Population and Climate Change | The Population Factor S1E2 | EarthX
Population and Climate Change | The Population Factor S1E2 | EarthX
EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Dr. Jane O’Sullivan and Kathleen Mogelgaard of the Population Institute, discuss the possibility of food shortages (due to climate change) and other existential crises if fertility rates do not slow.
About The Population Factor:
A series of key conversations examining the connection between our…
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There is no man made global climate change. Let’s start there.
A comment on your second guest, another good conversation. Again, I have to caution you both about thinking that we can continue to adapt to our current, massive overpopulation; climate change; pollution; natural system degradation; farmland loss and degradation, water, food, living space and other resource shortages, increasing conflicts within and between countries; mass migrations; increasing costs of living; etc. the rate of degradation of the natural systems that sustain life on Earth is increasing even faster than our human population.
Also, weather from pollution, habitat degradation and destruction, ocean acidification, groundwater pollution and overuse, declining agricultural productivity; and yes, climate change, we are passing tipping points.
Any one of these issues would reduce the human population carrying capacity of our planet. Combined, they will reduce the human carrying capacity of our planet in ways that we haven’t yet imagined.
I worked as an ecologist for 25 years, doing everything from plant and wildlife population studies; stream and other restoration projects, conservation land management, endangered species conservation, etc.
I’d got a very grim opinion of the Earth’s ability to sustain 2 billion people, much less our current 8, or the 10 or 12 billion we will see within the next few decades.
In terms of human population sustainability, every year we pass with a population over a billion means that we are actually doing so much damage to the Earth’s life support systems that we greatly reduce the number of people the Earth can sustain in the future. And, with our current rates of habitat destruction and pollution and global warming, etc., it appears that we may just make the Earth uninhabitable for our species and most other species.
The best term I’ve heard for the catastrophe is The Polycrisis. Overpopulation is the problem driving the extinction crisis, water, food, housing, and other resource shortages, the climate crisis, the increasing number of conflicts throughout the world, etc. Overpopulation drives all of these crises.