While I personally am not hoping disease, famine, pestilence and natural human caused disasters will decimate the population, I'm also a realist and find it highly plausible that some combination of the above will do just that. I also fall into the camp of those who do not see the viability of maintaining 6.5 billion humans on this planet let alone 9+ billion. The only reason we have so many is because of our access to cheap easy energy, which we no longer have. I won't won't even get into our current ecological crisis.

As for the comment "Go bird flu & H1N1!... and your counter comment "This juvenile sadism is part of what turns people off to the TOD message. It is really a shame."...
I find the first to be heavy with sarcasm but along the lines of "wake up people" and the second to be of the "Let's not talk about the unpleasant realities" sort. Neither of which may be very helpful in this discussion. However I'd much rather deal with realists who traffic in dark sarcasm as opposed to the ostriches with their heads in the sand.

Genocide, BTW, has a very specific definition and unless a virus were deliberately unleashed upon an unsuspecting group of people it falls under the "Natural Phenomena" category.
I find alluding to it to in this case to be both off the mark and a rather pathetic ad hominem.

Not to say, that based on the history of our race, that our current crisis will not lead to true genocide, BUT!

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.
Buchenwald concentration camp

While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."[1]

So to conclude my point, let's all get real!

This juvenile sadism is part of what turns people off to the TOD message. It is really a shame.

Fourthed.

"Mad Max" fantasizing adds nothing productive, and neither does the 900th time someone mindlessly types out some supposed magical "correct" number of humans. If a person has a quantitative and evidence-based analysis to share, they're highly encouraged to do so, but nobody cares about their apocalyptic fantasies.

When it comes to "omg teh die0ff!1!", please give us either evidence or absence.

So how about you?

OK, Fair question. I'm not interested in singing my own praises but I too try to lead by example and lifestyle. Perhaps we are not all that far apart in this regard. I am always trying to lessen my own footprint.

I'm active in a few organizations and my personal focus is marine reef ecosystems in my own back yard. In the past I have posted more specific things that I have done and continue to do. For starters I'm the president of www.kayuba.org and I support Reef Rescue. I'm also a father of a 14 year old with Aspergers who I am trying to raise in a world that I find to be in a state of transition and find the path forward to be very unclear.

Not to pat myself on the back too much but I think in the big picture I'm just trying to do the best that I can. I often say what I think, I try to base what I say on some factual knowledge. Sometimes I find that after the dust has settled I need to reassess my position.

All in all I have lived a full 56 years so far with a very eclectic international experience.
I have held positions of leadership, responsibility, been a teacher, instructor in diverse fields.
I try to maintain an open mind and remain flexible but I do accept and acknowledge my limitations and am cognizant of my foibles and idiosyncracies. Though I try to do things with humor I'm also a cynic and a natural skeptic and sometimes come across a bit on the harsh side. If given the chance I prefer to talk things out over a beer.

I most certainly believe from having been around the world an having had the opportunity to see the reality of the human condition and personally followed ecosystem destruction in places such as the Amazon and coral reefs that we need to change course sooner rather than later. I already have seen the miserable poor dying of starvation before my own eyes. I will need an awful lot of convincing to accept that we can achieve sustainabilty for 9+ billion people.

Thanks for the links Gav.

I have read them this morning and don't intend to provide a point by point critique.

However having worked in manufacturing for twenty years and been involved in supplying parts for electrified transport, my experience tells me that road transport is a critical component in manufacturing as hundreds, if not thousands of parts, come together in factory to rollout a rail car. Rail cars are but one component of an electrified transport system. There are signal boxes, overhead catenaries, ballast to be quarried etc. Yes we have built rail in the distant past without petroleum but it was heavy rail that was limited in both its frequency of service and the duty it performed. But it still needed road transport to function. Todays high level of manufacturing capacity is critically dependent on cheap heavy road transport as the glue that links up the outputs of one factory to the inputs of the next.

I am also now involved in the sale of industrial and commercial property, much of which is already built and fixed to a particualr spot. You can't move the factories closer together to reduce the transport links and you can't just move machinery either. Specialisation of parts manufacture is the system that has enabled the manufacture of elaborately engineered products. One facotry that makes do-dads in Germany may supply the complete world supply to thousands of other manufacturers, including the electrifeid transport industry in Australia. Just the capital investment in machniery required to make that part may mean a break even point of thousands of units, when the whole Asutralian market may only require 50. So the transport links are critical and road transport palys a vital link at either end of the distribution chain. Now multiply that scenario by many thousands and you can start to see the problems facing BAU.

So when I see simplistic statements like:

our energy and manufacturing systems are (the problem)- both can be completely changed

I need to ask how? How do you maintain the very fine grain transport relationships that make modern high tech manufacturing possible? How do you get the workers of these factories to and from work each day when the current suburban mode means all of them driving a car? How do you move the armies of engineering contractors that constantly move around several differnt sites each day with all their tools and equipment? What about the sale reps who service the factories? The stationery deliveries? The smoko vans? Some of this could be moved to electric commuter vehicles but the problem is the 40 tonne semi-trailers that deliver the inputs and outputs from these factories. Overcoming the steep rise in costs of semi-trailer transport in the face of peak oil is the thing you need to solve first if you want to maintain the high level of manufacturing required to build out renewables and electric commuter and urban transport for the masses. Long haul can be replaced by trains but not the short haul door to door stuff. You need to be able to demonstrate a feasible technical solution to moving around all the goods around rather than just pointing to net energy calcualtions from renewables versus FF.

Kiashu--You assume that geting rid of the richer I billion would not have a negative impact on the poorer 5.7bn. But do you have any actual evidence on that? Or is it just you've been reading too many Marx books about "exploitation". Currently many of the 5.7bn benefit in major ways from the inventions which originated among the "rich", not least from natives of the uk.

And one might further argue that it is the poorer countries' own fault, because they have seen enormous population increases far greater than the "rich" in recent decades.

And furthermore is there any basis beyond emotional kneejerk for saying that all people's lives must be considered of equal value? Certainly I myself am not getting paid enough to start a family; where's the equal valuation there please?!

Ironically I suspect it is the "rich" sector which is at greatest risk of die-off from their dependence on the globalised system. Few people round here have even the slighest clue how to source food from their locality. They know none of the names of the life-giving plants and care even less what they could do for them.

Kiashu--One minute you are scolding Carl for a flippant five words about swine virus, probably just trying to stay sane about a frightening subject. And next minute you are seriously advocating the extermination of I billion of the population of which there is negligible evidence that they are in any way less morally worthy. Indeed they include most of the people who have a clue about overpopulation, planetary crises etc, and are trying to do something about them.

How about we consider that the 20% who are illiterate use far less energy than the literate. So let's "get rid of" the literate lot? And those who don't speak English would also use less, so best "get rid of" the English speakers. Yes?

So which population is the problem, exactly? The 1 billion rich, or the 5.7 billion poor?

Both. Not necessarily in equal amounts, but still both. The 1 billion 'rich' are probably more at risk, because of their disconnect with the land.

So is the problem really population, or wasteful consumption?

Again, it's both, imo.

I don't advocate a genocide or anything like that. Natural deaths from old age, accidents, Flu, etc will take care of the problem all by itself, so long as we (voluntarily) reduce the number of children per woman. The existing Meme of 'breed breed breed' (exemplified by our own Baby Bonus - have one for the country, girs!) can't continue, or we'll blow straight through any upper population limit we wish to name, and we're no better off. I suspect Peak Resources will get us before we voluntarily reduce our numbers, though. The cognitive dissonance, self-belief, and blind faith in 'them' and 'technology' is just too great. The odd few who are getting back to the land, reducing their resource use, 'downsizing' etc doesn't seem to me like it's going to be enough (the propogation of ideas/actions through the population takes time, and there's plenty to obstruct them).

Wasteful consumption also has to stop. Building items which are only designed to last a year or two (at most), or are designed to promote yet more wasteful consumption (highway upgrades etc) is of no real benefit to anyone. Give me quality/longevity over price almost any day of the week.

I nearly fell over last week when I found out how much electricity this house uses, but, despite my subtle hints and not-so-subtle suggestions, more energy-hogging appliances enter the house each year. And we just threw away a perfectly good kettle because 'it tastes like ants' (ants got into it and were boiled alive. I can't taste anything different about the water). It's not my house, and not my stuff, so I can hardly go making an unilateral changes, however. :(

And the Land Whales I see walking (waddling?) around town! If there's a clearer example of excessive consumption, I don't know what it is. :P