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. 

Matt Ridley from the UK: The long shadow of Malthus

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. It centres on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. 

It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

Matt Ridley: The western environmental movement's role in China's one-child policy

 

The abolition of China’s one-child policy brings to an end one of the most futile and inhumane experiments in top-down social engineering the world has seen. 

I say futile because it did not work. China’s birth rate roughly halved in the decade before the policy was introduced, then fell not at all in the next decade. A less coercive policy would probably have slowed China’s population growth just as much, if not more — as it did that of other countries in Asia.