Free Republic

China's population is growing at the slowest pace in decades. That's according to the latest census data out this morning. There are currently 1.4 billion people living in China. That's just over 5 -percent more than a decade ago. But what has many in Beijing worried: the birth rate remains weak and the population is getting older. The number of Chinese citizens between 15 and 59 has dropped by 7 percent, while the number of people over 60 continues to rise. A demographic shift like this is likely to have significant economic and political implications for the world's second biggest...

If the United States wants to avoid falling like the Roman Empire, it must avoid “overconsumption” and distribute resources equally, according to a study funded by NASA. “The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent,” reads the NASA-funded report published in the Ecological Economics journal. “Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed,” the study adds. “The stretching of resources...

The notion that we are imperiled by the size of the human population has been around since Anglican priest Thomas Malthus first postulated it in the late 18th century. In regard to famine, immorality, war and human misery of all sorts, Malthus maintained that there is "one great cause," preventing "improvement of society," and that is "the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it." If the size of the human population were to go unchecked, Malthus' demographics suggested that people would soon outrun global food supplies. Yup, that tired notion has been around...

Does humanity have a future? We are presently living in what conservation biologists refer to as the Holocene extinction event. This is the sixth global mass extinction event in last 439 million years. The previous five extinction events wiped out between 50 to 95 percent of species each time. The most recent event was 65 million years ago at the end of the Jurassic period, a cataclysmic occurrence that exterminated the dinosaurs, the dominant group of species at of that period. Evolution addresses the diminishment of biological diversity through speciation, but it takes at least ten million years to build...

Johannesburg (CNSNews.com) - One of participants at the "People's Earth Summit," a parallel (protest) event to last week's United Nation's-sponsored Earth summit, said, "If anyone in a developing country looks to the U.S. and wants a lifestyle like the average American--it's total bull---t!" Paula Snyder, an American who is traveling around the developing world to promote various Green causes, told CNSNews.com , "Greed is the enemy - the underlying problem is greed, and that leads into most of the problems with the ecological system and the political system." The People's Earth Summit was held at St. Stithians College near the...

Bill Nye, the liberal establishment’s cartoonish Pseudoscience Guy, packages progressive ideology in childish goofiness so as to render it less menacing as he preaches disproven global warming theory to kids young enough to take it at face value. Although his attempts to implant fear of “climate change” are laughable, his underlying message should make your hair stand on end: “Climate change is a real deal everybody…“Now back in 1750 there were about one-and-a-half billion people in the world. Well today there is 7.2 going on 7.3 billion people. Well that’s the problem. There’s billions of people breathing and burning the...

We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence, researchers have declared. Researchers say a new study shows 'without any significant doubt' that we are entering the sixth great mass extinction on earth. The study says that the window for conserving threatened species is rapidly closing. The study shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,' said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who led the research.The new study, published in the journal Science Advances,...

The world population may grow larger than previously estimated, reaching 11 billion people by century's end, according to a UN-led analysis published Thursday. That would mean two billion more people on Earth than expected by 2100, largely due to high birth rates in Africa, said the report in the US journal Science. "The consensus over the past 20 years or so was that world population, which is currently around seven billion, would go up to nine billion and level off or probably decline," said co-author Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology at the University of Washington.

“Africa’s projected to have more people than China or India by mid-century. More than China and India combined by the end of the century. And this is one of the causal factors that must be addressed.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, Al Gore participated in a forum on “climate change” and how it affects the economy, and vice versa. In response to a question about whether he was happy to see increased willingness to act on global warming, Gore offered a rambling response that included the above eye-popper. Gore, like many other warmers, and in...

Sunday, January 22, 2012 The greatest threat facing mankind is... The greatest threat facing mankind is NOT anthropogenic "climate change." Nor is it anthropogenic environmental damage. It most certainly is not "overpopulation." Neither is it "peak oil." Nor is it food shortages. The greatest threat facing mankind is, however, "anthropogenic." Because the greatest threat facing mankind is the general failure of mankind to reproduce: Fewer tells a monumental human story, largely ignored, but which promises to starkly change the human condition in the years to come. Never before have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low,...

Leading Population Researcher: There Is A 90% Chance Of “Collapse Of Global Civilization” (Ehrlich) Mac Slavo October 25th, 2011 Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and professor of population studies at Stanford University, has been warning for decades (The Population Bomb, 1968) that the earth is becoming increasingly unstable and incapable of supporting our ever expanding population growth. With 7 billion people on the planet and growth estimated to continue at a pace that would reach 15 billion by the end of the 21st century, Ehrlich notes that our concerns about feeding the world’s population and meeting energy resource needs for future...

Perhaps one of the most persistent and pervasive myths that have shaped the thinking of many people and, subsequently, public policy is the myth that the world’s population is spiraling out of control and that it will ultimately lead to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life. This whole concept of “overpopulation” can be traced to Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and Anglican clergyman (albeit a very misguided one) who, without any specific knowledge other than his own speculations, predicted in 1789 that the planet’s rapid increase in population would soon outstrip the planet’s ability to produce...

A study touting Genghis Khan's environmental record is being cheered by the team which produced Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  Genghis Khan's great accomplishment for the green cause?  Killing off 40 million humans so their un-tilled fields would be overtaken by forests.  While some may find genocide morally repugnant, environmentalists had a different concern:  Would reforestation be enough to overcome the greenhouse gases released by all those decaying bodies?  Julia Pongratz, who headed the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology research project from the Institution's Stanford University campus offices, provides the answer in a January 20 news release: We found that during the short...

The use of birth control has been an issue debated by ethicists in the United States for over a century. Until now, it’s been a moral issue, and few mainstream voices ever advocated the use of birth control for environmental reasons. On Scientific American’s website, an Oct. 11 article by David Biello argues that if we were able to lower the growth of the world’s population, the amount of carbon that is expected to be emitted into the atmosphere would significantly diminish. He cited a study from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research that explained demographic ties to the...

December 14, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Population control groups have been using the hype surrounding the Copenhagen climate change conference to promote their solution to hypothetical impending environmental catastrophes. Earlier this month, two pieces appearing in the same edition of the Guardian revisited a report by Britain's Optimum Population Trust (OPT) that suggests that people in wealthy first-world countries should "offset" the carbon cost of their jet-setting lifestyles by paying to prevent the births of poor children in the developing world. John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor, wrote that the OPT's report suggesting a "radical" plan to cut carbon emissions was...

Population growth is the real driver for higher greenhouse gas emission, so why don't more mainstream solutions start there? Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter for The New York Times and author of the paper's Dot Earth blog, warns that the math is pretty depressing. There are about 6.8 billion people on the planet today, a number projected to get to 9 billion by 2050. Americans, the world's greatest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, produce about 20 tons of the stuff per person, per year. If we were to cut that in half, as emissions rose with the quality of...

As we all know but are sometimes reluctant to contemplate, oil is a finite, non-renewable resource. This automatically means that its use is not sustainable. If the use of oil is not sustainable, then of course the added carrying capacity the oil has provided is likewise unsustainable. Carrying capacity has been added to the world in direct proportion to the use of oil, and the disturbing implication is that if our oil supply declines, the carrying capacity of the world will automatically fall with it. These two observations (that oil has expanded the world's carrying capacity and oil use is...

Regular readers will recall that we are on the verge of a population problem. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe, and in nearly every industrialized country are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Despite the appearance of a world bursting at the seams with an ever-greater number of people, the current growth rate is slowing and the world's population is likely to peak about nine billion and then begin contracting - precipitously - by 2080. Regular readers also will recall that there are convincing, if not certain, reasons to suspect that population contraction could...

The experts do not agree when the Earth's population reached 6.5 billion, but they generally agree that it has. The U.S. Census Bureau chose February 25, 2006, but the United Nations Population Division (UNDP) had picked July 2005. The People's Daily of China's Communist Party, intent on reducing the population of the world's largest nation by any means necessary, went with Dec. 19, 2005. Both the UN and Census Bureau believe world population will continue to rise, with the UN predicting 9.1 billion by 2050 and the bureau 9.2 billion. It is taken as divinely revealed dogma by the media...

"Europe has been experiencing terrible problems because of the decline in its birth rates. Never have birth and fertility rates fallen so low for so long, in so many places, as they have in Europe, which has seen 45 consecutive years of fertility decline. As a result, the European Union expects to suffer a net loss of 70 million people by 2050."