The Catabolic Correction: Redefining Carrying Capacity (K) at the Entropic Event Horizon

The consensus among statistical demographers and orthodox economists is that the human population will smoothly plateau at approximately 10 to 11 billion by the end of the century. Relying on the Demographic Transition Model (DTM), this projection assumes that declining fertility rates will naturally stabilise the population without catastrophic mortality. This paper argues that such models constitute a biophysical absurdity. By treating the Earth’s carrying capacity (K) as a static or infinitely expandable baseline, mainstream demography ignores the thermodynamic reality that the current global population is in a state of massive ecological overshoot, sustained entirely by an artificial, continuously subsidised exergy flow. Integrating population dynamics with the Socio-Economic Thermodynamic Entropy (SETE) framework, we demonstrate that carrying capacity is a real-time function of Effective Circulating Power (Pef f ). As thermodynamic bottlenecks tighten and fossil subsidies withdraw, the global population will not experience a gentle demographic transition, but a rapid, mathematically unavoidable catabolic correction.