6 Minute English / Climate change: Are there too many people?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Neil Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Sam.

We re talking about the environment in this programme, specifically climate change. Now, Sam, what do you think is the biggest cause of climate change?

An obvious answer would be that climate change is the result of carbon emissions caused by humans. It s about people s carbon footprint the measurement of how much carbon dioxide is produced by someone s everyday activities.

That makes sense. But recently some scientists, especially in the west, have been focusing on another issue: the increasing number of people in the world, something known as overpopulation. In this programme, we ll be discussing the controversial link between overpopulation and climate change. And as usual we ll be learning some new vocabulary, as well.

Sounds good, Neil, but first I have a question for you. Over the last 100 years, within one lifetime, the world s population has soared. At the start of the 20th century, it was around one-and-a-half billion, but how many people are there in the world today? Is it:

a) seven billion?

b) eight billion? or

c) nine billion?