10 Billion Elephants in the Room

I had a play on the beeb's "work out your human sequence number" gizmo the other day and apparently I am the 77,191,204,131st person to have existed. All a bit silly really but the truly scary number comes when I saw that since I hatched in Blackpool back in the mid 60's the population of the world has doubled.


Now I am no Malthusian. Thomas Malthus, as you may recall, predicted that population growth would outstrip food supply which to be fair to him and the mathematics of the day did appear to be the case. However population didn't grow in quite the way Malthus' models had predicted and, being clever monkeys, we cam up with new and improved ways of food production. We continue to do that today and there's no reason to think that we can't support the predicted 10 billion peak population; sure the meat you're eating will probably be being grown from stem cells in a tank and your wheat and veg will have been highly genetically modified but at least we'll be spared from Charlton Heston yelling "Soylent Green is made of people" to anyone who'll listen.

No that's not the issue, the issue is one which the warble gloaming alarmists seem to have been rather quiet about, the 10 billion elephants in the room. Even if we cut out carbon emissions all those new people will still be consuming resources that'll need producing and transporting , they'l all be breathing out carbon dioxide and, at the risk of being crude, breaking wind and releasing tons of methane into the atmosphere. Sure we may be able to feed everyone but at what cost?


And I was just, you know, curious as to when the Global Warming lobby was going to start to calling for mandatory sterilization, people culls, and yes maybe the opening of a few centres where Edward G Robinson can commit suicide whilst watching deer frolic to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony.


Just asking.