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Visualizing Peak Popopulation
Even with having existed for millions of years, the process for humans to reach 1 billion in population was long and arduous. It is only about 12,000 years ago that humans started engaging in sedentary agriculture. This allowed humans to settle and consistently produce food, rather than hunt and gather throughout.
However, it is with the Industrial Revolution that the means for exponential human population increases was created. New technology, boosts in productivity, and the use of energy allowed for a new frontier in increasing health, sanitation, and standard of living. It is also around this time – in 1804 to be exact – that the earth’s population hit 1 billion people.
Fast forward two hundred years, and the impact of the Industrial Revolution is loud and clear. Now with over 7 billion people, global population has risen so fast that by one estimate, 14% of all human beings that have ever existed are alive today.
Based on a recent UN study, by 2100, our global population is predicted to be between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people. The world will be much different than we know it today in the future.
For starters, the vast majority of growth will happen in the less developed regions of the world. As an example, Nigeria’s population will increase five-fold, from around 174 million today to almost a billion people. It will likely be the 3rd most populous country behind India and China in 2100. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole could hold up to almost half of the world’s population in the future.
While population has exploded exponentially, unfortunately the resources on our planet are finite. The ecological term for this is “carrying capacity”, which is the maximum population that an environment and resources can sustain indefinitely.
Human carrying capacity is very complex and takes into account many factors, including nutrients, fresh water, environmental conditions, space, technology, medical care, and sanitation. The carrying capacity for humans is not static, and can be changed by adding or subtracting resources from the ecosystem.
While technology has saved the human race time after time, we have not yet found ways to address many of the problems tied to overpopulation such as consumption, changes to climate, inequality, and scarcity of resources.
There are certain realities we will have to face. Here are just some of the issues:
- By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity.
- The United States uses 1 million gallons of oil every 2 minutes.
- The marginal cost of producing oil and metals has never been higher.
- Food prices are skyrocketing, and availability of essential nutrients (like phosphorus) needed to grow food is becoming scarcer.
- Governments continue to create new currency and debt at unprecedented and unsustainable levels.
- Potential collapses in biodiversity and changes in our climate.
Is our future littered with disease, famine, stunted growth, currency collapse, and a lower quality of life?
Or should we be optimistic that we can persist? Can technology and smart decisions save the day?
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
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The low estimate has shown to be the one closest to reality, for 30+ years.
Relax everyone, nothing to worry about.
I was a precocious child and began tracking this population ""Bomb"" idea in 1968. Everytime I began to look at the dire predictions, the numbers kept falling and the date of peak moved closer and closer.
First it was 12 billion, then 10, 9 and now 8 billion. Many factors, just won't go into here, are accelerating the collapse of birth rates in all nations and globally with very few exceptions, and those exceptions are seeing dramatic drops of their very high birth rates.
My gut guess is that world population will peak at 7.9 billion before the year 2030 and will then level off.
Any resources that become scarce will rise in price, the market will adjust, and their will be enough copper to put coils in refrigerators for everyone.
The number of unused chemical bonds on this planet is massive. We are centuries away from running out of anything, and the elements from all those broken chemical bonds are still here on this planet but for a what was fissioned, fused, or sent into or beyond LEO.
The level of absolute and qualitative stupidity of stating that we have "unused chemical bonds on this planet" as a justification for ignoring a population threat to the planet is undeniable.
1. The planet is, without a doubt, not a cornucopia for stripping at will. This cements a disregard for the future and, further, a self-indulgent, sanctimonious arrogance that "all will be solved."
2. China has taken over Vancouver, Canada and (almost) Washington State. Lest you think this is arbitrary...consider that Jack Ma has stated he cannot find food that is unpolluted to eat in China. China is not happy that creating chochtkes and doo dads and shiny things for inspid US consumers has polluted their country, even as it provided the dollars for a military build-up.
Should you think "colonialism" is dead, consider that the number one immigrant population is the Chinese. Obomao used the Mexicans as a diversionary tactic (yes, that is also a problem) but he owes all he has to his Chinese masters, since the Chinese will/would have no hesitation to blow his real birth/college/sexual identiy documents onto the world's stage at any moment. His problem? No one hates blacks more than the Chinese. No one, and if he thinks that is any different for him...he's nuts.
3. There is implicit in the above post that someone/somehow there is a group of people who will just find this perfect carrying capcity and solve all problems. Find any system in human history where this is the case. Or read my favorite book on the subject, Frank Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine, a singularly brilliant work on the subject, (thinly ripped off by another author, ignore that book!).
Mr. Dikotter's book should be required reading in every 9th grade across the country; it would immediately end all thoughts of socialism, communism, and that it hasn't received the attention it deserves is a travesty and sham of the book industry.
I am not associated with Mr. Dikotter, do not know him.
There is no population threat. I pointed out a peak of less than 8 billion, or did you not read that and just went Full Doomer first?
If you don't think the planet is to be used by humans then please act upon your convictions. I encourage you to do so at the earliest possible moment.
Never in 100,000 years has the planet run out of a crucial resource for humans (not the extinction of a species - total eradication of wood, water, air, food, on a global scale). When things become scarce humans, who desire to survive, find an alternative.
This has always happened and thus it is safe to conclude this trend will continue and that the dropping birth rates will reduce carrying capacity.
Unless you are arguing that human invention has stopped as of 2014 and will cease forever. Would like to see your research.
You are a Doomer. You obsess about the negative and blind yourself to alternatives.
If humans cannot use "the planet is, without a doubt, not a cornucopia for stripping at will" then kill yourself and save the planet.
If you value the planet more than humans, the logical act is to kill yourself. Do so, now.
LULZ where's the real TD?
What's that? I finally goaded you into it? LULZ
1. The IPCC report is intended to inform future policy decisions
The United Nations is in the midst of a series of climate talks with the aim of adopting a new post-Kyoto regime with more aggressive and legally binding measures to curb anthropogenic climate change. AR5 will serve as a roadmap for future policy decisions made at the 20th and 21st UN Climate Conferences in Lima and Paris. The UN hopes to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a more aggressive treaty at the 2015 Paris conference.
2. Climate change is unequivocal and largely driven by humans through economic and population growth
etc
Peak oil was gospel, then came shale oil technology. Peak population may be the same. I will state that the world is getting dumber, and that the dumbest of the world population have the most kids. Just like the movie 'Idiotocracy'.
At peak oil all the easy to extract stuff has been found.
Fracking is getting the hard to extract stuff, we have passed peak oil.
Fracking fits perfectly with peak oil theory.
Ever heard of methane hydrates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate
The sedimentary methane hydrate reservoir probably contains 2–10 times the currently known reserves of conventional natural gas, as of 2013
Animal populations do this all the time.
Population numbers rise beyond the resources available to them and then the population corrects through starvation.
We might have thought human beings were smart enough to avoid this ..... maybe not.
HOWEVER...
...your analogy is not appropriate. You cannot apply the process of a natural system to modern day "civilization" and the globalist statist systems we have allowed to entrench.
A deer population in northern Michigan, is not aware of - or capable of - OR INCLINED TO - gather up a % of it's bumper acorn crop and ship it to it's drought-stricken cousins in north-east Texas. They have no greater/superior "authority" which informs them of this plight - a plight they themselves created by previously demanding acorns from the Michigan deer population, and shipping them to Texas, thereby allowing the Texas population of deer to grow beyond what it otherwise would. This "authority" also then is not there to demand EVEN MORE acorns from them, to be shipped to Texas - AND NOW Minnesota and Wisconsin too (initiating unsustainable growth in those areas).
And this comparison doesn't even begin to touch on all the collateral effects (problems/reactions,solutions) that (un)naturally occur as a result of this interventionist philosophy.
Below is a list of the worlds ten most crucial problems counted down from "least to most crucial", The world must begin to address these many problems with long term solutions. Most of these are issues that center on our sustainability.
Sadly, politicians do a damn poor job of dealing with such things leaving us without direction. As we look at the human condition we can let fate take us where it may choose or we can take control of our future by proper planning and by guiding it as best we can. I must admit it is sometimes hard to be optimistic!
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-worlds-10-worst-problems.html
To all the people who think the worlds surging population as not a problem because of new energy sources I say, wake up! Anyone with even the slightest mechanical knowledge will tell you that solar panels, wind mills and such take a lot of energy to build and often are maintenance intense. Both these systems have a short lifespan and require a great deal of energy to be expanded in just keeping these complicated systems up and running. This was one of my arguments that optimism concerning ethanol and its potential was being over hyped.
t took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.
Western Europe as a whole will most likely shrink from 460 million to just 350 million by the end of the century. That’s not so bad compared with Russia and China, each of whose populations could fall by half. As you may not be surprised to learn, the Germans have coined a polysyllabic word for this quandary: Schrumpf-Gesellschaft, or “shrinking society.”
On Star Trek they had a matter replicator. Once we figure that sucker out,...we can continue.....FORWARD !!!!!
Screw off depopulation scum bag..the earth is NOT over populated but we are meerly living wrongly. If we adjust the way we live and consume we can all live just fine and the earth can provide all we need. If you think we are overpopulated you are welcome to jump a cliff first and do us all a favour.
delusions on an unparallelled path
The elites vision of population is a parabolic slope(cliff) downward.
We can go through many more iterations of technological expansion.
While population has exploded exponentially, unfortunately the resources on our planet are finite. The ecological term for this is “carrying capacity”, which is the maximum population that an environment and resources can sustain indefinitely.
Productivity has exploded exponentially too. The planet was always able to produce more. The people just didn't know how to get it to do that. Now they do.
Human carrying capacity is very complex and takes into account many factors, including nutrients, fresh water, environmental conditions, space, technology, medical care, and sanitation. The carrying capacity for humans is not static, and can be changed by adding or subtracting resources from the ecosystem.
Actually the carrying capacity is changed more by changing practices. In the olden days you had hunting and gathering. Then you had animal husbandry and farming. Now we have factory animal and vegetable farms located on our most productive land. In the future we will have these factories on our most unproductive (e.g. desert) lands basking in sunlight.
We will pump water from lands and watersheds that get it to the now unproductive lands that don't. In time, these newly watered lands will become productive, the deserts will shrink, and it will rain there where it never did before. And innovations paralleling that of oil driven energy will yield energy driven desalinated water. The oceans are huge. It's smooth sailing for a long time after that as far as water is concerned. Further, most of our water is wasted in removing our waste. That's unnecessary and if necessitated will change.
While technology has saved the human race time after time, we have not yet found ways to address many of the problems tied to overpopulation such as consumption, changes to climate, inequality, and scarcity of resources.
We're a long way from optimal use of our resources or exhaustion. Just fly over the good ole USA and look at all the empty space you go over. In the west it's not only empty, it's totally unproductive. People live in clusters ... becoming more and more tightly packed into big cities. With improvements in communication (and adoption of those improvements), most people's jobs can be moved to anywhere they want them to be.
Just viewing things we know today, we can expand 10 fold and not feel a bump. What we need to do is decentralize our politics as we decentralize our nests. Further, prosperous people multiply less than un-prosperous people. The obvious solution? Stimulate more universal prosperity. This will happen naturally if we eliminate the artifical retraints the prosperous impose on the unprosperous. That probably starts with exposing capitalism for the con that it is ... while recognizing that socialism is a con of equal proportions, thus avoiding it as well. What's that leave? Traderism. Remove all restraints to trade.
It's not a static problem space people.
we already got peak popo-pulation. Da popo is everywhere. It's a popo state.
"Nigeria’s population will increase five-fold, from around 174 million today to almost a billion people. It will likely be the 3rd most populous country behind India and China in 2100."
This is never going to happen. They can barely feed the population that they have now. How exactly are they going pay to feed 5X more people and where is the food going to come from?
The "data" and the extrapolated results are a fiction borne of globalist statist propaganda. The reference to U.N. sources tells us all we need to know regarding the premise we are dealing with here. The only reason shit-hole countries are able to explode their populations is because of globalist "charitable" inputs which create a false reality for the recipients, and allows (and may even INCETIVIZE) them to propagate beyond localized carrying capacity.
So, to answer your question " How exactly are they going pay to feed 5X more people and where is the food going to come from?"...THEY, aren't.
WE will, via the statist U.N.
It's a downward spiral.
The world's population growth is totally non-White. One might suggest that the rapid rise in population amongst the non-white demographics is due to the White man's inventions as well as the aid, material, technological and humane, given to the people of color. To this very day you can see white doctors, such as Rand Paul, giving free medical care to non-whites in foreign lands, care which would BANKRUPT the average white person in America.
Also our homelands, such as the USA, are being flooded with people of color whose breeding is subsidized by the Whites who built and founded the USA. As we have seen with the passage of the 1965 immigration act and the amnesty in 1986 and the numerous amnesties of this present regime, the push continues to end the Dispossessed Majority, once and for all.
This was all by design, my friends, not by chance.
Whether the Whites will actively resist their extinction remains to be seen.
"Overpopulation in the United States will become THE single greatest issue facing Americans in the 21st century. We either solve it proactively or nature will solve it brutally for us via water shortages, energy crisis, air pollution, gridlock, species extinction and worse.
U.S. population will double from 300 million to 600 million on its way to 1 billion in the lifetime of a child born today if we fail to change course."
Frosty Wooldridge 2000
We're goners for sure.
The end of the world is coming this week!!!!
Hurry, hurry, hurry, and buy your gold from us befor it hits 1000........
This has been predicted since befor christ and will be for the next 2000 years.....
Yes, I agree that resources on Earth are limited, but resources in space are unlimited. Once we get off planet there is no limit to how many people could live out in the solar system. Had we spent the money on space exploration that we have on the great society and wars since 1970 we would be living in habitats in the Asteroid belt, mining water, gold, and rare earthes.
The rapidly expanding economies of the world would have vanquished starvation and poverty would be a relative term. That is because people would be fixated on any slice of an ever larger pie, rather than enlarging their slice of an ever smaller pie.
Unlimited untapped resources and economic expansion await. If only we and our leaders had a smidgen of foresight. The choice is simple, keep flushing money down the toilet... or take the next step.
Biodynamic farming actually adds nutrients to the soil. If we farmed naturally, instead of mining nutrients for the soil, we'd recalaim waste land instead of losing ground.
Eisenhower's Rhine-Meadows Death Camps - Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbp61fOVFaE (1:30:14)
We have known for decades that the world can only sustain 2 billion people indefinitely, maybe thats' what agenda 21 is all about - if you believe that shit.