WE HAVE A TICKING POPULATION TIME BOMB ON OUR HANDS.
On November 15 of this year experts claim that the world’s human population will reach the 8 billion mark! Humans evolved on the planet almost 3 million years ago. The oldest fossils date to 2.8 million years. Their simple nomadic life as hunter gatherers kept their populations relatively low and stable for well more than two million years. But the advent of agriculture at about 10,000BC (after 2,790,000 years of nomadic life) caused a spike in population to about 6 million individuals. From that period onward the population exploded. In only 8000 years it reached the 100 million mark (@ 2,000BC), and it took only two thousand years to more than doubled to the 250 million level (at or around 1century AD). It jumped to one billion only 1700 years later, in the 1800s AD. Today a little more than 200 years later humans teem around the planet with its population “octupled” to 8 billion.
Population experts claim that there is a limit to the number of people the earth can support. Most put that number at the 10 billion level. We are clearly approaching that critical level very rapidly, as we experience a human population explosion. That is the real threat humans face—not the slow accumulation of carbon in our atmosphere.
But the Green New Deal supporters, those who would continue in our present course and claim to “solve” the carbon problem by chemically sequestering fossil carbon, and the fearful “geo engineers “ who would permanently alter the Earth atmosphere by dumping particulates into the stratosphere in a “Hail Mary” attempt to cool the atmosphere, all ignore the elephant in the room—the ticking population bomb!
In 2022 Homo sapiens on this planet (a clearly misnamed species) generated 35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide which was unceremoniously released into the atmosphere as an earth-warming gas. On November 15, 2022 each one of the 8 billion strong world human population will directly or indirectly (each of us) add to that carbon load by contributing another 4.4 tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.
This amount includes the carbon “costs” of the food we grow, the grain we dry, the food we transport, the machines we manufacture, and the food eat, the energy costs of the clothes we wear and all their transport costs, as well as the “costly in carbon” concrete we walk and ride on, and the oil and gas energy we use to warm our houses and heat our shower and bath water. It’s simple—the more people we have the more carbon waste we generate.. Our population is growing so fast that without some form of control we will never be able to reach the goal of a neutral carbon footprint.
The goal of the Paris Accords is to reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 (or to a level of 15.75 billion metric tons). But with our present rate of use unchanged and our rapidly expanding population growth, that is impossible. We add about 110 million humans a year to our world population. Each one will contribute about 4.4 metric tons of carbon each year for a total of (4.4 tons x110 million = 484 million m tons) or nearly 500 million metric tons of carbon annually.
If we do not control our population explosion, energy conservation efforts will be simply a waste of time and (yes energy). It is irresponsible to continue to claim that our earth is imperiled by carbon emissions and yet ignore the obvious threat of burgeoning human population growth.
The first and easiest way to reduce carbon emission is to limit human populations!
Furthermore, without population control the 1.5C target of the Paris Accords becomes a moving goal post that could never be reached.
However, with strict population control, a moratorium on forest clearing. coupled with a global effort at reforestation (the best of all solutions), reduction of energy waste, and greater efficiency of transport and manufacturing as well as reasonable and sustainable decreases in fossil fuel consumption —-humans may have the time to adapt and may actually survive on this planet past 2100!
*Adapted from: “How Earth Population Exploded”, ABCNews site, dl 11/06/22 and Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques, INED Herve LeBras
No comments:
Post a Comment