7 billion and counting: Earth's population odometer turns over Monday

10/30/2011
By Bruce Newman
Mercury News (California, USA)

In an attempt to take note of a historic milestone over which it has about as much control as world peace, the United Nations declared Monday, Oct. 31, the day that the world's population officially surpasses 7 billion.

In a break with recent tradition, the U.N. won't name a symbolic billionth baby.

Nobody knows where the 7 billionth baby will be born, but India -- which is producing humans at a rate of nearly one per second -- seems a likely bet. With 1.3 billion inhabitants, China is currently the world's most populous nation, but India is expected to overtake it by 2030. Without China and India, the planet would be 37 percent less populous -- and a much harder place to find good takeout.

The last time mankind added a billionth person was 12 years ago. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan showed up in Sarajevo to hold the newborn Adnan Nevic aloft for photographers, then hightailed it out of town. The Nevic family said their little add-on, Adnan, viewed Annan "like a godfather," according to The Guardian. But he hasn't heard from the secretary-general since he set the record and now views the world body as a symbolic deadbeat dad.

The U.N. Population Fund estimates there will be 10 billion of us by the turn of the next century, which, to some people, sounds like a lot. But a crowded planet often is in the eye of the beholder. Did you know, for instance, that every person in the world could fit inside the borders of Texas if it were settled as densely as New York City?

Of course, the cattle would all have to be sent to refugee camps in Oklahoma. But that seems a small price to pay for being able to get a bagel and a schmear at a Korean grocery in Odessa at 2 a.m.

Population 'bomb' a dud

From the day we climbed out of the primordial ooze, it took our species until 1804 -- the year Lewis and Clark set out on their grand expedition -- to reach a population of 1 billion. The first doubling occurred in 1927, and anyone born that year and alive today has seen it more than triple since. That explosion led Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of population studies at Stanford and doomspinning author of the 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb," to predict mass starvation in the '70s.

Since Ehrlich's bummer prophecy, the planet's population has doubled, but advancements in technology -- notably the "green revolution" that vastly increased food production -- have prevented mass extinctions. Still, Ehrlich remains ready for the coming apocalypse. "I am a doomsayer," he concedes cheerfully. "But my critics don't seem to realize we've already got almost a billion people starving, and another couple billion with diets you or I wouldn't trade for."

Since 1950, the global fertility rate has dropped by half, making birth rates a less important factor in population growth than improvements in medical science that raised the average lifespan in industrialized nations from 35 years to 77 today.

Future shock?

As people live longer, the number of retirees in places like Greece, Singapore and Japan has increased, while the number of workers needed to support them has not. This has led the semi-authoritarian government of Singapore to run an online dating service to boost baby production. The same problem could soon strike the U.S., where every added year of life expectancy reduces Social Security's solvency by an additional $50 billion.

The problem as Ehrlich and others see it is not just that the world has too many mouths to feed. It's that everything affects everything else. Rising temperatures brought on by global warming have already lowered corn and wheat yields, and corn and soybean production in this country could fall by as much as 80 percent by 2100, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences.

But there is reason for optimism, depending on whether you see the world as half-empty or half-full. A baby could be born who someday creates a crop that's as abundant as our maternity wards. It could happen tomorrow.