{"id":36142,"date":"2018-07-21T11:58:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-21T16:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36142"},"modified":"2018-07-21T11:58:34","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T16:58:34","slug":"the-coming-population-crash-a-seneca-cliff-ahead-for-humankind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36142","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Population Crash: A Seneca Cliff Ahead for Humankind?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Coming Population Crash: A Seneca Cliff Ahead for Humankind?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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This is a condensed and modified version of a paper of mine that appeared on “The Journal of Population and Sustainability<\/a>” this year. The image above is the well known “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” by Albrecht Durer – 1498. Yes, I know it is catastrophistic, but it is not my fault if biological populations do tend to collapse! (see also my previous post: “Overpopulation Problem? What Overpopulation Problem?<\/a>“<\/i>A Seneca Collapse for the World\u2019s Human Population? <\/b><\/div>\n

By Ugo Bardi (a similar version has appeared in 2017 on “The Journal of Population and Sustainability<\/a>“)<\/p>\n

1. Introduction<\/b>
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\n\u201cThe world has enough for every man’s need, but not enough for every man’s greed.\u201d Gandhi [1]<\/i><\/p>\n

While Gandhi’s observation about greed remains true even today, it may not be so for the ability of the world to meet every man’s need. Gandhi is reported to have said that in 1947 when the world population was under 2.5 billion, about one-third of the current figure of 7.5 billion. And it keeps growing. Does the world still have enough for every man\u2019s need?<\/p>\n

It is a tautology that if there are 7.5 billion people alive on planet earth today there must exist sufficient resources to keep them alive. The problem is for how long: a question rarely taken into account in estimates purportedly aimed at determining the maximum human population that the Earth can support.<\/p>\n

The problem of long-term support of a population can be expressed in terms of the concept of \u201covershoot,\u201d applied first by Jay Forrester in 1972<\/a> [2] to social systems. The innovative aspect of Forrester’s idea is that it takes the future into consideration: if there is enough food for 7.5 billion people today, that doesn\u2019t mean that the situation will remain the same in the future.<\/div>\n

\n\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Coming Population Crash: A Seneca Cliff Ahead for Humankind? This is a condensed and modified version of a paper of mine that appeared on “The Journal of Population and Sustainability” this year. The image above is the well known “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” by Albrecht Durer – 1498. Yes, I know it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[10777,1371,20958,1776,2692],"class_list":["post-36142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-cassandras-legacy","tag-population","tag-population-crash","tag-seneca-cliff","tag-ugo-bardi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36143,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36142\/revisions\/36143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}