Canada might be suspended from the Commonwealth

[Gil Hamilton]

Out of curiosity, at one point does the population cross into the "overpopulation" threshold? What determines whether there are too many people?

To expand on Mike's definition, to give a more general one; there is a term used when talking about populations, be it biology or whatever, called a "carrying point". A carrying point is the point where adding another member to a population exceeds the ability of the area to provide adequate amounts of the most scarce resource in an area to all members of a population. This counts for mice as well as men. Mice population in nature have their populations set by the carrying point of the area and their needs. If birth rate exceeds the carrying point of the area, they will become overpopulated and the combination of lack of food, ease of predators catching them and increased incidence of disease due to increased population density will cause a die-off until they are safely under the carrying point again.

Men circumvent this with economics, by centralizing and transporting resources. This allows areas to have a large population which the area itself can't remotely support. Thus, you can define overpopulation as when people inhabit an area to such a degree that the carrying point is a dot on the horizon behind them and the population suffers extreme scarcity of resources because of it. If you cut all strings to an area, you get starvation, war and disease like the mice above under there are alot less people in the area. A great many wars, some would argue all of them actually, are the result of population pressure.

[TheKwas]

Why would we look at absolute emissions? The point is that we're not doing our fair share and are piggybacking on the efforts of other countries at the same time as damaging the crediability of international agreements. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, we're the cheater and we should be punished.

What is a "fair share"? Considering the fact that global overpopulation is the single biggest environmental problem if you must pick one, then it makes absolutely no sense to give a free pass to massively overpopulated countries by always measuring environmental emissions on a per capita basis.

The share we agreed to take on when signing international treaties?

[Setesh]

Hopefully this will shake up the Canadian public, and government. Several Commonwealth nations are directly at risk, such as the Maldives, which will disappear due to rising ocean levels.

As well, the permamnent arctic year over year sea ice is now only 19%, with the rest being 'rotten', less than 2m thick, and easily cracks.

Now only if there was any. Nils-Axel Mörner, an inconvenient name for sea level scare mongering, is a Swedish geologist and physicist who for the last 35 years has been using every scientific means available to study sea level change and predict its future. Chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. He found, there is none at all, and there hasn't been for 50 years. He went looking to find the source of IPCC's 'hard evidence' of a 2.3mm a year rise (mystified as to why the IPCC's graph of sea level rise showed none until 2003). As it turns out IPCC's experts were using measurements off a single tide marker in Hong Kong Harbour which showed a......wait for it......2.3mm rise.

"The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend"."

Mörner went to the Maldives and Tuvalu as part of the commission to look into the Maldives requests for millions, every year for the last 20 years, in international aid to stave off disaster and Tuvalu who's local leaders have called for evacuation for about that long. He and his team of experts went 6 times over the last 20 years, each time showing that there has been no change in the Maldives sea level for the last 50 years. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Tuvalu is even more ironic as over the same period he found the sea level there had actually dropped. The local governments 'evidence' of sea level rise is the local groundwater table is starting to fill with seawater, but this was found to be caused by excessive use in extracting the water for pineapple farming has let the seawater seep in to replace it.

"The sea is not rising. It hasn't risen in 50 years. If there is any rise this century it will not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and others could not possibly come about."

[tim31]

To reference this thread, Australia's right wing is currently having a last-man-standing leadership struggle, and our environmental policies are hinged upon the outcome. More on this later today when the vote is cast!

[Artemas]

You make a leadership race sound so exciting.

Anyway, if ever there were any doubt as to the continuing relevence of the Commonwealth, then this probably puts the matter to rest.