Climate Skeptics Point to World Population as the Real Problem

As you know, I have commented many times that behind all of humanity’s problems is overpopulation. And I have said the only possible way to reduce atmospheric carbon is drastic population reduction. The developing world is the part of mankind that is most stupid, ignorant, diseased, vulgar, and impoverished. Left to its own free agency, its population will continue to mushroom irresponsibly. Without drastic population reduction, or at least quasi stabilization, electrical energy demand will likely double by 2050. Affordable electricity on the scale the increasing population will demand is impossible with any proven technology except for burning fossil fuel. The cheapest fossil fuel is coal. The developing world wants affordable electricity much more than it wants to worry about CO2 and climate change. So expect the atmospheric CO2 load to increase.

It would be wonderful if the developed nation leaders abandoned their feeble failing gestures to regulate CO2 emissions, and apply their considerable assets and efforts to the dual projects of drastic population reduction and development of human-intelligence-level AI robots.

You seem concerned that national leadership is backing off futilely trying to regulate carbon emissions. The larger problem has always been overpopulation, but senior leadership (except for China’s) refuses to deal with that, and even thoughtful and educated private commentators such as you have been denying overpopulation is the actual problem. You have bravely promoted and defended the false, but attractive, proposition that governments can regulate carbon, and that increased prosperity in the developing world will drive down birthrates to reverse the overpopulation problem. Perhaps that is because the alternatives are too distasteful to contemplate.

A better argument is that if we are ever going to make things better we need to accept the facts, no matter how distasteful and unwelcome. I’d like to offer a more optimistic perspective on the problem and senior leadership’s response to it. In democratic societies the majority vote elects the leadership. But the majority vote is ignorant, stupid, self-interested, and short-sighted. That insures that no matter how intellectually competent, dedicated to social justice, and well-intentioned our senior politicos might secretly be, they can only gain and retain office by pretending to be something different and deceiving the voters, not by telling them unwelcome truths and trying to teach them to reason and act ethically in the longer-range community interest. There just is no way for the public to know what the senior politicos actually think and know, because the senior politicos carefully conceal their true selves. They probably are a lot smarter and know a lot more than the public supposes. In nearly every case, the politicos are surrounded by very well-educated and highly intelligent “advisors.”

They must nearly all be aware of, and familiar with, Ray Kurzweil’s AI Singularity predictions and speculations. He’s predicting human level AI by 2025, and dirt-cheap versions by 2030. His arguments supporting his predictions are very persuasive. I’ll confess that ever since I read Marvin Minsky’s, Society of Mind, back in the 1980s, I have always been certain that superior electronic AI persons would be coming in the future. But I never dreamed the future was only 50-years away. Now, Kuzweil has convinced me the future is nearly here. My optimistic perspective is that by 2030 the ITER will have wasted some $100-billion of the public’s money and proven itself and all other magnetic fusion schemes to be impractical as sources of grid power. But, happily, by 2030 electronic AI nuclear engineer persons will have designed perfectly safe, highly reliable, cost-effective, and completely automated fission reactors, likely along the lines of the thorium fuel cycle. (If fusion is actually practical, the electronic AI nuclear engineer persons will probably implement that instead of fission) Fully automated nuclear fission reactors staffed 24/7 by hundreds of fearless immortal robot persons all sharing a collective IQ over 200 will be something completely different and much better than the pressurized-water, enriched uranium, once-through fuel cycle, reactors of the present. The high intelligence robots can safely and competently handle all the fuel production and reprocessing. Power plant robots can provide virtually limitless cheap carbon-free fission reactor electricity. In practical effect, the power plants of the future will be sentient systems crawling with hundreds of common mind robotic cells. I’m guessing most senior leadership in major developed nations is thinking in those AI robot terms, and they all realize heavy investment in human designed and manned nuclear power plants is a stupid idea. Just 15-years from now, the carbon free grid design will be here, and once implemented that will allow hydrogen cycle transportation fuel. The world will still be grossly overpopulated, but the CO2 buildup past 500 ppm will end. Then too there is the certain prospect of universal human/AI mind meld.

Last week I engaged in discourse about his public school geography studies with a 15-year old HS student. The student displayed very little intellectual curiosity outside the particulars to be tested for grading purposes. The student seemed to have an adequate grasp of lines of latitude on maps, but understood nothing of lines of longitude. I asked why he knew nothing of the lines of longitude, and he smugly replied, “We don’t need to know that, we won’t be tested on it.” When I pressed the issue, the student said, “Everything I might ever need to know I can Google.” Within 30-seconds the student spoke to his cell phone and asked about lines of longitude, the cell phone spoke back with: “Here is what I found on lines of longitude in the Wikipedia.” The comprehensive Google article on cartography, navigational conventions, and history along with a photo of the Royal Observatory and marine museum at Greenwich was displayed on the cell phone screen. All that within 30-seconds. The student still showed no intellectual curiosity, (the Cutty Sark, the Suez Canal, the connections between time keeping and navigation, the observatory’s long pendulum clock, etc.) but he had truly made his point. I judged the proper rebuttal to his intrinsically weak mind was conceptually beyond his years. In silence I thought that such organic persons will make ideal and happy subjects for AI mind meld, and they will not lament surrendering most of their natural organic purposes and free-will control systems to their future AI person mind-mate. He will become an AI robot made of flesh, and he will be self-satisfied and never notice it. He will also have a low carbon footprint.