If environmental doomsday prophets had been around 10,000 years ago you would not exist.
Way back then, as a large tribe of people had begun to run out of food to hunt and berries to forage, some smart scientific person came up with the greatest idea anyone ever had - why don't we grow our own animals and vegetables?
A doomsday prophet in charge would have been talking about who they could kill off. They would have rationed and mitigated and legislated and agonized about who they could kill, preferably a bunch of people they did not like. Reason won out. Like the idea of a 1,500 calorie Big Kahuna Donut Burger? Thank science.
A quarter-pound of hamburger with cheese and bacon between slices of a grilled, glazed doughnut. The lettuce, tomato and onion is for health reasons only.
Their descendants of today are no less irrational - they are terrified of science, it is fickle and mysterious, and instead advocate human sacrifice, which is somehow sane.
Food, energy, you name it, let poor people get sent off on an iceberg and hope they are Republicans. Water shortage looming? Sure, if you say so, though it is so categorically untrue it borders on idiotic. Regardless, we are doomed and better look for ways to cut humanity before water starts wars.
I've tackled the mathematical illiteracy of "virtual water" nonsense before and Brian Wang tackles it again at Next Bug Future. I used chickens and cups of coffee - even if 140 liters in a cup of coffee were not completely made up (it is), you can wake me up from that snooze-fest of a factoid after we burn though 9,588,235,294,117,647 more cups of coffee. Then we can start over with all of the water recycled from that and that's without even bothering with desalination.
Not only can we do just fine with 10 billion people, we can do just fine with 30. We aren't going to be killing over water even then.
Links:
Humans: the real threat to life on Earth - Guardian
For doomers the answer is always to kill people or prevent people from being born - Next Big Future
