Titbit: 7 Billion People This Side of Christmas (2011)

The forecast back in mid-2010 was that the world would reach a population of seven billion by about April or May 2012. Well it seems the world has been making babies faster than expected or people have been dying off a lot slower.

The latest forecasts now have the global population hitting seven billion (7,000,000,000 for those that like all the zeros) in 2011 around the end of October.

According to the World Clock the population of the world is currently increasing by 150 people per minute. The number of births per minute is 482. So that means, one way or another, there are 332 deaths every minute across the world—that is about 20,000 per hour, or roughly 480,000 per day.

If you want to read more you can check this out over at Environmental Graffiti, this at Guardian Environment, or this at Slashdot (and there are some interesting comments here like “This only ends one way, and any fool can see it”).