Reddit reviews Ten Billion

> I am not going to try and convince you to have children one way or the other. My only point is that some people must have children - if everyone were to stop having children starting today, we would face much harsher consequences as a species than if we were to continue on as we are now (which also isn't the optimal solution either). Ideally, we would start shrinking population gradually across the globe until we met something that is completely sustainable (which is a moving target as technology develops, but I digress).

Loads of people are having children already though. It's not like we're facing imminent population crash.

> we would face much harsher consequences as a species than if we were to continue on as we are now (which also isn't the optimal solution either)

That's just not true though. The present course is the one which is leading to far harsher conditions. Loads of places are already really overpopulated. There are major emerging issues to do with food security, water security, jobs, health, climate etc and most of them are a consequence of the size of the population. Have you read this?

I'd guess Buzzfeed isn't a scientific source at all, but there's still no harm in calling it out. I just find the whole article's presentation of "shocking water use" is misleading, the facts are overly-distilled (sorry for pun) and set up for a misleading bias.

The article credits a book 10 Billion by Stephen Emmott for its data, and it seems that some reviewers have a similar opinion of the book.

Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ten-Billion-Stephen-Emmott/dp/0141976322/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373018022&sr=8-1&keywords=ten+billion

and an extract from the book too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/30/population-growth-wipe-out-life-earth?guni=Keyword:news-grid%20aux-1%20Pixies:Pixies:Position9:anchor%20image

10 Billion by Stephen Emmott is a pretty chilling fact based read about population and resource use.