OVERPOPULATION?

DEAN ESMAY puts into perspective the Greenie claim that the world either is overpopulated or shortly will become so

"Now, the United States encompasses about 3,717,142 square miles. The world population is currently estimated at well over 6 billion and is projected to reach 7 billion in 2010. Depending on whose estimates you believe, the population will either peak around 2050 and then begin to decline or, according to more aggressive estimates, may go as high as 11 billion some time after the year 2100. This is depending on whether you believe people around the world will continue to grow wealthier and more prosperous, which they have been throughout most of the world (except in totalitarian regimes) for the last 100 years, because a documented fact is that the more prosperous and healthy people become, the fewer children they tend to have.

Okay, so current estimates have the world population hitting 7 billion in about 6 years. Let's go with that figure. And like I just said above, the current land space in the United States is 3,717,142 square miles (a bit over 9,600,000 square kilometers). This means that if you took the entire world population in 2010 and forcibly relocated every man, woman and child to the United States, we would have a population density in this country of (drum roll, please):

1,883 people per square mile.

This would be about twice the population density of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin (813 people per square mile), or about two thirds of the population density of New Albin, Iowa (2,635 people per square mile).

In other words, it would be about average for a small rural farming community.

Now, remember where we started this little journey? Oh yes: Alberta. The Canadian province of Alberta, that great nation's 4th largest province, encompasses approximately 260,000 square miles.

Which means that if you took the entire world population in 2010 and forcibly relocated every single one of them to Alberta (we plan to make everyone Canadian, eh!), Alberta would have a population density of 26,923 people per square mile.

In other words, roughly the population density of New York City or Moscow, and considerably less crowded than cities like Paris, the famed City of Lights".

The comments on Dean's blog cover a fair range of "Yes, buts" too. It is true that to use all the earth's available space we would needs lots more energy -- but nuclear energy is both clean, safe and as abundant as we permit it to be, so that is only a Greenie-created problem. And with plenty of nuclear power, we could even desalinate the oceans for whatever amount of water we wanted, keep Alaska, Antarctica, Siberia and Northern Candada as heated up as we wanted and even live under the sea if we wanted.

As population shrinkage is is the real challenge we face, however, (due to shockingly low birthrates in most developed countries), the whole overpopulation "problem" is just the usual Greenie nonsense