Planet could be ’unrecognizable’ by 2050, experts say (solution: die, please)
Source: france24.com
A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.
To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.
Undated image of Earth’s city lights released by NASA. A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.
The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.
But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.
People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.
It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.
"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.
Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.
"For 20 years, there’s been very little investment in family planning, but there’s a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices," said Bongaarts.
"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning," said Casterline.
Article from: france24.com
Ed Note:
"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet":
Same planet, but smarter, more educated population than 8000 years ago. We are able to steward the land more effectively, and grow food in more abundance because we have a better scientific understanding of plants, growth cycles and food nutrition, and we also have better technology and equipment to help us produce more efficiently (this is leaving out scientific involvement of genetic modification).
"The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion":
This is only true if we do nothing to humanely and intelligently manage and judiciously conserve our resources. People are working towards that goal even now - more so than they were 50 or even 100 years ago.
Is "effective family planning" just eugenics?
It’s true we must be vigilant and intelligent in the management and distribution of resources. But we also mustn’t start culling the population (as the global elite see fit) while the resources continue to only benefit the rich and ’entitled’.
~E
Also tune into:
James Corbett - Geopolitics, Eugenics & Depopulation
Michael Tsarion - Roots of Tyranny, Calvinism & Behaviorism
Aaron Franz - TransAlchemy, Save the Humans!
Alan Watt - Bilderberg, Elites & The Navigators
Michael Tsarion - The Post Human World
Tim Ball - Climategate & The Anthropogenic Global Warming Fraud
William Henry - The Apotheosis is at Hand, NWO, COP15, Norway Blue Spiral & Stargates
Peter Taylor - The Corporatization of the Environmental Movement
James Follett - The Church of Global Warming
