The Uncertain Future of Global Population Numbers

An anonymous reader writes "The question of global population is a pretty crucial one; how many people will there be in ten years? In forty? The New York Times notes research done by a group called the Worldwatch Institute, research that concludes world population figures are too fluid to make any sort of educated guesses. Childbearing populations combined with severe resource shortages in some parts of the world make pinning down a global headcount unfeasible for ten years from now, let alone out to 2050. The article continues beyond its original borders, as well, with commenters in the field of population studies noting we don't even have a good grasp on how many people were alive in 2007."

Comments

Almost 7 Billion People...

[cjfs]

... and all still on the same rock.

We need to get out more.

Re:Almost 7 Billion People...

[CRCulver]

It is a matter of building a big enough ship

One of the major themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (namely the volume Blue Mars ) is that immigration into outer space cannot solve Earth's population problems. You could never move enough people off at once to counter the people being born at that same instant.

And your evidence is...?

[Wellington Grey]

Optimists cite plunging fertility rates in some countries as evidence that Earth's human passenger list will not reach 9 billion. Pessimists see a chance of zooming well past that mark, and they add that with all the signs of strained resources (what's the price of oil today?), this trajectory will lead to some hard knocks. Some say we've already shot over the edge of the cliff and, like Wile E. Coyote in the old cartoons, simply haven't noticed.

Looks to me like the optimists actually have some evidence behind them. The more crowded the world gets, the more expensive it will be to have many children, and the fewer people will have.

-Grey

Re:And your evidence is...?

[vertinox]

Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.

For the life of me I can't remember or find the source, but a particular person in the field of sociology had figured out if the current rate of population (which is still exponential) there would be more humans than atoms in 17,000 years which he concluded something has to give at one point between now and then.

The fact of the matter is that someday humans will have to stop having kids in order to make life comfortable for the living. In fact its arguable that mass death is often followed by times of economic prosperity such as the emergence of the middle class and renaissance after the black death of the middle ages. Now I'm not arguing for humans should die off but rather they should focus on accepting birth control as a societal norm until the individual is ready to actually have a child.

Carrying capacity overshoot

[rseuhs]

What few people realize, is that the earth can support more people than what is commonly called the "carrying capacity" - temporarily.

Of course when you look at some examples:

Easter islands, where the polynesians peaked at about 10000 inhabitants before falling to about 2000 because they chopped down all trees. (no more boats -> no more fishing, no more houses -> starvation, disease)

Haiti, where the population has stripped their half of the island almost literally bare (almost the complete population survives on food-aid, now you can imagine what happens when the food-aid stops.)

China, where groundwater continues to fall and many areas are already dry.

Great Britain, which is extremely densely populated, has to import about half of it's food and is stupid enough to let half a million immigrants in every year.

It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever. It probably can't even go on like that for more than a couple of years. The green revolution has been made possible by oil and gas and both are getting much more expensive each and every year now.

And no, it's not a "global problem" like the one-worlders want us to believe. Some countries will be able to manage well (like Iceland which with almost zero immigration and geothermal energy plants is well prepared), some will be average (like France which can keep the lights up with nuclear power, but has a huge 3rd-world immigration problem on the other hand or Japan which is overpopulated but may solve that problem with low birthrates and not mass-famine), some will turn into hell-holes (like England which has an even bigger trade deficit than the USA per capita and cannot feed it's population even now while oil and gas is still cheap and there is still some coming from the North Sea oilfields. On top of that immigration has transformed a once cohesive population into a society that with a huge potential for civil strife or even civil war, London is already one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world.) or continue to be hell-holes (like most of the 3rd world)

I would be very surprised if there will be more than 3 billion people living in 2050.

Of course the human species will carry on, future historians will probably think of the 20th century as some crazy period full of socialist (in the late 20th/early 21st-century USA usually called "liberal") experiments.

Re:Carrying capacity overshoot

[arpad1]

Yeah, Easter Island, a geographically isolated, stone-age culture with a total population that would give it "small town" status today has a lot to teach us about the dangers that face a globe-spanning economy with resources the Easter Islander's would dismiss as fantasies and technologies they'd scarcely understand.

The rest of the post consists of either misrepresentation of the current situation as in your use of England as an example of the dangers of overpopulation or clear repudiation of the beliefs of Malthusian fear-mongers as in China which is economically in vastly better shape then it was when its population was significantly less then it is now.

It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever.

On the basis of the examples you offer, it's quite clear that the world can go on like this forever since your examples are either a) inapplicable or b) unsupportive of your claim.

In fact, history does provide a guide to the way the future's likely to unfold. When incomes rise to a certain level the population increase grinds to a halt.

All the wealthier nations, once you subtract the population additions made by recent immigrants, have either very low population growth or a shrinking population. Japan's robotic technology expenditures are driven by a combination of their aging (shrinking) population and a refusal to allow immigration. Who's going to take care of Japan's rapidly increasing geezer population? The U.S.'s population increase is driven by immigration.

If you look at the trends in global per capita income the conclusion to be drawn is that the global population increase will start slowing down within twenty years and top out about 2050 with global population decline to follow. I know that's the sort of thought to fill the zero-population racists hearts with glee but they'll have about as much to do with it as a rooster's crowing does with the rising of the sun.

Of course the human species will carry on, future historians will probably think of the 20th century as some crazy period full of socialist (in the late 20th/early 21st-century USA usually called "liberal") experiments.

Not just historians and there's no need to wait till the future. You can offer examples to the contrary but I'm unaware of any "socialist experiment" that can be deemed a success. With utter uniformity socialism's been either a failure or a disastrous failure.

Let's put this into numbers...

[LynnwoodRooster]

If you moved every single person in the world to the land area within Texas, we'd have less population density than New York City (cites: NYC, land area of Texas, world population).

The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day (cites: Columbia River).

We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US (cites: vegan food estimates, farmland in the US).

Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.

We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn't need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.

The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.