An Earth-Scientist’s View of Human Population Dynamics
Posted: 1/10/2020 (CSDE Seminar Series)
This Friday, Stephen Warren from the UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences and UW Department of Earth & Space Sciences will discuss today’s fertility rates and population sizes and how these are examined in the context of past and future centuries. During the 20th century, the world’s population grew by the factor 3.5. What permitted this growth was the agricultural advances of the 20th century; without those advances the population would not have grown as it did, from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. Now in the 21st century, the ability to secure adequate food and water worldwide is threatened by continued rapid population growth, which has been steady at ~80 million per year for each of the last 50 years. For some countries the growth has instead been nearly exponential, as in the Philippines, whose population grew from 7 million in 1900 to 100 million in 2014, by doubling every 28 years (requiring on average 4 children per couple surviving to reproduce).
Date: 01/17/2020
Time: 12:30 - 1:30 PM
Location: 121 Raitt Hall