Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Death panels! They're back!!!

 

He's not wrong, we have more people than the planet can sustain. The problem is there are three solutions and all of them are not feasible. One requires humanity to pull a Thanos (and genocide is never going to happen). Another requires us to implement the Chinese policy globally (yeah, that's going to work). The last involves colonizing space but the technological and logistical limitations at this moment make that impossible.

In other words, I denounce this.

 

Nobody knows if this is true.

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-nature-damage-global-footprint-a8460756.html

 

That said . . .

A global population of 10 billion is nothing to worry about

Why We Should be Worried About the Rapid Growth in Global Households - CityLab

With population growth slowing, 10 billion may be the absolute top number. But as that second article points out, it's households, not population, that stress resources.

 

10 billion is a projection based on information we have now and estimates for population growth rates and technology advancement.
in the late 18th-early 19th century, Thomas Malthus used the information he had then and the estimates he could make then and concluded that we'd reach capacity in 100 years.
Didn't unfold that way.

Certainly there is some ceiling for earth-bound human population. Maybe it is 10 billion, maybe that will prove to be too conservative.
Technology advancements and the exponentially increasing speed of the improvements can create solutions that outpace population growth.
As worldwide standard of living, worldwide wealth and worldwide education, especially for women, population increase slows.

And at some point there is a ceiling for population on the planet, at which time the need to develop off-planet technology becomes top priority.

 

Also, letting too much surface water run out to sea (a real problem) and decreasing snowpack and precipitation related to warmer temperatures (real problems) are not the real drivers of California wildland fires.
The worst factor is the mismanagement of the state's forests as regulated by the state and federal governments.
Fixing the mismanagement of the forest would return the habitat to more natural conditions. Reduce the number of trees. Reduce tree die-off susceptability. And improve the conditions that currently have created an abundance of fuel that has cause larger and hotter fires.
Before the state and federal mismanagement of forests, there were fewer trees and trees were larger and more fire resistant, more disease resistant and more pest resistant.

Also, researchers at UC Merced say that properly managing the forests would result in an additional 1 million AF of surface water in the Sierra watershed.

 

A good, even-handed documentary on the topic of water scarcity in California.
Beyond The Brink

 

Two world wars and an influenza pandemic that wiped out about 150 million people, none of which he could have foreseen, probably had something to do with that.
Not saying we want any of those "solutions" to population growth, but we probably are overdue. If you look at the last 1,000 years there has often been a worldwide plague or catastrophe of some sort about once a century that seriously reduced the human population. Black Plague, smallpox, influenza have all been like controlled burns. The closest thing we've had in the past 100 years since the 1918 influenza outbreak was AIDS, and that has "only" killed about 25 million over 30 years. Compared to some of the pandemics of the past that's a small number.

 

There are a wide variety of factors that Malthus couldn't have foreseen.
Also including the massive, massive improvements in our ability to produce more food on less land using less labor, less energy and less water.
That said, I'm not saying Malthus' theories were wrong, just his predictions.
He's often used as an example of wrong scientific theory but that is a misapplication.
I believe much of his theories are correct even they fall short of being predictive because of so many variables.
But there probably is a hard ceiling for earth-bound human population.
I'm disagreeing, and 10 billion might be the number.

 

But what is a hard ceiling? It assumes some fixed set of conditions. The earth is dynamic. Even disregarding unknown changes in technology, human population growth itself will effect whatever the final sustainable population is, whether we get there slowly or quickly. What the sustainable population is today (add X billion to the earth) is almost certainly different than the population will be when, if ever, an unsustainable population is reached.