this time ~ this space

Without doubt world population trends touch on some of the most sensitive issues in our times: sex, race, childbearing, family size, immigration, and abortion. And anyone paying attention to human-induced global warming and rising fuel costs, as well as, rising food prices must pause to consider just how many people our planet is supporting.

The number of Americans surpassed 300 million in October of 2006. This was a milestone that raised many environmental impact questions for the only major industrial nation whose population is increasing substantially.

A recent Pew Research Study predicts if current population trends continue that the U.S. population will grow to 438 million in 2050 from 296 million in 2005 . Non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the United States by 2050. Immigrants and their children will be driving 82 percent of U.S. population growth.

The study predicts the white population, with its lower fertility rate, ages, the Latino population, the nation’s largest minority, will triple in size. Latinos will be responsible for 60 percent of the population growth until 2050. The report predicts that the Asian population will almost double in percentage terms, from 5 to 9 percent, while blacks will remain around 13 percent of the total and, the number of whites will increase, but only by 4 percent.

This year in New Orleans, a city that lost about half its own residents to other places after a hurricane named Katrina, at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, demographers and public health specialists met. The panel topics presented ranged from that unprecedented urban population drop (the city’s population has since rebounded to around 70 percent of its pre-Katrina size) to the idea that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has peaked globally. Read more.

References:
Whites to become minority in U.S. by 2050
U.S. population to hit 303.15 mln on Jan 1: census
Population rebounds in storm-hit New Orleans: census

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