No one actually thinks we will ever get that high. Current predictions are that we will never get higher than about 10 billion and then the levels will fall back down to about 8 billion.
Don’t believe me? Just ask the UN! Ask any of the modelers. Extrapolating from current trends and the knowledge that population growth stagnates as countries achieve prosperity, we will never hit 12 billion. We will be lucky to break 10 billion.
This is the problem perpetuated by idiots like Paul Ehlrich. You can’t look at something as complex as population growth and attempt to model it using a straight-line approximation. The idea that humans would experience some kind of “population cycle” is kind of ridiculous, since population cycles are a rather isolated phenomenon in nature. You can count the number of species that “boom and bust” on your hands and toes.
