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March 10, 2009
The dirty little secret behind An Inconvenient Truth?
Despite it having been pointed out to me before I don't think I ever really gave human population growth much thought with respect to Global Warming until yesterday when I read this post at Blue Oregon which talks about it in passing. If we are closing in on 7 Billion people on the planet, with a net population growth of nearly 15 million per year, can that be sustained without impacting the global health of our planet? And that figure includes an offset of nearly 9 million abortions per year. Take those away and population growth would jump by over 50% each year.
By way of comparison I checked this date-adjustable population clock to see what the world population was 45 years ago (a little over a month before I was born and pre-Roe v. Wade). It was HALF what it is today. Actually, just under half. So that means that human population has more than doubled in 45 years.
Here's an interesting video which gives a graphic depiction of how quickly human population has grown since the year AD 1:
And here's a virtuoso performance on how to lie with statistics:
After the jump some different population clocks:
U.S. and World Population Clocks via U.S. Census bureau.
I find this World Clock particularly fascinating, although in many respects it's very similar to the one below.
Here's one created from the perspective of India.
Posted by Kevin at March 10, 2009 09:08 PM
