Stephen Emmott's views on human population

Emmott is a professor of computing at Oxford University and head of Microsoft's Computational Science Laboratory in Cambridge. His lab is devoted to finding new techniques and ideas for solving key scientific problems. One of his research groups works on small-scale issues including the make-up of living cells and includes immunologists and neuroscientists. Another group is focused on global problems including the carbon cycle and is made up of plant biologists and marine ecologists.

The global population was 1 billion in 1800 and 4 billion in 1980.

It will probably have grown to 10 billion by the end of this century.

The demand for food will have doubled by 2050.

Food production already accounts for 30% of greenhouse gases – more than manufacturing or transport.

More food needs more land, especially when the food is meat.

More fields mean fewer forests, which means even more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which means an even less stable climate, which means less reliable agriculture – witness the present grain crisis in the US.

It takes 3,000 litres of water to make a burger (the UK eats 10bn burgers a year).

A world population of 10 billion will need 960 new dams, each of them the size of the world's largest in China's Three Gorges, plus 15,000 nuclear power stations and/or 11m wind farms.

The great objective of intergovernmental action, such as it is, has been to restrict the rise in average global temperature to no more than 2C, but a growing body of research suggests a warming by 6C is becoming more and more likely.

The world will become "a complete hellhole" riven by conflict, famine, flood and drought.

Go to a climate change conference these days, and, as well as all the traditional attendees, there will usually be a small detachment of the forward-looking military.

What's to be done?

Emmott takes us through the ideas offered by "the rational optimists" who believe that, faced with the species' near extinction, human inventiveness will engineer a solution.

Desalination plants, a new green revolution, seeding the oceans with iron filings to absorb more CO2: all of these threaten to produce as many problems as they solve.

He believes the only answer is behavioural change.

We need to have far fewer children and consume less.

How much less?

A lot less; two sheets of toilet paper rather than three, a Prius instead of a Range Rover – that kind of sacrifice won't really do it.

And does he believe we're capable of making this necessarily far bigger curb on our desires?

Not really.

He describes himself as a rational pessimist.

If a large asteroid were on course to the Earth and we knew when and where it would hit – say France in 2022 – then every government would marshal its scientific resources to find ways of altering the asteroid's path or mitigating its damage.

But there is no asteroid.

The problem is us.

Recently he asked one of his younger academic colleagues what he thought could be done.

"Teach my son how to use a gun," said the colleague.

Text adapted from theguardian

Questions

Does Emmott think the world is overpopulated?

Who are the "rational optimists" Emmott castigates?

Is there a solution to overpopulation according to Emmott?