World population growth

The graph below indicates the precipitous growth of human population in the last 200 years. It took around 100,000 years for homo sapiens population to attain a billion. My pencilled figures on the y axis (at left) show that it took then only 123 years to get to 2 billion, and then 33 years for 3 billion. Since then, we have been adding a billion every 12 or 13 years. That is, when someone born today reaches puberty, there will be an extra billion people on the planet compared to when he was born.

I don't believe people really understand what is happening here. It is almost incomprehensible that changes like this are occuring within the space of a single lifetime. For example, since I was born in 1951, there are now an extra 4.5  billion people on the planet.

And a large proportion of these people, about 2 billion in China and India alone, are becoming affluent, and all that that entails. Air conditioning, big houses, freezers, big cars, travel...in other words everything WE have and do.

Looked at like this, it would be surprising if we were NOT affecting climate. I would like to be optimistic, but I find it hard to imagine how we are going to willingly make the enormous sacrifices needed to mitigate overcome these problems. Even now, people just throw away their mobile phones, though they contain rare metals which cannot be produced. We cannot even organise simple systems to recycle these minerals. How would we be able to rise to the challenge of putting a brake on what is going on all over the globe?