Global Population

[UrbanWaterloo]

Global Population

[UrbanWaterloo]

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/img/7-billion-logo.gif
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/7-billion

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Population 7 Billion
There will soon be seven billion people on the planet. By 2045 global population is projected to reach nine billion. Can the planet take the strain?
January 2011 | Robert Kunzig, National Geographic | Link (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text)


...Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us.
And the explosion, though it is slowing, is far from over. Not only are people living longer, but so many women across the world are now in their childbearing years—1.8 billion—that the global population will keep growing for another few decades at least, even though each woman is having fewer children than she would have had a generation ago. By 2050 the total number could reach 10.5 billion, or it could stop at eight billion—the difference is about one child per woman. UN demographers consider the middle road their best estimate: They now project that the population may reach nine billion before 2050—in 2045.
...
With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it’s hard not to be alarmed.
...
World population hasn’t fallen, historians think, since the Black Death of the 14th century.
In the two centuries after Malthus declared that population couldn’t continue to soar, that’s exactly what it did. The process started in what we now call the developed countries, which were then still developing. The spread of New World crops like corn and the potato, along with the discovery of chemical fertilizers, helped banish starvation in Europe. Growing cities remained cesspools of disease at first, but from the mid-19th century on, sewers began to channel human waste away from drinking water, which was then filtered and chlorinated; that dramatically reduced the spread of cholera and typhus.
Moreover in 1798, the same year that Malthus published his dyspeptic tract, his compatriot Edward Jenner described a vaccine for smallpox—the first and most important in a series of vaccines and antibiotics that, along with better nutrition and sanitation, would double life expectancy in the industrializing countries, from 35 years to 77 today. It would take a cranky person to see that trend as gloomy: “The development of medical science was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” wrote Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968.
...
The green revolution—a combination of high-yield seeds, irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers that enabled grain production to double—was already under way. Today many people are undernourished, but mass starvation is rare.
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Millions of people in developing countries who would have died in childhood survived to have children themselves. That’s why the population explosion spread around the planet: because a great many people were saved from dying.
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They assumed some instinct would lead women to keep having enough children to ensure the survival of the species. Instead, in country after developed country, the fertility rate fell below replacement level. In the late 1990s in Europe it fell to 1.4. “The evidence I’m familiar with, which is anecdotal, is that women couldn’t care less about replacing the species,” Joel Cohen says.
...
Some parts of it may well be; some parts of it are hellish today. There are now 21 cities with populations larger than ten million, and by 2050 there will be many more.
...
But one can also draw a different conclusion—that fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future. People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation.
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For centuries population pessimists have hurled apocalyptic warnings at the congenital optimists, who believe in their bones that humanity will find ways to cope and even improve its lot.
...
Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity.

[BuildingScout]

UN demographers consider the middle road their best estimate: They now project that the population may reach nine billion before 2050—in 2045.

...and they have consistently been wrong. World population will likely peek around 8 billion in 2040 and start a rapid decline thereafter. The highest confirmed number of births worldwide took place twenty years ago from 1985 to 1990. Ever since then the number has been stable. The last five years from 2005 to 2010 might exceed the previous record number of births, as part of the echo effect from the 1985 boom. Projections suggest that this will be the last time the peak is approached/reached, never to exceed 125 million births a year again.

[T-Bone]

Here is a link I found kinnda neat. Shows world population and other interesting stats.
http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks/worldclock/

[metropolis]

Do you have a citation for this, BuildingScout? Demographics fascinate me and I would love to read more about this if you do.

[BuildingScout]

Do you have a citation for this, BuildingScout? Demographics fascinate me and I would love to read more about this if you do.

I'm just quoting from the standard UN population revision (http://esa.un.org/UNPP/) (latest one is 2008) and the US census bureau worldwide population database (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/informationGateway.php).

I've been following the figures also for a long time. What brought my attention to them was the consistent overestimation on the part of most demographers about population growth. For the UN it has become a bi-annual ritual to get together and revise world population projections downward.