Global warming fanatics will not be joining in any party this week to celebrate the birth of the Earth’s seven billionth baby. They are not at all keen on human breeding, which leads inevitably to a great deal of people breathing holes through the ozone layer.

The thought of seven billion of us breathing all at once, and capable of adding another few million or so of our species by the end of the century, must be driving the planet-savers mad.

I am sorry to pick on the greenies, but they are the ones, with the shiniest badges and loudest shouts. There are other misanthropes, some with far less pardonable motives for favouring a wet Brazilian tree over a starving Amerindian lumberjack.

Racist students of over-population will look down on a poor country, scalded by a permanent heatwave, and wonder why so many inferior persons should be allowed to dwell in it. Of course there are other surveyors of the kindlier sort. They believe they may stop babies from starving by raining contraceptives on their cradles. Or set up family planning centres amid village kraals.

The bias against babies has persisted throughout modern times. It is expressed, and politically acted on, by affluent peoples with plenty of space, which they demand to keep to themselves. Thomas Malthus, the parson pioneer of infant limitation, thought the world might relax about excessive fertility so long as famine and disease continued. But his era was the early 1800s, before the modernisation of agriculture and the discovery of antibiotics. It would have seemed inconceivable to him that the survival rate would ever produce seven billion mouths to feed.

How, by the way, are we suddenly so certain that there now are? The figure was released the other day by demographers of the United Nations. But they didn’t explain how they had carried out the counting. It seems to add up, though. There has been a continuous growth in population since the Great Famine and Black Death of 1350, even allowing for plague, war and 20th century genocide.

Matt Ridley, a superb scientist and author, argues we have nothing to worry about it.

He takes the line that human ingenuity will always win out. He thinks a growth in human population is bound to produce more sophisticated science, medicine and agriculture. That means fewer child deaths in Africa, where the human race began.

Moreover, he expects the global population eventually to come down by a billion or so through contraceptive wisdom reaching newly enlightened multitudes.

I would urge the pessimists of population to read the evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. His book, Unweaving the Rainbow, is a masterly celebration of all human life and the preciousness of its value. Every living one of us, he declares, has collected the jackpot prize in a lottery which offers a less than a one in a million chance of winning. That means there are greater Einsteins and Shakespeares and Beethovens who have never been born than there are grains in the sands of Arabia. I think here he errs on the romantic side.

We might equally have missed out on a few thousand Adolf Hitlers, Joe Stalins and Pot Pots. But on the ethical magic he is sound.

“We live” he writes, “on a planet that is all but perfect for our own kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in a kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Ye, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery. But... compare it to the planetary competition, and this is paradise.”

I was cursed from the start

August babies are thought by some specialists to get a rougher educational deal than people born in September. This is because of this school year starting in September.

The kids born the month before are often less sophisticated, having virtually missed a year’s preparatory tutorship before they start secondary school. Hence their predilection to crime, the law, journalism and other disreputable activities. That, at any rate, is my excuse: I was born at the end of August, and am still trying to catch up.

Oxford can take Liam and Noel

A group of rock enthusiasts in Oxford are claiming that they have as many first class rock bands as Manchester and Liverpool, but have been placed at a disadvantage by the media’s constant meditations on the university city’s elitist spires.

Manchester has spires too—and musical ones, the equal of any outside Vienna. I mean, of course, the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic, the Royal Northern College of Music, Chetham’s College, the composer and Master of the Queen’s Music Maxwell Davies, the soprano Amanda Roocroft. We also have the Gallagher brothers. Perhaps they would feel at home in Oxford.

Only Cliff needs happiness...

Dave Cameron's mania to measure the happiness of the country has caused civil servants to circulate impertinently probing questionnaires.

One question asks: “Are you satisfied with your wife and husband?” Perhaps up to half a dozen honeymooners might answer Yes. A fellow columnist on another paper pronounces: “Happiness is for children and Cliff Richard.” Brilliant. I wish I’d thought of it first.

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