THERE IS NO RELATION BETWEEN HATING HUMANS AND POPULATION NUMBERS:

David Attenborough has interesting timing. Just as reports were being published last week warning that the population of the human race is projected to decline, the TV naturalist declared that humans are a 'plague on the Earth' and that the growth of the 'enormous horde' that makes up the population must be curbed or things will get 'worse and worse'.

Attenborough and his Malthusian colleagues at Population Matters - the 'working name' of the sinister-sounding Optimum Population Trust - have long liked to cite statistical evidence to suggest that drastic curbs need to be made to population growth, lest we bring about the apocalypse. And, like the Reverend Thomas Malthus - one of their most notorious forebears in citing dodgy science to predict doomsday scenarios - time and again they underestimate the capacity for human beings to innovate and find creative solutions to any resource shortages.

But now it seems even the data may be against them, with recent research suggesting that population growth is slowing and could peak at about 10 billion during the middle of the century, before dropping over the coming centuries. These findings have even led one writer to hint at the start of an underpopulation panic; 'we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity', he writes.

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