From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Delusional population projections lead us sleepwalking into catastrophe   
   By Jane O’Sullivan, Sept 13, 2023, The Overpopulation Project   
      
   The Elon Musks of this world think there can never be enough humans. When we   
   fill up Earth, we will conquer the Universe! But most people think population   
   growth is not a problem because it’s stopping soon anyway. Those   
   “population alarmists” must    
   be naïve, or motivated by racism. But what if growth is not stopping as soon   
   as we think, and what if those extra numbers make it impossible to avoid   
   widespread famines and run-away climate change?   
      
   In a newly published paper, I show how the UN projections have consistently   
   underestimated global population growth this century. According to the UN’s   
   2022 data, there were 253 million more people on Earth in mid-2022 than the UN   
   expected there would    
   be in its projection from the year 2000. While they then estimated an annual   
   increment under 80 million and falling, the actual increase has been roughly   
   90 million per year, with no sure sign of diminishing.   
      
   [CHART]   
   Figure 1. The UN’s estimate of world population, given in 2010, 2012, 2015,   
   2017, 2019 and 2022 revisions (solid pink line) and the projected population   
   from each of those revisions (dashed blue lines). For full citations, see Jane   
   O’Sullivan,    
   Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections   
   and Jeopardising Scenarios for Sustainable Futures.   
      
   There are several rival projections, the most widely known being the   
   Wittgenstein Centre (the “shared socioeconomic pathways” or SSP series),   
   Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and the Stockholm   
   Resilience Centre’s “Earth4All”    
   project. All three anticipate far more rapid deceleration and lower peak   
   population than does the UN. Hence, all are even further from reality.   
      
   Worryingly, these unrealistically low projections are being used in research   
   efforts to model sustainable futures, which explore what it would take to   
   avoid dangerous climate change and meet everyone’s needs within planetary   
   limits for resource use and    
   environmental damage. The SSP projections are particularly widely used in   
   modelling. They then present sustainability as a viable (if highly   
   challenging) possibility, when greater population numbers would breach   
   environmental limits even under the most    
   techno-optimist scenarios.   
      
   [CHART]   
   Figure 2. Projections of world population by the UN, Wittgenstein Centre   
   (SSPs), IHME and Earth4All. For full citations, see Jane O’Sullivan,   
   Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections   
   and Jeopardising Scenarios for    
   Sustainable Futures.   
      
   One reason for this underestimation is attributing fertility decline to   
   socioeconomic circumstances, such as reducing infant mortality, improving   
   girls’ education, urbanisation and industrialisation. None of the models   
   assigns any importance to    
   deliberate interventions such as voluntary family planning programs. While   
   family size does correlate with each of those factors, all of the models treat   
   fertility as the ‘dependent variable’, not considering how family planning   
   programs might have    
   contributed to lowering infant mortality, improving girls’ access to   
   schooling and accelerating industrialisation and income growth.   
      
   The UN’s model is calibrated over the decades in which family planning   
   programs were well supported and many countries had relatively rapid fertility   
   transitions. However, since this support was withdrawn in the 1990s, fertility   
   declines slowed    
   globally and even reversed in a few countries. The UN doesn’t seem to have   
   adjusted its calibration to account for this slow-down. On the contrary, it   
   has recently recalibrated to increase the rate of future fertility decline,   
   with no apparent evidence    
   to back this change. Its rhetoric flatly denies that past family planning   
   programs played any role at all, and is silent on its own projections’ poor   
   record at predicting growth over the past two decades.   
      
   Regular readers of this blog might recall my critiques of each of these   
   projections (here, here, here, here and here). In my most recent paper, I   
   bring these together in the context of scenarios for sustainable futures.   
   While few such studies have    
   explored the influence of different population assumptions, those that did   
   have found it impossible to achieve sustainable food systems and low enough   
   emissions to avoid more than 2oC of global heating, no matter how rapidly and   
   universally we change our    
   production technologies and consumption behaviours, if the world population   
   exceeds 10 billion. Yet, at this point it seems that only massive calamities   
   will prevent the human population exceeding 10 billion.   
      
   Letting nature do the culling for us is not in anyone’s preferred playbook.   
   Nobel Laureate Henry Kendall once said, “If we don’t halt population   
   growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally   
   and without pity—and    
   will leave a ravaged world.”   
      
   If we go down in wars, famines and environmental disasters, we will take a   
   great deal of biodiversity with us. Hungry people eat the roots of plants, the   
   bark of trees, and anything that crawls, digs, swims or flies, if they can lay   
   their hands on them.    
   Protected areas become a meaningless concept. Hunger soon gives way to   
   violence and failed states.   
      
   What would it take to avoid these calamities? The only answer is a much faster   
   fall in birth rates in all high-fertility countries than is happening now.   
   Such fast transitions have happened in the past, but only when contraception   
   and small families were    
   strongly promoted through active family planning programs.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)