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25
Nov
2022
Sunday November 20, 2022
Two news stories juxtaposed themselves this past week.
In the first story, the eight-billionth human was born somewhere on Wednesday, according to an estimate by the United Nations.
Maybe not precisely on Wednesday. It might have happened on Tuesday. Or Thursday. But one of the 385,000 babies born during those three days was the eight-billionth member of the human race.
Just 12 years ago, there were only seven billion of us. A century ago, only two billion.
We have, in other words, grown like mould.
That famous “hockey stick” graph of greenhouse gases is duplicated, almost exactly, by the growth of human populations.
Yet we get all upset about one statistic and avoid the other.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: population, 8 billion, sperm counts, fertility