[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Hysterical is where you stop making sense. Have I done that?

Yes.

Unsubbed. Enjoy the malthus and the end of the world

Edit : One more I had in preview last night - If I stopped making sense then so has the WSJ, Time, Slate and Der Spiegel amongst hundreds of others.

Originally Posted by Time

But it turns out the world’s population isn’t growing nearly as fast as it once did. In fact, experts say the rate of population growth will continue to slow and that the total population will eventually — likely within our lifetimes — fall
...
The U.S. has seemingly been immune to the declining-birthrate trend. But in 2011, the Pew Research Center found that the birthrate in the U.S. reached its lowest point ever recorded: 63.2 children per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

Originally Posted by Slate

The world’s seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.

Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”

A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.

And then it will fall.

Originally Posted by Spiegel

An entire generation grew up in a world in which everything was on the increase, from the world's population to mankind's consumption of energy, food and land. Fears of a "population bomb" were reflected in the things we learned in school.

To a certain extent, the fears are justified. The global population will continue to grow for decades. "But," says Wolfgang Lutz, "that shouldn't distract us from the fact that an entirely different development has been underway for some time." Lutz is the director of the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) and one of the world's most prominent demographers. As he sees it, it is "highly probable that mankind will begin to shrink by 2060 or 2070."

It will be a global turning point. For the first time since the Black Death raged in the 14th century, the world's death rate will be higher than its birth rate
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Lutz's message, that the population boom will come to an end, isn't necessarily a happy one. In addition to the old challenges, such as feeding the masses, there will also be new ones, such as caring for aging baby boomers. Instead of AIDS and malaria, medicine will be faced with the challenges of diabetes and dementia.
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Only Pakistan, Afghanistan and the countries in sub-Saharan Africa are still reporting significantly higher birth rates. Niger leads the pack with a particularly impressive rate of seven children per woman. Indeed, by the end of the century, Africa is expected to be home to more than 2 billion people. But the demographic pendulum is shifting even there, as women begin to have fewer children.

The Spiegel article then goes on to describe the 5 stages of development which will lead to this. All forecasts but interesting anyway.

Part 2: Phase I: A People Before the Transformation
Part 3: Phase II: From the Masses to the Middle Classes
Part 4: Phase III: Booming Stock Markets and a Crisis in Delivery Rooms
Part 5: Phase IV: Emptying Out the Countryside
Part 6: Phase V: Mankind in Equilibrium