Ignore the climate doomsters: we should celebrate our 8 billion population

It almost certainly wasn’t Vinice Mabansag, the baby born in the Philippines last Tuesday and picked out by the UN to personalise the occasion, but somewhere in around about now someone will be born who really does take the world’s population to eight billion. It is a landmark which has attracted the usual Malthusian handwringing about over-population. The fact that the UN decided that the threshold was going to be passed during the COP27 climate conference is surely not coincidence. But far from fearing the eight billionth person on Earth we should instead openly celebrate the occasion. Indeed, there may well come a time when human civilisation looks back fondly at when the population was still growing.

Why has the population grown from 1 billion to 8 billion in the two and a bit centuries since 1800? Not because humans have suddenly turned into rabbits, breeding like mad to offset high rates of mortality.