What If Experts Are Wrong On World Population Growth?
Thanks to George Plumb for this article. Please see: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/what_if_experts_are_wrong_on_world_population_growth/2444/
19 Sep 2011: Analysis What If Experts Are Wrong On World Population Growth?
A central tenet of demography is that global population will peak at 9 to 10 billion this century and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But that assumption may be overly optimistic – and if it is, population will continue to rise, placing enormous strains on the environment.
by Carl Haub
In a mere half-century, the number of people on the planet has soared from 3 billion to 7 billion, placing us squarely in the midst of the most rapid expansion of world population in our 50,000-year history — and placing ever-growing pressure on the Earth and its resources.
But that is the past. What of the future? Leading demographers, including those at the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau, are projecting that world population will peak at 9.5 billion to 10 billion later this century and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But what if those projections are too optimistic? What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100, as a high-end UN estimate has projected? Such an outcome would clearly have enormous social and environmental implications, including placing enormous stress on the world’s food and water resources, spurring further loss of wild lands and biodiversity, and hastening the degradation of the natural systems that support life on Earth.
To read the full article, please click here: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/what_if_experts_are_wrong_on_world_population_growth/2444/
October 30th, 2011 at 10:51 am
Dear Bill, Carl Haub and PMC friends,
It seems somehow not quite right for so many respected colleagues to continue ignoring extant, unchallenged scientific research, while holding onto preternatural thought about an automatic demographic transition to benign stabilization of absolute global human population numbers a mere four decades from now. Although scientific evidence is already living in the world that directly contradicts so-called science from the field of demography, the widely shared, consensually validated, misleading and incomplete theory of a demographic transition continues to be touted as if it represents not only science (which it is not), but the best available scientific evidence (which it is not).
There is something terribly wrong with what is happening on our watch. How does the human family address and overcome the human-induced global challenges looming before humanity and threatening life as we know it if experts in human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth deny science and play at being stupid when presented with peer-reviewed, published, uncontested scientific research? The avoidance and denial of science during my lifetime is misguided behavior and cannot be condoned any longer. We are witnessing a colossal failure of intellectual honesty, moral courage and humane action.
Tomorrow the seventh billion human being joins the family of humanity, and still many too many experts are playing stupid, choosing consciously and deliberately to deny science.
http://bravenewworld.in/7-billion-is-many-too-many-time-to-humanely-limit-population-growth-is-now/
Sincerely,
Steve