日本のように少子化で人口が減っている国は、その経済の健康度も下降線を辿ると個人的に思っていたが、ここの記事ではいくつかの過去の例を引き出して、その逆もありえることを示唆している。でも世界経済が慢性的な不況下の現在では、現在とは状況が違う過去の例は参考になるとは思わないのだが。
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世界人口についての５つの思い違い
Five myths about global population
By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011 The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The world's population hit 7 billion people at the end of last month, according to United Nations estimates, launching another round of debates about "overpopulation," the environment and whether more people means more poverty.
As we mark this demographic milestone, let's dispense with some of the most common misconceptions surrounding the number of humans on the planet.
1. The world is overpopulated.
Sure, 7 billion is a big number. But most serious demographers, economists and population specialists rarely use the term "overpopulation" — because there is no clear demographic definition.
For instance, is Haiti, with an annual population growth rate of 1.3 percent, overpopulated? If it is, then was the United States overpopulated in 1790, when the new country was growing at more than 3 percent per year? And if population density is the correct yardstick, then Monaco, with more than 16,000 people per square kilometer, has a far greater problem than, say, Bangladesh and its 1,000 people per sq. km.
Back in the 1970s, some scholars tried to estimate the "optimum population" for particular countries, but most gave up. There were too many uncertainties (how much food would the world produce with future technologies?) and too many value judgments (how much parkland is ideal?).
Even considering resource scarcity isn't all that helpful. During the 20th century's population explosion — when we went from 1.6 billion people to more than 6 billion — real prices for rice, corn and wheat fell radically, and despite recent spikes, real prices for food are lower than 100 years ago. Prices, of course, are meant to reflect scarcity; by such reasoning, the world would be less overpopulated today than a century ago, not more.
2. Rapid population growth keeps poor countries poor.
In 1960, South Korea and Taiwan were poor countries with fast-growing populations. Over the two decades that followed, South Korea's population surged by about 50 percent, and Taiwan's by about 65 percent. Yet, income increased in both places, too: Between 1960 and 1980, per capita economic growth averaged 6.2 percent in South Korea and 7 percent in Taiwan.
Clearly, rapid population growth did not preclude an economic boom in those two Asian "tigers" — and their experience underscores that of the world as a whole. Between 1900 and 2000, as the planet's population was exploding, per capita income grew faster than ever before, rising nearly fivefold, by the reckoning of economic historian Angus Maddison.
And for much of the last century, the countries with faster economic growth tended to be the ones where population was growing most rapidly, too.
Today, the fastest population growth is found in so-called failed states, where poverty is worst. But it's not clear that population growth is their central problem: With physical security, better policies and greater investments in health and education, there is no reason that fragile states could not enjoy sustained improvements in income.
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3. For all its ethical problems, China's one-child policy boosts its economy.
China's economic boom has coincided with the promulgation of its one-child policy, which has used state muscle in an effort to limit births. Both this restrictive policy and the Chinese tilt toward pro-market reforms began in the late 1970s, and since then China's per capita income has risen more than eightfold. But that doesn't mean the two are linked.
Just before the one-child policy was enacted, China's total fertility rate (births per woman per lifetime) was about 2.7; today it is believed to be around 1.6, or roughly 40 percent lower. But between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, China's total fertility rate fell from about 5.9 to 2.9 births per woman per lifetime — a sharper drop. Yet China's per capita economic growth was much slower back in the pre-Deng Xiopeng decade of 1968-78. (Small wonder: Maoist economic formulas did not do wonders for material progress.)
China's fertility trajectory in the one-child era does not look strikingly different from those of many other East Asian and Southeast Asian societies. Much poorer countries, such as Burma, have very low fertility rates nowadays, even without state birth restrictions.
Thus the demographic impact of China's policy remains uncertain. But some Chinese demographers suggest that it is responsible for much of the surplus of baby boys in China in the past generation; if so, a growing army of essentially unmarriageable young men is hardly auspicious for social stability or economic progress.
4. If your population declines, your economy does, too.
Between the 1840s and 1960s, Ireland's population collapsed, spiraling downward from 8.3 million to 2.9 million. Over roughly that same period, however, Ireland's per capita gross domestic product tripled.
More recently, Bulgaria and Estonia have both suffered sharp population contractions of close to 20 percent since the end of the Cold War, yet both have enjoyed sustained surges in wealth: Between 1990 and 2010 alone, Bulgaria's per capita income (taking into account the purchasing power of the population) soared by more than 50 percent, and Estonia's by more than 60 percent. In fact, virtually all of the former Soviet bloc countries are experiencing depopulation today, yet economic growth has been robust in this region, the global downturn notwithstanding.
A nation's income depends on more than its population size or its rate of population growth. National wealth also reflects productivity, which in turn depends on technological prowess, education, health, the business and regulatory climate, and economic policies. A society in demographic decline, to be sure, can veer into economic decline, but that outcome is hardly preordained.
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No one can know how many people will be alive in 2100 because demographers have no techniques for accurately projecting our long-term population. The United Nations did predict a population of 10.1 billion in 2100 earlier this year — but that was just its "medium variant" projection; it also put out a "high variant" projection (exceeding 15 billion) and a "low variant" (6.2 billion, lower than the world's population today).
Further complicating matters, we are seeing unprecedented declines in birth rates in some low-income countries. In just two decades, for example, total fertility in Oman is estimated to have fallen by 5.4 births per woman, from 7.9 in the late 1980s to 2.5 in recent years. And just a few years ago, the United Nations' "medium projection variant" for Yemen in 2050 exceeded 100 million — now it is down to 62 million.
It would probably take a catastrophe of biblical proportions to prevent global population growth over the next several decades. But we do not know with confidence just how big the world's population will be in 2030, much less 70 years after that.
Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt scholar in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "The Poverty of the Poverty Rate."
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地球温暖化に戦々恐々するに及ばない。
16人の著名な科学者（リストは記事の終りにある）も賛同しているように、科学的な議論を許さない米政府の地球温暖化対策に疑問を投げかけている。
No Need to Panic About Global Warming
There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy..
OPINIONJANUARY 27, 2012.WJ
Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
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The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
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A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.
If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.
Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
2,300 birds found dead along Chilean beaches
From Marilia Brocchetto, CNN
updated 3:13 AM EDT, Sat May 12, 2012
(CNN) -- Chilean officials are asking fishermen to help save birds caught in nets after thousands of dead fowl appeared along coastal Chile this week.
At least 2,300 dead birds were found along beaches between Cartagena and Playa de Santo Domingo, Chile, said Jose Luis Britos, and environment professor and director of the Museum of Natural History of San Antonio, Chile.
Many of the birds, which come from several species, had broken wings and bruising on the outside of their bodies -- injuries consistent with getting trapped in fishing nets, Britos said.
He said bird deaths from fishing nets occur every year, but never at this level. In a typical year, about 15 to 20 dead birds are found, Britos said.
One hypothesis for the increase this year involves climate. As Chilean weather gets colder this time of year, migrating birds that would normally travel north for warmth are instead lingering to feast on an influx of anchovies and sardines that had fled the coast of Peru in search of cooler waters.
Earlier this week, Peruvian authorities say warm waters off that country's coast are to blame for the deaths of more than 5,000 marine birds.
The Peruvian National Center for the Study of El Nino said that since February, the Peruvian coast has had an abundance of warm water as a result of marine currents throughout the world's oceans. The warm water has altered the marine ecosystem, it said.
The warm water has led fish such as anchovies and other species that live in surface waters to migrate to deeper water toward the south. As a result, pelicans and other birds that feed from the surface of the water died of starvation.
"If these oceanographic conditions persist, it is likely that its impact will spread to other areas of the (Peruvian) coast even during the fall, which could make the numbers increase and affect other marine species," the report stated.
The Peruvian ministry of environment said seafood is still safe to eat, and encouraged everyone to continue to support local fishermen, according to state-run Andina news agency.
Officials in Peru continue to search for the cause of death of almost 900 dolphins since the beginning of the year. The health ministry is awaiting final results from molecular analysis looking for the morbillivirus, which previously has been linked to dolphin deaths.
The Chilean agriculture and livestock ministry and staff from Britos' center have called for a meeting with fishermen for Monday. They are asking fishermen to try to save trapped birds before closing their nets.
Britos said he worries that until Monday, the number of dead birds could rise significantly.
Bill Gates' foundation puts money on solar-powered toilet
By Bill Rigby
SEATTLE | Tue Aug 14, 2012 10:41pm EDT
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Bill Gates is betting the toilet of the future for the developing world will be solar powered.
The world's leading private philanthropist handed a $100,000 prize to the California Institute of Technology on Tuesday for its work on a self-contained, sun-powered system that recycles water and breaks down human waste into storable energy.
Gates is focusing on the need for a new type of toilet as an important part of his foundation's push to improve health in the developing world. Open defecation leads to sanitation problems that cause 1.5 million children under 5 to die each year, Gates said, and Western-syle toilets are not the answer as they demand a complex sewer infrastructure and use too much water.
The Microsoft Corp co-founder is looking to change that by sparking new inventions in toilet technology, which he says has not fundamentally changed since the invention of the flush toilet in 1775.
"Imagine what's possible if we continue to collaborate, stimulate new investment in this sector, and apply our ingenuity in the years ahead," Gates said at his foundation's Seattle headquarters on Tuesday. "Many of these innovations will not only revolutionize sanitation in the developing world, but also help transform our dependence on traditional flush toilets in wealthy nations."
His foundation announced $3.4 million in new funding on Tuesday for toilet projects being worked on by various organizations, bringing total investment in its "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" to about $6.5 million.
About 2.6 billion people, or 40 percent of world's population -- mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia -- lack access to safe sanitation and are forced to defecate in the open, according to Gates.
Last year the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave grants to eight universities around the world to help tackle the problem by creating a hygienic toilet that uses little or no water, is safe and affordable and can transform waste into energy, clean water and nutrients.
CREATES ENERGY
Gates presented prizes on Tuesday to the teams that showed the most progress, handing Caltech the first prize of $100,000 for its working model of a solar-powered bathroom, where a solar panel produces power for an electrochemical reactor that breaks down feces and urine into hydrogen gas, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells to provide a back-up energy source for night operation or use in low-sunlight conditions.
The workings of the toilet are designed to be buried underground beneath a conventional-looking stall and urinal set-up, which the Caltech team showed in cross-section at the Gates Foundation courtyard. Water recovered from the continuous process is pumped up again to provide water to flush the toilet.
Gates also handed out prizes to Britain's Loughborough University and Canada's University of Toronto for their designs, which focus on transforming feces into usable resources.
The software pioneer is hoping many of the universities work together to develop the best technologies and is aiming to get new-style toilets into use in the next two to four years.
Gates' foundation is spending about $80 million a year on water, sanitation and hygiene issues, areas where it thinks it can make a marked difference in people's lives.
The $370 million in total it has committed to that area so far is still only a small slice of global funding for health, development and education provided by the foundation, which has handed out, or is committed to, more than $26 billion in grants since Gates started his philanthropic endeavors in 1994.
The foundation, which Gates co-chairs with his father and wife, Melinda, is the world's biggest private philanthropic organization with an endowment worth more than $33 billion.
