50
The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
50 points (90.3% liked)
Futurology
1801 readers
121 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Worldwide climatological disaster and associated geopolitical turmoil cause the human population to plummet rapidly. How rapidly will determine whether or not we return to essentially the stone age or maintain some semblance of modern civilization.
Some cross-disciplinary work by climate scientists, ethnographers, and economists who have more holistically examined economic collapses, have tentatively posited that the latter half of this century (2040 to 2080) could see a 40% to 90% collapse in the human population due to chaotic weather and lethally high wet bulb temperatures shrinking agriculture at scale to next to nothing.
Considering that we are accelerating past +1.5℃ of warming, and are still solidly on the “business as usual” path that is increasingly likely to lead to +4℃ of warming before the end of the century, combined with historical evidence that +4℃ warming will likely cause the extinction of most any megafauna over 50kg, and yes. We will likely see a rapid and unrecoverable plummet.
Could you please explain one thing to me: How does climate change cause the current population decline?
Chaotic weather.
80+% of agriculture depends on rainfall, either directly or in very near-indirect ways. A warmer atmosphere means not only air that dries out soils a lot faster and rains a lot less, but also more chaotic weather, with stronger deluges and more powerful droughts.
Agriculture at scale depends vitally on stable, consistent weather.
That stability and consistency is not in our future. Expect the first multi-crop, multi-year, worldwide famines to hit at some point in the 2030s. Expect the shortfall to be so so severe that it hurts even first-world populations. Anyone else will be much worse off.
But this can be the causal root of the recent changes. Populations aren't declining because of famine, but because people aren't having more children.
Your argument need some middle step or mediator like "people already realizing the comming problems and react with getting less childeren". But is this really the case? I mean, we observe the decline even in places like north korea or by groups who denied clima change or simply don't care.
Maybe, the emerging problems of clima change are part of the creation of a pessimistic worldview or something.
They've been saying that for 100 years now and it hasn't happened yet. Humanity has always been able to adapt to changing circumstances.