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.

Review your math....

[Mathinker]

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?

Earth self-regulates

[AlexiaDeath]

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.

Becker/Posner are for growth, with caveats

[coldsalmon]

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 [becker-posner-blog.com]
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/05/yes-the-earth-will-have-ample-resources-for-10-billion-people-becker.html [becker-posner-blog.com]

Re:Population decline

[Anonymous Coward]

7-8 children in Africa... and they're supposedly starving? How about having less kids? Fuck, my kids would be starving, too, if I had 8 kids.

Re:Unsustainable growth

[mypalmike]

Humanity does not make decisions. People make decisions. Just as overpopulation in other species leads to resource starvation (typically food and/or water), so it has been happening and will continue with humans. 18 million humans starve to death each year. The parents of those 18 million quite clearly did not adjust breeding patterns to match available resources.

Re:This is why trying to save people is a bad idea

[Ryxxui]

I might agree with you it it wasn't for the fact that every part of the world that actually has abject poverty (the kind you talk about, where the country on a whole has no resources) has that poverty because the West (Europe and later the United States) caused it. We invaded them, and tried to force cultures on them that they didn't want, need, or understand. Then we took everything they had, told some of them that they were in charge and that we'd back them up if anyone tried to screw with them, and came back periodically to keep making things worse. The world is shit because people made it shit and we have to fix that before we can move forward. Stop thinking that people are poor just because they want to be and try actually thinking about how things got like this.

The Limits to Growth ... again. You should read it

[advid.net]

The slashdot crowd should definitly read "Limits to Growth" [wikipedia.org] !
Twice a month there is a /. topic for which the most insightfull answer would be a key point from this book, but I barely see any reference to it.

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 [csiro.au].

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.