Room for more? Squeeze in, the world population is about to hit 7 billion

Rajanish Kakade / AP

A newborn baby boy is weighed on a scale at a government hospital in Mumbai, India on Oct. 5. Already the second most populous country with 1.2 billion people, India is expected to overtake China around 2030 when its population soars to an estimated 1.6 billion.

The world is about to get a little more crowded.

By the end of October, it is expected that there will be 7 billion people living on the planet, according to the U.N. Population Fund. We are hitting this milestone, even though Western Europe, Japan and Russia are currently facing population declines as a result of low birthrates and aging populations. The declines cause serious concerns about who will care for and support the elderly, with a smaller number of people in the work force contributing to taxes and welfare.

While India and China have the largest populations, it is sub-Saharan Africa that has the highest birthrates. Quickly growing countries like Nigeria, Uganda and Burundi are already struggling with the area’s limited food and water resources, combined with high poverty levels.

For more information see: 7 population milestones for 7 billion people

Ng Han Guan / AP

Children play at a square in Beijing on Feb. 3, 2010. For now, China remains the most populous nation, with 1.34 billion people. In the past decade it added 73.9 million, more than the population of France or Thailand. Nonetheless, its growth has slowed dramatically and the population is projected to start shrinking in 2027. By 2050, according to some demographers, it will be smaller than it is in 2011.

Alvaro Barrientos / AP

Two elderly men sit on benches in the small town of La Puebla de Arganzon, northern Spain on Oct. 9. Spain used to give parents 2,500 euros ($3,300) for every newborn child to encourage families to reverse the country's low birth rate. But the checks stopped coming with Spain's austerity measures, raising the question of who will pay the bills to support the elderly in the years ahead.

Rafiq Maqbool / AP

Commuters hang on the outside of a local train in Mumbai, India on Oct. 10. Already the second most populous country with 1.2 billion people, India is expected to overtake China around 2030 when its population soars to an estimated 1.6 billion.

Luca Bruno / AP

A man uses a cane as he walks among other people through an open air market in Milan, Italy on Oct. 12. In 2010, more Italians died than were born for the fourth consecutive year according to the national statistics agency. Italy's population nonetheless grew slightly to 60.6 million due to immigration, a highly charged issue across Europe. Italy's youth minister Giorgia Meloni said earlier this year that measures to reverse the birth rate require "millions in investment" but that the resources aren't available.

Andy Wong / AP

Tourists visit Tiananmen Gate on China's National Day in Beijing on Oct. 1. For now, China remains the most populous nation, with 1.34 billion people. In the past decade it added 73.9 million, more than the population of France or Thailand. Nonetheless, its growth has slowed dramatically and the population is projected to start shrinking in 2027. By 2050, according to some demographers, it will be smaller than it is in 2011.

Godfrey Olukya / AP

Ahmed Kasadha, center foreground, on the porch of his house in Iganga, Uganda, with one of his wives and six of his 14 children on Oct. 1. A polygamist, Kasadha says large families are a sign of success and God's blessing. His father had 25 children, and he wants his own family to get bigger. Uganda, and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, have some of the world's highest birthrates - a point of concern as the world's population hits the 7 billion mark on Oct. 31, 2011 according to the U.N. Population Fund.

Rajanish Kakade / AP

The Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India at twilight on Oct. 9. Already the second most populous country with 1.2 billion people, India is expected to overtake China around 2030 when its population soars to an estimated 1.6 billion.

 

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Someone should send this to the Duggers.

    Reply#55 - Wed Oct 26, 2011 1:41 PM EDT

    Much more intellectual honesty, moral courage and humane action is needed. We are about to become a species of 7 billion overconsumers, overproducers and overpopulaters on a finite and frangible planet where its resources are dissipating and environs degrading rapidly.

    During my lifetime, when human numbers explode from less than 3 bn to 7+ bn worldwide, many experts may not have known enough about what they were talking about when they spoke of human population dynamics and all causes of the human overpopulation of Earth. Their research appears not to be scientific, but rather issues from ideological or totalitarian thinking, or from specious group-think consensus. Their all-too-attractive thinking, as viewed by greedmongers, is willfully derived from what is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed. Widely broadcast and long-accepted thinking of a surprisingly large number of so-called experts in the field of population dynamics appears to have an unscientific foundation and is likely wrong. Their preternatural theorizing about the population dynamics of the human species appears to be both incomplete and misleading. Most disturbing of all, a widely shared and consensually validated theory about a “demographic transition” four decades from now is directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research. As a consequence, and it is a pernicious consequence, a woefully inadequate thinking and fundamentally flawed theory was broadcast during my lifetime and continues to be broadcast everywhere by the mainstream media as if it is not only science but the best available scientific evidence. The implications of this unfortunate behavior, inasmuch as it appears to be based upon a colossal misperception of what could somehow be real regarding the human population, appear profound. This failure of nerve has slowed the momentum needed to confront a formidable, human-driven global predicament.

    In their elective mutism regarding an astonishing error, are first class professional researchers with expertise in population dynamics behaving badly by allowing the “ninety-nine percenters” to be misguided and led down a primrose path by the “one percenters”? The power of silence on the part of knowledgeable human beings with feet of clay is dangerous because research is being denied that appears to shed light upon a dark, non-recursive biological problem, the understanding of which appears vital to future human well being and environmental health. Too many experts appear to be ignoring science regarding the human population and instead consciously through their silence consenting to the leviathan scale and unbridled expansion of global overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities that are being adamantly advocated and relentlessly pursued by greedmongering masters of the universe, the tiny minority among us who are primarily responsible for ravaging the Earth, ruining its environs and reducing its fitness for habitation by the children. If this assessment of human behavior is indeed a fair representation of what is happening on our watch, then the desire to preserve the status quo, mainly the selfish interests of ‘the powers that be’, could be at least one basis for so much intellectually dishonest and morally bereft behavior. Could it be that the outrageous per capita overconsumption, large-scale corporate overproduction and unrestricted overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide cannot continue much longer on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of a finite and frangible planet like Earth?

    For human beings to count human population numbers is simple, really simple. The population dynamics of human beings with feet of clay are obvious and fully comprehensible. We have allowed ourselves to be dazzled by the BS of too many demographers just the way human beings have been deceived and victimized by a multitude of economists on Wall Street. Demographers and economists are not scientists. ‘The brightest and the best’ have sold their souls to greedmongers, duped the rest of us, made it difficult to see what is real, proclaimed what is known to be knowable as unknowable, engaged in the their own brands of alchemy. In their dishonest and duplicitous efforts to please the self-proclaimed masters of the universe, also known as the keepers of the ‘golden calf’ (a symbol now easily visible as the “raging bull” on Wall Street), they perpetrate frauds at everyone else’s expense, threaten the children’s future, put life as we know it at risk, and are consciously, deliberately, actively precipitating the destruction of Earth as a fit place for human habitation. Never in the course of human events have so few taken so much from so many and left so little for others.

    There are many too many overly educated “wise guys” among us who see the blessed world we inhabit through the lens of their own hubris and selfishness, and see themselves somehow as Homo sapiens sapiens and masters of the universe, as corporate kings and emperor’s with clothes. They supposedly are the brightest and best, the smartest guys in the room, like the guy who used to run the global political economy without recognizing that there was an “ideological flaw” in his economic theories and models, the same guy who reported he could not name 5 guys smarter than himself. These are guys who have denied science, abjectly failed humanity, forsaken life as we know it, the Earth and God. These ideologues rule the world now and can best be characterized by their malignant narcissism, pathological arrogance, extreme foolishness, addiction to risk-taking and wanton greed.

      Reply#56 - Wed Oct 26, 2011 1:50 PM EDT
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