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OSLO, (Reuters) - Global warming will cut Antarctica's 600,000-strong emperor penguin population by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which the birds breed becomes less secure, a study said on Sunday. The report urged governments to list the birds as endangered, even though populations in 45 known colonies were likely to rise slightly by 2050 before declining. Such a listing could impose restrictions on tourism and fishing companies. The study is the first to project the long-term outlook for Antarctica's largest penguins, which can grow 1.2 meters (four ft) tall, seeking to fill a gap...

June 5, 2014 (BreakPoint) - Every spring for the past 27 years, writers and other intellectuals have gathered in the Welsh town of Hay “to think about the world as it is,” “to imagine how it might be,” and to have a “big conversation about discovery and intellectual adventure.” This year, one of the featured speakers was Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College, London. Jones, who is an atheist, made headlines around Britain when he said that while “we atheists sometimes congratulate ourselves that the incidence of religious belief is going down,” atheism’s future is in doubt. That’s...

U.S. fertility is not recovering from the financial crisis — and demographers aren’t sure why. The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The total number of births, at 3.96 million, inched up by a mere 4,000 from 2012, the first increase since the financial crisis. But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86, the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of...

Concerned that the City is an inhomogeneous hodgepodge with pockets of great wealth in some neighborhoods and squalor in others, newly appointed Housing Preservation and Development Commissar Vicki Been announced a plan to move 80,000 to 120,000 poorer families into middle class neighborhoods. “This way instead of having blight and filth in every direction they might look poorer families will be within easy walking distance of a better kept neighborhood,” Been boasted. “The crimes that plague poorer sections of our City would be more evenly dispersed throughout the whole City. Victims will come from a more broadly representative subset of...

It was the Inconvenient Truth of its day. The book was The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, published in 1968. Ehrlich made some apocalyptic predictions about resource depletion and mass starvation resulting from population growth. A frightened public devoured the book. But Ehrlich got some things wrong. He didn’t factor into his thinking technological change and the growth of free enterprise around the world, both of which have done much to ameliorate global poverty and hunger. The biggest thing he got wrong, though, was that he failed to foresee this: The population is now shrinking in many parts of...

The U.S. population rose by just 0.72% in 2013, the lowest growth rate in more than 70 years. Not only has the country become less-attractive to immigrants than in years past, with net immigration down from nearly 1.2 million as of 2001 to 843,145 last year, but also the U.S.’s domestic birth rate has dropped to a multi-decade low. While the population of most of the country’s metro areas grew at a low pace in recent years, in a small number of metro areas the population actually shrank. Looking at the most recent years, the U.S. population rose by just...

New York: 19.6 million. Florida: 19.5 million. New York: 57.6% non-Hispanic white. Florida: 57.0% non-Hispanic white.

To really understand what’s going on with the American economy, don’t look at the headlines. Don’t look at the unemployment rate or the trade balance or the deficit. Don’t even look at what’s happening today at all: Look at what happened 46 years ago. And what happened then? Fewer Americas were being born, points out Harry S. Dent Jr. in “The Demographic Cliff: How to Survive and Prosper During the Great Deflation of 2014-2019” "Don’t blame politicians, the decline of manufacturing, education or cheap foreign imports for the economic stagnation that has already begun and will continue for many years....

There have been many studies debating the merits of right-to-work legislation. Because state economies are so large and complex, it is difficult to tease out exactly how much of an effect different policies can have. For example, consider that Michigan gains and loses approximately 800,000 jobs every year. In the past few decades, and certainly in the 10 years and since the national recession, low-tax, right-to work states have been gaining the most in population, jobs and income. Some economists attribute this at least partly to those policies while others claim different factors, like weather, family or college connections. Where...

The Census Bureau’s holiday treat is its release of annual state population estimates, to be digested slowly in the new year. The headline from this year’s release is that population growth from July 2012 to July 2013 was 0.72 percent, lower than in the two preceding years and the lowest since the Great Depression 1930s. This reflects continuing low, below-replacement-rate birth rates and lower immigration than in 1982-2007. Net immigration from Mexico evidently continues to be zero. The nation's economy may be growing again, but Americans -- and potential Americans -- are not acting like it. There's a parallel here...

An interesting footnote to all the stories about New York’s population growth decline is that its median age is fairly high. New York State ranks 30th in median age at 38. New York City’s median age is somewhat lower at 35.New York’s median age has been rising steadily due to low birth rates. In 1990, the city and the state had a median age below 34. Property taxes for the schools that attracted many residents upstate have helped price the area out raising its median age upstate while the local rust belt hasn’t exactly attracted workers in poorer areas.A...

While admitting that the process for adding a new baby to a family's Affordable Care Act insurance coverage is “difficult,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius denied that it is yet another of a seemingly endless series of “glitches” to the program. “Though this may come as a shock to some, the world is over-populated,” Sebelius contended. “Adding more people is something we need to discourage. Since we cannot outright restrict family sizes like they do in China we have to make do with a 'second-best' policy. The annoyance and anxiety factors that attend the paperwork aspect of the...

American politics turn on a now familiar set of categories: red states vs. blue states, rich states vs. poor states, Frostbelt vs. Sunbelt. But these generalizations mask deeper, less visible fissures in our political geography. We have written a great deal about the role of density in metropolitan voting patterns, highlighting the remarkably consistent and robust political red-to-blue tipping point that occurs when a metro reaches a density of roughly 800 residents per square mile. I took a deeper look at our emerging political geography in a recent feature for Politico magazine, where I argued that the suburbs have become...

Using Census data, we've figured out that half of the United States population is clustered in just the 146 biggest counties out of over 3000. Here's the map, with said counties shaded in. Below the map is the list of all the counties, so you can see if you live in one of them. See link for list of names.

Rosstat recently released their latest batch of demographic statistics. Nothing particularly bizarre or unexpected happened, but the data show that births have held steady at their 2012 level while deaths have modestly decreased. This means that, if the trends from the January-September period are maintained for the entirety of 2013, Russia will record natural population growth of roughly 13,000, its first natural population growth since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now in one sense natural growth of 13,000 out of a total population of 143,000,000 sounds puny and unimpressive. However, as I never tire of reminding people, it wasn’t...

BEIJING — Nineteen province-level governments in China collected a total of $2.7 billion in fines last year from parents who had violated family planning laws, which usually limit couples to one child, a lawyer who had requested the data said Thursday. The lawyer, Wu Youshui of Zhejiang Province, sent letters in July to 31 provincial governments asking officials to disclose how much they had collected in 2012 in family planning fines, referred to as “social support fees.” He said he suspected that the fines were a substantial source of revenue for governments in poor parts of China. Mr. Wu’s findings...

Using Census data, we've figured out that half of the United States population is clustered in just the 146 biggest counties out of over 3000. Here's the map, with said counties shaded in. Below the map is the list of all the counties, so you can see if you live in one of them. And here's the whole list of counties that are shaded in. Los Angeles County, CA Cook County, IL Harris County, TX Maricopa County, AZ San Diego County, CA Orange County, CA Miami-Dade County, FL Kings County, NY Dallas County, TX Queens County, NY (rest of list...

Curious about the correlation between population density and voting behavior, I began with analyzing the election results from the least and most dense counties and county equivalents. 98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney... At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic. Put another way, below 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Republican. Above 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Democrat. A 66% preference is...

PANJIN, China — It’s been 11 months, and Xu Min still rarely leaves the house. He spends his days on the couch in front of a TV, trying to block out memories of his dead son. He blames fate for the car accident that killed the 23-year-old in September. But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Xu blames the Chinese government. China told the couple that they could have only one child and threatened to take away everything if they didn’t listen. They were good citizens, Xu said, “so for 20...

The Head of the Samaria Regional Council, Gershon Mesika, said Tuesday that the latest statistics prove that the Jewish settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria cannot be undone. "The data that are published, again and again, give a clear picture that shows that the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria has passed the point of no return,” he said. "The population beyond the Green Line currently numbers over 730,000 Jewish citizens,” he noted. The “Green Line” refers to the 1949 armistice line, and the territories beyond it include parts of Jerusalem, as well as Judea and Samaria. "There are more...