In fact they don’t account for a changing population at all, as I discovered when I wrote a simple computer simulation to test his model. Thanks to a very basic calculus error, the lines actually show what the cumulative probability would have been if the population had started at the current level and stayed constant. So if we take the orange line at 10 years, instead of telling us the cumulative probability if the population had started at 5000 and fallen to 2500 over time, it gives us the value if the population had started at 2500 and stayed constant. Since this error occurs in equation 1, which the rest of Grimes’s equations are derived from… well, you get the idea.

Anything touted by NPR as "proof" government conspiracies don't exist should be instantaneously discounted.