[EirinnMoChroi]

Kamasatti, on 02 February 2012 - 10:38 AM, said:

Anti-human propaganda

Not anti-human at all. Anti-idiocity and anti-stupidity.

This thread is a joke now. Havent you realized that nobody but you has the opinion in this thread that overpopulation isnt a problem? Nobody else but you is arguing for more and more humans. It's a waste of time to even try to knock sense into people who ignore the years of study from environmental scientists and just take their information from some rando on a website.

[Kamasatti]

EirinnMoChroi, on 02 February 2012 - 02:58 PM, said:

Not anti-human at all. Anti-idiocity and anti-stupidity.

Not really, it's just a political cartoon that's bought into the anti-human propaganda. Even now you are yet to provide one example of where a reduced human population has had positive results for humans.

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This thread is a joke now. Havent you realized that nobody but you has the opinion in this thread that overpopulation isnt a problem? Nobody else but you is arguing for more and more humans. It's a waste of time to even try to knock sense into people who ignore the years of study from environmental scientists and just take their information from some rando on a website.

The only thing that can be realized from this thread, is that you have failed to successfully argue your views, and are not receptive to any facts, no matter how obvious, that are inconsistent with those views. An opinion is always going to be an opinion, no matter how educated it is nor how much credibility its riding on, and that is all you have presented; opinions.

[EirinnMoChroi]

Kamasatti, on 02 February 2012 - 04:49 PM, said:

Not really, it's just a political cartoon that's bought into the anti-human propaganda. Even now you are yet to provide one example of where a reduced human population has had positive results for humans.

How is it anti-human? It's saying that we've sawed the branch we are sitting on and that someday it will bite us in the a**. Totes true.

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The only thing that can be realized from this thread, is that you have failed to successfully argue your views, and are not receptive to any facts, no matter how obvious, that are inconsistent with those views. An opinion is always going to be an opinion, no matter how educated it is nor how much credibility its riding on, and that is all you have presented; opinions.

Not even remotely true. Just because you would rather listen to some website rather than professionals in Sustainability and Environmental Science doesnt mean I have "failed to successfully argue my views." My point isnt to make YOU agree with me. It's pretty clear to me that you dont give a crap about taking responsibility for our planet. Faith in you has already been lost, in my book. My point is to make sure you dont drag other people down with you. Luckily for me, nobody here seems to care about talking about anything even remotely religious, political, or philosophical anymore and probably wont even have the chance to care about your little website. AND, I would hope that they have better judgement than to believe that over the wonderfully magnificent artistic skills of my computer Paint program. The fact that I can make a better argument by drawing a few poorly represented cows than your "educational" website created by some rando with his head in the sand is pretty sad to me. Whats even more sad is the fact that you consider that logic "factual" and the logic coming from actual scientists in the field to be "opinion"

I went through the trouble of taking classes in this stuff. Your turn. I dont need to waste my time trying to change your mind if all you are going to do is blow it off and call it "opinion." Sadly, theres just nothing else to do around here but argue with you.

[ChotooMotoo]

How will increasing the human population improve the environmental condition of the planet? How will it improve global warming if instead of 3 billion people driving cars there are instead 6 billion? How will it improve the problem of water contamination to have 10 billion people creating garbage, poluting rivers, consuming stuff, pooping everywhere, than to have 6 billion? You fail to prove that doubling the human population which already has significant environmental impact everywhere it goes, will somehow have not only no impact, in fact its impact will reduce and decrease as its population doubles. This has never been the case in all of human history. There is ample evidence that human colonization of Australia decimated every species of large marsupial on the island within a few thousand years of colonization 65k years ago. That is a huge Island, those are many species, those were very few humans living a hunter gatherer lifestyle which is supposed to be the most eco-friendly lifestyle ever. If that's what happened with just a few thousand humans living a vew primitive lifestyle, how can we say that 10 billion humans living a modern lifestyle will have no impact on an already damaged planetary ecology? Its ludicrous.

[Kamasatti]

EirinnMoChroi, on 03 February 2012 - 09:36 AM, said:

How is it anti-human? It's saying that we've sawed the branch we are sitting on and that someday it will bite us in the a**. Totes true.

Yes, they've been making such claims about overpopulation for about 200 years now, and each time they keep having to revise their estimates higher and higher.

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Not even remotely true. Just because you would rather listen to some website rather than professionals in Sustainability and Environmental Science doesnt mean I have "failed to successfully argue my views." My point isnt to make YOU agree with me. It's pretty clear to me that you dont give a crap about taking responsibility for our planet. Faith in you has already been lost, in my book. My point is to make sure you dont drag other people down with you. Luckily for me, nobody here seems to care about talking about anything even remotely religious, political, or philosophical anymore and probably wont even have the chance to care about your little website. AND, I would hope that they have better judgement than to believe that over the wonderfully magnificent artistic skills of my computer Paint program. The fact that I can make a better argument by drawing a few poorly represented cows than your "educational" website created by some rando with his head in the sand is pretty sad to me. Whats even more sad is the fact that you consider that logic "factual" and the logic coming from actual scientists in the field to be "opinion"

I've already responded to everything that you have posted, while you are yet to do the same for what I have posted. Apparently, information from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme, the USDA's Conservation Reserve Program, and simple arithmetic, aren't as "credible" to you as the conclusions of Ivy League college professors, who wouldn't have seen "overpopulation", if they didn't already believe in it. None of that information you have even bothered responding to and yet you believe by appealing to authority, you've successfully argued your point?

And that drawing you posted only shows infrastructure and management problems, which would still be there regardless of what the population is, which also fails to prove your point.

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I went through the trouble of taking classes in this stuff. Your turn. I dont need to waste my time trying to change your mind if all you are going to do is blow it off and call it "opinion."

You aren't here to "change my mind", remember? The only thing you have done is argue in favor of your views on the issue. I've taken "Environmental Science" in college as well, so that is a weak argument.

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Sadly, theres just nothing else to do around here but argue with you.

And for those that agree with me or are indifferent to what I'm talking about, there isn't even that.

ChotooMotoo, on 03 February 2012 - 09:50 AM, said:

How will increasing the human population improve the environmental condition of the planet? How will it improve global warming if instead of 3 billion people driving cars there are instead 6 billion? How will it improve the problem of water contamination to have 10 billion people creating garbage, poluting rivers, consuming stuff, pooping everywhere, than to have 6 billion? You fail to prove that doubling the human population which already has significant environmental impact everywhere it goes, will somehow have not only no impact, in fact its impact will reduce and decrease as its population doubles. This has never been the case in all of human history.

"Global Warming" is part of the natural climate cycle of the Earth and the chemicals humans excrete from their cars are inconsequential to its overall trend. Plus, warmer temperatures tend to equal more sustainability anyway. As for water contamination, it is a management and infrastructure problem, and nothing is going to happen unless change is done to the management and infrastructure directly. More people isn't going to make a difference to it any more so than less people is.

History has shown us that as management and infrastructure improve, so does its coexistence with the environment, and consequently, this coexistence allows for a larger sustainable human population.

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There is ample evidence that human colonization of Australia decimated every species of large marsupial on the island within a few thousand years of colonization 65k years ago. That is a huge Island, those are many species, those were very few humans living a hunter gatherer lifestyle which is supposed to be the most eco-friendly lifestyle ever. If that's what happened with just a few thousand humans living a vew primitive lifestyle, how can we say that 10 billion humans living a modern lifestyle will have no impact on an already damaged planetary ecology? Its ludicrous.

Historically, the decimation of animal species by humans has virtually never been due to any human overpopulation. Furthermore, animals are not only used for food, and this is especially true for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. If this were a case of "overpopulation", it would have been more than just large marsupial species that would have been decimated.

Today, with improved infrastructure and management, the decimation of such species by humans is much less of a problem than it was then, even though we are today much more numerous than they were.

[ChotooMotoo]

Really? How do you explain the extinction of buffalo's on the American plains? wolves in the lower 48 states? near extinction of the whooping crane? extinction of numerous species of rhinoceros in Africa and Asia. Extinction of several species of whales, ongoing problems of whaling by the Japanese and Norwegians, numerous species still threatened in the USA which has laws protecting animals, forget about places like Pakistan and India, China with have no such laws. Humans never cause extinction you say? bullcrap.

http://www.independe...ind-397939.html

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When we hear of extinction, most of us think of the plight of the rhino, tiger, panda or blue whale. But these sad sagas are only small pieces of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are terrifying. Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analysed, but fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants.

By the most conservative measure - based on the last century's recorded extinctions - the current rate of extinction is 100 times the background rate But the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, and other scientists, estimate that the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and 270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.

all of this correlates with humans, and human expansion because of the way we utilize the environment. The problem is accelerating, not decelerating. More people, more poor people especially, they don't listen to "Oh, you should save that pretty bird because it's important to the ecology of the earth" they are hungry they see a bird and go "I'm hungry, I"m going to kill it" so they do, and there goes the last parrot of ... species. They are poor and know that selling rhino horns will make them money. They don't listen to your arguments about management whatever. THey want money now, so they kill it to get money now, instant reward not. That's how rhino's are going extinct and have gone extinct. All these theories of resource management are bull crap because they don't exist in reality and they don't take into account reality of human nature and the reality of life faced by people, the reality of resource distribution, the reality of what it would mean to evenly distribute resources. The simplest most cost effective solution, least painful solution is almost always the best solution. Guess what that solution is? It's been agreed on by people themselves for the last 60 years which is why Kerala India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, Argentina etc etc etc have all seen their birth rates drop. It's why the overall fertility rate in Pakistan is even dropping from 6 kids per woman to I think only 4 kids per woman on the last report I read. People know they can't afford it. There aren't enough resources, they can't see their children starve. Rather than be irresponsible and do the monetary equivalent of "I'm going to spend as much money as I want regardless of whether or not I have a job, and its' everyone else's duty to pay my bills" they are taking responsibility for their fertility and reducing it themselves for the most part, but too slowly. The solution is.... condoms. It's also the solution to the AIDS epidemic. We have no cure for AIDS, and none is forthcoming, one may never come. Therefore the most cost effective solution, the easiest solution is actually prevention, and it's dirt cheap. Condoms. Education and Condoms.

I ask you, would you advise someone, anyone, to spend as much money as they wanted, buy as much crap as they wanted regardless of how much they earned, whether or not they had a job? Sure buddy, go ahead and do whatever the heck you want, it's everyone else's responsibility to take care of your finances. That stranger who never met you will pay your bills, therefore you should make no effort whatsoever at personal responsibility. Would you do that for someones finances? FOr their credit cards, or car loans etc? Then why do we do it with the children we bring into the world for whom we have much more responsibility and burden than any debt we take from a human? We have a debt to GOD to provide for our children, why is that less serious to us than our debts to man?

[Kamasatti]

ChotooMotoo, on 03 February 2012 - 02:33 PM, said:

Really? How do you explain the extinction of buffalo's on the American plains? wolves in the lower 48 states? near extinction of the whooping crane? extinction of numerous species of rhinoceros in Africa and Asia. Extinction of several species of whales, ongoing problems of whaling by the Japanese and Norwegians, numerous species still threatened in the USA which has laws protecting animals, forget about places like Pakistan and India, China with have no such laws. Humans never cause extinction you say? bullcrap.

I never said that humans don't cause extinction. I was saying that the decimation or even the extinction of a species by humans, is not the result of human overpopulation. I thought it was clear the first time I said it, but I guess not.

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http://www.independe...ind-397939.html

all of this correlates with humans, and human expansion because of the way we utilize the environment. The problem is accelerating, not decelerating. More people, more poor people especially, they don't listen to "Oh, you should save that pretty bird because it's important to the ecology of the earth" they are hungry they see a bird and go "I'm hungry, I"m going to kill it" so they do, and there goes the last parrot of ... species. They are poor and know that selling rhino horns will make them money. They don't listen to your arguments about management whatever. THey want money now, so they kill it to get money now, instant reward not. That's how rhino's are going extinct and have gone extinct. All these theories of resource management are bull crap because they don't exist in reality and they don't take into account reality of human nature and the reality of life faced by people, the reality of resource distribution, the reality of what it would mean to evenly distribute resources.

The reality is that all of these problems lie with infrastructure and management, not "overpopulation". It is not "bull crap" to point out that simple, readily observable fact. That was the point, and since that is where the real problems lie, then it only makes sense that the real solutions lie there as well.

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The simplest most cost effective solution, least painful solution is almost always the best solution. Guess what that solution is? It's been agreed on by people themselves for the last 60 years which is why Kerala India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, Argentina etc etc etc have all seen their birth rates drop. It's why the overall fertility rate in Pakistan is even dropping from 6 kids per woman to I think only 4 kids per woman on the last report I read. People know they can't afford it. There aren't enough resources, they can't see their children starve. Rather than be irresponsible and do the monetary equivalent of "I'm going to spend as much money as I want regardless of whether or not I have a job, and its' everyone else's duty to pay my bills" they are taking responsibility for their fertility and reducing it themselves for the most part, but too slowly. The solution is.... condoms. It's also the solution to the AIDS epidemic. We have no cure for AIDS, and none is forthcoming, one may never come. Therefore the most cost effective solution, the easiest solution is actually prevention, and it's dirt cheap. Condoms. Education and Condoms.

I ask you, would you advise someone, anyone, to spend as much money as they wanted, buy as much crap as they wanted regardless of how much they earned, whether or not they had a job? Sure buddy, go ahead and do whatever the heck you want, it's everyone else's responsibility to take care of your finances. That stranger who never met you will pay your bills, therefore you should make no effort whatsoever at personal responsibility. Would you do that for someones finances? FOr their credit cards, or car loans etc? Then why do we do it with the children we bring into the world for whom we have much more responsibility and burden than any debt we take from a human? We have a debt to GOD to provide for our children, why is that less serious to us than our debts to man?

They aren't going to be less poor, or less desperate by having less kids. No one is going to offer them a well-paying job just because they have less kids to support. All they've done is reduced the number mouths to feed, which still doesn't do anything to fix the situation that they are in. Do you think if there were less people in the world, things like famine and poverty would just disappear? They wouldn't, and in fact, would get much worse, since less people also equals less distribution. If there are less people around to distribute things, then there is inevitably going to be less distribution, which also means less goods. So, people have even less kids to accommodate the falling supply, and the cycle repeats itself, until they stop having kids completely and die alone in poverty. That doesn't sound like any kind of solution to me.

[ChotooMotoo]

We've been pointing out readily observable facts about the booming population and the resulting destruction of the environment, the devastation that causes to the planet, global climate change which is NOT the result of a "natural cycle" as you would like to believe, it is absolutely exacerbated and enhanced many many times by human activities, and you don't want to listen to that. Scientists have been pointing out the irrefutable hard evidence for decades, but people make up fairy tales and prefer that to reality. Science is a process okay, it doesn't pull stuff out of thin air. Don't confuse science and philosophy. I can't help you if you don't want to help yourself.

This infrastructure management... how long can you push it? How long will you be able to push crop yields? How much are you going to increase oil production? The city of Las Vegas has decreased per capita water usage by an incredible amount but because the population of the city has increased by so much in the last few decades their water usage and water shortage problems are reaching epic proportions. Conservation only gets you so far. There comes a point where you simply cannot squeeze any more blood from the turnip, we are reaching that point.

[EirinnMoChroi]

Kamasatti, on 03 February 2012 - 11:42 AM, said:

Historically, the decimation of animal species by humans has virtually never been due to any human overpopulation. Furthermore, animals are not only used for food, and this is especially true for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. If this were a case of "overpopulation", it would have been more than just large marsupial species that would have been decimated.

Today, with improved infrastructure and management, the decimation of such species by humans is much less of a problem than it was then, even though we are today much more numerous than they were.

It might not be BECAUSE OF overpopulation, but the problem will get worse with more humans. Just because overpopulation isnt the cause of the problem doesnt mean it's any better for the issue. Adding more humans to a planet that is suffering is not going to fix the planet. It will make it worse.

You keep talking about "with proper management" but where do you think this management is going to come from? if this management isnt stopping the decimation of land animals, sea animals, deforestation, mining, etc. etc. then what makes you think its going to change int he future? In case you havent noticed, if it's not financially beneficial, nobody gives a hell. These "management" organizations that you keep promising will fix things arent even fixing things NOW so why would they fix things LATER? It's not a valid argument.

[EirinnMoChroi]

ChotooMotoo, on 03 February 2012 - 05:49 PM, said:

global climate change which is NOT the result of a "natural cycle" as you would like to believe, it is absolutely exacerbated and enhanced many many times by human activities, and you don't want to listen to that.

This girl has a PhD in Chemistry. Have fun trying to tell her that her education on global warming doesnt prove anything.

[Kamasatti]

ChotooMotoo, on 03 February 2012 - 05:49 PM, said:

We've been pointing out readily observable facts about the booming population and the resulting destruction of the environment, the devastation that causes to the planet, global climate change which is NOT the result of a "natural cycle" as you would like to believe, it is absolutely exacerbated and enhanced many many times by human activities, and you don't want to listen to that. Scientists have been pointing out the irrefutable hard evidence for decades, but people make up fairy tales and prefer that to reality. Science is a process okay, it doesn't pull stuff out of thin air. Don't confuse science and philosophy. I can't help you if you don't want to help yourself.

Yes, you have indeed pointed out all of these problems that result from human activity. However, virtually none of it is directly the result of human population growth. As for climate change, we are just going to have to agree to disagree on it, and save it for another discussion. It is, by no means, an undisputed fact among every scientist who has studied it, that human activity is exacerbating or enhancing it. The evidence may be hard, but the conclusions derived from it are not necessarily so.

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This infrastructure management... how long can you push it? How long will you be able to push crop yields? How much are you going to increase oil production? The city of Las Vegas has decreased per capita water usage by an incredible amount but because the population of the city has increased by so much in the last few decades their water usage and water shortage problems are reaching epic proportions. Conservation only gets you so far. There comes a point where you simply cannot squeeze any more blood from the turnip, we are reaching that point.

Obviously, there is a finite amount of resources available, so the human population cannot simply grow indefinitely. The disagreement is on what the limit is. I don't think you realize how much of a difference infrastructure and management can make in terms of "overpopulation", as it can make the difference between 1 billion people being the limit or 10 billion people being the limit.

EirinnMoChroi, on 03 February 2012 - 07:03 PM, said:

It might not be BECAUSE OF overpopulation, but the problem will get worse with more humans. Just because overpopulation isnt the cause of the problem doesnt mean it's any better for the issue. Adding more humans to a planet that is suffering is not going to fix the planet. It will make it worse.

Obviously, adding more people is going to make the problem worse, but then even only adding 1 more person can make it worse as well. The solution isn't to have less or more people, the solution is to fix the problem.

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You keep talking about "with proper management" but where do you think this management is going to come from? if this management isnt stopping the decimation of land animals, sea animals, deforestation, mining, etc. etc. then what makes you think its going to change int he future? In case you havent noticed, if it's not financially beneficial, nobody gives a hell. These "management" organizations that you keep promising will fix things arent even fixing things NOW so why would they fix things LATER? It's not a valid argument.

I'm not promising anything with any of these management organizations. I'm just saying that the real problem is infrastructure and management, and that any proper solution should therefore target both.

[ChotooMotoo]

EirinnMoChroi, on 03 February 2012 - 07:03 PM, said:

It might not be BECAUSE OF overpopulation, but the problem will get worse with more humans. Just because overpopulation isnt the cause of the problem doesnt mean it's any better for the issue. Adding more humans to a planet that is suffering is not going to fix the planet. It will make it worse.

You keep talking about "with proper management" but where do you think this management is going to come from? if this management isnt stopping the decimation of land animals, sea animals, deforestation, mining, etc. etc. then what makes you think its going to change int he future? In case you havent noticed, if it's not financially beneficial, nobody gives a hell. These "management" organizations that you keep promising will fix things arent even fixing things NOW so why would they fix things LATER? It's not a valid argument.

I would actually argue that it is because of over population. If populations were properly managed within available resources, extinctions would never happen. If the human population was self-sustaining, it would not need to increase it's killing of wildlife beyond the ability of the wildlife to replenish itself. Once again, anyone who bothered to read up on China's one child policy would gain a greater understanding on this issue. Much easier though to go "Oh those Chinese" than to try and even see their side of it.

When human populations were small and not encroaching onto Elephant habitats, Elephant populations were numerous. Human numbers increased, they needed more space, elephant numbers are decimated. You have increased your population beyond sustainability and in face destroyed habitat and destroyed resources, that to me is the definition of overpopulation. Read up on plagues of rats, plagues of locusts, you see that the insects, rats, their populations reproduce out of control until they are so numerous they swarm and end up consuming everything until there is nothing left to consume. Are we becoming a plague of humans? I think in some places on earth we are.