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Earth's Population To Hit 7 Billion This Year
MikeChino writes "The UN Population Division just announced that the world's human population will hit 7 billion by Halloween 2011. The increase of one billion people in the past 12 years is worrying, especially since the global population only reached one billion total in the early 19th century. In the next 20 years, our population growth is predicted to rise to 8 billion people as our demand for food increases by 50 percent, water by 30 percent and energy by 50 percent." Not everyone finds it to be worrying per se.
This only ends one way, and any fool can see it.
But sure, argue both sides. Have as many kids as you want. I couldn't guess their odds of living to 70, but I am willing to bet that this is that "magic" generation, and they will see suffering and mass death unprecedented in all of human history.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgDhDa4HHo
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I must be old and grumpy and cynical.
Humans consistently underestimate exponential growth. If you have a bigger population, it will grow faster.
Who honestly thinks humans are immune from population cycles of the animal kingdom? of overpopulation killoff? We're due for a war soon. War is just human's way of normalizing the population for resources.
I don't want kids and it annoys me when I see massive families. What does that make me? A dead end in genetic material or "Idiocracy" in the making?
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Given decreases in TFR, it's possible the world will experience a population decline this century.
The total fertility rate is below replacement level for many countries of the world. The main exception is sub-Saharan Africa.
Most of the Anglo- and Eurosphere is in decline. The US is in decline natively, and only growing due to immigration.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The world waits with baited breath for your solutions for increasing energy generation, food production, and water purification.
Oh and all this while we are about to run out of the millions of years of solar energy we just burned up in the form of fossil fuels.
Oh, you expected someone else to figure these things out. I see.
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The second derivative of the world population has been negative for a while now. In other words, this will end with the population stabilizing at some level. Quite possibly (but, of course, not certainly) without any catastrophic natural or human-made disaster.
Probably not what you were thinking?
We wont even need a war that becomes inevitable once resources get scarce. No, nature will take care of it first. The more there are people, the more densely populated the world, the more likely is a proper pandemic. People go every day from one end of the world to another. All you need is a germ that is highly contagious, lethal and has a 3 day latency period and most of that 7 billion will drop dead and it wont even take very long. This is bound to occur within this century. All the highly sterile environments we insist on keeping are perfect breeding grounds for such a disease.
If you want some arguments for growth, Becker and Posner discussed this a while ago. Becker came out more strongly for population growth.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/05/does-the-earth-have-room-for-10-billion-people-posner.html
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/05/yes-the-earth-will-have-ample-resources-for-10-billion-people-becker.html
I know I'll get down rated for this, but with the concerns of global food supplies not being enough, and the growing global population, should we REALLY be trying to save people from starvation who will never be able to provide for themselves? Starvation is the thing that keeps societies from growing faster than the increase in food production, so why encourage third world countries to continue to increase their populations when they can't feed themselves?
There is a basic concept, if you have a resource, trade it for a resource you do not have, and that includes money. If there is an entire nation that has no resources to trade and they are not capable of growing their own food, then the population will starve, the population will go down, and things balance out. Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help? The world as a whole does not need money pits, and the world as a whole does not need a "food pit" that will never be able to trade resources for food.
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole. If you want to adopt people and bring them into your own country, then fine, bring them in, and make them productive.
We just have to raise Africa out of poverty? That should be easy right?
Considering it was just last week I saw a report on the news about the refugee camps in Kenya. There is now 500,000 people in those camps. Half a freaking million. Also many of the camps have been around for 20 years. Twenty freaking years. There was a story about people that were BORN in the refugee camps, and are still there as adults!
Am I the only one that sees this and goes "WTF!"
On the whole Africa is one messed up place, between war, famine, corruption, exploitation, genocide, plague, lawlessness, lack of anything infrastructure, education, health care, dictators, racial hatred, etc... the place is about as messed up as a place can possibly be. It has been receiving aid from both countries and individuals for decades and decades and there has even been some UN "interventions" (though not nearly enough in my mind).
Anyway I am not offering up any solutions, as if I had one I would be trying to do something about it. That assumes there are "solutions" to this sort of thing. People have been trying to fix Africa for a long time with no success. The fact that they have so many kids, seems crazy to me (but of course it hard to judge never having been in that situation). So ya, I'm not going to hold my breath for an African solution to population issues.
The slashdot crowd should definitly read "Limits to Growth" ! /. topic for which the most insightfull answer would be a key point from this book, but I barely see any reference to it.
Twice a month there is a
Yes... it is sometimes called Club of Rome report and usually one think he knows what it is about after having read some random rant about it, written by people who haven't read the study either... Please, trust me: people really need to understand what it is about.
I do have read "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update", the 3rd edition of this report written by Meadows' team.
The point is that they were remarkably right in their first report (1972).
If you don't have much time, at least read the book introduction and/or the abstract of this short study: A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality.
Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th century.
The whole book is very interesting, it has many facts about humanity Earth "burn rate".
What you should keep in mind: even with VERY optimistic discoveries, a good deal of technical breakthroughs, wise politics... in the very next decades we will face a growth halt and a decrease of average well being, production, etc. We could have maintained the well being and the population if we had done the right thing in 1990, but it is too late now to avoid this decrease.
We're in overdrive since the 90's, has many over studies show, often stated as "1,5 Earth needed". And no matter how optimistic you are, how strong your faith is in technical advances, this won't make ocean fish replenish as we fish more and more with advanced techniques, this won't make available oil fields expand as we discover less than we pump out (even with more advanced techs), this won't make damaged farmlands heal as we over-exploit more and more lands, etc.
The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run" scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.
So where the point here ? This discussion is about Earth population but without any reference to this Earth simulation where all scenarios show that we're heading to a population decrease in the next decades.
I think the point is worth enough to be mentioned, to the least.