According to a report today, the world will be unrecognizable by the year 2050. Researchers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that the population explosion will overtax the ability of the planet to feed all those humans. There will be two billion additional mouths to feed by 2050.
When I read this report, I had to chuckle. One advantage to being old is that I have been around for a long time. I remember when Paul Erlich made his big news around 1970 when he predicted that the population explosion would lead to massive world wide famine by the year 2000. According to Erlich, the population explosion would overtax the ability of the planet to feed all those humans. Of course, in the years between 1970 and 2010, worldwide food production grew much faster than the population. simply put, the threat of the population explosion turned out to be nonsense.
I guess those so-called scientists at the AAAS conference like the motto, if at first you do not succeed, try, try again. since the first predictions of famine due to population growth proved false, why not try again with a date forty years from now.
In many ways, these predictions are much like the predictions of global warming due to human activity. No one has been able to prove that it is happening. Indeed, there remains a big question if the earth is even warming. Nevertheless, it does not stop people from proclaiming it to be so and it certainly does not stop the media from writing about it endlessly.
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