Climate ‘strikes’, street protests, extreme weather events and alarming warnings from scientists are focusing our attention on the global warming threat. But are we in danger of ignoring a basic issue of population numbers?
One perspective on world population growth is to consider it in terms of one’s own family lifespans. Figure 1 illustrates how many more people there are today, compared to the recent past, using my family as an example. World population has doubled since I was born, with 2 billion more added just in my son’s lifetime. When my parents were born world population was less than half of the population of Asia alone in 2019 (4.6 billion).
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