Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion later this century. But with the planet heating up and growing numbers of people putting increasing pressure on water and food supplies and on life-sustaining ecosystems, will this projected population boom turn into a bust?

by Robert Engelman, in a Yale e360 cross-post

The hard part about predicting the future, someone once said, is that it hasn’t happened yet. So it’s a bit curious that so few experts question the received demographic wisdom that the Earth will be home to roughly 9 billion people in 2050 and a stable 10 billion at the century’s end. Demographers seem comfortable projecting that life expectancy will keep rising while birth rates drift steadily downward, until human numbers hold steady with 3 billion more people than are alive today.

What’s odd about this demographic forecast is how little it seems to square with environmental ones. There’s little scientific dispute that the world is heading toward a warmer and harsher climate, less dependable water and energy supplies, less intact ecosystems with fewer species, more acidic oceans, and less naturally productive soils. Are we so smart and inventive that not one of these trends will have any impact on the number of human beings the planet sustains? When you put demographic projections side by side with environmental ones, the former actually mock the latter, suggesting that nothing in store for us will be more than an irritant. Human life will be less pleasant, perhaps, but it will never actually be threatened.

Some analysts, ranging from scientists David Pimentel of Cornell University to financial advisor and philanthropist Jeremy Grantham, dare to underline the possibility of a darker alternative future. Defying the optimistic majority, they suggest that humanity long ago overshot a truly sustainable world population, implying that apocalyptic horsemen old and new could cause widespread death as the environment unravels. Most writers on environment and population are loathe to touch such predictions. But we should be asking, at least, whether such possibilities are real enough to temper the usual demographic confidence about future population projections.

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Between the climate hawks and the anti-science deniers is a vast sea of highly influential people who don’t get global warming.

By “don’t get” I mean they fail to understand that business as usual emissions (or some vague “energy quest” focused on R&D) will lead with high probability to multiple, simultaneous catastrophes any one of which should be enough to motivate aggressive action now, but combined represent the greatest preventable threat humanity has ever faced.  See “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts” for a review of 50 recent studies.

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic — or unimaginably beyond catastrophic:  10°F [ 5.5°C] or higher).  Aggressive emissions reductions starting now dramatically improves humanity’s chances below 5°F.

I have written about these people in the past (see “Most opinion leaders just don’t get global warming” and “People who don’t get it: Robert J. Samuelson“).  But I’m planning to focus on them more in the coming months since they are the most influential group of “movable” or “persuadable” people.

But what to call them?

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It’s tough out there in the solar manufacturing space. But don’t count American companies out yet.

General Electric announced this week it will open a new 400-MW solar manufacturing facility for producing cadmium-telluride thin film panels in Colorado — creating 355 local jobs in the process.

The announcement comes after a round of high-profile closures at solar manufacturing facilities in the U.S. due to extremely competitive pricing in the global PV market (see “Are the Chinese Using Predatory Pricing to Knock America Out of Solar Manufacturing?“). In 2009, GE closed a manufacturing plant in Delaware that produced conventional crystalline-based solar modules. Today, it has restructured its solar investments and focused on thin film technologies.

At scale, thin film solar costs much less to produce. Industry leader First Solar is able to manufacture cadmium-telluride solar modules at $0.75 per watt, which is $.025 lower than the best conventional PV. But efficiencies are much lower — First Solar modules are about 11.7 percent efficient, compared with a 15.7% efficient module for polycrystalline solar.

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A cyber-penny for your cyber-thoughts and links.  Just another tree-free day on Climate Progress: