Can you suggest a respectable study on Human Carrying Capacity with related graph?

Question

I'm remebering a scary lecture given in high school biology (10 years ago!) about populations and their environment's carrying capacity. The teacher used the example of an expotential breeder, the rabbit, and then did a curve graph on the human population (another expotential breeder). I remember him saying that our population peak, plateau, and crash are slated around 2008-2012. Have I gone loopy? Can anyone please refer me to studies/predictions done by real, bonifide population density scientists? Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, pinpointing an exact date is really stretching. There are too many factors to take into account. But, from Rockfeller University:

"In fact, world population since the mid 20th century has grown by about 2% per year, a rate that doubles the population in roughly 35 years. Actual data fitted over five centuries with reasonable equations show that the secular rate of growth kept increasing until around 1970, leading, at least from a mathematical point of view, to an infinite population in a finite time (Figure 1). (See [2] for a numerical history and [3] for an infinite prediction.) Such growth worries environmentalists and many others and leads to a first question: Where is the world population moving?"

Check the first link below for the full article, with graphs. The other 2 links show simplified ideas regarding this problem, including the last one, which predicts the population will actually level out and decrease slightly by 2100.

All very interesting -- the next few decades should be amazing to live through.