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| Danny Dorling's 'Population 10 Billion'. |
Stephen Emmott has
suggested humanity’s chances of avoiding the real rigours of climate change
are less than good.
In fact, to be quite blunt, he says humanity is “fucked”.
That view is
contradicted by his professorial counterpart, Danny Dorling, who has written “Population
10 Billion: The coming demographic and knowing how to survive it”.
Dorling is a professor of Human Geography at the University
of Sheffield and is also a
visiting Professor at the University of Canterbury NZ, in the School of Social
and Community Medicine of the University of Bristol and in the Department of
Sociology, Goldsmiths, at the University of London.
From September this
year (2013) he will be the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford University.
Emmott, The
head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, Stephen
J. Emmott, who is also a visiting professor at the University College London
and the University of Oxford, has written about and put considerable thought
into population and written about it in his 2013 book, “10 Billion”.
Dorling
sees himself as a “practical possibilist” and Emmott as an “angry pessimist”.
Writing
in “Population 10 Billion”, Dorling alerts us to a third type, the “rational
optimist” – those among us who paint themselves as “sensible, but cheerful folk”.
The climate change conversation is complex, matched only
by the complexity of how individuals react and respond to the unfolding
difficulties.
How we respond physically will be both divisive and difficult, but even more
confusing and alarming, both for individuals and a groups, will be their
psychological response.he coming
demographic crisis and how to
