Yabby (sweety, darling, sweety)

Your posts concerning third world women tend to concentrate on contraception. You rarely mention education except in passing.

BTW Even Yabby the Aussie could be raped. Sexual abuse is common in all countries being as it is about power.

Oh well done, Dallas - you have just contributed the most pointless post I have come across on OLO.

Candide, thank you..., now back to the zero sums game!

If you look at the website suggested by PartTime, from 2000 to 2008, the global average fertility rate for women dropped from 2.80 to 2.61 or 6.7%. Extrapolate that reduction on into the future and, within 28 years, global population will have stopped rising thanks to a fertility rate just under 2.11 which is the parents' replacement rate.
Michael Lardelli presumably calls himself a scientist, yet in his article he has chosen to ignore the evidence which shows that population is definitely NOT the problem. The issue is, was and always will be the standard of living (not necessarily our quality of life) that the world's population will aspire to. Why would 200 million Indonesians want to migrate to Australia? For the economic opportunities that our system of government, parliament, judiciary and enforcement allow people to achieve.
Lardelli's article is shallow and only a Pauline Hanson type would see merit in it - simple, easy to understand, ignorant of the evidence and just plain wrong. No wonder the Greens remain politically irrelevant

Bernie, what do you make of these?

http://www.unfpa.org/pds/trends.htm

or

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/Papers/gkh1/chap1.htm

Do you think the UNFPA or the IIASA have it wrong as well?

I don't think Lardelli's article is shallow, I am not a fan of Pauline Hanson and I am not a Green - so where do you place me?

Q&A, there are no absolute certainties on dates or population size, etc, whenever dealing with human growth rates - there are simply too many variables. I'm expecting global population to reach about 9 billion before its stabilises about the middle of the century and then starts to decline. My major concern is the damage that will be done to the environment between now and then (whenever 'then' occurs) and the damage that will continue on for the next few decades as people strive to raise their standards of living. By focusing as Lardelli does on controlling population (which only Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao have done successfully), we're ignoring many important issues over which we do actually have some control.