Future population

I read articles sometimes that talk about how there will be 9 to 10 billion people on the planet by 2050 and what the consequences of that will be. I also hear that the UN is projecting that the rate of population growth will go to zero about then and the world population will stabilize.

I don't actually believe all this. "People" are saying there will be half again as many people on the planet in some 40 years and all will be pretty peachy. In the meantime, the rate of increase in food production has slowed and in fact, in the last several years, the grain harvest was less than was eaten.

I listed several potential problems recently:

- lack of arable land
- lack of fresh water
- lack of energy (in particular oil)
- warfare due to desperation, from the people suffering from the lack of food and opportunities (e.g. Darfur, Zimbabwae)
- infrastructure destruction from warfare


What I think is likely to happen is that people who are on the edge, not so far from viability that they simply starve, but people that have some small degree of power, will attack whoever they need to in order to get (or try to get) the resources they need.

These attacks will reduce the effective carrying capacity of the region, increasing the population of those on the edge. That will in turn increase the number and destructiveness of attacks. It's easy to see how this acts as a positive feedback loop with the result that the carrying capacity drops, and thus, the population drops.

I expect that the troubles will generate their own momentum, spreading in space beyond the local areas with the most stress around the world and spreading in time beyond the population drop that would bring the population within the level that could be sustained by a regions resources.

As an example, the New York Times had an article recently on cholera in Iraq. Cholera is spread via contaminated water. Water in Baghdad is becoming hard to get and clean water even harder, as a result of infrastructure destruction. In particular, the chlorine that is used to purify water was held up because it can also be used to make bombs. This is a perhaps somewhat subtle form of infrastructure destruction, that of trust that the material would get to its destination.