UN predicts population surge

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=613b17231b440755&cat=c08dd24cec417021

UN predicts population surge
From correspondents at the United Nations
February 25, 2005
THE world's population will surge from 6.5 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, with almost all the growth in developing countries, a United Nations study predicts.

Although birth rates in the developed world are low and declining, the population in the 50 least developed nations is expected to double, leading to 9.1 billion people on Earth.

"Continued population growth until 2050 is inevitable even if the decline of fertility accelerates," states the study, released today
snip...
Populations will at least triple in some of the world's poorest lands - Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Uganda.

more...
Thats alot of mouths to feed!!!

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Unless we run out of oil, or have a world war, famine or plague

[SomewhereOutThere424]

2. Or if things keep going the way they are...

All of the above.

[Lorien]

12. Exactly

at CURRENT consumption rates, the world will run out of natural resources (destroy all remaining rainforests and hardwood forests, consume every available source of fresh water, exhaust coal supplies, etc.) in 50 years. The planet simply CANNOT support 9 billion human beings. Indeed, one or all of the above WILL wipe out a significant portion of the population. Hell is coming no matter what happens.

[Dark]

14. The planet can easily support 9 billion human beings,

just not 9 billion Americans.

[NickB79]

15. Even 9 billion non-Americans is stretching it

You could theoretically support twice the current population of our planet, at a substantially reduced standard of living, if you went ahead and plowed under every square mile of arable land for food production, and put everyone in a mud-and-straw hut. This would lead to environmental devastation that would still come back to bite us in the ass in some way, shape or form. Clearcut forests, and you find HIV, Ebola, Marburg, and a host of other nasty diseases that can wipe out millions. You run short on drinking water. You run short on timber for building. You wipe out entire ecosystems that could provide useful new drugs and vaccines.

Even with a less-resource-intense lifestyle, 9 billion is pushing it.

[emcguffie]

22. that prediction is actually lower --

-- than it was four years ago. They went from predicting 11 some odd billion in 2050, to 8.9 predicted at 2050 two years ago, and then up to 9.1 in the 2004 revision.

They attribute that to more people with HIV/AIDS getting anti-retrovirals.

But it was HIV/AIDS that caused most of the reduction from 2000 to 2002.

And population ageing is going to be intense. Hey, I can give you the whole darn press release.... and the highlights of the report are posted on the internet. It's actually very interesting.

Women in the developing world who have a lot of children -- and who still want to have more than we would, say -- would be very happy to have a few less. The issue is giving them the tools to control their fertility. (!!!DUH!!!)

[TroubleMan]

3. Remember modern agriculture is just turning fossil fuels into food

That's simplifying it, but we use the energy from oil to mass produce food - so basically we're eating fossil fuels.

Think when the oil runs out....and we have all those people to feed.

[BlueEyedSon]

4. 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to grow 1 calorie of food!

http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html

The Oil We Eat
Following the food chain back to Iraq
Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning.
Sources

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

[Massacure]

8. That is why you better learn how to plant a garden.

You'll need it.

[BlueEyedSon]

9. And buy lots of guns to protect it?

:(

[Massacure]

10. You can only use one gun at a time.

You'll need ammo though. ;)

[whistle]

5. Now there's a startling prediction....60,000,000 people are dying..

...of starvation every year and 800 million are malnourished, but we are going to encourage the world's population to increase by 50% in the next 45 years!

The wealthiest 1% of rich and powerful people in the world refuse to address the conditions of the people of world right now by failing to provide for basic needs of food, shelter, clean water, health, education, jobs and decent standards of living, but they will endorse and encourage a population explosion that could endanger all of mankind, the environment and the balance of all living things on this planet.

Mass education in all countries with a real curriculum of language and communication skills, mathematics, science, history and the arts along with practical skills development and training for a productive occupation could put the brakes on such a population disaster before it spins out of control. But, if we wait even one generation, there may be no controlling it.

Look at this map and then ask where will all of the additional people live?

<link> http://www.global-vision.org/popex/index2.html#data

[whistle]

6. And there is this site as well.....

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html

[Igel]

23. Good link, worth bookmarking. n/t

[Rex]

7. 450 million total in the 1500s

6 billion 500 years later.

[cliss]

11. Stan Goff writes that

there are 6 billion people on this planet.

The world by itself can only sustain 2 billion people. But because of fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, transporting the food by trucks etc, we have increased the number.

That means that if we start to experience Peak Oil (which I believe we will), that means that 4 billion people are at risk.

Not good.

This means that Thomas Malthus (the gloomy economist) was right.

[moondust]

13. Don't worry. Bush and the Pope will feed them.

As you may recall, one of the first things Bush did when he took office was to cut funding for international family planning. And the Pope of course says no condoms.

Are these men planning to open a global soup kitchen or something? Will that be run out of the Vatican or the Crawford pig farm?

[Moderator]

16. kick to combine threads

[emad]

17. World population 'to rise by 40%'

BBC


The world's population is expected to rise from the current 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050, the UN says.

Virtually all the growth will be in the developing world, according to a report by the UN Population Division.

By contrast, the population of developed countries will remain almost static at 1.2 billion, the report adds.

It says India will overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2030 - five years earlier than previously expected.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/4297169.stm

[tjdee]

18. Bombs--that doesn't take into account how many wars there'll be.

Or mutant SARS episodes...

:scared:

[LibertyorDeath]

19. A crossroads

"More than at any other time in history, humankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Woody Allen

[BlueEyedSon]

20. Never happen. The end of cheap oil means the end of modern agriculture.

[Locut0s]

21. The center cannot hold

No matter how much the western world wants to hold onto it's current exorbitant lifestyle and consumption of the worlds resources, the rest of the world in the end simply won't allow it. An equilibrium will HAVE to be found. Trouble is the horrendous amount of suffering that is likely to be experienced by so many in wars and famines, in search of such a balance. Things are only going to get worse in the short run as those who have desperately try to hold on to their riches while those who have nothing, far outnumbering the haves, desperately try to claim some of their own.

[Igel]

24. But assuming that birthrates continue to fall, and achieve

the same kinds of rates as in Western countries, there's going to be a population bulge, with a fairly rapid dropoff in world population in the next 150-200 years.

In other words, what's predicted for Russia, Italy, and Japan, and what would be true for the US if not for immigration, will apply also to India and the population belt ranging from Pakistan to southern Africa.