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"the population has been exploding. Exponentially." Is this reflecting a 1980s claim, or is this supposed to be a result of current science? In either case, what's the exponent? 2? 1? 0.5? This sounds more like rhetoric than science. The UN said (see this NPR story at npr.org/2024/07/12/nx-s…) that, based on current trends, the world pop…
"the population has been exploding. Exponentially." Is this reflecting a 1980s claim, or is this supposed to be a result of current science? In either case, what's the exponent? 2? 1? 0.5? This sounds more like rhetoric than science. The UN said (see this NPR story at https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/nx-s1-5037684/united-nations-world-population-report) that, based on current trends, the world population will peak in about 60 years and that many countries already have a birth rate below the replacement level. If those UN statements are correct, then the population isn't growing exponentially or even arithmetically (doubling, for example).
In this context, I mean it as a general description of the world population over the course of the last several centuries (and last century), which exhibits a classic exponential growth curve. In the longer interview, I actually mentioned the UN population report and its current predictions of the population plateauing in the next few decades, but I cut it for space. The tricky thing about the plateau is that it still is a pretty high resource "requirement” — 10 billion people is a pretty high “carrying capacity.” Neither I nor Nasser are population alarmists, and both of us are pretty skeptical of the “solutions” that population alarmists tend to propose. But I also think that our current approach to growth doesn’t seem like it is all that sustainable.