Some years back, I took part in an opinion poll group survey. I managed to shock the room — which is nothing new, but… I digress. My shocking heresy, on this particular occasion, was to not be hysterically doom-obsessed about overpopulation. In fact, I said, it’s a problem that’s going to take care of itself: even the UN agrees that global population will plateau and begin to decline during this century.
In fact, countries like Russia and Japan are already de-populating. Even the Chinese Communist Party admit that their population will shortly begin to plummet.
Still, it’s hardly surprising that I was the lone voice of optimism in the room. For decades, we’ve been fed a steady diet of doom and gloom, most famously by Paul Ehrlich’s environmentalist Bible, The Population Bomb. The fact that Ehrlich has been steadily proved wrong ever since the 80s has done nothing to quell the fevered hysteria of his many acolytes.
In that respect, Ehrlich was an early forerunner of today’s Climate Cult.
All of which makes it doubly, nay, triply, surprising to find the Guardian agreeing with me.
The doubling of our numbers in 47 years did not bring about the famines and other disasters widely predicted in the 1960s.
As Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Population Foundation of India, explained last week, we welcomed the new child whose birth marked this event and we are no longer afraid.
“We”, I suspect, does not include most Grauniad readers. Try reading the Comments section on any Climate Cult article and downing a shot every time some bourgeois beardy-weirdy intones, “But the real problem is population!” You’ll be legless in minutes — which is far from a small mercy, if you’re inflicting The Guardian on yourself.
Nevertheless, it’s true that there’s more than enough reason to stop worrying about overpopulation.
In fact, the main driver of population growth in the last few decades has not been people breeding like rabbits, but people no longer dying like flies. As for births: we crested that wave decades ago.
Births peaked in 1990 with an echo of that peak 24 years later. The UN now predicts that there will never again be as many children born in a year as were born in 1990. Globally, births in 2022 were 8.5 million fewer than in 1990, despite there being far more potential parents alive today. Worries about populations growing in countries such as Tanzania are about people living longer, something we should not be concerned about. The average woman in Tanzania in 2020 was a mother to four children, 9% down on a decade earlier. UN projections are for that fall to accelerate to 15% a decade, to an average of 2.3 children in 2080.
Why is it so, as Professor Julius Sumner-Miller used to ask?
Because the world is getting richer.
The slowdown is due to billions of women demanding the right to choose how many children they have […] to date, births are falling fastest where they are most common. They fall even when governments, concerned about supposed virility of their nation, try to encourage more births.
After decades of punishing their citizens for having more than one child, the CCP has done an abrupt about-face. Now, they’re trying to convince Chinese to have more kids — but their own population projections admit that it isn’t working.
Even the High Priests of Doom at the UN, project population growth to decline, but their population models are just like their climate models: they run hot.
Successive UN projections have repeatedly underestimated just how rapid the fall in births has been […]
Most of us old folk will not be around to see the 10 billion number reached in 2059. That 10 billion year could be much later than 2059 or not at all. Successive UN projections have overestimated future population growth because they have repeatedly underestimated just how rapid the fall in births has been. However, almost all children today will live long enough to be alive in the key year, currently projected to be 2086, when for the first time in the recent history of our species the number of humans on Earth falls overall.
The Guardian
And who knows? Maybe by then, even The Guardian will finally be ready to admit that climate alarmism is a scam, too.