The human species has topped 8 billion, with longer lifespans offsetting fewer births, but world population growth continues a long-term trend of slowing down, the US Census Bureau said Thursday.
The bureau estimates that the global population exceeded the threshold on 26 September, though the agency said to take this precise date with a grain of salt.
The United Nations estimated the number was passed 10 months earlier, having declared 22 November 2022, the “Day of 8 Billion”, the Census Bureau pointed out in a statement.
The discrepancy is due to countries counting people differently — or not at all. Many lack systems to record births and deaths. Some of the most populous countries, such as India and Nigeria, haven’t conducted censuses in over a decade, according to the bureau.
While world population growth remains brisk, growing from 6 billion to 8 billion since the turn of the millennium, the rate has slowed since doubling between 1960 and 2000.
Always good to remind people overpopulation is not a problem when I see news like this.
Our consumption habits are much more detrimental to earth than how many of us there are (most of us live in poverty). As countries develop, the UN estimates the 12th billion human will never be born.
Poor 12th billion mother-to-be. She’ll push and push but the baby just won’t come out 😔
The best way to reduce consumption is to not exist.
The rules and ethics around who gets to exist or not exist are more complex than fucking not being aggressively destructive with the plentiful resource we have.
If you put it on a graph of how many people it takes to sustain the society you want versus the impact it has on consumption, you’d see you can’t draw a line that makes sense with our current way of life. Cut too low and you don’t have enough people. Cut too high and you end up with the same problems you think are due to overpopulation. Run the numbers, find your ideal spot and tell us how much of all this is actually number of people.
Consumption doesn’t scale exponentially or even linearly with population, it does for the most egregious industries that run the world today. The math doesn’t check out, dude. The only variable left is to change the way we consume. We have the economic and technological means to do it, with nothing but greed and cheating keeping us from it, to serve the few.
This isn’t even about communism or socialism either, we are far far beyond what is necessary in terms of capitalistic gains, like very very far beyond. You’re afraid your way of life would change but it wouldn’t really, as the video you didn’t watch clearly states.
And if that doesn’t make sense to you, then by all means “be the change you want to see in the world”.
All your essay is unraveled by just taking a plane and looking down. In many biomes, humans have left no room for anything else besides ourselves.
Yeah, I’m doing just that, by not reproducing.
I mean, most of the earth’s real estate is taken up by industries for the purpose of consumption, not for housing.
I still think that less humans is better. Restrictive birth should be more common.
The problem with this approach is evident in China right now, where they will experience a pure demographic catastrophe where the share of people in working age will go down significantly, meaning their economy will start contracting and people won’t be happy because this will directly affect their lifestyle.
That’s happening in most developed nations, btw.
What if you think humans are the problem?
Then you didn’t watch the video, and you’d be hard pressed to suggest a “human” oriented solution that would improve things permanently.
Easy, kill the ‘humans’
There it is everyone, the endgame of everyone who believes earth is overpopulated
Yes, kill all the humans
Pizza cutter comment
Where in this video does it state that overpopulation is not a problem? The message the video is conveying, as I’ve interpreted it, is that the bleak, distopian vision of an overpopulated planet is not likely based on historical trends: as we develop as a society, the overall standard of living has improved, fertility rates reduce to a stable or even shrinking population, etc., etc.
The video does not address the current state of our overpopulated planet, and the impact humans continue to have on animal populations, biomes or climate change. None of these things are likely to be easily reversed within even a few generations, and with the current trend, will likely only continue to get worse in our lifetimes.
In my opinion, overpopulation is a problem today, and while it may reduce social inequalities for humans, reproductive rates cannot drop quickly enough to make a dent in the lasting impact our species is having on issues affecting the planet as a whole.
That’s fair, but my objection to having kids is more due to the current capitalist structure than carrying capacity of the planet.
I don’t want to spend my own resources rearing another slave for billionaires.
Nuts take, planet is absolutely overpopulated with human beings, 100% undeniably. It isn’t just some abstract number, it’s the farms, fuel, logging, goods, the absolute everything a single human being partakes in or experiences. Human beings aren’t even managing to properly care, feed, and clothe the humans that are already here, and more igual systems won’t address the continuing need to scale into the environment and destroy even more land that nature needs to maintain the biosphere. I super promise we do not have enough even now, and even when the population was 3 billion we were overconsuming irreplaceable natural resources that other creatures were using.
Source: Trust me
I find the idea that people actually think overpopulation is a non issue actually a threat to the survival of the human race, the overall biosphere, and the planet.
I’m not sure why this understanding changed, but it’s a Western cultural perspective with the younger generation from what I can tell, it does not reflect reality.
Climate science, and history are a huge passion of mine, I’m beyond certain about this, and it seems impossible that so many people would be willfully ignorant to the point of denial about things so obvious and self evident.
Oh I didn’t realize you were certain, my bad
I wish I could drive home the severity so you could internalize and understand it.
Just because the problem is severe doesn’t mean the cause is overpopulation. Your argument doesn’t make sense.
I think overpopulation is a non-issue because I prefer to follow the data over my own intuition. And the data shows that population is already slowing and will peak without intervention.
And I think it’s extraordinarily important to reiterate that point because of the extreme dangers of any attempt at population control to devolve into outright eugenics and genocide.
https://www.pop.org/overpopulation-myth/
The most effective and the only ethical means of population control is a combination of increasing the availability of birth control, providing family planning education, and reducing child mortality. Yes this needs to be part of our climate change solutions, we’re doing this, and it’s already working.
Tell me you want an excuse to commit genocide without telling me you want an excuse to commit genocide
For Jesus sake, I’m talking about the long term survival of the human race and all species on the planet and you are trying to reduce this to some kind of political talking point.
How do we reduce the population then? Do you have an answer other than genocide?
Of course there are solutions other than genocide, it all just comes down to the timescale available. I do unfortunately think that the situation is urgent now, but on a longer timescale it could look like China’s one child policy, or programs with incentives for voluntary birth control access, maybe even sterilization.
There are lots of ways to solve this that range from completely or questionably moral, to socially responsible and planned. I care about the long term survival of the human race, and the rest of the planet, I could absolutely be talked into putting that far ahead of my own well-being depending on the circumstances.
There are more than enough resources to go around, and we aren’t going to start killing off new people to sustain greedy and wasteful old people. There’s no solution you could suggest regarding population count that wouldn’t be extremely short sighted and temporary.
Population is growth is not a unstoppable phenomenon and will soon stagnate. The problem is how much we’ve allowed single human beings to take. We could all live like we made 100k a year even at 12 billion people, if only it meant a handful of people weren’t allowed to hoard and cheat society out of enormous amounts of wealth.
I think you simply underestimate how much a billion is. You underestimate how much water 12 billion people need compared to how much nestle shoves in bottles for free to ship off to another part of the world. You also clearly didn’t watch the video.
This is so wrong on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin…
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
overpopulation is not a problem
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It is. Reduce the population to under 1b and consumption is not an issue anymore.
or OR, manage and distribute resources properly and don’t let a very few of the 8b hoard them
How’s that relevant?
My man here is calling for mass slaughter of the human race.