Population of world 'could grow to 15bn by 2100' | Environment | The Observer. The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal. That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion. The new figure is contained in a landmark study by the United Nations Population Fund (Unfpa) that will be released this week.
The report –The State of World Population 2011 – is being compiled to mark the expected moment this month when somewhere on Earth a person will be born who will take the current world population over the 7 billion mark, and will be released simultaneously in cities across the globe. Some experts reacted with shock to the figure. Paul Ehrlich, a prophet of global population doom who is gloomier than ever | Environment. The population of Earth has doubled since Paul Ehrlich first warned the world that there were too many humans. Three and a half billion people later, he is more pessimistic than ever, estimating there is only a 10% chance of avoiding a collapse of global civilisation. "Among the knowledgeable people there is no more conversation about whether the danger is real," Ehrlich told the Guardian.
"Civilisations have collapsed before: the question is whether we can avoid the first time [an] entire global civilisation has given us the opportunity of having the whole mess collapse. " The idea sounds melodramatic, but Ehrlich insists his vision only builds on famine, drought, poverty and conflict, which are already prevalent around the world, and would unfold over the "next few decades". "What it would look like is getting to the situation where more and more people are living in uncertainty about their future, subject to all kinds of disease," he said. "Can we solve this technologically? Why Energy Poverty Is the Worst Kind of Poverty. I want you to try to imagine what it's like to live without electricity. It's boring, for one thing — no television, no MP3 player, no video games. And it's lonely and disconnected as well — no computer, no Internet, no mobile phone. You can read books, of course — but at night you won't have light, other than the flicker of firewood.
And about that firewood — you or someone in your family had to gather it during the day, taking you away from more productive work or schooling, and in some parts of the world, exposing you to danger. That same firewood is used to cook dinner, throwing off smoke that can turn the air inside your home far more toxic than that breathed in an industrial city. You may lack access to vaccines and modern drugs because the nearest hospital doesn't have regular power to keep the medicine refrigerated. That's life for the 1.3 billion people around the planet who lack access to the grid.
Fortunately that attention is finally forthcoming. South Africa Plans the World’s Largest Solar Power Station. September 14, 2011 by Forum for the Future This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional) By Flemmich Webb at Green Futures South African Energy Minister Dipuo Peters has confirmed plans to build a 5GW solar power station – the world’s largest to date – in the Northern Cape. And it’s a good place for it. This region is one of the sunniest in the world. An initial feasibility study declared that 5GW of cost-effective electricity generation would be achievable through a combination of solar technologies in the area – although the exact mix and time frame have yet to be agreed.
A range of options are being considered, including concentrated photovoltaics – in which lenses or mirrors focus the rays onto tiny PV panels, and concentrated solar power (which focuses the sun’s rays to turn water to steam and so drive a generator – see ‘Spain opens the world’s largest CSP plant‘). Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory on flickr. Earth2movie's Channel.