David Attenborough is an Idiot

Or at least a misanthrope. He has recently said that humans are a plague on the Earth and we need to limit our numbers. Here is the article I read in the Telegraph.

The television presenter said that humans are threatening their own existence and that of other species by using up the world’s resources.

He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth.

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.

Sir David, who is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, has spoken out before about the “frightening explosion in human numbers” and the need for investment in sex education and other voluntary means of limiting population in developing countries.

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”

Is this fool not aware of the plummeting birthrates throughout the developed world. In many parts of Europe and in Japan the birth rates are below replacement level. Even in almost every poorer country birthrates are rapidly declining. We in the US may not have to worry about immigration from Mexico in a few decades, as their population will stop growing. In the Muslim world birthrates are crashing at a faster rate than Europe’s. If current trends continue, it is likely that the world population will peak at around 8-10.5 billion by 2050 and then begin to decline.

A declining birth rate for most of the world may be good for the environment but it will not be good at all for the economies of places like Europe and Japan. They will  have a growing number of elderly people depending on a  declining number of younger people for their pensions and health care. This does not bode well for the future of Europe and Japan. The situation in the Muslim world may become even worse. At least Europe and Japan are wealthy, technologically developed nations and could perhaps devise a solution to their demographic problems. The Muslim countries are neither wealthy, except for the oil producers and the wells will eventually run dry, nor technologically advanced. By the end of the twenty-first century, much of the world could have a real problem because there will not be enough people to sustain economic growth.

In fact, Malthus and Paul Ehrlich were simply wrong about overpopulation. We really don’t need for national or international governments to tell people to control the number of children they have. The truth is that most people do not want to have six or seven children and when they don’t need to have that many children to work the family farm or to make sure at least one or two survive to adulthood, they generally decide, on their own, to have only one or two children.