Right, so a tiny measurement (relatively) is extrapolated to thousands of years?
That's like standing at the beach, seeing the water rise and predicting when Europe will have sunk.
That's like standing at the beach, seeing the water rise and predicting when Europe will have sunk.
It's certainly easier to visualize than saying "the net reproduction rate of Hong Kong is 0.547".
Lets not forget that the world put on an extra billion people in just the past 11 years.
The thing is, the article is just extrapolating to make a point about existing conditions. By debunking the article by comparing with tides, you're making an implicit claim of cyclicality with no evidence, which is less defensible than the article.
A better argument would be that just because a bucket has a hole, and will have completely drained in one hour, doesn't mean that the bucket wont be repaired, or refilled. But that would be a fairly obvious thing to point out.
it's an extrapolation of a consistent and
systematic trend
2000 years ago the world population was somewhere around 300 million people. Today we are at 6.94 billion people. That's clearly exponential growth.
The downside is that our economies and our social security systems are somewhat designed around the assumption of rising population. How to square this circle as peacefully and comfortably as possible is the challenge...
I'm wondering why this article is making so many people really angry and making them state the obvious in attempts to shoot it down. Clearly it really got under some folks' skins. 'Shitty' indeed.
You can identify exponential growth from two data points? (Yes, population growth is exponential - I'm just pointing out that the data given doesn't "prove" that.)