Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

World Population: Inevitable Growth or Slated to Decline?

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-maybe dept.

AnonTechie writes:

By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.

But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?

That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."

The World Might Actually Run Out of People (archive)

Empty Planet

Who do you think is right ? The United Nations or Darrel Bricker/John Ibbitson ?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
World Population: Inevitable Growth or Slated to Decline? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 92 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 05 2019, @06:51PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday February 05 2019, @06:51PM (#796828) Journal

    The Accuracy of Past Projections [nap.edu]

    In 1998 the U.N. estimated that world population size will reach 6.06 billion in the year 2000. This figure is 220 million lower than the 6.28 billion projected by the U.N. in 1958. The error in this projection made 40 years earlier—assuming that the current estimate for the year 2000 is accurate—was therefore 3.6 percent. Figure 2-1 presents similar estimates of error for other U.N. world projections of recent decades. Errors range from 1 percent for the 1996 point forecast to 7 percent for the 1968 forecast, the latter being the only one with an error greater than 4 percent.

    If you look at the graph:

    1990: 3.3%
    1992: 2.8%
    1994: 1.7%
    1996: 0.5%

    So they started out pretty damn accurate and proceeded to get even more accurate through the 90's.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2