this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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Yes. That's exactly it. They assume business as usual. And your source is a landing page, not an actual source. And even then, that site doesn't discuss any effect of climate change on population projections. You just blindly linked to the UN's population agency.
For every degree of Celsius warming, farm yields of major staple crops decline 16-20%. We're already at 1.5C warming, and the rate of warming is rapidly increasing. We're looking at another 0.5-1.5C increase by 2050. There's no way this doesn't lead to mass famine on a Biblical scale.
This paper in Nature predict 4-14% in total global food production by 2050 due to climate effects. And these are using the RPC models, which we're learning are far too conservative in their predictions. I'm sure if everyone in the world went vegan tomorrow, we could absorb a 10% decline in agricultural production, but not a chance in Hell of that happening.
As far as the UN, they do work on climate change, but their population projections don't factor it into account. Here is a link to the 2024 population prospects summary
When you pull open that PDF, you won't find mention of climate change being incorporated into their methodology at all. As far as I'm aware, the UN's figures are purely based on population pyramids, demographic factors, birth rate projections, etc. Demographers don't like looking at factors beyond just population numbers, gender mixes, and age distributions. Other things, like war and economic policy, can certainly affect population numbers, but those are generally considered too unpredictable to properly model. The population projections you see are purely demographic models.
As far as I know, agricultural yields are never even part of their methodology. They look purely at what ages people are and how many children people of different ages have. They generally assume that resources will be available for those who want to have children. Do you have any evidence that they do take climate effects on agricultural yields into account when making their numbers?
Good, we can't sustain even the 8 billion useless eaters we have now. I welcome a decline to 4.
A decline by means of heightened education, better quality of life and available contraception like we see in developed countries would be nice. But this is going to be nasty, famine and wars - you don't want that, no one wants that.
I don't want to be fat and old, and yet...