Dystopian tales have always fascinated me. Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley being two of my favorites that describe an orderly but disordered and scary future.
Then there are the grim but morbidly fascinating predictions of an overpopulated, Hobbesean world where man devolves into unwashed, feral tribes at constant warfare with one another over dwindling resources.
For a more restrained view of what could happen if Europe were to be swamped by waves of poor immigrants, read Camp of the Saints, by Frenchman Jean Raspail.
Now comes Paul Farrell conjuring a fusion of catastrophic climate change and a demographic tidal wave that produces a global cataclysm making the fall of Rome look like a kids birthday party breaking up.
Thomas Malthus predicted as much almost 200 years ago, and people on the left and right have been hanging on his famous words ever since. This despite the fact that we have not yet seen his dire conclusions realized.
Our scientific minds have continued to pull our collective fat out of the fire for lo these many years, so I wouldn't yet be digging that bomb shelter with the 5,000,000 gallon water tank and a 100 years supply of MREs.
Nonetheless, Mr. Farrell does place his finger on an inexorable trend: Global population is increasing, and there are large swathes of benighted humanity that have not the technology to ameliorate the expansion of the teeming hordes. Wars are not fought for religion; wars are fought over resources, and the resource to person ratio is decreasing. Can science keep up?
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Five-reasons-population-boom-biggest/story.aspx?guid={66A7D394-5E73-4D74-8C22-4E1BC7BFB98B}
5 comments:
The level of speculation in so called news is out of control. Any story that says "could possibly, may, might, very well could and may end up" is not worth reading.
We humans have a horrible track record at predicting the future. Its useless filler material for people with too much time on their hands.
Give me the facts...just the facts.
SteveH
These modern day Jeremiads are crafted to scare us into the action. In the case of the enviros, its action of the author's choosing: Stop breeding and give up all fossil fuels or the world will burn up!
The overpopulation (and now climate change) people have always been wrong and will continue to be because they use simple models based on linear interpolation, and don't take into account the other factors involved.
e.g. The earth's temperature has risen one degree per decade, so in the year 2500 the average temperature in summer will be 140 degrees! It's balderdash, and the good, objective scientists who have a grounding in math and the scientific method have told us so.
Meanwhile, Orwell, Huxley and Raspail's dark predictions are coming true, thanks to the left.
I perdict that the human populatin will not exist one day. Redneck ron
This is the beauty of free market economics, actually, I think, Silverfiddle.
It's why we study Smith more than Malthus, today. Because free markets offer abundant resources, rather than the perpetually limited resource mentality that drives so many of these dystopian scenarios.
And somehow, despite assholes like Malthus and Keynes, things always work out.
The somehow on the other end of that thought is that people find ways to work things out despite the Cassandras among us.
Cassandras come in all stripes. The one stripe they all share is yellow.
And that just isn't really any way to run a civilization, I don't think.
I agree, Ben. The typical government bureaucrat or politician couldn't think us out of a wet paper bag. It's the free market that has spurred innovation and been the engine for advancing civilization. Just look at the places where a free market is stifled or nonexistent.
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