That’s true, but I think the issue with that is resource management. The trees themselves provide uses (to us, and other dependent species) other then fuel and the ones taken for fuel need to be replaced, or taken at a rate slower then nature naturally replaces them. Like fishing.
Ultimately proof biomass, while almost completely carbon neutral, has other problems that need to be managed.
True, but “re-forestation” is an generally an automatic process that only requires a few decades.
the process for “re-oilifying” takes quite a bit longer.
Nope. Deforestation (which is a common long-term environmental effect of preindustrial wood-burning societies) is most certainly not carbon neutral, much less carbon negative. I’d need to run the numbers, but it’s quite plausible that preindustrial civilizations had a per-capita carbon footprint comparable to modern First World societies.
That said, it does not follow that per capita carbon footprints can’t be reduced in the future. If anything, it would seem inevitable as it will sooner or later become necessary to switch from wood, coal, and oil to nuclear, hydro, solar, etc.
The Sahara seems to have taken rather longer than that…
:dubious: I’d like to see those numbers.
Agreed
The Sahara tree loss is kind of a red herring. With most places the trees will grow back.
Except that we aren’t discussing deforestation. We are discussing the use of wood for heating. This is like saying that using nuclear energy for heating will have massive positive impact on global warming because a global nuclear war will lead to substantial cooling.
It’s a nonsense argument based on a false dilemma. Yes, use of wood for heating may lead to deforestation, and use of nuclear for heating may lead to nuclear war. But in each case you have taken the most extreme example and tried to apply it as the norm. Totally illogical and quite invalid.
Nope, it’s not even vaguely plausible. Even if we accept that deforestation is solely or largely due to the use of wood for domestic heating, which is a load of crap, the rate of deforestation in the last century has been equal to or higher than during any medieval century.
So if the medieval carbon flux is entirely contingent on deforestation, and the current rate of deforestation is higher than the medieval rate and the modern world also has a massive contribution from fossil fuels, how can the medieval flux possibly be higher? It’s not plausible on any level
And then there are these figures:
World average per capita CO2 emission 1950 was 0.64. In 2005 1.23. The average person became associated with nearly twice as much CO2 emissions in 55 years. And it seems that it had been comparatively stable per capita before then: in 1750 the world population was about 700 million and there were, according to the first cite, about 3 million metric tons of CO2 produced - which comes to roughly about 0.43 metric tons per capita - about a third of 2005’s number and 2/3 of the number in 1950.
A fun site to explore looking at different regions btw. The source for the figures used is the CDIAC, a division of the DOE located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, so I think it is fairly likely reliable data.
…and with that bullshit, he disqualified himself from further consideration. Unless he backed it up really well. Did he?
Actually, from the viewpoint of this particular AGW skeptic, almost everyone who is yelping about AGW–if not overtly, than by omission.
I am skeptical of AGW for reasons endlessly discussed elsewhere, but I almost never see any real concern expressed about over-population, which I consider to be hugely more destructive and invasive.
My sense is that it has become politically incorrect to complain about over-population, because most population expansion is occurring in the developing world. In the developed world, the population is pretty level, but the overall world population is not likely to level out until we reach 9Billion–and even those projections are simply assumptions.
If we look at how aggressively the developed world has been able to alter the earth, consume its resources, change its topography and replace otherwise “natural” processes (over and above, say, some primitive Amazonian tribe), it’s pretty hard to think AGW is a bigger problem than too many people, particularly if the chunk of them who haven’t yet been developed are busy manufacturing Tatas as soon as possible to catch up.
And yet…article after article; headline after headline–it’s all about AGW. So all those folks hootin’ and hollerin’ about AGW who DON’T concomitantly mention “Oh-by-the-way, over-population is an even bigger problem” are like the person scolding her partner for smoking in bed because it could burn down the house while the forest fire outside is already lighting the roof on fire.
If there were only a billion people, there wouldn’t be any AGW.
I basically agree. I think it’s all about political correctness. Just like the Duke Lacrosse Hoax, global warming fits the metanarrative, i.e. it lets people cast wealthy westerners as the villain. Overpopulation doesn’t fit the metanarrative very well anymore.
Turning to the OP, it’s rather difficult to predict the future relationship between population and CO2. Put yourself in the position of someone in 1909 trying to predict what things would be like today.
It is somewhat hard to blame this on unattended overpopulation as the prime villain when the US with its relatively sparse population is neck to neck emitting with the just catching up hugely populous China. The average American citizen is associated with 5.32 metric tons of carbon; the average Chinese citizen with 1.16.
Ah but the problem is that there are so many of them, not that we emit too much per person. Yup, China really should do more about population growth; they are just ignoring the problem. :rolleyes: (Besides the obvious stringent means that China has been taking to decrease population growth there is the simple fact that fertility rate there is 1.7 per woman, less than the 2.1 considered sufficient to maintain a population and less than America’s current 2.05. The only reason that the population there continues to grow for now is because of an extending life expectancy and some immigration. Damn those medical advances and improved public health measures!)
I’m not real clear about the point you are making here, but if it is simply that overpopulation is a difficult problem, and that there may not be much that can be done about even if it is a core issue–I pretty much agree.
I’m not sure why you focused in on China as the chief sinner for population growth…
In any case, of course, arguments that we shouldn’t bother with overpopulation too much because it’s an unsolvable problem that’s gonna unfold however it unfolds anyway sounds an awful lot like similar arguments around AGW…
The dilemma, just to be clear, is that the rest of the world will be catching up as fast as they can to our US living standards. It’s overwhelmingly likely that catching up will accelerate CO2 production faster than a green energy infrastructure can be put in place to avoid it.
However AGW is simply one (and, as yet, un-realized) disastrous consequence of overpopulation. Drive around the US and have a gander at pavement, lost prairies, apartment complexes and suburban sprawl to get an idea of what happens when there are too many of one species. Scope out what’s happening to fish stocks in the world’s oceans just to feed 6B and extrapolate that out to 9B. It’s ridiculous to pooh pooh or minimize the problem of too many damn people while worrying about AGW.
If we solved AGW tomorrow and still let the population get to 9B, we’ll be living in a very different world in 50 years. Clean, cool, green parking lots and buildings, with farms in all the open spaces and the ocean penned up for growing food there, too. Nice.
I’m not sure what your point is, but I would note that (to my understanding), China surpassed the US in CO2 emissions a year or two ago.
For example: China overtakes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter | Environment | The Guardian
CP why focus on China? Well, as brazil points out (and I refered to by saying “neck and neck”) China is the other biggie admitter, even though they have a small fraction of out emissions per capita. When you talk about population causing CO2 emissions you have to talk China. And you have to talk China more than doubling their CO2 emissions per capita in twenty years, twenty years that have seen a leveling of their population growth rate.
Yes India is a huge and growing population too. But for now their CO2 per capita is a third of China’s and their total CO2 emission 1/4 of China and America’s. Keeping their CO2 rate of rise down is more of an urgent issue for global warming (and one that can be more quickly affected) than affecting their rate of population growth. If they just get up to China’s level per capita, let alone closer to ours, the problem is huge. And they are at risk of doing so. Africa is growing too, but its CO2 emission per capita is so low as to not be a big concern.
To turn your statement around, we could halt population growth tomorrow and still let CO2 emissions per capita rise and be living in a very different world in 50 years from now and for many centuries hence.
As for concerns about food supply independent of global warming - allow me to point out that with adequate water India has been able to feed itself for most of the last several years - that’s in a country with not the most fertile soil, 15+% of the world’s population, and only 2.4% of its land mass. Now get some droughts and climate change going and their ability to continue to do so may be under threat without significant adaptations. Even without any additional population growth.
The point is not that population growth is not an important issue but that it is neither the most urgent or most tractable issue in regards to global climate change. Moreover while the world population is continuing to increase, its rate of increase has slowed down dramatically - it’s halved since it 1963 peak. World births are down from 163 million per year to 137 million. But we do keep more people alive and for longer now … so population will increase some more for a while anyway. Yes better population planning for India and Africa in particular are important for other reasons than climate change.
The point is that overpopulation of the earth is a much larger net destroyer of nature than is AGW.
I don’t care what its effect is on AGW b/c I don’t personally buy into the AGW-as-TEOTWAWKI hype. I am suggesting that AGW notwithstanding, over-population is consuming the earth and will continue to do so. It’s ignorant and disingenuous to be concerned about AGW while ignoring the problem of over-population.
And (to the point of my original post above), over-population is being ignored as a problem.
Is overpopulation being ignored? I was not aware of that. Given that the world’s fertility rate is substantially decreased and that most of the worldis at a fertility rate on track to decline or stay with a stable population, which is a major change over the last several decades, that’s a hard argument to make. It seems like decades of attention has had some significant impact. India’s family planning programs have been less than completely successful but not for lack of attending to the issue. Attending to it effectively is another matter. China has used a heavy hammer but has been effective. Meanwhile in Africa, the other major area of increasing population growth, has had poorer success at controlling high birth rates, and probably won’t until the education level increases (especially for women) and the poverty level decreases. Changing those factors have historically been the most effective means of influencing birth rates. Since you obviously care much about global population growth as a risk to nature, I presume that you are therefore arguing for international investment in Africa to create those circumstances? Or maybe your answer is encourage more genocide and starvation and cut down the population that way? Do tell.
In any case, the op was about the (now I believe debunked) claim that population control is the sole means of influencing CO2 emission, so your comment that you do not care about population effects on Global Climate Change seems a bit out of place, even if your claim that excessive population growth is a bigger and unattended to long term threat to the world at large than increasing CO2 emissions was true.
China instituted its “one child” policy. Looks like they’re taking over-population seriously.
I may have missed it, but is there an actual reference to this article? I’d be interested to read it. I have nothing else to contribute to this thread.
Population growth is definitely a major driver of environmental problems. But your earlier comment that “If there were only a billion people, there wouldn’t be any AGW” is incorrect. AGW would simply take longer to unfold. If there were 10 billion people on the planet, and no one used fossil fuels, then CO2-driven climate change would not be the issue it is right now. There would certainly be other, major environmental issues to deal with, but the amount of CO2 would be much lower. We’d probably still have problems with methane and with some increase in CO2 due to deforestation. But we wouldn’t be pumping billions of tons of fossil CO2 into the atmosphere.
With only a billion people, the rate of CO2 addition would be much lower, but it would still be a net increase. At some point, the ambient CO2 levels would be high enough to make a difference.
Population is most definitely an issue relative to climate, but it’s also an issue relative to other problems, like availability of water, energy, food, and other resources. But the other problems can be solved a lot more easily than climate. And these other problems are going to be made worse by the impacts of climate change. Personally, I think the major problems we’ll face because of climate are not going to be natural disasters a la Katrina, but human disasters like wars and the like as people face drought, floods, and other climate impacts that are extremely difficult to clearly and directly attribute to climate change. These problems would be greatly lessened by lower population, but I doubt that we’ll see many volunteers to help contribute to the solution.
I’ve seen calculations that show very strong correlations between the decline in population growth in industrialized countries and a decline in stork population. The obvious conclusion is that, contrary to the hype of the medical community, babies are indeed delivered by storks.
It’s all too easy to confuse (intentionally or otherwise) correlation with causation. It’s also easy to ignore the fact that biogenic CO2 does not contribute to climate change, but is part of the natural carbon cycle. So total CO2 emissions, without any distinction between fossil and biogenic carbon, is an irrelevant number when discussing climate change.