Abstract
Although it took all of human history up until the 1800s for the global population to reach one billion, the most recent billion was added in a mere 12 years. This unprecedented growth in the global population has contributed to many serious moral problems, but arguably the most dire of these is climate change. The Earth’s atmosphere can only absorb so much greenhouse gas before it violently disrupts the climate, and the number of people on the planet make staying below that limit very difficult. In this chapter, I will argue that the relationship between the world’s population and the threat of catastrophic climate change entails that we have a global population crisis, and that the fact of this crisis constitutes a public health emergency.
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Notes
- 1.
Population data is easily located in any number of places. For some of the best, up-to-date information, see the UN’s Population Division, found at http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/index.shtml (last accessed January 27, 2016).
- 2.
This point about the ambiguity in the discussion of earth’s carrying capacity was made strongly by Joel Cohen in his (1996).
- 3.
According to the UN World Population Prospects 2015, we should expect the global population to hit 9.7 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100, based on their ‘medium variant’ fertility projections. However, the medium variant fertility projection has been consistently low for several years, prompting the UN to repeatedly update their projections. We might then worry that the actual future will look more like the higher limit of the confidence band (the highest prediction within a 95 % confidence interval), which predict a population of more than 11 billion by 2050, and a population of 13.3 (!) billion in 2100 (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2015).
- 4.
See this, and related data, at the GFN’s website: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/ (last accessed January 27, 2016).
- 5.
For a visual snapshot of the world’s food and water shortages, see the FAO Hunger Map 2013 (The Statistics Division, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2013); for more details, explore the UN’s full website at www.fao.org/economic/ess (last accessed January 27, 2016).
- 6.
This problem is really two problems, as it is likely that our resources will run out if we let them (if we continue use, unabated), but letting our resource use get to that point would be an environmental disaster. Even as I finish this manuscript in early 2016, America continues to look for novel (and ever dirtier) sources of fossil fuel, from the Alberta tar sands, to ever more wide-spread use of fracking, to the opening of drilling in the (now melted from climate change) arctic. And what all of this ignores is that, even burning through what is already on the accounting books for major energy companies will guarantee absolutely catastrophic climate change. In fact, according to Bill Mckibbin, the amount of coal, oil and gas in reserve (what we are planning to burn) is five times the amount that would lock in ‘dangerous climate change’ (Mckibben, 2012). So on the one hand, there is in fact a hard limit to the amount of fossil fuels that we can extract from the earth; but on the other hand, we will run out of what we can safely burn, long before we run out of what we can possibly burn.
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Rieder, T.N. (2016). Global Population and Public Health. In: Toward a Small Family Ethic. SpringerBriefs in Public Health(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33871-2_1
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