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1Depopulation, not Overpopulation?
The United Nations may have gotten it wrong…
1The United Nations (U.N.) has been warning us about global population size 1since the 1950s. Things really got grim though in 1968 when Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. since that time, the predictions have been of catastrophe due to too many people.
With a current global population of close to 7.8 billion people, concerns do make sense. I look at the photos of the pollution in our oceans, read about the destruction of rain forests, etc., and think — we have too many people!
The U.N. predicted that global populations would get to 11 billion by 2100.
However, it looks like the U.N. was wrong.
Demographers in more recent times have been calling the alarm about depopulation instead. They predict that world population will reach a peak in a few decades and then start to steadily and irreversibly decline.
This is already happening today in most of Europe as well as in Japan, South Korea, and Russia. China is soon to follow.
As recently as last August, the U.N. had published a report that claimed populations would continue to rise inexorably. This would lead to an overheated planet, the depletion of resources, and…
