What is the current estimate of the worldwide population?

Question

Describe how this number is changing from moment to moment, day to day, and from one year to the next.

Answer 1

6.6 billion

Answer 2

Census World PopClock - 6,668,142,444

These numbers are projections (or estimates) based on fertility and death rates throughout the world.

Answer 3

6,668,138,883

Answer 4

The current estimate is  6,668,157,996 at 05:17 Greenwich Mean Time  May 17, 2008 . You just read that number from the population clock.

The second part of the question is to describe how this number is changing from moment to moment, day to day, and from one year to the next.

The United Nations Population Fund declared 12 October 1999 as "The Day of 6 Billion" and predicts that the world will reach 7 Billion by the year 2011.

After thousands of years the number of births per year has leveled off about the year 1996. In addition the number of births per year is not predicted to change (within +/- 2%) for the next 40 years. The average number of births per year for the next few decades is:

133.2 million per year

11.1 million per month

2.56 million per week

365 thousand per day

15.2 thousand per hour

4.22 per second

Deaths are currently at 55.2 million per year and are expected to climb to 89.5 million per year by the year 2050.

When the number of deaths reaches the number of births there will be no population growth in the world.

For the year 2008 the population gain is

133.5 million births minus 55.5 million deaths = 78 million .

This gain peaked at 87.8 million in the year 1989. By the year 2050 the gain will be 44 million.

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Think about what this means. The number of people in the world is increasing, but the number of births is level. We are adding billions of women, but there are no extra children. Women are having less and less children per woman.

  The 133 million children born every  year is not expected to change, but where they are born will change. More and more of those children will be born in Africa and in South-Central Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.) and fewer and fewer will be born in Europe, Northern America, Latin America, Oceania, and East Asia.

  

Here are the changes predicted from 1996 to 2050 for

"Number of births per year"

Oceania   decrease by 4.1%

Asia       decrease by 13.9%

Europe    decrease by 25.0%

South Americadecrease by 26.9%

North America (outside of USA) decrease by 12.3%

USA:     increase by 43.3%

Africa:   increase by 58.0%

Some people might find that table unexpected.

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  In the United States there are currently slightly over  4 million children born (about the same as it was fifty years ago). There are about 2.5 million people who die. The difference is called the "natural increase" (4 - 2.5 = 1.5 million). In addition there are about 1 million legal immigrants, and an unknown number of illegal immigrants (government estimate is 0.5 million)