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Comment by innes | Hacker News Reader

It's not a tiny measurement (AFAICS - not entirely sure what you mean by that phrase), it's an extrapolation of a consistent and systematic trend. And it's really not like extrapolating the tides, since we know that tides are by definition cyclical whereas this change is not necessarily cyclical.

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.

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     it's an extrapolation of a consistent and 
     systematic trend

It's a shitty extrapolation to me, just because the fertility rate has been dropping since the sixties (a period of economic growth, following after a world war btw).

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.

And equally, from a resource utilisation perspective, the world is enormously more sustainable at a population level of 300m than of 6.94b; a long-term downward trend in population would be a net environmental win and is preferable as a means of achieving sustainability to a series of resource wars with mortality rates to make Russia in 1942 look pleasant.

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...

The trend in question is recent, and only in some parts of the world, so of course the trend over 2000 years is different. That's a no brainer and does nothing to 'combat' the point of the article.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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