Might be my new favorite tree in the spring
Temp is 53℉ and humidity at 30.0 in/Hg. Blue sky out with thready clouds and almost zero breeze. Feels like the spring rains will be coming soon. I gotta learn to live with that.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.”
Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”
I am getting sick of the word “collapse”. I am getting sick of the phrase “human extinction”. I am coming to the conclusion that these are nothing more than “Snarl Words” which are said/written to elicit anger.
Granted, I am now officially elderly. This is also considered a snarl word. But having stayed on the carnival ride as long as I have, you start noticing trends. The trend I want you to understand is the plain old population. I always use 1954 as my baseline year (I was born December 1953). The world population in that antediluvian year was 2.7 billion people. When you take a look at the world today you are looking at 8.1 billion. So in my lifetime, the population has tripled.
But some of my favorite folks here on the digital frontier are completely enamoured by the term “collapse”. I suppose this is normal, as collapse means to decline rapidly. But there is also an additional definition within the word that implies “ceasing function”. I can’t say that this applies.
Right now in developed countries, there is a struggle to stay even in population. I can’t seem to find a developed country that can maintain its current population with current fertility rates (2.1 births). So the population is heading down. Good!
Ugo is prepping a book on how population growth is going to end. All I can say is that it is about time. But sometimes Ugo gets out over his skis and starts mouthing the word “extinction”. This is where I start to get annoyed. I won’t stop reading and enjoying, but sometimes I wish that particular market segment of the information flow would choose words that more accurately.
So I am pleading with Ugo to consider using the phrase “reversion to mean” when discussing the upcoming and (I am assuming of course) inevitable population decline. I think that it more accurately describes what is coming without the emotional baggage.
My personal example is the world population in my lifetime. If you average the world population estimates for the period you get a mean of right around 5.3 billion. So if the growth curve is symmetric, in the year 2097 we should be looking at this number with a loss of around 2.8 billion. Ugo argues that Seneca wants this number to go down faster, which may or may not be true.
My argument is that this isn’t a collapse. My population biology class (granted it was almost fifty years ago) showed a curve that looked a lot like this (provided of course, that my memory is accurate, which is a dicey proposition):
So, while I think that I am talking about science, I suppose what I am talking about is semantics. What we will be experiencing is a “reversion to mean”. Ugo’s use of the word “collapse” (see graph below) while appropriate in a journalistic sense and plays well to the audience, might not convey meaning appropriate to the proposed effect.
So, just making certain, I think that Ugo does a great job defining the road ahead. Keep reading him. Though I am thinking that his graph may well be just a defined slice of the other graph.
