Choked out

As of last week the world is said to have reached seven billion people and as such the media has done their bit to keep us all informed about what this may or may not mean.

The CBC produced some interesting little factoids exploring what seven billion people means.

If everyone on Earth joined hands to form a human chain, it would stretch about 7 million kilometres. The chain would circle the Earth at the equator about 175 times, stretch to the moon and back about nine times, and reach about one-fifth of the way to Mars when it's at its closest point to Earth.

Another CBC article talked about how people are generally able to keep it together concerning the population milestone.

But there has been no drumbeat of panic about overpopulation, as it was called in the 1970s and '80s, when the UN hosted regular conferences on reproductive rights and tried to come up with a 20-year plan to keep the number of humans in check.

The BBC points out that perhaps we aren't at the seven billion level yet due statistical and demographic realities.

And he says the UN recognises that its own figures come with a 1-2% margin of error. Today's population could actually be 56 million higher or lower than seven billion, Mr Heilig says. 

"There is a window of uncertainty of at least six months before and six months after the 31 October for the world population to reach seven billion," he told the BBC.

So it would seem that reaching seven billion people (whether we have or will) is not causing widespread panic the way that anthropogenic global warming has.

Unless of course if your this person:

In reality I think that the AGW panic and some panic concerning over population have basically come together under the general umbrella of environmentalism.

Even though the rapid growth of the human population is such an obvious concern, very few people outside of the academic world and some dedicated NGOs are willing to discuss the issue. The earth’s population is projected to rise an astonishing 40% to 9.2 billion people by 2050! This level of increase will put tremendous strain on a wide range of already-stressed resources, including food stocks, fresh water, precious metals, and of course fossil fuels.

It has gone so far as to produce groups such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

The primary motivation of VHEMT as a movement is the belief that the biosphere of the planet Earth would be better off without humans. In VHEMT's view, the human race is akin to an "exotic invader", whose population is out of control and threatens other species with extinction, and only removal of the human race can restore the natural ecological order. VHEMT's primary goals are to influence people to choose to not reproduce and to advocate ready access for all human beings to methods of birth control.

Or spawned articles such as this:

There are three, and only three, ways by which population growth will be reduced to zero and/or made negative. The ways are--a) by war, with or without weapons of mass destruction, rape, murder, disease, predation, starvation, concentration camps, and other horrors beyond the imagination when humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth (and if population continues to grow humanity will shortly exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth, if humanity already has not exceeded it). The carrying capacity of the Earth, no matter how carrying capacity is defined, cannot be infinitely large and must reach a finite number; b) by the voluntary action of all of humanity for as long as humanity inhabits the Earth, before humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth; and c) by coercive population control before humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Its not surprising to see the author finally get to the point: emphasis mine

If humanity desires to survive on this planet for any reasonable length of time at a reasonable standard of living for even a relatively small number of human beings our species must consider and evaluate coercive population control.

I had pointed out before that there is a world of haves and have nots and right now its the haves telling the have nots to stop producing children all as a way of protecting their own have status. They might wrap it up in shiny packages of environmentalism but really its just about protecting their standard of living. Sustainability is a very real factor in all of this.

As you can see from the map, portions of the world consume vastly more than other areas and so the writer of the above article is correct. If we want a world where everyone can live at US levels of consumption then two billion is a good target. If, however, we as a human population consumed at a rate akin to India, then the planet could support as many as 10 - 12 billion people.

 So what do we take from all of this? Simply that there are a growing number of people out there that would rather restrict your rights to procreate and would look to forcibly reduce the population rather than cut down their personal consumption.

 Its a brave new world we're living in, to be sure.