Blogs can be like soapboxes. From time to time, I have banged on about population growth on this tiny spinning sphere in the vastness of this infinite universe. In the past, this topic weirdly riled my main trolls as though it was not a matter I had any authority to comment upon. Anyway, I am back to the subject this very evening - population growth.
It was in 1804 that Earth's population reached one billion for the first time. Then 123 years passed by before, in 1927, the population reached two billion. However it only took 33 more years to reach three billion which tally came about in 1960.
Onward to four billion and that happened just fourteen years later - in 1974. You can see that the pace of population growth was really picking up.
We reached five billion in 1987
We reached six billion in 1999
We reached seven billion in 2012
We reached eight billion this very year - 2024.
A decade ago, academic forecasters predicted that we would reach nine billion in 2048 but it is clearly going to happen much earlier than that as the world's ever increasing population has just this minute reached, wait for it:-
8,123,650,251
At this rate, we will be up to nine billion by 2030, not 2048. We will almost certainly be at ten billion by then.
It is easy to see that the COVID pandemic did almost nothing to put the brakes on population growth. As the graph continued to soar upward, COVID hardly made a blip in the ascending line. Not a squeak.
I still find it odd that meetings of world leaders and climate summits hardly ever mention our world's rampant population growth. It is as if they view it as a runaway train that cannot be halted and must inevitably plunge over the wooden bridge and down into the canyon of doom.
I am not offering any solutions, just stating the case.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/WDQ3owg