Ocean temperatures averaged 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the June-August period, 1 degree higher than normal.

Last month also saw the warmest August sea-surface temperatures  on record at an average of 62.4 degrees, also 1 degree higher than usual, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said.

The combined land and water temperature worldwide for June-August was 61.2 degrees, third warmest in 129 years of recordkeeping. For August it was 58.2 degrees, fourth warmest.

“Large portions of the world’s land mass observed warmer-than-average temperatures in August,” NOAA said in a statement. “The warmest departures occurred across Australia, Europe, parts of the Middle East, northwestern Africa, and southern South America. Both Australia and New Zealand had their warmest August since their records began.”

Meteorologists said there’s a combination of forces at work: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made carbon emissions tied to global warming, and a dash of random weather variations.

The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.

1). Bay Of Fire, Tasmania

Chances are you have never heard of this little paradise off the coast of St. Helen’s, a small whaling town in the lesser traveled portion of Tasmania. But with crystal clear waters, clean, sandy beaches, and some cozy little cottages for rent right on the shoreline, this known vacation spot it’s sure to give you the perfect island getaway.

2). Basque Country, France and Spain

Both France and Spain have always been the favorite European vacation spots, with some of the most breathtaking scenery you will ever witness. But the Basque costa is an especially lovely area with some amazing travel packages that can take you to one of the most beautiful areas of the world, while still letting you keep some cash for souvenirs.

3). Chiloe, Chile

Chile is a country rich in culture and adventure, and in recent years it has been able to maintain it’s wonderful traditions, while still modernizing the region. Chiloe is an especially impressive example of this mix, with their aging architecture, traditional ghost stories, and an increasing tourist market that includes plenty of adventure tours that will take you on some of the wildest treks of your life.

4). Ko Tao, Thailand

Rich, green landscapes as far as the eye can see, incredible diving locations, and the chance to come in contact with the marine and wildlife of the island, it’s no wonder this is one of the top 10 locations of 2009. If you love the ocean, and the idea of roughing it a little bit while still maintaining a few of the comforts of a resort, then this is the place for you.

5). Languedoc, France

With so much of France conquered by frequent tourism and mass modernization, Languedoc is still a tucked away little spot that offers a little solace from the gaudy gift shops and tourist traps of modern travel. With some lovely hotels, fine dining restaurants, and some great cruise options that take you along the Canal du Midi, this is a nice alternative to the usual French getaway.

6). Nam Ha, Laos

When you think of vacations, Laos is certainly not the first location that comes to mind. However, Nam Ha is one of the most culturally satisfying trips you could ever take. From home stays with the local people, treks through the mountains, and guided tours by locals to the waterfalls and through the jungles, it’s an experience you will never forget.

7). The Big Island, Hawaii

Who doesn’t want to visit Hawaii? It has been one of the most popular beach vacation spots for the last several decades. But the draw of The Big Island is different then that of it’s smaller siblings. With reach active volcanic lava wastes, beaches filled with white, black, and green sand, and ample time to spend in a less crowded, much more affordable area, this is a less popular, but much more appealing, Hawaiian vacation.

8). San Andres and Providencia, Colombia

Columbia gets a bit of a bad rep, and in some areas it’s warranted. But the two main islands of San Andres and Providencia are two beautiful, tourist-friendly areas that are dedicated to long days spent fishing, hiking, diving, or on submarine tours through the deeps to witness the modern marine life.

9). Svalbard, Norway

Norway is a country rich with tourist opportunities, which is why it has such a crowded holiday life. But the Cold Coast is a lesser known area that is full of dark fjords and mystery. If you like cooler temperatures and polar boat tours, then you will love Svalbard.

10). Yunnan, China

Home of the legendary Tiger Leaping trek, jungle tours, and the scenery of an environmentally rich land, with scattered ancient temples and small towns, this is the ultimate Asian hot spot. Expect the unexpected in Yunnan.

During 2007, two researchers spent months living and working on the Rutford Ice Stream in temperatures that dropped as low as -30°C. The ice stream moves towards Antarctica’s coast by one metre every day. The science team towed radar equipment back and forth across the ice measuring its thickness, and building up a picture of the landscape beneath. A lubricating mixture of sediment and water beneath the ice assists as it flows towards the ocean, and is sculpted into a series of massive ridges the size of tower blocks and separated by deep furrows. These features ultimately control the flow of the ice stream.

Lead author British Antarctic Survey glaciologist Edward King says: “It was really exciting to see this beautiful image of the landscape two kilometers below our feet emerge from the data. We are now sure that these amazing sediment formations are created by fast-flowing ice and we are much better placed to understand how ice streams behave and how they might change in the future.”

Co-author Dr Chris Stokes from University of Durham has studied similar features in parts of northern Canada which were covered by glaciers 9000 years ago. He says,

“It’s interesting to note that the features we see in Canada are the same as those under the Rutford Ice Stream. Until now we could only guess how they were formed. The next step will be to look closer at these features in Canada to see what happened as the glaciers disappeared.”

British Antarctic Survey scientists have measured the movement and behaviour of the Rutford Ice Stream for the last 25 years. Technological developments in the past 13 years, including satellites, seismic studies and radar, has led to a much greater understanding of what lies beneath Antarctica’s vast ice sheet. There is still much to learn, but the techniques developed for the study will greatly improve scientists’ capability to measure how the ice sheet may change in the future.

*The Rutford Ice Stream is also the size of Chesapeake Bay, in the US

Background

King and a field assistant spent two months in the ‘deep field’ over 1,000 kms from the nearby BAS Rothera Research Station. They lived under canvas and worked in temperatures often as low at -30°C. Weather permitting they drove their snowmobiles, fitted with radar equipment, 18 kms up the ice stream – doing this 35 times at 500 metre intervals – clocking up over 1200 kms in total.

WAIS contains 13% of all the ice on the Antarctic continent. Studying the flow of ice in Antarctica is important to understanding if the ice sheet is in balance. This means that the rate of snowfall (ice accumulated) equals the amount of ice discharged into the sea through glaciers and then ice bergs. The WAIS is not currently in balance.

Ice streams – are like gigantic rivers of ice. They can be as much as a few hundred km long, tens of km wide, and they typically move by a metre or more every day. Almost all of the ice from the interior of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is drained towards the sea through these ice streams. As the ice enters the ocean, it forms large floating ice shelves. The ice streams can be considered to form the link between the ocean and the more slowly moving ice in the interior of the Antarctic continent. Understanding what controls the flow of ice streams is considered to be of key importance for predicting the future behaviour of the Antarctic ice sheet.

A glacier – is a ‘river of ice’ that is fed by the accumulation of snow. Glaciers drain ice from the mountains to lower levels, where the ice either melts, breaks away into the sea as icebergs, or feeds into an ice shelf.

Ice sheet – is the huge mass of ice, up to 4 km thick, that covers Antarctica’s bedrock. It flows from the centre of the continent towards the coast where it feeds ice shelves.

Ice shelf – is the floating extension of the grounded ice sheet. It is composed of freshwater ice that originally fell as snow, either in situ or inland and brought to the ice shelf by glaciers. As they are already floating, any disintegration will have no impact on sea level. Sea level will rise only if the ice held back by the ice shelf flows more quickly onto the sea.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Mr. Krugman then gives a rundown of the latest climate research, whose predictions are far worse than previously thought. He describes climate change as a “clear and present danger” – borrowing a phrase first deployed in 1919 by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to imprison a man for opposing the draft – and concludes:

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

As Krugman suggests, recent years have seen the bar set pretty low for what can get a person branded as a traitor. In a February 2003 editorial, the now-defunct New York Sun called for police to monitor protesters opposing the invasion of Iraq “with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution,” for giving “aid and comfort to the enemy,” a crime that in the United States carries the death penalty.

A few months later saw the release of a bestselling book by conservative commentator Ann Coulter (who, incidentally, holds a law degree), that insisted that all American liberals – that is, about one fifth of the US population – are guilty of treason. Those who peacefully opposed the war were similarly maligned throughout the burgeoning right-wing wilds of the blogosphere, and were, it should be noted, extensively spied on by the US government.

So now a few environmentalists have envisioned the state wielding its coercive power against those who doubt that humans activity is destabilizing the Earth’s climate.

James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is regarded as one of the world’s leading climate scientists, last year called for CEOs of oil companies to be put on trial for crimes against humanity for their well-documented efforts to spread doubt about global warming.

In a similar vein, in 2006 British journalist and environmental activist Mark Lynas, whose book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, plausibly details how climate change could unleash a major extinction event, imagined a future climate court putting the deniers on trial. He writes:

I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put this in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.

His equation of climate change doubters to Nazi apologists was echoed that year by Grist’s David Roberts, who called for “some sort of climate Nuremberg” to hold the deniers accountable.

According to Guardian environmental columnist Leo Hickman, climate-change deniers love this kind of rhetoric, because it portrays them as  “brave, ‘truth’-wielding Galileos standing up against a wave of pseudo-scientific indoctrination.” Writing in response to Krugman’s column, Mr. Hickman says that deniers faced with accusations of treaon will inevitably “trot out the predictable comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism.”

Of course, it’s only a small fraction of environmentalists who have openly called for jail time – or worse – for climate-change deniers. After all, the environmental movement has benefited tremendously from laws that protect freedom of expression. Far more importantly, refraining from “hanging” people for what they say – even if you believe that what they say amounts to a destructive campaign of disinformation  –  is a hallmark of civilized society.

“People think that if there’s a trend, it has to be connected to this bigger trend,” he says. “You often get this kind of jumping the gun.” Sometimes researchers are citing a potential connection to global warming to get noticed, he says, and sometimes journalists are focusing on that connection to make the story more compelling. “There’s a bit of a backlash amid people who have a brain,” says Schmidt. “It’s akin to [the media's reporting on] medical studies. It adds to people’s confusion.”

Here are 5 studies Schmidt points to that made unfulfilled promises, used loose, questionable climate connections to sensationalize a story or predicted events that never came to be.

The Study: In a study released to the public last month and set to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in August, a team of American scientists found by gathering wind-speed data across the country that average and peak wind speeds in the Midwest and the East had decreased since the 1970s.

The Fallout: Though the authors acknowledged their study was preliminary, they raised an intriguing possibility—that if dying wind were a true trend, global warming could be the cause. The reasoning was that warming in polar regions, brought on by climate change, would shrink the temperature difference between the poles and the equator, as well as the pressure difference. This would mean that winds would die down, and wind-power generation would be harmed by the very thing its proponents are trying to combat.

The Truth: Despite the delicious irony, Schmidt says, it’s far too early to say that the dying wind is even a trend, much less one caused by climate change. Windiness is a complex phenomena with different causes in different places, he says, and is not one that can be measured by a singular cause on a global scale. Winds can change in one area, but if they do, expect to see changes in phenomena related to wind, like temperature gradients, as well. The data don’t bear that out, he says, and his climate models don’t predict wind changes over the North American continent caused by global warming.

The Study: The thermohaline circulation is crucial to the Earth’s climate, acting like a conveyor belt carrying warm water into the North Atlantic and moderating the climate of North America and Europe. Many studies, however, have suggested that freshwater from melting sea ice might have the potential to shut down that circulation. A 2005 study showed a steep slowdown of the circulation between 1957 and 2004.

The Fallout: The idea that thermohaline circulation could come to an end, pushing the planet into a new ice age, exploded into popular culture after it showed up in movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

The Truth: Schmidt says that what looked like a full-blown trend of the circulation weakening can be explained in part by studies showing that the circulation can vary its strength over many timescales, making it hard to see a real trend in the noise. That doesn’t mean that circulation could never be changed, Schmidt says, but the possibility was blown out of proportion. “The Gulf Stream shutting down is such a powerful meme,” he says.

The Study: In early 2006, a study in Nature published surprising results that plants were giving off trace amounts of methane.

The Fallout: We know that methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so the suggestion that it comes from plants led to a blizzard of headlines suggesting that trees could be contributing to global warming.

The Truth: The researchers balked after the media coverage of their study broke. The scientists said they were widely misinterpreted when it was reported that plants contribute to global warming. Rather, if plants do give off methane, they’ve been doing it since long before humans were on the scene and their emissions aren’t connected to today’s anthropogenic climate change. Schmidt says the findings were controversial among scientists from the beginning, because plants had never been known as methane emitters. “Subsequent work has dialed down the magnitude of this new effect tremendously,” he says.

The Study: A catastrophic rise in sea level is one of the worst consequences that some climate scientists predict for a warmer world. A study in Science in 2006 noted that temperatures by the end of the 21st century could be comparable to those 130,000 years ago, when global sea levels were about 20 feet higher.

The Fallout: Unsurprisingly, given the implications of the sea level rise, this study was sensationalized with headlines like “London Underwater by 2100 as Antarctica Crumbles into the Sea.” In his world tour, Al Gore also picked up the statistic, which led to much backlash both among scientists trying to get the science corrected and among climate skeptics.

The Truth: There’s a big gap between saying something is possible and predicting that it will occur, Schmidt says, and the authors didn’t predict that climate change would turn London into Atlantis by 2100. As Science’s editors said in the same issue, past climate changes should be taken into account when trying to predict future climate change, but they won’t be exactly the same. When media and others used the study as a predictive measure‹to say the sea will rise 20 feet in less than 100 years, Schmidt says, that “was a pretty egregious mess-up.”

The Study: In 2007, scientists found the oldest authenticated DNA ever, gathered from 400,000-year-old tree and insect samples entombed in the bottom of a Greenland glacier. About half a million years ago, the study concluded, Greenland was a pretty warm place.

The Fallout: When the study came out, Schmidt says, about many people responded to the DNA find itself. But the others keyed onto one sentence in the press release, in which the lead author suggested that the finding meant the Greenland ice sheet was more stable than scientists had previously thought. Because these seeds and DNA specimens were found in the ice sheet, the ice must have been intact for at least a half-million years and survived the warm period 130,000 years ago. This could mean that Greenland is more stable than scientists thought and in less danger from current warming.

The Truth: Schmidt isn’t impressed with the claim. The fact that Greenland was hot so recently (geologically speaking) shows that the ice isn’t that stable at all, and the latest satellite evidence contradicts the stability claim and shows that Greenland is steadily losing mass.

A population milestone has been set on this jam-packed planet.

At 7:16 p.m. ET on Saturday, the population here on this good Earth hit 6.5 billion people, according to projections.

Along with this forecast, an analysis by the International Programs Center at the U.S. Census Bureau points to another factoid, Robert Bernstein of the Bureau’s Public Information Center advised LiveScience. Mark this on your calendar: Some six years from now, on Oct. 18, 2012 at 4:36 p.m. ET, the Earth will be home to 7 billion folks.

These are estimates, of course, but clear trends emerge from the data behind them.

Population profile

A report issued by the Bureau in March 2004 noted that world population hit the 6 billion mark in June 1999. “This figure is over 3.5 times the size of the Earth’s population at the beginning of the 20th century and roughly double its size in 1960,” the study explained.

Even more striking is that the time required for the global population to grow from 5 billion to 6 billion — just a dozen years — was shorter than the interval between any of the previous billions.

On average, 4.4 people are born every second.

The population on Earth today is nearly four times the number in 1900. Behind that phenomenal global increase is a vast gulf in birth and death rates among the world’s countries. But according to population experts, this gulf is not a simple divide that perpetuates the status quo among the have and have-not nations.

Birth dearth

“What is worrisome about this demographic divide is not the differences among nations’ population growth rates, but the disparities associated with these trends … disparities in living standards, health, and economic prospects,” explained Mary Kent, co-author along with Carl Haub, of a Population Reference Bureau report issued last month titled “Global Demographic Divide.”

Kent, editor of the Population Bulletin, and Haub, a senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, reported that news of declining population in Europe fueled concern about a global “birth dearth,” but there is continuing population growth in developing countries. The question, they asked, is which demographic trend is the world facing?

“The reality is that both trends are occurring,” Haub said. “The dramatic fertility decline during the 20th century coincided with improved health, access to family planning, economic development, and urbanization.”

Kent and Haub also reported that most countries will experience population growth through 2050, as the world adds a projected 3 billion more people to the total.

Remarkably, despite the many new developments over the past 50 years, one fact looks very much the same, explained Kent and Haub: Populations are growing most rapidly where such growth can be afforded the least — an observation that has changed little over time, they said.

However, the Development Strategy and Investment Plan (DSIP) prepared about the same time by experts within the Ministry of Agriculture Animal Industry and Fisheries gave our population growth rate as 3.4 per cent and went on to indicate that it is the third highest in the world. The Washington-based Population Reference Bureau gave the same figure as far back as 2007. We have an unmet need for contraception of 41 per cent and it is estimated that if we proceed at the present rate, our population will be 130 million in 2050. DSIP further indicates that despite the rapid population growth, our agricultural production has suffered a decline since 2000/01 when it was at 7.9 per cent to 2007/8 when it is 0.7 per cent.

The Millennium Development Goal Uganda’s progress report 2007 also points at a slowdown in economic growth and says, “The challenge is exacerbated by the country’s high annual population growth rate of 3.2 per cent. The agricultural sector which employs the bulk of the labour force has grown at a slower rate than the overall economy.” Figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics indicate a production decline for a number of our main food crops over the recent years. Banana production for example dropped from 7,909,000 metric tonnes in 1995 to 4,176,000 in 2006. Sweet potato production dropped from 2,990,000 metric tonnes in 1996 to 1,695,000 in 2006. Cassava production too went down from 2,240,000 tonnes in 1999 to 1,656,000 in 2006. Chicken and sheep numbers have decreased and the fish stocks in the lakes are fast dwindling. We exported 3,400,000 bags of coffee in 2001/02 but in 2008/08, only 2,750,000 bags were exported.

An article in the Sunday Monitor of April 26, 2009 quoted a development consultant, Dr Augustus Nuwagaba, saying that since 56 per cent of our population is underage, there is a huge dependency burden that is bound to cause disaster. With the introduction of UPE and USE, 56 per cent of the population is therefore attending school or at home breastfeeding and not producing food.

We tend to blame parents who fail to provide lunch for their children who attend UPE schools, but are they really in position to produce enough food for all their offspring? Our agricultural production is still dependent on the hand hoe, which is labour-intensive. It is wrong to assume, as some do, that large populations create demand for food and that the high food prices will attract more production.

As Dr Nuwagaba rightly pointed out, a large poor population will not create demand. Rather, it will increase farm thefts and losses and worsen poverty and hunger as has already been reported in Daily Monitor’s June 16th issue, Food theft on the increase in Gulu.

Others often give the examples of India and China, densely populated nations that have substantially increased their food production and emerged as strong economies. But won’t we also go into genetically modified foods, which are behind these countries’ apparent successful stories? The United Nations and numerous NGOs supporting food production in Africa strongly advise that we sustain traditional agricultural technologies and move towards organic farming and environmental protection as the way forward.

Hon Syda Bbumba has allocated 4.4 per cent of the budget to agriculture and according to DSIP, the government is likely to expand the budget allocation to agriculture every year up to 5.2 per cent in 2012/13. But this will still be below the 10 per cent allocation to agriculture which all sub-saharan countries agreed upon in Maputo in 2006 if they are to halve poverty and hunger by 2015.  We have big food production challenges such as climatic change that has come along with drought, rainstorms and floods, and has a bearing on human settlement, water resources and food security. We have the international credit crunch that is already pushing up food production costs. We have crop diseases such as the banana bacterial wilt, cassava mosaic, coffee wilt disease, trypanosomiasis, African swine fever and a whole range of others.

Can we then afford to be proud of being the world’s third fastest growing population? Isn’t it time for the government to come up with a more vigorous population control campaign similar to the one we are famous for in the fight against HIV/Aids?

The number of senior citizens has already jumped 23 percent since 2000 to 516 million, according to census estimates released. That’s more than double the growth rate for the general population.

The world’s population has been graying for many years due to declining births and medical advances that have extended life spans. As the fastest-growing age group, seniors now comprise just under 8 percent of the world’s 6.8 billion people. But demographers warn the biggest shift is yet to come. They cite a coming wave of retirements from baby boomers and China’s Red Guard generation that will shrink pensions and add to rising health care costs.

Germany, Italy, Japan and Monaco have the most senior citizens, with 20 percent or more of their people 65 and older.

In the U.S., residents who are 65 and older currently make up 13 percent of the population, but that will double to 88.5 million by mid-century. In two years, the oldest of the baby boomers will start turning 65. The baby boomer bulge will continue padding the senior population year after year, growing to 1 in 5 U.S. residents by 2030.

“The 2020s for most of the developed world will be an era of fiscal crisis, with a real long-term stagnation in economic growth and ugly political battles over old-age benefits cuts,” said Richard Jackson, director of the Global Aging Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“In emerging countries like China, they will face the real prospect of a humanitarian aging crisis,” he said.

China’s current ratio of 16 elderly people per 100 workers is set to double by 2025, then double again to 61 by 2050, due partly to family planning policies that limit most families to a single child, Jackson said. Without a universal pension system to cover all elderly, millions of older Chinese could fall into poverty, creating social and political unrest and shock waves that could ripple through the global economy given the country’s economic heft.

In the U.S., immigration of younger residents has helped slow aging of the total population. Still, Medicare is projected to become insolvent by 2017, and President Barack Obama has said that overhauling Social Security and Medicare is critical. In making reforms, Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress risk alienating a 65-and-older voting group by cutting benefits or their younger generation by raising payroll taxes.

“As they age, boomer support on issues like Medicare and retirement security will be just as key for continued Democratic success as the party’s hold on younger minority voters,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings Institution, citing higher voting rates among seniors who could prove important in key states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri.

The Census Bureau’s international estimates also show:

• Only 5 percent of Africa’s population is projected to be 65 and older in 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa, with high fertility and AIDS cases roiling parts of the region, is home to the youngest people. Leading the way is Uganda where the median age is just 15.
• About 1.53 billion, or 16 percent, of the world’s estimated 9.3 billion people in 2050 will be 65 and older.
• Europe will continue to be the grayest region, with 29 percent of its population projected to be 65 and older by 2050. It aging population has prompted governments, including Austria, France and Russia, in recent years to provide incentives such as bonus payouts, tax benefits and free school books to couples who have children.
• In Latin America, known for its high fertility, youths ages 19 and younger outpace the 65-and-older group by more than 5 to 1. But by 2050, led by a dropoff in births in countries such as Brazil and Mexico, senior citizens will jump to 18 percent of the population compared to 25 percent for youths. Faced with its aging population, Cuba recently raised its retirement age by 5 years, delaying payment of pensions.

The Census Bureau updates projections each year on a variety of global demographic trends, including fertility and mortality rates and life expectancy. Its estimates are separate from figures released by the United Nations Population Division.

Britain will become one of the world’s major destinations for immigrants as the world heats up and populations continue to soar. Statistics from the United Nations show that, on average, every year more than 174,000 people will be added to the numbers in the UK and that this trend will continue for the next four decades.

By then, only the United States and Canada will be receiving more overseas settlers, says the UN. This increase in British numbers is likely to put considerable strain on the country’s transport, energy and housing, experts warned last week.

“The US and Canada will be taking in more people than us every year by 2050 but they are huge countries,” said demographer Professor Tom Dyson of the London School of Economics. “Britain, by contrast, is a small nation. We will feel the impact of all these people. There will be no getting out of it. Simply controlling our carbon dioxide emissions will become harder and harder as more and more people arrive on our shores. In addition, housing, water supplies and transport will be strained and will need greatly increased investment.”

However, other experts say such increases could also produce benefits for the nation, bringing in immigrants who could provide a vital supply of young workers. These demographers point out that, by 2050, more than a third of the UK population will be aged 60 or over. By then there will be a desperate need for bus drivers, care-workers and others to keep the country running and immigrants could fill this gap.

In addition, there is the issue of humanitarian responsibility. Britain is likely to be one of the few nations to survive the worst effects of climate change while other nations, particularly those in the developing world, have their farmland and fishing grounds destroyed. It could be argued that the UK has a moral duty to provide shelter for as many refugees as our shores can support.

But deciding what numbers the country might support is a highly controversial issue and will be the focus of a conference on sustainable populations which will be held this week in London. Organised by the Optimum Population Trust, the meeting will hear that the United Nation expects that by 2050 the world will be inhabited by around 9.2 billion people, compared to its current level of 6.8 billion. Every day, the equivalent of the population of a large city is added to the numbers of humans, a rise that is now straining the planet’s resources to breaking point.

At the same time, Britain’s population will rise from its current level of 61 million to 72 million by 2050. The nation will then be the most populous in the European Union, outstripping Germany, whose population will slump from 82 million to 71 million people as its immigration figures plummet.

The idea that Britain could one day support such numbers has been questioned by Aubrey Manning, emeritus professor of natural history at Edinburgh University. “There are far too many people living in Britain already,” he said. “Once our population passed the 20 million level around 1850, it became too numerous. That is the figure at which we could no longer sustain our population from our own resources. We are now three times over the limit and heading for more. We have long passed the line of sustainability. As for the planet, its maximum sustainable population is no more than 3 billion, I would say.”

The rise in population indicates that the country is set for some considerable overcrowding. Britain’s land area is only two-thirds that of Germany, yet it will soon support the same number of citizens. “This population rise, brought about by rising immigration, will strain our infrastructures – our housing and water supplies – and bring very little advantage to the nation,” said Dyson, who will address the conference. “Nor do I think these extra people will be able to help in looking after our older people.”

But these points were disputed by Tim Finch, head of immigration for the Institute of Public Policy Research. “A healthy economy sucks in young, educated people and that is what has happened to this country over the past couple of decades. These young immigrants have helped keep the country running as our population has started to get older and they will become more important as the decades go past and that ageing intensifies. The immigration system picks out the best and the brightest of immigrants and they will be of great service to Britain. That is just a fact.”

The problem is that discussions of population numbers in the past have been associated with talk of eugenics and with attempts at controlling ethnic populations. As a result, there is little discussion today of the subject or its impact on the environment, a point stressed by James Lovelock, the distinguished environmental scientist. “The subject has become a taboo, a matter of political correctness,” he said last week. “And that is dangerous, for the numbers of humans on Earth are going to be crucial to our survival.”

Manning added: “We have stopped worrying about population because other issues – acid rain, climate change and others – have occupied our attention and because past fears of global food shortages were proved unfounded. But the subject will not go away. Our planet is now dangerously overpopulated.”

Another conference speaker, Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, in London, agreed. “We desperately need to bring down our emissions of greenhouse gases but the truth is we will never get the contribution of each individual down to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it to zero, and that is an issue for population control which we need to talk about openly and urgently.”

Rapley will tell delegates that the Earth’s population is now rising at a rate of around 80 million a year. “That is roughly the same as the number of unwanted pregnancies across the world,” he said. “If we can prevent unwanted pregnancies, we can halt this spiral in our numbers.”

To do that, contraception will have to become universally available – and political and religious opposition to birth control removed. If that happened, the world’s population could be stabilised to around 8 billion by 2050, added Rapley.

But many climatologists believe that by then life on the planet will already have become dangerously unpleasant. Temperature rises will have started to have devastating impacts on farmland, water supplies and sea levels. Humans – increasing both in numbers and dependence on food from devastated landscapes – will then come under increased pressure. The end result will be apocalyptic, said Lovelock. By the end of the century, the world’s population will suffer calamitous declines until numbers are reduced to around 1 billion or less. “By 2100, pestilence, war and famine will have dealt with the majority of humans,” he said.

One of the few places to survive the worst impacts will be Britain. “Our climate will be one of the least affected by global warming,” added Lovelock. “As a result, everyone will want to live here. We will become one of the world’s lifeboats. The trouble, of course, will be that, even if we wanted to, we will not be able to pick up everyone. There will be some hard decisions to make.”

Many experts predict that disaster will strike long before 2050. Last week, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, said the planet faced “a perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages which could strike in less than 20 years. In a speech to the Sustainable Development Commission conference in London, Beddington said that one in three people were already facing water shortages and that by 2030 world water demand would increase by more than 30%; energy demands would increase by 50%. “There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected.”

In the long run, however, humanity should benefit, said Lovelock. “If you look at our species over the past million years, there have been a number of major climatic events, some devastating. Between the Ice Ages, sea levels rose by 120 metres and tracts of land were flooded. Yet that period covers the time that early humans emerged and evolved into Homo sapiens

“Often our numbers were brought to catastrophically low levels by climate change and numbers were reduced to only a couple of thousand on a couple of occasions. Every time things got bad, our numbers plummeted and we improved as a species. That is certainly going to happen again over the next 100 years.”

The world by numbers

• 1 million Britain’s population in Roman times
• 6 million Britain’s population around the time of the English civil war
• 47 million Britain’s population in 1945
• 52,000 The number of tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere every minute
• 267 The average number of births every minute worldwide; the average number of deaths per minute is 118
• 78 million The planet’s annual population increase, a number roughly equivalent to the population of Germany
• 1 million The number of chimpanzees in Africa in 1900. Today, thanks to habitat loss and hunting, numbers have dropped to around 15,000
• 38.4 The median age in the UK rose from 34.1 years in 1971 to 38.4 in 2003 and is projected to reach 43.3 in 2031. (The median is the age that separates the oldest half of the population from the youngest.)
• 10 billion The number of chickens eaten by man worldwide every year
• 500 million The number of ducks eaten every year
• 1.3 billion The population of China
• 1.2 billion India’s population
• 500 million The population of the EU
• 74 million The number of barrels of oil pumped daily across the planet; 15 million tonnes of coal are dug every day

Between 2010 and 2050, nine countries will account for half of the world’s projected population increase: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the United States, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Bangladesh, Tanzania

How many people live in each country in the world? The world’s best source is the United Nations population division and this brand spanking new set of data shows estimates for the populations of every country in the world, going from 1950 all the way up to 2050. Showing these by percentage change over the whole period – giving you the fastest growing countries globally – could be an interesting visualisation. Robin McKie writes that Britain will become one of the world’s ‘lifeboats’ as resources get scarce as the world’s population increases.

Britain will become one of the world’s major destinations for immigrants as the world heats up and populations continue to soar. Statistics from the United Nations show that, on average, every year more than 174,000 people will be added to the numbers in the UK and that this trend will continue for the next four decades.