what requires an ambulance and what can be dealt with at home. Make sure you have a good first aid kit as well.

10. Recognize that stuff happens, and every time it does, learn from the experience - assume that it will happen again, if not this year, next or the next. Find ways of making sure you are safe, comfortable, can provide aid to your loved ones and your community, and most of all, that you only turn to limited safety nets when you have to, so that they can meet the needs of the most vulnerable.