The Exponential Model Coordinates Population Growth Essay

There are many horrendous effects that come from population growth. One of the many major effects include decreasing amounts of available land. Another is the decreasing amount of essential natural resources. A part

Thesis: The topic of human population growth is an important issue due to its impacts upon people in developing countries, economics, religion, food production, and the environment; without any limitations, population growth can lead to negative consequences, such as famine and environmental destruction, or even positive outcomes, such as potential economic growth.

The Global human population increases growth amounts to around 75 million annually, or 1.1% per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion in 2012. It is expected to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.4 billion by mid-2030, and 9.6 billion by mid-2050. Many nations with rapid population growth have low standards of living, whereas many nations with low rates of population growth have high standards of living.

Former American particle physicist and former Nobel Prize winner Henry Way Kendall once said, “If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not” (“Population Quotes”). This is especially evident in the previous two units of study on population and climate change where I have learned about a variety of global population trends and how climate change has had a notable effect on the planet.

Competition is a limiting factor that can determine a species' carrying capacity. When population increase, individuals start competing for food, shelter, and the most suitable mates. While the stronger individuals tend to survive, the weaker individuals begin to die off because of insufficient resources for everyone in the community. Competition can lower birthrates and increase death rates. When two different species live in the same area, they compete for resources in that environment and typically one species is eliminated by the other. The population will reach its carrying capacity when competition reduces the size of the population to what the environment can support.

The expansion and development in all of the earth’s climate zones and habitats, as well as modern agriculture’s ability to grow more food for each unit of farmed land, play an important role in the population growth. Socioeconomic factors such as, healthcare, culture, family structure, marriage and social status also influences population growth, are contributors to population size increases through birth rate, as well as, decreases through the death rate. This imbalance of population equilibrium is a result of improved sanitation and health care, and the development of antibiotics and vaccines for the control of infectious diseases ultimately resulting in population death rates dropping.

Phosphate is an abiotic factor; therefore, it is a nonliving factor that affects living organism. In this experiment we prose to test the whether variation in environmental phosphate levels affects autotrophic organisms. We ran a lake and Chlamydomonas experiment in order to determine a solution for this question. In our lake experiment we took samples of water

In this lesson, we are going to discover why populations do not continue to grow at unlimited rates, and what ecological factors limit population growth. We'll also discover how humans factor into population limits.

You would expect to see a species growing at an exponential rate when a population has a constant birth rate through a period of time and it is never limited by food, disease, or space. WIth an exponential growth the rate of birth of a species alone can control how fast, and in some cases how slow, the population grows. A population will increase its rate and reach its maximum potential if it is filled with limitless amounts of resources. The numbers would start of slowly then pick up as quickly as the new individuals are added to the reproductive pool. Once they enter the pool the rate of growth will continue to increase over time.

The classic example of this model is the story of the Indian rice story. A king challenged a traveler to a game of chess and, if the traveler won, he could ask for any reward he would like. The traveler asked to be paid in rice, starting with one grain on the first day and doubling in amount each subsequent day for the rest of his life. Thinking this was a small request, the king agreed and lost. However, what he did not realize is by the twentieth day, the king would be paying the traveler one million grains of rice. This demonstrates the powerful effect of exponential growth on a population size.

All populations of species are limited to a specific number, called its carrying capacity, which refers to the ability of an ecosystem to support their needs. Once a population grows to the point where it extends past the limit, the environment no longer has the capacity to support them and individuals must die to stabilize the population. Humans are no exception to this rule, as their populations are constrained by such density dependent factors as the availability of food, land, and other resources. Growth in the human population in particular, profoundly worsens the effect on the environment as well, based on the IPAT equation which states that population directly contributes to environmental impact. With the rapid growth that the human population is undergoing, researchers predict that humanity is overshooting their carrying capacity and will soon face a collapse; however, the ability to use technology to efficiently maximize resource allocation while minimizing environmental impact raises a debate of whether or not humans will be able to continue living as they are now.

Thomas Malthus’ wrote ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ argued that the increasing rate of population growth is the impetus of many social and economic issues that affects our society. His belief was that population increases in geometrical scale whilst basic supply for humans increase in arithmetical scale, ‘I SAID THAT POPULATION, WHEN UNCHECKED, increased in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio.’ (Quoted from An Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter 2, page 6) Malthus believed that overpopulation would lead to mass malnutrition, famine, disease and even war. He proposed two kinds of method that could keep the population in a sustainable level. First is preventative checks, which suggested using moral restrains such as the practice of abstinence and criminal punishments for those who had children that they could not support. The other method is positive checks. Positive checks are factors that could increase the death

According to Ray (1998), every four days there is a net population increase of over one million people, and this exponential increase is greatly associated as being one of the main drivers of poverty and environmental degradation worldwide (Dasgupta, 1995), resulting in extreme stress on ecosystem services (ES), as well as human development. However, the extent to which future population growth will be a ‘problem’ for both the environment and development is disputed amongst academics around four main models which link population, environment, and development together. In this essay, I will begin by exploring the vicious circle and Malthusian models and their views of population growth on environment and development, and contrast these with the Boserup and Cornucopian models using examples, before concluding.

There is an enormous amount of speculation regarding population growth and overconsumption as problems for the environment. Some believe that the root cause of the deteriorating environment is overpopulation. Others believe that the overconsumption of resources in developed countries contributes more to the overall overuse of resources than population does. Economist, Julian Simon, didn’t find growing population to be a catastrophic problem. Instead, he explained that with a larger population comes development in markets and ideas. I agree with Simon that human ingenuity will continue to outpace environmental degradation. While the argument can be made that overpopulation directly drives overconsumption, it has been found that the

A. Hayami …1992† for Japan. The rising trend of the birth-rate for Phase 1 in