Ian Bradford: UK Professor says billions need to die to “save the planet.”

Just over  a week ago,  Bill McGuire, an Emeritus Professor at University College London said this:  If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I can see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown is the culling of human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”

 The issue of ‘overpopulation’ is one that has been long present in the climate science community but is rarely discussed in public in the stark terms employed by McGuire.  McGuire is articulating what some in the climate alarmist camp actually believe. A view that climate change is really about overpopulation is not that uncommon among climate alarmists. 

Writing in 1990, just two years after the formation of the IPCC, Robert White, president of the National Academy of Engineering  said that because of environmental pressures being experienced by the world, the prospects for stabilising the climate and arresting the deterioration of the habitability of the planet is hopeless without population control. Writing just one year later Stephen Schneider suggested several strategies for addressing climate change , including curtailing population growth. 

Then,  Michael Mann of hockey stick infamy, said: “because if the planet warms dramatically and infrastructure no longer remains viable then we can no longer support that elevated carrying capacity, then we revert to the natural carrying capacity of the planet, which is maybe a million people.  (So he’s suggesting a cull down to just one million). 

Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes was far more explicit when she recently said: “Eight billion people in the world is a crisis, not an achievement. More people will not solve the problem of too many people.” 

Then the best of all: Ingrid Newkirk, a co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said:  “ Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth. If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But if you give it a chance I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions of earth dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” 

The idea of a carrying capacity of the earth takes us back to  Thomas Malthus. The Reverend Thomas Malthus laid out his political and economic thought in his 1798 writings entitled : “An essay on the Principles of Population.”  Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is exponential, whereas the growth of food supply and resources is just linear.  In simple number terms, 1, 2, 4. 8, 16, 32, 64,  etc is exponential while 1 ,2 ,3 ,4 ,5 ,6, etc is linear.   Malthus did not take into account  that Humans would find more efficient ways of doing things. Technological advances since the Industrial Revolution have enabled this to happen.  Contraception has the potential to keep population levels down.

The food production is a line (linear), while the population increases exponentially. At the Malthusian catastrophe point the food production can just feed the population. After that the population starts to fall off as people die from starvation.

Once you start looking you see that neo-Malthusianism is disturbingly common among prominent climate alarmists. The notion of population management is not far behind - always focused on poorer countries. The Fifth  IPCC Assessment Report singled out population and economic growth as factors underlying increasing greenhouse gas emissions. 

Following the release of the IPCC AR6 in 2021 Simon Lewis of University College London   expressed disagreement about Malthusianism. Philip Cafaro of Colorado State University suggested that Lewis deserves a place in hell for his views.  Climate alarmists are not nice people. 

Many aspects of the Neo-Malthusian blueprint for survival can be seen today in demands of the climate alarmists cult such as to “just stop oil.”

Should we be Worried about Talk of Reducing Population? 

Yes I think we should.  Let’s go back to Covid. There is much evidence to show that experiments were conducted in the Lab at Wuhan on a bat virus.  From these experiments emerged  Covid 19.   Now what many do not know is that there is such a thing as the Armed Forces Games.  It is run along lines similar to the Olympics but for armed forces from many countries. In 2019 of all the countries it could have been held in it was held in China. Of all the places in China it could have been held it was held in - yes you guessed it, Wuhan. It was held between Oct 18 and Oct 27^th in 2019.  The Covid virus “escaped” at the same time the games were on. It seems several competitors and support staff were infected.  The infected people then took the virus back to their respective countries.  So we had a worldwide spread.  

Research has shown there was a correlation between the number of individuals who travelled to the event and the number of covid 19 cases in the country to which they returned. 

Some of the consequences of this virus are still coming out.  Many died from the virus itself but there are numerous claims that the so called vaccine also killed a large number of people. 

Now it looks like we may be facing another virus. That virus is Bird Flu. There is a headline in Environment and Health from the USA.  “Infectious Disease Experts warn Bird Flu Outbreak Bigger Than Previously Thought.”  ( 26^th April 2024).

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina said:  “The worst case scenario is that this could turn into a massive pandemic.”   The H5N1 strain of bird flu has jumped from poultry to cows.  Samples of pasteurised milk have tested positive for the H5N1 strain.  According to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, H5N1 has been identified in 33 herds in 8 states in the US. One in five milk samples have tested positive for H5N1.  So this strain has jumped species.  Federal Authorities say they have now spotted some isolated but worrying changes to the virus in cows, which are believed to have contracted the virus from wild birds. Authorities are now putting in place testing requirements before cattle cross state lines. Egg farms in Texas and Michigan are also suspected to have been infected by the virus spread from cows, adding to millions of poultry culled because of infections from wild birds. 

So far two people have contracted bird flu from cows in the US. Fortunately, they have recovered. 

Testing of milk is underway to see if the virus remains infectious. 

Unfortunately, for NZ, bird flu has now made its presence felt in Australia. 

The first human case in Australia happened on the 24^th May. A child acquired H5N1 in India and became ill on returning home. 

Bird flu hit Australian poultry farms the same day. A bird flu outbreak was reported at an Australian egg farm in Victoria. 

The strain has spread  further and more widely than any other avian flu virus. In mammals and birds, it causes severe respiratory disease but also affects the brain.  At this stage it is not detected in birds in Australia. The fatality rate in humans is 50%. So half the people who get bird flu will die. 

H5N1 is so widespread globally the chance of it mutating to a point where it is able to spread between humans is higher than ever.  

Well, if we are careful we may be able to negotiate a break out of bird flu as it is. But the situation may become much worse. Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than four years.  A US government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research.

The outcome may not satisfy scientists who believe certain studies that aim to make pathogens more potent or more likely to spread in mammals are so risky they should be limited or even banned.  

In 2011,  Fouchier and Kawaoka alarmed the world by revealing that they had separately modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets.  Advocates of such studies say they can help public health experts better understand how viruses might spread and thus plan for pandemics. But the worry was that such experiments  raised fears about the virus being able to jump to humans.  Such a souped-up virus could spark a pandemic, if it escaped from a lab, or was intentionally released by a bioterrorist. 

The above shows the two smiley people who are modifying the bird flu virus into a more deadly form. One has to ask who are they, and why are they doing this? 

Many climate alarmists state that they favour a huge reduction of world population, in  order to “save the planet.” Are we looking at another Wuhan here? Only this time the virus may be lethal.  If this virus is modified into a deadly form then allowed to escape we may all be in trouble and the climate alarmists may get their wish.  On top of this we have WHO pushing governments to let them have complete control over health issues like pandemics. They would make vaccines compulsory, with punishment for those who do not comply. With the controversy over the last lot of vaccines, commonly called gene therapy, the requirement to take a new vaccine would be concerning.   

In the meantime, bird flu in its present form will arrive here.  Make sure you know how it is transmitted and then take the necessary precautions to avoid it. 

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.