Don't worry there are plenty more fish in the sea.

F1Yorkshire

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Wasn't sure if this deserved its own thread or not but the BBC are reporting the colossal error made by two of our finest newspapers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19755695

According to the Times and the Telegraph there are only 100 cod left in the north sea, that's going to make my weekly fish and chips a little on the expensive side.

Luckily for us fish fans it is an error by the papers and there's only 100 cod over the age of 13 which in cod years is pretty geriatric, the actual figure is closer to half a billion.

I'll have mine battered with curry sauce!
 
Yeah the trouble is that most cod that are caught are netted before they reach sexual maturity tho.

I like fish, but feel that the oceans have been raped by advances in technology, just look at the price of tuna in Japan, they've fished all the huge tuna out of their seas and then the Med and are now overfishing the atlantic. Again I'm against bycatch laws, if you catch it then eat it but there are now species specific methods for catching fish, it can be sustainable if everyone signs up for it.

Curry sauce....you heathen.
 
Over fishing and farming is already a huge problem and it's only going to get worse.

The seas are being depleted.
The greenhouses in Spain take up so much room they can be seen from space - this image was taken in 2004.
Greenhouses_in_Spain_from_Space.jpg

The pig farms in Scotland contain tens of thousands of pigs which never see the light of day.
Chickens are intensively bred in tiny cages/sheds and live for less than 30 days.

With a global human population of 7 billion and growing, something's got to give.
 
Yep. They try different things like monitoring restriction of fishing quotas and other areas of agriculture, more or less disregarded by many but the bottom line is that there too many of us for this planet.
No easy solution and probably no solution at all. You can't tell people to stop having children or stop living longer. Not in democratic societies anyway. What can you do?
 
Aren't farmers in America still subsidised so they don't grow so much? They have the technology, space and climate to produce enough food to feed the whole planet. Surely a global food distribution network is the way forward.
 
Maybe what we need is the same thing that allegedly happened to the dinosaurs. Another asteroid cto come smashing into us and wipe most of us out. Start anew.
Well here's hoping. With any luck the only survivors would be myself and the rest of the female population.

Well, if my species needs me I will not be found wanting.
 
What we actually need to do is be a bit more intelligent and a little less political. If we worked as a species rather than a series of tribes, there would be more than enough resource to feed and water many, many more than are currently here. But that would mean we have to share.

Failing that, the planet will intervene, a bit like it did in 1918 and see off millions in a very short space of time via the flu pandemic. This coupled with a series of catastrophic natural disasters should bring back a balance.

Should neither of these options happen, let's hope Romney is elected President and we can guarantee a third world war.

Only the last paragraph is tongue in cheek!
 
Oh bloody hell, aren't we all cheerful today. Sorry guys and girls but I don't fancy watching my family wiped out by flu, asteroids or the noodly killer beast. I think we should just get the ****ing EU to scrap the common fisheries policy that sees hundreds of thousands of dead fish thrown back into the sea every year due to quotas. That would be a good start.
 
The EU pays farmers not to grow things. When there are huge over supplies of certain food stuffs the farmers bury large quantities to artificially keep the prices high. Speculators bet on futures for food which force prices up for the average schmo. Huge conglomerates sell seed to poor farmers which produce sterile crops so that they have to buy more seed for the next year

All in all there is plenty of capacity to feed the World but the politicians and the speculators like to **** it all up.
 
It is immaterial whether or not there is currently sufficient capacity to feed everyone on the planet. At the rate the population is growing it won't be long before there will not be enough food whatever method we use to grow it.

In the end the only acceptable method that I can see is to ration the population and the only way to do that is restrict women to two children. Even then there could still be an increase due to us all living longer (except badgers who are being culled). There would obviously still be some children who will not live long enough to reproduce so it is difficult to see whether or not there would be a noticeable increase in our numbers.

It will not happen, of course, because the human race is both stupid and selfish, so we will have to put up with fighting off would be immigrants who would be desperate to get to food, starvation of large percentages of the population in some countries and disease.
 
I think the issue of "population growth" is a misnomer (if that's the right word?). Surely it's because fewer women die in child birth, more children live into adulthood and people are living longer than they did 50 years ago. The net result is the same but the root cause is simply not down the more people being born, in many Western countries the rate of population expansion in declining although the total number of people is expanding due to inward migration.

As for some of the numbers shown here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

What's that old joke? What do you get if you put two economists into a room? Three opinions.
 
Surely if fewer women die during childbirth and more babies make it through to adulthood then there are more people available to have more children?

The evidence would suggest that population growth is real, although it's higher in some countries.
The UK for example is very shortly going to have a major problem with a smaller active workforce supporting a much larger retired population.
That's going to be fun when it happens...
 
The basic problem is all are living longer whether it be those giving birth, their offspring or the olds - and in most parts of the world.

Yes, some societies (mainly western) have had fewer offspring, but some are still seeking to produce the 'right' gender, as they have a huge impact on the care of their parents/grand-parents.
 
Sorry Brogan, meant to come back on this. When I was a kid there were, on average, 2.4 children per family, you might remember the comedy show of the same name. This would now have to be renamed 1.9 children:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11960183

Previously, certainly in what are now Western countries, people would have many more than 2 kids as they knew some would die in infancy and they needed a large family to support them into old age. Modern medicine (and the welfare state) has largely eliminated this need so people have the number of children they feel comfortable with, can afford or have space for. As other economies grow and develop it is likely the same phenomenon will take place, even without government intervention, such as in China which now has a ticking time bomb as there aren't enough young people to support the aging population - currently there are 6 working age people to support every retired person in the next 30 to 50 years this drops to 2.

The current peak will probably expand a little but not to the exponential level the doom mongers would have us believe, and then it will start to fall. Problem is we will have sucked the World dry by then!
 
FB, China also has to address the fact that their 'one child' policy has resulted in bugger all females being born, as they were either aborted or abandoned - that could help the World over the next few years.
 
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