Experts: Planet Earth Could Be ‘Unrecognizable’ By 2050

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people-worldA growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years — tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations — and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

“More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,” Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

{AFP/Matzav.com Newscenter}


5 COMMENTS

  1. Would you stop helping Hashem run his world. As much experience that you over smart scientists have, Hashem has much more experience. So let him run the show the way he understands. Thanks

  2. #1 and #2, the speculation about the y2k bug was just that: a speculation, a guess, a small possibility. This article is based on hard math and science and, while also speculative by nature, shouldn’t be so easily dismissed.

  3. #1 and #2 – The Y2K bug didn’t result in catastrophe because an army of programmers worked day and night to fix the programs that were threatened. I know programmers who made a bundle doing overtime working for banks and other types of company. If they hadn’t done their “hishtadlus” you had better believe there would have been chaos.
    I used to program and I remember when we needed to save space, so only used two digits for the year. Many of those old programs were running in 2000 – and without those fixes it would have meant the breakdown of banking systems worldwide, plus almost everything else.

    We dodged that bullet by being smart nad planning. Can we dodge this one too by using the brains HKBH gave us?

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