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Chijohnaok2 -> RE: Has Earth reached a Population Tipping Point? (10/10/2014 2:55:38 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Max 86
With the spread of Ebola and the Enterovirus here in the US and with Ebola expected in the UK and France in about a month I was wondering if our planet has reached a population tipping point to where Mother Nature steps in and delivers a rather brutal 'population readjustment' with plagues and the likes.
http://news.yahoo.com/high-risk-ebola-could-reach-france-uk-end-113015476.html
As one doctor said, any person can get on a plane and be anywhere else in the world in 24 hrs and that levels the playing field, biologically speaking.
I would like to think we are better prepared to handle a virus versus the black plague back in the day but how well is your area prepared? Are any of us really ready for such an event? Are any of us more prepared that the native Americans were for small pox?
Thoughts anyone?
quote:
I was wondering if our planet has reached a population tipping point to where Mother Nature steps in and delivers a rather brutal 'population readjustment' with plagues and the likes.
People have been predicting this for decades.
Have you ever heard of Paul R. Ehrlich?
In 1968 he wrote the book "The Population Bomb".
Among other things, he predicted:
---The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate ..
---"I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."[5] This view was widely held at the time, as another statement of his, later in the book: "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971."
---“By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
---in a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe!”, he predicted that by the end of the century the population of the US would be under 20 million, and our life expectancy would be around 40 years. A similar prediction of his was that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980-1989 and that by 1999, the US population would decline to 22.6 million.
--- In 1975′s The End of Affluence, Ehrlich predicted cataclysmic food riots in America, leading the President to declare martial law.
---He predicted that by the 1980s most of the world’s important resources would be depleted.
It's now 2014. Hundreds of millions did not die due to famine. India now has over 1.2 billion and is food self sufficient. The world's population did not drop to 1.5 billion. 65 million Americans did not die due to starvation in the 1980s. US life expectancy is now almost 79 years. US population is more than 300 million. There were no cataclysmic food riots in the US leading to a declaration of martial law. And there are still plenty of natural resources around.
Ehrlich is not the only "doom and gloom" prognosticator who has been proven wrong by the passage of time.
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