It’s going to get worse before it gets better

Yes, that’s right folks – it’s the Dad’s Army theory of the future [Frazer: “We’re Doomed! We’re Doomed!” – Corporal Jones “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”] – it appears that we’re all going to hell in a handcart!

Scientists have announced that the inexorable rise of the world’s population is unstoppable – or is it?

As we all learned at school, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) gave his name to the theory that – unless stopped by disease and/or famine – the human race had a in-built and limitless capacity to reproduce itself.

Put at its most basic, he suggested that the ability of the human race to increase itself was directly connected to the means of feeding itself. Human population would always increase as long as there was enough food to feed it. In other words, it would only stop increasing – and ‘plateau’ – at the point when its capacity to increase food production ran out. (Mind you, he also added that ‘misery and vice’ would also assist in this process).

See here for a link to an report by The Independent’s science editor Steve Connor on the latest findings – THE INDEPENDENT