rationalskepticism.org

Thommo wrote:

tuco wrote:

Thommo wrote:

tuco wrote:Are you? How about predictions to 2200 or 2B population scenarios to be taken seriously? Not sad about those? I am not being mean now, just curious.

I didn't see any that weren't appropriately qualified. So no.

I wouldn't take them too seriously if they were expressed with undue certainty. And I might get sad if people were unduly sure.

I don't know what "appropriately qualified" means but alright.

It just means that situationally appropriate words that limit or constrain the extent or circumstances of a claim have been used.

tuco wrote:I guess you missed the part with the claim that the current level of consumption would be sustainable if the population were 2B people, leaving alone where the 2B came from.

Quite possibly I did, although that doesn't actually sound like a prediction of population in 2200 to me anyway. I'm sure there's lots to discuss in such a claim, but it doesn't sound inherently unreasonable to me. Certainly if you had a world population stratified in the same way the current world population is, but stable at around the 2B mark a lot of sustainability issues like land use, deforestation, water use, mineral depletion or fish stock depletion would take on radically different dimensions, and other resources would be deteriorating at a proportionately lower rate which would allow for a much more gradual course correction.

There'd need to be more in depth discussion to form a sensible view one way or the other, I'm sure. Any criticism I would have to offer would be markedly different than that I would offer to the repetition of Oxfam's claim, which was rather uncritically based on the assumption that environmental impact operates on a 1 for 1 basis with income, combined with what rather disappointingly amounted to a small amount of disguised numerology.