The concept of human overpopulation, once common, is now rarely used in the scientific literature. The global population is set to surpass eight billion later this year, according to a United Nations forecast. It says that the planet should hit 8.5 billion people in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050, peaking at around 10.4 billion in the 2080s before steadying at that level until 2100. All analysts and population models agree that without any totalitarian or coercive measures, populations will start declining.  The question is simply when.

The UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres said the milestone was something to welcome, calling it an occasion to “celebrate our diversity, recognise our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates”. 

Population growth fell to less than 1% in 2020 according to the report, mainly due to a decline in fertility in many countries, which has fallen “markedly” in recent decades. 

Today, some two-thirds of the global population live in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman, “roughly the level required for zero growth in the long run, for a population with low mortality”, according to the UN. 

In 61 countries or areas, the population is expected to decrease by at least 1% over the next three decades, as a result of “sustained low levels of fertility” and in the case of some countries, “elevated rates of emigration”. 

More than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.

Indeed, India is set to pass China next year to become the world’s most populous nation, while Nigeria is expected to leapfrog the US into third place by 2050. 

China’s population will be dropping to 770 million by 2100, while the Russian Federation’s population of 145 million dropping to just 133 million by 2050 and 112 by the end of the century. 

Since the start of the millennium, “UN reports show that global resource use has been primarily driven by increases in affluence, not the population”, said The Washington Post.   This is “especially true in high- to upper-middle-income nations, which account for 78% of material consumption, despite having slower population growth rates than the rest of the world”, said the paper.  Meanwhile, in low-income countries, whose share of the global population has “almost doubled”, the demand for resources has “stayed constant at just about 3% of the global total”.

When concern about population becomes central to environmental policy, said researcher Betsy Hartman, “racism and xenophobia are always waiting in the wings. It just shifts the discourse away from the real problem of who has power and how the economy is organized.”

Are overpopulation fears unfounded? | The Week UK

Many households are falling behind on energy payments with total debt owed three times higher than in September last year, a survey has suggested.

 As in so many similar situations when the capitalist State begins to fail, working people start to organise themselves as this article shows. 

“Sri Lanka’s unprecedented economic and political crisis has created new kinds of solidarities among citizens, as they try and help each other ride through fuel and food shortages in the absence of assistance or information from the government…

…Tamil and Sinhala, Christian and Muslim, Buddhist and Atheist find themselves next to each other and end up talking about – what else – politics and economics…

…Soup kitchens have been started to feed people. Some of these kitchens have hired nutritionists to advise them on how to provide a simple and nutritious meal. People are also trying to grow vegetables in home and rooftop gardens. Expatriate Sri Lankans are sending much-needed medicine to help tide over the shortage of essential drugs. People visiting Sri Lanka have been besieged with requests to bring medicine…”

As The State Collapses In Sri Lanka, Citizens Fill The Vacuum| Countercurrents

BP has reported massive profits for the three months to June, after oil and gas prices soared.

More than one in eight UK households fear they have no further way to make cuts to afford a sharp increase in annual energy bills this autumn.

More than a quarter of households earning less than £20,000 worry they will be unable to cope with higher bills, with families in Yorkshire, the south-west and Northern Ireland the least confident about covering their costs.

Almost half of UK households are concerned about being able to keep up with rent or mortgage payments over the next 12 months as the majority realise they will have to make cuts elsewhere.

It recently emerged that a fifth of UK households now have an average shortfall of £60 a week between what they earn and what they need to cover essentials such as energy bills, rent, transport and food.

The amount that UK consumers borrowed rose by the fastest rate in three years last month, as households struggled to cope with the rising cost of living. People borrowed an additional £1.8bn in consumer credit last month, up from a £900m increase in May.

Pressure on households is expected to ramp up this autumn as the price of essentials – from clothing to food – continues to rise alongside higher energy bills.

More than one in eight UK households fear they have no way of making more cuts | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 Record-breaking heat has been recorded around the world this year, including in the UK, which smashed its previous record by an incredible 1.6C, reaching more than 40C. Portugal reached 47C on the 21st of this month, the hottest July day on record, while several places in France recorded new highs. 49C was hit in Delhi in May.

Recent research has found that we may actually already be nearing the threshold values for human survivability of temperature and humidity for short periods in some places of the world – a measure known as the “wet-bulb” temperature – and that this threshold may actually be far lower than previously thought.

Wet-bulb temperature (WBT) combines dry air temperature (as you’d see on a thermometer) with humidity – in essence, it is a measure of heat-stress conditions on humans. The term comes from how it is measured. If you slide a wet cloth over the bulb of a thermometer, the evaporating water from the cloth will cool the thermometer down. This lower temperature is the WBT, which cannot go above the dry temperature. If humidity in the surrounding air is high, however – meaning the air is already more saturated with water – less evaporation will occur, so the WBT will be closer to the dry temperature.

“The [wet-bulb] temperature reading you get will actually change depending on how humid it is,” says Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That’s the real purpose, to measure how well we’ll be able to cool ourselves by sweating.”

Humidity and temperature are not the only things that affect a person’s body temperature: solar radiation and wind speed are other factors. But WBT is especially important as a measure of indoor environments, where deaths often occur in heatwaves, says W Larry Kenney, a physiology professor at Penn State University.

Concern often centres on the “threshold” or “critical” WBT for humans, the point at which a healthy person could survive for only six hours. This is usually considered to be 35C, approximately equivalent to an air temperature of 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. (At the UK’s 19 July peak temperature, relative humidity was approximately 25% and the wet-bulb temperature about 25C.)

Humans usually regulate their internal body temperature by sweating, but above the wet-bulb temperature, we can no longer cool down this way, leading our body temperature to rise steadily. This essentially marks a limit to human adaptability to extreme heat – if we cannot escape the conditions, our body’s core can rise beyond the survivable range and organs can start failing.

The oft-cited 35C value comes from a 2010 theoretical study. However, research co-authored by Kenney this year found that the real threshold our bodies can tolerate could be far lower. “Our data is actual human subject data and shows that the critical wet-bulb temperature is closer to 31.5C,” he says.

Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre in the UK, says if the new finding is true, we are in “a whole new ball game” when it comes to extreme heat. “The numbers of people exposed to potentially deadly combinations of heat and humidity across the world would be vastly higher than previously thought.”

“My personal feeling is that a wet-bulb temperature of 35C would not be possible in the UK, although 31C may well be later in the century,” says McGuire. “Then again, the Met Office certainly didn’t expect 40C [dry temperature] heat in 2022.”

The risk of passing the WBT threshold is larger elsewhere, however. In 2020, research found that some coastal subtropical locations have already experienced WBTs of 35C, albeit only for a few hours. The study also found that globally, the number of times that a WBT of 30C was reached – still considered an extreme humidity and heat event – more than doubled between 1979 and 2017. There were about 1,000 occurrences of a 31C WBT, and about a dozen above 35C, in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Australia.

“Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” said lead author Colin Raymond, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The times these events last will increase and the areas they affect will grow in direct correlation with global warming.”

A study last year found that the maximum WBT in the tropics will rise by 1C for each 1C of average warming. This means limiting global heating to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era would prevent the majority of the tropical area – where 40% of the global population lives – from reaching the survival limit of 35C, the paper said. 

Heatwaves are worsening many times faster than any other type of extreme weather because of the climate crisis. Scientists estimate that it made the India and Pakistan heatwave 30 times more likely. As another paper put it, asking whether today’s most impactful heatwaves could have occurred in a pre-industrial climate is “fast becoming an obsolete question”.

Instead, as heatwaves begin affecting more people’s lives more frequently, the question of what we can do about them is becoming ever more important. As the world sees the deadly mix of high humidity and high temperature more and more often, this could ultimately mean that some places simply become too hot to live in, opening up the need for migration pathways to enable millions of people to get away from their home areas.

LET THE CAPITALISTS FIGHT THEIR OWN WARS

The only way in which mankind can bring about a social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a socialist-minded working-class. Our position is that we are against every war and both sides of every war. Wars are struggles between capitalist interests; no army fights for the interests of any working class. Only in a truly socialist world-wide society will war disappear, because while the capitalist world social order lasts, the roots of war remain. So the only way to lasting peace is through a new world —without money, armaments, classes, or nations. There is no need for war, just as there is no natural need for poverty or mass starvation or housing shortages or hospital waiting lists. It is because society is organised to provide profits for the few rather than satisfaction for the many that these problems face us. 

Ukrainian troops are not fighting to defend Peace, Democracy, Liberty or any other high-sounding ideal. The present conflict is represented in certain quarters as one between “freedom” and ‘‘tyranny” and for the rights of a smaller nation for self-determination. . No one should be misled by their fine words and airy phrases about democracy. Whether they nakedly expose their own profit-seeking interests or whether for reasons of tactics and expediency they mask them in phrases about democracy and it is the same cynical capitalist interest that guides them. We are told that this is a war in defence of peace against aggression and that therefore all defenders of peace and collective security should support it. There never was a bigger lie. This war is a fight between imperialist powers over world domination. This war is not a war for democracy against an oligarchy. It is not a war for the liberty of a small nation.

The Russian invasion is just an aspect of the conflict between Western imperialism and Russian imperialism for control of  Eastern Europe. Not an issue in which the Socialist Party take sides. Whichever side prevails the poor people of the region will lose as the war is basically over who is going to govern and exploit them. The answer to capitalist intrigue and power-politics is not to be found in supporting one capitalist group against another. The task before us is still that of winning over the working class to socialism. 

The way to prevent war is not by engaging in anti-war campaigns. These are quite useless because they leave the causes of war untouched. The only preventative is to take away the urge to war; take away the profit motive. While private ownership of the means of existence remains, the making of profit is the object of the private owners. Abolish private ownership and substitute for it common ownership in the means of production and the profit motive disappears, taking with it the seeds of war. Socialism is the only means to defeat the warmongers.

The working class has only to say “stop” and the entire present. system of society will cease to be. We have only to take the means of wealth production and distribution into the common ownership and democratic control of the whole community to put an end to the need for fighting over markets and resources and frontiers. We need only withdraw our consent to capitalism, in a majority, to set in motion the revolution. The truth is that capitalism is triumphant everywhere because the working class are blind to their own class position, and is still persuaded that they have an interest in leaving power in capitalist hands. It is only a degree worse that in some countries large numbers of workers go further on the road of stupid servility, and help to place power in the hands of Fascist demagogues. The only people who can end this are the workers themselves. When they sicken of Fascism they will be well on the road to destroying it, but it can only be done from within the country concerned. It is the duty of each national section of the working class to struggle against their own capitalist masters, aided to the extent that is possible by the international movement. 

 Figures, published by Citizens Advice, reveals the difficulties caused by spiralling domestic energy costs, which charities say are driving millions into fuel poverty.

The number of people seeking help because they cannot afford both food and energy has risen more than threefold in a year, according to new data.

The cap on average household gas and electricity bills in the UK – set by energy regulator Ofgem – is likely to soar in October from £1,971 to £3,500, according to forecasts issued last week. But the new data shows that the number of people struggling to eat and pay for energy has already surged, even before the new cap kicks in.

Given the predicted increase in the energy price cap, the National Energy Action (NEA) charity has added half a million households to its estimate of those facing fuel poverty – defined as spending more than 10% of income on energy. The charity, which advises people on how to manage energy bills, now predicts that 8.7m households, more than one in three in the UK, will find themselves in fuel poverty once the next price cap comes into effect in October.

NEA said the choice between food and energy isn’t the only one forced by poverty. “Some people are choosing between food and vital medical equipment like oxygen machines,” said Peter Smith, the NEA’s director of policy and advocacy.

Morgan Wild, head of policy at Citizens Advice, said the numbers were “truly shocking”. 

“That’s people who literally can’t afford to either keep their lights on or put food on the table,” he said.

Data from Citizens Advice also underscores how the cost of living crisis is disproportionately affecting particular groups of people, including those with disabilities or long-term health conditions. But the cost of living overtook all other issues combined for the first time in January 2021 and has since moved far ahead for disabled people, in contrast with the rest of the population. The data also showed higher-than-average referrals to food banks among single people and those in social housing. Referrals among single people, including those while children, have risen much faster than among couples, while there was also a pronounced rise among social tenants.

Citizens Advice pointed out that projections of monthly energy bills of £500 in January mean the cost of heating and electricity could overtake the average £420 spent on social rent in London for the first time.

Food and fuel poverty has more than tripled in a year, says Citizens Advice | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and his latest book, Hothouse Earth, makes for depressing pessimistic reading.

He makes clear an uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, that for far too long we have ignored the explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

He argues that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown and that we have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. 

“A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire explains.

McGuire, a volcanologist and  a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an outlier position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. 

At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

“I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.” He goes on to point out, “Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park and Kentucky. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”

These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather.

We should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C. From this perspective, it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead, we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and  start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says.

Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.

McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change.

Sadly, in this blog’s view, McGuire fails to identify the chief culprit – capitalism – as the motivating force for inaction.

‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert | Climate crisis | The Guardian