Pop! ulation

As we all thought of population this week, hitting 7 billion people on October 31 2011, I was startled at the  pop! I heard as the world burst its rapidly expanding balloon.  After 200 years of exponential growth we find our species on the brink of the Earth's carrying capacity.  What is striking to me is just how fast population has exploded.  To stick with the metaphor, its as if a child has been trying to blow up a balloon for 10 thousands years, but only able to fill the space to that initial elasticity.  Then a thousand years ago with stronger lungs the kid blew one long breath which forced the balloon to expand, and if you have ever filled balloons with helium at the fair it's as if the valve was suddenly opened and the balloon expanded so quickly you didn't even know if you could pull it off the helium bottle in time!  If you can picture that balloon doing nothing for a very long time, them starting to fill with slow expansion, and a sudden shift to an exponential rate of growth that makes you turn your head and shield your face from the impending explosion... we have an accurate view of where we are.


A great visual by NPR shows this growth in another way.  What is absolutely astounding is that we did finally hit 1B people in 1800 or so, but that took nigh on 10,000 years.  850 years to double, then double again from that original 300 million in 1000 AD; but it only took next 100 years to double and double again to hit 5 billion!  6 billion..  7 billion..

Now, population experts will say that there will be a self governing leveling before the balloon pops.  Conventional wisdom also shows that we believe much of this sudden growth was due to far better health care (lower infant mortality and longer lives), and increased crop yields.  Although this may be true, I see a correlation to the discovery and use of fossil fuels, along with the direct correlation of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Just look how well these two charts overlay!  The reason for better health and higher yields is due to easily accessible power, work not tied to human and animal power which has limited scale, and global economics that allowed advances circulate globally.  

Quite startling don't you think?  That which gave us so much potential and incredible evolution -easily accessible, low cost, and super dense energy- is also potentially our undoing.  


One argument about population is the disparity in per capita energy use, and the contrary per capita population growth between developed and developing worlds.  You could argue that the developed countries have caused the CO2 rise simply do to such huge energy consumption; where as the developing world is the cause of population explosion.  Well, the two happened simultaneously so energy must be responsible for improved medical and agriculture in the developing world allowing an exit from severe poverty, will also allowing a life style of wealth and rapidly decreasing birth rates over the previous two generations.  Awesome on us as humans to be well underway in lifting living standards around the world, and everything that comes with that from education to equality to innovation.  The down side we all know -as energy appetite increases there will be more than just stress on supply, demand, and environmental degradation.


So what to do?  The crash course that the human race is in with our Mother's ability to support us is apparent, we've already the population and life style expectations, and only the energy consumption, environmental degradation, and natural resource depletion lag to come.