A very dangerous man.

Danllan · Jan 14, 2020

SilliamWhale said:
I can't think of a modern day famine that was caused by too many mouths.

That Mount Tambora was a natural disaster so would it have really mattered what the population was? Its like saying a tsunami in Japan which wiped out crops would be a demo that the population was too large to be sustained agriculturally

No. In most of the world it's all about viable land and what it can produce. You - as a member of the general public - may hear about a civil war in country X or an international conflict between Y and Z; what do you know about the tribal conflicts that absolutely riddle Africa and a lot of Asia?

Take a squint at the casualty figures for the Falklands in 1983, ours or the total if you like. That's just a small fraction of the yearly butcher's bill in North Western Kenya due to inter-tribal war - and the same thing happens all over the place, and its all down to having access to enough food and related resources and it all adds up.

Macsky said:
You like Chris Packham?

Yes, he's a very good naturalist. I don't agree with a lot of what he advocates, but I like his way of explaining natural phenomena and think he has overcome a lot of personal problems very well.

Cowabunga · Jan 14, 2020

Danllan said:
No. In most of the world it's all about viable land and what it can produce. You - as a member of the general public - may hear about a civil war in country X or an international conflict between Y and Z; what do you know about the tribal conflicts that absolutely riddle Africa and a lot of Asia?

Take a squint at the casualty figures for the Falklands in 1983, ours or the total if you like. That's just a small fraction of the yearly butcher's bill in North Western Kenya due to inter-tribal war - and the same thing happens all over the place, and its all down to having access to enough food and related resources and it all adds up.

Yes, he's a very good naturalist. I don't agree with a lot of what he advocates, but I like his way of explaining natural phenomena and think he has overcome a lot of personal problems very well.

It is about access to food mainly due to tribalism, war itself, and poverty combined with subsistence agriculture and the aforementioned lack of income to trade food.

Packham on the other hand doesn't explain natural phenomena accurately. Indeed he patently misleads people on a regular basis, the issue of burning being the latest blatant bullpoo spouted by him. His personal problems are very likely to be the cause and what runs his life. He has no empathy and a pathologically determined and blinkered outlook to everything he does and says. It is not normal. The more exposure he gets, the more perverted and extreme his public utterances become with his disgusting views on disease and the culling of humans being amongst his worse yet.

glasshouse · Jan 14, 2020

Brisel said:
What was that? I'm not expecting a politically correct response...

I was trying to find a link to a film with peter cook where they got folk to jump off a cliff

ollie989898 · Jan 15, 2020

Katarina said:
Wales is full sorry. move along please.

Nonsense, theres plenty of space for that nuclear waste repository.

JCfarmer · Jan 15, 2020

DrWazzock said:
Religious leaders who are against birth control should be put on trial for damage to the planet and causing suffering to humanity in my view. You would think that sort of medieval nonsense would have died out years ago, but for some reason it's perpetrated. The ayatollah and the pope would be first in the dock. Just by their preaching they have consigned millions to poverty and suffering. They really are bellends when you look at it that way.

Religion has also played a MAJOR part in controlling the worlds population through history. So not all bad!

kiwi pom · Jan 15, 2020

M-J-G said:
As I said I don't know and that I was guessing, so I don't really have a base, I just notice the green bits getting smaller and the ugly bits getting bigger.

I guess I look at the vast areas of the world that are mined, used as dumps, millions of acres of concrete and tarmac, huge swaths of deforestation and think man has transformed the planet and I am often curious if it's beyond sustainability, particularly if we continue to change things at the same rate as we have in the past generation.

We've certainly left our mark on the planet but jump on a plane and fly around the world (yes I know, destroying the planet blah blah) Keep looking down from the plane. There's still a hell of a lot of relatively undisturbed country down there.

DrWazzock · Jan 15, 2020

Chris Packham hasn't said we should control the population using diseases. He merely commented that these diseases were what used to keep the population under control.

He then challenges us to think about how we need to keep the population to sensible levels by other means.

I can't really see anything wrong with that.

That's not to say that I agree with him in other areas.

DrWazzock · Jan 15, 2020

JCfarmer said:
Religion has also played a MAJOR part in controlling the worlds population through history. So not all bad!

Yes, the insititution of marriage for one thing. : )
Good point.

Macsky · Jan 15, 2020

DrWazzock said:
Chris Packham hasn't said we should control the population using diseases. He merely commented that these diseases were what used to keep the population under control.

He then challenges us to think about how we need to keep the population to sensible levels by other means.

I can't really see anything wrong with that.

That's not to say that I agree with him in other areas.

I think he did much more than merely comment on the effect of disease, but rather opened the door wide to draconian methods of population control, with plague being used as the benchmark from which we can work from. He mentioned he didn’t want children to suffer, does that make everyone else fair game?

The real danger lies in what he didn’t say.

Dry Rot · Jan 15, 2020

Cowabunga said:
Disease and war are not acceptable answers for any issue in the 21stCentury any more than they ever were.

We may not want to accept it but that's probably what we'll get.

And I don't accept that the world's population is decreasing. The rate of increase may be decreasing, but that is an entirely different matter.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics".

Danllan · Jan 15, 2020

Cowabunga said:
...Packham on the other hand doesn't explain natural phenomena accurately. Indeed he patently misleads people on a regular basis...

I disagree and as I wrote, he is very often a git, and I do dislike his forays into politics and policy.

However, his explanations of many aspects of the natural world e.g. the evolutionary reason for and journey to flightlessness for Emperor Penguins have been superb. You'll not find a better man to convey the beauty and wonder of a splash of bright colour caused by lichens on a rock or beech tree. He just needs to wind his neck in a bit.

Cowabunga · Jan 15, 2020

DrWazzock said:
Chris Packham hasn't said we should control the population using diseases. He merely commented that these diseases were what used to keep the population under control.

He then challenges us to think about how we need to keep the population to sensible levels by other means.

I can't really see anything wrong with that.

That's not to say that I agree with him in other areas.

He is wrong there too. What kept the population under control was low initial numbers and living like animals with few tools tp defend against predation and tribal killings, and a very high mortality rate, especially of infants, children and birthing mothers.

He is an absolute tool! Totally oblivious to the fact that birth rates over most of the planet are now at maintenance level or less. He would sacrifice human life for a badger’s, for instance, which is a sure sign of his own disease for which he needs help.

Cowabunga · Jan 15, 2020

Dry Rot said:
We may not want to accept it but that's probably what we'll get.

And I don't accept that the world's population is decreasing. The rate of increase may be decreasing, but that is an entirely different matter.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics".

You are another one that is blinkered and seemingly incapable of rationalising facts. Facts which are easily obtainable and have been referenced previously. The Earth’s population will continue to rise for the next decade or two, but not because of a high birthrate but because of people already here not dying off. The death rate will however catch up quite quickly over the next 20 years. The main reason the UK’s population has risen over the last decade, well there are two actually, one being the numbers of elderly people and the other being the rate of immigration. If not for these, the population would have declined significantly because the birth rate is somewhere around 1.8 babies per woman. The maintenance rate is 2.1 per woman.
28% of those babies born annually are from women immigrants. Imagine [or work out] the birthrate figures if 28% of current births did not occur! In a couple of centuries the UK would be impoverished with no people left to do any actual work or to create wealth.

DrWazzock · Jan 15, 2020

The rate of increase of population may be be slowing but the actual population is not reducing, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Nobody has suggested we should inflict terrible diseases on people to reduce the population. We specifically seek to avoid that and one way of doing that is keeping population numbers sensible.
But surely its worth raising awareness that population is unsustainably high and that adding to it isn't helping.
Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything on that front, but just raising awareness so people can make their own informed choices to help defuse the situation, rather than blunder on oblivious to some catastrophe that we can do nothing about.
Seems sensible to me.
Nothing wrong with people having kids. But like anything it can be overdone.

DrWazzock · Jan 15, 2020

And I still maintain anyway that people won't actually do whats necessary to create a more sustainable future.
It requires to much in the way of radical thinking.
I went through the village and saw all those manicured lawns paid for by big pensions.
What a waste of petrol mowing all that lot to be picked up and carted by the council.
More or less devoid of life, some even kill the worms to avid the worm casts spoiling the appearance.
Multiply that up across the country and it runs into millions of tonnes of CO2 for achieving the sum total of feck all.
But try telling them they are wasting resources and see how you get.
No, its all the farmers fault for trying to produce food and make a living.

Clive · Jan 15, 2020

chaffcutter said:
Wonder what his criteria for euthanasia might be? Dangerously close to the eugenics crazies if you ask me.

well if his criteria involve anyone with a mental condition he’s first in line for the hangman’s noose !

Lowland1 · Jan 15, 2020

Population increase has to be put into context here in Kenya a lot of my employees come from or have relatively large families (six kids or more) however I am sure their carbon/global footprint is a lot less than the average 2.4 kid family in U.K. I bus everyone to work as they don't have a car each, an awful lot live in houses with no electricity, they don't eat a lot of meat and they're wearing your cast off clothes. Why should n't they aspire to a developed world standard of living. The trick is going to be sharing everything out fairly.

Cowabunga · Jan 15, 2020

DrWazzock said:
The rate of increase of population may be be slowing but the actual population is not reducing, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Nobody has suggested we should inflict terrible diseases on people to reduce the population. We specifically seek to avoid that and one way of doing that is keeping population numbers sensible.
But surely its worth raising awareness that population is unsustainably high and that adding to it isn't helping.
Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything on that front, but just raising awareness so people can make their own informed choices to help defuse the situation, rather than blunder on oblivious to some catastrophe that we can do nothing about.
Seems sensible to me.
Nothing wrong with people having kids. But like anything it can be overdone.

No matter what period in time you look at, historically, we have always had barely sustainable numbers of people. What was not sustainable 500 years ago is a fraction of what is sustainable today.
If current trends continue and if Africa can sort itself out by raising living standards, there's every reason to think that the world's population will decline starting from about 20 years from now. Indeed in Europe we are already in a situation where birth rate is below that needed to maintain numbers and even in India they are now down to only just above maintenance levels.
The Asian birthrate is above maintenance currently but is declining at a rapid rate and will be at maintenance levels within ten years but their population will still grow for a while due to the numbers of old people going forward, but overall they are following the Western pattern of stabilising.

Katarina · Jan 15, 2020

ollie989898 said:
Nonsense, theres plenty of space for that nuclear waste repository.

What a load of togswoble . If thats the best you can come up with then we insist you move along.

Dry Rot · Jan 15, 2020

Cowabunga said:
You are another one that is blinkered and seemingly incapable of rationalising facts. Facts which are easily obtainable and have been referenced previously. The Earth’s population will continue to rise for the next decade or two, but not because of a high birthrate but because of people already here not dying off. The death rate will however catch up quite quickly over the next 20 years. The main reason the UK’s population has risen over the last decade, well there are two actually, one being the numbers of elderly people and the other being the rate of immigration. If not for these, the population would have declined significantly because the birth rate is somewhere around 1.8 babies per woman. The maintenance rate is 2.1 per woman.
28% of those babies born annually are from women immigrants. Imagine [or work out] the birthrate figures if 28% of current births did not occur! In a couple of centuries the UK would be impoverished with no people left to do any actual work or to create wealth.

At what point in history has the population of the UK been declining? On the other hand, not much point in asking the question as some will never learn from history but prefer to sit contemplating their crystal balls and navels.

A very dangerous man.

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