Don't look now! But there is an elephant standing in the room

Unrelenting population growth is the elephant in the room when the conversation turns to climate change.

Humans are squeezing the life out of the planet and by inference threatening their own existence.

A story on Mongabay.com headed: “Unrelenting population growth driving global warming, mass extinction” explores the fatal-like nexus between climate change and population growth.

Humans are prolific breeders and although it took 200 000 years to reach the first landmark of one billion, but in 200 years we have septupled that and over the last 40 years we have added a further billion every dozen years or so.

Then add to that the fact that the United Nations has said the earth will have a total of about 11 billion people by the century’s end.

Despite this few scientists, policymakers, or even environmentalists are willing to publicly connect incredible population growth to worsening climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, or the global environmental crisis in general.

"We are already to a point where our population size is unsustainable," Jeffrey McKee with the Ohio State University told mongabay.com.