World Population Growth

I found this graph on the website Population Growth Over Human History. I went looking for it because Nell Irvin Painter said in the session I mentioned in the previous posting that human population had doubled five times per century for the past three centuries. Of course there were no global census takers over the past millennia so that we are talking about estimates, but experts agree that there has been an exponential growth in global population over recent centuries.

It is hard to imagine a sparsely populated world that was known to our ancestors, even in most of the last millennium. It is equally hard to imagine the heavily populated world that our descendants are likely to live in in future centuries.

Strobe Talbot recently likened prudent environmental policy to prudent purchase of insurance. In both cases there are risks of adverse events in the future, and in each case appropriate action now can ameliorate the impact of those events if and when they occur.