Oh you’d need people to reproduce at the replacement rate, wouldn’t you, enforced probably - elimination for those who can’t or don’t want to? I don’t suppose economic growth is seen as a goal in that world-view either. Oh and there wouldn’t be any moving from country to country either of course because that would muck things up.
Oh @Concorde , that particular possible future is looking lovely isn’t it.
I think in the long run as a species we’re toast anyway, one way or another.
It was good, Concorde, until you got to the anti-immigrant slant.
Sorry to be frank.
But I didn’t - I didn’t mention immigration - anti - or otherwise. Please - where did I mention that topic ? That’s unfair - …………
Depends what you mean by “long run”, I suppose.
and
I rest my case.
Not since the mid ‘80s, no.
Oh dear! Older people are not always dead weight. They can impart their wisdom of experience and in many cultures they provide the best and most loving childcare. I do not feel we should write off anyone based on their age (or sex or colour or height…) but recognise their value where it is given.
Oh dear - I was using those figures in the paras referring to the UN quality of life report; they are ‘not’ anti-immigration. You are just being provocative and seeing something that is not there.
Just like brown people, eh 
No really if we’re thinking the population needs to be reduced that applies everywhere doesn’t it, so there aren’t, as we say in French, 36 solutions.
I’m just following @Concorde ‘s train of thought to its logical conclusion.
If food gets short you could always try some Soylent Green 
Shown to lycée pupils by my economics colleague - gives them plenty to think about.
I’m following a rather dystopian series on weekly release with AppleTV, called Pluribus. Just reached a logically explained similar system of people eating people as a logical way of preserving the earth’s limited resources. 
No. It’s a pattern that recurs in your posts and unfortunately it gives an anti-immigrant impression.
It’ll be about 150 million then won’t it, with all the illegals. Can’t take a step without tripping over one. Strewth.
I have little time this week to follow the debate. I would advise against basing any changes to climate on what happens in 35, or even 75 years. As I wrote last week, changes in climate over a few decades prior to the invention of the thermometer and systematic record keeping are simply not visible, as deferral to proxy data has offered only approx. century average data. So, one cannot assert that any change over the last 25 odd years is a manifestation of a permanent hanger to climate.
Regarding the claim that surface temperatures are inexorably rising for the last c. 50 years, these had dropped from highs in the1940s. For instance, a sustained high temperature climate from c. 1930 to 1944 manifest in parts of Canada and the US as severe drying of land, often historically referred to the dust bowls.
During essentially constant CO2 concentration from 0 BC to c. 1760, the earth experienced three 2+ century long periods of either heating and cooling; the CO2 as a control mechanism claim simply cannot explain this, even in this blink in climate history.
Greenland was indeed green until around the 16 century, having previously supported Viking populations.
Temperature, ice sheets, ocean levels (and land bed positions), natural species (and extinction) etc have always been changing, and often in a cyclical manner. Again, historical data over 100s millions of years shows that CO2 concentration results from changes in surface temperature, not temp responding from changes in CO2. And, the change lags by c. 800-1000 years.
Very thought-provoking BrianGerard. I hope you’ll stick around and keep posting if you’ve got more bits like that.
Surely that’s the case for any species, but deep, deep down, does it matter?
Greenland was only habitable in a few isolated pockets on the coast, during the Mediaeval Warm Period. By the 14th C life was increasingly difficult and the last settlements died out by the end of the 15th C. A similar warm period was happening throughout the Northern Atlantic region at the time. The vast majority of Greenland was still covered in thick ice sheets so no, Greenland wasn’t green, just a very few small coastal pocket were green enough to support life. Greenland has had a strong cooling trend since about 7,000 years ago with just a few brief blips. That has changed dramatically in the last 100 years.
Your posts question man-based climate change but seem to ignore the immediate social consequences of climate change, whether a consequence of industrialisation or not.
My own research into landscape history in South Africa has indicated that one of the main drivers of desertification in the Karoo interior has been the diminishing of the Tsitsikama temperate rain forest that in the C19th once extended far up the Indian Ocean coast, whereas today it is a tiny area on the south coast. This decline is primarily due to planting of fast growing Australian trees that propagate through intense forest fires that were too hot for the indigenous hardwoods. the other factor in the forests reduction was conversion to arable land that in the long term proved to be unsustainable.
But in respects of the consequences, the cause is immaterial, because as in many other parts of the world other consequences of climate change such as rising sea levels and salinisation of paddy fields drive migration. The world’s population is much higher than it was a few centuries ago and people have increasingly been forced into the least suitable liminal spaces, which are the first to be threatened. To take just one example, approximately 10% of the arable land of Bangladesh (population around 170 million) is only a metre above sea level and doesn’t actually need to be flooded to become infertile.
In other words, all over the world the consequences of climate change, whether man made or not are having an increasingly problematic social impact and to argue that it’s ‘just natural’ isn’t an adequate response.
