Just About 8 Billion People On The Planet....

[MrFanti]

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

At the time of this posting.
To say that population has no effect on the planet is ridiculous at best.

On a side note, diseases spread best in densely populated areas.....but hey.....

[Stavros]

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

At the time of this posting.
To say that population has no effect on the planet is ridiculous at best.

On a side note, diseases spread best in densely populated areas.....but hey.....

A useful link, so thanks for that. I don't know who thinks population has no impact on the planet, but in any case, it is trivial point.

The key is to think in terms of resource management, something few study these days, in part because Geography Departments are in decline in Universities and even existing ones don't study it.

From this perspective, you can chart in some countries, how land use has changed because of a combination of climatic factors, and human mistakes, such as losing the top soil with excessive farming. I am still amazed that so much agriculture has survived in the area between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, extending this geography to Jordan's east and southern reaches. One reason is the practice farmers once had of leaving fields fallow and of rotating this practice to preserve the integrity of the soil, and also to use less precious water resources. Some retain this, whereas commercial farming in Israel is close to environmental lunacy and vandalism. Population growth has put a lot of pressure on water resources, and on the West Bank, the 'Settler Colonists' have probably destroyed more arable land since 1977 than had taken place in the previous 2,000 years, having a love affair with concrete matched only by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and China.

But, in the past, deforestation, notably on hillsides, has led to the appearance found so commonly in this area, of brown hillsides shorn of trees with rain water run off creating gullies that scar the land. From this small part of the world, you can extrapolate the devastation found in parts of Siberia, Indonesia and the Amazon basin. Short term ambitions create produce long term problems, but if as the charts suggest, global population declines from say 2050 onwards, does this solve problems of scarce resources in arable land and water?

On the positive side, humans have been able to find solutions to the most complex problems. On the negative side, the impact of human greed and incompetence is mostly found in localized areas, such as the Palestinian Territories, or the South-West of the US, and the Sahel in Africa, and it is the pressures in such places that is most likely to cause turmoil and maybe worse. If people do not have the resources where they live to survive, they will move.

So not just the size of the world's population is of importance, but where people live, because mass movement may grow as a response to shrinking resources, even if this is, in terms of centuries, a temporary problem. I will not be alive to see any of these changes, and a part of me is glad for that. The challenge is to the generation behind me to get it right, and on that score, I am a pessimist.