[ELRayford]

No one can know the exact number of people on the globe. Even the best individual government censuses have a margin of error of at least 1 percent, which would translate in the global aggregation to “a window of uncertainty of six months before or six months after Oct. 31.” An error margin of even as little as 2 percent would mean that Monday’s seven billion estimate actually was 56 million off (which is more people than were counted in South Africa).

Realistically, the uncertainty is at least 2 percent and that’s for the 75 percent of the world for which we have recent official counts or estimates. Now, world population is estimated to be growing by about 1.1 percent per year. Hence each percent uncertainty in total count translates into almost one year uncertainty in the date by which the population grows past a given threshold. Bottom line: world population passes seven billion some time in the last year or two or the next year or two, most likely

jus sayin